Baghdad Burning
Feb 24th, 2006 at 7:24 am by Susie
Someone in comments yesterday noted the parallels between Iraq and Sarajevo, and yes, it’s all too familiar. As the country falls apart, factions will move from violence to targeted atrocities:
BAGHDAD, Iraq, Feb. 23 — After a day of violence so raw and so personal, Iraqis woke on Thursday morning to a tense new world in which, it seemed, anything was possible.
The violence on Wednesday was the closest Iraq had come to civil war, and Iraqis were stunned. In Al Amin, a neighborhood in southeast Baghdad, a Shiite man said he had watched gunmen set a house on fire. It was identified as the residence of Sunni Arab militants, said the man, Abu Abbas, though no one seemed to know for sure who they were.
“We all were shocked,” said Abu Abbas, a vegetable seller, standing near crates of oranges and tomatoes. “We saw it burning. We called the fire department. We didn’t know how to behave. Chaos was everywhere.”
There’s probably a similar case to be made re a comparison to pre-partion India. Albeit the violence then was between different religions rather than between sects within a religion. It will be interesting (in an intellectual sense only) to see what happens in the areas where the population is mixed (Sunni/Shia, Sunni/Kurd) if a proper civil war does break out. Will there be mass migration out of the mixed areas into the ethnic stongholds?
This should come as no surprise. While the Bush Leaguers tried to paint Iraq under Saddam as another Nazi Germany, I always thought it much more resembled Yugoslavia … a country of antagonistic ethnic groups poorly thrown together by larger powers and held in check only by a dictatorship.