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Tal Afar as Ethnic Civil War
By Juan Cole
09/13/05 "ICH"
-- -- Much of the American press has reported the Tal Afar campaign as a
strike by the new Iraqi Army, supported by US troops, against
foreign infiltrators in the largely Turkmen city of 200,000.
As
Jonathan Finer makes clear in the Washington Post, however,
the operation looks different if we know some details. The
"Iraqi Army" leading the assault turns out to be mainly
the Peshmerga or Kurdish ethnic militia. Along for the ride are
local Turkmen Shiites who are being used as informers and for the
purpose of identifying Sunni Turkmen they think are involved in
the guerrilla movement (apparently they sometimes make false
charge to settle scores). Tal Afar was 70 percent Sunni Turkmen
and 30 percent Shiite Turkmen. The Sunni Turkmen had thrown in
with Saddam, and some more recently had turned to radical Islam.
The Shiite Turkmen lived in fear of their lives.
So Kurds and Shiites are beating up on Sunni Turkmen allies of
Sunni Arabs. That is what is really going on. The number of
foreign fighters appears to be small, and US troops that had been
guarding against infiltration on the Syrian border were actully
moved to Tal Afar for this operation. It is mainly about punishing
the Sunni Turkmen for allying with the Sunni Arab guerrillas. That
the attack came in part in response to the pleas of local Shiite
Turkmen helps explain why why
Prime Minister Ibrahim Jaafari (Shiite leader of the
fundamentalist Dawa Party) authorized it, and went to Tal Afar on
Tuesday for a photo op.
The US will never get stability in Iraq if it is merely an adjunct
to a Kurdish-Shiite alliance against the Sunni Arabs and their
Turkmen supporters.
Reuters
surveys guerrilla violence for Tuesday. The report was put out
before a big bombing in Karrada in Baghdad that killed one and
injured at least 16, and before the British & American
diplomatic compound in the southern city of Basra came under
rocket attack.
It was revealed Monday that on Sunday evening guerrillas in
Latifiyah killed a bodyguard of Shaikh Ahmad al-Safi, a member of
parliament and the foremost representative of Grand Ayatollah Ali
Sistani, during an attack on his convoy.
A Marine lance corporal back in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan
has given
a succinct impression of his time in Iraq. It was hell, he
said. It was extremely hot and "everybody's always trying to
kill you."
The
British government shouldn't be taking any advice on anything or
even talking informally to Ahmad Thomson, a British Muslim who
had denied the Holocaust and alleged that a cabal of Freemasons
and Jews put Tony Blair up to joining the Iraq War. These are
hateful and unacceptable views totally ungrounded in reality, and
no one who holds them could give any useful advice at all to
Downing Street.
Juan Cole is Professor of History at the
University of Michigan. Visit his blog. http://www.juancole.com/
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