Ethnic cleansing in the New Iraq posted by Richard Seymour

I linked to a story about this yesterday, but The Times has caught up with it:

The grieving families in this predominantly Shi’ite district had collected their dead — all Sunnis — on Friday amid fury at the execution-style murders of the men and terror at the spread of sectarian killings in the run-up to this Saturday’s referendum on a new constitution.

Many believe the killers’ aim is to drive them out in a campaign of ethnic cleansing that is polarising communities, casting suspicion on the Iraqi police and undermining confidence in the ability of the Baghdad government to maintain security.

Some relatives of Iskan’s dead have already packed up and moved to Sunni areas where they feel safer.

...

But the blindfolds wrapped around their heads were intact, along with the cuffs of metal, plastic and rope used to bind their hands. One or two shots fired into each man had ended their lives.

“Why were they killed? What did they do?” shrieked one mourner as he prepared for a street procession of coffins to their place of burial on Friday.

...

One clue may lie in the alleged presence of Iraqi police officers when the men’s killers came to take them away. According to witnesses, about 40 police vehicles and four-wheel drives from the interior ministry stormed the district in the early hours of August 8.

The families say the police accompanied masked members of the Badr Brigade, the armed wing of Iraq’s main Shi’ite political party, the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq. The Badr Brigade was funded, trained and equipped by Iranian Revolutionary Guards.

The occupiers have clearly been trying to brew polarisation along ethnic lines, by sending Shiite death squads into Sunni areas. This is not the first time such reports have emerged either.

From the point of view of the occupiers, disrupting the development of pan-Iraqi unity against the occupation is crucial. Similarly, crushing resistance groups is difficult when they are as acephalous and diffuse as the Iraqi resistance is: but the use of death squads and terror is presumably designed to drain the sea in which their opponents swim. Meanwhile, the Kurdish leadership largely favours a federal break-up of Iraq as a means to acquire its own state - but this decision has also entailed trying to retake 'Arabised' territories, driving out residents so as to radically expand the potential zone for such a state. SCIRI, meanwhile, have decided that control over a large geographical area with substantial oil revenues is better than sharing control over Iraq as a whole with groups whose interests diverge from theirs and who may not share their goal of creating an Iran-style Islamic Republic. Hence, they are eager to take out those who may oppose such a goal through attacks on Sadr's movement and participation in death squads and ethnic cleansing against Sunnis.

The urgency of this situation can hardly be over-stated. The occupiers and their confederates have a confluent interest in producing the kind of ethnic polarisation that will lead to the break-up of Iraq. This could finally succeed in creating the situation of civil war that certain Cassandras have been dropping warnings about, usually to justify a continued military presence in Iraq. A cluster of minority Sunni sectarian groups like Tawhid wal-Jihad ('Al Qaeda in Iraq' my spotty arse) will be very happy with that. The Iraqi nationalists urgently need to unite in both their armed and unarmed struggles to prevent this, to present a united political programme and to force the occupiers out. One body, the Iraq National Foundation Congress, has been trying to achieve this. Sadr has called for pan-Iraq solidarity, while Sunni clerics have urged the same. This is the spirit that needs to be amplified and intensified now more than ever.