The Sunni insurgency in Iraq is splitting, with loyalists to the old Baathist regime now fighting al-Qaida-backed Islamists. Could it be a turning point in the country's civil war?(my bold.)
There are two very different opinions about what happened. "One of our men was going around in the city painting over enemy graffiti," is the al-Qaida version of events. "The Islamic Army shot him and that started the battle."The Islamic Army tells a different story. "We went to the Maluki mosque to take al-Qaida to task," they say. "It is no longer acceptable what these people are doing to our Sunni neighborhoods: They're ghost towns where nobody can live. That's why it came to a fight."
The battle in Amiriyah, currently Baghdad's most dangerous district, lasted two days. Afterwards, the dead littered the streets and even the last inhabitants of the Maluki mosque had fled. No one counted the actual number of casualties, since the Iraqi police, army and US military no longer come to this part of Amiriyah. Here terror, insurgency, murder and violence are left to fester undisturbed.
Still, the carnage in Amiriyah is a cause of hope for some. Until recently, the Iraqi branch of the global terrorist network al-Qaida had good ties to the Islamic Army, a homegrown radical Sunni outfit taking part in the country's insurgency. The two groups used to congratulate each other on their respective Web sites whenever they managed to blow up a US Humvee or a group of Iraqi police recruits.
Update: massacre of Shiite villagers in Diyala by Sunni gunmen.
No comments:
Post a Comment