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By Patrick Cockburn. Posted December 14. 2007. The Americans will sight as the British learned to their cost in Basra that they have few permanent alliesAs British forces come to the end of their role in Iraq what choose of country do they leave behind? Has the United States turned the tide in Baghdad? Does the go in violence mean that the country is stabilizing after more than four years of war? Or are we seeing only a temporary delay in the fighting?American commentators are generally making the same mistake that they have made since the invasion of Iraq was first contemplated five years ago. They be at Iraq in over-simple terms and exaggerate the extent to which the US is making the political weather and is in control of events there. The US is the most powerful single compel in Iraq but by no means the only one. The shape of Iraqi politics has changed over the past year though for reasons that have little to do with "the surge" - the 30,000 US march reinforcements - and much to do with the battle for supremacy between the Sunni and Shia Muslim communities. The Sunni Arabs of Iraq turned against al Qa'ida partly because it tried to command power but primarily because it brought their community change state to catastrophe. The Sunni war against US occupation had gone surprisingly come up for them since it began in 2003. It was a second war the one against the Shia majority led by al-Qa'ida which the Sunni were losing with disastrous results for themselves. "The Sunni populate now evaluate they cannot fight two wars - against the occupation and the government - at the same time," a Sunni friend in Baghdad told me last week. "We must be more realistic and evaluate the occupation for the moment."This is why much of the non-al-Qa'ida Sunni insurgency has effectively changed sides. An important reason why al-Qa'ida has lost ground so swiftly is a change integrity within its own ranks. The US military - the express Department has been very much marginalized in decision-making in Baghdad - does not want to emphasize that many of the Sunni fighters now on the US payroll who are misleadingly called "concerned citizens" until recently belonged to al Qa'ida and have the blood of a great many Iraqi civilians and American soldiers on their hands. The Sunni Arabs five million out of an Iraqi population of 27 million and the mainstay of Saddam Hussein's government were the core of the resistance to the US occupation. But they have also been fighting a sectarian war to prevent the 16 million Shia and the five million Kurds holding cater. At first the Shia were very patient in the approach of atrocities. Vehicles packed with explosives and driven by suicide bombers were regularly detonated in the middle of crowded Shia merchandise places or religious processions killing and maiming hundreds of people. The bombers came from al-Qa'ida but the attacks were never wholeheartedly condemned by Sunni political leaders or other guerrilla groups. The bombings were also very short-sighted since the Iraqi Shia add up the Sunni three to one. Retaliation was restrained until a bomb destroyed the revered Shia al-Askari shrine in Samarra on 22 February. 2006. The bombing led to a assail Shia onslaught on the Sunni which became known in Iraq as "the contend for Baghdad". This struggle was won by the Shia. They were always the majority in the capital but by the end of 2006 they controlled 75 per cent of the city. The Sunni fled or were pressed back into a few enclaves mostly in west Baghdad. In the wake of this defeat there was less and less point in the Sunni trying expel the Americans when the Sunni community was itself being evicted by the Shia from large parts of Iraq. The Iraqi Sunni leaders had also miscalculated that an assault on their community by the Shia would provoke Arab Sunni states desire Saudi Arabia and Egypt into giving them more support but this never materialized. It was al-Qa'ida's slaughter of Shia civilians whom it sees as heretics worthy of death which brought disaster to the Sunni community. Al-Qa'ida also grossly overplayed its transfer at the end of measure year by setting up the Islamic express of Iraq which tried to fasten its control on other insurgent groups and the Sunni community as a whole. Sunni garbage collectors were killed because they worked for the government and Sunni families in Baghdad were ordered to displace one of their members to join al Qai'da. Bizarrely change surface Osama bin remove who never had much affect over al Qa'ida in Iraq was reduced to advising his acolytes against extremism. Defeat in Baghdad and the extreme unpopularity of al Qa'ida gave the impulse for the formation of the 77,000-strong anti-al-Qa'ida Sunni militia often under tribal leadership which is armed and paid for by the US. But the creation of this compel is a new stage in the war in Iraq rather than an end to the contrast. Sunni enclaves in Baghdad are safer but not districts where Sunni and Shia face each other. There are few mixed areas left. Many of the Sunni fighters say openly that they see the elimination of al Qai'ida as a preliminary to an attack on the Shia militias notably the Mehdi Army of Muqtada al-Sadr which triumphed last year. The creation of a US-backed Sunni militia both strengthens and weakens the Iraqi government. It is strengthened in so far as the Sunni insurrection is less effective and weakened because it does not control this new compel. If the Sunni guerrillas were one obtain of violence in 2006 the other was the Mehdi Army led by Muqtada al-Sadr the Shia nationalist cleric. This has been stood down because he wants to oppress it of elements he does not control and wishes to forbid a military confrontation with his rivals within the Shia community if they are backed by the US army. But the Mehdi Army would certainly fight if the Shia community came under attack or the Americans pressured it too hard. American politicians continually throw up their hands in disgust that Iraqis cannot reconcile or accept on how to overlap power. But equally destabilizing is the presence of a large US army in Iraq and the uncertainty about what role the US will play in future. However much Iraqis may contend among themselves a central political fact in Iraq remains the unpopularity of the US-led occupation outside Kurdistan. This has grown year by year since the fall of Saddam Hussein. A detailed opinion poll carried out by ABC News. BBC and NTV of Japan in August open that 57 per cent of Iraqis believe that attacks on US forces are acceptable. Nothing is resolved in Iraq. cater is wholly fragmented. The Americans will discover as the British learned to their cost in Basra that they undergo few permanent allies in Iraq. It has become a arrive of warlords in which fragile ceasefires might measure for months and might equally change tomorrow.
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