The Common Ills: Already November's death toll is 627

Saturday, October 19, 2013

Already November's death toll is 627

Arabic News Digest notes:

Iraq is continuing its slide into the unknown as the security situation across the country is turning into a disaster, while politicians keep holding on to their narrow agendas, unmoved by the daily death toll from countless bomb attacks, columnist Abdul Zahra Al Rekabi wrote in yesterday’s edition of the Sharjah-based newspaper Al Khaleej.
The security failure in Iraq under prime minister Nouri Al Maliki is decidedly chronic, and there is “not a glimmer of hope” that the situation will improve, the writer said. “The death toll in Iraq from terrorist attacks during the past month alone, according to the United Nations, has reached 979, while the number of the injured went above 2,100.”

On the topic of violence, Press TV reports a Baghdad car bombing near a mosque left 3 dead and eleven injured. National Iraqi News Agency reports a Sheikhi village roadside bombing claimed the life of 1 police officer and left another injured, a Garmah bombing left two Iraqi soldiers injured, a Mosul roadside bombing left four people injured (two were Iraqi soldiers), 1 attorney was shot dead outside his Mosul home, and "Tigris Operations Command announced that a special unit belonging to the Army's 12 Division killed the military commander of al-Qaeda in Kirkuk after a successful operation carried out at dawn today Saturday 19 in Hawija west of the province." Through yesterday, Iraq Body Count counts 627 violent deaths for the month so far. There are twelve more days in the month.

October 29th, Nouri al-Maliki is scheduled to leave Iraq for the US with a November 1st meeting at the White House. Marc Lynch (Foreign Policy) notes this meeting cannot afford to be about meaningless platitudes. That includes Nouri repeating empty words about reconciliation:

The political failure in Iraq is nothing new and has very little to do with the withdrawal of U.S. troops. Maliki ignored such advice when there were 140,000 American troops in Iraq; he ignored it when those troops began to withdraw; and he ignored it after they left altogether. He was never going to make such concessions unless he felt them absolutely necessary for his own survival. In part due to the temporary security gains of the U.S. "surge" and co-optation of the Sunni insurgency, he never really felt that he did.
Things might be different now, though. The harvest of his exclusionary politics has been long months of sustained Sunni protest, renewed insurgency, and an increasing perception that the country is coming apart at the seams. A dramatic increase in violent deaths has driven a widely held fear that Iraq is unraveling and that the fire is again burning. The perverse consequence of this year's growing violence and political crisis could finally be that the carnage is finally enough to push him to such belated, reluctant concessions. His own political survival instincts, not American leverage, might finally bring him around. With fateful elections looming next year and troubling signs emerging about the contours of the new electoral law, the White House should do whatever it can during his visit to nudge him in that direction -- and condition all of the incentives that might be activated under the SFA (like the military and intelligence assistance Maliki wants) upon his doing so.
There is little question that Maliki's persistent exclusion of Sunnis and consolidation of power has kept Baghdad's perpetual political crisis boiling. The initially peaceful protest movement that broke out among Iraqi Sunnis earlier this year was driven by widespread grievances over his sectarian politics, his government's corruption, and his consolidation of autocratic power. Frustrations grew over his refusal to compromise, and exploded over the government's brutal crackdown on peaceful demonstrations, such as April's bloody attack on protesters in Hawija.

The meeting needs to be a serious one.

Nouri's a modern day Pinochet. If you're going to meet with Pinochet, you don't do it to make nice. As I noted in yesterday's snapshot, there are rumors of protests. The strongest rumors are that the Ashraf supporters who attend Congressional hearings wearing yellow. But there are rumors of other aggrieved populations in Iraq being represented here in protests.

The press would be doing their jobs if they began asking daily for specifics on the meet-up.

Don't hold your breath waiting for the press to do their job.

That's all I've got in me tonight, sorry. The following sites -- some community, some not -- updated last night and today:

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