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| A joint funeral was held Sunday for the governor of Qadisiyah Province and the police chief. Jalal Mudhar/AP |
Trouble grows in Iraq's Shiite south
Assassinations and party rivalries roil economically vital southern Iraq as Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki bids to solve a national political rift in talks this week.
By Sam Dagher | Correspondent of The Christian Science Monitorfrom the August 13, 2007 edition
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Baghdad - The Shiite-on-Shiite struggle for Iraq's economically important south has taken a violent turn.
Qadisiyah Province's governor was killed by a roadside bomb over the weekend, clashes in Basra Province killed at least three, and tensions are rising in Najaf as figures close to the senior Shiite cleric Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani have been targeted in a wave of assassinations.
"We are going to witness an escalation of this conflict ... the Shiites were never united, the question now is who's going to represent the Shiites," says Mustafa al-Ani, an analyst with the Dubai-based Gulf Research Center.
The widening split among Shiites parallels the national Iraqi political fissures. On Sunday, Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki called for meetings to begin Monday with the country's main political leaders to fix the national political paralysis.
Adnan al-Dulaimi, leader of the largest Sunni block in Parliament that withdrew from Maliki's government, told the Associated Press that Sunnis were being exposed to a "genocide campaign by the militias and death squads that are directed, armed, and supported by Iran." Mr. Dulaimi, leader of the Iraqi Accordance Front, asked for Arab countries to intervene to protect Sunnis.
As political infighting deepens nationwide, the US military fight against insurgents rages. On Saturday, five Americans were killed south of Baghdad, four in one roadside bombings. Those deaths raise the number of US military personnel killed in Iraq to at least 3,690 since March 2003.
On Saturday outside Diwaniyah, the provincial capital of Qadisiyah, Gov. Khalil Jalil and provincial police chief Maj. Gen. Khalid Hassan were killed, along with a driver and bodyguard, when their car was hit by a roadside bomb. They were returning from the funeral of a tribal leader in a neighboring town. As of press time Sunday, no one had claimed responsibility for the attack.
Anger over the killings met the governor's funeral cortege as it made its way through the city. Most Shiites refer to the mostly agricultural province by its old name, Diwaniyah; Qadisiyah was the name given to it by Saddam Hussein's regime.
During Mr. Hussein's rule, Mr. Jalil was one of the top operatives in the Badr Brigade, an antiregime paramilitary unit based in Iran. Although the Badr Brigade has since changed its name to Badr Organization and insists it is a political party, it is still widely believed to be the armed wing of the Supreme Islamic Iraqi Council (SIIC), a leading Shiite religious party headed by Abdel Aziz al-Hakim.
Like SIIC, many of Badr's top leaders now occupy high-ranking positions in the Iraqi government and across the predominantly Shiite mid-Euphrates and southern provinces.
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