Iraq: Renewed violence in Anbar province - full text

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A suicide car bombing on Nov. 21 outside a courthouse in the city of Ramadi, the capital of Anbar province, 110 km west of Baghdad (the capital of Iraq), killed up to six people, including at least one police officer, and injured 14 others, according to sources cited in a report published that day by the Reuters news agency.

Immediate Context

Anbar province had long been regarded as the heartland of the Sunni insurgency in Iraq, but had recently enjoyed a sharp drop in violence, partly because Sunni tribal chiefs in Anbar had joined forces in recent months with the US military in an attempt to drive out al-Qaida insurgents.

The attack on Nov. 21 was the first in the Ramadi area since Sept. 13, when a roadside bomb killed three, just days after US President George W. Bush, on a surprise visit to the al-Asad air base in Anbar, said that co-operation between the Sunnis and the USA had made the province, "once written off as lost", "one of the safest places in Iraq".

The USA had expanded the Anbar model of recruiting men to join local police units controlled by tribal leaders to other parts of Iraq, including around Baghdad, and credited the approach with helping reduce violence in those areas.

Regular attacks by insurgents in the province had prompted US forces in May 2005 to launch "Operation Matador", designed to cut the lines of communications by which foreign Islamist suicide bombers were entering Iraq. However, the operation, the largest since the US assault on the insurgent enclave of Fallujah in November 2004, failed to stem the flow of devastating suicide attacks in Anbar.

Eleven were killed in the city in February 2007 in a double suicide car bomb attack at the home of tribal leader Sattar al-Buzayih, a leader of the Awakening, a coalition of clans in the region opposed to al-Qaida-affiliated extremists. In April a truck rigged with explosives and chlorine was driven into a checkpoint near Ramadi, killing at least 27 people. In May , two car bombs exploded near a police checkpoint north of Ramadi, killing 25 people, including six police officers. In two separate attacks in June 2007, suicide bombers struck a gathering in Anbar of Sunni tribal leaders who opposed al-Qaida, killing at least 15 people, and a gathering of the Anbar Salvation Council (a Sunni alliance opposed to al-Qaida) in a Baghdad hotel, killing 12 people.

Reaction and Outlook

The Associated Press (AP) news agency reported on Nov. 22 that, according to a provincial police official, the suicide bombing on Nov. 21 had killed six people, including three police offers, and wounded 13 others. US military sources, cited in the report, said that four people had been killed, including the suicide bomber, and 22 others injured.

Lt-Gen. James Dubik, the US commander in charge of the training of the Iraqi police force, at a news conference on Nov. 22, said that the bombing underscored the fragility of country’s relative calm. "While the security situation is much better now than in previous months, the enemies of security in Iraq still have the capacity and desire for ruthless attacks" he said. "The war is not over."

A US statement said the blast was caused by a "explosively formed penetrator" (EFP), a type of bomb that the USA believed was being supplied to Shia militias by Iran--a charge that Iran denied. Dubik told the news conference that an earlier Iranian promise to curb the flow of weapons from Iran to extremists in Iraq had "made some contribution to a reduction of violence", adding that "we hope over time that the same commitment that has been made stays in effect."

The AP article of Nov. 22 also reported that Iraqi security forces had on Nov. 21 found 40 decomposed bodies, including those of women and children, in an area north of Ramadi, which had until recently been controlled by al-Qaida.

Historical Context

The insurgency began in 2003, shortly after the US-led invasion, in March that year, deposed the regime of former Iraqi President Saddam Hussein. Although US-led armed forces quickly defeated Iraq’s ill-equipped military forces , the US-led coalition was soon subjected to persistent guerrilla attacks by groups of Iraqi patriots and Islamists, including supporters of al-Qaida, who opposed the invasion and regarded the USA and its allies as occupiers rather than liberators.

By August 2003, the-then nascent insurgency had taken the toll of US troops killed in postwar Iraq to 139, thereby surpassing by one the total number of US troops who died from the start of the war in March until May 1 when President Bush declared the end of hostilities.

The costly war of attrition continued unabated in 2004, despite the nominal transfer of sovereignty, in June that year, from the US-led Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) to an interim Iraqi government, led by Ayad Allawi, who was appointed as prime minister.

The transfer of sovereignty, although regarded by supporters of the war as a milestone in Iraq’s transition to "democracy", was overshadowed in 2004 by two key events. Firstly, by the revelation in April that US troops had abused Iraqi prisoners held at Abu Ghraib prison , near Baghdad. The abuse came to light when photographs emerged of grinning US soldiers forcing Iraqi prisoners into acts of sexual humiliation and other abuses. The images shocked and appalled the international community and damaged the image of the US government. The second event unfolded in October , when a report published by the Iraq Survey Group (ISG), the US-led team of scientists and military personnel formed in May 2003 to hunt for weapons of mass destruction (WMD) in Iraq, concluded that the Iraqi regime had not possessed WMD nor the programmes to manufacture them. The conclusion contradicted pre-war assertions made by the leaders of the aggressor states, most notably Bush and Tony Blair, the-then UK prime minister. Both events also reinforced a growing sense of domestic and international distrust in the US and UK governments, at a time when the conflict was increasingly characterised by an upsurge in suicide bomb attacks and the taking hostage (and killing) of Western civilians working in Iraq.

A new Iraqi constitution was narrowly approved in October 2005 and legislators were elected to the new 275-member Council of Representatives (the unicameral legislature) in December 2005. However, a rising tide of sectarian violence, principally amongst Iraq’s Shia and Sunni Muslims, was by then prompting fears that the conflict would descend into open civil war. Those fears were heightened in February 2006 when a bomb attack demolished the dome of the al-Askariya shrine in Samarra, 100 km north of Baghdad, one of the four key Shia holy sites in Iraq. The bomb attack provoked an immediate convulsion of sectarian violence, in which more than 150 people died in massacres, armed fighting, suicide bomb attacks, and reprisal attacks on Sunni Muslim mosques.

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