Today’s Must Read“There are four wars going on in Iraq right now,” Secretary of Defense Robert Gates has said. Turns out he underestimated it by about twenty.
From The Boston Globe:
The messianic Soldiers of Heaven militia that fought US and Iraqi troops in one of the fiercest battles of the war Sunday is among the more than two dozen extremist militias operating across Iraq that are fast becoming a powerful, and hidden, new enemy.
US officials this week expressed concern about the explosion of splinter groups in Iraq, noting that their sheer number makes a political resolution to the ongoing violence in Iraq increasingly difficult. One Defense Department official said in an interview yesterday that the military is tracking at least 28 militias, many of them Shi’ite splinter groups, but knows little about their leadership or command structure.
From Shi’ite factions in southern Iraq to Sunni groups in Anbar Province to extremist Islamic militias operating in Kurdistan, it’s a dizzying array. Take just the Shi’ite splinter groups, for example:
…more than a dozen Shi’ite factions command their own armed followings in southern Iraq, including two competing groups that both call themselves “Hezbollah,” a family-run private army of the Garamsha tribe and armed fighters loyal to the Prince of the Marshes, an autocratic leader of Iraq’s marsh Arabs, said Juan Cole , a Shi’ite specialist and University of Michigan professor.
Certainly, the proliferation of militias “makes a political resolution to the ongoing violence in Iraq increasingly difficult,” as the Globe notes. In fact, “the Iraqi Constitution prohibits the formation of militias,” and, well, that doesn’t seem to have done much good.
Note: Don’t miss another must read from today: Reuters on the plight of Iraqis trying (and failing) to get safe harbor in the U.S.
