WASHINGTON, June 2 (UPI) -- The latest wave of violence in Iraq seems all too familiar to Americans, but its strategic implications are fresh and disturbing.
On Tuesday at least 54 people were killed around the California-sized nation of 28 million people in a new wave of car bomb and mortar attacks. The day before 40 people were killed in such attacks. And the rate at which Iraqis are dying in the insurgency is rising. Some 801 were killed in April, but 871 died in the month of May up to Tuesday.
Strategically, therefore, the 220,000-strong Iraqi police and army, backed by the 130,000 U.S. troops in Iraq, have been unable to significantly reduce the scale and intensity of the Sunni Muslim insurgency even though it is rooted primarily only in two of Iraq's 18 provinces and in the capital Baghdad, and even though its support is based among less than 20 percent of the Iraqi population, the 5.5 million or so Sunni Muslims.
Of potentially far greater import, relations between the U.S. armed forces in Iraq, their British allies and the Shiite militias that control much of southern Iraq -- where the bulk of the 60 percent Shiite majority population is located -- continue to deteriorate.
Hard-liners backed by Iran and led by Moqtada al-Sadr, head of the Mahdi Army militia, had good relations with the old Iraqi government of Prime Minister Ibrahim al-Jaafari. They are far less happy with the new, more pro-American government of Nouri al-Maliki. Therefore the prospects of a potentially disastrous collision between the U.S.-backed Maliki government and the Shiite militias in southern Iraq are growing by the day.
The Maliki government, which has yet to appoint its new interior and defense ministers, this week declared a state of emergency in the southern port city of Basra, where relations between British forces and the Iranian-backed Shiite militias have deteriorated to breaking point.
The current wave of Sunni insurgent violence appears prompted by direct hostility to the new Maliki government. Its strategic purpose appears to be to discredit and fatally weaken the Maliki government before it can get properly established.
The attacks also confirm the grim trend we have tracked in United Press International analysis columns over the past five months whereby, even when the rate of U.S. military fatalities in Iraq fell significantly in recent months, the numbers of U.S. troops wounded, Iraqi troops killed and Iraqi civilians killed in terror bombings continued at their previous levels or higher.
Further, the escalating violence and the failure of the new Iraqi armed forces to contain it has forced U.S. military commanders to re-commit increasing numbers of combat troops to the worst-affected areas of western Iraq. In March, Gen. George Casey, commander of U.S. forces in Iraq, sent 700 additional American troops into Anbar province. They are still operating there. This week, the U.S. military announced that another 1,500 troops were being sent to the region.
The Sunni insurgents appear to be focusing primarily not on attacking U.S. troops, but on killing and maiming as many Shiite civilians as possible in the hope of discrediting the new Maliki government from its main constituency. At least 25 people were killed and another 65 injured in a car bomb explosion at a market frequented by Shiites north of Baghdad Wednesday. Also Wednesday, another car bomb killed at least 12 people and injured 32 more in predominantly Shiite southern Iraq.
As long as the insurgency can maintain this kind of attack, apparently at will, it is likely to continue to succeed in achieving at least one of its strategic goals: denying the parliamentary-appointed central government in Baghdad basic credibility across the country. Meanwhile, the Shiite militias in the south, backed by Iran, benefit from the Sunni insurgents' onslaught on the Maliki government and its armed forces. So the more U.S. forces fail to roll back the Sunni insuirgency, the more they are likely to face Iranian-backed Shiite militas rising up against them too.
The Sunni insurgency strategy therefore, is not suicidal or insane. It is certainly ruthless.
But it is working.
