BAGHDAD, June 25 (UPI) -- The bombing of a crowded market in the Shiite slums of south Baghdad Wednesday in which at least 69 people were killed only a week before U.S. troops are due to pull out of Iraq's cities and towns underlines how the American withdrawal will not be simple or straightforward, and possibly the trigger for more bloodshed.
Renewed attacks by Sunni insurgents of al-Qaida and other groups against rival Shiites have been escalating for weeks, clearly intended to re-ignite sectarian fighting. Some 160 people have been killed in bombings over the last week alone.
The Shiite-dominated government of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki appears to be unable to counter the violence, and U.S. military commanders are skeptical that it will be able to maintain order once U.S. forces being their withdrawal from urban areas starting June 30 and hand over security to the Iraqis.
The pullback, with troops redeploying in the countryside, is part of a December security agreement between Maliki's government and the United States that schedules the withdrawal of the bulk of U.S. forces from Iraq by the end of 2011.
Maliki and his associates, including his military commanders, insist that they will be able to cope with anything al-Qaida or other insurgent groups can throw at them and that national elections slated for January 2010 will go ahead.
"We're confident about the abilities of our security forces," Foreign Minister Hoshyar Zebari declared confidently on June 19.
But the tempo of insurgent attacks, dramatically reduced by U.S. forces in 2007-08, has been stepped up in recent weeks and is likely to become more intense in the days ahead.
Iraq's U.S.-trained armed forces and other paramilitary groups have been steadily taking over combat operations from the Americans for many months. But their military prowess is patchy, with only a few elite battalions showing any real mettle.
Former Sunni insurgents, lured away from the insurgency by the Americans and formed into so-called Awakening Councils, are angry that Maliki's government has not absorbed them into the new Iraqi military.
One of the main reasons is the deep-rooted distrust between the Shiites, the long-suppressed majority, and their former tormentors, the minority Sunnis who dominated the regime of Saddam Hussein.
Despite U.S. efforts to bring the two sides together since the March 2003 invasion, the two communities remain far apart. The Sunnis claim -- with some justification -- that the Shiite-dominated military contains units that are little more than death squads who prey on the minority who once lorded it over them. Shiites claim the Awakening Council fighters cannot be trusted.
Baghdad also faces mounting tension between the government and the minority Kurds, key U.S. allies, who largely due to the Americans have their own semiautonomous enclave in northwestern Iraq. The Kurds claim the oil center of Kirkuk and its oil fields, which produce one-third of Iraq's oil.
They won't admit it, but they clearly want an independent state in their ancestral lands. Baghdad cannot afford to let them achieve their long-held dream, particularly if it includes the Kirkuk oilfields.
The government does not want to relinquish this economic prize, so trouble is brewing there and is likely to explode into sectarian violence once the Americans hand over to the Iraqis.
Kurdish fighters, known as Peshmerga, or "those who face death," are in a tense confrontation with government forces in northern Nineveh province, where the Kurds have steadily extended their control over the last five years.
The provincial capital, Mosul, is, like Kirkuk, a tinderbox that could explode at any moment into Kurdish-Arab fighting. The Kurds refuse to accept the authority of the region's new hard-line Arab governor, Atheel Najafi.
"Both sides have dug in and the only thing preventing open conflict is the Americans," observed Joost Hiltermann of the Brussels-based International Crisis Group.
In the south, the firebrand Shiite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr, whose forces were defeated by Maliki's U.S.-supported troops several months ago, remains a wild card and has political ambitions.
The Shiite-dominated south produces two-thirds of Iraq's oil and according to oil industry experts could contain immense new reserves that have never been tapped. Many southern Shiites want a separate state that would strip the central government of its economic mainstay.
In these circumstances, the next few months will be crucial for Iraq and for President Barack Obama's plan to focus U.S. might on the Afghanistan-Pakistan theater of operations.
