IRAQ - Govt Change?

Reuters on Aug. 28 reported Deputy PM Barham Saleh, part of the leadership in the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK) of President Jalal Talabani, as saying Maliki was to reshuffle his cabinet because of frustrations with some ministers' performance and disloyalty among others. He said Maliki would make the changes in an "important signal" of commitment to efficiency in his national unity coalition and to his efforts to rally factions behind a reconciliation plan to avert civil war.

Reuters reported "several political sources" as saying some changes would involve the movement of Muqtada al-Sadr, who denies his Jaysh al-Mahdi runs sectarian death squads. Saleh said: "It's only natural for the Prime Minister and the political leadership to contemplate reshuffling and changing to improve the ability of the government".

Saleh said: "Some people have a foot in the government and a foot outside. They have to make a choice. Either they are part of the government and abide by the policies of the government or be outside the government. My hope is that all elements of the Iraqi polity will be...committed to the government for national reconciliation. Those who are committed to that, their role in government should be enhanced".

These comments apply to Hizbullah which, like Jaysh al-Mahdi, has seats in parliament and portfolios in the government of Fou'ad Siniora as well as an armed force which it calls "Islamic resistance" against Israeli occupation. The same applies to Hamas which has an armed "resistance" force against Israel as well as controlling the Palestine cabinet and has a majority in the Palestinian parliament.

A neo-Salafi suicide car bomber on Aug. 27 attacked Iraq's largest newspaper, al-Sabah, detonating his vehicle inside its fortified compound in downtown Baghdad - killing 2 people and wounding 20 others. The bombing took place on a violent day across Iraq in which explosions and gun battles killed at least 34 people.

The bombing of al-Sabah, a publication financed by the Shi'ite-led government, destroyed more than a dozen vehicles and collapsed a quarter of the building where journalists and printing press operators worked. Before he could be killed, the bomber blew up his vehicle, sending at least two parked cars through the building's wall. The attack was the second on al-Sabah - the word means morning in Arabic - in three months. On May 6, a suicide bomber in a car detonated at the newspaper's main vehicle checkpoint, killing one and wounding several others. Experts blamed neo-Salafi insurgent and foreign terrorist groups, including the successor group to the organisation of Abu Mus'ab al-Zarqawi, the Jordanian leader of al-Qaeda in Mesopotamia, who was killed in a US air strike in June.

The New York Times on Aug. 27 quoted al-Sabah's editor as saying: "The [neo-Salafi] terrorists are trying to stop the media project in Iraq. We have received many threats from Zarqawi's assistants. We published them in the newspaper". He said the Aug. 27 bombing had also been retaliation for his newspaper's organising a meeting of Iraqi TV and newspaper editors to sign a "pledge of honour" to respect the government's reconciliation efforts and to avoid printing or broadcasting inflammatory statements or violent images.

Maliki on Aug. 27 told CNN the sectarian bloodshed was decreasing, adding: "We're not in a civil war. Iraq will never be in a civil war... The violence is in decrease and our security ability is increasing". If true, the reduction in casualties would reverse what has been a steady climb in murders since the Feb. 22 attack on a Shi'ite shrine in Samarra', with the number of bodies received by the Baghdad morgue reaching a high of 1,815 in July.

One US commander in Baghdad, Col. Robert Scurlock, said in a briefing on Aug. 25 that violent attacks had dropped 41%, down from 52 a day across Baghdad throughout July. US officers say the main perpetrators of sectarian violence are relatively few in number - small gangs and offshoots of larger militias, whose motives are as much criminal as ideological. If this picture is accurate, then targeted raids on the headquarters of these groups may have reduced their number. Alternately, the presence of large numbers of troops may simply be convincing them to lie low.

Less optimistically, insurgents and militias may just be running out of targets. Iraqi agencies have estimated that well over 100,000 people have fled their homes in the past six months, frequently resettling in areas occupied only by members of their own sect. Sunnis and Shi'ites alike say they have changed their habits, rarely venturing out of their home districts. Communities have organised themselves for self-defence, with neighbours watching to make sure strange vehicles do not venture on to their streets.

Police and other interior ministry forces, which Sunnis claim are infiltrated with Shi'ite militias, are now blocked from entering certain Sunni neighbourhoods. But Baghdad is still far from being partitioned into Sunni and Shi'ite halves - mixed areas remain. On the one hand, this indicates that US and Iraqi government forces, together with local self-defence groups, were to some degree able to contain the violence over the past six months. On the other, however, it suggests there is still scope for more sectarian killing if those troops deploy elsewhere.