Iraq lurches back to gang warfare
The relative stability and quiet in Iraq since September 2007 has been very, very relative. And now it could unravel in a very ugly way. Iraqi army forces, backed up by US and British forces, attacked the Sadr militia (Mahdi Army) in Basra in late March. The attack was a fiasco. Over 1000 Iraqi soldiers, including senior officers, deserted. Nouri al-Maliki's Baghdad government made good the losses by recruiting more people from the militias of the main Shia-Islamist government parties, Dawa and ISCI/SCIRI. Thus it made it clear that the attack was a factional one by the leaders of one group of...