The core conflict in Iraq has changed from a battle against insurgents to an increasingly bloody fight between Shiite and Sunni Muslims, creating conditions that could lead to civil war, the Penta-gon said in a report on Friday.
The congressionally mandated report provided a sober assessment of Iraq over the past three months, saying overall attacks rose 24 percent to 792 per week and daily Iraqi casualties soared 51 percent to nearly 120.
Violence between minority Sun-nis, who controlled Iraq under former president Saddam Hussein, and the majority Shiites, who are asserting themselves after decades of oppression, now defines the conflict, it stated.
Sectarian violence is spreading north, outside of Baghdad into Diyala Province and oil-rich Kirkuk, it said.
Death squads, sometimes with "rogue elements" of US-trained Iraqi security forces, are heavily responsible for the sectarian violence, including execution-style killings, it said.
Illegal militias
And some ordinary Iraqis now look to illegal militias to provide for their safety and sometimes for social needs and welfare, undermining Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki's government, it said.
The 63-page report said that the Sunni Arab insurgency remained "potent and viable," although its visibility has been overshadowed by the increasing sectarian violence.
The release of this fifth in a series of quarterly Pentagon assessments comes as President George W. Bush strives to bolster sagging US public support two months before congressional elections while Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and Vice President Dick Cheney assail war critics.
"Conditions that could lead to civil war exist in Iraq. Nevertheless, the current violence is not a civil war, and movement toward civil war can be prevented," the quarterly Pentagon report to Congress said.
"Concern about civil war within the Iraqi civilian population and among some defense analysts has increased in recent months," it said.
"The security situation is currently at its most complex state since the initiation of Operation Iraq Freedom [in March 2003]," the report added.
Out of control
Senate Democratic Leader Harry Reid of Nevada said the report showed speeches by Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld "are increasingly disconnected from the facts on the ground in Iraq. Even the Pentagon acknowledges Iraq is tipping into civil war."
Massachusetts Democratic Senator Edward Kennedy said the report "reaffirms what the American people already understand: the conditions of civil war exist, violence in Iraq is spiraling out of control and staying the course is not a viable option."
Since the last report in May, the core conflict in Iraq has changed into a struggle between Sunni and Shiite extremists vying to control key areas in Baghdad, protect sectarian enclaves, divert economic resources and impose their own political and religious agendas, the report stated.
Peter Rodman, assistant secretary of defense for international security affairs, said, "The last quarter, as you know, has been rough, and the levels of violence are up. And the sectarian quality of the violence is particularly acute and disturbing."
The US has boosted its Iraq force to 140,000, the most since January, with the 15,000 troops in Baghdad trying to halt the slide into all-out civil war.
Asked if Iraq already was in a low-grade civil war, Rear Admiral William Sullivan, a senior strategic planner for the military's Joint Staff, said, "It's hard to say," adding there is no "universally accepted definition" for civil war.
A fire caused by a burst gas pipe yesterday spread to several homes and sent a fireball soaring into the sky outside Malaysia’s largest city, injuring more than 100 people. The towering inferno near a gas station in Putra Heights outside Kuala Lumpur was visible for kilometers and lasted for several hours. It happened during a public holiday as Muslims, who are the majority in Malaysia, celebrate the second day of Eid al-Fitr. National oil company Petronas said the fire started at one of its gas pipelines at 8:10am and the affected pipeline was later isolated. Disaster management officials said shutting the
US Vice President J.D. Vance on Friday accused Denmark of not having done enough to protect Greenland, when he visited the strategically placed and resource-rich Danish territory coveted by US President Donald Trump. Vance made his comment during a trip to the Pituffik Space Base in northwestern Greenland, a visit viewed by Copenhagen and Nuuk as a provocation. “Our message to Denmark is very simple: You have not done a good job by the people of Greenland,” Vance told a news conference. “You have under-invested in the people of Greenland, and you have under-invested in the security architecture of this
UNREST: The authorities in Turkey arrested 13 Turkish journalists in five days, deported a BBC correspondent and on Thursday arrested a reporter from Sweden Waving flags and chanting slogans, many hundreds of thousands of anti-government demonstrators on Saturday rallied in Istanbul, Turkey, in defence of democracy after the arrest of Istanbul Mayor Ekrem Imamoglu which sparked Turkey’s worst street unrest in more than a decade. Under a cloudless blue sky, vast crowds gathered in Maltepe on the Asian side of Turkey’s biggest city on the eve of the Eid al-Fitr celebration which started yesterday, marking the end of Ramadan. Ozgur Ozel, chairman of the main opposition Republican People’s Party (CHP), which organized the rally, said there were 2.2 million people in the crowd, but
JOINT EFFORTS: The three countries have been strengthening an alliance and pressing efforts to bolster deterrence against Beijing’s assertiveness in the South China Sea The US, Japan and the Philippines on Friday staged joint naval drills to boost crisis readiness off a disputed South China Sea shoal as a Chinese military ship kept watch from a distance. The Chinese frigate attempted to get closer to the waters, where the warships and aircraft from the three allied countries were undertaking maneuvers off the Scarborough Shoal — also known as Huangyan Island (黃岩島) and claimed by Taiwan and China — in an unsettling moment but it was warned by a Philippine frigate by radio and kept away. “There was a time when they attempted to maneuver