Storms in U.S. divert gaze from worsening Iraq

Peter Alexander Correspondent • Profile

BAGHDAD, Iraq - Focused on its own troubles, America might have turned away for a while, but the situation in Iraq has not improved. In fact, there has been a surge in violence.

In the month since Hurricane Katrina struck the Gulf Coast, at least 55 U.S. soldiers have been killed. The Iraqi death toll is many times greater, though much harder to calculate. Sunni insurgents have terrorized many parts of Iraq, especially those occupied by majority Shiites, with a relentless series of suicide attacks, roadside bombs and shootings. Attacks on Thursday and Friday of this week alone have left more than 100 Iraqis dead.

‘It’s hell’
"It's worse," said 29-year-old Saif al-Hakim, who recently returned to his homeland after spending most of the last year in Los Angeles. "It's hell."

Al-Hakim, a graduate of the UCLA School of Theater, Film & Television, is an entrepreneur, a television producer with aspirations of becoming a Hollywood director. One of the many attacks that strike Baghdad each day, a car bombing, left his business in a formerly peaceful neighborhood in ruins.

"It ravaged my company completely," he said. "I was sitting in my office and I could see grenades thrown in the street."

Like most Iraqis, al-Hakim fears insurgents are likely to step up their campaign of violence ahead of the Oct. 15 referendum on Iraq's proposed constitution.

"They're going to heat it up. I'm afraid. I've been asked by my family to leave [the country] and come back later," he added.

Draft constitution threatens to destabilize things further
The draft constitution, designed to unite the country's Shiite, Sunni and Kurdish populations, now threatens to further destabilize Iraq, no matter which way it goes.

It's doubtful that Sunni Arabs — the minority  group that once ruled the country under Saddam Hussein and fears domination by the rival Shiites — would peacefully accept the constitution's approval, but rejection could throw the political process back a year and complicate America's exit strategy.

Either outcome is likely to fuel the insurgency and many fear sectarian violence will grow.

Saying he is "optimistic," President Jalal Talabani has called on all Iraqis to support the draft constitution. "For sure there is no book that is perfect and cannot be amended except the holy Koran," he said.

But Talabani may be too hopeful. Several leading Sunni political organizations are campaigning heavily to defeat the constitution. Having dominated Iraq for decades under Hussein and prior rulers, Sunni influence has essentially disappeared in the new Iraq and they fear the new constitution will formalize their reduced role in Iraq's new government.Meanwhile, Sunnis have increasingly complained of abuse as U.S. and Iraqi forces pursue insurgents.

And in his clearest call yet for a civil war, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the al-Qaeda leader in Iraq, declared "all-out war" on the country's Shiite Arab majority earlier this month.  His statement was released on an al-Qaeda Web site the same day 14 car bombs, half of them detonated by suicide attackers, exploded across Baghdad, killing more than 150.

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