Attacks in several parts of Iraq have killed police and civilians, a day after at least 68 people died in bombings in and around the capital. Tuesday's attacks are the latest in a spike of killings that has claimed more than 400 lives since the start of May, making it one of the country's bloodiest months in recent history. Five commuters were killed when a bomb exploded inside a minibus travelling through Sadr City, a Shia-majority district in eastern Baghdad, a police officer said. Five policemen and 20 civilians were wounded in the attack, he added. Another police officer said a suicide bomber set off his explosives-laden truck after passing a police checkpoint in the town of Tarmiyah north of Baghdad, killing a policeman and a civilian. Nine were wounded. 'Dangerous unknown' Al Jazeera's Jane Arraf, reporting from Baghdad, said a security official confirmed that at least three policemen - including the deputy head of police intelligence - were killed in a shoot-out with gunmen following a roadside bomb in the city of Mosul. "Four of the gunmen were also killed in the clashes in the July 17th neighbourhood of the Hamam Ali district," she said. Alarmed by the recent bloodshed, UN envoy Martin Kobler pressed Iraqi leaders on Tuesday to do more to halt the violence, saying it is "their responsibility to stop the bloodshed now". Kobler has repeatedly urged Iraqi officials to engage in dialogue as violence and political tensions have grown in recent weeks. He warned political leaders not to let fighters benefit from their political differences, and predicted that "the country will slide into a dangerous unknown if they do not take immediate action". No one has claimed responsibility for the recent wave of attacks. Bombings on Shia and Sunni mosques, security forces and Sunni tribal leaders over a month-long surge in violence are deepening worries Iraq may tip back into the kind of widescale sectarian violence that killed thousands in 2006-2007. Tensions between the Shia-led leadership and the country's Sunni Muslim community are at their worst since American troops left in December 2011. http://www.aljazeera.com/news/middleeast/2013/05/20135281480811117.html I guess we don't hear as much about Iraq since we don't have many troops there, but it doesn't sound like that country is headed in the right path. How much longer until there is all out civil war. I wonder who the next Saddam Hussein will be?
Sadly the reaction to those dictators are fundamentalist theocracies. Better to have the government there be an organic growth of the people in that nation and for the U.S. to support humane manifestations within that organic internal movement.
It's not so much keeping a tyrant place as not completely disbanding the military when you get there and replacing them with ethnic and cultural outsiders who don't speak the language and want to go home at the first chance.
Yes, because Yugoslavia became so peaceful once it was split up. And to top it off? The Shi'a section will be swallowed by Iran. The Sunni section doesn't actually have any oil. The Kurd section will begin pissing off the Turks. I've said it before, self-determination is a stupid concept, ever since Wilson and his buddies got down on their hands and knees to draw a bunch of lines on giant maps. People will always want more than what they have, which results all sorts of b****ing about whether some territory is Kurdish or Sunni or German or whatever.
I'd say much of former Yugoslavia is better off now than they were under Tito. Iraq is three separate countries pretending to be one, why pretend? How are they any better off like this than split up?
