Decision ‘08

A Bloody, Bloody Toll

Well, there’s no way to put a happy face on this. The main morgue in Baghdad is estimating a death toll of 1,300 during the sectarian strife that followed the bombing of the Al-Askari Shrine:

Grisly attacks and other sectarian violence unleashed by last week’s bombing of a Shiite shrine have killed more than 1,300 Iraqis, making the past few days the deadliest of the war outside of major U.S. offensives, according to Baghdad’s main morgue. The toll was more than three times higher than the figure previously reported by the U.S. military and the news media.

Hundreds of unclaimed dead lay at the morgue at midday Monday — blood-caked men who had been shot, knifed, garroted or apparently suffocated by the plastic bags still over their heads. Many of the bodies were sprawled with their hands still bound — and many of them had wound up at the morgue after what their families said was their abduction by the Mahdi Army, the Shiite militia of cleric Moqtada al-Sadr.

That’s a tragic, tragic number, and the reports of Shiite death squads are very disconcerting.

Earlier today, I noted how Mohammed, blogging from Baghdad with Iraq the Model, called for the government to seize the initiative and take on the militias. Now, we can see why he was so adamant…

All politics aside, let us hope and pray fervantly that both the insurgents and the militias might grow sick of so much bloodshed, or that the Iraqi people might be emboldened to put them down…those who say the war is unwinnable are half right - it’s unwinnable on our own. We need the Iraqis as much as they need us, for if the Sunni and Shia rank-and-file band together to end the violence, then the insurgents and militias will have no base of support.

The next few weeks will be perhaps pivotal…

3 Responses to “A Bloody, Bloody Toll”

1 peter Says:
February 27th, 2006 at 11:50 pm
Historical analogies are never exact, but the situation in Iraq is starting to resemble Yugoslavia: an ethnically diverse country held together by a strongman, and when the strongman goes, the internecine war and ethnic cleansing starts –
2 Amos Says:
February 28th, 2006 at 1:16 am
Let me say 3 things first:

1- I know mob violence falls mainly on the innocent
2- As a conservative partisan I know this sound like I’m trying to spin this tragic event
3- 1300 murdered people is nothing to be dismissive of

BUT

The Sunni have it coming. There, I said it.

I don’t buy this crap for one second that the insurgency is opperating without the diffused and gerneralised support of the mainstream Sunni population, these people have supported the bombers and killers because they think it’s in their interest to do so. They think Sunni terrorism and continuous threats against their fellow citizens offsets their lack of demographic weight. Every time a so-called sunni moderate makes some speach ‘denouncing’ the latest atrocity, it contains a veiled threat concerning how this is really all America/the iraqi governments fault and if some concession is not made there will be further terrorist atrocities and America/the Iraqi government will only have themselves to blame. All their political theater, the walk-outs and boycotts are synced with the bombing and murder campaigns (the baathist ones anyway). These people are using murder as a political tool, and alot, I say MOST and you can disagree if you will, Sunni are quietly going along with it. That fills me with utter contempt.

Too many Sunni, who are not necessarily involved in the insurgency themselves, have been privately making this disgusting, cynical calculations. They need to wake up to the prospect that Shia/Kurdish patience is not infinite and if the civil war the jihadi vermin have been formenting actually breaks out, they will be exterminated along with the car bombers and assasins

Personally I think it a miraculous that the Shai have absorbed the amount of barbarism they have in the last 30 years and not gone on a vengeance spree.
3 The Sheep's Crib Says:
February 28th, 2006 at 1:26 pm
GEMS: From the Blogosphere

We’re either going to have to do some horrible “civilian” warfare (there are no civilians in Muslim countries) or get the h__l out of that mess one of these days. Good news aside, these people tolerate Barbarians as their leaders … political and s…