Civil war spreads

Meanwhile, back in forgotten Iraq, Patrick Cockburn files this dispatch:

A civil war between Sunni and Shia Muslims is spreading rapidly through central Iraq, with each community seeking revenge for the latest massacre. Yesterday a suicide bomber driving a van packed with explosives blew himself up outside the golden-domed mosque in Kufa, killing at least 59 and injuring more than 130 Shia.

In the past 10 days, while the world has been absorbed by the war in Lebanon, sectarian massacres have started to take place on an almost daily basis, leading observers to fear a level of killing approaching that of Rwanda immediately before the genocide of 1994. On a single spot on the west bank of the Tigris river in north Baghdad, between 10 and 12 bodies have been drifting ashore every day.

This follows on the release of a new UN report that claims more than 100 Iraqis are being killed each day, totaling about 14K since the beginning of this year. I mention this news item again because it, too, seems to have gotten lost in Beirut's rubble.

Turning back to Cockburn's report, he throws in some additional context:

The failure of the newly formed government of Nouri al-Maliki to stop the mass killings has rapidly discredited it. The Shia and Sunni militias - in the latter case the insurgents fighting the Americans - are becoming stronger as people look to them for protection. After the explosion in Kufa angry crowds hurled stones at the police demanding that the militiamen of the Mehdi Army, followers of the nationalist cleric Muqtada al-Sadr, take over security in the city. Others chanted at the police - who began to fire in the air to disperse them - "you are traitors!" and accused them of being "American agents".

In much of Baghdad the militias have taken over and are killing or driving out the minority community. It has become very easy to be killed anywhere in central Iraq - where a third of the 27 million population lives - through belonging to the wrong sect. Many people carry two sets of identity papers, one forged at a cost of about $60 (£30), so they can claim to be a Sunni at Sunni checkpoints and Shia at Shia checkpoints.

Even this may not be enough to ensure survival. Aware of the number of forged identity papers being used, Mehdi Army checkpoints in the largely Shia Shu'ala district in west Baghdad have started to ask drivers questions about Shia theology which a Sunni would be unable to answer. One man, a Shia, passed the test but was still executed - because he was driving a car with number plates from Anbar, a wholly Sunni province.

While the White House and Downing Street still refuse to use the phrase "civil war", Iraqis in the centre of the country have no doubt what is happening. Baghdad's mortuary alone received 1,595 bodies in June, and it has got worse since then.

What can one say after reading this? Words fail.