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Now!
One person is being assassinated in
Basra every hour, as order in Iraq's second city disintegrates,
according to an Iraqi Defence Ministry official.
And a quarter of all Iraqi
children suffer from malnutrition, a survey of 20,000 households
by the Iraqi government and Unicef says.
The number of violent killings
in Basra is now at a level close to that of Baghdad, and marks
the failure of the British Army's three-year attempt to quell
violence there. Police no longer dare go to the site of a murder
because they fear being attacked. The governor of Basra, Mohammed
Misbahal-Wa'ili, is trying to sack the city's police chief, claiming
that the police have not carried out a single investigation into
hundreds of recent assassinations.
The collapse of government
authority in Iraq is increasing at every level and leaders in
Baghdad have yet to form a cabinet, five months after parliamentary
elections on 15 December.
Insurgent attacks on American
and British troops are also proving more lethal, with 44 US soldiers
and seven British killed so far this month, and with daily losses
exceeding anything seen for more than a year.
Majid al-Sari, an adviser to
the Iraqi Ministry of Defence, describing the situation in Basra
to the daily al-Zaman, said that on average one person was being
assassinated every hour. Militiamen and tribesmen are often the
only real authority. When Sheikh Hassan Jarih al-Karamishi was
killed by men dressed in police uniforms at the weekend, Mr Sari
said his heavily armed armed tribesmen stormed
one police station in south Basra, killing 11 police, and burnt
down two other buildings, headquarters for a political party.
Tribes who once lived in the
marshlands outside Basra are engaged in constant feuds with other
tribes. While militias owe allegiance to Shia parties, they are
also suspected of receiving funds from Kuwaiti and Iranian intelligence.
The number of Iraqis killed
as a result of violence receives some international attention,
but many others, particularly young children, die because they
are malnourished and vulnerable to disease. A quarter of all
Iraqi children suffer from chronic malnutrition, according to
an Iraqi government survey of more than 20,000 households, backed
by Unicef's Iraq Support Centre.
The number of children between
six months and five years old suffering from acute malnourishment
rose from 4 per cent in 2002, the last year of Saddam Hussein's
rule, to 9 per cent in 2005, Unicef said.
In the midst of the turmoil,
Iraq's political leaders have been laboring unsuccessfully to
put together a unity government. Their inability to do so after
five months only serves to demonstrate their deep disunity. The
prime minister-designate, Nuri al-Maliki, is due to announce
a cabinet by next Monday, but there is no agreement on the most
important posts such as the interior and defense ministries.
At the root of the failure
to form a government is the fact that Shia religious parties
won two parliamentary elections last year, on 30 January and
15 December.
Last year, Ibrahim al-Jaafari
led a government based on an alliance between the Kurds and Shia
religious parties. The Shia fear that the US and Britain, supporting
the Kurdish and Sunni parties, want to rob them of their electoral
victory.
Meanwhile, the rest of Baghdad
has slipped into civil war. Yesterday gunmen shot dead five guards
in the largely Shia district of Shaab. As bystanders went to
help the dead and dying, a car bomb blew up beside an oil tanker,
killing another 13 people.
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