Patrick Cockburn

The three months it took to cobble together a
government in Iraq after January’s election shows the
depth of the divisions between the Shia, Sunni and
Kurdish communities. In the north of the country the
Sunni Arabs and the Kurds are close to civil war.
Their savage skirmishes, around the oil city of Kirkuk
and in the streets of Mosul, are generally unreported
in Baghdad. The war of 2003 made the Kurds the north’s
dominant power. They are no longer penned in their
mountains, or in their decrepit cities crowded with
refugees from the 3800 villages destroyed by Saddam
Hussein. But their advance south is contested by the
Sunni Arabs, everywhere on the retreat but able to
stage daily suicide bomb attacks, ambushes and
assassinations. On 4 May a man with explosives
attached to his body blew himself up in a queue of
young men trying to join the police in Arbil, killing
60 of them and wounding 150. Ghassan Attiyah, a
political commentator in Baghdad, told me that ‘the
Kurds were able to destabilise Iraq for half a century
under Saddam Hussein and his predecessors. The Sunni
Arabs are certainly strong enough to do the same thing
if they want to.’

From US Centcom Page

April 20, 2004
Release Number: 04-04-32C

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

TASK FORCE OLYMPIA SOLDIER DIES, FOUR WOUNDED

MOSUL, Iraq – One Task Force Olympia Soldier died and four were wounded when their convoy was attacked with an improvised explosive device west of Mosul just after 9 a.m. April 20.

(Conflicting reports put the US casualty toll for April at 80, 90, 93 or 94)

BAGHDAD, Iraq (Reuters) - A U.S. soldier was killed in a roadside bomb attack in the northern Iraqi city of Samarra in the past 24 hours, a U.S. Army spokesman said Thursday.

Six More U.S. Soldiers Killed in Action in Iraq

BAGHDAD (Reuters) - The U.S. military said it had suffered six more combat deaths in Iraq on Wednesday and Thursday, bringing to 449 the number of U.S. soldiers killed in action since the start of the war to oust Saddam Hussein.