Various Forms of Chaos

A suicide car bombing attack killed an estimated 33 people and wounded 20 at a national reconciliation conference in Baghdad on Tuesday.  The attack occurred as the attendees exited the conference and stood outside the municipal building of Abu Grahib in western Baghadad.

Among the attendees were tribal leaders from the Abu Grahib area.  This was the most recent conference between Shiite officials and Sunni Arab tribal leaders.  So far, no one has taken responsibility for the attack; however, such attacks have been known to be committed by al Qaeda in Iraq.

Two days prior to this attack, a man armed with an explosives-laden vest drove his motorcycle, also equipped with bombs, into a gathering of police recruits in eastern Baghdad.  His attacked killed 30 people and wounded 61 others.  The majority of the victims were police officers and recruits who were grouped outside of a police academy on Palestine street.  This academy had also gone under attack on December 1^st in a “double bombing” that killed 16 people and wounded 46. 

Such violence has likely followed Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki’s call for the nation’s sheikhs to get involved in the government.  This request was the most recent effort to prompt reconciliation Sunnis, Shiites, and tribes of different affiliations so as to force former members of Saddam Hussein’s Baath party “into the political fold”.  In the past, Al-Maliki has been scrutinized for unfairly representing Iraq’s various ethnic groups.

On Sunday, the US military announced that in the next six months the number of troops in Iraq will decrease by 12,000.  The official plan is for two brigade combat teams and their supporting unites to be redeployed and not replaced; this would then lower the number of combat teams in Iraq from 14 to 12.  4,000 British troops will also be redeployed without replacement.

This announcement is said to be the first concerning “troop reduction” since the initial announcement of President Obama’s plan to pull out most of our soldiers from Iraq by the end of August 2010.

The reason for the decreasing number of coalition forces is due to the “increased level of security and stability” that the US has promoted in Iraq in the last year.  There are presently 142,000 troops in Iraq.  Throughout Obama’s presidential campaign, he promised to fully remove those troops within 16 months of taking office.  However, as part of Obama’s plan, 35,000-50,000 troops will stay in Iraq to help initiate a “drawdown plan”.  Former President George W Bush had arranged with the Iraqi government for all US forces to be removed from Iraq by December 31^st, 2011.  The US military is still determined to meet this deadline.

Obama plans to keep a small number of US troops in Iraq to fill an “advisory role” by training and equipping Iraq forces, overseeing civilian operations in Iraq, and executing targeted counterterrorism missions.  Obama said to have settled on this plan after reviewing numerous options offered to him by essential military and civilian advisors.

Although levels of violence are decreasing in Iraq, the war-ridden country’s women are being forced to take up the role of the breadwinner.  The years of fighting have left many women without their h

usbands; they have had to take charge of their families as their husbands had been, “killed, disappeared, abducted, or suffered from mental or physical abuse”.  Thus, many have become incapable of earning a substantial living.

It’s estimated that 740,000 widows are living in Iraq as “forgotten victims”.  A recent survey found that 35.5% of its women were heads of their households and that an estimated 25% had never been married.  An enourmous amount of men around the “marrying age” have been lost to the violence.

Oxfam international and its Iraqi partner group Al-Amal Association, collected the survey’s data in five provinces: Baghdad, Basra, Tameem, Najaf, and Nineveh.  Beginning last summer, 1,700 respondents were questioned and surveyed.

1/4^th of the women interviewed are still without a daily water supply, 1/3^rd of the women are unable to offer their children an education, and ½ of them have fallen victim to violence since the war began.  On top of that, 3/4ths of the women fail to receive the government pension that they are entitled to.