BAGHDAD (AP) - The Sunni Arab and al-Qaida insurgency that first shoved Iraq toward chaos three years ago clearly had taken a back seat by Sunday to the sectarian bloodletting that is sending the country spiralling toward, if not deeper into, civil war.
Evidence continued to mount in the 44th month of U.S. involvement that Iraqi centres of power - politicians and the government, the police and military - were unable or unwilling to rein in violence in parts of the country where Sunni and Shiite Muslim or Kurdish populations rub up against one another.
The violence has forced at least 1.5 million Iraqis to flee their homeland, with hundreds of new passports being issued daily to those who can afford a plane ticket or taxi ride out of the country, according to the Migration Ministry. The ministry said 300,000 people had also left their homes for elsewhere in Iraq.
The Shiite Majority in parliament, over complaints of dirty tricks from rival Sunni and even some Shiite legislators, adopted a measure that would allow the effective partition of the country after an 18-month waiting period, something widely opposed in polls of Iraqis.
"The starting point is to recognize that Iraq is not going to be a democratic, unified country that serves as a model for the region. The violence and the Sunni-Shiite division have already ruled that out," Dennis Ross, a Mideast peace negotiator and policy maker for former U.S. presidents Bill Clinton and George H.W. Bush, wrote in an Op-ed column for the Washington Post on Sunday.
A partition would leave Iraq with a weak central government and largely independent states run by Kurds in the north, Shiites in the south and Sunnis in the centre and west, giving impetus for still more violence and still further population upheaval.
Iraqis so-called national unity government announced that next Saturday's much-anticipated national reconciliation conference was indefinitely postponed for unspecified "emergency reasons." A week before the planned opening of the conference, Iraq's deeply divided politicians had not managed even to agree on a venue for the meeting.
Shiite Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, in power for just more than four months, took office at the head of what was termed a national unity government. Within days he had presented a 24-point plan for national reconciliation. The inability to meet on that topic speaks to the failure of both his government and opposition politicians.
The postponement was announced on the first anniversary of the successful national referendum which adopted the country's first post-Saddam constitution, which was hailed at the time of a harbinger of a peaceful and democratic Iraq.
By the close of the weekend, at least 86 people were reported dead in a two-day spree of sectarian revenge killings and insurgent bombings, mainly in one city north of Baghdad.
The capital, where random sectarian violence and roving death squads have caused traffic jams to vanish and commerce and society to head toward a standstill, felt like a stick of dynamite with a lighted fuse.
American analysts like Ross and Anthony Cordesman of the Center for Strategic and International Studies have said this week that 15,000 to 20,000 additional U.S. troops were needed to give the Americans an even shot at leaving behind a peaceful Iraq.
Then, they say, major policy changes are necessary in both Washington and Baghdad.
"Iraq is already in a state of serious civil war. The current efforts at political compromise and improved security at best are buying time. There is a critical risk that Iraq will drift into a major civil conflict over the coming months, see its present government fail, and/or divide and separate in some form," Cordesman wrote in an analysis last week.
Ross said the best solution was, in fact, the formation of a federal state, with Shiites, Sunnis and Kurds running areas where they are majorities.
A majority of Shiite politicians favour a division, but the larger population and some powerful leaders like anti-American cleric Muqtada al-Sadr refuse to accept such a plan. It is, however, highly popular among minority Kurds, who have fought for centuries to carve out an independent state from lands they live on across a belt of northeastern Syria, northern Iraq, southeastern Turkey and northwestern Iran.
Sunnis, a minority sect in Iraq that ran the country until the ouster of Saddam, are violently opposed, fearing it would leave them with no revenue from Iraq's oil riches. Natural resources are largely absent from their lands in central and western Iraq.
Perhaps the most shocking development of a tough week in Iraq was a new study that estimated the Iraq war has led to the deaths of nearly 655,000 Iraqis as of July.
Researchers from Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore and the Al Mustansiriya University in Baghdad derived that estimate from a door-to-door survey, conducted by doctors, of 1,849 households in Iraq. Taking the number of deaths reported by household residents, they extrapolated to a countrywide figure.
The researchers, reflecting the inherent uncertainties in such extrapolations, said they were 95 per cent certain that the real number lay somewhere between 392,979 and 942,636 deaths.
Even the smaller figure is almost eight times the estimate some others have derived.
President George W. Bush and his administration dismissed the study as not "credible" and statisticians and pollsters came down on both sides of the issue. Most previous estimates of Iraqi deaths put the number at about 50,000 or slightly above.
Evidence continued to mount in the 44th month of U.S. involvement that Iraqi centres of power - politicians and the government, the police and military - were unable or unwilling to rein in violence in parts of the country where Sunni and Shiite Muslim or Kurdish populations rub up against one another.
The violence has forced at least 1.5 million Iraqis to flee their homeland, with hundreds of new passports being issued daily to those who can afford a plane ticket or taxi ride out of the country, according to the Migration Ministry. The ministry said 300,000 people had also left their homes for elsewhere in Iraq.
The Shiite Majority in parliament, over complaints of dirty tricks from rival Sunni and even some Shiite legislators, adopted a measure that would allow the effective partition of the country after an 18-month waiting period, something widely opposed in polls of Iraqis.
"The starting point is to recognize that Iraq is not going to be a democratic, unified country that serves as a model for the region. The violence and the Sunni-Shiite division have already ruled that out," Dennis Ross, a Mideast peace negotiator and policy maker for former U.S. presidents Bill Clinton and George H.W. Bush, wrote in an Op-ed column for the Washington Post on Sunday.
A partition would leave Iraq with a weak central government and largely independent states run by Kurds in the north, Shiites in the south and Sunnis in the centre and west, giving impetus for still more violence and still further population upheaval.
Iraqis so-called national unity government announced that next Saturday's much-anticipated national reconciliation conference was indefinitely postponed for unspecified "emergency reasons." A week before the planned opening of the conference, Iraq's deeply divided politicians had not managed even to agree on a venue for the meeting.
Shiite Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, in power for just more than four months, took office at the head of what was termed a national unity government. Within days he had presented a 24-point plan for national reconciliation. The inability to meet on that topic speaks to the failure of both his government and opposition politicians.
The postponement was announced on the first anniversary of the successful national referendum which adopted the country's first post-Saddam constitution, which was hailed at the time of a harbinger of a peaceful and democratic Iraq.
By the close of the weekend, at least 86 people were reported dead in a two-day spree of sectarian revenge killings and insurgent bombings, mainly in one city north of Baghdad.
The capital, where random sectarian violence and roving death squads have caused traffic jams to vanish and commerce and society to head toward a standstill, felt like a stick of dynamite with a lighted fuse.
American analysts like Ross and Anthony Cordesman of the Center for Strategic and International Studies have said this week that 15,000 to 20,000 additional U.S. troops were needed to give the Americans an even shot at leaving behind a peaceful Iraq.
Then, they say, major policy changes are necessary in both Washington and Baghdad.
"Iraq is already in a state of serious civil war. The current efforts at political compromise and improved security at best are buying time. There is a critical risk that Iraq will drift into a major civil conflict over the coming months, see its present government fail, and/or divide and separate in some form," Cordesman wrote in an analysis last week.
Ross said the best solution was, in fact, the formation of a federal state, with Shiites, Sunnis and Kurds running areas where they are majorities.
A majority of Shiite politicians favour a division, but the larger population and some powerful leaders like anti-American cleric Muqtada al-Sadr refuse to accept such a plan. It is, however, highly popular among minority Kurds, who have fought for centuries to carve out an independent state from lands they live on across a belt of northeastern Syria, northern Iraq, southeastern Turkey and northwestern Iran.
Sunnis, a minority sect in Iraq that ran the country until the ouster of Saddam, are violently opposed, fearing it would leave them with no revenue from Iraq's oil riches. Natural resources are largely absent from their lands in central and western Iraq.
Perhaps the most shocking development of a tough week in Iraq was a new study that estimated the Iraq war has led to the deaths of nearly 655,000 Iraqis as of July.
Researchers from Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore and the Al Mustansiriya University in Baghdad derived that estimate from a door-to-door survey, conducted by doctors, of 1,849 households in Iraq. Taking the number of deaths reported by household residents, they extrapolated to a countrywide figure.
The researchers, reflecting the inherent uncertainties in such extrapolations, said they were 95 per cent certain that the real number lay somewhere between 392,979 and 942,636 deaths.
Even the smaller figure is almost eight times the estimate some others have derived.
President George W. Bush and his administration dismissed the study as not "credible" and statisticians and pollsters came down on both sides of the issue. Most previous estimates of Iraqi deaths put the number at about 50,000 or slightly above.