25 Dead In Violence Us Tightens

25 Dead in Violence
US Tightens Checkpoints at Ramadi

Al-Hayat says that civil war violence [Ar.] killed 25 in Iraq on Sunday.

Iraqi police found 11 bodies in the streets of Baghdad and Karbala on Sunday morning. They were killed with a bullet behind the ear. Typically such killings are sectarian reprisals. The Al-Sadiq Mosque and its attached Islamic University in West Baghdad took mortar fire, wounding 3.

A large car bomb in Mosul killed one and wounded 17 others.

Guerrillas kidnapped 10 bakers from a Shiite part of Baghdad. In Kirkuk, guerrillas kidnapped a translator for the US military. (Bakers may be being targeted on the theory that they make ordinary, every day life possible. Or this could be sectarian reprisal.)

al-Hayat says that the Sunni Council of Pious Endowments has called on Sunni mosques in Basra to close their doors in protest against the assassination of a prominent Sunni clergyman in the city on Friday.

The US military has set up additional checkpoints and closed off some roads at Ramadi in an attempt to combat the guerrillas based there, among the most active in the country.

One of the problems with the continued large US military presence in Iraq is that it is strangling the Iraq military. For instance, no Air Force allowed. Likewise, not much of an armored division. How can Maliki hope to rule a country like Iraq without those things?

Kurdish Islamists are agitating for the constitution of the Kurdistan Regional confederacy to include a provision that Islam is the principal source of legislation. They want to emulate the Federal constitution of Iraq, which stipulates that Islam is the religion of state and no legislation can be passed by parliament that contravenes Islamic law.

Gareth Stansfield wonders, with some authority, whether Kurdistan can overcome its internal fissures.