02/10/05: And it seems like I said something like THIS last week

Posted By: Aron

Insurgency predicted to survive for years

Thu Feb 10, 9:40 AM ET Top Stories - Chicago Tribune

By Liz Sly Tribune foreign correspondent

Iraq (news - web sites)'s insurgency will last many years, a senior U.S. official in Baghdad predicted Wednesday, tempering expectations that the success of the recent election would help end the violence that still threatens to undermine Iraq's journey toward democracy.

"I think it's going to take quite a number of years. I do not see any early end," the official said, in a sober assessment of the likely impact of the election on an insurgency fueled largely by Sunni resentment of the political process.

Iraq's Electoral Commission still has not finished counting the ballots, and officials said Wednesday that the final result, expected Thursday, would be delayed several days because of a variety of alleged discrepancies surrounding some ballot boxes.

Ballots from about 300 boxes will be recounted because of the allegations, which include suspicions of tampering, ballot stuffing and other irregularities. It wasn't clear how many votes will be affected by the review, but many of the boxes are believed to have come from the mostly Sunni province of Nineveh, home to the restive city of Mosul.

According to the last partial tally, the greatest share of votes has gone to a coalition of Shiite parties, with an alliance of the main Kurdish parties in second place, leaving Sunnis with little representation in the National Assembly that will form the next government and write the constitution.

No overall turnout figures have been released, but the partial returns and the size of the vote received by the Shiite and Kurdish alliances suggest few Sunnis voted, calling into question their likely acceptance of the new government that will be formed.

Although the insurgency failed in its threat to significantly disrupt the voting, it is also becoming clear that the election is unlikely to make a major dent in the insurgency's base of support, an assortment of committed Islamic radicals and former regime supporters as well as disaffected Sunnis opposed to the U.S. presence.

The American official, briefing reporters in Baghdad on condition of anonymity, said that the insurgency will not be defeated by military means alone and that a political settlement that gives Sunnis reason to have faith in the democratic process also will be needed.

"The most optimistic scenario is that you have on the one hand a set of political developments that increasingly convince Sunnis that they can live successfully and be reasonably well protected . . . not as an oppressed minority," he said. "And militarily you put more and more pressure on--and then it will still take years.

"It is political and military. They are not alternatives," he added.

However, he predicted that within a year, Iraq's regenerated security forces will be well placed to take on the bulk of the responsibility for fighting the insurgency, with U.S. troops playing a backup role. "I think we will make a lot of progress in the next year to having Iraqis in the lead," he said.

After a brief postelection lull, the pace of the violence has picked up. On Wednesday, a journalist, a government official and three politicians were assassinated and a top police officer was abducted from his car in Baghdad.

The journalist, Abdul Hussein Khazal, was the Basra correspondent for the U.S.-funded Al-Hurra television network in Iraq, a member of a Shiite political party and a spokesman for the local council, leaving it unclear precisely why he was targeted. He was gunned down by assailants at his home in Basra along with his 3-year-old son.

A director general of the Housing Ministry was shot dead in Baghdad, and a member of the Kurdish Democratic Party was killed when the car in which he was traveling with three colleagues was ambushed on the capital's notoriously violent Haifa Street, The Associated Press reported.

Two U.S. soldiers were killed, one in an attack on his patrol in Balad, north of Baghdad, and another by a gunshot wound in Balad, the U.S. military said.

The military also announced Wednesday that a U.S. soldier was killed Sunday in Mosul when his patrol came under fire.

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