“Throughout the reporting for Meeting Resistance, a common thread among the people we spoke to was a powerful sense of national identity – of being Iraqi – that sometimes was underpinned by a religious belief that defense of the nation was a divine duty,” Connors explained, “This held true for those who were involved in violence and their supporters in the broader community.

“As early as November of 2003 the US National Intelligence Council produced a National Intelligence Estimate that reported the resistance to occupation in Iraq as being nationalist in motivation with deep roots in the society. Department of Defense reports to Congress have shown that for the duration of the war 73 percent of significant attacks (those requiring planning and organization) have been directed at the US-led coalition forces, 15 percent targeted Iraqi troops and police, with the remaining 12 percent being aimed at civilians and producing massive casualties that have done severe damage to those groups that oppose the occupation.”

Thus, this same nationalism may well be in the process of being increasingly vented against the Maliki government that is strong-arming the Sahwa and any other former resistance fighters it can get its hands on.

Then, we have more broken promises from the US military, again backed by Maliki since his government’s survival depends on it, which continue to erode general Iraqi support for the government in Baghdad. April 14 turned out to be an interesting day, indeed, as not-so-coincidentally Army Col. Gary Volesky, commander of US forces in the northern city of Mosul, which is largely completely out of the control of either US or Iraqi forces, announced that US troops could remain in that city after a June deadline for withdrawal, which, of course, violates a pact reached last year that called for all US forces to withdrawal from all Iraqi cities by June 30. “If the Iraqi government wants us to stay we will stay,” Volesky told reporters, as though the Iraqi government has any jurisdiction whatsoever over the US military. Laying some groundwork for the ongoing US presence in Mosul, Volesky added, “There could be bad days ahead.”

Between Mosul and Baghdad lies the oil rich city of Kirkuk. Along with the growing storm of the Sahwa-Iraqi government impasse, the other current major flashpoint in Iraq is the growing tension between Iraqi Kurds and Arabs regarding the fate of Kirkuk. Also on April 14, a Kurdish political coalition announced it will boycott provincial council meetings until the main Arab party there cedes council leadership positions.

In the northern province of Nineveh, the Kurdish political coalition the Nineveh Fraternal List walked out of the council’s inaugural meeting and vowed not to return until the Arab’s handed over two of the council’s top three leadership positions – seats the Arab’s had legitimately won in the January provincial elections. Hashim al Tael, a Sunni Arab national lawmaker from Nineveh, said of the disagreements: “This is just the beginning. We may witness much more.”

Not surprisingly, as a result of the aforementioned, the next day, April 15, at least 14 people were killed and more than 25 injured in a car bomb attack in Kirkuk targeting police guards outside a building of the state-owned North Oil Company. The guards were traveling home on a bus when they were struck by the bomber. Lt. Col. Ghazi Mohammad Rashid, a police spokesman, told reporters, “All that was left of the bus were its seats, the officers’ Kalashnikovs and human body parts.”

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