AppId is over the quota
But on Monday, no one seemed to be able to agree on any of the details of the attack against the official, Finance Minister Rafe al-Essawi, or even whether it had happened at all. Not for the first time, the facts seemed to be scrambled by Iraq’s growing political and sectarian discord.
Security forces from the Salahuddin Operations Command, which answers to the Shiite-led government in Baghdad, denied that there had been any attack in Salahuddin Province, a largely Sunni area that is home to a renowned Shiite shrine and includes Saddam Hussein’s hometown. A security official at the command said officials “didn’t witness any security breach.”
But two hours later, the local police in Salahuddin contradicted that account, and accused the operations command of “hiding” the incident.
Mr. Essawi himself was in no doubt. He said in a telephone interview that he and a few other Iraqi politicians were returning to Baghdad from a funeral when a blast slammed their convoy outside the holy city of Samarra. Mr. Essawi, who has been an outspoken critic of Iraq’s Shiite prime minister, said he did not know whether the bombing was an assassination attempt aimed specifically at him. But he quickly laid blame for the bombing on the government, which is struggling to keep a lid on terrorist attacks and politically motivated violence in the country.
“With such a violated security situation, it could happen to everyone,” Mr. Essawi said.
The contradictory accounts were reminiscent of late November, when news of a suicide car bombing just outside Iraq’s Parliament was swamped by competing narratives. Immediately after the blast, a spokesman for the Sunni speaker of Parliament, Osama al-Nujaifi, said the attack appeared to be an attempt to assassinate Mr. Nujaifi. A few days later, a security spokesman said on television that the true target was Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki, a Shiite.
Within weeks of that disputed attack, a long-running feud between Mr. Maliki and his political opponents erupted into one of the country’s worst political crises in years, one that has exposed sectarian tensions and raised worries that Mr. Maliki was consolidating power against his rivals now that American military forces have withdrawn from Iraq.
The Sunni vice president has fled to the Kurdish north to avoid arrest on terrorism charges, and Mr. Maliki is trying to oust the deputy prime minister, another Sunni. Iraqiya, a political coalition with wide Sunni support, is boycotting Parliament, and so far Mr. Maliki and the Iraqiya bloc’s leaders have been unable to even agree to talk about the crisis.
Mr. Essawi, a former hospital director from Anbar Province in the western Sunni heartland, has been a central figure in the political furor. He has called for Mr. Maliki to be replaced and is refusing to attend meetings of Iraq’s cabinet — moves that have prompted the prime minister to try to push him aside.
On Monday, Mr. Nujaifi, another Iraqiya leader, made a televised speech warning of the deteriorating human rights picture in Iraq, marked by arbitrary arrests and abuses, and accused Mr. Maliki of using the security forces to advance his political interests.
An Iraqi employee of The New York Times contributed reporting from Samarra, Iraq.
No comments:
Post a Comment