Wednesday, September 29, 2004
Conclusions Based on Iraq Incident Map
On September 29 the NY Times published one of the most informative pieces on the Iraq war yet. The article was written around an incident map compiled by a private security company working in Iraq. They report that in the last 30 days there have been 2300 attacks, which is about average for this period of time. The point of the piece emphasized by the Times is that the insurgency is everywhere.
Yet studying the map rebuts this assumption and leads to very different conclusions. The number of incidents in the three southwestern provinces are 1, 2, and 7 respectively. For the provinces east of that, the figures are 1 and 6. Beyond that, on the Iranian border, they are 12 and 13. In the three Kurdish provinces in the northeast the figures are 1, 4, and 1. So out of the 18 provinces in the country 10 are essentially quiet. At the other extreme we have Baghdad with 997, Anbar (Falluja) with 332 and six others with 325, 283, 83, 123, 87, and 76 respectively. This certainly refutes Dr. Allawi’s recent claim in Washington that “14 to 15 of the provinces are completely safe”.
An overlay map of where the Sunni Arabs live shows that nearly all the incidents have been in Sunni Arab majority areas: Shi’a areas are remarkably free. The only Shi’a area with significant incidents is Basra with 87, and I believe there is a considerable Sunni Arab population there. It should be noted that in the Najaf and Karbala, areas where there has been heavy fighting recently, there were very few violent incidents in September. The kind of war that we had in Najaf is not a war against terrorists. It is essentially conventional and much easier to fight and win in a meaningful sense.
So the Coalition and the Interim Government are fighting the Sunni Arabs and not the Shi’a. As I have said many times, this fits the rational assumptions about why Iraqis might fight to fight “the invader”. The Sunni Arabs are the ones who will be left out in the cold in a democracy — or feel they will. The map also suggests that the Iranians are not playing a major role in anything that is going on. The map is remarkably free of incidents near the Iranian border, which, incidentally, is where the Shi’a and the Kurds live.
Yet studying the map rebuts this assumption and leads to very different conclusions. The number of incidents in the three southwestern provinces are 1, 2, and 7 respectively. For the provinces east of that, the figures are 1 and 6. Beyond that, on the Iranian border, they are 12 and 13. In the three Kurdish provinces in the northeast the figures are 1, 4, and 1. So out of the 18 provinces in the country 10 are essentially quiet. At the other extreme we have Baghdad with 997, Anbar (Falluja) with 332 and six others with 325, 283, 83, 123, 87, and 76 respectively. This certainly refutes Dr. Allawi’s recent claim in Washington that “14 to 15 of the provinces are completely safe”.
An overlay map of where the Sunni Arabs live shows that nearly all the incidents have been in Sunni Arab majority areas: Shi’a areas are remarkably free. The only Shi’a area with significant incidents is Basra with 87, and I believe there is a considerable Sunni Arab population there. It should be noted that in the Najaf and Karbala, areas where there has been heavy fighting recently, there were very few violent incidents in September. The kind of war that we had in Najaf is not a war against terrorists. It is essentially conventional and much easier to fight and win in a meaningful sense.
So the Coalition and the Interim Government are fighting the Sunni Arabs and not the Shi’a. As I have said many times, this fits the rational assumptions about why Iraqis might fight to fight “the invader”. The Sunni Arabs are the ones who will be left out in the cold in a democracy — or feel they will. The map also suggests that the Iranians are not playing a major role in anything that is going on. The map is remarkably free of incidents near the Iranian border, which, incidentally, is where the Shi’a and the Kurds live.
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