Bombers killed an Iraqi provincial governor on Monday — the second assassinated in two weeks — amid mounting tension between rival Shi’ite armed factions in Iraq’s southern cities.
Brigadier General Kadhim al-Jayashi, chief of police in the city of Samawa, said the Governor of the southern Iraqi province of Muthanna, Mohammed Ali al-Hassani, was killed by a roadside bomb on his way to work.
”Police leaders have imposed a curfew on Samawa after the assassination,” he said. ”We have formed a committee to investigate.”
Al-Hassani is the second Shi’ite governor to be killed within a fortnight, amid growing signs of conflict between rival political and militia factions within the country’s majority community.
On August 11, the Governor of the neighbouring province of Qadisiyah, Khalil Jamil Hamza, was killed in a multiple bomb attack on his convoy as it passed through his capital, Diwaniyah.
Both Hamza and al-Hassani were members of the Supreme Iraqi Islamic Council (SIIC), one of Iraq’s most powerful parties and a bitter rival of another Shi’ite movement led by radical cleric Moqtada al-Sadr.
”The governor’s vehicle was thrown 10m by the blast before falling into a stream by the side of the road,” said witness Hussein Kadhim from the Rumaitha neighbourhood of Samawa. ”The whole city is paralysed after the attack. There is no movement, no shops are open and everybody is staying indoors.”
Violence
Sectarian violence between Shi’ite and Sunni factions have dominated the headlines since the United States-led invasion of March 2003, but tensions inside both rival communities have also sometimes erupted in bloodshed.
Recent months have seen mounting reports of intra-Shi’ite violence between the SIIC’s militia, the Badr Organisation, and Sadr’s Mehdi Army. Fighting broke out between the factions in Samawa in July.
Many Badr fighters have been recruited into Iraq’s new security forces, while the Mehdi Army is a loosely controlled militia movement that can field tens of thousands of gunmen drawn from the Shi’ite underclass.
Al-Sadr’s movement, however, denied any involvement in killing the governors.
”We condemn this assassination and also the previous one too,” said Sheikh Ahmed al-Shaibani, the spokesman for al-Sadr’s movement in the holy city of Najaf. ”We want to assure that we have no links with the two assassinations.”
Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki received news of Hassani’s ”martyrdom” with sadness and warned of an attempt ”to destabilise our beloved southern Iraq”.
”We call on our people in Muthanna province to exercise self-control and avoid falling into the trap of this painful experience,” he said.
Hamid al-Saedi, an SIIC MP, blamed Monday’s killing on former members of ousted dictator Saddam Hussein’s ruling party and ”parties hostile to Iraq”.
In July 2006, Muthanna was the first province in Iraq to be handed back to the control of Iraqi security forces as British and Australian troops scaled back their operations in the relatively peaceful south.
Since then, however, local power struggles have triggered occasional violent clashes in many Shi’ite cities, leaving hundreds dead.
Militias
Violence between rival Shi’ite militias is now rife in Iraq’s second city, Basra, where British troops deployed there since the invasion are preparing to withdraw from their last base in the city and re-deploy to a desert airbase.
The situation has been exacerbated, US commanders allege, by Iranian agents training and arming hard-line Shi’ite militia units known as ”Special Groups” to carry out kidnappings and attacks on US-led forces.
Tehran has always vehemently denied trying to destabilise Iraq, and al-Maliki’s government maintains close ties with its larger Shi’ite neighbour.
The slain governors’ party, formerly known as the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq, was founded in Tehran under the auspices of the Iranian government as an Iraqi opposition force in exile.
Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is planning to make his first visit to Iraq, the Isna news agency reported. Meanwhile, al-Maliki arrived on Monday in Syria for a visit to another US foe and ally of Iran.
The latest political violence coincided with meetings between French Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner and the country’s divided political leaders to learn about the crisis.
Kouchner’s Baghdad visit is the first by a senior French official since the US-led invasion and, while he brought no concrete offers of assistance, it has been welcomed by Iraqi leaders keen for international support.
Al-Maliki’s Shi’ite-led ruling coalition has crumbled in recent months with the loss of 17 ministers, and emergency talks are under way to cobble together a power-sharing deal and save the government from collapse. — Sapa-AFP