22/12/2011 11:15
Political crises in Iraq
As the crisis in Syria deepened in recent weeks, there have been two significant developments in Iraq.
Sunni-majority provinces which had previously shunned the idea of setting up Kurdistan-style autonomous areas, as the new constitution allows, have begun to embrace that idea, to the clear displeasure of the Shia Prime Minister, Nouri Maliki, the BBC reports.
The prime minister's conduct has led to concern that he is attempting to exclude the Sunnis out of power and risks reigniting the violence between the two communities that scarred the middle of the last decade, the Telegraph reported.
His Shia-dominated administration, with all the security agencies under his personal control, has simultaneously been conducting an aggressive campaign to detain people - inevitably, mainly Sunnis - suspected of sympathies or affiliations with Saddam Hussein's now-banned Baath Party and its surviving adherents, some of whom took refuge in Syria.
"Maliki and the Shia are paranoid about the emergence of a Sunni Syria with Baathist and Salafist tendencies", said one senior Iraqi politician.