The New York Times website reports this afternoon: “Fighting in two of Iraq’s largest cities threatens to destabilize a long-term truce that had helped reduce the level of violence in the five-year-old war.”

Raed Jarrar, currently in Washington, D.C., is available for interviews.

RAED JARRAR
Jarrar, who was born and raised in Iraq, is Iraq consultant for the American Friends Service Committee. He said today: “Preparations for the next Iraqi elections are underway now. The Iraqi executive branch, controlled by the five Sunni, Shiite, and Kurdish separatist parties, wants to make sure their rivals won’t win the next provincial elections expected to take place before October. But unlike other pre-election preparations that might include TV advertisements and sticking posters around the streets, the separatist Shiites in the Iraqi executive branch sent 50,000 Iraqi troops, backed by U.S. troops, to Basra to destroy and kill their rivals (the nationalist Shiites).”

Jarrar added: “This Shiite-Shiite fight is an excellent example of how the Iraqi civil conflict is more about political/economic issues rather than sectarian and religious as the U.S. mainstream media and politicians have been repeating for years.”
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