Iraq is imploding, said the Khaleej Times (United Arab Emirates) in an editorial. Last year, more than 10,000 people were slaughtered in sectarian fighting and bombings, leaving Iraqis “nostalgic over the yesteryears of 2006–07 killings.” Last week, the al Qaida group calling itself the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, or ISIS, took control of the restive Sunni cities of Fallujah and Ramadi in Anbar province of western Iraq. Refugees are now streaming into Jordan. The Sunnis have legitimate gripes: Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki has failed to provide basic services in Anbar province and the west. “A negotiated way out is the only solution.” Al-Maliki’s government will have to “act selflessly and impartially to establish the writ of the state.”
That would be a first, said Al-Adalah (Iraq). This uprising started when al-Maliki sent in troops to dismantle a Sunni protest camp—unrelated to al Qaida—in Ramadi. The group targeted, as well as another Sunni movement called the Military Council of the Tribes, is “not a natural ally” of ISIS. But now all find themselves more or less on the same side, battling the biased, Shiite-dominated government. It’s al-Maliki’s heavy-handedness in Anbar province that is fueling all the opposition. In fact, said Yusuf al-Kuwaylit in Alriyadh (Saudi Arabia), al-Maliki has turned Anbar “into an arena for racial and sectarian liquidation of Sunnis.” He is determined to keep the Sunnis down, even if it means civil war.
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