New dawn for Iraq marked by bloodshed

For Iraqis, it was a grim fact of daily life. As a crowd of men, most of them impoverished Shia construction workers, gathered after dawn on May 20 at a food stand in Sadr City in the hope of picking up a day's labor, a powerful bomb ripped through the crowd. Half an hour later the bodies–a dozen of the 19 killed–were laid out in a garden of the Imam Ali hospital nearby, their faces covered with cardboard. "When will this stop? Where is the government?" a teenager sobbed as he stood amid pools of blood. A man beat his face with his hands and hugged his dead brother. Survivors rushed the wounded to hospital. Another day, another terrible death toll across Iraq. In the border town of Qaim, close to the Syrian frontier, a suicide bomber killed five people in a police station. In Musayib, south of Baghdad, 15 bodies of men who had been tortured and shot were dumped in the street. There are now two interlinked wars in Iraq: the insurgency against the US-led occupation, or rather two insurgencies, one Sunni, largely in the north, and the other a Shia rebellion whose targets are coalition troops. Then there is a sectarian war between Sunni and Shia, characterized by bombs and death squads. On May 20, as Iraq's Parliament finally approved a new government of "national unity," the first intended to serve for a full term, ending months of deadlock and fighting, the question was whether it could make any difference to the violence tearing Iraq apart. How much has been settled after five months of tortuous negotiations that have seen one candidate for prime minister, Ibrahim al-Jafari, withdraw under US pressure was far from clear. As the new Prime Minister, Nouri al-Maliki, stood to present his government, it was amid complaints about how the negotiations had been conducted and with the three key posts–defense, national security and interior–over which Iraq's political factions have been fighting, still effectively unfilled. Maliki himself, a tough-talking Shia, will "temporarily" take charge at the interior ministry, implicated in running torture centers and death squads. Maliki, a defender of Shia interests since his return from exile in 2003, has won praise from Sunnis for his willingness to seek consensus. As part of the 11th-hour temporary deal, the defense ministry will go to deputy Prime Minister Salam Zobaie, a Sunni. "We will work within a framework that will preserve the unity of the Iraqi people," Maliki told Parliament as he listed 34 policy priorities. He said he would personally supervise security and improving services such as electricity and water. But the announcement was greeted with turmoil. Before Maliki could begin naming his team, the leader of the Dialogue party–the smaller of two main Sunni factions–grabbed the microphone to denounce how posts in the 37-member government had been distributed. Maliki's cabinet was approved by a show of hands, minister by minister, after a turbulent start to the parliamentary session, when some minority Sunni leaders spoke out against the deal and several walked out.