Dead cities

It will be fascinating to see the learned recommendations of the Iraqi Cover...er...Study Group will deliver to the president. I mean, how can a group of elder American statesmen studying a chaotic disaster from Washington and a brief trip to the "Green Zone" not have just the options for salvaging this?

Shiite death squads in Baghdad have forced many Sunnis to flee to Baquba, 35 miles to the north, where some have joined the insurgency and have begun attacking Shiites.

“The Sunni have driven the Shia out of Baquba,” said Lt. Col. Thomas Fisher, commander of the 1-68 Combined Arms Battalion, which left Baquba in early November after a yearlong deployment. “They have come from Baghdad, driven out by Shiites there.”

Many Shiites are completing the circle, he said, fleeing to Baghdad or farther south.

Sunnis in Baquba now slaughter Shiites simply to avenge the killings of Sunnis in Baghdad, said Baquba’s mayor, Khalid al-Sinjari, a Sunni. “They kill in Baghdad, we kill in Baquba,” he said.

But now the Shiites also kill in Baquba. The Mahdi Army, a militia allied with the radical Shiite cleric Moktada al-Sadr, has 6,000 to 8,000 members in Diyala, said Ali Khazim al-Hamdan, an official in Mr. Sadr’s Diyala political office. That includes social service workers as well as armed fighters, mostly in the cities of Muqdadiya, about 25 miles northeast of Baquba, and Khan Bani Saad, 12 miles south of Baquba, where the threats are greatest, he said.

“Their goal is to protect Shia in Diyala,” he said. “If my brothers are killed, we have to react to that.”

The growing militia presence combined with the sectarian turn by Iraqi commanders will increasingly leave the Sunnis with only one source of protection, Colonel Jones said: terrorist groups like Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia and Ansar al-Sunna.

“We are really painting them into a box here,” he said. “If you want to have a fight for the next 20 years, it’s here. I can’t imagine anybody who has seen war who wants that to happen. It’s the innocents, it’s these farmers out here, it’s these kids who pay the price. But these interests are colliding and they don’t care about that. Power is what they’re going after, consolidated and uncontested political power.”

“I think the sectarian war is coming this way,” he added.

I'm just guessing, but the ISG's recommendation could be brief:

1. Cut.
2. Run.

Happy Veteran's Day.