Oil, Politics and Bloodshed Corrupt an Iraqi City

Basra is being pulled apart by Shiite parties that want to control Iraq's south and its biggest prize, oil.

Politics, once seen as a solution to the problems of a society broken by years of brutal single-party rule, has paralyzed the heart of Iraq's south. This once-quiet city of riverside promenades was among the most receptive to the American invasion. Now, three years later, it is being pulled apart by Shiite political parties that want to control the region and its biggest prize, oil. But in today's Iraq, politics and power flow from the guns of militias, and negotiating has been a bloody process.

"We're into political porridge, that's what's changed," said Brig. James Everard, commander of the British forces in Basra. "It's mafia-type politics down here." Police reports from the past five months read like war chronicles: Eight oil company employees murdered. Twenty caches of Russian rockets discovered, including a pile in the back of an ambulance. A tank of stolen oil found in a fake mosque. Shootouts reported between a politician's militia and the police, and between police officers.

Now, after two years of relative calm, Basra has a soaring murder rate (the 85 killings in May were nearly triple the number in January), a tattered oil industry and a terrified population. "I cannot talk with you," said Sajid Saad Hassan, a professor at Basra University's agriculture college. "I haven't joined a party and no militia is protecting me." The story of Basra's descent traces the arc of the war itself. People here, mostly Shiites whom Saddam Hussein oppressed, embraced the invasion. But for the next three years, Baghdad put its resources into fighting insurgents in central and western Iraq, leaving the quiet Shiite south to find its own way.

But the rules have fallen away along with the end of Mr. Hussein's rule, leaving a broken landscape of empty state institutions. "So much of the state melted after Saddam fell," an American official said. A primordial soup of political parties, their militias and tribes filled the void. They formed morals patrols at the university, commanded entire units of the flimsy police force, and moved into positions of power in the company that controls the vast oil-processing and transportation network.

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/06/13/world/middleeast/13basra.html?hp&ex=1150171200&en=ac106a7af0841616&ei=5094&partner=homepage

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