Anbar

Since April 2009 monthly death counts for Iraq have fluctuated up and down. October was no different as it was higher than the previous month. Iraq’s ministries for example, reported 410 deaths in October, compared to 203 in September and 456 in August.

Despite the recent October 2009 Baghdad bombing, and the previous one in August, attacks in Iraq are at their lowest level since the 2003 invasion. The Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction recorded drops in weekly attacks in eleven of Iraq’s eighteen provinces from May to October 2009.

One of the major problems with the Iraqi government is its inability to spend its budget effectively. The country’s eighteen provinces do much worse than the central government in Baghdad. The new Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction’s quarterly report to Congress has the latest numbers on how Iraq’s governorates have done up to October 13, 2009.

Anbar was once the center of the Sunni insurgency. After the Awakening movement and the Surge however, violence there dropped dramatically. Every time there’s a mass casualty bombing in the province however, there are concerns that militants are making a comeback. The latest incident was an October 11, 2009 attack on the provincial council building in Ramadi, which ended up killing 23, and wounding 65, while members of the National Reconciliation Committee were meeting with local Anbar officials.

The latest report by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) on the number of Iraqi refugees and internally displaced that have returned is now available. Like the last report, 2009 has continued to see a number of Iraqis come back, but varying by month. In June, 2009 14,750 displaced and 3,490 refugees for a total of 18,410 Iraqis made the trip back.

In mid-July 2009 Aswat al-Iraq reported that officials and tribal sheikhs in Anbar were worried about an up-tick in violence in their province. Sheikh Hashim Khalifa blamed the attacks on political factions vying for position before the January 2010 parliamentary elections. He said the provincial security forces were unable to deal with this violence because they were afraid of offending political parties.

More information is now available on the ruling coalitions that took power after the 2009 provincial elections. Here’s a rundown of governors and heads of councils, (and where possible their deputies), the parties that are now in control of the fourteen provinces that held balloting in January 2009, and the election results. After each is a short note about the motivations behind the coalitions. At the end is a comparison with the 2005 balloting.

In June 2009 Iraq had the highest oil revenues of the year, yet that has not helped Iraq’s provinces, which are facing massive budget deficits. That’s because it took five months for the country to reach the petroleum price set in the 2009 budget, and oil exports have still not achieved their target. 2008 was also a boom year for Iraq’s oil industry, and the provinces made large commitments to development projects as a result. Now that’s all coming back to haunt them.

Much of the commentary about Iraq is driven by U.S. experiences, which are not always the reality in Iraq. When the sectarian war took off in 2006 for example, much of the writing about the country was focused upon the Sunni-Shiite divide. A common argument was that these two interpretations of Islam had always been in conflict, and could not coexist in Iraq. Later, when the U.S. began working with the tribes in Anbar, which became known as the Awakening, a new line of thinking opened up claiming that Iraq was at heart a tribal society.