At least 20 US soldiers have been killed in Iraq in May, the most since last September, along with more than 50 wounded. Iraqi casualties are, as usual - and in both categories - at least ten times that number.
Attacks against US forces are once again on the rise in places like Baghdad and Fallujah, where the Iraqi resistance was fiercest before so many of them joined the Sahwa (Sons of Iraq, also referred to as Awakening Councils), and began taking payments from the US military in exchange for halting attacks against the occupiers and agreeing to join the fight against al-Qaeda in Iraq. In early April I wrote a column for this website that illustrated how ongoing Iraqi government and US military attacks against the Sahwa, coupled with broken promises of the Sahwa being incorporated into the government security apparatus or given civilian jobs, would likely lead to an exodus from the Sahwa and a return to the resistance.
Slowly, but surely, we are seeing that occur. While US liaison Col. Jeffrey Kulmayer has called this idea, along with the ongoing controversy from the Iraqi government - led by US-pawn Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki - not paying most of the Sahwa members, while continuing government arrests of and attacks on Sahwa members "overblown," this does not change reality. Let us recall the telling words of the reporter Caud Cockburn, father of journalist Patrick Cockburn, "Never believe anything until it's officially denied."
punditman says... Where there is foreign occupation, there will always be resistance—a rather obvious point lost within the propaganda matrix of the Iraq War. To put this in an Iraqi context, the "Sawa" are turning back into insurgents for a variety of reasons. What happens if all 100,000 of these fighters turn back against Iraqi and US forces? Still, most of the media continue to parrot the line that the "surge was a success," "General Petraeus is a hero," and "Iraq's security situation is improving." Clearly, Iraq remains a multi-faceted, multi-sided mess. Violence may be cyclical but there is no peace in sight.
