Fragile democracy grapples with challenges as US forces leave

Baghdad: The last convoy of US soldiers pulled out of Iraq yesterday, ending nearly nine years of war that cost almost 4,500 American and tens of thousands of Iraqi lives and left a country still grappling with political uncertainty.

The war launched in March 2003 with missiles striking Baghdad to oust dictator Saddam Hussain closes with a fragile democracy still facing insurgents, sectarian tensions and the challenge of defining its place in the Arab region.

The final column of around 100 mostly US military MRAP armoured vehicles carrying 500 US troops trundled across the southern Iraq desert through the night along an empty highway and across the Kuwaiti border. For many Iraqis security remains a worry — but no more than jobs and getting access to power in a country whose national grid provides only a few hours of electricity a day despite massive oil potential in the Opec country.

"We don't think about America... We think about electricity, jobs, our oil, our daily problems," said Abbas Jaber, a government employee in Baghdad. "They left chaos. Also, Iraq's Sunni minority are chafing under what they see as the increasingly authoritarian control of [Prime Minister Nouri Al] Maliki's Shiite coalition. Some local leaders are already pushing mainly Sunni provinces to demand more autonomy from Baghdad."

The main Sunni political bloc Iraqiya said on Saturday that it was temporarily suspending its participation in the parliament to protest against what it said was Al Maliki's unwillingness to deliver on power-sharing.

Meanwhile, Al Maliki called on lawmakers yesterday to withdraw confidence from one of his deputies, a Sunni Arab who described him on television as "worse than Saddam Hussain".

Al Maliki's push for Saleh Al Mutlaq to be removed from his post comes amid a political deadlock with the deputy prime minister's Sunni-backed Iraqiya bloc, which announced a day earlier that it was suspending its participation in parliament in protest at the premier's alleged centralisation of power.

Latest moves

"The prime minister sent an official letter to parliament, asking it to withdraw its confidence in Saleh Al Mutlaq after his recent statements," Ali Mousawi, media adviser to Al Maliki, told AFP.

Al Mutlaq, who had been accused of being a supporter of Saddam's outlawed Baath party in the run-up to March 2010 elections that he was barred from standing in, told CNN on Tuesday that Washington was leaving Iraq "with a dictator".

And in a separate interview with his own Babiliyah satellite television channel, Al Mutlaq charged: "Al Maliki is worse than Saddam Hussain, because the latter was a builder, but Al Maliki has done absolutely nothing."