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'Iraq on brink of collapse: report.


Iraq is on the brink of total disintegration and could drag its neighbors into a regional war, a leading think-tank said, after the Pentagon confirmed violence was at an all-time high.

The warning from the International Crisis Group came amid lawless chaos in Baghdad, where police were hunting for 16 kidnapped aid workers and a former minister who escaped from jail, allegedly with the help of US hired guns.

The ICG's report called on Washington to distance itself from Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki's beleaguered government, which has failed to tackle sectarian militias, and reach out to the United States' arch-foes Iran and Syria.

The permanent members of the UN Security Council and Iraq's six neighbours should engage with all the parties to Iraq's spiralling conflict, it urged, while nevertheless holding out little prospect of success.

"Implementation of the various measures mapped out in this report is one last opportunity. It is at best a feeble hope," the ICG paper said.

"But it is the only hope to spare Iraq from an all-out disintegration, with catastrophic and devastating repercussions for all," it warned.

The interior ministry's head of operations, Brigadier General Abdel Karim Khalaf, told AFP that a high-level investigation had been launched into the capture of Red Crescent staff, the latest in a series of mass kidnaps.

"It was repeated, and might be repeated again," he said, linking Sunday's raid on a Red Crescent office in Baghdad to another last Thursday in which several dozen shopkeepers were taken.

In both assaults, a large group of gunmen using security force uniforms, weapons and SUV trucks sealed off a central area of the capital and hauled off dozens of civilians, unchallenged by local law enforcement.'

Lees verder: http://www.turkishpress.com/news.asp?id=155989

Zie ook: http://www.crisisgroup.org/home/index.cfm?id=4580&l=1