The government has failed to address any of the major grievances of the
Sunni — and even some Shia — communities. Those include ongoing
exclusion from the political process, with regular delays in elections;
no real reforms in the punitive, wildly overbroad “De-Baathification”
and antiterrorism laws; increasingly centralized power in the hands of
the prime minister; and brutal policing, with mass arrests, unfair
trials and endemic torture in Iraqi prisons. But since early 2012,
Sunnis have challenged the status quo with persistent, overwhelmingly
peaceful protests, despite violent incursions by the state authorities.
It is in this environment that Maliki’s SWAT security forces, along with
army and federal police, carried out an armed attack on one of the
longest-running protest camps, in the Sunni village of Hawija. A
parliamentary committee’s preliminary findings were that 44 people were
killed and 104 injured, with the government saying 3 police officers
were killed. Remarkably, the attack came after several days of
negotiations with the protesters, whom the government accused of
harboring militants who had killed a soldier, and taking weapons from a
nearby checkpoint.
-- Human Rights Watch's Sarah Leah Whitson "How Baghdad Fuels Iraq's Sectarian Fire" (New York Times).
