SOMALINET NEWS ...Archives
IRAQ: CONFLICT A CIVIL WAR December 5, 2006
Zainab Osman
(SomaliNet) In an interview Monday with the BBC, United Nations Secretary General Kofi Annan gave his harshest assessment yet of the war in Iraq: "They had a dictator who was brutal but they had their streets: they could go out, their kids could go to school and come back without a mother or father worrying 'Am I going to see my child again?'"
Annan went on to say that life for ordinary Iraqis is now worse than under Saddam Hussein as the country plunges deeper into violence "much worse" than civil war. "If I was an average Iraqi, I would make the same comparison; a society needs minimum security and a secure environment for it to get on. Without security, not much can be done."
U.S. President George W. Bush still insists the violence is "sectarian strife," but much of the U.S. media last week began describing the conflict as a civil war. Annan indicated he had no doubt about its seriousness "given the level of the violence, the level of killing and the way the forces are ranged against each other."
Annan said he did "everything I could" to stop the war taking place in the first place and genuinely believed it could have been halted. He said what he regrets most was that the war had claimed the lives of almost two dozen colleagues in a Baghdad bombing.