Sectarian Violence Rises in Baghdad

All eyes may be on the Marjah offensive in Afghanistan, where the Taliban is now using human shields according to some reports, but Iraq bears attention too: Sectarian strife and violence may be returning to the country, and this time there’s not a significant U.S. troop commitment to help quell it. Last month, Sunni extremists targeted Shiites during a holy pilgrimage, and recently a Sunni man who lives in a Shiite neighborhood was murdered during a soccer match. "All we're doing is setting the clock back to 2005," a senior U.S. military official tells The Washington Post. "The militias are fully armed, and al Qaeda in Iraq is trying to move back from the west. These are the conditions now, and we're sitting back looking at PowerPoint slides and whitewashing."