Oil, Politics and Bloodshed Corrupt an Iraqi City

Oil, Politics and Bloodshed Corrupt an Iraqi City

By SABRINA TAVERNISE and QAIS MIZHER
Published: June 13, 2006

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Police reports from the past five months read like war chronicles: Eight oil company employees murdered. Twenty caches of Russian rockets discovered, including a pile in the back of an ambulance. A tank of stolen oil found in a fake mosque. Shootouts reported between a politician's militia and the police, and between police officers.

Now, after two years of relative calm, Basra has a soaring murder rate (the 85 killings in May were nearly triple the number in January), a tattered oil industry and a terrified population.

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But the rules have fallen away along with the end of Mr. Hussein's rule, leaving a broken landscape of empty state institutions.

"So much of the state melted after Saddam fell," an American official said. A primordial soup of political parties, their militias and tribes filled the void. They formed morals patrols at the university, commanded entire units of the flimsy police force, and moved into positions of power in the company that controls the vast oil-processing and transportation network.

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/06/13/world/middleeast/13basra.html?ex=1307851200&en=39925c1ec9ad927a&ei=5088&partner=rssnyt&emc=rss