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<\/span><\/p>\nIn this file photo taken on Monday, May 20, 2013, an Iraqi woman passes by the scene of a car bomb attack in the Kamaliyah neighborhood, a predominantly Shiite area of eastern Baghdad, Iraq. (Photo: AP) <\/span><\/span>With the previous month of April nearly as bad, the warnings that Iraq is already fighting an undeclared civil war<\/a> are given new credence with each passing day<\/a> that carries news of a bombing or masss killing.<\/p>\n As Reuters<\/em> reports<\/a>:<\/p>\n Nearly 2,000 people have been killed in the last two months as al Qaeda and Sunni Islamist insurgents, invigorated by the Sunni-led revolt in Syria<\/a> and by Sunni discontent at home, seek to revive the kind of all-out inter-communal conflict that killed tens of thousands five years ago.<\/span><\/p>\n “That is a sad record,” Martin Kobler, the U.N. envoy in Baghdad, said in a statement. “Iraqi political leaders must act immediately to stop this intolerable bloodshed.”<\/span><\/p>\n Shi’ite Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki later met leaders from across Iraq’s sectarian divide in Baghdad to try to broker talks on the crisis, which previous negotiations have failed to solve.<\/span><\/p>\n The renewed bloodletting reflects worsening tensions between Iraq’s Shi’ite-led government and the Sunni minority, seething with resentment at their treatment since Saddam Hussein was overthrown by the U.S.-led invasion of 2003 and later hanged.<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n As journalist John Pilger recently wrote<\/a>, the US and UK have walked away from the crimes of its invasion and war in Iraq, but Iraqis “don’t have that choice.”<\/p>\n The “mess” left by George Bush and Tony Blair in Iraq is a sectarian war… [but] Bush has retreated back into his Mickey Mouse “presidential library and museum<\/a>” and Tony Blair into his jackdaw travels and his money.<\/p>\n Their “mess” is a crime of epic proportions, wrote [Hans von Sponeck<\/a>, former assistant secretary general of the United Nations and senior UN humanitarian official in Iraq], referring to the Iraqi ministry of social affairs’ estimate of 4.5 million children who have lost one or both parents<\/a>. “This\u00a0means a horrific 14% of Iraq’s population are orphans,” he wrote. “An estimated one million families are headed by women, most of them widows”. […] In Iraq the catastrophe ignited by Britain has brought violence and abuse into millions of homes.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n __________________________________<\/p>\n This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 License<\/p>\n