The United States Ambassador to Iraq has acknowledged that ousting Saddam Hussein had opened up a “Pandora’s box” of sectarian and ethnic tension which meant the “potential was there” for a full-blown civil war.
Zalmay Khalilzad’s comments are one of the bleakest public assessments yet made by a senior American official of the situation in Iraq. He said the bombing last month of a Shia Muslim shrine in Samarra showed that the insurgents “recognise this vulnerability of Iraq . . . there is a concerted effort to provoke civil war”. Full Story