Support and extended arguments
- Sarah Baxter, “American Ponders Cutting Iraq in Three” The Times Online 10/8/06 – “Many Middle East experts are horrified by the difficulty of dividing the nation. ‘Fifty-three per cent of the population of Iraq live in four cities and three of them are mixed,’ said Anthony Cordesman of the Washington-based Centre for Strategic and International Studies, who fears a bloody outcome. Baghdad is a particular jumble, although ethnic cleansing is already dividing the population along the Tigris River, with Shi’ites to the east and Sunnis to the west of the city.”
- Rend Al Rahim Washington Post “Partition Is Not the Solution” 10/29/06 – “Neat partition lines are impossible because few regions in Iraq are ethnically or confessionally homogeneous. The governorates of Diyala, Mosul, Salahuddin, Hilla, Kirkuk and Basra are intermixed or have large minorities scattered throughout each province. In Baghdad, with probably a quarter of Iraq’s population, the ethnic and sectarian groups are inextricably interwoven.”
- Middle East scholar Andrew Terrill and director of the Army Military History Institute Conrad Crane “Precedents, Variables, and Options in Planning a U.S. Military Disengagement Strategy from Iraq”, 10/05 – “An amicable breakup of Iraq is virtually impossible to imagine since many of the most important areas, including Baghdad, are ethnically and religiously mixed, and since contradictory claims to oil producing regions are not subject to compromise.”
Bloodshed following the India-Pakistan partitioning in 1947 is an example of what would follow the partitioning of Iraq:
Israel, in addition to India, is an example of a partitioning that resulted in a massive death toll:
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