Billmon: Of Kurds and Crips

Tony Shadid and his colleague Steve Fainaru -- last seen at this blog cruising the Sunni Triangle with a bunch of Saddam-loving Iraqi Army recruits -- have a long story in today's Washington Post that reviews the transformation of Iraq into the new, juiced-up Lebanon:

Shiite and Kurdish militias, often operating as part of Iraqi government security forces, have carried out a wave of abductions, assassinations and other acts of intimidation, consolidating their control over territory across northern and southern Iraq and deepening the country's divide along ethnic and sectarian lines . . .

In Basra in the south, dominated by the Shiites, and Mosul in the north, ruled by the Kurds, as well as cities and villages around them, many residents say they are powerless before the growing sway of the militias, which instill a climate of fear that many see as redolent of the era of former president Saddam Hussein.

The picture they paint is chaotic, thuggish and utterly detached from the political bickering now under way in the Green Zone -- which might just as well be happening on another planet. The militias have already adopted their own constitution, which is loosely modeled on the one developed for the streets of South Central Los Angeles by the Crips and the Bloods: