Jamal Tahir Bakr, police chief of the Iraqi city of Kirkuk, expected the euphoria over the U.S. withdrawal from Iraqi cities to end, just not so quickly.
A car bomb blew up a city bazaar and killed 37 people on June 30, the official withdrawal date. It put an end to any illusion that the U.S. pullout, coupled with heightened control by the Iraqi police and army, would bring peace, he said.
“People were getting hypnotized by the idea that normal times were here,” Bakr said in an interview the day after the bombing. “It didn’t make any difference how much you warned them, they had it in their heads. And then the bomb. The real situation is now clear: The problems are not over.”
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