Hardly a day goes by in Iraq without some new atrocity to further drain confidence in stability being established there in the foreseeable future. The only comfort to be drawn from yesterday’s car bomb outside a Baghdad mosque was that no one was killed. Not so Thursday’s attack near the town of Ramadi which killed five US Marines or the previous day’s triple outrage in and around Baghdad which left 39 Iraqi soldiers and civilians dead or Tuesday’s attack when at least 22 people were killed in a suicide attack in Kirkuk. The possibility of sudden, violent death is the overriding fact of life in Iraq today, one that everyone — civilians, Iraqi soldiers and policemen, and occupying forces as well — has to contend with. The killing spree appears unstoppable, the insurgency inexorable and the insurgents’ lust for blood insatiable. Even US Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld has had to admit that Iraq is now as dangerous as it was immediately after the war. Around 1,000 people have died, mostly Iraqis, since the Iraqi government was sworn in, less than two months ago.

This daily round of slaughter stifles any optimism among the wider Arab and international public that things are going to getting better. Rather, there is a sense of foreboding and resentment that the Iraqis, having suffered so much over the years from Saddam Hussein and from international sanctions have to suffer so much more. That resentment has been further fueled by the leaked Downing Street memo that confirms what we all knew all along — that President Bush planned to invade Iraq long before the event. Yet, despite this, there are grounds for hope that Iraq will awaken from the nightmare. Iraqis themselves know that death is out there and may strike at any moment but there is no rush to leave the country in search of refuge elsewhere. They are prepared to live with the violence, believing that it will end. Two particular developments in the last couple of days go some way to strengthen that belief: Tuesday’s arrest in Mosul of Mohammed Khalaf Shakar, not only Abu Mussab Al-Zarqawi’s right-hand man in the city but more importantly according to the Americans, Zarqawi’s most trusted operations agent “in all of Iraq”; secondly, on Thursday, the deal between the government and Sunnis which gives them 17 seats on the 70-member committee to draft Iraq’s new constitution plus a further 10 consultants to advise.

Iraq’s bloody instability is due to a mix of three factors: Sunni alienation stemming from fears that they are being targeted in revenge attacks, sidelined from power and heading for oppression; Zarqawi and his band of mainly foreign militants, intent on attacking the occupying forces and the government and institutions of the new Iraq; and Baath remnants who have been happy to use them to destabilize the country. The deal with the Sunnis should go a long way to reassure them that they have a vital stake in Iraq and thus weaken any sympathies some may have for the insurgents. At the same time, Shakar’s arrest, itself the result of the earlier capture in Mosul of two of his closest aides, says that the insurgency can be crushed. The net is closing in around Zarqawi. It is slow, painfully slow, and there will be many more atrocities, but there is light at the end of the tunnel. Hope remains alive.