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Now that Americans have withdrawn from Iraqi cities, the situation of the country is mentioned by western media only when there is some chain of bloody attacks, as it happened in these days, with nearly 100 deaths in several explosions that have targeted the Shabak, an ethnic-religious minority that lives in the north, near Mosul, and the Shiite of Baghdad.

Mosul, Iraq's second city with almost two million inhabitants, has a predominantly Sunni population but is also inhabited by a strong Kurdish minority and many other minorities, now largely forced to flee. The real situation in Iraq after 6 years from the beginning of a war that never ended is not so good. Civilian deaths in total are at least 100,000. In fact, more realistic counts estimate that 1 million people died in the country since 2003 because of ethnic violence, terrorist attacks, common crime or the lack of medical treatment after being injured. Iraqi cities have been divided along ethnic lines between Shiites, Sunnis and Kurds, but the violence between different groups has never ceased, as the recent attacks demonstrate. The most "quiet" cities are those controlled by religious or party militias that often persecute minorities and anyone who is not considered as complying with the precepts of the dominant group, such as homosexuals or women who "offend morals." 

Many minorities have fled en masse. The 150,000 Iraqi Jews were all gone yet between 1950 and 1970 following the war between Israel and Arab states. The Assyrian Christians in Iraq were 1 million before the war, but at least half of them fled the country over the past 6 years to save themselves from the fierce persecution of the Islamic fundamentalists. The other 500,000 in most cases were forced to seek refuge in Kurdish or Shiite areas or willing to accept them. The mandeans Christians, 40,000 before the war, all of them have fled to Syria and Jordan or other countries. The approximately 35,000 Palestinians living in Iraq since the war of 1948 are now only 13,000 because most of them fled abroad after frequent attacks by the Shiites. The Yazids, who are 650,000 in Iraq in 2007 have been victims of the bloodiest attack in the history of the country, nearly 800 deaths and over 1,500 injured. The small minority of Iraqi gypsies, the Kawliya, fled north after most of their villages on the outskirts of Baghdad were destroyed. The Shabaks, 47 died in the attacks of August 10, had already more than 1,000 deaths since the war began. 
The Kurds in the north are trying to assimilate the minorities, with frequent intimidations, while the Sunnis often attack them for their alliance with the Kurds. The condition of women wasn't improved by the war, with hundreds of honor killings or murders for violations of Islamic precepts and an incalculable number of rapes and kidnappings. Also among the Iraqi refugees who have fled to Syria and Jordan prostitution because of poverty has reached dramatic levels. While the Middle Eastern nations have accepted hundreds of thousands of Iraqi refugees, especially Syria, 2 million, and Jordan, 1 million, Sweden, almost 20,000 and thousands Great Britain and Australia, the United States until 2006 had accepted less than 800 Iraqi refugees, then they started to change their policy only in 2007. But on the other hand the European nations, including Italy, have not proven anything welcoming towards Iraqi refugees, with the exception of Sweden and Denmark. Now Italy has inaugurated a policy of rejections of war refugees against any legal and moral standard.

Since 2003, the Iraqis that fled abroad are nearly 3 million, 10% of the population of the country, and another 2 million have been forced to internal migration, had to change the district or town, and almost always have lost everything, to escape religious and ethnic violence. 
So the war is not over yet and who knows when it will end, but one thing is certain. So far the only result of the U.S. invasion ordered by Bush in 2003 to find alleged weapons of mass destruction that never existed is the dramatic human, economic and cultural impoverishment of a country that was for centuries one of the main centers of civilization in Middle East. Now they say that the situation is gradually improving and violence decreases, and the account of the dead is in fact a little less frightening than before. Reading Iraqi blogs can be seen that even in the midst of the violence, there are many people in Iraq that try to live a relatively normal life and running the country. But there are still some fundamental questions that will never be satisfactorily answered. Why has all this been done? What reason can ever justify the deaths of 1 million people and 3 million refugees?