May 3, 2004
By Carlotta Gall
The New York Times
KABUL, Afghanistan, May 2 - There is not much sympathy in Afghanistan for Abdullah Shah, a notorious mujahedeen commander who became the first man to be executed in the two years since President Hamid Karzai established a new Afghan government.
Afghans welcomed the execution as a sign that the government was finally moving against criminal warlords. The decree ordering the execution said as much, stating that "it should be a lesson to other people that a person who commits a crime will be brought to justice."
But the execution has raised concerns among human rights groups and revealed shortcomings in the judicial system under Mr. Karzai's Transitional Administration. The rights groups say Mr. Shah, 37, was not given a fair trial and was falsely accused of being a notorious killer known locally as "Zardad's dog."
Some have even speculated that other, more powerful warlords orchestrated the case against Mr. Shah, who is from the Paghman district, west of Kabul, to remove a witness to their own crimes.
Yet with 15 more men on death row, Mr. Karzai has signaled that Afghanistan is ready to resume executions. There had been a moratorium since the fall of the Taliban, which became infamous for their public executions. Afghanistan's penal code, unchanged since the 1970's, allows for the death sentence in cases of premeditated murder.
Mr. Karzai said he was considering signing three more death sentences - for the man caught in January after laying a bomb in the southern city of Kandahar that killed 19 people, most of them children, and for the two men convicted of killing a 29-year-old French aid worker in Ghazni last year.
In an interview on April 25, Mr. Karzai said he had delayed signing the execution order for Mr. Shah for a year and a half, because he was personally very reluctant to endorse the death sentence. But he said that Mr. Shah had done "unbelievably horrible things" and that intense pressure from the victims' families and the dictates of the Islamic religion required it.
"It is no longer possible for me to delay that, because really it is against a clear conscience, it is against justice to keep him there," he said.
But in a sign of just how difficult the case had been for him, Mr. Karzai did not disclose in the interview that the execution had already taken place. The government confirmed the fact only after the human rights organization Amnesty International released a statement two days later saying the execution had been carried out.
Mr. Shah was taken from a jail in Kabul on April 20 to the forbidding Pul-i-Charki prison on the eastern outskirts of the capital, where thousands of prisoners were executed under the Soviet-backed Communist government. There he was executed by a shot to the head, and his body was taken to the military hospital in the city, according to the justice minister, Abdul Rahim Karimi.
His family learned of the execution by chance three days later, family members said, when someone in their village heard an account of it in a bazaar.
"We had a lot of problems to get hold of the body," one of his cousins said. The family buried Mr. Shah in their village, Chiltan, west of Kabul.
One cousin who helped collect the body said Mr. Shah's nose appeared to have been broken, "by something like a rifle butt," before he was killed.
The family said they were unable to attend his three trials because they learned about them only after they had concluded. The trials were conducted in the special courts of the intelligence service, the National Directorate of Security, also a leftover from the Soviet-backed government. His case was considered political because the authorities said he was a member of the outlawed party of the mujahedeen leader Gulbuddin Hekmatyar.
The prosecutors contended that he was a killer known as "Zardad's dog," who bit his victims like a dog, and was subordinate to a party commander based in eastern Afghanistan. Mr. Shah was also accused of killing at least one of his wives and one of his children, and of setting fire to a bus filled with civilians.
But his cousin Hamidullah, 26, and human rights officials who interviewed him in prison after his sentencing said he was not the man known as Zardad's dog, and had never been a member of the outlawed party.
Mr. Shah's family denies the murder accusations and contends that witnesses were bribed. Family members say powerful hands were guiding the case "from behind the curtain," but they said it was too dangerous to say whose hands they were. The family has a decades-old feud with another family in the Paghman region, but they made it clear that they blamed higher-level people for pushing for a death sentence.
"Abdullah Shah's execution may have been an attempt by powerful political players to eliminate a key witness to human rights abuses," Amnesty International said in a statement. The death penalty was imposed hastily by a judge under pressure of the Supreme Court, it said.
Amnesty International and the Afghan Independent Human Rights Commission had called for a stay of execution, saying Mr. Shah was not given a fair trial, and in particular had not been allowed to present any defense.
The chief of the Afghan commission, Sima Samar, said Mr. Shah had been accused of offenses in the category of organized crime and war crimes, which the court system in Afghanistan was not capable of addressing.
"There is no law that covers war crimes, and they do not have the experience for that," she said in an interview in Kabul on Thursday.
Yet the secretive manner in which the trials and execution were carried out did not set a good precedent for justice in Afghanistan, she said. "It is not a good beginning," she said.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Citation:
Carlotta Gall. "With Killer's Execution, Karzai Signals Move on Warlords," New York Times, 3 May 2004. Original URL:
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/05/03/international/asia/03AFGH.html
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24 June 2004
Afghan Deaths Linked to Unit at Iraq Prison
May 24, 2004
By Douglas Jehl and David Rohde
WASHINGTON, May 23 — A military intelligence unit that oversaw interrogations at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq was also in charge of questioning at a detention center in Afghanistan where two prisoners died in December 2002 in incidents that are being investigated as homicides.
For both of the Afghan prisoners, who died in a center known as the Bagram Collection Point, the cause of death listed on certificates signed by American pathologists included blunt force injuries to their legs. Interrogations at the center were supervised by Company A, 519th Military Intelligence Battalion, which moved on early in 2003 to Iraq, where some of its members were assigned to the Joint Interrogation and Debriefing Center at Abu Ghraib. Its service in Afghanistan was known, but its work at Bagram at the time of the deaths has now emerged in interviews with former prisoners, military officials and from documents.
Two men arrested with one of the prisoners who died in the Bagram Detention Center that month said in southeastern Afghanistan on Sunday that they were tortured and sexually humiliated by their American jailers; they said they were held in isolation cells, black hoods were placed over their heads, and their hands at times were chained to the ceiling. "The 10 days that we had was a very bad time," said Zakim Shah, a 20-year-old farmer and a father of two who said he felt he would not survive at times. "We are very lucky."
The account provided by the two men was consistent with those of other former Afghan prisoners, including those interviewed by The New York Times and cited in reports by human rights officials.
In interviews, the two men and other former prisoners who were held at the center in Afghanistan at that time have described an environment similar in some ways to that of Abu Ghraib, whose outlines have been depicted in photographs and testimony. At both places, prisoners were hooded, stripped naked and mocked sexually by female captors, according to a variety of accounts.
In Iraq, at least three members of the 519th Military Intelligence Battalion who had been assigned to the joint interrogation center at Abu Ghraib have been quietly disciplined for conduct involving the abuse of a female Iraqi prisoner there, an Army spokesman said.
At least one officer, Capt. Carolyn A. Wood, served in supervisory positions at the interrogation units both at the Bagram Collection Point from July 2002 to December 2003 and then again at the joint center at Abu Ghraib, according to Army officials. That center was established in the fall of 2003. In Congressional testimony last week, a senior Army lawyer, Col. Marc Warren, praised Captain Wood as an officer who took initiative in Iraq at a time when American commanders had yet to spell out rules for interrogation. But he also singled out Captain Wood and her unit as having brought to Iraq interrogation procedures developed during their service in Afghanistan. No one is known to have accused Captain Wood of any wrongdoing in connection with the abuses at Abu Ghraib or the deaths of prisoners there or in Afghanistan.
A spokesman for the 18th Airborne Corps, in Fort Bragg, N.C., identified Captain Wood as having been sent to Afghanistan in July 2002 as Company A's interrogation platoon leader, and having later assumed the duties of "operations officer in charge of the Bagram Collection Point." In a written statement sent Friday, that spokesman, Lt. Col. Billy Buckner, said Captain Wood had been assigned to the 519th Battalion at Abu Ghraib. But other Army officers have described her as having served as the officer in charge of the interrogation center there, under Lt. Col. Steve Jordan, a reservist who served as its director.
In an interview on Sunday, Brig. Gen. Janis Karpinski, who oversaw Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq but has since been admonished and suspended from command, described Captain Wood as an impressive and well-spoken expert on interrogations who oversaw the center. Colonel Buckner said that Captain Wood's commanding officer in Iraq, Lt. Col. Robert Whalen, was not available for comment. To date, seven enlisted personnel from a military police unit have been the only soldiers charged with crimes in connection with the abuses at Abu Ghraib. But an Army report completed in March identified Colonel Jordan as among four people who may have been among those "directly or indirectly" responsible for the misconduct.
Within days after the deaths of the two prisoners in Afghanistan in December 2002, both were ruled homicides by American military doctors in Afghanistan. But in a public statement at the time, the military described at least one death as the result of natural causes.
The deaths of two prisoners at the Bagram Collection Point in Afghanistan in December 2002 are believed to be among nine being investigated by the Army as possible homicides linked to interrogation practices in Iraq and Afghanistan. At least two other deaths being investigated occurred in Abu Ghraib, senior military officers have said, but it is not clear whether those prisoners were under the authority of the Joint Interrogation and Debriefing Center.
The two former Afghan prisoners who were interviewed in Afghanistan on Sunday said they believed that their acquaintance, a young man named Dilawar whose death is considered a possible homicide, received the same harsh treatment that they did. Both prisoners were later sent to the American-run detention center in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, but were released with letters from the Army saying they did nothing wrong.
The two men said that at Bagram they were forced to strip naked in the presence of female soldiers when receiving prison clothes, undergoing medical exams and taking showers. They said female soldiers were never present when they were naked in Guantánamo Bay.
Both men said appearing naked in front of women was deeply humiliating for Afghan men, who live in a conservative Islamic culture. "The other things don't matter," Parkhudin said, referring to the kicking and sleep deprivation. "But we are angry about this."
Since 2002, about 350 prisoners have been held at any given time at American-run detention centers in Afghanistan. The Bagram Collection Point, at Bagram Air Base, just north of Kabul, is the main American detention center, and is visited by officials of the International Committee of the Red Cross. No outside inspectors visit roughly 20 smaller American bases around Afghanistan where prisoners are also held.
The two Afghan prisoners who died in American custody in December 2002 are identified on death certificates only as Dilawar and "Ullah, Habib." Friends and family members have identified Dilawar as a 22-year-old farmer and part-time taxi driver. The second prisoner who died has been identified by family members as Mullah Habibullah, about 30 years old and a brother of a former Taliban commander.
The Dec. 13 death certificate for Dilawar says he died as a result of "blunt force injuries to lower extremities complicating coronary artery disease." The document was signed by Lt. Col. Elizabeth A. Rouse of the Air Force, a military pathologist, and listed as its finding that the "mode of death" was "homicide," rather than "natural," "accident" and "suicide."
At the time, American military officials said Dilawar had died of a heart attack and had coronary artery disease. The fact that the military characterized his death a "homicide" was not publicly known until his family showed a reporter from The New York Times his death certificate in late February 2003. Family members, who do not speak English, were unable to understand the certificate.
According to military documents, Dilawar was found dead in his isolation cell on Dec. 10, his fifth day of captivity. The military later disclosed that the death in Bagram of Mullah Habibullah, which occurred on Dec. 3, 2002, had also been deemed a homicide by an Army pathologist. He too was found collapsed in a cell on the second floor of the center.
The two men interviewed on Sunday in Turiuba, a village in Khost Province in southeastern Afghanistan, said they had been held in isolation cells on the second floor of the Bagram center for the first 10 days.
Mr. Shah, the 20-year-old farmer, and Parkhudin, a 26-year-old farmer and former soldier, said they were later transferred from Bagram to the American detention center in Guantánamo Bay. Their first 10 days in Bagram were by far the most harrowing of their 15 months in American custody, they said.
Guards shouted at them or kicked them whenever they tried to sleep, the two men said. The only time they were allowed to move freely was during trips to eat or go to the bathroom, they said. If they tried to speak to a prisoner in an adjoining cell, guards beat them, they said.
"They were punching me and kicking me when I talked to the other prisoners," said Parkhudin, who like many Afghans has only one name. Mr. Shah said soldiers never struck him when he tried to sit, but they constantly shouted at him to keep him awake. "We were standing for the whole 10 days," said the young farmer, who said he grew so exhausted at one point that he vomited. "When we were trying to sit they would tell us `Hands up!' `Stand up!' " Parkhudin said his hands were chained to the ceiling for 8 of the 10 days. Mr. Shah said his hands were chained for only 4 hours in total over the 10 days. Parkhudin said he believed American interrogators treated him worse because they thought he was a Taliban commander.
A third detainee who was in the Bagram center at the time, Abdul Jabar, a 35-year-old taxi driver from the same area as Dilawar, said he saw him being led downstairs to the bathroom hooded. In a March 2003 interview with The New York Times, he said the young man "was struggling a lot."
He added, "He was scared because he could not get enough oxygen."
Sixteen months later, military investigations into both deaths have not been completed. Military officials have said that it has proved difficult to track the personnel who were on duty in the Bagram Detention Center at the time.
"It's complicated because forces have rotated outside of Afghanistan," Lt. Col. Tucker Mansager, a United States military spokesman in Afghanistan, said Saturday. "Our United States Army Criminal Investigative Division is having to follow those people to the various places they've gone in order to interview them and complete an actual criminal investigation into those allegations."
Douglas Jehl reported from Washington for this article, and David Rohde from Khost, Afghanistan.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Citation:
Douglas Jehl and David Rohde. "Afghan Deaths Linked to Unit at Iraq Prison," New York Times, 24 May 2004. Original URL: http://www.nytimes.com/2004/05/24/politics/24ABUS.html?ex=1088222400&en=05e11290e4dc2f9e&ei=5070&pagewanted=print&position=
By Douglas Jehl and David Rohde
WASHINGTON, May 23 — A military intelligence unit that oversaw interrogations at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq was also in charge of questioning at a detention center in Afghanistan where two prisoners died in December 2002 in incidents that are being investigated as homicides.
For both of the Afghan prisoners, who died in a center known as the Bagram Collection Point, the cause of death listed on certificates signed by American pathologists included blunt force injuries to their legs. Interrogations at the center were supervised by Company A, 519th Military Intelligence Battalion, which moved on early in 2003 to Iraq, where some of its members were assigned to the Joint Interrogation and Debriefing Center at Abu Ghraib. Its service in Afghanistan was known, but its work at Bagram at the time of the deaths has now emerged in interviews with former prisoners, military officials and from documents.
Two men arrested with one of the prisoners who died in the Bagram Detention Center that month said in southeastern Afghanistan on Sunday that they were tortured and sexually humiliated by their American jailers; they said they were held in isolation cells, black hoods were placed over their heads, and their hands at times were chained to the ceiling. "The 10 days that we had was a very bad time," said Zakim Shah, a 20-year-old farmer and a father of two who said he felt he would not survive at times. "We are very lucky."
The account provided by the two men was consistent with those of other former Afghan prisoners, including those interviewed by The New York Times and cited in reports by human rights officials.
In interviews, the two men and other former prisoners who were held at the center in Afghanistan at that time have described an environment similar in some ways to that of Abu Ghraib, whose outlines have been depicted in photographs and testimony. At both places, prisoners were hooded, stripped naked and mocked sexually by female captors, according to a variety of accounts.
In Iraq, at least three members of the 519th Military Intelligence Battalion who had been assigned to the joint interrogation center at Abu Ghraib have been quietly disciplined for conduct involving the abuse of a female Iraqi prisoner there, an Army spokesman said.
At least one officer, Capt. Carolyn A. Wood, served in supervisory positions at the interrogation units both at the Bagram Collection Point from July 2002 to December 2003 and then again at the joint center at Abu Ghraib, according to Army officials. That center was established in the fall of 2003. In Congressional testimony last week, a senior Army lawyer, Col. Marc Warren, praised Captain Wood as an officer who took initiative in Iraq at a time when American commanders had yet to spell out rules for interrogation. But he also singled out Captain Wood and her unit as having brought to Iraq interrogation procedures developed during their service in Afghanistan. No one is known to have accused Captain Wood of any wrongdoing in connection with the abuses at Abu Ghraib or the deaths of prisoners there or in Afghanistan.
A spokesman for the 18th Airborne Corps, in Fort Bragg, N.C., identified Captain Wood as having been sent to Afghanistan in July 2002 as Company A's interrogation platoon leader, and having later assumed the duties of "operations officer in charge of the Bagram Collection Point." In a written statement sent Friday, that spokesman, Lt. Col. Billy Buckner, said Captain Wood had been assigned to the 519th Battalion at Abu Ghraib. But other Army officers have described her as having served as the officer in charge of the interrogation center there, under Lt. Col. Steve Jordan, a reservist who served as its director.
In an interview on Sunday, Brig. Gen. Janis Karpinski, who oversaw Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq but has since been admonished and suspended from command, described Captain Wood as an impressive and well-spoken expert on interrogations who oversaw the center. Colonel Buckner said that Captain Wood's commanding officer in Iraq, Lt. Col. Robert Whalen, was not available for comment. To date, seven enlisted personnel from a military police unit have been the only soldiers charged with crimes in connection with the abuses at Abu Ghraib. But an Army report completed in March identified Colonel Jordan as among four people who may have been among those "directly or indirectly" responsible for the misconduct.
Within days after the deaths of the two prisoners in Afghanistan in December 2002, both were ruled homicides by American military doctors in Afghanistan. But in a public statement at the time, the military described at least one death as the result of natural causes.
The deaths of two prisoners at the Bagram Collection Point in Afghanistan in December 2002 are believed to be among nine being investigated by the Army as possible homicides linked to interrogation practices in Iraq and Afghanistan. At least two other deaths being investigated occurred in Abu Ghraib, senior military officers have said, but it is not clear whether those prisoners were under the authority of the Joint Interrogation and Debriefing Center.
The two former Afghan prisoners who were interviewed in Afghanistan on Sunday said they believed that their acquaintance, a young man named Dilawar whose death is considered a possible homicide, received the same harsh treatment that they did. Both prisoners were later sent to the American-run detention center in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, but were released with letters from the Army saying they did nothing wrong.
The two men said that at Bagram they were forced to strip naked in the presence of female soldiers when receiving prison clothes, undergoing medical exams and taking showers. They said female soldiers were never present when they were naked in Guantánamo Bay.
Both men said appearing naked in front of women was deeply humiliating for Afghan men, who live in a conservative Islamic culture. "The other things don't matter," Parkhudin said, referring to the kicking and sleep deprivation. "But we are angry about this."
Since 2002, about 350 prisoners have been held at any given time at American-run detention centers in Afghanistan. The Bagram Collection Point, at Bagram Air Base, just north of Kabul, is the main American detention center, and is visited by officials of the International Committee of the Red Cross. No outside inspectors visit roughly 20 smaller American bases around Afghanistan where prisoners are also held.
The two Afghan prisoners who died in American custody in December 2002 are identified on death certificates only as Dilawar and "Ullah, Habib." Friends and family members have identified Dilawar as a 22-year-old farmer and part-time taxi driver. The second prisoner who died has been identified by family members as Mullah Habibullah, about 30 years old and a brother of a former Taliban commander.
The Dec. 13 death certificate for Dilawar says he died as a result of "blunt force injuries to lower extremities complicating coronary artery disease." The document was signed by Lt. Col. Elizabeth A. Rouse of the Air Force, a military pathologist, and listed as its finding that the "mode of death" was "homicide," rather than "natural," "accident" and "suicide."
At the time, American military officials said Dilawar had died of a heart attack and had coronary artery disease. The fact that the military characterized his death a "homicide" was not publicly known until his family showed a reporter from The New York Times his death certificate in late February 2003. Family members, who do not speak English, were unable to understand the certificate.
According to military documents, Dilawar was found dead in his isolation cell on Dec. 10, his fifth day of captivity. The military later disclosed that the death in Bagram of Mullah Habibullah, which occurred on Dec. 3, 2002, had also been deemed a homicide by an Army pathologist. He too was found collapsed in a cell on the second floor of the center.
The two men interviewed on Sunday in Turiuba, a village in Khost Province in southeastern Afghanistan, said they had been held in isolation cells on the second floor of the Bagram center for the first 10 days.
Mr. Shah, the 20-year-old farmer, and Parkhudin, a 26-year-old farmer and former soldier, said they were later transferred from Bagram to the American detention center in Guantánamo Bay. Their first 10 days in Bagram were by far the most harrowing of their 15 months in American custody, they said.
Guards shouted at them or kicked them whenever they tried to sleep, the two men said. The only time they were allowed to move freely was during trips to eat or go to the bathroom, they said. If they tried to speak to a prisoner in an adjoining cell, guards beat them, they said.
"They were punching me and kicking me when I talked to the other prisoners," said Parkhudin, who like many Afghans has only one name. Mr. Shah said soldiers never struck him when he tried to sit, but they constantly shouted at him to keep him awake. "We were standing for the whole 10 days," said the young farmer, who said he grew so exhausted at one point that he vomited. "When we were trying to sit they would tell us `Hands up!' `Stand up!' " Parkhudin said his hands were chained to the ceiling for 8 of the 10 days. Mr. Shah said his hands were chained for only 4 hours in total over the 10 days. Parkhudin said he believed American interrogators treated him worse because they thought he was a Taliban commander.
A third detainee who was in the Bagram center at the time, Abdul Jabar, a 35-year-old taxi driver from the same area as Dilawar, said he saw him being led downstairs to the bathroom hooded. In a March 2003 interview with The New York Times, he said the young man "was struggling a lot."
He added, "He was scared because he could not get enough oxygen."
Sixteen months later, military investigations into both deaths have not been completed. Military officials have said that it has proved difficult to track the personnel who were on duty in the Bagram Detention Center at the time.
"It's complicated because forces have rotated outside of Afghanistan," Lt. Col. Tucker Mansager, a United States military spokesman in Afghanistan, said Saturday. "Our United States Army Criminal Investigative Division is having to follow those people to the various places they've gone in order to interview them and complete an actual criminal investigation into those allegations."
Douglas Jehl reported from Washington for this article, and David Rohde from Khost, Afghanistan.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Citation:
Douglas Jehl and David Rohde. "Afghan Deaths Linked to Unit at Iraq Prison," New York Times, 24 May 2004. Original URL: http://www.nytimes.com/2004/05/24/politics/24ABUS.html?ex=1088222400&en=05e11290e4dc2f9e&ei=5070&pagewanted=print&position=
New Video Purports to Show Qaeda Training in Afghanistan
June 17, 2004
By David Rohde
ISLAMABAD, Pakistan, June 16 - Al Jazeera, the Arabic-language television network based in Qatar, broadcast Wednesday what it said was a new videotape showing members of Al Qaeda receiving military training at a camp in Afghanistan.
A leading terrorism expert said the scenes appeared to be authentic, but it was more likely that training was occurring inside Pakistan's remote tribal areas.
The video, if genuine, would be the first evidence that Al Qaeda had regrouped sufficiently to carry out training operations inside Afghanistan or Pakistan since the United States toppled the Taliban in 2001. It was broadcast a day after President Bush, welcoming the Afghan president, Hamid Karzai, in Washington, declared that the United States had won a major victory in the war against terrorism by denying Al Qaeda a safe refuge in Afghanistan.
Peter Bergen, a terrorism analyst who teaches at Johns Hopkins University, said the video was the first he had seen emerge from Afghanistan or Pakistan since the fall of the Taliban. He said it suggested renewed confidence by the group.
"It's one thing to be cowering in a mud hut, it's another thing when you're filming training," Mr. Bergen said. "This is more like the stuff we've seen out of Iraq, where we've seen insurgents filming their operations."
Men firing weapons and performing various physical exercises were shown in one part of the video. Another part showed what was described as a nighttime attack on a government post inside Afghanistan. A third scene displayed a man in uniform who appeared to be wounded or dead. The commander of the Qaeda fighters was identified as a Libyan.
Mr. Bergen said that the nighttime attack scenes might have been faked but that he believed the training was real and probably occurring in Pakistan's remote tribal areas, near the Afghan border.
"It's hard to tell which side of the border, but I think it is more likely to be on the Pakistan side," he said. "I think the U.S. Army has a better grip on Afghanistan than the Pakistani Army has on Pakistan." A week ago, thousands of Pakistani troops began carrying out an operation in the remote tribal areas to kill or capture foreign militants believed to be conducting terrorist attacks in Pakistan and cross-border attacks in Afghanistan. Pakistani officials said Monday that they had taken control of the Shakai Valley area where Qaeda-linked terrorists had been receiving training.
Hundreds of foreign militants are believed to be hiding in the Pakistani tribal areas; there are suspicions that Osama bin Laden may be among them. Some Pakistani political analysts and Afghan officials accuse Pakistan's ruler, Gen. Pervez Musharraf, of moving too slowly to eradicate militancy. They say the general tries to protect some militants in order to use them to put pressure on Pakistan's archrival, India.
Pakistani officials point out that militants have vowed to kill General Musharraf, who narrowly survived two assassination attempts in December, and say he is doing all he can to eradicate militancy. They say the government has taken extraordinary steps, including deploying army units in the fiercely independent tribal areas for the first time in Pakistan's history.
In an escalation of fighting on Wednesday, an estimated 70 local and foreign militants carried out a coordinated attack on a Pakistani military base in the tribal areas, killing one soldier and wounding 10 others, 6 seriously. Soldiers said the militants fired dozens of rockets and mortars during a five-hour attack on the camp in Luddah.
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Citation:
David Rohde, "New Video Purports to Show Qaeda Training in Afghanistan," New York Times, 17 June 2004. Original URL:
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/06/17/international/asia/17stan.html?pagewanted=print&position=
By David Rohde
ISLAMABAD, Pakistan, June 16 - Al Jazeera, the Arabic-language television network based in Qatar, broadcast Wednesday what it said was a new videotape showing members of Al Qaeda receiving military training at a camp in Afghanistan.
A leading terrorism expert said the scenes appeared to be authentic, but it was more likely that training was occurring inside Pakistan's remote tribal areas.
The video, if genuine, would be the first evidence that Al Qaeda had regrouped sufficiently to carry out training operations inside Afghanistan or Pakistan since the United States toppled the Taliban in 2001. It was broadcast a day after President Bush, welcoming the Afghan president, Hamid Karzai, in Washington, declared that the United States had won a major victory in the war against terrorism by denying Al Qaeda a safe refuge in Afghanistan.
Peter Bergen, a terrorism analyst who teaches at Johns Hopkins University, said the video was the first he had seen emerge from Afghanistan or Pakistan since the fall of the Taliban. He said it suggested renewed confidence by the group.
"It's one thing to be cowering in a mud hut, it's another thing when you're filming training," Mr. Bergen said. "This is more like the stuff we've seen out of Iraq, where we've seen insurgents filming their operations."
Men firing weapons and performing various physical exercises were shown in one part of the video. Another part showed what was described as a nighttime attack on a government post inside Afghanistan. A third scene displayed a man in uniform who appeared to be wounded or dead. The commander of the Qaeda fighters was identified as a Libyan.
Mr. Bergen said that the nighttime attack scenes might have been faked but that he believed the training was real and probably occurring in Pakistan's remote tribal areas, near the Afghan border.
"It's hard to tell which side of the border, but I think it is more likely to be on the Pakistan side," he said. "I think the U.S. Army has a better grip on Afghanistan than the Pakistani Army has on Pakistan." A week ago, thousands of Pakistani troops began carrying out an operation in the remote tribal areas to kill or capture foreign militants believed to be conducting terrorist attacks in Pakistan and cross-border attacks in Afghanistan. Pakistani officials said Monday that they had taken control of the Shakai Valley area where Qaeda-linked terrorists had been receiving training.
Hundreds of foreign militants are believed to be hiding in the Pakistani tribal areas; there are suspicions that Osama bin Laden may be among them. Some Pakistani political analysts and Afghan officials accuse Pakistan's ruler, Gen. Pervez Musharraf, of moving too slowly to eradicate militancy. They say the general tries to protect some militants in order to use them to put pressure on Pakistan's archrival, India.
Pakistani officials point out that militants have vowed to kill General Musharraf, who narrowly survived two assassination attempts in December, and say he is doing all he can to eradicate militancy. They say the government has taken extraordinary steps, including deploying army units in the fiercely independent tribal areas for the first time in Pakistan's history.
In an escalation of fighting on Wednesday, an estimated 70 local and foreign militants carried out a coordinated attack on a Pakistani military base in the tribal areas, killing one soldier and wounding 10 others, 6 seriously. Soldiers said the militants fired dozens of rockets and mortars during a five-hour attack on the camp in Luddah.
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Citation:
David Rohde, "New Video Purports to Show Qaeda Training in Afghanistan," New York Times, 17 June 2004. Original URL:
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/06/17/international/asia/17stan.html?pagewanted=print&position=
23 June 2004
U.S. Is Quietly Spending $2.5 Billion From Iraqi Oil Revenues to Pay for Iraqi Projects
By Steven R. Weisman
June 21, 2004
WASHINGTON, June 20 — Struggling with bureaucratic problems in spending the money appropriated by Congress to rebuild Iraq, American authorities are moving quietly and quickly to spend $2.5 billion from a different source, Iraqi oil revenue, for projects employing tens of thousands of Iraqis, especially in the country's hot spots, Bush administration officials say.
The spending program, which was started unannounced, has been undertaken in consultation with Iraqi ministers, despite misgivings
that the oil revenue belonged to Iraq and that it should be set aside for use when Iraq's sovereignty is restored, scheduled for June 30.
Because of deteriorating security and complex delays in contracts that have slowed the spending of the $18 billion in Congressionally appropriated money, occupation authorities say they decided recently that they had to spend the Iraqi money to build schools, factories and oil fields, and to turn Iraqis away from violence.
"The security needs were just overwhelming," said an occupation official. "Would we rather have been able to save the money and have a nice kitty? Sure. There's always a tension between putting money to work right away and having it available for a tough year next year. This is the way we resolved it."
Bush administration officials say they believe that the spending program has helped stabilize Iraq, although most note that negotiated
arrangements allowing insurgent groups to operate peacefully in Falluja, Karbala, Najaf and other troubled areas also have aided in
reaching that goal.
Iraq's overall domestic budget of roughly $20 billion for 2004, financed mostly by oil revenue, was approved last year by the Program Review Board, a unit of the Coalition Provisional Authority — the American-led occupation authority in Iraq.
But this spring, Bush administration officials said, it became clear that rising global oil prices were presenting Iraq with a windfall,
and a decision had to be made about whether to save that extra money or disburse it in a one-time expenditure that might not be available in the 2005 budget.
American occupation officials said the $2.5 billion had helped pay for security needs like police cars and uniforms, as well as repairs
of schools, power grids, oil fields, state-owned factories and other sources of employment. Additional funds have been used for vocational training for young Iraqis "to get some of these kids off the streets, doing something productive for the future," an occupation official said.
Some of the money has gone to American military teams operating since the beginning of the occupation 14 months ago. The teams have become famous in Iraq for the way they have spread across the country, commissioning repairs and paying for them from satchels bulging with $100 bills shipped by plane from a Federal Reserve vault in East Rutherford, N.J. Much of that money came from Iraqi assets frozen in the United States during the Persian Gulf war in 1991.
At least $1 billion has been distributed in this fashion — by some estimates more than $2 billion.
"The military commanders love that program, because it buys them friends," said an administration official, referring to the cash
distribution. "You want to hire everybody on the street, put money in their pockets and make them like you. We have always spent Iraqi money on that."
The $2.5 billion to be spent from Iraqi oil funds has several components, the biggest of which is $1 billion to be spent on 15 to 21
military or security projects around the country. The rest of the money is to be used for vocational training, infrastructure repair,
principally in the oil and electricity sectors, and increased supplies of food. A small amount has been set aside for future compensation of victims of Saddam Hussein's government and displacement since the occupation began.
A principal goal is to employ Iraqis and compensate for the shortfall in financing that was supposed to have come from American sources.
One reason for distributing cash for quick gains, some administration officials say, is that controls on the $18 billion appropriated by
Congress last fall to rebuild Iraq may make it harder to operate in that fashion, so policy makers have decided to use what they have before the formal end of the occupation, now scheduled for June 30.
Early last fall, L. Paul Bremer III, the American administrator in Baghdad, said he hoped that most of the $18 billion would be spent
by the time sovereignty was transferred.
In November, however, the transfer of sovereignty was accelerated. Meanwhile, what was intended as a spending program to showcase the benefits of the American occupation has been slow in functioning because of security problems and cumbersome contracting regulations.
Of the $18 billion appropriated by Congress, the American occupation has made spending "commitments" of $7.7 billion, with the hope of reaching $10 billion by the time Iraq officially regains self-rule on June 30. But these figures simply represent money that is reserved or to be reserved for certain purposes. Only $3.2 billion in contracts for actual construction projects have been awarded,
although the number could rise before June 30.
A senior administration official said that, contrary to early hopes, it would probably take five years to use up the $18 billion.
"The expectations for spending were unrealistic," said the official said. "You can't just pull 2,300 projects off the shelf and build
them without vetting. It takes time to figure out if you're going to build a power plant, where it should be and who should build it."
Another problem has been a lag in donor countries coming forward with the money they had pledged last September at a donors' conference in Madrid. Of $13 billion pledged then, less than $2 billion has been received.
"Donor countries can see that the money that is already there is not being spent, because they can't spend it," said a development official involved in that fund-raising effort. "That removes the pressure on the donors to come through with the money they pledged."
More than a year ago, after the fall of Mr. Hussein, some conservatives in the Bush administration envisioned Iraq as a model for
free enterprise, replacing the big money-losing state-owned industries in everything from petrochemicals to pharmaceuticals.
Instead, the accelerated government-driven employment and construction projects are cementing Iraq's reliance on the state as its central economic engine, just as it had been under Mr. Hussein.
"Lots of people wanted to change this, and change that, and transform the economy of Iraq," said an administration official. "But then we quickly realized that we had to put Humpty Dumpty back together first, and then give it over to the Iraqis and let them figure out the best way to change their country."
Accordingly, when sovereignty is transferred next week, Iraq will be what this official called "a centralized socialist state" on which
virtually all citizens are dependent for basic needs, putting a particular burden on the fragile interim government selected less than
three weeks ago.
Of Iraq's eight million employed workers, for example, an estimated 700,000 work for the government directly, 400,000 work for state-owned enterprises, many of them operating in the red, and 200,000 work for various armed forces or security branches, a number expected to grow.
But those numbers measure the equivalent of full-time employees, and some administration officials say that a more realistic number is two million Iraqis, one out of every four with a job, who are dependent on the state for employment.
In addition to the tens of thousands of jobs to be created by the new oil-financed program, American officials say 1.5 million jobs will be generated by the Congressionally appropriated funds that are only now starting to be spent.
Beyond these state programs, most Iraqis are given free or partially subsidized food, costing $4 billion this year. Electricity supplied
at subsidized rates costs $1.7 billion, and the cost of distributing low-cost kerosene and other fuel to Iraqis is estimated at $3 billion
to $5 billion.
But occupation officials say the spending of money now to generate employment will revive state industries, so that in the future they can be privatized and serve as the country's economic base.
"All the programs we have started have the full support of the Iraqi ministries of planning and finance," said an occupation official.
"There are two ways of looking at this," the official said. "First is the absolute need to find jobs for millions of young people who need training. But second is to increase the capacity of companies and of the oil infrastructure to become healthy and employ more Iraqis in the future."
---------------------------------------------------------------------
Citation:
Steven R. Weisman, "U.S. Is Quietly Spending $2.5 Billion From Iraqi Oil Revenues to Pay for Iraqi Projects," New York Times, 21 June 2004. Original URL: http://www.nytimes.com/2004/06/21/politics/21DIPL.html?pagewanted=print&position=
June 21, 2004
WASHINGTON, June 20 — Struggling with bureaucratic problems in spending the money appropriated by Congress to rebuild Iraq, American authorities are moving quietly and quickly to spend $2.5 billion from a different source, Iraqi oil revenue, for projects employing tens of thousands of Iraqis, especially in the country's hot spots, Bush administration officials say.
The spending program, which was started unannounced, has been undertaken in consultation with Iraqi ministers, despite misgivings
that the oil revenue belonged to Iraq and that it should be set aside for use when Iraq's sovereignty is restored, scheduled for June 30.
Because of deteriorating security and complex delays in contracts that have slowed the spending of the $18 billion in Congressionally appropriated money, occupation authorities say they decided recently that they had to spend the Iraqi money to build schools, factories and oil fields, and to turn Iraqis away from violence.
"The security needs were just overwhelming," said an occupation official. "Would we rather have been able to save the money and have a nice kitty? Sure. There's always a tension between putting money to work right away and having it available for a tough year next year. This is the way we resolved it."
Bush administration officials say they believe that the spending program has helped stabilize Iraq, although most note that negotiated
arrangements allowing insurgent groups to operate peacefully in Falluja, Karbala, Najaf and other troubled areas also have aided in
reaching that goal.
Iraq's overall domestic budget of roughly $20 billion for 2004, financed mostly by oil revenue, was approved last year by the Program Review Board, a unit of the Coalition Provisional Authority — the American-led occupation authority in Iraq.
But this spring, Bush administration officials said, it became clear that rising global oil prices were presenting Iraq with a windfall,
and a decision had to be made about whether to save that extra money or disburse it in a one-time expenditure that might not be available in the 2005 budget.
American occupation officials said the $2.5 billion had helped pay for security needs like police cars and uniforms, as well as repairs
of schools, power grids, oil fields, state-owned factories and other sources of employment. Additional funds have been used for vocational training for young Iraqis "to get some of these kids off the streets, doing something productive for the future," an occupation official said.
Some of the money has gone to American military teams operating since the beginning of the occupation 14 months ago. The teams have become famous in Iraq for the way they have spread across the country, commissioning repairs and paying for them from satchels bulging with $100 bills shipped by plane from a Federal Reserve vault in East Rutherford, N.J. Much of that money came from Iraqi assets frozen in the United States during the Persian Gulf war in 1991.
At least $1 billion has been distributed in this fashion — by some estimates more than $2 billion.
"The military commanders love that program, because it buys them friends," said an administration official, referring to the cash
distribution. "You want to hire everybody on the street, put money in their pockets and make them like you. We have always spent Iraqi money on that."
The $2.5 billion to be spent from Iraqi oil funds has several components, the biggest of which is $1 billion to be spent on 15 to 21
military or security projects around the country. The rest of the money is to be used for vocational training, infrastructure repair,
principally in the oil and electricity sectors, and increased supplies of food. A small amount has been set aside for future compensation of victims of Saddam Hussein's government and displacement since the occupation began.
A principal goal is to employ Iraqis and compensate for the shortfall in financing that was supposed to have come from American sources.
One reason for distributing cash for quick gains, some administration officials say, is that controls on the $18 billion appropriated by
Congress last fall to rebuild Iraq may make it harder to operate in that fashion, so policy makers have decided to use what they have before the formal end of the occupation, now scheduled for June 30.
Early last fall, L. Paul Bremer III, the American administrator in Baghdad, said he hoped that most of the $18 billion would be spent
by the time sovereignty was transferred.
In November, however, the transfer of sovereignty was accelerated. Meanwhile, what was intended as a spending program to showcase the benefits of the American occupation has been slow in functioning because of security problems and cumbersome contracting regulations.
Of the $18 billion appropriated by Congress, the American occupation has made spending "commitments" of $7.7 billion, with the hope of reaching $10 billion by the time Iraq officially regains self-rule on June 30. But these figures simply represent money that is reserved or to be reserved for certain purposes. Only $3.2 billion in contracts for actual construction projects have been awarded,
although the number could rise before June 30.
A senior administration official said that, contrary to early hopes, it would probably take five years to use up the $18 billion.
"The expectations for spending were unrealistic," said the official said. "You can't just pull 2,300 projects off the shelf and build
them without vetting. It takes time to figure out if you're going to build a power plant, where it should be and who should build it."
Another problem has been a lag in donor countries coming forward with the money they had pledged last September at a donors' conference in Madrid. Of $13 billion pledged then, less than $2 billion has been received.
"Donor countries can see that the money that is already there is not being spent, because they can't spend it," said a development official involved in that fund-raising effort. "That removes the pressure on the donors to come through with the money they pledged."
More than a year ago, after the fall of Mr. Hussein, some conservatives in the Bush administration envisioned Iraq as a model for
free enterprise, replacing the big money-losing state-owned industries in everything from petrochemicals to pharmaceuticals.
Instead, the accelerated government-driven employment and construction projects are cementing Iraq's reliance on the state as its central economic engine, just as it had been under Mr. Hussein.
"Lots of people wanted to change this, and change that, and transform the economy of Iraq," said an administration official. "But then we quickly realized that we had to put Humpty Dumpty back together first, and then give it over to the Iraqis and let them figure out the best way to change their country."
Accordingly, when sovereignty is transferred next week, Iraq will be what this official called "a centralized socialist state" on which
virtually all citizens are dependent for basic needs, putting a particular burden on the fragile interim government selected less than
three weeks ago.
Of Iraq's eight million employed workers, for example, an estimated 700,000 work for the government directly, 400,000 work for state-owned enterprises, many of them operating in the red, and 200,000 work for various armed forces or security branches, a number expected to grow.
But those numbers measure the equivalent of full-time employees, and some administration officials say that a more realistic number is two million Iraqis, one out of every four with a job, who are dependent on the state for employment.
In addition to the tens of thousands of jobs to be created by the new oil-financed program, American officials say 1.5 million jobs will be generated by the Congressionally appropriated funds that are only now starting to be spent.
Beyond these state programs, most Iraqis are given free or partially subsidized food, costing $4 billion this year. Electricity supplied
at subsidized rates costs $1.7 billion, and the cost of distributing low-cost kerosene and other fuel to Iraqis is estimated at $3 billion
to $5 billion.
But occupation officials say the spending of money now to generate employment will revive state industries, so that in the future they can be privatized and serve as the country's economic base.
"All the programs we have started have the full support of the Iraqi ministries of planning and finance," said an occupation official.
"There are two ways of looking at this," the official said. "First is the absolute need to find jobs for millions of young people who need training. But second is to increase the capacity of companies and of the oil infrastructure to become healthy and employ more Iraqis in the future."
---------------------------------------------------------------------
Citation:
Steven R. Weisman, "U.S. Is Quietly Spending $2.5 Billion From Iraqi Oil Revenues to Pay for Iraqi Projects," New York Times, 21 June 2004. Original URL: http://www.nytimes.com/2004/06/21/politics/21DIPL.html?pagewanted=print&position=
Shooting death angers Iraqi family
US tactics in raid raise concerns
By Thanassis Cambanis, Globe Staff
June 21, 2004
BAGHDAD -- American soldiers stormed into Sajid Kadhum Bouri al-Bawi's house three hours after midnight on May 17, breaking two doors and rousing the dozen children who live there.
An hour later, family members recalled, the soldiers led a hooded man from the house and told the family they were arresting Bawi.
Only after the soldiers left with what appeared to be a prisoner did Bawi's brother find his bloodied body, shot five times and stuffed behind a refrigerator underneath a pile of mattresses.
The US Army is investigating the shooting, and admits that Bawi was shot and killed by an American when, according to the soldiers involved, he tried to seize a soldier's weapon.
Bawi's slaying during the kind of routine night raid that is the military's bread-and-butter counterinsurgency tactic raises questions
about the control and supervision of soldiers on those raids, and the reliability of the local informants whose tips are often behind the
arrest lists.
The events described by family members are chilling: They say Bawi was killed in his mother's bedroom during an interrogation, while soldiers banged on metal doors to dull the sound of the shots.
The soldiers then pretended they were detaining Bawi, according to several members of the family who were present, parading another man in a dishdasha, or robe, through the darkened house to trick the family into thinking that the head of the household was still alive.
Brigadier General Jeffery Hammond, the number two commander of the First Armored Cavalry Division, which patrols Baghdad, said the shooting was unlikely to have occurred as described by the family.
''We have too many lines of supervision on any operation we do," Hammond said. ''It would be hard for me to believe that could happen."
In a terse statement released more than two weeks after Bawi's death, after repeated visits by his relatives to military officers
stationed near the slum where his family lives, the military admitted the shooting and said it had officially opened an investigation.
''According to a source, the Iraqi was an anti-Iraqi forces operative who bragged to his neighbors about murdering a First Cavalry
soldier at a checkpoint," the statement said.
Acting on the informant's tip, soldiers raided the house in Kamalaya, a mostly Shi'ite slum south of the Sadr City section of Baghdad.
''It is reported that during the raid, the Iraqi attempted to grab the weapon of a US soldier who shot and killed the subject," the statement said.
Through a spokesman, Hammond said it would be inappropriate to comment any further before the investigation was complete. It is not clear when that will be, nor has other information been disclosed regarding the identity of the unit or the names of the soldiers involved. In the past year, investigations into shootings by US troops have taken anywhere from a few weeks to several months.
It was not clear why the interrogation of Bawi took place in his house, rather than at an American base after his arrest.
The shooting, as recalled by a half-dozen family members present the night of the raid, has left deep scars on the family. The Bawis live in a two-story home on a narrow dirt lane just off the main road in Kamalaya. On the night of the raid, Bawi, his wife, and five children were sleeping in the front room, the only one with an air conditioner.
According to the family, US soldiers, accompanied by a translator, a group of Iraqi Civil Defense Corps soldiers, and an informant --
hooded to mask his identity -- entered the house. They demanded to know where Bawi was, and the hulking man -- he was 6 feet 6 inches tall and weighed about 265 pounds -- immediately identified himself.
Bawi was taken to an empty bedroom just behind the living room, family members said. The soldiers roused the families of two other brothers, who live in the same house. In a standard practice, they held the three other men in the house in the kitchen, and separately kept the women and children in the living room, where they sat on the mattresses in front of a wall-sized mural depicting the battle of Karbala, the signal event in the founding of Shi'ite Islam.
The soldiers found a machine gun in the upstairs bedroom belonging to Haidar Bawi, one of Bawi's brothers.
''I could only hear muffled sounds from the other room," said Wathiq Jawad Kadhum, 27, a nephew who was held in the kitchen during the roughly 45 minutes that soldiers interrogated his uncle in the bedroom.
Kadhum, his brother Muthanah Kadhum, and his uncle Haidar Bawi were handcuffed and kept on their knees at gunpoint, they said.
Several times, the translator and an American officer came to the kitchen and addressed the three men. ''They said, Sajid is in the
resistance, isn't he?" Wathiq Kadhum said. ''They asked me, what do you do?"
About half an hour into the interrogation, Wathiq Kadhum and Muthanah Kadhum said they heard Bawi shout, ''Oh, you bastard!" Then, they said, a series of gunshots rang out. A soldier kicked the metal door to the washroom, the family theorized, perhaps to mask the noise of the bullets.
The translator and officer came to the kitchen and told the relatives they had test-fired the confiscated weapon. Wathiq Kadhum said he demanded to know what happened.
''The translator told me, shut up, don't ask questions," he said. Someone -- in the darkened kitchen, he could not tell who -- then hit
him in the face with the butt of a gun, he said. His forehead bears a seven-stitch scar, and videotapes from his uncle's funeral show a bandage around his forehead with a streak of blood.
''Anyone who moves, we'll kill him," Muthanah Kadhum said the translator told him.
Shortly before 4 a.m., the soldiers left, taking with them a hooded man wearing one of Bawi's white robes, family members said.
The family regrouped in the yard.
''It was ordinary. We thought they had taken Sajid and maybe they would return him within a month," said his brother Nasser Bawi,
36, who lives in the next-door house, which is separated from Bawi's by a 3-foot-wide alley. He had waited in front of the house during the raid with another brother, Qasim Bawi, 40, and with a group of neighbors.
''We were sure he was just arrested and would come back."
One neighbor brought wire cutters to remove the plastic cuffs binding the hands of the three men.
When the power came back on, family members and neighbors filtered into the house to survey the mess and damage left from the soldiers' search -- cabinet doors askew, doors broken, bedding and clothes thrown to the floor.
That's when Hathima Hakim, Nasser Bawi's mother, saw a pair of feet protruding from under a mattress.
''It was as if the ceiling had opened up and dropped him," she said. She screamed: ''It's Sajid!"
Nasser Bawi came running, thinking that American soldiers had brought his brother home.
''I found him soaked in blood," he said, breaking into sobs as he stood next to the same refrigerator that had partially hidden Bawi's
body.
The coroner's report from the Baghdad Morgue, dated May 29, said Bawi had five bullet wounds: two in the torso, near the heart; two on his left side; and one in his right thigh.
Qasim Bawi represented the family in several visits to a nearby US base, the first one a few days after the funeral.
At an officer's request, he brought letters -- from neighborhood and tribal councils, from an Islamic charity, and from the actors'union -- attesting to Bawi's good character.
According to his brothers, Bawi, like the rest of the family, welcomed the United States as liberators. ''When Saddam was captured,he hired a band for the neighborhood," Qasim Bawi said.
Family snapshots show Wathiq Kadhum, the brother with the forehead scar, frolicking in a waterfall last summer, his arm around a female US soldier.
Now the family lives in fear. The children said they can't sleep. Knocks at the door make the men jump.
Ali, at 11 the eldest of Bawi's children, said he has a recurrent nightmare in which he cannot find his family. ''I don't go near the
Americans anymore, because I'm afraid they will kill me," Ali said.
Bawi's relatives say they want an apology from the Army, a trial for the person who shot him, and only then, financial compensation.
Qasim and Nasser Bawi think the soldiers were tricked by an Iraqi informant who had a personal gripe against their slain brother, a
well-known figure in the neighborhood who ran a business renting tents and chairs for funerals.
They do not have a guess as to who the informant was, but they refer to him as ''Hassan," because one of the neighbors contends he heard an American soldier say, ''No, Hassan," to the informant as they left the house.
Less than a month before his death, Bawi starred as Abbas, a founding figure of Shi'ite Islam, in a Sadr City production.
His brothers scoffed at the allegation that Bawi had killed an American soldier, or that he fought the soldiers who were interrogating
him during the raid. ''He was so fat, he couldn't run," Nasser Bawi said. ''How could he be in the resistance?"
With school over for the summer and their mother in mourning, Sajid Bawi's five children stay in the house all day. The women cry
ritualistically, especially when visitors come. They refuse to clean a spot of blood on the wall where they say Bawi was shot, or replace a shattered windowpane, or move the refrigerator into its proper place.
''They think they have killed one man," Qasim Bawi said. ''They have killed the whole family."
Thanassis Cambanis can be reached at tcambanis@globe.com.
© Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company
------------------------------------------------------------------
Citation:
Thanassis Cambanis, "Shooting Death Angers Iraqi Family," Boston Globe, 21 June 2004. Original URL: http://www.boston.com/news/world/articles/2004/06/21/shooting_death_angers_iraqi_family?mode=PF
By Thanassis Cambanis, Globe Staff
June 21, 2004
BAGHDAD -- American soldiers stormed into Sajid Kadhum Bouri al-Bawi's house three hours after midnight on May 17, breaking two doors and rousing the dozen children who live there.
An hour later, family members recalled, the soldiers led a hooded man from the house and told the family they were arresting Bawi.
Only after the soldiers left with what appeared to be a prisoner did Bawi's brother find his bloodied body, shot five times and stuffed behind a refrigerator underneath a pile of mattresses.
The US Army is investigating the shooting, and admits that Bawi was shot and killed by an American when, according to the soldiers involved, he tried to seize a soldier's weapon.
Bawi's slaying during the kind of routine night raid that is the military's bread-and-butter counterinsurgency tactic raises questions
about the control and supervision of soldiers on those raids, and the reliability of the local informants whose tips are often behind the
arrest lists.
The events described by family members are chilling: They say Bawi was killed in his mother's bedroom during an interrogation, while soldiers banged on metal doors to dull the sound of the shots.
The soldiers then pretended they were detaining Bawi, according to several members of the family who were present, parading another man in a dishdasha, or robe, through the darkened house to trick the family into thinking that the head of the household was still alive.
Brigadier General Jeffery Hammond, the number two commander of the First Armored Cavalry Division, which patrols Baghdad, said the shooting was unlikely to have occurred as described by the family.
''We have too many lines of supervision on any operation we do," Hammond said. ''It would be hard for me to believe that could happen."
In a terse statement released more than two weeks after Bawi's death, after repeated visits by his relatives to military officers
stationed near the slum where his family lives, the military admitted the shooting and said it had officially opened an investigation.
''According to a source, the Iraqi was an anti-Iraqi forces operative who bragged to his neighbors about murdering a First Cavalry
soldier at a checkpoint," the statement said.
Acting on the informant's tip, soldiers raided the house in Kamalaya, a mostly Shi'ite slum south of the Sadr City section of Baghdad.
''It is reported that during the raid, the Iraqi attempted to grab the weapon of a US soldier who shot and killed the subject," the statement said.
Through a spokesman, Hammond said it would be inappropriate to comment any further before the investigation was complete. It is not clear when that will be, nor has other information been disclosed regarding the identity of the unit or the names of the soldiers involved. In the past year, investigations into shootings by US troops have taken anywhere from a few weeks to several months.
It was not clear why the interrogation of Bawi took place in his house, rather than at an American base after his arrest.
The shooting, as recalled by a half-dozen family members present the night of the raid, has left deep scars on the family. The Bawis live in a two-story home on a narrow dirt lane just off the main road in Kamalaya. On the night of the raid, Bawi, his wife, and five children were sleeping in the front room, the only one with an air conditioner.
According to the family, US soldiers, accompanied by a translator, a group of Iraqi Civil Defense Corps soldiers, and an informant --
hooded to mask his identity -- entered the house. They demanded to know where Bawi was, and the hulking man -- he was 6 feet 6 inches tall and weighed about 265 pounds -- immediately identified himself.
Bawi was taken to an empty bedroom just behind the living room, family members said. The soldiers roused the families of two other brothers, who live in the same house. In a standard practice, they held the three other men in the house in the kitchen, and separately kept the women and children in the living room, where they sat on the mattresses in front of a wall-sized mural depicting the battle of Karbala, the signal event in the founding of Shi'ite Islam.
The soldiers found a machine gun in the upstairs bedroom belonging to Haidar Bawi, one of Bawi's brothers.
''I could only hear muffled sounds from the other room," said Wathiq Jawad Kadhum, 27, a nephew who was held in the kitchen during the roughly 45 minutes that soldiers interrogated his uncle in the bedroom.
Kadhum, his brother Muthanah Kadhum, and his uncle Haidar Bawi were handcuffed and kept on their knees at gunpoint, they said.
Several times, the translator and an American officer came to the kitchen and addressed the three men. ''They said, Sajid is in the
resistance, isn't he?" Wathiq Kadhum said. ''They asked me, what do you do?"
About half an hour into the interrogation, Wathiq Kadhum and Muthanah Kadhum said they heard Bawi shout, ''Oh, you bastard!" Then, they said, a series of gunshots rang out. A soldier kicked the metal door to the washroom, the family theorized, perhaps to mask the noise of the bullets.
The translator and officer came to the kitchen and told the relatives they had test-fired the confiscated weapon. Wathiq Kadhum said he demanded to know what happened.
''The translator told me, shut up, don't ask questions," he said. Someone -- in the darkened kitchen, he could not tell who -- then hit
him in the face with the butt of a gun, he said. His forehead bears a seven-stitch scar, and videotapes from his uncle's funeral show a bandage around his forehead with a streak of blood.
''Anyone who moves, we'll kill him," Muthanah Kadhum said the translator told him.
Shortly before 4 a.m., the soldiers left, taking with them a hooded man wearing one of Bawi's white robes, family members said.
The family regrouped in the yard.
''It was ordinary. We thought they had taken Sajid and maybe they would return him within a month," said his brother Nasser Bawi,
36, who lives in the next-door house, which is separated from Bawi's by a 3-foot-wide alley. He had waited in front of the house during the raid with another brother, Qasim Bawi, 40, and with a group of neighbors.
''We were sure he was just arrested and would come back."
One neighbor brought wire cutters to remove the plastic cuffs binding the hands of the three men.
When the power came back on, family members and neighbors filtered into the house to survey the mess and damage left from the soldiers' search -- cabinet doors askew, doors broken, bedding and clothes thrown to the floor.
That's when Hathima Hakim, Nasser Bawi's mother, saw a pair of feet protruding from under a mattress.
''It was as if the ceiling had opened up and dropped him," she said. She screamed: ''It's Sajid!"
Nasser Bawi came running, thinking that American soldiers had brought his brother home.
''I found him soaked in blood," he said, breaking into sobs as he stood next to the same refrigerator that had partially hidden Bawi's
body.
The coroner's report from the Baghdad Morgue, dated May 29, said Bawi had five bullet wounds: two in the torso, near the heart; two on his left side; and one in his right thigh.
Qasim Bawi represented the family in several visits to a nearby US base, the first one a few days after the funeral.
At an officer's request, he brought letters -- from neighborhood and tribal councils, from an Islamic charity, and from the actors'union -- attesting to Bawi's good character.
According to his brothers, Bawi, like the rest of the family, welcomed the United States as liberators. ''When Saddam was captured,he hired a band for the neighborhood," Qasim Bawi said.
Family snapshots show Wathiq Kadhum, the brother with the forehead scar, frolicking in a waterfall last summer, his arm around a female US soldier.
Now the family lives in fear. The children said they can't sleep. Knocks at the door make the men jump.
Ali, at 11 the eldest of Bawi's children, said he has a recurrent nightmare in which he cannot find his family. ''I don't go near the
Americans anymore, because I'm afraid they will kill me," Ali said.
Bawi's relatives say they want an apology from the Army, a trial for the person who shot him, and only then, financial compensation.
Qasim and Nasser Bawi think the soldiers were tricked by an Iraqi informant who had a personal gripe against their slain brother, a
well-known figure in the neighborhood who ran a business renting tents and chairs for funerals.
They do not have a guess as to who the informant was, but they refer to him as ''Hassan," because one of the neighbors contends he heard an American soldier say, ''No, Hassan," to the informant as they left the house.
Less than a month before his death, Bawi starred as Abbas, a founding figure of Shi'ite Islam, in a Sadr City production.
His brothers scoffed at the allegation that Bawi had killed an American soldier, or that he fought the soldiers who were interrogating
him during the raid. ''He was so fat, he couldn't run," Nasser Bawi said. ''How could he be in the resistance?"
With school over for the summer and their mother in mourning, Sajid Bawi's five children stay in the house all day. The women cry
ritualistically, especially when visitors come. They refuse to clean a spot of blood on the wall where they say Bawi was shot, or replace a shattered windowpane, or move the refrigerator into its proper place.
''They think they have killed one man," Qasim Bawi said. ''They have killed the whole family."
Thanassis Cambanis can be reached at tcambanis@globe.com.
© Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company
------------------------------------------------------------------
Citation:
Thanassis Cambanis, "Shooting Death Angers Iraqi Family," Boston Globe, 21 June 2004. Original URL: http://www.boston.com/news/world/articles/2004/06/21/shooting_death_angers_iraqi_family?mode=PF
16 June 2004
Kurds Threaten to Walk Away from Iraqi State
June 9, 2004
By Dexter Filkins
BAGHDAD, Iraq, June 8 — A crisis for the new Iraqi government loomed Tuesday as Kurdish leaders threatened to withdraw from the Iraqi state unless they received guarantees against Shiite plans to limit Kurdish self-rule.
In a letter to President Bush this week, the two main Kurdish leaders, Massoud Barzani and Jalal Talabani, wrote that the Kurds would "refrain from participating in the central government" in Baghdad if any attempt was made by the new government to nullify the interim Iraqi constitution adopted in March.
Shiite leaders have said repeatedly in recent weeks that they intend to remove parts of the interim constitution that essentially grant the Kurds veto power over the permanent constitution, which is scheduled to be drafted and ratified next year.
The Shiite leaders consider the provisions undemocratic, while the Kurds contend they are their only guarantee of retaining the rights to self-rule they gained in the past 13 years, protected from Saddam Hussein by United States warplanes.
In their letter, Mr. Talabani and Mr. Barzani wrote that the Kurdish leadership would refuse to take part in national elections, expected to be held in January, and bar representatives from going to "Kurdistan."
That would amount to something like secession, which Kurdish officials have been hinting at privately for months but now appear to be actively considering. "The Kurdish people will no longer accept second-class citizenship in Iraq," the letter said.
The two leaders also asked President Bush for a commitment to protect "Kurdistan" should an insurgency compel the United States to pull its forces out of the rest of Iraq.
To assure that Kurdish rights are retained, Mr. Talabani and Mr. Barzani, whose parties together deploy about 75,000 fighters, asked President Bush to include the interim Iraqi constitution in the United Nations security resolution that governs the restoration of Iraqi sovereignty.
But American officials rejected the Kurdish request after appeals from Shiite leaders, including Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, the nation's most powerful Shiite, who threatened "serious consequences" if any such move was undertaken. That seemed to set the stage for a showdown between Kurdish and Shiite leaders over the future of the Iraqi state.
A senior American official in Washington cautioned against reading the letter as a firm threat to abandon the central government, saying he expected the Kurds and Shiites to reach an agreement ultimately.
But in Baghdad, a rupture seemed quite possible. The Shiite leaders, whose people make up a majority in Iraq but who have been historically shut out of power, say the provisions that would allow the Kurdish minority to nullify the constitution would diminish the Shiites' historic opportunity to claim political power.
Adil Abdul Mahdi, Iraq's finance minister and a leader of one of the country's largest Shiite parties, said Tuesday that the country's Shiite leadership was determined to remove the provisions that could allow the Kurds to veto the permanent constitution, even at the risk of driving them away. "It's not against the Kurds, it's against the procedure," Mr. Mahdi said.
Adam Ereli, deputy State Department spokesman, did not offer details on the American decision to refuse the Kurdish request regarding the United Nations resolution. But he offered general assurances that Kurdish rights would be protected. "We in the international community will work with you to make this democracy a success, to ensure that the rights of all Iraqis are honored and respected," he said.
But a senior United Nations official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said American officials rejected the Kurdish request because of concerns over offending the country's Shiite leaders.
In a letter released Tuesday by his office, Ayatollah Sistani warned the Security Council against incorporating the interim constitution into the United Nations resolution.
"This law, which was written by a nonelected council under occupation, and under the direct influence of the occupation, would constrain the national assembly," Ayatollah Sistani wrote. "It is rejected by the majority of the Iraqi people."
The signing of the interim constitution, shepherded by American officials here, was regarded as a historic achievement that tried to reassure the country's long-suppressed Shiite majority without alienating the Kurds.
The crucial compromise was contained in the provision that the permanent constitution would pass with a majority vote of the Iraqi people unless voters in three of the country's 18 provinces opposed the constitution by a two-thirds vote. Ethnic Kurds, who make up a fifth of the Iraqi population, are a majority in three provinces.
Kurdish leaders say they are concerned that the new Iraqi government will not honor the interim constitution unless it is forced to.
Iraqi leaders and United Nations officials say that under generally accepted principles of international law, the new Iraqi government will not be bound by any of the laws passed during the American occupation.
A source close to the Kurdish leadership, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, said Kurdish leaders concluded that the interim constitution needed some sort of reaffirmation to compel the new government to adhere to it. The Kurds say they do not expect the Shiite-dominated interim government to provide such reaffirmation, so they asked the Bush administration to make sure it was included in the United Nations resolution.
Bush administration officials have maintained publicly that the interim constitution, as well as all the laws approved during the occupation, will continue to have legal force in Iraq after June 30. But privately, a senior official acknowledged that the interim constitution would need to be reaffirmed to have legal force.
The turning point for the Kurds, the source close to the leadership said, came last month when Robert Blackwill, President Bush's special envoy to Iraq, told the two Kurdish leaders that no ethnic Kurd would be considered for the post of either president or prime minister.
After that, Kurdish leaders began preparing to cut their ties to Baghdad. In an ominous sign, most of the senior leadership of both Mr. Talabani's Patriotic Union of Kurdistan and Mr. Barzani's Kurdish Democratic Party had left Baghdad Tuesday and gone to the Kurdish areas.
Steven R. Weisman contributed reporting from Washington for this article.
Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
Dexter Filkins, "Kurds Threaten to Walk Away from Iraqi State," The New York Times, 9 June 2004. Original URL: http://www.nytimes.com/2004/06/09/international/middleeast/09KURD.html?ei=1&en=5778e440cfa15e9b&ex=1087747936&pagewanted=print&position= (16 June 2004)
By Dexter Filkins
BAGHDAD, Iraq, June 8 — A crisis for the new Iraqi government loomed Tuesday as Kurdish leaders threatened to withdraw from the Iraqi state unless they received guarantees against Shiite plans to limit Kurdish self-rule.
In a letter to President Bush this week, the two main Kurdish leaders, Massoud Barzani and Jalal Talabani, wrote that the Kurds would "refrain from participating in the central government" in Baghdad if any attempt was made by the new government to nullify the interim Iraqi constitution adopted in March.
Shiite leaders have said repeatedly in recent weeks that they intend to remove parts of the interim constitution that essentially grant the Kurds veto power over the permanent constitution, which is scheduled to be drafted and ratified next year.
The Shiite leaders consider the provisions undemocratic, while the Kurds contend they are their only guarantee of retaining the rights to self-rule they gained in the past 13 years, protected from Saddam Hussein by United States warplanes.
In their letter, Mr. Talabani and Mr. Barzani wrote that the Kurdish leadership would refuse to take part in national elections, expected to be held in January, and bar representatives from going to "Kurdistan."
That would amount to something like secession, which Kurdish officials have been hinting at privately for months but now appear to be actively considering. "The Kurdish people will no longer accept second-class citizenship in Iraq," the letter said.
The two leaders also asked President Bush for a commitment to protect "Kurdistan" should an insurgency compel the United States to pull its forces out of the rest of Iraq.
To assure that Kurdish rights are retained, Mr. Talabani and Mr. Barzani, whose parties together deploy about 75,000 fighters, asked President Bush to include the interim Iraqi constitution in the United Nations security resolution that governs the restoration of Iraqi sovereignty.
But American officials rejected the Kurdish request after appeals from Shiite leaders, including Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, the nation's most powerful Shiite, who threatened "serious consequences" if any such move was undertaken. That seemed to set the stage for a showdown between Kurdish and Shiite leaders over the future of the Iraqi state.
A senior American official in Washington cautioned against reading the letter as a firm threat to abandon the central government, saying he expected the Kurds and Shiites to reach an agreement ultimately.
But in Baghdad, a rupture seemed quite possible. The Shiite leaders, whose people make up a majority in Iraq but who have been historically shut out of power, say the provisions that would allow the Kurdish minority to nullify the constitution would diminish the Shiites' historic opportunity to claim political power.
Adil Abdul Mahdi, Iraq's finance minister and a leader of one of the country's largest Shiite parties, said Tuesday that the country's Shiite leadership was determined to remove the provisions that could allow the Kurds to veto the permanent constitution, even at the risk of driving them away. "It's not against the Kurds, it's against the procedure," Mr. Mahdi said.
Adam Ereli, deputy State Department spokesman, did not offer details on the American decision to refuse the Kurdish request regarding the United Nations resolution. But he offered general assurances that Kurdish rights would be protected. "We in the international community will work with you to make this democracy a success, to ensure that the rights of all Iraqis are honored and respected," he said.
But a senior United Nations official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said American officials rejected the Kurdish request because of concerns over offending the country's Shiite leaders.
In a letter released Tuesday by his office, Ayatollah Sistani warned the Security Council against incorporating the interim constitution into the United Nations resolution.
"This law, which was written by a nonelected council under occupation, and under the direct influence of the occupation, would constrain the national assembly," Ayatollah Sistani wrote. "It is rejected by the majority of the Iraqi people."
The signing of the interim constitution, shepherded by American officials here, was regarded as a historic achievement that tried to reassure the country's long-suppressed Shiite majority without alienating the Kurds.
The crucial compromise was contained in the provision that the permanent constitution would pass with a majority vote of the Iraqi people unless voters in three of the country's 18 provinces opposed the constitution by a two-thirds vote. Ethnic Kurds, who make up a fifth of the Iraqi population, are a majority in three provinces.
Kurdish leaders say they are concerned that the new Iraqi government will not honor the interim constitution unless it is forced to.
Iraqi leaders and United Nations officials say that under generally accepted principles of international law, the new Iraqi government will not be bound by any of the laws passed during the American occupation.
A source close to the Kurdish leadership, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, said Kurdish leaders concluded that the interim constitution needed some sort of reaffirmation to compel the new government to adhere to it. The Kurds say they do not expect the Shiite-dominated interim government to provide such reaffirmation, so they asked the Bush administration to make sure it was included in the United Nations resolution.
Bush administration officials have maintained publicly that the interim constitution, as well as all the laws approved during the occupation, will continue to have legal force in Iraq after June 30. But privately, a senior official acknowledged that the interim constitution would need to be reaffirmed to have legal force.
The turning point for the Kurds, the source close to the leadership said, came last month when Robert Blackwill, President Bush's special envoy to Iraq, told the two Kurdish leaders that no ethnic Kurd would be considered for the post of either president or prime minister.
After that, Kurdish leaders began preparing to cut their ties to Baghdad. In an ominous sign, most of the senior leadership of both Mr. Talabani's Patriotic Union of Kurdistan and Mr. Barzani's Kurdish Democratic Party had left Baghdad Tuesday and gone to the Kurdish areas.
Steven R. Weisman contributed reporting from Washington for this article.
Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
Dexter Filkins, "Kurds Threaten to Walk Away from Iraqi State," The New York Times, 9 June 2004. Original URL: http://www.nytimes.com/2004/06/09/international/middleeast/09KURD.html?ei=1&en=5778e440cfa15e9b&ex=1087747936&pagewanted=print&position= (16 June 2004)
Ex-C.I.A. Aides Say Iraq Leader Helped Agency in 90's Attacks
June 9, 2004
By Joel Brinkley
WASHINGTON, June 8 — Iyad Allawi, now the designated prime minister of Iraq, ran an exile organization intent on deposing Saddam Hussein that sent agents into Baghdad in the early 1990's to plant bombs and sabotage government facilities under the direction of the C.I.A., several former intelligence officials say.
Dr. Allawi's group, the Iraqi National Accord, used car bombs and other explosive devices smuggled into Baghdad from northern Iraq, the officials said. Evaluations of the effectiveness of the bombing campaign varied, although the former officials interviewed agreed that it never threatened Saddam Hussein's rule.
No public records of the bombing campaign exist, and the former officials said their recollections were in many cases sketchy, and in some cases contradictory. They could not even recall exactly when it occurred, though the interviews made it clear it was between 1992 and 1995.
The Iraqi government at the time claimed that the bombs, including one it said exploded in a movie theater, resulted in many civilian casualties. But whether the bombings actually killed any civilians could not be confirmed because, as a former C.I.A. official said, the United States had no significant intelligence sources in Iraq then.
One former Central Intelligence Agency officer who was based in the region, Robert Baer, recalled that a bombing during that period "blew up a school bus; schoolchildren were killed." Mr. Baer, a critic of the Iraq war, said he did not recall which resistance group might have set off that bomb.
Other former intelligence officials said Dr. Allawi's organization was the only resistance group involved in bombings and sabotage at that time.
But one former senior intelligence official recalled that "bombs were going off to no great effect."
"I don't recall very much killing of anyone," the official said.
When Dr. Allawi was picked as interim prime minister last week, he said his first priority would be to improve the security situation by stopping bombings and other insurgent attacks in Iraq — an idea several former officials familiar with his past said they found "ironic."
"Send a thief to catch a thief," said Kenneth Pollack, who was an Iran-Iraq military analyst for the C.I.A. during the early 1990's and recalled the sabotage campaign.
Dr. Allawi declined to respond to repeated requests for comment, made Monday and Tuesday through his Washington representative, Patrick N. Theros. The former intelligence officials, while confirming C.I.A. involvement in the bombing campaign, would not say how, exactly, the agency had supported it.
An American intelligence officer who worked with Dr. Allawi in the early 1990's noted that "no one had any problem with sabotage in Baghdad back then," adding, "I don't think anyone could have known how things would turn out today."
Dr. Allawi was a favorite of the C.I.A. and other government agencies 10 years ago, largely because he served as a counterpoint to Ahmad Chalabi, a more prominent exile leader.
He "was highly regarded by those involved in Iraqi operations," Samuel R. Berger, who was national security adviser in the Clinton administration, said in an interview. "Unlike Chalabi, he was someone who was trusted by the regional governments. He was less flamboyant, less promotional."
The C.I.A. recruited Dr. Allawi in 1992, former intelligence officials said. At that time, the former senior intelligence official said, "what we were doing was dealing with anyone" in the Iraqi opposition "we could get our hands on." Mr. Chalabi began working with the agency in 1991, and the idea, the official added, was to "decrease the proportion of Chalabi's role in what we were doing by finding others to work with."
In 1991, Dr. Allawi was associated with a former Iraqi official, Salih Omar Ali al-Tikriti, whom the United States viewed as unsavory. He and Dr. Allawi founded the Iraqi National Accord in 1990. Both were former supporters of the Iraqi government.
Some intelligence officials have also suggested that Dr. Allawi, while he was still a member of the ruling Baath Party in the early 1970's, may have spied on Iraqi students studying in London. Mr. Tikriti was said to have supervised public hangings in Baghdad. The former officials said the C.I.A. would not work with Dr. Allawi until he severed his relationship with Mr. Tikriti, which he did in 1992.
Several intelligence officials said the agency's broad goal immediately after the Persian Gulf war in 1991 was to recruit opposition leaders who had senior contacts inside Iraq, something Dr. Allawi claimed. The Iraqi National Accord was made up of former senior Iraqi military and political leaders who had fled the country and were said to retain connections to colleagues inside the government.
"Iyad had contact with people the agency thought would be useful to us in the future," Mr. Pollack said. "He seemed to have ties to respected Sunni figures that no one else had." The Hussein government was dominated by Sunni Muslims.
The bombing and sabotage campaign, the former senior intelligence official said, "was a test more than anything else, to demonstrate capability."
Another former intelligence officer who was involved in Iraqi affairs recalled that the bombings "were an option we considered and used." Dr. Allawi's group was used, he added, "because Chalabi never had any sort of internal organization that could carry it out," adding, "We would never have asked him to carry out sabotage."
The varied assessments of the bombing campaign's effectiveness are understandable, the former senior intelligence official said, because "I would not attribute to the U.S. sufficient intelligence resources then so that we could perceive if an effective bombing campaign was under way."
Dr. Allawi is not believed to have ever spoken in public about the bombing campaign. But one Iraqi National Accord officer did. In 1996, Amneh al-Khadami, who described himself as the chief bomb maker for the Iraqi National Accord and as being based in Sulaimaniya, in northern Iraq, recorded a videotape in which he talked of the bombing campaign and complained that he was being shortchanged money and supplies. Two former intelligence officers confirmed the existence of the videotape.
Mr. Khadami said that "we blew up a car, and we were supposed to get $2,000" but got only $1,000, according to an account in the British newspaper The Independent in 1997. The newspaper had obtained a copy of the tape.
Mr. Khadami, it added, also said he worried that the C.I.A. might view him as "too much the terrorist."
Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Citation:
Joel Brinkley, "Ex-C.I.A. Aides Say Iraq Leader Helped Agency in 90's Attacks," The New York Times, 9 June 2004. Original URL: http://www.nytimes.com/2004/06/09/politics/09ALLA.html?ei=1&en=c040fed2685e7eb8&ex=1087747955&pagewanted=print&position= (16 June 2004)
By Joel Brinkley
WASHINGTON, June 8 — Iyad Allawi, now the designated prime minister of Iraq, ran an exile organization intent on deposing Saddam Hussein that sent agents into Baghdad in the early 1990's to plant bombs and sabotage government facilities under the direction of the C.I.A., several former intelligence officials say.
Dr. Allawi's group, the Iraqi National Accord, used car bombs and other explosive devices smuggled into Baghdad from northern Iraq, the officials said. Evaluations of the effectiveness of the bombing campaign varied, although the former officials interviewed agreed that it never threatened Saddam Hussein's rule.
No public records of the bombing campaign exist, and the former officials said their recollections were in many cases sketchy, and in some cases contradictory. They could not even recall exactly when it occurred, though the interviews made it clear it was between 1992 and 1995.
The Iraqi government at the time claimed that the bombs, including one it said exploded in a movie theater, resulted in many civilian casualties. But whether the bombings actually killed any civilians could not be confirmed because, as a former C.I.A. official said, the United States had no significant intelligence sources in Iraq then.
One former Central Intelligence Agency officer who was based in the region, Robert Baer, recalled that a bombing during that period "blew up a school bus; schoolchildren were killed." Mr. Baer, a critic of the Iraq war, said he did not recall which resistance group might have set off that bomb.
Other former intelligence officials said Dr. Allawi's organization was the only resistance group involved in bombings and sabotage at that time.
But one former senior intelligence official recalled that "bombs were going off to no great effect."
"I don't recall very much killing of anyone," the official said.
When Dr. Allawi was picked as interim prime minister last week, he said his first priority would be to improve the security situation by stopping bombings and other insurgent attacks in Iraq — an idea several former officials familiar with his past said they found "ironic."
"Send a thief to catch a thief," said Kenneth Pollack, who was an Iran-Iraq military analyst for the C.I.A. during the early 1990's and recalled the sabotage campaign.
Dr. Allawi declined to respond to repeated requests for comment, made Monday and Tuesday through his Washington representative, Patrick N. Theros. The former intelligence officials, while confirming C.I.A. involvement in the bombing campaign, would not say how, exactly, the agency had supported it.
An American intelligence officer who worked with Dr. Allawi in the early 1990's noted that "no one had any problem with sabotage in Baghdad back then," adding, "I don't think anyone could have known how things would turn out today."
Dr. Allawi was a favorite of the C.I.A. and other government agencies 10 years ago, largely because he served as a counterpoint to Ahmad Chalabi, a more prominent exile leader.
He "was highly regarded by those involved in Iraqi operations," Samuel R. Berger, who was national security adviser in the Clinton administration, said in an interview. "Unlike Chalabi, he was someone who was trusted by the regional governments. He was less flamboyant, less promotional."
The C.I.A. recruited Dr. Allawi in 1992, former intelligence officials said. At that time, the former senior intelligence official said, "what we were doing was dealing with anyone" in the Iraqi opposition "we could get our hands on." Mr. Chalabi began working with the agency in 1991, and the idea, the official added, was to "decrease the proportion of Chalabi's role in what we were doing by finding others to work with."
In 1991, Dr. Allawi was associated with a former Iraqi official, Salih Omar Ali al-Tikriti, whom the United States viewed as unsavory. He and Dr. Allawi founded the Iraqi National Accord in 1990. Both were former supporters of the Iraqi government.
Some intelligence officials have also suggested that Dr. Allawi, while he was still a member of the ruling Baath Party in the early 1970's, may have spied on Iraqi students studying in London. Mr. Tikriti was said to have supervised public hangings in Baghdad. The former officials said the C.I.A. would not work with Dr. Allawi until he severed his relationship with Mr. Tikriti, which he did in 1992.
Several intelligence officials said the agency's broad goal immediately after the Persian Gulf war in 1991 was to recruit opposition leaders who had senior contacts inside Iraq, something Dr. Allawi claimed. The Iraqi National Accord was made up of former senior Iraqi military and political leaders who had fled the country and were said to retain connections to colleagues inside the government.
"Iyad had contact with people the agency thought would be useful to us in the future," Mr. Pollack said. "He seemed to have ties to respected Sunni figures that no one else had." The Hussein government was dominated by Sunni Muslims.
The bombing and sabotage campaign, the former senior intelligence official said, "was a test more than anything else, to demonstrate capability."
Another former intelligence officer who was involved in Iraqi affairs recalled that the bombings "were an option we considered and used." Dr. Allawi's group was used, he added, "because Chalabi never had any sort of internal organization that could carry it out," adding, "We would never have asked him to carry out sabotage."
The varied assessments of the bombing campaign's effectiveness are understandable, the former senior intelligence official said, because "I would not attribute to the U.S. sufficient intelligence resources then so that we could perceive if an effective bombing campaign was under way."
Dr. Allawi is not believed to have ever spoken in public about the bombing campaign. But one Iraqi National Accord officer did. In 1996, Amneh al-Khadami, who described himself as the chief bomb maker for the Iraqi National Accord and as being based in Sulaimaniya, in northern Iraq, recorded a videotape in which he talked of the bombing campaign and complained that he was being shortchanged money and supplies. Two former intelligence officers confirmed the existence of the videotape.
Mr. Khadami said that "we blew up a car, and we were supposed to get $2,000" but got only $1,000, according to an account in the British newspaper The Independent in 1997. The newspaper had obtained a copy of the tape.
Mr. Khadami, it added, also said he worried that the C.I.A. might view him as "too much the terrorist."
Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Citation:
Joel Brinkley, "Ex-C.I.A. Aides Say Iraq Leader Helped Agency in 90's Attacks," The New York Times, 9 June 2004. Original URL: http://www.nytimes.com/2004/06/09/politics/09ALLA.html?ei=1&en=c040fed2685e7eb8&ex=1087747955&pagewanted=print&position= (16 June 2004)
Rebel Cleric's Fighters Seize a Police Station in Najaf
June 11, 2004
By Edward Wong
BAGHDAD, Iraq, June 10 — Militiamen loyal to the rebel Shiite cleric Moktada al-Sadr seized a police station in the center of Najaf on Thursday, set prisoners free and allowed looters to plunder the building, witnesses and Iraqi security officials said.
It was the worst infraction of a cease-fire negotiated less than a week earlier between Mr. Sadr's militiamen and an alliance of American-trained Iraqi security forces and American occupation troops deployed outside Najaf. A hospital official said at least five people were killed and 29 were wounded in the violence Thursday.
The gunmen withdrew from the police station after several hours, but they returned throughout the day as the looting went on. At night, militiamen set fire to eight new police cars, witnesses reported.
The dead included one policeman, three insurgents and one civilian, said Hussein Hadi, an administrative assistant at the Hakim Hospital. He said the wounded included a policeman and two children.
Each side accused the other of shooting first and breaking the cease-fire, which was announced on June 4 by Adnan Zurfi, the governor of Najaf. It was unclear whether the gunmen were acting on the orders of senior commanders in Mr. Sadr's militia, known as the Mahdi Army, or had acted independently.
American military officials have said they are unsure if Mr. Sadr controls all his fighters, many of whom are youths from the poor neighborhood of Sadr City in northeastern Baghdad.
[An American soldier died of wounds sustained during an attack in eastern Baghdad on Wednesday, the United States military said in a statement released Friday. Four other soldiers were wounded in the attack, the statement said.]
The cease-fire was the second one negotiated in the last several weeks; American soldiers and the Mahdi Army kept fighting after the first agreement was announced May 27.
By Thursday night, soldiers with the First Armored Division, which is assigned to the region, had not intervened in Najaf, which is regarded as holy city to Iraqi Shiites.
"We don't want the Americans to interfere in the confrontations," Mr. Zurfi said. "We will deal with the situation, and if we need help, we will ask the Americans to participate."
Later, the governor gave the Mahdi Army 24 hours to back down. But the destruction of the police station showed that the Iraqi security forces had failed to protect it against the militiamen, raising the question of whether such Iraqi forces are ready to take responsibility for securing the country and battling insurgents following the transfer of sovereignty on June 30.
Elsewhere on Thursday, the Arab satellite network Al Arabiya broadcast a videotape showing masked men with assault rifles guarding four Turkish hostages. The gunmen identified themselves as members of a group called the Jihad Squads, and demanded that Turkish companies stop doing business in Iraq.
A senior American Army officer was quoted by Reuters as saying the military had detained four Arab men with fake journalist credentials trying to enter the fortified American headquarters in Baghdad. The men were apparently posing as a television crew and were trying to drive a van into the compound. They were stopped when a sensor machine alerted guards to traces of explosive material on them, Reuters quoted the officer as saying.
Mr. Sadr has remained a major problem for the American-led occupation forces. He is wanted in connection with the killing of an American-backed cleric last April, but the Americans have hesitated in arresting or killing him for fear of angering his Shiite Muslim followers.
"We have called upon him and others to abide by the rule of law and to respect peaceful means," Iyad Allawi, the prime minister of the new Iraqi interim government and a Shiite, said at a news conference on Thursday. "Any continuity of using force will be dealt with by the Iraqi government in a very serious and strong way."
Qais al-Khazali, a spokesman for Mr. Sadr, said the Najaf incident Thursday started when the police tried to raid a building housing an Islamic organization that was guarded by members of the Mahdi Army.
In the nearby city of Karbala, where American forces fought the Mahdi Army for nearly three weeks last month, police officers seized a pickup truck carrying heavy weapons at a checkpoint north of the city, a police spokesman said. Support for Mr. Sadr still runs high in parts of the capital. Posters of him were seen Thursday covering many walls in the neighborhood of Kadhimiya.
An Iraqi employee of The New York Times contributed reporting from Najaf for this article.
Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Edward Wong, "Rebel Cleric's Fighters Seize a Police Station in Najaf," The New York Times, 11 June 2004. Original URL: http://www.nytimes.com/2004/06/11/international/middleeast/11IRAQ.html?ei=1&en=ddc83eb4d248610d&ex=1087924660&pagewanted=print&position= (16 June 2004)
By Edward Wong
BAGHDAD, Iraq, June 10 — Militiamen loyal to the rebel Shiite cleric Moktada al-Sadr seized a police station in the center of Najaf on Thursday, set prisoners free and allowed looters to plunder the building, witnesses and Iraqi security officials said.
It was the worst infraction of a cease-fire negotiated less than a week earlier between Mr. Sadr's militiamen and an alliance of American-trained Iraqi security forces and American occupation troops deployed outside Najaf. A hospital official said at least five people were killed and 29 were wounded in the violence Thursday.
The gunmen withdrew from the police station after several hours, but they returned throughout the day as the looting went on. At night, militiamen set fire to eight new police cars, witnesses reported.
The dead included one policeman, three insurgents and one civilian, said Hussein Hadi, an administrative assistant at the Hakim Hospital. He said the wounded included a policeman and two children.
Each side accused the other of shooting first and breaking the cease-fire, which was announced on June 4 by Adnan Zurfi, the governor of Najaf. It was unclear whether the gunmen were acting on the orders of senior commanders in Mr. Sadr's militia, known as the Mahdi Army, or had acted independently.
American military officials have said they are unsure if Mr. Sadr controls all his fighters, many of whom are youths from the poor neighborhood of Sadr City in northeastern Baghdad.
[An American soldier died of wounds sustained during an attack in eastern Baghdad on Wednesday, the United States military said in a statement released Friday. Four other soldiers were wounded in the attack, the statement said.]
The cease-fire was the second one negotiated in the last several weeks; American soldiers and the Mahdi Army kept fighting after the first agreement was announced May 27.
By Thursday night, soldiers with the First Armored Division, which is assigned to the region, had not intervened in Najaf, which is regarded as holy city to Iraqi Shiites.
"We don't want the Americans to interfere in the confrontations," Mr. Zurfi said. "We will deal with the situation, and if we need help, we will ask the Americans to participate."
Later, the governor gave the Mahdi Army 24 hours to back down. But the destruction of the police station showed that the Iraqi security forces had failed to protect it against the militiamen, raising the question of whether such Iraqi forces are ready to take responsibility for securing the country and battling insurgents following the transfer of sovereignty on June 30.
Elsewhere on Thursday, the Arab satellite network Al Arabiya broadcast a videotape showing masked men with assault rifles guarding four Turkish hostages. The gunmen identified themselves as members of a group called the Jihad Squads, and demanded that Turkish companies stop doing business in Iraq.
A senior American Army officer was quoted by Reuters as saying the military had detained four Arab men with fake journalist credentials trying to enter the fortified American headquarters in Baghdad. The men were apparently posing as a television crew and were trying to drive a van into the compound. They were stopped when a sensor machine alerted guards to traces of explosive material on them, Reuters quoted the officer as saying.
Mr. Sadr has remained a major problem for the American-led occupation forces. He is wanted in connection with the killing of an American-backed cleric last April, but the Americans have hesitated in arresting or killing him for fear of angering his Shiite Muslim followers.
"We have called upon him and others to abide by the rule of law and to respect peaceful means," Iyad Allawi, the prime minister of the new Iraqi interim government and a Shiite, said at a news conference on Thursday. "Any continuity of using force will be dealt with by the Iraqi government in a very serious and strong way."
Qais al-Khazali, a spokesman for Mr. Sadr, said the Najaf incident Thursday started when the police tried to raid a building housing an Islamic organization that was guarded by members of the Mahdi Army.
In the nearby city of Karbala, where American forces fought the Mahdi Army for nearly three weeks last month, police officers seized a pickup truck carrying heavy weapons at a checkpoint north of the city, a police spokesman said. Support for Mr. Sadr still runs high in parts of the capital. Posters of him were seen Thursday covering many walls in the neighborhood of Kadhimiya.
An Iraqi employee of The New York Times contributed reporting from Najaf for this article.
Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company
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Edward Wong, "Rebel Cleric's Fighters Seize a Police Station in Najaf," The New York Times, 11 June 2004. Original URL: http://www.nytimes.com/2004/06/11/international/middleeast/11IRAQ.html?ei=1&en=ddc83eb4d248610d&ex=1087924660&pagewanted=print&position= (16 June 2004)
9 Iraqi Militias Said to Approve Deal to Disband
June 7, 2004
By Dexter Filkins
BAGHDAD, Iraq, June 7 — American and Iraqi officials said today they had received commitments from nine of the largest independent militias to disband, as part of a process the officials here said would rid Iraq of any private armed groups by the end of next year.
The announcement was made by the new prime minister, Ayad Allawi. It followed weeks of negotiations with the leaders of the nine of the largest militias, which together are thought to have more 100,000 soldiers, nearly all of whom are operating outside any governmental control.
But there were indications that not all of the militias named in the agreement believed themselves to be part of it, and that carrying out the policy might prove more difficult than the writing of it.
Two of the largest armed groups operating inside the country were not included in the agreement: the Mahdi Army, the radical Shiite group that American soldiers have been battling for weeks, and the Falluja Brigade, a force of ex-Republican Guard soldiers and anti-American insurgents cobbled together last month to end the fighting there.
One indication of the difficulties ahead came this morning, when a senior leader of the one of the nine militias was shot dead by unknown assailants in Baghdad.
Under the agreement, the militia leaders agreed to a plan that would transfer their soldiers to the Iraqi police, army and other security services according to specific timetables that will gradually reduce the size of the private armies over time.
Militia fighters will qualify for pensions as if they were members of the regular army. Those who don't want to stay will get job training. All told, the program is expected to cost $200 million.
Many Iraqis and Americans have long expressed fears here that the militias, if left unchecked, could derail the democratic elections scheduled for next year or lay the groundwork for civil war.
Mr. Allawi, who was named prime minister a week ago, said the agreement would help strengthen the authority of the new Iraqi government that is preparing to take over from the Americans on June 30.
"The completion of these negotiations and the issuance of this order mark a watershed in establishing the rule of law, placing all armed forces under state control and strengthening the security of Iraq," Mr. Allawi said from the steps of his office, inside the fortified American compound known as the Green Zone.
Indeed, Mr. Allawi, who is also the head of the Iraqi National Accord, a political party, said he had already disbanded the army under his control shortly after the fall of Mr. Hussein's government last year.
"We don't have any armed militias anymore," Mr. Alawi said of the I.N.A.
American officials said they had secured agreements to disband from the nine largest armed groups, three of which, they said, held the overwhelming majority of fighters: the two Kurdish political parties, the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan and the Kurdish Democratic Party, which have about 75,000 fighters; and the Badr Brigade, the armed wing of a mainstream Shiite political party, which has about 15,000 fighters.
Six other groups are thought to deploy much smaller armies. Iraqi Hezbollah, a Shiite group; the Iraqi Communist Party; ad the Iraqi Islamic Party, which together are thought to have about 12,000 fighters. In addition to the I.N.A., the militias of two other political parties have told the Americans that they have disbanded: the Dawa Party, one of the country's largest Shiite parties; and the Iraqi National Congress, best known for its leader, Ahmed Chalabi.
The development came amid continuing violence in Iraq today. In Kufa, an arms dump exploded near the town's main mosque, where a radical Shiite cleric presides, officials said. The cause of the detonations was not immediately known.
At least one rebel fighter was killed and nine were wounded, witnesses and hospital sources told Reuters. The American military said in a news release that no American troops were in the area at the time of the explosion and that Iraqi police who had responded to the explosions were repelled by "unknown attackers" inside the mosque.
For weeks this spring, the mosque was the site of clashes between American troops and forces loyal to the radical cleric, Moktada al-Sadr. But the town has been calm since last week, when Mr. Sadr and the American authorities agreed to a cease-fire there and in nearby Najaf.
Riyadh Moussa, a militiaman who had been sleeping in the mosque compound, told The Associated Press that he had heard a "whoosh of a missile in the air" and a thud when a projectile hit the arms storage area.
"I'm sure it was the Americans who did it," he said. "We have no other enemies."
An American soldier was killed and two were wounded today when a roadside bomb exploded near Iskandariyah, 25 miles south of Baghdad, Agence France-Presse reported, quoting a military spokeswoman. American troops shot an unknown number of suspects fleeing the scene, the spokeswoman added.
The developments came a day after bomb blasts killed at least 21 people in a car bombing at a military base north of Baghdad and at an Iraqi police station 40 miles to the south.
Kirk Semple contributed reporting from New York for this article.
Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Citation:
Dexter Filkins, "9 Iraqi Militias Said to Approve Deal to Disband," The New York Times, 7 June 2004. Original URL: http://www.nytimes.com/2004/06/07/international/middleeast/07CND-IRAQ.html?ei=5070&en=5c872f0aecf42e00&hp=&ex=1087531200&pagewanted=print&position=
(16 June 2004)
By Dexter Filkins
BAGHDAD, Iraq, June 7 — American and Iraqi officials said today they had received commitments from nine of the largest independent militias to disband, as part of a process the officials here said would rid Iraq of any private armed groups by the end of next year.
The announcement was made by the new prime minister, Ayad Allawi. It followed weeks of negotiations with the leaders of the nine of the largest militias, which together are thought to have more 100,000 soldiers, nearly all of whom are operating outside any governmental control.
But there were indications that not all of the militias named in the agreement believed themselves to be part of it, and that carrying out the policy might prove more difficult than the writing of it.
Two of the largest armed groups operating inside the country were not included in the agreement: the Mahdi Army, the radical Shiite group that American soldiers have been battling for weeks, and the Falluja Brigade, a force of ex-Republican Guard soldiers and anti-American insurgents cobbled together last month to end the fighting there.
One indication of the difficulties ahead came this morning, when a senior leader of the one of the nine militias was shot dead by unknown assailants in Baghdad.
Under the agreement, the militia leaders agreed to a plan that would transfer their soldiers to the Iraqi police, army and other security services according to specific timetables that will gradually reduce the size of the private armies over time.
Militia fighters will qualify for pensions as if they were members of the regular army. Those who don't want to stay will get job training. All told, the program is expected to cost $200 million.
Many Iraqis and Americans have long expressed fears here that the militias, if left unchecked, could derail the democratic elections scheduled for next year or lay the groundwork for civil war.
Mr. Allawi, who was named prime minister a week ago, said the agreement would help strengthen the authority of the new Iraqi government that is preparing to take over from the Americans on June 30.
"The completion of these negotiations and the issuance of this order mark a watershed in establishing the rule of law, placing all armed forces under state control and strengthening the security of Iraq," Mr. Allawi said from the steps of his office, inside the fortified American compound known as the Green Zone.
Indeed, Mr. Allawi, who is also the head of the Iraqi National Accord, a political party, said he had already disbanded the army under his control shortly after the fall of Mr. Hussein's government last year.
"We don't have any armed militias anymore," Mr. Alawi said of the I.N.A.
American officials said they had secured agreements to disband from the nine largest armed groups, three of which, they said, held the overwhelming majority of fighters: the two Kurdish political parties, the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan and the Kurdish Democratic Party, which have about 75,000 fighters; and the Badr Brigade, the armed wing of a mainstream Shiite political party, which has about 15,000 fighters.
Six other groups are thought to deploy much smaller armies. Iraqi Hezbollah, a Shiite group; the Iraqi Communist Party; ad the Iraqi Islamic Party, which together are thought to have about 12,000 fighters. In addition to the I.N.A., the militias of two other political parties have told the Americans that they have disbanded: the Dawa Party, one of the country's largest Shiite parties; and the Iraqi National Congress, best known for its leader, Ahmed Chalabi.
The development came amid continuing violence in Iraq today. In Kufa, an arms dump exploded near the town's main mosque, where a radical Shiite cleric presides, officials said. The cause of the detonations was not immediately known.
At least one rebel fighter was killed and nine were wounded, witnesses and hospital sources told Reuters. The American military said in a news release that no American troops were in the area at the time of the explosion and that Iraqi police who had responded to the explosions were repelled by "unknown attackers" inside the mosque.
For weeks this spring, the mosque was the site of clashes between American troops and forces loyal to the radical cleric, Moktada al-Sadr. But the town has been calm since last week, when Mr. Sadr and the American authorities agreed to a cease-fire there and in nearby Najaf.
Riyadh Moussa, a militiaman who had been sleeping in the mosque compound, told The Associated Press that he had heard a "whoosh of a missile in the air" and a thud when a projectile hit the arms storage area.
"I'm sure it was the Americans who did it," he said. "We have no other enemies."
An American soldier was killed and two were wounded today when a roadside bomb exploded near Iskandariyah, 25 miles south of Baghdad, Agence France-Presse reported, quoting a military spokeswoman. American troops shot an unknown number of suspects fleeing the scene, the spokeswoman added.
The developments came a day after bomb blasts killed at least 21 people in a car bombing at a military base north of Baghdad and at an Iraqi police station 40 miles to the south.
Kirk Semple contributed reporting from New York for this article.
Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Citation:
Dexter Filkins, "9 Iraqi Militias Said to Approve Deal to Disband," The New York Times, 7 June 2004. Original URL: http://www.nytimes.com/2004/06/07/international/middleeast/07CND-IRAQ.html?ei=5070&en=5c872f0aecf42e00&hp=&ex=1087531200&pagewanted=print&position=
(16 June 2004)
Forced Nudity of Iraqi Prisoners Is Seen as a Pervasive Pattern, Not Isolated Incidents
June 8, 2004
By Kate Zernike and David Rohde
In the weeks since photographs of naked detainees set off the abuse scandal at Abu Ghraib, military officials have portrayed the sexual humiliation captured in the images as the isolated acts of a rogue night shift.
But forced nudity of prisoners was pervasive in the military intelligence unit of Abu Ghraib, so much so that soldiers later said they had not seen "the whole nudity thing," as one captain called it, as abusive or out of the ordinary.
While there have been reports of forced nakedness at detention facilities in Afghanistan and at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, the practice was apparently far more aggressive at Abu Ghraib, according to interviews, reports from human rights groups and sworn statements from detainees and soldiers. The detainees said leaving prisoners naked started as far back as last July, three months before the seven soldiers now charged and their military police company arrived at the prison. It bred a culture, some soldiers say, where the abuse captured on film could happen.
Detainees were paraded naked past other prisoners and guards; some were ordered to do jumping jacks and sing "The Star-Spangled Banner" in the nude, according to a several witnesses. Also, a father and his grown son were stripped, then forced to stand and stare at each other. The International Committee of the Red Cross, visiting in October, found prisoners left naked in their cells for days, modestly trying to shield themselves behind cardboard from meals-ready-to-eat boxes.
It is not clear how the practice emerged and, if it was official policy, exactly who authorized it. Col. Thomas M. Pappas, the military intelligence officer in charge of interrogations at the prison, told Army investigators that detainees might be stripped and shackled for questioning, but not without "good reason." When Red Cross monitors expressed alarm about prisoners being left in their cells or forced to move about naked, they said military intelligence officials "confirmed that it was part of the military intelligence process."
"It was not uncommon to see people without clothing," Capt. Donald J. Reese, the warden of the tier where the worst abuses occurred, told investigators in a sworn statement in January. "I only saw males. I was told the `whole nudity thing' was an interrogation procedure used by military intelligence, and never thought much of it."
An analyst from the 205th Military Intelligence Battalion, who asked not to be identified for fear of being punished for speaking out, said: "If you walked down through the wing of the prison where they were being held, they would have them strip down naked. Sometimes they would stand on boxes and would hold their arms out. That happened almost every night — having them naked. I wouldn't say it's abuse. It's definitely degrading to them."
Soldiers said at least one civilian interrogator, Steven Stefanowicz, had been so alarmed by the use of nudity that he reported a military intelligence interrogator after she made a detainee walk naked down a cellblock to humiliate him. His lawyer said Mr. Stefanowicz, who an Army report said might have been "directly or indirectly" responsible for abuses, had not thought stripping detainees was an appropriate interrogation technique, and had worried that doing so would incite more unrest at a time when guards were fending off rioters with live bullets.
Nudity is considered particularly shameful in Muslim culture, a violation of religious principles. While nudity as a disciplinary or coercive tool may be especially objectionable to Muslims, they are hardly the only victims of the practice. Soldiers in Nazi Germany paraded naked prisoners in daylight, and human rights groups have documented the use of nudity during conflicts in Egypt, Chile and Turkey, and in Afghanistan during the Soviet occupation. Central Intelligence Agency training manuals from the 1960's and 1980's taught the stripping of prisoners as an interrogation tool. Nudity and sexual humiliation have also been reported in American prisons where a number of guards at Abu Ghraib worked in their civilian lives.
Complaints about sexual humiliation have also emerged in Afghanistan. Seven Afghan men who had been held at the main detention center in Bagram, where the deaths of two detainees and accusations of abuse are now under investigation, said in recent interviews that during various periods from December 2002 to April 2004, they had been subjected to repeated rectal exams, and forced to change clothes, shower and go to the bathroom in front of female soldiers.
"I'm 50 years old, and no one has ever taken my clothes," said Abdullah Khan Sahak, who was released from American custody on April 19 and complained that he was photographed nude in Afghanistan. "It was a very hard moment for me. It was death for me."
Zakim Shah, a 20-year-old farmer, and Parkhudin, a 26-year-old farmer and former soldier who, like many Afghans, has only one name, said female soldiers had watched groups of male prisoners take showers at Bagram and undergo rectal exams.
"We don't know if it's medical or if they were very proud of themselves," Mr. Shah said. "But if it was medical, why were they taking our clothes off in front of the women? We are Afghans, not Americans."
On two or three occasions, the two men said, the women commented to one another about the size of prisoners' penises. "They were laughing a lot," Parkhudin said, adding that the women taunted prisoners during showers, saying, "You're my dog."
Three other prisoners reported being questioned while naked at an American firebase in the city of Gardez in 2003. And at Camp Rhino, John Walker Lindh, the American now serving a 20-year sentence for aiding the Taliban, was stripped and bound with duct tape to a stretcher for two days, according to the statement of fact in his plea-bargain agreement.
At Guantánamo Bay, where some prisoners from Afghanistan were taken, a few British detainees said forced nudity had occurred. One of them, Tarek Dergoul, said after his release that some detainees had been stripped of their clothing, which would then be returned piece by piece in exchange for good behavior.
But Lt. Col. Leon H. Sumpter, a spokesman for the military joint task force that runs the detention center, said in a recent interview that nudity had never occurred in connection with interrogation or discipline and had not been approved.
A military official who served at Guantánamo said that after a wave of suicide attempts by prisoners in late 2002 and early 2003, the military police guards did take away clothing from some detainees who were considered suicide risks, out of concern that they might rip up their garments to make nooses.
In its visits to detention centers and prisons in Iraq, the Red Cross singled out the military intelligence section at Abu Ghraib for using public nudity in a "systematic" pattern of maltreatment. By contrast, the committee said it had heard no complaints of "physical ill treatment" at Camp Bucca, another large detention center.
A list of interrogation techniques posted at Abu Ghraib in September, indicating which were acceptable and which needed special authorization, makes no mention of leaving detainees naked. A senior military officer said, "There was no interrogation authority that authorized the removal of all clothing from a detainee."
But detainees who made sworn statements after the prison abuse scandal broke all mentioned having been left naked, some for days. The practice goes back at least as far as July 10, when, according to his statement, a detainee named Amjed Isail Waleed was left unclothed in a dark room for five days. Another detainee, Ameen Saeed al-Sheik, said he was stripped on Oct. 7, a week before the arrival of the 372nd Military Police Company, the unit where soldiers are now charged with abuse.
By Oct. 20, forced nudity was such accepted practice that an incident report written by two of the soldiers now charged said an inmate in the cell where prisoners were held for interrogation had been ordered "stripped in his cell for six (6) days" for apparently whittling a toothbrush into what a soldier believed was a knife.
In late October, Red Cross monitors were so alarmed by the number of nude detainees that they halted their visit and demanded an immediate explanation.
"The military intelligence officer in charge of the interrogation explained that this practice was `part of the process,' " the Red Cross wrote in a report in February.
In November, Specialist Luciana Spencer of the 66th Military Intelligence Group ordered a detainee stripped and handcuffed behind his back during his interrogation, then paraded him outdoors in the cold past other detainees to his cell.
"I remember we said, `Do you really have to walk him out naked?' " said the intelligence analyst, who spoke on condition of anonymity. "And they said, `Yeah, yeah, we have to embarrass him.' "
Mr. Stefanowicz reported the incident, and Specialist Spencer was moved out of the interrogation unit. Sometime around December, the nudity seemed to stop, according to several soldiers. Captain Reese, the tier warden, credited the Red Cross.
"They were concerned with the amount of nudity, and the area was cold and damp," he said in his statement to investigators on Jan. 18. "The detainees did not have appropriate clothing and bedding. The second visit occurred two weeks ago, and things were much better. The nudity has stopped, and they seemed happy with what they saw."
Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Citation:
Kate Zernike and David Rohde, "Forced Nudity of Iraqi Prisoners Is Seen as a Pervasive Pattern, Not Isolated Incidents," New York Times, 8 June 2004. Original URL: http://www.nytimes.com/2004/06/08/international/middleeast/08NAKE.html?ei=1&en=cf394eb4eb1d9a0a&ex=1087748000&pagewanted=print&position= (16 June 2004)
By Kate Zernike and David Rohde
In the weeks since photographs of naked detainees set off the abuse scandal at Abu Ghraib, military officials have portrayed the sexual humiliation captured in the images as the isolated acts of a rogue night shift.
But forced nudity of prisoners was pervasive in the military intelligence unit of Abu Ghraib, so much so that soldiers later said they had not seen "the whole nudity thing," as one captain called it, as abusive or out of the ordinary.
While there have been reports of forced nakedness at detention facilities in Afghanistan and at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, the practice was apparently far more aggressive at Abu Ghraib, according to interviews, reports from human rights groups and sworn statements from detainees and soldiers. The detainees said leaving prisoners naked started as far back as last July, three months before the seven soldiers now charged and their military police company arrived at the prison. It bred a culture, some soldiers say, where the abuse captured on film could happen.
Detainees were paraded naked past other prisoners and guards; some were ordered to do jumping jacks and sing "The Star-Spangled Banner" in the nude, according to a several witnesses. Also, a father and his grown son were stripped, then forced to stand and stare at each other. The International Committee of the Red Cross, visiting in October, found prisoners left naked in their cells for days, modestly trying to shield themselves behind cardboard from meals-ready-to-eat boxes.
It is not clear how the practice emerged and, if it was official policy, exactly who authorized it. Col. Thomas M. Pappas, the military intelligence officer in charge of interrogations at the prison, told Army investigators that detainees might be stripped and shackled for questioning, but not without "good reason." When Red Cross monitors expressed alarm about prisoners being left in their cells or forced to move about naked, they said military intelligence officials "confirmed that it was part of the military intelligence process."
"It was not uncommon to see people without clothing," Capt. Donald J. Reese, the warden of the tier where the worst abuses occurred, told investigators in a sworn statement in January. "I only saw males. I was told the `whole nudity thing' was an interrogation procedure used by military intelligence, and never thought much of it."
An analyst from the 205th Military Intelligence Battalion, who asked not to be identified for fear of being punished for speaking out, said: "If you walked down through the wing of the prison where they were being held, they would have them strip down naked. Sometimes they would stand on boxes and would hold their arms out. That happened almost every night — having them naked. I wouldn't say it's abuse. It's definitely degrading to them."
Soldiers said at least one civilian interrogator, Steven Stefanowicz, had been so alarmed by the use of nudity that he reported a military intelligence interrogator after she made a detainee walk naked down a cellblock to humiliate him. His lawyer said Mr. Stefanowicz, who an Army report said might have been "directly or indirectly" responsible for abuses, had not thought stripping detainees was an appropriate interrogation technique, and had worried that doing so would incite more unrest at a time when guards were fending off rioters with live bullets.
Nudity is considered particularly shameful in Muslim culture, a violation of religious principles. While nudity as a disciplinary or coercive tool may be especially objectionable to Muslims, they are hardly the only victims of the practice. Soldiers in Nazi Germany paraded naked prisoners in daylight, and human rights groups have documented the use of nudity during conflicts in Egypt, Chile and Turkey, and in Afghanistan during the Soviet occupation. Central Intelligence Agency training manuals from the 1960's and 1980's taught the stripping of prisoners as an interrogation tool. Nudity and sexual humiliation have also been reported in American prisons where a number of guards at Abu Ghraib worked in their civilian lives.
Complaints about sexual humiliation have also emerged in Afghanistan. Seven Afghan men who had been held at the main detention center in Bagram, where the deaths of two detainees and accusations of abuse are now under investigation, said in recent interviews that during various periods from December 2002 to April 2004, they had been subjected to repeated rectal exams, and forced to change clothes, shower and go to the bathroom in front of female soldiers.
"I'm 50 years old, and no one has ever taken my clothes," said Abdullah Khan Sahak, who was released from American custody on April 19 and complained that he was photographed nude in Afghanistan. "It was a very hard moment for me. It was death for me."
Zakim Shah, a 20-year-old farmer, and Parkhudin, a 26-year-old farmer and former soldier who, like many Afghans, has only one name, said female soldiers had watched groups of male prisoners take showers at Bagram and undergo rectal exams.
"We don't know if it's medical or if they were very proud of themselves," Mr. Shah said. "But if it was medical, why were they taking our clothes off in front of the women? We are Afghans, not Americans."
On two or three occasions, the two men said, the women commented to one another about the size of prisoners' penises. "They were laughing a lot," Parkhudin said, adding that the women taunted prisoners during showers, saying, "You're my dog."
Three other prisoners reported being questioned while naked at an American firebase in the city of Gardez in 2003. And at Camp Rhino, John Walker Lindh, the American now serving a 20-year sentence for aiding the Taliban, was stripped and bound with duct tape to a stretcher for two days, according to the statement of fact in his plea-bargain agreement.
At Guantánamo Bay, where some prisoners from Afghanistan were taken, a few British detainees said forced nudity had occurred. One of them, Tarek Dergoul, said after his release that some detainees had been stripped of their clothing, which would then be returned piece by piece in exchange for good behavior.
But Lt. Col. Leon H. Sumpter, a spokesman for the military joint task force that runs the detention center, said in a recent interview that nudity had never occurred in connection with interrogation or discipline and had not been approved.
A military official who served at Guantánamo said that after a wave of suicide attempts by prisoners in late 2002 and early 2003, the military police guards did take away clothing from some detainees who were considered suicide risks, out of concern that they might rip up their garments to make nooses.
In its visits to detention centers and prisons in Iraq, the Red Cross singled out the military intelligence section at Abu Ghraib for using public nudity in a "systematic" pattern of maltreatment. By contrast, the committee said it had heard no complaints of "physical ill treatment" at Camp Bucca, another large detention center.
A list of interrogation techniques posted at Abu Ghraib in September, indicating which were acceptable and which needed special authorization, makes no mention of leaving detainees naked. A senior military officer said, "There was no interrogation authority that authorized the removal of all clothing from a detainee."
But detainees who made sworn statements after the prison abuse scandal broke all mentioned having been left naked, some for days. The practice goes back at least as far as July 10, when, according to his statement, a detainee named Amjed Isail Waleed was left unclothed in a dark room for five days. Another detainee, Ameen Saeed al-Sheik, said he was stripped on Oct. 7, a week before the arrival of the 372nd Military Police Company, the unit where soldiers are now charged with abuse.
By Oct. 20, forced nudity was such accepted practice that an incident report written by two of the soldiers now charged said an inmate in the cell where prisoners were held for interrogation had been ordered "stripped in his cell for six (6) days" for apparently whittling a toothbrush into what a soldier believed was a knife.
In late October, Red Cross monitors were so alarmed by the number of nude detainees that they halted their visit and demanded an immediate explanation.
"The military intelligence officer in charge of the interrogation explained that this practice was `part of the process,' " the Red Cross wrote in a report in February.
In November, Specialist Luciana Spencer of the 66th Military Intelligence Group ordered a detainee stripped and handcuffed behind his back during his interrogation, then paraded him outdoors in the cold past other detainees to his cell.
"I remember we said, `Do you really have to walk him out naked?' " said the intelligence analyst, who spoke on condition of anonymity. "And they said, `Yeah, yeah, we have to embarrass him.' "
Mr. Stefanowicz reported the incident, and Specialist Spencer was moved out of the interrogation unit. Sometime around December, the nudity seemed to stop, according to several soldiers. Captain Reese, the tier warden, credited the Red Cross.
"They were concerned with the amount of nudity, and the area was cold and damp," he said in his statement to investigators on Jan. 18. "The detainees did not have appropriate clothing and bedding. The second visit occurred two weeks ago, and things were much better. The nudity has stopped, and they seemed happy with what they saw."
Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Citation:
Kate Zernike and David Rohde, "Forced Nudity of Iraqi Prisoners Is Seen as a Pervasive Pattern, Not Isolated Incidents," New York Times, 8 June 2004. Original URL: http://www.nytimes.com/2004/06/08/international/middleeast/08NAKE.html?ei=1&en=cf394eb4eb1d9a0a&ex=1087748000&pagewanted=print&position= (16 June 2004)
Handlers Say Use of Dogs Approved
June 11, 2004
By Josh White and Scott Higham, Washington Post
WASHINGTON -- US intelligence personnel ordered military dog handlers at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq to use unmuzzled dogs to frighten and intimidate detainees during interrogations late last year, a plan approved by the highest-ranking military intelligence officer at the facility, according to sworn statements the handlers provided to military investigators.
A military intelligence interrogator also told investigators that two dog handlers at Abu Ghraib were "having a contest" to see how many detainees they could make involuntarily urinate out of fear of the dogs, according to the previously undisclosed statements obtained by The Washington Post.
The statements by the dog handlers provide the clearest indication yet that military intelligence personnel were deeply involved in tactics later deemed by a US Army general to be "sadistic, blatant, and wanton criminal abuses."
President Bush and top Pentagon officials have said the criminal abuse at Abu Ghraib was confined to a small group of rogue military police soldiers who stripped detainees naked, beat them, and photographed them in humiliating sexual poses. An Army investigation into the abuse condemned the MPs for those practices, but included the use of unmuzzled dogs to frighten detainees among the "intentional abuse."
So far, the only charges to emerge have been against seven MPs and do not include dog incidents, even though such use of dogs is an apparent violation of the Geneva Conventions and the Army's field manual. The military intelligence officer in charge of Abu Ghraib later told investigators that the use of unmuzzled dogs in interrogation sessions was recommended by a two-star general and that it was "OK."
Sergeant Michael J. Smith and Sergeant Santos A. Cardona, Army dog handlers assigned to Abu Ghraib, told investigators that military intelligence personnel requested that they bring their dogs to prison interrogation sites multiple times to assist in questioning detainees in December and January. Colonel Thomas Pappas, who was in charge of military intelligence at the prison, told both soldiers that the use of dogs in interrogations had been approved, according to the statements.
Neither Smith nor Cardona have been charged in connection with the abuse at Abu Ghraib.
In Army memos regarding interrogation techniques at the prison, the use of military working dogs was specifically allowed, as long as higher-ranking officers approved the measures. The Army previously has said that the commanding general of US troops in Iraq, Lieutenant General Ricardo Sanchez, would have had to approve the use of dogs.
© Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Citation:
Josh White and Scott Higham, "Handlers Say Use of Dogs Approved," Washington Post, 11 June 2004. Original URL: http://www.boston.com/news/nation/articles/2004/06/11/handlers_say_use_of_dogs_approved?mode=PF (16 June 2004)
By Josh White and Scott Higham, Washington Post
WASHINGTON -- US intelligence personnel ordered military dog handlers at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq to use unmuzzled dogs to frighten and intimidate detainees during interrogations late last year, a plan approved by the highest-ranking military intelligence officer at the facility, according to sworn statements the handlers provided to military investigators.
A military intelligence interrogator also told investigators that two dog handlers at Abu Ghraib were "having a contest" to see how many detainees they could make involuntarily urinate out of fear of the dogs, according to the previously undisclosed statements obtained by The Washington Post.
The statements by the dog handlers provide the clearest indication yet that military intelligence personnel were deeply involved in tactics later deemed by a US Army general to be "sadistic, blatant, and wanton criminal abuses."
President Bush and top Pentagon officials have said the criminal abuse at Abu Ghraib was confined to a small group of rogue military police soldiers who stripped detainees naked, beat them, and photographed them in humiliating sexual poses. An Army investigation into the abuse condemned the MPs for those practices, but included the use of unmuzzled dogs to frighten detainees among the "intentional abuse."
So far, the only charges to emerge have been against seven MPs and do not include dog incidents, even though such use of dogs is an apparent violation of the Geneva Conventions and the Army's field manual. The military intelligence officer in charge of Abu Ghraib later told investigators that the use of unmuzzled dogs in interrogation sessions was recommended by a two-star general and that it was "OK."
Sergeant Michael J. Smith and Sergeant Santos A. Cardona, Army dog handlers assigned to Abu Ghraib, told investigators that military intelligence personnel requested that they bring their dogs to prison interrogation sites multiple times to assist in questioning detainees in December and January. Colonel Thomas Pappas, who was in charge of military intelligence at the prison, told both soldiers that the use of dogs in interrogations had been approved, according to the statements.
Neither Smith nor Cardona have been charged in connection with the abuse at Abu Ghraib.
In Army memos regarding interrogation techniques at the prison, the use of military working dogs was specifically allowed, as long as higher-ranking officers approved the measures. The Army previously has said that the commanding general of US troops in Iraq, Lieutenant General Ricardo Sanchez, would have had to approve the use of dogs.
© Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company
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Citation:
Josh White and Scott Higham, "Handlers Say Use of Dogs Approved," Washington Post, 11 June 2004. Original URL: http://www.boston.com/news/nation/articles/2004/06/11/handlers_say_use_of_dogs_approved?mode=PF (16 June 2004)
Fighting in the Shadow of Iraq: Some Fear Afghanistan Has Become a Forgotten War
June 2, 2004
By Vanessa Williams, Washington Post Staff Writer
When Michael O'Neill heard about the two young soldiers from the 10th Mountain Division who were killed several weeks ago in Afghanistan, a twinge of pain tore through him. He immediately remembered the day last fall when he got a call at the firehouse to come home.
His son, Pfc. Evan W. O'Neill, was killed on Sept. 29 during a firefight with suspected al Qaeda and Taliban insurgents in Shkin, Afghanistan, near the border with Pakistan. Evan O'Neill also had served with the 10th Mountain Division. And even though his son was in a different battalion, and probably did not know Staff Sgt. Anthony Lagman and Sgt. Michael Esposito Jr., O'Neill considers them family.
"Those are my son's people; those are our people," said O'Neill, a lieutenant in the Andover Fire Department in Massachusetts. "And we grieve for them and their families."
It troubles O'Neill that his son's sacrifice, and those of other soldiers in the treacherous mountain terrain of Afghanistan, might have escaped the notice of much of a public transfixed on the raging conflict in Iraq.
"Not to downgrade Iraq," he said. Indeed, O'Neill, a decorated Vietnam War veteran, said he agreed with the decision to invade the country and topple Saddam Hussein. "But I want people in this country to realize that the initial get-go, prior to Iraq, was Afghanistan. And it had to do with the people that attacked our country: al Qaeda, the Taliban. . . . The ongoing conflict is being overshadowed by Iraq. It shouldn't be that way."
More than two years after the fall of the Taliban, the radical Islamic government that harbored al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden, about 15,000 U.S. troops remain in Afghanistan. Their primary mission, said Marine Capt. David T. Romley, a Pentagon spokesman, is to "provide security and hunt down the remnants of the Taliban and al Qaeda."
In carrying out that mission, 126 service members have died since Oct. 7, 2001, when the United States launched Operation Enduring Freedom, after the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. Seventy-seven have died in Afghanistan, including four who were killed on Saturday when their vehicle hit a land mine. Forty-nine more have died in other regions, including neighboring Pakistan, as part of the campaign to hunt down members of the al Qaeda network, which claimed responsibility for the terrorist attacks. Two CIA officers also have died.
The death of former professional athlete Patrick Tillman in April shined a brief spotlight on the war in Afghanistan. Tillman, 27, who walked away from a multimillion-dollar contract with the National Football League's Arizona Cardinals to enlist in the Army, was killed by "friendly fire" after his unit was ambushed by militia forces about 90 miles south of Kabul.
Tillman reportedly was moved to become an Army Ranger after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorists attacks. Many soldiers were inspired by the same emotions. Evan O'Neill, who enlisted right after graduating from high school and was 19 when he was killed, wanted to be in the battle, his father said.
"His whole goal in life was to go to Afghanistan to fight the people who attacked our country," O'Neill said. "He died doing that."
Nicholes Golding, another recent casualty, shared that goal, said his mother, Cynthia Coffin. "He said nobody was going to get away with that in our country. 'I'm going to get 'em.' . . . He was really angry."
Golding, 24, was stationed in Hawaii at the time of the Sept. 11 attacks, his mother said. He immediately began applying for a transfer into a unit that would take him to the war against terrorism. "He knew if he got into the 10th Mountain Division, he would go to Afghanistan or Iraq," his mother said from her home in Steuben, Maine.
He got the transfer and was sent to eastern Afghanistan last August. He died in February when his Humvee struck a mine in Ghazni.
Low-Level War
The two soldiers from the 10th Mountain Division killed on March 18 -- Lagman, 26, of Yonkers, N.Y., and Esposito, 22, of Brentwood, N.Y. -- were on a mission to root out enemy forces from a mountain village when their unit came under fire. They became two of the 31 soldiers who have been killed in action.
By contrast, in April, the Pentagon reported that 135 American troops died in Iraq, all but nine of them in combat.
Richard H. Kohn, chairman of curriculum in peace, war and defense at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and a former Pentagon chief of Air Force history, said Afghanistan has not been "forgotten, but I'd say it's been pushed to the back of people's minds."
Although the invasion of Afghanistan failed to capture or kill bin Laden, Kohn said, the United States did succeed in disrupting al Qaeda's base of operations and routing the Taliban. He argues that the effort in Afghanistan is more important in the war against terrorism than the campaign in Iraq is.
"The campaign in Afghanistan does not require tens of thousands of American troops. The level of operation is very low and very small and very dependent on intelligence and our allies in Afghanistan and Pakistan and so it's just not as visible or dramatic" as Iraq, he said.
Michael Donovan, a research analyst for the Center for Defense Information, a liberal think tank based in Washington, agrees that the war in Afghanistan has been eclipsed by Iraq, but he argues that it is because it is not a priority with the Bush administration.
Afghanistan "doesn't have any oil; it's not strategically located," he said. " . . . If it's fallen off the radar screen, it's because the stakes are not there for the administration."
He warned that the lack of attention to Afghanistan, which never recovered politically and economically from its decade-long war with the former Soviet Union and ensuing civil war, has led to rising instability in recent months, and said it was in the United States' interest not to let Afghanistan fail again.
"We found out that it was not so much a case of state-sponsored terrorism, but a terrorism-sponsored state in Afghanistan, and that could come back to haunt us," Donovan said.
The Pentagon's Romley dismissed suggestions that Afghanistan is heading for a new round of trouble. "The reality is the security situation in Afghanistan has dramatically gotten better over time," he said. The United States and its allies have "killed or captured two-thirds of the al Qaeda organization." He also acknowledged that "there are still terrorist elements in Afghanistan" and that "the war against terrorism is going to be long."
'Bad Mission'
The rugged topography that was once home to al Qaeda poses different kinds of risks to the troops there than those in Iraq. Five men died during a mission in November when their helicopter stalled as it climbed in mountainous terrain east of Bagram Air Base. Seven Marines were killed in March 2003 when their Hercules air tanker grazed a peak and caught fire in Pakistan. One Special Forces soldier fell 25 feet while descending by rope from a helicopter into an enemy cave complex.
From the ground, the troops draw their own comparisons and conclusions. "Urban terrain is about the toughest terrain to fight in," Maj. Michael Stefanchik e-mailed last week from Afghanistan. "Afghanistan doesn't have a whole lot of urban terrain -- a la Najaf -- for terrorists to operate in," he explained. "The firefight in Falluja will no doubt get more notice than the same type engagement on a remote mountain in Afghanistan -- though it is without doubt every bit as dangerous."
A hostile mission in either place always holds danger. Dawn Esposito told Newsday that her son had called her a few days before he was killed to tell her that he was headed out on a "bad mission." Lagman also called his mother shortly before taking off, but did not let on that he was embarking on a dangerous assignment, said his father, Joaquin Lagman.
Lagman said his son never complained about military life.
"He liked it; he loves adventure," said Lagman, whose older son also served in the Army. "He told me he wanted to finish his career in the military and then become a recruiter. He would say, 'Ma, we will retire in Hawaii and buy a house.' " Lagman said his son was supposed to return from Afghanistan in January, but his tour was extended to May.
Eleven soldiers from the 10th Mountain Division have died in Operation Enduring Freedom, said Maj. Daniel Bohr, public affairs officer for the division. The remaining members began arriving home last month. The Pentagon recently announced that 2,000 soldiers from the 10th were being deployed to Iraq.
During his six months in Afghanistan, Golding earned commendations for finding and securing a weapons cache in an enemy cave. He also was cited for helping to remove his squad and then securing their helicopter after it was forced to land in hostile territory. He received a Bronze Star and a Purple Heart.
"He did some pretty amazing things," Coffin said after reading his letter of commendation aloud.
Golding was married with two young children, including a daughter born last September whom he had never met. For his birthday on Jan. 30, Coffin made a card, a five-page collage of pictures from his childhood. She sent it to him in mid-January.
Golding was killed two weeks after his birthday.
"I didn't know whether he got it or not," Coffin said.
Several days after she buried her son, Coffin received a letter from him, postmarked Feb. 7.
It read, in part: "I have to say I just love the card you sent. It's funny, I can remember all those pictures. It takes me back to the past that's so full of memories."
© 2004 The Washington Post Company
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Citation:
Vanessa Williams, "Fighting in the Shadow of Iraq: Some Fear Afghanistan Has Become a Forgotten War," Washington Post, 2 June 2004. Original URL: http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A7873-2004Jun1?language=printer (16 June 2004)
By Vanessa Williams, Washington Post Staff Writer
When Michael O'Neill heard about the two young soldiers from the 10th Mountain Division who were killed several weeks ago in Afghanistan, a twinge of pain tore through him. He immediately remembered the day last fall when he got a call at the firehouse to come home.
His son, Pfc. Evan W. O'Neill, was killed on Sept. 29 during a firefight with suspected al Qaeda and Taliban insurgents in Shkin, Afghanistan, near the border with Pakistan. Evan O'Neill also had served with the 10th Mountain Division. And even though his son was in a different battalion, and probably did not know Staff Sgt. Anthony Lagman and Sgt. Michael Esposito Jr., O'Neill considers them family.
"Those are my son's people; those are our people," said O'Neill, a lieutenant in the Andover Fire Department in Massachusetts. "And we grieve for them and their families."
It troubles O'Neill that his son's sacrifice, and those of other soldiers in the treacherous mountain terrain of Afghanistan, might have escaped the notice of much of a public transfixed on the raging conflict in Iraq.
"Not to downgrade Iraq," he said. Indeed, O'Neill, a decorated Vietnam War veteran, said he agreed with the decision to invade the country and topple Saddam Hussein. "But I want people in this country to realize that the initial get-go, prior to Iraq, was Afghanistan. And it had to do with the people that attacked our country: al Qaeda, the Taliban. . . . The ongoing conflict is being overshadowed by Iraq. It shouldn't be that way."
More than two years after the fall of the Taliban, the radical Islamic government that harbored al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden, about 15,000 U.S. troops remain in Afghanistan. Their primary mission, said Marine Capt. David T. Romley, a Pentagon spokesman, is to "provide security and hunt down the remnants of the Taliban and al Qaeda."
In carrying out that mission, 126 service members have died since Oct. 7, 2001, when the United States launched Operation Enduring Freedom, after the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. Seventy-seven have died in Afghanistan, including four who were killed on Saturday when their vehicle hit a land mine. Forty-nine more have died in other regions, including neighboring Pakistan, as part of the campaign to hunt down members of the al Qaeda network, which claimed responsibility for the terrorist attacks. Two CIA officers also have died.
The death of former professional athlete Patrick Tillman in April shined a brief spotlight on the war in Afghanistan. Tillman, 27, who walked away from a multimillion-dollar contract with the National Football League's Arizona Cardinals to enlist in the Army, was killed by "friendly fire" after his unit was ambushed by militia forces about 90 miles south of Kabul.
Tillman reportedly was moved to become an Army Ranger after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorists attacks. Many soldiers were inspired by the same emotions. Evan O'Neill, who enlisted right after graduating from high school and was 19 when he was killed, wanted to be in the battle, his father said.
"His whole goal in life was to go to Afghanistan to fight the people who attacked our country," O'Neill said. "He died doing that."
Nicholes Golding, another recent casualty, shared that goal, said his mother, Cynthia Coffin. "He said nobody was going to get away with that in our country. 'I'm going to get 'em.' . . . He was really angry."
Golding, 24, was stationed in Hawaii at the time of the Sept. 11 attacks, his mother said. He immediately began applying for a transfer into a unit that would take him to the war against terrorism. "He knew if he got into the 10th Mountain Division, he would go to Afghanistan or Iraq," his mother said from her home in Steuben, Maine.
He got the transfer and was sent to eastern Afghanistan last August. He died in February when his Humvee struck a mine in Ghazni.
Low-Level War
The two soldiers from the 10th Mountain Division killed on March 18 -- Lagman, 26, of Yonkers, N.Y., and Esposito, 22, of Brentwood, N.Y. -- were on a mission to root out enemy forces from a mountain village when their unit came under fire. They became two of the 31 soldiers who have been killed in action.
By contrast, in April, the Pentagon reported that 135 American troops died in Iraq, all but nine of them in combat.
Richard H. Kohn, chairman of curriculum in peace, war and defense at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and a former Pentagon chief of Air Force history, said Afghanistan has not been "forgotten, but I'd say it's been pushed to the back of people's minds."
Although the invasion of Afghanistan failed to capture or kill bin Laden, Kohn said, the United States did succeed in disrupting al Qaeda's base of operations and routing the Taliban. He argues that the effort in Afghanistan is more important in the war against terrorism than the campaign in Iraq is.
"The campaign in Afghanistan does not require tens of thousands of American troops. The level of operation is very low and very small and very dependent on intelligence and our allies in Afghanistan and Pakistan and so it's just not as visible or dramatic" as Iraq, he said.
Michael Donovan, a research analyst for the Center for Defense Information, a liberal think tank based in Washington, agrees that the war in Afghanistan has been eclipsed by Iraq, but he argues that it is because it is not a priority with the Bush administration.
Afghanistan "doesn't have any oil; it's not strategically located," he said. " . . . If it's fallen off the radar screen, it's because the stakes are not there for the administration."
He warned that the lack of attention to Afghanistan, which never recovered politically and economically from its decade-long war with the former Soviet Union and ensuing civil war, has led to rising instability in recent months, and said it was in the United States' interest not to let Afghanistan fail again.
"We found out that it was not so much a case of state-sponsored terrorism, but a terrorism-sponsored state in Afghanistan, and that could come back to haunt us," Donovan said.
The Pentagon's Romley dismissed suggestions that Afghanistan is heading for a new round of trouble. "The reality is the security situation in Afghanistan has dramatically gotten better over time," he said. The United States and its allies have "killed or captured two-thirds of the al Qaeda organization." He also acknowledged that "there are still terrorist elements in Afghanistan" and that "the war against terrorism is going to be long."
'Bad Mission'
The rugged topography that was once home to al Qaeda poses different kinds of risks to the troops there than those in Iraq. Five men died during a mission in November when their helicopter stalled as it climbed in mountainous terrain east of Bagram Air Base. Seven Marines were killed in March 2003 when their Hercules air tanker grazed a peak and caught fire in Pakistan. One Special Forces soldier fell 25 feet while descending by rope from a helicopter into an enemy cave complex.
From the ground, the troops draw their own comparisons and conclusions. "Urban terrain is about the toughest terrain to fight in," Maj. Michael Stefanchik e-mailed last week from Afghanistan. "Afghanistan doesn't have a whole lot of urban terrain -- a la Najaf -- for terrorists to operate in," he explained. "The firefight in Falluja will no doubt get more notice than the same type engagement on a remote mountain in Afghanistan -- though it is without doubt every bit as dangerous."
A hostile mission in either place always holds danger. Dawn Esposito told Newsday that her son had called her a few days before he was killed to tell her that he was headed out on a "bad mission." Lagman also called his mother shortly before taking off, but did not let on that he was embarking on a dangerous assignment, said his father, Joaquin Lagman.
Lagman said his son never complained about military life.
"He liked it; he loves adventure," said Lagman, whose older son also served in the Army. "He told me he wanted to finish his career in the military and then become a recruiter. He would say, 'Ma, we will retire in Hawaii and buy a house.' " Lagman said his son was supposed to return from Afghanistan in January, but his tour was extended to May.
Eleven soldiers from the 10th Mountain Division have died in Operation Enduring Freedom, said Maj. Daniel Bohr, public affairs officer for the division. The remaining members began arriving home last month. The Pentagon recently announced that 2,000 soldiers from the 10th were being deployed to Iraq.
During his six months in Afghanistan, Golding earned commendations for finding and securing a weapons cache in an enemy cave. He also was cited for helping to remove his squad and then securing their helicopter after it was forced to land in hostile territory. He received a Bronze Star and a Purple Heart.
"He did some pretty amazing things," Coffin said after reading his letter of commendation aloud.
Golding was married with two young children, including a daughter born last September whom he had never met. For his birthday on Jan. 30, Coffin made a card, a five-page collage of pictures from his childhood. She sent it to him in mid-January.
Golding was killed two weeks after his birthday.
"I didn't know whether he got it or not," Coffin said.
Several days after she buried her son, Coffin received a letter from him, postmarked Feb. 7.
It read, in part: "I have to say I just love the card you sent. It's funny, I can remember all those pictures. It takes me back to the past that's so full of memories."
© 2004 The Washington Post Company
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Citation:
Vanessa Williams, "Fighting in the Shadow of Iraq: Some Fear Afghanistan Has Become a Forgotten War," Washington Post, 2 June 2004. Original URL: http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A7873-2004Jun1?language=printer (16 June 2004)
Bombings take toll on families
June 13, 2004
By Anne Barnard, Globe Staff
BAGHDAD -- Mazin's mother lies on his bed and drapes his clothes over her face to catch his fading scent. His grandfather wanders the house calling his name. The rest of the family sits in the darkened living room, afraid to leave the house and paralyzed with grief since the high school senior died in a recent car bombing that barely made the news.
His aunt, among the first Iraqis to return to work for Iraq's government after the invasion last year in her eagerness to help rebuild the country, now wonders, "What for?" His father, once optimistic about Iraq's future, now calls it "hopeless."
"How can you live, how can you shop, how can you work?" he said, speaking stiffly as his 21-year-old daughter stared into space beside him. "You are walking on the street and every minute you think a bomb could go off."
Car bombs and suicide attacks have killed more than 800 Iraqis since the fall of Saddam Hussein -- 600 of them this year and 30 this month, according to media reports. They have become part of the background noise in the conflict in Iraq.
Explosions like the one on June 2 that killed Mazin, who was 17, get only brief mentions in Iraqi and international news reports, drowned out by assassinations of political leaders or attacks that kill dozens. Although they do not grab headlines, the blasts that often strike several times in a week, killing two Iraqis here and five there, are destroying the lives of Iraqi families, braking their economic progress, and draining their trust in the US and Iraqi authorities who cannot seem to defend them from faceless attackers.
The emotional and physical toll that the violence is taking on Iraqis can be measured in plain sight on the streets of Aadhamiya, a Sunni Muslim neighborhood in Baghdad where Mazin's family has lived for five decades. In a three-block section near the scene of the blast, black banners festoon the walls, listing the names of the dead: Mazin, Ziad, Ahmed, Amin, Umm Mohammed.
The explosion struck just before noon on Omar Abdel Aziz Street, a busy thoroughfare lined with offices and shops. A small blast set a car on fire and drew a crowd of would-be rescuers to the scene. Then came a second explosion.
Four people were killed immediately, including Mazin, who was hit in the head with shrapnel. Thirty-seven people were wounded, and at least three others died later.
For Mazin's family, the loss added to a grinding fear. All the adults in the family work in Iraqi ministries, and for months have been terrified that they would be attacked on the way to work from their neighborhood, which is home to many members of Hussein's former military and has been the scene of frequent clashes in recent months between US troops and guerrillas. Now, they are afraid to go outside, or have their full names published.
On another side street, Ahmed Farouk, 25, is mourned by his bride of five months.
Across the street, a family of seven lost their breadwinner. Ziad Tariq, 25, worked in a car dealership. On Thursday, his mother lay on a mat in their bare living room beside a full ashtray, barely able to speak. His brother, Mohammed, 12, was in the hospital with a shrapnel wound. His sister, Zina, 22, picked at her black dress and worried that she would not be able to get a job to support the family because she missed her college graduation exams for his funeral.
"He was our father, he was our brother, he was everything to us," she said.
What the families have in common is a sense that they are forgotten. No officials have offered help or condolences, they said. No police have come to ask questions, and no official updates on the case have been issued.
The explosion was especially bewildering because it struck a neighborhood that has been hostile to the occupation. No US troops were in the area.
Some residents speculated that the second blast went off accidentally. But some witnesses think the blast was a sadistic attack that targeted rescuers: The car that caught on fire was strewn with toys, they said, and two large dolls in the back seat made people think that children had been trapped inside.
Abu Mazin, the traditional Arab nickname for Mazin's father, said he thinks he will never get an answer.
"There is no follow-up," he said. In the slow but precise English he learned at Baghdad College, a Jesuit school that was once affiliated with Boston College, he raged against the Iraqi police: "Your job is not to collect the pieces of the exploded people. Your job is to follow up to stop these attacks and protect Iraqis."
Abu Mazin is educated, moderate, thoughtful -- the kind of Iraqi professional whose help the new government may need most after it takes formal sovereignty at the end of this month.
"We love our country; we love Iraq," he said. "We want to do something for the sake of this country, in spite of all that we're suffering."
But he does not think the new regime will make Iraqis safe. "It is hopeless -- hopeless," he said. "The people here are too weak."
The sister of the slain teenager said she had hoped to finish her master's degree in microbiology at Baghdad University this month. But she missed exams because of her brother's death and may have to wait a year to graduate. The university says it will dock her grades 10 percent.
"I hate my university. I hate everything. I hate . . . the life here," she said. "I can't study. I can't read anything. I am very hurt."
On Thursday afternoon, she sat on a formal chair with a scrolled wooden back, glaring at the floor. Her aunts and her father sat along the walls decorated with modern art and traditional Islamic calligraphy. The electricity was out, but they kept the lights off and only ran fans off the expensive generator. During a year of mourning, they said, they will not leave the house except for necessities.
Abu Mazin flipped through pictures of his son, who as the only son of an only son was the last of the male line. In one photo, the boy stared intensely from a class picture. "What do I have?" Abu Mazin said. "His clothes, his glasses, his watch, his car, his shoes."
His wife walked into the room, her face pale and her short hair tousled. She accepted greetings in silence but seemed not to hear the rest of the conversation.
Mazin's family had tried to protect the boy by sending him to his grandfather's house in another Baghdad district, fearing he would be arrested in the many US raids on their neighborhood. They understand people's anger at the military raids, they said.
"It's not a reason to kill children, to kill ladies," Abu Mazin said.
"Especially not young people," his daughter said, fiercely.
Abu Mazin said he cannot believe Iraqis are responsible for the attacks on Iraqi civilians. But in the throes of emotion, he addressed the bombers as though they were countrymen: "Why are you killing your people? Why are you using the way of killing?"
The disarray in Iraq lent insult to injury on the day of Mazin's death, the father said. He received a call on his cellphone informing him that a blast had occurred in his neighborhood. When he got home, his father told him his son was dead.
Abu Mazin rushed to the hospital. Police pointed rifles at him. Doctors were working on a stream of patients without proper equipment. His contact with police, he said, amounted to, "Bring the papers for your son, put him in his grave, and go away."
For now, he is thinking about something simpler: what to do with Mazin's car. It is with a neighbor now, but when he thinks he can cope with it, Abu Mazin will bring it home, he said. "I will look at it every day."
Globe correspondents Shatha al-Awsy and Sa'ad al-Izzi contributed to this report.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Citation:
Anne Barnard, "Bombings Take Toll on Families," Boston Globe, 13 June 2004. Original URL: http://www.boston.com/news/world/middleeast/articles/2004/06/13/bombings_take_toll_on_families?mode=PF (16 June 2004)
By Anne Barnard, Globe Staff
BAGHDAD -- Mazin's mother lies on his bed and drapes his clothes over her face to catch his fading scent. His grandfather wanders the house calling his name. The rest of the family sits in the darkened living room, afraid to leave the house and paralyzed with grief since the high school senior died in a recent car bombing that barely made the news.
His aunt, among the first Iraqis to return to work for Iraq's government after the invasion last year in her eagerness to help rebuild the country, now wonders, "What for?" His father, once optimistic about Iraq's future, now calls it "hopeless."
"How can you live, how can you shop, how can you work?" he said, speaking stiffly as his 21-year-old daughter stared into space beside him. "You are walking on the street and every minute you think a bomb could go off."
Car bombs and suicide attacks have killed more than 800 Iraqis since the fall of Saddam Hussein -- 600 of them this year and 30 this month, according to media reports. They have become part of the background noise in the conflict in Iraq.
Explosions like the one on June 2 that killed Mazin, who was 17, get only brief mentions in Iraqi and international news reports, drowned out by assassinations of political leaders or attacks that kill dozens. Although they do not grab headlines, the blasts that often strike several times in a week, killing two Iraqis here and five there, are destroying the lives of Iraqi families, braking their economic progress, and draining their trust in the US and Iraqi authorities who cannot seem to defend them from faceless attackers.
The emotional and physical toll that the violence is taking on Iraqis can be measured in plain sight on the streets of Aadhamiya, a Sunni Muslim neighborhood in Baghdad where Mazin's family has lived for five decades. In a three-block section near the scene of the blast, black banners festoon the walls, listing the names of the dead: Mazin, Ziad, Ahmed, Amin, Umm Mohammed.
The explosion struck just before noon on Omar Abdel Aziz Street, a busy thoroughfare lined with offices and shops. A small blast set a car on fire and drew a crowd of would-be rescuers to the scene. Then came a second explosion.
Four people were killed immediately, including Mazin, who was hit in the head with shrapnel. Thirty-seven people were wounded, and at least three others died later.
For Mazin's family, the loss added to a grinding fear. All the adults in the family work in Iraqi ministries, and for months have been terrified that they would be attacked on the way to work from their neighborhood, which is home to many members of Hussein's former military and has been the scene of frequent clashes in recent months between US troops and guerrillas. Now, they are afraid to go outside, or have their full names published.
On another side street, Ahmed Farouk, 25, is mourned by his bride of five months.
Across the street, a family of seven lost their breadwinner. Ziad Tariq, 25, worked in a car dealership. On Thursday, his mother lay on a mat in their bare living room beside a full ashtray, barely able to speak. His brother, Mohammed, 12, was in the hospital with a shrapnel wound. His sister, Zina, 22, picked at her black dress and worried that she would not be able to get a job to support the family because she missed her college graduation exams for his funeral.
"He was our father, he was our brother, he was everything to us," she said.
What the families have in common is a sense that they are forgotten. No officials have offered help or condolences, they said. No police have come to ask questions, and no official updates on the case have been issued.
The explosion was especially bewildering because it struck a neighborhood that has been hostile to the occupation. No US troops were in the area.
Some residents speculated that the second blast went off accidentally. But some witnesses think the blast was a sadistic attack that targeted rescuers: The car that caught on fire was strewn with toys, they said, and two large dolls in the back seat made people think that children had been trapped inside.
Abu Mazin, the traditional Arab nickname for Mazin's father, said he thinks he will never get an answer.
"There is no follow-up," he said. In the slow but precise English he learned at Baghdad College, a Jesuit school that was once affiliated with Boston College, he raged against the Iraqi police: "Your job is not to collect the pieces of the exploded people. Your job is to follow up to stop these attacks and protect Iraqis."
Abu Mazin is educated, moderate, thoughtful -- the kind of Iraqi professional whose help the new government may need most after it takes formal sovereignty at the end of this month.
"We love our country; we love Iraq," he said. "We want to do something for the sake of this country, in spite of all that we're suffering."
But he does not think the new regime will make Iraqis safe. "It is hopeless -- hopeless," he said. "The people here are too weak."
The sister of the slain teenager said she had hoped to finish her master's degree in microbiology at Baghdad University this month. But she missed exams because of her brother's death and may have to wait a year to graduate. The university says it will dock her grades 10 percent.
"I hate my university. I hate everything. I hate . . . the life here," she said. "I can't study. I can't read anything. I am very hurt."
On Thursday afternoon, she sat on a formal chair with a scrolled wooden back, glaring at the floor. Her aunts and her father sat along the walls decorated with modern art and traditional Islamic calligraphy. The electricity was out, but they kept the lights off and only ran fans off the expensive generator. During a year of mourning, they said, they will not leave the house except for necessities.
Abu Mazin flipped through pictures of his son, who as the only son of an only son was the last of the male line. In one photo, the boy stared intensely from a class picture. "What do I have?" Abu Mazin said. "His clothes, his glasses, his watch, his car, his shoes."
His wife walked into the room, her face pale and her short hair tousled. She accepted greetings in silence but seemed not to hear the rest of the conversation.
Mazin's family had tried to protect the boy by sending him to his grandfather's house in another Baghdad district, fearing he would be arrested in the many US raids on their neighborhood. They understand people's anger at the military raids, they said.
"It's not a reason to kill children, to kill ladies," Abu Mazin said.
"Especially not young people," his daughter said, fiercely.
Abu Mazin said he cannot believe Iraqis are responsible for the attacks on Iraqi civilians. But in the throes of emotion, he addressed the bombers as though they were countrymen: "Why are you killing your people? Why are you using the way of killing?"
The disarray in Iraq lent insult to injury on the day of Mazin's death, the father said. He received a call on his cellphone informing him that a blast had occurred in his neighborhood. When he got home, his father told him his son was dead.
Abu Mazin rushed to the hospital. Police pointed rifles at him. Doctors were working on a stream of patients without proper equipment. His contact with police, he said, amounted to, "Bring the papers for your son, put him in his grave, and go away."
For now, he is thinking about something simpler: what to do with Mazin's car. It is with a neighbor now, but when he thinks he can cope with it, Abu Mazin will bring it home, he said. "I will look at it every day."
Globe correspondents Shatha al-Awsy and Sa'ad al-Izzi contributed to this report.
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Citation:
Anne Barnard, "Bombings Take Toll on Families," Boston Globe, 13 June 2004. Original URL: http://www.boston.com/news/world/middleeast/articles/2004/06/13/bombings_take_toll_on_families?mode=PF (16 June 2004)