By Carl Conetta
Project on Defense Alternatives, 30 December 2005
Barring special intervention, the final tally of Iraq national council seats won in the 15 December 2005 election will show further deterioration in the relative position of Sunni Arab parties. This much can be deduced from the national vote totals and the structure of the Iraqi electoral system.
Sunni Arab displeasure with the poll results have focused on some instances of voting irregularities. But the impact of these irregularities may be minor compared with structural features of the Iraqi electoral system that put Sunni Arab areas at a disadvantage. These features may clip Sunni Arab representation by 12 percent or more, feeding Sunni suspicions of the electoral process.
Regarding other electoral results: The main Shia religious coalition, the United Iraqi Alliance (or Unified Iraqi Coalition), will also show some slippage (in terms of percentage), although smaller Shia religious lists will make gains. The Kurdish alliance and Iyad Allawi's Iraqi National List will either retain their current
position or make minor gains (again: in terms of percent of total seats won) when the electoral tabulation is complete.
The two parties most favored in Sunni Arab areas - the Iraqi Accord Front (or Tawafoq Iraqi Front) and the Hewar National Iraqi Front - together won about 45 of the 230 seats attached to provinces, giving them 19.5 percent. But their final tally will give them only about 18.5 of the total 275 council seats.
* By contrast, the Kurdish alliance will control about 20 percent of assembly seats.
* The main Shia religious alliance, the United Iraqi Alliance (or Unified Iraqi Coalition) will control about 49.5 percent of the total seats. Other smaller Shia religious lists will add to this total.
* Iyad Allawi's National Iraqi List will probably garner about 6.5 percent of the total council seats.
These estimates are based on provisional vote totals for provinces and for "special" populations" as reported by the Independent Electoral Commission of Iraq. Also explained on their web site are the rules governing the allocation of seats. http://www.ieciraq.org (Disqualification of some votes due to irregularities might marginally affect the estimates offered above.)
The Sunni Arab community will find it difficult to accept that 18.5 percent of council seats constitutes fair representation - although a portion of Allawi's votes may also be considered "Sunni-based". At any rate, the current electoral system has disadvantaged the Sunni regions in several ways, as explained below. (In this light, the votes totals should leave no doubt that Sunni Arabs constitute more than 20 percent of the Iraqi population).
ANOTHER PERFECTLY AVOIDABLE MESS
There are many ways that the Iraqi electoral system could have been organized in accord with democratic practice, but several are especially relevant to understanding the current impasse and how it might have been avoided.
"Option 1" is the system employed in January 2005, which allowed assembly seats to float free of provinces. This treated all Iraq as a single electoral district - an unusual practice, especially for a country as large, varied, and divided as iraq. Using this approach, any distinction between regions affecting poll access or mobilization of local voters - such as security problems or military operations - would translate into different degrees of representation in government. And, because Iraq's main ethnic and religious groups tend to concentrate regionally, regional differences attain an ethnic hue, giving rise to complaints about discrimination. The overall impact of the original Iraqi system was to make every election a contest between regions (ethnic groups) over their relative degrees of representation in government.
A second feature of the original Iraqi system was Proportional Representation (PR). This is a progressive feature, but it cannot alleviate the problem of regional differentials in poll access.
"Option 2" - the road not taken: By contrast, Iraq might have adopted a system that allocated ALL assembly seats to provinces (based on some consistent standard, such as relative population size or relative numbers of registered voters). This approach, which resembles the one used for congressional elections in the United States, would have prevented elections from becoming contests between (ethnic) regions. Instead, elections would have been contests between parties within regions. This would have blunted the impact of any inter-regional differences in poll access. Proportional representation might have been applied in this system too - but within provinces, not nationally.
In a sense, Option 2 distinguishes between the relative "voice" that provinces would have in government and their decisions about how to use that voice. The first would be determined by a democratic compact - the allocation of seats to regions - and would not be "up for grabs" at every election. The second would be the object of elections. People would decide how they want to use their voice by choosing among candidates and parties. And, of course, parties could compete in as many provinces as they like.
"Option 3": In the actual event, the system employed in the recent December 2005 election combined elements of the two systems outlined above. While 230 assembly seats were tied to provinces, 45 were allowed to float free. In the inter-regional battle for the 45 national seats, differences in poll access had full play. Rural areas and those areas most plagued by terrorist activity and military operations were put at a disadvantage. Due to lower voter turnout, the interests and preferences of these provinces will have less impact on the final complexion of government.
The system employed for the recent elections has another feature that puts Sunni areas at a disadvantage: the 230 seats attached to provinces were allocated on the basis of voter registration numbers formulated in late 2004, when the Sunni election boycott and coalition military operations were at a peak. At the time, voter registration officials fully recognized the shortfall in efforts in several Sunni-majority provinces.
Considered together, the two factors mentioned above might easily have cost Sunni areas (and the parties they preferred) six seats in the assembly. Indeed, if we assume that all seats were assigned to provinces in accord with the adjusted population figures currently used by the Iraqi Ministry of Planning, the recent election returns would have given the Iraqi Accord Front and the Hewar National Iraqi Front a combined total of 56 to 58 seats, rather than their likely win of 50 to 52 seats.
Resource material:
* The Election Process Information Collection (EPIC) project provides data on a variety of electoral systems worldwide: http://www.epicproject.org/en/
* Iraq Living Conditions Survey 2004, Volume I: Tabulation Report, produced
by the UN Development Program and the Iraqi Ministry of Planning and Development Cooperation, provides 2004 population estimates. See page 16. http://www.iq.undp.org/ILCS/overview.htm
--------------------------
Citation: Carl Conetta. "Sunni parties may lose ground in final tally," Project on Defense Alternatives, 30 December 2005.
--------------------------
This site is designed for use by researchers, educators, and students who seek access to its 2000+ military policy articles for research and/or educational purposes. Provided on a not-for-profit basis per 'fair use' rules.
30 December 2005
Gulf War syndrome persists in US troops after 10 years: study
Agence France Presse, 29 December 2005
'Gulf War syndrome', a debilitating multi-symptom affliction identified in many soldiers after the 1991 conflict in Kuwait, is likely to strike US troops fighting in Iraq, a new study shows.
The syndrome, which proved hard to diagnose because it manifested itself in many different afflictions, remained widespread among US troops 10 years after the Gulf War ended, according to the study, lead-authored by Melvin Blanchard, assistant professor of medicine at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis, Missouri.
Blanchard's study will be published in January in the American Journal of Epidemiology.
A comprehensive medical evaluation of some 2,189 Gulf War veterans between 1999 and 2001 found that 28.9 percent of those deployed suffered from the affliction a decade after the war.
The rate for soldiers not deployed to the Gulf War was slightly more than half that, and usually not as severe.
The study's results suggest that soldiers fighting in Iraq today -- many of whose tours of duty are much longer than those in the previous war -- are likely to experience Gulf War syndrome as well.
"It's not unique to the Gulf," Blanchard told AFP. "It probably means there is a baseline in the (deployed) population, and the non-deployed reflect what happens in the general population."
"The military is trying to take better care of the soldiers' mental health in the field and that may have some bearing on the outcome, but I still expect to see CMI in those soldiers who are in Iraq now when they return," Blanchard said.
The long-term impacts could be severe, the study said, because those suffering from the syndrome were twice as likely to experience heart attacks, diabetes and liver disease.
Gulf War syndrome is the popular name for chronic multisymptom illness complex, or CMI. It was first identified by the Centers for Disease Control in 1994 after thousands of returning troops complained of numerous unexplained symptoms.
It is defined as having symptoms that fall into two of the three following groupings for more than six months: fatigue, mood and cognitive symptoms and musculoskeletal pain.
Blanchard said that a likely explanation for the illness is that the stress of combat released hormones that caused physiological changes.
Other high-stress situations such as divorce, job pressure or a death in the family could spark the syndrome, he said.
Earlier studies of Gulf War syndrome have examined the possibility of wartime stress, oil well fires and depleted uranium from US munitions, and a drug given to US soldiers to protect against nerve gas as the cause.
Some 100,000 of the 700,000 US soldiers who took part in the campaign to oust Iraq from Kuwait in 1991 have complained of experiencing at least one of the symptoms. British, French and Canadian troops were also affected.
In November, a British tribunal recognized for the first time that a former soldier was suffering from Gulf War Syndrome and should receive an invalid's pension.
Blanchard's study is the most comprehensive study of Gulf War syndrome to date. Comprehensive examinations including medical and psychiatric histories, general physicals, and neurological, pulmonary, nerve conduction, neuropsychological and clinical lab tests were performed on 1,061 deployed and 1,128 non-deployed veterans in the study.
While there was no evidence of an association of the syndrome with kidney, liver or lung disease, thyroid problems, blood abnormalities or neuropathy, the authors found that veterans with the syndrome were two times as likely to have metabolic syndrome.
Metabolic syndrome is a group of health risks that increase the likelihood of developing heart attacks, diabetes and liver disease. They include high blood pressure, cholesterol, triglycerides, glucose and weight levels.
The study did show that CMI can dissipate over time in some people. Earlier studies detected the syndrome in about 45 percent of returning Gulf War troops. But by ten years after the war, the level was down to just below 30 percent.
----------------------------
Citation: "Gulf War syndrome persists in US troops after 10 years: study," Agence France Presse, 29 December 2005.
Original URL: http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20051230/ts_alt_afp/ussciencehealthsyndrome_051230041653;_ylt=AhCF170pi_KEzJjgH2sVrkes0NUE;_ylu=X3oDMTA3MjBwMWtkBHNlYwM3MTg-
----------------------------
'Gulf War syndrome', a debilitating multi-symptom affliction identified in many soldiers after the 1991 conflict in Kuwait, is likely to strike US troops fighting in Iraq, a new study shows.
The syndrome, which proved hard to diagnose because it manifested itself in many different afflictions, remained widespread among US troops 10 years after the Gulf War ended, according to the study, lead-authored by Melvin Blanchard, assistant professor of medicine at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis, Missouri.
Blanchard's study will be published in January in the American Journal of Epidemiology.
A comprehensive medical evaluation of some 2,189 Gulf War veterans between 1999 and 2001 found that 28.9 percent of those deployed suffered from the affliction a decade after the war.
The rate for soldiers not deployed to the Gulf War was slightly more than half that, and usually not as severe.
The study's results suggest that soldiers fighting in Iraq today -- many of whose tours of duty are much longer than those in the previous war -- are likely to experience Gulf War syndrome as well.
"It's not unique to the Gulf," Blanchard told AFP. "It probably means there is a baseline in the (deployed) population, and the non-deployed reflect what happens in the general population."
"The military is trying to take better care of the soldiers' mental health in the field and that may have some bearing on the outcome, but I still expect to see CMI in those soldiers who are in Iraq now when they return," Blanchard said.
The long-term impacts could be severe, the study said, because those suffering from the syndrome were twice as likely to experience heart attacks, diabetes and liver disease.
Gulf War syndrome is the popular name for chronic multisymptom illness complex, or CMI. It was first identified by the Centers for Disease Control in 1994 after thousands of returning troops complained of numerous unexplained symptoms.
It is defined as having symptoms that fall into two of the three following groupings for more than six months: fatigue, mood and cognitive symptoms and musculoskeletal pain.
Blanchard said that a likely explanation for the illness is that the stress of combat released hormones that caused physiological changes.
Other high-stress situations such as divorce, job pressure or a death in the family could spark the syndrome, he said.
Earlier studies of Gulf War syndrome have examined the possibility of wartime stress, oil well fires and depleted uranium from US munitions, and a drug given to US soldiers to protect against nerve gas as the cause.
Some 100,000 of the 700,000 US soldiers who took part in the campaign to oust Iraq from Kuwait in 1991 have complained of experiencing at least one of the symptoms. British, French and Canadian troops were also affected.
In November, a British tribunal recognized for the first time that a former soldier was suffering from Gulf War Syndrome and should receive an invalid's pension.
Blanchard's study is the most comprehensive study of Gulf War syndrome to date. Comprehensive examinations including medical and psychiatric histories, general physicals, and neurological, pulmonary, nerve conduction, neuropsychological and clinical lab tests were performed on 1,061 deployed and 1,128 non-deployed veterans in the study.
While there was no evidence of an association of the syndrome with kidney, liver or lung disease, thyroid problems, blood abnormalities or neuropathy, the authors found that veterans with the syndrome were two times as likely to have metabolic syndrome.
Metabolic syndrome is a group of health risks that increase the likelihood of developing heart attacks, diabetes and liver disease. They include high blood pressure, cholesterol, triglycerides, glucose and weight levels.
The study did show that CMI can dissipate over time in some people. Earlier studies detected the syndrome in about 45 percent of returning Gulf War troops. But by ten years after the war, the level was down to just below 30 percent.
----------------------------
Citation: "Gulf War syndrome persists in US troops after 10 years: study," Agence France Presse, 29 December 2005.
Original URL: http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20051230/ts_alt_afp/ussciencehealthsyndrome_051230041653;_ylt=AhCF170pi_KEzJjgH2sVrkes0NUE;_ylu=X3oDMTA3MjBwMWtkBHNlYwM3MTg-
----------------------------
US to spend £30million on Iraq prisons to hold insurgents
By Francis Harris
The Telegraph, UK, 30 December 2005
American forces in Iraq have launched a £30 million programme to expand military prisons after the number of suspected insurgents in custody doubled to 15,000.
The programme forms part of a two-pronged scheme which aims to ensure there is space to keep captured gunmen locked up and to hand over the task to the Iraqis.
More than 3,700 US troops are involved in guarding prisoners in Iraq and Washington wants to bring them home.
But the plan has hit a series of snags, including several instances of mistreatment of Sunni Arab captives by Shias in the Iraqi security forces.
The Americans promised this week that prisons will not be transferred to the new government until it can guarantee adequate treatment of captives. A State Department spokesman said serious problems remained, despite the uncovering by US forces of three torture centres.
"We and the Iraqi government continue to have concern about the way prisoners are treated in Iraqi facilities and in facilities nominally under the control of the Iraqi government," he said.
Amnesty International has described the notion of a swift handover as "frightening". In addition, the Americans are dubious about the quality of some of the guards they have trained.
Those fears were apparently underlined on Wednesday when an Iraqi guard was disarmed by a prisoner, who then opened fire with the stolen AK47.
Nine guards and prisoners were killed and an American soldier wounded. The Americans said there was also an attempt made to storm the Baghdad prison armoury.
The prison building programme will be completed in April and should end the overcrowding at many facilities, where there are currently five prisoners for every four spaces.
The number of suspects in captivity has more than doubled in the past 15 months.
The main prison camps in Iraq are Camp Bucca near the southern port city of Umm Qasr, which holds 8,000 detainees, and the notorious Abu Ghraib jail near Baghdad which holds 4,600. Camp Cropper, near Baghdad airport, holds 124 mostly "high value" captives.
It was announced yesterday that large numbers of American troops will be deployed to "mind" the Iraqi police commando units held responsible for much of the prisoner abuse.
Some of the units are said to be subsidiaries of Iraqi Shia militias with close ties to Iran.
-------------------------------
Citation: Francis Harris. "US to spend £30million on Iraq prisons to hold insurgents," The Telegraph, UK, 30 December 2005.
Original URL: http://telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2005/12/30/wirq30.xml&sSheet=/news/2005/12/30/ixworld.html
-------------------------------
The Telegraph, UK, 30 December 2005
American forces in Iraq have launched a £30 million programme to expand military prisons after the number of suspected insurgents in custody doubled to 15,000.
The programme forms part of a two-pronged scheme which aims to ensure there is space to keep captured gunmen locked up and to hand over the task to the Iraqis.
More than 3,700 US troops are involved in guarding prisoners in Iraq and Washington wants to bring them home.
But the plan has hit a series of snags, including several instances of mistreatment of Sunni Arab captives by Shias in the Iraqi security forces.
The Americans promised this week that prisons will not be transferred to the new government until it can guarantee adequate treatment of captives. A State Department spokesman said serious problems remained, despite the uncovering by US forces of three torture centres.
"We and the Iraqi government continue to have concern about the way prisoners are treated in Iraqi facilities and in facilities nominally under the control of the Iraqi government," he said.
Amnesty International has described the notion of a swift handover as "frightening". In addition, the Americans are dubious about the quality of some of the guards they have trained.
Those fears were apparently underlined on Wednesday when an Iraqi guard was disarmed by a prisoner, who then opened fire with the stolen AK47.
Nine guards and prisoners were killed and an American soldier wounded. The Americans said there was also an attempt made to storm the Baghdad prison armoury.
The prison building programme will be completed in April and should end the overcrowding at many facilities, where there are currently five prisoners for every four spaces.
The number of suspects in captivity has more than doubled in the past 15 months.
The main prison camps in Iraq are Camp Bucca near the southern port city of Umm Qasr, which holds 8,000 detainees, and the notorious Abu Ghraib jail near Baghdad which holds 4,600. Camp Cropper, near Baghdad airport, holds 124 mostly "high value" captives.
It was announced yesterday that large numbers of American troops will be deployed to "mind" the Iraqi police commando units held responsible for much of the prisoner abuse.
Some of the units are said to be subsidiaries of Iraqi Shia militias with close ties to Iran.
-------------------------------
Citation: Francis Harris. "US to spend £30million on Iraq prisons to hold insurgents," The Telegraph, UK, 30 December 2005.
Original URL: http://telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2005/12/30/wirq30.xml&sSheet=/news/2005/12/30/ixworld.html
-------------------------------
29 December 2005
Kurds Are Flocking to Kirkuk, Laying Claim to Land and Oil
By Edward Wong
The New York Times, 29 December 2005
KIRKUK, Iraq - Clusters of gray concrete houses dot the barren plains surrounding this city, like seedlings scattered here by winds blowing down from the mountainous Kurdish homeland to the north.
The villages are uniformly spartan, except for the red, green and white flag of Iraqi Kurdistan sprouting from many rooftops, even though this province is not officially part of the Kurdish autonomous region.
The settlements' purpose is as blunt as their design: they are the heart of an aggressive campaign by the Kurds to lay claim to Kirkuk, which sits on one of the world's richest oil fields. The Kurdish settlers have been moving into the area at a furious pace, with thousands coming in the past few months, sometimes with direct financing from the two main Kurdish parties.
The campaign has emerged as one of the most volatile issues dogging the talks to form a new national government. In this region, it has ignited fury among Arabs and Turkmens, adding to already caustic tension in the ethnically mixed city, American and Iraqi officials say.
It could also be contributing to a complex web of violence. In the past three months alone, American commanders say, at least 30 assassination-style killings have happened in the area, making Kirkuk one of the deadliest midsize cities in Iraq.
The Kurdish parties are completely open about their desire to incorporate Kirkuk into Iraqi Kurdistan. No single issue is dearer to Kurdish leaders as they negotiate with the country's Arabs to form a new, four-year government. Kurdish voters cited it as one of the main reasons they flocked to the polls on Dec. 15.
"The important issues for us are those that concern all Iraqis, but at the top of them is Kirkuk," said Fouad Massoum, a vice president in the transitional National Assembly and senior official in the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan, one of the two main Kurdish parties. "If we leave it, it will be like a time bomb ready to explode at any time."
Because the Kurdish parties are expected to get at least 40 seats in the 275-seat Council of Representatives, they will almost certainly be a key ally for any Arab bloc that wants to muster the two-thirds vote needed to form a government. Kurdish leaders will use that leverage, they say, to force the Arabs to speed the repatriation of Kurds to Kirkuk. That would put the Kurds in an extremely favorable position by the time the province holds a referendum in 2007 to decide whether it should be governed by Iraqi Kurdistan.
The Kurds say all this goes toward redressing the crimes of Saddam Hussein, who for decades evicted Kurds and Turkmens from the oil-rich region and moved in Arabs.
There is an official mechanism that is supposed to help evicted Kurds move back to Kirkuk, a city of 800,000 with a crumbling citadel and twisting market streets at its center. Article 58 of the interim constitution, drafted in early 2004 by American and Iraqi officials, established a property claims commission to review individual cases. It also created a national panel to help make policy decisions on Kirkuk.
The Kurds say that because the Shiite-led government has dragged its feet on empowering these bodies, thousands of Kurds who returned to Kirkuk after the fall of Mr. Hussein still live in squatters' camps.
The Kurds have wrested control of most of the government institutions here. They won the majority of seats in the provincial council last January, partly because of a Sunni Arab boycott of the elections. That, coupled with their political influence in Baghdad, has helped them get most of the top local ministry posts and retain control of the police force.
All the ethnic groups here appear to be caught in rampant violence, American officers say. There is the occasional suicide bombing: one in November killed at least 16 oil infrastructure guards. The targets of assassinations are commanders of Iraqi security forces, as well as politicians, doctors, professors and oil engineers. In November, six police commanders - four Turkmens and two Arabs - were killed.
No one doubts that peace would be easier to come by if it were not for the oil reserves, 10 to 20 percent of the country's total. They are the economic fulcrum of the Kurdish drive to secure virtual independence for Iraqi Kurdistan. During the drafting of the permanent Constitution last summer, Kurdish leaders in Baghdad managed to work in a clause that says this province, Tamim, will hold a referendum in 2007 to determine whether it should be ruled by the Kurdistan regional government or the central authorities in Baghdad.
"Clearly, for the Kurds, Kirkuk is a strategic prize," said Col. David Gray, commander of the First Brigade of the 101st Airborne Division, charged with securing the province. "They feel very strongly about bringing their people to Kirkuk to right the wrong that was done under Saddam's regime and the Arabization program. That does collide, of course, with the other groups in the province." Arabs and Turkmens argue that many of the Kurds moving in were not displaced by Mr. Hussein - they originated elsewhere and are settling here to ensure that the province is voted into Kurdistan in 2007.
"The Kurds are building property, houses on land they don't own," said Sangul Chapuk, a Turkmen politician who served on the American-appointed Iraqi Governing Council.
The last accurate census showed that the Turkmens, a Central Asian ethnic group that governed this area under the Ottoman Empire, had a slight majority. That was in 1957. The numbers drastically changed under Mr. Hussein's decades-long program of ethnic displacement and further shifted after the American-led invasion.
Capt. Greg Ford, the First Brigade's intelligence officer, estimated that 85,000 to 350,000 Kurds had moved into the Kirkuk region since spring 2003. The result is a building boom in Kirkuk itself and along the main roads leading to the border of Iraqi Kurdistan. In Altun Kopri, a Kurd-Turkmen village 15 miles northwest of Kirkuk, new homes constructed in slapdash fashion line dirt tracks. White pickup trucks with Kurdistan flags roll through. "The construction is just huge," said Maj. Victor Vasquez, the head civil affairs officer for the First Brigade. "I've seen entire villages that didn't exist before spring up from rubble. It's a suburb of Kirkuk overnight."
"There's some funding from the Kurdish parties in terms of the housing," he added. "That's a fair assessment. A lot of it is also private business standing up."
The Kurds who have moved back to Kirkuk invariably say they were evicted from the area by Mr. Hussein. One, Adnan Abdul Rahman, a mathematics professor in Kirkuk, said his family was kicked out of the village of Dibis in the 1960's. "Let me tell you the honest truth," Mr. Rahman, 41, said as he stood in the courtyard of a high school on election day. "I've had 19 executions in my family, and I'll pay another 19 for Kirkuk to go back to Kurdistan."
Some Arabs say the Kurdish parties, backed by their militias, are threatening Arab families who refuse to sell their property and leave Kirkuk. Khalid al-Izzi, the Arab head of a human rights group in the city, said the Kurds had coerced Arabs into selling their property for considerably less than what it was actually worth. Kurdish leaders deny the accusations and insist it is the Kurds who are still suffering, because the repatriation process is moving so slowly. With the 2007 referendum fast approaching, the Kurds say their patience has run out.
"We've lost a lot of time," Mr. Massoum, the Kurdish politician, said. "For the Kirkuk project, there is a deadline. We insist on commitment to the deadline and implementing the Constitution."
Mona Mahmoud and Ali Adeeb contributed reporting from Baghdad for this article.
----------------------------------
Citation: Edward Wong. "Kurds Are Flocking to Kirkuk, Laying Claim to Land and Oil," The New York Times, 29 December 2005.
Original URL: http://www.nytimes.com/2005/12/29/international/middleeast/29kirkuk.html
----------------------------------
The New York Times, 29 December 2005
KIRKUK, Iraq - Clusters of gray concrete houses dot the barren plains surrounding this city, like seedlings scattered here by winds blowing down from the mountainous Kurdish homeland to the north.
The villages are uniformly spartan, except for the red, green and white flag of Iraqi Kurdistan sprouting from many rooftops, even though this province is not officially part of the Kurdish autonomous region.
The settlements' purpose is as blunt as their design: they are the heart of an aggressive campaign by the Kurds to lay claim to Kirkuk, which sits on one of the world's richest oil fields. The Kurdish settlers have been moving into the area at a furious pace, with thousands coming in the past few months, sometimes with direct financing from the two main Kurdish parties.
The campaign has emerged as one of the most volatile issues dogging the talks to form a new national government. In this region, it has ignited fury among Arabs and Turkmens, adding to already caustic tension in the ethnically mixed city, American and Iraqi officials say.
It could also be contributing to a complex web of violence. In the past three months alone, American commanders say, at least 30 assassination-style killings have happened in the area, making Kirkuk one of the deadliest midsize cities in Iraq.
The Kurdish parties are completely open about their desire to incorporate Kirkuk into Iraqi Kurdistan. No single issue is dearer to Kurdish leaders as they negotiate with the country's Arabs to form a new, four-year government. Kurdish voters cited it as one of the main reasons they flocked to the polls on Dec. 15.
"The important issues for us are those that concern all Iraqis, but at the top of them is Kirkuk," said Fouad Massoum, a vice president in the transitional National Assembly and senior official in the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan, one of the two main Kurdish parties. "If we leave it, it will be like a time bomb ready to explode at any time."
Because the Kurdish parties are expected to get at least 40 seats in the 275-seat Council of Representatives, they will almost certainly be a key ally for any Arab bloc that wants to muster the two-thirds vote needed to form a government. Kurdish leaders will use that leverage, they say, to force the Arabs to speed the repatriation of Kurds to Kirkuk. That would put the Kurds in an extremely favorable position by the time the province holds a referendum in 2007 to decide whether it should be governed by Iraqi Kurdistan.
The Kurds say all this goes toward redressing the crimes of Saddam Hussein, who for decades evicted Kurds and Turkmens from the oil-rich region and moved in Arabs.
There is an official mechanism that is supposed to help evicted Kurds move back to Kirkuk, a city of 800,000 with a crumbling citadel and twisting market streets at its center. Article 58 of the interim constitution, drafted in early 2004 by American and Iraqi officials, established a property claims commission to review individual cases. It also created a national panel to help make policy decisions on Kirkuk.
The Kurds say that because the Shiite-led government has dragged its feet on empowering these bodies, thousands of Kurds who returned to Kirkuk after the fall of Mr. Hussein still live in squatters' camps.
The Kurds have wrested control of most of the government institutions here. They won the majority of seats in the provincial council last January, partly because of a Sunni Arab boycott of the elections. That, coupled with their political influence in Baghdad, has helped them get most of the top local ministry posts and retain control of the police force.
All the ethnic groups here appear to be caught in rampant violence, American officers say. There is the occasional suicide bombing: one in November killed at least 16 oil infrastructure guards. The targets of assassinations are commanders of Iraqi security forces, as well as politicians, doctors, professors and oil engineers. In November, six police commanders - four Turkmens and two Arabs - were killed.
No one doubts that peace would be easier to come by if it were not for the oil reserves, 10 to 20 percent of the country's total. They are the economic fulcrum of the Kurdish drive to secure virtual independence for Iraqi Kurdistan. During the drafting of the permanent Constitution last summer, Kurdish leaders in Baghdad managed to work in a clause that says this province, Tamim, will hold a referendum in 2007 to determine whether it should be ruled by the Kurdistan regional government or the central authorities in Baghdad.
"Clearly, for the Kurds, Kirkuk is a strategic prize," said Col. David Gray, commander of the First Brigade of the 101st Airborne Division, charged with securing the province. "They feel very strongly about bringing their people to Kirkuk to right the wrong that was done under Saddam's regime and the Arabization program. That does collide, of course, with the other groups in the province." Arabs and Turkmens argue that many of the Kurds moving in were not displaced by Mr. Hussein - they originated elsewhere and are settling here to ensure that the province is voted into Kurdistan in 2007.
"The Kurds are building property, houses on land they don't own," said Sangul Chapuk, a Turkmen politician who served on the American-appointed Iraqi Governing Council.
The last accurate census showed that the Turkmens, a Central Asian ethnic group that governed this area under the Ottoman Empire, had a slight majority. That was in 1957. The numbers drastically changed under Mr. Hussein's decades-long program of ethnic displacement and further shifted after the American-led invasion.
Capt. Greg Ford, the First Brigade's intelligence officer, estimated that 85,000 to 350,000 Kurds had moved into the Kirkuk region since spring 2003. The result is a building boom in Kirkuk itself and along the main roads leading to the border of Iraqi Kurdistan. In Altun Kopri, a Kurd-Turkmen village 15 miles northwest of Kirkuk, new homes constructed in slapdash fashion line dirt tracks. White pickup trucks with Kurdistan flags roll through. "The construction is just huge," said Maj. Victor Vasquez, the head civil affairs officer for the First Brigade. "I've seen entire villages that didn't exist before spring up from rubble. It's a suburb of Kirkuk overnight."
"There's some funding from the Kurdish parties in terms of the housing," he added. "That's a fair assessment. A lot of it is also private business standing up."
The Kurds who have moved back to Kirkuk invariably say they were evicted from the area by Mr. Hussein. One, Adnan Abdul Rahman, a mathematics professor in Kirkuk, said his family was kicked out of the village of Dibis in the 1960's. "Let me tell you the honest truth," Mr. Rahman, 41, said as he stood in the courtyard of a high school on election day. "I've had 19 executions in my family, and I'll pay another 19 for Kirkuk to go back to Kurdistan."
Some Arabs say the Kurdish parties, backed by their militias, are threatening Arab families who refuse to sell their property and leave Kirkuk. Khalid al-Izzi, the Arab head of a human rights group in the city, said the Kurds had coerced Arabs into selling their property for considerably less than what it was actually worth. Kurdish leaders deny the accusations and insist it is the Kurds who are still suffering, because the repatriation process is moving so slowly. With the 2007 referendum fast approaching, the Kurds say their patience has run out.
"We've lost a lot of time," Mr. Massoum, the Kurdish politician, said. "For the Kirkuk project, there is a deadline. We insist on commitment to the deadline and implementing the Constitution."
Mona Mahmoud and Ali Adeeb contributed reporting from Baghdad for this article.
----------------------------------
Citation: Edward Wong. "Kurds Are Flocking to Kirkuk, Laying Claim to Land and Oil," The New York Times, 29 December 2005.
Original URL: http://www.nytimes.com/2005/12/29/international/middleeast/29kirkuk.html
----------------------------------
Next year could see Iraq economic revival
Agence France Presse, 29 December 2005
Experts predict the formation of a new Iraqi government, following a year of political reforms, will help stabilize the country, revive its stagnant economy and pave the way for contentious measures such as privatization.
"Ordinary Iraqis, domestic entrepreneurs and foreign investors have all been waiting for stability, predictability and greater security," said Thomas Delare, counselor for economic affairs at the US embassy in Baghdad.
The December 15 general election "doesn't guarantee any of those things, but it offers the promise that now we can put it in place."
That all depends on the smooth formation of the next government, which, as various political factions dispute the results, march in the street and threaten to boycott the new parliament does not seem a certainty. Final election results are not expected before next week.
"The economic prospects in 2006 will be good for Iraq, provided we have a consensus government which includes all major groups in Iraq and they agree on an economic program," said Abbas Abu al-Timen, director of the Baghdad Economic Forum.
The economist added that this is the key moment for the nation and failure to reach consensus would be a disaster.
"This country cannot have any more of this chaotic situation," he said, saying if a strong government isn't formed, "I think the country will be in a bleak dark long tunnel."
The battering the country took under sanctions in the 1990s, followed by the chaos and looting during and after the US-led invasion of March 2003, have had a devastating effect on the Iraqi economy.
Unemployment, officially around 28 percent, is estimated by some experts to be twice that, and small business are struggling to compete with the import of cheap, yet shoddy, goods now sold on the streets of the nation's cities.
But US experts see a slow improvement, estimating three to four percent GDP growth in 2005 and increased consumer spending as witnessed by the rise in mobile phone use and car buying.
The best piece of economic news to hit the country in a while was last week's decision by the International Monetary Fund to approve a standby arrangement for Iraq that paved the way for further debt relief.
The decision, however, came at a price and the government is now committed to cutting Iraq's massive fuel subsidies which are disastrous for the budget, but much appreciated by Iraqis, a quarter of whom live below the poverty line.
The initial tripling of the price of gasoline to the equivalent of 10 US cents a liter is only the start of price hikes for what is currently the world's cheapest gasoline.
Already there have been riots and even attacks on gas stations in protest at the subsidy cuts.
Another controversial issue is privatization, deemed a necessity for the moribund state industries by most economists. But while more private sector investment and competition would certainly help these industries, it could also be accompanied by layoffs.
"The Iraqi government has identified two factories for privatization ... two and a half years after the process started, that's pretty slow progress," said a US official, who thinks the process may finally be accelerating.
"We think that in 2006 there is a commitment to finally get it started."
Under Paul Bremer's Coalition Provisional Authority, the issue of privatization was mentioned repeatedly, resulting in public outcry that the nation's industrial patrimony was about to be sold off cheap to foreigners with disastrous effect, as happened in post-Soviet Eastern Europe.
"Privatization is not an issue," demurs the Baghdad Economic Forum's Timen, maintaining there is consensus on the matter. "The debate is how to approach privatization and how to confront the problem."
"You have to look at the issue in Iraq in its context -- the problems in Iraq are different," said Timen, cautioning against a generic approach.
One sector that will not be put on the auction block in 2006, however, is the very sensitive fossil fuels industry which nationalist Iraqis have often said is a target of foreign entrepreneurs.
The IMF, the same organization that pushed through the subsidy cuts, however, has also stipulated that downstream services, such as retail sales of gasoline and the fuel service sector, be opened up to private companies.
----------------------------
Citation: "Next year could see Iraq economic revival," Agence France Presse, 29 December 2005.
Original URL: http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20051229/wl_mideast_afp/iraqeconomyprivatizationoil
----------------------------
Experts predict the formation of a new Iraqi government, following a year of political reforms, will help stabilize the country, revive its stagnant economy and pave the way for contentious measures such as privatization.
"Ordinary Iraqis, domestic entrepreneurs and foreign investors have all been waiting for stability, predictability and greater security," said Thomas Delare, counselor for economic affairs at the US embassy in Baghdad.
The December 15 general election "doesn't guarantee any of those things, but it offers the promise that now we can put it in place."
That all depends on the smooth formation of the next government, which, as various political factions dispute the results, march in the street and threaten to boycott the new parliament does not seem a certainty. Final election results are not expected before next week.
"The economic prospects in 2006 will be good for Iraq, provided we have a consensus government which includes all major groups in Iraq and they agree on an economic program," said Abbas Abu al-Timen, director of the Baghdad Economic Forum.
The economist added that this is the key moment for the nation and failure to reach consensus would be a disaster.
"This country cannot have any more of this chaotic situation," he said, saying if a strong government isn't formed, "I think the country will be in a bleak dark long tunnel."
The battering the country took under sanctions in the 1990s, followed by the chaos and looting during and after the US-led invasion of March 2003, have had a devastating effect on the Iraqi economy.
Unemployment, officially around 28 percent, is estimated by some experts to be twice that, and small business are struggling to compete with the import of cheap, yet shoddy, goods now sold on the streets of the nation's cities.
But US experts see a slow improvement, estimating three to four percent GDP growth in 2005 and increased consumer spending as witnessed by the rise in mobile phone use and car buying.
The best piece of economic news to hit the country in a while was last week's decision by the International Monetary Fund to approve a standby arrangement for Iraq that paved the way for further debt relief.
The decision, however, came at a price and the government is now committed to cutting Iraq's massive fuel subsidies which are disastrous for the budget, but much appreciated by Iraqis, a quarter of whom live below the poverty line.
The initial tripling of the price of gasoline to the equivalent of 10 US cents a liter is only the start of price hikes for what is currently the world's cheapest gasoline.
Already there have been riots and even attacks on gas stations in protest at the subsidy cuts.
Another controversial issue is privatization, deemed a necessity for the moribund state industries by most economists. But while more private sector investment and competition would certainly help these industries, it could also be accompanied by layoffs.
"The Iraqi government has identified two factories for privatization ... two and a half years after the process started, that's pretty slow progress," said a US official, who thinks the process may finally be accelerating.
"We think that in 2006 there is a commitment to finally get it started."
Under Paul Bremer's Coalition Provisional Authority, the issue of privatization was mentioned repeatedly, resulting in public outcry that the nation's industrial patrimony was about to be sold off cheap to foreigners with disastrous effect, as happened in post-Soviet Eastern Europe.
"Privatization is not an issue," demurs the Baghdad Economic Forum's Timen, maintaining there is consensus on the matter. "The debate is how to approach privatization and how to confront the problem."
"You have to look at the issue in Iraq in its context -- the problems in Iraq are different," said Timen, cautioning against a generic approach.
One sector that will not be put on the auction block in 2006, however, is the very sensitive fossil fuels industry which nationalist Iraqis have often said is a target of foreign entrepreneurs.
The IMF, the same organization that pushed through the subsidy cuts, however, has also stipulated that downstream services, such as retail sales of gasoline and the fuel service sector, be opened up to private companies.
----------------------------
Citation: "Next year could see Iraq economic revival," Agence France Presse, 29 December 2005.
Original URL: http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20051229/wl_mideast_afp/iraqeconomyprivatizationoil
----------------------------
Sunnis and Secular Groups Demand Review of Iraq's Election
The Associated Press, 29 December 2005
BAGHDAD, Iraq (AP) -- An international team has agreed to review Iraq's parliamentary elections, announcing Thursday that members would travel to Iraq in response to protests by Sunni Arab and secular Shiite groups that the polls were tainted by fraud.
The announcement came after the Sunni and secular Shiite groups refused to open discussions with the Shiite religious bloc leading in the elections without a full review of the contested results, despite a U.N. observer's endorsement of the Dec. 15 vote. The official, Craig Jenness, said Wednesday his U.N.-led international election assistance team found the elections to be fair -- remarks that represented crucial support for Iraqi election commission officials, who refused opposition demands to step down.
Iraq's leading Sunni Arab group, the Iraqi Accordance Front, welcomed the review.
''We are optimistic with this international response and hope that it will find a solution for this crisis,'' Accordance spokesman Thafir al-Ani told The Associated Press.
In violence Thursday, gunmen killed 12 members of an extended Shiite family near Latifiyah, a Sunni Arab-dominated town about 20 miles south of Baghdad. Police said the men were taken from their homes, packed into a minivan and shot. In the capital, a suicide bomber killed a police officer, gunmen assassinated an Iraqi driver working with a French company and a university student in northwestern Baghdad was killed in a drive-by shooting.
The political turmoil surrounding the elections has dampened hopes by the Bush administration and many Iraqi officials for a broad-based government that will include minority Sunni Arabs as well as secular Shiites, helping draw disaffected Sunnis away from Iraq's violent insurgency and allow for a decrease in U.S. and coalition forces.
Among the International Mission for Iraqi Elections will be two representatives from the Arab League, one member of the Canadian Association of Former Parliamentarians and a respected European academic, the group said Thursday. The independent group said it helped monitor the elections in Baghdad and was ''assisted by monitors from countries of the European Union working under IMIE's umbrella.''
The team will travel to Iraq at the invitation of the Independent Electoral Commission of Iraq. An official for the commission, Safwat Rashid, said a review could ''evaluate what happened during the elections and what's going on now. We are highly confident that we did our job properly and we have nothing to hide.''
Preliminary results from the vote have given the governing Shiite religious bloc, the United Iraqi Alliance, a big lead -- but one which still would require forming a coalition with other groups.
The invitation to review the process and about 1,500 complaints lodged by candidates and parties was welcomed by the U.S. ambassador to Iraq, Zalmay Khalilzad, who said ''these experts will be arriving immediately and we are ready to assist them, if needed.'' Iraqi elections officials have acknowledged some instances of fraud, but said they would only change results a few areas.
On Thursday, Polish President Lech Kaczynski approved extending the country's military mission in Iraq for another year, the country's prime minister said. The government had asked Kaczynski to reverse plans by its predecessor to bring home troops serving with the U.S.-led coalition in early 2006.
''The issue is closed and taken care of,'' Prime Minister Kazimierz Marcinkiewicz told all-news station TVN24.
Though the mission will be prolonged, the number of Poles serving in Iraq will be cut from about 1,500 to 900 by March, officials have said.
U.S. airstrikes in Kirkuk province killed 10 insurgents on Tuesday, including three who were planting roadside bombs, the military said Thursday.
Al-Qaida in Iraq threatened on Thursday to kill five kidnapped employees of the Sudanese Embassy in Baghdad in two days unless Khartoum removes its diplomatic mission from Iraq. The group, which has kidnapped and killed a string of Arab diplomatic personnel this year, said in a statement on a Web forum where al-Qaida in Iraqi frequently posts messages that it had snatched the five Sudanese, who it said included diplomats.
The claim could not be immediately confirmed.
The Sudanese Foreign Ministry reported on Dec. 24 that six of its embassy employees were kidnapped, including a diplomat -- the mission's second secretary, Abdel Moneam Mohammad Tom. It was not immediately clear if the al-Qaida statement referred to the same group.
Also Thursday, gunmen kidnapped a Lebanese engineer in Iraq, the Lebanese Foreign Ministry said. The ministry's statement gave no other details on the disappearance of Camile Nassif Tannous, who works for the Schneider engineering firm.
Militants have kidnapped more than 240 foreigners and killed at least 39 of them during the past two years.
On Wednesday, militants released a video of a French engineer kidnapped in Iraq three weeks ago. Insurgents are also holding four Christian humanitarian workers -- two Canadians, a Briton and an American.
French Foreign Minister Philippe Douste-Blazy called Thursday for the immediate release of the engineer, Bernard Planche, emphasizing that France has no military presence there.
Militants who released the video of Planche denounced the ''illegal French presence'' in the country, the news channel Al-Arabiya reported.
Assem Jihad, a spokesman for Iraq's oil ministry, said Thursday the country's largest oil refinery had suspended operations since Dec. 24 after insurgents threatened to kill drivers and blow up trucks that distribute its oil products across Iraq.
Associated Press reporters Qassim Abdul-Zahra and Sinan Salaheddin contributed to this report from Baghdad.
------------------------------
Citation: "Sunnis and Secular Groups Demand Review of Iraq's Election," The Associated Press, 29 December 2005.
Original URL: http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-Iraq.html
------------------------------
BAGHDAD, Iraq (AP) -- An international team has agreed to review Iraq's parliamentary elections, announcing Thursday that members would travel to Iraq in response to protests by Sunni Arab and secular Shiite groups that the polls were tainted by fraud.
The announcement came after the Sunni and secular Shiite groups refused to open discussions with the Shiite religious bloc leading in the elections without a full review of the contested results, despite a U.N. observer's endorsement of the Dec. 15 vote. The official, Craig Jenness, said Wednesday his U.N.-led international election assistance team found the elections to be fair -- remarks that represented crucial support for Iraqi election commission officials, who refused opposition demands to step down.
Iraq's leading Sunni Arab group, the Iraqi Accordance Front, welcomed the review.
''We are optimistic with this international response and hope that it will find a solution for this crisis,'' Accordance spokesman Thafir al-Ani told The Associated Press.
In violence Thursday, gunmen killed 12 members of an extended Shiite family near Latifiyah, a Sunni Arab-dominated town about 20 miles south of Baghdad. Police said the men were taken from their homes, packed into a minivan and shot. In the capital, a suicide bomber killed a police officer, gunmen assassinated an Iraqi driver working with a French company and a university student in northwestern Baghdad was killed in a drive-by shooting.
The political turmoil surrounding the elections has dampened hopes by the Bush administration and many Iraqi officials for a broad-based government that will include minority Sunni Arabs as well as secular Shiites, helping draw disaffected Sunnis away from Iraq's violent insurgency and allow for a decrease in U.S. and coalition forces.
Among the International Mission for Iraqi Elections will be two representatives from the Arab League, one member of the Canadian Association of Former Parliamentarians and a respected European academic, the group said Thursday. The independent group said it helped monitor the elections in Baghdad and was ''assisted by monitors from countries of the European Union working under IMIE's umbrella.''
The team will travel to Iraq at the invitation of the Independent Electoral Commission of Iraq. An official for the commission, Safwat Rashid, said a review could ''evaluate what happened during the elections and what's going on now. We are highly confident that we did our job properly and we have nothing to hide.''
Preliminary results from the vote have given the governing Shiite religious bloc, the United Iraqi Alliance, a big lead -- but one which still would require forming a coalition with other groups.
The invitation to review the process and about 1,500 complaints lodged by candidates and parties was welcomed by the U.S. ambassador to Iraq, Zalmay Khalilzad, who said ''these experts will be arriving immediately and we are ready to assist them, if needed.'' Iraqi elections officials have acknowledged some instances of fraud, but said they would only change results a few areas.
On Thursday, Polish President Lech Kaczynski approved extending the country's military mission in Iraq for another year, the country's prime minister said. The government had asked Kaczynski to reverse plans by its predecessor to bring home troops serving with the U.S.-led coalition in early 2006.
''The issue is closed and taken care of,'' Prime Minister Kazimierz Marcinkiewicz told all-news station TVN24.
Though the mission will be prolonged, the number of Poles serving in Iraq will be cut from about 1,500 to 900 by March, officials have said.
U.S. airstrikes in Kirkuk province killed 10 insurgents on Tuesday, including three who were planting roadside bombs, the military said Thursday.
Al-Qaida in Iraq threatened on Thursday to kill five kidnapped employees of the Sudanese Embassy in Baghdad in two days unless Khartoum removes its diplomatic mission from Iraq. The group, which has kidnapped and killed a string of Arab diplomatic personnel this year, said in a statement on a Web forum where al-Qaida in Iraqi frequently posts messages that it had snatched the five Sudanese, who it said included diplomats.
The claim could not be immediately confirmed.
The Sudanese Foreign Ministry reported on Dec. 24 that six of its embassy employees were kidnapped, including a diplomat -- the mission's second secretary, Abdel Moneam Mohammad Tom. It was not immediately clear if the al-Qaida statement referred to the same group.
Also Thursday, gunmen kidnapped a Lebanese engineer in Iraq, the Lebanese Foreign Ministry said. The ministry's statement gave no other details on the disappearance of Camile Nassif Tannous, who works for the Schneider engineering firm.
Militants have kidnapped more than 240 foreigners and killed at least 39 of them during the past two years.
On Wednesday, militants released a video of a French engineer kidnapped in Iraq three weeks ago. Insurgents are also holding four Christian humanitarian workers -- two Canadians, a Briton and an American.
French Foreign Minister Philippe Douste-Blazy called Thursday for the immediate release of the engineer, Bernard Planche, emphasizing that France has no military presence there.
Militants who released the video of Planche denounced the ''illegal French presence'' in the country, the news channel Al-Arabiya reported.
Assem Jihad, a spokesman for Iraq's oil ministry, said Thursday the country's largest oil refinery had suspended operations since Dec. 24 after insurgents threatened to kill drivers and blow up trucks that distribute its oil products across Iraq.
Associated Press reporters Qassim Abdul-Zahra and Sinan Salaheddin contributed to this report from Baghdad.
------------------------------
Citation: "Sunnis and Secular Groups Demand Review of Iraq's Election," The Associated Press, 29 December 2005.
Original URL: http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-Iraq.html
------------------------------
U.S. forces aim to bring Iraq police under control
By Alastair Macdonald
Reuters, 29 December 2005
BAGHDAD, Dec 29 (Reuters) - The U.S. army in Baghdad plans to deploy large numbers of troops with Iraqi special police units to try to curb suspected sectarian militia activity among the police, a senior U.S. military official said on Thursday.
"We're going to try to wrap ourselves around them," the official told reporters, speaking on condition of anonymity.
"The lines are blurred now and it's not easy to determine that some operation tonight was directed ... by the MoI (Interior Ministry) or ... by some people in uniform ... who are part of somebody's posse," he said.
"We're trying to control that."
Strained relations between U.S. forces and Iraq's Interior Ministry were highlighted last month when American troops found dozens of abused Sunni Arab prisoners at a secret ministry site in Baghdad.
Two more such secret jails have since been discovered in Baghdad, the official said, as well as one in northern Iraq.
U.S. officials have voiced mounting concern that violence by pro-government, pro-Iranian Shi'ite militias could prolong unrest by alienating minority Sunni Arabs, so delaying a U.S. withdrawal.
"I'm very concerned about militias," the official said.
Nine special police brigades in Baghdad each have 40 to 45 U.S. personnel attached to them to train and liaise with the U.S. command, he said; the plan would raise that to hundreds of Americans, similar to ratios seen with the Iraqi army.
"By hugging the enemy, wrapping our arms around them, we hope to control them ... like we did with the army," he said, noting that the Interior Ministry was not enthusiastic about the idea. The plan was likely to be approved shortly, he said.
Officials at the Interior Ministry were unavailable for comment. Last week, the U.S. ambassador called for non-sectarian leadership at the ministry.
The present minister, Bayan Jabor, is from the SCIRI Shi'ite Islamist party whose Badr militia allies are widely accused by Sunnis of controlling some police units.
The ministry could change hands during negotiations on a new governing coalition following this month's election.
"PARTNERSHIPS"
A spokesman for the U.S. command which oversees cooperation with Iraqi forces confirmed plans to create "partnerships" between Iraqi special police and U.S. military units along the lines seen between the U.S. and Iraqi armies.
"This is in development," Lieutenant Colonel Fred Wellman said, adding that, with U.S. forces hoping to hand over security to Iraqis as far as possible, the police would play a key role over the coming year in taking over Iraqi cities like Baghdad.
"2006 we're going to call the year of the police," he said.
Wellman said the partnership plan was not a response to problems with the police: "It's not a failure to perform on the part of the special police or a failure of the system," he said.
But the senior military official made clear that this was part of the reason for proposing the plan in Baghdad that, he said, could be a model for police forces across the country.
"There were some elements of it allowed to grow that we may not fully have understood," he said of the way U.S. forces stood by while the police forces were massively expanded last year.
"The commandos and the public order brigades grew like Topsy, without much control," he said, adding that SCIRI's Badr organisation appeared to have influence over parts of the police.
"They can tell us to get lost but we ain't going to get lost," the official said of Iraqi commanders. "If we find they're breaking the law, then we're going to arrest them."
---------------------------------
Citation: Alastair Macdonald. "U.S. forces aim to bring Iraq police under control," Reuters, 29 December 2005.
Original URL: http://www.alertnet.org/thenews/newsdesk/L29252025.htm
---------------------------------
Reuters, 29 December 2005
BAGHDAD, Dec 29 (Reuters) - The U.S. army in Baghdad plans to deploy large numbers of troops with Iraqi special police units to try to curb suspected sectarian militia activity among the police, a senior U.S. military official said on Thursday.
"We're going to try to wrap ourselves around them," the official told reporters, speaking on condition of anonymity.
"The lines are blurred now and it's not easy to determine that some operation tonight was directed ... by the MoI (Interior Ministry) or ... by some people in uniform ... who are part of somebody's posse," he said.
"We're trying to control that."
Strained relations between U.S. forces and Iraq's Interior Ministry were highlighted last month when American troops found dozens of abused Sunni Arab prisoners at a secret ministry site in Baghdad.
Two more such secret jails have since been discovered in Baghdad, the official said, as well as one in northern Iraq.
U.S. officials have voiced mounting concern that violence by pro-government, pro-Iranian Shi'ite militias could prolong unrest by alienating minority Sunni Arabs, so delaying a U.S. withdrawal.
"I'm very concerned about militias," the official said.
Nine special police brigades in Baghdad each have 40 to 45 U.S. personnel attached to them to train and liaise with the U.S. command, he said; the plan would raise that to hundreds of Americans, similar to ratios seen with the Iraqi army.
"By hugging the enemy, wrapping our arms around them, we hope to control them ... like we did with the army," he said, noting that the Interior Ministry was not enthusiastic about the idea. The plan was likely to be approved shortly, he said.
Officials at the Interior Ministry were unavailable for comment. Last week, the U.S. ambassador called for non-sectarian leadership at the ministry.
The present minister, Bayan Jabor, is from the SCIRI Shi'ite Islamist party whose Badr militia allies are widely accused by Sunnis of controlling some police units.
The ministry could change hands during negotiations on a new governing coalition following this month's election.
"PARTNERSHIPS"
A spokesman for the U.S. command which oversees cooperation with Iraqi forces confirmed plans to create "partnerships" between Iraqi special police and U.S. military units along the lines seen between the U.S. and Iraqi armies.
"This is in development," Lieutenant Colonel Fred Wellman said, adding that, with U.S. forces hoping to hand over security to Iraqis as far as possible, the police would play a key role over the coming year in taking over Iraqi cities like Baghdad.
"2006 we're going to call the year of the police," he said.
Wellman said the partnership plan was not a response to problems with the police: "It's not a failure to perform on the part of the special police or a failure of the system," he said.
But the senior military official made clear that this was part of the reason for proposing the plan in Baghdad that, he said, could be a model for police forces across the country.
"There were some elements of it allowed to grow that we may not fully have understood," he said of the way U.S. forces stood by while the police forces were massively expanded last year.
"The commandos and the public order brigades grew like Topsy, without much control," he said, adding that SCIRI's Badr organisation appeared to have influence over parts of the police.
"They can tell us to get lost but we ain't going to get lost," the official said of Iraqi commanders. "If we find they're breaking the law, then we're going to arrest them."
---------------------------------
Citation: Alastair Macdonald. "U.S. forces aim to bring Iraq police under control," Reuters, 29 December 2005.
Original URL: http://www.alertnet.org/thenews/newsdesk/L29252025.htm
---------------------------------
Young ballet dancers' leap of faith defies Baghdad's bombs and guns
By Stephen Farrell
The Times, UK, 29 December 2005
OUTSIDE, the music of Baghdad plays on: angry sirens, gunshots from masked thugs, the squeal of brakes and helicopter gunships mutilating the air above the Tigris.
Inside, violins play as an orchestra practises for an end-of-year concert, and children rehearse their pirouettes. On the walls are paintings of the composer Robert Schumann and of Mesopotamian instruments.
Here, on one of the most dangerous roads in the Iraqi capital, undaunted by the low-level conflict raging all around it, stands Baghdad’s Music and Ballet School — the city’s Fame Academy. It is the only one in Iraq.
A mortar shell recently landed in the scrubby courtyard and guards watch out for car-bombers attacking American convoys. The windows are regularly broken by explosions. The adjacent Iraqi Army base in the western suburb of Mansour is a favourite target of bombers.
Few outsiders venture to Mansour these days. It is named after the 8th-century Abbasid Caliph, Abu Jaafar al-Mansour, who founded Baghdad, but the district has long ago surrendered its Western embassies and diplomatic residences to insurgent-compatible refugees from Fallujah and Ramadi.
Inside the school’s blue gates Iraqi youngsters — Sunni, Shia and Christian, headscarved and secular, shaven and hirsute — rush through the corridors knocking back Diet Coke, gossiping and dividing their day between the artistic and academic syllabuses of their 12-year study programme.
Clad in a black leotard and proper dancing shoes donated by foreign charities, Balsam Anmar, 9, admits that she has never seen a ballet, either in real life or on television. Most of her classmates also shake their heads.
But for the 220 pupils aged 6 to 18 the school is a refuge from violence and sectarianism. “I like ballet,” Balsam grins. “I like it when I come to school. I forget all the problems outside. The bombs, the car bombs, the traffic jams.”
The school’s ethos was laid down firmly from day one by Najiha Naief Hommadi, its director for the past 21 years. Asked how many Sunnis and Shias she has on the school roll she falls silent with disapproval. “We don’t know. We have students,” she says firmly.
“After the war I gathered all the students together. I told them, ‘You all have your personal opinions, your religion, your beliefs, but these you leave outside. Once you come through that gate you are students. We love each other. We love Iraq, and we work to build Iraq again’.” As she speaks she tucks back into her black headscarf a fringe of brown hair streaked with iron.
Her will is of iron too. She has stewarded her charges from the era of command performances at Saddam Hussein’s palaces to celebrate his birthdays, through the Iran-Iraq conflict and two Gulf wars, the looting that followed Saddam’s fall, the insurgency and now the advent of Islamist Shia clerics not known for their love of Debussy and Prokofiev.
With anti-Western jihadists and radicals seemingly everywhere in Iraq, the school’s staff are now cautious about proclaiming their love of the fine arts. Ghada al-Taie, a ballet teacher for nine years, no longer dares to tell taxi drivers what she does. “I don’t even tell all my family what I do, because some of my relatives are religious. I just tell them I work at the Ministry of Culture.”
For the guardians of Iraq’s ancient traditions of culture, dating back millennia to the Sumerians, Babylonians, Assyrians and Kingdom of Hatra, these are devastating times. A mile to the east of the school stands Iraq’s National Museum, looted of many treasures and with no hope of opening until order is restored. Across Iraq ancient burial grounds and archaeological sites are being stripped of their historic contents.
The performing arts fared little better. After Saddam’s invasion of Kuwait the Russian, Hungarian and Czech ballet and music teachers who trained the ballet school’s staff left Iraq. No longer could ballet dresses be imported from France, and a decade of sanctions took their toll on the wardrobe and instruments.
Then, following the US invasion of 2003, came the looters, stripping the school of its 40 violins, all its French horns, trumpets, flutes and Arabic instruments — and all but seven of its 25 pianos. “We found only the walls, nothing else,” Mrs Hommadi sighs. “I cried when I entered. It was so painful for me. What wasn’t looted was broken.”
Now the salaries are again being paid by the Government and the instruments have been replaced by Norwegian and Swiss donors.
But although the walls are plastered with children’s pictures and tinsel, and Mrs Hommadi hopes that her pupils will become tomorrow’s stars of Iraq’s National Symphony Orchestra, her thoughts drift to waste and loss. “If it hadn’t been for all those wars, there would have been maybe ten of these schools in Iraq. All that potential. All that talent . . .”
----------------------------------
Citation: Stephen Farrell. "Young ballet dancers' leap of faith defies Baghdad's bombs and guns," The Times, UK, 29 December 2005.
Original URL: http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,7374-1961828,00.html
----------------------------------
The Times, UK, 29 December 2005
OUTSIDE, the music of Baghdad plays on: angry sirens, gunshots from masked thugs, the squeal of brakes and helicopter gunships mutilating the air above the Tigris.
Inside, violins play as an orchestra practises for an end-of-year concert, and children rehearse their pirouettes. On the walls are paintings of the composer Robert Schumann and of Mesopotamian instruments.
Here, on one of the most dangerous roads in the Iraqi capital, undaunted by the low-level conflict raging all around it, stands Baghdad’s Music and Ballet School — the city’s Fame Academy. It is the only one in Iraq.
A mortar shell recently landed in the scrubby courtyard and guards watch out for car-bombers attacking American convoys. The windows are regularly broken by explosions. The adjacent Iraqi Army base in the western suburb of Mansour is a favourite target of bombers.
Few outsiders venture to Mansour these days. It is named after the 8th-century Abbasid Caliph, Abu Jaafar al-Mansour, who founded Baghdad, but the district has long ago surrendered its Western embassies and diplomatic residences to insurgent-compatible refugees from Fallujah and Ramadi.
Inside the school’s blue gates Iraqi youngsters — Sunni, Shia and Christian, headscarved and secular, shaven and hirsute — rush through the corridors knocking back Diet Coke, gossiping and dividing their day between the artistic and academic syllabuses of their 12-year study programme.
Clad in a black leotard and proper dancing shoes donated by foreign charities, Balsam Anmar, 9, admits that she has never seen a ballet, either in real life or on television. Most of her classmates also shake their heads.
But for the 220 pupils aged 6 to 18 the school is a refuge from violence and sectarianism. “I like ballet,” Balsam grins. “I like it when I come to school. I forget all the problems outside. The bombs, the car bombs, the traffic jams.”
The school’s ethos was laid down firmly from day one by Najiha Naief Hommadi, its director for the past 21 years. Asked how many Sunnis and Shias she has on the school roll she falls silent with disapproval. “We don’t know. We have students,” she says firmly.
“After the war I gathered all the students together. I told them, ‘You all have your personal opinions, your religion, your beliefs, but these you leave outside. Once you come through that gate you are students. We love each other. We love Iraq, and we work to build Iraq again’.” As she speaks she tucks back into her black headscarf a fringe of brown hair streaked with iron.
Her will is of iron too. She has stewarded her charges from the era of command performances at Saddam Hussein’s palaces to celebrate his birthdays, through the Iran-Iraq conflict and two Gulf wars, the looting that followed Saddam’s fall, the insurgency and now the advent of Islamist Shia clerics not known for their love of Debussy and Prokofiev.
With anti-Western jihadists and radicals seemingly everywhere in Iraq, the school’s staff are now cautious about proclaiming their love of the fine arts. Ghada al-Taie, a ballet teacher for nine years, no longer dares to tell taxi drivers what she does. “I don’t even tell all my family what I do, because some of my relatives are religious. I just tell them I work at the Ministry of Culture.”
For the guardians of Iraq’s ancient traditions of culture, dating back millennia to the Sumerians, Babylonians, Assyrians and Kingdom of Hatra, these are devastating times. A mile to the east of the school stands Iraq’s National Museum, looted of many treasures and with no hope of opening until order is restored. Across Iraq ancient burial grounds and archaeological sites are being stripped of their historic contents.
The performing arts fared little better. After Saddam’s invasion of Kuwait the Russian, Hungarian and Czech ballet and music teachers who trained the ballet school’s staff left Iraq. No longer could ballet dresses be imported from France, and a decade of sanctions took their toll on the wardrobe and instruments.
Then, following the US invasion of 2003, came the looters, stripping the school of its 40 violins, all its French horns, trumpets, flutes and Arabic instruments — and all but seven of its 25 pianos. “We found only the walls, nothing else,” Mrs Hommadi sighs. “I cried when I entered. It was so painful for me. What wasn’t looted was broken.”
Now the salaries are again being paid by the Government and the instruments have been replaced by Norwegian and Swiss donors.
But although the walls are plastered with children’s pictures and tinsel, and Mrs Hommadi hopes that her pupils will become tomorrow’s stars of Iraq’s National Symphony Orchestra, her thoughts drift to waste and loss. “If it hadn’t been for all those wars, there would have been maybe ten of these schools in Iraq. All that potential. All that talent . . .”
----------------------------------
Citation: Stephen Farrell. "Young ballet dancers' leap of faith defies Baghdad's bombs and guns," The Times, UK, 29 December 2005.
Original URL: http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,7374-1961828,00.html
----------------------------------
28 December 2005
Iraqi Army Needs Armored Vehicles
By Rowan Scarborough
The Washington Times, 27 December 2005
The emerging Iraqi army is in dire need of more armored vehicles, an issue largely lost in the two-year debate over U.S. soldiers and Marines who at one time lacked protective gear.
Defense sources say the required number of armored vehicles has not kept pace with the Iraqi army's growth, leaving exposed, newly minted troops to conduct patrols in thin-skinned trucks.
"One of the main things is they don't have much armor at all," said retired Coast Guard officer Michael Kearney, a defense contractor who is working to bolster the force. "Their people are running around in pickup trucks, and they are getting nailed."
Mr. Kearney ran a program to get quickly to the Iraqis 77 refurbished T-72 tanks in time for security duty in the Dec. 15 parliamentary elections.
The Soviet-era tanks, shipped by sea and then trucked through Kuwait, gave the 9th Mechanized Division, for the first time, a 45-ton, cannon-brandishing tank to take on insurgents who daily try to kill Iraqi soldiers.
The tanks were greeted like saviors when they arrived at the sprawling Taji army base north of Baghdad in November.
Mr. Kearney works for Defense Solutions, a Washington-based consulting firm and international arms dealer that won a $5 million contract to refurbish the tanks. The machines were donated by Hungary, which had agreed to get rid of them under a previous arms agreement.
In a deal that showed European countries cooperating with the U.S. on rebuilding Iraq's military, the tanks were refitted in Hungary, a former Soviet satellite and now a NATO ally of the U.S., and then shipped from Greece to Kuwait. The Arab emirate sweetened the shipment with 36 Soviet-designed BMP armored personnel carriers.
The boat docked in Kuwait, and the tanks rolled off, their Iraqi flags covered up so not to offend a country briefly conquered by Iraqi armor in 1990. Truck convoys then transported the tanks to Taji.
"The fact of the matter was not one convoy was attacked," Mr. Kearney said. "I think that says we are winning."
Lt. Col. Frederick Wellman, spokesman for the U.S. command that is equipping and training the new Iraqi security forces under a two-year, $10 billion plan, said more vehicles are on the way and other NATO countries are chipping in.
"I remind you that the Iraqi Army is a primarily light infantry force and their vehicles are used as transport to where they will operate and not as fighting vehicles," Col. Wellman said in an e-mail.
"It is not possible to armor them in a timely or cost effective manner and accomplish the building of an effective force in time. It would cost multiple billions of dollars and use nearly all manufacturers of armored vehicles to build a very difficult to manage mixed fleet of vehicles for the future of Iraq."
Fact sheets provided by the Multi-National Security Transition Command-Iraq show the 220,000-strong Iraqi security forces, which includes the army and paramilitary police, have received about 600 armored vehicles and have a requirement for nearly 3,000 more, including more than 1,500 armored U.S. Humvee utility vehicles.
Today, the Iraqi security forces rely on an international mix of armored vehicles -- the American Humvee, the Pakistani Talhas and Mohafiz, the French Panhard and the Soviet BMP.
Iraq needs more, and former Soviet satellites such as Hungary are the logical place to get them.
Under Saddam Hussein, Iraq was one of the Soviet Union's best customers for tanks, artillery, jet fighters and missiles -- all weapons badly depleted by a long war with Iran and two wars with U.S.-led alliances. Cost is important, too. Iraq could acquire the 77 T-72 tanks for a mere $5 million -- about the cost of one U.S.-made M1A1 Abrams tank.
"They don't need that level of sophistication," said retired Army Col. Timothy Ringgold, Defense Solutions' chief executive officer.
"They need equipment they already know how to operate and equipment they can afford. The Soviet stuff is very, very solid technically," he said. "It's soldier-proof because you're not going to break it driving around."
-------------------------------
Citation: Rowan Scarborough. "Iraqi Army Needs Armored Vehicles," The Washington Times, 27 December 2005.
Original URL: http://www.washingtontimes.com/national/20051227-124949-3236r.htm
-------------------------------
The Washington Times, 27 December 2005
The emerging Iraqi army is in dire need of more armored vehicles, an issue largely lost in the two-year debate over U.S. soldiers and Marines who at one time lacked protective gear.
Defense sources say the required number of armored vehicles has not kept pace with the Iraqi army's growth, leaving exposed, newly minted troops to conduct patrols in thin-skinned trucks.
"One of the main things is they don't have much armor at all," said retired Coast Guard officer Michael Kearney, a defense contractor who is working to bolster the force. "Their people are running around in pickup trucks, and they are getting nailed."
Mr. Kearney ran a program to get quickly to the Iraqis 77 refurbished T-72 tanks in time for security duty in the Dec. 15 parliamentary elections.
The Soviet-era tanks, shipped by sea and then trucked through Kuwait, gave the 9th Mechanized Division, for the first time, a 45-ton, cannon-brandishing tank to take on insurgents who daily try to kill Iraqi soldiers.
The tanks were greeted like saviors when they arrived at the sprawling Taji army base north of Baghdad in November.
Mr. Kearney works for Defense Solutions, a Washington-based consulting firm and international arms dealer that won a $5 million contract to refurbish the tanks. The machines were donated by Hungary, which had agreed to get rid of them under a previous arms agreement.
In a deal that showed European countries cooperating with the U.S. on rebuilding Iraq's military, the tanks were refitted in Hungary, a former Soviet satellite and now a NATO ally of the U.S., and then shipped from Greece to Kuwait. The Arab emirate sweetened the shipment with 36 Soviet-designed BMP armored personnel carriers.
The boat docked in Kuwait, and the tanks rolled off, their Iraqi flags covered up so not to offend a country briefly conquered by Iraqi armor in 1990. Truck convoys then transported the tanks to Taji.
"The fact of the matter was not one convoy was attacked," Mr. Kearney said. "I think that says we are winning."
Lt. Col. Frederick Wellman, spokesman for the U.S. command that is equipping and training the new Iraqi security forces under a two-year, $10 billion plan, said more vehicles are on the way and other NATO countries are chipping in.
"I remind you that the Iraqi Army is a primarily light infantry force and their vehicles are used as transport to where they will operate and not as fighting vehicles," Col. Wellman said in an e-mail.
"It is not possible to armor them in a timely or cost effective manner and accomplish the building of an effective force in time. It would cost multiple billions of dollars and use nearly all manufacturers of armored vehicles to build a very difficult to manage mixed fleet of vehicles for the future of Iraq."
Fact sheets provided by the Multi-National Security Transition Command-Iraq show the 220,000-strong Iraqi security forces, which includes the army and paramilitary police, have received about 600 armored vehicles and have a requirement for nearly 3,000 more, including more than 1,500 armored U.S. Humvee utility vehicles.
Today, the Iraqi security forces rely on an international mix of armored vehicles -- the American Humvee, the Pakistani Talhas and Mohafiz, the French Panhard and the Soviet BMP.
Iraq needs more, and former Soviet satellites such as Hungary are the logical place to get them.
Under Saddam Hussein, Iraq was one of the Soviet Union's best customers for tanks, artillery, jet fighters and missiles -- all weapons badly depleted by a long war with Iran and two wars with U.S.-led alliances. Cost is important, too. Iraq could acquire the 77 T-72 tanks for a mere $5 million -- about the cost of one U.S.-made M1A1 Abrams tank.
"They don't need that level of sophistication," said retired Army Col. Timothy Ringgold, Defense Solutions' chief executive officer.
"They need equipment they already know how to operate and equipment they can afford. The Soviet stuff is very, very solid technically," he said. "It's soldier-proof because you're not going to break it driving around."
-------------------------------
Citation: Rowan Scarborough. "Iraqi Army Needs Armored Vehicles," The Washington Times, 27 December 2005.
Original URL: http://www.washingtontimes.com/national/20051227-124949-3236r.htm
-------------------------------
Once Home, Troops Face New Battle
Company A is back from Iraq, but the National Guard veterans find few resources to help them adjust to civilian life.
By Vanessa Gregory and Claire Miller
Los Angeles Times, 27 December 2005
PETALUMA, Calif. — For the first time in two years, the soldiers of Company A are home for the holidays.
But normal life still eludes the families of the California National Guard unit — based in this town north of San Francisco — that suffered one of the state's highest casualty rates in Iraq. There are sudden overwhelming anxiety attacks, financial hardships and strained marriages.
"They bring home these empty shells of people, and that's what they are. They left the people they used to be behind," said Rene Gilmore, whose husband, Staff Sgt. Michael Gilmore, spent seven months on tense security patrols in Balad, Iraq, before he was wounded by a roadside bomb explosion.
Like many of the 7,000 California National Guard troops who have served in Iraq and Afghanistan, the soldiers of Company A, 579th Engineer Battalion, returned to a system mainly equipped for weekend drills and periodic call-ups to state emergencies, such as forest fires.
Asked to play a front-line role overseas for the first time since the Korean War, members of the Guard nationwide often feel like second-class citizens when they return home.
In contrast, their counterparts in the full-time military return to relatively well-equipped and -staffed bases, where their post-combat problems can be more easily observed and treated.
At Ft. Irwin, an Army base northeast of Barstow, soldiers undergo two weeks of "reintegration training" that includes counseling for family reunification and even a defensive-driving course to get soldiers used to civilian highways again.
Ft. Irwin has on-post medical facilities, subsidized grocery stores, day care and counseling programs for the children of parents at war. The base has six chaplains, a staff psychologist and a social worker office for its 5,000 soldiers and families.
The state's 20,000 California National Guard troops and their 40,000 dependents have only two full-time chaplains, one psychologist and one social worker.
Returning Company A troops received only four days of informational sessions at Camp Roberts, the dilapidated World War II-era Guard training base near Paso Robles. Once the troops were released to civilian life, the Guard waited three months to follow up with them, although many soldiers and Guard officials say emotional problems begin to surface after one or two months.
"Phones started ringing at the armory 30 to 60 days after the soldiers came back," said 579th Engineers operations officer Zachariahs Delwiche. "We had more problems than we could deal with. We had one soldier who basically sequestered himself in a motel for two months. Another soldier was living in the armory. We requested to have a team go out and check on the soldiers and families, but it was never funded."
Delwiche estimated that more than a dozen members of Company A — a 100-soldier unit that had three killed in action and 20 wounded in Iraq — came back from their service there with serious psychological problems.
"We don't have the resources that the active component does, in terms of bases and facilities to provide that support," said Maj. Jon Siepmann, a California National Guard spokesman. "That we're performing an active-duty role without commensurate resources is frustrating."
With Guard families spread throughout California, some veterans and their dependants live hours from the nearest counseling center.
In Company A, fewer than half the returning members enrolled in voluntary counseling offered by the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs.
Some have relied instead on overburdened spouses, compassionate strangers, hometown churches or their civilian workplaces to provide what the California National Guard does not.
Rene Gilmore, a 38-year-old mother of two young boys, served as Company A's volunteer family counselor.
While the unit was in Iraq, she worked nights from home for an insurance company, took care of her kids and answered four or five calls a day from other Guard spouses. She helped families cope with problems such as anxiety and a teenager's attempted suicide.
Gilmore's own family has also struggled with the fallout from the war in Iraq.
Her 37-year-old husband came home early, in November 2004, with a Purple Heart and a hole in his shoulder from the blast of an improvised explosive device.
His mental scars surfaced months later, when he and his wife were sprucing up the Petaluma armory for Company A's welcome-back celebration. Michael was struggling to hammer the company's awards onto the wall with his injured arm.
"He was frustrated," Rene recalled. "His thought was that he should have been coming home with the other guys, and instead he was with the wives."
After the party, on a two-lane road home to Livermore, Michael pulled out to pass a car. Soon, he passed another and reached 100 mph, forcing oncoming cars off the road. Mentally, he was back in Iraq.
"You're going to kill us! Stop!" Rene recalled yelling.
"She was yelling, and that didn't make sense, because we yell at each other back there" in Iraq, Michael recalled.
Finally, Rene touched her husband's arm and asked: "Who will raise our children if you kill us?"
He slowed down and, within days, Rene was at the Veterans Affairs Medical Center in Livermore, looking for a counselor who specializes in post-traumatic stress disorder.
Military psychologists do not know how many Iraq veterans suffer from the disorder, but studies of those who served in the Vietnam War show that as many as 30% of combat veterans may experience symptoms that include flashbacks, anxiety and emotional numbness, said Keith Armstrong, a social worker at the San Francisco VA Medical Center.
"I've got my good days and bad days," Michael said. "Still, sometimes when I'm driving down the road, my mind will drift back."
Tonya and Jim Saleda were planning an intimate family Christmas in Sonoma to celebrate his first holiday back. But the holidays have done little to diminish Tonya's bitterness.
"I wasn't happy with the whole support of the National Guard at any point of his deployment," she said. "Families just kind of fell through the cracks."
Despite promises of family assistance from the Guard, Tonya, 40, said no one called to see how she and her children were doing. She relied on her husband's employer, the Oakland Police Department.
"They sent me and my daughter care packages. They kept up insurance and retirement and pay, so we were OK in that respect," she said. "I just didn't count on the military for anything."
The feeling of neglect continued after Staff Sgt. Jim Saleda, 43, returned home, even as he copes with unexplained symptoms that his wife describes as mini-strokes.
None of the Guard officials "ever called to see how he was doing; nobody ever asked," she said.
In San Jose, Sgt. Steve Edwards is unable to work. Considered by his commander one of the most reliable soldiers in Iraq, Edwards now spends most of his time hunkered down inside his home.
His wife, Theresa, mother of the couple's 10-year-old daughter, is her husband's primary caregiver and the family's only breadwinner.
"I thought we would make it through the deployment and everything would be gravy," she said.
For the first couple of weeks, Steve had problems sleeping and sometimes walked the perimeter of the house to make sure it was secure before he went to bed. His wife thought that his behavior — odd but understandable — would pass with time.
Then one day she took him to Trader Joe's. They used to love shopping together, and after a year of Army cuisine he was ready to indulge.
Waiting in line with a full cart, Theresa turned to her husband and noticed he was shaking. His eyes were full of tears, and he said he had to get out of the store: It was too crowded, too loud.
Today, he cannot leave the house without scanning the rooftops for snipers; he can't stand crowds. He dreaded malls during the Christmas season. "Thank God there was online shopping," he said.
His wife supports the family with her job at a technology company. Steve Edwards, a former Fairmont Hotel technician, applied for his Army pension and compensation but was told it could take Veterans Affairs up to a year to process the claim.
The state provides about $250 a week in disability, but with food and rent topping $3,000 a month, the family barely squeaks by. They received a one-time $2,000 grant from the California Military Relief Fund, and Rene Gilmore has given them several Safeway gift cards.
Staff Sgt. Randy Dale, 43, and his wife, Amy, 38, have endured many of the same hardships faced by other National Guard families. Amy had to take two jobs to help support the family and their two teenagers.
Her husband's job as a truck driver evaporated almost as soon as he got back. The couple live in Lucerne, about 115 miles north of the armory in Petaluma.
But the Dales got unusually strong support from their church, where she worked as a part-time cleaning woman.
"Every time I needed help or anything, there was someone from our church," she said.
When her truck broke down, her pastor picked her up. When her kids were having trouble in school, the church youth leader gave her advice.
While he was in Iraq, Randy deepened his religious beliefs, praying with other soldiers before he went out on patrol.
The couple credit their faith with helping them through the ordeal and keeping their marriage strong.
"We're not looking at last year like it was a negative thing," Amy said. "We are looking at it like it was a positive thing. We made it through."
This is one in a series of occasional stories about a National Guard company that served in Iraq from January 2004 to February 2005. Part of a Los Angeles Times-UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism project directed by Times staff writer Rone Tempest, it was reported by Amanda Beck, Jennifer Buck, Vanessa Gregory, Nicole Hill, Ryan Lillis, Felicia Mello, Claire Miller and Jakob Schiller. Profiles of the families featured in this article and other stories in this series can be found at latimes.com/guardgoes.
------------------------------
Citation: Vanessa Gregory and Claire Miller. "Once Home, Troops Face New Battle," Los Angeles Times, 27 December 2005.
Original URL: http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/iraq/complete/la-me-guard27dec27,1,2602215.story?coll=la-iraq-complete
------------------------------
By Vanessa Gregory and Claire Miller
Los Angeles Times, 27 December 2005
PETALUMA, Calif. — For the first time in two years, the soldiers of Company A are home for the holidays.
But normal life still eludes the families of the California National Guard unit — based in this town north of San Francisco — that suffered one of the state's highest casualty rates in Iraq. There are sudden overwhelming anxiety attacks, financial hardships and strained marriages.
"They bring home these empty shells of people, and that's what they are. They left the people they used to be behind," said Rene Gilmore, whose husband, Staff Sgt. Michael Gilmore, spent seven months on tense security patrols in Balad, Iraq, before he was wounded by a roadside bomb explosion.
Like many of the 7,000 California National Guard troops who have served in Iraq and Afghanistan, the soldiers of Company A, 579th Engineer Battalion, returned to a system mainly equipped for weekend drills and periodic call-ups to state emergencies, such as forest fires.
Asked to play a front-line role overseas for the first time since the Korean War, members of the Guard nationwide often feel like second-class citizens when they return home.
In contrast, their counterparts in the full-time military return to relatively well-equipped and -staffed bases, where their post-combat problems can be more easily observed and treated.
At Ft. Irwin, an Army base northeast of Barstow, soldiers undergo two weeks of "reintegration training" that includes counseling for family reunification and even a defensive-driving course to get soldiers used to civilian highways again.
Ft. Irwin has on-post medical facilities, subsidized grocery stores, day care and counseling programs for the children of parents at war. The base has six chaplains, a staff psychologist and a social worker office for its 5,000 soldiers and families.
The state's 20,000 California National Guard troops and their 40,000 dependents have only two full-time chaplains, one psychologist and one social worker.
Returning Company A troops received only four days of informational sessions at Camp Roberts, the dilapidated World War II-era Guard training base near Paso Robles. Once the troops were released to civilian life, the Guard waited three months to follow up with them, although many soldiers and Guard officials say emotional problems begin to surface after one or two months.
"Phones started ringing at the armory 30 to 60 days after the soldiers came back," said 579th Engineers operations officer Zachariahs Delwiche. "We had more problems than we could deal with. We had one soldier who basically sequestered himself in a motel for two months. Another soldier was living in the armory. We requested to have a team go out and check on the soldiers and families, but it was never funded."
Delwiche estimated that more than a dozen members of Company A — a 100-soldier unit that had three killed in action and 20 wounded in Iraq — came back from their service there with serious psychological problems.
"We don't have the resources that the active component does, in terms of bases and facilities to provide that support," said Maj. Jon Siepmann, a California National Guard spokesman. "That we're performing an active-duty role without commensurate resources is frustrating."
With Guard families spread throughout California, some veterans and their dependants live hours from the nearest counseling center.
In Company A, fewer than half the returning members enrolled in voluntary counseling offered by the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs.
Some have relied instead on overburdened spouses, compassionate strangers, hometown churches or their civilian workplaces to provide what the California National Guard does not.
Rene Gilmore, a 38-year-old mother of two young boys, served as Company A's volunteer family counselor.
While the unit was in Iraq, she worked nights from home for an insurance company, took care of her kids and answered four or five calls a day from other Guard spouses. She helped families cope with problems such as anxiety and a teenager's attempted suicide.
Gilmore's own family has also struggled with the fallout from the war in Iraq.
Her 37-year-old husband came home early, in November 2004, with a Purple Heart and a hole in his shoulder from the blast of an improvised explosive device.
His mental scars surfaced months later, when he and his wife were sprucing up the Petaluma armory for Company A's welcome-back celebration. Michael was struggling to hammer the company's awards onto the wall with his injured arm.
"He was frustrated," Rene recalled. "His thought was that he should have been coming home with the other guys, and instead he was with the wives."
After the party, on a two-lane road home to Livermore, Michael pulled out to pass a car. Soon, he passed another and reached 100 mph, forcing oncoming cars off the road. Mentally, he was back in Iraq.
"You're going to kill us! Stop!" Rene recalled yelling.
"She was yelling, and that didn't make sense, because we yell at each other back there" in Iraq, Michael recalled.
Finally, Rene touched her husband's arm and asked: "Who will raise our children if you kill us?"
He slowed down and, within days, Rene was at the Veterans Affairs Medical Center in Livermore, looking for a counselor who specializes in post-traumatic stress disorder.
Military psychologists do not know how many Iraq veterans suffer from the disorder, but studies of those who served in the Vietnam War show that as many as 30% of combat veterans may experience symptoms that include flashbacks, anxiety and emotional numbness, said Keith Armstrong, a social worker at the San Francisco VA Medical Center.
"I've got my good days and bad days," Michael said. "Still, sometimes when I'm driving down the road, my mind will drift back."
Tonya and Jim Saleda were planning an intimate family Christmas in Sonoma to celebrate his first holiday back. But the holidays have done little to diminish Tonya's bitterness.
"I wasn't happy with the whole support of the National Guard at any point of his deployment," she said. "Families just kind of fell through the cracks."
Despite promises of family assistance from the Guard, Tonya, 40, said no one called to see how she and her children were doing. She relied on her husband's employer, the Oakland Police Department.
"They sent me and my daughter care packages. They kept up insurance and retirement and pay, so we were OK in that respect," she said. "I just didn't count on the military for anything."
The feeling of neglect continued after Staff Sgt. Jim Saleda, 43, returned home, even as he copes with unexplained symptoms that his wife describes as mini-strokes.
None of the Guard officials "ever called to see how he was doing; nobody ever asked," she said.
In San Jose, Sgt. Steve Edwards is unable to work. Considered by his commander one of the most reliable soldiers in Iraq, Edwards now spends most of his time hunkered down inside his home.
His wife, Theresa, mother of the couple's 10-year-old daughter, is her husband's primary caregiver and the family's only breadwinner.
"I thought we would make it through the deployment and everything would be gravy," she said.
For the first couple of weeks, Steve had problems sleeping and sometimes walked the perimeter of the house to make sure it was secure before he went to bed. His wife thought that his behavior — odd but understandable — would pass with time.
Then one day she took him to Trader Joe's. They used to love shopping together, and after a year of Army cuisine he was ready to indulge.
Waiting in line with a full cart, Theresa turned to her husband and noticed he was shaking. His eyes were full of tears, and he said he had to get out of the store: It was too crowded, too loud.
Today, he cannot leave the house without scanning the rooftops for snipers; he can't stand crowds. He dreaded malls during the Christmas season. "Thank God there was online shopping," he said.
His wife supports the family with her job at a technology company. Steve Edwards, a former Fairmont Hotel technician, applied for his Army pension and compensation but was told it could take Veterans Affairs up to a year to process the claim.
The state provides about $250 a week in disability, but with food and rent topping $3,000 a month, the family barely squeaks by. They received a one-time $2,000 grant from the California Military Relief Fund, and Rene Gilmore has given them several Safeway gift cards.
Staff Sgt. Randy Dale, 43, and his wife, Amy, 38, have endured many of the same hardships faced by other National Guard families. Amy had to take two jobs to help support the family and their two teenagers.
Her husband's job as a truck driver evaporated almost as soon as he got back. The couple live in Lucerne, about 115 miles north of the armory in Petaluma.
But the Dales got unusually strong support from their church, where she worked as a part-time cleaning woman.
"Every time I needed help or anything, there was someone from our church," she said.
When her truck broke down, her pastor picked her up. When her kids were having trouble in school, the church youth leader gave her advice.
While he was in Iraq, Randy deepened his religious beliefs, praying with other soldiers before he went out on patrol.
The couple credit their faith with helping them through the ordeal and keeping their marriage strong.
"We're not looking at last year like it was a negative thing," Amy said. "We are looking at it like it was a positive thing. We made it through."
This is one in a series of occasional stories about a National Guard company that served in Iraq from January 2004 to February 2005. Part of a Los Angeles Times-UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism project directed by Times staff writer Rone Tempest, it was reported by Amanda Beck, Jennifer Buck, Vanessa Gregory, Nicole Hill, Ryan Lillis, Felicia Mello, Claire Miller and Jakob Schiller. Profiles of the families featured in this article and other stories in this series can be found at latimes.com/guardgoes.
------------------------------
Citation: Vanessa Gregory and Claire Miller. "Once Home, Troops Face New Battle," Los Angeles Times, 27 December 2005.
Original URL: http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/iraq/complete/la-me-guard27dec27,1,2602215.story?coll=la-iraq-complete
------------------------------
'Semper Fit' on Home Front Only
Marines serving in Iraq are exempted from the Corps' weight-loss plan. Once back in U.S., extra fitness training, lectures, weigh-ins are the drill.
By Tony Perry
Los Angeles Times, 28 December 2005
SAN DIEGO — The Marine Corps has decided that fighting one war at a time is enough.
A recent order from headquarters at Quantico, Va., says overweight Marines sent to Iraq can be exempt from the Corps' rigid weight-loss program, which requires frequent weigh-ins, extra physical training and "Semper Fit" lectures about nutrition.
The rigors of being deployed in Iraq have made it difficult for Marines to comply with the fitness plan, known as the Body Composition Program, Marine Corps officials said.
Under an order issued before Christmas, commanders are allowed to exempt their troops in Iraq from what is usually a six-month program.
"In combat, the priority is combat and getting home safely and completing the mission," said Lt. Col. Kristi VanGorder, head of the training section at the Training and Education Command at the base in Quantico.
Once a Marine leaves Iraq, he or she is required to resume the fight against fat.
Failure to meet the Corps' standards for body fat percentage can lead to an administrative discharge.
Every Marine undergoes an official weigh-in at least twice a year. If an individual is heavier than a set standard for his height, then body fat is calculated.
For men, the calculation involves measuring the abdomen and neck; for women, the waist, hips and neck are measured.
The maximum body fat for men is 18%; for women, it is 26% — although the standard is looser if the Marine excels on an annual fitness test.
If his or her body fat is below a prescribed maximum, the Marine is considered to meet the standards regardless of weight and height.
"We don't want a bunch of skinny Marines," said VanGorder. "What we want is healthy Marines."
An overweight Marine who has been enrolled in the program before going to Iraq "should attempt to make progress," according to the order.
Although while in Iraq the Marine will be exempt from the weigh-ins and other aspects of the program, the individual will not be eligible for promotion until returning to the U.S. and meeting the body-fat standards. The only exception is a Marine who performs heroically in combat and receives a meritorious promotion.
Although the Marine Corps might enforce its standards more vigorously, each of the military services has a program to keep its personnel in fighting trim.
The Corps has a maximum weight for a person's height, regardless of age.
The Army makes allowances for weight by age, and allows a higher percentage of body-fat for all age groups.
Sgt. Zachary Balentine, a martial-arts instructor and weight-control instructor at the Quantico base, says that 35 of the 700 Marines in his battalion are in the Body Composition Program.
When he took over the job, four Marines were in the process of being discharged because they did not meet the weight and fitness standards, Balentine said.
With younger Marines in particular, much of the program involves warning them to stay away from fast food.
"It's so easy to order a pizza or a cheeseburger," Balentine said. "You can't eat like a slob and then expect to perform well."
----------------------------
Citation: Tony Perry. "'Semper Fit' on Home Front Only," Los Angeles Times, 28 December 2005.
Original URL: http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/iraq/complete/la-na-weight28dec28,1,3228850.story?coll=la-iraq-complete
----------------------------
By Tony Perry
Los Angeles Times, 28 December 2005
SAN DIEGO — The Marine Corps has decided that fighting one war at a time is enough.
A recent order from headquarters at Quantico, Va., says overweight Marines sent to Iraq can be exempt from the Corps' rigid weight-loss program, which requires frequent weigh-ins, extra physical training and "Semper Fit" lectures about nutrition.
The rigors of being deployed in Iraq have made it difficult for Marines to comply with the fitness plan, known as the Body Composition Program, Marine Corps officials said.
Under an order issued before Christmas, commanders are allowed to exempt their troops in Iraq from what is usually a six-month program.
"In combat, the priority is combat and getting home safely and completing the mission," said Lt. Col. Kristi VanGorder, head of the training section at the Training and Education Command at the base in Quantico.
Once a Marine leaves Iraq, he or she is required to resume the fight against fat.
Failure to meet the Corps' standards for body fat percentage can lead to an administrative discharge.
Every Marine undergoes an official weigh-in at least twice a year. If an individual is heavier than a set standard for his height, then body fat is calculated.
For men, the calculation involves measuring the abdomen and neck; for women, the waist, hips and neck are measured.
The maximum body fat for men is 18%; for women, it is 26% — although the standard is looser if the Marine excels on an annual fitness test.
If his or her body fat is below a prescribed maximum, the Marine is considered to meet the standards regardless of weight and height.
"We don't want a bunch of skinny Marines," said VanGorder. "What we want is healthy Marines."
An overweight Marine who has been enrolled in the program before going to Iraq "should attempt to make progress," according to the order.
Although while in Iraq the Marine will be exempt from the weigh-ins and other aspects of the program, the individual will not be eligible for promotion until returning to the U.S. and meeting the body-fat standards. The only exception is a Marine who performs heroically in combat and receives a meritorious promotion.
Although the Marine Corps might enforce its standards more vigorously, each of the military services has a program to keep its personnel in fighting trim.
The Corps has a maximum weight for a person's height, regardless of age.
The Army makes allowances for weight by age, and allows a higher percentage of body-fat for all age groups.
Sgt. Zachary Balentine, a martial-arts instructor and weight-control instructor at the Quantico base, says that 35 of the 700 Marines in his battalion are in the Body Composition Program.
When he took over the job, four Marines were in the process of being discharged because they did not meet the weight and fitness standards, Balentine said.
With younger Marines in particular, much of the program involves warning them to stay away from fast food.
"It's so easy to order a pizza or a cheeseburger," Balentine said. "You can't eat like a slob and then expect to perform well."
----------------------------
Citation: Tony Perry. "'Semper Fit' on Home Front Only," Los Angeles Times, 28 December 2005.
Original URL: http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/iraq/complete/la-na-weight28dec28,1,3228850.story?coll=la-iraq-complete
----------------------------
U.S. Missteps Leave Iraqis in the Dark
A $4-billion project to restore electricity has foundered amid poor decisions, from choosing natural gas turbines to underestimating costs.
By T. Christian Miller
Los Angeles Times, 25 December 2005
KHOR ZUBAYR, Iraq — When the United States fires up the last generator at this remote power plant this week, it will mark the r
sion of one of the most frustrating episodes in the effort to rebuild Iraq's infrastructure.
A pile of gray metal swarming with construction workers in the deserts of southern Iraq, the Khor Zubayr generating station is the final power plant being built under Washington's ill-fated $4-billion attempt to restore Iraq's electrical supply to its prewar level.
The massive U.S. effort will leave behind this legacy: Iraqis will actually have, on average, fewer hours per day of electricity in their homes than they did before the U.S.-led invasion in March 2003.
"The money was not effective," Muhsin Shalash, Iraq's minister of electricity, said in an interview. "The contracting was wrong. The whole planning was wrong…. It's a big problem."
U.S. officials have blamed insurgent attacks, unchecked demand and the poor conditions of Iraq's power plants for hobbling the bid to restore electricity. But interviews with dozens of U.S. and Iraqi officials reveal that poor decisions by the United States also played a significant role.
Perhaps most serious was the decision to expand a program begun under Saddam Hussein to install dozens of natural-gas-fired electrical generators, U.S. and Iraqi officials said. Iraq has such gas in abundance, but it uses only a fraction of it. The rest is burned off during oil production.
The U.S. spent hundreds of millions of dollars to purchase and install natural-gas-fired generators in electricity plants throughout Iraq. But pipelines needed to transport the gas weren't built because Iraq's Oil Ministry, with U.S. encouragement, concentrated instead on boosting oil production to bring in hard currency for the nation's cash-starved economy.
In at least one case, the U.S. paid San Francisco-based Bechtel Corp. $69 million for a natural-gas-fired plant that was never built, according to State Department documents and U.S. officials.
All told, of 26 natural gas turbines installed at seven plants in Iraq — ranging in cost from a few million dollars to more than $40 million — only seven are burning natural gas, reconstruction officials said.
Faced with widespread power shortages, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and the State Department decided to reconfigure many of the generators to burn a different fuel, an expensive process that decreased generation capacity and increased maintenance.
"You've got the wrong technology for the fuel we're burning, the wrong technology being gas turbines," said Bill Thompson, generation manager for the Project and Contracting Office, a Defense Department reconstruction agency. "But we're here and this is what we've got."
In many cases, the fuel in question has been heavy fuel oil, a tarry byproduct of Iraq's primitive refineries that has wreaked havoc on the natural gas generators. One turbine installed by the U.S. at a cost of $40 million at the Baiji power complex in north-central Iraq already needs replacement.
"My concept as a layman [is that] we basically wrecked the unit" that needs replacing, said Dennis Karns, the Army Corps official heading the power sector.
The U.S. simply canceled other plants. It scrapped the Bechtel project, a planned power station near the Mansuriya fields in northeastern Iraq, because it feared it would take too long to build and cost too much, said officials with the U.S. Agency for International Development.
Although the plant was never built, the U.S. paid Bechtel $69 million for drawing up plans, setting up a construction camp and buying two generators that were later installed elsewhere, USAID officials said. Bechtel also received $160 million to cover security and other unexpected costs in connection with other reconstruction projects.
"Starting about late 2004, we were finding out that security constrained our ability to build all the things we wanted to," said Heather Layman, a USAID spokeswoman.
A Bechtel official said the money was well spent since it paid for the gas-fired generators now in use elsewhere and provided the Iraqis with plant designs.
"Our position is it was a viable project," said the official, who asked not to be identified for security reasons.
The decision to rely so heavily on natural-gas-fired generators is a source of great frustration in the current Iraqi government. Shalash, the electricity minister, said the U.S. and the interim Iraqi government shared blame for not better understanding Iraq's power infrastructure.
"It was a combination of lack of knowledge and … people who were from the outside who did not have experience," Shalash said. "All they were doing is signing contracts, buying turbines and not bringing electricity to people."
Another serious problem was the failure to charge private consumers for electricity, which a U.S. advisor called one of the worst mistakes of the U.S.-led occupation, according to a recent report by the U.S. Institute of Peace, a congressionally funded think tank.
The virtually free power encouraged wealthy and middle-class Iraqis to go on a spending spree after the invasion, buying refrigerators, heaters and other goods.
As a result, demand for electricity surged far past supply. When the U.S. finishes its building program, Iraq will be able to produce about 5,500 megawatts on a sustained basis, about 1,000 more than the country produced under Hussein's government. But demand has soared to 9,000 megawatts during Iraq's sweltering summers and chilly winters.
Thus, while the U.S. will have technically reached its goal of restoring Iraq's power output to prewar levels, the average Iraqi will have about 10 to 12 hours of power a day, less than under Hussein. Those living in urban centers such as Baghdad, Basra and Mosul are especially affected.
Karns, of the Army Corps of Engineers, said it would be "multiple decades" before Iraqi homes had power 24 hours a day.
"In spite of all these problems, we have made a significant impact in keeping the system stable," Karns said. "They're in a much better starting position as they continue forward."
The lack of reliable electricity is one of the chief frustrations of Iraqis. Almost everyone quizzed about the pace of the reconstruction uttered the phrase "maku kahrabaa"— there's no electricity.
"Right now, our issue is electricity," said Raheem Abdul Sadr, a shopkeeper who was selling brightly colored tricycles and backpacks recently in Baghdad's Sadr City. "We have no issues except electricity."
His friend shook his head and concurred: "Electricity, electricity, electricity."
Unexpectedly high costs for security and maintenance and operational problems also have plagued reconstruction.
By last fall, the Army Corps had run out of cash for several projects being funded with Iraqi oil revenue — money spent in addition to the $4 billion in U.S. funding. They handed the unfinished plants to the Iraqis, hoping they would finish the work.
Instead, the Iraqis did nothing, their own budget hampered by the insurgency, inefficient state spending, oil production shortfalls and persistent corruption, U.S. officials said.
In January, corps officials decided to renew work on dozens of generators that had been abandoned, this time with U.S. money, in a plan called Project Phoenix.
The U.S. eventually paid Fluor-AMEC, a U.S.-British joint venture, $93 million to complete the work and add 700 megawatts of power to Iraq's grid.
The delays, however, resulted in millions of angry Iraqis having to sweat through the summer.
"We started it much too late," Thompson said.
Most of the power projects that were completed, U.S. officials said, have been poorly operated by the Iraqis, who before the invasion relied heavily on foreign contractors to run the plants.
By one U.S. estimate, Iraq would have an additional 1,000 megawatts of power if all of its 19 plants, with 142 generators, were run correctly.
To help remedy the problem, USAID sent scores of Iraqi engineers abroad for training as part of a multimillion-dollar effort to create "tiger teams" that would return and train other Iraqis.
Instead, the engineers were dispersed to different plants when they returned and provided very little training, reconstruction officials said.
"We put the tiger teams out there, but we never got anything out of them," Karns said.
There have been some successes. The larger problems of the power sector don't seem to have trickled down to the Khor Zubayr plant south of Basra, which will be the last to go online.
Chris Frabott, an Army Corps official, has spent the last several months installing two mammoth generators. If all goes as planned, they will actually use natural gas piped in from a nearby oil field.
The plant was abuzz with work one day last summer. More than 400 Iraqi workers were employed at the site, which sits alone in the middle of flat, barren desert.
When the plant goes online Thursday, it will deliver 500 megawatts of power to Iraq — about 10% of current capacity. Frabott looked up at one of the generators and patted its side.
"It's a lot of work," he said. "A lot of money."
------------------------------
Citation: T. Christian Miller. "U.S. Missteps Leave Iraqis in the Dark," Los Angeles Times, 25 December 2005.
Original URL: http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/iraq/complete/la-fg-power25dec25,1,5481215.story?coll=la-iraq-complete
------------------------------
By T. Christian Miller
Los Angeles Times, 25 December 2005
KHOR ZUBAYR, Iraq — When the United States fires up the last generator at this remote power plant this week, it will mark the r
sion of one of the most frustrating episodes in the effort to rebuild Iraq's infrastructure.
A pile of gray metal swarming with construction workers in the deserts of southern Iraq, the Khor Zubayr generating station is the final power plant being built under Washington's ill-fated $4-billion attempt to restore Iraq's electrical supply to its prewar level.
The massive U.S. effort will leave behind this legacy: Iraqis will actually have, on average, fewer hours per day of electricity in their homes than they did before the U.S.-led invasion in March 2003.
"The money was not effective," Muhsin Shalash, Iraq's minister of electricity, said in an interview. "The contracting was wrong. The whole planning was wrong…. It's a big problem."
U.S. officials have blamed insurgent attacks, unchecked demand and the poor conditions of Iraq's power plants for hobbling the bid to restore electricity. But interviews with dozens of U.S. and Iraqi officials reveal that poor decisions by the United States also played a significant role.
Perhaps most serious was the decision to expand a program begun under Saddam Hussein to install dozens of natural-gas-fired electrical generators, U.S. and Iraqi officials said. Iraq has such gas in abundance, but it uses only a fraction of it. The rest is burned off during oil production.
The U.S. spent hundreds of millions of dollars to purchase and install natural-gas-fired generators in electricity plants throughout Iraq. But pipelines needed to transport the gas weren't built because Iraq's Oil Ministry, with U.S. encouragement, concentrated instead on boosting oil production to bring in hard currency for the nation's cash-starved economy.
In at least one case, the U.S. paid San Francisco-based Bechtel Corp. $69 million for a natural-gas-fired plant that was never built, according to State Department documents and U.S. officials.
All told, of 26 natural gas turbines installed at seven plants in Iraq — ranging in cost from a few million dollars to more than $40 million — only seven are burning natural gas, reconstruction officials said.
Faced with widespread power shortages, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and the State Department decided to reconfigure many of the generators to burn a different fuel, an expensive process that decreased generation capacity and increased maintenance.
"You've got the wrong technology for the fuel we're burning, the wrong technology being gas turbines," said Bill Thompson, generation manager for the Project and Contracting Office, a Defense Department reconstruction agency. "But we're here and this is what we've got."
In many cases, the fuel in question has been heavy fuel oil, a tarry byproduct of Iraq's primitive refineries that has wreaked havoc on the natural gas generators. One turbine installed by the U.S. at a cost of $40 million at the Baiji power complex in north-central Iraq already needs replacement.
"My concept as a layman [is that] we basically wrecked the unit" that needs replacing, said Dennis Karns, the Army Corps official heading the power sector.
The U.S. simply canceled other plants. It scrapped the Bechtel project, a planned power station near the Mansuriya fields in northeastern Iraq, because it feared it would take too long to build and cost too much, said officials with the U.S. Agency for International Development.
Although the plant was never built, the U.S. paid Bechtel $69 million for drawing up plans, setting up a construction camp and buying two generators that were later installed elsewhere, USAID officials said. Bechtel also received $160 million to cover security and other unexpected costs in connection with other reconstruction projects.
"Starting about late 2004, we were finding out that security constrained our ability to build all the things we wanted to," said Heather Layman, a USAID spokeswoman.
A Bechtel official said the money was well spent since it paid for the gas-fired generators now in use elsewhere and provided the Iraqis with plant designs.
"Our position is it was a viable project," said the official, who asked not to be identified for security reasons.
The decision to rely so heavily on natural-gas-fired generators is a source of great frustration in the current Iraqi government. Shalash, the electricity minister, said the U.S. and the interim Iraqi government shared blame for not better understanding Iraq's power infrastructure.
"It was a combination of lack of knowledge and … people who were from the outside who did not have experience," Shalash said. "All they were doing is signing contracts, buying turbines and not bringing electricity to people."
Another serious problem was the failure to charge private consumers for electricity, which a U.S. advisor called one of the worst mistakes of the U.S.-led occupation, according to a recent report by the U.S. Institute of Peace, a congressionally funded think tank.
The virtually free power encouraged wealthy and middle-class Iraqis to go on a spending spree after the invasion, buying refrigerators, heaters and other goods.
As a result, demand for electricity surged far past supply. When the U.S. finishes its building program, Iraq will be able to produce about 5,500 megawatts on a sustained basis, about 1,000 more than the country produced under Hussein's government. But demand has soared to 9,000 megawatts during Iraq's sweltering summers and chilly winters.
Thus, while the U.S. will have technically reached its goal of restoring Iraq's power output to prewar levels, the average Iraqi will have about 10 to 12 hours of power a day, less than under Hussein. Those living in urban centers such as Baghdad, Basra and Mosul are especially affected.
Karns, of the Army Corps of Engineers, said it would be "multiple decades" before Iraqi homes had power 24 hours a day.
"In spite of all these problems, we have made a significant impact in keeping the system stable," Karns said. "They're in a much better starting position as they continue forward."
The lack of reliable electricity is one of the chief frustrations of Iraqis. Almost everyone quizzed about the pace of the reconstruction uttered the phrase "maku kahrabaa"— there's no electricity.
"Right now, our issue is electricity," said Raheem Abdul Sadr, a shopkeeper who was selling brightly colored tricycles and backpacks recently in Baghdad's Sadr City. "We have no issues except electricity."
His friend shook his head and concurred: "Electricity, electricity, electricity."
Unexpectedly high costs for security and maintenance and operational problems also have plagued reconstruction.
By last fall, the Army Corps had run out of cash for several projects being funded with Iraqi oil revenue — money spent in addition to the $4 billion in U.S. funding. They handed the unfinished plants to the Iraqis, hoping they would finish the work.
Instead, the Iraqis did nothing, their own budget hampered by the insurgency, inefficient state spending, oil production shortfalls and persistent corruption, U.S. officials said.
In January, corps officials decided to renew work on dozens of generators that had been abandoned, this time with U.S. money, in a plan called Project Phoenix.
The U.S. eventually paid Fluor-AMEC, a U.S.-British joint venture, $93 million to complete the work and add 700 megawatts of power to Iraq's grid.
The delays, however, resulted in millions of angry Iraqis having to sweat through the summer.
"We started it much too late," Thompson said.
Most of the power projects that were completed, U.S. officials said, have been poorly operated by the Iraqis, who before the invasion relied heavily on foreign contractors to run the plants.
By one U.S. estimate, Iraq would have an additional 1,000 megawatts of power if all of its 19 plants, with 142 generators, were run correctly.
To help remedy the problem, USAID sent scores of Iraqi engineers abroad for training as part of a multimillion-dollar effort to create "tiger teams" that would return and train other Iraqis.
Instead, the engineers were dispersed to different plants when they returned and provided very little training, reconstruction officials said.
"We put the tiger teams out there, but we never got anything out of them," Karns said.
There have been some successes. The larger problems of the power sector don't seem to have trickled down to the Khor Zubayr plant south of Basra, which will be the last to go online.
Chris Frabott, an Army Corps official, has spent the last several months installing two mammoth generators. If all goes as planned, they will actually use natural gas piped in from a nearby oil field.
The plant was abuzz with work one day last summer. More than 400 Iraqi workers were employed at the site, which sits alone in the middle of flat, barren desert.
When the plant goes online Thursday, it will deliver 500 megawatts of power to Iraq — about 10% of current capacity. Frabott looked up at one of the generators and patted its side.
"It's a lot of work," he said. "A lot of money."
------------------------------
Citation: T. Christian Miller. "U.S. Missteps Leave Iraqis in the Dark," Los Angeles Times, 25 December 2005.
Original URL: http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/iraq/complete/la-fg-power25dec25,1,5481215.story?coll=la-iraq-complete
------------------------------
Iraqi court disqualifies 90 candidates; Baath Party ties cited in ruling likely to further anger Sunnis
By Richard A. Oppel, Jr.
New York Times, 25 December 2005
Baghdad -- An Iraqi court has ordered at least 90 candidates in the recent national elections disqualified from serving in the new Iraqi parliament because of their ties to Saddam Hussein's Baath Party.
The head of Iraq's electoral commission, Adel al-Lami, said at a news conference here Saturday afternoon that the commission would abide by the court's ruling.
While it was not clear whether more than a handful of the affected candidates would have won seats in the 275-member parliament, the ruling bars some Sunni Arab leaders who probably would have won. It also is sure to stoke already deep resentment among Sunni Arabs, who are likely to have a limited role in the new government despite a large turnout at the ballot box nine days ago.
Sunni Arabs, Shiite Arabs and ethnic Kurds voted overwhelmingly Dec. 15 for lists of parliamentary candidates that represented their own groups. According to preliminary, unofficial ballot counts, the largest share of votes was won by the alliance of Shiite Muslim religious parties that leads Iraq's outgoing government.
That voting pattern, and the subsequent unrest and charges of fraud from minority Sunnis, who won fewer votes than they said they expected, have exacerbated distrust among Iraqis that has emerged since the fall of Hussein almost three years ago, Iraqi officials and Western diplomats said.
In recent weeks, Shiite and Sunni leaders have called for the formation of sectarian armies to police their respective regions -- a step some observers say could be a precursor to open clashes between the groups.
The Kurds, who dominate most of oil-rich northern Iraq, already have their own fighting force, as do several Shiite parties.
Most of the candidates affected by the anti-Baath ruling are Sunni Arabs, though some are secular Shiites and others opposed to the more conservative Shiite alliance. Several are leaders of the slate led by former Prime Minister Ayad Allawi.
Sunni Arab leaders have accused the dominant Shiite political parties of widespread ballot-box stuffing and other fraud, and have called for new elections. Several thousand Sunni Arabs demonstrated Friday in Baghdad.
On Saturday, Iraqi elections officials in Baghdad began examining ballot boxes from six polling sites in the capital that were subjects of fraud allegations.
Election officials also disclosed that some staff members from Iraq's Independent Election Commission were among those accused in the complaints of vote tampering. In addition to ballot-stuffing, the complaints include intimidation of voters to cast ballots for a specific list of candidates and refusing to record and forward to election officials in Baghdad witness accounts of fraud.
"There is great tension among Arab Sunnis," said Mahmoud al-Douri, an election adviser for one of the main Sunni political parties. "They feel like they voted in great numbers, but this isn't reflected in the results," he said.
Violence continued across the country Saturday. Gunmen killed eight people around Baghdad, and a U.S. soldier died from wounds sustained in a rocket-propelled grenade attack.
The soldier was assigned to the 205th Military Intelligence Brigade and was wounded in an attack while on patrol near the northern town of Hawija, the military said. Hawija Police Lt. Ali Abdullah said U.S. forces had responded to the attack by closing the town's main street and arresting three police nearby.
Elsewhere, three police officers were killed in Baquba by a booby-trapped motorcycle, and three civilians were killed during a mortar attack in Samarra.
About three-fifths of Iraq's population is Shiite, and early election results show that the main Shiite alliance will be the dominant force in the parliament. Moving to protect their showing on election day, Shiite leaders fired back Saturday at the Sunni allegations of voting fraud, calling the claims baseless and rejecting calls for new elections.
The leading Shiite coalition, the United Iraqi Alliance, called on Iraqis to move ahead with efforts to form a "national unity" government.
But senior officials in the alliance deepened the post-election turmoil by claiming that Islamic extremists and Hussein loyalists were at the forefront of those questioning the results. They also ruled out having anyone other than a Shiite member of their religious bloc become Iraq's new prime minister.
"The door is open for dialogue with our brothers and partners because we believe that Iraq cannot stand up without its main components," Jawad al-Maliki, a senior Alliance official, said at a news conference.
In the Shiite holy city of Najaf, Iraq's security adviser, Mowaffak al-Rubaie, emerged from a meeting with the nation's most revered Shiite leader, Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, and said the ayatollah had rebuffed calls for a new election. Rubaie quoted him as saying that "it is not possible to do it again and even to think about it."
Rubaie also said he believed the American-led alliance in Iraq would withdraw 50,000 troops over the next 12 months. The remaining military forces are likely to be withdrawn by the end of 2007, he added.
Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, who ended his trip to Iraq by serving Christmas Eve dinner to troops in Mosul, announced Friday a slight reduction of U.S. forces that is likely to result in two fewer Army battalions in Iraq by next spring.
Rubaie also vowed to rearrest former senior members of Hussein's government who have been released in the past week by U.S. forces. "Iraqi justice will pursue them because they committed crimes against Iraqis," said Rubaie. The detainees include four people who played a leading role in efforts to develop biological weapons for Hussein's government.
Rubaie's statement drew a response from the U.S. ambassador to Iraq, Zalmay Khalilzad, and Gen. George Casey, the senior U.S. commander, who said in a joint statement that the 22 detainees "no longer posed a security threat" and that the military "therefore had no legal basis to hold them any longer."
From his presidential retreat at Camp David, Md., President Bush called nine U.S. troops to recognize their service to the nation and wish them holiday cheer.
"The president wished them a Merry Christmas and thanked them for their service to our country," said White House spokesman Allen Abney. "He just wanted to tell them that he was thinking of them and their families at this holiday season and that the American people were behind them and supported their efforts overseas."
------------------------
Citation: Richard A. Oppel, Jr. "Iraqi court disqualifies 90 candidates; Baath Party ties cited in ruling likely to further anger Sunnis," New York Times, 25 December 2005.
Original URL: http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/chronicle/archive/2005/12/25/MNGMDGD86C1.DTL
------------------------
New York Times, 25 December 2005
Baghdad -- An Iraqi court has ordered at least 90 candidates in the recent national elections disqualified from serving in the new Iraqi parliament because of their ties to Saddam Hussein's Baath Party.
The head of Iraq's electoral commission, Adel al-Lami, said at a news conference here Saturday afternoon that the commission would abide by the court's ruling.
While it was not clear whether more than a handful of the affected candidates would have won seats in the 275-member parliament, the ruling bars some Sunni Arab leaders who probably would have won. It also is sure to stoke already deep resentment among Sunni Arabs, who are likely to have a limited role in the new government despite a large turnout at the ballot box nine days ago.
Sunni Arabs, Shiite Arabs and ethnic Kurds voted overwhelmingly Dec. 15 for lists of parliamentary candidates that represented their own groups. According to preliminary, unofficial ballot counts, the largest share of votes was won by the alliance of Shiite Muslim religious parties that leads Iraq's outgoing government.
That voting pattern, and the subsequent unrest and charges of fraud from minority Sunnis, who won fewer votes than they said they expected, have exacerbated distrust among Iraqis that has emerged since the fall of Hussein almost three years ago, Iraqi officials and Western diplomats said.
In recent weeks, Shiite and Sunni leaders have called for the formation of sectarian armies to police their respective regions -- a step some observers say could be a precursor to open clashes between the groups.
The Kurds, who dominate most of oil-rich northern Iraq, already have their own fighting force, as do several Shiite parties.
Most of the candidates affected by the anti-Baath ruling are Sunni Arabs, though some are secular Shiites and others opposed to the more conservative Shiite alliance. Several are leaders of the slate led by former Prime Minister Ayad Allawi.
Sunni Arab leaders have accused the dominant Shiite political parties of widespread ballot-box stuffing and other fraud, and have called for new elections. Several thousand Sunni Arabs demonstrated Friday in Baghdad.
On Saturday, Iraqi elections officials in Baghdad began examining ballot boxes from six polling sites in the capital that were subjects of fraud allegations.
Election officials also disclosed that some staff members from Iraq's Independent Election Commission were among those accused in the complaints of vote tampering. In addition to ballot-stuffing, the complaints include intimidation of voters to cast ballots for a specific list of candidates and refusing to record and forward to election officials in Baghdad witness accounts of fraud.
"There is great tension among Arab Sunnis," said Mahmoud al-Douri, an election adviser for one of the main Sunni political parties. "They feel like they voted in great numbers, but this isn't reflected in the results," he said.
Violence continued across the country Saturday. Gunmen killed eight people around Baghdad, and a U.S. soldier died from wounds sustained in a rocket-propelled grenade attack.
The soldier was assigned to the 205th Military Intelligence Brigade and was wounded in an attack while on patrol near the northern town of Hawija, the military said. Hawija Police Lt. Ali Abdullah said U.S. forces had responded to the attack by closing the town's main street and arresting three police nearby.
Elsewhere, three police officers were killed in Baquba by a booby-trapped motorcycle, and three civilians were killed during a mortar attack in Samarra.
About three-fifths of Iraq's population is Shiite, and early election results show that the main Shiite alliance will be the dominant force in the parliament. Moving to protect their showing on election day, Shiite leaders fired back Saturday at the Sunni allegations of voting fraud, calling the claims baseless and rejecting calls for new elections.
The leading Shiite coalition, the United Iraqi Alliance, called on Iraqis to move ahead with efforts to form a "national unity" government.
But senior officials in the alliance deepened the post-election turmoil by claiming that Islamic extremists and Hussein loyalists were at the forefront of those questioning the results. They also ruled out having anyone other than a Shiite member of their religious bloc become Iraq's new prime minister.
"The door is open for dialogue with our brothers and partners because we believe that Iraq cannot stand up without its main components," Jawad al-Maliki, a senior Alliance official, said at a news conference.
In the Shiite holy city of Najaf, Iraq's security adviser, Mowaffak al-Rubaie, emerged from a meeting with the nation's most revered Shiite leader, Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, and said the ayatollah had rebuffed calls for a new election. Rubaie quoted him as saying that "it is not possible to do it again and even to think about it."
Rubaie also said he believed the American-led alliance in Iraq would withdraw 50,000 troops over the next 12 months. The remaining military forces are likely to be withdrawn by the end of 2007, he added.
Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, who ended his trip to Iraq by serving Christmas Eve dinner to troops in Mosul, announced Friday a slight reduction of U.S. forces that is likely to result in two fewer Army battalions in Iraq by next spring.
Rubaie also vowed to rearrest former senior members of Hussein's government who have been released in the past week by U.S. forces. "Iraqi justice will pursue them because they committed crimes against Iraqis," said Rubaie. The detainees include four people who played a leading role in efforts to develop biological weapons for Hussein's government.
Rubaie's statement drew a response from the U.S. ambassador to Iraq, Zalmay Khalilzad, and Gen. George Casey, the senior U.S. commander, who said in a joint statement that the 22 detainees "no longer posed a security threat" and that the military "therefore had no legal basis to hold them any longer."
From his presidential retreat at Camp David, Md., President Bush called nine U.S. troops to recognize their service to the nation and wish them holiday cheer.
"The president wished them a Merry Christmas and thanked them for their service to our country," said White House spokesman Allen Abney. "He just wanted to tell them that he was thinking of them and their families at this holiday season and that the American people were behind them and supported their efforts overseas."
------------------------
Citation: Richard A. Oppel, Jr. "Iraqi court disqualifies 90 candidates; Baath Party ties cited in ruling likely to further anger Sunnis," New York Times, 25 December 2005.
Original URL: http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/chronicle/archive/2005/12/25/MNGMDGD86C1.DTL
------------------------
Jails handover on hold after abuse of detainees
By Stephen Farrell
The Times, UK, 27 December 2005
US MILITARY commanders will not hand over prisons or detainees to the Iraqi Government until it begins treating prisoners better, officials in Baghdad said yesterday.
The decision comes after Sunni protests that inmates are tortured in prisons run by the Shia-led Interior Ministry, and the discovery of 120 beaten detainees in two jails this month.
Lieutenant-Colonel Barry Johnson said that detention facilities will be transferred over time but human rights and international law had to be followed. Colonel Johnson, a military spokesman, said: “The transition will be based on meeting standards, not on a timeline.”
The decision comes weeks after a public plea by Fallujah city council officials to Zalmay Khalilzad, the US Ambassador, for Sunni detainees to be held in US prisons, not Iraqi ones.
Despite the US abuse of prisoners at Abu Ghraib, the Fallujah officials said that they feared Sunnis were disappearing into Interior Ministry facilities never to be seen again.
Insurgents stepped up their violence yesterday, killing at least 20 people in and around Baghdad. The victims included one US and five Iraqi soldiers and six Iraqi police.
A Shia politician was murdered and a provincial governor narrowly escaped an assassination attempt. As the violence increased, the lawyer for Barzan al-Tikriti, Saddam Hussein’s half-brother and co-defendant, claimed that US officials had offered him a “political” post in exchange for testimony against the former dictator. Khalil al-Dulaimi, a defence lawyer, told the Jordanian al-Arab al-Yawm news- paper that the former secret police chief was tortured after saying that he would “never betray” his eldest brother.
The US has repeatedly denied harming Saddam. Iraqi judges said that none of the eight murder defendants had complained of mistreatment.
-----------------------------
Citation: Stephen Farrell. "Jails handover on hold after abuse of detainees," The Times, UK, 27 December 2005.
Original URL: http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,7374-1959627,00.html
-----------------------------
The Times, UK, 27 December 2005
US MILITARY commanders will not hand over prisons or detainees to the Iraqi Government until it begins treating prisoners better, officials in Baghdad said yesterday.
The decision comes after Sunni protests that inmates are tortured in prisons run by the Shia-led Interior Ministry, and the discovery of 120 beaten detainees in two jails this month.
Lieutenant-Colonel Barry Johnson said that detention facilities will be transferred over time but human rights and international law had to be followed. Colonel Johnson, a military spokesman, said: “The transition will be based on meeting standards, not on a timeline.”
The decision comes weeks after a public plea by Fallujah city council officials to Zalmay Khalilzad, the US Ambassador, for Sunni detainees to be held in US prisons, not Iraqi ones.
Despite the US abuse of prisoners at Abu Ghraib, the Fallujah officials said that they feared Sunnis were disappearing into Interior Ministry facilities never to be seen again.
Insurgents stepped up their violence yesterday, killing at least 20 people in and around Baghdad. The victims included one US and five Iraqi soldiers and six Iraqi police.
A Shia politician was murdered and a provincial governor narrowly escaped an assassination attempt. As the violence increased, the lawyer for Barzan al-Tikriti, Saddam Hussein’s half-brother and co-defendant, claimed that US officials had offered him a “political” post in exchange for testimony against the former dictator. Khalil al-Dulaimi, a defence lawyer, told the Jordanian al-Arab al-Yawm news- paper that the former secret police chief was tortured after saying that he would “never betray” his eldest brother.
The US has repeatedly denied harming Saddam. Iraqi judges said that none of the eight murder defendants had complained of mistreatment.
-----------------------------
Citation: Stephen Farrell. "Jails handover on hold after abuse of detainees," The Times, UK, 27 December 2005.
Original URL: http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,7374-1959627,00.html
-----------------------------
Violence Defies Reson for Many in Iraq
By Mariam Fam
Associated Press, 27 December 2005
Jameela Abbas says her youngest son, Eissa, was "the flower of the house."
Three months ago, she bathed him, helped him get dressed, combed his hair and sprayed him with perfume before the 6-year-old left with his father for Syria. Nearly four hours later, her husband called to say their son was mistakenly killed by U.S. fire, becoming one of the many Iraqis who die simply for being in the wrong place at the wrong time.
In Iraq, people are killed for many reasons: working with the Americans, joining the security forces or belonging to the wrong sect or ethnic group.
But many others are killed without apparent reason in an often murky conflict that pits Islamic extremists and nationalist insurgents against U.S. troops and Iraqi government forces.
Their deaths not only leave families and neighbors baffled, they fuel a sense of vulnerability and insecurity. For a country increasingly polarized along ethnic and sectarian lines, it is perhaps ironic that the violence is so indiscriminate.
___
Eissa's birthday came two months before he died.
"He was about to enter school. I had just finished his paperwork," said Abbas. The photos she took for his school application now grace the walls of her house in Baghdad's eastern Shaab neighborhood.
"I look at them a lot," she said. "Eissa was beautiful. He was beautiful. He was chubby. His eyes were big. His hair was long. I liked to spoil him."
"He was always with me. He went to the market with me," she added. "Now, I feel lonely."
The last time Abbas saw her son, he was excited about traveling with his father, a driver, on a work trip to Syria.
"Dad will take me to the amusement park," he told her.
"I felt like he's not coming back to me. It's the feeling of a mother, but he was happy," Abbas recalled.
Abbas said she did not know what the U.S. troops were firing at when they hit her husband's car as he was driving in the Abu Ghraib area in western Baghdad.
"Eissa was sleeping in the arms of his brother. The bullet hit him in the head," Abbas said. "He died in his sleep. There was no time for him to wake up or move a muscle."
When she saw her son's body, Abbas slapped her face, beat her chest and ripped off her flowing robe. She wailed and sobbed as U.S. troops tried to calm her.
"It is a mistake. We didn't mean to kill the child. We will do anything you want," she said they told her. "They apologized, but I didn't accept their apology."
She never heard from them since, she complained. She wants the U.S. military to pay her money in compensation.
Queries to the U.S. military about the case went unanswered after an initial response that they would look into it.
Ali, her other son, was wounded.
"He is now like a mad person. It's like something got into his head. He stopped going to school," she said of Ali, 16.
Her husband stopped working and the family now lives off its savings, she added.
Abbas said she cannot forgive those responsible for Eissa's death.
"I feel like I want to drink the blood of those who killed my son," she said. "I want to kill them the way they killed him and killed me."
___
Khawla al-Azami, 52, wishes the car bomb that killed her eldest son had taken her life instead.
"What would I do with a life so painful?" she said. "I don't want it."
It was June 2004, when a car exploded in the Sunni neighborhood of Azamiyah where she lives.
Residents rushed to the car. They heard voices of people trapped inside: "Help! Help!" A bigger crowd gathered trying to open the car's doors. Boom! The car blew up again.
The voices calling out for help were not of real people, al-Azami said. It was a recording.
Al-Azami was a few yards away from the car when the second explosion sounded.
Her two sons, Ziad and Mohammed, were among the crowd.
She saw blood gushing out of the arm of Mohammed, then 14.
"Mama, Ziad has been hit. He died," he told her, oblivious to the pain in his own arm. Ziad was 26.
"I carried him myself and took him to the hospital. I carried him and he was dead," she said, bursting into tears. "He dropped out of school so that he could work and support the family. Now, everything is gone."
Three people were killed on al-Azami's street alone. Seven were wounded, some now confined to wheelchairs.
"There were no targets in the area. No U.S. troops. No government offices. No police stations," she said. "We have nothing to do with politics. We mind our own business and just try to scrape out a living."
Residents say they saw men detonating the car from a distance, but al-Azami maintains the Americans planted the car bomb to punish residents because a U.S. patrol was attacked at the same spot.
When asked about the possibility that insurgents were responsible, she said: "Maybe it was terrorists. But it's the Americans who brought the terrorists in. Let them close the borders."
The notion that time heals is a myth, she said.
"It gets even more difficult. It's like someone has stuck a nail in my head and my heart."
The scene of her carrying Ziad's bloodied body plays through her mind every time one of her children goes out of the house. She wants her daughter to quit her job.
"There is no security. You don't feel safe even in your own home. You go to bed terrified and you wake up terrified," she said.
Asked what would make her feel better, al-Azami said: "We should get rid of the Americans and of the criminal terrorists they have brought us."
Then she paused. "But nothing in the whole world can make up for my loss."
___
At first, Saad Kadhim did not think much of the masked gunmen who walked by his produce store. He thought they were police officers. Police, a frequent insurgent target, often cover their faces to protect their identities.
But he knew something was wrong when he heard gunshots. He rushed out, and saw the men firing in the air to keep people away.
Two stores down the road, his cousin, Naseer al-Nasrawi, was lying on his back in a pool of blood, killed by at least 12 bullets. His eyes were still open.
The gunmen fled in a black car.
Kadhim says that to this day he does not know why his 40-year-old cousin was killed.
"I know Naseer very well. He had no enemies. He had no party affiliations. We are very confused."
Since the attack, Kadhim has been feeling threatened.
"I don't have problems with anyone and yet I sit at my store looking left and right all the time," he said. "I look around when I am walking on the street. I don't feel safe."
"When I see a policeman standing next to my store, I ask him to leave. How can I tell that he is in fact a policeman? You can't tell a policeman from a terrorist these days."
Asked if he believed the attack was motivated by divisions between Shiite and Sunni Muslims, he quickly ruled out the possibility. Al-Nasrawi, like himself, was a Shiite who lived in Baghdad's western Jihad neighborhood.
"No. No. No. In Jihad we live together Sunnis and Shiites. We don't have discrimination. I don't feel any difference between my Sunni neighbors and the Shiite ones."
He then seemed to be having second thoughts, speculating the killer may have wanted to "create sedition."
"If only I knew the reason, maybe I would have felt a little better," he said.
--------------------------------
Citation: Mariam Fam. "Violence Defies Reson for Many in Iraq," Associated Press, 27 December 2005.
Original URL: http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20051227/ap_on_re_mi_ea/iraq_random_violence
--------------------------------
Associated Press, 27 December 2005
Jameela Abbas says her youngest son, Eissa, was "the flower of the house."
Three months ago, she bathed him, helped him get dressed, combed his hair and sprayed him with perfume before the 6-year-old left with his father for Syria. Nearly four hours later, her husband called to say their son was mistakenly killed by U.S. fire, becoming one of the many Iraqis who die simply for being in the wrong place at the wrong time.
In Iraq, people are killed for many reasons: working with the Americans, joining the security forces or belonging to the wrong sect or ethnic group.
But many others are killed without apparent reason in an often murky conflict that pits Islamic extremists and nationalist insurgents against U.S. troops and Iraqi government forces.
Their deaths not only leave families and neighbors baffled, they fuel a sense of vulnerability and insecurity. For a country increasingly polarized along ethnic and sectarian lines, it is perhaps ironic that the violence is so indiscriminate.
___
Eissa's birthday came two months before he died.
"He was about to enter school. I had just finished his paperwork," said Abbas. The photos she took for his school application now grace the walls of her house in Baghdad's eastern Shaab neighborhood.
"I look at them a lot," she said. "Eissa was beautiful. He was beautiful. He was chubby. His eyes were big. His hair was long. I liked to spoil him."
"He was always with me. He went to the market with me," she added. "Now, I feel lonely."
The last time Abbas saw her son, he was excited about traveling with his father, a driver, on a work trip to Syria.
"Dad will take me to the amusement park," he told her.
"I felt like he's not coming back to me. It's the feeling of a mother, but he was happy," Abbas recalled.
Abbas said she did not know what the U.S. troops were firing at when they hit her husband's car as he was driving in the Abu Ghraib area in western Baghdad.
"Eissa was sleeping in the arms of his brother. The bullet hit him in the head," Abbas said. "He died in his sleep. There was no time for him to wake up or move a muscle."
When she saw her son's body, Abbas slapped her face, beat her chest and ripped off her flowing robe. She wailed and sobbed as U.S. troops tried to calm her.
"It is a mistake. We didn't mean to kill the child. We will do anything you want," she said they told her. "They apologized, but I didn't accept their apology."
She never heard from them since, she complained. She wants the U.S. military to pay her money in compensation.
Queries to the U.S. military about the case went unanswered after an initial response that they would look into it.
Ali, her other son, was wounded.
"He is now like a mad person. It's like something got into his head. He stopped going to school," she said of Ali, 16.
Her husband stopped working and the family now lives off its savings, she added.
Abbas said she cannot forgive those responsible for Eissa's death.
"I feel like I want to drink the blood of those who killed my son," she said. "I want to kill them the way they killed him and killed me."
___
Khawla al-Azami, 52, wishes the car bomb that killed her eldest son had taken her life instead.
"What would I do with a life so painful?" she said. "I don't want it."
It was June 2004, when a car exploded in the Sunni neighborhood of Azamiyah where she lives.
Residents rushed to the car. They heard voices of people trapped inside: "Help! Help!" A bigger crowd gathered trying to open the car's doors. Boom! The car blew up again.
The voices calling out for help were not of real people, al-Azami said. It was a recording.
Al-Azami was a few yards away from the car when the second explosion sounded.
Her two sons, Ziad and Mohammed, were among the crowd.
She saw blood gushing out of the arm of Mohammed, then 14.
"Mama, Ziad has been hit. He died," he told her, oblivious to the pain in his own arm. Ziad was 26.
"I carried him myself and took him to the hospital. I carried him and he was dead," she said, bursting into tears. "He dropped out of school so that he could work and support the family. Now, everything is gone."
Three people were killed on al-Azami's street alone. Seven were wounded, some now confined to wheelchairs.
"There were no targets in the area. No U.S. troops. No government offices. No police stations," she said. "We have nothing to do with politics. We mind our own business and just try to scrape out a living."
Residents say they saw men detonating the car from a distance, but al-Azami maintains the Americans planted the car bomb to punish residents because a U.S. patrol was attacked at the same spot.
When asked about the possibility that insurgents were responsible, she said: "Maybe it was terrorists. But it's the Americans who brought the terrorists in. Let them close the borders."
The notion that time heals is a myth, she said.
"It gets even more difficult. It's like someone has stuck a nail in my head and my heart."
The scene of her carrying Ziad's bloodied body plays through her mind every time one of her children goes out of the house. She wants her daughter to quit her job.
"There is no security. You don't feel safe even in your own home. You go to bed terrified and you wake up terrified," she said.
Asked what would make her feel better, al-Azami said: "We should get rid of the Americans and of the criminal terrorists they have brought us."
Then she paused. "But nothing in the whole world can make up for my loss."
___
At first, Saad Kadhim did not think much of the masked gunmen who walked by his produce store. He thought they were police officers. Police, a frequent insurgent target, often cover their faces to protect their identities.
But he knew something was wrong when he heard gunshots. He rushed out, and saw the men firing in the air to keep people away.
Two stores down the road, his cousin, Naseer al-Nasrawi, was lying on his back in a pool of blood, killed by at least 12 bullets. His eyes were still open.
The gunmen fled in a black car.
Kadhim says that to this day he does not know why his 40-year-old cousin was killed.
"I know Naseer very well. He had no enemies. He had no party affiliations. We are very confused."
Since the attack, Kadhim has been feeling threatened.
"I don't have problems with anyone and yet I sit at my store looking left and right all the time," he said. "I look around when I am walking on the street. I don't feel safe."
"When I see a policeman standing next to my store, I ask him to leave. How can I tell that he is in fact a policeman? You can't tell a policeman from a terrorist these days."
Asked if he believed the attack was motivated by divisions between Shiite and Sunni Muslims, he quickly ruled out the possibility. Al-Nasrawi, like himself, was a Shiite who lived in Baghdad's western Jihad neighborhood.
"No. No. No. In Jihad we live together Sunnis and Shiites. We don't have discrimination. I don't feel any difference between my Sunni neighbors and the Shiite ones."
He then seemed to be having second thoughts, speculating the killer may have wanted to "create sedition."
"If only I knew the reason, maybe I would have felt a little better," he said.
--------------------------------
Citation: Mariam Fam. "Violence Defies Reson for Many in Iraq," Associated Press, 27 December 2005.
Original URL: http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20051227/ap_on_re_mi_ea/iraq_random_violence
--------------------------------
Iraq Vote Shows Sunnis Are Few in New Military
By Richard A. Oppel, Jr.
The New York Times, 27 December 2005
BAGHDAD, Iraq, Dec. 26 - An analysis of preliminary voting results released Monday from the Dec. 15 parliamentary election suggests that in contrast to the remarkable surge in Sunni Arab participation in the political process, the Sunnis still have comparatively little representation in the Iraqi security forces.
The indication is troubling because Sunni Arabs, who are about 20 percent of Iraq's population, came out in greater numbers largely as a response to the recent domination of the government by Shiites and Kurds. In particular, Sunni Arabs say they fear that the security forces will be used against them.
American military commanders say that it is crucial to build an Iraqi Army representative of Iraq's ethnicity, and that the alternative is to risk the consequences of Shiite and Kurdish forces' trying on their own to pacify insurgent hotbeds dominated by Sunni Arab militants.
It has been suspected that Sunni Arabs are underrepresented in the new military and police. Election officials believe that a special tally from the Dec. 15 vote helps to detail the disparity, mostly because voting in Iraq has almost completely been along ethnic and sectarian divisions.
In the special tally - which the officials said overwhelmingly consisted of most of the ballots cast by security forces, but also included votes from hospital patients and prisoners - about 7 percent of the votes were cast for the three main Sunni Arab parties. Across the whole population, though, officials have estimated, Sunni Arab candidates won about 20 percent of the seats in the new Parliament.
Along the same lines, the tally also suggested that Kurdish pesh merga militiamen seemed to have a heavily disproportionate presence in the security forces.
The figures, which are preliminary, are far from exact and are nothing like a census of the security forces. And it is impossible to know whether Sunni Arab soldiers and police officers turned out to vote to the same high degree as the overall Sunni population.
A spokesman for the American military command that oversees training of the Iraqi forces also said that while he did not know the security forces' ethnic mix, he believed that there were more Sunni troops than the election data suggest.
Yet the results provide some clues to the composition and political sympathies of Iraqi soldiers, a crucial but elusive factor in a country struggling to overcome deep sectarian divisions and defeat the mostly Sunni Arab insurgency. And the estimation seems to be a sign of how complete the reversal of fortune has been for Sunni Arabs, who dominated security forces under Saddam Hussein.
After a respite following the election, more than 70 Iraqis have been killed in the last four days, including more than 20 killed Monday in a string of ambushes and car bombings.
At least six car bombs detonated in Baghdad, killing five Iraqis. In Baquba, north of the capital, five policeman died in an early morning ambush. And a rocket-propelled grenade also killed an American soldier on patrol in the capital.
The voting data released Monday were just one sliver of preliminary results indicating that although Sunni Arabs will play a larger role in the new Parliament than they did in the interim government, where they were almost completely shut out, Shiites will once again dominate Parliament.
The Sunni Arabs have accused the Shiite-dominated government of widespread voting fraud and have demanded a new election. Sunnis, and some secular Shiites, have threatened to boycott the new government. But any chance of a large-scale election rerun has been all but ruled out. Officials from the independent electoral commission said Monday that they saw no reason for new elections - an opinion seconded by the chief United Nations election official here.
"We do think there might have been fraud in a few isolated places, but we don't see this widespread fraud people are talking about," Craig Jenness, head of the United Nations electoral assistance team in Iraq, said in an interview Monday evening.
"It wasn't perfect, but it was pretty credible given the circumstances," he said, adding, "There's nothing we see that would suggest a rerun is warranted."
Though more attention has been focused on the ethnic makeup of the government, the American military is very sensitive to the perception that the Iraqi forces have few Sunni Arabs, especially in the north, where Kurdish officials have made plain their desire to expand their territory into Sunni Arab and Turkmen regions. To many American commanders, a proportionate representation of Shiite, Sunni and Kurdish soldiers is vital to the Iraq's long-term stability and cohesion.
But on that score there still appears to be a way to go, according to the numbers from the special election tally. In that category, 45 percent of votes were cast for the main Kurdish slate of candidates, compared with the combined total of just 7 percent for the three main Sunni Arab political parties. The principal Shiite political alliance received 30 percent of the votes in the category.
The heavily disproportionate votes for the Kurds and the slight showing for the Sunnis primarily reflected their relative numbers in the security forces, election officials here said.
By contrast, while final election results will not be available for another week, Iraqi news reports have estimated that Kurds and Sunni Arabs each received perhaps 20 percent of the overall national vote for seats in Parliament. The main Shiite political alliance is expected to take slightly less than 50 percent of the seats. Those estimates more closely follow Iraq's demographic makeup.
Lt. Col. Fred Wellman, a spokesman for the military command that oversees training of Iraqi forces, said some Iraqi soldiers voted near their homes on Dec. 15 and would not have been included in the special tally, though he said he did not know whether those included a disproportionate number of soldiers from any one ethnic group.
Colonel Wellman said he did not have detailed estimates of the ethnic composition of the Iraqi military, though he said Sunni Arab representation "clearly lags." He also emphasized the efforts being made to recruit Sunni soldiers, including more than 4,000 who have been signed up in the last six months.
"One of the biggest goals of this enterprise is to build an army that reflects the national makeup of Iraq and deploys those units away from their home," he said. "There are great efforts to bring Sunnis into the fold and balance out the army as much as possible."
In addition to the special tally of votes from the military, prisons and hospitals, the Iraqi election commission also released separate figures showing that Iraqis living abroad voted evenly for the main Kurdish and Shiite coalitions, with each receiving 30 percent of the overseas vote. The figures reflected the high number of expatriates who fled Mr. Hussein's rule, whose government and military was dominated by and favored Sunni Arabs.
In the overseas tally, the three main Sunni Arab parties combined received about 7.5 percent of the vote. The slate of candidates backed by former prime minister Ayad Allawi, a secular Shiite and former Baathist, received 12 percent.
Reporting for this article was contributed by Abdul Razzaq al-Saiedi, Mona Mahmoud, Khalid al-Ansary and Omar al-Neami.
-----------------------
Citation: Richard A. Oppel, Jr. "Iraq Vote Shows Sunnis Are Few in New Military," The New York Times, 27 December 2005.
Original URL: http://www.nytimes.com/2005/12/27/international/middleeast/27iraq.html
-----------------------
The New York Times, 27 December 2005
BAGHDAD, Iraq, Dec. 26 - An analysis of preliminary voting results released Monday from the Dec. 15 parliamentary election suggests that in contrast to the remarkable surge in Sunni Arab participation in the political process, the Sunnis still have comparatively little representation in the Iraqi security forces.
The indication is troubling because Sunni Arabs, who are about 20 percent of Iraq's population, came out in greater numbers largely as a response to the recent domination of the government by Shiites and Kurds. In particular, Sunni Arabs say they fear that the security forces will be used against them.
American military commanders say that it is crucial to build an Iraqi Army representative of Iraq's ethnicity, and that the alternative is to risk the consequences of Shiite and Kurdish forces' trying on their own to pacify insurgent hotbeds dominated by Sunni Arab militants.
It has been suspected that Sunni Arabs are underrepresented in the new military and police. Election officials believe that a special tally from the Dec. 15 vote helps to detail the disparity, mostly because voting in Iraq has almost completely been along ethnic and sectarian divisions.
In the special tally - which the officials said overwhelmingly consisted of most of the ballots cast by security forces, but also included votes from hospital patients and prisoners - about 7 percent of the votes were cast for the three main Sunni Arab parties. Across the whole population, though, officials have estimated, Sunni Arab candidates won about 20 percent of the seats in the new Parliament.
Along the same lines, the tally also suggested that Kurdish pesh merga militiamen seemed to have a heavily disproportionate presence in the security forces.
The figures, which are preliminary, are far from exact and are nothing like a census of the security forces. And it is impossible to know whether Sunni Arab soldiers and police officers turned out to vote to the same high degree as the overall Sunni population.
A spokesman for the American military command that oversees training of the Iraqi forces also said that while he did not know the security forces' ethnic mix, he believed that there were more Sunni troops than the election data suggest.
Yet the results provide some clues to the composition and political sympathies of Iraqi soldiers, a crucial but elusive factor in a country struggling to overcome deep sectarian divisions and defeat the mostly Sunni Arab insurgency. And the estimation seems to be a sign of how complete the reversal of fortune has been for Sunni Arabs, who dominated security forces under Saddam Hussein.
After a respite following the election, more than 70 Iraqis have been killed in the last four days, including more than 20 killed Monday in a string of ambushes and car bombings.
At least six car bombs detonated in Baghdad, killing five Iraqis. In Baquba, north of the capital, five policeman died in an early morning ambush. And a rocket-propelled grenade also killed an American soldier on patrol in the capital.
The voting data released Monday were just one sliver of preliminary results indicating that although Sunni Arabs will play a larger role in the new Parliament than they did in the interim government, where they were almost completely shut out, Shiites will once again dominate Parliament.
The Sunni Arabs have accused the Shiite-dominated government of widespread voting fraud and have demanded a new election. Sunnis, and some secular Shiites, have threatened to boycott the new government. But any chance of a large-scale election rerun has been all but ruled out. Officials from the independent electoral commission said Monday that they saw no reason for new elections - an opinion seconded by the chief United Nations election official here.
"We do think there might have been fraud in a few isolated places, but we don't see this widespread fraud people are talking about," Craig Jenness, head of the United Nations electoral assistance team in Iraq, said in an interview Monday evening.
"It wasn't perfect, but it was pretty credible given the circumstances," he said, adding, "There's nothing we see that would suggest a rerun is warranted."
Though more attention has been focused on the ethnic makeup of the government, the American military is very sensitive to the perception that the Iraqi forces have few Sunni Arabs, especially in the north, where Kurdish officials have made plain their desire to expand their territory into Sunni Arab and Turkmen regions. To many American commanders, a proportionate representation of Shiite, Sunni and Kurdish soldiers is vital to the Iraq's long-term stability and cohesion.
But on that score there still appears to be a way to go, according to the numbers from the special election tally. In that category, 45 percent of votes were cast for the main Kurdish slate of candidates, compared with the combined total of just 7 percent for the three main Sunni Arab political parties. The principal Shiite political alliance received 30 percent of the votes in the category.
The heavily disproportionate votes for the Kurds and the slight showing for the Sunnis primarily reflected their relative numbers in the security forces, election officials here said.
By contrast, while final election results will not be available for another week, Iraqi news reports have estimated that Kurds and Sunni Arabs each received perhaps 20 percent of the overall national vote for seats in Parliament. The main Shiite political alliance is expected to take slightly less than 50 percent of the seats. Those estimates more closely follow Iraq's demographic makeup.
Lt. Col. Fred Wellman, a spokesman for the military command that oversees training of Iraqi forces, said some Iraqi soldiers voted near their homes on Dec. 15 and would not have been included in the special tally, though he said he did not know whether those included a disproportionate number of soldiers from any one ethnic group.
Colonel Wellman said he did not have detailed estimates of the ethnic composition of the Iraqi military, though he said Sunni Arab representation "clearly lags." He also emphasized the efforts being made to recruit Sunni soldiers, including more than 4,000 who have been signed up in the last six months.
"One of the biggest goals of this enterprise is to build an army that reflects the national makeup of Iraq and deploys those units away from their home," he said. "There are great efforts to bring Sunnis into the fold and balance out the army as much as possible."
In addition to the special tally of votes from the military, prisons and hospitals, the Iraqi election commission also released separate figures showing that Iraqis living abroad voted evenly for the main Kurdish and Shiite coalitions, with each receiving 30 percent of the overseas vote. The figures reflected the high number of expatriates who fled Mr. Hussein's rule, whose government and military was dominated by and favored Sunni Arabs.
In the overseas tally, the three main Sunni Arab parties combined received about 7.5 percent of the vote. The slate of candidates backed by former prime minister Ayad Allawi, a secular Shiite and former Baathist, received 12 percent.
Reporting for this article was contributed by Abdul Razzaq al-Saiedi, Mona Mahmoud, Khalid al-Ansary and Omar al-Neami.
-----------------------
Citation: Richard A. Oppel, Jr. "Iraq Vote Shows Sunnis Are Few in New Military," The New York Times, 27 December 2005.
Original URL: http://www.nytimes.com/2005/12/27/international/middleeast/27iraq.html
-----------------------
Iraqi Parties Try to Lay Foundation for Broad Coalition
By Dexter Filkins
The New York Times, 28 December 2005
BAGHDAD, Iraq, Dec. 27 - Iraqi political leaders on Tuesday began what are expected to be protracted negotiations to form a "national unity" government made up of Iraq's main sectarian and ethnic groups.
Abdul Aziz Hakim, the head of the Shiite coalition that is expected to capture the largest share of votes that were cast in the parliamentary election on Dec. 15, traveled to the northern city of Erbil to meet with Masoud Barzani, the leader of the Kurdish Democratic Party. On Wednesday, Mr. Hakim is expected to met with Jalal Talabani, the Iraqi president and head of the other large Kurdish party, the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan.
Those meetings are to be followed with discussions between the Kurdish leaders and at least two other groups: the Iraqi Consensus Front, a coalition of mostly Sunni political parties; and the National Democratic Rally, a group of secular parties led by Ayad Allawi, the former prime minister. Together, the five parties were expected to capture an overwhelming majority of the votes cast.
Iraqi officials said the Iraqi leaders are hoping to form a government that would be supported by most of those elected to the parliament, the National Assembly, and include representatives of all the major Iraqi parties. Such an outcome is strongly favored by the United States.
Preliminary election totals suggest that the Shiite collation will emerge as the largest single bloc in the 275-seat Assembly, though it will probably fall short of a majority. Owing to the complex rules governing the formation of a government, something close to a two-thirds majority will be needed for a coalition to assume power.
The Iraqi election commission is expected to announce final vote totals by the end of the week.
The negotiations come at a tense time. Preliminary results from the voting have incited anger among a number of Iraqi leaders, especially Sunnis, who complained that widespread fraud had tilted the election in favor of the Shiite alliance. Iraqi and American officials are especially worried about alienating the Sunnis, whose inclusion in the new government is considered vital in helping to marginalize the guerrilla insurgency.
American and Iraqi officials say they would like at least some of the Sunni parties to be included in a new government. They have expressed concern that the Shiite and the Kurdish parties, who are expected to win more than half of the seats in the National Assembly, would either leave the Sunnis out of the new government completely, or bring in the Sunnis only as a secondary partner.
"We will be working on closing the gaps between the different parliamentary blocs," said Foad Masoum, a senior leader of the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan.
There were signs on Tuesday that the good feelings that had spread in the wake of the large Sunni turnout on Dec. 15 were rapidly dissipating. In Baghdad, several thousand mostly Sunni voters gathered to protest the results of the election and what many said had been widespread fraud on behalf the Shiite coalition.
The demonstration, which also included supporters of Mr. Allawi, was the latest in a number of protests that appeared to be part of an orchestrated effort to gather more Sunni seats in the Assembly than had been won at the polls.
Saleh Mutlak, the leader of the Iraqi National Trend, a Sunni-dominated party, has made the most sweeping allegations of voter fraud. In an interview on Tuesday, Mr. Mutlak said that Shiite, Kurdish and Sunni parties had intimidated voters, destroyed ballots and stuffed some polling centers with more ballots than there were voters.
Some of the worst fraud, Mr. Mutlak said, had occurred in Diyala Province, where, he said, Kurdish militiamen had threatened some Arab voters and chased others from the polling places. In the mixed Arab-Kurdish city of Mosul, he said, Kurdish militiamen had prevented many Iraqi Arabs from voting.
But Mr. Mutlak seemed to hold scant faith that his allegations would be heard. Witnesses were afraid to come forward, he said, and the members of the Iraqi Independent Elections Commission seemed too close to the political parties to act fairly.
Moreover, Mr. Mutlak said he had struck an agreement with the Iraqi Consensus Front to coordinate their positions in any negotiations over entering a new government. Like many Iraqis, Mr. Mutlak said he worried over the increasingly sectarian nature of Iraqi politics.
"If this country goes sectarian, this is the end of Iraq," Mr. Mutlak said. "We are in a disaster."
On Tuesday, near Karbala, officials said they had discovered a mass grave containing the remains of dozens of people killed during an uprising against Saddam Hussein in 1991. Officials said workers had been installing a sewer network and stumbled across what appeared to be about 150 bodies, including those of many women and children.
Khalid Al-Ansary contributed reporting for this article.
--------------------------------
Citation: Dexter Filkins. "Iraqi Parties Try to Lay Foundation for Broad Coalition," The New York Times, 28 December 2005.
Original URL: http://www.nytimes.com/2005/12/28/international/middleeast/28iraq.html?adxnnl=1&adxnnlx=1135787824-XikdBXcK71cxfmUaYAvVdA
--------------------------------
The New York Times, 28 December 2005
BAGHDAD, Iraq, Dec. 27 - Iraqi political leaders on Tuesday began what are expected to be protracted negotiations to form a "national unity" government made up of Iraq's main sectarian and ethnic groups.
Abdul Aziz Hakim, the head of the Shiite coalition that is expected to capture the largest share of votes that were cast in the parliamentary election on Dec. 15, traveled to the northern city of Erbil to meet with Masoud Barzani, the leader of the Kurdish Democratic Party. On Wednesday, Mr. Hakim is expected to met with Jalal Talabani, the Iraqi president and head of the other large Kurdish party, the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan.
Those meetings are to be followed with discussions between the Kurdish leaders and at least two other groups: the Iraqi Consensus Front, a coalition of mostly Sunni political parties; and the National Democratic Rally, a group of secular parties led by Ayad Allawi, the former prime minister. Together, the five parties were expected to capture an overwhelming majority of the votes cast.
Iraqi officials said the Iraqi leaders are hoping to form a government that would be supported by most of those elected to the parliament, the National Assembly, and include representatives of all the major Iraqi parties. Such an outcome is strongly favored by the United States.
Preliminary election totals suggest that the Shiite collation will emerge as the largest single bloc in the 275-seat Assembly, though it will probably fall short of a majority. Owing to the complex rules governing the formation of a government, something close to a two-thirds majority will be needed for a coalition to assume power.
The Iraqi election commission is expected to announce final vote totals by the end of the week.
The negotiations come at a tense time. Preliminary results from the voting have incited anger among a number of Iraqi leaders, especially Sunnis, who complained that widespread fraud had tilted the election in favor of the Shiite alliance. Iraqi and American officials are especially worried about alienating the Sunnis, whose inclusion in the new government is considered vital in helping to marginalize the guerrilla insurgency.
American and Iraqi officials say they would like at least some of the Sunni parties to be included in a new government. They have expressed concern that the Shiite and the Kurdish parties, who are expected to win more than half of the seats in the National Assembly, would either leave the Sunnis out of the new government completely, or bring in the Sunnis only as a secondary partner.
"We will be working on closing the gaps between the different parliamentary blocs," said Foad Masoum, a senior leader of the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan.
There were signs on Tuesday that the good feelings that had spread in the wake of the large Sunni turnout on Dec. 15 were rapidly dissipating. In Baghdad, several thousand mostly Sunni voters gathered to protest the results of the election and what many said had been widespread fraud on behalf the Shiite coalition.
The demonstration, which also included supporters of Mr. Allawi, was the latest in a number of protests that appeared to be part of an orchestrated effort to gather more Sunni seats in the Assembly than had been won at the polls.
Saleh Mutlak, the leader of the Iraqi National Trend, a Sunni-dominated party, has made the most sweeping allegations of voter fraud. In an interview on Tuesday, Mr. Mutlak said that Shiite, Kurdish and Sunni parties had intimidated voters, destroyed ballots and stuffed some polling centers with more ballots than there were voters.
Some of the worst fraud, Mr. Mutlak said, had occurred in Diyala Province, where, he said, Kurdish militiamen had threatened some Arab voters and chased others from the polling places. In the mixed Arab-Kurdish city of Mosul, he said, Kurdish militiamen had prevented many Iraqi Arabs from voting.
But Mr. Mutlak seemed to hold scant faith that his allegations would be heard. Witnesses were afraid to come forward, he said, and the members of the Iraqi Independent Elections Commission seemed too close to the political parties to act fairly.
Moreover, Mr. Mutlak said he had struck an agreement with the Iraqi Consensus Front to coordinate their positions in any negotiations over entering a new government. Like many Iraqis, Mr. Mutlak said he worried over the increasingly sectarian nature of Iraqi politics.
"If this country goes sectarian, this is the end of Iraq," Mr. Mutlak said. "We are in a disaster."
On Tuesday, near Karbala, officials said they had discovered a mass grave containing the remains of dozens of people killed during an uprising against Saddam Hussein in 1991. Officials said workers had been installing a sewer network and stumbled across what appeared to be about 150 bodies, including those of many women and children.
Khalid Al-Ansary contributed reporting for this article.
--------------------------------
Citation: Dexter Filkins. "Iraqi Parties Try to Lay Foundation for Broad Coalition," The New York Times, 28 December 2005.
Original URL: http://www.nytimes.com/2005/12/28/international/middleeast/28iraq.html?adxnnl=1&adxnnlx=1135787824-XikdBXcK71cxfmUaYAvVdA
--------------------------------