Chris Hondros
The Independent
20 January 2005
Suicide bombers defy tightened security to kill 26 people in Baghdad
'Why did they shoot? We have no weapons' Blair's champion draws angry response with account of the war and its aftermath It was a routine foot patrol. As we made our way up a broad boulevard, in the distance I could see a car making its way toward us. As a defence against potential car bombs, it is now standard practice for foot patrols to stop oncoming vehicles, particularly after dark.
"We have a car coming," someone called out, as we entered an intersection. We could see the car about 100 metres away. It kept coming; I could hear its engine now, a high whine that sounded more like acceleration than slowing down. It was maybe 50 yards away now. "Stop that car!" someone shouted out, seemingly simultaneously with someone firing what sounded like warning shots - a staccato measured burst. The car continued coming. And then, perhaps less than a second later, a cacophony of fire, shots rattling off in a chaotic overlapping din. The car entered the intersection on its momentum and still shots were penetrating it and slicing it. Finally the shooting stopped, the car drifted listlessly, clearly no longer being steered, and came to a rest on a kerb. Soldiers began to approach it warily. The sound of children crying came from the car. I walked up to the car and a teenaged girl with her head covered emerged from the back, wailing and gesturing wildly. After her came a boy, tumbling on to the ground from the seat, already leaving a pool of blood.
"Civilians!" someone shouted, and soldiers ran up. More children - it ended up being six all told - started emerging, crying, their faces mottled with blood in long streaks. The troops carried them all off to a nearby sidewalk.
It was by now almost completely dark. There, working only by lights mounted on ends of their rifles, an Army medic began assessing the children's injuries, running his hands up and down their bodies, looking for wounds.
Incredibly, the only injuries were to a girl who suffered a cut hand and a boy with a superficial gash in the small of his back that was bleeding heavily but was not life-threatening. The medic immediately began to bind it, while the boy crouched against a wall.
From the pavement I could see into the bullet-mottled windshield more clearly, the driver of the car, a man, was penetrated by so many bullets that his skull had collapsed, leaving his body grotesquely disfigured. A woman also lay dead in the front, still covered in her Muslim clothing and harder to see.
Meanwhile, the children continued to wail and scream, huddled against a wall, sandwiched between soldiers either binding their wounds or trying to comfort them. The Army's translator later told me that this was a Turkoman family and that the teenaged girl kept shouting, "Why did they shoot us? We have no weapons! We were just going home!" After a delay in getting the armoured vehicles lined up and ready, the convoy moved to the main Tal Afar hospital.
The young children were carried in by soldiers and by their teenaged sister. Only the boy with the gash on his back needed any further medical attention, and the Army medic and an Iraqi doctor quickly chatted over his prognosis, deciding that his wound would be easily repaired. The Army told me that it would probably launch a full investigation.
Chris Hondros is a photographer with Getty Images and is embedded with US troops.
-----------------------------------------------------------------
Citation:
Chris Hondros, "'Why did they shoot? We have no weapons'", The Independent, 20 January 2005.
Original URL:
http://news.independent.co.uk/low_res/story.jsp?story=602608&host=3&dir=75
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.
20 January 2005
The Taliban are gone but Afghan women still learn to read and write in secret classrooms
Nick Meo
The Independent
20 January 2005
Off a dirty backstreet in a far-flung suburb of Kabul, past a washing line of ragged clothes and up a dingy stairwell, is a carefully hidden upstairs room.
Inside, teenage girls in headscarves sit crosslegged on the floor, faces twisted in concentration, doing something once strictly forbidden for female Afghans; learning to read and write.
Under the Taliban, an underground network of secret schools taught a rudimentary education at great risk to teachers and students. In the
democratic new Afghanistan, schools for girls are still operating - still in secret.
"There is no signboard in the street though most of the neighbours know what is going on here," said Faryal Benish of the Revolutionary
Association of Women of Afghanistan (Rawa).
"If the fundamentalists found out they would attack us. And the parents know it's a school but if they knew it was us teaching their girls, they might not let them come to lessons."
Rawa enjoyed brief fame in the West after 11 September as a group of doughty feminists who defied the Taliban. They taught girls banned
from schools. They helped widows barred from working. They also tried to tell the world about the nightmare Afghan women had fallen into, smuggling out a horrifying film shot surreptitiously of a woman being executed in Kabul's sports stadium. Yet, more than three years after the Taliban's fall. the women of Rawa still dare not emerge in public in Kabul. Members believe they are still in so much danger from their enemies that they have not even opened an office in the capital.
"We can be killed easily if we carry out our activities in public," said a Rawa organiser, Neelab Ismat, "It is better than the Taliban days of course. But we can only work underground, even now."
The secret schools - there are 50 in the capital, teaching hundreds of girls and women - no longer run the terrible risks they once did. But the threat from Islamic hardliners still requires discretion.
Some girls attend Rawa's literacy classes because their fathers have banned them from government schools.
"They are very backward, narrow-minded people," said Faryal, an 18-year-old student and Rawa member. "They think girls are just for
washing the clothes and sitting in the house."
Most of the pupils in the Laila (Tulip) school in the north of the city attend as an alternative to government schools. Their parents banned them from making the journey to and from the state school because security is still bad in their part of the city. Parents fear their daughters will be kidnapped on the way to or from school - the girls attending the Tulip school all live within a couple of streets of the classroom. The teacher, Rahela, started lessons seven years ago. "I would like to teach in a government school and perhaps when security conditions are better I will do that," she said.
"But God knows when that will be. We still haven't seen democracy in our land."
In the Taliban days, her pupils sometimes had to hurriedly hide their books under their burkhas when suspicious police poked their noses in. Rahela always told police she was running a handicraft class. Now, about a dozen girls between the ages of 10 and 19 learn together for an hour every morning in the cosy room, kept warm against the January cold by a wood-burning stove. On dark days, a single bulb provides light - powered by a car battery. In a corner, a fat baby boy slept in a cot, a brother being looked after by a 12-year-old pupil. Older brothers started arriving at the lesson's end
to escort their sisters back through the streets. Thirteen-year-old Nargis has learnt to read in the past three years and wants to be a doctor.
"My father won't let me go to the government school," she said. "But I like it here and I've learned a lot." The network of schools are now the main activity of Rawa but underground meetings and campaigns are still organised by the 2,000 members in Afghanistan, derided as
Communists by their enemies.
They tried to distribute copies of their magazine - Woman's Message -but men in uniform threatened shopkeepers not to stock it. A
newspaper in Kabul linked to a warlord described them as "dangerous" adding; "they must be finished". Their founder, Meena, was assassinated by a fundamentalist warlord in the 1980s and knowledge of the risks they run are never far from the thoughts of members. Ms Ismat said: "We hold meetings but they are not public. We must be very careful who we tell, and who we let into our organisation." Even student members at the university don't tell their friends they have joined. Rawa doesn't like President Hamid Karzai - "too close to the warlords" - and hates George Bush. "He is a hypocrite, using the pain of Afghanistan's women for propaganda," said Ms Ismat.
The appointment of three new women ministers to the Afghan cabinet last month was dismissed as window-dressing of a government
dominated by conservative old men, many with fundamentalist leanings.
Ms Ismat said: "We saw in the election many women who were proud to vote, but we do not think this new government will help women
much.
"Hospitals for women are terrible, commanders can still force girls into marriage, and there are hardly any jobs for women. Unfortunately we are not hopeful about the future of Afghanistan. There are some open-minded men here, but most are still very backward."
------------------------------------------------------------------
Citation:
Nick Meo, "The Taliban are gone but Afghan women still learn to read and write in secret classrooms", The Independent, 20 January 2005. Original URL:
http://news.independent.co.uk/low_res/story.jsp?story=602571&host=3&dir=71
The Independent
20 January 2005
Off a dirty backstreet in a far-flung suburb of Kabul, past a washing line of ragged clothes and up a dingy stairwell, is a carefully hidden upstairs room.
Inside, teenage girls in headscarves sit crosslegged on the floor, faces twisted in concentration, doing something once strictly forbidden for female Afghans; learning to read and write.
Under the Taliban, an underground network of secret schools taught a rudimentary education at great risk to teachers and students. In the
democratic new Afghanistan, schools for girls are still operating - still in secret.
"There is no signboard in the street though most of the neighbours know what is going on here," said Faryal Benish of the Revolutionary
Association of Women of Afghanistan (Rawa).
"If the fundamentalists found out they would attack us. And the parents know it's a school but if they knew it was us teaching their girls, they might not let them come to lessons."
Rawa enjoyed brief fame in the West after 11 September as a group of doughty feminists who defied the Taliban. They taught girls banned
from schools. They helped widows barred from working. They also tried to tell the world about the nightmare Afghan women had fallen into, smuggling out a horrifying film shot surreptitiously of a woman being executed in Kabul's sports stadium. Yet, more than three years after the Taliban's fall. the women of Rawa still dare not emerge in public in Kabul. Members believe they are still in so much danger from their enemies that they have not even opened an office in the capital.
"We can be killed easily if we carry out our activities in public," said a Rawa organiser, Neelab Ismat, "It is better than the Taliban days of course. But we can only work underground, even now."
The secret schools - there are 50 in the capital, teaching hundreds of girls and women - no longer run the terrible risks they once did. But the threat from Islamic hardliners still requires discretion.
Some girls attend Rawa's literacy classes because their fathers have banned them from government schools.
"They are very backward, narrow-minded people," said Faryal, an 18-year-old student and Rawa member. "They think girls are just for
washing the clothes and sitting in the house."
Most of the pupils in the Laila (Tulip) school in the north of the city attend as an alternative to government schools. Their parents banned them from making the journey to and from the state school because security is still bad in their part of the city. Parents fear their daughters will be kidnapped on the way to or from school - the girls attending the Tulip school all live within a couple of streets of the classroom. The teacher, Rahela, started lessons seven years ago. "I would like to teach in a government school and perhaps when security conditions are better I will do that," she said.
"But God knows when that will be. We still haven't seen democracy in our land."
In the Taliban days, her pupils sometimes had to hurriedly hide their books under their burkhas when suspicious police poked their noses in. Rahela always told police she was running a handicraft class. Now, about a dozen girls between the ages of 10 and 19 learn together for an hour every morning in the cosy room, kept warm against the January cold by a wood-burning stove. On dark days, a single bulb provides light - powered by a car battery. In a corner, a fat baby boy slept in a cot, a brother being looked after by a 12-year-old pupil. Older brothers started arriving at the lesson's end
to escort their sisters back through the streets. Thirteen-year-old Nargis has learnt to read in the past three years and wants to be a doctor.
"My father won't let me go to the government school," she said. "But I like it here and I've learned a lot." The network of schools are now the main activity of Rawa but underground meetings and campaigns are still organised by the 2,000 members in Afghanistan, derided as
Communists by their enemies.
They tried to distribute copies of their magazine - Woman's Message -but men in uniform threatened shopkeepers not to stock it. A
newspaper in Kabul linked to a warlord described them as "dangerous" adding; "they must be finished". Their founder, Meena, was assassinated by a fundamentalist warlord in the 1980s and knowledge of the risks they run are never far from the thoughts of members. Ms Ismat said: "We hold meetings but they are not public. We must be very careful who we tell, and who we let into our organisation." Even student members at the university don't tell their friends they have joined. Rawa doesn't like President Hamid Karzai - "too close to the warlords" - and hates George Bush. "He is a hypocrite, using the pain of Afghanistan's women for propaganda," said Ms Ismat.
The appointment of three new women ministers to the Afghan cabinet last month was dismissed as window-dressing of a government
dominated by conservative old men, many with fundamentalist leanings.
Ms Ismat said: "We saw in the election many women who were proud to vote, but we do not think this new government will help women
much.
"Hospitals for women are terrible, commanders can still force girls into marriage, and there are hardly any jobs for women. Unfortunately we are not hopeful about the future of Afghanistan. There are some open-minded men here, but most are still very backward."
------------------------------------------------------------------
Citation:
Nick Meo, "The Taliban are gone but Afghan women still learn to read and write in secret classrooms", The Independent, 20 January 2005. Original URL:
http://news.independent.co.uk/low_res/story.jsp?story=602571&host=3&dir=71
18 January 2005
Iraq now a terrorist breeding ground, say US officials
Rupert Cornwell
The Independent
15 January 2005
Rupert Cornwell
The Independent
15 January 2005
President Bush's Iraq policy has received another heavy blow with a report by top intelligence advisers that the 2003 invasion and its aftermath have turned the country into a breeding ground for a new generation of worldwide Islamic terrorism. Post-Saddam Iraq has become "a magnet for international terrorist activity," said Robert Hutchings, director of the National Intelligence Council, the official research arm of the entire US intelligence community, as he presented Mapping the Global Future, the NIC's latest report on long-term global trends.
The NIC warning is the second repudiation within a week of the Bush administration's rationale for the war. Two days ago, the White House quietly signalled it had ended the search for Saddam's non-existent weapons of mass destruction. Since then - and especially during his 2004 re-election campaign - the President has portrayed Iraq as a key part of the global war on terror and insisted the US has been made safer by the overthrow of Saddam. But these claims have been demolished by the NIC. According to David Low, a senior NIC official, Iraq has been transformed into "a training and recruitment ground, and an opportunity [for terrorists] to enhance their technical skills".
The likelihood now - even in the best case scenario where the upcoming Iraqi elections restore some stability to the country - is that foreign terrorists currently operating there will "go home, wherever home is", and disperse across the world as new threats to the US. Implicitly, the report also debunks the assertions of Mr Bush and Dick Cheney, the Vice-President, that Saddam had close and active links with al-Qa'ida. Instead, it says, radical Islamic terrorists only moved in amid the post-war chaos. As the report notes, the al-Qa'ida generation that trained in Afghanistan will dissipate, "to be replaced in part by survivors of the conflict in Iraq".
Their potential number, moreover, continues to grow. No longer do US commanders pretend the resistance in Iraq consists of only a few thousand insurgents. The latest estimates suggest there are 40,000 or so hardcore fighters, who have 200,000 or more sympathisers in the population. US officials admit that only a small proportion of the insurgents are foreigners.
Within little more than a decade, the NIC report predicts, al-Qa'ida will have been superseded by other Islamic extremist groups who will merge with local separatist and resistance movements. This process of fragmentation will make the job of US counter-terrorism even harder. The threat, warns the NIC, "will become an eclectic array of groups, cells and individuals that do not need a stationary headquarters".
-----------------------------------
Citation: Rupert Cornwell, "Iraq now a terrorist breeding ground, say US officials," The Independent , 15 January 2005.
Ayatollah alarms Sunnis with pledge of security force purge; Election favourite says that he will root out former Saddam acolytes
James Hider
London Times
12 January 2005
James Hider
London Times
12 January 2005
AN IRANIAN-BACKED Ayatollah tipped to become Iraq's first elected leader in decades said yesterday that he would carry out a purge of Iraq's intelligence and security structures if his party wins power. Ayatollah Abdelaziz al-Hakim told The Times that under US occupation and the interim administration the security forces had become infested with former officers of Saddam Hussein's Sunni-led regime and needed to be shaken up. His comments are likely to worry Sunnis, who already fear that their grip on government is slipping.
"There are major infiltrations, varying in degree from the Mukhabarat (secret intelligence service) to Interior Ministry and to a lesser degree the Ministry of Defence. Some of them are semi-infiltrated," he said. "Sometimes we come across their secret reports, where they use similar idioms and expression to those used in Saddam's time, as if Saddam's times were still here. This is sometimes painful, but sometimes it makes you laugh."
One of his aides told The Times that intelligence officers were still asking Shia detainees who was behind the 1996 assassination attempt on Saddam's son Uday, while others were asked who they had fought with in the Shia uprising of 1991.
The Ayatollah's party, the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq (Sciri), is the main player on a Shia list endorsed by Iraq's leading cleric, Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, and including the former Pentagon darling Ahmed Chalabi and partisans of the rebel Shia cleric Moqtada al-Sadr.
With Grand Ayatollah al- Sistani's blessing, the United Iraqi Alliance is expected to win at least 27 per cent of the seats in Iraq's new parliament after the January 30 elections. Ayatollah al-Hakim, poised to take power, already has the trappings of leadership in calamitous Baghdad. He was speaking in his heavily guarded headquarters _ once the home of Tariq Aziz, Saddam's Deputy Prime Minister _ where he survived a suicide car bomb attempt on his life two weeks ago. Aides say that he has not left the compound since the attack. Dozens of armed men loiter in nearby streets, manning roadblocks that cause congestion in the neighbourhood.
Asked if he planned a sweeping purge of the intelligence and security forces that the Americans built up piecemeal after the war, the Ayatollah, who once commanded Sciri's 10,000-strong militia, said: "For sure. If we want to improve the security situation. It's natural and it's one of our priorities." In their place, he said he would install "loyal Iraqis and the believers (in God), and those who believe in the process of change in Iraq". His words caused alarm among Iraq's liberal commentators.
"If he forms the government, that will be a disaster. He'll purge the army, purge the police and put his own men in it," said Ghassan al-Atiyyah, a secular Shia commentator, who is trying to build bridges with the Sunni community and defuse the uprising. "This is the road to civil war." Mr al-Atiyyah brushed aside the Ayatollah's promise to ensure Sunni seats in government even if turnout was too low to bring their parties into parliament. "This is exactly what the old regime did," he said.
Tawfiq al-Yasseri, the head of the parliamentary defence committee, said that a shake-up in the security apparatus was needed. "I agree completely with what Abdul Aziz said about the faults of the security system. They should be changed. All of them they are making dramatic mistakes." He stopped short of endorsing a takeover by Sciri. "We need experienced people with clean hands who were persecuted by the former regime."
Another commentator found it hard to believe that the Americans, having fought hard and long for elections, would allow an Iranian-backed Ayatollah to take control. "It will be doctored" to ensure pro-American secular moderates take the helm and write the country's constitution, said the observer, who asked not to be named.
Copyright 2005 Times Newspapers Ltd.
-------------------------------------------------
Citation: James Hider, "Ayatollah alarms Sunnis with pledge of security force purge; Election favourite says that he will root out former Saddam acolytes," London Times, 12 January 2005.
US troops gather for onslaught as Mosul unrest threatens election
Richard Beeston
London Times
17 January 2005
Richard Beeston
London Times
17 January 2005
THOUSANDS of American reinforcements are pouring into Iraq's northern capital for a battle that could decide the fate of the country's elections, being held in less than two weeks. In the biggest military operation since US troops stormed the rebel city of Fallujah two months ago, paratroopers, infantrymen and armoured units have converged on the city over the past two weeks, increasing the number of Americans on the ground to more than 10,000. Their objective is not only to wrest back control of the city from insurgents, but to create enough stability so that Mosul's inhabitants can be coaxed into voting in the January 30 elections. For the first time thousands of newly trained Iraqi troops have also been drafted in and will provide security at voting stations on polling day.
Several American commanders said that the objective could become the deciding factor in determining whether the polls to elect the country's first democratic parliament are a success or a failure. "Based on what I have seen I think we can hold elections. I am optimistic that we can change perceptions and restore security," said LieutenantColonel David Miller, an infantry commander who arrived two weeks ago to restore control of Mosul's ancient city centre. "We are already seeing progress on the ground. The population will go with whoever they think is successful."
American and Iraqi leaders have admitted that free and fair elections will be almost impossible in four of the country's central provinces, where the Sunni Muslim insurgents have vowed to stop the vote. While voters are expected to cast their ballots in the Shia Muslim South and the Kurdish North, this ethnically mixed city of two million could go either way. Half the population is Sunni Arab, but there are also large minorities of Kurds, Christians and other ethnic groups who might well vote if free from intimidation.
On patrol with the Americans it is easy to see how divided Mosul is. In Kurdish areas the population waves enthusiastically at a passing patrol. In Arab areas the same Americans are greeted with angry stares and the troops scan rooftops and alleys for the next ambush. The once passive city, which was a model of postwar co- operation, has in the past two months become one of the bloodiest. On November 8 militants staged a co-ordinated attack, seizing all but three of the city's 33 police stations. Some 8,000 Iraqi police officers fled, leaving behind weapons and equipment. Last month a young Saudi suicide bomber managed to infiltrate the largest American base here and killed 22 people in a dining hall _ the worst single American toll of the insurgency.
Lieutenant-Colonel Tom Heslin, who commands a giant swath of residential districts on the eastern side of the Tigris river, which dissects the city, said that since arriving his men had been involved in daily skirmishes with the rebels. On Saturday one of his patrols was ambushed from three sides at a busy intersection and tanks had to use their main guns to silence the attackers. A US Army helicopter sent in to help was hit by ground fire and forced to make an emergency landing. Yesterday, during a weapons search of a fruit and vegetable market, a rocket-propelled grenade landed at the feet of some soldiers but failed to explode. "We have had engagements every single day since we arrived," Lieutenant-Colonel Heslin said. "We expect that to continue and even intensify the closer we get to election day."
How Mosul's population will respond to the struggle has yet to be decided. In interviews with half a dozen residents yesterday, only one, a professor at the local university, said that he was optimistic and intended to vote. One man, who described himself as a taxi driver, said that he and others like him were far too afraid: "The mujahidin have handed out leaflets and written on the walls saying they will cut off the heads of anyone daring to vote. There is no way I am going to risk my life."
A retired soldier called Ibrahim, who said that he had trained with the British military in the early 1970s, looked terrified when asked whether he intended to cast his ballot. "I am happy to invite you to my house. We can talk about my memories of Wiltshire and Scotland," he said. "But I would rather not talk about the elections."
Copyright 2005 Times Newspapers Ltd.
-------------------------------------------------------
Citation: Richard Beeston, "US troops gather for onslaught as Mosul unrest threatens election," London Times, 17 January 2005.
Where Are the New Recruits?
The National Guard and Army Reserve are drawing fewer enlistees
Mark Thompson
Time
14 January 2005
The National Guard and Army Reserve are drawing fewer enlistees
Mark Thompson
Time
14 January 2005
Even as the Iraq war has dragged on, offering no foreseeable end, top Pentagon officials have maintained that the nation's Army is fit enough and big enough to fight it. But last week the military's taut tendons--at the breaking point for better than a year--could be heard painfully snapping from the Pentagon to the Sunni triangle. First came a warning from the head of the Army Reserve that those troops are "rapidly degenerating into a broken force." Then Army officials, speaking privately, conceded that a long-standing policy limiting deployments of National Guard and Army Reserve forces is likely to be scrapped. That's going to make the already difficult job of recruiting--and retaining--such part-time soldiers even tougher. Finally, they added, the continuing instability in Iraq will probably force the Army to make permanent what was supposed to be a temporary addition of 30,000 troops to the active-duty force.
Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld--who has long opposed a permanent hike in the Army's 500,000-strong active-duty force--made himself scarce as these troubling indicators surfaced. The Defense chief has argued that retooling the Army--turning cooks and accountants into trigger pullers and hiring contractors to perform such civilian tasks, among other steps--should generate efficiencies that would ease the strain on the Army without having to boost its size. But other Pentagon officials doubt that such measures will suffice. "We're growing increasingly concerned about the health of the force," an Army personnel officer says. "These deployments are really beginning to take a toll."
Outside observers agree. "The Army's wheels are going to come off in the next 24 months," Barry McCaffrey, a retired four-star Army general, said last week. "The data are now beginning to come in to support that." McCaffrey said the service needs to add 80,000 troops to ease the strain brought on by the Iraq war. "We are in a period of considerable strategic peril," he said. "And it's because Rumsfeld has dug in his heels and said, 'I cannot retreat from my position.'"
Because of other commitments overseas, in Europe and Eastern Asia, and because the Pentagon is trying to limit Iraq tours to a year, the Army increasingly has had to rely on the National Guard and Army Reserve to help fill the roster of 150,000 troops in Iraq. Those part-time forces represent 40% of the current U.S. troop strength in Iraq and will grow to 50% in coming months. There were about 160,000 National Guard and Army reservists on active duty last week, including 60,000 inside Iraq. In a Dec. 20 memo published in the Baltimore Sun last week, Lieut. General James Helmly, chief of the Army Reserve, warned that the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have put in "grave danger" his force's ability to fulfill other Pentagon missions or help grapple with domestic emergencies. "I do not wish to sound alarmist," wrote Helmly, who won a Bronze Star for valor in Vietnam. "I do wish to send a clear, distinctive signal of deepening concern." Helmly's memo split the Pentagon into two camps--those who praised Helmly's candor and courage, and those who found the memo's tone, and its appearance in a newspaper, a little too self-promoting.
But Army officers also have begun voicing concern that they are soon going to run out of Reserve troops to fight in Iraq, which would place even more strain on active-duty forces. Under Pentagon policy, reservists and Guard troops can serve no more than 24 months total on a single military operation. The military has already released some Reserve troops from deployment because they have hit the 24-month ceiling--or offered them a $1,000 monthly tax-free bonus to waive the rule. That money upsets Helmly. "We must consider the point at which we confuse 'volunteer to become an American soldier' with 'mercenary,'" he wrote in his memo. In light of the force crunch, the Army is weighing a change that could compel repeated deployments, of up to 24 months each, for some part-time soldiers.
That, however, would probably complicate recruitment challenges for the Reserves. As it is, says Paul Rieckerhoff, 29, a New York Guardsman who spent a year in Iraq, the Guard has lost its allure as repeated deployments have made it more like the active-duty force. "People in the Guard never thought they'd make up 40% of the force [in Iraq] and have six months of training and a year of boots-on-the-ground overseas," he says. "It's become a serious commitment that's going to disrupt your civilian life indefinitely."
Hard statistics back up Rieckerhoff's observation. The National Guard saw its enlistments fall 30% short of its goal for October and November, while the Army Reserve came up 10% shy of its mark for that period. As a result, the Guard is adding 1,400 recruiters to its 2,700-strong force, the first big boost in 15 years, while the Reserve is boosting its recruiter force by 400, to 1,440.
Recruiters have been given new sweeteners to dangle. The week before Christmas, the Guard and Army Reserve announced that the signing bonus for soldiers willing to commit to six years of service would be increased to $15,000--from $5,000 for the Guard and $8,000 for the Reserve. And although the active-duty Army has been meeting its recruitment goals, planners are taking precautions to keep the numbers healthy. The Army has added 375 soldiers to the ranks of its 5,654 recruiters. Active-duty G.I.s can now earn as much as $70,000 for college, up from $50,000. In outlays that won't show up as costs for the Iraq war, the Army is rolling out more than $1 billion in bonuses and benefits this year to induce young Americans to enlist and to entice those already in uniform to extend their service. There are premiums to be pocketed for signing up for certain jobs--infantry, military police, transportation--as well as for agreeing to ship out quickly to train--and then, probably, go to Iraq.
Robert Scales, a retired Army major general and military historian, believes that the recruitment problem is affecting the Reserves and National Guard first because they reflect the mood of the times more quickly. "The active-duty Army is an insular subculture within the American body politic, a piece of Sparta in the midst of Babylon," says Scales, former head of the U.S. Army War College. He is worried that the shortfall in sign-ups will soon be felt by the regular service. "Those of us who were in Vietnam in 1969 remember all the pronouncements about how good things were going," Scales says, recalling that Pentagon figures at that time showed retention numbers to be solid. "But in 1970 the whole thing collapsed, and the Army simply broke." Soldiers were deserting in droves, enlisted men were fragging their officers, and illegal drug use was skyrocketing.
There are important differences between then and now. A draft was in effect during the Vietnam years, while today's Army is all volunteer. And, in contrast to the Vietnam era, Americans continue to support the troops in Iraq even if many oppose the war. Still, the Iraq war has changed how many young people weigh a decision to sign up for the military. "People used to think they could just join up to get money for college, and so it was easier to recruit," says Curtis Mills, 31, an Army reservist who served in Iraq as a military-police sergeant for six months in 2003. "But with what you see in the papers and everybody being deployed, it's got to be tougher." Mills, of Shapleigh, Maine, spent 11 months recovering from wounds he suffered outside Ramadi when a roadside bomb cut up his arm, leg and back in September 2003. Unable to return to his job as a postal carrier, he gets by on a $2,000 monthly disability check from the Department of Veterans Affairs.
Guard officials are not denying the obvious. "There's no question that when you have a sustained ground-combat operation going that the Guard's participating in, that makes recruiting more difficult," says Lieut. General Steven Blum, the Guard's top officer. Roughly one-fourth of the Guard's members have served in Iraq. General Peter Schoomaker, the Army Chief of Staff who was plucked from retirement by Rumsfeld in 2003, told Congress in November that he was in danger of running out of troops. "It's going to get harder the longer we go with this, no question about it," he said. He pledged to do his best to meet the demand of commanders in Iraq for fresh bodies, but added, "I can't promise more than I've got ... If the Army National Guard or Army Reserve cannot muster and provide the formations that are required, perhaps we need to increase the size of the regular Army."
Pentagon officials have been watching recruitment and retention rates closely. Until this past fall, the figures were reassuring. All but one branch of the military met recruiting and retention goals for fiscal 2004, which ended Sept. 30. The lone exception was the Army National Guard, which came in at 98% strength--342,000 instead of 350,000--on that date. The shortfall was largely attributed to the Guard's missing by 5,000 its recruiting goal of 56,000 soldiers. It was the first time in a decade that the Guard fell short. But then came the even worse performance of October and November.
Lieut. Colonel Michael Jones, the Guard's No. 2 recruiting officer, says 70% of the deficit in sign-ups is the result of soldiers' declining to join the Guard when they leave active duty because they don't want to be sent right back to Iraq. In peacetime, many active-duty soldiers go into the Guard for the extra money and camaraderie. Some of the shortage is due to the Army's "stop-loss" orders, which keep soldiers on active duty past their agreed-on commitments and thus make them unable to join the Guard. But there is another factor in the case of young people right out of high school: parents often steer their kids away from the military. "Mom and Dad understand they're going to go right into basic training," Jones says, "and then be eligible to deploy right away." Even if parents don't object, he says, "it's human nature to flee from risk. It takes a special type of person to join during this time."
The cost of recruiting a soldier ballooned from $7,600 in 1996 to more than $14,000 in 2004. That includes about $2,000 for advertising. The Army has become a more savvy seller, abandoning the "Be All You Can Be" slogan it used for two decades in favor of the more narcissistic "An Army of One" motto it embraced eight months before 9/11, which played off the individuality and independence of today's young men and women and tried to convince them that soldiers are more than mere cogs in a dehumanizing military machine. Today the Army sponsors NASCAR racing cars, football games, rodeo riders and a popular Internet video game called America's Army. But just how much those teenage touchstones do for military recruiting is an open question. A federal study found that although the military doubled its spending on advertising--from $299 million in 1998 to $592 million in 2003--it couldn't tease out the impact of the Pentagon's ad campaigns because "joining the military is a profound life decision."
The war and its impact on personnel are forcing the Pentagon to cut corners in ways that could dull the military's fighting edge. The Guard, for example, can no longer count, as in the past, on half its troops' having had military experience. If current trends persist, soon only one-third will be veterans. "They'll be able to make their numbers, but the question is, How effective is the Guard going to be if its troops don't have much military experience?" says Lawrence Korb, Pentagon personnel chief during the Reagan Administration. What's more, the military may have to begin promoting soldiers with inadequate experience if senior sergeants flee. "Promoting more rapidly leads to a less effective military," Korb says. "We're going to end up with a less effective force and, in another year, I think we could break it."
Despite this roster of troubles, many Army officers remain upbeat. Brigadier General Sean Byrne, the Army's director of military-personnel policy, says that while "the going will be tough" in the months to come, the Army has the tools to keep its force properly manned. "The war on terror strikes home with everybody," he says, "and it motivates them to come on board and stay with us." Rumsfeld and Byrne believe that there is enough goodwill among young Americans out there to fill most of the ranks--and enough money to lure in the rest. Mills, the wounded Army reservist, is the kind of American they're counting on. "My buddies are expecting to be deployed again," he says. "And if I weren't injured and they called me to go again, I'd absolutely go."
Copyright c. Time/Warner
------------------------------------------
Citation: Mark Thompson, "Where Are the New Recruits? The National Guard and Army Reserve are drawing fewer enlistees," Time, 14 January 2005.
After Iraq elections, US should pull out
Joseph Galloway
Detroit Free Press
10 January 2005
Joseph Galloway
Detroit Free Press
10 January 2005
There may be 50 ways to leave your lover, but there may be only one good way out of the deepening disaster that is Iraq: Hold the elections on Jan. 30, declare victory and begin leaving. Anything less, any more "staying the course," and we're likely doomed to an even bloodier and more costly defeat in a country divided along ethnic and religious fault lines and headed toward civil war.
A large number of Americans, perhaps even a majority, believe that pulling out now would lead to an American defeat that undermines U.S. credibility and endangers the global war on terrorism. They worry it would create either an Afghan-style terrorist haven in Iraq or an anti-American Shiite regime that would only be a new source of instability in the Mideast, a region vital to American interests.
The problem is that there is no way we can win -- defeat the insurgents and install a stable, democratic, friendly government -- and bad things are going to happen anyway. There is no way Americans are willing to pay the price even of stalemate, never mind an unattainable victory. That would mean half a million American soldiers on the ground, maybe more, and a new draft to find enough people for the force. It would mean an escalating drain of hundreds of billions more dollars, and a bloodbath on both sides.
Why can't we win? Because we charged in with false premises and bogus assumptions. Because for every insurgent we kill, two or three more join the cause. Because even our advertised victories -- like Fallujah, where we apparently had to destroy the city in order to save it, or Samarra or Ramadi -- only turned the entire Sunni population against the United States and its Iraqi allies. And in the end, election or no, there is nothing we can do to produce an Iraqi government that will be considered legitimate by the entire population. The Sunnis hate the interim government as an American creation. They will hate any elected government dominated by the Shiite majority. They and a growing number of Shiites will hate us because we are there, because we are an occupying army.
If we learned nothing else from the bitter history of Vietnam it should be that there are places and people who won't accept change and won't quit fighting until even the most powerful nation and army in the world wearies of the killing and dying. The fallout from staying the course will be thousands more American soldiers killed and wounded, an Army so broken that repairs and reconstruction could take a decade or more and a federal budget deficit staggering under the costs of this war.
Consider these stories published last week:
Lt. Gen. James R. Helmly, commander of the U.S. Army's 200,000 Reserve soldiers, tells his boss, Army Chief of Staff Gen. Peter Schoomaker, that the Reserves are "rapidly degenerating into a broken force." The cause: The war in Iraq and dysfunctional Pentagon and congressional policies. (Baltimore Sun, Jan. 5)
U.S. casualties as of last week: 1,340 killed in action, 10,252 wounded in action and an estimated 12,000 ill or injured. More than half the wounded Americans are hurt so badly they are not able to return to duty.
The Bush administration is preparing to send to Congress a supplemental request for as much as $100 billion to cover unbudgeted costs of the Iraq war this year. That will bring the total cost to American taxpayers of this war to an estimated $230 billion. That against an original Bush administration estimate of total costs of $50 billion to $60 billion.
Under Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz has signed off on a Pentagon document proposing $30 billion in cuts in once untouchable Air Force and Navy weapons projects to help pay for Iraq and help reduce the overall budget deficit.
Gen. Muhammad Abdullah Shahwani, director of the Iraq government's new intelligence service, told the Times of London that he estimates there are more than 200,000 insurgents and active supporters opposing American, coalition and government forces in Iraq. "I think the resistance is bigger than the U.S. military in Iraq," Shahwani said.
Perhaps the only good things to emerge from this misbegotten war will be an end to our infatuation with high-tech weaponry and our willingness to continue paying for "new" fighter planes and nuclear submarines designed for the Cold War. It would also be good if it rekindles a new appreciation for boots on the ground to win our wars, an end to Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld's fixation with the kind of transformation that revolves around PowerPoint presentations focused on faster, lighter, cheaper.
As we approach the second anniversary of our invasion of Iraq we need to be discussing and debating what we are gaining, if anything, from this war and what we are losing.
JOSEPH L. GALLOWAY is the senior military correspondent for Knight Ridder Newspapers.
Copyright c 2005 Detroit Free Press Inc.
-----------------------------------------
Citation: Joseph Galloway, "After Iraq elections, US should pull out," Detroit Free Press, 10 January 2005.
Officers say more troops needed in Iraq
Rowan Scarborough
Washington Times
17 January 2005
Rowan Scarborough
Washington Times
17 January 2005
Officers in Iraq are telling colleagues back in the United States that they disagree with the official Pentagon position and think they need more troops on the ground. Retired and active-duty personnel who have received such e-mails say they are not couched as gripes. Rather, the shortfall is explained in terms of, "If we had more soldiers, we could be in two places at once," said a retired four-star Army general. This source said he has received such unofficial communications from a crosssection of commanders in the Army. "Senior army officers in Iraq have told me we need more troops to do this mission," said the retired general, who asked not to be named because he does business with the Pentagon. "They are not bemoaning. Not griping. It's just what they feel they need." He said the most-often repeated figure is six to eight more brigades, or more than 50,000 more troops.
An Army official at the Pentagon said he has heard similar complaints. But the U.S. command in Baghdad says the numbers are satisfactory. "We have sufficient Iraqi and coalition forces to establish a secure environment that will permit free and fair elections," said Air Force Brig. Gen. Erv Lessel, deputy chief of staff for strategic communications in Iraq.
Retired Air Force Lt. Gen. Thomas McInerney, a military analyst and author, said the Pentagon's policy is the best way to win. "We don't need more U.S. troops. We need more Iraqi troops," Gen. McInerney said. "American forces won't win this conflict. The Iraqis will. You always defeat an insurgency with indigenous forces, not foreign forces. We can shape it. But in the final analysis, they -- the Iraqis themselves -- are going to defeat it."
The U.S. goal is for a nationwide security force of 273,000 Iraqis. About 122,000 are now in the field. Gen. John Abizaid, the U.S. commander in the region, has not requested a sizable increase in strength. The Bush administration has settled on a total American force of 150,000 troops in Iraq for the Jan. 30 elections, an increase of 12,000. The hope is that the election of a constructional assembly, coupled with advances in fielding Iraqi security forces, will allow Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld to authorize a drawdown in late 2005.
A senior defense official, who asked not to be named, said the topic of troop numbers in Iraq has been debated periodically in the Pentagon's "tank," the secure meeting place of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. The official said much of the discussion has centered on "what if Abizaid requests more troops. How do we provide them?" This official said he knows of no service chief advocating more forces than Gen. Abizaid has requested. The official said the most frequently broached rationale for not sending sizable reinforcements is that it would create an array of new targets around the country for insurgents to go after. It also would require billions of dollars more in funds to set up new camps and international supply lines.
A senior military officer in Baghdad, who asked not to be identified, answered "certainly" when asked if U.S. forces are stretched thin in Iraq. But even with a large influx of new forces, this officer said, there would still be non-patrolled sections in the California-size country. "We can't stop or negate all terrorist acts," the source said. But there are enough forces to "deter or stop terrorists who are trying to prevent the election from taking place. ... Certainly, we don't need equal presence all over the country."
The crisis in Mosul is the most cited example of stretched troops. While Marines and Army soldiers subdued Fallujah in November in house-to-house fighting, insurgents struck miles away in northern Iraq. Terrorists routed Mosul's police force. The U.S. command had to quickly dispatch reinforcements to take back police stations and rout out the enemy. Since then, the U.S. has increased by 7,000 the number of American and Iraqi forces in the area as it rebuilds the police force.
Ken Allard, a retired Army colonel and author of four books on national security, said the 500,000-troop active force simply is not enough to fight wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, and to deter aggression in Europe and South Korea. "I would start adding forces until it is demonstratively too much," Mr. Allard said. "God forbid, what happens if somewhere something else goes wrong. ... We are eating seed corn. In an 18-division requirement, we have a 10-division force." The Army boasted 18 active divisions during the Cold War.
Copyright c 2005 News World Communications, Inc. All rights reserved.
----------------------------------------------
Citation: Rowan Scarborough, "Officers say more troops needed in Iraq," Washington Times, 17 January 2005.
Amid Talk of Withdrawal, Pentagon Is Taking Steps For Longer Stay in Iraq
Eli Lake
New York Sun
14 January 2005
Eli Lake
New York Sun
14 January 2005
As the Bush administration drops hints about withdrawing troops from Iraq as early as this year, the Pentagon is building a permanent military communications system that suggests American soldiers will be in Iraq for the foreseeable future. The new network, known as Central Iraq Microwave System, will eventually consist of up to 12 communications towers throughout Iraq and fiber-optic cables connecting Camp Victory, located outside of Baghdad, to other coalition bases in the country, according to three sources familiar with the project. The land-based system will replace the tactical communications network the Army and Marines have been using in Iraq. That network relied primarily on satellites and is much easier to dismantle. The contract for the new communications system covering central Iraq, won by Galaxy Scientific Corporation, is worth about $10 million.
The New York Sun learned of the investment in the communications system at a time when Washington is abuzz with speculation that the president may this year bring home many of the 150,000 American soldiers serving in Iraq. Earlier this week on National Public Radio, Secretary of State Powell said that as Iraqi security services assume more responsibility in fighting insurgents, he would expect the number of American soldiers on the ground there to decline. "With the assumption of that greater burden, the burden on our troops should go down, and we should start to see our numbers going in the other direction," he said.
Earlier this month, Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld dispatched to Iraq a retired four-star general, Gary Luck, who was a key adviser to General Franks in developing the plan for the invasion, to assess America's options in Iraq. He is due to present his report next week. Press outlets have speculated that General Luck's visit indicates the Pentagon may be considering an exit strategy to coincide with the January 30 elections for Iraq's legislature. The United Iraqi Alliance, the coalition likely to command the most seats in the new Parliament, is comprised of Shiite parties that in the past have called for the end of the American occupation in Iraq. The second plank of their platform says a new government should negotiate a withdrawal date upon assuming power.
The new projects to build the CIMS network do not necessarily mean the number of American troops would not diminish over time. But according to experts as well as some Pentagon officials, the new investments indicate that there will at least be some level of American forces in Iraq for several years to come.
A senior defense policy expert for the American Enterprise Institute, Thomas Donnelly, told the Sun that the kind of investment in the communications system is similar to the systems established during the Cold War in West Germany and more recently in the Balkans, two locations where American soldiers are still serving today. "This is the kind of investment that is reflective of the strategic commitment and intention to continue a military presence in Iraq," Mr. Donnelly said. "This is one of the indicators of an intention to stay, these kinds of communications networks."
The assistant project manager for CIMS, Lieutenant Colonel Joseph Schafer, rejected the notion that the system was a permanent one. In an e-mail message to the Sun he wrote, "CIMS will connect major bases serving U.S. and coalition forces in Central Iraq with much greater reliability. CIMS will be much less costly to maintain, reduce costly satellite costs, and free up tactical signal forces, but does not necessarily signal more permanence."
Other Pentagon officials familiar with the project told the Sun that its scope, which plans to eventually connect American bases in Qatar, the United Arab Emirates, and even Afghanistan, indicates a commitment to a long-term presence in the region, including Iraq.
"I believe this terrestrial microwave system going in, whose final target is Afghanistan, together with such recent signals as a new military relationship between the U.S. and the United Arab Emirates, are further indications of the long-term implementation of the Bush vision to bring democracy to the Middle East," a former CIA officer and founder of the CIA's counterterrorism center, Duane Clarridge, said in an interview.
Mr. Clarridge, who has spent four months in Iraq in the last year and is the former chief of Arab operations for the CIA's clandestine service, added, "People should get realistic and think in terms of our presence being in Iraq for a generation or until democratic stability in the region is reached."
The military concept underlying the new military communications network is called commercialization by experts in the field because the microwave towers and cables could also be used for nonmilitary uses like telephone and cell phone lines.
The vice director for the Navy's command, control, communications, and computer systems, Rear Admiral Nancy Brown, gave an interview in November to Signal Magazine in which she said the new network could eventually be turned over to the Iraqi government for commercial use. "Previous commercialization efforts supported only a few thousand troops in a handful of base camps," she told the magazine, the official publication of the Armed Forces Communications and Electronics Association. "The major and crucial difference between the OIF [Operation Iraqi Freedom] commercialization effort and previous precedents set in Bosnia, Kosovo, and Afghanistan was the sheer magnitude of the undertaking. This new effort will support tens of thousands of troops in multiple sites throughout a region the size of the state of Texas."
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Citation: Eli Lake, "Amid Talk of Withdrawal, Pentagon Is Taking Steps For Longer Stay in Iraq," New York Sun, 14 January 2005.
Can Iraq's Election Be Saved?
Bill Powell with Christopher Allbritton
Time
24 January 2005
Bill Powell with Christopher Allbritton
Time
24 January 2005
In the bustling city of Mosul in northern Iraq, there are few hints of the historic election that is about to take place. There are no candidates on the stump making speeches. No supporters handing out leaflets. No rallies, rope lines or debates. Many voters, in fact, don't even know who is on the ballot. Instead, on the streets of the country's third largest city, there is heavy armor, Bradley fighting vehicles, Abrams tanks, and 10,000 weapons-toting U.S. troops, reinforced by almost as many Iraqi government soldiers. They conduct raids on suspected insurgent hideouts, patrol neighborhoods on foot and man checkpoints throughout the city. In Mosul and the surrounding area, U.S. forces are working toward the same simple purpose: to "kill or capture bad guys and keep them from influencing the elections," says Captain Kevin Beagle, the squadron plans officer for the Army's 2-14 Cavalry. "We've been ramping up, obviously, for the elections."
Throughout Iraq's restive Sunni heartland, the military is in a race to subdue the insurgents by Jan. 30, when the country is scheduled to hold its first free elections in nearly 50 years. In Mosul commanders say they have curbed the insurgents' movements in the city. But the rebels have responded with ever more sophisticated strikes, disabling U.S. military vehicles with roadside bombs and then opening fire on stopped convoys from several positions. Their attacks have killed nine U.S. soldiers and scores of Iraqi national guardsmen in the past week. "By no means is this a safe city," says Captain Jim Pangelinan, who commands the Alpha Company of the Army's Task Force 1-14. "The insurgents' tactics have been more complex than what they've used previously here or elsewhere in the country." Pangelinan and his men have precious little time left to convince the estimated 1.8 million Mosul residents that it will be safe to participate on Jan. 30. "If they feel there isn't decent security," says Major D.A. Sims, the operations officer responsible for Mosul, "they won't turn out in large numbers."
With each day of mayhem, that prediction seems more accurate. The Bush Administration and Iraq's interim Prime Minister, Iyad Allawi, have resisted calls from a cross section of Iraqi political, tribal and religious leaders to postpone the vote until violence subsides in the insurgent-infested swath of territory that cuts through the center and up into the northern parts of the country. Those are areas with heavy concentrations of Sunni Arabs, who make up only 20% of Iraq's population yet ruled Iraq during Saddam Hussein's dictatorship. They know that in democracies the majority rules, and that in Iraq long-suppressed Shi'ite Muslims -- who make up 60% of the population -- are the majority. As distasteful as the prospect of Shi'ite dominance may be to some Sunnis, many would would prefer democracy to Saddam's tyranny. But with less than two weeks before the vote, U.S. officials admit that the insurgents have succeeded in discouraging Sunni participation by assassinating election workers, gunning down politicians and threatening with death anyone who shows up to vote.
Lieut. General Thomas Metz, the commander of U.S. ground forces, said last week that four of Iraq's 18 provinces remain too unsafe for many to vote. These insecure areas -- which include portions of Baghdad, Fallujah, Mosul and Saddam's hometown of Tikrit -- are home to as much as 40% of Iraq's population. While the U.S. expects high participation among the country's Shi'ites and Kurds, it fears that Sunni participation could be as low as 10% to 15%. "The insurgents are going to try to intimidate Iraqis to prevent them from voting, and they will go to any lengths to do that," says a Defense Department official. "We may not have seen the end of what they'll do."
That's a chilling prospect. In a report released last week, the cia's in-house think tank, the National Intelligence Council, warned that jihadists are transforming Iraq into another Afghanistan, a "training ground" for a "new class of terrorists who are professionalized and for whom political violence becomes an end in itself." Pentagon officials say there are fewer daily attacks on U.S. and Iraqi forces than there were two months ago, but they are stunned by the lethality of recent insurgent attacks. A roadside bomb last Monday blew up a Bradley fighting vehicle, a heavily armored troop carrier designed to battle Soviet infantry during the cold war, killing two U.S. soldiers. Many roadside bombs are expertly packed with large Russian-made shells fused together to blow up simultaneously and penetrate thickly armored vehicles. "What a mess," says another Pentagon official. "The frustration level here is high. The insurgents aren't stupid. They have the training, the equipment, the munitions, and they can see how effective they've been."
After months spent hyping the election as a watershed -- not just for Iraq but also for the entire Arab world -- and a necessary step toward an eventual reduction of U.S. troops in Iraq, the Administration is now downplaying expectations, pointing out that voters will merely be selecting a transitional government on Jan. 30, which will in turn begin the process of writing a constitution. If all goes as planned, a permanent government will take power in 2006. "These elections will not be perfect," says a senior Administration official. "Allawi said to our Congress that these will not be the best elections Iraq ever has. And that's true." So why not postpone them? Administration officials say that a delay would hand the insurgency a political victory and risk infuriating the majority Shi'ites -- in particular their chief religious authority, Grand Ayatullah Ali Husaini Sistani. The Shi'ites have "consistently expressed a desire for this process to just get a move on and for there to be fair representation," says a British official who has spent time in Iraq. And no one thinks security will quickly improve. "If we delay by two, three or six months," says the British official, "one month before election day we would be in exactly the same position we are now but with an extra 1,000 people dead and the violence more sophisticated."
But holding the election under the current volatile conditions carries its own risks. The insurgents' aim is to depress turnout in the Sunni areas and strip the election of broad legitimacy. About 15 million Iraqis are eligible to vote on election day, according to Iraq's Independent Electoral Commission. A commission official predicts about half will actually cast a ballot. That kind of turnout would be acceptable, but analysts are worried that the new legislature won't adequately reflect Iraq's ethnic composition. The assembly will select a new Prime Minister and President but, more important, will also draw up a new constitution. If Sunnis don't vote in sufficient numbers -- an official with a nongovernmental organization in Baghdad says that a Sunni turnout of "under 50% becomes a problem" -- the drafting of the constitution will be dominated by Shi'ite Muslims. And that would further alienate Sunnis and embolden extremists, including terrorist mastermind Abu Mousab al-Zarqawi, who has called for an all-out sectarian civil war against the Shi'ites.
What's more, the electoral system devised last year by the U.S., the U.N. and the now disbanded Iraqi Governing Council could further work against the Sunnis. Rather than let candidates compete in their home provinces -- which in the Sunni-dominated areas north and west of Baghdad would have guaranteed that Sunnis win seats in the constitutional assembly, no matter how many people showed up -- the system effectively throws everyone into a single pool. Those candidates who receive the most votes in the national tally will win seats. At the time it was adopted, a U.S. official says, the system was "the least worst option," in part because the process of determining provincial borders would have made it impossible to meet the Administration's goal of holding elections by the end of January. But the rules were made before it became apparent that voter participation in Sunni areas would be low. If more Sunnis cannot be persuaded to vote, the constitutional assembly will be disproportionately dominated by Shi'ites and Kurds -- groups that for more than two decades were mercilessly oppressed by Saddam and his Sunni-dominated government.
With time running short and many Iraqis afraid to vote, the U.S. is scrambling to shore up security in critical areas. In the so-called Sunni triangle, Pentagon officials say, U.S. and Iraqi forces conduct about 1,000 foot patrols every day. "We are definitely on the offensive," says a Pentagon official. In Baghdad the 1st Cavalry Division has brought in two battalions from the 82nd Airborne and extended the rotation of its own 2nd Brigade, adding about 5,000 troops. On election day, the job of providing security at 5,900 polling stations nationwide will fall mainly to the Iraqis' as 150,000 U.S. forces will try to fade into the background as much as possible. There are 7,600 Iraqi troops and 18,000 policemen in the capital alone, though a U.S. military official says at least 7,000 more police might be needed. The Allawi government is considering even more extreme measures to tighten security across the country as election day draws closer. The government has drawn up plans for a dusk-to-dawn curfew and a restriction on travel starting three days before the election, including a total ban on car traffic in major cities, which means voters will have to walk to polling stations. And since insurgents often set off roadside bombs with cell phones, cell service may be shut down on election day.
Throughout Iraq, the hopeful anticipation of the coming exercise in democracy is tempered by an ever present dread. On patrol in Mosul last week, Pangelinan's unit stopped in front of an old man's house. As Americans handed out candy to neighborhood children, Pangelinan asked the Iraqi how he thought the election would go. "Hopefully it will succeed in Mosul," the man said. Pangelinan responded, "I know it will." A few minutes later, after Pangelinan and his men had moved on, a car bomb detonated in the distance, sending a halo of white smoke into the air.
With reporting by Charles Crain/Mosul, Aparisim Ghosh/Baghdad, Helen Gibson/London and Elaine Shannon and Douglas Waller/Washington
c Time/Warner
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Citation: Bill Powell with Christopher Allbritton, "Can Iraq's Election Be Saved?", Time, 24 January 2005
12 January 2005
Allawi group slips cash to reporters
Financial Times
Steve Negus
January 10 2005
The electoral group headed by Iyad Allawi, the interim Iraqi prime minister, on Monday handed out cash to journalists to ensure coverage of its press conferences in a throwback to Ba'athist-era patronage ahead of parliamentary elections on January 30.
After a meeting held by Mr Allawi's campaign alliance in west Baghdad, reporters, most of whom were from the Arabic-language press, were invited upstairs where each was offered a "gift" of a $100 bill contained in an envelope.
Many of the journalists accepted the cash - about equivalent to half the starting monthly salary for a reporter at an Iraqi newspaper - and one jokingly recalled how Saddam Hussein's regime had also lavished perks on favoured reporters.
Giving gifts to journalists is common in many of the Middle East's authoritarian regimes, although reporters at the conference said the practice was not yet widespread in postwar Iraq.
The press conference came as Mr Allawi and his allies kicked the electoral campaign of their Iraqi List into high gear.
Mr Allawi was not at the conference, but Hussein al-Sadr, a Shia cleric running on the prime minister's list, used it to challenge Islamist opponents in the United Iraqi Alliance, saying they were falsely claiming the backing of the country's Shia clerical establishment.
In recent weeks, there have been signs that Mr Allawi's campaign is staging an unexpectedly strong challenge.
According to the preliminary results of one survey in Shia majority areas, Mr Allawi's list was favoured by 22 per cent of respondents compared with 27 per cent who chose the Alliance.
Mr Allawi's list, whose campaign emphasises the rebuilding of the Iraqi military, is playing on its leader's reputation as a strongman and Iraqi yearnings for stability.
Like most candidate groups, Mr Allawi's has not announced its complete list of candidates for security reasons.
However, officials in his party say that his prominent Shia allies include Mr Sadr and Basra governor Wael Abd al-Latif, while Sunnis include Falah al-Naquib, the interior minister, and Thamer al-Ghadhban, the minister for petroleum.
Leonid Kuchma, Ukraine's outgoing president, on Monday ordered an early withdrawal of the country's 1,600 troops from Iraq over the next six months.
Mr Kuchma's move came in response to the deaths of eight Ukrainian soldiers in a blast in Iraq at the weekend.
Viktor Yushchenko, the president-elect, said he would make the troop withdrawal a priority when he took office in the coming days.
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Citation:
Steve Negus, "Allawi group slips cash to reporters", Financial Times, 10 January 2005.
Original URL:
http://news.ft.com/cms/s/a3828a0c-6346-11d9-bec2-00000e2511c8,ft_acl=,s01=1.html
Steve Negus
January 10 2005
The electoral group headed by Iyad Allawi, the interim Iraqi prime minister, on Monday handed out cash to journalists to ensure coverage of its press conferences in a throwback to Ba'athist-era patronage ahead of parliamentary elections on January 30.
After a meeting held by Mr Allawi's campaign alliance in west Baghdad, reporters, most of whom were from the Arabic-language press, were invited upstairs where each was offered a "gift" of a $100 bill contained in an envelope.
Many of the journalists accepted the cash - about equivalent to half the starting monthly salary for a reporter at an Iraqi newspaper - and one jokingly recalled how Saddam Hussein's regime had also lavished perks on favoured reporters.
Giving gifts to journalists is common in many of the Middle East's authoritarian regimes, although reporters at the conference said the practice was not yet widespread in postwar Iraq.
The press conference came as Mr Allawi and his allies kicked the electoral campaign of their Iraqi List into high gear.
Mr Allawi was not at the conference, but Hussein al-Sadr, a Shia cleric running on the prime minister's list, used it to challenge Islamist opponents in the United Iraqi Alliance, saying they were falsely claiming the backing of the country's Shia clerical establishment.
In recent weeks, there have been signs that Mr Allawi's campaign is staging an unexpectedly strong challenge.
According to the preliminary results of one survey in Shia majority areas, Mr Allawi's list was favoured by 22 per cent of respondents compared with 27 per cent who chose the Alliance.
Mr Allawi's list, whose campaign emphasises the rebuilding of the Iraqi military, is playing on its leader's reputation as a strongman and Iraqi yearnings for stability.
Like most candidate groups, Mr Allawi's has not announced its complete list of candidates for security reasons.
However, officials in his party say that his prominent Shia allies include Mr Sadr and Basra governor Wael Abd al-Latif, while Sunnis include Falah al-Naquib, the interior minister, and Thamer al-Ghadhban, the minister for petroleum.
Leonid Kuchma, Ukraine's outgoing president, on Monday ordered an early withdrawal of the country's 1,600 troops from Iraq over the next six months.
Mr Kuchma's move came in response to the deaths of eight Ukrainian soldiers in a blast in Iraq at the weekend.
Viktor Yushchenko, the president-elect, said he would make the troop withdrawal a priority when he took office in the coming days.
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Citation:
Steve Negus, "Allawi group slips cash to reporters", Financial Times, 10 January 2005.
Original URL:
http://news.ft.com/cms/s/a3828a0c-6346-11d9-bec2-00000e2511c8,ft_acl=,s01=1.html
Many Fallujah residents angry over destruction from U.S.-led campaign
Abdul-qadir Saadi
Associated Press
January 11, 2005
Abdul-qadir Saadi
Associated Press
January 11, 2005
FALLUJAH, Iraq (AP) - When Ahmed Hussein Nasser returned to Fallujah weeks after a devastating U.S.-led campaign to retake the city from insurgents, he could barely recognize the city where he had spent all 66 years of his life. His anger against the Americans and Iraqi forces allied with them has only grown since his return - a worrisome sign for U.S. officials letting people back into Fallujah, a one-time insurgent stronghold where the population was generally believed to support the fighters. "When I see Americans in Fallujah I feel as if I am seeing devils in front of me," he said.
On Dec. 23, the first people allowed into the city were residents of the western neighbourhood of Andalus. The Iraqi government announced over the weekend that all the city's neighbourhoods will be open for returnees this Friday. The government said so far some 60,000 people have returned to the city. Few houses escaped damage from the intense American air raids late last year and the insurgent bombings and shootings that followed. Work teams have cleared rubble from the streets, but it is still tangled with downed power lines. Craters cut off access to side streets, and some buildings have walls or ceilings missing if they weren't simply destroyed.
There were suggestions before people began to return that they would have no idea of the devastation the campaign wrought. Some Marines south of the city reported people told them they thought Fallujah was practically unscathed. Alaa Sabri Hardan, a 20-year-old agriculture student, said he lost his most valuable possessions - photo albums. "I did not regret losing anything in my burnt house as much as I regret losing the 250 photographs of my childhood and my late parents," he said.
American officials have characterized their November battle as a fight to liberate Fallujah and have said the people returning have generally welcomed being free from the grip of the insurgents. "Losing your home is a very emotionally distressing, no matter how the loss came about. All human beings will experience a roller coaster of feelings and undoubtedly look for someone to blame," Maj. M. Naoimi Hawkins, spokeswoman for the 4th Civil Affairs unit, wrote in an e-mail. "Many Iraqi residents have made it clear to me that they realize that foreign fighters brought about the destruction and are ultimately the ones to blame."
Though the conditions are poor, many wanted to return no matter what. One of them was Salima Ouda, who came back with her son Hamed Jasem and his family after spending more than seven weeks in a tent camp. "Staying in our house is better than living in a tent where there is no running water for showers or even toilets," the 55-year-old widow said as she sat in her house, which was littered with bullets and a few shells.
The government said that each family will get immediate financial aid of $100 and that more aid worth $500 will be given later. Residents whose homes were damaged will get up to $10,000, the government said. Life has slowly improved in recent days as more people go out in the streets and vendors appear selling fruits and vegetables. U.S. troops continue to patrol some parts of the city to search for weapons caches and guerrillas who have trickled back.
People have running water and electricity for several hours every day, said Mohammed Hussein of the Ministry of Industry, which is supervising infrastructure projects in the city. American military officials say they have witnessed little friction with Iraqis coming back into the city. Lt. Col. Daniel Wilson, deputy for current operations for the 1st Marine Expeditionary Force, said the only discontent he's seen has been due to frustrations over wait times at city checkpoints for entering residents.
Mohsen Abdul-Ghani was among the first to return two weeks ago and found his house undamaged, though everything inside was in shambles. A blue "X" had been spray-painted outside to signify that American troops had searched the building. The 41-year-old professor at Baghdad's Islamic Law University left the city the same day to bring his family from Baghdad, where they have stayed during the attacks. "When I came back the next day I found the house totally burnt although there were no weapons in it and the Americans had earlier put a blue X sign," he said. Though he had no evidence, he immediately blamed the United States for killing and wounding civilians. He did not mention Iraq's insurgents. "The Americans have destroyed our city," he said.
-----------------------------------------
Citation: Abdul-qadir Saadi, "Many Fallujah residents angry over destruction from U.S.-led campaign," Associated Press, 11 January 2005; Original URL: http://cnews.canoe.ca/CNEWS/World/Iraq/2005/01/11/pf-894135.html
10 January 2005
'The Salvador Option'
Michael Hirsh and John Barry
Newsweek
09 January 2005
Jan. 8 - What to do about the deepening quagmire of Iraq? The Pentagon’s latest approach is being called "the Salvador option"—and the fact that it is being discussed at all is a measure of just how worried Donald Rumsfeld really is. "What everyone agrees is that we can’t just go on as we are," one senior military officer told NEWSWEEK. "We have to find a way to take the offensive against the insurgents. Right now, we are playing defense. And we are losing." Last November’s operation in Fallujah, most analysts agree, succeeded less in breaking "the back" of the insurgency—as Marine Gen. John Sattler optimistically declared at the time—than in spreading it out.
Now, NEWSWEEK has learned, the Pentagon is intensively debating an option that dates back to a still-secret strategy in the Reagan administration’s battle against the leftist guerrilla insurgency in El Salvador in the early 1980s. Then, faced with a losing war against Salvadoran rebels, the U.S. government funded or supported "nationalist" forces that allegedly included so-called death squads directed to hunt down and kill rebel leaders and sympathizers. Eventually the insurgency was quelled, and many U.S. conservatives consider the policy to have been a success—despite the deaths of innocent civilians and the subsequent Iran-Contra arms-for-hostages scandal. (Among the current administration officials who dealt with Central America back then is John Negroponte, who is today the U.S. ambassador to Iraq. Under Reagan, he was ambassador to Honduras.)
Following that model, one Pentagon proposal would send Special Forces teams to advise, support and possibly train Iraqi squads, most likely hand-picked Kurdish Peshmerga fighters and Shiite militiamen, to target Sunni insurgents and their sympathizers, even across the border into Syria, according to military insiders familiar with the discussions. It remains unclear, however, whether this would be a policy of assassination or so-called "snatch" operations, in which the targets are sent to secret facilities for interrogation. The current thinking is that while U.S. Special Forces would lead operations in, say, Syria, activities inside Iraq itself would be carried out by Iraqi paramilitaries, officials tell NEWSWEEK.
Also being debated is which agency within the U.S. government—the Defense department or CIA—would take responsibility for such an operation. Rumsfeld’s Pentagon has aggressively sought to build up its own intelligence-gathering and clandestine capability with an operation run by Defense Undersecretary Stephen Cambone. But since the Abu Ghraib interrogations scandal, some military officials are ultra-wary of any operations that could run afoul of the ethics codified in the Uniform Code of Military Justice. That, they argue, is the reason why such covert operations have always been run by the CIA and authorized by a special presidential finding. (In "covert" activity, U.S. personnel operate under cover and the U.S. government will not confirm that it instigated or ordered them into action if they are captured or killed.)
Meanwhile, intensive discussions are taking place inside the Senate Intelligence Committee over the Defense department’s efforts to expand the involvement of U.S. Special Forces personnel in intelligence-gathering missions. Historically, Special Forces’ intelligence gathering has been limited to objectives directly related to upcoming military operations—"preparation of the battlefield," in military lingo. But, according to intelligence and defense officials, some Pentagon civilians for years have sought to expand the use of Special Forces for other intelligence missions.
Pentagon civilians and some Special Forces personnel believe CIA civilian managers have traditionally been too conservative in planning and executing the kind of undercover missions that Special Forces soldiers believe they can effectively conduct. CIA traditionalists are believed to be adamantly opposed to ceding any authority to the Pentagon. Until now, Pentagon proposals for a capability to send soldiers out on intelligence missions without direct CIA approval or participation have been shot down. But counter-terrorist strike squads, even operating covertly, could be deemed to fall within the Defense department’s orbit.
The interim government of Prime Minister Ayad Allawi is said to be among the most forthright proponents of the Salvador option. Maj. Gen.Muhammad Abdallah al-Shahwani, director of Iraq’s National Intelligence Service, may have been laying the groundwork for the idea with a series of interviews during the past ten days. Shahwani told the London-based Arabic daily Al-Sharq al-Awsat that the insurgent leadership—he named three former senior figures in the Saddam regime, including Saddam Hussein’s half-brother—were essentially safe across the border in a Syrian sanctuary. "We are certain that they are in Syria and move easily between Syrian and Iraqi territories," he said, adding that efforts to extradite them "have not borne fruit so far."
Shahwani also said that the U.S. occupation has failed to crack the problem of broad support for the insurgency. The insurgents, he said, "are mostly in the Sunni areas where the population there, almost 200,000, is sympathetic to them." He said most Iraqi people do not actively support the insurgents or provide them with material or logistical help, but at the same time they won’t turn them in. One military source involved in the Pentagon debate agrees that this is the crux of the problem, and he suggests that new offensive operations are needed that would create a fear of aiding the insurgency. "The Sunni population is paying no price for the support it is giving to the terrorists," he said. "From their point of view, it is cost-free. We have to change that equation."
Pentagon sources emphasize there has been no decision yet to launch the Salvador option. Last week, Rumsfeld decided to send a retired four-star general, Gary Luck, to Iraq on an open-ended mission to review the entire military strategy there. But with the U.S. Army strained to the breaking point, military strategists note that a dramatic new approach might be needed—perhaps one as potentially explosive as the Salvador option.
----------------------------------------------------------------
Citation:
Michael Hirsh and John Barry, "'The Salvador Option'" Newsweek, 09 January 2005. Original URL: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/6802629/site/newsweek/
Newsweek
09 January 2005
Jan. 8 - What to do about the deepening quagmire of Iraq? The Pentagon’s latest approach is being called "the Salvador option"—and the fact that it is being discussed at all is a measure of just how worried Donald Rumsfeld really is. "What everyone agrees is that we can’t just go on as we are," one senior military officer told NEWSWEEK. "We have to find a way to take the offensive against the insurgents. Right now, we are playing defense. And we are losing." Last November’s operation in Fallujah, most analysts agree, succeeded less in breaking "the back" of the insurgency—as Marine Gen. John Sattler optimistically declared at the time—than in spreading it out.
Now, NEWSWEEK has learned, the Pentagon is intensively debating an option that dates back to a still-secret strategy in the Reagan administration’s battle against the leftist guerrilla insurgency in El Salvador in the early 1980s. Then, faced with a losing war against Salvadoran rebels, the U.S. government funded or supported "nationalist" forces that allegedly included so-called death squads directed to hunt down and kill rebel leaders and sympathizers. Eventually the insurgency was quelled, and many U.S. conservatives consider the policy to have been a success—despite the deaths of innocent civilians and the subsequent Iran-Contra arms-for-hostages scandal. (Among the current administration officials who dealt with Central America back then is John Negroponte, who is today the U.S. ambassador to Iraq. Under Reagan, he was ambassador to Honduras.)
Following that model, one Pentagon proposal would send Special Forces teams to advise, support and possibly train Iraqi squads, most likely hand-picked Kurdish Peshmerga fighters and Shiite militiamen, to target Sunni insurgents and their sympathizers, even across the border into Syria, according to military insiders familiar with the discussions. It remains unclear, however, whether this would be a policy of assassination or so-called "snatch" operations, in which the targets are sent to secret facilities for interrogation. The current thinking is that while U.S. Special Forces would lead operations in, say, Syria, activities inside Iraq itself would be carried out by Iraqi paramilitaries, officials tell NEWSWEEK.
Also being debated is which agency within the U.S. government—the Defense department or CIA—would take responsibility for such an operation. Rumsfeld’s Pentagon has aggressively sought to build up its own intelligence-gathering and clandestine capability with an operation run by Defense Undersecretary Stephen Cambone. But since the Abu Ghraib interrogations scandal, some military officials are ultra-wary of any operations that could run afoul of the ethics codified in the Uniform Code of Military Justice. That, they argue, is the reason why such covert operations have always been run by the CIA and authorized by a special presidential finding. (In "covert" activity, U.S. personnel operate under cover and the U.S. government will not confirm that it instigated or ordered them into action if they are captured or killed.)
Meanwhile, intensive discussions are taking place inside the Senate Intelligence Committee over the Defense department’s efforts to expand the involvement of U.S. Special Forces personnel in intelligence-gathering missions. Historically, Special Forces’ intelligence gathering has been limited to objectives directly related to upcoming military operations—"preparation of the battlefield," in military lingo. But, according to intelligence and defense officials, some Pentagon civilians for years have sought to expand the use of Special Forces for other intelligence missions.
Pentagon civilians and some Special Forces personnel believe CIA civilian managers have traditionally been too conservative in planning and executing the kind of undercover missions that Special Forces soldiers believe they can effectively conduct. CIA traditionalists are believed to be adamantly opposed to ceding any authority to the Pentagon. Until now, Pentagon proposals for a capability to send soldiers out on intelligence missions without direct CIA approval or participation have been shot down. But counter-terrorist strike squads, even operating covertly, could be deemed to fall within the Defense department’s orbit.
The interim government of Prime Minister Ayad Allawi is said to be among the most forthright proponents of the Salvador option. Maj. Gen.Muhammad Abdallah al-Shahwani, director of Iraq’s National Intelligence Service, may have been laying the groundwork for the idea with a series of interviews during the past ten days. Shahwani told the London-based Arabic daily Al-Sharq al-Awsat that the insurgent leadership—he named three former senior figures in the Saddam regime, including Saddam Hussein’s half-brother—were essentially safe across the border in a Syrian sanctuary. "We are certain that they are in Syria and move easily between Syrian and Iraqi territories," he said, adding that efforts to extradite them "have not borne fruit so far."
Shahwani also said that the U.S. occupation has failed to crack the problem of broad support for the insurgency. The insurgents, he said, "are mostly in the Sunni areas where the population there, almost 200,000, is sympathetic to them." He said most Iraqi people do not actively support the insurgents or provide them with material or logistical help, but at the same time they won’t turn them in. One military source involved in the Pentagon debate agrees that this is the crux of the problem, and he suggests that new offensive operations are needed that would create a fear of aiding the insurgency. "The Sunni population is paying no price for the support it is giving to the terrorists," he said. "From their point of view, it is cost-free. We have to change that equation."
Pentagon sources emphasize there has been no decision yet to launch the Salvador option. Last week, Rumsfeld decided to send a retired four-star general, Gary Luck, to Iraq on an open-ended mission to review the entire military strategy there. But with the U.S. Army strained to the breaking point, military strategists note that a dramatic new approach might be needed—perhaps one as potentially explosive as the Salvador option.
----------------------------------------------------------------
Citation:
Michael Hirsh and John Barry, "'The Salvador Option'" Newsweek, 09 January 2005. Original URL: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/6802629/site/newsweek/
Eight die in Iraq explosion
The Australian
10 January 2005
EIGHT soldiers - seven Ukrainians and one Kazakh - were killed in Iraq today while attempting to detonate an ammunition cache, a spokesman for the Polish army said.
"I can confirm that seven Ukrainians were killed and one Kazakh," General staff spokesman Colonel Zdzislaw Gnatowski told Reuters of the incident in Wasit province.
Earlier, Poland's PAP news agency had reported General Andrzej Ekiert, commander of the Polish-led multinational division in south-central Iraq, as putting the death toll at nine.
In Kiev, Ukraine's defence ministry confirmed seven of its soldiers had been killed.
Gnatowski said a single large bomb had exploded while being transported for destruction, injuring an additional seven Ukrainians and four Kazakhs.
Ukraine's parliament has asked outgoing President Leonid Kuchma to withdraw its 1600 troops in Iraq, further depleting the multinational division, whose numbers have already fallen to 6000.
Poland, one of the US administration's staunchest allies in Iraq, has said it will reduce its own 2400 troops in the country by one-third from February and hopes to bring the rest home by the end of the year.
----------------------------------------------------------------
Citation:
"Eight Die in Iraq Explosion", The Australian, 10 January 2005. Original URL:
http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/printpage/0,5942,11899111,00.html
10 January 2005
EIGHT soldiers - seven Ukrainians and one Kazakh - were killed in Iraq today while attempting to detonate an ammunition cache, a spokesman for the Polish army said.
"I can confirm that seven Ukrainians were killed and one Kazakh," General staff spokesman Colonel Zdzislaw Gnatowski told Reuters of the incident in Wasit province.
Earlier, Poland's PAP news agency had reported General Andrzej Ekiert, commander of the Polish-led multinational division in south-central Iraq, as putting the death toll at nine.
In Kiev, Ukraine's defence ministry confirmed seven of its soldiers had been killed.
Gnatowski said a single large bomb had exploded while being transported for destruction, injuring an additional seven Ukrainians and four Kazakhs.
Ukraine's parliament has asked outgoing President Leonid Kuchma to withdraw its 1600 troops in Iraq, further depleting the multinational division, whose numbers have already fallen to 6000.
Poland, one of the US administration's staunchest allies in Iraq, has said it will reduce its own 2400 troops in the country by one-third from February and hopes to bring the rest home by the end of the year.
----------------------------------------------------------------
Citation:
"Eight Die in Iraq Explosion", The Australian, 10 January 2005. Original URL:
http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/printpage/0,5942,11899111,00.html
Poll will be illegitimate, Iraqi elder statesman warns
Nicholas Pyke
The Independent
09 January 2005
Nicholas Pyke
The Independent
09 January 2005
An Iraqi elder statesman urged the country's interim government to postpone the general election yesterday, warning that the seemingly unstoppable wave of killings would only worsen if the poll takes place as planned in three weeks' time.
Adnan Pachachi, a former Iraqi foreign minister, said that the polls are bound to be condemned as illegitimate because, thanks to the violence and a Sunni boycott, many voters will be unable to take part. "If they are going to be held on 30 January without the participation of large segments of the Iraqi population and important areas of Iraq, the elections would be seen as non-inclusive and illegitimate," he told BBC Radio 4's Today programme yesterday. Mr Pachachi, who was foreign minister before Iraq's 1968 Baathist coup, was once seen as a possible president of post-Saddam Iraq and now heads the Iraqi Independent Democrats party.
President George Bush has acknowledged that four out of 18 Iraqi provinces are still not safe enough for voting to take place. Also, the major Sunni factions are refusing to take part, a potentially fatal challenge to the legitimacy of the poll. Even so, the American-led coalition is determined to press ahead.
This week the Pentagon is sending a retired senior general to Iraq - apparently in response to the continuing insurgent campaign aimed at derailing the election. General Gary Luck, a former commander of US forces in Korea, is due to travel this week on the orders of Donald Rumsfeld, the Defence Secretary.
According to a spokesman, the posting is to assess progress in training Iraqis to take over security, key to ensuring that US forces are eventually free to leave Iraq. He will also take an overview of American operations against the insurgents. US military commanders acknowledge that the performance of the Iraqis is mixed, and far from being able to cut US troop numbers as it had hoped, the Pentagon now has more personnel in Iraq than ever - more than 150,000. A senior US army official has said the army is likely to ask for a permanent increase of 30,000 in its strength.
There is mounting speculation that extra British troops will be sent to Iraq to bolster election security, with an announcement expected in the next few days. Battalions of the Royal Scots and the Royal Highland Fusiliers are waiting in reserve, with the former, currently in Cyprus, said to be favourites for deployment. The extra battalion of 650 soldiers would take the total of British troops in Iraq to more than 9,000.
In one of the few shows of electoral normality, Iraq's Communist Party held a campaign rally in central Baghdad last week, despite the recent assassination of two senior members. The party's main tenet is the separation of state and religion, making it unique in the country's political landscape. Established in 1934, it was banned under the British-installed monarchy of the time. Thousands of party members were massacred when the Baath Party came to power.
c 2004 Independent Digital (UK) Ltd
-----------------------------------------
Citation: Nicholas Pyke, "Poll will be illegitimate, Iraqi elder statesman warns," The Independent, 09 January 2005.
US military admits it hit wrong target after bomb kills 14 Iraqis
Nicholas Pyke
The Independent
09 January 2005
Nicholas Pyke
The Independent
09 January 2005
Fourteen Iraqis were reported killed and five injured early yesterday morning after an American war plane obliterated a family house in the north of the country. The military said it was a mistake. The American authorities promised a full investigation after admitting that a 500lb bomb had been unleashed on entirely the wrong target, south-east of Mosul. Television footage had earlier shown a house in the village of Aitha reduced to rubble, while locals inspected the damage.
Nearby there were rows of freshly dug graves where local people said the dead were buried. They reported that American military vehicles had surrounded part of the settlement overnight, shortly before the strike in the early hours of the morning. An official US statement said an F-16 jet dropped a satellite-guided bomb on a house that was meant to be searched: "The intended target was another location nearby."
American operations are under way to restore security to the area, where the police force has effectively collapsed, ahead of the 30 January elections. Military reinforcements have begun moving to the area and Iraqi security forces are also being beefed up. The bombing took place hours before a senior American embassy official in Iraq met leading members of Iraq's Sunni Arab community to try to persuade them to take part in the elections, which they have threatened to boycott.
The violence aimed at disrupting the poll continued yesterday. A suicide car bomb tore through a petrol station in Mahaweel, in the "triangle of death" south of Baghdad, killing four people and wounding 19 others who had been queuing at the fuel pump, police said. In a separate incident, three Sunni officials from Saddam Hussein's hometown of Tikrit were abducted on a road south of Baghdad. They had been returning from the holy city of Najaf, where they had held talks with Shia leaders to bridge sectarian divisions over the elections.
In the past week alone, insurgents have killed almost 100 people in bombings, ambushes and assassinations, mostly targeting fledgling security services - often from the majority Shia population - whom they regard as collaborators.
Under pressure to take action, the US military reported the capture of a man associated with Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the al-Qa'ida ally thought to be responsible for many of the bloodiest attacks. The American authorities said the arrest marked "significant progress in the inevitable destruction of the ... Zarqawi terrorist network" in Mosul.
Last year, US forces mounted frequent air strikes on houses in the western Iraqi city of Fallujah ahead of a major ground offensive, claiming the houses were being used by insurgents.
In May, US marines outraged ordinary Iraqis when they attacked an isolated villa in western Iraq, claiming it was an insurgent base and killing 40. Survivors said they were all civilians.
c 2004 Independent Digital (UK) Ltd
----------------------------------------------
Citation: Nicholas Pyke, "US military admits it hit wrong target after bomb kills 14 Iraqis," The Independent, 09 January 2005.
Campaigning in Iraq has worsened ethnic, religious tensions
Nancy Youssef
Knight Ridder Newspapers
9 January 2005
Nancy Youssef
Knight Ridder Newspapers
9 January 2005
BAGHDAD, Iraq - Asking someone whether he or she is Shiite, Sunni or Kurd was once taboo in Iraq. Iraq was one country, bound through wars and dictatorship, not a nation of divided sects or ethnic groups, came the standard answer. But that national identity has been breaking down in the parliamentary election campaign. In the absence of political ideologies or competing policy agendas, the nation's newly formed political parties are increasingly depending on religious and ethnic labels to help voters distinguish among them. While the appeals help build party support for the Jan. 30 elections, they contribute to a growing sectarianism. Shiite Muslim Arabs account for roughly 60 percent of Iraq's population. Sunni Muslim Arabs are about 20 percent, and the ethnic Kurds, who are also Sunni Muslim, are another 20 percent, mainly in the north of the country.
On the campaign posters plastered on thick concrete blast walls around Baghdad, only one name and face appears regularly: Grand Ayatollah Ali al Husseini al Sistani, the leading Shiite cleric, who isn't a candidate. Sistani appears on campaign signs for the major Shiite party, the United Iraqi Alliance. Some signs have Sistani and a verse from the Quran. Others have him above a campaign slogan. "With your voice, we will build Iraq," reads one. "No to dictatorship, Yes to the coalition," reads another.
None of the signs spell out what the party would do if it won.
Political parties are widely distrusted in Iraq. During Saddam Hussein's reign, only one party could operate freely, the Baath Party. And party politics usually meant courting favors for party members. Indeed, the word "party" has such negative connotations that of the 111 political parties that will appear on the ballot, only 19 use the word "party" in their names. The rest call themselves coalitions, gatherings, assemblies and the like.
Political parties "are going to the religious leaders to gain the people's respect," said Ahmed al Ruwaee, an economics professor at al Mustansiriya University in Baghdad who's followed the election. "It's because the parties are not confident in their base." In the process, it creates sectarianism, al Ruwaee said. Instead of campaigning on their plans for the country, they're leaning on the citizens' loyalty to their religious leaders.
Saad Jawad Quindeel, a spokesman for the Supreme Council of the Islamic Revolution in Iraq - which is part of the United Iraqi Alliance - defended evoking Sistani's name in the campaign. Quindeel said the Shiite campaign included "recognizing the Islamic identity of the Iraqi people." He denied that a Shiite slate meant sectarianism. "We are not calling for a Sistani state. No doubt if we did that, we would divide the state," he said. Earlier this week, interim Prime Minister Iyad Allawi, who's running on a secular Shiite slate, said he believed that the election would unify the country. The Shiites are expected to make big gains and win control of the government. The minority Sunnis have run the government for most of the past century, and the expected change in power may be contributing to sectarian discord.
At Baghdad University, students hesitated to suggest a divide between sects. A group of women sitting at a cafeteria in the student union at first said Iraq remained a united country. But talking about their views on the election widened the gap. Wasab Mehdi, 21, a Shiite political-science student, said she didn't know much about the candidates, but planned to vote, calling it a "duty to my country." She insisted there's no divide between sects: "We are all Muslims."
Next to her sat her friend Nadia Khatim, 21, a Sunni, who said she wouldn't vote because her neighborhood was littered with messages threatening to behead anyone who voted. And Khatim said she was worried about what Iraq would look like under Shiite leadership. "I have fears that my country will change," she said. Mehdi chimed in: "There is no need to worry. It doesn't matter, Sunni or Shiite, as long as an honorable person is in power." "For you, it doesn't matter," her friend responded. For Khatim herself, as a Sunni, "it will."
Poor security inhibits learning much about the parties and candidates beyond simple labels. The Independent Electoral Commission, which is in charge of producing the elections, has refused to release the names of the 7,000-plus candidates who are running, saying it's too dangerous for them. It has promised to announce the names eventually.
In the meantime, it's been up to the parties to let people know who's running on their slates. Many release only the top names on the ticket. The parties also say the bad security precludes them from announcing their candidates, and from going out and meeting voters. The lack of any understanding about the parties perpetuates the distrust between citizens and parties, said Nasser Chadiriji, the head of the National Democratic Party. "If I were to vote for a list, when would I find out who is on the list?" asked Ahmed Abu Hiba, a Sunni from Fallujah. "I would participate, but I don't know the people."
Chadiriji said two of his party's 48 candidates resigned Friday after receiving death threats; the remaining are afraid to leave their homes. He thinks every participant should have eight guards around him before announcing his candidacy. But he said his party couldn't afford such protection for all its candidates. "Most of the parties, especially those that don't have militias, can't campaign," Chadiriji said.
Some of the sectarian split is fueled by the growing difference in experiences for Sunnis and Shiites leading up to the election, residents said. Shiite parties have announced more of the candidates on their lists and have encouraged more voter participation than their Sunni counterparts. The Sunnis say the violent insurgency has spread into their major strongholds, and that the American attack on Fallujah made it impossible for them to campaign. The major Sunni party, the Iraqi Islamic Party, withdrew from the election last month, citing security problems among its voters. "How can elections be held where whole towns have been wiped out?" asked Ibrahim Abdullah, 25, a Sunni student at Baghdad University who lives in Fallujah and who thinks the United States wants the Sunnis to lose. "The winner will be carried in by the Americans."
Most people don't understand how the elections will work, where they'll vote or even what they're voting for, al Ruwaee said, forcing them to turn to their religious leaders for guidance. "To a lot of people, the process is unclear. A lot of people think we are voting for a president, not a national assembly," he said. "I had to do my own research to understand the process myself."
Some remain optimistic that nationalism, which grew during Iraq's more prosperous economic years and continued through Saddam's leadership, will keep sectarianism from becoming a permanent part of Iraqi politics. Sunnis and Shiites "are like the Tigris and the Euphrates; no matter how separated we are, in the end, we meet," said Zahnab Ahmed, 22, a Shiite from Baghdad's Sadr City neighborhood.
c 2005, Knight Ridder/Tribune Information Services.
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Citation: Nancy Youssef, "Campaigning in Iraq has worsened ethnic, religious tensions," Knight Ridder Newspapers, 9 January 2005; Original URL: http://www.sunherald.com/mld/sunherald/10592636.htm?template=contentModules/printstory.jsp