Dexter Filkins
New York Times
January 6, 2005
AGHDAD, Iraq, Jan. 6 -With three weeks to go before nationwide elections, significant areas of four of Iraq's 18 provinces are still not secure enough for citizens to vote, the commander of American ground forces here said today.
Lt. Gen. Thomas Metz, speaking at a news conference here, said the military operations were being stepped up to make those places safe enough for the vote to be held. The four provinces he named are all in the country's Sunni heartland, which forms the core of the resistance against the American-backed project: Al Anbar, which includes Falluja and Ramadi; Nineva, which contains the Mosul; Salahadin, which includes Tikrit, the hometown of Saddam Hussein; and Baghdad.
Together, the four provinces represent more than half the population of Iraq. But within each of them, he said, there appear to be areas safe and secure enough for people to vote.
The challenge for General Metz, and for the Iraqi government and the 153,000 American soldiers here, was made clear again today. Seven American soldiers who were on patrol in northwestern Baghdad were killed when their Bradley fighting vehicle was hit by "an improvised explosive device," the military said. And a marine conducting security operations in Al Anbar Province was killed in action.
The police in Mosul told The Associated Press they had unearthed the bodies of 18 young Shiite men who been taken off a bus last month and shot in the backs of their heads. At least some of the men had been working on an American military base in Mosul. They were found in a field.
Today's acknowledgement by General Metz that large parts of the country were still unfit for elections came as the Iraqi government announced that it was extending emergency rule in most areas of the country for 30 days. The laws grant the security forces expanded powers to carry out raids and to make arrests. The law, which was imposed on the eve of the invasion of Falluja in November, also gives the government the right to impose a curfew, which American officials said today would likely go into effect near the time of the election.
The extension of emergency rule followed a string of suicide attacks on Iraqi security forces, which have left more than 80 police and soldiers dead in the past week.
General Metz said the 14 other provinces were more or less ready to hold elections as scheduled on Jan. 30. Security at some 9,000 polling places will be largely provided by Iraqi security forces, he said, with American forces standing back unless they are called in. Though Iraqi security forces have often performed poorly in the face of insurgent attacks, General Metz expressed confidence that the Iraqi forces, which currently number about 127,000, could handle the job.
The American troops are being held back to avoid antagonizing potential voters. But the move runs the risk of allowing insurgents to disrupt the elections with violent attacks. The 127,000 figure falls far short of the 270,000 Iraqi officials have estimated are needed to secure the country on election day. General Metz said he could not guarantee the safety of every Iraqi who wanted to cast a ballot.
"I just can't guarantee that everyone will be able to go to a poll in total safety," General Metz said. "I cannot put a bubble around every person walking from their home to the polling site."
The statement by General Metz that there were still significant parts of the country too unstable to hold elections comes after several major offensives against insurgent strongholds in Falluja, Samara and areas south of Baghdad. It was an acknowledgement of the continued resilience of the Iraqi insurgency, which is thought to boast between 8,000 and 10,000 fighters and which has grown in strength despite a sustained American effort to crush it.
While the American military claimed to have killed hundreds of insurgents in those operations, some Iraqis said that many more insurgents simply fled the battlegrounds to fight another day.
"Today I would not be in much shape to hold elections in those provinces three weeks from today," General Metz said. "Those are the four areas that we see enough attacks that we are going to continue to focus our energies."
As part of that plan, American forces this week stepped up military operations in and around Mosul, the Sunni-dominated city in northern Iraq that has been particularly violent in recent weeks. American forces recently doubled the number of American troops there, adding around 3,000 soldiers, and also dispatched "significant numbers" of Iraqi forces as well.
Despite the difficulties, General Metz gave a mostly upbeat assessment of the security environment here in the final days before the vote, which Iraqi and American officials are billing not just as a landmark date in Iraqi history but also as a means that will eventually stabilize the country and allow the Americans to leave. General Metz said that attacks against American and Iraqi forces had declined in recent weeks following the monthlong Ramadan holiday.
General Metz, a three-star general, said American and Iraqi forces had been attacked an average of about 70 times a day in the past week. He said he expected the number of such attacks to climb to about 85 a day as the election nears.
The recent spate of suicide bombings, which have also killed dozens of civilians, is a perverse measure of desperation among the insurgents, General Metzi said. He said the guerrillas have realized that they cannot persuade the Iraqis to join their cause and so have chosen to intimidate them.
"Murder, kidnapping and torture are not the tools of a popular movement," General Metz said.
Yet even with the drop in recent attacks, their frequency still far exceeds the number of attacks faced by American and Iraqi forces in late 2003, when the insurgency began to gather steam. At the time, the number of attacks was peaking at an average of about 50 a day.
Like other senior American officials, General Metz said he was opposed to postponing the election, saying that a delay would give the insurgents more time to try to wreck the democratic process. "I think there is a greater chance of civil war with a delay than without one," he said.
General Metz said he favored going forward with the elections even if it meant that significant numbers of Iraqis stay away from the polls. Many prominent clerics and political leaders from Iraq's Sunni community have said they plan to stay away from the polls, some because of the violence, others because they insist that a fair election cannot take place under a foreign military operation.
"Part of democracy is the right to choose," General Metz said. "If people choose to boycott the election, that is their choice."
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Dexter Filkins, "Weeks Before Vote, General Says Parts of Iraq Are Not Ready", New York Times, 06 January 2005.
Original URL:
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/01/06/international/middleeast/06cnd-iraq.html?pagewanted=print&position=