By Guy Dinmore
Financial Times, 29 August 2006
Iraq’s main political factions have hammered out an agreement on the sharing of oil and gas revenues but other contentious issues need to be resolved before a draft hydrocarbon law is completed, a senior Iraqi official said on Tuesday.
Barham Salih, deputy prime minister in charge of the economy, told reporters in Washington by video link from Baghdad that the revenue sharing dispute had been settled during three days of intense talks at a “retreat” last week.
“That contentious issue is out,” he said. The cabinet hopes to present the draft law to parliament by the end of the year, he added.
Oil and gas revenues would be shared out at the federal level and redistributed to the regions according to population and “needs”, he said. This would still provide an incentive to regional oil companies to maximise output, he added.
Mr Salih, the most senior Kurd in the cabinet, did not elaborate on the negotiating process but the agreement would appear to be a compromise by the Kurdistan regional government.
Under its own regional draft oil law published this month, Kurdistan – which has already started signing contracts with foreign companies – would have received directly the revenues from “future fields”.
Hussain al-Shahristani, the oil minister from the main Shia alliance, has insisted that the federal government control all of Iraq’s resources. The formerly ruling Sunni minority fears the new constitution, which could yet be amended, would hand control of future oil development to the Shia and Kurdish dominated regions.
The parties also agreed last month to set up an “oil council” that would represent all regions in Iraq, and to restructure the Iraq National Oil Company as a holding company that would incorporate “functional regional companies”.
But reflecting the tensions between the regions and the strains with the federal government, Mr Salih said differences remained over who would be responsible for taking major decisions and signing contracts. He made no reference to the oil reserves of the disputed province of Kirkuk, which the Kurdish autonomous region wants to control.
Iraq, believed to hold the world’s second biggest oil reserves, after Saudi Arabia, is basing its federal 2007 budget on production of 2.2 to 2.5m barrels a day and exports of 1.7 to 1.8m b/d. Production is projected to double by 2010, Mr Salih said, while acknowledging serious security problems.
Before the 2003 invasion, the Bush administration ignored the advice of experts and former senior officials, assuring the US public that Iraq’s oil wealth would pay for reconstruction. But production has struggled to return to pre-war levels because of sabotage, corruption and the decrepit state of the industry.
“Iraq is a devastated economic wasteland,” Mr Salih commented. Nonetheless, Iraq planned to become economically self-sufficient within four years, he said.
------------------------------
Citation: Guy Dinmore. "Iraq’s parties reach deal on oil-sharing," Financial Times, 29 August 2006.
Original URL: http://www.ft.com/cms/s/c2d3d444-378c-11db-bc01-0000779e2340.html
------------------------------
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30 August 2006
US attorney general discusses interrogation tactics in Iraq
By Jay Deshmukh
Agence France-Presse, 29 August 2006
US Attorney General Alberto Gonzales met Iraq's Deputy Prime Minister Barham Saleh and discussed the tactics used by Iraqi security forces to combat a wave of violence, including torture.
"It is a somewhat difficult decision as to where to draw the line," Gonzales said, referring to possible measures that Iraqi police might use to extract information from suspected insurgents and death squad leaders.
"It is difficult to decide what is appropriate and what is allowed under law," said Gonzales, who has drawn criticism in the past for describing the Geneva Conventions against prisoner abuse as "quaint".
Gonzales, who arrived in Baghdad Tuesday, told reporters the issue of interrogation tactics came up during his meeting with Saleh but said the techniques to be used were a decision for the Iraqi government.
But he stressed that the US government was against any kind of torture.
"Our President is very clear that government does not engage in torture. The US is not engaging in torture. We are part of a convention against torture."
Iraq is in the grip of a brutal sectarian conflict and there are frequent allegations that militias and death squads with links to state security agencies are involved in the torture and murder of detainees.
Dozens of bodies are found every week across Iraq of kidnap victims killed execution style -- bound, blind-folded and killed with gunshots to the head or beheaded. Some show signs of abuse with power tools.
On Tuesday, at least 11 such bodies were found in Baghdad, their hands bound and dumped in the street.
Gonzales said discussions with Iraqi officials revolved around how to establish the "rule of law and establish greater security in Iraq."
"The rule of law will be systematically adopted by the representatives of the people," he said.
The US justice minister was questioned about the increasing use of adhoc Islamic Sharia law courts across the country, especially by militia groups, who employ clerics to sanction extra-judicial killings.
The Mahdi Army militia loyal to radical Shiite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr, is often accused of operating such courts and executing people it finds guilty.
"The way of thinking... the culture can't be changed overnight. The United States makes itself available by way of views and training" to establish a secure rule of law, Gonzales said.
"It's an ongoing process and will take time."
Gonzales also said it was a "challenge" to control the militias roaming on the streets of the capital.
He said the US government had also approved 100 million dollars for building new prisons and training and promoting the democratic rule of law in Iraq.
Referring to allegations of a series of abuses committed by US troops in Iraq, the attorney general insisted that "99.9 percent of the men and women in uniform observed ethical standards under difficult circumstances."
"But those who do not will be held accountable."
The US military is currently battling a series of accusations, most damaging being allegations of rape and murder of an Iraqi girl and killing of her family in the town of Mahmudiyah by a group of soldiers in March.
--------------------------
Citation: Jay Deshmukh. "US attorney general discusses interrogation tactics in Iraq," Agence France-Presse, 29 August 2006.
Original URL: http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20060829/pl_afp/iraqunrestusjustice
--------------------------
Agence France-Presse, 29 August 2006
US Attorney General Alberto Gonzales met Iraq's Deputy Prime Minister Barham Saleh and discussed the tactics used by Iraqi security forces to combat a wave of violence, including torture.
"It is a somewhat difficult decision as to where to draw the line," Gonzales said, referring to possible measures that Iraqi police might use to extract information from suspected insurgents and death squad leaders.
"It is difficult to decide what is appropriate and what is allowed under law," said Gonzales, who has drawn criticism in the past for describing the Geneva Conventions against prisoner abuse as "quaint".
Gonzales, who arrived in Baghdad Tuesday, told reporters the issue of interrogation tactics came up during his meeting with Saleh but said the techniques to be used were a decision for the Iraqi government.
But he stressed that the US government was against any kind of torture.
"Our President is very clear that government does not engage in torture. The US is not engaging in torture. We are part of a convention against torture."
Iraq is in the grip of a brutal sectarian conflict and there are frequent allegations that militias and death squads with links to state security agencies are involved in the torture and murder of detainees.
Dozens of bodies are found every week across Iraq of kidnap victims killed execution style -- bound, blind-folded and killed with gunshots to the head or beheaded. Some show signs of abuse with power tools.
On Tuesday, at least 11 such bodies were found in Baghdad, their hands bound and dumped in the street.
Gonzales said discussions with Iraqi officials revolved around how to establish the "rule of law and establish greater security in Iraq."
"The rule of law will be systematically adopted by the representatives of the people," he said.
The US justice minister was questioned about the increasing use of adhoc Islamic Sharia law courts across the country, especially by militia groups, who employ clerics to sanction extra-judicial killings.
The Mahdi Army militia loyal to radical Shiite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr, is often accused of operating such courts and executing people it finds guilty.
"The way of thinking... the culture can't be changed overnight. The United States makes itself available by way of views and training" to establish a secure rule of law, Gonzales said.
"It's an ongoing process and will take time."
Gonzales also said it was a "challenge" to control the militias roaming on the streets of the capital.
He said the US government had also approved 100 million dollars for building new prisons and training and promoting the democratic rule of law in Iraq.
Referring to allegations of a series of abuses committed by US troops in Iraq, the attorney general insisted that "99.9 percent of the men and women in uniform observed ethical standards under difficult circumstances."
"But those who do not will be held accountable."
The US military is currently battling a series of accusations, most damaging being allegations of rape and murder of an Iraqi girl and killing of her family in the town of Mahmudiyah by a group of soldiers in March.
--------------------------
Citation: Jay Deshmukh. "US attorney general discusses interrogation tactics in Iraq," Agence France-Presse, 29 August 2006.
Original URL: http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20060829/pl_afp/iraqunrestusjustice
--------------------------
Iraq strikes peace deal with militia as 155 killed
Agence France-Presse, 29 August 2006
Hard-pressed Iraqi government forces have been forced to strike a truce with Shiite militia fighters, as fierce fighting followed by a pipeline explosion left 155 people dead.
Officials said that 81 people died in Diwaniyah in Monday's clashes between security forces and militiamen and that on Tuesday, a few hours after a peace deal was reached, a fire at a fuel pipeline outside the town killed 74 more.
Hamid Jaathi, the head of Diwaniyah's health department, said that another 94 people were injured in the blast, which a defence official said was caused by looters sabotaging a disused fuel pipe to hunt for petrol on Tuesday.
Meanwhile -- as Iraq reeled from a three-day bout of bloodshed -- sectarian and rebel attacks left at least 14 people dead, including four members of one family who were killed when mortar bombs hit their house in south Baghdad's mainly Shiite neighbourhood of Al-Amel.
Since Saturday, when Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki hosted a peace conference for tribal leaders, Iraq has been battered by firefights, murders and bombings, in one of the most violent periods of recent months.
Scores of Iraqi troops and civilians have been killed along with 12 US soldiers, and government forces had to battle to retain control of the mainly Shiite city of Diwaniyah, 180 kilometres (112 miles) south of the capital.
"We reached a settlement with Mahdi Army forces to end the confrontation," town councillor Sheikh Ghanim Abid said, as shops in Diwaniyah reopened and water and electricity supplies were turned back on.
"We killed 50 gunmen in the clashes and this incident resulted in the deaths of 23 of our soldiers and injuries to 30 of them," Maliki said.
Jaathi said eight civilians were also killed in Monday's 12-hour gunbattle, and that 61 wounded bystanders had been treated.
The army has agreed not to enter residential areas for three days, while the Mahdi Army will withdraw its fighters and a militia commander who was arrested at the weekend will be brought to court within 24 hours, Abid said.
"We are now watching the militia withdrawing. They started pulling out early this morning and they're still going," an Iraqi army captain told AFP.
The Mahdi Army is nominally loyal to radical Shiite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr, whose party has ministers in the government and a large parliamentary bloc, but aides said the battle had been triggered by rogue elements.
Saheb Al-Ameri, the head of Sadr's office in Najaf, said Diwaniyah's governor met the firebrand cleric on Monday to negotiate an end to the battle, which he blamed on the "personal behaviour" of some Mahdi Army members.
During Monday's fighting, an American F-16 jet dropped a 500-pound (220-kilo) satellite-guided bomb on an "enemy position" while flying in support of Iraqi and coalition troops, the US air force said.
As a tentative peace returned to Diwaniyah, officials reported the deadly explosion at a fuel pipeline just outside the town.
A defence ministry official said the pipeline had not been used since 2003 but that it still contained some fuel and local residents often cut holes in it to siphon off petrol, which is currently in short supply.
"Today they did the same thing and the explosion was set off," he said.
Meanwhile, suspected Sunni Muslim insurgents killed two Shiite militiamen in an attack on the Mahdi Army office in Baquba north of Baghdad, police said.
Police also said more than 30 Shiite families fled the village of Khan Bani Saad, southwest of the town, after their homes came under mortar attack from suspected Sunni fighters.
Baquba is the violent capital of a region just north of Baghdad in the grip of a dirty war between Sunni and Shiite gangs. Eight more civilians were gunned down in the area on Tuesday, and two blindfolded corpses were also found.
Farther north, in the oil hub of Kirkuk, one policeman was killed when his patrol car was blasted by a roadside bomb, a police colonel said. Three policemen and two bystanders were wounded.
The battle in Diwaniyah underlined the growing confidence of Iraq's Shiite militias, some of which have been accused of involvement in sectarian killings of members of the Sunni Arab minority.
Maliki's government has so far been unable or unwilling to rein in these armed groups, which are linked to powerful figures in the ruling coalition.
The US military's losses in Iraq have increased to 2,631, according to an AFP count based on Pentagon figures, with the military reporting the deaths of 12 soldiers in the past three days alone.
--------------------------
Citation: "Iraq strikes peace deal with militia as 155 killed," Agence France-Presse, 29 August 2006.
Original URL: http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20060829/wl_mideast_afp/iraq
--------------------------
Hard-pressed Iraqi government forces have been forced to strike a truce with Shiite militia fighters, as fierce fighting followed by a pipeline explosion left 155 people dead.
Officials said that 81 people died in Diwaniyah in Monday's clashes between security forces and militiamen and that on Tuesday, a few hours after a peace deal was reached, a fire at a fuel pipeline outside the town killed 74 more.
Hamid Jaathi, the head of Diwaniyah's health department, said that another 94 people were injured in the blast, which a defence official said was caused by looters sabotaging a disused fuel pipe to hunt for petrol on Tuesday.
Meanwhile -- as Iraq reeled from a three-day bout of bloodshed -- sectarian and rebel attacks left at least 14 people dead, including four members of one family who were killed when mortar bombs hit their house in south Baghdad's mainly Shiite neighbourhood of Al-Amel.
Since Saturday, when Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki hosted a peace conference for tribal leaders, Iraq has been battered by firefights, murders and bombings, in one of the most violent periods of recent months.
Scores of Iraqi troops and civilians have been killed along with 12 US soldiers, and government forces had to battle to retain control of the mainly Shiite city of Diwaniyah, 180 kilometres (112 miles) south of the capital.
"We reached a settlement with Mahdi Army forces to end the confrontation," town councillor Sheikh Ghanim Abid said, as shops in Diwaniyah reopened and water and electricity supplies were turned back on.
"We killed 50 gunmen in the clashes and this incident resulted in the deaths of 23 of our soldiers and injuries to 30 of them," Maliki said.
Jaathi said eight civilians were also killed in Monday's 12-hour gunbattle, and that 61 wounded bystanders had been treated.
The army has agreed not to enter residential areas for three days, while the Mahdi Army will withdraw its fighters and a militia commander who was arrested at the weekend will be brought to court within 24 hours, Abid said.
"We are now watching the militia withdrawing. They started pulling out early this morning and they're still going," an Iraqi army captain told AFP.
The Mahdi Army is nominally loyal to radical Shiite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr, whose party has ministers in the government and a large parliamentary bloc, but aides said the battle had been triggered by rogue elements.
Saheb Al-Ameri, the head of Sadr's office in Najaf, said Diwaniyah's governor met the firebrand cleric on Monday to negotiate an end to the battle, which he blamed on the "personal behaviour" of some Mahdi Army members.
During Monday's fighting, an American F-16 jet dropped a 500-pound (220-kilo) satellite-guided bomb on an "enemy position" while flying in support of Iraqi and coalition troops, the US air force said.
As a tentative peace returned to Diwaniyah, officials reported the deadly explosion at a fuel pipeline just outside the town.
A defence ministry official said the pipeline had not been used since 2003 but that it still contained some fuel and local residents often cut holes in it to siphon off petrol, which is currently in short supply.
"Today they did the same thing and the explosion was set off," he said.
Meanwhile, suspected Sunni Muslim insurgents killed two Shiite militiamen in an attack on the Mahdi Army office in Baquba north of Baghdad, police said.
Police also said more than 30 Shiite families fled the village of Khan Bani Saad, southwest of the town, after their homes came under mortar attack from suspected Sunni fighters.
Baquba is the violent capital of a region just north of Baghdad in the grip of a dirty war between Sunni and Shiite gangs. Eight more civilians were gunned down in the area on Tuesday, and two blindfolded corpses were also found.
Farther north, in the oil hub of Kirkuk, one policeman was killed when his patrol car was blasted by a roadside bomb, a police colonel said. Three policemen and two bystanders were wounded.
The battle in Diwaniyah underlined the growing confidence of Iraq's Shiite militias, some of which have been accused of involvement in sectarian killings of members of the Sunni Arab minority.
Maliki's government has so far been unable or unwilling to rein in these armed groups, which are linked to powerful figures in the ruling coalition.
The US military's losses in Iraq have increased to 2,631, according to an AFP count based on Pentagon figures, with the military reporting the deaths of 12 soldiers in the past three days alone.
--------------------------
Citation: "Iraq strikes peace deal with militia as 155 killed," Agence France-Presse, 29 August 2006.
Original URL: http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20060829/wl_mideast_afp/iraq
--------------------------
Iraq Isn't the Philippines
A decades-long U.S. occupation eventually brought democracy to Manila, but analogies overlook historical American brutality and Iraq's comparative strength.
By Jon Wiener
Los Angeles Times, 30 August 2006
DOES HISTORY provide any models suggesting that the unhappy war in Iraq might have a happy ending? Journalists and military experts are pointing hopefully to the U.S. war in the Philippines at the turn of the 20th century as an example of how Americans can fight a tough guerrilla insurgency and eventually win.
Max Boot, an Op-Ed columnist for the Los Angeles Times, has written that the U.S. victory in the Philippines provides a "useful reminder" that Americans can prevail in Iraq. Similar arguments have been made by Robert Kaplan in the Atlantic Monthly and by the neoconservative American Enterprise Institute.
But the same suggestion is also made by writers who are not pro-war Republican pundits. The most prominent exponent of the Philippines model for Iraq is Thomas E. Ricks, the Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter for the Washington Post, whose new book, "Fiasco: The American Military Misadventure in Iraq," has been at or near the top of the bestseller lists this month. "Fiasco" shows that the war has been a disaster, but Ricks is nevertheless against pulling out American troops — because, he says, the Philippines example proves that a long occupation beginning in military disaster can end with the creation of a democratic and stable state.
Are Ricks and company correct? Is there hope from 100 years ago?
The Philippine war was part of the Spanish-American War of 1898, in which the U.S. promised to bring democracy to the Filipinos by freeing them from the Spaniards. But, as Ricks says, things there "began badly" when a powerful Philippine resistance movement challenged U.S. troops — "like Iraq in 2003." In 1902, after three years of guerrilla fighting, the United States declared victory, although American forces remained in the country for decades, administering it first as a colony and then as a commonwealth. The Philippines was granted independence in 1946 — after almost five decades of U.S. military occupation (interrupted by World War II). Today it's a functioning democracy.
The problem with this version of history is that it doesn't look closely enough at what happened in the Philippines.
First, it neglects the massive differences between the Philippines in 1900 and Iraq in 2006. The guerrillas in the Philippines fought the Army with old Spanish muskets and bolo knives; today's insurgents in Iraq employ sophisticated improvised explosive devices, rocket-propelled grenades and heat-seeking shoulder-fired missiles that can shoot down helicopters. And combat in Iraq takes place in a fully urbanized society where "pacification" is much more difficult than in the mostly rural islands of the Philippines.
Also, the Filipinos who fought the U.S. Army at the turn of the 20th century had no outside allies or sources of support. Today's Iraqi insurgents are at the center of a burgeoning anti-Americanism that has spread throughout the Arab and Muslim worlds, with supporters in Iran, Syria, Saudi Arabia and elsewhere.
And of course today there's also the media. Images of resistance fighters in Iraq, and of the victims of American attacks, are broadcast hourly throughout Iraq, Arab and Muslim countries and the rest of the world. Compared with the Philippines guerrillas of 1900, the Iraqi insurgents are much stronger and more capable and have a much broader base of support that extends beyond national boundaries.
There is also the matter of the atrocious "winning" conduct of the U.S. in the four years of the Philippine war. The U.S. did not count Filipino casualties, but historians today estimate 16,000 deaths for the guerrilla army and civilian deaths between 200,000 and 1 million — a horrifying toll. American tactics included massacres of civilians, "kill and burn" operations that resulted in the destruction of entire villages and starvation of the countryside that created the threat of famine, all exacerbated by a cholera epidemic.
Most of those who consider the Philippines to be the "best-case scenario" for the U.S. in Iraq acknowledge that the fight at first was, in Boot's words, "a long, hard, bloody slog" — but they argue it was worth it because democracy followed.
But how successful was it? After the U.S. granted the commonwealth independence in 1946, two decades of instability ushered in the corrupt dictatorship of Ferdinand Marcos, whose 21-year rule, from 1965 to 1986, was marked by rampant human rights violations. It took a revolution — albeit a peaceful one — to end his regime.
U.S. history provides a much better model for the future of Iraq: the withdrawal from Vietnam. Yes, that withdrawal was followed by a lot of suffering, but nothing like what came before it, when Americans killed something like 3 million Vietnamese. Because the United States got out in 1975, Vietnam today is a much better place — and so is the United States.
----------------------------
Citation: Jon Wiener. "Iraq Isn't the Philippines," Los Angeles Times, 30 August 2006.
Original URL: http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/la-oe-weiner30aug30,0,7865524.story?coll=la-opinion-rightrail
----------------------------
By Jon Wiener
Los Angeles Times, 30 August 2006
DOES HISTORY provide any models suggesting that the unhappy war in Iraq might have a happy ending? Journalists and military experts are pointing hopefully to the U.S. war in the Philippines at the turn of the 20th century as an example of how Americans can fight a tough guerrilla insurgency and eventually win.
Max Boot, an Op-Ed columnist for the Los Angeles Times, has written that the U.S. victory in the Philippines provides a "useful reminder" that Americans can prevail in Iraq. Similar arguments have been made by Robert Kaplan in the Atlantic Monthly and by the neoconservative American Enterprise Institute.
But the same suggestion is also made by writers who are not pro-war Republican pundits. The most prominent exponent of the Philippines model for Iraq is Thomas E. Ricks, the Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter for the Washington Post, whose new book, "Fiasco: The American Military Misadventure in Iraq," has been at or near the top of the bestseller lists this month. "Fiasco" shows that the war has been a disaster, but Ricks is nevertheless against pulling out American troops — because, he says, the Philippines example proves that a long occupation beginning in military disaster can end with the creation of a democratic and stable state.
Are Ricks and company correct? Is there hope from 100 years ago?
The Philippine war was part of the Spanish-American War of 1898, in which the U.S. promised to bring democracy to the Filipinos by freeing them from the Spaniards. But, as Ricks says, things there "began badly" when a powerful Philippine resistance movement challenged U.S. troops — "like Iraq in 2003." In 1902, after three years of guerrilla fighting, the United States declared victory, although American forces remained in the country for decades, administering it first as a colony and then as a commonwealth. The Philippines was granted independence in 1946 — after almost five decades of U.S. military occupation (interrupted by World War II). Today it's a functioning democracy.
The problem with this version of history is that it doesn't look closely enough at what happened in the Philippines.
First, it neglects the massive differences between the Philippines in 1900 and Iraq in 2006. The guerrillas in the Philippines fought the Army with old Spanish muskets and bolo knives; today's insurgents in Iraq employ sophisticated improvised explosive devices, rocket-propelled grenades and heat-seeking shoulder-fired missiles that can shoot down helicopters. And combat in Iraq takes place in a fully urbanized society where "pacification" is much more difficult than in the mostly rural islands of the Philippines.
Also, the Filipinos who fought the U.S. Army at the turn of the 20th century had no outside allies or sources of support. Today's Iraqi insurgents are at the center of a burgeoning anti-Americanism that has spread throughout the Arab and Muslim worlds, with supporters in Iran, Syria, Saudi Arabia and elsewhere.
And of course today there's also the media. Images of resistance fighters in Iraq, and of the victims of American attacks, are broadcast hourly throughout Iraq, Arab and Muslim countries and the rest of the world. Compared with the Philippines guerrillas of 1900, the Iraqi insurgents are much stronger and more capable and have a much broader base of support that extends beyond national boundaries.
There is also the matter of the atrocious "winning" conduct of the U.S. in the four years of the Philippine war. The U.S. did not count Filipino casualties, but historians today estimate 16,000 deaths for the guerrilla army and civilian deaths between 200,000 and 1 million — a horrifying toll. American tactics included massacres of civilians, "kill and burn" operations that resulted in the destruction of entire villages and starvation of the countryside that created the threat of famine, all exacerbated by a cholera epidemic.
Most of those who consider the Philippines to be the "best-case scenario" for the U.S. in Iraq acknowledge that the fight at first was, in Boot's words, "a long, hard, bloody slog" — but they argue it was worth it because democracy followed.
But how successful was it? After the U.S. granted the commonwealth independence in 1946, two decades of instability ushered in the corrupt dictatorship of Ferdinand Marcos, whose 21-year rule, from 1965 to 1986, was marked by rampant human rights violations. It took a revolution — albeit a peaceful one — to end his regime.
U.S. history provides a much better model for the future of Iraq: the withdrawal from Vietnam. Yes, that withdrawal was followed by a lot of suffering, but nothing like what came before it, when Americans killed something like 3 million Vietnamese. Because the United States got out in 1975, Vietnam today is a much better place — and so is the United States.
----------------------------
Citation: Jon Wiener. "Iraq Isn't the Philippines," Los Angeles Times, 30 August 2006.
Original URL: http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/la-oe-weiner30aug30,0,7865524.story?coll=la-opinion-rightrail
----------------------------
29 August 2006
Operation in Sadr City part of Baghdad plan: US military
By Jay Deshmukh
Agence France-Presse, 29 August 2006
BAGHDAD (AFP) - Iraqi and US forces will conduct operations in Baghdad's Sadr City, a bastion of Shiite militia fighters, as part of the ongoing security crackdown, a US military spokesman said.
Major General William Caldwell said operation Together Forward launched on June 14 would eventually move into Sadr City, a stronghold of the radical Shiite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr and a hotbed of anti-US fervour.
"The prime minister has stated that the operation be conducted through out the entire city of Baghdad. That is correct," Caldwell said when questioned about whether an operation will be conducted in Sadr City.
He would not, however, comment on the timing of the operation in the district whose nearly two million residents largely support Sadr but also of Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki's Shiite-led coalition government.
The district is one of the most volatile regions of Baghdad, and the alleged base of a number of death squads accused of killing Sunni Arabs in an ongoing sectarian conflict.
"There is no set time table. The prime minister is directing how rapidly the operation will continue. The prime minister is completely in charge of the operation, "Caldwell said
Maliki has in the past criticised US and Iraqi forces for carrying out nightime raids in the impoverished district.
The US military has clashed with Sadr's militia on a number of occasions, most notablly in August 2004 when a battle in the holy city of Najaf killed hundreds of militiamen and dozens of US soldiers.
Caldwell, meanwhile, said the Baghdad security plan was showing "progress" even as more than two dozen people have been killed in a spate of car bombings in the capital since Sunday.
On Monday a suicide car bomber blew himself up near the compound housing the interior ministry, killing 14 people.
"The Baghdad security operation has focussed on areas where there are the greatest number of kidnappings and murders. Focused effort continues in Baghdad and there are signs of progress," Caldwell said.
He said the level of violence had decreased from the July levels and that the plan had shown progress in reducing "kidnappings, murders and sectarian violence".
Caldwell said that in greater Baghdad, the number of daily attacks had averaged around 23 over the past week, lower than the comparable average in July.
"The average daily murder rate in Baghdad province has dropped 46 percent from July to August, while vehicle borne improvised devices decreased by 50 percent last week to a total of eight which was the lowest monthly average in eight months," he said.
----------------------------
Citation: Jay Deshmukh. "Operation in Sadr City part of Baghdad plan: US military," Agence France-Presse, 29 August 2006.
Original URL: http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20060828/pl_afp/iraqunrestusbaghdad
----------------------------
Agence France-Presse, 29 August 2006
BAGHDAD (AFP) - Iraqi and US forces will conduct operations in Baghdad's Sadr City, a bastion of Shiite militia fighters, as part of the ongoing security crackdown, a US military spokesman said.
Major General William Caldwell said operation Together Forward launched on June 14 would eventually move into Sadr City, a stronghold of the radical Shiite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr and a hotbed of anti-US fervour.
"The prime minister has stated that the operation be conducted through out the entire city of Baghdad. That is correct," Caldwell said when questioned about whether an operation will be conducted in Sadr City.
He would not, however, comment on the timing of the operation in the district whose nearly two million residents largely support Sadr but also of Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki's Shiite-led coalition government.
The district is one of the most volatile regions of Baghdad, and the alleged base of a number of death squads accused of killing Sunni Arabs in an ongoing sectarian conflict.
"There is no set time table. The prime minister is directing how rapidly the operation will continue. The prime minister is completely in charge of the operation, "Caldwell said
Maliki has in the past criticised US and Iraqi forces for carrying out nightime raids in the impoverished district.
The US military has clashed with Sadr's militia on a number of occasions, most notablly in August 2004 when a battle in the holy city of Najaf killed hundreds of militiamen and dozens of US soldiers.
Caldwell, meanwhile, said the Baghdad security plan was showing "progress" even as more than two dozen people have been killed in a spate of car bombings in the capital since Sunday.
On Monday a suicide car bomber blew himself up near the compound housing the interior ministry, killing 14 people.
"The Baghdad security operation has focussed on areas where there are the greatest number of kidnappings and murders. Focused effort continues in Baghdad and there are signs of progress," Caldwell said.
He said the level of violence had decreased from the July levels and that the plan had shown progress in reducing "kidnappings, murders and sectarian violence".
Caldwell said that in greater Baghdad, the number of daily attacks had averaged around 23 over the past week, lower than the comparable average in July.
"The average daily murder rate in Baghdad province has dropped 46 percent from July to August, while vehicle borne improvised devices decreased by 50 percent last week to a total of eight which was the lowest monthly average in eight months," he said.
----------------------------
Citation: Jay Deshmukh. "Operation in Sadr City part of Baghdad plan: US military," Agence France-Presse, 29 August 2006.
Original URL: http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20060828/pl_afp/iraqunrestusbaghdad
----------------------------
Explosion kills 29 petrol scavengers in Iraq
By Imad al-Khozaie
Reuters, 29 August 2006
NEAR DIWANIYA, Iraq - At least 29 people were killed when a blast ripped through scavengers siphoning petrol from pools around a breach in a disused pipeline in central Iraq late on Monday, health officials said.
A Reuters reporter at the rural site near Diwaniya, 180 km (110 miles) south of Baghdad, saw 15 charred and mutilated bodies, including that of a boy. The explosion wounded 26 people, who were taken to area hospitals with severe burns.
"Some of the wounded have burns in 75 percent of their bodies," Hamid Jaafi, a health official in Diwaniya told Reuters, adding the death toll is expected to climb.
Witnesses said the blast, which is under investigation, occurred at 11 p.m. (1900 GMT), while a group of impoverished people were scooping fuel from two large pools.
Despite having the world's third largest proven reserves of oil, Iraq is gripped by a fuel crisis blamed on sabotage attacks, aging infrastructure and rampart corruption.
Fuel prices have soared as the Iraqi government phases out subsidies under an International Monetary Fund deal.
Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki said the government was working to ease the crisis, a source of anger for Iraqis. Smuggling and a black market for petrol products are thriving.
"I bless the enormous efforts that (the Oil Ministry) has made in overcoming the fuel crisis that citizens are facing lately," he told reporters at the Oil Ministry in Baghdad. The government wants to liberalize import rules on fuel products.
CRATER
Mutilated and mud-caked bodies lay by one wide crater at least 10 meters (yards) wide. One witness said there were still bodies in the pools and under mud that had not been recovered.
A police source said more than 50 were killed, although that figure could not be confirmed.
"The government is to blame for this. It raised the prices of petrol and forced people to do these dangerous things," an elderly man told Reuters at the scene.
An Oil Ministry official in Baghdad said the pipe was one of many across Iraq that are out of operation due to the shortages. Residue left in the pipe could have caused the blast, he said.
The blast came one day after at least 20 Iraqi soldiers were killed in street fighting with Shi'ite militiamen in Diwaniya, in some of the bloodiest clashes among rival powers in Shi'ite southern Iraq.
-----------------------------
Citation: Imad al-Khozaie. "Explosion kills 29 petrol scavengers in Iraq," Reuters, 29 August 2006.
Original URL: http://today.reuters.com/news/articlenews.aspx?type=worldNews&storyID=2006-08-29T130836Z_01_MAC925159_RTRUKOC_0_US-IRAQ-PIPELINE.xml&archived=False
-----------------------------
Reuters, 29 August 2006
NEAR DIWANIYA, Iraq - At least 29 people were killed when a blast ripped through scavengers siphoning petrol from pools around a breach in a disused pipeline in central Iraq late on Monday, health officials said.
A Reuters reporter at the rural site near Diwaniya, 180 km (110 miles) south of Baghdad, saw 15 charred and mutilated bodies, including that of a boy. The explosion wounded 26 people, who were taken to area hospitals with severe burns.
"Some of the wounded have burns in 75 percent of their bodies," Hamid Jaafi, a health official in Diwaniya told Reuters, adding the death toll is expected to climb.
Witnesses said the blast, which is under investigation, occurred at 11 p.m. (1900 GMT), while a group of impoverished people were scooping fuel from two large pools.
Despite having the world's third largest proven reserves of oil, Iraq is gripped by a fuel crisis blamed on sabotage attacks, aging infrastructure and rampart corruption.
Fuel prices have soared as the Iraqi government phases out subsidies under an International Monetary Fund deal.
Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki said the government was working to ease the crisis, a source of anger for Iraqis. Smuggling and a black market for petrol products are thriving.
"I bless the enormous efforts that (the Oil Ministry) has made in overcoming the fuel crisis that citizens are facing lately," he told reporters at the Oil Ministry in Baghdad. The government wants to liberalize import rules on fuel products.
CRATER
Mutilated and mud-caked bodies lay by one wide crater at least 10 meters (yards) wide. One witness said there were still bodies in the pools and under mud that had not been recovered.
A police source said more than 50 were killed, although that figure could not be confirmed.
"The government is to blame for this. It raised the prices of petrol and forced people to do these dangerous things," an elderly man told Reuters at the scene.
An Oil Ministry official in Baghdad said the pipe was one of many across Iraq that are out of operation due to the shortages. Residue left in the pipe could have caused the blast, he said.
The blast came one day after at least 20 Iraqi soldiers were killed in street fighting with Shi'ite militiamen in Diwaniya, in some of the bloodiest clashes among rival powers in Shi'ite southern Iraq.
-----------------------------
Citation: Imad al-Khozaie. "Explosion kills 29 petrol scavengers in Iraq," Reuters, 29 August 2006.
Original URL: http://today.reuters.com/news/articlenews.aspx?type=worldNews&storyID=2006-08-29T130836Z_01_MAC925159_RTRUKOC_0_US-IRAQ-PIPELINE.xml&archived=False
-----------------------------
Iraq Army Battles Shiites
A clash in the south with Sadr's militia kills 25 soldiers, raising doubts about troop readiness.
By Solomon Moore
Los Angeles Times, 29 August 2006
BAGHDAD — A major battle between the Iraqi army and Shiite Muslim militiamen in the southern city of Diwaniya left more than 40 dead, including 25 soldiers, and more than 90 injured, U.S. and Iraqi military sources said.
Witnesses described a chaotic scene in which combatants fought through the streets using machine guns, mortars and rocket-propelled grenades. At one point during the battle, which began Sunday night and raged into Monday, militiamen executed a dozen Iraqi soldiers who had run out of ammunition, Maj. Gen. Othman Ghanimi said.
The Iraqi army's inability to deal a swift and decisive blow to the militia uprising in Diwaniya raised questions about the readiness of tens of thousands of recently trained troops who are taking on increased security responsibilities nationwide.
Half of Iraq's 10 army divisions either are in charge of their own territories or are in the process of taking over authority from the U.S.-led coalition. U.S. forces appear to have made progress recently in reducing the level of violence in Baghdad, but ultimately they are counting on having the Iraqi army take responsibility for security there as well.
Further evidence that Iraq's defense network remains divided by regional and sectarian loyalties came over the weekend when 100 Iraqi soldiers of a battalion of 550 refused to deploy to Baghdad from the southeastern province of Maysan, in part because of concern about confronting fellow Muslim sect members. The British military called the incident a mutiny.
The battle in Diwaniya ended only when reinforcements arrived from the city of Kut, 60 miles away. It was sparked after Iraqi soldiers in the predominantly Shiite town arrested a member of Shiite cleric Muqtada Sadr's Al Mahdi militia, saying the man was planning bombings there, authorities said.
Sadr, 33, whose militia was formed soon after the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq in 2003 and clashed with American forces in Najaf in 2004, is among Iraq's most powerful figures. After initially opposing Iraq's new government and constitution, Sadr's followers have become a major force in Prime Minister Nouri Maliki's administration, holding several Cabinet seats.
Members of Sadr's militia also have joined the Iraqi security forces in large numbers and allegedly have carried out sectarian killings under the color of law.
There was some dispute Monday over the U.S. role in the Diwaniya fighting. U.S. and Iraqi military officials said American helicopters provided cover for the Iraqi army but did not engage in the battle. Sadr leaders said American troops also fired on militiamen.
"The Iraqi army, accompanied by the U.S. Army, attacked areas inside Diwaniya that are known for their support for the Sadr movement," said a representative of the local Sadr office, on condition of anonymity. "They raided and bombed civilian homes and arrested residents. They killed four civilians, injured 50 and arrested more."
U.S. military officials cast the 12-hour battle as a hard-won victory by overwhelmed Iraqi police and troops.
"We had a situation that was beyond the … initial capability of the Iraqi police, so they called in the Iraqi army" to arrest the militia member, said U.S. Army Brig. Gen. Dana Pittard, commander of the Iraq Assistance Group in Baghdad. "The Iraqi army and the Iraqi police together, as a force, repelled the insurgents. I think that's a good-news story."
By Monday night, Iraqi authorities had imposed a curfew in Diwaniya and were negotiating with Sadr representatives. Sadr representative Sheik Abdel Razaq Nidawi demanded the withdrawal of military reinforcements and the release of the militia member.
The confrontation in Diwaniya, about 90 miles south of Baghdad, started on the same day that Al Mahdi fighters allegedly attacked a cafe in Khalis, a village north of Baghdad, and killed 22 people. The paramilitary fighters also are accused of carrying out a raid Sunday on the home of a Khalis judge, killing his brother.
The attacks, as well as the alleged mutiny, left U.S. officials defending their plans to transfer power to Iraqi forces.
Iraqi army officials said that the mostly Shiite force in Maysan was reluctant to operate in Baghdad, where they might have to face off against fellow Shiites.
"What's tough right now is the Iraqi army, for the most part, is a regionally based unit," Pittard said at a briefing with Pentagon reporters. "The majority of this particular unit was Shia, and they felt — the leadership of that unit and their soldiers felt — they were needed down there in Maysan province."
Instances of Iraqi units failing to fight or refusing to deploy to combat areas were relatively common early in the reconstruction period. Although mass mutinies have become rarer after U.S. leaders reorganized training and equipping programs two years ago, desertions continue to be a serious problem, particularly in remote deployments where living conditions are harsh and payment can be haphazard.
This year, Iraqi army leaders in Al Anbar province complained that desertion rates in some military units had climbed to as high as 40%.
Pittard portrayed the Maysan incident as isolated, although he acknowledged it was the second recent instance of Iraqi soldiers refusing to deploy. A number of soldiers from a northern-based unit, the 2nd Iraqi Army Division, objected to going to Ramadi, where U.S. Marines have mounted a major anti-insurgent offensive in recent months.
The army's retention problems highlight the difficult task of creating a national force that transcends Iraq's deep divisions.
"What it tells me is that, primarily, the Iraqi army has been a regionally recruited organization, which really means if you are from a particular area, that's where you're recruited from, and that's where your roots are," Pittard said. "Now as other units are asked to go to other places, it becomes more difficult because, for many of those soldiers, they just thought that they would be operating in their homeland areas."
British Maj. Charlie Burbridge said the Iraqi battalion in Maysan province would reassemble and deploy to Baghdad in two weeks. He said British trainers' optimism about the Iraqi army was undiminished.
"This organization was picked to be deployed to Baghdad because the commanding officer is the best commanding officer in the division and this battalion continues to be considered the best battalion in the division," he said.
Maysan has become a source of embarrassment for the Iraqi army and its Western backers. On Friday, hundreds of Iraqi soldiers and police officers looked on as thousands of looters ransacked a British military base in the provincial city of Amarah that had been handed over hastily to the Iraqi army.
Meanwhile, the U.S. military today announced the deaths of two soldiers who had been wounded, one while operating Sunday in Al Anbar province and the other when his vehicle rolled into a canal Aug. 21 near Balad. Neither was immediately named.
In Baghdad on Monday, a joint force of 3,000 Iraqi troops and 8,000 U.S. service members continued a military sweep aimed at curtailing sectarian violence between Sunni Arabs and Shiites.
Despite the heavy security presence, 31 violent deaths were reported Monday and today in the capital. Thirteen people died when a car bomb exploded at the gate of the Interior Ministry, two were killed by a bomb in the Dora neighborhood of southeast Baghdad, and one more died when a car bomb exploded near a gas station.
A bomb also was planted in the minivan of a Baghdad barber, killing him and injuring five other people.
Iraqi police discovered 14 bodies, all shot in the head execution-style, in southwest Baghdad.
In the southern port city of Basra, a motorcyclist detonated a bomb near a market, killing seven people and injuring 23.
In Kirkuk, a roadside bomb killed three bodyguards of an Iraqi army general.
Times staff writers Peter Spiegel in Washington, Saif Rasheed, Saif Hameed and Suhail Ahmad in Baghdad, Saad Fakhrildeen in Najaf and Ali Windawi in Kirkuk and a special correspondent in Basra contributed to this report.
--------------------------------
Citation: Solomon Moore. "Iraq Army Battles Shiites," Los Angeles Times, 29 August 2006.
Original URL: http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/iraq/complete/la-fg-iraq29aug29,1,7607105.story?coll=la-iraq-complete
--------------------------------
By Solomon Moore
Los Angeles Times, 29 August 2006
BAGHDAD — A major battle between the Iraqi army and Shiite Muslim militiamen in the southern city of Diwaniya left more than 40 dead, including 25 soldiers, and more than 90 injured, U.S. and Iraqi military sources said.
Witnesses described a chaotic scene in which combatants fought through the streets using machine guns, mortars and rocket-propelled grenades. At one point during the battle, which began Sunday night and raged into Monday, militiamen executed a dozen Iraqi soldiers who had run out of ammunition, Maj. Gen. Othman Ghanimi said.
The Iraqi army's inability to deal a swift and decisive blow to the militia uprising in Diwaniya raised questions about the readiness of tens of thousands of recently trained troops who are taking on increased security responsibilities nationwide.
Half of Iraq's 10 army divisions either are in charge of their own territories or are in the process of taking over authority from the U.S.-led coalition. U.S. forces appear to have made progress recently in reducing the level of violence in Baghdad, but ultimately they are counting on having the Iraqi army take responsibility for security there as well.
Further evidence that Iraq's defense network remains divided by regional and sectarian loyalties came over the weekend when 100 Iraqi soldiers of a battalion of 550 refused to deploy to Baghdad from the southeastern province of Maysan, in part because of concern about confronting fellow Muslim sect members. The British military called the incident a mutiny.
The battle in Diwaniya ended only when reinforcements arrived from the city of Kut, 60 miles away. It was sparked after Iraqi soldiers in the predominantly Shiite town arrested a member of Shiite cleric Muqtada Sadr's Al Mahdi militia, saying the man was planning bombings there, authorities said.
Sadr, 33, whose militia was formed soon after the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq in 2003 and clashed with American forces in Najaf in 2004, is among Iraq's most powerful figures. After initially opposing Iraq's new government and constitution, Sadr's followers have become a major force in Prime Minister Nouri Maliki's administration, holding several Cabinet seats.
Members of Sadr's militia also have joined the Iraqi security forces in large numbers and allegedly have carried out sectarian killings under the color of law.
There was some dispute Monday over the U.S. role in the Diwaniya fighting. U.S. and Iraqi military officials said American helicopters provided cover for the Iraqi army but did not engage in the battle. Sadr leaders said American troops also fired on militiamen.
"The Iraqi army, accompanied by the U.S. Army, attacked areas inside Diwaniya that are known for their support for the Sadr movement," said a representative of the local Sadr office, on condition of anonymity. "They raided and bombed civilian homes and arrested residents. They killed four civilians, injured 50 and arrested more."
U.S. military officials cast the 12-hour battle as a hard-won victory by overwhelmed Iraqi police and troops.
"We had a situation that was beyond the … initial capability of the Iraqi police, so they called in the Iraqi army" to arrest the militia member, said U.S. Army Brig. Gen. Dana Pittard, commander of the Iraq Assistance Group in Baghdad. "The Iraqi army and the Iraqi police together, as a force, repelled the insurgents. I think that's a good-news story."
By Monday night, Iraqi authorities had imposed a curfew in Diwaniya and were negotiating with Sadr representatives. Sadr representative Sheik Abdel Razaq Nidawi demanded the withdrawal of military reinforcements and the release of the militia member.
The confrontation in Diwaniya, about 90 miles south of Baghdad, started on the same day that Al Mahdi fighters allegedly attacked a cafe in Khalis, a village north of Baghdad, and killed 22 people. The paramilitary fighters also are accused of carrying out a raid Sunday on the home of a Khalis judge, killing his brother.
The attacks, as well as the alleged mutiny, left U.S. officials defending their plans to transfer power to Iraqi forces.
Iraqi army officials said that the mostly Shiite force in Maysan was reluctant to operate in Baghdad, where they might have to face off against fellow Shiites.
"What's tough right now is the Iraqi army, for the most part, is a regionally based unit," Pittard said at a briefing with Pentagon reporters. "The majority of this particular unit was Shia, and they felt — the leadership of that unit and their soldiers felt — they were needed down there in Maysan province."
Instances of Iraqi units failing to fight or refusing to deploy to combat areas were relatively common early in the reconstruction period. Although mass mutinies have become rarer after U.S. leaders reorganized training and equipping programs two years ago, desertions continue to be a serious problem, particularly in remote deployments where living conditions are harsh and payment can be haphazard.
This year, Iraqi army leaders in Al Anbar province complained that desertion rates in some military units had climbed to as high as 40%.
Pittard portrayed the Maysan incident as isolated, although he acknowledged it was the second recent instance of Iraqi soldiers refusing to deploy. A number of soldiers from a northern-based unit, the 2nd Iraqi Army Division, objected to going to Ramadi, where U.S. Marines have mounted a major anti-insurgent offensive in recent months.
The army's retention problems highlight the difficult task of creating a national force that transcends Iraq's deep divisions.
"What it tells me is that, primarily, the Iraqi army has been a regionally recruited organization, which really means if you are from a particular area, that's where you're recruited from, and that's where your roots are," Pittard said. "Now as other units are asked to go to other places, it becomes more difficult because, for many of those soldiers, they just thought that they would be operating in their homeland areas."
British Maj. Charlie Burbridge said the Iraqi battalion in Maysan province would reassemble and deploy to Baghdad in two weeks. He said British trainers' optimism about the Iraqi army was undiminished.
"This organization was picked to be deployed to Baghdad because the commanding officer is the best commanding officer in the division and this battalion continues to be considered the best battalion in the division," he said.
Maysan has become a source of embarrassment for the Iraqi army and its Western backers. On Friday, hundreds of Iraqi soldiers and police officers looked on as thousands of looters ransacked a British military base in the provincial city of Amarah that had been handed over hastily to the Iraqi army.
Meanwhile, the U.S. military today announced the deaths of two soldiers who had been wounded, one while operating Sunday in Al Anbar province and the other when his vehicle rolled into a canal Aug. 21 near Balad. Neither was immediately named.
In Baghdad on Monday, a joint force of 3,000 Iraqi troops and 8,000 U.S. service members continued a military sweep aimed at curtailing sectarian violence between Sunni Arabs and Shiites.
Despite the heavy security presence, 31 violent deaths were reported Monday and today in the capital. Thirteen people died when a car bomb exploded at the gate of the Interior Ministry, two were killed by a bomb in the Dora neighborhood of southeast Baghdad, and one more died when a car bomb exploded near a gas station.
A bomb also was planted in the minivan of a Baghdad barber, killing him and injuring five other people.
Iraqi police discovered 14 bodies, all shot in the head execution-style, in southwest Baghdad.
In the southern port city of Basra, a motorcyclist detonated a bomb near a market, killing seven people and injuring 23.
In Kirkuk, a roadside bomb killed three bodyguards of an Iraqi army general.
Times staff writers Peter Spiegel in Washington, Saif Rasheed, Saif Hameed and Suhail Ahmad in Baghdad, Saad Fakhrildeen in Najaf and Ali Windawi in Kirkuk and a special correspondent in Basra contributed to this report.
--------------------------------
Citation: Solomon Moore. "Iraq Army Battles Shiites," Los Angeles Times, 29 August 2006.
Original URL: http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/iraq/complete/la-fg-iraq29aug29,1,7607105.story?coll=la-iraq-complete
--------------------------------
28 August 2006
Iraq govt eyes economy boost to ease conflict
By Alastair Macdonald
Reuters, 27 August 2006
BAGHDAD - Iraq's government hopes its plans to attract investment and create jobs can stem a descent into civil war and says foreign leaders should back a U.N. economic package or face a disaster for the entire Middle East.
In an interview with Reuters, Deputy Prime Minister Barham Salih, the government's economy supremo, said the need to clamp down on sectarian and ethnic violence would not distract him from working to develop Iraq's vast potential oil wealth. Restoring prosperity could help rein in the killing, he argued.
"Undeniably security has to rank at the top," Salih, the most senior ethnic Kurd in the cabinet, said of its priorities.
"But does that mean at the expense of the economy and services? You cannot. All these things are inter-related. You need to regenerate the economy, create meaningful opportunities for employment, in order to help the security environment."
As a result, while bombs and death squads kill dozens of Iraqis every day and U.S. and Iraqi forces sweep Baghdad this month to try to staunch the bloodshed, Salih and other ministers are engaged in intensive meetings in their Green Zone official redoubt, wrangling over the budget and oil industry regulations.
While the lack of a government for six months following the election last December means that ministries are well behind in implementing plans for spending this year, Salih is pushing the Finance Ministry to pump more money into the economy next year.
"The Finance Ministry is erring on the side of caution in terms of budget revenue projections," he said late on Saturday.
"Iraq needs a budget that should be more ambitious and we need to stimulate the economy by providing the funds necessary for investment ... This budget will be crucial to Iraq."
A 2007 budget plan should reach parliament before the end of next month, in line with a constitutional deadline, he said.
The budget and legislation to attract investment in the oil industry, which produces almost all of Iraq's income, are being showcased to international institutions being shepherded by the United Nations into the "Compact for Iraq", what Salih calls a "vision" for support to the country over the next five years.
INTERNATIONAL SUPPORT
U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan will host a meeting on Sept. 18 in New York before the U.N. General Assembly. Foreign governments will also be solicited during the annual meetings of the World Bank and International Monetary Fund the week before.
"We need sustainable, meaningful engagement of ... all the international community, not just the United States and certain other powers," said Salih, an urbane, British-educated engineer whose warm personal relations with U.S. and British officials are a feature of Iraqi efforts to win foreign support.
"Success in Iraq will have good consequences for the region and the rest of the world," he said during talks at his marbled official residence, once home to an aide to Saddam Hussein.
"God forbid, failure in Iraq will be disastrous for everybody, not just for the people of Iraq.
"It is time ... that the international community moves beyond the differences of the past and unites around the central task of helping Iraq achieve economic and political stability."
Racing inflation of 70 percent, along with unemployment at 50 percent by Central Bank estimates, is causing grave hardship, with fuel prices especially being driven up as subsidies are phased out under a deal with the International Monetary Fund.
Mindful of popular anger, Salih said the government was also looking at ways to target help to the neediest in society.
The factions in Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki's national unity coalition are thrashing out a crucial law to regulate the oil and gas sector, without which, even without saboteurs attacking installations, foreign companies are not going to start putting money into renovating Iraq's aged infrastructure.
Internal meetings last week secured a basic agreement that control of resources must be shared between central and regional governments, in line with the new constitution, said Salih, whose fellow Kurds are eyeing profits from oil in their region.
But a bill will take at least a couple of months to finish, he added. Divisions reflect in part concerns among the once dominant Sunni Arab minority that new constitution's autonomy for federal regions could give southern Shi'ites and northern Kurds a lion's share of the world's third biggest oil reserves.
Insisting the bill was crucial but should not be rushed, Salih said: "This will decide the political economy of Iraq.
"This will decide the future of politics of this country."
-------------------------
Citation: Alastair Macdonald. "Iraq govt eyes economy boost to ease conflict," Reuters, 27 August 2006.
Original URL: http://www.alertnet.org/thenews/newsdesk/L27819573.htm
-------------------------
Reuters, 27 August 2006
BAGHDAD - Iraq's government hopes its plans to attract investment and create jobs can stem a descent into civil war and says foreign leaders should back a U.N. economic package or face a disaster for the entire Middle East.
In an interview with Reuters, Deputy Prime Minister Barham Salih, the government's economy supremo, said the need to clamp down on sectarian and ethnic violence would not distract him from working to develop Iraq's vast potential oil wealth. Restoring prosperity could help rein in the killing, he argued.
"Undeniably security has to rank at the top," Salih, the most senior ethnic Kurd in the cabinet, said of its priorities.
"But does that mean at the expense of the economy and services? You cannot. All these things are inter-related. You need to regenerate the economy, create meaningful opportunities for employment, in order to help the security environment."
As a result, while bombs and death squads kill dozens of Iraqis every day and U.S. and Iraqi forces sweep Baghdad this month to try to staunch the bloodshed, Salih and other ministers are engaged in intensive meetings in their Green Zone official redoubt, wrangling over the budget and oil industry regulations.
While the lack of a government for six months following the election last December means that ministries are well behind in implementing plans for spending this year, Salih is pushing the Finance Ministry to pump more money into the economy next year.
"The Finance Ministry is erring on the side of caution in terms of budget revenue projections," he said late on Saturday.
"Iraq needs a budget that should be more ambitious and we need to stimulate the economy by providing the funds necessary for investment ... This budget will be crucial to Iraq."
A 2007 budget plan should reach parliament before the end of next month, in line with a constitutional deadline, he said.
The budget and legislation to attract investment in the oil industry, which produces almost all of Iraq's income, are being showcased to international institutions being shepherded by the United Nations into the "Compact for Iraq", what Salih calls a "vision" for support to the country over the next five years.
INTERNATIONAL SUPPORT
U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan will host a meeting on Sept. 18 in New York before the U.N. General Assembly. Foreign governments will also be solicited during the annual meetings of the World Bank and International Monetary Fund the week before.
"We need sustainable, meaningful engagement of ... all the international community, not just the United States and certain other powers," said Salih, an urbane, British-educated engineer whose warm personal relations with U.S. and British officials are a feature of Iraqi efforts to win foreign support.
"Success in Iraq will have good consequences for the region and the rest of the world," he said during talks at his marbled official residence, once home to an aide to Saddam Hussein.
"God forbid, failure in Iraq will be disastrous for everybody, not just for the people of Iraq.
"It is time ... that the international community moves beyond the differences of the past and unites around the central task of helping Iraq achieve economic and political stability."
Racing inflation of 70 percent, along with unemployment at 50 percent by Central Bank estimates, is causing grave hardship, with fuel prices especially being driven up as subsidies are phased out under a deal with the International Monetary Fund.
Mindful of popular anger, Salih said the government was also looking at ways to target help to the neediest in society.
The factions in Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki's national unity coalition are thrashing out a crucial law to regulate the oil and gas sector, without which, even without saboteurs attacking installations, foreign companies are not going to start putting money into renovating Iraq's aged infrastructure.
Internal meetings last week secured a basic agreement that control of resources must be shared between central and regional governments, in line with the new constitution, said Salih, whose fellow Kurds are eyeing profits from oil in their region.
But a bill will take at least a couple of months to finish, he added. Divisions reflect in part concerns among the once dominant Sunni Arab minority that new constitution's autonomy for federal regions could give southern Shi'ites and northern Kurds a lion's share of the world's third biggest oil reserves.
Insisting the bill was crucial but should not be rushed, Salih said: "This will decide the political economy of Iraq.
"This will decide the future of politics of this country."
-------------------------
Citation: Alastair Macdonald. "Iraq govt eyes economy boost to ease conflict," Reuters, 27 August 2006.
Original URL: http://www.alertnet.org/thenews/newsdesk/L27819573.htm
-------------------------
Deaths Drop in Iraqi Capital
Even as the nation's toll climbs by at least 80, including 6 U.S. soldiers, officials credit a military sweep for Baghdad's lower tally this month.
By Solomon Moore
Los Angeles Times, 28 August 2006
BAGHDAD — An ambitious military sweep appears to be dramatically reducing Baghdad's homicide rate, U.S. and Iraqi officials said Sunday — even as violence nationwide killed at least 80 people, including six U.S. soldiers in and around the capital.
Last month, the Baghdad morgue received more than 1,800 bodies, a record high. This month, the morgue is on track to receive less than a quarter of that.
Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri Maliki seized on the drop in slayings during a CNN interview.
"The violence is not increasing…. No, we're not in a civil war," Maliki said. "In Iraq, we'll never be in civil war. What you see is an atmosphere of reconciliation."
Although the smaller monthly tally offers encouragement to U.S. and Iraqi officials, it remains a triple-digit reminder that sectarian violence and insurgent activity continue to roil the country.
"It is not possible to create a democracy at the barrel of a gun…. We cannot even work freely as politicians," said Saleh Mutlak, a Sunni Arab member of parliament. "It is not possible for us to even hold meetings. We cannot travel between one province and another."
U.S. Army Maj. Gen. James D. Thurman, commander of military forces in Baghdad, attributed the capital's declining violence to a sweep involving 8,000 U.S. soldiers and 3,000 Iraqi troops aimed at stopping sectarian violence.
The troops, many redeployed from hot spots around Iraq, have patrolled the capital, searched houses and made arrests since Aug. 7. Similar sweeps in Baghdad and elsewhere since the U.S.-led invasion in 2003 have reduced violence. But the bloodshed would increase when U.S. forces moved on.
Though the U.S. military has not issued a timetable for ending the sweep, officials say that patrolling Baghdad indefinitely would create dependency among Iraq's nascent security forces and tax U.S. resources and manpower.
The U.S. military, with 138,000 troops, is stretched thin in Iraq; many units are on their third deployments. Last week, the Pentagon announced an involuntary recall of as many as 2,500 Marines reservists. The Army has issued recall orders to 10,000 soldiers.
U.S. military leaders say they hope Iraqi police units, paired with American training teams, will be able to maintain security once the troops leave.
Many Baghdad residents, however, think that Iraq's notoriously corrupt and sectarian police forces are part of the problem. U.S. and Iraqi officials acknowledge that Shiite Muslim militiamen, many of whom have infiltrated the police, are responsible for most of Baghdad's slayings, but there is still no plan to disarm paramilitary groups.
U.S. and Iraqi officials describe the Baghdad security plan as a last-ditch effort to stave off civil war and to shore up Maliki's government, which has struggled to contain sectarian violence and deliver essentials such as electricity and gasoline.
Baghdad morgue statistician Muayed Matrood said Sunday that "the number of unidentified, identified bodies and those killed randomly in crossfire received by the morgue from Aug. 1 to Aug. 15 were between 240 and 250 bodies." Between the 15th and Sunday, the morgue received 80 to 85 bodies, Matrood said.
The morgue does not count victims of explosions, whose remains often are mutilated. But Iraqi police Capt. Mohammed Hanoon said bomb attacks were down by one-third during the first two weeks of August.
But the news of progress in Baghdad was damped by the flurry of weekend violence throughout Iraq.
Of the 80 deaths reported Sunday, 25 were in Baghdad.
Bombers targeted two media centers in the capital. Nine people were killed when a bomb planted on a commuter bus exploded near the pedestrian entrance of the Palestine Hotel, which houses several media organizations.
Two people died when a bomb exploded in the parking lot of the headquarters of Al Sabah, one of Iraq's largest daily newspapers.
"This is the second attack of its kind against us so far," Falah Mishal, an editor at the paper, told the Iraqiya television station. "This is the price that is being paid to the workers at Al Sabah due to their steadfastness and their patriotism."
Morgue workers at Yarmouk Hospital in Baghdad said they received at least a dozen bodies Sunday, among them torture victims, bystanders hit by gunfire, and a child killed by a mortar round.
Near Khalis, a village 15 miles north of Baghdad, gunmen killed 22 people at a cafe, an Iraqi army official said. The assailants also raided a judge's home, killing his brother. Also in Khalis, a bomb detonated near a market, killing six people.
In nearby Baqubah, two truck drivers were slain in drive-by shootings and gunmen killed an Iraqi army colonel. In addition, two brothers and their cousin were shot to death by unknown attackers. And Iraqi police found two bodies six miles north of Baqubah.
In the northern oil hub of Kirkuk, a car bomber smashed into the home of an Iraqi police colonel, killing nine people. Another car bomb killed one person at the office of Iraqi President Jalal Talabani's political party, the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan. It was the second time this month that bombers targeted the party's office.
The bombings are "aimed at igniting sectarian divisions between Kirkuk's residents, especially between Arabs and Kurds," said Mohammed Khalel Nsayef, an Arab politician in Kirkuk, a majority Kurdish city with significant Arab and Turkmen populations.
In Duluiya, 50 miles north of Baghdad, three bodyguards for parliament member Abed Jibouri were gunned down.
In the southern city of Basra, Iraqi police officers said gunmen killed a policeman and his sister. Basra authorities also arrested 18 people accused of kidnapping and selling women to foreigners.
U.S. military officials announced the deaths of six American soldiers. Two died in Baghdad, one by small-arms fire and one by a roadside bomb, officials said.
Four more troops died in a roadside bombing north of Baghdad. No location was given, but eyewitnesses in Tarmiya, 35 miles north of the capital, said that a bomb destroyed an American armored vehicle and that no one survived.
Deputy Prime Minister Barham Salih said in an interview that the leading Shiite coalition was planning to reshuffle the Cabinet three months after the formation of the unity government.
"This is aimed at improving the performance of the government," said Salih, who declined to identify which ministries would be affected.
Two senior U.S. military leaders in Iraq recently expressed concern that Interior Minister Jawad Bolani, a former engineer and Iraqi army officer with no police experience, had yet to rein in Shiite militias in the police forces. The paramilitary groups are accused of detaining and killing Sunni Arabs.
A conference of Sunni Arab tribal leaders from throughout Iraq ended Sunday with a declaration pledging support for Maliki, condemning killings and kidnappings of Iraqis, and calling for increased participation in Iraq's political process.
The tribesmen also denounced "irresponsible actions by the multinational forces that are hurting innocent people."
"What has been reflected in this conference is that there aren't any real differences that should separate Iraqis from each other," the declaration said.
---------------------------------
Citation: Solomon Moore. "Deaths Drop in Iraqi Capital," Los Angeles Times, 28 August 2006.
Original URL: http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/la-fg-iraq28aug28,0,5085663.story?coll=la-home-headlines
---------------------------------
By Solomon Moore
Los Angeles Times, 28 August 2006
BAGHDAD — An ambitious military sweep appears to be dramatically reducing Baghdad's homicide rate, U.S. and Iraqi officials said Sunday — even as violence nationwide killed at least 80 people, including six U.S. soldiers in and around the capital.
Last month, the Baghdad morgue received more than 1,800 bodies, a record high. This month, the morgue is on track to receive less than a quarter of that.
Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri Maliki seized on the drop in slayings during a CNN interview.
"The violence is not increasing…. No, we're not in a civil war," Maliki said. "In Iraq, we'll never be in civil war. What you see is an atmosphere of reconciliation."
Although the smaller monthly tally offers encouragement to U.S. and Iraqi officials, it remains a triple-digit reminder that sectarian violence and insurgent activity continue to roil the country.
"It is not possible to create a democracy at the barrel of a gun…. We cannot even work freely as politicians," said Saleh Mutlak, a Sunni Arab member of parliament. "It is not possible for us to even hold meetings. We cannot travel between one province and another."
U.S. Army Maj. Gen. James D. Thurman, commander of military forces in Baghdad, attributed the capital's declining violence to a sweep involving 8,000 U.S. soldiers and 3,000 Iraqi troops aimed at stopping sectarian violence.
The troops, many redeployed from hot spots around Iraq, have patrolled the capital, searched houses and made arrests since Aug. 7. Similar sweeps in Baghdad and elsewhere since the U.S.-led invasion in 2003 have reduced violence. But the bloodshed would increase when U.S. forces moved on.
Though the U.S. military has not issued a timetable for ending the sweep, officials say that patrolling Baghdad indefinitely would create dependency among Iraq's nascent security forces and tax U.S. resources and manpower.
The U.S. military, with 138,000 troops, is stretched thin in Iraq; many units are on their third deployments. Last week, the Pentagon announced an involuntary recall of as many as 2,500 Marines reservists. The Army has issued recall orders to 10,000 soldiers.
U.S. military leaders say they hope Iraqi police units, paired with American training teams, will be able to maintain security once the troops leave.
Many Baghdad residents, however, think that Iraq's notoriously corrupt and sectarian police forces are part of the problem. U.S. and Iraqi officials acknowledge that Shiite Muslim militiamen, many of whom have infiltrated the police, are responsible for most of Baghdad's slayings, but there is still no plan to disarm paramilitary groups.
U.S. and Iraqi officials describe the Baghdad security plan as a last-ditch effort to stave off civil war and to shore up Maliki's government, which has struggled to contain sectarian violence and deliver essentials such as electricity and gasoline.
Baghdad morgue statistician Muayed Matrood said Sunday that "the number of unidentified, identified bodies and those killed randomly in crossfire received by the morgue from Aug. 1 to Aug. 15 were between 240 and 250 bodies." Between the 15th and Sunday, the morgue received 80 to 85 bodies, Matrood said.
The morgue does not count victims of explosions, whose remains often are mutilated. But Iraqi police Capt. Mohammed Hanoon said bomb attacks were down by one-third during the first two weeks of August.
But the news of progress in Baghdad was damped by the flurry of weekend violence throughout Iraq.
Of the 80 deaths reported Sunday, 25 were in Baghdad.
Bombers targeted two media centers in the capital. Nine people were killed when a bomb planted on a commuter bus exploded near the pedestrian entrance of the Palestine Hotel, which houses several media organizations.
Two people died when a bomb exploded in the parking lot of the headquarters of Al Sabah, one of Iraq's largest daily newspapers.
"This is the second attack of its kind against us so far," Falah Mishal, an editor at the paper, told the Iraqiya television station. "This is the price that is being paid to the workers at Al Sabah due to their steadfastness and their patriotism."
Morgue workers at Yarmouk Hospital in Baghdad said they received at least a dozen bodies Sunday, among them torture victims, bystanders hit by gunfire, and a child killed by a mortar round.
Near Khalis, a village 15 miles north of Baghdad, gunmen killed 22 people at a cafe, an Iraqi army official said. The assailants also raided a judge's home, killing his brother. Also in Khalis, a bomb detonated near a market, killing six people.
In nearby Baqubah, two truck drivers were slain in drive-by shootings and gunmen killed an Iraqi army colonel. In addition, two brothers and their cousin were shot to death by unknown attackers. And Iraqi police found two bodies six miles north of Baqubah.
In the northern oil hub of Kirkuk, a car bomber smashed into the home of an Iraqi police colonel, killing nine people. Another car bomb killed one person at the office of Iraqi President Jalal Talabani's political party, the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan. It was the second time this month that bombers targeted the party's office.
The bombings are "aimed at igniting sectarian divisions between Kirkuk's residents, especially between Arabs and Kurds," said Mohammed Khalel Nsayef, an Arab politician in Kirkuk, a majority Kurdish city with significant Arab and Turkmen populations.
In Duluiya, 50 miles north of Baghdad, three bodyguards for parliament member Abed Jibouri were gunned down.
In the southern city of Basra, Iraqi police officers said gunmen killed a policeman and his sister. Basra authorities also arrested 18 people accused of kidnapping and selling women to foreigners.
U.S. military officials announced the deaths of six American soldiers. Two died in Baghdad, one by small-arms fire and one by a roadside bomb, officials said.
Four more troops died in a roadside bombing north of Baghdad. No location was given, but eyewitnesses in Tarmiya, 35 miles north of the capital, said that a bomb destroyed an American armored vehicle and that no one survived.
Deputy Prime Minister Barham Salih said in an interview that the leading Shiite coalition was planning to reshuffle the Cabinet three months after the formation of the unity government.
"This is aimed at improving the performance of the government," said Salih, who declined to identify which ministries would be affected.
Two senior U.S. military leaders in Iraq recently expressed concern that Interior Minister Jawad Bolani, a former engineer and Iraqi army officer with no police experience, had yet to rein in Shiite militias in the police forces. The paramilitary groups are accused of detaining and killing Sunni Arabs.
A conference of Sunni Arab tribal leaders from throughout Iraq ended Sunday with a declaration pledging support for Maliki, condemning killings and kidnappings of Iraqis, and calling for increased participation in Iraq's political process.
The tribesmen also denounced "irresponsible actions by the multinational forces that are hurting innocent people."
"What has been reflected in this conference is that there aren't any real differences that should separate Iraqis from each other," the declaration said.
---------------------------------
Citation: Solomon Moore. "Deaths Drop in Iraqi Capital," Los Angeles Times, 28 August 2006.
Original URL: http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/la-fg-iraq28aug28,0,5085663.story?coll=la-home-headlines
---------------------------------
22 August 2006
It's Starting to Look a Lot Like an Army
A combat operation is seen as a milestone for Afghan troops and their U.S. trainers -- and a signpost for the fledgling Iraqi force.
By David Zucchino
Los Angeles Times, 22 August 2006
RAMAZAN, Afghanistan — This remote village in the high desert of southern Afghanistan is home to six mud huts and 70 people. A few miles away, tucked behind two soaring escarpments, the settlement of Qazi contains four huts, 50 people and a few goats.
More than 100 Afghan army soldiers descended on the two villages one day last month looking for Taliban fighters. After a carefully scripted battle plan, the soldiers sealed the villages and searched every hut, shed, paddock and fighting-age male.
They found nothing — no Taliban, no weapons, no documents, no bomb-making material. But in the eyes of the U.S. military advisors who set the raid in motion, the operation was a milestone.
For the first time in Afghanistan, the Americans said, the Afghan army had conducted a battalion-sized combat operation that combined logistics, mortars, scouts and infantry from three companies. It is the sort of operation that U.S. troops conduct routinely, but the fledgling Afghan army is just beginning to apply its training to real-life battlefields.
"We witnessed a little piece of history today," said U.S. Col. Martin Leppert, his face sunburned below his blond crew cut after a day spent supervising the operation in 120-degree desert heat.
The Afghan army, like the one being built and trained chiefly by the U.S. in Iraq, is the fulcrum for American strategy in both countries. U.S. forces will remain mired in Afghanistan and Iraq for years unless the two armies become strong and capable enough to fight on their own. For both Afghanistan and Iraq, the army is the one national institution potentially capable of projecting government authority and security.
The nascent Afghan effort could provide a signpost for the Iraqi army, despite significant differences in size and the nature of the insurgency each is fighting. If the Afghan army is still struggling in its fifth year of training, its halting progress suggests that the Iraqi army, in its third year, has a long way to go.
Men such as Leppert, 46, a full-time National Guard soldier from Wisconsin, are at the forefront of the Afghan training. Known as an ETT, for embedded training team, his 20 American trainers serve as mentors for their Afghan counterparts.
The training has evolved from putting raw recruits through basic training at a military center in Kabul, the capital, to conducting combat forays alongside U.S. or NATO units. Afghan battalions are a long way from being able to operate on their own, but trainers are trying to wean them from relying on the U.S. military for everything from carrying enough food and ammunition to setting up observation posts and mortar crews.
It is slow, frustrating work. Most Afghan soldiers are fearless fighters, but more than half are illiterate, with virtually no experience fighting in cohesive, disciplined units. Many recruits are too young to have fought in the country's numerous wars over the last quarter-century. Many older soldiers and officers fought the Soviets or the Taliban, but as guerrillas, not as part of a national army.
Today's army is very much a work in progress. Afghan commanders and soldiers complain of poor pay, faulty weapons, ammunition shortages and lack of protective gear. U.S. trainers, while praising Afghan soldiers for their bravery, complain of slovenly appearance, lack of discipline, petty thefts, mistreated equipment and infiltration of the army by Taliban spies or soldiers who sell information.
Afghan soldiers are armed with old AK-47 assault rifles collected from warlord militias. A first-year soldier earns $70 a month, less than a common laborer. (The top enlisted man makes $180 a month, a general $530 a month.)
The Afghan brigade commander, Col. Abdul Raziq, said he spent $250 of his $400 monthly salary on phone cards because his personal cellphone was his only reliable means of communicating with his commanders.
Soldiers have no body armor and no armored vehicles. Few even have helmets. They ride into battle in the dusty beds of U.S.-supplied Ford Ranger pickups, clutching their weapons while bouncing over rutted dirt trails. Their commanders scream orders into outdated U.S.-issue radios, forgoing code words or secure call signs.
"We're building the Afghan army on the fly," said Leppert, an aggressive, fast-talking officer known to fellow commanders as "Cowboy," as he watched from a ridgeline as Afghan troops swept toward the two villages. "We're building the airplane while the airplane is flying."
Operation Mountain Thrust, the 2-month-old campaign against a resurgent Taliban in southern Afghanistan, is being led by combat units from the U.S. and NATO countries, with the Afghan army in support.
From a forward operating base called Apache, Leppert supervises an Afghan brigade. His small hilltop base is protected by dirt berms, blast barriers, high walls, concertina wire and guard towers against Taliban fighters who control towns and villages across the arid Zabol province.
On the next rise is the headquarters of the Afghan brigade at Alexander's Castle, a crenelated fortification said to date from the days of Alexander the Great.
"This is very, very dangerous country," Leppert said. "We've lost a lot of good ANA [Afghan National Army] soldiers here."
The night before the search operation, Apache was attacked by three pickups of gunmen who raked the encampment with machine-gun fire and rocket-propelled grenades in what Leppert called a "classic L.A. drive-by." The U.S. trainers climbed to the parapets and into the guard towers, firing back with automatic rifles and machine guns.
After a 25-minute battle, the attackers fled, Leppert said. Three were captured and interrogated. The only U.S. casualty was a twisted ankle suffered by a U.S. Navy trainer, part of a nine-man naval team training the Afghans to build and maintain military garrisons.
Just after dawn the next morning, the Americans and Afghans launched a "cordon and search" operation aimed at the two villages an hour's drive away over packed tan dirt and dry wadis. The trainers and Afghans had been collecting intelligence on the settlements, which they believed were sanctuaries for Taliban fighters.
The U.S. battalion commander, Lt. Col. Harold Walker, carried a battle plan and map with targets and observation posts marked with code names such as Roach, Firefly, Wasp and Maggot. His counterpart, Afghan battalion commander Maj. Gholem Sakhi, 44, carried a similar battle plan written in Dari.
The two commanders watched the operation play out from their command post at the top of a sandy ridge. They communicated through an interpreter. Walker speaks only a few Dari phrases, and Sakhi's only English phrase is a heartfelt "I love you, my friend!"
The Afghan scouts had taken up their positions on mountain ridges that rose high above the command post, and the mortar teams had set up on distant mountains to block any attempted escape by suspected militants. The two commanders used radio scanners to monitor all radio traffic in the area; Taliban fighters and their supporters in villages often communicate by two-way radio.
It was clear that the Taliban had its own observation posts and had spotted the convoy. It was likely that any Taliban in the two targeted villages had been warned to flee.
"We're watching them watching us," Walker said, squinting at the hazy gorges far below.
More than a hundred Afghan soldiers fanned out through the gorges, backed by more than 100 more in support roles. They were joined by 15 U.S. trainers, who had more firepower than the lightly armed Afghan troops.
The trainers were also able to call in artillery or airstrikes, if needed, along with helicopters for any wounded. Although this is a source of comfort for the Afghans, it has also made them dependent on U.S. resources. The Americans provide trucks, weapons, food, ammunition and fuel.
"We're the 911 for the ANA," said Walker, whose 10 trainers mentor 358 Afghan troops. "We will not let them fail."
Walker and Leppert acknowledged that the Afghans were unable to conduct proper combat operations without U.S. guidance and materiel support. But they point out that the battalion that conducted the search was less than a year old and had been created from scratch, mostly with young recruits.
"These guys are great fighters," Leppert said. "They believe in their cause, and they will get better."
On this day, for this mission, that seemed sufficient. The Afghan soldiers held their assigned positions, conducted a thorough search and jogged up mountains to set up observation posts.
"It's like watching a kid grow up," Walker said, sharing a meal of greasy chicken and naan flatbread with Sakhi. "It takes time and patience."
----------------------
Citation: David Zucchino. "It's Starting to Look a Lot Like an Army," Los Angeles Times, 22 August 2006.
Original URL: http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/iraq/complete/la-fg-army22aug22,1,1900870.story?coll=la-iraq-complete
----------------------
By David Zucchino
Los Angeles Times, 22 August 2006
RAMAZAN, Afghanistan — This remote village in the high desert of southern Afghanistan is home to six mud huts and 70 people. A few miles away, tucked behind two soaring escarpments, the settlement of Qazi contains four huts, 50 people and a few goats.
More than 100 Afghan army soldiers descended on the two villages one day last month looking for Taliban fighters. After a carefully scripted battle plan, the soldiers sealed the villages and searched every hut, shed, paddock and fighting-age male.
They found nothing — no Taliban, no weapons, no documents, no bomb-making material. But in the eyes of the U.S. military advisors who set the raid in motion, the operation was a milestone.
For the first time in Afghanistan, the Americans said, the Afghan army had conducted a battalion-sized combat operation that combined logistics, mortars, scouts and infantry from three companies. It is the sort of operation that U.S. troops conduct routinely, but the fledgling Afghan army is just beginning to apply its training to real-life battlefields.
"We witnessed a little piece of history today," said U.S. Col. Martin Leppert, his face sunburned below his blond crew cut after a day spent supervising the operation in 120-degree desert heat.
The Afghan army, like the one being built and trained chiefly by the U.S. in Iraq, is the fulcrum for American strategy in both countries. U.S. forces will remain mired in Afghanistan and Iraq for years unless the two armies become strong and capable enough to fight on their own. For both Afghanistan and Iraq, the army is the one national institution potentially capable of projecting government authority and security.
The nascent Afghan effort could provide a signpost for the Iraqi army, despite significant differences in size and the nature of the insurgency each is fighting. If the Afghan army is still struggling in its fifth year of training, its halting progress suggests that the Iraqi army, in its third year, has a long way to go.
Men such as Leppert, 46, a full-time National Guard soldier from Wisconsin, are at the forefront of the Afghan training. Known as an ETT, for embedded training team, his 20 American trainers serve as mentors for their Afghan counterparts.
The training has evolved from putting raw recruits through basic training at a military center in Kabul, the capital, to conducting combat forays alongside U.S. or NATO units. Afghan battalions are a long way from being able to operate on their own, but trainers are trying to wean them from relying on the U.S. military for everything from carrying enough food and ammunition to setting up observation posts and mortar crews.
It is slow, frustrating work. Most Afghan soldiers are fearless fighters, but more than half are illiterate, with virtually no experience fighting in cohesive, disciplined units. Many recruits are too young to have fought in the country's numerous wars over the last quarter-century. Many older soldiers and officers fought the Soviets or the Taliban, but as guerrillas, not as part of a national army.
Today's army is very much a work in progress. Afghan commanders and soldiers complain of poor pay, faulty weapons, ammunition shortages and lack of protective gear. U.S. trainers, while praising Afghan soldiers for their bravery, complain of slovenly appearance, lack of discipline, petty thefts, mistreated equipment and infiltration of the army by Taliban spies or soldiers who sell information.
Afghan soldiers are armed with old AK-47 assault rifles collected from warlord militias. A first-year soldier earns $70 a month, less than a common laborer. (The top enlisted man makes $180 a month, a general $530 a month.)
The Afghan brigade commander, Col. Abdul Raziq, said he spent $250 of his $400 monthly salary on phone cards because his personal cellphone was his only reliable means of communicating with his commanders.
Soldiers have no body armor and no armored vehicles. Few even have helmets. They ride into battle in the dusty beds of U.S.-supplied Ford Ranger pickups, clutching their weapons while bouncing over rutted dirt trails. Their commanders scream orders into outdated U.S.-issue radios, forgoing code words or secure call signs.
"We're building the Afghan army on the fly," said Leppert, an aggressive, fast-talking officer known to fellow commanders as "Cowboy," as he watched from a ridgeline as Afghan troops swept toward the two villages. "We're building the airplane while the airplane is flying."
Operation Mountain Thrust, the 2-month-old campaign against a resurgent Taliban in southern Afghanistan, is being led by combat units from the U.S. and NATO countries, with the Afghan army in support.
From a forward operating base called Apache, Leppert supervises an Afghan brigade. His small hilltop base is protected by dirt berms, blast barriers, high walls, concertina wire and guard towers against Taliban fighters who control towns and villages across the arid Zabol province.
On the next rise is the headquarters of the Afghan brigade at Alexander's Castle, a crenelated fortification said to date from the days of Alexander the Great.
"This is very, very dangerous country," Leppert said. "We've lost a lot of good ANA [Afghan National Army] soldiers here."
The night before the search operation, Apache was attacked by three pickups of gunmen who raked the encampment with machine-gun fire and rocket-propelled grenades in what Leppert called a "classic L.A. drive-by." The U.S. trainers climbed to the parapets and into the guard towers, firing back with automatic rifles and machine guns.
After a 25-minute battle, the attackers fled, Leppert said. Three were captured and interrogated. The only U.S. casualty was a twisted ankle suffered by a U.S. Navy trainer, part of a nine-man naval team training the Afghans to build and maintain military garrisons.
Just after dawn the next morning, the Americans and Afghans launched a "cordon and search" operation aimed at the two villages an hour's drive away over packed tan dirt and dry wadis. The trainers and Afghans had been collecting intelligence on the settlements, which they believed were sanctuaries for Taliban fighters.
The U.S. battalion commander, Lt. Col. Harold Walker, carried a battle plan and map with targets and observation posts marked with code names such as Roach, Firefly, Wasp and Maggot. His counterpart, Afghan battalion commander Maj. Gholem Sakhi, 44, carried a similar battle plan written in Dari.
The two commanders watched the operation play out from their command post at the top of a sandy ridge. They communicated through an interpreter. Walker speaks only a few Dari phrases, and Sakhi's only English phrase is a heartfelt "I love you, my friend!"
The Afghan scouts had taken up their positions on mountain ridges that rose high above the command post, and the mortar teams had set up on distant mountains to block any attempted escape by suspected militants. The two commanders used radio scanners to monitor all radio traffic in the area; Taliban fighters and their supporters in villages often communicate by two-way radio.
It was clear that the Taliban had its own observation posts and had spotted the convoy. It was likely that any Taliban in the two targeted villages had been warned to flee.
"We're watching them watching us," Walker said, squinting at the hazy gorges far below.
More than a hundred Afghan soldiers fanned out through the gorges, backed by more than 100 more in support roles. They were joined by 15 U.S. trainers, who had more firepower than the lightly armed Afghan troops.
The trainers were also able to call in artillery or airstrikes, if needed, along with helicopters for any wounded. Although this is a source of comfort for the Afghans, it has also made them dependent on U.S. resources. The Americans provide trucks, weapons, food, ammunition and fuel.
"We're the 911 for the ANA," said Walker, whose 10 trainers mentor 358 Afghan troops. "We will not let them fail."
Walker and Leppert acknowledged that the Afghans were unable to conduct proper combat operations without U.S. guidance and materiel support. But they point out that the battalion that conducted the search was less than a year old and had been created from scratch, mostly with young recruits.
"These guys are great fighters," Leppert said. "They believe in their cause, and they will get better."
On this day, for this mission, that seemed sufficient. The Afghan soldiers held their assigned positions, conducted a thorough search and jogged up mountains to set up observation posts.
"It's like watching a kid grow up," Walker said, sharing a meal of greasy chicken and naan flatbread with Sakhi. "It takes time and patience."
----------------------
Citation: David Zucchino. "It's Starting to Look a Lot Like an Army," Los Angeles Times, 22 August 2006.
Original URL: http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/iraq/complete/la-fg-army22aug22,1,1900870.story?coll=la-iraq-complete
----------------------
Iraq’s petrol stations fuel turf wars
By Steve Negus
Financial Times, 21 August 2006
In the chaos of a north Baghdad petrol station, where motorists who have waited for hours in 50°C heat jostle with black-clad women desperately trying to fill jerrycans for home generators, a nervous-looking man approaches a group of US troops just arrived at the scene.
Only 10 minutes ago, he says, the station had been under the control of Mahdi Army militiamen who have terrorised the local oil min-istry protection force and kidnapped two employees. The militiamen had fled as the Americans approached, he said, but would soon be back.
The US military has deployed thousands of troops into Baghdad in the last month to try to contain sectarian violence, which by most estimates claims dozens of lives a day. The killing is largely blamed on feuding militia and insurgent networks, some of whom are – according to residents of the capital – fighting each other for control of mixed-sectarian neighbourhoods.
Throughout Iraq, petrol stations are one of the main prizes in the militia turf wars. They are both money-makers and symbols of territorial control.
According to US soldiers, petrol station takeovers are a tactic used by armed groups countrywide, from remote highways in the Sunni heartland – where the stations are popular gathering points for unemployed young men and thus double as recruiting stations for insurgent commanders – to the farmlands south of Baghdad where Shia militias allegedly make Sunni pay tripled prices.
The roots of the problem lie in Iraq’s heavily subsidised fuel, which sees demand far outstripping the supply fed to the station by the ministry of oil, and feeds a healthy black market. Queues outside gas stations can sometimes run for a kilometre or more and can entail up to a 24-hour wait in line to buy fuel.
Officially, motorists are only allowed to fill up their tanks but anyone with connections at the station can fill up a jerrycan or two that can then be sold at up to many times the official price (about 25 cents a litre) by the side of the road.
Here the militias come in, regulating who gets to buy the extra black market fuel and who doesn’t, allowing their supporters to push in front of the queue, and taking a share of their profits.
The gunmen sometimes pose as protectors, keeping away other marauders and preventing the fights that inevitably break out in the queue, thus building up their reputation as de facto local government.
Control of the petrol black market, combined with protection money reaped from government oil tanker trucks and smuggling abroad, is one of the important sources of financing for the country’s armed groups. Last year an oil ministry auditor estimated the total value of the smuggling trade at $4bn; at least half of which goes to fund the insurgency.
The guards employed by the oil ministry are generally poorly motivated and reluctant to take on gunmen who outnumber and outgun them. At this station, the guards do not even have ammunition for their Kalashnikovs, having fired their bullets into the air while trying to control traffic.
The US commander Cpt Will Arnold gives the guards a brief pep talk and distributes ammunition and his phone number, telling them to call next time the militia shows up. The presence of the Americans and the Iraqi army also gets the line moving, eliciting thanks from several sweaty motorists.
The Americans eventually drive off. Next day a report comes in that the guards at one neighbourhood station fought off a robbery attempt by an armed gang. It could not at once be established whether it was the same station visited the day before.
------------------------
Citation: Steve Negus. "Iraq’s petrol stations fuel turf wars," Financial Times, 21 August 2006.
Original URL: http://www.ft.com/cms/s/a9c39e26-3138-11db-b953-0000779e2340.html
------------------------
Financial Times, 21 August 2006
In the chaos of a north Baghdad petrol station, where motorists who have waited for hours in 50°C heat jostle with black-clad women desperately trying to fill jerrycans for home generators, a nervous-looking man approaches a group of US troops just arrived at the scene.
Only 10 minutes ago, he says, the station had been under the control of Mahdi Army militiamen who have terrorised the local oil min-istry protection force and kidnapped two employees. The militiamen had fled as the Americans approached, he said, but would soon be back.
The US military has deployed thousands of troops into Baghdad in the last month to try to contain sectarian violence, which by most estimates claims dozens of lives a day. The killing is largely blamed on feuding militia and insurgent networks, some of whom are – according to residents of the capital – fighting each other for control of mixed-sectarian neighbourhoods.
Throughout Iraq, petrol stations are one of the main prizes in the militia turf wars. They are both money-makers and symbols of territorial control.
According to US soldiers, petrol station takeovers are a tactic used by armed groups countrywide, from remote highways in the Sunni heartland – where the stations are popular gathering points for unemployed young men and thus double as recruiting stations for insurgent commanders – to the farmlands south of Baghdad where Shia militias allegedly make Sunni pay tripled prices.
The roots of the problem lie in Iraq’s heavily subsidised fuel, which sees demand far outstripping the supply fed to the station by the ministry of oil, and feeds a healthy black market. Queues outside gas stations can sometimes run for a kilometre or more and can entail up to a 24-hour wait in line to buy fuel.
Officially, motorists are only allowed to fill up their tanks but anyone with connections at the station can fill up a jerrycan or two that can then be sold at up to many times the official price (about 25 cents a litre) by the side of the road.
Here the militias come in, regulating who gets to buy the extra black market fuel and who doesn’t, allowing their supporters to push in front of the queue, and taking a share of their profits.
The gunmen sometimes pose as protectors, keeping away other marauders and preventing the fights that inevitably break out in the queue, thus building up their reputation as de facto local government.
Control of the petrol black market, combined with protection money reaped from government oil tanker trucks and smuggling abroad, is one of the important sources of financing for the country’s armed groups. Last year an oil ministry auditor estimated the total value of the smuggling trade at $4bn; at least half of which goes to fund the insurgency.
The guards employed by the oil ministry are generally poorly motivated and reluctant to take on gunmen who outnumber and outgun them. At this station, the guards do not even have ammunition for their Kalashnikovs, having fired their bullets into the air while trying to control traffic.
The US commander Cpt Will Arnold gives the guards a brief pep talk and distributes ammunition and his phone number, telling them to call next time the militia shows up. The presence of the Americans and the Iraqi army also gets the line moving, eliciting thanks from several sweaty motorists.
The Americans eventually drive off. Next day a report comes in that the guards at one neighbourhood station fought off a robbery attempt by an armed gang. It could not at once be established whether it was the same station visited the day before.
------------------------
Citation: Steve Negus. "Iraq’s petrol stations fuel turf wars," Financial Times, 21 August 2006.
Original URL: http://www.ft.com/cms/s/a9c39e26-3138-11db-b953-0000779e2340.html
------------------------
21 August 2006
Snipers Target Shiite March
Sectarian violence tears into a huge Baghdad pilgrimage, and at least 22 die. Officials call the event a success, citing a lack of mass casualties.
By Patrick J. McDonnell
Los Angeles Times, 21 August 2006
BAGHDAD — Gunmen took aim at multitudes of Shiite Muslim worshipers marching through this besieged capital Sunday, killing at least 22 and leaving hundreds injured in a vivid illustration of the sectarian violence driving Iraq toward open civil war.
Panicked pilgrims, including women in full-length black robes, scattered in terror as opportunistic gunmen fired from positions on rooftops, inside buildings and on the streets. Security officers and Shiite militiamen returned fire during rolling gun battles along the routes to the worshipers' destination, a major Shiite shrine.
Iraqi television showed images of pilgrims diving for cover behind parked cars and buildings as ambulances ferried off victims. Authorities reported that security forces killed several of the snipers.
Despite the gunplay, U.S. and Iraqi officials argued that a draconian weekend security clampdown, including a two-day ban on most vehicular traffic in the capital, helped avert a higher death toll as more than 1 million Shiites headed on foot to the shrine. No major attack was reported at the bustling holy site.
An Interior Ministry official labeled the security dragnet, which also included the posting of thousands of police officers and troops at the shrine and along its access roads, as "an extraordinary success," given the potential for mass casualties in the incendiary climate of contemporary Iraq.
Last year, almost 1,000 pilgrims were killed during a stampede sparked by fears of a suicide attack that culminated in a human crush on the Aima Bridge over the Tigris River. Many of the victims, including numerous women and children, were forced into the river and drowned.
This year, police closed the Aima Bridge and funneled worshipers to two other spans in a move aimed at dispersing the masses and providing greater protection.
The U.S. military praised the "comprehensive security plan" devised by Iraqi military and civil leaders.
"These acts against innocent civilians are deplorable, but Iraqi security forces did an excellent job in preventing more needless loss of innocent civilian lives," Army Maj. Gen. James D. Thurman, who leads American forces in Baghdad, said in a statement.
Officials cited the lack of car bombs and suicide strikes as significant accomplishments during the two-day religious ceremony, which attracted masses of faithful to the gold-domed shrine in the northern Baghdad neighborhood of Kadhimiya. Four mortar strikes were reported in the capital, an official said, but none was fatal.
Authorities set up checkpoints as far as three miles from the shrine and searched everyone entering the holy site for weapons and concealed suicide devices. Foot patrols hunted for clandestine launching pads used to fire mortar rounds and Katyusha rockets, staples of the insurgent arsenal.
Officials said those killed Sunday were shot en route to or from the shrine as they walked through neighborhoods populated mostly by Sunni Muslims, who are fighting the country's Shiite majority in an increasingly bloody internecine struggle. Many worshipers walked for miles, some barefoot, to pay homage to Musa al Kadhim, who died more than 1,200 years ago and is one of the 12 revered imams of the Shiite sect.
Gunmen shot and killed at least seven other pilgrims along a highway on Friday, officials said, before the vehicle ban went into effect.
Authorities said 302 people were injured during this year's pilgrimage, including gunshot victims and shrapnel casualties from mortar strikes. It appeared that many were hurt in other ways, such as falling while scrambling from the gunfire.
Baghdad, whose residents long boasted of religious tolerance, is increasingly a city of Sunni and Shiite enclaves. Many have left once-mixed neighborhoods for the relative safety of zones dominated by one or the other sect and patrolled by corresponding militiamen. Others have been forced out or killed.
But many pilgrims headed to the Kadhimiya shrine had no choice but to pass through largely Sunni districts brimming with resentment about the Shiite political domination that followed the U.S.-led ousting in 2003 of Saddam Hussein, a Sunni who favored his minority sect.
"I left my house at 10 p.m. because it is much safer and the weather is cooler," said Ali Hassan, 18, a laborer who arrived safely at the shrine in the predawn hours Sunday. "But this morning we heard some gunshots aimed at the pilgrims, and some were hit."
Hassan, who was uninjured, said he made the pilgrimage in honor of his older brother, Sadeq, who perished in the Tigris during last year's human stampede.
That a day in which almost two dozen people were shot dead could be labeled a security success is a reflection of the unforgiving gauge of today's Iraq, where as many as 100 civilians are killed daily in a vicious sectarian struggle.
Extraordinary security measures, such as those imposed this weekend and during last year's elections, have managed only to curb the bloodshed for concentrated periods.
"This year there are more visitors, and the process was more organized," said one pilgrim, Saad Jabiri, a 30-year-old shop owner and father of four who walked to the shrine but returned in an ambulance accompanying a friend hit by sniper fire.
"This is a challenge to the terrorists, the Saddamists and the occupiers," said Jabiri, lumping together both the Sunni-led insurgents and U.S. forces in a formulation common among residents of Sadr City, a radicalized Shiite stronghold where he and many other pilgrims reside.
Iraq's large-scale Shiite religious celebrations, banned or otherwise held in check during Hussein's rule, have become vivid symbols of the Shiite ascendancy in recent years.
Shiite politicians and religious leaders have made no effort to limit the extravaganzas, despite the parlous state of security.
Volunteers line the pilgrimage routes, providing the faithful with water, food and glasses of sweetened tea served from steaming caldrons. Many participants chant, hoist the green-and-black flags of Islam and work their way into a religious frenzy as they approach the shrines.
In recent days, worshipers gathered at a major entrance to Sadr City, where a mural depicts victims of last year's stampede falling into the Tigris as doves fly above.
Many in the long-dominant Sunni community view the elaborate gatherings as political acts and provocations, just as many Roman Catholic nationalists in Northern Ireland resent the annual loyalist "marching season" as an affirmation of Protestant domination.
Attacks on Shiite festivities have become so commonplace that authorities have begun to devise elaborate security plans well before the pilgrims take to the streets. Religious leaders also muster throngs of Shiite militiamen to assist in the security effort.
Still, the Shiite gatherings have experienced some of the worst atrocities of the more than 3-year-old insurgency. Last year's stampede still ranks as the bloodiest day since U.S.-led forces deposed Hussein.
In 2004, during a Shiite religious festival, about 180 pilgrims were killed when up to a dozen suicide bombers mingling with pilgrims detonated their payloads at shrines in Kadhimiya and in the Shiite holy city of Karbala in coordinated strikes.
Times staff writers Saif Rasheed, Suhail Ahmad and Saif Hameed contributed to this report.
----------------------------
Citation: Patrick J. McDonnell. "Snipers Target Shiite March," Los Angeles Times, 21 August 2006.
Original URL: http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/la-fg-iraq21aug21,0,1874385.story?coll=la-story-footer
----------------------------
By Patrick J. McDonnell
Los Angeles Times, 21 August 2006
BAGHDAD — Gunmen took aim at multitudes of Shiite Muslim worshipers marching through this besieged capital Sunday, killing at least 22 and leaving hundreds injured in a vivid illustration of the sectarian violence driving Iraq toward open civil war.
Panicked pilgrims, including women in full-length black robes, scattered in terror as opportunistic gunmen fired from positions on rooftops, inside buildings and on the streets. Security officers and Shiite militiamen returned fire during rolling gun battles along the routes to the worshipers' destination, a major Shiite shrine.
Iraqi television showed images of pilgrims diving for cover behind parked cars and buildings as ambulances ferried off victims. Authorities reported that security forces killed several of the snipers.
Despite the gunplay, U.S. and Iraqi officials argued that a draconian weekend security clampdown, including a two-day ban on most vehicular traffic in the capital, helped avert a higher death toll as more than 1 million Shiites headed on foot to the shrine. No major attack was reported at the bustling holy site.
An Interior Ministry official labeled the security dragnet, which also included the posting of thousands of police officers and troops at the shrine and along its access roads, as "an extraordinary success," given the potential for mass casualties in the incendiary climate of contemporary Iraq.
Last year, almost 1,000 pilgrims were killed during a stampede sparked by fears of a suicide attack that culminated in a human crush on the Aima Bridge over the Tigris River. Many of the victims, including numerous women and children, were forced into the river and drowned.
This year, police closed the Aima Bridge and funneled worshipers to two other spans in a move aimed at dispersing the masses and providing greater protection.
The U.S. military praised the "comprehensive security plan" devised by Iraqi military and civil leaders.
"These acts against innocent civilians are deplorable, but Iraqi security forces did an excellent job in preventing more needless loss of innocent civilian lives," Army Maj. Gen. James D. Thurman, who leads American forces in Baghdad, said in a statement.
Officials cited the lack of car bombs and suicide strikes as significant accomplishments during the two-day religious ceremony, which attracted masses of faithful to the gold-domed shrine in the northern Baghdad neighborhood of Kadhimiya. Four mortar strikes were reported in the capital, an official said, but none was fatal.
Authorities set up checkpoints as far as three miles from the shrine and searched everyone entering the holy site for weapons and concealed suicide devices. Foot patrols hunted for clandestine launching pads used to fire mortar rounds and Katyusha rockets, staples of the insurgent arsenal.
Officials said those killed Sunday were shot en route to or from the shrine as they walked through neighborhoods populated mostly by Sunni Muslims, who are fighting the country's Shiite majority in an increasingly bloody internecine struggle. Many worshipers walked for miles, some barefoot, to pay homage to Musa al Kadhim, who died more than 1,200 years ago and is one of the 12 revered imams of the Shiite sect.
Gunmen shot and killed at least seven other pilgrims along a highway on Friday, officials said, before the vehicle ban went into effect.
Authorities said 302 people were injured during this year's pilgrimage, including gunshot victims and shrapnel casualties from mortar strikes. It appeared that many were hurt in other ways, such as falling while scrambling from the gunfire.
Baghdad, whose residents long boasted of religious tolerance, is increasingly a city of Sunni and Shiite enclaves. Many have left once-mixed neighborhoods for the relative safety of zones dominated by one or the other sect and patrolled by corresponding militiamen. Others have been forced out or killed.
But many pilgrims headed to the Kadhimiya shrine had no choice but to pass through largely Sunni districts brimming with resentment about the Shiite political domination that followed the U.S.-led ousting in 2003 of Saddam Hussein, a Sunni who favored his minority sect.
"I left my house at 10 p.m. because it is much safer and the weather is cooler," said Ali Hassan, 18, a laborer who arrived safely at the shrine in the predawn hours Sunday. "But this morning we heard some gunshots aimed at the pilgrims, and some were hit."
Hassan, who was uninjured, said he made the pilgrimage in honor of his older brother, Sadeq, who perished in the Tigris during last year's human stampede.
That a day in which almost two dozen people were shot dead could be labeled a security success is a reflection of the unforgiving gauge of today's Iraq, where as many as 100 civilians are killed daily in a vicious sectarian struggle.
Extraordinary security measures, such as those imposed this weekend and during last year's elections, have managed only to curb the bloodshed for concentrated periods.
"This year there are more visitors, and the process was more organized," said one pilgrim, Saad Jabiri, a 30-year-old shop owner and father of four who walked to the shrine but returned in an ambulance accompanying a friend hit by sniper fire.
"This is a challenge to the terrorists, the Saddamists and the occupiers," said Jabiri, lumping together both the Sunni-led insurgents and U.S. forces in a formulation common among residents of Sadr City, a radicalized Shiite stronghold where he and many other pilgrims reside.
Iraq's large-scale Shiite religious celebrations, banned or otherwise held in check during Hussein's rule, have become vivid symbols of the Shiite ascendancy in recent years.
Shiite politicians and religious leaders have made no effort to limit the extravaganzas, despite the parlous state of security.
Volunteers line the pilgrimage routes, providing the faithful with water, food and glasses of sweetened tea served from steaming caldrons. Many participants chant, hoist the green-and-black flags of Islam and work their way into a religious frenzy as they approach the shrines.
In recent days, worshipers gathered at a major entrance to Sadr City, where a mural depicts victims of last year's stampede falling into the Tigris as doves fly above.
Many in the long-dominant Sunni community view the elaborate gatherings as political acts and provocations, just as many Roman Catholic nationalists in Northern Ireland resent the annual loyalist "marching season" as an affirmation of Protestant domination.
Attacks on Shiite festivities have become so commonplace that authorities have begun to devise elaborate security plans well before the pilgrims take to the streets. Religious leaders also muster throngs of Shiite militiamen to assist in the security effort.
Still, the Shiite gatherings have experienced some of the worst atrocities of the more than 3-year-old insurgency. Last year's stampede still ranks as the bloodiest day since U.S.-led forces deposed Hussein.
In 2004, during a Shiite religious festival, about 180 pilgrims were killed when up to a dozen suicide bombers mingling with pilgrims detonated their payloads at shrines in Kadhimiya and in the Shiite holy city of Karbala in coordinated strikes.
Times staff writers Saif Rasheed, Suhail Ahmad and Saif Hameed contributed to this report.
----------------------------
Citation: Patrick J. McDonnell. "Snipers Target Shiite March," Los Angeles Times, 21 August 2006.
Original URL: http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/la-fg-iraq21aug21,0,1874385.story?coll=la-story-footer
----------------------------
18 August 2006
Iraq violence feeds funeral businesses
By Sinan Salaheddin
The Associated Press, 17 August 2006
Back in 1982, Radhwan Mizaal Ali opened a tiny shop offering funeral supplies. Now he runs six shops, and business is booming.
"Whenever they beat war drums, our business flourishes more," Ali said as he puffed on a hookah waterpipe in one of his shops.
From coffin makers to professional mourners who weep and wail at ceremonies, a wave of killings in Baghdad is fueling a boom in the funeral industry.
Ali offers everything a grieving family needs for a proper burial: chairs for the mourners, tape recorders and speakers to transmit Quranic verses, plates for traditional foods and a generator — all rented out for about $100 a day.
According to Muslim and Iraqi tradition, bodies should be buried quickly, if possible on the very day of death. But tradition also calls for three days of mourning. Families rent a tent near the deceased's home and receive visitors.
On the final day of mourning, the deceased's family throws a big feast, where mourners and the poor in the neighborhood can partake. That's where Ali and other funeral suppliers come in.
And demand for their services is up. Since the bombing of a Shiite shrine in Samarra, much of the country has been gripped by a wave of reprisal killings by Sunni and Shiite extremists.
The United Nations says nearly 6,000 people were killed in May and June, and the morgue in Baghdad said it received about 1,500 bodies of people who died violently last month.
With killings on the rise, coffin maker Abbas Hussein Mohammed has opened a new shop to cope with the demand.
"Our business is booming day after day with each roadside bomb or car bomb and with the ongoing sectarian killings," Abbas said as he showed off his wooden coffins inside his tiny shop on Baghdad's Haifa Street.
"During the Saddam era, we used to do one or two coffins a day and the price ranged between $5 to $10," Mohammed said. Now he produces an average of 10 to 15 coffins a day and charges about $50 for each of them.
Um Alaaa, 50, is a professional mourner who attends funerals to add emotion to the ceremony. The profession is widespread in the Middle East, but lately demand has been so great that she is training one of her six daughters to help with the workload.
"I can't do more than three funerals a day," she said by telephone from Baghdad's Sadr City, a Shiite stronghold, as she was preparing to attend another funeral.
Her rate is about $50 per appearance, which she limits to Sadr City unless clients agree to drive her to and from the services.
"Increasing demands give me the impression that this cursed country is running out of its people," she said.
-----------------------------
Citation: Sinan Salaheddin. "Iraq violence feeds funeral businesses," The Associated Press, 17 August 2006.
Original URL: http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20060817/ap_on_re_mi_ea/iraq_funeral_boom
-----------------------------
The Associated Press, 17 August 2006
Back in 1982, Radhwan Mizaal Ali opened a tiny shop offering funeral supplies. Now he runs six shops, and business is booming.
"Whenever they beat war drums, our business flourishes more," Ali said as he puffed on a hookah waterpipe in one of his shops.
From coffin makers to professional mourners who weep and wail at ceremonies, a wave of killings in Baghdad is fueling a boom in the funeral industry.
Ali offers everything a grieving family needs for a proper burial: chairs for the mourners, tape recorders and speakers to transmit Quranic verses, plates for traditional foods and a generator — all rented out for about $100 a day.
According to Muslim and Iraqi tradition, bodies should be buried quickly, if possible on the very day of death. But tradition also calls for three days of mourning. Families rent a tent near the deceased's home and receive visitors.
On the final day of mourning, the deceased's family throws a big feast, where mourners and the poor in the neighborhood can partake. That's where Ali and other funeral suppliers come in.
And demand for their services is up. Since the bombing of a Shiite shrine in Samarra, much of the country has been gripped by a wave of reprisal killings by Sunni and Shiite extremists.
The United Nations says nearly 6,000 people were killed in May and June, and the morgue in Baghdad said it received about 1,500 bodies of people who died violently last month.
With killings on the rise, coffin maker Abbas Hussein Mohammed has opened a new shop to cope with the demand.
"Our business is booming day after day with each roadside bomb or car bomb and with the ongoing sectarian killings," Abbas said as he showed off his wooden coffins inside his tiny shop on Baghdad's Haifa Street.
"During the Saddam era, we used to do one or two coffins a day and the price ranged between $5 to $10," Mohammed said. Now he produces an average of 10 to 15 coffins a day and charges about $50 for each of them.
Um Alaaa, 50, is a professional mourner who attends funerals to add emotion to the ceremony. The profession is widespread in the Middle East, but lately demand has been so great that she is training one of her six daughters to help with the workload.
"I can't do more than three funerals a day," she said by telephone from Baghdad's Sadr City, a Shiite stronghold, as she was preparing to attend another funeral.
Her rate is about $50 per appearance, which she limits to Sadr City unless clients agree to drive her to and from the services.
"Increasing demands give me the impression that this cursed country is running out of its people," she said.
-----------------------------
Citation: Sinan Salaheddin. "Iraq violence feeds funeral businesses," The Associated Press, 17 August 2006.
Original URL: http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20060817/ap_on_re_mi_ea/iraq_funeral_boom
-----------------------------
Trying to build an army in a combat zone
By Michael R. Gordon
The New York Times, 18 August 2006
The rules posted on the wall of the U.S. Marine Corps base in Barwana concisely summed up its predicament in Iraq: Be polite, be professional, have a plan to kill everyone you meet.
Barwana was a way station for a joint Iraqi-U.S. convoy as it traveled to a stretch of hard-packed sand in the Haditha triad, one of the more challenging areas in Anbar, the most dangerous province in Iraq.
The convoy's goal was to inspect a company of Iraqi soldiers who had been involved in a U.S.-directed operation to round up insurgents. With Iraq engulfed in bloody turmoil, any prospect of establishing a modicum of order depends heavily on the new Iraqi Army and the small cadre of Americans who are training it.
The rules at Barwana hinted at one rationale. For all the U.S. military's fighting skills, the Iraqi troops are better able to differentiate among the welter of tribes, self-styled militias, religious groupings, insurgent organizations and jihadists who make up part of Iraq.
But there are other important rationales as well. With U.S. forces stretched perilously thin, fielding an Iraqi military - along with a parallel effort to build up the Iraqi police - is the closest thing the Bush administration has to an exit strategy.
According to Pentagon officials, there is to be a 10-division Iraqi force. The effort to raise and train the troops, they stated, is 85 percent complete. Statistics like these convey a sense of measurable progress in a region that otherwise appears to be a caldron of violence.
What I saw in more than three weeks in Anbar Province was not reassuring. Dogged efforts were being undercut by a dysfunctional Iraqi bureaucracy in Baghdad.
The U.S. advisers were able and extremely dedicated, and the Iraqi troops under their tutelage were making strides toward becoming an independent fighting element. But Iraq's Ministry of Defense has been slow to issue promotions for the new soldiers and to distribute proper pay.
A goodly number of the Iraqi soldiers have voted with their feet and gone absent without leave - or left to join the Iraqi police, so they could live close to home.
In the Haditha triad, Colonel Jebbar Abass, a beefy Iraqi with a drooping mustache, commanded a battalion that started out with about 700 soldiers last autumn. It had dropped to about 400 troops. Since almost one-third of his battalion is on leave at any one time, that means that Abass can field about 270 soldiers on any given day, a useful supplement to the U.S. Marine Corps forces in and around Haditha but hardly enough to enable the Americans to draw back.
Figures provided by U.S. military commanders show that the two Iraqi divisions in Anbar Province are about 5,000 short of their authorized strength, while some 660 soldiers are currently absent without leave.
The Americans have some genuine Iraqi partners in one of Iraq's most hostile regions, and U.S. commanders believe that Iraqi troop levels in Anbar have finally bottomed out and may be slowly starting to improve. But what kind of exit strategy is it when Iraqi soldiers have been leaving faster than the Americans?
The project to field a new Iraqi Army was greatly hampered by clumsy political engineering in the months following Saddam Hussein's fall. From the start, U.S. generals realized that they lacked the troop strength to seal the borders and control the country. A plan to enlist the support of anti-Saddam Iraqi troops was approved in March 2003 by President George W. Bush.
But the Iraqi Army vanished when faced with the rapid U.S. push to Baghdad, and the Bush administration had to make a decision. Senior U.S. military commanders wanted to stick with the basic plan and recall Iraqi troops to duty. Lieutenant General David McKiernan, the top U.S. general in Iraq at the time, began to work toward this end with the CIA station chief in Baghdad by meeting with current and former Iraqi generals.
Those efforts were stopped, however, when L. Paul Bremer 3rd, the senior civilian official in Iraq, issued a decree abolishing the Iraqi Army, a move that was essentially an extension of the Bush administration's de-Baathification campaign. Bremer gave his order after consulting with Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, but neither Condoleezza Rice, then Bush's national security adviser, nor Colin Powell, then the secretary of state, was informed in advance.
Once the Iraqi military had been abolished, a methodical effort to rebuild the armed forces from the ground up was begun. Three Iraqi divisions were to be trained and equipped over two years, an extraordinarily slow pace for a country that was in chaos.
Meanwhile, the security situation got only worse. Most of the Iraqi officers I talked with in Iraq thought Bremer's decision to disband the military was a mystifying blunder. After the strength of the insurgency became apparent to Washington, the effort to rebuild the Iraqi Army and the police was pursued with a new urgency. The training effort that was once something of an afterthought is now the Bush administration's final card, embodied in the Multinational Security Transition Command, led by Lieutenant General Martin Dempsey.
I stopped at Camp Falluja to see Colonel Tom Greenwood, who had been a military aide on the staff of the National Security Council leading up to the war, and then commander of a Marine Expeditionary Unit in Baghdad. Now he was finishing a six-month tour as the senior marine responsible for training the Iraqi Army and police forces in Anbar.
Greenwood explained that the pay issues in Haditha were quite common. In the Anbar region, about 550 Iraqi soldiers received no pay for June, while another 2,200 were receiving less pay than they were entitled to by rank.
Logistics was another of Greenwood's worries. U.S. commanders in Baghdad had pushed the Iraqis to take over responsibility for their own logistics, but that led to cases in which Iraqi soldiers had received spoiled meat and rotten vegetables.
Each month, Iraqi soldiers are granted about a week's leave to deliver their pay to their families, who may live hundreds of kilometers away, a custom that reflects the lack of an effective banking system in Iraq. With all the dangers, hardships and problems, the soldiers do not always come back. Factoring in the generous leaves, the First Iraqi Division, which has the responsibility for parts of Falluja and is deployed near Habbaniya, is at about 50 percent strength.
When I raised some of these issues in a telephone interview with Dempsey, who oversees the training effort for all of Iraq, he insisted that the problems had to be put in perspective. The two divisions in Anbar, he said, were deployed in one of the harshest regions and were in the worst shape.
Most Iraqi divisions, he said, had 85 percent to 90 percent of the troops they were authorized. When leaves were taken into account, that meant they were at 65 percent to 70 percent strength.
The pay problems at Iraq's Ministry of Defense, he said, were being addressed. They reflected the lack of an automated system but also stemmed from the need to guard against corruption and ensure that Iraqi units in the field did not obtain more pay than they were entitled to by putting phantom soldiers on the rolls.
The Iraqi government, he said, was eager to enlist recruits and would now allow a soldier to sign up for a two-year tour in which at least one year was spent in his home province. As for logistics, Dempsey said, it is important that the Iraqis demonstrate that they are in control of their own military by assuming responsibility for sustaining and paying their own soldiers, though measures to ease the strain, like allowing commanders to buy some provisions locally, are under consideration.
The day after I visited Greenwood, I went to a dilapidated soap factory in Falluja where a U.S. military advisory team was working with an Iraqi battalion.
U.S. commanders consider Falluja a success story. After the U.S. Marine Corps cleared the city in a violent battle in 2004, seven checkpoints were established to control access, making Falluja Iraq's largest gated community.
For all that, militants have managed to slip back in. The night I arrived, a roadside bomb killed one Iraqi soldier and wounded another during a shift change at an observation post.
The military advisory team at the soap factory was commanded by Major David Richardson. He volunteered for his assignment in Iraq and was advising the battalion headed by Colonel Abdul Majid, a 41-year-old officer who fought in the Iran-Iraq war, participated in the invasion of Kuwait during Saddam's era, looks older than his years and presides over the battalion with an air of complete authority.
By reputation, Majid is a decisive and experienced officer, which is all to the good, as his forces are approaching a critical phase. The Iraqi Army is to assume responsibility for securing Falluja this autumn, though a U.S. Marine Corps unit will be poised to rush in if there is major trouble.
"I think they will take it over, struggle with it a bit and then grow into it," Richardson said. "That is the best-case scenario. The worst-case scenario is they take it over, heavy, heavy violence breaks out and essentially the people don't have any confidence in the army. I don't see that happening because there are some pretty strong battalion commanders, Majid being one of them."
One of Majid's bravest performances may have come that day at the soap factory, when three VIPs arrived for a visit: Iraq's new defense minister, Abdul Qadr Muhammad Jassim; its new interior minister, Jawad Kadem al-Bolani; and General George Casey Jr., the senior U.S. commander.
Pointing to the list of 70 casualties his battalion suffered in an earlier fight for Ramadi, the Iraqi colonel recounted the familiar litany of problems: the failure to pay soldiers according to their new ranks, the difficulty in getting the Ministry of Defense to approve promotions, the higher pay provided to the local police - and in this case the failure to provide any salaries at all to 34 recruits who graduated from boot camp in April. Because of combat losses and a dearth of recruits, the battalion had fewer than half the 759 troops it was authorized.
The Iraqi defense minister said he was only then learning of such problems and promised to take corrective action. Later, I asked Majid if he thought anything would come of his appeal.
"Sure, he is going to work on it, but he won't get results soon," he said. "It is going to take a while."
Michael R. Gordon is chief military correspondent for The New York Times. This article was adapted from The New York Times Magazine.
The rules posted on the wall of the U.S. Marine Corps base in Barwana concisely summed up its predicament in Iraq: Be polite, be professional, have a plan to kill everyone you meet.
Barwana was a way station for a joint Iraqi-U.S. convoy as it traveled to a stretch of hard-packed sand in the Haditha triad, one of the more challenging areas in Anbar, the most dangerous province in Iraq.
The convoy's goal was to inspect a company of Iraqi soldiers who had been involved in a U.S.-directed operation to round up insurgents. With Iraq engulfed in bloody turmoil, any prospect of establishing a modicum of order depends heavily on the new Iraqi Army and the small cadre of Americans who are training it.
The rules at Barwana hinted at one rationale. For all the U.S. military's fighting skills, the Iraqi troops are better able to differentiate among the welter of tribes, self-styled militias, religious groupings, insurgent organizations and jihadists who make up part of Iraq.
But there are other important rationales as well. With U.S. forces stretched perilously thin, fielding an Iraqi military - along with a parallel effort to build up the Iraqi police - is the closest thing the Bush administration has to an exit strategy.
According to Pentagon officials, there is to be a 10-division Iraqi force. The effort to raise and train the troops, they stated, is 85 percent complete. Statistics like these convey a sense of measurable progress in a region that otherwise appears to be a caldron of violence.
What I saw in more than three weeks in Anbar Province was not reassuring. Dogged efforts were being undercut by a dysfunctional Iraqi bureaucracy in Baghdad.
The U.S. advisers were able and extremely dedicated, and the Iraqi troops under their tutelage were making strides toward becoming an independent fighting element. But Iraq's Ministry of Defense has been slow to issue promotions for the new soldiers and to distribute proper pay.
A goodly number of the Iraqi soldiers have voted with their feet and gone absent without leave - or left to join the Iraqi police, so they could live close to home.
In the Haditha triad, Colonel Jebbar Abass, a beefy Iraqi with a drooping mustache, commanded a battalion that started out with about 700 soldiers last autumn. It had dropped to about 400 troops. Since almost one-third of his battalion is on leave at any one time, that means that Abass can field about 270 soldiers on any given day, a useful supplement to the U.S. Marine Corps forces in and around Haditha but hardly enough to enable the Americans to draw back.
Figures provided by U.S. military commanders show that the two Iraqi divisions in Anbar Province are about 5,000 short of their authorized strength, while some 660 soldiers are currently absent without leave.
The Americans have some genuine Iraqi partners in one of Iraq's most hostile regions, and U.S. commanders believe that Iraqi troop levels in Anbar have finally bottomed out and may be slowly starting to improve. But what kind of exit strategy is it when Iraqi soldiers have been leaving faster than the Americans?
The project to field a new Iraqi Army was greatly hampered by clumsy political engineering in the months following Saddam Hussein's fall. From the start, U.S. generals realized that they lacked the troop strength to seal the borders and control the country. A plan to enlist the support of anti-Saddam Iraqi troops was approved in March 2003 by President George W. Bush.
But the Iraqi Army vanished when faced with the rapid U.S. push to Baghdad, and the Bush administration had to make a decision. Senior U.S. military commanders wanted to stick with the basic plan and recall Iraqi troops to duty. Lieutenant General David McKiernan, the top U.S. general in Iraq at the time, began to work toward this end with the CIA station chief in Baghdad by meeting with current and former Iraqi generals.
Those efforts were stopped, however, when L. Paul Bremer 3rd, the senior civilian official in Iraq, issued a decree abolishing the Iraqi Army, a move that was essentially an extension of the Bush administration's de-Baathification campaign. Bremer gave his order after consulting with Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, but neither Condoleezza Rice, then Bush's national security adviser, nor Colin Powell, then the secretary of state, was informed in advance.
Once the Iraqi military had been abolished, a methodical effort to rebuild the armed forces from the ground up was begun. Three Iraqi divisions were to be trained and equipped over two years, an extraordinarily slow pace for a country that was in chaos.
Meanwhile, the security situation got only worse. Most of the Iraqi officers I talked with in Iraq thought Bremer's decision to disband the military was a mystifying blunder. After the strength of the insurgency became apparent to Washington, the effort to rebuild the Iraqi Army and the police was pursued with a new urgency. The training effort that was once something of an afterthought is now the Bush administration's final card, embodied in the Multinational Security Transition Command, led by Lieutenant General Martin Dempsey.
I stopped at Camp Falluja to see Colonel Tom Greenwood, who had been a military aide on the staff of the National Security Council leading up to the war, and then commander of a Marine Expeditionary Unit in Baghdad. Now he was finishing a six-month tour as the senior marine responsible for training the Iraqi Army and police forces in Anbar.
Greenwood explained that the pay issues in Haditha were quite common. In the Anbar region, about 550 Iraqi soldiers received no pay for June, while another 2,200 were receiving less pay than they were entitled to by rank.
Logistics was another of Greenwood's worries. U.S. commanders in Baghdad had pushed the Iraqis to take over responsibility for their own logistics, but that led to cases in which Iraqi soldiers had received spoiled meat and rotten vegetables.
Each month, Iraqi soldiers are granted about a week's leave to deliver their pay to their families, who may live hundreds of kilometers away, a custom that reflects the lack of an effective banking system in Iraq. With all the dangers, hardships and problems, the soldiers do not always come back. Factoring in the generous leaves, the First Iraqi Division, which has the responsibility for parts of Falluja and is deployed near Habbaniya, is at about 50 percent strength.
When I raised some of these issues in a telephone interview with Dempsey, who oversees the training effort for all of Iraq, he insisted that the problems had to be put in perspective. The two divisions in Anbar, he said, were deployed in one of the harshest regions and were in the worst shape.
Most Iraqi divisions, he said, had 85 percent to 90 percent of the troops they were authorized. When leaves were taken into account, that meant they were at 65 percent to 70 percent strength.
The pay problems at Iraq's Ministry of Defense, he said, were being addressed. They reflected the lack of an automated system but also stemmed from the need to guard against corruption and ensure that Iraqi units in the field did not obtain more pay than they were entitled to by putting phantom soldiers on the rolls.
The Iraqi government, he said, was eager to enlist recruits and would now allow a soldier to sign up for a two-year tour in which at least one year was spent in his home province. As for logistics, Dempsey said, it is important that the Iraqis demonstrate that they are in control of their own military by assuming responsibility for sustaining and paying their own soldiers, though measures to ease the strain, like allowing commanders to buy some provisions locally, are under consideration.
The day after I visited Greenwood, I went to a dilapidated soap factory in Falluja where a U.S. military advisory team was working with an Iraqi battalion.
U.S. commanders consider Falluja a success story. After the U.S. Marine Corps cleared the city in a violent battle in 2004, seven checkpoints were established to control access, making Falluja Iraq's largest gated community.
For all that, militants have managed to slip back in. The night I arrived, a roadside bomb killed one Iraqi soldier and wounded another during a shift change at an observation post.
The military advisory team at the soap factory was commanded by Major David Richardson. He volunteered for his assignment in Iraq and was advising the battalion headed by Colonel Abdul Majid, a 41-year-old officer who fought in the Iran-Iraq war, participated in the invasion of Kuwait during Saddam's era, looks older than his years and presides over the battalion with an air of complete authority.
By reputation, Majid is a decisive and experienced officer, which is all to the good, as his forces are approaching a critical phase. The Iraqi Army is to assume responsibility for securing Falluja this autumn, though a U.S. Marine Corps unit will be poised to rush in if there is major trouble.
"I think they will take it over, struggle with it a bit and then grow into it," Richardson said. "That is the best-case scenario. The worst-case scenario is they take it over, heavy, heavy violence breaks out and essentially the people don't have any confidence in the army. I don't see that happening because there are some pretty strong battalion commanders, Majid being one of them."
One of Majid's bravest performances may have come that day at the soap factory, when three VIPs arrived for a visit: Iraq's new defense minister, Abdul Qadr Muhammad Jassim; its new interior minister, Jawad Kadem al-Bolani; and General George Casey Jr., the senior U.S. commander.
Pointing to the list of 70 casualties his battalion suffered in an earlier fight for Ramadi, the Iraqi colonel recounted the familiar litany of problems: the failure to pay soldiers according to their new ranks, the difficulty in getting the Ministry of Defense to approve promotions, the higher pay provided to the local police - and in this case the failure to provide any salaries at all to 34 recruits who graduated from boot camp in April. Because of combat losses and a dearth of recruits, the battalion had fewer than half the 759 troops it was authorized.
The Iraqi defense minister said he was only then learning of such problems and promised to take corrective action. Later, I asked Majid if he thought anything would come of his appeal.
"Sure, he is going to work on it, but he won't get results soon," he said. "It is going to take a while."
---------------------------
Citation: Michael R. Gordon. Trying to build an army in a combat zone," The New York Times, 18 August 2006.
Original URL: http://www.iht.com/articles/2006/08/18/news/iraqarmy.php
---------------------------
The New York Times, 18 August 2006
The rules posted on the wall of the U.S. Marine Corps base in Barwana concisely summed up its predicament in Iraq: Be polite, be professional, have a plan to kill everyone you meet.
Barwana was a way station for a joint Iraqi-U.S. convoy as it traveled to a stretch of hard-packed sand in the Haditha triad, one of the more challenging areas in Anbar, the most dangerous province in Iraq.
The convoy's goal was to inspect a company of Iraqi soldiers who had been involved in a U.S.-directed operation to round up insurgents. With Iraq engulfed in bloody turmoil, any prospect of establishing a modicum of order depends heavily on the new Iraqi Army and the small cadre of Americans who are training it.
The rules at Barwana hinted at one rationale. For all the U.S. military's fighting skills, the Iraqi troops are better able to differentiate among the welter of tribes, self-styled militias, religious groupings, insurgent organizations and jihadists who make up part of Iraq.
But there are other important rationales as well. With U.S. forces stretched perilously thin, fielding an Iraqi military - along with a parallel effort to build up the Iraqi police - is the closest thing the Bush administration has to an exit strategy.
According to Pentagon officials, there is to be a 10-division Iraqi force. The effort to raise and train the troops, they stated, is 85 percent complete. Statistics like these convey a sense of measurable progress in a region that otherwise appears to be a caldron of violence.
What I saw in more than three weeks in Anbar Province was not reassuring. Dogged efforts were being undercut by a dysfunctional Iraqi bureaucracy in Baghdad.
The U.S. advisers were able and extremely dedicated, and the Iraqi troops under their tutelage were making strides toward becoming an independent fighting element. But Iraq's Ministry of Defense has been slow to issue promotions for the new soldiers and to distribute proper pay.
A goodly number of the Iraqi soldiers have voted with their feet and gone absent without leave - or left to join the Iraqi police, so they could live close to home.
In the Haditha triad, Colonel Jebbar Abass, a beefy Iraqi with a drooping mustache, commanded a battalion that started out with about 700 soldiers last autumn. It had dropped to about 400 troops. Since almost one-third of his battalion is on leave at any one time, that means that Abass can field about 270 soldiers on any given day, a useful supplement to the U.S. Marine Corps forces in and around Haditha but hardly enough to enable the Americans to draw back.
Figures provided by U.S. military commanders show that the two Iraqi divisions in Anbar Province are about 5,000 short of their authorized strength, while some 660 soldiers are currently absent without leave.
The Americans have some genuine Iraqi partners in one of Iraq's most hostile regions, and U.S. commanders believe that Iraqi troop levels in Anbar have finally bottomed out and may be slowly starting to improve. But what kind of exit strategy is it when Iraqi soldiers have been leaving faster than the Americans?
The project to field a new Iraqi Army was greatly hampered by clumsy political engineering in the months following Saddam Hussein's fall. From the start, U.S. generals realized that they lacked the troop strength to seal the borders and control the country. A plan to enlist the support of anti-Saddam Iraqi troops was approved in March 2003 by President George W. Bush.
But the Iraqi Army vanished when faced with the rapid U.S. push to Baghdad, and the Bush administration had to make a decision. Senior U.S. military commanders wanted to stick with the basic plan and recall Iraqi troops to duty. Lieutenant General David McKiernan, the top U.S. general in Iraq at the time, began to work toward this end with the CIA station chief in Baghdad by meeting with current and former Iraqi generals.
Those efforts were stopped, however, when L. Paul Bremer 3rd, the senior civilian official in Iraq, issued a decree abolishing the Iraqi Army, a move that was essentially an extension of the Bush administration's de-Baathification campaign. Bremer gave his order after consulting with Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, but neither Condoleezza Rice, then Bush's national security adviser, nor Colin Powell, then the secretary of state, was informed in advance.
Once the Iraqi military had been abolished, a methodical effort to rebuild the armed forces from the ground up was begun. Three Iraqi divisions were to be trained and equipped over two years, an extraordinarily slow pace for a country that was in chaos.
Meanwhile, the security situation got only worse. Most of the Iraqi officers I talked with in Iraq thought Bremer's decision to disband the military was a mystifying blunder. After the strength of the insurgency became apparent to Washington, the effort to rebuild the Iraqi Army and the police was pursued with a new urgency. The training effort that was once something of an afterthought is now the Bush administration's final card, embodied in the Multinational Security Transition Command, led by Lieutenant General Martin Dempsey.
I stopped at Camp Falluja to see Colonel Tom Greenwood, who had been a military aide on the staff of the National Security Council leading up to the war, and then commander of a Marine Expeditionary Unit in Baghdad. Now he was finishing a six-month tour as the senior marine responsible for training the Iraqi Army and police forces in Anbar.
Greenwood explained that the pay issues in Haditha were quite common. In the Anbar region, about 550 Iraqi soldiers received no pay for June, while another 2,200 were receiving less pay than they were entitled to by rank.
Logistics was another of Greenwood's worries. U.S. commanders in Baghdad had pushed the Iraqis to take over responsibility for their own logistics, but that led to cases in which Iraqi soldiers had received spoiled meat and rotten vegetables.
Each month, Iraqi soldiers are granted about a week's leave to deliver their pay to their families, who may live hundreds of kilometers away, a custom that reflects the lack of an effective banking system in Iraq. With all the dangers, hardships and problems, the soldiers do not always come back. Factoring in the generous leaves, the First Iraqi Division, which has the responsibility for parts of Falluja and is deployed near Habbaniya, is at about 50 percent strength.
When I raised some of these issues in a telephone interview with Dempsey, who oversees the training effort for all of Iraq, he insisted that the problems had to be put in perspective. The two divisions in Anbar, he said, were deployed in one of the harshest regions and were in the worst shape.
Most Iraqi divisions, he said, had 85 percent to 90 percent of the troops they were authorized. When leaves were taken into account, that meant they were at 65 percent to 70 percent strength.
The pay problems at Iraq's Ministry of Defense, he said, were being addressed. They reflected the lack of an automated system but also stemmed from the need to guard against corruption and ensure that Iraqi units in the field did not obtain more pay than they were entitled to by putting phantom soldiers on the rolls.
The Iraqi government, he said, was eager to enlist recruits and would now allow a soldier to sign up for a two-year tour in which at least one year was spent in his home province. As for logistics, Dempsey said, it is important that the Iraqis demonstrate that they are in control of their own military by assuming responsibility for sustaining and paying their own soldiers, though measures to ease the strain, like allowing commanders to buy some provisions locally, are under consideration.
The day after I visited Greenwood, I went to a dilapidated soap factory in Falluja where a U.S. military advisory team was working with an Iraqi battalion.
U.S. commanders consider Falluja a success story. After the U.S. Marine Corps cleared the city in a violent battle in 2004, seven checkpoints were established to control access, making Falluja Iraq's largest gated community.
For all that, militants have managed to slip back in. The night I arrived, a roadside bomb killed one Iraqi soldier and wounded another during a shift change at an observation post.
The military advisory team at the soap factory was commanded by Major David Richardson. He volunteered for his assignment in Iraq and was advising the battalion headed by Colonel Abdul Majid, a 41-year-old officer who fought in the Iran-Iraq war, participated in the invasion of Kuwait during Saddam's era, looks older than his years and presides over the battalion with an air of complete authority.
By reputation, Majid is a decisive and experienced officer, which is all to the good, as his forces are approaching a critical phase. The Iraqi Army is to assume responsibility for securing Falluja this autumn, though a U.S. Marine Corps unit will be poised to rush in if there is major trouble.
"I think they will take it over, struggle with it a bit and then grow into it," Richardson said. "That is the best-case scenario. The worst-case scenario is they take it over, heavy, heavy violence breaks out and essentially the people don't have any confidence in the army. I don't see that happening because there are some pretty strong battalion commanders, Majid being one of them."
One of Majid's bravest performances may have come that day at the soap factory, when three VIPs arrived for a visit: Iraq's new defense minister, Abdul Qadr Muhammad Jassim; its new interior minister, Jawad Kadem al-Bolani; and General George Casey Jr., the senior U.S. commander.
Pointing to the list of 70 casualties his battalion suffered in an earlier fight for Ramadi, the Iraqi colonel recounted the familiar litany of problems: the failure to pay soldiers according to their new ranks, the difficulty in getting the Ministry of Defense to approve promotions, the higher pay provided to the local police - and in this case the failure to provide any salaries at all to 34 recruits who graduated from boot camp in April. Because of combat losses and a dearth of recruits, the battalion had fewer than half the 759 troops it was authorized.
The Iraqi defense minister said he was only then learning of such problems and promised to take corrective action. Later, I asked Majid if he thought anything would come of his appeal.
"Sure, he is going to work on it, but he won't get results soon," he said. "It is going to take a while."
Michael R. Gordon is chief military correspondent for The New York Times. This article was adapted from The New York Times Magazine.
The rules posted on the wall of the U.S. Marine Corps base in Barwana concisely summed up its predicament in Iraq: Be polite, be professional, have a plan to kill everyone you meet.
Barwana was a way station for a joint Iraqi-U.S. convoy as it traveled to a stretch of hard-packed sand in the Haditha triad, one of the more challenging areas in Anbar, the most dangerous province in Iraq.
The convoy's goal was to inspect a company of Iraqi soldiers who had been involved in a U.S.-directed operation to round up insurgents. With Iraq engulfed in bloody turmoil, any prospect of establishing a modicum of order depends heavily on the new Iraqi Army and the small cadre of Americans who are training it.
The rules at Barwana hinted at one rationale. For all the U.S. military's fighting skills, the Iraqi troops are better able to differentiate among the welter of tribes, self-styled militias, religious groupings, insurgent organizations and jihadists who make up part of Iraq.
But there are other important rationales as well. With U.S. forces stretched perilously thin, fielding an Iraqi military - along with a parallel effort to build up the Iraqi police - is the closest thing the Bush administration has to an exit strategy.
According to Pentagon officials, there is to be a 10-division Iraqi force. The effort to raise and train the troops, they stated, is 85 percent complete. Statistics like these convey a sense of measurable progress in a region that otherwise appears to be a caldron of violence.
What I saw in more than three weeks in Anbar Province was not reassuring. Dogged efforts were being undercut by a dysfunctional Iraqi bureaucracy in Baghdad.
The U.S. advisers were able and extremely dedicated, and the Iraqi troops under their tutelage were making strides toward becoming an independent fighting element. But Iraq's Ministry of Defense has been slow to issue promotions for the new soldiers and to distribute proper pay.
A goodly number of the Iraqi soldiers have voted with their feet and gone absent without leave - or left to join the Iraqi police, so they could live close to home.
In the Haditha triad, Colonel Jebbar Abass, a beefy Iraqi with a drooping mustache, commanded a battalion that started out with about 700 soldiers last autumn. It had dropped to about 400 troops. Since almost one-third of his battalion is on leave at any one time, that means that Abass can field about 270 soldiers on any given day, a useful supplement to the U.S. Marine Corps forces in and around Haditha but hardly enough to enable the Americans to draw back.
Figures provided by U.S. military commanders show that the two Iraqi divisions in Anbar Province are about 5,000 short of their authorized strength, while some 660 soldiers are currently absent without leave.
The Americans have some genuine Iraqi partners in one of Iraq's most hostile regions, and U.S. commanders believe that Iraqi troop levels in Anbar have finally bottomed out and may be slowly starting to improve. But what kind of exit strategy is it when Iraqi soldiers have been leaving faster than the Americans?
The project to field a new Iraqi Army was greatly hampered by clumsy political engineering in the months following Saddam Hussein's fall. From the start, U.S. generals realized that they lacked the troop strength to seal the borders and control the country. A plan to enlist the support of anti-Saddam Iraqi troops was approved in March 2003 by President George W. Bush.
But the Iraqi Army vanished when faced with the rapid U.S. push to Baghdad, and the Bush administration had to make a decision. Senior U.S. military commanders wanted to stick with the basic plan and recall Iraqi troops to duty. Lieutenant General David McKiernan, the top U.S. general in Iraq at the time, began to work toward this end with the CIA station chief in Baghdad by meeting with current and former Iraqi generals.
Those efforts were stopped, however, when L. Paul Bremer 3rd, the senior civilian official in Iraq, issued a decree abolishing the Iraqi Army, a move that was essentially an extension of the Bush administration's de-Baathification campaign. Bremer gave his order after consulting with Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, but neither Condoleezza Rice, then Bush's national security adviser, nor Colin Powell, then the secretary of state, was informed in advance.
Once the Iraqi military had been abolished, a methodical effort to rebuild the armed forces from the ground up was begun. Three Iraqi divisions were to be trained and equipped over two years, an extraordinarily slow pace for a country that was in chaos.
Meanwhile, the security situation got only worse. Most of the Iraqi officers I talked with in Iraq thought Bremer's decision to disband the military was a mystifying blunder. After the strength of the insurgency became apparent to Washington, the effort to rebuild the Iraqi Army and the police was pursued with a new urgency. The training effort that was once something of an afterthought is now the Bush administration's final card, embodied in the Multinational Security Transition Command, led by Lieutenant General Martin Dempsey.
I stopped at Camp Falluja to see Colonel Tom Greenwood, who had been a military aide on the staff of the National Security Council leading up to the war, and then commander of a Marine Expeditionary Unit in Baghdad. Now he was finishing a six-month tour as the senior marine responsible for training the Iraqi Army and police forces in Anbar.
Greenwood explained that the pay issues in Haditha were quite common. In the Anbar region, about 550 Iraqi soldiers received no pay for June, while another 2,200 were receiving less pay than they were entitled to by rank.
Logistics was another of Greenwood's worries. U.S. commanders in Baghdad had pushed the Iraqis to take over responsibility for their own logistics, but that led to cases in which Iraqi soldiers had received spoiled meat and rotten vegetables.
Each month, Iraqi soldiers are granted about a week's leave to deliver their pay to their families, who may live hundreds of kilometers away, a custom that reflects the lack of an effective banking system in Iraq. With all the dangers, hardships and problems, the soldiers do not always come back. Factoring in the generous leaves, the First Iraqi Division, which has the responsibility for parts of Falluja and is deployed near Habbaniya, is at about 50 percent strength.
When I raised some of these issues in a telephone interview with Dempsey, who oversees the training effort for all of Iraq, he insisted that the problems had to be put in perspective. The two divisions in Anbar, he said, were deployed in one of the harshest regions and were in the worst shape.
Most Iraqi divisions, he said, had 85 percent to 90 percent of the troops they were authorized. When leaves were taken into account, that meant they were at 65 percent to 70 percent strength.
The pay problems at Iraq's Ministry of Defense, he said, were being addressed. They reflected the lack of an automated system but also stemmed from the need to guard against corruption and ensure that Iraqi units in the field did not obtain more pay than they were entitled to by putting phantom soldiers on the rolls.
The Iraqi government, he said, was eager to enlist recruits and would now allow a soldier to sign up for a two-year tour in which at least one year was spent in his home province. As for logistics, Dempsey said, it is important that the Iraqis demonstrate that they are in control of their own military by assuming responsibility for sustaining and paying their own soldiers, though measures to ease the strain, like allowing commanders to buy some provisions locally, are under consideration.
The day after I visited Greenwood, I went to a dilapidated soap factory in Falluja where a U.S. military advisory team was working with an Iraqi battalion.
U.S. commanders consider Falluja a success story. After the U.S. Marine Corps cleared the city in a violent battle in 2004, seven checkpoints were established to control access, making Falluja Iraq's largest gated community.
For all that, militants have managed to slip back in. The night I arrived, a roadside bomb killed one Iraqi soldier and wounded another during a shift change at an observation post.
The military advisory team at the soap factory was commanded by Major David Richardson. He volunteered for his assignment in Iraq and was advising the battalion headed by Colonel Abdul Majid, a 41-year-old officer who fought in the Iran-Iraq war, participated in the invasion of Kuwait during Saddam's era, looks older than his years and presides over the battalion with an air of complete authority.
By reputation, Majid is a decisive and experienced officer, which is all to the good, as his forces are approaching a critical phase. The Iraqi Army is to assume responsibility for securing Falluja this autumn, though a U.S. Marine Corps unit will be poised to rush in if there is major trouble.
"I think they will take it over, struggle with it a bit and then grow into it," Richardson said. "That is the best-case scenario. The worst-case scenario is they take it over, heavy, heavy violence breaks out and essentially the people don't have any confidence in the army. I don't see that happening because there are some pretty strong battalion commanders, Majid being one of them."
One of Majid's bravest performances may have come that day at the soap factory, when three VIPs arrived for a visit: Iraq's new defense minister, Abdul Qadr Muhammad Jassim; its new interior minister, Jawad Kadem al-Bolani; and General George Casey Jr., the senior U.S. commander.
Pointing to the list of 70 casualties his battalion suffered in an earlier fight for Ramadi, the Iraqi colonel recounted the familiar litany of problems: the failure to pay soldiers according to their new ranks, the difficulty in getting the Ministry of Defense to approve promotions, the higher pay provided to the local police - and in this case the failure to provide any salaries at all to 34 recruits who graduated from boot camp in April. Because of combat losses and a dearth of recruits, the battalion had fewer than half the 759 troops it was authorized.
The Iraqi defense minister said he was only then learning of such problems and promised to take corrective action. Later, I asked Majid if he thought anything would come of his appeal.
"Sure, he is going to work on it, but he won't get results soon," he said. "It is going to take a while."
---------------------------
Citation: Michael R. Gordon. Trying to build an army in a combat zone," The New York Times, 18 August 2006.
Original URL: http://www.iht.com/articles/2006/08/18/news/iraqarmy.php
---------------------------
Another Renegade Cleric Gains Clout
Hassani's power is marginal compared with that of Sadr, but officials are concerned. He attacks U.S. troops as well as fellow Shiites.
By Louise Roug
Los Angeles Times, 18 August 2006
BAGHDAD — A little-known ayatollah has emerged at the center of a violent conflict among Shiite Muslims that is sweeping Iraq's southern desert.
Mahmoud Hassani, whose gunmen fought a competing Shiite faction in the holy city of Karbala this week, is a renegade in the mold of Muqtada Sadr. He has criticized the largest Shiite party for being too closely aligned with Iran, and his green-clad militia has attacked Americans as well as fellow Shiites.
The battle for control among Shiites is another destabilizing development in a country already mired in insurgency, escalating the sectarian bloodshed and human rights abuses by security forces.
On Thursday, the U.S. military announced the death of two American troops, one killed by a roadside bomb while patrolling Baghdad on foot and one killed Wednesday in western Al Anbar province.
A roadside bomb also killed four people and injured 28 near a market in the heavily Shiite neighborhood of Sadr City in Baghdad. In Baqubah, north of the capital, gunmen attacked a police building, killing two officers and a child, and a curfew was imposed.
Though Baghdad remains the center of the violence, assassinations and street fights between militias now also take place regularly in the majority-Shiite south. Iraqi security forces, which are dominated by rival Shiite groups, and gunmen affiliated with Hassani battled in Karbala for three hours Tuesday. An Iraqi army official said two soldiers, two police officers and three gunmen were killed.
Security forces surrounded the city, imposed a curfew and arrested hundreds of Hassani followers, Iraqi authorities said.
Followers reached a truce with the local governor and police Thursday that calls for "Hassani [to] disavow those stirring seditions and those targeting the government's officials and properties."
"It is so clear that this was a conspiracy against us aimed at destroying [Hassani] and his followers," said Dhiaud Musawi, a Hassani aide in Karbala.
He accused local authorities of placing explosives near Hassani's office but said Iran was ultimately behind the attacks.
Hassani, who is believed to be about 40, claims to be a descendant of the prophet Muhammad. He is one of the few Shiites who have publicly criticized Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani, a moderate voice and the most revered and influential Shiite cleric in Iraq. Although his stronghold is in the south, Hassani also has followers in Sadr City.
Iraqis, unhappy because they are locked out of the local patronage system, are increasingly turning to more militant fringe parties such as Hassani's, said professor Juan Cole, an expert on Shiite Islam at the University of Michigan. "He's a symptom of how politics are working in the south," he said. "This is pushback from people who feel disenfranchised."
Fighting has broken out between other Shiite groups as well. On Wednesday, a Shiite tribe in Basra stormed a local government office and fought Sadr's followers for several hours. At least three people died, hospital officials said.
Local authorities said the situation was tense but under control there. The two most powerful Shiite militias, Sadr's Al Mahdi army and the Badr Brigade — affiliated with the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq political party — have been fighting in Basra for months. A third group, the Thar Allah Party, recently joined the fight, residents say.
Compared with Sadr, Hassani's power is marginal. But Iraqi officials appear worried about his ability to command popular support.
In the early days after the March 2003 U.S.-led invasion, Sadr and Hassani followed similar trajectories. Hassani claimed to have studied under Sadr's father, the revered Grand Ayatollah Mohammed Sadeq Sadr, who was assassinated in 1999, allegedly by agents working for Saddam Hussein. But authorities at seminaries in Karbala and Najaf, another holy city, have little recollection of him.
Like Sadr, Hassani employed anti-American rhetoric after the invasion. His virulence alienated other Shiites who initially praised Americans as their liberators.
Both Hassani and the younger Sadr sought control of Karbala and its shrines, which generate millions of dollars from pilgrims' contributions. Imam Hussein, grandson of Muhammad, was martyred in Karbala about 1,300 years ago.
Both men also encouraged their followers to fight the Americans.
In October 2003, Hassani's bodyguards killed three American MPs, including a battalion commander, in a ferocious firefight outside his office near the gold-domed Imam Abbas shrine in Karbala. The Americans and the interim Iraqi government put a $50,000 price on his head, and Hassani disappeared.
While Hassani remained underground, Sadr battled Americans in Najaf during 2004. But instead of disappearing, Sadr reinvented himself as a politician.
Today, Sadr's faction controls 30 seats in parliament and key ministries, including Health and Transportation, which give it control of vital infrastructure.
American commanders express frustration that Sadr and his followers have become almost untouchable.
When U.S. troops raided a suspected kidnapping and torture cell in Sadr City last week, calling in airstrikes for support, Prime Minister Nouri Maliki lashed out at the Americans, calling the operation "excessive."
Times staff writers Raheem Salman, Suhail Ahmad and Saif Hameed in Baghdad, Saad Fakhrildeen in Najaf and a special correspondent in Basra contributed to this report.
-------------------------------
Citation: Louise Roug. "Another Renegade Cleric Gains Clout," Los Angeles Times, 18 August 2006.
Original URL: http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/iraq/complete/la-fg-cleric18aug18,1,4614299.story?coll=la-iraq-complete
-------------------------------
By Louise Roug
Los Angeles Times, 18 August 2006
BAGHDAD — A little-known ayatollah has emerged at the center of a violent conflict among Shiite Muslims that is sweeping Iraq's southern desert.
Mahmoud Hassani, whose gunmen fought a competing Shiite faction in the holy city of Karbala this week, is a renegade in the mold of Muqtada Sadr. He has criticized the largest Shiite party for being too closely aligned with Iran, and his green-clad militia has attacked Americans as well as fellow Shiites.
The battle for control among Shiites is another destabilizing development in a country already mired in insurgency, escalating the sectarian bloodshed and human rights abuses by security forces.
On Thursday, the U.S. military announced the death of two American troops, one killed by a roadside bomb while patrolling Baghdad on foot and one killed Wednesday in western Al Anbar province.
A roadside bomb also killed four people and injured 28 near a market in the heavily Shiite neighborhood of Sadr City in Baghdad. In Baqubah, north of the capital, gunmen attacked a police building, killing two officers and a child, and a curfew was imposed.
Though Baghdad remains the center of the violence, assassinations and street fights between militias now also take place regularly in the majority-Shiite south. Iraqi security forces, which are dominated by rival Shiite groups, and gunmen affiliated with Hassani battled in Karbala for three hours Tuesday. An Iraqi army official said two soldiers, two police officers and three gunmen were killed.
Security forces surrounded the city, imposed a curfew and arrested hundreds of Hassani followers, Iraqi authorities said.
Followers reached a truce with the local governor and police Thursday that calls for "Hassani [to] disavow those stirring seditions and those targeting the government's officials and properties."
"It is so clear that this was a conspiracy against us aimed at destroying [Hassani] and his followers," said Dhiaud Musawi, a Hassani aide in Karbala.
He accused local authorities of placing explosives near Hassani's office but said Iran was ultimately behind the attacks.
Hassani, who is believed to be about 40, claims to be a descendant of the prophet Muhammad. He is one of the few Shiites who have publicly criticized Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani, a moderate voice and the most revered and influential Shiite cleric in Iraq. Although his stronghold is in the south, Hassani also has followers in Sadr City.
Iraqis, unhappy because they are locked out of the local patronage system, are increasingly turning to more militant fringe parties such as Hassani's, said professor Juan Cole, an expert on Shiite Islam at the University of Michigan. "He's a symptom of how politics are working in the south," he said. "This is pushback from people who feel disenfranchised."
Fighting has broken out between other Shiite groups as well. On Wednesday, a Shiite tribe in Basra stormed a local government office and fought Sadr's followers for several hours. At least three people died, hospital officials said.
Local authorities said the situation was tense but under control there. The two most powerful Shiite militias, Sadr's Al Mahdi army and the Badr Brigade — affiliated with the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq political party — have been fighting in Basra for months. A third group, the Thar Allah Party, recently joined the fight, residents say.
Compared with Sadr, Hassani's power is marginal. But Iraqi officials appear worried about his ability to command popular support.
In the early days after the March 2003 U.S.-led invasion, Sadr and Hassani followed similar trajectories. Hassani claimed to have studied under Sadr's father, the revered Grand Ayatollah Mohammed Sadeq Sadr, who was assassinated in 1999, allegedly by agents working for Saddam Hussein. But authorities at seminaries in Karbala and Najaf, another holy city, have little recollection of him.
Like Sadr, Hassani employed anti-American rhetoric after the invasion. His virulence alienated other Shiites who initially praised Americans as their liberators.
Both Hassani and the younger Sadr sought control of Karbala and its shrines, which generate millions of dollars from pilgrims' contributions. Imam Hussein, grandson of Muhammad, was martyred in Karbala about 1,300 years ago.
Both men also encouraged their followers to fight the Americans.
In October 2003, Hassani's bodyguards killed three American MPs, including a battalion commander, in a ferocious firefight outside his office near the gold-domed Imam Abbas shrine in Karbala. The Americans and the interim Iraqi government put a $50,000 price on his head, and Hassani disappeared.
While Hassani remained underground, Sadr battled Americans in Najaf during 2004. But instead of disappearing, Sadr reinvented himself as a politician.
Today, Sadr's faction controls 30 seats in parliament and key ministries, including Health and Transportation, which give it control of vital infrastructure.
American commanders express frustration that Sadr and his followers have become almost untouchable.
When U.S. troops raided a suspected kidnapping and torture cell in Sadr City last week, calling in airstrikes for support, Prime Minister Nouri Maliki lashed out at the Americans, calling the operation "excessive."
Times staff writers Raheem Salman, Suhail Ahmad and Saif Hameed in Baghdad, Saad Fakhrildeen in Najaf and a special correspondent in Basra contributed to this report.
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Citation: Louise Roug. "Another Renegade Cleric Gains Clout," Los Angeles Times, 18 August 2006.
Original URL: http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/iraq/complete/la-fg-cleric18aug18,1,4614299.story?coll=la-iraq-complete
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17 August 2006
Troops Push Security Door to Door in Iraq
The effort to stem the sectarian violence by getting weapons off the streets of Baghdad is a slow and sweaty task.
By Louise Roug
Los Angeles Times, 17 August 2006
BAGHDAD — Sweating through their uniforms, Capt. Ed Matthaidess and his men hunted through the heart of this Shiite neighborhood. In 120-degree heat, they spent six hours searching drawers and sewers alike. By the end of the day, their afternoon search had yielded slim pickings: four AK-47s and a tiny green water pistol.
While Matthaidess and his Charlie Company were searching Shula in northwest Baghdad this week, other troops built concrete walls around a Sunni neighborhood to the south. Both actions were part of a stepped-up effort by 12,000 U.S. and Iraqi troops to stem sectarian bloodshed in the capital.
The U.S. military Wednesday announced plans to expand the operation to other neighborhoods of Baghdad.
The Bush administration has said the capital must be brought under control in order to stabilize the rest of Iraq.
During the last year, as U.S. troops have handed over large swaths of Baghdad to Iraqi forces, security has deteriorated and thousands of civilians have been killed.
By rounding up suspects and taking weapons off the streets, American military officials hope to bring the city back under their control.
However, U.S. warnings about the operation appear to have given gunmen ample time to hide their weapons and disappear.
"The hard-core Al Mahdi guys left on the first day," said Matthaidess, of the 1st Battalion, 17th Infantry Regiment, 172nd Stryker Brigade Combat Team. He was referring to Shiite cleric Muqtada Sadr's Al Mahdi militia, which U.S. military officials believe is behind many of the kidnappings and extrajudicial executions of Sunni Arabs here.
Iraq's Shiite-dominated government has lately been critical of raids targeting Sadr-affiliated militiamen, frustrating U.S. commanders.
Last week, Prime Minister Nouri Maliki called on the Americans to halt the raids after Iraqi officials said a U.S.-led operation in the Sadr City neighborhood of Baghdad killed three civilians. U.S. officials said one civilian was injured.
A few days later, the Sadraffiliated health minister also spoke out against the U.S. military after a raid on his ministry, which the U.S. believes has been infiltrated by militia members.
At a news conference Wednesday, the top U.S. military spokesman, Army Maj. Gen. William B. Caldwell IV, said any decision on whether to enter Sadr City would be Maliki's.
The Sadr militia fought U.S. troops during the battle of Najaf in 2004. Sadr was on the Americans' most-wanted list before his faction won 30 parliamentary seats in the most recent elections. His support is crucial to Maliki, a fellow Shiite.
To enter a Sadr City office, Matthaidess and his men must first obtain the permission of the commanding general of Baghdad.
"It's frustrating," said Lt. Col. Jeffrey Kelly, commander of the 1st Battalion, whose men arrived in Baghdad 10 days ago. About 3,800 soldiers with the 172nd Stryker Brigade Combat Team were about to return home to Alaska when they were told to go to the capital from Mosul, adding 120 days to their yearlong deployment.
In northern Iraq, Kelly and his men fought a Sunni nationalist insurgency. In Baghdad's Shula neighborhood, Shiite militias "are the biggest problem," he said.
Many homes in the neighborhood are decorated with posters of Sadr; Al Mahdi members provide aid to widows and struggling families, and they distribute free gasoline. With only a few hours of electricity per day, Iraqis must rely on generators to keep cool. But at $1 per gallon at the pump and $4 on the black market, the fuel for the machines has become prohibitively expensive.
"They are pretty smart about gaining popular support," Kelly said.
Most residents who spoke with troops during a recent patrol praised the militiamen. But a few said they felt caught in the middle of a vicious sectarian war.
"Their goal is to protect the Shiite people, but what happened was the opposite," said a Shiite butcher, referring to Al Mahdi militiamen. "Nobody knows what their goals are."
Asked what would happen if the Americans left, he answered, "Disaster. Big disaster."
U.S. military officials suspect Sunni gangs from the nearby Ghazaliya neighborhood are fighting the militia from Shula.
Caldwell said Wednesday that the security operation had already brought calm to the Dora district, one of the most violent parts of the city.
"All across Baghdad, we're seeing progress," he said.
The hardest-hit areas have received humanitarian and medical aid, he said, adding that street cleaning is also part of the effort.
The installation of concrete blast walls around Amariya is creating "what some may call the semblance of a gated community."
Residents of that neighborhood were unable to leave for three days as Iraqi and U.S. troops cordoned it off and searched homes.
----------------------------
Citation: Louise Roug. "Troops Push Security Door to Door in Iraq," Los Angeles Times, 17 August 2006.
Original URL: http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/iraq/complete/la-fg-sweep17aug17,1,5088009.story?coll=la-iraq-complete
----------------------------
By Louise Roug
Los Angeles Times, 17 August 2006
BAGHDAD — Sweating through their uniforms, Capt. Ed Matthaidess and his men hunted through the heart of this Shiite neighborhood. In 120-degree heat, they spent six hours searching drawers and sewers alike. By the end of the day, their afternoon search had yielded slim pickings: four AK-47s and a tiny green water pistol.
While Matthaidess and his Charlie Company were searching Shula in northwest Baghdad this week, other troops built concrete walls around a Sunni neighborhood to the south. Both actions were part of a stepped-up effort by 12,000 U.S. and Iraqi troops to stem sectarian bloodshed in the capital.
The U.S. military Wednesday announced plans to expand the operation to other neighborhoods of Baghdad.
The Bush administration has said the capital must be brought under control in order to stabilize the rest of Iraq.
During the last year, as U.S. troops have handed over large swaths of Baghdad to Iraqi forces, security has deteriorated and thousands of civilians have been killed.
By rounding up suspects and taking weapons off the streets, American military officials hope to bring the city back under their control.
However, U.S. warnings about the operation appear to have given gunmen ample time to hide their weapons and disappear.
"The hard-core Al Mahdi guys left on the first day," said Matthaidess, of the 1st Battalion, 17th Infantry Regiment, 172nd Stryker Brigade Combat Team. He was referring to Shiite cleric Muqtada Sadr's Al Mahdi militia, which U.S. military officials believe is behind many of the kidnappings and extrajudicial executions of Sunni Arabs here.
Iraq's Shiite-dominated government has lately been critical of raids targeting Sadr-affiliated militiamen, frustrating U.S. commanders.
Last week, Prime Minister Nouri Maliki called on the Americans to halt the raids after Iraqi officials said a U.S.-led operation in the Sadr City neighborhood of Baghdad killed three civilians. U.S. officials said one civilian was injured.
A few days later, the Sadraffiliated health minister also spoke out against the U.S. military after a raid on his ministry, which the U.S. believes has been infiltrated by militia members.
At a news conference Wednesday, the top U.S. military spokesman, Army Maj. Gen. William B. Caldwell IV, said any decision on whether to enter Sadr City would be Maliki's.
The Sadr militia fought U.S. troops during the battle of Najaf in 2004. Sadr was on the Americans' most-wanted list before his faction won 30 parliamentary seats in the most recent elections. His support is crucial to Maliki, a fellow Shiite.
To enter a Sadr City office, Matthaidess and his men must first obtain the permission of the commanding general of Baghdad.
"It's frustrating," said Lt. Col. Jeffrey Kelly, commander of the 1st Battalion, whose men arrived in Baghdad 10 days ago. About 3,800 soldiers with the 172nd Stryker Brigade Combat Team were about to return home to Alaska when they were told to go to the capital from Mosul, adding 120 days to their yearlong deployment.
In northern Iraq, Kelly and his men fought a Sunni nationalist insurgency. In Baghdad's Shula neighborhood, Shiite militias "are the biggest problem," he said.
Many homes in the neighborhood are decorated with posters of Sadr; Al Mahdi members provide aid to widows and struggling families, and they distribute free gasoline. With only a few hours of electricity per day, Iraqis must rely on generators to keep cool. But at $1 per gallon at the pump and $4 on the black market, the fuel for the machines has become prohibitively expensive.
"They are pretty smart about gaining popular support," Kelly said.
Most residents who spoke with troops during a recent patrol praised the militiamen. But a few said they felt caught in the middle of a vicious sectarian war.
"Their goal is to protect the Shiite people, but what happened was the opposite," said a Shiite butcher, referring to Al Mahdi militiamen. "Nobody knows what their goals are."
Asked what would happen if the Americans left, he answered, "Disaster. Big disaster."
U.S. military officials suspect Sunni gangs from the nearby Ghazaliya neighborhood are fighting the militia from Shula.
Caldwell said Wednesday that the security operation had already brought calm to the Dora district, one of the most violent parts of the city.
"All across Baghdad, we're seeing progress," he said.
The hardest-hit areas have received humanitarian and medical aid, he said, adding that street cleaning is also part of the effort.
The installation of concrete blast walls around Amariya is creating "what some may call the semblance of a gated community."
Residents of that neighborhood were unable to leave for three days as Iraqi and U.S. troops cordoned it off and searched homes.
----------------------------
Citation: Louise Roug. "Troops Push Security Door to Door in Iraq," Los Angeles Times, 17 August 2006.
Original URL: http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/iraq/complete/la-fg-sweep17aug17,1,5088009.story?coll=la-iraq-complete
----------------------------