Taliban resurgence, relations with Pakistan stymie president
Reuters, 29 January 2007
KABUL, Afghanistan - The Afghan president finds himself grappling with maintaining stability in the capital while fighting grows ever bloodier in the south. He must also satisfy the conflicting demands of his countrymen and his foreign allies.
At the same time, the beleaguered leader must deal with powerful neighbor Pakistan, with whom relations are often testy.
Asked recently if he would like Karzai’s job, one key ally in Kabul replied bluntly: “No”.
The reluctance stems not so much from loyalty as the slippery complexities of Afghan politics and the increasingly tough job confronting the head of one of the world’s most dangerous states.
Five years after U.S.-led forces ousted the hard-line Taliban government, Afghans complain Karzai and the West have failed to deliver on their promises of a better life, the Taliban are at their strongest and the fighting is at its worst.
More than 4,000 people — a quarter of them civilians — were killed last year and suicide bombings, once almost unheard of, have skyrocketed as insurgents copy tactics from Iraq.
Both the Taliban and the United States say the coming spring after the traditional winter lull in fighting will be bloody.
'The mayor of Kabul'
Karzai’s Western allies want him to establish a moderate Islamic state and put in place Western-style democracy and freedom, but such efforts draw criticism from many at home.
Critics say he is too soft and an appeaser but according to Habibullat Rafi, a writer and academic, Karzai cannot afford to upset either side.
“He has dealt with the problems too much through convenience and that is why he gets all the blame for whatever has gone wrong,” says Rafi.
Many dismiss Karzai as “the mayor of Kabul” because his writ largely does not extend beyond the limits of the capital or the main cities.
Even in Kabul the president, who became a father for the first time at 49 this month, rarely moves outside the heavily fortified marbled palace.
Some also see a man who has spent most of his life outside Afghanistan as a sellout to his Pashtun tribe, the dominant ethnic group and the core of Taliban support in Afghanistan and among Pashtuns across the border in Pakistan.
Leaders from other ethnic groups who helped U.S.-led forces overthrow the Taliban often hold high positions in Karzai’s government.
“Look at the government set-up -- all the key positions are run by non-Pashtuns,” says 40-year-old hawker Raaz Mohammad.
Little control?
But after decades of foreign intervention and civil war, Karzai must tread carefully to stop the country sliding back into ethnic confrontation, says Abdul Hamid Mubariz, a former deputy information minister and now an analyst.
Karzai’s supporters point out he has little control over the more than 40,000 foreign soldiers and the way promised --but poorly delivered -- aid and development money is spent.
Washington chose Karzai, the son of a powerful Pashtun clan chief, as interim leader after it ousted the Taliban in 2001 for failing to surrender Osama bin Laden over the Sept. 11 attacks.
A soft-spoken man with a salt-and-pepper beard, he was confirmed as president in an open election in 2004, the first direct and democratic poll in Afghanistan’s turbulent history.
A critical issue is closing the porous border with Pakistan, where the mainly Pashtun Taliban enjoy much local support. Karzai wants his allies to put more pressure on Islamabad to stop the Taliban and other militants operating on both sides of the border.
Pakistan says it already does as much as it can and rejects accusations from Kabul that it still supports the Taliban.
The president’s efforts to coax Taliban leaders into talks and to disarm a myriad of tribal, political and other groups with the help of the United Nations have also sparked opposition from powerful warlords.
Drug boom
Efforts by Karzai, the United States and allies to combat the illegal opium trade have failed to stop production rocketing in the world’s major producer -- up 60 percent last year.
Part of that money is fuelling the mounting insurgency, government ministers and foreign diplomats say.
Karzai is also under fire at home and abroad for not doing enough to tackle rampant graft.
But Afghan ministers are also bitterly critical of the failure of foreign countries to deliver promised aid, and of the sums of money that get lost along the way.
Karzai wept recently as he spoke of how much his people had suffered during almost three decades of fighting. But the Taliban accused him of shedding “crocodile tears”, saying he could do more if he wanted to and urging him to eject foreign troops. ”
“I know everybody blames him, but there are others to take responsibility too,” Mubariz said.
------------------------------------
Citation: "Karzai increasingly beset by problems," Reuters, 29 January 2007.
Original URL: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/16865138/
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30 January 2007
New U.S. commander in Afghanistan predicts more suicide attacks this year
The Associated Press, 30 January 2007
A suicide car bomber attacked an Afghan Army convoy in western Afghanistan on Tuesday, wounding three soldiers and two civilians, officials said.
The bomber blew himself up next to a bus carrying the soldiers near the airport in the western city of Herat, said General Fazludin Sayar, deputy corps commander in western Afghanistan.
Three soldiers and two civilians were wounded, Sayar said. The bomber died in the blast.
Suicide bombings have so far been rare in western Afghanistan. Militants have mostly undertaken their suicide attacks in the country's south and east.
The incoming commander of the U.S. troops in Afghanistan said Monday that he expected Taliban militants to enact more suicide attacks this year than in 2006, when militants set off a record 139 such bombings.
Major General David Rodriguez, commander of the 82nd Airborne Division, said military leaders expected an increase in all kinds of attacks as the weather became warmer.
"We're expecting an increase in the suicide bombers and some of the other tactics that they have believed are successful," he said.
"So we expect to see that as well as the normal standoff type attacks and harassing kind of attacks on Afghan government officials, Afghan nationals, security forces, as well as coalition forces."
Rodriguez, who takes command from Major General Benjamin Freakley on Friday, traveled to the eastern province of Paktika, next to the Pakistan border, on Monday to be briefed by military leaders and the provincial governor.
The governor of Paktika, Mohammed Akram Akhpelwak, told Rodriguez that Taliban militants have bases across the border in Pakistan and that he hopes U.S. forces can help stop the flow of fighters crossing into Paktika.
"If we just focus on one side of the border, we won't be successful," Akhpelwak told U.S. leaders.
Rodriguez called the border situation "harmful" to both Afghanistan and Pakistan.
"We will continue to strengthen the security on the border, which is an important issue because of all the infiltration that occurs," he told the governor.
The Taliban last year undertook a record number of attacks, and about 4,000 people, most of them militants, died in insurgency-related violence, according to a tally by The Associated Press based on reports from Afghan, NATO and coalition officials.
Suicide attacks in 2006 totaled 139, up from 27 in 2005, according to U.S. military numbers. NATO has said suicide attacks last year killed 206 Afghan civilians, 54 Afghan security personnel and 18 soldiers from NATO's International Security Assistance Force.
Lieutenant Colonel David Accetta, a U.S. military spokesman, said militants would set more suicide attacks "because nothing else they've tried works."
President Hamid Karzai renewed his call Monday for talks with the Taliban and other groups battling his government.
Rodriguez arrived at a time of increased attention on Afghanistan. The Defense Department last week extended the tours of 3,200 soldiers from the 10th Mountain Division by four months, and the Bush administration said it would ask Congress for $10.6 billion for training Afghan security forces and reconstruction.
Rodriguez said that the development of the Afghan Army — a key U.S.
goal — "is moving in the right direction," but that it will need international support for at least a couple years. More than 90 percent of U.S. patrols in Paktika Province last year were joint patrols with the Afghan Army.
Human Rights Watch said Tuesday more than 1,000 civilians were killed in Afghanistan in 2006, many as a result of attacks by the Taliban and other anti- government forces in the country's south. The figure from Human Rights Watch also included at least 100 civilian deaths caused by NATO and U.S.-led troops facing a record number of Taliban attacks.
In all, more than 4,400 Afghans died in conflict-related violence, twice as many as in 2005 and more than in any other year since the United States helped remove the Taliban in 2001, Human Rights Watch said in a statement.
-----------------------------------
Citation: "New U.S. commander in Afghanistan predicts more suicide attacks this year," The Associated Press, 30 January 2007.
Original URL: http://www.iht.com/articles/2007/01/30/news/afghan.php
-----------------------------------
A suicide car bomber attacked an Afghan Army convoy in western Afghanistan on Tuesday, wounding three soldiers and two civilians, officials said.
The bomber blew himself up next to a bus carrying the soldiers near the airport in the western city of Herat, said General Fazludin Sayar, deputy corps commander in western Afghanistan.
Three soldiers and two civilians were wounded, Sayar said. The bomber died in the blast.
Suicide bombings have so far been rare in western Afghanistan. Militants have mostly undertaken their suicide attacks in the country's south and east.
The incoming commander of the U.S. troops in Afghanistan said Monday that he expected Taliban militants to enact more suicide attacks this year than in 2006, when militants set off a record 139 such bombings.
Major General David Rodriguez, commander of the 82nd Airborne Division, said military leaders expected an increase in all kinds of attacks as the weather became warmer.
"We're expecting an increase in the suicide bombers and some of the other tactics that they have believed are successful," he said.
"So we expect to see that as well as the normal standoff type attacks and harassing kind of attacks on Afghan government officials, Afghan nationals, security forces, as well as coalition forces."
Rodriguez, who takes command from Major General Benjamin Freakley on Friday, traveled to the eastern province of Paktika, next to the Pakistan border, on Monday to be briefed by military leaders and the provincial governor.
The governor of Paktika, Mohammed Akram Akhpelwak, told Rodriguez that Taliban militants have bases across the border in Pakistan and that he hopes U.S. forces can help stop the flow of fighters crossing into Paktika.
"If we just focus on one side of the border, we won't be successful," Akhpelwak told U.S. leaders.
Rodriguez called the border situation "harmful" to both Afghanistan and Pakistan.
"We will continue to strengthen the security on the border, which is an important issue because of all the infiltration that occurs," he told the governor.
The Taliban last year undertook a record number of attacks, and about 4,000 people, most of them militants, died in insurgency-related violence, according to a tally by The Associated Press based on reports from Afghan, NATO and coalition officials.
Suicide attacks in 2006 totaled 139, up from 27 in 2005, according to U.S. military numbers. NATO has said suicide attacks last year killed 206 Afghan civilians, 54 Afghan security personnel and 18 soldiers from NATO's International Security Assistance Force.
Lieutenant Colonel David Accetta, a U.S. military spokesman, said militants would set more suicide attacks "because nothing else they've tried works."
President Hamid Karzai renewed his call Monday for talks with the Taliban and other groups battling his government.
Rodriguez arrived at a time of increased attention on Afghanistan. The Defense Department last week extended the tours of 3,200 soldiers from the 10th Mountain Division by four months, and the Bush administration said it would ask Congress for $10.6 billion for training Afghan security forces and reconstruction.
Rodriguez said that the development of the Afghan Army — a key U.S.
goal — "is moving in the right direction," but that it will need international support for at least a couple years. More than 90 percent of U.S. patrols in Paktika Province last year were joint patrols with the Afghan Army.
Human Rights Watch said Tuesday more than 1,000 civilians were killed in Afghanistan in 2006, many as a result of attacks by the Taliban and other anti- government forces in the country's south. The figure from Human Rights Watch also included at least 100 civilian deaths caused by NATO and U.S.-led troops facing a record number of Taliban attacks.
In all, more than 4,400 Afghans died in conflict-related violence, twice as many as in 2005 and more than in any other year since the United States helped remove the Taliban in 2001, Human Rights Watch said in a statement.
-----------------------------------
Citation: "New U.S. commander in Afghanistan predicts more suicide attacks this year," The Associated Press, 30 January 2007.
Original URL: http://www.iht.com/articles/2007/01/30/news/afghan.php
-----------------------------------
29 January 2007
For Iraq, neighbors are key
By John Daniszewski
The Associated Press, 28 January 2007
DAVOS, Switzerland - Iraq's leaders are facing an acid test in coming weeks as the Iraqi and U.S. military launch their new security program to flush out militants and death squads district by district.
But to Iraq's government, the real key to long-term success is its neighbors: Will they begin to give their genuine support, and can Iran and Syria be persuaded — or pressured — to end the conduct that Iraq says is giving oxygen to insurgents, militias and death squads inside Iraq?
These were among the themes expressed by a number of Iraqi leaders and foreign policy experts circulating at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, this week. Among them were Iraqi Vice President Adil Abdul-Mahdi, Foreign Minister Hoshyar Zebari and Adnan Pachachi, a former foreign minister and Sunni elder statesman who is now in the parliament.
All were painfully aware that patience for the war is ebbing among the U.S. public, and that they must move quickly to solidify their authority and stamp out violence.
One initiative now being pushed aggressively by the Iraqi leadership is to convene in Baghdad a regional meeting of foreign ministers from Iraq's neighbors, including the Gulf countries, Syria, Turkey and Iran.
They say it will demonstrate that the region is behind their government and recognizes that it must be strengthened, because there is no good alternative to holding Iraq together as a pluralistic, integrated and democratic country, Zebari told The Associated Press.
"We are building a strong case that if you care (and) if you want to help the people of Iraq, the elected, legitimate Iraqi government, you should show some tangible support," said Zebari.
"It will send a good signal to ... ease this tension, this violence, and it will send a message to the insurgents, the terrorists, who will see that Iraq is managing to deal with its neighbors constructively" and that the region is "unified to help this country recover," he said.
Zebari said the series of high-casualty bombings in Baghdad in the past few days was expectable and expected. Sunni insurgents are striking before the new security offensive gets under way.
Forming a regional consensus behind the Iraqi government has become more difficult as fighting inside Iraq has become more sectarian.
Sunni Arab countries, like Saudi Arabia and Egypt, have displayed a hesitant attitude toward Iraq. The death-squad killings of Sunnis, attacks against Arab embassies and diplomats in Iraq, and the hanging of
Saddam Hussein have strained the government's image in the Sunni Arab world.
But probably the core problem is the fear that Shiite Iran exercises too much influence over the new Iraqi leadership.
Iraqi leaders here, however, argue that although the political coalition supporting Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki is Shiite-based, it is an Arab and Iraqi national government first, and even Shiite members are far too loyal to Iraq to be willing to turn the country into an extension of the Iranian political system.
If Arab states remain standoffish, however, it could drive Iraq closer to Iran, the leaders here warned, on and off the record. That is why they consider it essential that the Arab neighbors of Iraq engage the government directly, and not yield to the temptation to deal directly with Sunni groups within Iraq.
Iran and Syria were said to have already agreed to the meeting, along with at least one Gulf country. But Arab League Secretary-General Amr Moussa appeared to be holding back — saying at one open session here that the more important thing was for Iraqi leaders themselves to work to calm sectarian tensions.
Syria is a special case. Under President Bashar al-Assad, Syria is viewed as having failed to close the country's border to jihadists and weapons flowing into Iraq, even while it trades with Iraq and voices support to the Iraqi government.
Some Iraqi leaders believe Syria has given sanctuary to members of Saddam's regime and encouraged chaos in Iraq in hopes that the Baath Party might eventually return to power. The party shares a name, roots and philosophy with Syria's own ruling party.
Iraq has mounted a diplomatic initiative with Damascus in recent weeks, with President Jalil Talabani and other officials visiting Damascus to warn Syria that Iraq knows what Syria has and has not been doing, and encouraging it to change. There are signs that the Syrians are more willing to cooperate, officials believe.
Iran's aim in Iraq is somewhat different. It has agents and clients inside Iraq because it wants the current Iraqi government to survive, and hopes to have a large amount of political influence within it. It also likes having American forces kept pinned down in Iraq, both to help keep Iraq together and also so that U.S. troops cannot easily be turned against Iran.
The Iraqi government would like to convince both Syria and Iran separately and on different levels that these dangerous games cannot continue.
"The stakes are too high really and everybody has pushed the envelope too far. God forbid if Iraq were to break down or to fail, the threat of spillover is imminent to their countries," said Zebari. "That is why everything has really reached to some climax."
The new security offensive in Baghdad also is critical. All the leaders here said they were putting high hopes on its success, in spite of the bloody attacks of the past week. They rate its chances higher than previous efforts to clean up the capital because Iraqis will be in charge, and the government has everything at stake.
Zebari, a Kurd, said that the offensive would be evenhanded across ethnic and sectarian lines.
"This time it is different because U.S. officers would be embedded with all Iraqi units so that is a precaution to prevent ... going astray or to settle their own sectarian differences," said Zebari.
"All neighborhoods would be treated equally. Death squads or Sunni insurgents would be treated equally and on the same basis."
The plan envisions an overall commander who is Shiite, but who is a professional officer from the old Iraqi army, assisted by at least one Sunni deputy.
"We are not expecting that car bombs or suicide bombers will disappear completely," said Zebari. "But I think it will give the people some confidence that the government and the coalition are doing something really serious."
Associated Press writers Edith M. Lederer and Sally Buzbee contributed to this report.
------------------------
Citation: John Daniszewski. "For Iraq, neighbors are key," The Associated Press, 28 January 2007.
Original URL: http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20070128/ap_on_re_mi_ea/world_forum_iraq_1
------------------------
The Associated Press, 28 January 2007
DAVOS, Switzerland - Iraq's leaders are facing an acid test in coming weeks as the Iraqi and U.S. military launch their new security program to flush out militants and death squads district by district.
But to Iraq's government, the real key to long-term success is its neighbors: Will they begin to give their genuine support, and can Iran and Syria be persuaded — or pressured — to end the conduct that Iraq says is giving oxygen to insurgents, militias and death squads inside Iraq?
These were among the themes expressed by a number of Iraqi leaders and foreign policy experts circulating at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, this week. Among them were Iraqi Vice President Adil Abdul-Mahdi, Foreign Minister Hoshyar Zebari and Adnan Pachachi, a former foreign minister and Sunni elder statesman who is now in the parliament.
All were painfully aware that patience for the war is ebbing among the U.S. public, and that they must move quickly to solidify their authority and stamp out violence.
One initiative now being pushed aggressively by the Iraqi leadership is to convene in Baghdad a regional meeting of foreign ministers from Iraq's neighbors, including the Gulf countries, Syria, Turkey and Iran.
They say it will demonstrate that the region is behind their government and recognizes that it must be strengthened, because there is no good alternative to holding Iraq together as a pluralistic, integrated and democratic country, Zebari told The Associated Press.
"We are building a strong case that if you care (and) if you want to help the people of Iraq, the elected, legitimate Iraqi government, you should show some tangible support," said Zebari.
"It will send a good signal to ... ease this tension, this violence, and it will send a message to the insurgents, the terrorists, who will see that Iraq is managing to deal with its neighbors constructively" and that the region is "unified to help this country recover," he said.
Zebari said the series of high-casualty bombings in Baghdad in the past few days was expectable and expected. Sunni insurgents are striking before the new security offensive gets under way.
Forming a regional consensus behind the Iraqi government has become more difficult as fighting inside Iraq has become more sectarian.
Sunni Arab countries, like Saudi Arabia and Egypt, have displayed a hesitant attitude toward Iraq. The death-squad killings of Sunnis, attacks against Arab embassies and diplomats in Iraq, and the hanging of
Saddam Hussein have strained the government's image in the Sunni Arab world.
But probably the core problem is the fear that Shiite Iran exercises too much influence over the new Iraqi leadership.
Iraqi leaders here, however, argue that although the political coalition supporting Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki is Shiite-based, it is an Arab and Iraqi national government first, and even Shiite members are far too loyal to Iraq to be willing to turn the country into an extension of the Iranian political system.
If Arab states remain standoffish, however, it could drive Iraq closer to Iran, the leaders here warned, on and off the record. That is why they consider it essential that the Arab neighbors of Iraq engage the government directly, and not yield to the temptation to deal directly with Sunni groups within Iraq.
Iran and Syria were said to have already agreed to the meeting, along with at least one Gulf country. But Arab League Secretary-General Amr Moussa appeared to be holding back — saying at one open session here that the more important thing was for Iraqi leaders themselves to work to calm sectarian tensions.
Syria is a special case. Under President Bashar al-Assad, Syria is viewed as having failed to close the country's border to jihadists and weapons flowing into Iraq, even while it trades with Iraq and voices support to the Iraqi government.
Some Iraqi leaders believe Syria has given sanctuary to members of Saddam's regime and encouraged chaos in Iraq in hopes that the Baath Party might eventually return to power. The party shares a name, roots and philosophy with Syria's own ruling party.
Iraq has mounted a diplomatic initiative with Damascus in recent weeks, with President Jalil Talabani and other officials visiting Damascus to warn Syria that Iraq knows what Syria has and has not been doing, and encouraging it to change. There are signs that the Syrians are more willing to cooperate, officials believe.
Iran's aim in Iraq is somewhat different. It has agents and clients inside Iraq because it wants the current Iraqi government to survive, and hopes to have a large amount of political influence within it. It also likes having American forces kept pinned down in Iraq, both to help keep Iraq together and also so that U.S. troops cannot easily be turned against Iran.
The Iraqi government would like to convince both Syria and Iran separately and on different levels that these dangerous games cannot continue.
"The stakes are too high really and everybody has pushed the envelope too far. God forbid if Iraq were to break down or to fail, the threat of spillover is imminent to their countries," said Zebari. "That is why everything has really reached to some climax."
The new security offensive in Baghdad also is critical. All the leaders here said they were putting high hopes on its success, in spite of the bloody attacks of the past week. They rate its chances higher than previous efforts to clean up the capital because Iraqis will be in charge, and the government has everything at stake.
Zebari, a Kurd, said that the offensive would be evenhanded across ethnic and sectarian lines.
"This time it is different because U.S. officers would be embedded with all Iraqi units so that is a precaution to prevent ... going astray or to settle their own sectarian differences," said Zebari.
"All neighborhoods would be treated equally. Death squads or Sunni insurgents would be treated equally and on the same basis."
The plan envisions an overall commander who is Shiite, but who is a professional officer from the old Iraqi army, assisted by at least one Sunni deputy.
"We are not expecting that car bombs or suicide bombers will disappear completely," said Zebari. "But I think it will give the people some confidence that the government and the coalition are doing something really serious."
Associated Press writers Edith M. Lederer and Sally Buzbee contributed to this report.
------------------------
Citation: John Daniszewski. "For Iraq, neighbors are key," The Associated Press, 28 January 2007.
Original URL: http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20070128/ap_on_re_mi_ea/world_forum_iraq_1
------------------------
1,500 Policemen Fired in Iraqi Province
The Associated Press, 28 January 2007
BAGHDAD, Iraq - The mayor of Baqouba and 1,500 police officers in Diyala province have been fired in a bid to end the raging violence in that region northeast of Baghdad, the provincial police chief said Sunday.
Ghanim al-Qureyshi, who took command of police operations in the violent province after his predecessor was sacked last month, said Mayor Khalid Al-Senjeri, a Sunni Muslim, was dismissed over suspicions he was collaborating with Sunni Arab insurgents.
Last week, the mayor was reported kidnapped by insurgents who blew up his office and stole several new police vehicles in Baquoba, the provincial capital. He was released a few days later.
Al-Qureyshi said the 1,500 policemen were fired because they fled rather than fight when insurgents attacked in Baqouba in November. The chief said he was determined to create a police force free of corruption.
American and Iraqi officials reported last week that their military forces had killed 100 insurgent fighters in a 10-day operation near Baqouba.
In June, al-Qaida in Iraq leader Abu Musab al-Zarqawi was killed in a U.S. airstrike on his hideout near Baqouba, and his death was followed by a series of raids that the military said revealed a "treasure trove" of intelligence.
But the situation in Baqouba began to worsen in October when Iraq's predominantly Shiite Muslim army launched a major detention campaign against suspected Sunni insurgents in the city. Angry Sunnis fought back.
Days after the start of the campaign, leaflets of a little-known group called the Mujahedeen of Diyala were found in the streets. They demanded the resignation of the army and police commanders as well as the governor of the province _ all Shiites _ within 30 days.
None of the three resigned by the deadline, and insurgents attacked police, leaving dozens of people dead. The police force nearly collapsed in late November, and the city has been under the authority of the Iraqi army since then.
----------------------
Citation: "1,500 Policemen Fired in Iraqi Province," The Associated Press, 28 January 2007.
Original URL: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/16859221/
----------------------
BAGHDAD, Iraq - The mayor of Baqouba and 1,500 police officers in Diyala province have been fired in a bid to end the raging violence in that region northeast of Baghdad, the provincial police chief said Sunday.
Ghanim al-Qureyshi, who took command of police operations in the violent province after his predecessor was sacked last month, said Mayor Khalid Al-Senjeri, a Sunni Muslim, was dismissed over suspicions he was collaborating with Sunni Arab insurgents.
Last week, the mayor was reported kidnapped by insurgents who blew up his office and stole several new police vehicles in Baquoba, the provincial capital. He was released a few days later.
Al-Qureyshi said the 1,500 policemen were fired because they fled rather than fight when insurgents attacked in Baqouba in November. The chief said he was determined to create a police force free of corruption.
American and Iraqi officials reported last week that their military forces had killed 100 insurgent fighters in a 10-day operation near Baqouba.
In June, al-Qaida in Iraq leader Abu Musab al-Zarqawi was killed in a U.S. airstrike on his hideout near Baqouba, and his death was followed by a series of raids that the military said revealed a "treasure trove" of intelligence.
But the situation in Baqouba began to worsen in October when Iraq's predominantly Shiite Muslim army launched a major detention campaign against suspected Sunni insurgents in the city. Angry Sunnis fought back.
Days after the start of the campaign, leaflets of a little-known group called the Mujahedeen of Diyala were found in the streets. They demanded the resignation of the army and police commanders as well as the governor of the province _ all Shiites _ within 30 days.
None of the three resigned by the deadline, and insurgents attacked police, leaving dozens of people dead. The police force nearly collapsed in late November, and the city has been under the authority of the Iraqi army since then.
----------------------
Citation: "1,500 Policemen Fired in Iraqi Province," The Associated Press, 28 January 2007.
Original URL: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/16859221/
----------------------
Black Hawk Down: The True Cost of Iraq War
By Weston Kosova
Newsweek, 05 February 2007
For American soldiers stationed in Iraq, one of the few comforts of this war is how easily they can keep in touch with family back home. Many service members call their spouses and kids several times a week and e-mail daily, reassuring them that they are all right. Sgt. 1/c John Gary Brown knew his wife, Donna, worried every time he went up in the air. A Black Hawk helicopter crew chief and gunner with an Arkansas Army National Guard unit, Brown had experience calming the anxieties of his wife of 18 years. War had separated them before: Brown had flown missions over a similarly bleak landscape a decade and a half ago when he served in the gulf war.
That didn't make it any easier for Donna, so Brown called and wrote her almost every day. The only phone available to him was two miles from his barracks. At first he made the trek on foot, then bought a bicycle from a soldier who was rotating out. In their conversations, he reassured his wife that most of the time he was making routine flights over relatively safe territory. He even asked her to send "care" packages filled with sweets so that he could drop "candy bombs" to Iraqi children as the chopper whisked by. But there was no hiding the hazards of his duty. Large and often low to the ground, helicopters are a favorite target of insurgents, who fire at them with machine guns and rockets. They are also prone to mechanical problems, especially in the unforgiving Iraqi climate. About 90 helicopters have been lost since the war began.
Soldiers are not permitted to give their families details about combat operations. So Brown used a simple code when he spoke to Donna. If he mentioned he was going on a "training" flight, she knew not to worry. But if he told her he was going on a "mission," that meant he was heading into dangerous territory and he promised to contact her as soon as he landed. At 5:14 in the evening on Friday, Jan. 19, Donna was at home in Little Rock when Gary called and said the word she dreaded. He was at the airfield and ready to take off—this time on a "mission." Brown had just returned to Iraq after a 15-day home leave. On the phone, he told his wife how much he'd enjoyed being back with her and their two children and pair of grandchildren. Then he cut the conversation short. "I really have to go," he said. In the background, she could hear the thumping of the chopper's rotors.
She began to worry when he didn't call or e-mail on Saturday, but told herself he was probably still on duty and couldn't get to a phone or computer. She spent the day willing the phone to ring. When he still hadn't called by Sunday, she says, she suspected the worst. Still, the solemn visit from the Army's Casualty Assistance Officers came as a surprise. On Monday afternoon, there was a knock on the door. Christian, her 10-year-old grandson, answered and called to her that there were two men outside. She told the boy to ask them what they were selling. He said, "No, you don't understand. They're Army men."
Including Brown, 12 soldiers died around 3 p.m. Iraq time on Saturday when his Black Hawk crashed in Diyala province, northeast of Baghdad. The flight was a seemingly routine haul from the massive Camp Anaconda near Balad to the Iraqi capital, carrying four crew and eight passengers. Not far from the town of Baqubah, Brown's chopper—Easy 4-0—broadcast a mayday signal and went down; an accompanying Black Hawk landed nearby and its soldiers reportedly took fire from insurgents. The Army has been unusually tight-lipped about the details of the crash. It has not said exactly what went wrong. At first it reported 13 people had died, then 12. Officials tentatively blamed an equipment malfunction, then enemy fire. Now they say the crash is under investigation. The families of the soldiers say the Army did warn them not to expect much in the way of remains.
Those looking to put the crash into some larger perspective might point out that 10 of those who died were members of the National Guard—the greatest number of guard members killed in a combat mission since the Korean War. Or that the number of U.S. soldiers killed across Iraq that day (25 in all) made it one of the deadliest since the war began. But the most remarkable thing about the crash might be how quickly the deaths of a dozen soldiers can pass into and out of the public's consciousness these days, if they ever register at all.
More than 3,000 U.S. service members have now died in the Iraq war. At first it was difficult not to feel overwhelmed by the number of deaths. After four years, it is now difficult not to feel numb. In a nation without a draft, the emotional connection between the front and the home front is the weakest it has been in a major conflict in recent memory. There are so many news accounts of troops killed in combat that the details blur. The death of one soldier, or 20, loses its power to shock, except to the families of the fallen.
At some point, the way we talk about the war itself changes. We speak less and less about husbandless wives and parentless children, and instead obscure the suffering in vaguer, more distant and—guiltily—easier terms. We shake our heads and talk about the "losses."
In Washington, the talk is now all about Iraq. Democrats, emboldened by their control of Congress and the president's sinking poll numbers, no longer fear being labeled "Defeatocrats" if they take a stand against George Bush on the war. And some Republicans, including Sens. Chuck Hagel and John Warner, are speaking out against the handling of the war and about the cost in human life. Nonetheless, the president, trying to appear conciliatory and resolute at the same time, is determined to send an additional 21,000 troops to Iraq, no matter what anyone else thinks. If Congress rejects the idea, Dick Cheney told CNN last week, "it won't stop us."
The president did not learn about the crash until late in the day on Saturday. Each morning he is handed what aides call "the blue sheets"—the overnight Iraq reports from the Situation Room that are printed on blue paper. The first line of each sheet lists the most recent casualties. But reports of the downed helicopter had not yet reached Washington. Bush spent part of the morning talking about the troop increase with Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and Defense Secretary Robert Gates. Both had recently returned from a tour of Europe and the Middle East to promote the new Iraq strategy. The news wasn't all good. Not surprisingly, some of the allies weren't in favor of a troop escalation.
Is the president right that the additional troops can turn things around? Or is Iraq lost? These questions are the makings of a serious and long-overdue debate over the war. And yet so much of the chatter turns on the politics of the war. Who is up and who is down for 2008? Is the Bush presidency effectively "over" and will Americans trust a Democrat—and possibly a woman—to be commander in chief? Democrats (and rebelling Republicans) invest their passions in clinical debates over "exit strategies" and "withdrawal timetables," and congratulate themselves for "nonbinding" resolutions that condemn an increase in troops while still allowing them to go into the field. But few seem to be grappling with the fate of those soldiers.
There are, as always, more questions than answers about what to do in Iraq. Honest people can disagree about whether it is more dangerous to stay or to leave. But the 12 Americans who died in the Black Hawk crash offer us a vivid reminder of what is happening on the battlefield, and of the cost so many families are paying when loved ones die in combat. Guard members have taken on much of the burden of this war, and those who died aboard that helicopter were like many others who have lost their lives in the fighting: ordinary people asked to do the extraordinary. They were husbands and wives, parents and even grandparents. Some relied on their faith in God, others, their faith in the commander in chief. At least one no longer believed the war was worth fighting, but carried out his duties. Together, they left behind 34 children and at least a dozen grandchildren.
As we contemplate sending more men and women like them into harm's way, their demise leaves behind perhaps the only question that truly matters in wartime: is it worth it?
Army Capt. Sean Lyerly believed it was. At 31, Lyerly was among the younger soldiers onboard the helicopter. A proud Texan from a family with a history of military service, he went to Texas A&M and joined up with the Texas Army National Guard. "It's in the genes," says his father, George Lyerly, who himself served in the Army. "His granddaddy and uncle fought in World War II." Lyerly was determined to become a pilot. He flew relief missions in Louisiana after Hurricane Katrina and told his family about the satisfaction he got from plucking stranded people from rooftops. Up to that point his wife, 24-year-old Csilla, had convinced herself that she had no reason to fear his dedication to the guard. She worried about his flying, but she didn't give a second thought to the possibility of his being called up to serve in combat.
Most of the time Lyerly wasn't anywhere near an Army helicopter. In college he majored in horticulture and later worked as a manager in the garden department at a Home Depot. "The military was one weekend a month, two weeks a year. I never knew they could get deployed," Csilla says. "He mentioned something about maybe going to Bosnia, and I said, 'What do you mean, Bosnia? You're in the guard'." But last February, he got the call, and it wasn't Bosnia. He was nervous about going to Iraq, but he was also proud to become the next in his family to serve overseas. Like so many other soldiers, he said he "felt like he was making a difference." His wife tried to mirror his enthusiasm, but her fears sometimes got the better of her. "I was anxious. I had a bad gut feeling. There was just something ... " she recalls.
A combat captain, Lyerly was based at the sprawling Camp Anaconda, a major way station for the helicopter flights that crisscross Iraq now that the roads are so unsafe. Soldiers had nicknamed the place Mortaritaville because of frequent enemy attacks. Lyerly kept that kind of detail to himself when he called home to Pflugerville, a quiet suburb of Austin, each night at around 9 o'clock. Instead, he tried to re-create some semblance of home life by reading his toddler son, Zack, a favorite bedtime story—usually "Thomas the Tank Engine"—over a Webcam. A couple of days after Csilla was told that her husband had died, she tried to explain to her son what had happened. She told him about heaven, and described how beautiful it was. "Daddy went to heaven to meet God," she said gently. "We can talk to him, but we're not going to be able to see him anymore. He's always going to be able to hear us, but he's not going to come home." Zack looked back at her blankly. "Yes, he is," he said with all the worldly confidence of a 3-year-old. "He's in Iraq. When he's finished, he's going to come home."
Cpl. Victor Langarica did not share Sean Lyerly's optimism about the mission in Iraq. From the moment he received his deployment orders last April, he seemed convinced that he would not leave the war zone alive. Worse, he believed that he was going to die for no good reason. A twice-divorced single father of a young son and daughter, he had joined the Army hoping to gain the skills that would lead to higher pay than he made at Home Depot. His mother and ex-wives looked after the kids while he was overseas. He was proud of the nine months he served in combat in Afghanistan after 9/11, but the experience left the lighthearted 29-year-old sullen and fearful. Once he was surprised by an Afghan soldier who put a gun to his head. Just as the soldier was about to fire, a fellow American shot the Afghan dead. He never found out who had saved his life, but thought of him as an angel.
Unlike most of the others who died in the crash, Langarica was regular Army. But when he got his deployment papers to Iraq, he didn't want to go. The invasion made no sense to him. " 'I don't understand why Bush is doing this to us'," his mother, Pearl Lucas, recalled his saying. " 'If I die, I won't know why I died, if it was for oil or for revenge'."
Langarica arrived in Iraq last September. His fears about the dangers were justified. Stationed in southern Baghdad, he worked as a heavy-equipment mechanic and shouldn't have been in the thick of combat. But his job required him to repair Humvees and other vehicles that had broken down in the streets, amid gunfire and missile attacks. One day, as he lay under a vehicle performing a repair, a bullet grazed the top of his scalp.
In November, Langarica was granted a two-week leave. He returned to the United States to visit his mother and daughter in Decatur, Ga., and his son in Brunswick, Md. He told relatives that he dreaded returning. His aunt urged him to desert the Army and seek refuge in Nicaragua, where she and his mother were born. But Langarica was determined to finish out his tour, and returned to Iraq. Before he left, he told friends he didn't think he was going to see them again. He had already convinced himself he was "an angel of God—no matter what happens I will always be around." In a letter to his mother in 2003, he had confided, "I know it sounds crazy, but I really believe I am [an angel]."
The night before the helicopter flight, he called home for the last time, certain that he would die the next day. "You better make it," his mother told him. "Your kids are waiting here for you." She put his 6-year-old daughter, Devina, on the phone to talk with him. When he got back on the line with his mother, he was crying.
"I will remember you every second," he said.
Some of the time Jane Allgood was perfectly content not to know what her husband, Col. Brian Allgood, was doing over in Iraq. A West Point grad and orthopedic surgeon, Brian Allgood was the top medical officer for all Coalition forces in Iraq. He also used his position to help train Iraqi doctors. At 46, he was considered to be on the fast track to earning his first general's star. He routinely made hazardous trips around the country; his wife, Jane, a retired colonel who had served in the Army's Medical Service Corps, knew that his life was in danger. "I understood that it was an occupational hazard," she says. "I did not want to know when he was traveling in Iraq." The two had an arrangement. He would call home once a week, and e-mail as often as possible.
Allgood never doubted his path in life. He met his future wife at 17, and had already planned to earn a medical degree and launch a military career. Expert in flight and combat surgery, he also trained as an Army Ranger so that he could better treat jumpers' injuries. He rose quickly, served as the top U.S. military doctor in South Korea and was next scheduled to command a medical brigade in Germany, where his wife and 11-year-old son, Wyatt, live.
Allgood considered himself a doctor first, and stuck his neck out to get troops the equipment he thought they needed. This fall, an infantry unit requested fire-retardant uniforms, which were typically worn only by flight crews. Allgood believed all the men should have them. Within days, he authorized $20 million for the new uniforms. Officers with their eyes on promotion don't often make high-dollar demands of their superiors. "It would have been very easy to say no, or just give them to one unit," says Col. Donald Jenkins, who worked with Allgood in Baghdad. "There was a lot of questioning about the money. He didn't flinch." The mission that took his life was important to him. Allgood had spent hundreds of hours working to improve care for Iraqi civilians injured by insurgent attacks. He was returning to Baghdad that Saturday from Taji, where he had presented the Iraqi people with a new, American-built hospital.
Stories about soldiers fighting in Iraq do not immediately evoke images of grandparents in uniform. But many guard troops, plucked from their everyday civilian lives, are well into their 40s or even 50s. Lt. Col. David C. Canegata III of the Virgin Islands National Guard was the father of four and left behind a 15-month-old grandson. Command Sgt. Maj. Marilyn Gabbard of the Iowa Army National Guard and her husband, Ed, had seven children and 11 grandchildren between them. She was the only woman aboard. At 46, she had been in the military 28 years and was the first woman in the Iowa Guard to reach her rank.
Like Langarica, who eased his fears by believing himself an angel, many of the fallen took great comfort in faith. Canegata played keyboard and sang gospel in church with his wife, Shenneth. Thirty-seven-year-old Staff Sgt. Darryl Booker of the Virginia Army National Guard believed it was more than luck that saved him the day a rocket missed him by inches. "He would always tell me, 'I'm covered, Dad'," his father, Earnest Hardy, recalls. "Let me tell you, when he said he was covered, he meant Jesus was looking out for him. He was not talking about the U.S. government."
Others relied on their devotion to the cause itself. Roger Haller, a 49-year-old command sergeant major with the Maryland Army National Guard, was the top-ranking enlisted man in the guard's HQ 70th Regiment. Inspired by 9/11, Haller went to Afghanistan, and later to Iraq, for what would be his final mission. His son, Sgt. Daniel Haller, also served in Afghanistan and Iraq. Daniel is back home, and his father's tour was coming to a close soon. He had hoped to make it in time for his daughter Kathryn's high-school graduation. Retired Command Sgt. Maj. Kathleen Hurley, Haller's longtime friend, reminisced about his optimism under fire and his unshakable belief that he was doing the right thing by serving. She echoed the sentiments of many friends and family members when she said she did not want his service to be forgotten. "I don't want him to be just another casualty statistic. He was so much more."
Last Wednesday, about 1,200 soldiers gathered for a memorial service at Camp Anaconda. The base is home to the 36th Combat Aviation Brigade, the Army National Guard's first helicopter brigade. Four of the men who died in the crash had been assigned to the 36th CAB, whose service of moving men and material around Iraq is known as Catfish Air. The troops stationed there took the crash hard. On that Saturday afternoonthe men knew something serious had happened. Internet and phone service were shut down across the base, a tactic the military uses to prevent information leaks when soldiers are killed. When the lead helicopter on the fateful flight returned, its crew was led off to be debriefed immediately, before they'd even finished shutting down their bird completely. Another 24 hours passed before soldiers on the base were even told that a Black Hawk had gone down.
At the service, helmets and rifles were set up in honor of the dead. The brigade commander and chaplain rose to speak, then close friends of the fallen made short speeches. Together, the assembled soldiers had seen plenty of bloodshed, and many could not hold back their tears. "It was a pretty emotional scene," says Master Sgt. Charles Wheeler, a public-affairs officer. "People were not just trying to stand back and be stoic."
With reporting by Arian Campo-Flores in Decatur, Gretel C. Kovach in Pflugerville, Babak Dehghanpisheh in Baghdad, Stefan Theil in Heidelberg, Dan Ephron, Eve Conant, Richard Wolffe, Daren Briscoe, Jonathan Mummolo and Steve Tuttle in Washington and Andrew Murr, Sarah Childress and Karen Breslau.
----------------------------
Citation: Weston Kosova. "Black Hawk Down: The True Cost of Iraq War," Newsweek, 05 February 2007.
Original URL: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/16843652/site/newsweek/page/2/
----------------------------
Newsweek, 05 February 2007
For American soldiers stationed in Iraq, one of the few comforts of this war is how easily they can keep in touch with family back home. Many service members call their spouses and kids several times a week and e-mail daily, reassuring them that they are all right. Sgt. 1/c John Gary Brown knew his wife, Donna, worried every time he went up in the air. A Black Hawk helicopter crew chief and gunner with an Arkansas Army National Guard unit, Brown had experience calming the anxieties of his wife of 18 years. War had separated them before: Brown had flown missions over a similarly bleak landscape a decade and a half ago when he served in the gulf war.
That didn't make it any easier for Donna, so Brown called and wrote her almost every day. The only phone available to him was two miles from his barracks. At first he made the trek on foot, then bought a bicycle from a soldier who was rotating out. In their conversations, he reassured his wife that most of the time he was making routine flights over relatively safe territory. He even asked her to send "care" packages filled with sweets so that he could drop "candy bombs" to Iraqi children as the chopper whisked by. But there was no hiding the hazards of his duty. Large and often low to the ground, helicopters are a favorite target of insurgents, who fire at them with machine guns and rockets. They are also prone to mechanical problems, especially in the unforgiving Iraqi climate. About 90 helicopters have been lost since the war began.
Soldiers are not permitted to give their families details about combat operations. So Brown used a simple code when he spoke to Donna. If he mentioned he was going on a "training" flight, she knew not to worry. But if he told her he was going on a "mission," that meant he was heading into dangerous territory and he promised to contact her as soon as he landed. At 5:14 in the evening on Friday, Jan. 19, Donna was at home in Little Rock when Gary called and said the word she dreaded. He was at the airfield and ready to take off—this time on a "mission." Brown had just returned to Iraq after a 15-day home leave. On the phone, he told his wife how much he'd enjoyed being back with her and their two children and pair of grandchildren. Then he cut the conversation short. "I really have to go," he said. In the background, she could hear the thumping of the chopper's rotors.
She began to worry when he didn't call or e-mail on Saturday, but told herself he was probably still on duty and couldn't get to a phone or computer. She spent the day willing the phone to ring. When he still hadn't called by Sunday, she says, she suspected the worst. Still, the solemn visit from the Army's Casualty Assistance Officers came as a surprise. On Monday afternoon, there was a knock on the door. Christian, her 10-year-old grandson, answered and called to her that there were two men outside. She told the boy to ask them what they were selling. He said, "No, you don't understand. They're Army men."
Including Brown, 12 soldiers died around 3 p.m. Iraq time on Saturday when his Black Hawk crashed in Diyala province, northeast of Baghdad. The flight was a seemingly routine haul from the massive Camp Anaconda near Balad to the Iraqi capital, carrying four crew and eight passengers. Not far from the town of Baqubah, Brown's chopper—Easy 4-0—broadcast a mayday signal and went down; an accompanying Black Hawk landed nearby and its soldiers reportedly took fire from insurgents. The Army has been unusually tight-lipped about the details of the crash. It has not said exactly what went wrong. At first it reported 13 people had died, then 12. Officials tentatively blamed an equipment malfunction, then enemy fire. Now they say the crash is under investigation. The families of the soldiers say the Army did warn them not to expect much in the way of remains.
Those looking to put the crash into some larger perspective might point out that 10 of those who died were members of the National Guard—the greatest number of guard members killed in a combat mission since the Korean War. Or that the number of U.S. soldiers killed across Iraq that day (25 in all) made it one of the deadliest since the war began. But the most remarkable thing about the crash might be how quickly the deaths of a dozen soldiers can pass into and out of the public's consciousness these days, if they ever register at all.
More than 3,000 U.S. service members have now died in the Iraq war. At first it was difficult not to feel overwhelmed by the number of deaths. After four years, it is now difficult not to feel numb. In a nation without a draft, the emotional connection between the front and the home front is the weakest it has been in a major conflict in recent memory. There are so many news accounts of troops killed in combat that the details blur. The death of one soldier, or 20, loses its power to shock, except to the families of the fallen.
At some point, the way we talk about the war itself changes. We speak less and less about husbandless wives and parentless children, and instead obscure the suffering in vaguer, more distant and—guiltily—easier terms. We shake our heads and talk about the "losses."
In Washington, the talk is now all about Iraq. Democrats, emboldened by their control of Congress and the president's sinking poll numbers, no longer fear being labeled "Defeatocrats" if they take a stand against George Bush on the war. And some Republicans, including Sens. Chuck Hagel and John Warner, are speaking out against the handling of the war and about the cost in human life. Nonetheless, the president, trying to appear conciliatory and resolute at the same time, is determined to send an additional 21,000 troops to Iraq, no matter what anyone else thinks. If Congress rejects the idea, Dick Cheney told CNN last week, "it won't stop us."
The president did not learn about the crash until late in the day on Saturday. Each morning he is handed what aides call "the blue sheets"—the overnight Iraq reports from the Situation Room that are printed on blue paper. The first line of each sheet lists the most recent casualties. But reports of the downed helicopter had not yet reached Washington. Bush spent part of the morning talking about the troop increase with Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and Defense Secretary Robert Gates. Both had recently returned from a tour of Europe and the Middle East to promote the new Iraq strategy. The news wasn't all good. Not surprisingly, some of the allies weren't in favor of a troop escalation.
Is the president right that the additional troops can turn things around? Or is Iraq lost? These questions are the makings of a serious and long-overdue debate over the war. And yet so much of the chatter turns on the politics of the war. Who is up and who is down for 2008? Is the Bush presidency effectively "over" and will Americans trust a Democrat—and possibly a woman—to be commander in chief? Democrats (and rebelling Republicans) invest their passions in clinical debates over "exit strategies" and "withdrawal timetables," and congratulate themselves for "nonbinding" resolutions that condemn an increase in troops while still allowing them to go into the field. But few seem to be grappling with the fate of those soldiers.
There are, as always, more questions than answers about what to do in Iraq. Honest people can disagree about whether it is more dangerous to stay or to leave. But the 12 Americans who died in the Black Hawk crash offer us a vivid reminder of what is happening on the battlefield, and of the cost so many families are paying when loved ones die in combat. Guard members have taken on much of the burden of this war, and those who died aboard that helicopter were like many others who have lost their lives in the fighting: ordinary people asked to do the extraordinary. They were husbands and wives, parents and even grandparents. Some relied on their faith in God, others, their faith in the commander in chief. At least one no longer believed the war was worth fighting, but carried out his duties. Together, they left behind 34 children and at least a dozen grandchildren.
As we contemplate sending more men and women like them into harm's way, their demise leaves behind perhaps the only question that truly matters in wartime: is it worth it?
Army Capt. Sean Lyerly believed it was. At 31, Lyerly was among the younger soldiers onboard the helicopter. A proud Texan from a family with a history of military service, he went to Texas A&M and joined up with the Texas Army National Guard. "It's in the genes," says his father, George Lyerly, who himself served in the Army. "His granddaddy and uncle fought in World War II." Lyerly was determined to become a pilot. He flew relief missions in Louisiana after Hurricane Katrina and told his family about the satisfaction he got from plucking stranded people from rooftops. Up to that point his wife, 24-year-old Csilla, had convinced herself that she had no reason to fear his dedication to the guard. She worried about his flying, but she didn't give a second thought to the possibility of his being called up to serve in combat.
Most of the time Lyerly wasn't anywhere near an Army helicopter. In college he majored in horticulture and later worked as a manager in the garden department at a Home Depot. "The military was one weekend a month, two weeks a year. I never knew they could get deployed," Csilla says. "He mentioned something about maybe going to Bosnia, and I said, 'What do you mean, Bosnia? You're in the guard'." But last February, he got the call, and it wasn't Bosnia. He was nervous about going to Iraq, but he was also proud to become the next in his family to serve overseas. Like so many other soldiers, he said he "felt like he was making a difference." His wife tried to mirror his enthusiasm, but her fears sometimes got the better of her. "I was anxious. I had a bad gut feeling. There was just something ... " she recalls.
A combat captain, Lyerly was based at the sprawling Camp Anaconda, a major way station for the helicopter flights that crisscross Iraq now that the roads are so unsafe. Soldiers had nicknamed the place Mortaritaville because of frequent enemy attacks. Lyerly kept that kind of detail to himself when he called home to Pflugerville, a quiet suburb of Austin, each night at around 9 o'clock. Instead, he tried to re-create some semblance of home life by reading his toddler son, Zack, a favorite bedtime story—usually "Thomas the Tank Engine"—over a Webcam. A couple of days after Csilla was told that her husband had died, she tried to explain to her son what had happened. She told him about heaven, and described how beautiful it was. "Daddy went to heaven to meet God," she said gently. "We can talk to him, but we're not going to be able to see him anymore. He's always going to be able to hear us, but he's not going to come home." Zack looked back at her blankly. "Yes, he is," he said with all the worldly confidence of a 3-year-old. "He's in Iraq. When he's finished, he's going to come home."
Cpl. Victor Langarica did not share Sean Lyerly's optimism about the mission in Iraq. From the moment he received his deployment orders last April, he seemed convinced that he would not leave the war zone alive. Worse, he believed that he was going to die for no good reason. A twice-divorced single father of a young son and daughter, he had joined the Army hoping to gain the skills that would lead to higher pay than he made at Home Depot. His mother and ex-wives looked after the kids while he was overseas. He was proud of the nine months he served in combat in Afghanistan after 9/11, but the experience left the lighthearted 29-year-old sullen and fearful. Once he was surprised by an Afghan soldier who put a gun to his head. Just as the soldier was about to fire, a fellow American shot the Afghan dead. He never found out who had saved his life, but thought of him as an angel.
Unlike most of the others who died in the crash, Langarica was regular Army. But when he got his deployment papers to Iraq, he didn't want to go. The invasion made no sense to him. " 'I don't understand why Bush is doing this to us'," his mother, Pearl Lucas, recalled his saying. " 'If I die, I won't know why I died, if it was for oil or for revenge'."
Langarica arrived in Iraq last September. His fears about the dangers were justified. Stationed in southern Baghdad, he worked as a heavy-equipment mechanic and shouldn't have been in the thick of combat. But his job required him to repair Humvees and other vehicles that had broken down in the streets, amid gunfire and missile attacks. One day, as he lay under a vehicle performing a repair, a bullet grazed the top of his scalp.
In November, Langarica was granted a two-week leave. He returned to the United States to visit his mother and daughter in Decatur, Ga., and his son in Brunswick, Md. He told relatives that he dreaded returning. His aunt urged him to desert the Army and seek refuge in Nicaragua, where she and his mother were born. But Langarica was determined to finish out his tour, and returned to Iraq. Before he left, he told friends he didn't think he was going to see them again. He had already convinced himself he was "an angel of God—no matter what happens I will always be around." In a letter to his mother in 2003, he had confided, "I know it sounds crazy, but I really believe I am [an angel]."
The night before the helicopter flight, he called home for the last time, certain that he would die the next day. "You better make it," his mother told him. "Your kids are waiting here for you." She put his 6-year-old daughter, Devina, on the phone to talk with him. When he got back on the line with his mother, he was crying.
"I will remember you every second," he said.
Some of the time Jane Allgood was perfectly content not to know what her husband, Col. Brian Allgood, was doing over in Iraq. A West Point grad and orthopedic surgeon, Brian Allgood was the top medical officer for all Coalition forces in Iraq. He also used his position to help train Iraqi doctors. At 46, he was considered to be on the fast track to earning his first general's star. He routinely made hazardous trips around the country; his wife, Jane, a retired colonel who had served in the Army's Medical Service Corps, knew that his life was in danger. "I understood that it was an occupational hazard," she says. "I did not want to know when he was traveling in Iraq." The two had an arrangement. He would call home once a week, and e-mail as often as possible.
Allgood never doubted his path in life. He met his future wife at 17, and had already planned to earn a medical degree and launch a military career. Expert in flight and combat surgery, he also trained as an Army Ranger so that he could better treat jumpers' injuries. He rose quickly, served as the top U.S. military doctor in South Korea and was next scheduled to command a medical brigade in Germany, where his wife and 11-year-old son, Wyatt, live.
Allgood considered himself a doctor first, and stuck his neck out to get troops the equipment he thought they needed. This fall, an infantry unit requested fire-retardant uniforms, which were typically worn only by flight crews. Allgood believed all the men should have them. Within days, he authorized $20 million for the new uniforms. Officers with their eyes on promotion don't often make high-dollar demands of their superiors. "It would have been very easy to say no, or just give them to one unit," says Col. Donald Jenkins, who worked with Allgood in Baghdad. "There was a lot of questioning about the money. He didn't flinch." The mission that took his life was important to him. Allgood had spent hundreds of hours working to improve care for Iraqi civilians injured by insurgent attacks. He was returning to Baghdad that Saturday from Taji, where he had presented the Iraqi people with a new, American-built hospital.
Stories about soldiers fighting in Iraq do not immediately evoke images of grandparents in uniform. But many guard troops, plucked from their everyday civilian lives, are well into their 40s or even 50s. Lt. Col. David C. Canegata III of the Virgin Islands National Guard was the father of four and left behind a 15-month-old grandson. Command Sgt. Maj. Marilyn Gabbard of the Iowa Army National Guard and her husband, Ed, had seven children and 11 grandchildren between them. She was the only woman aboard. At 46, she had been in the military 28 years and was the first woman in the Iowa Guard to reach her rank.
Like Langarica, who eased his fears by believing himself an angel, many of the fallen took great comfort in faith. Canegata played keyboard and sang gospel in church with his wife, Shenneth. Thirty-seven-year-old Staff Sgt. Darryl Booker of the Virginia Army National Guard believed it was more than luck that saved him the day a rocket missed him by inches. "He would always tell me, 'I'm covered, Dad'," his father, Earnest Hardy, recalls. "Let me tell you, when he said he was covered, he meant Jesus was looking out for him. He was not talking about the U.S. government."
Others relied on their devotion to the cause itself. Roger Haller, a 49-year-old command sergeant major with the Maryland Army National Guard, was the top-ranking enlisted man in the guard's HQ 70th Regiment. Inspired by 9/11, Haller went to Afghanistan, and later to Iraq, for what would be his final mission. His son, Sgt. Daniel Haller, also served in Afghanistan and Iraq. Daniel is back home, and his father's tour was coming to a close soon. He had hoped to make it in time for his daughter Kathryn's high-school graduation. Retired Command Sgt. Maj. Kathleen Hurley, Haller's longtime friend, reminisced about his optimism under fire and his unshakable belief that he was doing the right thing by serving. She echoed the sentiments of many friends and family members when she said she did not want his service to be forgotten. "I don't want him to be just another casualty statistic. He was so much more."
Last Wednesday, about 1,200 soldiers gathered for a memorial service at Camp Anaconda. The base is home to the 36th Combat Aviation Brigade, the Army National Guard's first helicopter brigade. Four of the men who died in the crash had been assigned to the 36th CAB, whose service of moving men and material around Iraq is known as Catfish Air. The troops stationed there took the crash hard. On that Saturday afternoonthe men knew something serious had happened. Internet and phone service were shut down across the base, a tactic the military uses to prevent information leaks when soldiers are killed. When the lead helicopter on the fateful flight returned, its crew was led off to be debriefed immediately, before they'd even finished shutting down their bird completely. Another 24 hours passed before soldiers on the base were even told that a Black Hawk had gone down.
At the service, helmets and rifles were set up in honor of the dead. The brigade commander and chaplain rose to speak, then close friends of the fallen made short speeches. Together, the assembled soldiers had seen plenty of bloodshed, and many could not hold back their tears. "It was a pretty emotional scene," says Master Sgt. Charles Wheeler, a public-affairs officer. "People were not just trying to stand back and be stoic."
With reporting by Arian Campo-Flores in Decatur, Gretel C. Kovach in Pflugerville, Babak Dehghanpisheh in Baghdad, Stefan Theil in Heidelberg, Dan Ephron, Eve Conant, Richard Wolffe, Daren Briscoe, Jonathan Mummolo and Steve Tuttle in Washington and Andrew Murr, Sarah Childress and Karen Breslau.
----------------------------
Citation: Weston Kosova. "Black Hawk Down: The True Cost of Iraq War," Newsweek, 05 February 2007.
Original URL: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/16843652/site/newsweek/page/2/
----------------------------
25 January 2007
Working Syria, Iran into talks on Iraq
By Paul Richter
Los Angeles Times, 09 January 2007
WASHINGTON — Although President Bush has rejected proposals for direct talks with Syria and Iran over the future of Iraq, officials in his administration are working to find a way to include those countries in negotiations in a way that might be acceptable to Bush.
The president and top aides have insisted they will not talk to Iran until it suspends its nuclear program, and they have shunned Syria over its meddling in Lebanon. However, the White House has come under growing domestic and international pressure to negotiate with the two countries as it revamps its troubled strategy in Iraq.
Bush plans to address the nation within days on a new U.S. war strategy, which is expected to involve additional troops and stepped-up pressure on the government in Baghdad to devise political compromises to share power and oil revenue.
Last month, the Iraq Study Group, a U.S. commission whose report has topped best-seller lists, urged the administration to hold talks with Iran and Syria as a necessary step toward addressing the violence in Iraq and potential instability throughout the Middle East.
The White House brushed off the panel's recommendation that the diplomatic efforts begin before the end of 2006. But administration officials said a new multinational effort not yet underway could involve Iran and Syria.
One U.S. official familiar with administration talks said there was substantial support for "revitalizing" the effort to involve influential neighbors in seeking solutions on Iraq.
"This is something that Iran and Syria could be part of, if they wanted, but that would not be seen as us reaching out specifically to them," said the official, who declined to be identified because of the sensitivity of the talks.
The official said the effort might entail expanding a United Nations-led effort to help Iraq's economy "into the political realm" — allowing regional neighbors and world powers to use their influence to calm sectarian violence.
By including political issues, the new effort would be broader than either the U.N.-led effort, called the International Compact for Iraq, or a U.S.-led collaboration involving the United States, six Persian Gulf Arab states, Jordan and Egypt.
Those familiar with the White House discussions said they weren't certain whether any such diplomatic initiative would be announced as part of the shift in Iraq strategy that Bush is expected to lay out in his upcoming speech. One official speculated that any announcement would come later in the year.
It is unclear whether Bush approves of the efforts to find a way to involve Iran and Syria. He and top officials have opposed direct talks with either country, saying Iran is using its civilian nuclear program to develop atomic weapons and Syria is working to destabilize Lebanon.
But top aides have said those concerns don't exclude the possibility of group collaborations that could put U.S. officials in close contact with Syrians and Iranians on issues of mutual interest.
Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, for example, noted in a recent interview that U.S. officials met with representatives of Syria, Iran and more than 30 other countries last fall to discuss the International Compact for Iraq, a 3-month-old effort.
"We need an international approach to Iraq…. It's been our policy for some time," Rice said then.
Administration officials said such group talks differed from one-on-one negotiations.
"This is not at all equivalent to having direct bilateral talks," said a State Department official, who also declined to be identified. "But we have no objection to being in the same room with all of Iraq's neighbors, including Iran and Syria. We want Iraq to have good relations with all of its neighbors."
Former Secretary of State Colin L. Powell and other U.S. officials worked side by side with Iranians and Syrians in an international conference convened by the Iraqi government in November 2004 in Sharm el Sheik, Egypt. The gathering, aimed at building more international support for Iraq's U.S.-appointed government, was supported by the Bush administration.
The Iraq Study Group, headed by former Secretary of State James A. Baker III and former Rep. Lee H. Hamilton (D-Ind.), said a new effort could help push Iraq toward political reconciliation.
"Iraq's leaders may not be able to come together unless they receive the necessary signals and support from abroad," the panel said in its report. "This support will not materialize of its own accord, and must be encouraged by the United States."
Syrian officials indicated a willingness to meet with U.S. counterparts after the release of the report, but Iran's government rebuffed a recent U.S. offer for a meeting involving Zalmay Khalilzad, the U.S. ambassador to Iraq.
Although the administration has rejected the Iraq Study Group's recommendation for "extensive and substantive" talks with Syria and Iran, some proponents point out that the collaboration now under consideration could lead to a quiet broadening of the conversations.
James Dobbins, a former administration envoy and advisor to the Baker-Hamilton commission, predicted the administration would take part in a new regional collaboration on Iraq involving Iran and Syria.
"That's probably how the administration will square the circle of needing to move forward without actually appearing to be inconsistent" with demands that Iran and Syria cease their objectionable conduct, he said.
But Dobbins questioned whether such meetings would be fruitful without one-on-one conversations on broader differences.
"You've had multilateral meetings before, but they haven't amounted to much," said Dobbins, director of the Rand Corp.'s International Security and Defense Policy program. "The question is whether the administration takes advantage of this to engage in the kind of bilateral exchanges that would make the gatherings productive."
Other experts doubt the administration would talk to Tehran and Damascus.
"Bush is committed to the idea that these guys just aren't going to help us," said Steven A. Cook, a Middle East analyst at the Council on Foreign Relations.
------------------------------
Citation: Paul Richter. "Working Syria, Iran into talks on Iraq," Los Angeles Times, 09 January 2007.
Original URL: http://www.latimes.com/news/printedition/asection/la-fg-neighbors9jan09,1,352236.story?coll=la-news-a_section
------------------------------
Los Angeles Times, 09 January 2007
WASHINGTON — Although President Bush has rejected proposals for direct talks with Syria and Iran over the future of Iraq, officials in his administration are working to find a way to include those countries in negotiations in a way that might be acceptable to Bush.
The president and top aides have insisted they will not talk to Iran until it suspends its nuclear program, and they have shunned Syria over its meddling in Lebanon. However, the White House has come under growing domestic and international pressure to negotiate with the two countries as it revamps its troubled strategy in Iraq.
Bush plans to address the nation within days on a new U.S. war strategy, which is expected to involve additional troops and stepped-up pressure on the government in Baghdad to devise political compromises to share power and oil revenue.
Last month, the Iraq Study Group, a U.S. commission whose report has topped best-seller lists, urged the administration to hold talks with Iran and Syria as a necessary step toward addressing the violence in Iraq and potential instability throughout the Middle East.
The White House brushed off the panel's recommendation that the diplomatic efforts begin before the end of 2006. But administration officials said a new multinational effort not yet underway could involve Iran and Syria.
One U.S. official familiar with administration talks said there was substantial support for "revitalizing" the effort to involve influential neighbors in seeking solutions on Iraq.
"This is something that Iran and Syria could be part of, if they wanted, but that would not be seen as us reaching out specifically to them," said the official, who declined to be identified because of the sensitivity of the talks.
The official said the effort might entail expanding a United Nations-led effort to help Iraq's economy "into the political realm" — allowing regional neighbors and world powers to use their influence to calm sectarian violence.
By including political issues, the new effort would be broader than either the U.N.-led effort, called the International Compact for Iraq, or a U.S.-led collaboration involving the United States, six Persian Gulf Arab states, Jordan and Egypt.
Those familiar with the White House discussions said they weren't certain whether any such diplomatic initiative would be announced as part of the shift in Iraq strategy that Bush is expected to lay out in his upcoming speech. One official speculated that any announcement would come later in the year.
It is unclear whether Bush approves of the efforts to find a way to involve Iran and Syria. He and top officials have opposed direct talks with either country, saying Iran is using its civilian nuclear program to develop atomic weapons and Syria is working to destabilize Lebanon.
But top aides have said those concerns don't exclude the possibility of group collaborations that could put U.S. officials in close contact with Syrians and Iranians on issues of mutual interest.
Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, for example, noted in a recent interview that U.S. officials met with representatives of Syria, Iran and more than 30 other countries last fall to discuss the International Compact for Iraq, a 3-month-old effort.
"We need an international approach to Iraq…. It's been our policy for some time," Rice said then.
Administration officials said such group talks differed from one-on-one negotiations.
"This is not at all equivalent to having direct bilateral talks," said a State Department official, who also declined to be identified. "But we have no objection to being in the same room with all of Iraq's neighbors, including Iran and Syria. We want Iraq to have good relations with all of its neighbors."
Former Secretary of State Colin L. Powell and other U.S. officials worked side by side with Iranians and Syrians in an international conference convened by the Iraqi government in November 2004 in Sharm el Sheik, Egypt. The gathering, aimed at building more international support for Iraq's U.S.-appointed government, was supported by the Bush administration.
The Iraq Study Group, headed by former Secretary of State James A. Baker III and former Rep. Lee H. Hamilton (D-Ind.), said a new effort could help push Iraq toward political reconciliation.
"Iraq's leaders may not be able to come together unless they receive the necessary signals and support from abroad," the panel said in its report. "This support will not materialize of its own accord, and must be encouraged by the United States."
Syrian officials indicated a willingness to meet with U.S. counterparts after the release of the report, but Iran's government rebuffed a recent U.S. offer for a meeting involving Zalmay Khalilzad, the U.S. ambassador to Iraq.
Although the administration has rejected the Iraq Study Group's recommendation for "extensive and substantive" talks with Syria and Iran, some proponents point out that the collaboration now under consideration could lead to a quiet broadening of the conversations.
James Dobbins, a former administration envoy and advisor to the Baker-Hamilton commission, predicted the administration would take part in a new regional collaboration on Iraq involving Iran and Syria.
"That's probably how the administration will square the circle of needing to move forward without actually appearing to be inconsistent" with demands that Iran and Syria cease their objectionable conduct, he said.
But Dobbins questioned whether such meetings would be fruitful without one-on-one conversations on broader differences.
"You've had multilateral meetings before, but they haven't amounted to much," said Dobbins, director of the Rand Corp.'s International Security and Defense Policy program. "The question is whether the administration takes advantage of this to engage in the kind of bilateral exchanges that would make the gatherings productive."
Other experts doubt the administration would talk to Tehran and Damascus.
"Bush is committed to the idea that these guys just aren't going to help us," said Steven A. Cook, a Middle East analyst at the Council on Foreign Relations.
------------------------------
Citation: Paul Richter. "Working Syria, Iran into talks on Iraq," Los Angeles Times, 09 January 2007.
Original URL: http://www.latimes.com/news/printedition/asection/la-fg-neighbors9jan09,1,352236.story?coll=la-news-a_section
------------------------------
Inside Baghdad: A city paralysed by fear
By Patrick Cockburn
The Independent, 25 January 2007
Baghdad is paralysed by fear. Iraqi drivers are terrified of running into impromptu checkpoints where heavily armed men in civilian clothes may drag them out of their cars and kill them for being the wrong religion. Some districts exchange mortar fire every night. This is mayhem beyond the comprehension of George Bush and Tony Blair.
Black smoke was rising over the city centre yesterday as American and Iraqi army troops tried to fight their way into the insurgent district of Haifa Street only a mile north of the Green Zone, home to the government and the US and British embassies. Helicopters flew fast and low past tower blocks, hunting snipers, and armoured vehicles manoeuvred in the streets below.
Many Iraqis who watched the State of the Union address shrugged it off as an irrelevance. "An extra 16,000 US soldiers are not going to be enough to restore order to Baghdad," said Ismail, a Sunni who fled his house in the west of the city, fearing he would be arrested and tortured by the much-feared Shia police commandos.
It is extraordinary that, almost four years after US forces captured Baghdad, they control so little of it. The outlook for Mr Bush's strategy of driving out insurgents from strongholds and preventing them coming back does not look good.
On Monday, a helicopter belonging to the US security company Blackwater was shot down as it flew over the Sunni neighbourhood of al-Fadhil, close to the central markets of Baghdad. Several of the five American crew members may have survived the crash but they were later found with gunshot wounds to their heads, as if they had been executed on the ground.
Baghdad has broken up into hostile townships, Sunni and Shia, where strangers are treated with suspicion and shot if they cannot explain what they are doing. In the militant Sunni district of al-Amariyah in west Baghdad the Shia have been driven out and a resurgent Baath party has taken over. One slogan in red paint on a wall reads: "Saddam Hussein will live for ever, the symbol of the Arab nation." Another says: "Death to Muqtada [Muqtada al-Sadr, the nationalist Shia cleric] and his army of fools."
Restaurants in districts of Baghdad like the embassy quarter in al-Mansur, where I once used to have lunch, are now far too dangerous to visit. Any foreigner on the streets is likely to be kidnapped or killed. In any case, most of the restaurants closed long ago.
It is difficult for Iraqis to avoid joining one side or the other in the conflict. Many districts, such as al-Hurriya in west Baghdad, have seen the minority - in this case the Sunni - driven out.
A Sunni friend called Adnan, living in the neighbouring district of al-Adel, was visited by Sunni militiamen. They said: "You must help us to protect you from the Shia in Hurriya by going on patrol with us. Otherwise, we will give your house to somebody who will help us." He patrolled with the militiamen for several nights, clutching a Kalashnikov, and then fled the area.
The fear in Baghdad is so intense that rumours of even bloodier battles sweep through the city. Two weeks ago, many Sunni believed that the Shia Mehdi Army was going to launch a final "battle of Baghdad" aimed at killing or expelling the Sunni minority in the capital. The Sunni insurgents stored weapons and ammunition in order to make a last-ditch effort to defend their districts. In the event, they believe the ultimate battle was postponed at the last minute. Mr Bush insisted that the Iraqi government, with US military support, "must stop the sectarian violence in the capital". Quite how they are going to do this is not clear. American reinforcements might limit the ability of death squads to roam at will for a few months, but this will not provide a long-term solution.
Mr Bush's speech is likely to deepen sectarianism in Iraq by identifying the Shia militias with Iran. In fact, the most powerful Shia militia, the Mehdi Army, is traditionally anti-Iranian. It is the Badr Organisation, now co-operating with US forces, which was formed and trained by the Iranian Revolutionary Guards. In the Arab world as a whole, Mr Bush seems to be trying to rally the Sunni states of Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Jordan to support him in Iraq by exaggerating the Iranian threat.
Iraqis also wonder what will happen in the rest of Iraq while the US concentrates on trying to secure Baghdad. The degree of violence in the countryside is often underestimated because it is less reported than in the capital. In Baquba, the capital of Diyala province north-east of Baghdad, US and Iraqi army commanders were lauding their achievements at a press conference last weekend, claiming: "The situation in Baquba is reassuring and under control but there are some rumours circulated by bad people." Within hours, Sunni insurgents kidnapped the mayor and blew up his office.
The situation in the south of Iraq is no more reassuring. Five American soldiers were killed in the Shia holy city of Karbala last Saturday by gunmen wearing American and Iraqi uniforms, carrying American weapons and driving vehicles used by US or Iraqi government forces. A licence plate belonging to a car registered to Iraq's Minister of Trade was found on one of the vehicles used in the attack. It is a measure of the chaos in Iraq today that US officials do not know if their men were killed by Sunni or Shia guerrillas.
US commanders and the Mehdi Army seem to be edging away from all-out confrontation in Baghdad. Neither the US nor Iraqi government has the resources to eliminate the Shia militias. Even Kurdish units in the capital have a high number of desertions. The Mehdi Army, if under pressure in the capital, could probably take over much of southern Iraq.
Mr Bush's supposedly new strategy is less of a strategy than a collection of tactics unlikely to change dramatically the situation on the ground. But if his systematic demonising of Iran is a precursor to air strikes or other military action against Iran, then Iraqis will once more pay a heavy price.
------------------------------
Citation: Patrick Cockburn. "Inside Baghdad: A city paralysed by fear," The Independent, 25 January 2007.
Original URL: http://news.independent.co.uk/world/middle_east/article2183852.ece
------------------------------
The Independent, 25 January 2007
Baghdad is paralysed by fear. Iraqi drivers are terrified of running into impromptu checkpoints where heavily armed men in civilian clothes may drag them out of their cars and kill them for being the wrong religion. Some districts exchange mortar fire every night. This is mayhem beyond the comprehension of George Bush and Tony Blair.
Black smoke was rising over the city centre yesterday as American and Iraqi army troops tried to fight their way into the insurgent district of Haifa Street only a mile north of the Green Zone, home to the government and the US and British embassies. Helicopters flew fast and low past tower blocks, hunting snipers, and armoured vehicles manoeuvred in the streets below.
Many Iraqis who watched the State of the Union address shrugged it off as an irrelevance. "An extra 16,000 US soldiers are not going to be enough to restore order to Baghdad," said Ismail, a Sunni who fled his house in the west of the city, fearing he would be arrested and tortured by the much-feared Shia police commandos.
It is extraordinary that, almost four years after US forces captured Baghdad, they control so little of it. The outlook for Mr Bush's strategy of driving out insurgents from strongholds and preventing them coming back does not look good.
On Monday, a helicopter belonging to the US security company Blackwater was shot down as it flew over the Sunni neighbourhood of al-Fadhil, close to the central markets of Baghdad. Several of the five American crew members may have survived the crash but they were later found with gunshot wounds to their heads, as if they had been executed on the ground.
Baghdad has broken up into hostile townships, Sunni and Shia, where strangers are treated with suspicion and shot if they cannot explain what they are doing. In the militant Sunni district of al-Amariyah in west Baghdad the Shia have been driven out and a resurgent Baath party has taken over. One slogan in red paint on a wall reads: "Saddam Hussein will live for ever, the symbol of the Arab nation." Another says: "Death to Muqtada [Muqtada al-Sadr, the nationalist Shia cleric] and his army of fools."
Restaurants in districts of Baghdad like the embassy quarter in al-Mansur, where I once used to have lunch, are now far too dangerous to visit. Any foreigner on the streets is likely to be kidnapped or killed. In any case, most of the restaurants closed long ago.
It is difficult for Iraqis to avoid joining one side or the other in the conflict. Many districts, such as al-Hurriya in west Baghdad, have seen the minority - in this case the Sunni - driven out.
A Sunni friend called Adnan, living in the neighbouring district of al-Adel, was visited by Sunni militiamen. They said: "You must help us to protect you from the Shia in Hurriya by going on patrol with us. Otherwise, we will give your house to somebody who will help us." He patrolled with the militiamen for several nights, clutching a Kalashnikov, and then fled the area.
The fear in Baghdad is so intense that rumours of even bloodier battles sweep through the city. Two weeks ago, many Sunni believed that the Shia Mehdi Army was going to launch a final "battle of Baghdad" aimed at killing or expelling the Sunni minority in the capital. The Sunni insurgents stored weapons and ammunition in order to make a last-ditch effort to defend their districts. In the event, they believe the ultimate battle was postponed at the last minute. Mr Bush insisted that the Iraqi government, with US military support, "must stop the sectarian violence in the capital". Quite how they are going to do this is not clear. American reinforcements might limit the ability of death squads to roam at will for a few months, but this will not provide a long-term solution.
Mr Bush's speech is likely to deepen sectarianism in Iraq by identifying the Shia militias with Iran. In fact, the most powerful Shia militia, the Mehdi Army, is traditionally anti-Iranian. It is the Badr Organisation, now co-operating with US forces, which was formed and trained by the Iranian Revolutionary Guards. In the Arab world as a whole, Mr Bush seems to be trying to rally the Sunni states of Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Jordan to support him in Iraq by exaggerating the Iranian threat.
Iraqis also wonder what will happen in the rest of Iraq while the US concentrates on trying to secure Baghdad. The degree of violence in the countryside is often underestimated because it is less reported than in the capital. In Baquba, the capital of Diyala province north-east of Baghdad, US and Iraqi army commanders were lauding their achievements at a press conference last weekend, claiming: "The situation in Baquba is reassuring and under control but there are some rumours circulated by bad people." Within hours, Sunni insurgents kidnapped the mayor and blew up his office.
The situation in the south of Iraq is no more reassuring. Five American soldiers were killed in the Shia holy city of Karbala last Saturday by gunmen wearing American and Iraqi uniforms, carrying American weapons and driving vehicles used by US or Iraqi government forces. A licence plate belonging to a car registered to Iraq's Minister of Trade was found on one of the vehicles used in the attack. It is a measure of the chaos in Iraq today that US officials do not know if their men were killed by Sunni or Shia guerrillas.
US commanders and the Mehdi Army seem to be edging away from all-out confrontation in Baghdad. Neither the US nor Iraqi government has the resources to eliminate the Shia militias. Even Kurdish units in the capital have a high number of desertions. The Mehdi Army, if under pressure in the capital, could probably take over much of southern Iraq.
Mr Bush's supposedly new strategy is less of a strategy than a collection of tactics unlikely to change dramatically the situation on the ground. But if his systematic demonising of Iran is a precursor to air strikes or other military action against Iran, then Iraqis will once more pay a heavy price.
------------------------------
Citation: Patrick Cockburn. "Inside Baghdad: A city paralysed by fear," The Independent, 25 January 2007.
Original URL: http://news.independent.co.uk/world/middle_east/article2183852.ece
------------------------------
Our mercenaries in Iraq
The president relies on thousands of private soldiers with little oversight, a disturbing example of the military-industrial complex.
By Jeremy Scahill
Los Angeles Times, 25 January 2007
AS PRESIDENT BUSH took the podium to deliver his State of the Union address Tuesday, there were five American families receiving news that has become all too common: Their loved ones had been killed in Iraq. But in this case, the slain were neither "civilians," as the news reports proclaimed, nor were they U.S. soldiers. They were highly trained mercenaries deployed to Iraq by a secretive private military company based in North Carolina — Blackwater USA.
The company made headlines in early 2004 when four of its troops were ambushed and burned in the Sunni hotbed of Fallouja — two charred, lifeless bodies left to dangle for hours from a bridge. That incident marked a turning point in the war, sparked multiple U.S. sieges of Fallouja and helped fuel the Iraqi resistance that haunts the occupation to this day.
Now, Blackwater is back in the news, providing a reminder of just how privatized the war has become. On Tuesday, one of the company's helicopters was brought down in one of Baghdad's most violent areas. The men who were killed were providing diplomatic security under Blackwater's $300-million State Department contract, which dates to 2003 and the company's initial no-bid contract to guard administrator L. Paul Bremer III in Iraq. Current U.S. Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad, who is also protected by Blackwater, said he had gone to the morgue to view the men's bodies, asserting the circumstances of their deaths were unclear because of "the fog of war."
Bush made no mention of the downing of the helicopter during his State of the Union speech. But he did address the very issue that has made the war's privatization a linchpin of his Iraq policy — the need for more troops. The president called on Congress to authorize an increase of about 92,000 active-duty troops over the next five years. He then slipped in a mention of a major initiative that would represent a significant development in the U.S. disaster response/reconstruction/war machine: a Civilian Reserve Corps.
"Such a corps would function much like our military Reserve. It would ease the burden on the armed forces by allowing us to hire civilians with critical skills to serve on missions abroad when America needs them," Bush declared. This is precisely what the administration has already done, largely behind the backs of the American people and with little congressional input, with its revolution in military affairs. Bush and his political allies are using taxpayer dollars to run an outsourcing laboratory. Iraq is its Frankenstein monster.
Already, private contractors constitute the second-largest "force" in Iraq. At last count, there were about 100,000 contractors in Iraq, of which 48,000 work as private soldiers, according to a Government Accountability Office report. These soldiers have operated with almost no oversight or effective legal constraints and are an undeclared expansion of the scope of the occupation. Many of these contractors make up to $1,000 a day, far more than active-duty soldiers. What's more, these forces are politically expedient, as contractor deaths go uncounted in the official toll.
The president's proposed Civilian Reserve Corps was not his idea alone. A privatized version of it was floated two years ago by Erik Prince, the secretive, mega-millionaire, conservative owner of Blackwater USA and a man who for years has served as the Pied Piper of a campaign to repackage mercenaries as legitimate forces. In early 2005, Prince — a major bankroller of the president and his allies — pitched the idea at a military conference of a "contractor brigade" to supplement the official military. "There's consternation in the [Pentagon] about increasing the permanent size of the Army," Prince declared. Officials "want to add 30,000 people, and they talked about costs of anywhere from $3.6 billion to $4 billion to do that. Well, by my math, that comes out to about $135,000 per soldier." He added: "We could do it certainly cheaper."
And Prince is not just a man with an idea; he is a man with his own army. Blackwater began in 1996 with a private military training camp "to fulfill the anticipated demand for government outsourcing." Today, its contacts run from deep inside the military and intelligence agencies to the upper echelons of the White House. It has secured a status as the elite Praetorian Guard for the global war on terror, with the largest private military base in the world, a fleet of 20 aircraft and 20,000 soldiers at the ready.
From Iraq and Afghanistan to the hurricane-ravaged streets of New Orleans to meetings with Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger about responding to disasters in California, Blackwater now envisions itself as the FedEx of defense and homeland security operations. Such power in the hands of one company, run by a neo-crusader bankroller of the president, embodies the "military-industrial complex" President Eisenhower warned against in 1961.
Further privatizing the country's war machine — or inventing new back doors for military expansion with fancy names like the Civilian Reserve Corps — will represent a devastating blow to the future of American democracy.
JEREMY SCAHILL is a fellow at the Nation Institute and the author of the forthcoming "Blackwater: The Rise of the World's Most Powerful Mercenary Army."
---------------------------------
Citation: Jeremy Scahill. "Our mercenaries in Iraq," Los Angeles Times, 25 January 2007.
Original URL: http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/la-oe-scahill25jan25,0,7395303.story?coll=la-opinion-rightrail
---------------------------------
By Jeremy Scahill
Los Angeles Times, 25 January 2007
AS PRESIDENT BUSH took the podium to deliver his State of the Union address Tuesday, there were five American families receiving news that has become all too common: Their loved ones had been killed in Iraq. But in this case, the slain were neither "civilians," as the news reports proclaimed, nor were they U.S. soldiers. They were highly trained mercenaries deployed to Iraq by a secretive private military company based in North Carolina — Blackwater USA.
The company made headlines in early 2004 when four of its troops were ambushed and burned in the Sunni hotbed of Fallouja — two charred, lifeless bodies left to dangle for hours from a bridge. That incident marked a turning point in the war, sparked multiple U.S. sieges of Fallouja and helped fuel the Iraqi resistance that haunts the occupation to this day.
Now, Blackwater is back in the news, providing a reminder of just how privatized the war has become. On Tuesday, one of the company's helicopters was brought down in one of Baghdad's most violent areas. The men who were killed were providing diplomatic security under Blackwater's $300-million State Department contract, which dates to 2003 and the company's initial no-bid contract to guard administrator L. Paul Bremer III in Iraq. Current U.S. Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad, who is also protected by Blackwater, said he had gone to the morgue to view the men's bodies, asserting the circumstances of their deaths were unclear because of "the fog of war."
Bush made no mention of the downing of the helicopter during his State of the Union speech. But he did address the very issue that has made the war's privatization a linchpin of his Iraq policy — the need for more troops. The president called on Congress to authorize an increase of about 92,000 active-duty troops over the next five years. He then slipped in a mention of a major initiative that would represent a significant development in the U.S. disaster response/reconstruction/war machine: a Civilian Reserve Corps.
"Such a corps would function much like our military Reserve. It would ease the burden on the armed forces by allowing us to hire civilians with critical skills to serve on missions abroad when America needs them," Bush declared. This is precisely what the administration has already done, largely behind the backs of the American people and with little congressional input, with its revolution in military affairs. Bush and his political allies are using taxpayer dollars to run an outsourcing laboratory. Iraq is its Frankenstein monster.
Already, private contractors constitute the second-largest "force" in Iraq. At last count, there were about 100,000 contractors in Iraq, of which 48,000 work as private soldiers, according to a Government Accountability Office report. These soldiers have operated with almost no oversight or effective legal constraints and are an undeclared expansion of the scope of the occupation. Many of these contractors make up to $1,000 a day, far more than active-duty soldiers. What's more, these forces are politically expedient, as contractor deaths go uncounted in the official toll.
The president's proposed Civilian Reserve Corps was not his idea alone. A privatized version of it was floated two years ago by Erik Prince, the secretive, mega-millionaire, conservative owner of Blackwater USA and a man who for years has served as the Pied Piper of a campaign to repackage mercenaries as legitimate forces. In early 2005, Prince — a major bankroller of the president and his allies — pitched the idea at a military conference of a "contractor brigade" to supplement the official military. "There's consternation in the [Pentagon] about increasing the permanent size of the Army," Prince declared. Officials "want to add 30,000 people, and they talked about costs of anywhere from $3.6 billion to $4 billion to do that. Well, by my math, that comes out to about $135,000 per soldier." He added: "We could do it certainly cheaper."
And Prince is not just a man with an idea; he is a man with his own army. Blackwater began in 1996 with a private military training camp "to fulfill the anticipated demand for government outsourcing." Today, its contacts run from deep inside the military and intelligence agencies to the upper echelons of the White House. It has secured a status as the elite Praetorian Guard for the global war on terror, with the largest private military base in the world, a fleet of 20 aircraft and 20,000 soldiers at the ready.
From Iraq and Afghanistan to the hurricane-ravaged streets of New Orleans to meetings with Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger about responding to disasters in California, Blackwater now envisions itself as the FedEx of defense and homeland security operations. Such power in the hands of one company, run by a neo-crusader bankroller of the president, embodies the "military-industrial complex" President Eisenhower warned against in 1961.
Further privatizing the country's war machine — or inventing new back doors for military expansion with fancy names like the Civilian Reserve Corps — will represent a devastating blow to the future of American democracy.
JEREMY SCAHILL is a fellow at the Nation Institute and the author of the forthcoming "Blackwater: The Rise of the World's Most Powerful Mercenary Army."
---------------------------------
Citation: Jeremy Scahill. "Our mercenaries in Iraq," Los Angeles Times, 25 January 2007.
Original URL: http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/la-oe-scahill25jan25,0,7395303.story?coll=la-opinion-rightrail
---------------------------------
24 January 2007
Doctors propose using Afghan opium as NHS pain-killer
By Justin Huggler
The Independent, UK, 24 January 2007
Afghan heroin available on the NHS? It may sound far-fetched but that is what two leading doctors from the British Medical Association have put forward as a way of dealing with a shortage of the drug. Heroin is used by doctors under its medical name diamorphine as a pain-killer for the terminally ill and after serious operations. But there is currently a severe shortage of legal diamorphine in the UK.
At the same time, British soldiers in Afghanistan are in the midst of efforts to wipe out the cultivation of opium, from which heroin is refined. Doctors have suggested a solution to both problems: use the opium to produce heroin for medicinal use.
"If we were harvesting this drug from Afghanistan rather than destroying it, we'd be benefiting the population of Afghanistan as well as helping patients," Dr Vivienne Nathanson, the BMA's head of science and ethics, told the BBC.
But the suggestion has been rejected by both the Department of Health in Britain and the Afghan government. The idea of using Afghan opium for legal medicines has been touted before by a French think-tank. But it is the first time that the proposal has been given the weight of an internationally respected medical association.
Britain is the leading Western donor to Afghanistan's efforts to wipe out opium production, which accounts for 90 per cent of the world's illegal opium. Kabul does not have a major domestic problem with opium abuse, with most being exported to Europe.
To satisfy Western demands that this supply chain is broken, Afghan farmers have had their entire crops destroyed. Other farmers who voluntarily gave up growing poppies on the promise of financial help to grow other crops say the help never materialised. Reports have emerged of farmers made destitute by the West's anti-poppy campaign, who have resorted to selling their children in order to stay financially afloat.
The targeting of the poppy fields is widely believed to be a major factor in the popularity of the Taliban insurgency in the south and east. British troops facing some of the most intense fighting are in Helmand, a major centre of poppy cultivation.
"There must be ways of harvesting it and making sure that the harvest safely reaches the drug industry which would then refine it into diamorphine," Dr Nathanson said.
Her remarks were supported by Dr Jonathan Fielden, a consultant in anaesthesia and intensive care. He said: "Over the past year the availability of diamorphine has dramatically reduced. It has got to the stage where it is almost impossible in some hospitals to get hold of this drug for use outside very specific circumstances."
But the Department of Health said the shortage of diamorphine was due to limited production capacity, not a shortage of raw opium. Western anti-narcotics agencies have rejected the suggestion of cultivating Afghan opium for medicinal use in the past, saying it is too difficult to put safeguards in place and ensure the opium conforms to international standards.
Leading NGOs still contend the best solution is long-term investment in alternative crops. The problem is little else will grow in many barren parts of Afghanistan.
----------------------------------
Citation: Justin Huggler. "Doctors propose using Afghan opium as NHS pain-killer," The Independent, UK, 24 January 2007.
Original URL: http://news.independent.co.uk/world/asia/article2180759.ece
----------------------------------
The Independent, UK, 24 January 2007
Afghan heroin available on the NHS? It may sound far-fetched but that is what two leading doctors from the British Medical Association have put forward as a way of dealing with a shortage of the drug. Heroin is used by doctors under its medical name diamorphine as a pain-killer for the terminally ill and after serious operations. But there is currently a severe shortage of legal diamorphine in the UK.
At the same time, British soldiers in Afghanistan are in the midst of efforts to wipe out the cultivation of opium, from which heroin is refined. Doctors have suggested a solution to both problems: use the opium to produce heroin for medicinal use.
"If we were harvesting this drug from Afghanistan rather than destroying it, we'd be benefiting the population of Afghanistan as well as helping patients," Dr Vivienne Nathanson, the BMA's head of science and ethics, told the BBC.
But the suggestion has been rejected by both the Department of Health in Britain and the Afghan government. The idea of using Afghan opium for legal medicines has been touted before by a French think-tank. But it is the first time that the proposal has been given the weight of an internationally respected medical association.
Britain is the leading Western donor to Afghanistan's efforts to wipe out opium production, which accounts for 90 per cent of the world's illegal opium. Kabul does not have a major domestic problem with opium abuse, with most being exported to Europe.
To satisfy Western demands that this supply chain is broken, Afghan farmers have had their entire crops destroyed. Other farmers who voluntarily gave up growing poppies on the promise of financial help to grow other crops say the help never materialised. Reports have emerged of farmers made destitute by the West's anti-poppy campaign, who have resorted to selling their children in order to stay financially afloat.
The targeting of the poppy fields is widely believed to be a major factor in the popularity of the Taliban insurgency in the south and east. British troops facing some of the most intense fighting are in Helmand, a major centre of poppy cultivation.
"There must be ways of harvesting it and making sure that the harvest safely reaches the drug industry which would then refine it into diamorphine," Dr Nathanson said.
Her remarks were supported by Dr Jonathan Fielden, a consultant in anaesthesia and intensive care. He said: "Over the past year the availability of diamorphine has dramatically reduced. It has got to the stage where it is almost impossible in some hospitals to get hold of this drug for use outside very specific circumstances."
But the Department of Health said the shortage of diamorphine was due to limited production capacity, not a shortage of raw opium. Western anti-narcotics agencies have rejected the suggestion of cultivating Afghan opium for medicinal use in the past, saying it is too difficult to put safeguards in place and ensure the opium conforms to international standards.
Leading NGOs still contend the best solution is long-term investment in alternative crops. The problem is little else will grow in many barren parts of Afghanistan.
----------------------------------
Citation: Justin Huggler. "Doctors propose using Afghan opium as NHS pain-killer," The Independent, UK, 24 January 2007.
Original URL: http://news.independent.co.uk/world/asia/article2180759.ece
----------------------------------
Scant evidence found of Iran-Iraq arms link
U.S. warnings of advanced weaponry crossing the border are overstated, critics say.
By Alexandra Zavis and Greg Miller
Los Angeles Times, 23 January 2007
BAQUBAH, IRAQ — If there is anywhere Iran could easily stir up trouble in Iraq, it would be in Diyala, a rugged province along the border between the two nations.
The combination of Sunni Arab militants believed to be affiliated with Al Qaeda and Shiite Muslim militiamen with ties to Iran has fueled waves of sectarian and political violence here. The province is bisected by long-traveled routes leading from Iran to Baghdad and Shiite holy cities farther south in Iraq.
But even here, evidence of Iranian involvement in Iraq's troubles is limited. U.S. troops have found mortars and antitank mines with Iranian markings dated 2006, said U.S. Army Col. David W. Sutherland, who oversees the province. But there has been little sign of more advanced weaponry crossing the border, and no Iranian agents have been found.
In his speech this month outlining the new U.S. strategy in Iraq, President Bush promised to "seek out and destroy" Iranian networks that he said were providing "advanced weaponry and training to our enemies." He is expected to strike a similar note in tonight's State of the Union speech.
For all the aggressive rhetoric, however, the Bush administration has provided scant evidence to support these claims. Nor have reporters traveling with U.S. troops seen extensive signs of Iranian involvement. During a recent sweep through a stronghold of Sunni insurgents here, a single Iranian machine gun turned up among dozens of arms caches U.S. troops uncovered. British officials have similarly accused Iran of meddling in Iraqi affairs, but say they have not found Iranian-made weapons in areas they patrol.
The lack of publicly disclosed evidence has led to questions about whether the administration is overstating its case. Some suggest Bush and his aides are pointing to Iran to deflect blame for U.S. setbacks in Iraq. Others suggest they are laying the foundation for a military strike against Iran.
Before invading Iraq, the administration warned repeatedly that Saddam Hussein was developing nuclear, chemical and biological weapons. Those statements proved wrong. The administration's charges about Iran sound uncomfortably familiar to some. "To be quite honest, I'm a little concerned that it's Iraq again," Sen. John D. Rockefeller IV, head of the Senate Intelligence Committee, said last week, referring to the administration's comments on Iran.
*
Lowered credibility
The accusations of Iranian meddling "illustrate what may be one of our greatest problems," said Anthony Cordesman, a former Defense Department official and military expert at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington.
"We are still making arguments from authority without detail and explanation. We're making them in an America and in a world where we really don't have anything like the credibility we've had in the past."
Few doubt that Iran is seeking to extend its influence in Iraq. But the groups in Iraq that have received the most Iranian support are not those that have led attacks against U.S. forces. Instead, they are nominal U.S. allies.
The Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq, one of the two largest parties in parliament, is believed to be the biggest beneficiary of Iranian help. The Shiite group was based in Iran during Hussein's reign, and Iran's Revolutionary Guard trained and equipped its Badr Brigade militia.
But the Supreme Council also has strong U.S. connections. Bush played host to the head of the party, Abdelaziz Hakim, at the White House in December, and administration officials have frequently cited Adel Abdul Mehdi, another party leader, as a person they would like to see as Iraq's prime minister.
The Islamic Dawa Party of Iraq's current prime minister, Nouri Maliki, also has strong ties to Iran.
Some U.S. officials have also suggested that Iran, a Shiite theocracy, has provided aid to the Sunni insurgents, who have led most of the attacks against U.S. forces. Private analysts and other U.S. officials doubt that. Evidence is stronger that the Iranians are supporting a Shiite group that has attacked U.S. forces, the Al Mahdi militia, which is loyal to radical cleric Muqtada Sadr.
Top U.S. intelligence officials have been making increasingly confident assertions about Iran.
"I've come to a much darker interpretation of Iranian actions in the past 12 to 18 months," CIA Director Michael V. Hayden said in recent congressional testimony. Previously, Tehran's priority was to maneuver for a stable Iraq dominated by its Shiite majority, but that attitude has changed, he said.
"There is a clear line of evidence that points out the Iranians want to punish the United States, hurt the United States in Iraq, tie down the United States in Iraq," he said.
One high-ranking intelligence official in Washington acknowledged a lack of "fidelity" in the intelligence on Iran's activities, saying reports are sometimes unclear because it is difficult to track weapons and personnel that might be flowing across the long and porous border.
But U.S. forces have picked up specially shaped charges used to make roadside bombs capable of penetrating advanced armor, he said, with markings that could be traced to Iran and dates that were recent. The markings have been found on the devices themselves or the crates in which they were smuggled into the country, he said.
"Two years ago we were debating whether this was really happening," the official said. "Now the debate is over."
*
Documents withheld
U.S. officials have declined to provide documentation of seized Iranian ordnance despite repeated requests. The U.S. military often releases photographs of other weapons finds.
British government officials, including Prime Minister Tony Blair, have also accused Iran of supplying advanced explosive devices to Iraq.
Blair said a year ago that the weapons bore the hallmarks of Iran or Hezbollah, the Iranian-backed militia in Lebanon. But British officers stationed in Iraq at the time said they had seized no such weapons in the districts for which they had responsibility.
"We do have intelligence which suggests that weapons and ammunition are being smuggled in from Iran," Maj. David Gell, a spokesman for British forces in Basra, said last week. "We don't always manage to find any."
U.S. military officials in Diyala have had the same experience. No munitions or personnel have been seized at the border, officers said.
Sutherland, the U.S. colonel who oversees Diyala, believes that Tehran is prepared to work with any group, Shiite or Sunni, that can tie up U.S. forces. But State Department and intelligence officials have privately expressed doubts that Iranians are helping Sunnis.
Sunni insurgents in Diyala don't appear to need outside suppliers. They exploit massive weapons stashes containing materiel dating back to the Iran-Iraq war, when Hussein had a major military base in the area. U.S. military officials say they have found the type of shaped charges they attribute to Iran and Hezbollah in majority-Shiite parts of the province.
Outside military analysts have questioned how many of these sorts of weapons actually come from Iran. The technology used to make them is simple and widely known in the Middle East, they note. Iran is a likely source for some of the more sophisticated devices, but other countries could also be pitching in.
"A lot of rather sophisticated weapons have actually been released by Syria," said Peter Felstead, editor of the London-based Jane's Defense Weekly.
Others note that smugglers could be bringing weapons across the border from Iran without government approval.
*
'They are significant'
A second high-ranking U.S. intelligence official in Washington acknowledged that only a "small percentage" of explosions in Iraq could be linked to shaped charges coming from Iran.
"But in terms of American casualties, they are significant," he said, because they are much more lethal than standard roadside bombs.
A senior U.S. military intelligence official said coalition forces in Iraq had also found shaped charges "in the presence of Iranians captured in the country." He declined to elaborate but noted that U.S. operatives who raided an Iranian office in the Iraqi city of Irbil this month captured documents and computer drives he called a "treasure trove" on Iran's "networks, supply lines, sourcing and funding."
Five Iranians were taken into custody in the raid, prompting angry protests from the Iraqi government.
U.S. intelligence officials emphasized that Iran intentionally stops short of steps that would be seen as direct provocation and provide justification for a military response. For example, Iran has refrained from supplying Shiite militias with surface-to-air missiles and other weaponry that was part of Hezbollah's arsenal in its fight with Israel last summer, they said.
A high-ranking U.S. intelligence official called it a "careful calibration" that probably reflected disagreements within the Islamic regime. "I don't doubt that Iranian national security council meetings are very contentious," the official said.
-----------------------------
Citation: Alexandra Zavis and Greg Miller. "Scant evidence found of Iran-Iraq arms link," Los Angeles Times, 23 January 2007.
Original URL: http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/iraq/complete/la-fg-iraniraq23jan23,1,1462839.story?coll=la-iraq-complete
-----------------------------
By Alexandra Zavis and Greg Miller
Los Angeles Times, 23 January 2007
BAQUBAH, IRAQ — If there is anywhere Iran could easily stir up trouble in Iraq, it would be in Diyala, a rugged province along the border between the two nations.
The combination of Sunni Arab militants believed to be affiliated with Al Qaeda and Shiite Muslim militiamen with ties to Iran has fueled waves of sectarian and political violence here. The province is bisected by long-traveled routes leading from Iran to Baghdad and Shiite holy cities farther south in Iraq.
But even here, evidence of Iranian involvement in Iraq's troubles is limited. U.S. troops have found mortars and antitank mines with Iranian markings dated 2006, said U.S. Army Col. David W. Sutherland, who oversees the province. But there has been little sign of more advanced weaponry crossing the border, and no Iranian agents have been found.
In his speech this month outlining the new U.S. strategy in Iraq, President Bush promised to "seek out and destroy" Iranian networks that he said were providing "advanced weaponry and training to our enemies." He is expected to strike a similar note in tonight's State of the Union speech.
For all the aggressive rhetoric, however, the Bush administration has provided scant evidence to support these claims. Nor have reporters traveling with U.S. troops seen extensive signs of Iranian involvement. During a recent sweep through a stronghold of Sunni insurgents here, a single Iranian machine gun turned up among dozens of arms caches U.S. troops uncovered. British officials have similarly accused Iran of meddling in Iraqi affairs, but say they have not found Iranian-made weapons in areas they patrol.
The lack of publicly disclosed evidence has led to questions about whether the administration is overstating its case. Some suggest Bush and his aides are pointing to Iran to deflect blame for U.S. setbacks in Iraq. Others suggest they are laying the foundation for a military strike against Iran.
Before invading Iraq, the administration warned repeatedly that Saddam Hussein was developing nuclear, chemical and biological weapons. Those statements proved wrong. The administration's charges about Iran sound uncomfortably familiar to some. "To be quite honest, I'm a little concerned that it's Iraq again," Sen. John D. Rockefeller IV, head of the Senate Intelligence Committee, said last week, referring to the administration's comments on Iran.
*
Lowered credibility
The accusations of Iranian meddling "illustrate what may be one of our greatest problems," said Anthony Cordesman, a former Defense Department official and military expert at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington.
"We are still making arguments from authority without detail and explanation. We're making them in an America and in a world where we really don't have anything like the credibility we've had in the past."
Few doubt that Iran is seeking to extend its influence in Iraq. But the groups in Iraq that have received the most Iranian support are not those that have led attacks against U.S. forces. Instead, they are nominal U.S. allies.
The Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq, one of the two largest parties in parliament, is believed to be the biggest beneficiary of Iranian help. The Shiite group was based in Iran during Hussein's reign, and Iran's Revolutionary Guard trained and equipped its Badr Brigade militia.
But the Supreme Council also has strong U.S. connections. Bush played host to the head of the party, Abdelaziz Hakim, at the White House in December, and administration officials have frequently cited Adel Abdul Mehdi, another party leader, as a person they would like to see as Iraq's prime minister.
The Islamic Dawa Party of Iraq's current prime minister, Nouri Maliki, also has strong ties to Iran.
Some U.S. officials have also suggested that Iran, a Shiite theocracy, has provided aid to the Sunni insurgents, who have led most of the attacks against U.S. forces. Private analysts and other U.S. officials doubt that. Evidence is stronger that the Iranians are supporting a Shiite group that has attacked U.S. forces, the Al Mahdi militia, which is loyal to radical cleric Muqtada Sadr.
Top U.S. intelligence officials have been making increasingly confident assertions about Iran.
"I've come to a much darker interpretation of Iranian actions in the past 12 to 18 months," CIA Director Michael V. Hayden said in recent congressional testimony. Previously, Tehran's priority was to maneuver for a stable Iraq dominated by its Shiite majority, but that attitude has changed, he said.
"There is a clear line of evidence that points out the Iranians want to punish the United States, hurt the United States in Iraq, tie down the United States in Iraq," he said.
One high-ranking intelligence official in Washington acknowledged a lack of "fidelity" in the intelligence on Iran's activities, saying reports are sometimes unclear because it is difficult to track weapons and personnel that might be flowing across the long and porous border.
But U.S. forces have picked up specially shaped charges used to make roadside bombs capable of penetrating advanced armor, he said, with markings that could be traced to Iran and dates that were recent. The markings have been found on the devices themselves or the crates in which they were smuggled into the country, he said.
"Two years ago we were debating whether this was really happening," the official said. "Now the debate is over."
*
Documents withheld
U.S. officials have declined to provide documentation of seized Iranian ordnance despite repeated requests. The U.S. military often releases photographs of other weapons finds.
British government officials, including Prime Minister Tony Blair, have also accused Iran of supplying advanced explosive devices to Iraq.
Blair said a year ago that the weapons bore the hallmarks of Iran or Hezbollah, the Iranian-backed militia in Lebanon. But British officers stationed in Iraq at the time said they had seized no such weapons in the districts for which they had responsibility.
"We do have intelligence which suggests that weapons and ammunition are being smuggled in from Iran," Maj. David Gell, a spokesman for British forces in Basra, said last week. "We don't always manage to find any."
U.S. military officials in Diyala have had the same experience. No munitions or personnel have been seized at the border, officers said.
Sutherland, the U.S. colonel who oversees Diyala, believes that Tehran is prepared to work with any group, Shiite or Sunni, that can tie up U.S. forces. But State Department and intelligence officials have privately expressed doubts that Iranians are helping Sunnis.
Sunni insurgents in Diyala don't appear to need outside suppliers. They exploit massive weapons stashes containing materiel dating back to the Iran-Iraq war, when Hussein had a major military base in the area. U.S. military officials say they have found the type of shaped charges they attribute to Iran and Hezbollah in majority-Shiite parts of the province.
Outside military analysts have questioned how many of these sorts of weapons actually come from Iran. The technology used to make them is simple and widely known in the Middle East, they note. Iran is a likely source for some of the more sophisticated devices, but other countries could also be pitching in.
"A lot of rather sophisticated weapons have actually been released by Syria," said Peter Felstead, editor of the London-based Jane's Defense Weekly.
Others note that smugglers could be bringing weapons across the border from Iran without government approval.
*
'They are significant'
A second high-ranking U.S. intelligence official in Washington acknowledged that only a "small percentage" of explosions in Iraq could be linked to shaped charges coming from Iran.
"But in terms of American casualties, they are significant," he said, because they are much more lethal than standard roadside bombs.
A senior U.S. military intelligence official said coalition forces in Iraq had also found shaped charges "in the presence of Iranians captured in the country." He declined to elaborate but noted that U.S. operatives who raided an Iranian office in the Iraqi city of Irbil this month captured documents and computer drives he called a "treasure trove" on Iran's "networks, supply lines, sourcing and funding."
Five Iranians were taken into custody in the raid, prompting angry protests from the Iraqi government.
U.S. intelligence officials emphasized that Iran intentionally stops short of steps that would be seen as direct provocation and provide justification for a military response. For example, Iran has refrained from supplying Shiite militias with surface-to-air missiles and other weaponry that was part of Hezbollah's arsenal in its fight with Israel last summer, they said.
A high-ranking U.S. intelligence official called it a "careful calibration" that probably reflected disagreements within the Islamic regime. "I don't doubt that Iranian national security council meetings are very contentious," the official said.
-----------------------------
Citation: Alexandra Zavis and Greg Miller. "Scant evidence found of Iran-Iraq arms link," Los Angeles Times, 23 January 2007.
Original URL: http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/iraq/complete/la-fg-iraniraq23jan23,1,1462839.story?coll=la-iraq-complete
-----------------------------
Daily body count in Baghdad falls
U.S. forces attribute the decrease to greater pressure on insurgents and militias, but others aren't sure trend is real.
By Borzou Daragahi
Los Angeles Times, 24 January 2007
BAGHDAD — Iraqi authorities found 19 bodies of young men scattered around Baghdad on Tuesday, a sharp drop from the scores found each day several weeks ago. The reported daily body count for the last week or so has hovered around 30 or lower.
The bodies of late also have not shown signs of torture often associated with Shiite Muslim militias, morgue and hospital officials say.
Officials cautioned that the casualty figures were preliminary and sketchy. Previous drops in Baghdad violence have been followed by upsurges.
U.S. and Iraqi officials hope an increase in the number of American troops, political pressure and aggressive new tactics to protect Baghdad neighborhoods can reduce the level of violence in the capital and pave the way for political reconciliation and an end to the country's undeclared sectarian civil war. In recent days, additional U.S. troops have begun to be deployed in certain volatile neighborhoods.
U.S. military officials in the capital's tumultuous northern district of Adhamiya confirmed the statistical drop shown in morgue and police casualty figures collected daily by the Los Angeles Times.
"During the last two weeks, Task Force 1-26 has seen a decrease in found dead bodies in Adhamiya," said Army Capt. Jared Purcell, spokesman for a Taji-based unit that patrols parts of northeastern Baghdad.
Purcell attributed the decline, which he said was in keeping with The Times' estimate of a 50% drop, to stepped-up pressure on cells of Sunni Arab insurgents and Shiite militiamen, including raids against high-level insurgents. Political pressure and aggressive patrols by the U.S. military and the Iraqi police and army are also factors, he said.
Some observers speculated that the drop in the number of bodies bearing marks of torture indicated a decline in Shiite militia activity, but Purcell said the decrease was not necessarily attributable to Shiite groups lying low.
"In our area of operations there are both Sunni and Shia terrorist groups," he said in an e-mail.
Still, violence continued across Iraq on Tuesday, with at least two U.S. military personnel and 56 Iraqis reported killed. And five Western security officers employed by Blackwater USA were killed in a helicopter crash in a residential neighborhood in east-central Baghdad amid reports of ground fire, officials and witnesses said.
The military said no U.S. forces were involved in the crash, but North Carolina-based Blackwater said the five employees, all American citizens, were killed while working on behalf of the U.S. government. Private security contractors sometimes dispatch small helicopters to accompany vehicle convoys throughout the country.
The incident apparently was the second in which an aircraft was forced down in Iraq in less than a week — the first being Saturday's crash of a Black Hawk helicopter northeast of Baghdad, which killed all 12 U.S. soldiers aboard. An American official in Washington said initial evidence suggested that helicopter was downed by ground fire.
Official word of Tuesday's incident coincided with reports that a chopper had been fired upon while flying low over a Sunni district.
Witnesses said authorities sealed off the area, known as Fadhil. They also reported hearing heavy gunfire and helicopters scouring the district after the apparent crash.
The U.S. military, meanwhile, reported the combat deaths of two service members.
A Marine assigned to the 1st Marine Expeditionary Force died Sunday of wounds from enemy action south of Baghdad. A U.S. soldier assigned to Regimental Combat Team 5 died Monday of wounds from enemy action while operating in Al Anbar province.
The deaths brought to 3,060 the total number of American military fatalities in the Iraq theater since the 2003 U.S.-led invasion, according to icasualties.org.
At least two British soldiers were injured when a Katyusha rocket struck their base in the southern city of Basra, a spokeswoman there said.
Bombings, shootings and rocket fire roiled a wide swath of the country.
In Baghdad, a day after a pair of car bombs killed 88 people in a crowded market, at least nine bomb blasts targeting official vehicle convoys and civilians shook the city, killing 11 people and injuring 36, many of them severely. Among those killed was Diya Meqoter, a business school professor who starred on a popular reality television show in which entrepreneurs received small loans to start businesses.
South of the capital in the religiously mixed province of Babil, gunmen killed a suspected former member of Saddam Hussein's Baath Party and a contractor working for the U.S. military.
Police also discovered the body of a police officer inside an explosives-packed vehicle, a booby trap apparently meant to kill responding officers.
Mortar shells struck various locations in Babil, killing 10 people and injuring six, many of them huddled in a tent during a pilgrimage to Karbala for the annual festival commemorating the martyrdom of Imam Hussein, a revered Shiite saint.
An Iraqi hospital official in Ramadi, Ahmed Jassem, said that at least 10 Iraqis were killed and 13 injured during apparent fighting between U.S. troops and insurgents in the war-torn capital of the western province of Al Anbar. The account could not be confirmed. The U.S. military said it killed nine insurgents and wounded another nine in various clashes with armed men in the city.
Violence also erupted in Iraq's north. In Kirkuk, capital of an oil-rich province claimed by Iraq's Kurds, Sunni Arabs and Turkmens, at least two Iraqis were killed and eight injured in insurgent violence.
Clashes broke out overnight between insurgents and police officers in the mostly Sunni Arab city of Mosul, leaving at least five officers dead and three wounded.
-----------------------------
Citation: Borzou Daragahi. "Daily body count in Baghdad falls," Los Angeles Times, 24 January 2007.
Original URL: http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/iraq/complete/la-fg-iraq24jan24,1,4395827.story?coll=la-iraq-complete
-----------------------------
By Borzou Daragahi
Los Angeles Times, 24 January 2007
BAGHDAD — Iraqi authorities found 19 bodies of young men scattered around Baghdad on Tuesday, a sharp drop from the scores found each day several weeks ago. The reported daily body count for the last week or so has hovered around 30 or lower.
The bodies of late also have not shown signs of torture often associated with Shiite Muslim militias, morgue and hospital officials say.
Officials cautioned that the casualty figures were preliminary and sketchy. Previous drops in Baghdad violence have been followed by upsurges.
U.S. and Iraqi officials hope an increase in the number of American troops, political pressure and aggressive new tactics to protect Baghdad neighborhoods can reduce the level of violence in the capital and pave the way for political reconciliation and an end to the country's undeclared sectarian civil war. In recent days, additional U.S. troops have begun to be deployed in certain volatile neighborhoods.
U.S. military officials in the capital's tumultuous northern district of Adhamiya confirmed the statistical drop shown in morgue and police casualty figures collected daily by the Los Angeles Times.
"During the last two weeks, Task Force 1-26 has seen a decrease in found dead bodies in Adhamiya," said Army Capt. Jared Purcell, spokesman for a Taji-based unit that patrols parts of northeastern Baghdad.
Purcell attributed the decline, which he said was in keeping with The Times' estimate of a 50% drop, to stepped-up pressure on cells of Sunni Arab insurgents and Shiite militiamen, including raids against high-level insurgents. Political pressure and aggressive patrols by the U.S. military and the Iraqi police and army are also factors, he said.
Some observers speculated that the drop in the number of bodies bearing marks of torture indicated a decline in Shiite militia activity, but Purcell said the decrease was not necessarily attributable to Shiite groups lying low.
"In our area of operations there are both Sunni and Shia terrorist groups," he said in an e-mail.
Still, violence continued across Iraq on Tuesday, with at least two U.S. military personnel and 56 Iraqis reported killed. And five Western security officers employed by Blackwater USA were killed in a helicopter crash in a residential neighborhood in east-central Baghdad amid reports of ground fire, officials and witnesses said.
The military said no U.S. forces were involved in the crash, but North Carolina-based Blackwater said the five employees, all American citizens, were killed while working on behalf of the U.S. government. Private security contractors sometimes dispatch small helicopters to accompany vehicle convoys throughout the country.
The incident apparently was the second in which an aircraft was forced down in Iraq in less than a week — the first being Saturday's crash of a Black Hawk helicopter northeast of Baghdad, which killed all 12 U.S. soldiers aboard. An American official in Washington said initial evidence suggested that helicopter was downed by ground fire.
Official word of Tuesday's incident coincided with reports that a chopper had been fired upon while flying low over a Sunni district.
Witnesses said authorities sealed off the area, known as Fadhil. They also reported hearing heavy gunfire and helicopters scouring the district after the apparent crash.
The U.S. military, meanwhile, reported the combat deaths of two service members.
A Marine assigned to the 1st Marine Expeditionary Force died Sunday of wounds from enemy action south of Baghdad. A U.S. soldier assigned to Regimental Combat Team 5 died Monday of wounds from enemy action while operating in Al Anbar province.
The deaths brought to 3,060 the total number of American military fatalities in the Iraq theater since the 2003 U.S.-led invasion, according to icasualties.org.
At least two British soldiers were injured when a Katyusha rocket struck their base in the southern city of Basra, a spokeswoman there said.
Bombings, shootings and rocket fire roiled a wide swath of the country.
In Baghdad, a day after a pair of car bombs killed 88 people in a crowded market, at least nine bomb blasts targeting official vehicle convoys and civilians shook the city, killing 11 people and injuring 36, many of them severely. Among those killed was Diya Meqoter, a business school professor who starred on a popular reality television show in which entrepreneurs received small loans to start businesses.
South of the capital in the religiously mixed province of Babil, gunmen killed a suspected former member of Saddam Hussein's Baath Party and a contractor working for the U.S. military.
Police also discovered the body of a police officer inside an explosives-packed vehicle, a booby trap apparently meant to kill responding officers.
Mortar shells struck various locations in Babil, killing 10 people and injuring six, many of them huddled in a tent during a pilgrimage to Karbala for the annual festival commemorating the martyrdom of Imam Hussein, a revered Shiite saint.
An Iraqi hospital official in Ramadi, Ahmed Jassem, said that at least 10 Iraqis were killed and 13 injured during apparent fighting between U.S. troops and insurgents in the war-torn capital of the western province of Al Anbar. The account could not be confirmed. The U.S. military said it killed nine insurgents and wounded another nine in various clashes with armed men in the city.
Violence also erupted in Iraq's north. In Kirkuk, capital of an oil-rich province claimed by Iraq's Kurds, Sunni Arabs and Turkmens, at least two Iraqis were killed and eight injured in insurgent violence.
Clashes broke out overnight between insurgents and police officers in the mostly Sunni Arab city of Mosul, leaving at least five officers dead and three wounded.
-----------------------------
Citation: Borzou Daragahi. "Daily body count in Baghdad falls," Los Angeles Times, 24 January 2007.
Original URL: http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/iraq/complete/la-fg-iraq24jan24,1,4395827.story?coll=la-iraq-complete
-----------------------------
23 January 2007
Chronology - The deadliest bomb attacks in Iraq
Reuters, 22 January 2007
Two simultaneous car bombs blasted a busy market in central Baghdad on Monday, killing at least 75 people, Iraqi police said.
Here is a list of some of the deadliest bomb attacks in Iraq since the overthrow of Saddam Hussein in 2003:
Aug. 19, 2003 - A truck bomb wrecks U.N. headquarters in Baghdad, killing 22 people, including U.N. envoy Sergio Vieira de Mello.
Aug. 29, 2003 - A car bomb kills at least 83 people, including top Shi'ite Muslim leader Ayatollah Mohammed Baqer al-Hakim, at the Imam Ali mosque in Najaf.
Feb. 1, 2004 - 117 people are killed when two suicide bombers blow themselves up in Arbil at the offices of the two main Kurdish factions in northern Iraq.
Feb. 10, 2004 - Suicide car bomb rips through a police station in Iskandariya, south of Baghdad, killing 53.
Feb. 11, 2004 - Suicide car bomb explodes at an Iraqi army recruitment centre in Baghdad, killing 47.
March 2, 2004 - 171 people are killed in twin attacks in Baghdad and Kerbala.
Dec. 19, 2004 - A suicide car bomb blast in Najaf, 300 metres from the Imam Ali shrine, kills 52 and wounds 140.
Feb. 28, 2005 - A suicide car bomb attack in Hilla, south of Baghdad, kills 125 people and wounds 130. It was postwar Iraq's worst single blast.
July 16, 2005 - A suicide bomber in a fuel truck near a Shi'ite mosque in the town of Mussayib, near Kerbala, kills 98.
Sept. 14, 2005 - A suicide bomber kills 114 people and wounds 156 in a Shi'ite district of Baghdad.
Sept. 29, 2005 - 98 people are killed in three coordinated car bomb attacks in the mixed Shi'ite and Sunni town of Balad.
Nov. 18, 2005 - At least 74 people are killed and 150 wounded when suicide bombers blow themselves up inside two Shi'ite mosques in Khanaqin.
Jan. 5, 2006 - Two suicide bombers kill over 120 people and wound more than 200 in the cities of Kerbala and Ramadi. Fifty-three were killed and 148 wounded in Kerbala and 70 killed and 65 wounded in Ramadi.
July 1, 2006 - A car bomb attack at a crowded market in Sadr city, a Shi'ite district of eastern Baghdad, kills 62 and wounds 114. The Supporters of the Sunni People, a previously unknown Iraqi Sunni Muslim group claim responsibility.
July 18, 2006 - Fifty-nine people are killed by a suicide bomb in Kufa, near Najaf, in an attack claimed by al Qaeda.
Aug. 10, 2006 - Thirty-five people are killed and 90 injured by bomb blasts near the Imam Ali shrine in southern city of Najaf. The Jamaat Jund al-Sahaba (Soldiers of the Prophet's Companions) group claims responsibility.
Nov. 23, 2006 - Six car bombs in different parts of the Sadr City neighbourhood of Baghdad kill 202 people and wound 250.
Dec. 12, 2006 - A suicide bomber kills 70 people and wounds at least 236 in Tayran Square, in central Baghdad after luring a crowd of labourers to his vehicle with promises of work.
Jan. 16, 2007 - A car bomb and suicide bomber strikes the Mustansiriya University in central Baghdad killing at least 70 people and wounding 180.
Jan. 22, 2007 - A double car bombing at a second-hand goods market in Bab al-Sharji, a busy commercial area in central Baghdad, kills 75 people and wounds 170.
--------------------------------
Citation: "Chronology - The deadliest bomb attacks in Iraq," Reuters, 22 January 2007.
Original URL: http://www.alertnet.org/thenews/newsdesk/L22774903.htm
--------------------------------
Two simultaneous car bombs blasted a busy market in central Baghdad on Monday, killing at least 75 people, Iraqi police said.
Here is a list of some of the deadliest bomb attacks in Iraq since the overthrow of Saddam Hussein in 2003:
Aug. 19, 2003 - A truck bomb wrecks U.N. headquarters in Baghdad, killing 22 people, including U.N. envoy Sergio Vieira de Mello.
Aug. 29, 2003 - A car bomb kills at least 83 people, including top Shi'ite Muslim leader Ayatollah Mohammed Baqer al-Hakim, at the Imam Ali mosque in Najaf.
Feb. 1, 2004 - 117 people are killed when two suicide bombers blow themselves up in Arbil at the offices of the two main Kurdish factions in northern Iraq.
Feb. 10, 2004 - Suicide car bomb rips through a police station in Iskandariya, south of Baghdad, killing 53.
Feb. 11, 2004 - Suicide car bomb explodes at an Iraqi army recruitment centre in Baghdad, killing 47.
March 2, 2004 - 171 people are killed in twin attacks in Baghdad and Kerbala.
Dec. 19, 2004 - A suicide car bomb blast in Najaf, 300 metres from the Imam Ali shrine, kills 52 and wounds 140.
Feb. 28, 2005 - A suicide car bomb attack in Hilla, south of Baghdad, kills 125 people and wounds 130. It was postwar Iraq's worst single blast.
July 16, 2005 - A suicide bomber in a fuel truck near a Shi'ite mosque in the town of Mussayib, near Kerbala, kills 98.
Sept. 14, 2005 - A suicide bomber kills 114 people and wounds 156 in a Shi'ite district of Baghdad.
Sept. 29, 2005 - 98 people are killed in three coordinated car bomb attacks in the mixed Shi'ite and Sunni town of Balad.
Nov. 18, 2005 - At least 74 people are killed and 150 wounded when suicide bombers blow themselves up inside two Shi'ite mosques in Khanaqin.
Jan. 5, 2006 - Two suicide bombers kill over 120 people and wound more than 200 in the cities of Kerbala and Ramadi. Fifty-three were killed and 148 wounded in Kerbala and 70 killed and 65 wounded in Ramadi.
July 1, 2006 - A car bomb attack at a crowded market in Sadr city, a Shi'ite district of eastern Baghdad, kills 62 and wounds 114. The Supporters of the Sunni People, a previously unknown Iraqi Sunni Muslim group claim responsibility.
July 18, 2006 - Fifty-nine people are killed by a suicide bomb in Kufa, near Najaf, in an attack claimed by al Qaeda.
Aug. 10, 2006 - Thirty-five people are killed and 90 injured by bomb blasts near the Imam Ali shrine in southern city of Najaf. The Jamaat Jund al-Sahaba (Soldiers of the Prophet's Companions) group claims responsibility.
Nov. 23, 2006 - Six car bombs in different parts of the Sadr City neighbourhood of Baghdad kill 202 people and wound 250.
Dec. 12, 2006 - A suicide bomber kills 70 people and wounds at least 236 in Tayran Square, in central Baghdad after luring a crowd of labourers to his vehicle with promises of work.
Jan. 16, 2007 - A car bomb and suicide bomber strikes the Mustansiriya University in central Baghdad killing at least 70 people and wounding 180.
Jan. 22, 2007 - A double car bombing at a second-hand goods market in Bab al-Sharji, a busy commercial area in central Baghdad, kills 75 people and wounds 170.
--------------------------------
Citation: "Chronology - The deadliest bomb attacks in Iraq," Reuters, 22 January 2007.
Original URL: http://www.alertnet.org/thenews/newsdesk/L22774903.htm
--------------------------------
22 January 2007
Afghanistan's Taliban say to open schools
Reuters, 21 January 2007
KABUL - Afghanistan's Taliban insurgents say they are going to spend $1 million on opening schools in areas they control to counter the propaganda of the West and the Western-backed government.
The Taliban banned girls from education during their rule, and have attacked hundreds of schools and killed some teachers and pupils in recent years as part of their war against the government and its Western backers.
"The aims are to reopen schools so children who are deprived can benefit and secondly, to counter the propaganda of the West and its puppets against Islam, jihad and the Taliban," a Taliban spokesman, Abdul Hai Mutmaen, said by telephone from an undisclosed location.
The Taliban refer to the government of President Hamid Karzai as puppets.
"Students will be taught subjects that are in line with Islamic teaching and jihad," he said late on Saturday.
The schools will be opened from March in 14 districts, he said. It was not clear if they would be open to boys and girls, or just boys.
Progress has been made in education since the Taliban were ousted in 2001 and up to six million Afghan children are back in class although many who should be going are not.
About half of all Afghan girls of primary school age are not going to classes, partly because parents fear for their safety, the U.N. Children's Fund (UNICEF) said last year.
Hundreds of schools, particularly in the volatile south and east, have closed, either because they were attacked or because teachers fear attacks.
Analysts say the Taliban target schools to convince Afghans the government can't protect them and can't control the country. In many areas, schools are the only symbol of government authority.
The government and UNICEF have set up a special task force to fight the problem, focusing on better surveillance, special monitoring teams and encouraging communities and parents to pass on information and help reopen damaged or destroyed schools.
The Taliban operate across large parts of the Afghan south and east but they have been unable to hold or administer any significant territory if challenged by NATO and U.S. forces.
-------------------------------
Citation: "Afghanistan's Taliban say to open schools," Reuters, 21 January 2007.
Original URL: http://in.today.reuters.com/news/newsArticle.aspx?type=worldNews&storyID=2007-01-21T141645Z_01_NOOTR_RTRJONC_0_India-284456-1.xml&archived=False
-------------------------------
KABUL - Afghanistan's Taliban insurgents say they are going to spend $1 million on opening schools in areas they control to counter the propaganda of the West and the Western-backed government.
The Taliban banned girls from education during their rule, and have attacked hundreds of schools and killed some teachers and pupils in recent years as part of their war against the government and its Western backers.
"The aims are to reopen schools so children who are deprived can benefit and secondly, to counter the propaganda of the West and its puppets against Islam, jihad and the Taliban," a Taliban spokesman, Abdul Hai Mutmaen, said by telephone from an undisclosed location.
The Taliban refer to the government of President Hamid Karzai as puppets.
"Students will be taught subjects that are in line with Islamic teaching and jihad," he said late on Saturday.
The schools will be opened from March in 14 districts, he said. It was not clear if they would be open to boys and girls, or just boys.
Progress has been made in education since the Taliban were ousted in 2001 and up to six million Afghan children are back in class although many who should be going are not.
About half of all Afghan girls of primary school age are not going to classes, partly because parents fear for their safety, the U.N. Children's Fund (UNICEF) said last year.
Hundreds of schools, particularly in the volatile south and east, have closed, either because they were attacked or because teachers fear attacks.
Analysts say the Taliban target schools to convince Afghans the government can't protect them and can't control the country. In many areas, schools are the only symbol of government authority.
The government and UNICEF have set up a special task force to fight the problem, focusing on better surveillance, special monitoring teams and encouraging communities and parents to pass on information and help reopen damaged or destroyed schools.
The Taliban operate across large parts of the Afghan south and east but they have been unable to hold or administer any significant territory if challenged by NATO and U.S. forces.
-------------------------------
Citation: "Afghanistan's Taliban say to open schools," Reuters, 21 January 2007.
Original URL: http://in.today.reuters.com/news/newsArticle.aspx?type=worldNews&storyID=2007-01-21T141645Z_01_NOOTR_RTRJONC_0_India-284456-1.xml&archived=False
-------------------------------
Burdened U.S. military cuts role in drug war
Air and sea patrolling is slashed on southern smuggling routes.
By Josh Meyer
Los Angeles Times, 22 January 2007
WASHINGTON — Stretched thin from fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan, the U.S. military has sharply reduced its role in the war on drugs, leaving significant gaps in the nation's narcotics interdiction efforts.
Since 1989, Congress has directed the Pentagon to be the lead federal agency in detecting and monitoring illegal narcotics shipments headed to the United States by air and sea and in supporting Coast Guard efforts to intercept them. In the early 1990s, at the height of the drug war, U.S. military planes and boats filled the southern skies and waters in search of cocaine-laden vessels coming from Colombia and elsewhere in South America.
But since 2002, the military has withdrawn many of those resources, according to more than a dozen current and former counter-narcotics officials, as well as a review of congressional, military and Homeland Security documents.
Internal records show that in the last four years the Pentagon has reduced by more than 62% its surveillance flight-hours over Caribbean and Pacific Ocean routes that are used to smuggle cocaine, marijuana and, increasingly, Colombian-produced heroin. At the same time, the Navy is deploying one-third fewer patrol boats in search of smugglers.
The Defense Department also plans to withdraw as many as 10 Black Hawk helicopters that have been used by a multi-agency task force to move quickly to make drug seizures and arrests in the Caribbean, a major hub for drugs heading to the United States.
And the military has deactivated many of the high-tech surveillance "aerostats," or radar balloons, that once guarded the entire southern border, saying it lacks the funds to restore and maintain them.
The Department of Defense defended its policy shift in a budget document sent to Congress in October: "The DOD position is that detecting drug trafficking is a lower priority than supporting our service members on ongoing combat missions."
Members of Congress and drug-control officials have said the Pentagon's cuts and redeployments have hamstrung the U.S. drug interdiction effort at a time when an estimated 1,000 metric tons of inexpensive, high-quality cocaine is entering the country each year.
It's hard to gauge the precise effect of the pullback because authorities say they only know the amount of narcotics they are seizing, not how much is getting through — especially with fewer surveillance planes and boats to gather intelligence.
In the budget report to Congress, the Pentagon estimated recently that it detected only 22% of the "actionable maritime events" in fiscal 2006 because it "lacks the optimal number of assets."
Even when they did detect suspected smuggling vessels, U.S. authorities had to let one in every five go because they lacked the resources to chase them, Pentagon officials conceded in their report.
"We have not stopped trying to fix that gap. We're very much concerned about it, and working very hard to try and fix these problems," Edward Frothingham III, acting deputy assistant Defense secretary for counter-narcotics, said in an interview. "DOD is in no way lessening our support" for the war on drugs, he said. "But in the post-9/11 world, some of these assets are needed elsewhere."
With Pentagon support dropping, the Coast Guard and other Homeland Security agencies such as U.S. Customs and Border Protection are trying to play a greater role in the interdiction effort. But current and former officials within those agencies say they do not have the resources to do the job because they, too, have had to dramatically redistribute resources since the sweeping post-Sept. 11 reorganization that made Homeland Security the front line in keeping terrorists out of the United States.
"I can't stand here and tell you drugs aren't coming into the U.S. by sea. It happens," said Cmdr. Jeff Carter, a Coast Guard spokesman. "There are huge challenges, but we are making a dent."
(The Justice Department, through the FBI and Drug Enforcement Administration, also has a central role in the drug war, but it is more focused on arresting narcotics traffickers in the U.S. than on interdiction.)
The cutbacks continue at a time when the Pentagon has officially reclassified the drug interdiction effort as part of the broader war on terrorism, citing intelligence showing growing ties among terrorists, drug dealers and organized-crime syndicates.
"In the post-9/11 world, where both securing and detecting threats to our nation's borders have become critical national security objectives, we cannot continue to neglect the fact that narco-traffickers are breaching our borders on a daily basis," according to a report that was quietly issued last month by the House Subcommittee on Criminal Justice, Drug Policy and Human Resources.
At a November 2005 hearing before another House subcommittee, Rep. Dan Burton (R-Ind.) said the lack of available military assets and the amount of drugs getting through "just boggled my mind."
"The spike in narcotics shipments via Central America we ignore at our own peril," said Burton, who at the time was chairman of the international relations subcommittee on the Western Hemisphere. "They could be carrying weapons, terrorists and other things that could destroy not only the youth of America, but American cities."
The weakening of the U.S. drug interdiction effort comes just as U.S. authorities have had some major successes in the drug war, led by the Pentagon's Joint Interagency Task Force-South, based on Key West, Fla. Authorities have seized increasing amounts of cocaine since 2001, including a record 300,000 pounds in 2005, although records show that seizures dropped off sharply in 2006, to 230,000 pounds.
Counter-narcotics officials, including some in the Pentagon, acknowledge that the large recent seizures are only masking more fundamental problems caused by the sharp decline in drug interdiction assets.
The recent successes were due in part to improved interagency cooperation and U.S. efforts to bolster the Colombian government's counter-narcotics program. They were also aided by a windfall of intelligence gained from a program known as Operation Panama Express, which allowed authorities to pinpoint major shipments of drugs, documents show. That intelligence has largely dried up as Colombian drug lords have tightened their operational security, making the Pentagon's detection and monitoring assets in the so-called transit zones ever more crucial, according to U.S. documents and officials.
"What you've had is a significant downsizing of the counter-narcotics effort in the transit zones, and that has very direct national security implications," said Robert B. Charles, assistant secretary of State for international narcotics and law enforcement affairs from 2003 to 2005. He said the loss of resources threatened to "consign future generations of young Americans to a deluge of cocaine and heroin."
Perhaps the most important link in the drug interdiction chain is the Pentagon's aerial patrols. Without them, a U.S. military ship can detect only about one out of every 10 suspected drug vessels (one out of five if the ship has a helicopter on board), according to statistics from the Joint Interagency Task Force-South. With the planes, whose radars can cover hundreds of miles, the military's odds improve to seven out of 10.
Department of Defense aerial patrol-hours in the transit zones declined from 6,062 hours in fiscal 2002 to a low of 1,432 in 2005. They rose to 2,296 in the most recent fiscal year, which ended in October, but since then, the Pentagon has grounded much of its fleet of P-3s for long stretches because of a lack of pilots, money for flying time or maintenance issues, documents show.
Military officials say the aerial surveillance situation is dire, and likely to get much worse. That's because most of the Pentagon's drug planes are Vietnam-era P-3s that were mothballed for years before being brought back into service for the drug war. Many of them have been redeployed to war zones or for use in counter-terrorism operations, Frothingham said. Those remaining have such severe wing corrosion that they're in the shop much of the time, U.S. documents and officials say. Many of them have no working radar. But their replacements won't be ready until at least 2012.
The Pentagon has also redirected other planes used to spot smugglers — including fighter jets and high-flying reconnaissance planes — toward other missions, and turned down requests to use unmanned drones in the drug war.
Things aren't much better at sea, where there is a continuing lack of Navy resources to intercept drug runners who are using "go fast" multi-engine boats that are often 40 feet long, travel at up to 40 knots, and can carry several tons of cocaine.
In the Eastern Pacific transit area, four U.S. ships are dedicated to patrolling an area larger than the continental United States.
Two years ago, U.S. authorities discovered that smugglers were easily avoiding military boats by navigating far into the eastern Pacific Ocean with the help of at-sea refueling vessels. In comparison, for every four days of patrol, U.S. military ships spend an average of eight days traveling to and from the transit zone to refuel, said Rear Adm. Jeffrey J. Hathaway, director of the JIATF-South.
Frothingham's tiny counter-narcotics office at the Pentagon is still looking for a solution because the department's leadership won't commit military tankers for the task. A senior Pentagon budget official said the British government recently pledged to provide a tanker in the Pacific, but only temporarily.
Homeland Security agencies, the Coast Guard in particular, have moved boats and planes to the region to intercept smugglers, but documents show that in most cases, the U.S. presence remains far below what it was before Sept. 11, 2001.
In May, the Pentagon decided to withdraw its Caribbean-based Black Hawk helicopters for use elsewhere.
The Justice Department protested, calling the helicopters a linchpin in the U.S. counter-drug effort because they ferried law enforcement agents among the thousands of islands that cocaine traffickers use as transshipment points.
That opposition has pushed back the withdrawal of the Black Hawks until October, but counter-narcotics officials say the larger problem is that no other agency has received funding to keep them operating.
As the U.S. fortifies its border with Mexico, counter-narcotics officials warn that smugglers could simply move east and penetrate the vast Gulf Coast.
In response to such threats, various U.S. agencies had for years been using radar-equipped tethered aerostats to provide continuous and long-range monitoring of smugglers by land, air and sea.
The Pentagon took over the Tethered Aerostat Radar System, or TARS, in 1992 and shut down three of the balloons in the Bahamas in 1994.
Then, in 2001 and 2002, it shut down three others in Texas, Louisiana and Florida, leaving virtually the entire Gulf Coast uncovered — from Florida to east Texas, and part of the Caribbean as well.
The Pentagon won't put the radar balloons back up because it believes the money is better spent elsewhere, Frothingham said.
In November 2005, the Government Accountability Office raised serious concerns about the shortcomings in the interdiction effort, and said it was particularly troubled by the lack of strategic planning by the Pentagon and Homeland Security to deal with a major redeployment of drug war assets that it believed would only get worse, not better.
The GAO, the independent investigative arm of Congress, requested that the Pentagon and Homeland Security Department devise comprehensive plans on how to maintain the drug interdiction effort with dramatically fewer resources.
More than a year later, the GAO's Jess T. Ford said in an interview that he had seen few signs of progress.
"If that trend continues," he said, "it just means we are going to miss more and more opportunities."
---------------------------
Citation: Josh Meyer. "Burdened U.S. military cuts role in drug war," Los Angeles Times, 22 January 2007.
Original URL: http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-drugwar22jan22,0,7593287.story?coll=la-home-headlines
---------------------------
By Josh Meyer
Los Angeles Times, 22 January 2007
WASHINGTON — Stretched thin from fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan, the U.S. military has sharply reduced its role in the war on drugs, leaving significant gaps in the nation's narcotics interdiction efforts.
Since 1989, Congress has directed the Pentagon to be the lead federal agency in detecting and monitoring illegal narcotics shipments headed to the United States by air and sea and in supporting Coast Guard efforts to intercept them. In the early 1990s, at the height of the drug war, U.S. military planes and boats filled the southern skies and waters in search of cocaine-laden vessels coming from Colombia and elsewhere in South America.
But since 2002, the military has withdrawn many of those resources, according to more than a dozen current and former counter-narcotics officials, as well as a review of congressional, military and Homeland Security documents.
Internal records show that in the last four years the Pentagon has reduced by more than 62% its surveillance flight-hours over Caribbean and Pacific Ocean routes that are used to smuggle cocaine, marijuana and, increasingly, Colombian-produced heroin. At the same time, the Navy is deploying one-third fewer patrol boats in search of smugglers.
The Defense Department also plans to withdraw as many as 10 Black Hawk helicopters that have been used by a multi-agency task force to move quickly to make drug seizures and arrests in the Caribbean, a major hub for drugs heading to the United States.
And the military has deactivated many of the high-tech surveillance "aerostats," or radar balloons, that once guarded the entire southern border, saying it lacks the funds to restore and maintain them.
The Department of Defense defended its policy shift in a budget document sent to Congress in October: "The DOD position is that detecting drug trafficking is a lower priority than supporting our service members on ongoing combat missions."
Members of Congress and drug-control officials have said the Pentagon's cuts and redeployments have hamstrung the U.S. drug interdiction effort at a time when an estimated 1,000 metric tons of inexpensive, high-quality cocaine is entering the country each year.
It's hard to gauge the precise effect of the pullback because authorities say they only know the amount of narcotics they are seizing, not how much is getting through — especially with fewer surveillance planes and boats to gather intelligence.
In the budget report to Congress, the Pentagon estimated recently that it detected only 22% of the "actionable maritime events" in fiscal 2006 because it "lacks the optimal number of assets."
Even when they did detect suspected smuggling vessels, U.S. authorities had to let one in every five go because they lacked the resources to chase them, Pentagon officials conceded in their report.
"We have not stopped trying to fix that gap. We're very much concerned about it, and working very hard to try and fix these problems," Edward Frothingham III, acting deputy assistant Defense secretary for counter-narcotics, said in an interview. "DOD is in no way lessening our support" for the war on drugs, he said. "But in the post-9/11 world, some of these assets are needed elsewhere."
With Pentagon support dropping, the Coast Guard and other Homeland Security agencies such as U.S. Customs and Border Protection are trying to play a greater role in the interdiction effort. But current and former officials within those agencies say they do not have the resources to do the job because they, too, have had to dramatically redistribute resources since the sweeping post-Sept. 11 reorganization that made Homeland Security the front line in keeping terrorists out of the United States.
"I can't stand here and tell you drugs aren't coming into the U.S. by sea. It happens," said Cmdr. Jeff Carter, a Coast Guard spokesman. "There are huge challenges, but we are making a dent."
(The Justice Department, through the FBI and Drug Enforcement Administration, also has a central role in the drug war, but it is more focused on arresting narcotics traffickers in the U.S. than on interdiction.)
The cutbacks continue at a time when the Pentagon has officially reclassified the drug interdiction effort as part of the broader war on terrorism, citing intelligence showing growing ties among terrorists, drug dealers and organized-crime syndicates.
"In the post-9/11 world, where both securing and detecting threats to our nation's borders have become critical national security objectives, we cannot continue to neglect the fact that narco-traffickers are breaching our borders on a daily basis," according to a report that was quietly issued last month by the House Subcommittee on Criminal Justice, Drug Policy and Human Resources.
At a November 2005 hearing before another House subcommittee, Rep. Dan Burton (R-Ind.) said the lack of available military assets and the amount of drugs getting through "just boggled my mind."
"The spike in narcotics shipments via Central America we ignore at our own peril," said Burton, who at the time was chairman of the international relations subcommittee on the Western Hemisphere. "They could be carrying weapons, terrorists and other things that could destroy not only the youth of America, but American cities."
The weakening of the U.S. drug interdiction effort comes just as U.S. authorities have had some major successes in the drug war, led by the Pentagon's Joint Interagency Task Force-South, based on Key West, Fla. Authorities have seized increasing amounts of cocaine since 2001, including a record 300,000 pounds in 2005, although records show that seizures dropped off sharply in 2006, to 230,000 pounds.
Counter-narcotics officials, including some in the Pentagon, acknowledge that the large recent seizures are only masking more fundamental problems caused by the sharp decline in drug interdiction assets.
The recent successes were due in part to improved interagency cooperation and U.S. efforts to bolster the Colombian government's counter-narcotics program. They were also aided by a windfall of intelligence gained from a program known as Operation Panama Express, which allowed authorities to pinpoint major shipments of drugs, documents show. That intelligence has largely dried up as Colombian drug lords have tightened their operational security, making the Pentagon's detection and monitoring assets in the so-called transit zones ever more crucial, according to U.S. documents and officials.
"What you've had is a significant downsizing of the counter-narcotics effort in the transit zones, and that has very direct national security implications," said Robert B. Charles, assistant secretary of State for international narcotics and law enforcement affairs from 2003 to 2005. He said the loss of resources threatened to "consign future generations of young Americans to a deluge of cocaine and heroin."
Perhaps the most important link in the drug interdiction chain is the Pentagon's aerial patrols. Without them, a U.S. military ship can detect only about one out of every 10 suspected drug vessels (one out of five if the ship has a helicopter on board), according to statistics from the Joint Interagency Task Force-South. With the planes, whose radars can cover hundreds of miles, the military's odds improve to seven out of 10.
Department of Defense aerial patrol-hours in the transit zones declined from 6,062 hours in fiscal 2002 to a low of 1,432 in 2005. They rose to 2,296 in the most recent fiscal year, which ended in October, but since then, the Pentagon has grounded much of its fleet of P-3s for long stretches because of a lack of pilots, money for flying time or maintenance issues, documents show.
Military officials say the aerial surveillance situation is dire, and likely to get much worse. That's because most of the Pentagon's drug planes are Vietnam-era P-3s that were mothballed for years before being brought back into service for the drug war. Many of them have been redeployed to war zones or for use in counter-terrorism operations, Frothingham said. Those remaining have such severe wing corrosion that they're in the shop much of the time, U.S. documents and officials say. Many of them have no working radar. But their replacements won't be ready until at least 2012.
The Pentagon has also redirected other planes used to spot smugglers — including fighter jets and high-flying reconnaissance planes — toward other missions, and turned down requests to use unmanned drones in the drug war.
Things aren't much better at sea, where there is a continuing lack of Navy resources to intercept drug runners who are using "go fast" multi-engine boats that are often 40 feet long, travel at up to 40 knots, and can carry several tons of cocaine.
In the Eastern Pacific transit area, four U.S. ships are dedicated to patrolling an area larger than the continental United States.
Two years ago, U.S. authorities discovered that smugglers were easily avoiding military boats by navigating far into the eastern Pacific Ocean with the help of at-sea refueling vessels. In comparison, for every four days of patrol, U.S. military ships spend an average of eight days traveling to and from the transit zone to refuel, said Rear Adm. Jeffrey J. Hathaway, director of the JIATF-South.
Frothingham's tiny counter-narcotics office at the Pentagon is still looking for a solution because the department's leadership won't commit military tankers for the task. A senior Pentagon budget official said the British government recently pledged to provide a tanker in the Pacific, but only temporarily.
Homeland Security agencies, the Coast Guard in particular, have moved boats and planes to the region to intercept smugglers, but documents show that in most cases, the U.S. presence remains far below what it was before Sept. 11, 2001.
In May, the Pentagon decided to withdraw its Caribbean-based Black Hawk helicopters for use elsewhere.
The Justice Department protested, calling the helicopters a linchpin in the U.S. counter-drug effort because they ferried law enforcement agents among the thousands of islands that cocaine traffickers use as transshipment points.
That opposition has pushed back the withdrawal of the Black Hawks until October, but counter-narcotics officials say the larger problem is that no other agency has received funding to keep them operating.
As the U.S. fortifies its border with Mexico, counter-narcotics officials warn that smugglers could simply move east and penetrate the vast Gulf Coast.
In response to such threats, various U.S. agencies had for years been using radar-equipped tethered aerostats to provide continuous and long-range monitoring of smugglers by land, air and sea.
The Pentagon took over the Tethered Aerostat Radar System, or TARS, in 1992 and shut down three of the balloons in the Bahamas in 1994.
Then, in 2001 and 2002, it shut down three others in Texas, Louisiana and Florida, leaving virtually the entire Gulf Coast uncovered — from Florida to east Texas, and part of the Caribbean as well.
The Pentagon won't put the radar balloons back up because it believes the money is better spent elsewhere, Frothingham said.
In November 2005, the Government Accountability Office raised serious concerns about the shortcomings in the interdiction effort, and said it was particularly troubled by the lack of strategic planning by the Pentagon and Homeland Security to deal with a major redeployment of drug war assets that it believed would only get worse, not better.
The GAO, the independent investigative arm of Congress, requested that the Pentagon and Homeland Security Department devise comprehensive plans on how to maintain the drug interdiction effort with dramatically fewer resources.
More than a year later, the GAO's Jess T. Ford said in an interview that he had seen few signs of progress.
"If that trend continues," he said, "it just means we are going to miss more and more opportunities."
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Citation: Josh Meyer. "Burdened U.S. military cuts role in drug war," Los Angeles Times, 22 January 2007.
Original URL: http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-drugwar22jan22,0,7593287.story?coll=la-home-headlines
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U.S. forces look to Iraqi city for progress
Mosul, which fell to insurgents briefly in 2004, is held up as an example of how Iraqi troops can take charge.
By Alexandra Zavis
Los Angeles Times, 22 January 2007
MOSUL, IRAQ — The date 11/11 is so ingrained in the memory of residents of this ancient citadel that it requires no further explanation than 9/11 would in the United States.
On Nov. 11, 2004, the city that had been heralded as an American success story fell to Sunni Arab insurgents and the local police melted away.
It took U.S.-led troops months of hard fighting to reclaim Mosul, a diverse city of about 2 million people wedged between the Kurdish north and Arab south, about 60 miles from the Syrian border.
More than two years later, U.S. officials are again touting the city as an example of progress in an intensified effort to train Iraqi forces to take over security so American troops can begin heading home.
Thousands of new police officers and soldiers have been recruited here and across northern Iraq. Their U.S. handlers say they are better trained, better equipped and more motivated than their predecessors, allowing American forces to reduce their presence in the six northern provinces by more than a third over the last year, to about 19,500.
The 2nd Iraqi Army Division assumed security control over Mosul on Dec. 22 and is expected to fall under the command of Iraqi ground forces today, completing a hand-over that is a cornerstone of the U.S. exit strategy in Iraq.
Still a violent place
Yet the city where former Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein's feared sons, Uday and Qusai, died in a gunfight with U.S. forces in 2003 is far from subdued. Bombings and mortar barrages rattle residents almost daily, and neighborhoods remain hotbeds of the Sunni Arab insurgency. Assassins have killed police officers, journalists, university professors, even a popular singer.
Senna Ahmed, a 27-year-old primary school teacher, said she had not taken her three children for a walk in more than a year. She lives in a predominantly Sunni neighborhood of drab concrete homes that is a focus of violence.
Every day, she said, the streets are clogged with checkpoints — some run by the police, others by Americans, and some by insurgents. Fighters pull up at high speed, set up weapons and start firing at the security forces, sending residents scurrying indoors to escape the inevitable riposte.
"We are caught between the hammer of the insurgents and the anvil of the troops," she said.
U.S. military officials think insurgents inspired by Al Qaeda and funded by exiled members of Hussein's Baath Party are trying to regain a foothold in the city. Last month, the U.S. military announced the capture of a senior Al Qaeda in Iraq leader who they said had returned to Mosul to reorganize the insurgency after spending months directing operations in west Baghdad.
With the U.S. planning to deploy about 17,000 additional troops in Baghdad, officials predict that insurgents will soon redirect many of their activities to cities such as Mosul and nearby Tall Afar. But the province's governor and police and army chiefs say that Mosul will not fall again.
"We sacrificed our blood for this country," said Duraid Kashmoula, who succeeded his slain brother as governor of Nineveh province and has survived more assassination attempts than he can count. "We are not going to let it go now."
Yet he and others blanch at the possibility of American troops leaving the region, which receives little support from Baghdad.
"It is not a good idea for them to leave right now," said Mosul's police chief, Gen. Mohammed Wathiq.
Nobody wants a repeat of 11/11, they said.
No match for insurgency
In the year after the U.S.-led invasion in 2003, the United States spent millions in Mosul refurbishing schools and factories, setting up a police force and fire department, and forming one of the first city councils to draw in members of all the major ethnic and religious groups. At the time, the councils were heralded as a model of representative government.
But when U.S. forces reduced their presence, the police force proved no match for the insurgency, leaving Kashmoula to defend the governor's palace with a handful of bodyguards.
U.S. and Iraqi officials think they have again turned the city around. This time, they say, they have trained and equipped two divisions of soldiers, about 8,000 troops each, and more than 18,000 police officers for the province, of which Mosul is the capital.
Police officers and soldiers who before rarely left their bases are guarding checkpoints, cruising bustling shopping streets, collecting intelligence, conducting raids and breaking up insurgent cells, with U.S. forces taking an increasingly secondary role, American officials said.
When insurgents attack, the local security forces swarm to the fight, said Army Col. Steve Townsend, commander of the 3rd Stryker Brigade Combat Team, 2nd Infantry Division, based in Ft. Lewis, Wash.
"Sometimes they will say to us, 'Why don't you stay on the [base] today? We'll take care of you,' " said Lt. Col. Fred Johnson, Townsend's deputy. "That's pretty powerful."
The U.S. effort in Mosul, they said, has benefited from close ties with a group of strong Iraqi leaders, including Kashmoula and Wathiq, who meet regularly over endless rounds of sweet tea to coordinate security in the city.
Wathiq regularly goes on patrols with his forces and never misses an opportunity to promote their successes on television.
He strode into his office one Friday morning, normally a day off, for an early morning security meeting with U.S. commanders. He told them he had been out on patrol until 5 a.m., and stopped at home only long enough to change clothes.
"In 2004, there was no security, no peace. Now we are maybe 75% secure," he said, as glasses of tea were passed around the room, which was barricaded behind layers of concrete walls and concertina wire.
As if on cue, a loud explosion rocked the building. Wathiq reached for the phone and barked questions. A suicide car bomber had just plowed into an army convoy, he informed his visitors. There were injuries, but no one was killed.
The main problem, he continued, is the justice system. Police and soldiers are making arrests, but judges are afraid to dispense harsh sentences.
"The terrorists know where they live, and they are afraid," he said, before tucking a pistol into his waist and racing off in a heavily armed convoy to watch a police team play an army squad in a soccer match.
Lack of trust all around
In a bid to counter the problem, the Nineveh criminal court has recently started bringing judges up from Baghdad to try terrorism cases, securing death sentences against at least five defendants, according to local news reports.
Sports matches aside, there remains deep distrust between Wathiq's locally recruited police officers, most of them Sunni Arabs, and the city's predominantly Kurdish soldiers, who were brought in from the north by the U.S. military to help fill the security vacuum in 2004.
Army commanders accuse the police rank-and-file of ties to the insurgency. The police and some residents treat the soldiers like outsiders.
Corruption and inefficiency plague both forces. Residents grumble that police officers are as likely to commit crimes as to solve them. And it can take months for ammunition, spare parts and other crucial supplies to reach the units.
Chronic electricity and fuel shortages compound the misery. Residents say they get only a few hours of power a day and can find no diesel to run generators or gas to heat their homes.
Iraqi officials worry that if services don't improve, public support could swing back to the insurgency.
"The locals are becoming our enemies because of the bad services they are getting," said Brig. Gen. Aziz Abdal Hussein, a former army commander who heads Mosul's Joint Coordination Center, the Iraqi equivalent of a 911 system.
His biggest concern is the legions of young men with no jobs. They are easy prey for insurgents willing to pay $100 to plant a bomb.
"If we don't find them jobs," he said, "the terrorists will."
-------------------------------------
Citation: Alexandra Zavis. "U.S. forces look to Iraqi city for progress," Los Angeles Times, 22 January 2007.
Original URL: http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/iraq/complete/la-fg-mosul22jan22,1,495888.story?coll=la-iraq-complete
-------------------------------------
By Alexandra Zavis
Los Angeles Times, 22 January 2007
MOSUL, IRAQ — The date 11/11 is so ingrained in the memory of residents of this ancient citadel that it requires no further explanation than 9/11 would in the United States.
On Nov. 11, 2004, the city that had been heralded as an American success story fell to Sunni Arab insurgents and the local police melted away.
It took U.S.-led troops months of hard fighting to reclaim Mosul, a diverse city of about 2 million people wedged between the Kurdish north and Arab south, about 60 miles from the Syrian border.
More than two years later, U.S. officials are again touting the city as an example of progress in an intensified effort to train Iraqi forces to take over security so American troops can begin heading home.
Thousands of new police officers and soldiers have been recruited here and across northern Iraq. Their U.S. handlers say they are better trained, better equipped and more motivated than their predecessors, allowing American forces to reduce their presence in the six northern provinces by more than a third over the last year, to about 19,500.
The 2nd Iraqi Army Division assumed security control over Mosul on Dec. 22 and is expected to fall under the command of Iraqi ground forces today, completing a hand-over that is a cornerstone of the U.S. exit strategy in Iraq.
Still a violent place
Yet the city where former Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein's feared sons, Uday and Qusai, died in a gunfight with U.S. forces in 2003 is far from subdued. Bombings and mortar barrages rattle residents almost daily, and neighborhoods remain hotbeds of the Sunni Arab insurgency. Assassins have killed police officers, journalists, university professors, even a popular singer.
Senna Ahmed, a 27-year-old primary school teacher, said she had not taken her three children for a walk in more than a year. She lives in a predominantly Sunni neighborhood of drab concrete homes that is a focus of violence.
Every day, she said, the streets are clogged with checkpoints — some run by the police, others by Americans, and some by insurgents. Fighters pull up at high speed, set up weapons and start firing at the security forces, sending residents scurrying indoors to escape the inevitable riposte.
"We are caught between the hammer of the insurgents and the anvil of the troops," she said.
U.S. military officials think insurgents inspired by Al Qaeda and funded by exiled members of Hussein's Baath Party are trying to regain a foothold in the city. Last month, the U.S. military announced the capture of a senior Al Qaeda in Iraq leader who they said had returned to Mosul to reorganize the insurgency after spending months directing operations in west Baghdad.
With the U.S. planning to deploy about 17,000 additional troops in Baghdad, officials predict that insurgents will soon redirect many of their activities to cities such as Mosul and nearby Tall Afar. But the province's governor and police and army chiefs say that Mosul will not fall again.
"We sacrificed our blood for this country," said Duraid Kashmoula, who succeeded his slain brother as governor of Nineveh province and has survived more assassination attempts than he can count. "We are not going to let it go now."
Yet he and others blanch at the possibility of American troops leaving the region, which receives little support from Baghdad.
"It is not a good idea for them to leave right now," said Mosul's police chief, Gen. Mohammed Wathiq.
Nobody wants a repeat of 11/11, they said.
No match for insurgency
In the year after the U.S.-led invasion in 2003, the United States spent millions in Mosul refurbishing schools and factories, setting up a police force and fire department, and forming one of the first city councils to draw in members of all the major ethnic and religious groups. At the time, the councils were heralded as a model of representative government.
But when U.S. forces reduced their presence, the police force proved no match for the insurgency, leaving Kashmoula to defend the governor's palace with a handful of bodyguards.
U.S. and Iraqi officials think they have again turned the city around. This time, they say, they have trained and equipped two divisions of soldiers, about 8,000 troops each, and more than 18,000 police officers for the province, of which Mosul is the capital.
Police officers and soldiers who before rarely left their bases are guarding checkpoints, cruising bustling shopping streets, collecting intelligence, conducting raids and breaking up insurgent cells, with U.S. forces taking an increasingly secondary role, American officials said.
When insurgents attack, the local security forces swarm to the fight, said Army Col. Steve Townsend, commander of the 3rd Stryker Brigade Combat Team, 2nd Infantry Division, based in Ft. Lewis, Wash.
"Sometimes they will say to us, 'Why don't you stay on the [base] today? We'll take care of you,' " said Lt. Col. Fred Johnson, Townsend's deputy. "That's pretty powerful."
The U.S. effort in Mosul, they said, has benefited from close ties with a group of strong Iraqi leaders, including Kashmoula and Wathiq, who meet regularly over endless rounds of sweet tea to coordinate security in the city.
Wathiq regularly goes on patrols with his forces and never misses an opportunity to promote their successes on television.
He strode into his office one Friday morning, normally a day off, for an early morning security meeting with U.S. commanders. He told them he had been out on patrol until 5 a.m., and stopped at home only long enough to change clothes.
"In 2004, there was no security, no peace. Now we are maybe 75% secure," he said, as glasses of tea were passed around the room, which was barricaded behind layers of concrete walls and concertina wire.
As if on cue, a loud explosion rocked the building. Wathiq reached for the phone and barked questions. A suicide car bomber had just plowed into an army convoy, he informed his visitors. There were injuries, but no one was killed.
The main problem, he continued, is the justice system. Police and soldiers are making arrests, but judges are afraid to dispense harsh sentences.
"The terrorists know where they live, and they are afraid," he said, before tucking a pistol into his waist and racing off in a heavily armed convoy to watch a police team play an army squad in a soccer match.
Lack of trust all around
In a bid to counter the problem, the Nineveh criminal court has recently started bringing judges up from Baghdad to try terrorism cases, securing death sentences against at least five defendants, according to local news reports.
Sports matches aside, there remains deep distrust between Wathiq's locally recruited police officers, most of them Sunni Arabs, and the city's predominantly Kurdish soldiers, who were brought in from the north by the U.S. military to help fill the security vacuum in 2004.
Army commanders accuse the police rank-and-file of ties to the insurgency. The police and some residents treat the soldiers like outsiders.
Corruption and inefficiency plague both forces. Residents grumble that police officers are as likely to commit crimes as to solve them. And it can take months for ammunition, spare parts and other crucial supplies to reach the units.
Chronic electricity and fuel shortages compound the misery. Residents say they get only a few hours of power a day and can find no diesel to run generators or gas to heat their homes.
Iraqi officials worry that if services don't improve, public support could swing back to the insurgency.
"The locals are becoming our enemies because of the bad services they are getting," said Brig. Gen. Aziz Abdal Hussein, a former army commander who heads Mosul's Joint Coordination Center, the Iraqi equivalent of a 911 system.
His biggest concern is the legions of young men with no jobs. They are easy prey for insurgents willing to pay $100 to plant a bomb.
"If we don't find them jobs," he said, "the terrorists will."
-------------------------------------
Citation: Alexandra Zavis. "U.S. forces look to Iraqi city for progress," Los Angeles Times, 22 January 2007.
Original URL: http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/iraq/complete/la-fg-mosul22jan22,1,495888.story?coll=la-iraq-complete
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