By Aseel Kami
Reuters, 25 April 2007
BAGHDAD (Reuters) - Iraq has modified a U.S. military plan to protect a Sunni enclave in Baghdad with high concrete walls, and is using barbed wire and smaller cement barriers instead, an Iraqi military spokesman said on Wednesday.
The move to alter the controversial project follows an order from Shi'ite Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki to halt construction of the 5-km (3-mile) wall around Adhamiya, a Sunni Arab area surrounded on three sides by Shi'ite communities.
Residents have complained bitterly that the walls, up to 12 feet (3.5 metres) tall, would isolate them from other communities and sharpen sectarian tensions.
On Wednesday, anti-American Shi'ite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr slammed the U.S. plan as a "sectarian" and "racist" project.
"We have sought other substitutes such as barbed wire, sand walls and small concrete barriers," said Brigadier-General Qassim Moussawi, spokesman for a U.S.-backed security crackdown in Baghdad.
"We immediately started implementing the order of the prime minister three days ago."
U.S. military spokesman Rear Admiral Mark Fox said on Monday that the erection of barriers around Baghdad's markets and neighbourhoods was approved by Iraq's government and that it was up to the Iraqis to make modifications.
But neither Fox nor U.S. Ambassador Ryan Crocker at a separate news conference on Monday would say if work would stop.
HOSTILITY
Both the U.S. military and the Iraqi authorities appear to have been caught off guard by the hostility the project sparked among residents in Adhamiya.
It is not the first time Maliki has flexed his muscles with the United States. He ordered the lifting of U.S. military checkpoints in Sadr's Baghdad stronghold last year.
The U.S. military has said it is erecting tall concrete walls to protect at least five Baghdad neighbourhoods in what are being called "gated communities".
It has said the aim was to protect some residential areas from gunmen and control access and not an attempt to divide Baghdad along sectarian lines or seal off neighbourhoods.
In his first public comment on the Adhamiya wall, Sadr said in a statement: "If this wall shows anything, it proves the cunningness of the occupier."
"We the sons of the Iraqi people will defend Adhamiya and all other areas they want to isolate. We will ... protest with you, to defend our holy land."
The statement indicated the young cleric is increasingly trying to portray himself as a nationalist figure in Iraq.
Sunnis have long accused his Mehdi Army militia of sectarian death squad killings. Sadr denies sanctioning violence.
"Did we not see and hear the voices of those dear to us in Adhamiya as they shouted 'no, no to sectarianism', rejecting the sectarian, racist and oppressive wall that would isolate them from us?" Sadr said.
(Additional reporting by Khaled Farhan in Najaf)
----------------------------
Citation: Aseel Kami. "Iraq says modifying Baghdad neighbourhood wall," Reuters, 25 April 2007.
Original URL: http://uk.reuters.com/article/idUKL2565825020070425?src=042507_1003_TOPSTORY_bloodiest_month
----------------------------
26 April 2007
Roar of battle, whir of the blender
By Todd Pitman
The Associated Press, 25 April 2007
RAMADI, Iraq - He's seen more combat and casualties than many troops in Iraq. But he totes no weapon and his uniform at a U.S. base includes a tidy black bow tie and little paper hat.
This is the milkshake man's war.
"Too much bombs," said Abraham Chacka, a soft-spoken Indian who mans a single blender at a U.S. Army outpost in Ramadi — which may have taken more insurgent mortar hits than any other in Iraq.
But, amid the battles, Chacka serves up more than just Baskin-Robbins nostalgia 75 miles west of Baghdad. It's also a taste of outsourcing,
Pentagon-style.
Chacka is part of a small army of Asian migrants recruited for U.S. military dining services around Iraq under deals that wrap together the ways of modern war, globalization and, some claim, greed.
The jobs were organized by a Saudi firm under agreements with Houston-based KBR Inc., a former division of Halliburton Co., which has come under intense congressional scrutiny for alleged overpricing abuses connected to military contracts for food and other services in Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere.
Other border-busting pacts in Iraq — not touched by the KBR probes — have brought in an international cast of characters such as private Peruvian commandos running Green Zone checkpoints in Baghdad and sniffer dogs being led by handlers from Zimbabwe.
For Chacka, it's simply about stashing away nearly $500 a month — more than three times what he could earn at home — and returning to spend it. "I pray to God to keep me safe," he said.
So far his luck has held. He was one of the 35 members of the first catering team at Camp Corregidor in Ramadi two years ago. Nearly a third have been wounded in rocket or mortar attacks, said Chacka's boss, Masih Uzzaman, who also works on the base.
There are now 51 staff members — from India, Nepal, Bangladesh, Pakistan and Sri Lanka.
Chacka and Uzzaman arrived in Iraq shortly after the American invasion in 2003. Neither has left since. For the first two years, they were deployed at a quiet dining facility in Balad, outside Baghdad.
Uzzaman transferred to Corregidor in late 2005. Chacka followed a couple months later.
They both found a base under such threat it was completely engulfed in darkness at night. For good reason: It was smack dab in the middle of a war zone.
RPG rounds struck guard towers. Tracer-fire crisscrossed the sky. U.S. warplanes bombed insurgent targets just outside the base.
"All my guys were looking at me. They said, 'What's happening? Where are we?'" Uzzaman said, recounting his first day there.
So great was the mortar threat that soldiers — until last month — wore armored jackets and helmets around the base. Tamimi Global Co., the Saudi Arabian firm that employees the Asians, issued armored vests, but staff spurned them. Too hot, they complained.
In 2005, one bomb exploded beside a trailer where workers slept, injuring three. Another round struck wounded seven severely, including a man who lost his eyes and another who lost his legs.
No one has been killed. But there's been plenty of close calls. One worker was taking out the trash when a bullet ripped a hole in the rear of his trousers, just missing his flesh.
"We never stopped feeding soldiers, not a single time," Uzzaman said. "Even after seven of our guys got injured, we started serving 15 minutes later."
Through it all, Chacka has worked solo in a corner of the small mess hall. On a typical day, he goes through 15 three-gallon drums of Baskin-Robbins: Rainbow Sherbet, Chocolate Mint, Cookies and Cream and so on.
In February, he was named the dining services' Employee of the Month for "phenomenal" support to soldiers.
"Oh yeah, they love him," said Sgt. Eric Hutzell, of Ashtabula, Ohio. "Guys go out, get shot at, and come back looking forward to that ice cream. It helps with morale, eases the stress."
Maj. Dave Christensen agreed. "No matter how hard the day was, they know there's always that guy with the little paper hat waiting for them with a milkshake when they get back," he said.
One American colonel liked to joke that keeping the bomb-ridden supply road into Ramadi open was crucial because "that's where our ice cream comes from."
Uzzaman keeps a small collection of wartime souvenirs: two twisted bullet tips that pierced his trailer during a 12-hour gunbattle, and a jagged two-inch-long piece of shrapnel he pulled from the back of one of his crew after a mortar attack.
"Nobody likes to put himself in danger, but poverty can make you do a lot of things," Uzzaman said. "Everybody has dreams."
And Chacka?
If all goes well, he'll leave in December, buy a house and get married. "I no coming back here," he said, grinning.
--------------------------
Citation: Todd Pitman. "Roar of battle, whir of the blender," The Associated Press, 25 April 2007.
Original URL: http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20070425/ap_on_re_mi_ea/iraq_milkshake_man--------------------------
The Associated Press, 25 April 2007
RAMADI, Iraq - He's seen more combat and casualties than many troops in Iraq. But he totes no weapon and his uniform at a U.S. base includes a tidy black bow tie and little paper hat.
This is the milkshake man's war.
"Too much bombs," said Abraham Chacka, a soft-spoken Indian who mans a single blender at a U.S. Army outpost in Ramadi — which may have taken more insurgent mortar hits than any other in Iraq.
But, amid the battles, Chacka serves up more than just Baskin-Robbins nostalgia 75 miles west of Baghdad. It's also a taste of outsourcing,
Pentagon-style.
Chacka is part of a small army of Asian migrants recruited for U.S. military dining services around Iraq under deals that wrap together the ways of modern war, globalization and, some claim, greed.
The jobs were organized by a Saudi firm under agreements with Houston-based KBR Inc., a former division of Halliburton Co., which has come under intense congressional scrutiny for alleged overpricing abuses connected to military contracts for food and other services in Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere.
Other border-busting pacts in Iraq — not touched by the KBR probes — have brought in an international cast of characters such as private Peruvian commandos running Green Zone checkpoints in Baghdad and sniffer dogs being led by handlers from Zimbabwe.
For Chacka, it's simply about stashing away nearly $500 a month — more than three times what he could earn at home — and returning to spend it. "I pray to God to keep me safe," he said.
So far his luck has held. He was one of the 35 members of the first catering team at Camp Corregidor in Ramadi two years ago. Nearly a third have been wounded in rocket or mortar attacks, said Chacka's boss, Masih Uzzaman, who also works on the base.
There are now 51 staff members — from India, Nepal, Bangladesh, Pakistan and Sri Lanka.
Chacka and Uzzaman arrived in Iraq shortly after the American invasion in 2003. Neither has left since. For the first two years, they were deployed at a quiet dining facility in Balad, outside Baghdad.
Uzzaman transferred to Corregidor in late 2005. Chacka followed a couple months later.
They both found a base under such threat it was completely engulfed in darkness at night. For good reason: It was smack dab in the middle of a war zone.
RPG rounds struck guard towers. Tracer-fire crisscrossed the sky. U.S. warplanes bombed insurgent targets just outside the base.
"All my guys were looking at me. They said, 'What's happening? Where are we?'" Uzzaman said, recounting his first day there.
So great was the mortar threat that soldiers — until last month — wore armored jackets and helmets around the base. Tamimi Global Co., the Saudi Arabian firm that employees the Asians, issued armored vests, but staff spurned them. Too hot, they complained.
In 2005, one bomb exploded beside a trailer where workers slept, injuring three. Another round struck wounded seven severely, including a man who lost his eyes and another who lost his legs.
No one has been killed. But there's been plenty of close calls. One worker was taking out the trash when a bullet ripped a hole in the rear of his trousers, just missing his flesh.
"We never stopped feeding soldiers, not a single time," Uzzaman said. "Even after seven of our guys got injured, we started serving 15 minutes later."
Through it all, Chacka has worked solo in a corner of the small mess hall. On a typical day, he goes through 15 three-gallon drums of Baskin-Robbins: Rainbow Sherbet, Chocolate Mint, Cookies and Cream and so on.
In February, he was named the dining services' Employee of the Month for "phenomenal" support to soldiers.
"Oh yeah, they love him," said Sgt. Eric Hutzell, of Ashtabula, Ohio. "Guys go out, get shot at, and come back looking forward to that ice cream. It helps with morale, eases the stress."
Maj. Dave Christensen agreed. "No matter how hard the day was, they know there's always that guy with the little paper hat waiting for them with a milkshake when they get back," he said.
One American colonel liked to joke that keeping the bomb-ridden supply road into Ramadi open was crucial because "that's where our ice cream comes from."
Uzzaman keeps a small collection of wartime souvenirs: two twisted bullet tips that pierced his trailer during a 12-hour gunbattle, and a jagged two-inch-long piece of shrapnel he pulled from the back of one of his crew after a mortar attack.
"Nobody likes to put himself in danger, but poverty can make you do a lot of things," Uzzaman said. "Everybody has dreams."
And Chacka?
If all goes well, he'll leave in December, buy a house and get married. "I no coming back here," he said, grinning.
--------------------------
Citation: Todd Pitman. "Roar of battle, whir of the blender," The Associated Press, 25 April 2007.
Original URL: http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20070425/ap_on_re_mi_ea/iraq_milkshake_man--------------------------
Bin Laden overseeing Iraq, Afghanistan ops: Taliban
Reuters, 25 April 2007
DUBAI (Reuters) - Al Qaeda chief Osama bin Laden is orchestrating militants' operations in Iraq and Afghanistan, a senior Taliban commander said in remarks broadcast on Wednesday.
Bin Laden has not made any video statements for many months raising speculation that he might have died.
"He is drawing plans in Iraq and Afghanistan ... Praise God he is alive," Mullah Dadullah told Al Jazeera television.
In September, a French newspaper quoted French foreign intelligence service as saying the Saudi intelligence were convinced bin Laden had died of typhoid in Pakistan in August.
Dadullah said bin Laden ordered the attack on February 27 at the U.S. Bagram base during a visit by U.S. Vice President
Dick Cheney to Afghanistan.
"Do you remember the martyrdom operation inside the Bagram base which targeted a senior American official ... this operation was the result of blessed plans put by him," Dadullah said. Jazeera said the U.S. official Dadullah was referring to was Cheney.
"He (bin Laden) guided us through it," he said, adding that no Afghan would have been able to penetrate the base if it was not for the world's most wanted militant.
Asked for reaction to Dadullah's assertion that bin Laden ordered the Bagram attack, White House spokeswoman Dana Perino told reporters: "It's an interesting claim but I haven't seen any intelligence that would support that."
About 14 people were killed, including one American and one South Korean soldier in the suicide bombing, which militants said targeted Cheney. A U.S. official then said Cheney was about half a mile away on the base and was not in danger.
The Taliban were toppled in 2001 by a U.S.-led coalition for refusing to hand over leaders of al Qaeda after the group's September 11 attacks on U.S. cities.
Dadullah gave no further details about the role bin Laden was playing in operations in the two countries where the United States deploys troops.
A senior Afghan security official had said on Tuesday Afghan and
NATO troops had surrounded more than 200 Taliban in the southern province of Uruzgan and Dadullah might be among them.
But NATO forces were not involved in the operation, a NATO spokeswoman said on Wednesday, and an Afghan politician from the region said he doubted that Dadullah had been surrounded.
(Additional reporting by Washington bureauu)
-----------------------------
Citation: "Bin Laden overseeing Iraq, Afghanistan ops: Taliban," Reuters, 25 April 2007.
Original URL: http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20070425/ts_nm/binladen_iraq_afghanistan_dc_2
-----------------------------
DUBAI (Reuters) - Al Qaeda chief Osama bin Laden is orchestrating militants' operations in Iraq and Afghanistan, a senior Taliban commander said in remarks broadcast on Wednesday.
Bin Laden has not made any video statements for many months raising speculation that he might have died.
"He is drawing plans in Iraq and Afghanistan ... Praise God he is alive," Mullah Dadullah told Al Jazeera television.
In September, a French newspaper quoted French foreign intelligence service as saying the Saudi intelligence were convinced bin Laden had died of typhoid in Pakistan in August.
Dadullah said bin Laden ordered the attack on February 27 at the U.S. Bagram base during a visit by U.S. Vice President
Dick Cheney to Afghanistan.
"Do you remember the martyrdom operation inside the Bagram base which targeted a senior American official ... this operation was the result of blessed plans put by him," Dadullah said. Jazeera said the U.S. official Dadullah was referring to was Cheney.
"He (bin Laden) guided us through it," he said, adding that no Afghan would have been able to penetrate the base if it was not for the world's most wanted militant.
Asked for reaction to Dadullah's assertion that bin Laden ordered the Bagram attack, White House spokeswoman Dana Perino told reporters: "It's an interesting claim but I haven't seen any intelligence that would support that."
About 14 people were killed, including one American and one South Korean soldier in the suicide bombing, which militants said targeted Cheney. A U.S. official then said Cheney was about half a mile away on the base and was not in danger.
The Taliban were toppled in 2001 by a U.S.-led coalition for refusing to hand over leaders of al Qaeda after the group's September 11 attacks on U.S. cities.
Dadullah gave no further details about the role bin Laden was playing in operations in the two countries where the United States deploys troops.
A senior Afghan security official had said on Tuesday Afghan and
NATO troops had surrounded more than 200 Taliban in the southern province of Uruzgan and Dadullah might be among them.
But NATO forces were not involved in the operation, a NATO spokeswoman said on Wednesday, and an Afghan politician from the region said he doubted that Dadullah had been surrounded.
(Additional reporting by Washington bureauu)
-----------------------------
Citation: "Bin Laden overseeing Iraq, Afghanistan ops: Taliban," Reuters, 25 April 2007.
Original URL: http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20070425/ts_nm/binladen_iraq_afghanistan_dc_2
-----------------------------
23 April 2007
Walls will increase violence, specialists say
IRIN, 23 April 2007
BAGHDAD - Baghdad specialists and citizens have hit out against the US strategy of building walls around Sunni districts that are surrounded by Shia areas. They say such barriers would worsen the lives of thousands of Iraqis and would increase violence.
"When they build barriers, automatically they are assuming the existence of religious and ethnic differences in Iraq, reinforcing the fighting groups' beliefs," Jassem al-Rheiri, a sociology professor at Baghdad University, said.
Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki said during a visit to Egypt on Sunday that the construction of such walls, particularly the one in the mainly Sunni Adhamiya district, should be halted by US troops. He had been under pressure from Sunni communities who complained that their neighbourhoods were being turned into ghettoes that would choke off life in their areas.
"I oppose the building of the wall, and its construction will stop. There are other methods to protect neighbourhoods," al-Maliki told reporters in Egypt. However, it appears his statement has been ignored as locals say the walls continue to be built by US troops.
US officials have said the barriers they began building on 10 April should be finished by the end of April.
Brig. Gen. John Campbell, the US deputy commanding general in Baghdad, said in a press release on Saturday that temporary concrete barrier walls will be built in selected neighbourhoods around Baghdad in an attempt to help protect the Iraqi population from terrorists, adding that protecting people is the primary reason behind the concrete barriers.
"The intent is not to divide the city along sectarian lines. The intent is to provide a more secured neighbourhood for people who live in selected neighbourhoods," Campbell said.
Walls will increase violence
Experts and the local population believe that the building of the barriers, rather than decreasing violence, will increase the division of the country according to sect, and as such delay any peace process.
"The aim of the government should be to make fighting groups aware that we are all one community and that such differences will just bring more destruction to Iraq. But the concrete barriers will just highlight the fact that sectarian differences exist," al-Rheiri said.
Locals in Adhamiya reacted angrily to the building of the concrete barriers, saying the government was forcibly dividing the population
"Surrounding our neighbourhood with concrete barriers will make it clear that when we're out of our area we're going to be in danger. We're being forced to live inside just one area. Our lives will have to be limited to a few square kilometres of houses and shops," said Khadija Kubaissy, 52, a resident of Adhamiyah district. "Rather than isolate us, they have to find a logical solution to the violence and not cause more suffering and hostility."
Abu Ahmed, who claims to be a spokesman for insurgent group the Islamic Army, said that the construction of concrete barriers would not stop them fighting US troops and those who support them.
"They want to divide the country by sects and also they have this idea that by isolating districts it will make it easier to catch Muslim fighters. The government is deeply wrong because it will just make us stronger," he said.
Following al-Maliki's call to stop building the walls, other government members have become more vocal in their opposition to the plan, agreeing with the views of militants.
"US troops allege that such walls will help protect civilians but we believe that they will just help fighters to know who to target and where. The construction [of walls] should stop and the Prime Minister's decision should be respected," said Lt. Col. Ala'a Hussein Obadi, senior officer at the Ministry of Interior. "There are many different ways to help improve security and we hope US troops understand the appeal [by al-Maliki]."
---------------------------------
Citation: "Walls will increase violence, specialists say," IRIN, 23 April 2007.
Original URL: http://www.alertnet.org/thenews/newsdesk/IRIN/24d117eeb97208230843dd011da874a7.htm---------------------------------
BAGHDAD - Baghdad specialists and citizens have hit out against the US strategy of building walls around Sunni districts that are surrounded by Shia areas. They say such barriers would worsen the lives of thousands of Iraqis and would increase violence.
"When they build barriers, automatically they are assuming the existence of religious and ethnic differences in Iraq, reinforcing the fighting groups' beliefs," Jassem al-Rheiri, a sociology professor at Baghdad University, said.
Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki said during a visit to Egypt on Sunday that the construction of such walls, particularly the one in the mainly Sunni Adhamiya district, should be halted by US troops. He had been under pressure from Sunni communities who complained that their neighbourhoods were being turned into ghettoes that would choke off life in their areas.
"I oppose the building of the wall, and its construction will stop. There are other methods to protect neighbourhoods," al-Maliki told reporters in Egypt. However, it appears his statement has been ignored as locals say the walls continue to be built by US troops.
US officials have said the barriers they began building on 10 April should be finished by the end of April.
Brig. Gen. John Campbell, the US deputy commanding general in Baghdad, said in a press release on Saturday that temporary concrete barrier walls will be built in selected neighbourhoods around Baghdad in an attempt to help protect the Iraqi population from terrorists, adding that protecting people is the primary reason behind the concrete barriers.
"The intent is not to divide the city along sectarian lines. The intent is to provide a more secured neighbourhood for people who live in selected neighbourhoods," Campbell said.
Walls will increase violence
Experts and the local population believe that the building of the barriers, rather than decreasing violence, will increase the division of the country according to sect, and as such delay any peace process.
"The aim of the government should be to make fighting groups aware that we are all one community and that such differences will just bring more destruction to Iraq. But the concrete barriers will just highlight the fact that sectarian differences exist," al-Rheiri said.
Locals in Adhamiya reacted angrily to the building of the concrete barriers, saying the government was forcibly dividing the population
"Surrounding our neighbourhood with concrete barriers will make it clear that when we're out of our area we're going to be in danger. We're being forced to live inside just one area. Our lives will have to be limited to a few square kilometres of houses and shops," said Khadija Kubaissy, 52, a resident of Adhamiyah district. "Rather than isolate us, they have to find a logical solution to the violence and not cause more suffering and hostility."
Abu Ahmed, who claims to be a spokesman for insurgent group the Islamic Army, said that the construction of concrete barriers would not stop them fighting US troops and those who support them.
"They want to divide the country by sects and also they have this idea that by isolating districts it will make it easier to catch Muslim fighters. The government is deeply wrong because it will just make us stronger," he said.
Following al-Maliki's call to stop building the walls, other government members have become more vocal in their opposition to the plan, agreeing with the views of militants.
"US troops allege that such walls will help protect civilians but we believe that they will just help fighters to know who to target and where. The construction [of walls] should stop and the Prime Minister's decision should be respected," said Lt. Col. Ala'a Hussein Obadi, senior officer at the Ministry of Interior. "There are many different ways to help improve security and we hope US troops understand the appeal [by al-Maliki]."
---------------------------------
Citation: "Walls will increase violence, specialists say," IRIN, 23 April 2007.
Original URL: http://www.alertnet.org/thenews/newsdesk/IRIN/24d117eeb97208230843dd011da874a7.htm---------------------------------
Iraq PM asks for halt to Baghdad wall
By Dean Yates and Ibon Villelabeitia
Reuters, 22 April 2007
BAGHDAD, April 22 (Reuters) - Iraq's prime minister said on Sunday he had urged the U.S. military to halt work on a wall separating a Baghdad Sunni enclave from nearby Shi'ite areas after sharp criticism from some residents.
The cement wall around the district of Adhamiya is part of a new U.S. military tactic to protect flashpoint neighbourhoods with barriers, in a security crackdown in the capital that is seen as a final attempt to halt civil war between majority Shi'ites and minority Sunni Arabs.
Car bombs killed 18 people in Baghdad on Sunday and gunmen shot dead 23 workers from an ancient minority sect after pulling them off a minibus in the northern city of Mosul in an apparent revenge attack.
Speaking in Cairo at the start of an Arab tour to drum up support for Iraq, Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki, a Shi'ite Islamist, said he objected to the 5-km (3-mile) wall, which residents said would isolate them from other communities and sharpen sectarian tensions.
"I asked yesterday that it be stopped and that alternatives be found to protect the area," Maliki said in his first public comments on the issue.
"I said that I fear this wall might have repercussions which remind us of other walls, which we reject," he added.
Some Adhamiya residents have compared the wall to barriers erected by Israel in the occupied West Bank.
The U.S. military sought on Sunday to play down any hint of friction between Maliki and American commanders behind the Baghdad plan, saying it would coordinate with the Iraqi government and Iraqi commanders on how best to establish security measures.
"The government of Iraq and MNF-I (Multinational Force-Iraq) do agree that we need to protect the people of Iraq. How that is done is always being discussed and we will continue that dialogue," the military said in a statement.
Among Sunday's attacks in Baghdad, two suicide car bombers rammed their vehicles into a police station in a mostly Shi'ite neighbourhood, killing 12 people and wounding 95, police said.
It was one of the deadliest bombings aimed at Iraq's security forces since the crackdown was launched two months ago.
"Look at the situation Iraqis are living in. You see blasts whenever you try to go out to earn a living," said one witness.
ANCIENT SECT
In Mosul, gunmen killed 23 textile workers from the minority Yazidi sect after forcing them out of a minibus.
Brigadier-General Mohammed al-Waggaa said the gunmen stopped the vehicle and gunned down the workers.
Waggaa said the mass killing appeared to be in retaliation for an incident in which a Yazidi woman was stoned to death several weeks ago for converting to Islam. Another police source who declined to be named confirmed the incident.
U.S. and Iraqi forces have poured thousands of extra troops into Baghdad over the past two months.
While the boost in troop levels has reduced killings by sectarian death squads, car bomb attacks still plague the city. A wave of car bombs killed nearly 200 people last Wednesday.
U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Gates told Iraq's leaders on Friday that progress in reconciling warring Shi'ites and Sunni Arabs would be an "important element" when Washington decides this summer whether to maintain the higher troop numbers.
But remarks by senior U.S. commanders and officials and a change in Army deployment plans suggest the higher level of American troops will likely remain for months beyond the summer.
Washington has avoided saying how long it will keep the beefed-up force of about 160,000 troops ordered in January.
It has said only that it will review progress in the late summer. The implication is that troops could then start to be withdrawn but that appears improbable.
The U.S. military commander in Iraq, General David Petraeus, said during Gates' visit that the buildup of some 28,000 extra U.S. troops would not even be complete for another two months.
(Additional reporting by Yara Bayoumy, Wissam Mohammed and Ahmed Rasheed, Andrew Gray in Washington and Mohamed Abdellah in Cairo)
----------------------------------------------
Citation: Dean Yates and Ibon Villelabeitia. "Iraq PM asks for halt to Baghdad wall," Reuters, 22 April 2007.
Original URL: http://www.alertnet.org/thenews/newsdesk/IBO270638.htm
----------------------------------------------
Reuters, 22 April 2007
BAGHDAD, April 22 (Reuters) - Iraq's prime minister said on Sunday he had urged the U.S. military to halt work on a wall separating a Baghdad Sunni enclave from nearby Shi'ite areas after sharp criticism from some residents.
The cement wall around the district of Adhamiya is part of a new U.S. military tactic to protect flashpoint neighbourhoods with barriers, in a security crackdown in the capital that is seen as a final attempt to halt civil war between majority Shi'ites and minority Sunni Arabs.
Car bombs killed 18 people in Baghdad on Sunday and gunmen shot dead 23 workers from an ancient minority sect after pulling them off a minibus in the northern city of Mosul in an apparent revenge attack.
Speaking in Cairo at the start of an Arab tour to drum up support for Iraq, Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki, a Shi'ite Islamist, said he objected to the 5-km (3-mile) wall, which residents said would isolate them from other communities and sharpen sectarian tensions.
"I asked yesterday that it be stopped and that alternatives be found to protect the area," Maliki said in his first public comments on the issue.
"I said that I fear this wall might have repercussions which remind us of other walls, which we reject," he added.
Some Adhamiya residents have compared the wall to barriers erected by Israel in the occupied West Bank.
The U.S. military sought on Sunday to play down any hint of friction between Maliki and American commanders behind the Baghdad plan, saying it would coordinate with the Iraqi government and Iraqi commanders on how best to establish security measures.
"The government of Iraq and MNF-I (Multinational Force-Iraq) do agree that we need to protect the people of Iraq. How that is done is always being discussed and we will continue that dialogue," the military said in a statement.
Among Sunday's attacks in Baghdad, two suicide car bombers rammed their vehicles into a police station in a mostly Shi'ite neighbourhood, killing 12 people and wounding 95, police said.
It was one of the deadliest bombings aimed at Iraq's security forces since the crackdown was launched two months ago.
"Look at the situation Iraqis are living in. You see blasts whenever you try to go out to earn a living," said one witness.
ANCIENT SECT
In Mosul, gunmen killed 23 textile workers from the minority Yazidi sect after forcing them out of a minibus.
Brigadier-General Mohammed al-Waggaa said the gunmen stopped the vehicle and gunned down the workers.
Waggaa said the mass killing appeared to be in retaliation for an incident in which a Yazidi woman was stoned to death several weeks ago for converting to Islam. Another police source who declined to be named confirmed the incident.
U.S. and Iraqi forces have poured thousands of extra troops into Baghdad over the past two months.
While the boost in troop levels has reduced killings by sectarian death squads, car bomb attacks still plague the city. A wave of car bombs killed nearly 200 people last Wednesday.
U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Gates told Iraq's leaders on Friday that progress in reconciling warring Shi'ites and Sunni Arabs would be an "important element" when Washington decides this summer whether to maintain the higher troop numbers.
But remarks by senior U.S. commanders and officials and a change in Army deployment plans suggest the higher level of American troops will likely remain for months beyond the summer.
Washington has avoided saying how long it will keep the beefed-up force of about 160,000 troops ordered in January.
It has said only that it will review progress in the late summer. The implication is that troops could then start to be withdrawn but that appears improbable.
The U.S. military commander in Iraq, General David Petraeus, said during Gates' visit that the buildup of some 28,000 extra U.S. troops would not even be complete for another two months.
(Additional reporting by Yara Bayoumy, Wissam Mohammed and Ahmed Rasheed, Andrew Gray in Washington and Mohamed Abdellah in Cairo)
----------------------------------------------
Citation: Dean Yates and Ibon Villelabeitia. "Iraq PM asks for halt to Baghdad wall," Reuters, 22 April 2007.
Original URL: http://www.alertnet.org/thenews/newsdesk/IBO270638.htm
----------------------------------------------
US to help Iraq recruit 40,000 troops
Agence France-Presse, 22 April 2007
BAGHDAD (AFP) - Iraq and the United States are to spend 14 billion dollars and recruit 40,000 new soldiers into the Iraqi armed forces in the next 18 months, a US military commander said Sunday.
US army Lieutenant General Martin Dempsey, who is in charge of training Iraqi security forces, said that America will spend five billion dollars and the remaining nine billion would come from Iraqi coffers.
Dempsey said the plan is driven by how "the Iraqis want their security forces to look" in the future and and not just to "solve problems of today."
By end of 2007, the Iraqi army will field 170,700 soldiers -- 34,500 more than at the end of last year -- and swell from 10 to 12 divisions.
The Iraqi police force -- including local, national and border patrol units -- will grow to 198,600 personnel, up from 192,200 in December 2006.
With domestic support for continuing the four-year-old US military mission in Iraq crumbling, the military has made a priority of training competent and well-armed Iraqi forces to replace its units on the ground.
Iraqi and US security forces are regularly attacked by insurgents, with the US military itself having lost more than 3,300 troops in the past four years and its Iraqi comrades many thousands more.
The plan will also involve equipping the existing security forces with new American-made weapons, Dempsey said.
"We intend to take out the AK-47s and replace them with M16," he said, revealing that the veteran Soviet-designed assault rifle will be replaced by its American equivalent, which is still issued to some US units.
Dempsey said Iraqi forces are currently equipped with weapons supplied by US-led coalition countries, the government of Iraq, weapons that have been donated by other countries and also those captured in raids.
In an attempt to ensure that weapons remain the hands of government forces, every soldier "will go through biometric screening" to issue them with secure ID cards tied to the issue of specific arms.
There have been many reports in recent years of Iraqi personnel selling US-issued weapons and ammunition on the open market.
Developing Iraq's tiny air force will be a tough task, the general said.
"The challenge is to build pilots. Most pilots stopped serious flying in 1991 which means Iraq has missed a generation of pilots," he said.
"Weaponry is not the issue, it's the pilots," the general said, adding that over the next five to six years, 135 new pilots would be recruited annually.
The air force, which is already conducting transport and surveillance operations will also be equipped with 28 new Russian Mi-17 and American 16 UH-II helicopters in 2007.
The Iraqi navy, seen as vital to protect the country's oil platforms, will also expand this year. Around 900 new sailors and marines will be recruited along with new patrol boats, Dempsey said.
---------------------------------
Citation: "US to help Iraq recruit 40,000 troops," Agence France-Presse, 22 April 2007.
Original URL: http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20070422/wl_mideast_afp/iraqussecurity
---------------------------------
BAGHDAD (AFP) - Iraq and the United States are to spend 14 billion dollars and recruit 40,000 new soldiers into the Iraqi armed forces in the next 18 months, a US military commander said Sunday.
US army Lieutenant General Martin Dempsey, who is in charge of training Iraqi security forces, said that America will spend five billion dollars and the remaining nine billion would come from Iraqi coffers.
Dempsey said the plan is driven by how "the Iraqis want their security forces to look" in the future and and not just to "solve problems of today."
By end of 2007, the Iraqi army will field 170,700 soldiers -- 34,500 more than at the end of last year -- and swell from 10 to 12 divisions.
The Iraqi police force -- including local, national and border patrol units -- will grow to 198,600 personnel, up from 192,200 in December 2006.
With domestic support for continuing the four-year-old US military mission in Iraq crumbling, the military has made a priority of training competent and well-armed Iraqi forces to replace its units on the ground.
Iraqi and US security forces are regularly attacked by insurgents, with the US military itself having lost more than 3,300 troops in the past four years and its Iraqi comrades many thousands more.
The plan will also involve equipping the existing security forces with new American-made weapons, Dempsey said.
"We intend to take out the AK-47s and replace them with M16," he said, revealing that the veteran Soviet-designed assault rifle will be replaced by its American equivalent, which is still issued to some US units.
Dempsey said Iraqi forces are currently equipped with weapons supplied by US-led coalition countries, the government of Iraq, weapons that have been donated by other countries and also those captured in raids.
In an attempt to ensure that weapons remain the hands of government forces, every soldier "will go through biometric screening" to issue them with secure ID cards tied to the issue of specific arms.
There have been many reports in recent years of Iraqi personnel selling US-issued weapons and ammunition on the open market.
Developing Iraq's tiny air force will be a tough task, the general said.
"The challenge is to build pilots. Most pilots stopped serious flying in 1991 which means Iraq has missed a generation of pilots," he said.
"Weaponry is not the issue, it's the pilots," the general said, adding that over the next five to six years, 135 new pilots would be recruited annually.
The air force, which is already conducting transport and surveillance operations will also be equipped with 28 new Russian Mi-17 and American 16 UH-II helicopters in 2007.
The Iraqi navy, seen as vital to protect the country's oil platforms, will also expand this year. Around 900 new sailors and marines will be recruited along with new patrol boats, Dempsey said.
---------------------------------
Citation: "US to help Iraq recruit 40,000 troops," Agence France-Presse, 22 April 2007.
Original URL: http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20070422/wl_mideast_afp/iraqussecurity
---------------------------------
M-16s a step forward for Iraqi forces, says US
By Paul Tait
Reuters, 22 April 2007
BAGHDAD - Iraqi security forces will start replacing their AK-47 rifles this year with the M-16s and M-4s used by U.S. troops, which will help track the weapons and cut down on theft, a senior U.S. military official said.
Lieutenant-General Martin Dempsey, in charge of training Iraq's security forces, said keeping track of the thousands of weapons that have flooded Iraq since the U.S.-led invasion in 2003 had been a major challenge.
Under an urgent need to arm Iraqi forces, weapons had been supplied by coalition members and Iraqi procurements, and captured weapons had also been used, Dempsey said.
Now the country is awash with guns, with the ubiquitous AK-47 assault rifle a common sight on almost every street corner and the most popular selling item on the weapons black market.
"It's been somewhat complicated," Dempsey told reporters.
The Brookings Institution, a U.S. think tank, said in 2006 that the flow of weapons from Iraq's now 325,000-strong security forces to the black market posed a dilemma for U.S. commanders.
They had to choose between properly equipping the Iraqis and risk seeing arms fall into the hands of insurgents or providing inferior weapons that would make it harder to fight them.
Now the U.S.-made M-16s and M-4s will be matched to their users with a sophisticated database using fingerprints and retinal scans, as well as serial numbers on the rifles.
"The government of Iraq will be able to track those weapons very, very carefully," Dempsey said.
The AK-47s handed in would then be registered in the database before being redistributed to new units formed as Iraq takes over security control from U.S.-led forces, he said.
Dempsey did not put a price tag on the weapons handover or give an exact date for when it would begin.
But he said the Iraqi government had allocated $7.3 billion, or 20 percent of its 2007 budget, to security forces and would spend $9 billion over the next 18 months. Washington would contribute a further $5 billion over the same period.
U.S. President George W. Bush is battling Democrats over new financing for the war. He is being pressed to accept a pull-out timetable for U.S. troops in return for $100 billion in funds.
Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki is also under pressure from his fractious government to set a timetable for a U.S. withdrawal but says that will not happen until Iraqi security forces are ready to take over.
----------------------------
Citation: Paul Tait. "M-16s a step forward for Iraqi forces, says US," Reuters, 22 April 2007.
Original URL: http://www.alertnet.org/thenews/newsdesk/COL246573.htm
----------------------------
Reuters, 22 April 2007
BAGHDAD - Iraqi security forces will start replacing their AK-47 rifles this year with the M-16s and M-4s used by U.S. troops, which will help track the weapons and cut down on theft, a senior U.S. military official said.
Lieutenant-General Martin Dempsey, in charge of training Iraq's security forces, said keeping track of the thousands of weapons that have flooded Iraq since the U.S.-led invasion in 2003 had been a major challenge.
Under an urgent need to arm Iraqi forces, weapons had been supplied by coalition members and Iraqi procurements, and captured weapons had also been used, Dempsey said.
Now the country is awash with guns, with the ubiquitous AK-47 assault rifle a common sight on almost every street corner and the most popular selling item on the weapons black market.
"It's been somewhat complicated," Dempsey told reporters.
The Brookings Institution, a U.S. think tank, said in 2006 that the flow of weapons from Iraq's now 325,000-strong security forces to the black market posed a dilemma for U.S. commanders.
They had to choose between properly equipping the Iraqis and risk seeing arms fall into the hands of insurgents or providing inferior weapons that would make it harder to fight them.
Now the U.S.-made M-16s and M-4s will be matched to their users with a sophisticated database using fingerprints and retinal scans, as well as serial numbers on the rifles.
"The government of Iraq will be able to track those weapons very, very carefully," Dempsey said.
The AK-47s handed in would then be registered in the database before being redistributed to new units formed as Iraq takes over security control from U.S.-led forces, he said.
Dempsey did not put a price tag on the weapons handover or give an exact date for when it would begin.
But he said the Iraqi government had allocated $7.3 billion, or 20 percent of its 2007 budget, to security forces and would spend $9 billion over the next 18 months. Washington would contribute a further $5 billion over the same period.
U.S. President George W. Bush is battling Democrats over new financing for the war. He is being pressed to accept a pull-out timetable for U.S. troops in return for $100 billion in funds.
Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki is also under pressure from his fractious government to set a timetable for a U.S. withdrawal but says that will not happen until Iraqi security forces are ready to take over.
----------------------------
Citation: Paul Tait. "M-16s a step forward for Iraqi forces, says US," Reuters, 22 April 2007.
Original URL: http://www.alertnet.org/thenews/newsdesk/COL246573.htm
----------------------------
Iraq war brain trauma victims turn to private care
By Kim Dixon
Reuters, 23 April 2007
CHICAGO - Sgt. Eric Edmundson arrived at the U.S. Army's Walter Reed hospital in October 2005 with a severe head concussion, a victim of one of the many roadside bombs that are a part of daily life for soldiers in Iraq.
Six months later, after intense physical rehab and an infection that made control of his limbs futile, his morale hit bottom. The Department of Veterans Affairs gave him the choice of a nursing home or returning home from a Richmond, Virginia facility, his family said.
"We felt the VA had a 'wait and see' attitude, and our belief was that time was our enemy," said Eric's father Edward, who left his job at Conagra Foods in North Carolina to be his son's full-time health advocate. "So we took him home."
Unsatisfied with the outcome, Eric and his family eventually found treatment at a private hospital, and began a slow path to recovery. But his story is unusual. Wounded vets are seldom treated at private hospitals, which say they offer expertise for severe brain injuries like Eric's. The VA is resisting using their services, setting up a clash over care for some the war's most seriously wounded veterans.
Of the nearly 24,000 wounded soldiers returning from Iraq and Afghanistan, about a third suffer from some degree of traumatic brain injury, or TBI, according to the General Accounting Office.
The government has been on the defensive about veterans' medical care after a probe found shoddy living conditions of recovering wounded at Walter Reed Army Medical Center, considered the jewel in the military's health care system.
A newly-appointed Commission on Care for America's Returning Wounded Warriors was formed by U.S. President George Bush in response. A major topic is whether the civilian sector could be used more in treating traumatic brain injury, one of the fastest growing injuries of the war.
"That is a $64,000 question, and one that the Commission will be studying," as it holds hearings in advance of drawing up recommendations for Bush, said Edward Eckenhoff, president of the National Rehabilitation Hospital in Washington and a member of the commission.
CASE BY CASE
The VA has four hospitals to treat severe brain injuries, in Minneapolis, California, Florida and Virginia. Critics say the total of 48 hospital beds in the entire VA system devoted to the brain injuries is inadequate to meet demand.
Barbara Sigford, the VA's National Director for Physical Medicine and Rehab, said the agency's expertise in spinal cord injuries and amputations, often intertwined with brain trauma, has been growing for the past 20 years.
"This isn't new for us by any means," she said. "I would say that seldom is it in someone's best interest to transfer them to another (civilian) program."
Sigford said there is no issue of overcrowding since the four VA trauma centers are running at about 80 percent capacity.
For their part, private hospitals said they have been building expertise by treating tough brain injuries for decades, whether for construction accidents or car crash victims. The VA by contrast has been caring for mostly chronic illness in Vietnam and World War II veterans, they say.
Jeremy Chwat, executive vice president of the advocacy group, the Wounded Warrior project, said the VA does a good job of caring for critical patients once they arrive, but that it could use assistance in the long road of rehabilitation.
"We've been urging them to collaborate with the private sector. It's about choice; we want veterans to choose the VA but not be captive by it," he said.
NOVEL INJURY
Traumatic brain injury, caused by a blow or jolt to the head, often results in severe disability, at times permanent brain damage. It is being called the signature injury of this war, as improved armor and medical advances save many more lives than in prior conflicts.
"In Vietnam, if you got your leg blown off, you bled to death. Now if they can get you to a hospital, you are not going to die," said Ronald Glasser, a Minneapolis specialist in nephrology and rheumatology, who has written several books on veteran care and was a physician during the Vietnam war.
Symptoms include blurred vision, slurred speech, and physical paralysis, among many others, and it is often coupled with amputation and spinal cord problems.
The VA estimates about 400 cases over four years were severe enough to require significant rehab, while some critics say the numbers are several times that.
Often-times lack of physical symptoms may cause slow reporting of the injury, experts said.
"The presence or absence of particularly a closed-head injury where there is not an obvious breach of the skull" is hard to diagnose, said Col. Joyce Grissom, medical director for the Defense Department's Tricare health program.
STANDING UP
Private rehab hospitals are dealing with financial pressures, including a need to fill beds because of more stringent Medicare requirements, Chwat noted.
"Obviously dollars and sense do come into play. To say there is not a financial motive involved would be naive, but unless the family can choose to go somewhere else, you can't say they are choosing the VA."
The private sector officials say there have been encouraging signs recently. One of the private institutions, the Rehabilitation Institute of Chicago, is where Eric Edmundson wound up two months ago after his father discovered he could use a civilian facility and have it paid by GI benefits.
It was worth it, he says. About a month ago, Eric stood up by himself for the first time since 2005.
"When we first got to Walter Reed. They took us together in a room and said he'd be a vegetable his whole life," his father said.
-----------------------
Citation: Kim Dixon. "Iraq war brain trauma victims turn to private care," Reuters, 23 April 2007.
Original URL: http://www.alertnet.org/thenews/newsdesk/N02447108.htm
-----------------------
Reuters, 23 April 2007
CHICAGO - Sgt. Eric Edmundson arrived at the U.S. Army's Walter Reed hospital in October 2005 with a severe head concussion, a victim of one of the many roadside bombs that are a part of daily life for soldiers in Iraq.
Six months later, after intense physical rehab and an infection that made control of his limbs futile, his morale hit bottom. The Department of Veterans Affairs gave him the choice of a nursing home or returning home from a Richmond, Virginia facility, his family said.
"We felt the VA had a 'wait and see' attitude, and our belief was that time was our enemy," said Eric's father Edward, who left his job at Conagra Foods in North Carolina to be his son's full-time health advocate. "So we took him home."
Unsatisfied with the outcome, Eric and his family eventually found treatment at a private hospital, and began a slow path to recovery. But his story is unusual. Wounded vets are seldom treated at private hospitals, which say they offer expertise for severe brain injuries like Eric's. The VA is resisting using their services, setting up a clash over care for some the war's most seriously wounded veterans.
Of the nearly 24,000 wounded soldiers returning from Iraq and Afghanistan, about a third suffer from some degree of traumatic brain injury, or TBI, according to the General Accounting Office.
The government has been on the defensive about veterans' medical care after a probe found shoddy living conditions of recovering wounded at Walter Reed Army Medical Center, considered the jewel in the military's health care system.
A newly-appointed Commission on Care for America's Returning Wounded Warriors was formed by U.S. President George Bush in response. A major topic is whether the civilian sector could be used more in treating traumatic brain injury, one of the fastest growing injuries of the war.
"That is a $64,000 question, and one that the Commission will be studying," as it holds hearings in advance of drawing up recommendations for Bush, said Edward Eckenhoff, president of the National Rehabilitation Hospital in Washington and a member of the commission.
CASE BY CASE
The VA has four hospitals to treat severe brain injuries, in Minneapolis, California, Florida and Virginia. Critics say the total of 48 hospital beds in the entire VA system devoted to the brain injuries is inadequate to meet demand.
Barbara Sigford, the VA's National Director for Physical Medicine and Rehab, said the agency's expertise in spinal cord injuries and amputations, often intertwined with brain trauma, has been growing for the past 20 years.
"This isn't new for us by any means," she said. "I would say that seldom is it in someone's best interest to transfer them to another (civilian) program."
Sigford said there is no issue of overcrowding since the four VA trauma centers are running at about 80 percent capacity.
For their part, private hospitals said they have been building expertise by treating tough brain injuries for decades, whether for construction accidents or car crash victims. The VA by contrast has been caring for mostly chronic illness in Vietnam and World War II veterans, they say.
Jeremy Chwat, executive vice president of the advocacy group, the Wounded Warrior project, said the VA does a good job of caring for critical patients once they arrive, but that it could use assistance in the long road of rehabilitation.
"We've been urging them to collaborate with the private sector. It's about choice; we want veterans to choose the VA but not be captive by it," he said.
NOVEL INJURY
Traumatic brain injury, caused by a blow or jolt to the head, often results in severe disability, at times permanent brain damage. It is being called the signature injury of this war, as improved armor and medical advances save many more lives than in prior conflicts.
"In Vietnam, if you got your leg blown off, you bled to death. Now if they can get you to a hospital, you are not going to die," said Ronald Glasser, a Minneapolis specialist in nephrology and rheumatology, who has written several books on veteran care and was a physician during the Vietnam war.
Symptoms include blurred vision, slurred speech, and physical paralysis, among many others, and it is often coupled with amputation and spinal cord problems.
The VA estimates about 400 cases over four years were severe enough to require significant rehab, while some critics say the numbers are several times that.
Often-times lack of physical symptoms may cause slow reporting of the injury, experts said.
"The presence or absence of particularly a closed-head injury where there is not an obvious breach of the skull" is hard to diagnose, said Col. Joyce Grissom, medical director for the Defense Department's Tricare health program.
STANDING UP
Private rehab hospitals are dealing with financial pressures, including a need to fill beds because of more stringent Medicare requirements, Chwat noted.
"Obviously dollars and sense do come into play. To say there is not a financial motive involved would be naive, but unless the family can choose to go somewhere else, you can't say they are choosing the VA."
The private sector officials say there have been encouraging signs recently. One of the private institutions, the Rehabilitation Institute of Chicago, is where Eric Edmundson wound up two months ago after his father discovered he could use a civilian facility and have it paid by GI benefits.
It was worth it, he says. About a month ago, Eric stood up by himself for the first time since 2005.
"When we first got to Walter Reed. They took us together in a room and said he'd be a vegetable his whole life," his father said.
-----------------------
Citation: Kim Dixon. "Iraq war brain trauma victims turn to private care," Reuters, 23 April 2007.
Original URL: http://www.alertnet.org/thenews/newsdesk/N02447108.htm
-----------------------
20 April 2007
Baghdad death squads end truce to seek revenge
By Patrick Cockburn
The Independent, 20 April 2007
Death squads are returning to the streets of Baghdad despite the security plan for the capital launched with great fanfare by the US two months ago.
As Iraqis bury the 230 people killed or found dead on Wednesday, ominous signs are appearing that the Shia militias have resumed their tit-for-tat killings. There is a sharp increase in the number of dead bodies found bearing signs of torture, with 67 corpses discovered dumped in Baghdad in the first three days of the week.
People in Baghdad, both Shia and Sunni, do not dare move bodies left lying in the rubbish outside their doors though they sometimes cover them with a blanket. One corpse was left lying for days in the centre of a main commercial street in the Sunni bastion of al-Adhamiyah in east Baghdad. He was believed to be a victim of al-Qa'ida in Iraq, which has been killing Sunni who belong to other guerrilla groups or are associated with the government. Local people say that US and Iraqi forces stationed in a newly renovated police station in al-Adhamiyah as part of the security plan seem unaware of what is happening around them.
Shia militiamen are likely to seek revenge for recent horrific bombings since most victims were Shia. The bomb used in the most deadly attack, which killed 127 people and wounded 148 in Sadriyah, was meticulously planned to explode just as minibuses were collecting workers who had finished work at 4pm.
As wakes for the dead were held in huge mourning tents in nearby alleys in Sadriyah, Akram Abdullah, owner of a clothing shop, said: "It's a tragedy - devastation covers the whole area. It's as if a volcano erupted here. Charred bodies are still inside the twisted cars, some cars are still covered with ashes."
The attacks are likely to speed the return of the Mehdi Army in Shia areas to provide protection. It was stood down by its leader, the nationalist cleric Muqtada al-Sadr, as the US-Iraqi security crackdown began on 14 February. When Iraqi army soldiers and a US patrol entered Sadriyah after the bombing they were met with jeers and stones.
The truce by the Mehdi Army militia, though never total, may now be ending because it was met with an escalation in violence by the Sunni insurgents. In a gruesome video posted on the internet a group linked to al-Qa'ida showed a masked gunman shooting 20 kidnap victims, all police or soldiers, in the back of the head. The group had demanded the freeing of all female prisoners by the government.
There was a further suicide bomb in Baghdad yesterday which killed a dozen people in the mainly Shia Karradah district 500 yards from the heavily guarded home of President Jalal Talabani. Hours later the US Defence Secretary, Robert Gates, arrived on an unannounced visit saying he would tell Iraqi leaders that America's commitment was not open-ended.
The US security plan has never had the political as well as the military components essential to success. It should have encouraged more Iraqi groups to enter the political process and eschew violence. In fact it has done the opposite. The US has been pushing the government of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki to break with Mr Sadr, who has a very large following among the Shia majority.
Mr Sadr withdrew his six ministers from the government this week saying that Mr Maliki had failed to set a deadline for a US troop withdrawal. But the Sadrists are also angry that US and Iraqi government troops have arrested 800 of their men, including Sheikh Qais Khazali, one of their leaders. Mr Sadr reportedly believes the Prime Minister reneged on an agreement not to purse the Mehdi Army if it did not fight.
The soaring number of people being executed by the government since the death penalty was reintroduced in 2004 is condemned in a new report by Amnesty International. It says that 270 people are under sentence of death and more than 100 have been executed, almost all of them since the start of 2006. The report says many of them only confessed under torture.
---------------------------
Citation: Patrick Cockburn. "Baghdad death squads end truce to seek revenge," The Independent, 20 April 2007.
Original URL: http://news.independent.co.uk/world/middle_east/article2465943.ece
---------------------------
The Independent, 20 April 2007
Death squads are returning to the streets of Baghdad despite the security plan for the capital launched with great fanfare by the US two months ago.
As Iraqis bury the 230 people killed or found dead on Wednesday, ominous signs are appearing that the Shia militias have resumed their tit-for-tat killings. There is a sharp increase in the number of dead bodies found bearing signs of torture, with 67 corpses discovered dumped in Baghdad in the first three days of the week.
People in Baghdad, both Shia and Sunni, do not dare move bodies left lying in the rubbish outside their doors though they sometimes cover them with a blanket. One corpse was left lying for days in the centre of a main commercial street in the Sunni bastion of al-Adhamiyah in east Baghdad. He was believed to be a victim of al-Qa'ida in Iraq, which has been killing Sunni who belong to other guerrilla groups or are associated with the government. Local people say that US and Iraqi forces stationed in a newly renovated police station in al-Adhamiyah as part of the security plan seem unaware of what is happening around them.
Shia militiamen are likely to seek revenge for recent horrific bombings since most victims were Shia. The bomb used in the most deadly attack, which killed 127 people and wounded 148 in Sadriyah, was meticulously planned to explode just as minibuses were collecting workers who had finished work at 4pm.
As wakes for the dead were held in huge mourning tents in nearby alleys in Sadriyah, Akram Abdullah, owner of a clothing shop, said: "It's a tragedy - devastation covers the whole area. It's as if a volcano erupted here. Charred bodies are still inside the twisted cars, some cars are still covered with ashes."
The attacks are likely to speed the return of the Mehdi Army in Shia areas to provide protection. It was stood down by its leader, the nationalist cleric Muqtada al-Sadr, as the US-Iraqi security crackdown began on 14 February. When Iraqi army soldiers and a US patrol entered Sadriyah after the bombing they were met with jeers and stones.
The truce by the Mehdi Army militia, though never total, may now be ending because it was met with an escalation in violence by the Sunni insurgents. In a gruesome video posted on the internet a group linked to al-Qa'ida showed a masked gunman shooting 20 kidnap victims, all police or soldiers, in the back of the head. The group had demanded the freeing of all female prisoners by the government.
There was a further suicide bomb in Baghdad yesterday which killed a dozen people in the mainly Shia Karradah district 500 yards from the heavily guarded home of President Jalal Talabani. Hours later the US Defence Secretary, Robert Gates, arrived on an unannounced visit saying he would tell Iraqi leaders that America's commitment was not open-ended.
The US security plan has never had the political as well as the military components essential to success. It should have encouraged more Iraqi groups to enter the political process and eschew violence. In fact it has done the opposite. The US has been pushing the government of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki to break with Mr Sadr, who has a very large following among the Shia majority.
Mr Sadr withdrew his six ministers from the government this week saying that Mr Maliki had failed to set a deadline for a US troop withdrawal. But the Sadrists are also angry that US and Iraqi government troops have arrested 800 of their men, including Sheikh Qais Khazali, one of their leaders. Mr Sadr reportedly believes the Prime Minister reneged on an agreement not to purse the Mehdi Army if it did not fight.
The soaring number of people being executed by the government since the death penalty was reintroduced in 2004 is condemned in a new report by Amnesty International. It says that 270 people are under sentence of death and more than 100 have been executed, almost all of them since the start of 2006. The report says many of them only confessed under torture.
---------------------------
Citation: Patrick Cockburn. "Baghdad death squads end truce to seek revenge," The Independent, 20 April 2007.
Original URL: http://news.independent.co.uk/world/middle_east/article2465943.ece
---------------------------
Insurgents announce 'Islamic Cabinet'
By Maamoun Youssef
The Associated Press, 19 April 2007
CAIRO, Egypt - An insurgent coalition announced an "Islamic Cabinet" for Iraq in a Web video posted on Thursday, naming the head of al-Qaida in Iraq as "minister of war."
The announcement appeared to be a propaganda move by the Islamic State in Iraq coalition to present itself as an alternative government opposed to the U.S.-backed, Shiite-led administration of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki.
The Islamic State of Iraq is a coalition of eight insurgent groups, the most powerful of them al-Qaida in Iraq. It was first announced in October, claiming to hold territory in the Sunni-dominated areas of western and central Iraq.
In Thursday's video, a man identified as a spokesman for the group appeared, with his face obscured, speaking from behind a desk with a flat-screen computer.
"It is the duty at our present stage to form this Cabinet, the first Islamic Cabinet, which has faith in God," said the spokesman, wearing robes and a red kaffiyeh headdress.
He then listed a 10-member "Cabinet," including Abu Hamza al-Muhajer as "war minister."
Al-Muhajer is the name announced as the successor of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the leader of al-Qaida in Iraq, who was killed in the summer of 2006.
Al-Qaida in Iraq is blamed for some of the deadliest suicide bombings against Shiite civilians, as well as numerous attacks on U.S. troops and Iraqi soldiers and police.
The names listed by the spokesman were all pseudonyms, and their real names were not known. The Islamic state is led by Abu Omar al-Baghdadi, who holds the title of "emir (prince) of the faithful."
Sheik Abu Abdul-Rahman al-Falahi was named as the emir's "first minister," the spokesman said. Other positions included ministers of information, "prisoners and martyrs," agriculture and health.
The issuing of the video could also be aimed at strengthening the Islamic State of Iraq's status among supporters after a rare public dispute between it and other insurgent groups not part of the coalition.
In the past week, another Sunni insurgent group, the Islamic Army in Iraq, has issued statements accusing al-Qaida of killing its members and trying to force others to join its ranks. Al-Baghdadi tried to patch up the dispute by issuing a Web audiotape this week calling for unity and promising to punish any of his group's members who kill other insurgents.
--------------------------------
Citation: Maamoun Youssef. "Insurgents announce 'Islamic Cabinet'," The Associated Press, 19 April 2007.
Original URL: http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20070419/ap_on_re_mi_ea/iraq_insurgent_government_2;_ylt=AsCkCpG56GYc70R48RMLCHdX6GMA
--------------------------------
The Associated Press, 19 April 2007
CAIRO, Egypt - An insurgent coalition announced an "Islamic Cabinet" for Iraq in a Web video posted on Thursday, naming the head of al-Qaida in Iraq as "minister of war."
The announcement appeared to be a propaganda move by the Islamic State in Iraq coalition to present itself as an alternative government opposed to the U.S.-backed, Shiite-led administration of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki.
The Islamic State of Iraq is a coalition of eight insurgent groups, the most powerful of them al-Qaida in Iraq. It was first announced in October, claiming to hold territory in the Sunni-dominated areas of western and central Iraq.
In Thursday's video, a man identified as a spokesman for the group appeared, with his face obscured, speaking from behind a desk with a flat-screen computer.
"It is the duty at our present stage to form this Cabinet, the first Islamic Cabinet, which has faith in God," said the spokesman, wearing robes and a red kaffiyeh headdress.
He then listed a 10-member "Cabinet," including Abu Hamza al-Muhajer as "war minister."
Al-Muhajer is the name announced as the successor of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the leader of al-Qaida in Iraq, who was killed in the summer of 2006.
Al-Qaida in Iraq is blamed for some of the deadliest suicide bombings against Shiite civilians, as well as numerous attacks on U.S. troops and Iraqi soldiers and police.
The names listed by the spokesman were all pseudonyms, and their real names were not known. The Islamic state is led by Abu Omar al-Baghdadi, who holds the title of "emir (prince) of the faithful."
Sheik Abu Abdul-Rahman al-Falahi was named as the emir's "first minister," the spokesman said. Other positions included ministers of information, "prisoners and martyrs," agriculture and health.
The issuing of the video could also be aimed at strengthening the Islamic State of Iraq's status among supporters after a rare public dispute between it and other insurgent groups not part of the coalition.
In the past week, another Sunni insurgent group, the Islamic Army in Iraq, has issued statements accusing al-Qaida of killing its members and trying to force others to join its ranks. Al-Baghdadi tried to patch up the dispute by issuing a Web audiotape this week calling for unity and promising to punish any of his group's members who kill other insurgents.
--------------------------------
Citation: Maamoun Youssef. "Insurgents announce 'Islamic Cabinet'," The Associated Press, 19 April 2007.
Original URL: http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20070419/ap_on_re_mi_ea/iraq_insurgent_government_2;_ylt=AsCkCpG56GYc70R48RMLCHdX6GMA
--------------------------------
18 April 2007
Stressed army makes US vulnerable - retired general
By Susan Cornwell
Reuters, 17 April 2007
WASHINGTON - The disastrous state of the U.S. military is putting the country in strategic peril, a retired U.S. general said on the eve of a showdown between President George W. Bush and Democrats over paying for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Even as he offered a blistering critique of the Pentagon, retired Gen. Barry McCaffrey on Tuesday urged Congress to approve Bush's $100 billion funding request for the conflicts, saying that to delay it would be "monumental bad judgment."
"We have no option at this point but to give General (David) Petraeus and Ambassador Ryan Cocker the tools and timing to do their job," McCaffrey told the Senate Armed Services Committee, referring to the new U.S. commander and ambassador in Iraq.
"If it doesn't work, within a year this Congress is going to pull the plug on the war," said McCaffrey, retired four-star general and former head of the U.S. Southern Command.
Talks are set for Wednesday between the Republican president and congressional leaders. Democrats say there must be a withdrawal timetable for the 49ers Iraq war attached to the money for the troops; Bush says he won't sign a funding bill with a withdrawal deadline attached.
McCaffrey, who returned last month from a trip to Iraq and Afghanistan, condemned Pentagon policies he said had left the U.S. Army too small, with its equipment in disarray and lacking a fallback position should a challenge come from somewhere like Iran, Syria or North Korea.
The Bush administration plans to permanently increase the size of the U.S. Army and Marines by about 92,000 troops over the next several years, but McCaffrey felt increases were not happening fast enough.
"It is my judgment we are in a position of strategic peril that is going to take us three to five years to get out of," McCaffrey said.
But Gen. Peter Pace, chairman of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff, said the military has the ability to take on a major new conflict, despite the strain of Iraq and Afghanistan.
"I try to speak very precisely publicly about this because the worst thing you can do is you have some country sitting out there miscalculating the enormous residual capacity of the United States military and think that they can do something because we are currently tied up," Pace told reporters in Washington.
"We are focused on Iraq. We are focused on Afghanistan. We do have a lot of our assets there. But we do have enormous residual capacity that's available to the nation," he said.
In the House of Representatives, top Army officials on Tuesday urged Congress to approve the war money. Vice Chief of Staff Gen. Richard Cody said a delay in funding last year had forced Army officials to freeze civilian hiring, fire temporary workers and delay information technology purchases.
------------------------------
Citation: Susan Cornwell. "Stressed army makes US vulnerable - retired general," Reuters, 17 April 2007.
Original URL: http://www.alertnet.org/thenews/newsdesk/N17454352.htm
------------------------------
Reuters, 17 April 2007
WASHINGTON - The disastrous state of the U.S. military is putting the country in strategic peril, a retired U.S. general said on the eve of a showdown between President George W. Bush and Democrats over paying for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Even as he offered a blistering critique of the Pentagon, retired Gen. Barry McCaffrey on Tuesday urged Congress to approve Bush's $100 billion funding request for the conflicts, saying that to delay it would be "monumental bad judgment."
"We have no option at this point but to give General (David) Petraeus and Ambassador Ryan Cocker the tools and timing to do their job," McCaffrey told the Senate Armed Services Committee, referring to the new U.S. commander and ambassador in Iraq.
"If it doesn't work, within a year this Congress is going to pull the plug on the war," said McCaffrey, retired four-star general and former head of the U.S. Southern Command.
Talks are set for Wednesday between the Republican president and congressional leaders. Democrats say there must be a withdrawal timetable for the 49ers Iraq war attached to the money for the troops; Bush says he won't sign a funding bill with a withdrawal deadline attached.
McCaffrey, who returned last month from a trip to Iraq and Afghanistan, condemned Pentagon policies he said had left the U.S. Army too small, with its equipment in disarray and lacking a fallback position should a challenge come from somewhere like Iran, Syria or North Korea.
The Bush administration plans to permanently increase the size of the U.S. Army and Marines by about 92,000 troops over the next several years, but McCaffrey felt increases were not happening fast enough.
"It is my judgment we are in a position of strategic peril that is going to take us three to five years to get out of," McCaffrey said.
But Gen. Peter Pace, chairman of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff, said the military has the ability to take on a major new conflict, despite the strain of Iraq and Afghanistan.
"I try to speak very precisely publicly about this because the worst thing you can do is you have some country sitting out there miscalculating the enormous residual capacity of the United States military and think that they can do something because we are currently tied up," Pace told reporters in Washington.
"We are focused on Iraq. We are focused on Afghanistan. We do have a lot of our assets there. But we do have enormous residual capacity that's available to the nation," he said.
In the House of Representatives, top Army officials on Tuesday urged Congress to approve the war money. Vice Chief of Staff Gen. Richard Cody said a delay in funding last year had forced Army officials to freeze civilian hiring, fire temporary workers and delay information technology purchases.
------------------------------
Citation: Susan Cornwell. "Stressed army makes US vulnerable - retired general," Reuters, 17 April 2007.
Original URL: http://www.alertnet.org/thenews/newsdesk/N17454352.htm
------------------------------
13 April 2007
A bloody message from Iraq: nowhere is safe...
The day a suicide bomber struck at the heart of Iraq's democracy
By Patrick Cockburn
The Independent, 13 April 2007
Nowhere is safe. Insurgents struck in the heart of the Green Zone yesterday, one of the most heavily defended places in Baghdad. The symbolism - and the bloody message - was clear with this attack on the home to the US-imposed democracy.
A suicide bomber cleared at least eight rings of security to blow himself up in the Iraqi parliament, killing eight people including three lawmakers as they were eating lunch. It was the most deadly attack mounted from within the Green Zone.
In a separate attack, the Iraqi capital was cut in two as one of the main bridges over the Tigris was blown up earlier in the day.
The Green Zone bombing was not only an assault on democracy. It was intended to undermine President George Bush's troop "surge", which is denounced as a sham by so many Iraqis.
But even Iraqis hardened to violence were shocked by the bloody scene in parliament. "I saw a ball of fire and heard a huge, loud explosion," said one witness. "There were pieces of flesh floating in the air."
The bodyguard of a Sunni member of parliament is suspected of detonating a vest packed with explosives in the restaurant beside the chamber where parliament meets. The success of a suicide bomber in penetrating one of the most tightly guarded buildings in the world could only have happened if he had help from other security men. The Iraqi parliament is well inside the heavily fortified Green Zone and is protected by eight layers of security, including at least three checks for explosives.
President Bush condemned the attack saying: "It reminds us that there is an enemy willing to bomb innocent people in a symbol of democracy."
The bombing is likely to increase scepticism that the two-month old American campaign to get control of Baghdad, the "surge", is achieving very much.
The suicide bombing is one of the most dramatic demonstrations of the extent to which the Sunni insurgents have infiltrated the government's own security apparatus. Other recent examples include the serious wounding of the deputy prime minister Salam al-Zubaie on 23 March by a bomber who got near him with the connivance of his own bodyguards.
The 275-member Iraqi parliament meets on the first floor of a cavernous building, originally built by Saddam Hussein to hold meetings of Islamic nations. Immediately outside the assembly hall is a restaurant. It was there, beside the cash register, that the bomber blew himself up.
The sensitivity of the US and the Iraqi government to the breach in security was apparent because all television cameras and video tapes showing the immediate aftermath of the blast were confiscated and handed to US authorities.
The only footage to be shown was by al-Hurra channel, shot seconds after the attack, it showed a dusty hallway with people screaming for help. One man is shown slumped in the dust.
Mohammed Abu Bakr, the head of media at the parliament, said: "I saw two legs in the middle of the cafeteria and none of those killed or wounded lost their legs, which means they must be the legs of the suicide attacker."
Of the three members of parliament to die, two were from Sunni parties and one from the Shia alliance. Khalaf al-Ilyan, one of the leaders of the Iraqi Accordance Front, said the explosion "underlines the failure of the government security plan."
"The plan is 100 per cent a failure," said Mr al-Ilyan. "It's a complete flop. The explosion means instability and the lack of security has reached the Green Zone, which the government boasts is heavily fortified."
Shia and Kurdish members of parliament have long claimed the bodyguards of Sunni politicians are infiltrated by insurgents. Some 92 per cent of Iraq's five million strong Sunni community say they support armed resistance against the US.
The Green Zone itself is four miles square in the centre of Baghdad. It is heavily defended but some 5,000 Iraqis live inside it. It is defended by a mixture of soldiers, private security personel and bodyguards of uncertain loyalty. Some weeks ago, the US military said they had found two suicide vests inside the zone.
In the US, leaders tried to give the impression that the "surge" was going ahead as planned and is, in any case, only in its initial stages.
"We've said there are going to be good days and bad days concerning the security plan," said the US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice.
Senator John McCain, the Republican presidential candidate, who visited Baghdad earlier in the month, said the US security plan was beginning to show modest results. He said "spectacular" attacks like that yesterday on parliament were aimed at grabbing headlines. He had earlier claimed that the media were exaggerating the collapse of security in Baghdad.
In the second attack yesterday, a truck bomb exploded on the al-Sarafiya bridge over the Tigris, which links east and west Baghdad, killing at least 10 people and injuring 26.
"A huge explosion shook our house and I thought it would demolish our house," said Farhan al-Sudani, a Shia businessman who lives near by. "Me and my wife jumped immediately from our bed, grabbed our three kids and took them outside."
Some 20 people who were in cars that crashed into the river after the blast were still missing last night. Among the 10 confirmed dead were four policemen whose patrol car fell into the river. All that was left of the steel bridge, built by the British authorities 75 years ago, was twisted girders.
Although President Bush has been seeking to blame Iran for supporting the insurgency in Iraq there is little evidence for that. The great majority of attacks on US forces are by Sunni guerrillas in Sunni districts. There have been battles with Shia militia but these have been intermittent. Muqtada al-Sadr, the leader of the Mehdi Army, the largest Shia militia, has stood down his men and told them to avoid a confrontation with US forces.
The US is gradually increasing its forces to 173,000 by sending in five new brigades as part of the new security plan. But there is little sign the additional troops are altering the political and military balance in Iraq. The Sunni rebellion is continuing and is still highly effective.
Meanwhile, the Shia are increasingly hostile to the US occupation and Mr Sadr staged large anti-US demonstrations in the holy city of Najaf last weekend. So far, the US has balked at large confrontations with the Shia militias in Baghdad.
A citadel under siege
September 2003
Using shoulder-launched missiles, Iraqi insurgents strike the Al Rashid Hotel, often frequented by US military and government figures Only one of the rockets hits its target, which stands less than 500 yards from the concrete blast walls that surround the area, but the attack is a propaganda coup.
OCTOBER 2004
The first suicide bombing inside the Green Zone occurred when two bombers smuggled explosives into the area and detonated them in the north-eastern corner of the enclave. The blast tore through the Green Zone's bazaar, killing 10 people including four Americans.
November 2004
A mortar attack killed four employees of Global Risk Strategies, a British security firm, and wounded at least 12. The company later announced the four were former Gurkhas.
January 2005
Insurgents managed to strike the US embassy in the Green Zone by firing a salvo of rockets, killing two Americans and wounding a further four. The attack came on the eve of elections, striking a blow against the Iraqi government.
November 2006
Iraq's parliamentary speaker, Mahmoud al-Mashhadani, narrowly avoided assassination after a bomb tore through one of his cars as it passed through the Green Zone.
March 2007
Amid reports from the US Army that insurgents were stepping up mortar attacks on the Green Zone, a suicide bomber passed through security checkpoints undetected on 23 March and was able to detonate his belt next to Salam Zikam Ali al-Zubaie, Iraq's deputy prime minister, as he left afternoon prayers. Nine people were killed although, remarkably, Mr Zubaie survived. The attack came a day after a rocket attack on the Green Zone forced the UN secretary general, Ban Ki-moon, to duck behind a podium for cover.
----------------------------------
Citation: Patrick Cockburn. "A bloody message from Iraq: nowhere is safe...," The Independent, 13 April 2007.
Original URL: http://news.independent.co.uk/world/middle_east/article2444473.ece
----------------------------------
By Patrick Cockburn
The Independent, 13 April 2007
Nowhere is safe. Insurgents struck in the heart of the Green Zone yesterday, one of the most heavily defended places in Baghdad. The symbolism - and the bloody message - was clear with this attack on the home to the US-imposed democracy.
A suicide bomber cleared at least eight rings of security to blow himself up in the Iraqi parliament, killing eight people including three lawmakers as they were eating lunch. It was the most deadly attack mounted from within the Green Zone.
In a separate attack, the Iraqi capital was cut in two as one of the main bridges over the Tigris was blown up earlier in the day.
The Green Zone bombing was not only an assault on democracy. It was intended to undermine President George Bush's troop "surge", which is denounced as a sham by so many Iraqis.
But even Iraqis hardened to violence were shocked by the bloody scene in parliament. "I saw a ball of fire and heard a huge, loud explosion," said one witness. "There were pieces of flesh floating in the air."
The bodyguard of a Sunni member of parliament is suspected of detonating a vest packed with explosives in the restaurant beside the chamber where parliament meets. The success of a suicide bomber in penetrating one of the most tightly guarded buildings in the world could only have happened if he had help from other security men. The Iraqi parliament is well inside the heavily fortified Green Zone and is protected by eight layers of security, including at least three checks for explosives.
President Bush condemned the attack saying: "It reminds us that there is an enemy willing to bomb innocent people in a symbol of democracy."
The bombing is likely to increase scepticism that the two-month old American campaign to get control of Baghdad, the "surge", is achieving very much.
The suicide bombing is one of the most dramatic demonstrations of the extent to which the Sunni insurgents have infiltrated the government's own security apparatus. Other recent examples include the serious wounding of the deputy prime minister Salam al-Zubaie on 23 March by a bomber who got near him with the connivance of his own bodyguards.
The 275-member Iraqi parliament meets on the first floor of a cavernous building, originally built by Saddam Hussein to hold meetings of Islamic nations. Immediately outside the assembly hall is a restaurant. It was there, beside the cash register, that the bomber blew himself up.
The sensitivity of the US and the Iraqi government to the breach in security was apparent because all television cameras and video tapes showing the immediate aftermath of the blast were confiscated and handed to US authorities.
The only footage to be shown was by al-Hurra channel, shot seconds after the attack, it showed a dusty hallway with people screaming for help. One man is shown slumped in the dust.
Mohammed Abu Bakr, the head of media at the parliament, said: "I saw two legs in the middle of the cafeteria and none of those killed or wounded lost their legs, which means they must be the legs of the suicide attacker."
Of the three members of parliament to die, two were from Sunni parties and one from the Shia alliance. Khalaf al-Ilyan, one of the leaders of the Iraqi Accordance Front, said the explosion "underlines the failure of the government security plan."
"The plan is 100 per cent a failure," said Mr al-Ilyan. "It's a complete flop. The explosion means instability and the lack of security has reached the Green Zone, which the government boasts is heavily fortified."
Shia and Kurdish members of parliament have long claimed the bodyguards of Sunni politicians are infiltrated by insurgents. Some 92 per cent of Iraq's five million strong Sunni community say they support armed resistance against the US.
The Green Zone itself is four miles square in the centre of Baghdad. It is heavily defended but some 5,000 Iraqis live inside it. It is defended by a mixture of soldiers, private security personel and bodyguards of uncertain loyalty. Some weeks ago, the US military said they had found two suicide vests inside the zone.
In the US, leaders tried to give the impression that the "surge" was going ahead as planned and is, in any case, only in its initial stages.
"We've said there are going to be good days and bad days concerning the security plan," said the US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice.
Senator John McCain, the Republican presidential candidate, who visited Baghdad earlier in the month, said the US security plan was beginning to show modest results. He said "spectacular" attacks like that yesterday on parliament were aimed at grabbing headlines. He had earlier claimed that the media were exaggerating the collapse of security in Baghdad.
In the second attack yesterday, a truck bomb exploded on the al-Sarafiya bridge over the Tigris, which links east and west Baghdad, killing at least 10 people and injuring 26.
"A huge explosion shook our house and I thought it would demolish our house," said Farhan al-Sudani, a Shia businessman who lives near by. "Me and my wife jumped immediately from our bed, grabbed our three kids and took them outside."
Some 20 people who were in cars that crashed into the river after the blast were still missing last night. Among the 10 confirmed dead were four policemen whose patrol car fell into the river. All that was left of the steel bridge, built by the British authorities 75 years ago, was twisted girders.
Although President Bush has been seeking to blame Iran for supporting the insurgency in Iraq there is little evidence for that. The great majority of attacks on US forces are by Sunni guerrillas in Sunni districts. There have been battles with Shia militia but these have been intermittent. Muqtada al-Sadr, the leader of the Mehdi Army, the largest Shia militia, has stood down his men and told them to avoid a confrontation with US forces.
The US is gradually increasing its forces to 173,000 by sending in five new brigades as part of the new security plan. But there is little sign the additional troops are altering the political and military balance in Iraq. The Sunni rebellion is continuing and is still highly effective.
Meanwhile, the Shia are increasingly hostile to the US occupation and Mr Sadr staged large anti-US demonstrations in the holy city of Najaf last weekend. So far, the US has balked at large confrontations with the Shia militias in Baghdad.
A citadel under siege
September 2003
Using shoulder-launched missiles, Iraqi insurgents strike the Al Rashid Hotel, often frequented by US military and government figures Only one of the rockets hits its target, which stands less than 500 yards from the concrete blast walls that surround the area, but the attack is a propaganda coup.
OCTOBER 2004
The first suicide bombing inside the Green Zone occurred when two bombers smuggled explosives into the area and detonated them in the north-eastern corner of the enclave. The blast tore through the Green Zone's bazaar, killing 10 people including four Americans.
November 2004
A mortar attack killed four employees of Global Risk Strategies, a British security firm, and wounded at least 12. The company later announced the four were former Gurkhas.
January 2005
Insurgents managed to strike the US embassy in the Green Zone by firing a salvo of rockets, killing two Americans and wounding a further four. The attack came on the eve of elections, striking a blow against the Iraqi government.
November 2006
Iraq's parliamentary speaker, Mahmoud al-Mashhadani, narrowly avoided assassination after a bomb tore through one of his cars as it passed through the Green Zone.
March 2007
Amid reports from the US Army that insurgents were stepping up mortar attacks on the Green Zone, a suicide bomber passed through security checkpoints undetected on 23 March and was able to detonate his belt next to Salam Zikam Ali al-Zubaie, Iraq's deputy prime minister, as he left afternoon prayers. Nine people were killed although, remarkably, Mr Zubaie survived. The attack came a day after a rocket attack on the Green Zone forced the UN secretary general, Ban Ki-moon, to duck behind a podium for cover.
----------------------------------
Citation: Patrick Cockburn. "A bloody message from Iraq: nowhere is safe...," The Independent, 13 April 2007.
Original URL: http://news.independent.co.uk/world/middle_east/article2444473.ece
----------------------------------
Violence Threatens Oil, Iraq
By Ben Lando
United Press International, 12 April 2007
WASHINGTON (UPI) -- Two Shiite political factions seem to have temporarily set down their arms in Basra, Iraq's second-largest city, the center of its oil industry and the port through which all Iraq's income flows. But the area and the oil sector still face violence while militias and gangs battle for power and control of the oil smuggling trade.
Last week a bomb successfully targeted a pipeline connecting the Rumaila oil field, which produces nearly half or Iraq's 2 million barrels per day, to the southern network. The attack was rare, since the oil infrastructure is seen as important for the country and a prize for the intra-sectarian battles, but could foreshadow new instability.
"Basra is very important, as anybody knows," Ali al-Dabbagh, spokesman for Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, said Wednesday at the U.S. Institute for Peace in Washington. He said a new army/police security force will address it this month.
Dabbagh said Basra is the "most important city because it is the only port in Iraq," and the vast majority of Iraq's 115 billion barrels of proven reserves are in the surrounding area.
"Basra could be as good as Kuwait," Dabbagh said.
But cleric Moqtada al-Sadr's party and the Fadila Party, led by Grand Ayatollah Muhammad al-Yaacoubi, escalated tensions in the past few weeks, locked in violent street battles in Basra in a struggle for control of the city and inside the ruling central government in Baghdad.
"There's a strong rivalry between these two groups that has spilled over into violence recently," said Greg Priddy, global energy analyst for the business risk consulting firm Eurasia Group. "And one of the issues among many that they're fighting over is control of the industry in southern Iraq."
The Fadila Party controls the local Basra government and has heavy influence in business there. Oil sales fund 93 percent of Iraq's federal budget, which means Basra is comparative to Baghdad in terms of importance to the country.
"If you look at Basra as a city, it's the main provider of subcontract jobs, most of the high wage jobs are in that industry," Priddy said. "So whoever controls that has a lot of leverage in terms of dispensing political patronage."
Fadila and Sadr parties both want control of Iraq's Oil Ministry in the expected shakeup of the Maliki Cabinet.
Juan Cole, a Middle East expert at the University of Michigan, said Fadila and Sadrists have laid down arms for now. But two incidents last week have Cole worried about the future.
"This is the first time I remember a Rumaila pipeline being bombed," Cole said. "The reasons they didn't bomb the pipelines down there is that everybody was getting a cut of all this smuggling, and the militias and the tribes are all involved in it.
"I presume somebody has gotten cut out of the deal so badly that this is their way of complaining," Cole said.
No one has claimed responsibility for the attack.
Any party excluded from the power structure has "an incentive to work outside the system and put pressure on it," Priddy said. "It potentially could entail targeting the oil infrastructure, if they're no longer cut in on the oil, so to speak."
Violence, even away from the oil infrastructure, could lead to "operational disruption," Priddy said.
"It hasn't reached that level yet, but the area right around where the oil is produced is not really populated, so most of the people who work there commute out in mini-buses in the morning from Basra and its environs," Priddy said. "There was over a million barrels a day taken off line during the Iranian revolution simply due to loss of skilled labor. Nobody blew up anything. But the skilled labor you need to keep the industry running quit showing up.
"That could reduce output in a way that would affect the market and affect prices," Priddy said. "The more severe version would be that somebody actually starts making a sustained campaign of attacks against the pipeline."
And while pipelines are relatively easy to fix, Priddy said, they are also easy targets to hit and hard to protect, since the long pipeline infrastructure in the area runs in and around cities and villages.
Also last week, British troops stationed in the area -- and on the verge of being withdrawn from the country -- were ambushed. Six were killed. Cole said if the British do leave, security in Basra is left to U.S. or Iraqi troops. Cole said he doubts they are up to the job.
"Then Basra could go completely out of control," Cole said. "Security in Basra is shaky. That to the extent it exists at all it's being provided by the British. Were the British to withdraw most of their troops by December under the new Labor (Party) prime minister, it's hard to see how security would be maintained.
"And if it's not maintained then it becomes more and more difficult to export petroleum through Basra and make sure the government actually gets any of the receipts," Cole said. "That would be the end of the Iraqi government."
------------------------------
Citation: Ben Lando. "Violence Threatens Oil, Iraq," United Press International, 12 April 2007.
Original URL: http://www.upi.com/Energy/Analysis/2007/04/12/analysis_violence_threatens_oil_iraq/
------------------------------
United Press International, 12 April 2007
WASHINGTON (UPI) -- Two Shiite political factions seem to have temporarily set down their arms in Basra, Iraq's second-largest city, the center of its oil industry and the port through which all Iraq's income flows. But the area and the oil sector still face violence while militias and gangs battle for power and control of the oil smuggling trade.
Last week a bomb successfully targeted a pipeline connecting the Rumaila oil field, which produces nearly half or Iraq's 2 million barrels per day, to the southern network. The attack was rare, since the oil infrastructure is seen as important for the country and a prize for the intra-sectarian battles, but could foreshadow new instability.
"Basra is very important, as anybody knows," Ali al-Dabbagh, spokesman for Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, said Wednesday at the U.S. Institute for Peace in Washington. He said a new army/police security force will address it this month.
Dabbagh said Basra is the "most important city because it is the only port in Iraq," and the vast majority of Iraq's 115 billion barrels of proven reserves are in the surrounding area.
"Basra could be as good as Kuwait," Dabbagh said.
But cleric Moqtada al-Sadr's party and the Fadila Party, led by Grand Ayatollah Muhammad al-Yaacoubi, escalated tensions in the past few weeks, locked in violent street battles in Basra in a struggle for control of the city and inside the ruling central government in Baghdad.
"There's a strong rivalry between these two groups that has spilled over into violence recently," said Greg Priddy, global energy analyst for the business risk consulting firm Eurasia Group. "And one of the issues among many that they're fighting over is control of the industry in southern Iraq."
The Fadila Party controls the local Basra government and has heavy influence in business there. Oil sales fund 93 percent of Iraq's federal budget, which means Basra is comparative to Baghdad in terms of importance to the country.
"If you look at Basra as a city, it's the main provider of subcontract jobs, most of the high wage jobs are in that industry," Priddy said. "So whoever controls that has a lot of leverage in terms of dispensing political patronage."
Fadila and Sadr parties both want control of Iraq's Oil Ministry in the expected shakeup of the Maliki Cabinet.
Juan Cole, a Middle East expert at the University of Michigan, said Fadila and Sadrists have laid down arms for now. But two incidents last week have Cole worried about the future.
"This is the first time I remember a Rumaila pipeline being bombed," Cole said. "The reasons they didn't bomb the pipelines down there is that everybody was getting a cut of all this smuggling, and the militias and the tribes are all involved in it.
"I presume somebody has gotten cut out of the deal so badly that this is their way of complaining," Cole said.
No one has claimed responsibility for the attack.
Any party excluded from the power structure has "an incentive to work outside the system and put pressure on it," Priddy said. "It potentially could entail targeting the oil infrastructure, if they're no longer cut in on the oil, so to speak."
Violence, even away from the oil infrastructure, could lead to "operational disruption," Priddy said.
"It hasn't reached that level yet, but the area right around where the oil is produced is not really populated, so most of the people who work there commute out in mini-buses in the morning from Basra and its environs," Priddy said. "There was over a million barrels a day taken off line during the Iranian revolution simply due to loss of skilled labor. Nobody blew up anything. But the skilled labor you need to keep the industry running quit showing up.
"That could reduce output in a way that would affect the market and affect prices," Priddy said. "The more severe version would be that somebody actually starts making a sustained campaign of attacks against the pipeline."
And while pipelines are relatively easy to fix, Priddy said, they are also easy targets to hit and hard to protect, since the long pipeline infrastructure in the area runs in and around cities and villages.
Also last week, British troops stationed in the area -- and on the verge of being withdrawn from the country -- were ambushed. Six were killed. Cole said if the British do leave, security in Basra is left to U.S. or Iraqi troops. Cole said he doubts they are up to the job.
"Then Basra could go completely out of control," Cole said. "Security in Basra is shaky. That to the extent it exists at all it's being provided by the British. Were the British to withdraw most of their troops by December under the new Labor (Party) prime minister, it's hard to see how security would be maintained.
"And if it's not maintained then it becomes more and more difficult to export petroleum through Basra and make sure the government actually gets any of the receipts," Cole said. "That would be the end of the Iraqi government."
------------------------------
Citation: Ben Lando. "Violence Threatens Oil, Iraq," United Press International, 12 April 2007.
Original URL: http://www.upi.com/Energy/Analysis/2007/04/12/analysis_violence_threatens_oil_iraq/
------------------------------
NATO seeks 3,400 more trainers for Afghanistan - US
By Kristin Roberts
Reuters, 12 April 2007
QUEBEC CITY (Reuters) - NATO commanders have asked for 3,400 additional police and Army trainers for Afghanistan, a need the United States wants European allies to fill, U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Gates said on Thursday.
"NATO has asked for about 3,400 training positions, and quite frankly we're having trouble," Gates said after meeting with defense ministers from countries with troops in Afghanistan's volatile southern region.
Gates said the group, including ministers from Canada, Britain, Australia and other countries, talked about approaching European allies that do not have troops engaged in combat in Afghanistan to fill the training requirement.
"You have nations that are not willing to put combat troops in. ... Those who are not willing to do that or able to do that may be able to pick up the slack in this area where those of us who are contributing most of the combat forces don't have additional forces available," he said.
The request for more trainers came about six weeks ago, Gates said. About 60 percent of the 3,400 trainers are needed for Afghanistan's police and the rest for the army.
Those training needs come on top of other troop and equipment shortfalls previously identified by NATO commanders. The United States and Britain have contributed most of the troops to the Afghan mission, and officials have expressed frustration that other nations have not committed additional forces following commanders' call for more troops earlier this year.
Gates said the United States could provide some of the trainers, but he could not say how many. U.S. forces are already stretched thin by the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, as highlighted on Wednesday by the Pentagon's decision to extend the tours of all active-duty troops.
"We can fill some of (the training positions) but we don't really have the ability right now to fill them all," he said.
------------------------------
Citation: Kristin Roberts. "NATO seeks 3,400 more trainers for Afghanistan - US," Reuters, 12 April 2007.
Original URL: http://today.reuters.com/news/articlenews.aspx?type=worldnews&storyID=2007-04-13T000916Z_01_N12365691_RTRUKOC_0_US-NATO-AFGHANISTAN.xml
------------------------------
Reuters, 12 April 2007
QUEBEC CITY (Reuters) - NATO commanders have asked for 3,400 additional police and Army trainers for Afghanistan, a need the United States wants European allies to fill, U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Gates said on Thursday.
"NATO has asked for about 3,400 training positions, and quite frankly we're having trouble," Gates said after meeting with defense ministers from countries with troops in Afghanistan's volatile southern region.
Gates said the group, including ministers from Canada, Britain, Australia and other countries, talked about approaching European allies that do not have troops engaged in combat in Afghanistan to fill the training requirement.
"You have nations that are not willing to put combat troops in. ... Those who are not willing to do that or able to do that may be able to pick up the slack in this area where those of us who are contributing most of the combat forces don't have additional forces available," he said.
The request for more trainers came about six weeks ago, Gates said. About 60 percent of the 3,400 trainers are needed for Afghanistan's police and the rest for the army.
Those training needs come on top of other troop and equipment shortfalls previously identified by NATO commanders. The United States and Britain have contributed most of the troops to the Afghan mission, and officials have expressed frustration that other nations have not committed additional forces following commanders' call for more troops earlier this year.
Gates said the United States could provide some of the trainers, but he could not say how many. U.S. forces are already stretched thin by the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, as highlighted on Wednesday by the Pentagon's decision to extend the tours of all active-duty troops.
"We can fill some of (the training positions) but we don't really have the ability right now to fill them all," he said.
------------------------------
Citation: Kristin Roberts. "NATO seeks 3,400 more trainers for Afghanistan - US," Reuters, 12 April 2007.
Original URL: http://today.reuters.com/news/articlenews.aspx?type=worldnews&storyID=2007-04-13T000916Z_01_N12365691_RTRUKOC_0_US-NATO-AFGHANISTAN.xml
------------------------------
12 April 2007
Spending soars to keep troops
The Associated Press, 11 April 2007
Bonuses for soldiers, Marines top $1 billion; tally keeps growing
WASHINGTON - The struggle to entice Army soldiers and Marines to stay in the military, after four years of war in Iraq, has ballooned into a $1 billion campaign, with bonuses soaring nearly sixfold since 2003.
The size and number of bonuses have grown as officials scrambled to meet the steady demand for troops on the battlefields in Iraq and Afghanistan and reverse sporadic shortfalls in the number of National Guard and Reserve soldiers willing to sign on for multiple tours.
Besides underscoring the extraordinary steps the Pentagon must take to maintain fighting forces, the rise in costs for re-enlistment incentives is putting strains on the defense budget, already strapped by the massive costs of waging war and equipping and caring for a modern military.
The bonuses can range from a few thousand dollars to as much as $150,000 for very senior special forces soldiers who re-enlist for six years. All told, the Army and Marines spent $1.03 billion for re-enlistment payments last year, compared with $174 million in 2003, the year the war in Iraq began.
‘War is expensive’
The Associated Press compiled and analyzed the budget figures from the military services for this story.
“War is expensive,” said Col. Mike Jones, who oversees retention issues for the National Guard. “Winning a war, however, is less expensive than losing one.”
The soaring budget for re-enlistment bonuses — particularly for the Guard and Reserves, which have seen the most dramatic cost increases — has prompted some observers to question whether the country can still afford its volunteer force.
“I believe the whole issue of the affordability of the volunteer force is something we need to look at,” said Arnold Punaro, who heads an independent panel established by Congress to study the National Guard and Reserves.
The higher bonuses come as support for the war continues to wane both in Congress and with the American public. That decline is fueling concerns that more soldiers will leave the military under pressure from families who fear the rising death toll and are weary of the lengthy and repeated overseas deployments. The Iraq war has claimed the lives of at least 3,280 U.S. troops to date.
Incentives for Army Guard and Reserve members combined have skyrocketed from about $27 million in 2003 to more than $335 million in 2006.
The active Army, meanwhile, poured more than $600 million into these payments last year, a six-fold increase from $98 million in 2003. The Army gave two out of every three soldiers who re-enlisted a bonus last year, compared to less than two in 10 who received one during 2003.
Those who don’t get bonuses are generally in jobs that are not in high demand or are not in war zones. For example, certain artillery crewmembers who re-enlisted outside Afghanistan or Iraq would receive no bonus, said Army spokesman Lt. Col. Bryan Hilferty.
Bonuses for Marines have nearly doubled, from about $50 million in 2003 to nearly $90 million in 2006.
The incentives help the military compete with private employers who often pay much higher salaries, Hilferty said.
“Soldiers with valuable skills and experience are aggressively sought after by industry,” Hilferty said. He said while the extra money is important, “people don’t re-enlist in a wartime Army for $13,000. ... If soldiers didn’t think they were doing the right thing for the right reason, they would get out and get a job back home.”
He said soldiers with special skills can get bonuses between $10,000 and $30,000, with a select few eligible for payments up to $50,000. Only very few highly qualified special forces soldiers would get the top bonus of $150,000. Nearly all soldiers deployed to Iraq, Afghanistan and Kuwait get a maximum of $15,000 for re-enlisting, just a bit more than the average.
Bonuses for Marines in certain critical specialties can go as high as $60,000 for a new four-year tour. On average a Marine who re-enlists this year can receive as much as $24,000. About eight in 10 Marines with up to six years of service will get a bonus this year, as will more than half of those with six to 14 years in the Corps.
Punaro, chairman of the Commission on the National Guard and Reserves, calls the soaring costs “a ticking time bomb.”
“My instinct tells me ... that the Guard and Reserve will continue to be a real bargain for the taxpayer” because the costs for the active duty military have gone up a lot more, he said.
So far, the extra cash appears to be working. The active Army, the Guard and the Army Reserve are all on track to meet their re-enlistment goals for the fiscal year that will end Sept. 30.
Sgt. 1st Class Richard Doran, who works full-time for the Guard, signed on for another six-year tour late last year, just before he returned home from Iraq. That not only gives him the $15,000 bonus but also makes it tax-free because he was on the battlefront when he re-enlisted.
“It helps a lot of guys out,” said Doran. “And I think it does sway some of the decisions to stay in when guys are on the fence trying to decide.”
Not just about money
But for some who have been sent to war as many as three times, the money isn’t enough.
“We had some that, once we got back, opted to say goodbye and just leave. Some guys said the money did play a part in their decision to stay, others said the $15,000 wasn’t worth it.”
Jones of the Guard said boosting the maximum re-enlistment bonus from $5,000 to $15,000 caused most of the budget increase. And, he said, more soldiers signed up than anticipated.
“When we’re at peace, and when we’re not deploying units, the bonuses probably don’t need to be what they are today,” said Jones. “When the risks are lowered, the reward would be lowered. But one of the reasons we struggled in 2005 and 2004 is because we were slow as a nation to increase the rewards at the same time as we increased the risk.”
-------------------------------
Citation: "Spending soars to keep troops," The Associated Press, 11 April 2007.
Original URL: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/18053235/
-------------------------------
Bonuses for soldiers, Marines top $1 billion; tally keeps growing
WASHINGTON - The struggle to entice Army soldiers and Marines to stay in the military, after four years of war in Iraq, has ballooned into a $1 billion campaign, with bonuses soaring nearly sixfold since 2003.
The size and number of bonuses have grown as officials scrambled to meet the steady demand for troops on the battlefields in Iraq and Afghanistan and reverse sporadic shortfalls in the number of National Guard and Reserve soldiers willing to sign on for multiple tours.
Besides underscoring the extraordinary steps the Pentagon must take to maintain fighting forces, the rise in costs for re-enlistment incentives is putting strains on the defense budget, already strapped by the massive costs of waging war and equipping and caring for a modern military.
The bonuses can range from a few thousand dollars to as much as $150,000 for very senior special forces soldiers who re-enlist for six years. All told, the Army and Marines spent $1.03 billion for re-enlistment payments last year, compared with $174 million in 2003, the year the war in Iraq began.
‘War is expensive’
The Associated Press compiled and analyzed the budget figures from the military services for this story.
“War is expensive,” said Col. Mike Jones, who oversees retention issues for the National Guard. “Winning a war, however, is less expensive than losing one.”
The soaring budget for re-enlistment bonuses — particularly for the Guard and Reserves, which have seen the most dramatic cost increases — has prompted some observers to question whether the country can still afford its volunteer force.
“I believe the whole issue of the affordability of the volunteer force is something we need to look at,” said Arnold Punaro, who heads an independent panel established by Congress to study the National Guard and Reserves.
The higher bonuses come as support for the war continues to wane both in Congress and with the American public. That decline is fueling concerns that more soldiers will leave the military under pressure from families who fear the rising death toll and are weary of the lengthy and repeated overseas deployments. The Iraq war has claimed the lives of at least 3,280 U.S. troops to date.
Incentives for Army Guard and Reserve members combined have skyrocketed from about $27 million in 2003 to more than $335 million in 2006.
The active Army, meanwhile, poured more than $600 million into these payments last year, a six-fold increase from $98 million in 2003. The Army gave two out of every three soldiers who re-enlisted a bonus last year, compared to less than two in 10 who received one during 2003.
Those who don’t get bonuses are generally in jobs that are not in high demand or are not in war zones. For example, certain artillery crewmembers who re-enlisted outside Afghanistan or Iraq would receive no bonus, said Army spokesman Lt. Col. Bryan Hilferty.
Bonuses for Marines have nearly doubled, from about $50 million in 2003 to nearly $90 million in 2006.
The incentives help the military compete with private employers who often pay much higher salaries, Hilferty said.
“Soldiers with valuable skills and experience are aggressively sought after by industry,” Hilferty said. He said while the extra money is important, “people don’t re-enlist in a wartime Army for $13,000. ... If soldiers didn’t think they were doing the right thing for the right reason, they would get out and get a job back home.”
He said soldiers with special skills can get bonuses between $10,000 and $30,000, with a select few eligible for payments up to $50,000. Only very few highly qualified special forces soldiers would get the top bonus of $150,000. Nearly all soldiers deployed to Iraq, Afghanistan and Kuwait get a maximum of $15,000 for re-enlisting, just a bit more than the average.
Bonuses for Marines in certain critical specialties can go as high as $60,000 for a new four-year tour. On average a Marine who re-enlists this year can receive as much as $24,000. About eight in 10 Marines with up to six years of service will get a bonus this year, as will more than half of those with six to 14 years in the Corps.
Punaro, chairman of the Commission on the National Guard and Reserves, calls the soaring costs “a ticking time bomb.”
“My instinct tells me ... that the Guard and Reserve will continue to be a real bargain for the taxpayer” because the costs for the active duty military have gone up a lot more, he said.
So far, the extra cash appears to be working. The active Army, the Guard and the Army Reserve are all on track to meet their re-enlistment goals for the fiscal year that will end Sept. 30.
Sgt. 1st Class Richard Doran, who works full-time for the Guard, signed on for another six-year tour late last year, just before he returned home from Iraq. That not only gives him the $15,000 bonus but also makes it tax-free because he was on the battlefront when he re-enlisted.
“It helps a lot of guys out,” said Doran. “And I think it does sway some of the decisions to stay in when guys are on the fence trying to decide.”
Not just about money
But for some who have been sent to war as many as three times, the money isn’t enough.
“We had some that, once we got back, opted to say goodbye and just leave. Some guys said the money did play a part in their decision to stay, others said the $15,000 wasn’t worth it.”
Jones of the Guard said boosting the maximum re-enlistment bonus from $5,000 to $15,000 caused most of the budget increase. And, he said, more soldiers signed up than anticipated.
“When we’re at peace, and when we’re not deploying units, the bonuses probably don’t need to be what they are today,” said Jones. “When the risks are lowered, the reward would be lowered. But one of the reasons we struggled in 2005 and 2004 is because we were slow as a nation to increase the rewards at the same time as we increased the risk.”
-------------------------------
Citation: "Spending soars to keep troops," The Associated Press, 11 April 2007.
Original URL: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/18053235/
-------------------------------
Probe: Marines used excessive force
By Robert Burns
The Associated Press, 11 April 2007
WASHINGTON - A U.S. military commander has determined that Marines accused of killing civilians after a suicide bombing in Afghanistan last month used excessive force, and he has referred the case for possible criminal inquiry, The Associated Press has learned.
The initial investigation of the March 4 incident, in which up to a dozen Afghan civilians are reported to have died, concluded that the Marines' response was "out of proportion to the threat that was immediately there," a senior defense official said Wednesday.
The official spoke on condition of anonymity because the probe's results have not been released. The findings have been forwarded to Central Command, which has responsibility for U.S. military operations in the Middle East and Central Asia.
The case has also been referred to the Naval Criminal Investigative Service for a broader criminal inquiry, the official said.
Another official, also speaking on condition of anonymity, said the initial military investigation concluded that there was a "reasonable suspicion" that the Marines violated the rules for the use of deadly force, and that crimes, possibly including homicide, may have been committed in the aftermath of the convoy being struck by a car bomb.
The Naval investigative service got the case within the past week but has not yet begun interviewing the Marines, this official said. This official said the number of Marines involved in the case is "in the 20s." They were in six military vehicles that were traveling in a convoy at the time of the incident.
In the March 4 incident in Nangahar province, an explosives-rigged minivan crashed into a convoy of Marines that U.S. officials said also came under fire from gunmen. Reports of the number of dead and wounded varied. Injured Afghans said the Americans fired on civilian cars and pedestrians as they sped away.
U.S. military officials said militant gunmen shot at Marines and may have caused some of the civilian casualties.
The Afghan government has done its own investigation and the results are pending. President Hamid Karzai condemned the incident, which was one among several involving U.S. forces in which civilians were killed and injured.
Army Maj. Gen. Francis H. Kearney III, head of Special Operations Command Central, began his investigation after taking the highly unusual step of ordering the unit of about 120 Marines out of Afghanistan.
The Marines are in a special operations unit that deployed from Camp LeJeune, N.C., in January with the 26th Marine Expeditionary Unit. After Kearney ordered them out of Afghanistan they returned to the ships of the 26th in the Persian Gulf.
Their unit is one of four Marine Special Operations Command companies that have been established since the command was created in February 2006. The one ordered out of Afghanistan was the first to deploy abroad.
---------------------------------
Citation: Robert Burns. "Probe: Marines used excessive force," The Associated Press, 11 April 2007.
Original URL: http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20070411/ap_on_go_ca_st_pe/marines_afghanistan
---------------------------------
The Associated Press, 11 April 2007
WASHINGTON - A U.S. military commander has determined that Marines accused of killing civilians after a suicide bombing in Afghanistan last month used excessive force, and he has referred the case for possible criminal inquiry, The Associated Press has learned.
The initial investigation of the March 4 incident, in which up to a dozen Afghan civilians are reported to have died, concluded that the Marines' response was "out of proportion to the threat that was immediately there," a senior defense official said Wednesday.
The official spoke on condition of anonymity because the probe's results have not been released. The findings have been forwarded to Central Command, which has responsibility for U.S. military operations in the Middle East and Central Asia.
The case has also been referred to the Naval Criminal Investigative Service for a broader criminal inquiry, the official said.
Another official, also speaking on condition of anonymity, said the initial military investigation concluded that there was a "reasonable suspicion" that the Marines violated the rules for the use of deadly force, and that crimes, possibly including homicide, may have been committed in the aftermath of the convoy being struck by a car bomb.
The Naval investigative service got the case within the past week but has not yet begun interviewing the Marines, this official said. This official said the number of Marines involved in the case is "in the 20s." They were in six military vehicles that were traveling in a convoy at the time of the incident.
In the March 4 incident in Nangahar province, an explosives-rigged minivan crashed into a convoy of Marines that U.S. officials said also came under fire from gunmen. Reports of the number of dead and wounded varied. Injured Afghans said the Americans fired on civilian cars and pedestrians as they sped away.
U.S. military officials said militant gunmen shot at Marines and may have caused some of the civilian casualties.
The Afghan government has done its own investigation and the results are pending. President Hamid Karzai condemned the incident, which was one among several involving U.S. forces in which civilians were killed and injured.
Army Maj. Gen. Francis H. Kearney III, head of Special Operations Command Central, began his investigation after taking the highly unusual step of ordering the unit of about 120 Marines out of Afghanistan.
The Marines are in a special operations unit that deployed from Camp LeJeune, N.C., in January with the 26th Marine Expeditionary Unit. After Kearney ordered them out of Afghanistan they returned to the ships of the 26th in the Persian Gulf.
Their unit is one of four Marine Special Operations Command companies that have been established since the command was created in February 2006. The one ordered out of Afghanistan was the first to deploy abroad.
---------------------------------
Citation: Robert Burns. "Probe: Marines used excessive force," The Associated Press, 11 April 2007.
Original URL: http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20070411/ap_on_go_ca_st_pe/marines_afghanistan
---------------------------------
11 April 2007
Treating war's 'silent injury'
They may have no visible wounds, but Marines with brain trauma face many hurdles.
By Tony Perry
Los Angeles Times, 11 April 2007
ENCINITAS, Calif. — At a community hospital here, doctors and therapists are working to help Marines overcome what is often called the signature injury of the Iraq war: brain trauma with no visible wounds.
"It's the silent injury," said Jessica Martinez, an occupational therapist at Scripps Memorial Hospital Encinitas. "With every blast they suffer, their brain is rattling like a yolk in an egg."
Marine Lance Cpl. Brian Vargas was a high school football player. Now, even though he looks fit, he cannot toss the football with his buddies, let alone be part of pickup games with other off-duty Marines.
"I can't catch anything," he said. "I can't remember any plays."
Vargas, 20, was subjected to innumerable mortar and roadside bomb blasts while patrolling the insurgent stronghold of Hit in the Euphrates River Valley. In mid-January he was shot in the hand and cheek by a sniper and airlifted to Germany and then the United States for treatment.
He has the classic signs of post-concussive injury.
"My thinking has gone down," he said. "I can't remember what I did this morning. I have trouble putting memory and speaking together. I'm trying to learn to speak as clearly as possible."
Lance Cpl. Keene Sherburne, 20, who was injured when a bomb exploded under his Humvee in Fallouja, is frustrated at the slow pace of his recovery.
"I can't read," he said. "I used to love it, but now I hate it. I pick up a snowboard magazine, and I get so mad because I don't understand it."
For most of the Marines, who come here from nearby Camp Pendleton, the regimen is six hours a day, three days a week. Physical therapists work with them to restore their balance, hand-eye coordination and stamina. Counselors work on behavioral changes and anger management. Occupational and speech therapists work on language skills and on restoring their memories.
In one exercise, Marines listen to words being defined and then are asked to repeat the definitions. Sometimes their wartime experiences intrude.
Asked to define "cherry," Vargas could not remember, but he recalled something else: "That was the name of the street I was walking over when I got shot."
Experts say studies of civilians with mild to moderate brain injuries suggest that they can recover. But it remains unknown whether military personnel, whose injuries are coupled with the experiences of war, have similar chances.
For a decade, the Encinitas hospital has had a contract with Camp Pendleton to provide care for active-duty personnel and their family members. As the numbers of brain-injured Marines and sailors mounted, the contract was expanded last year to include those kinds of injuries.
The more severe cases in which the skull has been damaged are treated at acute-care hospitals, including the Department of Veterans Affairs center in Palo Alto. Often, brain injuries without outward wounds go undiagnosed. Symptoms can be slow to appear. Brain injuries such as those suffered by Vargas and Sherburne commonly do not show up on MRIs or CT scans.
There is also the complicating factor of Marine Corps culture.
"Marines are taught to be self-reliant, to not complain, to 'suck it up and do your job,' " said Dr. Michael Lobatz, director of the rehabilitation center at Scripps-Encinitas and a clinical assistant professor at the UC San Diego medical school. "As a result, Marines are often delayed in getting recognition for their symptoms."
At Camp Pendleton, Marines are examined for possible concussion injuries when they return from Iraq and again 90 days later. Those showing signs of injury are referred for further examination at the base hospital's concussion clinic.
Navy doctors and corpsmen, as part of their pre-deployment training, now receive additional instruction in how to spot and treat brain injuries.
A study by the Defense and Veterans Brain Injury Center at Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington, D.C., suggests that "closed-brain" injuries — those without visible wounds — outnumber penetrating brain injuries by 7 to 1. Navy Capt. Edward Hessel, the top doctor with the 1st Marine Division, said he thinks the number may be far greater.
Maj. Gen. John M. Paxton Jr., commanding general of the 1st Marine Division, said Marine leaders became concerned when they noticed that some Marines returning from Iraq were "struggling emotionally."
"It's like football or boxing injuries. You never know the cumulative effect," he said.
The surgeon general of the Army ordered a report done on traumatic brain injuries and possible treatment plans. The report is due May 1. Two battalions from Camp Pendleton have been selected for another study on brain injury assessment and treatment in Iraq.
One preliminary study at Walter Reed suggests that patients with mild traumatic brain injury are at greater risk of developing post-traumatic stress disorder than patients who have suffered even greater brain injuries through direct wounds.
Many of the symptoms of mild brain trauma and post-traumatic stress disorder overlap: anxiety, memory loss, depression, loss of concentration.
Physical exercise is an integral part of the regimen. But brain injuries often impair balance. There can be a disconnect between the brain and heart, so the latter will not pump enough blood to allow for exertion.
"It's so hard for them to back off," said physical therapist Rebecca Askew. "They're used to being able to run, jump and climb, but now the only thing they can do is walk."
So far, the hospital has treated 31 Marines with therapy and visits with the neurologists. Two-thirds have been declared fit to return to active duty, the goal of the program, officials said.
Sherburne is in the process of receiving a medical discharge and still dreams of becoming a professional snowboarder. Vargas would like to remain on active duty, at least through the final two years of his enlistment.
"I want to stay in," Vargas said. "This is my job. I'd like to become an instructor, maybe teach my guys how to survive in Iraq."
-------------------------------
Citation: Tony Perry. "Treating war's 'silent injury'," Los Angeles Times, 11 April 2007.
Original URL: http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/iraq/complete/la-me-brain11apr11,1,5949154.story?coll=la-iraq-complete
-------------------------------
By Tony Perry
Los Angeles Times, 11 April 2007
ENCINITAS, Calif. — At a community hospital here, doctors and therapists are working to help Marines overcome what is often called the signature injury of the Iraq war: brain trauma with no visible wounds.
"It's the silent injury," said Jessica Martinez, an occupational therapist at Scripps Memorial Hospital Encinitas. "With every blast they suffer, their brain is rattling like a yolk in an egg."
Marine Lance Cpl. Brian Vargas was a high school football player. Now, even though he looks fit, he cannot toss the football with his buddies, let alone be part of pickup games with other off-duty Marines.
"I can't catch anything," he said. "I can't remember any plays."
Vargas, 20, was subjected to innumerable mortar and roadside bomb blasts while patrolling the insurgent stronghold of Hit in the Euphrates River Valley. In mid-January he was shot in the hand and cheek by a sniper and airlifted to Germany and then the United States for treatment.
He has the classic signs of post-concussive injury.
"My thinking has gone down," he said. "I can't remember what I did this morning. I have trouble putting memory and speaking together. I'm trying to learn to speak as clearly as possible."
Lance Cpl. Keene Sherburne, 20, who was injured when a bomb exploded under his Humvee in Fallouja, is frustrated at the slow pace of his recovery.
"I can't read," he said. "I used to love it, but now I hate it. I pick up a snowboard magazine, and I get so mad because I don't understand it."
For most of the Marines, who come here from nearby Camp Pendleton, the regimen is six hours a day, three days a week. Physical therapists work with them to restore their balance, hand-eye coordination and stamina. Counselors work on behavioral changes and anger management. Occupational and speech therapists work on language skills and on restoring their memories.
In one exercise, Marines listen to words being defined and then are asked to repeat the definitions. Sometimes their wartime experiences intrude.
Asked to define "cherry," Vargas could not remember, but he recalled something else: "That was the name of the street I was walking over when I got shot."
Experts say studies of civilians with mild to moderate brain injuries suggest that they can recover. But it remains unknown whether military personnel, whose injuries are coupled with the experiences of war, have similar chances.
For a decade, the Encinitas hospital has had a contract with Camp Pendleton to provide care for active-duty personnel and their family members. As the numbers of brain-injured Marines and sailors mounted, the contract was expanded last year to include those kinds of injuries.
The more severe cases in which the skull has been damaged are treated at acute-care hospitals, including the Department of Veterans Affairs center in Palo Alto. Often, brain injuries without outward wounds go undiagnosed. Symptoms can be slow to appear. Brain injuries such as those suffered by Vargas and Sherburne commonly do not show up on MRIs or CT scans.
There is also the complicating factor of Marine Corps culture.
"Marines are taught to be self-reliant, to not complain, to 'suck it up and do your job,' " said Dr. Michael Lobatz, director of the rehabilitation center at Scripps-Encinitas and a clinical assistant professor at the UC San Diego medical school. "As a result, Marines are often delayed in getting recognition for their symptoms."
At Camp Pendleton, Marines are examined for possible concussion injuries when they return from Iraq and again 90 days later. Those showing signs of injury are referred for further examination at the base hospital's concussion clinic.
Navy doctors and corpsmen, as part of their pre-deployment training, now receive additional instruction in how to spot and treat brain injuries.
A study by the Defense and Veterans Brain Injury Center at Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington, D.C., suggests that "closed-brain" injuries — those without visible wounds — outnumber penetrating brain injuries by 7 to 1. Navy Capt. Edward Hessel, the top doctor with the 1st Marine Division, said he thinks the number may be far greater.
Maj. Gen. John M. Paxton Jr., commanding general of the 1st Marine Division, said Marine leaders became concerned when they noticed that some Marines returning from Iraq were "struggling emotionally."
"It's like football or boxing injuries. You never know the cumulative effect," he said.
The surgeon general of the Army ordered a report done on traumatic brain injuries and possible treatment plans. The report is due May 1. Two battalions from Camp Pendleton have been selected for another study on brain injury assessment and treatment in Iraq.
One preliminary study at Walter Reed suggests that patients with mild traumatic brain injury are at greater risk of developing post-traumatic stress disorder than patients who have suffered even greater brain injuries through direct wounds.
Many of the symptoms of mild brain trauma and post-traumatic stress disorder overlap: anxiety, memory loss, depression, loss of concentration.
Physical exercise is an integral part of the regimen. But brain injuries often impair balance. There can be a disconnect between the brain and heart, so the latter will not pump enough blood to allow for exertion.
"It's so hard for them to back off," said physical therapist Rebecca Askew. "They're used to being able to run, jump and climb, but now the only thing they can do is walk."
So far, the hospital has treated 31 Marines with therapy and visits with the neurologists. Two-thirds have been declared fit to return to active duty, the goal of the program, officials said.
Sherburne is in the process of receiving a medical discharge and still dreams of becoming a professional snowboarder. Vargas would like to remain on active duty, at least through the final two years of his enlistment.
"I want to stay in," Vargas said. "This is my job. I'd like to become an instructor, maybe teach my guys how to survive in Iraq."
-------------------------------
Citation: Tony Perry. "Treating war's 'silent injury'," Los Angeles Times, 11 April 2007.
Original URL: http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/iraq/complete/la-me-brain11apr11,1,5949154.story?coll=la-iraq-complete
-------------------------------
Humanitarian situation in Iraq worsening: Red Cross
By Richard Waddington
Reuters, 11 April 2007
GENEVA (Reuters) - The suffering of Iraqi civilians is worsening and there is no sign yet that a security crackdown in Baghdad is bringing relief, the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) said on Wednesday.
Hospitals were stretched to the limit by daily mass casualties, malnutrition was on the rise and power shortages were becoming more frequent around the country, the relief agency said.
"The humanitarian situation is steadily worsening and it is affecting, directly or indirectly, all Iraqis," the ICRC said.
Thousands of Iraqis continued to be forced out of their homes owing to military operations, generally poor security and the destruction of houses, it said.
All parties to the conflict, including coalition forces, needed to do more to protect ordinary people it said in a report called 'Civilians without Protection, the ever-worsening humanitarian crisis in Iraq'.
"The suffering that Iraqi men, women and children are enduring today is unbearable and unacceptable," Pierre Kraehenbuehl, director of operations for the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), told a news conference.
He said there was no indication yet the clampdown in Baghdad, launched in February by Iraqi and U.S.-led coalition forces, was improving the situation of civilians.
"We are not seeing a stabilizing effect yet," said the official, whose Swiss-based organization is one of the few humanitarian groups to have foreign staff in
Iraq.
The report detailing ICRC operations gave no new figures on the humanitarian impact of the continuing violence, which began with the ousting of former President
Saddam Hussein by coalition forces in 2003 and is being fuelled by sectarian rivalry.
But unemployment and hardship levels were rising, with an estimated one third of the population living in poverty and five percent in extreme poverty. Both the quantity and quality of drinking water was insufficient, despite some improvements, mainly in the south.
Doctors and nurses were fleeing the country in large numbers because of the murder and abduction of colleagues, leaving hospitals and other key services desperately short of qualified staff, the ICRC said.
According to the Iraqi Red Crescent, some 106,000 families, probably more than 600,000 people, have been driven from their homes to seek refuge elsewhere in Iraq since February 2006.
"The outlook is bleak, particularly in Baghdad and other areas with mixed communities, where the situation is likely to worsen," the ICRC warned.
------------------------------------
Citation: Richard Waddington. "Humanitarian situation in Iraq worsening: Red Cross," Reuters, 11 April 2007.
Original URL: http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20070411/wl_nm/iraq_icrc_dc_3
------------------------------------
Reuters, 11 April 2007
GENEVA (Reuters) - The suffering of Iraqi civilians is worsening and there is no sign yet that a security crackdown in Baghdad is bringing relief, the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) said on Wednesday.
Hospitals were stretched to the limit by daily mass casualties, malnutrition was on the rise and power shortages were becoming more frequent around the country, the relief agency said.
"The humanitarian situation is steadily worsening and it is affecting, directly or indirectly, all Iraqis," the ICRC said.
Thousands of Iraqis continued to be forced out of their homes owing to military operations, generally poor security and the destruction of houses, it said.
All parties to the conflict, including coalition forces, needed to do more to protect ordinary people it said in a report called 'Civilians without Protection, the ever-worsening humanitarian crisis in Iraq'.
"The suffering that Iraqi men, women and children are enduring today is unbearable and unacceptable," Pierre Kraehenbuehl, director of operations for the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), told a news conference.
He said there was no indication yet the clampdown in Baghdad, launched in February by Iraqi and U.S.-led coalition forces, was improving the situation of civilians.
"We are not seeing a stabilizing effect yet," said the official, whose Swiss-based organization is one of the few humanitarian groups to have foreign staff in
Iraq.
The report detailing ICRC operations gave no new figures on the humanitarian impact of the continuing violence, which began with the ousting of former President
Saddam Hussein by coalition forces in 2003 and is being fuelled by sectarian rivalry.
But unemployment and hardship levels were rising, with an estimated one third of the population living in poverty and five percent in extreme poverty. Both the quantity and quality of drinking water was insufficient, despite some improvements, mainly in the south.
Doctors and nurses were fleeing the country in large numbers because of the murder and abduction of colleagues, leaving hospitals and other key services desperately short of qualified staff, the ICRC said.
According to the Iraqi Red Crescent, some 106,000 families, probably more than 600,000 people, have been driven from their homes to seek refuge elsewhere in Iraq since February 2006.
"The outlook is bleak, particularly in Baghdad and other areas with mixed communities, where the situation is likely to worsen," the ICRC warned.
------------------------------------
Citation: Richard Waddington. "Humanitarian situation in Iraq worsening: Red Cross," Reuters, 11 April 2007.
Original URL: http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20070411/wl_nm/iraq_icrc_dc_3
------------------------------------
Myth of Tal Afar, beacon of American 'success'
By Patrick Cockburn
The Independent, 11 April 2007
Pity the city that becomes a symbol of US success in Iraq. Last year,Tal Afar in the north-east of the country was being lauded in Washington as the one place where the US had brought peace. Perhaps the same prescription might work elsewhere in Iraq.
Embedded American journalists scurried to this poor and depressing Turkoman city between Mosul and the Syrian border to report on the good news. President Bush even singled it out for optimistic comment in March 2006. "Tal Afar shows that, when Iraqis can count on a basic level of safety and security, they can live together peacefully," he said. "The people of Tal Afar have shown why spreading liberty and democracy is at the heart of our strategy to defeat the terrorists."
It was always a myth. On 27 March, a gigantic truck bomb exploded in a Shia market area in Tal Afar. It was the deadliest single bomb out of the many that have been detonated by Sunni insurgents. The Interior Ministry said that 152 people were killed and 347 wounded in the explosion.
Hours after the blast, an event occurred that the Iraqi government had been dreading. The police, all Shia, possibly including some who had lost relatives in the explosion, went on a pogrom. They picked up Sunni men and boys in the streets and in their houses, and then killed them with single shots to the head. As many as 70 may have been executed.
Troops from the Iraqi Army 3rd Division were rushed to the town. They were followed by members of Mosul police force who were overwhelmingly Sunni Arab. Some 18 members of the Tal Afar police were arrested and then released.
It was always absurd to treat Tal Afar as a possible textbook case of how the US might successfully expedite a counter-insurgency policy. It is a very peculiar city, the only city in Iraq that is almost entirely Turkoman. They in turn are divided between a Sunni Turkoman majority and a large Shia Turkoman minority.
Under Saddam Hussein the Sunni had the upper hand. In a poor place with few jobs they monopolised posts in the army and security forces. After the fall of Saddam they swiftly joined the insurgency. The insurgents gained control in 2005 only to be routed by American and local Iraqi government forces.
But Tal Afar has another peculiarity. A grim-looking place, it has some strategic importance because it is situated on the dividing line between Arab and Kurdish Iraq. The Kurds are eager to control the road passing through Tal Afar because it leads to Sinjar and is a link to the Kurds across the border in Syria.
The American hero of the supposedly successful campaign of 2005 was Colonel H R McMaster, the commander of the 3rd Armoured Cavalry Regiment. Accounts of his triumph tell once more about the preoccupations of US journalists than it does about Tal Afar and its environs.
Col McMaster was quoted as saying: "You gotta come in with your ears open. You can't come in and start talking. You have to really listen to people."
Sadly, these deep insights were not enough to prevent fresh explosions of sectarian violence.
In Tal Afar and northern Iraq as a whole, the Iraqi army divisions are mostly, though not entirely, Kurdish. The Kurds are the one community in Iraq that support the occupation. The Shia Turkomans in Tal Afar are also supportive of the government in Baghdad. In the rest of Iraq, the fatal weakness of the US forces is that they have no reliable local allies.
-------------------------------
Citation: Patrick Cockburn. "Myth of Tal Afar, beacon of American 'success'," The Independent, 11 April 2007.
Original URL: http://news.independent.co.uk/world/middle_east/article2439534.ece
-------------------------------
The Independent, 11 April 2007
Pity the city that becomes a symbol of US success in Iraq. Last year,Tal Afar in the north-east of the country was being lauded in Washington as the one place where the US had brought peace. Perhaps the same prescription might work elsewhere in Iraq.
Embedded American journalists scurried to this poor and depressing Turkoman city between Mosul and the Syrian border to report on the good news. President Bush even singled it out for optimistic comment in March 2006. "Tal Afar shows that, when Iraqis can count on a basic level of safety and security, they can live together peacefully," he said. "The people of Tal Afar have shown why spreading liberty and democracy is at the heart of our strategy to defeat the terrorists."
It was always a myth. On 27 March, a gigantic truck bomb exploded in a Shia market area in Tal Afar. It was the deadliest single bomb out of the many that have been detonated by Sunni insurgents. The Interior Ministry said that 152 people were killed and 347 wounded in the explosion.
Hours after the blast, an event occurred that the Iraqi government had been dreading. The police, all Shia, possibly including some who had lost relatives in the explosion, went on a pogrom. They picked up Sunni men and boys in the streets and in their houses, and then killed them with single shots to the head. As many as 70 may have been executed.
Troops from the Iraqi Army 3rd Division were rushed to the town. They were followed by members of Mosul police force who were overwhelmingly Sunni Arab. Some 18 members of the Tal Afar police were arrested and then released.
It was always absurd to treat Tal Afar as a possible textbook case of how the US might successfully expedite a counter-insurgency policy. It is a very peculiar city, the only city in Iraq that is almost entirely Turkoman. They in turn are divided between a Sunni Turkoman majority and a large Shia Turkoman minority.
Under Saddam Hussein the Sunni had the upper hand. In a poor place with few jobs they monopolised posts in the army and security forces. After the fall of Saddam they swiftly joined the insurgency. The insurgents gained control in 2005 only to be routed by American and local Iraqi government forces.
But Tal Afar has another peculiarity. A grim-looking place, it has some strategic importance because it is situated on the dividing line between Arab and Kurdish Iraq. The Kurds are eager to control the road passing through Tal Afar because it leads to Sinjar and is a link to the Kurds across the border in Syria.
The American hero of the supposedly successful campaign of 2005 was Colonel H R McMaster, the commander of the 3rd Armoured Cavalry Regiment. Accounts of his triumph tell once more about the preoccupations of US journalists than it does about Tal Afar and its environs.
Col McMaster was quoted as saying: "You gotta come in with your ears open. You can't come in and start talking. You have to really listen to people."
Sadly, these deep insights were not enough to prevent fresh explosions of sectarian violence.
In Tal Afar and northern Iraq as a whole, the Iraqi army divisions are mostly, though not entirely, Kurdish. The Kurds are the one community in Iraq that support the occupation. The Shia Turkomans in Tal Afar are also supportive of the government in Baghdad. In the rest of Iraq, the fatal weakness of the US forces is that they have no reliable local allies.
-------------------------------
Citation: Patrick Cockburn. "Myth of Tal Afar, beacon of American 'success'," The Independent, 11 April 2007.
Original URL: http://news.independent.co.uk/world/middle_east/article2439534.ece
-------------------------------
10 April 2007
Pentagon strains to uphold troops levels in Iraq
It plans to send four National Guard units back into combat and may extend the tours of five Army brigades.
By Peter Spiegel and Richard Simon
Los Angeles Times, 10 April 2007
WASHINGTON — The Pentagon will send four National Guard brigades to Iraq and may extend the tours of five active-duty Army brigades by as much as four months as it strains to find troops to sustain the buildup in Baghdad through the end of the year.
The National Guard deployments — 13,000 soldiers based in Arkansas, Indiana, Oklahoma and Ohio — mark the first time since the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks that entire brigades are being called up for second combat tours. The four brigades served in Iraq, Afghanistan or the Balkans in 2004 or 2005.
"Obviously everyone is going to be a little apprehensive about going back to Iraq," said Col. Kendall Penn, commander of the 39th Infantry Brigade Combat Team in Arkansas. "However, this is a mission that the unit has trained for…. It is a mission that we are capable of doing."
The deployments come at a politically difficult time for President Bush, who is fighting efforts in the Democratic-controlled Congress to force him to withdraw combat forces from the 4-year-old war.
The Army said the National Guard alert, sent over the weekend, was not related to the current buildup in Iraq. It said the action was taken in part to limit the tours of soldiers going to Iraq to a one-year deployment.
The National Guard units will not be sent to Iraq until December, so the military has to find other troops to meet the administration's goal of deploying 20 combat brigades in Iraq through the end of the year.
To meet that goal, Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates is considering four-month extensions for five brigades, or about 15,000 soldiers, according to a Pentagon official who spoke on condition of anonymity because Gates had not signed off on the plan.
Troops scheduled to return home in late summer would stay in Iraq through the fall, maintaining the desired brigade level until the National Guard units arrived.
Under rotations already announced by the Pentagon, the troop buildup would last through August and then start dropping to 15 brigades as units returned home.
The Army has been forced to send two combat brigades back to Iraq without their normal one-year respite in order to sustain the buildup.
The deployments come as Congress is working on a bill that would fund the war through the end of the year but force Bush to start withdrawing troops.
Several Arkansas Democrats expressed concern that Bush was relying too heavily on the state's National Guard.
"The best strategy for success in Iraq is not to continue to stretch our own military, National Guard and reserves too thin," said Rep. Mike Ross (D-Ark.), "but instead to demand more responsibility from the Iraqi government to train more Iraqis to take control of their own police and military operations."
Sen. Mark Pryor (D-Ark.) said he was certain that Arkansas National Guard forces would serve "bravely and honorably" but added, "We must all ask the president what is the plan for a successful outcome to this conflict."
*
Republican support
Bush's Republican allies appeared to be standing behind him Monday, even though some governors complained that the National Guard deployments hindered their ability to prepare for emergencies.
"While it is always difficult to hear that Oklahoma's sons and daughters may be put in harm's way," said Rep. Mary Fallin (R-Okla.), "it is inspiring to see their continued willingness to do so in order to serve their country and protect our freedoms."
The announcement about four-month tour extensions for the five brigades could come this week.
The Pentagon has already extended the tour of one Army brigade, a unit of the Minnesota National Guard, for four months as part of the buildup of forces in Baghdad.
Two Marine Corps regiments also have had their deployments lengthened.
Gates revised the deployment rules in January to try to prevent extensions and the loss of a year at home between deployments, known as "dwell time."
But he acknowledged last week that there would probably be a "transition period" before the new policies took place. He said the transition could last as long as two years.
"We always anticipated, and talked pretty clearly about, the fact that there would be a transition time when there would be both extensions and violations of dwell policy, just because of the magnitude of the commitments we have," Gates said.
More than 200,000 National Guard troops have been deployed to Iraq or Afghanistan. Most were sent in the early months of the war.
In early 2005, nearly half of all troops in Iraq were National Guard or Reserve forces. They now make up 17% of the 145,000 soldiers and Marines in Iraq.
*
Political implications
National Guard deployments are often controversial.
"Any use of the Guard overseas is fraught with domestic political implications," said Loren Thompson, a military analyst at the Lexington Institute, a Virginia think tank. "The war has grown so unpopular that you have to be concerned if you're in the White House about how voters will react to members of their community once again being called to go fight in a war that to many people seems kind of pointless."
Members of National Guard and reserve units are drawn from the same community, so a large number of deaths in any brigade could have political reverberations.
The most prominent example of how casualties can effect politics occurred in a Marine Corps Reserve unit from Ohio. The company had 23 men killed during its tour in western Iraq in summer 2005, deaths that devastated families across the state.
In the 2006 midterm elections, Republicans lost almost every major statewide office in Ohio, including a GOP-held Senate seat and the governor's office. Polls showed that the Republican losses, particularly in the Senate race, were connected to outrage over the war in Iraq.
The National Guard deployments come after Army officials pushed the Pentagon for more than a year to allow for second Guard combat tours to relieve pressure on the active-duty Army.
Under previous Pentagon guidelines, National Guard units were allowed to spend five years at home after their first combat tours. Gates also revised those rules in January.
The National Guard forces will get bonuses and be activated for a year, meaning they could be in Iraq for as little as 10 months. Previous National Guard deployments to Iraq have lasted as long as 18 months.
Indiana's 76th Infantry Brigade, which was in Afghanistan for 16 months until August 2005, is the National Guard unit that will return to combat the quickest. It will have spent less than 2 1/2 years at home.
*
peter.spiegel@latimes.com
richard.simon@latimes.com
-----------------------------------------
Citation: Peter Spiegel and Richard Simon. "Pentagon strains to uphold troops levels in Iraq," Los Angeles Times, 10 April 2007.
Original URL: http://www.latimes.com/news/printedition/front/la-na-guard10apr10,1,1411014.story?coll=la-headlines-frontpage
-----------------------------------------
By Peter Spiegel and Richard Simon
Los Angeles Times, 10 April 2007
WASHINGTON — The Pentagon will send four National Guard brigades to Iraq and may extend the tours of five active-duty Army brigades by as much as four months as it strains to find troops to sustain the buildup in Baghdad through the end of the year.
The National Guard deployments — 13,000 soldiers based in Arkansas, Indiana, Oklahoma and Ohio — mark the first time since the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks that entire brigades are being called up for second combat tours. The four brigades served in Iraq, Afghanistan or the Balkans in 2004 or 2005.
"Obviously everyone is going to be a little apprehensive about going back to Iraq," said Col. Kendall Penn, commander of the 39th Infantry Brigade Combat Team in Arkansas. "However, this is a mission that the unit has trained for…. It is a mission that we are capable of doing."
The deployments come at a politically difficult time for President Bush, who is fighting efforts in the Democratic-controlled Congress to force him to withdraw combat forces from the 4-year-old war.
The Army said the National Guard alert, sent over the weekend, was not related to the current buildup in Iraq. It said the action was taken in part to limit the tours of soldiers going to Iraq to a one-year deployment.
The National Guard units will not be sent to Iraq until December, so the military has to find other troops to meet the administration's goal of deploying 20 combat brigades in Iraq through the end of the year.
To meet that goal, Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates is considering four-month extensions for five brigades, or about 15,000 soldiers, according to a Pentagon official who spoke on condition of anonymity because Gates had not signed off on the plan.
Troops scheduled to return home in late summer would stay in Iraq through the fall, maintaining the desired brigade level until the National Guard units arrived.
Under rotations already announced by the Pentagon, the troop buildup would last through August and then start dropping to 15 brigades as units returned home.
The Army has been forced to send two combat brigades back to Iraq without their normal one-year respite in order to sustain the buildup.
The deployments come as Congress is working on a bill that would fund the war through the end of the year but force Bush to start withdrawing troops.
Several Arkansas Democrats expressed concern that Bush was relying too heavily on the state's National Guard.
"The best strategy for success in Iraq is not to continue to stretch our own military, National Guard and reserves too thin," said Rep. Mike Ross (D-Ark.), "but instead to demand more responsibility from the Iraqi government to train more Iraqis to take control of their own police and military operations."
Sen. Mark Pryor (D-Ark.) said he was certain that Arkansas National Guard forces would serve "bravely and honorably" but added, "We must all ask the president what is the plan for a successful outcome to this conflict."
*
Republican support
Bush's Republican allies appeared to be standing behind him Monday, even though some governors complained that the National Guard deployments hindered their ability to prepare for emergencies.
"While it is always difficult to hear that Oklahoma's sons and daughters may be put in harm's way," said Rep. Mary Fallin (R-Okla.), "it is inspiring to see their continued willingness to do so in order to serve their country and protect our freedoms."
The announcement about four-month tour extensions for the five brigades could come this week.
The Pentagon has already extended the tour of one Army brigade, a unit of the Minnesota National Guard, for four months as part of the buildup of forces in Baghdad.
Two Marine Corps regiments also have had their deployments lengthened.
Gates revised the deployment rules in January to try to prevent extensions and the loss of a year at home between deployments, known as "dwell time."
But he acknowledged last week that there would probably be a "transition period" before the new policies took place. He said the transition could last as long as two years.
"We always anticipated, and talked pretty clearly about, the fact that there would be a transition time when there would be both extensions and violations of dwell policy, just because of the magnitude of the commitments we have," Gates said.
More than 200,000 National Guard troops have been deployed to Iraq or Afghanistan. Most were sent in the early months of the war.
In early 2005, nearly half of all troops in Iraq were National Guard or Reserve forces. They now make up 17% of the 145,000 soldiers and Marines in Iraq.
*
Political implications
National Guard deployments are often controversial.
"Any use of the Guard overseas is fraught with domestic political implications," said Loren Thompson, a military analyst at the Lexington Institute, a Virginia think tank. "The war has grown so unpopular that you have to be concerned if you're in the White House about how voters will react to members of their community once again being called to go fight in a war that to many people seems kind of pointless."
Members of National Guard and reserve units are drawn from the same community, so a large number of deaths in any brigade could have political reverberations.
The most prominent example of how casualties can effect politics occurred in a Marine Corps Reserve unit from Ohio. The company had 23 men killed during its tour in western Iraq in summer 2005, deaths that devastated families across the state.
In the 2006 midterm elections, Republicans lost almost every major statewide office in Ohio, including a GOP-held Senate seat and the governor's office. Polls showed that the Republican losses, particularly in the Senate race, were connected to outrage over the war in Iraq.
The National Guard deployments come after Army officials pushed the Pentagon for more than a year to allow for second Guard combat tours to relieve pressure on the active-duty Army.
Under previous Pentagon guidelines, National Guard units were allowed to spend five years at home after their first combat tours. Gates also revised those rules in January.
The National Guard forces will get bonuses and be activated for a year, meaning they could be in Iraq for as little as 10 months. Previous National Guard deployments to Iraq have lasted as long as 18 months.
Indiana's 76th Infantry Brigade, which was in Afghanistan for 16 months until August 2005, is the National Guard unit that will return to combat the quickest. It will have spent less than 2 1/2 years at home.
*
peter.spiegel@latimes.com
richard.simon@latimes.com
-----------------------------------------
Citation: Peter Spiegel and Richard Simon. "Pentagon strains to uphold troops levels in Iraq," Los Angeles Times, 10 April 2007.
Original URL: http://www.latimes.com/news/printedition/front/la-na-guard10apr10,1,1411014.story?coll=la-headlines-frontpage
-----------------------------------------
Reporter recalls the layers of truth told in Iraq
After 41/2 years 'in country,' The Times' Borzou Daragahi looks back on what it took each day to get to the story and get out alive.
By Borzou Daragahi
Los Angeles Times, 10 April 2007
Baghdad — THE young man with the AK-47 at a checkpoint in the Triangle of Death ordered us out of the car the moment he realized I was a foreigner. A flat gray sky closed in. Dust and diesel exhaust filled the hot air. He led us into the desert, over scrub brush and cigarette butts, toward a grizzled man in a wooden hut.
"And who is he?" the older man asked my Iraqi colleague and interpreter, Raheem.
I had repeatedly promised my bosses, my colleagues, my family and my wife, Delphine, that I wouldn't take big risks. But here I was in the early summer of 2006 in the middle of a lawless desert between Baghdad and Najaf that had swallowed up hundreds of Iraqis and not a small number of foreigners. I was speaking to a man who acted like a cop but looked like he could have been an insurgent commander, the head of a kidnapping ring or a death squad leader.
We were in a mostly Shiite Muslim part of the country, so I stuck to my cover story: I was an Iranian headed to Najaf, one of the thousands of Shiite pilgrims who make their way there each month to pay their respects at the shrine of Imam Ali.
He demanded to see my passport. To my surprise and terror, he thumbed through it. Then he calmly looked up and asked, "Where's your entry stamp?"
I had no answer. I had entered Iraq with my U.S. passport, which I wouldn't dare bring with me on the road. I froze.
Since first arriving in Iraq 4 1/2 years ago, first as a freelance reporter and then as the Los Angeles Times bureau chief, I had kept up the pretense that I was playing it safe.
Now that I am out of Iraq, I can begin to be honest.
For years, I had swaddled myself in layers of half-truths: I was an Iranian heading to the shrine cities. I was an average Joe from the Midwest who liked to go canoeing in the summer. I was a reporter for Radio Canada here to tell the truth about what's happening in Iraq. I was an Iranian journalist visiting the brave fighters of Sadr City.
Sometimes I went beyond the truth in the name of survival. I was a Sunni Arab with a speech impediment. I was a sympathetic journalist visiting the brave Sunni patriots of west Baghdad. I was among a group of pharmacists heading down to visit a hospital caring for truck bomb victims. Anything to get the story and get out.
In fact, I am an Iranian American reporter from Chicago, a graduate of Columbia University's journalism school, where I was taught that the greatest journalists were impartial and balanced.
But in Iraq, I measured success through my ability to make it past checkpoints and gunfire, to melt into the background as mysterious masked gunmen flashed by, to ease back into the office compound alive, story in hand, and to breeze past any of the day's complications in chats with my editors.
At the end of every day, I put on my iPod and got on the treadmill to release the tension. I called Delphine, a journalist who early on had shared so many Iraq experiences with me, and assured her everything had gone well.
At the checkpoint on the road to Najaf, I struggled to decide whether to admit that I was an American journalist for a U.S. paper traveling in disguise. If I did, the gunmen could kill me and everyone with me, and no one might ever find out what became of us. I couldn't bear to think what Delphine would do if she didn't hear from me that night.
*
MY time in Iraq had started so promisingly.
"Welcome!" said the peshmerga warrior. "Welcome to free Kurdistan!"
It was September 2002, months before the U.S.-led invasion. Delphine and I had just made it across the Iran-Iraq border into what was then the autonomous Kurdish enclave. We were freelance journalists then, in the springtime of our romance. We vowed to go on adventures together, in Iran, to the gulf, to Afghanistan. We had been struggling to get the necessary permits to cross the frontier into mountainous Kurdistan, and were thrilled to have finally made it in.
The peshmerga were irregular soldiers of an undeclared country. Even the border crossing from Iran was unofficial. We stayed at the Sulaymaniya Palace, an ostentatious hotel with terrible food and even worse service, but our first impressions of northern Iraq were great.
We were drawn to the Kurds' festive spirit, colorful weddings and boisterous candor. Their stated vision for a democratic federal Iraq was seductive in this authoritarian region of the world. They outlined their hopes in the snowy mountaintop town of Salahuddin.
"If the Kurds, the most unadvanced part of Iraq, can have democracy, why can't all Iraq have democracy?" said Jalal Talabani, then a Kurdish leader and now the president of Iraq.
But he also issued an ominous warning.
"Liberating Iraq is easy," he said. "Ruling Iraq is difficult. Ruling Iraq requires the full cooperation of the Iraqi people and the Iraqi opposition."
Even then we caught glimpses of the demons now ravaging Iraq. Kurdistan's democratic trappings masked corrupt, thuggish single-party fiefdoms run by former warlords. Their minions rolled through towns in pickup trucks with mounted machine guns.
Political parties had their private militias. Iranian-backed Shiite gunmen opposed to Saddam Hussein fought against Baghdad-backed militants opposed to Tehran. Muslim radicals bombed Kurdish nationalists in the dead of night. Western intelligence agencies camped out on mountaintops spotting bombing sites in Kirkuk.
The tensions came to a head when Kurdish peshmerga opened fire in a gangland-style execution of five suspected Muslim radicals at a checkpoint. Kurdish security officials assured reporters that the killings were justified as part of their fight against terrorism. It soon emerged that the victims were members of a group allied with the Kurdish government, killed in a still-murky case of mistaken identity.
As the war to oust Hussein began in March 2003, many feared chemical weapon attacks, refugee crises and a drawn-out conflict. But of all the violence and political chicanery that unfolded in northern Iraq during those months before the war, the checkpoint killing most foretold the dirty war that was to come.
*
WITHIN weeks of the checkpoint incident, Delphine and I joined convoys of peshmerga and U.S. Special Forces storming Khanaqin and Kirkuk, and basked in the adulation of the liberated Kurds. They showered us with candy, flowers and hugs. Hussein's rule was wiped away.
But the country's unraveling began quickly. By day, looters swarmed Iraqi military bases, hauling off rocket-propelled-grenade launchers and mortar rounds. At night, explosions boomed throughout the land and fires raged into the sky.
Outside the friendly, pro-American Kurdish areas, political troubles started early. We entered Hussein's hometown, Tikrit, a few hours before the Marines did. We were greeted with smiles at a gas station. But a friendly man warned us to get out quickly. Among the welcoming faces, he said, were Hussein loyalists who would harm us. We sped away, returning the next day to see Marines arresting middle-aged Sunni Arab men, putting them in plastic handcuffs and seating them on the pavement.
The detainees smiled at the troops.
In retrospect, anyone could have seen what was coming next, but much like the U.S. officials, we were oblivious. We listened to the complaints and warnings from ordinary Iraqis: no electricity, no security, unfair detentions. "Where is the freedom?" they said. "Where is the democracy? Soon we will take up arms."
We also gave credence to the narrative described by American officials in the Green Zone, Iraq's U.S.-protected administrative headquarters in central Baghdad.
"We measure our success on whether Iraq is on a path toward a sovereign democratic future with a government whose policies are dedicated to being at peace with its own citizens, peace with its neighbors, peace with the international community and certainly peace with the United States," a spokesman for the U.S.-run Coalition Provisional Authority, Dan Senor, said in June 2004. "That is the path we are on."
We found ourselves charmed by Baghdad. Life was hard during the first year or two after the invasion: The generators roared all night and the heat was unbearable. The stench of raw sewage rose from the nearby Tigris River. But we were intrigued by the new Iraq.
It was a land where Sufi musicians in the city of Fallouja crafted songs about jihad and artists turned from painting portraits of Hussein to those of Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani. New television stations broadcast funny soap operas chronicling the lives of Iraqis.
We lunched with Iraqi friends at fancy restaurants named Latakkia and the White Palace. We shopped for clothes and shoes in the upscale Mansour district. Karaoke night with other journalists at the Chinese restaurant was a treat.
I had drinks with my driver, Abbas, at his little plot of land. He nicknamed it Camp David. Once, Abbas, a Shiite, invited me over along with some Sunni Muslim pals from Fallouja. The talk turned to the aggressive tactics of anti-American cleric Muqtada Sadr's Shiite militia, the Jaish al-Mahdi, or Al Mahdi army.
There was a moment of tense silence.
"Here's to the Jaish al-Whiskey!" Abbas said suddenly, holding his drink aloft. We roared with laughter. Sunnis and Shiites, Iranians and Americans, all were welcome in the Jaish al-Whiskey.
Delphine and I priced houses to rent and thought gingerly about the prospect of moving to Iraq to cover the reconstruction. After all, L. Paul Bremer III, the head of the Coalition Provisional Authority until it was dissolved in June 2004, was talking about a Marshall Plan for Iraq.
In Samarra, I coaxed Delphine up the famous minaret. Afraid of heights, she cursed me as I nearly dragged her up.
"Trust me," I said. "You'll be happy when we get to the top."
"I hate you!" was her reply.
But once we got to the top, she was elated. We looked out upon a gorgeous scene: the palm tree groves, the azure waters of the Tigris, the gleaming golden-domed Askari shrine.
"It was worth it," she said.
I asked her to marry me a few months later. We seated the guests at tables named after cities where we'd worked: Tehran, Kabul, Dubai and so on. We sat at Baghdad.
*
IRAQ'S descent quickly intruded onto our illusions. The violence edged closer and closer. We befriended Al Arabiya television correspondent Ali Khatib a few months before he was killed. We met with clerics in Najaf a few weeks before its shrine was bombed, killing Ayatollah Mohammed Bakr Hakim and launching the spiral of sectarian violence that would become the narrative of the coming years.
We lunched in the cafeteria of the United Nations headquarters on the Canal Highway a couple of days before it was bombed. We missed by seconds a massive roadside bombing that killed an American soldier on the highway to Fallouja. I was sleeping in my hotel room when a bomb went off close by, shattering the windows and lodging shrapnel in the wall of my kitchenette.
Honestly, I loved the action and adrenaline. The more dangerous, the greater the exhilaration. I got used to the gunfire and explosions. Sadly, I even got used to the smell of burnt flesh after car bombs exploded. I believed I could distance myself from it, as long as I was not physically harmed.
I became attached to the Iraqis I worked with. The more danger and horrors we experienced together and survived together, the closer we became. I cherished relations with ordinary Iraqis, politicians, U.S. Embassy officials and soldiers I befriended.
I told friends and colleagues that Iraq was the most important story of our time. And though covering it was the most difficult and dangerous job I have ever had, it was also the most rewarding.
As the situation in Iraq grew more dire, Delphine left Iraq for the most part, for the relative safety of reporting in Tehran. I took a full-time job with The Times, committing myself to an even longer stay in Baghdad. My wife and I began spending more and more time apart. (I joked that my coalition partner was abandoning me, just like Spain and others ditched President Bush.) What had started out as a romantic adventure became a dangerous full-time job and a bizarre lifestyle.
I came up with more innovative survival tricks. My greatest fear was being followed by gunmen or kidnappers as we left an appointment or the hotel, which everyone in Baghdad knew was teeming with Western journalists and contractors.
Sometimes, I would dress down, like an Iraqi laborer, and walk off the hotel compound with Nadeem, my interpreter, holding digital cameras, recorders and notebooks in a decrepit plastic bag. Our driver would pull up, with a little "taxi" plate on the roof of his sedan. We'd pretend to haggle with him for a few seconds before getting into the car.
A little facial hair, a Middle Eastern complexion and local clothes helped me blend in, as long as I didn't open my mouth. But there were far more close calls than I care to remember.
Once after interviewing truck bomb witnesses in downtown Baghdad, we were briefly stopped by the police.
"Who are you? Where's your identification?"
We cleared up the confusion, only to stumble into greater peril.
"They're American journalists!" one Iraqi cop announced to his superior, amid the huge crowd. It felt like all eyes were on us as we briskly walked away.
I was scarred, tired and adrift in a sea of sandbags, razor wire, blast barriers and gunfire. Death became part of my daily rhythm.
Mornings I awoke to the dry thud of explosions across the city. The metallic clang of weapons loading signaled preparations for an afternoon trip to the grocery store. Night fell, and after days that stretched 19 hours, I fell asleep to the sounds of automatic gunfire.
I rarely mentioned the close calls to my wife.
"How was your day?" she asked on the phone.
"It ended up being fine," I replied.
My goal was to prevent Iraq's troubles from flooding into my life or those of the increasingly demoralized Iraqis I worked with. But inevitably, Iraq began inundating my waking hours, even when I wasn't in Iraq.
On a holiday in Sri Lanka, the ongoing battle between government troops — dominated by the majority Sinhalese — and Tamil separatists obscured the beach and sun.
"Where are you coming from?" the driver of the tiny three-wheeled tuk-tuk asked us.
"It's none of your business," I snapped at him. "Just drive."
"What are you doing?" Delphine chastised me. "He's just trying to be nice. And you're not in Iraq."
During a drive through Chicago, I imagined the majority Latino West Side fighting against the mostly African American South Side. I imagined fighters setting up mortar positions along the Dan Ryan Expressway. Snipers taking shots at rival gunmen from the top of Soldier Field, its facade crumbling from rocket fire.
In Tehran, a Dutch colleague spoke to me in English as we walked down the street and I turned on him. "Shhhh!" I demanded. Be quiet.
"Dude!" he said. "We can speak English here! We're not in Iraq."
I was moody, despondent and distracted. I surfed the Web, checking for news updates from Baghdad. I saw a group of kids playing soccer, laughing in the streets of Tehran, and I just wanted to cry.
Delphine and I argued, always about the same thing: Even when I was not in Iraq, I was in Iraq.
"Why do you bother even coming home?" she said.
At a dinner party once, I accidentally told the story of one of my close calls. Delphine was outraged. "You didn't tell me about that," she reprimanded me.
"I didn't want you to worry," I said meekly.
Months later, I became enraged when I found out she hadn't told me about a frightening encounter she'd had with authorities in Tehran. We hadn't seen each other in two months, and here we were fighting. I was indignant. "I knew something was wrong. You lied to me."
She was having none of it. "Well, you do the same thing to me," she said.
We were becoming two loners, deceiving each other in pursuit of our addictions.
*
I trembled each time the trucks rumbled past on the road to Najaf. I had seconds to make a decision. Left with little recourse, I decided to tell the man at the checkpoint the truth: I was an American journalist traveling in disguise. He asked for my American passport. I told him I didn't bring it. "Would you bring an American passport on this road?" I asked defensively.
His assistant nodded in understanding, but the older man looked at me and shook his head, his frown hardening.
With my fear came a strange calm, a sense of resignation.
Then the guy's frown melted and he smirked, shaking his head. He believed my story. I was no spy or terrorist. If anything, he thought I was a total moron for driving down this road, just a few months after the bombing of the Samarra shrine. The civil war was raging and every Iraqi who could flee the country was long gone. And here I was playing undercover agent.
He handed back my documents, but not before jotting down my personal details and obtaining the name and address of the hotel we'd be staying at in Najaf. I had survived yet another close call, and would hear Delphine's voice again that night.
*
I am out of Iraq right now, but I keep having to remind myself that there's no countdown anymore before my next trip to Baghdad. Getting ready for the next stint "in country" was always so hard. I could rarely sleep the nights before I left.
It's getting better now. I am learning again to appreciate quiet breakfasts with my wife and boisterous games of soccer with friends. But readjusting to ordinary life is hard. I miss the action.
I still daydream about my last helicopter ride to go north of Baghdad. I stuffed in earplugs and strapped on a flak jacket.
I thrilled as the Black Hawk lifted up, swinging over the Green Zone across the homes of the brawny, good-humored British, South African and American security contractors. We skirted past the mosque of the wily Shiite cleric who venomously ripped into his enemies during Friday prayers, but politely offered visitors tea and sweets.
We passed over a marketplace, where teens in plastic slippers pushed around wooden gurneys while shopkeepers worked their prayer beads. Young women stood in the courtyard of a school, perhaps recounting the woes that befell loved ones. Farmers outside the city limits worked ancient fields of barley and wheat. Boys and girls dressed in colorful robes of pink and purple walking on a dirt road waved up to us.
I imagined reaching my hand out and grasping them, drawing them all into my heart.
All of them.
*
daragahi@latimes.com
Daragahi is currently in Cairo and moving to a new assignment in Beirut.
-----------------------------------------
Citation: Borzou Daragahi. "Reporter recalls the layers of truth told in Iraq," Los Angeles Times, 10 April 2007.
Original URL: http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/iraq/complete/la-fg-fouryears10apr10,1,2197564.story?coll=la-iraq-complete
-----------------------------------------
By Borzou Daragahi
Los Angeles Times, 10 April 2007
Baghdad — THE young man with the AK-47 at a checkpoint in the Triangle of Death ordered us out of the car the moment he realized I was a foreigner. A flat gray sky closed in. Dust and diesel exhaust filled the hot air. He led us into the desert, over scrub brush and cigarette butts, toward a grizzled man in a wooden hut.
"And who is he?" the older man asked my Iraqi colleague and interpreter, Raheem.
I had repeatedly promised my bosses, my colleagues, my family and my wife, Delphine, that I wouldn't take big risks. But here I was in the early summer of 2006 in the middle of a lawless desert between Baghdad and Najaf that had swallowed up hundreds of Iraqis and not a small number of foreigners. I was speaking to a man who acted like a cop but looked like he could have been an insurgent commander, the head of a kidnapping ring or a death squad leader.
We were in a mostly Shiite Muslim part of the country, so I stuck to my cover story: I was an Iranian headed to Najaf, one of the thousands of Shiite pilgrims who make their way there each month to pay their respects at the shrine of Imam Ali.
He demanded to see my passport. To my surprise and terror, he thumbed through it. Then he calmly looked up and asked, "Where's your entry stamp?"
I had no answer. I had entered Iraq with my U.S. passport, which I wouldn't dare bring with me on the road. I froze.
Since first arriving in Iraq 4 1/2 years ago, first as a freelance reporter and then as the Los Angeles Times bureau chief, I had kept up the pretense that I was playing it safe.
Now that I am out of Iraq, I can begin to be honest.
For years, I had swaddled myself in layers of half-truths: I was an Iranian heading to the shrine cities. I was an average Joe from the Midwest who liked to go canoeing in the summer. I was a reporter for Radio Canada here to tell the truth about what's happening in Iraq. I was an Iranian journalist visiting the brave fighters of Sadr City.
Sometimes I went beyond the truth in the name of survival. I was a Sunni Arab with a speech impediment. I was a sympathetic journalist visiting the brave Sunni patriots of west Baghdad. I was among a group of pharmacists heading down to visit a hospital caring for truck bomb victims. Anything to get the story and get out.
In fact, I am an Iranian American reporter from Chicago, a graduate of Columbia University's journalism school, where I was taught that the greatest journalists were impartial and balanced.
But in Iraq, I measured success through my ability to make it past checkpoints and gunfire, to melt into the background as mysterious masked gunmen flashed by, to ease back into the office compound alive, story in hand, and to breeze past any of the day's complications in chats with my editors.
At the end of every day, I put on my iPod and got on the treadmill to release the tension. I called Delphine, a journalist who early on had shared so many Iraq experiences with me, and assured her everything had gone well.
At the checkpoint on the road to Najaf, I struggled to decide whether to admit that I was an American journalist for a U.S. paper traveling in disguise. If I did, the gunmen could kill me and everyone with me, and no one might ever find out what became of us. I couldn't bear to think what Delphine would do if she didn't hear from me that night.
*
MY time in Iraq had started so promisingly.
"Welcome!" said the peshmerga warrior. "Welcome to free Kurdistan!"
It was September 2002, months before the U.S.-led invasion. Delphine and I had just made it across the Iran-Iraq border into what was then the autonomous Kurdish enclave. We were freelance journalists then, in the springtime of our romance. We vowed to go on adventures together, in Iran, to the gulf, to Afghanistan. We had been struggling to get the necessary permits to cross the frontier into mountainous Kurdistan, and were thrilled to have finally made it in.
The peshmerga were irregular soldiers of an undeclared country. Even the border crossing from Iran was unofficial. We stayed at the Sulaymaniya Palace, an ostentatious hotel with terrible food and even worse service, but our first impressions of northern Iraq were great.
We were drawn to the Kurds' festive spirit, colorful weddings and boisterous candor. Their stated vision for a democratic federal Iraq was seductive in this authoritarian region of the world. They outlined their hopes in the snowy mountaintop town of Salahuddin.
"If the Kurds, the most unadvanced part of Iraq, can have democracy, why can't all Iraq have democracy?" said Jalal Talabani, then a Kurdish leader and now the president of Iraq.
But he also issued an ominous warning.
"Liberating Iraq is easy," he said. "Ruling Iraq is difficult. Ruling Iraq requires the full cooperation of the Iraqi people and the Iraqi opposition."
Even then we caught glimpses of the demons now ravaging Iraq. Kurdistan's democratic trappings masked corrupt, thuggish single-party fiefdoms run by former warlords. Their minions rolled through towns in pickup trucks with mounted machine guns.
Political parties had their private militias. Iranian-backed Shiite gunmen opposed to Saddam Hussein fought against Baghdad-backed militants opposed to Tehran. Muslim radicals bombed Kurdish nationalists in the dead of night. Western intelligence agencies camped out on mountaintops spotting bombing sites in Kirkuk.
The tensions came to a head when Kurdish peshmerga opened fire in a gangland-style execution of five suspected Muslim radicals at a checkpoint. Kurdish security officials assured reporters that the killings were justified as part of their fight against terrorism. It soon emerged that the victims were members of a group allied with the Kurdish government, killed in a still-murky case of mistaken identity.
As the war to oust Hussein began in March 2003, many feared chemical weapon attacks, refugee crises and a drawn-out conflict. But of all the violence and political chicanery that unfolded in northern Iraq during those months before the war, the checkpoint killing most foretold the dirty war that was to come.
*
WITHIN weeks of the checkpoint incident, Delphine and I joined convoys of peshmerga and U.S. Special Forces storming Khanaqin and Kirkuk, and basked in the adulation of the liberated Kurds. They showered us with candy, flowers and hugs. Hussein's rule was wiped away.
But the country's unraveling began quickly. By day, looters swarmed Iraqi military bases, hauling off rocket-propelled-grenade launchers and mortar rounds. At night, explosions boomed throughout the land and fires raged into the sky.
Outside the friendly, pro-American Kurdish areas, political troubles started early. We entered Hussein's hometown, Tikrit, a few hours before the Marines did. We were greeted with smiles at a gas station. But a friendly man warned us to get out quickly. Among the welcoming faces, he said, were Hussein loyalists who would harm us. We sped away, returning the next day to see Marines arresting middle-aged Sunni Arab men, putting them in plastic handcuffs and seating them on the pavement.
The detainees smiled at the troops.
In retrospect, anyone could have seen what was coming next, but much like the U.S. officials, we were oblivious. We listened to the complaints and warnings from ordinary Iraqis: no electricity, no security, unfair detentions. "Where is the freedom?" they said. "Where is the democracy? Soon we will take up arms."
We also gave credence to the narrative described by American officials in the Green Zone, Iraq's U.S.-protected administrative headquarters in central Baghdad.
"We measure our success on whether Iraq is on a path toward a sovereign democratic future with a government whose policies are dedicated to being at peace with its own citizens, peace with its neighbors, peace with the international community and certainly peace with the United States," a spokesman for the U.S.-run Coalition Provisional Authority, Dan Senor, said in June 2004. "That is the path we are on."
We found ourselves charmed by Baghdad. Life was hard during the first year or two after the invasion: The generators roared all night and the heat was unbearable. The stench of raw sewage rose from the nearby Tigris River. But we were intrigued by the new Iraq.
It was a land where Sufi musicians in the city of Fallouja crafted songs about jihad and artists turned from painting portraits of Hussein to those of Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani. New television stations broadcast funny soap operas chronicling the lives of Iraqis.
We lunched with Iraqi friends at fancy restaurants named Latakkia and the White Palace. We shopped for clothes and shoes in the upscale Mansour district. Karaoke night with other journalists at the Chinese restaurant was a treat.
I had drinks with my driver, Abbas, at his little plot of land. He nicknamed it Camp David. Once, Abbas, a Shiite, invited me over along with some Sunni Muslim pals from Fallouja. The talk turned to the aggressive tactics of anti-American cleric Muqtada Sadr's Shiite militia, the Jaish al-Mahdi, or Al Mahdi army.
There was a moment of tense silence.
"Here's to the Jaish al-Whiskey!" Abbas said suddenly, holding his drink aloft. We roared with laughter. Sunnis and Shiites, Iranians and Americans, all were welcome in the Jaish al-Whiskey.
Delphine and I priced houses to rent and thought gingerly about the prospect of moving to Iraq to cover the reconstruction. After all, L. Paul Bremer III, the head of the Coalition Provisional Authority until it was dissolved in June 2004, was talking about a Marshall Plan for Iraq.
In Samarra, I coaxed Delphine up the famous minaret. Afraid of heights, she cursed me as I nearly dragged her up.
"Trust me," I said. "You'll be happy when we get to the top."
"I hate you!" was her reply.
But once we got to the top, she was elated. We looked out upon a gorgeous scene: the palm tree groves, the azure waters of the Tigris, the gleaming golden-domed Askari shrine.
"It was worth it," she said.
I asked her to marry me a few months later. We seated the guests at tables named after cities where we'd worked: Tehran, Kabul, Dubai and so on. We sat at Baghdad.
*
IRAQ'S descent quickly intruded onto our illusions. The violence edged closer and closer. We befriended Al Arabiya television correspondent Ali Khatib a few months before he was killed. We met with clerics in Najaf a few weeks before its shrine was bombed, killing Ayatollah Mohammed Bakr Hakim and launching the spiral of sectarian violence that would become the narrative of the coming years.
We lunched in the cafeteria of the United Nations headquarters on the Canal Highway a couple of days before it was bombed. We missed by seconds a massive roadside bombing that killed an American soldier on the highway to Fallouja. I was sleeping in my hotel room when a bomb went off close by, shattering the windows and lodging shrapnel in the wall of my kitchenette.
Honestly, I loved the action and adrenaline. The more dangerous, the greater the exhilaration. I got used to the gunfire and explosions. Sadly, I even got used to the smell of burnt flesh after car bombs exploded. I believed I could distance myself from it, as long as I was not physically harmed.
I became attached to the Iraqis I worked with. The more danger and horrors we experienced together and survived together, the closer we became. I cherished relations with ordinary Iraqis, politicians, U.S. Embassy officials and soldiers I befriended.
I told friends and colleagues that Iraq was the most important story of our time. And though covering it was the most difficult and dangerous job I have ever had, it was also the most rewarding.
As the situation in Iraq grew more dire, Delphine left Iraq for the most part, for the relative safety of reporting in Tehran. I took a full-time job with The Times, committing myself to an even longer stay in Baghdad. My wife and I began spending more and more time apart. (I joked that my coalition partner was abandoning me, just like Spain and others ditched President Bush.) What had started out as a romantic adventure became a dangerous full-time job and a bizarre lifestyle.
I came up with more innovative survival tricks. My greatest fear was being followed by gunmen or kidnappers as we left an appointment or the hotel, which everyone in Baghdad knew was teeming with Western journalists and contractors.
Sometimes, I would dress down, like an Iraqi laborer, and walk off the hotel compound with Nadeem, my interpreter, holding digital cameras, recorders and notebooks in a decrepit plastic bag. Our driver would pull up, with a little "taxi" plate on the roof of his sedan. We'd pretend to haggle with him for a few seconds before getting into the car.
A little facial hair, a Middle Eastern complexion and local clothes helped me blend in, as long as I didn't open my mouth. But there were far more close calls than I care to remember.
Once after interviewing truck bomb witnesses in downtown Baghdad, we were briefly stopped by the police.
"Who are you? Where's your identification?"
We cleared up the confusion, only to stumble into greater peril.
"They're American journalists!" one Iraqi cop announced to his superior, amid the huge crowd. It felt like all eyes were on us as we briskly walked away.
I was scarred, tired and adrift in a sea of sandbags, razor wire, blast barriers and gunfire. Death became part of my daily rhythm.
Mornings I awoke to the dry thud of explosions across the city. The metallic clang of weapons loading signaled preparations for an afternoon trip to the grocery store. Night fell, and after days that stretched 19 hours, I fell asleep to the sounds of automatic gunfire.
I rarely mentioned the close calls to my wife.
"How was your day?" she asked on the phone.
"It ended up being fine," I replied.
My goal was to prevent Iraq's troubles from flooding into my life or those of the increasingly demoralized Iraqis I worked with. But inevitably, Iraq began inundating my waking hours, even when I wasn't in Iraq.
On a holiday in Sri Lanka, the ongoing battle between government troops — dominated by the majority Sinhalese — and Tamil separatists obscured the beach and sun.
"Where are you coming from?" the driver of the tiny three-wheeled tuk-tuk asked us.
"It's none of your business," I snapped at him. "Just drive."
"What are you doing?" Delphine chastised me. "He's just trying to be nice. And you're not in Iraq."
During a drive through Chicago, I imagined the majority Latino West Side fighting against the mostly African American South Side. I imagined fighters setting up mortar positions along the Dan Ryan Expressway. Snipers taking shots at rival gunmen from the top of Soldier Field, its facade crumbling from rocket fire.
In Tehran, a Dutch colleague spoke to me in English as we walked down the street and I turned on him. "Shhhh!" I demanded. Be quiet.
"Dude!" he said. "We can speak English here! We're not in Iraq."
I was moody, despondent and distracted. I surfed the Web, checking for news updates from Baghdad. I saw a group of kids playing soccer, laughing in the streets of Tehran, and I just wanted to cry.
Delphine and I argued, always about the same thing: Even when I was not in Iraq, I was in Iraq.
"Why do you bother even coming home?" she said.
At a dinner party once, I accidentally told the story of one of my close calls. Delphine was outraged. "You didn't tell me about that," she reprimanded me.
"I didn't want you to worry," I said meekly.
Months later, I became enraged when I found out she hadn't told me about a frightening encounter she'd had with authorities in Tehran. We hadn't seen each other in two months, and here we were fighting. I was indignant. "I knew something was wrong. You lied to me."
She was having none of it. "Well, you do the same thing to me," she said.
We were becoming two loners, deceiving each other in pursuit of our addictions.
*
I trembled each time the trucks rumbled past on the road to Najaf. I had seconds to make a decision. Left with little recourse, I decided to tell the man at the checkpoint the truth: I was an American journalist traveling in disguise. He asked for my American passport. I told him I didn't bring it. "Would you bring an American passport on this road?" I asked defensively.
His assistant nodded in understanding, but the older man looked at me and shook his head, his frown hardening.
With my fear came a strange calm, a sense of resignation.
Then the guy's frown melted and he smirked, shaking his head. He believed my story. I was no spy or terrorist. If anything, he thought I was a total moron for driving down this road, just a few months after the bombing of the Samarra shrine. The civil war was raging and every Iraqi who could flee the country was long gone. And here I was playing undercover agent.
He handed back my documents, but not before jotting down my personal details and obtaining the name and address of the hotel we'd be staying at in Najaf. I had survived yet another close call, and would hear Delphine's voice again that night.
*
I am out of Iraq right now, but I keep having to remind myself that there's no countdown anymore before my next trip to Baghdad. Getting ready for the next stint "in country" was always so hard. I could rarely sleep the nights before I left.
It's getting better now. I am learning again to appreciate quiet breakfasts with my wife and boisterous games of soccer with friends. But readjusting to ordinary life is hard. I miss the action.
I still daydream about my last helicopter ride to go north of Baghdad. I stuffed in earplugs and strapped on a flak jacket.
I thrilled as the Black Hawk lifted up, swinging over the Green Zone across the homes of the brawny, good-humored British, South African and American security contractors. We skirted past the mosque of the wily Shiite cleric who venomously ripped into his enemies during Friday prayers, but politely offered visitors tea and sweets.
We passed over a marketplace, where teens in plastic slippers pushed around wooden gurneys while shopkeepers worked their prayer beads. Young women stood in the courtyard of a school, perhaps recounting the woes that befell loved ones. Farmers outside the city limits worked ancient fields of barley and wheat. Boys and girls dressed in colorful robes of pink and purple walking on a dirt road waved up to us.
I imagined reaching my hand out and grasping them, drawing them all into my heart.
All of them.
*
daragahi@latimes.com
Daragahi is currently in Cairo and moving to a new assignment in Beirut.
-----------------------------------------
Citation: Borzou Daragahi. "Reporter recalls the layers of truth told in Iraq," Los Angeles Times, 10 April 2007.
Original URL: http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/iraq/complete/la-fg-fouryears10apr10,1,2197564.story?coll=la-iraq-complete
-----------------------------------------