By Robert Burns
The Associated Press, 12 June 2007
WASHINGTON - For the first time since the Iraq war began, the Army is notifying thousands from a special category of reservists that they must report this summer for medical screening and other administrative tasks.
The decision to issue "muster" orders for 5,000 members of the Individual Ready Reserve, or IRR, is not a prelude to a new mobilization or deployment of reservists to Iraq, an Army spokesman said. Instead it is part of a new effort to fix an IRR call-up system that failed on multiple fronts early in the Iraq war.
One problem was that the Army simply could not contact many of its IRR members; it had allowed them to ignore the requirement that they notify the Army of a change in residence. Some turned out to be deceased; others were physically unfit for duty or faced personal problems that barred them from serving.
To correct that the Army is now requiring that they show up in person for what it calls a one-day "physical muster." The idea is to ensure that when and if more IRR members are needed for Iraq or other active-duty deployments the Army will at least know which are fit for duty and where to find them.
The Army planned to announce the decision on Thursday.
Eventually all IRR members will get the order to report for screening; the first 5,000 are considered a test group.
IRR members are people who were honorably discharged after finishing their active-duty service but have not yet completed the eight-year commitment they made when they joined the Army. While in the IRR they are not required to train; they are not paid, and thus many believed they had no further active-duty obligation. Some are former officers who chose not to resign their commission and thus remained on the IRR rolls.
There are now about 78,000 members of the IRR, down from more than 110,000 three years ago.
An Army spokesman, Lt. Col. Bryan Hilferty, said the 5,000 who are receiving "muster" orders this month were picked at random, and they are not necessarily in line to get mobilized and sent to Iraq.
The first 5,000 will receive orders to report to one of four reserve centers — in Tacoma, Wash.; Fort Totten, N.Y.; Fort Meade, Md.; or Los Alamitos, Calif. — and will be paid a $176 stipend once they finish the one-day process, Gall said. All 5,000 live within a 50-mile radius of one of the reserve stations, he said.
The reporting is mandatory. It will begin in mid-July and run through August.
The last time the Army required IRR members to report to a reserve station for administrative processing was 2000, according to Raymond Gall, a spokesman for the Army's Human Resources Command in St. Louis. After that the Army considered it too expensive to repeat, but the Iraq experience changed Army minds.
"The IRR pool is not in the kind of shape we would like it to be," Gall said.
Prior to the Iraq war, IRR members were rarely called to active duty — and many believed they never would be called — but when the Army found itself stretched by unexpected combat demands in Iraq in the summer of 2004 it began issuing mobilization orders. Hundreds of surprised IRR members refused to report or simply ignored their mailed mobilization orders, and the Army realized it had lost control of the situation.
About 5,700 of the approximately 10,700 IRR members who have been sent mobilization orders over the past three years requested that their mobilization date be delayed or that they be exempt from service, and nearly 90 percent of those requests were granted by the Army, according to Army figures as of March 7.
There are now about 2,000 IRR members on active duty, mostly in Iraq.
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Citation: Robert Burns. "Army Reservists ordered for screenings," The Associated Press, 12 June 2007.
Original URL: http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20070612/ap_on_go_ca_st_pe/army_reservists
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13 June 2007
Afghanistan faces growing civilian death toll in US/NATO war vs Taliban - ICRC
Forbes, 12 June 2007
GENEVA (Thomson Financial) - The International Committee of the Red Cross warned today that Afghan civilians were paying the price as increasingly bitter fighting between international forces and Taliban insurgents spreads across Afghanistan.
'The humanitarian situation in Afghanistan is worse now than it was a year ago,' said Pierre Kraehenbuehl, director of operations for the International Committee of the Red Cross.
'Civilians suffer horribly from mounting threats to their security, such as increasing numbers of roadside bombs and suicide attacks, and regular aerial bombing raids,' he added.
The ICRC said in a statement that the conflict pitting the Afghan government and US and NATO forces against the armed opposition had 'significantly intensified' in the south and east of the country since 2006.
It has also spread to the north and west, resulting in 'a growing number of civilian casualties,' the agency added.
'If you have one primary concern among Afghans today, it's security and how to avoid being caught up in the violence,' Kraehenbuehl told journalists.
Late yesterday, rockets fired from Pakistan at a US and Afghan military base in southeastern Afghanistan landed on civilian houses and wounded a family of five, the local governor said.
Scores of civilians are caught up in suicide and roadside bombings by insurgents, but the rising number of civilian casualties from the US and NATO military effort is also causing alarm.
Kraehenbuehl warned that some of the air attacks were carried out without 'necessary precautions' to protect civilians, and that armed opposition also illicitly mingled with civilians for cover.
The senior ICRC official criticised aerial bombings in Shindand district in western Afghanistan in mid-May, which killed dozens of civilians, damaged 170 houses and left some 2,000 people homeless.
'In such instances we clearly believe that much more should be done to preserve and protect civilians during military operations,' he insisted, even taking into account the difficulty posed by Taliban stationed in villages.
The increasingly polarised situation is hampering humanitarian and development work outside major cities, leaving many civilians 'in dire need of emergency assistance,' said the ICRC.
'They also lack access to basic services. It is incredibly difficult for ordinary Afghans to lead a normal life,' while access to medical care has worsened, Kraehenbuehl added.
Nearly 13 bln usd of international aid has been spent in Afghanistan in a US-led reconstruction and security effort following the 2001 toppling of the Taliban regime.
But the development effort has been sharply criticised for failing to produce much progress in war-shattered Afghanistan.
The humanitarian agency, which has been in the country for 20 continuous years, is also visiting a growing number of detainees in Afghan government or US-run prisons to check on their conditions -- some 6,900 detainees so far this year.
'We've not visited anyone held by the armed opposition. We've had sustained dialogue with them on the conduct of hostilities,' Kraehenbuehl said.
Southern Afghanistan is the birthplace of the extremist Taliban movement and the area has seen most of the attacks from the movement's insurgency.
More than 50,000 foreign soldiers, most of them Americans, are in Afghanistan to help Afghan security forces fight the Taliban.
--------------------------------------
Citation: "Afghanistan faces growing civilian death toll in US/NATO war vs Taliban - ICRC," Forbes, 12 June 2007.
Original URL: http://www.forbes.com/markets/feeds/afx/2007/06/12/afx3812745.html
--------------------------------------
GENEVA (Thomson Financial) - The International Committee of the Red Cross warned today that Afghan civilians were paying the price as increasingly bitter fighting between international forces and Taliban insurgents spreads across Afghanistan.
'The humanitarian situation in Afghanistan is worse now than it was a year ago,' said Pierre Kraehenbuehl, director of operations for the International Committee of the Red Cross.
'Civilians suffer horribly from mounting threats to their security, such as increasing numbers of roadside bombs and suicide attacks, and regular aerial bombing raids,' he added.
The ICRC said in a statement that the conflict pitting the Afghan government and US and NATO forces against the armed opposition had 'significantly intensified' in the south and east of the country since 2006.
It has also spread to the north and west, resulting in 'a growing number of civilian casualties,' the agency added.
'If you have one primary concern among Afghans today, it's security and how to avoid being caught up in the violence,' Kraehenbuehl told journalists.
Late yesterday, rockets fired from Pakistan at a US and Afghan military base in southeastern Afghanistan landed on civilian houses and wounded a family of five, the local governor said.
Scores of civilians are caught up in suicide and roadside bombings by insurgents, but the rising number of civilian casualties from the US and NATO military effort is also causing alarm.
Kraehenbuehl warned that some of the air attacks were carried out without 'necessary precautions' to protect civilians, and that armed opposition also illicitly mingled with civilians for cover.
The senior ICRC official criticised aerial bombings in Shindand district in western Afghanistan in mid-May, which killed dozens of civilians, damaged 170 houses and left some 2,000 people homeless.
'In such instances we clearly believe that much more should be done to preserve and protect civilians during military operations,' he insisted, even taking into account the difficulty posed by Taliban stationed in villages.
The increasingly polarised situation is hampering humanitarian and development work outside major cities, leaving many civilians 'in dire need of emergency assistance,' said the ICRC.
'They also lack access to basic services. It is incredibly difficult for ordinary Afghans to lead a normal life,' while access to medical care has worsened, Kraehenbuehl added.
Nearly 13 bln usd of international aid has been spent in Afghanistan in a US-led reconstruction and security effort following the 2001 toppling of the Taliban regime.
But the development effort has been sharply criticised for failing to produce much progress in war-shattered Afghanistan.
The humanitarian agency, which has been in the country for 20 continuous years, is also visiting a growing number of detainees in Afghan government or US-run prisons to check on their conditions -- some 6,900 detainees so far this year.
'We've not visited anyone held by the armed opposition. We've had sustained dialogue with them on the conduct of hostilities,' Kraehenbuehl said.
Southern Afghanistan is the birthplace of the extremist Taliban movement and the area has seen most of the attacks from the movement's insurgency.
More than 50,000 foreign soldiers, most of them Americans, are in Afghanistan to help Afghan security forces fight the Taliban.
--------------------------------------
Citation: "Afghanistan faces growing civilian death toll in US/NATO war vs Taliban - ICRC," Forbes, 12 June 2007.
Original URL: http://www.forbes.com/markets/feeds/afx/2007/06/12/afx3812745.html
--------------------------------------
Al-Qaida targets Iraqi infrastructure
By Qassim Abdul-Zahra
The Associated Press, 11 June 2007
BAGHDAD - Suspected al-Qaida bombers stepped up attacks on key transportation arteries, striking a bridge north of the capital Monday a day after shutting the superhighway south of Baghdad with a huge explosion that collapsed an overpass and killed three U.S. soldiers.
The latest attack, a parked truck bomb, blew apart the bridge that carries traffic over the Diyala River in Baqouba, police said on condition they not be identified by name because they feared retribution. There were no casualties, but motorists and truckers now must use a road that runs through al-Qaida-controlled territory to reach important nearby cities.
Baqouba is the capital of Diyala province, which is swarming with al-Qaida fighters. Those militants were driven out of Baghdad by the four-month-old U.S. security operation and out of Anbar province west of the capital by Sunni tribesman who rose up against the terrorist group.
The attacks on the bridges were only the latest in a campaign to deepen turmoil in
Iraq, especially on the vital transportation network linking Baghdad to the rest of the country. Such bombings — especially suicide attacks — are an al-Qaida trademark and one of the group's many and ever-shifting tactics against U.S. and Iraqi forces.
Earlier this month, a bomb heavily damaged the Sarhat Bridge, a key crossing 90 miles north of the capital on a major road connecting Baghdad with Irbil, Sulaimaniya and other Kurdish cities.
In March and April, three of Baghdad's 13 bridges over the Tigris River were bombed. The attacks were blamed on Sunni insurgent or al-Qaida attempts to divide the city's predominantly Shiite east bank from the mostly Sunni western side of the river.
The most serious attack, an April 12 suicide truck bombing, collapsed the landmark Sarafiyah bridge and sent cars plunging into the brown waters of the Tigris. Eleven people were killed.
U.S. forces used bulldozers Monday to push aside the rubble of the overpass that crashed onto Iraq's main north-south highway just east of Mahmoudiyah, a dangerous triangle of death city with a large al-Qaida presence.
The suicide truck bombing 20 miles south of Baghdad not only brought down a section of the bridge, it killed three U.S. soldiers at a checkpoint and wounded six other American soldiers along with an Iraqi interpreter, the U.S. military said in a statement issued at its Camp Victory headquarters at Baghdad International Airport.
Paul Kane, a fellow with the International Security Program at Harvard University's Kennedy School of Government, said the attacks on bridges are an extension of earlier insurgent attacks on "electric generation sites, infrastructure for water and also the obvious target of oil pipelines."
Kane noted that Iraq does not have railroad service so insurgents "may be at the end of the transit list. If anything, it means they're trying to be creative and they're running out of targets."
Tumult arose in Iraq's fragile political structure Monday when lawmakers declared themselves fed up with the parliament speaker and voted to oust the controversial Sunni politician from his powerful post.
Mahmoud al-Mashhadani is a physician who was jailed by
Saddam Hussein and who had said from the parliament speaker's chair that those who attack American forces should be treated as heroes. He was voted out in a closed session of the Shiite-dominated 275-member legislature.
His ouster appeared to have grown out of a shouting match Sunday with lawmaker Firyad Mohammed Omar, a Shiite Turkoman.
Omar had complained to the speaker about the heavy-handedness of al-Mashhadani's bodyguards; al-Mashhadani responded abusively, according to lawmakers who spoke on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the issue. Omar told fellow legislators that the speaker's guards had assaulted him.
Al-Mashhadani's deputy, Khaled al-Attiyah, who chaired the closed session, will assume the duties of the speaker until a replacement is chosen.
"It's an illegal decision made by a juvenile house," al-Mashhadani told the U.S.-funded Radio Sawa in an interview posted on the Internet.
Al-Mashhadani is part of the Accordance Front, parliament's largest Sunni Arab bloc with 44 of the house's 275 seats. Salim Abdullah, a fellow lawmaker from the Accordance Front, said it would offer a replacement for al-Mashhadani within a week.
The speaker's job is allotted to a Sunni member of parliament according to an agreement among lawmakers who struggled for months to chose their leadership, a prime minister and government.
"We agreed to replace him because we want to improve the house's performance," Abdullah told The Associated Press.
But al-Mashhadani told Radio Sawa that if his performance as speaker were below par, Shiite Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki's was "much worse." The level of competence of President Jalal Talabani, a Sunni Kurd, was "even worse because he does nothing," the former speaker said.
The man expected to become Britain's next prime minister, meanwhile, met with Iraqi leaders in an unannounced visit. Treasury chief Gordon Brown has vowed to study his country's participation in the Iraq war in the face of growing opposition at home.
Brown, slated to succeed Tony Blair this month, was on a one-day fact-finding mission, British officials said.
In London, the House of Commons rejected a motion by Britain's opposition Conservative Party calling for a formal inquiry into the decision to go to war in Iraq. By a vote of 288 to 253, the lower house of parliament sided with Blair, who has ruled out such an inquiry while British troops are deployed in Iraq.
Like so much in Iraq these days, even final exams for high school seniors aren't going as planned: Iraq's Education Ministry delayed the start of finals after some of the test questions were leaked to students, an official said.
A week of final exams had been due to start Tuesday with the Islamic education test, but that was put off until July 1 while authorities investigate reports of cheating, an official said, on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the subject.
Iraqi police, morgue and hospital officials reported 34 deaths in sectarian violence across Iraq on Monday, including 17 bodies dumped on Baghdad streets and believed to be the victims of Shiite death squads.
The al-Qaida front group Islamic State in Iraq posted a video showing what it said were 14 captive members of the Iraqi security forces. The hostages were shown in uniform standing in three rows; one of them repeatedly sighed and looked up at the ceiling. It wasn't clear when they were seized. The video was provided to the AP on Monday by the Virginia-based IntelCenter.
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Citation: Qassim Abdul-Zahra. "Al-Qaida targets Iraqi infrastructure," The Associated Press, 11 June 2007.
Original URL: http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20070612/ap_on_re_mi_ea/iraq_070611170737;_ylt=ApKYP8WfWRX8AFrzTyXwGeVX6GMA
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The Associated Press, 11 June 2007
BAGHDAD - Suspected al-Qaida bombers stepped up attacks on key transportation arteries, striking a bridge north of the capital Monday a day after shutting the superhighway south of Baghdad with a huge explosion that collapsed an overpass and killed three U.S. soldiers.
The latest attack, a parked truck bomb, blew apart the bridge that carries traffic over the Diyala River in Baqouba, police said on condition they not be identified by name because they feared retribution. There were no casualties, but motorists and truckers now must use a road that runs through al-Qaida-controlled territory to reach important nearby cities.
Baqouba is the capital of Diyala province, which is swarming with al-Qaida fighters. Those militants were driven out of Baghdad by the four-month-old U.S. security operation and out of Anbar province west of the capital by Sunni tribesman who rose up against the terrorist group.
The attacks on the bridges were only the latest in a campaign to deepen turmoil in
Iraq, especially on the vital transportation network linking Baghdad to the rest of the country. Such bombings — especially suicide attacks — are an al-Qaida trademark and one of the group's many and ever-shifting tactics against U.S. and Iraqi forces.
Earlier this month, a bomb heavily damaged the Sarhat Bridge, a key crossing 90 miles north of the capital on a major road connecting Baghdad with Irbil, Sulaimaniya and other Kurdish cities.
In March and April, three of Baghdad's 13 bridges over the Tigris River were bombed. The attacks were blamed on Sunni insurgent or al-Qaida attempts to divide the city's predominantly Shiite east bank from the mostly Sunni western side of the river.
The most serious attack, an April 12 suicide truck bombing, collapsed the landmark Sarafiyah bridge and sent cars plunging into the brown waters of the Tigris. Eleven people were killed.
U.S. forces used bulldozers Monday to push aside the rubble of the overpass that crashed onto Iraq's main north-south highway just east of Mahmoudiyah, a dangerous triangle of death city with a large al-Qaida presence.
The suicide truck bombing 20 miles south of Baghdad not only brought down a section of the bridge, it killed three U.S. soldiers at a checkpoint and wounded six other American soldiers along with an Iraqi interpreter, the U.S. military said in a statement issued at its Camp Victory headquarters at Baghdad International Airport.
Paul Kane, a fellow with the International Security Program at Harvard University's Kennedy School of Government, said the attacks on bridges are an extension of earlier insurgent attacks on "electric generation sites, infrastructure for water and also the obvious target of oil pipelines."
Kane noted that Iraq does not have railroad service so insurgents "may be at the end of the transit list. If anything, it means they're trying to be creative and they're running out of targets."
Tumult arose in Iraq's fragile political structure Monday when lawmakers declared themselves fed up with the parliament speaker and voted to oust the controversial Sunni politician from his powerful post.
Mahmoud al-Mashhadani is a physician who was jailed by
Saddam Hussein and who had said from the parliament speaker's chair that those who attack American forces should be treated as heroes. He was voted out in a closed session of the Shiite-dominated 275-member legislature.
His ouster appeared to have grown out of a shouting match Sunday with lawmaker Firyad Mohammed Omar, a Shiite Turkoman.
Omar had complained to the speaker about the heavy-handedness of al-Mashhadani's bodyguards; al-Mashhadani responded abusively, according to lawmakers who spoke on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the issue. Omar told fellow legislators that the speaker's guards had assaulted him.
Al-Mashhadani's deputy, Khaled al-Attiyah, who chaired the closed session, will assume the duties of the speaker until a replacement is chosen.
"It's an illegal decision made by a juvenile house," al-Mashhadani told the U.S.-funded Radio Sawa in an interview posted on the Internet.
Al-Mashhadani is part of the Accordance Front, parliament's largest Sunni Arab bloc with 44 of the house's 275 seats. Salim Abdullah, a fellow lawmaker from the Accordance Front, said it would offer a replacement for al-Mashhadani within a week.
The speaker's job is allotted to a Sunni member of parliament according to an agreement among lawmakers who struggled for months to chose their leadership, a prime minister and government.
"We agreed to replace him because we want to improve the house's performance," Abdullah told The Associated Press.
But al-Mashhadani told Radio Sawa that if his performance as speaker were below par, Shiite Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki's was "much worse." The level of competence of President Jalal Talabani, a Sunni Kurd, was "even worse because he does nothing," the former speaker said.
The man expected to become Britain's next prime minister, meanwhile, met with Iraqi leaders in an unannounced visit. Treasury chief Gordon Brown has vowed to study his country's participation in the Iraq war in the face of growing opposition at home.
Brown, slated to succeed Tony Blair this month, was on a one-day fact-finding mission, British officials said.
In London, the House of Commons rejected a motion by Britain's opposition Conservative Party calling for a formal inquiry into the decision to go to war in Iraq. By a vote of 288 to 253, the lower house of parliament sided with Blair, who has ruled out such an inquiry while British troops are deployed in Iraq.
Like so much in Iraq these days, even final exams for high school seniors aren't going as planned: Iraq's Education Ministry delayed the start of finals after some of the test questions were leaked to students, an official said.
A week of final exams had been due to start Tuesday with the Islamic education test, but that was put off until July 1 while authorities investigate reports of cheating, an official said, on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the subject.
Iraqi police, morgue and hospital officials reported 34 deaths in sectarian violence across Iraq on Monday, including 17 bodies dumped on Baghdad streets and believed to be the victims of Shiite death squads.
The al-Qaida front group Islamic State in Iraq posted a video showing what it said were 14 captive members of the Iraqi security forces. The hostages were shown in uniform standing in three rows; one of them repeatedly sighed and looked up at the ceiling. It wasn't clear when they were seized. The video was provided to the AP on Monday by the Virginia-based IntelCenter.
---------------------------------------
Citation: Qassim Abdul-Zahra. "Al-Qaida targets Iraqi infrastructure," The Associated Press, 11 June 2007.
Original URL: http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20070612/ap_on_re_mi_ea/iraq_070611170737;_ylt=ApKYP8WfWRX8AFrzTyXwGeVX6GMA
---------------------------------------
Team blasts way through Iraq munitions
By Charles J. Hanley
The Associated Press, 12 June 2007
AMMUNITION SUPPLY POINT 8, Iraq - The voice bellowed the customary alert over the radio: "Fire in the hole!"
On the horizon, in an instant, the earth leaped up — a black curtain of soil and debris streaked with fire. A heartbeat later, the shock wave and thunder jolted this fort-like compound, a half-mile away.
Explosion by meticulously planned explosion, a little-known U.S. Army outfit has not so quietly notched one success here in Iraq, a country known more for failure these days.
The band of ordnance experts has destroyed 366,000 tons of leftover Iraqi munitions, enough explosive power for an endless supply of makeshift roadside bombs, or "improvised explosive devices," the Iraqi insurgents' No. 1 killer of American troops.
Perhaps 150,000 tons remain out there, however, some of it exposed to pilferage by anti-U.S. forces. Noted Brad McCowan, civilian manager of the Coalition Munitions Clearance Program, "It doesn't take much to make an IED," some of which are as simple as mortar shells lashed together.
The amount of explosives in the destroyed munitions — not including the casings and coverings — theoretically could have made almost 1 million 200-pound roadside bombs.
Since its start six months after the U.S. invasion in early 2003, the private contractors of the munitions demolition project have cleared 66 large Iraqi sites of a vast array of weaponry — from rifle ammunition and hand grenades to sea mines, artillery, tank and mortar rounds, rockets and aerial bombs. It's all a legacy of decades of arms buildup under
Saddam Hussein.
Initial estimates of the deadly lode to be destroyed ranged from 2 million tons down to 600,000 tons. The lower end is now considered more accurate.
"People talk about Iraq being one large ammo dump, and that's what it is," said Lt. Col. Garry Bush, 41, of Tecumseh, Mich., the Army officer in charge of the program.
Clearing that ammo dump has been a costly job: More than 100 Iraqi, American and other civilian employees have been killed since 2003, although only five — three Americans, two Iraqis — have died in munitions handling accidents. The rest were killed by roadside bombs, snipers and the other deadly dangers of Iraq at war.
In dollars the cost also has been substantial, some $1.1 billion through this fiscal year, according to Lt. Col. Bush. It's worth it, he said. Although the number of IED attacks has escalated steadily through the years, it might have been worse.
"We're keeping a lot of material out of the bad guys' hands," Bush said.
The "UXO" — unexploded ordnance — specialists are currently clearing seven remaining sites, including this old-regime supply base in parched farmlands between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers about 100 miles southeast of Baghdad.
From a square "fort" 250 feet on each side — surrounded by 10-foot-high walls of dirt-filled barriers and corner gun towers — a team from Pasadena, Calif.-based Tetra Tech Inc. ranges over the flat, wind-swept site beyond: six square miles once dotted with dozens of sunken munitions magazines, hangar-sized structures under steel, earth-covered roofs.
In 2003, before the Americans arrived, some 120 local scavengers were killed at this site, one by one, as they stripped valuable brass and copper from artillery rounds, said Sheik Karim Faraj, head of the local al-Swalim tribe.
Now, he said, the demolition blasts one mile from his village are "no problem," especially since more than 150 of his men hold jobs at "ASP 8" as laborers or security guards, a welcome boost in an impoverished countryside.
The ordnance team, under Army Corps of Engineers oversight, are down to their last 11 magazines here. They methodically empty each, one by one, of rusting remnants from a defunct army: mostly run-of-the-mill artillery and mortar rounds ranging up to 155mm, but also including some oversized specimens, such as 8-inch artillery rounds sold by the United States to Iraq when it was fighting
Iran in the 1980s.
Their sweeps also have turned up a couple of dozen 240mm mortar rounds — unusual 5-foot-long giants. "That can make one hell of an IED," said Cliff Coulson-Bonner, an Australian senior UXO specialist with Tetra Tech.
On this day, the team has carefully arranged 24 tons' worth of munitions in several deep pits for a "demolition shot," with C4 explosive as an initiator and several feet of earth on top to limit flying fragments. A relatively small "shot," it nonetheless rocked the landscape with its power.
Back at his office on Baghdad's outskirts, McCowan, 51, of Huntsville, Ala., who helped start the project in 2003, said the work grows more difficult as more and more ordnance must be dug up — some buried by earth turned up by U.S. bombing in 2003, some hidden by old-regime loyalists in backyards and other unlikely places.
"Some folks thought we'd finish up a year ago, but that's not realistic," he said.
He now envisions sending smaller teams to help Army units turning up smaller weapons caches across Iraq. "I believe we'll be here as long as the U.S. military is here," he said.
---------------------------------
Citation: Charles J. Hanley. "Team blasts way through Iraq munitions," The Associated Press, 12 June 2007.
Original URL: http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20070612/ap_on_re_mi_ea/iraq_a_million_ieds
---------------------------------
The Associated Press, 12 June 2007
AMMUNITION SUPPLY POINT 8, Iraq - The voice bellowed the customary alert over the radio: "Fire in the hole!"
On the horizon, in an instant, the earth leaped up — a black curtain of soil and debris streaked with fire. A heartbeat later, the shock wave and thunder jolted this fort-like compound, a half-mile away.
Explosion by meticulously planned explosion, a little-known U.S. Army outfit has not so quietly notched one success here in Iraq, a country known more for failure these days.
The band of ordnance experts has destroyed 366,000 tons of leftover Iraqi munitions, enough explosive power for an endless supply of makeshift roadside bombs, or "improvised explosive devices," the Iraqi insurgents' No. 1 killer of American troops.
Perhaps 150,000 tons remain out there, however, some of it exposed to pilferage by anti-U.S. forces. Noted Brad McCowan, civilian manager of the Coalition Munitions Clearance Program, "It doesn't take much to make an IED," some of which are as simple as mortar shells lashed together.
The amount of explosives in the destroyed munitions — not including the casings and coverings — theoretically could have made almost 1 million 200-pound roadside bombs.
Since its start six months after the U.S. invasion in early 2003, the private contractors of the munitions demolition project have cleared 66 large Iraqi sites of a vast array of weaponry — from rifle ammunition and hand grenades to sea mines, artillery, tank and mortar rounds, rockets and aerial bombs. It's all a legacy of decades of arms buildup under
Saddam Hussein.
Initial estimates of the deadly lode to be destroyed ranged from 2 million tons down to 600,000 tons. The lower end is now considered more accurate.
"People talk about Iraq being one large ammo dump, and that's what it is," said Lt. Col. Garry Bush, 41, of Tecumseh, Mich., the Army officer in charge of the program.
Clearing that ammo dump has been a costly job: More than 100 Iraqi, American and other civilian employees have been killed since 2003, although only five — three Americans, two Iraqis — have died in munitions handling accidents. The rest were killed by roadside bombs, snipers and the other deadly dangers of Iraq at war.
In dollars the cost also has been substantial, some $1.1 billion through this fiscal year, according to Lt. Col. Bush. It's worth it, he said. Although the number of IED attacks has escalated steadily through the years, it might have been worse.
"We're keeping a lot of material out of the bad guys' hands," Bush said.
The "UXO" — unexploded ordnance — specialists are currently clearing seven remaining sites, including this old-regime supply base in parched farmlands between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers about 100 miles southeast of Baghdad.
From a square "fort" 250 feet on each side — surrounded by 10-foot-high walls of dirt-filled barriers and corner gun towers — a team from Pasadena, Calif.-based Tetra Tech Inc. ranges over the flat, wind-swept site beyond: six square miles once dotted with dozens of sunken munitions magazines, hangar-sized structures under steel, earth-covered roofs.
In 2003, before the Americans arrived, some 120 local scavengers were killed at this site, one by one, as they stripped valuable brass and copper from artillery rounds, said Sheik Karim Faraj, head of the local al-Swalim tribe.
Now, he said, the demolition blasts one mile from his village are "no problem," especially since more than 150 of his men hold jobs at "ASP 8" as laborers or security guards, a welcome boost in an impoverished countryside.
The ordnance team, under Army Corps of Engineers oversight, are down to their last 11 magazines here. They methodically empty each, one by one, of rusting remnants from a defunct army: mostly run-of-the-mill artillery and mortar rounds ranging up to 155mm, but also including some oversized specimens, such as 8-inch artillery rounds sold by the United States to Iraq when it was fighting
Iran in the 1980s.
Their sweeps also have turned up a couple of dozen 240mm mortar rounds — unusual 5-foot-long giants. "That can make one hell of an IED," said Cliff Coulson-Bonner, an Australian senior UXO specialist with Tetra Tech.
On this day, the team has carefully arranged 24 tons' worth of munitions in several deep pits for a "demolition shot," with C4 explosive as an initiator and several feet of earth on top to limit flying fragments. A relatively small "shot," it nonetheless rocked the landscape with its power.
Back at his office on Baghdad's outskirts, McCowan, 51, of Huntsville, Ala., who helped start the project in 2003, said the work grows more difficult as more and more ordnance must be dug up — some buried by earth turned up by U.S. bombing in 2003, some hidden by old-regime loyalists in backyards and other unlikely places.
"Some folks thought we'd finish up a year ago, but that's not realistic," he said.
He now envisions sending smaller teams to help Army units turning up smaller weapons caches across Iraq. "I believe we'll be here as long as the U.S. military is here," he said.
---------------------------------
Citation: Charles J. Hanley. "Team blasts way through Iraq munitions," The Associated Press, 12 June 2007.
Original URL: http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20070612/ap_on_re_mi_ea/iraq_a_million_ieds
---------------------------------
12 June 2007
Army misses May recruiting goal
By Robert Burns
The Associated Press, 11 June 2007
WASHINGTON - The Army fell short of its recruiting goal for May, its first significant slip in two years. The active-duty Navy, Marine Corps and Air Force met or surpassed their May targets, although the Army National Guard and Air National Guard fell far short.
With an array of special incentives for attracting recruits, the Army managed to recover from a 2005 recruiting slump, but the impact of the Iraq war and the strong domestic economy have made it difficult to attract enlistees.
The Army and Marine Corps have suffered the bulk of casualties in Iraq.
The pace of recruiting is even more important now that Defense Secretary Robert Gates has set a goal of increasing the size of the active-duty Army by 65,000 to a total of 547,000 within five years. The increase is intended to ease some of the strain on the Army from its heavy commitments in both Iraq and
Afghanistan.
The Marine Corps also is expanding, although by a small amount.
Statistics released Monday showed that in May the Army signed up 5,101 new recruits, short of its goal of 5,500, although it remains on track to meet its goal of 80,000 for the full year, which runs from Oct. 1, 2006 to Sept. 30, 2007.
"May is historically a difficult month to recruit," said Maj. Anne Edgecomb, an Army spokeswoman. High school graduation and other spring events tend to make it harder to attract the attention of potential recruits, she said.
The Army tends to have its best recruiting months during the summer.
The last time the active-duty Army missed a monthly goal was September 2006, although that was a special circumstance: the Army had already met its full-year goal by September, so it chose to defer some sign-ups to later months.
In 2005 the Army missed its recruiting target by wide margins four straight months, through May. But it began a recovery that continued until last month, propelled by bigger enlistment bonuses and other special incentives.
The Marine Corps had a banner month in May, signing up 2,225 recruits compared to its goal of 1,665. The Navy hit exactly its target of 2,709, and the Air Force met its goal of 2,451.
The Army National Guard met only 88 percent of its goal and the Air National Guard met 77 percent of its goal.
--------------------------------------------
Citation: Robert Burns. "Army misses May recruiting goal," The Associated Press, 11 June 2007.
Original URL: http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20070611/ap_on_go_ca_st_pe/army_recruiting
--------------------------------------------
The Associated Press, 11 June 2007
WASHINGTON - The Army fell short of its recruiting goal for May, its first significant slip in two years. The active-duty Navy, Marine Corps and Air Force met or surpassed their May targets, although the Army National Guard and Air National Guard fell far short.
With an array of special incentives for attracting recruits, the Army managed to recover from a 2005 recruiting slump, but the impact of the Iraq war and the strong domestic economy have made it difficult to attract enlistees.
The Army and Marine Corps have suffered the bulk of casualties in Iraq.
The pace of recruiting is even more important now that Defense Secretary Robert Gates has set a goal of increasing the size of the active-duty Army by 65,000 to a total of 547,000 within five years. The increase is intended to ease some of the strain on the Army from its heavy commitments in both Iraq and
Afghanistan.
The Marine Corps also is expanding, although by a small amount.
Statistics released Monday showed that in May the Army signed up 5,101 new recruits, short of its goal of 5,500, although it remains on track to meet its goal of 80,000 for the full year, which runs from Oct. 1, 2006 to Sept. 30, 2007.
"May is historically a difficult month to recruit," said Maj. Anne Edgecomb, an Army spokeswoman. High school graduation and other spring events tend to make it harder to attract the attention of potential recruits, she said.
The Army tends to have its best recruiting months during the summer.
The last time the active-duty Army missed a monthly goal was September 2006, although that was a special circumstance: the Army had already met its full-year goal by September, so it chose to defer some sign-ups to later months.
In 2005 the Army missed its recruiting target by wide margins four straight months, through May. But it began a recovery that continued until last month, propelled by bigger enlistment bonuses and other special incentives.
The Marine Corps had a banner month in May, signing up 2,225 recruits compared to its goal of 1,665. The Navy hit exactly its target of 2,709, and the Air Force met its goal of 2,451.
The Army National Guard met only 88 percent of its goal and the Air National Guard met 77 percent of its goal.
--------------------------------------------
Citation: Robert Burns. "Army misses May recruiting goal," The Associated Press, 11 June 2007.
Original URL: http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20070611/ap_on_go_ca_st_pe/army_recruiting
--------------------------------------------
U.S. mistakenly kills 7 Afghan police
By Amir Shah
The Associated Press, 12 June 2007
KABUL, Afghanistan - Afghan police mistook U.S. troops on a nighttime mission for Taliban fighters and opened fire on them early Tuesday, prompting U.S. forces to return fire and call in attack aircraft. Seven Afghan police were killed.
Gunmen on motorbikes, meanwhile, killed two schoolgirls Tuesday in central
Afghanistan, as U.S.-led coalition and Afghan troops killed more than 24 suspected Taliban fighters during a battle in the south on Monday, officials said.
President Hamid Karzai's spokesman said the deaths of the Afghan police were "a tragic incident" caused by a lack of communication.
"The police forces were not aware of the coalition's operation," said spokesman Karim Rahimi. "The police checkpoint in the area thought that they were the enemy, so police opened fire on the coalition, and then the coalition thought that the enemies were firing on them, so they returned fire back."
The commander at the remote checkpoint in the eastern province of Nangarhar, Esanullah, who goes by one name, said U.S. gunfire and helicopter rockets killed seven policemen and wounded four.
Maj. Chris Belcher, a spokesman for the U.S.-led coalition, said a combined coalition-Afghan force was ambushed by small arms fire and rocket-propelled grenades from two sides while on the way to conduct an operation against a suspected Taliban safe house.
"Afghan and coalition forces took incoming fire and they responded to it," Belcher said. The forces called in air support, he said.
A policeman at the remote checkpoint said police called out for the approaching U.S. forces to halt.
"I thought they were Taliban, and we shouted at them to stop, but they came closer and they opened fire," said Khan Mohammad, one of the policemen at the post. "I'm very angry. We are here to protect the Afghan government and help serve the Afghan government, but the Americans have come to kill us."
Rahimi said the incident was being investigated and showed why Karzai has repeatedly called for increased cooperation and communication between Afghan and international troops, which would also help solve the ongoing problem of civilian casualties in Afghanistan.
In Nangarhar province in March — the same province of Tuesday's police shootings — 19 civilians were killed and 50 wounded by U.S. Marines Special Operations Forces who fired on civilians while speeding away from the site of a suicide bomb attack, casualties that sparked angry protests and denunciations of the U.S. presence there.
A U.S. military commander later determined that the Marines used excessive force.
The International Committee of the Red Cross on Tuesday said the impact of violence on civilians in Afghanistan is worse now than it was a year ago.
Pierre Kraehenbuehl, the ICRC's director of operations, said fighting between armed opposition groups and the Afghan army supported by international forces had intensified significantly in the south and east of the country since 2006 and was spreading to the north and west.
"Civilians suffer horribly from mounting threats to their security," such as increasing numbers of roadside bombs, suicide attacks and airstrikes, he said in a statement.
In central Logar province, gunmen on two motorbikes opened fire on students leaving an all-girls school, killing two schoolgirls and wounding six others, said Education Minister Mohammad Hanif Atmar.
In the southern Kandahar province, U.S.-led coalition and Afghan troops killed more than 24 suspected Taliban fighters during an eight-hour battle in Shah Wali Kot in southern Kandahar province, the coalition said Tuesday.
The troops were ambushed by militants, who retreated after several of their fighters were killed. A force of some 30 Taliban later attacked the same coalition convoy, who called in airstrikes on a compound and a vehicle, killing "over two dozen enemy fighters," the coalition said.
Violence has spiked in Afghanistan in recent weeks. More than 2,300 people have died in insurgency-related violence this year, according to an Associated Press count based on U.S., NATO and Afghan figures.
Associated Press writer Rahim Faiez in Kabul contributed to this report.
----------------------------------
Citation: Amir Shah. "U.S. mistakenly kills 7 Afghan police," The Associated Press, 12 June 2007.
Original URL: http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20070612/ap_on_re_as/afghan_violence
----------------------------------
The Associated Press, 12 June 2007
KABUL, Afghanistan - Afghan police mistook U.S. troops on a nighttime mission for Taliban fighters and opened fire on them early Tuesday, prompting U.S. forces to return fire and call in attack aircraft. Seven Afghan police were killed.
Gunmen on motorbikes, meanwhile, killed two schoolgirls Tuesday in central
Afghanistan, as U.S.-led coalition and Afghan troops killed more than 24 suspected Taliban fighters during a battle in the south on Monday, officials said.
President Hamid Karzai's spokesman said the deaths of the Afghan police were "a tragic incident" caused by a lack of communication.
"The police forces were not aware of the coalition's operation," said spokesman Karim Rahimi. "The police checkpoint in the area thought that they were the enemy, so police opened fire on the coalition, and then the coalition thought that the enemies were firing on them, so they returned fire back."
The commander at the remote checkpoint in the eastern province of Nangarhar, Esanullah, who goes by one name, said U.S. gunfire and helicopter rockets killed seven policemen and wounded four.
Maj. Chris Belcher, a spokesman for the U.S.-led coalition, said a combined coalition-Afghan force was ambushed by small arms fire and rocket-propelled grenades from two sides while on the way to conduct an operation against a suspected Taliban safe house.
"Afghan and coalition forces took incoming fire and they responded to it," Belcher said. The forces called in air support, he said.
A policeman at the remote checkpoint said police called out for the approaching U.S. forces to halt.
"I thought they were Taliban, and we shouted at them to stop, but they came closer and they opened fire," said Khan Mohammad, one of the policemen at the post. "I'm very angry. We are here to protect the Afghan government and help serve the Afghan government, but the Americans have come to kill us."
Rahimi said the incident was being investigated and showed why Karzai has repeatedly called for increased cooperation and communication between Afghan and international troops, which would also help solve the ongoing problem of civilian casualties in Afghanistan.
In Nangarhar province in March — the same province of Tuesday's police shootings — 19 civilians were killed and 50 wounded by U.S. Marines Special Operations Forces who fired on civilians while speeding away from the site of a suicide bomb attack, casualties that sparked angry protests and denunciations of the U.S. presence there.
A U.S. military commander later determined that the Marines used excessive force.
The International Committee of the Red Cross on Tuesday said the impact of violence on civilians in Afghanistan is worse now than it was a year ago.
Pierre Kraehenbuehl, the ICRC's director of operations, said fighting between armed opposition groups and the Afghan army supported by international forces had intensified significantly in the south and east of the country since 2006 and was spreading to the north and west.
"Civilians suffer horribly from mounting threats to their security," such as increasing numbers of roadside bombs, suicide attacks and airstrikes, he said in a statement.
In central Logar province, gunmen on two motorbikes opened fire on students leaving an all-girls school, killing two schoolgirls and wounding six others, said Education Minister Mohammad Hanif Atmar.
In the southern Kandahar province, U.S.-led coalition and Afghan troops killed more than 24 suspected Taliban fighters during an eight-hour battle in Shah Wali Kot in southern Kandahar province, the coalition said Tuesday.
The troops were ambushed by militants, who retreated after several of their fighters were killed. A force of some 30 Taliban later attacked the same coalition convoy, who called in airstrikes on a compound and a vehicle, killing "over two dozen enemy fighters," the coalition said.
Violence has spiked in Afghanistan in recent weeks. More than 2,300 people have died in insurgency-related violence this year, according to an Associated Press count based on U.S., NATO and Afghan figures.
Associated Press writer Rahim Faiez in Kabul contributed to this report.
----------------------------------
Citation: Amir Shah. "U.S. mistakenly kills 7 Afghan police," The Associated Press, 12 June 2007.
Original URL: http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20070612/ap_on_re_as/afghan_violence
----------------------------------
Study: Brute Force Won't Win Iraq War
LiveScience.com
11 June 2007
The most powerful nations failed to achieve their objectives in 39 percent of their military operations since World War II, according to a new study that bodes ill for American hopes of winning the war in Iraq.
Victory in any conflict hinges on getting the population of the adversary on your side, the study showed.
Driving Saddam Hussein’s army out of Kuwait in the 1991 Gulf War and overthrowing is government in 2003 worked by brute force, said study leader Patricia L. Sullivan in the School of Public and International Affairs at the University of Georgia. But quelling sectarian violence in Iraq today would require "target compliance."
“We can try to use brute force to kill insurgents and terrorists, but what we really need is for the population to be supportive of the government and to stop supporting the insurgents,” Sullivan said today. “Otherwise, every time we kill an insurgent or a terrorist, they’re going to be replaced by others.”
The war in Iraq has a probability of success of about 26 percent with an estimated duration of 10 years, according to Sullivan's model.
Sullivan analyzed all 122 post World War II wars and military interventions in which the United States, the Soviet Union, Russia, China, Britain or France fought a weaker adversary. She examined factors such as the type of objective, whether the target was a formal state or a guerilla or terrorist group, whether the target had an ally, and whether the more powerful nation had an ally.
The model was accurate in 80 percent of conflicts. It predicted a 7 percent chance of success for the Soviets in the 1979 to 1988 war in
Afghanistan and a 93 percent chance of success for the U.S. in the 1991 Gulf War.
Previous researchers have hypothesized that more powerful states fail because of poor strategy choices or a lack of resolve. Sullivan agreed that those factors play a role, but the support of a population is also required.
“No one could have predicted exactly what would happen after we overthrew the regime of Saddam Hussein ,” Sullivan said. “But what my model could say was that if the population was not supportive of whatever new regime we put in power and the American strategic objective shifted from regime removal to maintaining the authority of a new government, the likelihood of a successful outcome would drop from almost 70 percent to just under 26 percent.”
The research, detailed in the June issue of the Journal of Conflict Resolution, was supported by grants from the
National Science Foundation and the Institute on Global Conflict and Cooperation.
-----------------------------------
Citation: "Study: Brute Force Won't Win Iraq War," LiveScience.com
11 June 2007.
Original URL: http://news.yahoo.com/s/livescience/20070611/sc_livescience/studybruteforcewontwiniraqwar
-----------------------------------
11 June 2007
The most powerful nations failed to achieve their objectives in 39 percent of their military operations since World War II, according to a new study that bodes ill for American hopes of winning the war in Iraq.
Victory in any conflict hinges on getting the population of the adversary on your side, the study showed.
Driving Saddam Hussein’s army out of Kuwait in the 1991 Gulf War and overthrowing is government in 2003 worked by brute force, said study leader Patricia L. Sullivan in the School of Public and International Affairs at the University of Georgia. But quelling sectarian violence in Iraq today would require "target compliance."
“We can try to use brute force to kill insurgents and terrorists, but what we really need is for the population to be supportive of the government and to stop supporting the insurgents,” Sullivan said today. “Otherwise, every time we kill an insurgent or a terrorist, they’re going to be replaced by others.”
The war in Iraq has a probability of success of about 26 percent with an estimated duration of 10 years, according to Sullivan's model.
Sullivan analyzed all 122 post World War II wars and military interventions in which the United States, the Soviet Union, Russia, China, Britain or France fought a weaker adversary. She examined factors such as the type of objective, whether the target was a formal state or a guerilla or terrorist group, whether the target had an ally, and whether the more powerful nation had an ally.
The model was accurate in 80 percent of conflicts. It predicted a 7 percent chance of success for the Soviets in the 1979 to 1988 war in
Afghanistan and a 93 percent chance of success for the U.S. in the 1991 Gulf War.
Previous researchers have hypothesized that more powerful states fail because of poor strategy choices or a lack of resolve. Sullivan agreed that those factors play a role, but the support of a population is also required.
“No one could have predicted exactly what would happen after we overthrew the regime of Saddam Hussein ,” Sullivan said. “But what my model could say was that if the population was not supportive of whatever new regime we put in power and the American strategic objective shifted from regime removal to maintaining the authority of a new government, the likelihood of a successful outcome would drop from almost 70 percent to just under 26 percent.”
The research, detailed in the June issue of the Journal of Conflict Resolution, was supported by grants from the
National Science Foundation and the Institute on Global Conflict and Cooperation.
-----------------------------------
Citation: "Study: Brute Force Won't Win Iraq War," LiveScience.com
11 June 2007.
Original URL: http://news.yahoo.com/s/livescience/20070611/sc_livescience/studybruteforcewontwiniraqwar
-----------------------------------
Close and deadly contact
The killing of an Iraqi teen offers a rare look at how U.S. military action in an urban setting can be fatal to civilians.
By Tina Susman
Los Angeles Times, 12 June 2007
BAGHDAD — On a sunny April afternoon, a bomb ripped a jagged hole in the road near Abu Mohammed's small grocery store. Gunfire crackled along the street as U.S. soldiers responded to the attack. Someone pounded frantically on the grocer's locked door, pleading for help.
Mohammed recognized the frightened voice as that of a local teenager and let him inside. The 17-year-old had been struck by a bullet in the chaos that followed the explosion and was bleeding heavily. Within two hours, the boy was dead. Witnesses charge he was killed by U.S. troops firing randomly.
U.S. military officials say troops are trained to avoid civilian casualties and do not fire wildly. Iraqis, however, say the shootings happen frequently and that even if troops are firing at suspected attackers, they often do so on city streets where bystanders are likely to be hit. Rarely is it possible to confirm such incidents. In this case, the boy was the son of a Los Angeles Times employee, which provided reporters knowledge of the incident in time to examine it. Witness and military accounts of the shooting offered a rare look into how such killings can occur.
With more troops on the ground as a result of President Bush's "surge," U.S. military officials acknowledge that there are greater chances for civilian casualties.
"Being that we are doing more operations in places where we were not before, and doing operations in large numbers, there is just more contact with the enemy and therefore more chance of people on the periphery being involved in that," said Army Lt. Col. Christopher Garver, a military spokesman in Baghdad.
The situation is amplified by the challenge of enforcing the counterinsurgency tactics introduced by the commander of U.S. troops in Iraq, Army Gen. David H. Petraeus, who took charge of the war just as the troop buildup began in mid-February. Under Petraeus, more troops are embedded in Iraq's residential neighborhoods, putting them in closer contact with civilians and forcing them to exercise a level of restraint that can be difficult in Iraq, where attacks on troops are on the rise.
Kalev Sepp, a counterinsurgency expert with the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, Calif., who has traveled frequently to Iraq to advise the Pentagon, said he doubts there are enough mid-level Army officers who fully understand the complex tactics needed to win over local populations when U.S. units move into neighborhoods en masse.
Without such officers, Sepp said, "you just end up with another group of foreign occupation troops shooting civilians who they feel threaten them when their car drives too close to them."
Counting civilian casualties has been a challenge since the start of the Iraq war in March 2003. In the heat of the battle, troops often move on without knowing whether civilians were killed. Among Iraq's population, competing political agendas can lead to wildly varying accounts of individual incidents.
Estimates of civilians killed by terrorist attacks, sectarian warfare and in combat-related violence range from tens of thousands to as many as 600,000. Last year, retired Lt. Col. Andrew J. Bacevich, a Vietnam veteran who is a professor of international relations at Boston University, estimated that U.S. troops alone had killed "tens of thousands" of innocent Iraqis, either by accident or through carelessness.
The challenge of reaching an accurate tally has become more acute since the military surge began.
The Iraqi government, eager to show that the security plan is working, has stopped releasing monthly civilian casualty figures to the United Nations, arguing that Cabinet ministries collecting the numbers were inflating them for political purposes.
The U.S. military rarely issues public reports on civilians it has killed or wounded. It did not respond to requests for information on civilians killed this year by U.S. troops.
Since mid-February, Los Angeles Times stringers across Iraq have reported at least 18 incidents in which witnesses said troops had opened fire wildly or in areas crowded with civilians, usually after being attacked. The reports indicated that at least 22 noncombatants died in the incidents. Because they are based on various witness accounts and reports from hospital and police officials, many of whom refuse to give their names, it is not possible to independently verify most reports.
If the anecdotal evidence is an indication, such deaths often occur after troops are shaken by roadside bombs, as occurred when The Times employee's son was killed April 17.
The shop where the teenager sought shelter is a few minutes' walk from his home in a middle-class neighborhood of split-level houses with balconies, driveways and cerise bougainvillea draping garden walls. The stroll took him down his quiet street to a commercial strip with small stores, butcher shops and cafes. Parallel to the strip is a median and then a highway, which passes beneath a concrete tangle of overpasses before heading to the airport. Blackened blotches are evidence of the frequency of attacks on troops patrolling it.
Mohammed said the bomb went off about 1 p.m., when his shop, which is attached to his home, was closed. "I was hesitant to open the door because I was afraid that the American soldiers would shoot me dead," he said, recalling his initial thoughts after the boy began beating on his door.
The shopkeeper laid the boy on the shop's concrete floor, amid racks of potato chips, candies and soap, and placed a pillow under his head as the boy used his waning energy to recite his mother's phone number. Mohammed called repeatedly, but the line was busy, and he never got through.
In the meantime, he said, troops kept firing.
"They were confused and angry and suspecting anyone around," Mohammed said. "If a bird had passed by, they would have shot it."
The U.S. military said troops shot in self-defense after being targeted first by the bomb and then by gunfire, but Mohammed and other witnesses denied that anybody shot at the soldiers.
"It's a psychological thing. When one U.S. soldier gets killed or injured, they shoot in vengeance," said Alaa Safi, who said his brother, Ahmed, was killed April 4 when U.S. troops riddled the streets of their southwestern Baghdad neighborhood with bullets after a sniper attack.
Safi, who was the minister of civil society in the government of former Prime Minister Ibrahim Jafari, said his brother had just stepped out of a minibus taxi and was walking home about 4 p.m. when the shooting began.
"We don't blame the entire U.S. military, but these things are happening," Safi said.
In some places, such as Diyala province and Sadr City, where anti-U.S. sentiment is especially high, there often are vast disparities between what locals say happened and what official accounts describe.
Even the troops directly involved in incidents often cannot say if civilian casualties have occurred.
Garver cited a Sadr City raid on May 10 in which locals said helicopter gunships killed several people inside a house. The military said three civilians were wounded but made no mention of civilian deaths. But Garver said troops did not reenter the targeted house to check for civilian casualties.
"I can't tell you that nobody got killed in that specific incident," Garver said. "In some instances, we're not able to know what really happened."
Because the teenager slipped into the grocery store after being shot and was taken to a hospital by relatives, it is likely soldiers never knew he had been hit. Witnesses said that at least one civilian woman died in the same incident.
The military has guidelines designed to keep civilian casualties to a minimum. Printed on a card that every service member is supposed to carry, they permit use of force in self-defense against people committing hostile acts or exhibiting hostile intent. "You must be reasonably certain that your target is the source of the threat," the rules state.
Military officials have acknowledged, however, that the rules are sometimes broken in the heat of combat.
At a news briefing last June, after the killings of Iraqi civilians by Marines in the town of Haditha came to light, Army Brig. Gen. Donald Campbell, then chief of staff of Multinational Forces in Iraq, said troops "become stressed, they become fearful" on a battlefield where it is difficult to tell civilians from insurgents.
"It doesn't excuse the acts that have occurred, and we're going to look into them," he said, referring to Haditha and other reported killings of civilians. "But I would say it's stress, fear, isolation, and in some cases they're just upset. They see their buddies getting blown up on occasion and they could snap."
Iraqis can seek compensation when relatives are killed by U.S. troops. But as the security situation worsens, they are less likely to do so, said Jon Tracy, a former Army captain who spent 14 months in Iraq as a military lawyer adjudicating such claims.
Filing a claim involves visiting a U.S. military post, he pointed out. "The reality is if you go to a U.S. base or a CMO [civilian military operations center], that is viewed as a target, so nobody really wants to go there to file their claims," said Tracy, a consultant for the Washington-based Campaign for Innocent Victims in Conflict, which has lobbied to make it easier for Iraqis to get compensatory payments.
From the start of the war through 2006, at least 479 Iraqis filed claims asking for compensation for civilian relatives allegedly killed by U.S. troops, according to records obtained by the American Civil Liberties Union. The ACLU says the list is not complete.
Most claimants were denied damages because the incidents were judged combat-related, excluding them from compensation payments under federal law. The military can also make condolence payments, but those do not include a military admission of responsibility and are capped at $2,500. Many are less, and not enough to make it worth many Iraqis' efforts.
"No amount of money is worth a drop of my brother's blood," said Safi, who said his family had not applied for compensation or condolence payments. "We don't want money. We just want to hold the military responsible."
Times staff writers Saad Khalaf in Baghdad and Peter Spiegel in Washington and special correspondents in Baghdad and Baqubah contributed to this report.
---------------------------------------
Citation: Tina Susman. "Close and deadly contact," Los Angeles Times, 12 June 2007.
Original URL: http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/iraq/complete/la-fg-civilians12jun12,1,5094935.story?coll=la-iraq-complete
---------------------------------------
By Tina Susman
Los Angeles Times, 12 June 2007
BAGHDAD — On a sunny April afternoon, a bomb ripped a jagged hole in the road near Abu Mohammed's small grocery store. Gunfire crackled along the street as U.S. soldiers responded to the attack. Someone pounded frantically on the grocer's locked door, pleading for help.
Mohammed recognized the frightened voice as that of a local teenager and let him inside. The 17-year-old had been struck by a bullet in the chaos that followed the explosion and was bleeding heavily. Within two hours, the boy was dead. Witnesses charge he was killed by U.S. troops firing randomly.
U.S. military officials say troops are trained to avoid civilian casualties and do not fire wildly. Iraqis, however, say the shootings happen frequently and that even if troops are firing at suspected attackers, they often do so on city streets where bystanders are likely to be hit. Rarely is it possible to confirm such incidents. In this case, the boy was the son of a Los Angeles Times employee, which provided reporters knowledge of the incident in time to examine it. Witness and military accounts of the shooting offered a rare look into how such killings can occur.
With more troops on the ground as a result of President Bush's "surge," U.S. military officials acknowledge that there are greater chances for civilian casualties.
"Being that we are doing more operations in places where we were not before, and doing operations in large numbers, there is just more contact with the enemy and therefore more chance of people on the periphery being involved in that," said Army Lt. Col. Christopher Garver, a military spokesman in Baghdad.
The situation is amplified by the challenge of enforcing the counterinsurgency tactics introduced by the commander of U.S. troops in Iraq, Army Gen. David H. Petraeus, who took charge of the war just as the troop buildup began in mid-February. Under Petraeus, more troops are embedded in Iraq's residential neighborhoods, putting them in closer contact with civilians and forcing them to exercise a level of restraint that can be difficult in Iraq, where attacks on troops are on the rise.
Kalev Sepp, a counterinsurgency expert with the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, Calif., who has traveled frequently to Iraq to advise the Pentagon, said he doubts there are enough mid-level Army officers who fully understand the complex tactics needed to win over local populations when U.S. units move into neighborhoods en masse.
Without such officers, Sepp said, "you just end up with another group of foreign occupation troops shooting civilians who they feel threaten them when their car drives too close to them."
Counting civilian casualties has been a challenge since the start of the Iraq war in March 2003. In the heat of the battle, troops often move on without knowing whether civilians were killed. Among Iraq's population, competing political agendas can lead to wildly varying accounts of individual incidents.
Estimates of civilians killed by terrorist attacks, sectarian warfare and in combat-related violence range from tens of thousands to as many as 600,000. Last year, retired Lt. Col. Andrew J. Bacevich, a Vietnam veteran who is a professor of international relations at Boston University, estimated that U.S. troops alone had killed "tens of thousands" of innocent Iraqis, either by accident or through carelessness.
The challenge of reaching an accurate tally has become more acute since the military surge began.
The Iraqi government, eager to show that the security plan is working, has stopped releasing monthly civilian casualty figures to the United Nations, arguing that Cabinet ministries collecting the numbers were inflating them for political purposes.
The U.S. military rarely issues public reports on civilians it has killed or wounded. It did not respond to requests for information on civilians killed this year by U.S. troops.
Since mid-February, Los Angeles Times stringers across Iraq have reported at least 18 incidents in which witnesses said troops had opened fire wildly or in areas crowded with civilians, usually after being attacked. The reports indicated that at least 22 noncombatants died in the incidents. Because they are based on various witness accounts and reports from hospital and police officials, many of whom refuse to give their names, it is not possible to independently verify most reports.
If the anecdotal evidence is an indication, such deaths often occur after troops are shaken by roadside bombs, as occurred when The Times employee's son was killed April 17.
The shop where the teenager sought shelter is a few minutes' walk from his home in a middle-class neighborhood of split-level houses with balconies, driveways and cerise bougainvillea draping garden walls. The stroll took him down his quiet street to a commercial strip with small stores, butcher shops and cafes. Parallel to the strip is a median and then a highway, which passes beneath a concrete tangle of overpasses before heading to the airport. Blackened blotches are evidence of the frequency of attacks on troops patrolling it.
Mohammed said the bomb went off about 1 p.m., when his shop, which is attached to his home, was closed. "I was hesitant to open the door because I was afraid that the American soldiers would shoot me dead," he said, recalling his initial thoughts after the boy began beating on his door.
The shopkeeper laid the boy on the shop's concrete floor, amid racks of potato chips, candies and soap, and placed a pillow under his head as the boy used his waning energy to recite his mother's phone number. Mohammed called repeatedly, but the line was busy, and he never got through.
In the meantime, he said, troops kept firing.
"They were confused and angry and suspecting anyone around," Mohammed said. "If a bird had passed by, they would have shot it."
The U.S. military said troops shot in self-defense after being targeted first by the bomb and then by gunfire, but Mohammed and other witnesses denied that anybody shot at the soldiers.
"It's a psychological thing. When one U.S. soldier gets killed or injured, they shoot in vengeance," said Alaa Safi, who said his brother, Ahmed, was killed April 4 when U.S. troops riddled the streets of their southwestern Baghdad neighborhood with bullets after a sniper attack.
Safi, who was the minister of civil society in the government of former Prime Minister Ibrahim Jafari, said his brother had just stepped out of a minibus taxi and was walking home about 4 p.m. when the shooting began.
"We don't blame the entire U.S. military, but these things are happening," Safi said.
In some places, such as Diyala province and Sadr City, where anti-U.S. sentiment is especially high, there often are vast disparities between what locals say happened and what official accounts describe.
Even the troops directly involved in incidents often cannot say if civilian casualties have occurred.
Garver cited a Sadr City raid on May 10 in which locals said helicopter gunships killed several people inside a house. The military said three civilians were wounded but made no mention of civilian deaths. But Garver said troops did not reenter the targeted house to check for civilian casualties.
"I can't tell you that nobody got killed in that specific incident," Garver said. "In some instances, we're not able to know what really happened."
Because the teenager slipped into the grocery store after being shot and was taken to a hospital by relatives, it is likely soldiers never knew he had been hit. Witnesses said that at least one civilian woman died in the same incident.
The military has guidelines designed to keep civilian casualties to a minimum. Printed on a card that every service member is supposed to carry, they permit use of force in self-defense against people committing hostile acts or exhibiting hostile intent. "You must be reasonably certain that your target is the source of the threat," the rules state.
Military officials have acknowledged, however, that the rules are sometimes broken in the heat of combat.
At a news briefing last June, after the killings of Iraqi civilians by Marines in the town of Haditha came to light, Army Brig. Gen. Donald Campbell, then chief of staff of Multinational Forces in Iraq, said troops "become stressed, they become fearful" on a battlefield where it is difficult to tell civilians from insurgents.
"It doesn't excuse the acts that have occurred, and we're going to look into them," he said, referring to Haditha and other reported killings of civilians. "But I would say it's stress, fear, isolation, and in some cases they're just upset. They see their buddies getting blown up on occasion and they could snap."
Iraqis can seek compensation when relatives are killed by U.S. troops. But as the security situation worsens, they are less likely to do so, said Jon Tracy, a former Army captain who spent 14 months in Iraq as a military lawyer adjudicating such claims.
Filing a claim involves visiting a U.S. military post, he pointed out. "The reality is if you go to a U.S. base or a CMO [civilian military operations center], that is viewed as a target, so nobody really wants to go there to file their claims," said Tracy, a consultant for the Washington-based Campaign for Innocent Victims in Conflict, which has lobbied to make it easier for Iraqis to get compensatory payments.
From the start of the war through 2006, at least 479 Iraqis filed claims asking for compensation for civilian relatives allegedly killed by U.S. troops, according to records obtained by the American Civil Liberties Union. The ACLU says the list is not complete.
Most claimants were denied damages because the incidents were judged combat-related, excluding them from compensation payments under federal law. The military can also make condolence payments, but those do not include a military admission of responsibility and are capped at $2,500. Many are less, and not enough to make it worth many Iraqis' efforts.
"No amount of money is worth a drop of my brother's blood," said Safi, who said his family had not applied for compensation or condolence payments. "We don't want money. We just want to hold the military responsible."
Times staff writers Saad Khalaf in Baghdad and Peter Spiegel in Washington and special correspondents in Baghdad and Baqubah contributed to this report.
---------------------------------------
Citation: Tina Susman. "Close and deadly contact," Los Angeles Times, 12 June 2007.
Original URL: http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/iraq/complete/la-fg-civilians12jun12,1,5094935.story?coll=la-iraq-complete
---------------------------------------
Iraq Plans To Buy 5,000 Tons/Day Oil Products From Kuwait - SOMO
By Hassan Hafidh
Dow Jones Newswires, 12 June 2007
Iraq is planning to buy some 5,000 tons a day of gas oil, gasoline and kerosene from Kuwait to meet growing domestic shortages of these three oil products, a senior official with the State Oil Marketing Organization, or SOMO, said Monday.
A delegation from SOMO is expected to be in Kuwait this week to conclude the deal with the Kuwaiti Petroleum Co. The deal will include 2,000 tons a day of gas oil to supply power stations, 2,000 tons a day of gasoline and 1,000 tons a day of kerosene, the official told Dow Jones.
Supply of these products is expected to start at the beginning of July, he added.
The official, however, didn't give details of the value of the deal, but the state-run al-Iraqiya satellite television said it is worth more than $150 million.
Iraq, which sits on the world's third-largest oil reserves, has been suffering from acute shortages of oil products since the U.S.-led invasion in 2003.
Iraq's main three refineries - Doura, Beiji and Basra - are working at half capacity because of lack of maintenance and investment as well as the deteriorating security situation in the country.
The Iraqi oil ministry is planning to build three large refineries in the country to meet growing oil products demand. One refinery is to be built in northern Iraq, the second in the middle of the country and the third in the south.
The government is waiting for an oil and gas law to be enacted before signing deals with foreign companies to build these three refineries.
-----------------------------
Citation: Hassan Hafidh. "Iraq Plans To Buy 5,000 Tons/Day Oil Products From Kuwait - SOMO," Dow Jones Newswires, 12 June 2007.
Original URL: http://www.nasdaq.com/aspxcontent/NewsStory.aspx?cpath=20070611\ACQDJON200706110323DOWJONESDJONLINE000061.htm
-----------------------------
Dow Jones Newswires, 12 June 2007
Iraq is planning to buy some 5,000 tons a day of gas oil, gasoline and kerosene from Kuwait to meet growing domestic shortages of these three oil products, a senior official with the State Oil Marketing Organization, or SOMO, said Monday.
A delegation from SOMO is expected to be in Kuwait this week to conclude the deal with the Kuwaiti Petroleum Co. The deal will include 2,000 tons a day of gas oil to supply power stations, 2,000 tons a day of gasoline and 1,000 tons a day of kerosene, the official told Dow Jones.
Supply of these products is expected to start at the beginning of July, he added.
The official, however, didn't give details of the value of the deal, but the state-run al-Iraqiya satellite television said it is worth more than $150 million.
Iraq, which sits on the world's third-largest oil reserves, has been suffering from acute shortages of oil products since the U.S.-led invasion in 2003.
Iraq's main three refineries - Doura, Beiji and Basra - are working at half capacity because of lack of maintenance and investment as well as the deteriorating security situation in the country.
The Iraqi oil ministry is planning to build three large refineries in the country to meet growing oil products demand. One refinery is to be built in northern Iraq, the second in the middle of the country and the third in the south.
The government is waiting for an oil and gas law to be enacted before signing deals with foreign companies to build these three refineries.
-----------------------------
Citation: Hassan Hafidh. "Iraq Plans To Buy 5,000 Tons/Day Oil Products From Kuwait - SOMO," Dow Jones Newswires, 12 June 2007.
Original URL: http://www.nasdaq.com/aspxcontent/NewsStory.aspx?cpath=20070611\ACQDJON200706110323DOWJONESDJONLINE000061.htm
-----------------------------
11 June 2007
U.N. demands action on Afghan graft, lawlessness
By Mark Bendeich
Reuters, 11 June 2007
KABUL - The United Nations accused the Afghan government, its Western allies and lawmakers of failing to curb corruption and lawlessness on Monday, warning that this could fuel militant insurgents and threaten stability.
Corruption and violent crimes are widespread in Afghanistan, feeding disillusionment with the government of Western-leaning President Hamid Karzai who has been leading the country since U.S.-led forces removed the Taliban from power in 2001.
Tackling corruption, taming war-lords and improving living standards were top of Karzai's agenda when he won the country's first ever direct elections in 2004.
But U.N. Special Representative to Afghanistan, Tom Koenigs, called a news conference in Kabul to urge faster progress on the government, its foreign allies and the parliament, and he said the establishment of rule of law should be a top priority.
"There won't be stability without justice," he said.
Koenigs said U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon would put law and order at the top of the agenda for an international peace conference on Afghanistan to be held in Rome on July 2 and 3.
"The era of lawlessness and corruption and unprofessional police and an unreliable justice system must end," he said.
"I am not satisfied with the progress made so far in the last three or five years."
Karzai, who has led Afghanistan since invading U.S.-led forces ousted the Taliban from power, is under pressure at home and from foreign allies to make more progress on his pledges, but he faces daunting problems and threats to his life.
On Sunday, Karzai survived a third attempt on his life in five years in a rocket attack during a provincial trip.
Afghan police are poorly trained and ill equipped, and violent street crimes often go unpunished. Some criminals are linked to drug barons in the world's leading producer of heroin and former warlords who helped U.S.-led forces evict the Taliban six years ago and who now serve inside government.
The lower house of parliament, populated by ex-warlords and former militia leaders along with suspected drug dealers, has also proposed a blanket amnesty for those who committed war crimes over nearly 30 years of conflict.
"Anti-government elements are supported, fuelled and partly financed by criminals, sometimes linked with mafias and sometimes linked with smuggling, and quite a few times linked with the narcotic economy," Koenigs said.
Afghanistan supplies about 90 percent of the world's heroin.
Koenigs also appealed for cooler heads to prevail in domestic politics, after a roadside argument between Afghanistan's attorney-general and a general within the interior ministry erupted into a brawl near a picnic spot outside Kabul on Friday.
Karzai is locked in a struggle with parliament, which recently passed a vote of no confidence in his foreign minister.
"I would appreciate if everybody could lower the temperature. In two words, cool down," Koenigs said.
-------------------------
Citation: Mark Bendeich. "U.N. demands action on Afghan graft, lawlessness," Reuters, 11 June 2007.
Original URL: http://www.alertnet.org/thenews/newsdesk/KLR42994.htm
-------------------------
Reuters, 11 June 2007
KABUL - The United Nations accused the Afghan government, its Western allies and lawmakers of failing to curb corruption and lawlessness on Monday, warning that this could fuel militant insurgents and threaten stability.
Corruption and violent crimes are widespread in Afghanistan, feeding disillusionment with the government of Western-leaning President Hamid Karzai who has been leading the country since U.S.-led forces removed the Taliban from power in 2001.
Tackling corruption, taming war-lords and improving living standards were top of Karzai's agenda when he won the country's first ever direct elections in 2004.
But U.N. Special Representative to Afghanistan, Tom Koenigs, called a news conference in Kabul to urge faster progress on the government, its foreign allies and the parliament, and he said the establishment of rule of law should be a top priority.
"There won't be stability without justice," he said.
Koenigs said U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon would put law and order at the top of the agenda for an international peace conference on Afghanistan to be held in Rome on July 2 and 3.
"The era of lawlessness and corruption and unprofessional police and an unreliable justice system must end," he said.
"I am not satisfied with the progress made so far in the last three or five years."
Karzai, who has led Afghanistan since invading U.S.-led forces ousted the Taliban from power, is under pressure at home and from foreign allies to make more progress on his pledges, but he faces daunting problems and threats to his life.
On Sunday, Karzai survived a third attempt on his life in five years in a rocket attack during a provincial trip.
Afghan police are poorly trained and ill equipped, and violent street crimes often go unpunished. Some criminals are linked to drug barons in the world's leading producer of heroin and former warlords who helped U.S.-led forces evict the Taliban six years ago and who now serve inside government.
The lower house of parliament, populated by ex-warlords and former militia leaders along with suspected drug dealers, has also proposed a blanket amnesty for those who committed war crimes over nearly 30 years of conflict.
"Anti-government elements are supported, fuelled and partly financed by criminals, sometimes linked with mafias and sometimes linked with smuggling, and quite a few times linked with the narcotic economy," Koenigs said.
Afghanistan supplies about 90 percent of the world's heroin.
Koenigs also appealed for cooler heads to prevail in domestic politics, after a roadside argument between Afghanistan's attorney-general and a general within the interior ministry erupted into a brawl near a picnic spot outside Kabul on Friday.
Karzai is locked in a struggle with parliament, which recently passed a vote of no confidence in his foreign minister.
"I would appreciate if everybody could lower the temperature. In two words, cool down," Koenigs said.
-------------------------
Citation: Mark Bendeich. "U.N. demands action on Afghan graft, lawlessness," Reuters, 11 June 2007.
Original URL: http://www.alertnet.org/thenews/newsdesk/KLR42994.htm
-------------------------
06 June 2007
Bombing shows schism among Iraq's Sunnis
By Kim Gamel
The Associated Press, 05 June 2007
BAGHDAD - A suicide car bomber struck a group of tribal chiefs who opposed al-Qaida, killing at least 18 in a market area near Fallujah. Tuesday's attack underscored the difficulties facing Sunni leaders in trying to wrest control of Anbar province from the terror network.
Much of the al-Buissa tribe has formed an alliance against al-Qaida in
Iraq, which has alienated more moderate Sunnis with its brutality and dependence on foreign fighters. The U.S. military has touted the alliance, the Anbar Salvation Council, as a success in its efforts to stabilize the country.
The bomb exploded in a pickup truck next to where the elders were trying to solve a tribal dispute in Amiriyah, 40 miles west of Baghdad, police said. The driver of the pickup had gained access to the market area by saying he needed to buy some watermelons, said Ahmed al-Issawi, 40, an owner of a food store there.
"We told him not to stay long in the market," al-Issawi said, adding the driver did stop to buy some watermelons. "Then, he drove very fast toward the sheiks and exploded the pickup. There was a hot storm that sent several stalls and bodies into the air."
Al-Issawi said he and other shop owners tried to extinguish some burning bodies.
At least 18 people were killed and 15 were wounded, according to U.S. Marine Maj. Jeff Pool, a military spokesman for the area.
As the mourners later buried the dead in the cemetery of the town on the outskirts of Fallujah, four mortar shells landed in the cemetery, police said. No casualties were reported in that attack.
An al-Buissa tribal chieftain, Abbas Mohammed, said the violence would not deter the local leaders from their fight against al-Qaida.
"We expected such attacks after we cleaned our area of al-Qaida members," Mohammed said. "Despite these attacks, we will go on in chasing al-Qaida elements."
Elsewhere in Anbar, Iraqi security officials said a suicide car bomber struck a police checkpoint in the provincial capital of Ramadi, killing six policemen and wounding three others.
But Pool, the Marine spokesman, disputed the report, which initially came from an intelligence official with the Anbar Salvation Council who declined to be identified because of security concerns. The report had been confirmed by police Col. Tariq Mohammed Youssef, who also is linked to the alliance.
Officials also moved ahead with efforts to train Iraqi forces that they hope will eventually be able to take over security from U.S. troops.
Gen. David Petraeus, the top U.S. commander in Iraq, and Iraq's Interior Minister Jawad al-Bolani attended the opening ceremony of the Anbar Iraqi Police Academy in nearby Fallujah, which was the site of fierce clashes between Americans and insurgents in 2004. The initial class of 550 recruits from Anbar will graduate Aug. 19, the military said.
Alert guards foiled a suicide attack in eastern Baghdad on Tuesday, gunning down a black-clad female bomber as she approached a group of police recruits and causing her explosives to detonate, according to Interior Ministry spokesman Abdul-Karim Khalaf.
"She didn't obey the guards' orders to stop and they shot her and she immediately blew up," Khalaf told The Associated Press.
The woman was dead at the scene. A police officer witness, who spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to talk to the media, said three police recruits were slightly wounded.
Suicide bombings continue to claim scores of victims in Iraq's violence, principally aimed at Shiite targets and blamed on Sunni extremists in al-Qaida in Iraq. But female bombers remain relatively rare.
The number of execution-style killings usually blamed on Shiite militias also appears to be on the rise. Such killings had tapered after radical cleric Muqtada al-Sadr ordered his fighters to lay low during a security crackdown that began on Feb. 14.
In all, at least 90 Iraqis were killed or found dead Tuesday. They included 61 bullet-riddled bodies, more than half found in Baghdad and most showing signs of torture — the apparent victims of so-called sectarian death squads. A U.S. soldier also was killed by small-arms fire in southern Baghdad, the military said.
In other violence, gunmen set up an illegal checkpoint near the Shiite enclave of Khalis in volatile Diyala province, northeast of Baghdad, and kidnapped 12 male college students who were on their way home from Diyala University in Baqouba, police said.
The attack came two weeks after the university was reported to have received threats from al-Qaida in Iraq with fliers and graffiti on the walls saying the facility should be closed because it is run by "infidels" and the classes are mixed with young men and women.
More than 4 million Iraqis have now been displaced by violence in the country, the U.N. refugee agency said Tuesday, warning that the figure will continue to rise.
The number of Iraqis who have fled the country as refugees has risen to 2.2 million, said Jennifer Pagonis, spokeswoman for the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees. A further 2 million have been driven from their homes but remain within the country, increasingly in "impoverished shanty towns," she said in Geneva.
Meanwhile, Iraqi legislators led by followers of al-Sadr passed a resolution Tuesday requiring the government to seek parliamentary permission for asking the
United Nations to extend the mandate of U.S.-led forces in Iraq.
The U.N. mandate for foreign forces in Iraq has been extended for a year through Dec. 31 at Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki's request, so the parliamentary action was not expected to have any immediate effect. But it reflected growing disenchantment with the U.S.-backed government as Iraq's fractured parties jockey for power amid calls for American forces to withdraw.
U.S. Ambassador Ryan Crocker said "things could get very much worse if we don't maintain an effective engagement here."
"Sometimes I think that in the U.S. we're looking at Iraq right now as though it were the last half of a three-reel movie," Crocker told NPR News. "I think for Iraqis, it's a five-reel movie and they are still in the first half of it. So I don't see an end game, as it were, in sight."
------------------------------------
Citation: Kim Gamel. "Bombing shows schism among Iraq's Sunnis," The Associated Press, 05 June 2007.
Original URL: http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20070605/ap_on_re_mi_ea/iraq
------------------------------------
The Associated Press, 05 June 2007
BAGHDAD - A suicide car bomber struck a group of tribal chiefs who opposed al-Qaida, killing at least 18 in a market area near Fallujah. Tuesday's attack underscored the difficulties facing Sunni leaders in trying to wrest control of Anbar province from the terror network.
Much of the al-Buissa tribe has formed an alliance against al-Qaida in
Iraq, which has alienated more moderate Sunnis with its brutality and dependence on foreign fighters. The U.S. military has touted the alliance, the Anbar Salvation Council, as a success in its efforts to stabilize the country.
The bomb exploded in a pickup truck next to where the elders were trying to solve a tribal dispute in Amiriyah, 40 miles west of Baghdad, police said. The driver of the pickup had gained access to the market area by saying he needed to buy some watermelons, said Ahmed al-Issawi, 40, an owner of a food store there.
"We told him not to stay long in the market," al-Issawi said, adding the driver did stop to buy some watermelons. "Then, he drove very fast toward the sheiks and exploded the pickup. There was a hot storm that sent several stalls and bodies into the air."
Al-Issawi said he and other shop owners tried to extinguish some burning bodies.
At least 18 people were killed and 15 were wounded, according to U.S. Marine Maj. Jeff Pool, a military spokesman for the area.
As the mourners later buried the dead in the cemetery of the town on the outskirts of Fallujah, four mortar shells landed in the cemetery, police said. No casualties were reported in that attack.
An al-Buissa tribal chieftain, Abbas Mohammed, said the violence would not deter the local leaders from their fight against al-Qaida.
"We expected such attacks after we cleaned our area of al-Qaida members," Mohammed said. "Despite these attacks, we will go on in chasing al-Qaida elements."
Elsewhere in Anbar, Iraqi security officials said a suicide car bomber struck a police checkpoint in the provincial capital of Ramadi, killing six policemen and wounding three others.
But Pool, the Marine spokesman, disputed the report, which initially came from an intelligence official with the Anbar Salvation Council who declined to be identified because of security concerns. The report had been confirmed by police Col. Tariq Mohammed Youssef, who also is linked to the alliance.
Officials also moved ahead with efforts to train Iraqi forces that they hope will eventually be able to take over security from U.S. troops.
Gen. David Petraeus, the top U.S. commander in Iraq, and Iraq's Interior Minister Jawad al-Bolani attended the opening ceremony of the Anbar Iraqi Police Academy in nearby Fallujah, which was the site of fierce clashes between Americans and insurgents in 2004. The initial class of 550 recruits from Anbar will graduate Aug. 19, the military said.
Alert guards foiled a suicide attack in eastern Baghdad on Tuesday, gunning down a black-clad female bomber as she approached a group of police recruits and causing her explosives to detonate, according to Interior Ministry spokesman Abdul-Karim Khalaf.
"She didn't obey the guards' orders to stop and they shot her and she immediately blew up," Khalaf told The Associated Press.
The woman was dead at the scene. A police officer witness, who spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to talk to the media, said three police recruits were slightly wounded.
Suicide bombings continue to claim scores of victims in Iraq's violence, principally aimed at Shiite targets and blamed on Sunni extremists in al-Qaida in Iraq. But female bombers remain relatively rare.
The number of execution-style killings usually blamed on Shiite militias also appears to be on the rise. Such killings had tapered after radical cleric Muqtada al-Sadr ordered his fighters to lay low during a security crackdown that began on Feb. 14.
In all, at least 90 Iraqis were killed or found dead Tuesday. They included 61 bullet-riddled bodies, more than half found in Baghdad and most showing signs of torture — the apparent victims of so-called sectarian death squads. A U.S. soldier also was killed by small-arms fire in southern Baghdad, the military said.
In other violence, gunmen set up an illegal checkpoint near the Shiite enclave of Khalis in volatile Diyala province, northeast of Baghdad, and kidnapped 12 male college students who were on their way home from Diyala University in Baqouba, police said.
The attack came two weeks after the university was reported to have received threats from al-Qaida in Iraq with fliers and graffiti on the walls saying the facility should be closed because it is run by "infidels" and the classes are mixed with young men and women.
More than 4 million Iraqis have now been displaced by violence in the country, the U.N. refugee agency said Tuesday, warning that the figure will continue to rise.
The number of Iraqis who have fled the country as refugees has risen to 2.2 million, said Jennifer Pagonis, spokeswoman for the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees. A further 2 million have been driven from their homes but remain within the country, increasingly in "impoverished shanty towns," she said in Geneva.
Meanwhile, Iraqi legislators led by followers of al-Sadr passed a resolution Tuesday requiring the government to seek parliamentary permission for asking the
United Nations to extend the mandate of U.S.-led forces in Iraq.
The U.N. mandate for foreign forces in Iraq has been extended for a year through Dec. 31 at Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki's request, so the parliamentary action was not expected to have any immediate effect. But it reflected growing disenchantment with the U.S.-backed government as Iraq's fractured parties jockey for power amid calls for American forces to withdraw.
U.S. Ambassador Ryan Crocker said "things could get very much worse if we don't maintain an effective engagement here."
"Sometimes I think that in the U.S. we're looking at Iraq right now as though it were the last half of a three-reel movie," Crocker told NPR News. "I think for Iraqis, it's a five-reel movie and they are still in the first half of it. So I don't see an end game, as it were, in sight."
------------------------------------
Citation: Kim Gamel. "Bombing shows schism among Iraq's Sunnis," The Associated Press, 05 June 2007.
Original URL: http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20070605/ap_on_re_mi_ea/iraq
------------------------------------
Staffing crisis at U.S. foreign service
Stretched thin by the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, it needs 1,100 more officers just to restore its capabilities to 2005 levels, a report says.
By Paul Richter
Los Angeles Times, 06 June 2007
WASHINGTON — The Iraq and Afghanistan wars have overstretched the U.S. foreign service, damaging its staffers' morale and threatening its performance around the world, a coalition of advocates for diplomats charged Tuesday.
The Foreign Affairs Council, a group of 11 nonprofit organizations, said in a report that the State Department would need to hire 1,100 foreign service officers simply to restore the capabilities it had when Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice took her post at the beginning of 2005.
"The foreign service is at the front end of a personnel crisis, and if something isn't done … we're going to have a very, very serious situation a year or so from now," said Thomas Boyatt, a retired U.S. ambassador and the council's president, at a news conference.
The council said Rice has required diplomats to carry out a more aggressive mission of "transformational diplomacy" to prod other countries to adhere to democratic principles.
But at the same time, envoys have had to cope with wartime strains, inadequate language and skills training and more overtime work.
In addition, about 750 have been required to take one-year stints in sometimes dangerous postings where they are not allowed to bring their families, the group said.
Over the last two years, the Bush administration failed to anticipate the rising need for foreign service personnel in global hot spots, including Baghdad, where about 200 foreign service officers work in a 1,000-person embassy, the largest in the world, the council said.
At the same time, Congress has rejected the administration's requests for additional personnel in the last two budgets, the council said.
About 200 foreign service jobs abroad are unfilled, according to the report, and about 900 other training slots needed to give diplomats language and other job skills have not yet been created. The foreign service has about 9,000 employees.
Officials of the advocacy group said the recent shift of diplomats from Europe to the Middle East and elsewhere had left embassy staffs in Europe sometimes unable to get their work done on time.
Despite the morale problems, however, statistics don't indicate that foreign service officers are quitting their jobs at higher rates, Boyatt acknowledged.
In the 1990s, with the end of the Cold War, Congress cut the staffing and budget of the foreign service by about one-third.
During President Bush's first term, then-Secretary of State Colin L. Powell, alarmed by the short staffing, added about 1,000 officers.
But now those have been "vacuumed up" in Iraq, Afghanistan and other new danger spots, Boyatt said.
Sean McCormack, the chief State Department spokesman, said department officials agree with the need for an increase in staff and would like in particular to restore training slots.
Foreign service officers "are making a noble and worthy sacrifice trying to help the people of these countries," he said.
------------------------------
Citation: Paul Richter. "Staffing crisis at U.S. foreign service," Los Angeles Times, 06 June 2007.
Original URL: http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/la-fg-diplomats6jun06,0,1147840.story?coll=la-home-world
------------------------------
By Paul Richter
Los Angeles Times, 06 June 2007
WASHINGTON — The Iraq and Afghanistan wars have overstretched the U.S. foreign service, damaging its staffers' morale and threatening its performance around the world, a coalition of advocates for diplomats charged Tuesday.
The Foreign Affairs Council, a group of 11 nonprofit organizations, said in a report that the State Department would need to hire 1,100 foreign service officers simply to restore the capabilities it had when Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice took her post at the beginning of 2005.
"The foreign service is at the front end of a personnel crisis, and if something isn't done … we're going to have a very, very serious situation a year or so from now," said Thomas Boyatt, a retired U.S. ambassador and the council's president, at a news conference.
The council said Rice has required diplomats to carry out a more aggressive mission of "transformational diplomacy" to prod other countries to adhere to democratic principles.
But at the same time, envoys have had to cope with wartime strains, inadequate language and skills training and more overtime work.
In addition, about 750 have been required to take one-year stints in sometimes dangerous postings where they are not allowed to bring their families, the group said.
Over the last two years, the Bush administration failed to anticipate the rising need for foreign service personnel in global hot spots, including Baghdad, where about 200 foreign service officers work in a 1,000-person embassy, the largest in the world, the council said.
At the same time, Congress has rejected the administration's requests for additional personnel in the last two budgets, the council said.
About 200 foreign service jobs abroad are unfilled, according to the report, and about 900 other training slots needed to give diplomats language and other job skills have not yet been created. The foreign service has about 9,000 employees.
Officials of the advocacy group said the recent shift of diplomats from Europe to the Middle East and elsewhere had left embassy staffs in Europe sometimes unable to get their work done on time.
Despite the morale problems, however, statistics don't indicate that foreign service officers are quitting their jobs at higher rates, Boyatt acknowledged.
In the 1990s, with the end of the Cold War, Congress cut the staffing and budget of the foreign service by about one-third.
During President Bush's first term, then-Secretary of State Colin L. Powell, alarmed by the short staffing, added about 1,000 officers.
But now those have been "vacuumed up" in Iraq, Afghanistan and other new danger spots, Boyatt said.
Sean McCormack, the chief State Department spokesman, said department officials agree with the need for an increase in staff and would like in particular to restore training slots.
Foreign service officers "are making a noble and worthy sacrifice trying to help the people of these countries," he said.
------------------------------
Citation: Paul Richter. "Staffing crisis at U.S. foreign service," Los Angeles Times, 06 June 2007.
Original URL: http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/la-fg-diplomats6jun06,0,1147840.story?coll=la-home-world
------------------------------
Iraq's leader can't get out of 1st gear
By Ned Parker
Los Angeles Times, 06 June 2007
BAGHDAD — Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri Maliki and Tariq Hashimi, the country's Sunni vice president, faced each other across the room as the latter spoke angrily of the bad blood between Sunni and Shiite officials.
A hush fell over the room as Hashimi demanded to know whether the prime minister had been accusing his political bloc of being infiltrated by terrorists.
"Are you talking about us? If you are … we would ask for proof," said Hashimi, according to his account of a recent closed-door meeting of Iraq's top political and national security officials. "I am treated as an opponent," he said, his voice rising. "If you continue treating me like this, it is better for me to quit."
Maliki sat in silence.
Iraq's government is teetering on the edge. Maliki's Cabinet is filled with officials who are deeply estranged from one another and more loyal to their parties than to the government as a whole. Some are jostling to unseat the prime minister. Few, if any, have accepted the basic premise of a government whose power is shared among each of Iraq's warring sects and ethnic groups.
Maliki is the man U.S. officials are counting on to bring Iraq's civil war under control, yet he seems unable to break the government's deadlock.
Even Maliki's top political advisor, Sadiq Rikabi, says he doubts the prime minister will be able to win passage of key legislation ardently sought by U.S. officials, including a law governing the oil industry and one that would allow more Sunni Arabs to gain government jobs.
"We hope to achieve some of them, but solving the Iraqi problems and resolving the different challenges in the [next] three months would need a miracle," Rikabi said.
Interviews with a broad range of Iraqi and Western officials paint a portrait of Maliki as an increasingly isolated and ineffectual figure, lacking in confidence and unable to trust people.
Iraq's intractable problems would challenge even the most skilled of politicians. But skilled politicians are in short supply here. Most of Iraq's current leaders grew to adulthood as members of underground militias, skilled in the arts of conspiracy, not compromise. And many of those leaders appear to believe that their side can still win a decisive military victory in the country's civil war.
Maliki, 57, shares that background and world view. A longtime Shiite Muslim leader, he fled to Iran soon after Saddam Hussein took power and spent the subsequent years in exile in Iran and Syria, plotting Hussein's overthrow. He was never expected to become prime minister and emerged as a compromise candidate after his Islamic Dawa Party's first two choices were rejected by the Americans and the Kurds.
Nonetheless, he took office amid hopes that he could succeed where others had not.
"Maliki had an amazing opportunity," said a senior Iraqi politician, speaking on condition of anonymity because he still does business regularly with the prime minister. "He had amazing support from Bush. Amazing support even from the regional countries, the Arabs — even Saudi Arabia at the start."
"He did not seek the right tactics. The guys around him did not enable him to do his job. All of these guys around him were small-minded and sectarian."
Now, fellow Iraqi officials describe the prime minister as dangerously out of touch. They accuse him of insulating himself with a tightknit group of advisors from his party and of shutting others out of decision making. Rikabi, Maliki's political advisor, denied that allegation.
Parliament recently humiliated the prime minister by twice refusing to approve his nominations for six Cabinet positions left vacant for nearly two months. A Western diplomat in Baghdad, speaking on condition of anonymity because he deals with the government, said Maliki had alienated would-be partners.
"Maliki is to blame for that because he has surrounded himself with his Dawa colleagues in his prime minister's office," the diplomat said. "It is a very big problem and doesn't promote trust.
"He isn't a natural leader. You either have it or you don't."
Kurdish leaders in Baghdad, who were once strong allies, have become irritated by Maliki's behavior, said Kurdish lawmaker Mahmoud Othman. "They complain about him. They say he does all these things without telling us."
The most problematic relationship in the government remains the one between Maliki and Hashimi. Their failure to find a way of sharing power feeds into the violent struggle between Sunnis and Shiites on the street.
Some of Maliki's advisors consider Hashimi's faction, which holds 44 seats in the Iraqi parliament, a front for terrorists. A few of its members have been linked to violence in Baghdad and have had their homes raided and their bodyguards detained.
"They really work inside and outside the political process to end it [the government], to return back to the past. That is the real problem," Rikabi said. "Many of the [Sunni Muslim political] participants are accused of supporting terrorism or terrorist actions. The Americans troops have all the data on this."
For his part, Hashimi says Maliki has not reached out to him. He describes his experience in government as one slight after another from the prime minister.
"Within the first month, I don't recall how many messages I passed to him, trying to encourage him, trying to propose something for the government's benefit," Hashimi said. "He just exclusively ignored all of these messages. He didn't reply. He didn't reply to anything."
Last year, he says, he sent Maliki 30 messages that went unanswered.
A breaking point came in February when Maliki fired the head of the Sunni Waqf, or religious endowment, that maintains Baghdad's Sunni mosques. He acted without informing Hashimi after the endowment chief criticized the government.
Hashimi learned of the firing on the television news. "This is unacceptable," he said. "This is humiliating me in front of my constituency: the Sunni people."
By early May, Hashimi and Maliki had gone a month without speaking to each other. The vice president threatened to withdraw the Sunni bloc from the government. Maliki then called him in for a meeting. Both sides pledged greater cooperation, but Hashimi says nothing has changed.
Mindful of the tensions, Maliki reconciled last month with the ex-head of the Sunni Waqf. But Hashimi's main demand is for a greater role in the Defense Ministry. Sunnis believe that the ministry and the rest of Iraq's security apparatus are dominated by Shiite parties.
The Sunni leader said his group was now exploring alliances to unseat the government, asserting it was making progress toward forging a new coalition.
"We are not far away myself from the Kurds and the Supreme Islamic Iraqi Council," he said, referring to the largest party in Iraq's Shiite bloc. "We more or less have a joint consensus that things have to be changed."
In theory, a new alliance could give the Shiite and Sunni blocs a chance to shed their most extreme elements, allowing the government to function.
But many here doubt that scenario is workable. "What is going to be so different about an alliance or government they put together that is going to be able to achieve where Maliki failed?" the Western diplomat asked. "The alliances people talk about are shifting one party here and one party there. It's going to be the same old faces."
Already, the country is turning into power cliques beneath the radar of the government, warned the senior Iraqi politician who still works with Maliki.
"One of the dangers we have is out of this chaos, an oligarchy is evolving, little fiefdoms manipulating money, smuggling oil, getting into contracting procedures.
"Look at Basra," he said, referring to the oil-rich city in southern Iraq where Shiite tribes, militias and parties are fighting one another for power.
Iraq "could also move into an era of impasse," he said. "No one will be able to take the government out or put in a better alternative. That is my personal worry."
----------------------------------
Citation: Ned Parker. "Iraq's leader can't get out of 1st gear," Los Angeles Times, 06 June 2007.
Original URL: http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/la-fg-maliki6jun06,0,6924199.story?coll=la-home-center
----------------------------------
Los Angeles Times, 06 June 2007
BAGHDAD — Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri Maliki and Tariq Hashimi, the country's Sunni vice president, faced each other across the room as the latter spoke angrily of the bad blood between Sunni and Shiite officials.
A hush fell over the room as Hashimi demanded to know whether the prime minister had been accusing his political bloc of being infiltrated by terrorists.
"Are you talking about us? If you are … we would ask for proof," said Hashimi, according to his account of a recent closed-door meeting of Iraq's top political and national security officials. "I am treated as an opponent," he said, his voice rising. "If you continue treating me like this, it is better for me to quit."
Maliki sat in silence.
Iraq's government is teetering on the edge. Maliki's Cabinet is filled with officials who are deeply estranged from one another and more loyal to their parties than to the government as a whole. Some are jostling to unseat the prime minister. Few, if any, have accepted the basic premise of a government whose power is shared among each of Iraq's warring sects and ethnic groups.
Maliki is the man U.S. officials are counting on to bring Iraq's civil war under control, yet he seems unable to break the government's deadlock.
Even Maliki's top political advisor, Sadiq Rikabi, says he doubts the prime minister will be able to win passage of key legislation ardently sought by U.S. officials, including a law governing the oil industry and one that would allow more Sunni Arabs to gain government jobs.
"We hope to achieve some of them, but solving the Iraqi problems and resolving the different challenges in the [next] three months would need a miracle," Rikabi said.
Interviews with a broad range of Iraqi and Western officials paint a portrait of Maliki as an increasingly isolated and ineffectual figure, lacking in confidence and unable to trust people.
Iraq's intractable problems would challenge even the most skilled of politicians. But skilled politicians are in short supply here. Most of Iraq's current leaders grew to adulthood as members of underground militias, skilled in the arts of conspiracy, not compromise. And many of those leaders appear to believe that their side can still win a decisive military victory in the country's civil war.
Maliki, 57, shares that background and world view. A longtime Shiite Muslim leader, he fled to Iran soon after Saddam Hussein took power and spent the subsequent years in exile in Iran and Syria, plotting Hussein's overthrow. He was never expected to become prime minister and emerged as a compromise candidate after his Islamic Dawa Party's first two choices were rejected by the Americans and the Kurds.
Nonetheless, he took office amid hopes that he could succeed where others had not.
"Maliki had an amazing opportunity," said a senior Iraqi politician, speaking on condition of anonymity because he still does business regularly with the prime minister. "He had amazing support from Bush. Amazing support even from the regional countries, the Arabs — even Saudi Arabia at the start."
"He did not seek the right tactics. The guys around him did not enable him to do his job. All of these guys around him were small-minded and sectarian."
Now, fellow Iraqi officials describe the prime minister as dangerously out of touch. They accuse him of insulating himself with a tightknit group of advisors from his party and of shutting others out of decision making. Rikabi, Maliki's political advisor, denied that allegation.
Parliament recently humiliated the prime minister by twice refusing to approve his nominations for six Cabinet positions left vacant for nearly two months. A Western diplomat in Baghdad, speaking on condition of anonymity because he deals with the government, said Maliki had alienated would-be partners.
"Maliki is to blame for that because he has surrounded himself with his Dawa colleagues in his prime minister's office," the diplomat said. "It is a very big problem and doesn't promote trust.
"He isn't a natural leader. You either have it or you don't."
Kurdish leaders in Baghdad, who were once strong allies, have become irritated by Maliki's behavior, said Kurdish lawmaker Mahmoud Othman. "They complain about him. They say he does all these things without telling us."
The most problematic relationship in the government remains the one between Maliki and Hashimi. Their failure to find a way of sharing power feeds into the violent struggle between Sunnis and Shiites on the street.
Some of Maliki's advisors consider Hashimi's faction, which holds 44 seats in the Iraqi parliament, a front for terrorists. A few of its members have been linked to violence in Baghdad and have had their homes raided and their bodyguards detained.
"They really work inside and outside the political process to end it [the government], to return back to the past. That is the real problem," Rikabi said. "Many of the [Sunni Muslim political] participants are accused of supporting terrorism or terrorist actions. The Americans troops have all the data on this."
For his part, Hashimi says Maliki has not reached out to him. He describes his experience in government as one slight after another from the prime minister.
"Within the first month, I don't recall how many messages I passed to him, trying to encourage him, trying to propose something for the government's benefit," Hashimi said. "He just exclusively ignored all of these messages. He didn't reply. He didn't reply to anything."
Last year, he says, he sent Maliki 30 messages that went unanswered.
A breaking point came in February when Maliki fired the head of the Sunni Waqf, or religious endowment, that maintains Baghdad's Sunni mosques. He acted without informing Hashimi after the endowment chief criticized the government.
Hashimi learned of the firing on the television news. "This is unacceptable," he said. "This is humiliating me in front of my constituency: the Sunni people."
By early May, Hashimi and Maliki had gone a month without speaking to each other. The vice president threatened to withdraw the Sunni bloc from the government. Maliki then called him in for a meeting. Both sides pledged greater cooperation, but Hashimi says nothing has changed.
Mindful of the tensions, Maliki reconciled last month with the ex-head of the Sunni Waqf. But Hashimi's main demand is for a greater role in the Defense Ministry. Sunnis believe that the ministry and the rest of Iraq's security apparatus are dominated by Shiite parties.
The Sunni leader said his group was now exploring alliances to unseat the government, asserting it was making progress toward forging a new coalition.
"We are not far away myself from the Kurds and the Supreme Islamic Iraqi Council," he said, referring to the largest party in Iraq's Shiite bloc. "We more or less have a joint consensus that things have to be changed."
In theory, a new alliance could give the Shiite and Sunni blocs a chance to shed their most extreme elements, allowing the government to function.
But many here doubt that scenario is workable. "What is going to be so different about an alliance or government they put together that is going to be able to achieve where Maliki failed?" the Western diplomat asked. "The alliances people talk about are shifting one party here and one party there. It's going to be the same old faces."
Already, the country is turning into power cliques beneath the radar of the government, warned the senior Iraqi politician who still works with Maliki.
"One of the dangers we have is out of this chaos, an oligarchy is evolving, little fiefdoms manipulating money, smuggling oil, getting into contracting procedures.
"Look at Basra," he said, referring to the oil-rich city in southern Iraq where Shiite tribes, militias and parties are fighting one another for power.
Iraq "could also move into an era of impasse," he said. "No one will be able to take the government out or put in a better alternative. That is my personal worry."
----------------------------------
Citation: Ned Parker. "Iraq's leader can't get out of 1st gear," Los Angeles Times, 06 June 2007.
Original URL: http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/la-fg-maliki6jun06,0,6924199.story?coll=la-home-center
----------------------------------
05 June 2007
Guantanamo war crimes trials screech to halt
By Jane Sutton
Reuters, 05 June 2007
GUANTANAMO BAY U.S. NAVAL BASE, Cuba - U.S. military judges dropped all war crimes charges on Monday against the only two Guantanamo captives facing trial, rulings that could preclude trying any of the 380 prisoners held at the U.S. base in Cuba any time soon.
The judges said they lacked jurisdiction under the strict definition of those eligible for trial by military tribunal under a law the U.S. Congress enacted last year.
"It's another demonstration that the system simply doesn't work," said the tribunals' chief defense counsel, Marine Col. Dwight Sullivan.
The rulings did not affect U.S. authority to indefinitely hold the 380 foreign terrorism suspects detained at the Guantanamo Bay naval base in southeast Cuba.
But it was the latest setback for the Bush administration's efforts to put the Guantanamo captives through some form of judicial process. It was forced to rewrite the rules last year after the U.S. Supreme Court deemed the old tribunals illegal.
Charges were dropped for Omar Khadr, a Canadian captured in a firefight in Afghanistan at age 15. Khadr, now 20, was accused of killing a U.S. soldier with a grenade and wounding another in a battle at a suspected al Qaeda compound in Afghanistan in 2002.
Charges were also dropped for Salim Ahmed Hamdan of Yemen, who is accused of driving and guarding Osama bin Laden. Hamdan last year won a U.S. Supreme Court challenge that scrapped the first Guantanamo tribunal system.
Both had been charged with conspiracy and providing material support for terrorism. Khadr also faced charges of murder, attempted murder and spying, the latter for allegedly conducting surveillance of U.S. military convoys in Afghanistan.
HAMDAN STILL HOPES FOR FAIR TRIAL-ATTORNEY
Both defendants had been declared "enemy combatants" during administrative hearings begun at Guantanamo in 2004 to determine if there were grounds to continue holding them.
But the judge for Hamdan's case, Navy Capt. Keith Allred, said that definition was broad enough to include captives who supported the Taliban or al Qaeda without actually engaging in combat.
He said the Military Commissions Act adopted by the U.S. Congress in 2006 set more stringent rules and allowed only those designated as "unlawful enemy combatants" to face trial in the Guantanamo tribunals.
Allred said that law limited the tribunals' jurisdiction to "those who actually engaged in hostilities."
No Guantanamo captives have been formally designated as "unlawful enemy combatants," and defense lawyers said none could be tried unless they first faced proceedings reclassifying them as such.
Hamdan was relieved and "still hopes he's going to get a fair trial," said his military lawyer, Navy Lt. Cmdr. Charles Swift.
A Pentagon spokeswoman, Army Maj. Beth Kubala, said it would be speculative to draw conclusions about the future of the tribunal system. She called the tribunals fair, transparent and legitimate and said the rulings demonstrated that "the military judges operate independently."
Allred and the judge in the Khadr case, Army Col. Peter Brownback, left open the possibility of refiling charges against the two defendants if they were reclassified.
But defense lawyers and rights groups said any trials should be moved to the regular U.S. federal court system or the long-established court-martial system.
"At this point, detainees have been more successful committing suicide in Guantanamo than the government has been successful in getting detainees to trial," Amnesty International observer Jumana Musa said.
Four prisoners have committed suicide at Guantanamo since the detention and interrogation camp opened in 2002.
---------------------------
Citation: Jane Sutton. "Guantanamo war crimes trials screech to halt," Reuters, 05 June 2007.
Original URL: http://www.alertnet.org/thenews/newsdesk/N04481007.htm
---------------------------
Reuters, 05 June 2007
GUANTANAMO BAY U.S. NAVAL BASE, Cuba - U.S. military judges dropped all war crimes charges on Monday against the only two Guantanamo captives facing trial, rulings that could preclude trying any of the 380 prisoners held at the U.S. base in Cuba any time soon.
The judges said they lacked jurisdiction under the strict definition of those eligible for trial by military tribunal under a law the U.S. Congress enacted last year.
"It's another demonstration that the system simply doesn't work," said the tribunals' chief defense counsel, Marine Col. Dwight Sullivan.
The rulings did not affect U.S. authority to indefinitely hold the 380 foreign terrorism suspects detained at the Guantanamo Bay naval base in southeast Cuba.
But it was the latest setback for the Bush administration's efforts to put the Guantanamo captives through some form of judicial process. It was forced to rewrite the rules last year after the U.S. Supreme Court deemed the old tribunals illegal.
Charges were dropped for Omar Khadr, a Canadian captured in a firefight in Afghanistan at age 15. Khadr, now 20, was accused of killing a U.S. soldier with a grenade and wounding another in a battle at a suspected al Qaeda compound in Afghanistan in 2002.
Charges were also dropped for Salim Ahmed Hamdan of Yemen, who is accused of driving and guarding Osama bin Laden. Hamdan last year won a U.S. Supreme Court challenge that scrapped the first Guantanamo tribunal system.
Both had been charged with conspiracy and providing material support for terrorism. Khadr also faced charges of murder, attempted murder and spying, the latter for allegedly conducting surveillance of U.S. military convoys in Afghanistan.
HAMDAN STILL HOPES FOR FAIR TRIAL-ATTORNEY
Both defendants had been declared "enemy combatants" during administrative hearings begun at Guantanamo in 2004 to determine if there were grounds to continue holding them.
But the judge for Hamdan's case, Navy Capt. Keith Allred, said that definition was broad enough to include captives who supported the Taliban or al Qaeda without actually engaging in combat.
He said the Military Commissions Act adopted by the U.S. Congress in 2006 set more stringent rules and allowed only those designated as "unlawful enemy combatants" to face trial in the Guantanamo tribunals.
Allred said that law limited the tribunals' jurisdiction to "those who actually engaged in hostilities."
No Guantanamo captives have been formally designated as "unlawful enemy combatants," and defense lawyers said none could be tried unless they first faced proceedings reclassifying them as such.
Hamdan was relieved and "still hopes he's going to get a fair trial," said his military lawyer, Navy Lt. Cmdr. Charles Swift.
A Pentagon spokeswoman, Army Maj. Beth Kubala, said it would be speculative to draw conclusions about the future of the tribunal system. She called the tribunals fair, transparent and legitimate and said the rulings demonstrated that "the military judges operate independently."
Allred and the judge in the Khadr case, Army Col. Peter Brownback, left open the possibility of refiling charges against the two defendants if they were reclassified.
But defense lawyers and rights groups said any trials should be moved to the regular U.S. federal court system or the long-established court-martial system.
"At this point, detainees have been more successful committing suicide in Guantanamo than the government has been successful in getting detainees to trial," Amnesty International observer Jumana Musa said.
Four prisoners have committed suicide at Guantanamo since the detention and interrogation camp opened in 2002.
---------------------------
Citation: Jane Sutton. "Guantanamo war crimes trials screech to halt," Reuters, 05 June 2007.
Original URL: http://www.alertnet.org/thenews/newsdesk/N04481007.htm
---------------------------