Daily Telegraph, 29 July 2007
KABUL, Afghanistan — Taliban militants used a heat-seeking, surface-to-air missile to attack a Western aircraft over Afghanistan for the first time last week, coalition military sources say.
The attack with a weapon thought to have been smuggled across the border with Iran represents a worrisome increase in the capability of the militants that Western commanders had long feared.
The sources said the Taliban attempted to bring down an American C-130 Hercules airplane flying over the southwestern province of Nimroz on July 22. The crew reported that a missile system locked on to their aircraft and that a missile was fired.
It closed in on the large C-130, pursuing it as the pilots made a series of violent evasive maneuvers and jettisoned flares to confuse the heat sensors in the nose of the surface-to-air missile, or SAM.
Crew members said they saw what they thought was a missile passing very close to the aircraft. The C-130 was not damaged in the attack.
NATO officials on Friday refused to confirm or deny that such an attack had taken place.
"If there was such an incident of the type you describe in Nimroz, it is classified," a NATO spokesman said. "I can't release it, if in fact it did occur."
However, a surface-to-air missile alert was put out for Western aircraft traveling in the southwest of Afghanistan in the last week, which affected civilian and military aircraft.
It was confirmed by civilian air operators in Helmand province. The alert remains in place.
Western military commanders have been aware of concerted efforts by the Taliban to obtain shoulder-launched, surface-to-air missiles called MANPADS (man-portable air-defense system).
The recent attack was probably with a SAM-7 shoulder-launched missile, an early model of Soviet or Chinese origin, the sources said. Though relatively primitive, they are still a potent weapon, particularly against low-flying helicopters, such as the workhorse Chinook transporters used by NATO forces in the southern Helmand province.
The C-130 attacked in Nimroz was flying at 11,000 feet at the time of the attack, which is within the 1.5- to 3.4-mile range of a shoulder-launched missile system such as the SAM-7.
Though the West supplied hundreds of sophisticated Stinger heat-seeking missiles to the Afghan mujahedeen in the 1980s, they are not thought to be still usable because of the deterioration of their sophisticated electronics and battery systems.
As a contingency in 2002, the U.S. government offered an amnesty on Stingers and successfully bought back many of the missiles still in the arsenals of Afghan warlords for $40,000 a missile.
To date, the Taliban has shot down several Western helicopters, but only through the use of unguided rocket-propelled grenades, which have a range of 500 yards.
In April, members of the Special Boat Service operating in Nimroz province intercepted several truckloads of weapons coming across the Iranian border, including a working SAM-7 missile.
It was one of a number of recent weapons caches that Western officials say have been seized on the border with Iran, fueling claims by Britain and the United States that Iran, or elements within the Iranian government, have begun supplying arms to the Taliban.
Hundreds of SAM-7 missiles disappeared into the black market in Iraq in the aftermath of the fall of dictator Saddam Hussein, where they have since been used to shoot down dozens of helicopters and airplanes, reportedly including a British C-130 in 2005.
--------------------------------
Citation: "Taliban's failed first use of SAM still worrisome," Daily Telegraph, 29 July 2007.
Original URLl: http://www.washingtontimes.com/article/20070729/FOREIGN/107290045/1003
--------------------------------
30 July 2007
Nato plans smaller bombs for Afghanistan
By Daniel Dombey
The Financial Times, 29 July 2007
Nato plans to use smaller bombs in Afghanistan as part of a change in tactics aimed at stemming a rise in civilian casualties that threatens to undermine support in the fight against the Taliban.
The head of the alliance, Jaap de Hoop Scheffer, acknowledged in an interview with the Financial Times that mounting civilian casualties had hurt Nato and alliance commanders had recently instructed troops to hold off attacking the Taliban in some situations where civilians were at risk.
“We realise that, if we cannot neutralise our enemy today without harming civilians, our enemy will give us the opportunity tomorrow,” he said, adding that Gen Dan McNeill, the commander of Nato’s 35,000 troops in Afghanistan, had given the new instructions to his troops. “If that means going after a Taliban not on Wednesday but on Thursday, we will get him then.”
Mr de Hoop Scheffer indicated that the alliance was also planning to use smaller bombs in certain instances. He said Nato was “working with weapons load on aircraft to reduce collateral damage” although it was impossible to avoid civilian casualties entirely.
“If you put a 250kg bomb rather than 500kg bomb on the plane that could make a huge amount of difference,” said a Nato diplomat. Other Nato officials say that the alliance will also increasingly leave house-to-house searches to the Afghan army to reduce the risks of confrontation.
In June, the Agency Coordinating Body for Afghan Relief, a coalition of more than 90 aid agencies, said at least 230 Afghan civilians had been killed by western troops this year. The rate has been increasing. Aid agencies say that in 2006 the number of civilians killed by both sides was 700-1,000, the highest figure since the Taliban were ousted from power in 2001.
Last week, Massimo D’Alema, Italy’s foreign minister, said the civilian casualties were “not acceptable on a moral level” and “disastrous on a political level”. Hamid Karzai, Afghanistan’s president, has warned the western forces against treating Afghan lives as “cheap”.
However, the facts are often difficult to establish. On Friday, an Afghan member of parliament said 50 to 60 civilians had been killed in a fight between Nato and the Taliban in Helmand province – primarily because of the alliance’s bombs. But Nato said it was not aware of such civilian casualty figures.
--------------------------------------
Citation: Daniel Dombey. "Nato plans smaller bombs for Afghanistan," The Financial Times, 29 July 2007.
Original URL: http://www.ft.com/cms/s/44aaa8be-3e01-11dc-8f6a-0000779fd2ac.html
--------------------------------------
The Financial Times, 29 July 2007
Nato plans to use smaller bombs in Afghanistan as part of a change in tactics aimed at stemming a rise in civilian casualties that threatens to undermine support in the fight against the Taliban.
The head of the alliance, Jaap de Hoop Scheffer, acknowledged in an interview with the Financial Times that mounting civilian casualties had hurt Nato and alliance commanders had recently instructed troops to hold off attacking the Taliban in some situations where civilians were at risk.
“We realise that, if we cannot neutralise our enemy today without harming civilians, our enemy will give us the opportunity tomorrow,” he said, adding that Gen Dan McNeill, the commander of Nato’s 35,000 troops in Afghanistan, had given the new instructions to his troops. “If that means going after a Taliban not on Wednesday but on Thursday, we will get him then.”
Mr de Hoop Scheffer indicated that the alliance was also planning to use smaller bombs in certain instances. He said Nato was “working with weapons load on aircraft to reduce collateral damage” although it was impossible to avoid civilian casualties entirely.
“If you put a 250kg bomb rather than 500kg bomb on the plane that could make a huge amount of difference,” said a Nato diplomat. Other Nato officials say that the alliance will also increasingly leave house-to-house searches to the Afghan army to reduce the risks of confrontation.
In June, the Agency Coordinating Body for Afghan Relief, a coalition of more than 90 aid agencies, said at least 230 Afghan civilians had been killed by western troops this year. The rate has been increasing. Aid agencies say that in 2006 the number of civilians killed by both sides was 700-1,000, the highest figure since the Taliban were ousted from power in 2001.
Last week, Massimo D’Alema, Italy’s foreign minister, said the civilian casualties were “not acceptable on a moral level” and “disastrous on a political level”. Hamid Karzai, Afghanistan’s president, has warned the western forces against treating Afghan lives as “cheap”.
However, the facts are often difficult to establish. On Friday, an Afghan member of parliament said 50 to 60 civilians had been killed in a fight between Nato and the Taliban in Helmand province – primarily because of the alliance’s bombs. But Nato said it was not aware of such civilian casualty figures.
--------------------------------------
Citation: Daniel Dombey. "Nato plans smaller bombs for Afghanistan," The Financial Times, 29 July 2007.
Original URL: http://www.ft.com/cms/s/44aaa8be-3e01-11dc-8f6a-0000779fd2ac.html
--------------------------------------
In outsourced U.S. wars, contractor deaths top 1,000
By Bernd Debusmann
Reuters, 03 July 2007
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The death toll for private contractors in the U.S. wars in Iraq and Afghanistan has topped 1,000, a stark reminder of the risks run by civilians working with the military in roles previously held by soldiers.
A further 13,000 contractors have been wounded in the two separate wars led by the United States against enemies who share fundamentalist Islamic beliefs and the hit-and-run tactics that drain conventional armies.
The casualty toll is based on figures the U.S. Department of Labor provided to Reuters in response to a request under the Freedom of Information Act and on locally gathered data.
The department said it had recorded 990 deaths - 917 in Iraq and 73 in Afghanistan - by the end of March. Since then, according to incident logs tallied by Reuters in Baghdad and Kabul, at least 16 contractors have died in Iraq and two in Afghanistan.
Those killed in Iraq between March 31 and today included four contractors from the Philippines killed in a rocket strike on Baghdad's heavily fortified Green Zone compound, a frequent target of attacks.
The Labor Department's statistics put the number of wounded in Iraq between March 1, 2003 and March 31, 2007 as 10,569. The corresponding figure for Afghanistan, from September 2001 to March 2007, is 2,428.
Deaths and injuries among the growing ranks of civilians working in war zones are tracked on the basis of claims under an insurance policy, the Defense Base Act, which all U.S. contracting companies and subcontractors must take out for the civilians they employ outside the United States.
In Iraq, their number is estimated to be close to 130,000 -- not much less than the 157,000 U.S. troops presently deployed to the country. Their work ranges from driving fuel trucks, cooking meals and cleaning toilets to servicing advanced weapons systems and guarding senior U.S. officials.
The contractor death toll compares with 3,577 U.S. military deaths in Iraq and 342 in Afghanistan, according to the U.S. Department of Defense. That means that on average, since the two conflicts began in 2001 and 2003 respectively, one civilian contractor is killed for every four members of the U.S. Armed Forces.
STILL MORE APPLICANTS THAN JOBS
Despite the risks, there is no shortage of those wanting to work in the war zones, lured by high pay and, in some cases, a sense of adventure.
"There are more applicants than there are jobs," said Doug Brooks, president of the International Peace Operations Association, a trade group for more than 30 private security companies.
"That's been the case from the beginning and it is still true, even though pay has gone down because there is a lot of competition."
Neither the Pentagon nor any other U.S. government agency keeps a precise tally on the number of private security companies active in war zones - a fact that is drawing increasing complaints from Congressional critics who say there is not enough oversight and little accountability.
By some estimates, the number of private security companies in Iraq and Afghanistan has swollen to almost 300, both U.S. and foreign corporations. One of the richest contracts awarded since the U.S. invaded Iraq went to Aegis, a British firm involved in intelligence-gathering.
Contrary to common perceptions, the majority of civilian contractors in the war zones are not Americans - and foreigners have done most of the dying as the U.S. accelerated outsourcing functions previously performed by soldiers.
The Labor Department declined to give details of the nationalities of the contractors it listed as killed or wounded, saying that doing so would "constitute an unwarranted invasion of personal privacy" under the U.S. Privacy Act.
But at a Congressional hearing in May, Joseph McDermott, the Assistant Inspector General for Iraq, quoted Labor Department statistics as saying that of 900-plus contractors killed by the end of April, 224 were U.S. citizens.
Officials say the majority of contractors are Iraqis and people from developing countries as far apart as Chile and Nepal, Colombia and India, Fiji and El Salvador. Filipinos make up one of the largest single groups.
------------------------------
Citation: Bernd Debusmann. "In outsourced U.S. wars, contractor deaths top 1,000," Reuters, 03 July 2007.
Original URL: http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20070703/wl_nm/usa_iraq_contractors_dc
------------------------------
Reuters, 03 July 2007
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The death toll for private contractors in the U.S. wars in Iraq and Afghanistan has topped 1,000, a stark reminder of the risks run by civilians working with the military in roles previously held by soldiers.
A further 13,000 contractors have been wounded in the two separate wars led by the United States against enemies who share fundamentalist Islamic beliefs and the hit-and-run tactics that drain conventional armies.
The casualty toll is based on figures the U.S. Department of Labor provided to Reuters in response to a request under the Freedom of Information Act and on locally gathered data.
The department said it had recorded 990 deaths - 917 in Iraq and 73 in Afghanistan - by the end of March. Since then, according to incident logs tallied by Reuters in Baghdad and Kabul, at least 16 contractors have died in Iraq and two in Afghanistan.
Those killed in Iraq between March 31 and today included four contractors from the Philippines killed in a rocket strike on Baghdad's heavily fortified Green Zone compound, a frequent target of attacks.
The Labor Department's statistics put the number of wounded in Iraq between March 1, 2003 and March 31, 2007 as 10,569. The corresponding figure for Afghanistan, from September 2001 to March 2007, is 2,428.
Deaths and injuries among the growing ranks of civilians working in war zones are tracked on the basis of claims under an insurance policy, the Defense Base Act, which all U.S. contracting companies and subcontractors must take out for the civilians they employ outside the United States.
In Iraq, their number is estimated to be close to 130,000 -- not much less than the 157,000 U.S. troops presently deployed to the country. Their work ranges from driving fuel trucks, cooking meals and cleaning toilets to servicing advanced weapons systems and guarding senior U.S. officials.
The contractor death toll compares with 3,577 U.S. military deaths in Iraq and 342 in Afghanistan, according to the U.S. Department of Defense. That means that on average, since the two conflicts began in 2001 and 2003 respectively, one civilian contractor is killed for every four members of the U.S. Armed Forces.
STILL MORE APPLICANTS THAN JOBS
Despite the risks, there is no shortage of those wanting to work in the war zones, lured by high pay and, in some cases, a sense of adventure.
"There are more applicants than there are jobs," said Doug Brooks, president of the International Peace Operations Association, a trade group for more than 30 private security companies.
"That's been the case from the beginning and it is still true, even though pay has gone down because there is a lot of competition."
Neither the Pentagon nor any other U.S. government agency keeps a precise tally on the number of private security companies active in war zones - a fact that is drawing increasing complaints from Congressional critics who say there is not enough oversight and little accountability.
By some estimates, the number of private security companies in Iraq and Afghanistan has swollen to almost 300, both U.S. and foreign corporations. One of the richest contracts awarded since the U.S. invaded Iraq went to Aegis, a British firm involved in intelligence-gathering.
Contrary to common perceptions, the majority of civilian contractors in the war zones are not Americans - and foreigners have done most of the dying as the U.S. accelerated outsourcing functions previously performed by soldiers.
The Labor Department declined to give details of the nationalities of the contractors it listed as killed or wounded, saying that doing so would "constitute an unwarranted invasion of personal privacy" under the U.S. Privacy Act.
But at a Congressional hearing in May, Joseph McDermott, the Assistant Inspector General for Iraq, quoted Labor Department statistics as saying that of 900-plus contractors killed by the end of April, 224 were U.S. citizens.
Officials say the majority of contractors are Iraqis and people from developing countries as far apart as Chile and Nepal, Colombia and India, Fiji and El Salvador. Filipinos make up one of the largest single groups.
------------------------------
Citation: Bernd Debusmann. "In outsourced U.S. wars, contractor deaths top 1,000," Reuters, 03 July 2007.
Original URL: http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20070703/wl_nm/usa_iraq_contractors_dc
------------------------------
Iraq: One in seven joins human tide spilling into neighbouring countries
By Patrick Cockburn
The Independent, 30 July 2007
Two thousand Iraqis are fleeing their homes every day. It is the greatest mass exodus of people ever in the Middle East and dwarfs anything seen in Europe since the Second World War. Four million people, one in seven Iraqis, have run away, because if they do not they will be killed. Two million have left Iraq, mainly for Syria and Jordan, and the same number have fled within the country.
Yet, while the US and Britain express sympathy for the plight of refugees in Africa, they are ignoring - or playing down- a far greater tragedy which is largely of their own making.
The US and Britain may not want to dwell on the disasters that have befallen Iraq during their occupation but the shanty towns crammed with refugees springing up in Iraq and neighbouring countries are becoming impossible to ignore.
Even so the UNHCR is having difficulty raising $100m (£50m) for relief. The organisation says the two countries caring for the biggest proportion of Iraqi refugees - Syria and Jordan - have still received "next to nothing from the world community". Some 1.4 million Iraqis have fled to Syria according to the UN High Commission for Refugees, Jordan has taken in 750 000 while Egypt and Lebanon have seen 200 000 Iraqis cross into their territories.
Potential donors are reluctant to spent money inside Iraq arguing the country has large oil revenues. They are either unaware, or are ignoring the fact that the Iraqi administration has all but collapsed outside the Baghdad Green Zone. The US is spending $2bn a week on military operations in Iraq according to the Congressional Research Service but many Iraqis are dying because they lack drinking water costing a few cents.
Kalawar refugee camp in Sulaymaniyah is a microcosm of the misery to which millions of Iraqis have been reduced.
"At least it is safe here," says Walid Sha'ad Nayef, 38, as he stands amid the stink of rotting garbage and raw sewage. He fled from the lethally dangerous Sa'adiyah district in Baghdad 11 months ago. As we speak to him, a man silently presents us with the death certificate of his son, Farez Maher Zedan, who was killed in Baghdad on 20 May 2006.
Kalawar is a horrible place. Situated behind a petrol station down a dusty track, the first sight of the camp is of rough shelters made out of rags, torn pieces of cardboard and old blankets. The stench is explained by the fact the Kurdish municipal authorities will not allow the 470 people in the camp to dig latrines. They say this might encourage them to stay.
"Sometimes I go to beg," says Talib Hamid al-Auda, a voluble man with a thick white beard looking older than his fifty years. As he speaks, his body shakes, as if he was trembling at the thought of the demeaning means by which he feeds his family. Even begging is difficult because the people in the camp are forbidden to leave it on Thursday, Friday and Saturday. Suspected by Kurds of being behind a string of house robberies, though there is no evidence for this, they are natural scapegoats for any wrong-doing in their vicinity.
Refugees are getting an increasingly cool reception wherever they flee, because there are so many of them and because of the burden they put on resources. "People here blame us for forcing up rents and the price of food," said Omar, who had taken his family to Damascus after his sister's leg was fractured by a car bomb.
The refugees in Kalawar had no option but to flee. Of the 97 families here, all but two are Sunni Arabs. Many are from Sa'adiyah in west Baghdad where 84 bodies were found by police between 18 June and 18 July. Many are young men whose hands had been bound and who had been tortured.
"The majority left Baghdad because somebody knocked on the door of their house and told them to get out in an hour," says Rosina Ynzenga, who runs the Spanish charity Solidarity International (SIA) which pays for a mobile clinic to visit the camp.
Sulaymaniyah municipality is antagonistic to her doing more. One Kurdish official suggested that the Arabs of Kalawar were there simply for economic reasons and should be given $200 each and sent back to Baghdad.
Mr Nayef, the mukhtar (mayor) of the camp who used to be a bulldozer driver in Baghdad, at first said nobody could speak to journalists unless we had permission from the authorities. But after we had ceremoniously written our names in a large book he relented and would, in any case, have had difficulty in stopping other refugees explaining their grievences.
Asked to list their worst problems Mr Nayef said they were the lack of school for the children, shortage of food, no kerosene to cook with, no money, no jobs and no electricity. The real answer to the question is that the Arabs of Kalawar have nothing. They have only received two cartons of food each from the International Committee of the Red Cross and a tank of clean water.
Even so they are adamant that they dare not return to Baghdad. They did not even know if their houses had been taken over by others.
Abla Abbas, a mournful looking woman in black robes, said her son had been killed because he went to sell plastic bags in the Shia district of Khadamiyah in west Baghdad. The poor in Iraq take potentially fatal risks to earn a little money.
The uncertainty of the refugees' lives in Kalawar is mirrored in their drawn faces. While we spoke to them there were several shouting matches. One woman kept showing us a piece of paper from the local authority in Sulaymaniyah giving her the right to stay there. She regarded us nervously as if we were officials about to evict her.
There are in fact three camps at Kalawar. Although almost all the refugees are Sunni they come from different places and until a month ago they lived together. But there were continual arguments. The refugees decided that they must split into three encampments: one from Baghdad, a second from Hillah, south of Baghdad, and a third from Diyala, the mixed Sunni-Shia province that has been the scene of ferocious sectarian pogroms.
Governments and the media crudely evaluate human suffering in Iraq in terms of the number killed. A broader and better barometer would include those who have escaped death only by fleeing their homes, their jobs and their country to go and live, destitute and unwanted, in places like Kalawar. The US administration has 18 benchmarks to measure progress in Iraq but the return of four million people to their homes is not among them.
---------------------------------
Citation: Patrick Cockburn. "Iraq: One in seven joins human tide spilling into neighbouring countries," The Independent, 30 July 2007.
Original URL: http://news.independent.co.uk/world/middle_east/article2816666.ece
---------------------------------
The Independent, 30 July 2007
Two thousand Iraqis are fleeing their homes every day. It is the greatest mass exodus of people ever in the Middle East and dwarfs anything seen in Europe since the Second World War. Four million people, one in seven Iraqis, have run away, because if they do not they will be killed. Two million have left Iraq, mainly for Syria and Jordan, and the same number have fled within the country.
Yet, while the US and Britain express sympathy for the plight of refugees in Africa, they are ignoring - or playing down- a far greater tragedy which is largely of their own making.
The US and Britain may not want to dwell on the disasters that have befallen Iraq during their occupation but the shanty towns crammed with refugees springing up in Iraq and neighbouring countries are becoming impossible to ignore.
Even so the UNHCR is having difficulty raising $100m (£50m) for relief. The organisation says the two countries caring for the biggest proportion of Iraqi refugees - Syria and Jordan - have still received "next to nothing from the world community". Some 1.4 million Iraqis have fled to Syria according to the UN High Commission for Refugees, Jordan has taken in 750 000 while Egypt and Lebanon have seen 200 000 Iraqis cross into their territories.
Potential donors are reluctant to spent money inside Iraq arguing the country has large oil revenues. They are either unaware, or are ignoring the fact that the Iraqi administration has all but collapsed outside the Baghdad Green Zone. The US is spending $2bn a week on military operations in Iraq according to the Congressional Research Service but many Iraqis are dying because they lack drinking water costing a few cents.
Kalawar refugee camp in Sulaymaniyah is a microcosm of the misery to which millions of Iraqis have been reduced.
"At least it is safe here," says Walid Sha'ad Nayef, 38, as he stands amid the stink of rotting garbage and raw sewage. He fled from the lethally dangerous Sa'adiyah district in Baghdad 11 months ago. As we speak to him, a man silently presents us with the death certificate of his son, Farez Maher Zedan, who was killed in Baghdad on 20 May 2006.
Kalawar is a horrible place. Situated behind a petrol station down a dusty track, the first sight of the camp is of rough shelters made out of rags, torn pieces of cardboard and old blankets. The stench is explained by the fact the Kurdish municipal authorities will not allow the 470 people in the camp to dig latrines. They say this might encourage them to stay.
"Sometimes I go to beg," says Talib Hamid al-Auda, a voluble man with a thick white beard looking older than his fifty years. As he speaks, his body shakes, as if he was trembling at the thought of the demeaning means by which he feeds his family. Even begging is difficult because the people in the camp are forbidden to leave it on Thursday, Friday and Saturday. Suspected by Kurds of being behind a string of house robberies, though there is no evidence for this, they are natural scapegoats for any wrong-doing in their vicinity.
Refugees are getting an increasingly cool reception wherever they flee, because there are so many of them and because of the burden they put on resources. "People here blame us for forcing up rents and the price of food," said Omar, who had taken his family to Damascus after his sister's leg was fractured by a car bomb.
The refugees in Kalawar had no option but to flee. Of the 97 families here, all but two are Sunni Arabs. Many are from Sa'adiyah in west Baghdad where 84 bodies were found by police between 18 June and 18 July. Many are young men whose hands had been bound and who had been tortured.
"The majority left Baghdad because somebody knocked on the door of their house and told them to get out in an hour," says Rosina Ynzenga, who runs the Spanish charity Solidarity International (SIA) which pays for a mobile clinic to visit the camp.
Sulaymaniyah municipality is antagonistic to her doing more. One Kurdish official suggested that the Arabs of Kalawar were there simply for economic reasons and should be given $200 each and sent back to Baghdad.
Mr Nayef, the mukhtar (mayor) of the camp who used to be a bulldozer driver in Baghdad, at first said nobody could speak to journalists unless we had permission from the authorities. But after we had ceremoniously written our names in a large book he relented and would, in any case, have had difficulty in stopping other refugees explaining their grievences.
Asked to list their worst problems Mr Nayef said they were the lack of school for the children, shortage of food, no kerosene to cook with, no money, no jobs and no electricity. The real answer to the question is that the Arabs of Kalawar have nothing. They have only received two cartons of food each from the International Committee of the Red Cross and a tank of clean water.
Even so they are adamant that they dare not return to Baghdad. They did not even know if their houses had been taken over by others.
Abla Abbas, a mournful looking woman in black robes, said her son had been killed because he went to sell plastic bags in the Shia district of Khadamiyah in west Baghdad. The poor in Iraq take potentially fatal risks to earn a little money.
The uncertainty of the refugees' lives in Kalawar is mirrored in their drawn faces. While we spoke to them there were several shouting matches. One woman kept showing us a piece of paper from the local authority in Sulaymaniyah giving her the right to stay there. She regarded us nervously as if we were officials about to evict her.
There are in fact three camps at Kalawar. Although almost all the refugees are Sunni they come from different places and until a month ago they lived together. But there were continual arguments. The refugees decided that they must split into three encampments: one from Baghdad, a second from Hillah, south of Baghdad, and a third from Diyala, the mixed Sunni-Shia province that has been the scene of ferocious sectarian pogroms.
Governments and the media crudely evaluate human suffering in Iraq in terms of the number killed. A broader and better barometer would include those who have escaped death only by fleeing their homes, their jobs and their country to go and live, destitute and unwanted, in places like Kalawar. The US administration has 18 benchmarks to measure progress in Iraq but the return of four million people to their homes is not among them.
---------------------------------
Citation: Patrick Cockburn. "Iraq: One in seven joins human tide spilling into neighbouring countries," The Independent, 30 July 2007.
Original URL: http://news.independent.co.uk/world/middle_east/article2816666.ece
---------------------------------
Interior Ministry mirrors chaos of a fractured Iraq
The nerve center of the nation's police is not so much a government agency as an 11-story powder keg of factions.
By Ned Parker
Los Angeles Times, 30 July 2007
BAGHDAD — The colonel pulls his Mercedes into the parking lot of the drab, 11-story concrete building, scanning the scene for suspicious cars.
Before reaching for the door handle, he studies the people loitering nearby in hopes he will be able to recognize anyone still there later in the day. He grips his pistol, the trigger cocked, wary of an ambush.
He has arrived at his office.
This is Iraq's Ministry of Interior — the balkanized command center for the nation's police and mirror of the deadly factions that have caused the government here to grind nearly to a halt.
The very language that Americans use to describe government — ministries, departments, agencies — belies the reality here of militias that kill under cover of police uniform and remain above the law. Until recently, one or two Interior Ministry police officers were assassinated each week while arriving or leaving the building, probably by fellow officers, senior police officials say.
That killing has been reduced, but Western diplomats still describe the Interior Ministry building as a "federation of oligarchs." Those who work in the building, like the colonel, liken departments to hostile countries. Survival depends on keeping abreast of shifting factional alliances and turf.
On the second floor is Gen. Mahdi Gharrawi, a former national police commander. Last year, U.S. and Iraqi troops found 1,400 prisoners, mostly Sunnis, at a base he controlled in east Baghdad. Many showed signs of torture. The interior minister blocked an arrest warrant against the general this year, senior Iraqi officials confirmed.
The third- and fifth-floor administrative departments are the domain of Prime Minister Nouri Maliki's Islamic Dawa Party, a Shiite group.
The sixth, home to border enforcement and the major crimes unit, belongs to the Badr Organization militia. Its leader, Deputy Minister Ahmed Khafaji, is lauded by some Western officials as an efficient administrator and suspected by others of running secret prisons.
The seventh floor is intelligence, where the Badr Organization and armed Kurdish groups struggle for control.
The ninth floor is shared by the department's inspector general and general counsel, religious Shiites. Their offices have been at the center of efforts to purge the department's remaining Sunni employees. The counsel's predecessor, a Sunni, was killed a year ago.
"They have some bad things on the ninth," says the colonel, a Sunni who, like other ministry officials, spoke on condition of anonymity to guard against retaliation.
The ministry's computer department is on the 10th floor. Two employees were arrested there in February on suspicion of smuggling in explosives, according to police and U.S. military officials. Some Iraqi and U.S. officials say the workers intended to store bombs there. Others say they were plotting to attack the U.S. advisors stationed directly above them on the top floor.
Months after the arrests, it's unclear whether the detainees are Sunni insurgents or followers of Muqtada Sadr, the anti-U.S. Shiite cleric whose portrait stares down from some office walls in a sign of his spreading influence in the ministry.
Partitions divide the building's hallways, and gunmen guard the offices of deputy ministers. Senior police officials march up and down stairs rather than risk an elevator. They walk the halls flanked by bodyguards, wary of armed colleagues.
"What is in their hearts? You do not know who they belong to," a senior officer said.
The factionalization of the ministry began quickly after Saddam Hussein's fall. As with most Iraqi government departments, deputy ministers were appointed to represent each of the country's main political parties. Deputies then distributed jobs among party stalwarts.
The initial winners were the Kurdish Democratic Party and the two Shiite parties, Dawa and the Supreme Islamic Iraqi Council, which sponsors the Badr Organization. The Kurdish party is one of two factions that control Iraq's northern provinces.
Sadr's Al Mahdi militia started late in the patronage game but has made significant inroads, particularly among the guard force that surrounds the ministry compound.
Parties representing the Sunni minority, which controlled Iraq in Hussein's day, have been almost entirely purged from the ministry in the last two years. Three of the ministry's longest-serving Sunni generals have been killed in the last year.
Interior Minister Jawad Bolani, a Shiite leader who took office last summer, has attempted to repair the ministry's reputation. He has removed the leaders of eight of nine national police brigades and 17 of 27 police battalions, which have been accused of killings and mass kidnappings. But change has come slowly.
"There is a lot of pressure, there is influence from everywhere, from everyone: political parties, religious groups, the government itself, from familial and tribal influences," said U.S. Army Brig. Gen. Dana Pittard, who supervised the U.S. advisors to the national police until last month.
"It would be very difficult for anybody to operate as a leader in this environment, and the Iraqis do," Pittard said.
No floor has posed more of a challenge than the seventh, which houses the intelligence division. In theory, the intelligence office should be key to tracking and combating the insurgents who bomb Iraq's streets and marketplaces and attack U.S. soldiers. Instead, the division has been hobbled by a power struggle between two of America's nominal allies in Iraq, the Kurds and the Supreme Islamic Iraqi Council.
The fight came to a head earlier this year with a death threat against the Kurdish deputy minister in charge of intelligence, Hussein Ali Kamal. The Kurdish leader, who controls the eastern wing of the floor, was battling for control of the intelligence apparatus with his deputy, a Badr militia commander who dominates the western side.
Several months ago, U.S. advisors warned Kamal that his life was in danger, most probably from the Badr militia, and advised him to stay in the Green Zone, away from the ministry building in east Baghdad. He stayed out of the ministry for several weeks.
The Shiite deputy, Basheer Wandi, better known as Engineer Ahmed, was appointed in the spring of 2005. Around the same time, Shiite militias began aggressive efforts to target and kill Sunnis in Baghdad, often using police cover to detain Sunnis in secret prisons and carry out assassinations.
They made little effort to hide their methods. A U.S. police advisor recalled a visit to the seventh floor in the summer of 2005, a few months after Engineer Ahmed took office.
"When we left Hussein Ali Kamal's office in the eastern wing of the ministry building, we walked down to the other end to see someone else. As we walked down, there was an Iraqi prisoner on the floor, in handcuffs, hands tied behind him, the floor was just soaked in clear fluid, he was still vomiting and gagging. It looked like he had vomited gallons," the advisor recalled.
One of Engineer Ahmed's work sites was a secret prison set up in a bunker in Baghdad's Jadriya neighborhood, U.S. officials said. In November 2005, U.S. troops uncovered the prison, finding 169 detainees, many showing signs of torture.
After the bunker was found, U.S. officials documented Engineer Ahmed's role. "There were case files written and prepared, presented to Maliki by the Americans that laid out responsibility," said a Western diplomat who spoke on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the subject.
Top American officials eventually decided to back off the effort to hold Engineer Ahmed accountable because of the political problems involved, two Western diplomats said.
Engineer Ahmed enjoyed almost untouchable status in the Badr militia for his reputation as a fighter against Hussein.
"Someone like that is a real war hero for the Shiites. It's very hard for Maliki to allow any action to be taken against them. From our side, it becomes how much political capital do we possess in doing something Maliki is going to find very, very difficult to do," the Western diplomat said.
After the threat on Kamal's life, Engineer Ahmed was transferred. But U.S. and other Western officials, some of whom suspect Maliki's government of playing a shell game to protect militant leaders, say he is now working out of Maliki's security bureau. Shiite officials insisted that Engineer Ahmed was innocent.
U.S. military documents viewed by The Times show that Engineer Ahmed has had frequent contact with the prime minister. He even played a role in drawing up the current U.S.-Iraqi security plan for Baghdad.
Kamal, the Kurdish deputy minister, says he believes the ministry has started reining in Shiite militias but knows suspect figures still operate openly in the ministry, including Gen. Gharrawi on the second floor.
Fifty-seven warrants were issued in November after inspectors discovered evidence of torture at the police base Gharrawi controlled, but only two men have been arrested.
Interior Minister Bolani set up a committee to review the case but blocked the arrest warrant against the general after American officials failed to bring forward the accusing witnesses, Kamal said. "Now [Gharrawi] thinks he is an innocent man. We couldn't bring people to face him," Kamal said.
Western officials see Gharrawi's case as an indicator of whether the Iraqi government is willing to hold senior Shiites accountable for criminal behavior by their forces.
"He's senior enough that the question arises, if he went down, then what's the next step? The next step is for other senior generals or indeed ministers to go down as well," the Western diplomat said.
Even the remaining Sunni members of the police force respect Bolani for trying to rein in the ministry. But they know he depends on a web of fragile political alliances and wonder whether any political figure can undo the effects of several years of recruiting hard-line militia members to the ministry.
"Even if they brought the prophet Muhammad or Jesus, they couldn't control them," said a senior ministry official. "They have an agenda. They follow their parties."
ned.parker@latimes.com
-------------------------------------------
Citation: Ned Parker. "Interior Ministry mirrors chaos of a fractured Iraq," Los Angeles Times, 30 July 2007.
Original URL: http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/iraq/complete/la-fg-interior30jul30,1,4337256.story?coll=la-iraq-complete&ctrack=1&cset=true
-------------------------------------------
By Ned Parker
Los Angeles Times, 30 July 2007
BAGHDAD — The colonel pulls his Mercedes into the parking lot of the drab, 11-story concrete building, scanning the scene for suspicious cars.
Before reaching for the door handle, he studies the people loitering nearby in hopes he will be able to recognize anyone still there later in the day. He grips his pistol, the trigger cocked, wary of an ambush.
He has arrived at his office.
This is Iraq's Ministry of Interior — the balkanized command center for the nation's police and mirror of the deadly factions that have caused the government here to grind nearly to a halt.
The very language that Americans use to describe government — ministries, departments, agencies — belies the reality here of militias that kill under cover of police uniform and remain above the law. Until recently, one or two Interior Ministry police officers were assassinated each week while arriving or leaving the building, probably by fellow officers, senior police officials say.
That killing has been reduced, but Western diplomats still describe the Interior Ministry building as a "federation of oligarchs." Those who work in the building, like the colonel, liken departments to hostile countries. Survival depends on keeping abreast of shifting factional alliances and turf.
On the second floor is Gen. Mahdi Gharrawi, a former national police commander. Last year, U.S. and Iraqi troops found 1,400 prisoners, mostly Sunnis, at a base he controlled in east Baghdad. Many showed signs of torture. The interior minister blocked an arrest warrant against the general this year, senior Iraqi officials confirmed.
The third- and fifth-floor administrative departments are the domain of Prime Minister Nouri Maliki's Islamic Dawa Party, a Shiite group.
The sixth, home to border enforcement and the major crimes unit, belongs to the Badr Organization militia. Its leader, Deputy Minister Ahmed Khafaji, is lauded by some Western officials as an efficient administrator and suspected by others of running secret prisons.
The seventh floor is intelligence, where the Badr Organization and armed Kurdish groups struggle for control.
The ninth floor is shared by the department's inspector general and general counsel, religious Shiites. Their offices have been at the center of efforts to purge the department's remaining Sunni employees. The counsel's predecessor, a Sunni, was killed a year ago.
"They have some bad things on the ninth," says the colonel, a Sunni who, like other ministry officials, spoke on condition of anonymity to guard against retaliation.
The ministry's computer department is on the 10th floor. Two employees were arrested there in February on suspicion of smuggling in explosives, according to police and U.S. military officials. Some Iraqi and U.S. officials say the workers intended to store bombs there. Others say they were plotting to attack the U.S. advisors stationed directly above them on the top floor.
Months after the arrests, it's unclear whether the detainees are Sunni insurgents or followers of Muqtada Sadr, the anti-U.S. Shiite cleric whose portrait stares down from some office walls in a sign of his spreading influence in the ministry.
Partitions divide the building's hallways, and gunmen guard the offices of deputy ministers. Senior police officials march up and down stairs rather than risk an elevator. They walk the halls flanked by bodyguards, wary of armed colleagues.
"What is in their hearts? You do not know who they belong to," a senior officer said.
The factionalization of the ministry began quickly after Saddam Hussein's fall. As with most Iraqi government departments, deputy ministers were appointed to represent each of the country's main political parties. Deputies then distributed jobs among party stalwarts.
The initial winners were the Kurdish Democratic Party and the two Shiite parties, Dawa and the Supreme Islamic Iraqi Council, which sponsors the Badr Organization. The Kurdish party is one of two factions that control Iraq's northern provinces.
Sadr's Al Mahdi militia started late in the patronage game but has made significant inroads, particularly among the guard force that surrounds the ministry compound.
Parties representing the Sunni minority, which controlled Iraq in Hussein's day, have been almost entirely purged from the ministry in the last two years. Three of the ministry's longest-serving Sunni generals have been killed in the last year.
Interior Minister Jawad Bolani, a Shiite leader who took office last summer, has attempted to repair the ministry's reputation. He has removed the leaders of eight of nine national police brigades and 17 of 27 police battalions, which have been accused of killings and mass kidnappings. But change has come slowly.
"There is a lot of pressure, there is influence from everywhere, from everyone: political parties, religious groups, the government itself, from familial and tribal influences," said U.S. Army Brig. Gen. Dana Pittard, who supervised the U.S. advisors to the national police until last month.
"It would be very difficult for anybody to operate as a leader in this environment, and the Iraqis do," Pittard said.
No floor has posed more of a challenge than the seventh, which houses the intelligence division. In theory, the intelligence office should be key to tracking and combating the insurgents who bomb Iraq's streets and marketplaces and attack U.S. soldiers. Instead, the division has been hobbled by a power struggle between two of America's nominal allies in Iraq, the Kurds and the Supreme Islamic Iraqi Council.
The fight came to a head earlier this year with a death threat against the Kurdish deputy minister in charge of intelligence, Hussein Ali Kamal. The Kurdish leader, who controls the eastern wing of the floor, was battling for control of the intelligence apparatus with his deputy, a Badr militia commander who dominates the western side.
Several months ago, U.S. advisors warned Kamal that his life was in danger, most probably from the Badr militia, and advised him to stay in the Green Zone, away from the ministry building in east Baghdad. He stayed out of the ministry for several weeks.
The Shiite deputy, Basheer Wandi, better known as Engineer Ahmed, was appointed in the spring of 2005. Around the same time, Shiite militias began aggressive efforts to target and kill Sunnis in Baghdad, often using police cover to detain Sunnis in secret prisons and carry out assassinations.
They made little effort to hide their methods. A U.S. police advisor recalled a visit to the seventh floor in the summer of 2005, a few months after Engineer Ahmed took office.
"When we left Hussein Ali Kamal's office in the eastern wing of the ministry building, we walked down to the other end to see someone else. As we walked down, there was an Iraqi prisoner on the floor, in handcuffs, hands tied behind him, the floor was just soaked in clear fluid, he was still vomiting and gagging. It looked like he had vomited gallons," the advisor recalled.
One of Engineer Ahmed's work sites was a secret prison set up in a bunker in Baghdad's Jadriya neighborhood, U.S. officials said. In November 2005, U.S. troops uncovered the prison, finding 169 detainees, many showing signs of torture.
After the bunker was found, U.S. officials documented Engineer Ahmed's role. "There were case files written and prepared, presented to Maliki by the Americans that laid out responsibility," said a Western diplomat who spoke on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the subject.
Top American officials eventually decided to back off the effort to hold Engineer Ahmed accountable because of the political problems involved, two Western diplomats said.
Engineer Ahmed enjoyed almost untouchable status in the Badr militia for his reputation as a fighter against Hussein.
"Someone like that is a real war hero for the Shiites. It's very hard for Maliki to allow any action to be taken against them. From our side, it becomes how much political capital do we possess in doing something Maliki is going to find very, very difficult to do," the Western diplomat said.
After the threat on Kamal's life, Engineer Ahmed was transferred. But U.S. and other Western officials, some of whom suspect Maliki's government of playing a shell game to protect militant leaders, say he is now working out of Maliki's security bureau. Shiite officials insisted that Engineer Ahmed was innocent.
U.S. military documents viewed by The Times show that Engineer Ahmed has had frequent contact with the prime minister. He even played a role in drawing up the current U.S.-Iraqi security plan for Baghdad.
Kamal, the Kurdish deputy minister, says he believes the ministry has started reining in Shiite militias but knows suspect figures still operate openly in the ministry, including Gen. Gharrawi on the second floor.
Fifty-seven warrants were issued in November after inspectors discovered evidence of torture at the police base Gharrawi controlled, but only two men have been arrested.
Interior Minister Bolani set up a committee to review the case but blocked the arrest warrant against the general after American officials failed to bring forward the accusing witnesses, Kamal said. "Now [Gharrawi] thinks he is an innocent man. We couldn't bring people to face him," Kamal said.
Western officials see Gharrawi's case as an indicator of whether the Iraqi government is willing to hold senior Shiites accountable for criminal behavior by their forces.
"He's senior enough that the question arises, if he went down, then what's the next step? The next step is for other senior generals or indeed ministers to go down as well," the Western diplomat said.
Even the remaining Sunni members of the police force respect Bolani for trying to rein in the ministry. But they know he depends on a web of fragile political alliances and wonder whether any political figure can undo the effects of several years of recruiting hard-line militia members to the ministry.
"Even if they brought the prophet Muhammad or Jesus, they couldn't control them," said a senior ministry official. "They have an agenda. They follow their parties."
ned.parker@latimes.com
-------------------------------------------
Citation: Ned Parker. "Interior Ministry mirrors chaos of a fractured Iraq," Los Angeles Times, 30 July 2007.
Original URL: http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/iraq/complete/la-fg-interior30jul30,1,4337256.story?coll=la-iraq-complete&ctrack=1&cset=true
-------------------------------------------
Kurdish rebels threaten to draw regional players into Iraq
By Liz Sly
Chicago Tribune, 30 July 2007
MT. QANDIL, Iraq
The paved road runs out about 10 miles from the Iranian border, and so does the authority of the Iraqi government. High in the jagged peaks above lies territory controlled by a radical band of Kurdish leftists that has emerged as the latest threat to the region's imperiled stability.
At the last Iraqi border checkpoint, a squat gray castle flanked by fields of sunflowers and melons, Col. Ahmed Hamid warns travelers that he can't guarantee their safety.
"If anything happens to you, the Iraqi government is not responsible," he cautions. "There could be bombing, and there are terrorists everywhere."
He was referring to fighters of the PKK, or Kurdistan Workers' Party, who have been launching guerrilla attacks against Turkey from the borderlands of the northern Iraqi region of Kurdistan for the last 16 years, in pursuit of their dream of an independent Marxist-Leninist state encompassing the Kurdish areas of Turkey, Iraq, Iran and Syria.
Now this forgotten frontier and the leftist revolutionaries living off its land risk becoming the flash point for a future conflict that could draw in players from across the region.
In response to a recent surge of PKK attacks, Turkey has massed up to 140,000 troops along the Iraq border. They have fired periodic bursts of artillery toward remote villages on the Iraqi side and threatened to launch military action unless the PKK halts its attacks.
Iran also has been reinforcing its side of the border to deter attacks by a PKK-affiliated Iranian Kurdish group. The Iranians also have been shelling the area, most recently on July 22, local villagers say. Since a U.S. warplane flew over it a little over a week ago, the Iranians have bolstered their positions in the area with 2,000 more men, according to Hamid, though he said he thinks the Iranian move is defensive.
"They don't want Kurds escaping into Iran if Turkey attacks the area," he said.
Iraq's Kurds are hoping it won't come to that. They point out that Kurdistan is the one relative success story that the U.S. can point to in Iraq, and they believe the U.S., as one of Turkey's NATO allies, will be able to restrain Ankara.
"The only safe area in Iraq is Kurdistan, and if Turkey destroys this area, it will blacken the face of the Americans," said Gen. Jaber Manda, the deputy commander of the Kurdish pesh merga, the former guerrilla army now responsible for security within Kurdistan.
Iraq's Kurds attribute much of the Turkish saber-rattling to the Turkish election campaign and are hoping that Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan's victory in the July 22 election will diminish the threat of imminent military action.
Erdogan has invited Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki for talks to discuss the PKK. If the talks fail, he warned in an election eve pledge, Turkey will launch military action against northern Iraq.
Kirkuk referendum feared
The Kurds suspect that the real goal of Turkey's military buildup goes far beyond the PKK bases. A referendum is to be held in December in Kirkuk on whether to absorb the oil-rich Iraqi city into the region of Kurdistan, something that Turkey fears would further encourage Kurdish aspirations to independence. Turkey has made it clear that it does not want the referendum to go ahead, citing the potential for civil strife in Iraq, and Kurds speculate that the troops' presence along the border is intended to pressure Iraq into delaying the poll.
If that is the case, then Turkey's military presence along the border threatens to cast a long shadow over Kurdistan's future, deterring investment and undermining stability in the one region in Iraq that is viewed as safe.
"Turkey has a disease, a sensitivity that Kurds should not have anything. They don't want Kurdistan to succeed," said Maj. Gen Aziz Wesyi, commander of the pesh merga's border guards. "If Kurds are a success anywhere in the world, even in Siberia, Turkey will interfere. This is the problem."
In Turkey's view, the PKK is a terrorist organization that has killed more than 15,000 Turks in the past three decades, and Turkey has as much right to wage war against it as the U.S. has to fight terrorism elsewhere. If the U.S. and the Iraqi government do not do more to crack down on the PKK, Erdogan warned in a pre-election TV interview, "We will have to do whatever it takes. And that 'whatever' is obvious."
Iraqi Kurds in no mood to fight
Struggling to recover from decades of conflict, Kurdish officials say they are in no mood for another fight. At most, Turkey will launch limited strikes against the PKK's bases, and Kurdistan will have little choice but to look the other way, predicted Sadi Ahmed Pire, a top official in the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan, or PUK, one of the two main Kurdish parties governing the Kurdish region.
"It takes two sides to make a war," said Pire, an adviser to Iraqi President Jalal Talabani, who is a Kurd. "We have to ignore it. We have not one penny to spend on a another war."
But the Kurdish regional government is equally disinclined to bow to Turkish pressure to rein in the activities of the PKK, leaving uncertain the prospects for dialogue. Iraqi Kurds have fought three times against the PKK over the last 15 years, twice alongside Turkish troops, and on each occasion they were unable to dislodge the PKK from its bases.
That was back when Turkey and Kurdistan enjoyed relatively warm relations, before the fall of Saddam Hussein in 2003 formalized Kurdish autonomy in northern Iraq. Turkey now accuses the Iraqi Kurds of helping the PKK, but Kurdish officials say they have had no contact with the rebel group since a 2000 cease-fire.
"We have nothing to do with them. They do not have our permission to be there," said Ahmed Hussein, the mayor of Qaladiza, the last town before the Iraqi border post. "They don't come here, and we don't go there."
Turkey's past failed incursions demonstrate that military action won't work in the forbidding terrain, said Manda, the Kurdish security official.
"These are very harsh, very high mountains, and they cannot be controlled by the Kurdish government, nor could they be controlled by Saddam, and they couldn't be controlled by Turkey," he said. "They are uncontrollable. Even America couldn't control them."
An oasis in the harsh terrain
A visit to Mt. Qandil, where the PKK's main base in northern Iraq is located, illustrates the challenges inherent in taking on the rebels in their mountain fortress, where soaring cliffs offer natural defenses for a guerrilla army.
The first PKK checkpoint, marked by two flagpoles flying the group's sunshine-logo flag, lies a grueling 20-minute drive from the Iraqi post, up a perilously twisting dirt track that winds high above a steep gorge. Two youthful guards, dressed in olive fatigues bound at the waist with thick Kurdish-style sashes, peer suspiciously at visitors, then wave them on.
At the second checkpoint, an older fighter takes journalists' passports and assigns them an escort wielding an AK-47 to visit the Martyrs' Shrine, an unexpected oasis in the harsh terrain. The shrine is planted with geraniums, peach trees and roses and contains the graves of 67 fallen fighters, all killed in battles with Iraqi Kurds. A lily pond features a running fountain and jumping fish.
This is as far as visitors are permitted to go because of the sensitivity of the situation, according to Farhat, 30, a PKK fighter guarding the shrine who would only give his first name.
"This is a very hot area so we are expecting an attack at any time," he said. "That is why we're here."
The main camp, which includes guest houses, a restaurant and classrooms, lies farther up the mountain; it is sustained by crops grown by the PKK fighters and the proceeds of cross-border smuggling, local Kurds say. They say it is not a military command center so much as a training facility that draws young Kurds from across the region to be schooled in Marxist-Leninist thought, Kurdish nationalism and how to survive in the forbidding terrain.
Though it is safely out of reach of gunners on the Turkish side of the border, nearly 50 miles away, Iranian artillery is just over the mountain ridge. The area is well within the reach of Turkish warplanes, which launched air strikes against the camp in 1992.
Disdain mixed with kinship
Local villagers, living among the PKK in rough-hewn stone houses with satellite dishes perched on their roofs, are nervous. Two days earlier, they cowered in fear at the sound of artillery exploding in the distance.
"They hit the mountains and killed some goats. We were very afraid," said Fatma Hajji. "We expect the attacks to increase."
Officials in the pro-American, pro-foreign investment Kurdish government do not attempt to hide their disdain for the leftist revolutionaries who are jeopardizing their stability. The U.S., as well as Turkey, has designated the PKK a terrorist organization, and Kurdistan would be "more than happy" if the PKK went away, said Pire, the PUK official.
Yet a bond of Kurdish kinship inevitably ties the Kurds governing their own territory to those still fighting for an independent Kurdistan.
"The PKK represents a nation without rights just as we used to be in the past," said Hussein, the Qaladiza mayor and himself a former pesh merga fighter.
"Once it was us who was fighting in those mountains, and Mam [uncle] Jalal was our leader," he said, using a term of endearment to refer to President Talabani. "We suffered thousands of martyrs until we reached the point where we are today, and now Mam Jalal is our president.
"It's a dream come true."
-------------------------------------
Citation: Liz Sly. "Kurdish rebels threaten to draw regional players into Iraq," Chicago Tribune, 30 July 2007.
Original URL: http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/nationworld/chi-pkk_sly_jul30,1,4929359.story?ctrack=3&cset=true
-------------------------------------
Chicago Tribune, 30 July 2007
MT. QANDIL, Iraq
The paved road runs out about 10 miles from the Iranian border, and so does the authority of the Iraqi government. High in the jagged peaks above lies territory controlled by a radical band of Kurdish leftists that has emerged as the latest threat to the region's imperiled stability.
At the last Iraqi border checkpoint, a squat gray castle flanked by fields of sunflowers and melons, Col. Ahmed Hamid warns travelers that he can't guarantee their safety.
"If anything happens to you, the Iraqi government is not responsible," he cautions. "There could be bombing, and there are terrorists everywhere."
He was referring to fighters of the PKK, or Kurdistan Workers' Party, who have been launching guerrilla attacks against Turkey from the borderlands of the northern Iraqi region of Kurdistan for the last 16 years, in pursuit of their dream of an independent Marxist-Leninist state encompassing the Kurdish areas of Turkey, Iraq, Iran and Syria.
Now this forgotten frontier and the leftist revolutionaries living off its land risk becoming the flash point for a future conflict that could draw in players from across the region.
In response to a recent surge of PKK attacks, Turkey has massed up to 140,000 troops along the Iraq border. They have fired periodic bursts of artillery toward remote villages on the Iraqi side and threatened to launch military action unless the PKK halts its attacks.
Iran also has been reinforcing its side of the border to deter attacks by a PKK-affiliated Iranian Kurdish group. The Iranians also have been shelling the area, most recently on July 22, local villagers say. Since a U.S. warplane flew over it a little over a week ago, the Iranians have bolstered their positions in the area with 2,000 more men, according to Hamid, though he said he thinks the Iranian move is defensive.
"They don't want Kurds escaping into Iran if Turkey attacks the area," he said.
Iraq's Kurds are hoping it won't come to that. They point out that Kurdistan is the one relative success story that the U.S. can point to in Iraq, and they believe the U.S., as one of Turkey's NATO allies, will be able to restrain Ankara.
"The only safe area in Iraq is Kurdistan, and if Turkey destroys this area, it will blacken the face of the Americans," said Gen. Jaber Manda, the deputy commander of the Kurdish pesh merga, the former guerrilla army now responsible for security within Kurdistan.
Iraq's Kurds attribute much of the Turkish saber-rattling to the Turkish election campaign and are hoping that Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan's victory in the July 22 election will diminish the threat of imminent military action.
Erdogan has invited Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki for talks to discuss the PKK. If the talks fail, he warned in an election eve pledge, Turkey will launch military action against northern Iraq.
Kirkuk referendum feared
The Kurds suspect that the real goal of Turkey's military buildup goes far beyond the PKK bases. A referendum is to be held in December in Kirkuk on whether to absorb the oil-rich Iraqi city into the region of Kurdistan, something that Turkey fears would further encourage Kurdish aspirations to independence. Turkey has made it clear that it does not want the referendum to go ahead, citing the potential for civil strife in Iraq, and Kurds speculate that the troops' presence along the border is intended to pressure Iraq into delaying the poll.
If that is the case, then Turkey's military presence along the border threatens to cast a long shadow over Kurdistan's future, deterring investment and undermining stability in the one region in Iraq that is viewed as safe.
"Turkey has a disease, a sensitivity that Kurds should not have anything. They don't want Kurdistan to succeed," said Maj. Gen Aziz Wesyi, commander of the pesh merga's border guards. "If Kurds are a success anywhere in the world, even in Siberia, Turkey will interfere. This is the problem."
In Turkey's view, the PKK is a terrorist organization that has killed more than 15,000 Turks in the past three decades, and Turkey has as much right to wage war against it as the U.S. has to fight terrorism elsewhere. If the U.S. and the Iraqi government do not do more to crack down on the PKK, Erdogan warned in a pre-election TV interview, "We will have to do whatever it takes. And that 'whatever' is obvious."
Iraqi Kurds in no mood to fight
Struggling to recover from decades of conflict, Kurdish officials say they are in no mood for another fight. At most, Turkey will launch limited strikes against the PKK's bases, and Kurdistan will have little choice but to look the other way, predicted Sadi Ahmed Pire, a top official in the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan, or PUK, one of the two main Kurdish parties governing the Kurdish region.
"It takes two sides to make a war," said Pire, an adviser to Iraqi President Jalal Talabani, who is a Kurd. "We have to ignore it. We have not one penny to spend on a another war."
But the Kurdish regional government is equally disinclined to bow to Turkish pressure to rein in the activities of the PKK, leaving uncertain the prospects for dialogue. Iraqi Kurds have fought three times against the PKK over the last 15 years, twice alongside Turkish troops, and on each occasion they were unable to dislodge the PKK from its bases.
That was back when Turkey and Kurdistan enjoyed relatively warm relations, before the fall of Saddam Hussein in 2003 formalized Kurdish autonomy in northern Iraq. Turkey now accuses the Iraqi Kurds of helping the PKK, but Kurdish officials say they have had no contact with the rebel group since a 2000 cease-fire.
"We have nothing to do with them. They do not have our permission to be there," said Ahmed Hussein, the mayor of Qaladiza, the last town before the Iraqi border post. "They don't come here, and we don't go there."
Turkey's past failed incursions demonstrate that military action won't work in the forbidding terrain, said Manda, the Kurdish security official.
"These are very harsh, very high mountains, and they cannot be controlled by the Kurdish government, nor could they be controlled by Saddam, and they couldn't be controlled by Turkey," he said. "They are uncontrollable. Even America couldn't control them."
An oasis in the harsh terrain
A visit to Mt. Qandil, where the PKK's main base in northern Iraq is located, illustrates the challenges inherent in taking on the rebels in their mountain fortress, where soaring cliffs offer natural defenses for a guerrilla army.
The first PKK checkpoint, marked by two flagpoles flying the group's sunshine-logo flag, lies a grueling 20-minute drive from the Iraqi post, up a perilously twisting dirt track that winds high above a steep gorge. Two youthful guards, dressed in olive fatigues bound at the waist with thick Kurdish-style sashes, peer suspiciously at visitors, then wave them on.
At the second checkpoint, an older fighter takes journalists' passports and assigns them an escort wielding an AK-47 to visit the Martyrs' Shrine, an unexpected oasis in the harsh terrain. The shrine is planted with geraniums, peach trees and roses and contains the graves of 67 fallen fighters, all killed in battles with Iraqi Kurds. A lily pond features a running fountain and jumping fish.
This is as far as visitors are permitted to go because of the sensitivity of the situation, according to Farhat, 30, a PKK fighter guarding the shrine who would only give his first name.
"This is a very hot area so we are expecting an attack at any time," he said. "That is why we're here."
The main camp, which includes guest houses, a restaurant and classrooms, lies farther up the mountain; it is sustained by crops grown by the PKK fighters and the proceeds of cross-border smuggling, local Kurds say. They say it is not a military command center so much as a training facility that draws young Kurds from across the region to be schooled in Marxist-Leninist thought, Kurdish nationalism and how to survive in the forbidding terrain.
Though it is safely out of reach of gunners on the Turkish side of the border, nearly 50 miles away, Iranian artillery is just over the mountain ridge. The area is well within the reach of Turkish warplanes, which launched air strikes against the camp in 1992.
Disdain mixed with kinship
Local villagers, living among the PKK in rough-hewn stone houses with satellite dishes perched on their roofs, are nervous. Two days earlier, they cowered in fear at the sound of artillery exploding in the distance.
"They hit the mountains and killed some goats. We were very afraid," said Fatma Hajji. "We expect the attacks to increase."
Officials in the pro-American, pro-foreign investment Kurdish government do not attempt to hide their disdain for the leftist revolutionaries who are jeopardizing their stability. The U.S., as well as Turkey, has designated the PKK a terrorist organization, and Kurdistan would be "more than happy" if the PKK went away, said Pire, the PUK official.
Yet a bond of Kurdish kinship inevitably ties the Kurds governing their own territory to those still fighting for an independent Kurdistan.
"The PKK represents a nation without rights just as we used to be in the past," said Hussein, the Qaladiza mayor and himself a former pesh merga fighter.
"Once it was us who was fighting in those mountains, and Mam [uncle] Jalal was our leader," he said, using a term of endearment to refer to President Talabani. "We suffered thousands of martyrs until we reached the point where we are today, and now Mam Jalal is our president.
"It's a dream come true."
-------------------------------------
Citation: Liz Sly. "Kurdish rebels threaten to draw regional players into Iraq," Chicago Tribune, 30 July 2007.
Original URL: http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/nationworld/chi-pkk_sly_jul30,1,4929359.story?ctrack=3&cset=true
-------------------------------------
Private contractors outnumber U.S. troops in Iraq
New U.S. data show how heavily the Bush administration has relied on corporations to carry out the occupation of the war-torn nation.
By T. Christian Miller
Los Angeles Times, 04 July 2007
The number of U.S.-paid private contractors in Iraq now exceeds that of American combat troops, newly released figures show, raising fresh questions about the privatization of the war effort and the government's capacity to carry out military and rebuilding campaigns.
More than 180,000 civilians — including Americans, foreigners and Iraqis — are working in Iraq under U.S. contracts, according to State and Defense department figures obtained by the Los Angeles Times.
Including the recent troop buildup, 160,000 soldiers and a few thousand civilian government employees are stationed in Iraq.
The total number of private contractors, far higher than previously reported, shows how heavily the Bush administration has relied on corporations to carry out the occupation of Iraq — a mission criticized as being undermanned.
"These numbers are big," said Peter Singer, a Brookings Institution scholar who has written on military contracting. "They illustrate better than anything that we went in without enough troops. This is not the coalition of the willing. It's the coalition of the billing."
The numbers include at least 21,000 Americans, 43,000 foreign contractors and about 118,000 Iraqis — all employed in Iraq by U.S. tax dollars, according to the most recent government data.
The array of private workers promises to be a factor in debates on a range of policy issues, including the privatization of military jobs and the number of Iraqi refugees allowed to resettle in the U.S.
But there are also signs that even those mounting numbers may not capture the full picture. Private security contractors, who are hired to protect government officials and buildings, were not fully counted in the survey, according to industry and government officials.
Continuing uncertainty over the numbers of armed contractors drew special criticism from military experts.
"We don't have control of all the coalition guns in Iraq. That's dangerous for our country," said William Nash, a retired Army general and reconstruction expert. The Pentagon "is hiring guns. You can rationalize it all you want, but that's obscene."
Although private companies have played a role in conflicts since the American Revolution, the U.S. has relied more on contractors in Iraq than in any other war, according to military experts.
Contractors perform functions including construction, security and weapons system maintenance.
Military officials say contractors cut costs while allowing troops to focus on fighting rather than on other tasks.
"The only reason we have contractors is to support the war fighter," said Gary Motsek, the assistant deputy undersecretary of Defense who oversees contractors. "Fundamentally, they're supporting the mission as required."
But critics worry that troops and their missions could be jeopardized if contractors, functioning outside the military's command and control, refuse to make deliveries of vital supplies under fire.
At one point in 2004, for example, U.S. forces were put on food rations when drivers balked at taking supplies into a combat zone.
Adding an element of potential confusion, no single agency keeps track of the number or location of contractors.
In response to demands from Congress, the U.S. Central Command began a census last year of the number of contractors working on U.S. and Iraqi bases to determine how much food, water and shelter was needed.
That census, provided to The Times under the Freedom of Information Act, shows about 130,000 contractors and subcontractors of different nationalities working at U.S. and Iraqi military bases.
However, U.S. military officials acknowledged that the census did not include other government agencies, including the U.S. Agency for International Development and the State Department.
Last month, USAID reported about 53,000 Iraqis employed under U.S. reconstruction contracts, doing jobs such as garbage pickup and helping to teach democracy. In interviews, agency officials said an additional 300 Americans and foreigners worked as contractors for the agency.
State Department officials said they could not provide the department's number of contractors. Of about 5,000 people affiliated with the U.S. Embassy in Iraq, about 300 are State Department employees. The rest are a mix of other government agency workers and contractors, many of whom are building the new embassy.
"There are very few of us, and we're way undermanned," said one State Department official who spoke on condition of anonymity. "We have significant shortages of people. It's been that way since before [the war], and it's still that way."
The companies with the largest number of employees are foreign firms in the Middle East that subcontract to KBR, the Houston-based oil services company, according to the Central Command database. KBR, once a subsidiary of Halliburton Co., provides logistics support to troops, the single largest contract in Iraq.
Middle Eastern companies, including Kulak Construction Co. of Turkey and Projects International of Dubai, supply labor from Third World countries to KBR and other U.S. companies for menial work on U.S. bases and rebuilding projects. Foreigners are used instead of Iraqis because of fears that insurgents could infiltrate projects.
KBR is by far the largest employer of Americans, with nearly 14,000 U.S. workers. Other large employers of Americans in Iraq include New York-based L-3 Communications, which holds a contract to provide translators to troops, and ITT Corp., a New York engineering and technology firm.
The most controversial contractors are those working for private security companies, including Blackwater, Triple Canopy and Erinys. They guard sensitive sites and provide protection to U.S. and Iraqi government officials and businessmen.
Security contractors draw some of the sharpest criticism, much of it from military policy experts who say their jobs should be done by the military. On several occasions, heavily armed private contractors have engaged in firefights when attacked by Iraqi insurgents.
Others worry that the private security contractors lack accountability. Although scores of troops have been prosecuted for serious crimes, only a handful of private security contractors have faced legal charges.
The number of private security contractors in Iraq remains unclear, despite Central Command's latest census. The Times identified 21 security companies in the Central Command database, deploying 10,800 men.
However, the Defense Department's Motsek, who monitors contractors, said the Pentagon estimated the total was 6,000.
Both figures are far below the private security industry's own estimate of about 30,000 private security contractors working for government agencies, nonprofit organizations, media outlets and businesses.
Industry officials said that private security companies helped reduce the number of troops needed in Iraq and provided jobs to Iraqis — a benefit in a country with high unemployment.
"A guy who is working for a [private security company] is not out on the street doing something inimical to our interests," said Lawrence Peter, director of the Private Security Company Assn. of Iraq.
Not surprisingly, Iraqis make up the largest number of civilian employees under U.S. contracts. Typically, the government contracts with an American firm, which then subcontracts with an Iraqi firm to do the job.
Stan Soloway, president of the Professional Services Council, a contractors' trade group, said the number of Iraqis reflected the importance of the reconstruction and economic development efforts to the overall U.S. mission in Iraq.
"That's not work that the government does or has ever done…. That's work that is going to be done by companies and to some extent by" nongovernmental organizations, Soloway said. "People tend to think that these are contractors on the battlefield, and they're not."
The Iraqis have been the most difficult to track. As recently as May, the Pentagon told Congress that 22,000 Iraqis were employed by its contractors. But the Pentagon number recently jumped to 65,000 — a result of closer inspection of contracts, an official said.
The total number of Iraqis employed under U.S. contracts is important, in part because it may influence debate in Congress regarding how many Iraqis will be allowed to come to the U.S. to escape violence in their homeland.
This year, the U.S. planned to cap that number at 7,000 a year. To date, however, only a few dozen Iraqis have been admitted, according to State Department figures.
Kirk Johnson, head of the List Project, which seeks to increase the admission of Iraqis, said that the U.S. needed to provide a haven to those who worked most closely with American officials.
"We all say we are grateful to these Iraqis," Johnson said. "How can we be the only superpower in the world that can't implement what we recognize as a moral imperative?"
t.christian.miller@latimes.com
--
(INFOBOX BELOW)
The back story
Information in this article is based in part on a database of contractors in Iraq obtained by The Times under the Freedom of Information Act, which allows the public access to government records.
The database is the result of a census conducted earlier this year by the U.S. Central Command.
The census found about 130,000 contractors working for 632 companies holding contracts in Iraq with the Defense Department and a handful of other federal agencies.
The Times received the database last month, four months after first requesting it. Because the Freedom of Information Act law requires an agency to provide only information as of the date of the request, the census is based on figures as of February. During interviews, Pentagon officials said the census had since been updated, and they provided additional figures based on the update.
--
Los Angeles Times
--
--
Contractors in Iraq
There are more U.S.-paid private contractors than there are American combat troops in Iraq.
Contractors: 180,000
U.S. troops: 160,000
--
Nationality of contractors*
118,000 Iraqis
43,000 non-U.S. foreigners
21,000 Americans
--
Top contractors
Company: Kulak Construction Co.
Description: Based in Turkey, supplies construction workers to U.S. bases
Total employees: 30,301
--
Company: KBR
Description: Based in Houston, supplies logistics support to U.S. troops
Total employees: 15,336
--
Company: Prime Projects International
Description: Based in Dubai, supplies labor for logistics support
Total employees: 10,560
--
Company: L-3 Communications
Description: Based in New York, provides translators and other services
Total employees: 5,886
--
Company: Gulf Catering Co.
Description: Based in Saudi Arabia, provides kitchen services to U.S. troops
Total employees: 4,002
--
Company: 77 Construction
Description: Based in Irbil, Iraq, provides logistics support to troops
Total employees: 3,219
--
Company: ECC
Description: Based in Burlingame, Calif, works on reconstruction projects
Total employees: 2,390
--
Company: Serka Group
Description: Based in Turkey, supplies logistics support to U.S. bases
Total employees: 2,250
--
Company: IPBD Ltd.
Description: Based in England, supplies labor, laundry services and other support
Total employees: 2,164
--
Company: Daoud & Partners Co.
Description: Based in Amman, Jordan, supplies labor for logistics support
Total employees: 2,092
--
Company: EOD Technology Inc
Description: Based in Lenoir City, Tenn., supplies security, explosives demolition and other services
Total employees: 1,913
--
Note: Data are as of February, which is most current available.
*Approximate - numbers rounded
Sources: U.S. Central Command, Times reporting
--
Paul Duginski Los Angeles Times
--------------------------------------------
Citation: T. Christian Miller. "Private contractors outnumber U.S. troops in Iraq," Los Angeles Times, 04 July 2007.
Original URL: http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/la-na-private4jul04,0,5808980.story?coll=la-home-center
--------------------------------------------
When is an accidental civilian death not an accident?
When the Air Force asks permission first. In Iraq and Afghanistan, the U.S. military has rules for killing civilians. But do the rules actually save lives?
By Mark Benjamin
Salon.com, 30 July 2007
At the beginning of the Iraq war in 2003, there was one number that was crucial to American military officials as they planned airstrikes.
"The magic number was 30," said Marc Garlasco, who was the Pentagon's chief of high-value targeting at the start of the war. "That means that if you hit 30 as the anticipated number of civilians killed, the airstrike had to go to Rumsfeld or Bush personally to sign off." If the expected number of civilian deaths was less than 30, however, neither the president nor the secretary of defense needed to know.
Four years later, the U.S. military still has rules in place that permit the killing of civilians in airstrikes. In fact, the number of anticipated civilian deaths is carefully appraised beforehand in a calculation known as the collateral damage estimate, which is then reviewed by commanders and military attorneys who must decide if the benefits of the strike outweigh the cost in innocent civilian lives. The military's goal is to reconcile precision-bombing technology with the web of international treaties, including the Geneva Conventions, designed to protect civilians during wartime under a legal rubric called the Law of Armed Conflict.
But what these rules mean is that killing civilians is legal -- as long as the deaths are the result of a strike at a legitimate military target. And it also means that some unknown percentage of civilian deaths from airstrikes in Iraq and Afghanistan are not accidents.
"'Accident' is not the right word," said Sarah Holewinski, executive director of the Campaign for Innocent Victims in Conflict, which works to help remunerate civilians caught in the crossfire. "They call them accidental deaths, but they are not," said Holewinski. "They know what they are doing."
The decisions the bomb planners are making about who lives and who dies are increasingly important. While Washington's political elite wrestles with how to wind down the ground war in Iraq, the air wars over Iraq and Afghanistan are escalating sharply. In the first six and a half months of 2007, according to a Human Rights Watch database, the U.S. Air Force dropped 527,860 pounds of bombs in Afghanistan -- nearly equal to the 575,500 pounds during all of 2006, according to that database. In Iraq, the tonnage is lower, but the increase is more dramatic. In the first half of this year, 222,000 pounds of bombs fell in Iraq, compared to 61,500 during 2006.
Today, thanks to improved technology and intelligence, U.S. officials know with more certainty than ever that they may kill innocent civilians in an airstrike at a legitimate military target, like a key insurgent leader. But the same technology, they say, also permits them to minimize the inevitable civilian casualties. Col. Gary Crowder, the deputy director of the Combined Air Operations Center in Qatar, the command hub running the air wars in both Iraq and Afghanistan, calls it "precision as a method to decrease casualties rather than a method to hit the target." Within the past two years, the military has come to recognize that collateral damage is a crucial consideration in the larger battle for hearts and minds. Is the collateral damage estimate a particularly chilling example of military bureaucracy, or is it a modern and efficient tool for saving lives?
What is happening in Iraq and Afghanistan today is a far cry from the sweeping, indiscriminate "carpet bombing" of Vietnam 40 years ago, when nobody really knew when the strings of falling bombs from massive B-52s might be landing on civilians. It's also different from the situation in the first invasion of Iraq 16 years ago, when, despite all the publicity about "smart bombs," 90 percent of the aerial munitions used were blunt instruments -- old-fashioned, unguided "dumb bombs." Things have even changed a lot since the invasion of Iraq four years ago, when estimates of collateral damage were crude and based on outdated information.
The transformation began with the intersection of high technology and bad publicity in the first Gulf War. The pivotal moment was the airstrike that killed approximately 288 Iraqis sheltered in the al-Firdos bunker in Baghdad on Feb. 13, 1991. After that incident the man running the war, Gen. Norman Schwarzkopf, personally reviewed every proposed target and reportedly called off some strikes. The military realized that the advent of precision-guided munitions gave it the ability to minimize collateral damage as well as increase the percentage of targets destroyed. The first Gulf War gave birth to a modern military bureaucracy that could analyze and approve airstrikes based, in part, on anticipated civilian casualties.
A dozen years later, during the opening phase of the second Iraq war, there was a system in place for calculating those casualties. In 2003, collateral damage estimates of civilian deaths from planned airstrikes were done with computer models using outdated population density statistics. There was also that magic number, 30, that required a signature from someone in Washington.
According to Crowder, there was a higher tolerance for civilian casualties during the first phase of the war than there is at present. Garlasco, now a senior military analyst at Human Rights Watch, describes a callous approach back in 2003. "It is important to understand that in January 2003 when the target packages were 'finalized,' we had about 300 targets that were considered 'high CD,' or high collateral damage, meaning over 30," Garlasco wrote in an e-mail. "We had the Air Force play with the bomb angles, fusing, bomb tonnage, etc., and got that number down to about 25."
Garlasco said every high-CD target was ultimately approved except two structures holding foreign journalists, the Al-Rasheed hotel and Saddam's Ministry of Information.
The days of the "magic number" of 30 are over. The sign-off process now used to approve airstrikes in Iraq and Afghanistan is classified. But there is still methodology in place for collateral damage estimates. Planners must still ask and answer a set series of questions about each airstrike, including the number of expected civilian casualties.
The collateral damage must be proportional to the military advantage gained by the strike. "You can't deliberately target civilians," explained Georgetown law professor David Koplow. "But the proportionality judgment contemplates that sometimes civilians will be harmed in pursuit of a military strike."
The number of civilian casualties is still a key factor in determining which strikes are approved and who must sign off. "That will determine who the approval authority is," Crowder said. Strikes likely to involve higher collateral damage still require higher approval.
Four years after the invasion there is far better on-the-ground intelligence and far better technology. The skies over both Iraq and Afghanistan are filled with buzzing drones armed with powerful cameras. Military officials hundreds of miles away planning an airstrike can, in some cases, literally count the number of women and children near a target by staring at a screen. In other cases, troops on the ground calling in airstrikes can see nearby civilians with their own eyes. And individual "smart bombs" dropped in Iraq or Afghanistan are steered to pinpoint targets with stunning precision, sometimes guided by a laser shot by someone standing on the ground staring at the target.
We do know some of the details of the classified sign-off process. Many of the tough calls are made in Crowder's command center in Qatar, 700 miles south of Baghdad. It is the brain center in control of every detail of the air wars above Iraq and Afghanistan. In the air-conditioned comfort of that command hub, Crowder's team assemble explicit "air-tasking orders" for almost all of the airplanes flying over the two war zones. This includes targets that have been reviewed by commanders and vetted by attorneys.
There are two kinds of airstrikes. The first are preplanned strikes aimed at what are sometimes called "deliberate targets." An example would be a bridge, a Taliban leader, or an insurgent safe house quietly under surveillance from a circling drone. The military calls this new capability to eye a target for a long time "persistent look."
The cold, hard math of estimating collateral damage for preplanned strikes includes a calculation of the precise number of expected civilian deaths from each bomb, and it is made every day for every strike in the air wars over Iraq and Afghanistan. This grisly number is what must be weighed against the military value of the target in question. Garlasco calls that process "the macabre calculus of trying to determine how many dead civilians are worth a dead bad guy."
Planners say they go to great lengths to minimize collateral damage. The size of each bomb, ranging from 250 pounds to the extremely devastating 2,000-pound varieties, is minimized. The direction of the approach of the aircraft is altered to focus the explosive force away from civilians. And extreme prejudice is supposed to be employed when civilians are thought to be within 1,000 feet of a target, a situation referred to as "danger close." Military officials even consider what is on the ground underneath an approaching plane to minimize the damage in case a malfunction causes munitions to fall short of their targets. "We always look at our run-in heading and what is underneath the run-in heading," Crowder said. "This is a constant evolution of trying to get more and more precision."
When the assessment has been made, the planners submit the proposed airstrike to a military attorney whose job is to make sure the assessment has been done according to the law and that the anticipated casualties are within set limits.
These kinds of deliberate targets, however, represent a minority of the airstrikes in Iraq and Afghanistan. Much more common is the second category of airstrike: close air support. These are hastily arranged attacks from the air to relieve troops on the ground under enemy fire. They present a unique set of challenges with respect to protecting civilians.
Some planes are tasked to simply circle Iraq and Afghanistan, patrol air space, and wait for the troops on the ground, pinned down by enemy fire, to call for bombs. These situations are dubbed "troops in contact."
During "troops in contact" situations, the targeting for an airstrike is done by a person called a joint terminal attack controller -- the person on the ground authorized to aim the bombs. In some cases, the controller is out in the field right next to the troops in contact. And he is likely to aim those bombs using either a laser or a GPS system.
In the laser method, the controller on the ground aims the laser at the target. A pilot high above that target identifies the laser dot, and the coordinates of the dot are routed to the "smart bomb" under the nearby circling airplane. Once released, the bomb steers itself to the target.
A controller may instead rely on a GPS system and laser range finder to calculate the coordinates of the target. The controller reads the coordinates of the target to the pilot above via radio. The pilot punches in the numbers, reads the coordinates back to the controller -- and it is bombs away.
Controllers carry data on collateral damage ranges for each variety of bomb. But when troops are in a firefight and need immediate help from the air, decisions have to be made quickly, with greater emphasis on protecting U.S. forces. Steps are taken to minimize civilian deaths, but there simply is no time for a formal collateral damage assessment. Often there is only limited information on where any vulnerable civilians might be. "In those kinds of circumstances," Crowder said, "that is where you see most of the civilians being killed."
The result of improved technology and intelligence is that the military is more likely to hold its fire in 2007 than in 2003. In fact in the large majority of cases, Crowder says, commanders simply do not drop bombs at all if intelligence shows with some certainty that any innocent civilians are likely to be killed in a preplanned airstrike. "Our default is not to drop," he said in a telephone interview from Qatar. Rare situations do still arise when the excruciating decision goes the other way. "There are circumstances where we accept the fact that a target is of such value that there may be civilian casualties," Crowder said. "That is a hard calculation to make."
But all this effort to minimize civilian casualties does not stem from altruism alone. In the past two years, as American military officials have grasped the fact that they are dealing with a long-term insurgency, they've also become aware that the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan may hinge on the hearts and minds of the civilians who sometimes end up in the crosshairs. Crowder is studying "A Savage War of Peace," Alistair Horne's 1977 history of the French occupation of Algeria, illustrative of the dynamics of an insurgency. "It is an issue ultimately of growing the capacity of indigenous forces," Crowder said. "Every civilian casualty we create undermines the support for those forces and reduces the likelihood of obtaining our objective."
Other U.S. officials agree that civilian deaths from airstrikes erode support for U.S. forces and the governments they are trying to prop up. "You could win the battle and lose the war," said Air Force Maj. John Thomas, a spokesman for the International Security Assistance Force in Afghanistan, the NATO force trying to provide stability in that country and help the government led by President Hamid Karzai. "The fight is to not lose the support of the Afghan people or this fledgling Afghan government," Thomas said in an interview from Kabul.
Civilian deaths are a particularly sensitive issue for U.S. officials in Afghanistan, after being stung this summer by a string of harrowing headlines. News reports last month noted allegations of 90 civilian deaths from airstrikes over a 10-day period. Karzai held a news conference last month calling air operations over Afghanistan "careless." Then on June 19, the Agency Coordinating Body for Afghan Relief, representing nearly 100 humanitarian groups, released a statement of "strong concern" about the death toll.
Is the criticism fair? Does the military's system of collateral damage assessment work? The success of U.S. efforts to minimize casualties from airstrikes is extremely difficult to judge, since statistics for Iraqi and Afghan fatalities are scarce and hotly debated. In Afghanistan in particular, what is happening on the ground is difficult to assess. The terrain is rough and remote. There are few reliable witnesses or independent assessments of civilian deaths. But it is at least possible that civilian deaths from airstrikes are decreasing even as the tonnage of bombs dropped increases.
A study published in the British medical journal Lancet last October painted a famously bleak picture of spiraling violence in Iraq. The Lancet study came in at the high end of casualty estimates for the war, estimating that 655,000 more Iraqis have died since the invasion than would have died if the occupation had never occurred, and that fully 601,000 of those deaths were violent. The study said 31 percent of the violent deaths were attributable to coalition forces. The study, overseen by epidemiologists at Johns Hopkins and derided by the Bush administration as not credible, said the number of violent deaths attributable to coalition forces has increased every year since the invasion. But there was one exception: Compared with 2003 and 2004, the number of reported deaths from airstrikes decreased in 2006.
Anecdotally, U.S. officials also add some caveats to recent civilian casualty headlines. They acknowledge that mistaken intelligence has led to some truly accidental deaths, including the deaths of children. But in other cases, they say, Taliban or al-Qaida sympathizers appear to be delivering inflated reports of civilian deaths. The Taliban also fights among civilians, dramatically increasing the likelihood of civilian deaths when troops call for close air support. (U.S. officials say that during a recent firefight, innocent civilians were forced into a trench alongside Taliban fighters so that any airstrike would result in the significant loss of civilian lives).
The unreliability of civilian casualty numbers from Afghanistan is exemplified by an Associated Press report from Friday, July 27. The AP said that airstrikes in Helmand province, in support of NATO troops, had killed 50 Taliban and 28 civilians. The source was Gereshk district chief Abdul Manaf Khan, who based his claims on reports from villagers. The AP noted that Khan's claims could not be verified because of the remote location -- and that there was apparently no evidence. Though the clashes had started Thursday night, Khan said the bodies had already been buried, even as fighting continued Friday. The article also quoted Malim Mirwali, a member of Parliament for Gereshk, who claimed that more than 40 civilians had been killed in that airstrike.
In a telephone call from Kabul, Garlasco, the airstrike chief turned human rights advocate, said he is trying to get to the bottom of the overall civilian casualty numbers in Afghanistan. According to Garlasco, his research to date shows that the number of civilian deaths reported from airstrikes is inflated.
But one of the hurdles to determining whether the U.S. military is successfully limiting civilian casualties is that the military itself isn't doing a good job of counting. That's why advocates for civilians in Iraq and Afghanistan, while applauding the military's steps to minimize civilian deaths, remain skeptical about whether those steps are working.
The military is supposed to go back and review an airstrike using aerial footage and, when possible, conduct an inspection by troops on the ground. But thorough postmortems are rare. The military devotes resources to preventing civilian casualties before munitions are used, the advocates say, but it isn't devoting the same energy to see if its preventive measures are working. "You have to do this collateral damage estimate beforehand," said Holewinski, from the Campaign for Innocent Victims in Conflict. "And afterwards, in order to make sure you did it correctly, you are supposed to do a collateral damage assessment. And that is what they rarely do." Crowder said that the military reviews airstrikes from aerial footage, but admitted that on-the-ground investigations are far from guaranteed. "In some cases, you can't get there in a timely fashion."
And regardless of whether the American measures are effective, human rights activists are well aware that the NATO forces fighting in Afghanistan have tighter rules about collateral damage than the Americans. The statement issued by human rights groups last month, which cited "disproportionate and indiscriminate" air power -- language quoted from the Law of Armed Conflict -- directed most of its venom at "forces or agencies outside NATO command, often American forces in Operation Enduring Freedom."
In an unconventional and complicated arrangement in Afghanistan, roughly 32,000 NATO-led troops are conducting stabilization activities there. Meanwhile, approximately 21,000 U.S. service members are conducting counterterrorism operations in Afghanistan under Operation Enduring Freedom, currently spearheaded by the 82nd Airborne Division and special operations units. Commanders from NATO and Operation Enduring Freedom both call in airstrikes, carried out almost exclusively by U.S. aircraft getting their air-tasking orders from Crowder's shop in Qatar, the Combined Air Operations Center.
NATO forces conduct their own collateral damage estimates for preplanned targets like Taliban leaders. Thomas, the spokesman in Kabul, says NATO forces have adopted a "zero tolerance" policy on civilian casualties for preplanned strikes. This is because the NATO stabilization mission is particularly dependent on the good will of the Afghan people. (And NATO partners are extremely sensitive to civilian casualties.)
Thomas calls the airstrike protocol there "the most strict possible rules for civilian casualties that you could possibly have." Forces there will not carry out a strike "if there is any reasonable evidence or reason to think that there might be a single civilian in a compound or an area."
Even for close air support for troops fighting under the NATO flag, Thomas says, forces go to great lengths to avoid dropping bombs on innocent civilians. "Self-defense trumps everything," he said, noting that close air support is far more prevalent than preplanned strikes. "But even in a self-defense-type situation, the idea is to try to break contact some other way to avoid endangering civilians."
But Thomas also confirms that the standards for civilian deaths are "more strict" for NATO forces than for U.S. forces in Operation Enduring Freedom. "Our job is not a counterterrorism mission," Thomas explained. "That's not the same for other missions going on here or in Iraq."
"Yes, the Taliban are killing civilians," said Garlasco, summarizing the situation. "And yes, the U.S. is doing its darnedest to make sure they don't ... But when it really comes down to it, they are still dropping the bombs, so it is incumbent on them at all times to do their best and follow international law to make sure they are not killing innocent civilians." On whether they are succeeding in preventing civilian deaths, Garlasco said, "I really think they are trying very hard. It's tough."
--------------------------------------
Citation: Mark Benjamin. "When is an accidental civilian death not an accident?," Salon.com, 30 July 2007.
Original URL: http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2007/07/30/collateral_damage/
--------------------------------------
By Mark Benjamin
Salon.com, 30 July 2007
At the beginning of the Iraq war in 2003, there was one number that was crucial to American military officials as they planned airstrikes.
"The magic number was 30," said Marc Garlasco, who was the Pentagon's chief of high-value targeting at the start of the war. "That means that if you hit 30 as the anticipated number of civilians killed, the airstrike had to go to Rumsfeld or Bush personally to sign off." If the expected number of civilian deaths was less than 30, however, neither the president nor the secretary of defense needed to know.
Four years later, the U.S. military still has rules in place that permit the killing of civilians in airstrikes. In fact, the number of anticipated civilian deaths is carefully appraised beforehand in a calculation known as the collateral damage estimate, which is then reviewed by commanders and military attorneys who must decide if the benefits of the strike outweigh the cost in innocent civilian lives. The military's goal is to reconcile precision-bombing technology with the web of international treaties, including the Geneva Conventions, designed to protect civilians during wartime under a legal rubric called the Law of Armed Conflict.
But what these rules mean is that killing civilians is legal -- as long as the deaths are the result of a strike at a legitimate military target. And it also means that some unknown percentage of civilian deaths from airstrikes in Iraq and Afghanistan are not accidents.
"'Accident' is not the right word," said Sarah Holewinski, executive director of the Campaign for Innocent Victims in Conflict, which works to help remunerate civilians caught in the crossfire. "They call them accidental deaths, but they are not," said Holewinski. "They know what they are doing."
The decisions the bomb planners are making about who lives and who dies are increasingly important. While Washington's political elite wrestles with how to wind down the ground war in Iraq, the air wars over Iraq and Afghanistan are escalating sharply. In the first six and a half months of 2007, according to a Human Rights Watch database, the U.S. Air Force dropped 527,860 pounds of bombs in Afghanistan -- nearly equal to the 575,500 pounds during all of 2006, according to that database. In Iraq, the tonnage is lower, but the increase is more dramatic. In the first half of this year, 222,000 pounds of bombs fell in Iraq, compared to 61,500 during 2006.
Today, thanks to improved technology and intelligence, U.S. officials know with more certainty than ever that they may kill innocent civilians in an airstrike at a legitimate military target, like a key insurgent leader. But the same technology, they say, also permits them to minimize the inevitable civilian casualties. Col. Gary Crowder, the deputy director of the Combined Air Operations Center in Qatar, the command hub running the air wars in both Iraq and Afghanistan, calls it "precision as a method to decrease casualties rather than a method to hit the target." Within the past two years, the military has come to recognize that collateral damage is a crucial consideration in the larger battle for hearts and minds. Is the collateral damage estimate a particularly chilling example of military bureaucracy, or is it a modern and efficient tool for saving lives?
What is happening in Iraq and Afghanistan today is a far cry from the sweeping, indiscriminate "carpet bombing" of Vietnam 40 years ago, when nobody really knew when the strings of falling bombs from massive B-52s might be landing on civilians. It's also different from the situation in the first invasion of Iraq 16 years ago, when, despite all the publicity about "smart bombs," 90 percent of the aerial munitions used were blunt instruments -- old-fashioned, unguided "dumb bombs." Things have even changed a lot since the invasion of Iraq four years ago, when estimates of collateral damage were crude and based on outdated information.
The transformation began with the intersection of high technology and bad publicity in the first Gulf War. The pivotal moment was the airstrike that killed approximately 288 Iraqis sheltered in the al-Firdos bunker in Baghdad on Feb. 13, 1991. After that incident the man running the war, Gen. Norman Schwarzkopf, personally reviewed every proposed target and reportedly called off some strikes. The military realized that the advent of precision-guided munitions gave it the ability to minimize collateral damage as well as increase the percentage of targets destroyed. The first Gulf War gave birth to a modern military bureaucracy that could analyze and approve airstrikes based, in part, on anticipated civilian casualties.
A dozen years later, during the opening phase of the second Iraq war, there was a system in place for calculating those casualties. In 2003, collateral damage estimates of civilian deaths from planned airstrikes were done with computer models using outdated population density statistics. There was also that magic number, 30, that required a signature from someone in Washington.
According to Crowder, there was a higher tolerance for civilian casualties during the first phase of the war than there is at present. Garlasco, now a senior military analyst at Human Rights Watch, describes a callous approach back in 2003. "It is important to understand that in January 2003 when the target packages were 'finalized,' we had about 300 targets that were considered 'high CD,' or high collateral damage, meaning over 30," Garlasco wrote in an e-mail. "We had the Air Force play with the bomb angles, fusing, bomb tonnage, etc., and got that number down to about 25."
Garlasco said every high-CD target was ultimately approved except two structures holding foreign journalists, the Al-Rasheed hotel and Saddam's Ministry of Information.
The days of the "magic number" of 30 are over. The sign-off process now used to approve airstrikes in Iraq and Afghanistan is classified. But there is still methodology in place for collateral damage estimates. Planners must still ask and answer a set series of questions about each airstrike, including the number of expected civilian casualties.
The collateral damage must be proportional to the military advantage gained by the strike. "You can't deliberately target civilians," explained Georgetown law professor David Koplow. "But the proportionality judgment contemplates that sometimes civilians will be harmed in pursuit of a military strike."
The number of civilian casualties is still a key factor in determining which strikes are approved and who must sign off. "That will determine who the approval authority is," Crowder said. Strikes likely to involve higher collateral damage still require higher approval.
Four years after the invasion there is far better on-the-ground intelligence and far better technology. The skies over both Iraq and Afghanistan are filled with buzzing drones armed with powerful cameras. Military officials hundreds of miles away planning an airstrike can, in some cases, literally count the number of women and children near a target by staring at a screen. In other cases, troops on the ground calling in airstrikes can see nearby civilians with their own eyes. And individual "smart bombs" dropped in Iraq or Afghanistan are steered to pinpoint targets with stunning precision, sometimes guided by a laser shot by someone standing on the ground staring at the target.
We do know some of the details of the classified sign-off process. Many of the tough calls are made in Crowder's command center in Qatar, 700 miles south of Baghdad. It is the brain center in control of every detail of the air wars above Iraq and Afghanistan. In the air-conditioned comfort of that command hub, Crowder's team assemble explicit "air-tasking orders" for almost all of the airplanes flying over the two war zones. This includes targets that have been reviewed by commanders and vetted by attorneys.
There are two kinds of airstrikes. The first are preplanned strikes aimed at what are sometimes called "deliberate targets." An example would be a bridge, a Taliban leader, or an insurgent safe house quietly under surveillance from a circling drone. The military calls this new capability to eye a target for a long time "persistent look."
The cold, hard math of estimating collateral damage for preplanned strikes includes a calculation of the precise number of expected civilian deaths from each bomb, and it is made every day for every strike in the air wars over Iraq and Afghanistan. This grisly number is what must be weighed against the military value of the target in question. Garlasco calls that process "the macabre calculus of trying to determine how many dead civilians are worth a dead bad guy."
Planners say they go to great lengths to minimize collateral damage. The size of each bomb, ranging from 250 pounds to the extremely devastating 2,000-pound varieties, is minimized. The direction of the approach of the aircraft is altered to focus the explosive force away from civilians. And extreme prejudice is supposed to be employed when civilians are thought to be within 1,000 feet of a target, a situation referred to as "danger close." Military officials even consider what is on the ground underneath an approaching plane to minimize the damage in case a malfunction causes munitions to fall short of their targets. "We always look at our run-in heading and what is underneath the run-in heading," Crowder said. "This is a constant evolution of trying to get more and more precision."
When the assessment has been made, the planners submit the proposed airstrike to a military attorney whose job is to make sure the assessment has been done according to the law and that the anticipated casualties are within set limits.
These kinds of deliberate targets, however, represent a minority of the airstrikes in Iraq and Afghanistan. Much more common is the second category of airstrike: close air support. These are hastily arranged attacks from the air to relieve troops on the ground under enemy fire. They present a unique set of challenges with respect to protecting civilians.
Some planes are tasked to simply circle Iraq and Afghanistan, patrol air space, and wait for the troops on the ground, pinned down by enemy fire, to call for bombs. These situations are dubbed "troops in contact."
During "troops in contact" situations, the targeting for an airstrike is done by a person called a joint terminal attack controller -- the person on the ground authorized to aim the bombs. In some cases, the controller is out in the field right next to the troops in contact. And he is likely to aim those bombs using either a laser or a GPS system.
In the laser method, the controller on the ground aims the laser at the target. A pilot high above that target identifies the laser dot, and the coordinates of the dot are routed to the "smart bomb" under the nearby circling airplane. Once released, the bomb steers itself to the target.
A controller may instead rely on a GPS system and laser range finder to calculate the coordinates of the target. The controller reads the coordinates of the target to the pilot above via radio. The pilot punches in the numbers, reads the coordinates back to the controller -- and it is bombs away.
Controllers carry data on collateral damage ranges for each variety of bomb. But when troops are in a firefight and need immediate help from the air, decisions have to be made quickly, with greater emphasis on protecting U.S. forces. Steps are taken to minimize civilian deaths, but there simply is no time for a formal collateral damage assessment. Often there is only limited information on where any vulnerable civilians might be. "In those kinds of circumstances," Crowder said, "that is where you see most of the civilians being killed."
The result of improved technology and intelligence is that the military is more likely to hold its fire in 2007 than in 2003. In fact in the large majority of cases, Crowder says, commanders simply do not drop bombs at all if intelligence shows with some certainty that any innocent civilians are likely to be killed in a preplanned airstrike. "Our default is not to drop," he said in a telephone interview from Qatar. Rare situations do still arise when the excruciating decision goes the other way. "There are circumstances where we accept the fact that a target is of such value that there may be civilian casualties," Crowder said. "That is a hard calculation to make."
But all this effort to minimize civilian casualties does not stem from altruism alone. In the past two years, as American military officials have grasped the fact that they are dealing with a long-term insurgency, they've also become aware that the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan may hinge on the hearts and minds of the civilians who sometimes end up in the crosshairs. Crowder is studying "A Savage War of Peace," Alistair Horne's 1977 history of the French occupation of Algeria, illustrative of the dynamics of an insurgency. "It is an issue ultimately of growing the capacity of indigenous forces," Crowder said. "Every civilian casualty we create undermines the support for those forces and reduces the likelihood of obtaining our objective."
Other U.S. officials agree that civilian deaths from airstrikes erode support for U.S. forces and the governments they are trying to prop up. "You could win the battle and lose the war," said Air Force Maj. John Thomas, a spokesman for the International Security Assistance Force in Afghanistan, the NATO force trying to provide stability in that country and help the government led by President Hamid Karzai. "The fight is to not lose the support of the Afghan people or this fledgling Afghan government," Thomas said in an interview from Kabul.
Civilian deaths are a particularly sensitive issue for U.S. officials in Afghanistan, after being stung this summer by a string of harrowing headlines. News reports last month noted allegations of 90 civilian deaths from airstrikes over a 10-day period. Karzai held a news conference last month calling air operations over Afghanistan "careless." Then on June 19, the Agency Coordinating Body for Afghan Relief, representing nearly 100 humanitarian groups, released a statement of "strong concern" about the death toll.
Is the criticism fair? Does the military's system of collateral damage assessment work? The success of U.S. efforts to minimize casualties from airstrikes is extremely difficult to judge, since statistics for Iraqi and Afghan fatalities are scarce and hotly debated. In Afghanistan in particular, what is happening on the ground is difficult to assess. The terrain is rough and remote. There are few reliable witnesses or independent assessments of civilian deaths. But it is at least possible that civilian deaths from airstrikes are decreasing even as the tonnage of bombs dropped increases.
A study published in the British medical journal Lancet last October painted a famously bleak picture of spiraling violence in Iraq. The Lancet study came in at the high end of casualty estimates for the war, estimating that 655,000 more Iraqis have died since the invasion than would have died if the occupation had never occurred, and that fully 601,000 of those deaths were violent. The study said 31 percent of the violent deaths were attributable to coalition forces. The study, overseen by epidemiologists at Johns Hopkins and derided by the Bush administration as not credible, said the number of violent deaths attributable to coalition forces has increased every year since the invasion. But there was one exception: Compared with 2003 and 2004, the number of reported deaths from airstrikes decreased in 2006.
Anecdotally, U.S. officials also add some caveats to recent civilian casualty headlines. They acknowledge that mistaken intelligence has led to some truly accidental deaths, including the deaths of children. But in other cases, they say, Taliban or al-Qaida sympathizers appear to be delivering inflated reports of civilian deaths. The Taliban also fights among civilians, dramatically increasing the likelihood of civilian deaths when troops call for close air support. (U.S. officials say that during a recent firefight, innocent civilians were forced into a trench alongside Taliban fighters so that any airstrike would result in the significant loss of civilian lives).
The unreliability of civilian casualty numbers from Afghanistan is exemplified by an Associated Press report from Friday, July 27. The AP said that airstrikes in Helmand province, in support of NATO troops, had killed 50 Taliban and 28 civilians. The source was Gereshk district chief Abdul Manaf Khan, who based his claims on reports from villagers. The AP noted that Khan's claims could not be verified because of the remote location -- and that there was apparently no evidence. Though the clashes had started Thursday night, Khan said the bodies had already been buried, even as fighting continued Friday. The article also quoted Malim Mirwali, a member of Parliament for Gereshk, who claimed that more than 40 civilians had been killed in that airstrike.
In a telephone call from Kabul, Garlasco, the airstrike chief turned human rights advocate, said he is trying to get to the bottom of the overall civilian casualty numbers in Afghanistan. According to Garlasco, his research to date shows that the number of civilian deaths reported from airstrikes is inflated.
But one of the hurdles to determining whether the U.S. military is successfully limiting civilian casualties is that the military itself isn't doing a good job of counting. That's why advocates for civilians in Iraq and Afghanistan, while applauding the military's steps to minimize civilian deaths, remain skeptical about whether those steps are working.
The military is supposed to go back and review an airstrike using aerial footage and, when possible, conduct an inspection by troops on the ground. But thorough postmortems are rare. The military devotes resources to preventing civilian casualties before munitions are used, the advocates say, but it isn't devoting the same energy to see if its preventive measures are working. "You have to do this collateral damage estimate beforehand," said Holewinski, from the Campaign for Innocent Victims in Conflict. "And afterwards, in order to make sure you did it correctly, you are supposed to do a collateral damage assessment. And that is what they rarely do." Crowder said that the military reviews airstrikes from aerial footage, but admitted that on-the-ground investigations are far from guaranteed. "In some cases, you can't get there in a timely fashion."
And regardless of whether the American measures are effective, human rights activists are well aware that the NATO forces fighting in Afghanistan have tighter rules about collateral damage than the Americans. The statement issued by human rights groups last month, which cited "disproportionate and indiscriminate" air power -- language quoted from the Law of Armed Conflict -- directed most of its venom at "forces or agencies outside NATO command, often American forces in Operation Enduring Freedom."
In an unconventional and complicated arrangement in Afghanistan, roughly 32,000 NATO-led troops are conducting stabilization activities there. Meanwhile, approximately 21,000 U.S. service members are conducting counterterrorism operations in Afghanistan under Operation Enduring Freedom, currently spearheaded by the 82nd Airborne Division and special operations units. Commanders from NATO and Operation Enduring Freedom both call in airstrikes, carried out almost exclusively by U.S. aircraft getting their air-tasking orders from Crowder's shop in Qatar, the Combined Air Operations Center.
NATO forces conduct their own collateral damage estimates for preplanned targets like Taliban leaders. Thomas, the spokesman in Kabul, says NATO forces have adopted a "zero tolerance" policy on civilian casualties for preplanned strikes. This is because the NATO stabilization mission is particularly dependent on the good will of the Afghan people. (And NATO partners are extremely sensitive to civilian casualties.)
Thomas calls the airstrike protocol there "the most strict possible rules for civilian casualties that you could possibly have." Forces there will not carry out a strike "if there is any reasonable evidence or reason to think that there might be a single civilian in a compound or an area."
Even for close air support for troops fighting under the NATO flag, Thomas says, forces go to great lengths to avoid dropping bombs on innocent civilians. "Self-defense trumps everything," he said, noting that close air support is far more prevalent than preplanned strikes. "But even in a self-defense-type situation, the idea is to try to break contact some other way to avoid endangering civilians."
But Thomas also confirms that the standards for civilian deaths are "more strict" for NATO forces than for U.S. forces in Operation Enduring Freedom. "Our job is not a counterterrorism mission," Thomas explained. "That's not the same for other missions going on here or in Iraq."
"Yes, the Taliban are killing civilians," said Garlasco, summarizing the situation. "And yes, the U.S. is doing its darnedest to make sure they don't ... But when it really comes down to it, they are still dropping the bombs, so it is incumbent on them at all times to do their best and follow international law to make sure they are not killing innocent civilians." On whether they are succeeding in preventing civilian deaths, Garlasco said, "I really think they are trying very hard. It's tough."
--------------------------------------
Citation: Mark Benjamin. "When is an accidental civilian death not an accident?," Salon.com, 30 July 2007.
Original URL: http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2007/07/30/collateral_damage/
--------------------------------------
28 July 2007
Unrelenting Violence Drains Iraq Blood Supply
By James Palmer
Newhouse News Service, 08 April 2006
BAGHDAD, Iraq -- Drained by the deadly sectarian attacks this year, Iraq's central blood bank now faces two very different problems: precious reserves that no longer keep pace with demand and a sudden wave of new donors it can't tap quickly enough.
"The fighting is overwhelming us," says Haider Al-Shammari, director of Iraq's National Blood Transfusion Center.
The problem has been growing since the February bombing of a venerable Shiite shrine in northern Iraq sparked the current wave of sectarian violence. On the worst days, demand can be double or triple the 350 to 500 pints the transfusion center tries to maintain, Al-Shammari says.
"Keeping the blood in supply is a vicious cycle," says Manof Jasim, a hematologist at the center.
Faced with the shortages, the center made several emergency appeals for donations through television, radio and newspapers.
So many Iraqis are responding, the center's staff of about 150 now works around the clock in eight-hour shifts.
"These people love their country and feel a need to do humanitarian deeds, but we have so many coming in that it's sometimes impossible to keep up," says Sidaqa Hassan, 42, a nurse who has worked at the center for 20 years.
Meanwhile, the staffing challenge gets tougher. "We lose many employees every week because they're afraid to travel here, or they want to move out of Baghdad," says Nibris Al-Attir, 44, a physician who oversees training at the transfusion center. The workers make anywhere from $100 to $300 a month, in a nation where the average is less then $50.
The center allows donations from healthy Iraqis between the ages of 18 and 65. Men can provide a pint once every three months, while women can give the same once every four months. Foreigners are not currently permitted to donate.
"Blood is a gift from God," says Mustafa Al-Okabi, a 22-year-old student at Baghdad University interviewed while donating blood at the center. "We must give it to anyone who needs it, whether they're Shiite or Sunni, Christian or Muslim."
As a human being, "you feel for the people and their needs," says 55-year-old photographer Yassin Yousef, who has contributed his B-positive blood a total of 66 times since the National Blood Transfusion Center was established in 1960, according to his donor card. "At this time, my country needs me to volunteer more than ever."
Donated blood lasts 30 to 35 days, according to hematologists at the transfusion center. Blood components, such as plasma, can be stored frozen for up to a year, while blood platelets have a life of only three days.
Much of the supply here is maintained by mandatory donations from the family or friends of patients receiving a transfusion. The rules are simple: Receive a pint and someone must contribute a pint for you, regardless of type.
Nazar Razaq, 31, an unemployed carpenter, and Ali Haider, an 18-year-old neighbor, are each donating a pint for Razaq's infant daughter, Sagar, who is to undergo neck surgery at Baghdad's neurological hospital.
Khadem Obead, a 34-year-old blacksmith, is donating for his pregnant 25-year-old sister-in-law, Zaineb, who is preparing for a Caesarean delivery.
The three men concede they never have donated without taking blood away, but pledge to do so in the future.
Some Iraqis are hesitant to donate blood due to suspicions about the spread of infectious diseases, such as HIV, the virus that causes AIDS.
Physicians here say HIV entered Iraq in 1986 through tainted blood. Today, the transfusion center employs a more advanced and thorough screening process, and it takes at least 24 hours to manually group and test the blood before separating its components.
Saed Mahmoud, 43, a physician at the center, says about 10 percent of all blood donations are rejected due to infections and other deficiencies.
Workers at the blood bank must contend with an underground market that threatens to contaminate its supply.
According to a United Nations report last year, hundreds of poor and unemployed Iraqis were selling their untested blood for $15 to $25 per pint.
------------------------------------
Citation: James Palmer. "Unrelenting Violence Drains Iraq Blood Supply," Newhouse News Service, 08 April 2006.
Original URL: http://www.newhousenews.com/archive/palmer041106.html
------------------------------------
Newhouse News Service, 08 April 2006
BAGHDAD, Iraq -- Drained by the deadly sectarian attacks this year, Iraq's central blood bank now faces two very different problems: precious reserves that no longer keep pace with demand and a sudden wave of new donors it can't tap quickly enough.
"The fighting is overwhelming us," says Haider Al-Shammari, director of Iraq's National Blood Transfusion Center.
The problem has been growing since the February bombing of a venerable Shiite shrine in northern Iraq sparked the current wave of sectarian violence. On the worst days, demand can be double or triple the 350 to 500 pints the transfusion center tries to maintain, Al-Shammari says.
"Keeping the blood in supply is a vicious cycle," says Manof Jasim, a hematologist at the center.
Faced with the shortages, the center made several emergency appeals for donations through television, radio and newspapers.
So many Iraqis are responding, the center's staff of about 150 now works around the clock in eight-hour shifts.
"These people love their country and feel a need to do humanitarian deeds, but we have so many coming in that it's sometimes impossible to keep up," says Sidaqa Hassan, 42, a nurse who has worked at the center for 20 years.
Meanwhile, the staffing challenge gets tougher. "We lose many employees every week because they're afraid to travel here, or they want to move out of Baghdad," says Nibris Al-Attir, 44, a physician who oversees training at the transfusion center. The workers make anywhere from $100 to $300 a month, in a nation where the average is less then $50.
The center allows donations from healthy Iraqis between the ages of 18 and 65. Men can provide a pint once every three months, while women can give the same once every four months. Foreigners are not currently permitted to donate.
"Blood is a gift from God," says Mustafa Al-Okabi, a 22-year-old student at Baghdad University interviewed while donating blood at the center. "We must give it to anyone who needs it, whether they're Shiite or Sunni, Christian or Muslim."
As a human being, "you feel for the people and their needs," says 55-year-old photographer Yassin Yousef, who has contributed his B-positive blood a total of 66 times since the National Blood Transfusion Center was established in 1960, according to his donor card. "At this time, my country needs me to volunteer more than ever."
Donated blood lasts 30 to 35 days, according to hematologists at the transfusion center. Blood components, such as plasma, can be stored frozen for up to a year, while blood platelets have a life of only three days.
Much of the supply here is maintained by mandatory donations from the family or friends of patients receiving a transfusion. The rules are simple: Receive a pint and someone must contribute a pint for you, regardless of type.
Nazar Razaq, 31, an unemployed carpenter, and Ali Haider, an 18-year-old neighbor, are each donating a pint for Razaq's infant daughter, Sagar, who is to undergo neck surgery at Baghdad's neurological hospital.
Khadem Obead, a 34-year-old blacksmith, is donating for his pregnant 25-year-old sister-in-law, Zaineb, who is preparing for a Caesarean delivery.
The three men concede they never have donated without taking blood away, but pledge to do so in the future.
Some Iraqis are hesitant to donate blood due to suspicions about the spread of infectious diseases, such as HIV, the virus that causes AIDS.
Physicians here say HIV entered Iraq in 1986 through tainted blood. Today, the transfusion center employs a more advanced and thorough screening process, and it takes at least 24 hours to manually group and test the blood before separating its components.
Saed Mahmoud, 43, a physician at the center, says about 10 percent of all blood donations are rejected due to infections and other deficiencies.
Workers at the blood bank must contend with an underground market that threatens to contaminate its supply.
According to a United Nations report last year, hundreds of poor and unemployed Iraqis were selling their untested blood for $15 to $25 per pint.
------------------------------------
Citation: James Palmer. "Unrelenting Violence Drains Iraq Blood Supply," Newhouse News Service, 08 April 2006.
Original URL: http://www.newhousenews.com/archive/palmer041106.html
------------------------------------
A gift for power
Iraq's Kurdish president is impossible to pin down. He's friends with the Americans - but also with Iran. He calls himself a Maoist - yet enjoys immense wealth. Who is Jalal Talabani? Jon Lee Anderson meets him in Baghdad
By John Lee Anderson
The Guardian, 09 February 2007
On November 5, the day Saddam Hussein was sentenced to death, Jalal Talabani, the longtime Kurdish guerrilla leader, who is currently Iraq's president, was in Paris, on a state visit. He was installed in the sumptuous presidential suite at Le Meurice, a gold-and-marble Louis XVI hotel on the Rue de Rivoli, overlooking the Jardin des Tuileries. I watched the verdict with Talabani in his suite, on a large plasma-screen television tuned to the satellite channel Al Arabiya. He sat in a gilded chair, and his expression betrayed nothing. Soon, after a few curt words, Talabani got up and wandered off to his bedroom. One of his aides tiptoed behind him. The aide reappeared a moment later to say that Talabani was sitting in an armchair, deep in thought.
Saddam's death sentence put Talabani in an awkward position. Saddam had been convicted for the mass killing of 146 people in the Shia village of Dujail in 1982. If he was executed, he would not face a second trial, for the 1988 Anfal campaign, in which as many as 186,000 Kurds were killed. Talabani was on the record as being opposed to capital punishment, but, according to the Iraqi constitution, one of his duties was to approve death warrants. In public statements, he had finessed this problem by saying that he would respect any decisions made by Iraq's judiciary. Still, he was in a predicament.
After a while, Talabani returned, in a better mood. He sat down next to me, but we were interrupted by the arrival of two superbly dressed Frenchmen carrying large shopping bags from Façonnable and Ermenegildo Zegna. They approached Talabani, bowed deferentially, and took a pair of dark suits from the bags. One man brandished a measuring tape, and explained that they needed His Excellency to remove some of his clothes for a fitting. Talabani stood up and began struggling to take off his jacket. A valet rushed over to help.
Talabani, who is 73 and has the fat cheeks, brush moustache and large belly of a storybook pastry chef, is renowned for his political cunning, his prodigious love of food and cigars, his sense of humour, his unflagging optimism, and his inability to keep a secret. He is known as Mam Jalal, which means Uncle Jalal in Kurdish. It is a term of both endearment and cautious deference; Talabani has a mercurial personality, with extreme mood swings. He has survived in Iraqi politics largely owing to an ability to outfox his opponents and, sometimes, his allies. Over the years, he has made deals with everyone from Saddam Hussein to Ayatollah Khomeini and both Bush presidents. He is probably one of the very few people in the world who can claim, truthfully and unapologetically, to have kissed the cheeks of Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of Iran. Talabani refers to George W Bush as his "good friend" but regards Mao Zedong as his political role model.
Mowaffak al-Rubaie, a Shia politician who is Iraq's national security adviser, told me, "He's very difficult to define. If you are an Islamist, he brings you Koranic verses; if you're a Marxist, he'll talk to you about Marxist-Leninist theory, dialectics and Descartes. He has a very interesting ability to speak several languages, sometimes" - he laughed - "with a very limited vocabulary. He has a lot of anecdotes and knows a lot of jokes. He is an extraordinarily generous person, and he spends like there is no tomorrow."
Rubaie mentioned a period in the 60s when Talabani was allied with Saddam. "One day he was a good friend of Saddam, and then he became a staunch enemy," he said. (In fact, Talabani flirted with Saddam twice more.) Rubaie saw nothing contradictory in this; Talabani, he said, was the ultimate pragmatist.
No other Iraqi politician has Talabani's experience, contacts, and savvy. As a result, he has made the presidency, which was meant to be more ceremonial than the prime minister's job, a powerful post. Yet this role, too, carries contradictions. After spending decades fighting for "self-determination" for Iraq's Kurds, Talabani finds himself defending Iraq's unity. He now has a choice to make: either he can be a founding father of the "new Iraq" - the elder statesman who will help rescue it from civil war - or, if Iraq falls apart, he can be a founding father of an independent Kurdish state. As always, Talabani has hedged his bets. "I am a Kurd from Iraqi Kurdistan, but now I am responsible for Iraq," he told me. "And I feel my responsibility." In another conversation, he said, "It's true that I am an Iraqi, but in the final analysis I am a Kurd."
Under Saddam, the Kurds "were facing a dictatorship in Baghdad that was launching a war of annihilation against the Kurdish people," he said. "We were in need of all kinds of support from anybody in the world. When war starts, and you participate in it, you will need support from anyone. There is no supermarket where you can go and choose your friends in a war."
In the current war, some of his unreconciled friendships have been troublesome. Iran was once one of the Kurds' greatest allies, and Talabani had planned to fly from Paris to Tehran. But he abruptly postponed the trip at the request of the Bush administration: he would have arrived in Tehran on November 6, and the prospect of pictures of America's Iraqi ally visiting Iran the day before the midterm elections made the White House uncomfortable.
In Baghdad, Talabani lives in a yellow- brick mansion on the eastern shore of the Tigris river, outside the Green Zone. Until April 2003, when Talabani seized it, the mansion belonged to Barzan al-Tikriti, Saddam Hussein's half brother and the former chief of the secret police, who, like Saddam, was sentenced to die for his role in the Dujail massacre. (Barzan was executed on January 15, but his hanging was bungled when the rope ripped off his head.) The presidential offices are next door, in a palace that once belonged to Saddam's wife, Sajida.
Talabani's complex sits on the north side of the ramparts of the Jadiriya Bridge; on the south side is the home of his political ally Abdul Aziz al-Hakim, the Shia leader of the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq. Hakim's house is where Tariq Aziz, Saddam's deputy prime minister, once lived. The approaches on Talabani's side are heavily guarded by Kurdish peshmerga ("those who face death") fighters - Talabani commands some 50,000 peshmerga in the militia of his party, the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan, or PUK - and on Hakim's by militiamen of the Badr Organization, his party's armed wing.
The two leaders and their militias work closely on political and security matters, though in other ways the Kurds, who are largely secular, and the Shias, who are very devout, present a sharp contrast in styles. During weeks spent in Talabani's company, I never saw him or any of his aides pray. Talabani is not averse to alcohol, either, and he enjoys playing cards with a small group of his cronies.
Talabani's wife, Hero, does not live in Baghdad with her husband. She stays in their home city of Sulaimaniya, where she runs a foundation and a television station, and publishes a newspaper. She and Talabani have two sons: one, Bafel, runs the counterinsurgency wing of his father's party; the other, Qubad, represents the autonomous Kurdish government in the US.
At home in Baghdad one morning, Talabani invited me up to his private quarters. It was early, and he was still dressed in loose-fitting pyjama bottoms and an immense yellow-and-blue striped rugby shirt. A valet brought us Nescafé stirred with sugar into a creamy mixture. (I later learned that this was "Mam Jalal style".) Talabani lit a cigar. (He favours the long ones known as Churchills.) The day before, two suicide bombers had blown themselves up at a police recruitment centre just outside the Green Zone, killing 38 potential recruits. It was the latest incident in what almost everyone but Talabani acknowledged was an accelerating sectarian war. "I don't think Iraq is on the eve of a civil war," he said stubbornly. "Day by day - and this is not an exaggeration - Sunni and Shia leaders are coming close to each other."
Iraq's main problem was not sectarianism, he said, but a terrorist war waged by Ba'athists and foreign forces such as al-Qaida. Without losing his habitual equanimity, he added that the situation had been made worse by American ineptitude, arrogance and naivety, saying: "I think the main one responsible for this was Rumsfeld" - Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, who had resigned days earlier. (Talabani has since welcomed President Bush's plan to send an additional 21,500 American soldiers to Baghdad in a so-called "surge". He said in a statement that it showed "a new effort to improve security in Iraq" and that it "concurs and corresponds with Iraq's plans and ideas" - although some members of the government had been openly sceptical.)
After breakfast, Talabani went downstairs to deal with the affairs of the day. Half a dozen senior personnel were waiting, as they do each morning. When Talabani has an appointment elsewhere, he is driven in a BMW 7 Series armoured black saloon, preceded and followed by a sizable fleet of white Nissan Patrols carrying peshmerga guards. But, more often than not, people come to Talabani. It is a measure of his ascendancy that Nuri al-Maliki, the prime minister, usually comes to Talabani, rather than vice versa. Maliki is the third prime minister since 2004, while Talabani has been a constant fixture. Maliki does not have Talabani's access to American and other foreign leaders, and must often work through him. In public, Talabani tries to defer to Maliki, and he appears to wish him to succeed.
One source of Talabani's power is his wealth. Together with his old rival Massoud Barzani, who is the president of the autonomous Kurdish region, Talabani is believed to have amassed many millions of dollars in "taxes" on oil smuggled out of Iraq through Kurdistan between 1991 and 2003, when the country was under UN sanctions. And Talabani obsessively dispenses gifts, trades favours, and buys allegiances, on the assumption that, in Iraq, the richest suitor has the best chance of winning the bride.
In many ways, Talabani's behaviour and his lifestyle are those of a clandestine party boss. His private quarters are cramped, poorly lit, and undecorated, with counters cluttered with satellite phones. His indulgences are food and a large personal staff. He and the US ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad have regular meetings over kallapacha, an Iraqi dish consisting of the head and stuffed intestines of a sheep. Twice a month, Talabani sends consignments of Kurdish yogurt, cheeses, honey and handmade sweets to foreign ambassadors and leading politicians.
Several of Talabani's aides told me privately about men in his entourage who, they suspected, profited from government contracts that they steered toward their friends. In this, Talabani's circle is not unusual. Mahmoud Othman, a Kurdish MP, is close to Talabani but is scathing about the entire government's profligacy, corruption and moral cowardice. "How does the government expect to have respect when it is closed off?" he said. "The leaders live in Saddam's palaces, and in the Green Zone, and they never go out. The prime minister and the president have discretionary funds to spend as they like of a million or more dollars a month. I think the corruption is widespread and systemic and comes from the very top . . . All of this is against a reality in which the families of killed soldiers or police are given pensions of only $100 a month."
In Maliki's government, cobbled together after four months of tortuous negotiations following the December 2005 parliamentary elections, Talabani helped make sure that many of the high-level jobs that didn't go to Shias went to Kurds. (A number of them are Talabani's friends and relatives.) One of the two deputy prime ministers is a Kurd, and Kurds head several ministries, including the foreign ministry; the minister of water resources is Talabani's brother-in-law. From the American perspective, there is simply an abundance of qualified Kurds - or, at least, many with whom the US feels comfortable.
Talabani, like many senior Iraqi politicians, views Moqtada al-Sadr, the radical Shia militia leader whose militia is known as the Mahdi army, with a mixture of condescension and contempt. The key to weakening Sadr, Talabani said, was Iran. "If the Iranians will calm down the Mahdi army, if there will be no assassination, if these - what do you call them? - 'death squads' will be no more, then only the terrorists will remain. And if Syria will be silent, only al-Qaida will remain, and we can defeat al-Qaida very easily."
Talabani went on, "One of the main mistakes the Americans have made in fighting terrorism is tying our hands and the hands of the Shias, while at the same time the terrorists are free to do what they want. If they let us, within one week we will clean all Kirkuk and adjacent areas." (Talabani's implication was clear: "to clean" is a euphemism for wiping out your opposition, for killing or capturing your enemies.) Talabani then adopted a high-pitched, whining voice, to mimic the Americans: "'No-o, Kurds must not move to the Arab areas, this is sensitive.' If they let the Shias clean the road from Najaf to Baghdad, they can do it within days. If they permit the people of Anbar to liberate their area, they will do it, but they say, 'Ah, no, this is another kind of militia.' They don't understand the realities of Iraq. From the beginning, we have had this problem with them." He added, "Wrong plan, wrong tactic, and wrong policy."
Talabani has been involved in politics since 1946, when, at the age of 13, with Iraq still ruled by the British-installed Hashemite monarchy, he joined an underground Kurdish student organisation. It was part of a Kurdish independence movement that had taken shape during the breakup of the Ottoman Empire, after the first world war, when the victorious European powers failed to give the Kurds their own state. The division of the empire left the Kurds spread among Iraq (with an estimated four million Kurds today, or between 15% and 20% of Iraq's population), Turkey, Syria, and Iran; the greater Kurdistan envisaged by some separatists would encompass parts of each of those countries.
Talabani was born in the village of Kelkan, in south-eastern Iraqi Kurdistan; his father was a local sheikh. By 18, Talabani was the youngest member of the central committee of the Soviet-backed Kurdistan Democratic Party, led by Mullah Mustafa Barzani. He studied law in Baghdad (interrupted by a period spent in hiding) and completed his obligatory service in the Iraqi army. Then, in 1961, Talabani joined an armed uprising launched by Barzani.
Three years later, Talabani split with Barzani to join a splinter group founded by Ibrahim Ahmed, the father of his future wife, Hero. Ahmed did not like the terms of Barzani's negotiations with the central government. This was a period of violent political instability in Iraq, with four presidents in the space of 10 years. After a Ba'athist coup in 1968, Talabani made a deal with Saddam, who was then the deputy president, to obtain more rights for the Kurds and to get his help in fighting Barzani - only to reconcile with Barzani when Saddam switched sides. It was the beginning of a dizzying sequence of schisms within the Kurdish rebellion, for which Talabani bears significant responsibility, and which, for a time, strengthened Saddam.
Talabani was a Marxist, and then a Maoist, attracted by "Mao's idea of popular war, of fighting in the mountains against dictatorship". He was also drawn to the anti-colonial Arab nationalist causes of the day. On trips during the 60s, he made important contacts - with Gamel Abdel Nasser of Egypt, King Hussein of Jordan, Muammar Gadafy, Yasser Arafat, and President Hafez al-Assad of Syria. (In Talabani's office, there is a single photograph on the wall, of him with Assad. "He was very, very kind to me," Talabani said.)
In the mid-70s, Talabani spent time in Beirut, working with the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, a Marxist Palestinian guerrilla organisation. It is a murky period about which Talabani says little, but Kurds close to him suggest that he was then at his most radical, and at one point became involved in a Palestinian plot to hijack an American plane in Europe. He is said to have abandoned the scheme when a contact warned him that Mossad planned to assassinate him.
"We considered the US the enemy of the Iraqi Kurdish people," Talabani told me. Through the 80s, the US, for its part, saw the Kurds primarily as troublemakers and as pawns of Syria and Iran. In Turkey, America's Nato ally, Kurdish separatists had been waging a remorseless guerrilla war, to which the Turkish military responded with a vicious counterinsurgency campaign; thousands of Kurdish civilians were killed.
At the height of the Iran-Iraq War, Talabani once again allied himself with Saddam, then opposed him and helped Iran. Saddam's next move was the genocidal Anfal campaign. Saddam razed thousands of Kurdish villages, primarily in Talabani's territory. In the town of Halabja, between March 16 and March 17 1988, 5,000 Kurdish civilians were killed when planes dropped a lethal chemical cocktail that reportedly included mustard gas and nerve agents such as sarin, tabun and VX. Although these attacks later became part of the current Bush administration's case for overthrowing Saddam, the Reagan administration, which was supporting Saddam in his war with Iran, paid little attention; when the news of Halabja broke, the White House blamed Iran.
After Saddam's defeat in the first Gulf war, in early 1991, Shias in the south and Kurds in the north carried out uprisings. Talabani led his forces into Sulaimaniya and Kirkuk. With the US looking on, Saddam dispatched his army against them. Hundreds of thousands of Kurds fled, in the midst of a harsh winter, provoking a humanitarian crisis. The US and its allies declared a safe haven in the north; Talabani and Barzani (who had temporarily reconciled) began negotiating terms of settlement with Saddam.
There is an unfortunate photograph from this period that shows Talabani kissing Saddam on the cheek. "But, you know, at that time the Kurdish people were in danger of being annihilated," Talabani told me, by way of explanation. "Fighting is not playing ping-pong," Talabani said. "Fighting is killing each other. When we were fighting Saddam, we killed them, they killed us. It's something ordinary. It's war. And when we stop the war both killers sit down to receive each other. And this happens all over the world. Mao, he sat down with Chiang Kai-shek! Chiang Kai-shek killed his wife. His son! . . . But when the time comes to talk peace, they must sit down with each other. This is the process of life."
As the Kurdish "safe haven" developed into a "no fly zone" policed by US and British warplanes - a de facto Kurdish autonomous zone, beyond the authority of Saddam Hussein - Barzani and Talabani fought for pre-eminence. One dispute was over revenues from oil smuggling.
"Jalal is at his best when he is down, and is prone to making mistakes when he is up," a longtime friend of Talabani's told me. "In 1991, he was emerging as a statesman of the Kurds, internationally renowned. Instead of moving to become the nation builder that he was supposed to be, he moved into battle, playing with fire, undermining all that he built. "
In 1994, a civil war broke between the armies of Talabani and Barzani. In the midst of the fighting, Talabani provided a base for a CIA task force, and for Ahmed Chalabi, the Iraqi exile leader, who were involved in various failed coup plots. Hundreds of people died in these efforts. Talabani continued fighting Barzani, who at one point, astoundingly, invited Saddam's army into the north.
When President Clinton signed the Iraq Liberation Act, in 1998, promising American support for Iraqi opposition groups, Talabani and Barzani went to Washington and settled their differences. By then, several thousand Kurds from both sides had been killed.
Talabani called the bipartisan Iraq Study Group's report "unfair" and "unjust"; he compared it to terms imposed on a "colony". But one recommendation that he had no problem with was that President Bush begin direct talks with Syria and Iran. "It is in our interest that relations between the US and Iran about Iraq be at least normal, and if they have other differences let them take them to other parts of the world," he had told me a couple of weeks earlier. He was about to leave for his delayed trip to Iran. He was also keeping the Americans informed. "We never hide our relation with Iran from America."
Tehran was cold and grey on November 27 last year, when Talabani and his entourage arrived. Several ministers and a clutch of Iraqi journalists and photographers were on board. During our descent into Tehran, one of Talabani's junior aides came down the aisles, handing each person a form to sign. It was printed in Arabic, and, assuming it was an official landing document of some sort, I signed it, whereupon he handed me a thick envelope and moved on. Inside were 20 $100 bills. After we landed, I asked the aide why he had given me money, and he said it was "a gift from the president". I thanked him, but said that I could not accept it, and handed the envelope back. He looked very confused. A senior aide translated my explanation about "journalistic ethics", which left the man looking only more mystified. The senior aide then opened his own envelope and, whistling, counted out 50 $100 bills. "I think he's given me the same amount as the ministers," he exclaimed. "He does this from his own pocket, you know." He said that, on each trip, Talabani gives money to all those on board, including the bodyguards, the flight attendants and the pilot. We calculated that during the one-hour flight Talabani had given away about $100,000.
The contrast with Baghdad was striking. There were no armed soldiers or blast walls and security barricades to negotiate. Instead, we drove through street after street of brightly lit stores with neon signs; the sidewalks were full of people. But what most caught the attention of the Iraqis was the large number of women and girls out on the street; the sight of women in public has become a rarity in Baghdad.
The next morning, Talabani awoke early and visited the tomb of Ayatollah Khomeini. Then he met Ahmadinejad and the Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. Sources close to Talabani told me that in their talks he requested a reversal in Iran's policy - specifically, that Iran's leadership "control" Sadr's militia and ally itself instead with his government, and that it persuade its allies, including Syria, Hamas and Hizbullah, to do the same. Talabani then asked that Iran open up communications with the multinational forces in Iraq, and cooperate with the Iraqi and US governments in their security plan for Baghdad. And, perhaps most controversial from the Americans' point of view - assuming that they knew about it - Talabani proposed that Tehran and Baghdad exchange intelligence, and that Iran help train and equip Iraq's security forces.
One of the Iraqis who attended the meeting said that Talabani told Khamenei that Iraq was "at a make-or-break point and needed Iran's help". He went on: "The Supreme Leader said that he understood and would do everything he could. In return, he wanted the Iraqis to take more control over their own security from the Americans."
At a press conference, Ahmadinejad said, "Iraq is like a wounded hero." Talabani, standing next to him, said, smiling, "We can only hope that he recovers." The crowd laughed; it was a classic Mam Jalal moment. Ahmadinejad added, "The best way to support Iraq is to support its democratically elected government." However disingenuous this may have sounded under the circumstances, Talabani's officials took it as a further sign that the Iranians were prepared to help. They told me it was the first time that the Iranians had explicitly endorsed the current Iraqi government.
An Iraqi minister came up to me afterward, looking enthusiastic, and said, "You see? I told you it was more than symbolic!" After a short pause, the official leaned over and whispered excitedly, "These guys even offered us weapons!"
That evening, a senior Iraqi official said that he was worried about the "mixed messages" coming from the US. "I emphasised with the Iranians that they should not just assume that because the Americans were bogged down in Iraq they were incapable of taking action against Iran; I said that they were entirely capable of it."
Saddam's execution, which came at dawn on December 30, was a clumsy and brutish affair. As he stood on a scaffold with the noose around his neck, he was taunted by some of his hooded executioners and by spectators. Talabani was in Sulaimaniya. Hours before the execution, he had found the perfect solution to his dilemma concerning the death warrant. "It couldn't have been any better," Hiwa Osman, his media adviser, explained. "He found that in cases of international war crimes the constitution did not give him the authority to alter the court's ruling. In a way, it was a blessing from the sky, and it solved his ethical dilemma."
As for Talabani's reaction to the execution, Osman said: "Remember what he did in Paris when the death sentence was announced, and he went into his bedroom for an hour or so? This time, it lasted three or four days. No one saw him".
© 2007 Jon Lee Anderson
· Jon Lee Anderson is the author of The Fall of Baghdad, The Lion's Grave: Dispatches from Afghanistan and Che Guevara: A Revolutionary Life
------------------------------------
Citation: John Lee Anderson. "A gift for power," The Guardian, 09 February 2007.
Original URL: http://www.saag.org/Bb/view.asp?msgID=27619
------------------------------------
By John Lee Anderson
The Guardian, 09 February 2007
On November 5, the day Saddam Hussein was sentenced to death, Jalal Talabani, the longtime Kurdish guerrilla leader, who is currently Iraq's president, was in Paris, on a state visit. He was installed in the sumptuous presidential suite at Le Meurice, a gold-and-marble Louis XVI hotel on the Rue de Rivoli, overlooking the Jardin des Tuileries. I watched the verdict with Talabani in his suite, on a large plasma-screen television tuned to the satellite channel Al Arabiya. He sat in a gilded chair, and his expression betrayed nothing. Soon, after a few curt words, Talabani got up and wandered off to his bedroom. One of his aides tiptoed behind him. The aide reappeared a moment later to say that Talabani was sitting in an armchair, deep in thought.
Saddam's death sentence put Talabani in an awkward position. Saddam had been convicted for the mass killing of 146 people in the Shia village of Dujail in 1982. If he was executed, he would not face a second trial, for the 1988 Anfal campaign, in which as many as 186,000 Kurds were killed. Talabani was on the record as being opposed to capital punishment, but, according to the Iraqi constitution, one of his duties was to approve death warrants. In public statements, he had finessed this problem by saying that he would respect any decisions made by Iraq's judiciary. Still, he was in a predicament.
After a while, Talabani returned, in a better mood. He sat down next to me, but we were interrupted by the arrival of two superbly dressed Frenchmen carrying large shopping bags from Façonnable and Ermenegildo Zegna. They approached Talabani, bowed deferentially, and took a pair of dark suits from the bags. One man brandished a measuring tape, and explained that they needed His Excellency to remove some of his clothes for a fitting. Talabani stood up and began struggling to take off his jacket. A valet rushed over to help.
Talabani, who is 73 and has the fat cheeks, brush moustache and large belly of a storybook pastry chef, is renowned for his political cunning, his prodigious love of food and cigars, his sense of humour, his unflagging optimism, and his inability to keep a secret. He is known as Mam Jalal, which means Uncle Jalal in Kurdish. It is a term of both endearment and cautious deference; Talabani has a mercurial personality, with extreme mood swings. He has survived in Iraqi politics largely owing to an ability to outfox his opponents and, sometimes, his allies. Over the years, he has made deals with everyone from Saddam Hussein to Ayatollah Khomeini and both Bush presidents. He is probably one of the very few people in the world who can claim, truthfully and unapologetically, to have kissed the cheeks of Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of Iran. Talabani refers to George W Bush as his "good friend" but regards Mao Zedong as his political role model.
Mowaffak al-Rubaie, a Shia politician who is Iraq's national security adviser, told me, "He's very difficult to define. If you are an Islamist, he brings you Koranic verses; if you're a Marxist, he'll talk to you about Marxist-Leninist theory, dialectics and Descartes. He has a very interesting ability to speak several languages, sometimes" - he laughed - "with a very limited vocabulary. He has a lot of anecdotes and knows a lot of jokes. He is an extraordinarily generous person, and he spends like there is no tomorrow."
Rubaie mentioned a period in the 60s when Talabani was allied with Saddam. "One day he was a good friend of Saddam, and then he became a staunch enemy," he said. (In fact, Talabani flirted with Saddam twice more.) Rubaie saw nothing contradictory in this; Talabani, he said, was the ultimate pragmatist.
No other Iraqi politician has Talabani's experience, contacts, and savvy. As a result, he has made the presidency, which was meant to be more ceremonial than the prime minister's job, a powerful post. Yet this role, too, carries contradictions. After spending decades fighting for "self-determination" for Iraq's Kurds, Talabani finds himself defending Iraq's unity. He now has a choice to make: either he can be a founding father of the "new Iraq" - the elder statesman who will help rescue it from civil war - or, if Iraq falls apart, he can be a founding father of an independent Kurdish state. As always, Talabani has hedged his bets. "I am a Kurd from Iraqi Kurdistan, but now I am responsible for Iraq," he told me. "And I feel my responsibility." In another conversation, he said, "It's true that I am an Iraqi, but in the final analysis I am a Kurd."
Under Saddam, the Kurds "were facing a dictatorship in Baghdad that was launching a war of annihilation against the Kurdish people," he said. "We were in need of all kinds of support from anybody in the world. When war starts, and you participate in it, you will need support from anyone. There is no supermarket where you can go and choose your friends in a war."
In the current war, some of his unreconciled friendships have been troublesome. Iran was once one of the Kurds' greatest allies, and Talabani had planned to fly from Paris to Tehran. But he abruptly postponed the trip at the request of the Bush administration: he would have arrived in Tehran on November 6, and the prospect of pictures of America's Iraqi ally visiting Iran the day before the midterm elections made the White House uncomfortable.
In Baghdad, Talabani lives in a yellow- brick mansion on the eastern shore of the Tigris river, outside the Green Zone. Until April 2003, when Talabani seized it, the mansion belonged to Barzan al-Tikriti, Saddam Hussein's half brother and the former chief of the secret police, who, like Saddam, was sentenced to die for his role in the Dujail massacre. (Barzan was executed on January 15, but his hanging was bungled when the rope ripped off his head.) The presidential offices are next door, in a palace that once belonged to Saddam's wife, Sajida.
Talabani's complex sits on the north side of the ramparts of the Jadiriya Bridge; on the south side is the home of his political ally Abdul Aziz al-Hakim, the Shia leader of the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq. Hakim's house is where Tariq Aziz, Saddam's deputy prime minister, once lived. The approaches on Talabani's side are heavily guarded by Kurdish peshmerga ("those who face death") fighters - Talabani commands some 50,000 peshmerga in the militia of his party, the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan, or PUK - and on Hakim's by militiamen of the Badr Organization, his party's armed wing.
The two leaders and their militias work closely on political and security matters, though in other ways the Kurds, who are largely secular, and the Shias, who are very devout, present a sharp contrast in styles. During weeks spent in Talabani's company, I never saw him or any of his aides pray. Talabani is not averse to alcohol, either, and he enjoys playing cards with a small group of his cronies.
Talabani's wife, Hero, does not live in Baghdad with her husband. She stays in their home city of Sulaimaniya, where she runs a foundation and a television station, and publishes a newspaper. She and Talabani have two sons: one, Bafel, runs the counterinsurgency wing of his father's party; the other, Qubad, represents the autonomous Kurdish government in the US.
At home in Baghdad one morning, Talabani invited me up to his private quarters. It was early, and he was still dressed in loose-fitting pyjama bottoms and an immense yellow-and-blue striped rugby shirt. A valet brought us Nescafé stirred with sugar into a creamy mixture. (I later learned that this was "Mam Jalal style".) Talabani lit a cigar. (He favours the long ones known as Churchills.) The day before, two suicide bombers had blown themselves up at a police recruitment centre just outside the Green Zone, killing 38 potential recruits. It was the latest incident in what almost everyone but Talabani acknowledged was an accelerating sectarian war. "I don't think Iraq is on the eve of a civil war," he said stubbornly. "Day by day - and this is not an exaggeration - Sunni and Shia leaders are coming close to each other."
Iraq's main problem was not sectarianism, he said, but a terrorist war waged by Ba'athists and foreign forces such as al-Qaida. Without losing his habitual equanimity, he added that the situation had been made worse by American ineptitude, arrogance and naivety, saying: "I think the main one responsible for this was Rumsfeld" - Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, who had resigned days earlier. (Talabani has since welcomed President Bush's plan to send an additional 21,500 American soldiers to Baghdad in a so-called "surge". He said in a statement that it showed "a new effort to improve security in Iraq" and that it "concurs and corresponds with Iraq's plans and ideas" - although some members of the government had been openly sceptical.)
After breakfast, Talabani went downstairs to deal with the affairs of the day. Half a dozen senior personnel were waiting, as they do each morning. When Talabani has an appointment elsewhere, he is driven in a BMW 7 Series armoured black saloon, preceded and followed by a sizable fleet of white Nissan Patrols carrying peshmerga guards. But, more often than not, people come to Talabani. It is a measure of his ascendancy that Nuri al-Maliki, the prime minister, usually comes to Talabani, rather than vice versa. Maliki is the third prime minister since 2004, while Talabani has been a constant fixture. Maliki does not have Talabani's access to American and other foreign leaders, and must often work through him. In public, Talabani tries to defer to Maliki, and he appears to wish him to succeed.
One source of Talabani's power is his wealth. Together with his old rival Massoud Barzani, who is the president of the autonomous Kurdish region, Talabani is believed to have amassed many millions of dollars in "taxes" on oil smuggled out of Iraq through Kurdistan between 1991 and 2003, when the country was under UN sanctions. And Talabani obsessively dispenses gifts, trades favours, and buys allegiances, on the assumption that, in Iraq, the richest suitor has the best chance of winning the bride.
In many ways, Talabani's behaviour and his lifestyle are those of a clandestine party boss. His private quarters are cramped, poorly lit, and undecorated, with counters cluttered with satellite phones. His indulgences are food and a large personal staff. He and the US ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad have regular meetings over kallapacha, an Iraqi dish consisting of the head and stuffed intestines of a sheep. Twice a month, Talabani sends consignments of Kurdish yogurt, cheeses, honey and handmade sweets to foreign ambassadors and leading politicians.
Several of Talabani's aides told me privately about men in his entourage who, they suspected, profited from government contracts that they steered toward their friends. In this, Talabani's circle is not unusual. Mahmoud Othman, a Kurdish MP, is close to Talabani but is scathing about the entire government's profligacy, corruption and moral cowardice. "How does the government expect to have respect when it is closed off?" he said. "The leaders live in Saddam's palaces, and in the Green Zone, and they never go out. The prime minister and the president have discretionary funds to spend as they like of a million or more dollars a month. I think the corruption is widespread and systemic and comes from the very top . . . All of this is against a reality in which the families of killed soldiers or police are given pensions of only $100 a month."
In Maliki's government, cobbled together after four months of tortuous negotiations following the December 2005 parliamentary elections, Talabani helped make sure that many of the high-level jobs that didn't go to Shias went to Kurds. (A number of them are Talabani's friends and relatives.) One of the two deputy prime ministers is a Kurd, and Kurds head several ministries, including the foreign ministry; the minister of water resources is Talabani's brother-in-law. From the American perspective, there is simply an abundance of qualified Kurds - or, at least, many with whom the US feels comfortable.
Talabani, like many senior Iraqi politicians, views Moqtada al-Sadr, the radical Shia militia leader whose militia is known as the Mahdi army, with a mixture of condescension and contempt. The key to weakening Sadr, Talabani said, was Iran. "If the Iranians will calm down the Mahdi army, if there will be no assassination, if these - what do you call them? - 'death squads' will be no more, then only the terrorists will remain. And if Syria will be silent, only al-Qaida will remain, and we can defeat al-Qaida very easily."
Talabani went on, "One of the main mistakes the Americans have made in fighting terrorism is tying our hands and the hands of the Shias, while at the same time the terrorists are free to do what they want. If they let us, within one week we will clean all Kirkuk and adjacent areas." (Talabani's implication was clear: "to clean" is a euphemism for wiping out your opposition, for killing or capturing your enemies.) Talabani then adopted a high-pitched, whining voice, to mimic the Americans: "'No-o, Kurds must not move to the Arab areas, this is sensitive.' If they let the Shias clean the road from Najaf to Baghdad, they can do it within days. If they permit the people of Anbar to liberate their area, they will do it, but they say, 'Ah, no, this is another kind of militia.' They don't understand the realities of Iraq. From the beginning, we have had this problem with them." He added, "Wrong plan, wrong tactic, and wrong policy."
Talabani has been involved in politics since 1946, when, at the age of 13, with Iraq still ruled by the British-installed Hashemite monarchy, he joined an underground Kurdish student organisation. It was part of a Kurdish independence movement that had taken shape during the breakup of the Ottoman Empire, after the first world war, when the victorious European powers failed to give the Kurds their own state. The division of the empire left the Kurds spread among Iraq (with an estimated four million Kurds today, or between 15% and 20% of Iraq's population), Turkey, Syria, and Iran; the greater Kurdistan envisaged by some separatists would encompass parts of each of those countries.
Talabani was born in the village of Kelkan, in south-eastern Iraqi Kurdistan; his father was a local sheikh. By 18, Talabani was the youngest member of the central committee of the Soviet-backed Kurdistan Democratic Party, led by Mullah Mustafa Barzani. He studied law in Baghdad (interrupted by a period spent in hiding) and completed his obligatory service in the Iraqi army. Then, in 1961, Talabani joined an armed uprising launched by Barzani.
Three years later, Talabani split with Barzani to join a splinter group founded by Ibrahim Ahmed, the father of his future wife, Hero. Ahmed did not like the terms of Barzani's negotiations with the central government. This was a period of violent political instability in Iraq, with four presidents in the space of 10 years. After a Ba'athist coup in 1968, Talabani made a deal with Saddam, who was then the deputy president, to obtain more rights for the Kurds and to get his help in fighting Barzani - only to reconcile with Barzani when Saddam switched sides. It was the beginning of a dizzying sequence of schisms within the Kurdish rebellion, for which Talabani bears significant responsibility, and which, for a time, strengthened Saddam.
Talabani was a Marxist, and then a Maoist, attracted by "Mao's idea of popular war, of fighting in the mountains against dictatorship". He was also drawn to the anti-colonial Arab nationalist causes of the day. On trips during the 60s, he made important contacts - with Gamel Abdel Nasser of Egypt, King Hussein of Jordan, Muammar Gadafy, Yasser Arafat, and President Hafez al-Assad of Syria. (In Talabani's office, there is a single photograph on the wall, of him with Assad. "He was very, very kind to me," Talabani said.)
In the mid-70s, Talabani spent time in Beirut, working with the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, a Marxist Palestinian guerrilla organisation. It is a murky period about which Talabani says little, but Kurds close to him suggest that he was then at his most radical, and at one point became involved in a Palestinian plot to hijack an American plane in Europe. He is said to have abandoned the scheme when a contact warned him that Mossad planned to assassinate him.
"We considered the US the enemy of the Iraqi Kurdish people," Talabani told me. Through the 80s, the US, for its part, saw the Kurds primarily as troublemakers and as pawns of Syria and Iran. In Turkey, America's Nato ally, Kurdish separatists had been waging a remorseless guerrilla war, to which the Turkish military responded with a vicious counterinsurgency campaign; thousands of Kurdish civilians were killed.
At the height of the Iran-Iraq War, Talabani once again allied himself with Saddam, then opposed him and helped Iran. Saddam's next move was the genocidal Anfal campaign. Saddam razed thousands of Kurdish villages, primarily in Talabani's territory. In the town of Halabja, between March 16 and March 17 1988, 5,000 Kurdish civilians were killed when planes dropped a lethal chemical cocktail that reportedly included mustard gas and nerve agents such as sarin, tabun and VX. Although these attacks later became part of the current Bush administration's case for overthrowing Saddam, the Reagan administration, which was supporting Saddam in his war with Iran, paid little attention; when the news of Halabja broke, the White House blamed Iran.
After Saddam's defeat in the first Gulf war, in early 1991, Shias in the south and Kurds in the north carried out uprisings. Talabani led his forces into Sulaimaniya and Kirkuk. With the US looking on, Saddam dispatched his army against them. Hundreds of thousands of Kurds fled, in the midst of a harsh winter, provoking a humanitarian crisis. The US and its allies declared a safe haven in the north; Talabani and Barzani (who had temporarily reconciled) began negotiating terms of settlement with Saddam.
There is an unfortunate photograph from this period that shows Talabani kissing Saddam on the cheek. "But, you know, at that time the Kurdish people were in danger of being annihilated," Talabani told me, by way of explanation. "Fighting is not playing ping-pong," Talabani said. "Fighting is killing each other. When we were fighting Saddam, we killed them, they killed us. It's something ordinary. It's war. And when we stop the war both killers sit down to receive each other. And this happens all over the world. Mao, he sat down with Chiang Kai-shek! Chiang Kai-shek killed his wife. His son! . . . But when the time comes to talk peace, they must sit down with each other. This is the process of life."
As the Kurdish "safe haven" developed into a "no fly zone" policed by US and British warplanes - a de facto Kurdish autonomous zone, beyond the authority of Saddam Hussein - Barzani and Talabani fought for pre-eminence. One dispute was over revenues from oil smuggling.
"Jalal is at his best when he is down, and is prone to making mistakes when he is up," a longtime friend of Talabani's told me. "In 1991, he was emerging as a statesman of the Kurds, internationally renowned. Instead of moving to become the nation builder that he was supposed to be, he moved into battle, playing with fire, undermining all that he built. "
In 1994, a civil war broke between the armies of Talabani and Barzani. In the midst of the fighting, Talabani provided a base for a CIA task force, and for Ahmed Chalabi, the Iraqi exile leader, who were involved in various failed coup plots. Hundreds of people died in these efforts. Talabani continued fighting Barzani, who at one point, astoundingly, invited Saddam's army into the north.
When President Clinton signed the Iraq Liberation Act, in 1998, promising American support for Iraqi opposition groups, Talabani and Barzani went to Washington and settled their differences. By then, several thousand Kurds from both sides had been killed.
Talabani called the bipartisan Iraq Study Group's report "unfair" and "unjust"; he compared it to terms imposed on a "colony". But one recommendation that he had no problem with was that President Bush begin direct talks with Syria and Iran. "It is in our interest that relations between the US and Iran about Iraq be at least normal, and if they have other differences let them take them to other parts of the world," he had told me a couple of weeks earlier. He was about to leave for his delayed trip to Iran. He was also keeping the Americans informed. "We never hide our relation with Iran from America."
Tehran was cold and grey on November 27 last year, when Talabani and his entourage arrived. Several ministers and a clutch of Iraqi journalists and photographers were on board. During our descent into Tehran, one of Talabani's junior aides came down the aisles, handing each person a form to sign. It was printed in Arabic, and, assuming it was an official landing document of some sort, I signed it, whereupon he handed me a thick envelope and moved on. Inside were 20 $100 bills. After we landed, I asked the aide why he had given me money, and he said it was "a gift from the president". I thanked him, but said that I could not accept it, and handed the envelope back. He looked very confused. A senior aide translated my explanation about "journalistic ethics", which left the man looking only more mystified. The senior aide then opened his own envelope and, whistling, counted out 50 $100 bills. "I think he's given me the same amount as the ministers," he exclaimed. "He does this from his own pocket, you know." He said that, on each trip, Talabani gives money to all those on board, including the bodyguards, the flight attendants and the pilot. We calculated that during the one-hour flight Talabani had given away about $100,000.
The contrast with Baghdad was striking. There were no armed soldiers or blast walls and security barricades to negotiate. Instead, we drove through street after street of brightly lit stores with neon signs; the sidewalks were full of people. But what most caught the attention of the Iraqis was the large number of women and girls out on the street; the sight of women in public has become a rarity in Baghdad.
The next morning, Talabani awoke early and visited the tomb of Ayatollah Khomeini. Then he met Ahmadinejad and the Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. Sources close to Talabani told me that in their talks he requested a reversal in Iran's policy - specifically, that Iran's leadership "control" Sadr's militia and ally itself instead with his government, and that it persuade its allies, including Syria, Hamas and Hizbullah, to do the same. Talabani then asked that Iran open up communications with the multinational forces in Iraq, and cooperate with the Iraqi and US governments in their security plan for Baghdad. And, perhaps most controversial from the Americans' point of view - assuming that they knew about it - Talabani proposed that Tehran and Baghdad exchange intelligence, and that Iran help train and equip Iraq's security forces.
One of the Iraqis who attended the meeting said that Talabani told Khamenei that Iraq was "at a make-or-break point and needed Iran's help". He went on: "The Supreme Leader said that he understood and would do everything he could. In return, he wanted the Iraqis to take more control over their own security from the Americans."
At a press conference, Ahmadinejad said, "Iraq is like a wounded hero." Talabani, standing next to him, said, smiling, "We can only hope that he recovers." The crowd laughed; it was a classic Mam Jalal moment. Ahmadinejad added, "The best way to support Iraq is to support its democratically elected government." However disingenuous this may have sounded under the circumstances, Talabani's officials took it as a further sign that the Iranians were prepared to help. They told me it was the first time that the Iranians had explicitly endorsed the current Iraqi government.
An Iraqi minister came up to me afterward, looking enthusiastic, and said, "You see? I told you it was more than symbolic!" After a short pause, the official leaned over and whispered excitedly, "These guys even offered us weapons!"
That evening, a senior Iraqi official said that he was worried about the "mixed messages" coming from the US. "I emphasised with the Iranians that they should not just assume that because the Americans were bogged down in Iraq they were incapable of taking action against Iran; I said that they were entirely capable of it."
Saddam's execution, which came at dawn on December 30, was a clumsy and brutish affair. As he stood on a scaffold with the noose around his neck, he was taunted by some of his hooded executioners and by spectators. Talabani was in Sulaimaniya. Hours before the execution, he had found the perfect solution to his dilemma concerning the death warrant. "It couldn't have been any better," Hiwa Osman, his media adviser, explained. "He found that in cases of international war crimes the constitution did not give him the authority to alter the court's ruling. In a way, it was a blessing from the sky, and it solved his ethical dilemma."
As for Talabani's reaction to the execution, Osman said: "Remember what he did in Paris when the death sentence was announced, and he went into his bedroom for an hour or so? This time, it lasted three or four days. No one saw him".
© 2007 Jon Lee Anderson
· Jon Lee Anderson is the author of The Fall of Baghdad, The Lion's Grave: Dispatches from Afghanistan and Che Guevara: A Revolutionary Life
------------------------------------
Citation: John Lee Anderson. "A gift for power," The Guardian, 09 February 2007.
Original URL: http://www.saag.org/Bb/view.asp?msgID=27619
------------------------------------