REPORTS – LIFE IN IRAQ
Iraqi Bomb Attacks Leave 80 Dead
Bomb attacks killed nearly 80 people in Iraq yesterday, including 48 who died in twin truck bombings in the northwestern town of Tal Afar, police said. Among other attacks, suspected Al-Qaeda militants killed 21 people in bombings targeting police and Sunni Arab tribes who have formed an alliance against the militants, officials said. The attacks follow an upsurge in violence in recent days. US and Iraqi security forces have deployed thousands more soldiers in Baghdad to try to stem a sectarian war that threatens to tear the country apart. Police Brig. Karim Khalaf Al-Jubouri said the bomber lured victims to buy wheat loaded on his truck. A second truck bomb exploded in a used car lot. On Saturday, a man wearing an explosive vest blew himself up in Tal Afar, killing 10 people. In 2006, President George W. Bush held up Tal Afar as an example of progress being made in Iraq after US-led forces freed it from Al-Qaeda militants in an offensive the previous year. Near Ramadi, in western Anbar province, a suicide bomber exploded his car outside a restaurant on a main road, killing 17 people and wounding 32, a hospital source said. The restaurant was frequented by police in an area where local tribes have joined the tribal alliance against Al-Qaeda. Many police were among the casualties.
Mosque Burnt In Revenge Attack
Attackers have stormed and burnt a mosque in the southern Iraqi town of Haswa, while elsewhere five US soldiers were killed in roadside bombings. The Sunni mosque in Haswa, a religiously mixed town 35 miles south of Baghdad, the capital, was attacked on Sunday morning. Attackers blew up its minaret and set the mosque on fire, police said. The attack was said to be in revenge for the destruction of a Shia mosque in the town the previous day. Police said at least four people were wounded in Sunday's attack. A second Sunni mosque was attacked at the same time but damage was reported to be minor.
Betrayed
Laith had a job with an American organization, affiliated with the National Endowment for Democracy, that encouraged private enterprise in developing countries. Othman had worked with a German group called Architects for People in Need, and then as a translator for foreign journalists. These were coveted jobs, but over time they had become so dangerous that Othman and Laith could talk candidly about their lives with no one except each other. “I trust him,” Othman said of his friend. “We’ve shared our experiences with foreigners—the good and the bad. We don’t have a secret life when we are together. But when we go out we have to lie.” Othman’s cell phone rang: a friend was calling from Jordan. “I had a vision that you’ll be killed by the end of the month,” he told Othman. “Get out now, please. You can stay here with me. We’ll live on pasta.” Othman said something reassuring and hung up, but his phone kept ringing, the friend calling back; his vision had made him hysterical. A string of bad events had given Othman the sense that time was running out for him in Iraq. In November, members of the Mahdi Army—the Shia militia commanded by the radical cleric Moqtada al-Sadr—rounded up Othman’s older brother and several other Sunnis who worked in a shop in a mixed neighborhood. The Sunnis were taken to a local Shia mosque and shot. Othman’s brother was only grazed in the head, but a Shiite soldier noticed that he was still alive and shot him in the eye. Somehow, he survived this, too. Othman found his brother and took him to a hospital for surgery. The hospital—like the entire Iraqi health system—was under the Mahdi Army’s control, and Othman decided that his brother would be safer at their parents’ house. The brother was now blind, deranged, and vengeful, making life unbearable for Othman’s family. A few days later, Othman’s elderly maternal aunts, who were Shia and lived in a majority-Sunni area, were told by Sunni insurgents that they had three days to leave. Othman’s father, a retired Sunni officer, went to their neighborhood and convinced the insurgents that his wife’s sisters were, in fact, Sunnis. And then, one day in January, Othman’s two teen-age brothers, Muhammad and Salim, on whom he doted, failed to come home from school. Othman called the cell phone of Muhammad, who was fifteen. “Is this Muhammad?” he said. A stranger’s voice answered: “No, I’m not Muhammad.” “Where is Muhammad?” “Muhammad is right here,” the stranger said. “I’m looking at him now. We have both of them.” “Are you joking?” “No, I’m not. Are you Sunni or Shia?” Thinking of what had happened to his older brother, Othman lied: “We’re Shia.” The stranger told him to prove it. The boys had left their identity cards at home, for their own safety. Othman’s mother took the phone, sobbing and begging the kidnapper not to hurt her boys. “We’re going to behead them,” the kidnapper told her. “Choose where you want us to throw the bodies. Or do you prefer us to cut them to pieces for you? We enjoy cutting young boys to pieces.” The man hung up. After several more phone conversations, Othman realized his mistake: the kidnappers were Sunnis, with Al Qaeda. Shiites are not Muslims, the kidnappers told him—they deserve to be killed. Then they stopped answering the phone. Othman called a friend who belonged to a Sunni political party with ties to insurgents; over the course of the afternoon, the friend got the kidnappers back on the phone and convinced them that the boys were Sunnis. They were released with apologies, along with their money and their phones. It was the worst day of Othman’s life. He said he would never forget the sound of the stranger’s voice.
Othman began a campaign of burning. He went into the yard or up on the roof of his parents’ house with a jerrican of kerosene and set fire to papers, identity badges, books in English, photographs—anything that might incriminate him as an Iraqi who worked with foreigners. If Othman had to flee Iraq, he wanted to leave nothing behind that might harm him or his family. He couldn’t bring himself to destroy a few items, though: his diaries, his weekly notes from the hospital where he had once worked. “I have this bad habit of keeping everything like memories,” he said. [Long article, but worth reading. – dancewater]
Audio of Interview with Iraqi Refugee
And they call it peace: Inside Iraq, four years on
In a personal diary to mark the fourth anniversary of the war, our award-winning correspondent Patrick Cockburn journeys through a country riven with violence and chaos.
Sunday 18 March. Khanaqin
The difficulty of reporting Iraq is that it is impossibly dangerous to know what is happening in most of the country outside central Baghdad. Bush and Blair hint that large parts of Iraq are at peace; untrue, but difficult to disprove without getting killed in the attempt. My best bet was to go to Sulaymaniyah, an attractive city ringed by snow-covered mountains in eastern Kurdistan. I would then drive south, sticking to a road running through Kurdish towns and villages to Khanaqin, a relatively safe Kurdish enclave in north-east Diyala province, one of the more violent places in Iraq. We start for the south through heavy rain, and turn sharp east at Kalar, a grubby Kurdish town, to Jalawlah, a mixed Kurdish and Arab town where there has been fighting. Ominously, there are few trucks coming towards us. I was on this road last year and it was crowded with them. We go to the heavily guarded office of the deputy head of the PUK, Mamosta Saleh, who says the situation in Diyala is getting worse. The insurgents have control of Baquba, the provincial capital. He says: "They are also attacking a Kurdish tribe called the Zargosh in the Hamrin mountains." Security is so bad that government rations had not been delivered for seven months. I do the rounds of the town and hear on all sides that "security is good in the centre". Everybody says this in Iraq, even in villages that do not seem to have a centre. I know that six weeks earlier a bomb killed 12 and wounded 40 people in the centre of Khanaqin. Baquba is only 30 miles from Baghdad. It is as if the government in London had lost control of Reading. I say I want to meet some refugees from Baquba or Baghdad. A grim-looking policeman is given the job of guiding us. We drive a long way out of town behind his red car. Then he stops and talks to some men. The conversation seems too long if he is only asking the way. We are nervous of kidnappers so we race back into town. The mayor, Mohammed Amin Hassan Hussein, explains why there are no trucks on the road: the government in Baghdad has shut the nearby border with Iran, a serious blow to Khanaqin, which depends on cross-border trade.
Monday 19 March. Sulaymaniyah
I drive up into the mountains behind Sulaymaniyah. The snow is melting and the grass is green. After the Kurdish uprising was crushed in March 1991, the Baghdad government brought us here to show they had recaptured it. In these same hills, a mechanical grab was unearthing the bodies of Iraqi government security men from muddy mass graves. Reviled as torturers and killers, they expected no mercy from the Kurds and had fought to the last man.
Tuesday 20 March. Kirkuk
I drive to Kirkuk. The cliché was to describe it as "the powder keg" of Iraq, where Kurds and Arabs competing for control, along with the Turkoman, who had the trump card of Turkish support. The explosion is yet to happen, but every city and town in Iraq can now claim to be a powder keg, so people have forgotten how dangerous Kirkuk can be. I was here when the city fell to the Kurds in 2003. The PUK forces captured Kirkuk with no resistance. The Arabs and Turkoman were deeply unhappy. They still are. The day before I arrived, there were seven bomb attacks, killing 12 people and injuring 39. It is not as bad as Baghdad - few places are - but dead bodies, often tortured, turn up every few days.
VIDEO: Japanese-Iraqi Solidarity Feeds Hungry Iraq
REPORTS – IRAQI MILITIAS, POLITICIANS, POWER BROKERS
Insurgents Loot Arms Dumps
Comment Iraqi arms dumps overrun by coalition forces in 2003 were still being looted by insurgents in search of explosives and ammunition as late as last October, according to a damning new report by the US Government Accountability Office (GAO).
REPORTS – US/UK/OTHERS IN IRAQ
US Major Recalls Year with Wolf Brigade
U.S. Army Maj. Charles Miller suspects members of the Iraqi police unit he was advising of killing, kidnapping and beating Sunni Muslims and leading him into an ambush. Yet Miller still supports the U.S. policy of embedding small teams in larger units of Iraqi security forces, believing his work improved the national police battalion he advised. Miller, who normally works at U.S. Pacific Command in Hawaii, led an 11-strong team advising the battalion that was part of the Shi'ite-dominated Wolf Brigade, widely reputed to abuse its powers to target Sunnis. "They were all very friendly but they all have other motives on the side," recalled Miller, who completed his year-long mission last month and is now teaching other U.S. soldiers soon to deploy in advisory teams. "They're friendly because as long as the Americans are with them, they can get away with more because the Iraqi people see Americans with them and think everything is legitimate." The battalion would detain far more Sunnis than Shi'ites in raids, Miller said. The few Shi'ites would be released while Sunnis would be mistreated before being transferred to prison. "Some of the people, when they showed up, were pretty well beat up," said Miller, calmly recounting his story at Fort Riley, Kansas, where the Army trains advisory teams. Now, every detainee is photographed on arrest so any mistreatment can be documented, he said. Between 4,000 and 5,000 U.S. troops serve in "transition teams" advising Iraqi units. Improving Iraqi security forces is seen as vital to allowing U.S. forces to leave the country. Miller's team discovered arrest warrants used by the Wolf Brigade often were not legitimate and told the battalion his team would not go on any mission without correct documents. A month or two later, the battalion was called out on a mission at short notice. Soon after three U.S. officers left their vehicles at the site of the mission, a bomb exploded and the group came under fire from mortars, machine guns and rocket-propelled grenades, Miller said. "The national police dismounted their vehicles, took cover in a ditch and never fired back," Miller said. The Iraqi commander said the whole battalion's ammunition did not work. Miller believes his team was set up "because we were being so rough on them, sticklers for details". "From then on, we never did another mission unless me and my team were involved in the planning," Miller said. [I remember the Iraqi bloggers on Iraq the Model talking about the Wolf Brigade. They thought they were wonderful and had no questions about all the terrorist’s “confessions” on live TV, even though the so-called terrorists were clearly tortured. It amazes me that Miller thinks the work he did was of some benefit to decent people in the world. He is totally into self-delusion, I would say. – dancewater]
Israeli Officer Sells Weapons To Terrorists in Iraq
Shmoel Avivi, an Israeli retired officer, had established a firm in Iraq 2 years ago, which secretly sold arms to terrorist groups in Iraq, Ma'ariv reported. Amnesty International reported that Avivi was one of the biggest weapon dealers in the Middle East. Iraqi sources earlier announced that terrorist attacks in Iraq were backed by the intelligent agencies of CIA and Mossad and the secret agents of Iraqi former regime. Earlier, Iraqi parliament security commission chairman Hadi Ameri had accused the occupying soldiers of secretly directing the terrorist attacks and forming terror squads in Iraq.
COMMENTARY
Counting the Cost
Our collective failure has been to take our political leaders at their word. This week, the BBC reported that the government's own scientists advised ministers that the Johns Hopkins study on Iraq civilian mortality was accurate and reliable. This paper was published in the Lancet last October. It estimated that 650,000 Iraqi civilians had died since the American- and British-led invasion in March 2003. Immediately after publication, the prime minister's official spokesman said that The Lancet's study "was not one we believe to be anywhere near accurate". The foreign secretary, Margaret Beckett, said that the Lancet figures were "extrapolated" and a "leap". President Bush said: "I don't consider it a credible report". Scientists at the UK's Department for International Development thought differently. They concluded that the study's methods were "tried and tested". Indeed, the Hopkins approach would likely lead to an "underestimation of mortality". The Ministry of Defence's chief scientific advisor said the research was "robust", close to "best practice", and "balanced". He recommended "caution in publicly criticising the study". When these recommendations went to the prime minister's advisers, they were horrified. One person briefing Tony Blair wrote: "are we really sure that the report is likely to be right? That is certainly what the brief implies?" A Foreign Office official was forced to conclude that the government "should not be rubbishing The Lancet". The prime minister's adviser finally gave in. He wrote: "the survey methodology used here cannot be rubbished, it is a tried and tested way of measuring mortality in conflict zones". How would the government respond? Would it welcome the Hopkins study as an important contribution to understanding the military threat to Iraqi civilians? Would it ask for urgent independent verification? Would it invite the Iraqi government to upgrade civilian security? Of course, our government did none of these things. Tony Blair was advised to say: "the overriding message is that there are no accurate or reliable figures of deaths in Iraq". His official spokesman went further and rejected the Hopkins report entirely. It was a shameful and cowardly dissembling by a Labour - yes, by a Labour - prime minister. Indeed, it was even contrary to the Americans' own Iraq Study Group report, which concluded last year that "there is significant underreporting of the violence in Iraq".
Nothing But Fascists
The war on Iraq was not carried out on the basis of mere strategic interests. No strategies or interests could explain the level of death and destruction that Iraq had undergone ever since the Gulf War in 1991. If one were to assume that the US led invasion in 2003 is a continuation of that war, then Iraq could be said to have suffered more horrors than any country had, including the countries that were involved the WWII. We are talking about at least two and a half million Iraqi civilians who had met their fate, where 750,000 of them were killed during the last four years. That figure represents 10% of Iraq’s population. In addition, you have over three and a half million Iraqis displaced (two million of them fled outside the country while the other1.5 million lost their homes and became displaced inside their own country). That is 14% of the population. Even when the Nazis brought destruction to Europe during WWII, no country alone suffered such human losses. Although the Soviet Union at the time, who suffered the biggest number of victims, had lost 20 million lives (military and civilian), that figure represents only 10% of the population which was 197 million in 1941. The tight sanctions that Iraq had faced for over 12 years were also unprecedented in modern history, affecting such basic needs as food and medicine. The aim of those sanctions was not only to strangle the country’s economy but also to pressure Iraqi society, too. The sanctions, which reduced many segments of the population into poverty, were meant to make the country easier to invade, after creating a public desperation for change. But it has also created internal resentments and divisions between the ‘Haves’ and ‘Have-nots’, which naturally led to organised crime and armed gang formations. It was like some sort of a ‘social nuclear bomb’. If you accept the findings of Johns Hopkins University team which estimated that 650,000 Iraqi civilians had died during the first three years of the US-led invasion, and compare that figure to the number of victims who have died by the Hiroshima bomb, then you could say that Iraq has suffered the effect of four nuclear bombs. Combining all the losses that Iraq has endured ever since 1991 as a direct result of US involvement, one could conclude that Iraqis would have witnessed more mercy had they been besieged and invaded by the Nazis. Causing such genocide cannot be attributed to perusing interests only. The mass killings in Iraq, like the genocide in Rwanda in 1994, had been met with great indifference from citizens from around the globe (and not just their involved governments). Inaccurate media coverage has helped creating a sense of hatred in some societies against ‘the other’.
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