REPORTS – LIFE IN IRAQ
Gunmen Kill 50 in Tal Afar
Gunmen rampaged through a Sunni district of the northwestern Iraqi town of Tal Afar overnight, killing about 50 people in reprisal for bombings in a Shi'ite area, Iraqi officials said on Wednesday. Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki, a Shi'ite, ordered an inquiry into reports the gunmen included policemen from his Shi'ite- dominated security forces, an official in his office said. The attack was on the Sunni district of al-Wihda in Tal Afar, where tensions have been rising between Shi'ite and Sunni Muslim residents, mostly Turkish-speaking ethnic Turkmen. The tit-for-tat violence in a town held up by U.S. President George W. Bush only a year ago as an example of progress towards peace in Iraq, graphically illustrates the challenge facing Maliki in bridging an ever-widening sectarian divide. There has been a sharp upsurge in violence in recent days outside Baghdad, epicentre of the communal bloodshed, where thousands of U.S. and Iraqi security forces are focusing their efforts to halt a slide to full-scale civil war. [Later reports said 70 were killed. – dancewater]
Victims Describe Chlorine-Gas Attack
Gunmen in black hoods came to Albuaifan, a town south of Fallujah, four months ago and demanded that the sheiks of the Albu Issa tribe pledge loyalty to the Islamic State of Iraq, the insurgent "nation" that the group al-Qaida in Iraq had proclaimed last October. The tribal leaders said no. Since then, the tribe has been at war. Its men have stopped going to work, and they carry weapons routinely now. They've even issued a password and closely question anyone they encounter who doesn't know it. The battle entered a frightening new stage 10 days ago when insurgents blew up a chlorine tank in the middle of Albuaifan. The heavy, poisonous gas sank near the ground and seeped into the garden of Irsan Majid Alisawy, where a dozen children were playing. "I couldn't breathe," Alisawy recalled Monday. "I wanted to open my mouth but there was no air." It was even worse for the children, who quickly passed out. "We were terrified," Alisawy said.
Sweeps in Iraq Cram Two Jails with Detainees
Hundreds of Iraqis detained in the Baghdad security crackdown have been crammed into two detention centers run by the Defense Ministry that were designed to hold only dozens of people, a government monitoring group said Tuesday. The numbers suggested that the security plan’s emphasis on aggressive block-by-block sweeps of troubled neighborhoods in the capital had flooded Iraq’s frail detention system, and appeared to confirm the fears of some human rights advocates who have been predicting that the new plan would aggravate already poor conditions. The disclosure came as violence continued to tear through Iraq, including a double suicide-vehicle bombing in Tal Afar that killed at least 55 people, the authorities said, and the murder of two Chaldean Christian nuns in Kirkuk. In one of the detention centers, in the town of Mahmudiya, south of Baghdad, 705 people were packed into an area built for 75, according to Maan Zeki Khadum, an official with the monitoring group. The other center, on Muthana Air Base, held 272 people in a space designed to hold about 50, he said, and included two women and four boys who were being held in violation of regulations that require juveniles to be separated from adults and males from females. In an interview, Mr. Khadum said a majority of the detainees at the two detention centers had been picked up while the security plan, which began in mid-February, was being put into effect. He said the detention system had been suffering from a problem of “fast detention and very slow release, especially for those who are not guilty.” His group includes 17 lawyers and is working under a government committee run by the Shiite politician Ahmad Chalabi.
For Many Iraqis, Hunt for the Missing Is Never Ending
He comes to her in dreams, dressed in the blue police uniform he wore the day he disappeared. “I’m alive,” he tells Intisar Rashid, his wife and the mother of their five children. “I’m alive.” And so she restlessly keeps searching. Ever since the Thursday two months ago when her husband failed to come home, Ms. Rashid has tried to find the man she loves. In the Green Zone last week, where she waited to scour a database of Iraqis detained by American troops, she said she had already visited the Baghdad morgue a dozen times, every hospital in the city and a handful of Iraqi government ministries. “I feel like I’m going to collapse,” she said, carrying her husband’s police identification card in one hand and a crumpled tissue in the other. “It’s taken over my days, my nights.” The past year of dizzying violence here has produced thousands of Iraqis like Ms. Rashid — sad-eyed seekers caught in an endless loop of inquiry and disappointment. Burdened by grief without end or answers, they face a set of horrors as varied and fractured as Iraq itself. Has my son or husband or father been killed by a death squad, his body hidden? Or has he been arrested? Is he in a legitimate prison with his name unregistered, or trapped in a secret basement jail with masked torturers? Most importantly: How can he be found? …..Nearly 3,000 Iraqis visited the American-run National Iraqi Assistance Center in the Green Zone last month to look for missing relatives, roughly triple the monthly traffic of last spring, and an increase of 50 percent since December, according to military figures. Capt. Lance Carr, the director of the center, which also manages programs for medical aid, employment and other issues, said the swell in inquiries about missing men tracks with a rise in detentions under the new Baghdad security plan. Iraqis said that despite the legacy of abuses at Abu Ghraib prison, their best-case scenario was still American detention because at least then their loved ones were registered and had a chance to be released if innocent. But American-run prisons hold only a small portion of Iraq’s detainees. Because many victims of the violence here are never identified, and because the Iraqi detention system remains corrupt, sectarian and opaque, according to Iraqi and American officials, most Iraqis never find who they are looking for. “There are so many different sides that are fighting now, without names or uniforms,” said Muhammad Haideri, a Shiite cleric and chairman of the human rights committee in the Iraqi Parliament. “There’s terrorism; there are kidnappings, armed militias and gangs. On top of that, when a bomb explodes, people end up deformed, and they are considered missing, too.”
NGOs Urge More Aid For Displaced Families in South
Fakhouri said that nearly 90 percent of the 700,000 internally displaced people in the southern provinces lack essential needs. According to the United Nations Refugee Agency (UNHCR), of this total, at least 310,000 arrived there after the bombing on 22 February 2006 of a revered Shia shrine in the northern city of Samarra caused an escalation of sectarian violence. Fakhouri said that unofficial records suggest there are at least 200,000 more displaced people in the southern provinces, bringing the total to nearly a million. The economically poorer southern cities have few jobs to offer this massive influx of people. As such, the displaced are largely unemployed and depend on assistance from aid organisations. Local NGOs say they simply cannot cope with the large numbers arriving in the south and blame the government for being slow to respond to the growing humanitarian crisis there. Fareed Abbas, a spokesman for Najaf-based NGO the Muslim Organisation for Peace (MOP), said the central government was unwilling to provide sufficient funds to develop sanitation, education and electricity projects in the southern provinces. “We have appealed dozens of times to the central government to help in such critical circumstances but we haven’t got any response yet. Instead, over the past few months, their assistance has decreased considerably, leaving people without support and infrastructure,” Abbas said. “Children are getting sick and the elderly are dying because they cannot get treatment for their chronic diseases. Pregnant women are dying or losing their babies because they cannot reach hospitals on time to get help from specialists,” he added. Abbas stressed the urgent need for international support and better coordination of aid deliveries. “When aid convoys reach our provinces, they come with medicines that aren’t useful, such as tonnes of drugs for headaches, or food stuffs that won’t help to feed families,” he said.
……..Dr Aziz Ali Baroud, a physician at Najaf Main Hospital, said the region’s hospitals cannot cope with the increase in people seeking medical treatment since the beginning of 2007. As a result, there are severe shortages in specialists and in medical essentials such as paediatric needles and heart disease drugs, he said. “At least one person dies in our hospital every day due to lack of assistance or medicines. If you add all the people dying for the same reason in all the hospitals in the southern provinces, the number becomes very serious,” Baroud said, adding that abortions have become common among displaced women unable to cope with their situation.
Iraqis in Jordan Cause Black Market for Jobs
The huge influx of Iraqis in Jordan over the past year has caused the creation of an illegal employment market that is undercutting the wages of ordinary Jordanians and sometimes robbing them of their jobs, local officials say. In addition, some Jordanians blame incoming Iraqis for property price rises, and increasingly overburdened education and health systems. “Iraqis who are educated can easily get good jobs in the black market but they are not well paid, and are exploited by working longer hours without being compensated,” Mustafa Abdel-Kadder, a spokesman for the Association of Iraqis in Jordan (AIJ), said. “They [Iraqis] accept these conditions to keep their families in the country and avoid deportation,” he added.
“I can’t find medicines for my son’s convulsions”
Um Mustafa Bakr is a 33-year-old mother-of-three who is desperately looking for treatment for her son, Omar. The two-year-old has been suffering serious bouts of epilepsy-induced convulsions for the past year. "I'm tired of going to public hospitals in search of treatment for my son. He's just a baby and is suffering from a condition that could kill him. Basic medicines can keep him alive. Omar has to take a drug called carbamazepine, which is used for the treatment of anxiety, epilepsy and convulsions. "Each time he has a bout of convulsions, I get scared that it's going to be the last day of his life. Initially, we were getting free treatment in public pharmacies, but for the past six months the situation has changed and we don't get free treatment any more. "My husband's been unemployed for the past two years. We're only able to survive because some relatives are helping us with food and clothes for the children. We don't have money to buy medicines from private pharmacies for Omar, especially after a medicine shortage has made pharmacy owners raise their prices.
REPORTS – IRAQI MILITIAS, POLITICIANS, POWER BROKERS
Militants Attack Iraqi, US Forces with Chlorine
Insurgents with two chlorine gas truck bombs attacked a local government building in Falluja, in western Iraq, and 15 Iraqi and U.S. security forces were injured in the bomb blasts, the U.S. military said on Wednesday. "Numerous Iraqi soldiers and policemen are being treated for symptoms such as laboured breathing, nausea, skin irritation and vomiting that are synonymous with chlorine inhalation," a U.S. statement said. It said no Iraqi or U.S. forces were killed in what it called a "complex attack" using mortars and small arms as well as the truck bombs.
Iraq Militias Feed on Poverty
On the ground in Iraq, working-class people unable to leave because they are poor and unskilled have been falling prey to militias who enjoy incredible financial power. Ziad, an Iraqi asylum seeker in Sweden, who did not want to give his second name fearing that it would affect his asylum application, said: "It was a mass immigration. I, along with dozens of my friends and university colleagues decided to leave, because there is nothing to do in Iraq. "University graduates and professionals cannot be part of the army or police, which are the only jobs you can have easily in Iraq nowadays." Observers have started to question why reconstruction in oil-rich southern Iraq, which has been relatively stable, has not yet started in earnest. It would provide work opportunities for thousands of Iraqis and a haven for the middle classes. Muhammad al-Hasan, an Iraqi journalist from the southern city of Samawa, said that high unemployment has contributed to the steady flow of fighters into different militias. ………Ahmed Zayed, a sociology professor at Cairo University, said the shortage of resources may well push many more people to carry arms for money to support their families. "When the existence of a human being and his family is threatened, he tends to do anything to keep his head above the water," he said. "Unfortunately, this case is very common in human history, and it is likely to continue. Warlords know how to play this game. They use their connections to close all doors; meanwhile they keep their doors open." Ali al-Zubi, a sociology professor at Kuwait University, said: "Definitely, unemployment and deprivation develop tension and hostility. Let us take the suicide bombers, nearly all of them belonged to deprived families. I think that unemployment and deprivation produce the human fuel for terrorist groups."
REPORTS – US/UK/OTHERS IN IRAQ
Green Zone Sees Spike in Mortars
Insurgents have stepped up rocket and mortar attacks on Baghdad's international Green Zone where most Iraqi government offices and the U.S. embassy are located, a senior U.S. military spokesman said on Wednesday. Rear Admiral Mark Fox said nine people were wounded and two killed in three mortar or rocket strikes in three days from March 25. On Tuesday a U.S. contractor and a U.S. soldier were killed, and one U.S. state department employee was wounded. Insurgents have for years been firing mortar bombs and rockets into the Green Zone, a large area stretching for several miles along the River Tigris surrounded by fortified walls and checkpoints. Usually the attacks do not cause casualties as there are many uninhabited areas within the Green Zone. Fox said that while the total number of indirect fire attacks in March was on a trend to be lower than in recent months, there appeared to be a change in targets.
Occupation, Splits Threaten Iraq Civil War
Saudi King Abdullah told Arab leaders at a summit on Wednesdsay that illegal foreign occupation and sectarian violence in Iraq was threatening a civil war. "In beloved Iraq, blood flows between brothers in the shadow of illegitimate foreign occupation and hateful sectarianism, threatening a civil war," he said in a speech.
COMMENTARY
Iraq’s Next Civil War
Seven bombs detonating in the space of 35 minutes sent up clouds of black smoke over the centre of Kirkuk earlier this week. The explosions in Arab and Turkoman districts killed 12 people and injured 39 but exactly who was behind them is unclear. Kirkuk is a place where trust is in short supply. "I firmly predict there will be a rumour the Kurds were behind these bombings," sighs Rafat Hamarash, the head of the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan, the Kurdish political party that largely controls the city. He said somebody wanted to stir up ethnic divisions between Kurd, Arab and Turkoman before they vote on the future of Kirkuk in nine months' time. Mr Hamarash is probably right about the motives for the latest attacks. The city is approaching a critical moment in its long history. In December, there is a referendum, its timing agreed under the Iraqi constitution, when 1.8 million people of Kirkuk province will vote on whether or not to join the highly autonomous Kurdish region that is already almost a separate state. Kurds will vote in favour and probably win; Arabs and Turkomans will vote against and lose.
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