News & Views 05/21/07

Photo: A boy stands beside his mother, who was wounded in a mortar attack, in a hospital in Baquba 65 km (40 miles) northeast of Baghdad May 21, 2007. Two people were killed and 15 wounded when three mortar rounds landed in the religiously mixed city of Baquba, police said. REUTERS/Helmiy al-Azawi (IRAQ)

REPORTS – LIFE IN IRAQ

Video: Challenges at A Girls School in Baghdad

On May 16, IRIN released a devastating report on Iraq’s education troubles. But in Adhamiya, and all over Baghdad and the rest of Iraq, schools remain open if possible, dedicated to educating Iraqi children for a better life. The Safina Middle School in Adhamiya is a girls’ school in a particularly dangerous area of Baghdad. Raids and mortar attacks such as this one in the Adel/Adil neighborhood last January are also common in Adhamiya. Violence against schools continues to be condemned, as it was after the January attack, but security is tenuous at best. Although the students interviewed by Alive in Baghdad are desperate to continue school against all odds, many Iraqi children are leaving out of fear for their safety. Teachers are also becoming increasingly difficult to come by, fleeing for their safety to other countries or leaving their jobs altogether if they cannot. Other teachers report being threatened by students with ties to Iraq’s different militias. Despite all of these threats and difficulties, students at Safina say they will continue and urge their parents not to move them to a closer school, or one in a potentially safer area, even if security continues to deteriorate. The teachers at Safina pride themselves on continuing their lessons and helping those students to catch up who miss days.

Surviving In A Lawless War Zone

My home is in Diyala, a province north of Baghdad. The area around the capital city of Baquba has become a focal point for some of the most intense fighting in Iraq in recent months. For the past five months, I have been forced to live at my mum's in Baghdad with the rest of my family. I can't go back home. I went to visit my family in Baghdad for Eid. While there, one of my cousins went into Baquba to pick up my husband's wages and found out insurgents had invaded my house. She bumped into one of my neighbours who told her terrorists were using it as their base. They have looted everything and now live and sleep there. My brother, Safaa, has told me not to worry about it. He says it is still my house. This has happened to other people I know. These insurgents come to houses, unafraid to show their faces, and say you must leave your house or tomorrow they will return to bomb it. People tell them they have nothing to leave in and have no money, but they don't care. If you don't leave, they come back and blow up your house with grenades.

……….There is a shortage of medicine here too. My mother is diabetic and suffers from high blood pressure, but struggles to get hold of medicine. She was discharged quickly from hospital after a recent operation to free up room for fresh casualties even though she wasn't ready to go home. Just before the last war started, my sister-in-law became pregnant with her sixth child. She and her husband had five daughters and wanted a son.
They found out this was a boy. It was a dream come true after more than ten years of trying. As the pregnancy went on, she started losing weight and went to see a doctor. She said there was nothing wrong, but she continued to lose more and more weight. She needed specialist help, but the doctors did nothing. In the end, she died before their son was born. Less than two years later, my brother died of the same illness, with fluid on his chest. Today, many of us have bad diarrhoea - some people are dying from it. We need food and clean water.

"Mine is a dirty and miserable life”

Nineteen-year-old Nafisa Ridwan says she was forced to work as a sex worker to feed her younger brothers after her father died in an attack in the capital, Baghdad. With her mother seriously sick with a heart condition and without anyone to look after the family, she had to resort to prostitution after failing to find other work. She gets enough money to feed herself, her mother and three younger brothers, and is able to buy medicine for her mother. Nafisa says she cries every time she sleeps with a man but feels happy when she sees her brothers - Muhammad (16), Mustafa (14) and Khalija (10) - eating. “I was studying literature at college when my father died a year ago. Desperately broke and with my mother’s health deteriorating every day, I was forced to leave university and find a job. “I tried looking for different kinds of work but in Iraq being a woman is really tough. With no money to buy food, someone told me he would give me money if I slept with him. I was reluctant at first but later when I saw that things were getting worse and we were going to be evicted from the house we were renting because we were late with the rent, I decided to accept the guy’s offer and I have been a sex worker since then. At the time, I was a virgin and saw my precious honour [virginity] being taken for miserable dinars. But I had no option because I couldn’t let my mother or brothers starve.

Baghdad: three lives under duress

In different neighborhoods, a shopkeeper, a Christian, and an imam try to carry on amid daily dangers. Haidar Abdel Haathez knows that business at his makeshift market is good in part because of Baghdad's violence. That's not always a good feeling, he says, his two young sons close by his side. So he does what he can to smooth the rough edges of his customers' lives. "There is danger in the big markets now, so the people come here more," he says as he stands behind the counter in his 10-by-20-ft. bazaar of stacked cans, neatly shelved cleaning products, colorfully packaged local staples, and imported specialties with names like Heinz and Kraft. "I try to do things to help them out." The surge that is set to put 30,000 more troops in Iraq by mid-June has led to fewer bodies turning up on Baghdad's streets from sectarian violence. But it has also spurred an adaptable insurgency to redirect attention to potential high-casualty, high-impact targets – forcing different adjustments in different neighborhoods of this sprawling city of 5 million. In Jamiyah, Mr. Haathez's middle-class enclave at the top of an oxbow bend in the Tigris River, the new phase means residents stay closer to home. In the mixed neighborhood of Dora, where the US military says their push has been a success, Iraqi officials were on hand recently for the reopening of a neighborhood market. But local Christians have also faced demands, of murky origin, to convert to Islam, leave, or die. And in the historic Khadimiya district on the west bank of the Tigris, the golden dome of the Imam Kadhim shrine is a beacon to Shiite pilgrims – and a source of anxiety for US officers who remember the sectarian storm unleashed by the bombing of another Shiite holy site in Samarra last year. There, an uneasy cohabitation has settled in between sworn enemies with a common interest in keeping the shrine safe.

Sunni extremists threaten to kill Christian converts in north

A Sunni extremist group - al-Qaeda in Iraq - has threatened to kill Muslim youths in the northern city of Sulaimaniyah should they convert to Christianity or Zoroastrianism. “We are hunting those who have converted to Christianity or Zoroastrianism as we consider them renegades and God’s punishment must be implemented by killing them," said a statement posted on the al-Farouk website on 22 April and signed by al-Qaeda in Iraq. The statement, whose authenticity could not be immediately confirmed, also urged the youth to join “[the] Mujahedin and hoist the jihad flag against the crusaders who are occupying Iraq, instead of supporting them.”

REPORTS – IRAQI MILITIAS, POLITICIANS, POWER BROKERS

Oil Law Mired In Dispute Over Foreign Rights

Disagreement over the future role of foreign investment in Iraq's oil fields has stalled passage of an oil law the Bush administration says is crucial to Iraq's future. The measure seeks to establish a framework for how the world's third-largest oil reserves will be divided among Iraq's rival sects. The parliament will miss a May 31 target date set by the Iraqi government to pass the bill, said Mahmoud Othman, a leading Kurdish lawmaker. "There's no way it will be done by then," Othman said. "Not even close." Iraq's Cabinet approved a draft of the bill in February, but negotiations have recently bogged down over whether foreign oil companies or the state-run Iraqi National Oil Co. (INOC) will have primary rights to Iraq's oil. An annex to the oil bill introduced last month by Iraq's oil minister, Hussain al-Shahristani, proposed that the INOC manage 93% of Iraq's known oil fields and related contracts.

Leaders in the Kurdish north, which enjoys semiautonomy from Baghdad, have resisted most efforts to centralize economic power in the capital. A greater role by the INOC could also discourage foreign investors from modernizing Iraq's outdated oil production facilities, said Ashti Hawran, Kurdistan's natural resources minister. "This is a source of contention," Hawran said. "It's not what the Kurds want. The INOC is inefficient. It doesn't have the technical capability. It is not entitled to receive all that responsibility. It's contrary to the spirit of the (oil) law itself and certainly contrary to the constitution."

Many Sunnis and Shiites favor tighter control by the INOC, fearing that otherwise a greater share of oil profits - which account for more than 90% of Iraqi government revenue - could go to multinational energy companies. "We want foreign oil companies, and we have to lure them into Iraq to learn from their expertise and acquire their technology, but we shouldn't give them big privileges," Tariq al-Hashemi, Iraq's Sunni vice president, said in Geneva on Sunday. Some Sunni leaders say they will not pass the oil law until other structural questions are resolved, such as how power will be divided between Baghdad and provincial governments. "Unless there's a change in the constitution, this oil law doesn't mean anything," said Ayad al-Sammarie, deputy chairman of the Iraqi Islamic Party, a leading Sunni group. Othman, the Kurdish lawmaker, said U.S. pressure to pass the oil law as soon as possible was making matters worse. The legislation was written "in a hurry" and left some crucial details unclear, he said.

Iraq Draws Up Plans If US Forces Leave

Iraq's military is drawing up plans on how to cope if U.S.-led forces leave the country quickly, the defense minister said Monday. The statement by Defense Minister Abdul-Qader al-Obeidi marked the first time a senior Iraqi official has spoken publicly about the possibility of a quick end to the U.S.-led mission. It was unclear if the remarks were more than routine contingency planning. "The army plans on the basis of a worst-case scenario so as not to allow any security vacuum," al-Obeidi said. "There are meetings with political leaders on how we can deal with a sudden pullout.”

REPORTS – US/UK/OTHERS IN IRAQ

US Troops Kill Iraq Raid “Leader”

US forces in Iraq have killed the alleged mastermind of a guerrilla attack in which five US troops died, military officials have said. Azhar al-Dulaimi was killed on Friday during clashes with US troops as they tried to capture him in northern Baghdad, said Maj Gen William Caldwell. He was believed to be behind a raid in which guerrillas posing as US troops attacked a military base in Karbala. One US soldier was killed and four others abducted and later gunned down. US forces had been hunting al-Dulaimi since the sophisticated January attack, in which English-speaking gunmen with American weapons and military uniforms attacked a joint US-Iraqi military headquarters in the Shia city. "We found him finally Friday morning," Maj Gen Caldwell told CNN. The brazen attack shocked the US military, which was examining how the guerrillas managed to bypass Iraqi security forces to enter the compound. "We went in on a precision operation to capture him and in the pursuing engagement that occurred, he was killed." The brazen attack shocked the US military, which was examining how the guerrillas managed to bypass Iraqi security forces to enter the compound. [Sami Rasouli, an Iraqi-American living in Najaf, said he got phone calls that day from Iraqis on the scene who claimed that the people who did the abductions were Americans. They thought it was a staged movie event, or something, until they realized that one was killed. I rather think most Iraqis could tell the difference between a native Iraqi acting like an American and an American. – dancewater]

Exclusive: Secret US plot to kill Al-Sadr

The US Army tried to kill or capture Muqtada al-Sadr, the widely revered Shia cleric, after luring him to peace negotiations at a house in the holy city of Najaf, which it then attacked, according to a senior Iraqi government official. The revelation of this extraordinary plot, which would probably have provoked an uprising by outraged Shia if it had succeeded, has left a legacy of bitter distrust in the mind of Mr Sadr for which the US and its allies in Iraq may still be paying. "I believe that particular incident made Muqtada lose any confidence or trust in the [US-led] coalition and made him really wild," the Iraqi National Security Adviser Dr Mowaffaq Rubai'e told The Independent in an interview. It is not known who gave the orders for the attempt on Mr Sadr but it is one of a series of ill-considered and politically explosive US actions in Iraq since the invasion. In January this year a US helicopter assault team tried to kidnap two senior Iranian security officials on an official visit to the Iraqi President. Earlier examples of highly provocative actions carried out by the US with little thought for the consequences include the dissolution of the Iraqi army and the Baath party.

Assessments Made in 2003 Foretold Situation in Iraq

Two intelligence assessments from January 2003 predicted that the overthrow of Saddam Hussein and subsequent U.S. occupation of Iraq could lead to internal violence and provide a boost to Islamic extremists and terrorists in the region, according to congressional sources and former intelligence officials familiar with the prewar studies.

Contractor Deaths in Iraq Soar to Record

Casualties among private contractors in Iraq have soared to record levels this year, setting a pace that seems certain to turn 2007 into the bloodiest year yet for the civilians who work alongside the American military in the war zone, according to new government numbers. At least 146 contract workers were killed in Iraq in the first three months of the year, by far the highest number for any quarter since the war began in March 2003, according to the Labor Department, which processes death and injury claims for those working as United States government contractors in Iraq. That brings the total number of contractors killed in Iraq to at least 917, along with more than 12,000 wounded in battle or injured on the job, according to government figures and dozens of interviews. The numbers, which have not been previously reported, disclose the extent to which contractors - Americans, Iraqis and workers from more than three dozen other countries - are largely hidden casualties of the war, and now are facing increased risks alongside American soldiers and marines as President Bush's plan to increase troop levels in Baghdad takes hold.

Quote of the day: "The West won the world not by the superiority of its ideas or values or religion but rather by its superiority in applying organized violence. Westerners often forget this fact, non-Westerners never do." - Samuel P. Huntington