News & Views 06/26/07

.Photo: An Iraqi hospital worker inspects the bodies of victims of violence at a hospital in the restive city of Baquba, northeast of Baghdad. US and Iraqi troops are conducting a major operation in the city of Baquba, which has become a central Al-Qaeda stronghold, in an attempt to halt Iraq's Sunni-led insurgency. (AFP)

REPORTS – LIFE IN IRAQ

Iraqi Youth Face Lasting Scars of War

Conflict's Psychological Impact on Children Is Immense, Experts Say. Marwa Hussein watched as gunmen stormed into her home and executed her parents. Afterward, her uncle brought her to the Alwiya Orphanage, a high-walled compound nestled in central Baghdad with a concrete yard for a playground. That was more than two years ago, and for 13-year-old Marwa, shy and thin with walnut-colored eyes and long brown hair, the memory of her parents' last moments is always with her. "They were killed," she said, her voice trailing away as she sat on her narrow bed with pink sheets. Tears started to slide down her face. As social worker Maysoon Tahsin comforted her, other orphans in the room, where 12 girls sleep, watched solemnly. Iraq's conflict is exacting an immense and largely unnoticed psychological toll on children and youth that will have long-term consequences, said social workers, psychiatrists, teachers and aid workers in interviews across Baghdad and in neighboring Jordan. "With our limited resources, the societal impact is going to be very bad," said Haider Abdul Muhsin, one of the country's few child psychiatrists. "This generation will become a very violent generation, much worse than during Saddam Hussein's regime."

……At Sadr General, as many as 250 children arrive for treatment every day, nearly double from last year. "We only treat the first 20 children who arrive and then we run out of drugs," Sahib said. There is no child psychiatrist on staff. At the orphanage, Dina Shadi sleeps a few feet away from Marwa Hussein. Twelve-year-old Dina had recently received two telephone calls from relatives. She learned that her 17-year-old brother had been killed and that her aunt had been kidnapped and executed. "She totally collapsed," Tahsin recalled. "I was not able to control myself that day. I cried," Tahsin said, her voice cracking. "There is a great amount of sadness here. No matter what we do for the children, it will never replace the kindness of their mother and father." "Now Dina expects another call with more bad news. She has a very dark image of the future. More and more, she's afraid of the future." UNICEF officials estimate that tens of thousands children lost one or both parents to the conflict in the past year. If trends continue, they expect the numbers to rise this year, said Claire Hajaj, a UNICEF spokesperson in Amman, Jordan. While many children at the orphanage have lost one or both parents, others have been abandoned or sent here because their parents can no longer afford to care for them.

Village disputes story of deadly attack

A group of villagers in Iraq is bitterly disputing the US account of a deadly air attack on 22 June, in the latest example of the confusion surrounding the reporting of combat incidents there. On 22 June the US military announced that its attack helicopters, armed with missiles, engaged and killed 17 al-Qaeda gunmen who had been trying to infiltrate the village of al-Khalis, north of Baquba, where operation "Arrowhead Ripper" had been under way for the previous three days. The item was duly carried by international news agencies and received widespread coverage, including on the BBC News website. But villagers in largely-Shia al-Khalis say that those who died had nothing to do with al-Qaeda. They say they were local village guards trying to protect the township from exactly the kind of attack by insurgents the US military says it foiled. They say that of 16 guards, 11 were killed and five others injured - two of them seriously - when US helicopters fired rockets at them and then strafed them with heavy machinegun fire. Minutes before the attack, they had been co-operating with an Iraqi police unit raiding a suspected insurgent hideout, the villagers said. They added that the guards, lightly armed with the AK47 assault rifles that are a feature of practically every home in Iraq, were essentially a local neighbourhood watch paid by the village to monitor the dangerous insurgent-ridden area to the immediate south-west at Arab Shawkeh and Hibhib, where the al-Qaeda leader Abu Musab al-Zarqawi was killed a year ago.

…….This is the story as told to the BBC by several local villagers: At around 2am on Friday morning, the village guards were at their usual base in an unfinished building on the edge of the Hayy al-Junoud quarter about 2km (1.2 miles) south-west of al-Khalis village centre. They were surprised when a convoy of Iraqi police suddenly turned up, headed by the commander of the Khalis emergency squad, Col Hussein Kadhim. The police told them they were about to raid a suspect house in nearby al-Akrad Street and asked for the village mukhtar (headman) to accompany them. The Mukhtar of Hayy al-Junoud, Jassem Khalil, and his brothers Abbas and Ali, went with the police. Some of the other guards, about half altogether, also offered to go along. The raid turned out to be a false alarm - there was nothing suspicious at the house in question. But as the police and guards began to return, the police received an urgent radio message from the Joint Operations Centre saying that US helicopters were about to raid the area. The police disappeared immediately. But before the guards could even get to their own car, they were hit by a rocket strike by American helicopters which suddenly appeared overhead. So too were the remainder of the guards, still at their base in the unfinished building nearby. The rocket attacks were followed by a prolonged period of strafing by heavy machinegun fire from the helicopters. "It was like a battlefront, but with the fire going only in one direction," said a local witness. "There was no return fire". When frightened villagers ventured out at first light, they found 11 of the village guards dead, some of their bodies cut into small pieces by the munitions used against them.

Attacks on bridges affecting aid deliveries

The delivery of humanitarian aid in war-torn Iraq is being hampered as bridges and key transportation arteries come under attack from insurgents, the Iraqi Red Crescent Society (IRCS) said on 26 June. "Our humanitarian work has been hampered since the main bridges and highway overpasses in Baghdad and other provinces started to come under attack," said Abdul-Hamid Salem, director of the ICRS's Baghdad office. "Sometimes it takes us a very long time to transport aid between the two main parts of Baghdad as the authorities do not allow trucks capable of carrying more than two metric tonnes to cross before 3pm to prevent further attacks," Salem said. "So we have to wait until after 3pm to cross and that of course undermines our efforts to help those who need our help," he added. Three of Baghdad's 13 bridges over the River Tigris have been targeted by large explosions since March. Iraqi and US commanders say they are studying the attacks, which they term "desperate acts by insurgents who are under pressure from the five-month old Baghdad security operation".

After 4 Years, Electricity Still Luxury

Surviving without electricity in the simmering Baghdad summer poses an unwelcome choice for 22-year-old Ferrah al-Caisy. With the limited amperage of her family's generator, she can use their second-rate air cooler to battle temperatures pushing 120 degrees, or she can switch on the pump to pull water to their fourth-floor shower. But neither the timid cooler nor the tepid water really cools her off, she says, and it takes full-blown city power to run an air conditioner - a forgotten luxury now that electricity is available barely two hours a day. "Sometimes I cry, I swear," she said as a fan churned hot air through her apartment. "This stuff? It doesn't help that much, you know." This is about as good as it gets for Baghdad residents, who have waited four years since the U.S. invasion for the lights to come back on - and will have to go on waiting into the foreseeable future.

The U.S. is within months of exhausting its $4 billion reconstruction fund for Iraq's electrical sector, meaning the end of American efforts to underwrite what had been the signature reconstruction mission of the initial occupation. Nowadays, when American electrical advisers in Baghdad discuss projects to "generate capacity," they refer not to new power plants but to training Iraqis to take over the complicated rebuilding effort.
Fuel problems, sabotage, regional disputes and overdue maintenance dogged the first months of 2007, contributing to average generation of 3,877 megawatts of power, less than the estimated 4,300 megawatts produced before the war. Though outlying provinces gained more electricity than they had under Saddam Hussein, feeble production and surging demand have meant far less for Baghdad, and it is reliable nowhere. Within the next year, fixing the problem will fall to Iraq's government ministries. And under the best of conditions, Electricity Minister Karim Hasan says, it will be years before supply reaches demand - 2010 at the earliest.

Northern Iraq’s Tangled Web

There are few areas in the world more entangled in historical deceit and betrayal than northern Iraq, where the British, the Ottomans, and the Americans have played a deadly game of political chess at the expense of the local Kurds. And now, because of a volatile brew of internal Iraqi and Turkish politics, coupled with the Bush administration’s clandestine war to destabilize and overthrow the Iranian government, the region threatens to explode into a full-scale regional war. A series of bombings and attacks over the past year in Turkey touched off the current crisis. The Turks attribute the violence to the Iraq-based Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK), which fought a bitter war against the Turks from 1984 through the 1990s. Ankara’s campaign to repress its Kurdish population during that period ended up killing some 35,000 people, destroying 3,000 villages, and forcibly relocating between 500,000 and 2 million Kurds. The Kurds make up about 20% of Turkey and Iraq and have a significant presence in Syria and Iran. With a population of between 25 and 30 million, the Kurds represent one of the world’s largest ethnic groups without a country, a status that has long aggrieved them. In May, the Turks declared martial law in three provinces that border Iraq. They massed troops, armor, and artillery, and threatened to invade if the United States and the Iraqi government of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki did not suppress the PKK. It looked like a conflict simply between the Turkish government and the Kurdish separatists. But things are never quite what they appear in northern Iraq.

…..Rather than suppressing the PKK, the United States is using its offshoot, the Party for a Free Life in Kurdistan (PEJAK), to attack Iran. According to a Financial Times investigation last year, U.S. Marines are working with Iranian minorities to see if “Iran would be prone to violent fragmentation along the same kind of fault lines that are splitting Iraq.” Farsi speakers dominate Iran, but they make up only a slim majority of the country. The rest of the population consists of Kurds, Arabs, Azeris, and Baluchs. The United States is also supporting a violent Baluch group, the Jundallah, which killed 11 Revolutionary Guard this past February in southern Iran. “I think everybody in the region knows that there is a proxy war already afoot, with the United States supporting anti-Iranian elements in the region as well as opposition groups in Iran,” says Vali Nasr of the Council on Foreign Relations. Investigative journalist Seymour Hersh says that PRJAK is also receiving help from Israel, and that there are some 1,200 Israeli intelligence agents in northern Iraq. According to Meir Javedanfar, an Israeli expert on the Kurds, Israel is using the Kurdish areas of Iraq “to undermine Iran’s influence” and “the Iranian government itself.”

Anbar model' under fire

A suicide bomber's attack on an upscale Baghdad hotel Monday was a blow struck against the US plan to support and arm Sunni tribes in western Iraq. The bomber walked up to a group of Sunni sheikhs and detonated his explosives belt. Among the 12 people killed were four senior tribal members linked to an American effort to combat Al Qaeda in Anbar Province. The US military says that its strategy of building ties with the tribes has been effective in reducing attacks. But the approach is facing growing criticism from both Iraqi politicians and military experts. Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki has complained that the initiative is creating militias outside its control and undermining his plan to strengthen the central government's control over security forces. "This may result in a temporary ally to help against Al Qaeda, but we are also creating more and better-armed militias, and we are working against what we have said is our principal reason for being [in Iraq,] which is to create and build up a strong central Iraqi government with a monopoly on handling the country's security," says Bruce Riedel, a career-long expert in the Middle East and counterterrorism with the Central Intelligence Agency and other federal agencies. "This is a strategy fraught with risks," he says.

Some US military officers are questioning the wisdom of the strategy of working with the coalition of tribes known as the Anbar Salvation Council. Some officers in Iraq have noted they are now working with tribes whose members just a few months ago made up a large slice of the Iraqis they were arresting for attacks on US forces and other crimes. But supporters say the strategy recognizes the reality of the tribes' powerful role in Iraqi society. Tribal sheikhs, or leaders, have already provided valuable intelligence about Al Qaeda operations and members in their areas. The tribes are anxious to change sides, they say, because Al Qaeda has used mass-casualty tactics like car bombings that the tribes find anathema. US reliance on tribes is also supported by others who have already written off the possibility of seeing a strong central Iraqi government emerge. "I've been pushing for four years to deal directly with the tribal leaders," said Sen. Joseph Biden (D) of Delaware at a Monitor lunch in Washington Thursday. The US, he added, has to "give up on the possibility of having a strong central democratic government trusted by all the major constituencies.... It's simply not capable of occurring."

Al-Qaeda claims attack as White House warns of hot summer

Al-Qaeda in Iraq claimed responsibility Tuesday for a suicide bombing that targeted US-allied sheikhs in Baghdad as the White House warned it expected more "spectacular acts of terror" ahead. The claim came as another sheikh was gunned down in Baghdad and US forces pressed ahead with an offensive northeast of Baghdad to root out Al-Qaeda militants based in and around the flashpoint town of Baquba. An alliance of Sunni groups led by Al-Qaeda in Iraq claimed in an Internet statement that one of its "heroes" had penetrated security at the Al-Mansour Melia hotel on Monday and detonated himself, killing at least 12 people. "A hero of the Islamic State of Iraq, Abu Othman al-Dulami, wearing an explosives belt ... infiltrated the Al-Mansour Melia hotel during a gathering of apostates and infidels," said the statement, which could not be verified. The explosion in the hotel's crowded lobby targeted a meeting of Sunni and Shiite tribal sheikhs who have allied with US forces to fight Al-Qaeda, and succeeded despite the security "surge" of extra US troops to the city. The dead included Fassal al-Gawud, an ex-governor of western Anbar province where tribal leaders have turned against Al-Qaeda, and Hussein Shaalan, a Shiite tribal chief from the central city of Diwaniyah. Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki condemned what he called an attempt to "conceal the terrorists' defeats in Anbar and Diyala provinces at the hands of our armed forces and the tribes."

Where Is Iraq Heading? Lessons from Basra

Amid the media and military focus on Baghdad, another major Iraqi city – Basra – is being overlooked. Yet Basra’s experience carries important lessons for the capital and nation as a whole. Coalition forces have already implemented a security plan there, Operation Sinbad, which was in many ways similar to Baghdad’s current military surge. What U.S. commanders call “clear, hold and build”, their British counterparts earlier had dubbed “clear, hold and civil reconstruction”. And, as in the capital, the putative goal was to pave the way for a takeover by Iraqi forces. Far from being a model to be replicated, however, Basra is an example of what to avoid. With renewed violence and instability, Basra illustrates the pitfalls of a transitional process that has led to collapse of the state apparatus and failed to build legitimate institutions. Fierce intra-Shiite fighting also disproves the simplistic view of Iraq neatly divided between three homogenous communities. [Simplistic and wrong. – dancewater]

………..On its face, Basra’s security plan ranked as a qualified success. Between September 2006 and March 2007, Operation Sinbad sought to rout out militias and hand security over to newly vetted and stronger Iraqi security forces while kick-starting economic reconstruction. Criminality, political assassinations and sectarian killings, all of which were rampant in 2006, receded somewhat and – certainly as compared to elsewhere in the country – a relative calm prevailed. Yet this reality was both superficial and fleeting. By March–April 2007, renewed political tensions once more threatened to destabilise the city, and relentless attacks against British forces in effect had driven them off the streets into increasingly secluded compounds. Basra’s residents and militiamen view this not as an orderly withdrawal but rather as an ignominious defeat. Today, the city is controlled by militias, seemingly more powerful and unconstrained than before. What progress has occurred cannot conceal the most glaring failing of all: the inability to establish a legitimate and functioning provincial apparatus capable of redistributing resources, imposing respect for the rule of law and ensuring a peaceful transition at the local level. Basra’s political arena remains in the hands of actors engaged in bloody competition for resources, undermining what is left of governorate institutions and coercively enforcing their rule. The local population has no choice but to seek protection from one of the dominant camps.

REPORTS – IRAQI MILITIAS, POLITICIANS, POWER BROKERS

Warrant issued for Sunni minister

An arrest warrant was issued against Iraq's Sunni culture minister, and police raided his home on Tuesday after he was accused of ordering a 2005 assassination attempt against a secular Sunni politician that killed his two sons, officials said. The main Sunni political bloc immediately demanded the decision be reversed. Culture Minister Asad Kamal al-Hashimi, who was not home during the raid, was identified by two suspected militants as the mastermind of a Feb. 8, 2005, ambush against then-parliamentary candidate Mithal al-Alusi, according to Ali al-Dabbagh, a government spokesman. Al-Alusi escaped unharmed but two of his sons were killed. "The two who planned and carried out the killings of Mithal al-Alusi's two sons confessed that they took orders from him," al-Dabbagh said. He added that al-Hashimi was a mosque imam at the time. ….Al-Hashimi's party, the hardline Congress of the People of Iraq, condemned the arrest warrant and warned the Shiite-dominated government to avoid "playing with fire by continuing the policy of fabricating lies to exclude Sunni politicians and officials from the Iraqi arena."

REPORTS – US/UK/OTHERS IN IRAQ

VIDEO: The Bases Are Loaded

Will the U.S. ever leave Iraq? Official policy promises an eventual departure, while warning of the dire consequences of a "premature" withdrawal. But while Washington equivocates, facts on the ground tell another story. Independent journalist Dahr Jamail, and author Chalmers Johnson, are discovering that military bases in Iraq are being consolidated from over a hundred to a handful of "megabases" with lavish amenities. Much of what is taking place is obscured by denials and quibbles over the definition of "permanent." The Bases Are Loaded covers a wide range of topics. Gary Hart, James Goldsborough, Nadia Keilani, Raed Jarrar, Bruce Finley Kam Zarrabi and Mark Rudd all add their observations about the extent and purpose of the bases in Iraq. "What are the odds that a US military commander of one of these bases is going to say, "Well, OK Iraqis, looks like our job's done here. Here's the keys. Enjoy the movie theater. Have fun in the swimming pool. Enjoy your democracy. Take Care?" It's just not going to happen. That's my point. These are billion dollar bases. These are Mega Bases. They're permanent bases, and they are there absolutely to stay."

COMMENTARY

OPINION: Why Hillary Scares Me

In the same frightening speech, Hillary went on the blame the Iraqis for the mess in their country: "The American military has succeeded. It is the Iraqi government which has failed to make the tough decisions that are important for their own people.'' Let me get this straight. The Iraq disaster is not the fault of the delusional neo-cons, the greedy oil companies, or the gullible and cowardly Congressional warhawks. (Most senators including Clinton didn't even bother to read the 90-page National Intelligence Estimate). According to Hillary, the real culprit is the Iraqi government that we created virtually overnight and left to govern a fractured, impoverished society. Talk about blaming the victim! Hillary, as an active supporter of the war, you are one of many Americans who are guilty. And now all Americans are left responsible, regardless of whether we supported or opposed he war. When we pull out, our hands will drip with the blood of the tens of thousands of American casualties and hundreds of thousands of Iraqi dead. The Iraqi government didn't start this, we did. Of course we can continue to compartmentalize ourselves from the truth, remove the troops and blame the rubble on the Iraqis. We can feed the collective fantasy that our good intentions and heroic efforts were thwarted by the cowardice and incompetence of others. But if that's what we take from our experience in Iraq, we will never learn the true lessons and we will be condemned to repeat the same mistakes. [She scares me too. - dancewater]

IRAQI REFUGEES

Audio: Iraqis in Jordan Dogged by Medical Costs

Violence in Iraq has brought the health care system there close to a collapse, according to aid agencies. Neighboring Jordan is one of the few places Iraqis can get advanced medical treatment. But the system there is expensive — and pay-as-you-go. In Amman, many Iraqi exiles say the Iraqi government could do much more to cover expenses. The Iraqi government has pledged $25 million to help support Iraqis forced to flee the country. But so far, that money has not been dispersed.

How to Help Iraqi Refugees

Iraq Moratorium Day – September 21 and every third Friday thereafter

"I hereby make a commitment that on Friday, September 21, 2007, and the third Friday of every subsequent month I will break my daily routine and take some action, by myself or with others, to end the War in Iraq."

Quote of the day: “Justice denied anywhere diminishes justice everywhere.” ~ Martin Luther King, Jr. 1929-1968