News & Views 11/13/07

Photo: Three women walk as a U.S. armoured vehicles of the 3rd Squadron 2nd Stryker Cavalry Regiment patrol the neighbourhood Muhalla 836 'Mechanik' in Baghdad November 11, 2007. Iraq's government hopes it will soon be able to declare an end to a U.S.-Iraqi security operation in Baghdad following a sharp drop in insurgent attacks in the capital, a military spokesman said. (Stefano Rellandini/Reuters)

REPORTS – LIFE IN IRAQ

IRAQ: Male gynaecologists attacked by extremists

BAGHDAD, 13 November 2007 (IRIN) - Male gynaecologists are being targeted by Islamic extremists in Iraq as they are accused of invading the privacy of women. Women’s NGOs have raised concerns as there are few women gynaecologists in the country and their male counterparts are scared to continue working. “Because of the extremists’ religious views, doctors are scared to continue with their work and the number of women gynaecologists is very low and cannot meet the demand,” said Mayada Zuhair, spokeswoman for the Women’ Rights Association (WRA). “Extremists say that [male] doctors are not allowed to see the private parts of women and two male doctors were reportedly killed last week after leaving their clinics. A message was left near their bodies saying that was the end for any doctor who insists in invading the privacy of Muslim women,” Mayada added. An Iraqi Medical Association (IMA) spokesman, Walid Rafi, told IRIN it knew of at least 22 male gynaecologists who had been sent threatening letters.

U.S. finds a way to pacify Iraqi town — by using cash

JURF AL SAKHR, Iraq — In this desolate tiny town in what was once called the Triangle of Death, signs of the violent past mix oddly with evidence of today's more tranquil life. Large plots of land emptied by car bombs sit next to refurbished buildings. A new water treatment plant looks out to blast walls that haven’t been necessary for months. A newly opened clothes shop is next to one that's been shut for ages. The U.S. calls this former al Qaida stronghold a paragon of post-surge Iraq. Violence has come to a near-standstill. Yet the government that's emerged is far from the democratic republic that the Bush administration once promised. The town is run by deals among its anointed leaders, nearly all of them former Sunni Muslim insurgents. None was elected. No one pays any mind to what might be happening in Iraq’s Shiite-dominated parliament in Baghdad. In fact, residents assume that the elected central government will never help them. Instead, the insurgents-turned-leaders depend on an influx of money from the U.S. or from the provincial government to keep Islamic extremists from dominating the town again. So far, the U.S. military has spent $1 million, the cost of one of the military’s newest armored vehicles, on reconstruction projects and salaries for residents to secure the town and its surrounding area — 30,000 people in all. If the U.S. plan works, the next million will come from the Shiite-led provincial government. U.S. officials acknowledge that their approach is tenuous, but one that so far has produced a big drop in violence. No U.S. soldier has been attacked since June, and they can now walk in town with some assurance of safety.

In Mixed Slice of Baghdad, Old Bonds Defy War

At its oldest spot, a small dusty strip of dirt road near a mosque, the neighborhood of Bab al Sheik — a maze of snaking streets too narrow for cars — dates from a time, more than a thousand years ago, when Baghdad ruled the Islamic world. At that time, orchards and palaces of Abbasid princes unfolded in stately splendor not far away. Ten centuries later, Bab al Sheik is less grand, but still extraordinary: it has been spared the sectarian killing that has gutted other neighborhoods, and Sunnis, Shiites, Kurds and Christians live together here with unusual ease. It has been battered by bombings around its edges, but the war has been kept from its heart, largely because of its ancient, shared past, bound by trust and generations of intermarriage. “All of these people grew up here together,” said Monther, a suitcase seller here. “From the time of our grandfathers, same place, same food, same everything.”

Much of today’s Baghdad sprang into existence in the 1970s, when oil nationalization drew Iraqis from all over the country to work. The city’s population more than tripled over the course of 20 years, and new neighborhoods sprawled east and west. The war and civil conflict have seemed to take a heavier toll in those areas than in some of the older neighborhoods. No one knows that better than Waleed, a rail-thin Bab al Sheik native who 10 years ago moved his family to Dora, a newly built middle-class neighborhood in southern Baghdad. In Dora, residents were from all over. That never seemed to matter until the basic rules of society fell away after the American occupation began. The only bulwark left against chaos was trust between families, and in Dora there was not enough. “We didn’t know each other’s backgrounds,” said Waleed, sitting recently with Monther in a barbershop in Bab al Sheik, rain spitting on the street outside. Neither man wanted to be identified by his last name out of concern for safety. “Here, he can’t lie to me,” he said, jabbing a finger in Monther’s direction. “He can’t say, ‘I’m this, I’m that,’ because I know it’s not true.”

Audio and Photos: A Neighborhood Apart

Doors of learning reopen at Baghdad University

One month into the new academic year and education at the sprawling University of Baghdad is as near to normal as it has been for years -- the grisly killings of two professors and two students aside. Educators at the tree-lined, garden-sprinkled campus on the banks of the Tigris River are upbeat that 2007-2008 will restore the university's reputation for excellence that it has enjoyed since it was established 50 years ago. Student numbers -- both Shiite and Sunni -- are back to near capacity, they say, many vacant lecturing posts have been filled and the kind of sectarian violence in Baghdad which virtually wrote off last year's academic efforts has dipped significantly. "We could say the situation is about as normal as is possible, given the circumstances," said a 24-year-old lecturer in soil science, who despite his bubbling optimism would give his name only as Salah and declined to be photographed. [Or, in other words, it is not normal when a University lecturer will not give his name. – dancewater]

It's good to be home, say displaced Iraqis

The dusty, battered bus comes to a halt in Baghdad's once upscale Al-Mansur neighbourhood after a 12-hour journey in the night along treacherous roads from the Syrian border to the Iraqi capital. A few seconds later the door opens. Arif Abdul Salam is the first to disembark. "Oh! The checkpoint is still there," are his first words as he looks at an Iraqi army outpost at nearby Al-Liqha Square. "I have returned as I believe the security situation is better in Iraq, especially Baghdad," Salam says as his wife and three children leave the bus and join him. The family fled to Damascus a year ago after receiving threats from militants during the peak of the brutal sectarian violence unleashed across Iraq after the bombing of a Shiite mosque in the central town of Samarra in February 2006. "A year ago I received a threatening letter, ordering me and my family to leave my house within 48 hours. I had no choice but to flee to Syria," he tells AFP. "But a few days ago, I decided to return as I learned that the security situation is better now," says Salam, who took to selling home appliances while he was in Damascus.

REPORTS – IRAQI MILITIAS, POLITICIANS, POWER BROKERS

Chalabi returns to prominence and power

Ahmad Chalabi sits in the conference room of his compound in the Green Zone preparing to meet with Lt. Gen. Raymond T. Odierno, the No. 2 U.S. military officer in Iraq. Sunlight streams over expensive Persian carpets and modern Iraqi furniture. Chalabi wears a sober charcoal suit, but there's a touch of the dandy in his lime-colored polka-dot tie. Chalabi professes not to even know what the meeting is about. The general, he says nonchalantly, requested it. As advertised, an imposing figure sporting fatigues and a shaved head strides through the door a few minutes later. "Thank you for seeing me," Odierno says. Ahmad Chalabi, it would appear, is back. Three years ago when the U.S. military came calling on the onetime darling of Washington's neoconservatives, it raided 11 of his properties and left his compound in ruins.Chalabi, who helped the Bush administration make the case for the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq,denounced the American occupation of Iraq. It was the denouement to an increasingly fractured relationship between Washington and Chalabi, the Iraqi exile who provided intelligence about Saddam Hussein's alleged weapons of mass destruction program that proved to be false.

POLITICS: Iraqi MPs Challenge Coalition Mandate

The United Nations Security Council has been warned by Iraqi parliamentarians of a potentially "serious" constitutional and political crisis if it decides to renew the mandate of the U.S.-led multinational force (MNF) beyond December 2007, without approval from lawmakers. A majority of members of the Iraqi parliament -- 144 out of a total of 275 -- is demanding that any future renewals of the legislative mandate of the 160,000-strong MNF be duly authorised by parliament. "If we are asked to approve a trade agreement concerning olive oil, should we not have the right to pass an agreement concerning the stationing of foreign military forces on our national soil?" one senior Iraqi lawmaker was quoted as saying. The existing MNF mandate, established by the U.N. Security Council in October 2003 and renewed in June 2004, November 2005 and November 2006, will terminate Dec. 31. The Council, however, is expected to meet early next month to approve a fourth mandate renewal, at the request of the United States.
The New York-based Global Policy Forum (GPF) says the letter from the Iraqi legislators warns Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki and his cabinet against recommending a renewal for 2008 without parliamentary approval. The six-page letter, dated April and made public by the GPF last week, reminds the Security Council that the "Iraqi parliament, as the elected representatives of the Iraqi people, has the exclusive right to approve and ratify international treaties and agreements, including those signed with the United Nations Security Council."

REPORTS – US/UK/OTHERS IN IRAQ

U.S. Navy Builds Installation Atop Iraqi Oil Terminal

The Wall Street Journal reports the U.S. Navy is quietly building a military installation atop one of Iraq's main offshore oil export terminals. The new installation will house U.S., British and Australian officers and sailors and will serve as a U.S.-controlled command post straddling a major component of Iraq's oil industry. The Journal also reports the new offshore outpost offers a convenient perch from which to monitor Iran's Revolutionary Guards Corps.

Turkish Aircraft Attack Iraq, as Kurdish Militants Kill 4 Turks

Turkish military aircraft attacked a handful of abandoned villages in northern Iraq on Tuesday, Iraqi officials said, in the first cross-border assault since tensions between Turkey and Kurdish rebels began intensifying last month. Turkish officials also said that Kurdish militants in southeast Turkey had killed four Turkish soldiers and wounded nine in clashes. It was unclear whether the confrontations were connected, but they appeared to signal a revival of the fighting between Turkish troops and the Kurdistan Workers’ Party, or P.K.K., a nationalist group of militants in Turkey and Iraq. This represented the most significant military action between the groups since a round of diplomacy among American, Iraqi and Turkish officials early this month, but they did not immediately set off additional attacks. The Turkish attack, in the early morning, in and around the remote village of Zahku, killed no one and damaged little. Officials from Iraq’s autonomous Kurdish region could not agree on whether helicopters or planes had been used, and they defined the assault as a scouting mission, possibly in search of P.K.K. positions.

U.S. Military Trains New Iraqi Air Force

Iraq's air force is undergoing a tentative revival under tight U.S. military control with a small but growing corps of pilots already flying their own missions, the top U.S. air commander in the Gulf said Monday. Iraqi pilots fly U.S. planes with surveillance and reconnaissance equipment, but no firepower, and mainly conduct transport and observation flights, said Lt. Gen. Gary L. North, the air commander at the Qatar-based U.S. Central Command. They also do training for air patrols against sabotage of oil pipelines and electrical grids, he said. North told reporters the Dubai International Airshow - where the U.S. is exhibiting military aircraft deployed in operations over Iraq and Afghanistan - that the Iraqi pilots were flying "right now with their own crews in combat and combat support operations."

IRAQI REFUGEES

IRAQ: Refugees forced home as funds dry up

Broke and desperate, Ziad Qahtan Naeem and his family have returned to their house in war-battered Baghdad, a move they likened to a “death sentence”. The six-member Shia family fled the Sunni-dominated Mansour neighbourhood of western Baghdad nearly two years ago and took refuge in Syria, joining more than one million Iraqis there. But they have become part of a growing wave of Iraqis leaving Syria - not because they are confident of Iraq’s future but because they have run out of money. Others are returning because the Syrian authorities have made it more difficult for them to stay as most Iraqis cannot work legally in Syria and have been surviving on savings or handouts from relatives. “Being in Baghdad again means approaching your death sentence,” said Naeem, who supported his three sons, wife and mother in Syria after selling his tiny supermarket, his wife’s gold and other belongings.

IRAQ: Basra closes doors to displaced

Basra province, 550km south of Baghdad, can no longer accommodate Iraqi families fleeing insecurity, according to local officials. “We cannot cope with any more families seeking refuge in our province, whatever their reasons. The governorate is seriously affected by the high number of displaced families,” a senior official in Basra Governing Council, Hassan Abdul-Kareem, told IRIN on 11 November. “Health services have deteriorated, schools are overcrowded and we aren’t even able to offer a good service to our locals. Things have become worse since the high influx of new arrivals,” Abdul-Kareem said. He added that according to the local council and the Ministry of Displacement and Migration, more than 40 displaced families have been arriving daily in Basra. The increase has led to higher crime rates, deteriorating security and a rise in the number of commercial sex workers.

Report: Iraqis detained in Lebanon

Iraqis fleeing violence in their homeland are increasingly detained in Lebanon and jailed alongside "common criminals," a U.S. refugee protection group said Monday. The report by Washington-based Refugees International also outlined discrimination and other obstacles facing Iraqi refugees in Egypt and Syria. The group recommended the United States do more to assist Iraqi refugees across the region and also upgrade the U.S. diplomatic presence in Syria, which has an estimated 1.5 million Iraqi refugees. The report — made available to The Associated Press in advance of its Wednesday release date — came as both Syria and the United States took steps to cope with the flow of Iraqis across the border.

US defends efforts to help Iraqi refugees

US Secretary of Homeland Security Michael Chertoff on Monday defended his country's procedures on admitting Iraqi refugees to the United States, saying the process was "efficient." "I think we have a process that is efficient, quick but thorough. Obviously we want to make sure that the process of admitting refugees is not abused for the wrong purposes and that our security concerns are met," he told reporters in Amman after visiting an interviewing and processing centre. "Last year nearly 2,000 Iraqi refugees were admitted. We would like to have as many as 12,000 Iraqis admitted," said Chertoff who arrived in Jordan from Iraq, where he took part in a ceremony for more than 100 foreign-born service members to become US citizens. The US government, which led the Iraq invasion in 2003, has come under fire from both non-government organisations and Congress for its slow response to the needs of Iraqi refugees, many of whom fear for their lives for having collaborated with the American occupation.

Jordan hosts half a million Iraqis - study

Jordan is home to about half a million Iraqi refugees, most of whom fled violence in their country after the U.S.-led invasion in 2003, a study released by a research body said on Tuesday. The Oslo-based Norwegian Research Institute (FAFO) said a six-month long survey commissioned by the Jordanian government showed the majority of Iraqi refugees were Sunni Muslims who fled from the capital Baghdad. The largest influx of Iraqis arrived in 2005, according to data provided by Jordanian border authorities. Earlier unofficial estimates of the numbers of Iraqis residing in Jordan were put as high as one million. The study said more than 95 percent of Iraqis interviewed had no plans to return to Iraq before security stabilised and almost one in five were already seeking to emigrate to the West. Aid workers estimate at least 2.2 million Iraqis have fled to other countries, mainly Syria and Jordan. Both these countries have tightened migration rules for Iraqis. Iraq had a pre-war population of about 27 million. U.N. agencies say the refugees are driven by violence, poor services and unemployment.

UN spotlights 'survival sex' among Iraqi women refugees

A UN official on Tuesday underscored the growing problem of "survival sex" among Iraqi women refugees as advocates pressed the world community to help share the burden of sheltering those who have fled the war in Iraq. Erika Feller, an assistant high commissioner for protection at the UN refugee agency UNHCR, said attention must be paid to the plight of women refugees in countries neighboring Iraq, particularly Syria. Feller, who recently visited Syria, singled out the resurgence of problems such as "weekend marriages," a euphemism for prostitution. Families make available young girls for "a traditional marriage ceremony" for the weekend to men who are prepared to pay and "the divorce takes place on Sunday in accordance to traditional practices," she explained. "So it's not formally speaking labelled as prostitution but it is basically survival sex," she told reporters, noting that those women, particularly single women heading households, had often no other choice to feed their children.

Video: Iraq refugee crisis

The number of displaced Iraqis is rising. CNN's Michael Holmes speaks with Dr. Sa'id Hakki of the Iraqi Red Crescent.

How to Help Iraqi Refugees

ANOTHER Way to help: The Collateral Repair Project

COMMENTARY

Iraq in the time of cholera

It is the kind of news that everybody had been dreading. An outbreak of cholera in Iraq, which started in two northern provinces, has already reached Baghdad and has become Iraq's biggest cholera outbreak in recent memory. This "frightening and dangerous situation," as stated by Bahktiyar Ahmed, a Unicef emergency health facilitator, serves to underscore the unrelenting threat to people already affected by a devastated healthcare system. Statistics from the World Health Organisation indicate that there have already been more than 3,300 cases of cholera in the country and more than 33,000 cases of diarrhea, which could be a milder form of the disease. The cholera epidemic aggravates what is already, by any measure, a serious humanitarian and public health emergency. According to Jeremy Hobbs, director of Oxfam International: "The terrible violence in Iraq has masked the ongoing humanitarian crisis. Malnutrition amongst children has dramatically increased and basic services, ruined by years of wars and sanctions, cannot meet the needs of the Iraqi people. Millions of Iraqis have been forced to flee the violence, either to another part of Iraq or abroad. Many of those are living in dire poverty."

It is estimated that 28% of children are malnourished, compared with 19% before the 2003 invasion. In 2006, more than 11% of newborn babies were born underweight, compared with 4% in 2003. Malnutrition contributes to death from other conditions such as intestinal and respiratory infections, malaria and typhoid. The lack of food is affecting not only children. It is estimated that four million Iraqis - 15% of the total population - regularly cannot buy enough to eat and are now dependent on food assistance. Children's suffering doesn't end there. Last year, the Association of Psychologists of Iraq released a report which states that the US-led invasion has greatly affected the psychological development of Iraqi children. The association's spokesman, Marwan Abdullah, stated: "It was incredible how strong the results were. The only things they [the children] have in their minds are guns, bullets, death and a fear of the US occupation." What can one say to those that are responsible for the destruction of children's lives and hopes?

Inside the Surge

Joint Security Station Thrasher, in the western Baghdad suburb of Ghazaliya, is housed in a Saddam-era mansion with twenty-foot columns and a fountain, now dry, that looks like a layer cake of concrete and limestone. The mansion and two adjacent houses have been surrounded by blast walls. J.S.S. Thrasher was set up last March, and is part of the surge in troops engineered by General David Petraeus, the American commander in Iraq. Moving units out of large bases and into Joint Security Stations—small outposts in Baghdad’s most dangerous districts—has been crucial to Petraeus’s counterinsurgency strategy, and Thrasher is now home to a hundred American soldiers and a few hundred Iraqis. This fall, on the roof of the mansion, amid sandbags, communications gear, and exercise equipment protected by a sniper awning, Captain Jon Brooks, Thrasher’s commander, pointed out some of the local landmarks. “This site was selected because it was the main body drop in Ghazaliya,” he said, indicating a grassy area nearby. “There were up to eleven bodies a week. Most were brutally mutilated.”

…“You had Sunni extremists in the area before Samarra. After Samarra, though, Al Qaeda in Iraq came on strong,” Captain Brooks said. “They had death squads. They systematically selected people because of the locations of their houses, or their relationships. They brutally tortured them, killed them, and dumped their bodies.” Shia families, and many Sunnis—those who had the financial means—fled the neighborhood. By the beginning of this year, southern Ghazaliya was under the de-facto control of Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia, while the northern part of the neighborhood was besieged by Shiite militiamen. “Twenty dollars and a phone card could get you an I.E.D. placed,” Captain Brooks said, referring to the improvised explosive devices that have caused the majority of American military deaths in Iraq. “The people realized they had let something in that they couldn’t control.”

…..The new strategy is also meant to prepare the ground for Iraqi security forces to replace the Americans, and all the Joint Security Stations, as the name suggests, involve Americans and Iraqis. But the Iraqis do not all belong to the official, government forces. With American assistance, several hundred armed Sunni volunteers called the Ghazaliya Guardians were gradually assuming police duties. Such U.S.-approved Sunni forces had begun to sprout up everywhere. Many of them, to the dismay of some Shiites, included former insurgents. An official with one of the major Shiite political parties told me, “Some of these armed groups were, until yesterday, hostile forces that attacked the Iraqi government, Coalition forces, and anyone who was involved in the government. They were considered terrorists. What happened?”

It was a question I heard often in Iraq. Colonel J. B. Burton is a good-natured bull of a man who commands the First Infantry’s Dagger Brigade, covering most of northwest Baghdad, with fourteen J.S.S.s, including the three in Ghazaliya. “We began by asking ourselves the question: What is facilitating the entry of Al Qaeda into an area populated by moderate secular Arabs?” Colonel Burton said. The answer, he said, was fear of Shiite militias. “I think we’re in a time of increasing opportunity to bring in people who want to be part of the solution. It’s done by talking to people. Hell, it’s no different than Tullahoma, Tennessee, where I’m from. It’s sitting on the back porch, drinking tea, listening to the crickets, and talking.” Colonel Burton went on, “You’re talking with people who’ve pulled a trigger against American forces? Hell, yeah! Because we’re fighting a common enemy—Al Qaeda.”

Iraq situation unacceptable: U.S. Catholic bishops

U.S. Catholic bishops on Tuesday described the situation in Iraq as "unacceptable and unsustainable," and urged the Bush administration to pull out American troops in a responsible way as quickly as possible. The bishops also warned of dangerous divisions in U.S. society created and exacerbated by the war. "The dangerous political stalemate in Iraq that blocks national reconciliation finds a parallel in our own nation. We are alarmed by the political and partisan stalemate in Washington," the bishops said in a statement approved at their semi-annual meeting in Baltimore. They criticized both pro and anti-war adherents, saying the former did not recognize the real failures of U.S. policy in Iraq and the need for change while the latter disregarded the probable human costs of an immediate U.S. troop withdrawal. "These two forms of denial have helped contribute to partisan paralysis," the bishops said. The statement echoed many themes the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops have sounded in earlier pronouncements.

Quote of the day: "People only see what they are prepared to see.'': - Ralph Waldo Emerson - (1803-1882) American essayist, poet