News & Views 12/10/07

Photo: A girl who was in a bomb attack cries as she waits treatment in a hospital in Baiji, 180 km (112 miles) north of Baghdad December 8, 2007. At least eight people were killed and 40 wounded in a suicide car bomb attack in a residential neighbourhood in Baiji, north of Baghdad, police said. (REUTERS/Sabah al-Bazee)

REPORTS – LIFE IN IRAQ

IRAQ: Education Becomes the New Casualty in Baquba

The alarming security situation in Diyala province north of Baghdad has killed off much of the education system. The U.S.-led invasion of Iraq had at first brought hope. Salaries were increased; a newly appointed primary or secondary school teacher was given 200,000 Iraqi Dinars, about 150 dollars a month. In September 2006, the Ministry of Education increased teachers' salaries by 20 to 50 percent in an attempt to entice them to stay in their jobs. But in Diyala capital Baquba, 40km north of Baghdad, lack of security means many teachers have quit, and children are not going to school. This is a trend across Iraq. According to a report released last year by the non-governmental group Save the Children, 818,000 children of primary school age, representing 22 percent of Iraq's potential student population, were not attending school. "We suffer so much because of the problem just of going from home to school; no one can easily move in the streets," Layla Hussein, a secondary school teacher told IPS in Baquba. "The militants are everywhere." The security situation remains volatile despite massive U.S.-led military operations to rid Diyala province of militiamen, al-Qaeda and resistance fighters. "Day after day our education system is in decline," primary school teacher Juma'a Jabur told IPS. "One should ask who will benefit from stoppage of school work, and from keeping the boys and girls at home."

Iraq calmer, but more divided

The U.S. troop buildup in Iraq was meant to freeze the country's civil war so political leaders could rebuild their fractured nation. Ten months later, the country's bloodshed has dropped, but the military strategy has failed to reverse Iraq's disintegration into areas dominated by militias, tribes and parties, with a weak central government struggling to assert its influence. In the south, Shiite Muslim militias are at war over the lucrative oil resources in the Basra region. To the west, in Anbar province, Sunni Arab tribes that once fought U.S. forces now help police the streets and control the highways to Jordan and Syria. In the north, Arabs, Kurds and Turkmens are locked in a battle for the regions around Kirkuk and Mosul. In Baghdad, blast walls partition neighborhoods policed by Sunni paramilitary groups and Shiite militias.

"Iraq is moving in the direction of a failed state, a highly decentralized situation - totally unplanned, of course - with competing centers of power run by warlords and militias," said Joost Hiltermann of the International Crisis Group. "The central government has no political control whatsoever beyond Baghdad, maybe not even beyond the Green Zone." The capital's Green Zone mirrors the chaos outside. Once the base of Saddam Hussein's dictatorial regime, it is now the seat of Iraq's fractured and dysfunctional representative government. The U.S. troop buildup was intended to help Iraq's national leaders overcome differences and give them space to pass compromise measures to end the country's sectarian war, but lawmakers remain divided and continue to harbor suspicions about each other's motives.

Iraq's hardline Baathists prefer to stay in the shadows

Hardline Baathists, the remnants of Saddam Hussein's regime, prefer to remain in the shadows in Baghdad's Sunni neighbourhoods, fearing that a new law to bring them back into public life will instead serve as their death warrants. Without work, isolated and believing themselves to be targets of the Shiite-dominated government, the Sunni former elite have no faith in the new Justice and Accountability Law now before the parliament. The bill aims partly to reverse the purge of tens of thousands of members of Saddam's Baath party from government jobs after he was ousted in the US-led invasion of 2003. Under the proposed law, senior party leaders who implemented the oppressive policies of the regime would remain banned from holding public jobs but middle-ranking officials not implicated in any crimes would be reintegrated into the civil service. "The law in parliament is worse for us," said a professor who would only give his name as Dawood, fearing reprisals from Shiite militias. "It is against the Baathists. It is a punishment to Baathists," Dawood told AFP in an interview at his house deep inside Baghdad's Sunni stronghold of Adhamiyah, now marked by broken drainage pipes, piles of stinking rubbish and gun-toting Sunni militias. [Of course, a lot of the former Baathists were Shi’as. – dancewater]

Vigilantes kill 40 women in Iraq's south

Religious vigilantes have killed at least 40 women this year in the southern Iraqi city of Basra because of how they dressed, their mutilated bodies found with notes warning against "violating Islamic teachings," the police chief said Sunday. Maj. Gen. Jalil Khalaf blamed sectarian groups that he said were trying to impose a strict interpretation of Islam. They dispatch patrols of motorbikes or unlicensed cars with tinted windows to accost women not wearing traditional dress and head scarves, he added. "The women of Basra are being horrifically murdered and then dumped in the garbage with notes saying they were killed for un-Islamic behavior," Khalaf told The Associated Press. He said men with Western clothes or haircuts are also attacked in Basra, an oil-rich city some 30 miles from the Iranian border and 340 miles southeast of Baghdad.

Fear grips Basra and Najaf in wake of murder of 40 women

More than 40 women have been brutally murdered and their bodies dumped in the streets of the southern cities of Basra and Najaf, police and eyewitnesses say. The killings come as religious and sectarian factions who wield immense power in southern cities have begun applying strict Islamic jurisdiction by force. Female students are now barred from entering university campuses in Basra if not covered from head to toe. Lt. Gen. Abduljaleel Khalaf, head of Basra police, confirmed the deaths and said women in the city were “under an unprecedented reign of terror.” Iraqi police in Basra, Najaf and other cities are almost powerless as none of these horrific crimes have ever been investigated or the perpetrators brought to justice.

Baghdad safer, but it's a life behind walls

Abu Nawas, Baghdad's storied riverbank thoroughfare, reopened amid much official fanfare two weeks ago. But three years since they last saw business, merchants on the street are facing a new challenge, say some local merchants: overwhelming security. Abu Nawas – once witness to frequent suicide car bombs and mortar attacks – now hums with activity of a different sort. The newly fortified area is patrolled by Humvees and guarded by US-funded private security companies that search every entering vehicle and scrupulously monitor shopkeepers and residents – and occasional intrepid visitors. For Hassan Abdullah, a cabinetmaker, that spells bad business. "It's worse than the Green Zone," he exclaims. No customers come in. He can't even deliver orders, he says. It's not just Abu Nawas that's starting to resemble a fortress. Walls like those around the ultrasecure Green Zone, where US officials and Iraqi dignitaries live and work, are rising around neighborhoods all over Baghdad – new "Green Zones" protected by US-paid Iraqi neighborhood guards.

Kirkuk: Edging out its Arab migrants

Umm Nasser sits on a curb in northern Iraq, trying to decide where her home is. The black-draped Shiite woman left her native Baghdad for this contested city 27 years ago — one of tens of thousands lured by Saddam Hussein's campaign to settle Arabs in this oil-rich area near Iran and Turkey while displacing Kurds he did not trust because of their separatist views. Saddam redrew the province's borders to maximize its Arab population, and paid Arabs from elsewhere in Iraq to move here. Now Arabs like Umm Nasser are being encouraged to leave as part of a constitutional mandate to undo the demographic changes Saddam forced on this community. Kurds hope the population shift will pave the way for their autonomous administration to take control of Kirkuk and its vast oil wealth. But Turkey and other countries in the region with Kurdish minorities have long feared that Kurdish rule of Kirkuk would encourage separatist sentiment within their own borders. A referendum is expected next year on whether Kirkuk will join the semiautonomous Kurdish zone to its north, or continue to be ruled by Baghdad.

IRAQ: Returning to destroyed, looted or occupied homes

In recent weeks, tens of thousands of Iraqi refugees living in Syria have been coming back to Baghdad after a sharp decline in violence in the Iraqi capital. Many of the returnees have been shocked to find their homes destroyed, looted or occupied. “We lost everything,” said Ibtissam, a 54-year-old Shia mother-of-four who arrived in Iraq three weeks ago. “Nearly two years ago we fled to Syria after my husband escaped an assassination attempt by Sunni militants after he refused to obey them and leave the neighbourhood.” She decided to return to Baghdad with her 16-year-old son to prepare the house for when the rest of the family came back. ”But I never imagined how hard and expensive this was going to be. We have almost run out of resources and we depend only on our pensions,” she said.

REPORTS – IRAQI MILITIAS, POLITICIANS, POWER BROKERS

Iraq plans crackdown in violent province

Iraq's defense minister promised on Sunday to wage a new crackdown in a volatile province northeast of Baghdad where militants are trying to regroup after being routed from their urban stronghold there last summer. Suicide attacks have killed more than 20 people in the last three days in Diyala province, a tribal patchwork of Sunni Arabs, Shiites and Kurds that stretches from Baghdad to the border with Iran. Defense Minister Abdul-Qader al-Obeidi told The Associated Press that preparations had begun for a fresh military operation in the provincial capital, Baqouba, about 35 miles from Baghdad. "If we succeed in controlling areas of Diyala close to Baghdad, the rate of incidents in Baghdad decreases by 95 percent," al-Obeidi told The Associated Press.

Iraq awaits a fiery Shiite cleric's next move

After Friday prayers in Sadr City, 300 women in black shuffled slowly, quietly down a narrow street toward a billboard-sized photo of Muqtada al Sadr, the fiery young leader of their Shiite Muslim movement. Holding banners and flags, the women protested the U.S. presence in Iraq and the detentions of hundreds of the radical cleric's followers. "Anything that comes from Sayed Muqtada is good for us," said Hannah al Rubaye, using the honorific title for descendents of the prophet Mohammed. "After this step, we expect other orders from Sayed Muqtada. Patience has limits." Sadr issued a heated anti-American statement last week, but he instructed his increasingly restless followers not to act. Their demonstration was organized without his orders, and their silence quickly gave way to agitated shouts.

Iraqi army forces ready to receive Basra security file - PM

Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki said on Monday that Iraq's armed forces are ready to receive the Basra security file. During his meeting with U.S. Central Command. Admiral William J. Fallon, al-Maliki said "Our armed forces are ready to receive the security file in Basra and will continue their efforts in facing gunmen throughout Iraq in cooperation with tribal men," the premier said in a statement released by the cabinet and received by the independent news agency Voices of Iraq (VOI). British Prime Minister Gordon Brown paid a visit to the province last night. A well-informed source said that Brown conferred with his Iraqi counterpart over the phone and said that "they agreed to handover the Basra security file in two weeks."

Any decision on article 140 should be taken by Kurds - President Barazani

President of Iraq's Kurdistan region Massoud Barazani said on Monday that any resolution on article 140 of the constitution should be recommended by the Kurdish people. This came during his meeting with a U.S. delegation, headed by the diplomat David Pierce. "The president also highlighted the negative repercussions in Kurdistan because of the delay in implementing this article," according to a statement released on the Kurdish government's Web site. "The two sides discussed a mechanism of dealing with this article in the future, as well as the legal and constitutional issues," the statement also said. Article 140 of the Iraqi Constitution relates to the normalization of the situation in Kirkuk, an important and mixed city of Kurds, Turkmen, Christians, and Arabs. Kurds seek to include the city in the autonomous Iraq's Kurdistan region, while Sunni Arabs, Turkmen, and Shiite Arabs oppose the incorporation.

Iraq's premier warns of use of human rights to undermine his government

Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki warned Sunday against what he called attempts to use the issue of human rights as a cover to undermine his government. Al-Maliki did not single out who he believed was exploiting the issue of human rights for political gain, but he was apparently referring to his Sunni Arab critics who accuse his 18-month-old administration of human rights abuses and sectarian bias. "We must be aware of and alert against those who wish to manipulate and exploit those noble principles to legitimize many excesses aimed against the individual and the political regime," al-Maliki said in televised comments. "Those who campaign for human rights must themselves abide by them," he said at a ceremony held to mark the U.N. Human Rights Day.

Saddam's vice president escapes raid

Former Iraq's vice president under Saddam Hussein has escaped an Iraqi security raid on him in Salaheddin province, north of Baghdad. A senior provincial official told Xinhua on Friday that Izzat Ibrahim al-Douri escaped an overnight raid on his hideout in a village east of Tikrit City, 170 kilometers north Iraqi capital. He said that the raid was conducted upon intelligence report that al-Douri and his aides were holding a meeting in the village. The Iraq security force did not find al-Douri in the hideout. However, they seized very important documents which describe the links between al-Douri and al-Qaeda as well as other insurgent groups in Iraq.

Information from Left I on the News

Back in 2003 the U.S. arrested al-Douri's wife and daughter to try to force him out of hiding; it didn't work. At least six months later they were still being held; for all we know they still are, just like the still un-charged Gen. Amer al-Saadi (crime: telling the truth to Colin Powell's lies), Tariq Aziz, and many others who have for all intents and purposes been "disappeared."

From NYT Article:

Elsewhere, the Iraqi police near Mr. Hussein’s hometown of Tikrit said they raided a hide-out that belonged to Mr. Hussein’s former vice president, Izzat Ibrahim al-Douri, who has eluded capture for nearly five years. Documents retrieved during the raid indicated that Mr. Douri had been there recently, the police said. The documents detailed ties to Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia, a predominantly Iraqi group that American intelligence says has foreign leadership. They also laid out Iraqi police targets and included the blueprints of Iraqi military bases, the police said. The authorities said they also found the attack plan for a Mosul jailbreak that occurred in May, when five prisoners accused of terrorism escaped and two guards were killed. [As Missing Links blogger points out, no documents will ever be shown to back up this claim. They don’t exist. – dancewater]

From Missing Links Blog: So It Goes

Al-Hayat ties current wave of suicide bombings throughout Iraq to the campaign announced by Abu Omar al-Baghdadi in his recent speech, writing: “The steep growth in suicide operations targeting tribal leaders and the awakening councils indicates that "Al Qaeda" [in Iraq] is continuing to carry out the warnings of its leader Abu Omar al-Baghdadi who announced a few days ago the formation of the "Al-Sadiq Brigades" to take revenge on the Sunni "rebels" who formed, with the assistance of the Americans and the government, armed militias and rebelled against AQI expelling them from most of their areas."

……The current suicide-bombing campaign is clearly the work of Baghdadi's group, as the Al-Hayat reporter says. As he explained in his speech, the point is to kill apostates in the interest of promoting the one true state. This is the mirror opposite of the ideology of the national-resistance groups, whose theme is not true-religion/apostates, but rather Iraqi/occupation, and for that they need to bring anti-occupation groups together, not have them killing each other. The American information-operations people are intent, as always, on blurring this distinction, grouping takfiiris and nationalists together under the heading of "the Sunni Arab guerilla movement", as if this opposition between takfiiris and nationalists didn't exist.

Government rebuked over bid to slash food rations

Shiite religious clerics led Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani, the country’s top Shiite clergyman, have lashed out at the government plans to reduce budgetary allocations for food rations. Sistani’s representative in Karbala, Abdulmahdi al-Karbalaai, said the top cleric was extremely worried about the plans. The ration system was introduced by former leader Saddam Hussein to offset the impact of crippling U.N. trade sanctions. For more than a decade the system helped the country to stave starvation. But the program has run into difficulties since the 2003 U.S. invasion. Iraqi families say they receive much less subsidized food than under Saddam while the quality of the little they get has been deteriorating. Millions of Iraqis who fled violence at home to neighboring states no longer have access to the rations. Minister of Trade Abdulfalah al-Sudani last week confirmed reports that the government was bent on removing certain food items from the rations and reducing key food stuff by a third, namely flour and rice. [Occupiers want to starve them out. – dancewater]

REPORTS – US/UK/OTHERS IN IRAQ

UN renews Iraq peace mission

The United Nations is ready to help Iraq solve its most intractable political problems, including the future status of the contested northern city of Kirkuk, its top official in the country said yesterday. Staffan de Mistura, Ban Ki-moon's special representative for Iraq, told the Guardian that the UN was now beefing up its engagement with the country, four years after the bombing of the organisation's compound in Baghdad that killed 22 UN staff. De Mistura's predecessor Sergio Vieira de Mello was among the dead. Since then, the UN's Iraq programme has been largely operating out of Jordan. De Mistura warned that 2008 would be "a crucial year for Iraq", and that Baghdad politicians needed to capitalise on security gains and push through legislative measures aimed at bridging the divide between Sunni and Shia political groups. "The most important feeling I have detected among ordinary people is that three years of horror have led nowhere," he said. "It only produced tit-for-tat destruction and the displacement of 4.2 million people."

China starts work on vital power plant in south

China’s Shanghai Heavy Industry has started work on a giant power plant in Kut, the capital of the southern province of Wasit. The $940 million plant is expected to pump some 1,300 megawatts of electricity into the Iraqi gird when completed. It is a huge step in upgrading the country’s national grid as all the current plants connected to it barely produce 5,000 megawatts. Construction will go on full stream in January next year, according to a statement faxed to the newspaper. The statement said an Iraqi delegation from the Ministry of Electricity has finalized the contract with the Chinese firm, the largest power deal the country signs since 1990.

Qaeda changing tactics in Iraq's Diyala: U.S. general

Al Qaeda is changing tactics in Iraq's volatile Diyala province, the commander of U.S. forces in north Iraq said on Saturday, shortly after a suicide car bomb killed eight people in a northern oil refining town. Major-General Mark Hertling said al Qaeda fighters driven out of other areas were targeting Diyala using suicide vests and attacking neighborhood police units. But a spate of attacks there did not reflect a wider surge in violence, he said. North of Diyala, police said at least eight people were killed in what a Reuters witness said was a suicide car bomb attack in the oil refining city of Baiji in the latest bombing. The U.S. military also said its soldiers had killed 12 suspected al Qaeda gunmen and detained 13 others in operations north and south of the capital. Religiously and ethnically mixed Diyala has become one of the epicenters of violence in Iraq after Sunni Islamist al Qaeda and other fighters were squeezed out of western Anbar province, Baghdad and other areas by security crackdowns this year.

IRAQI REFUGEES

IRAQ-JORDAN: Few Iraqis returning home

Due to the fragile security situation in Iraq, the UN Refugee Agency (UNHCR) is not encouraging Iraqis in Jordan to return to their homeland, but it is ready to help those who are determined to do so, according to Imran Riza, UNHCR representative in Jordan. "We still need to make a thorough evaluation of the situation before we can say it is safe [for them] to return. We are not in a position to encourage Iraqis to leave Jordan, but we are ready to help those who desire to do so," said Riza, who noted that the number of Iraqis returning to their country from Jordan is very small, in contrast to Syria where thousands of Iraqi asylum seekers are returning every day. Since the US-led invasion of Iraq in 2003, more than two million Iraqis have fled to neighbouring countries, with Jordan (500,000-750,000) and Syria (1.2-1.4 million) hosting the greatest numbers. Recent figures issued by UNHCR in Syria show that more Iraqis are leaving (1,500 a day) than entering (500 a day) the country. …..In contrast, the majority of Iraqis in Jordan are well off with established businesses in Amman and other main cities. The Jordanian government allows Iraqis to own property and invest in the stock market.

At least 51 migrants drown off Turkish coast-TV

At least 51 illegal migrants from Africa and the Middle East drowned when a boat carrying some 80 people capsized off the Turkish Aegean coast on Saturday, broadcaster CNN Turk said on Monday. Six people, including two Palestinians, were rescued and taken to hospital, Orhan Sefik Guldibi, a local governor in the coastal Izmir province, told state-run Anatolian news agency. Helicopters and rescue boats were searching the waters for the missing migrants. Dozens of bodies had already washed up on the Turkish coast. The Turkish coast guard, which put the death toll at 32 earlier on Monday, said there had been some 85 people on the 15- to 20-metre (49- to 66-foot) boat. It quoted survivors as saying the boat had sunk near what they thought was a Greek island. Guldibi said the migrants were Palestinian, Somali and Iraqi.

Syria sinking in flood of refugees from Iraq

And just when might the refugees return home? An Iraqi doctor, now a refugee in Damascus, addressed the issue in a recent e-mail: "Some of the refugees are going back now because the new visa regulations won't allow them to stay. I would love to go back, but my kids won't let me. They say if I go back, they will. I can't go through the agony of the kidnapping and getting terrified every single day whenever each of them go to school or out of the house. Also, what is safe or unsafe? I think drinking water polluted with cholera and other deadly waterborne diseases is more dangerous than a bullet when you don't have decent access to hospitals; or when you have electricity only for two hours a day; or in an oil-rich country you can't get gasoline or cooking gas. We have been living like animals in a cage for a long while. We wake up in the morning to the sound of explosions of the raiding forces when they bomb the doors to reduce the troops' losses because somebody decided to fight back during a raid. The kids keep shaking because of the yelling and screaming, the pushing against the walls and the shoving, the cursing and hitting of the parents and older brothers and sisters in front of them. "If all this is considered safe, I will agree that it is safer in Iraq now."

***Contact your congressional representative. For the House, use www.house.gov/writerep; for the Senate, use goto.seattlepi.com/r1149.

***Donate to the UNHCR: Browse to unhcr.org/help.

How to Help Iraqi Refugees

ANOTHER Way to help: The Collateral Repair Project

COMMENTARY

It is the season of paying homage to Tehran

U.S. President George W. Bush’s statements on dangers of Iran’s nuclear program have become almost meaningless and are made solely for rhetorical parade purposes indicating that Iran is about to reap yet another victory. This means that war is a possibility only in the imagination of those betting that Iran is no longer a crucial player in the big powers’ geopolitics of the Gulf and Iraq. As for the Arabs, they now look like simple-minded people who the U.S. administration could drag to the conference in Annapolis to sit down side by side with the Israelis in the belief that a war with Iran was imminent. Washington has no more option left from now on but to appease Iran with regard to Iraq file. Washington needs Iran’s protection when the hour for withdrawal strikes. Iran is not naïve and stupid. It has longstanding strategic interests in Iraq with a bearing on developing the country’s oil riches. It wants to link Iraq’s economy intricately with its own so that no government will be in a position in the future to shun Iran’s hegemony. Washington was late in giving Iran the clean bill of nuclear health. But as arrangements for U.S. withdrawal are being made, it had no choice but to pursue the path of appeasement.

Quotes of the day: "Make the lie big, make it simple, keep saying it, and eventually they will believe it" - Adolf Hitler

"People do not believe lies because they have to, but because they want to" - Malcolm Muggeridge