*IRAQ: latest news and developments

[Barking_Mad]

Siniyah: an Iraqi town that is now a prison

SINIYAH (Iraq): Twice now, an IPS correspondent has been refused entry to this town that has become a prison for its inhabitants. Contact with residents of the town came only at the checkpoint.

A month back, the United States military built a 10 kilometre wall of sand around the town of Siniyah, 220km north of Baghdad. The town is close to Saddam Hussein’s hometown Tikrit and the oil refining centre at Beiji.

Construction of a sand wall around the town began on January 7 in response to repeated attacks against the 101st Airborne US forces stationed in the area. A night curfew has been imposed in the area.

An IPS correspondent could not visit the town to look at the situation within, despite official claims.

“Journalists have not been limited or prevented from travelling in and around Siniyah,” US military spokesman Major Tim Keefe told IPS. “Coalition and Iraqi Forces go to great lengths to make sure journalists are able to do their job in a safe environment.”

That was after soldiers stopped the IPS correspondent entering the town on two occasions. But in the queue to the main checkpoint many people were more than willing to speak to IPS about the situation within.

“On the 7th of January, the US troops started building this wall around Siniyah,” said Mohammed, a 34-year-old engineer from Siniyah. “They are trying to isolate Iraqi fighters who are attacking them every day. The troops have been exposed to attacks near Siniyah by roadside bombs and by different weapons... Also, the resistance blows up the petrol pipelines leading to Turkey.”

The issue of the pipeline is a salient one for residents of Siniyah. The town has been sealed off not because of attacks within the town, but due to the belief it is being used as a staging ground for attacks outside... The coalition forces are attempting to halt attacks directed mainly at the Beiji refinery and at convoys serving the coalition.

The chosen targets have brought general support for Iraqi resistance within Siniyah. Mohammed says the attacks are taking place because “this petrol will go to Turkey and is stolen by occupation forces, or when Turkey buys this petrol the money is taken by the occupation forces.”

 

[Barking_Mad]

Car bomb kills five people, wounds three in western Iraq.

11 dead in Baghdad bombing

Eight Killed in Bombing, Onlookers Shot

Two civilians, two US soldiers killed in Iraq

Roadside bomb kills two U.S. Marines near Fallujah

 

[oi2002]

ICG In Their Own Words: Reading the Iraqi Insurgency:

The insurgency increasingly is dominated by a few large groups with sophisticated communications. It no longer is a scattered, erratic, chaotic phenomenon.
...
There has been gradual convergence around more unified practices and discourse, and predominantly Sunni Arab identity.
...
Despite recurring contrary reports, there is little sign of willingness by any significant insurgent element to join the political process or negotiate with the U.S.
...
The groups appear acutely aware of public opinion and increasingly mindful of their image.
...
The insurgents have yet to put forward a clear political program or long-term vision for Iraq.
...
The insurgency is increasingly optimistic about victory.

Worth reading the PDF, challenged some of my assumptions on the Baath element in the Rebellion. Wingnuts will be dispointed by this conclusion:

There is no evidence that Saddam designed a guerrilla.
...
Former Baathist or army hierarchies helped
structure what initially were amorphous cells.31 But for
the most part this had little to do with party loyalty. From
the outset, the armed opposition’s discourse built on
patriotic and religious themes at the expense of a largely
discredited ideology.
...
First, Saddam’s capture in December 2003 helped rid the
insurgency of the image of a rear-guard struggle waged on
behalf of a despised regime. Paradoxically, his incarceration
gave the insurgency renewed momentum, dissociating it
from the Baathist regime and shoring up its patriotic,
nationalist and religious/jihadist credentials. By the
same token, it facilitated a rapprochement between the
insurgency and transnational jihadi networks, which had
been hostile to a partnership with remnants of a secular,
heretical regime and whose resources (monetary and
human) could now be fully marshalled.63
Secondly, the April 2004 siege of Falluja coupled with
the onslaught against Muqtada al-Sadr’s armed militia
(Jaysh al-Mahdi) significantly boosted popular sympathy
for the armed opposition at a time when disillusionment
with the political process was intensifying.

They claim the Baath are now marginal and various odd cocktail of Salafi beliefs and Iraqi Nationalism are now dominant. They award Al Zarqawi more importance than some commentators, but still see his as just one of several signifigant groups.

This is based largely on textual analysis which would raise some doubts but much of the best work on Bin Ladin is based on a close reading of his speeches, Salafi can be surprsingly candid folk, though it's fairly obvious Al Zarqawi is a big fat liar.

 

[oi2002]

PDF from ESISC on Iran's influence in Iraq. Take with a pinch of salt but he's accurate about the breadth and depth or Iran's infiltration of Iraqi affairs.

 

[oi2002]

Christopher over at Back to Iraq 3.0:

I’m not sure, but I don’t recall air strikes in or near Iraq’s capital city for a long time. In fact, I can’t remember any since I got here in May 2004, although these things tend to blend together after a while. But if the war’s going so well, and the Iraqis are taking the fight to the terrorists, blah blah, why are the Americans resorting to air strikes here? That’s, like, so 2003.

 

[oi2002]

Galbraith in NYRB contemplates The Mess:

With the US Army vastly overextended in Iraq and Iran's friends in power in Baghdad, the Iranians apparently feel confident that the United States will take no action to stop them if they try to make a nuclear weapon. This is only one little-noticed consequence of America's failure in Iraq. We invaded Iraq to protect ourselves against nonexistent WMDs and to promote democracy. Democracy in Iraq brought to power Iran's allies, who are in a position to ignite an uprising against American troops that would make the current problems with the Sunni insurgency seem insignificant. Iran, in effect, holds the US hostage in Iraq, and as a consequence we have no good military or nonmilitary options in dealing with the problem of Iran's nuclear facilities. Unlike the 1979 hostage crisis, we did this to ourselves.

I've read Packer's fair minded book and recommend it to both hawks and doves; there is not a better account of this ideologically undermined occupation. Bremer emerges as a hopeful man given a hopeless job, a lonely determined figure brimming with quixotic energy.

I'll certainly read Bremer's book. Some in Iraq are grateful to the man:

As one Kurdish leader tells me almost every time I see him, "We will erect a statue of Bremer here in Kurdistan. He did more than anyone else to break up Iraq."

Galbraith nails it here:

He was in charge of Iraq, but could not accept the obvious: that Iraqis knew much more about their country than he would ever know. They were not, as he complains in his book, lazy or disorganized. They simply didn't share his goal of a unified, democratic, and Western-oriented Iraq. The more Bremer tried to dictate, the less relevant he and the United States became. Bremer should have started by letting Iraqis run Iraq, not the ones he picked but the seven selected by the Iraqi opposition to Saddam Hussein. It is possible that Ahmad Chalabi would have emerged as Iraq's prime minister, but only as the agent of the Kurds and the Shiite religious parties who were, and are, Iraq's real power brokers. As deputy prime minister in the current Iraqi government, Chalabi has demonstrated both administrative skills and an ability to build alliances without having any electoral base at all. With all his flaws, an Ahmad Chalabi– led Iraqi government could not have done worse than Jerry Bremer and the CPA.

 

[oi2002]

David Cole in NYRB asks Are We Safer?

Daniel Benjamin and Steven Simon, counterterrorism experts at the National Security Council under President Clinton, argue in their new book, The Next Attack, that the problem is more deep-rooted than the administration's erroneous venture in Iraq. In their view, the Iraq war is a symptom of the Bush administration's obsession with fighting an offensive "war on terror," an obsession that has caused the administration to disregard the less glamorous but more crucial task of shoring up America's defenses against future attacks. Committed to an outmoded strategy directed at states rather than the loose-knit non-state terrorist movements that actually threaten us, the administration sought out a state to attack, and after an initial and justifiable campaign in Afghanistan, invaded Iraq. But when it comes to fighting the decentralized threat of fundamentalist Islamic terrorism, Benjamin and Simon maintain, the best defense is not a good offense, but a good defense.
...
There is little question that the Iraq war, instead of supporting the struggle against terror, has weakened it. In February 2005, CIA Director Porter Goss told Congress that "Islamic extremists are exploiting the Iraqi conflict to recruit new anti-US jihadists," and those "who survive will leave Iraq experienced and focused on acts of urban terrorism. They represent a potential pool of contacts to build transnational terrorist cells, groups, and networks."[3] The military analyst Anthony Cordesman has identified thirty-two "adaptations" to US strategy that the insurgents have successfully made since the war began, including "mixed attacks" in which one bomb follows another with some delay, in order to maximize injury to police and rescue workers; more sophisticated surveillance of US forces and their allies; improved infiltration of the Iraqi military and police forces; and increasingly deadly improvised explosive devices. The insurgents have obtained access to large caches of Saddam Hussein's arms that the US military failed to secure. And they have been able to demonstrate to the world their commitment and their willingness to die by daily attacks on the US and Iraqi military and police forces—many of them suicide attacks that are videotaped and promptly disseminated throughout the world via the Internet.

As Benjamin and Simon put it, the administration "failed the first test of military leadership. They did not know who their real enemy was." The authors cite the constant bombing and heavy ground fire of the "shock and awe" campaign at the beginning of the Iraq war as an illustration of the problem. The bombing was effective for a few weeks in subduing Saddam Hussein. But if the enemy is a terrorist ideology spread throughout the Muslim diaspora, a "shock and awe" strategy is very likely to backfire by reinforcing the enemy's description of the United States as an aggressive force without regard for the lives of innocent Muslims.

 

[oi2002]

LA Times Iran Was on Edge; Now It's on Top:

Now Iraq's fledgling democracy has placed power in the hands of the nation's Shiite majority and its Kurdish allies, many of whom lived as exiles in Iran and maintain strong religious, cultural and linguistic ties to it. The two groups sit atop most of Iraq's oil, and both seek a decentralized government that would give them maximum control of it. A weak central government would also limit Sunni influence.

The proposed changes have aggravated ancient tensions between the two branches of Islam, not to mention Arabs and Iranians. Neighboring countries have historical and tribal links to Iraq's Sunnis.

"A weak Iraq is now sitting next to a huge, mighty Iran. Now the only counterpart to Iran is not a regional power, but a foreign power like the United States," said Abdel Khaleq Abdullah, a political analyst and television host in Dubai. "This is unsustainable. It's bad for [Persian] Gulf security. It's given Iran a sense of supremacy that we all feel."

Fear of a Shiite Iraq has helped shape the Sunni Arab world's view of the insurgency in that country. Although many revile the violence, there is also a quiet sense that the insurgents are fighting on behalf of Sunnis, standing up for their sect in the face of American and Iranian attempts to dominate Iraq.

Some Sunni extremists, jihadis from Yemen to Morocco, have been drawn to Iraq to attack symbols of Shiite power.

"When they attack the Shiites, they think they are attacking the Iranian influence," said Mustafa Alani, a counter-terrorism expert at the Gulf Research Center in Dubai. "They think they're attacking Iranian agents. To them, it's a legitimate target."

Though Iran owes much of its newfound strength to the war in Iraq, that's not the only event that has benefited it. The U.S. eliminated another foe, the Taliban regime in neighboring Afghanistan, in 2001.

Meanwhile, hard-liners in Tehran centralized their power and quashed dissent after winning control of the government in elections that brought President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to office last year. U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice asked Congress this week to increase 2006 spending on promoting democracy in Iran, to $85 million from $10 million.

Rising oil prices have deepened Iran's value as a strategic partner and dramatically increased its assets.
...
The possibility that Iran will develop nuclear weapons is another worry for the Sunni-dominated Arab world.

When Jordan's King Abdullah II warned a year ago with uncharacteristic bluntness that the emergence of a new government in Iraq could create a "Shiite crescent," Shiites in Iraq reacted angrily and Jordanian officials insisted the king had been misunderstood.

But many analysts believe he meant exactly what he said: that a fortified Iranian influence now stretches throughout Iraq, through the Kurdistan region into Turkey, to an ever weaker Syria and down into Lebanon's Hezbollah-dominated south, on Israel's border. Iran's hand also stretches into the heart of the Arabian peninsula through Shiite communities scattered in the Persian Gulf countries.

The roots of distrust between Sunnis and Shiites are old, and Persian rulers have vied for centuries with Arab and Ottoman rivals. But until the invasion of Iraq, a solid bloc of Sunni Arab governments ruled the northern and western coasts of the gulf. Strong, oil-rich Iraq and Saudi Arabia were seen as counterweights to Iran.

For many gulf Arabs, Iran is a long-feared boogeyman, quietly coming to dominate Iraqi politics with an eye to controlling those vast oil fields.

"We fought a war together to keep Iran from occupying Iraq. . . . Now we are handing the whole country over to Iran without reason," Saudi Foreign Minister Saud al Faisal told the Council on Foreign Relations in New York last year.

Sunni Arab leaders across the region worry about a lessening of their power, wonder whether they've fallen out of favor with the Americans, and fret over increasing threats to their dominance over Shiites at home.

"The U.S. knows everything and they're allowing everything to happen," said Adel Mawda, a Sunni sheik and legislator in Bahrain's parliament. "They know very well the Sunnis have lost a lot, and they are not defending them."

The example of Iraq has inspired many Shiites living under the rule of Sunni governments to become more outspoken in demanding their due.

In Saudi Arabia, the Shiite minority is concentrated in the east, the same turf that covers the kingdom's vast oil reserves. For Saudi Shiites, the war in Iraq has helped deliver increased political participation and unprecedented religious freedoms. For the first time, Shiites have been permitted to openly celebrate the Shiite holiday of Ashura with traditional processions.

 

[oi2002]

NYT Iraq Power Shift Widens a Gulf Between Sects

For hard-line Sunnis, Shiite power is a bitter pill. A recent conversation in a Baghdad gas station line illustrates the attitude.

"Those Shiites were servants," one man told another, watching angrily as a third maneuvered in front, according to Ilham al-Jazaari, who was waiting nearby and overheard the exchange. "They wiped our shoes. Now they are going in front of us."

 

[oi2002]

Daily StarIran calls for withdrawal of U.K. troops from Basra:

"The Islamic Republic of Iran demands the immediate withdrawal of British forces from Basra," Manouchehr Mottaki told reporters during a visit to Lebanon.

"We believe that the presence of the British military forces in Basra has led to the destabilization of the security situation in the city," he said.

 

[oi2002]

Hefty PDF from U.S. Naval Postgraduate School on Al Qaeda in Iraq:

The war in Iraq is neither won nor lost. Implementing a coordinated multidimensional
strategy presents a strong counter to AQI’s political opportunities,
mobilizing structures frames and action repertoires.
The internationally-supported, ideologically-committed Salafi-Jihadist
group Al Qaeda in Iraq is a numerically minor organization but is important to
understand because they pose a unique and particularly difficult
counterinsurgency challenge. Because AQI draws much of its motivation and
resources from a larger international Salafi-Jihadi movement, it is resistant to the
direct effects of an Iraq-centric counterinsurgency strategy as outlined in the
National Strategy for Victory in Iraq. In addition, other Sunni-nationalist insurgent
groups engage in instrumental, cross-group cooperation in order to leverage
AQI’s destabilizing operations for their own purposes. Defeating or demobilizing
AQI is essential to stabilizing Iraq.
...
The American-led war against Saddam Hussein’s regime in many ways
provided an enormous political opportunity to al-Qaeda. With Afghanistan
effectively closed, the Iraq war opened a new theater of operations for Salafi-
Jihadists to train and conduct operations against their “far enemy”, the United
States. The collapse of stability in the transition to post-conflict (Phase-IV)
operations allowed insurgent groups to take hold, grow, and mature.
...
With the loss of Afghanistan as a training locale, terror groups need
new training camps to test and evaluate their recruits. Within Iraq, Zarqawi has
gained a foothold in western and central Iraq and is attempting to replace
Afghanistan as the effective training ground for a second generation of Jihadis.
These Jihadis are thought to be more dangerous than their predecessor in they
are training in a “real-world laboratory for urban combat.”

 

[oi2002]

From DNI two views of the Iraqi endgame: Iranian bang or an enervated US domestic whimper.

 

[FruitandNut]

Daily StarIran calls for withdrawal of U.K. troops from Basra:

Wow, there is a suprise! Now Shi'ites have got the Southern Oilfields and are securing their grip on the reins of government who needs the referee?

 

[oi2002]

Juan is worth reading today. Not the bit about sending in the Smurfs but on Khalilzad desparate attempts to get the Interior Ministry away from SCIRI and death squad loving Badr:

In plain English, Khalilzad was saying that the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI) may not retain control of Interior (which in Iraq is a security organization) and continue to pack it with members of the paramilitary Badr Corps, most of them trained originally by the Iranian Revolutionary Guards. Sunni Arabs have charged that Interior Ministry police commandos have functioned as death squads, conducting reprisal killings against Sunnis.

It is in fact important for the recovery of social peace in Iraq that SCIRI and Badr be gotten away from Interior. The problem is that the Shiite religious parties have 132 MPs who will vote with them in a parliament of 275. Barring an unforeseen and substantial defection from among their ranks, they will almost certainly form the government. SCIRI has made it clear that it wants Interior, i.e. federal domestic policing and surveillance, under its control.

 

[Barking_Mad]

Attack on al-Askari Shine in Samarra

Well it seems that there's been a fair few skirmishes after the attack on the al-Askari shrine in Samarra. According to the BBC

In Basra, gunmen attack Sunni mosques and exchange fire with guards at an office of the Sunni Iraqi Islamic Party.

- In Baghdad, a Sunni mosque in Baladiya district is raked with gunfire, while black-clad militiamen of the Shia Mehdi Army demonstrate in Sadr City .

- Businesses shut down in Najaf and about 1,000 march through the streets, waving flags and shouting slogans

- Markets, shops and stalls close in Diwaniyah, AP says. A Mehdi Army militiaman is killed in clashes after gunmen from the faction attack Sunni houses, Reuters news agency reports.

- About 3,000 people demonstrate in the Shia city of Kut, chanting anti-American and anti-Israeli slogans and burning US and Israeli flags, AP says.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/middle_east/4740010.stm

 

[oi2002]

Back to Iraq 3.0:

If this doesn’t spark a much-feared civil war, we’ll be lucky. This is the tensest Baghdad has been in two years, and this attack is especially provocative coming as it does during Arba’een, the 40-day mourning period for Imam Hussayn that follows the Shi’ite commemoration of Ashura.
...
Al-Sistani has condemned the attack on the Askari shrine, but also said — somewhat ominously — “The Iraqi Government is expected, now more than any time before, to fully shoulder its responsibilities and halt the wave of criminal acts that target the holy places. If the government’s security organs are not capable of providing the necessary protection, the believers are capable of doing so with Almighty God’s assistance.” (emphasis added.) That’s really not good.

 

[Barking_Mad]

Shrine related or not, there's a lot of killing going on..............

BAGHDAD (Reuters) - Iraq canceled all leave for the police and army and placed them on the highest alert as the death toll mounted on Thursday in sectarian violence that has swept the country after bombs wrecked a major Shi'ite shrine.

The main Sunni political group pulled out of U.S.-sponsored talks on joining a national unity government, blaming the ruling Shi'ite Islamists for attacks on Sunni mosques and dozens of killings since Wednesday's suspected al Qaeda bomb attack that destroyed the Shi'ites' Golden Mosque in Samarra.

The main Sunni religious authority made an extraordinary public criticism of the Shi'ites' most revered clerical leader, accusing him of fuelling the violence by calling for protests.

President Jalal Talabani, a Kurd, pressed ahead despite the Sunni boycott with a meeting of political leaders that he had called to avert a descent toward a "devastating civil war". His office could not say who was present at the talks.

Police and military sources tallied at least 78 deaths, mostly of Sunnis, in the two biggest cities Baghdad and Basra in the 24 hours since the Samarra attack. Dozens of Sunni mosques have been attacked and several burned to the ground.

Washington, which wants stability in Iraq to help it extract around 130,000 U.S. troops, called for restraint.

The Interior Ministry said all police and army leave was canceled, curfews were extended as the country locks down for three days of national mourning and forces were on high alert.

A bomb blasted an Iraqi army foot patrol in a market in the religiously divided city of Baquba, killing 16 people, including eight civilians, and wounding 21.

It was not clear if the total of 53 deaths in Baghdad included over 40 bodies found at a nearby village which has seen previous attacks on Sunnis by Shi'ite militias. Nor was it clear if the Basra death toll of 25 included up to 11 Sunni rebel suspects hauled from a prison overnight by men in police uniform and left shot dead around the mainly Shi'ite southern city.

Three journalists working for Al Arabiya television were found shot dead after being attacked while filming in Samarra.

http://today.reuters.com/news/newsA...AC231520_RTRUKOC_0_US-IRAQ.xml&archived=False

More than 120 shot dead in Iraq sectarian bloodshed
Gunmen have killed at least 127 people in Iraq in sectarian violence that flared after the bombing of a revered Shiite shrine and reprisal attacks on Sunni mosques, officials say.

Amid warnings that sectarian violence could spiral further out of control, Iraqi political leaders went into an emergency meeting with President Jalal Talabani. The bloodshed is likely to complicate the task of Shiite and Sunni political leaders who have pledged to set up a government of national unity in the wake of the December elections which illustrated a deep sectarian split in Iraq.

Eighty bullet-ridden corpses were brought to the Baghdad morgue between Wednesday afternoon and Thursday morning, the deputy director of the morgue, Dr Kais Mohammed, told AFP.

"I've only been able to carry out autopsies on 25 of them," he said, adding that all had been shot.

The bodies, which had been dumped in Baghdad and its suburbs, could not immediately be identified. Another 47 bodies of men shot to death were discovered along with 10 burned out cars alongside a road near Nahrawan, south-east of Baghdad, police say.

The corpses were found near a brick factory and it was not immediately known if the victims were workers from the factory.

http://www.abc.net.au/news/newsitems/200602/s1577160.htm

Gunmen kill 47 factory workers at checkpoint north of Baghdad: officials

February 23, 2006 3:48 AM

BAQOUBA, Iraq (AP) - Gunmen pulled factory workers off buses northeast of Baghdad and killed 47 of them, a provincial council member said.

The victims were traveling in three buses when they were stopped at a checkpoint in the Nahrawan area, about 12 miles south of Baqouba, said Dhari Thuban, a member of the Diyala Provincial Council. The buses were burned and their passengers killed, he said.

The motive for the killing was not immediately clear.

Residents told police that the bullet-riddled bodies were found around midday behind a brick factory, the Interior Ministry said.

The victims, who ranged in age between about 20 and 50, were dressed in civilian clothes and their deaths appeared recent, the ministry's Maj. Falah al-Mohamadawi told the Associated Press.

Thuban said the victims were brick factory workers, but al-Mohamadawi said no identification documents were found on them

http://www.newspress.com/Top/Article/article.jsp?Section=WORLD&ID=564686825579742640

 

[Barking_Mad]

More killings...........

Twenty more bodies found in Baghdad
Twenty bodies of people who were killed overnight and this morning have been brought to the morgue, a police source said. About 200 Iraqis have been killed in Baghdad alone since Wednesday...

Gunmen kill a member of Badr organization
In the northern city of Kirkuk, gunmen killed a member of Badr organization of the (Shiite) Supreme Council of the Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI), police said. Ali Mohammed was gunned down in Al-Qadisiah district, they said.

Shi'ite militia, insurgents clash in Baghdad
Shi'ite militiamen clashed with gunmen in southern Baghdad on Friday, leaving Iraqi security forces who are trying to enforce a curfew helpless to stop them, police sources said. They said the clashes were between unidentified gunmen...

 

[Barking_Mad]

Iraq Vet Accused of Stabbing Wife - 71 times

FORT LEWIS, Wash. - Army officials have recommended a court-martial for a Purple Heart recipient accused of stabbing his young wife 71 times with knives and a meat cleaver.

Spc. Brandon Bare, 19, of Wilkesboro, N.C., was charged with premeditated murder and indecent acts related to the mutilation of his wife's remains.

On Wednesday, Fort Lewis officials said post commander Lt. Gen. James Dubik agreed with an investigating officer and referred Bare's case to a general court-martial.

Bare remains held in the post's Regional Corrections Facility. No trial date has been set. If found guilty, he faces a maximum of life in prison.

Bare had returned to Fort Lewis from Iraq in April to recuperate from cuts and internal ear injuries in a grenade attack on his Stryker brigade unit in Mosul. He was there as a machine-gunner with the 1st Brigade, 25th Infantry Division.

His wife, Nabila Bare, 18, was killed July 12.

"The murder was premeditated, deliberate and savage," prosecutor Capt. Scott DiRocco said in January during Bare's Article 32 hearing, similar to a preliminary hearing in civilian court. "He did not stop after he killed her."

Bare's lawyer said there was nothing to show the killing was planned.

"What this looks like ... is an act of rage, or some sort of other unexplainable act," defense attorney Capt. Patrick O'Brien said.

 

[Barking_Mad]

Two clerics killedi n Tuz Khromato, Hillah

A Shiite cleric was shot dead Thursday night in Tuz Khormato, a mostly Kurdish city 130 miles north of Baghdad, and another Sunni preacher was killed the mostly Shiite city of Hillah 60 miles south of the capital.

Gunmen kill five Iraqis in Latifiyah

South of the capital, in the religiously mixed area known as the "Triangle of Death," gunmen burst into a Shiite home in Latifiyah, separated men from women, and killed five of the males, police Capt. Ibrahim Abdullah said.

Two bodyguards killed in Basra

police found the bodies of two bodyguards for the Basra head of the Sunni Endowment, a government body that cares for Sunni mosques and shrines. They had been shot.

 

[Barking_Mad]

Al-Qaida leader in northern Baghdad killed in raid

BAGHDAD, Feb. 24 (Xinhuanet) -- Coalition forces killed Abu Asma,an al-Qaida leader in northern Baghdad, in a raid on Friday, the U.S. military said in a statement.

"Coalition Forces, with the assistance of the Iraqi police,conducted a raid in northern Baghdad on Feb. 24, which resulted in the death of Abu Asma, the al-Qaida Military Emir of Northern Baghdad," said the statement.According to the U.S. military, Abu Asma was an explosives expert with close ties to senior Baghdad-based vehicle borne improvised explosive device manufacturers. Coalition forces accused him of being directly responsible formany deaths and injuries of coalition and Iraqi security forces.

 

[Barking_Mad]

Navies guarding Gulf knew about Saddam kickbacks

The global shipping giant P&O told the British and US navies, the British embassy in Dubai and its own customers five years ago that Saddam Hussein's regime was imposing kickbacks on companies shipping goods to Iraq, evidence released by the Cole inquiry reveals.

The P&O Nedlloyd office in Dubai posted the notice about a 10 per cent Iraqi kickback policy on its online bulletin board, Iraq-doc.policy, in 2001. At the same time, Australia's wheat exporter, AWB, was paying the kickback for shipping wheat to Iraq under the UN oil-for-food program, the inquiry heard yesterday.

The general manager of the P&O Nedlloyd Dubai office, Michael Wallbanks, said in a sworn statement to the inquiry that P&O's main subcontractor to Iraq, Simatech Shipping, had informed him of the policy in 2001.

He said Iraq had imposed an "after-sales service fee" of 10 per cent and "ships would be turned away" if companies could not prove they had paid the impost.

To his knowledge, all other shipping lines sending goods to Iraq via Dubai were also told about the fee. "It was well-known and widely communicated, and anyone involved in shipping goods to Iraq from August or September 2001 would have known about it". The US and British navies were "all aware" of the requirement to pay the 10 per cent fees but told P&O as long as it was "merely advising" exporters, "it was doing nothing wrong".

 

[oi2002]

Christopher on Back to Iraq 3.0:

Sunnis are quite prepared to believe the Shi’as, i.e., Iran, blew a holy shrine to cause chaos and create the pretext for a give-no-ground negotiating position in the government talks. The consequent show of Shi’a strength by means of Moqtada al-Sadr’s Mahdi Army and the Iranian-backed Badr Brigade also is a way of reminding the Americans who’s really calling the shots in Iraq these days. So hands off that nuclear program next door!

For the Shi’as, it’s not nearly so convoluted. Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the head of AQI, has been trying to start a civil war for almost three years because a failed state allows him to operate freely and he comes from the hard-core anti-Shi’a branch of Salafist Islam. Simply put, the Shi’a are worse than the American infidels and they deserve to die.

 

[oi2002]

The Colonel strikes an almost optimistic note viewing the shrine crisis as just more of the same old shit. Arguing that all that's new is Shi'a retaliation he makes a similar point to the FT:

Indeed, arguably the most remarkable feature of the Iraqi conflict is how the Shia have resisted being drawn into open warfare despite escalating provocations that have killed them in hundreds and then thousands. That stoic restraint may now have ended.

 

[oi2002]

Abu Aaardvark on the three al-Arabiya employees murders.

 

[oi2002]

More in the FT on the wider impacts of Iraq:

One result has been that Shia populations in the Sunni-dominated Gulf have become more assertive in demanding their rights, both where they are in the majority but ruled by the Sunni, as in Bahrain, and in Saudi Arabia where they form less than 10 percent of the population.

At home, the Saudi authorities have reacted delicately, inviting the Shia into a national dialogue and allowing greater debate about their position in society.

Saudi Arabia has also been heavily involved in recent months in efforts to diffuse sectarian tensions in Lebanon, where tens of thousands of Shia gathered in Beirut on Thursday to protest the Samarra bombing.

As the conflict in Iraq has assumed increasingly sectarian dimensions, so tensions have risen beyond its borders. “Unfortunately, the last year has not been a good year for the Sunni and Shia together [in Bahrain]. There have been no clashes, but in general what happens in Iraq is looked at very differently in the Shia mosque and in the Sunni mosque,” Sheikh Salman said.

Bahrain has parliamentary elections later this year, where the position of the majority Shia will be the prominent issue. The political crisis in Lebanon, which experienced its own bitter sectarian civil war in the 1970s and 1980s, shows no sign of abating.

Shia-dominated Iran is also flexing its muscles. While Tehran has little interest in seeing its Shia allies in Baghdad lose control of government in an escalating conflict, its growing influence in the region continues to unnerve Sunni leaders, in particular in Saudi Arabia.

“The sectarian situation in Iraq has a direct impact on its neighbours. It’s a dangerous region,” says Dia Rashwaan, an expert in Islamism at the Al Ahram centre for political and strategic studies.

 

[oi2002]

Arms Control Wonk boggles:

The former U.N. inspector behind the “Saddam Tapes” says God revealed WMD sites to him.

 

[oi2002]

WaPo on the US military in Iraq:

This year the war seems to hinge on the battle for Baghdad. Inside the capital, that promises to be primarily a political fight over the makeup of the future government of Iraq -- and whether it can prevent a civil war, a threat that appeared much more likely this week with the bombing of a Shiite shrine in Samarra and retaliatory attacks on Sunni mosques and clerics.

U.S. officials don't talk much about the prospects of civil war. It is unclear what role the United States would play if such a war broke out, but military strategists said American forces would be used to try to minimize violence but not to actually intervene between warring groups.
...
Despite such signs of hope, huge questions hang over the U.S. effort. Foremost is the question of whether Iraq is moving toward civil war, which could cause the situation to spin out of U.S. control. That in turn raises the issue of whether Iraqi forces believe they are training to put down an insurgency or preparing to fight a conflict that pits Shiites against Sunnis. "I can't argue with that," said Col. James Pasquarette, who shares a base at Taji, north of Baghdad, with the Iraqi army's only tank division.

In an ominous sign of the growing rift within Iraqi security forces, the first thing an Iraqi army battalion staff officer did as he briefed a reporter this month was denounce the Iraqi police and its leaders at the Shiite-dominated Interior Ministry. "The army doesn't like the Ministry of Interior," said the officer, who asked that his name not be used for fear of retaliation. "The people don't like the police, either."
...
"I would like to think that there are still possibilities here," Army Reserve Lt. Col. Joe Rice said in the coffee shop of the al-Rashid Hotel in Baghdad's Green Zone. "We are finally getting around to doing the right things," said Rice, who is working on an Army "lessons learned" project here but who was expressing his personal opinion. "I think we're getting better, I do."

But, he continued, "is it too little too late?"

There are signs that the Yank military is finally being allowed to get things right in Iraq. They're becoming more careful and less kinetic but increasingly they are a spectator.

 

[oi2002]

LA Times says lets hope for Lebanon:

Doomsayers long have warned that Iraq was turning into a failed state like Somalia or Taliban-run Afghanistan, a regional black hole. It's far too early to write Iraq off as a quagmire, analysts say, but the threat of contagious and continuous instability — like in Lebanon — looms.

"The expectations of the United States and its allies have been lowered considerably," said Mark Sedra, a researcher specializing in rebuilding post-conflict countries at the Bonn International Center for Conversion, a German think tank. "Now the main goal is just creating a state that controls instability and contains the high levels of violence that prevail at the moment and prevents that violence from spilling over into neighboring states or destabilizing the region."

I'd pray hard for that.

 

[Barking_Mad]

This puts US troop deaths in perspective when it comes to the amount of killing going on. 1,300 dead in Baghdad ALONE since last Wednesday Bear in mind that the morgue in Baghdad last July was getting 1,000 dead per month so it gives a rough indication of the increase in violence.

Toll in Iraq's Deadly Surge: 1,300

Grisly attacks and other sectarian violence unleashed by last week's bombing of a Shiite Muslim shrine have killed more than 1,300 Iraqis, making the past few days the deadliest of the war outside of major U.S. offensives, according to Baghdad's main morgue. The toll was more than three times higher than the figure previously reported by the U.S. military and the news media.

Hundreds of unclaimed dead lay at the morgue at midday Monday -- blood-caked men who had been shot, knifed, garroted or apparently suffocated by the plastic bags still over their heads. Many of the bodies were sprawled with their hands still bound -- and many of them had wound up at the morgue after what their families said was their abduction by the Mahdi Army, the Shiite militia of cleric Moqtada al-Sadr.

"After he came back from the evening prayer, the Mahdi Army broke into his house and asked him, 'Are you Khalid the Sunni infidel?' " one man at the morgue said, relating what were the last hours of his cousin, according to other relatives. "He replied yes and then they took him away."

Aides to Sadr denied the allegations, calling them part of a smear campaign by unspecified political rivals.

By Monday, violence between Sunni Arabs and Shiites appeared to have eased. As Iraqi security forces patrolled, American troops offered measured support, in hopes of allowing the Iraqis to take charge and prevent further carnage.

But at the morgue, where the floor was crusted with dried blood, the evidence of the damage already done was clear. Iraqis arrived throughout the day, seeking family members and neighbors among the contorted bodies.

"And they say there is no sectarian war?" demanded one man. "What do you call this?"

The brothers of one missing man arrived, searching for a body. Their hunt ended on the concrete floor, provoking sobs of mourning: "Why did you kill him?" "He was unarmed!" "Oh, my brother! Oh, my brother!"