History > 2007 > UK > Wars > Iraq (IV)

Dave Brown        The Independent        31.7.2007

From L to R: George W. Bush, Gordon Brown.

Reference:

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Ingmar Bergman's death (30.7.2007) 1918 - 2007

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Leading Article:

Straight talk;

and an interesting soundbite

Published: 31 July 2007
The Independent

For all of George Bush's typical stabs at levity, there was a refreshing tone of seriousness on display at yesterday's press conference with Gordon Brown at Camp David. This was certainly not a "Yo, Brown!" summit. The Prime Minister's first official trip to the United States came across as strictly a working visit. The backslapping and mutual admiration that were such a feature of Tony Blair's meetings with President Bush had been banished. Even the distance between the two lecterns on the Camp David lawn appeared to have grown a little compared with previous meetings of this nature.

In terms of substance, Mr Brown deserves credit for getting the President to engage with his plan to jump-start the stalled world trade liberalisation talks. Only concrete progress in the Doha round will tell if Mr Bush's commitment yesterday is anything more than warm words, but it was refreshing to see the President forced to address in his own backyard the rich world's scandalous agricultural protectionism.

The greater focus agreed by the two leaders on halting the atrocities in Darfur is also to be welcomed. And the floating of a financial package to act as an incentive to the Khartoum regime is an encouraging sign of lateral thinking on this issue from Mr Brown. The Prime Minister clearly came to Washington with a detailed set of proposals, not just a vague intention of "hugging them close". It is also notable that all the ideas outlined yesterday involved the participation of international bodies such as the United Nations. The era of reflexive unilateralism seems to coming to a none-too-premature end.

On the subject of Islamist terrorism, Mr Brown came out with an interesting soundbite. The Prime Minister argued that jihadist violence is "not a cause, but a crime". This represents a subtle contradiction of the clumsy and counterproductive rhetoric of President Bush's "war on terrorism". Overall, though, Mr Brown was disappointing on the subject of Iraq. Although he avoided the simplistic "good and evil" narrative of Mr Blair and President Bush - he framed Britain's commitment to Iraq strictly in terms of UN resolutions - he also indicated that he is not about to swerve from the policy laid down by his predecessor. No doubt President Bush was grateful to hear this. But it seems safe to assume that the 5,500 British troops serving in southern Iraq hoped for more, as does a large part of the British public.

For President Bush, the meeting was a welcome distraction from his domestic woes. And to the extent that it unleashed no nasty surprises, it was a success for the White House. But President Bush has larger fish to fry in the shape of a hostile congress, awful poll ratings and a disaster in Iraq that grows grimmer by the day. Mr Bush seems to be pinning his last hopes for Iraq on September's report from the US military commander General David Petraeus on whether the so-called "surge" has succeeded. Mr Brown will have to demonstrate much more than a simple willingness to hold the line when that crunch moment arrives.

In the meantime, Mr Brown achieved what he came for. He looked statesmanlike and eloquent (especially next to the inarticulate, and at times irritable, President Bush). At the same time, he managed to signal a subtle change of tone in transatlantic relations, although nothing that is going to cause diplomatic rupture.

Yet the true test of Mr Brown's strategy will be the extent that he can use the relationship with this lame duck president over the next 18 months to enhance the greater international good. We hope for the best, but the Prime Minister would do well to remember that previous attempts to steer the Bush administration in the right direction have not ended happily.

Leading Article: Straight talk; and an interesting soundbite, I, 31.7.2007, http://comment.independent.co.uk/leading_articles/article2819565.ece

British Prime Minister Is Cautious

on Question of Iraq Troop Withdrawal

July 30, 2007
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 1:15 p.m. ET
The New York Times

CAMP DAVID, Md. (AP) -- British Prime Minister Gordon Brown told President Bush Monday he shares the U.S. view that there are ''duties to discharge and responsibilities to keep'' in Iraq.

''Our aim, like the United States is, step-by-step, to move control to the Iraqi authorities,'' Brown said, joining Bush at a news conference at the president's Maryland mountaintop ranch.

Brown hinted that a decision about British troop levels was coming soon, while assuring that such a determination would be based ''on the military advice of our commanders on the ground,'' thus echoing language often heard from Bush.

Indeed, minutes later, in response to a question, Bush said: ''The decisions on the way forward in Iraq must be made with a military recommendation as an integral part of it.''

The United Kingdom's commitment to the war is essential to the Bush administration. Britain has 5,500 troops there, with forces moving from a combat role to aiding local Iraqi forces.

Bush didn't directly answer whether he planned to pass on the war to the next president, who will take office in January 2009. But he suggested that was likely. ''This is going to take a long time in Iraq, just like the ideological struggle is going to take a long time,'' he said.

The Camp David meeting was an attempt by Brown and Bush to seek common footing between leaders new to each other, but who jointly oversee one of the world's most important alliances.

In deference to the U.S.-British relationship, Bush gave Brown the full foreign-leader treatment: a coveted overnight stay at the presidential retreat here, three meals of all-American fare and introductory talks spanning a range of weighty matters.

But building personal rapport was the main theme. The men have been together before, but this was their first official sit-down since Brown took office in Britain a month ago. There was some sign they achieved a connection, with Brown thanking Bush for his compassionate words about the death of a baby daughter four years ago and the two trading jokes about Brown's reputation as a dour Scotsman.

Still, what the men stressed was what their nations have in common when they appeared together before reporters -- 25 minutes late, a rarity for the usually punctual president -- to cap the two days of talks -- both one-on-one and with advisers.

''So everyone's wondering whether or not the prime minister and I were able to find common ground, to get along, to have a meaningful discussion,'' Bush said at the outset. ''And the answer is `Absolutely.'''

Bush said they met over dinner Sunday night for more than two hours alone, dismissing aides from both countries to the rustic camp's bowling alley (where the British side apparently prevailed).

''You know, he probably wasn't sure what to expect from me,'' the president said. ''I kinda had a sense of the kind of person I was going to be dealing with. I would describe Gordon Brown as a principled man who really wants to get something done.''

On the battle against terror, in particular, the men said there is no daylight between their views.

''We are one in fighting the battle against terrorism,'' said Brown.

Bush congratulated the prime minister on his response when his country was hit with terror threats and catastrophic flooding immediately after he took office. ''You've proved your worthiness as a leader.''

''He gets it,'' the president said of his new partner.

Some of Brown's advisers have caused a stir with comments about Bush's famously close ties with Brown's predecessor, Tony Blair, and the Iraq war -- raising questions about whether British troops were headed for an early withdrawal from Iraq.

''In Iraq we have duties to discharge and responsibilities to keep in support of the democratically elected government and in support of the explicit will of the international community,'' Brown said.

Military officials have said that British forces are likely to hand over control of Basra, the last area for which they hold responsibility, by the end of the year. Brown said at Bush's side that a decision on the future role of British troops could be announced to Parliament when it returns from a summer recess in October.

That decision would follow the scheduled September report to Bush by Army Gen. David Petraeus.

If Bush had any dissatisfaction about what he heard from Brown on Iraq, he didn't reveal it.

''There's no doubt in my mind he understands the stake of the struggle,'' Bush said. ''And there's no doubt in my mind that he will keep me abreast of his military commanders' recommendations based upon conditions on the ground.''

Notably, though, Brown is covering his bases. After leaving Bush, he planned to meet U.S. congressional leaders on Capitol Hill, where support for Bush on the war is fading.

He also was heading from Washington for New York, where he will hold talks with U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon and deliver a speech to the United Nations.

Brown arrived Sunday at Camp David, and the two got off to a chatty start. Brown could be overhead remarking on how he was honored to be at Camp David, given its rich history. Part of that history included a stop by Blair in 2001 when Bush barely knew him, either.

The alliance of the United States and Britain has long been shaped by personalities -- Roosevelt and Churchill, Reagan and Thatcher, Bush and Blair.

Bush likes to size up a fellow world leader in person and measure the person's mettle under fire. Yet time is short and his popularity and clout have worn away with the war in Iraq.

''What the president wants to find out is whether the new prime minister is a reliable ally,'' said Simon Serfaty, a European expert at the Center for Strategic & International Studies.

Associated Press writer David Stringer contributed to this report.

British Prime Minister Is Cautious on Question of Iraq Troop Withdrawal, NYT, 30.7.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/washington/AP-Bush-Brown.html?hp

Iraq: One in seven joins human tide

spilling into neighbouring countries

Published: 30 July 2007
The Independent
Patrick Cockburn in Sulaymaniyah

Two thousand Iraqis are fleeing their homes every day. It is the greatest mass exodus of people ever in the Middle East and dwarfs anything seen in Europe since the Second World War. Four million people, one in seven Iraqis, have run away, because if they do not they will be killed. Two million have left Iraq, mainly for Syria and Jordan, and the same number have fled within the country.

Yet, while the US and Britain express sympathy for the plight of refugees in Africa, they are ignoring - or playing down- a far greater tragedy which is largely of their own making.

The US and Britain may not want to dwell on the disasters that have befallen Iraq during their occupation but the shanty towns crammed with refugees springing up in Iraq and neighbouring countries are becoming impossible to ignore.

Even so the UNHCR is having difficulty raising $100m (£50m) for relief. The organisation says the two countries caring for the biggest proportion of Iraqi refugees - Syria and Jordan - have still received "next to nothing from the world community". Some 1.4 million Iraqis have fled to Syria according to the UN High Commission for Refugees, Jordan has taken in 750 000 while Egypt and Lebanon have seen 200 000 Iraqis cross into their territories.

Potential donors are reluctant to spent money inside Iraq arguing the country has large oil revenues. They are either unaware, or are ignoring the fact that the Iraqi administration has all but collapsed outside the Baghdad Green Zone. The US is spending $2bn a week on military operations in Iraq according to the Congressional Research Service but many Iraqis are dying because they lack drinking water costing a few cents.

Kalawar refugee camp in Sulaymaniyah is a microcosm of the misery to which millions of Iraqis have been reduced.

"At least it is safe here," says Walid Sha'ad Nayef, 38, as he stands amid the stink of rotting garbage and raw sewage. He fled from the lethally dangerous Sa'adiyah district in Baghdad 11 months ago. As we speak to him, a man silently presents us with the death certificate of his son, Farez Maher Zedan, who was killed in Baghdad on 20 May 2006.

Kalawar is a horrible place. Situated behind a petrol station down a dusty track, the first sight of the camp is of rough shelters made out of rags, torn pieces of cardboard and old blankets. The stench is explained by the fact the Kurdish municipal authorities will not allow the 470 people in the camp to dig latrines. They say this might encourage them to stay.

"Sometimes I go to beg," says Talib Hamid al-Auda, a voluble man with a thick white beard looking older than his fifty years. As he speaks, his body shakes, as if he was trembling at the thought of the demeaning means by which he feeds his family. Even begging is difficult because the people in the camp are forbidden to leave it on Thursday, Friday and Saturday. Suspected by Kurds of being behind a string of house robberies, though there is no evidence for this, they are natural scapegoats for any wrong-doing in their vicinity.

Refugees are getting an increasingly cool reception wherever they flee, because there are so many of them and because of the burden they put on resources. "People here blame us for forcing up rents and the price of food," said Omar, who had taken his family to Damascus after his sister's leg was fractured by a car bomb.

The refugees in Kalawar had no option but to flee. Of the 97 families here, all but two are Sunni Arabs. Many are from Sa'adiyah in west Baghdad where 84 bodies were found by police between 18 June and 18 July. Many are young men whose hands had been bound and who had been tortured.

"The majority left Baghdad because somebody knocked on the door of their house and told them to get out in an hour," says Rosina Ynzenga, who runs the Spanish charity Solidarity International (SIA) which pays for a mobile clinic to visit the camp.

Sulaymaniyah municipality is antagonistic to her doing more. One Kurdish official suggested that the Arabs of Kalawar were there simply for economic reasons and should be given $200 each and sent back to Baghdad.

Mr Nayef, the mukhtar (mayor) of the camp who used to be a bulldozer driver in Baghdad, at first said nobody could speak to journalists unless we had permission from the authorities. But after we had ceremoniously written our names in a large book he relented and would, in any case, have had difficulty in stopping other refugees explaining their grievences.

Asked to list their worst problems Mr Nayef said they were the lack of school for the children, shortage of food, no kerosene to cook with, no money, no jobs and no electricity. The real answer to the question is that the Arabs of Kalawar have nothing. They have only received two cartons of food each from the International Committee of the Red Cross and a tank of clean water.

Even so they are adamant that they dare not return to Baghdad. They did not even know if their houses had been taken over by others.

Abla Abbas, a mournful looking woman in black robes, said her son had been killed because he went to sell plastic bags in the Shia district of Khadamiyah in west Baghdad. The poor in Iraq take potentially fatal risks to earn a little money.

The uncertainty of the refugees' lives in Kalawar is mirrored in their drawn faces. While we spoke to them there were several shouting matches. One woman kept showing us a piece of paper from the local authority in Sulaymaniyah giving her the right to stay there. She regarded us nervously as if we were officials about to evict her.

There are in fact three camps at Kalawar. Although almost all the refugees are Sunni they come from different places and until a month ago they lived together. But there were continual arguments. The refugees decided that they must split into three encampments: one from Baghdad, a second from Hillah, south of Baghdad, and a third from Diyala, the mixed Sunni-Shia province that has been the scene of ferocious sectarian pogroms.

Governments and the media crudely evaluate human suffering in Iraq in terms of the number killed. A broader and better barometer would include those who have escaped death only by fleeing their homes, their jobs and their country to go and live, destitute and unwanted, in places like Kalawar. The US administration has 18 benchmarks to measure progress in Iraq but the return of four million people to their homes is not among them.

Iraq: One in seven joins human tide spilling into neighbouring countries, I, 30.7.2007, http://news.independent.co.uk/world/middle_east/article2816666.ece

US fears that Brown wants Iraq pull-out

July 29, 2007
From The Sunday Times
Sarah Baxter in Washington and David Cracknell

A SENIOR Downing Street aide has sounded out Washington on the possibility of an early British military withdrawal from Iraq.

Simon McDonald, the prime minister’s chief foreign policy adviser, left the impression that he was “doing the groundwork” for Gordon Brown, according to one of those he consulted.

Brown, who arrives at Camp David in Maryland today to meet President George W Bush, said yesterday that “the relationship with the United States is our single most important bilateral relationship”.

Downing Street remains emphatic that he will not unveil a plan to withdraw British troops, who are due to remain in southern Iraq until the Iraqi army is deemed capable of maintaining security. A spokesman said there had been no change in the government's position.

Behind the scenes, however, American officials are picking up what they believe are signals that a change of British policy on Iraq is imminent.

McDonald, a senior diplomat who formerly ran the Iraq desk at the Foreign Office, was in Washington this month to prepare for the summit. He asked a select group of US foreign policy experts what they believed the effect would be of a British pull-out from Iraq.

“The general feeling was that he was doing the groundwork for a Brown conversation,” said a source. Most of the experts felt it was a question of when, not if, Britain would leave.

“The view is Britain feels it can’t fight two wars, and Afghanistan is more worth fighting for,” added the source. Yesterday a British soldier was killed during a rocket attack in Afghanistan, bringing to 67 the number of British fatalities there.

McDonald’s questions, coming in the wake of remarks by Douglas Alexander, the international development secretary, about the use of American power, and the appointment of Lord Malloch-Brown, a critic of US policy, as a Foreign Office minister, were seen by some in Washington as another signal that Brown is distancing himself from Iraq.

Malloch-Brown, in particular, arouses strong emotions. Critics within the Bush administration have long viewed the former UN deputy secretary-general with suspicion and were annoyed when he said last month Britain and America would no longer be “joined at the hip”.

A former UN official, Artjon Shkurtaj, has now accused him of turning a blind eye to corruption and mismanagement at the United Nations programme he ran for six years.

Shkurtaj lost his job after claiming that rules designed to prevent corruption were being breached in the North Korean offices of the UN Development Programme. Some UN insiders have, however, accused Shkurtaj of being an American “stooge”, manipulated by Washington to embarrass Malloch-Brown.

Henry Kissinger, the former US secretary of state, has warned British ministers to beware of distancing themselves from America.

“Ostentatious dissociation from the US just sets up a quarrel,” he said in an interview with The Sunday Times.

He added that Brown had qualities that could be “very helpful” to the president in resolving the Iraq problem. “Gordon Brown is an extremely thoughtful person with a more intellectual approach than Tony Blair,” said Kissinger. “President Bush has not invited him to Camp David to lecture him on how Britain can fit in with America’s wishes. He will listen to him with an open mind.”

Brown visited Iraq last month to discuss the situation there with Lieutenant-General Graeme Lamb, the coalition deputy commander and overall UK commander, and Major-General Jonathan Shaw, the commander in the south.

Army chiefs make no secret of their desire to withdraw. British troops are under virtual siege in Basra with four servicemen killed in the past two weeks by mortar or rocket attacks on their two bases. Most are in tents with no overhead protection.

Shaw has drawn up a proposal - backed by Lamb - under which the bulk of the British troops could be withdrawn by the end of the year or early next year, leaving only small training teams. They are due to withdraw to a single base at Basra airport by the end of this month.

Bob Ainsworth, the armed forces minister, told MPs last week that the local Iraqi military commander believed his force was “approaching the point” where it could take over responsibility.

“There is hope among our people out there at every level that we are approaching the situation where that can be done. But we have got to talk to our allies and to the Iraqi government about that. That cannot be a unilateral decision on our part,” he said.

In contrast with the famous “Colgate summit” - at which Bush told the press he and Blair shared the same brand of toothpaste - no walkabouts or matey photo-opportunities are expected when the president meets the new prime minister.

“President Bush and prime minister Brown don’t need a photo-opportunity of the two of them heading off into the sunset holding hands to prove that the US-UK relationship is as strong as ever,” a British official said.

Brown will have a one-to-one dinner with Bush tonight and they will meet again without aides for breakfast tomorrow.

A Whitehall source said: “It will be more businesslike now, with less emphasis on the meeting of personal visions you had with Bush and Blair.”

    US fears that Brown wants Iraq pull-out, STs, 29.7.2007, http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/article2159281.ece

We're running out of troops,

warns army chief

· Defence memo leak says virtually no reserves left
· 'Intense tempo of life' due to Iraq and Afghan fighting

Saturday July 21, 2007
Guardian
Richard Norton-Taylor

The head of the army has warned that Britain is almost running out of troops to defend the country or fight in military operations abroad.

The warning by General Sir Richard Dannatt, chief of the general staff, to fellow defence chiefs comes at a time when the army is asking for a big increase in reservists to be deployed in Afghanistan, reflecting a crisis in Britain's armed forces.

In a secret memorandum he says: "We now have almost no capability to react to the unexpected." Reinforcements for emergencies or for operations in Iraq or Afghanistan were "now almost non-existent".

He adds: "The enduring nature and scale of current operations continues to stretch people". Gen Dannatt warns the army had to "augment" 2,500 troops from other units for operations in Iraq and Afghanistan to bring up the total force to the 13,000 needed there. This remained "far higher than we ever assumed", he says.

He continues: "When this is combined with the effects of under-manning (principally in the infantry and Royal Artillery) and the pace of training support needed to prepare units for operations, the tempo of life in the Field Army is intense." While the current situation was "manageable", Gen Dannatt said he was "concerned about the longer term implications of the impact of this level of operations on our people, equipment and future operational capability".

The general's warnings, in a document leaked to the Daily Telegraph, come at a time when the Ministry of Defence and the Treasury are finalising spending plans for the next three years in the comprehensive spending review expected to be revealed in October. The three service chiefs are arguing among themselves about how the money should be spent. The navy is expected next week to be told it will get two new aircraft carriers at a cost of between £2bn and £3bn and fewer destroyers and frigates than it wants.

Gordon Brown, the prime minister who as chancellor fought regularly with the MoD, has told defence chiefs to sort out a deal among themselves, according to defence sources.

As the army has been forced to call up 600 reservists for Afghanistan there is only one Spearhead battalion of 500 troops, available for an emergency.

Gen Dannatt's memo says Britain's other rapid deployment unit, the Airborne Task Force, made up mainly of Paras, was unable to fully deploy "due to shortages in manpower, equipment and stocks".

It is not the first time Gen Dannatt has expressed concern about pressure on the army. Soon after he took up his post last August he told the Guardian that the army was "running hot" and called for a national debate on defence.

    We're running out of troops, warns army chief, G, 21.7.2007, http://www.guardian.co.uk/military/story/0,,2131699,00.html

9am

Basra attack kills three RAF personnel

Friday July 20, 2007
Guardian Unlimited
Agencies

Three Royal Air Force personnel have been killed and several other people wounded in an attack on a military compound in the southern Iraqi city of Basra, a military spokesman said today.

Major Matthew Bird said the airport camp came under several "indirect fire attacks" - the term usually used to refer to mortar and rocket attacks.

Major Bird said: "Unfortunately [the attack] resulted in the death of three British service personnel belonging to the Royal Air Force. A number of personnel were also injured, and some of them remain in the military hospital at the airport for treatment."

He said the families of the victims had been informed.

Attacks on British bases in Basra occur almost every day. The latest deaths raises to six the number of British troops killed in Iraq this month, with at least 161 killed since the invasion in March 2003.

Britain has withdrawn hundreds of troops from Iraq, leaving a force of around 5,500 based mainly on the fringes of Basra, Iraq's second-largest city, 340 miles south-east of Baghdad.

British troops in Afghanistan came under renewed attack today, with three soldiers wounded in a suicide car bombing in the southern province of Helmand.

The provincial police chief, Hussain Andiwal, told Reuters that the attack was in the Sangin district of Helmand where British troops have been engaged in heavy fighting with Taliban insurgents for more than a year.

    Basra attack kills three RAF personnel, G, 20.7.2007, http://www.guardian.co.uk/Iraq/Story/0,,2130964,00.html

Just another day in Iraq:

100 more fathers, mothers,

sons and daughters killed

Published: 17 July 2007
The Independent
By Patrick Cockburn
in Khanaquin, Diyala Province, Iraq
 

The United States surge, the use of the American troop reinforcements to bring violence in Iraq under control, is bloodily failing across northern Iraq. That was proved again yesterday when a suicide bomber detonated a truck packed with explosives in Kirkuk killing at least 85 people and wounding a further 183.

The truck bomb blasted a 30ft-deep crater in a busy road full of small shops and booths near the ancient citadel of Kirkuk, setting fire to a bus in which the passengers burned to death and burying many others under the rubble. Dozens of cars were set ablaze and their blackened hulks littered the street. Some 25 of the wounded suffered critical injuries and may not live.

In Baghdad, at least 44 people were killed or found dead across the city, police said. They included the bullet-riddled bodies of 25 people, apparent victims of sectarian death squads.

The attack is the latest assault by Sunni insurgents on Kurds who claim Kirkuk as their future capital.

Adnan Sarhan, 30, lost both his eyes and had his back broken in the blast. He lay on the operating table as his anguished mother, Mahiya Qadir, sat nearby with her daughter-in-law. "Will I ever see my son alive again?" she asked.

Two more car bombs blew up later in Kirkuk but caused few casualties.

The dispatch of 28,000 extra troops to Iraq starting in January, and the more aggressive deployment of the US army in the country, is not working. At best it is moving violence from one area of Iraq to another. The US is allying itself to local tribes and militias against guerrillas but that is angering the government in Baghdad and deepening the violence.

In Diyala, a mixed Shia-Sunni-Kurdish province south of Kirkuk and north-east of Baghdad, the US launched an offensive against al-Qa'ida and Sunni insurgent forces three weeks ago. It claimed to have killed many guerrillas and forced others to flee.

Hamdi Hassan Zubaydi, the Sunni leader of the Iraqi Islamic Party in Diyala, painted a very different picture. He described how some of the Sunni tribesmen had joined US troops to storm al-Qa'ida-held villages and had killed 100 insurgents. But when the US withdrew, al-Qa'ida returned and drove the tribesmen out.

Mr Zubaydi, who was jailed by Saddam Hussein in the 1980s, quivered with disgust as he explained the bloody complexities of sectarian war in Diyala.

The tough-looking former teacher in his fifties said 20 Sunni students on a bus had been abducted and he feared they would be killed. He said he knew who had carried out the kidnapping: "It was the emergency police forces led by Captain Abbas Waisi and Lt Zaman Abdul Hamid. I told the American special forces but they have done nothing."

We met Mr Zubaydi in the office of the Mayor of Khanaqin, a Kurdish enclave in northern Diyala, where he had come to ask for help. We had reached there through Kurdish-controlled territory along the right bank of the Diyala river that runs parallel to the Iranian border. Kurdish control ends at a dishevelled town called Khalar where we crossed the river over a long, rickety metal bridge with old tyres marking places where metal slats had fallen into the waters below. We picked up armed guards and then circled round behind Khanaqin to enter from the east.

Mr Zubaydi had a shorter but more dangerous route to Khanaqin from a town called Muqdadiyah, a few miles to the west of Khaniaqin, which he accurately described as "the most dangerous place in Iraq". His house had been attacked five times in the past month.

He was beset by the Sunni insurgents of al-Qa'ida on one side and the Shia militia of the Mehdi Army on the other. He gave an impressive list of the Iraqi security forces available in Muqdadiyah, in addition to a US battalion, including 1,200 police and 1,600 army.

The problem is that nobody is quite sure on which side the Iraqi security forces are planning to fight. Often they do nothing: "The house of the deputy police chief is just 10 metres from a police station but somebody blew it up," Mr Zubaydi said scornfully. He ran through a list of police and army commanders in Diyala, all of whom were Shia and unlikely to help the Sunnis.

There are at least three different wars being fought in northern Iraq: Sunni against Americans; Shia against Sunni; Arabs against Kurds. Alliances can switch. The Kurds are the Americans' only sincere ally in Iraq but many of them are also convinced that the Americans in Kirkuk city have a tacit understanding with the Arab insurgents not to attack each other.

The US does not want to be seen as siding with the Kurds in their struggle to join Kirkuk and its oil fields to their semi-independent enclave, the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG), in a referendum due at the end of the year. The US is restraining the Kurds but this may be more difficult after yesterday's bombings. "If we wanted to do so, we [Kurds] could secure as far as Khalis," a town far to the south of Kirkuk in Diyala Fuad Hussein, the chief of staff of Massoud Barzani president of the KRG, told me.

The US is caught in quagmire of its own making. Such successes as it does have are usually the result of tenuous alliances with previously hostile tribes, insurgent groups or militias. The British experience in Basra was that these marriages of convenience with local gangs weakened the central government and contributed to anarchy in Iraq. They did not work in the long term.

    Just another day in Iraq: 100 more fathers, mothers, sons and daughters killed, I, 17.7.2007, http://news.independent.co.uk/world/middle_east/article2776137.ece

Campbell:

cabinet's severe doubts on Iraq

Former spin doctor's diaries

reveal tensions in build-up to invasion

Monday July 9, 2007
Guardian
Will Woodward, chief political correspondent


Tony Blair pressed ahead with the invasion of Iraq without betraying any uncertainty to even his closest colleagues, all of whom had "severe moments of doubt", his former communications chief, Alastair Campbell, reveals today.

Mr Campbell records how one of Mr Blair's staunchest allies, John Reid, and the deputy prime minister, John Prescott, looked "physically sick" when cabinet met on the day before the Commons vote to endorse the war.

Mr Reid, then party chairman, "said never underestimate the instincts for unity and understand that we will be judged by the Iraq that replaces Saddam's Iraq, and by the Middle East", Mr Campbell wrote in the first publication of extracts from his long-awaited, but heavily edited, diaries.

The next day, March 18 2003, Mr Blair called his staff in to thank them after the government had won the vote at the end of a highly charged Commons debate, albeit with the rebellion of 139 Labour MPs.

"His own performance today had been superb. All of us, I think, had had pretty severe moments of doubt but he hadn't really, or if he had he had hidden them even from us. Now there was no going back at all," Mr Campbell wrote.

Mr Campbell used his website yesterday to publish 4,500 words of extracts, ahead of the publication of 350,000 words on 794 pages this morning and an even smaller fraction of the 2.5m words the unedited diaries run to.

He defended his decision to bring forward the publication of his diaries and to excise some critical references to the new prime minister, Gordon Brown. "What I'm not going to do is publish a book that allows David Cameron to think he's got a goldmine to use against the new Labour prime minister," Mr Blair's former spin doctor said, acknowledging that the unedited version could cause Mr Brown damage.

None the less, the prime minister indicated his irritation at the publication of the diaries in an interview at the weekend.

Mr Campbell, a former political editor of the Daily Mirror who joined Mr Blair as press secretary in 1994, accepted that his initial intention had been to publish the diaries once Tony Blair and Mr Brown had left office. "It's true that initially I thought, well I'll just wait, I don't know, 10, 15, 20 years, and then just put them all out there," Mr Campbell said in an interview on Sunday AM on BBC1.

But he decided it was "a bit a waste for that just to sort of sit there and we just wait until frankly, Tony, I, and the rest of us are just, you know, people are no longer thinking that much about us".

The diaries report that George Bush and Dick Cheney, the US vice-president, were split over whether to go back to the United Nations to seek a new security council resolution in the run-up to the Iraq war. At talks with Mr Blair at Camp David, Mr Bush said Mr Cheney wanted an immediate invasion. "As we left, Bush joked to me 'I suppose you can tell the story of how Tony flew in and pulled the crazed unilateralist back from the brink'."

In the BBC interview Mr Campbell said he still believed it was right to go to war. "I don't think the aftermath was as well planned as it should have been, I would accept that. I was alongside Tony as he made what was clearly the most difficult decision of his life, and his career...I think he was driven by the right motives."

Mr Campbell added: "At least give him the credit of understanding he did it because he thought he was doing the right thing and the right thing for the long-term."

The diaries say that in July 2002 Mr Blair considered resigning before the forthcoming election - which proved to be his third victory - because of polls showing his trust ratings had dipped.

"He said 'In truth I've never really wanted to do more than two full terms'. It was pretty clear to me that he had just about settled his view, that he would sometime announce it, say that he was going to stay for the full term, but not go into the election as leader," Mr Campbell wrote.

The diaries also report that:

· Gerry Adams was at odds with his Martin McGuinness over whether Sinn Fein could sign a blueprint for peace in Northern Ireland which did not include a specific commitment to a united Ireland. Mr Adams was prepared to do it.

· Mr Campbell flirted with the "drop-dead gorgeous" Diana, Princess of Wales - but Mr Blair was the author of the famous "People's Princess" soundbite shortly after her death

· A week before the historic 1997 landslide election victory Mr Blair was considering not just offering Paddy Ashdown, the Liberal Democrat leader, a post in the cabinet, but talks about possible merger between Labour and the Lib Dems.

Last month Mr Brown offered Lord Ashdown the job of Northern Ireland secretary but was rebuffed.

That conversation underlines an emerging theme of the book, how Mr Blair saw himself as different politically from even his closest allies. "TB said it was important I understood why parts of Thatcherism were right...'What gives me real edge is that I'm not as Labour as you lot.'

"I pointed out that was a rather discomfiting observation. He said it was true. He felt he was in the same position he had always been and we were the people who had changed to adapt."

    Campbell: cabinet's severe doubts on Iraq, G, 9.7.2007, http://politics.guardian.co.uk/iraq/story/0,,2121886,00.html

8.45am

Basra bomb kills three British soldiers

Thursday June 28, 2007
Guardian Unlimited
Staff and agencies

Three British soldiers have been killed by a roadside bomb while on patrol in the southern Iraqi city of Basra.

They came under attack in the Al Antahiya district at about 1am (10pm yesterday BST), the British military in Iraq said in a statement.

They had dismounted from their Warrior armoured vehicle when insurgents set off an improvised explosive device.

Another soldier was wounded in the blast and was in a stable condition at a military hospital.

The deaths, which bring to 156 the British military death toll in Iraq since fighting began, came on Gordon Brown's first full day as prime minister. It means he will have to begin his first prime minister's question time next week in the same way as so many of Tony Blair's recent appearances - by paying tribute to soldiers killed in Iraq.

Britain has withdrawn hundreds of troops from Iraq, leaving a force of around 5,500 based mainly on the fringes of Basra, 340 miles south-east of Baghdad. The US currently has about 155,000 troops in the country.

Yesterday, Mr Blair said more British troops would leave within weeks, but he refused to set a more specific timetable.

The British military statement said: "It is with deep regret that we can confirm that three soldiers were killed by an improvised explosive device this morning.

"We will not be naming them or revealing their regiments until next of kin have been informed."

The deaths came just after the body of the 153rd serviceman to die in Iraq, Corporal John Rigby, of 4th Battalion The Rifles, was flown back to the UK.

Cpl Rigby, of Rye, East Sussex, died on his 24th birthday having also been wounded by a roadside bomb in Basra.

His twin brother, Will, who holds the same rank in the same battalion, was by Cpl Rigby's side when he died in a field hospital hours after being injured.

    Basra bomb kills three British soldiers, G, 28.6.2007, http://www.guardian.co.uk/Iraq/Story/0,,2113414,00.html

Roadside Bombs in Iraq Kill 7 Troops

June 23, 2007
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 10:36 a.m. ET
The New York Times

BAGHDAD (AP) -- Roadside bombs killed seven American troops in Iraq on Saturday, including four in a single strike outside Baghdad, the military said, as U.S. and Iraqi troops captured two senior al-Qaida militants in Diyala province.

Separately, a predawn operation by U.S. forces working with Iraqi informants in Baghdad's main Shiite district of Sadr City netted three other militants suspected of ties to Iran, the military said.

The Americans have accused Iran of providing mainly Shiite militias with training and powerful roadside bombs known as explosively formed projectiles, or EFPs, that have killed hundreds of U.S. troops in recent months.

Roadside bombs, including EFPs and other makeshift devices used by Sunni and Shiite militants alike, are the No. 1 killer of foreign troops in Iraq and Saturday's deaths were no exception.

Roadside bombs killed four soldiers northwest of the capital, a U.S. airman in Tikrit, and two U.S. soldiers in eastern Baghdad whose unit has recently targeted bomb networks. In addition, a British soldier died Saturday of wounds from a roadside bombing the day before in the southern city of Basra.

The announcement of the capture of two senior al-Qaida members in Diyala province came after concerns were raised that much of the terror organization's local leadership fled before a major U.S. military crackdown began on Monday.

The U.S. ground forces commander, Lt. Gen. Raymond Odierno, has said Baqouba's al-Qaida leadership learned about the American advance beforehand and fled before the Americans moved in.

Iraqi Maj. Gen. Abdul Karim al-Rubaie said the suspects were transferred to Baghdad, but he provided no more information about their identities. Seven other suspected al-Qaida fighters were arrested in the center of Baqouba, and 30 hostages were released from a prison elsewhere in the provincial capital, al-Rubaie said.

The U.S. military said earlier Saturday that at least 55 al-Qaida operatives have been killed and 23 detained since the start of Operation Arrowhead Ripper. It also said 16 weapons caches have been discovered, and 28 roadside bombs and 12 booby-trapped structures have been destroyed.

Earlier this week, creeping house-to-house through western Baqouba, U.S. soldiers made a startling discovery: a suspected al-Qaida field hospital stocked with oxygen tanks, heart defibrillators and other medical equipment.

The find displayed al-Qaida's sophisticated support network in Baqouba, a mostly Sunni city of about 300,000 people.

Baqouba has received little aid or other services from the central government, which feared supplies would end up with al-Qaida. As the field hospital proved, much assistance did end up bypassing residents and found its way to the terrorist organization.

''There are a multitude of systematic functions that aren't working,'' said Maj. Robbie Parke, 36, spokesman for the 3rd Brigade, 2nd Infantry Division. ''The Iraqi government has to say, `Look, Baqouba is in trouble, and we need to help.'''

So far that has not happened, U.S. officials say. But there are signs of hope.

''The (Iraqi) government is very immature, but they're getting better and saying the right things. We've got to hold them to that,'' said Odierno, the ground forces commander.

He spoke to AP during a trip to Baqouba on Thursday as American forces began in earnest to squeeze al-Qaida, Sunni insurgents and Shiite militiamen after the arrival of the final brigade of an additional 30,000 troops dispatched by President Bush.

Associated Press writer Lauren Frayer in Baqouba contributed to this report.

    Roadside Bombs in Iraq Kill 7 Troops, NYT, 23.6.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/world/AP-Iraq.html

Kidnapped Britons being held

by group backed by Iran - US general

Thursday June 21, 2007
Guardian
Lee Glendinning

Five British civilians kidnapped in Baghdad last month are being held by a group trained, funded and armed by Iran, according to the US commander in Iraq.

General David Petraeus said he believed that the Britons - four security guards and a consultant - were taken by a "secret cell" of the Mahdi Army, the Shia militia loyal to cleric Moqtada al-Sadr.

There had been repeated efforts to free the men, Gen Petraeus said, and "a very intensive effort" was in place to find the group who he believes were abducted in retaliation for the killing of Abu Qader, the militia's leader in Basra.

"We think that it is the same network that killed our soldiers in Karbala in an operation back in January," he said.

He said that the head of that network was killed less than a week before the Britons were captured by Mahdi Army members. He did not believe the fighters who captured the workers were ordinary "rank and file" members. "They are trained in Iran, equipped with Iranian [weapons], and advised by Iran," he told the Times. "The Iranian involvement here we have found to be much, much more significant than we thought before.

"They have since about the summer of 2004 played a very, very important role in training in Iran, funding, arming."

The five Britons were abducted from the finance ministry on May 29, by a group of up to 40 men. Since then Britain has sent hostage negotiators to assist with the search and the British embassy in Baghdad has staff working to secure their release. A series of raids on suspected terrorist hide-outs have been carried out by commandos searching for the hostages.

"There have been several operations to try to rescue them, we just have not had the right intelligence," Gen Petraeus said. The Foreign Office has said that diplomats have made contact with religious leaders to find out who was behind the abduction.

Meanwhile a soldier from the 4th Battalion the Rifles was killed yesterday in an attack on the Iraqi security forces' provincial joint coordination centre in Basra, the Ministry of Defence said.

    Kidnapped Britons being held by group backed by Iran - US general, G, 21.6.2007, http://www.guardian.co.uk/Iraq/Story/0,,2107924,00.html

2.45pm

British military death toll reaches 150

Thursday June 7, 2007
Guardian Unlimited
Fred Attewill and agencies

A British soldier was killed in Basra today, bringing the total number of UK military deaths in Iraq since 2003 to 150.

The soldier, from the 4th Battalion The Rifles, was shot by small arms fire while mounting a search and detention operation northwest of Basra City.

Three other coalition troops were injured during the operation but they are not believed to be in a life-threatening condition.

According to the MoD, of the 150 deaths since the invasion, 96 are classified as killed in action, 20 were the result of combat injuries and 34 were accidents, linked to natural causes, remain unexplained, or are still under investigation.

"We are deeply saddened about this death and all the lives that have been lost," a spokesman said.

More than two years since Operation Telic was launched in March 2003 to help overthrow Saddam Hussein, 5,500 members of the UK armed forces remain in Iraq.

The grim milestone came the day after Britain's former ambassador to Washington warned that UK and military presence in Iraq is worsening security across the region Sir Christopher Meyer said the mission was not worth the death of one more serviceman.

"I personally believe that the presence of American and British and coalition forces is making things worse, not only inside Iraq but the wider region around Iraq. The arguments against staying for any greater length of time themselves strengthen with every day that passes," Sir Christopher told the Iraq commission in London.

British commanders in Iraq have drawn up a plan for the withdrawal of almost all UK troops within 12 months, as one of several options to be presented to Gordon Brown when he takes over as prime minister.

    British military death toll reaches 150, G, 7.6.2007, http://www.guardian.co.uk/Iraq/Story/0,,2097762,00.html

1.30pm update

Troops search Sadr City

for kidnapped Britons

Wednesday May 30, 2007
Guardian Unlimited
Staff and agencies

Hundreds of Iraqi and US troops today carried out raids in the Sadr City area of Baghdad as the search for the five Britons kidnapped yesterday intensified.

The sprawling Shia district, in the north-east of the Iraqi capital, is a stronghold of the Mahdi Army militia.

The Iraqi foreign minister, Hoshyar Zebari, today said the Mahdi Army - loosely controlled by the radical cleric Moqtada al-Sadr - could have been behind the abductions of a financial expert and four bodyguards from the finance ministry building near Sadr City.

Iraqi forces have established a special battalion of Iraqi soldiers and police officers to search for the missing men.

Sadr City residents reported that hundreds of US and Iraqi troops had sealed off areas of the neighbourhood overnight, carrying out a series of raids that lasted until dawn.

"We are conducting search operations near the site where the abduction took place," Brigadier General Qassim al-Musawi, an Iraqi army spokesman, said.

"Maybe today, or in the coming few days, we will find them [the Britons] with the help of secret intelligence."

Not all today's military activity in Sadr City was linked to the kidnappings: five people were arrested in raids on suspicion of weapons smuggling, the US military said.

The five Britons' kidnappers wore police uniforms, had the appropriate identification papers and drove up to the ministry building in 19 four-wheel drive vehicles of a type used by officers.

Mr Zebari, who described the abduction of the five Britons as sophisticated, acknowledged the possible involvement of corrupt elements of the interior ministry police in the operation.

"It has been a known fact for some time that the interior ministry police, security units and forces are corrupt, are penetrated," he told BBC Radio 4's Today programme. "This issue is a very serious, challenging fact to the government itself.

"The number of people who were involved in the operation, to seal off the building, to set roadblocks and to get into the building with such confidence, must have some connection."

The seized British security guards worked for a private firm, while the financial expert has been advising the Iraqi government. They were abducted just before noon in what appeared to be a carefully planned assault intended to give the impression it was a government-sanctioned operation.

According to one witness's account, a group of gunmen stormed into a hall where a western adviser was giving a lecture, shouting: "Where are the foreigners?"

The gunmen - led by a man in a police major's uniform - then rounded up the five and left.

In London, the cabinet's Cobra crisis committee held an emergency meeting to discuss the situation, and Tony Blair said the government would "do everything we possibly can to help".

Today, the foreign secretary, Margaret Beckett, who is at a G8 meeting in Berlin, said: "This is clearly a very distressing time for all concerned. Foreign Office officials are offering help and assistance to the next of kin.

"It is not sensible at this stage to speculate on what might have happened. We are working closely with the Iraqi authorities to establish the facts and doing all we can to secure their swift and safe release."

Employees at the finance ministry are likely to be questioned on how the kidnappers were able to enter the building, seize the Britons and leave with no apparent resistance.

Bayan Jabr, the finance minister, is a conservative Shia politician who has been accused by Sunnis of fomenting sectarian violence, but he is a senior member of a Shia group that is a rival to the Mahdi Army.

The missing Britons have not been named for their own safety. The security guards were working for GardaWorld, a Canadian-based firm employing mainly British ex-soldiers.

The finance expert was working for BearingPoint, a US management consultancy based in Virginia, which won a contract to help rebuild the Iraqi financial system in 2003.

    Troops search Sadr City for kidnapped Britons, G, 30.5.2007, http://www.guardian.co.uk/Iraq/Story/0,,2091188,00.html

Human rights in Iraq:

a case to answer

Revealed:

How Lord Goldsmith advised Army chiefs
to deny detainees 'full' legal protection

Published: 29 May 2007
The Independent
By Robert Verkaik, Law Editor

The Attorney General, Lord Goldsmith, is facing accusations that he told the Army its soldiers were not bound by the Human Rights Act when arresting, detaining and interrogating Iraqi prisoners.

Previously confidential emails, seen by The Independent, between London and British military head-quarters in Iraq soon after the start of the war suggest Lord Goldsmith's advice was to adopt a "pragmatic" approach when handling prisoners and it was not necessary to follow the " higher standards" of the protection of the Human Rights Act.

That, according to human rights lawyers, was tantamount to the Attorney General advising the military to ignore the Human Rights Act and to simply observe the Geneva Conventions. It was also contrary to advice given by the Army's senior lawyer in Iraq, who urged higher standards to be met.

Today, rights groups and experts in international law will call on the Government to disclose Lord Goldsmith's legal opinion, which they say could have helped create a culture of abuse of Iraqis by British soldiers.

Last month, the first British soldier convicted of a war crime was jailed for a year and dismissed from the Army after being convicted of mistreating Iraqi civilians, including the hotel worker Baha Mousa, who died of his injuries at the hands of British soldiers. In 2005, three British soldiers were jailed by a court martial in Germany after "trophy" photographs emerged, showing Iraqi detainees being abused at an aid centre called Camp Bread Basket. There are about 60 more allegations of abuse being prepared for legal claims by rights groups.

Last week, Parliament's Joint Committee on Human Rights wrote to the Government to ask for an "explanation" about the evidence of torture in the Baha Mousa court martial.

Andrew Dismore MP, chair of the committee, said: "We have asked the Ministry of Defence to explain what appear to be stark inconsistencies in the evidence presented to our committee about the use of inhuman and degrading interrogation techniques prohibited as long ago as 1972."

But emails sent just after the invasion indicate Lord Goldsmith's belief that British soldiers in Iraq were not bound by the Human Rights Act. The documents also show a wide differing of opinion between him and Lieutenant-Colonel Nicholas Mercer, the Army's most senior legal adviser on the ground, who wrote to say he felt "the ECHR would apply" to troops in Iraq.

On one occasion, Rachel Quick, the legal adviser to Permanent Joint Headquarters who had regularly sought and been given guidance from Lord Goldsmith on the treatment of Iraqi prisoners, wrote to Colonel Mercer giving her interpretation of the Attorney General's advice. His view, she said, "was that the HRA was only intended to protect rights conferred by the Convention and must look to international law to determine the scope of those rights".

Ms Quick went on say that the advice of the Attorney General, supported by Professor Christopher Greenwood [the barrister who advised Lord Goldsmith on the legality of the war], was that, in the circumstances, the HRA did not apply. "For your purposes," she wrote, "I would suggest this means no requirement for you to provide guidance on the application of the HRA. I hope this is clear."

Ms Quick, who in November 2003, was appointed OBE, added: "With regard to the detention of civilians - I will look at your documents in more detail and discuss with FCO, MoD legal advisers. Although my initial thoughts are you are trying to introduce UK procedures to a Geneva Convention IV context. Whilst this may be the perfect solution it may not be the pragmatic solution. Again we raised this issue with the AG and got a helpful steer on the procedures. I'll aim to try to produce guidance, taking into account their advice on the detention of civilians."

Such were the concerns of legal advisers on the ground over the Attorney General's views that the MoD arranged for the senior legal adviser at the Foreign Office, Gavin Hood, to visit Permanent Joint Headquarters to settle any worries. Crucially, the emails make clear Lord Goldsmith's legal opinion was not shared by Colonel Mercer, who contacted his superiors in London to ask for guidance after he had witnessed the hooding of 40 Iraqis at a British PoW camp in March. The men were all forced to kneel in the sun and had their hands cuffed behind their backs. Worried this could leave the soldiers vulnerable to prosecutions, he told the MoD that in his view soldiers should behave in accordance with the "higher standard" of the Human Rights Act.

But the response from the military's Permanent Joint Headquarters in Qatar was that Lord Goldsmith had told the MoD the human rights law did not apply and soldiers should simply observe the Geneva Conventions.

When Colonel Mercer said he disagreed with the Government's most senior law officer he was told that "perhaps you should put yourself up as the next Attorney General". Colonel Mercer also asked for a British judge to be flown out to oversee the procedures for the detention of Iraqi prisoners, but this also was blocked at a high level.

Colonel Mercer's interpretation of the law has since proved correct. Thirty months after he first raised his concerns during the Iraq conflict, the Court of Appeal ruled that British soldiers were bound by the Human Rights Act, which bans torture or degrading of prisoners.

The emails, part of court documents being prepared to support a judicial review in the High Court this year, reveal considerable disquiet among the military about the Attorney General's advice.

The documents show that as early as March 2003, the International Committee of the Red Cross had begun investigating complaints of possible war crimes by British soldiers at the same PoW camp in south-east Iraq that had prompted Colonel Mercer's original intervention. The Government was so worried about this that it flew out a political adviser from London to address the Red Cross's concerns about hooding and other practices.

International law

* Torture is defined by international law as any threat or use of severe pain, physical or mental, against an individual with the intention of obtaining a confession or other information. Under the UN Convention Against Torture, 40 states - including Britain - have agreed not to engage in such practices.

During military conflict the third and fourth Geneva Conventions protect prisoners of war and civilians who are held by soldiers. Torture is also defined as a war crime by the International Criminal Court, which describes it as the unlawful infliction of severe pain.

Many of the incidents of abuse committed by British soldiers on Iraqi civilians may fall outside the strict definition of torture under international law.

But under the European Convention of Human Rights, incorporated in the Human Rights Act 1998, there is no requirement that the threat or use of pain should be severe for an act to fall foul of the law.

Lord Goldsmith argued that because UK forces did not have full control of Iraq, the country was not part of its jurisdiction and therefore the Human Rights Act did not apply. He lost this argument when the Court of Appeal ruled that Iraqi civilians held in custody and the soldiers detaining them were subject to the Human Rights Act. The case is to be settled later this year by the House of Lords. If the Government loses then it is expected that full and independent inquiries will be held into the deaths, disappearances and torture of Iraqis by British soldiers.

    Human rights in Iraq: a case to answer, I, 29.5.2007, http://news.independent.co.uk/uk/legal/article2591496.ece

Leading article:

An abuse of human rights

- and a blot on our integrity

Published: 29 May 2007
The Independent

The abuse of Iraqi detainees at the hands of British and American forces in Iraq has left a dark stain on the reputations of both countries in the Middle East, and in the wider world beyond. Claims once confidently advanced by Britain and the United States to be occupying the moral high ground in dealings with tyrannical regimes have been severely discredited over the last four years. It will take much longer than that to shake off the shame. The fact that the events at Abu Ghraib were more serious and more damaging to America's reputation than those at Camp Bread Basket were to Britain's is of little comfort.

It is, therefore, shocking to discover that the Attorney General, Lord Goldsmith, was not merely a passive spectator in the process by which the Army lost its moral compass in Iraq; he appears to have actively assisted matters, assuring the Army just after the war started that "pragmatism" and the Geneva Convention, rather than the European Convention of Human Rights, should form the basis of the treatment of any Iraqis detained or interrogated by the military.

It would be bad enough were Lord Goldsmith to have made these remarks in an off-the-cuff manner, as if he were somehow ignorant of their real consequences. No such plea can be made on his behalf. As this newspaper reports, he delivered his opinion knowing it was in sharp contrast with the views of the Army's senior lawyer, Colonel Nicholas Mercer, who emerges far more honourably from this affair, having urged adherence to what he termed the "higher standard" of the Human Rights Act compared to the Geneva Convention.

Apart from the hypocrisy of the Government's chief law officer publicly upholding the value of the Human Rights Act at home while privately suggesting that the Army could ignore it abroad - and the obvious connection that may be drawn between his recommendations and the subsequent abuses committed in Iraq - it suggests a remarkably callous attitude on his part towards British troops. At the time, Colonel Mercer made it very clear that he was worried that abandonment of the Human Rights Act would not only encourage maltreatment of Iraqi prisoners - which it clearly did - but expose British troops to subsequent prosecution. According to human rights lawyers, that concern did not appear to bother Lord Goldsmith - not when weighed against the higher need to smooth away all obstacles in the way of Tony Blair's policy of unflinching support for the US occupation forces.

What are the consequences of this dereliction of duty? In the Army, one British soldier has already been convicted of war crimes, and more may follow. More than 60 allegations of abuse are now being prepared for legal claims. In Iraq, we leave with our heads bowed, an object of mocking jeers as well as accusations that we have been exposed as indifferent to the deaths of 700,000 Arabs and Muslims.

This is not to suggest that Lord Goldsmith should take the sole or even primary responsibility for this. The entire Government and most of the Labour Party - and opposition - were swept along by Mr Blair's steely determination to get his way in Iraq. In the process they all connived, more or less, in the burial or suppression of inconvenient facts and in the systematic vilification and rubbishing of doubters and nay-sayers.

The Attorney General will soon be gone, so calls for his resignation are superfluous. What's important is that his successor try to recover more of the spirit of independence in relation to the executive that Attorney Generals used to enjoy, and so rebuild the reputation of the office, which Lord Goldsmith by his actions has regrettably diminished.

Leading article: An abuse of human rights - and a blot on our integrity, I, 29.5.2007, http://comment.independent.co.uk/leading_articles/article2591457.ece

5.15pm update

Five Britons seized in central Baghdad

Tuesday May 29, 2007
Guardian Unlimited
Mark Tran and agencies

The Foreign Office today confirmed the kidnapping of five Britons in Iraq, as the government's top-level emergency committee, Cobra, met to discuss the incident.

Gunmen wearing police uniforms abducted the group from a finance ministry building in central Baghdad.

The hostages are reported to include four security guards, a British computer expert and possibly some Germans who had been giving a lecture to ministry personnel in the city centre building.

Officials at the German embassy in London said they were in contact with their German counterparts in Baghdad as they attempted to find out more details about the kidnapping.

Police said the hostages were seized from cars outside the building. It is believed to be the first time westerners have been taken from a government location.

The bodyguards reportedly work for GardaWorld, a Canadian security company based in Montreal. A spokeswoman said the firm was investigating reports that its staff had been involved in today's incident.

"We are working together with our teams in Iraq to fully investigate, in accordance with our procedures, what has actually happened," she said.

She said GardaWorld - which has hundreds of staff, mostly ex-military personnel, in Iraq - was involved in "risk mitigation" and security projects, adding: "We have a number of British people working as teams of specialists throughout Iraq." GardaWorld provides security in the Iraqi capital's heavily fortified Green Zone, including services for the British embassy.

The Foundation for Relief and Reconciliation in the Middle East, a British religious group with an office in Iraq that uses the company, described it as "inspirational" and said the people abducted were "uniquely courageous individuals".

"We are working with religious and tribal leaders and doing everything we can to achieve their quick release," Canon Andrew White, who started the foundation, told Sky News from Baghdad.

The Pentagon has estimated that between 20,000 and 30,000 armed security contractors work in Iraq, although there are no official figures and some estimates are much higher.

More than 200 foreigners and thousands of Iraqis have been kidnapped since the US-led invasion of Iraq in 2003.

At least 60 foreign hostages, including the aid worker Margaret Hassan, are believed to have been executed by their captors.

Reports of the kidnappings come on another bloody day for Iraq, with two car bombings in Baghdad killing more than 35 people. At least 22 people died and 55 others were wounded in a bomb explosion in a parked bus in the centre of the city, police said.

The blast happened near a major intersection in Tayaran Square, a busy commercial area usually filled with markets. Many day workers, mostly poor Shias, often wait in the square for work.

US military officials said eight soldiers were killed in two separate incidents in Diyala province, north of Baghdad.

Six soldiers died in explosions near their vehicles, and two were killed when their helicopter went down. It was not immediately known whether the aircraft was shot down or had suffered mechanical difficulties.

    Five Britons seized in central Baghdad, G, 29.5.2007, http://www.guardian.co.uk/Iraq/Story/0,,2090340,00.html

The entire Labour party

shares blame for Iraq's horrors

The members may want to pin responsibility

on just one man, but they have a moral duty

to question their own role

Monday May 28, 2007
The Guardian
Haifa Zangana

Iraqis often debate whether it is the Labour party as an institution or Tony Blair as an individual that is the real British culprit in their tragedy. This issue needs to be addressed, not least for the future of relations between Iraq and Britain; but the debate echoes the deeply felt anger among Arabs and Muslims worldwide.

Blair's callousness about Iraqi lives and the country's ongoing destruction should now be notorious. In December 2004, the BBC's Andrew Marr asked Blair during a visit to Baghdad's Green Zone: "Many thousands of people have died for this moment, including scores of British people: are you sure that this prize was worth that price?" Blair's answers ranged from, "I know that we are doing the right thing" to, "Yes, I believe we did the right thing" and, finally, "I've got no doubt at all that that is the right thing for us to do".

But all that was in the second year of the occupation, and some Iraqis naively thought that the Labour party would deal with an individual who discredited its ethical foreign policy. It proved a delusion. Blair was re-elected as prime minister.

"Why?" we asked, while witnessing the descent of Iraq into hell. Has Blair apologised for the death of 650,000 Iraqis? Of course not. His emotional resignation speech to members of his party two weeks ago displayed the same rhetoric: "I did what I thought was right for our country."

This is not unusual. History, the gatekeeper of collective memory, teaches us that dictators and tyrants never admit to committing crimes, but adamantly justify them by saying that they acted in the national interest. Parties and ideologies often act in the same way. Parties rise to power on the strength of declared commitments, and they must be judged on whether they fulfil them.

It was the late foreign secretary, Robin Cook, who launched the Labour government's ethical foreign policy in April 1998, following Labour's manifesto of 1997 which pledged: "We will make the protection and promotion of human rights a central part of our foreign policy." I was one of many who believed that. Since then the Labour government has been engaged in the invasion and occupation of Iraq, based on a lie, and a hypocritical policy on Palestine involving doing nothing about Israel's aggression against Lebanon. Neither policy can be described as ethical.

Robin Cook kept a measure of sincerity in his resignation speech in the House of Commons on the eve of the invasion of Iraq, by pointing out the hypocrisy regarding Iraq and Palestine. But the Labour party continued its march under Blair, guided by a shared sense of mission and vision with President Bush in his war on terror, laced with rhetoric about "legal and moral obligations towards Iraqi people". How to dispose now of this legal and moral responsibility? In the fifth year of occupation, Iraq is a country of horrors, invoking comparison in the mind of Iraqis with the barbarity of the Mongols in 1258. An academic, who fears for his life, told me last week that every aspect of human rights has been violated.

This April Iraq lost between 3,000 and 10,000 of its citizens, depending on who estimates the figures, since no one officially counts. British forces lost 12 soldiers, the largest monthly total in the 50 months of occupation. The United States lost 104 soldiers, with 634 injured. No one has yet declared the number of dead and injured foreign mercenaries, euphemistically labelled "contractors", whose numbers in Iraq are widely believed to equal the official occupation troops.

The latest military operations and the much-publicised "surge" have displaced a further 27,000 Iraqis in three months. The pretext of fighting the militias and murder squads was shown to be phoney by the continuing daily spectacle of handcuffed, tortured and brutally murdered men found after night curfew; by gruesome executions in public places by thugs wearing police uniforms; by the sectarian walls built around many districts in Baghdad and other cities; and by the corruption and oil-smuggling, which is breeding new militias for the political parties in government. The United Nations last month confirmed a massacre on January 28 in the village of al-Zarka, in the province of Najaf, in which more than 260 people were killed by the police and by aerial bombardment from multinational forces.

The Labour party should not be relieved of its responsibility just because Blair is leaving. It is the moral responsibility of its members to question the party's role in the destruction of Iraq, and whether its new leader will listen to them and to the people of Iraq.

The overwhelming majority of Iraqis want the occupation forces out now, and they believe that the enemy is the occupation itself and not "al-Qaida and Iranian-backed elements", as Blair tells the world. In order to put an end to the daily bloodshed and to build a lasting peace, the Labour party and its new leader must accept that this will only be possible when they acknowledge that there are different voices that represent the Iraqi people. These include the widely popular resistance, whose different strands include both political and armed movements. And the British government must agree to initiate a compensation programme for the destruction it has helped to cause.

· Haifa Zangana is author of Women on a Journey: Between Baghdad and London

    The entire Labour party shares blame for Iraq's horrors, G, 28.5.2007, http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/story/0,,2089505,00.html

6.30pm

Court clears anti-war saboteurs

Tuesday May 22, 2007
Guardian Unlimited
Fred Attewill

Two anti-war campaigners who broke into an airbase to sabotage US bombers at the outbreak of the Iraq war have been cleared of all charges.

Protesters Toby Olditch, 38, and Philip Pritchard, 36, used bolt cutters to enter RAF Fairford in Gloucestershire. They had intended to clog the planes' engines with nuts and bolts when they were arrested by Ministry of Defence police.

The men pleaded not guilty at Bristol crown court to conspiring to cause criminal damage, claiming the B52s would have been used to commit war crimes in Iraq.

Speaking outside court, Mr Pritchard said: "I am delighted. It is a great relief - and a huge vote of confidence for anti-war protesters - that a jury were convinced that our actions were lawful." Standing beside him, Mr Olditch added: "It is very difficult to put this all into perspective at the moment.

"We have spent four years waiting for this day. It demonstrates that the law really can come down to reasonableness.

"From the outset we had been trying to prepare for all eventualities. The worse case scenario for us would have been prison - but nothing compares to the horror that has been inflicted on innocent Iraqis."

The court heard that the pair entered the base, which was being used by the US Air Force, on March 18 2003 - the day before bombing began in Iraq.

They were armed with bottles of red and brown coloured liquid along with bags of nails and staples which they intended to pour into the planes' engine bays.

Prosecutors alleged that they were also planning to damage the noses of the aircraft, so the planes could not bomb their targets.

Defence barrister Edward Rees said they carried out the protest because they believed the B52 planes were being prepared with uranium and scatter bombs to attack Iraq "indiscriminately".

Mr Rees said: "These particular bombs would have inevitably resulted in indiscriminate death of civilians.

"They believed that the extent of the damage to normal life was unreasonable." Mr Pritchard and Mr Olditch, both tradesmen from Oxford, walked out of court together, closely followed by a group of anti-war protesters.

It is the second time the pair had been tried for the offences. A jury had failed to reach a verdict after days of deliberation at the previous trial last year.

    Court clears anti-war saboteurs, G, 22.5.2007, http://www.guardian.co.uk/antiwar/story/0,,2085692,00.html

'Welcome to Tehran'

- how Iran took control of Basra

Britain has failed to stop

southern Iraq falling into grip of militias

Saturday May 19, 2007
Guardian
Ghaith Abdul-Ahad in Basra


On a recent overcast afternoon in Basra, two new police SUVs drove onto a dusty, rubbish-strewn football pitch where a group of children were playing. The game stopped and the kids looked on.

Three men in white dishdashas got out of one of the cars. One, holding a Kalashnikov, stood guard as the other two removed some metal tubes and cables from the back of a vehicle. As the two men fiddled with the wires, the man with the gun waved it at a teenager who wanted to film with his mobile phone.

Then, amid cries of "Moqtada, Moqtada" and "Allahu Akbar", there were two thunderous explosions and a pair of Katyusha rockets streaked up into the sky. Their target would be the British base in Saddam Hussein's former palace compound. Their landing place could be anywhere in Basra, and was most likely to be a civilian home.

The men got back in their cars and drove away, and the children resumed their match.

"Since the British started deploying the anti-rocket magnetic fields our rockets are falling on civilians," Abu Mujtaba, the commander of the group of Mahdi army men told me later. The "magnetic fields" are the latest rumour doing the rounds of Basra's militias; another is that the British are shelling civilians to damage the reputation of the Mahdi army.

The scene I had just watched was an everyday incident in an area long regarded as relatively safe and stable compared with the civil war-racked regions to the north. But as the British army's decision not to deploy Prince Harry highlighted this week, Basra and the nominally British controlled areas around it are far from secure.

During a recent nine-day visit, politicians, security officials and businessmen explained how the streets of the city were effectively under the control of rival militias competing to control territory, the fragile post-Saddam apparatus of state and revenue sources such as oil and weapons smuggling. As in Baghdad, gunmen speed through the streets on the back of pickups and the city is divided between militias as mutually suspicious as rival mafia families.

"If the Prophet Muhammad would come to Basra today he would be killed because he doesn't have a militia," a law professor told me. "There is no state of law, the only law is the militia law."

The politician

His description of life in the city was echoed by Abu Ammar, once a prominent Basra politician. A secular technocrat, he had high hopes when the British first arrived more than four years ago. The city had been hit hard by Saddam's wars against Iran and Kuwait and he was optimistic that the occupation would bring democracy and prosperity.

But the rise of the militias has put paid to that, he said. Now he was too scared to talk in a hotel lobby and insisted we meet in my room.

"When these religious parties say Basra is calm, that's because they control the city, and they are looting it," he said. "It's calm not because it's under the control of the police, but because all the militias have interests and they want to maintain the status quo. The moment their interests are under threat the whole city can burn."

Like many I spoke to, he said the appearance of a functioning state was largely an illusion: "The security forces are made of militiamen. In any confrontation between political parties, the police force will splinter according to party line and fight each other."

The militia commander

The people who really control Basra are men such as Sayed Youssif. He is a mid-level militia commander, but his name and that of his militia - God's Revenge - strikes fear anywhere in Basra.

Beginning with a small group of gunmen occupying a small public building, the former religious student built up a reputation as a fearless thug, killing former Ba'athists, alcohol sellers and eventually freelancing as a hitman for anyone willing to pay the price.

I went to see him in his Basra compound. Gunmen dressed in the uniforms of ministry of interior commandos stood guard outside and a sniper watched from the roof.

In the room outside his office, tribal leaders, officials and more gunmen sat, bare footed, waiting for Sayed Youssif to call them. Some wanted him to help their relatives join the army or police. Some had problems with other militias and were seeking his protection. But most were there to pay homage to a powerful man whose help they may one day need. As the official apparatus of state slides into chaos, men such as him have become the main dispensers of justice and patronage. No one in Basra can be appointed to the army, police or any official job without a letter of support from a militia or a political party.

Sitting in front of a mural of an eagle emerging from Basra and enveloping the whole of Iraq, he retained the manners of a religious student; stretching his arms on his lap, he lowered his head to listen intently as visitors address him. But on the desk in front of him, two phones that rang constantly and a pistol with two cartridges hinted at the power he now wields.

Sayed Youssif had just made a ruling in the case of a Sunni man whose brother was accused of shooting at Shias more than 15 years ago. Relatives of the alleged victims were demanding that he pay them compensation or be killed. The man pleaded that his brother had left the country two years before and he was too poor to pay 7m dinars (£250,000) in compensation.

The Sunni man shook, pleading for mercy. "Time has changed," said Sayed Youssif in a low but powerful voice. "Now you Sunni come here and beg like the mice. Do you remember the days when no one of us could even talk to you? You were the tyrants then, but we are not tyrants like you - I will give you a week to go to your tribe and either convince then to hand your brother or you will be judged in his place."

At the moment, he explained, he was preoccupied with a power struggle against the Fadhila party, another Shia militia that has controlled the governorship and the oil terminals for most of the past two years.

Sayed Youssif and a group of other militias all with strong ties to Iran were trying to displace Fadhila. "I have told all city council members: you have to make a choice, you either vote against the governor or you will die," he told one of his aides. The next day, two bombs exploded outside the homes of city councillors from the Fadhila party.

The general

One afternoon I went to meet a senior Iraqi general in the interior ministry. A dozen gunmen in military uniforms lay dozing as a junior officer led me through a maze of corridors padded with sandbags.

The general was on the phone to another officer when I entered. He was jokingly threatening the caller: "Shut up or I will send democracy to your town."

When he finished his conversation, the general - who didn't want his name published because he feared retribution from militias -stretched out his hand to me and said: "Welcome to Tehran."

I asked him about British claims that the security situation was improving. His reply was withering: "The British came here as military tourists. They committed huge mistakes when they formed the security forces. They appointed militiamen as police officers and chose not confront the militias. We have reached this point where the militias are a legitimate force in the street."

He and other security officials in Basra, including a British adviser to the local police force, described a web of different security forces with allegiances to different factions or militias.

"Most of the police force is divided between Fadhila which controls the TSU [the tactical support unit, its best-trained unit] and Moqtada which controls the regular police," the general said.

"Fadhila also control the oil terminals, so they control the oil protection force and part of the navy. Moqtada controls the ports and customs, so they control the customs, police and its intelligence. Commandos are under the control of Badr Brigade."

The relationship between militias and the security units they had infiltrated was fluid and difficult to pin down, he said. "Even the police officer who is not part of a militia will join a militia to protect himself, and once he is affiliated with a militia then as a commander you can't change him ... because then you are confronting a political party," he added.

More than 60% of his own officers, and "almost all" policemen, were militiamen. "We need a major surgical operation, to clean the city," he said.

The British army's Operation Sinbad was designed to do just that. The army has claimed it was a success but the general saw it somewhat differently. "The Sinbad operation failed miserably, because it didn't cleanse the police force," he said. "Ahead of us we have years of fighting and murder, a militia will be toppled by another militia and those will split so day after day we are witnessing the formations of new groups. And the British withdrawal is leading to a power struggle between the different factions."

The intelligence officer

In the living room of his modest Basra home, a senior military intelligence official, call him Samer, told me the militias could take control of the city in half an hour if they chose. Next to the sofa we sat on lay a rocket-propelled grenade launcher, a machine gun and couple of grenades. Samer had survived two assassination attempts.

As a young man with a pistol tucked into the back of his trousers brought us cans of Fanta, Samer described the economic forces behind the growth of the militias. "The militias and the tribes are cartels, they control the main ports the main oil terminal, and they have their own ports and everyone smuggles oil. When the balance of power is disrupted, they clash in the streets," he said.

He told me how a few weeks earlier an official in the directorate of electricity loyal to Moqtada al-Sadr had been was replaced by another one loyal to the Fadhila party, triggering clashes in the streets between different police units.

When there was a clash between two militias, the police force split and one police unit began fighting other units. Police cars became militia cars. (One Mahdi army commander was aghast that I found this strange: "Of course I should travel in a police car, do you want the commander to travel by taxi?")

Complicating matters further, Samer said most militiamen had multiple IDs associated with different groups. "They switch depending on who pays more."

Like the general, he said much of the blame for the current situation lay with the British: "The British officers are very careful about their image, they are too scared to go into confrontation. They allowed the cancer to [take over the body]. Even if the militias burn the city tomorrow, [the British] won't go into confrontation. They know they are outnumbered and they have huge losses if they do so."

The next day I went back to see the general. He was sitting with two other officers discussing his day."Our uncles, the British, flew me today to Ammara to attend the security handover ceremony," he said. "Give it one month and it will collapse," one of the officers replied.

"One month?" the general laughed . "Give it a few days."

The Iranians

You can't move far in Basra without bumping into some evidence of the Iranian influence on the city. Even inside the British consulate compound visitors are advised not to use mobile phones because, as the security official put it ,"the Iranians next door are listening to everything".

In the Basra market Iranian produce is everywhere, from dairy products to motorcycles and electronic goods. Farsi phrase books are sold in bookshops and posters of Ayatollah Khomeini are on the walls.

But Iranian influence is also found in more sinister places. Abu Mujtaba described the level of cooperation between Iran and his units. His account echoed what several militia men in other parts of Iraq have told me.

Sitting in his house in one of Basra's poorest neighbourhoods, he told me: "We need weapons and Iran is our only outlet. If the Saudis would give us weapons we would stop bringing weapons from Iran."

He went on: "They [the Iranians] don't give us weapons, they sell us weapons: an Iranian bomb costs us $100, nothing comes for free. We know Iran is not interested in the good of Iraq, and we know they are here to fight the Americans and the British on our land, but we need them and they are using us."

Despite this scepticism about Tehran's motives, he said some Mahdi army units were now effectively under Iranian control. "Some of the units are following different commanders, and Iran managed to infiltrate [them], and these units work directly for Iran."

Most of the Shia militias and parties that control politics in Basra today were formed and funded by Tehran, he said.

His assessment was shared by both the general and the intelligence official. "Iran has not only infiltrated the government and security forces through the militias and parties they nurtured in Iran, they managed to infiltrate Moqtada's lot, by providing them with weapons," the general told me. "And some disgruntled and militias were over taken by Iran and provided with money and weapons."

In his office, littered with weapons bearing Iranian markings, Samer showed me footage his men had shot of a weapons smuggling operation after they captured six brand new Katyushas.

"In Basra, Iran has more influence than the government in Baghdad," he said. "It is providing the militias with everything from socks to rockets."

But, like many he was philosophical about Iranian interference. "Unlike the US and the UK, Iran invested better. They knew where to pump their money, into militias and political parties. If a war happens they can take over Basra without even sending their soldiers. They are fighting a war of attrition with the US and UK, bleeding them slowly. We arrest Iranian spies and intelligence networks but they are not spying on the Kalashnikovs of the Iraqi army - they are here to gather intelligence on the coalition forces."

But others cite evidence of Iranian influence being used to pursue less strategic aims. A businessman in Basra, who regularly imports soft drinks from Iran, told me he once had a dispute with his suppler in Iran over price. When he refused to pay, gunmen from a pro-Iranian militia stormed his shop and kidnapped him. He was only released after paying all of what he owed to the Iranian dealer.

Nasaif Jassem, a city councillor for the Fadhila party that controls the governorship and the oil industry in Basra, was critical of Iranian interference. Fadhila, widely seen as backed by the British, split from the main Shia alliance in Baghdad after accusing it of having a sectarian agenda.

"This British occupation will go but the other occupation, that of Iran, will stay for a long time," he said. "They want to have an agent in Iraq that they can move every time they want, just like Hizbullah in Lebanon. Iran is sending a message to the west: don't you dare come close to us because we can burn Basra and its people."

Fear of the Iranians runs through the city. I saw it in the offices of the general as we sat in his office one late one night. His two mobile phones had just rung, each with someone asking for a wrong number. The general's face turned pale and he said: "They have located me - the militia control all the transmission towers for the mobile network and now they have located my position."

Were 'they' the Iranians or a militia, I asked. "They are all the same." He called on his guards to send more men outside and ran to the window to check that the sandbags behind the glass were well stacked. "Do you think I or the British commander can walk freely in Basra?" he asked. "No is the answer, but the Iranian chargé d'affaires runs around freely."

The names of Abu Ammar and Samer have been changed for their safety. Ghaith Abdul- Ahad's second dispatch from Basra on oil smuggling will appear in Monday's newspaper

Competing forces

Several groups vie for power in Basra, Iraq's second largest city

· Mahdi army A loose alliance of Shia militiamen, about half of which are connected to Moqtada al-Sadr's office in the Shia holy city of Najaf. His men control the ports and customs as well as the customs police

· Fadhila party An anti-Iranian Shia militia organisation that controls the oil business in Basra, parts of the security forces and the ports and customs

· Badr brigade The armed wing of the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq. Before the 2003 invasion it was based in Iran for 20 years

· Tribes There are at least 20 major tribes in the Basra area. Iraqis often feel the strongest allegiance to their tribe, above nationality. At least one influential tribe in the city runs its own smuggling business. They also support politicians in the city

    'Welcome to Tehran' - how Iran took control of Basra, G, 19.5.2007, http://www.guardian.co.uk/Iraq/Story/0,,2083387,00.html

The bad news from Basra


Saturday May 19, 2007
The Guardian


There was no containing the mutual admiration of George Bush and Tony Blair as they stood in the Rose Garden for one last time on Thursday. They were so close, we were informed, they could read each other's minds and finish each other's sentences. Mr Bush rounded on British reporters for tap dancing on his friend's political grave. Cut from the choreographed pas de deux in Washington and over to Basra, where our reporter Ghaith Abdul Ahad spent nine days with militiamen, generals, city officials and intelligence officers. His remarkable report should freeze the smiles on coalition faces.

Is it the scene where three men dismount from two new police SUVs, assemble two Katyusha rockets, fire them at a British base in Saddam's former compound in the city and drive off? Or is it the interior ministry general who greets our reporter with the words "Welcome to Tehran" and goes on to explain how 60% of his officers are militiamen, how almost all the policemen in the city are gangsters, how the police are divided between the Fadhila, who control the oil terminals, and Moqtada al Sadr's men, who control the ports?

If this is the situation on the ground as British forces start to leave after four years of occupation then Mr Bush and Mr Blair's collective account of Iraq amounts to virtual reality. In their vision there are 152,000 Iraqi soldiers (10 divisions) and 135,000 policemen, 26,000 national servicemen and 33,000 other forces personnel - all trained. There is a navy, 1,000-strong, and an air force. There is a government that functions, and whose writ runs outside the heavily fortified green zone in central Baghdad. There is a constitution, and a political process in place. The surge of US reinforcements is showing signs of working. As trained, professional, non-sectarian Iraqi troops stand up, coalition forces will stand down. The situation is difficult. It may get worse before it gets better. But the American and British people need to hold their nerve. Give the plan we have got time to work, they plead.

But examine the plan and it begins to unravel, as all the other security plans have. Sunni insurgents are showing a remarkable ability to regroup. Forced out of Baghdad temporarily, 50 of them attacked a US base in Baquba yesterday. There is a major manhunt going on for three US soldiers seized in an ambush a week ago. Anyone who argues that the surge is quelling the insurgency, rather than merely displacing it, will have difficulty sustaining the thesis. Power has become so dispersed that it makes little sense talking about one insurgency, or indeed one civil war. As Gareth Stansfield argues in a Chatham House paper this week, there are Shias fighting against Sunnis for control of Baghdad; there are Kurds struggling against Arabs in Kirkuk and possibly also Mosul; there are Sunnis fighting US soldiers in the centre and the north; there are Sadrist Shias fighting the US and British in the south; Sunni tribal forces are fighting Sunni Islamists of al-Qaida; Shia militia groups are fighting each other in the south, as we report today; and there is also rampant criminality everywhere.

There is no shortage of deeply gloomy scenarios for a country that is in the process of disintegrating. If serious fighting breaks out this year between the Kurds and Arabs in Kirkuk, the world will see just how much further Iraq can fall. Few doubt that there will be a pull-out of coalition forces. The only debate is how quickly and under what conditions. Some insiders argue that it is better to get the pain over with now, and hand over to the Iraqi army and police force immediately, others that a central government with an army and police force is a myth on which it is dangerous to rely, and that local forces should be put in charge of local law enforcement. Whoever is right, it is surely time that our leaders started recognising the reality of life in Iraq and stopped indulging in daydreams.

The bad news from Basra, G, 19.5.2007, http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/story/0,,2083442,00.html

Bloodshed rises in Iraq

as US demands 'victory'

As Tony Blair, one of the architects of the Iraq war, prepares to leave office, it is clearer than ever that his ally's strategy of systematically crushing the Sunni insurgency is not working. In this special report from Baghdad, Patrick Cockburn shows why

Published: 13 May 2007
The Independent on Sunday

It will be a long war. The rumble of artillery, broken by the clatter of helicopters passing overhead, resounded across Baghdad late last week as US forces fought insurgents in their stronghold in the sprawling district of Dohra, in the south of the capital. Early yesterday, five US soldiers were killed and three are missing after an explosion in Mahmoudiyah, near Baghdad.

The three-month-old US plan to regain control of Baghdad is slow to show results, despite the arrival of four more US brigades. Security in the heart of the city may be a little better, but the US and the Iraqi government are nowhere near to dealing a knockout blow to the Sunni insurgency or Shia militias.

The Sunni guerrillas trying to isolate Baghdad from the rest of the country exploded truck bombs on three important bridges last week, killing 26 people. One blew up in a queue of cars on the old Diyala bridge, just south of Baghdad. Two minutes later a truck exploded on a newer bridge over the same river. North of Baghdad, at Taji, long a centre for insurgents, a third vehicle bomb made impassable a bridge linking Baghdad with northern Iraq.

This is the situation as Tony Blair, with President George Bush the chief architect and defender of the Iraq war, prepares to leave office. But as the fierce fighting continued, far to the south Mr Bush's Vice-President, Dick Cheney, was proclaiming defiance to Iran. "With two carrier strike groups in the Gulf, we're sending clear messages to friends and adversaries alike," he told sailors assembled on one of the carriers. "We'll stand with others to prevent Iran from gaining nuclear weapons and dominating the region."

The US administration is not backing away from its confrontation with Iran, despite being nudged by the Iraqi government towards talks. Hoshyar Zebari, the Iraqi Foreign Minister, says that whether the Americans and the Iranians like it or not, they are both players in Iraq. In an interview with The Independent on Sunday in Baghdad, he laughed as he pointed out that Iran and the US both genuinely support the Iraqi government of Nouri al-Maliki. The Iranian stance contrasts with that of Arab states, such as Saudi Arabia, where King Abdullah refuses to meet the Iraqi Prime Minister.

"Ironically," said Mr Zebari, "the Iranian statement on majority rule in Iraq [at the conference on Iraq at Sharm el-Sheikh 10 days ago] agrees entirely with what we and the Americans say."

The US may be more interested in cultivating Syria than Iran, but it is Syria that has the greater desire to see the Maliki government overthrown. When it comes to Syria, "we are assuming goodwill but we are not so dumb that we do not know what is going on", said Mr Zebari.

For the Iranians, Mr Cheney's message probably will make the most impression. "The American people will not support a policy of defeat," he said. "We want to complete the mission, we want to get it done right, and then we want to return home with honour."

His words are a recipe for a long conflict. As soon as the US and Britain overthrew Saddam Hussein, the detested enemy of Iran, in 2003, Iranian influence in Iraq and her power in the Gulf increased. When the Shia religious parties won the parliamentary elections in Iraq in 2005, Iranian influence grew again.

Iran has longstanding links with the Shia parties in Iraq, the powerful Shia religious hierarchy and the Kurdish leaders it supported during their wars with Saddam. Tehran also has more covert links to the Sunni insurgents. "The Iranians are supporting anybody who is against the Americans," says Dr Mahmoud Othman, a veteran Kurdish politician and member of parliament.

In Iraq, even supposed allies don't trust each other. Dr Othman, speaking before a truck bomb killed 16 people outside the Interior Ministry in the Kurdish capital, Arbil, last week, said Kurdish security had discovered an Ansar al-Sunna cell in the city of Sulaimaniyah, dedicated to planting bombs, whose members admitted to being trained in Iran.

The Americans also wonder what deals with Iran their Kurdish and Shia allies have. Dr Othman suspects the failed US raid to capture senior Iranian security officers on an official visit to Kurdistan on 11 January was motivated by suspicions of the Kurdish leaders.

"The attack showed the dissatisfaction of the Americans with [Iraqi President Jalal] Talabani and [Kurdish President Massoud] Barzani," said Dr Othman. "The Americans think that Talabani and Barzani are hiding things from them. It was a message to both."

The political and military position in Iraq is one of stalemate. The 28,000 US reinforcements, most of whom have already arrived, are having an impact in Baghdad, but not enough for the "surge" to be regarded as a success. A sign of this is that the two million Iraqis who fled the country are not coming home, and Baghdad remains divided into Shia and Sunni bastions.

Some Iraqi and Western officials buoy themselves up with hopes that the followers of the Shia cleric Moqtada al-Sadr are divided, and that the Sunni tribes in Anbar province are turning against al-Qa'ida in Iraq.

Underestimating the Sadrist movement has been a repeated US and British mistake in Iraq since 2003. Another frequent error has been to believe that the Shia alliance, so powerful because the Shia are 60 per cent of the population, is always on the verge of collapse.

Peace, when it finally comes to Iraq, will inevitably be the result of a package deal of which a timetable for a US withdrawal is likely to be a central part.

The Sunni insurgency is not going out of business, or even showing signs of being seriously weakened, and the economy is in ruins. President Bush's strategy of confronting Iran and seeking to pacify Baghdad by sending US troop reinforcements is not working.

    Bloodshed rises in Iraq as US demands 'victory', IoS, 13.5.2007, http://news.independent.co.uk/world/middle_east/article2536864.ece

Soldier's family:

'Our son died in a pointless war'

Published: 13 May 2007
The Independent on Sunday
By Lauren Veevers

Kevin Thompson doted on his grandfather, and emulated him by joining the Army. Now they have both died, just days apart.

Pte Thompson was serving with 19 Combat Service Support Battalion in Iraq when his 78-year-old grandfather, Stan Thompson, a professional soldier for 12 years, died of a heart attack two weeks ago. His grandson was granted compassionate leave, and returned to Lancaster to attend the funeral.

But just after he went back to Iraq, Pte Thompson's convoy was hit by a roadside bomb. The seriously injured soldier was treated at Basra Air Station before being evacuated to Selly Oak hospital in Birmingham, where he died on Sunday. He was 21.

"Tomo", as he was known, joined the Army in 2004 and had only two weeks left of his first operational tour.

His family have criticised the war as "pointless", blaming the Prime Minister and calling for British troops to be withdrawn - not least for the sake of Pte Thompson's brother Andrew, 18, also a serving soldier, who is currently training for a tour of duty in Iraq. Their grandmother, Dorothy Thompson, said: "We want Andrew out of the Army - we're not prepared to lose two family members for a pointless war."

Mark Thompson, their father, said last week: "I could strangle Tony Blair. So many young men have died in Iraq when they shouldn't be there in the first place. When Kevin was over for the funeral, he said morale was very low. My only consolation is that he died a hero."

Pte Thompson also leaves behind his mother Teresa, sisters Nicola and Jade, and his fiancée, Lucy.

    Soldier's family: 'Our son died in a pointless war', IoS, 13.5.2007, http://news.independent.co.uk/world/middle_east/article2536865.ece

Pride and tears

over rising toll of teenagers

sent to war

Britain allows the lowest recruitment

and deployment age in Europe, critics say

Tuesday May 8, 2007
Guardian
Karen McVeigh


The day of her 17-year-old son Aaron's passing out parade in Catterick last summer is a bitter-sweet memory for Karen Lincoln. As he marched past with his regiment, 2nd Battalion The Rifles, looking every inch the professional soldier, she cheered and wept, overcome with maternal pride. But it was also then she learned her youngest son was about to be sent to Iraq.

On April 2 - eight months after the passing out parade and just five months after his 18th birthday - he became one of the youngest soldiers to die in a conflict that has claimed 148 British lives. Of those, 14 have been teenagers.

"They shouldn't be over there on the front line at that age," Mrs Lincoln, 43, said. "It's bad enough for hardened soldiers, but Aaron was just a bairn. He never had enough training in the first place, not to kill people."

Last Thursday, the body of another 18-year-old from Rifleman Lincoln's battalion, Rifleman Paul Donnachie, was flown back to Britain from the Gulf. He, too, had enlisted at the youngest possible age of 17 and met his death on April 29 while on duty in the Ashar district of Basra, where Rifleman Lincoln had died weeks before. In a statement which served as a poignant reminder of how near to childhood he was, his family paid tribute to a "wonderful son and brother", which ended: "Take care, my little sweetheart".

The rising teenage death toll has reignited fierce criticism of Britain for sending soldiers into battle so young.

It is not illegal to send 18-year-olds to war, but human rights activists take issue with the very young age - 16 and 17 - at which British soldiers are recruited and could be deployed.

Rifleman Lincoln's father, Peter, 60, who refused to sign his son's parental consent papers because he did not want him to join up at 17, feels that soldiers should not be sent into armed conflict until they are 21.

"He couldn't get a job in the factories around here until he was 18, but he could go and learn to kill," said Mr Lincoln. "He never had a life, did he?"

Mrs Lincoln reluctantly agreed to sign her son's papers because he told her he would enlist as soon as he was 18 anyway. She said: "He wanted to make something of himself. There's nothing round here for teenagers. He wanted to be a gunner like his great-grandfather."

At their home in Durham, photographs of her son at various stages of his short life cover the mantelpiece, while the walls are festooned with hundreds of sympathy cards she cannot bear to clear away. Barely through school, he had six months' basic training before passing out as a rifleman. He loved the army and was in it for the long term, signing up for 24 years.

His belt, hat and the Union flag from his coffin lie next to the television and as she talks, Mrs Lincoln touches a gold locket around her neck carrying pictures of her dead boy.

"It's like a big piece of your heart's been ripped away. It's killing us," she said.

Britain has the lowest deployment and recruitment age in Europe and it is the only European country that has routinely sent under-18s into armed conflict, according to Amnesty International. Most western European countries have set all forms of military recruitment at 18 and Sweden has campaigned to raise the age higher.

In 2003, Britain ratified the optional protocol to the UN convention of the rights of the child involving children in armed conflicts, and has said it will ensure that no under-18s are routinely deployed to war zones. But it reserves the right to deploy under-18s where, for instance, navy units carrying younger soldiers may find themselves diverted at short notice.

It has since emerged that, despite the promises, a number of 17-year-olds have been sent to Iraq. In a written answer to a parliamentary question, the defence minister, Adam Ingram, admitted that 15 soldiers were "inadvertently deployed to Iraq before their 18th birthday" between June 2003 and July 2005.

The Sherburn Road estate in Durham, where the Lincoln family live, has a high unemployment rate and prospects for teenagers without qualification like Aaron Lincoln are few and far between.

His brother Craig and sister Christina are unemployed, while another sister, Donna Marie, 22, works as a manageress in a local bakery.

They are all proud of what he achieved. At his funeral last month, more than 700 people lined the streets around the estate to pay tribute to him.

Mrs Lincoln visits his grave every day - but still cannot believe he is gone.

    Pride and tears over rising toll of teenagers sent to war, G, 8.5.2007, http://www.guardian.co.uk/military/story/0,,2074421,00.html

Hoon admits fatal errors

in planning for postwar Iraq

Wednesday May 2, 2007
Guardian
Patrick Wintour, political editor

A catalogue of errors over planning for Iraq after the invasion, and an inability to influence key figures in the US administration, led to anarchy in Iraq from which the country has not recovered, the British defence secretary during the invasion admits today.

In an exclusive interview with the Guardian, Geoff Hoon reveals that Britain disagreed with the US administration over two key decisions in May 2003, two months after the invasion - to disband Iraq's army and "de-Ba'athify" its civil service. Mr Hoon also said he and other senior ministers completely underestimated the role and influence of the vice-president, Dick Cheney.

"Sometimes ... Tony had made his point with the president, and I'd made my point with Don [Rumsfeld] and Jack [Straw] had made his point with Colin [Powell] and the decision actually came out of a completely different place. And you think: what did we miss? I think we missed Cheney."

Giving the most frank assessment of the postwar planning, Mr Hoon, admits that "we didn't plan for the right sort of aftermath".

"Maybe we were too optimistic about the idea of the streets being lined with cheering people. Although I have reconciled it in my own mind, we perhaps didn't do enough to see it through the Sunni perspective. Perhaps we should have done more to understand their position."

He said history would have to decide whether the coalition should have anticipated the Sunni-Shia violence. "Given what we know now, I suppose the answer is that we should, but we did not know that at the time."

Of the summary dismissal of Iraq's 350,000-strong army and police forces, Mr Hoon said the Americans were uncompomising: "We certainly argued against [the US]. I recall having discussions with Donald Rumsfeld, but I recognised that it was one of those judgment calls. I would have called it the other way. His argument was that the Iraqi army was so heavily politicised that we couldn't be sure that we would not retain within it large elements of Saddam's people."

Mr Hoon, now minister for Europe, accepted that the sacking of so many Iraqis in possession of weapons and military training had been catastrophic, allowing "Saddam's people to link up with al-Qaida and to link up ultimately with Sunni insurgents" in fomenting suicide attacks and sectarian violence.

He added that the military advance on Baghdad had been so rapid that "Saddam's people had been left in its wake, who were not defeated. Partly because they were not wearing uniforms and they didn't line up and fight ... classically what was happening was that the advance went forward and the insurgents were coming in at the back ... simply picking off, at the sides, the people they could attack.

"And that created this situation in which it was possible for Saddam's people to link up with al-Qaida and to link up ultimately with Sunni insurgents, and ... this has grown".

The dismantling of several ministries and removal from office of all state employees with Ba'ath party membership was also an error, Mr Hoon says.

The decision is widely seen to have paralysed the country's infrastructure. "I think we probably saw it in a different way [to the US]. I think we felt that a lot of the Ba'ath people were first and foremost local government people, and first and foremost civil servants - they weren't fanatical supporters of Saddam."

Describing the task of dealing with the US administration as a "multi-dimensional jigsaw puzzle," Mr Hoon accepted that Britain had greatly underestimated the influence of the neo-con vice-president Mr Cheney and had lacked a comparable figure able to engage him regularly over the war. And he admitted that as Mr Powell became more marginalised by the White House and Mr Rumsfeld's Pentagon, Britain's coordination of its position through his state department left its influence greatly diminished.

Mr Hoon also expressed regret over the government's claim in the run-up to war that Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction, which, he now accepts, turned out to be false. He said he had "gradually come to the acceptance" the weapons did not exist. But he insisted the government had acted in good faith.

He still does not understand why the intelligence proved to be false. "I've been present at a number of meetings where the intelligence community was fixed, and looked in the eye and asked are you absolutely sure about this? And the answer came back 'Yes, absolutely sure'."

Mr Hoon added: "I saw intelligence from the first time I came into office, in May 1999 - week in, week out - that said Saddam had weapons of mass destruction ... I have real difficulty in understanding why it was, over such a long period of time, we were told this and, moreover, why we acted upon it."

Mr Hoon accepted that the public hostility towards Mr Blair is considerable. "No one's interested in subtleties of judgment or what was the case at the time. I think, especially when British soldiers are being killed, that the public have got to be pretty confident as to why. I think they're not any longer confident, and want us out of Iraq. That's why Tony gets the blame."

"Whatever else I did, even if say people say it was catastrophically wrong, I wouldn't agree with it, but I could live with it. But I can't live with the idea that I was telling lies, because I wasn't."

On the question of an apology, he says: "That's the whole thing about apologising, and saying we were wrong. - it's quite hard. You can say "it did not turn out as we expected" and "we made some bad calls", but at the end of the day I defy anyone to to go through what we went through and come to a different conclusion".

Hoon admits fatal errors in planning for postwar Iraq, G, 2.5.2007, http://www.guardian.co.uk/Iraq/Story/0,,2070256,00.html