History > 2008 > USA > Wars > Iraq (VI)

Illustration: Ronald Cala

Behind the Woman Behind the Bomb

NYT

2.8.2008

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/02/opinion/02orourke.html 

Holiday Bombings Kill 27 in Baghdad

September 29, 2008
The New York Times
By SAM DAGHER and MUHAMMED AL-OBAIDI

BAGHDAD — Five bomb attacks struck Baghdad on Sunday, three of them aimed at civilians who were out holiday shopping and strolling. Security sources said at least 27 people had been killed and 84 wounded.

The bombings reinforced fears among a growing number of residents that the security situation in Baghdad was deteriorating, even though over all it remained at the most stable level since the American-led invasion in 2003, according to data measured by the United States military command.

The worst of the bombings, in a bustling market of the central Karada district, seemed intended to inflict casualties on people preparing to celebrate a major holiday at the end of Ramadan, the Muslim holy month.

First, a car bomb blew up in a parking lot on Attar Street. Then as crowds gathered, a second bomb exploded, in what seemed to be an effort to kill or maim bystanders, several witnesses said.

Brig. Gen. Qassim Atta, an Iraqi military spokesman, said the attacks involved a car bomb and a roadside homemade bomb. He put the toll at 13 dead and 46 wounded.

An official at the Interior Ministry, who did not want to be identified because he was not authorized to speak to the media, gave a toll of at least 19 killed and 72 wounded.

Police officers at the scene provided a toll of at least 18 killed and 41 wounded. Conflicting tolls are common in the confusion that follows attacks in Iraq.

Ayman Saadi, a resident, said he ran away when the first bomb went off, expecting a second detonation. “We have become accustomed to these traps,” he said.

Nearby, a Karada resident who identified himself as Abbas Jarousha stood in disbelief as he received a call on his cellphone from a stranger who said that he had found Mr. Jarousha’s brother’s phone and that the brother was dead.

The blasts in Karada occurred about 7 p.m. as many people poured onto the streets after the breaking of the daytime fast observed by most Iraqis during Ramadan, which ends Monday. Ramadan is followed by Id al-Fitr, a five-day holiday during which families customarily go out strolling, and children receive gifts and parade in new clothes.

Many people were out shopping on Sunday in Karada, where vendors were selling shoes, clothes, watches and perfume. Attar Street is also home to Jabbar Abu al-Sharbat, a cafe renowned for its pomegranate and raisin juice.

Baghdad was jarred by another explosion shortly before sundown in Shurta, a neighborhood on the city’s southwestern side. A bomb placed in a parked vehicle at a market there killed 12 and wounded 35, according to the Interior Ministry official.

Mizher Abed Hanoush, a Shurta resident, said the attack took place near a Shiite house of worship, or husseiniya, now occupied by the Iraqi Army.

Mr. Hanoush said the husseiniya previously had served as the local base of the Mahdi Army militia of Moktada al-Sadr, the anti-American Shiite cleric. It was taken over by the army in the aftermath of battles this year between Iraqi and American forces and the militia in Baghdad and the south.

Mr. Hanoush echoed concerns voiced by many Iraqis in recent weeks about the fragility of the security situation in Baghdad. “The situation is turning to the worse again, I do not know why,” he said.

Earlier, an Iraqi soldier was killed and three others were wounded when their patrol hit a roadside bomb in Mansour, a neighborhood in western Baghdad. Also, a bomb inside a vehicle exploded on a main road in the Amil neighborhood, killing the driver, the Interior Ministry official said.
 

Atheer Kakan contributed reporting.

    Holiday Bombings Kill 27 in Baghdad, NYT, 29.9.2008, http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/29/world/middleeast/29iraq.html

Appeals court orders release of Iraqi abuse photos

Mon Sep 22, 2008
10:00pm EDT
The New York Times

NEW YORK (Reuters) - A federal appeals court on Monday ordered the release of 21 photographs it said depicted prisoner abuse by U.S. soldiers in Afghanistan and Iraq, which rights groups say prove abuse was widespread.

The pictures, which have never been made public and are part of U.S. Army investigative files, were first ordered released, with redaction, in 2006 by U.S. District Judge Alvin Hellerstein after he reviewed them and ruled they were of critical public interest.

Their release was held up while the U.S. Department of Defense appealed, arguing the release would endanger U.S. soldiers and result in an unwarranted invasion of the privacy of the detainees they depict.

On Monday, the Second U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals turned aside those objections.

The 21 pictures were taken at multiple locations by individuals serving in Iraq and Afghanistan. In the photographs, the detainees "were clothed and generally not forced to pose," the ruling said.

"The photographs depict abusive treatment of detainees by United States soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan," the ruling said.

The order to release the images is part of a Freedom of Information Act suit filed in 2003 by civil rights groups, including the American Civil Liberties Union, over treatment of detainees in Iraq, Afghanistan and Guantanamo Bay.

The ACLU, who originally requested the release of 29 photos, of which Hellerstein ruled 21 related to detainee abuse, said in a statement that the release of the pictures would help deter future abuse.

"These photographs demonstrate that the abuse of prisoners held in U.S. custody abroad was not aberrational and not confined to Abu Ghraib," ACLU attorney Amrit Singh said in a reference to the Iraqi Abu Ghraib prison that gained notoriety in 2004 when photos emerged of U.S. soldiers abusing Iraqi detainees.

"Their release is critical for bringing an end to the administration's torture policies and for deterring further prisoner abuse," Singh said.

A spokeswoman for the U.S. Attorney's Office in Manhattan had no comment. The government could try to appeal at the U.S. Supreme Court but otherwise the photos could be released by the ACLU within weeks.

In response to the suit, the Pentagon initially offered a list of documents, including a separate group of photographs taken in the Abu Ghraib prison, which included scenes of detainees being physically abused and sexually humiliated, but declined to make them public.

Hellerstein said the release of the images, which were provided by Sgt. Joseph Darby whose photos set off the Iraqi prisoner abuse scandal, would initiate debate on the conduct of American soldiers and about the U.S. Army's command structure.

The Pentagon appealed but backed down after the same photos and others were published on Salon.com.

To date more than 100,000 pages of government documents have been released in response to the lawsuit.

(Reporting by Edith Honan; Editing by Christine Kearney and Bill Trott)

    Appeals court orders release of Iraqi abuse photos, NYT, 22.9.2008, http://www.reuters.com/article/domesticNews/idUSTRE48M0Z420080923

U.S. Arms Sales Climbing Rapidly

September 14, 2008
The New York Times
By ERIC LIPTON

WASHINGTON — The Bush administration is pushing through a broad array of foreign weapons deals as it seeks to rearm Iraq and Afghanistan, contain North Korea and Iran, and solidify ties with onetime Russian allies.

From tanks, helicopters and fighter jets to missiles, remotely piloted aircraft and even warships, the Department of Defense has agreed so far this fiscal year to sell or transfer more than $32 billion in weapons and other military equipment to foreign governments, compared with $12 billion in 2005.

The trend, which started in 2006, is most pronounced in the Middle East, but it reaches into northern Africa, Asia, Latin America, Europe and even Canada, through dozens of deals that senior Bush administration officials say they are confident will both tighten military alliances and combat terrorism.

“This is not about being gunrunners,” said Bruce S. Lemkin, the Air Force deputy under secretary who is helping to coordinate many of the biggest sales. “This is about building a more secure world.”

The surging American arms sales reflect the foreign policy tides, including the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and the broader campaign against international terrorism, that have dominated the Bush administration. Deliveries on orders now being placed will continue for several years, perhaps as one of President Bush’s most lasting legacies.

The United States is far from the only country pushing sophisticated weapons systems: it is facing intense competition from Russia and elsewhere in Europe, including continuing contests for multibillion-dollar deals to sell fighter jets to India and Brazil.

In that booming market, American military contractors are working closely with the Pentagon, which acts as a broker and procures arms for foreign customers through its Foreign Military Sales program.

Less sophisticated weapons, and services to maintain these weapons systems, are often bought directly by foreign governments. That category of direct commercial sales has seen an enormous surge as well, as measured by export licenses issued this fiscal year covering an estimated $96 billion, up from $58 billion in 2005, according to the State Department, which must approve the licenses.

About 60 countries get annual military aid from the United States, $4.5 billion a year, to help them buy American weapons. Israel and Egypt receive more than 80 percent of that aid. The United States has also recently given Iraq and Afghanistan large amounts of weapons and other equipment and has begun to train fledgling military units at no charge; this assistance is included in the tally of foreign sales. But most arms exports are paid for by the purchasers without United States financing.

The growing tally of international weapon deals, which started to surge in 2006, is now provoking questions among some advocates of arms control and some members of Congress.

“Sure, this is a quick and easy way to cement alliances,” said William D. Hartung, an arms control specialist at the New America Foundation, a public policy institute. “But this is getting out of hand.”

Congress is notified before major arms sales deals are completed between foreign governments and the Pentagon. While lawmakers have the power to object formally and block any individual sale, they rarely use it.

Representative Howard L. Berman of California, chairman of the House Committee on Foreign Affairs, said he supported many of the individual weapons sales, like helping Iraq build the capacity to defend itself, but he worried that the sales blitz could have some negative effects. “This could turn into a spiraling arms race that in the end could decrease stability,” he said.

The United States has long been the top arms supplier to the world. In the past several years, however, the list of nations that rely on the United States as a primary source of major weapons systems has greatly expanded. Among the recent additions are Argentina, Azerbaijan, Brazil, Georgia, India, Iraq, Morocco and Pakistan, according to sales data through the end of last month provided by the Department of Defense. Cumulatively, these countries signed $870 million worth of arms deals with the United States from 2001 to 2004. For the past four fiscal years, that total has been $13.8 billion.

In many cases, these sales represent a cultural shift, as nations like Romania, Poland and Morocco, which have long relied on Russian-made MIG-17 fighter jets, are now buying new F-16s, built by Lockheed Martin.

At Lockheed Martin, one of the largest American military contractors, international sales last year brought in about $6.3 billion, or 15 percent of the company’s total sales, up from $4.8 billion in 2001. The foreign sales by Lockheed and other American military contractors are credited with helping keep alive some production lines, like those of the F-16 fighter jet and Boeing’s C-17 transport plane.

Fighter jets made in America will now be flying in other countries for years to come, meaning continued profits for American contractors that maintain them, and in many cases regular interaction between the United States military and foreign air forces, Mr. Lemkin, the Air Force official, said.

Sales are also being driven by the push by many foreign nations to join the once-exclusive club of countries whose arsenals include precise, laser-guided missiles, high-priced American technology that the United States displayed during its invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan.

In the Persian Gulf region, much of the rearmament is driven by fears of Iran.

The United Arab Emirates, for example, are considering spending as much as $16 billion on American-made missile defense systems, according to recent notifications sent to Congress by the Department of Defense.

The Emirates also have announced an intention to order offensive weapons, including up to 26 Black Hawk helicopters and 900 Longbow Hellfire II missiles, which can knock out enemy tanks.

Saudi Arabia, this fiscal year alone, has signed at least $6 billion worth of agreements to buy weapons from the United States government — the highest figure for that country since 1993, which was another peak year in American weapons sales, after the first Persian Gulf war.

Israel, long a major buyer of United States military equipment, is also increasing its orders, including planned purchases of perhaps as many as four American-made coastal warships, worth $1.9 billion.

In Asia, as North Korea has conducted tests of a long-range missile, American allies have been buying more United States equipment. One ally, South Korea, has signed sales agreements with the Pentagon this year worth $1.1 billion.

So far, the value of foreign arms deliveries completed by the United States has increased only modestly, reaching $13 billion last year compared with an average of $12 billion over the previous three years. Because complex weapons systems take a long time to produce, it is expected that the increase in sales agreements will result in much greater arms deliveries in the coming years. (All dollar amounts for previous years cited in this article have been adjusted to reflect the impact of inflation.)

The flood of sophisticated American military equipment pouring into the Middle East has evoked concern among some members of Congress, who fear that the Bush administration may be compromising the military edge Israel has long maintained in the region.

Not surprisingly, two of the biggest new American arms customers are Iraq and Afghanistan.

Just in the past two years, Iraq has signed more than $3 billion of sales agreements — and announced plans to buy perhaps as much as $7 billion more in American equipment, financed by its rising oil revenues.

Lt. Col. Almarah Belk, a Pentagon spokeswoman, said that making these sales served the interests of both Iraq and the United States because “it reduces the risk of corruption and assists the Iraqis in getting around bottlenecks in their acquisition processes.”

Over the past three years, the United States government, separately, has agreed to buy more than $10 billion in military equipment and weapons on behalf of Afghanistan, according to Defense Department records, including M-16 rifles and C-27 military transport aircraft.

Even tiny countries like Estonia and Latvia are getting into the mix, playing a part in a collaborative effort by 15 countries, mostly in Europe, to buy two C-17 Boeing transport planes, which are used in moving military supplies as well as conducting relief missions.

Boeing has delivered 176 of these $200 million planes to the United States. But until 2006, Britain was the only foreign country that flew them. Now, in addition to the European consortium, Canada, Australia and Qatar have put in orders, and Boeing is competing to sell the plane to six other countries, said Tommy Dunehew, Boeing’s C-17 international sales manager.

In the last year, foreign sales have made up nearly half of the production at the California plant where C-17s are made. “It has been filling up the factory in the last couple of years,” Mr. Dunehew said.

Even before this new round of sales got under way, the United States’ share of the world arms trade was rising, from 40 percent of arms deliveries in 2000 to nearly 52 percent in 2006, the latest year for which the Congressional Research Service has compiled data. The next-largest seller was Russia, which in 2006 accounted for 21 percent of global deliveries.

Representative Berman, who sponsored a bill passed in May to overhaul the arms export process, said American military sales, while often well intended, were sometimes misguided. He cited military sales to Pakistan, which he said he feared were doing more to stoke tensions with India than combat terrorism in the region.

Travis Sharp, a military policy analyst at the Center for Arms Control and Nonproliferation, a Washington research group, said one of his biggest worries was that if alliances shifted, the United States might eventually be in combat against an enemy equipped with American-made weapons. Arms sales have had unintended consequences before, as when the United States armed militants fighting the Soviets in Afghanistan, only to eventually confront hostile Taliban fighters armed with the same weapons there.

“Once you sell arms to another country, you lose control over how they are used,” Mr. Sharp said. “And the weapons, unfortunately, don’t have an expiration date.”

But Mr. Lemkin, of the Pentagon, said that with so many nations now willing to sell advanced weapons systems, the United States could not afford to be too restrictive in its own sales.

“Would you rather they bought the weapons and aircraft from other countries?” he said. “Because they will.”

    U.S. Arms Sales Climbing Rapidly, NYT, 14.9.2008, http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/14/washington/14arms.html?hp

8,000 Troops to Leave Iraq Next Year

September 9, 2008
The New York Times
By THOM SHANKER

WASHINGTON — President Bush has accepted the recommendation of his senior civilian and military advisers to reduce the number of American troops in Iraq by 8,000 in the early months of next year.

The reduction will begin with a Marine Corps battalion set to leave this fall from Anbar Province, once the center of the antigovernment insurgency.

Mr. Bush announced his decision on future force levels in Iraq, which includes withdrawing a full brigade of combat troops in the first few weeks of 2009, in an address on Tuesday to the National Defense University here. The text of his speech was released late Monday by the White House.

Neither the Marine battalion nor the Army brigade will be replaced, leaving the American combat force in Iraq at 14 brigades. After other support and logistics units are withdrawn under the new orders, the American troop levels in Iraq would drop to about 138,000 by March, still several thousand more than were there in January 2007, when Mr. Bush announced the “surge” that brought the total over 160,000.

“Here is the bottom line: While the enemy in Iraq is still dangerous, we have seized the offensive, and Iraqi forces are becoming increasingly capable of leading and winning the fight,” Mr. Bush said in the speech. “As a result, we have been able to carry out a policy of ‘return on success’ — reducing American combat forces in Iraq as conditions on the ground continue to improve.”

Mr. Bush accepted a consensus set of recommendations presented last week by Gen. David H. Petraeus, the senior Iraq commander; Lt. Gen. Martin E. Dempsey, acting commander of the military’s Central Command; Adm. Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff; and Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates, according to Pentagon and White House officials.

Mr. Bush also announced a decision to increase American force levels in Afghanistan by about 4,500 troops.

“The president’s decision paves the way for us to get even more troops out of Iraq this year and into Afghanistan,” said Geoff Morrell, the Pentagon press secretary. “So the progress our forces are making in Iraq continues to pay big dividends for the commanders in Afghanistan."

A Marine battalion that was scheduled for service in Iraq will instead enter Afghanistan by November. And in January, an Army combat brigade that had been scheduled for service in Iraq will deploy instead to Afghanistan.

The president’s speech also highlighted decisions to vastly increase the size of the Afghan National Army, which will grow from its current size of 60,000 troops to 120,000, beyond the 80,000 goal of previous plans. If the progress in Iraq continues, he said, additional reductions would be possible in the first half of 2009.

Mr. Bush said that an order shortening combat tours for Army forces in Iraq to 12 months, down from 15 months before, will “ease the burden on our forces, and make life easier for the military families that support them.”

Democrats in Congress criticized the steps as too meager. “I am stunned that President Bush has decided to bring so few troops home from Iraq and send so few resources to Afghanistan,” the Senate Majority Leader, Harry Reid of Nevada, told The Associated Press.

In the House, Rep. Ike Skelton of Missouri, the chairman of the Armed Services Commitee, told the news agency, “The President’s plan to reduce force levels in Iraq may seem to signal movement in the right direction, but it really defers troop reductions until the next administration. More significant troop reductions in Iraq are needed so that we can start to rebuild U.S. military readiness and provide the additional forces needed to finish the fight in Afghanistan.”

    8,000 Troops to Leave Iraq Next Year, NYT, 9.9.2008, http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/09/world/middleeast/09prexy.html?hp

Op-Ed Contributor

Behind the Woman Behind the Bomb

August 2, 2008
By LINDSEY O’ROURKE
The New York Times

Chicago

FOUR more Iraqi women carried out suicide bombings in Iraq this week, bringing to at least 27 the number of such attacks this year in that country involving female terrorists. Anyone reading the newspapers or watching television has been treated to a flurry of popular misconceptions about the root causes of female suicide terrorism.

Women, we are told, become suicide bombers out of despair, mental illness, religiously mandated subordination to men, frustration with sexual inequality and a host of other factors related specifically to their gender. Indeed, the only thing everyone can agree on is that there is something fundamentally different motivating men and women to become suicide attackers.

The only problem: There is precious little evidence of uniquely feminine motivations driving women’s attacks.

I have spent the last few years surveying all known female suicide attacks throughout the world since 1981 — incidents in Afghanistan, Israel, Iraq, India, Lebanon, Pakistan, Russia, Somalia, Sri Lanka, Turkey and Uzbekistan. In order to determine these women’s motives, I compared the data with a database of all known suicide attacks over that period compiled by the Chicago Project on Suicide Terrorism.

This research led to a clear conclusion: the main motives and circumstances that drive female suicide attackers are quite similar to those that drive men. Still, investigating the dynamics governing female attackers not only helps to correct common misperceptions but also reveals important characteristics about suicide terrorism in general.

To begin with, there is simply no one demographic profile for female attackers. From the unmarried communists who first adopted suicide terrorism to expel Israeli troops from Lebanon in the 1980s, to the so-called Black Widows of Chechnya who commit suicide attacks after the combat deaths of their husbands, to the longtime adherents of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam separatist movement in Sri Lanka, the biographies of female suicide attackers reveal a wide variety of personal experiences and ideologies.

Likewise, while stories of young, psychologically disturbed women being coerced into their attacks makes for compelling news (and rightly emphasizes the barbarity of the terrorist organizations), they represent a small minority of cases. For example, female suicide attackers are significantly more likely to be in their mid-20s and older than male attackers.

Additionally, claims of coercion are largely exaggerated. For instance, the well-publicized claims that two women who killed dozens in blowing up a Baghdad pet market were mentally retarded were later revealed to be unfounded.

Blaming Islamic fundamentalism is also wrongheaded. More than 85 percent of female suicide terrorists since 1981 committed their attacks on behalf of secular organizations; many grew up in Christian and Hindu families. Further, Islamist groups commonly discourage and only grudgingly accept female suicide attackers. At the start of the second intifada in 2000, Sheik Ahmed Yassin, the founder of Hamas, claimed: “A woman martyr is problematic for Muslim society. A man who recruits a woman is breaking Islamic law.” Hamas actually rejected Darin Abu Eisheh, the second Palestinian female attacker, who carried out her 2002 bombing on behalf of the secular Aqsa Martyrs Brigade.

So, what does motivate female suicide attackers? Surprisingly similar motives driving men to blow themselves up on terrorist missions.

For one, 95 percent of female suicide attacks occurred within the context of a military campaign against foreign occupying forces, suggesting that, at a macro level, the main strategic logic is to create or maintain territorial sovereignty for their ethnic group. Correspondingly, the primary individual motivation for both male and female suicide bombers is a deep loyalty to their communities combined with a variety of personal grievances against enemy forces.

Terrorist organizations are well aware of the variety of individual motives for male and female attackers. As such, recruitment tactics aimed specifically at women often involve numerous, even contradictory, arguments: feminist appeals for equal participation, using a suicide attack as a way to redeem a woman’s honor for violations of the gender roles of her community, revenge, nationalism and religion — almost any personal motive that does not contradict the main strategic objective of combating a foreign military presence.

All secular organizations that employ suicide bombings have used female attackers early and often. For instance, 76 percent of attackers from the Kurdistan Workers’ Party in Turkey have been women, as have 66 percent of those from Chechen separatist groups, 45 percent of the Syrian Socialist National Party’s and a quarter of those from the Tamil Tigers.

Religious groups only came to realize the strategic value of female bombers after seeing secular groups’ success. For example, in a 2003 interview, a female Al Qaeda agent calling herself Um Osama told a Saudi newspaper that “the idea of women kamikazes came from the success of martyr operations carried out by young Palestinian women in the occupied territories.”
 

Why use women?

Paradoxically, the strategic appeal of female attacks stems from the rules about women’s behavior in the societies where these attacks take place. Given their second-class citizenship in many of these countries, women generate less suspicion and are better able to conceal explosives. Moreover, since female attacks are considered especially shocking, they are more likely to generate significant news media attention for both domestic and foreign audiences.

In a similar vein, my research showed that women were much more likely than men to be used for single-target assassination suicide attacks. Perhaps the most famous of these was the 1991 assassination of India’s prime minister, Rajiv Gandhi, by Thenmuli Rajaratnam, a Tamil Tiger. Although women make up roughly 15 percent of the suicide bombers within the groups that employ females, they were responsible for an overwhelming 65 percent of assassinations; one in every five women who committed a suicide attack did so with the purpose of assassinating a specific individual, compared with one in every 25 for the male attackers.

Yes, many female suicide terrorists are motivated by revenge for close family members or friends killed by occupation forces. But so too are males. Indeed, there are so many known instances of personal revenge driving both sexes to strike, and so much missing data about the friendship and extended family circles of suicide attackers, that it is simply impossible to say one sex cares more about others.

So, how can we defend against the spate of female suicide attacks in Iraq? The logical first step is to better screen women at key security checkpoints. Coincidentally, American officials recently started a “Daughters of Iraq” program to train Iraqi women to search for female attackers. However, the program is unlikely to have a substantial effect for three reasons: First, the program is very small; only about 30 women initially graduated from the course, and each is expected to work only a few days a month. Second, since the root cause of suicide terrorism appears to be anger at occupying forces, we risk blowback if we are seen as trying to buy loyalty from Iraqi women. Third, the fact that religious groups changed their position on employing women attackers illustrates their willingness to develop new tactics to overcome security measures — thus efforts like the Daughters of Iraq are probably stopgap measures at best.

In the long run, decreasing female suicide attacks depends upon an American strategy that minimizes the presence of United States troops in what Iraqis consider their private sphere, while simultaneously providing material support that will improve the quality of life for all Iraqis. For now, however, given the strategic desirability of female attackers, we’re likely to see an increasing number of Iraqi women killing themselves and their countrymen in an effort to end what they see as the occupation of their nation.
 

Lindsey O’Rourke is a doctoral student

in political science at the University of Chicago.

Behind the Woman Behind the Bomb, NYT, 2.8.2008, http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/02/opinion/02orourke.html