USA > History > 2010 > War > Iraq (III)

David Fitzsimmons

Arizona Daily Star

Tucson AZ

Cagle

1 September 2010

U.S. President Barack Obama

Politics in Iraq Casts Doubt

on a U.S. Presence After 2011

December 18, 2010
The New York Times
By STEVEN LEE MYERS,
THOM SHANKER and JACK HEALY

This article was reported by Steven Lee Myers,
Thom Shanker and Jack Healy
and written by Mr. Myers.

BAGHDAD — The protracted political turmoil that saw the resurgence of a fiercely anti-American political bloc here is casting new doubt on establishing any enduring American military role in Iraq after the last of nearly 50,000 troops are scheduled to withdraw in the next 12 months, military and administration officials say.

Given Iraq’s military shortcomings, especially in air power, intelligence coordination and logistics, American and Iraqi officials had long expected that some American military presence, even if only in an advisory role, would continue beyond 2011. That is the deadline for a troop withdrawal negotiated under President George W. Bush more than three years ago and adhered to, so far, by President Obama.

Even as contingency planning for any lasting American mission has quietly continued in Baghdad and at the Pentagon, however, the shifting political landscape in both countries has made it increasingly possible that the 2011 withdrawal could truly be total, the officials said. Both Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki of Iraq and Mr. Obama, struggling to retain the support of their political bases, have repeated their public vows to adhere to the deadline.

The military and administration officials emphasized in interviews that the White House had made no final decision on whether any troops might remain beyond the scheduled withdrawal — and that it would not even consider one unless asked by Mr. Maliki’s government.

The question is so politically delicate — here and in Washington — that officials would speak only on condition of anonymity. Further, they say the topic has not been broached in detail even in recent private meetings between senior Iraqi and American officials, including one in Baghdad last week between Mr. Maliki and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Adm. Mike Mullen.

“Maliki can’t start asking right now for a large, extended American footprint,” a senior administration official said. “First of all, there is no Maliki government. And second, it would introduce a hugely controversial issue just when he doesn’t need it.”

It could remain so for many more months, even after Mr. Maliki completes his cabinet of ministers and submits it to the new Parliament, now scheduled to happen within a week. That has raised anxieties among American officials and military commanders presiding over what the Obama administration calls a “responsible drawdown” to end the American war here.

They are already planning a steady reduction of troops and bases, which will begin in earnest by spring and is to reach zero by this time next year. Those plans have been complicated by the uncertainty over what troops will replace them — or whether any will at all.

“They’re going to have to sort their way through that,” Maj. Gen. Terry A. Wolff, the departing commander of American forces in central Iraq, said in an interview, referring to administration officials. “At this point, I just don’t know. I don’t know how that’s going to look in 2012.”

After parliamentary elections in March led to a protracted period of deadlock and deal-making, Mr. Maliki now leads an unwieldy coalition with parties pursuing conflicting agendas, including lawmakers allied with Moktada al-Sadr, a Shiite cleric in exile whose fighters actively battled against American and Iraqi forces until they were routed in 2008.

Their new partnership, which propelled Mr. Maliki’s nomination to a second term, will make it politically risky for him to now reverse himself. Even Ayad Allawi, the leader of a multisectarian bloc who has long been supportive of the Americans, said in an interview last week that there was not yet any consensus among Iraqi leaders to request an extension of the American military presence.

A growing confidence in Iraq’s security forces, coupled with national pride, has also become a factor. Mr. Maliki and others have adamantly ruled out the need for foreign troops to help the country protect itself.

That may reflect a degree of political posturing, but officials in both militaries point to the maturing capabilities of Iraq’s army and federal police, which now conduct day-to-day security without a great deal of direct American involvement.

A spokesman for the Ministry of Defense, Maj. Gen. Mohammed al-Askari, said in an interview that the American military role in Iraq “must take another shape,” providing training and weaponry, but not necessarily American boots on the ground.

“We are different than Afghanistan,” the general said, noting the comparative maturity of Iraq’s government ministries, including those overseeing security.

Among Iraqis, the question of the American military presence is deeply conflicted, and often nuanced. Many loathe what they view as a foreign occupying force, even as some consider the Americans a reassuring bulwark against insurgent attacks and simmering ethnic disputes.

Along the internal border between Iraq’s Kurds and Arabs, for example, American soldiers continue to operate checkpoints jointly with troops from both sides, defusing potential clashes.

Assad Ismail, a local council president in Sadiya, a village along the disputed territories northeast of Baghdad, said that only the Americans were able to settle a recent dispute that flared when Iraqi soldiers trying to restrict the movement of insurgents closed off local farmers’ access to their date palms, tomatoes and peanuts.

“Thank God, the American Army was with us,” Mr. Ismail said. “We want them to stay for 5 or 10 years.”

The administration has already drawn up plans for an extensive expansion of the American Embassy and its operations, bolstered by thousands of security contractors. The embassy in Baghdad, two satellite offices in Mosul and Kirkuk, and two consulates in Erbil and Baghdad are scheduled to take over most of more than 1,000 tasks now carried out by the American military.

Militarily, at a minimum, the administration plans to create an Office of Security Cooperation that, like similar ones in countries like Egypt, would be staffed by civilians and military personnel overseeing the training and equipping of Iraq’s security forces. Privately, officials say the Iraqis needed such an office if they hope to continue purchasing and learning how to use M1A1 tanks, F-16 fighter jets and other equipment necessary to rebuild the country’s shattered armed forces.

The officials said that a small office would not require a new security agreement with the Iraqi government to replace the existing one, but the size of the office now under active consideration — with as many as 1,000 personnel — certainly would, even without a larger contingent of American troops in bases around Iraq after 2011.

While officials said there was still time in the coming months to negotiate with the Iraqis, if they want to, the deadline was rapidly approaching.

“I think everybody understands we can’t wait until the end of the year, and also that whatever agreement we are going to reach, we need to start working on that as soon as possible,” Admiral Mullen said in an interview after meeting with Mr. Maliki in Baghdad. “There’s a finite amount of time. There is a physics problem with this, a mechanical problem, to physically move people and equipment out.”

At the same time, American commanders have also begun to acknowledge that the United States might in fact be able to leave Iraq to handle its own security, something almost unthinkable only a few years ago. Even shortcomings like control of its airspace and electronic surveillance could, in theory, be covered using American aircraft based elsewhere in the Persian Gulf, they say.

“There’s no doubt you can get to zero,” General Wolff said, noting that critics questioned the consequences of reducing the number of troops to 50,000 from more than 140,000 when Mr. Obama took office.

“The president’s given us direction, and the answer is zero,” he said. “So that’s where we’re going.”

Others are skeptical, saying that the United States should not risk the failure of a struggling democracy by adhering religiously to the withdrawal.

“We don’t yet know whether Iraq’s new government will be friendly enough to want a strategic partnership, or stable and effective enough to make one work,” Anthony Cordesman, a security analyst at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, wrote in a recent report. “What we do know is that Iraq is far from over its internal problems, and we have not yet won anything in grand strategic terms.

“If we don’t maintain strong presence,” he continued, “if the State Department does not have sufficient funding to aid Iraq in improving its economy and governance, if Defense cannot maintain a strong advisory presence and offer aid to Iraq in rebuilding its military forces to the point where it can defend the nation, we throw away any chance at turning what has so far been a tactical victory into one that has any lasting meaning.”

Steven Lee Myers and Thom Shanker reported from Baghdad, and Jack Healy from Diyala Province.

Politics in Iraq Casts Doubt on a U.S. Presence After 2011,
NYT,
18.12.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/19/world/middleeast/19iraq.html

More Christians Are Fleeing Iraq

After New Violence

December 12, 2010
The New York Times
By STEVEN LEE MYERS

QOSH, Iraq — A new wave of Iraqi Christians has fled to northern Iraq or abroad amid a campaign of violence against them and growing fear that the country’s security forces are unable or, more ominously, unwilling to protect them.

The flight — involving thousands of residents from Baghdad and Mosul, in particular — followed an Oct. 31 siege at a church in Baghdad that killed 51 worshipers and 2 priests and a subsequent series of bombings and assassinations singling out Christians. This new exodus, which is not the first, highlights the continuing displacement of Iraqis despite improved security over all and the near-resolution of the political impasse that gripped the country after elections in March.

It threatens to reduce further what Archdeacon Emanuel Youkhana of the Assyrian Church of the East called “a community whose roots were in Iraq even before Christ.”

Those who fled the latest violence — many of them in a panicked rush, with only the possessions they could pack in cars — warned that the new violence presages the demise of the faith in Iraq. Several evoked the mass departure of Iraq’s Jews after the founding of the state of Israel in 1948.

“It’s exactly what happened to the Jews,” said Nassir Sharhoom, 47, who fled last month to the Kurdish capital, Erbil, with his family from Dora, a once mixed neighborhood in Baghdad. “They want us all to go.”

Iraq’s leaders, including Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki, have pledged to tighten security and appealed for tolerance for minority faiths in what is an overwhelmingly Muslim country.

“The Christian is an Iraqi,” he said after visiting those wounded in the siege of the church, Our Lady of Salvation, the worst single act of violence against Christians since 2003. “He is the son of Iraq and from the depths of a civilization that we are proud of.”

For those who fled, though, such pronouncements have been met with growing skepticism. The daily threats, the uncertainty and palpable terror many face have overwhelmed even the pleas of Christian leaders not to abandon their historic place in a diverse Iraq.

“Their faith in God is strong,” said the Rev. Gabriele Tooma, who heads the Monastery of the Virgin Mary, part of the Chaldean Catholic Church in Qosh, which opened its monastic rooms to 25 families in recent weeks. “It is their faith in the government that has weakened.”

Christians, of course, are not the only victims of the bloodshed that has swept Iraq for more than seven and a half years; Sunni and Shiite Arabs have died on a far greater scale. Only two days after the attack on the church, a dozen bombs tore through Sunni and Shiite neighborhoods in Baghdad, killing at least 68 people and wounding hundreds.

The Christians and other smaller minority groups here, however, have been explicitly made targets and have emigrated in disproportionate numbers. According to the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, these groups account for 20 percent of the Iraqis who have gone abroad, while they were only 3 percent of the country’s prewar population.

More than half of Iraq’s Christian community, estimated to number 800,000 to 1.4 million before the American-led invasion in 2003, have already left the country.

The Islamic State of Iraq, an iteration of the insurgent group Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia, claimed responsibility for the suicidal siege and said its fighters would kill Christians “wherever they can reach them.”

What followed last month were dozens of shootings and bombings in Baghdad and Mosul, the two cities outside of the semi-autonomous Kurdish region in northern Iraq. At least a dozen more Christians died, eight of them in Mosul.

Three generations of the Gorgiz family — 15 in all — fled their homes there on the morning of Nov. 23 as the killings spread. Crowded into a single room at the monastery in Qosh, they described living in a state of virtual siege, afraid to wear crosses on the streets, afraid to work or even leave their houses in the end.

The night before they left, Diana Gorgiz, 35, said she heard voices and then screams; someone had set fire to the garden of a neighbor’s house. The Iraqi Army arrived and stayed until morning, only to tell them they were not safe there anymore. The Gorgizes took it as a warning — and an indication of complicity, tacit or otherwise, by Iraq’s security forces. “When the army comes and says, ‘We cannot protect you,’ ” Ms. Gorgiz said, “what else can you believe?”

There is no exact accounting of those who have fled internally or abroad. The United Nations has registered more than 1,100 families. A steady flow of Christians to Turkey spiked in November to 243, an official there said.

The Kurdish Regional Government in northern Iraq offered itself as a haven and pledged to help refugees with housing and jobs. Many of those who fled are wealthy enough to afford rents in Iraqi Kurdistan; others have moved in with relatives; the worst off have ended up at the monastery here and another nearby, St. Matthew’s, one of the oldest Christian monasteries in the world.

There have been previous exoduses, especially from Mosul. In October 2008, more than 12,000 Christians left after a wave of assassinations killed 14 Christians. In February of this year, more than 4,000 fled to the Kurdish-controlled region in Nineveh or to Syria after 10 Christians were killed. When violence ebbed after each exodus, many returned to their homes and jobs, though not all, leaving fewer and fewer Christians. By one estimate, only 5,000 of the 100,000 Christians who once lived in Mosul remain.

“I expect that a month from now not a single Christian will be left in Mosul,” Nelson P. Khoshaba, an engineer in the city’s waterworks, said in Erbil, where he joined a chaotic scrum of people trying to register with the local authorities there.

The displacement of Christians has continued despite the legal protections that Iraq’s Constitution offers religious and ethnic minorities, though Islam is the official state religion and no law can be passed contradicting its basic tenets.

Christians have a quota of 5 seats in the new 325-member Parliament, though little political influence. Christmas was declared a national holiday in 2008, though celebrations are muted, and in Kirkuk, a tensely disputed city north of Baghdad, Christmas Mass was canceled last year.

The United States Commission on International Religious Freedom, appointed by the president and Congress, said that the nominal protections for religious minorities in Iraq — including Christians, Yazidis and Sabean Mandeans, followers of St. John the Baptist — did little to stop violence or official discrimination in employment, housing and other matters. It noted that few of the attacks against minority groups were ever properly investigated or prosecuted, “creating a climate of impunity.”

“The violence, forced displacement, discrimination, marginalization and neglect suffered by members of these groups threaten these ancient communities’ very existence in Iraq,” the commission said in its latest annual report in May. Last week security officials announced the arrest of insurgents whom they said planned the attack on Our Lady of Salvation; those who actually carried it out died when Iraqi forces stormed the church. They offered few details, and a spokesman for the American military, which regularly joins Iraqi forces during such arrests, said he had no information on those arrested.

Archdeacon Emanuel said the government needed to do more to preserve a community that has been under siege in Iraq for decades — from the first massacre of Christians in Sumail in 1933 after the creation of the modern Iraqi nation to the dictatorship of Saddam Hussein to today’s nihilistic extremism that, in his words, has taken Islam hostage.

Invitations by European countries for Christians to emigrate following the attack, he said, would only hasten the departure of more, which “is not a solution.” Instead, the latest violence should give impetus to the creation of an autonomous Christian enclave in the part of Nineveh Province near here that is now under the control of the Kurdish region. That idea, though, has little political support in Iraq in Baghdad or Iraqi Kurdistan.

“What happened has been done repeatedly and systematically,” he said. “We have seen it in Mosul, in Baghdad. The message is very clear: to pluck Iraqi Christians from the roots and force them out of the country.”

Yasmine Mousa contributed reporting from Erbil, Iraq, and Sebnem Arsu from Istanbul.

    More Christians Are Fleeing Iraq After New Violence, NYT, 12.12.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/13/world/middleeast/13iraq.html

Church Attack Seen as Strike at Iraq’s Core

November 1, 2010
The New York Times
By ANTHONY SHADID

BAGHDAD — Blood still smeared the walls of Our Lady of Salvation Church on Monday. Scraps of flesh remained between the pews. It was the worst massacre of Iraqi Christians since the war began here in 2003.

But for survivors, the tragedy went deeper than the toll of the human wreckage: A fusillade of grenades, bullets and suicide vests had unraveled yet another thread of the country’s once eclectic fabric.

“We’ve lost part of our soul now,” said Rudy Khalid, a 16-year-old Christian who lived across the street. He shook his head. “Our destiny, no one knows what to say of it.”

The massacre, in which 58 people were killed by an affiliate of Al Qaeda, paled before the worst spectacles of violence in Iraq. Since the American invasion, tens of thousands have died here — Sunni and Shiite Muslims — and few of the deaths generated the outrage expressed Monday.

Iraq was once a remarkable mélange of beliefs, customs and traditions; the killings on Sunday drew another border in a nation defined more by war, occupation and deprivation. Identities have hardened; diversity has faded. Nearly all of Iraq’s Jews left long ago, many harassed by a xenophobic government. Iraq’s Christians have dwindled; once numbering anywhere between 800,000 and 1.4 million, at least half are thought to have emigrated since 2003, their leaders say.

“They came to kill Iraq, not Iraqis,” said Bassam Sami, who huddled in a room for four hours before security forces managed to free him. “They came to kill the spirit of Iraq. They came to kill the reason to live, every dream that you want to make true.”

Down the street was Mr. Khalid, as upset as he was anxious at a country that seems to grasp at the mirage of normalcy, fleeting as it might be, only to turn away in disgust at the resilience of violence.

“No one has any answers for us,” he said.

On the morning after security forces stormed the Syrian Catholic church, freeing hostages but leaving far more dead and wounded behind, there were no answers. Not in the statements of outrage from Iraqi leaders, themselves blamed for the dysfunction of the Iraqi state. Not from Pope Benedict XVI, who condemned the “absurd and ferocious violence.” Not from security officials, whose accounts contradicted one another’s and prompted suggestions they might have inadvertently worsened the carnage.

Most of all, not from the survivors, one of whom said the gunmen who seized the church on Sunday evening had only one task in mind.

“They came to kill, kill, kill,” Mr. Sami said.

Not even the police who stood guard at the church, its doors barricaded with barbed wire and its walls lined with roses, orange trees and a plant Iraqis call “the ears of an elephant,” knew quite what to say. One discouraged anyone from entering the shattered doors, under a portico that celebrated the glory of God “on the land of peace.”

“Blood, flesh and bones,” he described the scene. “You can’t bear the smell.”

Knots of survivors, as well as their friends and relatives, stood in the street amid bullet casings and bandage wrappers, some of them crying. The Rev. Meyassr al-Qasboutros, a priest, was among them. His cousin, Wassim Sabih, was one of the two priests killed. Survivors said Father Sabih was pushed to the ground as he grasped a crucifix and pleaded with the gunmen to spare the worshipers.

He was then killed, his body riddled with bullets.

“We must die here,” Father Qasboutros said defiantly. “We can’t leave this country.”

Some survivors echoed his sentiments.

“If we didn’t love this country, we wouldn’t have stayed here,” said Radi Climis, an 18-year-old who wore a floppy bandage on his forehead, where he was wounded by shrapnel from a grenade thrown by the gunmen.

But many others looked in disbelief when asked whether they would stay in a place still so unsettled, so dangerous.

“Why? That’s no question to ask,” said Stephen Karomi, who had come to Baghdad a day before from Qaraqosh, a troubled Christian town in the north. “Everyone wants to leave for one reason: to protect ourselves and to keep our sanity.”

Confusion still reigned Monday over what precisely happened in the attack, in which an affiliate of Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia, a homegrown group led by Iraqis, claimed responsibility. An American official, speaking on the condition of anonymity, said security forces made the decision to storm the church after believing that the assailants had begun killing the hostages. Had they not, he said, the toll would have been even worse.

“Our information was the hostage takers had begun to systematically execute hostages,” he said.

But Interior Ministry officials and survivors offered other accounts. One official said that 23 of the hostages were killed when two of the gunmen detonated suicide vests as security forces stormed the church. Another confirmed that account, but said that many hostages were killed soon after the gunmen, thought to number between 6 and 15, seized the building.

“We received orders to raid the church, so when we did, they blew themselves up and killed many, but they had already killed a number of civilians before the raid, those cowards,” said Jihad al-Jabiri, a senior official in the Interior Ministry.

Several survivors said that many of the casualties occurred when the gunmen entered and began firing randomly — at people, church icons and even windows. They described a ferocity on the part of the gunmen, some of them speaking in dialects from other Arab countries, as though the very sight of the church’s interior had enraged them.

“They seemed insane,” said Ban Abdullah, a 50-year-old survivor.

Her daughter, Marie Freij, was shot in the right leg as the gunmen entered. She lay in a pool of her own blood for more than three hours.

“I thought I would make it, but even if I didn’t, I was in the church, and it would have been O.K.,” she said from her bed at Ibn al-Nafis Hospital.

Before the gunmen entered, Rafael Qutaimi, a priest, had managed to herd many of the other survivors into a back room, where they barricaded themselves behind two bookshelves.

“Peace be upon you, Mary,” some prayed. “God in heaven, help us,” others muttered. In time, the gunmen learned they were there. Unable to break in, they hurled four grenades inside through a window, killing four and wounding many more, survivors said.

Mr. Sami was lucky. He escaped from the back room without any visible wounds. But on Monday, he listed his friends who had died the day before. Raghda, John, Rita, Father Wassim, Fadi, George, Nabil and Abu Saba.

“A long list,” he said simply. He shook his head, growing angry. “Why was Father Wassim killed? I don’t know. Why was Nabil killed? I don’t know.” He turned silent, and his eyes softened with the trace of tears.

Duraid Adnan contributed reporting.

    Church Attack Seen as Strike at Iraq’s Core, NYT, 1.11.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/02/world/middleeast/02iraq.html

Army Studies Thrill-Seeking Behavior

October 30, 2010
The New York Times
By ELISABETH BUMILLER

WASHINGTON — Senior Airman Michael Kearns had been back from Iraq for only two months when he was pulled over on a Florida highway for going more than 120 miles per hour on his new Suzuki. He knew his motorcycle riding was reckless, but after living through daily mortar attacks on his base in Iraq, he said he needed the adrenaline rush.

“When you get here, there’s nothing that’s very exciting that keeps your pulse going,” Airman Kearns, 27, said in a recent interview.

His experience is so common that the United States military, alarmed by a rising suicide rate and the record number of Iraq and Afghanistan veterans who die in highway accidents back home, is asking a provocative new question: Nearly a decade into two bloody wars, are the armed forces attracting recruits drawn to high-risk behavior?

“In January 1990, you could join the military and think, ‘You know, I’m probably not going to get deployed,’ ” said Peter D. Feaver, a Duke University professor who has done research on the gap between the military and civilian society. “So on the margins it is reasonable to expect that there might have been a few more people in the pre-9/11 period who said, ‘I have no interest in war and there are other reasons for me to join.’

“By 2005, there were very few, or nobody, like that,” he said. “Or if you were like that, you were a fool. The evidence was staring you in the face that you would be deployed in ground combat.”

The military says the people who enlist to serve their country have always included plenty of adrenaline addicts, which recruiters say is a good thing when troops are needed to jump out of airplanes and go on raids in Afghanistan. But military researchers say they have been compelled to take a deeper look at the psychological demographic of an all-volunteer force during the most prolonged period of combat in American history.

“We’ve never been at war for as long as we’ve been, and we don’t know the effects of that,” said Bruce Shahbaz, a retired Army lieutenant colonel and one of the three main authors of a recent Army suicide report. “We may be attracting people who are more comfortable with risk, and if so, how do we measure that?”

Beyond that, Colonel Shahbaz said, the Army wants to know whether risk-takers are more likely to commit suicide or die in accidents, and whether a predisposition to risk-taking is increased by combat.

To try to find answers, this fall the Army and the National Institute of Mental Health are beginning a five-year study of 90,000 active-duty soldiers and all new Army recruits, 80,000 to 120,000 per year. The recruits are to answer confidential surveys that Colonel Shahbaz said might include questions on whether they owned motorcycles, used drugs or liked to bungee-jump. There will be cognitive tests to measure reactions to stress as well as an in-depth look at a recruit’s family background and genetics.

“It will give us an assessment of someone’s cognitive style and whether they have a history that draws them to high-risk behaviors,” said Thomas R. Insel, the institute’s director.

Researchers acknowledge that in focusing so much on recruits, they are slighting what many say is the biggest reason for the high military suicide rate, the stress of repeated wartime deployments. But in one of the more surprising statistics cited in the Army’s suicide report, 79 percent of the soldiers who committed suicide in recent years had had only one deployment, or had not deployed at all.

“For us to blame this thing just on the war would be wrong,” Gen. Peter W. Chiarelli, the vice chief of staff of the Army, said at a July news conference about the report.

The report concluded that much of the fault was with commanders who disregarded the mental health problems of their troops, but it also blamed the Army for not winnowing out enough of the recruits with records of substance abuse and crime. From roughly 2005 to 2007, when a strong economy sent potential soldiers looking elsewhere for jobs with better pay, the Army lowered its recruiting and retention standards to meet the demands of two wars. As a result, the report said, tens of thousands of recruits were granted waivers for the kind of behavior, including felonies, that would have kept them out of the service in earlier years.

There were a record 160 active-duty Army suicides in the year from Oct. 1, 2008, to Sept. 30, 2009, and the report said that if accidental deaths were included, “less young men and women die in combat than die by their own actions.”

Whatever the survey finds, the military says it has to do a better job of managing the risk-takers of any kind within its ranks. “A soldier who dies bungee-jumping on a weekend because he needs that adrenaline rush is no less painful to the Army than a soldier who commits suicide,” Colonel Shahbaz said. “If we could figure out three or four of those behaviors that affect a large number of people and say, ‘O.K., a lot of guys are doing this, how can we teach them to do that in a way that is more safe and more responsible?’ ”

Some programs are already in place for young men and women who return from war feeling invincible. The military requires riding classes for service members who buy motorcycles, a popular way to spend deployment cash. The Marines hold sport-bike racing events to try to cut down on speeding on the roads. And the Air Force has a new safety program in which young airmen who have been in accidents talk to their peers about their close calls.

One of them is Airman Kearns, the Iraq veteran who was stopped speeding on his motorcycle. This year, working out of Patrick Air Force Base in Florida, he has spoken to at least 300 young members of the Air Force to tell them, “There are other ways to get your adrenaline.”

Before he joined the military, Airman Kearns liked extreme sports, including motorcycle racing and bungee-jumping. He enlisted, he said, to serve his country. But, as he also acknowledged, “I might have been attracted to the risk of it.”

    Army Studies Thrill-Seeking Behavior, NYT, 30.10.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/31/us/31memo.html

Baghdad’s Shiite Heart Beats Freely as War Ebbs

October 29, 2010
The New York Times
By JOHN LELAND

BAGHDAD — Is it too early to declare a Sadr City Spring?

In a neighborhood known for its black-clad militiamen and strict Islamist codes, this was the scene on a recent evening: young men with angular haircuts shooting pool at curbside tables; coffeehouses bustling with hookah smokers and American movies; a raucous wedding party banging drums in celebration; photo studios displaying pictures of women with bared shoulders.

All would have been dangerous a year or two ago, but now they add up to just another night in this sprawling neighborhood that has long been the beating heart of Shiite Baghdad.

As Iraq’s government remains frozen in a seven-month standstill, the vibrant transformation of Sadr City may offer a prophetic glimpse of the country’s next chapter: repressed by Saddam Hussein, fearsome in its resistance to the American-led invasion and then brutal in its religious crackdown, the neighborhood is now fomenting a mix of secular and religious life that is both ad hoc and infectious.

“It’s not only new shops,” said Majid Lattef, 32, hanging out with three friends on a recent Friday after thousands gathered in the main square for prayers. “Young people here are changing their minds and attitudes.

“No one is harassing us to think one way,” he said. “Religion is available, and I worship God, but people who are praying and going to the mosque are also playing billiards and going to the coffee shops.”

Much of the last seven years here have belonged to the Mahdi Army, a militia loyal to the fiery cleric Moktada al-Sadr that imposed a strict interpretation of Islam. Residents took cover in overcrowded homes; parents did not allow their sons out after dark. But as the police and Iraqi Army have taken control, Mr. Sadr has remade himself and his following as a mainstream electoral force, winning 40 seats in the national election in March.

Their power is no longer in the streets but in Parliament. In turn, the Mahdi Army, whose violence threatened to marginalize the Sadrists, is letting the locals play.

“Those losers who were trying to claim they were doing this for Islam have no power now,” said Amaar Kreem, 26, shooting pool at a sidewalk table. “Now, people don’t listen to them.”

Memories of the recent past remain close to the surface. Ali Kraibit, who opened an outdoor pool hall, saw his tables as a product of history. First, Mr. Hussein banned all Shiite observances, he said. “Then after that, of course people were looking for religious ceremonies,” he said. “But now, people have had enough of this. They’ve relieved themselves. They realized they are free now.”

In a small barbershop, Saad Sabar, 34, remembered plucking beards in secret because it was contrary to Islamic law.

“The people who took control of the neighborhood were taking people with strange hairstyles from the street to the mosque,” he said, hesitant to name the Mahdi Army. “Then they beat them and shaved their heads.” Now, he said, many customers want Western haircuts. “Right now I can do everything I want, thank God,” he said, voicing a common refrain here.

Some here say imprisoned Mahdi Army fighters have started to flow back to the neighborhood after Mr. Sadr threw his support to Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki this month. Haider Mazban, 24, wearing a gray T-shirt that said Army in block capital letters, said that the militia could come back at any time. In the meantime, he said, he was “using this opportunity to get back to listening to music in my car and drinking alcohol.”

Like other parts of Baghdad, Sadr City is experiencing a boom in weddings. Haider Ali Hussain, 28, said that he stretched his engagement for more than a year because of the security situation. When he finally married two months ago, he had a street party with music and dancing.

“Before, if there was a wedding, people did it quick, and of course there was no dancing in the street, because people were afraid,” he said.

Now wedding parties are everywhere. At Princess Bride, a store that sells and rents ornate, candy-colored wedding dresses, Nethal Hussain said that she outfitted 50 weddings a month, up from 15 or 20 a year ago.

“We didn’t get threats, but other shops and hairstylists got shut down,” she said, adding that with security, brides’ tastes had opened up. “Before, they all asked for something to cover their hair and shoulders,” she said, displaying a lavender gown with jewels and slender shoulder straps that rented for about $50 a day. “Now, they ask for whatever they like.”

Still, a level of caution remains. Hammad Karim, who recently opened a video-game parlor, said he was warned not to network the computers so players could compete against each other, because “people here are simple-minded; they think this is gambling, so it is forbidden.”

An unmarked door on one of the neighborhood’s main streets leads to a second-floor coffee shop called Orange Juice that opened five months ago. The name comes from a song that has a racy video. The manager, Nawar Sabah, said that the shop was open only to people he knew, because bringing in strangers might invite trouble. Most nights, the patrons watch soccer matches or American action movies and smoke hookahs. “People come in here and talk freely about whatever they want,” he said.

He said the owner had to swear an oath at the Sadrists’ office to forbid alcohol and drugs. But he said the new permissiveness in Sadr City did not mean a turning away from religion.

“Yes, many young people are more open to new things, we are changing our attitudes and behaviors, wearing Western hairstyles and clothes, but it doesn’t affect our values,” he said. “You see my hair and clothes,” he said, pointing to the Nike logo on his shirt. “But Friday, I go to prayers. This is a new attitude for a new generation.”

At a sidewalk pool hall, Ali Abraham and Ali Samah illustrated the push and pull of Sadr City after dark. Below the pool hall was an open drainage ditch; across the street, a row of coffee shops lit by fluorescent lanterns. Mr. Abraham, flaunting gelled hair, declared, “We are living in our freedom right now.” Pointing to his beard, he said, “Some do it like this.”

But Mr. Samah, 25, was not impressed. “There are many new things, but still we feel suffocated, because we need more,” he said. “I can spend time here, but I don’t like it, because it’s not at the same level of development.”

    Baghdad’s Shiite Heart Beats Freely as War Ebbs, NYT, 29.10.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/30/world/middleeast/30sadrcity.html

Iraq Court Sentences Tariq Aziz to Death

October 26, 2010
The New York Times
By JACK HEALY

BAGHDAD — Tariq Aziz, a former top aide to Saddam Hussein, was sentenced to death by an Iraqi court on Tuesday for crimes against members of rival Shiite political parties.

The ruling was the latest in a series of criminal cases against Mr. Aziz, 74, who as foreign minister and, later, deputy prime minister became the bespectacled face of Mr. Hussein’s government during and before the Persian Gulf war of 1991, which was triggered by Iraq’s invasion of oil-rich Kuwait.

Because Mr. Hussein seldom left Iraq because of fears about his safety, Mr. Aziz represented Iraq in the diplomatic world. He surrendered to American forces in 2003, aware that he was among Iraq’s most hunted officials.

In March 2009, Mr. Aziz was sentenced to 15 years in prison for crimes against humanity, and was acquitted earlier that year on charges of ordering a 1999 crackdown against Shiite protesters after a revered Shiite cleric was assassinated.

Mr. Aziz’s lawyers were not immediately available for comment, and it was unclear whether they would appeal the sentence. Nor was it clear when the sentence would be carried out. Mr. Aziz’s lawyers have long claimed he was only responsible for Iraq’s diplomatic and political relations, and had no ties to the executions and purges carried out by Mr. Hussein’s Baathist government. Mr. Hussein, who was ousted as president by an American-led invasion in 2003, was himself hanged in 2006.

Death sentences were also handed down on Tuesday other former officials in Mr. Hussein’s government: Abed Hammoud, a former secretary to Mr. Hussein, and former Interior Minister Sadoon Shaker.

Earlier this year Mr. Aziz, a Christian from the Chaldean sect, was reported in poor health. In January, the American military said in a statement that he suffered a blood clot in the brain. He was taken to an American military hospital north of Baghdad for treatment.

Mr. Aziz, a former foreign minister, is also serving a seven-year prison sentence for a case involving the forced displacement of Kurds in northern Iraq.

In a recent interview with The Associated Press, he predicted he will die in prison, citing his old age and lengthy prison sentences.

Under Mr. Hussein, Mr. Aziz cultivated a reputation as a cigar-smoking, whiskey-drinking, well-traveled diplomat who used his official posts to justify the invasion of Kuwait, the efforts to obscure Mr. Hussein’s program to develop unconventional weapons, the mass killings of Kurds and Shiites in the late 1980’s and early 1990’s and the use of chemical weapons at the Kurdish town of Halabja, among other things.

Only weeks before the American-led invasion in 2003, he had an audience with Pope John Paul II at the Vatican, one of dozens of encounters with world leaders.

When he surrendered to American troops in his hometown, Mosul, in northern Iraq, it apparently for his own safety in the face of mobs hunting down officials of the ousted government.

He was No. 43, and the eight of spades, on the Pentagon’s ”pack of cards” listing the 55 most wanted officials of Mr. Hussein’s government. American officials said that, after his surrender, Mr. Aziz offered to testify against Mr. Hussein on the condition that he be released early, a proposition eventually rejected by an Iraqi court and its American advisers.

Khalid D. Ali contributed reporting.

    Iraq Court Sentences Tariq Aziz to Death, NYT, 26.10.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/27/world/middleeast/27iraq.html

The Wars That America Forgot About

October 17, 2010
The New York Times
By TOM BROKAW

McLeod, Mont.

IN what promises to be the most contentious midterm election since 1994, there is no shortage of passion about big issues facing the country: the place and nature of the federal government in America’s future; public debt; jobs; health care; the influence of special interests; and the role of populist movements like the Tea Party.

In nearly every Congressional and Senate race, these are the issues that explode into attack ads, score points in debates and light up cable talk shows. In poll after poll, these are the issues that voters say are most important to them this year.

Notice anything missing on the campaign landscape?

How about war? The United States is now in its ninth year of fighting in Afghanistan and Iraq, the longest wars in American history. Almost 5,000 men and women have been killed. More than 30,000 have been wounded, some so gravely they’re returning home to become, effectively, wards of their families and communities.

In those nine years, the United States has spent more than $1 trillion on combat operations and other parts of the war effort, including foreign aid, reconstruction projects, embassy costs and veterans’ health care. And the end is not in sight.

So why aren’t the wars and their human and economic consequences front and center in this campaign, right up there with jobs and taxes?

The answer is very likely that the vast majority of Americans wake up every day worrying, with good reason, about their economic security, but they can opt out of the call to arms. Unless they are enlisted in the armed services — or have a family member who has stepped forward — nothing much is asked of them in the war effort.

The all-volunteer uniformed services now represent less than 1 percent of the American population, but they’re carrying 100 percent of the battle. It’s not unusual to meet an Army infantryman or Marine who has served multiple tours in Iraq and/or Afghanistan.

Moreover, the majority of those in uniform come from working-class or middle-class backgrounds. The National Guard units and reserve forces that have been called up, some for more than one tour, draw heavily on first responders, as well as farm, factory and service workers.

Their families live in their own war zone. At a recent Minnesota event for military families, I heard Annette Kuyper, the mother of a National Guardsman who had an extended deployment in Iraq, describe how she and other Guard mothers changed their lives while their children were in harm’s way. “We close the blinds on the windows overlooking the driveway,” she said, “so we don’t see the Army vehicle arriving with a chaplain bearing the unbearable news.”

This woman’s son returned safely, but too many do not. As the campaign season careens to an end, military funerals will be held in country burial grounds, big city graveyards and at Arlington National Cemetery. Military families will keep the blinds closed on the windows facing the driveway.

While campaigns trade shouts of witchcraft, socialism, greed, radicalism (on both sides), warriors and their families have a right to ask, “What about us?” If this is an election about a new direction for the country, why doesn’t some candidate speak up for equal sacrifice on the home front as well as the front lines?

This is not just about military families, as important as they are. We all would benefit from a campaign that engaged the vexing question of what happens next in the long and so far unresolved effort to deal with Islamic rage.

No decision is more important than committing a nation to war. It is, as politicians like to say, about our blood and treasure. Surely blood and treasure are worthy of more attention than they’ve been getting in this campaign.

Tom Brokaw, a special correspondent for NBC News, is the author, most recently, of “Boom! Talking About the ’60s.”

    The Wars That America Forgot About, NYT, 17.10.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/18/opinion/18brokaw.html

Sunnis in Iraq Allied With U.S. Quitting to Rejoin Rebels

October 16, 2010
The New York Times
By TIMOTHY WILLIAMS and DURAID ADNAN

BAQUBA, Iraq — Members of United States-allied Awakening Councils have quit or been dismissed from their positions in significant numbers in recent months, prey to an intensive recruitment campaign by the Sunni insurgency, according to government officials, current and former members of the Awakening and insurgents.

Although there are no firm figures, security and political officials say hundreds of the well-disciplined fighters — many of whom have gained extensive knowledge about the American military — appear to have rejoined Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia. Beyond that, officials say that even many of the Awakening fighters still on the Iraqi government payroll, possibly thousands of them, covertly aid the insurgency.

The defections have been driven in part by frustration with the Shiite-led government, which Awakening members say is intent on destroying them, as well as by pressure from Al Qaeda. The exodus has accelerated since Iraq’s inconclusive parliamentary elections in March, which have left Sunnis uncertain of retaining what little political influence they have and which appear to have provided Al Qaeda new opportunities to lure back fighters.

The Awakening members’ switch in loyalties poses a new threat to Iraq’s tenuous social and political balance during the country’s ongoing political crisis and as the United States military prepares to withdraw next year.

“The Awakening doesn’t know what the future holds because it is not clear what the government intends for them,” said Nathum al-Jubouri, a former Awakening Council leader in Salahuddin Province who recently quit the organization.

“At this point, Awakening members have two options: Stay with the government, which would be a threat to their lives, or help Al Qaeda by being a double agent,” he said. “The Awakening is like a database for Al Qaeda that can be used to target places that had been out of reach before.”

The Awakening began in 2006, when Sunni insurgents and tribal leaders began turning against Al Qaeda and other extremists — a change that played a major role in pulling Iraq back from deadly sectarian warfare. The former insurgents were initially paid by the American military, with promises that they would eventually get jobs with the government.

But Awakening leaders and security officials say that since the spring, as many as several thousand Awakening fighters have quit, been fired, stopped showing up for duty, or ceased picking up paychecks.

During the past four months, the atmosphere has become particularly charged as the Awakening members find themselves squeezed between Iraqi security forces, who have arrested hundreds of current and former members accused of acts of recent terrorism, and Al Qaeda’s brutal recruitment techniques.

As part of the militants’ unusual, though often convincing strategy, Awakening members that Al Qaeda fails to kill are then sought out to rejoin the insurgency. They are offered larger paychecks than their $300 a month government pay and told that they would be far safer.

The government, which says it is trying to integrate the Awakening into broader Iraqi society, has further angered the group recently by confiscating its weapons, saying Awakening fighters lack proper permits, and stripping some fighters of their ranks, which the government says were not properly earned. The pay of some Awakening leaders has also been reduced.

Iraqi officials in Baghdad say they are aware of only a handful of Awakening members who have quit recently, and they are unapologetic about the government’s treatment of the fighters.

“Fighting the Al Qaeda organization does not mean you are giving service to the government or to the people, and that you deserve gifts, rank, presents or benefits,” said Zuhair al-Chalabi, head of the National Reconciliation Committee, set up to heal the country’s sectarian divides. “It is a national duty.”

The Awakening has long complained about Iraq’s reluctance to hire more of its members into the army and the police, and about receiving salaries late. Those problems persist, members say.

As of July, less than half — 41,000 of 94,000 — of the Awakening’s fighters had been offered jobs by the government, according to the United States Defense Department. Much of the employment has been temporary and involved menial labor. The government has hired only about 9,000 Awakening members for the security forces, with officials blaming budget constraints.

Leaders of the Awakening, who so far do not appear to be among those leaving, say they are not surprised about the defections given what they call the group’s marginalization by the government and its abandonment by the American military.

United States forces had overseen the Awakening in some areas of the country as recently as last year, including in Diyala Province, the violent area northeast of Baghdad that is one of Al Qaeda’s remaining strongholds. The United States relinquished control of the group as it began ceding more oversight of security to the Iraqi government. The American military declined to comment on the Awakening’s troubles.

One Awakening leader in Diyala, Bakr Karkhi, said during an interview that nearly two dozen of his fighters had rejoined Al Qaeda during the past few weeks, a process he said had been occurring throughout Sunni areas of Iraq. Other fighters, he said, had abruptly stopped reporting for duty. “I became suspicious when some of them started making questionable comments, so I expelled them,” he said. “Others left the Awakening on their own and then disappeared from their villages. We found out they were conducting illegal operations and cooperating with armed groups, including Al Qaeda.”

Awakening fighters say recent entreaties by Al Qaeda — messages that have been passed along by relatives or posted on Internet Web sites — have included pledges not to disrupt tribal traditions, one of the issues that drove a wedge between the majority of Sunni tribes and the insurgency.

A man who identified himself as a member of Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia said recently that the recruitment of disaffected Awakening members had been successful in Baquba, the capital of Diyala.

“Many of those who called themselves the Awakening felt remorse,” said the man, who used the nom de guerre Abu Mohammed al-Daeni. “They believed they were making a mistake by helping the occupiers and have now returned to Al Qaeda. I can say that the number is increasing every day.”

Diyala has also witnessed a number of events in which police say Awakening fighters have helped Al Qaeda detonate bombs and commit other violent acts.

“The Awakening is not helping the police,” said Lt. Gen. Tariq al-Assawi, the province’s security forces commander. “They are not telling us if Al Qaeda is in the area. They are not warning us about car bombs that go off in places they are responsible for securing. A lot of them are definitely helping the insurgents.”

Muthana al-Tamimi, head of the provincial council’s security committee, said Awakening members were clearly returning to the insurgency, but that Baghdad should share the blame.

“The Awakening needs government support,” he said. “They’re not getting it, so they’re an easy bite for terrorists.”

Since January, more than 90 Awakening fighters in Diyala have been arrested on suspicion of terrorism, the authorities said. During that same period, about 100 Awakening members have been killed or wounded by Al Qaeda, according to the Awakening. The police acknowledge that almost half of those arrested were later released for lack of evidence, bolstering the Awakening’s claims of harassment.

Al Qaeda’s carrot-or-stick strategy with the Awakening was on display during a recent phone call received by Hussam al-Majmaei, the Awakening leader in Diyala Province.

The caller was Jihad Ibrahim Halim, who had been a Qaeda commander before his arrest last year. He was calling from prison.

Mr. Halim, who is Mr. Majmaei’s cousin, told him that for his own good he should rejoin the insurgency because Al Qaeda would slaughter those who had opposed them, Mr. Majmaei included. Mr. Majmaei, 27, chuckled and made his own threats before hanging up. The call, he said, was part of an ongoing “seduction.”

So far, Mr. Majmaei said he had not been swayed by Al Qaeda’s promises of money and power.

“I would never join them,” he said. “But they have no doubts. They believe in what they are saying and I see how others might bend.”


Reporting was contributed by Yasir Ghazi from Baghdad, and Iraqi employees of The New York Times from Baghdad, Diyala, Salahuddin, Kirkuk, Babil and Anbar Provinces.

    Sunnis in Iraq Allied With U.S. Quitting to Rejoin Rebels, NYT, 16.10.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/17/world/middleeast/17awakening.html

Four Suicides in a Week Take a Toll on Fort Hood

September 29, 2010
The New York Times
By JAMES C. McKINLEY Jr.

HOUSTON — Four veterans of the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan died this week from what appeared to be self-inflicted gunshot wounds at Fort Hood in central Texas, raising the toll of soldiers who died here at their own hands to a record level and alarming Army commanders.

So far this year, Army officials have confirmed that 14 soldiers at Fort Hood have committed suicide. Six others are believed to have taken their own lives but a final determination has yet to be made. The highest number of suicides at Fort Hood occurred in 2008, when 14 soldiers killed themselves, said Christopher Haug, a military spokesman.

About 46,000 to 50,000 active officers and soldiers work at the base at any given time, making this year’s suicide rate about four times the national average, which the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates at 11.5 deaths per 100,000 people.

The largest base in the United States, Fort Hood and the surrounding communities have suffered high rates of crime, domestic violence, suicide and various mental illnesses as wave after wave of soldiers have been deployed abroad over nine years of continual warfare, often serving more than one tour.

Last November, an Army psychiatrist, Maj. Nidal M. Hasan, was charged with killing 13 people with a pistol in a rampage at a building on the post.

On Sunday, Sgt. Michael Timothy Franklin and his wife, Jesse Ann Franklin, were found fatally shot in their house on the base.

Army investigators said they believed that Sergeant Franklin, who was 31 and had served two tours in Iraq, killed his wife and then turned the gun on himself. The couple had two small children.

Maj. Gen. William F. Grimsley, the Fort Hood senior commander, said in a statement released at a news conference on Wednesday that “leaders at all levels remain deeply concerned about this trend.”

Mr. Haug said that the general did not believe that additional measures were necessary to stop the trend and that the base already had an extensive suicide-prevention program.

But advocates for soldiers who have suffered mental breakdowns said the programs were not effective.

Cynthia Thomas runs the Under the Hood Café, an organization of antiwar activists and veterans who provide referrals for soldiers to mental health professionals. She said a stigma remained among soldiers about seeking help from Army counselors for suicidal thoughts or other mental problems. And those soldiers who do seek counseling are often given medication and put back on duty, she said.

“You don’t get counseling, you get medication,” Ms. Thomas said. “These soldiers are breaking.”

    Four Suicides in a Week Take a Toll on Fort Hood, NYT, 29.9.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/30/us/30hood.html

7 Civilians Killed in U.S. and Iraqi Raid

September 15, 2010
The New York Times
By TIMOTHY WILLIAMS and DURAID ADNAN

BAGHDAD — Seven Iraqi civilians were killed near the western city of Falluja on Wednesday during an early morning raid conducted by American and Iraqi security forces, officials said.

Four of the dead were brothers between the ages of 12 and 23, according to the Iraqi police and residents of the area. The United States military in Iraq said in an e-mail Wednesday afternoon that the Iraqi military had “planned and led” the “joint counterterrorism” operation. The raid underscored the continuing presence of American service members in security operations, even after the United States declared an official end to the combat at the end of August. An American military spokesman directed inquiries to the government of Iraq.

It is not clear whether the dead were the targets of the raid or how they were killed. Four other people were wounded during the operation.

Officials in Iraq’s Ministry of Defense and in the prime minister’s office did not immediately return calls seeking comment.

Iraqi police said that the raid started about 1 a.m. Wednesday in the village of Hay Jibel, about 40 miles west of Baghdad in Anbar Province.

American helicopters provided support, police officials said, speaking on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak to the press. The operation concluded about 7 a.m.

Qasim Mohammed Abed, the governor of Anbar Province, said he had been angered by how the raid was conducted and blamed both the American and Iraqi militaries for the deaths.

“We did not know about this operation — they only informed us that there was going to be a small raid in which they would arrest someone,” he said. “We did not expect this to happen.”

Mr. Abed said he had been told by witnesses that the deaths were unjustified.

“The security forces behaved without morals,” the governor said. “They say that people there resisted them, but it is not true. No one resisted them. They just came to bring trouble to this province.”

In the northern city of Mosul on Wednesday, nine Iraqi soldiers were killed and seven other people were wounded after the minibus carrying them struck a roadside bomb, the Iraqi police said.


Iraqi employees of The New York Times contributed reporting from Anbar and Nineveh Provinces.

    7 Civilians Killed in U.S. and Iraqi Raid, NYT, 15.9.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/16/world/middleeast/16iraq.html

Blackwater Won Contracts Through a Web of Companies

September 3, 2010
The New York Times
By JAMES RISEN and MARK MAZZETTI

WASHINGTON — Blackwater Worldwide created a web of more than 30 shell companies or subsidiaries in part to obtain millions of dollars in American government contracts after the security company came under intense criticism for reckless conduct in Iraq, according to Congressional investigators and former Blackwater officials.

While it is not clear how many of those businesses won contracts, at least three had deals with the United States military or the Central Intelligence Agency, according to former government and company officials. Since 2001, the intelligence agency has awarded up to $600 million in classified contracts to Blackwater and its affiliates, according to a United States government official.

The Senate Armed Services Committee this week released a chart that identified 31 affiliates of Blackwater, now known as Xe Services. The network was disclosed as part of a committee’s investigation into government contracting. The investigation revealed the lengths to which Blackwater went to continue winning contracts after Blackwater guards killed 17 Iraqi civilians in Baghdad in September 2007. That episode and other reports of abuses led to criminal and Congressional investigations, and cost the company its lucrative security contract with the State Department in Iraq.

The network of companies — which includes several businesses located in offshore tax havens — allowed Blackwater to obscure its involvement in government work from contracting officials or the public, and to assure a low profile for any of its classified activities, said former Blackwater officials, who, like the government officials, spoke only on condition of anonymity.

Senator Carl Levin, the Michigan Democrat who is chairman of the Armed Services Committee, said in a statement that it was worth “looking into why Blackwater would need to create the dozens of other names” and said he had requested that the Justice Department investigate whether Blackwater officers misled the government when using subsidiaries to solicit contracts.

The C.I.A.’s continuing relationship with the company, which recently was awarded a $100 million contract to provide security at agency bases in Afghanistan, has drawn harsh criticism from some members of Congress, who argue that the company’s tarnished record should preclude it from such work. At least two of the Blackwater-affiliated companies, XPG and Greystone, obtained secret contracts from the agency, according to interviews with a half dozen former Blackwater officials.

A C.I.A. spokesman, Paul Gimigliano, said that Xe’s current duties for the agency were to provide security for agency operatives. Contractors “do the tasks we ask them to do in strict accord with the law; they are supervised by C.I.A. staff officers; and they are held to the highest standards of conduct” he said. “As for Xe specifically, they help provide security in tough environments, an assignment at which their people have shown both skill and courage.”

Congress began to investigate the affiliated companies last year, after the shooting deaths of two Afghans by Blackwater security personnel working for a subsidiary named Paravant, which had obtained Pentagon contracts in Afghanistan. In a Senate hearing earlier this year, Army officials said that when they awarded the contract to Paravant for training of the Afghan Army, they had no idea that the business was part of Blackwater.

While Congressional investigators have identified other Blackwater-linked businesses, it was not the focus of their inquiry to determine how much money from government contracts flowed through the web of corporations, especially money earmarked for clandestine programs. The former company officials say that Greystone did extensive work for the intelligence community, though they did not describe the nature of the activities. The firm was incorporated in Barbados for tax purposes, but had executives who worked at Blackwater’s headquarters in North Carolina.

The former company officials say that Erik Prince, the business’s founder, was eager to find ways to continue to handle secret work after the 2007 shootings in Baghdad’s Nisour Square and set up a special office to handle classified work at his farm in Middleburg, Va.

Enrique Prado, a former top C.I.A. official who joined the contractor, worked closely with Mr. Prince to develop Blackwater’s clandestine abilities, according to several former officials. In an internal e-mail obtained by The New York Times, Mr. Prado claimed that he had created a Blackwater spy network that could be hired by the American government.

“We have a rapidly growing, worldwide network of folks that can do everything from surveillance to ground truth to disruption operations,” Mr. Prado wrote in the October 2007 message, in which he asked another Blackwater official whether the Drug Enforcement Administration might be interested in using the spy network. “These are all foreign nationals,” he added, “so deniability is built in and should be a big plus.”

It is not clear whether Mr. Prado’s secret spy service ever conducted any operations for the government. From 2004 to 2006, both Mr. Prado and Mr. Prince were involved in a C.I.A. program to hunt senior leaders of Al Qaeda that had been outsourced to Blackwater, though current and former American officials said that the assassination program did not carry out any operations. Company employees also loaded bombs and missiles onto Predator drones in Pakistan, work that was terminated last year by the C.I.A.

Both Mr. Prince and Mr. Prado declined to be interviewed for this article.

The company is facing a string of legal problems, including the indictment in April of five former Blackwater officials on weapons and obstruction charges, and civil suits stemming from the 2007 shootings in Iraq.

The business is up for sale by Mr. Prince, who colleagues say is embittered by the public criticism and scrutiny that Blackwater has faced. He has not been implicated in the criminal charges against his former subordinates, but he has recently moved his family to Abu Dhabi, where he hopes to focus on obtaining contracts from governments in Africa and the Middle East, according to colleagues and former company officials.

After awarding Blackwater the new security contract in June, the C.I.A. director, Leon E. Panetta, publicly defended the decision, saying Blackwater had “cleaned up its act.”

But Rep. Jan Schakowsky, an Illinois Democrat and a member of the House Intelligence Committee, said she could not understand why the intelligence community had been unwilling to cut ties to Blackwater. “I am continually and increasingly mystified by this relationship,” she said. “To engage with a company that is such a chronic, repeat offender, it’s reckless.”

It is unclear how much of Blackwater’s relationship with the C.I.A. will become public during the criminal proceedings in North Carolina because the Obama administration won a court order limiting the use of classified information. Among other things, company executives are accused of obtaining large numbers of AK-47s and M-4 automatic weapons, but arranging to make it appear as if they had been bought by the sheriff’s department in Camden County, N.C. Such purchases were legal only if made by law enforcement agencies.

But defense lawyers say they hope to argue that Blackwater had a classified contract with the C.I.A. and wanted at least some of the guns for weapons training for agency officers.

    Blackwater Won Contracts Through a Web of Companies, NYT, 3.9.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/04/world/middleeast/04blackwater.html