History > 2011 > USA > War > Iraq (I)

A man excavates a newly-discovered mass grave

in the desert of western Anbar province on April 14, 2011.

Tens of thousands of Iraqis were killed or went missing

in the sectarian conflict in 2006-2007 unleashed

by the US-led invasion in 2003.

Many of the missing were never found,

and the excavation of mass graves

that may provide answers for the relatives of the dead

is considered a critical step in healing after years of war.

Photograph: Ali al-Mashhadani

Reuters

Boston Globe > Big Picture > Scenes from Iraq

December 30, 2011

http://www.boston.com/bigpicture/2011/12/scenes_from_iraq_1.html

The Prime Minister and the Sunnis

November 4, 2011
The New York Times

The authoritarian tendencies of Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki of Iraq are well known. But the arrest of more than 600 Iraqis whom the government describes as suspected former members of Saddam Hussein’s Baath Party and army is particularly cynical and reckless. With American troops scheduled to withdraw by year’s end, the last thing Mr. Maliki should be doing is stoking sectarian tensions.

As Andrew E. Kramer reported in The Times, the detainees — a vast majority are assumed to be Sunnis — were rounded up after the Shiite-controlled government supposedly received a tip from the new interim leaders in Libya that former Baathists were plotting a coup.

Some political leaders have discussed replacing Mr. Maliki through a no-confidence vote. The government has yet to provide any real evidence of a plot, and the idea that 600 people were involved strains credulity. American officials are highly skeptical.

The majority Shiites were badly persecuted under Saddam Hussein’s Sunni-led regime. Post-Saddam governments have all been Shiite-dominated and far more interested in payback than inclusion. If Mr. Maliki has proof that any detainees committed real crimes, they should be prosecuted in a just and transparent process. Otherwise, he should release them.

All Iraqis have reason to be unhappy with Mr. Maliki. A report in September by the International Crisis Group describes his government as riddled with corruption, lacking credibility, showing “authoritarian tendencies,” and contributing to a “severe decay in public services.”

The record with the Sunnis is especially bad. The government promised jobs to 100,000 members of the Sunni Awakening Councils — insurgents whose decision to switch sides helped end the civil war — but only half that number have been hired. Sunnis do lead a few high-profile ministries but don’t have nearly the clout they expected after their bloc won the most votes in the 2010 election.

The Bush-era Coalition Provisional Authority that initially ran postwar Iraq disbanded the army and barred most Baath Party members from government jobs. A law passed in 2008 was intended to promote reconciliation by opening jobs to former Baathists. But it has been applied in a selective way to undermine political opponents.

The government needs to clearly define what degree of involvement with the Baath Party was so egregious as to be disqualifying for government jobs and carry out those judgments equitably. (The number of worst offenders is believed to be very small.) Parliament still hasn’t enacted a law, called for in the Constitution, that would provide a legal basis for determining who should be prosecuted for supporting the Baath Party or other extremist ideologies.

Washington’s influence is diminishing. But Baghdad still wants to buy American weapons — it has F-16 jet fighters on order — and needs help with military training. The Obama administration needs to use that leverage to press Mr. Maliki to restrain his worst impulses. Iraq’s democracy is fragile, and the risk of renewed sectarian violence is chillingly real.

The Prime Minister and the Sunnis, NYT, 4.11.2011,
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/05/opinion/prime-minister-maliki-and-the-sunnis.html

At Abu Ghraib,

Ambivalence on America’s Departure

November 3, 2011
The New York Times
By TIM ARANGO

ABU GHRAIB, Iraq — On a recent day off, Hussam Saad stood at a roadside vegetable stand across the highway from the prison where he says he works.

“I can still remember guarding the prison at night, and hearing the voices and the shouting while people were being tortured,” said Mr. Saad, recalling the time when the Americans were in charge at Abu Ghraib.

Even so, he claims, it is worse there now.

“It would be better,” he said, “if the Americans were still in charge of the prison.”

It is difficult to verify Mr. Saad’s claims; the government denies harming any inmates although the State Department says cases of torture throughout the country have been documented by Iraq’s own government watchdogs. But as an indication of what type of country the United States is leaving behind, Mr. Saad’s comments were striking.

Given the legacy of the torture scandal at the prison, this would seem as likely a place as any for the imminent departure of American troops to be greeted with unabashed happiness.

The ambivalence reflects how much is left to be done to reinvent this ethnically fractured country as a functioning democracy. Efforts to bring Sunnis into the Shiite-led government have been haphazard at best. Laws for splitting precious oil dollars among ethnic groups and regional fiefs remain unwritten. And nearly two years after a national election, the country’s bitterly divided political blocs cannot agree on who should run the Defense and Interior Ministries.

The town of Abu Ghraib was once more famous for its yogurt and cheese than its prison. Under Saddam Hussein, it was a prideful Sunni tribal area. Today, its people seem as fearful of the local army brigade as they are of insurgents.

As for the departing Americans, whose scandal cast a lingering stain on the community, residents express the same ambivalence felt all over Iraq — a combination of joy at the end of the occupation after eight years and fear of what could come next. Around the country, the announcement last month that American forces would pull out by year’s end has prompted not widespread celebration — although there is some of that — but mostly muted introspection.

“Is that right, are they really going to leave?” said Ali Sattar, who owns an electrical supply shop behind the prison and complained about harassment from the local security forces.

“What will the Iraqi Army do when they leave Iraq?” he said. “That’s what we are afraid of.”

Even at a village elder’s home, where many of the household’s men spent time over recent years in American-run detention facilities here and elsewhere, the imminent end of the American war has brought forth the same ambiguous sentiments.

One of the men, Ahmed Ali Dawood, has welcomed the end of the American military role in Iraq, but worries about the ability of Iraqis to overcome their own anger. His friends and family, as in so many other communities, were divided between those who joined the insurgency and others who welcomed the Americans. “It created hatred among the people,” he said. “You can’t say that people have healed yet. They still don’t trust the government.”

Mr. Dawood spent three months in the Abu Ghraib prison, while the Americans still ran it in 2006, on terrorism charges he said were false. “They were treating me like an animal,” he said. He later spent “three years and one month and 12 days” in Camp Bucca, an American prison in southern Iraq, before being released.

For the United States, the end of its military role is seen as the fulfillment of a promise President Obama made as a candidate and the turning of the page on a painful and costly chapter in recent history — one many Americans have largely moved on from anyway.

Here, it is different. The American invasion and its aftermath are but one layer of a much deeper trauma that started decades ago and was marked by Baath Party terror and the mass graves it generated, the devastating war with Iran and the international sanctions of the 1990s after Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait. All still resonate. On a wall in the village elder’s home hangs a framed portrait of a relative in a military uniform. He was an officer in Mr. Hussein’s army who disappeared in 1985.

That history makes Iraqis more wary of what could come. Sheik Ali Hamad, another of the men who gathered in the house recently to discuss the exit of American troops, wants the forces to leave, but is angry that the United States will not leave a more stable state in its wake.

“They are leaving the country in the hands of politicians that are like teenagers,” he said. “There may be a sectarian war. This is a bigger scandal than Abu Ghraib, leaving things unfinished and with these politicians.”

At the vegetable stand across from the prison, young children gathered around, happy, giddy even, at the chance to talk to a foreigner and show off English textbooks printed in London. A convoy of American armored vehicles had recently passed on the highway that leads west, to Jordan and Syria, intermingled with traffic, a sign itself of how much has changed.

The children, who have only known this war, laughed and mimicked the motion of raising a rifle and the sounds of machine-gun fire when asked what they will remember of the Americans, and said words like “candy” and “tanks.” Then they ran off.

Mr. Saad, standing nearby, identified himself as an employee of the prison for 11 years, beginning under Mr. Hussein. Nowadays, he said, prison officials single out the people from Anbar and Mosul — meaning Sunnis — and mistreat them, a reversal of the circumstances under the Sunni-dominated government.

An official in charge of prisons at the Justice Ministry, Gen. Hamed Hamadi al-Mousawi, said there was “no torturing, no oppression and no sectarianism” inside Iraq’s detention facilities. He said prisoners were even given cigarettes and blankets.

“We try in any way to satisfy them with food, clothes, underwear, doctors, water, electricity,” he said. “They have better electricity than the people. It doesn’t shut off. We do this for many reasons. For example, so they won’t think to escape.”

 

Yasir Ghazi contributed reporting from Baghdad.

    At Abu Ghraib, Ambivalence on America’s Departure, NYT, 3.11.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/04/world/middleeast/at-abu-ghraib-ambivalence-on-americas-departure.html

Optimism of Intellectuals Ebbs in Iraq

September 29, 2011
The New York Times
By TIM ARANGO

BAGHDAD — In a note to friends brimming with defiance and poetic musings, citing as inspiration Jesus, Imam Hussein, Gandhi, Che Guevara and the Buddha, Hadi al-Mahdi prophesized his own murder.

“I will sleep in peace. I want to rest so long, and dream of my name written on my grave, dream that my son will come and visit me, even once, my son who does not speak Arabic well. I hope that he will be able to read his father’s name, the lover of freedom and its martyr.”

That letter was written in June, and by September he was dead from an assassin’s silenced pistol, another journalist killed in Iraq. But perhaps none of the killings has resonated so deeply in a nook of society that welcomed war with such eagerness.

The murder has reverberated through Baghdad’s community of journalists, artists and writers, spurring a moment of deep introspection for a cadre of secular intellectuals, many of whom fled repression under Saddam Hussein and returned to their homeland after the invasion with the hopes of being the liberal conscience of a new nation.

Many kept their optimism during the worst years of the war. But now, as the American military leaves and they witness scenes of triumph from homegrown revolutions in neighboring Arab countries, they are reconsidering their country’s own experience with overturning a dictatorship.

“For me, I was still optimistic a year ago,” said Ali Sumari, a newspaper editor and film director who returned to Iraq in 2003 from Jordan and was a close friend of Mr. Mahdi’s. “Even during the sectarian war, I thought things would settle down. Nowadays, I am starting to fear that Iraq will never become a stable country.”

In Iraq, where there is sometimes little distinction between a journalist, an artist and an activist, Mr. Mahdi, 45 when he was killed, hosted a popular radio show, becoming a powerful voice for those disenchanted with their government, often criticizing officials by name and receiving frequent death threats. He also produced films and wrote plays and columns, and became a leader of a small band of protesters who since February have gathered most Fridays at Baghdad’s Tahrir Square to protest against the government.

Just as former political opponents of the government followed American tanks into Iraq, intellectuals did too, hoping to shape an architecture of ideas to buttress their new democracy. Their experience has been starkly different. The politicians returned to preside over a state, the journalists to suffer under tactics that they, and human rights activists, say mimic those wielded by the former government.

In February, Mr. Sumari was arrested alongside Mr. Mahdi after a protest against the government in Baghdad. The two were beaten and interrogated and accused of being sympathetic to the Baath Party — the worst kind of insult in Iraq, especially for two men who had fled the country under Mr. Hussein’s Baathist government.

“You can accuse me of anything, even of being a terrorist, but don’t call me a Baathist,” said Mr. Sumari. “You humiliate my humanity.”

Those thinkers and writers who returned represented a powerful counternarrative to the exodus of this country’s educated middle class, many of whom have yet to come back, leaving a fissure in Iraq’s social structure between an often corrupt political elite and a vast underclass.

Mr. Mahdi had fled to Syria and then Denmark, where his children remain. Mr. Sumari had been in Jordan. Another close friend, Ahmed Hussein, a newspaper editor, lived in Syria, Lebanon and Canada before the American invasion. He was a college mate of Mr. Mahdi’s in Baghdad, and introduced him to his first wife.

When he returned, Mr. Hussein said: “I was very optimistic. I thought Americans were smarter than they turned out to be.”

He had communicated on Facebook with Mr. Mahdi just hours before he was killed, discussing an upcoming protest. “Hadi was not only optimistic, but a dreamer,” he said. “He thought Iraq would become liberal and secular. Even until his last days he was dreaming this dream.”

Other friends of Mr. Mahdi’s never left, and recalled jubilant scenes of reunion after the fall of the government on Mutanabbi Street, a bustling pedestrian thoroughfare of booksellers’ stalls that is a hub of intellectual life in the old quarter of the capital.

“We were so happy to have him back in Iraq,” said Karema Hashim, a friend of his since the 1980s when they both worked in cinema and media in Baghdad. “And he was happy to be back because he thought it was liberated.”

Ms. Hashim, who manages a fine arts high school in Baghdad, spoke recently outside a mosque during Mr. Mahdi’s funeral, near a table where men were setting out plates of fruit for the mourners. She was dressed in black, a tissue in her hand to blot out the tears. “I was so happy because all of my friends came back to Iraq,” she said. “We were full of power and ambition.”

Now, she said, “Iraq is in its worst time. I know I’m going to get killed one day.”

Another friend, Satar Muhsin, came to intellectual life after the fall of the government. “The best years of my life I wasted in the army under Saddam,” said Mr. Muhsin, now a bookseller on Mutanabbi Street. “It was war, it was killing, it was hunger and fear.”

He met Mr. Mahdi in Najaf at a conference featuring the liberal Iraqi writer and cleric Ahmed al-Qabbanji, and the two bonded over Mr. Qabbanji’s message. “His idea is that Islam is not the solution,” he said. “The modern state of technocrats and secularism is.”

For some, Mr. Mahdi’s murder has elevated the level of fear so high that they are even reconsidering their work as journalists. Mr. Sumari said he might stop writing temporarily.

“We’ve become so afraid of what we do and what we write,” he said. “We’re changing where we meet, we’re not sleeping at home.”

Mr. Mahdi was the 93rd journalist murdered in the last decade — many more died from indiscriminate acts of war — and in not a single case has anyone been brought to justice, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists.

    Optimism of Intellectuals Ebbs in Iraq, NYT, 29.9.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/30/world/middleeast/after-mahdis-murder-optimism-of-intellectuals-ebbs-in-iraq.html

Looking After the Soldier,

Back Home and Damaged

September 27, 2011
The New York Times
By CATRIN EINHORN

RAY CITY, Ga.— April and Tom Marcum were high school sweethearts who married after graduation. For years, she recalls, he was a doting husband who would leave love notes for her to discover on the computer or in her purse. Now the closest thing to notes that they exchange are the reminders she set up on his cellphone that direct him to take his medicine four times a day.

He usually ignores them, and she ends up having to make him do it.

Since Mr. Marcum came back in 2008 from two tours in Iraq with a traumatic brain injury and post-traumatic stress disorder, his wife has quit her job as a teacher to care for him. She has watched their life savings drain away. And she has had to adjust to an entirely new relationship with her husband, who faces a range of debilitating problems including short-term memory loss and difficulties with impulse control and anger.

“The biggest loss is the loss of the man I married,” Ms. Marcum said, describing her husband now as disconnected on the best days, violent on the worst ones. “His body’s here, but his mind is not here anymore. I see glimpses of him, but he’s not who he was.”

Ms. Marcum has joined a growing community of spouses, parents and partners who, confronted with damaged loved ones returning from war who can no longer do for themselves, drop most everything in their own lives to care for them. Jobs, hobbies, friends, even parental obligations to young children fall by the wayside. Families go through savings and older parents dip into retirement funds.

Even as they grieve over a family member’s injuries, they struggle to adjust to new daily routines and reconfigured relationships.

The new lives take a searing toll. Many of the caregivers report feeling anxious, depressed or exhausted. They gain weight and experience health problems. On their now frequent trips to the pharmacy, they increasingly have to pick up prescriptions for themselves as well.

While taking comfort that their loved ones came home at all, they question whether they can endure the potential strain of years, or even decades, of care.

“I’ve packed my bags, I’ve called my parents and said I’m coming home,” said Andrea Sawyer, whose husband has been suicidal since returning from Iraq with post-traumatic stress disorder. “But I don’t. I haven’t ever physically walked out of the house.”

Those attending to the most severely wounded must help their spouses or adult children with the most basic daily functions. Others, like Ms. Marcum, act as safety monitors, keeping loved ones from putting themselves in danger. They drive them to endless medical appointments and administer complicated medication regimens.

One of the most frustrating aspects of life now, they say, is the bureaucracy they face at the Department of Defense and the Department of Veterans Affairs, from problems with the scheduling of medical appointments to being bounced around among different branches of the system, forcing them to become navigators and advocates for their loved ones.

A variety of care services are offered to the severely injured. But many family members do not want their loved ones in nursing homes and find home health services often unsatisfactory or unavailable.

Despite Ms. Marcum’s cheerful manner and easy laugh, she has started taking antidepressants and an anti-anxiety medication when needed. She has developed hypertension, takes steroids for a bronchial ailment that may be stress related, and wears braces to relieve a jaw problem.

“I just saw all of my dreams kind of vanishing,” she said.

Over the past few years, advocacy organizations like the Wounded Warrior Project lobbied Congress to pass a law providing direct financial compensation and other benefits to family caregivers of service members. In 2010 they succeeded, and by mid-September, the veterans agency had approved 1,222 applications, with average monthly stipends of $1,600 to $1,800. Caregivers can also receive health insurance and counseling.

“We know it doesn’t replace full lost income,” said Deborah Amdur, who oversees caregiver support for the agency. “It’s really a recognition of the kinds of sacrifices that are being made.”

While families express deep gratitude for the help, questions remain about who will qualify and how compensation is determined, advocates for veterans say. Furthermore, the law applies only to caregivers of service members injured in the line of duty on or after Sept. 11, 2001, eliminating help for thousands who served in earlier conflicts.

And the emotional strain is still palpable as families struggle to adjust to what many call their “new normal.”

In a reversal of the classic situation in which adult children help out ailing parents, a substantial number of the caregivers of post- Sept. 11 service members are parents caring for their adult children.

Rosie Babin, 51, was managing an accounting office when a bullet tore through her son Alan’s abdomen in 2003. She and her husband rushed to Walter Reed Army Medical Center and stayed at his side when Alan, then 22, arrived from Iraq. He lost 90 percent of his stomach and part of his pancreas. His kidneys shut down and he had a stroke, leaving him with brain damage. He eventually underwent more than 70 operations and spent two years in hospitals, his mother said.

Ms. Babin fought efforts by the military to put her son in a nursing home, insisting that he go into a rehabilitation facility instead, and then managed to care for him at home.

But since her son’s injuries, her doctor has put her on blood pressure medication and sleeping pills. Now, while deeply grateful for her son’s remarkable recovery — he gets around in a wheelchair and has regained some speech — she sadly remembers the days when she looked forward to travel and dance lessons with her husband. Instead, she helps Alan get in and out of bed, use the bathroom and shower.

“I felt like I went from this high-energy, force-to-be-reckoned-with businesswoman,” she said, “to a casualty of war. And I was working furiously at not feeling like a victim of war.”

Research on the caregivers of service members from the post-Sept. 11 era is just beginning, said Joan M. Griffin, a research investigator with the Minneapolis V.A. Health Care System who is leading one such study. (The V.A. estimates that 3,000 families will benefit from the new caregiver program; 92 percent of the caregivers approved so far are women.)

What makes the population of patients receiving care different, Ms. Griffin said, is their relative youth. “The V.A. has not had a significant influx of patients of this age group since Vietnam,” she said, with a result that caregivers are looking at a “long horizon of providing care.” And one in five returning service members, a previous study found, report symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder or major depression.

Ms. Griffin’s research shows that many family members spend more than 40 hours a week providing care. Half feel that they do not have a choice.

“They feel stuck,” Ms. Griffin said.

Some walk away.

For Ms. Marcum, 37 — who has an 18-year marriage and two sons, ages 14 and 11, with Tom, 36 — there was never a question of leaving. “I’m his wife and it’s my job, whether he’s hurt or not, to make sure he’s O.K.,” she said.

When she first asked for a leave of absence from work to care for him, she expected it would be for just a few weeks, while doctors got to the bottom of the migraines keeping him in bed for days on end. When he was up, he often seemed confused and sometimes slurred his speech. After 12 years in the Air Force, where he worked as a weapons specialist, he was suddenly having trouble taking a phone message or driving home from the base.

Mr. Marcum, who endured several mortar attacks in Iraq, one of which knocked him unconscious, eventually was given diagnoses of traumatic brain injury and post-traumatic stress disorder.

“My wife, I would imagine, probably felt as if she was a single parent for a while,” said Mr. Marcum, who is now medically retired from the Air Force. “She had to raise two boys. And now at times she probably thinks that she’s raising three boys,” he added with a laugh.

Ms. Marcum has found relief at a weekend retreat for military wives in her situation, and on a private Facebook page where caregivers vent, offer emotional support and swap practical advice. Participants say online communities like these are often more supportive than their extended families, who sometimes retreat in the face of such overwhelming change.

Financially, at least, things are looking up for the Marcum family. Ms. Marcum was awarded the highest tier of coverage through the veterans agency’s new caregiver program, giving her a monthly stipend of $1,837. Physical, occupational and speech therapy have all helped Mr. Marcum improve, but she worries that his progress has plateaued.

“We kind of have been in the same spot for a while,” Ms. Marcum said.

As proud as she is of her husband’s service, Ms. Marcum feels guilty that neither of them now works, and hopes that one day she will again hold down a job, while continuing to care for him. She pictures herself working somewhere relaxed, like a Hallmark store, where she could chat with people and help them with cards and gifts. It would be an escape, she said, from the stress at home.

    Looking After the Soldier, Back Home and Damaged, NYT, 27.9.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/28/us/looking-after-the-soldier-back-home-and-damaged.html

At Arlington,

Obama Pays Tribute to US War Dead

September 10, 2011
The New York Times
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

ARLINGTON, Va. (AP) — President Barack Obama and first lady Michele Obama have visited Arlington National Cemetery where they paid tribute to members of the military killed in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

One day before the 10th anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks, the Obamas made a pilgrimage to Section 60 of the cemetery. The White House says that's the burial ground for military personnel killed in those two wars. Those conflicts have claimed 6,213 military personnel.

At one gravesite, the Obamas stopped to talk with members of a family who appeared to be visiting a grave. The Obamas chatted a few minutes, posed for pictures and gave out handshakes and hugs.

Then the Obamas, hand in hand, strolled along one of the rows between identical white tombstones, pausing at some markers.

    At Arlington, Obama Pays Tribute to US War Dead, NYT, 10.9.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/2011/09/10/us/AP-US-Sept-11-Obama-Arlington.html

Many Iraqis Have Second Thoughts

as U.S. Exit Nears

September 10, 2011
The New York Times
By MICHAEL S. SCHMIDT

BAGHDAD — Sheik Kamal Maamouri, the leader of one of the largest Shiite-dominated tribes in Iraq, used to call the United States troops here occupiers, demanding that they withdraw because he said they killed and imprisoned innocent members of his tribe.

But now he is not so sure he wants the Americans to go, at least not yet. Like many others across Iraq, he felt conflicted, and a bit frightened, after it was revealed last week that the United States may keep 3,000 to 4,000 troops in Iraq next year.

“The political changes that have occurred here and the security problems have led a lot of Iraqis, including me, to change our minds about the withdrawal of U.S. forces,” Mr. Maamouri said. That was a view that few Shiites, empowered by the fall of Saddam Hussein’s Sunni government, would ever have spoken — when it seemed the United States was never going to go.

“They bring a balance to Iraqi society,” he said.

Though Iraqis have called for Americans to leave from the start of the occupation in 2003, the prospect of such a drastic drawdown, from the 48,000 troops here now, has revealed another side of the Iraqi psyche. This is a nation that distrusts itself, with little faith in the government’s own security forces or political leaders. It is as if people here never actually believed that the United States would leave, so all along demands for a pullout were never carefully weighed against the potential fallout.

This is not to say that Iraqis no longer want to be liberated from a foreign military, which of course they say they do. But Iraqis who once cheered the fall of a dictator recall all too vividly the chaos and bloodshed that came after Mr. Hussein’s iron rule was broken. Iraq still has the fault lines of that past, Sunni versus Shiite, Arab versus Kurd. What it does not have are strong institutions, or a collective sense of national purpose, to hold it together.

“We shouldn’t think about the occupation emotionally,” said the governor of Anbar Province, Mohammed Qasim Abed, who for eight years wanted the Americans out, but now has had second thoughts as violence in his area escalates. “Iraq is just not ready, and it’s necessary for the Americans to stay to prevent Iran from overrunning the country and helping to prevent violence. But we know 3,000 troops will not be enough.”

The politics of occupation have not changed. For months, American officials warned the Iraqis that if they did not issue a formal request to stay, and soon, it would become logistically impossible to slow the pullout. After months of stalling, the government agreed to open negotiations to leave some forces behind.

Then last week it was revealed that Defense Secretary Leon E. Panetta is supporting a plan to keep as few as 3,000 soldiers in Iraq, enough to provide some training to Iraqi forces, and not much else. From the north to the center to the south, many Iraqis said they were shocked by such a small number and feared that the few Americans would become irresistible targets for violence, unable to safeguard themselves, let alone Iraq.

“If the Americans withdraw, there will be problems because there will be no great power in the country that everyone respects,” said Mateen Abdullah Karkukli, a 43-year-old Turkmen from Kirkuk. But, reflecting his own mixed feelings, he said, “If they stay, there will be a bigger problem because insurgents and militias will have justification to resume their armed activities.”

It is not altogether surprising that Kurds or Sunnis, minorities in the Shiite-majority nation, would be more apprehensive about an American withdrawal. Kurds worry that a strong Shiite-dominated government will upset the virtual autonomy they enjoy in the north. And Sunnis worry about violence from Shiite militias.

But there is also anxiety in unexpected places, like Babil, a Shiite-dominated city where residents have bitterly complained about midnight raids by American forces since 2003. Those feelings have not diminished, but they have been overshadowed for some by concerns that the Iraqi government would not be able to fill the vacuum the United States forces would leave behind.

“The leading parties now in the government tend to act like dictators,” said Mr. Maamouri, the tribal leader. “I am afraid if the Americans withdraw from Iraq, these parties will act even more like dictators. Three thousand troops will not be enough to deal with any of the threats facing Iraq.”

Iraqis have little faith in their government’s preserving modest gains and in restoring stability because of bombings, assassinations and rocket attacks that are still carried out on a daily basis. And to a large extent they blame the United States for rupturing their society, and then planning to pull out before repairing the damage it caused. Many Iraqis have a list of things they still want the Americans to do: prevent violence between Kurds and Arabs near the city of Kirkuk, and ensure that the prime minister, Nuri Kamal al-Maliki, and his government do not alienate the country’s Sunni minority.

“After the Iraqi government was formed, I began to discover that the Americans were far better than the current officials,” said Raad Hamada, 51, an oil engineer from Basra. “I wish that the United States would stay longer because we need their culture, their assistance and their development. The American security forces keep the evil and militias away.”

Many secular Sunnis and Shiites also say they worry the Iranians will be able to exert greater influence in Iraq if the United States keeps only 3,000 soldiers.

“The Americans insulted us, did de-Baathification and created the sectarian conflict,” said Khalif Mijbel al-Jebori, a 51-year-old farmer from Hawija. “And now they will leave and the countries that surround Iraq will come and dominate. But they created all of these problems, so they should stay and fix them.”

Analysts here say the Iraqi security forces have concentrated so much energy on trying to stop violence within the country’s borders that they failed to guard against an external threat. In Baghdad, the two agencies in charge of ensuring security — the Interior and Defense Ministries — have been without permanent leaders for a year and a half because of political infighting in Baghdad.

“The Iranians believe they have achieved something because the Americans are only going to keep 3,000 troops here,” said Mithal al-Alusi, a secular Sunni who used to be a member of Parliament from the Iraqi Nation Party. “The Iranians and their agents are celebrating. ”

Reporting was contributed by Yasir Ghazi, Zaid Thaker and Omar al-Jawoshy from Baghdad, and employees of The New York Times from Anbar Province, Iraq; Kirkuk, Iraq; and Babil, Iraq.

    Many Iraqis Have Second Thoughts as U.S. Exit Nears, NYT, 10.9.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/11/world/middleeast/11iraq.html

Analysis:

Obama's Risky Calculus

on Iraq Troop Levels

September 10, 2011
By REUTERS

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - When it comes to the tricky political calculus of deciding how many U.S. troops to keep in Iraq, President Barack Obama may truly have no good options.

Obama was an Iraq war opponent who repeatedly promised no U.S. troops will remain in the country beyond 2011, the deadline for the U.S. withdrawal under a bilateral pact.

But his past two defense secretaries have publicly advocated keeping some U.S. forces there on a training mission, should Iraq ask for it. To that end, Iraq and the United States agreed to start formal negotiations last month.

Sources tell Reuters the Obama administration is now considering options including a training force as small as 3,000 troops in the country. Obama's Democratic base may still feel that is too many and Republican critics say that number is too few to guard against a dangerous escalation in violence.

Any deterioration in Iraq could come back to haunt Obama during the 2012 U.S. presidential election year. It would remind Democrats that American forces are still in danger there while bolstering a Republican narrative of policy blunder.

In his State of the Union address, Obama vowed to "finish the job of bringing our troops out of Iraq." Civilians, he said, would forge a lasting partnership with the Iraqi people, a nod to an expanded role planned for the State Department.

To counter the impression of backpedaling, the Obama administration appears to be flirting with the idea of rebranding current military operations in Iraq as "combat" and future ones as "training."

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said last month, at event where she was flanked by Defense Secretary Leon Panetta, "our combat mission in Iraq ends at the end of this year."

"Our support and training mission, if there is to be such a one, is what the subject of this discussion (with the Iraqis) would be," she said at the National Defense University.

There is a problem though: Obama has already announced the end of the U.S. combat mission in Iraq. The remaining 43,000 or so forces in the country are already in an 'advise and assist' role, even though the U.S. military still sometimes conducts air strikes.

SPLIT WITH THE MILITARY?

Declaring that the "tide of war is receding," Obama announced in June a faster withdrawal from Afghanistan than his military had recommended. That may now happen in Iraq, although there are competing visions within the military itself about just how big a force may be needed.

Eight years after the United States ousted Saddam Hussein, Iraq is still building its police and army to battle a lethal Sunni Islamist insurgency and Shi'ite militias within, as well as defending against external threats.

Anti-U.S. Shi'ite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr, a key member of Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki's coalition government who openly opposes any continued U.S. presence, has threatened to escalate protests and military resistance if any American troops stay.

So, the U.S. military has emphasized that "force protection" for American troops will be key to any future mission in Iraq.

The Pentagon declined to comment on internal deliberations, but sources familiar with the matter said U.S. officers have felt at least 10,000 troops would be necessary to help Baghdad address all the shortcomings in its security forces.

Even so, Army Chief of Staff General Raymond Odierno, until last year the top U.S. commander in Iraq, has not expressed alarm at the possibility of keeping on just 3,000 troops.

He told reporters at the Pentagon on Thursday: "I always felt that we had to be careful about leaving too many people in Iraq. I'm not saying 3,000 to 5,000 is the right number. But what I would say is there comes a time when ... it becomes counter-productive" to have too many forces.

Too many troops risk being seen as an occupying force, he said.

KURDS VS ARABS

One example of a mission that could fall by the wayside is U.S. operations to keep the peace between Arabs and Kurds.

The president of Iraq's semi-autonomous Kurdish region warned this week that the withdrawal of U.S. forces will increase the possibility of a civil war.

"If you're doing 3,000, you could do a scaled-back version of the Northern Iraq mission and that's all you'd be doing," said a U.S. official, speaking on condition of anonymity.

Odierno, who had long been the face of the Iraq mission before General Lloyd Austin took over this year, said that wasn't necessarily the case.

"I've heard some discuss where we need 5,000 people to work the Arab-Kurd issue. Well, I've read some things lately that we think that they are starting to handle that," he said.

"So if that's the case, then we don't need those 5,000," he added, without directly taking a position on the issue.

(Editing by Warren Strobel and Christopher Wilson)

    Analysis: Obama's Risky Calculus on Iraq Troop Levels, NYT, 10.9.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/2011/09/10/us/politics/politics-us-usa-iraq-troops.html

Wounded Iraqi Veterans Face a New Battle

September 3, 2011
The New York Times
By TIM ARANGO and YASIR GHAZI

BAGHDAD — It is hard to say which is a worse indignity to the thousands of Iraqi soldiers and police officers who have suffered crippling injuries fighting alongside the Americans in a war that continues today: receiving subpar medical care from the government they fought to preserve, or a new law that could slash their already paltry benefits.

“We are defending the Iraqi people,” said Ali Mohammad Heaal, who was a police trainee when he lost his left arm in a car bomb attack in 2005 and now works at a nongovernmental organization that advocates on behalf of wounded members of Iraq’s security forces. “Right now, we feel humiliated.”

Mr. Heaal’s organization, the Lanterns of Mercy, is trying to overturn the new law, passed in July by Parliament, that raises the salaries of active-duty soldiers and police officers but reduces government payments to those who have been wounded, including those who have lost limbs and have been unable to obtain prosthetics to enable them to work again. The law could be put into effect as soon as this month.

His efforts appear to be paying dividends, as some members of Parliament now say they never intended to reduce compensation for war veterans and plan to consider amending the legislation. Even in Iraq, it seems, politicians are finding that there are risks to laws that appear to abandon veterans.

“We are studying it,” said Abbas al-Bayati, a lawmaker and a member of the security committee. “If we find there are problems, we are ready to modify it in a way that keeps the level of compensation for their sacrifices.”

As it is written now, the law would also reduce lump-sum payments to those who were severely wounded and rescind a provision from a previous law that awarded land to victims — even though many have not received any property.

Mr. Bayati said that the intention of the law was to raise salaries for active-duty soldiers and police officers, and that he was unaware of the provisions that reduced compensation for veterans. “This is an unintentional mistake, and we will address it through amendment as soon as possible,” he said.

Another lawmaker, Najiha Abdulamir, a member of a parliamentary commission for wounded veterans, said that if Parliament did not change the law, then veterans should “demonstrate and demand their rights.”

The controversy comes as the American military prepares to withdraw, leaving the fighting to Iraq’s soldiers and police officers, who continue to take casualties from insurgent attacks almost daily, and who face those dangers without the comfort of knowing that their country will care for them and honor their sacrifices if they are hurt.

The new law that will reduce veterans’ benefits has Iraq’s wounded feeling dishonored and ignored. Many recall Saddam Hussein’s time, when those who sacrificed to preserve a dictator’s power were rewarded with land and money. “If you compare now to the previous regime, it would have been better,” Mr. Heaal said. “And they call this a democracy.”

Many joined Iraq’s new army after it was reconstituted in 2005 for a mix of motives, economic and patriotic.

“There were no opportunities for work in 2003,” said Ali Jasim, 39, who fought alongside American soldiers and Marines before losing a leg in 2005 when he was struck by a roadside bomb while securing polling sites for a national referendum that year on Iraq’s new constitution. “I also felt I needed to protect my country.”

He and his sister, and their children, are squatters in a ramshackle and boxlike home constructed of concrete blocks in a poor Shiite neighborhood that is a maze of dirt alleys.

On a recent afternoon, Mr. Jasim was spending his day as he always does: lying on the floor, his head propped up on a pillow, sweltering from the lack of air-conditioning and surrounded by his children. Like many men in his position, he is experiencing a severe economic hardship that, with the passage of the new law, could get worse.

After his injury, Mr. Jasim continued to receive his full pay — which had included a combat bonus and allowances for food — of $700 a month. It was then reduced to $450 when the government stopped paying the extra danger pay. Under the new law, he said, his pay will fall to $200.

Mr. Heaal, the former police trainee, was forced to sell his house to pay for medical treatment after being wounded. He receives $530 a month, and he could see his compensation fall to under $200 a month.

The law has added a new layer of resentment toward politicians who operate in a sphere of corruption and favoritism, and who are widely seen as out of touch with most of the Iraqi people.

“I joined the police to protect my country in a time when you were afraid of going outside the Green Zone,” said Falah Hassan Abed, who was displaced from his home because he could not work after losing his right leg in 2005, directing his rage at lawmakers. “I was face to face with the ruthless killers, the terrorists. In return, I just want to live in dignity, me and my family, and not be forced to beg to feed my family. I want to feel that there is someone who is grateful for what I did and what I lost.”

In some ways the thousands of casualties among Iraq’s army and police are the forgotten victims of the war, overshadowed in many accounts of the conflict’s toll by the numbers of American troops and Iraqi civilians who have been killed or wounded. Those numbers are familiar and easily referenced: close to 5,000 American military personnel killed, and nearly 100,000 Iraqi civilians killed, according to some accounts. Among Iraq’s security forces, more than 10,000 have been killed, according to the Iraq Index compiled by the Brookings Institution, and while there is no precise estimate for the number wounded, that figure is certainly in the tens of thousands.

A further grievance for these soldiers and police officers is the knowledge that the American soldiers and Marines who fought with them returned home to a country that may not have supported the war, but supported them. They have glimpsed television images of American presidents visiting the wounded in military hospitals.

“Here in Iraq, we don’t have any officials visiting us,” Mr. Heaal said. “And now they are punishing us with this new law.”

 

Duraid Adnan contributed reporting.

    Wounded Iraqi Veterans Face a New Battle, NYT, 3.9.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/04/world/middleeast/04iraq.html

Iraq War Marks First Month

With No U.S. Military Deaths

August 31, 2011
The New York Times
By MICHAEL S. SCHMIDT

BAGHDAD — Under increased pressure from the United States, an Iraqi crackdown on Iranian-backed Shiite militias has helped produce a previously elusive goal: For the first time since the American invasion of Iraq, an entire month has passed without a single United States service member dying.

The milestone is particularly remarkable because it comes after 14 troops were killed in July, making it the most deadly month for the Americans in three years, and it has occurred amid a frightening campaign of suicide bombings and assassinations from Sunni insurgents that killed hundreds of Iraqis, resurrecting the specter of the worst days of sectarian fighting.

“If you had thought about a month without a death back during the surge in 2007, it would have been pretty hard to imagine because we were losing soldiers every day, dozens a week,” said Col. Douglas Crissman, who is in charge of American forces in four provinces of southern Iraq and oversaw a battalion in Anbar Province during the troop increase. “I think this shows how far the Iraqi security forces have come.”

None of the roughly 48,000 troops in Iraq were killed in August, a remarkable if fragile achievement, officials said. In all, 4,465 American soldiers have died here since the United States invasion in 2003, according to Defense Department figures.

American military commanders attribute the drop in deaths to the Iraqi government finally pushing back against Iran and the Shiite militias, as well as aggressive unilateral strikes by United States forces. If the Americans are correct, and August is not just a statistical blip, it may also be connected to the continuing negotiations between American and Iraqi officials over whether to leave some troops behind after the end of the year, experts said. Though all sides in Iraq have said they want the Americans to leave, each has some interest in seeing that some troops stay behind.

The Iraqi government continues to rely on American forces and expertise to preserve security. Shiite militias would lose some of their rationale for existence, and Al Qaeda and Sunni insurgents could lose a useful foil. For the United States, domestic political concerns would also make it easier to sell an extension to a war-weary public if there were fewer casualties.

“The militia groups involved are being paid by the Iranians to make trouble for the Americans, and that means that their main objective is no longer there if the Americans withdraw all their troops,” said Joost Hiltermann, the International Crisis Group’s deputy program director for the Middle East. “It doesn’t mean they won’t exist altogether, but their violence will be harder to justify.”

American military and diplomatic officials said Iraq has not only pressed the militias, but also sent word directly to Tehran to back off on attacks. The Iranians had used the militias, which are primarily based in the southern part of the country and Baghdad, to wage a proxy battle with the Americans for dominance and influence in Iraq. Those militias were responsible for 12 of the 14 deaths in June, many the result of rocket or mortar attacks on military bases.

American officials increased pressure on Iraqis to clamp down after the spate of attacks in June, and Iraq eventually responded. The government increased its counterterrorism operations against the militias, brought judges from Baghdad into the southern part of the country to ensure those captured were not summarily released, and replaced poorly performing generals, officials said.

Colonel Crissman, who worked with the Iraqi forces, said that at times they needed some additional prodding. “We did targeting on our own and some hand-holding of the Iraqis,” he said.

In July, nearly two-thirds of the Iraqi counterterrorism missions were aimed at Iranian-backed militias, compared with just a fifth of all missions in the first six months of the year. In the first half of the year the Shiite-led government focused on Al Qaeda and other Sunni insurgent groups, according to Maj. Gen. Jeffrey Buchanan, the military’s top spokesman in Iraq.

The operations and diplomatic efforts, according to American officials, significantly reduced the number of rocket attacks on military bases, particularly in southern Iraq, where the militias most frequently operate. In a single day in July, a base in the southern province of Maysan was attacked with rockets 43 times. The attacks in southern Iraq were so bad in July that the United States military took the unusual step of bombing open swaths of desert with a C-130 gunship and an Apache helicopter in the middle of the night to try and deter the militias.

“We used them out here as a demonstration to say these are the capabilities we have, and we are willing to use it to protect ourselves,” Colonel Crissman said.

The crackdown and the American use of force appear to have helped. In August, there were days when none of the American bases in southern Iraq received incoming fire.

“I wish U.S. service members could take full credit for being responsible for this, but it’s absolutely a combination of things coming together, particularly the Iraqis acting against the militias,” Colonel Crissman said.

Ali al-Moussawi, an adviser to Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki, said, “Part of the reason for the drop in troop deaths has been the growth and development of the Iraqi security forces.

“Providing security for the citizens and every one inside of Iraq is the duty of the government, even the foreign troops that are in Iraq legally,” Mr. Moussawi said. “The security breaches we’ve had in Iraq are not because of the militias. The security breaches we’ve had have been suicide bombers and other kinds of attacks. That is what worries us now.”

Colonel Crissman and other military officials cautioned that the August figures did not mean that Iraq was suddenly safe, either for the United States military or the Iraqis. They said that as the United States began to withdraw its troops in the coming months, there would likely be a resurgence in attacks as militias and insurgents tried to claim responsibility for pushing the Americans out of Iraq.

As much as the Iraqis have clamped down on the militias, their security forces are still struggling to thwart attacks from Al Qaeda and other Sunni insurgents. On Aug. 15, those insurgents pulled off a devastating series of attacks across Iraq, killing more than 90 people and wounding more than 300. None of those attacks, however, were aimed at Americans. Since then, there have been several suicide bomb attacks, including one inside a mosque on Sunday that killed more than 30 Iraqi civilians.

    Iraq War Marks First Month With No U.S. Military Deaths, NYT, 31.8.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/01/world/middleeast/01iraq.html

Threat Resurges

in Deadliest Day of Year for Iraq

August 15, 2011
The New York Times
By MICHAEL S. SCHMIDT

BAGHDAD — A chilling series of fatal attacks across Iraq on Monday sent a disheartening message to the Iraqi and American governments: After hundreds of billions of dollars spent since the United States invasion in 2003, and tens of thousands of lives lost, insurgents remain a potent and perhaps resurging threat to Iraqis and the American troops still in the country.

The 42 apparently coordinated attacks underscored the reality that few places in Iraq are safe. The number of American troops killed this year has jumped, ahead of their planned withdrawal. Monday’s strikes against civilians and security forces across the country made it the deadliest day of the year for Iraqis, and it came in many forms: suicide attacks, car bombs, homemade bombs and gunmen.

By sundown, when Iraqis broke their fast in observance of the holy month of Ramadan, the death toll had reached 89, including 3 suicide bombers, and an additional 315 people were wounded. The widespread and lethal nature of the attacks — compared with an average of 14 a day this year — frightened many Iraqis, because it suggested that radical Sunni insurgents, led by Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia, may have regained the capacity for the kind of violence that plagued Iraq at the height of the sectarian war in 2006 and 2007.

But it also demonstrated the multiple and simultaneous threats gripping the nation at this pivotal time, with Shiite militants being linked with the killing of American troops, and threatening more violence if they remain, and Iraqi forces clearly unable to preserve the peace.

“Our forces are supposed to have the intelligence capabilities to prevent these types of breaches,” said Shawn Mohammed Taha, a Kurdish member of Parliament who serves on its security committee. “The fact is, the insurgents have acted like our security forces don’t even exist.”

No group claimed responsibility for the attacks on Monday. But in a voice recording posted on a Web site for Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia last week, a spokesman for the terrorist group said that it was preparing a wide-scale strike.

“I promise you that we are on the right path,” said the spokesman, Abu Muhammad al-Adnani. “Thank God that we are doing very well here.”

“Do not worry, the days of Zarqawi are going to return soon,” he said, referring to Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the former leader of Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia who was killed by American forces in 2006. “We have men who have divorced themselves from life and love death more than you love life, and killing is one of their wishes.”

The attacks came just two weeks after the Iraqi government agreed to formally negotiate with the United States about possibly leaving some troops in Iraq after the end of the year.

“The insurgents are able to attack anywhere and everywhere and no one can really stop them,” Mr. Taha said, adding that the United States has achieved little in trying to improve Iraq’s own intelligence operation.

Still, one political analyst said he saw the attacks as a calculated bid to frighten the Iraqis into asking the American forces to stay behind, because if they completely withdraw, Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia will have lost its rationale for existing.

“If the Americans leave, Al Qaeda will no longer have an excuse to operate throughout the country,” said Hamid Fhadil, a professor of political science at Baghdad University. “Al Qaeda wants Americans to stay here so they will have Iraq as a battlefield to fight the Americans.”

Mr. Fhadil said that one of the biggest problems with the Iraqi security forces was that they were more loyal to armed groups like Al Qaeda and Shiite militias than to the Iraqi government. “This army is not able to take control by itself,” he said. “It’s hard to talk about the existence of an Iraqi Army and a Ministry of Interior without them being loyal to Iraq.”

The attacks began around 3:30 a.m. on Monday in the city of Ramadi, when two improvised bombs exploded near a police patrol, killing three officers and wounding two others. A half-hour later in the city of Baquba, gunmen attacked a checkpoint, killing one police officer.

About 5:45 a.m., two suicide bombers attacked an Iraqi counterterrorism unit in the city of Tikrit, killing three officers.

Fifteen minutes later, gunmen with silencer weapons attacked a group of Iraqi Army officers in Baquba, killing five.

At 7:45 a.m., the day’s most lethal attack occurred when two car bombs exploded in a market in the southern city of Kut, killing 35 people and wounding 71 others.

An hour and a half after that attack, two suicide car bombers struck a police checkpoint in the city of Taji, just north of Baghdad, killing one person and wounding nine, including seven officers.

Saad Ahmed, 38, a policeman who was wounded in Taji, said he opened fire on a suicide bomber who was driving toward him.

The car struck Mr. Ahmed and knocked him to the ground. He said he stood up and fired again. Seconds later, the attacker detonated the car bomb.

“I looked at my body, and I was drowning in blood,” he said at Kadhimiya Hospital in Baghdad, where he was being treated for wounds to his legs, arm and neck. “I just thought about my friends and if they were O.K., because it was 9:15 in the morning and there was a change in shifts.”

He added: “It is Ramadan this month, and we should pray that we won’t kill each other. What crime did we commit? We were just trying to protect our country.”

Another policeman being treated at the hospital, Amir Khazal, 33, said that he was leaving work at the time of the attack.

“I was just about the leave the checkpoint for vacation,” he said. “All I wanted was to get home to my kids. I heard gunfire at the beginning and then I heard shouting saying, ‘Car bomb, car bomb!’ ” “After that there was a boom,” he said. “I heard my friend calling me: ‘Help, help, I lost my leg!’ ”

Around 8 p.m., gunmen dressed in military uniforms stormed into a mosque in the city of Yusufiya, just south of Baghdad. The gunmen read off the names of seven people who had been loyal to the United States and joined the Awakening movement, took them outside the mosque and executed them.

After the execution, the gunmen told the people gathered in the mosque that they were from Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia and then left.

 

Reporting was contributed by Yasir Ghazi and Duraid Adnan from Baghdad, and Iraqi employees of The New York Times from the provinces of Diyala, Salahuddin, Babil and Anbar, and the cities of Kirkuk, Najaf, Kut and Mosul.

    Threat Resurges in Deadliest Day of Year for Iraq, NYT, 15.8.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/16/world/middleeast/16iraq.html

To Track Militants,

U.S. Has System

That Never Forgets a Face

July 13, 2011
The New York Times
By THOM SHANKER

WASHINGTON — When the Taliban dug an elaborate tunnel system beneath the largest prison in southern Afghanistan this spring, they set off a scramble to catch the 475 inmates who escaped.

One thing made it easier. Just a month before the April jailbreak, Afghan officials, using technology provided by the United States, recorded eye scans, fingerprints and facial images of each militant and criminal detainee in the giant Sarposa Prison.

Within days of the breakout, about 35 escapees were recaptured at internal checkpoints and border crossings; they were returned to prison after their identities were confirmed by biometric files.

One escapee was seized during a routine traffic stop less than two miles from his home village. Another was recaptured at a local recruiting station where he was trying to infiltrate Afghan security forces.

With little notice and only occasional complaints, the American military and local authorities have been engaged in an ambitious effort to record biometric identifying information on a remarkable number of people in Afghanistan and Iraq, particularly men of fighting age.

Information about more than 1.5 million Afghans has been put in databases operated by American, NATO and local forces. While that is one of every 20 Afghan residents, it is the equivalent of roughly one of every six males of fighting age, ages 15 to 64.

In Iraq, an even larger number of people, and a larger percentage of the population, have been registered. Data have been gathered on roughly 2.2 million Iraqis, or one in every 14 citizens — and the equivalent of one in four males of fighting age.

To get the information, soldiers and police officers take digital scans of eyes, photographs of the face, and fingerprints. In Iraq and Afghanistan, all detainees and prisoners must submit to such scrutiny. But so do local residents who apply for a government job, in particular those with the security forces and the police and at American installations. A citizen in Afghanistan or Iraq would almost have to spend every minute in a home village and never seek government services to avoid ever crossing paths with a biometric system.

What is different from traditional fingerprinting is that the government can scan through millions of digital files in a matter of seconds, even at remote checkpoints, using hand-held devices distributed widely across the security forces.

While the systems are attractive to American law enforcement agencies, there is serious legal and political opposition to imposing routine collection on American citizens.

Various federal, state and local law enforcement agencies have discussed biometric scanning, and many have even spent money on hand-held devices. But the proposed uses are much more limited, with questions being raised about constitutional rights of privacy and protection from warrantless searches.

In Afghanistan and Iraq, there are some complaints — but rarely on grounds recognizable to Americans as civil liberties issues.

Afghanistan, in particular, is a nation with no legacy of birth certificates, driver’s licenses or social security numbers, and where there is a thriving black market in forged national identity papers. Some Afghans are concerned that in the future the growing biometric database could be abused as a weapon of ethnic, tribal or political retaliation — a census of any particular group’s adversaries. Even Afghan officials who support the program want to take it over themselves, and not have the Americans do it.

“To be sure, there must be sound and responsible policies and oversight regarding enrollment and the storage, use and sharing of private individual data,” said Brig. Gen. Mark S. Martins, commander of the military’s new Rule of Law Field Force in Afghanistan.

But he stressed that biometric systems “can combat fraud and corruption, place law enforcement on a sounder evidentiary footing, and greatly improve security.”

Instant, computerized iris scans as a tool of population control used to be the monopoly of science fiction films. Even real-world use of biometric identification technologies overseas was for years reserved for the intelligence agencies and the military’s elite hunter-killer commando units.

But a new generation of hand-held biometric systems has spread across the military.

“You can present a fake identification card,” said Sgt. Maj. Robert Haemmerle of the Combined Joint Interagency Task Force 435. “You can shave your beard off. But you can’t change your biometrics.” The task force conducts detention, judicial and biometrics operations — responsibilities that will be turned over to the Afghan government.

Defense Department spending on biometrics programs is enormous, set at $3.5 billion for the 2007 through 2015 fiscal years, according to the Government Accountability Office.

The concept of expanding biometrics for wholesale application on the battlefield was first tested in 2004 by Marine Corps units in Falluja, a militant stronghold in Anbar Province, Iraq. The insurgent safe haven was walled off, and only those who submitted to biometrics were allowed in and out.

In late 2004, when an Iraqi militant was allowed on to an American base in Mosul, where he detonated a suicide vest and killed 22 in a dining tent, commanders ordered a stringent identification program for Iraqi and third-country citizens entering American facilities.

Gen. David H. Petraeus, reviewing these efforts when he took command in Iraq in 2007, ordered a surge of biometric scans across the war zone to match the increase in American troops.

General Petraeus lauds the technology, not only for separating insurgents from the population in which they seek to hide, but also for cracking cells that build and plant roadside bombs, the greatest killer of American troops in Iraq and Afghanistan. Fingerprints and other forensic tidbits can be lifted from a defused bomb or from remnants after a blast, and compared with the biometric files on former detainees and suspected or known militants.

“This data is virtually irrefutable and generally is very helpful in identifying who was responsible for a particular device in a particular attack, enabling subsequent targeting,” said General Petraeus, who will soon retire as commander in Afghanistan to become director of central intelligence. “Based on our experience in Iraq, I pushed this hard here in Afghanistan, too, and the Afghan authorities have recognized the value and embraced the systems.”

Military officials acknowledge that the new systems fielded by American, coalition and Afghan units do not all speak to one another. The hand-held devices fail in the awesome heat of the Afghan summer. Screens break when dropped. But a significant challenge in spreading biometric devices among an illiterate Afghan security force was resolved when the operating system was changed from English to an easy-to-teach system of color-coded commands.

    To Track Militants, U.S. Has System That Never Forgets a Face, R, 13.7.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/14/world/asia/14identity.html

U.S. Braces for Withdrawal

Along Iraqi Road

June 6, 2011
The New York Times
By MICHAEL S. SCHMIDT

BAGHDAD — Even as the American military winds down its eight-year war in Iraq, commanders are bracing for what they fear could be the most dangerous remaining mission: getting the last troops out safely.

The resurgent threat posed by militants was underscored Monday when rockets slammed into a military base in eastern Baghdad, killing five service members in the most deadly day for American forces here since 2009. In recent weeks, insurgent fighters have stepped up their efforts to kill American forces in what appears to be a strategy to press the United States to withdraw on schedule, undercut any resolve to leave troops in Iraq, and win a public relations victory at home by claiming credit for the American withdrawal.

American commanders say one of the gravest threats to the 46,000 troops here is that they could become easy targets for insurgents when they begin their final withdrawal this summer and head for the border along a 160-mile stretch of road cutting through the desert into Kuwait.

“Our forces were attacked today, and we were just sitting still,” said Col. Douglas Crissman, who is in charge of American forces in four provinces of southern Iraq, and is overseeing highway security in them. “What is going to happen to the threat when we line up our trucks to leave and start moving out of the country?”

Eight years in Iraq has taught the United States military a hard-learned lesson, that American forces cannot effectively secure large areas without the help of the local people. So commanders have fashioned an exit strategy which borrows a key element from the Awakening Movement, a successful tactical program carried out in 2006, just as the violence was peaking. The American exit strategy calls for the military to give cash payments of $10,000 a month to 10 tribal leaders.

Officially, the money is paid to have Iraqis clean the crucial roadway of debris, an apparent pretense because an Iraqi-American agreement bars outright payments for security. The sheiks keep some of the cash and use the rest to hire 35 workers each who clear the road of trash. The work does make it harder for militants to hide bombs.

But the military says it is aiming for more than a highway beautification project. It is hoping for local people to help police the road and the area, and to provide intelligence on militants.

“I can’t possibly be all places at one time,” said Colonel Crissman. “There are real incentives for them to keep the highway safe. Those sheiks we have the best relationships with and have kept their highways clear and safe will be the most likely ones to get renewed for the remainder of the year.”

So far, the contracts have proved to be a cost-effective method for improving troop safety, even at $100,000 a month. Roadside bomb attacks on American and Iraqi soldiers stationed in the area are down, officials said, as are rocket attacks on the military base from areas controlled by the sheiks.

The contracts, officials said, cost far less than nearly all the other measures the military has used in Iraq to ensure security, and sheiks provide the names of the workers so the military can conduct a security check.

“The cost of a damaged MRAP that gets hit by an explosive device is $400,000, and we are not even talking about the cost of a human life,” said Colonel Crissman, referring to an armored vehicle the American troops use. “Given the amount of money we have spent in this country, $100,000 to secure our highway a month is a small price to pay, especially given the importance of the highway to the withdrawal.”

On many days, workers can be seen raking up trash and throwing tires into pickup trucks. Several times a week, the military flies over the highway to ensure that the sections are clean. The value of the contracts — along with their limitations — is evident in roads neighboring the highway, where attacks are up.

That has prompted commanders to begin to expand the program to include neighboring roads as well.

And local sheiks across southern Iraq are more than eager for the cash, jockeying for a chance to collect what may the last bit of military largess. The money also helps the sheiks solidify the loyalty of their own people by giving them the power to dole out jobs.

But the military says the Shiite militias are also aware of the influence cash payments can have with tribal leaders, and so they, too, try to buy allegiance, intelligence and access. “There are some sheiks who are working for the other team and are being paid well by the militants so they can operate in their land,” Colonel Crissman said, referring to Shiite militants who operate in southern Iraq.

Shiite militias and followers of the anti-American Shiite cleric Moktada al-Sadr have been some of the United States’ fiercest enemies in Iraq. The groups, which have close ties to Iran, have stepped up their anti-American activities recently as Iraqi lawmakers in Baghdad have debated whether to ask the Americans to stay past their scheduled departure date.

Last week, followers of Mr. Sadr, whose Shiite militia, the Mahdi Army, was largely defeated three years ago, held a mass demonstration in Baghdad in which they marched unarmed in formations, trampling over American flags and calling for the Americans to withdraw.

The potential value of the highway cleaning contracts was illustrated last month when a reporter for The New York Times accompanied Lt. Col. Robert Wright to a lunch with tribal leaders.

The meeting, which took place in a tent in the middle of a barren stretch of desert, lasted for three hours, as the tribe’s leaders and Americans ate from large platters of rice and lamb and talked about their families and Iraqi politics. Then on the ride back toward the American base, one of the tribal leaders offered a bit of intelligence regarding Shiite militants who he said met regularly in an open field.

The colonel said he was interested — and then the local leader raised the topic of a contract, to clean the highway.

This article has been revised

to reflect the following correction:

Correction: June 7, 2011

An earlier version of this article misstated the number of fatalities in Monday's attacks on American forces in Iraq. It is five, not six.

    U.S. Braces for Withdrawal Along Iraqi Road, NYT, 6.6.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/07/world/middleeast/07iraq.html

Five U.S. troops killed in Iraq rocket attack

BAGHDAD | Mon Jun 6, 2011
2:54pm EDT
Reuters
By Muhanad Mohammed

BAGHDAD (Reuters) - Five U.S. service members were killed in a rocket attack in Iraq on Monday, in the worst single toll for American troops in the country for at least two years, the U.S. military and Iraqi security officials said.

The attack showed Iraq's security situation is still precarious despite a decline in violence. U.S. troops are preparing to withdraw from the country more than eight years after the invasion that toppled former dictator Saddam Hussein.

The U.S. military in Iraq gave few details, saying only that a base in eastern Baghdad came under "indirect fire."

A senior Iraqi security official said the Americans had died when militants fired rockets into a joint base in Baghdad's Baladiyat district in the east of the capital.

"This morning, the American base at Loyalty Camp came under rocket attack. There was a lot of smoke inside and the Americans died in that attack in the Baladiyat area," the security official, who asked not to be named, told Reuters.

Loyalty Forward Operating Base, on the former site of Saddam's internal security directorate, is next to Sadr City, the stronghold of anti-U.S. Shi'ite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr.

Two suspected militants involved in the attack were killed when a rocket exploded prematurely on the truck they were using as a launch platform, an Interior Ministry source said.

Violence in Iraq has steadily declined since the height of sectarian conflict in 2006-7, but gun and bomb attacks still occur daily, often targeting local Iraqi security forces.

At least 13 people, mostly Iraqi soldiers, were killed on Monday when a suicide bomber detonated a car in an attack on security forces in the central city of Tikrit.

Tikrit is dominated by Sunni Muslims, a minority in Iraq who were favored under Saddam. Suspected Sunni Islamists, including al Qaeda, have carried out frequent attacks in the town and surrounding Salahuddin province, trying to destabilize the Baghdad government and stir up sectarian tension.

 

WITHDRAWAL DEBATE

U.S. forces officially ended combat operations in Iraq last August ahead of a scheduled U.S. troop withdrawal at the end of this year. American troops are now mainly involved in a support and training role, and helping Iraqi security forces in counter-terrorism operations.

U.S. fatalities in Iraq since last year have become more sporadic. Two U.S. soldiers were killed in May. Monday's deaths brought the total of U.S. military casualties in Iraq since 2003 to 4,459, the icasualties.org website reported.

So far this year, 29 U.S. service members have been killed in Iraq, compared with 60 last year and 150 in 2009, the website said. That compares with 961 in 2007 at the height of the sectarian conflict.

Around 47,000 U.S. troops still in Iraq are due to leave by the end of 2011 under a security pact, and Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki's Shi'ite-led coalition government is debating the sensitive question of whether to ask Washington to keep some of them in place.

U.S. officials and senior Iraqi military commanders have said they believe some kind of continuing U.S. military presence is necessary to ensure Iraq's security and defense needs, especially in an advisory and training role.

 

(Additional reporting by Khalid al-Ansary, Waleed Ibrahim and Suadad al-Salhy; writing by Patrick Markey; Editing by Jon Hemming)

    Five U.S. troops killed in Iraq rocket attack, R, 6.6.2011,
    http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/06/06/us-iraq-violence-usa-idUSTRE7553ZW20110606

Two U.S. troops killed

as Baghdad hit by bombs

BAGHDAD | Sun May 22, 2011
5:09pm EDT Reuters
By Muhanad Mohammed

BAGHDAD (Reuters) - A string of bombings killed at least 15 people and wounded 74 more across Baghdad on Sunday and two U.S. troops were killed in central Iraq, officials said.

Violence in Iraq has dropped sharply since the height of sectarian conflict four years ago, but bombings, assassinations and attacks occur daily as the remaining U.S. troops prepare to pull out of the country by the end of this year.

At least 11 Iraqi troops were killed when a bomber blew up his car among a group of soldiers investigating another car bomb outside a checkpoint on a main street in Taji, 20 km (12 miles) north of Baghdad, said the capital's security spokesman, Major-General Qassim al-Moussawi.

"Two vehicles exploded in Taji. The first was a parked car bomb. They were trying to defuse it, when another driver blew himself up," he said.

The two U.S. troops were killed on Sunday during operations in central Iraq, the U.S. military said in a statement with no further details of when or how they died.

Iraqi security forces and police are often targeted by insurgents as Washington prepares to withdraw the last U.S. troops at year-end, more than eight years after the invasion that ousted Saddam Hussein from power.

On Sunday, four roadside bombs and a parked car bomb also targeted an Iraqi Federal Police base in Amil District, southwestern Baghdad, killing two civilians and wounding 15 including three policemen, a security official said.

Two more people were killed and another seven were wounded by another roadside bomb planted near a hospital in Sadr City in northeastern Baghdad.

Iraqi forces will take over full control of security at the end of this year when the remaining 47,000 U.S. troops are scheduled to leave Iraq. U.S. troops are now mainly engaged in training and advising Iraqi forces.

Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki has said Iraqi forces are ready to contain internal threats. But he has called on Iraq's main political parties to discuss the sensitive issue of whether to extend the presence of some U.S. troops.

Some officials have suggested a small U.S. force remain to assist Iraqis in areas such as intelligence and border security. But already the idea of U.S. troops remaining has sparked street protests.

Three other soldiers were also killed on Sunday by a bomb attached to their Iraqi army vehicle in the town of Tuz Khurmato 170 km (105 miles) north of Baghdad, police said.

Three bombs targeting security forces killed 27 people last week in the northern oil city of Kirkuk, a disputed area with a mixed Arab and Kurd population and a potential flashpoint once U.S. troops leave.

 

(Reporting by Muhanad Mohammed, Baghdad newsroom; Writing by Patrick Markey; Editing by Jon Hemming)

    Two U.S. troops killed as Baghdad hit by bombs, R, 22.5.2011,
    http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/05/22/us-iraq-attack-idUSTRE74L0TN20110522

Iraqi soldiers say need U.S. beyond 2011 for training

BESMAYA, Iraq | Mon Apr 18, 2011
4:00pm EDT
Reuters
By Serena Chaudhry and Muhanad Mohammed

BESMAYA, Iraq (Reuters) - Some Iraqi soldiers are worried about the U.S. troops' withdrawal from Iraq at the end of the year and say the country's security forces need more training to use the modern tanks and jets it has bought.

The U.S. military moved into an advisory and assistance role to Iraq's 660,000-strong police and military after ending combat operations last August. But the readiness of Iraqi troops to fend off a still-potent insurgency remains a concern among many.

Eight years after the U.S.-led invasion that ousted Saddam Hussein, the U.S. military is due to depart by December 31 under a security agreement between the two countries.

"The Iraqi army needs the Americans for training because most of the weapons are modern and we need training to use them," Iraqi soldier Karim Saleh told Reuters on Monday during a live fire exercise at Besmaya training camp, 90 km (55 miles) southeast of Baghdad.

Iraqi Army Brigadier Abbas Fadhil, the base commander at Besmaya agreed. "I don't get involved with policy, that depends on the government ... (but) we need this training. We need this for the people," he said. "For us, it's important (to have U.S. training beyond 2011)."

Iraq has bought a range of modern military equipment to boost its forces, including armored personnel carriers, patrol boats, M1A1 Abrams tanks and towed and self-propelled howitzers.

It is expected to receive 99 out of 140 M1A1 Abrams tanks by the end of this month and the rest by the end of the year. However, some equipment will be delivered after 2011, and some Iraqi officials are worried the training received by the time U.S. troops depart will not be sufficient to operate it.

Much of the U.S. troops' training has been focused on Iraq's army and police. Its navy and air force -- which suffered a major setback earlier this year after Iraq diverted funds for the purchase of F-16 fighter jets to its national food ration scheme -- are underdeveloped comparatively.

MODERNISE FORCE

Bombings and killings remain a daily occurrence and although violence has subsided from the height of sectarian fighting in 2006-07, Shi'ite militia and Sunni insurgents are still able to carry out lethal attacks.

Two suicide car bombers killed five people and wounded 20 others on Monday near the western gate of Baghdad's fortified Green Zone, where Iraq is scheduled to host an Arab League summit next month.

On a recent trip to Iraq, U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Gates pushed the Iraqi government to decide quickly whether it wanted U.S. forces to stay longer. Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki has said his police and army are ready and U.S. troops will not be needed beyond the year's end.

On Monday, Iraqi forces at Besmaya demonstrated their capability with an exercise showing how units of the air force and army can work together.

Saleh, who was trained at Besmaya by U.S. soldiers, said the U.S. military had made a big impact in developing the Iraqi army's combat abilities but stressed the need for further training beyond 2011 to help modernize the security forces.

"Iraqi trainers have become experienced but not at the same level as American trainers," he said. "Without them, the Iraqi army will remain unchanged and will not develop ... the Iraqi government has to keep the Americans to train our army."

(Writing by Serena Chaudhry;

Editing by Elizabeth Fullerton)

Iraqi soldiers say need U.S. beyond 2011 for training, R, 18.4.2011,
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-iraq-us-training/iraqi-soldiers-say-need-u-s-beyond-2011-for-training-idUSTRE73H59U20110418

U.N. confirms 34 dead

at Iranian camp in Iraq

UNITED NATIONS | Thu Apr 14, 2011
6:33pm EDT
Reuters
By Louis Charbonneau

UNITED NATIONS (Reuters) - The United Nations on Thursday confirmed 34 people have been found dead at an Iranian dissident camp in Iraq after Iraqi security forces moved against the camp last week.

"We are aware of 34 dead in the camp and its immediate environs," U.N. spokesman Farhan Haq said. "We're trying to get further details."

He said U.N. officials visited the camp on Wednesday.

The fatality count was the same number of deaths Camp Ashraf residents had reported. Their death toll was disputed by Iraqi authorities, who said only three people were killed in the operation and others were dead before troops moved in.

Iraqi authorities say the three were killed when security forces responded to rock-throwing and threats by residents during an operation to reclaim land from the camp and return it to farmers. The Iraqi Defense Ministry has said it will launch an investigation into the operation.

Senator John Kerry, chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, said the U.N. confirmation was "deeply disturbing and the Iraqi military action is simply unacceptable."

He said in a statement that the situation at the camp was untenable and urged the Iraqis to take "corrective action" and "stop the bleeding."

"The Iraqi government has announced a full investigation into the massacre and it must be thorough and serious," he said. "The investigation must hold accountable the responsible parties and ensure that there will be no sequel."

Ashraf is the base of the People's Mujahideen Organization of Iran, which the United States, Iraq and Iran consider a terrorist organization, although the European Union removed it from its terrorism blacklist in 2009.

The group, seeking the overthrow of Iran's Islamic government, mounted attacks on Iran from Iraq before Saddam Hussein's 2003 downfall. In the 1970s, it led a guerrilla campaign against the U.S.-backed Shah of Iran, including attacks on U.S. targets.

Hussein gave it refuge in Iraq in the 1980s and some of its fighters joined him in the 1980-1988 war against Iran. The group surrendered its weapons to U.S. forces after the 2003 invasion that ousted Saddam.

Maryam Rajavi, head of the group's political wing, the National Council of Resistance of Iran, said the U.N. statement confirmed "the scope of the crimes perpetrated by the Iraqi forces ... against defenseless and civilian Ashraf residents."

"This atrocity is a clear case of crime against humanity, war crime and crime against (the) international community," she said in a statement, adding that a U.N. team should remain at Camp Ashraf to monitor the situation there.

(Reporting by Louis Charbonneau;

editing by Mohammad Zargham)

    U.N. confirms 34 dead at Iranian camp in Iraq, R, 14.3.2011,
    http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/04/14/us-iraq-iran-ashraf-idUSTRE73D81N20110414

Iraqi cleric warns of violence

if U.S. troops don't go

BAGHDAD | Sat Apr 9, 2011
8:37am EDT
Reuters
By Muhanad Mohammed

BAGHDAD (Reuters) - Iraq's fiery anti-American cleric Moqtada al-Sadr will "escalate military resistance" and unleash his Mehdi Army militia if U.S. troops fail to leave Iraq as scheduled this year, his aides said on Saturday.

On the 8th anniversary of the day U.S. forces toppled Saddam Hussein's statue in Baghdad, senior Sadr aide Hazem al-Araji told tens of thousands of followers: "We say to the Black House (White House), 'we are all time bombs and the detonators are at the hands of Moqtada al-Sadr.' American troops must definitely leave our lands."

Men, women and children -- many waving Iraq's black, white and red flag or singing songs -- gathered in Baghdad's Mustansiriya square to mark the occasion. The mood was festive, and vendors milled around, selling ice cream, water and juice.

Some of the followers carried signs reading "Occupiers Out" and "No to America." Others burned U.S., Israeli and British flags, or draped white funeral shrouds over their shoulders -- signifying they were willing to die for their beliefs.

As the crowd cheered wildly, spokesman Salah al-Ubaidi read out a speech from the influential Shi'ite cleric, warning an extension of the U.S. "occupation" would have two consequences.

"First, the escalation of military resistance work and the withdrawal of the order freezing the Mehdi Army, in a new statement issued later. Second, escalation of peaceful and public resistance through sit-ins and protests, to say that the people want the exit of the occupation," he said.

Sadr is currently in Iran, a source close to him said.

The warning came after visiting U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Gates pressed the Iraqi government to decide if it wanted U.S. troops to stay on and help fend off a festering insurgency.

Ali Mohammed, a 39-year-old government employee at the protest who had wrapped an Iraqi flag around his head, said a delayed withdrawal would trigger extraordinary violence.

"They must understand that our resistance now is peaceful, but it will turn into actions beyond imagination," he said.

MEHDI ARMY

Some 47,000 remaining forces are scheduled to leave by year's end under a security agreement between the two countries.

Sadr's Mehdi Army militia fought U.S. troops during the height of Iraq's sectarian bloodshed in 2006-07, when tens of thousands of Iraqis were killed. Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki sent government troops to crush the militia in 2008.

U.S. officials and Sunni Arab leaders accused the Mehdi Army of being behind many of the sectarian killings in Iraq after the 2003 U.S. invasion that deposed Sunni dictator Saddam Hussein.

Sadr disavowed violence against fellow Iraqis and in 2008 ordered his militia to become a humanitarian group. The black-clad fighters have maintained a relatively low profile since but U.S. officials still regard them with suspicion.

Sadr's political movement won strong support in elections last year and overcame animosity toward Maliki to join his coalition government, formed in December after nine months of tense negotiations between Shi'ite, Sunni and Kurdish factions.

Sadr, who fled Iraq in 2006 or 2007 after an arrest warrant was issued for him, has lived and studied in neighboring Iran in recent years. He returned in early January but did not stay long before heading back to Iran.

Sadr and his senior leaders have the ability to turn out hundreds of thousands of enthusiastic followers.

Maliki has said foreign troops will not be needed in Iraq after the U.S. security pact expires at year-end but U.S. and Iraqi military officials have said Iraq's fledgling army and police still need help, particularly with air defense to protect against external threats.

(Additional reporting by Ahmed Rasheed in Baghdad;

Writing by Jim Loney and Caroline Drees;

Editing by Mike Nesbit)

    Iraqi cleric warns of violence if U.S. troops don't go, R, 9.4.2011,
http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/04/09/us-iraq-protests-idUSTRE73816Z20110409

Suicide Bomber Kills 30

on Pilgrimage in Iraq

February 12, 2011
The New York Times
By JACK HEALY

BAGHDAD — A suicide bomber attacked a bus carrying Shiite pilgrims home from Samarra on Saturday, killing at least 30 people in the latest of several recent assaults on pilgrims.

It was the second attack in three days against Shiite pilgrims near Samarra, whose gold-domed shrine was damaged in a 2006 bombing that led to waves of sectarian killings between Iraq’s Sunni and Shiite populations.

The bombing happened at one of about 40 checkpoints that line the road between Samarra and Baghdad, highlighting how easily attackers are able to exploit security flaws at the remote outposts. The checkpoints often cause traffic to back up, leaving vehicles open to attack.

According to security officials, the bus was stopped at a police checkpoint about seven miles south of Samarra on Saturday afternoon when the bomber strode through the checkpoint and walked up to the vehicle’s open front door.

One report on Iraqi television said the attacker had been speaking with police officers seconds before he detonated his explosive vest.

There were no claims of responsibility, but security officials quickly blamed Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia, a Sunni group, and said the bombing highlighted flaws in Iraq’s intelligence-gathering.

“Checkpoints cannot prevent such operations,” said Falah al-Naqeeb, a former minister of the interior and a candidate to become Iraq’s next defense minister. “We have a problem in our security strategy. It really depends on intelligence to prevent such attacks.”

On Thursday, a car bomb killed nine pilgrims heading to Samarra’s Askariya Shrine, where two revered Shiite imams are buried.

Every year, hundreds of thousands of Iraqi and Iranian pilgrims flock to Samarra to visit the shrine. Saturday was the anniversary of the death of one of the imams, an occasion that drew large crowds.

After the attack, religious leaders from Samarra asked citizens to donate blood. At the city’s main hospital, some of the 28 people wounded in the attack seethed at the government’s inability to prevent attackers from striking groups of pilgrims.

“No one is doing anything to stop the killing,” said a man who gave his name as Abu Amjad. “Why do we always have to be the sacrifice?”

Millions of pilgrims have flocked to shrines in Iraq since the American invasion in 2003, but militants have exploited the displays of faith — banned under Saddam Hussein — to sow unrest. Attacks against buses of Iranian pilgrims are common.

In late January, suicide car bombers struck lines of Shiite pilgrims marching to a revered shrine in Karbala to celebrate an annual Shiite holiday.

Also on Saturday, the police said that a mass grave discovered a day earlier in northeastern Iraq contained the bodies of as many as 153 men, women and children. Officials said they believed that the victims were civilians who had been executed by Al Qaeda in 2006, when the militant group controlled large parts of the area.

Security officials said the grave was the largest of the 13 that have been uncovered in Diyala Province.


Zaid Thaker, Khalid D. Ali, Omar al-Jawoshy and an Iraqi employee of The New York Times contributed reporting.

    Suicide Bomber Kills 30 on Pilgrimage in Iraq, NYT, 2.2011, http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/13/world/middleeast/13iraq.html

Maliki Won’t Seek Another Term

February 5, 2011
The New York Times
By MICHAEL S. SCHMIDT

BAGHDAD — Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki said Saturday that he would not seek re-election as leader of the Iraqi government after his current term ends in 2014. The statement came a day after Mr. Maliki, who began his second term in December, said he would cut his pay in half.

The announcements came as antigovernment protests have swept the Arab world, but a spokesman for the prime minister said Mr. Maliki’s decisions had nothing to do with regional developments.

Mr. Maliki is simply keeping a campaign promise to implement term limits, the spokesman said.

“Don’t take it in the frame of the recent wave with Ali Abdullah Saleh and whatever is going on,” the spokesman, Ali al-Moussawi, said in an interview, referring to the leader of Yemen who said last week that he would not run for another term. “Whatever is going on with the prime minister has to do with the democratic process.”

Under the Iraqi Constitution, the only top leader subject to term limits is the president, who is limited to two four-year terms. Mr. Moussawi said that Mr. Maliki would seek a constitutional amendment to impose the same requirements on the prime minister.

The pay cut, Mr. Moussawi said Friday, was aimed at reducing the vast income gap between high-ranking government officials and ordinary Iraqis. Mr. Maliki is believed to earn about $350,000 a year, although the precise amount has never been made public.

But opposition leaders said they thought regional developments were at play.

Fatah al-Sheikh, a member of the Iraqiya bloc, the mostly Sunni coalition led by former Prime Minister Ayad Allawi, said that Mr. Maliki “saw what is going on the Arab streets and he knows the Iraqi street is not satisfied with what he has given them.”

He added, “A year has passed with his promises for services and security, and the situation is going to get worse.”

Iraqis have protested sporadically in the past six months over the lack of electricity and other services, and complaints that Mr. Maliki has become too powerful. However, those protests have not been as large or violent as the ones in Yemen, Tunisia and Egypt.


Zaid Thaker and Duraid Adnan contributed reporting.

    Maliki Won’t Seek Another Term, NYT, 5.2.2011, http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/06/world/middleeast/06baghdad.html

A Year in Iraq and Afghanistan

January 29, 2011
The New York Times
By IAN LIVINGSTON,
ALICIA CHENG and SARAH GEPHART

IN 2010, the United States and its allies continued to shift the military focus from Iraq and to Afghanistan. American troop levels in Iraq fell by half, from more than 100,000 troops in January to under 50,000. In Afghanistan, a surge of mainly United States troops brought numbers to roughly 140,000, from near 100,000 at the beginning of the year. As shown in the chart (based on data from the Pentagon, icasualties.org and American allies), in 2010 there were 696 fatalities in Afghanistan and 56 in Iraq.

The death total in Iraq was the lowest of any year in the war by a significant margin, down by 85 from 2009. Nearly two-thirds of the deaths there were not related to combat, and most of the hostile deaths occurred in isolated incidents. Though overall violence levels in Iraq have not improved markedly over the last year, they at least seem fairly stable as Iraqi security forces take on more of the burden.

The fighting in parts of Afghanistan was intense, and 198 more allied troops died there than in 2009. Many of the fatalities occurred in Helmand Province, where some 15,000 American and NATO troops began a major offensive in February; homemade bombs and small-arms fire caused the vast majority of the casualties. While 2010 finished as the deadliest year of the war effort thus far, there is no question that Afghan and Western troops have made great strides in stabilizing the insecure provinces in the south and east of the country.


Ian Livingston is a senior research assistant

at the Brookings Institution in Washington.

Alicia Cheng and Sarah Gephart are partners

at mgmt. design in Brooklyn.

    A Year in Iraq and Afghanistan, NYT, 29.1.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/30/opinion/30casualty-chart.html

Bomb at Iraq Funeral Kills 35

January 27, 2011
Filed at 11:07 a.m. ET
The New York Times
By REUTERS


BAGHDAD (Reuters) - A car bomb exploded at a funeral wake in a Shi'ite area of Iraq's capital on Thursday, killing at least 35 people, wounding dozens and triggering clashes between angry residents and police, health and security sources said.

The blast capped a bloody two weeks as suspected insurgents challenge Iraq's security forces ahead of the withdrawal this year of U.S. troops and try to undermine the newly reappointed Shi'ite-led government of Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki.

Witnesses said a suicide bomber struck a funeral tent packed with relatives and guests in Baghdad's Shula district, a former stronghold of anti-U.S. cleric Moqtada al-Sadr but now thought to be controlled by a violent splinter group, Asaib al-Haq.

"I see blood everywhere. I see at least five or six damaged cars, smoke rising from them, chairs scattered everywhere," said Murtadha Kadhem, a freelance TV cameraman working for Reuters.

Deputy Health Minister Khamis al-Saad said 35 people were killed and 65 wounded, and a local hospital official gave the same death toll. An Interior Ministry source put the toll at 37 dead and 78 wounded.

Two other security sources said more than 45 people were killed and around 120 were wounded.

The blast was the latest in a series of bombings in Iraq that have killed more than 150 people and wounded more than 500 in the past two weeks.

Suspected insurgents launched three days of suicide attacks against police and police recruits last week and planted car bombs targeting Shi'ite pilgrims streaming into the holy Shi'ite city of Kerbala in southern Iraq for a major religious rite.

The violence is occurring before an Arab League summit in March that could help Iraq reintegrate itself into a region where many Arab-led countries view the rise to political power of its Shi'ite majority with suspicion. They also fear Iran's growing influence in Baghdad.

U.S. forces are also due to withdraw this year, eight years after the invasion that toppled Sunni dictator Saddam Hussein, placing full responsibility for ensuring security on the shoulders of Iraqi police and troops.

NEW ALLIANCE?

Political analyst Ibrahim al-Sumaidaie suggested the recent attacks could signal a defacto alliance of Sunni Islamist al Qaeda and Shi'ite militants against the government.

"I believe we are witnessing a cross-sectarian alliance of

insurgents ... They are ready to ally with Satan against the political process," he said. "I think our security forces, with their current capabilities, along with the fragile political alliances, cannot stand in the face of this alliance."

The funeral bomber struck as relatives and friends mourned at the home of an elderly man who died while on the pilgrimage to Kerbala for the recent Arbain commemoration.

"According to what I see, it was not a parked car bomb. It looked like a suicide bomber, driving a car, entered the funeral and blew up the car," said Ali al-Hilly of a neighbourhood council.

Armed clashes broke out in Shula, in northwest Baghdad, after the bomb blast, local officials and eyewitnesses said.

"People were angry after the explosion. They charged out into the streets to protest against the security forces," said Nasser al-Sadi, the manager of Sadr's office in Shula.

"The police opened fire against them or to disperse them and then some of the people responded by shooting back," he said.

Security forces poured into the area and told residents to

stay home while they searched for the gunmen, he said.

An eyewitness who asked not to be identified said the police had fired into the air but then came under attack from gunmen. "Of course the police returned fire," the witness said.

Sadi said one person was killed and two wounded in the clashes.

At least four other fatal bombings struck Baghdad on Thursday, killing another five people and wounding more than 20.

(Additional reporting by Suadad al-Salhy, Khalid al-Ansary and Waleed Ibrahim; Writing by Michael Christie and Jim Loney; Editing by Myra MacDonald)

    Bomb at Iraq Funeral Kills 35, NYT, 27.1.2011, http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/2011/01/27/world/middleeast/international-uk-iraq-violence-funeral.html

Iraqi Cleric Embraces State

in Comeback Speech

January 8, 2011
The New York Times
By ANTHONY SHADID

NAJAF, Iraq — To a rapturous welcome that conflated the religious and political, the populist Iraqi cleric Moktada al-Sadr delivered his support Saturday for an Iraqi state that he had once derided as a traitorous tool of the United States and that his followers had battled in the streets of Iraq’s most important cities only a few years before.

The brief speech to thousands of followers was his first since returning this week after more than three years of voluntary exile in Iran, and across the country, many had watched it for signs of a movement that portrays itself today as a far more disciplined, mature heir to the group that surged on the scene after the American invasion in 2003. His political allies and Mahdi Army militia raucously articulated the voice of the urban poor, fighting the American military and then engaging in some of the worst sectarian carnage of the civil war.

Delivered in a warren of streets near Mr. Sadr’s home in this sacred city, the speech marked yet another, halting step into Iraq’s mainstream by a movement that fashions itself as the permanent face of opposition, even though its ministers and deputies fill the ranks of the government.

And as the movement is prone to do, Mr. Sadr again sought to have it both ways in the 28-minute address, calling for the expulsion of American troops but giving time for a withdrawal and offering support for a government his followers underpin but making his backing conditional on that government’s effectiveness.

“We are with it, not against it,” said a grayer Mr. Sadr, who spoke forcefully and deliberately, if occasionally testily, with a confidence he once lacked. “The government is new, and we have to open the way for it to prove it will serve Iraq’s people.”

Rowdy, and at times ecstatic, a crowd stretching down the street to the turquoise-domed mosque of Kamil bin Zayid answered Mr. Sadr with chants of fealty. Some cried uncontrollably. Others, dangling from electricity pylons, thrust their fists into the air.

“Yes, yes, to his excellency, the leader!” they shouted.

Scion of one of Iraq’s most prominent religion families, who inherited a grass-roots movement founded by his revered father in the 1990s, Mr. Sadr is perhaps the sole national figure who can compete with the prominence of Prime Minister Nouri Kamal al-Maliki. So far, their relationship has proven tumultuous, from allies to enemies to allies again, and Mr. Sadr’s speech outlined the pivots on which their relationship may turn.

In the clearest terms, he insisted no American troops could remain by 2012, as required by agreement, and urged his followers to persist in resistance by any means to their presence. More cautiously, he suggested he could withdraw their support for Mr. Maliki if the government fails to address the most basic complaints of daily life here, particularly for the disenfranchised he claims to represent — shoddy roads, dirty water, leaking sewage and, that motif of post-Saddam Hussein Iraq, persistent blackouts.

But Mr. Sadr urged patience from his followers, and at the very least, his words seemed to mean Mr. Maliki’s new government would have a grace period to act.

“We haven’t put a deadline on the government,” said Hazem al-Araji, a prominent lieutenant of Mr. Sadr’s. “We’re watching how it progresses, and after that we’ll decide.”

“The government needs a chance,” added another Sadr aide, Salah al-Obeidi.

The occasion itself was street theater, bringing together all the divergent currents that shape a movement many believe could transform Iraqi politics. On stage was the movement’s essence, from the resonant, centuries-old symbolism of Shiite sacrifice and martyrdom to a martial culture made possible by the American invasion and occupation.

Since reaching its nadir in 2008, after Mr. Maliki sent the Iraqi army against its militia in Baghdad and southernmost Basra, with decisive help from the American military, the movement has returned to prominence, essentially by staking its claim to Iraqi politics. It scored success in local elections in 2009. The next year, Mr. Sadr, who had long hedged his support for elections, called on his supporters from exile to fully participate in the vote last March. They did, and in a feat of logistics and planning, the movement won 40 seats, emerging as a savvy player in eight months of negotiations. Their eventual support for Mr. Maliki was the key to his return for a second term.

At Saturday’s speech, the movement sought to convey a certain respectability, from sharply dressed security in gray suits to the punctuality of Mr. Sadr himself, whose speech began precisely at a scheduled 10 a.m. Cadres passed out Iraqi flags, soon overwhelming the crowd’s pious banners and portraits of Mr. Sadr. In fact, it was hard not to draw at least superficial comparisons to another Arab Shiite movement, Lebanon’s Hezbollah, both of whom navigate political, social and military identities and have built personality cults around their leaders, junior clerics more prominent as politicians.

There were even echoes between Mr. Sadr and Hezbollah’s leader, Hassan Nasrallah, though Mr. Nasrallah remains, by far, the more dynamic and eloquent. It was there in the mannerisms, the way each held a white handkerchief or excused himself to drink a glass of water. Each related to their audience the same way, too — speaking in a stentorian formal Arabic, only to lapse into slang when offering a joke or a casual aside.

“What’s up? Are you scared of the Americans?” Mr. Sadr asked the crowd from a 25-foot-high pulpit, draped in black, as he led them in a chant of “No, no to America.”

The crowd answered defiantly, raising their voices.

“You’re getting better,” he complimented them, with the wryest of smiles.

Most comparisons to Hezbollah go only so far, though, and many Sadrist officials point out the obvious: Just as Hezbollah was impossible without Israel’s 1982 invasion of Lebanon, so is Sadr’s movement without the assassination of his father on Saddam’s orders in 1999 and the American invasion and occupation four years later.

“We are a movement, we are not simply a party,” said Hakim al-Zamili, a Sadrist lawmaker who beat charges of murder, kidnapping and corruption from his time as an official in the Ministry of Health and who joined other Sadr officials at the event.

With that ambiguity, Mr. Zamili captured what many see as Mr. Sadr’s challenge: turning a street movement into a political group, without surrendering the legions of supporters from hard-scrabble neighborhoods, so zealous that some tried to stampede the stage.

Mr. Sadr’s speeches offered few clues Saturday, going little beyond the reflexive nationalism and millenarian theology that has long served as the movement’s rallying cries. Nor did his lieutenants, some of whom volunteered a contradictory notion of being inside the government, while looking out and, from there, looking back in at its performance.

“We’ll be watching them,” said Nassar al-Rubaie, himself the minister of labor and social affairs. “We’ll monitor the performance of this government.”

Khalid D. Ali contributed reporting.

    Iraqi Cleric Embraces State in Comeback Speech, NYT, 8.1.2011, http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/09/world/middleeast/09iraq.html

Radical Cleric Returns to Iraq

After Years in Iran

January 5, 2011
The New York Times
By JOHN LELAND and ANTHONY SHADID

BAGHDAD — Moktada al-Sadr, the radical cleric whose followers waged deadly warfare against American troops after the fall of Saddam Hussein’s government in 2003, returned to Iraq on Wednesday after three years of voluntary exile in Iran. Mr. Sadr pursued clerical studies in Iran while avoiding an arrest warrant for the killing of a rival cleric in 2003.

In the Shiite holy city of Najaf, where Mr. Sadr appeared on Wednesday, a jubilant crowd of about 3,000 gathered outside his house to welcome him back. “Long live the leader,” some shouted.

The mercurial and enigmatic Mr. Sadr returns as a vastly different figure than the one who left three years ago, with a claim on the center of Iraqi political power. In last year’s national election his party, the Sadrist Trend, won 40 seats in Parliament, a show of strength and organization that party members said demonstrated their transition from a militia force to a mainstream political entity. Mr. Sadr’s surprise decision in August to throw support behind the bid of his longtime antagonist, Nuri Kamal al-Maliki, for a second term as prime minister effectively decided the election in Mr. Maliki’s favor.

On Wednesday, it was unclear whether any criminal charges hung over Mr. Sadr’s return. Jawad Khadhum, a Sadrist member of Parliament, said that there was no warrant for the cleric’s arrest.

“That was just from the previous government to target the Sadrists, to take us away from the political process,” Mr. Khadhum said, adding, “we proved to everyone that we are an important part in Iraq and the political process.”

A lawmaker from Mr. Maliki’s winning bloc, Hussain al-Saffi, said the government had “no intention or tendency to raise any legal issues related to Mr. Moktada.”

Mr. Sadr’s surprise alliance with Mr. Maliki was widely believed to have been brokered by the Iranian government in order to create a ruling Shiite alliance in Iraq. Sadrist militias had fought lethal battles against Iraqi army troops sent against them by Mr. Maliki in 2008 in Baghdad and in Basra, Iraq’s second-largest city.

Mr. Sadr’s return has long been rumored. In the weeks before the election last March, many supporters were convinced that his journey back was imminent, in part to rally support before the vote. This time, the return came as a surprise, and most of his followers learned of his arrival from television. In Sadr City, a vast slum that bears the name of his father, one of Iraq’s most revered ayatollahs, reaction was muted to his return, coming as it did during a somber month in the Shiite calendar.

There were conflicting reports, too, on whether Mr. Sadr’s return was permanent or merely a visit. Even some of his supporters seemed unsure.

“It’s up to his eminence to stay permanently in Najaf or go back to Iran,” said Balqis al-Khafaji, a candidate with Sadr’s bloc in the election. “He knows which.”

Mr. Sadr remains a divisive presence here. More than Iraq’s political figures, he captured the voice of populist anger against the American invasion, as he antagonized foreign troops from the pulpit and on the battlefield. But to many, especially among Iraq’s Sunni minority, he remains synonymous with black-clad Shiite death squads that terrorized the country as it descended into a sectarian civil war in 2006 and 2007.

His return now, said Ahmed Abdul Khaliq, 58, a shop owner in Baghdad’s largely Sunni Adhamiya neighborhood, meant that Iraqi life “will disrupted again,” and that “the militias will return and dominate.” He added, “Spending three years in Iran will change him worse than before.”

Omar al-Jawoshy and Duraid Adnan contributed reporting.

Radical Cleric Returns to Iraq After Years in Iran, NYT, 5.1.2011,
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/06/world/middleeast/06iraq.html

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