Iraq- The West Shakes Up The Middle East Page 5

  The history of Mosul over the past four years since the fall of Saddam Hussein has some lessons for resolving the conflict in Iraq in the long term. Many of the crass errors made in the first days of the occupation in Baghdad did not happen in Mosul. American and Kurdish commanders have often been able men. But the end result has been disastrously similar in both cities. Perhaps the most crucial lesson is that Iraqi communities mean exactly what they say and will fight to get it. In Iraq, this means that the Kurds are going to recover their lost lands; the Sunni are going to get the Americans out and the Shia, as the majority, are determined to be the primary force in government.

  Friday, 4 May 2007

  DO NOT TRUST THE IRAQI POLICE

  "Be careful," warned a senior Iraqi government official living in the Green Zone in Baghdad, "be very careful and above all do not trust the police or the army."

  He added that the level of insecurity in the Iraqi capital is as bad now as it was before the US drive to make the city safe came into operation in February.

  The so-called "surge", the dispatch of 20,000 extra American troops to Iraq with the prime mission of getting control of Baghdad, is visibly failing.

  There are army and police checkpoints everywhere but Iraqis are terrified because they do not know if the men in uniform they see there are, in reality, death squad members.

  Omar, the 15-year-old brother-in-law of a friend, was driving with two other boys through al-Mansur in west Baghdad a fortnight ago. Their car was stopped at a police checkpoint. Most of the police in Baghdad are Shia. They took him away saying they suspected that his ID card was a fake. The real reason was probably that only Sunnis use the name Omar. Three days later he was found dead.

  I was driving through central Baghdad yesterday. Our car was pulled over at an army checkpoint. I had hung my jacket from a hook above the window so nobody could easily see I was a foreigner. A soldier leaned in the window and asked who I was. We were lucky. He merely looked surprised when told I was a foreign journalist and said softly: "Keep well hidden."

  The problem about the US security plan is that it does not provide security. It had some impact to begin with and the number of bodies found went down. This was mainly because the Shia Mehdi Army was stood down by its leader, Muqtada al-Sadr.

  But the Sunni insurgent groups increased the number of sectarian suicide bombings against Shia markets. Now the sectarian body count is on the rise again. Some 30 bodies, each shot in the head, were found on Wednesday alone.

  The main new American tactic is proving counterproductive. This is the sealing-off of entire neighbourhoods so there is only a single entrance and exit.

  Speaking of Sunni districts such as al-Adhamiyah, a government official said: "We are creating mini-Islamic republics."

  This is borne out by anecdotal evidence. The uncle of a friend called Mohammed (nobody wants their full name published) died of natural causes. The family, all Sunni, were unable to reach the nearest cemetery in Abu Ghraib. Instead they went to one in Adhamiyah. As they entered, armed civilians, whom they took to be al-Qa’ida from their way of speaking, asked directly: "Are any of you Shia?" Only when reassured that they were all Sunni were they allowed to bury their relative.

  The failure of the "surge" comes because it is not accompanied by any political reconciliation. On the contrary the government is fac-tionalised. The two vice-presidents, Tariq al-Hashimi, a Sunni, and Adel Abdel Mehdi, a Shia, may make conciliatory statements, but one Iraqi observer noted: "Tariq only employs Sunni and Adel only Shia."

  The Sunni feel they are fighting for their lives. Their last redoubts in east Baghdad (aside from Adhamiyah) are being overrun by the Mehdi Army. The Sunni insurgent groups, notably al-Qa’ida, are on the offensive in west Baghdad, where they are strongest. When the Americans succeed in driving away Shia militia their place is taken, not by government forces, but by Sunni militia.

  People in Baghdad are terrified of being killed by a bomb or bundled into the boot of a car and murdered. Less dramatic, but equally significant in forcing people to flee Iraq for Jordan or Syria is the sheer difficulty of maintaining a normal life. Much of the trade in the city used to take place in open-air markets. But only one is now open. This is in Karada, but many people no longer go there because it has come under repeated attack.

  So many areas are now sealed off that there are continuous traffic jams. If drivers try to avoid the jam by driving off the main road they may enter an area where militiamen may kill them. One friend who got back from Syria found that, because of an attack on a government patrol, his neighbourhood was closed to traffic. "I had to walk for 40 minutes with my suitcase," he lamented.

  Even in dangerous neighbourhoods such as Beitawin, off Saadoun Street in central Baghdad, notorious for its criminal gangs even in Saddam's time, people were queuing for petrol for hours yesterday evening because they have no choice.

  A bizarre flavour has been given to Saadoun Street because the government has encouraged artists to paint the giant concrete blast barriers with uplifting, if unlikely, scenes of mountain torrents, meadows in spring and lakeside scenes. Many of the pictures, all in garish greens, blues and yellows, look more like Switzerland than Iraq.

  Muqtada al-Sadr, for his part, is encouraging artists to paint the blast barriers with scenes illustrating the anguish inflicted on the Iraqi people by the US.

  The only "gated community" that functions successfully in Baghdad is the Green Zone itself, the four square miles on the right bank of the Tigris that is home to the government and the US embassy. It is sealed off from the rest of Iraq by multiple security barriers and fortifications. Entering the zone recently I was questioned and searched, at different stages, by Kurds, Georgians, Peruvians and Nepalese. No country in the world has such rigorous frontier procedures as what one American called "this little chunk of Texas". Living cut off in the zone it is impossible for the ruling elite of Iraq to understand the terrible suffering and terror beyond.

  Monday, 7 May 2007

  STONED TO DEATH FOR ELOPING AND CONVERTING

  The stoning to death of a teenage girl belonging to the Yazidi religious sect because she fell in love with a Muslim man has led to a spiral of violence in northern Iraq in which 23 elderly factory workers have been shot dead and 800 Yazidi students forced to flee their university in Mosul. The killings began with an act of brutality horrific even by Iraqi standards.

  A 17-year-old girl called Doaa Aswad Dekhil from the town of Bashika in the northern province of Nineveh converted to Islam. She belonged to the Yazidi religion, a mixture of Islam, Judaism and Christianity as well as Zoroastrian and Gnostic beliefs. The 350,000-strong Kurdish speaking Yazidi community is centred in the north and east of Mosul and has often faced persecution in the past, being denounced as "devil worshippers". On 7 April, Doaa returned home after she had converted to Islam in order to marry a Sunni Muslim who was also a Kurd. She had been told by a Sunni Muslim cleric that her family had forgiven her for her elopement and conversion. Instead she was met in Bashika by a large mob of 2,000 people led by members of her family.

  What happened next was captured in a mobile phone video. It shows a dark-haired girl dressed in a red track suit top and black underwear with blood streaming from her face. As she tries to rise to her feet she is kicked and hit on the head with a concrete block.

  Armed and uniformed police stand by watching her being killed over several minutes. Many in the crowd hold up their phone cameras to record the scene. Nobody tries to help her as she is battered to death.

  The savagery of the lynching led to threats of retaliation. This part of Nineveh, though outside the jurisdiction of the KRG, is strongly under its influence. The murdered girl and her intended husband were Kurds. The KRG's President, Massoud Barzani, held meetings with Yazidi leaders. Kurdish officials in Mosul said at the time that they had the situation under control. The KRG is now calling for an investigation into what happened, though the central government in
Baghdad has little authority in the north of the country.

  Retaliation when it came was savage. On 23 April a bus carrying back workers from a weaving factory in Mosul to Bashika, which has a Christian as well as a Yazidi population, was stopped by several cars filled with unidentified gunmen at about 2pm. They asked the Christians to get off the bus, according to the police account. They then took the bus to eastern Mosul city where they lined up the men, mostly elderly, against a wall and shot them to death.

  The revenge killings led to two days of demonstrations in Bashika. Sunni Muslims, also Kurds, feared retaliation. Yazidis say that 204 members of their community have been killed since the overthrow of Saddam Hussein in 2003. Some 800 Yazidi students at Mosul university have since fled to Kurdish cities such as Dohuk where they are safe. They say they were told to convert or die.

  In the Baghdad district of Dora the Christian community has been threatened in recent weeks and told to convert to Islam, pay protection money or be killed. Many have fled to other parts of the city.

  Sectarian war continues in Baghdad. A bomb exploded in a market in the Shia district of Bayaa yesterday, killing 35 and wounding 80 people. "What did these innocent people do to be killed by a car bomb?" shouted a witness. "Where is the government? Where is security?" In practice, however, it is impossible to protect the crowded streets of Baghdad from vehicles packed with explosives.

  Thursday, 10 May 2007

  TEACHERS’ KILLINGS TURN SUNNIS AGAINST AL-QA’IDA

  The murder of Juma'a, the headmaster of a primary school in the Ghaziliyah district of west Baghdad, explains why many Sunnis are increasingly hostile to al-Qa’ida in Iraq. At the same time, the Sunni community as a whole continues to support armed resistance to the US-led occupation.

  Juma'a, a teacher in his forties with three daughters and one son, was told by members of al-Qa'ida in his Sunni neighbourhood to close his school. Other headmasters got the same message but also refused to comply. The demand from al-Qa'ida seems to have come because it sees schools as being under the control of the government.

  Juma'a knew the danger he was running. A few months earlier, he was detained by another Sunni insurgent group as he queued for gasoline. The insurgents suspected he was carrying fake identity papers and was really a Shia. They held him for three days until he proved to them he was a Sunni.

  Two weeks later, Juma'a was kidnapped again. This time there was no release. Other headmasters were kidnapped at the same time and their bodies found soon after. His family wanted to look in the Baghdad morgue, the Bab al-Modam, but faced a problem. The morgue is deemed by Sunni to be under the control of Shia militiaman who may kill or arrest Sunni looking for murdered relatives.

  Finally, Juma'a's sister-in-law, Wafa, and niece went to the morgue on the grounds that women are less likely to be attacked. They passed through a room filled with headless bodies and severed limbs and looked at photographs of the faces of the dead. In 15 minutes, they identified Juma'a, but they were not strong enough to transport his body home in a cheap wooden coffin.

  The revolt in Iraq against the occupation has been confined hitherto to the five-million-strong Sunni community. The growing unpopularity of al-Qa'ida in Iraq among the Sunni is partly a revulsion against its massacres of Shia by suicide bombers that lead to tit-for-tat killings of Sunni.

  It is also because al-Qa'ida kills Sunni who have only limited connections with the government. Those killed include minor officials in the agriculture ministry, barbers who give un-Islamic haircuts and garbage collectors. The murder of the latter is because it is convenient for al-Qa'ida to leave large heaps of rubbish uncollected on roadsides in which to hide mines.

  The most visible sign of the revolt against al-Qa'ida in Iraq is along the roads passing through the deserts of Anbar province to the west of Baghdad to Jordan and Syria. In recent weeks, the road to Syria has been controlled by members of the Abu Risha tribe, led by Mahmoud Abu Risha and supported by the US. It may be al-Qa'ida has overplayed its hand. In January, its leaders announced the establishment of the ISI based in western Iraq. That united resistance groups sympathetic to al-Qa'ida. The ISI began to purge resistance activists disagreeing with its line. Sunni families were forced to make contributions and send some of their young men to fight alongside the ISI.

  The Iraqi insurgency is notoriously fragmented and its politics are shadowy. By one account, the ISI got chased out of Mosul in the north soon after being formed and took refuge in the Himrin mountains south of Kirkuk. Though shaken, it remains effective under the leadership of Omar al-Baghdadi, a former army officer.

  The ISI, as with other resistance groups, owes its military effectiveness in large part to well-trained officers from the Iraqi army and, in particular, the Republican Guards.

  Windows at the US embassy in Baghdad were rattled by an explosion yesterday during a visit by Dick Cheney. The US Vice-President had arrived unannounced to see Iraqi political leaders. Washington may be getting worried that the so-called "surge", the 30,000 US reinforcements being sent to Iraq, are not producing the dramatic results hoped for by President George Bush.

  Meanwhile, a suicide bomber in a truck packed with explosives killed at least 19 people and wounded 80 in the Kurdish capital of Arbil. It was one of the first bombs in Kurdistan for over a year and blew up outside the Kurdish Interior Ministry, leaving an enormous crater.

  Wednesday, 16 May 2007

  WHATEVER HAPPENED TO AHMED CHALABI?

  Ahmed Chalabi stands on the bank of the Tigris river within easy sniper range of the opposite side and surveys the twisted steel girders of the al-Sarafiyah bridge in Baghdad, its central spans torn apart by a massive truck bomb last month. The force of the blast impresses him. "I am surprised that the explosion managed to bring down three spans," he says as he looks at the wreckage.

  It is a placid enough scene but nothing in Baghdad is truly safe. I supposed that Mr Chalabi's numerous and heavily armed police and army guards knew their business but I was hoping that we would not dawdle too long. The al-Sarafiyah bridge, once one of the sights of Baghdad, connected the Shia district where we were standing with Wazzariyah, where there had been clashes with Sunni insurgents. I selected a reassuringly vast concrete plinth of the bridge to dodge behind if there was any shooting. Conspicuous in a dark business suit, Mr Chalabi seemed uncaring about our possible vulnerability to hostile fire and was talking with some of the men in charge of rebuilding the bridge. There were no signs of reconstruction. He stepped into a small, dark, river police patrol boat which circled below the bridge for a few moments. Returning to the bank he remarked that one of the policemen on the boat had told him that "five out of 16 river policemen in his unit had been killed". "Snipers at Taji," one of his aides commented. As for the bridge, Mr Chalabi said reconstruction was "very slow - they should be working now".

  The broken remains of the al-Safariyah bridge was a strange place to meet the man whom opponents of the invasion of Iraq regard as a hate figure who gulled the US into a bloody and unnecessary war by concocting evidence that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction. He has always had an impressive array of enemies. Demonised by Saddam as a creature of the Americans, he was simultaneously loathed by the CIA and the US State Department, mainly because he would not obey American orders. Whatever his political future, Mr Chalabi is one of the great survivors of Iraqi politics. "Never ever write him off," Hoshyar Zebari, the Iraqi Foreign Minister, said to me last year.

  For a start he is still alive despite numerous assassination attempts. Aged 62 he has seen extraordinary reversals of fortune. He comes from a wealthy Shia family that flourished in Baghdad until the overthrow of the monarchy in 1958. Always an opponent of Saddam Hussein, he became a banker in Jordan only to see his bank collapse in controversial circumstances in the late 1980s. In the 1990s he was in Iraqi Kurdistan vainly seeking to use it as a platform to overthrow Saddam. Forced to flee again in 1996 he seemed to have failed, but 10 years later Sadd
am is in his grave and Mr Chalabi sits in his heavily fortified house in Baghdad.

  Meeting political leaders in Baghdad is different than in other countries, where the difficulty is generally in securing the interview in the first place. Getting to it is just a matter of calling a taxi. In Baghdad the main problem may be covering the last 500 yards to see the person to be interviewed without undue danger. It is quite evident meeting Iraqis and foreigners in the Green Zone in Baghdad that few have the slightest idea of the risk involved in coming to see them. One ambassador happily gave a party starting at 9pm and invited people from outside the zone when not a cat is stirring in the streets of Baghdad.

  I had called Mr Chalabi's office in the morning. I was in fact in the Green Zone seeing Kurdish friends when the reply came that he could see me almost immediately. He does not live in the Green Zone but in a fortress-like villa not far away. Two vehicles filled with armed men were sent to pick me up. We drove through the desolate streets of west Baghdad, which these days look like a war zone, at great speed, zigzagging around concrete blast walls and rolls of razor wire.

  Mr Chalabi was waiting at the house in the al-Mansur district, once known as the embassy quarter of Baghdad but now a lethally dangerous place.

  There were few cars about and by early evening those shops that had opened were closing. There were nervous-looking soldiers and police everywhere. We were to go on to another house, known as The Farm, which had once belonged to his father. For a man who is not officially a member of the government his police and army escort boasted significant firepower.