The WaPo‘s Steve Fainaru, embedded with some US military in northern Iraq, has a telling story deep in today’s paper that recreates some of the details of the battle in which, just last week, US forces recaptured control of the Iraqi city of Tall Afar (popn. 250,000-plus) from the “insurgents” who had previously controlled it.
Like this: he tells us that during the battle, US forces turned off basic services, including water and electricity for “at least three days”.
An action like that constitutes a clear collective punishment of the city’s people and is quite possibly a war crime.
I can tell you from my own experience in war-time Beirut, most people can survive a cutoff of electricity, somehow, for some time. But a cutoff of water kills people. Especially as existing supplies become increasingly degraded and disease-ridden.
In Fainaru’s latest piece, we can also learn this startling fact: Of the 600 members of the “new” Iraqi police force who were deployed in the city at the start of the battle, 517 either deserted or defected to the insurgents. Plus: “The Iraqis who switched sides included the police chief and his deputy, both of whom were detained by U.S. forces.”
Right underneath Fainaru’s piece, there on p.A32, there’s a small box in which Robin Wright cites puppet-PM Allawi as saying the insurgents are fighting a “last stand” in his country, and “We are winning.”
H’mmm.
Actually, Fainaru’s piece is full of little vignettes and snippets that indicate the shocking degree to which–18 long months into the US war against Iraq–the US military still lack much basic understanding of the political/social context in which they are fighting….
There is even a sort of refreshing honesty in some of the quotes that Fainaru elicits from Brig. Gen Carter F. Ham, the commander of all US forces in northern Iraq, as the two of them apparently walk around some parts of the newly re-occupied city with the new “mayor” that Ham’s troops have installed there. Like this one:
- “I tell you frankly, having done this for nine months, that I didn’t understand the complexity of this operation,” Ham said.
“I didn’t understand the complexity of the tribal nature of the Iraqi society and the extraordinary influence that tribal leaders play in all aspects of life here,” he said.
How’s that again? He’s been the commander of northern Iraq and there’s a city of that size there that he was still so basically clueless about? Why would any mother in the US trust her son or daughter to serve in the armed forces under a leadership as incompetent as that?
When Ham’s people launched the effort to re-take Tall Afar, one of the first things they did was follow the standard Israeli tactic of trying to empty it as much as possible of civilians, so that would allow them to then use it as a “free-fire zone” against all those left inside it, who could all be described to the US media as “die-hard insurgents”.
(Fainaru quotes the deputy director of Tall Afar General Hospital as saying 55 Iraqis were killed during the battle, and 157 were injured. “Many were civilians, including seven women and seven children, [the official] said, holding a list of the casualties.”)
When Israel launched its successive sweeps through south Lebanon in 1993, 1996, etc., its leaders always used to broadcast instructions to the residents of the region beforehand, telling them to evacuate their homes “or face the consequences”. What an abusive, terrorizing, terroristic maneuver!
When I interviewed Shimon Peres in ’98, and quizzed him about his use of that maneuver in ’96, he said, “He who warns is absolved of responsibility for what happens to those who stay”. What nonsense! Nowhere in international humanitarian law does it offer any such absolution. And of course, in all those forced evacuations of terrified families, people die.
I wonder how Shimon Peres or Gen. Ham would like it if someone came in tanks to surround their hometowns and told all the civilians to leave immediately or risk death?
Well, back to Tall Afar, 2004… One of the ways the US forces had been hoping to “benefit” from the mass displacement of people out of the city that they had instigated was to screen all these people carefully as (or before) they sought to return to it after the battle, by picking out “insurgents” or “terrorists” as they sought to pass back in through the (small number of) checkpoints dotting the US perimeter around the city.
Oh, you might have thought that the “insurgents” would all have been penned up inside the city by the city, and that most of those who had fled outside it–as per orders given to them by loudspeaker last week– would NOT have been insurgents, but just ordinary civilians?
No, a simple fact like that doesn’t halt the zeal of the US military and the small band of masked Iraqi informers who work with them to identify the “bad guys”.
As Fainaru wrote in this Sept. 15 piece, squads of US soldiers were even roaming the villages around the city looking for refugees from the city… and they had a masked informer whom they referred to only as “The Source” along with them, as well as an interpreter known only as “Terp”… and the Source would identify people among the villagers to be taken away into detention…
This is how it went:
- The men fanned out and headed for buildings on the other side of the field. A half-dozen soldiers punched through the door of a two-room mud house. Nineteen women and children huddled together in the shade of the courtyard while the soldiers searched for weapons.
Two soldiers came to a large cabinet containing scattered clothes, small teacups, a small Winnie the Pooh doll and a large stack of blankets. The men poked their guns into the blankets on the top shelf and they began to fall. The soldiers scoured the jumble, then left.
Outside the house, other soldiers had seven men lined up facing the mud wall surrounding the house. Two of the detainees massaged prayer beads as the soldiers fitted them with plastic flexible handcuffs and blindfolds. Some wore trousers, others white gowns.
“You have the right to remain silent,” one soldier told an uncomprehending detainee in English. “Anything you say will result in a punch in the face.”
… One man gave his name as Mustafa Abdul Rahman, 55. He said he was from Tall Afar and had left to escape the fighting.
“They said on the loudspeaker for us to leave the city,” he said through an interpreter. During the fighting last week, the Tall Afar police chief had asked residents to leave for their safety.
The man sitting next to him said he had also fled the violence. “We escaped because we were scared,” he said. “We came here.”
As the men sat, some with their heads tipping forward, others looking around, a soldier yelled, “Get The Source.”
The Source, still wearing the borrowed uniform and black ski mask, came forward. He was asked to point out the terrorists in the group. He walked down the rows of detainees, putting his hand on the head of one man here, another there. As he did, a soldier would pick up the fingered detainee and separate him from the group.
“All of the village, they are terrorists,” The Source told two journalists after he finished.
Asked how he knew, he said: “I have one guy here, and he passed along the information to me.”
Asked how he could be sure, he said: “Yes, they are terrorists. They all have the long beard. They had the beard, but some of them they shaved.”
The Source declined to give his name. He then asked: “Is the commander going to pay me any money? If you are an informant, they are supposed to give you money.”
Well, so much for the deep democratic convictions of those with whom the US military choose to work in Iraq, eh?
According to today’s piece by Fainaru, even Mohammed Rashid Hamid, the “mayor” newly installed in the city by Brig. Ham openly voiced complaints about the Americans’ practices to him and an accompanying US Major:
- Jabbing his left hand for emphasis as he spoke through an interpreter, Hamid told the Americans that the slow pace at which returning residents were being searched had paralyzed the city. He complained that women and children were being searched and said U.S. forces searching for remaining insurgents were relying on inaccurate information to detain people.
“About 40 percent of the information you have about the people of Tall Afar is wrong,” he told the officers.
Maj. O’Steen responded that U.S. forces were frisking only military-age men reentering the city and were preparing to release about 40 detainees picked up the day before.
“We are caught in the middle between two fires,” Hamid told the Americans. “On the one side, we have the terrorists, and on the other side, we have the coalition forces.”
Not much conviction there, either, I’d say…
This piece is an interesting example of the uses and limitations of the practice of “embedding” reporters, I think. It is clearly excellent to be able to get some fairly clear expression of the views of a field commander like BG Ham. It is useful to get that description of the ghastly practices of the sqaud working with “The Source”.
But there are also clear limits on what Fainaru has written about. Principally, I haven’t seen in any of the pieces he’s written since being embedded that provide any descriptions of the physical damage suffered by the city, or really, any firsthand description of how harsh the situation has been over the past few weeks for the people who live in and around Tall Afar.
Why couldn’t he have provided these things? Was there censorship, or a degree of self-censorship? We readers deserve to be told the terms of his embedment.
It is true, our occupation of Iraq is our most brutal occupation since Vietnam. It is time to leave Iraq; about 45% of the American people agree it is time to go.
Only 45%? How depressing that the majority remain so ignorant.
Helena, thank you for the brilliant analysis of the Fainaru’s fine article, which shows how uniquely unfitted the US is to handle the situation in Iraq.
Shirin and Tony, this recent article in the LA Times suggests that while most Iraqis want the US out, many are ambivalent about whether they want us out immediately, given the security situation. In light of that, what should the US do? While I agree that it would be better for the US to withdraw than to continue as we have been, is there a more productive course the US could take than dropping everything and leaving?
(I think I know what Helena’s thoughts are. If I understand them correctly, they are to surrender direction of the country to a more legitimate body, possibly the UN, placing US troops under its control. That’s my thinking as well. )
Juan cole presented a USA today poll done in Iraq last april (scroll down to 29th):
Amazingly, 57% of Iraqis say that US troops should leave Iraq immediately. If one subtracted the Kurds, a much higher percentage of Arabic speaking Iraqis say this. And, they say it with their eyes open. About 57% also admit that life would get harder (i.e. there would be a lot of instability) if the US suddenly withdrew. They want the US gone anyway, and will take their chances.
If this hasn
It’s not a poll, just the juxtaposition of several interviews.
That’s true. Nonetheless, it rings true for me.
Cutting off the water and electricity. How disgusting. How inhumane can we be. But after Abu Grahib prison behavior on the part of the USA, nothing should surprise me. And I hope the Internatonal War Crimes Commission is taking notes and making plans to include cutting off the water in its anticipated list of crimes against humanity that they will schedule for prosecution at some point down the road.
But cutting off the water supply? Lets try that tactic on the White house itself. Or try it in mr bush’s hometown of Midland, Texas for three days and see what the reaction would be.
I can only recall the biblical phrase “As you sow, so shall you reap.” And some day. Some day the “chickens will come home to roost.” After reading the entire Fainuru account of what happened at Tall Afru, none of us should ever again have to endure the question, “Why do they hate us so much?”
This attack on Tel Afar is very strange. Tel Afar is a predominantly Turkmen and Christian town. The great majority of Turkmens, and therefore the great majority of residents of Tel Afar are Shi`as.
There has been for a long time a lot of bad blood between Kurds and Turkmens in Iraq. This is, in my view, the only truly intractible conflict between Iraq’s many religions, sects and ethnicities. I count among my friends and associates members of both groups, and neither has anything nice to say about the other. I have never seen anything quite like this among Iraqis.
There is a lot of conflict right now over the fact that the Kurdish leaders are on a campaign to lay claim, at great expense to the Turkmens, to formerly mixed or even predominantly Turkmen areas, with Kirkuk being the most important one. The Turkmens insist they have always been the majority in these places, the Kurds insist Kirkuk, in particular, is part of their ancestral homeland, and belongs to them only.
This horror in Tel Afar has all the earmarks of a scam by the Kurds to get the Americans to do some dirty work for them. I am willing to bet a lot that the informant – what did they call him? The Source? – was a Kurd, most likely one of Mas`oud Barzani’s gang. From everything I have heard from Iraqis and others on the ground the Americans are both ignorant and incurious enough not to know the nature of the population of Tel Afar, and would believe any nonsense their informants fed them. It also appears that the Americans are sufficiently bloodthirsty at this point that they are eager for excuses to pound Iraqis of any kind whenever or wherever they find them.
This would not be the first time, by the way, that the Kurds have gotten the Americans to take care of their business, thought it is, as far as I know, the biggest, most bloody and by far the most disgustingly reprehensible one.
Cutting the water? How cruel!
Back at the ranch the other side continues to behead people of all races, colors, and soon genders (now when they get to the Italian aid workers). A couple of car bombs a day against their own brethren, but cutting the water? Cruel.
I do agree however with the pulling out, stop all reconstruction aid, and leave them to their own devices. Building democracy in Arab country? A thankless and impossible job if there ever was one. Actually a sad joke.
Maybe pull back to some bases in the desert and watch them factions of the oldest civilization united by their “religion of peace” show the world how they get along in their own ways and humanity.
Oh, and they can drink their oil if they please. Will finally force us to find a way of doing without it.
E. Bilpe
Well, Bilpe, have you come back so I can hand you your head (figuratively speaking only, of course) once more? It was a pleasure the first time, and it will be an even greater pleasure the next.
Hi Shirin, did you see the remark I posted about the LA Times article above, and do you have a response?
NP, I am sorry I did not respond to your question earlier, but my time and energy have been very limited lately, and I only just now had time to read the article.
Unfortunately, I can’t give you a full response right now, because I want to respond to the article in some detail and I can’t do that now. I will try to do it tomorrow.
My brief response to the article is that it doesn’t really tell us anything about overall Iraqi views and feelings. Interviewing and quoting a few selected individuals does not give a picture of anything except what those individuals have to say. I am more inclined to believe the polls which indicate that the majority want to U.S. out yesterday whatever the consequences.
I understand very well the statements and feelings of those who are ambivalence. In some sense it comes from the well-known “better the devil you know” idea. The unknown is usually a good deal more frightening than whatever situation one is in at any moment. I understand the concern of those who are afraid of what will happen if the Americans leave, and I also think they are not understanding clearly the reality that the Americans will never bring anything to Iraq but more death, destruction and chaos. Whatever Iraqis might do to each other it cannot be as bad as what is going on now. The Americans are committing the greatest amoung and magnitude of violence, and so their removal would be an improvement even if none of the other violence decreased. At least there would not be half ton bombs blasting houses and their inhabitants into little bits on a daily basis.
I also find the writer makes some statements with absolutely no basis for them. He is simply parroting the standard “received wisdom” about Iraq and Iraqis which has nothing at all to do with reality.
I will try to get more specific tomorrow.
FYI, Shirin – a riveting interview with Canadian journalist Scott Taylor about his abduction in Tal Afar:
Veteran War Correspondent Held Hostage in Iraq Describes His “Five Days in Hell”
I’m still curious about your view of what should be done in Iraq. Lots of the intelligensia, secular Iraqis and minorities seem to be justifiably worried about what will happen to them. It’s heartbreakingly familiar to Vietnam in some ways. It seems to me that, like Vietnam, the US has a poison touch. Anyone and any process we support is automatically delegitimized because we are the foreign invader alien – perhaps even hostile – to the local culture.
Like you, I question whether the US can play a positive role. The question is what to do. I’d like your views. I’d also like to know a little about how you developed those views – what your background is, whether you have contacts in Iraq, and so on. Sorry if you’ve posted this before; my memory is not always the best.
NP,
Sorry, but I can only manage a few brief and superficial remarks right now.
I heard an interview with the Canadian journalist, and when he started talking about a Turkmen branch of Ansar Al Islam my jaw dropped all the way to the floor and stayed there. I am skeptical of this claimto the point of complete disbelief. Unless there is a well-hidden fact that I have not discovered, Ansar Al Islam is, like Al Qa`eda and other such groups, virulently anti-Shi`a. Since the great majority of Turkmen are Shi`a, it is extremely unlikely that there would be a Turkmen branch.
Sorry, that is all I have time for right now. I will try to write more in the next few days.
There’s a story in today’s NY Times about the Turkish reporter who was kidnapped with Taylor that confirms Taylor’s statements about the kidnappers:
. . . Her abductors in the ethnic Turkmen city of Tal Afar identified themselves as members of Ansar al-Islam, a fundamentalist Muslim group that set up a Taliban-like enclave in northern Iraq before the war. The American authorities have linked the group to Al Qaeda, and the kidnappers described Osama bin Laden and the Jordanian terrorist Abu Musab al-Zarqawi as brothers. They spoke Turkish, Ms. Tugrul said, but also claimed to be Sunni Arabs, and not Turkmen of the Shia branch of Islam. Ms. Tugrul said they also spoke a very different Turkish dialect from the Turkmen.