Category: Iraq 2003 thru June 2005

The Institute for War and Peace Reporting (to which recently started linking on the sidebar here) has a great-looking quartet of new stories up today from their reportorial trainees there:
(1) This, from Aqil Jabbar, reporting from Najaf and Kufa, titled Fallujah fighters provide military training for Sadrist forces. I haven’t seen anyone cover that angle before. And he has some good details there.
(2) This, from Zainab Naji in Ana, western Iraq, writing on the theme, An unofficial court imposes harsh sentences on Iraqis who work for the Americans and their allies.
That piece was really interesting. The court in question has, she writes, been operating since late 2003. It’s basically under the auspices of local clerics there.
A couple of other aspects of the story struck me as notable. It’s the first time I’ve seen IWPR’s Iraq program using material from ma female trainee. Hurrah! And secondly, Naji quotes a LOT of local people, on the record, who seem very familiar with the working of this court–which has even beheaded at least one alleged collaborator with the occupation. That indicates to me that the people she quoted have just about zero fear of retribution against themselves on the behalf of the US authorities or the Allawi people.
And then, (3) and (4), there are two interesting stories written by young (?) journos associated with a youth publication called “Liberal Education”, in the Kurdish city of Suleimaniyah. This one is about the discrimination some Kurdish students say they have experienced in various majority-Arab cities in the country. And this one is about the experiences various ethnic-Arab Iraqis report having had during sojourns in Iraqi Kurdistan: some good, and some very bad.
I think it’s great to have the young journos work on both sides of that issue. The general picture that emerges, however, is of increasing ethnic polarization.
Anyway, I’ve got to run. I just wanted to share those with y’all. Check them out.

Well, first, it really couldn’t have happened to a nice pair of guys! How are the mighty fallen, eh? From schmoozing with Laura Bush at the State of the Union to international ignominy within a bare seven months…
Having said that, I should add that I actually feel rather sorry for Uncle Ahmad Chalabi… I can’t believe I am writing these words… but it turns out the amount of counterfeited “old dinars” they are charging him for is around 30,000 old dinars, or about $2.
Truly, with all the problems Iraq is facing these days, the idea of launching a court case, extradition attempt, etc., around that charge is quite mind-boggling.
Or, dare I say it, plainly political?
Uncle Ahmad is now in Iran, having no doubt greased his way in there with a few well-placed donations… Actually, I’m sure they’re delighted to have him. (1) They can maybe carry on milking him for good, ‘insider’ info about the Bushites and their current acolytes in Baghdad. (2) They can keep an eye on him. (Surely no-one in the world would any longer trust this guy further than they could throw him?) (3) If the price is right, they can “give him up” to the highest bidder, should they choose to do so.
It’s young Salem, though, whose situation seems really intriguing.
(1) The case that Iraqi judge Zuhair al-Maliki has brought against him is much more serious than the one against Unca Ahmad. He’s accused of murder in the case of the death in June of Haithem Fadhil, director-general of the Iraqi finance ministry, who’d been looking into Chalabi family finances.
(2) He’s been the lynch-pin in organizing Saddam’s trial there in Baghdad. So now, evidently, the whole course of that trial is in question, too.
(3) He’s in London. We’ll have to see what the British authorities decide to do about him.
Well, I’m too tired to write much more about all this right now. Sometime this week, when I have the energy, I want to write a longer post here about all the many ways in which the situation in Iraq seems to be imploding. So fast… So tragic…
I know it doesn’t help any to say this, but maybe it’s worth reminding ourselves anyway: It didn’t have to be like this. George W. Bush and the ignorant bunch of ideologues you have around you: you all have a lot to answer for.

Juan Cole’s had a couple of link recently to pieces from Iraq in the Guardian by Ghaith Abdul-Ahad. Somehow, I believe that’s Salam/Pax’s friend ‘G’, but I may be wrong. Anyway, he’s a fine reporter and a pretty fearless one too.
This is the piece he had in today’s (Monday’s) paper. It’s a great piece of reporting from a couple of days spent covering the (recent? ongoing? who knows?) fighting in Najaf…
After describing nine corpses of pro-Moqtada “martyrs” he saw stacked up in “one of Najaf’s oldest religious schools … a few yards away from the main Imam Ali mosque”, he comments:

The injuries to the dead said a lot about the precision of American snipers, but there was more argument over the precision of their counting.
While the Americans claimed 300 of the Mahdi army had been killed, no more than a dozen wounded and the nine dead were to be seen.
“If they had killed 300 that means we have at least another 1,000 injured,” said Ahmad al-Shaibani, the militia’s leading commander. “How many fighters do they think we have?”

The kind of tactics he describes seemed like the classic hit-and-run members of a small mobile force would use:

Continue reading “Ghaith, from Najaf”

On a number of occasions, including in this July 2003 JWN post, I’ve reflected on the “slippery” nature of the Iraq question.
Nowadays, the problem of the lack of traction in the country is at a new level of criticality–and in two different though linked dimensions.
In the security dimension, the current plan of the eager-to-withdraw occupiers is that new Iraqi security forces will be rapidly trained up so that they can police most of the country, as the occupiers withdraw ever further into out-of-sight cantonments.
But how do you even start to assemble Iraqi security people in the required numbers if you can’t even assure security for those Iraqis willing to come forward and enlist?
You need a traction point. It doesn’t appear to be there.
And then, in the political dimension, there’s a similar lack-of-traction problem, as shown by the failure of Allawi’s present “transitional” administration to meet the deadline for convening the first precursor body, that will then choose a second precursor body, to help organize an election, that will choose the Constitution-writing body, that will the lay out the rules for (sometime along the way there in the distant future) actually exercizing sovereign self-government of the country…
A big lack-of-traction problem there, too.
And of course these two dimensions are linked. How can you convene any of the national-level precursor bodies if the country is still wracked by inssecurity? And on the other hand, how can you ever get a national representative enlistment into the security forces if great chunks of the national population feel alienated politically from the occupier-backed regime?
Some people might call these chicken-and-egg problems. But with all the complexity in Iraq these days it looks like what you’d have with this metaphor is a massive omelette made with ground-up chicken feet, gristle, and beaks, garnished with bloody chicken feathers…. Not easy to find any way out of such a morass…
However, if you look at these as lack-of-traction problems, it’s just possible that–once you can find a more solid point from which to intervene–then enough traction can be provided slowly to start unraveling all aspects of the problem.

Continue reading “Getting ‘traction’ in Iraq”

I don’t think I’m an anti-white racist… But am I the only person who’s a bit perplexed by all the repeated pictures of Iyad Allawi, the ‘prime minister’ of the supposedly ‘independent’ transitional government of Iraq always appearing in public being very publicly guarded by a squad of very Aryan-looking and heavily armed blond beasts? Is this, I wonder, quite the image that he wants to project?

Last August, there burst into the blogosphere a shining new light by the name of Riverbend. In her very first post, August 17, 2003, she told us:

A little bit about myself: I’m female, Iraqi and 24. I survived the war. That’s all you need to know. It’s all that matters these days anyway.

Since there is, understandably, quite a lot of interest these days in what has happened to Iraq’s women before, during, and since the US/UK invasion, I thought it would be good for JWN readers to do some good reading of the great blog that Riv provided us with between then and mid-June. (Some of us are quite worried about what has happened to Riv since then… Please, if anyone knows, tell me. meanwhile, do join us in beaming some good thoughts her way…)
Maybe the best thing you could do, if you have a bit of time and access to a good web connection, is to go cruise in River’s blog yourself.
However, in case you don’t have those great commodities, Adela of Abundance Alliance has helped us all by picking out some of the posts in which Riv comments and reflects most perinently on the situation of women in Iraq.
By August 23, Riv was giving us a first really great overview of women’s situation in post-invasion Iraq. In this post, titled We’ve only just begun, she wrote:

Females can no longer leave their homes alone. Each time I go out, E. and either a father, uncle or cousin has to accompany me. It feels like we’ve gone back 50 years ever since the beginning of the occupation. A woman, or girl, out alone, risks anything from insults to abduction. An outing has to be arranged at least an hour beforehand. I state that I need to buy something or have to visit someone. Two males have to be procured (preferably large) and ‘safety arrangements’ must be made in this total state of lawlessness. And always the question: “But do you have to go out and buy it? Can’t I get it for you?” No you can’t, because the kilo of eggplant I absolutely have to select with my own hands is just an excuse to see the light of day and walk down a street. The situation is incredibly frustrating to females who work or go to college.
Before the war, around 50% of the college students were females, and over 50% of the working force was composed of women. Not so anymore. We are seeing an increase of fundamentalism in Iraq which is terrifying.
For example, before the war, I would estimate (roughly) that about 55% of females in Baghdad wore a hijab- or headscarf. Hijabs do not signify fundamentalism. That is far from the case- although I, myself, don’t wear one, I have family and friends who do. The point is that, before, it didn’t really matter. It was *my* business whether I wore one or not- not the business of some fundamentalist on the street.
For those who don’t know (and I have discovered they are many more than I thought), a hijab only covers the hair and neck. The whole face shows and some women even wear it Grace Kelley style with a few locks of hair coming out of the front. A ‘burqa’ on the other hand, like the ones worn in Afghanistan, covers the whole head- hair, face and all.
I am female and Muslim. Before the occupation, I more or less dressed the way I wanted to. I lived in jeans and cotton pants and comfortable shirts. Now, I don’t dare leave the house in pants. A long skirt and loose shirt (preferably with long sleeves) has become necessary. A girl wearing jeans risks being attacked, abducted or insulted by fundamentalists who have been… liberated!
Fathers and mothers are keeping their daughters stashed safe at home. That’s why you see so few females in the streets (especially after 4 pm). Others are making their daughters, wives and sisters wear a hijab. Not to oppress them, but to protect them.
I lost my job for a similar reason. I’ll explain the whole depressing affair in another post. Girls are being made to quit college and school. My 14-year-old cousin (a straight-A student) is going to have to repeat the year because her parents decided to keep her home ever since the occupation. Why? Because the Supreme Council of the Islamic Revolution in Iraq overtook an office next to her school and opened up a special ‘bureau’.
Men in black turbans (M.I.B.T.s as opposed to M.I.B.s) and dubious, shady figures dressed in black, head to foot, stand around the gates of the bureau in clusters, scanning the girls and teachers entering the secondary school. The dark, frowning figures stand ogling, leering and sometimes jeering at the ones not wearing a hijab or whose skirts aren’t long enough. In some areas, girls risk being attacked with acid if their clothes aren’t ‘proper’…

Continue reading “Riverbend on women in Iraq”

The Institute for War and Peace Reporting has put some very good pieces up in the past couple of days.
In its Iraq collection, it has this story from an un-named IWPR trainee who was taken to a training camp for a group calling itself the ‘Iraqi Resistance’. He (she?) writes:

A photograph of Saddam Hussein and his two sons hung on one wall, while the other displayed an old Iraqi flag and a sword.
This insurgent leader identified himself as a former intelligence officer who transferred to the paramilitary Saddam Fidayeen organisation before the war last year.
He explained his movement’s goal, “If we do not hold authority in Iraq, then we will allow no one else to hold authority.”

That latter statement seems to sum up the thinking behind a lot of what’s been going on in Iraq in the past few weeks: a campaign to try to make the country “ungovernable”, pure and simple.
The piece has a lot of other interesting tidbits, too.
This story, about the claimed finding of the body of former Iraqi president Abdel-Karim Qassam, and popular reactions to it, is somethng I hadn’t seen elsewhere.
Their Iraqi Press Monitor for July 19 refers to a story in Adalah that quotes Special tribunal chief Salim Chalabi as saying that two former Saddam henchmen–including former Foreign Minister Tarek Aziz–have agreed to testify against Saddam. Interesting. I hadn’t seen a reference to that anyplace else.
In IWPR’s Balkans collection, there’s a good think-piece by their editor in The Hague, Rachel Taylor, asking “Was Milosevic Charge Sheet Too Ambitious?”
Taylor recounts the whole history of how the three cases against Slobo–for Croatia, forBosnia, for Kosovo–all got joined into one. She quotes some people who have supported handling the case that way, and some who now criticize the stragey. For example:

Marieke Wierda, senior associate at the International Center for Transitional Justice and a former law clerk to Judge May, told IWPR that having one massive case is a ‘high stakes’ approach, because “if the accused is deemed unfit or dies during the case, then you are left with nothing”.
On the other hand, she said, if the prosecutors had gone forward with the Kosovo indictment first, they “could have had a conviction on Kosovo under their belts by now”.

Taylor also quotes Richard Dicker, head of Human Rights Watch’s International Justice Program, thus:

In the end, he said, people’s hopes for what such a trial can accomplish may just have been too high.
“Going forward, it is important that we have realistic expectations about the trial process and what is going to come out,” he explained. “Prosecutors should focus on a limited set of charges, or counts, for which the proof is strongest even though important incidents may not be included.
“The trials shouldn’t attempt to be a history book.”

The latest stories on Afghanistan on the IWPR site are worth reading, too.

Douglas McCollam has a pretty well-researched piece in the latest Columbia Journalism Review titled “How Chalabi played the press”. His focus is, not surprisingly, on the run-up to the war, and way that everyone’s (then-)favorite snake-oil salesman worked assiduously and successfully to plant in the western press the kinds of stories that would jerk western governments–but especially the US!–into launching the war that he sought against Saddam.
From a quick read of the piece–and from what one knew already–the way it seemed to work was this: Chala got gobs of money from various US government agencies to run something called the “Information Collection Program” (ICP).
Collection?? Well, that was the easy part… He would just groom a few alleged “defectors” from Iraq who would tell their tales to selected journalists. The part that Chala really focused on, however, was information dissemination. And in that department, he found many, many journalists whom he played like fine violins.
(So we taxpayers here in the US found ourselves paying money to someone who then used it to try to sell his lies to us.)
McCollam writes that he thinks the strong focus on Judy Miller in the whole journo community is not totally fair. He seems to give his own “Golden Gull” award to someone called David Rose. In a piece in the May 2002 issue of Vanity Affair, Rose recounted many stories from Mohammed Harith, a former Iraqi “Mukhabarat ” (intel) officer, who claimed to have personal knowledge of Saddam Hussein’s mobile biological weapons labs.
According to McCollam, in Rose’s article, Harith claimed that, in addition to those (now-discredited) “mobile labs”,

Hussein was close to building a new long-range missile. He also told of a trip to Africa to buy radioactive materials for a dirty bomb from renegade Russians. He spoke of a chemical weapons factory in Samarra and a bioweapons lab in the suburbs of Baghdad. And so on. In the piece, Rose effusively praised the INC’s defector operation, going so far as to say it resembled ‘nothing so much as the Underground Railroad, the clandestine network which rescued slaves from the American South before the Civil War.’

Oh, gimme a break.
As McCollam notes,

Continue reading “Those charming Chalabis (contd.)”

I have been shocked–“shocked!”– to read in Sy Hersh’s latest piece in the New Yorker that Israelis, including Mossad operatives, have been all over Iraqi Kurdistan in the past 18 months.
Look, it’s always been perfectly clear that this whole administration is completely riddled with Israeli infiltration at every decisionmaking and operational level. I always simply assumed the US occupation forces throughout the whole of Iraq were just a continuation of that picture.
And indeed, when I was in DC last week, an old friend of mine who is retired from but still well connected to high US diplomatic and military circles confirmed to me that, “Yes, the Israelis have been all over Iraq ever since the start of the occupation… And certainly, they’ve been advising the ‘interrogation’ systems inside all the prisons there.”
In Sy’s piece, he tries to portray what he’s writing as something breathlessly new and unknown. (Prime example right there in the first graf: “In July 2003 … Israeli intelligence assets in Iraq were reporting that the insurgents had the support of Iranian intelligence operatives and other foreign fighters, who were crossing the unprotected border between Iran and Iraq at will. ” Duh. Everyone could see that the border was quite unprotected, and being raversed at will by all sorts of people from Iran. But the Bushites simply didn’t want to send in the manpower–American, or anyone else’s–that it would have taken to seal it.)

Continue reading “Israelis in Iraq”

Just a few more indicators to add to what I wrote about here Sunday…
Juan Cole posted today news from Az-Zaman that:

Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani has decided to send a representative to Kurdistan to discuss the differences between him and the Kurdish leadership over Kurdish desires for a loose federalism that would give them substantial autonomy within Iraq. Sistani’s spokesman said that he wanted to reduce the feelings of anxiety and being slighted expressed by the Kurdish leaders and in the Kurdish street at Sistani’s stance.

In that same post, he also noted that,

Veteran diplomat and superb Arabist Christopher Ross, who is in the Coalition Provisional Authority’s Outreach Department, has indicated a desire to meet with radical Shiite leader Muqtada al-Sadr for talks about the fate of the Mahdi Army militia. Previously the CPA had refused to deal with Muqtada directly, accusing him of having had rival cleric Abdul Majid al-Khoei killed in April of 2003.
Ross’s request for a meeting may well be a sign that a more pragmatic set of officials from the State Department is beginning to take charge of such policies from the Neocon establishment that had dominated the Coalition Provisional Authority (and which had generally screwed up Iraq royally). On June 30, the real transition will be from Defense Department dominance of Iraq to State Department responsibility for Iraq.

I really like that last judgment he articulates there!
Still in the column for “indicators of useful internal contacts inside Iraq”, I see that Reuters is reporting today that:

Interim [Iraqi] President Ghazi al-Yawar, recently returned from the Group of Eight summit in the United States, said he welcomed Sadr’s recent decision to create a political party that could take part in Iraq’s first democratic elections in the new year.
“I kept on saying consistently that if I were in his shoes I would try to go to the political arena instead of raising arms,” Yawar told reporters outside the Iraqi government building.
“He has supporters, he has constituents, he should go through the political process and I commend this smart move on his side.”

In the column for “indicators of distinctly unuseful internal contacts inside Iraq”, meanwhile, is the following Reuters report:

Continue reading “Real politics inside Iraq? ~Part 2”