These are the archives for the week ending 2nd September 2005
Bad planning may be to blame for deaths
Iraq was shrouded in mourning last night after more than 700 Shia pilgrims died in a stampede across a Baghdad bridge, in the deadliest incident since the March 2003 invasion.
The government said insurgents instigated the disaster by spreading rumours of a suicide bomber. But many survivors said they heard nothing about a putative attack, and blamed the authorities for mishandling the vast gathering.
Guardian 1/9/05
August is bloodiest month this year for US
U.S. forces in Iraq suffered at least 74 combat deaths in Iraq in August -- more than in any month since last November and the third-highest total for any month of the war, according to Pentagon figures.
Associated Press, 31/8/05
Sadr movement revitalised
Hazem Araji's résumé reads like a story of Iraq's recent past -- and perhaps its near future. In the tumult that followed the U.S. invasion in 2003, he hit the streets with a clique of fellow Shiite Muslim clerics to organize what became Iraq's first postwar popular movement. Their symbol was Moqtada Sadr, a young, radical clergyman and son of a revered ayatollah. The next year, Araji emerged as the group's public face, as it twice fought U.S. troops. He and others were arrested, and for nine months he languished in U.S. custody in Abu Ghraib prison, then at Camp Bucca.
Long the bane of the U.S. project in Iraq, Sadr's movement returned to center stage last week, with what his aides describe as a new confidence following the release of Araji and other leaders, along with the experience of their sometimes quiet activism. In dramatic fashion over three days, the movement embodied virtually every aspect of power in today's Iraq: support in the street, an easily mobilized militia, and loyalists within the government that it often denounces.
After a clash Wednesday night in Najaf that they blamed on a rival Shiite militia, Sadr's armed followers poured into Baghdad and at least six other cities. Twenty-one members of parliament and three cabinet ministers loyal to him suspended their work in protest. Two days later, Sadr's followers organized some of the biggest demonstrations in recent years; ostensibly protests over government services, they were effectively shows of strength.
Since his release, Araji has taken over the social affairs committee, one of the movement's more than half-dozen branches. (Others include tribal affairs, politics, culture, religious education and information, and the Mahdi Army, Sadr's militia.) As he sat at his office, Araji described some of his panel's activities, including distribution of millions of dollars to the poor in southern cities to purchase cattle for farms and supplies for small grocery stores, and the provision of food, medicine and clothes to 30,000 families.
In a country whose sectarian and ethnic divides have relentlessly deepened, Sadr stands as a rare figure with support among both Sunnis and Shiites. At a protest Monday against Iraq's new constitution in Tikrit, near Hussein's home town, Sunnis held aloft pictures of the cleric. "Yes, yes to Sadr!" some of the 1,500 protesters shouted.
Wahington Post, 30/8/05
Government death squads
A leader of Iraq's largest Sunni political group blamed Shiite-led security forces Monday for the deaths of 36 Sunnis found shot in the head and said such acts could have unforeseen consequences. Tarek al-Hashimi, secretary-general of the Iraqi Islamic Party, said the Sunnis were abducted by squads in police uniforms from Baghdad's northern neighborhood of Hurriyah. Their bodies were discovered last week in a dry riverbed south of the capital.
The Interior Ministry, which is run by members of the Shiite group Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq, has denied similar accusations in the past, saying anyone can buy a police uniform.
San Diego Union-Tribune, 29/8/05
Arab world opposes Iraq constitution
Iraq's draft constitution was on Monday greeted with stiff opposition in the wider Arab world, amid fears that it undermines the country's Arab identity and will inflame sectarian tensions. Delegates from Iraq's Sunni minority, who refused to endorse the draft constitution, have appealed to the Arab League and United Nations to help block a referendum due in October.
Supporting their position Amr Moussa, secretary-general of the Arab League, described parts of the draft as a "recipe for chaos". He claimed Iraq's Sunni minority had "not been heard" during the constitution-drafting process and said he shared their concerns on the federal nature of the draft.
The decentralised, federal system outlined in the draft is unprecedented in the Arab world and has played to regional fears of growing Iranian influence and Kurdish separatism. "I do not believe in this division between Shia and Sunni and Muslims and Christians and Arabs and Kurds," Mr Moussa said. "I don't buy this and I find in this a true recipe for chaos and perhaps a catastrophe in Iraq and around it."
Financial Times, 29/8/05
Iraqi security forces are years from readiness
Experience in restive Anbar Province suggests that Iraqi security forces will need years of preparation before they're ready to take charge of the complex and violent tribal areas of western Iraq. President Bush has said repeatedly that US troops will withdraw only when Iraqi troops are ready to take over.
But many of the Iraqi troops appear to be in poor condition, unable or unwilling to complete long foot patrols without frequent breaks. They often do not know what to do in complicated situations, standing back and letting Marines and soldiers take the lead.
The Iraqi National Guard, heralded last year as the answer to security in the area, has been disbanded because morale was low and insurgents had infiltrated it. The old national guard trucks, with their blue emblems, now sit rusting. As with the Iraqi Civil Defense Corps, the predecessor to the national guard, American officials say the new Iraqi Army and police will establish security in places such as Anbar.
However, the police force has collapsed in Ramadi, the provincial capital. Two divisions of Iraqi soldiers -- a total of 12,000 men -- are to establish security, but so far only 2,000 are available, and half of them lack basic training.
Boston Globe, 28/8/05
Basra christians prefer Saddam regime
V For the Christians in Basra, the downfall of Saddam Hussein has meant a terrible loss of religious freedom. The social club where Yousef Lyon and his friends would gather in the evening to play dominoes, where families danced or listened to live music on holidays, is closed. Wedding celebrations are held quietly at home.
"Of course, during the Saddam regime, it was better," said Lyon, 40, a member of the city's small Armenian community. "Now we are afraid from the religious parties that maybe they will throw a bomb at us." Not just the Christians, but many of the city's minorities -- from obscure sects like the ancient Sabeans to the sizable Sunni Muslim community - - live in fear of the hard-line Shiite religious parties and their militias that now rule Iraq's second-largest city.
Freedom has been curtailed for women, regardless of their religion. Several decades ago, almost no woman in Basra covered her head. Now, they all do, under fear of harassment or worse.
San Francisco Chronicle, 28/8/05
French back US in Afghanistan
As the going gets tougher for the U.S. military in Afghanistan and elsewhere in the region, one ally has stepped up despite a recent straining of ties: France. Paris has significantly boosted its military presence in Central Asia and Afghanistan, plus in nearby seas, as both it and Washington nurture their budding rapprochement after a bitter falling out over the Iraq war.
French fighters have been flying sorties under U.S. command in Afghanistan since Aug. 16, and France also took command this month of an international naval task force on terrorism-related patrols in the seas between the Horn of Africa and Pakistan. "It's France's wish to show that we are cooperating in the fight against terror and in support of you in Afghanistan," said French Air Force Col. Gilles Michel, who oversees his country's air force role in the theater.
"We remind the bad guys that they might get a bomb on the head if they're not careful," warned Michel, who is an old hand at joint missions with the U.S. military, flying a French fighter in the 1991 Gulf War and in NATO-led operations in Bosnia and Kosovo.
USA Today, 28/8/05
Halliburton critic demoted
A top Army contracting official who criticized a large, noncompetitive contract with the Halliburton Company for work in Iraq was demoted Saturday for what the Army called poor job performance. The official, Bunnatine H. Greenhouse, has worked in military procurement for 20 years and for the past several years had been the chief overseer of contracts at the Army Corps of Engineers, the agency that has managed much of the reconstruction work in Iraq. The demotion removes her from the elite Senior Executive Service and reassigns her to a lesser job in the corps' civil works division.
Ms. Greenhouse's lawyer, Michael Kohn, called the action an "obvious reprisal" for the strong objections she raised in 2003 to a series of corps decisions involving the Halliburton subsidiary Kellogg Brown & Root, which has garnered more than $10 billion for work in Iraq. Dick Cheney led Halliburton, which is based in Texas, before he became vice president.
New York Times, 29/8/05
Kurdish security forces kill Assyrian
Witnesses in Bartilla reported yesterday that a group of Kurdish Iraqi National Guards killed 37 year old Nabil Akram Amona by shooting him in the head execution style. Mr. Amona, a father of two, was filling his car with gasoline at the local gas station when the Kurdish militia drove in. Seconds later, they put a gun to his head and shot him. A second Assyrian, Matta Shamoun Zora Sha'ya who attempted to bring Mr. Amona to the hospital was also shot to the head twice. Mattai, a father of 4, who is the nephew of the local Syriac Orthodox bishop of Mar Matti Monastery, is in serious condition in the Nineveh hospital.
Eyewitnesses heard the militia speaking Kurdish and have seen them come in regularly to steal the gasoline and natural gas from this government station to sell it on the black-market. The murder is widely seen as a retaliation for the anti-constitution protests Assyrians held two days earlier. The Kurds have voted for the constitution in their regional government. The Kurdistan Democratic party, which funds and controls the Kurdish militia, has been stepping up its aggression by arresting Assyrians for no apparent reason and at times beating them severely.
Assyrian International News Agency, 27/8/05
US troops kill journalist
A Reuters Television soundman was shot dead in Baghdad on Sunday and a cameraman who was wounded was still being questioned by U.S. troops 12 hours later. "A team from Reuters news agency was on assignment to cover the killing of two policemen in Hay al-Adil; U.S. forces opened fire on the team from Reuters and killed Waleed Khaled, who was shot in the head, and wounded Haider Kadhem," an Interior Ministry official quoted the police incident report as saying.
Cameraman Kadhem, 24, who was wounded in the back, told colleagues at the scene: "I heard shooting, looked up and saw an American sniper on the roof of the shopping centre." The only known witness, he was later detained by the U.S. troops. For 10 hours, U.S. officers said they could not trace Kadhem. Finally a spokesman, Lieutenant Colonel Robert Whetstone, said he was being held at an unspecified location. His "superficial" wound had been treated "on location", he said.
Reporters Without Borders, a Paris-based media rights group, called it "extremely disturbing" and said the Reuters soundman was the 66th journalist or assistant killed in Iraq since the invasion of 2003, three more than died in 20 years in Vietnam.
Reuters, 28/8/05
Sunnis attack 'American' constitution
Hussein al-Falluji, a Sunni member of the committee that drafted the constitution, said that his community would reject the document with their "dying breath". "We have never agreed on this constitution. We have objections which are the same as we had from day one," he said. "This is an American constitution and we will not accept it, no matter what."
Although the strident language could be dismissed as the frustration of a politician who did not get his way in the hours of tortuous negotiations, ordinary Sunnis seemed to concur. "This is a constitution written by exiles for exiles. It aims to exclude all those who participated in the events of this country in the past 35 years," said Mahmoud Jubouri, 26, an engineer working in Baghdad who listened to the constitution being read out on television. "It was not written by professionals, but by Shia clerics and Kurdish dictators."
Times, 29/8/05
US won't give Iraqis heavy arms
Even though President Bush keeps saying American forces won't leave Iraq until its forces can fight on their own, the United States isn't rushing to give the Iraqi military heavy weapons. There is an official explanation for that - that such things take time. But there is also another reason to go slow, one that illustrates how tightly American military success is intertwined with the political prospects of Iraq itself. Simply put, Iraq remains too fragile for any planner to know what shape the country will be in six months or a year from now - whether it will reach compromises and hold together or split apart in a civil war.
And that presents a conundrum for American military planners. With those questions up in the air, they have to fear that any heavy arms distributed now could end up aimed at American forces or feeding a growing civil conflict. And the longer Iraq's army has to wait for sophisticated weapons, the longer American forces are likely to be needed in Iraq as a bulwark against chaos.
At the same time, the Americans are building at least four semi-permanent military bases that could hold 18,000 troops each. And if Iraq's politics remain unstable, the bases could offer a continuing rationale for not providing heavier weaponry, since the Americans would still be close by for the Iraqis to rely on. "We're trying to build an army to fight the current fight," one American officer said. "It's too early to start talking about M1A1 tanks, and they don't need helicopters when they have American military support."
New York Times, 28/8/05
Downing Street knew war was fuelling Muslim resentment
Downing Street was warned more than a year before the London bombings that the Iraq war was exacerbating a sense of "anger and impotence" among British Muslims. The revelation will increase the Government's problems as it tries to convince an increasingly sceptical public that invading Iraq was a step towards eliminating world terrorism.
A letter, written in May 2004 by the permanent secretary to the Foreign Office, Sir Michael Jay warns that the task of engaging with Muslims had been "knocked back" by the conflict. Sir Michael wrote: "Colleagues have flagged up some of the potential underlying causes of extremism that can affect the Muslim community, such as discrimination, disadvantage and exclusion. But another recurring theme is the issue of British foreign policy, especially in the context of the Middle East peace process and Iraq.
Independent, 28/8/05
Prisoners used as political pawns
The U.S. military has announced the release of nearly 1,000 Iraqi prisoners from Abu Ghraib prison, as negotiations on Iraq's draft constitution continue. The prisoner release came after a request by the Iraqi government. It followed appeals by a Sunni negotiator on the constitution committee for thousands of prisoners to be freed before a referendum on the draft constitution, scheduled for October 15.
The U.S. military said the released prisoners were not guilty of serious or violent crimes. The decision to release the prisoners is widely seen as a move to facilitate negotiations between Sunni Arabs and Shi'ite Muslim and Kurds.
Voice of America, 27/8/05
Resistance fight US to standstill
Insurgents in Anbar province, the center of guerrilla resistance in Iraq, have fought the U.S. military to a stalemate. After repeated major combat offensives in Fallujah and Ramadi, and after losing hundreds of soldiers and Marines in Anbar during the past two years - including 75 since June 1 - many American officers and enlisted men assigned to Anbar have stopped talking about winning a military victory in Iraq's Sunni Muslim heartland. Instead, they're trying to hold on to a handful of population centers and hit smaller towns in a series of quick-strike operations designed to disrupt insurgent activities temporarily.
"I don't think of this in terms of winning," said Col. Stephen Davis, who commands a task force of about 5,000 Marines in an area of some 24,000 square miles in the western portion of Anbar. Instead, he said, his Marines are fighting a war of attrition. "The frustrating part for the (American) audience, if you will, is they want finality. They want a fight for the town and in the end the guy with the white hat wins."
That's unlikely in Anbar, Davis said. He expects the insurgency to last for years, hitting American and Iraqi forces with quick ambushes, bombs and mines. Roadside bombs have hit vehicles Davis was riding in three times this year already. "We understand counter-insurgency ... we paid for these lessons in blood in Vietnam," Davis said. "You'll get killed on a nice day when everything is quiet."
Fort Wayne News-Sentinel, 25/8/05
Sunnis protest against 'American and Iranian' constitution
In a sign of public opinion within the Sunni community, the country's Sunni vice president said the current draft constitution was written only by Shiites and Kurds and is "far from the aspirations of all Iraqi people."
Meanwhile thousands marched in praise of Iraq's deposed leader Saddam Hussein on Friday in the city of Baqubah, 40 miles northeast of Baghdad. They reportedly danced and chanted his name and condemned plans by the Shiite and Kurdish-led assembly to push through a draft constitution. They accused the Shiites of kowtowing to Shiite Iran and to the United States.
"Bush, Bush, listen well; We all love Saddam Hussein!" crowds chanted. "We reject the American and Iranian constitution" and "No to a constitution that breaks up Iraq," their placards read.
Washington Post, 26/8/05
People falling ill from dirty water
Numerous cases of people falling ill from contaminated water in districts across Baghdad have been reported by local doctors and the Ministry of Public Works this week. "We have registered dozens of cases of people falling ill from dirty water in the past four days and we have found that the water used was from taps water inside the homes," Dr Hassan Adnan, a paediatrician at Yarmouk Hospital, said. Doctors have informed the ministries of Public Works and Health and asked for urgent assistance, especially in districts where there are large numbers of people falling ill.
"We have asked the population not to drink the water without boiling it until we have a total confirmation of the source of the bacteria," said Mua'ad Husseiny, a senior official in the Ministry of Public Works. "If this situation expands to other areas in the capital we can guarantee that it will get out of control."
Reuters, 25/8/05