Iraq- The West Shakes Up The Middle East

by Patrick Cockburn

  Most likely, the ambushers did not know who she was or what she was doing. Jill Carroll, the Christian Science Monitor correspondent, was kidnapped in similar circumstances in January last year after leaving the office of a political party.

  There was little the guards could do. The first vehicle of the little convoy escaped and then returned to help the two survivors who had been wounded. Ms Parhamovich appears to have died in the first assault.

  Much of west Baghdad is under the control of the insurgent fighters. "With God's assistance, we have succeeded in the destruction of two SUV vehicles belonging to the Zionist Mossad, attacking them by light and medium weapons," wrote one group on a Sunni insurgent website. The insurgents sometimes have armed units waiting in basements and safe houses for opportunities to attack as soon as they are tipped off by security guards, shopkeepers and cigarette sellers.

  The extent of insurgent dominance in Baghdad is such that it will be extremely difficult for Mr Bush's "surge" in troop numbers to work effectively. It is easy enough for guerrillas to pull back, stockpile weapons or even leave Baghdad for a period. Mr Bush's answer is that US troops will stay in place instead of withdrawing as they did in the past. But saturation of whole districts of Baghdad with troops over an extended period would require a far bigger army than the US is ever likely to field in Iraq.

  The Mehdi Army, the largest Shia militia, has been removing its checkpoints and adopting a low profile in order to avoid a confrontation with US troops. The Iraqi government has even arrested some of its militants and is holding them in what appears to be a carefully calculated ploy to make it difficult for the US to assault Shia neighbourhoods.

  The Mehdi leaders may also calculate the natural friction between US troops and local people - particularly if US forces use heavy artillery and air power inflicting heavy civilian casualties - will ultimately work in their favour. The "surge" in US troop numbers does not resolve the problem that few Iraqi military units are loyal to the state before their own communities.

  In one Sunni area of west Baghdad, US troops have distributed leaflets telling people to ring a hotline telephone number if they come under attack from sectarian militias. "But we don't know how long the Americans are going to be around," said one resident. "Maybe calling them on the phone is not a great idea."

  The killing of Ms Parhamovich is typical of ambushes and assassinations in Baghdad. Kidnappings of foreigners - unlike the abduction of Iraqis- have tailed off in recent months because there are few foreigners outside the Green Zone and other heavily defended localities in Baghdad. The US has hinted that if the Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki does not move against the Shia militias, he might well lose Washington's support. That has led to a recurrence of rumours there might be so-called "moderate" government installed. But that would mean ignoring the results of the elections of 2005 won by the Shia parties. Washington's closest allies performed dismally at the polls then and are even more unpopular now. A new coalition would be more dependent on the US than that of Mr Maliki and would have less credibility among Iraqis.

  Sunday, 18 February 2007

  ROADSIDE BOMBS ARE NOTHING NEW

  There is something ludicrous about the attempt by the US military in Iraq to persuade the world that the simple but devastating roadside bomb or IED (improvised explosive device) is a highly developed weapon requiring Iranian expertise. Here is the official police report of one IED attack. It reads: "At about 8.25am, 100 men of the X Regt with their colonel in charge, marched with their band from the military barracks at Y to their rifle range via fixed route. When they got to place Z a land mine exploded, killing three outright and wounding 22 others, three of these died shortly afterwards. The mine was connected to an electric battery by about 150 yards of cable. It is believed that there were only two men involved in carrying out this outrage."

  This is fairly typical of a roadside bomb. It might have happened in Iraq yesterday- except it didn't. The IED in question exploded in the town of Youghal in County Cork on 21 June 1921. I happen to have read the Royal Irish Constabulary report on the incident, because I was born 29 years later about two miles away from the site.

  IEDs have not changed much in the decades that followed. They have been used everywhere from Cyprus to Vietnam. They are cheap and easy to make, and can be detonated by a single person. They came as a nasty shock to the incoming US soldiers who invaded Iraq in 2003 because they were so well equipped to fight the Soviet army - American military procurement long ago detached itself from real conditions on the battlefield.

  In early 2004 I met some US combat engineers, or sappers, charged with the lethal job of finding these bombs, which were nicknamed "convoy killers". Because the Pentagon was in a state of denial about their very existence, the sappers had received no training in locating them. A sergeant told me that he had obtained with great difficulty an old but still valid US army handbook, printed during the Vietnam War, about IEDs. The book had not been reissued because to do so might appear to contradict the Pentagon's line that Iraq was not like Vietnam. The US Army is pretending that "explosively formed penetrators" are a new form of weapon which could only have been obtained in Iran. It claimed last week that the so-called EFPs had been supplied to the Shia militias and had killed 170 US troops. But the US has been primarily fighting a Sunni insurgency, and has had only intermittent clashes with Shia militiamen.

  Sophisticated weapons may be obtained in Iraq, if the money is there to pay for them. Until recently smugglers were moving weapons out of Iraq into Saudi Arabia - prices were higher there. A favourite method of moving them was to tie the guns under sheep, so they were concealed by the wool, and to pay the shepherds to drive them across the frontier.

  Wednesday, 28 February 2007

  MAKING THE WORLD A MORE TERRIFYING PLACE

  Innocent people across the world are now paying the price of the "Iraq effect", with the loss of hundreds of lives directly linked to the invasion and occupation by American and British forces.

  An authoritative US study of terrorist attacks after the invasion in 2003 contradicts the denials of George Bush and Tony Blair that the war is not to blame for an upsurge in fundamentalist violence worldwide. The research is said to be the first to attempt to measure the "Iraq effect" on global terrorism. It found the number killed in jihadist attacks around the world has risen dramatically since the Iraq war began. The count, excluding the Arab-Israel conflict, shows in the 18 months between 11 September 2001 and the start of the Iraq war in March 2003 some 729 people were killed, while in the following 42 months to September 2006, the number of deaths rose to 5,420 - a three-fold rise in the number of deaths per year, from 486 to 1,549. As well as strikes in Europe, attacks have also increased in Chechnya and Kashmir since the invasion. The research was carried out by the Centre on Law and Security at the NYU Foundation for Mother Jones magazine. Iraq was the catalyst for a ferocious fundamentalist backlash, according to the study, which says that the number of those killed by Islamists within Iraq rose from seven to 3,122. Afghanistan, invaded by US and British forces in direct response to the September 11 attacks, saw a rise from very few before 2003 to 802 since then. In the Chechen conflict, the toll rose from 234 to 497. In the Kashmir region, as well as India and Pakistan, the total rose from 182 to 489, and in Europe from none to 297.

  Two years after declaring "mission accomplished" in Iraq President Bush insisted: "If we were not fighting and destroying the enemy in Iraq, they would not be idle. They would be plotting and killing Americans across the world and within our borders. By fighting these terrorists in Iraq, Americans in uniform are defeating a direct threat to the American people."

  Mr Blair has also maintained that the Iraq war has not been responsible for Muslim fundamentalist attacks such as the 7/ 7 London bombings which killed 52 people. "Iraq, the region and the wider world is a safer place without Saddam[Hussein]," Mr Blair declared in July 2004. Announcing the deployment of 1,400 extra troops to Afghanistan ea
rlier this week- raising the British force level in the country above that in Iraq- the Prime Minister steadfastly denied accusations by MPs that there was any link between the Iraq war and unravelling of security elsewhere.

  Last month John Negroponte, director of National Intelligence in Washington, said he was "not certain" that the Iraq war had been a recruiting factor for al-Qa’ida and insisted: "I wouldn't say that there has been a widespread growth in Islamic extremism beyond Iraq, I really wouldn't."

  Yet the report points out that the US administration's own National Intelligence Estimate on "Trends in Global Terrorism: Implications for the United States" - partially declassified last October - stated that "the Iraq war has become the 'cause célèbre' for jihadists and is shaping a new generation of terrorist leaders and operatives." The new study, by Peter Bergen and Paul Cruickshank, argues that, on the contrary, "the Iraq conflict has greatly increased the spread of al-Qa’ida ideological virus, as shown by a rising number of terrorist attacks in the past three years from London to Kabul, and from Madrid to the Red Sea.

  "Our study shows that the Iraq war has generated a stunning increase in the yearly rate of fatal jihadist attacks, amounting to literally hundreds of additional terrorist attacks and civilian lives lost. Even when terrorism in Iraq and Afghanistan is excluded, fatal attacks in the rest of the world have increased by more than one third."

  In trying to gauge the "Iraq effect", the authors focused on the rate of terrorist attacks in two periods - from September 2001 to 30 March 2003 (the day of the Iraq invasion) and 21 March 2003 to 30 September 2006. Their research is based on the MIPT-RAND terrorism database, a trusted source.

  The report's assertion that the Iraq invasion has had a far greater impact in radicalising Muslims is widely backed by security personnel in the UK. Senior anti-terrorist officials told The Independent that the attack on Iraq, and the now-discredited claims by the US and British governments about Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction, had led to far more young Muslims engaging in extremist activity than the invasion of Afghanistan two years previously.

  Dame Eliza Manningham-Buller, head of the Secret Service (MI5), said recently: "In Iraq attacks are regularly videoed and the footage is downloaded into the internet.

  "Chillingly, we see the results here. Young teenagers are being groomed to be suicide bombers. The threat is serious, is growing and will, I believe, be with us for a generation."

  In Afghanistan the most active of the Taliban commanders, Mullah Dadullah, acknowledged how the Iraq war has influenced the struggle in Afghanistan.

  "We give and take with the mujahedin in Afghanistan," he said. The most striking example of this has been the dramatic rise in suicide bombings in Afghanistan, a phenomenon not seen through the 10 years of war with the Russians in the 1980s.

  The report said the effect of Iraq on various jihadist conflicts was influenced by a number of factors, such as whether a country has troops in Iraq, geographical proximity to the war zone, the empathy felt for the Iraqis and the exchange of information between Islamist groups. "This may explain why jihadist groups in Europe, Arab countries, and Afghanistan were more affected by the Iraq war than other regions", it said.

  Russia, like the US, has used the language of the "war on terror" in its actions in Chechnya, and al-Qa’ida and its associates have entrenched themselves in the border areas of Pakistan from where they have mounted attacks in Kashmir, Pakistan and India.

  Statistics for the Arab-Israel conflict also show an increase, but the methodology is disputed in the case of Palestinian attacks in the occupied territories and settler attacks on Palestinians.

  Kim Sengupta and Patrick Cockburn

  Tuesday, 20 March 2007

  FOUR YEARS SINCE LIBERATION AND DRENCHED IN BLOOD

  "I have fled twice in the past year," said Kassim Naji Salaman as he stood beside his petrol tanker outside the town of Khanaqin in central Iraq this weekend. "I and my family used to live in Baghdad but we ran for our lives when my uncle and nephew were killed and we moved into a house in the village of Kanaan in Diyala."

  Mr Salaman hoped he and his family, all Sunni, would be safer in a Sunni district. But almost everywhere in Iraq is dangerous. "Militiamen kidnapped my brother Natik, who used to drive this tanker, and forced him into the boot of their car," he continued. "When they took him out they shot him in the head and left his body beside the road. I am frightened of going back to Kanaan where my family are refugees because the militiamen would kill me as well." Iraqis expected their lives to get better when the US and Britain invaded with the intention of overthrowing Saddam Hussein four years ago today. They were divided on whether they were being liberated or occupied but almost no Iraqis fought for the old regime in 2003. Even his own Sunni community knew that Saddam had inflicted almost a quarter of a century of hot and cold war on his own people. He had reduced the standard of living of Iraqis, owners of vast oil reserves, from a level close to Greece to that of Mali.

  No sooner had Saddam Hussein fallen than Iraqis were left in no doubt that they had been occupied not liberated. The army and security services were dissolved. As an independent state Iraq ceased to exist. "The Americans want clients not allies in Iraq," lamented one Iraqi dissident who had long lobbied for the invasion in London and Washington.

  Guerrilla war against the US forces by the five million strong Sunni community erupted with extraordinary speed and ferocity. By summer 2003, whenever I went to the scene of a bomb attack or an ambush of US soldiers I would find jubilant Iraqis dancing for joy around the pools of drying blood on the road or the smouldering Humvee vehicles.

  For Iraqis, every year has been worse than the last since 2003. In November and December last year alone 5,000 civilians were murdered, often tortured to death, according to the UN. This toll compares to 3,000 killed in 30 years of conflict in Northern Ireland. Many Iraqis have voted with their feet, some two million fleeing- mostly to Syria and Jordan - since President George Bush and Tony Blair ordered US and British troops across the Iraqi border four years ago today. So dangerous is it to travel anywhere in Iraq outside Kurdistan that it is difficult for journalists to provide evidence of the slaughter house the country has become without being killed themselves. Mr Blair and Mr Bush have long implied that the violence is confined to central Iraq. This lie should have been permanently nailed by the Baker-Hamilton report written by senior Republicans and Democrats, which examined one day last summer when the US military had announced that there had been 93 attacks and discovered that the real figure was 1,100. In other words the violence was being understated by a factor of 10.

  Diyala is one of the most violent provinces. It used to be one of the richest, with rich fruit orchards flourishing on the banks of the Diyala river before it joins the Tigris south of Baghdad. But its sectarian geography is lethal. Its population is a mixture of Sunni and Shia with a small Kurdish minority. For at least two years it has been convulsed by ever-escalating violence.

  It is impossible for a foreign journalist to travel to Diyala from Baghdad unless he or she is embedded with the US forces. I knew, having made the journey before, that it was possible to get to Khanaqin, in the Kurdish controlled north-east corner of Diyala by taking a road passing through Kurdish villages along the Iraqi side of the Iranian border.

  We started in Arbil, the Kurdish capital, and drove through the mountains to Sulaimaniyah three hours to the east. The Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK), the party of Jalal Tala-bani, the Iraqi President, arranged a guide who knew the road to take us on to Khanaqin the following morning. We drove out of the mountains through the Derbendikan tunnel and then followed the right bank of the Diyala river, swollen by torrential rain, until we got to the tumble down town of Kalar. It is important here to turn right over a long bridge across the Diyala because the next town on the road, Jalawlah, is contested between Kurds and Arab Sunni. The road then goes in the direction of the Iranian border until it reaches Khanaqin, which is under
PUK control.

  We met a tribal leader from Jalawlah called Ghassim Mohammed Shati, who was also a police captain. He said: "The centre of the town is safe enough but my father and brother and aunt were murdered on the outskirts in March 2005." Surprisingly Mr Shati did not favour shooting the insurgents who had killed his relatives. "The only solution is to give employment to the police and army officers who were sacked and now support al-Qa’ida. If they get jobs they will stop," he said. Everybody agreed the situation in Diyala was worse than ever. And the insurgents say they are setting up the Islamic emirate of Diyala.

  Earlier this month the US, with much fanfare, sent 700 soldiers to Diyala to restore government authority. It fought a ferocious battle with insurgents in which it lost two armoured "Stryker" vehicles. But, as so often in Iraq, in the eyes of Iraqis the presence or absence of American forces does not make as much difference to who holds power locally as the US military command would like to believe. Supposedly they are supporting 20,000 Iraqi security forces, but earlier this year it was announced that 1,500 local police were to be fired for not opposing the insurgents. At one embarrassing moment US and Iraqi military commanders were claiming at a video-link press conference that they had a firm grip on the situation in Baquba when insurgents burst into the mayor's office, kidnapped him and blew it up.

  Power in Diyala is fragmented. As in the rest of Iraq it is difficult to know who is in charge. The Iraqi government, whose ministers issue optimistic statements about the improving state of their country when on visits to London or Washington, carries surprisingly little weight outside the Green Zone in Baghdad. Often its interventions do nothing but harm. For instance the main source of employment in Khanaqin is the large border crossing from Iran at Monzariyah. Cross-border traffic provided 1,000 jobs. But the government has closed the crossing point and the road that used to be crowded with trucks a few months ago is now empty. No rations, on which 60 per cent of Iraqis depend, have been delivered in Diyala for seven months. Those delivering them say it is too dangerous to do so since the drivers of trucks containing the rations are often deemed to be collaborators by insurgents and shot to death. In Mr Salaman's village of Kanaan, five men were burnt to death for guarding two petrol stations.