Iraq- The West Shakes Up The Middle East

by Patrick Cockburn

  Paradoxically, Iran, unlike Saudi Arabia and the Sunni Arab states, actually supports the Iraqi government in Baghdad. It is run largely by their Shia co-religionists and political leaders who were supported by Iran for years against Saddam Hussein. The problem here is that Washington has never been willing to accept that the great campaign it launched to overthrow Saddam Hussein has increased Iranian influence and put Shia clergy in black turbans in power in Baghdad as they have long held power in Tehran.

  The "benchmarks" in President Bush's report are trivial and prove nothing. They appear to be an attempt to pretend that the war is still winnable in Iraq up to the presidential election in the US next year.

  These vain hopes of victory rule out compromises that the US still might make and are a pretence which many Americans and Iraqis will die unnecessarily trying to sustain.

  Tuesday, 17 July 2007

  DERBY MAN WHO CAME TO IRAQ TO WAGE WAR

  The wars being waged by the US and a mosaic of Iraqi communities in northern Iraq have on the surface little to do with Britain. But Kurdish security men recently killed a man called Mala Isa in a shoot-out in his house in Kirkuk. His brother also died in the gun battle. Mala Isa was a Kurd and also a member of Ansar al Sunna, a particularly dangerous Sunni fundamentalist group. The Kurds say that he was previously a resident of Derby, where he raised money for jihadi causes. They point out that northern Iraq is now filled with people like Mr Isa, who are as willing to blow up Piccadilly as Kirkuk, and know exactly how to do so.

  Iraq has become a breeding ground for numerous groups who know the impact a few well-placed explosives can have. "Every shepherd in this country knows how to make a detonator," said one security specialist here.

  The idea pushed by the White House and Downing Street, that the manufacture of shaped charges to make bombs more effective can be blamed on Iran, was always unrealistic. Iraq is full of military specialists and unemployed engineers. After the invasion of Kuwait, Saddam Hussein claimed to have raised an army of one million men. What is new about the war in Iraq since 2003 is the use of suicide bombers on an industrial scale. This has never happened before. The US and Britain have kept very quiet about the origins of these young men prepared to kill themselves, but 45 per cent are reportedly from Saudi Arabia, 15 per cent from Syria and Lebanon and 10 per cent from north Africa.

  This fits in with the pattern set by 9/11, when 15 out of the 19 men who hijacked the planes and flew them into the twin towers were Saudi. But because the US and Britain are closely allied to the Saudi kingdom they have never seriously tried to staunch the flow of suicide bombers from there. President Bush and Tony Blair reserved all their criticism for Iran, which is not known to have provided a single suicide bomber.

  There is a further reason why the expertise and motivation of suicide bombers is likely to spread further. The war in Iraq has created a diaspora of Iraqis across the world. In Syria and Jordan alone there are 1.8 million refugees. This is the biggest exodus from a single country ever in the Middle East, surpassing even the flight or expulsion of Palestinians in 1948. The world is full of angry Iraqis.

  In Iraq itself, US military offensives to eradicate al-Qa'ida or other fundamentalist groups simply disperse them. This has always been the pattern of guerrilla wars. But al-Qa'ida leaders could not in their most optimistic dreams have expected to have such an ideal base as embattled Iraq.

  Monday, 30 July 2007

  HUMAN TIDE SPILLING INTO NEIGHBOURING COUNTRIES

  Two thousand Iraqis are fleeing their homes every day. It is the greatest mass exodus of people ever in the Middle East and dwarfs anything seen in Europe since the Second World War. Four million people, one in seven Iraqis, have run away, because if they do not they will be killed. Two million have left Iraq, mainly for Syria and Jordan, and the same number have fled within the country.

  Yet, while the US and Britain express sympathy for the plight of refugees in Africa, they are ignoring - or playing down- a far greater tragedy which is largely of their own making.

  The US and Britain may not want to dwell on the disasters that have befallen Iraq during their occupation but the shanty towns crammed with refugees springing up in Iraq and neighbouring countries are becoming impossible to ignore.

  Even so the UNHCR is having difficulty raising $100m (£50m) for relief. The organisation says the two countries caring for the biggest proportion of Iraqi refugees - Syria and Jordan - have still received "next to nothing from the world community". Some 1.4 million Iraqis have fled to Syria according to the UN High Commission for Refugees, Jordan has taken in 750 000 while Egypt and Lebanon have seen 200 000 Iraqis cross into their territories.

  Potential donors are reluctant to spent money inside Iraq arguing the country has large oil revenues. They are either unaware, or are ignoring the fact that the Iraqi administration has all but collapsed outside the Baghdad Green Zone. The US is spending $2 billion a week on military operations in Iraq according to the Congressional Research Service but many Iraqis are dying because they lack drinking water costing a few cents. Kalawar refugee camp in Sulaymaniyah is a microcosm of the misery to which millions of Iraqis have been reduced.

  "At least it is safe here," says Walid Sha'ad Nayef, 38, as he stands amid the stink of rotting garbage and raw sewage. He fled from the lethally dangerous Sa'adiyah district in Baghdad 11 months ago. As we speak to him, a man silently presents us with the death certificate of his son, Farez Maher Zedan, who was killed in Baghdad on 20 May 2006. Kalawar is a horrible place. Situated behind a petrol station down a dusty track, the first sight of the camp is of rough shelters made out of rags, torn pieces of cardboard and old blankets. The stench is explained by the fact the Kurdish municipal authorities will not allow the 470 people in the camp to dig latrines. They say this might encourage them to stay. "Sometimes I go to beg," says Talib Hamid al-Auda, a voluble man with a thick white beard looking older than his fifty years. As he speaks, his body shakes, as if he was trembling at the thought of the demeaning means by which he feeds his family. Even begging is difficult because the people in the camp are forbidden to leave it on Thursday, Friday and Saturday. Suspected by Kurds of being behind a string of house robberies, though there is no evidence for this, they are natural scapegoats for any wrongdoing in their vicinity.

  Refugees are getting an increasingly cool reception wherever they flee, because there are so many of them and because of the burden they put on resources. "People here blame us for forcing up rents and the price of food," said Omar, who had taken his family to Damascus after his sister's leg was fractured by a car bomb. The refugees in Kalawar had no option but to flee. Of the 97 families here, all but two are Sunni Arabs. Many are from Sa'adiyah in west Baghdad where 84 bodies were found by police between 18 June and 18 July. Many are young men whose hands had been bound and who had been tortured. "The majority left Baghdad because somebody knocked on the door of their house and told them to get out in an hour," says Rosina Ynzenga, who runs the Spanish charity Solidarity International (SIA) which pays for a mobile clinic to visit the camp. Sulaymaniyah municipality is antagonistic to her doing more. One Kurdish official suggested that the Arabs of Kalawar were there simply for economic reasons and should be given $200 each and sent back to Baghdad. Mr Nayef, the mukhtar (mayor) of the camp who used to be a bulldozer driver in Baghdad, at first said nobody could speak to journalists unless we had permission from the authorities. But after we had ceremoniously written our names in a large book he relented and would, in any case, have had difficulty in stopping other refugees explaining their grievences.

  Asked to list their worst problems Mr Nayef said they were the lack of school for the children, shortage of food, no kerosene to cook with, no money, no jobs and no electricity. The real answer to the question is that the Arabs of Kalawar have nothing. They have only received two cartons of food each from the International Committee of the Red Cross and a tank of clean water. Even so they are adamant that they dare not return to
Baghdad. They did not even know if their houses had been taken over by others.

  Abla Abbas, a mournful looking woman in black robes, said her son had been killed because he went to sell plastic bags in the Shia district of Khadamiyah in west Baghdad. The poor in Iraq take potentially fatal risks to earn a little money. The uncertainty of the refugees' lives in Kalawar is mirrored in their drawn faces. While we spoke to them there were several shouting matches. One woman kept showing us a piece of paper from the local authority in Sulaymaniyah giving her the right to stay there. She regarded us nervously as if we were officials about to evict her.

  There are in fact three camps at Kalawar. Although almost all the refugees are Sunni they come from different places and until a month ago they lived together. But there were continual arguments. The refugees decided that they must split into three encampments: one from Baghdad, a second from Hillah, south of Baghdad, and a third from Diyala, the mixed Sunni-Shia province that has been the scene of ferocious sectarian pogroms.

  Tuesday, 7 August 2007

  THE SURGE

  The war in Iraq passed a significant but little remarked anniversary this summer.

  The conflict that President George Bush announced was in effect over on 1 May 2003 has now gone on longer than the First World War. Like that great conflict almost a century ago, the Iraqi war has been marked by repeated claims that progress is being made and that a final breakthrough is in the offing.

  In 1917, the French commander General Robert Nivelle proudly announced that "we have the formula for victory" before launching the French armies on a catastrophic offensive in which they were massacred. Units ordered to the front brayed like donkeys to show they saw themselves as being like animals led to the slaughter. Soon, the soldiers broke into open mutiny.

  On 10 January this year, President Bush announced that he too now believed he had the formula for victory. In an address to the American nation, he announced a new strategy for Iraq that became known as "the surge". He said he was sending a further 20,000 US troops to Iraq. With the same misguided enthusiasm as General Nivelle had expressed in his plan, President Bush explained why "our past efforts to secure Baghdad failed" and why the new American formula would succeed: in the past, US and Iraqi troops had cleared areas, but when they moved on guerrillas returned. In future, said Bush, American and allied troops would stay put.

  As if the US was not facing enough enemies in Iraq, Bush pointed to Iran and Syria as the hidden hand sustaining the insurgency. "These two regimes are allowing terrorists and insurgents to use their territory to move in and out of Iraq," he said. "Iran is providing material support for attacks on American troops."

  He added in his State of the Union address on 23 January that "Shia extremists are just as hostile to America [as al-Qa'ida], and are also determined to dominate the Middle East". The implication was that US troops were going to move into areas such as Sadr City, home to two million Shia Iraqis, in pursuit of the powerful Shia militia, the Mehdi Army of the nationalist cleric Muqtada al-Sadr.

  Six months after the surge was actually launched, in mid- February, it has failed as dismally as so many First World War offensives. The US Defense Department says that, this June, the average number of attacks on US and Iraqi forces, civilian forces and infrastructure peaked at 177.8 per day, higher than in any month since the end of May 2003. The US has failed to gain control of Baghdad. The harvest of bodies picked up every morning first fell and then rose again. This may be because the Mehdi Army militia, who provided most of the Shia death squads, was stood down by Sadr. Nobody in Baghdad has much doubt that they could be back in business any time they want. Whatever Bush might say, the US military commanders in Iraq clearly did not want to take on the Mehdi Army and the Shia community when they were barely holding their own against the Sunni.

  The surge is now joining a host of discredited formulae for success and fake turning-points that the US (with the UK tripping along behind) has promoted in Iraq over the past 52 months. In December 2003, there was the capture of Saddam Hussein. Six months later, in June 2004, there was the return of sovereignty to Iraq. "Let freedom reign," said Bush in a highly publicised response. And yet the present Iraqi Prime Minister, Nouri al-Maliki, claims he cannot move a company of soldiers without American permission.

  In 2005, there were two elections that were both won handsomely by Shia and Kurdish parties. "Despite endless threats from the killers in their midst," exulted Bush, "nearly 12 million Iraqi citizens came out to vote in a show of hope and solidarity that we should never forget."

  In fact, he himself forgot this almost immediately. A year later, the US forced out the first democratically elected Shia prime minister, Ibrahim al-Jaafari, with the then US Ambassador in Baghdad, Zilmay Khalilzad, saying that Bush "doesn't want, doesn't support, and doesn't accept that Jaafari should form the next government".

  Fresh US initiatives in Iraq seemed to succeed each other about every six months. Just as it was becoming evident in the US that the surge was not going anywhere very fast, there came good news from Anbar province in western Iraq. The Sunni tribes were rising against al-Qa'ida, which had overplayed its hand by setting up an umbrella organisation for insurgents called the ISI. In Sunni areas, it was killing rubbish collectors on the grounds that they worked for the government, shooting women in the face because they were not wearing veils, and trying to draft one young man from each family into its forces. Sunni tribal militiamen backed by the US fought al-Qa'ida in insurgent strongholds such as Ramadi, and attacks on American troops there fell away dramatically.

  The US administration could portray this as a fresh turning-point. It had always pretended that the insurrection in Iraq was conducted largely by al-Qa'ida. In reality, Anthony H Cordesman, an Iraqi specialist at the Centre for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, points out that al-Qa'ida's attacks make up only 15 per cent of the total in Iraq, although they launch 80 to 90 per cent of the suicide bombings.

  As with many a development in Iraq portrayed as a sign of progress by the White House, the recruitment of Sunni tribal militias by the US is not quite what it seems. In practice, it is a tactic fraught with dangers. In areas where they operate, police are finding more and more bodies, according to the Interior Ministry. Victims often appear to have been killed solely because they were Shia. The gunmen from the tribes are under American command, and this weakens the authority of the Iraqi government, army and police - institutions that the US is supposedly seeking to foster.

  A grim scene showing Sunni tribal militiamen in action was recorded on a mobile phone and later appeared on Iraqi websites. It shows a small, terrified man in a brown robe being bundled out of a vehicle by a group of angry men with sub-machine guns who cuff and slap him as he cowers, trying to shield his face with his hands. One of his captors, who seems to be in command, asks him fiercely if he has killed somebody called "Khalid". After a few moments he is dragged off by two gunmen to a patch of waste ground 30 yards away and executed with a burst of machine-gun fire to the chest.

  It is a measure of the desperation of the White House to show that the surge is having some success that it is now looking to these Sunni fighters for succour. Often they are former members of anti-American resistance groups such as the 1920 Revolution Brigade and the Army of Islam - Bush has spent four years denouncing these groups as murderous enemies of the Iraqi people. To many Iraqi Shia and Kurds, who make up 80 percent of all Iraqis, the US appears to be building up its own Sunni militia. So, far from preventing civil war (a main justification for continuing occupation), the US is arming sectarian killers engaged in a murder campaign that is tearing Iraq apart.

  The White House says that it is too early to know if the surge is succeeding, and that it will wait for a security report due next month from General David Petraeus, the top US military commander in Iraq, and the US Ambassador to the country, Ryan Crocker. But the new strategy was never going to turn the tide in Iraq. Its main advantage for B
ush is that it puts off the moment when failure has to be admitted, a potentially disastrous confession for Republicans standing for election next year. If an American withdrawal can be postponed until after the poll, then the neo-cons can blame the Democrats for a stab in the back, pulling out the troops at the very moment when victory was almost in their grasp.

  I was in Baghdad in January, when Bush made his State of the Union speech outlining his plans for the surge. Iraqis were pessimistic from the beginning about its chances of success. A friend called Ismail remarked gloomily: “A extra 16,000 (sic) US troops are not going to be enough.” A Sunni, he had recently fled his house in the west of the capital because he was frightened of being arrested and tortured by the paramilitary police commandos – like most Sunni, he regarded them as uniformed Shia death squads.

  Baghdad was paralysed by fear. Drivers were terrified of being stopped at impromptu checkpoints were they might be dragged out of their cars and killed for belonging to the wrong religion. Conversation was dominated by accounts of narrow escapes. Most people had at least one fake ID card so they could claim, depending on circumstance, to be either Sunni or Shia. This might not be enough; some Shia checkpoints had a list of theological questions drawn up by a religious scholar that they would use to interrogate people.

  It was extraordinary how little control US forces and the Iraqi army exercised over the very centre of the capital. There was black smoke rising from Haifa street, a two-mile-long Sunni corridor just north of the Green Zone, which US forces had repeatedly invaded but failed to secure. When a helicopter belonging to the security company Blackwater was shot down or crash-landed in the al-Fadhil district in the centre of Baghdad, the survivors were executed by insurgents before US forces could get them.