The fall of Saddam was highly popular in Basra, as it was in the rest of Shia Iraq, but while liberation was popular, occupation was not.
British forces had an early lesson about this when they entered the notoriously violent town of al-Majir al-Kabir north of Basra. An attempt to search for weapons led to friction, and during a second patrol this escalated into fighting, and the killing on 24 June 2003 of six members of the Royal Military Police who were trapped in a police station.
Rivalries between different Shia militias remain intense. The Mehdi Army is obeying a truce called by Mr Sadr. His declared purpose is to root out criminals, and he wants to avoid a military confrontation with ISCI.
Mr Miliband may be right that Iraqi politicians are better able to handle Iraqi problems than the British, but this does not mean they are effective. The ruling elite in Basra is heavily criminalised, and although the three southernmost Iraqi provinces stand on a reservoir of oil, they remain miserably poor. For this the local leadership is partly to blame, but the leadership of the Shia community in Iraq comes primarily from Baghdad and the shrine cities of Kerbala and Najaf. Britain stumbled into a small war in southern Iraq which it did not expect to fight and where its aims were always unclear. It is now stumbling out with very little achieved and its military reputation dented, after a conflict in which a victory could never have been won.
Saturday, 29 December 2007
IS THIS THE BEGINNING OF THE END IN IRAQ?
Some 19 US soldiers have been killed so far in December, the lowest number of American military fatalities in a single month since the invasion of Iraq in March 2003. As recently as May this year, 135 US soldiers were shot dead or blown up by Iraqi guerrillas.
The fall in US casualties is one of the most surprising events of 2007. At the beginning of the year, the American army in Iraq seemed to be clinging on by its fingertips as more and more of the country came under the control of Sunni and Shia warlords. Twelve months later, US units are peaceably patrolling districts of Baghdad where once they faced ambushes at every street corner.
Viewed from the White House, events in Iraq seem to be one of the few optimistic developments in the series of crises facing it in the central core of the Islamic world, as the fragility of the US position is underlined by the assassination of Benazir Bhutto, one of its main allies, in Pakistan.
Iraqis and the outside world are equally perplexed as to what this means. Are we seeing the beginning of the end of the fighting in Iraq, a conflict which has now gone on for longer than the First World War? Or is it a lull in the violence that is bound to end because Shia, Sunni, Kurd and American are as divided as ever?
Significant changes have taken place in Iraq this year. The most important is that part of the Sunni Arab community, the core of the insurgency against the US occupation, has changed sides and is now fighting al-Qa'ida in alliance with the US military. This dramatic switch in allegiance occurred primarily because the Sunni Arabs, only 20 per cent of Iraq's population, were being overwhelmed by the Shia, the branch of Islam to which 60 per cent of Iraqis belong.
The US and British armies have examined many past guerrilla wars, looking for parallels which might prove useful in combating the Iraqi insurgency.
British generals were once particularly keen on proudly citing their actions in Malaya and Northern Ireland as providing rich experience in anti-guerrilla warfare. Most analogies were highly misleading. "Basra was the exact opposite of Northern Ireland and Malaya," a British officer told me in exasperation. "In the latter we were supported by the majority communities while we fought the Roman Catholic and Chinese minorities. In southern Iraq our main problem is that we had no real local allies."
The Americans suffer from a similar problem in central Iraq. Outside Kurdistan, it is difficult to find an Iraqi who supports the US occupation for more than tactical reasons. Seldom mentioned, for obvious reasons, is the one recent anti-guerrilla war which has many similarities to that being fought by America in Iraq. This is Russia's successful re-conquest of Chechnya between 1999 and the present.
In a similar way to al-Qa'ida in Iraq, the Islamic fundamentalists in Chechnya, invariably called Wahabi, played an increasingly central role in the armed resistance to the Russian occupation. But the savagery of their fighters alienated many anti-Russian Chechens and eventually split the insurgency. I remember being astonished that Chechen human rights workers, who usually denounced Russian atrocities to me, were prepared to co-operate with the Russian army to attack the Wahabi. Often their motive was a blood feud against a Wahabi commander who had killed their relatives.
The parallels between Iraq and Chechnya should not be carried too far. The US has effectively raised a Sunni militia force which may soon total 100,000 men, many of them former insurgents. They are armed and paid for by the US, but regard the Shia-Kurdish government with deep suspicion. Many Sunni commanders speak of taking on the Shia militia, the Mehdi army, which has been stood down by its leader, Muqtada al-Sadr.
It is a bizarre situation. One experienced Iraqi politician told me that al-Qa'ida in Iraq, which never had much connection with Osama bin Laden's organisation, had effectively split last year. A sign of this was when somebody betrayed the location of its leader, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, to the US military, which bombed his hideout and killed him. Some of the so-called "Concerned Citizens" militiamen now on the US payroll are former al-Qa'ida fighters, though the US is still holding hundreds of men in Guantanamo, accusing them of being associates of al-Qa'ida.
The US has had real operational successes on the ground in Iraq this year, but there is little sign yet of Iraq being pacified. Local warlords in Sunni areas have switched from attacking US forces to working with them, but they might easily switch back tomorrow. As with the British in Basra, the Americans lack long-term allies that can stand on their own feet without US assistance.
This is one of the dangers of the continuing US presence. The longer it goes on, the more the government of Iraq becomes incapable of existing without US support. The government in the Green Zone is a hothouse plant that would wither and die without the American military presence. Although prime minister Nouri al-Maliki complains about the way in which the US controls the Iraqi army, he makes little practical effort to move out of the Green Zone or establish his practical independence. The US may say that it will leave when the Iraqi government can stand on its own two feet, but the continuing occupation makes sure that day does not come.
Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan are very different countries, but they are the terrain in which President Bush chose to test America's status as a superpower. They are also countries where it is difficult to win a decisive victory because power is so fragmented. Successes often turn out to be illusory or exaggerated. For instance, the Taliban was so swiftly overthrown in 2001 because the local warlords, whom the Taliban had bribed or intimidated into supporting it, found that the US offered bigger bribes and its bombers were more intimidating. They changed sides once again, though very few of them went out of business.
The same is true of Iraq today. Iraqi parties, movements and communities have an extraordinary ability to withstand outside pressure. Most of them survived Saddam Hussein and are not going to buckle under anything the US can do to them.
A WAR OF LIES (2008)
President George W. Bush, June 18, 2008
Thursday, 17 January 2008
OPIUM FIELDS SPREAD ACROSS IRAQ
The cultivation of opium poppies whose product is turned into heroin is spreading rapidly across Iraq as farmers find they can no longer make a living through growing traditional crops.
Afghans with experience in planting poppies have been helping farmers switch to producing opium in fertile parts of Diyala province, once famous for its oranges and pomegranates, northeast of Baghdad.
At a heavily guarded farm near the town of Buhriz, south of the provincial capital Baquba, poppies are grown between the orange trees in order to hide them, accor
ding to a local source.
The shift by Iraqi farmers to producing opium was first revealed by The Independent in May - it is a very recent development. The first poppy fields, funded by drug smugglers who previously supplied Saudi Arabia and the Gulf with heroin from Afghanistan, were close to the city of Diwaniyah in southern Iraq. The growing of poppies has now spread to Diyala, which is one of the places in Iraq where al-Qa'ida is still resisting US and Iraqi government forces. It is also deeply divided between Sunni, Shia and Kurd and the extreme violence means that local security men have little time to deal with the drugs trade. The speed with which farmers are turning to poppies is confirmed by the Iraqi news agency al-Malaf Press, which says that opium is now being produced around the towns of Khalis, Sa'adiya, Dain'ya and south of Baladruz, pointing out that these are all areas where al-Qa'ida is strong.
The agency cites a local agricultural engineer identified as M S al-Azawi as saying that local farmers received no support from the government and could not compete with cheap imports of fruit and vegetables. The price of fertiliser and fuel has also risen sharply. Mr Azawi says: "The cultivation of opium is the likely solution [to these problems]."
Al-Qa'ida is in control of many of the newly established opium farms and has sometimes taken the land of farmers it has killed, said a local source. At Buhriz, American military forces destroyed the opium farm and drove off al-Qa'ida last year, but it later returned. "No one can get inside the farm because it is heavily guarded," said the source, adding that the area devoted to opium in Diyala is still smaller than that in southern Iraq around Amara and Majar al-Kabir.
After being harvested, the opium from Diyala is taken to Ramadi in western Iraq. There are still no reports of heroin laboratories being established in Iraq, unlike in Afghanistan.
Iraq has not been a major consumer of drugs but heroin from Afghanistan has been transited from Iran and then taken to Basra from where it is exported to the rich markets of Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and the Gulf. Under Saddam Hussein, state security in Basra was widely believed to control local drug smuggling through the city.
The growing and smuggling of opium will be difficult to stop in Iraq because much of the country is controlled by criminalised militias. American successes in Iraq over the past year have been largely through encouraging the development of a 70,000-strong Sunni Arab militia, many of whose members are former insurgents linked to protection rackets, kidnapping and crime. Muqtada al-Sadr, the leader of the powerful Shia militia, the Mehdi Army, says that criminals have infiltrated its ranks.
The move of local warlords, both Sunni and Shia, into opium farming is a menacing development in Iraq, where local political leaders are often allied to gangsters. The theft of fuel, smuggling and control of government facilities such as ports means that gangs are often very rich. It is they, rather than impoverished farmers, who have taken the lead in financing and organising opium production in Iraq.
Initial planting in fertile land west and south of Diwaniya around the towns of Ash Shamiyah, Al-Ghammas and Shinafiyah were said to have faced problems because of the extreme heat and humidity. Al-Malaf Press says that it has learnt that the experiments with opium poppy-growing in Diyala have been successful.
Although opium has not been grown in many of these areas in Iraq in recent history, some of the earliest written references to opium come from ancient Iraq. It was known to the ancient Sumerians as early as 3400BC as the "Hul Gil" or "joy plant" and there are mentions of it on clay tablets found in excavations at the city of Nippur just east of Diwaniyah.
Monday, 28 January 2008
RETURN TO FALLUJAH
Fallujah is more difficult to enter than any city in the world. On the road from Baghdad I counted 27 checkpoints, all manned by well-armed soldiers and police. "The siege is total," says Dr Kamal in Fallujah Hospital as he grimly lists his needs, which include everything from drugs and oxygen to electricity and clean water.
The last time I tried to drive to Fallujah, several years ago, I was caught in the ambush of an American fuel convoy and had to crawl out of the car and lie beside the road with the driver while US soldiers and guerrillas exchanged gunfire. The road is now much safer but nobody is allowed to enter Fallujah who does not come from there and can prove it through elaborate identity documents. The city has been sealed off since November 2004 when United States Marines stormed it in an attack that left much of the city in ruins.
Its streets, with walls pockmarked with bullets and buildings reduced to a heap of concrete slabs, still look as if the fighting had finished only a few weeks ago.
I went to look at the old bridge over the Euphrates from whose steel girders Fallujans had hanged the burnt bodies of two American private security men killed by guerrillas - the incident that sparked the first battle of Fallujah. The single-lane bridge is still there, overlooked by the remains of a bombed or shelled building whose smashed roof overhangs the street and concrete slabs are held in place by rusty iron mesh.
The police chief of Fallujah, Colonel Feisal Ismail Hassan al-Zubai, was trying to show that his city was on the mend.
As we looked at the bridge a small crowd gathered and an elderly man in a brown coat shouted: "We have no electricity, we have no water."
Others confirmed that Fallujah was getting one hour's electricity a day. Colonel Feisal said there was not much he could do about the water or electricity though he did promise a man that a fence of razor wire outside his restaurant would be removed.
Fallujah may be better than it was, but it still has a very long way to go. Hospital doctors confirm that they are receiving few gunshot or bomb blast victims since the Awakening movement drove al-Qa'ida from the city over the past six months, but people still walk warily in the streets as if they expected firing to break out at any minute.
Colonel Feisal, a former officer in Saddam Hussein's Special Forces, cheerfully admits that before he was chief of police, "I was fighting the Americans". His brother Abu Marouf, a former guerrilla commander, controls 13,000 fighters of the anti-al-Qa'ida Awakening movement in and around Fallujah. The colonel stressed that the streets of Fallujah were now wholly safe but his convoy drove at speed and was led by a policeman, his face hidden by a white balaclava, on top of a vehicle holding a machine gun and frantically gesturing oncoming vehicles out of the way.
The police station is large and protected by concrete and earth barriers. Just as we reached the inner courtyard we saw signs that the battle against al-Qa'ida may be over but arrests go on. From another part of the police station there emerged a line of 20 prisoners, each with his eyes covered by a white blindfold, gripping the back of the clothes of the prisoner in front of him. The prisoners reminded me of photographs of men blinded by gas in the First World War stumbling along behind a single man who could see and who, in this case, was a prison guard.
There are new buildings in the main street. I used to eat at a kebab restaurant called Haji Hussein, which was one of the best in Iraq. Then, as the occupation went on, I started attracting a lot of hostile stares. The manager suggested it might be safer if I ate upstairs in an empty room, and soon after it was destroyed by an American bomb. It has now been rebuilt in gaudy colours and seemed to be doing good business.
At one time Fallujah had a population of 600,000, but none of the officials in the city seemed to know how many there are now. Col Feisal is hopeful of investment and took us to a white, new building called the Fallujah Business Development Centre, which had been partly funded by a branch of the US State Department. Tall American soldiers were guarding a business development conference. "It has attracted one American investor so far," said a uniformed American adviser hopefully. "My name is Sarah and I am in psychological operations," said another US officer and proudly showed us around a newly established radio Fallujah.
At the other end of the city we crossed over the iron bridge built in about 1930 and now the only link with the far side of the Euphrates. There is a modern bridge half a
mile down river but it has been taken over by the American army and, say locals, used as a vehicle park. On the far side of the bridge, past beds of tall bullrushes where people escaping the city during the sieges of 2004 tried to hide, there is a building eviscerated by bombs on one side of the road. On the other side is the hospital whose officials US commanders used to accuse of systematically exaggerating the number of those killed by American bombing.
When I asked what the hospital lacked Dr Kamal said wearily: "Drugs, fuel, electricity, generators, a water treatment system, oxygen and medical equipment." It was difficult not to think that American assistance might have gone to the hospital rather than the business development centre.
Colonel Feisal said things were getting better but he was mobbed by black-clad women shouting that their children had not been treated. "Every day 20 children die here," said one. "Seven in this very room."
The doctors said that they were tending their patients as best they could. "The Americans provide us with nothing," said one mother who was cradling a child. "They bring us only destruction."
Tuesday, 5 February 2008
SUNNI VERSUS SHIA
A teenage boy was arrested recently for the attempted rape of a girl his own age in a school in west Baghdad. He admitted he had chosen the particular girl as his victim "because I knew she was a Sunni and nobody would protect her". The boy was mistaken in his belief that he was beyond the law, mainly because the girl's uncle was a senior officer in the army. But his words explain why Iraq's Sunni minority feel so vulnerable since they lost power to the Shia majority when Saddam Hussein was overthrown five years ago.
Iraq- The West Shakes Up The Middle East Page 9
