March 13, 2006
Baghdad Market Bombings Kill 46 and Wound 200
By EDWARD WONG and ROBERT F. WORTH
BAGHDAD, Iraq, March 12 — Six car bombs exploded at dusk on Sunday in four crowded markets in a Shiite area of eastern Baghdad, killing at least 46 people, wounding more than 200 others and spurring Shiite militiamen to take to the streets, an Interior Ministry official and witnesses said.

The explosions, the deadliest assault in Baghdad in weeks, threatened to unleash a wave of sectarian violence similar to the one that followed the bombing of a revered Shiite shrine last month.

The powerful blasts set vehicles aflame in the Sadr City neighborhood and scattered body parts across city blocks. In the gathering darkness, with ambulances wailing through the streets, black-clad militiamen loyal to the Shiite cleric Moktada al-Sadr raced among the debris and set up checkpoints. Firemen aimed their hoses at charred metal hulks, the arcs of water shooting past dazed people stumbling from the wreckage of market stalls.

"I heard a loud boom; I was inside a bathhouse at the time," said Jafar Thamer Nahee, 25, a metalworker. "I saw tens of people being taken away by ambulances. The police and Mahdi Army surrounded the area. There were Mahdi Army checkpoints all around, and they were carrying weapons."

The scene evoked the aftermath of the Askariya Shrine bombing in Samarra in the north on Feb. 22, when the Mahdi Army, Mr. Sadr's militia, streamed out of Sadr City and led mobs in attacking Sunni mosques across eastern Baghdad, leaving hundreds dead and pushing Iraq to the edge of a civil war.

The Iraqi Islamic Party, a conservative Sunni Arab group, quickly released a statement condemning the latest bombings, apparently sensing the potential for deadly anti-Sunni reprisals and, quite possibly, another slide toward civil war. "Every time the political groups try to start negotiations to reach common opinions among them, we are surprised by a bloody incident aimed at destroying the political process and inflicting more damage among our people," the party said.

The Sadr City bombings took place after the leaders of all of Iraq's major political blocs met for the first time to discuss forming a government. The leaders had been mired in rancorous sniping over nominations for prime minister and had not come together in one room since Feb. 25, when they met to address sectarian tensions. At the urging of the American ambassador, the leaders convened Sunday afternoon in the fortified Green Zone and promptly decided to move the date of the first session of Parliament to March 16 from March 19.

The ambassador, Zalmay Khalilzad, appeared afterward with the Iraqi politicians at an outdoor news conference and gave an unusually frank assessment of the state of the country. "I think the situation is such that there's a degree of vacuum in authority," he said. "The need on an urgent basis to form a government of national unity is there."

The trial of Saddam Hussein resumed Sunday, with the court hearing testimony from defendants for the first time. Three of Mr. Hussein's co-defendants, all former lower-level Baath Party officials, denied any role in the torture and killings of 148 men and boys from the Shiite village of Dujail in the early 1980's.

At the high-level political meeting, in the headquarters of the Kurdistan Democratic Party, leaders representing the main Shiite bloc, the Kurds, the Sunni Arabs and a secular bloc agreed to later tackle the major issues confronting them: the conflict over the post of prime minister and the definition of a national unity government.

As the politicians met in a compound, Kurdish militiamen in camouflage fatigues and Shiite militiamen in navy blue suits lingered under palm trees on the front lawn, with foreign and Iraqi journalists called together at the last minute by the American Embassy, in an apparent attempt to exert more pressure on the politicians.

The Shiite bloc, which has tentative control of the Parliament because it holds 130 of 275 seats, has nominated Ibrahim al-Jaafari, the prime minister and a frequently criticized figure, as its candidate for prime minister. Under the new constitution, the largest bloc in Parliament may nominate a prime minister. In early February, the Shiite bloc's 130 legislators held a secret ballot, and Mr. Jaafari won by one vote, after getting the support of Mr. Sadr.

But a loose alliance of the Kurds, Sunni Arabs and secular politicians has demanded that the Shiites replace Mr. Jaafari. He has been widely criticized for failing to quell the rampant violence and improve reconstruction, and has ignited fury among the Kurds for a recent visit to Turkey, which often threatens to invade Iraqi Kurdistan to suppress any secessionist aspirations among the Kurds.

Mr. Jaafari's office released a statement on Sunday morning suggesting that he intended to fight to keep the nomination. "I think they dealt with it in a democratic way," Mr. Jaafari said, referring to his selection. "This is a democratic tradition and we should all respect it and abide by it."

American officials fear a prolonged battle over the new government may embolden the Sunni-led insurgency and inflame sectarian tensions. At least 15 Iraqis were killed and 19 injured in violence from Saturday night through Sunday afternoon, before the Sadr City attacks.

On Sunday morning, a roadside bomb exploded near an American convoy in southern Baghdad, killing at least 6 Iraqi civilians and wounding 13 others, the Interior Ministry official said. Insurgents shot dead an interpreter for the Defense Ministry and an employee of the Culture Ministry in separate incidents. Gunmen killed three other people, and a mortar round killed two civilians and injured six others. Two Iraqi intelligence officers were fatally shot Saturday night.

Iraqi policemen found eight bodies, all bound and blindfolded, in Rustamiya, a neighborhood in southeast Baghdad, and two others in separate locations.

The six car bombs that exploded in Sadr City ripped through four marketplaces, all crowded with evening shoppers. The police discovered a seventh car bomb that had not detonated, the Interior Ministry official said. As the fires burned, Mahdi Army fighters stopped arriving ambulances to check for explosives.

Militiamen showed up, shortly after the bombings, in Beirut Square, in a neighborhood bordering Sadr City, and ordered merchants to close their stores. Though shoppers filled the area, all the stores closed within minutes, and the place emptied out.

"Everyone knows Sadr City is the main Shia area in Baghdad and the main support for the Shia alliance," said Ali Saleh Abbas, a Sadr follower and the leader of the Ansar Organization, a local charity. "They are trying to put more pressure on the alliance in this bombing. They want the Mahdi Army to revolt."

The American military and Iraqi Army set up checkpoints right outside Sadr City after nightfall, military officials said, presumably to try to prevent sectarian reprisals.

Earlier in the day, at a secured courthouse in the Green Zone, the defendants in Mr. Hussein's trial appeared one by one to testify before Judge Raouf Abdel-Rahman. The defendants have often spoken out in the trial — especially Mr. Hussein and his half-brother Barzan Ibrahim al-Tikriti — but Sunday they were formally given a chance to present their version of the events in the Dujail case.

On Sunday, two of Mr. Hussein's co-defendants described seeing people rounded up and killed after the assassination attempt, but all three denied any responsibility and even portrayed themselves as good Samaritans.

Hosham Hussein and Mona Mahmoud contributed reporting for this article.



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March 12, 2006
6 Bombings Kill at Least 46 Iraqis in Shiite Area of Baghdad
By EDWARD WONG
and ROBERT F. WORTH
BAGHDAD, Iraq, March 12 — Six car bombs exploded at dusk today in four crowded markets in a Shiite area of eastern Baghdad, killing at least 46 people and injuring more than 200 others, an Interior Ministry official said. The bombings spurred Shiite militiamen to take to the streets.

The explosions, the deadliest single assault in Baghdad in weeks, threatened to unleash a wave of sectarian violence similar to the one that followed the bombing of a revered Shiite shrine last month.

The powerful blasts set vehicles aflame in the Sadr City neighborhood and scattered body parts across city blocks. In the gathering darkness, with ambulances wailing through the streets, black-clad militiamen from the Mahdi Army, which is loyal to the militant Shiite cleric Moktada al-Sadr, raced among the debris and set up checkpoints. Firemen aimed their hoses at charred metal hulks, the arcs of water shooting past dazed people stumbling from the wreckage of market stalls.

"I heard a loud boom; I was inside a bathhouse at the time," said Jafar Thamer Nahee, 25, a metal worker. "I saw tens of people being taken away by ambulances. The police and Mahdi Army surrounded the area. There were Mahdi Army checkpoints all around, and they were carrying weapons."

The scene evoked the aftermath of the Askariya Shrine bombing in the northern city of Samarra on Feb. 22, when the Mahdi Army streamed out of Sadr City and led mobs in attacking Sunni mosques across eastern Baghdad, leaving hundreds dead and pushing Iraq to the edge of a full-scale civil war.

The Iraqi Islamic Party, a conservative Sunni Arab group, quickly released a statement condemning the latest bombings, apparently sensing the potential for deadly anti-Sunni reprisals and, quite possibly, another slide toward civil war.

"Every time the political groups try to start negotiations to reach common opinions among them, we are surprised by a bloody incident aimed at destroying the political process and inflicting more damage among our people," the party said.

The Sadr City bombings took place at about 6 p.m. local time, just after the leaders of all of Iraq's main political blocs met for the first time to discuss forming a government. The leaders had been mired in rancorous sniping over nominations for the office of prime minister, and had not met since Feb. 25, when they had met to address sectarian tensions. At the urging of the American ambassador, the leaders convened in the fortified Green Zone this afternoon, and promptly decided to move up the date of the first session of Parliament to March 16 from March 19.

The ambassador, Zalmay Khalilzad, appeared with the Iraqi politicians in an outdoor news conference afterward and gave an unusually frank assessment of the state of the country.

"I think the situation is such that there's a degree of vacuum in authority," he said. "The need on an urgent basis to form a government of national unity is there."

Early this afternoon, the trial of Saddam Hussein resumed, entering a new phase as the court heard testimony from defendants for the first time. Three of Mr. Hussein's co-defendants, all lower-level former Baath Party officials, denied any role in the torture and killing of 148 men and boys from the Shiite village of Dujail in the 1980's.

At the high-level political meeting, which took place in the headquarters of the Kurdistan Democratic Party, leaders representing the main Shiite bloc, the Kurds, the Sunni Arabs and a secular bloc agreed to tackle later the major issues confronting them: the conflict over the post of prime minister and the definition of a national unity government.

As the politicians met inside a compound, Kurdish militiamen in camouflage fatigues and Shiite militiamen in navy-blue suits hung around on the front lawn beneath palm trees, along with a group of foreign and Iraqi journalists called together at the last minute by the American embassy, in an apparent attempt to exert more pressure on the politicians.

The political parties have reached an impasse in talks because of a conflict over the nominee for prime minister. The Shiite bloc, which has tentative control of the Parliament by holding 130 of 275 seats, has nominated Ibrahim al-Jaafari, the current prime minister and a much-maligned figure, to be its candidate. Under the new constitution, the largest bloc in Parliament can nominate a prime minister.

In early February, the Shiite bloc's 130 legislators held a secret ballot to choose the nominee, and Mr. Jaafari won by one vote, after getting the support of Mr. Sadr, the radical cleric.

But a loose alliance of the Kurds, Sunni Arabs and secular politicians has demanded that the Shiites replace Mr. Jaafari with someone more acceptable. Mr. Jaafari has been widely criticized for failing to quell the rampant violence and improve reconstruction, and he has drawn the anger of the Kurds for making a recent visit to Turkey, a country that often threatens to invade Iraqi Kurdistan in order to suppress any secessionist aspirations among the Kurds.

Mr. Jaafari's office released a statement on this morning suggesting that he intended to fight to keep the nomination. "I think they dealt with it in a democratic way," Mr. Jaafari said. "This is a democratic tradition and we should all respect it and abide by it."

American officials fear a prolonged battle over the new government may embolden the Sunni-led insurgency and inflame sectarian tensions. At least 15 Iraqis were killed and 19 injured in violence between Saturday night and Sunday afternoon, before the Sadr City attacks.

This morning, a roadside bomb exploded by an American convoy in southern Baghdad, killing at least six Iraqi civilians and injuring 13 others, an Interior Ministry official said. Insurgents shot dead an interpreter for the Defense Ministry and an employee of the Culture Ministry in separate incidents. Gunmen killed three other people, and a mortar round killed two civilians and injured six others. Two Iraqi intelligence officers were gunned down Saturday night.

Iraqi policemen found eight bodies, all bound and blindfolded, in Rustamiya neighborhood, and two others in two separate locations.

The six car bombs that exploded in Sadr City ripped through four marketplaces, all crowded with evening shoppers. The police discovered a seventh car bomb that had failed to detonate, the Interior Ministry official said. As the fires burned, Mahdi Army fighters stopped ambulances arriving at the sites to check for explosives.

Militiamen showed up shortly after the bombings in Beirut Square, in a neighborhood bordering Sadr City, and ordered merchants to close up. Though the area was thronged with shoppers, all the stores shut down within minutes and the place emptied out completely.

"Everyone knows Sadr City is the main Shia area in Baghdad and the main support for the Shia alliance," said Ali Saleh Abbas, a follower of Mr. Sadr and the leader of the Ansar Organization, a local charity. "They are trying to put more pressure on the alliance in this bombing. They want the Mahdi Army to revolt."

The American military and Iraqi Army set up checkpoints right outside Sadr City after nightfall, military officials said, presumably to try to prevent sectarian reprisals.

Earlier in the day, at a secured courthouse inside the Green Zone, the defendants in Mr. Hussein's trial appeared one by one to testify before Judge Raouf Abdel Rahman. The defendants have often spoken out in the trial — especially Mr. Hussein and his half-brother Barzan Ibrahim al-Tikriti — but today they were formally given a chance to present their version of the events in the Dujail case.

The session was the first since March 1, when Mr. Hussein acknowledged that he ordered the trial of the 148 men and boys who were executed after an assassination attempt on him in Dujail in 1982. He stopped short of saying he had signed the death warrant that prosecutors displayed as evidence. He defended his action, saying that the men were suspected of plotting to kill him and that he had acted within his rights as Iraq's president.

Today, two of Mr. Hussein's co-defendants described seeing people rounded up and killed after the assassination attempt, but all three denied any responsibility and even portrayed themselves as good Samaritans.

The first defendant, Mizhar Abullah Ruwayyid, said he had been working as a telephone operator at the Dujail telephone exchange at the time, and he insisted that his accusers had grudges against him because he had cut off their phone service for nonpayment of their bills.

The next defendant, Ali Dayih Ali, described seeing Baath Party officials arresting people in the village and war planes bombing the nearby orchards. "Many families were arrested," he said. "Some of them returned, some did not. Most of the youth did not come back."

Mr. Ali said he had been a graduate student at the time of the incident, spending most of his time in the library. He admitted to having arrested one teenage boy in the case. But he did so only under protest, he said, and because his father, the local sheriff, was sick.

Both Mr. Ali and Mr. Ruwayyid disavowed earlier incriminatory statements they had signed for court investigators, saying they had poor eyesight and could not read the documents properly.

The third defendant, Abdullah al-Roweed, said he had seen pickup trucks carrying as many as 10 dead bodies after airstrikes on the orchards. He described himself as a farmer who had been on vacation at the time and "did not even hurt a fly."

Hosham Hussein and Mona Mahmoud contributed reporting for this article.



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- Iraqi Unity Government Needed To Avert Civil War: Rumsfeld
http://www.spacewar.com/reports/Iraqi_Unit...r_Rumsfeld.html

Washington (AFP) Mar 13, 2006 - Iraq must promptly form a national unity government to avoid a civil war but the United States will rely on Iraqi forces if one does erupt, US Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said Thursday.

U.S. Campaign Is Aimed at Iran's Leaders
Uneasy About Tehran's Nuclear Plans, Bush Administration Tries to Build Opposition to Theocracy

By Peter Baker and Glenn Kessler
Washington Post Staff Writers
Monday, March 13, 2006; A01



As the dispute over its nuclear program arrives at the U.N. Security Council today, Iran has vaulted to the front of the U.S. national security agenda amid Bush administration plans for a sustained campaign against the ayatollahs of Tehran.

President Bush and his team have been huddling in closed-door meetings on Iran, summoning scholars for advice, investing in opposition activities, creating an Iran office in Washington and opening listening posts abroad dedicated to the efforts against Tehran.

The internal administration debate that raged in the first term between those who advocated more engagement with Iran and those who preferred more confrontation appears in the second term to be largely settled in favor of the latter. Although administration officials do not use the term "regime change" in public, that in effect is the goal they outline as they aim to build resistance to the theocracy.

"We may face no greater challenge from a single country than from Iran," Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said in Senate testimony last week. "We do not have a problem with the Iranian people. We want the Iranian people to be free. Our problem is with the Iranian regime."

In private meetings, Bush and his advisers have been more explicit. Members of the Hoover Institution's board of overseers who met with Bush, Vice President Cheney and national security adviser Stephen J. Hadley two weeks ago emerged with the impression that the administration has shifted to a more robust policy aimed at the Iranian government.

"The message that we received is that they are in favor of separating the Iranian people from the regime," said Esmail Amid-Hozour, an Iranian American businessman who serves on the Hoover board.

"The upper hand is with those who are pushing regime change rather than those who are advocating more diplomacy," said Richard N. Haass, who as State Department policy planning director in Bush's first term was among those pushing for engagement.

But as the administration gears up, the struggle with Iran remains shadowed by Iraq. The botched intelligence on Saddam Hussein's weapons has left a credibility challenge in convincing the public and the world that the administration is right this time about Iran. After alienating European allies in the rush to war in Iraq, the administration is following a slower, multilateral approach. And with U.S. forces stretched, analysts wonder how feasible a military option would be if it came to that.

The focus on Iran inside the administration lately has been striking. Bush, according to aides, has been spending more time on the issue, and advisers have invited 30 to 40 specialists for consultations in recent months.

In the past week, the State Department created an Iran desk. Last year, only two people in the department worked full time on Iran; now there will be 10. The department is launching more training in the Farsi language and is planning an Iranian career track, which has been difficult without an embassy there.

Undersecretary of State R. Nicholas Burns said in an interview that the department will also add staff in Dubai, which is part of the United Arab Emirates, as well as at other embassies in the vicinity of Iran, all assigned to watch Tehran. He called the new Dubai outpost the "21st century equivalent" of the Riga station in Latvia that monitored the Soviet Union in the 1930s when the United States had no embassy in Moscow.

The administration also has launched a $75 million program to advance democracy in Iran by expanding broadcasting into the country, funding nongovernmental organizations and promoting cultural exchanges. Voice of America broadcasts one hour a day into Iran; by April, that will grow to four hours a day, and the administration plans to go to 24 hours a day. But the administration suffered a setback last week when lawmakers slashed $19 million, mainly from broadcast operations.

The administration got to this point after a year of deliberately staying on the sidelines. After the United States took the lead on Iraq, the British told Bush administration officials that Washington should let the Europeans go first on dealing with Iran's alleged nuclear weapons program.

During her first trip to Europe as secretary of state, in February 2005, Rice was surprised that most questions from European officials concerned Iran, not Iraq, and was sobered by the realization that they viewed Washington as the problem, not Tehran.

When Bush went to Europe a few weeks later, French President Jacques Chirac and then-Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder of Germany pushed him to support a British-French-German diplomatic effort dubbed the EU-3. Bush agreed, and Rice announced the decision a year ago last weekend. With the Europeans in the lead, it became easier to persuade Russia and China as well to take a tougher line with Iran.

"We have taken the position from the get-go that we believed it was important to work with as many countries as possible," Burns said. "We wanted to have the entire international community on our side in order to pressure Iran."

The biggest help bringing the international community together, though, came from Iran. President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad proved so incendiary -- in dismissing the Holocaust and talking about wiping Israel off the map -- that the prospect of a negotiated solution faded. The statements underscored the danger posed by Tehran and, according to Burns, led Rice "to say we need to fire on all pistons on Iran." Ultimately, the Europeans, Russia and China agreed to send Iran to the Security Council.

Bush decided to push more overtly for a democratic Iran. "Tonight," he said in his State of the Union address on Jan. 31, "let me speak directly to the citizens of Iran: America respects you, and we respect your country. We respect your right to choose your own future and win your own freedom. And our nation hopes one day to be the closest of friends with a free and democratic Iran."

Now that the nuclear issue is at the Security Council, the U.S. strategy is to escalate gradually rather than force an immediate climax. The first step would be a statement by the council president declaring Iran in violation of nuclear treaty obligations and demanding it suspend uranium enrichment. If that fails, the council could be asked to impose economic sanctions or pass a resolution allowing military force to enforce compliance. Russia and China, which have veto power, seem unlikely to support either move.

"There's a clear desire to have a broad coalition," a senior U.S. official said. "The question is, how do you get any action out of it?"

Some analysts believe this year will lead to a decision point for Bush whether to use a military option. For now, Bush and his aides say all options are on the table, but as a practical matter no armed strike is likely until diplomacy has been exhausted.

Many military specialists doubt a strike would be effective because Iran's nuclear facilities are scattered in dozens of locations, and would require hundreds of sorties first to disrupt Iranian air defenses. Such an attack, they say, could inflame the Muslim world and alienate reformers within Iran.

Haass, now president of the Council on Foreign Relations, said Washington should instead try direct negotiations with Tehran: "The United States ought to make a major diplomatic push in part because it might succeed, in part because none of the other options are attractive and in part because if you're going to escalate you want to demonstrate that you tried." The current policy, he said, "looks to me more like a hope than a strategy."

Some Republicans, though, say a military attack may be required if only to set back Iran's nuclear program a few years.

"Every year that we wait, the risk increases," said former House speaker Newt Gingrich, a member of the Pentagon's Defense Policy Board. "I would hope that the administration would decide to do something decisive. . . . We have the military power in the region if we need it. It's a question of whether we have the will."

Such a decision could prompt deep skepticism after the Iraq intelligence failure. "As far as Congress, they're certainly going to do their homework more this time and demand more from the intelligence community before they go along with this," said a Senate Republican leadership aide who spoke on the condition of anonymity.

The way things are going now, the aide said, "It's hard to see this getting resolved under the Bush administration."

© 2006 The Washington Post Company

Dozens Killed in Baghdad Explosions

By John Ward Anderson and Bassam Sebti

BAGHDAD, March 12 -- A series of powerful explosions ripped through a Shiite Muslim slum in eastern Baghdad on Sunday evening, killing about 50 people and wounding more than 200, as top Iraqi politicians vowed to redouble efforts to form a national unity government to help ease a recent surge in...

To view the entire article, go to http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/conte...er=emailarticle

http://www.antiwar.com/engelhardt/?articleid=8693

March 13, 2006
The Campaign to Pacify Sunni Iraq
by Michael Schwartz and Tom Engelhardt
Tom Dispatch
In the first of a two-part dispatch, "Disintegrating Iraqi Sovereignty," Michael Schwartz explored Iraq's missing "sovereignty." Most of us take sovereignty for granted, but under the pressure of invasion, occupation, destruction, and arrogance as well as increasing ethnic/religious strife and rippling chaos, it has proved ever harder to bring to bear in Iraq. Schwartz explored an unstable, extremely volatile "stalemate" of sovereignty that has developed there in which a central government without the means of coercion or of administration – or significant economic resources – cowers in Baghdad's Green Zone; the Americans occupy their bases and any place they care to put their troops (but no place else); while, in southern Iraq, Shia religious parties, and in the north, Kurdish parties, each with their own militias, established local governments at odds with the central government and the Americans, but have proved capable of wielding only limited and partial power themselves. He now turns to the rebellious Sunni provinces of Iraq and considers the nature of the Iraqi "power vacuum" there. Tom

Iraq's Sovereignty Vacuum (Part 2)
by Michael Schwartz

The December elections in Iraq did not initiate a period of state-building, but instead marked an expanding, many-sided conflict whose latest major horror was the bombing of the Golden Mosque in Samarra and the carnage it triggered. All the conflicts of the present moment have metastasized and spread from the ill-fated attempt by American-led forces to pacify Sunni communities in Baghdad and in four provinces to the north and west. Today, not only is the country edging toward an ever more virulent civil war, but the Sunni resistance is stronger than ever, registering about 100 attacks a day in January.

This original war remains the central front in the ongoing battle for domination in Iraq and, as the core conflict, it continues to cast off enough bitterness, suffering, destruction, and rebellion to guarantee its never-ending spread to new areas and groups.

More than anything else, this low-level but fierce war is responsible for the constantly diminishing reservoir of sovereignty in Iraq. If the Americans sought to establish the legitimacy of the occupation by crushing early signs of Sunni resistance, that effort has, in the end, only helped convince Iraqis of the illegitimacy of the American presence. For all its failures, however, the occupation has succeeded in one endeavor. It has managed to undermine all efforts by other parties to establish their own legitimacy and therefore to build a foundation for a new and sovereign Iraq. If one day Iraq ceases to be, splitting chaotically into several entities, the way the occupation destroyed sovereignty (along with parts of Sunni cities) will certainly come in for a major share of the blame.

The Sunni Resistance

What the world has come to call the "insurgency "in Iraq is largely located in Baghdad and the Sunni-dominated cities to the north and west of the capital. In the Kurdish north and Shia south, residents have largely been organized into local quasi-governments that are frequently at odds with the American occupation (and therefore with the central government in the capital); but – despite notable moments of great violence – none of these localities has mounted a sustained war against the American-led presence as the Sunnis have.

While the Sunni insurgency is certainly the focus of Iraqi news coverage, the actual nature of the war in Sunni areas goes largely unreported. Coverage tends to focus on spectacular moments of violence and destruction, especially car bombs and other suicide attacks against civilian targets. Only rarely mentioned are the multitude of small-scale confrontations between resistance fighters and patrolling American troops that account for the majority of violent clashes. As a result, the methods of the American side – the use of assault weapons, tanks, artillery, and air power – and so the spreading "collateral" damage to Iraqi civilians is significantly underreported.

A recent James Glanz piece in the New York Times proved an exception to this pattern. Based on U.S. military statistics, Glanz offered strong evidence against the administration portrait of a weakening (or at least stalemated) resistance movement. Guerrilla attacks had, in fact, "steadily grown in the nearly three years since the invasion." Even during a "lull" in December 2005, the 2,500 violent confrontations – over 80 per day – were "almost 250 percent [higher than] the number in March 2004," which, in turn was twice the level of August 2003.

The chart that accompanied the article (originally delivered to the Senate Foreign Affairs Committee by Joseph A. Christoff of the Government Accountability Office) contained an even more significant fact, almost unknown to the American public: Despite the impression we may have from news reports, Iraqi civilians constitute only a small proportion of resistance targets each month – never exceeding 20 percent and typically falling well below 10 percent. In December 2005, they accounted for just 8 percent – about 200 – of the 2,500 attacks.

The overwhelming target of such attacks – in a typical month around 80 percent of them – was the American military and its coalition allies, mainly the British. Last December, the figure was a little over 70 percent; some months it reaches 90 percent. The Iraqi armed forces (integrated, as they are, into the American command) account for another 5-10 percent of the targets.

Until now, at least, the war in the Sunni areas of Iraq has largely been between the Americans and the guerrillas. The Iraqi government itself is not a factor in this confrontation, and consequently is rarely mentioned – even in a pro forma way – in news accounts of the battles, negotiations, and other elements of the war.

How then, as best we can tell, is the Sunni resistance organized in the many cities in the four provinces in central Iraq and in Baghdad where the war is an ongoing part of life?

Though it is divided into two ideologically contrary groups – the guerrillas who target the occupation and the jihadists who tend to seek out civilian targets – and within those divisions into many grouplets, the Sunni resistance is coherent enough to be another contender for sovereignty, at least in its own areas. It has tied down and exhausted the U.S. military, forcing strategic and tactical alterations in American policy. It continues to influence both national and local Iraqi politics, even as its internal contradictions increasingly set jihadists and guerrillas against each other.

The role played by the Sunni resistance can best be understood by briefly reviewing the situation in Fallujah before its recapture by American forces in November 2004. In April of that year, after an abortive attempt to seize the city, the U.S. military had withdrawn, leaving it in the hands of the "Fallujah Brigade," made up mainly of Ba'athist army veterans. They were assigned the job of pacifying the city. Instead, the Brigade gave its support to a group of local religious leaders allied with the insurgency that soon evolved into a local government. Borrowing its organizational skeleton from the rich community organizations traditionally connected to Sunni mosques (including their Sharia courts), it used the resistance fighters as a police force. Perhaps not surprisingly, the structure that developed was similar to those that had already formed in Shia cities like Basra.

During the period from April to November, Fallujah had only the most tenuous ties to the national government in Baghdad. Nir Rosen, an independent journalist, produced remarkable descriptions of the city in this period (for the New Yorker and Asia Times). His pieces give a sense of the developing tensions between the jihadists, who wanted to establish Fallujah as a safe rear area for their larger operations, and the local resistance, determined to keep the Americans out but uninterested in going on the offensive. The new government also heightened tensions by enforcing cultural customs similar to those adopted in Basra: head scarves for women, facial hair for men, and the abolition of liquor and western music. In these months, street crime disappeared, as did armed confrontations of any sort. They would prove the most peaceful in Fallujah since the fall of Saddam's regime.

As this interlude indicated, in the Sunni areas local clerics already constituted a proto-government-in-waiting, quite capable of enforcing "law and order" if not challenged by the occupation military. The fighting in Sunni cities comes and goes with the arrival and departure of the occupation military. When the occupation forces enter a city (or a neighborhood in Baghdad), the IEDs begin to explode, snipers fire away, and hit-and-run attacks start up. As soon as they withdraw to pacify another town, the city in question, in a more battered state, falls back into the hands of local clerics and their allies among the guerrillas.

At no time does the Iraqi government figure significantly into this process. Occasionally, it may appoint a governor or police chief, but these functionaries quickly discover (like their counterparts in Basra and Kirkuk) that they have little choice but to work with the local power structure, resign in protest over their lack of authority, or become assassination targets.

In a sense, the difference between Sunni cities – most of which have been wracked by fighting – and their Shia or Kurdish counterparts has been the determination of the American military to pacify them.

The Guerrilla War in Baiji

The experience of Baiji illustrates how little leverage the Iraqi government has over events on the ground in Sunni Iraq. As the site of the largest oil refining plant in the country, it is a more important city than its population of 70,000 might suggest. During the Hussein years, its 98 percent Sunni inhabitants were supported by well-paying jobs in a government-owned industrial district that grew up around the oil-refining facilities.

After the American-led invasion, however, Baiji fell on hard times. Thanks to one of the first executive orders issued by L. Paul Bremer, the Bush-appointed head of the Coalition Provisional Authority that was then ruling from Baghdad, all government-owned enterprises, with the exception of the oil industry itself, were shuttered. This was in preparation for a privatization program considered crucial by American economic planners. Unemployment swept through Baiji, generating bitterness, inspiring a variety of protests, and eventually energizing what had until then been an exceedingly modest resistance to the U.S. presence.

In late 2003, in response to this growing discontent, the U.S. initiated what Washington Post reporter Ann Tyson characterized as "heavy-handed sweeps through Baiji … [that] left many people angry, frightened, and humiliated." She quoted Adil Faez Jeel, the director of the oil refinery, saying that the sweeps only solidified support for an armed resistance: "Most of the people fighting the Americans tell me they do nothing for us but destroy the houses and capture people. … There are no jobs, no water, no electricity."

By late 2004, Baiji's guerrillas were strong enough to take control of the town in response to the American conquest of Fallujah. In addition to skirmishes with U.S. troops and Iraqi police, the guerrillas began to sabotage pipelines around the refinery and to attack oil trucks. At one point, they launched a mortar attack against a mixed American and Iraqi National Guard patrol in the center of town, triggering two days of running battles. A doctor at the local hospital told the Agence France Press that at least 10 civilians were killed and 26 wounded in the ensuing melee.

For the next year, Baiji was out of the news, largely because the American military was busy with massive sweeps in the west of Anbar province. In late 2005, however, the Americans returned to Baiji, characterized at the time by Tyson as "firmly in the grip of insurgents."

According to U.S. military sources, this pacification attempt was provoked by suspicions that guerrillas were using Baiji as a staging area for attacks in Mosul and Baghdad, and – more immediately – by evidence that, while targeting oil pipelines and convoys, they were also siphoning off a significant proportion of the refinery's output for sale on the black market to finance their activities. A resistance supporter in Baiji told Inter Press Service reporters Brian Conley and Isam Rashid that that these efforts were meant to stop what he considered an American "theft" of Iraqi oil.

The Americans temporarily closed the refinery and sent in the 101st Airborne Division to retake Baiji. For a month, virtually no progress was made in pacifying the city, while American casualties were high. A quarter of the 34 soldiers in one platoon suffered casualties of one sort or another. Sgt. 1st Class Danny Kidd, a veteran of Afghanistan and Iraq, attributed the hard going to the fact that Baiji residents supported the guerrilla fighters: "They have the place locked down. We have almost no support from the local people. We talk to 1,000 people and one will come forward."

The degree of this support was illustrated by a gruesome incident during the early weeks of the campaign. Capt. Matt Bartlett, accompanied by a convoy of tanks and personnel carriers, sought information from a tribal chief about a group of bomb-makers suspected of operating in the chief's domain. The convoy was cordially greeted by the sheik's children, who accepted the officers' gifts and "traded high-fives with them." Capt. Bartlett was told, however, that the sheik was hosting a large gathering and could not meet him that day. Preparing to leave, the Americans found the street blocked by people and cars, apparently part of the gathering. They were directed instead down a dirt route along the Tigris River nicknamed "Smugglers' Road."

"A few hundred yards down the road, bordered by fields, the convoy was hit by a massive explosion. Behind the blast, [First Sgt. Robert] Goudy jumped out of his Humvee and ran forward toward the huge cloud of smoke and debris. As it cleared, he was confused by what he found.

"'I saw this big piece of flesh and thought it was a goat or cow. I thought, 'Wow, these guys put an IED in a dead animal,' he recalled. He went on, hoping to find his men sitting in the truck. But as he got closer, he recalled, 'I didn't see the truck. I started seeing limbs and body parts.' Goudy tripped over what was left of one soldier. Then he found the only survivor of the five soldiers in the Humvee, blinded and screaming.

"'It was horrible,' Bartlett said. 'We had to pick up body parts 200 meters away.' The Humvee was 'ripped in half and shredded,' he said, by a monster bomb later found to contain 1,000 pounds of explosives and two antitank mines, with a 155mm artillery round on top."

Sgt Goudy and the other survivors were "convinced Iraqis living nearby knew about the bomb but did nothing to warn them." In fact, it appears that they participated in luring the convoy into a trap. The soldiers' thoughts naturally turned to revenge: "I felt so angry and violated…. We all wanted to go out and tear up the city, kick down the doors, shoot the civilians, blow up the mosque."

Subsequent reports from Baiji contain no accounts of such acts of revenge, but the incident, and the failure of other strategies to pacify the city, led to an official escalation of the American assault. According to the Army Times, the new strategy was modeled after "walls built around Fallujah and Samarra in recent months [that] have quelled restive insurgent cells." An earthen barrier was constructed around Siniyah, the most rebellious neighborhood in the city. Checkpoints were set up to stop "all vehicles leaving or entering … as soldiers look for known insurgents, bomb-making materials, and illegal weapons."

These draconian measures disrupted normal life. Anyone with business inside or outside the community could not reliably pass through the checkpoint: College students interrupted their educations; employees lost their jobs. Sumiya, a 33-year-old Siniyah housewife, who spoke on the phone to Conley and Rashid, described the situation inside the community of 3,000:

"Siniyah has become a real battlefield now, and the occupation forces have destroyed many of our homes…. There is no security inside Siniyah and it is worse than any place in Iraq now. The occupation forces and Iraqi National Guard are raiding Siniyah houses everyday and arresting many people. There is a curfew from 5 p.m. to 5 a.m.; in Baghdad it is only midnight to 5 a.m."

One resident commented to the Inter Press reporters, "We live in a very big jail for three thousand"; while a local cleric told the Army Times that Siniyah had become "a concentration camp."

This situation will prevail until the American troops move on to "pacify" another city. At that time, the residents – further alienated from the occupation – will attempt to rebuild their lives, though from an even deeper hole than before. The jerry-rigged local government left behind will have no resources with which to address their problems, and there will be none forthcoming from either the Americans or, of course, the Iraqi government, which has none to offer.

As in other Sunni cities, while the fighting in Baiji has occurred episodically, the physical, economic, and infrastructural decline of the city has been more or less continuous. So has the inability of either the Americans or the resistance to create a stable government. Each has undermined the credibility of the other. And the national government has no presence at all. In such circumstances, any residual faith residents might have in the idea of a sovereign state has undoubtedly evaporated as well.

Sovereignty Lost?

"Stay the course," President Bush tells us. "Democracy is being built," he insists. His case rests on high turnout percentages in the national elections, which demonstrate, he believes, that the vast majority of Iraqis want (and support) a national government. American forces, in his view, are training the Iraqi military and police to provide that government with the coercive force it needs to destroy a small but persistent insurgency that relies on intimidation and terror to keep the majority of Iraqis from speaking out and acting as they might wish. The developing institutions of civil society will provide, in his opinion, a nonviolent social infrastructure for a successful central government. But all this naturally takes time and money, and the American people need to give his administration the space to apply both effectively.

The on-the-ground evidence suggests quite a different reality. Sovereignty is made up of four ingredients: ultimate control over the means of coercion; sufficient resources to deliver government services; an administrative apparatus capable of carrying out these functions; and the acquiescence of most people in the exercise of such power. The government in Baghdad has none of these, nor will any of them soon be available to it.

As the war between Sunni communities and the occupation military continues, and as it throws off pieces of rebellion that set off new conflicts, the impotent isolation of the Iraqi government within its Green Zone sanctuary becomes more visible to all. In the meantime, the various contending parties – the occupation, the Sunni resistance, the Shia fundamentalists, and the Kurdish nationalists – frustrate each other's designs on power while destroying any group's ability to establish sovereignty.

One symptom of the debilitation of Iraq under the weight of this war has been its ever declining oil production which, in January 2006, fell to perhaps half of the already depressed production levels during the last embattled years of Saddam Hussein.

Oil – that most precious commodity – has become scarce in oil-rich Iraq. But sovereignty – an even more precious commodity – is scarcer still.

Michael Schwartz, professor of sociology and faculty director of the Undergraduate College of Global Studies at Stony Brook University, has written extensively on popular protest and insurgency, and on American business and government dynamics. His work on Iraq has appeared at numerous Internet sites, including TomDispatch, Asia Times, MotherJones.com, and ZNet; and in print in Contexts, Against the Current, and Z Magazine. His books include Radical Protest and Social Structure, and Social Policy and the Conservative Agenda (edited, with Clarence Lo). His e-mail address is Ms42@optonline.net.

Copyright 2006 Michael Schwartz

http://www.dailystar.com.lb/article.asp?ed...rticle_id=22913
Copyright © 2006 The Daily Star
Monday, March 13, 2006

No let up in Iraqi bloodshed, bombs, mortars kill 80
U.S. urges leaders to avoid civil war


Bombs and mortar blasts across Iraq killed at least 80 people in one of the country's bloodiest days for weeks as Washington urged leaders to form a coalition to avert a slide to civil war.

At least 40 people were killed and 104 wounded when three car bombs exploded Sunday evening at crowded markets in the Sadr City Shiite district of Baghdad, an Interior Ministry official said quoting hospital figures. A fourth car bomb was defused. "People were torn to pieces," a witness, who declined to be named, said at the scene.

The two car bombs detonated within minutes at Al-Hay and Al-Ula markets - less than two kilometers apart - said Interior Ministry official Lieutenant Colonel Falah al-Mohammadawi.

Earlier, 16 more died and around 25 were hurt, mostly in Baghdad, in further car and roadside bombs, mortar and gunfire attacks, the official said. Altogether, from body counts during the day at least 80 people were killed, Reuters reported.

Reuters reporters witnessed chaotic scenes at a hospital in Sadr City where many of the casualties were taken. One woman wept and a man slapped his head in grief. Some of the wounded were lying on the floor.

Shiite reprisals after Sunni Arab insurgents were blamed for the bombing of a shrine on February 22 pushed Iraq to the brink of civil war and officials have warned a new incident could push the country into all-out conflict.

The deadly attack came moments after Iraq's main political blocs emerged from a 90-minute meeting with U.S. ambassador to Iraq, Zalmay Khalilzad and said that the first session of the new Parliament would be held Thursday, three days earlier than initially announced.

"There was a lot of flexibility on all sides," Khalilzad said of the talks, stressing a deal was urgent. Pressed to say how long it might take, he said: "It's going to take a bit of time."

Khalilzad has said a similar incident to the February 22 Samarra Mosque bombing, which triggered sectarian bloodshed that killed hundreds, could spark a civil war and possibly ignite the entire Middle East.

President Jalal Talabani, a Kurd, stood at the side of Shiite leader Abdel-Aziz al-Hakim and other Kurdish, Sunni Arab and secular leaders to make the announcement, telling reporters that meetings would continue daily until there is agreement on key government positions and other issues.

While moving the Parliament's first session forward suggested some progress, none of those present indicated there had been any breakthrough in the deadlock over forming a national unity government.

Defying calls from Sunnis, Kurds and secular leaders, Prime Minister Ibrahim al-Jaafari said he would not step down.

"My nomination was settled by the Alliance in a democratic manner and that should be respected and accepted," Jaafari told reporters after meeting President Jalal Talabani, a Kurd who has made no secret of his own preference for Jaafari to quit.

Khalilzad said a permanent government needed to be in place quickly to fill the "vacuum in authority" at a time of continuing effort by "terrorists

to provoke sectarian conflict." "To deal with the threat, [there is] the need on an urgent basis to form a government of national unity," Khalilzad said. He added that he would be available at any time to join the negotiations.

Hakim, head of the powerful Shiite Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq, agreed forming a government was now imperative. "We have to get Iraq out of the situation it is in now," he said.

The meeting was held at Massoud Barzani's Kurdish Democratic Party headquarters in the heavily fortified Green Zone.

Other participants included Adnan al-Dulaimi, leader of the largest Sunni bloc in

Parliament and Adnan Pachachi, a secular Sunni representing Iyad Allawi, a Shiite and former prime minister.

Jaafari, a Shiite, did not attend but met earlier Sunday with Talabani.

The convening of Parliament will start a 60-day clock on electing a new president, approving a prime minister and signing off on his Cabinet.

In an interview with the pan-Arab Al-Hayat daily published Sunday, Khalilzad linked stability in Iraq, which he said would take "a long time," to creation of a unity government.

"We are prepared to work with the Iraqis to speed up the process, but the speed of this process depends on the decisions of the Iraqis to form a national unity government and give Cabinet posts to competent individuals who unite the people and who do not quarrel with each other," Khalilzad was quoted as saying. - Agencies



Copyright © 2006 The Daily Star
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March 13, 2006
Ex-Judge in Iraq Stands by Death Sentences for 148 Shiites
By ROBERT F. WORTH
BAGHDAD, Iraq, March 13 — A former judge in Saddam Hussein's Revolutionary Court acknowledged today that he sentenced 148 Shiites to death in 1984, but he said they had received a proper trial and had confessed to trying to assassinate the former Iraqi leader at the instigation of Iran.

The former judge, Awad al-Bandar, spoke as defendant testimony continued in the trial of Mr. Hussein and seven others in connection with mass tortures and executions after the failed assassination attempt in 1982. The first high-level defendants testified today, and Mr. Hussein is expected to speak on Tuesday.

The chief prosecutor and judge often seemed amazed at Mr. Bandar's defense of his role in the trial of the 148 Shiites. Mr. Bandar said that the 1984 trial had taken two weeks, and that the dock in his courtroom had often been packed as the men moved in and out.

The prosecutor, Jafar Musawi, then showed Mr. Bandar documents indicating that 46 of the 148 defendants had been "liquidated during interrogation" prior to the two-week trial. Prosecutors have said in the past that the entire 1984 trial was a sham, but this time Mr. Bandar seemed not to understand the prosecutor's efforts to undercut him.

"Is it a strange thing that a defendant died during interrogation?" he asked.

The prosecutor drove his point home shortly afterward: "People were dying during interrogation and the strange thing is that they were afterwards being referred to the Revolutionary Court to get the death penalty."

Mr. Bandar angrily denied that. But he invoked the war with Iran as a necessary context for his actions, saying, "We had an external enemy and an internal enemy," and that the would-be assassins were members of the dissident Dawa Party with links to Iran.

Mr. Hussein himself offered a similar self-defense two weeks ago when he admitted ordering the trial, though he stopped short of saying he had signed the execution order that prosecutors have introduced as documentary evidence.

Several of the defendants have questioned the authenticity of those documents, or suggested that they were marred by commonplace errors. "The typist must have made a mistake," Mr. Bandar said, when asked why the records of the Revolutionary Court show no mention of any defense lawyers for the 148 Shiites who were executed.

Aside from Mr. Bandar, all the defendants who have given direct testimony so far this week have denied any role in the torture and executions carried out after the assassination attempt, in the Shiite village of Dujail. Taha Yassin al-Ramadan, a former vice president in Mr. Hussein's government, said he had no connection to the events in Dujail.

But Mr. Ramadan insisted on reading a lengthy statement alleging that he was tortured after his capture in August 2003. His captors included an American, he said, and they demanded to know where Mr. Hussein was hiding. When he told them he did not know, they beat and kicked him for days.

The other four defendants are local Baath Party officials who are accused of playing roles in the crackdown that followed the assassination attempt. Three testified on Sunday, saying they were innocent of any wrongdoing, and disavowing earlier signed statements given to investigators. But they have described terrifying scenes on the days in question in Dujail, with warplanes bombing orchards near where the assassination attempt took place and security officers storming the town.

A fourth local official, Muhammad Azawi Ali, testified today, saying he had been in the Baath Party headquarters in Dujail on the day in question. But he also said he is illiterate and had not understood the statement he gave investigators earlier. "I am innocent, I am innocent, I am innocent!" he said as he finished his testimony.



Copyright 2006The New York Times Company Home Privacy Policy Search Corrections XML Help Contact Us Work for Us Site Map Back to Top

http://www.csmonitor.com/2006/0313/dailyUpdate.html
posted March 13, 2006 at 10:50 a.m.

Nature of conflict changing for Iraqis

Sectarian violence, not insurgency, now greatest threat to life.

By Tom Regan | csmonitor.com

As the third anniversary of the start of the invasion of Iraq nears, the nature of the conflict is changing for Iraqis. The greatest danger is no longer the insurgency, reports The Washington Post, but the threat of sectarian violence, which increases almost daily. Increasingly, lines are being drawn – literally – between Sunni and Shiite neighborhoods.
Baghdad has calmed since the mosque bombing, partly because the city's nightly curfew was moved up three hours to 8 p.m. But Baghdad and Iraq have nevertheless begun to look like Lebanon during that country's 15-year civil war. Green lines and red lines have sprung up between neighborhoods, and complex rivalries have grown among myriad factions pursuing political aims with armed militias. ...
Checkpoints set up by Iraqi security forces now mark the otherwise imperceptible boundaries between some neighborhoods. Uniformed gunmen from Iraq's many ambiguous and shifting security forces and militias scan passing traffic, sticking their heads in rolled-down windows to question motorists, in search of anyone who looks like an outsider and a possible threat.

In one sign of the growing public nature of this violence, the Los Angeles Times reports that the head of Iraq's public TV network, Al-Iraqiya, was ambushed and killed Saturday. The network is indirectly controlled by the Shiite-led government. But it appears the murder was in retaliation for the killing four days earlier of Munsuf Abdallah Khalidi, a news anchor on Baghdad Television, which is run by the country's largest Sunni Arab party.




03/10/06

Rumsfeld: Iraqi troops, not US, to fight a civil war



03/09/06

North Korea test-fires short-range missiles

03/08/06

Algeria releasing 2,629 Islamist prisoners this week



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The Los Angeles Times reports that the growing power of radical Shiite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr, and his Madhi Army, causes great concern among US officials. Many see the only way that the US time in Iraq will be considered a success is if they leave behind a stable government, but Sadr's growing power is a danger to that hope.

"The true nightmare in Iraq is not Anbar," the province that is the hotbed of the Sunni-led insurgency, "it's Basra," said a high-level U.S. official, speaking on condition of anonymity. "It's neighborhood by neighborhood, police station by police station, collectives of quasi-political, quasi-criminal gangs, who may use a label that has a national color to it but in reality isn't national at all. And it's the intermingling of criminality and the push for individual power, all blended into one."
The BBC reports that Britain's Foreign Office minister, Kim Howells, admits that the situation in Iraq is "a mess," but argues that Iraq's prospects are better than media reports suggest. He also dismissed reports of civil war, and said that while Iraq may be a mess, it's "a mess that can't launch an attack now on Iran; a mess that won't be able to march into Kuwait; it's a mess that can't develop nuclear weapons." He also took a swipe at conservative figures in the US who have complained about the direction of the war.
"I would never take my guidance from swivel-eyed right-wing Americans and I'm surprised that anybody ever did. I do not look to them to continue the fight for democracy and to rebuild a nation in Iraq any more than I would look at some left-wing loony," he said.
"This is a job that has to be done; these are the materials we have got to deal with; and they are great materials. We've just got to get on with it now."

But John Burns, who has been the New York Times bureau chief in Baghdad for four years and was one of the few journalists to remain in the capital during the US invasion, paints a completely different picture of the situation. Editor & Publisher reports that Mr. Burns, appearing on HBO's Real Time with Bill Maher on Friday night, said that for the first time, he believes the US mission in Iraq "will fail."
Asked if a civil war was developing there, Burns said, "It's always been a civil war," adding that it's just a matter of extent. He said the current US leaders there – military and diplomatic – were doing their best but sectarian differences would "probably" doom the enterprise.
Burns said that he and others underestimated this problem, feeling for a long time that toppling Saddam Hussein would almost inevitably lead to something much better. He called the Abu Ghraib abuse the worst of many mistakes the US made but said that even without so many mistakes the sectarian conflict would have gotten out of hand.

Burns said the US military officials in Iraq will be deciding over the next couple of weeks if they should draw down US forces in Iraq this spring. With conditions on the ground deteriorating, it could lead to chaos in Iraq, but if the troops are not brought back "it would prove to be a political disaster for the White House."
A secret study by the Canadian Security Intelligence Service seems to support concerns about early withdrawal from Iraq. The Toronto Star reports that unless Iraq first had a stable government, insurgents would see the removal of US troops as a "significant victory." The CSIS study says the insurgents are working hard to exploit the differences between the various factions in Iraq and that the "spectrum of instability" in Iraq includes "high levels of criminal activity, civil unrest, increased sectarian violence between Sunnis and Shiites, regular guerrilla action against allied forces, assaults on Iraqi authorities, sabotage, kidnapping and assassination."

The spy service notes some observers have argued that rather than prompt a descent into civil war, an American pullout may pacify anti-U.S. elements, impair the recruiting efforts of the insurgents and give the Iraqi state a new sense of purpose.
"However, without having clearly established a stable democratic government, insurgents will likely perceive a U.S. withdrawal as a significant victory," the study adds.

The Associated Press reports that, after a meeting with US Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad, Iraqi leaders announced that the parliament would convene three days earlier than planned. Officials also announced that meetings to break the deadlock over the forming of a new government would continue. Khalilzad said a permanent government needed to be in place quickly because of the continuing effort by "terrorists to provoke sectarian conflict. To deal with the need on an urgent basis [we must] form a government of national unity."
The Sydney Morning Herald reported last week, however, that Abdul Karim al-Enzy, Iraq's national security minister, took a swipe at the US for interfering in Iraq's internal affairs. He said the US was intentionally slowing Iraq's redevelopment because of "a self-serving agenda that included oil and the 'war on terror.'"


Mr. Enzy argued that if the US-led coalition in Iraq had been more serious about rebuilding the country's security forces in the first year of the occupation, it could now be making substantial cuts in foreign troop numbers in Iraq. "We don't want foreign forces here, but it's impossible for them to leave now, because we're on the edge of civil war," he said.

"The truth is the Americans don't want us to reach the levels of courage and competence needed to deal with the insurgency because they want to stay here. They came for their own strategic interests. A lot of the world's oil is in this region and they want to use Iraq as a battlefield in the war on terror because they believe they can contain the terrorism in Iraq."

Enzy said Iraq and the region's relationship with the West was complicated by "significant differences of culture and tradition."

Iraqis try to avert civil war
More sectarian attacks have increased the pressure on leaders to form a
new government. By Scott Peterson
http://www.csmonitor.com/2006/0314/p01s04-woiq.html?s=hns

- Baghdad 'Street' Fears Imminent Civil War
http://www.spacewar.com/reports/Baghdad_St..._Civil_War.html

Washington (UPI) Mar 14, 2006 - Rumors in Iraq have a weight that government and even newspaper reports don't seem to carry, and the latest rumors suggest Iraqis believe a civil war is imminent and the United States secretly wants it to happen.

Bomb Kills 58 : Four Men Found Hanged in Slum:

POLICE found four hanged men dangling from electricity pylons in a Baghdad Shiite slum, hours after car bombs and mortars shells ripped through teeming market streets, killing at least 58 people and wounding more than 200.
http://tinyurl.com/zdfph

===
2 U.S. Military Personel Among 14 Killed In Latest Iraq Violence:

Five people were killed and 18 wounded when a bomb targeting a police patrol exploded in Tikrit
http://www.alertnet.org/thenews/newsdesk/L1375868.htm

===
Shia cleric blames US forces for Sunday massacre:

He said terrorists carried out the bombing "under US air cover" arguing that the halt of telephone connections before the incident was proof of the cooperation between the terrorists and the occupier to "destabilise the security of this Shia region.
http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/articleshow/1448002.cms

===
Video: Sadr city morning after attacks : -

Morning scene after bombs ripped through Baghdad's Sadr City, killing 46.
http://today.reuters.com/tv/videoStory.asp...=FEEDROOM136505

===
Death squads found inside Iraqi government :

Senior Iraqi officials on Sunday confirmed for the first time that death squads composed of government employees had operated illegally from inside two government ministries.
http://informationclearinghouse.info/article12310.htm

===
Iraq's president warns of civil war after bombings:

raq's president pressed political parties on Monday to accelerate efforts to form a broad government to arrest a slide into civil war after bomb blasts in a Baghdad Shi'ite slum killed 52 people.
http://tinyurl.com/e5wx5

===
Biden: Troops Should Come Home in Summer :

The U.S. should pull troops from Iraq after this summer if the political conditions in the country do not improve, the top Democrat on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee said Sunday
http://tinyurl.com/ekzem

===
Mike Ferner: 67 Billion For Murderous Work:

The killing will proceed as planned, with no congressional intervention, although chances are you heard absolutely zip about the 67 Billion Dollar Question, thanks to the Guardians of Reality who insured the news from that hearing was the Dubai Port deal, not the unimaginable sum of our money Congress voted for war, nor the voices raised against it.
http://informationclearinghouse.info/article12312.htm

===
British companies profited by at least £1.1bn out war in Iraq:

The company roll-call of post-war profiteers includes some of the best known names in Britain's boardrooms as well many who would prefer to remain anonymous. They come from private security services, banks, PR consultancies, urban planning consortiums, oil companies, architects offices and energy advisory bodies.
http://informationclearinghouse.info/article12311.htm

===
Troops from Iraq suffer the 'Vietnam effect':

BRITISH veterans of the Iraq war are suffering a "Vietnam effect" after returning home to face a hostile public, according to one of Britain's foremost experts on post-traumatic stress disorder.
http://news.scotsman.com/index.cfm?id=371972006

===
US warns of Baghdad airport "security incident":

A "security incident" at Baghdad airport prompted the U.S. embassy to bar employees from using commercial flights on Sunday.
http://tinyurl.com/hrat5

86 Found Brutally Slain in Baghdad

BAGHDAD-The bodies of 86 men shot execution-style, tortured or
strangled have been discovered in various Sunni and Shiite Muslim
neighborhoods here during the two days since a bloody attack on
the capital’s largest Shiite slum, authorities said. By Louise
Roug.
http://email.latimes.com/cgi-bin1/DM/y/ezX...Io30G2B0HNAA0EO

‘I Have Seen Death’

BAGHDAD-Journalist and unity advocate Atwar Bahjat felt called to
witness Iraq’s agony. She expected to be safe in her hometown,
Samarra. By Megan K. Stack.
http://email.latimes.com/cgi-bin1/DM/y/ezX...Io30G2B0HNAB0EP

March 15, 2006
Hussein Testimony Prompts Closure of Court to Public
By EDWARD WONG
BAGHDAD, Iraq, March 15 - Saddam Hussein took the witness stand today for his first formal testimony in his trial, delivering a rambling political diatribe urging Iraqis to continue their resistance to the American occupation.

Mr. Hussein, the last of the defendants to testify, did not address the charges against him, concerning the torture and killing of Shiite villagers in the 1980's.

He walked into the court, neatly dressed in a black suit and dark gray vest over a white shirt, put on a pair of glasses and began his testimony by reading from a written statement that essentially was an address to the country's insurgents.

"In your resistance to the American-Zionist invasion, you are great, and you will always be great in my eyes," Mr. Hussein said. "You're defending your country against the occupation. I want you to stick to your virtues, your faith and your patience."

"It's only a question of time till the sun rises and you will be victorious," he declared

Mr. Hussein called on Iraqis to stop fighting each other and said that "criminals" were responsible for the bombing in Samarra that touched off waves of sectarian killings.

The trial's chief judge, Raouf Abdel-Rahman, repeatedly interrupted Mr. Hussein, telling him to stick to the charges against him.

"This is a criminal court, we are not in politics," the judge said.

"If it wasn't for politics neither you nor I would be here today," Mr. Hussein retorted.

Later, when the judge reminded Mr. Hussein that he was charged with killing innocent people, Mr. Hussein replied. "Yesterday 80 people were found in Baghdad. Weren't they innocent?"

Finally, after more than half an hour, the chief judge ordered that the live broadcast of the trial be cut off. "This is something between you and the Americans," he told Mr. Hussein. "Don't involve the court in the struggle between you and the Americans."

Mr. Hussein's testimony concluded the second portion of the trial, in which he and seven other former government officials are charged with wrongly imprisoning and killing 148 men and boys from the Shiite village of Dujail after assassins there tried to gun down Mr. Hussein in 1982.

The prosecution ended its case last week. After months of repeated delays, outbursts from the defendants and changes in the judges hearing the case, the trial picked up speed earlier this month when prosecutors presented reams of documents, including what they described as Mr. Hussein's signature on execution orders.

The panel of judges will now consider what charges to proceed on, after which the defense will have an opportunity to present witnesses.

Mr. Hussein's testimony came after his half-brother, Barzan Ibrahim al-Tikriti, much feared and loathed among Iraqis, presented the first formal defense of his actions in court today, saying he had played no role in the villagers' deaths.

He walked into court in the morning dressed in a red headscarf and gray robes, and proceeded to read from a lengthy statement. On occasion, he looked up at the judge, thick glasses perched on his nose.

"I would rather be a victim than inflict injustice on others," said Mr. Ibrahim, who led the intelligence service in the early 1980's. "I appreciate you giving me time to defend myself."While denying any role in the massacre, Mr. Ibrahim said the government was justified in trying the villagers because they had worked with Iran in the assassination attempt.

In his meandering testimony, which began at a courthouse in the Green Zone before 11 a.m. and went on into the afternoon, Mr. Ibrahim said documents that had been presented as evidence had been forged; complained about his treatment in prison; asked the authorities to released his jailed son; and mocked the Americans for invading Iraq on false premises.

"Your honor, during the last three years, I was under torture both physically and mentally," Mr. Ibrahim said. "The total time of interrogation was about four hours, and the rest of the time I was sitting in my damp cell."

The American military is believed to be holding Mr. Ibrahim and his co-defendants at Camp Cropper, a small detention center near Baghdad International Airport. Mr. Hussein and others have complained about torture during the trial, but American officials have said the accusations are false, merely thrown out there by the defendants to bolster the circus atmosphere of the trial.

At times today, the judge showed impatience with Mr. Ibrahim, telling him to limit his pronouncements to the Dujail case.

Other defendants have already testified before the court. On Monday, Awad al-Bandar, a former judge in the Revolutionary Court, said the people from Dujail who were killed had received a proper trial and had confessed to trying to assassinate Mr. Hussein at the instigation of Iran.

On Sunday, lower-level Baath Party officials from Dujail said they had seen men being rounded up and carted off to prison in the hours after the assassination attempt, but denied playing any role in that.



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Judge Silences Saddam, Closes Courtroom Los Angeles Times
Saddam Hussein, for the first time in his trial, formally testified today during a long-winded tirade in which he urged Iraqis to end sectarian violence and unite against the US occupation. Wearing a dark suit and reading from a yellow notepad, Hussein ignored Judge Raouf Abdel-Rahman's order to testify under oath to the charge of killing Shiite villagers in the 1980s. Instead, the onetime president, who insisted again today that he remains Iraq's leader, made a rambling speech to praise the insurgency and persuade Iraqis to defy the American occupation. "You've been great in your resistance to the American and Zionist invasion and its followers … and you've been great in my eyes," Hussein said. The outburst prompted the judge to cut off Hussein's microphone, one of nine times today. "This role is over," Judge Abdel Rahman said at one point to Hussein, as they shouted at each other several times during today's court session. "Enough of the speeches and politics." The judge added: "You are in front of an Iraqi court. This is a subject between you and the Americans. Don't involve the court." But Hussein's diatribe continued, dismissing the judge's orders repeatedly to speak to the charges by saying, "I'll get around to talking about the trial when I've said what I want to say." After nearly 40 minutes, the judge demanded journalists leave and ordered television cameras turned off for a closed session that lasted nearly two hours. When court reopened, Prosecutor Jaafar Moussawi planned to cross-examine Hussein. But Hussein said he needed more time to review the legal documents that apparently were handed to him during the private session. Moussawi agreed, and the judge adjourned the trial until April 5. Hussein was the eighth and final defendant to testify for crimes against humanity. During another impromptu outburst earlier this month, Hussein said he ordered residents of Dujayl to stand trial after an assassination attempt against him in 1982. The people, including children, were later tortured and executed. But Hussein insisted his acts were legal. Hussein's testimony today came one day after Awad Hamed Bandar, the former chief of Hussein's secret Revolutionary Court said that he had personally convicted and sentenced 148 Shiite Muslims to death after a two-week hearing but later conceded that some might have been executed before the trial began. Prosecutors said that Bandar's court, a creation of Hussein's Sunni Arab-led Baath Party that was independent of other tribunals, did not summon the defendants to appear but simply received intelligence police files of their alleged confessions and summarily issued death sentences. But today, Barzan Ibrahim, Hussein's half-brother and the former chief of Hussein's secret Revolutionary Court, rejected every document prosecutors said that showed his signature, linking him to the executions. During three hours of testimony, Ibrahim denied, for instance, that he signed a document showing he approved promoting several intelligence officers, who had been involved in the crackdown in Dujayl. "This is rubbish…this is not my signature," he said after looking at one document. The judge then ordered forensic tests on the signatures to determine their validity, according to the Associated Press.
Hussein's Half Brother Latest to Testify in Trial New York Times
Saddam Hussein trial adjourned for three weeks Xinhua
Reuters AlertNet - Guardian Unlimited - CBC News - Monsters and Critics.com - all 959 related »

Mass grave find fuels sectarian tension in Iraq :

Iraq moved closer to sectarian civil war as police found the bodies of 87 men killed in Baghdad, many of them showing signs of torture. The dead appear to be Sunni Muslims killed in retaliation for the bombs that slaughtered 58 people and wounded 200 when they exploded in crowded markets in the strongly Shia area of Sadr City.
http://tinyurl.com/fqlvr

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18 dead in Iraqi violence :

Up to 18 people have been killed in violence in the central Iraqi cities of Balad, Baquba and Baghdad
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/middle_east/4809160.stm

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Iraq: U.S. military kills five children, two men and four women:

Major Ali Ahmed of the Ishaqi police said U.S. forces had landed on the roof of the house in the early hours and shot the 11 occupants, including the five children
http://informationclearinghouse.info/article12341.htm

===
U.S. military airstrikes significantly increased in Iraq:

American forces have dramatically increased airstrikes in Iraq during the past five months, a change of tactics that may foreshadow how the United States plans to battle a still-strong insurgency while reducing the number of U.S. ground troops serving here.
http://tinyurl.com/hvpwf

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American arrested with weapons in Iraq:

The man it described as a security contractor working for a private company, possessed explosives which were found in his car. It said he was arrested on Tuesday.
http://informationclearinghouse.info/article12342.htm

===
In case you missed it:

‘The Salvador Option’:

The Pentagon may put Special-Forces-led assassination or kidnapping teams in Iraq
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/6802629/site/newsweek/

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Military officers say U-S to send more troops into Iraq:

The armored unit may spend as little as 30 days in Iraq. The move contrasts with the Bush administration's stated goal of substantially cutting U-S forces in Iraq this year.
http://www.abc25.com/Global/story.asp?S=46...0&nav=menu213_2

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Remi Kanazi: Accepting Reality: America Lost the War in Iraq:

The chance for victory vanished long ago with the hearts, minds, arms, legs and lives of the Iraqi people.
http://informationclearinghouse.info/article12348.htm

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US 'may want to keep Iraq bases':

The United States may want to keep a long-term military presence in Iraq to bolster moderates against extremists in the region and protect oil supplies, the army general overseeing US operations in Iraq has said.
http://informationclearinghouse.info/article12340.htm

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Electricity Hits Three-Year Low in Iraq :

Electricity output has dipped to its lowest point in three years in Iraq. The Iraqis, in fact, may have to turn to neighboring Iran to help bail them out of their energy crisis - if not this summer, then in years to come.
http://informationclearinghouse.info/article12344.htm

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In case you missed it:

Secret U.S. Plans For Iraq's Oil :

The Bush administration made plans for war and for Iraq's oil before the 9/11 attacks sparking a policy battle between neo-cons and Big Oil, BBC's Newsnight has revealed.
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article8307.htm

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'I am still the head of state' :

Saddam Hussein insisted today that he was still Iraq's president and called on Iraqis to stop fighting each other and rise up against US and British troops as he gave evidence for the first time at his trial.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/Iraq/Story/0,,1731557,00.html

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Iraq War Resisters Stage 241-Mile Peace March Across U.S.-Mexico Border
http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=06/03/15/158256

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US general says no proof Iran behind Iraq arms:

President George W. Bush said on Monday components from Iran were being used in powerful roadside bombs used in Iraq, and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said last week that Iranian Revolutionary Guard personnel had been inside Iraq.
http://tinyurl.com/r4owy

March 16, 2006
Report Backs Iraq Strike and Cites Iran Peril
By DAVID E. SANGER
WASHINGTON, March 15 — An updated version of the Bush administration's national security strategy, the first in more than three years, gives no ground on the decision to order a pre-emptive attack on Iraq in 2003, and identifies Iran as the country likely to present the single greatest future challenge to the United States.

The strategy document declares that American-led diplomacy to halt Iran's program to enrich nuclear fuel "must succeed if confrontation is to be avoided," a near final draft of the document says. But it carefully avoids spelling out what steps the United States might take if diplomacy fails, and it makes no such direct threat of confrontation with North Korea, which boasts that it has already developed nuclear weapons.

When asked about the omission in an interview today, Stephen J. Hadley, President Bush's national security adviser and the principal author of the new report, said "the sentence applies to both Iran and North Korea."

The 48-page draft of the new "National Security Strategy of the United States," which was released by the White House before a formal presentation by Mr. Hadley on Thursday, is an effort to both expand on and assess the security strategy published by the administration in September 2002, a year after the terrorist attacks against New York and the Pentagon upended American foreign policy.

But in a reflection of new challenges, the document also covers territory that the first strategy sidestepped, warning China, for example, against "old ways of thinking and acting" in its competition for energy resources.

China's leaders, it says, are "expanding trade, but acting as if they can somehow 'lock up' energy supplies around the world or seek to direct markets rather than opening them up — as if they can follow a mercantilism borrowed from a discredited era."

No such discussion appears in the earlier version of the strategy, and Mr. Hadley said the warning was an effort to get China's leaders to think about "the broader constellation" of their interests.

In a reflection of growing tensions between Washington and Moscow, the administration also expresses deep worry that Russia is falling off the path to democracy that Mr. Bush spent much of his first term celebrating.

"Recent trends regrettably point toward a diminishing commitment to democratic freedoms and institutions," the document reads. In a much tougher tone than the 2002 document, it emphasizes that the future of the relationship with Russia "will depend on the policies, foreign and domestic, that Russia adopts."

Mr. Hadley, who was the deputy to Condoleezza Rice, who was the national security adviser when the 2002 document was produced, said the effort was not intended to formulate new strategy, but to "take stock of what has been accomplished and describe the new challenges we face."

He noted, for example, that dealing with economic globalization — a subject the administration rarely talked about directly until recently — constituted a new chapter, and that in other areas "we've learned something over the past four years."

But chief among the sections that remain unchanged is the most controversial section of the 2002 strategy: the elevation of pre-emptive strikes to a central part of United States strategy.

"The world is better off if tyrants know that they pursue W.M.D. at their own peril," the strategy says. It acknowledges misjudgments about Iraq's weapons program that preceded the invasion three years ago, but it is clearly unwilling to give ground on that decision. The report notes that "there will always be some uncertainty about the status of hidden programs since proliferators are often brutal regimes that go to great lengths to conceal their activities."

While the new document hews to many of the administration's familiar themes, it contains changes that seem born of bitter experience. Throughout the document there is talk of the need for "effective democracies," a code phrase, some of its drafters said, for countries that do not just hold free elections but also build democratic institutions and spread their benefits to their populations. "I don't think there was as much of an appreciation of the need for that in 2002," one senior official said.

The new document is also less ideological in tone, and far more country-specific. Syria, for example, received no mention in the older document, but it is cited as a sponsor of terrorism in this one.

Mr. Hadley and other officials said that in using the word "confrontation" the administration did not intend to signal a greater willingness to use military force against Iran's nuclear production sites. But it did indicate a willingness to step up pressure against Iranian leaders, including the threat of penalties that the United States is pressing in the United Nations Security Council.

Even as the White House edited the final drafts of the strategy, the House International Relations Committee voted 37 to 3 for legislation to end American economic aid to any country that invests in Iran's energy sector. The administration has opposed the bill out of concern that it would interfere with efforts to form a common front against Iran in the Security Council.

Still, the wording of the warning about confrontation with Iran comes just two pages after the strategy reiterates the 2002 warning that the United States reserves the right to take "anticipatory action to defend ourselves, even if uncertainty remains as to the time and place of the enemy's attack." The juxtaposition is unlikely to be lost on Iran's leaders.

Sections of the new document discuss at greater length the need to strengthen alliances, with specific references to supporting NATO and reforming the United Nations.

Following Mr. Bush's new push to ward off what he has called a dangerous shift toward isolationism, there is a section that refers to the need to "engage the opportunities and confront the challenges of globalization," a word that did not appear in the 2002 document.

The passage hails the "new flows of trade, investment, information and technology," which it says are transforming national security in every area from the spread of H.I.V./AIDS to avian flu to "environmental destruction, whether caused by human behavior or cataclysmic megadisasters such as flood, hurricanes, earthquakes or tsunamis." It stays away from the subject of global warming.



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March 15, 2006
Hussein Gives First Testimony, Prompting Closure of Trial to Public
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 11:43 p.m. ET

BAGHDAD, Iraq (AP) -- Saddam Hussein, testifying Wednesday for the first time in his trial, called on Iraqis to stop killing each other and instead fight U.S. troops. The judge reprimanded him for making a rambling, political speech and ordered the TV cameras switched off.

Saddam began his speech by declaring he was the elected president, touching off a shouting match with chief judge Raouf Abdel-Rahman.

''You used to be a head of state. You are a defendant now,'' Abdel-Rahman told him.

Saddam, dressed in a black suit and wearing large reading glasses, repeatedly brushed off the judge's demands that he address the charges against him -- the killing of 148 Shiites and the imprisonment and torture of others during a crackdown in the 1980s.

Instead, he read from a prepared text, addressing the ''great Iraqi people'' -- a phrase he often used in his presidential speeches -- and said he was ''pained'' by the recent wave of Sunni-Shiite violence.

''Let the people unite and resist the invaders and their backers. Don't fight among yourselves,'' he said, praising the insurgency.

''In your resistance to the invasion by the Americans and Zionists and their allies, you were great. You were great in my eyes and you remain so. ... It's only a matter of time until the sun rises and you'll be victorious,'' he said.

Abdel-Rahman shouted at him again and closed the session for 90 minutes, ordering journalists out of the room and the delayed broadcast cut while Saddam finished reading his speech.

The stormy exchanges were a stark contrast to the past few sessions, when each of Saddam's seven co-defendants took the stand, one by one, and were questioned by the judge and prosecutor about the crackdown in the Shiite town of Dujail after a 1982 assassination attempt on the then-Iraqi president.

Even Saddam's half-brother, former intelligence chief Barzan Ibrahim -- who has frequently caused an uproar in the court in the past -- submitted to more than three hours of questioning earlier Wednesday. He denied any role in the crackdown, and as prosecutors presented a series of intelligence memos on the arrests allegedly with his signatures, he insisted each was a forgery.

Prosecutors will have another chance to try to question Saddam on the charges when the trial reconvenes April 5.

But in Wednesday's session, Saddam sought to project the image of a man still in power addressing his people in troubled times, even as Abdel-Rahman repeatedly stabbed a button on his desk to shut off Saddam's microphone.

At one point, the judge screamed, ''Respect yourself!'' Saddam shouted back: ''You respect yourself!''

''You are a defendant in a major criminal case, concerning the killing of innocents. You have to respond to this charge,'' Abdel-Rahman told him.

''What about those who are dying in Baghdad? Are they not innocents?'' Saddam replied. ''I am talking to the Iraqi people.''

In his speech, Saddam told Iraqis that ''of all religions and sects ... I do not discriminate among you.''

''What pains me most is what I heard recently about something that aims to harm our people,'' he said, referring to Shiite-Sunni violence that has rocked the country since the bombing of a major Shiite shrine in Samarra last month.

He blamed ''criminals'' for the shrine bombing and the attacks on Sunni mosques that followed, and urged Iraqis to unite. ''What happened in the last days is bad,'' he said. ''You will live in darkness and rivers of blood for no reason.''

''The bloodshed that they (the Americans) have caused to the Iraqi people only made them more intent and strong to evict the foreigners from their land and liberate their country,'' he said.

After Abdel-Rahman closed the session, Saddam finished reading his speech.

Former U.S. attorney general Ramsey Clark, who is a member of Saddam's defense team, told CNN the speech explained the context of the time period in which the Dujail events took place, arguing the legality of the government actions while Iraq was at war with Iran.

But Clark said the judge ''threatened us with prosecution if we release what (Saddam) said.''

Saddam argued further with Abdel-Rahman, complaining about the closing of the session and insisting he wanted to help stop the violence. ''I am trying to extinguish the fire with few drops of water,'' he said, according to a person close to the trial, speaking on condition of anonymity because of the judge's gag order.

When journalists returned to the court, Saddam was sitting alone in the defendants' pen. The chief prosecutor tried to question him, but he refused, demanding first to see a copy of an affidavit he made to investigators before the trial. Abdel-Rahman ordered that he be given a copy and adjourned the trial until April 5.

Saddam and the seven former members of his regime face possible execution by hanging if they are convicted in connection with the crackdown launched in Dujail following a July 8, 1982 shooting attack on Saddam's motorcade in the town.

In a March 1 session, Saddam stood up in court and boldly acknowledged that he ordered the 148 Shiites put on trial before his Revolutionary Court, which eventually sentenced them all to death. But Saddam insisted it was his right to do so since they were suspected in the attempt to kill him.

The defense has argued that Saddam's government acted within its rights to respond after the assassination attempt. The prosecutor has sought to show that the crackdown went well beyond the planners of the attack to punish Dujail's civilian population, saying entire families were arrested and tortured and that the 148 who were killed were sentenced to death without a proper trial.



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Steps Toward Unity in Iraq

By David Ignatius

BAGHDAD -- For a change, pessimism isn't necessarily the right bet for Iraq. Its leaders are taking the first tentative steps toward reversing the country's downward slide.

To view the entire article, go to http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/conte...er=emailarticle

1st Declassified Iraq Documents Released
By JOHN SOLOMON, Associated Press Writer

The Bush administration Wednesday night released the first declassified documents collected by U.S. intelligence during the Iraq war, showing among other things that Saddam Hussein's regime was monitoring reports that Iraqis and Saudis were heading to Afghanistan after the Sept. 11 attacks to fight U.S. troops.

The documents, the first of thousands expected to be declassified over the next several months, were released via a Pentagon Web site at the direction of National Intelligence Director John Negroponte.

Many were in Arabic — with no English translation — including one the administration said showed that Iraqi intelligence officials suspected al-Qaida members were inside Iraq in 2002.

The Pentagon Web site described that document this way: "2002 Iraqi Intelligence Correspondence concerning the presence of al-Qaida Members in Iraq. Correspondence between IRS members on a suspicion, later confirmed, of the presence of an Al-Qaeda terrorist group. Moreover, it includes photos and names."

The release of the documents, expected to continue for months, is designed to allow lawmakers and the public to investigate what documents from Saddam's regime claimed about such controversial issues as weapons of mass destruction and al-Qaida in the period before the United States invaded Iraq in March 2003.

The Web site cautioned that the U.S. government "has made no determination regarding the authenticity of the documents, validity or factual accuracy of the information contained therein, or the quality of any translations, when available."

A handful of prewar Iraq government documents released Wednesday had been translated into English.

They included one Iraqi intelligence document indicating Saddam's feared Fedayeen paramilitary forces were investigating rumors in the fall of 2001 that as many as 3,000 Iraqis and Saudis were going to fight in Afghanistan after the U.S. invasion.

"In the report on the status of rumors for November of 2001 regarding Fedayeen Saddam in al-Anbar, there is an entry that indicates that there is a group of Iraqi and Saudi Arabians numbering around 3,000 who have gone in an unofficial capacity to Afghanistan and have joined the mujahidin (mujahedeen, or holy warriors) to fight with and aid them in defeating the American Zionist Imperialist attack," the translated document stated.

"After presenting the matter to the Supervisor of Fedayeen Saddam, he ordered that the matter should be looked into for verification of the truth of the rumor," the translation said.

House Intelligence Chairman Peter Hoekstra, R-Mich., requested the release of millions pages of documents and audio recordings captured during current and previous U.S. military operations in Iraq. Most have sat untranslated for years.

Last weekend, Negroponte agreed to set aside money and establish a system to make the documents available to the media, academics and other researchers.

In a statement, Hoekstra welcomed the chance to answer questions about prewar Iraq. "Whether Saddam Hussein destroyed Iraq's weapons of mass destruction or hid or transferred them, the most important thing is we discover the truth of what was happening in the country prior to the war," he said.

___

On the Net:

The declassified documents can be accessed at: http://fmso.leavenworth.army.milproducts-docex.htm




Copyright © 2006 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. The information contained in the AP News report may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed without the prior written authority of The Associated Press.


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March 16, 2006
Iraqi Parliament Convenes for First Time
By EDWARD WONG
BAGHDAD, Iraq, March 16 — The new Iraqi Parliament convened for the first time today, in a long-awaited gathering of legislators elected three months earlier, and its leaders delivered blunt speeches that acknowledged the rising sectarian tensions and the vacuum of power.

In the absence of any real authority, the Parliament adjourned after engaging in 40 minutes of ceremonial procedures, with party leaders hastening off to afternoon meetings to continue negotiations over forming the new, four-year government.

The remarks by the Iraqi officials were some of the frankest assessments in recent weeks of the country's direction.

"The country is going through dangerous times, it faces challenges, and the perils come from every direction," said Adnan Pachachi, the newly appointed temporary speaker of Parliament. "Sectarian tensions have increased. We have to prove to the whole world that there will not be civil war between the people of this country. The danger is still there, and our enemies are watching us."

Much is at stake in the turbulent political process. The talks only began in earnest this week, after weeks of acrimonious political sniping, and are deadlocked over several critical issues, including the nominee for prime minister. American and Iraqi officials fear that a prolonged political battle could fuel the Sunni-led insurgency and widen sectarian rifts, which in turn could push Iraq further down the path to full-scale civil war and affect the Bush administration's plans to start drawing down the 133,000 troops here.

The most optimistic politicians said today they expected the government to be formed in a month, with the prime minister, president and cabinet positions appointed. But many others estimated the talks would drag on until the summer. The American ambassador, Zalmay Khalilzad, has been urging quick resolution to the most contentious issues, and has shepherded several meetings himself.

In a sign of the precarious situation here, Iraqi officials imposed an extraordinary travel ban across Baghdad today, as they had done in the days after sectarian violence erupted last month. When the transitional parliament met last year, there was no such curfew, and streets were jammed with the cars of people going about their daily business.

The widening cycle of violence even touched Iraqi Kurdistan, long believed to be a haven of calm. In the northern town of Halabja, hundreds of protestors angry at lack of services took to the streets and burned down a museum that had been erected, with international financing, in memory of the 5,000 Kurds killed by Saddam Hussein's military in a gas attack in the 1980's. Protestors were injured and some may have been killed. The crowd was demonstrating against the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan, the party that governs eastern Kurdistan and whose leader, Jalal Talabani, is president of Iraq.

In the late morning, parliament members began arriving at the convention center inside the fortified Green Zone, protected by layers of concrete blast walls, miles of concertina wire and Georgian soldiers who speak neither English nor Arabic.

The top party leaders stood in the front row of the assembly hall and shook hands with the legislators as they filed past. Ambassador Khalilzad walked in with Bayan Jabr, the Interior Minister — a much-maligned figure who has been criticized by the Americans for allowing Shiite militias into the police forces.

After a singing of Koranic verses, the speaker of the transitional assembly, Hajim al-Hassani, announced the temporary appointment of Mr. Pachachi to the new job. Mr. Pachaci took the lectern in a dark suit and blue tie, a white handkerchief poking out of a breast pocket. At 83, he is the oldest member of Parliament and entitled, by Arab tradition, to take the role of speaker until someone is appointed permanently.

Mr. Pachachi tried to outline what is at stake in the political talks, saying that the appointment of ministers should not be done on a sectarian basis.

But he was interrupted by Abdul-Aziz al-Hakim, the head of the main Shiite bloc. "The first session of Parliament, according to the constitution, should be for administering the oath of office and appointing a speaker," Mr. Hakim said, sitting in black robes and turban in the front row. "These discussions should come later."

Mr. Hakim's outburst underscored the very sectarian tensions that Mr. Pachachi had sought to highlight. Some Sunni Arab politicians later expressed fury at the interruption. Mr. Hakim and his party, the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq, are viewed by many Sunnis as one of Iraq's most dangerous elements, because the party adheres to a conservative Shiite ideology and has an Iranian-trained militia, the Badr Organization, that has filled top posts in the security forces.

In a press conference afterward, Ibrahim al-Jaafari, the current prime minister, who has been nominated by the Shiites to keep his job, said he would step aside if asked to do so. But the Shiites have banded behind him in support, even though the main Sunni Arab parties, the Kurds and secular leaders are insisting on his departure.

Later, in an interview with Iraqiya, the state-financed television network, Mr. Jaafari affirmed his right to the nomination by saying the Shiites had chosen him in a fair vote last month.



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Largest Iraq Air Assault Since '03 Begins ABC News
U.S., Iraqi Forces Launch Biggest Air Assault Since Invasion; Insurgents North of Baghdad Targeted. U.S. and Iraqi forces on Thursday launched what was termed the largest air assault since the U.S.-led invasion in 2003, targeting insurgent strongholds north of the capital, the U.S. military said. "More than 1,500 Iraqi and Coalition troops, over 200 tactical vehicles, and more than 50 aircraft participated in the operation," the military statement said of the attack, designed to "clear a suspected insurgent operating area northeast of Samarra." Samarra is 95 kilometers (60 miles) north of Baghdad. The military said the operation was expected to continue over several days against insurgent targets in Salahuddin province.
US launches Iraq air offensive Aljazeera.net
US launches major offensive against Sunni insurgents Guardian Unlimited
Dallas Morning News (subscription) - ITV.com - Times Online - Bloomberg - all 158 related »

US open to talks with Iran on Iraq Reuters
The White House said on Thursday that the United States is open to holding talks with Iran about stabilizing Iraq after the Islamic republic responded to prior offers from Washington for a dialogue. But White House spokesman Scott McClellan noted that any such talks would be confined to the Iraq issue and would be on a separate track from efforts to resolve the nuclear standoff with Iran. In November, President George W. Bush authorized his ambassador in Iraq to have talks with Iran in what would be unusual contact between two long-standing foes who are locked in a standoff over Tehran's nuclear programs. Iran initially rejected the U.S. offer for talks. But Iran changed its position on Thursday after Bush made his most explicit accusation this week that Iranian involvement in Iraq was destabilizing a country wracked by sectarian violence. McClellan said U.S. ambassador to Iraq Zalmay Khalilzad was authorized to speak with Iran about issues specifically relating to Iraq. "The other issues are separate from this issue. The nuclear issue is being discussed at the United Nations among diplomats of the Security Council. That's a separate issue from this," he added. "We previously have had discussions with Iran about issue relating to Afghanistan. But this is a very narrow mandate, dealing with issues specifically relating to Iraq," he said.
Iran Says It's Ready for Talks With the US on Iraq Bloomberg
Report: Iran would talk with US about Iraq CNN International
ABC News - Globe and Mail - Monsters and Critics.com - Politics.co.uk - all 346 related »

U.S., Iraqis Launch 'Operation Swarmer'

By Debbi Wilgoren

U.S. and Iraqi forces today launched a sizeable helicopter and ground attack on a suspected insurgent stronghold northeast of Samarra, the city where a mosque bombing last month triggered a wave of deadly sectarian violence across the country, the U.S. military said.

To view the entire article, go to http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/conte...er=emailarticle

Iraq: 21 Killed in continuing violence:

Four college students were shot dead by gunmen in Mosul 390 km (240 miles) north of Baghdad, police said.
http://www.alertnet.org/thenews/newsdesk/L16763848.htm

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Two US soldiers killed in western Iraq:

Two US soldiers have been killed in fighting in Iraq's restive western Al Anbar province, US military authorities said Wednesday
http://www.politicalgateway.com/news/read.html?id=6551

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U.S. launches largest air assault since invasion of Iraq:

"More than 1,500 Iraqi and Coalition troops, over 200 tactical vehicles, and more than 50 aircraft participated in the operation," the military statement said of the attack designed to "clear a suspected insurgent operating area northeast of Samarra," 60 miles north of Baghdad.
http://tinyurl.com/h5wke

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Video Purports To Show Iraqi Children Playing With Body Of U.S. Soldier:

The camera hones in to show what one boy is holding: torn fabric, the colour of the camouflage fatigues worn by US troops. The next scene shows the same children holding aloft a human leg, shreds of the same camouflage fabric hang from it and the foot is clad in a military-style boot. The children trample the leg and kick it around in the dust.
http://informationclearinghouse.info/article12361.htm

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Fight the invaders, Saddam urges Iraqis from dock :

"I call on the people to start resisting the invaders instead of killing each other," he said.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/Iraq/Story/0,,1731949,00.html

===
Terrorists or Resistance Fighters: America’s Dilemma in Iraq :

When your homeland is occupied by foreign troops, extraordinary courage seems to come naturally.
http://informationclearinghouse.info/article12355.htm

===
Iraqi PM offers to step down :

He made the comments at a news conference shortly after Iraq's parliament met for the first time since the landmark national elections three months ago.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/Iraq/Story/0,,1732250,00.html

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Iraq parliament ends in deadlock:

The first session of Iraq's new parliament has concluded with no real business conducted as Shia, Sunnis, Kurds and others remain deadlocked over the posts of speaker, president, prime minister and cabinet members.
http://tinyurl.com/kraq5

===
5 minute video: How Many Dead Children Will It Take To Free Iraq?

Where is the outrage?

Warning - Video contains images depicting the reality and horror of the U.S. invasion of Iraq
http://informationclearinghouse.info/article12368.htm

===
Bob Herbert: Stop Bush's War :

Most of the people who thought this war was a good idea also thought that the best way to fight it was with other people's children. That in itself is a form of depravity.
http://informationclearinghouse.info/article12371.htm

===
Iraqis escape ruined country:

Some Iraqis have lost hope that their country can be rebuilt
http://tinyurl.com/zr7w4

Why Journalists Are Being Murdered In Iraq:

One of those killed was Yasser Salihee. He was shot dead as he approached a US checkpoint on June 24 last year. In the previous weeks, Salihee had documented, for the Knight-Ridder news agency, dozens of cases of men being dumped at morgues after having been detained by the Wolf Brigade, the most notorious unit among the Special Police Commandos, and under the direct command of a US officer.
http://informationclearinghouse.info/article12360.htm

March 17, 2006
Kurds Destroy Shrine in Rage at Leadership
By ROBERT F. WORTH
HALABJA, Iraq, March 16 — For nearly two decades, Kurds have gathered peacefully in this mountainous corner of northern Iraq to commemorate one of the blackest days in their history. It was here that Saddam Hussein's government launched a poison gas attack that killed more than 5,000 people on March 16, 1988.

So it came as a shock when hundreds of stone-throwing protesters took to the streets here Thursday on the anniversary, beating back government guards to storm and destroy a museum dedicated to the memory of the Halabja attack.

The violence, pitting furious local residents against a much smaller force of armed security men, was the most serious popular challenge to the political parties that have ruled Iraqi Kurdistan for the past 15 years. Occurring on the day the new Iraqi Parliament met for the first time, the episode was a reminder that the issues facing Iraq go well beyond fighting Sunni Arab insurgents and agreeing on cabinet ministers in Baghdad.

Although Kurdistan remains a relative oasis of stability in a country increasingly threatened by sectarian violence, the protests here — which left the renowned Halabja Monument a charred, smoking ruin — starkly illustrated those challenges even in Iraq's most peaceful region.

Many Kurds have grown angry at what they view as the corruption and tyranny of the two dominant political parties here. They accuse their regional government of stealing donations gathered to help survivors of the poison gas attack. The town's residents chose Thursday to close off the town's main road and rally against government corruption. When government guards fired weapons over the protesters' heads, the crowd went wild and attacked the monument.

The sudden and deliberate destruction of such a well-known symbol of Kurdish suffering clearly stunned officials with the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan, which governs the eastern part of the Kurdish region. But many local people, including survivors of the 1988 attack — said the Patriotic Union was to blame, having transformed the monument into an emblem of its own tyranny and greed.

"All the money given by foreign countries has been stolen," said Sarwat Aziz, 24, as he marched to the museum in a crowd of furious, chanting young men. "After 18 years, Halabja is still full of debris from the war, we don't even have decent roads."

Several protests have occurred in recent months against the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan, led by Iraq's president, Jalal Talabani, and the Kurdistan Democratic Party, which runs western Kurdistan and is led by Massoud Barzani. But nothing has come close to the violence that erupted Thursday in Halabja.

Apparently unnerved by the prospect of publicity, party militia members tried twice to confiscate the cameras of a photographer for The New York Times who was leaving Halabja by car Thursday evening, and only stopped after an appeal to high-ranking party officials.

At a hastily arranged news conference in Halabja, Emad Ahmad, the acting regional prime minister and a Patriotic Union of Kurdistan official, said the party would "try to address any defects and corruption that exist within the administration." He said the demonstration had started peacefully only to be overtaken by outsiders, and he hinted that Islamic radicals might be to blame.

"There is a hand behind this, and we must cut off the hand," Mr. Ahmad said.

An Islamic opposition movement operates in Halabja, though there were no signs that it had a role in organizing the demonstration.

By all appearances, the attack on the Halabja Monument was an authentic expression of popular rage. The crowd contained young and old, men and women. Most seemed to view the museum — which was inaugurated in September 2003 at a ceremony attended by Colin L. Powell, then the secretary of state — as the prop of an unjust government.

"That monument over there has become the main problem for Halabja," said Bakhtiar Ahmad, nodding at the museum, with its distinctive yellow crown-shaped roof. "All the foreign guests are taken there, not to the city."

Nearby, Tara Rahim, a quiet 19-year-old dressed in a neat black cloak and head scarf, said she had come to honor her sister Zara, killed in the 1988 attack, and to stop the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan from taking advantage of the anniversary.

"Kurdish officials used Halabja to gather money," she said, standing with a group of eight other identically dressed young women. "Millions of dollars has been spent, but nothing has reached us."

The protest began about 9 a.m., when local residents poured onto Halabja's main road and ignited tires. As the crowd grew, protesters moved toward the monument and hurled stones at a sign outside that read, in Kurdish, "No Baathists Allowed Here." It collapsed in pieces.

About 40 Patriotic Union of Kurdistan guards, gathered around the monument, began firing long machine-gun bursts into the air. The sound echoed like thunderclaps against the towering wall of snow-capped mountains that forms the Iranian border, a few miles away.

The shooting only enraged the crowd, and as the guards retreated in a panic, the protesters reached the monument and began smashing its windows and glass display cases with stones. Inside, protesters poured propane from a can and set fire to it. Within minutes, flames were licking from the windows and a thick column of black smoke was twisting into the bright blue sky.

The security guards moved back toward the monument, and some began firing weapons into the retreating crowd. One bullet sliced through the chest of Kurdistan Ahmed, a 17-year-old high school student, and he collapsed onto the grass, dying.

By noon, it was over. One protester was dead, six were wounded, and most of the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan guards had retreated to their compound on the edge of town, leaving the monument a blackened hulk of broken glass and shattered tiles.

At the hospital, anxious mothers searched for their sons. "I fled the gas attack with no shoes, and now I must come here to see if my relatives have been shot," cried Roshna Sidiq, 31, her face heavy with grief.

The violence made a surreal contrast with the peaceful mountain landscape, where, only a few hundred yards away, shepherds in traditional Kurdish dress tended their sheep on fields as green as Eden.

Later, family members and friends gathered in a Halabja mosque to recite Koranic prayers over the youth's body, wrapped in a blanket on the floor. Many sobbed uncontrollably, repeating his name.

"Kurdistan," they wailed, clutching their faces. "Oh, my Kurdistan."

Yerevan Adham contributed reporting for this article.



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Coalition forces swoop in to clear area of insurgents Detroit Free Press
US and Iraqi forces in 50 helicopters swept into the countryside north of the capital Thursday looking for insurgents. There was no bombing or firing from the air in the offensive northeast of Samarra, a town 60 miles north of Baghdad, the U.S. military said. All 50 aircraft were helicopters -- Black Hawks, Apaches and Chinooks -- used to ferry in and provide cover for the more than 1,500 Iraqi and U.S. troops from the 101st Airborne Division. There were no immediate reports of casualties on either side. Residents in the area of the assault reported a heavy U.S. and Iraqi troop presence and said large explosions could be heard in the distance. U.S. forces routinely blow up structures they suspect to be insurgent safe houses or weapons depots. It was not known whether the troops met any resistance, but the military reported detaining 41 people. White House spokesman Scott McClellan denied the operation was tied to a new campaign to change public opinion about the war. "This was a decision made by our commanders," he said, adding that President George W. Bush was briefed but did not specifically authorize the operation. The operation appeared concentrated near four villages -- Jillam, Mamlaha, Banat Hassan and Bukaddou -- about 20 miles north of Samarra. The settlements are near the highway leading from Samarra to the city of Adwar, scene of repeated insurgent roadblocks and ambushes. U.S. military officials did not say whether the assault was in response to the bombing last month that destroyed the Askariya shrine, one of Shi'ite Islam's holiest sites, and spurred Shi'ite militiamen to rampage across eastern Baghdad and cities in the south, leaving hundreds dead.
US leads Iraq assault as parliament opens Chicago Tribune
US, Iraqi Troops Search for Insurgents ABC News
Reuters.uk - CNN International - San Francisco Chronicle - Baltimore Sun - all 878 related »

March 17, 2006
U.S., Iraqi Troops Continue Their Sweep
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 9:34 a.m. ET

BAGHDAD, Iraq (AP) -- U.S. and Iraqi troops pressed their sweep through a 100-square-mile swath of central Iraq on Friday in a bid to break up a center of insurgent resistance, the U.S. military said. No resistance or casualties were reported.

''We believe we achieved tactical surprise,'' Lt. Col. Edward Loomis, spokesman for the 101st Airborne Division, said of the day-old Operation Swarmer. He said about 40 suspects were detained, 10 of whom were later released.

The military described the operation, in which a combined Iraq-U.S. fighting force was delivered in 50 helicopters, as the ''biggest air assault'' in three years. It was not an air raid, however, as the military reported no bombing or firing from the air in the offensive northeast of Samarra, a town 60 miles north of Baghdad.

In tense Baghdad, meanwhile, drive-by gunmen targeting streams of Shiite Muslim pilgrims killed three people and wounded five in Sunni areas of the city, police reported.

Devout Shiites headed south to the holy city of Karbala for a religious holiday, a pilgrimage that authorities feared would present ''soft'' targets in the continuing Sunni-Shiite violence roiling Iraq.

At least seven people were reported killed in scattered violence in and near Baghdad.

A standoff between the Shiite majority and Sunni minority underlies the political impasse blocking formation of a new government of national unity here. An all-party meeting was scheduled for later Friday to try to move those negotiations forward.

U.S. Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad, who has played a leading role in forcing Iraqi politicians to find a compromise, said in an interview with The Associated Press that talks were under way about when he would meet Iranian officials to discuss Iraq. He said the talks should be held in Baghdad.

The joint U.S.-Iraqi air assault Thursday focused on a 10-by-10-mile area some 60 miles north of Baghdad and northeast of the city of Samarra, where an insurgent bombing on Feb. 22 badly damaged a major Shiite shrine, an attack that ignited days of sectarian bloodshed across Iraq in which more than 500 people died.

Fifty U.S. transport and attack helicopters ferried in and gave cover to some 1,500 U.S. and Iraqi troops taking part in Operation Swarmer -- units of the 101st Airborne Division and the Iraqi 4th Division.

On Friday morning, Loomis said, the forces ''continue to move'' through the area. ''Approximately 40 suspected insurgents were detained without resistance,'' he said. ''Tactical interviews began immediately, and 10 detainees have been released.''

The sweep also uncovered six weapons caches, the U.S. military spokesman said.

The operation was aimed at disrupting ''terrorist activity in and around Samarra, Adwar and Salahuddin province,'' he said, an area that was a stronghold of Sunni support for Saddam Hussein's ousted Baathist party regime.

Saddam's former No. 2, Izzat Ibrahim, who was deputy chairman of the ruling Revolutionary Command Council, was from the city of Adwar and is still at large -- at times thought to remain in that area.

The deputy governor of Salahuddin province, Abdullah Hussein, told reporters Friday that 48 alleged insurgents had been detained, men accused of bombings and kidnappings.

He said intelligence indicated about 200 insurgents were in the area, including people linked to the Baathist group Jaish Muhammad -- Muhammad's Army -- and to the al-Qaida in Iraq terror group, led by Abu Mussab al-Zarqawi.

The sweep was aimed particularly at capturing two local leaders of the Zarqawi group, said a police official. He said they had not yet been located.

Iraqi officials said Salahuddin province became more important as an insurgent center after the U.S. offensive that seized the resistance stronghold of Fallujah in late 2004, and subsequent U.S.-Iraqi offensives in other western areas close to the Syrian border.

Friday's Baghdad bloodshed began as groups of Shiite faithful, many parents with children in tow, trekked down city streets in the morning, headed for the southbound highway and Karbala, a shrine city 50 miles south of here.

At about 7:30 a.m., a BMW sedan driving alongside pilgrims in the western district of Adil opened fire, killing three and wounding two, said police Lt. Thair Mahmoud. Police later reported a second incident, also in western Baghdad, in which armed men riding in a car fired on pilgrims near Um al-Tuboul Square, wounding three.

Such attacks were feared this pilgrimage weekend as Sunni-Shiite tensions heighten across the strife-torn country. To help guard against violence in Shiite holy cities, the U.S. military dispatched a fresh battalion of the 2nd Brigade, 1st Armored Division, about 700 troops, to Iraq from its base in Kuwait to provide extra security.

Tens of thousands of devout Shiites are converging on Karbala for Monday's celebration of Arbaeen, marking the end of the 40-day mourning period after the date of the death of Imam Hussein, the Prophet Muhammad's grandson, killed in Karbala in 680 A.D.

In other violence:

-- A bomb left on a minibus exploded at midday Friday and killed two passengers and wounded four in a Shiite district of Baghdad, police reported.

-- Police in a Shiite area of east Baghdad late Thursday found the bodies of four Sunni men who had been seized from a taxi by masked gunmen the day before in western Baghdad.

-- Six mortar rounds landed on six houses Friday in a mixed Sunni-Shiite area of Khan Bani Saad, 10 miles north of Baghdad, killing one person and wounding three, police reported.

Iraq's new Parliament held its first session on Thursday, as the first permanent elected legislature since the U.S. invasion, which began three years ago this coming Monday.

The lawmakers immediately adjourned, however, after taking their oaths of office, since the deep-seated sectarian disputes have all but paralyzed efforts to name a prime minister and Cabinet. Khalilzad has been trying to broker talks to establish a government embracing major factions in a way acceptable to Shiite, Sunni and Kurdish blocs in Parliament.



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US presses assaults on guerrillas Yahoo! NEWS
U.S.-led forces on Friday pressed on with a highly publicized offensive against suspected guerrilla targets near the northern Iraqi town of Samarra in their latest bid to weaken a raging insurgency, witnesses said. "Operation Swarmer" came as
Iraq's deeply divided political leadership met again hoping to break a deadlock on forming a unity government that might avert sectarian civil war. Signs of movement to end the paralysis did emerge, however, as U.S. and Iranian officials said they could set aside years of hostility to discuss stabilizing Iraq, where Tehran has gained influence with ties to fellow Shi'ites in power. U.S. military officials on Thursday said the operation, involving 50 helicopters, was the biggest "air assault" since a similar airlift across Iraq just after the war in late April 2003. That operation was also by the 101st Airborne Division. Military spokesman Lieutenant Colonel Barry Johnson said that U.S.-led forces are searching a 10-mile-by-10-mile (16-km-by 16-km) area for guerrillas and that no casualties have been reported by American or Iraqi forces. The operation, which comes just ahead of the third anniversary of the U.S.-led invasion which toppled Saddam Hussein, appears to be the latest U.S. effort to show that Iraqi troops are improving their performance against insurgents. A U.S. troop withdrawal hinges on whether Iraqi troops can improve their skills after watching rebels armed with extensive intelligence and bombs kill hundreds of their comrades. The U.S. ambassador to Iraq, Zalmay Khalilzad, has been mediating tirelessly hoping that Iraqi leaders will finally bury their sharp differences and form a government three months after parliamentary polls. Washington is also concerned that interference from regional Shi'ite power Iran, which has close ties to the Shi'ite-led Baghdad government, could further destabilize Iraq. U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice told a news conference on a trip to Australia on Friday that she believed talks with Iran on stabilizing Iraq would be "useful." The U.S. embassy in Baghdad in a statement again accused Iran of meddling in its neighbor's internal affairs, saying the Islamic Republic was carrying out "unhelpful activities" there. The statement was issued one day after Iran said it accepted a proposal by leading Iraqi Shi'ite leader Abdul Aziz al-Hakim to open a dialogue with the United States on Iraq. Sunni Arab leaders deeply suspicious of ties between Tehran and Iraq's Shi'ite leaders rejected any talks between the United States and Iran. "The Iraqi Accordance Front strongly condemns it and considers it as meddling in the Iraqi issue which is unjustified," said a statement from the biggest Sunni bloc. "We will not commit to any results of these talks."

VIOLENCE
Fresh violence reminded all parties of the enormous challenges that lay ahead nearly three years since Saddam Hussein was toppled and Iraqis were promised a bright future. A suicide bomber stepped into a bus and detonated his explosives belt, killing the driver and wounding four passersby, police said. Police said three bodies with bullet holes to the head and signs of torture were found in the capital -- apparently part of the latest wave of sectarian violence that has left more than 100 corpses dumped in the capital alone since Monday. South of Baghdad in Mahmudiya, in an area known as the "Triangle of Death" for its insurgent attacks, two Shi'ite pilgrims walking to the sacred city of Kerbala were killed in a roadside bomb attack, police said. Another roadside bomb killed a policeman in nearby Latifiya, police said. Johnson said 50 people have been detained and 30 remain in custody. A leading Sunni Arab politician said the U.S. assault would send a discouraging message at a time when Iraqi leaders are seeking a political solution to the country's woes. "This large operation that used airplanes is sending a signal to parliament and Iraqis that the solution is military and not political," said Saleh Mutlak. Iraqi Defense Ministry spokesman General Salih Sarhan criticized the attention being given to the assault, describing it as one of many operations aimed at rooting out rebels and seizing weapons.
By Michael Georgy

March 17, 2006
Iraqi Sunnis Denounce Plan for Talks Between U.S. and Iran
By MICHAEL SLACKMAN
and DAVID E. SANGER
TEHRAN, March 17 — Iran and the United States agreed Thursday to hold direct talks on how to halt sectarian violence and restore calm in Iraq, a plan that was denounced today by Iraq's largest bloc of Sunni parties.

And while the agreement offered the first face-to-face conversation between Iran and the United States after months of confrontation over Iran's nuclear program, it was followed today by a new round of mutual criticism.

Iran's chief nuclear negotiator, Ali Larijani, announced in Iran's Parliament on Thursday that he would send a team of negotiators to Iraq to meet with American representatives there. But he also suggested in an interview that there would be stiff preconditions.

"I think Iraq is a good testing ground for America to take a harder look at the way it acts," Mr. Larijani said in his office shortly after making the announcement. "If there's a determination in America to take that hard look, then we're prepared to help."

In Washington, the White House spokesman, Scott McClellan, said that American officials would have a "very narrow mandate" in talking to the Iranians, and that direct talks on the nuclear issue would occur only with the major European powers and Russia and China.

Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said in Sydney, Australia, that talks with Iranian envoys in Baghdad could be "useful" if limited to discussions on Iraqi security.

But the Iraqi Tawafuq Front, a coalition of Sunni groups, denounced news of the talks "as an obvious unjustified interference in Iraq's affairs."

The group said, in a statement released in Baghdad, that "it is not committed, under any circumstances, to any results" of the negotiations.

Within Iraq, crucial negotiations are underway on the formation of a national unity government. American officials are hoping that a formula that draws in Sunni groups could weaken the insurgency, but the Sunnis are deeply suspicious of the links they see between Iran and Shiite politicians, particularly Abdul Aziz al-Hakim, a leader of the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq. Mr. Larijani said that he called for the American talks at Mr. al-Hakim's request.

At the same time, Iran and the United States have been moving toward a conflict on Tehran's nuclear program and other issues, and officials in Tehran and Washington seemed more focused on the possible spillover of Iraq talks into those disputes.

President Bush's national security adviser, Stephen J. Hadley, said Thursday that he regarded Iran's initiative as a sign that Tehran's leaders "are finally beginning to listen" to the nations that have referred Iran's nuclear activity to the United Nations Security Council.

But he suggested that there had been plenty of dialogue — most of it conducted in public — and that the problem was not one of discussion but of action by Iran to give up all production of nuclear fuel.

Mr. Larijani today also said that "at present there is no connection between the issue and Iran's nuclear case," according to the state-run news agency.

It is not clear exactly what steps Iran could take to help stabilize Iraq, where a majority of the population are Shiite Muslims, as in Iran. But it has long supported Iraqi Shiite political parties and maintained personal ties with their leaders.

The United States has been putting pressure on Shiite leaders to make concessions to Sunni parties and to rein in militias implicated in death squads and sectarian reprisals.

Mr. Larijani, general secretary of Iran's Supreme National Security Council, announced that he would send negotiators to Iraq to meet with the American ambassador, Zalmay Khalilzad. He said that in addition to the request from Mr. al-Hakim, Mr. Khalilzad had reached out to Iran on several occasions asking for help.

"Hakim urged the Iranian government to do this because he said it was necessary for security in Iraq," said Mr. Larijani's spokesman, Hossein Entezami, who was present during the interview.

Today, Mr. Larijani told reporters that Iran's goals in the talks were establishing "lasting security in Iraq and helping it get rid of the occupiers' tyranny."

"The core issue is the problems that the occupiers have created in Iraq," he said, according to Iran's state-run news agency..

In Baghdad, the statement issued by the American embassy today emphasized that talks would focus on "unhelpful Iranian activities."

"These concerns are well known and we have talked about them," the statement said.

A senior administration official, who would not speak on the record because he is not authorized to talk about Iran, said Mr. Khalilzad had asked the Iranians months ago to talk about Iraq, chiefly to warn Tehran to stop sending in weapons.

Earlier this week, Mr. Bush accused Tehran of producing sophisticated roadside bombs that are being used against both Iraqi and American troops.

Mr. Hadley appeared to try to dampen expectations that the talks would produce any breakthroughs, saying: "We're talking to Iran all the time: We make statements; they make statements."

So far, most of those statements have amounted to a public exchange of accusations and vague threats, from Iran's periodic claim that it would consider an oil cutoff if the Security Council censured it, to the Bush administration's warning, in a revised national security strategy released on Thursday, that diplomacy "must succeed if confrontation is to be avoided."

Nonetheless, the decision by Tehran to open talks amounts to the first tangible sign that Iran has taken a step back, however slight, from its full-bore confrontational approach with the United States and Europe over its nuclear program. Since early last summer, Iran has moved aggressively in defiance of the West, opening its nuclear facilities and moving ahead with small-scale uranium enrichment.

The Iranian leadership's combative approach had won wide support in Iran when it was seen to be working. But with Iran unable to win the unequivocal support of Russia and with the board of International Atomic Energy Agency referring the case to the Security Council, there has been growing concern in Iran and a desire among some to move away from all-out confrontation.

While Iran reopened its nuclear facilities and canceled its voluntary cooperation with Europe over inspections, it did not resume industrial-level enrichment when it was referred to the Security Council, as it had threatened. Mr. Entezami said Iran "did not want to provoke."

Mr. Larijani, who ran for president in the last election, sat for more than an hour in his office defending Iran's right to develop nuclear energy, while berating the United States as arrogant, evil and disrespectful of other countries.

In between the invective, he held out the prospect that Iran might be able to help America in calming Iraq. He did not mention that Iran would also stand to gain from stability next door and from the presence of a strong Shiite- dominated government receptive to Iranian influence.

"We have repeatedly said that we are willing to help bring stability in Iraq and bring to power a democratic government," Mr. Larijani said. "We are prepared to give our hand. But the condition is that the United States should respect the vote of the people. Their army must not provoke from behind the scenes."

"We do not have much trust," Mr. Larijani said. "We have certain doubts about the way Americans act. We do not hear one voice. We hear distorted voices from the U.S."

The feeling is mutual in Washington, where R. Nicholas Burns, the under secretary of state for political affairs, told reporters on Thursday that "we see an Iranian government, particularly since Ahmadinejad came to office, that seems bound and determined to create a nuclear weapons capability." He said Washington had calculated that facing that kind of leader, "it is better to try to isolate the Iranian government."

Mr. Hadley also took care to say the repetition of the American doctrine of pre-emptive military action to face down nuclear threats had not been made "with Iran in mind."

In Tehran, European diplomats said there did not appear to be room for common ground on the nuclear issue for now. One European diplomat said the West would never accept Iran's bottom line, that it must enrich uranium on Iranian soil to bolster its scientific and economic development.

One diplomat said Iranian feelers about direct talks with the United States were a local political calculation. Despite public invective against America, many Iranians are eager to see an improvement in relations.

"Is there a deal out there that gives them enrichment? No," said the diplomat who agreed to speak on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitive nature of the discussion.

Another European diplomat said the West had little trust left in Iran.

"The leadership here has managed to sell us the same carpet four times, and each time, it's a bit more expensive," said the diplomat, who also spoke anonymously to preserve his ability to work in Tehran.

But several European diplomats said that only direct talks between the United States and Iran could produce a diplomatic agreement to head off a crisis.

"They want a security guarantee that only the United States can give," a European diplomat said. "They want a guarantee to at least be left alone."

There is something else Iran wants from America, and the nuclear issue is only the latest flashpoint in a grievance that has existed since the Islamic revolution nearly three decades ago. As Mr. Larijani spelled out grievances and slights, it was clear that he was saying, among other things, that Iran wants respect.

"If America wants to be a superpower, it should learn its manners," Mr. Larijani said. "One should not humiliate others."

Michael Slackman reported from Tehran for this article, and David E. Sanger from Washington. Nazila Fathi contributed reporting from Tehran, Edward Wong from Baghdad, Steven R. Weisman from Sydney, Australia and John O'Neil from New York.



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March 17, 2006
U.S.-Led Forces Continue Sweep for Insurgent Bases in Iraq
By KIRK SEMPLE
BAGHDAD, Iraq, March 17 — Sunni Arab political leaders today denounced an agreement between the United States and Iran to hold face-to-face talks about Iraq, saying the conversations would amount to "unjustified interference" by foreign nations in Iraq's domestic affairs.

The Iraqi Consensus Front, the country's main Sunni Arab political bloc, said it was "not committed, under any circumstances, to any results of these negotiations" and insisted that Iraq's affairs should be managed by Iraqis alone.

The Sunni Arab leadership has long criticized Tehran's influence over Iraq's powerful Shiite religious parties, and its opposition to the bilateral talks could add another obstacle to the grinding efforts by Iraq's political leaders to forge a coalition government.

"The Iraqis in the current government should have these talks with the Iranians and talk about the level of intervention of Iran," Naseer al-Ani, a member of the Sunni Arab bloc, said in a telephone interview.

The agreement between the United States and Iran was announced on Thursday. Mr. Larijani, general secretary of Iran's Supreme National Security Council, said he was acting at the request of Abdul Aziz al-Hakim, leader of the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq, a powerful Shiite party with ties to Iran.

The Consensus Front's criticism came as leaders of the Iraq's major political blocs, as well as the American ambassador to Iraq, gathered here in the heavily fortified compound of President Jalal Talabani to discuss the formation of a new Iraqi government.

According to several participants, the late-afternoon discussions focused on the proposal to create a kind of national security council for Iraq. Some groups, including the Sunni Arab parties, want such a council to have binding authority, but others, including the Shiite leadership, are insisting that it have only an advisory mandate, participants said.

A working group representing the blocs planned to meet on Saturday to consider the various notions for a council and would submit its conclusions to the political leaders at their next summit, scheduled for Sunday, officials said.

In Halabja, Kurdistan, militias loyal to the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan, the party that governs the eastern part of the autonomous region, flooded the streets and began a crackdown following a riot on Thursday in which demonstrators destroyed a museum dedicated to the thousands of victims who perished in a poison gas attack by Saddam Hussein's security forces in 1988.

Many Kurds have grown angry at what they view as the corruption and tyranny of the two dominant political parties in Kurdistan, and have accused their regional government of stealing donations gathered to help survivors of the poison gas attack. The riot first began as a popular rally against government corruption but erupted in violence after government guards fired weapons over the protesters' heads.

"I recognize there is discontent — for political reform, for the need for fighting corruption, for improving services," Barham Saleh, a Kurd and Iraq's planning minister, said in an interview today. "But that can not justify this violence of a few." He said that "radical Islamists" may have taken advantage of the situation to foment violence. "Obviously this has to be investigated thoroughly," he added.

American and Iraqi troops continued their sweep for insurgent hideouts near the town of Samarra today, the second day of an assault in the area. About 50 suspects were detained, though 17 were later released after questioning, said Lt. Col. Edward Loomis, a spokesman for the 101st Airborne, which is leading the operation. Troops have uncovered several weapons caches, the spokesman said, though he did not reveal the size of these finds.

The operation has garnered widespread media attention, in part because Samarra is where a revered Shiite shrine was bombed by insurgents last month, triggering a wave of sectarian violence. But the military has not suggested in its comments that this assault was a direct response to the bombing.

The operation was also the first significant military offensive in several months. The American military command has been trying to ratchet back its visibility and encourage Iraqi security forces to take the lead in security their country.

The American command announced on Thursday that it had employed more than 50 aircraft in the operation and described it as the largest "air assault" — the insertion of troops by helicopter — since the American-led invasion in 2003. Some television networks on Thursday erroneously translated the phrase to mean "airstrikes," conjuring images for some people of the "shock and awe" bombing campaign that heralded the start of the American-led push. But in the operation this week, there were no reported aerial bombardments.

Colonel Loomis said today that the American and Iraqi forces had encountered no armed resistance from insurgent fighters and suffered no casualties.

By comparison with other offensives since the American invasion, the assault near Samara was not among the biggest. The Marines, for instance, have launched several larger offensives in Anbar Province, including two assaults on Falluja in 2004, each involving several thousand troops, as well as a lengthy sweep of towns along the Euphrates River last November that involved about 3,500 Iraqi and American troops.

Abdul Razzaq al-Saiedi contributed reporting from Baghdad for this article and Robert Worth from Halabja.



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Rallies Mark Third Anniversary of Iraq War Yahoo! NEWS
Thousands of anti-war protesters marched in Australia, Turkey and Asian countries at the start of global demonstrations Saturday, as campaigners marked the third anniversary of the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq with a demand that coalition troops pull out. Demonstrations were planned for cities across Europe later in the day. Police in London shut down streets in the heart of the capital's shopping and theater district ahead of a demonstration which organizers said they hoped would be attended by up to 100,000 people. Around 500 protesters marched through central Sydney, chanting "End the war now and "Troops out of Iraq." Many campaigners waved placards branding President Bush the "World's No. 1 Terrorist" or expressing concerns that Iran could be the next country to face invasion. "Iraq is a quagmire and has been a humanitarian disaster for the Iraqis," said Jean Parker, a member of the Australian branch of the Stop the War Coalition, which organized the march. "There is no way forward without ending the occupation." Opposition to the war is still evident in Australia, which has some 1,300 troops in and around Iraq. Visiting Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice was heckled by campaigners in Sydney this week, who said she had "blood on her hands." But Saturday's protest was small, compared to the mass demonstrations that swept across the country in the buildup to the invasion — the largest Australia had seen since joining U.S. forces in the Vietnam War. In Tokyo, about 2,000 people rallied in a downtown park, carrying signs saying "Stop the Occupation" as they listened to a series of anti-war speeches, said Takeshiko Tsukushi, a member of World Peace Now, which helped plan the rally. Tokyo police were unable to immediately confirm the number in attendance. "The war is illegal under international law," Tsukushi said. "We want the immediate withdrawal of the Self Defense Forces and from Iraq along with all foreign troops." Japanese Prime Minister Junchiro Koizumi is a staunch supporter of the U.S.-led coalition in Japan and dispatched 600 troops to the southern city of Samawah in 2004 to purify water and carry out other humanitarian tasks. The Cabinet approved an extension of that mission in December, authorizing soldiers to stay in Iraq through the end of the year. But public opinion polls show the majority of Japanese oppose the mission, which has been criticized as a violation of the country's pacifist constitution. Many say the deployment has made Japan a target for terrorism. In Turkey, thousands gathered in Istanbul for protests Other anti-war protests were planned in the cities of Izmir, Trabzon and the capital, Ankara. Opposition to the war is nearly universal in Turkey and cuts across all political stripes. "Murderer USA," read a sign unfurled by a communist in Taksim Square in Istanbul. "USA, go home!" said red and black signs carried by hundreds of the some 5,000 protesters gathered in Kadikoy on the city's Asian coast. Turkey is Iraq's northern neighbor and the only Muslim-majority member of the NATO military alliance. Historically close relations with the U.S. were severely strained after the Turkish parliament refused to allow U.S. troops to launch operations into Iraq from Turkish territory. U.S. military planners said the move complicated operations by shutting down the U.S. option of opening a northern front in the 2003 invasion of Iraq. Since the war, support for the United States has plummeted in Turkey. Demonstrations were also expected across Europe. "We will continue until we see the last general running for a helicopter on the roof of the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad," read a statement from Stop the War Alliance, which is organizing a rally outside the U.S. Embassy in Athens, Greece. In London, Scotland Yard police headquarters said streets around Piccadilly Circus in the heart of the shopping and theater district would be closed as up to 100,000 people planned to march through the capital. Britain has about 8,000 troops in Iraq. Demonstrations "Against the Occupation of Iraq" were planned Saturday in several Spanish cities, including Madrid and Barcelona.
By ED JOHNSON, Associated Press Writer

http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/HC18Ak03.html
Taking the sting out of the Samarra swarm
By Syed Saleem Shahzad

KARACHI - The city of Samarra, target of the biggest US air strike since the invasion of Iraq three years ago, has been the nucleus of the national resistance since the fall of Baghdad.

The Sunni-dominated city 125 kilometers north of Baghdad, despite several attempts, has never been subjugated, because of the strong tribal structure and fierce nationalism of its residents.

Operation Swarmer, which began on Thursday with more than 650 American and 800 Iraqi soldiers, 200 tactical vehicles and more than 50 helicopters, aims to change this. The mission involved a combination of UH-60 Black Hawk, AH-64D Apache Longbow, and CH-47 Chinook helicopters, the Pentagon said in a fact sheet, all of them to ferry troops and provide cover.

The bomb attacks on the revered Shi'ite Golden Mosque in Samarra last month provided the opportunity the United States had been waiting for, as they provided the motivation for the Shi'ite-dominated Iraqi army to commit fully to the assault on the city. In previous offensives, notably on Fallujah, Iraqi troops have proved highly unreliable.

In the Samarra attack, which is expected to last several days, Iraqi forces are at the forefront of pitched house-to-house battles against the resistance. Iraqi Foreign Minister Hoshyar Zebari called the targeted area "a hotbed for insurgents and terrorists".

According to a report by Al-Jazeera, residents north of Samarra said that there was a heavy US and Iraqi troop presence in the area and that large explosions could be heard in the distance. They said the operation appeared to be concentrated near four villages - Jillam, Mamlaha, Banat Hassan and Bukaddou - near the highway leading north from Samarra to the city of Adwar. It was not clear how much resistance the operation had met. The US Army said 41 suspects had been detained.

The offensive began on the same day that Iraq's new parliament in the heavily fortified Green Zone met for the first time since elections in December. In a brief ceremony, the lawmakers each took an oath and then the House adjourned. Parliament has been unable to agree on a Speaker, let alone on confirming prime minister-designate Ibrahim al-Jaafari, the Shi'ite choice for the position. No date was set for parliament to meet again.

Samarra, a vital part of the Sunni triangle that is the heart of the resistance, has been a martial city for centuries. It was chosen by the Abbasid rulers as the cantonment for their Turkish-dominated army so that non-Arab influence would be kept to a minimum in the caliphate's capital Baghdad.

During Saddam Hussein's Ba'ath Party rule, Samarra retained its identity as a military city as it was home to many top officers.

After the fall of Baghdad in 2003, Samarra initially remained calm, but in time the local population booted out the US-backed administration and US forces, and leaders of the resistance took over the affairs of the city.

In late 2004, the US conducted a massive operation to regain control of the city from the resistance. However, after claiming initial success, matters returned to the status quo, with former Iraqi army officers and firebrand Arab nationalists coordinating the resistance. Even the now-deceased Izzat Ibrahim al-Douri, once No 2 under Saddam, stayed in Samarra to command the resistance.

The US realized that the only way to have a chance of "purging" the city and its surrounding areas would be to invoke a committed indigenous force. The sectarian backlash to the Samarra shrine attack, in which Sunni-Shi'ite tensions escalated and more than 500 people were killed, focused attention on the resistance leaders in Samarra, who happened to be Sunnis. Shi'ites in uniform did not need a second invitation for the chance to join the attack.

There is no doubt that the current offensive will deal a blow to the resistance as for the first time its primary weapons cache has been targeted. A US military statement said that caches containing artillery shells, explosives, bomb-making materials, improvised explosive devices and military uniforms had been discovered on the first day of the raid. It can be expected that more bunkers will be unearthed, containing in addition to arms large amounts of money meant to finance the resistance.

But even if the resistance does lose its main supply base, or parts of it, there are alternatives, including Nineveh and Babylon. Further, the resistance can make use of the often-porous border with Syria.

While all of the United States' attention is on central Iraq, trouble could be brewing in the south, too. Contacts of Asia Times Online familiar with the Iraqi resistance claim that the Jaishul Islam al-Iraq (Islamic Army of Iraq), an indigenous group commanded by former top Iraqi generals and independent Islamists, has established itself in Basra and Amarah. Although the group includes former Ba'athists of both Sunni and Shi'ite origin, the ideology of the Muslim Brotherhood is its binding force.

A general observation of the Iraqi resistance is its highly developed military acumen. By all accounts it has been on red alert ever since the Samarra mosque attack last month, and it can be expected to have devised strategies to counter offensives such as Operation Swarmer.

Syed Saleem Shahzadis Bureau Chief, Pakistan Asia Times Online. He can be reached at saleem_shahzad2002@yahoo.com.

(Copyright 2006 Asia Times Online Ltd. All rights reserved. Please contact us about sales, syndication and republishing .)

March 19, 2006
Task Force 6-26
Before and After Abu Ghraib, a U.S. Unit Abused Detainees
By ERIC SCHMITT and CAROLYN MARSHALL
As the Iraqi insurgency intensified in early 2004, an elite Special Operations forces unit converted one of Saddam Hussein's former military bases near Baghdad into a top-secret detention center. There, American soldiers made one of the former Iraqi government's torture chambers into their own interrogation cell. They named it the Black Room.

In the windowless, jet-black garage-size room, some soldiers beat prisoners with rifle butts, yelled and spit in their faces and, in a nearby area, used detainees for target practice in a game of jailer paintball. Their intention was to extract information to help hunt down Iraq's most-wanted terrorist, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, according to Defense Department personnel who served with the unit or were briefed on its operations.

The Black Room was part of a temporary detention site at Camp Nama, the secret headquarters of a shadowy military unit known as Task Force 6-26. Located at Baghdad International Airport, the camp was the first stop for many insurgents on their way to the Abu Ghraib prison a few miles away.

Placards posted by soldiers at the detention area advised, "NO BLOOD, NO FOUL." The slogan, as one Defense Department official explained, reflected an adage adopted by Task Force 6-26: "If you don't make them bleed, they can't prosecute for it." According to Pentagon specialists who worked with the unit, prisoners at Camp Nama often disappeared into a detention black hole, barred from access to lawyers or relatives, and confined for weeks without charges. "The reality is, there were no rules there," another Pentagon official said.

The story of detainee abuse in Iraq is a familiar one. But the following account of Task Force 6-26, based on documents and interviews with more than a dozen people, offers the first detailed description of how the military's most highly trained counterterrorism unit committed serious abuses.

It adds to the picture of harsh interrogation practices at American military prisons in Afghanistan and Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, as well as at secret Central Intelligence Agency detention centers around the world.

The new account reveals the extent to which the unit members mistreated prisoners months before and after the photographs of abuse from Abu Ghraib were made public in April 2004, and it helps belie the original Pentagon assertions that abuse was confined to a small number of rogue reservists at Abu Ghraib.

The abuses at Camp Nama continued despite warnings beginning in August 2003 from an Army investigator and American intelligence and law enforcement officials in Iraq. The C.I.A. was concerned enough to bar its personnel from Camp Nama that August.

It is difficult to compare the conditions at the camp with those at Abu Ghraib because so little is known about the secret compound, which was off limits even to the Red Cross. The abuses appeared to have been unsanctioned, but some of them seemed to have been well known throughout the camp.

For an elite unit with roughly 1,000 people at any given time, Task Force 6-26 seems to have had a large number of troops punished for detainee abuse. Since 2003, 34 task force members have been disciplined in some form for mistreating prisoners, and at least 11 members have been removed from the unit, according to new figures the Special Operations Command provided in response to questions from The New York Times. Five Army Rangers in the unit were convicted three months ago for kicking and punching three detainees in September 2005.

Some of the serious accusations against Task Force 6-26 have been reported over the past 16 months by news organizations including NBC, The Washington Post and The Times. Many details emerged in hundreds of pages of documents released under a Freedom of Information Act request by the American Civil Liberties Union. But taken together for the first time, the declassified documents and interviews with more than a dozen military and civilian Defense Department and other federal personnel provide the most detailed portrait yet of the secret camp and the inner workings of the clandestine unit.

The documents and interviews also reflect a culture clash between the free-wheeling military commandos and the more cautious Pentagon civilians working with them that escalated to a tense confrontation. At one point, one of Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld's top aides, Stephen A. Cambone, ordered a subordinate to "get to the bottom" of any misconduct.

Most of the people interviewed for this article were midlevel civilian and military Defense Department personnel who worked with Task Force 6-26 and said they witnessed abuses, or who were briefed on its operations over the past three years.

Many were initially reluctant to discuss Task Force 6-26 because its missions are classified. But when pressed repeatedly by reporters who contacted them, they agreed to speak about their experiences and observations out of what they said was anger and disgust over the unit's treatment of detainees and the failure of task force commanders to punish misconduct more aggressively. The critics said the harsh interrogations yielded little information to help capture insurgents or save American lives.

Virtually all of those who agreed to speak are career government employees, many with previous military service, and they were granted anonymity to encourage them to speak candidly without fear of retribution from the Pentagon. Many of their complaints are supported by declassified military documents and e-mail messages from F.B.I. agents who worked regularly with the task force in Iraq.

A Demand for Intelligence

Military officials say there may have been extenuating circumstances for some of the harsh treatment at Camp Nama and its field stations in other parts of Iraq. By the spring of 2004, the demand on interrogators for intelligence was growing to help combat the increasingly numerous and deadly insurgent attacks.

Some detainees may have been injured resisting capture. A spokesman for the Special Operations Command, Kenneth S. McGraw, said there was sufficient evidence to prove misconduct in only 5 of 29 abuse allegations against task force members since 2003. As a result of those five incidents, 34 people were disciplined.

"We take all those allegations seriously," Gen. Bryan D. Brown, the commander of the Special Operations Command, said in a brief hallway exchange on Capitol Hill on March 8. "Any kind of abuse is not consistent with the values of the Special Operations Command."

The secrecy surrounding the highly classified unit has helped to shield its conduct from public scrutiny. The Pentagon will not disclose the unit's precise size, the names of its commanders, its operating bases or specific missions. Even the task force's name changes regularly to confuse adversaries, and the courts-martial and other disciplinary proceedings have not identified the soldiers in public announcements as task force members.

General Brown's command declined requests for interviews with several former task force members and with Lt. Gen. Stanley McChrystal, who leads the Joint Special Operations Command, the headquarters at Fort Bragg, N.C., that supplies the unit's most elite troops.

One Special Operations officer and a senior enlisted soldier identified by Defense Department personnel as former task force members at Camp Nama declined to comment when contacted by telephone. Attempts to contact three other Special Operations soldiers who were in the unit — by phone, through relatives and former neighbors — were also unsuccessful.

Cases of detainee abuse attributed to Task Force 6-26 demonstrate both confusion over and, in some cases, disregard for approved interrogation practices and standards for detainee treatment, according to Defense Department specialists who have worked with the unit.

In early 2004, an 18-year-old man suspected of selling cars to members of the Zarqawi terrorist network was seized with his entire family at their home in Baghdad. Task force soldiers beat him repeatedly with a rifle butt and punched him in the head and kidneys, said a Defense Department specialist briefed on the incident.

Some complaints were ignored or played down in a unit where a conspiracy of silence contributed to the overall secretiveness. "It's under control," one unit commander told a Defense Department official who complained about mistreatment at Camp Nama in the spring of 2004.

For hundreds of suspected insurgents, Camp Nama was a way station on a journey that started with their capture on the battlefield or in their homes, and ended often in a cell at Abu Ghraib. Hidden in plain sight just off a dusty road fronting Baghdad International Airport, Camp Nama was an unmarked, virtually unknown compound at the edge of the taxiways.

The heart of the camp was the Battlefield Interrogation Facility, alternately known as the Temporary Detention Facility and the Temporary Holding Facility. The interrogation and detention areas occupied a corner of the larger compound, separated by a fence topped with razor wire.

Unmarked helicopters flew detainees into the camp almost daily, former task force members said. Dressed in blue jumpsuits with taped goggles covering their eyes, the shackled prisoners were led into a screening room where they were registered and examined by medics.

Just beyond the screening rooms, where Saddam Hussein was given a medical exam after his capture, detainees were kept in as many as 85 cells spread over two buildings. Some detainees were kept in what was known as Motel 6, a group of crudely built plywood shacks that reeked of urine and excrement. The shacks were cramped, forcing many prisoners to squat or crouch. Other detainees were housed inside a separate building in 6-by-8-foot cubicles in a cellblock called Hotel California.

The interrogation rooms were stark. High-value detainees were questioned in the Black Room, nearly bare but for several 18-inch hooks that jutted from the ceiling, a grisly reminder of the terrors inflicted by Mr. Hussein's inquisitors. Jailers often blared rap music or rock 'n' roll at deafening decibels over a loudspeaker to unnerve their subjects.

Another smaller room offered basic comforts like carpets and cushioned seating to put more cooperative prisoners at ease, said several Defense Department specialists who worked at Camp Nama. Detainees wore heavy, olive-drab hoods outside their cells. By June 2004, the revelations of abuse at Abu Ghraib galvanized the military to promise better treatment for prisoners. In one small concession at Camp Nama, soldiers exchanged the hoods for cloth blindfolds with drop veils that allowed detainees to breathe more freely but prevented them from peeking out.

Some former task force members said the Nama in the camp's name stood for a coarse phrase that soldiers used to describe the compound. One Defense Department specialist recalled seeing pink blotches on detainees' clothing as well as red welts on their bodies, marks he learned later were inflicted by soldiers who used detainees as targets and called themselves the High Five Paintball Club.

Mr. McGraw, the military spokesman, said he had not heard of the Black Room or the paintball club and had not seen any mention of them in the documents he had reviewed.

In a nearby operations center, task force analysts pored over intelligence collected from spies, detainees and remotely piloted Predator surveillance aircraft, to piece together clues to aid soldiers on their raids. Twice daily at noon and midnight military interrogators and their supervisors met with officials from the C.I.A., F.B.I. and allied military units to review operations and new intelligence.

Task Force 6-26 was a creation of the Pentagon's post-Sept. 11 campaign against terrorism, and it quickly became the model for how the military would gain intelligence and battle insurgents in the future. Originally known as Task Force 121, it was formed in the summer of 2003, when the military merged two existing Special Operations units, one hunting Osama bin Laden in and around Afghanistan, and the other tracking Mr. Hussein in Iraq. (Its current name is Task Force 145.)

The task force was a melting pot of military and civilian units. It drew on elite troops from the Joint Special Operations Command, whose elements include the Army unit Delta Force, Navy's Seal Team 6 and the 75th Ranger Regiment. Military reservists and Defense Intelligence Agency personnel with special skills, like interrogators, were temporarily assigned to the unit. C.I.A. officers, F.B.I. agents and special operations forces from other countries also worked closely with the task force.

Many of the American Special Operations soldiers wore civilian clothes and were allowed to grow beards and long hair, setting them apart from their uniformed colleagues. Unlike conventional soldiers and marines whose Iraq tours lasted 7 to 12 months, unit members and their commanders typically rotated every 90 days.

Task Force 6-26 had a singular focus: capture or kill Mr. Zarqawi, the Jordanian militant operating in Iraq. "Anytime there was even the smell of Zarqawi nearby, they would go out and use any means possible to get information from a detainee," one official said.

Defense Department personnel briefed on the unit's operations said the harsh treatment extended beyond Camp Nama to small field outposts in Baghdad, Falluja, Balad, Ramadi and Kirkuk. These stations were often nestled within the alleys of a city in nondescript buildings with suburban-size yards where helicopters could land to drop off or pick up detainees.

At the outposts, some detainees were stripped naked and had cold water thrown on them to cause the sensation of drowning, said Defense Department personnel who served with the unit.

In January 2004, the task force captured the son of one of Mr. Hussein's bodyguards in Tikrit. The man told Army investigators that he was forced to strip and that he was punched in the spine until he fainted, put in front of an air-conditioner while cold water was poured on him and kicked in the stomach until he vomited. Army investigators were forced to close their inquiry in June 2005 after they said task force members used battlefield pseudonyms that made it impossible to identify and locate the soldiers involved. The unit also asserted that 70 percent of its computer files had been lost.

Despite the task force's access to a wide range of intelligence, its raids were often dry holes, yielding little if any intelligence and alienating ordinary Iraqis, Defense Department personnel said. Prisoners deemed no threat to American troops were often driven deep into the Iraqi desert at night and released, sometimes given $100 or more in American money for their trouble.

Back at Camp Nama, the task force leaders established a ritual for departing personnel who did a good job, Pentagon officials said. The commanders them with two unusual mementos: a detainee hood and a souvenir piece of tile from the medical screening room that once held Mr. Hussein.

Early Signs of Trouble

Accusations of abuse by Task Force 6-26 came as no surprise to many other officials in Iraq. By early 2004, both the C.I.A. and the F.B.I. had expressed alarm about the military's harsh interrogation techniques.

The C.I.A.'s Baghdad station sent a cable to headquarters on Aug. 3, 2003, raising concern that Special Operations troops who served with agency officers had used techniques that had become too aggressive. Five days later, the C.I.A. issued a classified directive that prohibited its officers from participating in harsh interrogations. Separately, the C.I.A. barred its officers from working at Camp Nama but allowed them to keep providing target information and other intelligence to the task force.

The warnings still echoed nearly a year later. On June 25, 2004, nearly two months after the disclosure of the abuses at Abu Ghraib, an F.B.I. agent in Iraq sent an e-mail message to his superiors in Washington, warning that a detainee captured by Task Force 6-26 had suspicious burn marks on his body. The detainee said he had been tortured. A month earlier, another F.B.I. agent asked top bureau officials for guidance on how to deal with military interrogators across Iraq who used techniques like loud music and yelling that exceeded "the bounds of standard F.B.I. practice."

American generals were also alerted to the problem. In December 2003, Col. Stuart A. Herrington, a retired Army intelligence officer, warned in a confidential memo that medical personnel reported that prisoners seized by the unit, then known as Task Force 121, had injuries consistent with beatings. "It seems clear that TF 121 needs to be reined in with respect to its treatment of detainees," Colonel Herrington concluded.

By May 2004, just as the scandal at Abu Ghraib was breaking, tensions increased at Camp Nama between the Special Operations troops and civilian interrogators and case officers from the D.I.A.'s Defense Human Intelligence Service, who were there to support the unit in its fight against the Zarqawi network. The discord, according to documents, centered on the harsh treatment of detainees as well as restrictions the Special Operations troops placed on their civilian colleagues, like monitoring their e-mail messages and phone calls.

Maj. Gen. George E. Ennis, who until recently commanded the D.I.A.'s human intelligence division, declined to be interviewed for this article. But in written responses to questions, General Ennis said he never heard about the numerous complaints made by D.I.A. personnel until he and his boss, Vice Adm. Lowell E. Jacoby, then the agency's director, were briefed on June 24, 2004.

The next day, Admiral Jacoby wrote a two-page memo to Mr. Cambone, under secretary of defense for intelligence. In it, he described a series of complaints, including a May 2004 incident in which a D.I.A. interrogator said he witnessed task force soldiers punch a detainee hard enough to require medical help. The D.I.A. officer took photos of the injuries, but a supervisor confiscated them, the memo said.

The tensions laid bare a clash of military cultures. Combat-hardened commandos seeking a steady flow of intelligence to pinpoint insurgents grew exasperated with civilian interrogators sent from Washington, many of whom were novices at interrogating hostile prisoners fresh off the battlefield.

"These guys wanted results, and our debriefers were used to a civil environment," said one Defense Department official who was briefed on the task force operations.

Within days after Admiral Jacoby sent his memo, the D.I.A. took the extraordinary step of temporarily withdrawing its personnel from Camp Nama.

Admiral Jacoby's memo also provoked an angry reaction from Mr. Cambone. "Get to the bottom of this immediately. This is not acceptable," Mr. Cambone said in a handwritten note on June 26, 2004, to his top deputy, Lt. Gen. William G. Boykin. "In particular, I want to know if this is part of a pattern of behavior by TF 6-26."

General Boykin said through a spokesman on March 17 that at the time he told Mr. Cambone he had found no pattern of misconduct with the task force.

A Shroud of Secrecy

Military and legal experts say the full breadth of abuses committed by Task Force 6-26 may never be known because of the secrecy surrounding the unit, and the likelihood that some allegations went unreported.

In the summer of 2004, Camp Nama closed and the unit moved to a new headquarters in Balad, 45 miles north of Baghdad. The unit's operations are now shrouded in even tighter secrecy.

Soon after their rank-and-file clashed in 2004, D.I.A. officials in Washington and military commanders at Fort Bragg agreed to improve how the task force integrated specialists into its ranks. The D.I.A. is now sending small teams of interrogators, debriefers and case officers, called "deployable Humint teams," to work with Special Operations forces in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Senior military commanders insist that the elite warriors, who will be relied on more than ever in the campaign against terrorism, are now treating detainees more humanely and can police themselves. The C.I.A. has resumed conducting debriefings with the task force, but does not permit harsh questioning, a C.I.A. official said.

General McChrystal, the leader of the Joint Special Operations Command, received his third star in a promotion ceremony at Fort Bragg on March 13.

On Dec. 8, 2004, the Pentagon's spokesman, Lawrence Di Rita, said that four Special Operations soldiers from the task force were punished for "excessive use of force" and administering electric shocks to detainees with stun guns. Two of the soldiers were removed from the unit. To that point, Mr. Di Rita said, 10 task force members had been disciplined. Since then, according to the new figures provided to The Times, the number of those disciplined for detainee abuse has more than tripled. Nine of the 34 troops disciplined received written or oral counseling. Others were reprimanded for slapping detainees and other offenses.

The five Army Rangers who were court-martialed in December received punishments including jail time of 30 days to six months and reduction in rank. Two of them will receive bad-conduct discharges upon completion of their sentences.

Human rights advocates and leading members of Congress say the Pentagon must still do more to hold senior-level commanders and civilian officials accountable for the misconduct.

The Justice Department inspector general is investigating complaints of detainee abuse by Task Force 6-26, a senior law enforcement official said. The only wide-ranging military inquiry into prisoner abuse by Special Operations forces was completed nearly a year ago by Brig. Gen. Richard P. Formica, and was sent to Congress.

But the United States Central Command has refused repeated requests from The Times over the past several months to provide an unclassified copy of General Formica's findings despite Mr. Rumsfeld's instructions that such a version of all 12 major reports into detainee abuse be made public.



Copyright 2006The New York Times Company Home Privacy Policy Search Corrections XML Help Contact Us Work for Us Site Map Back to Top

24 Killed in Continuing Violence:

The bodies of 16 victims of shootings were found in different areas of the capital, police said.
http://www.alertnet.org/thenews/newsdesk/GEO842761.htm

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Car bomb kills 20 in Baghdad:

Twenty Iraqis were killed or injured in a car bomb blast Saturday in a Baghdad suburb.
http://www.kuna.net.kw/Home/Story.aspx?Lan...=en&DSNO=839897

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Bombs, bullets meet Shiite pilgrims in Iraq:

The Muslim pilgrims' road to the holy city of Karbala was a highway of bullets and bombs for Shiites on Friday. Drive-by shootings and roadside and bus bombs killed or injured 19 people, ratcheting up the sectarian tensions gripping Iraq.
http://tinyurl.com/mdcqf

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Four U.S. Soldiers Die, Four Others Wounded in Explosion in Iraq: .

The explosion occurred near a checkpoint of the Iraqi police in the region. According to the information U.S. troops have closed the area and arrested ten Iraqi policemen, guarding the checkpoint.
http://www.focus-fen.net/index.php?catid=1...atte=2006-03-18

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Soldiers killed by indirect fire :

Two U.S. Soldiers from the 101st Airborne Division were killed and another wounded in an indirect fire attack on Contingency Operating Base Speicher, northwest of Tikrit
http://www.mnf-iraq.com/Releases/Mar/060318a.htm

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US soldier killed in Samarra offensive:

The US military said one US soldier was killed and about 30 people detained by the end of the second day of their assault on Samarra.
http://tinyurl.com/ldzzz

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US Marines investigated for Iraq war crimes:

About a dozen US Marines are being investigated for possible war crimes after the deaths last year of 15 Iraqi civilians caught in the crossfire during a gun battle with insurgents.
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,7374-2090849,00.html

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Cost of Iraq war could surpass $1 trillion :

One thing is certain about the Iraq war: It has cost a lot more than advertised. In fact, the tab grows by at least $200 million each and every day.
http://informationclearinghouse.info/article12393.htm

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Charley Reese : Consequences of a War State :

War consists of killing people and destroying property. That's all there is to war. Any honest soldier will tell you the same thing: His job is to kill people and destroy property. That's true of all branches of the service.
http://informationclearinghouse.info/article12398.htm

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Global Protests Mark Iraq War Anniversary :

Anti-war protesters marched in Australia, Asia, Turkey and Europe on Saturday in demonstrations that marked the third anniversary of the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq with a demand that coalition troops pull out.
http://tinyurl.com/n6rdj

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Must Watch 7 Minute Video

Cindy Sheehan - Camp Casey

"They can't kill hope and the can't kill love"
http://informationclearinghouse.info/article12401.htm

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Click Here to Find An Anti-War Event In Your Area:

There are currently 438 events planned in 49 states and counting...
http://www.afsc.org/3years/

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A Powerful New Voting Block Emerges:

The Anti-War Movement Becoming a Political Force That Cannot Be Ignored
http://informationclearinghouse.info/article12400.htm

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Saddam Was Trying to Capture Zarqawi:

Newly released documents from the captured Iraqi archives show that Saddam had put out an APB for Zarqawi and was trying to have him arrested as a danger to the Baath regime!
http://www.juancole.com/2006/03/saddam-was...re-zarqawi.html

Rumsfeld: leaving Iraq like giving Nazis Germany Yahoo! NEWS
Leaving Iraq now would be like handing postwar Germany back to the Nazis, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said in a column published on Sunday, the third anniversary of the start of the Iraq war. "Turning our backs on postwar Iraq today would be the modern equivalent of handing postwar Germany back to the Nazis," he wrote in an essay in The Washington Post. Rumsfeld said "the terrorists" were trying to fuel sectarian tensions to spark a civil war, but they must be "watching with fear" the progress in the country over the past three years. In London, former Iraqi Prime Minister Iyad Allawi said on Sunday that Iraq is in a civil war and is nearing the point of no return when the sectarian violence will spill over throughout the Middle East. "It is unfortunate that we are in civil war. We are losing each day, as an average, 50 to 60 people throughout the country, if not more. If this is not civil war, then God knows what civil war is," he told BBC television. Rumsfeld's view was that the Iraqi insurgency was failing. "The terrorists seem to recognize that they are losing in Iraq. I believe that history will show that to be the case," he wrote. He said 75 percent of all military operations in Iraq include Iraqi security forces. "Today, some 100 Iraqi army battalions of several hundred troops each are in the fight, and 49 percent control their own battle space," Rumsfeld wrote. Thousands of anti-war protesters gathered in cities around the world for demonstrations on Saturday to mark the anniversary of the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq. Doubts about the Iraq war have helped drive down President George W. Bush's approval ratings to their lowest level. In a Newsweek poll released on Saturday, only 36 percent of Americans said they approved of his performance as president. Sixty-five percent disapprove of his handling of the situation in Iraq, once one of his strongest suits. Bush used his weekly radio address on Saturday to urge Americans to resist a temptation to retreat from Iraq, but opposition Democrats pressed him to offer a plan for drawing down U.S. troops and said Iraq was moving closer to a civil war. Rumsfeld wrote that if U.S. forces leave Iraq now, "there is every reason to believe Saddamists and terrorists will fill the vacuum -- and the free world might not have the will to face them again." A recent Le Moyne College/Zogby poll showed 72 percent of U.S. troops serving in Iraq think that the United States should exit within a year. Nearly one in four said the troops should leave immediately.

Iraq Shi'ite pilgrims gather, civil war warning Yahoo! NEWS
Hundreds of thousands of Shi'ite pilgrims gathered in the sacred Iraqi city of Kerbala on Sunday for a religious event held under tight security as a top politician said Iraq was already in a sectarian civil war. U.S. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, writing to mark the third anniversary of the invasion, said to disengage from Iraq now would be like handing Germany "back to the Nazis" in 1945. In Baghdad, Shi'ite, Sunni and Kurdish leaders were still struggling to form a national unity government more than three months after elections, raising fears that a political vacuum will play into the hands of insurgents and fuel violence. Former Prime Minister Iyad Allawi said civil war was already a reality and that Iraq was nearing the "point of no return" on a path toward all-out military conflict. Flying flags and flailing themselves, a sea of people filled roads to Kerbala ahead of Arbain, mourning the dead of the 7th century battle that confirmed a schism in Islam that has left Iraq dangerously divided between Sunnis and Shi'ites today. Aside from a mortar that landed near a garage and caused no casualties, the event, which centers on Monday evening, was calm. But the blast was a reminder of Sunni Arab suicide bombers who have turned previous Shi'ite religious events into carnage. Allawi, a secular Shi'ite appointed under U.S. supervision in 2004 and whose major offensives against both Shi'ite and Sunni guerrillas failed to halt insurgencies, warned that Iraq had already plunged into sectarian civil war. "It is unfortunate that we are in civil war. We are losing each day as an average 50 to 60 people throughout the country, if not more. If this is not civil war, then God knows what civil war is," he told BBC television on Sunday. "Iraq is in the middle of a crisis. Maybe we have not reached the point of no return yet. But we are moving toward this point. We are in a terrible civil conflict now." He said that if Iraq were to crumble, sectarian violence would spread throughout the Middle East with Europe and the United States also feeling the impact.

WIDER DANGERS
Those concerns are shared in Washington, which is also keeping a close eye on Iraq's strategic oil-rich but dangerous neighborhood, home to some close allies and worst enemies. A defiant Shi'ite Iran has nuclear ambitions and both Sunni Saudi Arabia and Jordan have suffered from a deadly al Qaeda campaign to topple pro-Western Arab governments. "Turning our backs on postwar Iraq today would be the modern equivalent of handing postwar Germany back to the Nazis," Rumsfeld wrote in the Washington Post ahead of Monday's anniversary of the invasion on March 20, 2003. Wary that an attack on the Shi'ite pilgrims could unleash a new wave of bloody reprisals, the Kerbala authorities deployed at least 8,000 Iraqi police and soldiers in the city. Mehdi Army militiamen loyal to fiery Shi'ite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr were also taking part in security precautions which include sandbags set up around Kerbala, 110 km (68 miles) southwest of Baghdad. Local officials say they expect as many as 2 million people to attend the mourning ritual on Monday evening. Under pressure to raise hopes in Iraq and back home that stability is possible, the U.S. military carried on with what it called the biggest helicopter transport of troops since the invasion. But there have been few signs of significant fighting or arrests in the operation near Samarra, north of Baghdad. U.S. troops killed nine people, including a family, after their patrol was ambushed in a nearby town early on Sunday, Iraqi police said. Police said three of the victims were a 13-year-old boy and his parents who were shot dead when U.S. soldiers entered their house in the Sunni town of Duluiya, about 90 km (60 miles) north of Baghdad. "A patrol of U.S. forces was attacked by gunmen using rocket propelled grenades," Duluiya police said. The U.S. military said it was checking the report. There are 133,000 U.S. troops in Iraq trying to maintain security and train local security forces to keep a lid on the violence. Both countries reject claims Iraq has already slid into civil war. But U.S. ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad has been speaking frankly about avoiding the point of no return after the bombing of a Shi'ite shrine in Samarra last month pushed the country closer than ever to full-blown civil war.
By Sami al-Jumaili

Mortar attack on Iraq Shiites highlights sectarian divide Yahoo! NEWS
A missile was fired into a Shiite holy city as hundreds of thousands gathered for a major religious holiday, raising fears of civil war on the third anniversary of America's war on Iraq. The 122 millimetre Grad missile, one of three fired at the southern shrine city of Karbala, caused no casualties but came as a sea of Shiite pilgrims gathered to commemorate the death of Imam Hussein, Prophet Mohammed's grandson, Governor Aqil Khazali told a news conference. There have been numerous attacks on pilgrims walking to Karbala, killing at least 12 people and fueling rampant fears that the country -- which is still without a new government three months after a landmark election -- was ripe for more communal bloodshed. "Three Grad missiles were fired towards Karbala, two fell into the desert and one in town," Khazali said. Police initially said a mortar shell landed in a parking lot, causing no casualties. "This is the first time that the terrorists used this type of missile," the governor said, adding that they were fired from the Musayyib region, about 20 kilometres (15 miles) away. Karbala police chief General Razeq al-Tayi said the missiles were fired from a rural area, adding "we have no way of preventing such attacks as we have no aerial observation capabilities". The governor said he had asked US-led coalition forces to provide air cover during the pilgrimage which reaches its climax on Monday. Just on Sunday, six more pilgrims were wounded in a drive-by shooting in Latifiyah, 40 kilometres (25 miles) south of the capital, local medics said. Security has been tightened in the Karbala with vehicle traffic banned in the city to prevent car bombings and successive cordons of police searching pilgrims. Over 2,000 Iraqi police commandos, 10,000 policemen and 1,500 soldiers have been drafted into the region to boost security, said Karbala's police chief. US forces brought in an extra 700 soldiers from neighbouring Kuwait to boost security for the pilgrimage. Extremist Sunnis, bent on triggering a civil war which could lead to the disintegration of the country, have multiplied their attacks on the majority Shiite population. In Karbala, a suicide bomber blew himself up in January in the middle of a busy market area near the Iman Hussein shrine, killing at least 44 and wounding 85 others. Never in the three years since the US-led coalition invaded Iraq to topple
Saddam Hussein has the country looked so close to the edge of civil war. Former prime minister Iyad Allawi even suggested Iraq has already slid into such a conflict. "We are losing each day an average 50 to 60 people throughout the country, if not more," Allawi told the BBC. "If this is not civil war, then God knows what civil war is." A major US-Iraqi operation sweeping for insurgents near Samarra, north of Baghdad, entered its fourth day on Sunday with the arrest of 60 suspects and the discovery of 11 weapons caches. The highly-publicized operation featured helicopters transporting troops to the rural area. But the only opposition was a roadside bomb that lightly damaged one vehicle on Sunday. Twelve people were killed in violence around Iraq Sunday, including seven Iraqis when US forces returned fire during a raid on the town of Dhuluiya, north of Baghdad, security sources said. The violence wracking the country comes amid mounting pressure for the nation's politicians to finally agree on the shape of the country's first permanent government since the invasion. The turmoil coincides with rising public dissatisfaction with the war in the United States on the invasion's third anniversary, which falls on March 20, with anti-war demonstrations being held across the globe. US President George W. Bush said Saturday that the war was "the right decision" and vowed to overcome violence that has killed some 2,300 US soldiers. US Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld warned a quick US pullout from Iraq will result in terrorists taking it over -- and insisted it would be tantamount to handing Germany back to the Nazis. "Turning our backs on postwar Iraq today would be the modern equivalent of handing postwar Germany back to the Nazis," he said in Sunday's Washington Post. Recent polls show that 65 percent of Americans disapprove of Bush's handling of the situation in Iraq.

http://www.khaleejtimes.com/DisplayArticle...ion=focusoniraq

Allawi sees Iraq mired in “unfortunate civil war”
(AFP)

19 March 2006

LONDON - Iraq is in the grip of a civil war, and Europe and the United States will not be spared its consequences, Iraq’s former interim Prime Minister Iyad Allawi said on Sunday.

“It is unfortunate that we are in civil war,” said Allawi on BBC television on the eve of the third anniversary of the US and British invasion that overthrew Saddam Hussein’s dictatorship.

“We are losing each day an average 50 to 60 people throughout the country, if not more,” he said. “If this is not civil war, then God knows what civil war is.”

He told the “Sunday AM” programme that he had warned against a political vacuum in Iraq, and had expressed concerns over the dismantling of Saddam’s armed forces and prevalence of militia groups.

Iraq is “edging towards” a deal between its political factions to secure a national unity government, but that will not represent ”an immediate solution” to its post-invasion problems, Allawi said.

“Iraq is in the middle of a crisis,” he said. “Maybe we have not reached the point of no return yet, but we are moving towards this point. We are in a terrible civil conflict now.”

“It will not only fall apart, but sectarianism will spread throughout the region -- and even Europe and the United States would not be spared all the violence that may occur as a result of sectarian problems in this region.”

March 19, 2006
Iraq Shi'ite Pilgrims Gather, Civil War Warning
By REUTERS
Filed at 9:36 a.m. ET

KERBALA, Iraq (Reuters) - Hundreds of thousands of Shi'ite pilgrims gathered in the sacred Iraqi city of Kerbala on Sunday for a religious event held under tight security as a top politician said Iraq was already in a sectarian civil war.

U.S. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, writing to mark the third anniversary of the invasion, said to disengage from Iraq now would be like handing Germany ``back to the Nazis'' in 1945.

In Baghdad, Shi'ite, Sunni and Kurdish leaders were still struggling to form a national unity government more than three months after elections, raising fears that a political vacuum will play into the hands of insurgents and fuel violence.

Iran agreed to an Iraqi proposal to hold talks with the United States on stabilizing Iraq.

Standing beside Shi'ite and Sunni leaders at a news conference, President Jalal Talabani, a Kurd, on Sunday backed a call by an Iraqi Shi'ite leader for the talks with Iran, which Washington accuses of meddling in Iraqi affairs.

``I am one of the people who supports this. The problem of Iraq has become an international one,'' said Talabani, who played down concerns that such talks would deepen divisions between political parties.

Sunni Arabs are deeply suspicious of the strong ties between Iran and its fellow Shi'ites leading the Baghdad government.

In Tehran, an Iranian government official said: ``We have agreed to start talks with America on Iraq. Particularly on the timetable for departure of occupying forces.''

Former Prime Minister Iyad Allawi was pessimistic about the future, saying Iraq was nearing the ``point of no return'' on a path toward all-out military conflict.

Allawi, a secular Shi'ite appointed under U.S. supervision in 2004 and whose major offensives against both Shi'ite and Sunni guerrillas failed to halt insurgencies, warned that Iraq had already plunged into sectarian civil war.

``It is unfortunate that we are in civil war. We are losing each day an average 50 to 60 people throughout the country, if not more. If this is not civil war, then God knows what civil war is,'' he told BBC television on Sunday.

U.S. ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad has been speaking frankly about avoiding the point of no return after the bombing of a Shi'ite shrine in Samarra last month pushed the country closer than ever to full-blown civil war.

Flying flags and flailing themselves, a sea of people filled roads to Kerbala ahead of Arbain, mourning the dead of the 7th century battle that confirmed a schism in Islam that has left Iraq dangerously divided between Sunnis and Shi'ites today.

Aside from a mortar that landed near a garage and caused no casualties, the event, which centers on Monday evening, was calm. But the blast was a reminder of Sunni Arab suicide bombers who have turned previous Shi'ite religious events into carnage.

Arab and Western leaders worry that if Iraq were to crumble, sectarian violence would spread throughout the Middle East with Europe and the United States also feeling the impact.

WIDER DANGERS

Washington is keeping a close eye on Iraq's strategic neighborhood, home to some close allies and worst enemies.

Defiant Iran has nuclear ambitions and both Sunni Saudi Arabia and Jordan have suffered from a deadly al Qaeda campaign to topple pro-Western Arab governments.

Iran accepted calls for talks with Washington by Iraqi Shi'ite leader Abdul Aziz al-Hakim on Thursday, but some U.S. officials are skeptical and believe it may be a ploy to divert attention from Iran's nuclear stand-off with the West.

Rumsfeld warned that the consequences would be dire if the United States pulled out of Iraq too quickly.

``Turning our backs on postwar Iraq today would be the modern equivalent of handing postwar Germany back to the Nazis,'' he wrote in the Washington Post ahead of Monday's anniversary of the invasion on March 20, 2003.

Wary that an attack on the Shi'ite pilgrims could unleash a new wave of bloody reprisals, the Kerbala authorities deployed at least 8,000 Iraqi police and soldiers in the city.

Local officials say they expect as many as 2 million people to attend the mourning ritual on Monday evening in Kerbala, 110 km (68 miles) southwest of Baghdad.

Under pressure to raise hopes in Iraq and back home that stability is possible, the U.S. military carried on with what it called the biggest ``air assault'' since just after the invasion.

A U.S. military statement said more than 60 suspected insurgents had been captured in Operation Swarmer near Samarra, north of Baghdad.

In an unrelated operation, U.S. troops killed eight people, including a family, after their patrol was ambushed in a nearby town early on Sunday, Iraqi police said.

Police said three of the victims were a 13-year-old boy and his parents who were shot dead when U.S. soldiers entered their house in the Sunni town of Duluiya, about 90 kmnorth of Baghdad. The U.S. military denied the report.



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March 19, 2006
US Objectives in Iraq Prove Elusive
By REUTERS
Filed at 11:30 a.m. ET

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The world's only superpower has learned some hard lessons during three years of war in Iraq and there is increasing skepticism about whether it can ever achieve its objectives there.

President George W. Bush's stated rationale for invading in March 2003 -- ridding Iraq of weapons of mass destruction -- quickly proved illusory. No such arms were ever found.

Three years later, as bodies are dumped daily on the streets of Baghdad and civil war is very possible, longer term U.S. ambitions for a stable and democratic Iraq also seem shaky, experts say.

``It's quite clear, the United States did not achieve its objectives in Iraq'' because they were ``fundamentally wrong,'' said Anthony Cordesman, a former Pentagon official who once worked for Republican Sen. John McCain of Arizona.

Iraq had ``no serious weapons of mass destruction program ... so we went to war for the wrong reason to deal with a threat that didn't exist,'' he told Reuters.

Rather than ridding the Middle East of Islamic extremists, the U.S. invasion has strengthened them, and there is ``much more threat from al Qaeda in Iraq,'' said Cordesman, of the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

Although U.S. officials remain upbeat about Iraq's prospects, public opinion polls show deep division among ordinary Americans. Bush's popularity has sunk to its lowest point in his six years in office, support for keeping U.S. troops in Iraq has plummeted and there is deepening concern about Iraq's future.

U.S. political leaders are so worried they created a high-powered bipartisan study group last week to look at alternatives for U.S. policy in Iraq that could unite Americans. Participants, who acknowledged their task would be extremely difficult, did not set a deadline for completing the work.

Judith Yaphe, an Iraq specialist at the National Defense University, noted the invasion succeeded in ousting Saddam Hussein and bringing the dictator to trial.

But Iraq is far from being a stable democracy that could serve as a model for regional change, and it definitely was not the U.S. aim to trigger civil war, she said.

REPEATED WARNINGS IGNORED

``It was simplistic of people to think that you could get rid of Saddam and things would be fine. ... The U.S. government understood very little about Iraq and how easily and quickly it is for a country which was held together by 35 years of repression to spin out of control,'' Yaphe added.

Yet in the run-up to war, Bush and his foreign policy team -- one of the most experienced in modern U.S. history -- were warned repeatedly -- by allies, experts and other U.S. officials -- about the difficulties Iraq presented.

Danielle Pletka of the conservative American Enterprise Institute acknowledged that building a stable U.S.-style democracy in Iraq is probably out of reach.

But ``if the goal is to create a relatively stable democracy and a slow but improving security environment for the Iraqis, then I think we're on our way,'' she insisted.

There is broad consensus among experts that the U.S. failure to plan for the postwar period was a major flaw that allowed the insurgency to take hold.

The administration tried to correct that in part by establishing a State Department office to coordinate postwar stabilization and reconstruction efforts in future crises, but it has run into bureaucratic problems.

Other lessons are showing up in U.S. policy documents. The just-released National Security Strategy and a recent defense planning paper emphasize working with allies and play down the kind of unilateral tendencies the United States displayed in Iraq, Cordesman said.

``We've learned a great deal and it's been a set of painful lessons,'' he said.

Those lessons include the need for U.S. forces that fight conventional wars and conduct counterinsurgency operations; a vigorous nation-building capability; and a stronger State Department that can manage diplomacy as well as aid for training police in post-conflict situations, he said.

Another realization is that ``military options can create as many problems as they solve,'' he added.

Pletka said the administration also realized the importance of having a lower-key chief representative in Iraq -- like U.S. Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad -- and that ``reinforcing existing fissures'' in Iraqi society by including sectarian militias in the army is not a good idea.



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Bush: Violence Creating Urgency in Iraq
By DEB RIECHMANN, Associated Press Writer

President Bush on Saturday braced Americans for more bloodshed in Iraq but said recent civil strife has motivated warring political factions to move quickly to set up a representative government.

"Our ambassador to Iraq, Zal Khalilzad, reports that the violence has created a new sense of urgency among these leaders to form a national unity government as quickly as possible," Bush said in his weekly radio address.

"I urge them to continue their work to put aside their differences, to reach out across political, religious and sectarian lines, and to form a government that can confront the terrorist threat and earn the trust and confidence of all Iraqis."

Bush's broadcast came in advance of a speech he plans to deliver in Cleveland on Monday, the second in a series of talks marking Sunday's three-year anniversary of the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq. In the speech, Bush will discuss how the United States is working with various sectors of Iraqi society to defeat terrorists, restore calm and help rebuild homes and communities.

The president said victory in Iraq will come when terrorists and loyalists of former Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein no longer threaten Iraq's democracy, when Iraqi security forces can ensure safety for citizens and terrorists can't call Iraq home.

"More fighting and sacrifice will be required to achieve this victory," he told listeners.

Democrats are calling on Bush to provide more leadership to unify fighting political sectors in Iraq and prevent the nation from spiraling into civil strife. The Feb. 22 bombing of a Shiite mosque and subsequent violence led to the deaths of hundreds of people and pushed the country to the brink of civil war between rival Muslim sects.

According to the latest AP-Ipsos poll, more than three-fourths of Americans, 77 percent, say they think a civil war is likely in Iraq. Seventy percent of Republicans and 90 percent of Democrats felt that way. People are evenly split on whether they think a stable, democratic government will be formed in Iraq, according to the poll taken in early March.

Bush has said that as Iraqi security forces step up, U.S. troops will be able to stand down. But critics of the administration's handling of the war say that the Iraqis must be told that the American military will not be in Iraq forever, and they must realize that the eventual pullout will be on U.S., not Iraqi, terms.

"We need the president to urgently exercise the leadership necessary to bring Iraq's political factions together," Sen. Dianne Feinstein (news, bio, voting record), D-Calif., said in the Democratic radio response Saturday. "In no uncertain terms, the president must immediately inform the Iraqi people that they need to get their political house in order."

Feinstein said the Iraqis need to be told that they must get a government and key ministries up and running, that they need to quickly secure their streets by ramping up the deployment of a viable police force, and they must reconcile differences between Sunnis and the Shia.

"Iraqis must know that we will exit on our terms, not theirs," she said.

Bush's speeches — a total of three this month and possibly more in April — would be similar in tone to a series of talks he made in December to help turn public opinion on the war in his favor. In those talks, he combined steely resolve with frank acknowledgments that mistakes have led to changes in U.S. strategy.

The president said that, in Ohio on Monday, he would provide concrete examples of how U.S. strategy in Iraq is succeeding.

"In recent weeks, Americans have seen horrific images from Iraq: the bombing of a great house of worship in Samarra, sectarian reprisals between Sunnis and Shias, and car bombings and kidnappings," Bush said.

"Amid continued reports about the tense situation in parts of that country, it may seem difficult at times to understand how we can say that progress is being made," he said. "But the reaction to the recent violence by Iraq's leaders is a clear sign of Iraq's commitment to democracy."




Copyright © 2006 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. The information contained in the AP News report may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed without the prior written authority of The Associated Press.


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Bush Predicts 'Victory' Three Years After Iraq Invasion
http://www.spacewar.com/reports/Bush_Predi...q_Invasion.html

Washington (AFP) Mar 20, 2006 - Three years after invading Iraq, President George W. Bush said Sunday he had a strategy for "victory in Iraq" while administration officials denied that the country had sunk into civil war.

- Operation Swarmer Is More Hype
http://www.spacewar.com/reports/Operation_..._More_Hype.html

March 20, 2006
Top Iraqi Leaders Agree to Form a Policy Council
By EDWARD WONG
BAGHDAD, Iraq, March 19 — Iraqi officials announced Sunday that they had agreed to form a council of the country's top politicians to make policy on security and economic issues in the new government. The council, which will include the prime minister and president, is an attempt to include all the country's major factions in decision making at a time of rising sectarian tensions.

The Iraqi Constitution approved by voters last fall does not have language supporting the creation of such a council. The 19-member body will essentially concentrate power in the hands of the country's political party leaders, and supersede the cabinet and Parliament in making broad decisions.

The move is a step forward in the snail-paced negotiations over the formation of a full, four-year government. Debate over creating the so-called national security council, and what powers it would wield, had contributed to the deadlock in the talks.

The main Shiite political bloc, which is expected to hold the most executive power in the new government, had opposed formation of the council, while the Kurds, Sunni Arabs, secular politicians and the Americans had pushed for it.

Many Shiite leaders viewed the idea of the council, first proposed by Massoud Barzani, the president of Iraqi Kurdistan, as an attempt to hamstring the prime minister, expected to be a Shiite, and check the power of the main Shiite bloc, known as the United Iraqi Alliance.

But on Sunday, after five hours of negotiations at President Jalal Talabani's guest villa here, the Shiites agreed to the council's formation. Because of the way the council will be set up, the Shiites, who constitute the largest political bloc in Parliament, will have an effective veto over council decisions.

Furthermore, the prime minister or president will be able to override any decisions they disagree with if the decisions conflict with the executives' constitutional authority, Iraqi officials said.

Otherwise, the council's actions will be considered binding.

"It's a good thing," said Adnan Pachachi, the temporary speaker of Parliament and a secular politician. "It's a safety valve in a way. Decisions will be taken in which all major political parties will be part of. No one will accuse the prime minister of making decisions on his own."

The council is expected to make policy on security issues, like how to build up and deploy the Iraqi Army and the police, how to disarm the country's many militias and what to do about insurgent territories like Anbar Province in western Iraq, Iraqi officials said. The council will also address economic matters, including oil revenue and the budget.

Any decisions that require legislation will be put before Parliament, Mr. Pachachi said. But the Parliament will probably support any decisions made by the council because all the leaders of the major parliamentary blocs will sit on the council, he added.

The council's decisions require a two-thirds vote of its 19 members. The president, prime minister, speaker of Parliament and the leader of any autonomous region (only Iraqi Kurdistan, for now) get seats on the council. The rest will be given to other party leaders. Over all, the seats will be distributed in proportion to the percentage of Parliament controlled by each major bloc.

According to that system, the main Shiite religious bloc will get nine seats, the Kurds four, the main Sunni Arab religious bloc three, the secular bloc two and a smaller Sunni Arab bloc one, Mr. Pachachi said. The two-thirds vote requirement effectively gives the Shiite members final say over any decision, as long as they remain united.

The council will operate parallel to the cabinet but will have greater responsibility for broad policy decisions. The cabinet will run the day-to-day affairs of the government ministries. Part of the motivation for creating the council is a desire to check the power of the ministers, especially those in charge of security.

Control of the Interior and Defense Ministries has been one of the most hotly debated issues in the talks to form a government. Each political bloc suspects the others of sectarian motives in trying to control the armed forces. With heightened sectarian tensions and talk of impending civil war on the rise, whoever controls the army and the police would have a guaranteed arms supply. Besides the prime minister and president, who have yet to be chosen, the politicians expected to sit on the national security council include Abdul Aziz al-Hakim, leader of the Shiite bloc; Tarik al-Hashimi, leader of the main Sunni Arab bloc; Saleh al-Mutlak, leader of the smaller Sunni Arab bloc; Ayad Allawi, the former prime minister and a secularist; and Mr. Barzani, the president of Iraqi Kurdistan.

"It's true that there's no explicit mention of it in the Constitution," Mr. Hashimi said at a news conference at Mr. Talabani's villa. "We think that the salvation of Iraq for the time being lies in showing a lot of flexibility in establishing new political bodies that include all the components of the Iraqi people."

The political leaders must now tackle other deeply contentious issues in the talks to form a government. At the top of the list is the Shiite nomination of Ibrahim al-Jaafari, the current prime minister, to retain that post. The other blocs oppose Mr. Jaafari's nomination, and have demanded that the Shiites present a new candidate. Mr. Jaafari has come under sharp criticism for failing to quell the violence and for the huge shortcomings in postwar reconstruction.

The political jockeying took place as Mr. Allawi, the former prime minister, told the BBC News on Sunday that the country was already mired in civil war. "It is unfortunate that we are in civil war," he said. "We are losing each day, as an average, 50 to 60 people throughout the country, if not more. If this is not civil war, then God knows what civil war is."

At least 15 bodies, all of them shot, were found across Baghdad on Sunday, police and hospital officials said. More than 200 bodies have been discovered in nearly two weeks, virtually all believed to be victims of sectarian violence.

A homemade bomb killed a police commando in Baghdad on Sunday. In Kirkuk, a cluster bomb left from the American invasion of 2003 exploded, killing a shepherd and a 6-year-old boy, said Lt. Col. Yadgar Abdullah of the Kirkuk police department.

The police found two Iraqi soldiers shot dead in Hawija, west of Kirkuk. Officials in Basra said two employees of the South Oil Company were shot to death on Saturday night. Both were members of the Iraqi Islamic Party, a conservative Sunni Arab group, and had been handcuffed.

An Iraqi employee of The New York Times contributed reporting from Kirkuk for this article.



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Iraqi's Factions Agree to Form Security Council

BAGHDAD - Iraqi officials agreed to set up a council that would
give each of the country's main political factions a voice in
making security and economic policy for a new government. By
Richard Boudreaux.
http://email.latimes.com/cgi-bin1/DM/y/ezh...Io30G2B0HNpP0EP

Dispatch From Baghdad: With Each Mile, the Divisions Deepen

BAGHDAD - Three years after the military invasion to oust Saddam
Hussein, the country's fault lines are visible in the landscape,
like land heaved up by shifting tectonic plates. By Borzou
Daragahi.
http://email.latimes.com/cgi-bin1/DM/y/ezh...Io30G2B0HNpQ0EQ

http://www.wpherald.com/storyview.php?Stor...19-092329-4248r

Iraqis see long road to recovery
By Sharon Behn
The Washington Times
Published March 19, 2006


BAGHDAD -- Iraqis interviewed on the streets of Baghdad on the eve of the third anniversary of the U.S.-led invasion said it will take at least a decade, maybe longer, to get their country on its feet.

After three years of war and with no signs of the conflict in Iraq ending soon, many Iraqis said they had lost confidence in their political leadership's ability to pull the country together.


"Saddam [Hussein] was a dictator, it was one-party rule, but now we have 60 parties running the country," said 55-year-old Falah Hassan, referring to the multiple political factions that make up the main political alliances in the national assembly. Tomorrow marks the third anniversary of the invasion that toppled Saddam.

"We don't want to say Saddam is better than this, but the situation is bad," said Mr. Hassan, fingering his Muslim prayer beads as he stood in the entrance of his small hardware store in Baghdad's busy shopping district of Karrada.

"It will not be less than 10 years" before Iraq is back to normal, and we will once again feel safe, Mr. Hassan said.

For 30-year-old Ayad Khaz Ali, who works in Baghdad's leather district selling custom-made leather coats, getting rid of Saddam was like being let out of a cage.

"We felt happy when the dictator fell, but the ones who took that happiness away are the terrorists," he said, adding that business had dropped off as death and violence has dominated the streets.

"We just blame our government and security systems, because they are not doing anything to get rid of the terror here in Iraq," Mr. Ali said.

But he denied that there was a civil war.

"Our brothers are getting killed every day, Shi'ites and Sunnis. But [civil war] must start from the bedroom, because there are a lot of mixed marriages here -- that will never happen," he said.

Despite the mistakes Mr. Ali felt the American-led coalition has made in Iraq, such as disbanding the army, he called on them to stay until Iraq had a leader with a "steel fist" capable of stopping the violence.

"If they left now, it would be a victory for the terrorists," he said.

Others say civil war is already under way, and point out that even repeated curfews have failed to stop sectarian slayings and car bombs that continue to explode daily in the capital.

"Civil war exists right now, but it has not been announced," said Ali Faris, who works in a cigar shop in the once-upscale business district of Arasat.

"It will take 10 years or more to fix Iraq -- if we don't break out in full-scale civil war," he said.

Mr. Faris said the Americans are the only ones who have enough power to roll back the violence. "If the U.S. destroyed the Soviet Union, can they not fix Iraq?" he asked.

The United States currently has about 130,000 troops in Iraq, and last week deployed to the Baghdad area an additional battalion task force from its "call-forward force" in Kuwait.

Life is much more peaceful in the Shi'ite dominated south and Kurdish north, with businesses open late and few of the horrific bombs and attacks that prevail in the strongly Sunni and religiously mixed areas of central Iraq.

Najeeb Hanoudi, an Iraqi Catholic in his 70s who grew up side by side with Muslims in the now-troubled city of Mosul, said the solution to Iraq's lethal triple insurgency of nationalists, former Ba'athists and al Qaeda was not easy, but it was possible.

"They can be bought off," he said, smoking calmly in a Baghdad hotel coffee shop. "You can buy people here by three methods: money, women and food. Every Iraqi, including myself, is amenable to this sort of treatment." All except the al Qaeda group, led by the Jordanian-born Islamic extremist Abu Musab Zarqawi, he said.

"They are the most dangerous. They don't care about human life. They murder, they decapitate, and I don't know why," Mr. Hanoudi said.

A supporter of the Americans when they first arrived in Iraq and their removal of Saddam, Mr. Hanoudi is now much more reserved. His son was shot by U.S. troops, and despite U.S. attempts to help, his son now lies in a vegetative state.

"The current situation is chaotic, dangerous and very unpredictable in every aspect. I'm very sad that it has turned out to be like that," he said, sipping some milky coffee.

After an hour of talking, Mr. Hanoudi concluded: "I might have given a gloomy and pessimistic picture, but still, in the depths of my heart, I am cautiously optimistic for a better future, for freedom, prosperity and democracy for my children and grandchildren."

In military action yesterday, American and Iraqi troops pushing through a desolate area of Iraq's Sunni Arab heartland rounded up dozens more suspected insurgents, including the purported killers of a television journalist, U.S. and Iraqi officials told the Associated Press yesterday.

In Baghdad, meanwhile, a dozen more bodies were found as a shadowy war of Shi'ite-Sunni reprisals went on, and Shi'ite Muslim pilgrims heading to the holy city of Karbala again came under attack, with a roadside bomb killing one and wounding at least five, the AP reported.

http://www.wpherald.com/storyview.php?Stor...19-093748-2115r

Analysis: Operation Swarmer less than meets the eye?
By Sana Abdallah
United Press International
Published March 19, 2006


AMMAN, Jordan -- Operation Swarmer, a joint U.S.-Iraqi offensive around the northern Iraqi city of Samarra in Salaheddine province, went into its fourth day Sunday with very little to verify why it has been described as the largest assault operation since the American-led invasion of Iraq three years ago.

According to U.S. military information, 80 people were arrested, 20 of whom were later released, and weapons were confiscated since the operation was kicked off early Thursday to crack down on the Iraqi insurgency in the area.


There have been no reports of casualties or exchange of fire, although the offensive involves 1,500 American and Iraqi troops and 50 helicopters, but no air strikes were reported.

Other high-profile military operations, with sexier code names targeting insurgents, have by far included thousands of more troops and fighter jets, air strikes and thousands of casualties, many of them Iraqi civilians.

Operation Swarmer is said to bear no comparison to the assault on Fallujah in November 2004 and last year's operations involving air strikes and ground forces near the Syrian border in western Iraq.

However, Arab analysts say the lack of independent reports from Salaheddine has raised questions on the accuracy and credibility of the reports being given by the U.S. military authorities in Iraq, leaving room for speculation.

They say the "media blackout" on the ongoing operation against Samarra and surrounding areas, the third in the area in the past two years, might have caused unreported casualties and destruction similar to what happened in Fallujah.

The London-based al-Quds al-Arabi's chief editor, Abdul Bari Atwan, wrote in a front-page commentary Sunday that "no one knows what is happening in the city or the number of victims who have fallen from this assault because the American forces have imposed a total media blackout."

Atwan, who runs the independent Palestinian daily, said "we will not be surprised to discover, after the liberation of Samarra for the third time, that horrifying massacres have taken place and a new mass grave has been dug up to fit the bodies of the victims of this city."

He speculated the Americans will destroy Samarra "just like they destroyed it in the past, but they will definitely not be able to end the resistance and achieve the stability they seek in Iraq."

Whether the size of Operation Swarmer will reveal such a result when the offensive ends Monday or Tuesday remains to be seen. But the statements by the U.S. and Iraqi forces so far indicate little is being achieved in terms of capturing key insurgents or seizing substantial weapons.

So why this hype over Operation Swarmer that had television networks interrupt their programs to break the news and had oil prices surge when the offensive is appearing more of a regular routine combing exercise?

Independent analysts say the targeted area may be one reason. Samarra was home to the Shiite Imam al-Askari shrine that was bombed and destroyed on Feb. 22, sparking off sectarian fighting and reprisals that left hundreds of people dead and threatened to take the country into an all-out civil war.

The timing of Operation Swarmer is another important element. It came amid declining support at home for President George W. Bush and his war on Iraq and as U.S. and Western anti-war protests were scheduled to mark the third anniversary of the invasion.

But military experts say the offensive also constitutes a shift in the operations that have so far been conducted in Iraq under occupation in terms of Iraqi participation and intelligence information.

They say the "backbone" of the participating troops is made up of Iraqi soldiers trained by the Americans and that the intelligence information which led to the assault had been collected by the Iraqi intelligence services, not by the Americans.

Therefore, the experts add, this operation could be construed as being more Iraqi than American to show that a new Iraqi army is suddenly ready to take over the country's military and security reins when the U.S. withdraws from the country or move to permanent bases it sets up in Iraq.

Arab analysts say the U.S. forces cannot remain in Iraq much longer as pressure mounts on the administration, even from some Republicans, to end what is being widely seen as an American failure in Iraq that stands on the edge of a civil war.

It is a civil war, they insist, in which the United States does not want to be caught, especially as America prepares for legislative elections this year.

Operation Swarmer, therefore, may be nothing more than a PR campaign, rather than a campaign against the insurgency, to promote the Iraqi army's ability to confront the rebels and foreign fighters - with U.S. backing - to begin the process of establishing permanent American bases in Iraq and leaving direct combat to the Iraqis.

http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/HC21Ak01.html
Regional vultures circling Iraq
By Ashraf Fahim

If Iraq wasn't on the brink of civil war before last month's bombing of the previously gold-domed Askariya Mosque in Samarra, which is sacred to Shi'ite Muslims, it certainly is now. The attack turned what was a low-intensity sectarian conflict hot, with media reports saying that Baghdad's central morgue alone recorded 1,300 Iraqis dead in four days of reprisal killings after the attack.

That increased violence between Arab Sunnis and Shi'ites has persisted, and fears are growing that civil war could draw Iraq's neighbors further into the conflict, or even spark a wider war. That fear was recently expressed by US Ambassador to Iraq Zalmay Khalilzad, who warned that if US troops pulled out, a regional conflict could result. Religious extremists could triumph, he said, and use Iraq as a base for expansion, while Persian Gulf oil supplies could be disrupted.

Khalilzad is hardly a disinterested party, so his motives bear scrutiny. But his belated observation that the United States had opened a Pandora's box in Iraq echoed the concerns of those who wanted the Ba'athist lid kept on to begin with.

With the lid nearly off, the incipient civil war is capsizing the failing Iraq project, complicating the formation of a government, turning the armed forces into just another militia, and transforming Iraq into a bigger, meaner version of the Lebanon of 1975-90.

War by proxy, or regional war?
As it was in Lebanon, the civil conflict in Iraq is rooted in the genuine historical grievances of the country's basic communities. And as Lebanon did, Iraq is fast becoming a battleground for the competing interests of surrounding states. Yet because Iraq sits at the nexus of the world's largest petroleum reserves, far more more is at stake.

Experts believe that increased intervention by Iraq's neighbors is now inevitable.

"I think it's definite that they will become involved in the same way that they were in Lebanon, by proxy," said Dr Rosemary Hollis, the director of research at London's Royal Institute of International Affairs (RIIA). "They will support the factions that they feel the most affinity to, in part because those factions will need help and will come looking for it, but in part because they won't want their opponents to win."

Iraq's neighbors, particularly Iran, are already deeply enmeshed in the Iraqi maelstrom. And as the chaos mounts, they may be tempted to assert forcefully their economic interests and their stake in what political system eventually rises above the killing fields. Added to this are growing fears of the Sunni-Shi'ite divide igniting sectarian fires across the region, with either calls from the majority-Sunni states to protect the Iraqi Sunni minority, or sectarian tension in the Gulf states, many of which have large Shi'ite minorities (and a majority in Bahrain).

As a proxy war evolves, direct interventions are unlikely, according to Dr Bahgat Korany, the head of Middle East Studies at the American University of Cairo (AUC). "If the Americans don't want that, it will not happen," he said. "I can't imagine that troops from other countries will cross borders when you have 150,000-160,000 American troops there."

There have been consistent attempts by the US to secure Arab troops to aid the occupation, however, an outcome that could have myriad unforeseen consequences once those troops disembark. Informed sources said US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, on her recent visit to Cairo, made a strong pitch to persuade Egypt to send troops.

Ripples of chaos
The predominant fear now in the region is the dismemberment of Iraq.

"If the whole state system unravels, if Iraq unravels and everybody has to choose inside Iraq - and there's no nationalist side - then everybody's state is in jeopardy," said Hollis. The neighbors are therefore caught between asserting influence to create a favorable political order and pushing so hard they force it apart. A Sunni-Shi'ite war could make this balancing act unsustainable.

A recent report by the International Crisis Group (ICG) captured this dilemma: "Should neighboring states conclude either that Shi'ite influence has become a strategic threat or that Iraq's breakup is inevitable, they are likely to take steps that will accelerate the country's disintegration ... a development in which, ironically, they have no interest."

The greatest danger of copycat sectarian warfare is in the Persian Gulf region, though there is as yet no sign of it. Shi'ite empowerment appears to be emboldening Shi'ite minorities, but not inspiring militancy. Korany of AUC cautions that the dynamic in these countries is different from that in Iraq. "Minorities expressing their grievances doesn't mean that you're going into a civil war," he said.

But Hollis of RIIA warned that instability in Iraq could alter the existing balance in such countries as Saudi Arabia.

"The Shi'ites of the eastern province of Saudi Arabia are much better off loyal to the crown at this stage," she said. "But they are using this rise of Shi'ite power in Iraq as a bargaining tool to get a bit more recognition for their rights as Saudi citizens. In the future, if the al-Saud seem to be losing their grip, then maybe they would make a new calculation."

Shi'ite Iran, with its ties to the former Shi'ite Iraqi exiles who now rule Iraq, has considerable influence in that country, perhaps greater than the United States. Various agencies of the Iranian regime have maintained leverage with Iraq's multitude of feuding Shi'ite power brokers, whose rise to power has given Iran currency even as it profits by raging against the occupation that delivered them. The full extent of Iranian military involvement in Iraq is not clear, though. While support for the Shi'ite militias is probable, some analysts say Iran is supporting Sunni militants at the same time.

Hollis said that many in the Iranian regime preferred stability in Iraq, but not all. "There's been a certain amount of hedging of bets, keeping in with as many factions as possible."

But while moderate conservatives want stability, Iranian President Mahmud Ahmadinejad may be more of a gambler. "I think the president, as a populist and a bit of a believer in his own ideology, may see larger work to be done in a sort of regional, Shi'ite Muslim anti-Western sense," Hollis said.

The administration of US President George W Bush recently warned Iran against direct interference in Iraq and accused it of sending in the Revolutionary Guards. But for all the tough talk, the looming civil war and the reality of Iranian influence appear to have led to last Friday's announcement by the US that it would hold talks with Iran on Iraq. If those talks go ahead, Iraqi Prime Minister-designate Ibrahim al-Jaafari's fate will certainly be on the agenda. Tehran is backing Jaafari, with Washington hoping to install Abdul Aziz al-Hakim of the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq. This ongoing political war has the potential to add internecine Shi'ite warfare to Iraq's lethal brew.

While Iran now operates behind the scenes, there are scenarios for direct Iranian intervention. One flash point is the nuclear issue. The ICG report concluded, "Should the nuclear question come to a head and force international intervention of some kind (including sanctions), the regime may want to fight the US where it is most vulnerable, namely in Iraq."

Korany of AUC said also that "if the sacred holy places of Shi'ism are violated", as in Samarra, "the Iranians could be so provoked and the government under so much pressure" that Iranian troops could conceivably cross the border.

Sunni fears, secular woes
Iraq's other neighbors have an obvious economic stake in Iraq - Turkey, Jordan and Syria benefited from Iraqi oil concessions before Saddam Hussein's fall, and stability in Iraq would open markets that civil war is foreclosing. But the more pressing preoccupations of Iraq's secular, Sunni-majority neighbors are political and ideological. Not only is the rise in Iranian Shi'ite Islamist influence causing sleepless nights, but so is the empowerment of Sunni Islamist militants who have western Iraq as their playground.

Islamist parties are now scoring victories at the ballot box across the Arab world, with their kindred spirits in Iraq proving the enduring power of military jihad. The combination is focusing secular minds as never before.

Turkey is particularly worried about Iran's central role in Iraq. As Ayhan Simsek has written in The New Anatolian, Turkey would like to keep Iraq intact, partly so that it can serve as a buffer to its regional rival, Iran. Key to this are fears of Iranian influence and Islamism spreading to strongly secular Turkey.

Jaafari's recent visit to Ankara, of which he neglected to inform Kurdish Iraqi President Jalal Talabani in advance, has also reignited tension with Iraq's Kurds. Ankara fears their empowerment will embolden its own Kurdish minority, and Iraqi Kurds fear that Ankara is now sidestepping them to keep a check on their ambitions.

Talabani has vocally opposed Jaafari's candidacy, with reports suggesting the Kurds are displeased that Jaafari is forestalling a resolution of their bid to control the oil-rich city of Kirkuk. There are also reports in the Turkish press that while in Ankara Jaafari offered to have Turkish troops replace US troops in northern Iraq.

If Iraq dissolves into civil war, Korany said, Turkey could feel obliged to secure its interests in northern Iraq. "I can imagine that the Turks, who are not happy at all about the autonomy of the Kurds in Iraq, will try to reimpose a sort of control of the situation," he said, "so that there wouldn't be a contagion through the Kurdish population in Turkey."

Just as Turkey fears the extension of Iran's reach, Jordan is worried about the rise of Sunni extremists. Those claiming to fight under Abu Musab al-Zarqawi's banner now have a base from which to try to bring down the pro-Western, secular Hashemites. And some Jordanians, said Hollis, "foresee that in the breakup of Iraq, Zarqawi is more likely to see his battlefront as western Iraq and Jordan, and are [speculating] that Jordanian troops will end up being deployed to western Iraq in order to head this off".

Such adventurism would, of course, require US acquiescence, and unnerve Iran and Syria. Of all Iraq's neighbors, Syria has perhaps the most ambiguous relationship to Iraq's widening vortex. What role Syria has played in allowing fighters to cross into Iraq is an enduring mystery of the war. What is clear is that the phenomenon is a doubled-edged sword for Damascus.

On the one hand disorder in Iraq undoubtedly distracts the United States from its confrontation with the regime of President Bashar Assad. On the other hand, militant Islamist fighters may well be crossing back into Syria, complicating the secular Ba'athist regime's long struggle with the Syrian Muslim Brotherhood.

The sharp dangers of the phenomenon of blowback from Iraq's new jihadis was demonstrated recently in the Saudi context, with the failed attack on Abqaiq, the world's largest oil-processing facility, on February 24. While a Saudi al-Qaeda-linked group claimed the attack, the first directly targeting the Saudi oil industry, there has been speculation that it was inspired by attacks on Iraq's oil infrastructure. The House of Saud is facing its own mini-insurgency and is perhaps the regime with the most to lose as Iraqi jihad is exported.

America's Iraq conundrum
The Sunni-Shi'ite war in Iraq is a potential catastrophe for US interests in the region. Not only are allies of the United States being threatened and its military being placed under further duress, the symbolic setback civil war presents is profound. Korany of AUC said the US is now facing "complete failure of the objective of establishing a new Iraq, which would have been a showcase, a model of democracy for the region".

"If the Americans leave now," he said, "with the chaos behind them, it is bound to affect American influence - particularly its advice on democracy in the region."

With the war more unpopular than ever in the US, the Bush administration is now befuddled by an election-year conundrum. On March 13, President Bush came as close as he has yet to setting a timetable for withdrawal when he vowed Iraqi troops would control most of the country by the end of the year. But by the administration's own logic, withdrawal would bring Khalilzad's warning to fruition.

As a result, the US administration may well have to choose between, on the one hand, holding together a country at war with itself and, on the other, surrendering it and ushering in a regional war.

Ashraf Fahim is a freelance writer on Middle Eastern affairs based in New York and London. His writing can be found at www.storminateacup.org.uk.

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March 20, 2006
More Deaths As Iraq War Enters Fourth Year
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 1:24 p.m. ET

BAGHDAD, Iraq (AP) -- Roadside bombings killed at least eight Iraqi policemen on Monday's third anniversary of the U.S.-led invasion, and authorities said they found 15 bullet-riddled bodies dumped in the capital.

South of Baghdad, millions of Shiite pilgrims poured into Karbala to complete 40 days of symbolic mourning for Imam Hussein, the Prophet Muhammad's grandson.

The Shiite Muslims carried flags and performed rituals of self-flagellation with chains and machetes to display grief over Hussein's death. Some 4 million pilgrims had arrived at the city, said Karbala Gov. Akeel al-Khuzai, who expected more through Tuesday.

The commemoration has been marked by deadly insurgent attacks in the past. In 2004, coordinated blasts at Shiite shrines in Karbala and in Baghdad killed at least 181 people.

Tight security appeared to be holding sectarian violence at bay, though five pilgrims making their way to Karbala were attacked in a drive-by shooting. All survived, police said.

The Baghdad International Airport was ordered closed through Tuesday as a precaution, Transportation Ministry spokesman Ahmed Abdul-Wahab said.

Monday's violence took up where it left off Sunday, when at least 35 people were killed.

A large explosion rocked a coffee shop in northern Baghdad's Azamiyah neighborhood, killing at least three civilians and wounding 15, police said.

One of the roadside bombings Monday, just a few hundred yards from an Interior Ministry lockup in central Baghdad, killed at least three Iraqi police commandos and a prisoner, police Lt. Col. Falah al-Mohammedawi said. Four commandos were injured.

A second roadside bomb in a farming area in the so-called ''Triangle of Death'' south of Baghdad killed four policemen, police Capt. Muthana Khalid Ali said.

The 15 dumped bodies, including that of a 13-year-old girl, were the latest gruesome discoveries tied to the underground sectarian war being conducted by Shiite and Sunni Muslims as they settle scores in the chaos gripping the capital.

At least 954 Iraqis have been killed in sectarian violence since the Feb. 22 bombing of a Shiite shrine in Samarra, according to an Associated Press count.

Baghdadis voiced anger when asked about their lives as the war entered its fourth year.

''Since (U.S.-led troops) came into Iraq, we get nothing,'' said Ali Zeidan. ''Three years have passed by for the Iraqi people and they are still suffering psychologically ... and economically.''

Stifling terrorism and reviving the economy are the main challenges, interim Prime Minister Ibrahim al-Jaafari wrote in a column in Monday's Washington Post.

President Bush sought Monday to emphasize progress over disillusionment, urging Americans to see a developing democracy beyond the frequent images of violence.

Meeting at the White House with NATO Secretary General Jaap de Hoop Scheffer, Bush said the military alliance's training mission in Iraq will help ensure that Iraqi security forces ''can end up protecting the Iraqi people from those who want to kill innocent life in order to affect the outcome of that democracy.''

A car bomb exploded close to a police checkpoint near a hospital in downtown Baqouba, northeast of Baghdad, killing one police officer and wounding another as well as two civilians, police said.

Gunmen appeared to hunt down specific individuals, killing an oil official going to work in the northern town of Mosul and opening fire on a former Baghdad mayor as he left home in the southern Dora neighborhood, causing serious injuries, police said.

Assailants in a speeding car shot and wounded a city council member for Karradah, a downtown Baghdad district, and gunmen killed a grocer in the capital at work, according to police.

In Mosul, 225 miles northwest of the capital, three separate attacks on police patrols killed one officer and wounded four others and two civilians late Sunday.

Another Iraqi police officer with a joint American-Iraqi patrol was killed in Baghdad during fighting with insurgents in the Amariyah neighborhood, police said. Two others, including a policewoman in civilian clothes on her way home, were seriously injured.

On the political front, Iraqi leaders still had not formed a government more than three months after landmark elections for the first permanent post-invasion parliament. However, they announced agreement on setting up a Security Council to deal with key matters while negotiations proceed.

The announcement came Sunday after the fourth in a series of U.S.-brokered all-party meetings on forming a government.

''It was a successful meeting, and we have agreed on forming a National Security Council whose powers will not contradict the constitution,'' Adnan al-Dulaimi, a Sunni Arab political leader, told the AP.

The council, to be headed by President Jalal Talabani, was established as an interim measure as politicians struggle to agree on the makeup of a government following the Dec. 15 parliamentary elections.

Al-Dulaimi said nine council seats would go to Iraq's Shiite Muslim majority, while Kurds and Sunni Arabs each would control four seats and the secular bloc two. Talabani, a Kurd, would head the group.

The exact powers of the council, if any, were not explained. But it appeared to have been formed to ensure that politicians from minority blocs would at least be consulted in advance on important government and security decisions.

The political discussions on forming a government began last week under pressure from U.S. Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad. Al-Dulaimi said the talks would not resume until Saturday because of Shiite and Kurdish holidays this week.



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