Category Archives: Insurgency

Make the List Public (Updated and recanted)

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*UPDATE 12÷21÷05 5:58:33 AM:* Upon fur­ther thought on this mat­ter, I’m going to pub­licly reverse myself and rescind my call for the list to be pub­lic. It was a poorly thought out deci­sion on my part and I was wrong. Peo­ple on the list should have access to it through FOIA or some other method, but they should have the right and the oppor­tu­nity to do what they want with that infor­ma­tion _in private._ I under­stand why peo­ple would want the list pub­lished, but I think now those rea­sons — embar­rass­ing the Bush admin­is­tra­tion, among them — are out­weighed by the right of peo­ple on the list to main­tain some pri­vacy. Lord knows they’ve had that vio­lated enough already. Any­way, I will keep the orig­i­nal post avail­able for archival pur­poses.
NEW YORK — I fully agree with Steve’s idea that the list of names of peo­ple who have been mon­i­tored under the NSA’s pro­gram to spy on peo­ple in the United States should be made public.

If there are spe­cific indi­vid­u­als or num­bers that a judge wishes to give ex post facto pro­tec­tion, I can accept that.
But this inva­sion of pri­vacy in the case of hun­dreds, per­haps thou­sands, of Amer­i­can cit­i­zens must be chal­lenged in the courts. What Bush did is engage in an extra-legal act against the cit­i­zens he is paid to rep­re­sent — and this is crim­i­nal.
Post the list. It should be made pub­lic because at this point there is NO NATIONAL SECURITY ratio­nale to jus­tify the mon­i­tor­ing of cit­i­zens in cases that have not been approved by a court. That means that all of those cit­i­zens mon­i­tored are inno­cent — and unwit­ting vic­tims of this domes­tic spy cam­paign launched by George W. Bush.

Per­haps I’m indulging in para­noia, but I don’t think I’m being unrea­son­able. I’m a reporter. In Bagh­dad. I have dealth with sources in the insur­gency and the Mahdi Army. This admin­is­tra­tion and its agents in the embassy in Bagh­dad have long been hos­tile to the press and our work in Bagh­dad, espe­cially when we try to tell the whole story of the insur­gency — by talk­ing with insur­gents. And TIME has long had an aggres­sive approach to cov­er­ing the insur­gency.
Now, I don’t want to pump up my sourc­ing more than it is. My bureau chief, Michael Ware, deserves far more credit for his work on insur­gents than I ever do. But because of my asso­ci­a­tion with the mag­a­zine, I can only assume that my brother, mother, friends and oth­ers have been poten­tially mon­i­tored because of my activ­i­ties. And based on my traf­fic logs, I know mil­i­tary and CIA peo­ple read this blog. Thus, any­one who has sent me email in the past two years is _potentially_ on Pres­i­dent Bush’s list. So par­don me if I take this a lit­tle per­son­ally.
Make the list pub­lic. Let my loved ones and friends see if they’re on it, and let them then be able to make the deci­sion of what to do then. Because I can tell you truth­fully that my brother et al. are not national secu­rity risks, and invad­ing their pri­vacy is doing noth­ing to make Amer­ica safer.
*UPDATE 12÷18÷05 11:32:58 AM:* A good friend of mine, who’s very smart, makes the fol­low­ing, dis­sent­ing points:

Sorry, dude, not with you on this one. If I’m on that list, I want to be informed of the fact and the rea­son — and then to have the list utterly destroyed with­out the pub­lic ever see­ing it. I have no inter­est in bear­ing a scar­let T for Ter­ror­ist, thank you very much.
Seri­ously, can you imag­ine the impact on some mid­west Mus­lim if the White House put out a list say­ing that they had mon­i­tored his e-mail for pos­si­ble ter­ror­ist activ­ity? No offi­cial assur­ance of inno­cence would ever take away the smear. Indeed, I would expect some peo­ple on that list to end up dead.
Notify the peo­ple on the list, yes. Then, if they want to make the fact pub­lic, or to sue in open court, their call.

Points to think about. Dis­cuss below…

A note on Jaysh al-Muhammad

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In a post on alpha­bet city, Robert brings up the idea that Jaysh al-Muhammad, which was involved in the plan­ning of the Pales­tine Hotel attack on Mon­day, was founded by Sad­dam Hus­sein right before the war. He’s sorta right, but there are more details. As usual, it’s more com­pli­cated than just say­ing it’s a cre­ation of Sad­dam.
Just after the war, Sad­dam instructed his sub­or­di­nates to “rebuild your net­works.” These net­works became the core of the insur­gency that included Jaysh al-Muhammad. The major­ity of JAM’s mem­bers are for­mer mil­i­tary men who, by def­i­n­i­tion, were mem­bers of the Ba’ath Party, but that does not mean they sub­scribe fully to the Ba’athist ide­ol­ogy or that they fol­low Sad­dam. They are _generally_ more nation­al­is­tic than Ba’athist, but their ide­ol­ogy is a com­pli­cated mish­mash of Iraqi nation­al­ism and pan-Arabism. (The lat­ter is a plank of Ba’athist ide­ol­ogy, though.) The JAM also attracts money and sup­port from for­mer regime ele­ments and exiles in Syria and Jor­dan because of a) its rel­a­tive effec­tive­ness and b) its sur­face Ba’athist trap­pings.
How do the _jihadis_ such as Zar­qawi fit into this? While Zar­qawi was present in Iraq prior to the war, he was con­fined to the Kur­dish area in the north and was work­ing with Ansar al-Islam, a group mainly made up of Kur­dish salafists and some vet­er­ans of Afghanistan. It was only after the Ba’athist and nation­al­ist insur­gency began to make some gains that they were able to get into the fight. They estab­lished a great deal of momen­tum and have been rid­ing it ever since, strug­gling for con­trol of “the insur­gency” against the Ba’athists and nation­al­ists.
The weapons in this internecine strug­gle are money and appeals to reli­gion. While the Ba’athists can com­mand great sums of cash through old accounts in Syria, Jor­dan and else­where, the _jihadis_ can call on equal funds from the oil-rich sym­pa­thiz­ers in the Gulf states. (I’m talk­ing indi­vid­u­als, not nec­es­sar­ily gov­ern­ment sup­port — but I wouldn’t rule it out, either.)
The _jihadis_ gain influ­ence within the insur­gency by ini­tially pro­vid­ing money and materiel to smaller nation­al­ist groups, but then start lob­by­ing for their new-found ben­e­fi­cia­ries to start­ing being bet­ter Mus­lims. More help, more preach­ing fol­lows, and soon enough, a group of nation­al­ists have grown their beards, stopped drink­ing beer and smok­ing cig­a­rettes and start pray­ing five times a day. What they may have orig­i­nally seen as a strug­gle of national resis­tance has become jihad, with the orig­i­nal lead­ers of the nation­al­ist group either elim­i­nated or pushed aside in favor of more religious-minded men.
This fight over nationalism/secularism and jihad/fundamentalism is hap­pen­ing all over Iraq, not just in the insur­gency. It’s hap­pen­ing in the soci­ety at large and within the Iraqi gov­ern­ment. It’s also hap­pen­ing all over the Mus­lim world, and in many ways is the real war on “terror.”

Constitutional Con?

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BAGHDAD–Hello all. We haven’t spo­ken in a while. I wish I could give you a good rea­son for that, but I can’t. After Marla’s death, I just didn’t feel like blog­ging for a while. It’s not like there’s been a dearth of mate­r­ial, how­ever. A new gov­ern­ment, a hell of a lot of vio­lence, alle­ga­tions of prior cor­rup­tion, mas­sive mil­i­tary oper­a­tions… And that’s just in the last month or so. Iraq’s a busy place.

But this week, the new Iraqi gov­ern­ment estab­lished the Con­sti­tu­tional Com­mit­tee that will draft Iraq’s per­ma­nent con­sti­tu­tion. It’s made up of 55 mem­bers of par­lia­ment that didn’t get tapped for Ibrahim al-Jaafari’s cabinet–which took way too long to get off the ground. Three months? I mean, c’mon. The gov­ern­ment expires, in the­ory, at the end of this year any­way. These guys’ main job is sup­posed to be mak­ing sure all the checks get signed and the writ­ing of a con­sti­tu­tion. And yet, they’re act­ing like a per­ma­nent gov­ern­ment, argu­ing over cab­i­net posts and putting more thought into their own polit­i­cal futures than the country’s. This pisses Iraqis off.

And speak­ing of polit­i­cal futures, Iyad Allawi is con­sid­er­ing tak­ing the chair­man­ship of the com­mit­tee, although one of his aides told me that he’s really prepar­ing for the next elec­tion. I told the aide that I thought being chair­man of the com­mit­tee might be a nice plat­form from which to run. True, admit­ted the aide, but if the process falls apart, Allawi will be blamed for that if he’s the chair­man. I coun­tered that if the process falls apart, Allawi’s going to have a lot more to worry about than his polit­i­cal viability–and so will Iraq.

Another name being bandied about is Houman al-Hammoudi, a polit­i­cal advi­sor to Abdul Aziz al-Hakim, head of Supreme Coun­cil for Islamic Rev­o­lu­tion in Iraq (SCIRI). These two guys are handy sym­bols for where Iraq may be head­ing. If Allawi takes the chair­man­ship, the new con­sti­tu­tion will likely have more Amer­i­can input and be more sec­u­lar. If al-Hamoudi gets it, look for a stronger role for Islam and more influ­ence from Tehran. (SCIRI still has sig­nif­i­cant ties to the Iran­ian regime.)

The chair­man will be announced today, inshal­lah, so we’ll get to see where we’re going. [UPDATE 5÷16÷05 5:32:23 PM: The chair­man­ship wasn’t announced on Sun­day because com­mit­tee mem­bers can’t decide between al-Hammoudi and a Kur­dish mem­ber.] But, in my opin­ion, it’s already off to a bad start. There are only two Sun­nis on the com­mit­tee. One sug­ges­tion to increase their rep­re­sen­ta­tion is to shunt them off to a sub­com­mit­tee ghetto, where they’ll fil­ter up their rec­om­men­da­tions to the main com­mit­tee. Dr. Saleh Mut­lak, a mem­ber of the National Dia­logue Coun­cil, the hot, new polit­i­cal group for dis­en­fran­chised Sun­nis, thinks things might be OK if Allawi is the chair­man but if it’s al-Hammoudi, the mar­gin­al­iz­ing of the reli­gious minor­ity will be com­plete. This is a recipe for yet more dis­as­ter, con­sid­er­ing the Sun­nis are already sus­pi­cious that de-Ba’athification is really code for an anti-Sunni purge.

The new gov­ern­ment and the Amer­i­cans might be wise to lis­ten to Mut­lak and his com­pa­tri­ots on the Coun­cil. They have good ties to the Iraqi insurgency–the Ba’athists and nation­al­ists, not the jihadis–and they’re look­ing for a deal. As TIME Mag­a­zine reported in Feb­ru­ary, mem­bers of the Ba’athist/nationalist insur­gency are open to nego­ti­at­ing an end to their strug­gle with the U.S. “We are ready,” said a top insur­gent nego­tia­tor, “to work with you.” The Coun­cil is their Sinn Fein.

But talks may have bro­ken down. Mut­lak declined to con­firm any nego­ti­a­tions, but handed me a state­ment yes­ter­day that reads, in part:

What we can­not for­get is the respon­si­bil­ity for the con­tin­u­a­tion of casu­al­ties that is borne by a blind insis­tence on a mil­i­tary solu­tion to the insur­gency. That mil­i­tary solu­tion, over the course of now two long years, has proven to be clearly unreachable.

The U.S. and its Coali­tion part­ners, which cre­ated the con­di­tions that pre­vail in Iraq today by its ill-advised dis­so­lu­tion of the Army and its sweep­ing de-Ba’athification edicts, should drop its “hands-off“attitude toward nego­ti­a­tions and polit­i­cal solu­tions and join with all of us, those in the Iraqi gov­ern­ment and those who are out­side, in the com­mon work of find­ing a polit­i­cal solu­tion that will end the insur­gency, and bring about the new demo­c­ra­tic Iraq that we all desire.

This tells me the talks may have bro­ken down and that they’re look­ing to start them up again. Prob­a­bly because the Sun­nis are wor­ried about Shi’ite revenge squads. One could argue whether they have it com­ing or not, but that is, in effect, argu­ing for civil war. So I guess the choices are let the Shi’ites and the Kurds mas­sacre the Sun­nis or talk with the for­mer Ba’athists and bring them into the gov­ern­ment. Your pick.

And this ties in with my cur­rent obses­sion: how Iraq will rec­on­cile itself with its recent bloody past and the role of the Ba’ath Party. While many Sunni lead­ers stayed and took part in the regime, the cur­rent Shi’ite and Kur­dish lead­er­ship spent much of the Sad­dam years in exile–and they have long mem­o­ries of the oppres­sion of their peo­ple by a mil­i­tary largely com­manded by Sunni offi­cers. So it’s no sur­prise that many for­mer mem­bers of Saddam’s mil­i­tary think this is not only a polit­i­cal purge, but also a sec­tar­ian one. “They do not mean Ba’athists,” said Abu Laith (a pseu­do­nym), a cap­tain from Fal­lu­jah in Iraq’s new 8th Mech­a­nized Divi­sion. “They mean Sunnis.“

Abu Laith is a for­mer cap­tain in Iraq’s 6th Armored Divi­sion, which was based in Basra. He chose not to fight the Amer­i­cans in March 2003, when they rolled north out of Kuwait. But now he’s ready to take up arms against the new gov­ern­ment and the Amer­i­cans if talks break down and hard­lin­ers in the Jaa­fari gov­ern­ment push for a purge of the secu­rity forces. “We are pro­fes­sional men and we know how to fight,” he said.

Los­ing expe­ri­enced offi­cers like Abu Laith to the insur­gency is not some­thing the Amer­i­cans want to see, which is why they seem to be more open to talks than the Iraqi gov­ern­ment. The Jaa­fari cab­i­net and the Kurds are not in a for­giv­ing mood for a lot of rea­sons. But the choices are going to come to down to talk­ing or fight­ing. Dri­ving the for­mer Ba’athists away from talks and their jobs is invit­ing catastrophe.

“If the gov­ern­ment has 1,000 ene­mies now, they will have 10,000 ene­mies,” said Abu Laith. “We are fight­ing for our lives.”

Shahwani’s interview—Finally!

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A while back, I men­tioned that I would post the full al-Sharq inter­view with Gen­eral Muham­mad Abdul­lah Shah­wani, Iraq’s intel­li­gence chief, from Jan. 4. I got snowed under by elec­tion deadlines–sorry about that–but here it is finally. More infor­ma­tion on what the offi­cial line is on the insur­gency. Shahwani’s gen­er­ally been a good source, and I’m inclined to believe a lot of what he says–mainly because it matches a lot of what I’ve got­ten from other folks.

What is your opin­ion about the num­ber of the armed fight­ers in Iraq?

Offi­cially call them ter­ror­ists because they are doing ter­ror­ism against the peo­ple and they are out­laws. Their num­ber is between 20,000, 30,000, in the whole of Iraq, dis­trib­uted in the Sunni area. The peo­ple who live in this area emo­tion­ally sup­port them, and they are about 200,000 with­out offer­ing them money or logis­tic sup­port. For exam­ple, they don’t give any infor­ma­tion about their activ­i­ties if they have this information.

That means those 200,000 do not fight with the fight­ers?

It’s impos­si­ble that the fight­ers’ num­bers reach 200,000. These are those who live in those areas where the fight­ers are active–for exam­ple the right side of Mosul is com­pletely out of control–and in this area, the ter­ror­ist are very active with­out any infor­ma­tion about them from the local peo­ple, and very often they offer them shel­ter (hospitality).

Are those fight­ers from one group or many dif­fer­ent groups?

They are from the rem­nants of the Ba’ath Party, from Islamic extrem­ists and others.

The Iraqis and Amer­i­cans have claimed the Jor­dan­ian extrem­ist Abu Musab al-Zarqawi is behind this ter­ror­ism, but recently they’ve started point­ing to the Ba’ath party and its lead­ers. Is there any changes or some new facts?

There are no changes, but the Ba’ath Party has been orga­nized for a long time. What hap­pened is they reor­ga­nized them­selves and they are get­ting money and sup­port from their lead­ers in Syria. Their oper­a­tions are well-developed because or their large num­ber, their expe­ri­ence and their financ­ing ability.

How many Ba’athists are involved in the armed oper­a­tions now?

I can’t tell the exact num­ber but we expect the Ba’athists before num­bered two mil­lion and if we expect 20% of them are involved now that mean the num­ber is very huge and all of them are well-organized and armed and some start work­ing with them after they found them­selves job­less. Most of them are from the for­mer Iraqi army.

Who leads these orga­ni­za­tions now?

As we know the Ba’ath Party divided into many parts, and now there are three wings, the most pow­er­ful wing, which belongs to the for­mer regime, got a large quan­tity of money.

Who are those lead­ers?

There is Izzat al Douri, Mohammed Unis al Ahmed, who is mov­ing between Syria and Iraq and Sabawi al Has­san and other Ba’ath lead­ers who live in Syria.

Do you think that there is for­eigner or Arab sup­port?

They don’t need finan­cial sup­port. The Ba’ath Party, as you know, was the rich­est party in the world, and was gain­ing 5% from the oil ben­e­fits since 1970 for the party budget.

Has the Iraqi gov­ern­ment asked the Syr­ian gov­ern­ment to hand them over?

There have been such attempts, but there are no results so far.

But hasn’t the Syr­ian gov­ern­ment denied their exis­tence in their ter­ri­to­ries?

No. We are sure that they are in Syria and they are mov­ing eas­ily between Syria and Iraq border,

Are there any other Ba’ath lead­ers?

There is a group that split itself from the for­mer regime under the lead­er­ship of the Taih Abdul Karim and Naim Hadad and both work­ing inside Iraq.

Did the Amer­i­can mil­i­tary oper­a­tions in Fal­lu­jah lead to a decrease in ter­ror­ist oper­a­tions?

It became less only in Fallujah.

And in the rest of Iraq?

In gangs war which acted by the ter­ror­ism groups we can’t get the results as we get in the orga­nized army war, or the tra­di­tional war. The goal from Fal­lu­jah oper­a­tion was to destroy the ter­ror­ism gangs or to cap­ture their mem­bers but the results in Fal­lu­jah we could not cap­ture the ter­ror­ists or kill their lead­ers, we did not see or hear about cap­tur­ing or killing any big leader of ter­ror­ism, all the lead­ers of the ter­ror­ism have left Fal­lu­jah before the oper­a­tions started already.

And they went work­ing in other sites or hid­ing out­side Fal­lu­jah in each fight there is a goal and the goal of Fal­lu­jah oper­a­tion was to destroy the ter­ror­ist and their lead­er­ship but the goal was not done actu­ally in spite of the full con­trol­ling of Fallujah.

What are the sources of the armed group?

The Ba’ath Party, extrem­ist Islamist orga­ni­za­tion like Ansar al-Sunna, Tawhid w’al-Jihad, Ansar al-Islam, the 1920 Rev­o­lu­tion and other from these names and its reached about 12 groups.

All these groups you men­tioned are Sun­nis. Are there any Shi’ite groups?

The group of Moq­tada al-Sadr was fight­ing just like the oth­ers before, but now there is no Shi’ite group car­ry­ing weapons against the government.

The state­ment of the Iraqi offi­cials pointed to Iran and Syria con­sider them the two sources of sup­port­ing these oper­a­tions, is there any changes in this sub­ject?

I am per­son­ally did not notice any changes in their atti­tudes and the prob­lems still com­ing from those two coun­tries because the bor­ders are open and the sup­port is still com­ing in.

What are the effects of the armed oper­a­tions on the elec­tions process?

For sure there is a neg­a­tive effects on the elec­tions. Some of the Iraqi peo­ple will not be able to reach vot­ing cen­ters, and this will affect the elec­tion process.

What is the need for the intel­li­gence sys­tem in a demo­c­ra­tic regime?

There is no coun­try in the whole world that has no intel­li­gence sys­tem to pro­tect the coun­try and the peo­ple and mon­i­tor­ing the gangs like drug gangs and all other cases to stop them includ­ing all the cases that is related to the secu­rity of the coun­try. Usu­ally we observe and col­lect infor­ma­tion to be deliv­ered to the secu­rity forces so secu­rity forces can do its duties to pro­tect the country.

Do you think that the armed oper­a­tion will increase or decrease?

It depends on the elec­tion. We have to wait for the result and then we will see. As a secu­rity sys­tem we expect this kind of oper­a­tions will decrease within one year.

What are the most unse­cured areas in Iraq now?

Mis­tak­enly, they call it the Sunni tri­an­gle, but there are other unse­cured areas like Diyala, which has 50% of its pop­u­la­tion Shi’ite and also the north of Baby­lon, which is extended to reach Sow­era and Salman Pak. All these areas are very dif­fi­cult to reach, for exam­ple the area between Had­har and Mosul its out of con­trol and those armed group in the streets search­ing the peo­ple and also the area which extend from Shar­qat down to Baiji and Samara. All these areas are unse­cured in addi­tion to Ramadi, Fal­lu­jah and its sur­round­ing areas, while inside Bagh­dad there is Haifa street and Adhamiya and Dora and Ghaz­a­liya and Air­port road and all these areas are unse­cured and dan­ger­ous and may God give those ter­ror­ists their punishment.

200,000 in the insurgency?

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BAGHDAD — There’s been a lot of talk about the num­ber of fight­ers in the insur­gency, with Gen­eral Muham­mad Abdul­lah Shah­wani, the head of the Iraqi Intel­li­gence Ser­vices, being quoted as putting the num­ber at 200,000 — more than the num­ber of U.S. troops in country.

He’s been widely — and lit­er­ally — mis­in­ter­preted. I have a trans­la­tion of the orig­i­nal Jan. 4 inter­view in Al-Sharq news­pa­per and it’s clear he’s talk­ing about the pas­sive sup­port of the insur­gency. Here’s what he actu­ally said, as trans­lated by one of my fix­ers here in Baghdad:

What is your opin­ion about the num­ber of the armed fight­ers in Iraq?

Offi­cially call them ‘ter­ror­ists’ because they are doing ter­ror­ism against the peo­ple and they are out­side the law, Their num­ber is between 20,000 and 30,000, in all of Iraq, dis­trib­uted in the Sunni area. [The “Sunni Tri­an­gle” — CA] And the peo­ple who live in this area and emo­tion­ally sup­port them, are about 200,000 with­out offer­ing them money or logis­tic sup­port. As an exam­ple, they don’t give any infor­ma­tion about their activ­i­ties if they have this information.

That means those 200,000 do not fight with the fight­ers?

It’s impos­si­ble that the fight­ers’ num­bers reach 200,000. These are those who live in the areas where the fight­ers are active. For exam­ple, the right side [west­ern — CA] of Mosul is com­pletely out of con­trol and in this area, the ter­ror­ists are very active with­out any announce­ment [inform­ing — CA] about them for the local peo­ple, and very often they offer them shel­ter (hos­pi­tal­ity). (Empha­sis mine.)

I can’t believe Juan Cole missed this. He speaks Ara­bic, and he reads al-Sharq, often cit­ing it. I’m not say­ing that Shah­wani is right. I have my own the­o­ries that I’d like to con­firm before I pub­lish them. I’m just try­ing to cor­rect an erro­neous notion that is being floated in the blo­gos­phere right now.

Alas, I’m on a wicked dead­line at the moment, but after that’s over, I’ll clean up the trans­la­tion and post the whole interview.