Category Archives: Iraq

More from Abu Ghraib

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BAGHDAD — Well, it was bound to hap­pen. Aus­tralian papers and news shows are pub­lish­ing 60 new pho­tos from Abu Ghraib. They snap­shots were attained by the Amer­i­can Civil Lib­er­ties Union after a fed­eral judge ordered their release. That was delayed how­ever because the U.S. gov­ern­ment appealed the rul­ing.
And yet the pho­tos were leaked.
That the gov­ern­ment sat on these pho­tos for almost two years is stu­pid and point­less. _Of course_ they would get out. Did they really think they wouldn’t? They should have released all of them imme­di­ately and taken their blows. (A lit­tle fit of humil­ity or even — gasp — an apol­ogy would have been nice, too.) Even bet­ter: NOT TORTURING OR ABUSING PEOPLE TO BEGIN WITH.
These pho­tos are already being spun as “iso­lated inci­dents” that are no longer occur­ring, and that may be true. The Amer­i­cans may be “scared straight” by the reac­tion around the Mus­lim world to the pho­tos.
Alas, the same can’t be said for their allies in the Iraqi gov­ern­ment whose Shi’ite-dominated secu­rity forces are tor­tur­ing Sunni men to death and dump­ing their bod­ies at sewage plants in south­east Bagh­dad. Yeah, at least the U.S. never did that.
God, how did the bar get set so low?
These pho­tos come at a bad time, obvi­ously. The Dan­ish car­toon furor is still going on and the British have been caught on video beat­ing the snot out of teenagers in Basra. This will do lit­tle to calm things down. And I don’t even want to think how this may com­pli­cate things with Jill Car­roll, the Amer­i­can jour­nal­ist cur­rently being held in Iraq. (I’m not sure what to make of this report, though, in which Iraqi offi­cials say the United States actu­ally “delayed the release of sev­eral women”:http://www.ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=32147 pris­on­ers — the key demand of Carroll’s kid­nap­pers — so as not to appear to be nego­ti­at­ing with ter­ror­ists. _Disclaimer: Jill is a friend of mine and I know her pretty well._)
But this is just par for the course for this admin­is­tra­tion. When faced with choos­ing between secrecy and open­ness, stub­born­ness and a will­ing­ness to get things done, the Bush peo­ple will always choose the secret, stub­born path — even if the easy thing to do is also the right thing to do. If they can’t turn back the clock and undo the tor­ture at Abu Ghraib, then by all means come clean and get it out of the way. When faced with the kid­nap­ping of an Amer­i­can civil­ian, they could get her out by either speed­ing up pris­oner releases or at least not imped­ing it. They were going to hap­pen any­way! In both cases, doing the right thing is, well, the right thing to do and it’s good pol­i­tics.
But that’s too com­pli­cated for these guys.

“The Anger of God”: Al Qaeda claimed Hamra bombing

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BAGHDAD — Fol­low­ing up on my “pre­vi­ous entry”:http://www.back-to-iraq.com/archives/2006/02/aftermath_of_th_1.php, I found the “video claim of responsibility”:http://www.back-to-iraq.com/Files/al-Hamra.rmvb (60MB, RealVideo, sorry) for the Hamra bomb­ing “back in November”:http://www.back-to-iraq.com/archives/2005/11/the_hamras_been_1.php. It’s all in Ara­bic, but it’s pretty typ­i­cal _jihadi_ video stuff, albeit with bet­ter pro­duc­tion val­ues than I’ve seen usually.

Abu Musab al-Zarqawi’s orga­ni­za­tion, Al Qaeda in Iraq, did the oper­a­tion in the name of “Sheikh Omar Abdel-Rahman”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sheik_Omar_Abdel-Rahman, the “blind sheikh” cur­rently in prison for his role in a plot to blow up New York City land­marks. Early in the morn­ing on Nov. 18, two white vans laden with explo­sives approached the back wall of the Hamra com­pound. The first one, dri­ven by Abu Ayub al-Iraqi, was to clear a path for the sec­ond van. In the video, the bomb-makers claim to have loaded the sec­ond van with 2.5 _tons_ of explo­sives, but I find this doubt­ful. You can see, how­ever, that they used a num­ber of 155mm artillery shells.

Abu Abdul Malik al-Najdi, a Saudi, drove the sec­ond van. Along­side him was Abu Samain al-Tunisi, from Tunisia, who car­ried a Russ­ian machine gun to shoot any guards who arrived at the scene of the first bomb­ing and tried to pre­vent the sec­ond bomb from get­ting to the heart of the com­pound. This means they learned from the “unsuc­cess­ful Pales­tine Bomb­ing in October”:http://www.back-to-iraq.com/archives/2005/10/three_car_bombs.php, when the van car­ry­ing the main pay­load came under fire and was, pos­si­bly, stopped because the dri­ver was shot.

Also, you can see that they make use of the lat­est open-source intel­li­gence, mainly Google maps. In one part of the video, the plot­ters are shown por­ing over print­outs of the neigh­bor­hood, mark­ing routes of access. They look exactly like Google maps. The maps are also later used to show the planned points of attack.

Why attack the com­pound? The video claims it was in retal­i­a­tion for the tor­ture of Sun­nis at the hands of the Shi’ite-led Min­istry of Inte­rior as well as for the deaths of Iraqi offi­cers by Amer­i­cans inter­roga­tors. They also saw the com­pound as a den of for­eign intel­li­gence, the Badr Brigade and hous­ing for Kur­dish _pesh merga_ and West­ern secu­rity com­pa­nies. The attack also was billed a suc­cess in the video: “It was the anger of God to heal the hearts of believ­ers,” the video pro­claims. It ends with a record­ing of some­one who is claimed to be Zar­qawi him­self: “To the Islamic nation, we promise you we will con­tinue fight­ing until the last drop of blood.”

This claim of respon­si­bil­ity is unusual in that it came in Jan­u­ary, two months after the attack. It’s pos­si­ble the delay is because of the rel­a­tive fail­ure of the attack. Only Iraqi civil­ians were killed or injured and the sec­ond bomb didn’t make it to its intended tar­get. Whether that means al Qaeda will come back as they usu­ally do after ini­tial fail­ures is still unclear.

Aftermath of the Hamra Bombing

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Blood­stains on the Hamra walls
(Orig­i­nally uploaded by Bagh­dad Chris).

BAGHDAD — I finally made it over to where the bomb­ing of the “Hamra Hotel occurred in November”:http://www.back-to-iraq.com/archives/2005/11/the_hamras_been_1.php. The build­ing is being repaired, but it’s still grim inside. Blood­stains still adorn the walls where flee­ing res­i­dents pressed their hands against the wall for sup­port as they tum­bled down the stairs. Ceil­ings are still caved in. And the house that bore the brunt of the blast is sim­ply gone, with noth­ing more to mark it but a gap and a pile of bricks. Sur­round­ing homes had their facades sheared off.
All those peo­ple died.
It’s a grim reminder of what dan­gers exist for us in Iraq every day. And by “us” I don’t mean just jour­nal­ists or for­eign­ers, but I mean every per­son in Iraq. (More pho­tos “here”:http://www.flickr.com/photos/baghdadchris/sets/72057594060666710/)

Gridlock in Baghdad

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BAGHDAD — Things are, pretty obvi­ously, mov­ing slowly in the for­ma­tion of the new Iraqi gov­ern­ment. I ran into Mah­moud Oth­man, a ras­cally Kurd who has been a fix­ture of Iraqi pol­i­tics since the old CPA days, out­side the Iraqi Con­ven­tion Cen­ter today after renew­ing my press cre­den­tials. We stopped a moment to talk. Because his son is the spokesman for Pres­i­dent Jalal Tal­a­bani, I con­sider him fairly plugged in.
“Time is not on our side,” he said, com­plain­ing of the slow pace of gov­ern­ment nego­ti­a­tions. The results of the elec­tions have been known, more or less, for a long time but the var­i­ous party lead­ers are wait­ing for the offi­cial results to be released later this week before they enter into gov­ern­ment nego­ti­a­tions in earnest. And one of the major stum­bling blocks, of course, is who is going to be prime min­is­ter. Since the 555 list (United Iraqi Alliance) con­tains mul­ti­ple par­ties — Sadrists, Dawa Party, SCIRI and oth­ers — there is con­cern that the head of the UIA and the PM should not come from the same party. This could sink Vice Pres­i­dent Adel Abdul Mehdi’s chances to take the pre­mier­ship because he and the 555 head, Abdul Aziz al-Hakim, are both from SCIRI. Jaa­fari may yet stick around because of that.
Oth­man — and a major­ity of Iraqis, for that mat­ter — think Jaa­fari has been a weak and inef­fec­tual PM, but he would be accept­able to the other mem­bers of the coali­tion. Why? Min­istries in Iraq are handed out to var­i­ous par­ties who then hand out jobs and favors to fam­ily mem­bers, and tribal and polit­i­cal allies. A strong and pop­u­lar chief exec­u­tive would be an imped­i­ment to this crony­ism.
But the Amer­i­cans are push­ing for Mehdi because of his appar­ent pro-Western sen­ti­ment. He’s also con­sid­ered mal­leable. But in this case, he’d be manip­u­lated by the Amer­i­cans instead of, as in the case of Jaa­fari, other coun­tries that are spelled almost like “Iraq” but with an “n” instead of “q”. Accord­ing to _al-Mutamar_, a news­pa­per pub­lished by Ahmad Chalabi’s Iraqi National Con­gress, U.S. Ambas­sador Zal­may Khalilzad has wrung a com­mit­ment from Mehdi to reduce Iran­ian influ­ence in Iraq in return for sup­port­ing him for prime min­is­ter.
To that effect, Khalilzad is threat­en­ing to orga­nize an oppo­si­tion bloc in Par­lia­ment if Mehdi isn’t the can­di­date. The paper reports that this bloc’s can­di­date would be Barham Salih, from the Kur­dis­tan Demo­c­ra­tic Party Patri­otic Union of Kur­dis­tan. (Pre­sum­ably because get­ting Mehdi to leave SCIRI would be dif­fi­cult.) Salih is the cur­rent min­is­ter of plan­ning and a thor­oughly capa­ble, Western-educated guy. He’s a pro-American tech­no­crat through and through.
Despite the wran­gling over the pre­mier­ship, Oth­man said SCIRI would prob­a­bly keep the Inte­rior Min­istry, although Bayan Jabr would be out of job. The Sun­nis would keep the Defense Min­istry, but again, with some per­son­nel changes. Maybe they’ll get some­one who is up to the job instead of the feck­less, but well-meaning, Sadoun al-Dulaimi. “I think we will keep the for­eign min­istry,” Oth­man chuck­led, refer­ring to the uni­ver­sally regarded Hoshi al-Zebari. (I think he’s uni­ver­sally regarded because he’s never in the coun­try. Absence does make the Iraqi heart grow fonder, it would seem.) It’s almost cer­tain that Jalal Tal­a­bani will remain pres­i­dent.
So when we we see a new gov­ern­ment? Oth­man just smiled and walked away.

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Covering Saddam

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BAGHDAD — I will be part of the print pool for today’s ses­sion of Sad­dam Hussein’s trial, so I’ll be busy doing that until late tonight. I will post my report as soon as I can.
UPDATE 10:54 A.M.: We’re still wait­ing to go into the court­room, but some back­ground: Today will be the 10th ses­sion of the Iraqi High Tri­bunal, and the ninth meet­ing in the cour­t­house. The press room is a round cham­ber dom­i­nated by an expan­sively chan­de­liered ceil­ing and mar­ble floor tiles. The effect is spolied, how­ever, by the cheap desks and IBM ThinkPads the Amer­i­cans have set up for our use. But at least the Inter­net works, eh?
Secu­rity is rather unreal. We’re not allowed to bring in our own note­books, cell­phones, wal­lets or any­thing with metal on it. We can bring in our own pens, how­ever. We were screened mul­ti­ple times before allowed to even think about get­ting near the cour­t­house.
Nor­mal court hours are sup­posed to be 10:30 a.m. to 4 p.m., but I’m told the court has only started on time once. Usu­ally, it runs late.
For now, we’re all just wait­ing for game time.
UPDATE 11:38 A.M.: The trial has been delayed because of “pro­ce­dural issue,” accord­ing to a source here in the cour­t­house. While the source said he didn’t know what the prob­lem is, but it’s likely talks between the judges and the defense lawyers and what they’re going to do fol­low­ing their walk­out on Sun­day.
UPDATE 12:02 P.M.: The court has entered a closed ses­sion that could last up to 30 min­utes. Pre­sum­ably we’ll find out what the prob­lem when Head Judge Raouf Abdel Rah­man calls the court back into a reg­u­lar ses­sion. This is the fourth spe­cial ses­sion of the court with the first deal­ing with the absence of Sad­dam, the sec­ond with the expo­sure of an anoy­mous wit­ness and the third with pur­ported “secret” infor­ma­tion from defen­dant Barzan Ibrahim al-Hassan al-Tikriti, Saddam’s half-brother and the for­mer head of the Iraqi _mukhabarat._ After Barzan’s alleged bomb­shell — bizarrely rumored to be that he was offered the pres­i­dency of Iraq — the court recessed for a month.
UPDATE 1:17 P.M.: Well, we’re still wait­ing. We just had lunch, how­ever, so that was nice.