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WAGING THE WAR ON TERROR (2007)

Saturday, 20 January 2007

SHE HEEDED AMERICA’S CALL AND PAID WITH HER LIFE

All foreigners are targets in Iraq, Americans especially. Even those who come to the country to do good share the fate of those who come to kill.

Moments after Andrea Parhamovich, a 28-year-old from Ohio, left the offices of a Sunni Arab political party in Baghdad this week, her car was caught in withering crossfire and burst into flames, killing her and her two bodyguards. Unlike the 20,000 troops who have started arriving in the country as part of President George Bush's "surge", she was not a soldier who had come to Iraq to fight: her mission was to teach the people how to vote.

The ambush was a deadly reminder of the danger all foreigners face. It should, but probably will not, give pause to the plan to embed more US soldiers with Iraqi military units in Baghdad. Polls show about four out of five Iraqis in the capital approve of armed attacks on US-led forces.

It may have been an attempted kidnapping. Some of the attackers first attempted to break into her car. It was only when they failed to break the locks that they used grenades and machine guns. Another guard was killed and two more wounded in a second car.

Ms Parhamovich was working for the National Democratic Institute giving lessons to Iraqi political parties. She had gone to meet Sunni politicians of the Iraqi Islamic Party at its headquarters in the Yarmouk district. Most probably the insurgents were tipped off by a guard at the headquarters. Ms Parhamovich had followed her boyfriend, Michael Hastings, a Newsweek journalist, to Baghdad 15 months ago. In the US she raised funds for the liberal radio network Air America. In Baghdad, she first worked for the International Republican Institute and joined the National Democratic Institute at the end of 2006.

Most likely, the ambushers did not know who she was or what she was doing. Jill Carroll, the Christian Science Monitor correspondent, was kidnapped in similar circumstances in January last year after leaving the office of a political party.

There was little the guards could do. The first vehicle of the little convoy escaped and then returned to help the two survivors who had been wounded. Ms Parhamovich appears to have died in the first assault.

Much of west Baghdad is under the control of the insurgent fighters. "With God's assistance, we have succeeded in the destruction of two SUV vehicles belonging to the Zionist Mossad, attacking them by light and medium weapons," wrote one group on a Sunni insurgent website. The insurgents sometimes have armed units waiting in basements and safe houses for opportunities to attack as soon as they are tipped off by security guards, shopkeepers and cigarette sellers.

The extent of insurgent dominance in Baghdad is such that it will be extremely difficult for Mr Bush's "surge" in troop numbers to work effectively. It is easy enough for guerrillas to pull back, stockpile weapons or even leave Baghdad for a period. Mr Bush's answer is that US troops will stay in place instead of withdrawing as they did in the past. But saturation of whole districts of Baghdad with troops over an extended period would require a far bigger army than the US is ever likely to field in Iraq.

The Mehdi Army, the largest Shia militia, has been removing its checkpoints and adopting a low profile in order to avoid a confrontation with US troops. The Iraqi government has even arrested some of its militants and is holding them in what appears to be a carefully calculated ploy to make it difficult for the US to assault Shia neighbourhoods.

The Mehdi leaders may also calculate the natural friction between US troops and local people - particularly if US forces use heavy artillery and air power inflicting heavy civilian casualties - will ultimately work in their favour. The "surge" in US troop numbers does not resolve the problem that few Iraqi military units are loyal to the state before their own communities.

In one Sunni area of west Baghdad, US troops have distributed leaflets telling people to ring a hotline telephone number if they come under attack from sectarian militias. "But we don't know how long the Americans are going to be around," said one resident. "Maybe calling them on the phone is not a great idea."

The killing of Ms Parhamovich is typical of ambushes and assassinations in Baghdad. Kidnappings of foreigners - unlike the abduction of Iraqis- have tailed off in recent months because there are few foreigners outside the Green Zone and other heavily defended localities in Baghdad. The US has hinted that if the Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki does not move against the Shia militias, he might well lose Washington's support. That has led to a recurrence of rumours there might be so-called "moderate" government installed. But that would mean ignoring the results of the elections of 2005 won by the Shia parties. Washington's closest allies performed dismally at the polls then and are even more unpopular now. A new coalition would be more dependent on the US than that of Mr Maliki and would have less credibility among Iraqis.

Sunday, 18 February 2007

ROADSIDE BOMBS ARE NOTHING NEW

There is something ludicrous about the attempt by the US military in Iraq to persuade the world that the simple but devastating roadside bomb or IED (improvised explosive device) is a highly developed weapon requiring Iranian expertise. Here is the official police report of one IED attack. It reads: "At about 8.25am, 100 men of the X Regt with their colonel in charge, marched with their band from the military barracks at Y to their rifle range via fixed route. When they got to place Z a land mine exploded, killing three outright and wounding 22 others, three of these died shortly afterwards. The mine was connected to an electric battery by about 150 yards of cable. It is believed that there were only two men involved in carrying out this outrage."

This is fairly typical of a roadside bomb. It might have happened in Iraq yesterday- except it didn't. The IED in question exploded in the town of Youghal in County Cork on 21 June 1921. I happen to have read the Royal Irish Constabulary report on the incident, because I was born 29 years later about two miles away from the site.

IEDs have not changed much in the decades that followed. They have been used everywhere from Cyprus to Vietnam. They are cheap and easy to make, and can be detonated by a single person. They came as a nasty shock to the incoming US soldiers who invaded Iraq in 2003 because they were so well equipped to fight the Soviet army - American military procurement long ago detached itself from real conditions on the battlefield.

In early 2004 I met some US combat engineers, or sappers, charged with the lethal job of finding these bombs, which were nicknamed "convoy killers". Because the Pentagon was in a state of denial about their very existence, the sappers had received no training in locating them. A sergeant told me that he had obtained with great difficulty an old but still valid US army handbook, printed during the Vietnam War, about IEDs. The book had not been reissued because to do so might appear to contradict the Pentagon's line that Iraq was not like Vietnam. The US Army is pretending that "explosively formed penetrators" are a new form of weapon which could only have been obtained in Iran. It claimed last week that the so-called EFPs had been supplied to the Shia militias and had killed 170 US troops. But the US has been primarily fighting a Sunni insurgency, and has had only intermittent clashes with Shia militiamen.

Sophisticated weapons may be obtained in Iraq, if the money is there to pay for them. Until recently smugglers were moving weapons out of Iraq into Saudi Arabia - prices were higher there. A favourite method of moving them was to tie the guns under sheep, so they were concealed by the wool, and to pay the shepherds to drive them across the frontier.

Wednesday, 28 February 2007

MAKING THE WORLD A MORE TERRIFYING PLACE

Innocent people across the world are now paying the price of the "Iraq effect", with the loss of hundreds of lives directly linked to the invasion and occupation by American and British forces.

An authoritative US study of terrorist attacks after the invasion in 2003 contradicts the denials of George Bush and Tony Blair that the war is not to blame for an upsurge in fundamentalist violence worldwide. The research is said to be the first to attempt to measure the "Iraq effect" on global terrorism. It found the number killed in jihadist attacks around the world has risen dramatically since the Iraq war began. The count, excluding the Arab-Israel conflict, shows in the 18 months between 11 September 2001 and the start of the Iraq war in March 2003 some 729 people were killed, while in the following 42 months to September 2006, the number of deaths rose to 5,420 - a three-fold rise in the number of deaths per year, from 486 to 1,549. As well as strikes in Europe, attacks have also increased in Chechnya and Kashmir since the invasion. The research was carried out by the Centre on Law and Security at the NYU Foundation for Mother Jones magazine. Iraq was the catalyst for a ferocious fundamentalist backlash, according to the study, which says that the number of those killed by Islamists within Iraq rose from seven to 3,122. Afghanistan, invaded by US and British forces in direct response to the September 11 attacks, saw a rise from very few before 2003 to 802 since then. In the Chechen conflict, the toll rose from 234 to 497. In the Kashmir region, as well as India and Pakistan, the total rose from 182 to 489, and in Europe from none to 297.

Two years after declaring "mission accomplished" in Iraq President Bush insisted: "If we were not fighting and destroying the enemy in Iraq, they would not be idle. They would be plotting and killing Americans across the world and within our borders. By fighting these terrorists in Iraq, Americans in uniform are defeating a direct threat to the American people."

Mr Blair has also maintained that the Iraq war has not been responsible for Muslim fundamentalist attacks such as the 7/ 7 London bombings which killed 52 people. "Iraq, the region and the wider world is a safer place without Saddam[Hussein]," Mr Blair declared in July 2004. Announcing the deployment of 1,400 extra troops to Afghanistan earlier this week- raising the British force level in the country above that in Iraq- the Prime Minister steadfastly denied accusations by MPs that there was any link between the Iraq war and unravelling of security elsewhere.

Last month John Negroponte, director of National Intelligence in Washington, said he was "not certain" that the Iraq war had been a recruiting factor for al-Qa’ida and insisted: "I wouldn't say that there has been a widespread growth in Islamic extremism beyond Iraq, I really wouldn't."

Yet the report points out that the US administration's own National Intelligence Estimate on "Trends in Global Terrorism: Implications for the United States" - partially declassified last October - stated that "the Iraq war has become the 'cause célèbre' for jihadists and is shaping a new generation of terrorist leaders and operatives." The new study, by Peter Bergen and Paul Cruickshank, argues that, on the contrary, "the Iraq conflict has greatly increased the spread of al-Qa’ida ideological virus, as shown by a rising number of terrorist attacks in the past three years from London to Kabul, and from Madrid to the Red Sea.

"Our study shows that the Iraq war has generated a stunning increase in the yearly rate of fatal jihadist attacks, amounting to literally hundreds of additional terrorist attacks and civilian lives lost. Even when terrorism in Iraq and Afghanistan is excluded, fatal attacks in the rest of the world have increased by more than one third."

In trying to gauge the "Iraq effect", the authors focused on the rate of terrorist attacks in two periods - from September 2001 to 30 March 2003 (the day of the Iraq invasion) and 21 March 2003 to 30 September 2006. Their research is based on the MIPT-RAND terrorism database, a trusted source.

The report's assertion that the Iraq invasion has had a far greater impact in radicalising Muslims is widely backed by security personnel in the UK. Senior anti-terrorist officials told The Independent that the attack on Iraq, and the now-discredited claims by the US and British governments about Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction, had led to far more young Muslims engaging in extremist activity than the invasion of Afghanistan two years previously.

Dame Eliza Manningham-Buller, head of the Secret Service (MI5), said recently: "In Iraq attacks are regularly videoed and the footage is downloaded into the internet.

"Chillingly, we see the results here. Young teenagers are being groomed to be suicide bombers. The threat is serious, is growing and will, I believe, be with us for a generation."

In Afghanistan the most active of the Taliban commanders, Mullah Dadullah, acknowledged how the Iraq war has influenced the struggle in Afghanistan.

"We give and take with the mujahedin in Afghanistan," he said. The most striking example of this has been the dramatic rise in suicide bombings in Afghanistan, a phenomenon not seen through the 10 years of war with the Russians in the 1980s.

The report said the effect of Iraq on various jihadist conflicts was influenced by a number of factors, such as whether a country has troops in Iraq, geographical proximity to the war zone, the empathy felt for the Iraqis and the exchange of information between Islamist groups. "This may explain why jihadist groups in Europe, Arab countries, and Afghanistan were more affected by the Iraq war than other regions", it said.

Russia, like the US, has used the language of the "war on terror" in its actions in Chechnya, and al-Qa’ida and its associates have entrenched themselves in the border areas of Pakistan from where they have mounted attacks in Kashmir, Pakistan and India.

Statistics for the Arab-Israel conflict also show an increase, but the methodology is disputed in the case of Palestinian attacks in the occupied territories and settler attacks on Palestinians.

Kim Sengupta and Patrick Cockburn

Tuesday, 20 March 2007

FOUR YEARS SINCE LIBERATION AND DRENCHED IN BLOOD

"I have fled twice in the past year," said Kassim Naji Salaman as he stood beside his petrol tanker outside the town of Khanaqin in central Iraq this weekend. "I and my family used to live in Baghdad but we ran for our lives when my uncle and nephew were killed and we moved into a house in the village of Kanaan in Diyala."

Mr Salaman hoped he and his family, all Sunni, would be safer in a Sunni district. But almost everywhere in Iraq is dangerous. "Militiamen kidnapped my brother Natik, who used to drive this tanker, and forced him into the boot of their car," he continued. "When they took him out they shot him in the head and left his body beside the road. I am frightened of going back to Kanaan where my family are refugees because the militiamen would kill me as well." Iraqis expected their lives to get better when the US and Britain invaded with the intention of overthrowing Saddam Hussein four years ago today. They were divided on whether they were being liberated or occupied but almost no Iraqis fought for the old regime in 2003. Even his own Sunni community knew that Saddam had inflicted almost a quarter of a century of hot and cold war on his own people. He had reduced the standard of living of Iraqis, owners of vast oil reserves, from a level close to Greece to that of Mali.

No sooner had Saddam Hussein fallen than Iraqis were left in no doubt that they had been occupied not liberated. The army and security services were dissolved. As an independent state Iraq ceased to exist. "The Americans want clients not allies in Iraq," lamented one Iraqi dissident who had long lobbied for the invasion in London and Washington.

Guerrilla war against the US forces by the five million strong Sunni community erupted with extraordinary speed and ferocity. By summer 2003, whenever I went to the scene of a bomb attack or an ambush of US soldiers I would find jubilant Iraqis dancing for joy around the pools of drying blood on the road or the smouldering Humvee vehicles.

For Iraqis, every year has been worse than the last since 2003. In November and December last year alone 5,000 civilians were murdered, often tortured to death, according to the UN. This toll compares to 3,000 killed in 30 years of conflict in Northern Ireland. Many Iraqis have voted with their feet, some two million fleeing- mostly to Syria and Jordan - since President George Bush and Tony Blair ordered US and British troops across the Iraqi border four years ago today. So dangerous is it to travel anywhere in Iraq outside Kurdistan that it is difficult for journalists to provide evidence of the slaughter house the country has become without being killed themselves. Mr Blair and Mr Bush have long implied that the violence is confined to central Iraq. This lie should have been permanently nailed by the Baker-Hamilton report written by senior Republicans and Democrats, which examined one day last summer when the US military had announced that there had been 93 attacks and discovered that the real figure was 1,100. In other words the violence was being understated by a factor of 10.

Diyala is one of the most violent provinces. It used to be one of the richest, with rich fruit orchards flourishing on the banks of the Diyala river before it joins the Tigris south of Baghdad. But its sectarian geography is lethal. Its population is a mixture of Sunni and Shia with a small Kurdish minority. For at least two years it has been convulsed by ever-escalating violence.

It is impossible for a foreign journalist to travel to Diyala from Baghdad unless he or she is embedded with the US forces. I knew, having made the journey before, that it was possible to get to Khanaqin, in the Kurdish controlled north-east corner of Diyala by taking a road passing through Kurdish villages along the Iraqi side of the Iranian border.

We started in Arbil, the Kurdish capital, and drove through the mountains to Sulaimaniyah three hours to the east. The Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK), the party of Jalal Tala-bani, the Iraqi President, arranged a guide who knew the road to take us on to Khanaqin the following morning. We drove out of the mountains through the Derbendikan tunnel and then followed the right bank of the Diyala river, swollen by torrential rain, until we got to the tumble down town of Kalar. It is important here to turn right over a long bridge across the Diyala because the next town on the road, Jalawlah, is contested between Kurds and Arab Sunni. The road then goes in the direction of the Iranian border until it reaches Khanaqin, which is under PUK control.

We met a tribal leader from Jalawlah called Ghassim Mohammed Shati, who was also a police captain. He said: "The centre of the town is safe enough but my father and brother and aunt were murdered on the outskirts in March 2005." Surprisingly Mr Shati did not favour shooting the insurgents who had killed his relatives. "The only solution is to give employment to the police and army officers who were sacked and now support al-Qa’ida. If they get jobs they will stop," he said. Everybody agreed the situation in Diyala was worse than ever. And the insurgents say they are setting up the Islamic emirate of Diyala.

Earlier this month the US, with much fanfare, sent 700 soldiers to Diyala to restore government authority. It fought a ferocious battle with insurgents in which it lost two armoured "Stryker" vehicles. But, as so often in Iraq, in the eyes of Iraqis the presence or absence of American forces does not make as much difference to who holds power locally as the US military command would like to believe. Supposedly they are supporting 20,000 Iraqi security forces, but earlier this year it was announced that 1,500 local police were to be fired for not opposing the insurgents. At one embarrassing moment US and Iraqi military commanders were claiming at a video-link press conference that they had a firm grip on the situation in Baquba when insurgents burst into the mayor's office, kidnapped him and blew it up.

Power in Diyala is fragmented. As in the rest of Iraq it is difficult to know who is in charge. The Iraqi government, whose ministers issue optimistic statements about the improving state of their country when on visits to London or Washington, carries surprisingly little weight outside the Green Zone in Baghdad. Often its interventions do nothing but harm. For instance the main source of employment in Khanaqin is the large border crossing from Iran at Monzariyah. Cross-border traffic provided 1,000 jobs. But the government has closed the crossing point and the road that used to be crowded with trucks a few months ago is now empty. No rations, on which 60 per cent of Iraqis depend, have been delivered in Diyala for seven months. Those delivering them say it is too dangerous to do so since the drivers of trucks containing the rations are often deemed to be collaborators by insurgents and shot to death. In Mr Salaman's village of Kanaan, five men were burnt to death for guarding two petrol stations.

A difficulty in explaining Iraq to the outside world is that since 2003 the US and British governments have produced a series of spurious turning points. There was the capture of Sad-dam Hussein in December 2003, the supposed hand back of sovereignty in June 2004, the two elections and the new constitution in 2005 and - recently - the military "surge" into Baghdad. In all cases the benefits of these events were invented or exaggerated.

After Sunni fundamentalists blew up the golden-domed Shia al-Askari shrine in Samarra in February last year, central Iraq was torn apart by sectarian fighting. Baghdad broke up into a dozen hostile cities, Sunni and Shia, which fired mortars at each other. Government ministries, if controlled by different communities, fought each other. The Shia-controlled Interior Ministry kidnapped 150 people from the Sunni-held Higher Education Ministry and killed many of them. For a brief moment last November, after the mid-term elections in the US and the Baker-Hamilton report, it seemed that the US was going to start negotiations with its myriad enemies in around Iraq. But in the event President Bush refused to admit failure. Some 21,500 troop reinforcements are being sent to Baghdad and Anbar province to the west. So far there is little sign that the "surge" will really change the course of the war. Diyala, its once-prosperous villages now becoming heavily armed Sunni or Shia fortresses, is a symbol of the failure of the occupation that began four years ago. From an early moment it was evident that only the Kurds in Iraq fully supported the US and British presence.

The invasion four years ago failed. It overthrew Saddam but did nothing more. It destabilised the Middle East. It tore apart Iraq. It was meant to show the world that the US was the world's only superpower that could do what it wanted. In fact it demonstrated that the US was weaker than the world supposed. The longer the US refuses to admit failure the longer the war will go on.

Thursday, 12 April 2007

UNDER SIEGE

"If you go in the streets by yourself, you'll be dead in 15 minutes," says Khasro Goran, the deputy governor of Mosul, the second largest Iraqi city. An able, confident man, he speaks from experience, having survived more assassination attempts than almost any political leader in Iraq. The one-hour car journey to Goran's office from the Kurdish capital, Arbil, underlines the dangers. He has sent guards, many of them his relatives, to pick me up from my hotel. They travel in slightly battered civilian cars, chosen to blend in with the rest of the traffic, wear civilian jackets and T-shirts, and keep their weapons concealed.

We drive at great speed across the Greater Zaab river, swollen with flood water, into the province of Nineveh, of which the ancient city of Mosul is the capital. The majority of its 1.8 million people are Sunni Arabs and one third are Kurds, along with 25,000 Christians. Arabs and Kurds have been fighting for control of the city for four years. Every day brings its harvest of dead. "Five Kurds were killed here yesterday," says one of the guards dolefully.

The weapon of choice in Mosul these days is the vehicle-borne suicide bomb. We pass the headquarters of the PUK, one of the two main Kurdish parties, where 19 people were killed by just such a bomb last year. I can see where a second suicide driver targeted another PUK branch office close to the light blue dome of a mosque in March, killing a further three people and wounding 20.

The city is not as obviously dangerous as Baghdad, where whole districts are intermittently controlled by Sunni insurgents or Shia militiamen. At a quick glance there even appear to be reasons for optimism in Mosul, since there are plenty of relaxed-looking policemen patrolling in their blue and white cars and directing traffic.

But such signs are misleading as an indication of uncontested government authority. In Mosul, the police are mostly Arab, while the two Iraqi army divisions are largely Kurdish. Out of 20,000 police, Goran believes that half belong to or sympathise with the Sunni resistance. When Saddam Hussein was sentenced to death last November, one policeman stuck a picture of the former leader on his windscreen by way of protest. We drive quickly through the crumbling walls of ancient Nineveh, capital of the Assyrian Empire, and past a large mound, beneath which is the tomb of Jonah, who, having survived his unfortunate experience with the whale, was buried here. Traffic is lighter than I remember during my visit last year. This is good news from the point of view of safety, because we are unlikely to get caught in a traffic jam, where other drivers have time to notice that I am obviously a foreigner and that the guards are wearing civilian shirts but camouflage trousers.

Unfortunately, the reason why there are so few vehicles on the streets turns out to be bad news for the people of Mosul and Nineveh province. Syria has suspended supplies of fuel. As a result, the province is getting only 10 per cent of its overall fuel needs and 4 per cent of its normal supply of petrol. Food rations are no longer being delivered. Water and sewage, as well as hospitals, are affected.

We finally speed into Goran's heavily fortified headquarters, a former Baath party centre on the left bank of Tigris river taken over by the Kurdistan Democratic Party, of which he is head in Mosul. Its elaborate defences, high concrete walls and watchtowers, would do credit to a castle in a particularly disturbed part of medieval Europe. The sentries indicate to cars on a nearby roundabout that they are getting too close to the headquarters by firing bursts from their automatic rifles into the air.

Goran, though deputy governor, is a Kurd and more powerful than the Arab governor. He is very different from those politicians in Baghdad who never leave the Green Zone except to make numerous foreign trips, during which they exude ill-informed optimism about security. He has a clear vision of the strengths and weaknesses of the government's position in Mosul. He points out that, unlike Baghdad and the provinces of central Iraq, insurgents do not permanently control any single area. His claim that government security forces have arrested many "terrorists" is confirmed by other security sources.

The difference between Mosul and Baghdad is that in Mosul the government can at least rely on the Kurdish community as supporters. In the capital, government has nobody on whose loyalty it can wholly depend. On 23 March, the deputy prime minister, Salam al-Zubaie, was badly injured by a bomber who got near him with the connivance of his own bodyguards. The government's only response was to consider hiring another, non-Iraqi, security company.

Goran admits that the insurgents have a sort of "shadow" government in Mosul that competes with the real government. "There are eyes everywhere knowing what you do," he says. They visit hairdressers and beauty salons to make sure they give only "Islamic" haircuts. Many Kurds are fleeing the city because of assassinations and intimidation. Some 70,000 have already left. Kurdish students at Mosul university, one of the largest and previously among the most distinguished in Iraq, dare not stay.

Aside from wholly Kurdish units, the Iraqi government's own security forces are thoroughly infiltrated. This is true not just in Mosul but throughout Iraq. It is a crucial point that President Bush and Tony Blair never seem to understand when they explain that they are training and equipping some 265,000 police and soldiers in Iraq. The real problem for Washington and London is that most of these men are loyal to their own communities - Shia, Sunni or Kurdish-before they are loyal to the government in Baghdad.

Mosul has already seen examples of this. In November 2004, the city police force went home, effectively handing over control of Mosul to insurgents who captured 30 police stations and $41m (£20m) in arms. Things have improved since then, but possibly not by as much as the Iraqi government and the US would like to imagine. The police are not only Sunni Arabs. Many of them come from the powerful and numerous al-Juburi tribe. This makes it politically very difficult to fire or demote them.

It is not only the police whose loyalties are suspect. On 6 March, insurgents from the Islamic State in Iraq (ISI) movement- of which al-Qa’ida in Iraq is a part - stormed Badoush prison north-west of Mosul. They freed 68 prisoners, of whom 57 were non-Iraqis. It was the biggest jail-break in Iraq since the occupation started in 2003.

Goran cynically points out that there are supposedly 1,200 guards at Badoush, of whom 400 to 500 were present during the attack, but did nothing to halt it. He suspects that many of the guards, who get their orders not from him but from the Ministry of Justice in Baghdad, had colluded with the insurgents in the break-out. He suggests that the jail be moved to Basra or into Kurdistan for greater security.

It is allegiance, not training, equipment and numbers that determines the effectiveness of the Iraqi security forces. For instance, frontier guards on the border with Syria to the west of Mosul mostly come from the Sunni-Arab Shammar tribe. They are unlikely to be very effective because many of the insurgents and smugglers whom they are supposed to stop also belong to the Shammar, who live on both sides of the Iraqi-Syrian frontier.

I have always liked Mosul. It feels a more ancient city than Baghdad. I enjoyed climbing the ancient stone streets in the Christian quarter too narrow and rutted by carts over the centuries for any car to enter. Even today, from Goran's heavily defended KDP headquarters, there is a wonderful view across the shimmering Tigris towards the old city, with its elegant minarets, on the west side of the river.

I first visited Mosul in 1978 and saw the tourist sights. I spent a few days here in 1991 during the first Gulf War. But the day in the city I most vividly recall was 11 April 2003, when the Iraqi army collapsed and Kurdish forces poured in. It was a moment full of lessons for the future.

At first, there was a sense of jubilation as people realised that Saddam Hussein's iron rule was over. Even the looters had a cheery air. Scores of young men were breaking down the doors of the Central Bank building and reappearing, clutching great bundles of Iraqi dinars. A small yellow KDP flag floated from one end of the governor's office and an Iraqi flag from the other but looters were in charge.

I was fascinated by one determined man who was trying, unaided, to drag a vast and hideously ornate gold and purple sofa he had found in the governor's sanctum, down the stairs and into the street. He would go to one end of the sofa and laboriously move it a few feet. Then he would repeat the process at the other end. I kept running into the man in the course of the day as he doggedly moved his sofa across Mosul's main square towards his home. The mood began to change in the course of the morning. The hotels were on fire and men were breaking into the local museum. At first, people blamed criminals released by Saddam under an amnesty the previous year. Others wondered why the Americans had not arrived. The answer was they had only 2,000 men in the whole of northern Iraq and these had been sent to secure the Kirkuk oilfields. The Americans - and this was to be the pattern for the next four years - could not control Mosul without the Kurds. Iraqi nationalism was not entirely dead. I went looking for American troops and found some of them at a checkpoint on the outskirts. They had raised the Stars and Stripes. Suddenly, a man popped up from behind a wall nearby and vigorously waved an Iraqi flag. The soldiers, fearing he might lob a grenade, opened fire but he dodged down and escaped.

By evening, most of the Arab majority in Mosul had concluded that the problem was not criminals but Kurds. I went to the Republican hospital where Dr Ayad Ramadani, the hospital director, said: "The Kurdish militias are looting the city."

There was a frightening air of anarchy. As I spoke to the doctor there was a deafening chatter of a heavy machine-gun nearby. Some men had been trying to lift the body of a dead relative, wrapped in a white shroud, into the back of a pick-up. At the sound of the firing, the driver of the pick-up panicked and drove off, leaving the mourners shaking their fists at the departing vehicle.

Vigilantes began to appear and- again a sign for the future - they were organised by the local mosques. Rudimentary barricades made of rocks appeared in the streets. There was a growing feeling of rage among the Arabs of Mosul. I had gone to see whether I could stay with the Assyrian archbishop in the Christian quarter. When I got back to the car, our driver, Yusuf, normally a taciturn man, was looking shaken. He explained that a crowd had come out of a mosque while I was away. They noticed that our car had numberplates showing it came from Arbil in Kurdistan. They wanted to know what a Kurd was doing in their city and clearly suspected Yusuf of being a looter. He said: "One of them yelled, "Let's kill him and burn the car."Fortunately, wiser counsels prevailed, but it was obvious that we had to get out of Mosul as fast as possible.

The Americans did make a serious effort to cope with the problems of Mosul. General David Petraeus, now overall US commander in Iraq, then commanded 20,000 men of the 101st Airborne Division, based in Mosul, during the first year of the occupation. He avoided many of the crass errors being made by Paul Bremer, the US viceroy in Baghdad.

Petraeus could see that he had to deal with a predominantly Sunni Arab city with a proud nationalist and military tradition. Nineveh province was full of ex-army and ex-security officers who needed to be conciliated. They would never love the occupation, but they might be persuaded not to join the armed resistance. Bremer dissolved the Iraqi armed forces - the symbol of Iraqi independence- and thus made a gift to the resistance of tens of thousands of young men with military training but no job. Petraeus tried to evade the ruinous consequences of de-Baathification by getting officers to sign a document renouncing the Baath party. On a wet day on a hilltop outside Mosul in January 2004, I watched as 2,243 former officers raised their right hands and solemnly renounced the Baath and all its works. There was no doubt about the officers' motives. They wanted jobs. Major Faiq Ahmed Abed, a grizzled veteran with 26 years' military service, had served in the Republican Guard but had not been paid since the previous April. "Since then, I have been selling my furniture to feed my children," he said.

Petraeus kept the returning Iraqi exiles, who were gaining power in Baghdad, at arm's length. Several had turned up in Mosul and politely suggested that they were willing to carry out any non-competitive contract the US military might like to put their way. Petraeus wanted to hold elections as quickly as possible to give the Iraqis he was cooperating with some legitimacy. When he left Mosul in early 2004, I asked him what was the most important advice he could give to his successor. He said, after reflecting for some moments, that it was, "not to align too closely with one ethnic group, political party, tribe, religious group or social element".

By the end of the year, the conciliatory policies pursued by Petraeus were in ruins. In November, during the US assault on Fallujah, the Mosul police force revolted to a man. So, too, had all the soldiers, aside from the Kurds, at the army base in the centre of town. US army and Kurdish units had to be rushed into the city to regain control. The Kurds had detested Petraeus because he had avoided aligning too closely with them. Today, there are two Iraqi army divisions, most of the soldiers Kurdish, and one US battalion in Mosul. After November 2004 the Americans in the city became, in the eyes of many Sunnis, one more tribe allied to the Kurds. The city today lives on its nerves. Bombings and assassinations are not as frequent as in Baghdad but enough to make life hideously insecure. A message from a professor at Mosul University, who did not want her name published, sent last November, conveys the grim flavour of life. "The condition here is worsening more and more," she writes. "My office at the college was in havoc by the shrapnel and huge storm of a huge explosion just in the early morning. If I were in my office I should have been torn to pieces.

"A suicidal explosion by a huge fuel vehicle took place at 7am targetting at a police centre. The area includes a paediatrics hospital, a neighbourhood, a filling station where a long line of waiting people (mostly the poor who cannot afford buying benzene from the black market). The casualties were mostly them, children at the hospital, a whole family who were by chance there and some officials going to their offices in the university. It was more horrible than one can imagine or describe."

The professor did not expect life in Mosul to get better and her pessimistic expectations have been fulfilled. For centuries, Mosul has been one of the great cosmopolitan cities of the Middle East. Sadly, this is now ending. Kurds are in flight. So, too, are Christians. Fanatical Jihadi Islamists persecute them as being no different from US soldiers. When US soldiers were accused of damaging a mosque in a raid, two Christians churches in Mosul were blown up by way of retaliation.

The fighting is likely to get worse. Under article 140 of the Iraqi constitution passed by a referendum in 2005 - though Nineveh province voted against - there must be a referendum on joining the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) by the end of 2007. The Kurds are determined to get back the lands from which they were expelled by Saddam Hussein and his predecessors. Above all, they want Kirkuk and its oilfields. The vote will be by district, so existing provinces, whose boundaries were gerrymandered by Sad-dam Hussein, will cease to exist. The Kurds expect large areas of eastern, northern and western Nineveh province will join the KRG, but not Mosul city, because it has an Arab majority. The Kurds are absolutely determined to get what they consider their rights after years of persecution, expulsion and genocide. They rightly think that they now have an historic opportunity to create a powerful near-independent state within Iraq: They are America's only effective allies in Iraq; they are powerful in Baghdad; the non-Kurdish parts of the Iraqi government are weak. Goran confirms that they may postpone the referendum for a short period, but not for long. He suspects that the province will split into two, one Kurdish and part of the KRG and the other Arab.

The history of Mosul over the past four years since the fall of Saddam Hussein has some lessons for resolving the conflict in Iraq in the long term. Many of the crass errors made in the first days of the occupation in Baghdad did not happen in Mosul. American and Kurdish commanders have often been able men. But the end result has been disastrously similar in both cities. Perhaps the most crucial lesson is that Iraqi communities mean exactly what they say and will fight to get it. In Iraq, this means that the Kurds are going to recover their lost lands; the Sunni are going to get the Americans out and the Shia, as the majority, are determined to be the primary force in government.

Friday, 4 May 2007

DO NOT TRUST THE IRAQI POLICE

"Be careful," warned a senior Iraqi government official living in the Green Zone in Baghdad, "be very careful and above all do not trust the police or the army."

He added that the level of insecurity in the Iraqi capital is as bad now as it was before the US drive to make the city safe came into operation in February.

The so-called "surge", the dispatch of 20,000 extra American troops to Iraq with the prime mission of getting control of Baghdad, is visibly failing.

There are army and police checkpoints everywhere but Iraqis are terrified because they do not know if the men in uniform they see there are, in reality, death squad members.

Omar, the 15-year-old brother-in-law of a friend, was driving with two other boys through al-Mansur in west Baghdad a fortnight ago. Their car was stopped at a police checkpoint. Most of the police in Baghdad are Shia. They took him away saying they suspected that his ID card was a fake. The real reason was probably that only Sunnis use the name Omar. Three days later he was found dead.

I was driving through central Baghdad yesterday. Our car was pulled over at an army checkpoint. I had hung my jacket from a hook above the window so nobody could easily see I was a foreigner. A soldier leaned in the window and asked who I was. We were lucky. He merely looked surprised when told I was a foreign journalist and said softly: "Keep well hidden."

The problem about the US security plan is that it does not provide security. It had some impact to begin with and the number of bodies found went down. This was mainly because the Shia Mehdi Army was stood down by its leader, Muqtada al-Sadr.

But the Sunni insurgent groups increased the number of sectarian suicide bombings against Shia markets. Now the sectarian body count is on the rise again. Some 30 bodies, each shot in the head, were found on Wednesday alone.

The main new American tactic is proving counterproductive. This is the sealing-off of entire neighbourhoods so there is only a single entrance and exit.

Speaking of Sunni districts such as al-Adhamiyah, a government official said: "We are creating mini-Islamic republics."

This is borne out by anecdotal evidence. The uncle of a friend called Mohammed (nobody wants their full name published) died of natural causes. The family, all Sunni, were unable to reach the nearest cemetery in Abu Ghraib. Instead they went to one in Adhamiyah. As they entered, armed civilians, whom they took to be al-Qa’ida from their way of speaking, asked directly: "Are any of you Shia?" Only when reassured that they were all Sunni were they allowed to bury their relative.

The failure of the "surge" comes because it is not accompanied by any political reconciliation. On the contrary the government is fac-tionalised. The two vice-presidents, Tariq al-Hashimi, a Sunni, and Adel Abdel Mehdi, a Shia, may make conciliatory statements, but one Iraqi observer noted: "Tariq only employs Sunni and Adel only Shia."

The Sunni feel they are fighting for their lives. Their last redoubts in east Baghdad (aside from Adhamiyah) are being overrun by the Mehdi Army. The Sunni insurgent groups, notably al-Qa’ida, are on the offensive in west Baghdad, where they are strongest. When the Americans succeed in driving away Shia militia their place is taken, not by government forces, but by Sunni militia.

People in Baghdad are terrified of being killed by a bomb or bundled into the boot of a car and murdered. Less dramatic, but equally significant in forcing people to flee Iraq for Jordan or Syria is the sheer difficulty of maintaining a normal life. Much of the trade in the city used to take place in open-air markets. But only one is now open. This is in Karada, but many people no longer go there because it has come under repeated attack.

So many areas are now sealed off that there are continuous traffic jams. If drivers try to avoid the jam by driving off the main road they may enter an area where militiamen may kill them. One friend who got back from Syria found that, because of an attack on a government patrol, his neighbourhood was closed to traffic. "I had to walk for 40 minutes with my suitcase," he lamented.

Even in dangerous neighbourhoods such as Beitawin, off Saadoun Street in central Baghdad, notorious for its criminal gangs even in Saddam's time, people were queuing for petrol for hours yesterday evening because they have no choice.

A bizarre flavour has been given to Saadoun Street because the government has encouraged artists to paint the giant concrete blast barriers with uplifting, if unlikely, scenes of mountain torrents, meadows in spring and lakeside scenes. Many of the pictures, all in garish greens, blues and yellows, look more like Switzerland than Iraq.

Muqtada al-Sadr, for his part, is encouraging artists to paint the blast barriers with scenes illustrating the anguish inflicted on the Iraqi people by the US.

The only "gated community" that functions successfully in Baghdad is the Green Zone itself, the four square miles on the right bank of the Tigris that is home to the government and the US embassy. It is sealed off from the rest of Iraq by multiple security barriers and fortifications. Entering the zone recently I was questioned and searched, at different stages, by Kurds, Georgians, Peruvians and Nepalese. No country in the world has such rigorous frontier procedures as what one American called "this little chunk of Texas". Living cut off in the zone it is impossible for the ruling elite of Iraq to understand the terrible suffering and terror beyond.

Monday, 7 May 2007

STONED TO DEATH FOR ELOPING AND CONVERTING

The stoning to death of a teenage girl belonging to the Yazidi religious sect because she fell in love with a Muslim man has led to a spiral of violence in northern Iraq in which 23 elderly factory workers have been shot dead and 800 Yazidi students forced to flee their university in Mosul. The killings began with an act of brutality horrific even by Iraqi standards.

A 17-year-old girl called Doaa Aswad Dekhil from the town of Bashika in the northern province of Nineveh converted to Islam. She belonged to the Yazidi religion, a mixture of Islam, Judaism and Christianity as well as Zoroastrian and Gnostic beliefs. The 350,000-strong Kurdish speaking Yazidi community is centred in the north and east of Mosul and has often faced persecution in the past, being denounced as "devil worshippers". On 7 April, Doaa returned home after she had converted to Islam in order to marry a Sunni Muslim who was also a Kurd. She had been told by a Sunni Muslim cleric that her family had forgiven her for her elopement and conversion. Instead she was met in Bashika by a large mob of 2,000 people led by members of her family.

What happened next was captured in a mobile phone video. It shows a dark-haired girl dressed in a red track suit top and black underwear with blood streaming from her face. As she tries to rise to her feet she is kicked and hit on the head with a concrete block.

Armed and uniformed police stand by watching her being killed over several minutes. Many in the crowd hold up their phone cameras to record the scene. Nobody tries to help her as she is battered to death.

The savagery of the lynching led to threats of retaliation. This part of Nineveh, though outside the jurisdiction of the KRG, is strongly under its influence. The murdered girl and her intended husband were Kurds. The KRG's President, Massoud Barzani, held meetings with Yazidi leaders. Kurdish officials in Mosul said at the time that they had the situation under control. The KRG is now calling for an investigation into what happened, though the central government in Baghdad has little authority in the north of the country.

Retaliation when it came was savage. On 23 April a bus carrying back workers from a weaving factory in Mosul to Bashika, which has a Christian as well as a Yazidi population, was stopped by several cars filled with unidentified gunmen at about 2pm. They asked the Christians to get off the bus, according to the police account. They then took the bus to eastern Mosul city where they lined up the men, mostly elderly, against a wall and shot them to death.

The revenge killings led to two days of demonstrations in Bashika. Sunni Muslims, also Kurds, feared retaliation. Yazidis say that 204 members of their community have been killed since the overthrow of Saddam Hussein in 2003. Some 800 Yazidi students at Mosul university have since fled to Kurdish cities such as Dohuk where they are safe. They say they were told to convert or die.

In the Baghdad district of Dora the Christian community has been threatened in recent weeks and told to convert to Islam, pay protection money or be killed. Many have fled to other parts of the city.

Sectarian war continues in Baghdad. A bomb exploded in a market in the Shia district of Bayaa yesterday, killing 35 and wounding 80 people. "What did these innocent people do to be killed by a car bomb?" shouted a witness. "Where is the government? Where is security?" In practice, however, it is impossible to protect the crowded streets of Baghdad from vehicles packed with explosives.

Thursday, 10 May 2007

TEACHERS’ KILLINGS TURN SUNNIS AGAINST AL-QA’IDA

The murder of Juma'a, the headmaster of a primary school in the Ghaziliyah district of west Baghdad, explains why many Sunnis are increasingly hostile to al-Qa’ida in Iraq. At the same time, the Sunni community as a whole continues to support armed resistance to the US-led occupation.

Juma'a, a teacher in his forties with three daughters and one son, was told by members of al-Qa'ida in his Sunni neighbourhood to close his school. Other headmasters got the same message but also refused to comply. The demand from al-Qa'ida seems to have come because it sees schools as being under the control of the government.

Juma'a knew the danger he was running. A few months earlier, he was detained by another Sunni insurgent group as he queued for gasoline. The insurgents suspected he was carrying fake identity papers and was really a Shia. They held him for three days until he proved to them he was a Sunni.

Two weeks later, Juma'a was kidnapped again. This time there was no release. Other headmasters were kidnapped at the same time and their bodies found soon after. His family wanted to look in the Baghdad morgue, the Bab al-Modam, but faced a problem. The morgue is deemed by Sunni to be under the control of Shia militiaman who may kill or arrest Sunni looking for murdered relatives.

Finally, Juma'a's sister-in-law, Wafa, and niece went to the morgue on the grounds that women are less likely to be attacked. They passed through a room filled with headless bodies and severed limbs and looked at photographs of the faces of the dead. In 15 minutes, they identified Juma'a, but they were not strong enough to transport his body home in a cheap wooden coffin.

The revolt in Iraq against the occupation has been confined hitherto to the five-million-strong Sunni community. The growing unpopularity of al-Qa'ida in Iraq among the Sunni is partly a revulsion against its massacres of Shia by suicide bombers that lead to tit-for-tat killings of Sunni.

It is also because al-Qa'ida kills Sunni who have only limited connections with the government. Those killed include minor officials in the agriculture ministry, barbers who give un-Islamic haircuts and garbage collectors. The murder of the latter is because it is convenient for al-Qa'ida to leave large heaps of rubbish uncollected on roadsides in which to hide mines.

The most visible sign of the revolt against al-Qa'ida in Iraq is along the roads passing through the deserts of Anbar province to the west of Baghdad to Jordan and Syria. In recent weeks, the road to Syria has been controlled by members of the Abu Risha tribe, led by Mahmoud Abu Risha and supported by the US. It may be al-Qa'ida has overplayed its hand. In January, its leaders announced the establishment of the ISI based in western Iraq. That united resistance groups sympathetic to al-Qa'ida. The ISI began to purge resistance activists disagreeing with its line. Sunni families were forced to make contributions and send some of their young men to fight alongside the ISI.

The Iraqi insurgency is notoriously fragmented and its politics are shadowy. By one account, the ISI got chased out of Mosul in the north soon after being formed and took refuge in the Himrin mountains south of Kirkuk. Though shaken, it remains effective under the leadership of Omar al-Baghdadi, a former army officer.

The ISI, as with other resistance groups, owes its military effectiveness in large part to well-trained officers from the Iraqi army and, in particular, the Republican Guards.

Windows at the US embassy in Baghdad were rattled by an explosion yesterday during a visit by Dick Cheney. The US Vice-President had arrived unannounced to see Iraqi political leaders. Washington may be getting worried that the so-called "surge", the 30,000 US reinforcements being sent to Iraq, are not producing the dramatic results hoped for by President George Bush.

Meanwhile, a suicide bomber in a truck packed with explosives killed at least 19 people and wounded 80 in the Kurdish capital of Arbil. It was one of the first bombs in Kurdistan for over a year and blew up outside the Kurdish Interior Ministry, leaving an enormous crater.

Wednesday, 16 May 2007

WHATEVER HAPPENED TO AHMED CHALABI?

Ahmed Chalabi stands on the bank of the Tigris river within easy sniper range of the opposite side and surveys the twisted steel girders of the al-Sarafiyah bridge in Baghdad, its central spans torn apart by a massive truck bomb last month. The force of the blast impresses him. "I am surprised that the explosion managed to bring down three spans," he says as he looks at the wreckage.

It is a placid enough scene but nothing in Baghdad is truly safe. I supposed that Mr Chalabi's numerous and heavily armed police and army guards knew their business but I was hoping that we would not dawdle too long. The al-Sarafiyah bridge, once one of the sights of Baghdad, connected the Shia district where we were standing with Wazzariyah, where there had been clashes with Sunni insurgents. I selected a reassuringly vast concrete plinth of the bridge to dodge behind if there was any shooting. Conspicuous in a dark business suit, Mr Chalabi seemed uncaring about our possible vulnerability to hostile fire and was talking with some of the men in charge of rebuilding the bridge. There were no signs of reconstruction. He stepped into a small, dark, river police patrol boat which circled below the bridge for a few moments. Returning to the bank he remarked that one of the policemen on the boat had told him that "five out of 16 river policemen in his unit had been killed". "Snipers at Taji," one of his aides commented. As for the bridge, Mr Chalabi said reconstruction was "very slow - they should be working now".

The broken remains of the al-Safariyah bridge was a strange place to meet the man whom opponents of the invasion of Iraq regard as a hate figure who gulled the US into a bloody and unnecessary war by concocting evidence that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction. He has always had an impressive array of enemies. Demonised by Saddam as a creature of the Americans, he was simultaneously loathed by the CIA and the US State Department, mainly because he would not obey American orders. Whatever his political future, Mr Chalabi is one of the great survivors of Iraqi politics. "Never ever write him off," Hoshyar Zebari, the Iraqi Foreign Minister, said to me last year.

For a start he is still alive despite numerous assassination attempts. Aged 62 he has seen extraordinary reversals of fortune. He comes from a wealthy Shia family that flourished in Baghdad until the overthrow of the monarchy in 1958. Always an opponent of Saddam Hussein, he became a banker in Jordan only to see his bank collapse in controversial circumstances in the late 1980s. In the 1990s he was in Iraqi Kurdistan vainly seeking to use it as a platform to overthrow Saddam. Forced to flee again in 1996 he seemed to have failed, but 10 years later Saddam is in his grave and Mr Chalabi sits in his heavily fortified house in Baghdad.

Meeting political leaders in Baghdad is different than in other countries, where the difficulty is generally in securing the interview in the first place. Getting to it is just a matter of calling a taxi. In Baghdad the main problem may be covering the last 500 yards to see the person to be interviewed without undue danger. It is quite evident meeting Iraqis and foreigners in the Green Zone in Baghdad that few have the slightest idea of the risk involved in coming to see them. One ambassador happily gave a party starting at 9pm and invited people from outside the zone when not a cat is stirring in the streets of Baghdad.

I had called Mr Chalabi's office in the morning. I was in fact in the Green Zone seeing Kurdish friends when the reply came that he could see me almost immediately. He does not live in the Green Zone but in a fortress-like villa not far away. Two vehicles filled with armed men were sent to pick me up. We drove through the desolate streets of west Baghdad, which these days look like a war zone, at great speed, zigzagging around concrete blast walls and rolls of razor wire.

Mr Chalabi was waiting at the house in the al-Mansur district, once known as the embassy quarter of Baghdad but now a lethally dangerous place.

There were few cars about and by early evening those shops that had opened were closing. There were nervous-looking soldiers and police everywhere. We were to go on to another house, known as The Farm, which had once belonged to his father. For a man who is not officially a member of the government his police and army escort boasted significant firepower.

I had met Mr Chalabi in the early 1990s and had always been impressed by his skill as an operator and his ability to bounce back from defeat. He also had an ability to irritate his friends and attract the loathing of his enemies to a degree which seemed beyond reason. A few days before I met him in al-Mansur, an official in the Green Zone had told me with feeling that he considered Mr Chalabi to be "evil".

Yet much of what he had done during the 1990s was what all exiled oppositions do when trying to overthrow an authoritarian regime. They try to foment unrest, coups or mutinies inside their country and look for the backing of neighbouring states and the great powers. Mr Chalabi did what others in the Iraqi opposition did but with greater success. The US had failed to go on to Baghdad to overthrow Saddam Hussein in 1991. The opposition always wanted to lure it to try again. Attempted coups and mutinies had all failed by 1996. This was probably inevitable. Mr Chalabi once said to me that people "outside Iraq did not realise how difficult it was to try to overthrow a government with a violent and pro-active security service".

Did he invent evidence of weapons of mass destruction or prompt witnesses to do so? In fact all the opposition, particularly the Kurdish security services, were doing this. But it was absurd for the CIA and assorted American services and newspapers along with MI6 to claim later that they were misled. They knew what President George Bush and Tony Blair wanted and gave it to them.

Mr Chalabi's own justification for encouraging the US to invade is simple. He says he favoured the overthrow of Saddam Hussein by the US but not the subsequent occupation of Iraq to which he attributes all the disasters that followed. It is not an argument that goes down well in Washington or London. In April 2004 a meeting in the White House discussed a memo drawn up by the National Security Council entitled "Marginalising Chalabi".

Action swiftly followed. Mr Chalabi was accused of being too close to the Iranians and of telling their intelligence station chief in Baghdad that the US had broken Iranian codes. The FBI was told to investigate. A few days later, on 20 May, US-led forces raided his headquarters in Baghdad. His fortunes waned. After the parliamentary elections in December 2005 he was part of the Shia alliance that triumphed. He became deputy prime minister. At the election at the end of the year he stood outside the Shia alliance and did not win a single seat.

Sitting in his garden, Mr Chalabi is sceptical about the success of the security plan for Baghdad. He says that "there are less sectarian killings and places that were expected to be difficult like Sadr City [the Shia slum that houses two million people] were not". But he says the latter success was only possible because of successful negotiations that led to the Mehdi Army, the main Shia militia body, being stood down, through the influence of its leader, Muqtada al-Sadr, the Iranians and the Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani. He does not think that US-Iraqi army plan to seal off areas, the so-called gated communities, is going to work. He points out that in a Sunni commercial area such as al-Adhamiyah, most people who work there live outside the enclave. "In any case it is consecrating division in the city. There is nothing so permanent as a temporary solution."

At the same time he says firmly that "the Sunnis have lost the battle for Baghdad. They were encouraged to go on the offensive by Arab states that did nothing for them." He identifies one factor in the weakness of the Sunni, as confirmed by election results. They are far less numerous in Baghdad than they had supposed. Some had spoken of Baghdad being equally divided but Mr Chalabi thinks that the proportions in the capital are 80 per cent Shia and 20 per cent Sunni.

He sees the most immediate problem in Baghdad as being the return of people driven from their homes and detainees. "Efforts must be made to bring them back otherwise security is reversible. The displaced people are very angry and want to go home." Through popular committees he is trying to get mosques returned to their original community.

His judgement is different from that of many Iraqi and American officials in the Green Zone. He does not think that the Sadrists, the movement of Muqtada al-Sadr, are disintegrating: "A lot of it is wishful thinking. Their local leaders will all comply with what Muqtada al-Sadr says." A key element in ending the war is bringing in the Iranians: "An understanding through the Iraqi government between the US and Iran."

He does not think that Washington's famous "benchmarks" are more than slogans in Iraq. Giving Saddam Hussein's security services back their old jobs is just not acceptable. He does not add that the Shia and Kurds will veto such an idea but they certainly will. On US threats to withdraw he says "many Iraqis are asking if this is a promise or a threat" but he wants an agreement on the limits of the authority of the multinational forces, essentially the Americans and the British.

At this stage Mr Chalabi sees a US withdrawal as something that will be a function of US politics and not what is happening in Iraq. Essentially he sees the US and Britain as having unwittingly committed a revolutionary act in the Middle East by overthrowing Saddam Hussein. "The US found that it had dismantled the cornerstone of the Arab security order."

The US and Britain have been trying ever since to fill the vacuum left by the fall of the Baath party. They wanted "to prevent Shia control and limit Iranian influence in Iraq and in this they have not succeeded." And that is why they will leave.

Tuesday, 3 July 2007

IRAQ INVASION STRENGTHENED THE MILITANTS

Car bombs have almost as long a history as the car. What has changed since the invasion of Iraq is that bombers targeting civilian targets in the West now have a popular base and access to expertise in the Sunni community of Iraq.

The invasion was seen as an attack on Muslims as a whole by at least some Muslims in every country, who are willing and able to construct and deliver bombs. From the moment foreign armies were ordered into Iraq, al-Qa'ida was bound to be the winner. US spokesmen have long blamed al-Qa'ida for every attack in Iraq but in fact the Salafi, proponents of a puritanical and bigoted variant of Sunni Islam, and the Jihadi, willing to wage holy war, belong to many groups.

The al-Qa'ida of Osama bin Laden was a surprisingly weak organisation in Afghanistan and Pakistan before 2001. To make the blood curdling videos of militants training that are frequently shown in documentaries, al-Qa'ida had to hire local tribesmen.

It is in Iraq that al-Qa'ida has come into its own. The US proclamation of the group as its most dangerous enemy served only as effective advertising among young Sunni men. Such denunciations also made it much easier for al-Qa'ida to raise money in Saudi Arabia and the Gulf.

The three car bombs used in Glasgow and London are far inferior to anything used in Iraq. This is an ominous pointer for the future because Iraq is now full of people who know exactly how to make a highly-effective bomb - and the means to detonate it. It is only a matter of time before this knowledge spreads.

The expertise of the Iraqi bombers attained a high level almost as soon as the first explosions occurred in Baghdad in August 2003. The Jordanian embassy was attacked and then the UN headquarters. Assassination by suicide bomber began with the killing of Mohammed Baqir al-Hakim, the leader of the largest Shia party, the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq, along with 85 of his followers in Najaf. By November, Jihadists were able to attack half a dozen targets at the same time.

There also appeared to be an endless supply of suicide bombers from Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Egypt, Syria and almost every state in the Arab world. The one Muslim country that suicide bombers did not come from was Iran, though the Iranians have been far more vigorously denounced than the Sunni states that produce the bombers.

In the immediate aftermath of the latest bombings in the UK, there were immediate suspicions that Iraqi methods had spread. The opposite is true. It is surprising, given that one of the alleged bombers comes from Jordan, home to one million Iraqi refugees, that they did not know more about making a bomb. It is the political not the technical influence of the Iraq war that we are now seeing.

Car bombs have almost as long a history as the car. What has changed since the invasion of Iraq is that bombers targeting civilian targets in the West now have a popular base and access to expertise in the Sunni community of Iraq.

The invasion was seen as an attack on Muslims as a whole by at least some Muslims in every country, who are willing and able to construct and deliver bombs. From the moment foreign armies were ordered into Iraq, al-Qa'ida was bound to be the winner. US spokesmen have long blamed al-Qa'ida for every attack in Iraq but in fact the Salafi, proponents of a puritanical and bigoted variant of Sunni Islam, and the Jihadi, willing to wage holy war, belong to many groups.

The al-Qa'ida of Osama bin Laden was a surprisingly weak organisation in Afghanistan and Pakistan before 2001. To make the blood curdling videos of militants training that are frequently shown in documentaries, al-Qa'ida had to hire local tribesmen.

It is in Iraq that al-Qa'ida has come into its own. The US proclamation of the group as its most dangerous enemy served only as effective advertising among young Sunni men. Such denunciations also made it much easier for al-Qa'ida to raise money in Saudi Arabia and the Gulf.

The three car bombs used in Glasgow and London are far inferior to anything used in Iraq. This is an ominous pointer for the future because Iraq is now full of people who know exactly how to make a highly-effective bomb - and the means to detonate it. It is only a matter of time before this knowledge spreads.

The expertise of the Iraqi bombers attained a high level almost as soon as the first explosions occurred in Baghdad in August 2003. The Jordanian embassy was attacked and then the UN headquarters. Assassination by suicide bomber began with the killing of Mohammed Baqir al-Hakim, the leader of the largest Shia party, the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq, along with 85 of his followers in Najaf. By November, Jihadists were able to attack half a dozen targets at the same time.

There also appeared to be an endless supply of suicide bombers from Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Egypt, Syria and almost every state in the Arab world. The one Muslim country that suicide bombers did not come from was Iran, though the Iranians have been far more vigorously denounced than the Sunni states that produce the bombers.

In the immediate aftermath of the latest bombings in the UK, there were immediate suspicions that Iraqi methods had spread. The opposite is true. It is surprising, given that one of the alleged bombers comes from Jordan, home to one million Iraqi refugees, that they did not know more about making a bomb. It is the political not the technical influence of the Iraq war that we are now seeing.

Friday, 13 July 2007

BUSH’S OPTIMISM IMPOSSIBLE TO SQUARE WITH IRAQ SITUATION

Scrambling to shore up crumbling support for the Iraq war, President George Bush released a report yesterday claiming sufficient political and military progress to justify the presence of 170,000 US troops in the country.

Mr Bush said he still believed victory in Iraq was possible. "Those who believe that the battle in Iraq is lost will likely point to the unsatisfactory performance on some of the political benchmarks," he said.

"Those who believe the battle in Iraq can and must be won see the satisfactory performance on several of the security benchmarks as a cause of optimism." He added it was too early to say if his new strategy in Iraq was working.

But in Iraq as in the US there is a sense Washington is playing its last cards. "I assume the US is going to start pulling out because 70 per cent of Americans and Congress want the troops to come home," Mahmoud Othman, a veteran Iraqi politician, said. "The Americans are defeated. They haven't achieved any of their aims."

And to underline Mr Othman's comments, last night the House of Representatives approved legislation, by a vote of 223-201, to bring combat troops out of Iraq by 1 April 2008, despite a White House veto threat.

The report itself admits to a sense in Iraq that the US, one way or another, is on the way out more than four years after its invasion in 2003. It says that political reconciliation in Iraq is being hampered by "increasing concern among Iraqi political leaders that the United States may not have a long-term commitment to Iraq".

The White House yesterday sought to suggest possible change for the better in Iraq by saying that there had been satisfactory progress on eight of the 18 goals set by Congress. Unsatisfactory progress is reported on six, unsatisfactory but with some progress on two and "too early to assess" on a further two.

The picture it hopes to give - and this has been un-critically reported by the US media - is of a mixture of progress and frustration in Iraq.

The wholly misleading suggestion is that the war could go either way. In reality the six failures are on issues critical to the survival of Iraq while the eight successes are on largely trivial matters. Thus unsatisfactory progress is reported on "the Iraqi security forces evenhandedly enforcing the law" and on the number of Iraqi units willing to fight independently of the Americans. This means that there is no Iraqi national army but one consisting of Kurds, Shia and Sunni who will never act against their own communities. Despite three years of training, the Iraqi security forces cannot defend the government.

Set against these vitally important failures are almost ludicrously trivial or meaningless successes. For instance, "the rights of minority political parties are being defended" but these groups have no political influence. The alliance of Shia religious and Kurdish nationalist parties that make up the government is not keen to share power with anybody. This is scarcely surprising since they triumphantly won the election in 2005.

There have been some real improvements over the past six months. Sectarian killings in Iraq have declined to 650 in June compared with 2,100 in January. So-called "high-profile" bombings, including suicide bomb attacks on Shia markets, fell to 90 in June compared with 180 in March. But it is doubtful if these are entirely or even mainly due to the US surge. The fall in sectarian killings, mostly of Sunni by Shia, may be largely the result of the Mehdi Army militia of Muqtada al-Sadr being told by their leader to curb their murder campaign. It is also true that last year, after the attack on the Shia shrine in Samarra on 22 February 2006, there was a battle for Baghdad which the Shia won and the Sunni lost. Baghdad is more and more Shia-dominated and the Sunni are pinned into the south-west of the city and a few other enclaves. As Sunni and Shia are killed or driven out of mixed areas, there are fewer of them to kill. Some 4.2 million people in Iraq are now refugees, of whom about half have fled the country.

The real and appalling situation on the ground in Iraq has been all too evident this week. Thirty bodies, the harvest of the death squads, were found in the streets of Baghdad on Wednesday. The figure for Tuesday was 26 and, in addition, 20 rockets and mortar bombs were fired into the Green Zone killing three people. This was significant because they were fired by the Mehdi Army, who had been upset by criticism made of them by the Iraqi Prime Minister, Nuri al-Maliki. By way of gentle reproof they shelled his offices in the Green Zone.

US and British claims of success in Iraq over the past four years have a grim record of being entirely sculpted to political needs at home. British ministers trumpeted the success of Operation Sinbad in Basra last year and early this year, saying it would put the worst of the militia out of business. This year Basra is wholly ruled by these very same militias.

Overall the "surge" has already failed. It was never necessary to wait for yesterday's report or a further assessment in September. The reason for the failure is the same as that for American failures since 2003. They have very few allies in Iraq outside Kurdistan. The occupation is unpopular and always has been.

Economic and social conditions are becoming more and more desperate. There is in theory 5.6 hours of electricity in Baghdad every 24 hours but many districts get none at all. It is baking hot in the Mesopotamian plain, where temperatures even at night are above 40C. People used to sleep on the roof but this has become dangerous because of mortar bombardments.

Oil pipelines are sabotaged by insurgents and punctured by thieves. "In just one stretch of pipeline between Baghdad and Baiji, we found 1,488 holes," the Oil Minister, Hussein Shahristani, told the Iraqi parliament, speaking of an important pipe that brings oil products to the capital from Baiji refinery. He added: "It doesn't function as a pipeline … it's more like a sieve." Gasoline is brought to Baghdad by truck but these are not allowed on bridges because they might be packed with explosives.

In a further sign of how life is lived in Baghdad, clerics have issued a fatwa against eating river fish - previously a favourite food - because the fish gorge on dead bodies floating in the Tigris. Astonishingly, the report suggests that one of the successes in Iraq has been the spending of $10 billion "for reconstruction projects, including delivery of essential services, on an equitable basis".

The danger of the false optimism in the report is that it prevents other policies being devised. In January, President Bush decided to in effect ignore the most important recommendations of the Baker-Hamilton report, which were to talk to Iran and Syria and to disengage US troops. Instead Mr Bush sent reinforcements to Iraq, denounced Iran and Syria and added to the number of his enemies by threatening to clamp down on the Shia militias.

But talking to Iran has always been essential to any solution in Iraq.

"The Iranians can afford to compromise in Iraq but they cannot afford to lose," said one Iraqi observer. The more threatened they feel by the US over nuclear power or the possibility of air attack, the greater incentive they have to ensure that the US does not succeed in gaining control of Iraq. For most of the past four years they have not had to do much because the US has helpfully ensured its own failure by pursuing disastrous policies.

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

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

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

Tuesday, 17 July 2007

DERBY MAN WHO CAME TO IRAQ TO WAGE WAR

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

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

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

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

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

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

Monday, 30 July 2007

HUMAN TIDE SPILLING INTO NEIGHBOURING COUNTRIES

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Tuesday, 7 August 2007

THE SURGE

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

****

Sectarian warfare between Shia and Sunni began in August 2003 when al-Qa’ida suicide bombers started targeting Shia civilians. It escalated over the next two years, but it was the bomb the destroyed the Shia shrine at Samarra on 22 February 2006 that unleashed a Shia pogrom in Baghdad in which 1,300 Sunni were killed in days.

A struggle for the capital was waged between the two sects for the rest of the year, and by January 2007 the Shia had largely won it. My surviving Sunni friends were terrified that the Mehdi Army, often used as a catch-all phrase to describe Shia militiamen of all descriptions, would launch a final “battle of Baghdad” to wipe out the remaining Sunni enclaves.

A weakness of the US position in Iraq is that it has always exaggerated its own strength and underestimated that of its opponents. Outside Kurdistan, it has no dependable allies. Among Iraqi Arabs, both Shia and Sunni, the occupation is unpopular. A US military study recently examined the weapons used by guerrillas to kill American soldiers, and it reached the unsettling conclusion that the most effective were high-quality American weapons supplied to the Iraqi army by the US, which were passed on or sold to insurgents.

US commanders are often cheery believers in their own propaganda, even as the ground is giving way beneath their feet. In Baquba, a provincial capital north-east of Baghdad, US and Iraqi army commanders praised their own achievements at a press conference held over a video link. Chiding media critics for their pessimism, the generals claimed: “The situation in Baquba is reassuring and is under control but there are some rumours circulated by bad people.” Within hours Sunni insurgents, possibly irked by these self-congratulatory words, stormed Baquba, kidnapped the mayor and blew up his office.

The surge got underway in February, and from the beginning the sceptics seemed to be in the right. Its most positive impact was that Muqtada al-Sadr decided not to risk an all-out military confrontation between his Mehdi Army and the US army. He sent many of his senior lieutenants out of Baghdad, stood down his men and disappeared, either to Iran, as the US claimed, or to the holy cities of Kufa and Najaf, according to his followers.

The Sunni bore the brunt of the surge in Baghdad. Districts like al-Adhamiyah in east Baghdad were sealed off. But this probably achieved less than was intended, because Adhamiyah is a commercial district in which half of the people who work there live elsewhere. Joint security stations were set up in every neighborhood manned by US and Iraqi forces, but these posts seem ineffectual and tie down troops.

There was intense pressure on the US military and the civilian leadership in Baghdad to show that the surge visibly succeeding. US embassy staff complained that when the pro-war Republican Senator John McCain came to Baghdad and ludicrously claimed that security was fast improving, they were forced to doff their helmets and body armour when standing with him lest the protective equipment might be interpreted as a mute contradiction of the Senator’s assertions. When Vice President Dick Cheney visited the Green Zone, the sirens giving waring of incoming rockets or mortar rounds were kept silent during an attack, to prevent them booming out of every television screen in America.

By the end of May, I found it a little easier to drive through Baghdad, but the danger was still extreme. I sat in the back of the car with my jacket hanging inside the window so it was difficult for other drivers to see me. We were pulled over by an army checkpoint. A soldier leaned in and asked who I was. We were lucky. He looked surprised when I told him I was a foreign journalist, and said softly: “Keep well hidden.”

Back in my hotel I phoned an Iraqi friend in the Green Zone who was close to the government. “Be very careful,” he warned. “Above all do not trust the army or police.” There was an example of what he meant a few days later when a convoy of 19 vehicles carrying 40 uniformed policemen arrived in the forecourt of the Finance Ministry. They entered the building and calmly abducted five British security men, who have not been seen since. The kidnappers may be linked to a unit of the Mehdi Army.

The surge has changed very little in Baghdad. It was always a collection of tactics rather than a strategy. All the main players – Sunni insurgents, Shia militiamen, Iraqi government, Kurds, Iran and Syria – are still in the game.

One real benchmark of progress – or lack of it – is the number of Iraqis who have fled for their lives. This figure is still going up. Over one million Iraqis have become Internally Displaced Persons (IDPs) since the Samarra bombing, according to the Red Crescent. A further 2.2 million people have fled the country. This exodus is bigger than anything ever seen in the Middle East, exceeding in size even the flight or expulsion of the Palestinians in 1948. A true sign of progress in Iraq will be when the number of refugees, inside and outside the country, starts to go down.

****

The surge was never going to bring Iraq nearer to peace. It always made sense in terms of American, but not Iraqi, politics. It has become a cliché for US politicians to say that there is a “Washington clock” and a “Baghdad clock”, which do not operate at the same speed. This has the patronizing implication that Iraqis are slothful in moving to fix problems within their country, while Americans are all get-up-and-go. But the reality is that it is not the clocks, but the agendas, that are different. The Americans and the Iraqis want contrary things.

The US dilemma in Iraq goes back to the Gulf War. It wanted to be rid of Saddam Hussein 1991 but not at the price of the Shia replacing him; something the Shia were bound to do in fair elections, because they comprise 60 percent of the population. Worse, the Shia coming to power would have close relations with Iran, America’s arch-enemy in the Middle East.

This was the main reason the US did not press on to Baghdad after defeating Saddam’s armies in Kuwait in 1991. It then allowed him to savagely to crush the Shia and Kurdish rebellions that briefly captured 14 out of 18 Iraqi provinces.

Ever since 2003, the US has wrestled with this same problem. Unwittingly, the most conservative of American administrations had committed a revolutionary act in the Middle East by overthrowing the minority Sunni Baathist regime.

The Bush family has always been close to the Saudi monarchy, but George W Bush dismantled a cornerstone of the Sunni Arab security order. This is why the US and Britain opted for a thoroughgoing occupation of Iraq after the fall of Saddam Hussein. They put off elections for as long as they could. When elections were held in 2005 and voters overwhelmingly chose a Shia-Kurdish government, Washington tried to keep it under tight control.

“The US and Britain have a policy of trying to fill the vacuum left by the Baath disappearing, but it is unsuccessful,” says Ahmed Chalabi, out of office but still one of the most astute political minds in Iraq. “Now the Americans and British want to disengage, but if they do so the worst fears of their Arab allies will come to pass. Shia control and strong Iranian influence in Iraq.”

The hidden history of the past four years is that the US wants to defeat the Sunni insurgents but does not want the Shia-Kurdish to win a total victory. It props up the Iraqi state with one hand and keeps it weak with the other.

The Iraqi intelligence service is not funded through the Iraqi budget, but by the CIA. Iraq independence is far more circumscribed than the outside world realizes. The US is trying to limit the extent of the Shia-Kurdish victory, but by preventing a clear winner emerging in the struggle for Iraq, Washington is ensuring that the bloodiest of wars goes on, with no end in sight.

Tuesday, 11 December 2007

ONLY ONE THING UNITES IRAQ, HATRED OF THE US

As British forces come to the end of their role in Iraq, what sort of country do they leave behind? Has the United States turned the tide in Baghdad? Does the fall in violence mean that the country is stabilising after more than four years of war? Or are we seeing only a temporary pause in the fighting?

American commentators are generally making the same mistake that they have made since the invasion of Iraq was first contemplated five years ago. They look at Iraq in over-simple terms and exaggerate the extent to which the US is making the political weather and is in control of events there.

The US is the most powerful single force in Iraq but by no means the only one. The shape of Iraqi politics has changed over the past year, though for reasons that have little to do with "the surge" - the 30,000 US troop reinforcements - and much to do with the battle for supremacy between the Sunni and Shia Muslim communities.

The Sunni Arabs of Iraq turned against al Qa'ida partly because it tried to monopolise power but primarily because it brought their community close to catastrophe. The Sunni war against US occupation had gone surprisingly well for them since it began in 2003. It was a second war, the one against the Shia majority led by al-Qa'ida, which the Sunni were losing, with disastrous results for themselves. "The Sunni people now think they cannot fight two wars - against the occupation and the government - at the same time," a Sunni friend in Baghdad told me last week. "We must be more realistic and accept the occupation for the moment."

This is why much of the non-al-Qa'ida Sunni insurgency has effectively changed sides. An important reason why al-Qa'ida has lost ground so swiftly is a split within its own ranks. The US military - the State Department has been very much marginalised in decision-making in Baghdad - does not want to emphasise that many of the Sunni fighters now on the US payroll, who are misleadingly called "concerned citizens", until recently belonged to al Qa'ida and have the blood of a great many Iraqi civilians and American soldiers on their hands.

The Sunni Arabs, five million out of an Iraqi population of 27 million and the mainstay of Saddam Hussein's government, were the core of the resistance to the US occupation. But they have also been fighting a sectarian war to prevent the 16 million Shia and the five million Kurds holding power.

At first, the Shia were very patient in the face of atrocities. Vehicles, packed with explosives and driven by suicide bombers, were regularly detonated in the middle of crowded Shia market places or religious processions, killing and maiming hundreds of people. The bombers came from al-Qa'ida but the attacks were never wholeheartedly condemned by Sunni political leaders or other guerrilla groups. The bombings were also very short-sighted since the Iraqi Shia outnumber the Sunni three to one. Retaliation was restrained until a bomb destroyed the revered Shia al-Askari shrine in Samarra on 22 February, 2006.

The bombing led to a savage Shia onslaught on the Sunni, which became known in Iraq as "the battle for Baghdad". This struggle was won by the Shia. They were always the majority in the capital but, by the end of 2006, they controlled 75 per cent of the city. The Sunni fled or were pressed back into a few enclaves, mostly in west Baghdad.

In the wake of this defeat, there was less and less point in the Sunni trying to expel the Americans when the Sunni community was itself being evicted by the Shia from large parts of Iraq. The Iraqi Sunni leaders had also miscalculated that an assault on their community by the Shia would provoke Arab Sunni states like Saudi Arabia and Egypt into giving them more support but this never materialised.

It was al-Qa'ida's slaughter of Shia civilians, whom it sees as heretics worthy of death, which brought disaster to the Sunni community. Al-Qa'ida also grossly overplayed its hand at the end of last year by setting up ISI, which tried to fasten its control on other insurgent groups and the Sunni community as a whole. Sunni garbage collectors were killed because they worked for the government and Sunni families in Baghdad were ordered to send one of their members to join al Qai'da. Bizarrely, even Osama bin Laden, who never had much influence over al Qa'ida in Iraq, was reduced to advising his acolytes against extremism.

Defeat in Baghdad and the extreme unpopularity of al Qa'ida gave the impulse for the formation of the 77,000-strong anti-al-Qa'ida Sunni militia, often under tribal leadership, which is armed and paid for by the US. But the creation of this force is a new stage in the war in Iraq rather than an end to the conflict.

Sunni enclaves in Baghdad are safer, but not districts where Sunni and Shia face each other. There are few mixed areas left. Many of the Sunni fighters say openly that they see the elimination of al Qai'ida as a preliminary to an attack on the Shia militias, notably the Mehdi Army of Muqtada al-Sadr, which triumphed last year.

The creation of a US-backed Sunni militia both strengthens and weakens the Iraqi government. It is strengthened in so far as the Sunni insurrection is less effective and weakened because it does not control this new force.

If the Sunni guerrillas were one source of violence in 2006 the other was the Mehdi Army, led by Muqtada al-Sadr, the Shia nationalist cleric. This has been stood down because he wants to purge it of elements he does not control, and wishes to avoid a military confrontation with his rivals within the Shia community if they are backed by the US army. But the Mehdi Army would certainly fight if the Shia community came under attack or the Americans pressured it too hard.

American politicians continually throw up their hands in disgust that Iraqis cannot reconcile or agree on how to share power. But equally destabilising is the presence of a large US army in Iraq and the uncertainty about what role the US will play in future. However much Iraqis may fight among themselves, a central political fact in Iraq remains the unpopularity of the US-led occupation outside Kurdistan. This has grown year by year since the fall of Saddam Hussein. A detailed opinion poll carried out by ABC News, BBC and NTV of Japan in August found that 57 per cent of Iraqis believe that attacks on US forces are acceptable.

Nothing is resolved in Iraq. Power is wholly fragmented. The Americans will discover, as the British learned to their cost in Basra, that they have few permanent allies in Iraq. It has become a land of warlords in which fragile ceasefires might last for months and might equally collapse tomorrow.

Monday, 17 December 2007

BRITAIN BOWS OUT OF A WAR IT COULD NEVER HAVE WON

Britain handed over security in Basra province yesterday, bringing a formal end to its ill-starred attempt over almost five years to control southern Iraq.

The transfer of power was marked by a parade of thousands of Iraqi soldiers and police beside the Shatt al-Arab waterway, which runs past Basra. As helicopters roared overhead it was the biggest show of strength by the Iraqi army forces since the fall of Saddam Hussein.

The majority of people in Basra were glad to see the British go. "You can see the happiness on the faces of everyone," said Adel Jassam, a teacher. "It feels like a heavy burden has been lifted off our chests."

The unpopularity of the British presence is underlined by the results of an opinion poll commissioned by the BBC showing that just 2 per cent of people in Basra believed that the British presence had had a positive effect on their province since 2003. Some 86 per cent said they saw British troops as having a negative impact.

Britain did not suffer a military defeat in southern Iraq, though it lost 134 soldiers and never really established control of the city, the second-largest in Iraq.

By the time of yesterday's handover ceremony it had 4,500 troops in Iraq, confined to Basra airport, whose numbers will be reduced to 2,500 by mid-2008.

The Foreign Secretary, David Miliband, who was at the ceremony in Basra, said that Britain was not handing over "a land of milk and honey". This is an understatement, since the Basra that Britain leaves behind will be controlled by semi-criminal Shia militias and political movements.

"This remains a violent society whose tensions need to be redressed," said Mr Miliband, "but they need to be addressed by Iraqi political leaders, and it is politics that is going to come to the fore in the months and years ahead."

The British Army some time ago concluded that its patrols simply provided targets for militiamen without doing any good.

Last night Al Qaeda's second-in-command said the handover showed that insurgents were gaining the upper hand. In a video posted on the internet, Ayman al-Zawahri said: "Reports from Iraq point to the increasing power of the mujahideen and the deteriorating condition of the Americans. And the decision of the British to flee is sufficient [proof of this]."

Mr Zawahri said that Iraq was still the most important theatre of battle for Islamist militants, and dismissed optimistic US assessments of the situation there.

The steady retreat of the British has not so far been followed by a battle for Basra between the three main contenders for power. These are the Fadhila movement, which controls much of the government, the Mehdi Army militia, loyal to the nationalist cleric Muqtada al-Sadr, and the Badr Organisation of the Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq (ISCI).

These groups control different units of the security forces, as well as valuable economic concessions, such as Basra port. Iran also retains a pervasive influence over the militias.

Britain is officially handing over control of Basra to government security forces. This has supposedly long been the aim of the US and Britain in southern Iraq, but in practice both countries have favoured only one of the Shia parties, ISCI, as its favoured ally.

Violence in Basra was never as bad as it was in Baghdad or Mosul, because the city was overwhelmingly Shia. The Sunni and other minority groups have been progressively driven out. The British Army never tried to impose its authority on the four southern provinces of Iraq to the degree that the US forces tried to win control of central Iraq.

The area where they were meant to be bringing a better life is one of the most devastated in Iraq. Because it was Shia it was never favoured by the overwhelmingly Sunni regime of Saddam.

The date palms for which southern Iraq was famous were burned or cut down. In the marshes where the Tigris and Euphrates meet, a distinct civilisation had survived for 5,000 years until Saddam drained them so they could no longer provide a sanctuary for his opponents.

There seems to be no end to the miseries that Basra has suffered since the war with Iran started in 1980. The Iran-Iraq war was followed by the first Gulf War, and this in turn by the great Shia uprising of 1991, which began in a square in Basra when a tank gunner fired a shell into one of the omnipresent pictures of Saddam. In the fighting which followed, thousands of Shia were killed.

The fall of Saddam was highly popular in Basra, as it was in the rest of Shia Iraq, but while liberation was popular, occupation was not.