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Iraq Says It Foiled Green Zone Plot
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Today: March 14, 2006 at 13:7:9 PST
BAGHDAD, Iraq (AP) -
Security officials foiled a plot that would have put hundreds of al-Qaida men at guard posts around Baghdad's Green Zone, home to the U.S. and other foreign embassies as well as the Iraqi government, the interior minister told The Associated Press on Tuesday.
A senior Defense Ministry official confirmed the plot, and said the 421 al-Qaida fighters involved were actually recruited to storm the U.S. and British embassies and take hostages. Several ranking Defense Ministry officials have been jailed in the plot, the official said on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the information.
Interior Minister Bayan Jabr, in an exclusive interview with The Associated Press, said the al-Qaida recruits were one bureaucrat's signature away from acceptance into an Iraqi army battalion whose job it is to control the gates and main squares in the Green Zone. The plot was discovered three weeks ago.
"You can imagine what could happen to a minister or an ambassador while passing through these gates when those terrorists are there," Jabr said in the interview conducted at his office in the Green Zone - a 2-square-mile hunk of prime real estate on the west bank of the Tigris River. The area is a maze of concrete blast walls, concertina wire and checkpoints.
In Washington, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld said of the scheme: "I've heard about the report. I've not received anything definitive." He noted that initial reports often change.
"I don't know that I'd say we've learned anything at least at this stage that would suggest any important lesson," Rumsfeld said.
"We've always known that there are people who've tried to infiltrate the various security forces and get to close access to places they ought not to be. There's nothing new about that that I know of," he said.
Jabr confirmed that a number of Defense Ministry officials had been jailed after the plot was discovered. The Defense Ministry official said some of them had forged the signature of Defense Minister Saadoun al-Dulaimi.
The Defense Ministry official said the plot was uncovered by the military intelligence and the government's General Intelligence Service, which said the al-Qaida recruits planned to take U.S. and British diplomats hostage, then demand withdrawal of U.S. and British troops.
The Defense Ministry was working to capture the recruits, both men said.
"Most of them were members of the same tribe and came from the same area," Jabr said, but he refused to give specifics because of the ongoing operation. Neither Jabr nor the Defense Ministry official would give details on any arrests.
"The 421 were supposed to be in control of the entrances to the Green Zone and internal squares. I mean they were going to be in charge of security in the Green Zone in the future," Jabr told the AP. "They were going to carry out operations. Most of them are wanted terrorists" using false identification.
There have been attacks on the Green Zone with mortar rounds and rockets. A number of car bombs driven by suicide attackers have been detonated in the past two years at the entrances, killing scores of people.
On Oct. 14, 2004, two al-Qaida members carried out a suicide attack inside the zone, hitting a market and a cafe. Six people were killed, including four Americans.
Jabr is a Shiite and his ministry, which controls the police, has been repeatedly accused of allowing death squads to operate against Sunnis as the two Muslim sects settle old scores.
The Sunnis, the minority sect in Iraq, were politically dominant under Saddam, a co-religionist. But since the former leader was ousted after the U.S.-led invasion, Sunni power is much diminished, a source of fierce resentment.
The insurgency that has raged since the late summer of 2003 has been largely a Sunni operation in conjunction with foreign fighters imported by Jordanian-born al-Qaida in Iraq chief Abu Musab al-Zarqawi.
Jabr's disclosures, which could have been seen as a political ploy to divert criticism, were confirmed by the top Defense Ministry official, a Sunni, who described it in even more dramatic terms.
On other matters, Jabr told AP:
- Jill Carroll, a kidnapped freelance writer for The Christian Science Monitor, was still alive following her Jan. 7 abduction and is being moved from place to place by her captors. He would say nothing more about the case.
- Much of the chaos in Iraq could be blamed on former U.S. administrator L. Paul Bremer's decision in May 2003 to disband the army and security forces.
- He did not expect a civil war in Iraq.
- The government security apparatus, within two months, would begin trying to absorb all of the independent militia forces - except for the Mahdi Army of Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr. "We must think of another solution for them," he said.
- With Sunni tribesmen in western Anbar province reportedly turning on al-Qaida fighters, he had heard that some of them were going "back to Afghanistan."
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Jabr's disclosures, which could have been seen as a political ploy to divert criticism, were confirmed by the top Defense Ministry official, a Sunni, who described it in even more dramatic terms.
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I wonder what is meant by that?.....