101 Americans die in Iraq during October

BAGHDAD, Iraq - The American death toll for October climbed past 100, a grim milestone reached as a top White House envoy turned up unexpectedly in Baghdad on Monday to smooth over a rough patch in U.S.-Iraqi ties. At least 80 people were killed across Iraq, 33 in a Sadr City bombing targeting workers.

A member of the 89th Military Police Brigade was killed in east Baghdad Monday, and a Marine died in fighting in insurgent infested Anbar province the day before, raising to 101 the number of U.S. service members killed in a bloody October, the fourth deadliest month of the war. At least 2,814 American forces have died since the war began.

Upon arriving on an unannounced visit, National Security Adviser Stephen Hadley went straight into meetings with Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki and his security chief, Mouwafak al-Rubaie, telling them he "wanted to reinforce some of the things you have heard from our president."

The White House said Hadley was not on a mission to repair ragged relations, accounts of which it said had been "overblown" by the news media.

"Absolutely not," said Gordon Johndroe, spokesman for the National Security Council in Washington. "This is a long planned trip to get a first hand report of the situation on the ground from the political, economic and security fronts."

Last week Al-Maliki issued a string of bitter complaints — at one point saying he wasn't "America's man in Iraq" — after U.S. Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad unveiled adjustments in America's Iraq strategy.

The ambassador said the prime minister was in agreement. Al-Maliki angrily charged the White House with infringing on his government's sovereignty and said that he was not consulted.

By week's end, al-Maliki and President George W. Bush held a hastily convened video conference call and agreed to speed the training of Iraqi forces and the return of control over all territory to the Iraqi army.

With American voter support for the war at a low point and the midterm vote just days away, a top aide to al-Maliki said the Iraqi leader was using Bush and Republican vulnerability on the issue to leverage concessions from the White House — particularly the speedy withdrawal of American forces from Iraqi cities to U.S. bases in the country.

The case of a kidnapped American soldier, meanwhile, took a curious turn when a woman claiming to be his mother-in-law said that the soldier was married to her daughter, a Baghdad college student, and was with the young woman and her family when hooded gunmen handcuffed and threw him in the back seat of a white Mercedes early last week. The marriage would violate military regulations.

The soldier's disappearance prompted a massive and continuing manhunt in Baghdad, with much of it focused on Sadr City, the sprawling Shiite slum in extreme northeastern Baghdad.

The military still had checkpoints surrounding the district Monday when a suspected Sunni insurgent bomber slipped in and set off a bomb among laborers assembled to find a day's work. The blast tore through food stalls and kiosks shortly after 6 a.m., killing at least 33 and wounding 59.

Sadr City, is a stronghold of the Mahdi Army loyal to radical anti-American Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr and has been the scene of repeated bomb attacks by suspected al-Qaida fighters in what were seen as attempts to incite Shiite revenge attacks and drag the country into full-blown civil war.

Al-Sadr, in a statement addressed to supporters in Sadr City Monday night, warned of unspecified action if the "siege" of the neighborhood continued and criticized what he called the silence of politicians over actions by the U.S. military in the district.

"If this siege continues for long, we will resort to actions which I will have no choice but to take, God willing, and when the time is right," he said in the statement, a text of which was obtained by The Associated Press.

Ali Abdul-Ridha, injured in the head and shoulders, said he was waiting for a job with his brother and about 100 others when he heard the massive explosion and "lost sight of everything."

He said the area had been exposed to attack because U.S. and Iraqi forces had driven into hiding Mahdi Army fighters who police the district.

"That forced Mahdi Army members, who were patrolling the streets, to vanish," the 41-year-old Abdul-Ridha said from his bed in al-Sadr Hospital, his brother lying beside him asleep.

However, Falih Jabar, a 37-year old father of two boys, blamed the militia forces for provoking extremists to attack civilians in the neighborhood of 2.5 million people.

"We are poor people just looking to make a living. We have nothing to do with any conflict," said Jabar, who suffered back wounds. "If (the extremists) have problems with the Mahdi Army, they must fight them, not us," he added.

The last major bombing in Sadr City occurred on Sept. 23 when a bomb hidden in a barrel blew up a kerosene tanker and killed at least 35 people waiting to stock up on fuel for the Muslim holy month of Ramadan.

Elsewhere in the capital, gunmen killed hard-line Sunni academic Essam al-Rawi, head of the University Professors Union, as he was leaving home. At least 156 university professors have been killed since the war began. Hundreds, perhaps thousands, more are believed to have fled to neighboring countries, although Education Ministry spokesman Basil al-Khatib al-Khatib said he had no specific numbers on those who had fled.

Police and security officials throughout Iraq reported that at least 45 other people, many of them police, were killed in sectarian violence Monday or found dead, many of them dumped in the Tigris River and a tributary south of the capital.

Eye on Iraq; Alienating Maliki
By MARTIN SIEFF
UPI Senior News Analyst

WASHINGTON, Oct. 30 (UPI) -- Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki is biting the hand that feeds him -- but he knows what he's doing.

On Wednesday, an angry Maliki outspokenly rejected comments made only the day before by top U.S. diplomatic and military officials in Iraq that he had to come up with a timetable or time-line setting dates to disarm Iraq's powerful and ferociously warring militias. The calls to do so came from Zalmay Khalizad, the U.S. ambassador to Baghdad and from Gen. George Casey, commander of U.S. military forces in Iraq.

Maliki ironically used the very democratic process that Bush policymakers took such pride in as the source of his legitimacy and authority to reject the U.S. calls. "I affirm that this government represents the will of the people, and no one has the right to impose a timetable on it," he said.

In the six months since becoming prime minister of Iraq, Maliki has been forced to preside over a relentless deterioration of the security situation in the country. It did not happen as the result of decisions he took, and it was well under way before he became prime minister, but despite having supposedly 300,000 troops, police and other security forces at his command -- more than twice the manpower of U.S. military forces in his country -- he and his government have been unable to prevent the escalation of random killings, mass ethnic cleansing and the other horrific characteristics of full-scale civil war.

However, Maliki has worked hard to try and gain and retain a degree of personal credibility with the Shiite majority community that constitutes 60 percent of the population of the California-sized nation of 28 million people. The main military pillars of support for him and his own Dawa party in fact are not the national army created at breakneck speed and with much fanfare by the U.S. military and the Bush administration. They are his own political Dawa Party, the Shiite Supreme Council for the Revolution in Iraq, or SCIRI, and the Mahdi Army of charismatic anti-American firebrand Moqtada al-Sadr.

As we have noted in previous analyses, real power in Baghdad and in much of Shiite-dominated southern Iraq rests not with the police or the national army, but with these Shiite militias and their local allies.

The Shiite-dominated and predominately officered new Iraqi army has tried to avoid outright clashes with these militias whenever possible and in many areas its local units have tacitly cooperated with them.

U.S. military spokesmen have downplayed the degree to which these militias have successfully infiltrated the new security forces, but Maliki was forced a few weeks ago to fire the head of a national special police unit because sectarian Shiite murder squads had been operating with members within the police.

Therefore, by pressuring Maliki to use his fragile new armed forces to try and crush Shiite militias as well as the Sunni insurgents operating in Baghdad, U.S. leaders have only weakened their own ties with the Iraqi government, with Maliki personally and with the Shiite majority community in general.

The potential dangers of this development are far more dangerous than any atrocity or strategy the Sunni insurgents have come up with over the past three and a half years. For the Sunni insurgents have been able to derail ambitious U.S. political and strategic objectives for Iraq while operating as a relatively small minority within a community of only 5 million Sunni Muslim Iraqis, less than 20 percent of the total population.

But the 16-17 million Shiites of Iraq comprise at least 60 percent of the nation's population, and they are far better organized and armed thanks precisely to consistent U.S. policies over the past three and a half years than the Sunnis are.

The Shiites effectively control the new police, army and other major security forces, and Shiite militias, also supported to differing degrees by neighboring Iran have proven able to get far more weapons than the Sunni insurgents have managed to do.

Therefore, since the Shiite militias cut loose with a wave of reprisal attacks following the bombing of their sacred al-Askariya, or Golden Mosque, in Samara on Feb.22, they have been killing Sunnis at an estimated rate of four times the number of Shiites killed by Sunni insurgents.

The more U.S. policymakers have pressured the Maliki government to crack down on the Shiite militias, therefore, the greater has been the distrust and hostility it has inspired among the very Shiite forces they worked so hard to organize, arm and empower.

The ultimate outcome of this process may well be that one day in the none too distant future, U.S. troops in Iraq will find themselves fighting not merely the paramilitary Shiite militias but also the Shiite-dominated armed forces they trained and armed.

This dark irony is far from unprecedented in Iraqi history. The last time Iraq was a parliamentary democracy from 1932 to 1958, the Iraqi army rebelled three times against the occupying British forces that were supposedly there as allies, to protect British interests and to guarantee the stability of the country.

Those rebellions occurred in 1936, 1941 and 1958. In 1941, the Iraqi tried to stab Britain in the back when it was fighting Nazi Germany and tried to join the Nazis as their ally. In 1958,, they finally succeeded in forcing the British to abandon Iraq and give up their vast economic interests there.

Maliki's comments Wednesday therefore should not be disregarded as either unimportant political maneuvers or the ungrateful anger of someone fated always to be loyal to his American allies. They are, to use Thomas Jefferson's famous phrase, a fire bell in the night, warning of the dangers of a reckless and little understood policy.

http://www.upi.com/SecurityTerrorism/view.php?StoryID=20061030-104353-7223r

HRW: gov't protecting death squad members
Report, IRIN, 30 October 2006

BAGHDAD - The Iraqi government must move quickly to prosecute all Ministry of Interior personnel responsible for "death squad" killings in Baghdad and elsewhere, the New-York based NGO Human Rights Watch (HRW) said on Saturday.

"Evidence suggests that Iraqi security forces are involved in these horrific crimes, and thus far the government has not held them accountable," said Sarah Leah Whitson, director of HRW's Middle East division. "The Iraqi government must stop giving protection to security forces responsible for abduction, torture and murder."

Sectarian violence between the majority Shi'ite Muslims and Sunni Muslims in Iraq has been steadily escalating since a revered Shi'ite shrine was bombed in the northern city of Samarra in February.

Since then, local and international sources say thousands of ordinary Iraqis have been killed and the UN's refugee agency (UNHCR) says some 365,000 people have been forced to flee their homes.

Brig. Abdul-Karim Khalaf, the Iraqi interior ministry's spokesman, said that the ministry and the Supreme Judicial Council have begun investigating all officers and employees suspected of collaborating in the ongoing sectarian violence.

"Those who committed crimes will be punished 100 percent and the ministry will not hesitate to punish anyone for any wrongdoing he did," Khalaf told IRIN.

Khalaf said that as part of the interior ministry's restructuring plan, which started in October, 3,000 policemen were fired on corruption or rights abuses charges. A total of 600 of the 3,000 personnel fired will face prosecution, according to Khalaf.

Khalaf added that the Shi'ite-dominated ministry also sacked two officers in charge of commando units that have been accused by Sunnis of running death squads that kill Sunnis.

On 15 October, Iraq's Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, a Shi'ite Muslim, pledged in a nationally televised address to crack down on militias. "The state and the militias cannot coexist. Arms can only be in the hands of the government and no one has the right to be above the law," al-Maliki said.

However, analysts say that government rhetoric is not being matched by action. "He [al-Maliki] has issued repeated statements against illegal armed groups, but he is not able to take any concerted action against these militias because of their political weight in his government," said Emad al-Janabi, a Baghdad-based political sciences professor at the University of Mosul.

"This increase in violence has put him at odds with the United States over his seeming unwillingness to crack down against the armed wings of his major political supporters," al-Janabi added.

Shi'ite militias - such as the al-Mahdi army and the Badr Brigade, the two most prominent - have links with religious members of the government, analysts say. As such, these militias are thought to have infiltrated the country's police force and are running death squads which roam Baghdad and nearby cities and towns snatching, torturing and killing Sunnis by the thousands.

In return, Sunni insurgent fighters have fought back viciously, as violence in the centre of Iraq has begun to resemble civil war.

http://electroniciraq.net/news/2577.shtml

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