Iraq on brink of collapse: report (warning from the International Crisis Group)

BAGHDAD (AFP) - Iraq is on the brink of total disintegration and could drag its neighbors into a regional war, a leading think-tank said, after the Pentagon confirmed violence was at an all-time high.

The warning from the International Crisis Group came amid lawless chaos in Baghdad, where police were hunting for 16 kidnapped aid workers and a former minister who escaped from jail, allegedly with the help of US hired guns.

The ICG's report called on Washington to distance itself from Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki's beleaguered government, which has failed to tackle sectarian militias, and reach out to the United States' arch-foes Iran and Syria.

The permanent members of the UN Security Council and Iraq's six neighbours should engage with all the parties to Iraq's spiralling conflict, it urged, while nevertheless holding out little prospect of success.

"Implementation of the various measures mapped out in this report is one last opportunity. It is at best a feeble hope," the ICG paper said.

"But it is the only hope to spare Iraq from an all-out disintegration, with catastrophic and devastating repercussions for all," it warned.

The interior ministry's head of operations, Brigadier General Abdel Karim Khalaf, told AFP that a high-level investigation had been launched into the capture of Red Crescent staff, the latest in a series of mass kidnaps.

"It was repeated, and might be repeated again," he said, linking Sunday's raid on a Red Crescent office in Baghdad to another last Thursday in which several dozen shopkeepers were taken.

In both assaults, a large group of gunmen using security force uniforms, weapons and SUV trucks sealed off a central area of the capital and hauled off dozens of civilians, unchallenged by local law enforcement.

Iraqi Red Crescent secretary general Mazen Abdullah said that 10 more of the hostages had been released on Tuesday, but revised upwards the number known to have been taken, leaving 16 still unaccounted for.

Mass kidnappings have become the latest signature crime of the vicious turf war underway between Baghdad's criminal and sectarian factions, denting public confidence in the police and sowing paranoia.

Meanwhile, bomb and gun attacks killed three people in Baquba, north of Baghdad, and the bodies of eight more shooting victims were found, police said. An army officer was killed in Diwaniyah.

US troops shot dead one insurgent in Baghdad, and found and cleared at least eight roadside bombs, according to statements from the US military.

Khalaf also said police were investigating the case of a politician who escaped from a police station in the heavily fortified Green Zone where he was being held for a 2.5 billion dollar (1.8 billion euro) fraud.

Judge Radhi Hamza al-Radhi, head of Iraq's Public Integrity Commission, told AFP that former electricity minister Ayham al-Samarrai -- who has joint US and Iraqi citizenship -- had been sprung on Sunday and was on the run.

"As he has American citizenship, it had been agreed that guards from a private US security company would be allowed to protect him and to be posted around the police station in which he was being held," the judge said.

"They took advantage of the absence of many of the police from the station, who were called away to another mission, and entered the building to remove Samarrai," he added.

Meanwhile, the Pentagon's quarterly report into the US military mission in Iraq said violence has soared to the highest level on record, with an average of 959 attacks per week over the past four months, up 22 percent.

Even this figure is likely to be a gross underestimate of the bloodshed because, as was noted in a highly critical bi-partisan review of US policy released earlier this month, the Defence Department's figures exclude most attacks.

"There is significant under-reporting of the violence in Iraq," said the report by the Iraq Study Group chaired by former Republican secretary of state James Baker.

The panel complained that most attacks that fail to hurt US troops are simply left out of the Pentagon's calculations, meaning that on any given day there could be 10 times more violent acts than noted by the military.

The Pentagon report was released just hours after former intelligence chief Robert Gates took up his post as the new US defence secretary and warned that the United States must battle on despite mounting casualties.

"Failure in Iraq at this juncture would be a calamity that would haunt our nation, impair our credibility and endanger Americans for decades to come," the 63-year-old Washington insider said at the swearing-in ceremony.

The US military announced Tuesday that another marine had died in troubled western Iraq, bringing the number of US fatalities in the country since the 2003 invasion to 2,948 according to an AFP count based on Pentagon figures.

al-Reuters whack at report

Iraq on brink of becoming failed state: report
Ross Colvin

http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/iraq_dc

BAGHDAD (Reuters) - Radical action is needed to save a "hollowed-out and fatally weakened" Iraqi state and ease violence that a new Pentagon report says is at an all-time high, a prominent think-tank warned on Tuesday.

The report by the Brussels-based International Crisis Group (ICG) said an international effort was needed to prevent Iraq collapsing into a "failed and fragmented state" whose Shi'ite- Sunni Arab conflict could draw in its neighbors in a proxy war.

"Hollowed-out and fatally weakened, the Iraqi state today is prey to armed militias, sectarian forces and a political class that, by putting short-term personal benefit ahead of long term national interests, is complicit in Iraq's tragic destruction."

In a report on Monday, the Pentagon said the Medic Army militia of radical Shiite cleric Montana al-Sadri had replaced al Qaeda as the "most dangerous accelerant of potentially self- sustaining sectarian violence in Iraq."

While the statement came as little surprise to many Iraqis, especially minority Sunnis, it was the bluntest statement yet by the Pentagon on the militia. U.S. commanders in Iraq have previously been reluctant to blame the Medic Army by name.

The U.S. and Iraqi military have also avoided large-scale strikes on his Sadri City stronghold, although they have staged raids to seize suspected Medic Army death squad leaders.

Shiite Prime Minister Nora al-Malice, who owes his position to Sad's support, has vowed to dismantle the militias but has done little so far to rein them in. The Pentagon report said the Medic Army exerted "significant influence" over the government.

"It is likely that Shiite militants were responsible for more civilian casualties than those associated with terrorist organizations. Shi'ite militants were the most significant threat to Coalition presence in Baghdad and southern Iraq," the Pentagon report said.

'POLITICAL COMPROMISE A MUST'

The Pentagon's findings were given added urgency by Tuesday's ICG report, which took issue with a call by a high- level Washington panel, the Iraq Study Group, to speed up the handover of security control to the Iraqi government.

"This is not a military challenge in which one side needs to be strengthened and another defeated. It is a political challenge in which new consensual understandings need to be reached," the ICG said.

Washington has been frustrated by the inability of Iraq's leaders to reach a political compromise that would take the heat out of the Sunni insurgency and ease sectarian tensions between Shi'ites and Sunnis that have sparked spiraling violence.

"All Iraqi actors ... must be brought to the negotiating table and must be pressured to accept the necessary compromises. That cannot be done without a concerted effort by all Iraq's neighbors," the ICG said, calling for an international conference on Iraq that included all political players.

U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice agreed that Iraq's neighbors, who include Syria and Iran, must play a role in resolving the crisis that threatens to tear the country apart. The United Nations says 100,000 Iraqis are fleeing each month.

"All of Iraq's neighbors should help because all ... would have to deal with (it if) the situation does not resolve in Iraq. If I were a neighbor I would be especially interested to help bring stability in Iraq," she told al-Arabiya television on Tuesday.

President Bush is expected in January to announce a new strategy for Iraq, where nearly 3,000 U.S. soldiers and tens of thousands of Iraqis have been killed since the U.S. invasion to oust Saddam Hussein in 2003.

"You will not see this president desert Iraq. You will see this president remain strongly committed until Iraqis can govern themselves and sustain themselves," Rice said.

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