Iraq

The big story out of Iraq this weekend was the admission by the United States that it had killed nine civilians accidentally in an airstrike targeting Al-Qaeda forces in Iskanadariya. The Guardian’s piece is quite descriptive, saying that an Iraqi officer described the victims as Sunni members of the Al-Ghrir tribe. What’s interesting is the fact that this happened in a town so close to Baghdad, which according to the US military, has been free and clear of militants for some months, hence the need for the big push in Mosul. On Saturday, President Maliki said that a ‘decisive battle’ was imminent, after meeting with officials in Mosul. Why is the US military still pursing Al-Qaeda militants in the areas close to Baghdad if they’ve all been supposedly pushed out and into Mosul and other northern areas? Understandably there are stragglers everywhere, but conducting an airstrike seems to suggest that perhaps the operation was big to deal with a big AQ cell or unit.

64 people were killed and over 100 more were wounded when what are believed to be two female suicide bombers detonated their payloads on Friday morning. The first was in a market in central Baghdad, which killed 46 people and wounded 82, and the second detonated in a market in southeastern Baghdad with 18 killed and 25 wounded.

In other news, rockets were aimed at a British base in Basra, at the airport. Two British soldiers were wounded, and according to Capt. Finn Aldrich, many more Iraqi casualties were reported. There are no numbers on the Iraqis as of yet. The British withdrew from Basra city for the most part back in September of 2007, and only officially handed the entire province back over to the Iraqis on December 16th, 2007. Before the pull out, the province’s police chief Major General Khalaf, had warned (dismissing fears for his own safety) that not only were his own ranks infiltrated by sectarian militants, but that the religious officials themselves were not doing enough to stop the bloodshed. He bluntly said that the they needed to encourage the militants to stop the violence. His outspokenness has earned him many assassination attempts, a larger one having wounded four of his guards in November of 2007. More to come on the nature of the intra-sectarian violence that permeates Basra in an upcoming post.

Monday greeted the reports of five US troops killed in Mosul as a result of a roadside bomb, or IED. For a comprehensive definition of what an IED is, click here for the Globalsecurity.org’s explanation (click here for an Iraq specific explanation). The ‘pre-offensive’ is gearing up in Mosul, after Prime Minister Maliki announced the plans on Friday. Defense Ministry spokesperson Mohammed Askari has said “The largest portion of those forces have arrived already. They are Iraqi army forces and include troops, mechanized troops and air force…The plan will be similar to the ones implemented in Baghdad and Diyala [province].”

The real problems in Mosul stem from tensions between Arabs and Kurds, and has created a new flashpoint in the country’s battle against internal sectarian and ethnic violence. Defense Minister Abdel Qadir Jassim Mohammed visited the city on Sunday, and gave a press conference saying that “The situation in Mosul is worse than imagined by far“. He also said that the Iraqi military’s deployment in Mosul was scattered and lacked unity. The situation with the security forces was being rectified, according to him.
Following up on the bomb blast in Mosul on Wednesday, the death toll has risen to far beyond the initial report of 12. It is estimated to be about 60. The Iraq Red Crescent reported that many families had buried their deceased relatives without registering the deaths with the authorities or local morgue.

In a small but symbolic step forward today, the Iraqi parliament approved a change to the Iraqi national flag, removing the stars the represented Saddam Hussein’s Ba’ath Party. This is a temporary change and a new flag design will be brokered in a years’ time. I think at this point, the Iraq people need much, much more than symbolic changes. The flag on top is the new design.

Mosul, in the Kurdistan province in northern Iraq, has suffered a bomb blast that came almost immediately after police arrived to act on a tip that the building contained explosives. According to Brigadier General Abdul Karim Al-Jubouri, it occurred at 1630 local time, and witnesses said it was the loudest blast they had ever heard in Mosul. Apparently, it was a booby-trapped house that has followed a string of such houses that have killed many Iraqi forces, US/Coalition forces, and civilians according to the Bloomberg website. However, Brig. Gen. Al-Jubouri has said that officials do not think that it was a traditional booby-trap mechanism by the usual suspects, because the insurgents would wait for the local security officers to actually enter the building to increase the victim yield. In addition, he also said that insurgents would warn local residents to leave the area, which did not happen in this case.

An attempted assassination on the head of the Kirkuk police academy has resulted in five civilians dead and over 10 injured. A suicide car bomb missed its target in a town called Dibis, about 20 miles northwest of Kirkuk. This marks a rise in violence in the once placid area of Kurdistan.

BBC does these pieces sometimes where they will interview and tell the story of someone who is living the headlines. In a piece dated January 19 they tell the story of Noor who is an Iraqi refugee living in Syria. It’s quite searing, and gives a human perspective to the media headlines. In today’s Washington Post however, US officials are calling a cache of files on foreign fighters flowing into Iraq “one of the deepest reservoirs of information we’ve ever obtained of the network going into Iraq”. The youngest would-be bomber’s profile discovered in these documents was 16 years old.

In other developments, members of the Issawi tribe were killed when a suicide bomber detonated an explosive belt on Sunday in Fallujah, making it the second suicide attack in the Anbar province over the weekend. On Saturday, six policemen were killed and 13 wounded west of Ramadi.

The clashes between the Shi’ite sect Soldiers of Heaven and the local Iraqi security forces have occurred almost exactly a year after the previous clashes that killed over 25o people in Najaf, although this time, the violence is farther south, in Nasiriyah and Basra. They are targeting Shi’ite observers of Ashura, a major Shi’ite holiday which involves a pilgrimage to Karbala. They began attacking police positions in a coordinated fashion, and also targeting pilgrims. Not much is known about the Soldiers of Heaven, they seem to be a heavily armed Shi’ite messianic cult.

Last year, the battle that ensued after the confrontation between the Soldiers of Heaven and the local Iraqi security forces took the Iraqi government completely by surprise. US ground troops as well as air support had to be called in. After the battle was over, it was discovered that the SoH had set up camp for quite some time preparing to storm Karbala, and had dug trenches, tunnels, and even had anti-aircraft weaponry. What was disturbing was that this messianic cult had so much military prowess. They seemed to be very well organized, and as the deputy governor of Najaf at the time said, “This group had more capabilities than the government”.

Why is a Shi’ite group attacking other Shi’as, especially during the holiest day of Muharram? Where on earth did they get all this firepower and training from? These are some difficult questions. Last year, SoH’s goal was to assassinate top Shi’a leaders such Ayatollah Sistani and to occupy the main shrine at Karbala. Some officials link them to Al-Qaeda, because during last year’s battle, they apparently arrested/found some Sunnis and foreign fighters. Since Al-Qaeda is so anti-Shi’a, this seems suspect, although it would make sense from a training and funding point of view because the majority of the fighters were poor peasants from the surrounding countryside. Where else could poor peasants get such training, funding, and equipping? Najaf’s governor at the time of last year’s attack, Asad abu Kalal, said,“In external form, the way they look is Shiite, but its reality is something else,” Kalal said. “They meant to destroy the Shiite and kill the Grand Marjiyas and occupy the Holy Shrine of Imam Ali,” he said.

But I don’t think that Shi’ite on Shi’ite violence is impossible, perhaps it should be looked at as Iraqi on Iranian violence, because the group’s main goal last year was to kill Ayatollah al-Sistani and occupy the Holy Shrine. It may be that they wanted it out of the hands of foreign (ie: Iranian) influences.

Woman bomber kills 11 in Iraq in Baquba, capital of the Diyala province. Incidentally, this is the province where a major operation to clean out insurgents is underway. Unfortunately, this has been the third female bomber in three months in Baquba. With the upsurge in booby-trapped houses killing coalition and local security forces, the insurgents are not going quietly. An unannounced visit to Baghdad by Secretary Rice had her meeting PM Maliki and FM Hoshiar Zebari and praising the political process that has moved along ‘quite remarkably’, as she termed it.

Unfortunately, Judge Amir Jawdat Naeib was assassinated in Baghdad on his way to work today. According to the linked BBC article, assassinations have gone down since the ’surge’, but this is another example of how far Iraq is from true stability. Despite this, the Coalition has announced that over 60 militants have been killed in the latest push into the Diyala province called Operation Phantom Pheonix. Another booby trapped house killed seven police officers in the same operation. Iraq eases law against Baathists, according to Al Jazeera English, while Solomon Moor of the New York Times analyzes the development in a little more depth.