Dahr Jamail: On the Awakening Councils conflict in Iraq

This is from truthout.
This is another instance of blowback. While the councils helped defeat Al Qaeda in Iraq they also set the stage for the present confrontation with the Shia dominated government. It remains to be seen whether the situation is defused or if more Sunnis return to insurgency.

The Storm Widens
Monday 06 April 2009
by: Dahr Jamail, t r u t h o u t Report

One week after Iraqi government forces arrested an Awakening Group (commonly referred to as Sons of Iraq, al-Sahwa) leader, Adil al-Mashhadani, head of a patrol unit in central Baghdad's Fadhil neighborhood in Baghdad, sparking gun battles that raged for hours between US-backed Iraqi forces and US-allied Sunni militiamen that killed three people, militiamen have once again been detained, widening concerns that sectarian violence may once more engulf Baghdad. There are 50,000 Sahwa fighters in Baghdad alone.
While the Sahwa leader, who had been detained with 32 of his fighters, was eventually released by the Iraqi government, tensions grew in the wake of his detention as threats made by both sides increased. Thus far, only 11 of the 32 others have been released.
Just days after the aforementioned detention, Iraqi forces arrested two more Sahwa guards in the al-Dora neighborhood of Baghdad, which is controlled by their forces. In an article for Truthout last week, I voiced my concerns of these government attacks against Sahwa forces spreading. I am surprised at the rapidity at which this is occurring now, as this trend, if it continues, appears almost certain to spark a dramatic flare of sectarian violence in the capital city.
The Sahwa fighters, who once numbered 100,000 across Iraq according to the US military, were backed and paid by US forces until the Shiite-led Iraqi government took over the program last October, a process that was completed this week. Payment to Sahwa leaders by the US military, however, has shifted from overt payments to payment in the form of "construction contracts" to key leaders.
That the treatment of the Sahwa forces by the Iraqi government is largely seen as a barometer for the process of reconciliation does not bode well for these recent events. Most of the Sahwa fighters are former resistance fighters, who feared they would be arrested for their previous attacks against the Iraqi government. For example, Mashhadani was arrested, according to Iraqi government officials, for running a bomb-making factory among other reasons.
Further complicating matters, in separate incidents last week, US forces opened fire on a group of fighters they said could belong to a Sahwa unit, killing one, after allegedly spotting them planting a bomb. In addition, last Friday, Iraqi police arrested Hussam Alwan, a Sahwa leader in the town of Muqtadiya, 50 miles northeast of Baghdad.
On Sunday, April 5, two houses were blown up in the Abu Ghraib district of west Baghdad, one of which belonged to a leader of the local Sahwa group. A man was killed and two women wounded, municipal officials said. Assuming this trend continues, the leadership of the Sahwa groups under attack and the fighters under their control are left with two choices: sit by and wait to be arrested or assassinated, or begin to fight back. Thus far, we are seeing the latter, and there is little reason to suspect this wonít increase if the government continues with its policy.
As the threat of a resurgence of sectarian violence grows, black funeral banners hang across Baghdad, ominous reminders that there is no normal life in the war-ravaged country. The Los Angeles Times reports , "At a time when the Iraqi government and US military speak of lower death tolls, black banners drape the mosque walls and traffic circles of Baghdad, telling a different story of a world beyond statistics, where killings still ripple through society. These disposable funeral banners, randomly read by drivers who pass on the word about the drive-by shootings, bombings and assassinations they document, remind ordinary Iraqis that nothing is as it seems, that the embers of the recent civil war still burn."
Meanwhile, violence continues across the country. A brief tally of the last several days gives an idea of the situation in Iraq:
Sunday, April 5: nine Iraqis killed, 30 wounded
Saturday, April 4: one US marine, two Iraqis killed; eight Iraqis wounded
Friday, April 3: one US soldier, five Iraqis killed; 17 Iraqis wounded
Thursday, April 2: nine Iraqis killed, 22 wounded
Wednesday, April 1: one US soldier, 15 Iraqis killed; 25 Iraqis wounded
At the height of the sectarian violence that ravaged Iraq between early 2006

The Myth of Sectarianism

Even though the occupation may have increased sectarianism it was no doubt latent all along but repressed by Hussein's iron rule. The US probably thought it would be useful to exploit it. However, some of the sectarian violence is an unintended by-product of the introduction of an elected government which gave Kurds plus Shias a big majority over the Sunnis. This in itself increased sectarian friction. There is also intergroup conflict as between moderate Sunnis and Al Qaeda. The US has successfully exploited this conflict by paying Sunni groups to attack Al Qaeda in Sunni areas.

The Myth Of Sectarianism

The policy is divide to rule

By DAHR JAMAIL

09/01/08 "ISR" -- -- IF THE U.S. leaves Iraq, the violent sectarianism between the Sunni and Shia will worsen. This is what Republicans and Democrats alike will have us believe. This key piece of rhetoric is used to justify the continuance of the occupation of Iraq.

This propaganda, like others of its ilk, gains ground, substance, and reality due largely to the ignorance of those ingesting it. The snow job by the corporate media on the issue of sectarianism in Iraq has ensured that the public buys into the line that the Sunni and Shia will dice one another up into little pieces if the occupation ends.

It may be worthwhile to consider that prior to the Anglo-American invasion and occupation of Iraq there had never been open warfare between the two groups and certainly not a civil war. In terms of organization and convention, Iraqis are a tribal society and some of the largest tribes in the country comprise Sunni and Shia. Intermarriages between the two sects are not uncommon either.

Soon after arriving in Iraq in November 2003, I learned that it was considered rude and socially graceless to enquire after an individual’s sect. If in ignorance or under compulsion I did pose the question the most common answer I would receive was, “I am Muslim, and I am Iraqi.” On occasion there were more telling responses like the one I received from an older woman, “My mother is a Shia and my father a Sunni, so can you tell which half of me is which?” The accompanying smile said it all.

Large mixed neighborhoods were the norm in Baghdad. Sunni and Shia prayed in one another’s mosques. Secular Iraqis could form lifelong associations with others without overt concern about their chosen sect. How did such a well-integrated society erupt into vicious fighting, violent sectarianism, and segregated neighborhoods? How is one to explain the millions in Iraq displaced from their homes simply because they were the wrong sect in the wrong place at the wrong time?

Back in December 2003 Sheikh Adnan, a Friday speaker at his mosque, had recounted a recent experience to me. During the first weeks of the occupation, a U.S. military commander had showed up in Baquba, the capital of Diyala province located roughly twenty-five miles northeast of Baghdad with a mixed Sunni-Shia population. He had asked to meet with all the tribal and religious leaders. On the appointed day the assembled leaders were perplexed when the commander instructed them to divide themselves, “Shia on one side of the room, Sunni on the other.”

It would not be amiss, perhaps, to read in this account an implanting of a deliberate policy of “divide and rule” by the Anglo-American invaders from the early days of the occupation.

There have been no statistical surveys in recent years to determine the sectarian composition of Iraq. However, when the Coalition Provisional Authority, led by Paul Bremer, formed the first puppet Iraqi government, a precedent was set. The twenty-five seats in the Iraqi Governing Council (IGC), were assigned strictly along sectarian lines based on the assumption that 60 percent of the population is Shia, 20 percent Sunni, and 20 percent Kurds, who are mostly Sunni. For good measure, a couple of Turkoman and a Christian were thrown in.

It is evident that this puppet troupe deployed at the onset of “democracy” in Iraq was mandated to establish to the population that it was in the larger interest to begin thinking, at least politically, along sectarian and ethnic lines. Inevitably, political power struggles ensued and were cemented and exacerbated with the January 30, 2005, elections.

Mild surface scratching reveals a darker, largely unreported aspect of the divisive U.S. plan. A UN report released in September 2005 held Iraqi interior ministry forces responsible for an organized campaign of detention, torture, and killing of fellow Iraqis. These special police commando units were recruited from the Shia Badr Organization and Mehdi Army militias.

In Baghdad during November and December 2004, I heard widespread accounts of death squads assassinating Sunni resistance leaders and their key sympathizers. It was after the failure of Operation Phantom Fury, as the U.S. siege of Fallujah that November was named, that the Iraqi resistance spread across Iraq like wildfire. Death squads were set up to quell this fire by eliminating the leadership of this growing resistance.

The firefighting team had at its helm the U.S. ambassador to Iraq, John Negroponte, ably assisted by retired Colonel James Steele, adviser to Iraqi security forces. In 1984–86 Steele had been commander of the U.S. military advisory group in El Salvador. Between 1981 and 1985 Negroponte was U.S. ambassador to neighboring Honduras. In 1994 the Honduras Commission on Human Rights charged him with extensive human rights violations, reporting the torture and disappearance of at least 184 political workers. A CIA working group set up in 1996 to look into the U.S. role in Honduras has placed on record documents admitting that the operations Negroponte oversaw in Honduras were carried out by “special intelligence units,” better known as “death squads,” of CIA-trained Honduran armed units which kidnapped, tortured, and killed thousands of people suspected of supporting leftist guerrillas. Negroponte was ambassador to Iraq for close to a year from June 2004.

The only public mention of any of this I have seen was in Newsweek magazine on January 8, 2005. It quotes Donald Rumsfeld, U.S. secretary of defense at the time, who discussed the use of the “Salvador Option” in Iraq. It compared the strategy being planned for Iraq to the one used in Central America during the Reagan administration:

"Then, faced with a losing war against Salvadoran rebels, the U.S. government funded or supported “nationalist” forces that allegedly included so-called death squads directed to hunt down and kill rebel leaders and sympathizers. Eventually the insurgency was quelled, and many U.S. conservatives consider the policy to have been a success—despite the deaths of innocent civilians and the subsequent Iran-Contra arms-for-hostages scandal."

U.S.-backed sectarian death squads have become the foremost generator of death in Iraq, even surpassing the U.S. military machine, infamous for its capacity for industrial-scale slaughter. It is no secret in Baghdad that the U.S. military would regularly cordon off pro-resistance areas like the al-Adhamiyah neighborhood of Baghdad and allow “Iraqi police” and “Iraqi army” personnel, masked in black balaclavas, through their checkpoints to carry out abductions and assassinations in the neighborhood.

Consequently, almost all of Baghdad and much of Iraq is now segregated. The flipside is that violence in the capital city has subsided somewhat of late now that the endgame of forming the death squads, that of fragmenting the population, has been mostly accomplished.

Baghdad resident, retired General Waleed al-Ubaidy told my Iraqi colleague recently, “I would like to agree with the idea that violence in Iraq has decreased and that everything is fine, but the truth is far more bitter. All that has happened is a dramatic change in the demographic map of Iraq.” Baghdad today is a divided city.

Ahmad Ali, chief engineer from one of Baghdad’s municipalities told my colleague, Ali al-Fadhily, “Baghdad has been torn into two cities and many towns and neighborhoods. There is now the Shia Baghdad and the Sunni Baghdad to start with. Each is divided into little town-like pieces of the hundreds of thousands who had to leave their homes.” Al-Adhamiyah, on the Russafa side of Tigris River, is now entirely Sunni, the other areas are all Shia. The al-Karkh side of the river is purely Sunni except for Shula, Hurriya, and small strips of Aamil which are dominated by Shia militias.

Not being privy to the U.S. machinations, Iraqis in Baghdad blame the Iraqi police and Iraqi army for the sectarian assassinations and wonder why the U.S. military does little or nothing to stop them. “The Americans ask [Prime Minister Nouri al] Maliki to stop the sectarian assassinations knowing full well that his ministers are ordering the sectarian cleansing,” says Mahmood Farhan of the Muslim Scholars Association, a leading Sunni group.

A more recent manifestation of the divisive U.S. policy has been the “purchase” of members of the largely Sunni resistance in Baghdad and in al-Anbar province that constitutes one-third of the geographic area of Iraq. Payments made by the U.S. military to collaborating tribal sheikhs already amount to $17 million. The money passes directly into the hands of fighters who in many cases were engaged in launching attacks against the occupiers less than two weeks ago. Tribal fighters are being paid $300 per month to patrol their areas, particularly against foreign mercenaries. Today the military refers to these men as “concerned local citizens,” “awakening force,” or simply “volunteers.”

Arguably, violence in the area has temporarily declined. “Those Americans thought they would decrease the resistance attacks by separating the people of Iraq into sects and tribes,” announced a thirty-two-year-old man from Ramadi, who spoke with al-Fadhily on terms of anonymity, “They know they are sinking deeper into the shifting sand, but the collaborators are fooling the Americans right now, and will in the end use this strategy against them.” By the end of November 2007, the U.S. military had enlisted 77,000 of these fighters, and hopes to add another 10,000. Eighty-two percent of the fighters are Sunni.

Politically, the U.S. administration maintains its support of the Shia-dominated government in Baghdad. The fallout has been blatantly clear. On the first of December, Adnan al-Dulaimi, head of the Accordance Front, which is the Sunni political bloc in the Iraqi Parliament, was placed under house arrest by Iraqi and U.S. security forces in the Adil neighborhood, west of Baghdad. Iraqi security forces also detained his son Makki and forty-five of his guards. They were accused of manufacturing car bombs and killing Sunni militia members in the neighborhood who have been working with the U.S. military. Members of the Accordance Front, which holds 44 of the 275 seats in the Iraqi Parliament, promptly walked out. Maliki has, several times in the last several weeks, hurled public accusations and criticisms at al-Dulaimi, sending political and sectarian shock waves, further crippling the crumbling political process.

It is important to mention that Maliki, a U.S. puppet par excellence, acts only as told. After the January 2005 elections, the government that came into power had chosen Ibrahim al-Jaafari as its prime minister. When Jaafari refused to toe the U.S./UK line, Condoleezza Rice and her UK counterpart Jack Straw flew to Baghdad, and before their short trip ended Jaafari was out and Maliki was in as prime minister.

In the context of these facts let us now return to the big question: Will Iraq descend further into a sectarian nightmare if the occupation ends?

An indicator of how things will likely resolve themselves upon the departure of foreign troops may be drawn from the southern city of Basra. In early September, 500 British troops left one of Saddam Hussein’s palaces in the heart of the city and ceased to conduct regular foot patrols. According to the British military, the overall level of violence in the city has decreased 90 percent since then.

This may or may not be a guarantee of a drop in sectarianism upon the departure of the invading armies, but it does prove that when the primary cause of the violence, sectarian strife, instability, and chaos is removed from the equation of Iraq, things are bound to improve rapidly.

Are we still going to believe that the occupation is holding Iraq together?

Dahr Jamail, who spent eight months in Iraq as an independent journalist, is author of Beyond the Green Zone: Dispatches From an Unembedded Journalist in Occupied Iraq (Haymarket Books, 2007). The New York Times’ Stephen Kinzer describes his writing as “international journalism at its best.” Dahr is currently on a national speaking tour sponsored by Haymarket and his articles can be found at http://www.dahrjamailiraq.com/ .

Dahr Jamail: The "success" of the surge.

Dahr Jamail interview: Iraq occupation in the eye of the storm



This is from this site. Jamail analyses the reasons why there is more relative peace in Iraq since the surge. The reasons have little to do with the surge but depend on tactical decisions by Sadr, alliances with former Sunni insurgents, ethnic cleansing of neighborhoods, less military patrols and more airstrikes. Of course there is still considerable civilian carnage and people are returning to Baghdad because they have nowhere to go!


One of the few independent journalists to report from inside Iraq, Dahr Jamail spoke to Socialist Worker about the reality behind US claims of success in its ‘surge’

The US military are claiming that the “surge” of 30,000 troops in Iraq has stabilised the occupation. Is this true?

The propaganda campaign which is being pushed by most of the establishment media in the US has now assumed is that the so-called surge is working.

The line goes something like, “People are returning to their homes in Baghdad, fewer people are dying”, and so on.

It is true that their are fewer US soldiers are being killed – in May this year 131 US troops were killed, last month this dropped to 40 – but we’re not told why.

There are fewer military patrols being run, and the US has bought off much of the resistance in the mainly Sunni Muslim al-Anbar province in western Iraq and the capital Baghdad. Meanwhile rebel Shia cleric Moqtada al-Sadr has declared a ceasefire.

There has also been a huge escalation in the use of air strikes.

With Baghdad we need to consider the fact that one million of the six million who lived there have fled.

There is less violence in the capital because we’re seeing the endgame of the US-backed sectarian death squads.

“Sectarian cleansing” and the segregating of the mixed neighbourhoods is now largely complete.

There are some people returning to Baghdad now. But this has little to do with a new confidence among ordinary people.

As of 1 October 2007 Syria, the last country to allow Iraqis unrestricted entry, has imposed tough new visa restrictions.

So most folks who get to the Syrian border are turned back. They can sit in the desert in a refugee camp or return to Baghdad.

People are also returning from both Syria and Jordan because their savings are running out.

Since the “surge” was launched however, the number of displaced Iraqis has quadrupled.

There are now over one million who have been killed, three million wounded, over five million displaced, and four million in need of some emergency assistance.

That means that over half the population of the country are either displaced, wounded, in need of emergency assistance, or dead.

Why are sections of the mainly Sunni resistance now co-operating with the US?

Several tribal sheikhs, mostly in the al-Anbar province, have agreed to take US cash to order their fighters to stand-down.

This is the primary reason why there is less violence in al-Anbar. So resistance fighters are being paid, armed, and backed by the US military they were fighting a few months ago.

It is a classic example of divide and rule. The US is now arming and backing Sunni resistance groups, while supporting the predominantly Shia government in Baghdad. It is a ticking time bomb.

Why did Muqtada al-Sadr call a ceasefire?

His Mehdi militia had been heavily infiltrated by criminal gangs, and “foreign elements” which led to generating strife with rival groups.

He called a six month stand-down to rebuild his militia, to vet members, and weed out the undesirable elements.

That is why they are on ceasefire for the moment. The final straw for Sadr was when members of his militia attacked the rival Badr Brigades in the holy city of Kerbala and Baghdad a few months ago. He did not order the attacks and was struggling to keep control of his supporters.

The US is building a huge embassy complex in Baghdad. What does this tell us about their long term plans?

They plan to stay there permanently.

Look at the mega military bases they are building, look at the new embassy. It has the same infrastructure that we see in other US militarised areas around the globe like Japan, South Korea and Germany.

Both the US National Security Strategy and the Quadrennial Defence Review Report – which are the engines that drive US foreign policy – call for the military to protect “US interests” like oil, natural gas and the shipping lanes in the Middle East.

Until these priorities are changed, there will be no change in US policy for the Middle East and no withdrawal from Iraq.

What can we expect from the Democratic party if they win the next US presidential elections?

The top three Democratic presidential candidates for the 2008 presidential elections – Hilary Clinton, Barack Obama and John Edwards – have already taken off the table the discussion of total withdrawal from Iraq until after their first term in office in 2013 – if they come to power, that is. So we can expect little change in US policy even under a new administration.

The mainly Kurdish region of northern Iraq has, up till now, been seen as a success story. Yet reports are emerging that ethnic tensions are building. What are the reasons behind it?

Primarily it is because of the Kurds want independence from Baghdad. This demand was made with the full knowledge of the US from the beginning of the occupation.

Now the Kurds are signing their own contracts with foreign oil companies, (mainly western oil giants), and are thumbing their nose at Baghdad in the process.

This has signalled to Turkey that the Kurds really are taking strides towards independence. This has been one of the prime motivators for Turkey’s aggression towards the Kurds as of late.

Part of this plan has been to force out other ethnic Iraqi groups from Kirkuk, their oil hub. They have been involved in removing Arabs, Turkomen, and other minorities from the city to make it more “Kurdish.”

This has included “sectarian cleansing” of mixed neighbourhoods by the US backed Peshmerga militia. This militia has been removing all signs in Arabic, and are only flying the Kurdish flag in the city. This has, needless to say, not helped to dampen sectarian tensions in the city.

How deep is the sectarian divide in Iraq, and how serious are moves to divide the country?

The sectarian divide is a result of the US policy to “divide and conquer”. We cannot underestimate the impact of the sectarian death squads – orchestrated by John Negroponte while he was US ambassador to Iraq and facilitated by colonel James Steele, the “Counsellor for Iraqi Security Affairs”.

Negroponte and Steele launched their death squads in November

2004 and controlled them through the Iraqi ministry of interior.

They funded, armed and backed them in a similar way that they ran death squads in Central America in the 1980s. This is the key element in the US plan to divide the country.

Then of course we have the overt attempts to stoke divisions. The White House has been praising Iraqi premier Nouri al-Maliki for his progress towards the “soft-partition” of the country.

What are your reports on life for ordinary people in Iraq?

There is no ordinary life. On all levels the basic infrastructure in Iraq is far worse than before the invasion.

Unemployment is between 60 to 70 percent, the average home has only up to five hours of electricity a day, there are ongoing gas shortages, and 70 percent of Iraqis do not have access to drinkable water.

Over half the medical workers have fled the country, and the situation in the hospitals is worse today than it was than during the punitive United Nations sanctions following the first Gulf War in 1991.

The occupation of Iraq is a complete catastrophe, and one could easily argue that is the result of a genocidal policy conducted by the current Bush administration, the former Clinton administrations,

and the Bush senior administration before that.

This is a bipartisan war against Iraq by successive US administrations that has spanned decades and resulted in the destruction of the country.