UK withdrawal from Basra

This article gives rather a rosy picture of Basra under the British. No doubt the city was on the whole less restive than Baghdad and other cities in US controlled areas but there were serious clashes including the arrest of British secret operatives and they were freed by blasting their jail, and there were many other clashes. Also, it was under UK jurisdiction that these factions built up their militas and infrastructure. The UK was not able to stop them. Now they have left they are just able to operate openly. The article fails to note that the UK occupation was in the first place just a way of Blair the lapdog pleasing his master Bush. He is now gone to the Mid-East yelping at the heels of the Palestinians trying to herd them toward peace talks.

As British Leave, Basra Deteriorates
Violence Rises in Shiite City Once Called a Success Story

By Karen DeYoung and Thomas E. Ricks
Washington Post Staff Writers
Tuesday, August 7, 2007; A01



As British forces pull back from Basra in southern Iraq, Shiite militias there have escalated a violent battle against each other for political supremacy and control over oil resources, deepening concerns among some U.S. officials in Baghdad that elements of Iraq's Shiite-dominated national government will turn on one another once U.S. troops begin to draw down.

Three major Shiite political groups are locked in a bloody conflict that has left the city in the hands of militias and criminal gangs, whose control extends to municipal offices and neighborhood streets. The city is plagued by "the systematic misuse of official institutions, political assassinations, tribal vendettas, neighborhood vigilantism and enforcement of social mores, together with the rise of criminal mafias that increasingly intermingle with political actors," a recent report by the International Crisis Group said.

After Saddam Hussein was overthrown in April 2003, British forces took control of the region, and the cosmopolitan port city of Basra thrived with trade, arts and universities. As recently as February, Vice President Cheney hailed Basra as a part of Iraq "where things are going pretty well."

But "it's hard now to paint Basra as a success story," said a senior U.S. official in Baghdad with long experience in the south. Instead, it has become a different model, one that U.S. officials with experience in the region are concerned will be replicated throughout the Iraqi Shiite homeland from Baghdad to the Persian Gulf. A recent series of war games commissioned by the Pentagon also warned of civil war among Shiites after a reduction in U.S. forces.

For the past four years, the administration's narrative of the Iraq war has centered on al-Qaeda, Iran and the sectarian violence they have promoted. But in the homogenous south -- where there are virtually no U.S. troops or al-Qaeda fighters, few Sunnis, and by most accounts limited influence by Iran -- Shiite militias fight one another as well as British troops. A British strategy launched last fall to reclaim Basra neighborhoods from violent actors -- similar to the current U.S. strategy in Baghdad -- brought no lasting success.

"The British have basically been defeated in the south," a senior U.S. intelligence official said recently in Baghdad. They are abandoning their former headquarters at Basra Palace, where a recent official visitor from London described them as "surrounded like cowboys and Indians" by militia fighters. An airport base outside the city, where a regional U.S. Embassy office and Britain's remaining 5,500 troops are barricaded behind building-high sandbags, has been attacked with mortars or rockets nearly 600 times over the past four months.

Britain sent about 40,000 troops to Iraq -- the second-largest contingent, after that of the United States, at the time of the March 2003 invasion -- and focused its efforts on the south. With few problems from outside terrorists or sectarian violence, the British began withdrawing, and by early 2005 only 9,000 troops remained. British Prime Minister Tony Blair announced further drawdowns early this year before leaving office.

The administration has been reluctant to publicly criticize the British withdrawal. But a British defense expert serving as a consultant in Baghdad acknowledged in an e-mail that the United States "has been very concerned for some time now about a) the lawless situation in Basra and b) the political and military impact of the British pullback." The expert added that this "has been expressed at the highest levels" by the U.S. government to British authorities.

The government of new Prime Minister Gordon Brown has pointed to the current relative calm in three of the region's four provinces -- barring Basra -- as evidence of success. According to one British official, Brown told President Bush when they met last week at Camp David that Britain hopes to turn Basra over to Iraqi control in the next few months. Although a further drawdown of its forces is likely, Britain will coordinate its remaining presence with Washington after an assessment in September by Gen. David H. Petraeus, the U.S. commander in Iraq.

As it prepares to take control of Basra, the government of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki has dispatched new generals to head the army and police forces there. But the warring militias are part of factions in the government itself, including radical cleric Moqtada al-Sadr -- whose Mahdi Army is believed responsible for most of the recent attacks on the airport compound -- as well as the Fadhila, or Islamic Virtue Party, and the Supreme Islamic Iraqi Council, the country's largest Shiite party.

In March, Fadhila pulled out of Maliki's ruling alliance of Shiite parties in Baghdad after it lost control of the petroleum ministry to the Supreme Council. Last week, under pressure from the council, Maliki fired the Fadhila governor of Basra. Fadhila has refused to relinquish power over the governate or over Basra's lucrative oil refineries, calling the Maliki government "the new Baath" -- a reference to Hussein's Sunni-led political party -- and appealed the dismissal to Iraq's constitutional court.

Jockeying for political power in Baghdad has long since translated into shooting battles in Basra. The militias have shifted alliances with one another, as well as with the British and with Iran as they fight for control of neighborhoods and resources. With the escalation of street battles and assassinations, much of the population is confined to homes and is fearful of Islamic rules imposed by militias.

Although neighbor Iran's presence is pervasive -- with cultural influence, humanitarian aid, arms and money -- U.S. officials and outside experts think that the Iraqi parties are using Iran more than vice versa. Iraqis in the south have long memories of the Iran-Iraq war in the 1980s, one U.S. official said, and when a southern Shiite "wants to tar someone, they call them an Iranian." He said the United States is "always very concerned about Iranian influence, as well we should be, but there is a difference between influence and control. It would be very difficult for the Iranians to establish control."

The ICG study described Iran, Britain and the United States as equally confused about what is happening in Basra. During a recent visit there, the U.S. official said, he was unable to meet with any local Iraqis outside the airport base or to travel beyond the secured route between the base and the palace. About 200 Americans are in and around the city, including those assigned to the embassy office, some civilian support personnel and contract security guards.

Basra's "security nightmare" has already had devastating effects on Iraq's economy, said Juan Cole, a Middle East specialist at the University of Michigan. Home to two-thirds of Iraq's oil resources, Basra is the country's sole dependable outlet for exporting oil, with a capacity of 1.8 million barrels a day. Much of Basra's violence is "over who gets what cut from Iraq's economic resources," a U.S. Army strategist in Iraq said.

Militias and criminal gangs are financed in part by stolen oil smuggled outside the country, even as Iraq lacks enough energy to provide electricity to many of its people. Both the oil industry and the port facilities -- providing Iraq's only maritime access -- have made Basra "a significant prize for local political actors," the ICG said.

The current U.S. security operation to "clear, hold and build" in Baghdad and its surroundings is almost a replica of Operation Sinbad, which British and Iraqi forces conducted in Basra from September 2006 to March of this year with a mission of "clear, hold and civil reconstruction." Although Operation Sinbad initially succeeded in lowering crime and political assassinations, attacks rose in the spring and British forces withdrew into their compounds.

In the early years of Iraq's occupation, British officials often disdained the U.S. use of armored patrols and heavily protected troops. The British approach of lightly armed foot patrols -- copied from counterinsurgency operations in Northern Ireland -- sought to avoid antagonizing the local population and encourage cooperation. A 2005 report by the defense committee of the House of Commons commended the British army's performance and urged the Ministry of Defense to "use its influence" to get the Americans to take a less aggressive approach.

In a recent BBC interview, Air Chief Marshal Jock Stirrup, chief of the British defense staff, insisted that Basra has been a success. But he acknowledged that judgment depended on "what your interpretation of the mission was in the first place," adding: "I'm afraid people had, in many instances, unrealistic aspirations."

The mission, he said, was simply to "get the place and the people to a state where Iraqis could run this part of the country, if they chose to."

In Mosul Kurds driven out by Arabs

This is just one more part of the mosaic of conflicts that amount to a virtual civil war in Iraq. It seems that neither the US nor so far local authorities are able to do much to stop it.

In North Iraq, Sunni Arabs Drive Out Kurds
By EDWARD WONG
Published: May 30, 2007
MOSUL, Iraq — The letter tossed into Mustafa Abu Bakr Muhammad’s front yard got right to the point.

“You will be killed,” it read, for collaborating with the Kurdish militias. Then came the bullet through a window at night.

A cousin had already been gunned down. So Mr. Muhammad and three generations of his family joined tens of thousands of other Kurds who have fled growing ethnic violence by Sunni Arab insurgents here and moved east, to the safety of Iraqi Kurdistan.

“We had our home in Mosul and it was good there, but things are now very bad between Arabs and Kurds,” said Mr. Muhammad, 70, standing outside his new, scorpion-infested cinderblock house in the nearby town of Khabat.

While the American military is trying to tamp down the vicious fighting between rival Arab sects in Baghdad, conflict between Arabs and Kurds is intensifying here, adding another dimension to Iraq’s civil war. Sunni Arab militants, reinforced by insurgents fleeing the new security plan in Baghdad, are trying to rid Mosul of its Kurdish population through violence and intimidation, Kurdish officials said.

Mosul, Iraq’s third largest city, with a population of 1.8 million, straddles the Tigris River on a grassy, windswept plain in the country’s north. It was recently estimated to be about a quarter Kurdish, but Sunni Arabs have already driven out at least 70,000 Kurds and virtually erased the Kurdish presence from the city’s western half, said Khasro Goran, the deputy governor of surrounding Nineveh Province and a Kurd.

The militants “view this as a Sunni-dominated town, and they view the Kurds as encroaching on Mosul,” said Col. Stephen Twitty, commander of the Fourth Brigade, First Cavalry Division, which is deployed in Nineveh. Some Kurdish and Christian enclaves remain on the east side, though their numbers are dwindling. Kurdish officials say the flight has accelerated in recent months, contributing to the wider ethnic and religious partitioning that is taking place all over Iraq.

Nineveh is Iraq’s most diverse province, with a dizzying array of ethnic and religious groups woven into an area about the size of Maryland. For centuries, Arabs, Kurds, Christians, Turkmens, Yezidis and Shabaks lived side by side in these verdant hills, going to the same schools, bartering in the same markets, even intermarrying on occasion.

But what took generations to build is starting to unravel in the shadow of the Sunni Arab insurgency, which is tapping into several wells of ethnic resentment.

Already embittered at the toppling of the Sunni Arab government of Saddam Hussein, insurgents here have been further enraged by their current political disenfranchisement, a result of their boycotting the 2005 elections. The main Kurdish coalition now holds 31 of 41 seats on the provincial council and all the top executive positions, even though Kurds make up only 35 percent of the province. Most Kurds are of the Sunni sect, but they have little in common with the Arabs.

Sunni Arabs have asked for new provincial elections and are growing frustrated that the Shiite- and Kurdish-dominated national government seems to be ignoring their requests.

“We demanded elections a year ago, but it never happened,” said Muhammad Shakir, the local leader of the Iraqi Islamic Party, the province’s most prominent Sunni Arab political group. “The current council does not represent the governorate.”

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Some officials in the national government say conditions will not permit provincial elections until next year.

Just as worrisome for the Arabs is a growing push by the autonomous region of Iraqi Kurdistan to annex large swaths of eastern and northern Nineveh. A contentious measure in the Constitution gives the regional Kurdish government the right to take the land by the end of 2007 through a popular referendum.

The parts of the province that Iraqi Kurdistan wants are called the “disputed territories” along its border, areas that were historically Kurdish until Saddam Hussein moved in Arabs and forced out half a million Kurds to strengthen Arab control, Kurdish officials say.

Mr. Goran, the deputy governor, said six of Nineveh’s nine districts — with at least 30 percent of the province’s 2.7 million people — could vote to join Iraqi Kurdistan. Before the vote is held, however, the Iraqi government must find a way to move out the Arab settlers and move back the original Kurdish residents. Some of this relocation has already taken place, but many more original residents still need to return, Mr. Goran said.

If the vote is put off, he said, violence will soar even further between Kurds and Arabs as each group struggles for the land. “This is a good time to solve the problem,” he said, “because if not, we will open another front in the north between Kurds and Arabs.”

To ensure control of the lands, the Kurdish parties are encouraging settlers to move to eastern Nineveh, just as they have been doing in disputed areas in Diyala Province and around the oil-rich city of Kirkuk. Kurdish militias have also been operating in Nineveh and the streets of Mosul, stoking Sunni Arab fears of Kurdish domination, Colonel Twitty said.

The violence here against the Kurds and other minorities is vicious and unrelenting, Kurdish and American officials say. More than 1,000 Kurdish civilians have recently been killed in Mosul, and at least two or three are gunned down each day now, Mr. Goran said. One well-known Kurdish singer was murdered because he had the same last name as Mr. Goran.

“Everyone gets threats or can feel threatened here,” said James Knight, the head of the State Department’s provincial reconstruction team in Nineveh. “The intimidation of people is one of the dramatic ongoing problems we have.”

Mr. Knight said 70,000 was a reasonable estimate for the number of people who have fled Mosul, but he did not know how many were Kurds.

[On May 13, in the mostly Kurdish district of Makhmur, a suicide truck bomber rammed into the local headquarters of the Kurdistan Democratic Party, killing at least 50 people and wounding at least 115. On May 9, a truck bomb exploded in front of Kurdish government offices in Erbil, the relatively secure capital of Iraqi Kurdistan, killing at least 19 and wounding at least 70.]

While the Americans are fighting the Sunni Arab insurgency, they are also vigorously supporting what they say are legitimate Sunni Arab demands, like the call for provincial elections. The Arabs and Kurds have to reach a power-sharing arrangement, American officials say.

But the surge in ethnic violence has sharpened the animosity of Kurds toward Arabs, and few Kurds are ready to forgive the atrocities committed by Mr. Hussein’s Sunni Arab government.

“I compare the Sunni Arabs to Bosnian Serbs: their behavior, their way of thinking, their way of acting,” Mr. Goran said in an interview at the fortified government center downtown. “They are for killings, they are for mass graves. Not all of them, but the majority of them.”

So far, Kurdish militias have refrained from engaging in the kind of wide-scale reprisals against Sunni Arabs that Shiite militias have carried out in Baghdad. But the Kurds are capable, Mr. Goran warned.

“We can kill every day 50 Arabs in the streets,” Mr. Goran said with a quick smile. “Every day, everywhere, in Mosul and outside of Mosul. But we don’t do that, because we know they want us to do that.”

The insurgency here is a caldron of prominent Sunni Arab groups that include Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia and Ansar al-Sunna. The city was a recruitment base for commanders of the old Iraqi Army, and former officers are now among the leaders of the local guerrilla movement.

During a November 2004 uprising, much of the Mosul police force defected to the insurgency, and Mr. Goran said he suspects that a third to half of the existing police force still aids or sympathizes with the insurgency. After the execution of Saddam Hussein in December, he said, some policemen put Mr. Hussein’s picture in their cars. A new police chief who is a Sunni Arab, Maj. Gen. Wathiq Muhammad al-Hamdani, is trying to clean house, he said.

There are some positive signs, American commanders say. As in Anbar Province, some Sunni militants are chafing at the Islamist agenda of Al Qaeda, said Lt. Col. Eric Welsh, leader of the Second Battalion, Seventh Cavalry, the single American combat battalion in Mosul.

And one of the two, mostly Kurdish, Iraqi Army divisions in Nineveh has been working well under a respected Sunni Arab general, Brig. Gen. Moutaa Jassim Habeeb, Mr. Goran said. But conservative Sunni Arab politicians in Baghdad are pushing to replace him with a hard-line commander, Mr. Goran added.

If that happens, he said, “no Kurdish soldier will remain in the division.”

Despite their heavy presence in the army, Kurdish soldiers have been unable to end the violence that is driving so many Kurds from Mosul.

Sanaa Saadan and her husband are known as “Mosulis.” They were born and raised there, but they could be the last in their families to lay claim to that title.

Last year, Ms. Saadan and her husband moved with their three sons into the home of her older sister in Khabat, 30 miles to the east. The two said they knew at least seven Kurds who had been murdered in Mosul.

Khabat, just inside Iraqi Kurdistan, has become a place of refuge. Rents have skyrocketed, said the mayor, Rizgar Mustafa Muhammad. At least 1,300 families have moved there from Mosul. More than 120 came in April alone, the most of any month, he said. Soon, he said, tent camps will be needed.

“We were unhappy to leave Mosul,” said Ms. Saadan, 28, as she watched over her youngest son in his crib. Her husband, a wedding singer, finds work scarce in Iraqi Kurdistan. Their two oldest sons had a tough time adjusting to school lessons in Kurdish rather than Arabic.

The highway from Khabat to Mosul runs past Ms. Saadan’s home and through a checkpoint a mile to the west, on a concrete bridge spanning a river that marks the border with Nineveh. Kurdish soldiers check the identification cards of people driving in. They say Kurds arrive regularly in cars packed with furniture and household goods.

“If we’re ordered to go protect residents of Mosul, we’ll do it,” said the commander, Maj. Ghafour Ahmed Hussein.

He stared out at the green hills to the west. Beyond lay the city and its newly emptied houses.


Yerevan Adham contributed from Erbil, and an Iraqi employee of The New York Times from Mosul.

The Problem of Kirkuk

This is a problem to watch. The Kurds have been returning to Kirkuk since the US led invasion. Since it is an oil rich region the Kurds would like to see it part of the Kurdish controlled regions in Iraq. There is to be a referendum to determine the area's future by the end of next year.

Turkish PM warns Iraqi Kurds against seeking control of oil-rich KirkukBy ASSOCIATED PRESSANKARA, Turkey





Turkey's prime minister warned Iraqi Kurdish groups Tuesday against trying to seize control of the northern Iraqi city of Kirkuk. Kurdish lawmakers responded by accusing Ankara of interfering in internal Iraqi matters.
Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan said Turkey would not stand by amid growing tensions among ethnic Turkmens, Arabs and Kurds in Iraq's oil-rich north. Turkish lawmakers are to discuss Kirkuk and Iraq on Thursday, and Turkey's main opposition party has said it would back a cross-border offensive to quell a Kurdish rebellion.
Iraqi Kurds, who claim the region as their own and hope to eventually include Kirkuk in an enclave of self-rule in northern Iraq, responded by accusing Turkey of interfering in Iraqi internal affairs.
Kurdish legislators in Iraq's parliament "condemn this interference in Iraqi affairs by the Turkish government (and) ... call upon parliament to issue a statement condemning them as well," they said in a statement Tuesday.
Kurdish lawmakers urged parliament to "call upon the Iraqi government and the Foreign Ministry to take a decisive stance to stop this interference, and to threaten to cut political and the economic relations with Turkey in case Turkey keeps its interference."
Turkey fears Iraq's Kurds want Kirkuk's lucrative oil to fund a bid for independence that could encourage separatist Kurdish guerrillas in Turkey who have been fighting since 1984 for autonomy.
Erdogan chided an Iraqi Kurdish group for denouncing an Ankara conference on Kirkuk's future, saying Turkey "cannot digest their words" and cannot stand such criticism, recalling how Turkey sheltered more than 500,000 Iraqi Kurdish refugees who escaped the Iraqi army's bombardment following a failed Kurdish insurgency in early 1991.
Erdogan reminded Kurds of his country's historical and ethnic ties to the region.
"Turkey did not remain indifferent to the plight of Kurdish peshmergas who were escaping oppression and death," he said. "Today, it will not remain indifferent to the Turkmens, Arabs ... in Kirkuk."
Kirkuk, an ancient city that once was part of the Ottoman Empire, has a large minority of ethnic Turks as well as Christians, Shiite and Sunni Arabs, Armenians and Assyrians.
Since the US-led invasion of Iraq in 2003, thousands of Kurds pushed out of the region under Saddam Hussein's rule have flooded back to Kirkuk.
Kirkuk lies just south of the autonomous Kurdish region stretching across Iraq's northeast. Kurdish leaders want to annex the city, and Iraq's constitution calls for a referendum on the issue by the end of next year.
US legislators have warned that Kirkuk is a "powder keg" and have recommended that the referendum be delayed.

A recipe for more ethnic discord in Iraq

So Kurds are going to be attacking Sunnis and Shias. They do not understand the language or culture. They need translators. They will be about as welcome as Americans. This is just sowing the seeds of more conflict and bad feeling among ethnic groups. One wonders if the US actually wants to make things worse or if they really do think they will prevail and make Baghdad more secure. It is clear that Maliki thinks that the Iraqi govt. will control the offensive but this is surely wishful thinking. The US says it can go anywhere it wants any time and that the gloves are off now. If there is a full attack on the Sadr slum this will ignite a tinderbox.


Kurdish gen.: brigade trains for Baghdad
By YAHYA BARZANJI, Associated Press Writer 8 minutes ago
KIRKUK, Iraq - An Iraqi army brigade based in the northern Kurdish region is undergoing intensive training in urban combat and will be dispatched to Baghdad as part of a new joint U.S.-Iraqi security drive in the sprawling and violence-ridden city, the commander said Saturday.
The brigade is one of two coming from the Kurdish region and a third brigade will come from southern
Iraq' name=c1> SEARCHNews News Photos Images Web' name=c3> Iraq. The second Kurdish brigade will come from the northern city of Sulaimaniyah.
"We will head to Baghdad soon. We have 3,000 soldiers who are currently undergoing intensive training especially in urban combat and how the army should act inside a city," said Brig. Gen. Nazir Assem Korran, commander of the 1st Infantry Brigade, 2nd Division of the Iraqi army that is based in the city of Irbil.
Korran told The Associated Press he did not know how the drive would be carried out but said the Defense Ministry in Baghdad had asked the brigade to take part in the security operation announced by Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki a week ago.
Thousands of Iraqi and U.S. troops are expected to do neighborhood-to-neighborhood searches to clear the city of Sunni Muslim insurgents and local militias such as the Mahdi Army of radical Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr. The Mahdi Army has been blamed for much of the sectarian killing in the past months.
"We are going to confront any terrorist elements or militias. We will confront any outlaws," the general said.
Korran said his troops would face a language barrier because 95 percent of the brigade is Kurdish and unable to speak Arabic. Kurds, a separate ethnic group, are largely Sunnis but not Arabs.
"I believe that we will bring translators with our brigade to solve this problem," he said.
The general said his troops were part of the Iraqi army and do not belong to local Kurdish militias, known as peshmergas, as some Iraqi media reports have claimed.
"We do not represent any sect or ethnic group," Korran said. "I believe that the plan will include street battles with militias in residential areas. It could also include raids that are needed to wipe out terrorists elements and militias."
Al-Maliki's office, meanwhile, expressed support for
President Bush' name=c1> SEARCHNews News Photos Images Web' name=c3> President Bush's new war strategy on Saturday but stressed the government would maintain control over military action in Baghdad.
The Shiite prime minister's opinion is that Bush's plan to send 21,500 more U.S. troops to stem the violence in Iraq "represents a common vision and a mutual understanding between the Iraqi government and the American administration," his spokesman said in a statement.
But the spokesman, Ali al-Dabbagh, stressed the American forces would be working in support of the Iraqis as they implement al-Maliki's plan to restore peace in Baghdad.