Some say the USA causes the current Iraq violent death rate of 0.0857% per year by leaving its combat troops in Iraq.
Some say the itm causes the current Iraq violent death rate of 0.0857% per year by murdering Iraqi civilians.
According to conservatives it's the liberal press that's ripping apart Iraq with all their bad news. It's the liberal press that makes Iraq look worse then what it really is. It's the liberal press that hates America and supports the terrorist.
Well conservatives here's some more liberal press.
Quote:State of emergency declared in Baghdad By SINAN SALAHEDDIN, Associated Press Writer
30 minutes ago
The Iraqi government declared a state of emergency and imposed a curfew Friday after insurgents set up roadblocks in central Baghdad and opened fire on U.S. and Iraqi troops outside the heavily fortified Green Zone.
Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki ordered everyone off the streets of the capital from 2 p.m. until 5 p.m.
U.S. and Iraqi forces also fought gunmen in the volatile Dora neighborhood in south Baghdad.
Two U.S. soldiers were killed when a roadside bomb struck their vehicle southeast of the capital, the U.S. military said.
The military also said two U.S. Marines died in combat in volatile Anbar province in separate attacks on Wednesday and Thursday, and a soldier died elsewhere in a non-combat incident on Wednesday.
At least 2,517 members of the U.S. military have died since the Iraq war started in March 2003, according to an Associated Press count.
A car bomb ripped through a market and nearby gas station in the increasingly violent southern city of Basra, killing at least five people and wounding 18, including two policemen, police said.
A bomb also struck a Sunni mosque in Hibhib, northeast of Baghdad, killing 10 worshippers and wounding 15 in the town where Abu Musab al-Zarqawi was slain this month, police said.
At least 19 other deaths were reported in Baghdad.
Throughout the morning, Iraqi and U.S. military forces clashed with attackers armed with rocket-propelled grenades, hand grenades and rifles in busy Haifa Street, which runs into the Green Zone, site of the U.S. and British embassies and the Iraqi government.
Four Iraqi soldiers and three policemen were wounded in the fighting, police Lt. Maitham Abdul Razzaq said.
The region was sealed and Iraqi and U.S. forces conducted house-to-house searches.
The prime minister's office said the curfew would last from 2 p.m. Friday until 6 a.m. Saturday but later shortened to end at 5 p.m. Friday.
The state of emergency includes a ban on carrying weapons and gives Iraqi security forces broader arrest powers, Defense Ministry official Maj. Gen. Abdul-Aziz Mohamed Jassim said.
"The state of emergency and curfew came in the wake of today's clashes to let the army work freely to chase militants and to avoid casualties among civilians," he said. "They will punish all those who have weapons with them and they can shoot them if they feel that they are danger."
Gunmen also attacked a group of worshippers marching from Sadr City, the Shiite slum in eastern Baghdad, to the Buratha mosque on the other side of the city to protest a suicide attack a week ago on the revered Shiite shrine. At least one marcher was killed and four were wounded, Lt. Ahmed Mohammed Ali said.
Al-Maliki has been trying to rein in unrelenting insurgent and sectarian violence. He launched a massive security operation in Baghdad 10 days ago, deploying tens of thousands of troops who flooded the city, snarling traffic with hundreds of checkpoints.
Police said they found the bodies of five men who apparently were victims of a mass kidnapping from a factory on Wednesday. The bodies, which showed signs of torture and had their hands and legs bound, were floating in a canal in northern Baghdad, police Lt. Maitham Abdul-Razzaq said.
A police raid on a farm Thursday freed 17 of the captives
Meanwhile, the U.S. military said it killed four foreign insurgents in a raid north of Fallujah. Two of the dead men had 15-pound bombs strapped to their bodies. The military said an insurgent thought to be an Iraqi also was killed in the raid, which was launched on the basis of information from a suspected arrested in the region in previous days.
Separately, the military said, it detained a senior leader of al-Qaida in Iraq and three other suspected insurgents Monday during raids northeast of Baghdad, near where al-Zarqawi was killed in a U.S. air raid earlier this month.
After three years things have improved significantly in Iraq under the Bush administration.
Isn't Iraqi democracy just wunnerful?
Do they still understand the simple fact that insurgents and terrorists have an unlimited supply of suicide-bombers? That the US occupation is the recruiting tool for them?
Some say the unrelenting critics of the USA invasion of Iraq cause the current Iraq violent death rate of 0.0857% per year by leaving its combat troops in Iraq.
Yeah, peace-mongers are to all the blame for the wars and killings in this world.
Some say the USA's unwillingness to attack the itm's support structure in Iraq, causes the current Iraq violent death rate of 0.0857% per year.
Brought to you by the American Committees on Foreign Relations ACFR NewsGroup No. 726, Friday, June 23, 2006.
Quote:'The Extremist Is Never Alone'
By FOUAD AJAMI
June 22, 2006 Wall Street Jounral
Abu Musab al-Zarqawi's tribe in Jordan, the Al-Khalayleh, claimed last November that they had disowned the man who had sown havoc in Iraq. They made that public declaration in the aftermath of his attack on three Amman hotels. That day, Nov. 9, 2005, was dubbed by the Jordanians as their own 9/11. But blood has its claims, and in truth Zarqawi had been, and remained, a man of high standing in Jordan and in other Arab lands. After his death, the regime in Amman may have announced that his corpse would not "stain Jordan's soil," but his clan held a "martyr's wedding" for him, and four members of Jordan's Parliament turned up at that funeral ceremony. Grant Jordan's rulers their due: They know that a Zarqawi grave on Jordanian soil would become a shrine to his cult.
The four parliamentarians were rounded up by Jordanian security forces and hauled off to prison. But the matter of Zarqawi cannot be written off as the "embarrassing" scandal of a prison bully and enforcer given to macabre videotapes and grim beheadings. For in the way he lived and died, Zarqawi illuminated much of the Arab reality from which he hailed. The bigotry of Zarqawi was not his alone. He came to Iraq to war against Shiite heretics (al-rafida) and Americans, and countless Sunni Arabs shared his aversion to the new order in Iraq. He saw a noble war that had deposed a tyrant as an alliance between "heretics" and "crusaders." America had dared give liberty to the Shiite majority of Iraq, as well as to the Kurdish people, and this perpetrator of terror shared the wider judgment of the Arabian Peninsula and the Gulf, and of Egypt, that the Shiites were "collaborators" in an American project bent on securing dominion over the Arabs. Modern Iraq had been an Anglo-Sunni dominion when it was cobbled together in the 1920s. The Shiites had been the rebels then, and paid dearly for their purity: British hegemony shattered their autonomy and delivered power to the Sunni political class of the towns. Now the Sunni Arabs feared that this new order would be an American-Shiite edifice.
The extremist is never alone; the terrorist on the fringe of political life always works with the winks and nods of the society that gives him cover. Forgive the likes of Zarqawi their belief that the world around them shares their aversion to the Shiites. From the commanding heights of the Arab states around Iraq, to the storefront mosques of Finsbury Park and Toronto, the claim of the Shiite Arabs to a measure of their world's bounty and power has never been recognized. It was in that vein that King Abdullah of Jordan warned of a "Shia crescent" that stretches from Iran to Iraq, Syria and Lebanon, while jihadists from his own country were bringing calamity to Iraq. And it was of a piece with this moral obtuseness that the Egyptian ruler recently said that the loyalty of the Shiite Arabs was to Iran. The regimes in Amman and Cairo were bidding for American patronage, holding out the promise that they would -- and that only they could -- lead the foreign power through the labyrinth of Araby.
Here is a glimpse of these self-appointed guides in America's awkward journey. It comes from Paul Bremer's chronicle of his stewardship of Iraq. It is June 4, 2003, at an American base in Qatar, and President Bush wants to know from his man on the scene if this American project in Iraq will work. "Will they be able to make a free country?" the president asked. "Some of the Sunni leaders in the region doubt it. They say 'All the Shia are liars.' What's your impression?" A whole world of bigotry, a culture that had never found its way out of sectarianism, was being passed onto the Pax Americana, with the distant foreign power being asked to partake of the phobias of the Arab ruling stratum.
The Jordanians are now eager to claim that they were helpful in the hunt for Zarqawi, that their intelligence had found its way to the Sunni Arab tribes of western and central Iraq. In their recent statements, though, the Jordanians tell us much about the ways of our allies: The collaboration with U.S. intelligence, they add, had begun in earnest in the aftermath of the hotel bombings of last November. But Jordanian jihadists had been at work in Iraq long before they struck Amman. For the rulers in the saddle in Arab lands, jihadism has been a commodity for export. There has been a covert and subtle understanding with the perpetrators of terror: The order would avert its gaze from them so long as they took their furies beyond their homelands.
Jordan is not unique. The Saudi realm only awakened to the terror when its perpetrators struck within the peninsula itself. This happened in the spring of 2003. All that had transpired before was sanctioned and perhaps admired. Pamphleteers and preachers had praised the zeal of the jihadists, took their brutal deeds as evidence of youth's purity and faith. In the same vein, the Egyptian regime, merciless in the way it deals with challenges to its power at home, has never owned up to the darkness of Egyptian terrorists operating the world over. No one in Egypt has accepted responsibility for Mohammed Atta; nothing has been said in official life about the culture that shaped Ayman al-Zawahiri, who took out on other lands the wrath bred in him by the violent struggle between the Egyptian Islamists and the military autocracy.
* * *
It is fitting that the early intelligence has identified Zarqawi's successor as an Egyptian, one Abu Ayyub al-Masri (who goes by another nom de guerre, Abu Hamza al-Muhajer). From Jordan to Egypt: We are still in the darkness of regimes in the orbit of American power. With the torture and murder of two young American soldiers, Kristian Menchaca and Thomas Tucker, who had been kidnapped at a checkpoint south of Baghdad, Zarqawi's successor has sent a grim, cruel reminder that the end of this terrible darkness in the Arab world is not yet at hand.
Yet the identity of this successor will be of little consequence: He and his ilk emerge out of a broader context that ought to be familiar to us. Doubtless, they are misfits in their homelands who have come to Iraq to kill and be killed because they were not given a dream of normalcy, nor modern skills, nor a place in the world. Zarqawi epitomized the jihadists: Life in Jordan offered him little. He had been unable to find work that would sustain him. He hit his stride and found his calling in the "fields of battle" in Afghanistan and Iraq. There would come his way fame and money; the "charities" would find their way to him. Devotees would give him -- a one-time prison thug -- the honorific title of sheikh, acclaim him for picking up the Sunni standard against crusaders and apostates. His was no solitary campaign. He was a witness to his own glory: He no doubt watched his own videotapes on the satellite TV channels of the Arab world.
By accounts available, these jihadists are junkies of the Web and the Arabic press: They can read between the lines, and know of the unease in their world at the emergence from serfdom of the Shiites. They partake of the antimodernism and conspiracy theories on the loose in Arab lands. They are virulently anti-Semitic, but anti-Semitism is a familiar weed on contemporary Arab soil. They may be "embarrassing," those jihadists, in their talk of "crusaders" bent on plundering the Arab world, but the respectable Arabic press out of London, and out of Arab capitals, is now filled with anti-Americanism.
No one wishes the distant Great Power well in Arab lands, and the beneficiaries of American largesse are no exception. Zarqawi and al-Masri did not descend from the sky: One was formed by the world of his native Zarqa, east of Amman, the other joined the Egyptian Islamic Jihad in 1982, and his odyssey must duplicate that of countless young men who flooded the Islamist movements after Anwar Sadat's assassination in 1981. Egypt has been reduced to a terrible standoff between a plundering autocracy and a vengeful Islamist opposition. The regime in Cairo has nothing to offer the young. Embittered Islamists take to the road bereft of mercy, for none has been shown to them on their own soil. A cynical ruler winks at the chaos, and in his silence about his country's breed of radicals, he speaks volumes about the terrible bargain America has struck with his regime. He picks our pockets and sends our way -- and the way of the Iraqis -- the angry outcasts of his domain.
* * *
In the aftermath of his surprise trip to Iraq, President Bush has returned to an old theme: He has called on the Arabs, yet again, to come to the aid of Iraq. On the face of it, this is the most natural of requests, for the fire in Iraq, and a failure in Iraq, is sure to spill into neighboring Arab lands. But here we are face-to-face with the ways of the Arab world. No Arab cavalry shall ride to Iraq's rescue; no Arab development funds -- in a region wallowing in oil wealth -- shall be committed to Iraq. The foreign leaders who have visited Iraq were from Britain, Australia, Poland, South Korea, Bulgaria, Denmark, Ukraine and Spain. No Arab king or president has deemed it fit to turn up in a show of solidarity with Iraq's people. (A prime minister of Jordan came to repair the breach between the two countries, but prime ministers in Jordan come and go; political power is the king's prerogative.) The Arabs who cross into Iraq are jihadists, and "mules" who bring money to keep the insurgency alive. In the main, Arabs are content to pronounce on Iraq's "innate" violence, and on the errors of the American war. No greater sense of responsibility can be expected from the custodians of political power in the Arab lands.
We should be under no illusions about Iraq's Arab neighbors: They are content to see America bleed, and they see this great struggle as a contest between American power and the region's laws of gravity. True cynics, pessimists through and through, they see the American mission in Iraq as one of extravagant optimism and hubris. The mere claim that the Shiite step-children and the Kurdish highlanders can find a way out of darkness galls them. The Arab ruling elites are invested in the insurgents and the jihadists in Iraq. The more these forces of mayhem engage American power, the more time they buy for the entrenched order. There is no "Arab solution" for Iraq, as there was none for Lebanon in its long Syrian captivity. The Iraqis understood the great Arab silence which attended the death of Zarqawi. A clerical leader of Najaf, Sadr al-Din Qabanji, noted the sorrow with which the men of Hamas responded to the hunting down of Zarqawi. Addressing neighboring Arabs, Qabanji asked the question: "Why do you accept the shedding of our blood?"
The borders of Iraq, examined closely, tell of a powerful but overlooked truth. The borders with Arab lands -- Jordan, Syria, Saudi Arabia and Kuwait -- are borders with harsh deserts. The more natural borders -- across population centers, contiguous human habitations -- are with Turkey and Iran. In the face of these stark facts of ecology and demography, Arab nationalism and Arab legend, insisting on the "Arabness" of Iraq, declared it the "eastern gate of the Arab world." This willfulness falsified Iraq's life: This was a borderland across Arab-Turkish, and Arab-Persian, divides. And within, there was a Kurdish nation with its own separate memory, its own dream of autonomy and independence. Now this Iraqi order, delivered through American sacrifices, struggles to take hold. The cabinet of Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki was long in coming, fought over, and divided across sect and ethnicity -- a Shiite interior minister, balanced by a Sunni minister of defense, a Kurdish foreign minister, two portfolios given to the forces of Moqtada al-Sadr, etc. But this is Iraq today, and better this diversity, and the ways of the bazaar, than the pharaonic regime of Hosni Mubarak and the servile culture of his court.
A gap has opened between Arab jihadists and the Sunnis of Iraq. As a celebrated Iraqi intellectual, Hassan al-Alawi, put it: The former have their gaze fixed on the green fields of Paradise, while the latter have theirs fixed on the Green Zone. A balance of fear has been arrived at in Iraq between the Sunnis and the Shiites, a development that issued out of a bloody struggle, and this has altered Iraqi politics for the better. For the first time in their history, Sunni Arabs have come to accept that their old hegemony has been irretrievably shattered; this new order gives them a claim to their country's bounty that is, also for the first time, not indecent.
President Bush took with him to Baghdad the right message: a reaffirmation of the American commitment mixed with a reminder that Iraq's salvation lies in the hands of its new government. The Arabs nearby will say, as they have, that the American leader traveled into an occupied country, that he did not venture beyond the Green Zone, that the place he visited was more his domain than Nuri al-Maliki's. But President Bush called on an elected government, a rare plant in Arab soil. This new government should be strengthened by the promise of American resolve. But it should also take to heart that it is reckoning-time for Iraq's leaders, that it is their country, and their history, that lies in the balance.
Mr. Ajami, a 2006 Bradley Prize recipient, is author of "The Foreigner's Gift: The Americans, the Arabs, and the Iraqis in Iraq," forthcoming from the Free Press in July.
It would seem that the Iraqis are busy drawing up peace plans which are eerily similar to those offered by... Senate Democrats.
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,7374-2239088,00.html
Quote:Peace deal offers Iraq insurgents an amnesty
From Ned Parker in Baghdad and Tom Baldwin
THE Iraqi Government will announce a sweeping peace plan as early as Sunday in a last-ditch effort to end the Sunni insurgency that has taken the country to the brink of civil war.
The 28-point package for national reconciliation will offer Iraqi resistance groups inclusion in the political process and an amnesty for their prisoners if they renounce violence and lay down their arms, The Times can reveal.
The Government will promise a finite, UN-approved timeline for the withdrawal of all foreign troops from Iraq; a halt to US operations against insurgent strongholds; an end to human rights violations, including those by coalition troops; and compensation for victims of attacks by terrorists or Iraqi and coalition forces.
It will pledge to take action against Shia militias and death squads. It will also offer to review the process of "de-Baathification" and financial compensation for the thousands of Sunnis who were purged from senior jobs in the Armed Forces and Civil Service after the fall of Saddam Hussein.
The deal, which has been seen by The Times, aims to divide Iraqi insurgents from foreign fighters linked to al-Qaeda. It builds on months of secret talks involving Jalal al-Talabani, the Iraqi President, Zalmay Khalilzad, the US Ambassador, and seven Sunni insurgent groups.
Mr al-Talabani told The Times that after a "summit" in Baghdad about a month ago the groups made clear their willingness to commence talks with the Iraqi Government, although he was awaiting a formal response.
But one big potential obstacle is whether the US would be willing to grant an amnesty to insurgents who have killed US soldiers but who are not members of extreme groups such as al-Qaeda. The Bush Administration is thought to be split on the issue.
"This is very hard for us, particularly at a time when American servicemen are facing prosecution for alleged war crimes ?- and others are being captured and tortured," a senior US official said.
With 2,500 US soldiers having died in Iraq, to grant an amnesty would be a "huge political football" before the November mid-term elections in the US, he said. But he added: "This is what we did after the Second World War, after the Civil War, after the War of Independence. It may be unpalatable and unsavoury but it is how wars end."
The Government intends to form a committee to distinguish between groups that can be considered legitimate resistance and those that are beyond the pale. "For those that defended their country against foreign troops, we need to open a new page . . . They did not mean to destabilise Iraq. They were defending Iraqi soil," said Adnan Ali, a senior member of the Dawa party of Nouri alMaliki, the Prime Minister.
Reading directly from the draft package, Mahmoud al-Mashaadani, the Parliament's Sunni Speaker, told The Times: "There will be a general amnesty to release all the prisoners who were not involved in the shedding of innocent Iraqis' blood." Neither the Iraqi Government nor the US Embassy would name the insurgent groups involved in the discussions.
But Mr Talabani said that after the last meeting the groups went away to agree their position. He had since received "a message from a common friend that they are ready to discuss finalising an agreement with the United States and the Iraqi Government".
Mr Khalilzad recently told The Times that reconciliation required "a comprehensive strategy that has political elements, that has security elements, and that has reintegration elements in it: decommissioning, demobilisation, and reintegration of these forces."
The draft marks the first time the Iraqi Government has endorsed a fixed timeline for the withdrawal of coalition forces from Iraq, a key demand of the Sunni insurgency.
"We must agree on a timed schedule to pull out the troops from Iraq, while at the same time building up the Iraqi forces that will guarantee Iraqi security and this must be supported by a United Nations Security Council decision," the document reads.
One insurgent group involved in the discussions told The Times that the timetable for withdrawing foreign troops was key. "We are not against the formation of the new Iraqi goverment, but with certain conditions, which are to put a timetable for the pullout of US Troops," Abu Fatma, from the Islamic National Front for Liberation of Iraq, said.
Adopting a carrot-and-stick approach, Mr Khalilzad and Mr Talabani have also used the threat of Iranian influence in Iraq to persuade the rebels to come on board.
"I have said to the Sunnis, they complain to me about Iran, but some of the things they are doing in terms of their fight and the insurgency is serving Iranian interests," Mr Khalilzad said.
THE OFFER
A schedule for coalition forces to withdraw
General amnesty for prisoners "who have not shed innocent Iraqis' blood"
A halt to "anti-terrorist operations" by coalition forces in insurgent areas
A review of the process of de-Baathification and of financial compensation to sacked civil servants from the Saddam regime
So, a UN approved timeline for the removal of
all foreign troops from Iraq?
Cessation of anti-terrorist operations by coalition forces in insurgent areas?
Amnesty for those who have fought against Coalition forces?
Somehow, I don't think this is going to fly very well with the Administration, for various reasons.
Cycloptichorn
When the Iraqis ask the US to leave, what happens to all those new permanent military bases being built by the US?
I believe the 'removal of all foreign troops' is going to be a sticking point with the Admin. After all, they aren't building a 2 billion dollar embassy just to have it blown up, and there has been some speculation about the Bush admin refusal to rule out permanent bases in Iraq.
Quote:Amnesty for those who have fought against Coalition forces?
and who are not itm?
They didn't say anything about that, so...
Cycloptichorn
Cyclo, Some times it's almost impossible to let people see what is so obvious to non-Bush defenders. The government of Iraq is now existing under the auspices of the US government money. If they don't follow their "suggestions," those funding can very well disappear - like it did for Hamas.
Nobody can fix stupid.
cicerone imposter wrote:When the Iraqis ask the US to leave, what happens to all those new permanent military bases being built by the US?
The Iraqi military will use 'em.
Oh no, lets go with the creative flow here. The Iraqis will:
convert 'em to housing developments;
store oil in 'em;
store oil revenue in 'em;
rent 'em to Ringling Brothers Barnum and Bailey Circus;
rent 'em to Walt Disney;
rent 'em to the UN for a new UN headquarters;
rent 'em to George Soros;
rent 'em to the Democrats;
rent 'em to the Republicans;
turn 'em into mosques;
do all of the above except rent 'em to George Soros.
cicerone imposter wrote:
...
Nobody can fix stupid.
Come on now. Don't be so negative. You still have a chance. There's lots of competent professional counseling out there to rid you of your pseudology (i.e., falsifying and/or lying). Yes, it will take time -- lots of time -- but you'll think it worth it with every day you invest in the divestiture of your pseudology. Hurry up now and sign up for that counseling 'cause there are lots of people in the same fix as yourself. Its waiting lines are likely to grow quite rapidly after the Iraq invasion issue evaporates.
Hey, ican, when is Bush going to start bombing US cities to get rid of terrorists in our country?
US fears home-grown terror threat
The US Attorney-General, Alberto Gonzales has warned that home-grown terrorists could pose as much danger to the US as foreign al-Qaeda operatives.
Seven men have been charged with plotting to blow up the Sears Towers in Chicago, and attack FBI offices.
The men, five from the US and two from Haiti, hoped to wage a "full ground war" against the US, according to the charges brought against them.
Officials said the men were foiled at an early stage and posed no danger.
Mr Gonzales said the group of "home-grown terrorists" were inspired by "a violent jihadist message".
"They were persons who for whatever reason came to view their home country as the enemy," he told reporters.
'Dangerous'
According to charges brought against the men, the group of men aged 22 to 32 had sworn allegiance to al-Qaeda, but had no contacts with it.
They have been charged with conspiring to blow up both the Sears Tower and the FBI building in North Miami Beach.
Left unchecked these home-grown terrorists may prove as dangerous as groups like al-Qaeda
Alberto Gonzales
US Attorney-General
A federal indictment says they were conspiring to "levy war against the United States".
They were arrested at a warehouse in Miami, during an undercover operation after their group was infiltrated by an agent posing as an al-Qaeda member
Mr Gonzales said the lack of direct link to al-Qaeda did not make the group any less dangerous.
"Today terrorist threats come from a smaller, more loosely defined cells not affiliated to al-Qaeda," he said.
"Left unchecked these home-grown terrorists may prove as dangerous as groups like al-Qaeda."
'Wannabes'
Five of those charged appeared at a Miami federal court on Friday.
They wore ankle chains and were chained together at the wrists, the Associated Press reported.
Alleged ringleader Narseal Batiste apparently asked an undercover agent he thought was from al-Qaeda for help to build an "army to wage jihad", the indictment said.
He is said to have told the agent he and his "soldiers" wanted al-Qaeda training and planning for a "full ground war" against the US in order to "kill all the devils we can".
His mission would "be just as good or greater than 9/11", Mr Batiste said, according to the indictment.
No weapons were found in the Miami warehouse, and the seven had not posed any immediate danger, the FBI said.
Deputy FBI leader John Pistole said the plot had been "aspirational" rather than "operational".
Neighbours in Miami's poor Liberty City area said the men apparently slept in the warehouse where they were arrested.
"They would come out late at night and exercise. It seemed like a military boot camp they were working on there. They would come out and stand guard," said Tashawn Rose.
However a man claiming links to the arrested men told the news channel CNN that they were a peaceful religious group, who studied Allah.
Story from BBC NEWS:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/hi/americas/5112354.stm
Published: 2006/06/24 02:09:22 GMT
June 24, 2006
Fear Invades Once Comfortable Baghdad Enclave
By SABRINA TAVERNISE
BAGHDAD, Iraq, June 23 ?- Mansour is Baghdad's Upper East Side. It has fancy pastry shops, jewelry stores, a designer furniture boutique and an elite social club.
But it is no longer the address everyone wants.
In the past two months, insurgents have come to Mansour to gun down a city councilman, kidnap four Russian Embassy workers, shoot a tailor dead in his shop and bomb a pastry shop.
Now, Mansour, a religiously mixed area just three miles from the fortified Green Zone, feels more like wartime Beirut than Park Avenue, and its affluent residents worry that the wave of violence that has devoured large swaths of Baghdad has begun encroaching on them.
"It's falling to the terrorists," said Hasaneen F. Mualla, director of the Hunting Club, Mansour's social center. "They are coming nearer to us now. No one is stopping them."
For most of the past six months, Iraq drifted without a government and its security forces largely stood by and watched at crucial moments, like the one in February, when Shiite militias killed Sunnis after the bombing of a sacred shrine.
Now, as Iraqi leaders in the Green Zone savor their recent successes ?- the naming of the first permanent government since the fall of Saddam Hussein and the killing of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, Iraq's most wanted guerrilla leader ?- Iraqis outside its walls are more frightened than ever. Neighborhood after neighborhood in western Baghdad has fallen to insurgents, with some areas bordering on anarchy. Bodies lie on the streets for hours. Trash is no longer collected. Children are home-schooled.
The paralysis that shut down life in western Baghdad is creeping ever closer to the heart of the city, and Iraqis in still-livable areas are frantic for the government to halt its advance, something it pledged to do when it started its new security plan for Baghdad last week.
"It's like a cancer, spreading from area to area," said a guard at Delta Communications, a Mansour mobile phone shop that is now shuttered after a bomb blast in front of it last month.
Mansour is an area of stately homes, elaborately trimmed hedges and people who can afford guards. In recent weeks, that has not seemed to matter. Homemade bombs have struck two sport utility vehicles belonging to the former Iraqi exile leader, Ahmad Chalabi, a Mansour resident, twice in the past month. Gangs have kidnapped the United Arab Emirates ambassador and the Russian Embassy workers, whom Al Qaeda claimed to have killed this week. The Hunting Club now tells wedding parties to bring guards.
"These middle- and upper-class families, these guys are not willing to fight," one resident said. "It's like cutting into butter."
The neighborhood has long been tormented by kidnappings; criminal gangs know where the money is. But the violence in the past two months feels more commonplace, and in many ways more relentless, aimed broadly at businesses and neighborhood mainstays.
One victim was the Khassaki Sweet Shop, a fixture on Mansour Street since the 1980's, famous for its plump baklava, candied almonds and crème-filled honey rolls displayed behind a sparkling glass storefront. On May 28, a teenager placed a bag in front of the shop, and moments later it exploded, shattering glass, scattering pastries, and sending a large chunk of shrapnel flying over the head of the cashier.
Earlier this month, workers were building an ugly brick protective wall in front of the shop. A small piece of cloth that read "open" hung above the gaping entrance.
"Ruined! Destroyed!" the owner said angrily. "It's not a first-class shop anymore."
The owner, who refused to give his name, blamed the Americans for the security troubles, an opinion expressed by many in Mansour ?- Shiite and Sunni alike.
"If the Americans want to destroy Iraq, they are on the right path," said the owner, a Shiite, who stood scowling behind a candy counter. He displayed a pistol jammed in his waistband. "If they can't improve things, they should just leave us alone."
A man waiting in line disagreed: "But not now, we're still in a mess."
The owner shook his head in disgust.
Residents of Mansour have good reason to be afraid. The wave of insurgent crime has already sunk neighborhoods in western Baghdad into anarchy. In Dawra, it is impossible to collect the bodies of the murdered because of sniper fire.
Ali Aziz, a Shiite, had to hastily load the body of his friend into the back of a pickup in Dawra in late April, after the police refused to respond to pleas from the man's widow. He waited until he had reached the safety of a police station to put the body in a coffin.
"There is no government there," said a computer programmer who moved earlier this month from another western Baghdad neighborhood, Amiriya, after four murders on his block. "I want to go to my home, to bring some clothes, but I can't go there. My own country, my own home, and I can't go there."
In Mansour, by contrast, life has not shut down entirely, but has slowed from a bustle to a trickle. An internal American Embassy security document, recently posted on the Internet by The Washington Post, quoted an Iraqi employee who had said Mansour was "an unrecognizable ghost town."
Threats have closed a number of shops on Mansour Street, and the emptiness in the early afternoon is palpable. Earlier this month, two jewelry shop owners were sitting in the back room of a house in the afternoon, watching a World Cup soccer game. Just days before, they had shut their shops when they received telephone calls from a man threatening to bomb them if they did not pay money. It was the day, coincidentally, that Mr. Zarqawi was killed.
"I thought it was one of my friends joking," said one owner, Omar, who declined to give his last name. He later checked the phone number with a friend, who said he had received three calls from the same number. Omar never considered going to the police.
Now he barely recognizes his life. He washes his car, and goes shopping. He naps in the middle of the day. He is losing about $500 every day he keeps the store closed.
Some shop owners said insurgents had told Shiite merchants to take down pictures of Shiite saints, but Omar scoffed at the idea that the threats, which have closed down a number of businesses, had mostly sectarian motives.
"It's all about money," he said, the Dutch and Serbian soccer teams flashing on the screen behind him. "The pictures are just an excuse."
Fatalism and dark humor infuse conversations around dinner tables and among friends in Mansour.
"Someone was wearing shorts, and someone else said, 'Well, at least we know that when Zarqawi's people arrive, you'll be the first one they grab,' " one foreign resident said, because such dress might seem immodest.
Even so, Iraqis expressed some hope that the new government's security program would produce meaningful results. Last week, a smiling Iraqi Army soldier stood waving cars by a makeshift checkpoint near Mr. Chalabi's compound, across from the Hunting Club. Mr. Mualla, the club's director, said the area had been quiet since the program began.
A major problem is the state itself. With the central government weak, powerful Iraqis ?- rich men, political leaders, tribal sheiks ?- manipulate it with ease, using their influence to enlist Iraqi police officers and soldiers to do their bidding. Smaller-time criminals buy uniforms. As a result, it can be all but impossible to differentiate between criminals and official forces.
Consider the case of Iraqna, one of the country's largest cellphone providers, whose shop in Mansour was raided in early April by about 10 Iraqis in army uniforms. The soldiers ?- or criminals dressed to look like them, or some combination of the two ?- locked 60 employees on two floors in a room, rummaged through drawers and took phones and wallets. Two Iraqis were killed.
Company executives are still puzzling over whether the forces were legitimate government ones (none have admitted to it) or thieves dressed as soldiers. Alain Sainte-Marie, the company's chief executive, said he had filed a criminal complaint in court to force the state to get to the bottom of what happened.
"Witnesses said it was a raid done by official troops," Mr. Sainte-Marie said, in the company's elegant headquarters with a spiral staircase in a fortified area of Mansour. "To tell you frankly, the way that it happened, I still have doubts."
The branch is now closed, and Mr. Sainte-Marie is reviewing new security plans. For aesthetic reasons, he has balked at suggestions for giant chunks of concrete.
"It has to stay friendly," he said. "I won't accept it to look like a bunker."
Mr. Mualla, the Hunting Club director, sips ice-cold water in his renovated office in the back of the club and worries. Business ?- receptions and banquets ?- is down by about half over the past two months. Weddings are now booked just a week in advance, not a month.
"They are coming nearer to us now," he said, slumping slightly in a high-backed chair.
"I'm tired. I'm very tired of controlling the situation. Nobody is helping me."
Hosham Hussein and Sahar Nageeb contributed reporting for this article.
U.S. working to reduce civilian casualties in Iraq
Posted on Wed, Jun. 21, 2006
U.S. working to reduce civilian casualties in Iraq
By Nancy A. Youssef
Knight Ridder Newspapers
BAGHDAD, Iraq
The death of civilians at the hands of U.S. troops has fueled the insurgency in Iraq, according to a top-level U.S. military commander, who said U.S. officials began keeping records of these deaths last summer.
Lt. Gen. Peter Chiarelli, who as head of the Multinational Corps Iraq is the No. 2 U.S. commander in Iraq, said the number of civilian dead and wounded is an important measurement of how effectively U.S. forces are interacting with the Iraqi people.
"We have people who were on the fence or supported us who in the last two years or three years have in fact decided to strike out against us. And you have to ask: Why is that? And I would argue in many instances we are our own worst enemy," Chiarelli told Knight Ridder.
Chiarelli said he reviews the figures daily. If fewer civilians are killed, "I think that will make our soldiers safer," Chiarelli said.
U.S. officials previously have said they don't keep track of civilian causalities, and Iraqi officials stopped releasing numbers of U.S.-caused casualties after Knight Ridder reported in September 2004 that the Iraqi Ministry of Health had attributed more than twice as many civilian deaths to the actions of U.S. forces than to "terrorist" attacks during the period from June 2004 to September 2004.
Chiarelli declined to release the numbers, but he said that U.S. soldiers are killing and injuring fewer Iraqi civilians this year in so-called "escalation of force" incidents at checkpoints and near convoys than they did in July of last year, when officials first started tracking the statistic.
"Escalation of force incidents" typically involve a U.S. soldier giving a verbal warning or hand signal to a driver approaching a checkpoint or convoy. The situation escalates if the driver fails to stop, with the soldier firing a warning shot, and then shooting to kill.
Chiarelli made his comments Saturday during a wide-ranging interview. Knight Ridder delayed publishing the comments as it tried to obtain military records detailing civilian deaths. Chiarelli would not say how many civilians have been killed overall or what percentage of civilian deaths occur at checkpoints or near convoys.
But a military official who's not authorized to release the numbers and asked not to be named, said there were 3,000 so-called "escalation of force" incidents from July 2005, when officials began studiously tracking such information, to Dec. 31, 2005.
Of those, 16 percent led to a civilian being killed or injured, the official said.
During the first five months of this year, 1,700 such incidents were reported. Of those 12 percent led to a civilian being killed or injured, the official said.
Civilian casualties have been a frequent issue almost since the day U.S. troops invaded Iraq more than three years ago. But U.S. officials have voiced particular concern in recent weeks after investigators began probing allegations that U.S. Marines killed 24 civilians, including women and children, during a sweep of the Sunni city of Haditha Nov. 19. Residents said the Marines killed the civilians in their homes in retaliation for a roadside bomb that killed a Marine.
That investigation is continuing, but U.S. officials on Wednesday announced criminal prosecutions in two other cases where U.S. troops were accused of killing Iraqi civilians. The Marine Corps announced that seven Marines and a Navy corpsman had been charged with kidnapping, murder and conspiracy in the April 26 death of an Iraqi farmer in the town of Hamdania, while officials in Baghdad said that a fourth soldier had been charged with murder and conspiracy in the deaths of three Iraqi detainees last month.
But the intentional targeting of Iraqis by U.S. troops is only one aspect of the controversy surrounding civilian casualties. Iraqis have been far more vocal about deaths at poorly marked checkpoints or because Iraqi civilians don't understand the military's rules of engagement.
Some of the deaths have received widespread publicity, most recently when U.S. soldiers killed a pregnant woman and a relative as they raced to a hospital in Samarra last month.
Chiarelli said he's not aware of a soldier not firing at an approaching suicide bomber in an effort to be more careful. Instead, he believes soldiers are paying closer attention to whether a family or a lone man are in the car and whether the trunk of the car appears heavy, as though it were carrying explosives.
It's unclear what impact the presence of Iraqi troops, who increasingly take the lead at checkpoints, may have had on the decline. But Chiarelli said he believes U.S. soldiers understand how important it is to reduce civilian casualties.
"It's the sergeants, the young non-commissioned officers who understand they have to change their mindset from what Iraq was just two years ago to what it is today," Chiarelli said.
Chiarelli said it's important that soldiers, particularly sergeants, understand that their behavior toward Iraqis affects the way Iraqis view their newly elected government.
"That government's legitimacy will be based in part on how we act," he said, "because we are invited guests in that country."
