Team Infidel
Forum Spin Doctor
New York Times
November 8, 2007 By James Glanz
BAGHDAD, Nov. 7 — The Iraqi interior minister said Wednesday that he would authorize raids by his security forces on Western security firms to ensure that they were complying with tightened licensing requirements on guns and other weaponry, setting up the possibility of violent confrontations between the Iraqis and heavily armed Western guards.
The tightening of the requirements followed a shooting in September by one of those firms, Blackwater, that Iraqi authorities said left 17 Iraqis dead.
“Every company will be subject to such examination, and any company that does not follow the law will lose its license,” the minister, Jawad al-Bolani, said of the planned raids. “They are called security companies. They are not called violate-the-law companies.”
During a tour of the Interior Ministry compound in eastern Baghdad, Iraqi government officials also said for the first time that they accepted estimates by American oversight officials that some 190,000 pistols and automatic rifles supplied by the United States to Iraqi forces in 2004 and 2005 were unaccounted for.
Iraqi officials have created an elaborate computerized database to help recover the weapons and ensure that no more are lost, and officials took great pains on Wednesday to show the system to this reporter and his interpreter.
“We have 190,000 lost weapons because they were not distributed properly,” said Maj. Gen. Abdul Karim Khalaf, an Interior Ministry spokesman. “So we built this database.”
Many of those weapons were distributed when Gen. David H. Petraeus, now the American commander in Iraq, was in charge of training and equipping Iraqi security forces in 2004 and 2005. General Petraeus has said that he decided to arm the Iraqi forces as quickly as possible, before tracking systems were fully in place.
On Wednesday, Iraqi officials delicately placed blame for the loss of the weapons on the American military, saying that it had been impossible for the Iraqis to account for the weapons when they were not given necessary tracking information, such as serial numbers.
Within Baghdad’s relatively safe and heavily guarded Green Zone, there have been early indications of a battle over who controls Iraqi streets. Private security guards say that Iraqi police officers have already descended on Western compounds and stopped vehicles driven by Westerners to check for weapons violations in recent weeks.
Any extension of those measures into the rest of the country, known as the Red Zone, could quickly turn into armed confrontation. Westerners are wary of Interior Ministry checkpoints, some of which have been fake, as well as of ministry units, which are sometimes militia-controlled and have been implicated in sectarian killings. Western convoys routinely have to choose between the risk of stopping and the risk of accelerating past what appear to be official Iraqi forces.
And because Western convoys run by private security companies are often protecting senior American civilian and military officials, the Iraqi government’s struggle with the companies has in some cases become a sort of proxy tug-of-war with the United States.
That dynamic was laid bare in the weeks immediately after the shooting on Sept. 16 in Nisour Square in Baghdad. The Iraqi government at first suggested that it would ban Blackwater, which has a contract to protect American diplomats, from working in Iraq. But the government was embarrassed when it discovered that its legal options were limited, and the United States — after placing a few new restrictions on the company — quickly sent it back onto the streets.
Based on its own investigation, the Iraqi government has concluded that the Blackwater guards who opened fire committed murder. An American investigation led by the F.B.I. has not yet publicly announced any results.
The outlines of a struggle for primacy on the streets also seem apparent in what the Interior Ministry says is a decision to insist that weapons carried by members of Shiite-controlled militias that protect certain neighborhoods must also be registered. Asked about the vast areas of Baghdad patrolled by the powerful Mahdi Army, which was founded by the radical Shiite cleric Moktada al-Sadr, General Khalaf said that it too would be challenged.
“In the near future there is a campaign that will happen,” General Khalaf said. “We are delaying this campaign until we finish this database.”
Privately, Interior Ministry officials say that they had been surprised that the Iraqi investigators’ findings of culpability by the Blackwater guards had found such a sympathetic hearing elsewhere in the world, where for years there had been questions about the loyalties and capability of Interior Ministry officials.
In one sense, by emphasizing the new steps it is taking to control weapons, the Interior Ministry seems determined to leverage the respect shown for its investigators in such a high-profile case into an improved image over all. The strategy appears to be to concede that both American and Iraqi security forces have made mistakes in the past but that both were taking steps to put those problems behind them.
During one remarkable session on Wednesday, an administrative official at the ministry said that it had had problems with “ghost payrollers,” or fictitious employees, and political pressure in the past. But the official, Maj. Gen. Jihan Hussein, said that the ministry was squarely facing those problems.
“If you knew the pressures we have from members of Parliament to have their relatives employed by the ministry, you wouldn’t believe it,” General Hussein said.
But he said the ministry would not bow to those pressures. In a similar vein, Mr. Bolani said that the ministry’s strict new approach to weapons licenses would try to redress past mistakes.
And Mr. Bolani said he believed that legal action against Blackwater in Iraq was still possible in spite of immunity given to Western security contractors under Iraqi law. He said that third parties like nongovernmental organizations or the Iraqi Bar Association could bring suits on behalf of the victims of the Sept. 16 shootings.
“We are fully aware that the people must be given their rights, and there are cases that will be brought against the criminals,” Mr. Bolani said.
Ahmad Fadam contributed reporting.
November 8, 2007 By James Glanz
BAGHDAD, Nov. 7 — The Iraqi interior minister said Wednesday that he would authorize raids by his security forces on Western security firms to ensure that they were complying with tightened licensing requirements on guns and other weaponry, setting up the possibility of violent confrontations between the Iraqis and heavily armed Western guards.
The tightening of the requirements followed a shooting in September by one of those firms, Blackwater, that Iraqi authorities said left 17 Iraqis dead.
“Every company will be subject to such examination, and any company that does not follow the law will lose its license,” the minister, Jawad al-Bolani, said of the planned raids. “They are called security companies. They are not called violate-the-law companies.”
During a tour of the Interior Ministry compound in eastern Baghdad, Iraqi government officials also said for the first time that they accepted estimates by American oversight officials that some 190,000 pistols and automatic rifles supplied by the United States to Iraqi forces in 2004 and 2005 were unaccounted for.
Iraqi officials have created an elaborate computerized database to help recover the weapons and ensure that no more are lost, and officials took great pains on Wednesday to show the system to this reporter and his interpreter.
“We have 190,000 lost weapons because they were not distributed properly,” said Maj. Gen. Abdul Karim Khalaf, an Interior Ministry spokesman. “So we built this database.”
Many of those weapons were distributed when Gen. David H. Petraeus, now the American commander in Iraq, was in charge of training and equipping Iraqi security forces in 2004 and 2005. General Petraeus has said that he decided to arm the Iraqi forces as quickly as possible, before tracking systems were fully in place.
On Wednesday, Iraqi officials delicately placed blame for the loss of the weapons on the American military, saying that it had been impossible for the Iraqis to account for the weapons when they were not given necessary tracking information, such as serial numbers.
Within Baghdad’s relatively safe and heavily guarded Green Zone, there have been early indications of a battle over who controls Iraqi streets. Private security guards say that Iraqi police officers have already descended on Western compounds and stopped vehicles driven by Westerners to check for weapons violations in recent weeks.
Any extension of those measures into the rest of the country, known as the Red Zone, could quickly turn into armed confrontation. Westerners are wary of Interior Ministry checkpoints, some of which have been fake, as well as of ministry units, which are sometimes militia-controlled and have been implicated in sectarian killings. Western convoys routinely have to choose between the risk of stopping and the risk of accelerating past what appear to be official Iraqi forces.
And because Western convoys run by private security companies are often protecting senior American civilian and military officials, the Iraqi government’s struggle with the companies has in some cases become a sort of proxy tug-of-war with the United States.
That dynamic was laid bare in the weeks immediately after the shooting on Sept. 16 in Nisour Square in Baghdad. The Iraqi government at first suggested that it would ban Blackwater, which has a contract to protect American diplomats, from working in Iraq. But the government was embarrassed when it discovered that its legal options were limited, and the United States — after placing a few new restrictions on the company — quickly sent it back onto the streets.
Based on its own investigation, the Iraqi government has concluded that the Blackwater guards who opened fire committed murder. An American investigation led by the F.B.I. has not yet publicly announced any results.
The outlines of a struggle for primacy on the streets also seem apparent in what the Interior Ministry says is a decision to insist that weapons carried by members of Shiite-controlled militias that protect certain neighborhoods must also be registered. Asked about the vast areas of Baghdad patrolled by the powerful Mahdi Army, which was founded by the radical Shiite cleric Moktada al-Sadr, General Khalaf said that it too would be challenged.
“In the near future there is a campaign that will happen,” General Khalaf said. “We are delaying this campaign until we finish this database.”
Privately, Interior Ministry officials say that they had been surprised that the Iraqi investigators’ findings of culpability by the Blackwater guards had found such a sympathetic hearing elsewhere in the world, where for years there had been questions about the loyalties and capability of Interior Ministry officials.
In one sense, by emphasizing the new steps it is taking to control weapons, the Interior Ministry seems determined to leverage the respect shown for its investigators in such a high-profile case into an improved image over all. The strategy appears to be to concede that both American and Iraqi security forces have made mistakes in the past but that both were taking steps to put those problems behind them.
During one remarkable session on Wednesday, an administrative official at the ministry said that it had had problems with “ghost payrollers,” or fictitious employees, and political pressure in the past. But the official, Maj. Gen. Jihan Hussein, said that the ministry was squarely facing those problems.
“If you knew the pressures we have from members of Parliament to have their relatives employed by the ministry, you wouldn’t believe it,” General Hussein said.
But he said the ministry would not bow to those pressures. In a similar vein, Mr. Bolani said that the ministry’s strict new approach to weapons licenses would try to redress past mistakes.
And Mr. Bolani said he believed that legal action against Blackwater in Iraq was still possible in spite of immunity given to Western security contractors under Iraqi law. He said that third parties like nongovernmental organizations or the Iraqi Bar Association could bring suits on behalf of the victims of the Sept. 16 shootings.
“We are fully aware that the people must be given their rights, and there are cases that will be brought against the criminals,” Mr. Bolani said.
Ahmad Fadam contributed reporting.