Team Infidel
Forum Spin Doctor
New York Times
February 23, 2008
Pg. 1
By Solomon Moore
BASRA, Iraq — This southern port city has been, in effect, on its own since September, when British forces here moved to the outskirts, yielding authority to local leaders. British and American officials say Basra’s experiment in self-rule could serve as a model for Iraq’s future, but if so — many locals and outside advisers say — that future remains dark.
What makes the situation in Basra — Iraq’s second largest city and commercial hub — so alarming, they say, is that it is a test of Iraqi rule under relatively optimal conditions: Basra has the nation’s best economic base, little ethnic tension within a homogeneous Shiite population and no Western occupation force to inflame nationalist tensions.
Yet the city remains deeply troubled. Disappearances of doctors, teachers and other professionals are common, as are some clashes among competing militias, most of which are linked to political parties. Murder victims include judicial investigators, politicians and tribal sheiks. One especially disturbing trend is the slaying of at least 100 women in the last year, according to the police. The Iraqi authorities have blamed Shiite militiamen for many of those killing, saying the militants had probably deemed the women to be impious.
“Most of the killings are done by gunmen in police cars,” said Sheik Khadem al-Ribat, a Basra tribal leader who claims no party membership. He spoke of the militias in an antechamber of his downtown mosque, his voice barely above a whisper. “These cars were given to the political parties. There are supposed to be 16,000 policemen, but we see very few of them on the street, and most of the ones we do see are militiamen dressed as police.”
Two dozen Shiite political parties and their respective militias compete, often violently, over control of the oil sector, seaport profits, smuggling operations across the nearby Iranian border and political authority over Iraq’s economic nerve center. So while the sectarian tension that has marred life elsewhere is missing here, the strife itself is not.
A local leader pointed to a political dispute as an example of the difference between perception and reality here.
Rival Shiite political parties, led by the Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq and followers of the cleric Moktada al-Sadr, tried last year to remove Gov. Mohammed Mosbeh al-Waeli over demands that he share more government jobs, particularly in the oil sector, among provincial factions.
British officials said they were heartened that the spat found its way into provincial council deliberations and Iraq’s court system and counted it as a sign that politics and law were starting to supplant bloodshed in Basra.
“They did all of that through the judiciary,” said Lt. Col. Michael Shearer, a British military spokesman. “Certainly there were no assassinations that anybody is aware of.”
However, according to Mr. Waeli’s political adviser, Sheik Abbas al-Zaidi, “They tried many times to kill the governor.” It was unclear who the attackers were, he added, but he was confident that they were rival militias. There were roadside bombs on Mr. Waeli’s way to work, shootings at home, and at least two bodyguards were killed. Militiamen also clashed last year over oil sector jobs, Mr. Zaidi said.
Still, he acknowledged, “The assassination attempts failed, and we won the case in the courts.”
It is this daily violence intermingled with normal politics that seems most worrying, experts here say.
“They have these overlapping spheres of gangsterism and politics, militias and legitimate businesses, and legitimate politics,” said Rob Tinline, a spokesman for the British Provincial Reconstruction Team.
Iraq’s security forces are the most conspicuous example of the tension between politics and violence in Basra, and the aptly named Serious Crimes Unit of the Basra Police is perhaps the most egregious example. The British Army determined that the unit was a death squad linked to Shiite militias and dispatched Warrior tanks in December 2006 to pound the rogue force’s headquarters to rubble.
But Iraqi arrest warrants for the unit’s members have never been executed. A warrant issued by Iraq’s Interior Ministry last month singles out Abdullah Najim, also known as Abu Muslim, and accuses him of orchestrating kidnappings, torture and assassinations while leading the police unit.
Mr. Abu Muslim escaped the 2006 British assault and is still a free man.
In fact, he is still a Basra policeman.
“Either he’s still operating as a police officer or he has gotten tacit approval to pose as a police officer,” said Jonathan Ratel, a Canadian contractor working as a justice adviser for the British Foreign Office in Basra.
Mr. Ratel has been working with provincial security and judicial officials for more than a year to help the Iraqi justice system weed out corruption in Basra’s justice system. He suspects that Abu Muslim is receiving protection from high-level members of the Mahdi Army, the armed militia of Mr. Sadr. The cleric on Friday extended a cease-fire declaration he had imposed on his militiamen in August, but Mr. Ratel said the militia’s domination of the Basra police is a kind of loophole.
“We never pretended to be handing over a white picketed province that resembles something out of the Stepford Wives,” said Colonel Shearer, the British military spokesman, in explaining British policy. “What we did is hand over a manageable situation; manageable by the Iraqis.”
Reported killings peaked in May, when 112 people were murdered. By December killings had declined to 38, finishing 2007 with a total of 848 known homicides. Basra also had 383 reported kidnappings in 2007, according to official provincial tallies.
But British officials, who had kept a lower profile in Basra even at the beginning of the war, now have virtually no presence within the city and acknowledge they are hard-pressed to monitor Iraqi governance on a day-to-day basis.
So although Basra residents generally agreed with the British military’s redeployment, no Iraqis interviewed for this article called the province’s complex and often militant factionalism “manageable.”
Because Mr. Sadr’s followers boycotted the 2004 elections that established the local government, they lack official representation in the local council. The Mahdi Army has compensated for its lack of official authority in Basra by pushing for jobs for Sadr followers in major government sectors, including health, oil, the port and education. Militia elements have also established protection rackets, ransom schemes and smuggling operations, according to American and Iraqi officials.
The militia has had the most success stacking Basra’s security forces.
“The only way to put together a police force was to talk to the militias and say to the agreed militias, ‘You get 100 guys, and you get 200, and you get 300,’” said Mr. Ratel, the adviser. He described the police force as “hired mercenaries for the militias,” most of whom are illiterate and have undergone little or no training.
The military withdrawal has made British training and monitoring efforts more difficult, Mr. Ratel said. For example, Westerners have not visited militia-controlled police detention facilities since September, and Mr. Ratel said he feared that human rights violations were taking place at the prisons.
He said three tribal sheiks and one internal affairs police officer were assassinated on one recent day. He blamed militiamen. Sheik Ribat, in the interview at his mosque, said he spent an inordinate amount of time negotiating with militia-affiliated policemen who had kidnapped Iraqi Army soldiers for ransom. He has assisted the release of at least 50 soldiers since the British transfer of authority, he said.
“The police can kidnap the soldiers because the soldiers are not militia, and so they are scared,” he said. “The soldiers just want their salaries, so they do not fight.”
Gen. Mohan Fahad al-Fraji’s Iraqi Army headquarters is at the old Shatt al Arab Hotel, built decades ago in the Art Deco style as a resort for Westerners. Recently the lobby was occupied by a dozen young men sitting on the floor handcuffed, with blindfolds over their eyes.
They were suspected of being members of Ansar al Mahdi, a well-armed millenarian cult whose members assaulted Shiite pilgrims during the observance of Ashura last month. The organization emerged nearly two years ago throughout the Shiite south, but most Iraqi security officials believe that it is a fringe group without mass following. During several hours of intense firefights, Basra security forces put them down convincingly and followed up with hundreds of arrests. British officials argued that the incident proved the ability of Basra’s security forces to protect the public.
But General Mohan worries about the more existential threat of the militia-packed police force. He acknowledged that they routinely kidnapped his soldiers. He also complained of militias within his own force.
“Seventy percent of the army is pure,” he said. “The other 30 percent, I don’t know. The militias are like a smoldering fire. They can explode at any time.”
Jaleel Khalaf, a police general, believes that his own men are trying to kill him. The general, who has a penchant for berets and camouflage scarves, leaned back on one of his overstuffed office couches and nonchalantly recounted the 10 assassination attempts he had survived since he started his job in July. He blames militia-affiliated policemen for some of those attempts, most of which were bomb attacks.
General Khalaf said his main challenge was to professionalize the police force and root out corruption. But he acknowledged that serious problems remained beyond his control. When he took over last year he said he discovered that 250 police cars and 5,000 pistols had been stolen by Basra’s various Shiite political parties and that they were being used by militia death squads.
And General Khalaf criticized his police colleagues who “came to their jobs poor, and are now very rich.”
“I have fired many of them,” he said. “Hundreds. But we still have militias here. We push them out of the door and they come back through the window.”
Qais Mizher, Ahmad Fadham and an Iraqi employee of The New York Times contributed reporting.
February 23, 2008
Pg. 1
By Solomon Moore
BASRA, Iraq — This southern port city has been, in effect, on its own since September, when British forces here moved to the outskirts, yielding authority to local leaders. British and American officials say Basra’s experiment in self-rule could serve as a model for Iraq’s future, but if so — many locals and outside advisers say — that future remains dark.
What makes the situation in Basra — Iraq’s second largest city and commercial hub — so alarming, they say, is that it is a test of Iraqi rule under relatively optimal conditions: Basra has the nation’s best economic base, little ethnic tension within a homogeneous Shiite population and no Western occupation force to inflame nationalist tensions.
Yet the city remains deeply troubled. Disappearances of doctors, teachers and other professionals are common, as are some clashes among competing militias, most of which are linked to political parties. Murder victims include judicial investigators, politicians and tribal sheiks. One especially disturbing trend is the slaying of at least 100 women in the last year, according to the police. The Iraqi authorities have blamed Shiite militiamen for many of those killing, saying the militants had probably deemed the women to be impious.
“Most of the killings are done by gunmen in police cars,” said Sheik Khadem al-Ribat, a Basra tribal leader who claims no party membership. He spoke of the militias in an antechamber of his downtown mosque, his voice barely above a whisper. “These cars were given to the political parties. There are supposed to be 16,000 policemen, but we see very few of them on the street, and most of the ones we do see are militiamen dressed as police.”
Two dozen Shiite political parties and their respective militias compete, often violently, over control of the oil sector, seaport profits, smuggling operations across the nearby Iranian border and political authority over Iraq’s economic nerve center. So while the sectarian tension that has marred life elsewhere is missing here, the strife itself is not.
A local leader pointed to a political dispute as an example of the difference between perception and reality here.
Rival Shiite political parties, led by the Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq and followers of the cleric Moktada al-Sadr, tried last year to remove Gov. Mohammed Mosbeh al-Waeli over demands that he share more government jobs, particularly in the oil sector, among provincial factions.
British officials said they were heartened that the spat found its way into provincial council deliberations and Iraq’s court system and counted it as a sign that politics and law were starting to supplant bloodshed in Basra.
“They did all of that through the judiciary,” said Lt. Col. Michael Shearer, a British military spokesman. “Certainly there were no assassinations that anybody is aware of.”
However, according to Mr. Waeli’s political adviser, Sheik Abbas al-Zaidi, “They tried many times to kill the governor.” It was unclear who the attackers were, he added, but he was confident that they were rival militias. There were roadside bombs on Mr. Waeli’s way to work, shootings at home, and at least two bodyguards were killed. Militiamen also clashed last year over oil sector jobs, Mr. Zaidi said.
Still, he acknowledged, “The assassination attempts failed, and we won the case in the courts.”
It is this daily violence intermingled with normal politics that seems most worrying, experts here say.
“They have these overlapping spheres of gangsterism and politics, militias and legitimate businesses, and legitimate politics,” said Rob Tinline, a spokesman for the British Provincial Reconstruction Team.
Iraq’s security forces are the most conspicuous example of the tension between politics and violence in Basra, and the aptly named Serious Crimes Unit of the Basra Police is perhaps the most egregious example. The British Army determined that the unit was a death squad linked to Shiite militias and dispatched Warrior tanks in December 2006 to pound the rogue force’s headquarters to rubble.
But Iraqi arrest warrants for the unit’s members have never been executed. A warrant issued by Iraq’s Interior Ministry last month singles out Abdullah Najim, also known as Abu Muslim, and accuses him of orchestrating kidnappings, torture and assassinations while leading the police unit.
Mr. Abu Muslim escaped the 2006 British assault and is still a free man.
In fact, he is still a Basra policeman.
“Either he’s still operating as a police officer or he has gotten tacit approval to pose as a police officer,” said Jonathan Ratel, a Canadian contractor working as a justice adviser for the British Foreign Office in Basra.
Mr. Ratel has been working with provincial security and judicial officials for more than a year to help the Iraqi justice system weed out corruption in Basra’s justice system. He suspects that Abu Muslim is receiving protection from high-level members of the Mahdi Army, the armed militia of Mr. Sadr. The cleric on Friday extended a cease-fire declaration he had imposed on his militiamen in August, but Mr. Ratel said the militia’s domination of the Basra police is a kind of loophole.
“We never pretended to be handing over a white picketed province that resembles something out of the Stepford Wives,” said Colonel Shearer, the British military spokesman, in explaining British policy. “What we did is hand over a manageable situation; manageable by the Iraqis.”
Reported killings peaked in May, when 112 people were murdered. By December killings had declined to 38, finishing 2007 with a total of 848 known homicides. Basra also had 383 reported kidnappings in 2007, according to official provincial tallies.
But British officials, who had kept a lower profile in Basra even at the beginning of the war, now have virtually no presence within the city and acknowledge they are hard-pressed to monitor Iraqi governance on a day-to-day basis.
So although Basra residents generally agreed with the British military’s redeployment, no Iraqis interviewed for this article called the province’s complex and often militant factionalism “manageable.”
Because Mr. Sadr’s followers boycotted the 2004 elections that established the local government, they lack official representation in the local council. The Mahdi Army has compensated for its lack of official authority in Basra by pushing for jobs for Sadr followers in major government sectors, including health, oil, the port and education. Militia elements have also established protection rackets, ransom schemes and smuggling operations, according to American and Iraqi officials.
The militia has had the most success stacking Basra’s security forces.
“The only way to put together a police force was to talk to the militias and say to the agreed militias, ‘You get 100 guys, and you get 200, and you get 300,’” said Mr. Ratel, the adviser. He described the police force as “hired mercenaries for the militias,” most of whom are illiterate and have undergone little or no training.
The military withdrawal has made British training and monitoring efforts more difficult, Mr. Ratel said. For example, Westerners have not visited militia-controlled police detention facilities since September, and Mr. Ratel said he feared that human rights violations were taking place at the prisons.
He said three tribal sheiks and one internal affairs police officer were assassinated on one recent day. He blamed militiamen. Sheik Ribat, in the interview at his mosque, said he spent an inordinate amount of time negotiating with militia-affiliated policemen who had kidnapped Iraqi Army soldiers for ransom. He has assisted the release of at least 50 soldiers since the British transfer of authority, he said.
“The police can kidnap the soldiers because the soldiers are not militia, and so they are scared,” he said. “The soldiers just want their salaries, so they do not fight.”
Gen. Mohan Fahad al-Fraji’s Iraqi Army headquarters is at the old Shatt al Arab Hotel, built decades ago in the Art Deco style as a resort for Westerners. Recently the lobby was occupied by a dozen young men sitting on the floor handcuffed, with blindfolds over their eyes.
They were suspected of being members of Ansar al Mahdi, a well-armed millenarian cult whose members assaulted Shiite pilgrims during the observance of Ashura last month. The organization emerged nearly two years ago throughout the Shiite south, but most Iraqi security officials believe that it is a fringe group without mass following. During several hours of intense firefights, Basra security forces put them down convincingly and followed up with hundreds of arrests. British officials argued that the incident proved the ability of Basra’s security forces to protect the public.
But General Mohan worries about the more existential threat of the militia-packed police force. He acknowledged that they routinely kidnapped his soldiers. He also complained of militias within his own force.
“Seventy percent of the army is pure,” he said. “The other 30 percent, I don’t know. The militias are like a smoldering fire. They can explode at any time.”
Jaleel Khalaf, a police general, believes that his own men are trying to kill him. The general, who has a penchant for berets and camouflage scarves, leaned back on one of his overstuffed office couches and nonchalantly recounted the 10 assassination attempts he had survived since he started his job in July. He blames militia-affiliated policemen for some of those attempts, most of which were bomb attacks.
General Khalaf said his main challenge was to professionalize the police force and root out corruption. But he acknowledged that serious problems remained beyond his control. When he took over last year he said he discovered that 250 police cars and 5,000 pistols had been stolen by Basra’s various Shiite political parties and that they were being used by militia death squads.
And General Khalaf criticized his police colleagues who “came to their jobs poor, and are now very rich.”
“I have fired many of them,” he said. “Hundreds. But we still have militias here. We push them out of the door and they come back through the window.”
Qais Mizher, Ahmad Fadham and an Iraqi employee of The New York Times contributed reporting.