Iraqis, say thank you to Oon Yeoh

Nearly 4 years after invasion, many Iraqis long for old days

By Leila Fadel
McClatchy Newspapers

BAGHDAD — Four years ago, Iraqi poet Abbas Chaychan, a Shiite Muslim forced into exile during the predominantly Sunni Muslim regime of Saddam Hussein, hailed the American presence here in a poem that praised the top U.S. diplomat in Iraq, L. Paul Bremer.

"We have breakfasts of kabab and qaymar," he wrote, describing the new Iraq with a reference to a rich cream that's considered a sign of wealth. "We put, in your stead, Mr. Bremer / Better than a tyrant of our own flesh and blood, and his torture."

Last January, shortly after Saddam was hanged, Chaychan again put words to paper. But his outlook had changed.

"History is proud to write about him," he said of Saddam. "It wasn't a rope that wrapped around the neck / It was the neck that wrapped around the rope. ...

"From his childhood he was a leader, stubborn and against the occupation."

As the anniversary of the March 20, 2003, U.S.-led invasion of Iraq nears, many Iraqis, like Chaychan, are expressing nostalgia for the time more than 1,000 days ago when Saddam's statue stood proudly in Baghdad's Fardos Square.

Chaychan's reading of his most recent work, in which he calls Saddam the Arab world's "knight" and compares his death to the eclipsing of the sun, has become a popular Iraqi destination on video-sharing services such as YouTube, where his pained voice rings out over a montage of shots of the dictator: clenching his fist in the air, sporting his signature beret, at trial with a Quran and a noose around his neck.

In a January interview with CBS News' "60 Minutes," President Bush told correspondent Scott Paley that the American invasion had taken "care of a source of instability in Iraq."

"Envision a world in which Saddam Hussein was rushing for a nuclear weapon to compete against Iran," Bush said. "My decision to remove Saddam Hussein was the correct decision, in my judgment. We didn't find the weapons we thought we would find or the weapons everybody thought he had. But he was a significant source of instability."

In interviews across Baghdad, few Iraqis agreed, however. Instead, they displayed a collective fatigue, even as another plan to bring about security got under way. They're tired of waiting for better days when each morning brings new terrorism. Trapped in their homes, afraid that death will knock, they're worn down, they said.

Law and order — even under a bloody dictator who killed thousands and tortured many others — was better than this, many said. Even those who are glad to see Saddam dead expressed a longing for more orderly times.

Promise unfulfilled

Layla Mohammed, a Sunni Muslim mother of three, remembered that heady day four years ago when a noose tightened around the neck of Saddam's statue.

"I felt that I was at the highest point of a roller coaster, just about to plunge into what I hoped would be an exhilarating experience," Mohammed said. "I thought, 'Oh, my God, it's happening. I live to see my sons set free.' "

A pharmacist, she said she had voted in all three elections that Iraq has had since Saddam was toppled: first for an interim government, then for a new constitution, then for a permanent government. She remembers dipping her finger in purple ink — to indicate she had voted — with her two sons and her daughter. Together they held up their fingers and took a family photo to commemorate their future democracy.

"At that moment I felt that I was, at last, a sated human being. I had an opinion and it carried weight! I shall treasure that moment all my life," she said. "If only I could have that moment back; its joy was untainted. Now I know better."

The life of freedom and liberty she was promised never came. Her sons are trying to flee the country. She can't afford to keep her house warm, and no longer goes to her pharmacy in the neighborhood of Hurriyah, a once mixed-sect neighborhood emptied of most Sunnis in December.

"I have been conned," Mohammed said.

When Saddam was executed she told herself, "There goes the one man who could stop this bloodbath. I thought we would have to pay oil for freedom and democracy, but not our life's blood. It's too much."

She put her hand to her head. "It's too much."

Deaths take a toll

Ahmed al Yasseri, a Shiite, also remembers his excitement at the fall of Saddam. He excitedly set up a once-forbidden satellite dish. For the first time he watched Arabic news channels and foreign stations. He bought a cellphone and subscribed to an Internet service.

His brother, a former officer in Saddam's army, then was shot as he returned from his electronics shop in 2004. Yasseri fled his neighborhood looking for somewhere safer.

Three months later his uncle was killed, caught in a crossfire as he waited in a line to buy gasoline. Yasseri moved again.

"In a short time you lose your dear ones, and for what?" he asked with despair. "Believe me, for nothing."

His current neighborhood, Mansour, once an upscale shopping district in central Baghdad, now has grown dangerous as well. The crowded Shorja market, where he works, is a tempting target for bombs: A triple car bomb there killed at least 67 people a few weeks ago. He travels nowhere but the path between home and work. He always worries that he'll die in the kind of bombing that fills the morgue with body parts.

"We envy the people who die in one piece now," he said.

From bad to worse

Saddam was caught nearly nine months after the invasion, hidden in an underground hole with a pistol. Bilal Ali, 40, a Shiite, remembers that night. He pulled out an AK-47 rifle and fired into the air in celebration, then handed the weapon to his mother, then to his 7-year-old son.

But it didn't bring the peace that the shopkeeper in the Shiite area of Karada had imagined. Car bombs became prevalent in Shiite areas. Shiites were afraid to pray in their mosques, and Iraqis were afraid to shop in outdoor markets, targets of the Sunni insurgency.

Shiite militias struck back. Men, mostly Sunnis, turned up in the morgue, shot in the head, hands tied behind their back, drill holes in their bodies. The perpetrators eventually were linked to the Ministry of Interior, which oversees the police.

Electricity grew scarcer, at first available for eight hours, then six, then as few as three hours a day. Salaries went up, but so did the cost of living.

Still, Bilal Ali is happy that Saddam was hanged.

"I had hope at that time that life would be much better after his regime's collapse," he said. "But I'm very happy with his end even if the security situation is bad."

Fear for the children

Every morning as Mona Ali, a single Shiite mother, prepares sandwiches and breakfast for her three children she wonders whether they won't return to her. She leaves her 4-year-old son at home and tightly grips the hands of her two young daughters. On the daily walk to school, bullets sometimes have whizzed above their heads in the Shiite Amil neighborhood in west Baghdad.

"There is fear in my heart every day that my kids will go and not come back to me," she said.

Daily she walks to the neighborhood marketplace. On one trip, a car bomb ripped through the vegetable stands as she approached. The blood, the dead, the injured lay in front of her and she thought, it could have been me. She had a nightmare about her children as orphans.

"I remembered the fear I had for my children, and I realized I might not return safely to them," she said.

She remembers the bombing of the gold-domed Shiite shrine in Samarra more than a year ago. She knew the attack was different from the others.

"I felt bitterness in my heart that day," she said. "I knew that things would not rest; I knew that we shall have torment for a long time, and it was true."

Shiite revenge killings soared. Neighbors soon couldn't live with one another. Sunnis feared Shiite militias and their dreaded checkpoints; Shiites feared the Sunni insurgency and its bloody bombings. People fled, and families were torn apart.

Many, like Ali, feel numb to the pain, cheated out of the lives they expected.

On the morning Saddam was hanged, Ali said, she wept. Not for the dictator, but for the death of her hope and the loss of confidence in a government that she thinks is worse than the one that came before it.

"I want safety," she said. "Saddam's time was a safe time for us."

Record 3,709 Iraqi civilians died in October

Oon Yeoh must be loving it.


Record 3,709 Iraqi civilians died in October, U.N. says
By Sameer N. Yacoub
The Associated Press
http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/nationworld/2003442981_webiraq22.html

BAGHDAD, Iraq – The United Nations said today that 3,709 Iraqi civilians were killed in October, the highest monthly toll since the March 2003 U.S. invasion and another sign of the severity of Iraq's sectarian bloodbath.

The U.N. tally was more than three times higher than the total The Associated Press had tabulated for the month, and far more than the 2,866 U.S. service members who have died during all of the war.

The report on civilian casualties, handed out at a U.N. news conference in Baghdad, said the influence of militias was growing, and torture continued to be rampant, despite the government's vow to address human rights abuses.

"Hundreds of bodies continued to appear in different areas of Baghdad handcuffed, blindfolded and bearing signs of torture and execution-style killing," the U.N. Assistance Mission for Iraq report said. "Many witnesses reported that perpetrators wear militia attire and even police or army uniforms."

The report painted a grim picture across the board, from attacks on journalists, judges and lawyers and the worsening situation of women to displacement, violence against religious minorities and the targeting of schools.

Based on figures from the Iraqi Health Ministry, the country's hospitals and the Medico-Legal Institute in Baghdad, the report said October's figure was higher than July's previously unprecedented civilian death toll of 3,590.

"I think the type of violence is different in the past few months," Gianni Magazzeni, the UNAMI chief in Baghdad, told the news conference. "There was a great increase in sectarian violence in activities by terrorists and insurgents, but also by militias and criminal gangs."

He said "this phenomenon" has been typical since Sunni-Arab insurgents bombed a major Shiite shrine on Feb. 22 in Samarra, north of Baghdad.

UNAMI's Human Rights Office continued to receive reports that Iraqi police and security forces are either infiltrated or act in collusion with militias, the report said.

It said that while sectarian violence is the main cause of the civilian killings, Iraqis also continue to be the victims of terrorist acts, roadside bombs, drive-by shootings, crossfire between rival gangs, or between police and insurgents, kidnappings, military operations, crime and police abuse.

Asked about the U.N. report, government spokesman Ali al-Dabbagh called it "inaccurate and exaggerated" because "it is not based on official government reports."

When asked if there is a government report, al-Dabbagh said in a telephone interview with The Associated Press that one "is not available yet but it will be published later."

Access to the U.N. news conference in the heavily fortified Green Zone in Baghdad was blocked for many because the main entrance was closed as U.S. forces were checking for unexploded ordnance in the area, a U.S. military official said on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to release the information.

On Tuesday, a car bomb attack inside the Green Zone apparently attempted to kill Iraq's controversial speaker of parliament. The small bomb exploded in the back of an armored car in the motorcade of the Sunni speaker, Mahmoud al-Mashhadani, as it was being driven into a parking lot near the Green Zone's convention center, where al-Mashhadani and other Iraqi legislators were meeting, a parliamentary aide said.

The driver, an American security guard, was slightly wounded. He got out of the vehicle and found other explosive devices planted beneath it, the aide said on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the issue.

The driver called U.S. soldiers who brought dogs to the scene that detected explosives in another vehicle in the area belonging to al-Mashhadani's motorcade, said Lt. Col. Christopher Garver, a U.S. military spokesman.

Bomb specialists detonated that car, which set off a series of blasts that caused a fire but injured no one and caused no major damage to nearby structures, Garver said. The blaze was put out by the Green Zone's fire department.

"Obviously, we take security very seriously so we are investigating this incident," Garver said.

The serious security breach in the Green Zone — which houses the Iraqi government, the U.S. and British embassies and thousands of foreign troops and private contractors — forced the Iraqi legislators to stay inside the convention center for several hours until the fire was put out and the area found to be safe, the aide said.

"We strongly condemn this act," Ammar Wajih, the chief spokesman for the Iraqi Islamic Party, the largest Sunni-Arab part in Iraq, told the AP. "To plant a bomb in a heavily guarded place near the parliament building is a big security breach because few authorized persons can enter this area. The aim of this act is to hamper the political process."

In other developments:

• President Bush and Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki announced they will meet Nov. 29-30 in Jordan to discuss the deteriorating security situation in Iraq. "We will focus our discussions on current developments in Iraq, progress made to date in the deliberations of a high-level joint committee on transferring security responsibilities, and the role of the region in supporting Iraq," they said in a statement.

• British Foreign Secretary Margaret Beckett said her country's forces may hand over security responsibilities in Basra to Iraqi forces by the spring. It was the first time a government minister had set even a vague target for handing over security in Basra, but officials stressed this was a hope, not a timetable.

• At least 13 Iraqis were killed and six were wounded in attacks by suspected insurgents using drive-by shootings and bombings in Baghdad and other areas of Iraq, police said. Coalition forces also said they detained 59 suspected insurgents during raids in Baghdad, Fallujah and south of the capital in the past few days.

• Raad Jaafar Hamadi, an Iraqi journalist working for the state-run al-Sabah newspaper in Baghdad, was killed in a drive-by shooting, police said. The slaying raised to at least 92 the number of journalists killed in Iraq since the war began. Thirty-six other media employees — including drivers, interpreters and guards — also have been killed, all of them Iraqi except one Lebanese.

• A U.S. soldier died of a non-hostile injuries north of Baghdad on Tuesday, raising to at least 2,866 the number of U.S. servicemen who have died since the beginning of the war. So far this month, 48 American service members have died.

• Indonesia said it would be willing to send peacekeepers to Iraq under a U.N. flag and to encourage other Muslim countries to do the same. Indonesia, which had previously rejected the possibility of sending troops to Iraq, said any long-term solution to the war should include the involvement of the global community.

Al-Mashhadani, a hard-line Sunni Arab nationalist reviled by many Shiites, was the fourth high-ranking Iraqi government official to be targeted by assailants in recent days.

Last summer, Shiite and Kurdish parties tried unsuccessfully to oust him as parliament speaker after his comments about the insurgency and regional self-rule angered and embarrassed key political groups. He called the U.S. occupation of Iraq "the work of butchers."

On Nov. 1, al-Mashhadani had to be physically restrained from attacking a Sunni lawmaker. The speaker had been holding a nationally televised news conference when he lashed out at the legislator, Abdel-Karim al-Samarie, for alleged corruption and failure to attend sessions, calling him a "dog" — a deep insult in Iraq and other Arab societies.

Does 1320 deaths a month makes Oon Yeoh happy?

November 20, 2006
Cycle of Revenge Fuels a Pattern of Iraqi Killings
New York Times

By SABRINA TAVERNISE
BAGHDAD, Nov. 19 — As Iraq sinks deeper into war, a new pattern of revenge has become the driver of violence in the capital.

In a cycle that has been tracked by the American military since May and June, after months of apparently random sectarian violence the pattern has become one of attack and counterattack, with Sunni militants staging what commanders call “spectacular” strikes and Shiite militias retaliating with abductions and murders of Sunnis.

Militias come to funerals and offer to carry out revenge attacks. Gunmen execute blindfolded people in full public view. Mortars are lobbed between Sunni and Shiite neighborhoods. Sometimes the killers seem to be seeking specific people who were involved in earlier attacks, but many victims lose their lives simply to even out the sectarian toll.

“The problem is that every time there’s a sensational event, that starts the whole sectarian cycle again,” said Maj. Gen. William B. Caldwell IV, the chief spokesman for the American command in Iraq. “If we could stop the cyclical nature of this in Baghdad, we could really change the dynamics here.”

General Caldwell said that a recent and intensive series of American raids against Al Qaeda cells, as well as against Shiite militias that have struck back at Sunnis, had seriously damaged some of their networks. But American commanders have made similar claims on several occasions in the course of the war only to have the killing resume later at a higher level.

Scores of survivors and witnesses have noted the emerging cycle of revenge in interviews, describing highly personal attacks that involve a bullet in the head far more often than a bomb. In the past eight days, at least 715 Iraqis have been killed or have been found dead, according to The Associated Press. The death toll has reached 1,320 already this month, higher than the 1,216 who died in October, according to The A.P.’s count.

The sectarian violence that exploded after the bombing of a major Shiite shrine in Samarra in February has firmly locked into this new cycle of revenge, in which Sunnis and Shiites in many Baghdad neighborhoods are now openly at war.

Iraqis are hardening against one another as the deaths chip away at any remaining trust between the sects and radicalize even larger portions of their fringes. The killings are sometimes as brutal as they were under Saddam Hussein’s rule: bodies are found with drill holes, acid burns and broken bones. The bodies are dumped in sewage areas and trash pits.

The hatred evident on both sides presents new challenges to the American military, which must face this increasingly complex Iraqi landscape in which larger numbers of people are involved in killing.

“We shouldn’t talk in a false way, that we are all brothers,” said Faaz, a young Shiite graduate student, who follows Abu Dera, a militant leader, and who, like most people here, would not give his full name. “We have to admit there is a wound. It is a vicious, destructive war.”

New words for the culture of killing have popped up. Sakaka: death squad member. Tali: lamb, or a Sunni victim. Batta: car used by Shiite militias.

In Naariya, a neighborhood in southeastern Baghdad, the pattern began in a flash of gunfire on a sunny September morning, when eight friends were killed while putting up a poster of a Shiite cleric. In the following days, Sunni men in the area began to disappear. The bodies of at least 20 were found in Shiite areas, three of their families said in interviews.

Some of the men were taken in front of their families, forced into cars with guns pointed at their heads. Others simply disappeared. Families counted 20 to 40 dead, including, in one family, a grandfather, his son and his 14-year-old grandson. Americans tracking the Sunni deaths verified 17, according to residents they questioned.

An uneasy suspicion fell over the neighborhood. The police station, largely infiltrated by the Shiite militia called the Mahdi Army, did not even have a record of the disappearances. Muhammad Faisal, the brother of one of the slain Shiites, said he did not believe the reports of the Sunni deaths. The funerals for the eight Shiites drew large crowds. The Sunni ones did not.

“Where were their funerals?” he said, sitting in his tiny room in the neighborhood, holding his dead brother’s 5-month-old baby. “We didn’t see their numbers.”

He was arrested by the Americans for questioning in connection with the killings and later released.

The kidnappings seemed calculated to wipe away any remaining trust. Sunnis started to leave the neighborhood — about 50 families, according to a rough count by Sunni residents and a police official. Some time later, the word spread through mosques that it was safe to return.

Hamid Salman al-Dulaimy, 65, was happy to go back after having to sleep on couches. But several hours after he reinstalled himself at home, gunmen arrived in four cars, pointed guns at the heads of two of his sons and asked for identification cards. They took Mr. Dulaimy and his brother. Their bodies were found in a Shiite area several days later.

“You said we could come back here,” one of the sons, Zaid, recalled saying to the gunmen.

Zaid Dulaimy was taken several days after he was interviewed. He is still missing.

In some cases, the force behind the cycle of revenge has its roots in Iraq’s tribes, the network of communities that form the fabric of society here. With the world around them turning increasingly chaotic and the government largely impotent, Iraqis are retreating to the safety of their tribes — and the militias to which their members belong.

“This fighting, killing Sunnis and Shias, this is deep in the history of these tribes,” said Husham al-Madfai, an architect and history buff. “They call it revenge. This is in the history of the country, in the blood of the people.”

The killing is an ugly thing, not something Iraqis speak about openly. But its traces are everywhere, even in public places. Arkan lives in Ur, a neighborhood in northeast Baghdad that borders the area where the Shiite militant Abu Dera lives. He has seen at least four killings of Sunnis, and one failed one, an Egyptian man who was left for dead.

In January, the authorities in Ur found 18 bodies; in June, 30; and in August, 90; according to the local police authorities.

The intensity of executions in Ur jumped several days after the shooting deaths of Shiite pilgrims in August. One man in the area where the Sunnis were killed, a construction materials market, said he saw 14 killings in the days that followed.

In Sugel Uleh, a market area in Sadr City where a Sunni bomb gouged out a large crater this summer, Shiite gunmen shot dead at least eight men in its center. The attacks were carried out during funerals for some of the Shiites killed in the bombing, a witness said.

It is a long way between the pain of loss and the cold steel of killing, but militias, which move freely through the country’s lawlessness, shorten the path.

Two sedans of Mahdi militiamen arrived at a funeral this spring of a man who was killed along with five of his friends in a Sunni area, on their way back from a fish restaurant. According to an account by a relative, the militiamen called the mourning family out to the street and opened the sedans’ trunks. People were inside, the relative said. The men offered to kill them. The family refused.

For those who do not agree to killings, militias offer other things. Arkan began receiving $50 a month from the Mahdi Army after his father, a truck driver, died from wounds suffered in a sectarian attack in September.

Arkan said his family advised him against trying to seek revenge; it is dangerous business and he is the only working member in the family. Still, he has known others who have.

“There are many people like this,” he said. “They bring a normal Sunni and say, ‘This is revenge for my brother.’ Some say it’s enough, killing two or three. Some continue.”

An increasingly common tool for retaliatory attacks is the mortar. In the three days that followed the death sentence for Mr. Hussein, a source of bitterness for Sunni Arabs, 10 different strikes around the capital killed at least 15 Iraqis and wounded 87, including three Shiite boys who were watching a soccer game in Sadr City.

General Caldwell said the military’s raids had reduced the mortar attacks and put pressure on the militias, because killings appear to be carried out more quickly now by the looks of the bodies.

Jamal, a nephew of the Shiite killed with his five friends, said Shiites, long oppressed under Mr. Hussein, had simply had enough. “You can’t expect people with all this tragedy in all these years not to have any reaction.”

When Jamal first saw his uncle’s broken body stuffed in the trunk of a car, he was overcome by anger.

“The feeling of revenge overwhelmed me,” he said, in a house in Sadr City. “I said to myself, ‘I will kill all the Sunnis.’ ”

He said he did not resort to the killing of strangers, as some Iraqis have begun to do, but reached out for tribal and militia connections to track down the killers.

“On the surface, people say they trust,” said a policeman in Naariya, who asked that his name not be used because he could be killed. “Inside, they don’t trust each other at all.”

A Shiite government employee said: “My family, they are not aggressive, but it’s the feeling inside, the hatred. They believe Sunnis are doing all of this.”

As the capital becomes more violent, many of those who refuse to give in to it leave. Hassan Jabr, a Shiite whose 12-year-old son was kidnapped and murdered this spring, moved to Jordan in the fall with his wife and one remaining son. He said he was forever changed when he saw his son’s body in the morgue.

Before he left, he was waiting to register the death certificate in a government ministry, when he struck up a conversation with a man in his 20s whose only brother had been killed. The man said he had killed three Sunnis to avenge the death, Mr. Jabr said.

The man was surprised at Mr. Jabr’s restraint. “Are you a coward?” Mr. Jabr said the man asked. “Why don’t you take revenge?”

Qais Mizher and Hosham Hussein contributed reporting.

Thanks to Oon Yeoh...

September 24, 2006
Spy Agencies Say Iraq War Worsens Terrorism Threat

By MARK MAZZETTI
WASHINGTON, Sept. 23 — A stark assessment of terrorism trends by American intelligence agencies has found that the American invasion and occupation of Iraq has helped spawn a new generation of Islamic radicalism and that the overall terrorist threat has grown since the Sept. 11 attacks.

The classified National Intelligence Estimate attributes a more direct role to the Iraq war in fueling radicalism than that presented either in recent White House documents or in a report released Wednesday by the House Intelligence Committee, according to several officials in Washington involved in preparing the assessment or who have read the final document.

The intelligence estimate, completed in April, is the first formal appraisal of global terrorism by United States intelligence agencies since the Iraq war began, and represents a consensus view of the 16 disparate spy services inside government. Titled “Trends in Global Terrorism: Implications for the United States,’’ it asserts that Islamic radicalism, rather than being in retreat, has metastasized and spread across the globe.

An opening section of the report, “Indicators of the Spread of the Global Jihadist Movement,” cites the Iraq war as a reason for the diffusion of jihad ideology.

The report “says that the Iraq war has made the overall terrorism problem worse,” said one American intelligence official.

More than a dozen United States government officials and outside experts were interviewed for this article, and all spoke only on condition of anonymity because they were discussing a classified intelligence document. The officials included employees of several government agencies, and both supporters and critics of the Bush administration. All of those interviewed had either seen the final version of the document or participated in the creation of earlier drafts. These officials discussed some of the document’s general conclusions but not details, which remain highly classified.

Officials with knowledge of the intelligence estimate said it avoided specific judgments about the likelihood that terrorists would once again strike on United States soil. The relationship between the Iraq war and terrorism, and the question of whether the United States is safer, have been subjects of persistent debate since the war began in 2003.

National Intelligence Estimates are the most authoritative documents that the intelligence community produces on a specific national security issue, and are approved by John D. Negroponte, director of national intelligence. Their conclusions are based on analysis of raw intelligence collected by all of the spy agencies.

Analysts began working on the estimate in 2004, but it was not finalized until this year. Part of the reason was that some government officials were unhappy with the structure and focus of earlier versions of the document, according to officials involved in the discussion.

Previous drafts described actions by the United States government that were determined to have stoked the jihad movement, like the indefinite detention of prisoners at Guantánamo Bay and the Abu Ghraib prison abuse scandal, and some policy makers argued that the intelligence estimate should be more focused on specific steps to mitigate the terror threat. It is unclear whether the final draft of the intelligence estimate criticizes individual policies of the United States, but intelligence officials involved in preparing the document said its conclusions were not softened or massaged for political purposes.

Frederick Jones, a White House spokesman, said the White House “played no role in drafting or reviewing the judgments expressed in the National Intelligence Estimate on terrorism.” The estimate’s judgments confirm some predictions of a National Intelligence Council report completed in January 2003, two months before the Iraq invasion. That report stated that the approaching war had the potential to increase support for political Islam worldwide and could increase support for some terrorist objectives.

Documents released by the White House timed to coincide with the fifth anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks emphasized the successes that the United States had made in dismantling the top tier of Al Qaeda.

“Since the Sept. 11 attacks, America and its allies are safer, but we are not yet safe,” concludes one, a report titled “9/11 Five Years Later: Success and Challenges.” “We have done much to degrade Al Qaeda and its affiliates and to undercut the perceived legitimacy of terrorism.”

That document makes only passing mention of the impact the Iraq war has had on the global jihad movement. “The ongoing fight for freedom in Iraq has been twisted by terrorist propaganda as a rallying cry,” it states.

The report mentions the possibility that Islamic militants who fought in Iraq could return to their home countries, “exacerbating domestic conflicts or fomenting radical ideologies.”

On Wednesday, the Republican-controlled House Intelligence Committee released a more ominous report about the terrorist threat. That assessment, based entirely on unclassified documents, details a growing jihad movement and says, “Al Qaeda leaders wait patiently for the right opportunity to attack.”

The new National Intelligence Estimate was overseen by David B. Low, the national intelligence officer for transnational threats, who commissioned it in 2004 after he took up his post at the National Intelligence Council. Mr. Low declined to be interviewed for this article.

The estimate concludes that the radical Islamic movement has expanded from a core of Qaeda operatives and affiliated groups to include a new class of “self-generating” cells inspired by Al Qaeda’s leadership but without any direct connection to Osama bin Laden or his top lieutenants.

It also examines how the Internet has helped spread jihadist ideology, and how cyberspace has become a haven for terrorist operatives who no longer have geographical refuges in countries like Afghanistan.

In early 2005, the National Intelligence Council released a study concluding that Iraq had become the primary training ground for the next generation of terrorists, and that veterans of the Iraq war might ultimately overtake Al Qaeda’s current leadership in the constellation of the global jihad leadership.

But the new intelligence estimate is the first report since the war began to present a comprehensive picture about the trends in global terrorism.

In recent months, some senior American intelligence officials have offered glimpses into the estimate’s conclusions in public speeches.

“New jihadist networks and cells, sometimes united by little more than their anti-Western agendas, are increasingly likely to emerge,” said Gen. Michael V. Hayden, during a speech in San Antonio in April, the month that the new estimate was completed. “If this trend continues, threats to the U.S. at home and abroad will become more diverse and that could lead to increasing attacks worldwide,” said the general, who was then Mr. Negroponte’s top deputy and is now director of the Central Intelligence Agency.

For more than two years, there has been tension between the Bush administration and American spy agencies over the violence in Iraq and the prospects for a stable democracy in the country. Some intelligence officials have said the White House has consistently presented a more optimistic picture of the situation in Iraq than justified by intelligence reports from the field.

Spy agencies usually produce several national intelligence estimates each year on a variety of subjects. The most controversial of these in recent years was an October 2002 document assessing Iraq’s illicit weapons programs. Several government investigations have discredited that report, and the intelligence community is overhauling how it analyzes data, largely as a result of those investigations.

The broad judgments of the new intelligence estimate are consistent with assessments of global terrorist threats by American allies and independent terrorism experts.

The panel investigating the London terrorist bombings of July 2005 reported in May that the leaders of Britain’s domestic and international intelligence services, MI5 and MI6, “emphasized to the committee the growing scale of the Islamist terrorist threat.”

More recently, the Council on Global Terrorism, an independent research group of respected terrorism experts, assigned a grade of “D+” to United States efforts over the past five years to combat Islamic extremism. The council concluded that “there is every sign that radicalization in the Muslim world is spreading rather than shrinking.”


Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company

Yet another reason to thank Oon Yeoh

Yet another reason to thank Oon Yeoh.


New suicide bombers: kidnapped Iraqis
By David Rising
The Associated Press

BAGHDAD, Iraq — Insurgents are using unwitting kidnapping victims as suicide bombers — booby-trapping their cars without their knowledge, then releasing them only to blow up the vehicles by remote control, the Defense Ministry warned Thursday.

It was unclear from the ministry's statement whether the insurgents are using kidnapping victims because they are having trouble finding recruits for suicide missions. Suicide car bombs are responsible for 7 percent of the total Iraqi deaths this year — down from 25 percent in the last eight months of 2005, according to an Associated Press count.

A U.S. official who spoke on condition of anonymity said he was aware of such incidents but was unable to provide further details. U.S. officials have said insurgents often tape or handcuff a suicide driver's hands to a car, or bind his foot to the accelerator pedal, to ensure that he does not back out at the last minute. The remains of such hands and feet have been found at blast sites.

Although roadside bombs are the main weapon used by insurgents, suicide car bombers are often their most effective one — designed to maximize casualties and sow fear among the population. According to the Washington-based Brookings Institution, from the fall of Saddam Hussein to Sept. 17, there have been 343 suicide car bombings involved in attacks causing multiple deaths around Iraq.

"According to our intelligence information, recent car bomb explosions targeting checkpoints and public places have nothing to do with [traditional] terrorist operations," the Defense Ministry said in its statement.

It said that first "a motorist is kidnapped with his car. They then booby-trap the car without the driver knowing. Then the kidnapped driver is released and threatened to take a certain road."

The kidnappers then follow the car and when the unwitting victim "reaches a checkpoint, a public place or an army or police patrol, the criminal terrorists following the driver detonate the car from a distance."

The U.N. Assistance Mission in Iraq's Human Rights office warned that the total of Iraqi civilians killed in July and August hit 6,599, a record number that is far greater than initial estimates had suggested and points to the grave sectarian crisis gripping the country.

It offered a grim assessment across a range of indicators, reporting worrying evidence of torture, unlawful detentions, the growth of sectarian militias and death squads, and a rise in "honor killings" of women.

The United Nations' chief anti-torture expert warned in Geneva on Thursday that torture may now be more widespread than it was under Saddam's regime, with militias, terrorist groups and government forces disregarding rules on humane treatment of prisoners.

"What most people tell you is that the situation as far as torture is concerned now in Iraq is totally out of hand," Manfred Nowak said.

Other developments

• More than a dozen apparent victims of death squads were found in the capital Thursday, many showing signs of torture.

• A U.S. soldier was killed Thursday while operating in the restive Anbar province west of Baghdad, the military announced. The military said another American soldier was killed in northern Baghdad on Wednesday when a roadside bomb exploded next to the vehicle in which he was traveling.

• Italy formally handed over the reins of the relatively quiet Dhi Qar province in the south. It was the second of Iraq's 18 provinces to be turned over to local control and paves the way for most of Italy's 1,600 troops to return home by the end of the year.

• In Baghdad, about 15 armed men in three pickup trucks robbed a bank in a downtown commercial neighborhood.

• U.S. and Iraqi forces arrested top aides to anti-American cleric Muqtada al-Sadr in pre-dawn raids Thursday, according to al-Sadr officials who called the move a provocation. The raids, which took place in Baghdad and Najaf, included a top spokesman for the group, Sheikh Salah al-Obaidy, al-Sadr officials said.

Information from The Washington Post is included in this report.

Copyright © 2006 The Seattle Times Company

Thank you very much Oon Yeoh!

This man has Oon Yeoh and other pro-Iraq war supporters like him to thank for the situation that he is in now. Fuck Thank you very much Oon Yeoh!

An Iraqi's lament: "A human life is now worth nothing in this country"
By Los Angeles Times

After summer of violence, schools reopen across Iraq
Because this account reveals where the writer lives, his name is being withheld to protect his safety. He is an Iraqi reporter in the L.A. Times' Baghdad Bureau.

BAGHDAD, Iraq — On a recent Sunday, I was buying groceries in my beloved Amariya neighborhood in western Baghdad when I heard the sound of an AK-47 for about three seconds. It was close but not very close, so I continued shopping.

As I took a right turn on Munadhama Street, I saw a man lying in a small pool of blood. He wasn't dead.

The idea of stopping to help or to take him to a hospital crossed my mind, but I didn't dare. Cars passed without stopping. Pedestrians and shop owners kept doing what they were doing, pretending nothing had happened.

I was still looking at the wounded man and blaming myself for not stopping to help. Other shoppers peered at him from a distance, sorrowful and compassionate, but did nothing.

I went on to another market, staying for about five minutes while shopping for tomatoes, onions and other vegetables. During that time, the man managed to sit up and wave to passing cars. No one stopped. A white Volkswagen then pulled up. A passenger stepped out with a gun, walked steadily to the wounded man and shot him three times. The car took off down a side road and vanished.

No one did anything. No one lifted a finger. The only reaction came from a woman in the store. In a low voice, she said, "My God, bless his soul."

I went home but didn't tell my wife. I did not want to frighten her.

I've lived in my neighborhood for 25 years. My daughters went to kindergarten and elementary school here. I'm a Christian. My neighbors are mostly Sunni Arabs. We always had lived in harmony. Before the U.S.-led invasion, we would visit for tea and a chat. On summer afternoons, we would meet on the corner to joke and talk politics.

This used to be a nice, upper-middle-class neighborhood, bustling with commerce and traffic. On the main street, ice-cream parlors, hamburger stands and take-away restaurants competed for space. We would rent videos and buy household appliances.

Until 2005, we were mostly unaffected by violence. We would hear shootings and explosions. Compared with other places in Baghdad, though, it was relatively peaceful.
Then, in late 2005, someone blew up three supermarkets in the area. Shops started closing. Most of the small number of Shiite Muslim families moved out. The commercial street became a ghost road.

On Christmas Day last year, we visited — as always — our local church, St. Thomas, in Mansour. It was half-empty. Some members of the congregation had left the country; others feared coming to church after a series of attacks against Christians.

American troops, who patrol the neighborhood in Humvees, also have become edgy. Get too close, and they'll shoot. A colleague — an interpreter and physician — was shot and killed by soldiers last year on his way home from a shopping trip. He hadn't noticed the Humvees parked on the street.

By early this year, living in my neighborhood had become a nightmare. In addition to anti-American graffiti, fliers were telling women to wear conservative clothes and to cover their hair. Men were told not to wear shorts or jeans.

As a Christian, it was unacceptable that someone would tell my wife and daughters what to wear. What's the use of freedom if someone is telling you what to wear, how to behave or what to do in your life?

But coming home one day, I saw my wife on the street. I didn't recognize her. She had covered up.

After the attack on a Shiite mosque in Samarra in February, Shiite gunmen tried to raid Sunni mosques in my neighborhood. One night, against the backdrop of heavy shooting, we heard the cleric calling for help through the mosque's loudspeakers. We stayed up all night, listening as they battled for the mosque. It made me feel unsafe. If a Muslim would shoot another Muslim, what would they do to a Christian?

Fear dictates everything we do.

I see my neighbors less and less. When I go out, I say hello and that's it. I fear someone will ask questions about my job working for Americans, which could put me in danger. Even if he had no ill will toward me, he might talk and reveal an identifying detail. We're afraid of an enemy among us. Someone we don't know. It's a cancer.

In March, assassinations started in our neighborhood. Early one evening, I was sitting in my garden with my wife when we heard several gunshots. I rushed to the gate to see what was going on, despite my wife's pleas to stay inside. My neighbors told me that gunmen had dropped three men from a car and shot them in the street before driving off. No one dared approach the victims to find out who they were.

The bodies remained there until morning. The police or the American military probably picked them up, but I don't know. They simply disappeared.

The sounds of shootings and explosions are now commonplace. We don't know who is shooting whom, or who has been targeted. We don't know why, and we're afraid to ask or help. We, too, could be shot. Bringing someone to the hospital or to the police is out of the question. Nobody trusts the police, and nobody wants to answer questions.

I feel sad, bitter and frustrated — sad because a human life is now worth nothing in this country; bitter because people no longer help each other; frustrated because I can't help. If I'm targeted one day, I'm sure no one will help me.

I was very happy when my eldest daughter married an American. First, because there was love between them, but also because she would be able to leave Iraq, and I wouldn't have to worry about her safety day after day. She left last year.

If you had asked a year ago whether I would consider leaving Iraq, I would have said maybe, but without enthusiasm. Now it's a definite yes. Things are going from bad to worse, and I can't see any light at the end of the tunnel.

Four weeks ago, I came home from work. As I reached my street, I saw a man lying in a pool of blood. Someone had covered him with bits of cardboard. This was the best they could do. No one dared move him.

I drove on.

Oon Yeoh, are Iraqis better off now?

http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/national/1107AP_Iraq_Out_of_Control.html

Tuesday, July 18, 2006 · Last updated 12:03 p.m. PT
Violence in Iraq spinning out of control

By ROBERT H. REID
ASSOCIATED PRESS WRITER

BAGHDAD, Iraq -- A Sunni driver lures Shiites into a van by promising jobs - then blows it up, killing 53 people. Sunni gunmen spray bullets and grenades at shoppers, not caring that they include women and children. Shiite death squads roam Baghdad streets, singling out and slaughtering Sunnis.

The new unity government of Shiites, Sunnis and Kurds was supposed to bring Iraqis together. Instead, sectarian bloodletting is spiraling out of control.

In the last two days alone, more than 120 people were killed in two spectacular examples of Sunni-Shiite violence - 53 in the suicide van bombing Tuesday in Kufa and 50 in the massacre Monday in the market in Mahmoudiya.

Since then, at least 19 more have been slain in Mahmoudiya in what police say were reprisals for the market massacre. Their bodies were found by police, scattered in different parts of town.

American officials had hoped the unity government, which took office May 20, could curb sectarian attacks by promoting cooperation between the sects. It promised to disband the Shiite militias and persuade Sunni insurgents to lay down their arms, so that U.S. troops could go home.

But unity in parliament has not been translated into peace on the streets. Lawmakers elected on religiously based tickets find it difficult to restrain their constituents, whose lives are under constant threat by the rival religious group.

With the government unable to protect them, people put their trust in religious-based militias. The killings continue and the government loses respect with every mass killing.

"The security situation is heading toward collapse," Shiite politician Bassem Sharif warned last week. "There is sectarian animosity within the Iraqi public, and this is putting pressure on the political process."

Instead of withdrawal, the top U.S. commander, Gen. George W. Casey, said last week that more U.S. troops may take to the streets if Iraqi forces cannot cope with the rising violence.

Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki may yet be able to reverse the slide. But public confidence is waning. His much-heralded security plan for Baghdad - which includes 50,000 police and troops operating checkpoints and patrolling the capital - is widely perceived as a failure.

"Iraqis had hoped for good news when al-Maliki formed his Cabinet," commentator Mohammed al-Shabout wrote in the government-owned newspaper Al-Sabah. "But regrettably, the good news ceased. We regret to say all we have is bad news."

And there's plenty of bad news.

In the first 18 days of July, at least 695 Iraqis were killed in sectarian or war-related violence and 1,029 wounded, according to an AP count. That represents a sharp rise over the same period last year, when an AP count showed more than 450 Iraqis were killed.

But statistics alone cannot convey the depth of the sectarian brutality.

In Kufa, police said the suicide attacker drove to a street corner where laborers congregate, hoping someone will offer them work for the day. The driver promised jobs, filled the van, and then detonated it on a bustling street.

Sunni gunmen in Mahmoudiya sprayed the crowd of mostly Shiite shoppers Monday with automatic weapons and fired rocket-propelled grenades into the melee, according to police and survivors. In the aftermath, children lay on hospital gurneys, their legs shattered, their bodies writhing in pain.

Nearly every day, police find corpses in Baghdad streets and vacant lots, victims of death squads that hunt down members of the rival sect. The bodies often show signs of horrific torture, including holes drilled into their eyes or skulls.

As a result, many Iraqis - especially those who live in Baghdad and other religiously mixed cities - are terrified. Almost everyone seems to have a relative or acquaintance who has disappeared or died violently.

Airlines that fly out of Baghdad are heavily booked through the summer as Iraqis with enough money send their families abroad - many of them for long stays. But most Iraqis can't leave, and are forced to live in a constant state of fear.

In Baghdad, few venture out in the evening - except in districts where their sect is in the majority and the streets are controlled by militias. Motorists use streets that steer clear of areas where the other sect dominates.

In a statement June 27, the United Nations estimated that about 150,000 Iraqis had fled their neighborhoods to escape sectarian and insurgency-related violence during the previous four months.

The lucky ones find shelter with relatives in areas where most people are members of their own sect. The less fortunate end up in small tent cities clustered around mosques.

U.S. officials blame much of the sectarian crisis on the legacy of the Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, leader of al-Qaida in Iraq until he was killed in a U.S. airstrike June 7. The Jordanian-born al-Zarqawi considered Shiites heretics and collaborators with the Americans and sought to promote civil war by repeated attacks on Shiite civilians.

"Terrorists have adapted by exploiting Iraq's sectarian fault lines," U.S. Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad told a Senate committee last week. "Sectarian violence has now become THE significant challenge to Iraq's future."

Others believe the U.S. contributed to sectarian strains by appearing to favor Shiites early in the occupation, in the belief that many Sunni Arabs remained loyal to Saddam Hussein. That perception fueled Sunni fears that the Shiite majority would seek payback for repression under Saddam's Sunni-dominated regime.

Although sectarian killings began soon after Saddam fell in 2003 but accelerated after the bombing of a Shiite shrine in Samarra five months ago. That triggered a tidal wave of reprisal attacks against Sunni mosques and clerics.

The latest outbreak began July 1 when a car bombing killed 66 people in Bagdad's heavily Shiite district of Sadr City. A week later, masked Shiite gunmen roamed the streets of Baghdad's Jihad neighborhood killing Sunnis. At least 41 people died.

Pacifism is immoral?

Self claimed Buddhist Oon Yeoh is at it again. This time repeating his claim that "pacifism is immoral". A wise reader "Visitor" of his site pointed out that based on Oon Yeoh's claim that Pacifism "is nothing less than the willingness to allow other people to get killed", then Oon Yeoh should be considered as a pacifist as well. Visitor also asked this very important question: "Is trying to get rid of one man worth the deaths, sufferings and chaos in Iraq now?"

Oon Yeoh responded:

If you are asserting that Afghanistan and Iraq were better off before the Taliban and Saddam regime were forcibly removed, or that the people of those countries would prefer Mullah Omar or Saddam Hussein back in power, you are not just cherry picking but totally ignorant of history and reality.

Oon Yeoh accused "Visitor" of "not just cherry picking but totally ignorant of history and reality." Who is the one that is cherry picking and totally oblivious to what is happening in Iraq? According to Dr Abdallah, interviewed in the article published by the Christian Science Monitor,

"We were so happy, so optimistic about what the Americans had done, but Saddam Hussein is very humane compared to what is happening now," the doctor says. "I'm sorry to say that - I hate him - but the Saddam time was much better. I blame the Americans; they made so many mistakes. They are the big players."

It is high time for Oon Yeoh, like some former neo-conservatives, to publicly admit that he was wrong about supporting the war on Iraq, and that he is partially responsible for the mess that we have in Iraq now. Come on, be a real Buddhist and admit and repent for your mistakes!