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.