[Centraal] Irak na de oorlog - deel 38

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U.S. military steps up war-zone airstrikes

By Jim Michaels, USA TODAY
The U.S. military has increased airstrikes in Iraq four-fold this year, reflecting a steep escalation in combat operations aimed at al-Qaeda and other militants.

Coalition forces launched 1,140 airstrikes in the first nine months of this year compared with 229 in all of last year, according to military statistics.

Airstrikes are up in Afghanistan, too. Coalition planes have made 2,764 bombing runs this year, up from 1,770 last year. The figures don't include strikes by helicopter gunships.

The increasing use of air power also stems from improved accuracy and smaller munitions that allow commanders to launch airstrikes against insurgents who travel in small groups and sometimes hide among civilians.

In Iraq, the temporary increase of 30,000 U.S. troops ordered by President Bush in January has led to the increase in bombing missions. The U.S. command has moved forces off large bases and into neighborhoods and has launched several large offensives aimed at al-Qaeda.

"You end up having that many more opportunities for close air support," said Air Force Brig. Gen. Stephen Mueller, director of the Combined Air Operations Center.

More precise targeting and smaller bombs have made it easier for the Air Force to support ground troops in counterinsurgencies, such as those in Afghanistan and Iraq.

"We're hitting within 15 feet of where we're aiming," Mueller said. A typical 500-pound bomb is 50% explosives, but newer versions carry about 100 pounds of explosives.

Some bombs are "designed to take one building and not the whole block," Mueller said.

Fighting in Baghdad has also pushed insurgents into the surrounding countryside, making it easier to spot and bomb them, he said.

Afghanistan's mountainous terrain lends itself to airstrikes, since attack planes can reach remote regions before troops can, and there are fewer ground forces in the country.

"We are using air power in lieu of putting extensive forces on the ground," said Air Force Maj. Gen. Allen Peck, commander of the Air Force Doctrine Development and Education Center.

However, increased use of air power raises the chances of killing innocent civilians, said Mark Clodfelter, a professor at the National War College. Winning over the population is key to defeating insurgents.

"You don't want bombing to be a recruiting method for the insurgents," Clodfelter said.

Airstrikes in Afghanistan this year allegedly killed dozens of civilians, angering the population and drawing criticism from Afghanistan President Hamid Karzai.

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America’s Responsibility to Iraqi Refugees

By Anne C. Richard | Wednesday, October 31, 2007

Over the past year, violence in their home country has forced many Iraqis to flee. Inside Iraq, about 2.2 million people are displaced — forced out of their homes, villages and towns. More than 2.2 million people have fled across borders into neighboring countries. Against this backdrop, Anne C. Richard argues that the United States should honor its historic tradition of aiding and providing sanctuary for those fleeing persecution and violence.

This crisis is continuing to worsen — as an estimated 60,000 people reportedly flee violence and persecution in Iraq each month.

According to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), 2,000 people were fleeing to Syria each day before Syria recently joined Jordan in closing its border to the influx.

Impact on host countries

The impact of the displacement crisis has been especially difficult on Syria and Jordan. Syria has taken in more than 1.2 million Iraqi refugees, equal to 10% of Syria’s own population.

Jordan is hosting up to 750,000 Iraqi refugees, who now make up 24% of Jordan’s population. Of course, adjusted for population size, that is the equivalent of 75 million people in the United States. And don't forget that Jordan already has many Palestinians living within its borders.

Syria has opened its educational and health systems to Iraqi refugees, and the Government of Jordan is allowing Iraqi school children to enroll in Jordanian schools.

Help needed

Neither country has the resources to meet the needs of all the Iraqi refugees that they are hosting. Both countries need international help.

With a combined displaced population of over four million people, this represents one of the largest and fastest-growing humanitarian crises of our time. These refugees are targets of persecution due to their political opinions, ethnicities, religious affiliations and professions, to name just a few factors.

Life as a refugee

Many of the Iraqi refugees fear persecution because they worked closely with and helped Americans — the U.S. military, U.S. contractors, humanitarian organizations and journalists.

In Jordan, the majority of refugees are living in the country illegally. They have overstayed their visas — and, while some have resources, many have run through their savings. Most live in impoverished East Amman — or the cities of Zarqa and Irbid.

It’s not unusual to find a family of six living in one room. The father and any adult sons may fear to leave the apartment and will not have jobs. They may rely on the women and children to go to the market, run errands — and make a little money.

Turning down children

Their greatest worry may be the health and education of their children.

Despite Jordan’s generous official policy of admitting all refugee children to school this year, the local principal may in fact have turned the children away because of school overcrowding.

Why the U.S. response matters

When someone falls ill, the family will not have money for private physicians and have no access to healthcare.

Even if their present circumstances are very difficult, going back to Iraq is not an option. That’s where they experienced killings, kidnappings and extortion — or saw that happen to someone close to them. At the same time, they must know that their chances of being resettled in a third country are slim.

The United States did not intend for this crisis to happen, but it has. And the United States should play a central role in addressing it. Other countries will base their own responses on ours.

U.S. pledges

On February 5, 2007, U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice established a senior-level State Department task force on Iraqi refugees and displaced people. Various State Department announcements indicated that the number of Iraqis resettled in the United States by the end of September 2007 would be either (a) unlimited, (b) 25,000 or (c) 7,000 Iraqi refugees.

Despite these pledges, the United States resettled only 1,608 Iraqi refugees by September 30th. (Sweden, by comparison, took in 12,259 Iraqi asylum-seekers during the same period.) The U.S. State Department now plans to bring 12,000 Iraqis to the United States in fiscal year 2008.

Examples from history

Given the extent of the problem and the number of people who are suffering and in need of basic protection, however, this number of 12,000 people is clearly inadequate. It is an ambitious number only if a “business as usual” approach is taken, using current procedures for the U.S. refugee program.

What is needed instead, however, is to adopt this crisis as a top U.S. government priority. That means to provide robust aid to help other countries host refugees, to do more inside Iraq for the displaced — and to scale up operations in order to bring many more Iraqis to the United States.

We need something today on the order of what Presidents Ford and Carter did back in the late 1970s/early 1980s — the post-Vietnam War era — when they authorized and ensured the admission of hundreds of thousands of Southeast Asians per year to the United States.

Examples from history

Back then, 131,000 people were resettled between May and December 1975 alone, and the United States has taken in more than 900,000 Vietnamese refugees overall.

Similarly, the United States welcomed more than 600,000 Russian Jews during the Cold War — and took in more than 150,000 Bosnian refugees during the Bosnian conflict.

Calls for doing more

Recognizing that resettlement in another country will be a solution for only a minority of the cases, there is a pressing need to do more than admit more refugees and asylum seekers in Europe and North America.

In particular, aid is needed for the countries hosting the refugees. Jordan and Egypt (and to a lesser extent Lebanon) already benefit from sizable U.S. government aid programs — but much of this is military aid, and more needs to be done to help these countries manage the impact on their economies.

While Jordan’s public schools were already overcrowded and dilapidated before the refugees arrived and rents might have increased anyway, price hikes, rent increases and other economic problems are being blamed on the influx of Iraqis.

Helping Jordan

The Government of Jordan calculates it provides $1 billion in goods and services to the Iraqi refugees. Some fear that Jordan's economy and society will become unstable. It is in our interest to provide help to fix Jordan’s public schools, improve housing and upgrade health care.

Recent pieces of U.S. legislation — such as Senator Ted Kennedy’s Refugee Crisis in Iraq Act and Representative Earl Blumenauer’s Responsibility to Iraqi Refugees Act of 2007 — are critical in that they address the massive displacement of Iraqis since 2003 in a comprehensive way. These measures would ensure that the United States begins to meet its promise to protect Iraqi refugees.

Aid package

A number of nongovernmental organizations, including my own, have recommended $1.4 billion in comprehensive assistance.

Admittedly, there is a sharp contrast to the Bush Administration’s requests to Congress to provide more assistance. The recent war funding package sent to Congress requested just $240 million to help the displaced Iraqis, on top of $35 million previously requested.

The $1.4 billion could be funded by Congress on an urgent basis in fall 2007/winter 2008 as part of a mid-year “supplemental” appropriations bill.

Launching future aid programs

But even this significant package does not begin to approach what the United States has done in the past. President Bush should recognize and acknowledge this serious crisis and launch an ambitious program.

And it’s time for Americans to tell their President and Congress that the United States must honor its historic tradition of aiding and providing sanctuary for those fleeing persecution and violence. We must help these desperate and vulnerable Iraqis and the countries that are helping them.

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Suffer the Children

Number of children dying higher than when the country was under sanctions.

By Hind al-Safar in Baghdad (ICR No. 237, 16-Nov-07)
Child mortality in Iraq has spiralled because of the tense security situation, deteriorating health services and lack of medical supplies, say experts.

According to a report released in May 2007 by aid agency Save the Children, “Iraq’s child mortality rate has increased by a staggering 150 per cent since 1990, more than any other country.”

The report, entitled State of the World’s Mothers 2007, said that some 122,000 Iraqi children - the equivalent of one in eight - died in 2005, before reaching their fifth birthday. More than half of the deaths were among newborn babies in their first month of life.

“Even before the latest war, Iraqi mothers and children were facing a grave humanitarian crisis caused by years of repression, conflict and external sanctions,” said the report.

“Since 2003, electricity shortages, insufficient clean water, deteriorating health services and soaring inflation have worsened already difficult living conditions.”

The study listed pneumonia and diarrhoea as major killers of children in Iraq, together accounting for over 30 per cent of child deaths.

“Conservative estimates place increases in infant mortality following the 2003 invasion of Iraq at 37 per cent,” it said.

In the capital of Baghdad, there are four paediatric hospitals and three gynaecological hospitals, as well as individual children’s wards in other medical institutions.

The city’s central paediatric hospital is in the capital’s Islam neighbourhood - a volatile area which is hard for families and medical staff to reach.

The hospitals fall short in providing quality care because they do not have enough medical supplies or staff - who, in many cases, have fled to other countries.

Experts draw parallels between the dire state of Iraq’s health care system today and the way it was when the country was under sanctions during the 1990s, when there was a similar limited supply of drugs and other medical resources.

The UN Security Council imposed economic sanctions against Iraq in 1990, following the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait and these continued until 2003.

In 2000, the UN children’s agency UNICEF published a survey which showed the mortality rate among Iraqi children under five had more than doubled in the government-controlled south and centre of Iraq during the sanctions.

At the time, Anupama Rao Singh, a senior UNICEF official, said in an interview with Reuters that around half a million children under the age of five had died in Iraq since the international embargo was imposed.

“In absolute terms, we estimate that perhaps about half a million children under five years of age have died, who ordinarily would not have died had the decline in mortality that was prevalent over the 70s and the 80s continued through the 90s,” she said.

Mohammed Zahraw, a paediatrician with the ministry of health’s inspector-general’s office, said that similar threats to children’s health exist today – and that these are compounded by the lack of security which now prevails in Iraq.

"In the past [infant deaths] were caused by the economic sanctions and the lack of medicine and medical supplies. The same problem exists now, in addition to the deteriorating security situation. This is particularly true in Baghdad, where it’s difficult to access hospitals," he said.

Fahima Salman, the head of the inspector-general’s monitoring force, said the primary reason for high infant mortality in Iraq is a lack of drugs and medical supplies.

The inspector-general’s office at the health ministry is tasked with inspecting hospitals and reports back to the ministry on the sanitation, performances and needs of health facilities.

Salman said that poor security and a lack of transport meant that it was hard to transfer drugs and supplies to hospitals and clinics. This means that families of patients usually buy basic medicine, such as antibiotics and hydrocortisone, on the black market and bring the medicine to the hospital or clinic.

"We, as the inspector general's office, visit health facilities to determine the level of shortages and note the difficulties,” said Salman. “We try to provide what we can…but we still face major challenges."

Sometimes, drug deliveries fail to reach the ministry of health’s warehouses, and go missing en route.

Amal Abdul-Amir, a paediatrician at the Yarmook Teaching Hospital in Baghdad’s Karkh area, said that infants were also dying because paediatricians and gynaecologists had fled the country in droves, resulting in a lack of skilled staff.

“People are turning to midwives who do not necessarily have experience with births or emergency cases,” she explained. “This is causing the number of infant mortalities to rise."

In hospitals throughout the country, it is not uncommon to hear the wails of grieving mothers, such as 30-year-old Zaineb Mohammed, whose two-month-old baby died after she failed to get him to hospital in time.

She told IWPR that en route to the hospital in the impoverished Baghdad suburb of Sadr City, her family was repeatedly stopped at roadblocks and checkpoints erected to combat security problems there.

The delays caused the child’s condition to worsen and when they finally arrived there weren’t paediatric specialists to treat her.

Mohammed has vowed not to have another child. "I don’t think that I can bear to lose another baby to the poor health and public services in Iraq," she said.

Hind al-Safar is an IWPR contributor in Baghdad.

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Terug naar Bagdad

Door Chaalan Charif

21-11-2007

Vanaf volgende week rijden er dagelijks gratis bussen tussen de Syrische hoofdstad Damascus en Bagdad, om vluchtelingen terug te brengen naar Irak. Het aantal teruggekeerde vluchtelingen ligt volgens officiële cijfers uit Syrië en Irak tussen 500 en 1000 mensen per dag.

Strenge visum- en verblijfregelingen van de Syrische autoriteiten, maar ook de merkbare verbetering van de veiligheidsituatie in Bagdad zijn de belangrijkste redenen voor terugkeer. De Iraakse regering heeft gezegd alle kosten te betalen van vluchtelingen die terug willen naar hun land.

Razzak (33 jaar) is een van de vele Irakese vluchtelingen die deze maand zijn koffers pakte om naar zijn land terug te gaan. Hij woont nu weer in zijn oude huis in het oostelijke deel van de Irakese hoofdstad. Razzak zegt dat het heel rustig is in de sjiitische wijk waar hij woont. "Dat geldt inmiddels voor het grootste deel van Bagdad, maar nog niet voor de hele stad", benadrukt hij. Volgens hem zijn tot nu toe alleen vluchtelingen uit Syrië teruggekeerd die in hun thuisland geen direct gevaar liepen, maar vertrokken vanwege de algemene onveiligheid in hun land. Bagdadi's die wel persoonlijk in gevaar verkeerden, durven nog niet terug naar Irak, zegt Razzak. Bovendien hebben veel vluchtelingen hun huizen en andere kostbare bezittingen verloren. "Ze komen niet terug naar Bagdad om vervolgens op straat te staan en de regering heeft nog geen regelingen getroffen om die mensen financieel bij te staan. De vluchtelingen hebben veel meer nodig dan gratis bussen om terug te kunnen", aldus Razzak.

Wie eerst?
De regering vertelt trots over de verbeteringen van de veiligheid in Bagdad en omgeving. Maar er zijn geen concrete maatregelen genomen om de sektarische zuivering in de wijken ongedaan te maken. Er heerst nog altijd een sfeer van onderling wantrouwen. Soennitische politici vinden dat de door sjiieten gedomineerde regering het eerste signaal moet geven voor terugkeer van soennieten naar hun huizen in sjiitische wijken, die zij eerder ontvlucht waren. Maar de sjiieten zeggen dat zij het eerst zijn gedeporteerd en daarom zouden zij het recht hebben om als eerste terug te keren naar hun huizen.

Veilig naar werk
Razzak werkt nu als ambtenaar bij het ministerie van handel. Hij moet elke dag naar de wijk al-Mansour, in het westelijke deel van Bagdad. Vroeger was dat een dagelijks avontuur. Hij moest via verschillende wijken reizen, waarvan een aantal tot twee maanden geleden in handen van al-Qaeda gerelateerde terroristen waren. "Dat is nu veranderd", zegt de 33-jarige ambtenaar. "Ik ga nu met een goed gevoel naar mijn werk. De weg is helemaal veilig en de terroristen zijn verjaagd."
Dat is het resultaat van de zogenoemde Sahwa-groepen; soennieten die zelf in opstand komen tegen al-Qaeda. De groepen worden gesteund door de Amerikanen in Irak en de Iraakse regering.

Opstand tegen etnische opdeling
Enthousiast vertelt Razzak over de wijk Azamiya in oost-Bagdad. Deze grote wijk was vanaf 2003 een belangrijk bolwerk van het soennitische verzet. Azamiya stond op een etnische opdeling van de hoofdstad. Eerder dit jaar werd de wijk afgescheiden van de rest van de stad door de bouw van een muur; een omstreden maatregel die tot veel ophef leidde.
Maar nu hebben de bewoners van Azamiya genoeg gekregen van de terroristen, die hun ultrafundamentalistische levenswijze met geweld willen invoeren. De bewoners zijn in opstand gekomen en hebben met Amerikaanse hulp de fundamentalisten binnen twee dagen verjaagd.
Razzak: "Tot kort durfde niemand via Azamiya te reizen. Nu kan ik daar rustig winkelen."
En deze voorzichtig positieve ontwikkelingen maken dat langzamerhand steeds meer Iraakse vluchtelingen uit Syrië durven terug te keren naar hun geboorteland.

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Iraakse milities gaan extremistische toer op
Ali al-Fadhily

BAGDAD, 18 december 2007 (IPS) - Vrouwen in het zuiden van Irak die zich niet strikt aan de islamitische wetten houden, worden gedood of verkracht door milities. Volgens de politie zijn de laatste vijf maanden minstens veertig vrouwen vermoord.

“Maar we zijn er zeker van dat er veel meer slachtoffers zijn", zegt Jilal Hannoon, hoofd van de politie in Basra. “Hun families durven de moorden vaak niet aangeven uit schrik voor een schandaal”.

De milities leggen een strikte interpretatie van de islamitische regels op. Ze worden gedomineerd door de sjiitische Badr Organisatie, die verantwoording aflegt aan het sjiitische blok in de Irakese regering, en het eveneens sjiitische Mehdi Leger van Muqtada al-Sadr.

In heel Basra zijn graffiti te vinden die de vrouwen waarschuwen zich strikt aan de regels te houden. Vrouwen die de hijab, de traditionele hoofddoek, niet dragen, worden het doelwit van de milities. “We zijn benaderd door militieleden die ons zeggen dat we de hijab moeten dragen en geen make-up meer mogen gebruiken,” zegt Zahra Alwan, een jonge studente die uit Basra vluchtte. “Ze imiteren de Iraanse Revolutionaire Garde, en we denken dat ze ook bevelen uit Iran krijgen”.

Volgens Mazin Abdul Jabbar, onderzoeker aan de Universiteit van Bagdad, is de situatie in de hoofdstad even erg. “Alle universiteiten worden gecontroleerd door islamitische milities die de vrouwelijke studenten de hele tijd lastig vallen met religieuze richtlijnen”. Volgens Jabbar sturen daarom veel families hun dochters niet langer naar school of naar de universiteit.
“Slechte” vrouwen

Verschillende slachtoffers werden ervan beschuldigd “slechte vrouwen” te zijn voor ze werden ontvoerd. De meeste vrouwen werden later vermoord teruggevonden. Sommige lichamen vertoonden tekenen van verkrachting en foltering. Inwoners van Basra vertellen dat bij enkele lichamen een briefje werd gevonden waarop stond dat het om “slechte” vrouwen ging.

Een anonieme sjiitische geestelijke verdedigt de milities: “We zijn een islamitisch land en we moeten ons houden aan de beperkingen van ons geloof. We mogen niet toelaten dat corruptie onze families binnendringt onder het mom van vrijheid en dergelijke nonsens.”

Soennitische geestelijken zien dat anders. “Het is tegen de islamitische regels dat vrouwen hun haar en lichaam ontbloten,” zegt Tariq al-Abdaly. “Maar dit is geen islamitische staat, en we kunnen het vrouwen dus alleen aanraden, net als we bij de mannen doen, om die regels te volgen. In elk geval is terechtstelling een veel te zware straf voor zulke fouten.”

Iraakse liberalen zijn diep gefrustreerd door het gebrek aan persoonlijke vrijheid. “We zijn erg ontgoocheld dat alles is verloren gegaan wat de Iraakse vrouwen opgebouwd hebben onder een regime dat wij als voorbijgestreefd zagen”, zegt Salim Mahmood van de Iraakse Communistische Partij. “De Amerikanen beloofden dat ze van Irak een symbool van vrijheid en welvarendheid zouden maken. Nu is het precies het omgekeerde geworden.”
IPS(JG, PD)

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Just Blame it on the Indians

By Nathan Richter | Wednesday, December 19, 2007

While in the minds of many Americans the Iraq war seems to be entering its post-mortem phase, U.S. presidential candidates, policymakers and analysts never tire of dissecting the reasons for going to war. However, one major cause remains largely unexplored: America’s 19th-century wars — and, in particular, the Iraq war’s roots in the United States’ past domestic “civilizing" efforts.

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UNHCR: nog altijd veel geld nodig voor Irak

Gepubliceerd: dinsdag 08 januari 2008 16:29 UTC

Laatst gewijzigd: dinsdag 08 januari 2008 16:30 UTC

Genève - De VN-Vluchtelingenorganisatie UNHCR heeft dit jaar 177 miljoen euro nodig om Iraakse vluchtelingen te helpen. De organisatie heeft in Genève een dringend beroep gedaan op regeringen om het bedrag op te hoesten.
Volgens het UNHCR zijn 2,2 miljoen Irakezen binnen de eigen landsgrenzen op de vlucht, en nog eens 2 miljoen in het buitenland, hoofdzakelijk Syrië en Jordanië. Het aantal vluchtelingen is vorig jaar afgenomen, maar het UNHCR benadrukt dat dit vooral komt door het strengere visumbeleid van de buurlanden, en niet doordat het in Irak veiliger is geworden.
De Iraakse tegenhanger van het Rode Kruis maakte onlangs bekend dat in drie maanden tijd bijna 50 duizend vluchtelingen vanuit het buitenland zijn teruggekeerd. Het UNHCR is er niet van overtuigd dat dit cijfer klopt. De organisatie wil er nog niet toe overgaan repatriëring van Irakezen actief aan te moedigen, maar belooft vluchtelingen die wel teruggaan op alle mogelijke manieren te helpen.

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UNHCR: 'Damascus is ongelooflijk gastvrij'

door Nicolien den Boer

10-01-2008

De VN-Vluchtelingenorganisatie UNHCR heeft dit jaar 177 miljoen euro nodig voor hulp aan Iraakse vluchtelingen. Het geld is bestemd voor onder meer voedsel- en medische hulp in Irak, Syrië en Jordanië. Want als de Irakezen de verschrikkingen van de oorlog achter zich hebben gelaten, doemen er weer nieuwe problemen op. Dat ondervond ook de Iraakse Arok die aan leukemie lijdt.

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Australië biedt asiel aan Iraakse tolken

Gepubliceerd: woensdag 09 april 2008 05:41 UTC
Laatst gewijzigd: woensdag 09 april 2008 05:41 UTC
Canberra - Australië wil honderden lokale medewerkers van de troepen in Irak asiel aanbieden. Canberra trekt later dit jaar zijn militairen terug uit Irak. Volgens minister Joel Fitzgibbon van Defensie hebben Iraakse tolken en vertalers een belangrijke rol gespeeld bij de missie en heeft Australië een morele verplichting om hen op te nemen. Hij voegde er aan toe dat de regering niet de fouten wil herhalen van de oorlog in Vietnam. Toen bleef de voltallige lokale staf achter tijdens een haastige uittocht uit Saigon. Het aanbod geldt voor alle Iraakse medewerkers en hun familie. Het zou gaan om ongeveer zeshonderd Irakezen.

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Iraqi militias use food as recruiting tool, report says

(CNN) -- A leading humanitarian group says Sunni and Shiite militias in Iraq are pulling displaced people into their movements because governments and international entities are failing to adequately address their plight.

Refugees International underscored that development in a report issued Tuesday titled "Uprooted and Unstable: Meeting Urgent Humanitarian Needs in Iraq."

The report says the United States, the government of Iraq and the international community aren't doing enough to address the daily problems faced by the 2.7 million internally displaced Iraqis, who have fled homes in war-torn regions to other places in Iraq. Those people find themselves unemployed in their new locations and many times unable to access food and health care.

"As a result of the vacuum created by the failure of both the Iraqi government and the international community to act in a timely and adequate manner, non-state actors play a major role in providing assistance to vulnerable Iraqis," the report says.

Social services are being provided by "militias of all denominations" that want to build their groups, with Muqtada al-Sadr's political movement using a Hezbollah model to set itself up "as the main service provider in the country." Hezbollah, the Lebanese Shiite militant group labeled a terrorist group by the United States, has built a large base of support with its social service network.

"Similarly, other Shiite and Sunni groups are gaining ground and support through the delivery of food, oil, electricity, clothes and money to the civilians living in their fiefdoms.

"Not only do these militias now have a quasi-monopoly in the large-scale provision of assistance in Iraq, they are also recruiting an increasing number of civilians to their militias -- including displaced Iraqis," the report said.

The report says al-Sadr's militia, the Mehdi Army, has resettled displaced Iraqis "free of charge in homes that belonged to Sunnis."

"It provides stipends, food, heating oil, cooking oil and other non-food items to supplement the Public Distribution System rations which are still virtually impossible to transfer after displaced Iraqis have moved to a new neighborhood, though it is easier for Shiites to do so," the report says.

Refugees International visited a Sadrist office in Baghdad's Ur district and observed residents providing "clothing, milk, oil, rice, sugar, clothes and fuel for heating and cooking when supplies are available." The Sadrists also adjudicate legal disputes among citizens and give stipends to families of displaced people and slain or jailed Mehdi Army fighters.

The report says Sunni militias also play a similar role in helping needy and displaced Sunnis, though there is less organized help.

"Sunni militias also handle the distribution of key items such as heating gas. As Sunnis in Baghdad get virtually no electricity or other services from the government, they rely on local militias and warlords to secure their areas and manage what services they can obtain."

The displaced have joined "awakening" groups -- the "U.S.-backed militias" dominated by Sunnis. Those groups provide security duties, such as guarding checkpoints, and many of them have been getting paychecks from the United States.

The U.N. refugee agency says the displacement crisis caused by the war in Iraq is the most significant in the Middle East since the population changes that occurred during the 1948 creation of Israel. Along with the 2.7 million internally displaced people, there are more than 2 million Iraqi refugees -- mostly in Syria and Jordan.

The report slams the government of Iraq as being "unwilling" and "unable" to address such humanitarian issues -- "lacking both the capacity and the political will to use its important resources to address humanitarian needs."

"The little assistance provided by the government is perceived by most as being biased in favor of the Shiite population, especially when it comes to the delivery of government services such as electricity or food ration cards from the Public Distribution System," the report says.

The report adds that the "international community has largely been in denial" about the dire humanitarian situation in Iraq.

"Only recently has the United Nations issued a common humanitarian appeal for Iraq, recognizing the nature of the situation and the need for all agencies to step up and address humanitarian needs."

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Iraqis see red as U.S. opens world's biggest embassy

The 104-acre, 21-building enclave was cleared for occupancy recently and will open next month.

By Howard LaFranchi | Staff writer of The Christian Science Monitor
from the April 24, 2008 edition

Page 1 of 2

BAGHDAD - For the average American who will never see it, the new US Embassy in Baghdad may be little more than the Big Dig of the Tigris.

Like the infamous Boston highway project, the embassy is a mammoth development that is overbudget, overdue, and casts a whiff of corruption.

For many Iraqis, though, the sand-and-ochre-colored compound peering out across the city from a reedy stretch of riverfront within the fortified Green Zone is an unsettling symbol both of what they have become in the five years since the fall of Saddam Hussein, and of what they have yet to achieve.

quote:

Middle East
Apr 18, 2008

Basra: Echoes of Vietnam
By Conn Hallinan

One battle rarely wins or loses a war, at least in the moment. Gettysburg crippled General Robert E Lee's army in 1863, but the Confederates fought on until 1865. Stalingrad broke the back of the German 6th army, but it would be two and a half years before the Russians took Berlin. War - particularly the modern variety - is a complex mixture of tactics, technology and politics. Then there are the intangibles, such as morale.

But while a single battle may not end a conflict, it can illuminate an underlying reality that generally gets lost in the thunder of propaganda, illusion and wishful thinking that always accompanies the horsemen of the apocalypse.

Now that some of the dust has settled over the recent battle of the southern city of Basra that pitted Muqtada al-Sadr's Mahdi Army against the armies of the United States and Iraq, it is time to examine what that clash meant, and what are some analogies that might help bring it into focus. There were certainly echoes of Vietnam in last month's fighting, and some of those parallels, particularly to the 1968 Tet offensive, are worth a closer look.

Remembering Tet
As Frank Rich pointed out in The New York Times, there was indeed a whiff of Tet in the debacle in Basra. Just before the 1968 attack, US General William Westmoreland made his historic "light at the end of the tunnel" prediction. In recent testimony before the US Senate, General David Petraeus said the United States was making "significant" progress in Iraq, and his spokesman, Rear Admiral Gregory Smith, bragged that the United States had the Mahdi Army on the ropes: "We've degraded their capability."

"There is a parallel to Tet here," says military historian Jack Radey. "We have won the war, violence is down, the surge works [the US told itself], and then Kaboom! The Green Zone is taking incoming."

Radey argues that the American "victories" against the Vietnamese in the period leading up to the Tet offensive were an illusion. "If the enemy seems to be missing from the picture, this is not proof you have wiped him out," he says. "It is more likely proof that you have lost track of him, and he will, at his own chosen time, find ways to remind you of his presence."

Which is exactly what Muqtada and the Mahdi Army did.

According to historian Gareth Porter, the United States mistakenly concluded that the ceasefire Muqtada declared six months ago was a sign that the Mahdi Army was vulnerable. When the Americans began attacking Muqtada strongholds - more than 2,000 militia members and leaders have been arrested since last July's truce - and the Mahdi Army did not react, the United States was convinced that the militia was weak.

Other analogies
But Tet is not the only relevant Vietnam analogy. The other parallel was Operation Lam Son, the 1971 invasion of Laos by the South Vietnamese Army (ARVN). The United States pushed South Vietnam to attack Laos to demonstrate that the ARVN could stand on its own two feet, and to make the point prior to the upcoming 1972 US elections that Richard Nixon's policy of "Vietnamization" was working.

Instead, US audiences watched as panicked ARVN troops clung to helicopter landing skids in their desperation to escape from Laos. Lam Son "was a disaster", writes historian A J Langguth in Our Vietnam: The War, 1954-1975: "Vietnamization became one more doomed fantasy. After 10 years of training and costly equipment, South Vietnam's troops seemed to be no match for the communists."

Radey says the Lam Son analogy is a useful one. The invasion didn't work "because the [ARVN] soldiers didn't believe in the cause they fought for", while their opponents, with far less fire power, "believed in what they were doing. Vive la difference."

As for Iraq and the recent fighting: "Was anyone paying attention the last time this lesson was taught in Vietnam?" Radey asks. "Did anyone do the reading? Hello? Do I have to start throwing chalk?"

In Basra
On the surface, the battle of Basra - which quickly spread to virtually every major city between Basra and Baghdad - was a major setback for Prime Minster Nuri al-Maliki and the Americans. As Indian diplomat M K Bhadrakumar points out in Asia Times Online, the principal outcome of the fighting is that "the Bush administration's triumphalism over the so-called Iraqi 'surge' strategy has become irredeemably farcical". (Iran torpedoes US plans for Iraqi oil April 3.)

The fighting also exposed the Iraqi army as a hollow shell, much as the Laos invasion revealed the incompetence of ARVN. While Petraeus was telling the senate that "recent operations in Basra highlight improvements in the ability of the Iraqi security forces to deploy substantial numbers of units, supplies and replacements on a very short notice", journalists were reporting that thousands of Iraqi troops refused to fight and abandoned their weapons.

According to Ali al-Fadhily and Dahr Jamail of the Inter Press Service, much of the Iraqi army simply disintegrated. A Baghdad police colonel told reporters that the "Iraqi army and police forces, as well as the Da'wa and Badr militias, suddenly disappeared from the streets, leaving their armored vehicles for the Mahdi militia to drive around in joyful convoys". The Badr militia is associated with the Supreme Iraqi Islamic Council, a major ally of Maliki's Da'wa party. Like the Mahdi Army, both parties are Shi'ite.

So, after three years and $22 billion in training and equipment, the Iraqi army got shellacked. The only thing that prevented a full-scale rout was the intervention of US troops and air support.

While the Americans have tried to distance themselves from the disaster by claiming that Maliki never consulted with them, historian Porter argues that the claim is ludicrous. "No significant Iraqi military action can be planned without a range of military support functions being undertaken by the US command," he writes, pointing out that US trainers are embedded with every unit in the Iraqi security forces.

It's the oil
Rather than as an assault on "criminal militias", virtually every independent observer saw the attack as an effort by Maliki and the Americans to take control of Basra's oil resources preliminary to turning them over to private oil conglomerates. Standing in the way of both those goals was the nationalist-minded Mahdi Army as well as Iraq's oil and dockworkers unions.

As the George W Bush administration saw it, a successful attack on the Mahdi Army would not only clear the way for privatizing the Iraqi oil industry, it would demonstrate that the Iraqi army was ready "to stand up", thus boosting the campaign of Republican presidential candidate John McCain.

But as Prussian soldier and military historian Karl von Clausewitz (1780-1831) once pointed out, no plan survives contact with the enemy. Historical analogies are tricky. They may obscure as much as they reveal. But history is the only guide we have, and it is one the Bush administration has willfully chosen to ignore.

As it did in Vietnam, the United States looks at Iraq though the lens of firepower and troop deployments. But war is not just about things that blow up, and occupiers always ignore the point of view of the occupied.

For starters, people don't like losing control of their country. With the exceptions of the Kurds and Maliki and his allies, Iraqis are overwhelmingly opposed to the occupation. That disconnect between occupied and occupiers was summed up by Luu Doan Huynh, a Vietnamese veteran of the war against the Japanese, the French, and the Americans, and one of the key diplomats in the Vietnam peace talks. "The Americans thought that Vietnam was a war," he said. "We knew that Vietnam was our country."

Conn Hallinan is a Foreign Policy In Focus (www.fpif.org) columnist.

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Koerden lijken bereid tot machtsdeling Kirkuk
Mohammed A. Salih

WASHINGTON, 5 juni 2008 (IPS) - Voor het eerst in jaren heeft een hoge Koerdische functionaris laten doorschemeren dat de Koerden bereid zijn tot een oplossing voor de kwestie-Kirkuk, een tikkende tijdbom onder de stabiliteit van Irak. De uitspraak wordt door verschillende partijen met opluchting en hoop ontvangen.

“In Kirkuk zijn wij als Koerden bereid om de macht te delen”, zei Nechirvan Barzani, premier van de Regionale Regering Koerdistan. Dat meldde persbureau Reuters in Dubai dinsdag. “We werken aan een oplossing, niet speciaal een referendum. We hebben de VN gevraagd om technisch betrokken te zijn omdat de situatie complex is”, zei hij.

Het is voor het eerst in jaren dat een hoge Koerd zich zo uitliet. Tot nog toe wilden de Koerden niet instemmen met een andere optie in deze olierijke regio dan een referendum. De andere bevolkingsgroepen zagen wantrouwig het aantal Koerden groeien en beschuldigden hen ervan de stad Kirkuk te willen overnemen.

Pressie

Volgens Wayne White, die tot 2005 in Irak werkte als hoofd van de inlichtingendienst van het Amerikaanse Ministerie van Buitenlandse Zaken, lijkt dit goed nieuws. “Want zowel de Koerdische leider Barzani als de Iraakse president Talabani staan onder enorme pressie van hun achterban om in verschillende regio’s het maximale eruit te halen, inclusief delen van Kirkuk.”

Volgens de Iraakse grondwet had er voor eind 2007 een referendum gehouden moeten zijn, om te kiezen tussen aansluiting bij de Koerdische regio, aansluiting bij de rest van Irak, of de derde optie: doorgaan als een nieuwe onafhankelijke regio. De raadpleging werd een half jaar uitgesteld, maar het ziet er niet naar uit dat het er nog van komt, door enorme tegenwerking van verschillende Iraakse groepen, buurlanden en de VS. Speciaal VN-gezant Steffan de Mistura heeft de opdracht om nieuwe oplossingen te verzinnen.

Zeer gevoelig

Temidden van alle pogingen om Irak te stabiliseren, bleef het probleem-Kirkuk een potentieel begin van een burgeroorlog. De regio ligt zeer gevoelig bij de Koerden, die nog goed weten dat de afspraken voor zelfbestuur in 1975 werden afgebroken doordat Bagdad de Koerdische claims op het gebied, verdedigd door de grootvader van Barzani, mollah Mustafa Barzani, niet wilde inwilligen. Geen enkele Koerdische leider kon zich sindsdien een mildere opstelling veroorloven.

Ondanks de angst voor de woede van de Koerdische achterban, zou een concessie inzake Kirkuk ook een paar serieuze voordelen kunnen opleveren. Het kan de banden met Turkije verbeteren, het land dat indirect dreigt met militaire actie zodra de Koerden Kirkuk zouden overnemen. Het zou andere concessies mogelijk maken, bijvoorbeeld een erkenning door Bagdad van de buitenlandse oliecontracten, die door Bagdad en Washington worden afgekeurd. En het zou de veiligheid van Koerdistan verbeteren, en de relaties met de buren, de soennieten, de sjiieten en de Turkmenen.

Ook de Turkmenen claimen de provincie. “Ze hebben Barzani's uitspraken met veel optimisme begroet”, zei Akram Tarzi, een Turkmeens lid van het Iraakse parlement uit het blok van de sjiiet Muqtada al-Sadr, tegen een persbureau. “De Turkmeense leiders weten dat de kwestie-Kirkuk niet wordt opgelost zonder wederzijds begrip.”

IPS(FM, JS)

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Bringing Ireland to Baghdad: How the Resistance Will Eventually Kick the Americans Out

By Gary Brecher, AlterNet. Posted July 2, 2008.

One thing the United States doesn't get about guerrilla warfare: It's not over until the guerrillas win.

It's very easy to see what's up in Iraq right now -- if you're willing to face it. The trouble is, most "experts" aren't willing. That has been the pattern right from the beginning. We didn't want to admit there even was an insurgency, and even now, nobody misses a chance to declare that "the surge worked," as if that translates to "we win, it's over, let's go home."

Fact number one about guerrilla wars: They're not over until the guerrillas win. Mao set out the guerrilla's viewpoint 80 years ago: "The enemy wants to fight a short war, but we simply will not let him." The longer the guerrillas stay in the game, the sicker the occupying army gets. Sooner or later, they'll go home -- because they can. It's that simple, and it works. So anyone who tells you it's over is just plain ignorant. That's one thing you can rule out instantly.

But people keep saying it. The most recent and ridiculous take is that "Moqtada al Sadr is renouncing violence." Talk about naive! What led these geniuses to that conclusion is that on June 13, Moqtada al Sadr, leader of the biggest and toughest Shia militia, the Mahdi Army, sent out a big announcement: "From now on, the resistance will be exclusively conducted by only one group. ... The weapons will be held exclusively by this group." In other words, he's switching from a big, sloppy, amateur force to a select group of professional guerrillas.

Also, there'll be a non-military role for the civilian supporter, working on local politics to "liberate the minds from domination and globalization."

The glass-half-full school of thought took Sadr's announcement to mean that he's getting out of the violence business, trying to marginalize the "special groups," which is U.S. Army talk for hardcore Shia militias, and move his party to the good ol' middle of the road. See, that's classic misreading of Iraqi reality as if it were U.S. politics. It's like we keep trying to pretend that Iraq under occupation is just a dusty version of Iowa. Sorry, but a country under enemy occupation doesn't think or act like Des Moines. If you want a good analogy to what Sadr is actually doing, it's easy to find one, but you can't look at American politics. You need to go to research other countries occupied by enemy armies, where urban insurgencies started off like Sadr's Mahdi Army did -- as neighborhood defense groups protecting the locals against mobs from across the ethnic divide. And when you start thinking on those lines, there's a really close, clear parallel between what Sadr is doing now and another insurgency that shifted from neighborhood-gang/paramilitary organization to small armed cells, with civilian support channeled into an above-ground political wing: the IRA back in the 1970s.

The basic parallels between Shia Iraqis and the IRA are clear enough: They're both minorities that got stomped on by the dominant tribe -- in Northern Ireland, Protestant mobs used to burn and stomp at will when they were in the mood; and in Shia Iraq, Sunni goons went on regular murder runs in Shia neighborhoods. So both places, Catholic Belfast and Shia Baghdad, got used to defending their own neighborhoods because nobody else was going to defend them. Then they were "saved" by foreign troops from countries that had always been their biggest enemy: The Ulster Catholics were occupied by the British Army, and Shia Iraq by the Americans. Of course, it was all supposed to be gratitude and happiness, the way the occupiers saw it. They expected the slum people to be grateful. Well, there haven't been too many people in history who've been glad to be occupied by foreign troops. Even when the Vietnamese invaded Cambodia to root out the Khmer Rouge, a lot of Khmer were more angry at the foreigners than pleased to be rid of Pol Pot. And of course, in both of these cases the troops who arrived were hated alien types: British paratroopers in Belfast, American "crusaders" in Baghdad. A few trigger-happy troops firing on local crowds and boom! Gratitude season was over, and the insurgency was in da house. In both places, the local rebel groups were ready: The IRA in Belfast dated back to 1916, and Sadr City had the same tradition of organizing neighborhood defensive gangs.

The trouble is, when po' folks organize, they have this fatal addiction to big, fancy titles and military fol-der-ol. It's easy to understand: It helps stomped-on people feel braver, have a little pride. So these groups always go for show, a lot of pomp and uniforms, and a traditional military organizational chart. Pretty soon the guy next door is a colonel, the clerk in the corner store is a four-star general, and they're strutting around in homemade uniforms feeling ready to take on Genghis Khan. Good for morale, but fatal to real urban guerrilla war. There are two reasons for that. First, these amateur armies get slaughtered when they go up against professional troops; and second, the traditional open organizational chart makes it very easy for the occupiers to identify everyone who's anyone in the insurgency. When an organization starts out fighting mobs from the enemy tribe, that's fine. So when the IRA tried to fight the British Army head to head in the 1970s, it got stomped; so did Sadr's militia when it went up against U.S. troops in April 2004.

See, when you start a guerrilla movement you can be absolutely sure that some of your members are spies. If you use your imagination a little, really try to imagine what it's like in an insurgent neighborhood, you'll soon see why.

Imagine you're a Sadr City homeboy, cheering the local "brigade" of the Mahdi Army. They march down the street, and everybody feels proud. They're guys you grew up with, know and like. So far so good. Then you get word that U.S. troops, or Iraqi troops, or somebody even scarier, have thrown your little brother in the back of a Humvee. People who get taken like that don't come back, or they come back really messed up. If that isn't scary enough, the troops can crush your family "legally"; after a few hours in an interrogation center, your little brother will sign anything, and next thing you know the Humvees are back to arrest your whole family.

Suddenly you're ready to name names, if they'll just let him out. And you know the names, because you know exactly who's who in the local "Mahdi Army," thanks to all that foolhardy paramilitary organization and open parading. And the guerrillas know you know, and they understand what kind of pressure you're under, which gives them a nasty choice: Kill you, threaten you or risk letting you trade your brother's life for theirs. If they kill you, the neighborhood turns against them; and besides, these guys aren't monsters, no matter what the TV tells you. If you lived in Sadr City, and if you had an ounce of guts, you'd join the Mahdi Army too. They're ordinary people, just like suicide bombers are ordinary people. You'll never understand them if you fall for thinking that they're all monster lunatics.

But the guerrillas have a nasty choice to make when they hear that your brother has been picked up by the army: If they let you live, you'll give them up, and they'll die slowly, under torture. And before they die they're going to name names too -- everybody does, under torture, no matter what the movies say -- bigger names, weapons caches, guerrilla agents inside the occupation government, the really big stuff.

That's basically what happened to the IRA in the 1970s. The IRA had done a good job fighting off Protestant mobs who tried to burn Catholics out of their neighborhood; for that sort of job, their large-unit organization into "Belfast Brigade" and "Derry Brigade" worked well enough. But after the British Army's best units occupied the province in 1969, they were up against "the professionals," as the army liked to call itself. And when you're fighting a first-world army with unlimited funds, manpower, technology and spy services, that sort of wide-open style is hopeless. Rounding up the IRA was as simple as photocopying its organizational charts: "Let's see, today we'll grab so-and-so, the local commander, and tomorrow his next-in-command, then a spot of tea." And if they didn't feel like arresting somebody themselves, they'd just hand his dossier, with photo, to one of the Protestant hit squads that were in bed with the intel services.

It was a wipeout. Within a few years, the IRA's best people ended up dead or in prison because they'd tried to straddle an impossible divide between guerrilla warfare and populist politics. They had plenty of time, sitting in internment camps like Long Kesh, to think over their mistakes, and it was in those cells that the brains of the outfit, Gerry Adams and Martin McGuinness, came up with the exact same move that Sadr's making now.

Like Sadr just did, the IRA divided the "movement" into two parts. One would be a much smaller, more professional urban guerrilla armed wing divided into cells, not "brigades." Each cell would have maybe a half-dozen members, and if possible the members would be from different parts of Northern Ireland, so they wouldn't be obviously connected. Only the leader of the cell would know all the members, and that leader would only have contact with one guy from the main organization. That meant, to put it bluntly, that even under torture he couldn't tell enough to destroy the whole guerrilla movement.

Not only was this a safer way to fight, it was actually more effective than bigger paramilitary units in urban guerrilla fighting. The IRA had already found out the hard way that big, amateur "brigades" couldn't defend their neighborhoods against professional military attacks in the summer of 1972, during "Operation Motorman," when the British Army used Centurion tanks and other heavy equipment to smash through the pathetic barricades around "Free Derry" and the other "No-Go Zones" the IRA had tried to set up. Trivia point: As far as I know, this is still the only time MBTs have been used in military action within the U.K.

Sadr's "Mahdi Army" learned the same hard lesson when it tried to barricade Sadr City against the U.S. Army. The first blow came in April 2004, when Sadr ordered his amateur troops into the streets to fight the U.S. occupiers. They died like a Stallone comedy. Sheer massacre. That was lesson number one: Urban combat should be left to a few trained people, not amateurs with guns.

Then, after the surge, when we finally started applying commonsense counterinsurgency tactics, came hard lesson number two, the same one the IRA had learned: If you're running an open "army," it's very easy for the occupier to know who to snatch. In the past few months, U.S.-Iraqi forces have smashed their way into Sadr City and grabbed most of the Mahdi Army leadership.

That's the situation Sadr is facing, and it's incredibly similar to the one the IRA faced back in the days of disco, with one big, big difference: The level of violence in Iraq is, oh, about a zillion times higher than it was in Northern Ireland. In more than 30 years of "war" up there, only about 3,100 people died. Nobody knows how high the toll's running in Iraq, but you can add a couple of zeros to that 3,100 and not be too far off. U.S. troop losses alone are already higher than the total number of dead in 30 years of Northern Ireland fighting, after only five years of war.

So Sadr has had a big slap in the face, and he's got to go into relaunch mode. Luckily for him, he has outside help in the brains department, with advisers from Hezbollah in Lebanon, the very best guerrilla movement in the world right now, and Iranian intelligence, the MVPs of this whole war. I'd take that lineup over hick boneheads like Cheney any day.

Sadr's answer was clear, from that announcement he made in mid-June: He's going to divide the movement into two parts, just like the IRA did. There'll be a big-tent political party for the ordinary civilian supporter, backed by a small, well-trained urban guerrilla movement. And there'll be a firewall between the two groups, so Sadr can deny any armed operation that gets messy, just like Gerry Adams of Sinn Fein used to do when an IRA attack went wrong. The IRA provides Sadr with a perfect blueprint on how to do it. (It even had a slogan to describe its new tactics, saying it would win "with an Armalite in one hand and a ballot in the other.")

After its reorganization, the IRA fought much smarter, pushing its political party, Sinn Fein, and working to set up top-secret guerrilla cells in London to hurt the Brits where they lived and take the war away from the Northern Ireland slums. Over the long term, it worked: After it blasted London a couple of times, it cut a deal just in time to be out of the terrorism business before 9/11. As of now, not a single IRA fighter is in prison and Sinn Fein is the fastest-growing party in Ireland.

My guess is that Sadr is planning to make exactly that kind of move: dividing his forces into a big-tent, peaceful political party for the ordinary Shia civilian and forming a cell-based, small, deniable, professional urban guerrilla force with his best fighters.

Some of the recent hits on U.S. targets in Baghdad show that the Shia are shifting from open rebellion to smart, well-planned hits on the targets that hurt the occupier most: U.S. troops and civilian staff in Baghdad.

On June 24, two weeks after Sadr announced his reorganization, "Shiite extremists" in Sadr City carried out one of the most effective bombings of the war, blasting a district council meeting and killing two U.S. soldiers, two State Department officials and six Iraqis who'd been working with the Americans. That's exactly the kind of operation Sadr's new force wants to specialize in: fast, secret, aimed at the Americans, with no civilian casualties. Compare that attack to the standard Sunni car-bomber who blows up a whole street full of kids to get a couple of cops, and you can see that somebody in Sadr City is playing smarter than the average Iraqi insurgent. You can't do something that slick with the sort of amateur, open paramilitary group Sadr used to have. That's Hezbollah-style professionals at work.

Meanwhile, on the political front, Sadr is setting up the new political wing to "liberate minds," meaning "control the new Shia Baghdad." You see, what the U.S. press isn't telling us, but I know from my top-secret military moles in Iraq, is that there are no more Sunni districts in Baghdad. Baghdad is becoming a Shia city fast. Formerly Sunni districts like Karkh are now majority-Shia. There are a few holdout Sunni neighborhoods ("nahias") and little slices of neighborhoods ("malhallas.")

But they're crumbling, too. Baghdad is a Shia city and getting Shia-er by the day. So Sadr is in position to be mayor and warlord at the same time. Lord, he must laugh his Orson Welles beard off when he reads these ignorant U.S. military "analysts" saying he's renouncing violence.