Slaughter
House Iraq
By Patrick Cockburn
28 November 2006
The
Independent
Iraq
is rending itself apart. The signs of collapse are everywhere. In Baghdad,
the police often pick up more than 100 tortured and mutilated bodies
in a single day. Government ministries make war on each other.
A new and ominous stage in
the disintegration of the Iraqi state came earlier this month when police
commandos from the Shia-controlled Interior Ministry kidnapped 150 people
from the Sunni-run Higher Education Ministry in the heart of Baghdad.
Iraq may be getting close
to what Americans call "the Saigon moment", the time when
it becomes evident to all that the government is expiring. "They
say that the killings and kidnappings are being carried out by men in
police uniforms and with police vehicles," the Iraqi Foreign Minister
Hoshyar Zebari said to me with a despairing laugh this summer. "But
everybody in Baghdad knows that the killers and kidnappers are real
policemen."
It is getting worse. The
Iraqi army and police are not loyal to the state. If the US army decides
to confront the Shia militias it could well find Shia military units
from the Iraqi army cutting the main American supply route between Kuwait
and Baghdad. One convoy was recently stopped at a supposedly fake police
checkpoint near the Kuwait border and four American security men and
an Austrian taken away.
The US and British position
in Iraq is far more of a house built on sand than is realised in Washington
or London, despite the disasters of the past three-and-a-half years.
George Bush and Tony Blair show a unique inability to learn from their
mistakes, largely because they do not want to admit having committed
any errors in the first place.
Civil war is raging across
central Iraq, home to a third of the country's 27 million people. As
Shia and Sunni flee each other's neighbourhoods, Iraq is turning into
a country of refugees.
The UN High Commissioner
for Refugees says that 1.6 million are displaced within the country
and a further 1.8 million have fled abroad. In Baghdad, neighbouring
Sunni and Shia districts have started to fire mortars at each other.
On the day Saddam Hussein was sentenced to death, I phoned a friend
in a Sunni area of the capital to ask what he thought of the verdict.
He answered impatiently that "I was woken up this morning by the
explosion of a mortar bomb on the roof of my next-door neighbour's house.
I am more worried about staying alive myself than what happens to Saddam."
Iraqi friends used to reassure
me that there would be no civil war because so many Shia and Sunni were
married to each other. These mixed couples are now being compelled to
divorce by their families. "I love my husband but my family has
forced me to divorce him because we are Shia and he is Sunni,"
said Hiba Sami, a mother, to a UN official. "My family say they
[the husband's family] are insurgents ... and that living with him is
an offence to God." Members of mixed marriages had set up an association
to protect each other called the Union for Peace in Iraq but they were
soon compelled to dissolve it when several founding members were murdered.
Everything in Iraq is dominated
by what in Belfast we used to call "the politics of the last atrocity".
All three Iraqi communities - Shia, Sunni and Kurds - see themselves
as victims and seldom sympathise with the tragedies of others. Every
day brings its gruesome discoveries.
Earlier this month, I visited
Mosul, the capital of northern Iraq that has a population of 1.7 million
people, of whom about two thirds are Sunni Arabs and one third Kurds.
It is not the most dangerous city in Iraq but it is still a place drenched
in violence.
A local tribal leader called
Sayid Tewfiq from the nearby city of Tal Afar told me of a man from
there who went to recover the tortured body of his 16-year-old son.
The corpse was wired to explosives that blew up, killing the father
so their two bodies were buried together.
Khasro Goran, the efficient
and highly effective deputy governor of Mosul, said there was no civil
war yet in Mosul but it could easily happen.
He added that 70,000 Kurds
had already fled the city because of assassinations. It is extraordinary
how, in Iraq, slaughter that would be front-page news anywhere else
in the world soon seems to be part of normal life.
On the day I arrived in Mosul,
the police had found 11 bodies in the city which would have been on
the low side in Baghdad. I spoke to Duraid Mohammed Kashmula, the governor
of Mosul, whose office is decorated with pictures of smiling fresh-faced
young men who turned out to be his son and four nephews, all of them
killed by insurgents.
His own house, together with
his furniture, was burned to the ground two years ago. He added in passing
that Mr Goran and he himself were the prime targets for assassination
in Mosul, a point that was dramatically proved true the day after we
spoke when insurgents exploded a bomb beside his convoy - fortunately
he was not in it at the time - killing one and wounding several of his
bodyguards.
For the moment Mosul is more
strongly controlled by pro-government forces than most Iraqi cities.
That is because the US has powerful local allies in the shape of the
Kurds. The two army divisions in the province are primarily Kurdish,
but the 17,000 police in Nineveh, the province of which Mosul is the
capital, are almost entirely Sunni and their loyalty is dubious.
One was dismissed on the
day of Saddam's trial for putting a picture of the former leader in
the window of his car. In November 2004, the entire Mosul police force
abandoned their police stations to the insurgents who captured £20m
worth of arms.
"The terrorists do not
control a single district in Mosul," is the proud claim of Major
General Wathiq Mohammed Abdul Qadir al-Hamdani, the bullet-headed police
chief of Nineveh. "I challenge them to fight me face to face."
But the situation is still very fragile. We went to see the police operations
room where an officer was bellowing into a microphone: "There is
a suicide bomber in a car in the city. Do not let him get near you or
any of our buildings." There was a reason to be frightened. On
my way into Mosul, I had seen the broken concrete walls of the party
headquarters of the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan, one of the two big
Kurdish political parties. In August, two men in a car packed with explosives
shot their way past the outer guard post and then blew themselves up,
killing 17 soldiers.
The balance of forces in
Nineveh between American, Arab, Kurd, Turkoman, Sunni and Shia is complicated
even by Iraqi standards. Power is fragmented.
Sayid Tewfiq, the Shia tribal
leader from Tal Afar, resplendent in his flowing robes, admitted: "I
would not last 24 hours in Tal Afar without Coalition [US] support."
"That's probably about right," confirmed Mr Goran, explaining
that Sayid Tewfiq's Shia Turkoman tribe was surrounded by Sunni tribes.
Earlier I had heard him confidently invite all of Nineveh provincial
council to visit him in Tal Afar. Nobody looked enthusiastic about taking
him up on the offer.
"He may have 3,000 fighters
from his tribe but he can't visit most of Tal Afar himself," said
another member of the council, Mohammed Suleiman, as he declined the
invitation. A few hours before somebody tried to assassinate him, Governor
Kashmula claimed to me that "security in Mosul is the best in Iraq
outside the Kurdish provinces".
It is a measure of the violence
in Iraq that it is an arguable point. Khasro Goran said: "The situation
is not perfect but it is better than Anbar, Baquba and Diyala."
I could vouch for this. In Iraq however bad things are there is always
somewhere worse.
It is obviously very difficult
for reporters to discover what is happening in Iraq's most violent provinces
without being killed themselves. But, at the end of September, I travelled
south along the Iraqi side of the border with Iran, sticking to Kurdish
villages to try to reach Diyala, a mixed Sunni-Shia province north-east
of Baghdad where there had been savage fighting. It is a road on which
a wrong turning could be fatal.
We drove from Sulaimaniyah
through the mountains, passed through the Derbandikhan tunnel and then
took the road that runs beside the Diyala river, its valley a vivid
streak of lush green in the dun-coloured semi desert.
The area is a smuggler's
paradise. At night, trucks drive through without lights, their drivers
using night-vision goggles. It is not clear what cargoes they are carrying
- presumably weapons or drugs - and nobody has the temerity to ask.
We had been warned it was
essential to turn left after the tumbledown Kurdish town of Kalar before
reaching the mixed Arab-Kurdish village of Jalula. We crossed the river
by a long and rickety bridge, parts of which had fallen into the swirling
waters below, and soon arrived in the Kurdish stronghold of Khanaqin
in Diyala province. If I had any thoughts about driving further towards
Baghdad they were put to rest by the sight, in one corner of the yard
of the local police headquarters, of the wreckage of a blue-and-white
police vehicle torn apart by a bomb.
"Five policemen were
killed in it when it was blown up at an intersection in As-Sadiyah two
months ago," a policeman told me. "Only their commander survived
but his legs were amputated."
Officials in Khanaqin had
no doubt about what is happening in their province. Lt Col Ahmed Nuri
Hassan, the exhausted-looking commander of the federal police, said:
"There is a sectarian civil war here and it is getting worse every
day." The head of the local council estimated 100 people were being
killed a week.
In Baquba, the provincial
capital, Sunni Arabs were driving out Shia and Kurds. The army and police
were divided along sectarian lines. The one Iraqi army division in Diyala
was predominantly Shia and only arrested Sunni. On the day after I left,
Sunni and Kurdish police officers fought a gun battle in Jalula, the
village I had been warned not to enter. The fighting started when Kurdish
police refused to accept a new Sunni Arab police chief and his followers.
Here, in miniature, in Diyala it was possible to see Iraq breaking up.
The province is ruled by its death squads. The police say at least 9,000
people had been murdered. It is difficult to see how Sunni and Shia
in the province can ever live together again.
In much of Iraq, we long
ago slipped down the rapids leading from crisis to catastrophe though
it is only in the past six months that these dire facts have begun to
be accepted abroad. For the first three years of the war, Republicans
in the US regularly claimed the liberal media was ignoring signs of
peace and progress. Some right-wingers even set up websites devoted
to spreading the news of American achievements in this ruined land.
I remember a team from a
US network news channel staying in my hotel in Baghdad complaining to
me, as they buckled on their body armour and helmets, that they had
been once again told by their bosses in New York, themselves under pressure
from the White House, to "go and find some good news and report
it."
Times have changed in Washington.
The extent of the disaster in Iraq is admitted by almost all, aside
from President Bush. Even before the Democrats' victory in the Congressional
elections on 7 November the magazine Vanity Fair commented acidly that
"the only group in the Bush camp at this point are the people who
wait patiently for news of the WMD and continue to believe that Saddam
and Osama were once lovers."
Previous supporters of the
war are showing embarrassing haste in recanting past convictions.
These days, it is in Britain
alone, or more specifically in Downing Street, that policies bloodily
discredited in Iraq in the years since the overthrow of Saddam Hussein
still get a hearing. I returned from Mosul to London just in time to
hear Tony Blair speaking at the Lord Mayor's banquet. It was a far more
extraordinary performance that his audience appreciated.
As the Prime Minister spoke
with his usual Hugh Grant charm, it became clear he had learned nothing
and forgotten nothing in three-and-a-half years of war. Misconception
after misconception poured from his lips.
Contrary to views of his
own generals and every opinion poll assessing Iraqi opinion, he discounted
the idea that armed resistance in Iraq is fueled by hostility to foreign
occupation. Instead he sees dark forces rising in the east, dedicated,
like Sauron in Lord of the Rings, to principles of pure evil. The enemy,
in this case, is "based on a thoroughly warped misinterpretation
of Islam, which is fanatical and deadly."
Even by the standard of Middle
Eastern conspiracy theories, it was puerile stuff. Everywhere Mr Blair
saw hidden hands - "forces outside Iraq that are trying to create
mayhem" - at work.
An expert on the politics
of Iraq and Lebanon recently said to me: "The most dangerous error
in the Middle East today is to believe the Shia communities in Iraq
and Lebanon are pawns of Iran." But that is exactly what the Prime
Minister does believe.
The fact that the largest
Shia militia in Iraq - the Mehdi Army of Muqtada al-Sadr - is anti-Iranian
and Iraqi nationalist is conveniently ignored. Those misconceptions
are important in terms of practical policy because they give support
to the dangerous myth that if the US and Britain could only frighten
or square the Iranians and Syrians then all would come right as their
Shia cats-paws in Iraq and Lebanon would inevitably fall into line.
In a very British way, opponents
of the war in Iraq have focused not on current events but on the past
sins of the government in getting us into the war.
No doubt it was all very
wrong for Downing Street to pretend that Saddam Hussein had WMD and
was a threat to the world when they knew he was not. But this emphasis
on the origins of the war in Iraq has diverted attention from the fact
that, going by official statements, the British government knows no
more about what was going on in Iraq in 2006 than it did in 2003.
The picture Mr Blair paints
of Iraq seldom touches reality at any point. For instance, he says Iraqis
"voted for an explicitly non-sectarian government," but every
Iraqi knows the vote in two parliamentary elections in 2005 went wholly
along sectarian and ethnic lines. The polls were the starting pistol
for the start of the civil war.
Mr Blair steadfastly refuses
to accept the fact that opposition to the American and British occupation
of Iraq has been the main cause of the insurgency.
The commander of the British
army, General Sir Richard Dannatt, was almost fired for his trouble
when he made the obvious point that "we should get ourselves out
some time soon because our presence exacerbates the security problem."
A series of opinion polls
carried out by the US-based group WorldPublicOpinion.org at the end
of September show why Gen. Dannatt is right and Mr Blair is wrong. The
poll shows that 92 per cent of the Sunni and 62 per cent of the Shia
- up from 41 per cent at the start of the year - approve of attacks
on US-led forces. Only the Kurds support the occupation. Some 78 per
cent of all Iraqis think the US military presence provokes more conflict
than it prevents and 71 per cent want US-led forces out of Iraq within
a year. The biggest and most menacing change this year is the growing
hostility of Iraq's Shia to the American and British presence.
It used to be said that at
least the foreign occupation prevented a civil war but, with 1,000 Iraqis
being killed every week, it is now very clearly failing.
It was always true that in
post-Saddam Iraq there was going to be friction between the Shia, Sunni
and Kurds. But Iraqis were also forced to decide if they were for or
against a foreign invader.
The Sunnis were always going
to fight the occupation, the Kurds to welcome it and the Shia to co-operate
for just so long as it served their interests. Patriotism and communal
self-interest combined. Before 2003, a Sunni might see a Shia as the
member of a different sect but once the war had started he started to
see him as a traitor to his country.
Of course Messrs Bush and
Blair argue there is no occupation. In June 2004, sovereignty was supposedly
handed back to Iraq. "Let Freedom Reign," wrote Mr Bush. But
the reality of power remained firmly with the US and Britain. The Iraqi
prime minister Nouri al-Maliki said this month that he could not move
a company of soldiers without seeking permission of the Coalition (the
US and Britain). Officials in Mosul confirmed to me that they could
not carry out a military operation without the agreement of US forces.
There is a hidden history to the occupation of Iraq which helps explain
why has proved such a disaster. In 1991, after the previous Gulf War,
a crucial reason why President George HW Bush did not push on to Baghdad
was that he feared the overthrow of Saddam Hussein would be followed
by elections that would be won by Shia parties sympathetic to Iran.
No worse outcome of the war could be imagined in Washington. After the
capture of Baghdad in 2003, the US faced the same dilemma. Many of the
contortions of US policy in Iraq since then have been a covert attempt
to avoid or dilute the domination of Iraq's Shia majority.
For more than a year, the
astute US envoy in Baghdad, Zalmay Khalilzad, tried to conciliate the
Sunni. He failed. Attacks on US forces are on the increase. Dead and
wounded US soldiers now total almost 1,000 a month..
An Iraqi government will
only have real legitimacy and freedom to operate when US and British
troops have withdrawn. Washington and London have to accept that if
Iraq is to survive at all it will be as a loose federation run by a
Shia-Kurdish alliance because together they are 80 per cent of the population.
But, thanks to the miscalculations of Mr Bush and Mr Blair, the future
of Iraq will be settled not by negotiations but on the battlefield.
The Occupation: War and Resistance
in Iraq by Patrick Cockburn is published by Verso.
The toll of war
* US troops killed since
invasion - 2,880
* UK troops killed - 126
* Iraqis who have died as
result of invasion - 655,000
* Journalists killed - 77
* Daily attacks on coalition
forces - 180
* Average number of US troops
killed every day in October - 3.5
* Strength of insurgency
- 30,000 nationwide
* Number of police - 180,000
* Trained judges - 740
* Percentage of Iraqi population
that wants US forces to leave within 12 months - 71 per cent
* Hours of electricity per
day in Baghdad in November - 8.6 (pre-war estimate 16-24 hours)
* Unemployment - 25-40 per
cent
* Internet subscribers -
197,310 (pre-war 4,500)
* Population with access
to clean drinking water - 9.7 million (12.9 million pre-war). Percentage
of children suffering malnutrition - 33 per cent
© 2006 Independent News
and Media Limited
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