Gorilla’s Guides

The two massive bomb explosions in Western Mosul in January of this killed more than two hundreds, wounded many others, and literally destroyed communities. It should have been a warning to the green zone government headed by Nouri al-Maliki and indeed since then the GZG has not ceased talking about how determined it is to launch a “surge” in to defeat al-Qaeda in Ninawa.

Thus far the “Mosul Surge” has not materialised.

What the GZG did instead was to launch the “Basrah surge” codenamed “The Charge of the Knights”. Maliki attached so much importance to this assault on his main rival for power that he, his security adviser, and the GZG defense and interior ministers, went to Basrah, and Maliki personally took charge of the operation. Faced with the killing of his trusted confidant and personal security adviser, and the singularly unpleasant shock of the dismal performance of his troops, many of whom promptly went over to the Jaish al-Mahdi, against an entrenched and well-led Mahdi Army, Maliki was forced to take the politically costly step of calling in the British and American invaders to take direct part in the fighting.

Maliki and the GZG were thus fully occupied with the southern and central governments at a time when a massive campaign of bombings, kidnappings, and assassinations was wreaking havoc in Mosul and it’s hinterland. This infuriated the governor who has not ceased to vociferously condemn Maliki, his Dawa party, his political allies the SIIC, and the Kurdish bloc, for incompetence and neglect of the security of Mosul, Irak’s third largest and strategically vital city.

The Anbar Model Will Not Work

Maliki, al-Hakim, Barzani, and their American invader allies had hoped, foolishly, that as in al-Anbar a tribal movement would emerge as a base upon which to build a security force possessed both of local knowledge and the determination to use it. This was never likely. The circumstances that obtained in al-Anbar most certainly do not obtain eithr in Mosul or in the governorate as a whole:

Mosul is far more ethnically diverse that al-Anbar possessing as it does substantial populations of:

• Kurds
• Fayli
• Turkmen
• Christians
• Shabaki,
• Assyrians

Such diversity ruled out the possibility of engineering a Sunni stability axis. Moreover the results of the refusal of the Sunni Arabs in the governorate to join the American sponsored “security forces” have engendered many sources of lasting bitterness, particularly towards the Kurds and their Peshmerga. Having refused to to betray Irak by allying themselves with the hated Americans the Sunni leadership in the governorate political and tribal alike found themselves facing both military and political disasters.

• A campaign of systematic and frequently brutal ethnic cleansing the Peshmerga loyal to the KDP [Editors’ Note: headed by Massoud Barzani.]

  ( The KDP has frequently tried to deny that they have imported Peshmerga forces into the governorate claiming instead that the local GZG security forces are Kurds indigenous to the governorate. Given the accents of many of these “local” Kurds this defies belief.)

• A concerted effort by the KDP reportedly ordered by Massoud Barzani to severely reduce, if not entirely eliminate, their access to political influence.
• The assassination campaign waged against them not only by al-Qaeda surrogates such as the IAI but also by sections of the legitimate Iraki resistance.

It’s Not Just The Arabs Who Are Bitter

The bitterness of the Sunni Arab tribes is mirrored by bitterness from the other groups in the governorate all of whom accuse them of shielding armed groups such as the IAI who have mounted an intense ethnic cleansing campaign and numerous suicide bombings. Non-Muslim groups such as the Yazhidi and Christians have been particularly targeted in this campaign. Both Fayli and Turkmen have also been subjected to what can only be described as a vicious campaign of extermination. In the case of the Turkmen the area around Tal Afar has seen many attacks and many deaths in the last twelve months for which, with good reason, they blame both Sunni Arabs and the Peshmerga.

All of these groups have set up protective militias to counteract the extermination campaigns being waged against them.

Assassinations Of Former Armed Forces Members

There are two assassination campaigns being waged against former members of the armed forces. The first is relatively sporadic and appears to be being waged by Peshmerga. The second is more organised, given that this campaign is being waged primarily against former Air Force Officers, given that many of the victims fought as pilots in the war against Iran, and given that several of the victims have been kidnapped and severely tortured both by burning with heated irons and the use of electric drills it is more than highly likely that there are at least three Badr Brigade death squads operating in the city and its environs.

The Coming “Surge”

The complexity of the situation outlined briefly above make it clear that the Americans and their GZG underlings will not be able to co-opt any one group to act as a security and stabilisation force. Several indicators lead me to believe that Maliki is nevertheless determined to press ahead with a “surge” in Mosul:

• Politically he has no choice but to press ahead with a “surge” both because of his own actions and the pressure upon him from SIIC and the Americans.

  The strident tone of his remarks and statements following his meeting with the American Secretary of State in late April. [Editor’s note: April 20th 2008. ] He stressed repeatedly that he was in the process of launching a security campaign and that the campaign would be the conclusive battle against “al-Qaeda.”

• The arrival of reinforcement Peshmerga forces over a period of weeks.
• The arrival of other GZG forces.
• The arrival of Sahwa fighters.

  This last development appears to be related to the efforts of the leaders of the Sahwa to establish themselves as a political party (see our report: مؤتمر صحوة العراق يبدي استعداده لارسال افواج لدعم القوات الامنية )

  Both [name withheld] and [name withheld] are of the opinion that this particular move is not approved of by the Sahwa movement leadership in general and is largely a “freelance” effort by a particular faction. My own enquiries amongst relatives in al-Anbar active in Sahwa leadership circles produced contradictory results. Enquiries by [name withheld] produced similarly opaque results.

Local Factors

There is no doubt that any effective operation tending to reduce the impact of al-Qaeda inspired and/or affiliated groups in Mosul and it’s hinterlands would receive some public support. In tribal circles those voices who wish to regain their influence by organising along the lines of the Anbar model are calling for a security plan to be implemented. Not coincidentally these are the same people who are trying to organise a local “awakening”. For the reasons outlined above these are unlikely to be enough. Moreover the various armed groups in Mosul have been busy entrenching themselves. Dislodging them would require massive bombing by the attacking forces followed by fierce street battles in which areas would likely need to be cleared house by house. These and looking to the resumption of the bombing campaigns in Diyalah and Baghdad lead me to believe that any battle of Mosul will be both hard and unlikely to be over quickly.

• U.S. helicopter gun ships and warplanes have been pounding the city, home to more than 2 million people – their declared aim is to have it flushed of gunmen.

• While gunmen are nowhere to be found, those bearing the brunt of U.S.’s disproportionate use of force are none but the city’s impoverished inhabitants.

• Sadr City is a warren of mainly one-story houses, most of them shabby and dilapidated.

• Iraqi demographers say the city is even more densely populated in terms of the number of people per square kilometer than the city of Gaza in Palestine.

• The U.S. only speaks of killing armed men.

• Kurdish legislators who were on the visit also made parallels between what Saddam did in Halabja and what the U.S. is currently doing in Saddam City. The Kurdish deputies spoke on the strict condition of anonymity.

Continue reading ‘U.S. repeats Halabja massacre in Baghdad’s Sadr City, Iraqi legislators say’ »

Instead of learning from the French experience, the U.S. has naively looked to the Israeli experience as a training manual for counterinsurgency. The U.S. continues to be mesmerized by a mythical version of Israel that is based more on savvy marketing than demonstrated performance. Israel’s responses to unconventional war has never been well developed or very successful; it was defeated by Hezbollah in South Lebanon not once but twice, and its attempt to crush the Palestinian uprising through force actually led to further suicide bombings, while its destruction of the Palestinian infrastructure has left the political field open to Hamas and Islamic Jihad.

Mimicking Israel is a recipe for failure. Martin Van Creveld, an Israeli military historian who had lectured U.S. military officials on Israeli military strategy in late 2003, warned in an Associated Press article (December 12, 2003) that just as Israel had been unsuccessful in eliminating militant groups and suicide bombers, the United States cannot expect to be victorious in Iraq. “The Americans are coming here to try to mimic all kinds of techniques, but it’s not going to do them any good,” he reportedly warned. “I don’t see how on earth they (the U.S.) can win. I think this is going to end the same way Vietnam did. They are going to flee the country hanging on the strings of helicopters.”

The new “surge” strategy in Iraq, led by General David Petreaus, has been heavily marketed as an example of the U.S. military’s application of the “lessons of history” from previous counterinsurgencies to Iraq, foremost among them the need to win the population over from insurgents through cultivating human relationships, addressing popular grievances and providing security. Yet one glance at the realities on the ground in Iraq today reveal that the cornerstone of current U.S. military strategy is less about cultivating human relationships than about limiting them, primarily through concrete walls and checkpoints. And it has been less about minimizing violence than containing Iraq’s population and redirecting the battlefield from the streets to the skies above Iraq.

While the coffee klatches between Marine commanders and Sunni tribal sheikhs may garner all the publicity, the real story on the ground in Iraq is that from Baghdad to Mosul, the U.S. military has been busy constructing scores of concrete walls and barriers between and around Iraqi neighborhoods, which it terms “Gated Communities.” In Baghdad alone, 12-foot-high walls now separate and surround at least eleven Sunni and Shiite enclaves. Broken by narrow checkpoints where soldiers monitor traffic via newly issued ID cards, these walls have turned Baghdad into dozens of replica Green Zones, dividing neighbor from neighbor and choking off normal commerce and communications. Similar walls are being erected in other Iraqi cities, while the entire city of Falluja remains surrounded by a razor-wire barrier, with only one point of entry into the city. Moreover, the U.S. military has doubled its use of unmanned aerial drones and increasingly relies upon aerial strikes to quell insurgent activities, often through bombings and targeted assassinations.

While there is no question that overall levels of violence have temporarily decreased, Iraq has become virtually caged in a carapace of concrete walls and razor wire, reinforced by an aerial occupation from the sky. Reporting from a recent visit to the Dora neighborhood of Baghdad, the seasoned journalist Nir Rosen noted in Rolling Stone (March 6, 2008) that:

Looming over the homes are twelve-foot-high security walls built by the Americans to separate warring factions and confine people to their own neighborhood. Emptied and destroyed by civil war, walled off by President Bush’s much-heralded “surge,” Dora feels more like a desolate, post-apocalyptic maze of concrete tunnels than a living, inhabited neighborhood.

The Israeli Laboratory

Continue reading ‘The New Walls of Baghdad - UN Security Council - Global Policy Forum’ »

The factions battling each other in Iraq get refuge in the shade of their sectarian umbrellas and do not give a damn to a national reconciliation program to put the country back on the right path.

The Americans are now so insecure and unstable to the extent they are being used as proxies to wage battles at the behest of certain groups against others. In other words they have become partners in the civil war.

Bombing by warplanes, helicopter gun ships and rockets is going on unabated in Baghdad and other parts of Iraq while our politicians mull revising the ‘constitution’.

Ferocious fighting from street to street currently takes place in several parts of the country which makes ludicrous any talk about the constitution and its revision.

Iraqis now sarcastically remember the referendum on a constitution whose creators and sponsors themselves have not taken with a grain of salt.

That constitution, of which U.S. and British occupiers bragged about, is the product of a dirty and vicious sectarian war that is being fed from several quarters whether domestic or foreign.

Continue reading ‘Iraqis want to revise constitution and U.S. warplanes bomb Baghdad’ »

If you’ve heard it once, you’ve heard it countless times: Governments and corporations turn to private military contractors because it is more cost-effective than using regular military forces. But is it true?

Typical is this statement by Doug Brooks, president of the International Peace Operations Association: “Contractors are cost effective. While the popular perception is of huge salaries for cushy jobs, the reality is that contractors live alongside military personnel and generally cost the government far less in the long run.”

This is a popular notion once adhered to only by diehard-free market advocates who believe government is fundamentally inefficient and unproductive. Admittedly, the actions of the Bush administration have given it credence, but it has been conventional wisdom since the days of Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher.

Read in full: Dogs of War: Cost-effective: Myth or fact? - UPI.com

Is history repeating itself, asks Ayman El-Amir*

The Iraqi government of Prime Minister Nuri Al-Maliki has completed the first phase of negotiations with the US over the long-term strategic agreement that will govern relations between the occupying power and occupied Iraq for decades to come. It will be supplemented by a “status of forces” agreement outlining the privileges and immunities of the 50,000-strong US military force that will be stationed in Iraq well beyond the formal withdrawal of the occupation army. Iraq will thus be incorporated into the “Axis of the Good” that includes the six members of the Gulf Cooperation Council where the US has developed and maintains sprawling military bases and other facilities, encircling Iran and controlling the southern entrance to the Straits of Hormuz. Fifty years after the demise of the Baghdad Pact (1955-1958) the military alliance has not only been reborn, but is more expansive, with US Central Command at the helm and Iran replacing the former Soviet Union as the adversary.

In 1955, when the Cold War and the nuclear arms race between the former Soviet Union and the US had reached fever pitch, the Arab world was also undergoing deep transformation triggered by the Nasser-led 1952 Egyptian revolution. Egypt’s emerging role as a beacon of national liberation in the Arab region and in Africa was coveted by both superpowers though for different reasons. The Soviet Union, reversing the old-era Stalinist approach, wanted to embrace Third World revolutionary movements as a bulwark against the old imperial and colonial powers. The US secretary of state at the time, John Foster Dulles, was obsessed with the idea of blocking Communist expansion towards the Middle East which occupied strategic routes, waterways, and possessed burgeoning oil wealth.

Continue reading ‘A reincarnation of the Baghdad Pact’ »

America is cultivating new allies among Iraq’s disaffected, reports Saad Abdel-Wahab

Both the US military in Iraq and Staffan de Mistura, the UN chief in Iraq, credit the emergence of Awakening Councils with playing a major part in the decline in violence nationwide over the past six months. Such groups, backed by the Americans, have also managed to expel Al-Qaeda from much of Anbar province, a largely desert area in western Iraq. The Awakening Councils are the first Sunni group to publicly turn against Al-Qaeda in Iraq.

The Americans’ new Sunni allies have increasingly been targeted by Al-Qaeda in Iraq, seeking to derail the movement that began in Anbar and has since spread to Baghdad and surrounding areas.

Continue reading ‘Al-Ahram Weekly |New dawn for Sunnis?’ »

He doesn’t write nearly often enough. Go there read it, and then tell him Haleema said so :-)

“We came to power on a CIA train,” said Ali Saleh Sa’adi, the Ba’ath Party interior minister in the 1960s. One of the passengers on that train was an up-and-coming assassin named Saddam Hussein

A Non-Arab Arab / عربي غير عربي: CIA In the Mideast from “Legacy of Ashes”

WASHINGTON, Apr 17 (IPS) - There are an estimated 2.7 million Iraqis who have been displaced within their own country. No house; no food; no security. Who do they turn to for help? The international community’s humanitarian organisations? The occupying United States government? The central Iraqi government based in Baghdad?

According to a report released Tuesday by Refugees International (RI), none of these has been able to provide sufficient assistance to the most vulnerable Iraqis. As a result, they are turning increasingly to local religious-political armed groups for their humanitarian needs — often Shia cleric Moqtada al-Sadr’s Mahdi Army, or the Sunni militias known as Sahwa or Awakening groups, made up of former insurgents armed and funded by the U.S. military, though other militias and strongmen exist as well.

The ongoing fragmentation of Iraqi society well beyond pre-U.S. invasion levels — caused by the flawed U.S. occupation and even encouraged by some of it and the nascent Iraqi government’s policies — has left militias and other neighbourhood strongmen the only ones able to effectively provide food, shelter, oil for heating and cooking, and the semblance of a judiciary system, according to the report entitled “Uprooted and Unstable: Meeting Urgent Humanitarian Needs in Iraq”.

“The trend more and more has been [that] Iraq, leaving aside Kurdistan, resembles Somalia, where you have warlords and militias independent fiefdoms,” said journalist Nir Rosen, who has spent significant time in Iraq, in a conference call to launch the report, which he co-authored. “These militias, be they Mahdi Army, be they Sunni Awakening groups or otherwise, provide security, provide housing, and other forms of assistance.”
Continue reading ‘IRAQ: Chaos Hardening Sectarian Fiefdoms’ »