Gorilla’s Guides

‘The Tenure of Coalition Troops in Iraq Should Be Limited’

The situation in Iraq seems to be improving. SPIEGEL spoke with Iraqi Prime Minister al-Maliki about his approval of Barack Obama’s withdrawal plans and what he hopes from US President Bush in his last months in office.

SPIEGEL: Mr. Prime Minister, the war and its consequences have cost more than 100,000 lives and caused great suffering in your country. Saddam Hussein and his regime are now part of the past. Was all of this worth the price?

Maliki: The casualties have been and continue to be enormous. But anyone who was familiar with the dictator’s nature and his intentions knows what could have been in store for us instead of this war. Saddam waged wars against Iran and Kuwait, and against Iraqis in the north and south of his own country, wars in which hundreds of thousands died. And he was capable of instigating even more wars. Yes, the casualties are great, but I see our struggle as an enormous effort to avoid other such wars in the future.

SPIEGEL: Germany was opposed to the war. German Economics Minister Michael Glos was in Baghdad the week before last, Daimler AG plans to build trucks in Iraq, and you will travel to Berlin this week. Has everything been smoothed out between Germany and Iraq?

Maliki: We want closer relations, and it is my impression that the Germans — the government, the people and German companies — want the same thing. Our task is to rebuild a country, and the Germans are famous for effective and efficient work. We have great confidence in them and want to involve them in the development of our country.

SPIEGEL: And there is truly no resentment against a country that opposed the war in 2003?

Maliki: We do not judge our partners on the basis of whether or not they were militarily involved in toppling Saddam. The decisions back then corresponded to the national will of the countries, and we respect that.

SPIEGEL: What exactly do you expect from the Germans and from German companies?

Maliki: We want to get to know them, and we want to know what they want — and the things they fear when thinking about Iraq. We have to start over again in many areas, including oil production, the development of the power grid and all industries. There is much to be done.

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DAMASCUS, May 19 (IPS) - In the struggle now just to stay alive, everyone has forgotten that Iraq has lost, among other things, its tradition in sports. Some of its best sportsmen are now refugees.

“No one seems to care about us,” 20-year-old footballer Ali Rubai’i told IPS. Ali fled Iraq with his family to Syria like countless other young Iraqis. The young from Iraq, born after 1980, have grown up amidst three major wars, 13 years of strangling economic sanctions, and now five years of occupation.

Through all this some still manage to keep up with sports. But it has begun to seem to many others like an indulgence.

“I was one of the best soccer players in Anbar province, and my coach expected the brightest future for me,” Ayid Humood from Ramadi, 100 km west of Baghdad, told IPS in Damascus. “I struggled to keep my training together with my work as a construction labourer, but then I had to give up playing because work brought survival for the family.”

“Despite the Iraq-Iran war of the eighties, and the UN sanctions later, there was some support for sports and youth in Iraq,” a senior member of the Iraqi Olympics Committee told IPS on condition of anonymity on telephone from Baghdad. “Iraq produced many Olympic teams and stars because of the organised system that was founded in the early days of the Iraqi state. It got worse during the UN sanctions, and then the very worst came with the U.S. occupation in 2003.”

“Most of our stadiums and playing grounds have been converted into U.S. and Iraqi military bases,” Waleed Khalid of the Ramadi Sports Club who fled to Damascus with his family told IPS. “Our Ramadi stadium is now used as a U.S. military base, and we were deprived of playing official games. Gradually we stopped training, given the chaos brought by the U.S. military operations in our city.”

Khalid added, “I do not think there will be any future for any Ramadi player any more.”

In Fallujah a football stadium was turned into a graveyard through the April 2004 U.S. siege when people could not find any other place to bury their dead. According to doctors at Fallujah General Hospital IPS interviewed after that siege, 736 people were killed, more than 60 percent of them civilians. The football stadium is now known as the Fallujah Martyrs Graveyard.

The al-Sumood stadium in Fallujah was closed down for conversion into a private hospital, a general hospital and a market.

Some of the damage has been done by Iraqis themselves.

“A country that is led by clerics who think sports are forbidden could never have any progress,” Adil Hamza, a sports teacher at a Baghdad high school who fled to Syria told IPS. “Our sports stars are all abroad now looking for their personal future. Soccer clubs in Qatar, United Arab Emirates, Jordan, and Iran signed contracts with the best Iraqi soccer players and coaches, while most Iraqi clubs cannot afford to pay the simplest salaries to their players.”

Many religious leaders in Iraq now forbid sports, and even the wearing of shorts.

The al-Karkh Club in western Baghdad was closed down when militias began killing all the young men they could find in early 2006. “I came to Syria looking for a chance to play after our club was closed,” Huthayfa, who was a member of the club told IPS. “Now I am going back to Fallujah where my family fled to, I have given up hope of any future in soccer.”

Still, not everyone has. Syrian authorities have set aside a soccer stadium in Baghdad for Iraqi youth. The al-Nidhal stadium draws hundreds of Iraqi youngsters.

“It was so generous of our Syrian brothers to gift us such a good place,” said Ibrahim Mahmood. “But our problem is much bigger than just finding a place for practice. We need to make our future as soccer players, and that needs huge assets and international support.”

IRAQ: Praying, Not Playing

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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.