Rene — Is the US really bringing stability to Baghdad?
Topic(s): Iraq | Comments Off on Rene — Is the US really bringing stability to Baghdad?Is the US really bringing stability to Baghdad?
To judge from the talk in Washington, the ‘surge’ that put 30,000 more
US troops on the ground in Iraq has succeeded in bringing stability to
a nation still riven by ethnic, religious and tribal conflict. Life,
the Pentagon boasts, is returning to normal. But the truth is a very
different story.
By Patrick Cockburn
The Independen/UK
Friday, 15 February 2008
People in Baghdad are not passive victims of violence, but seek
desperately to avoid their fate. In April 2004, I was almost killed by
Shia militiamen of the Mehdi Army at a checkpoint at Kufa in southern
Iraq. They said I was an American spy and were about to execute me and
my driver, Bassim Abdul Rahman, when they decided at the last moment to
check with their commander. “I believe,” Bassim said afterwards, “that
if Patrick had an American or an English passport [instead of an Irish
one] they would have killed us all immediately.”
In the following years, I saw Bassim less and less. He is a Sunni, aged
about 40, from west Baghdad. After the battle for Baghdad between Shia
and Sunni in 2006, he could hardly work as a driver as three-quarters
of the capital was controlled by the Shia. There were few places where
a Sunni could drive in safety outside a handful of enclaves.
What happened to Bassim was also to happen to millions of Iraqis who
saw their lives ruined by successive calamities. As their world
collapsed around them they were forced to take desperate measures to
survive, obtain a job and make enough money to feed and educate their
families.
In the US and Europe, the main measure of whether the war in Iraq is
“going well” or “going badly” is the casualty figures. The number of
American soldiers and Iraqi civilians being killed went down to 39 US
soldiers and 599 Iraqi civilians in January. The White House is
promoting the idea that the United States is finally on the road to
success, if not victory, in Iraq.
On the back of this renewed optimism about the war, Senator John
McCain, the premier hawk among the Republican candidates for the
presidency, has been able to revive his foundering campaign and is set
to be his party’s nominee. Despite the scepticism of many US
journalists permanently stationed in Iraq, television and newspaper
newsrooms in New York and Washington (in London they are more
sceptical) have largely bought into the idea that “the surge” ` the
wider deployment of 30,000 extra US troops since February 2006 ` has
succeeded.
But any true assessment of the happiness or misery of Iraqis must use a
less crude index than the number of dead and injured. It must ask if
people have been driven from their houses, and if they can return. It
must say whether they have a job and, if they do not, whether they
stand a chance of getting one. It has to explain why so few of the 3.2
million people who are refugees in Syria and Jordan, or inside Iraq,
are coming back.
At the time we had our encounter with the Mehdi Army in Kufa, Bassim
was living in a house in the mixed Sunni-Shia area of Jihad in
south-west Baghdad. He loved the house, which had a sitting room and
two bedrooms, because he had built it himself in 2001. “I didn’t
complete it because I didn’t have enough money,” he said. “But we were
so happy to have our own home.”
He was living there in the summer of 2006 with his wife Maha, 38, and
his children Sarah, 13, Noor, eight, and Sama, three, when Shia
militiamen took over Jihad. The struggle for the capital had begun on
22 February when Sunni insurgents blew up a revered Shia shrine in
Samarra. Bassim fled to Syria with his family and, when he returned to
Jihad three months later, he found pictures of Muqtada al-Sadr, the
Shia nationalist cleric who heads the Mehdi Army, pasted to the gate of
his house.
Neighbours told Bassim to get out as fast as he could before the Mehdi
Army militiamen came back and killed him. He drove with his family to
his father-in-law’s house in the tough Sunni district of al-Khadra,
where he and his wife and three children were to live in future in a
single small room. He did not dare go back to his old home, but he
heard about it in the summer of 2007 from a friendly Shia neighbour who
said it had been taken over by militiamen. “They accused me,” says
Bassim, “of being a high-rank officer in the former intelligence
service and because of that they got a permit [from al-Sadr’s office]
to take it over.”
Two Shia families moved in for a couple of months and, when they left,
they took all his remaining belongings. They left the house unlocked,
and soon the wooden doors and other fittings were gone. The permanent
loss of his home, his only possession of any value apart from his car,
was a terrible blow to Bassim and his wife. “I have nothing else to
lose aside from my house,” he wrote to me in a sad letter in the autumn
of 2007, “and because of what happened I had a heart attack. I worked
as a taxi driver for a few days, but I couldn’t do it any longer
because of the dangerous situation and I had no other way of earning a
living. Finally, I sold my car and my wife’s few gold things and I will
try to go to Sweden even if I have to go illegally.”
I thought his plan to travel to Sweden was a terrible one, as Bassim
spoke only Arabic and had not travelled outside Iraq, apart from a few
trips to Syria and Jordan. But there was nothing I could do to dissuade
him. I did not see or hear from him for six months, though I heard from
his friends that his bid to reach Sweden had failed and that he was
stuck in Kuala Lumpur.
Then, on 1 February, he appeared at the door of my hotel room in
Baghdad, looking shrunken and miserable, and told me of his strange and
disastrous odyssey.
I had originally hoped that his plan to travel illegally to Sweden was
a fantasy he would never try to realise, but everything he had said in
his letter turned out to be true. He had sold his car, his wife’s gold
jewellery and some furniture for $6,500 (about £3,300) and borrowed
$1,500 from his sister and the same amount from friends. Of this,
$6,900 was paid to Abu Mohammed, an Iraqi in Sweden, who provided
Bassim and a friend called Ibrahim with Lithuanian passports (these
turned out to be genuine, but one of Bassim’s many fears over the next
three months was that his passport was a fake and he would be thrown in
jail). The two men went first to Damascus and then, instructed over the
phone by Abu Mohammed in Sweden, they flew to Malaysia.
This would seem to be the wrong direction, but Malaysia has the great
advantage of being one of the few countries to give Iraqis entry visas
at the airport. Bassim and Ibrahim took rooms at the cheapest hotel
they could find in Kuala Lumpur.
They were then told by Abu Mohammed to get a plane to Cambodia and take
a bus to Vietnam. Though their money was fast dwindling, they did so.
Somehow, still speaking only Arabic, they made their way from Phnom
Penh to Ho Chi Minh City. The plan was to get a ticket to Sweden by way
of France (Bassim now thinks that this was a mistake and it would have
been better to travel first to Lithuania, posing as citizens returning
home, but this would have left the two Iraqis with the problem of
explaining to officials there why they did not speak Lithuanian).
In the check-in queue at the airport in Vietnam on 5 January this year,
Bassim was desperately worried he would be detected. He had staked all
his remaining money and his family’s future on getting to Sweden. In
fact, he and Ibrahim had little chance of being allowed on to the
plane. Too many Iraqis, claiming to be citizens of small East European
states, had tried this route before. Suspicious Vietnamese immigration
officials took them to an investigation room where Bassim felt ill and
asked for a glass of water, which was refused. He and Ibrahim continued
to protest that they were Lithuanian citizens and demanded to be taken
to the Lithuanian embassy, knowing full well that Lithuania is
unrepresented in Vietnam.
It was all in vain. The officials guessed that they were Iraqis. They
sent Bassim and Ibrahim back to Cambodia. Half-starved because he did
not like the local food ` “I was used to Iraqi bread,” he recalled
later ` and with his money almost gone, Bassim made his way back to
Kuala Lumpur by the end of January. He last saw his friend Ibrahim
heading for Indonesia in a small boat.
Abu Mohammed in Sweden became elusive and, when finally contacted by
phone after six days, admitted that “for Iraqis, all the ways from Asia
to Sweden are shut”. He did not offer to return Bassim’s $6,900.
Demoralised, and hearing that many Iraqi refugees trying to get to
Europe through Indonesia simply disappeared, Bassim used his last few
dollars to fly to Damascus and took a shared taxi across the desert to
Baghdad. “The journey took three months but it felt like 10 years,” he
said. “I have lost everything.”
Life in the Iraq to which Bassim has returned is said by foreigners and
Iraqis alike to be getting better. Perky pieces in the foreign media
breathlessly describe how Sunni children are once again playing
football in al-Zahra park near the Green Zone, where they would have
been murdered a year ago. “The problem,” complained one American
correspondent in Baghdad, “is that newsrooms back home have two
mindsets ` ‘War Rages’ and ‘Peace Dawns’ ` and not a lot in between.”
Previous claims of an improvement in security by the US or the Iraqi
government had been wholly false. I remembered Paul Bremer, the US
viceroy during the first year of the occupation, claiming that the
Sunni insurgents were a doomed remnant battling against “the new Iraq”.
When Bremer left in 2004, he was shown on television clambering into
one helicopter and then, when the cameras departed, scuttling on to a
second aircraft in case those same insurgents might shoot him down.
In contrast to the spurious turning-points of the past, the most recent
political changes in Iraq, which had led to the fall in American and
Iraqi casualties, are quite real. But they differ significantly from
the way in which they are portrayed in the outside world, and have less
to do with al-Qa’ida and the US than the continuing struggle for power
between Sunni and Shia in Iraq.
From the fall of Saddam Hussein in 2003 to the summer of 2006, the five
million-strong Sunni community had battled the US and the Shia-Kurdish
Iraqi government. Then, quite suddenly, last year many of the Sunni
rebel groups switched sides and allied themselves with the Americans,
formed the “al-Sahwa” or “Awakening” movement and declared war on
al-Qa’ida.
Dramatic changes of side when enemies embrace each other are not
unknown in Iraqi politics and may stem from its traditions of tribal
warfare. I was in Iraqi Kurdistan in 1996 when the Kurdish leader
Massoud Barzani, many of whose family and tribe had been murdered by
Saddam Hussein, called in Saddam’s tanks to capture the city of Arbil
and to repulse an offensive by the rival Kurdish leader Jalal Talabani,
now president of Iraq.
The US commander in Iraq, General David Petraeus, and the US
ambassador, Ryan Crocker, are cautious about claiming too much success.
But the White House and the Republicans have been quick to suggest that
a turning point had been reached in the war. As in 2003, after the
American overthrow of Saddam, both the Democrats and much of the
American media could be easily intimidated by the fear that they were
being unpatriotic or defeatist when military victory was in sight.
“The problem in Iraq is that the agenda is driven not by what is really
happening, but by the perception in America of what is happening,”
Ahmad Chalabi, veteran of the opposition to Saddam and one of the most
astute observers of the Iraqi scene, told me. A problem is that US
politicians and commentators assume far greater American control of
events in Iraq than is the case. The US is the most powerful player
there, but it is by no means the only one.
The dramatic change of sides of Sunni guerrilla organisations such as
the “1920 Revolution Brigades” and the “Islamic Army” came about for
many reasons. In Anbar province west of Baghdad (perhaps one-third of
Iraq by area), the Sunni tribes had become enraged by al-Qa’ida’s
attempt to establish total dominance, and to replace or murder
traditional leaders and set up a Taliban-type state. But the Sunni
community could also see that, although its guerrilla war was effective
against the US, it was being defeated by the Shia who controlled the
Iraqi government and armed forces after the elections of 2005.
The only source of money in Iraq is oil revenues, and the only jobs `
four million, if those on a pension are included ` are with the
government. The Shia, in alliance with the Kurds, controlled both. “The
Sunni people found that the only way to be protected from the Shia was
to be allied to the Americans,” said Kassim Ahmed Salman, a
well-educated Sunni from west Baghdad. “Otherwise we were in a hopeless
situation. For the last two years it has been possible for Sunni to be
killed legally [by death squads covertly supported by the government]
in Baghdad.”
The “surge” ` the 30,000 extra US troops implementing a new security
plan in Baghdad ` has helped to make Baghdad safer. In effect, they
have frozen into place the Shia victory of 2006. The city is broken up
into enclaves sealed off by concrete walls with only one entrance and
exit.
Areas that were once mixed are not being reoccupied by whichever
community was driven out. Bassim can no more reclaim, or even visit,
his house in the Jihad district of Baghdad than he could a year ago. He
can still work as a taxi driver only in Sunni areas. The US military
and the Iraqi government are wary of even trying to reverse sectarian
cleansing because this might break the present fragile truce.
“People say things are better than they were,” says Zanab Jafar, a
well-educated Shia woman living in al-Hamraa, west Baghdad, “but what
they mean is that they are better than [during] the bloodbath of 2006.
The situation is still terrible.”
Baghdad still feels and looks like a city at war. There are checkpoints
everywhere. “You seldom see young girls walking in the streets, or in
restaurants,” adds Zanab Jafar, “because their families are terrified
they will be kidnapped, so they send private cars to pick them up
directly from school.” New shops open, but they are always in the heart
of districts controlled by a single community because nobody wants to
venture far from their home to shop.
For all the talk of Baghdad being safer, it remains an extraordinarily
dangerous place. One Western security company is still asking $3,000 to
pick a man up at the airport and drive him six miles to his hotel in
central Baghdad. The number of dead bodies being picked up by the
police every morning in the capital is down to three or four when once
it was 50 or 60.
“People are being killed in the back streets and alleyways but not in
the main roads as they were 12 months ago,” says one Shia leader with a
network of contacts throughout Baghdad. “About twice as many people are
being killed as the government admits.” This figure is still well below
what it was 18 months ago, and is unlikely to return to its previous
level as long as al-Qa’ida does not resume its suicide bombing
campaign, using trucks loaded with a ton of explosives detonated in the
middle of Shia markets or religious processions, killing and wounding
hundreds. If the attacks on the two bird markets in Shia areas on 1
February, killing 99 people, are repeated, then Shia death squads will
start a fresh cycle of tit-for-tat killings of Sunni.
The new element in Iraq is the development of the Awakening Council, or
al-Sahwa, movement. Suddenly there is a Sunni militia, paid by the US,
that has 80,000 men under arms. This re-empowers the Sunni community
far more than any legislation passed by the Iraqi parliament. But it
also deepens the divisions in Iraq because the leaders of the Awakening
do not bother to hide their hatred and contempt for the Iraqi
government.
At the end of January, I visited Abu Marouf, one of the leaders of the
Awakening, in his headquarters near Khan Dari, halfway between Abu
Ghraib and Fallujah. Asked about his attitude to the government of
Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, Abu Marouf, until recently a
commander of the 1920 Revolution Brigades, said: “Maliki has got 13
divisions [in the army] most of whom are Shia, and half are from
militias controlled by Iran.”
In his State of the Union address, President Bush spoke of the 80,000
Awakening Council members ` also labelled “concerned local citizens”,
as if they were respectable householders who have taken up arms against
“terrorists”.
The picture Bush evoked is similar to that often seen in Hollywood
Westerns when outraged townsfolk and farmers, driven beyond endurance
by the crimes of a corrupt sheriff or saloon owner and their bandit
followers, rise in revolt. In reality, in Iraq the exact opposite has
happened. The Awakening Council members of today are the “terrorists”
of yesterday.
Even the police chief of Fallujah, Colonel Feisal, the brother of Abu
Marouf, cheerfully explained that until he was promoted to his present
post in December 2006 he was “fighting the Americans”. Abu Marouf is
threatening to go back to war or let al-Qa’ida return unless his 13,000
men receive long-term jobs in the Iraqi security services. The Iraqi
government has no intention of allowing this because to do so would be
to allow the Sunni and partisans of Saddam Hussein’s regime to once
again hold real power in the state.
Bizarrely, the US is still holding hundreds of men suspected of
contacts with al-Qa’ida in Afghanistan and elsewhere, while in Iraq
many of the Awakening members are past and, in many cases, probably
current members of al-Qa’ida being paid by the US Army.
“I knew a young man, aged 17 or 18,” says Kassim Ahmed Salman, “who was
a friend of my brother and used to carry a PKC [a Russian light
machine-gun] and fight for al-Qa’ida. I was astonished to see him a few
days ago in al-Khadra where he is a lieutenant in al-Sahwa, standing
together with Iraqi army officers.”
The present state of Iraq is highly unstable, but nobody quite wants to
go to war again. It reminds me of lulls in the Lebanese civil war
during the 1970s and 1980s, when everybody in Beirut rightly predicted
that nothing was solved and the fighting would start again. In Iraq the
fighting has never stopped, but the present equilibrium might go on for
some time.
All the Iraqi players are waiting to see at what rate the US will draw
down its troop levels. The Mehdi Army is discussing ending its
six-month ceasefire, but does not want to fight its Shia rivals if they
are supported by American military power. Al-Qa’ida is wounded but by
no means out of business. Four days after I had seen Abu Marouf, who
was surrounded by bodyguards and maintains extreme secrecy about his
movements, al-Qa’ida was able to detonate a bomb in a car close to his
house and injure four of his guards.
Protestations of amity between Shia security men and Awakening members
should be treated with scepticism. My friend, the intrepid French
television reporter Lucas Menget, filmed a Shia policeman showering
praise on the Awakening movement. He introduced two of its members,
declaring enthusiastically to the camera: “You see, together we will
defeat al-Qa’ida.” Back in his police car, the policeman, lighting up a
Davidoff cigarette and shaking his head wearily, explained: “I don’t
have a choice. I was asked to work with these killers.”
Iraq remains a great sump of human degradation and poverty, unaffected
by the “surge”. It was not a government critic but the civilian
spokesman for the Baghdad security plan, Tahseen Sheikhly, who pointed
out this week that the city is drowning in sewage because of blocked
and broken pipes and drains. In one part of the city, the sewage has
formed a lake so large that it can be seen “as a big black spot on
Google Earth”.
In the coming weeks, we will see the fifth anniversary of the invasion
of Iraq by American and British forces on 19 March, and the fall of
Saddam Hussein on 9 April. There will be much rancorous debate in the
Western media about the success or failure of the “surge” and the US
war effort here.
But for millions of Iraqis like Bassim, the war has robbed them of
their homes, their jobs and often their lives. It has brought them
nothing but misery and ended their hopes of happiness. It has destroyed
Iraq.