Mere Irak

Fra The Weekly Standard, om de ikke-voldelige politikker shiaerne bruger mod deres tidligere undertrykkere, sunnierne, og hvorfor der er brug for de 20.000 ekstra amerikanske soldater primært i Baghdad:

To get an idea of the problems facing American commanders in Iraq, consider the case of the Rafidain Bank in Baghdad's Amiriyah neighborhood. The bank, which has been closed since shortly after Saddam's fall, isn't much more than a storefront on a street lined with small retail businesses, but residents desperately want it reopened. General George Casey visited Amiriyah in mid-December, heard those demands, and ordered his top subordinates to make reopening the bank a priority.

Colonel J.B. Burton, who has responsibility for Amiriyah, snapped into action. Money was spent to install surveillance cameras and teller windows. Concrete barriers were put out front as protection from car bombs. The Sunni management of the bank hired local guards. All the work was done quietly through Iraqi intermediaries so it would not look like an American project and become a target for insurgents. By late December, the bank was open again.

And here is where the story takes an all-too-familiar turn. After three weeks of brisk activity, the bank was no longer doing business, a victim not of insurgent bombs, but of the Iraqi government. The finance ministry, which is controlled by the Shia SCIRI party, ordered the bank closed. It's not secure, ministry officials explained, and therefore must be shut down. Military officials with responsibility for Amiriyah say the claim is bogus. "That bank is secure because these people have a vested interest in keeping it secure," says Major Brynt Parmeter. "We could open it tomorrow." The military suspects the bank was shuttered for
another reason: It was injecting economic vibrancy into a Sunni neighborhood that had been slowly dying.

This kind of story is told and retold every day in Baghdad. The Shia-dominated federal and local governments are systematically denying resources to Baghdad's Sunni neighborhoods. You see it in lines that go on for blocks at fuel stations. The Sunni areas don't get much gas or kerosene. You see it in the trash strewn everywhere in once upscale Sunni neighborhoods. Sanitation trucks don't come anymore. "They have the trucks," says Major Parmeter. "They have the people to drive them, but the trash isn't picked up." Fuel lines are much shorter in the Shia neighborhoods, but access to those stations is frequently blocked by Shia militia thugs who stand in front of the stations and, mafia-like, decide who gets fuel and who doesn't.

Several U.S. military officers I spoke to in Baghdad are convinced that the squeezing of Baghdad's Sunni neighborhoods is a deliberate operation carried out primarily by Baghdad's unelected Shia provincial government. The local government, they say, is trying to "soften" the Sunni neighborhoods, so Shia militias can move in and force out Sunni residents. Whether it is government malfeasance or incompetence, the result is the same.

The first thing that hits you in these neighborhoods is the stench of garbage. Picking up trash was part of the mission when the military launched Operation Together Forward back in August. The plan was to kill the bad guys, clean up the streets, and give Iraqis a chance to take their neighborhoods back. In the Sunni Doura neighborhood, the military scored its first success. The insurgents were either killed or chased away, the trash bulldozed, and sure enough, the markets reopened and a sense of normalcy returned. That was August. In September, as soon as U.S. troops left, the trash began to pile up again. Dead bodies piled up too--many of them with holes drilled in their heads. Over the past three months, this has been perhaps Baghdad's deadliest neighborhood.

Dødspatruljer i Irak

Efter en uges penge brugt i slægtsforskningens tegn er det ved at være på tide at tage blogningen op igen. Næsten vanen tro leverer de danske medier anledningen, denne gang dog på en positiv - eller rettere informativ måde.

Det er Dags Dato Special fra i onsdags, der er tale om, men dokumentaren The Death Squads om de dødspatruljer, der i Irak står for hovedparten af de fund af torterede og henrettede lig, vi hører om i medierne.

Dokumentaren gør et godt job med at samle indikationer på, at det er militsmænd loyale over for de to iransk-støttede militser Badr-brigaderne og Mahdi-hæren, der står bag. Værten Deborah Davies´ teatralske påfund (som at iklæde sig skudsikker vest, en konvoj af biler og 100 livvagter for at afhente billeder og video i en konvolut der lige så godt kunne være overbragt med posten) kunne jeg godt have undværet, men generelt er dokumentaren uhyre seværdig.

En ting man dog skal holde sig in mente: få mennesker med magt i Irak kan siges at være uskyldige. Den irakiske hovedkilde til dokumentaren - det sunnimuslimske parlamentsmedlem Mohammed al-Daini - nævnes som "modstander af den amerikanske besættelse". Oversæt dette som "støtte af de sunnimuslimske terrorister".

Han er heller ikke ked af at vise det. HRINFO kunne i efteråret i sit ugebrev for ugen 29. september til 5. oktober afsløre, at de havde video af at han han truede journalister på tv-stationen al-Iraqiya på livet. Inden der var gået en uge var al-Iraqiya-journalisten Raid Qais Al Shammari blevet skudt i sin bil i Baghdad, og tre dage senere blev hans kollega Ali Halil dræbt på samme måde.

Tilsvarende skal man holde sig in mente, at bare fordi ti af hans fætre blev henrettet efter at have besøgt ham betyder det ikke, at de var rene uskyldigheder. Hvad Hr. al-Daini´s fætre er i stand til kan man se af en elfte fætter, Rasool al-Daini. Han blev arresteret i torsdags for en imponerende række af forbrydelser:

The source said that Rasool Al Daini is accused to being involved in killing 49 civilians in Kanaan city in addition to his responsibility of displacing tens of Shiite and Kurdish families, assassinating tens of people and targeting the Iraqi security members

Med det in mente kan man imidlertid roligt se dokumentaren, hvis man ikke allerede har fået det gjort. Youtube´s version har problemer med synkroniseringen af lyd og billede, så prøv google video´s istedet:

UPDATE:

Fremviseren fra Google Video lader ikke til at virke her på bloggen, så jeg har slettet den. Istedet kan man vælge mellem selv at tage over på Google Video´s site og selv se dokumentaren der, eller se den i fem dele her på bloggen:

"Nu er jihaden mod Shia´erne, ikke mod Amerikanerne"

Man kan ikke åbne en avis uden at få at vide, at det endelig er lykkedes al Qaeda og allierede post-Baath terrorister at fremprovokere en krig mellem de religiøse grupper i Irak. Mellem linierne kan man læse sig til, at sunniernes drøm om, at de kunne dræbe sig vej til magten i Irak selv om de kun udgør 15% af befolkningen nu er blevet til et mareridt for dem. Helt fraværende i den danske presse er den forandring, realisationen af samme har medført i den suni-muslimske terror-bevægelse. Fra 'The jihad now is against the Shias, not the Americans' i The Guardian:

In Baghdad in late October I called a Sunni insurgent I had known for more than a year. He was the mid-level commander of a small cell, active against the Americans in Sunni villages north of Baghdad. Sectarian frontlines had been hardening in the city for months - it took us 45 minutes of haggling to agree on a meeting place which we could both get to safely. We met in a rundown workers' cafe.

Kidnapped

"Its not a good time to be a Sunni in Baghdad," Abu Omar told me in a low voice. He had been on the Americans' wanted list for three years but I had never seen him so anxious; he had trimmed his beard in the close-cropped Shia style and kept looking towards the door. His brother had been kidnapped a few days before, he told me, and he believed he was next on a Shia militia's list. He had fled his home in the north of the city and was staying with relatives in a Sunni stronghold in west Baghdad.

He was more despondent than angry. "We Sunni are to blame," he said. "In my area some ignorant al-Qaida guys have been kidnapping poor Shia farmers, killing them and throwing their bodies in the river. I told them: 'This is not jihad. You can't kill all the Shia! This is wrong! The Shia militias are like rabid dogs - why provoke them?' "

Then he said: "I am trying to talk to the Americans. I want to give them assurances that no one will attack them in our area if they stop the Shia militias from coming."

This man who had spent the last three years fighting the Americans was now willing to talk to them, not because he wanted to make peace but because he saw the Americans as the lesser of two evils. He was wrestling with the same dilemma as many Sunni insurgent leaders, beginning to doubt the wisdom of their alliance with al-Qaida extremists.

Another insurgent commander told me: "At the beginning al-Qaida had the money and the organisation, and we had nothing." But this alliance soon dragged the insurgents and then the whole Sunni community into confrontation with the Shia militias as al-Qaida and other extremists massacred thousands of Shia civilians. Insurgent commanders such as Abu Omar soon found themselves outnumbered and outgunned, fighting organised militias backed by the Shia-dominated security forces.

A week after our conversation, Abu Omar invited me to a meeting with insurgent commanders. I was asked to wait in the reception room of a certain Sunni political party. A taxi driver took me to a house in a Sunni neighbourhood that had recently been abandoned by a Shia family. The driver came in with me - he was also a commander.

The house had been abandoned in a hurry, cardboard boxes were stacked by the door, some of the furniture was covered with white cloths and a few cheap paintings were piled against a wall. The property had been expropriated by the local Sunni mujahideen and we sat on sofas in a dusty reception room.

Abu Omar had been meeting commanders of groups with names like the Fury Brigade, the Battalions of the 1920 Revolution, the Islamic Army and the Mujahideen Army, to discuss options they had for fighting both an insurgency against the Americans and an escalating civil war with the Shia.

Abu Omar had proposed encouraging young Sunni men to enlist in the army and the police to redress the sectarian balance. He suggested giving the Americans a ceasefire, in an attempt to stop ministry of interior commandos' raids on his area. Al-Qaida had said no to all these measures; now he wanted other Iraqi insurgent commanders to support him.

'Do politics'

A heated discussion was raging. One of the men, with a very thin moustache, a huge belly and a red kuffiya wrapped around his shoulder, held a copy of the Qur'an in one hand and a mobile phone in the other. I asked him what his objectives were. "We are fighting to liberate our country from the occupations of the Americans and their Iranian-Shia stooges."

"My brother, I disagree," said Abu Omar. "Look, the Americans are trying to talk to us Sunnis and we need to show them that we can do politics. We need to use the Americans to fight the Shia."

He looked nervously at them: suggestions of talking to the Americans could easily have him labelled as traitor. "Where is the jihad and the mujahideen?" he continued. "Baghdad has become a Shia town. Our brothers are being slaughtered every day! Where are these al-Qaida heroes? One neighbourhood after another will be lost if we don't work on a strategy."

The taxi driver commander, who sat cross-legged on a sofa, joined in: "If the Americans leave we will be slaughtered." A big-bellied man waved his hands dismissively: "We will massacre the Shia and show them who are the Sunnis! They couldn't have done anything without the Americans' support."

When the meeting was over the taxi driver went out to check the road, then the rest followed. "Don't look up, we could be monitored, Shia spies are everywhere," said the big man. The next day the taxi driver was arrested.

By December Abu Omar's worst fears were being realised. The Sunnis had become squeezed into a corner fighting two sides at the same time. But by then he had disappeared; his body was never found.

Baghdad was now divided: frontlines partitioned neighbourhoods into Shia and Sunni, thousands of families had been forced out of their homes. After each large-scale bomb attack on Shia civilians, scores of mutilated bodies of Sunnis were found in the streets. Patrolling militias and checkpoints meant that men with Sunni names dared not venture far outside their neighbourhoods, while certain Sunni areas came under the complete control of insurgent groups the Shura Council of the Mujahideen and the Islamic Army. The Sunni vigilante self-defence groups took shape as reserve units under the control of these insurgent groups.

Like Abu Omar before him, Abu Aisha, a mid-level Sunni commander, had come to understand that the threat from the Shia was perhaps greater than his need to fight the occupying Americans. Abu Aisha fought in Baghdad's western Sunni suburbs, he was a former NCO in the Iraqi army and followed an extreme form of Islam known as Salafism.

Jamming

Deep lines criss-crossed his narrow forehead and his eyes half closed when he tried to answer a question He seemed to evaluate every answer before he spoke. He claimed involvement in dozens of attacks on US and Iraqi troops, mostly IEDs (bombs) but also ambushes and execution of alleged Shia spies. "We have stopped using remote controls to detonate IEDs," he volunteered halfway through our conversation. "Only wires work now because the Americans are jamming the signals."

On his mobile phone he proudly showed me grainy images of dead bodies lying in the street, their hands tied behind their backs . He claimed they were Shia agents and that he had killed them. "There is a new jihad now," he said, echoing Abu Omar's warning. "The jihad now is against the Shia, not the Americans."

In Ramadi there was still jihad against the Americans because there were no Shia to fight, but in Baghdad his group only attacked the Americans if they were with Shia army forces or were coming to arrest someone.

"We have been deceived by the jihadi Arabs," he admitted, in reference to al-Qaida and foreign fighters. "They had an international agenda and we implemented it. But now all the leadership of the jihad in Iraq are Iraqis."

Abu Aisha went on to describe how the Sunnis were reorganising. After Sunni families had been expelled from mixed areas throughout Baghdad, his area in the western suburbs was prepared to defend itself against any militia attack.

"Ameriya, Jihad, Ghazaliyah," he listed, "all these areas are becoming part of the new Islamic state of Iraq, each with an emir in charge." Increasingly the Iraqi insurgency is moving away from its cellular structure and becoming organised according to neighbourhood. Local defence committees have intertwined into the insurgent movement.

"Each group is in charge of a specific street," Abu Aisha said. "We have defence lines, trenches and booby traps. When the Americans arrive we let them go through, but if they show up with Iraqi troops, then it's a fight."

A few days later Rami was telling me about the Sunni insurgents in his north Baghdad area. A network of barricades and small berms blocked the streets around the car in which we sat talking. A convoy of two cars with four men inside whizzed past. "Ah, they are brothers on a mission," Rami said.

Like every man of fighting age, Rami was required to take part in his local vigilante group, guarding the neighbourhood at night or conducting raids or mortar attacks on neighbouring Shia areas.

But he paid $30 a week to a local commander and was exempted.

According to Rami and other commanders, funding for the insurgents comes from three sources. Each family in the street pays a levy, around $8, to the local group. "And when they go through lots of ammunition because of clashes," Rami said, "they pay an extra $5." Then there are donations from rich Sunni businessmen, financiers and wealthier insurgent groups. A third source of funding was "ghaniama", loot which is rapidly becoming the main fuel of the sectarian war

'A business'

"Every time they arrest a Shia, we take their car, we sell it and use the money to fund the fighters, and jihad," said Abu Aisha. The mosque sheik or the local commander collects the money and it is distributed among the fighters; some get fixed salaries, others are paid by "operations", and the money left is used for ammunition.

"It has become a business, they give you money to kill Shia, we take their houses and sell their cars," said Rami. "The Shia are doing the same.

"Last week on the main highway in our area, they killed a Shia army officer. He had a brand new Toyota sedan. The idiots burned the car. I offered them $40,000 for it, they said no. Imagine how many jihads they could have done with 40k."

Og sandt nok lader det til, de irakiske "frihedskæmpere" i endnu større grad end normalt har vendt våbnene væk fra "besættelsestropperne" og over mod deres egene medborgere. Det gennemsnitlige antal dræbte koalitions-soldater pr. dag er således faldet drastisk, med godt 70% mellem december og januar. Samtidig er antallet af dræbte medlemmer af de irakiske sikkerhedsstyrker også styrtdykket - med 50%, mens antallet af dræbte civilister kun er svagt dalende.

Med andre ord: de sunni-muslimske terrorister er trykket i bund, og alle parter venter spændt på, hvilken side i de religiøse massakrer, amerikanerne vælger først at slå ned på. Som tidligere nævnt er de allerede i gang med at skrue bissen på over for Iran, der forsyner shia-ilitserne.