MAY 2007
Over a million Iraqis demonstrate in Najaf (April 9), call on US to leave
Date: Wed, 18 Apr 2007 05:59:37 +1000 From: Governor <governor@cqfreestate.com>
The nightmare Bush dreads most
By Dilip Hiro
The Asia Times April 17, 2007
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/ID17Ak05.html
Public opinion polls are valuable chips to play for those engaged in a debate of national or international consequence. In the end, however, they are abstract numbers. It is popular demonstrations which give them substance, color, and - above all - wide media exposure, and make them truly meaningful. This is particularly true when such marches are peaceful and disciplined in a war-ravaged country like Iraq.
This indeed was the case with the demonstration on April 9 in Najaf. Over a million Iraqis, holding aloft thousands of national flags, marched, chanting, "Yes, yes, Iraq/No, no, America" and "No, no, American/Leave, leave occupier."
The demonstrators arrived from all over the country in response to a call by Muqtada al-Sadr, a radical Shi'ite cleric, to demand an end to foreign occupation on the fourth anniversary of the end of Ba'athist rule in Baghdad.
Both the size of the demonstration and its composition were unprecedented. "There are people here from all different parties and sects," Hadhim al-Araji, Muqtada's representative in Baghdad's Kadhimiya district, told reporters. "We are all carrying the national flag, a symbol of unity. And we are all united in calling for the withdrawal of the Americans."
The presence of many senior Sunni clerics at the head of the march, which started from Muqtada's mosque in Kufa, a nearby town, and the absence of any sectarian flags or images in the parade, underlined the ecumenical nature of the protest.
Crucially, the mammoth demonstration reflected the view prevalent among Iraqi lawmakers. Last autumn, 170 of them in a 275-member Parliament, signed a motion demanding to know the date of an American withdrawal. The discomfited government of Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki played a procedural trick by referring the subject to a parliamentary committee, thereby buying time.
Opinion polls conducted since then show three-quarters of Iraqi respondents demanding the withdrawal of the Anglo-American troops within six to 12 months.
What makes Muqtada tick?
Though only in his early thirties and only a hojatalislam ("proof of Islam") - one rank below an ayatollah in the Shi'ite religious hierarchy - Muqtada al-Sadr has pursued a political strategy no other Iraqi politician can match.
The sources of his ever-expanding appeal are: his pedigree, his fierce nationalism, his shrewd sense of when to confront the occupying power and when to lie low and his adherence to the hierarchical order of the Shi'ite sect, topped by a grand ayatollah - at present 73-year-old Ali Sistani, whose opinion or decree must be accepted by all those below him. (For his part, Sistani does not criticize any Shi'ite leader.)
Muqtada's father, grand ayatollah Muhammad Sadiq al-Sadr, and two elder brothers were assassinated outside a mosque in Najaf in February 1999 by the henchmen of president Saddam Hussein. The grand ayatollah had defied Saddam by issuing a religious decree calling on Shi'ites to attend Friday prayers in mosques. The Iraqi dictator, paranoid about large Shi'ite gatherings, feared these would suddenly turn violently anti-regime.
Muqtada then went underground - just as he did recently in the face of the Bush administration's "surge" plan - resurfacing only after the Ba'athist regime fell in April 2003; and Saddam City, the vast slum of Baghdad, with nearly 2 million Shi'ite residents, was renamed Sadr City. As the surviving son of the martyred family of a grand ayatollah, Muqtada was lauded by most Shi'ites.
While welcoming the demise of the Ba'athist regime, Muqtada consistently opposed the continuing occupation of his country by Anglo-American forces. When L Paul Bremer, the American viceroy in Iraq, banned his magazine al-Hawza al Natiqa ("The Vocal Seminary") in April 2004 and American soldiers fired on his followers protesting peacefully against the publication's closure, Muqtada called for "armed resistance" to the occupiers.
Uprisings spread from Sadr City to the southern Iraqi holy cities of Najaf and Karbala as well as four other cities to the south. More than 540 civilians died in the resulting battles and skirmishes. Since the American forces were then also battling Sunni insurgents in Fallujah, Bremer let the ban on the magazine lapse and dropped his plan to arrest Muqtada.
Later, Muqtada fell in line with the wishes of Sistani to see all Shi'ite religious groups gather under one umbrella to contest parliamentary election. His faction allied with two other Shi'ite religious parties - the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI) and al-Da'awa al-Islamiya (the Islamic Call) - to form the United Iraqi Alliance (UIA).
By so doing, in the face of American hostility, Muqtada gave protective political cover to his faction and its armed wing, the Mehdi Army. (US officials in Baghdad and Washington have long viewed Muqtada and his militia as the greatest threat to American interests in Iraq.) Of the 38 ministers in Maliki's cabinet, six belong to the Sadrist group. (On Monday, it was reported that the six ministers would quit the government because Maliki had refused to set a timetable for the withdrawal of foreign troops.)
When the Pentagon mounted its latest security plan for Baghdad on February 13 - aiming to crush both the Sunni insurgents and Shi'ite militias - Muqtada considered discretion the better part of valor. He ordered his Mehdi militiamen to get off the streets and hide their weapons. For the moment, they were not to resist American forays into Shi'ite neighborhoods. He then went incommunicado.
Muqtada's decision to avoid bloodshed won plaudits not only from Iraqi politicians but also, discreetly, from Sistani, who decries violence, and whose commitment to bringing about the end of the foreign occupation of Iraq is as strong as Muqtada's - albeit not as vocal.
In a message to the nation on the eve of the fourth anniversary of the demise of Saddam's Ba'athist regime, Muqtada coupled his order to the Mehdi fighters to intensify their campaign to expel the Anglo-American troops with a call to the Iraqi security forces to join the struggle to defeat "the arch enemy - America". He urged them to cease targeting Iraqis and direct their anger at the occupiers.
It was the Mehdi Army - controlling the shrine of Imam Ali, the founder of Shi'ite Islam, in the holy city of Najaf - that battled the American troops to a standstill in August 2004. The impasse lasted a fortnight, during which large parts of Najaf's old city were reduced to rubble, with the government of the US-appointed prime minister Iyad Allawi, favorite Iraqi exile of the Central Intelligence Agency and the State Department as well as leader of the exiled Iraqi National Accord, failing to defuse it.
By contrast, it took Sistani, freshly back in Najaf, his home base, from London after eye surgery a single session with Muqtada over dinner to resolve the crisis. A compromise emerged. The Mehdi Army ceded control of the holy shrine not to the Americans or their Iraqi cohorts but to Sistani's representatives, and both Mehdi militiamen and US troops left the city.
The towering Sistani
Ali Sistani established his nationalist credentials early on. As the invading American forces neared Najaf on March 25, 2003, he issued a religious decree requiring all Muslims to resist the invading "infidel" troops. Once the Anglo-American forces occupied Iraq, he adamantly refused to meet American or British officials or their emissaries, and continues to do so to this day.
In January, 2004, when Washington favored appointing a hand-picked body of Iraqis, guided by American experts, to draft the Iraqi constitution along secular, democratic and capitalist lines, Sistani decided to act. He called on the faithful to demonstrate for an elected Parliament, which would then be charged with drafting the constitution - and he succeeded.
Sistani then issued a religious decree calling on the faithful to participate in the vote to create a representative assembly committed to achieving the exit of foreign troops through peaceful means. The White House, however, exploited Sistani's move as part of its own "democracy promotion" campaign in Iraq, with Iraqi fingers dipped in inedible purple ink becoming its much flaunted "democracy symbol".
When Allawi began dithering about holding the vote for an interim parliament by January 2005, as stipulated by UN Security Council Resolution 1546, Sistani warned that he would call for popular non-cooperation with the occupying powers if it was not held on time.
In the elections that followed, the United Iraqi Alliance - the brain-child of Sistani - emerged as the majority group and thus the leading designer of the new constitution. Respecting Sistani's views, the Iraqi constitution stipulated that sharia (Islamic law) was to be the principal source of Iraqi legislation and that no law would be passed that violated the undisputed tenets of Islam.
In the December 2005 parliamentary general election under the new constitution, the UIA became the largest group, a mere 10 seats short of a majority. Though Ibrahim Jaafari of Da'awa won the contest for UIA leadership by one vote, he was rejected as prime minister by the Kurdish parties, holding the parliament's swing votes, as well as by Washington and London. A crisis paralyzed the government. Once again, Sistani's intercession defused a crisis. He persuaded Jaafari to step down.
Jaafari's successor, Maliki, is as reverential toward Sistani as other Shi'ite leaders. For instance, in December 2006, when American officials reportedly urged Maliki to postpone Saddam's execution until after the religious holiday of Eid Al Adha (the Festival of Sacrifice), Maliki turned to Sistani. The grand ayatollah favored an immediate execution. And so it came to pass.
Sistani's next blow fell on the Bush administration earlier this month. He let be known his disapproval of Washington-backed legislation to allow thousands of former Ba'ath Party members to resume their public service positions. That undermined one of the White House's pet projects in Iraq - an attempt to entice into the political mainstream part of the alienated Sunni minority that is at the heart of the Iraqi insurgency.
In sum, while refraining from participating in everyday politics, Sistani intervenes on the issues of paramount importance to the Iraqi people, as he sees them. Western journalists, who routinely describe him as belonging to the "quietist school" of Shi'ite Islam (at odds with the "interventionist school"), are therefore off the mark.
Given Sistani's uncompromising opposition to the presence of foreign troops in Iraq, his staunch nationalism and the unmatched reverence that he evokes, particularly among the majority Shi'ites, he poses a greater long-term threat to Washington's interests in Iraq than Muqtada; and, far from belonging to opposite schools of Shi'ite Islam, Muqtada and Sistani, both staunch nationalists, complement each other - much to the puzzled frustration of the White House.
What must worry Washington more than the massive size of the demonstration on April 9 was its mixed Shi'ite-Sunni composition and nationalistic ambience. The prospect of Muqtada's appeal extending to a section of the Sunni community, with the tacit support of Sistani, is the nightmare scenario that the Bush administration most dreads. Yet it may come to pass.South African (Jewish) Minister Ronnie Kasrils says Iran's nuclear program wise
FOUR YEARS OF HELL
Edward
Wong, Baghdad
http://www.theage.com.au/news/world/shiite-leader-calls-for-iraqis-to-join-militia
/2007/04/09/1175971016015.html
LEADING Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr has urged Iraqi security forces to unite with his militiamen against the American military in Diwaniya, an embattled southern city in Iraq where fighting has raged for three days.
The cleric's call was answered by thousands of Iraqis who flocked to the southern Shiite holy city of Najaf.Sheikh Sadr, who blames the US-led invasion for Iraq's unrelenting violence, issued a statement on Sunday urging Iraqis to protest on the fourth anniversary of the day coalition forces swept into central Baghdad.The US military says Sheikh Sadr, who is popular among Iraq's urban Shiite poor, is in neighbouring Iran. His aides say the cleric is in Iraq and have denied suggestions that he fled to Iran to escape a crackdown in Baghdad.The Baghdad-Najaf road was packed with hundreds of vehicles yesterday crammed with passengers waving Iraqi flags and chanting religious and anti-US slogans."No, no to America … yes, yes Muqtada," they chanted as they converged on the holy city.
Sheikh Sadr's statement did not explicitly call for armed struggle against the Americans, but it still represented his most forceful condemnation of the US-led occupation since he went underground after the start of a crackdown in Baghdad nearly two months ago.
| The Financial Times reported Mr. Allawi as
saying that “the Iraqi exiles who advised
the U.S. war planners described the country of
their memories. Sadly, the Iraq with a solid
infrastructure, a solid middle class and a
secular tradition had ended ‘decades ago.' Anonymous said...
|
It came as the American military announced the deaths of 10 soldiers in five attacks over the weekend, the highest two-day total for American fatalities since the crackdown began on February 14. Five soldiers were wounded in the attacks.
Violence against Iraqis continued unabated on Sunday, with at least 43 people killed or found dead. Seventeen were killed and 26 wounded in a car bombing near a hospital and mosque in the insurgent enclave of Mahmoudiya, south of Baghdad.
Sheikh Sadr's statement indicated that he might begin steering his militia, the Mahdi Army, towards more open confrontation with US forces.
Intense fighting broke out in Diwaniya when American and Iraqi soldiers isolated neighbourhoods there to search for militiamen.
Fighter jets hit militia positions on Saturday, and one police official said at least seven Iraqis had been killed and 15 wounded in the fighting. Residents reported American soldiers scampering across rooftops on Saturday evening.
"The strife that is taking place in Diwaniya was planned by the occupier to drag down the brothers and make them quarrel, fight and even kill each other," Sheikh Sadr said in a written statement.
"O my brothers in the Mahdi Army and my brothers in the security forces, stop fighting and killing because that is what our enemy and your enemy and even God's enemy hope for."
The American military said at least 39 people suspected of being militiamen had been detained during the weekend fighting, and soldiers had uncovered caches of particularly deadly explosives that American officials claim have come from Iran.
Brigadier Qassim Moussawi, spokesman for the US-Iraqi security crackdown in Baghdad, said a 24-hour vehicle ban was in force in the capital yesterday. "There will be protests marking the fourth anniversary (of occupation). We don't want to give the terrorists a chance to use this opportunity," Brigadier Moussawi said.
Iraqi Prime Minister "asks" the US to stop
building A "Berlin" Wall in Baghdad
"I fear this wall might have repercussions which remind us of other walls, which we reject," he said.
Construction of the 5km (3-mile) concrete wall began on 10 April and the US military says it hopes to complete the project by the end of the month.
US troops, protected by heavily-armed vehicles, have been working at night to build the 3.6m (12ft) wall.
Earlier this week, senior Sunni politician Adnan al-Dulaimi, who heads the largest Sunni bloc in parliament, said the barrier would breed yet more sectarian strife.
Residents also said the wall would do little to improve bitter relations between the communities.
Iraq's Strongman Keeps his Options Open
By Bernhard Zand in Dubai
Iraqi Shiite leader Muqtada
al-Sadr is withdrawing his ministers from the country's
cabinet. Does this spell the end of the government -- and
of his own political career? Not at all. Sadr enjoys
enormous support and is a flexible politician
.
Moqtada al-Sadr: anti-American, but pragmatic
No one in postwar Iraq has so many and such succinctly worded labels as Muqtada al-Sadr, "Iraq's most dangerous man." Some call him the tribune of the Iraqi mobs, Iran's vicarious agent, or a nefarious Shiite leader with a tendency to have his adversaries murdered. To his admirers Sadr is a great tactician who has managed to reinvent himself as a politician, while detractors see him as nothing but an immature, helpless militia leader whose troops are abandoning him.
None of these assessments is truly backed up by facts, nor have any of the premature swan songs been confirmed. On Monday, Sadr announced the withdrawal of his six ministers from the Iraqi government. What does Sadr's latest maneuver tell us about the motives of one of the most important political figures in postwar Iraq, and how will it affect the bleak situation in Baghdad?
First of all, it was no dramatic departure. He was withdrawing his ministers "for the public good," said Nasser al-Rubaie, the head of the group of legislators who support Sadr in parliament. The ministers, Rubaie said, were returning their posts to the government in the hope that it would fill them with qualified technocrats. This is the kind of rhetoric business executives use when resigning their positions on a company's board of directors, not the kind of language one uses to bring down a government. Sadr's step is also half-hearted in another respect: His 30 members of parliament retained their seats and remained part of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki's coalition government. Only the ministers -- six men, none of them known as competent politicians -- are leaving, and no one is exactly sad to see them go.
Against the Americans
There were likely two motives behind Sadr's decision. He mentioned the first one himself: He is dissatisfied with Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki and his refusal to name a fixed timetable for the withdrawal of US troops. Sadr, who makes no secret of his anti-Americanism, has always been unambiguous on this issue. The Sadrists had already "suspended" their cooperation last November after Maliki met with US President George W. Bush in Amman, Jordan, where the two men agreed on a new security offensive.
None of Maliki's measures is as unpopular among Sadr's supporters as this security offensive. Why, they ask, does our government join forces with the Americans to attack our own militia, the Mahdi Army, instead of putting an end to the terrorist attacks by the Sunni al-Qaida? This sentiment, shared by all Shiites, is especially prevalent among Sadr's supporters, which points to a second, more powerful motive: Sadr himself put Maliki in power a year ago, his Mahdi Army serving essentially as a paramilitary wing for Maliki, a politician without a militia of his own.
Sadr himself has gone underground, and he has made it clear to his militia leaders that they too would be wise to avoid a conflict with the Americans. The question Sadr will face from his own supporters is why they must hide as their government cooperates with the Americans? This is the reason he has withdrawn his ministers.
Trading the Mahdi Army for the US Army
The balance of power in Baghdad has in fact shifted since Maliki took office. The prime minister no longer depends on the goodwill of Muqtada al-Sadr. When the security offensive began in February, Maliki essentially traded one militia for another -- the Mahdi Army for the US Army. George W. Bush has placed all of his bets on Maliki, and this alliance will hold up, at least until the US Congress foils Bush's Iraq plans or Maliki loses the support of the majority in Baghdad. But this is unlikely to happen, with both the Americans and Iraq's Shiite clerics standing behind Maliki.
Does this mean that the withdrawal of his ministers
spells the beginning of the end of Muqtada al-Sadr's
political career? Certainly not, because Sadr -- as a
rally by hundreds of thousands of his supporters in Najaf
last week demonstrated -- still has a broad base of
support, probably the broadest of all political leaders
in postwar Iraq. Besides, Sadr is a flexible politician
and not a fanatic like al-Qaida leaders, including Abu
Musab al-Zarqawi, who was killed last June. In April 2004
Sadr, the Shiite leader, supported the Sunni uprising
against the US Army in Fallujah, in December 2005 he took
part in the elections and in last week's anti-American
rally he ordered his supporters to take to the streets
carrying nothing but Iraqi flags -- and not portraits of
himself, which could frighten off nationalist Sunnis.
Muqtada al-Sadr is billing himself as a Shiite Iraqi
nationalist -- as someone who opposes the Americans but
is also against his fellow Shiites' demands for secession
of the Shiite south. Although he is far from being in
control of all his cohorts and perhaps even tolerates
their incendiary acts, he remains true, at least in his
speeches, to a phrase coined by his father-in-law,
Mohammed Bakr al-Sadr: "I am for you, my son --
whether you are a Shiite or a Sunni, a Kurd or an
Arab."
Unless he, like so many in his family, falls victim to an assassination, Muqtada al-Sadr will remain a decisive figure in Iraq. "One can do business with him," the former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafik Hariri, who was murdered in 2005, once said about Lebanese Shiite leader Hassan Nasrallah. Iraqi politicians are quietly saying similar things about Sadr. It is quite possible that the withdrawal of his ministers could be part of doing business with Sadr. Prime Minister Maliki, at least, welcomed the step by "His Eminence Muqtada al-Sadr." As usual in the Middle East, it will take a while before it becomes apparent whether the deal was worth it -- and who benefited from it.
Translated from the German by Christopher Sultan
SPIEGEL 360: Our Full Coverage of Iraq
CIA "drilled holes" in diplomat's feet
Wed, 11 Apr 2007 12:16:07 The recently released
Iranian diplomat who had been seized by Iraqi security
forces says he endured torture at the hands of the CIA
while in custody.
Jalal Sharafi, the second secretary of Iran's embassy in
Iraq, was released April 3, more than two months after
armed gunmen wearing uniforms of the elite Iraqi Commando
Battalion abducted the diplomat in central Baghdad.
The head of the International Committee of the Red Cross
(ICRC) delegation in Iraq, Peter Stocker, and Iraq's
ambassador to Iran, Mohammad Majid Al-Sheikh, have
visited Sharafi at an Iranian hospital, where he is being
treated for injuries he sustained while in U.S. custody
in Iraq.
Last February, Jalal Sharafi was reportedly carrying a
videogame, a gift for his daughter, when he found himself
surrounded by what were described as Iraqi forces driving
U.S. military vehicles.
The Iraqi ambassador to Iran and the ICRC representative
are now said to be studying Sharafi's medical file since
his release, which reportedly reveals scars on the
Iranian diplomat's body allegedly left by CIA personnel
and Iraqi forces.
Jalal Sharafi, who is said to still bear signs of his
torture, had earlier stated that U.S. forces were
involved in his seizure and detention in Iraq, and that
CIA officers took part in his interrogation and torture.
Sharafi has reportedly told the ICRC representative that
he endured excruciating pain at the hands of his
torturers during the first 15 days of his capture.
The Iranian diplomat was reportedly left with a broken
nose, scars to his neck and deep scars as well as severe
bruising on his back.
Sharafi's medical record also indicates that he sustained
injuries to his ear and suffered intestinal bleeding.
According to Sharafi, these were among just some of the
torture that the second secretary of Iran's embassy in
Iraq endured while in U.S. custody in Iraq.
Perhaps the most graphic incidence of torture, however,
was the "holes" that were "drilled"
into Sharafi's feet while he remained in custody, an act
that the former detained diplomat says was the most
painful torture he experienced at the hands of his
captors.
Sharafi says that his captors intensified their torture
after he insisted that Iran merely has official relations
with the Iraqi government and denied that Tehran was
involved in insurgent activity.
"They intensified [the] torture and tortured me
through different methods day and night, Sharafi,"
told reporters on his return to Iran.
SO/MR/BG
Footage refutes Brit
sailors' claims
Mon, 09 Apr 2007 12:22:01
New footage released from Iran's Arabic satellite TV
channel Al-Alam refutes claims made by 15 released
British naval officers of being under pressure in Iran.
The eight sailors and seven marines who were detained
after illegally entering Iran's territorial waters were
shown wearing track suits and playing chess and table
tennis while in custody.
Different video clips also showed the detained officers
watching soccer on television. The British naval crew
could be heard laughing and chatting in the video.
Iran believes the footage is a clear indicator that the
detained Briti
sh naval officers enjoyed complete liberty during
their detention, which contradicts claims of mistreatment
made by some of the officers after arriving in Britain.
The spokesman for Iran's Ministry of Foreign Affairs,
Mohammad-Ali Hosseini had previously stated that the
immediate transfer of the marines to a military base and
reading from 'dictated instructions' and claims of
mistreatment cannot damage the existing evidence which
clearly indicates that the British military violated
Iran's territorial waters.
According to Hosseini, "theatrical propaganda cannot
conceal the mistake made by British military on violation
of Iran's territorial waters and their repeated illegal
entry into the country."
The sailors and marines were captured in the Persian Gulf
on March 23, 2007 and freed on April 4 by Iranian
President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad..
iraq's oil finances:Von
Sponeck reported that a large chunk of the money
generated from Iraq’s oil, 55 percent, went to fund
the UN’s own inadequate “humanitarian”
programs. Much of the rest was taken by the UN
compensation commission, entrusted in handling claims of
damages made by those allegedly harmed by the Iraqi
invasion of Kuwait. According to von Sponeck, the Iraqi
oil pie was so large, there was plenty for everyone:
Kuwait, Jordan, Turkey, and all the rest. But most
ironically, the commission awarded a large sum of money
to two Israeli kibbutzim in the Occupied Syrian Golan
Heights, for allegedly losing some of their income due to
the fact that the war damaged the tourism industry in
Israel.
www.angryarab.blogspot.com