Informed Comment

31 Dead, 108 Wounded in Hillah Blasts
Basra Insecure

Suicide bombers in the Shiite city of Hillah about an hour’s drive south of Baghdad killed at least 31 persons and wounded 108 on Monday. Al-Zaman says one bomber targeted recruits to the Iraqi security forces standing in line for a medical examination. Another hit recently fired security men who had been let go and who were demonstrating because they said they were still owed back pay. It should be remembered that these bombs inevitably kill a lot of civilian by-standers.

On Sunday night, one Iraqi soldier was killed and 4 were wounded in Baiji north of Baghdad in a bombing directed at a joint US/ Iraqi patrol in the west of the city. In the eastern part of the city of Balad, another Iraqi soldier was killed by a mortar strike. Two bodies of drivers were discovered at Sahliyah, who had been kidnapped by guerrillas last week. Guerrillas killed Col. Ahmad Salih al-Barzinji Sunday night after he had been kidnapped in Kirkuk.

In Irbil, guerrillas subjected the South Korean contingent to mortar fire for the first time, but did not appear to hit anything of value. On Sunday, the US military sweep of Hadithah in western Iraq came to an end.

An Iraqi army force detained (al-Zaman says “kidnapped”) the Sunni cleric Shaikh Nawfal Kadhim al-Juburi, the prayer leader at the al-Salam mosque in Nahrawan in southeast Baghdad along with 35 worshippers in a dawn raid on the mosque. The raid was forcefully condemned by the Sunni Pious Endowments Board.

Al-Hayat Muhsin Abdul Hamid, a former president of Iraq under the American Coalition Provisional Authority and the leader of the Iraqi Islamic Party who was mistakenly arrested by the US military and then released, said late Monday that he considered the arrest to have been “deliberate.” Party spokesmen said that the arrest was a piece of American “stupidity” aimed at alienating the Sunni Arabs from political participation. Meanwhile, the other major religious group among the Sunnis, the Association of Muslim Scholars, condemned the arrest as proof that the elected Iraqi government “is not sovereign over the country” and said that Abdul Hamid’s detention “underlined the power of the Occupier.” They added, “no Iraqi is safe under the shadow of presence” of the occupying forces. An AMS spokesman said that the government’s acceptance of this situation had multiplied the opportunities for the occupiers to intervene in Iraqi affairs. The AMS called for a united Iraqi front that would stop the occupying forces in their tracks. Adnan al-Dulaimi, another Sunni spokesman, said that there is a hidden hand plotting to marginalize the Sunni Arabs.

Abdul Hamid said he still did not know why he had been taken into custody along with his sons. He said, “American troops invaded my home at 4 am. They handcuffed me and led me to an unknown place, then transported me by helicopter to yet another location, where I was interrogated all day long about various matters.” The US military apologized to Abdul Hamid for the inconvenience.

Abdul Aziz al-Hakim, leader of the victorious United Iraqi Alliance list that dominates parliament, complained recently that the guerrillas blowing up things in Iraq are just prolonging the US military presence in Iraq. He also complained that the US is stopping Iraq from buying heavy weaponry (I had been wondering where the new Iraqi tank corps was. There is a small one, but it is rudimentary). I conclude that al-Hakim is eager to get rid of the Americans, and feels frustrated that he cannot proceed with it until the Sunni Arab rejectionists stop their war and until he can find a way to get tanks and heavy artillery for his own forces so as to reduce dependence on the US.

Al-Hakim also leads the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI), which was formed in 1982 in Tehran under the sponsorship of Ayatollah Khomeini and which had its HQ in Iran until 2003. It is therefore no surprise that Iran and Iraq are now moving steadily toward better and better relations, including plans for a rail link from Khorramshahr to Basra and another from Kermanshah to Diyalah province. Iran and Iraq will do a billion dollars worth of trade this year, but the number is likely to mushroom in coming years, especially if the security situation allows Shiite pilgrims to come to Najaf and Karbala. Iran expects trade barriers to be removed, and has expressed willingness to sell Iraq electricity.

Rory Carroll of the Guardian reports from Basra on the views of its police chief, who had been appointed by Iyad Allawi:

General Hassan al-Sade said half of his 13,750-strong force was secretly working for political parties in Iraq’s second city and that some officers were involved in ambushes. Other officers were politically neutral but had no interest in policing and did not follow his orders, he told the Guardian. “I trust 25% of my force, no more.” The claim jarred with Basra’s reputation as an oasis of stability and security and underlined the burgeoning influence of Shia militias in southern Iraq. “The militias are the real power in Basra and they are made up of criminals and bad people,” said the general.

It gradually becomes apparent, though, that al-Sade’s jaundiced view of the situation in Basra is that of an ex-Baathist nervous about the rising influence of the Sadrists and the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq, who are replacing Allawi’s ex-Baathists with their own men in the police force.

Carroll would have done his readers a favor to have mentioned who won the provincial elections in Basra on January 30. Of 41 seats, 20 went to the Shiite Islamists of the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI). Another 16 or so went to the Virtue Party or Fadilah, which follows the late ayatollah Muhammad Sadiq al-Sadr. Carroll, it seems to me, is likely confusing Fadilah with the followers of Muqtada al-Sadr. In fact, they follow Muhammad al-Yaqubi, a more low-key rival of Muqtada’s who studied with Muqtada’s father. Fadilah controls Basra city hall because it put together a coalition that gave it 21 seats, so it can outvote SCIRI. The two victors of the democratic elections, in any case, are now appointing the police, which are obviously loyal to the parties rather than to an ex-Baathist police chief installed by the widely disliked ex-Baathist and old time CIA asset Iyad Allawi.

Ash-Sharq al-Awsat reports Tuesday that the Ministry of Interior has established a fifth branch of its special forces, called the Panther Brigade, in Basra. The ministry is now controlled by the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq, and some Sunni leaders have claimed that its special forces are tools of Shiite dominance over Sunnis. Al-Sade may also worry about being outflanked by this Federal force, which has a special charge of fighting terrorism and protecting Federal property.

So I come away not knowing if al-Sade is accurately reporting a crime problem in Basra or is just expressing the sour grapes of an ex-Baathist whose prime minister lost the election in a crushing defeat, and who seems a little unlikely to survive in his post because of the current Iraqi spoils system.

“Yoshihiko Motoyama: Lawless private militaries milking Iraq conflict” explains the private paramilitaries operating in Iraq.

Now the senior Iraqi physicians are fleeing the country. More good news.

This article on unmanned aerial vehicles or UAV’s and their military usefulness in Iraq begs the question of why, if they are so great, there are still all those bombings.

Reuters profiles the neighborhood watch program in the northern Kurdish city of Sulaimaniyah. It is a great idea and has had some success there, but it probably cannot be done in the Sunni Arab areas where it is most needed, for two reasons. 1) People are too afraid and intimidated to call in, for fear of reprisals and 2) a large number of people approve of the Iraqi guerrillas, to whom they refer as the “resistance.”

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Iraqi Islamic Party Leader Released

The US military has released Muhsin Abd al-Hamid, the leader of the Iraqi Islamic Party. The IIP runs the provincial council in Anbar and is the only major Sunni Arab religious party that has generally been willing to cooperate with the Americans. Abd al-Hamid served on the American-appointed Interim Governing Council.

His arrest had provoked major protests.

Reader Sally Quinn kindly sends a translation of a French report from Le Monde via Reuters/AFP:

“The Islamic Party, in a communiqué, demanded an explanation for the raid on the Baghdad residence of its leader as well as an official apology. “They must also release two of this three sons, Mokdad and Assayed, who are still beikng held along with several houseguests and bodyguards, said the party without indicating their numbers . . . Although critical of the current Shi’a-dominated government, the Islamic Party has not excluded its participation in the drafting of the permanent Constitution . . . recently the party has taken a position against the blind violence
targeting the populace and the security forces while criticizing the arrest of Sunni
clerics, the warhorses of the powerful Committee of Iraqi Ulema, which refuses to
participate in negotiations surrounding the drafting of the Constitution . . . Following his release, Mr. Abdel Hamid underscored the humiliation to which he was subjected by US soldiers, saying that they handcuffed him and interrogated him for hours.”

Prime Minister Ibrahim Jaafari and President Jalal Talabani complained bitterly about the US action and apparently were not consulted about the arrest. They pointed out that the US keeps saying it wants to involve the Sunni leadership, but that arrests like this one just drive away even the moderates. The initial reports also talked about US troops confiscating money. Basically they kicked down his door, rifled through his things, hooded him, and dragged him away. There was no arrest warrant, no consultation with the supposedly sovereign Iraqi government, and apparently no knowledge of who Abd al-Hamid really is.

Susan Hu is leading a good discussion of the SNAFU over at Daily Kos. I’ve been watching CNN for hours and there is nothing about this.

A keen observer of Iraq’s legal and economic scene writes in with regard to whether the US military was legally justified in arresting Abd al-Hamid in the first place.

“Discretion may be the better part of valour, but it is quite clear:

For starters, there is this:

‘Article 15.

(B) Police, investigators, or other governmental authorities may not violate the sanctity of private residences, whether these authorities belong to the federal or regional governments, governorates, municipalities, or local administrations, unless a judge or investigating magistrate has issued a search warrant in accordance with applicable law on the basis of information provided by a sworn individual who knew that bearing false witness would render him liable to punishment. Extreme exigent circumstances, as determined by a court of competent jurisdiction, may justify a warrantless search, but such exigencies shall be narrowly construed. In the event that a warrantless search is carried out in the absence of an extreme exigent circumstance, the evidence so seized, and any other evidence found derivatively from such search, shall be inadmissible in connection with a criminal charge, unless the court determines that the person who carried out the warrantless search believed reasonably and in good faith that the search was in accordance with the law.’

The National Emergency Law makes clear that only “government officials” may arrest people. (Even if that were not clear, the requirement of a “court order” would seem unambiguous. Could there possibly be a constitution-type law that says that a court order is required for “government officials,” but anyone else, willy-nilly, who has colorable authority from somewhere else can “arrest” people?)

As far as Iraqi law is concerned, there is no question, and any question there might be could be resolved by an act of the National Assembly.

The authority of the MNF derives from SCR 1546 and an alleged “partnership,” with respect to which there is no partnership agreement (normally legally fatal), which authorizes “all necessary measures,” but one would have to ask the members of the Security Council what that would mean in the current context.

As to whether a Security Council resolution is superior to a national interim “constitution,” I leave for another day. Strict constructionists like Senator Coleman might think not.”

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30 Dead, Dozens Wounded by Guerrillas
In Response to Operation Lightning

Guerrillas in Baghdad fought determinedly against the 40,000 Iraqi soldiers fielded to crack down on violence in Baghdad. AFP writes,

“Four car bombs in and around the capital killed 16 people, most of them security personnel, Sunday, in a swift response to Iraq’s widest homegrown clampdown since the fall of Saddam Hussein over two years ago. Nine soldiers taking part in Operation Lightning died in a suicide car bombing at their roadblock just south of the capital, while two policemen were killed when a suicide car bomber targeted their patrol in southwestern Baghdad. In western Baghdad, a car bomb targeting police commandos killed three people and wounded 20, an interior ministry source said, adding that police had then fought a firefight with men in the area. An earlier suicide bombing near the oil ministry left two dead, while violence elsewhere claimed the lives of a British soldier and seven Iraqis.”

John Burns of the NYT says that the guerrillas are putting up a vigorous fight against government troops and that 14 died in a pitched battle between the two that lasted for hours.

US troops arrested Muhsin Abd al-Hamid Monday morning. He is the head of the (Sunni) Iraqi Islamic Party and had served on the Interim Governing Council appointed by Bremer. The IIP initially announced that they would take part in the parliamentary elections, then declared neutrality because of the November, 2004, Fallujah campaign.

Forbes reports, “Hamid, leader of the Iraq Islamic Party, was hooded and taken away after US troops broke windows in his home and allegedly mistreated him and his sons, the party official said. “

Actually it is not clear under the provisional Iraqi constitution that it is legal for US troops just to go arrest people.

The arrest of a major Sunni leader will cerainly have an impact on the guerrilla movement. Journalists are already talking about a new potential civil war among the sects.

Will write more on Monday afternoon.

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No God But God

Max Rodenbeck makes odd statements and basic errors in his review of Reza Aslan’s “No God but God” on the struggle between moderates and extremists in the Muslim world.

Rodenbeck writes:

“Aslan’s wish to emphasize the tolerant, merciful side of Islam can lead to pitfalls. It is not particularly comforting to learn that when the prophet triumphantly returned to Mecca, the city of his birth that had rejected him, there were no forced conversions and ”only” six men and four women were put to the sword.”

First of all, we don’t know that Muhammad had anyone at all killed when he took Mecca in 630. The sources reporting this are late, 200 years after the fact, and the authors use terms like “dhukira anna” (“it was mentioned that”) instead of giving tight citations as they usually do. My teacher, the great historian of early Islamic sources, Marsden Jones, flatly disbelieved the few execution stories based on the wording of the sources.

Muhammad was a merchant of Mecca from a noble family, who began receiving what he interpreted as revelations from God around 610 A.D. (C.E. or Common Era). He began preaching the one God, but was persecuted by the pagan Meccan elite. In 622 he emigrated to the nearby Yathrib, which later became known as Medina, just ahead of an attempt to assassinate him. Even in Medina, the Meccan elite came after him, intending to kill him and wipe out his religion. He and the Muslims fought back, and

they ultimately won.

It is certainly the case that Muhammad did not have his primary enemies killed, and did not visit vengeance on the city that had tried to murder him and wipe out his religion through active warfare over more than a decade. Aslan’s praise for Muhammad in this regard is a commonplace and completely appropriate.

Here are some instances of prophets not behaving with Muhammad’s magnanimity:

Exod.17

1. [9] And Moses said to Joshua, “Choose for us men, and go out, fight with Am’alek; tomorrow I will stand on the top of the hill with the rod of God in my hand.”
2. [10] So Joshua did as Moses told him, and fought with Am’alek; and Moses, Aaron, and Hur went up to the top of the hill.
3. [13] And Joshua mowed down Am’alek and his people with the edge of the sword.
4. [14] And the LORD said to Moses, “Write this as a memorial in a book and recite it in the ears of Joshua, that I will utterly blot out the remembrance of Am’alek from under heaven.”

Or how about this from Chapter 8 of the Book of Joshua?

“# [18] Then the LORD said to Joshua, “Stretch out the javelin that is in your hand toward Ai; for I will give it into your hand.” And Joshua stretched out the javelin that was in his hand toward the city.
# [21] And when Joshua and all Israel saw that the ambush had taken the city, and that the smoke of the city went up, then they turned back and smote the men of Ai.
# [23] But the king of Ai they took alive, and brought him to Joshua.
# [26] For Joshua did not draw back his hand, with which he stretched out the javelin, until he had utterly destroyed all the inhabitants of Ai.
# [27] Only the cattle and the spoil of that city Israel took as their booty, according to the word of the LORD which he commanded Joshua.
# [28] So Joshua burned Ai, and made it for ever a heap of ruins, as it is to this day.
# [29] And he hanged the king of Ai on a tree until evening; and at the going down of the sun Joshua commanded, and they took his body down from the tree, and cast it at the entrance of the gate of the city, and raised over it a great heap of stones, which stands there to this day.”

So actually, yes, Muhammad’s treatment of Mecca was remarkably gracious, and it is weird that Rodenback should have so much trouble acknowledging it. Muhammad did not have his opponents among the Meccan elite hanged, did not kill all the Meccans, did not raze the city. The scribes that wrote the Joshua story many centuries later depicted him as a bloodthirsty mass murderer egged on by Moses, his mentor in wiping people out. All those Westerners who go on about how much better the Bible is than the Koran apparently haven’t actually read much of the Bible.

Then Rodenbeck writes:

“The killing and enslavement of Jewish tribes at Medina receives a similarly light gloss, although Aslan may be right to point out that their ”Jewishness” may have been rather vaguely defined.”

Rodenbeck is mixing up several distinct narratives here. And, again, we don’t have early sources. The late sources we do have from a couple of centuries later do not agree with one another on key details and may well reflect Muslim-Jewish relations in post-conquest Iraq. But the narratives we do have suggest that their authors thought that the Jewish tribes in Medina (who are depicted as joining in pagan rituals) initially pledged neutrality in the Muslim/Meccan struggle, but later many of them sided against Muhammad. Personally, I think such narratives are very suspect (see, e.g., Rizwi S. Faizer, “Muhammad and the Medinan Jews,” International Journal of Middle East Studies, Vol. 28, No. 4 (Nov., 1996), pp. 463-489 ).

Then Rodenbeck writes:

“Even archconservative Saudi Arabia is slowly evolving. In April, its top religious authority declared that forcing a woman to marry against her will was an imprisonable offense.”

Rodenbeck seems not to know that in traditional Islamic law women were full persons under the law, with the sort of property rights that Western women lacked until about 1850. Indeed, I suspect that Muslim women were the wealthiest and most powerful women in the world between 632 and 1850 or so. It has been the general stance of Muslim jurists through the centuries that a girl cannot be married off to someone without her consent. Ibn Abbas says that when a girl came to the Prophet and said that her father forced her to marry without her consent, Muhammad gave her the choice of annuling the marriage or keeping it. (Ibn Hanbal No. 2469). It wasn’t just an ideal, either. Judith Tucker found a Hanafi jurist of 18th century Palestine maintaining that it was wrong to marry a girl off to someone against her will. Obviously, some fathers have married daughters off against their will, but that is a matter of patriarchal custom, not Islamic principle.

You can’t treat Muhammad as a historical figure in a vacuum or by reading the sources naively. And you can’t write knowledgably on modern Islamic reform if you don’t know what Muslim authorities have written on issues in the medieval and early modern period.

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43 Iraqis Dead in 2 Days
Shiite Pilgrims Massacred
Killings in Sinjar, Hilla

Wire services report that the unconventional sectarian civil war in Iraq continued on Saturday. Guerrillas in Qaim executed 10 Shiite pilgrims originally from Diwaniyah returning from Syria. The shrine of Sayyidah Zaynab, the granddaughter of the Prophet Muhammad and the sister of martyred Imam Husain, is located near Damascus and likely the pilgrims had been up to visit it. If there is anything calculated to provoke Sunni-Shiite civil war, it is the murder of people who just came back from a religious pilgrimage to a sacred Shiite site.

In addition, two suicide bombers killed at least five Iraqis and wounded dozens more when they set off their payloads at a join US/Iraqi army base near the northern town of Sinjar close to the Syrian border.

Guerrillas killed four Iraqi soldiers and wounded a fifth when they shot up the car carrying them near Hilla, a Shiite city south of Baghdad.

It was announced by Iraqi authorities only on Saturday that there had been bombings in Tikrit and killings in Babil province south of Baghdad on Sunday that left a dozen or so dead.

The Scotsman reports that “A roadside bomb blast targeting a US convoy in Mosul killed three Iraqi civilians, including a 10-year-old boy.”

It also reports that the Association of Muslim Scholars (Sunni) and the Badr Corps paramilitary of the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI, Shiite) have reached an initial agreement to back off their earlier confrontation witon one another and to “serve the nation.” The agreement came about through the mediateion of Muqtada al-Sadr and his aides, Shiite nationalists who are probably on friendlier terms with the hard line Sunnis than they are with the Badr Corps, their rival. Another meeting of the two sides is planned.

About 1,000 US and Iraqi troops continued their find and destroy operation against guerrillas in Haditha in western Iraq.

Tidbits from the Iraqi press via BBC World Monitoring for May 28:

“Dar al-Salam on 26 May publishes on page 2 a 250-word report on the statement issued by the University Professors Association condemning the US “occupation” forces for violating the Al-Anbar University campus. . .

Al-Zaman publishes on the front page a 220-word report citing the newspaper’s reporter as saying yesterday, 27 May, that Iraqi security forces backed by multinational forces are imposing a tight siege around Buhriz district in the Diyala Governorate, in a search for specific individuals. Al-Zaman publishes on page 3 a 150-word report citing police sources in Al-Diwaniyah confirming the arrest of a gang involved in forging official documents . . .

Al-Ufuq carries on page 4 a 200-word report stating that the Education Ministry has reinstated 88 teachers in the Karbala Education Directorate. [These were Shiites fired by Saddam for not being loyal Baathists.] . . .

Al-Mashriq publishes on page 6 a 600-word article commenting on the fatwas being issued by religious authorities in Iraq and urging the Iraqi public to listen to their conscience and not only to these fatwas.”

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