Informed Comment

Deteriorating Security in Diyala

From Reuters: reports on major violence in the ongoing Iraqi Civil War on Tuesday:

‘ BAGHDAD – A car bomb killed at least 25 people and wounded 65 in the northern Baghdad district of Husa[y]niya, police said.

HILLA – A suicide bomber in a car killed at least 12 people and wounded 36 near a car dealership . . .

BAGHDAD – A bomb killed nine people and wounded 10 others in a bakery in eastern Baghdad . . .

BAGHDAD – Two women employees of the Ministry of Interior were killed and four policemen were wounded by a rocket which landed near the ministry, police said.’

The Ministry of Interior is in charge of domestic security.

It was revealed that a GI had been killed on Monday, Memorial Day.

From the USG Open Source Center:

‘ Diyala Governor Warns of Deteriorating Security Situation
Report by Samah al-Makhzumi: “Letter Urges Government To Deal With Deteriorating Security Situation in Ba’qubah; Diyala Governor Threatens To Declare State of Emergency and Expose Collaborating Officials”

Al-Zaman

Wednesday, May 31, 2006 T19:22:37Z

Diyala Governor Ra’d al-Mullah Jawad has urged the government to take precautions against the deteriorating security situation in the governorate quickly in order to avoid the situation deteriorating further, as it is getting worse day by day. Jawad has also called on the Advisory Council to suspend its work in order to attract the central government’s attention to the grave danger engulfing the governorate. He confirmed that he will declare a state of emergency in the governorate based on a security plan.

At a press conference attended by Al-Zaman yesterday, 28 May, Jawad confirmed that he had sent a letter to Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki and the parliament warning them of the dangerous security situation in the governorate and urging them to “defy the large-scale sectarian campaign that the governorate, which has become a cradle for terrorism, is currently witnessing.”

In his letter, Jawad confirmed: “The situation in Diyala Governorate is very difficult. We lack capabilities and authority.” He urged officials, parliament members, clerics, and tribal chiefs “to shoulder responsibility and take into consideration the best interests of the governorate.”

Jawad explained that “uncontrolled violence is extending like a crescent from Salah al-Din Governorate towards Al-Jizani, Hibhib, Al-Hadid, and Khan Bani Sa’d Districts and then to Southern Buhriz District towards Baladruz and finally Al-Muqdadiyah District.” He confirmed the discovery a few days ago of weapons caches in Al-Muqdadiyah that contained enough weapons to supply a complete army brigade.

Jawad accused administrative officials of involvement in acts of violence and added: “We will speak to them frankly and if they do not stop their involvement, we will not keep silent.” Jawad demanded that “the wider and larger authorities confront and expose these officials.” He confirmed the displacement of 40 families and the killing of over 70 people in Ba’qubah last week alone.

Jawad revealed that several officials, including Al-Wajihiyah administrator Isma’il Alwan and the director of public relations and complaints, have requested to be transferred from the governorate due to the escalation in violence.

Jawad threatened that he will declare a state of emergency if the government does not take action. He attributed the delay in imposing curfew in the districts witnessing turmoil in the governorate to the final examinations.

Meanwhile, Diyala Advisory Council Chairman Ibrahim Bajilan and Deputy Governor for Technical Affairs Imad Jalil escaped an assassination attempt when a roadside bomb explosion targeted their convoy on its way from Khanaqin to Ba’qubah. An official source in the governorate administration confirmed that a bodyguard was killed and six others were injured in the incident. The source confirmed that unidentified gunmen attacked the convoy after the explosion.

Unidentified gunmen assassinated a peddler selling children’s clothing in the middle of Ba’qubah’s market. Two civilians were injured in a bomb explosion in Al-Khalis District. Yesterday morning, a police patrol discovered three heads separated from the bodies, including one of an old man, near a highway in Abd-al-Hamid Village in Had Miksir District. Gunmen broke into a house in Al-Gatun District in Ba’qubah yesterday. The tenant and his two boys were killed and his wife was injured in the attack.

In related news, US forces raided a house in Al-Mafraq District in Ba’qubah and arrested five family members, including an eighty year old man, according to the district’s inhabitants. They confirmed that US troops destroyed the furniture and other facilities in the house during the raid, in which US helicopters took part.

(Description of Source: Baghdad Al-Zaman in Arabic — Baghdad-based independent Iraqi daily providing coverage of Iraqi, Arab, and international issues, headed by Iraqi journalist Sa’d al-Bazzaz; Internet version available at: http://www.azzaman.com)

Compiled and distributed by NTIS, US Dept. of Commerce. All rights reserved.

City/Source: Baghdad
DIALOG Update Date: 20060531; 16:32:21 EST ‘

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Kabul under Curfew after Anti-US, anti-Karzai Riots
14 Dead, over 100 Wounded
50 Killed in US Airstrike

“We have conducted a thorough assessment of our military and reconstruction needs in Iraq, and also in Afghanistan. I will soon submit to Congress a request for $87 billion. The request will cover ongoing military and intelligence operations in Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere, which we expect will cost $66 billion over the next year. This budget request will also support our commitment to helping the Iraqi and Afghan people rebuild their own nations, after decades of oppression and mismanagement. We will provide funds to help them improve security. And we will help them to restore basic services, such as electricity and water, and to build new schools, roads, and medical clinics. This effort is essential to the stability of those nations, and therefore, to our own security. Now and in the future, we will support our troops and we will keep our word to the more than 50 million people of Afghanistan and Iraq.”
- George W. Bush

The Bush administration is in the midst of “imperial overstretch” on a grand scale. Taking on al-Qaeda and the Taliban, convincing Pakistan to change its policies, and reconstructing Afghanistan would have been a tough enough job. It might not have been possible even with the investment of enormous resources and personnel. Afghanistan is large and rugged and desperately poor. Bad characters are still hiding out in the region, who have proved that they can reach into the United States and hit the Pentagon itself.

Instead of doing the job, Bush ran off to Iraq almost immediately. Even as our brave troops were being killed at Operation Anaconda in Afghanistan in spring of 2002, Centcom commander Tommy Franks was telling a visiting Senator Bob Graham that the US “was no longer engaged in a war in Afghanistan” or words to that effect, and that military and intelligence personnel were being deployed to Iraq. The US troops in Afghanistan would have been shocked and disturbed to discover that in the Centcom commander’s mind, they were no longer his priority and no longer even at war! As for money, Iraq has hogged the lion’s share. What has been spent on reconstruction in Afghanistan is piddling.

Bush’s Iraq imbroglio, or “Bush’s Furnace,” as history might well call his trillion-dollar purchase, has sucked up money and resources on a vast scale and left US personnel in Central and South Asia to struggle along on the cheap. Afghanistan defeated the British Empire in its heyday twice, and is not an enterprise that can be accomplished without significant resources. Now the chickens are coming home to roost.

Monday’s riots in Kabul, in which altogether 14 died and over 100 were wounded and during which thousands thronged the streets chanting “Death to America”, also produced violent attacks and gunfire throughout the city, with hotel windows being sprayed with machine gun fire. The protests were sparked by a traffic accident. But they have other roots.

The US military presence in Afghanistan has quietly been pumped up from 19,000 to 23,000 troops.

A fresh US airstrike in Helmand killed some 50 Afghans on Monday Over 400 Afghans have been killed by US bombing and military actions in only the past two weeks. While most of these are Pushtun nativist guerrillas (coded by the US as “Taliban”), some have demonstrably been innocent civilians. (Taliban are, properly speaking, mostly Afghan orphans and displaced youths who got their education in neo-Deobandi seminaries in Pakistan and were backed by the Pakistani Inter-Services Intelligence. It is not clear that those now fighting the US in southern Afghanistan are actually in the main Taliban in this technical sense.)

Whoever they are, the Pushtun guerrillas have been waging a very effective terror campaign in the countryside around Qandahar, and have launched a fierce series of spring offensives. They wounded 5 Canadian troops on Monday, something US mass media anchors somehow have trouble getting past their lips. (Another 5 had been wounded last week, and several Canadian and French troops have been killed, not to mention US troops.)

A recent US airstrike that killed 16 children, women and noncombatant men provoked an enormous outcry in Afghanistan, and sparked President Hamid Karzai to begin a presidential inquiry into it.

While most anti-US actions in Afghanistan come from the Pushtun ethnic group, these Kabul protests, which paralyzed the capital and resulted in the imposition of a curfew, heavily involved Tajiks. Kabul is a largely Tajik city, and the Tajiks mostly hated the Taliban with a passion, and many high officials in the Karzai government have been Tajik. So they haven’t been as upset with the US invasion and presence as have been many Pushtuns, especially those Pushtuns who either supported the Taliban or just can’t abide foreign troops in their country (who have moreover installed the Tajiks in power . . .) The demonstrators Monday carried posters of Ahmad Shah Massoud, the Tajik leader of the Northern Alliance who had played a major role in expelling Soviet troops in the late 1980s and then fought the Taliban tenaciously before being assassinated shortly before September 11, 2001. Significant numbers of Tajiks are clearly now turning against the US, and that is a very bad sign indeed. Al-Hayat’s Jamal Ismail in Islamabad suggests that some of the Tajik discontent derives from the way Karzai has eased out Northern Alliance Tajik leaders such as Marshal Muhammad Fahim and former cabinet minister Yunus Qanuni, reducing Tajik dominance of the government in the name of ethnic diversity (and of mitigating Pushtun anger over the imbalance). There have also been attempts to limit the Tajik presence in the new Afghan Army, which is some 60,000 strong (some sources say 80,000). The CIA factbook says that Pushtuns are 42 % of the population and Tajiks 27 %. Pushtuns have usually supplied the top rulers.

Despite Bush administration pledges to reconstruct the country, only six percent of Afghans have access to electricity. Less than 20 percent have access to clean water. Although the gross domestic product has grown by 80 percent since the nadir of 2001, and may be $7 billion next year, most of that increase comes from the drug trade or from foreign assistance. (Some of the increase also comes from the end of a decade-long drought in the late 90s and early 00s, which had reduced the country’s arable land by 50 percent. The coming of the rains again is good luck but nothing to do with policy). About half the economy of Afghanistan is generated by the poppy crop, which becomes opium and then heroin in Europe. Afghanistan produces 87 percent of the world’s opium and heroin, and no other country comes close in its dedication of agricultural land to drug production (over 200,000 hectares).

The government lives on international welfare. Some 92 percent of Afghan government expenditures come from foreign assistance. The Afghan government is worse at collecting taxes than fourth world countries in subsaharan Africa. Unemployment remains at 35 percent. Unemployment is estimated to have been 25 percent in the US during the Great Depression.

The great danger is renewed Muslim radicalism and the reemergence of al-Qaeda, combined with a narco-terrorism that could make Colombia’s FARC look like minor players.

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60 Dead, including US Major, 2 British Soldiers, CBS Crew
Parliamentary Delegation Planned to Basra

The FCC will investigate the placing by the Bush administration of “video news releases” full of “good news” about Iraq on US television channels, passing them off as real news. Having defeated the Soviet Union, the US government seems increasingly intent on emulating its domestic security policies.

Wire services are reporting between 50 and 60 deaths from guerrilla violence in Iraq on Monday. The dead including two British members of a CBS camera crew embedded with the 4th ID in Baghdad along with a US army captain and an interpreter, and two British soldiers in Basra (another two British soldiers were injured).

Three massive bombs shook the area of Adhamiyah and Kadhimiyah [Kazimiyah] in northern Baghdad.

Adhamiyah, still from all accounts a Baath Party stronghold in the capital It was hit by an enormous car bomb, killing 12 and wounding 24. Then just a moment later, guerrillas detonated another car bomb, killing 5 and wounding 7.

Then guerrillas blew up a bus in neighboring Kadhimiyah, across the Tigris, killing 7 and wounding 9. Kadhimiyah has a major Shiite shrine.

The Iraqi parliament is concerned about the rising tensions in Basra. Conflicts among the Badr Corps of SCIRI, the Mahdi Army of Muqtada al-Sadr, and the Fadhila or Virtue Party, threaten to break apart what is left of the United Iraqi Alliance, the biggest bloc in parliament, consisting of religious Shiite parties. Likewise, Sunnis in Basra, some of whom have received Saudi funding for militant activities, face increased ethnic cleansing at the hands of Shiites. Hundreds have fled to West Baghdad in recent weeks. Prime Minsiter Nuri al-Maliki may lead a delegation to the country’s second city, including representatives of major Shiite parties and also of the Sunni Arabs, in hopes of calming the fighting and assassinations.

Some of the fighting seems to me to be between Marsh Arab tribes loyal to Muqtada al-Sadr and the Badr Corps of the Supreme Council. An Iraqi from Basra told me that the rumors were that the Marsh Arabs were fighting “Iranian influence” in Basra. Badr is probably being coded as Iranian agents by the nativist Marsh Arabs.

Al-Zaman reports that the Fadhila or Virtue Party has expressed doubt that the new oil minister, Husain Shahristani, can resolve the fuel and electricity problems in Iraq, given that he is a technocrat with no popular base, and no particular experience in the petroleum sector. The Virtue Party, which is mainly based in Basra, had coveted the ministry of petroleum, and had had it in the previous, Jaafari government. It has withdrawn from the government coalition in disappointment and is conducting a work slow-down in the Basra petroleum industry in protest. Iraqi electricity supply has also faced substantial problems recently because of concerted guerrilla sabotage.

Al-Zaman reports from Riyadh that George W. Bush called Saudi Arabia’s King Abdullah on Monday to discuss regional affairs, including The Palestinian question, Iraq, and Iran’s nuclear energy program.

Iraqi widows struggle to survive.

Al-Sharq al-Awsat says that the British military attempted to hold a press conference on Monday, but that the local press refused to come in protest for an earlier incident, in which British troops fired on a Reuters cameraman.

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55 Dead in Civil War
Member of Parliament wounded in Attack

al-Zaman/ DPA: An aide of Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani called [Ar.] Sunday for the Iraqi tribesmen to convene a wide conference in order to find aways of stopping the shedding of blood in Iraq.

US firms bidding on contracts to provide foodstuffs to Iraq might have expected to have an edge. But in fact, Vietnam has won a contract to supply rice to Iraq.

Guerrillas placed a bomb on a bus full of laborers near Baquba, killing 11 and wounding 16 on Monday morning. Aljazeera is saying that the workers were constructing something for the Mojahedin-e Khalq anti-Iranian terrorist group based in northeastern Iraq.

On Sunday, 17 persons were killed in various incidents of the ongoing civil war.

In addition a battle between the Iraqi army and guerrillas or tribesmen at Dulu’iyah north of the capital left 20 Iraqi soldiers and 18 guerrillas dead. (I’d say the guerrillas won that one by two corpses). In total, I count that as 55 dead in political violence.

Guerrillas assassinated the head of the a Sunni tribe at Karabila for cooperating with the Americans against them.

The ministers of defense and interior have still not been appointed.

The parliament decided its members all need armored cars. The press seems to be taking an attitude of ridicule toward this measure, but I see it as a good sign. The parliament should spend $50 million on enabling its members to come to work without fear of being shot dead by guerrillas.

Or maybe they missed this Reuters item today:

‘BAGHDAD – A Shi’ite woman member of parliament, Gufran al- Saidi, was wounded in a shooting incident near Baghdad’s Green Zone, police sources said. They had no further details. Saidi is a supporter of radical cleric Moqtada al-Sadr. ”

Apparently the reporters have forgotten that parliamentarians and candidates for parliament really have been killed by the guerrillas. The sum mentioned is peanuts compared to what private security guards of the sort Westerners in Iraq use would cost. (Maybe only Western lives are important?) And if the parliamentarians wouldn’t even act to save their own lives, how could you hope they would ever accomplish anything at all (wouldn’t that, at least, presumably be important to them?) So much money has been wasted in Iraq, both American and Iraqi, since the fall of the Baath. The defense minister appointed by Iyad Allawi (who was in turn more or less appointed by the Americans) is thought to have embezzled very big bucks, for which there is nothing to show. Armored cars that really exist and help the Iraqi government function? That would be a bargain.

Shiite and Kurdish politicians are trying to reduce the power of the Sunni Arab speaker of the House. The Sunni Arabs only have a vice president, a vice premier, four cabinet seats, and the speaker of the house among high government posts. They are outraged that one of the few nodes of power they have left should now be removed.

AP discusses the pain of Iraq War widows.

Baghdad is broken, with little electricity, water or garbage collection. This according to the SF Chronicle.

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Iran Cleans up in Iraq

Iran is perhaps the only unambiguous winner in the new situation in Iraq, and its foreign minister was basking in the glow on Saturday. On Friday, Iraqi foreign minister Hoshyar Zebari defended Iran’s right to have a civilian nuclear energy program. That can’t be what Washington was going for in backing the new Iraqi government.

Al-Hayat reports that Iranian Foreign Minister Manouchehr Mottaki wrapped up his visit to Iraq by meeting in Najaf with Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani and with the junior cleric and nationalist leader Muqtada al-Sadr, along with numerous other clerics in Najaf and Karbala. He also met in Baghdad with Sunni fundamentalist leader Adnan Dulaimi in an attempt to “reassure” him about Iran’s intentions in Iraq. The representative of Iraqi Foreign Minister Hoshyar Zebari, Labid Abawi, said that Mottaki’s visit was “extremely positive.” He added, “One of our objectives was to underline that Iran is close to Iraq and that it is impossible to bypass it in looking for a resolution of the Iraq question.”

Mottaki reaffirmed that Iran had committed $1 billion in aid to Iraq, and would cooperate in the area of energy production. Mottaki also sent a letter to the tribunal judging Saddam Hussein with a list of charges against him.

Issues the Iraqis brought up with the Iranian official included the need for better border control to stop unauthorized entry of Iranians, as well as combatting weapons smuggling and drug smuggling. The Iranians in turn complained about the infiltration of Iran from Iraq of terrorists from the Mojahedin-e Khalq (MEK) guerrilla movement. Saddam had allowed this terrorist group to establish a base in Iraq, in order to use it to harass the Iranian regime. Although the State Department considers the MEK a terrorist organization, the Department of Defense appears to be giving it free rein in Iraq.

Iranian news of the visit concentrated on the new Iranian consulates that will be established in Iraq.

Al-Sharq al-Awsat reports that Mottaki said Sistani emphasized the necessity of Iraqi national unity, and had avoided using the words “Shiite” and “Sunni.”

Tom Lasseter of Knight Ridder looks at the Shiite militias of the south. His interviewees in the British and US military maintain that Iran is running training camps inside Iran for Iraqi militiamen. (Iran for over two decades had trained the Badr Corps, recruiting from Iraqis who fled Saddam, so such training camps, facilities and expertise are nothing new.) On the other hand, since they have such longstanding and tight relations with Badr, it doesn’t really make much sense for them to arm, fund and train Badr’s potential rivals, such as splinter groups of the Iraqi nationalist Sadr movement. On that, I would have to see more proof. Badr is a no brainer.

Lasseter says that the Sadr movement dominates the city council of Amarah. Then he says that Amarah police are mostly Badr corps. That I don’t understand (I’m not challenging it, I just don’t understand). Wouldn’t the Sadrist councilmen have packed the police with members of the Mahdi Army? [Answer: The central government's Ministry of Interior has enormous influence over the hiring of local police, and under Bayan Jabr it was in the hands of the Supreme Council, which has Badr as its paramilitary arm.]

Lasseter also reports on suspicions that the governor of Basra is using Shiite militias (of various sorts) for extortion and assassination. The governor is from the Virtue Party but is alleged to be using Badr and the Mahdi Army. (Last I knew, the Mahdi Army is not actually very powerful in Basra, but this may have changed).

The NYT profiles the ways in which Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is drawing power into the traditionally weak office of president.

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3 GIs Dead
So Far, 18,200 US Troops Wounded in Iraq

See Nir Rosen’s important article, “Iraq is the Republic of Fear” in WaPo today.

Reuters rounds up the civil war violence in Iraq on Saturday. By my count, at least nineteen were reported dead.

Three GIs were announced dead, two in a helicopter crash on Saturday and one on Friday in clashes in Anbar province.

Up north, guerrillas stopped an army patrol 25 miles south of Kirkuk and shot an Iraqi army major to death, and wounding three soldiers. In Mosul, guerrillas shot two men dead. In Dujail, guerrillas attacked a military checkpoint, killing 2 Iraqi soldiers and wounding 3.

In the northeast near Baquba, guerrillas ambushed a police car, killing a colonel and four of his bodyguards, and wounding other bodyguards. In Baquba itself, guerrillas shot three ironsmiths and then killed two men at a tire repair shop. Sounds like a contract dispute to me.

In Baghdad, guerrillas fired a mortar round into a crowded market to the south of the city, killing 4 and wounding 15.

In the south, in Diwaniyah, guerrillas set off a roadside bomb near the house of a police colonel, seriously wounding him. The previously mentioned incidents were probably carried out by Sunni Arabs, but the hit in Diwaniyah is more likely by local Shiite militiamen.

18,200 GIs have been wounded in Iraq. This article says that half a million Americans bear wounds from warfare, going back to WW II.

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Italians to Pull Out nearly Half of Troops in June
Sectarian struggle among Tribes at Suwayra

Congrats to Mariam Karouny for an excellent story on how the Virtue (Fadhila) Party is staging what she calls a “go-slow” in Basra’s oil industry to protest the federal government’s refusal to appoint a member of Virtue as Minister of Petroleum. Since Basra controls southern petroleum exports, and Virtue controls much of Basra, there is a real disconnect now between on-the-ground power and bureaucratic authority. The governor of Basra is from the Virtue Party, and it occurs to me that part of his annoyance with the local represtentatives of Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani is that the latter’s great supporter, Husain Shahristani, a nuclear engineer, got the petroleum ministry.

Italy will bring 1100 of its 2600 troops in Iraq out in June according to Foreign Minister Massimo D’Alema. Prime Minister Romano Prodi’s complex coalition is divided on how fast to bring all the troops home, and his razor thin majority in the senate makes his position delicate.

Reuters rounds up some of the violence in Iraq on Friday. One bomb in Baghdad killed 9 and wounded 31. Another wounded 20, though several of those may have later died. Another wounded 5. Reuters tends to file these reports on security relatively early in the day, so it left out a lot of incidents. Two were killed in Kirkuk. Bodies showed up dead in Kut in the south. Altogether some 19 were killed, though my experience is that if you count up all the persons killed and those discovered dead, the totals are higher than the wire service reports suggest.

RevisedA tennis coach and two of his players was killed on Thursday. Some suspect radical Sunni fundamentalists, who had put about a pamphlet insisting on moderate dress. Al-Zaman blamed the Mahdi Army. Puritanical dress codes may well be behind the incident, though it is still murky.

This item from Reuters is important: “Suwayra – Police said they found on Friday near Suwayra, south of Baghdad, the body of a member of the Mahdi Army militia which had bullet wounds and showed signs of torture.” It turns out that the supposed tribal feud “over land” near Suwayra is actually a political struggle, with one of the sub-tribes having joined the Mahdi Army and acting aggressively in the region.

I have the following account from someone there who has been following this:

‘ The [sectarian conflict near Suwayra] faded out in November of last year.

It suddenly errupted three days ago. There were actually three days of violence in that area. The first day was an attack on Obaid by members of the Ghuran tribe who were members of the Mahdi army (at least they carried Mhdi army id’s). 14 people were killed.

The second saw an attack from Suwaira security forces (although the area administratively belongs to Baghdad).

The third day saw a massive assault by Iraqi and US army accompanied by helicopter gunships and fighter planes. The assault lasted for 10 hours . . .

It is absolutely fascinating for me to see that piece of information being propagated on Iraqi news channels, newspapers and websites as a land dispute. It was originally based on a “police source”.

It is now almost certain that the US army was misled into taking action against one of the two parties yesterday.

The whole thing was a ‘sectarian’ assault that failed miserably the first time. It failed again this time . . .

In yesterday’s ‘American’ raid only one man was killed – young Marwan (!!) 6 were injured and about a dozen detained (exact number unconfirmed).

Today, all tribes in the area (Sunni and Shiite) were in uproar against the Ghurraan. Their 3 acts were seen as treacherous. The Ghurraan shaikh, Saad A. A. al-Bassi sent word to Obaid that he was enlisting support from his tribe to disown the sub-clan that was responsible (known as Rattaan). A few hours ago I received word (unconfirmed) that Saad was arrested by the Iraqi National Guard!
‘

Americans arrested the brother of one of the Sunni Arab members of parliament, drawing protests from her about parliamentary immunity being violated. MP Taysir Awwad may be under the impression that Bush honors things like parliamentary immunity at home.

In Basra, a Sunni prayer leader was assassinated. Waves of Sunni refugees have been fleeing largely Shiite Basra for Baghdad in recent weeks.

Al-Zaman reports that tension over security returned to Basra on Friday after 10 corpses were discovered in a Basra district. They were said to be innocent Sunni Arabs not involved in lawless violence.

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