Over 6,000 Killed in July-August;
75% Sunnis Support Insurgency;
50 Killed on Weds. including 2 GIs
Two US soldiers were announced killed on Wednesday, as the US military admitted that attacks against US personnel have risen during the past month. Typically about 70 percent of the roadside bombings in Iraq are aimed at US troops.
Altogether, Reuters reports about 50 dead in civil war violence. 35 bodies were found in Baghdad on Wednesday. Two significant bombings were:
' BAGHDAD - A suicide truck bomber blew up his explosives near a police checkpoint in the southern Doura district of Baghdad, killing seven police commandos and wounding 11 people, including three civilians, an Interior Ministry source said.
SAMARRA - A suicide car bomber rammed his car into the house of Khalid al-Fulalli, a Sunni leader of the Bazi tribe, in Samarra, 100 km (62 miles) north of Baghdad, police and a Reuters cameraman at the scene said. Police major Saadoun Mohammed said that one child was killed and 26 people, mostly women and children, were wounded in the attack. '
(The Samarra attack killed 6-year-old child and may have wounded 60 members of the sheikh's family, mostly women and children. This sort of thing is why I couldn't understand the US announcing on Tuesday that it was turning Salahuddin Province, where Samarra is located, over to the Iraqi 4th Division. I presume that the sheikh was viewed by the guerrillas as being too friendly to the Americans.)
This account in the LA Times of everyday life in Baghdad explains how dangerous it would be just to help a wounded person lying in the street.
The United Nations, which has access to statistics from Iraqi morgues and the Ministery of Health, reported that 6,599 persons were killed in political violence in Iraq in July and August--a 13% increase over the previous two months. Reuters says:
' The July total of 3,590 deaths was unprecedented, it said, while the August figure of 3,009, though lower, was also among the worst yet.
In its previous report two months ago, it gave a combined figure of 5,818 for the two months of May and June. The latest two-month figure shows an increase of more than 13 percent over that number, which it described as a sharp surge at the time . . .
"Bodies found at the Medico-legal Institute often bear signs of severe torture including acid-induced injuries and burns caused by chemical substances, missing skin, broken bones, missing eyes, missing teeth and wounds caused by power drills or nails." '
The US Department of Defense has done some opinion polling that indicates that 3/4s of Iraqi Sunnis now support what the Pentagon calls the "insurgency". When the DoD started doing polling on the subject in 2003, they found that 14 percent of Sunni Arabs supported the insurgency. If there are 5 million Sunni Arabs, let us say that 1.5 million are less than 15 years of age. Of the 3.5 million left, half are women and less likely to actually engage in violence, though they might offer support for it. So that is 1.75 million men. At 75%, that is 1.3 million male supporters of the guerrilla movement.
Of the 147,000 US troops in Iraq, a very large number of which now seem to be in and around Baghdad itself, I don't know exactly how many are fighters. The traditional rule of thumb is 10%, but I read somewhere that the percentage is much higher in this war. A reader who served over there challenged the latter assertion and said that no, it is just 10%.
If we really just have 14,700 fighters facing 1.3 million Sunni guerrilla supporters, it isn't any mystery why things in Iraq are as they are and why Gen. Casey openly admits that we are not there to win, just to keep a lid on. I can't imagine how they could hope even to keep a lid on. Given the figures released today, I'd say it isn't much of a lid (though remember that the death figures could easily be twice or ten times as bad.)
The other thing to remember is that the Sunni Arab areas have been under US military occupation for the past over 3 years, and that this vast increase in support for the guerrilla movement is therefore in some large part the fault of bad counter-insurgency tactics by the US military. They were all reading that stupid, racist tract, Raphael Patai's The Arab Mind, which says you can control Arabs by humiliating them. What Patai didn't tell them is that yes, you can for a short while, but then in order to recover his self-respect, the humiliated Arab has to spend the rest of his life trying to kill you, and so do his 5 brothers and 25 cousins.
There are probably also at least a couple million Shiite mem who support guerrilla action to get the multinational forces out of their country.
A UAE newspaper reports that the vast majority of guerrilla fighters in Iraq are not international terrorists but rather Iraq Sunni Arabs worried about their position in the new Iraq.
Iranian shelling of PEJAK terrorist bases in Iraqi Kurdistan has driven 900 Iraqi families from their homes along the border, leaving them in dire straits.
posted by Juan Cole @ 9/21/2006 12:31:00 AM
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I read "The Arab Mind" myself, just to get the flavor of the sort of anthropology the U.S. Army and CIA are relying on. It is indeed simplistic, although I would not call it racist. It is a throwback to the 1950's and 1960's approach in which child rearing practices and family structure are thought to determine the rest of culture, including ideology and political organization. Benedict's "The Chrysanthemum and the Sword" would be a similar work on another culture which we engaged militarily. This may be the first time that anthropology has been so directly employed to structure interrogation and military strategy, however. In addition, there are probably anthropologists as well as psychologists actively participating in interrogation. This will make it very difficult for an American to work as an objective researcher in many foreign countries in the future.
A lot of the tail is back home, for deployed troops the ratio is more like 1 in 4, possibly 1 in 3 for the Marines.
My recollection is that we have about a dozen brigades there. That would be about 30,000. A quick look at google shows McCain giving the same number in 2003 with a 130,000 troops.
http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/middle_east/july-dec03/mccain_11-06_a.html
I didn't bother to dig up more recent numbers, you might be able to dig them up at fester's place whose URL is given near the end of this post.
There are also a number of special forces and private units. However the 30,000 or so mercenaries are probably detrimental to counter insurgency in a lot of ways. The US military has reduced tail by hiring private workers for things like food preparation and transport. The later makes supply lines vulnerable.
Traditional counter insurgency doctrine argues for 20 troops per thousand members of the population. THis is not in itself necessarily effective. In Vietnam the number of US troops was around this with significantly more SVA availible. And while the local guerillas (NLF) were worn down as military formations and pretty much destroyed in Tet (perhaps intentionally by the North Vietnamese) they mantained sappers (bombers and other small scale units,) logics and excellant espionage including secret police control of many regions throughout the war.
If the Sunni insurgency was the only problem (as war supporters mantained until recently) then the troops we have might be enough. But since spring 2003 there have been massive criminal organizations which act to accomplish one of the basics of guerilla war which is to destroy infrastructure and show the existing system can't rule. This includes intimidation of professionals and others, guerilla war is ugly and should never be romanticized.
Later the criminal gangs merged into militias and various religious and political groups with various goals. While the south is calm it is essentially hostile as are many of the units in the government. The Shiite do remember the betrayal of 1991 and Sunni who cooperated with us in the west were frequently killed when units protecting them were called to hotspots, they are frequently kiled under our nose. The people in those places know we don't protect our friends so it's hard to imagine us being the successful organizer.
The dice are simply rolling now, the forces driving the game are primarily Iraqi. I don't know if we act to stabilize the game or add greater instability. I think in the west it is possible that tribes and other local groups will rally against AQ and other fanatics, it is also possible that we could serve to support them, but occupation probably inhibits the possibility in IMO.
In Baghdad an "ink blot" strategy might work and third world countries tend to be hierarchial which structurally implies links that can break, but because the pieces are weak means a strong capital can act to weld the pieces together, at least superficially, it's surprising how many supposedly centralized regimes such as (probably) N. Korea consist of many fiefdoms.
Still holding the center together can possibly have a cohesive and calming effect.
http://festersplace.blogspot.com/
frequently has well calculated estimates on troop strength and what is availible.
http://cernigsnewshog.blogspot.com/
supports withdrawal, but points out is currently impossible because the Iraqi army lacks logistics and most other functions, not much tail.
You'll need to search these blogs for relevant articles but they are worth it.
http://globalguerrillas.typepad.com/globalguerrillas/
regularly posts articles on how we could literally lose this war (especially if the Shia hit supply lines, remember in spring 2004 Baghdad and our units were running short,) the theme is a bit "far out," attempting to define a new type of war, but is food for thought.
Colonel Lang often has good articles on the war and the commentators are informed. Again it's worrthwhile searching the archives.
http://turcopolier.typepad.com/sic_semper_tyrannis/
I suspect and electoral results confirm that Shiites are similarly supportive of the militias. So the US position that the insurgency and militias must be disarmed is totally unworkable to the point of being crazy. The US does not have the troops to do it. It is structurally impossible for the Sunnis and Shiites to agree voluntarily on a political basis - especially while the Iraqi army is dependent on the Americans.
The Kurds also support the Peshmerga. But it must dumbfound the Shiites and even the Sunnis that the Kurdish militias are being incorporated into the legitimate security forces at the same time the Americans are demanding every other militia be dismantled.
Breathtakingly ridiculous. How can the Americans even make the request? It's as if the US agreed to federations of just enough provinces to get the Kurds an quasi-independent state, but not enough to get the Shiites the exact same quasi-independent status.
How could the Shiites look at themselves in the mirror if they even considered going along with this? Even the most obsequious regional puppets (better known to Americans as "strong men") would not be able to pull that off.
The militias and non-national military forces of every ethnic group will have to be accommodated exactly the same way the Kurdish military forces are. A country that cannot understand this should not be occupying other countries. The only possible outcome is for it to stupidly and clumsily harm its own interests.
On US fighters, many of the casuaalties taken are from support units like MPs and logistical support, many of which are reservists. From a morale POV, it must be real hard to rationalize why a soldier is there when Bush has finally admitted his lies that there were no ties between Sadaam and 9/11 or al-Qaida and many soldiers polled gave their response as to why they were in Iraq to those two "reasons." I think Lt. Watada has a great case for not following what were certainly illegal orders. When I was a young directionless man, I was a soldier, and I still take my oath of service seriously: The enemy we are threatened with is domestic, not foreign. I wonder how many officers and enlisted now understand that fundamental fact, and whether we could see a reversal of Seven Days in May.
Juan,
I listened to most of both speaches, and i have to say, i found Chavez's speach refreshing, Bush's speach was hard to listen to and had no substance.
I think you should listen to Chavez's speach again. Yes, he calls Bush "el diablo", but then he says it smells of sulfur. Now i assume everyone in the room did not smell sulfur, i assume that Chavez did not smell sulfur, so i assumed that he was speaking rhetorically. I also assumed that everyone in that room is smarter than me and also assumed that he was speaking rhetorically.
Why is it that you assme that he was not? Why do you critik only a sound bite of a speach and ignore the rest of what he said? Why does everyone seem to ignore the long round of applause he got after his speach?
Did you even listen to the speach?
From your LA Times story: "A colleague — an interpreter and physician — was shot and killed by soldiers last year on his way home from a shopping trip. He hadn't noticed the Humvees parked on the street."
I recognise the case. It's this one:
Shots to the Heart of Iraq
By Richard C. Paddock
The Los Angeles Times
Monday 25 July 2005
http://www.truthout.org/docs_2005/072505B.shtml
A recent case highlighted by the Iraqi government in its criticism of the U.S. was the June 24 killing of Yasser Salihee, 30, an Iraqi special correspondent for Knight-Ridder newspapers. Salihee, a physician, had taken a rare day off and planned to take his wife and daughter swimming. He went to get gasoline and was returning home at midmorning. By then, U.S. troops were conducting a military operation in his neighborhood. It appears he did not see them until it was too late.
The route he chose was not blocked off and there was no sign warning motorists to halt, witnesses say. As he neared the scene of the military operation, a U.S. Army sniper fired at his car. One bullet hit a tire. The other hit Salihee in the forehead. That bullet also severed fingers on his right hand, indicating he was holding up at least one of his hands at the time he was killed. U.S. officials are investigating the shooting.
Salihee's widow, Raghad al Wazzan, said she accepted the American soldiers' presence when they first arrived in Iraq because "they came and liberated us." She sometimes helped them at the hospital where she works as a doctor. But not anymore.
"Now, after they killed my husband, I hate them," she said. "I want to blow them all up."
This was a fantastic article in which the most unexpected Iraqis - a Kurdish anti-Saddam activist, a westernised secular professional, even a US-appointed Iraqi police general, recount how people they know were shot by US forces, and how it turned them against America.
Another quote from the same piece:
"Of course the shootings will increase support for the opposition," said Farraji, 49, who was named a police general with U.S. approval. "The hatred of the Americans has increased. I myself hate them."
I'd be very curious to hear Prof Cole's assessment of Mehdi Army, the Sadrists, the Fadhila wing, Moqtada al-Sadr himself and the death squads.
Sadr, of course, has always publicly promoted Shia-Sunni unity against the Americans. Yet it's clear that many of the death squads are Mehdi army types.
Also, death squad activity in the Health Ministry has gone up since Sadrists took over.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/08/29/AR2006082901680.html
Also, the Facilities Protection Services, with their police-style uniforms and cars, seem heavily implicated. The largest FPS force is the transport ministry's, which again is run by Sadrists.
Sunnis insist that death squads are linked to the Interior Ministry, which would have suggested Badr/SCIRI involvement under Bayan Jabr. But his removal has not reduced deaths. And the Americans, for what it's worth, claim that people they're arresting for sectarian killings in Forward Together aren't linked to the Interior Ministry. Also the Interior ministry police have been reorganised, and US officers claim they're closely supervised. Yet death rates keep going up.
I read a fascinating article this week, (think it was Patrick Cockburn in the Independent but can't find it) which quoted a US intelligence officer saying that their view of the Mehdi Army has changed during the Baghdad op, that they no longer see it as an army or militia, but as a loose affiliation of criminal gangs clustered around the black market petrol business.
To this end, they say, the solution is police, and they aim to recruit 3-5000 as soon as possible in Baghdad. They understand the risk of militia infiltration, the MI officer said, but have run out of other options so they have no choice.
ABC reports of a "confidential Pentagon assessment" that 75% of Sunnis support the insurgency, which it compares to lower findings in 2003. One wonders whether both made consistent use of the Arabic word for "resistance" or "insurgency."
Queer that there was no tandem question about whether the Sunnis supported the government (at least half way) or consider it an outright impostor.
Since the W administration insists that insurgents = Al Qaeda = Saddam = 9/11, it's odd the Pentagon does not think it worthwhile to ask Iraqis whether they concur. Odd too that, 4 years into the insurgency, there is still no dparty or leadership to give any discernable face to it. So what, in fact, are the 75% supporting, other than amorphous sectarian and anti-US violence?
The 75% assessment may have been based on a gut estimate, rather than a poll. First, Tony Snow will find it easier to discount the former than the latter. Second, it would hardly seem safe for Iraqis give a candid reply to any pollsters.
Handing over security for Salahuddin is even screwier than that
It's not just a matter of Salahuddin not really being pacified, or of it being an inherently important area to Iraq -- it contains the occupation's most important military support assets. The Baghdad Airport gets all the attention, mostly because it's what reporters and dignitaries see on their way in and out of country, but Balad Airfield, in Salahuddin, is where the attack helicopters are based, and where the evacuation hospital is located. Neither is particularly good at defending itself, yet support from both is vital to our ground forces being able to dominate the country. Having Balad overrun by insurgents would be a Pearl Harbor level disaster.
Part of the explanation is almost certainly that strong US ground forces will retain responsibility for the security of Balad itself. But it is also probable that the wider security of Salahuddin as a whole was handed over to Iraqi forces in name only, as a purely notional arrangement for PR purposes only.
If they really have turned over real responsibility for security for Salahuddin to the 4th Division, and even more so, security of Balad itself, then something is going on beneath the surface. The administration would have to want to have something like the bombing of the Pleiku Barracks happen to Balad, because compromising the security of Balad would be too stupid for even this crew to do it without ulterior motive.
The displacement of over 900 Kurdish families in the North because of Turkish and Iranian shelling from across the border was reported by al-Quds al-Arabi, citing Kurdish TV, on September 12. Blurbed at the time on my http://arablinks.blogspot.com The reason this is being treated as another slow-moving disaster-relief story, is because news organizations can't figure out the right spin. I can just hear the guy on the Desk: "You need to firm up the good versus evil side of this before we can run it as a news story..."
I should add I can't believe the latest explanantion myself, that these bodies turning up all over Baghdad are the work of Mehdi-affiliated criminal gangs trying to keep their working environment free of law and order.
Local organised criminals, by definition, seek to control their own patch. Why then would mafias from, say, Sadr City, go looking for Sunni victims in Adhamiya? How does that protect their business or intimidate the police in their own area? Logically, they should be attacking the police and local government.
Everyone must buy petrol. Yet all the victims are Sunnis. The killing is clearly political.
The question of the Baghdad death squads is rapidly becoming the biggest unsolved murder case in history. How can the identity of the killers still be a mystery?
Sometimes I wonder if all the Baghdadis really know exactly who's behind it but just won't say.
Re that article I mentioned, it wasn't Patrick Cockburn, but Peter Beaumont in the Observer. Here's the key bit at the end:
Inside Baghdad: last battle of a stricken city
http://www.guardian.co.uk/Iraq/Story/0,,1874439,00.html
...One US military intelligence officer with an interest in the Jaish al-Mahdi and the Sadr Office, said: 'Certain parts are now operating like old-fashioned mobs. In the last year or so power has been given to certain individuals. They have created their own small armies which have gained power by controlling rackets around petrol stations, and thefts from people they kidnap and kill. What we have started to notice is that Moqtada al-Sadr, who is now based in Najaf, is having difficulty controlling these people who derive their power from his name. It has forced people to reassess what the Jaish al-Mahdi really is.'
It is a recognition, in large part, that has persuaded the US and Iraqi government that the way to tackle the Mahdi militia violence is not through military operations but policing, and an extra 5,000 Iraqi policemen are to join the 2,000 already deployed in Sadr City. US officers, aware of the history of massive infiltration of the Iraqi police, and its implication in death squad activities, admit it is a gamble that could backfire by arming and equipping thousands more gunmen but believe it is a risk worth taking.
(the whole thing is worth a read, though very depressing.)
When you ask yourself, looking at the kind of information posted here... How is this ever going to work out well? The answer that keeps coming back, is that it's not. Not from us, not from the US or allies. There is no large act we can do that will solve this. Can it come from somewhere inside the Iraqi world/tradition/mind.
Think back how easy it was to predict the Sunni insurgency. The Shiite militias growing stronger, more aggressive and impatient with time-- even with all the deals struck and the self interest in having us do the fighting for them. The lack of weapons of mass destruction-- of any significance. The lack of connection with you know who. Foreign fighters flocking in to get a shot at us. It was easy to see the mess the Bush bunch was creating.
If the opponents of the war were suddenly in charge, and Rumsfields and the rest gone, its terribly hard to see a good way through this disaster. Suddenly -- no insight.
I sometimes wonder if the administration is really trying anymore... if its not like a business trying to stay afloat and just hope things will work out or reduce the internal tension by thinking of plans are not going to happen.
What's to be done? Talk to everyone there, no matter how bloodthirsty. That's one thing. People do get weary of killing each other--the hundred years war, Europe today, the Lebanese civil war, the Balkans. At some point they look for an excuse to stop.
If no center emerges from Iraq. Then the only thing we can do is massively smother the violence as the country partitions itself with our help. Intervene carefully and fairly to prevent the worst. Not 'cut and run' but try to cut everybody's losses.
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