US Air Raid on Diwaniya Allegedly Kills 10 Civilians
6 US Troops Killed
Iran Denies US Charges of Covert Ops in Iraq
6 US soldiers were announced killed on Monday in Iraq. They were all killed in Sunni Arab areas.
Militiamen in the southern Shiite city of Diwaniya, probably tied to the Mahdi Army, launched an intensive mortar barrage at Camp Echo on early Monday morning. The US responded with airstrikes. Iraqi police said that they killed 10 civilians along with the targeted militiamen. A crowd gathered to protest the civilian deaths, sparking a further clash that left a man dead and two policemen wounded.
The Iraqi cabinet approved key changes in a draft of the country's petroleum law on Monday. Parliament is expected to take it up on Wednesday. But some elements of the law are not expected to be settled for months.
Reuters reports other political violence in Iraq on Monday, including the discovery of 17 bodies in the streets of Baghdad.
' BAGHDAD - [11] people were killed and 33 wounded by a car bomb parked near a market in the religiously mixed district of Binoog in northern Baghdad, police said. . .
BAGHDAD - One person was killed and two wounded in a mortar attack in Bayaa, south west Baghdad, police said. . . Gunmen killed two people and wounded three in a drive-by shooting in Bayaa.
BAGHDAD - Gunmen killed three Iraqi soldiers and one civilian when they attacked an Iraqi military checkpoint in eastern Baghdad on Sunday evening, police sources said. They said three people were wounded. . .
DIWANIYA - A man was killed and two police guards were wounded during an exchange of fire between police guarding a government building and dozens of demonstrators protesting what they said was a pre-dawn U.S. air strike in the city of Diwaniya, 180 km (110 miles) south of Baghdad, police said. . .
MOSUL - A roadside bomb killed a policeman and wounded four people, including two policemen, when it struck their patrol car in Mosul, police said.
MOSUL - The Iraqi army killed 12 insurgents, including three al Qaeda members, during overnight raids near the northern city of Mosul, the army said. Troops found lethal roadside bombs called explosively formed penetrators, or EFPs, during the raid. . .
KIRKUK - Gunmen killed the preacher of a Sunni mosque in the northern city of Kirkuk on Sunday, police said.'
McClatchy has more details, especially of violence in Khalis in Diyala province.
The story about the Lebanese Hizbullah and Iran kidnapping US troops in Karbala, Iraq, seemed to me to hang an awful lot on the activities of one person. It is not surprising that a few Lebanese Shiites with a background in Hizbullah and good contacts in Iran have gone to Iraq to fight the US. What is surprising is how few they have been. It is also surprising that the US has lost relatively few men to fights with the Shiites.
The US has 19,000 persons in custody in Iraq, and hundreds of foreigners. Almost all of them are Sunni Arabs. They appear to have exactly one Lebanese Shiite.
Why put all this emphasis on this one guy and ignore the hundreds from Saudi Arabia, Jordan, etc.? It is to build a case against Iran in preparation to bombing it.
Iran is denying the charge.
Labels: Iraq
posted by Juan Cole @ 7/03/2007 12:25:00 AM
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4 Comments:
if i read the account correctly the attack occurred in january and the arrest was made in march with the arrestee carrying papers on him outlining the plan of attack.
how utterly helpful.
Not to belabour the point, but a few days back you were discussing the potential for the Sunni's being treated as the de facto Palestinians in Iraq. I respectfully disagreed that it would be the Shiites, due to their aledged association with Iran. I see this as further confirmation that, as you mention in this article, Saudi's et al. will never be held to account for their duplicity. Somehow it always comes back to being an outright Iranian problem.
PS. Please don't interpret that as a "I told you so" type of comment, just an elaboration on the previous point.
Lastly, I find it odd that it took this much time for the release of the information...coincidence with domestic issues perhaps? I saw that CNN was working that issue pretty hard, and even the seemingly trustworthy Michael Ware played along for the most part. both he and CNN were making some specious and unsupported arguments about the EFP and Iranian training.
As you mentioned a while back, manufacturing the EFPs isn't all that hard and that manufacturing shops have been found in Iraq.
There is a 'No Shit' assumption that colors many analysts' initial reading any time something like this comes up about Iran's relations and links to any Shiite groups in the region... I have already posted my comments on why I think it is easy to believe that Iran wants to acquire nuclear weapons, even if we have no real proof of this...
Similarly, it is easy for me to assume, as an analyst, that Iran would want to have a leading role in the Shiite communities in Iraq... Did not, for instance, the Iranians send experts from the Pasdaran e-Inquilab e-Islami to the Bekaa valley in Lebanon in 1982 to help train Lebanese Shiites to organize and fight off the Israeli invasion?
I was so sure of Hizbollah's possible involvement in Iraq that I asked the question to Hizbollah's spokesperson in Beirut in 2003, mere months after the U.S. invasion, at a time when I already had confirmed reports of Sunni Lebanese and Palestinians going to Iraq and returning, some dead some alive, after fighting against the U.S.-led forces...
Here is how the Hizbollah spokesperson in Beirut replied to my query regarding Hizbollah's role in Iraq in 2003, along with a few paragraphs of background information from the report:
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Professor Ahmad Moussalli, a United States Institute of Peace (USIP) Fellow specializing in research on Islamic movements, feels that all the American rhetoric and military activity over the last two years have only made the Islamists stronger. Moussalli states that now that the discredited nationalists and secular parties, such as the Ba’ath, have been shown to be corrupt, hollow and powerless, parties such as the Hizbollah, with their record of successful military, social and political work, are gaining an increased following in the Arab and Muslim world.
Despite this upsurge in support, the most important question before the Hizbollah right now is whether or not the Bush administration or Israel will launch military operations against them in Lebanon. MP Muhammad Raad warns that Hizbollah’s cease fire will not last forever, especially not in the face of hostility, and that the Hizbollah will resort to full-scale military operations if attacked by Israel or anyone else.
Hizbollah spokesman Haider Dukmak is confident that the Bush administration’s follies in Iraq will keep them preoccupied and far from Lebanon. He dismisses allegations that Hizbollah is supporting units attacking American forces in Iraq, but maintains that the Iraqi resistance may well grow to the degree required to oust Americans out of Iraq and also embarrass Bush in the presidential elections.
“The Iraqi people are proud, nationalistic and love their culture,” says Dukmak. “They do not need anyone to tell them how to resist an occupation force.”
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Some of this made sense to me at the time... I got to understand the use of IEDs and guerrilla ambush and attack techniques by viewing hours of Hizbollah's videos of their operations in South Lebanon in 1999 and 2000. A lot of this material is now also available on YouTube, and I have posted multiple clips of Hizbollah and Iraqi Sunni insurgency videos below for the readers' perusal...
At the time of the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003, these guerrilla warfare techniques, including the use of IEDs and shaped charges, were fairly well known, largely due to the airing of these videos regularly on Hizbollah's Al Manar TV, which is available across the region, especially after the Hizbollah's success in pushing the withdrawal of Israeli troops from Lebanon in May 2000...
And let us not forget, Iraqi Army officers were trained in guerrilla warfare by U.S. Special Forces teams during the Iran-Iraq War, especially after Iran's successes in the post-1982 phase threatened an Iranian occupation of Iraqi territory...
Well, now the U.S. military is claiming it has proof of Hizbollah's role in Iraq, due to Dakdouk's 'confession' to U.S. interrogators of his role in Iraq...
But can the capture of one alleged Hizbollah operative really signify the involvement of the Lebanese Hizbollah's role in Iraq? After all, devout Lebanese Shiites, many of them being members of Hizbollah, have been taking pilgrimages through Iraq's holy Shiite cities since the fall of Saddam in 2003... Was Dakdouk nabbed as a tourist or was he really setting up 'cells' of Shiite resistance fighters in the image of Hizbollah's guerrilla structure in Lebanon? Was he even there in an official capacity?
As someone who reported on counter-insurgency operations, and their human rights fallout, I tend to cringe every time I hear of someone having admitted something under interrogation... Having no way to verify these alleged confessions, the journalists are forced to take the authorities for their word... Are these actual confessions or statements made under duress?
As Far as I am concerned there are two, broadly speaking, two situations at play here:
1. The confession is true and Iran is supporting the Iraqi Shiite militias loyal to one faction of the Shiite community, and Hizbollah is providing proxy support for this training. In this case, it seems clear that the Bush administration is at a Kissinger Crossing - does it escalate the war by bombing Lebanese and Iranian cities, or does it play it cool? I have stated repeatedly, since before the Bush War in Iraq, that the U.S. ops in Afghanistan and Iraq will provide for a natural growth of Iranian influence among these countries' Shiite populations especially if they are allowed to empower themselves through a democratic process. How does the U.S. expel the Iranian influence, which is more culturally, historically and naturally in tune with Afghan and Iraqi Shiites than the U.S. occupation forces?
2. The confession is coerced or exaggerated, and the military is being used to play up Iran and Hizbollah's role in Iraq to provide the Bush administration with a reason to escalate the war, a la Kissinger, by bombing Lebanese and Iranian targets. Surely, the idea that Iranian and Lebanese Shiite radicals are behind the deaths of U.S. soldiers provides a powerful emotional blowback in the U.S. - one strong enough to rile up enough support for the Bush administration to see through an escalation of a currently unpopular war. However, as a skeptic when it comes to claims made by the Bush administration, I would want to wait and see more concrete evidence before we go blindly into a Bush War in Iran or Lebanon.
I think the reports today of Israel's one-year anniversary of its 2006 invasion of Lebanon should provide adequate room for reflection regarding the Neck Deep in Shiite scenario I repeatedly warn against.
Links to related news reports and articles are on my blog.
- Abhinav Aima
The Indianapolis Star(Dan Quayles' Right Wing Rag) headlined yesterday that the death toll in Iraq was down for last month. Now, the Death Star has been avoiding international headlines for months, and putting local news on the front page. By whose estimate, other than the U.S. government, is this being touted? If it is the U.S. government's estimate, it isn't worth the paper it is written on; since lies and exaggerations are their daily modus operandi. But, for the Death Star, any port in a storm will do, even if it is controlled by pirates. Just wondering.......
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