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Air Force officer disciplined for saying

Bush allowed September 11 attacks
 

By: WSWS

on: 28.03.2008

 ”Return to Iraq”:

Rageh Omarr, Al Jazeera…

MUST SEE!!!

Much has changed since Rageh was last in Baghdad
“The Witness” is presented as five youtube videos:

Part 1:

Part 2:

Part 3:

Part 4:

Dick Cheney gave the orders for Basra campaign

-Bush hails Iraq militia crackdown-

Maliki’s government busy trying to save face by issuing a dead line for Mahdi fighters, but the reality is another way around it is Al-Sadr asks AL-Maliki to leave the city, Maliki was saved by the American helicopters when the fighters surrounded his resident in Basra, Al-Qabas reported about the main problem faced the government in this bad presentation that forced Maliki to use his relatives with extra forces came from Karbala:

Members of army and the police did not carry out the military orders many of them deliberately went back to their homes with lack of desire to fight this battle and the complicated tribal links among the forces and militants, but there also Mahdi Army’s experience factor in urban, guerrilla war.

Notice what Nazar Hatim wrote to the same newspaper:

For the media it is the government forces against Mahdi Army, but the reality is more complicated than this, there are the oil smuggle mafia and even “Heaven Soldiers” group, all these groups use AL-Sadr as a cover for their operations.

At the end of his report he mentions the 17 soldiers arrested yesterday but he don’t says their nationality, are they the same American soldiers reported yesterday

Zuhair Al-Dujaili take a preview on the government performance for the few last months:

The bumpy political process, Maliki-government tendency to beautify its performance for the last two years, hiding the real problems and using fake media report manipulating facts, the reality is now exploding in form of political and security crises, for the time being the government can use military forces to solve some of these crises but not enough to extinguish the fires that erupt around.

Cheney’s orders
For Al-Arab newspaper sources tell about Dick Cheney gave the green light to start Basra campaign against Mahdi Army in his visit to Baghdad see this, what do you think they are talking about? …growing flowers?, and the goal is to give the Iraqi forces more confidence in itself to carry on the security responsibilities in the south of Iraq.

American commander of South-Iraq discussed with high rank marines officers; how to involve southern Iraq militias such as Mahdi Army, Ali bin Abi Talib Brigades and Al-Taf Brigades in a final battle.

The topic had been raised during Dick Cheney recent visit to Iraq, where he agreed on the subject, considered it important by the end of George Bush presidential term.

Link

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Bush hails Iraq militia crackdown

‘No retreat’

“We have made up our minds to enter this battle and we will continue until the end. No retreat,” Mr Maliki said in a speech broadcast on Iraqi state television.

The prime minister has personally overseen the operation in Basra, which involves some 30,000 troops and police.

But Mehdi Army fighters loyal to radical Shia cleric Moqtada Sadr remain in control of some densely-populated areas.

Speaking at a US Air Force museum in Dayton, Ohio, Mr Bush said “normalcy” was returning to Iraq.

“As we speak Iraqis are waging a tough battle against militia fighters and criminals in Basra, many of whom have received arms and training and funding from Iran,” he said.

Mr Maliki’s move against Basra’s militias underlined “his leadership and his commitment to enforce the law in an even-handed manner”, the US president added.

Rising violence

He spoke as one of several Americans injured this week in rocket attacks on Baghdad’s Green Zone died, amid fresh missiles attacks on the fortified area.

Meanwhile, one of Iraq’s two main oil export pipelines from Basra was blown up in a bomb attack, sending oil prices above $107 a barrel.

And Basra’s police chief survived a bomb attack that killed three of his bodyguards.

With many shops and markets shut, residents in the city said they were beginning to run out of food and water.

In Baghdad, thousands of Sadr supporters marched to demand Mr Maliki quit over the Basra operation and there was sporadic fighting in Shia areas of the capital.

In other developments:

The number of gunfights in southern Iraq appears to be growing, says the BBC’s Crispin Thorold in Baghdad.

The fighting still seems to be mainly with members of the Mehdi Army, our correspondent says.

The militia had held to a ceasefire since last August, contributing to the general fall in violence across Iraq.

The government says it aims to re-impose law and order in Basra, which the British military handed over to Iraqi forces in December.

However, Moqtada Sadr’s supporters say the government wants to weaken the militias before local elections in October.

At stake, analysts say, is control of Iraq’s only port city and the region’s oil fields.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/1/hi/world/middle_east/7317123.stm

Thursday: 225 Iraqis, 1 US Soldier,

3 US Contractors Killed;

538 Iraqis Wounded

-Muqtada Sadr cuts free-

Although the fighting continues in Basra, followers of Shi’ite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr in Baghdad instead took to the streets in mostly peaceful protests. The cleric himself has asked for peace talks, but the prime minister is refusing. At least 225 Iraqis were killed or found dead and 538 more were wounded in various incidents across Iraq. Also, the FBI is in possession of three new bodies belonging to kidnapped American contractors, and an American soldier was killed this afternoon by an IED explosion in Baghdad.

Ten of thousands of al-Sadr followers protested peacefully in Baghdad. They are demanding an end to the U.S.-backed Iraqi government headed by Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, who was once championed by al-Sadr, and to his crackdown against the Mahdi Army. The prime minister has said that he will see the crackdown through to the end, even though the Sadrists are asking for peace talks. The demonstrations were held in predominantly Shi’ite neighborhoods, in particular the Sadr City suburb, which was named for al-Sadr’s father. Some analysts believe the crackdown is actually meant to politically cripple the cleric. The Mahdi Army was observing a unilateral cease-fire at the time of the crackdown.

Meanwhile, the casualty totals from the Mahdi Army clashes in Baghdad has risen to 30 people dead and 200 more wounded, upping yesterday’s figures by 16 dead and 60 wounded. Many of the wounded are women and children caught in the crossfire. Four soldiers were wounded during an armed attack in Sadr City. U.S. forces killed two suspects who were launching indirect attacks, and another 24 suspects were killed in and around Baghdad. Also, a spokesperson for the Baghdad Security Plan was kidnapped from his home in the al-Amin neighborhood.

In more violence, three people were killed and 15 more were wounded during a mortar attack on a bus terminal in Karaj Alawy. Two people were wounded by mortar fire in Batawin. Mortars falling on a prison left one dead and four injured. In Ur, one person was killed and two were injured during mortar shelling. A car bomb near a Red Crescent office left no casualties. No casualties were reported as a Dawa Party office in Shabb was set on fire. Three people were injured during separate shelling in Karada. Also, five dumped bodies were recovered.

As many as 29 people were killed and another 39 more were wounded during an air attack by U.S. forces in Hilla. Some unconfirmed reports have placed the number of dead at sixty. In street clashes as many as 30 have been wounded, including women and children.

In Basra, the casualty figures were upped by 60 dead and 300 injured to a total of 100 people killed and 500 others wounded over the last three days. Reports out the city today mention heavy mortar fire and more armed attacks. Last night, a roadside bomb killed three bodyguards working for the city’s police chief. Also, some of the police casualties are being treated in Baghdad.

The totals so far in Kut have been 49 people killed and 75 more injured, adding 31 dead and 63 wounded since yesterday’s preliminary reports.

Four Iraqi soldiers were killed in Daquq when gunmen attacked their checkpoint.

Gunmen attacked an army patrol in near Nasariya in al-Rifai, killing two Iraqi soldiers.

In Kirkuk, a car bomb killed two Kurdish Peshmerga soldiers and wounded six others, including two civilians. These may have been in two separate events.

A roadside bomb killed four policemen and wounded four more in Mahaweel.

Four bodies were found near Balad Ruz.

Outside Muqdadiyah, police have found a mass grave containing 37 bodies. The age of the grave was not given, but it could date from the Saddam era. Mass graves from that period and quite a few recent ones dot the Diyala province.

Also, a main oil pipeline outside Basra was bombed.

Clashes with the Mahdi Army left three policemen dead in Hamza. Another officer was wounded along with two Iraqi soldiers.

In Diwaniya, one gunmen was killed and a policeman was wounded in an operation that netted eight suspects.

Security forces arrested 48 in Karbala.

A roadside bomb in al-Kafl left three policemen dead and another four wounded.

A bomb in Fallujah was defused.

In Amara, a Badr party office was attacked with rocket propelled grenades. A resident of a neighboring structure was injured. Two people were killed and seven wounded in the crossfire during clashes at the Yugoslave Brigde.

In Samarra, al-Qaeda connected gunmen killed a father and son, who were members of the Sons of Iraq organization. A woman and a child were also injured.

Eight Iraqi soldiers were wounded during clashes in Talbiyah. A father and son were killed in a drive-by shooting.

A mortar in Baiji killed a woman and injured five civilians including a woman. A roadside bomb killed an Iraqi soldier.

A roadside bomb in Khanaquin injured two civilians.

The district office in Khan Bani Saad was attacked but no casualties were reported.

Power plants throughout southern and central Iraq were attacked and left inoperative.

http://www.antiwar.com/updates/?articleid=12591

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Muqtada cuts free
 

By: Gareth Porter

WASHINGTON – The escalation of fighting between Mahdi Army militiamen and their Shi’ite rivals, which could mark the end of Muqtada al-Sadr’s self-imposed ceasefire, also exposes General David Petraeus’ strategy for controlling Muqtada’s forces as a failure.

Petraeus reacted immediately to Sunday’s rocket attacks on the Green Zone by blaming them on Iran. He told the BBC the rockets were “Iranian provided, Iranian-made rockets”, and that they were launched by groups that were funded and trained by the Quds Force of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC). Petraeus said this was “in complete violation of promises made by President Mahmud Ahmadinejad and other most senior Iranian leaders to their Iraqi counterparts”.

Petraeus statement was clearly intended to divert attention from a development that threatens one of the two main pillars of the administration’s claim of progress in Iraq – the willingness of Muqtada to restrain the Mahdi Army, even in the face of systematic raids on its leadership by the US military and its Iraqi allies.

The rocket attacks appear to have been one of several actions by the Mahdi Army to warn the United States and the Iraqi government to halt their systematic raids aimed at driving the Sadrists out of key Shi’ite centers in the south. They were followed almost immediately by Mahdi Army clashes with rival Shi’ite militiamen in Basra, Sadr City and Kut and a call for a nationwide general strike to demand the release of Sadrist detainees.

Even more pointed was a strong warning from Muqtada aide Abdul-Hadi al-Mohammedawi to the United States as well as to the Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq (ISCI), whose Badr Organization militiamen, in the uniforms of Iraqi security forces, have targeted the Madhi Army throughout the south. “They don’t seem to realize that the Sadrist trend is like a volcano,” he told worshippers Friday in Kufa. “If it explodes, it will crush their rotten heads.”

The signs that the Madhi Army will no longer remain passive mark a major defeat for the US military command’s strategy aimed at weakening the Mahdi Army.

When he took command in Iraq in early 2007, Petraeus recognized that the US occupation forces could not afford to wage a full-fledged campaign against the Mahdi Army as a whole. Instead it adopted a strategy of dividing the Sadrist movement.

Petraeus and the ground commander in Iraq, Lieutenant General Ray Odierno, hoped that there were leaders in the Sadrist movement who would be willing to give up further military resistance and accept the US occupation and the existing government.

For months, the command tried to generate a “dialogue” with “moderates” in the Sadrist camp. It issued a series of statements hailing Muqtada’s willingness to change the purpose of his movement. Most recently, on January 17, Odierno said, “I believe he is trying to move forward with more of a religious organization and get away from a militia type-supported organization.” But he admitted, “That could change.”

Meanwhile, Petraeus targeted selected elements of the Mahdi Army in raids in Sadr City and the Shi’ite south, portraying its targets as “criminals” and “rogue elements” which had broken away from Muqtada and were armed, trained and financed by Iran. Odierno suggested in his January 17 press briefing that such renegade groups were causing “the majority of the violence”.

But the “moderate” Sadrists who would be willing to make a deal with the US never materialized. Last July, a US commander in Baghdad claimed that Sadrist representatives had initiated “indirect” talks with the US military. But in January, Odierno would say only that they had been meeting with “local leaders” in Sadr City, not with representatives of the Sadrist movement.

The Mahdi Army’s blunt warnings of military countermeasures followed months of raids against Muqtada’s political-military organization by both US forces and the Badr Organization. According to a senior Sadrist parliamentarian, between 2,000 and 2,500 Mahdi Army militiamen had been detained since Muqtada declared a ceasefire last August.

The raids have been aimed at weakening the Madhi Army’s political hold on Shi’ite cities in anticipation of eventual provincial elections.

During 2007 there were signs of strong support for Muqtada in Najaf, Basra and Karbala, as Sudarsan Raghavan reported in the Washington Post last December. In Najaf, portraits of Muqtada and his father, grand ayatollah Mohammed Sadiq Sadr, who was assassinated by Saddam Hussein’s security forces in 1999, had “mushroomed defiantly in the streets”.

Muqtada’s image had also been “pervasive” in Karbala, according to Raghavan, until security forces loyal to the ISCI arrested more than 400 of Muqtada’s followers in an obvious effort to destroy its organization in the city.

For months Muqtada had refrained from authorizing a full-fledged response to such attacks on his forces. But on Tuesday an officer at Muqtada’s headquarters in Najaf said the Mahdi Army should be prepared to “strike the occupiers” as well as the Badr Organization.

Revealing the contradictions built into the US position in Iraq, even as it was blaming Iran for the alleged renegade units of the Mahdi Army, the US was using the Badr Organization, the military arm of the ISCI, to carry out raids against the Mahdi Army. The Badr Organization and the ISCI had always been and remained the most pro-Iranian political-military forces in Iraq, having been established, trained and funded by the IRGC from Shi’ite exiles in Iran during the Iran-Iraq war.

It was the ISCI leader Abdul-Aziz al-Hakim who had invited two IRGC officers to be his guests in December 2006, apparently to discuss military assistance to the Badr Organization. The Iranian officials were seized in the home of Hadi al-Ameri, the leader of the Badr Organization and detained by the US military. The George W Bush administration continued throughout 2007 to cite those Iranian visitors as evidence of the IRGC’s illicit intervention in Iraq.

But the Badr Organization had become the indispensable element of the Iraqi government’s security forces, who could be counted on to oppose the Mahdi Army in the south. And in a further ironic twist, it was the leaders of the ISCI and of the Nuri al-Maliki government, which depended on Iranian support, who insisted last summer and autumn that the US should credit Iran with having prevailed on Muqtada to agree to a ceasefire. The close collaboration of the US command with these pro-Iranian groups against Muqtada appears to be the main reason for the State Department’s endorsement of that argument last December.

The Petraeus assertion that the rocket attacks on the Green Zone were Iranian-inspired strongly implied that Iran is still providing arms to Shi’ite militias. However, Odierno told a press briefing in mid-January, “We are not sure if they’re still importing sic weapons into Iraq.”

That admission came only after many months in which US officers in the border provinces were unable to find any evidence of arms coming across the border from Iran.

Those officers also found no trace of the alleged presence of the IRGC personnel in Iraq. Last November, the French weekly news magazine Le Point quoted Major Scott A Pettigrew, the military intelligence chief in Diyala province on the Iranian border, as saying, “I have never seen any activity or presence of the Quds Force. I see nothing here that resembles a proxy war with Iran.”

Link

Stalled assault on Basra exposes the Iraqi government’s shaky authority

A Mehdi Army fighter flashes a victory sign in Basra yesterday

Friday, 28 March 2008

The Iraqi army’s offensive against the Shia militia of the radical cleric Muqtada al-Sadr in Basra is failing to make significant headway despite a pledge by the Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki to fight “to the end”.

Instead of being a show of strength, the government’s stalled assault is demonstrating its shaky authority over much of Baghdad and southern Iraq. As the situation spins out of Mr Maliki’s control, saboteurs blew up one of the two main oil export pipelines near Basra, cutting by a third crude exports from the oilfields around the city. The international price of oil jumped immediately by $1 a barrel before falling back.

In Baghdad, tens of thousands of supporters of Mr Sadr, whose base of support is the Shia poor, marched through the streets shouting slogans demanding that Mr Maliki’s government be overthrown. “We demand the downfall of the Maliki government,” said one of the marchers, Hussein Abu Ali. “It does not represent the people. It represents Bush and Cheney.”

The main bastion of the Sadrist movement is impoverished Sadr City, which has a population of two million and is almost a twin city to Baghdad. The densely packed slum has been sealed off by US troops. “We are trapped in our homes with no water or electricity since yesterday,” said a resident called Mohammed. “We can’t bathe our children or wash our clothes.”

The streets are controlled by Mehdi Army fighters, many of whom say they expect an all-out American attack, though this seems unlikely since the US says that an attack on the Shia militias is a wholly Iraqi affair.

In Basra, Iraqi forces have cordoned off seven districts but appear stalled in their effort to dislodge the Mehdi Army fighters. Masked gunmen in some cases have captured or seized abandoned Iraqi army vehicles and painted pro-Sadrist slogans on their armour.

A co-ordinated mortar bombardment struck the main police base in the city beside the Shatt al-Arab waterway and there was heavy shooting in the main commercial street of Iraq’s southern capital. An Interior Ministry source said that 51 people had been killed and more than 200 wounded in three days of fighting in Basra. There was an attempt to assassinate Basra’s police chief in which three of his bodyguards were killed by a bomb.

Mr Maliki’s surprise offensive against the Mehdi Army is likely to have repercussions far beyond Iraq. The Americans must have agreed to the attack though they had previously praised the six-month ceasefire declared by Mr Sadr on 29 August and renewed in February as being one of the main reasons why violence had fallen in Iraq. Although Mr Sadr has said the truce is continuing it is ceasing to have much meaning.

President George Bush praised Mr Maliki yesterday saying he faces a “tough battle against militia fighters and criminals”. He said that the Iraqi Prime Minister had taken a bold decision “in going after the illegal groups in Basra”.

But the rapid increase in violence may puncture optimism in the US over the “success” of the surge in leading to a turning point in the five-year-long war.

The Green Zone, the heavily fortified centre of American power in Iraq, was wreathed in smoke yesterday as it was struck by rockets and mortars fired from Shia neighbourhoods. In a further blow to the belief that the surge has restored law and order, one of the two Iraqi spokesmen for the Baghdad security plan, which is at the heart of the surge strategy, was kidnapped and three of his bodyguards killed before his house was set on fire. The victim was Tahseen Sheikhly, a Sunni who often appeared with American officials to proclaim the success of the surge.

Clashes are now taking place across Iraq and most of the Shia districts in Iraq. In the middle of last year a Mehdi Army commander said that his militia controlled 80 per cent of Shia Baghdad and 50 per cent of the capital as a whole. This is probably only a slight exaggeration. There has also been heavy fighting in Kut on the Tigris, where 44 have been killed and 75 wounded, and in Hilla on the Euphrates where 60 people died. In past months the Sadrists have been locked in a struggle for Diwaniya, also on the Euphrates south of Baghdad, where they have been fighting police units controlled by Badr, the militia of the other great Shia party, the Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq (ISCI).

When he first came to power, Mr Maliki balanced between ISCI and the Sadrists but has steadily become closer to the first party and has shown growing hostility to Mr Sadr. The last great battle between the Sadrists and the Iraqi government backed by the Americans was in Najaf in 2004 and was ended by the intervention of Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani who wanted the Sadrists humbled but not crushed. He also did not want to see the Shia community divided into warring factions. It is possible that the Grand Ayatollah may seek to mediate again but Mr Maliki may find it difficult to compromise after his claim that he will win control of Basra.

The government has about 15,000 soldiers and the same number of police in Basra but this is not a great number in a city of two million. The police are closely linked to the militias and are unlikely to prove a resolute ally against the Mehdi Army.

Link