Lacking Grant Money, Scientists Shift Research To Defense And Security

Scientists switch focus to security

By Rebecca Knight in Boston

Published: February 25 2007 23:01 | Last updated: February 25 2007 23:01

Scientists are looking to focus their research on defence and homeland security as federal funding for scientific grants becomes harder to come by.

According to the American Association for the Advancement of Science, funding for non-defence research and development will shrink for the fourth consecutive year in fiscal 2008. The National Institutes of Health’s R&D budget will fall $325m (£166m, €247m) or 1.1 per cent, next year. “Funding conditions are forcing researchers to look outside their traditional boxes at places that they might not have looked at before – such as the Department of Homeland Security,” said Kei Koizumi, a director at the AAAS.

The DHS’s budget for R&D will dip slightly to $933m next year.

Some researchers are putting scientific questions in the context of security. Jeremy Wolfe, professor of ophthalmology at Harvard Medical School, who studies how the brain processes visual input, was granted $460,000 by the DHS. His lab will research why airport guards fail to notice items on scanner screens.

Prof Wolfe, who described himself as “comfortably funded by a combination of NIH and non-NIH entities”, said his research’s security emphasis would not harm its scientific integrity.

“I am dedicated to solving basic research problems. If as a part of that I can also be useful in an area like airport security, I don’t have any particular problem with that,” he said.

Scientists seeking money from the NIH and National Science Foundation have also turned to security. The NIH’s bio­defence research portfolio will total $1.8bn in fiscal 2008. This had caused some scientists to “tailor their research to fit this priority”, Mr Koizumi said.

Thomas Cech, president of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, said an over-emphasis on practical application could have a negative impact on future scientific discoveries, which are typically the result of basic rather than applied research.

“Some countries have gone heavily in this direction where research is funded based on [how it will] boost the nation’s economy, but the evidence has been that it stifles creativity and true breakthroughs,” he said. “I think it’s fine to have some portion of the nation’s funding focused on outcome, but it’s worrying if it becomes a major slice of the pie.”

Scientists have long sought funding from federal agencies, and researchers in all disciplines often follow the money trail. But some have voiced concern.

“Part of the strength of the US system is that we do have multiple sources of funding and people understand why defence and homeland security are a much more important priority than they were even five years ago. But there is a frustration because these priorities are not everyone’s priorities,” Mr Koizumi said.

Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2007

Into the valley of death

© Steve Bell 2007 Bush, Blair and troops in Iraq.
steve.bell@guardian.co.uk


Straw promises inquiry but Blair 'proud' of war
February 23 2007: Investigation will follow British exit from Iraq
· PM denies Bush planned attack regardless of WMD

Iraqi court sentences former Saddam VP to death

By Ahmed Rasheed 18 minutes ago

The Iraqi High Court ruled on Monday that Saddam Hussein's former vice president should follow him to the gallows, despite appeals from UN officials and international human rights groups for his life to be spared.

"I swear by God almighty that I am innocent and he will take revenge on everyone who oppressed me," Taha Yassin Ramadan said after he was sentenced to death by hanging for his role in the killing of 148 Shi'ites in the town of Dujail in the 1980s.

Ramadan was sentenced in November to life in jail for the killings, for which Saddam and two former aides have already been hanged. But an appeals court recommended that he receive the death penalty and referred the case back to the trial court.

"In the name of the people the court decided ... to sentence the convicted, Taha Yassin Ramadan, to death by hanging for committing the crime of willful killing as a crime against humanity," judge Ali al-Kahachi said.

Ramadan, in his 60s and wearing thick-rimmed black spectacles and traditional Arab robes and red-checkered headdress, showed no emotion as the ruling, which can be appealed, was read out.

New York-based Human Rights Watch, which raised concerns about the fairness of the original trial, urged the court on Sunday not to impose the death penalty, saying there had been a lack of evidence tying Ramadan to the Dujail killings.

The trial court in November found Ramadan guilty of issuing orders for the systematic killing, detention and torture of men, women and children from Dujail following an attempt on Saddam's life there in 1982.

"God knows I didn't do anything wrong. All the witnesses confirmed they did not see me in Dujail," Ramadan told the court on Monday when asked if he had any final remarks before the ruling was delivered.

United Nations human rights chief Louise Arbour last week urged the court to spare Ramadan's life, saying a death sentence would break international law.

Saddam's execution in December sparked anger among fellow Sunnis, who were outraged by an illicit video showing the ousted leader being hanged to sectarian taunts from official observers. His half-brother Barzan Ibrahim al-Tikriti was executed two weeks later in a botched hanging in which he was decapitated.

Ramadan and Saddam's former deputy Izzat Ibrahim, now believed by Iraqi officials to be in Syria or Yemen, are the sole survivors of the plotters of the 1968 coup that returned the Baath party to power.

Ramadan, a hawkish member of Saddam's inner circle, was trusted by the Iraqi leader to carry out his orders to crush dissent and put down revolts.

When made industry minister in the 1970s, he reportedly told colleagues: "I don't know anything about industry. All I know is that anyone who doesn't work hard will be executed."

Iran: The war begins

John Pilger

Published 05 February 2007

As opposition grows in America to the failed Iraq adventure, the Bush administration is preparing public opinion for an attack on Iran, its latest target, by the spring.

The United States is planning what will be a catastrophic attack on Iran. For the Bush cabal, the attack will be a way of "buying time" for its dis aster in Iraq. In announcing what he called a "surge" of American troops in Iraq, George W Bush identified Iran as his real target. "We will interrupt the flow of support [to the insurgency in Iraq] from Iran and Syria," he said. "And we will seek out and destroy the networks providing advanced weaponry and training to our enemies in Iraq."

"Networks" means Iran. "There is solid evidence," said a State Department spokesman on 24 January, "that Iranian agents are involved in these networks and that they are working with individuals and groups in Iraq and are being sent there by the Iranian government." Like Bush's and Tony Blair's claim that they had irrefutable evidence that Saddam Hussein was deploying weapons of mass destruction, the "evidence" lacks all credibility. Iran has a natural affinity with the Shia majority of Iraq, and has been implacably opposed to al-Qaeda, condemning the 9/11 attacks and supporting the United States in Afghanistan. Syria has done the same. Investigations by the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times and others, including British military officials, have concluded that Iran is not engaged in the cross-border supply of weapons. General Peter Pace, chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff, has said no such evidence exists.

As the American disaster in Iraq deepens and domestic and foreign opposition grows, "neo-con" fanatics such as Vice-President Dick Che- ney believe their opportunity to control Iran's oil will pass unless they act no later than the spring. For public consumption, there are potent myths. In concert with Israel and Washington's Zionist and fundamentalist Christian lobbies, the Bushites say their "strategy" is to end Iran's nuclear threat. In fact, Iran possesses not a single nuclear weapon, nor has it ever threatened to build one; the CIA estimates that, even given the political will, Iran is incapable of building a nuclear weapon before 2017, at the earliest. Unlike Israel and the United States, Iran has abided by the rules of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, of which it was an original signatory, and has allowed routine inspections under its legal obligations - until gratuitous, punitive measures were added in 2003, at the behest of Washington. No report by the International Atomic Energy Agency has ever cited Iran for diverting its civilian nuclear programme to military use. The IAEA has said that for most of the past three years its inspectors have been able to "go anywhere and see anything". They inspected the nuclear installations at Isfahan and Natanz on 10 and 12 January and will return on 2 to 6 February. The head of the IAEA, Mohamed ElBaradei, says that an attack on Iran will have "catastrophic consequences" and only encourage the regime to become a nuclear power.

Unlike its two nemeses, the US and Israel, Iran has attacked no other countries. It last went to war in 1980 when invaded by Saddam Hussein, who was backed and equipped by the US, which supplied chemical and biological weapons produced at a factory in Maryland. Unlike Israel, the world's fifth military power - with its thermo nuclear weapons aimed at Middle East targets and an unmatched record of defying UN resolutions, as the enforcer of the world's longest illegal occupation - Iran has a history of obeying international law and occupies no territory other than its own.

The "threat" from Iran is entirely manufactured, aided and abetted by familiar, compliant media language that refers to Iran's "nuclear ambitions", just as the vocabulary of Saddam's non-existent WMD arsenal became common usage. Accompanying this is a demonising that has become standard practice. As Edward Herman has pointed out, President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad "has done yeoman service in facilitating [this]"; yet a close examination of his notorious remark about Israel in October 2005 reveals how it has been distorted. According to Juan Cole, American professor of modern Middle East and south Asian history at the University of Michigan, and other Farsi language analysts, Ahmadinejad did not call for Israel to be "wiped off the map". He said: "The regime occupying Jerusalem must vanish from the page of time." This, says Cole, "does not imply military action or killing anyone at all". Ahmadinejad compared the demise of the Israeli regime to the dissolution of the Soviet Union. The Iranian regime is repressive, but its power is diffuse and exercised by the mullahs, with whom Ahmadinejad is often at odds. An attack would surely unite them.

Nuclear option

The one piece of "solid evidence" is the threat posed by the United States. An American naval build-up in the eastern Mediterranean has begun. This is almost certainly part of what the Pentagon calls CONPLAN 8022-02, which is the aerial bombing of Iran. In 2004, National Security Presidential Directive 35, entitled "Nuclear Weapons Deployment Authorisation", was issued. It is classified, of course, but the presumption has long been that NSPD 35 authorised the stockpiling and deployment of "tactical" nuclear weapons in the Middle East. This does not mean Bush will use them against Iran, but for the first time since the most dangerous years of the cold war, the use of what were then called "limited" nuclear weapons is being discussed openly in Washington. What they are debating is the prospect of other Hiroshimas and of radioactive fallout across the Middle East and central Asia. Seymour Hersh disclosed in the New Yorker last year that American bombers "have been flying simulated nuclear weapons delivery missions . . . since last summer".

The well-informed Arab Times in Kuwait says that Bush will attack Iran before the end of April. One of Russia's most senior military strategists, General Leonid Ivashov, says the US will use nuclear munitions delivered by cruise missiles launched from the Mediterranean. "The war in Iraq," he wrote on 24 January, "was just one element in a series of steps in the process of regional destabilisation. It was only a phase in getting closer to dealing with Iran and other countries. [When the attack on Iran begins] Israel is sure to come under Iranian missile strikes . . . Posing as victims, the Israelis . . . will suffer some tolerable damage and then the outraged US will destabilise Iran finally, making it look like a noble mission of retribution . . . Public opinion is already under pressure. There will be a growing anti-Iranian . . . hysteria, . . . leaks, disinformation et cetera . . . It . . . remain[s] unclear . . . whether the US Congress is going to authorise the war."

Asked about a US Senate resolution disapproving of the "surge" of US troops to Iraq, Vice-President Cheney said: "It won't stop us." Last November, a majority of the American electorate voted for the Democratic Party to control Congress and stop the war in Iraq. Apart from insipid speeches of "disapproval", this has not happened and is unlikely to happen. Influential Democrats, such as the new leader of the House of Representatives, Nancy Pelosi, and the would-be presidential candidates Hillary Clinton and John Edwards, have disported themselves before the Israeli lobby. Edwards is regarded in his party as a "liberal". He was one of a high-level American contingent at a recent Israeli conference in Herzliya, where he spoke about "an unprecedented threat to the world and Israel [sic]. At the top of these threats is Iran . . . All options are on the table to ensure that Iran will never get a nuclear weapon." Hillary Clinton has said: "US policy must be unequivocal . . . We have to keep all options on the table." Pelosi and Howard Dean, another liberal, have distinguished themselves by attacking the former president Jimmy Carter, who oversaw the Camp David Agreement between Israel and Egypt and has had the gall to write a truthful book accusing Israel of becoming an "apartheid state". Pelosi said: "Carter does not speak for the Democratic Party." She is right, alas.

In Britain, Downing Street has been presented with a document entitled Answering the Charges by Professor Abbas Edalat, of Imperial College London, on behalf of others seeking to expose the disinformation on Iran. Blair remains silent. Apart from the usual honourable exceptions, parliament remains shamefully silent, too.

Can this really be happening again, less than four years after the invasion of Iraq, which has left some 650,000 people dead? I wrote virtually this same article early in 2003; for Iran now, read Iraq then. And is it not remarkable that North Korea has not been attacked? North Korea has nuclear weapons.

In numerous surveys, such as the one released on 23 January by the BBC World Service, "we", the majority of humanity, have made clear our revulsion for Bush and his vassals. As for Blair, the man is now politically and morally naked for all to see. So who speaks out, apart from Professor Edalat and his colleagues? Privileged journalists, scholars and artists, writers and thespians, who sometimes speak about "freedom of speech", are as silent as a dark West End theatre. What are they waiting for? The declaration of another thousand-year Reich, or a mushroom cloud in the Middle East, or both?

John Pilger

About the writer

John Pilger, renowned investigative journalist and documentary film-maker, is one of only two to have twice won British journalism's top award; his documentaries have won academy awards in both the UK and the US. In a New Statesman survey of the 50 heroes of our time, Pilger came fourth behind Aung San Suu Kyi and Nelson Mandela. "John Pilger," wrote Harold Pinter, "unearths, with steely attention facts, the filthy truth. I salute him."

http://www.johnpilger.com

The invisible man

December 11, 2006

In Baghdad, nobody is what he seems. People invent stories to hide who they are and what they do. They tell their acquaintances they work for a relative, but head off to a job in the Green Zone that could get them killed. Others carry an ID with a Shia or Sunni name to escape death at the hands of the city’s armed militias.

But what happens if you are exposed. What then in a country mired in sectarian warfare, where the discovery of your religious identity or political allegiance could leave you with a bullet to the head? Thirty-three-year-old Dr. Abdul Abbas knows. Since September, he has lived every Iraqi's nightmare after he was unmasked as a Sunni at work.

For two years, Abbas survived on a cover story at Baghdad’s largest hospital Medical City, where the Shia militia, the Mahdi Army, patrolled the hallways. Abbas had heard stories of Sunni patients disappearing and militiamen beating doctors.

He was terrified of what would happen if the Mahdi Army found out the truth: he had been raised a Shia Muslim but had become a Sunni as a young man. His traditional Shia name fooled the other doctors at the hospital. His few Sunni colleagues at the hospital also tried to fade into the woodwork and give the impression that they were Shia.

Abbas took many precautions. He locked the door to his office when he prayed. If he heard the Shia doctors call Sunnis terrorists or insult Sunni religious figures, he kept his mouth shut.

Eventually, his secret life unraveled. In late September, an old acquaintance spotted him walking through the hospital cafeteria.

The man’s name was Qassem. He was a doctor in Diyala province east of Baghdad, but had been visiting the hospital when he was astonished to recognise Abbas. He watched his old friend pass through the cafeteria and didn’t say hello. Instead he told his fellow Shia doctors at the table that Abbas had converted to Sunni Islam ten years earlier.

It was a kiss of death – not only had Abbas committed sacrilege by turning his back on the faith, but Qassem had called him a Wahabist— a reference to Saudi Arabia’s fundamentalist strain of Islam.

A friend raced to Abbas’ office and warned him that his identity had been revealed. “They will kill me,” Abbas said. He started to shake. “I have to leave here.”

Immediately, he put in a vacation request. The next few days, Abbas was nervous. He arrived in the
early mornings, stayed a few hours, skipped his duties and left before people saw him. Finally, he stopped coming at all.

In his neighborhood Khadra, he also ran into trouble. Although his parents had moved away, people had started calling Abbas’ family home a Shia house. Already worried about the Mahdi Army, he now had to worry about the Sunni mujahadeen. He woke up one morning to find a bullet wrapped in white paper, with the words printed on it: “Rafidah” (a slur for Shia). Leave your house within three days, or you will be killed.”

Abbas panicked. Within half-an-hour, he moved his wife and three children to his father-in-law’s home across town. He couldn’t believe his luck: Sunni militants wanted to kill him because they didn’t believe he was a Sunni and Shia extremists wanted to kill him because he had abandoned their faith. He was hated by everyone.

Abbas decided to resolve his problem with the Sunnis by going to confront his prayer leader at Khadra’s local mosque. He was terrified that he would go inside the mosque and mujahadeen would shoot him, cut his throat or torture him, that he would end up like one of the blank-eyed corpses at Medical City. Abbas told the sheikh his story and the cleric promised to investigate it.

Then, he waited at his father-in-law’s house. A week went by and the sheikh phoned him and asked him to come in. At the mosque, the sheikh apologized. “It was a mistake. I used all my connections to find these guys. They said tell Sheikh Abbas accept our apology. We didn’t know you were a Sunni. You can come back to your house.”

Now, Abbas thought it was safe to return to Khadra, while he figured out his next move. He hired a local
woman to clean his house. But when he went to pay her, his home was deserted. Suspicious, he drove to her house. When he found the cleaning lady, she was terrified. She said a car had stopped by Abbas' home and three men with pistols had walked out. They asked ‘Are you Abbas’ mother or his sister?’ And then the gunmen grabbed her ID card. She pleaded she was just a worker.

One of them said: “Tell him, we know everything about him. We know he converted to Sunni and we will find him. If he comes back we will kill him. We will take revenge. The man is an unbeliever."

Abbas listened to the cleaning lady's story in shock. He had heard about a shadowy group, called Ghasil al-Ar (Erasing the Shame), which killed Shia who had converted to Sunni Islam.

He could not wait any longer to plan his escape from Baghdad. He flew to Damascus for three days hoping to find work and then went to Arbil in Kurdistan. A hospital there offered him a job.

Returning to Baghdad, he moved secretively. He sold off his furniture, television, heaters, carpets and air conditioner. He slipped by the hospital to get his bosses’ permission for his transfer to Kurdistan. His bosses said the paperwork would take a few months. But Abbas feared every visit to the hospital might spell his death, so he just fled. He had no regrets. “I’m following God’s path," he said.

Posted by The Times Baghdad bureau on December 11, 2006 at 08:40 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Lucky You !

Tuesday, December 12, 2006

We have a ritual that we share on a daily basis.
It is an unspoken agreement.
No matter what the distances are , whether we are next door to each other or miles away , we call each other daily just to "check".

This ritual helps us preserve whatever familial and social fabric we may have salvaged , a protective wall from the total disintegration around us.
Today was my turn to call.

Radhee was on the other end of the line .
We have skipped asking the usual "How are you".
The sentences are short and usually start with "Is everything ok? Am just checking".

Radhee spoke very fast and went into a litany of all the woes around him .

Auntie Salma cannot make it to the doctor , it's too dangerous .

Uncle Wassem has run out of medication and it is nowhere to be found . Trying to cross the city to another district to find it, is too dangerous.

Cousin Reema , a widow, has not been getting any of her husband's pension, she needs to go and search for a job, but what's the point, there are none and in any case it's too dangerous.
Abu Saleem, a father of 4, has been out of work for nearly a year now and can no longer feed his kids. He is in total despair and proposing his services to anyone is out of the question, it's too dangerous .

Radhee himself dares not go shopping for food in the neighborhood, it's too dangerous.
His son Bassel, a brilliant surgeon stopped showing up at the hospital, it's too dangerous.
Abu Issam and his wife and their kids left the country because everything is getting too dangerous .

And the list goes on ...

Once we finish checking on the family network or what is left of it ,we start with the neighbors, friends and acquaintances circle.

And it usually goes this way : " Do you remember so and so , well he is kidnapped, and remember X , they abducted him and Y , he disappeared and Z, he was tortured to death..."
Once we are done with this round , we move to war zone reporting.

"Three mortars here , a car bomb there , loud explosions in the vicinity, bullets across the street checkpoints here and checkpoints there ..." and it goes on .

Radhee paused for a minute or so , took a deep breath and said : " By the way , I forgot to mention that Uncle Kamal died ".

"How, when, who killed him, was he tortured, was he imprisoned, who found him, where, was he dumped ? A street, a prison, the morgue ?...
I bombarbed him with questions .
"No , no , he died a natural Death." Natural Death in today's Iraqi lingo means: old age, an illness, lack of medication or medical care , that kind of stuff.
I sighed with relief so did Radhee .

"Praise to God , may he rest in Peace", we both uttered at the same time.
And Radhee concluded by saying:

"He is lucky, now he can rest . What about us left behind, when will we find rest ?"

Sleeping, if one can sleep that is and waking up if one is "lucky", with dread and anxiety,24 hours a day, 7 days a week, day in and day out, non stop, no respite.

No this is no General Anxiety Disorder that a couple of Prozacs can cure . No amount of anything can cure that- short of a total Peace . A total Peace that only dead Iraqis know.

Yes Ladies and Gentlemen , the "living" or more aptly the "surviving" Iraqis envy the Dead .
Some, miles away cherish Life and hold on to it and some wish its clement ending.
A crazy paradox ? I don't know.
All I know is from whichever way one looks at it- It's lucky You.

Painting : Iraqi Artist Ismail Fattah.

'You must leave in 24 hours or your heads will be cut, your houses burnt'

Calling the Sunni death squads al-Qaeda is incorrect.

The Times December 09, 2006

Ned Parker, Baghdad

One Shia family saw their neighbours flee, one by one. They stayed - until the al-Qaeda death threat finally landed on the doorstep

Read Ned Parker's Iraq blog

The three Azzawi brothers, Hussein, Qadam and Ali, loved their home. Their late father had picked the two-storey villa because it was big enough for his sons to marry and raise children in. He hoped that they would always live there.

That dream ended with a letter, dumped after dark on the Azzawis’ doorstep. The death threat was organised like a business memorandum, with the helpful heading “Subject: displacement”.

It read: “An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth. You should leave the Sunni areas, including Ghazaliyah, within 24 hours. Otherwise your heads will be cut, your houses and furniture will be burnt just as the militias have done to the Sunnis . . . Signed: al-Qaeda in the land of two rivers and the Mujahidin Shura Council.”

Two gunmen had walked down the street like postmen and dropped the letter off at every Shia home. Once they had covered the block, a car picked them up.

No one should have been surprised. Things had worsened since the bombing of a Shia shrine in Samarra 10 months ago triggered widespread Shia-Sunni violence. About 420,000 people have since been displaced across Iraq; 1.6 million have fled the country since 2003. The large-scale expulsion of Sunnis and Shia has been redrawing Iraq’s map.

The trend of religious and ethnic cleansing has overwhelmed Baghdad. “Maybe at the beginning we thought the neighbourhood bonds between Sunnis and Shia were stronger and able to overcome the intimidation factors,” said a Western diplomat. “But at this point, it is a little bit more of every man for himself.”

The al-Qaeda threat said that the expulsions were in revenge for similar attacks by Shia militias, that Sunnis had been killed, kidnapped and displaced in Mahmudiyah, Rashadiyah, Shaab, Shaoula and Hurriyah.

On November 19, on the evening that the Azzawis received the letter, Qadam looked out of his window to see nine families fleeing the neighbourhood — too frightened to wait until morning. They headed on foot for the Shia enclave of Shaoula, directly to the north (the Azzawis’ street sits right on the dividing line). Shaoula was controlled by the Shia Mahdi Army militia, which had been raiding Ghazaliyah for months. Qadam remarked bitterly that the normal Iraqi army checkpoints had disappeared that evening on his way home. They always did when there was trouble.

The Azzawis were now the last Shia family on their street. They had doggedly hung on for the past year as shadowy Sunni groups pushed to purge Ghazaliyah of Shias. They had watched others flee after getting similar death threats, but the family had always convinced themselves that they were safe.

The al-Qaeda letter changed everything. Their 62-year-old mother could not bear to leave her late husband’s home. He had died the year before from a heart attack, but she told her sons: “I’m not worried about me, it’s you. All of you are coming and going in the morning and afternoon. It’s too dangerous.”

That night, the brothers guarded their home. “We watched the road. Qadam was on the roof. I was in the main door and my brother Ali was in the other window until the sun came up,” Qadam’s older brother. Hussein. told The Times.

Hussein and Ali’s wives and their three sisters packed important papers and food. Their mother, already suffering from chronic asthma, sobbed in her room, clutching a picture of her beloved husband. Hussein’s two infant daughters and Ali’s little boy and girl slept, oblivious to the turmoil. Hussein spoke by phone every half hour with their brother-in-law, who lived on a neighbouring street.

In the morning, Qadam drove to Shaoula to find a truck, but all the moving companies refused. “The drivers were scared. They thought maybe we’ll get killed by Mujahidin.”

The brothers knew that they should leave. Hussein was certain that al-Qaeda or the Omar Brigades, another Sunni militia, would attack them that night. However, they could not bring themselves to abandon everything their father had collected over his lifetime.

Hussain ordered all the women and children to hide in the bathrooms and kitchens away from any bombs or bullets that might hit the house. But his mother refused to leave her bedroom. The brothers manned their shooting positions. “No one could help us, not the police, not the army, not even the Americans. We were alone,” Hussein recalled.

The next day, Qadam hired a moving truck for $300 (£153), but the driver said that he would come only if the army or police accompanied him. Qadam went to a police station first. They refused.

Then he headed to a nearby army base and asked a commander. At first, he said no, but Qadam pleaded: “Please, please, I am a Shia and you are a Shia. You know me, you know how bad the situation is.”

The commander relented and agreed to send three Humvees for protection, but once the soldiers pulled up to the area, they refused to enter the street. They warned Qadam they would circle the neighbourhood for just 30 minutes.

Qadam was terrified that someone would start shooting at his family as they packed the truck. Nevertheless, he stood in the middle of the street with a Kalashnikov and a pistol.

Five Sunni friends spotted them and came to say goodbye. “They started to cry ‘please don’t go, we will miss you’. Some women tried to convince my mother to stop crying because she was going to get sick,” Hussein said. “They hugged us and said they were losing a good family. They said even they would move because they hate this area without us.”

Qadam watched them and thought about the times when his Sunni friends used to bring him food or when he gave them discounts at his market. He realised that they probably knew the al-Qaeda militants forcing his family to leave. But then Qadam himself knew Mahdi Army members. All of them were too afraid to speak up and now it was too late.

The Sunnis left. About 20 minutes had passed. The Iraqi army Humvees had driven by a few times, but on their next turn they abruptly shouted “bye, bye”. “Stop, stop, stop,” Qadam screamed. “If you leave us my family will get killed. The Mujahidin will shoot rockets at us.”

The truck revved its motor and chased the army convoy. Its back doors flapped open as it sped off. Qadam yelled for Hussein to lock up the house. “You’ve got two minutes,” he said.


Then he chased the truck in his own vehicle. Ali followed on a motorbike. Hussein closed the gate to the house and dashed into his car, packed with 14 family members, including his two daughters and Ali’s infants, who crawled and screamed in the back seat. His mother sobbed and Hussein braced himself for a hail of bullets.

A giant cabinet, clothes and televisions were left on the kerb. The family had barely taken anything. Inside the home was their father’s gilded tribal robes, his headdresses and his walking stick; pictures of Hussein’s wedding; children’s toys, generators, heaters, clothes; even their mother’s gold jewellery.

“If you have just 30 minutes to go or you will be killed, what can you take with you?” Qadam asked.

The same afternoon, Qadam drove around Shia sections of eastern Baghdad looking for a home that could accommodate 16 people. He found a four-bedroom house, but had to pay $6,000 upfront for six months.

Estate agents were raising rents because they knew that Shia were being expelled from western Baghdad. The agent was not shocked by the story and easily arranged for them to move in that day. The story is the same across Iraq. Sunnis from Shia regions in the south have been moving north to Sunni parts of Baghdad or northern Iraq. Shias have left Sunni towns in Salahaddin province for Shia sections of Baghdad, or shrine cities such as Najaf.

The Azzawis hated the new place. They needed to buy so many things, from new clothes, furniture to carpets, a generator and a heater.

Meanwhile, the brothers kept hearing awful news about their old home. A friend told them that Sunni rebels were planning to move into the house. Already, the gate had been knocked down and the windows shattered by a mortar strike.

“What can I do?” Qadam sighed, resigned. He thought it was stupid to gather tribal members or friends from the Mahdi Army to attack the street. They could all die and he still dreamt that things would get better.

“They will take my house for three, four or five years. But after this Sunni-Shia war finishes, we will return.” Hussein fell into a dark mood. He cursed and threatened to take revenge. Only his baby girls calmed him down and made him realise the stupidity of the idea.

He sobbed thinking about the house. It was intertwined with his memories of his father. His father had told him he would head the family after his death and now he had lost his inheritance.

He had failed to protect his mother and brothers.

Sometimes, he thought about his father’s last minutes alive. “He said, ‘let me die here in my house’. Can you imagine how important his house was to him? The last thing he saw was his house, it was the last thing.”

He cupped his face in his hands and tried to gather himself. “His final words were ‘Hussein, this is your house. Take care of it’.”

(Names have been changed for security reasons)

The Times is the only British paper to maintain a full-time Baghdad bureau

The warning letter

‘In the name of the most merciful, compassionate God

[Koranic verse]

“Ye who believe turn not (for friendship) to people on whom is the Wrath of God. Of the Hereafter they are already in despair, just as the Unbelievers are in despair about those [buried] in graves.


Subject: Displacement

Due to the sectarian and criminal actions that have been taken by the so-called al-Mahdi Army (‘Shameful Army’) and the Badr forces (‘Betrayal forces’) against the Sunnis – killing, kidnapping and displacement in Mahmudiyah, Rashadiyah, Shaab, Shaoula and Hurriyah as well as forcibly taking money from the Sunnis – the organization, God willing, has decided to return the strike with two strikes and reciprocate an eye for eye, a tooth for a tooth and wounds equal for equal.

Therefore it was decided that you should leave from the Sunni areas including Ghazaliyah within 24 hours otherwise your heads will be cut, your houses and furniture will be burned just as the militias have done to the Sunnis. Those who have notified you are excused.


Koranic verse

“If they have assaulted you, attack them in the same way they have attacked you.


-- Al Qaeda Organisation In The Land Of The Two Rivers and The Mujahadeen Shura (consultative) Council’

Israeli soldier gets two weeks in military prison for shooting Palestinian

Two whole weeks!? Sharon would be scandalized.
---
Last update - 13:44 01/12/2006


IDF soldier gets two weeks in military prison for shooting Palestinian

By Amira Hass, Haaretz Correspondent

An Israel Defense Forces soldier, who shot and seriously injured a Palestinian at a roadblock, was sentenced to 14 days in a military prison. Military Police will investigate further.

The soldier shot Haytem Yasin, 25, on November 4, at the roadblock of Asira al-Shemaliya. Yasin is being treated at Beilinson hospital in Petah Tikva, where he is in serious condition as a result of major abdominal injuries.

According to testimonies collected by the human rights group B'Tselem, Yasin was shot aft
er he told the soldiers that they should not ask women to run their hands over their bodies as a means of searching for concealed arms.

Military sources told Haaretz that the investigation at the brigade level was completed earlier this week, and a probe was carried out on Thursday at the divisional level based on the evidence collected in the first investigation. It was also decided that the case would be transferred to the Military Police for further examination.

According to a senior military source, the trial of the soldier by a disciplinary court would prevent bringing him before a court martial.

The details of the incident collected by B'Tselem suggest that the soldier pushed Yasin in response to his comment, and Yasin pushed the soldier back. The soldier then hit Yasin, and two other soldiers joined the fracas, trying to grab Yasin, and hit him, while Yasin tried resisting. At some point the soldiers fired in the air and on the ground. Even after Yasin fell to the ground, they grabbed and threw him against the cement blocks used to make a roadblock. He was cuffed and the soldiers continued to hit and kick him.

Yasin had been living with his parents in Algeria, and came to visit for several months. When his parents learned of the injuries their son had suffered, they returned to the territories.

Hat tip to qrswave: IDF soldier gets 2 wks in military prison

Slaughter in Iraq soon seems to be part of normal life

A special dispatch by Patrick Cockburn on his journey through a country being torn apart by civil war

Published: 28 November 2006


Iraq is rending itself apart. The signs of collapse are everywhere. In Baghdad, the police often pick up more than 100 tortured and mutilated bodies in a single day. Government ministries make war on each other.

A new and ominous stage in the disintegration of the Iraqi state came earlier this month when police commandos from the Shia-controlled Interior Ministry kidnapped 150 people from the Sunni-run Higher Education Ministry in the heart of Baghdad.

Iraq may be getting close to what Americans call "the Saigon moment", the time when it becomes evident to all that the government is expiring. "They say that the killings and kidnappings are being carried out by men in police uniforms and with police vehicles," the Iraqi Foreign Minister Hoshyar Zebari said to me with a despairing laugh this summer. "But everybody in Baghdad knows that the killers and kidnappers are real policemen."

It is getting worse. The Iraqi army and police are not loyal to the state. If the US army decides to confront the Shia militias it could well find Shia military units from the Iraqi army cutting the main American supply route between Kuwait and Baghdad. One convoy was recently stopped at a supposedly fake police checkpoint near the Kuwait border and four American security men and an Austrian taken away.

The US and British position in Iraq is far more of a house built on sand than is realised in Washington or London, despite the disasters of the past three-and-a-half years. George Bush and Tony Blair show a unique inability to learn from their mistakes, largely because they do not want to admit having committed any errors in the first place.

Civil war is raging across central Iraq, home to a third of the country's 27 million people. As Shia and Sunni flee each other's neighbourhoods, Iraq is turning into a country of refugees.

The UN High Commissioner for Refugees says that 1.6 million are displaced within the country and a further 1.8 million have fled abroad. In Baghdad, neighbouring Sunni and Shia districts have started to fire mortars at each other. On the day Saddam Hussein was sentenced to death, I phoned a friend in a Sunni area of the capital to ask what he thought of the verdict. He answered impatiently that "I was woken up this morning by the explosion of a mortar bomb on the roof of my next-door neighbour's house. I am more worried about staying alive myself than what happens to Saddam."

Iraqi friends used to reassure me that there would be no civil war because so many Shia and Sunni were married to each other. These mixed couples are now being compelled to divorce by their families. "I love my husband but my family has forced me to divorce him because we are Shia and he is Sunni," said Hiba Sami, a mother, to a UN official. "My family say they [the husband's family] are insurgents ... and that living with him is an offence to God." Members of mixed marriages had set up an association to protect each other called the Union for Peace in Iraq but they were soon compelled to dissolve it when several founding members were murdered.

Everything in Iraq is dominated by what in Belfast we used to call "the politics of the last atrocity". All three Iraqi communities - Shia, Sunni and Kurds - see themselves as victims and seldom sympathise with the tragedies of others. Every day brings its gruesome discoveries.

Earlier this month, I visited Mosul, the capital of northern Iraq that has a population of 1.7 million people, of whom about two thirds are Sunni Arabs and one third Kurds. It is not the most dangerous city in Iraq but it is still a place drenched in violence.

A local tribal leader called Sayid Tewfiq from the nearby city of Tal Afar told me of a man from there who went to recover the tortured body of his 16-year-old son. The corpse was wired to explosives that blew up, killing the father so their two bodies were buried together.

Khasro Goran, the efficient and highly effective deputy governor of Mosul, said there was no civil war yet in Mosul but it could easily happen.

He added that 70,000 Kurds had already fled the city because of assassinations. It is extraordinary how, in Iraq, slaughter that would be front-page news anywhere else in the world soon seems to be part of normal life.

On the day I arrived in Mosul, the police had found 11 bodies in the city which would have been on the low side in Baghdad. I spoke to Duraid Mohammed Kashmula, the governor of Mosul, whose office is decorated with pictures of smiling fresh-faced young men who turned out to be his son and four nephews, all of them killed by insurgents.

His own house, together with his furniture, was burned to the ground two years ago. He added in passing that Mr Goran and he himself were the prime targets for assassination in Mosul, a point that was dramatically proved true the day after we spoke when insurgents exploded a bomb beside his convoy - fortunately he was not in it at the time - killing one and wounding several of his bodyguards.

For the moment Mosul is more strongly controlled by pro-government forces than most Iraqi cities. That is because the US has powerful local allies in the shape of the Kurds. The two army divisions in the province are primarily Kurdish, but the 17,000 police in Nineveh, the province of which Mosul is the capital, are almost entirely Sunni and their loyalty is dubious.

One was dismissed on the day of Saddam's trial for putting a picture of the former leader in the window of his car. In November 2004, the entire Mosul police force abandoned their police stations to the insurgents who captured £20m worth of arms.

"The terrorists do not control a single district in Mosul," is the proud claim of Major General Wathiq Mohammed Abdul Qadir al-Hamdani, the bullet-headed police chief of Nineveh. "I challenge them to fight me face to face." But the situation is still very fragile. We went to see the police operations room where an officer was bellowing into a microphone: "There is a suicide bomber in a car in the city. Do not let him get near you or any of our buildings." There was a reason to be frightened. On my way into Mosul, I had seen the broken concrete walls of the party headquarters of the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan, one of the two big Kurdish political parties. In August, two men in a car packed with explosives shot their way past the outer guard post and then blew themselves up, killing 17 soldiers.

The balance of forces in Nineveh between American, Arab, Kurd, Turkoman, Sunni and Shia is complicated even by Iraqi standards. Power is fragmented.

Sayid Tewfiq, the Shia tribal leader from Tal Afar, resplendent in his flowing robes, admitted: "I would not last 24 hours in Tal Afar without Coalition [US] support." "That's probably about right," confirmed Mr Goran, explaining that Sayid Tewfiq's Shia Turkoman tribe was surrounded by Sunni tribes. Earlier I had heard him confidently invite all of Nineveh provincial council to visit him in Tal Afar. Nobody looked enthusiastic about taking him up on the offer.

"He may have 3,000 fighters from his tribe but he can't visit most of Tal Afar himself," said another member of the council, Mohammed Suleiman, as he declined the invitation. A few hours before somebody tried to assassinate him, Governor Kashmula claimed to me that "security in Mosul is the best in Iraq outside the Kurdish provinces".

It is a measure of the violence in Iraq that it is an arguable point. Khasro Goran said: "The situation is not perfect but it is better than Anbar, Baquba and Diyala." I could vouch for this. In Iraq however bad things are there is always somewhere worse.

It is obviously very difficult for reporters to discover what is happening in Iraq's most violent provinces without being killed themselves. But, at the end of September, I travelled south along the Iraqi side of the border with Iran, sticking to Kurdish villages to try to reach Diyala, a mixed Sunni-Shia province north-east of Baghdad where there had been savage fighting. It is a road on which a wrong turning could be fatal.

We drove from Sulaimaniyah through the mountains, passed through the Derbandikhan tunnel and then took the road that runs beside the Diyala river, its valley a vivid streak of lush green in the dun-coloured semi desert.

The area is a smuggler's paradise. At night, trucks drive through without lights, their drivers using night-vision goggles. It is not clear what cargoes they are carrying - presumably weapons or drugs - and nobody has the temerity to ask.

We had been warned it was essential to turn left after the tumbledown Kurdish town of Kalar before reaching the mixed Arab-Kurdish village of Jalula. We crossed the river by a long and rickety bridge, parts of which had fallen into the swirling waters below, and soon arrived in the Kurdish stronghold of Khanaqin in Diyala province. If I had any thoughts about driving further towards Baghdad they were put to rest by the sight, in one corner of the yard of the local police headquarters, of the wreckage of a blue-and-white police vehicle torn apart by a bomb.

"Five policemen were killed in it when it was blown up at an intersection in As-Sadiyah two months ago," a policeman told me. "Only their commander survived but his legs were amputated."

Officials in Khanaqin had no doubt about what is happening in their province. Lt Col Ahmed Nuri Hassan, the exhausted-looking commander of the federal police, said: "There is a sectarian civil war here and it is getting worse every day." The head of the local council estimated 100 people were being killed a week.

In Baquba, the provincial capital, Sunni Arabs were driving out Shia and Kurds. The army and police were divided along sectarian lines. The one Iraqi army division in Diyala was predominantly Shia and only arrested Sunni. On the day after I left, Sunni and Kurdish police officers fought a gun battle in Jalula, the village I had been warned not to enter. The fighting started when Kurdish police refused to accept a new Sunni Arab police chief and his followers. Here, in miniature, in Diyala it was possible to see Iraq breaking up. The province is ruled by its death squads. The police say at least 9,000 people had been murdered. It is difficult to see how Sunni and Shia in the province can ever live together again.

In much of Iraq, we long ago slipped down the rapids leading from crisis to catastrophe though it is only in the past six months that these dire facts have begun to be accepted abroad. For the first three years of the war, Republicans in the US regularly claimed the liberal media was ignoring signs of peace and progress. Some right-wingers even set up websites devoted to spreading the news of American achievements in this ruined land.

I remember a team from a US network news channel staying in my hotel in Baghdad complaining to me, as they buckled on their body armour and helmets, that they had been once again told by their bosses in New York, themselves under pressure from the White House, to "go and find some good news and report it."

Times have changed in Washington. The extent of the disaster in Iraq is admitted by almost all, aside from President Bush. Even before the Democrats' victory in the Congressional elections on 7 November the magazine Vanity Fair commented acidly that "the only group in the Bush camp at this point are the people who wait patiently for news of the WMD and continue to believe that Saddam and Osama were once lovers."

Previous supporters of the war are showing embarrassing haste in recanting past convictions.

These days, it is in Britain alone, or more specifically in Downing Street, that policies bloodily discredited in Iraq in the years since the overthrow of Saddam Hussein still get a hearing. I returned from Mosul to London just in time to hear Tony Blair speaking at the Lord Mayor's banquet. It was a far more extraordinary performance that his audience appreciated.

As the Prime Minister spoke with his usual Hugh Grant charm, it became clear he had learned nothing and forgotten nothing in three-and-a-half years of war. Misconception after misconception poured from his lips.

Contrary to views of his own generals and every opinion poll assessing Iraqi opinion, he discounted the idea that armed resistance in Iraq is fueled by hostility to foreign occupation. Instead he sees dark forces rising in the east, dedicated, like Sauron in Lord of the Rings, to principles of pure evil. The enemy, in this case, is "based on a thoroughly warped misinterpretation of Islam, which is fanatical and deadly."

Even by the standard of Middle Eastern conspiracy theories, it was puerile stuff. Everywhere Mr Blair saw hidden hands - "forces outside Iraq that are trying to create mayhem" - at work.

An expert on the politics of Iraq and Lebanon recently said to me: "The most dangerous error in the Middle East today is to believe the Shia communities in Iraq and Lebanon are pawns of Iran." But that is exactly what the Prime Minister does believe.

The fact that the largest Shia militia in Iraq - the Mehdi Army of Muqtada al-Sadr - is anti-Iranian and Iraqi nationalist is conveniently ignored. Those misconceptions are important in terms of practical policy because they give support to the dangerous myth that if the US and Britain could only frighten or square the Iranians and Syrians then all would come right as their Shia cats-paws in Iraq and Lebanon would inevitably fall into line.

In a very British way, opponents of the war in Iraq have focused not on current events but on the past sins of the government in getting us into the war.

No doubt it was all very wrong for Downing Street to pretend that Saddam Hussein had WMD and was a threat to the world when they knew he was not. But this emphasis on the origins of the war in Iraq has diverted attention from the fact that, going by official statements, the British government knows no more about what was going on in Iraq in 2006 than it did in 2003.

The picture Mr Blair paints of Iraq seldom touches reality at any point. For instance, he says Iraqis "voted for an explicitly non-sectarian government," but every Iraqi knows the vote in two parliamentary elections in 2005 went wholly along sectarian and ethnic lines. The polls were the starting pistol for the start of the civil war.

Mr Blair steadfastly refuses to accept the fact that opposition to the American and British occupation of Iraq has been the main cause of the insurgency.

The commander of the British army, General Sir Richard Dannatt, was almost fired for his trouble when he made the obvious point that "we should get ourselves out some time soon because our presence exacerbates the security problem."

A series of opinion polls carried out by the US-based group WorldPublicOpinion.org at the end of September show why Gen. Dannatt is right and Mr Blair is wrong. The poll shows that 92 per cent of the Sunni and 62 per cent of the Shia - up from 41 per cent at the start of the year - approve of attacks on US-led forces. Only the Kurds support the occupation. Some 78 per cent of all Iraqis think the US military presence provokes more conflict than it prevents and 71 per cent want US-led forces out of Iraq within a year. The biggest and most menacing change this year is the growing hostility of Iraq's Shia to the American and British presence.

It used to be said that at least the foreign occupation prevented a civil war but, with 1,000 Iraqis being killed every week, it is now very clearly failing.

It was always true that in post-Saddam Iraq there was going to be friction between the Shia, Sunni and Kurds. But Iraqis were also forced to decide if they were for or against a foreign invader.

The Sunnis were always going to fight the occupation, the Kurds to welcome it and the Shia to co-operate for just so long as it served their interests. Patriotism and communal self-interest combined. Before 2003, a Sunni might see a Shia as the member of a different sect but once the war had started he started to see him as a traitor to his country.

Of course Messrs Bush and Blair argue there is no occupation. In June 2004, sovereignty was supposedly handed back to Iraq. "Let Freedom Reign," wrote Mr Bush. But the reality of power remained firmly with the US and Britain. The Iraqi prime minister Nouri al-Maliki said this month that he could not move a company of soldiers without seeking permission of the Coalition (the US and Britain). Officials in Mosul confirmed to me that they could not carry out a military operation without the agreement of US forces. There is a hidden history to the occupation of Iraq which helps explain why has proved such a disaster. In 1991, after the previous Gulf War, a crucial reason why President George HW Bush did not push on to Baghdad was that he feared the overthrow of Saddam Hussein would be followed by elections that would be won by Shia parties sympathetic to Iran. No worse outcome of the war could be imagined in Washington. After the capture of Baghdad in 2003, the US faced the same dilemma. Many of the contortions of US policy in Iraq since then have been a covert attempt to avoid or dilute the domination of Iraq's Shia majority.

For more than a year, the astute US envoy in Baghdad, Zalmay Khalilzad, tried to conciliate the Sunni. He failed. Attacks on US forces are on the increase. Dead and wounded US soldiers now total almost 1,000 a month..

An Iraqi government will only have real legitimacy and freedom to operate when US and British troops have withdrawn. Washington and London have to accept that if Iraq is to survive at all it will be as a loose federation run by a Shia-Kurdish alliance because together they are 80 per cent of the population. But, thanks to the miscalculations of Mr Bush and Mr Blair, the future of Iraq will be settled not by negotiations but on the battlefield.

The Occupation: War and Resistance in Iraq by Patrick Cockburn is published by Verso.

The toll of war

* US troops killed since invasion - 2,880

* UK troops killed - 126

* Iraqis who have died as result of invasion - 655,000

* Journalists killed - 77

* Daily attacks on coalition forces - 180

* Average number of US troops killed every day in October - 3.5

* Strength of insurgency - 30,000 nationwide

* Number of police - 180,000

* Trained judges - 740

* Percentage of Iraqi population that wants US forces to leave within 12 months - 71 per cent

* Hours of electricity per day in Baghdad in November - 8.6 (pre-war estimate 16-24 hours)

* Unemployment - 25-40 per cent

* Internet subscribers - 197,310 (pre-war 4,500)

* Population with access to clean drinking water - 9.7 million (12.9 million pre-war). Percentage of children suffering malnutrition - 33 per cent

Iraq is rending itself apart. The signs of collapse are everywhere. In Baghdad, the police often pick up more than 100 tortured and mutilated bodies in a single day. Government ministries make war on each other.

A new and ominous stage in the disintegration of the Iraqi state came earlier this month when police commandos from the Shia-controlled Interior Ministry kidnapped 150 people from the Sunni-run Higher Education Ministry in the heart of Baghdad.

Iraq may be getting close to what Americans call "the Saigon moment", the time when it becomes evident to all that the government is expiring. "They say that the killings and kidnappings are being carried out by men in police uniforms and with police vehicles," the Iraqi Foreign Minister Hoshyar Zebari said to me with a despairing laugh this summer. "But everybody in Baghdad knows that the killers and kidnappers are real policemen."

It is getting worse. The Iraqi army and police are not loyal to the state. If the US army decides to confront the Shia militias it could well find Shia military units from the Iraqi army cutting the main American supply route between Kuwait and Baghdad. One convoy was recently stopped at a supposedly fake police checkpoint near the Kuwait border and four American security men and an Austrian taken away.

The US and British position in Iraq is far more of a house built on sand than is realised in Washington or London, despite the disasters of the past three-and-a-half years. George Bush and Tony Blair show a unique inability to learn from their mistakes, largely because they do not want to admit having committed any errors in the first place.

Civil war is raging across central Iraq, home to a third of the country's 27 million people. As Shia and Sunni flee each other's neighbourhoods, Iraq is turning into a country of refugees.

The UN High Commissioner for Refugees says that 1.6 million are displaced within the country and a further 1.8 million have fled abroad. In Baghdad, neighbouring Sunni and Shia districts have started to fire mortars at each other. On the day Saddam Hussein was sentenced to death, I phoned a friend in a Sunni area of the capital to ask what he thought of the verdict. He answered impatiently that "I was woken up this morning by the explosion of a mortar bomb on the roof of my next-door neighbour's house. I am more worried about staying alive myself than what happens to Saddam."

Iraqi friends used to reassure me that there would be no civil war because so many Shia and Sunni were married to each other. These mixed couples are now being compelled to divorce by their families. "I love my husband but my family has forced me to divorce him because we are Shia and he is Sunni," said Hiba Sami, a mother, to a UN official. "My family say they [the husband's family] are insurgents ... and that living with him is an offence to God." Members of mixed marriages had set up an association to protect each other called the Union for Peace in Iraq but they were soon compelled to dissolve it when several founding members were murdered.

Everything in Iraq is dominated by what in Belfast we used to call "the politics of the last atrocity". All three Iraqi communities - Shia, Sunni and Kurds - see themselves as victims and seldom sympathise with the tragedies of others. Every day brings its gruesome discoveries.

Earlier this month, I visited Mosul, the capital of northern Iraq that has a population of 1.7 million people, of whom about two thirds are Sunni Arabs and one third Kurds. It is not the most dangerous city in Iraq but it is still a place drenched in violence.

A local tribal leader called Sayid Tewfiq from the nearby city of Tal Afar told me of a man from there who went to recover the tortured body of his 16-year-old son. The corpse was wired to explosives that blew up, killing the father so their two bodies were buried together.

Khasro Goran, the efficient and highly effective deputy governor of Mosul, said there was no civil war yet in Mosul but it could easily happen.

He added that 70,000 Kurds had already fled the city because of assassinations. It is extraordinary how, in Iraq, slaughter that would be front-page news anywhere else in the world soon seems to be part of normal life.

On the day I arrived in Mosul, the police had found 11 bodies in the city which would have been on the low side in Baghdad. I spoke to Duraid Mohammed Kashmula, the governor of Mosul, whose office is decorated with pictures of smiling fresh-faced young men who turned out to be his son and four nephews, all of them killed by insurgents.

His own house, together with his furniture, was burned to the ground two years ago. He added in passing that Mr Goran and he himself were the prime targets for assassination in Mosul, a point that was dramatically proved true the day after we spoke when insurgents exploded a bomb beside his convoy - fortunately he was not in it at the time - killing one and wounding several of his bodyguards.

For the moment Mosul is more strongly controlled by pro-government forces than most Iraqi cities. That is because the US has powerful local allies in the shape of the Kurds. The two army divisions in the province are primarily Kurdish, but the 17,000 police in Nineveh, the province of which Mosul is the capital, are almost entirely Sunni and their loyalty is dubious.

One was dismissed on the day of Saddam's trial for putting a picture of the former leader in the window of his car. In November 2004, the entire Mosul police force abandoned their police stations to the insurgents who captured £20m worth of arms.

"The terrorists do not control a single district in Mosul," is the proud claim of Major General Wathiq Mohammed Abdul Qadir al-Hamdani, the bullet-headed police chief of Nineveh. "I challenge them to fight me face to face." But the situation is still very fragile. We went to see the police operations room where an officer was bellowing into a microphone: "There is a suicide bomber in a car in the city. Do not let him get near you or any of our buildings." There was a reason to be frightened. On my way into Mosul, I had seen the broken concrete walls of the party headquarters of the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan, one of the two big Kurdish political parties. In August, two men in a car packed with explosives shot their way past the outer guard post and then blew themselves up, killing 17 soldiers.

The balance of forces in Nineveh between American, Arab, Kurd, Turkoman, Sunni and Shia is complicated even by Iraqi standards. Power is fragmented.

Sayid Tewfiq, the Shia tribal leader from Tal Afar, resplendent in his flowing robes, admitted: "I would not last 24 hours in Tal Afar without Coalition [US] support." "That's probably about right," confirmed Mr Goran, explaining that Sayid Tewfiq's Shia Turkoman tribe was surrounded by Sunni tribes. Earlier I had heard him confidently invite all of Nineveh provincial council to visit him in Tal Afar. Nobody looked enthusiastic about taking him up on the offer.

"He may have 3,000 fighters from his tribe but he can't visit most of Tal Afar himself," said another member of the council, Mohammed Suleiman, as he declined the invitation. A few hours before somebody tried to assassinate him, Governor Kashmula claimed to me that "security in Mosul is the best in Iraq outside the Kurdish provinces".

It is a measure of the violence in Iraq that it is an arguable point. Khasro Goran said: "The situation is not perfect but it is better than Anbar, Baquba and Diyala." I could vouch for this. In Iraq however bad things are there is always somewhere worse.

It is obviously very difficult for reporters to discover what is happening in Iraq's most violent provinces without being killed themselves. But, at the end of September, I travelled south along the Iraqi side of the border with Iran, sticking to Kurdish villages to try to reach Diyala, a mixed Sunni-Shia province north-east of Baghdad where there had been savage fighting. It is a road on which a wrong turning could be fatal.

We drove from Sulaimaniyah through the mountains, passed through the Derbandikhan tunnel and then took the road that runs beside the Diyala river, its valley a vivid streak of lush green in the dun-coloured semi desert.

The area is a smuggler's paradise. At night, trucks drive through without lights, their drivers using night-vision goggles. It is not clear what cargoes they are carrying - presumably weapons or drugs - and nobody has the temerity to ask.

We had been warned it was essential to turn left after the tumbledown Kurdish town of Kalar before reaching the mixed Arab-Kurdish village of Jalula. We crossed the river by a long and rickety bridge, parts of which had fallen into the swirling waters below, and soon arrived in the Kurdish stronghold of Khanaqin in Diyala province. If I had any thoughts about driving further towards Baghdad they were put to rest by the sight, in one corner of the yard of the local police headquarters, of the wreckage of a blue-and-white police vehicle torn apart by a bomb.

"Five policemen were killed in it when it was blown up at an intersection in As-Sadiyah two months ago," a policeman told me. "Only their commander survived but his legs were amputated."

Officials in Khanaqin had no doubt about what is happening in their province. Lt Col Ahmed Nuri Hassan, the exhausted-looking commander of the federal police, said: "There is a sectarian civil war here and it is getting worse every day." The head of the local council estimated 100 people were being killed a week.
In Baquba, the provincial capital, Sunni Arabs were driving out Shia and Kurds. The army and police were divided along sectarian lines. The one Iraqi army division in Diyala was predominantly Shia and only arrested Sunni. On the day after I left, Sunni and Kurdish police officers fought a gun battle in Jalula, the village I had been warned not to enter. The fighting started when Kurdish police refused to accept a new Sunni Arab police chief and his followers. Here, in miniature, in Diyala it was possible to see Iraq breaking up. The province is ruled by its death squads. The police say at least 9,000 people had been murdered. It is difficult to see how Sunni and Shia in the province can ever live together again.

In much of Iraq, we long ago slipped down the rapids leading from crisis to catastrophe though it is only in the past six months that these dire facts have begun to be accepted abroad. For the first three years of the war, Republicans in the US regularly claimed the liberal media was ignoring signs of peace and progress. Some right-wingers even set up websites devoted to spreading the news of American achievements in this ruined land.

I remember a team from a US network news channel staying in my hotel in Baghdad complaining to me, as they buckled on their body armour and helmets, that they had been once again told by their bosses in New York, themselves under pressure from the White House, to "go and find some good news and report it."

Times have changed in Washington. The extent of the disaster in Iraq is admitted by almost all, aside from President Bush. Even before the Democrats' victory in the Congressional elections on 7 November the magazine Vanity Fair commented acidly that "the only group in the Bush camp at this point are the people who wait patiently for news of the WMD and continue to believe that Saddam and Osama were once lovers."

Previous supporters of the war are showing embarrassing haste in recanting past convictions.

These days, it is in Britain alone, or more specifically in Downing Street, that policies bloodily discredited in Iraq in the years since the overthrow of Saddam Hussein still get a hearing. I returned from Mosul to London just in time to hear Tony Blair speaking at the Lord Mayor's banquet. It was a far more extraordinary performance that his audience appreciated.

As the Prime Minister spoke with his usual Hugh Grant charm, it became clear he had learned nothing and forgotten nothing in three-and-a-half years of war. Misconception after misconception poured from his lips.

Contrary to views of his own generals and every opinion poll assessing Iraqi opinion, he discounted the idea that armed resistance in Iraq is fueled by hostility to foreign occupation. Instead he sees dark forces rising in the east, dedicated, like Sauron in Lord of the Rings, to principles of pure evil. The enemy, in this case, is "based on a thoroughly warped misinterpretation of Islam, which is fanatical and deadly."

Even by the standard of Middle Eastern conspiracy theories, it was puerile stuff. Everywhere Mr Blair saw hidden hands - "forces outside Iraq that are trying to create mayhem" - at work.

An expert on the politics of Iraq and Lebanon recently said to me: "The most dangerous error in the Middle East today is to believe the Shia communities in Iraq and Lebanon are pawns of Iran." But that is exactly what the Prime Minister does believe.

The fact that the largest Shia militia in Iraq - the Mehdi Army of Muqtada al-Sadr - is anti-Iranian and Iraqi nationalist is conveniently ignored. Those misconceptions are important in terms of practical policy because they give support to the dangerous myth that if the US and Britain could only frighten or square the Iranians and Syrians then all would come right as their Shia cats-paws in Iraq and Lebanon would inevitably fall into line.

In a very British way, opponents of the war in Iraq have focused not on current events but on the past sins of the government in getting us into the war.

No doubt it was all very wrong for Downing Street to pretend that Saddam Hussein had WMD and was a threat to the world when they knew he was not. But this emphasis on the origins of the war in Iraq has diverted attention from the fact that, going by official statements, the British government knows no more about what was going on in Iraq in 2006 than it did in 2003.

The picture Mr Blair paints of Iraq seldom touches reality at any point. For instance, he says Iraqis "voted for an explicitly non-sectarian government," but every Iraqi knows the vote in two parliamentary elections in 2005 went wholly along sectarian and ethnic lines. The polls were the starting pistol for the start of the civil war.

Mr Blair steadfastly refuses to accept the fact that opposition to the American and British occupation of Iraq has been the main cause of the insurgency.

The commander of the British army, General Sir Richard Dannatt, was almost fired for his trouble when he made the obvious point that "we should get ourselves out some time soon because our presence exacerbates the security problem."

A series of opinion polls carried out by the US-based group WorldPublicOpinion.org at the end of September show why Gen. Dannatt is right and Mr Blair is wrong. The poll shows that 92 per cent of the Sunni and 62 per cent of the Shia - up from 41 per cent at the start of the year - approve of attacks on US-led forces. Only the Kurds support the occupation. Some 78 per cent of all Iraqis think the US military presence provokes more conflict than it prevents and 71 per cent want US-led forces out of Iraq within a year. The biggest and most menacing change this year is the growing hostility of Iraq's Shia to the American and British presence.

It used to be said that at least the foreign occupation prevented a civil war but, with 1,000 Iraqis being killed every week, it is now very clearly failing.

It was always true that in post-Saddam Iraq there was going to be friction between the Shia, Sunni and Kurds. But Iraqis were also forced to decide if they were for or against a foreign invader.

The Sunnis were always going to fight the occupation, the Kurds to welcome it and the Shia to co-operate for just so long as it served their interests. Patriotism and communal self-interest combined. Before 2003, a Sunni might see a Shia as the member of a different sect but once the war had started he started to see him as a traitor to his country.

Of course Messrs Bush and Blair argue there is no occupation. In June 2004, sovereignty was supposedly handed back to Iraq. "Let Freedom Reign," wrote Mr Bush. But the reality of power remained firmly with the US and Britain. The Iraqi prime minister Nouri al-Maliki said this month that he could not move a company of soldiers without seeking permission of the Coalition (the US and Britain). Officials in Mosul confirmed to me that they could not carry out a military operation without the agreement of US forces. There is a hidden history to the occupation of Iraq which helps explain why has proved such a disaster. In 1991, after the previous Gulf War, a crucial reason why President George HW Bush did not push on to Baghdad was that he feared the overthrow of Saddam Hussein would be followed by elections that would be won by Shia parties sympathetic to Iran. No worse outcome of the war could be imagined in Washington. After the capture of Baghdad in 2003, the US faced the same dilemma. Many of the contortions of US policy in Iraq since then have been a covert attempt to avoid or dilute the domination of Iraq's Shia majority.

For more than a year, the astute US envoy in Baghdad, Zalmay Khalilzad, tried to conciliate the Sunni. He failed. Attacks on US forces are on the increase. Dead and wounded US soldiers now total almost 1,000 a month..

An Iraqi government will only have real legitimacy and freedom to operate when US and British troops have withdrawn. Washington and London have to accept that if Iraq is to survive at all it will be as a loose federation run by a Shia-Kurdish alliance because together they are 80 per cent of the population. But, thanks to the miscalculations of Mr Bush and Mr Blair, the future of Iraq will be settled not by negotiations but on the battlefield.

The Occupation: War and Resistance in Iraq by Patrick Cockburn is published by Verso.

The toll of war

* US troops killed since invasion - 2,880

* UK troops killed - 126

* Iraqis who have died as result of invasion - 655,000

* Journalists killed - 77

* Daily attacks on coalition forces - 180

* Average number of US troops killed every day in October - 3.5

* Strength of insurgency - 30,000 nationwide

* Number of police - 180,000

* Trained judges - 740

* Percentage of Iraqi population that wants US forces to leave within 12 months - 71 per cent

* Hours of electricity per day in Baghdad in November - 8.6 (pre-war estimate 16-24 hours)

* Unemployment - 25-40 per cent

* Internet subscribers - 197,310 (pre-war 4,500)

* Population with access to clean drinking water - 9.7 million (12.9 million pre-war). Percentage of children suffering malnutrition - 33 per cent

http://news.independent.co.uk/world/middle_east/article2021233.ece

Israeli occupation forces conducted an overnight raid in the West Bank town of Qabatiya murdering two Palestinians

Nov 26, 2006

The same day that a truce goes into effect, Israeli occupation forces raid Qabatiya and murder two. The pretexts for the killings are the usual ones. The threat of this type of action is that the truce in Gaza will not hold because of it.

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