1. IRAQ: Home to Too Many Widows (June 18, 2008)
2. Iraq Still a Major Source of Refugees in 2007 (June 19, 2008)
3. U.S./IRAQ: A Blueprint for Withdrawal (June 25, 2008)
4. Pull-out Demand Signals Final Bush Defeat in Iraq (July 10, 2008)
5. IRAQ: Refugees Forsaken Even By Their Own Gov’t (July 11, 2008)
6. Fallujah Braces for Another Assault (July 21, 2008)
7. Bush, U.S. Military Pressure Iraqis on Withdrawal(July 24, 2008)
8. Bush Forced al-Maliki to Back Down on Pullout in 2006 (July 28, 2008)
IRAQ: Home to Too Many Widows
By Ahmed Ali and Dahr Jamail*
Inter Press Service
http://ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=42858
BAQUBA, June 18, 2008 (IPS) - Just about everyone in Iraq is a loser as a result of the occupation, but none more than women. One of the more obvious signs of that is the very large number of widows.
The Asharq al-Awsat Arab media channel estimated in late 2007 there were 2.3 million widows in Iraq. These include widows from the 1980-1988 war with Iran in which half a million men were killed, the U.S.-led invasion and occupation of Iraq, and from ‘natural’ causes. The news outlet cited the Iraqiyat (Iraqi women) group as a source for their figure.
For a widow, all things are the same, dark.
“Being a widow means being dead in Iraq today,” a professor from Diyala University, speaking on condition of anonymity, told IPS. “This is because of the tremendous responsibilities cast upon her.”
The widows have become victims of the occupation, but also of social codes. Women are not supposed to commit mistakes, and when they do, their mistakes are rarely forgiven. Women are easily accused of doing ‘bad things’, regardless of proof.
Widowed women have a tough struggle on their hands, beyond the loss they have had to live through. They are not easily allowed to work, or even to carry out normal daily activities.
“When a woman breaks these rules, she loses the respect of others, or might be spoken of badly,” a local trader told IPS. “This is because much of rural Iraqi society is primitive and undereducated.” Like most others, the trader did not want his name used, for fear of retribution.
“Islam gives respectable freedom to the woman when she loses her husband,” a religious cleric told IPS. “But because of their ignorance, people place severe restrictions on the woman.”
Millions of lives have been shattered during the occupation. Two groups, Just Foreign Policy in the U.S. and the Opinion Business Research group in Britain estimate the total number of Iraqis who have died due to the occupation to be at least 1.2 million.
This has had devastating knock-on effects. The man is typically the one who earns the living. Death means his wife has to do a double job — to be responsible for earning a living, and to take care of her children and home as well. And, she has to conduct herself as a widow is expected to.
A woman whose husband was killed told IPS of her “unimaginable” troubles.
“I have five children. The oldest one is 11 years old and the youngest is two,” she said. “They are a very big responsibility because I have no job, and there is no salary for my dead husband.
“Life is getting terribly hard, and in addition to the loss of my husband, there is this new suffering; being lonely, and responsible for a big family. The hours of joy are very few in the long years of grief. This occupation has brought a very heavy tax.”
Another woman whose husband was killed two years ago at a militia check point in the main street in Baquba (the capital city of Diyala province, 40 km northeast of Baghdad), says her life is hell.
“My husband was all my life. He was a prominent businessman in Baquba. The militants asked for 50,000 dollars to release him. I gave them the money but my husband did not return. I found him in the morgue.
“Now, after the luxurious life we had with my husband, we ask for help from relatives. But no one cares about me or my four children. We’re forgotten.”
A woman who loses her husband can live a life of begging and humiliation.
“When I need something, I have to go to my relatives for help,” a widow with four children told IPS. She lost her husband to U.S. military gunfire. “They are fed up with my repeated needs. And I feel reluctant asking for anything.
“This being alone, fully responsible for the first time for a family is exhausting,” she added. “My eldest son, 12 years old, will not listen to me, and I don’t know how to deal with him. My husband was controlling everything at home, I find it hard to take on such a big task.”
A local resident said the fear of death brings also the fear of what will happen to the family later. “I’m worried and full of fear that I may be killed and leave my family in this wild world. They’re everything to me. I don’t want them to suffer after me.”
The government pays little attention to the plight of widows. “Every family is given a 2,000 dollar donation if someone is killed in violence or random firing,” an employee at the provincial office told IPS.
“This donation solves no problem,” said an employee at the social care office, also speaking on terms of anonymity. “The real solution would be to give each of these families a monthly payment.”
(*Ahmed, our correspondent in Iraq’s Diyala province, works in close collaboration with Dahr Jamail, our U.S.-based specialist writer on Iraq who has reported extensively from Iraq and the Middle East)
Copyright © 2008 IPS-Inter Press Service. All rights reserved.
Iraq Still a Major Source of Refugees in 2007
By Jim Lobe
Inter Press Service
http://ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=42887
WASHINGTON, June 19, 2008 (IPS) - Despite a marked reduction in violence due in part to more aggressive U.S. counter-insurgency efforts in 2007, Iraq was the biggest source of the world’s newest refugees for the third year in a row, according to the latest annual report of the U.S. Committee for Refugees and Immigrants (USCRI) released here Thursday.
Last year’s exodus was absorbed mostly by Syria, which took in some 500,000 Iraqis during the year — or nearly half of the more than a million people who sought refuge by crossing an international border during 2007. Tens of thousands more Iraqis also found their way to Lebanon, Egypt, Yemen, Turkey, and even Sweden and Germany, which took in, respectively, 10,000 and 6,700 Iraqis during the year.
The report, “World Refugee Survey 2008”, said more than two million Iraqis are currently living outside their homeland, the vast majority in Syria and Jordan.
Somalia — also caught up in Washington’s “global war on terror” — ranked second as a source of new refugees during the year, in large part due to renewed fighting there after U.S.-backed Ethiopian troops ousted Islamist forces, who had brought order to much of the chronically unstable East African nation in 2006, from the capital, Mogadishu, and much of the countryside, according to the new report.
While the continuing violence there has reportedly uprooted over one million Somalis, some 45,000 sought refuge in Ethiopia, and thousands more fled to Yemen and Kenya. Most of the people displaced by the violence, however, have remained within the country in what some have described as the world’s worst and most neglected humanitarian crisis.
The total number of refugees worldwide rose to 14 million by the end of 2007, the largest number since the U.S. war on terror began in late 2001, but only a modest net increase from the previous year, due in major part to the return of nearly 200,000 Afghans from Iran and Pakistan; tens of thousands of Congolese from Tanzania and Congo-Brazzaville; and tens of thousands more Burundians from Tanzania, and Sudanese from Kenya, Sudan, and Uganda. About 40,000 Liberians also returned home from other West African countries as well.
The net increase echoes the conclusion of the annual report released earlier in the week by the U.N. High Commission for Refugees (UNCHR), which concluded that the number of refugees in the world climbed from 9.9 million to 11.4 million during 2007. The greater relative size of the increase, compared to USCRI’s, was due in part to a change in its own methodology compared to previous years.
Despite the continuing increase in the number of Iraqi refugees, the world’s biggest refugee populations by far as of the end of 2007 include Afghans, about three million of whom remain in Pakistan and Iran, and Palestinians, of whom more than two million live in the West Bank, Gaza, and Lebanon; about one million more in Jordan and Syria; and yet another half a million in Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, North Africa, and even Iraq, where, despite persecution by Shi’a militias since the U.S. invasion in 2003, there remain about 14,000 Palestinians today out of the 85,000 living there before the occupation.
Most of these are considered “warehoused” refugee populations, living in large camps or segregated settlements of at least 10,000 people for more than five years — and in some cases, decades. The Palestinians in Gaza, the West Bank and Lebanon have been there since 1949, and those in Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Kuwait since 1968. The 2.7 million Afghans in Iran and Pakistan date back to 1980.
Other large “warehoused” groups include Somalis (418,400 in Kenya, Ethiopia and Yemen since 1992) and Sudanese (300,700 in Uganda, Kenya, Ethiopia, Egypt since 1984).
The USCRI report rates the Palestinians’ plight in Iraq as among the 10 worst places in the world for the treatment of refugees. Other “worst places” for refugees include Bangladesh, particularly the situation of Rohingya refugees from Burma; China, especially its forcible repatriation of North Korean refugees; India and its treatment of Tibetans and Burmese; Kenya, Malaysia, Russia, Sudan, Thailand.
Europe was also included among “the worst” in the report for its increasingly restrictive policies directed against refugees and asylum seekers.
Aside from the West Bank and Gaza, the latest report found that Jordan, Syria, and Lebanon are currently the countries that host the largest refugee populations relative to their size of their indigenous population. For every nine Jordanian citizens, for example, there is one refugee; for Syria, the ratio is 1:11; for Lebanon, 1:12.
Some of the world’s poorest countries also host a high relative number of refugees. Chad, one of the world’s five poorest nations, hosts nearly 300,000 refugees, or a ratio of 1:37. Similarly, Tanzania, despite the recent repatriations, hosts over 400,000 refugees, or a refugee of 1:89.
The Middle East and North Africa lead the world in hosting refugee populations, with a total of 6,380,200, followed by sub-Saharan Africa (2,799,500), East Asia and the Pacific (934,700), Americas and the Caribbean (787,800) and Europe (527,900).
Overall, nations with a per capita GDP of less than 2,000 dollars hosted almost two-thirds of all refugees.
“The mistreatment of refugees is not limited to poor countries or undemocratic regimes,” the report notes. “Wealthy industrial nations utilise policies designed to limit the number of refugees that enter their territory, explaining that they have limited resources, that refugees are unable to integrate or that some other country had primary responsibility.”
The report gave Europe a grade of “D” and the United States a grade of “F” for their practice of “refoulement”, or returning refugees to places where their lives or freedoms could be threatened.
Copyright © 2008 IPS-Inter Press Service. All rights reserved.
U.S./IRAQ: A Blueprint for Withdrawal
By Ali Gharib
Inter Press Service
http://ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=42969
WASHINGTON, June 25, 2008 (IPS) - Proponents of a U.S. military withdrawal from Iraq routinely brush off criticisms that their ideas are “irresponsible”. But until today, the charge that withdrawal cannot be accomplished responsibly — and just how that would be done — has never been coherently answered.
With the release Wednesday of the report “Quickly, Carefully, and Generously: The Necessary Steps for a Responsible Withdrawal from Iraq”__, withdrawal-minded experts, analysts and politicians sought to pull all the answers together in one document.
The report, written by the organising committee after meetings of the more than 20-member Task Force for a Responsible Withdrawal for Iraq in March, does not address the underlying reasons why the withdrawal option is the best one — that case, it says, has already been compellingly made — but rather focuses on how it can be responsibly carried out.
Whenever the topic of withdrawal is broached, said one of three workshop participants from Congress, Rep. Jim McGovern, “the [Pres. George W. Bush] administration screams, ‘bloodbath!’” — raising the spectre of Iraq descending into chaos, igniting regional wars, and, as presumptive Republican presidential nominee Sen. John McCain has said, al Qaeda “taking a country”.
But far-fetched warnings of worst-case scenarios aside, the alternative of, as the report puts it, withdrawing “U.S. troops while pursuing a diplomatic and political solution to Iraq’s civil conflict” is out there.
“What we need to argue is how,” said McGovern on a media conference call to discuss the report. “The alternative to not doing anything and not talking about this is resigning to the status quo.”
The report lays out a comprehensive plan for withdrawal of U.S. forces by internationalising what is currently the U.S. role as the centre of political power and humanitarian aid in Iraq, engaging in regional dialogue to stem outside interference in Iraq and convincing neighbouring friends and foes alike to take a constructive role in reconstruction and development, and fomenting Iraqi reconciliation with international and regional support.
Part of the plan is to create a true national reconciliation between the sometimes fighting and always feuding Iraqi sectarian and political factions to be accomplished by a U.S.-endorsed process of a U.N.-led “pan-Iraqi conference” that would draft an Iraqi national accord.
While the U.S. media often toes the Bush line that al-Maliki is making progress towards reconciliation, the Iraqi government has yet to significantly accommodate other disenfranchised minority political and sectarian groups. Organising committee member Chris Toensing of the Middle East Research and Information Project disputed this notion — noting that though the civil war had cooled down, the political structural problems still existed.
“Genuine national reconciliation in Iraq — which is the key to progress on every other front — requires addressing these structural political problems,” he said.
The Task Force also called for robust diplomacy with all of Iraq’s neighbours, including U.S. regional adversaries Syria and Iran.
“[The report] shines a spotlight on many policy ideas that don’t get enough attention here in Washington,” said the Centre for American Progress’ Brian Katulis, “and one of them is the need for stepped-up diplomacy.”
Syria and Iran, despite their important role in the region and particularly with Iraq, have yet to be meaningfully engaged by the Bush administration.
“We’re changing the rules of the game and we’re changing the incentive structure radically for the neighbours to be engaged,” said Toensing. He stressed the importance of diplomacy under a U.N. lead and that the Bush administration has made, at best, half-hearted efforts at engagements.
“Iran and Syria would not be approached hat in hand by the U.S.,” he said, “but rather, by the U.N. as an equal partner in trying to promote stability in Iraq.”
“Wider diplomatic outreach” with all the neighbours, including Sunni powers, “and trying to bring them together into a more comprehensive and sustained security dialogue about Iraq” is an important step towards a constructive regional role, said George Washington University professor Marc Lynch.
The report also calls for a short-term extension of the current U.N. mandate for the presence of foreign troops as a means to cover U.S. troops from prosecution as they prepare to withdraw. The Bush administration, in contrast, plans to sign a controversial bilateral agreement with the government of Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki to continue the status quo of U.S. troops as an occupying force.
During the initial extension, Caleb Rossiter, counselor to Rep. Bill Delahunt, said on the press call, a longer-term U.N. mandate would be drawn up that would cover the withdrawal and ensuing international involvement.
Part of that, in the even farther long-term, could be a “blue-helmeted peacekeeping force” — referring to U.N. peacekeepers by the distinctive colour of their helmets. But that prospect is clouded by Iraqi resentment of the U.N. after corrupt programmes that benefited the dictator Saddam Hussein and U.N. sanctions that crippled the country in the 1990s.
Asked by IPS about the issue during the call, Task Force advisory group member Carl Conetta of the Project on Defence Alternatives said that U.S. withdrawal can serve to “alter the spin on blue helmets and troops on the ground.” He said that peacekeeping forces would be “invited” by Iraqi authorities.
Rossiter, whose boss, Delahunt, has been one of the most vocal opponents of the Bush-al-Maliki security agreement, said that the U.N. will “need to be able to operate — as a new force — directly with the Iraqi government,” as opposed to the current set up that has the U.N. now operates through the “true force” of 160,000 U.S. troops.
A Government Accountability Office report earlier this week — and simultaneously rejected by the Bush administration — said that some of the administration’s markers of success in Iraq had been overstated. In reality, violence is on the rise and Bush and al-Maliki’s assertions about the readiness of Iraqi security forces are exaggerated.
Copyright © 2008 IPS-Inter Press Service. All rights reserved.
Pull-out Demand Signals Final Bush Defeat in Iraq
Analysis by Gareth Porter*
Inter Press Service
http://www.ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=43140
WASHINGTON, July 10, 2008 (IPS) - Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki’s demand for a timetable for complete U.S. military withdrawal from Iraq, confirmed Tuesday by his national security adviser Mowaffak al-Rubaie, has signaled the almost certain defeat of the George W. Bush administration’s aim of establishing a long-term military presence in the country.
The official Iraqi demand for U.S. withdrawal confirms what was becoming increasingly clear in recent months — that the Iraqi regime has decided to shed its military dependence on the United States.
The two strongly pro-Iranian Shiite factions supporting the regime in Baghdad, the Supreme Islamic Iraqi Council (SIIC) and al-Maliki’s own Dawa Party, were under strong pressure from both Iran and their own Shiite population and from Shiite clerics, including Ayatollah Ali Sistani, to demand U.S. withdrawal.
The statement by al-Rubaei came immediately after he had met with Sistani, thus confirming earlier reports that Sistani was opposed to any continuing U.S. military presence.
The Bush administration has had doubts in the past about the loyalties of those two Shiite groups and of the SIIC’s Badr Corps paramilitary organisation, and it manoeuvred in 2005 and early 2006 to try to weaken their grip on the interior ministry and the police.
By 2007, however, the administration hoped that it had forged a new level of cooperation with al-Maliki aimed at weakening their common enemy, Moqtada al-Sadr’s anti-occupation Mahdi Army. SIIC leader Abdul Aziz al-Hakim was invited to the White House in December 2006 and met with Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice in November 2007.
The degree of cooperation with the al-Maliki regime against the Sadrists was so close that the Bush administration even accepted for a brief period in late 2007 the al-Maliki regime’s argument that Iran was restraining the Mahdi Army by pressing Sadr to issue his August 2007 ceasefire order.
In November, Bush and al-Maliki agreed on a set of principles as the basis for negotiating agreements on stationing of U.S. forces and bilateral cooperation, including a U.S. guarantee of Iraq’s security and territorial integrity. In February 2008, U.S. and Iraqi military planners were already preparing for a U.S.-British-Iraqi military operation later in the summer to squeeze the Sadrists out of Basra.
But after the U.S. draft agreement of Mar. 7 was given to the Iraqi government, the attitude of the al-Maliki government toward the U.S. military presence began to shift dramatically, just as Iran was playing a more overt role in brokering ceasefire agreements between the two warring Shiite factions.
The first indication was al-Maliki’s refusal to go along with the Basra plan and his sudden decision to take over Basra immediately without U.S. troops. Petraeus later said a company of U.S. army troops was attached to some units as advisers “just really because we were having a problem figuring where was the front line.”
That al-Maliki decision was followed by an Iranian political mediation of the intra-Shiite fighting in Basra, at the request of a delegation from the two pro-government parties. The result was that Sadr’s forces gave up control of the city, even though they were far from having been defeated.
U.S. military officials were privately disgruntled at that development, which effectively cancelled the plan for a much bigger operation against the Sadrists during the summer. Weeks later, a U.S. “defence official” would tell the New York Times, “We may have wasted an opportunity in Basra to kill those that needed to be killed.”
In another sign of the shifting Iraqi position away from Washington, in early May, al-Maliki refused to cooperate with a Cheney-Petraeus scheme to embarrass Iran by having the Iraqi government publicly accuse it of arming anti-government Shiites in the South. The prime minister angered U.S. officials by naming a committee to investigate U.S. charges.
Even worse for the Bush administration, a delegation of Shiite officials to Tehran that was supposed to confront Iran over the arms issue instead returned with a new Iranian strategy for dealing with Sadr, according to Alissa J. Rubin of the New York Times: reach a negotiated settlement with him.
The al-Maliki regime began to apply the new Iranian strategy immediately. On May 10, al-Maliki and Sadr reached an accord on Sadr City, where pitched battles were being fought between U.S. troops and the Sadrists.
The new accord prevented a major U.S. escalation of violence against the Mahdi Army stronghold and ended heavy U.S. bombing there. Seven U.S. battalions had been poised to assault Sadr City with tanks and armoured cars in a battle expected to last several weeks.
Under the new pact, Sadr allowed Iraqi troops to patrol in his stronghold, in return for the government’s agreement not to arrest any Sadrist troops unless they were found with “medium and heavy weaponry”.
The new determination to keep U.S. forces out of the intra-Shiite conflict was accompanied by a new tough line in the negotiations with the Bush administration on status of forces and cooperation agreements. In a May 21 briefing for Senate staff, Bush administration officials said Iraq was now demanding “significant changes to the form of the agreements”.
The al-Maliki regime was rejecting the U.S. demand for access to bases with no time limit as well as for complete freedom to use them without consultation with the Iraqi government, as well as its demand for immunity for its troops and contractors. The Iraqis were asserting that these demands violated Iraqi sovereignty. By early June, Iraqi officials were openly questioning for the first time whether Iraq needs a U.S. military presence at all.
The unexpected Iraqi resistance to the U.S. demands reflected the underlying influence of Iran on the al-Maliki government as well as Sadr’s recognition that he could achieve his goal of liberating Iraq from U.S. occupation through political-diplomatic means rather than through military pressures.
Iran put very strong pressure on Iraq to reject the agreement, as soon as it saw the initial U.S. draft. It could cite the fact that the draft would allow the United States to use Iraqi bases to attack Iran, which was known to be a red line in Iran-Iraq relations.
The Iranians could argue that an Iraqi Shiite regime could not depend on the United States, which was committed to a strategy of alliance with Sunni regimes in the region against the Shiite regimes.
Iran was able to exploit a deep vein of Iraqi Shiite suspicion that the U.S. might still try to overthrow the Shiite regime, using former Prime Minister Iyad Allawi and some figures in the Iraqi Army. When the U.S. draft dropped an earlier U.S. commitment to defend Iraq against external aggression and pledged only to “consult” in the event of an external threat, Iran certainly exploited the opening to push al-Maliki to reject the agreement.
The use of military bases in Iraq to project U.S. power into the region to carry out regime change in Iran and elsewhere had been an essential part of the neoconservative plan for invading Iraq from the beginning.
The Bush administration raised the objective of a long-term military presence in Iraq based on the “Korea model” last year at the height of the U.S. celebration of the pacification of the Sunni stronghold of Anbar province, which it viewed as sealing its victory in the war.
But the Iraqi demand for withdrawal makes it clear that the Bush administration was not really in control of events in Iraq, and that Shiite political opposition and Iranian diplomacy could trump U.S. military power.
*Gareth Porter is an investigative historian and journalist specialising in U.S. national security policy. The paperback edition of his latest book, “Perils of Dominance: Imbalance of Power and the Road to War in Vietnam”, was published in 2006.
Copyright © 2008 IPS-Inter Press Service. All rights reserved.
IRAQ: Refugees Forsaken Even By Their Own Gov’t
By Ali Gharib
Inter Press Service
http://ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=43152
WASHINGTON, July 11, 2008 (IPS) - As Iraq’s refugee crisis continues to worsen, the government of Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki is failing to help the estimated five million Iraqis who have been displaced by conflict, says a new report by the International Crisis Group (ICG).
“Failed Responsibility: Iraqi Refugees in Syria, Jordan and Lebanon” acknowledges that while things have gotten better for many Iraqis with the relative success of the U.S. troops “surge” strategy, Iraqi refugees in neighbouring countries are still living in harsh conditions.
Refugees face a desperate economic situation and rigid policies while the Iraqi authorities and the international community — especially the occupying U.S. government — does too little to support them, it says.
“Flush with oil money, it has been conspicuously ungenerous towards its citizens stranded abroad,” says the report of the Iraqi authorities.
The Iraqi government makes life difficult by encouraging tough visa policies by host countries and giving refugees limited access to Iraqi documents.
The refugees, says the report, view the moves as the Interior Ministry in Baghdad trying to control the flow of people and restrict what it sometimes sees as Ba’athists and other collaborators who left because of the new order.
“No doubt there are senior former regime figures among the refugees, but this does not excuse callous neglect of overwhelming non-political people who loyally served Iraq rather than a particular regime,” says the report, noting that Iraq has lost much of its professional class.
Many of the white-collar refugees reportedly had their diplomas and other documents seized as they fled violence in Iraq, making it difficult to find skilled professional jobs in the limited instances where host countries would have allowed it.
With refugees unable to work, the report points to their dwindling resources as leading to “a growing pauperisation of Iraqis” that could, in turn, lead to radicalisation.
“Increased destitution and unemployment among Iraqi refugees are worrying factors,” says the report, “and some observers warn against the possibility of young male refugees joining al Qaeda type militant groups.”
The exact number of refugees is unknown — roughly five million — but the scale is certain: Iraq is the second biggest crisis, preceded only by Afghanistan.
ICG acknowledges the large burden on by Syria, Lebanon, and other neighbours, who have taken on about half of the total displaced, but it says unfriendly treatment leaves Iraqis there with few services and opportunities.
The U.S. and others in the international community, including wealthy Arab states, also contribute to the crisis by neither resettling their share of refugees nor giving enough financial support to host countries and aid organisations, ICG says.
“Donor countries and Iraq bear the greater responsibility to assist both refugees and host countries,” said the report. “Western nations have been happy to let host countries cope with the refugee challenge, less than generous in their financial support, and outright resistant to the notion of resettlement in their midst.”
With host countries strained and so little international and Iraqi aid, most refugees “rely chiefly on personal savings and remittances from relatives in Iraq and elsewhere.”
The report notes that crime in refugee camps and other areas is already on the rise in areas where there is little access to education for Iraqi children, and they and women are often exploited. The conditions have become so deplorable that some refugees return to war-ravaged Iraq because the situation in host countries is so bad.
But the numbers of those returning — though they are publicised — are limited. Oftentimes, refugees cannot return home because their formerly mixed neighbourhoods experienced sectarian cleansing and members of rival sects, often settled by militias, occupy their homes.
While sectarian lines still starkly exist in refugee communities, there has been little “spill over effect” of the sort of strife seen in Iraq.
“Of course they talk about Sunni-Shiite problems; of course they rant in front of you. But that is all they do,” an Iraqi Sunni in Jordan who says he encounters all stripes of Iraqis told ICG. “It’s their way of making sense of their lives and of their past.”
With Iraq still such a violent and chaotic place, ICG recommends that the Iraqi government put a mechanism in place to both help refugees abroad and — while discouraging large-scale returns until security improves — to assist those returning to Iraq.
Syria, Jordan, and Lebanon also need to dramatically step up their efforts to organise the refugees.
In Jordan, says the report, “Even Iraqis fleeing violence were not granted refugee status; instead, they were referred to as ‘guests’ and at times treated far worse than that.”
By limiting even yearly-renewable residency permits — initially more widely available to at least the affluent Iraqis — to those who already met a particular high threshold of investment in Jordan, the host has created a “closed-door policy.”
In Syria, local officials claimed to ICG that Prime Minister al-Maliki had encouraged the visa restrictions placed on Iraqi refugees beginning in September 2007.
The restrictions on movements — effectively ending the open-door policy — coupled with poor relations with the West and particularly the U.S., have worsened conditions in Syria.
ICG calls for the U.S. to end its politically motivated low aid levels and isolate the humanitarian crisis from other political considerations with Syria. The report noted that none of the involved parties are dealing with the refugee crisis that exists, and should another one break out, it would be disastrous.
Copyright © 2008 IPS-Inter Press Service. All rights reserved.
Fallujah Braces for Another Assault
By Ali al-Fadhily and Dahr Jamail*
Inter Press Service
http://www.ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=43248
FALLUJAH, July 21, 2008 (IPS) - U.S. and Iraqi forces are preparing another siege of Fallujah under the pretext of combating “terror”, residents and officials say.
Located 69 km west of Baghdad, the city that suffered two devastating U.S. attacks in 2004 has watched security degrade over recent months.
“Ruling powers in the city fighting to gain full control seem willing to use the security collapse to accuse each other of either conspiracy (in lawlessness) or incapability of control,” Sufian Ahmed, a lawyer and human rights activist in Fallujah told IPS.
“They suddenly changed their tone from saying that the city was the safest in Iraq to claiming that al-Qaeda is a serious threat. Fallujah residents know their so-called leaders are using security threats to terrify them for their own political interests.”
In the face of U.S. military claims of improved security, violence has been rising by the day this month. The city has now been placed under tight curfew while U.S. and Iraqi military forces prepare for a new offensive, according to the local Azzaman daily.
Iraqi security forces have established new checkpoints around the city and are forbidding movement of people and traffic. Pick-up trucks are roaming the city warning residents that al-Qaeda has once again infiltrated Fallujah.
Iraqi police officers insist that the situation is under control despite the “occasional incidents that take place all over Iraq.”
The indications on the ground belie these claims. “The Americans and their allies transferred our leader, Colonel Fayssal al-Zoba’i from his post because they have bad plans for the city,” a major in the Fallujah police force told IPS. “He has all the right to keep his post because he was the one who led us to defeat the insurgency while the Americans failed. They (the U.S. military) seem to have a plan to destroy the city again.”
Iraqi police and troops from other areas are being deployed in the city in what police officials say is a build-up for a huge offensive. U.S. occupation forces are on the ready in nearby bases.
The government in Baghdad has made it clear that direct U.S. military involvement is critical for an “imminent offensive” in Fallujah, sources in the Iraqi military have been quoted as saying in Iraqi media.
The two U.S. sieges of the city during 2004 led to the destruction of approximately 75 percent of the city, thousands of civilian deaths, and the displacement of hundreds of thousands of people, according to the Fallujah-based Iraqi NGO Monitoring Net for Human Rights.
Some officers in the Fallujah police believe Iraqi politicians are using the threat of “terror” for election purposes, ahead of provincial elections scheduled for October.
“The resignation of Colonel Fayssal is not yet definite,” another police officer, speaking on terms of anonymity, told IPS. “But I agree that the Americans and the Islamic Party are planning something bad for the city before the provincial elections.”
The officer added, “We learnt that such plans could not be conducted in a quiet atmosphere, so politicians are adding gas to the fire just to make sure they win the elections. We, policemen and citizens, will be the victims as usual.” Residents fear parties will use the violence to accuse one another, and perhaps sabotage the election itself.
A police spokesman told IPS that “the media is exaggerating things once more” in speaking of another military operation in the city. The spokesman declined to give his name.
Everyone IPS spoke with in the city expressed fear of an impending attack.
There are meanwhile no signs of improvement of any other kind in Fallujah. Walls now divide the city into sectarian sections, with poverty, unemployment and suffering on all sides.
(*Ali, our correspondent in Baghdad, works in close collaboration with Dahr Jamail, our U.S.-based specialist writer on Iraq who travels extensively in the region.)
Copyright © 2008 IPS-Inter Press Service. All rights reserved.
Bush, U.S. Military Pressure Iraqis on Withdrawal
Analysis by Gareth Porter*
Inter Press Service
http://www.ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=43299
WASHINGTON, July 24, 2008 (IPS) - Instead of moving toward accommodating the demand of Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki for a timetable for U.S. military withdrawal, the George W. Bush administration and the U.S. military leadership are continuing to pressure their erstwhile client regime to bow to the U.S. demand for a long-term military presence in the country.
The emergence of this defiant U.S. posture toward the Iraqi withdrawal demand underlines just how important long-term access to military bases in Iraq has become to the U.S. military and national security bureaucracy in general.
From the beginning, the Bush administration’s response to the al-Maliki withdrawal demand has been to treat it as a mere aspiration that the United States need not accept.
The counter-message that has been conveyed to Iraq from a multiplicity of U.S. sources, including former CENTCOM commander William Fallon, is that the security objectives of Iraq must include continued dependence on U.S. troops for an indefinite period. The larger, implicit message, however, is that the United States is still in control, and that it — not the Iraqi government — will make the final decision.
That point was made initially by State Department spokesman Gonzalo Gallegos, who stated flatly on Jul. 9 that any U.S. decision on withdrawal “will be conditions-based”.
In a sign that the U.S. military is also mounting pressure on the Iraqi government to abandon its withdrawal demand, Fallon wrote an op-ed piece published in the New York Times Jul. 20 that called on Iraqi leaders to accept the U.S. demand for long-term access to military bases.
Fallon, who became something of a folk hero among foes of the Bush administration’s policy in the Middle East for having been forced out of his CENTCOM position for his anti-aggression stance, takes an extremely aggressive line against the Iraqi withdrawal demand in the op-ed. In fact the piece is remarkable not only for its condescending attitude toward the Iraqi government, but for its peremptory tone toward it.
Fallon is dismissive of the idea that Iraq can take care of itself without U.S. troops to maintain ultimate control. “The government of Iraq is eager to exert its sovereignty,” Fallon writes, “but its leaders also recognise that it will be some time before Iraq can take full control of security.”
Fallon goes on to insist that “the government of Iraq must recognise its continued, if diminishing reliance on the American military”. And in the penultimate paragraph, he demands “political posturing in pursuit of short-term gains must cease”.
Fallon, now retired from the military, is obviously serving as a stand-in for U.S. military chiefs for whom the public expression of such a hard-line stance against the Iraqi withdrawal demand would have been considered inappropriate.
But the former U.S. military proconsul in the Middle East, like his active-duty colleagues, appears to actually believe that the United States can intimidate the al-Maliki regime. The assumption implicit in his op-ed is that the United States has both the right and power to preempt Iraq’s national interests in order to continue to build its military empire in the Middle East.
As CENTCOM chief, Fallon had been planning on the assumption that the U.S. military would continue to have access to military bases in both Iraq and Afghanistan for many years to come. A Jul. 14 story by Washington Post national security and intelligence reporter Walter Pincus said that the Army had requested 184 million dollars to build power plants at its five main bases in Iraq.
The five bases, Pincus reported, are among the “final bases and support locations where troops, aircraft and equipment will be consolidated as the U.S. military presence is reduced”.
Funding for the power plants, which would be necessary to support a large U.S. force in Iraq within the five remaining bases, for a longer-term stay, was eliminated from the military construction bill for fiscal year 2008. Pincus quoted a Congressional source as noting that the power plants would have taken up to two years to complete.
The plan to keep several major bases in Iraq is just part of a larger plan, on which Fallon himself was working, for permanent U.S. land bases in the Middle East and Central Asia.
Fallon revealed in Congressional testimony last year that Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan is regarded as “the centrepiece for the CENTCOM Master Plan for future access to and operations in Central Asia”.
As Fallon was writing his op-ed, the Bush administration was planning for a videoconference between Bush and al-Maliki Jul. 17, evidently hoping to move the obstreperous al-Maliki away from his position on withdrawal.
Afterward, however, the White House found it necessary to cover up the fact that al-Maliki had refused to back down in the face of Bush’s pressure.
It issued a statement claiming that the two leaders had agreed to “a general time horizon for meeting aspirational goals” but that the goals would include turning over more control to Iraqi security forces and the “further reduction of U.S. combat forces from Iraq” — but not a complete withdrawal.
But that was quickly revealed to be a blatant misrepresentation of al-Maliki’s position. As al-Maliki’s spokesman Ali Dabbagh confirmed, the “time horizon” on which Bush and al-Maliki had agreed not only covered the “full handover of security responsibility to the Iraqi forces in order to decrease American forces” but was to “allow for its [sic] withdrawal from Iraq.”
An adviser to al-Maliki, Sadiq Rikabi, also told the Washington Post that al-Maliki was insisting on specific timelines for each stage of the U.S. withdrawal, including the complete withdrawal of troops.
The Iraqi prime minister’s Jul. 19 interview with the German magazine Der Speigel, in which he said that Barack Obama’s 16-month timetable “would be the right timeframe for a withdrawal, with the possibility of slight changes”, was the Iraqi government’s bombshell in response to the Bush administration’s efforts to pressure it on the bases issue.
State Department spokesman Sean McCormack emphasised at his briefing Tuesday that the issue would be determined by “a conclusion that’s mutually acceptable to sovereign nations”.
That strongly implied that the Bush administration regards itself as having a veto power over any demand for withdrawal and signals an intention to try to intimidate al-Maliki.
Both the Bush administration and the U.S. military appear to harbour the illusion that the U.S. troop presence in Iraq still confers effective political control over its clients in Baghdad.
However, the change in the al-Maliki regime’s behaviour over the past six months, starting with the prime minister’s abrupt refusal to go along with Gen. David Petraeus’s plan for a joint operation in Basra in mid-March, strongly suggests that the era of Iraqi dependence on the United States has ended.
Given the strong consensus on the issue among Shiite political forces of all stripes as well as Ayatollah Ali Sistani, the Shiite spiritual leader, the al-Maliki regime could not back down to U.S. pressure without igniting a political crisis.
*Gareth Porter is an investigative historian and journalist specialising in U.S. national security policy. The paperback edition of his latest book, “Perils of Dominance: Imbalance of Power and the Road to War in Vietnam”, was published in 2006.
Copyright © 2008 IPS-Inter Press Service. All rights reserved.
Bush Forced al-Maliki to Back Down on Pullout in 2006
Analysis by Gareth Porter*
Inter Press Service
http://www.ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=43339
WASHINGTON, July 28, 2008 (IPS) - Many official and unofficial proponents of a long-term U.S. military presence in Iraq are dismissing Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki’s demand for a U.S. timeline for withdrawal as political posturing, assuming that he will abandon it under pressure.
But that demand was foreshadowed by an episode in June 2006 in which al-Maliki circulated a draft policy calling for negotiation of just such a withdrawal timetable and the George W. Bush administration had to intervene to force the prime minister to drop it.
The context of al-Maliki’s earlier advocacy of a timetable for withdrawal was the serious Iraqi effort to negotiate an agreement with seven major Sunni armed groups that had begun under his predecessor Ibrahim al-Jaafari in early 2006. The main Sunni demand in those talks had been for a timetable for full withdrawal of U.S. troops.
Under the spur of those negotiations, al-Jaafari and Iraqi national security adviser Mowaffak al-Rubaei had developed a plan for taking over security in all 18 provinces of Iraq from the United States by the end of 2007. During his first week as prime minister in late May, al-Maliki referred twice publicly to that plan.
At the same time al-Maliki began working on a draft “national reconciliation plan”, which was in effect a road map to final agreement with the Sunni armed groups. The Sunday Times of London, which obtained a copy of the draft, reported Jun. 23, 2006 that it included the following language:
“We must agree on a time schedule to pull out the troops from Iraq, while at the same time building up the Iraqi forces that will guarantee Iraqi security, and this must be supported by a United Nations Security Council decision.”
That formula, linking a withdrawal timetable with the buildup of Iraqi forces, was consistent with the position taken by Sunni armed groups in their previous talks with U.S. Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad, which was that the timetable for withdrawal would be “linked to the timescale necessary to rebuild Iraq’s armed forces and security services”. One of the Sunni commanders who had negotiated with Khalilzad described the resistance position in those words to the London-based Arabic-language Alsharq al Awsat in May 2006.
The Iraqi government draft was already completed when Bush arrived in Baghdad Jun. 13 without any previous consultation with al-Maliki, giving the Iraqi leader five minutes’ notice that Bush would be meeting him in person rather than by videoconference.
The al-Maliki cabinet sought to persuade Bush to go along with the withdrawal provision of the document. In his press conference upon returning, Bush conceded that Iraqi cabinet members in the meeting had repeatedly brought up the issue of reconciliation with the Sunni insurgents.
In fact, after Bush had left, Vice President Tariq al-Hashimi, a Sunni, said he had asked Bush to agree to a timetable for withdrawal of all foreign forces. Then President Jalal Talabani, a Kurd, released a statement of support for that request.
Nevertheless, Bush signaled his rejection of the Iraqi initiative in his Jun. 14 press conference, deceitfully attributing his own rejection of a timetable to the Iraqi government. “And the willingness of some to say that if we’re in power we’ll withdraw on a set timetable concerns people in Iraq,” Bush declared.
When the final version of the plan was released to the public Jun. 25, the offending withdrawal timetable provision had disappeared. Bush was insisting that the al-Maliki government embrace the idea of a “conditions-based” U.S. troop withdrawal. Khalilzad gave an interview with Newsweek the week the final reconciliation plan was made public in which he referred to a “conditions-driven roadmap”.
Washington Post columnist David Ignatius further revealed in a Jun. 28 column that Khalilzad had told him that Gen. George Casey, then commander of the Multi-National Force - Iraq, was going to meet with al-Maliki about the formation of a “joint U.S.-Iraqi committee” to decide on “the conditions related to a road map for an ultimate withdrawal of U.S. troops”. Thus al-Maliki was being forced to agree to a negotiating body that symbolised a humiliating dictation by the occupying power to a client government.
The heavy pressure that had obviously been applied to al-Maliki on the issue during and after the Bush visit was resented by al-Maliki and al-Rubaie. The Iraqi rancor over that pressure was evident in the op-ed piece by al-Rubaei published in the Washington Post a week after Bush’s visit.
Although the article did not refer directly to al-Maliki’s reconciliation plan and its offer to negotiate a timetable for withdrawal, the very first line implied that the issue was uppermost in the Iraqi prime minister’s mind. “There has been much talk about a withdrawal of U.S. and coalition troops from Iraq,” wrote al-Rubaie, “but no defined timeline has yet been set.”
Al-Rubaei declared “Iraq’s ambition to have full control of the country by the end of 2008”. Although few readers understood the import of that statement, it was an indication that the al-Maliki regime was prepared to negotiate complete withdrawal of U.S. troops by the end of 2008.
Then the national security adviser indicated that the government already had its own targets for the first two phases of foreign troop withdrawal: withdrawal of more than 30,000 troops to under 100,000 foreign troops by the end of 2006 and withdrawal of “most of the remaining troops” — i.e., to less than 50,000 troops — by end of the 2007.
The author explained why the “removal” of foreign troops was so important to the Iraqi government: it would “remove psychological barriers and the reason that many Iraqis joined the resistance in the first place”; it would also “allow the Iraqi government to engage with some of our neighbours that have to date been at the very least sympathetic to the resistance…” Finally, al-Rubaie asserted, it would “legitimise the Iraqi government in the eyes of its own people.”
He also took a carefully-worded shot at the Bush administration’s actions in overruling the centrepiece of Iraq’s reconciliation policy. “While Iraq is trying to gain independence from the United States,” he wrote, “some influential foreign figures” were still “trying to spoon-feed our government and take a very proactive role in many key decisions.”
The 2006 episode left a lasting imprint on both the Bush and al-Maliki regimes, which is still very much in evidence in the present conflict over a withdrawal timetable. The Bush White House continues to act as though it is confident that al-Maliki can be pressured to back down as he was forced to do before. And at least some of al-Maliki’s determination to stand up to Bush in 2008 is related to the bitterness that he and al-Rubaie, among others, still feel over the way Bush humiliated them in 2006.
It appears that Bush is making the usual dominant power mistake in relations to al-Maliki. He may have been a pushover in mid-2006, but the circumstances have changed, in Iraq, in the U.S.-Iraq-Iran relations and in the United States. The al-Maliki regime now has much greater purchase to defy Bush than it had two years ago.
*Gareth Porter is an investigative historian and journalist specialising in U.S. national security policy. The paperback edition of his latest book, “Perils of Dominance: Imbalance of Power and the Road to War in Vietnam”, was published in 2006.
Copyright © 2008 IPS-Inter Press Service. All rights reserved.
