AMSI:September 2010 stats

http://www.iraq-amsi.com/Portal/news.php?action=view&id=47397&9d6a2d26bb41dca7bee47fb491859922
Association of Muslim Scholars in Iraq (AMSI) statement number 732 dated 9th October 2010
Number of official raids in Sep 2010 : 375 up and down Iraq resulting in the arrests of 1681 persons
Baghdad 322, Ninevh 296, Salah Din 260, Dhiala 259, Kirkuk 169, Anbar 142, Karbala 83, Basra 80, Babil (hilla) 25, muthana (samawa) 18, Wasit (Kut) 10, Thi Qar (Nassiriyah) 8, Najaf 5, Qaddisiya (Diwaniya)3, Missan (amarra) one arrest.

These figures are based on official figures of the Defence and intyerior ministries and do no include figures of the so called ministry of national security, offices of so called anti terrorism, arrests carried out by forces belonging to the office of prime minster, official militias such as the peshmerga, awakenings and 'unofficial' militias such as bader brigade and kurdish Assaiysh, in the kurdish areas and in the so called 'disputed territories.
http://www.iraq-amsi.com/Portal/news.php?action=view&id=47300&334fd7ba80434d6b8ed2d49dc5cefdf0


AMSI monitored 94 violations of the SOFA agreement during September 2010 by US forces. They were spotted 94 times in the streets of Iraqi towns and cities unaccompanied by Iraqi government forces

Iran's influence in Iraq: Game, set but not match to Tehran

• Michael Knights
• guardian.co.uk, Sunday 17 October 2010 21.09 BST

Undertaking or supporting an attack upon Iran would simply be much harder for Iraqi politicians who relied upon Iran for protection during the last three decades of Ba'athist rule and who often made common cause with the Tehran against the Iraqi military. This is one reason why Iran has supported its Iraqi allies in their ongoing de-Ba'athification efforts and why it would prefer not to see a new, cross-sectarian nationalist bloc emerge in Iraq.
Looking forward, Iran's supporters in the Iraqi government will seek to complicate the task of negotiating a post-2011 US-Iraqi security agreement and to restrict the scale and effectiveness of American security assistance to Iraq's external security forces. Though Iranian-backed militancy in Iraq is an irritant in the two countries' relations, the al-Quds Brigades of Iran's Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), responsible for operations outside Iran, will maintain its ability to target US military personnel, diplomats and private citizens in Iraq, which could act as one source of deterrence against a US or Israeli military strike on Iran - a nightmare scenario for US generals and diplomats in Iraq.

Michael Knights is a Lafer fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, specialising in the military and security affairs of Iraq, Iran, Yemen, and the Gulf Arab states.

Read the whole article

More journalists killed in Iraq than in 2009: IPI

AFP report (October 5^th):

 

More journalists have been killed in Iraq so far this year than in all of 2009, press watchdog IPI said.

Tahrir Kadhim Jawad, a cameraman for the al-Hurra satellite channel, was killed when a magnetic "sticky bomb" attached to his car detonated in the town of Garma, 50 kilometres (30 miles) west of the capital, police in nearby Fallujah said.

"Jawad is the fifth journalist to be killed in Iraq this year, and the third to be killed there in less than a month," the Vienna-based International Press Institute (IPI) said.

http://uk.news.yahoo.com/18/20101005/twl-more-journalists-killed-in-iraq-than-3cd7efd.html

From the New York Times

In Iraq, New Leadership but Same Reality

NY Times reports (October 1^st): The sound of explosions from the Green Zone across the river is a familiar sound to anyone in Baghdad. In the bad old days you could set your morning alarm clock by the pre-dawn barrage. But since 2008 you could go for months without hearing the “Duck and Cover” tannoy.

A powerful cocktail of factors is behind the general fall in violence since 2007: the Sunni Awakening; the American troop surge; war fatigue; Sunni reconciliation to the electoral process; the growth of Iraq’s security forces and a sustained campaign to arrest and kill Shiite death squads.

But the rockets are back now, with Shiite militias the suspects. American commanders say that there were about 60 attacks on the airport and Green Zone in July and August, and 23 in September.

http://atwar.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/10/01/in-iraq-new-leadership-but-same-reality/?ref=world

Some stories in the media this week

US Businessman: Blackwater Paid Me to Buy Steroids and Weapons on Black Market

The Nation reports (September 23^rd): A Texas businessman who has worked extensively in Iraq claims that Blackwater paid him to purchase steroids and other drugs for its operatives in Baghdad, as well as more than 100 AK47s and massive amounts of ammunition on Baghdad's black market. Howard Lowry, who worked in Iraq from 2003-2009, also claims that he personally attended Blackwater parties where company personnel had large amounts of cocaine and blocks of hashish and would run around naked. At some of these parties, Lowry alleges, Blackwater operatives would randomly fire automatic weapons from their balconies into buildings full of Iraqi civilians. Lowry described the events as a "frat party gone wild" where "drug use was rampant."

Lowry made his statements in a deposition on September 10 as part of a whistleblower lawsuit brought by two former Blackwater employees. The suit was filed in 2008 by former employees Brad and Melan Davis. They allege that Blackwater tried to bill the US government for a prostitute for its men in Afghanistan and for strippers in New Orleans in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.

http://www.thenation.com/blog/154977/us-businessman-blackwater-paid-me-buy-steroids-and-weapons-black-market-its-shooters

Abuse and torture rife in Iraqi prisons

The Guardian reports (September 23^rd): Up to 30,000 prisoners, including many veterans of the US detention system, remain detained without rights in Iraq and are frequently tortured, or abused, according to a report by Amnesty International.

The study has found that the human rights situation remains dire in Iraq, with arbitrary arrests and secret detention common, as well as a lack of accountability throughout the security forces.

The abuses are systemic, the report claims, with alleged victims having little redress or access to trial — in many cases for longer than two years.

The allegations were released on Monday in a report titled New Order, Same Abuses; Unlawful Detentions and Torture in Iraq.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/sep/23/iraq-prisons-and-probation

Iraqi journalists face daily threat

The National reports (September 25^th): After the Iraqi journalist Riyad Assariyeh was assassinated this month, his family advised other reporters to stay away from the traditional three-day funeral wake, fearing the gathering would present an easy target for militants.

It is a sign of just how vulnerable Iraqi journalists now feel that many of them took the advice, paying respect to their fallen colleague on the first day of mourning and not returning.

Assariyeh’s murder in Baghdad on September 7, and the killing one day later in Mosul of another reporter are part of an increasingly dangerous battle for control over information, that has seen insurgents and government institutions working to suppress the media, journalists and analysts say.

http://www.thenational.ae/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20100926/FOREIGN/100929728/1002

So much for the drawdown

Two stories that underline that the much-heralded US pull-out was largely smoke and mirrors...

Three day of mourning declared in Fallujah

Azzaman reports (September 16^th): The Iraqi city of Fallujah has declared three-day long mourning after a joint U.S.-Iraqi attack on the city killed at least 10 civilians and injured many others.

The raid has raised tensions and angered the city’s inhabitants as well as the nearly two million Muslim Sunnis who live in the Province of Anbar, west of Baghdad.

The Muslim Scholars Association, a group of powerful Muslim Sunni clerics in Iraq, described the raid as “a massacre in which two children were killed.”

U.S. and Iraqi officials claim that the raid killed a former Iraqi officer linked to al-Qaeda group in the country.

But the claim could not be substantiated and eyewitnesses and officials in the city said all the dead and injured were civilians.

http://www.azzaman.com/english/index.asp?fname=news\2010-09-16\kurd.htm

Iraqi forces struggling, forcing U.S. troops to fight

McClatchy reports (September 17^th): In the two weeks since President Barack Obama declared the end of the U.S. combat mission in Iraq, a series of bloody skirmishes has sharpened the questions about the Iraqi security forces' ability to protect the country.

In three incidents in different parts of Iraq, American forces stepped in with ground troops and air support when their Iraqi counterparts were threatened by suicide attackers or well-armed gunmen, according to U.S. and Iraqi military accounts.

The incidents suggest that the 50,000 U.S. soldiers who remain in Iraq, far from merely "advising and assisting" Iraqi forces, as the Obama administration has described their new role, are still needed on the battlefields as insurgents try to exploit the diminished American military presence and the six-month political stalemate that's failed to produce a new Iraqi government since the country's March 7 elections.

http://www.mcclatchydc.com/2010/09/17/100778/iraqi-forces-struggling-as-us.html

Edited extract from Foreign Policy

What America Left Behind in Iraq

Foreign Policy reports (September 7^th): Hundreds of cars waiting in the heat to slowly pass through one of the dozens of checkpoints and searches they must endure every day. The constant roar of generators. The smell of fuel, of sewage. Automatic weapons pointed at your head out of military vehicles, out of SUVs with tinted windows. Mountains of garbage. Rumors of the latest assassination or explosion. Welcome to the new Iraq, same as the old Iraq -- even if Barack Obama has declared George W. Bush's Operation Iraqi

Since the Americans have declared the end of combat operations, U.S. Stryker and MRAP vehicles can be seen conducting patrols without Iraqi escorts in parts of the country and the Americans continue to conduct unilateral military operations in Mosul and elsewhere, even if under the guise of "force protection" or "countering improvised explosive devices." American military officers in Iraq told me they were irate with the politically driven announcement from the White House that combat troops had withdrawn. Those remaining still consider themselves combat troops, and commanders say there is little change in their rules of engagement -- they will still respond to threats pre-emptively.

Iraq is still being held back from full independence -- and not merely by the presence of 50,000 U.S. soldiers. The Status of Forces Agreement, which stipulates that U.S. forces will be totally out by 2011, deprives Iraq of full sovereignty. The U.N.'s Chapter 7 sanctions force Iraq to pay 5 percent of its oil revenues in reparations, mostly to the Kuwaitis. Saudi and Iranian interference, both political and financial, has also limited Iraq's scope for democracy and sovereignty. Throughout the occupation, major decisions concerning the shape of Iraq have been made by the Americans with no input or say by the Iraqis: the economic system, the political regime, the army and its loyalties, the control over airspace, and the formation of all kinds of militias and tribal military groups. The effects will linger for decades, regardless of any future milestones the United States might want to announce.

http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2010/09/07/what_america_left_behind_in_iraq