Latest reports

Living in fear of Baghdad's dirty squad
Al Jazeera reports (November 11th): Adhamiya, in the northeast of Baghdad,  has been spared the worst of the violence that has plagued the city, and many people here feel safe enough enough to take advantage of the cool night air to hang out with friends.
But not everyone can do so. Inside the mosque is a man who is afraid to be seen in public. I meet him in a back room to hear his story of the night of October 3.
Firas tells me he was asleep at home."Suddenly I heard a huge crash and men shouting. It was 2am. I was with my wife and children in our room. Suddenly soldiers appeared from nowhere. They punched and kicked me and my wife. My children sat in the corner screaming in panic. They hit me with sticks.
"I was pulled out from the house in my underwear, thrown into a pickup truck and driven to a prison in Baghdad airport. With me was a cripple, a 70-year-old man. None us knew why we had been taken."
Firas says he was tortured at the prison. He says his captors beat him regularly and denied him food and water.

http://blogs.aljazeera.com/blog/middle-east/living-fear-baghdads-dirty-squad

US soldier charged with murdering Iraqis
Al Jazeera reports (November 16th): A United States army soldier has been charged with premeditated murder in the deaths of two civilians during the Iraq war.
Sergeant Michael Barbera was charged over the deaths of two Iraqis near the village of As Sadah in Diyala province on March 6, 2007, the army said.

http://www.aljazeera.com/news/americas/2013/11/us-soldier-charged-with-murdering-iraqis-2013111675453572607.html

Harsh Tactics in Advance of Holy Month
HRW reports (November 15th): Iraqi security forces have been surrounding and closing off majority Sunni neighborhoods, effectively shutting residents inside, raiding homes, and carrying out mass arrests in advance of the Muslim holy month of Muharram, Human Rights Watch said. The Iraqi government should take measures to prevent the escalation of sectarian attacks on Shia during the holy month without resorting to repressive measures such as indiscriminate arrests.

http://www.hrw.org/news/2013/11/15/iraq-harsh-tactics-advance-holy-month

Iraq executes 12 amid international disquiet
AFP reports (November 18th): Iraqi authorities announced the execution of a dozen terrorism convicts, defying widespread international condemnation of the country’s use of the death penalty.
The latest executions, carried out on Sunday, bring the number of people put to death by Iraq this year to about 144, compared to 129 last year.

http://www.thenational.ae/world/middle-east/iraq-executes-12-amid-international-disquiet

No more arms to Iraq, Obama

Haifa Zangana writes for The Guardian (November 1st): Barack Obama is meeting Iraq's prime minister, Nouri al-Maliki, in Washington today. According to the official Iraqi story, they are to discuss Maliki's plea to train and equip Iraqi forces with advanced weapons to fight terrorism. If this is heeded, it will add to the crimes committed by the US against Iraqis since the invasion of 2003, as weapons and equipment made available to the regime have, to date, been used only against Iraqi people.
The Maliki regime blames all terrorist acts (frequent car explosions, often in markets, cafes and mosques) on al-Qaida, selectively choosing not to mention the regime's own militias: Asa'ib Ahl al-Haq, Iraqi Hezbollah, factions of the Mahdi army, the Badr brigades and the Mokhtar army.
A common belief among Iraqis is that only agents connected to the nearly 1 million strong army and security forces, and especially to the Special Forces (inherited from the occupation, trained by the US and now attached directly to Maliki's office) could carry out such sustained and widespread campaign of terror.

Read more here: http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/nov/01/no-more-arms-to-iraq-obama-nouri-al-maliki

More on that WHO report

Charlie Pottins posted the following. The original is here: http://randompottins.blogspot.co.uk/

LAST month the World Health Organisation (WHO) published a long-awaited report summarising the findings of an investigation into congenital birth defects in Iraq which many people had expected would point to a link between their prevalence and the use of depleted uranium (DU) munitions by US and allied forces. 

To the surprise of those who had awaited it, this 'summary report' finds:

"The rates for spontaneous abortion, stillbirths and congenital birth defects found in the study are consistent with or even lower than international estimates. The study provides no clear evidence to suggest an unusually high rate of congenital birth defects in Iraq."

Although critics have suggested there were odd features to this report, Jaffar Hussain, WHO's Head of Mission in Iraq, said it was based on survey techniques that are "renowned worldwide" and that the study was peer reviewed "extensively" by international experts.

Writing in the Guardiant this week ,Dr.Nafeez Ahmed reminds us of the Iraqi Health Ministry officials who told the BBC there would be "damning evidence" of the links between depleted uranium use and birth defects.

"For years, medical doctors in Iraq have reported "a high level of birth defects." Other peer-reviewed studies have documented a dramatic increase in infant mortality, cancer and leukaemia in the aftermath of US military bombardment. In Fallujah, doctors are witnessing a "massive unprecedented number" of heart defects, and an increase in the number of nervous system defects. Analysis of pre-2003 data compared to now showed that "the rate of congenital heart defects was 95 per 1,000 births - 13 times the rate found in Europe."

Nafeez Ahmed quotes  Dr. Keith Bavistock of the Department of Environmental Science, University of Eastern Finland,  a retired WHO expert on radiation and health who says the WHO 'summary document' is  "disappointing."

"This document is not of scientific quality. It wouldn't pass peer review in one of the worst journals. One of the biggest methodological problems, among many, is that the document does not even attempt to look at existing medical records in Iraqi hospitals - these are proper clinical records which document the diagnoses of the relevant cases being actually discovered by Iraqi doctors. These medics collecting clinical records are reporting higher birth defects than the study acknowledges. Instead, the document focuses on interviews with mothers as a basis for diagnosis, many of whom are traumatised in this environment, their memories unreliable, and are not qualified to make diagnosis."

Asked whether there was reason to believe the WHO report had been politically compromised, Dr. Baverstock  said:

"The way this document has been produced is extremely suspicious. There are question marks about the role of the US and UK, who have a conflict of interest in this sort of study due to compensation issues that might arise from findings determining a link between higher birth defects and DU. I can say that the US and UK have been very reluctant to disclose the locations of DU deployment, which might throw further light on this correlation."

Dr.Ahmed says this has happened before:
"In 2001, Baverstock was on the editorial board for a WHO research project clearing the US and UK of responsibility for environmental health hazards involved in DU deployment. His detailed editorial recommendations accounting for new research proving uranium's nature as as a genotoxin (capable of changing DNA) were ignored and overruled:

"My editorial changes were suppressed, even though some of the research was from Department of Defense studies looking at subjects who had ingested DU from friendly fire, clearly proving that DU was genutoxic."

Baverstock then co-authored his own scientific paper on the subject arguing for plausibility of the link between DU and high rates of birth defects in Iraq, but said that WHO blocked publication of the study"because they didn't like its conclusions."

"The extent to which scientific principles are being bent to fit politically convenient conclusions is alarming", said Baverstock.

The British medical journal, The Lancet, reports that despite the study's claims, a "scientific standard of peer review... may not have been fully achieved."

One scientist named as a peer-reviewer for the project, Simon Cousens, professor of epidemiology and statistics at London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine (LSHTM), told The Lancet that he "attended a relatively brief meeting of around one and a half hours, so just gave some comments on an early presentation of the results. I wouldn't classify that as thorough peer review."

Nafeez Ahmad also contrasts the WHO findings with those of a Japanese-based human rights network which investigated recorded birth defects at a major hospital in Fallujah for the year 2012, confirmed first hand birth defect incidences over a one-month period in 2013, and interviewed doctors and parents of children born with birth defects. The report concluded there was:

"... an extraordinary situation of congenital birth defects in both nature and quantity. The investigation demonstrated a significant rise of these health consequences in the period following the war... An overview of scientific literature relating to the effects of uranium and heavy metals associated with munitions used in the 2003 Iraq War and occupation, together with potential exposure pathways, strongly suggest that environmental contamination resulting from combat during the Iraq War may be playing a significant role in the observed rate of birth defects."

The report criticised both the UN and the WHO for approaches that are "insufficient to meet the needs of the issues within their mandate."

Hans von Sponeck, former UN assistant secretary general and UN humanitarian coordinator for Iraq,says it would justify public skepticism:

"The brevity of this report is unacceptable", he told me:

"Everybody was expecting a proper, professional scientific paper, with properly scrutinised and checkable empirical data. Although I would be guarded about jumping to conclusions, WHO cannot be surprised if people ask questions about whether the body is giving into bilateral political pressures."

Von Sponeck said that US political pressure on WHO had scuppered previous investigations into the impact of DU on Iraq:

"I served in Baghdad and was confronted with the reality of the environmental impact of DU. In 2001, I saw in Geneva how a WHO mission to conduct on-spot assessments in Basra and southern Iraq, where depleted uranium had led to devastating environmental health problems, was aborted under US political pressure."

Asked whether such political pressure on the UN body could explain the unscientific nature of the latest report, Von Sponeck said "It would not be surprising if such US pressure has continued".

"There is definitive evidence of an alarming rise in birth defects, leukaemia, cancer and other carcinogenic diseases in Iraq after the war. Looking at the stark difference between previous descriptions of the WHO study's findings and this new report, it seems that someone, somewhere clumsily decided that they would not release these damning findings, but instead obscure them."

http://www.theguardian.com/environment/earth-insight/2013/oct/13/world-health-organisation-iraq-war-depleted-uranium

More executions

Iraq's latest surge: state executions

The Guardian reports (September 17th): In the bloody shadow of Iraq's recent surge in violence lurks another troubling statistic: this year, Iraq has executed nearly 70 people accused of terrorist-related activities, including 17 men and women last month alone.

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/sep/17/iraq-latest-surge-state-executions

Iraq executes 13 men following unfair trials marred by torture allegations

AI reports (September 25th): All executions in Iraq must be halted immediately, Amnesty International urged after 13 men were executed in Baghdad.

Today, the organization has been able to confirm the names of nine of the men, who were executed on 22 September following death sentences imposed after unfair trials and based on “confessions” allegedly extracted under torture. Four others were also executed that day, bringing the total number of executions in Iraq so far this year to at least 73.

http://www.amnestyusa.org/news/news-item/iraq-executes-13-men-following-unfair-trials-marred-by-torture-allegations

The spectre of Iraq

When commentators claimed after last week’s parliamentary vote that Iraq had played a key role in motivating MPs  to vote against military intervention, it was an important public acknowledgment of the ongoing disaster wrought by US-UK foreign policy. Gone was the New Labour narrative that Iraq today is better off than under Saddam Hussein. Although it rarely makes the front pages, the sheer volume of bad news from this country will not have escaped many MPs.

Take the Wikileaks and related whistle-blowing stories that dominated the summer headlines. Iraq was at the centre of the most damaging revelations. Hundreds of incidents of abuse and torture of prisoners by Iraqi security services, up to and including rape and murder, were documented. US forces are alleged to have colluded in these activities, as well as themselves continuing to abuse prisoners long after the Abu Ghraib scandal broke in 2004. US forces operating helicopter gunships were also accused of killing 14 unarmed civilians in a series of previously unreported incidents.

British troops were also deeply implicated. The Guardian reported that 90 complaints involving 128 Iraqi civilians were being investigated in the aftermath of the Wikileaks revelations. Earlier this year lawyer Phil Shiner took 180 different statements –  with another 871 to follow – before a judicial review hearing at the high court in London in a claim seeking to demonstrate that Britain broke international laws of war by pursuing a policy of systematic torture.

The long-term social consequences of invasion also constitute a lasting deterrent to intervention elsewhere. One in two households in Baghdad alone have lost a family member. A million have died. A further million have been left disabled.  One in six Iraqis is an orphan. An estimated sixteen percent of the Iraqi population has been uprooted. There are an estimated 450,000 Iraq refugees in Jordan alone.

Drinking water remains unsafe. Basic foods and necessities are beyond the reach of ordinary Iraqis, thanks to soaring inflation unleashed by the occupation's free market ideology. Unemployment is regularly estimated at over fifty percent. Seventy percent of doctors are estimated to have fled the country. Homelessness is widespread. Water shortages are destroying agriculture, power shortages crippling industry. Permanent damage has been inflicted on the country’s historic cultural heritage. Besides the looting and deliberate destruction of historic sites by the US military, tens of thousands of historic artifacts are now in US hands.

Some of the long-term effects of the occupation are most felt in the city of Falluja.
US forces flattened three-quarters of the city in their 2004 bombardment, with up to 6,000 people killed. The US admits that it used white phosphorous as a battlefield weapon in its assault on Fallujah. Repeated studies now show a dramatic spike in birth defects in the city of Falluja. One suspected cause of the birth defects is depleted uranium shells, fired in 2004 by US forces in the city, which contain ionising radiation. A recent survey in the city showed a four-fold increase in all cancers and a twelve-fold increase in childhood cancer in under-14 year olds. The UK also used depleted uranium weapons during the invasion. It will cost about $30m to clean DU from around 300 sites in Iraq. Meanwhile, similar post-war health problems are being documented in other Iraqi cities.

Politically, Iraq is also becoming increasingly authoritarian. There has been a surge in the use of the death penalty. Brutality and torture are rife in its jails. Rape of women in prison is widespread. Additionally, new laws have been passed to crack down on the independent media. According to the Journalistic Freedoms Observatory, the first two years following the withdrawal of US troops from Iraq were the worst since the fall of the former regime in terms of violations of press freedoms.

The position of trade unions has also deteriorated significantly in Iraq. There are reports too of police crackdowns on gay people. The Education Ministry has banned theatre and music classes. Many girls still dare not go to school or college because of violence and kidnappings. Women’s equal rights in law have been replaced with statutes giving tribal leaders the power to regulate family affairs according to their traditions - a huge step back.

At the heart of the problem is the sectarianisation of the state. When elections were first held, occupation forces organised them on the basis of Shia and Sunni slates. Thenceforth, religious affiliation could be a deciding factor in whether you worked or had state protection, and thus became a significant source of friction. But, conveniently, it did allow the occupiers to reinvent their role as that of arbitrator between warring religious factions.

After the 2010 elections, it took several months and several visits from the US Vice President and State Department officials to cobble together a government. When a government finally did emerge, one politician claimed that Cabinet seats had been bought at a secret meeting in the house of an Iraqi businessman. “Buying” a ministry is nothing new in Iraq. The ritual of power-sharing is all about sharing the spoils of power among political parties and transforming state institutions into fiefdoms of competing groups.

The Electricity ministry best illustrates the complete corruption of the Iraqi state. The money the government has poured into the electricity sector would have bought every Iraqi family a modern furnished flat in a western country, the Oil and Energy Commission of the Iraqi parliament said in July. The commission estimated that the hard cash spent on the electricity sector “equals ten times the annual budget of Bahrain.”

But this corruption was inherited from the US reconstruction programme. A recent report to US Congress said private defence contractors, which had some 170,000 employees on the ground, reaped some $140 billion in profits in Iraq. Halliburton alone, whose former CEO was Dick Cheney,  made $39.5 billion on Iraq. Some of these profits came from flagrant overcharging, such as the contractor that billed the US government $900 for a switch that was valued at $7.05, a 12,000 percent mark-up. In 2012 Transparency International ranked Iraq 169th out of 175 countries for corruption. More than three quarters believed it had got worse in the last three years.

The division of ministries among competing elites, with different sectarian affiliations, was probably the cause of this year’s Abu Ghraib prison breakout of 850 prisoners. That’s the accusation of the Ministry of Justice against the Interior Ministry, whom it accuses of collusion in the incident. Others accuse the security forces of allowing sectarian militias to set up checkpoints and carry out attacks on civilians. Here too the role of US occupiers can be traced - a recent documentary highlighted the role of US Special Forces operatives in training sectarian militias to commit acts or torture that helped fuel the narrative of a civil war.

Dominating all this is the sheer level of violence in Iraq. Government figures show 989 people were killed in July, making it the deadliest month in five years. The origins are complex, given the role of US special forces and the Iraqi state itself, the attribution of a lot of the violence to Al Qaeda and a renewed Sunni insurgency reacting against a Shia sectarian bias evident in many state institutions that denies Sunnis work and rights.

The crisis in Syria exacerbates these problems. Some commentators point to the role of Assad in fuelling violence within Iraq for geopolitical reasons. Others argue that the activities of a Sunni-led armed opposition in Syria strengthen Sunni insurgents in Iraq. Faced with mounting violence, Iraq’s  government is now turning back to the US for lethal aid.

Reuters reported recently: “The United States and Iraq agreed to boost cooperation to keep Iran from flying weapons over Iraq to Syria, and to curb the radicalization of young Iraqis and other spillover effects from the Syrian conflict.” The irony is that the US invasion of Iraq and the occupation-organised elections actually strengthened Iranian influence in the region. So Iraq also stands for many policymakers as a testament to US incompetence.

Anti-war activists can take some credit for keeping these issues alive. It wasn’t just the sense of betrayal, having been lied to by Tony Blair ten years ago over WMD, that motivated some Labour MPs to rule out military action against Syria. It was also the pickets of their surgeries, the anger of their constituents and other ongoing efforts of peace activists that made MPs uncomfortable about voting for intervention this time on the basis of flimsy intelligence, incoherent military strategy and no search for a diplomatic solution.

Iraq’s Dysfunctional Elite

By Harith Hasan

Global Research, August 13, 2013

Al-Monitor 9 August 2013

Last month, demonstrators in the southern Iraqi cities of Nassiriya and Basra organized nightly rallies to protest the government’s failure to provide enough electricity for households during the notoriously hot summer. With temperatures exceeding 113 degrees Fahrenheit during July and August, most households get less than 12 hours a day of electric power. The Iraqi government spent $28 billion to reform electricity services, which became one of the most critical problems in the country since the second Gulf War in 1991.

The failure to handle this problem is another cause for the increasing disillusionment with the government. Responding to the popular rage, Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki said in a TV interview that he was manipulated by the minister of electricity and his staff, who provided him with incorrect information about their system’s capacity. Although the minister of electricity position has been rotated among five people since 2006, none of them managed to make tangible improvements. But this did not prevent political parties from competing to obtain this position, a contest driven less by a “commitment” to social welfare and more by the fact the ministry is contract-rich. During a TV interview, Khalaf al-Ileyan, whose party was “awarded” this ministry according to a 2006 power-sharing agreement, said that he was offered a $2 million “down payment” and a monthly $1 million if he accepted a nomination for this position.

This confession might be shocking, but in fact it reflects habitual relations within Iraqi elite. “Buying” a ministry is nothing new in Iraq. The ritual of power-sharing has become all about finding ways to distribute the growing oil revenues among political parties and transforming state institutions into fiefdoms of competing groups. Initially, the power-sharing formula was presented as a method to create an inclusive system of government that departs from the legacy of exclusionary politics. In practice, power-sharing has become a power apportionment, what Iraqis call: Muhasesa. This is partly because it emphasized ethnic and sectarian categories in determining political weights, which turned institutions into instruments of political conflicts rather than being frameworks to solve them.

Maliki has exploited the failures and gaps of this system to create a shadow state that is loyal and responsive to him. He managed to maneuver this system and build strong personal influence within the security institutions, armed forces, independent institutions and Iraq’s judiciary. In an oil-dependent country like Iraq, the executive branch tends to become stronger than the legislative branch because it manages more resources and more complex networks of patronage. But these measures have only intensified political conflict while failing to make the state more efficient.

Divided between Maliki’s camp, whose authoritarian disposition is increasing, and his rivals’ camp, whose only alternative is more “apportionment” politics, the political elite is evidently out of touch with the demands of average citizens. Maliki accuses his rivals of doing everything to hinder his government; his rivals say that the failure is caused by his policies. Their contest is more about finding a scapegoat and less about identifying new ways to address the state’s failure.

The problem overrides this short-sighted dispute among opportunistic politicians. It is rather about the way Iraq’s economy is working and the way in which the lack of strong institutions affects a responsible and wise management of the wealth. The Iraqi constitution stipulates: “Oil and gas are the Iraqi people’s property,” but the true story is different. According to the UN Development Program, 75% of Iraqis identified poverty as the most pressing need, 79% of households rated electricity as “bad” or “very bad,” and only 26% of the population is covered by the public sewage network. This, despite Iraq’s GDP growth from $20 billion in 2002 to $128 billion in 2012, thanks to growth in oil production, which accounts for 60% of GDP and 90% of government revenue.

For years, it has been repeated that Iraq is a rich state and a poor society. The path Iraq has taken has only confirmed this saying, despite the improvement in per capita income. Powerful political parties managed to extract their revenues through the networks of patronage they run within state bodies. One way to do so was by awarding governmental contracts to real or fake companies in exchange for bribes or commissions.

One example is the Ministry of Interior’s $40 million contract with a British businessman, James McCormick, to import “bomb detectors” that turned out to be dressed-up divining rods. McCormick was convicted on four accounts of fraud in England, yet his devices were still used by Iraqi security. Some officials, including the prime minister himself, insist that not all these devices were fraudulent. After two years since Iraqi authorities arrested Maj. Gen. Jihad al-Jabiri, the army’s bomb squad commander, on corruption charges for taking bribes to purchase McCormick’s fake explosive detectors, he was recently released and the charges against him were dropped.

Security-related ministries have seen the worst examples of corruption because of their huge budget allocations, poorly monitored US financial support and the urgent need to build them from scratch. There are reports by the Integrity Committee, the US general inspector in Iraq and the Parliamentary Security and Defense Committee, on the hundreds of millions wasted because of corruption in these ministries. Yet, except for a few mid- or low-level officials who found no political sponsor, all partisan senior officials managed to escape punishment or accountability. As the highest constitutional body with a mandate to monitor executive officials, the parliament was supposed to play a crucial role in addressing this corruption. In reality, it did nothing but deepen it by relating accountability to sectarian targeting and behind-the-scenes compromises on the basis of “let my guy go, I let yours go.” Among average Iraqis, the parliament itself is very notorious, especially for legislation it passed to provide its members with huge salaries and benefits.

The state in Iraq has always been the main shaper of social change and hierarchies. Post-Saddam Iraq is no exception. In the last few years, and as a result of the flourishing clientelism and political nepotism, new alliances have emerged between political groups and sectors of the business class in a sort of collaboration based on crony capitalism. Each major group has its own favorite entrepreneurs, who benefit from contracts awarded by the group’s representatives in the government and, in turn, they support the group financially.

Politics is mixed with business everywhere, but in Iraq this takes the form of direct looting of “national” wealth by a new oligarchy composed of conflicting political groups and their economic and bureaucratic clients. The political process which was initially intended to break with the authoritarian past is becoming more influenced by elite politics and interests than people’s needs. Politicians resort to identity politics and ethnic and sectarian incitement to overshadow their personal benefits generated by a process which, instead of solving ethno-sectarian tensions, reproduces them.

Harith Hasan is an Iraqi scholar and the author of Imagining the Nation: Nationalism, Sectarianism and Socio-Political Conflict in Iraq. On Twitter: @harith_hasan

Falluja

http://randompottins.blogspot.co.uk/2013/07/fallujah-must-not-be-forgotten.html