Iraq analysis

[Al-khiyal]

أعياد المسيحيين في العراق تقتصر علي المنازل

[Al-khiyal]

Three female students from the University of Mustansiriya were kidnapped, then raped and then killed and then their mutilated bodies passed to the Baghdad morgue.

The horrendous crime has shocked many in Baghdad and unleashed yet another wave of terror in the violence-torn city home to a quarter of Iraq’s population.

The female students were raped and killed “in a horrific manner at the hands of militias,” said the non-governmental Organization for the Defense of Women in Iraq.

“This is a fresh horrifying indication that the level of crime and violence is taking unprecedented proportions in Iraq,” the group said in a statement.

The crime has terrorized the university community in Baghdad, prompting many parents to stop sending their girls to classes.

Universities and high schools in Baghdad already suffer from high level of absenteeism due to the spiraling violence. Teachers complain that most of their students now stay away.

Militia groups work freely in Baghdad and frequently U.S. and Iraqi troops turn a blind eye to their atrocities.

A female teacher from the Ghazaliya district in Baghdad was also kidnapped, raped and killed and her body later found on a street in the same district.

University officials in Baghdad, refusing to be named, say teaching is under threat and classes may be suspended any time unless the authorities do something to halt the violence.

Scores of Iraqi professors have either been killed or kidnapped, forcing many of them to flee the country.

Militiamen abduct, rape and kill students

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Iraqi court says Hussein must die within 30 days

DUBAI (Reuters) - Saddam Hussein said his execution would be a sacrifice for Iraq and called on Iraqis to unite and fight U.S. forces, in a letter obtained by Reuters on Wednesday.

"Here I offer myself in sacrifice. If God almighty wishes, it (my soul) will take me where he orders to be with the martyrs," Saddam said in the hand-written letter obtained from his defense lawyers in Jordan.

"If my soul goes down this path (of martyrdom) it will face God in serenity."

The defense team said the letter was written shortly after Saddam was sentenced to death in November for crimes against humanity during his 24-year rule, and before the Iraqi High Tribunal appeals court on Tuesday ratified the lower court's ruling.

"You have known your brother and leader as you have known your own family. He has not bowed down to the tyrants and remained a sword against them," Saddam said.

"Oh great people, I call on you preserve the values that enabled you to be worthy of carrying out shouldering the faith and to be the light of civilisation," the letter said.

"Your unity stands against falling into servitude."

Saddam added: "Oh brave, pious Iraqis in the heroic resistance. Oh sons of the one nation, direct your enmity toward the invaders. Do not let them divide you ... Long live jihad (holy war) and the mujahdeen against the invaders."

Following the appeals court decision, Saddam faces death by hanging within 30 days.

Saddam Hussein says he faces death without fear

[Al-khiyal]

BAGHDAD (Reuters) - Many Iraqis said on Wednesday they would welcome a swift execution of Saddam Hussein but others expressed fears that carrying out the death sentence now would further fuel sectarian violence.

An Iraqi appeals court on Tuesday upheld Saddam's death sentence for crimes against humanity and said he should hang within 30 days. It comes amid raging violence between Saddam's fellow Sunni Arabs and majority Shi'ites.

"This is a just sentence because Saddam oppressed the Iraqi people but I think it came at the wrong time because we're living through a cycle of violence," said Baghdad resident Mohammed Nasir.

Edward Iskander, a 37-year-old shopkeeper, agreed.

"I just hope they let him die naturally because if we execute him, his followers will unleash mayhem," Iskander said as he opened his small food store in central Baghdad's Karrada district.

Some people fear Saddam's die-hard followers, who form part of the Sunni Arab insurgency, will produce a bloody backlash if he is executed. But others say his death will end their hopes and their fight.

"I think his death will end violence from Sunnis and they'll be forced to negotiate for reconciliation. We desperately need to turn this page in history," said Akram Salman, a 21-year-old mathematics university student.

Shi'ites and Kurds, Saddam's main victims during his 24-year rule, have been keen to speed up the execution but some minority Sunni Arabs, who had been the ruling elite for decades, are nostalgic for his return.

There were no major celebrations or protests against the decision as many Iraqis, struggling to live through sectarian violence and shortages in basic services, had expected the November 5 death sentence to be upheld.

Iraqi newspapers squeezed in headlines and small articles on the announcement late on Tuesday by the head of the Iraqi High Tribunal, Aref Abdul-Razzaq al-Shahin, but no editorials focused on the decision.

It remains unclear when Saddam will be executed for his role in the killings of 148 Shi'ite villagers after a failed 1982 assassination attempt against him in the village of Dujail, but al-Shahin said the sentence must be carried out within 30 days.

Although many Iraqis anxiously wait to see if it may help ease violence or improve their lives, laundry owner Yusif Ali said he just wanted to enjoy the moment when it comes.

"I'm very happy that justice was finally done," Ali said. "All I ask the government is for a broadcast of his execution."

Some Iraqis fear Saddam Hussein execution would fuel violence

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BAGHDAD (Reuters) - A car bomb killed eight people and wounded 10 on Wednesday in Talbie, a Baghdad district near the Shi'ite militia stronghold of Sadr City, police said.

Police said a parked car exploded near a restaurant on a busy commercial street. All the casualties were civilians.

Car bomb kills eight near restaurant in Baghdad

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"It looks like the president would rather let the whole operation go down in flames than admit he was wrong."

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Just weeks after pledging a new approach in the Iraq war in the wake of his party's defeat in congressional elections, President Bush seems to be digging in his heels against any major change of course.

Bush is spending the holiday week in consultations at his Texas ranch preparing for one of the most fateful moments of his presidency, a policy speech early in the new year charting what he has called "a new way forward" in Iraq.

Even as he gives the impression of seriously considering a range of ideas on how to handle an increasingly unpopular war that has killed nearly 3,000 U.S. troops and tens of thousands of Iraqis, Bush has made clear some options are off-limits.

He has brushed aside a proposal from a bipartisan panel to ask U.S. foes Iran and Syria for help in stabilizing Iraq and, instead of talking about a U.S. troop reduction, he is said to be looking closely at a temporary increase.

That has critics predicting that Bush, who prides himself in sticking to decisions, will announce little real change.

"He is now caught between admitting the war was a mistake and his policy has failed, or trying to tough it out," said Joseph Cirincione, a foreign policy analyst at the Center for American Progress, a liberal Washington think tank.

"It looks like the president would rather let the whole operation go down in flames than admit he was wrong."

With Congress out of session, Bush's apparent reluctance to bend also looks like an attempt to reassert his relevance and salvage his final two years in office.

His domestic political troubles are sure to deepen starting on January 4, when his Republican Party formally cedes control of Congress to the Democrats, who won November 7 elections in what was widely seen as a rebuke of his Iraq policy.

Bush conceded then that voter discontent over the handling of the war helped fuel his party's losses and he quickly ousted Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, a move long sought by Democrats and some Republicans.

Key Democratic lawmakers are pushing for a timetable for withdrawing U.S. forces, which Bush rejects.

"This isn't a time for stubbornness, nor is it a time for halfway solutions," Democratic Sen. John Kerry, who lost to Bush in the 2004 presidential election, wrote in the Washington Post.

A report issued this month by the Iraq Study Group, co-chaired by former Secretary of State James Baker, has added to pressure for far-reaching changes in Iraq policy to deal with what it called a "grave and deteriorating situation."

Bush has shown little enthusiasm for its recommendations and some commentators say his resistance may stem in part from resentment over the implicit condemnation by old Washington insiders like Baker, a Bush family loyalist.

Instead of embracing the group's call for a pullback of most U.S. combat forces by early 2008, Bush is considering a surge of up to 30,000 troops, mostly to help secure Baghdad.

While the idea has the backing of Sen. John McCain, a likely 2008 Republican presidential contender, it is opposed by a key Democratic presidential hopeful, Sen. Joseph Biden, the incoming chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.

"We've already broken Iraq. We're about to break the United States military," Biden told reporters. He is planning hearings starting on January 9 to examine Bush's Iraq policy.

White House spokesman Scott Stanzel said the president was making sure all options were given the "due consideration they need". There is speculation Bush might go on television by the middle of next week to set the agenda before Congress returns.

Even if Bush continues to balk at major strategy changes, he is starting to alter his rhetoric.

Before the elections, he insisted the United States was "absolutely" winning in Iraq. In a Washington Post interview last week, he offered a murkier view.

"We're not winning," Bush said. "We're not losing."

Bush digging in heels on Iraq course change

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BAGHDAD: The U.S. military said it had credible evidence linking Iranians and their Iraqi associates, detained here in raids last week, to criminal activities, including attacks against U.S. forces. Evidence also emerged that some of the detainees were involved in shipments of weapons to illegal armed groups in Iraq.

In its first official confirmation of the raids last week, the U.S. military said Tuesday that it had confiscated maps, videos, photographs and documents in one of the raids on a site in Baghdad. The military confirmed the arrests of five Iranians and said that three of them had since been released.

The Bush administration has described the two Iranians still being held late Tuesday night as senior military officials. Major General William Caldwell, the chief spokesman for the U.S. command, said that the military, in the raid, had "gathered specific intelligence from highly credible sources that linked individuals and locations with criminal activities against Iraqi civilians, security forces and coalition force personnel."

Caldwell made his remarks by e-mail, in response to a query about the raids, first reported Monday in the New York Times. "Some of that specific intelligence," he said via e-mail, "dealt explicitly with force-protection issues, including attacks on MNF-I forces." MNF- I stands for Multinational Force-Iraq, the official name of the U.S.-led foreign forces there.

U.S. officials have long said that the Iranian government interferes in Iraq, but the arrests, in the compound of Abdul Aziz al-Hakim, one of Iraq's most powerful Shiite political leaders, were the first since the U.S. invasion in which officials were offering evidence of the link.

The raids threaten to upset the delicate balance of the three-way relationship between the United States, Iran and Iraq. The Iraqi government has made extensive efforts to engage Iran in security matters in recent months, and the arrests of the Iranians could scuttle those efforts.

Some Iraqis questioned the timing of the arrests, suggesting that the Bush administration had political motives. The arrests came just days before the UN Security Council passed a resolution imposing sanctions against Iran for its refusal to suspend uranium enrichment.

The Bush administration has rejected pressure to open talks with Iran on Iraq.

The Iraqi government has kept silent on the arrests, but officials spoke Tuesday night of intense behind-the-scenes negotiations by Iraq's government and its fractured political elite over how to handle the situation.

The Iraqi president, Jalal Talabani, had invited the two Iranians during his visit to Tehran, his spokesman said on Sunday, but by Tuesday, some Iraqi officials had begun to question if Talabani had in fact made the invitation.

"We know when they caught them they were doing something," said one Iraqi official, who added that the Iranians did not appear to have formally registered with the government.

Some political leaders speculated that the arrests were intended to derail efforts by Iraqis to deal with Iran on their own by making Iraqis look weak.

But the U.S. military seemed sure of what and whom it had found.

At about 7 p.m. last Wednesday, the military stopped a car in Baghdad and detained four people — three Iranians and an Iraqi. The military released two of them on Friday and the other two on Sunday night, Caldwell said. The Iranian Embassy confirmed the releases.

But the more significant raid came in predawn hours of Thursday morning, when U.S. forces raided a second location, the general said.

The military described it as "a site in Baghdad," but declined to release further details about the location.

Iraqi leaders said last week that the site was the compound of Hakim, who met with President George W. Bush in Washington three weeks ago. A spokesman for Hakim said he had not heard of a raid on the compound.

A careful reading of Caldwell's statement makes it clear, however, that the location itself was of central importance. The military gathered "specific intelligence from highly credible sources that linked individuals and locations with criminal activities," it said.

The crimes were against Iraqi civilians, security forces and Americans.

In that raid, U.S. forces detained 10 men, two of them Iranians.

They seized documents, maps, photographs and videos at the location, the military said. The military declined to say precisely what the items showed, nor did it specify if the Iranians themselves were suspected of attacking Americans, or if the Iraqis arrested with them were suspected, or both.

Some Iraqis questioned the U.S. motives, saying that the operation seemed aimed at embarrassing Hakim, the driving force behind a new political grouping backed by the United States to distance militants from the political process.

The allegation, if true, would mark the first time since the U.S. invasion that Iranian military officials were discovered in the act of planning military action inside Iraq. U.S. officials have long accused them of supplying arms and money from Iran, but never of traveling to Iraq and actively taking part in plotting violent acts here.

An official in the Iranian Embassy in Baghdad said that its diplomats had tried to see the detainees but were not allowed to, a refusal that violated international rules, the official said.

U.S. says evidence links Iran military to plots in Iraq