has just been removed because of criminal activity and complicity with death squads. American general gave statement with the look of hopelessness.
someone find link please.
Iraqi police unit linked to militias
By SAMEER N. YACOUB, Associated Press Writer 58 minutes ago
BAGHDAD, Iraq - Iraqi authorities have taken a brigade of up to 700 policemen out of service and put members under investigation for "possible complicity" with death squads following a mass kidnapping earlier this week, the U.S. military said Wednesday.
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Meanwhile, a series of bombs went off in rapid succession in a shopping district in a mainly Christian neighborhood of Baghdad, killing 12 people and wounding 87, police said. The dead were among 28 people killed in attacks across
Iraq.
The U.S. military also announced the death of two soldiers — the latest in what has been one of the bloodiest stretches of days for American troops this year. At least 17 troops have been killed in combat since Saturday, including eight U.S. soldiers who died in gunbattles and bomb blasts Monday in Baghdad — the most killed in a single day in the capital since July 2005.
The Iraqi police officers were decommissioned following a kidnapping Sunday when gunmen stormed a frozen food plant in the Amil district, abducted 24 workers and shot two others. The bodies of seven of the workers were found hours later but the fate of the others remains unknown.
The action appeared aimed at signaling a new seriousness in tackling police collusion with militias at a time when the government is under increased pressure to put an end to the Shiite-Sunni violence that has killed thousands this year and threatened to tear Iraq apart.
Sunni leaders blamed Shiite militias for the kidnapping and suggested security forces had turned a blind eye to the attack.
The top U.S. military spokesman in Iraq, Maj. Gen. William B. Caldwell, said the Iraqi police brigade in the area had been ordered to stand down and was being retrained.
"There was some possible complicity in allowing death squad elements to move freely when they should have been impeding them," he told a Baghdad news conference. "The forces in the unit have not put their full allegiance to the government of Iraq and gave their allegiance to others," he said.
He said problems with the unit had emerged during a broad brigade-by-brigade assessment of police in Baghdad led by the U.S. military.
The suspended brigade has about 650-700 police, said Interior Ministry spokesman Lt. Col. Karim Mohammedawi.
The Iraqi Interior Ministry said Tuesday that the commander of the unit, a lieutenant colonel, had been detained for investigation and the major general who commands the battalion that includes the brigade had been suspended temporarily and ordered transferred.
Brig. Abdul-Karim Khalaf, the chief ministry spokesman, said a random selection of troops in the suspended unit were being investigated for ties to militias.
Sunni leaders have frequently charged that Shiite militiamen have infiltrated the Shiite-led police forces and have accused police of helping or allowing their attacks.
On Monday, Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki announced a new security plan aimed at putting an end to sectarian violence and uniting the feuding Shiite and Sunni parties in his government.
The four-point plan calls for creating neighborhood Shiite-Sunni committees to monitor efforts to stop the killings. The aim is to overcome the deep mistrust between the two communities and get them to persuade followers to stop killings.
At the same time, U.S. and Iraq forces have been carrying out a district-by-district sweep in the capital since August. The military announced Wednesday that one soldier was killed a day earlier in a shooting in Baghdad, while a second died Tuesday from gunfire in the northern city of Kirkuk.
Just before noon Wednesday, a car bomb and two roadside bombs blew up in the span of 10 minutes in a shopping district of the Camp Sara neighborhood, which is predominantly Christian, 1st Lt. Ali Abbas said.
The blasts left 16 dead and injured 87, including shoppers and 15 policemen. They destroyed cars and collapsed part of a nearby building, he said.
Bodies lay in the street next to burning cars. Rescue workers piled the corpses into an ambulance parked next to the crumbled facade of a building, while a policeman warned residents to evacuate because more bombs might explode.
An increasingly common insurgent tactic is to detonate one bomb to draw rescue workers and onlookers, then to explode a second device to cause more casualties.
One witness, who identified himself only by his first name, Hamdi, said a roadside bomb went off first and people started to gather, then the second blast went off.
"Then more people gathered and they were searching for their dead or missing relatives when the car bomb exploded," he told AP Television News. "Everybody knows this is a Christian neighborhood, they are neither Sunnis or Shiites, so why are they doing this?"
Earlier in the nearby New Baghdad area, a bomb hit a convoy carrying the Iraqi industry minister. Three police guards were killed and nine were wounded, but the minister was not harmed, Abbas said.
In Baqouba, 35 miles northeast of Baghdad, gunmen attacked a police patrol, killing two policemen and injuring eight people including six policemen, Diyala province police said.
Near Baqouba, Iraqi forces carried out a pre-dawn raid on homes in two villages, arresting 41 suspects and seizing weapons and ammunition, provincial police said. The province has been the scene of increasing violence in recent weeks.
At least 53 people were killed Tuesday, a day after al-Maliki announced the new security plan.
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20061004/...huBHNlYwNtdHM-
Thanks
Well, at least we found the WMDs. Ooops, those are in N. Korea.
who couldn't see this coming besides our administration.
Just the beginning.
I wonder if we'll suspend the Iraqi government officials for their ties to militias.
Looks like a positive development to me.
Yoni, your a riot. Come'on, work it!
So, one day you have 750 to 800 policemen facilitating death squads and the next day you don't? What's negative?
the fact that there was 750 to 800 policemen facilitating death squads
Well, there is sectarian strife going on in the middle of a war. You might expect some of this is going on. I still say it's an improvement when you take 750 to 800 accomplices to murder off the street.
catching criminals=good
crime=bad
terrorism....Everybody knows this is a Christian neighborhood, they are neither Sunnis or Shiites, so why are they doing this?
It's just the beginning. We will end up funding and arming all facets of the Iraqi security forces, only to watch them descend into factions that oppose one another and eventually take down the puppet government we installed.
Without any pleasure or gloating, I say the Repugs have lost Iraq. They will not put in the 300K more troops to beat back the civil war and assur public security. Same story in Afghanistan.
In other good news about the Iraq Civil War:
===================
September 28, 2006
Cleric Said to Lose Reins of Parts of Iraqi Militia
By SABRINA TAVERNISE, NYTimes
BAGHDAD, Sept. 27 — The radical Shiite cleric Moktada al-Sadr has lost control of portions of his Mahdi Army militia that are splintering off into freelance death squads and criminal gangs, a senior coalition intelligence official said Wednesday.
The question of how tightly Mr. Sadr holds the militia, one of the largest armed groups in Iraq, is of critical importance to American and Iraqi officials. Seeking to ease the sectarian violence raging across the country, they have pressed him to join the political process and curb his fighters, who see themselves as defenders of Shiism — and often as agents of vengeance against Sunnis.
But as Mr. Sadr has taken a more active role in the government, as many as a third of his militiamen have grown frustrated with the constraints of compromise and have broken off, often selling their services to the highest bidders, said the official, who spoke to reporters in Baghdad on condition of anonymity because he was not permitted to speak publicly on intelligence issues.
( good old market forces at work. I wonder if the Muslim mercenaries are making more than the US mercenaries and US war profiteers?)
“When Sadr says you can’t do this, for whatever political reason, that’s when they start to go rogue,” the official said. “Frankly, at that point, they start to become very open to alternative sources of sponsorship.” The official said that opened the door to control by Iran.
Mr. Sadr’s militia — dominated by impoverished Shiites who are loosely organized into groups that resemble neighborhood protection forces — has always operated in a grass-roots style but generally tended to heed his commands. It answered his call to battle American forces in two uprisings in 2004, and stopped fighting when he ordered it. But as the violence in Iraq has spread, evidence of freelancing Shiites has ac ulated.
After the bombing of a Shiite shrine in Samarra in February, bands of militants dressed in black, the favorite color of Sadr loyalists, drove into neighborhoods, kidnapping and killing Sunnis. Mr. Sadr, who was abroad at the time, returned home and gave a rare public speech calling on his followers to stop, even proposing joint prayer sessions with Sunni clerics. Still, the rampage continued.
In Basra, a province in southeastern Iraq, Mr. Sadr has less direct control over militiamen, and they have tended to operate to suit their own agenda. Local leaders there have said that he has disciplined some members and fired others, but with little overall effect. He has run through four different leaders in Basra, according to the intelligence official, and has even had to shut offices temporarily, when local leaders ignored him and acted on their own.
Mr. Sadr is still immensely powerful, with as many as 7,000 militiamen in Baghdad, the official said. And the cleric has turned that firepower into political might. His candidate list won about 30 seats in Parliament this year, one of the largest shares. The participation was a central goal for American officials, who tried for months to persuade him to stop fighting and enter politics.
Still, six major leaders here no longer answer to Mr. Sadr’s organization, according to the intelligence official. Most describe themselves as Mahdi Army members, the official said, and even get money from Mr. Sadr’s organization, but “are effectively beyond his control.” Some of those who moved away from Mr. Sadr saw him as too accommodating to the United States. Others saw him as too bound by politics, particularly as killings of Shiite civilians in mixed neighborhoods began to soar.
“They’re not content to sit there and just defend their family on the street corner,” the official said. “They want to go out and take on what they view as Al Qaeda or Baathists or both in aggressive measure.”
One example is Abu Dera, a fighter in the Shiite stronghold of Sadr City in the capital who used to be loyal to Mr. Sadr. Residents said that as he began to gain a reputation for killing Sunni figures, Mr. Sadr told him to stop. But he ignored the order, and now he is referred to as the “Shiite Zarqawi,” after Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the terrorist leader who exhorted Sunnis to kill Shiites.
“He started against the Americans, but he moved on to killing Sunnis,” said Sattar Awad, a 29-year-old resident of the district. “People here look at him as a brave man.”
American forces are hunting for Mr. Dera, the intelligence officer said, but he has eluded capture.
Although the splintering has solved some problems for the American military, it has raised new ones. “In some ways it makes it easier for me because I now have digestible doses I can deal with,” said a senior American military official at a briefing on Wednesday, also in Baghdad. “At the same time it creates problems because they are harder to find when they are splintered.”
The splintering has changed the tone of the American military’s interaction with the Mahdi Army in Sadr City. In past years, American forays into the area would often draw a storm of grenade attacks. But recent American moves into the area have been carried out relatively peacefully: Mr. Sadr has not ordered attacks because the men being sought were freelancers like Abu Dera, the intelligence officer said.
The fighters’ defections have raised the troubling prospect of more avenues of influence for Iran, the senior intelligence official said. The official cited shipments of weapons with labels that trace back to Iranian weapons manufacturers as evidence that Iran was actively aiding groups in Iraq. And that assistance has not just been limited to Mahdi Army offshoots. “They’re not sure who will come out on top, so they fund everybody,” the official said of Iran.
Even Mr. Sadr, who fashions himself as the quintessential Iraqi nationalist, has reached out to Iran’s government, making a very public trip to Iran for talks early this year. He is also trying to reassert control over his power base at home, and to expand his influence, the intelligence official said. “What Sadr is looking for is discipline,” the official said.
He said Mr. Sadr had begun to increase his exposure in the northern city of Kirkuk and in Diyala Province, both mixed-population areas north of Baghdad where sectarian disputes have been on the rise. There, he is trying to appeal by casting himself as a defender of Shiites against Kurdish and Sunni Arab factions.
Richard A. Oppel Jr. contributed reporting.
Here's an idea: NOT 300K BUT 400K AT LEAST. HAVE THEY EVER HEARD OF BORDERS?
Here's a clue: if the police are Sunni, they'll look the other way as Sunnis kill. If they are Shi'ite, just the opposite. It's not just 750-800 police. It's cultural and endemic. They've pretty much been killing each other for the better part of 1500 years, minus Saddam's tenure.
I don't know why everyone assumes more troops will solve anything. Obviously more is better than less, which is why every general (excluding those sucking up to Rummy) insists on more troops. But, this is not Army A vs. Army B, where Army A needs a larger number of troops than Army B in order to win. This is Army A vs. insurgency, tribal warfare, crime, and the general chaos of running a destabilized nation with a broken infrastructure.
If more troops now really won't recover the relative peace that the Repugs incompetently, no-sightedly allowed to be destroyed soon after the invasion, then it really is over.
However, I think more troops will be able to clear AND hold, rather than just clear, lose, re-clear, lose, re-clear.
Then there is the problem of the borders with Syria and Iraq to be controlled.
Even with journalists tied down to basically the Green Zone due to general chaos, they are reporting absolutely no progress, which means they are under-reporting how bad it really is. Even the US military brass is saying they cannot see the end to the downward spiral.
If Iraq is really lost, all of dubya's childhish "hope" proven to be a fairy tale, the Repugs/rummy themselves are totally lost, then the only move is pull the military out of Iraq.
The Iraqis simply aren't going to stand-up, so the Repugs will have to stand down.
Last edited by boutons_; 10-05-2006 at 05:49 AM.
It's very probably too late in long-gone, lost Iraq, but the military's new counter-insurgency is clearly saying, repeatedly, that Iraq is an example of NOT ENOUGH TROOPS (aka Rummy's "the army you have").
===================
October 5, 2006
Military Hones a New Strategy on Insurgency
By MICHAEL R. GORDON
WASHINGTON, Oct. 4 — The United States Army and Marines are finishing work on a new counterinsurgency doctrine that draws on the hard-learned lessons from Iraq and makes the welfare and protection of civilians a bedrock element of military strategy.
The doctrine warns against some of the practices used early in the war, when the military operated without an effective counterinsurgency playbook. It cautions against overly aggressive raids and mistreatment of detainees. Instead it emphasizes the importance of safeguarding civilians and restoring essential services, and the rapid development of local security forces.
( sounds like the counts in an indictment of Rummy's military approach in Iraq
The current military leadership in Iraq has already embraced many of the ideas in the doctrine. But some military experts question whether the Army and the Marines have sufficient troops to carry out the doctrine effectively while also preparing for other threats.
The subtleties of the battle were highlighted Wednesday when the Iraqi Interior Ministry suspended a police brigade on su ion that some members had been involved in death squads. The move was the most serious step Iraqi officials had taken to tackle the festering problem of militias operating within ministry forces.
The new doctrine is part of a broader effort to change the culture of a military that has long promoted the virtues of using firepower and battlefield maneuvers in swift, decisive operations against a conventional enemy.
“The Army will use this manual to change its entire culture as it transitions to irregular warfare,” said Jack Keane, a retired four-star general who served in 2003 as the acting chief of staff of the Army. “But the Army does not have nearly enough resources, particularly in terms of people, to meet its global responsibilities while making such a significant commitment to irregular warfare.”
The doctrine is outlined in a new field manual on counterinsurgency that is to be published next month. But recent drafts of the unclassified do ents have been made available to The New York Times, and military officials said that the major elements of final version would not change.
The spirit of the do ent is captured in nine paradoxes that reflect the nimbleness required to win the support of the people and isolate insurgents from their potential base of support — a task so complex that military officers refer to it as the graduate level of war.
1.
Instead of massing firepower to destroy Republican Guard troops and other enemy forces, as was required in the opening weeks of the invasion of Iraq, the draft manual emphasizes the importance of minimizing civilian casualties. “The more force used, the less effective it is,” it notes.
2.
Stressing the need to build up local ins utions and encourage economic development, the manual cautions against putting too much weight on purely military solutions. “Tactical success guarantees nothing,” it says.
3.
Noting the need to interact with the people to gather intelligence and understand the civilians’ needs, the doctrine cautions against hunkering down at large bases. “The more you protect your force, the less secure you are,” it asserts.
The military generally turned its back on counterinsurgency operations after the Vietnam War. The Army concentrated on defending Europe against a Soviet attack. The Marines were focused on expeditionary operations in the third world.
“Basically, after Vietnam, the general at ude of the American military was that we don’t want to fight that kind of war again,” said Conrad C. Crane, the director of the military history ins ute at the Army War College, a retired Army lieutenant colonel and one of the principal drafters of the new doctrine. “The Army’s idea was to fight the big war against the Russians and ignore these other things.”
A common assumption was that if the military trained for major combat operations, it would be able to easily handle less violent operations like peacekeeping and counterinsurgency. But that assumption proved to be wrong in Iraq; in effect, the military without an up-to-date doctrine. Different units improvised different approaches. The failure by civilian policy makers to prepare for the reconstruction of Iraq compounded the problem.
The limited number of forces was also a constraint. To mass enough troops to storm Falluja, an insurgent stronghold, in 2004, American commanders drew troops from Haditha, another town in western Iraq. Insurgents took advantage of the Americans’ limited numbers to attack the police there. Iraqi policemen were executed, dealing a severe setback to efforts to build a local force.
Frank G. Hoffman, a retired Marine infantry officer who works as a research fellow at an agency at the Marine base at Quantico, Va., said that in 2005, the Marines sometimes lacked sufficient forces to safeguard civilians. As a result, while these forces were often effective “in neutralizing an identifiable foe, they could not stay and work with the population the way the classical counterinsurgency would suggest.”
The effort to develop the new program began a year ago under Lt. Gen. David H. Petraeus, commander of the Army’s Combined Arms Center at Fort Leavenworth, Kan., and Lt. Gen. James N. Mattis, former commander of the Marine Corps Combat Development Command and the current chief of the First Marine Expeditionary Force. Colonel Crane, Lt. Col. John A. Nagl and Col. Douglas King of the Marines were among the major drafters.
Academics and experts from private groups were asked for input. A draft was completed in June and was circulated for comment. Almost 800 responses were received, but military officials said they would not alter the substance of the new doctrine.
“We are codifying the best practices of previous counterinsurgency campaigns and the lessons we have learned from Iraq and Afghanistan to help our forces succeed in the current fight and prepare for the future,” Colonel Nagl said.
( yep, Iraq is dead and lost )
In drafting the doctrine, the military drew upon some of the classic texts on counterinsurgency by the likes of T. E. Lawrence of Arabia, and David Galula, whose ideas were partly informed by his experience in Algeria.
Colonel Crane said that many of the ideas adopted for the manual had been percolating throughout the military. “In many ways, this is a bottom-up change, “ he said. “The young soldiers who had been through Somalia, Haiti, Bosnia, Kosovo, and now Iraq and Afghanistan, understood why we need to do this.”
As the manual is being drafted, the military has also revised the curriculum at its war colleges and training ranges to emphasize counterinsurgency. At the National Training Center in California, the old tank-on-tank war games against a Soviet-style enemy have been supplanted by combat rehearsals in which troops on their way to Iraq and Afghanistan engage in mock operations with role players who simulate insurgents, militias and civilians.
Dennis Tighe, a training program manager for the Combined Arms Center at Fort Leavenworth, said the rehearsals were vital for preparing troops for their new counterinsurgency mission. But the Army is stretched so thin and so many units are focused on rehearsing for Iraq and Afghanistan at the training center that concerns have grown that the Army may be raising a new group of young officers with little experience in high-intensity warfare against heavily equipped armies like North Korea.
“That is one of the things folks are a little concerned about,” Mr. Tighe said.
While the counterinsurgency doctrine attempts to look beyond Iraq, it cites as a positive example the experience in 2005 of the Army’s Third Armored Cavalry Regiment, which worked with Iraqi security forces to clear Tal Afar of insurgents, to hold the town with Iraqi and American troops, then to encourage reconstruction there, an approach known as “clear, hold, build.”
( Rummy's idea is that the Army clears, Iraqis hold, and somebody else builds. The Army has been clearing and re-clearing, but hold and build have failed. From pre-war with no post-invasion plan, through the disastrous Bremer, and right up to the present, nothing buy incompetence and "cheap" undermanning by the Repugs )
One military officer who served in Iraq said American units there generally carried out the tenets of the emerging doctrine when they had sufficient forces. But protecting civilians is a troop-intensive task. He noted that there were areas in which there were not enough American and Iraqi troops to protect Iraqis adequately against intimidation, a central element of the counterinsurgency strategy.
“The units that have sufficient forces are applying the doctrine with good effect,” said the officer, who is not authorized to speak on military policy.
“Those units without sufficient forces can only conduct raids to disrupt the enemy while protecting themselves. They can’t do enough to protect the population effectively and partner with Iraqi forces.”
===============
The new army manual is saying, in Iraq terms:
1) what should have been done in Iraq from the start
2) and what should be done now in Iraq
but
3) the military can't fight a troop-intensive counter-insurgenc in Iraq because there aren't enough troops.
Even now, a heavy build of troops, +200K, could have a serious impact.
However, the situation so far, esp in the at udes of the Iraqi civilians, has deteriorated so far that an huge injection of troops will be less effective, have a much tougher job than if the job had Shinsheki-level thinking from the outset.
The Repugs have lost Iraq
a) for not enough troops
b) the Repugs were totally incompetent in conception, imangination (greeted with open arms, not by an insurgency), no planning for post-invasion, and execution of the hold and build steps.
The abject failure of the Repugs in Iraq suggests they weren't really serious about Iraq itself (the Repugs aren't really as stupid as Iraq makes them look), but were serious about some other hidden objectives, the first of which was to get dubya re-elected in 2003 as "war winning/Mission Accomplsihed president" or as "(on-going) war president (don't change horses...)". T
he Repugs got their puppet re-elected, but it got 2700+ US military murdered and totally destabilized the M/E, increasing Iran's hegemony.
Iraq is lost, the Repugs have failed miserably, Repugs have NO PLANS to save Iraq, so bring the US military home. There is not even anybody to "transition" / hand-off to, except the militias and al-Quaida, proxies for Iran.
you're doing a heckuva job, dubya
Last edited by boutons_; 10-05-2006 at 08:20 AM.
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