History > 2007 > USA > War > Iraq (IV)

During the operation,

Specialist Paul Goodyear

wore a headband bearing a passage from Psalm 91:

"He that dwelleth in the secret place of the Most High

shall abide under the shadow of the Almighty.

I will say of the Lord, He is my refuge and my fortress:

my God; in him will I trust."

Photograph: Scott Nelson

World Picture Network, for the New York Times

For G.I.’s in Iraq, a Harrowing Day Facing a Trap

NYT        26.6.2007

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/26/world/middleeast/26diyala.html

2 G.I.’s Charged in Murders of 3 Iraqis

June 30, 2007
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 8:38 a.m. ET
The New York Times

BAGHDAD (AP) -- American soldiers rolled into Baghdad's Sadr City slum on Saturday in search of Iranian-linked militants and as many as 26 Iraqis were killed in what a U.S. officer described as ''an intense firefight.''

But residents, police and hospital officials said eight people were killed -- all civilians in their homes, and angrily accused U.S. forces of firing blindly on the innocent. Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki condemned the raids and demanded an explanation for the assault into a district where he has barred U.S. operations in the past.

Separately, two American solders were charged with the premeditated murder of three Iraqis, the U.S. military said Saturday. And in Muqdadiyah, 60 miles north of the capital, police said a suicide bomber exploded himself in a crowd of police recruits, killing at least 16 people and wounding 24, a police officer said on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to release the information.

The U.S. military said it conducted two pre-dawn raids in Sadr City, Baghdad's largest Shiite slum, killing 26 ''terrorists'' who attacked U.S. troops with small arms fire, rocket-propelled grenades and roadside bombs. But Iraqi police and hospital officials said all the dead were civilians killed in their homes.

''The Iraqi government totally rejects U.S. military operations... conducted without a pre-approval from the Iraqi military command,'' al-Maliki said in a statement released by his office. ''Anyone who breaches the military command orders will face investigation.''

An American military spokesman insisted all of those killed were combatants.

''Everyone who got shot was shooting at U.S. troops at the time,'' said Lt. Col. Christopher Garver, the spokesman. ''It was an intense firefight.''

The Iraqi officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity out of security concerns, put the death toll at eight, with 20 wounded.

Seventeen suspected militants also were detained in the operation, which consisted of two separate raids, the U.S. military said in a statement.

American troops entered the Shiite enclave in search of militants suspected of helping Iranian terror networks fund operations in Iraq, the statement said. There were no U.S. casualties, it said.

Witnesses said U.S. forces rolled into their neighborhood before dawn and opened fire without warning.

''At about 4 a.m., a big American convoy with tanks came and began to open fire on houses -- bombing them,'' said Basheer Ahmed, who lives in Sadr City's Habibiya district. ''What did we do? We didn't even retaliate -- there was no resistance.''

The raids centered on the Habibiya and Orfali districts of Sadr City, police said.

Sadr City is the Iraqi capital's largest Shiite neighborhood -- home to some 2.5 million people. It is also the base of operations for the Mahdi Army, a militia loyal to anti-American cleric Muqtada al-Sadr. The fighters are blamed for much of the sectarian killing in Baghdad.

In the Shiite holy city of Najaf, Sheik Salah al-Obaidi, a spokesman for al-Sadr condemned Saturday's raids: ''The bombing hurt only innocent civilians.''

The U.S. military statement said soldiers riding in armored vehicles ''used proper escalation of force rules to engage four civilian vehicles.''

''You start with warnings and work your way up to firing on a vehicle,'' Garver said. ''Every structure and vehicle that the troops on the ground engaged were being used for hostile intent,'' he said.

U.S. soldiers fired a barrage of bullets at one vehicle after it failed to yield at a checkpoint, Garver said. The other civilian cars were being used as a cover for insurgents, who hid behind them and fired on American forces, he said.

Some of the 26 victims were in civilian cars, some had been hiding behind the cars and others had fired on U.S. troops from nearby buildings, Garver said.

But according to Iraqi officials, the dead included three members of one family -- a father, mother and son. Several women and children, along with two policemen, were among the wounded, they said.

One of the policemen, Montadhar Kareem, said he was on night duty in the Habibiya area when the raids began.

''At about dawn, American troops came with tanks and began bombing houses in the area,'' he said.

''The bombing became more intense, and I was injured by shrapnel in both my legs and in my left shoulder,'' Kareem said from a gurney at Al Sadr General Hospital.

Hours after the raids, a funeral procession snaked through the streets of Sadr City's Orfali district. Three coffins were hoisted atop cars.

One resident who goes by the nickname of Um Ahmed, or ''mother of Ahmed,'' stood outside her home as mourners passed by.

''We are being hit while we are peacefully sleeping in our houses. Is that fair?'' she cried. The woman gave only her nickname, fearing reprisal.

Houses, a bakery and some other shops were damaged by fire from U.S. tanks during the operation, Iraqi officials said.

In the murder case, the two American soldiers are accused of killing three Iraqis in separate incidents, then planting weapons on the victims' remains, the military said in a statement. Fellow soldiers reported the alleged crimes, which took place between April and this month in the vicinity of Iskandariyah, 30 miles south of Baghdad, it said.

The U.S. military on Saturday identified the soldiers as Staff Sgt. Michael A. Hensley from Candler, N.C., and Spc. Jorge G. Sandoval from Laredo, Texas.

Hensley is charged with three counts each of premeditated murder, obstructing justice and ''wrongfully placing weapons with the remains of deceased Iraqis,'' the military said. He was placed in military confinement in Kuwait on Thursday.

Sandoval faces one count each of premeditated murder and placing a weapon with the remains of a dead Iraqi, a statement said. He was taken into custody Tuesday while at home in Texas, and was transferred to military confinement in Kuwait three days later, it said.

2 G.I.’s Charged in Murders of 3 Iraqis, NYT, 30.6.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/world/AP-Iraq.html

Sectarian Attacks Kill Dozens in Baghdad

June 29, 2007
The New York Times
By RICHARD A. OPPEL Jr. and STEPHEN FARRELL

BAGHDAD, June 28 — A spate of grisly attacks believed to have been carried out by Sunni Arab militants killed dozens of Shiites around Baghdad, just days ahead of a planned huge march of devout Shiites through Sunni heartlands to the remnants of a revered shrine.

A rush-hour bombing Thursday morning killed 25 people in the largely Shiite neighborhood of Baya in southwest Baghdad, where the Mahdi Army militia has escalated violence against Sunnis, an Interior Ministry official said. Ten people were killed in a bombing Wednesday night in the mostly Shiite neighborhood of Kadhimiya in northwestern Baghdad. And the police reported finding 20 decapitated bodies — a hallmark of Sunni extremists — south of the capital, although other officials later disputed the account.

The attacks took place ahead of the rally called by the Shiite cleric Moktada al-Sadr, who had urged Shiites to march to Samarra next week to protest the recent bombing that destroyed the twin golden minarets of the city’s Askariya shrine. The shrine’s dome was demolished in a bombing last year that unleashed a storm of sectarian killings.

Mr. Sadr’s office in Najaf urged Iraqis of all sects to use the protest “to get close to each other and break all the barriers installed by the Takfiris and the occupation,” a reference to Sunni extremists and the American military.

Clearly concerned that thousands of Shiites marching north of Baghdad would be an obvious target for attack, Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki’s cabinet on Thursday urged a delay, bluntly admitting that the route to Samarra was not safe and that time was needed to “cleanse it of terrorists.”

Mr. Maliki also claimed that confessions from insurgents arrested in Iraq have revealed that the Sunni group Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia is looking to export “wide-ranging and dangerous plans” to neighboring countries.

“Al Qaeda is surrounded and is suffering heavy blows in Iraq, and so elements from it are fleeing to other countries where it is easier to infiltrate, and opening new battles to conceal its losses,” he said during a visit to an Iraqi counterterrorism headquarters.

The worst attack in Baghdad on Thursday struck commuters at the Baya bus station. The police said a bomb in a parked car exploded there just after 8 a.m. Buses were set ablaze as bystanders rushed to the scene, where 25 people were killed and at least 50 wounded, the police said.

The neighborhood is at the heart of a sectarian battleground where Shiites from the Mahdi Army, a loosely organized group loyal to Mr. Sadr, have redoubled efforts to drive out Sunnis and take control of southwest Baghdad.

After the blast, Mahdi Army fighters surrounded the area along with Iraqi soldiers and policemen, and they set up checkpoints to search vehicles entering the neighborhood through side roads, avoiding the American patrols on larger thoroughfares.

As one Iraqi reporter for The New York Times arrived at a Mahdi Army checkpoint, 20 fighters milled about and inspected vehicles. On the next road over, a group of American Humvees approached. “The Americans are coming!” one of the militiamen shouted. The fighters then walked away, blending into crowds already outside who were heading to the blast site.

Nearby, Iraqi national policemen in camouflage uniforms cursed Sunnis. “We are going to finish you!” one of them shouted, to no one in particular.

Residents said Mahdi Army fighters stopped people after the blast and demanded to see identification cards to determine whether they had Shiite or Sunni names. Some residents said the checks were intended to keep out other Sunni attackers, but others said the militia was scouring the area for Sunnis to take revenge upon. The bodies of two recently killed middle-aged men were found hours later in Amel, a neighborhood nearby, but the victims’ sects were not known.

Contradicting the Iraqi authorities, the American military reported a toll of only 13 dead and 20 wounded in the bombing. The military described the blast as a “suicide car-bomb detonation” as opposed to a bomb in a parked, unattended car, and said that the police believed that 40 vehicles had been damaged. The military also said an American soldier was killed and another wounded in an unrelated bomb attack in eastern Baghdad on Thursday.

The discovery of 20 headless bodies was made in the Om-Obaid village near the Tigris River southeast of Baghdad, according to a police official in nearby Madaen. A half-dozen heads were also found near the still-clothed bodies, which appeared to be of men of varying ages, he said. An Interior Ministry official asserted later that it was doubtful that bodies had in fact been found.

The area is largely Sunni Arab, with many residents from the Dulaimi and Jabouri tribes. And it is in a region that for the past year has received little attention from American forces but is now a focus of the military’s efforts to smash Sunni extremists’ supply lines into Baghdad and to kill and capture insurgents who fled the troop buildup in the capital.

The Wednesday night attack in Kadhimiya struck people strolling in front of supermarkets, ice cream parlors and other shops at sunset. The blast left pools of blood and shards of glass scattered inside and outside the shops and on the sidewalk.

“The aim was to kill as many civilians as possible, because it is a Shia area,” said Khadim Muhammad, a 19-year-old who owns an ice cream parlor nearby. He said that if had he not been at home preparing ingredients, “I would have been dead.”

Fifteen unidentified bodies were found scattered around Baghdad on Thursday, an Interior Ministry official said. Four people were killed by a car bomb near a gasoline station in the Mansour neighborhood, while 11 people were wounded when a volley of mortar shells fell on the Shorja market in central Baghdad, the official added.

In southern Iraq, three British soldiers were killed Thursday by a roadside bomb in Basra that hit their resupply patrol shortly after midnight. A British military spokesman said the soldiers were killed by an improvised explosive device while they were on foot during a patrol of armored vehicles traveling between Basra Palace and the city’s airport, the only two major British bases left in the southern city.

Reporting was contributed by Karim Hilmi, Ali Fahim, Khalid al-Ansary, Qais Mizher and Khalid W. Hassan from Baghdad, and an Iraqi employee of The New York Times from Kut.

    Sectarian Attacks Kill Dozens in Baghdad, NYT, 29.6.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/29/world/middleeast/29iraq.html

Republican Support for Iraq War Slips

June 27, 2007
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 6:37 a.m. ET
The New York Times

WASHINGTON (AP) -- Republican support for the Iraq war is slipping by the day. After four years of combat and more than 3,560 U.S. deaths, two Republican senators previously reluctant to challenge President Bush on the war announced they could no longer support the deployment of 157,000 troops and asked the president to begin bringing them home.

''We must not abandon our mission, but we must begin a transition where the Iraqi government and its neighbors play a larger role in stabilizing Iraq,'' Sen. George Voinovich, R-Ohio, wrote in a letter to Bush.

Voinovich, a member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, released his letter Tuesday -- one day after Sen. Richard Lugar of Indiana, the panel's top Republican, said in a floor speech that Bush's strategy was not working.

''The longer we delay the planning for a redeployment, the less likely it is to be successful,'' said Lugar, who plans to meet later this week with Stephen Hadley, Bush's national security adviser.

Lugar and Voinovich are not the first GOP members to call for U.S. troops to leave Iraq. Sens. Chuck Hagel of Nebraska, Olympia Snowe of Maine and Gordon Smith of Oregon made similar remarks earlier this year. But their public break is significant because it raises the possibility that Senate Democrats could muster the 60 votes needed to pass legislation that would call for Bush to bring troops home.

Their remarks also are an early warning shot to a lame duck president that GOP support for the war is thinning. The administration is not expected until September to say whether a recent troop buildup in Iraq is working.

''Everyone should take note, especially the administration,'' said Snowe, R-Maine, noting Lugar's senior position within the GOP. ''It certainly indicates the tide is turning.''

Lugar told reporters Tuesday that he does not expect the fall assessment to be conclusive and would only fuel sentiment among lawmakers that Congress should intervene with legislation to end the war.

''The president has an opportunity now to bring about a bipartisan foreign policy,'' Lugar said. ''I don't think he'll have that option very long.''

The White House on Tuesday appealed to members for more patience on the war in Iraq.

''We hope that members of the House and Senate will give the Baghdad security plan a chance to unfold,'' said White House spokesman Tony Snow.

Snow also said Lugar was a thoughtful man and that his remarks came as no surprise.

''We've known that he's had reservations about the policy for some time,'' he said.

Republican support for the war has declined steadily since last year's elections, mirroring public poll numbers. In an AP-Ipsos poll earlier this month, 28 percent said they were satisfied with President Bush's handling of the war in Iraq, down 5 percentage points in a month.

Earlier this year, Voinovich and Lugar said they doubted the troop buildup in Iraq would work. But they declined to back a resolution expressing opposition to the troop increase because they said it would have no practical effect. The two senators also refused Democratic proposals to set a timetable for troop withdrawals.

Other Republicans, including Sens. Norm Coleman of Minnesota and Susan Collins of Maine, expressed similar concerns about Iraq but recently have said they will wait until the September assessment before calling for a change in course, including possible troop withdrawals.

Voinovich and Lugar said they still would not support a timetable for troop withdrawals and are unlikely to switch their vote. But softer alternative proposals are in the works that could possibly attract their support.

After the Fourth of July recess, ''you'll be hearing a number of statements from other (Republican) colleagues,'' predicted Sen. John Warner, R-Va., a longtime skeptic of the war strategy.

Warner spokesman John Ullyot said the senator is drafting a legislative proposal on the war, but declined to discuss the details. The measure would likely be offered as an amendment to the 2008 defense authorization bill on the floor next month.

In the meantime, Democrats say they will try again to set an end date on the war and cut off funding for combat.

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., called Lugar's speech ''brilliant'' and ''courageous'' and said it would later be noted in the history books as a turning point in the war.

''But that will depend on whether more Republicans take the stand that Sen. Lugar took,'' Reid added.

Also on Tuesday, the Senate Armed Services Committee voted in favor of confirming Lt. Gen. Douglas Lute as Bush's personal adviser on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and Pete Geren as Army secretary. A full Senate vote on the nominations has not been scheduled.

------

On the Net:

Senate Foreign Relations Committee: http://foreign.senate.gov/

    Republican Support for Iraq War Slips, NYT, 27.6.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/us/AP-US-Iraq.html

Kara-Ula Journal

Baghdad Christians Find New Life in Kurdish North

June 27, 2007
The New York Times
By SABRINA TAVERNISE

KARA-ULA, Iraq — The 70 houses of this tiny village spring from the treeless, arid plain here in the northern tip of Iraq with the uniformity of an army camp.

Built over the past four years of war, they house Christian refugees from some of Baghdad’s most dangerous neighborhoods: Dora, New Baghdad and Mashtel.

There the residents did not know one another, busy with their city lives. Now a barber, a bank manager, a news anchor and an electrician are comrades in the misery of flight.

“We saw everything a human can see,” said Majida Hamo, a mother of four who came from Mashtel recently. “It was a kind of genocide killing.”

“We were saying to Jesus, ‘See us and save us.’ ”

The Iraqi exodus is one of the largest displacements in the Middle East since the creation of Israel in 1948. Many have fled to Jordan and Syria, countries where Arabic is spoken. Others have stayed within Iraq’s borders, moving into the largely peaceful Kurdish north, which is more foreign to them than neighboring countries because the main language is Kurdish, not their native Arabic.

The choice of this small patch of land along the Turkish border was not arbitrary. On a gray day in 1975, the refugees’ parents were driven from their farms here, caught in one of Saddam Hussein’s cruel sectarian relocation plans, residents said. They were given a few hours to gather their possessions and get into army trucks. They ended up in Baghdad.

In the capital, the families — farmers and shepherds — became city dwellers, taking jobs as taxi drivers, maids and barbers. Samir Bibadro was born the year his parents arrived. They settled in Dora, a bustling lower-middle-class area with a large Christian population.

For most of his adult life Mr. Bibadro worked as a barber, giving trims and close shaves in his southern Baghdad neighborhood. After the American invasion, Sunni militants moved in to control it and began killing barbers, because the Prophet Muhammad wore a beard.

Mr. Bibadro did not have the money to move to America, as some in the Christian community had, and settled for the village of his father, a place he had never been. Plans to move became urgent after the killing of his cousin and his brother-in-law.

Sitting on a couch in his one-story concrete house far from the violence, Mr. Bibadro patted his chest with thick fingers and described his feelings with a smile and one word: comfortable.

Upper-middle-class refugees have a different view.

For Suhail Nissan, a former bank manager, living in Kara-Ula feels like running out of air. She and her four children fled a year ago, after an anonymous caller threatened to kill her if she did not give up her house. She left without taking her furniture.

Now, she is spending her meager savings busing her children to an Arabic school. The teaching is far short of the standards in the schools for the gifted that her children attended in Baghdad, where they learned French and English, and she worries that their future is dimmer.

Her savings will last just a few months more, she said.

“I am thinking, in two months what will I do?” she said, standing outside the new village church, clenching her hands nervously. She has even tried getting her old job back, as a manager at the Rafidain Bank in Baghdad, but it refused.

The only instruction in the village for teenagers is a religious lesson taught by a former news anchor, Salam Toma, in a white room, empty except for rows of plastic chairs.

Another problem is health care. As bad as the hospitals have become in Baghdad, care, at least for those with money, is still better than it would be here. Ms. Nissan’s husband went to Syria for care when he fell ill recently. Behjat Tahkia, 43, an electrician, said his brother had wanted to move to the village with the rest of the family but had to stay in Baghdad because of a heart ailment.

Still, people here are glad to be alive, and grateful to the local Kurdish government, which has allotted small monthly stipends and the land for their houses, residents said.

Hermes Toma Musa was 32 when Mr. Hussein’s soldiers forced him to leave his patches of eggplant and watermelon, his goats and sheep. For him, the return in 2004 was a homecoming. The concrete house is much better than the hut he lived in 40 years before. He has planted rows of apricot trees. The only building left from the past is an old police station, which is now a school.

“Even if Baghdad were not on fire, we would still come here,” he said, standing in the sun on his roof. “It is like being in heaven while I’m still alive.”

    Baghdad Christians Find New Life in Kurdish North, NYT, 27.6.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/27/world/middleeast/27christians.html?hp

For G.I.’s in Iraq, a Harrowing Day Facing a Trap

June 26, 2007
The New York Times
By MICHAEL R. GORDON

BAQUBA, Iraq, June 25 — The enemy was a phantom who never showed his face but transformed a neighborhood into a network of houses rigged to explode.

And the soldiers from Comanche Company’s First Platoon confronted this elaborate and deadly trap.

The platoon’s push began shortly after 4 a.m. on Saturday, as American forces continued their effort to wrest the western section of this city north of Baghdad from Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia. Tracer rounds zipped through the air as the soldiers fired antitank weapons, mortar shells and machine guns at the abandoned houses they planned to inspect across the street.

They calculated that the firepower would blow up any bombs the insurgents might have planted in the houses, while providing cover so the first squads could move south across the thoroughfare.

The use of house bombs is not a new trick, but as the soldiers were to learn, the scale was daunting. The entire neighborhood seemed to be a trap.

After darting across the road, Sgt. Gerard Mennitto, 23, checked the front door of a partly constructed house and peered through a window looking for telltale signs of enemy explosives. The house was free of explosives and the operation seemed to be going as planned.

But there were a few early indications that the bomb threat in the area might be more challenging than the Americans had expected. The street the soldiers had raced across was strewn with slender copper wires, which the insurgents used to set off buried bombs powerful enough to upend armored vehicles.

As the platoon watched from its new foothold south of the road, a Buffalo vehicle, a heavily armored truck with a V-shaped body to dissipate bomb blasts and a giant mechanical claw, began to scour the nearby roads for bombs. It found three, which were exploded by American combat engineers.

“Controlled dets,” a soldier called out, referring to a deliberate detonation of a discovered bomb. The good news was that the buried bombs had been found and neutralized. But some had been deeply buried on the road the platoon had just crossed.

The street bombs were probably little threat without a triggerman to set off the blast. The houses where the soldiers had secured their toehold seemed to have been abandoned, but soon after the platoon settled in, a small line of weary Iraqi civilians carrying a white flag emerged and slowly walked away. If some civilians had been lingering in or near the neighborhood, perhaps some insurgents were, too.

To blast a path through the next bomb-ridden stretch of road, combat engineers brought in a mine-clearing device. A bright fireball appeared over the street and a cloud of gritty dust engulfed the platoon’s house as the soldiers huddled in the back and plugged their ears.

Afterward, as Sgt. Philip Ness-Hunkin, 24, walked to the house next door, he saw copper wires leading to the home. The gate was unlocked and the front door was invitingly open.

“Right in the front door there was a pressure plate under a piece of wood,” he said, referring to a mine that is set to blow when it is stepped on. “Over in that neighborhood there were wires going all over the place.”

“H-BIED,” a soldier called out, using the military’s acronym for a house-borne improvised explosive device.

The last place the platoon wanted to be was next door to a house bomb and a series of structures that had not been cleared. If the soldiers got into a firefight and had to dart in and out of the houses along the road, they might be diving into a series of deadly booby traps, explained First Lt. Charles Morton, 25, the platoon leader.

The explosive-rigged house needed to be destroyed by an airstrike or artillery fire. So the soldiers were instructed to move back across the road they had just crossed.

Once there, the troops clambered into a two-story house. When Sergeant Mennitto got to the second floor, however, he spotted antiaircraft ammunition and a detonation cord next to two propane tanks. The platoon had escaped from one house bomb, only to encounter another.

“Everyone get out!” he yelled.

Next, the men found a nearby building American troops had recently occupied. They were safe, but the insurgents’ bombs had forced them to the starting point. The temperature soared to over 110 degrees and the soldiers had been sleeping on floors of abandoned homes, without a shower or clean clothes for days.

Three soldiers sat down on a couch facing a large rectangular, blown-out window and looked at the street as if watching a large-screen television.

The insurgent strategy appeared to be to use deep-buried bombs under the road and small-arms fire to force the soldiers to take refuge in the houses adjoining the route — and then to blow them up. Col. Steve Townsend, the commander of the Third Stryker Brigade Combat Team, Second Infantry Division, which carried out the assault on western Baquba, said the network of house bombs here was the most extensive he had seen in Iraq. He said that in the first seven days of the attack, the brigade destroyed 21 house bombs. The platoon had encountered more than its share.

The radio traffic was crackling. Capt. Isaac Torres, the commander of Comanche Company, was impatient. An airstrike was called in on the house with the propane tanks. But now it was late afternoon, and he wanted to know what the platoon’s plan was to resume the mission to clear the area south of the street.

The platoon thought it was time to pound the houses across the road with airstrikes or artillery. There were 84 days left in its 15-month tour. Apart from the fleeing family and a stray man who came bearing a white flag to beg for water, no civilians were in sight.

“I don’t know how realistic it is to ask for this, but I really think we could destroy this block, not cause any damage to the civilian populace and reduce a lot of risk to ourselves,” Lieutenant Morton said over the tactical radio. “This entire place is literally rigged.”

The final decision was to pound the houses fronting the street and to declare the rest of the homes in the section off limits until explosives experts could be brought in.

“It is too painful to deal with right now,” Colonel Townsend said. “We need some expertise to come in here and find out, is there a way to reduce those house-borne I.E.D.’s without destroying the whole block? We need real bomb-squad kind of guys to come do this for us.”

The next morning, an M1 tank arrived. The neighborhood reverberated with enormous booms as soldiers blasted the homes suspected of containing bombs with antitank missiles, artillery and tank fire. The platoon’s advance had been stymied for a day, but there were no American casualties and more bombs had been cleared out.

Lieutenant Morton, the platoon commander, sought to put the hectic, anxiety-filled day in the arc of a long war. He said, “It is one of those days when you’re not doing anything, but stuff happens.”

    For G.I.’s in Iraq, a Harrowing Day Facing a Trap, NYT, 26.6.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/26/world/middleeast/26diyala.html?hp

U.S. Plan to Capture and Kill Insurgents in Baquba Fell Far Short of Goal, Officer Says

June 26, 2007
The New York Times
By MICHAEL R. GORDON

BAQUBA, Iraq, June 25 — One week after American forces mounted their assault on insurgent strongholds in western Baquba, at least half of the estimated 300 to 500 fighters who were there have escaped or are still at large, the colonel who is leading the attack said Monday.

Col. Steve Townsend told a group of journalists that his soldiers had wrested control over most of the area from Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia, deprived the insurgent group of its nominal capital and made headway in protecting the residents from reprisals by militants.

But he acknowledged that his forces had not killed or captured as many of the insurgents as he had hoped.

“We are on our way to securing the population of Baquba, which is what we came here to do,” said the colonel, who commands the Third Stryker Brigade Combat Team of the Second Infantry Division. “I am pretty satisfied, with the exception of my own goal to kill and capture as many as possible so we don’t have to fight them somewhere else.”

The American forces had sought to trap the insurgents in the city by establishing a cordon around the western section of Baquba in the early hours of the operation.

Senior military commanders said last week that the top leaders had left the city well before they tried to seal it off, but that they hoped to kill or apprehend many of the remaining fighters. But the account from Colonel Townsend indicates that many of those fighters also eluded capture, by posing as ordinary citizens or leaving the city.

Colonel Townsend said reports from the field showed that there were more than 100 insurgent casualties; his conservative count was that 49 of them had been killed. More than 60 suspected insurgents have also been captured, he added.

“When I came here I thought there were 300 to 500 fighters in there because that is what the intelligence told me,” he said. “Does that mean that half or more eluded us? I guess it does.”

During the week of fighting, the insurgents made liberal use of their weapon of choice: concealed or buried bombs. They engaged in firefights and had roving teams armed with rocket-propelled grenades.

But the insurgents have yet to make a final stand. So far, they have resorted to a familiar tactic: tangling with the United States troops only to leave or melt into the population when faced with overwhelming American firepower.

Colonel Townsend said that the fight was not drawing to a close and that he expected the insurgents to carry out fresh attacks. “The enemy has done what I would do in his shoes,” he said. “He has largely tried to melt away after putting up initial resistance. So, yes, I expect the enemy will come back.”

In a sense, senior American military commanders in Baghdad turned out to be their own worst enemy when it came to catching the insurgents by surprise. They talked publicly about the need to mount military operations in Diyala Province, where Baquba is situated.

“The coalition was very open, very public about our intentions to come to Baquba as part of the surge,” Colonel Townsend said.

Beyond that, some insurgents appeared to have been tipped off, he said. “Then we have reason to believe that some left immediately prior to the operation,” he said. “How they got that word I don’t know.”

The ability of many of the insurgents to elude capture was reflected in the relatively small number of arms that the Americans seized. Still, Colonel Townsend said there were some important military gains.

American forces, he said, found a Qaeda courthouse where the insurgents administered their strict version of Islamic justice. They also found, he said, two bags of documents, including a list of fighters who carried out suicide attacks and a roster of insurgents. Two captured insurgents may have ties to senior Qaeda leaders, he added.

The soldiers also neutralized 48 buried and concealed bombs, six car bombs and 45 water heating tanks full of explosives. And they identified and destroyed 21 house bombs.

So far, one American has died and 18 were wounded. American commanders say there have been 11 civilians wounded due to an errant strike with a satellite guided bomb, a figure that appears low given accounts by witnesses.

The longer-term effect of the assault remains to be seen, but Colonel Townsend described an operation that disrupted the insurgents without delivering a knockout blow.

“They will go somewhere else and they will start building a new network,” he said. “I think they are more vulnerable when they are on the move.”

    U.S. Plan to Capture and Kill Insurgents in Baquba Fell Far Short of Goal, Officer Says, NYT, 26.6.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/26/world/middleeast/26baquba.html

Wounded GI Endures Blindness, Paralysis

June 24, 2007
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 7:02 p.m. ET
The New York Times

TAMPA, Fla. (AP) -- He lies flat, unseeing eyes fixed on the ceiling, tubes and machines feeding him, breathing for him, keeping him alive. He cannot walk or talk, but he can grimace and cry. And he is fully aware of what has happened to him.

Four years ago almost to this day, Joseph Briseno Jr. was shot in the back of the head at point-blank range in a Baghdad marketplace. His spinal cord was shattered, and cardiac arrests stole his vision and damaged his brain.

He is one of the most severely injured soldiers -- some think the most injured soldier -- to survive.

''Three things you would not want to be: blind, head injury, and paralyzed from the neck down. That's tough,'' said Dr. Steven Scott, head of the Polytrauma Rehabilitation Center at the Tampa VA Medical Center, where Briseno has twice been hospitalized for extensive care. In recent days, Briseno was hospitalized yet again, this time at the Washington, D.C., VA Medical Center.

As a high schooler, Briseno liked the Discovery Channel and CSI, and wanted to be a forensic scientist or investigator. He was 20 years old, attending George Mason University, when he was called up from the reserves and sent to war.

After he was shot, he was flown to Kuwait and then to a military hospital in Landstuhl, Germany. His parents and two sisters rushed to his side.

''They told us, 'Prepare for his service.' That's how bad he was,'' said his father, Joseph Briseno Sr., a retired career Army man.

But he survived. From Germany, he went to Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Bethesda, Md., then to McGuire VA Medical Center in Richmond, Va. In December 2003, he went home, to Manassas Park, Va., where his parents, Joseph Sr. and Eva, quit their jobs to care for him.

''All our savings, all our money, was just emptied ... the 401(k)s, everything,'' said Joseph Briseno, who took a new job a year and a half ago to make ends meet.

Various charities, especially Rebuilding Together, raised money to renovate their basement, supply a backup generator for the medical equipment, and install a lift so they can hoist ''Jay,'' as they call him, into a chair and bathe him in a handicapped accessible bathroom.

''If you asked me this from the very beginning, if we can handle it, I wouldn't lie to you. I would say no, that there is no way. There's no way that we're going to learn all these things. But my wife and I, we learned everything. We are the respiratory technician, we are the physical therapists, occupational therapists, speech therapists ... his wound care nurse,'' Joseph Briseno said.

''It's a lot of work and it's hard, and some days are harder than the other days. But we don't take this as a burden for us because he's our son. We will do everything for him.''

The family has help from VA-provided nurses, but not around the clock. Jay's mother and father often do overnight duty, making sure their son is turned every four hours so he does not develop bedsores, which can become infected and threaten his life. If they do not turn him and keep him on schedule, he does not sleep well and becomes agitated.

At the Tampa VA, a nurse taught Jay Briseno to swallow his saliva -- a big step that allowed him to have some pureed foods instead of just tube-feeding. He has not been able to handle any solid food, though -- his injuries are too profound.

More recently, the Tampa staff tried to wean him from the respirator. This involved painstaking therapy to strengthen his diaphragm by placing weights on his belly and gradually increasing the air pressure on the machine to try to create resistance and muscle strength. So far, it hasn't worked.

He has had other trials: surgeries, procedures and medications for bladder problems, high blood pressure, the opening for his breathing tube, dead tissue on his tongue -- even an ingrown toenail. The latest is the bone disease, osteoporosis.

He can respond to questions by grunting or grimacing, and occasionally can say ''mom'' or ''go,'' but not consistently. He often opens his mouth.

''We believe he is very frustrated because he wants to say something. Those are the hardest times for us, especially when he's sick or not feeling well. He just lays there. We don't know what's wrong with him,'' Joseph Briseno said.

They pray that he will continue to improve, not get worse. And they hope to move to Tampa, where they believe their son can get the best care.

''We always have hope. One day at a time -- that's the way we live our lives,'' the elder Briseno said. ''We're so lucky to have him. He was a very good son from the very beginning. God gave Jay to us and he's a blessing to us.''

------

On the Net:

Department of Veterans Affairs: http://www.va.gov/

Charitable group: http://www.rebuildingtogether.org/

    Wounded GI Endures Blindness, Paralysis, NYT, 25.6.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/us/AP-Coming-Home-Wounded-Worst.html

Bombing Kills Iraqi Sheiks Allied to U.S.

June 25, 2007
The New York Times
By JON ELSEN

More than 40 people died today in a wave of suicide bombings across Iraq, including an attack on a hotel in Baghdad where a group of sheiks opposed to Al Qaeda was holding a tribal conference.

The bombing at the Mansour Hotel, which is also headquarters to several news organizations, killed 12 people and wounded 18. Members of Anbar Awakening, a group of Sunni tribal leaders and former insurgents opposed to Al Qaeda, were meeting at the hotel at the time of the explosion. The group has joined forces with police units backed by the United States to fight Al Qaeda, prompting a power struggle in the region.

“According to initial reports, six sheiks are among the dead,” Lt. Col. Scott Bleichwehl, an American military spokesman in Baghdad, told Reuters. Also among the dead were Rahim al-Maliki, a noted Iraqi poet, as well as a ministry of defense consultant.

Despite heavy security at the hotel, the suicide bomber, wearing traditional Arab dress, was able to enter the lobby and blow himself up there. Bodies of the dead and wounded were scattered across the lobby, which was strewn with broken glass.

In Baiji, north of Tikrit, 20 people died, including 11 police officers, and 50 more were wounded when a fuel tanker was detonated at a police station, the police said. Buildings and shops nearby collapsed or burned, and 30 cars were damaged. Five American soldiers who shared the post with the Iraqi police had minor wounds, The Associated Press reported, citing the American command.

In the southern, mainly Shiite city of Hilla, a car bomber struck near the police academy’s main gate, killing eight people and wounding 25, an official from the health office in Hilla said. Most of the victims were police academy students scheduled to graduate next week.

A traffic officer who witnessed the attack said “we found many dead bodies and human remains, and we also saw a man and a woman were killed by shrapnel inside a red car that was near the explosion.”

In Mosul, north of Baiji, a car bomb in a residential area killed three and wounded 40, Reuters reported.

Coalition forces announced that during a raid in Mosul today they killed a terrorist leader, Khalid Sultan Khulayf Shakir al-Badrani, also known as Abu Abdullah. He was described as the Al Qaeda in Iraq emir of western Mosul.

Employees of The New York Times contributed reporting from Baghdad, Hilla and Saladin.

    Bombing Kills Iraqi Sheiks Allied to U.S., NYT, 25.6.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/25/world/middleeast/25cnd-Iraq.html?hp

Sentences in Iraq's Anfal Trial

June 24, 2007
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 12:29 p.m. ET
The New York Times

Specific sentences and charges against the six former Saddam Hussein regime officials in the so-called Anfal trial in Iraq, according to the International Center for Transitional Justice:

-- Ali Hassan al-Majid, Saddam Hussein's cousin, also known as ''Chemical Ali.'' Five death sentences for genocide, willful killing, forced disappearances and extermination as crimes against humanity, and intentionally directing attacks against a civilian population as a war crime. Multiple prison terms ranging from seven years to life for other inhumane acts.

-- Sabir al-Douri, director of military intelligence. Three terms of life imprisonment for genocide, willful killing as a crime against humanity, and intentionally directing attacks against the civilian population as a war crime. Ten years imprisonment for the destruction or seizing of the property of an adversary as a war crime.

-- Sultan Hashim Ahmad al-Tai, the defense minister during the fall of Saddam's regime in 2003. Four death sentences for genocide, willful killing and extermination as crimes against humanity, and intentionally directing attacks against civilians as a war crime. Two terms of life imprisonment for forced disappearances and other inhumane acts as crimes against humanity, as well as four other prison terms for deportation as a crime against humanity and three counts of war crimes.

-- Hussein Rashid Mohammed, former deputy director of operations for the Iraqi Armed Forces. Sentenced to death for genocide, willful killing as a crime against humanity, and intentional attacks against the civilian population as a war crime. A term of seven years imprisonment for attacks against buildings dedicated to religious purposes.

-- Farhan Mutlaq Saleh, former head of military intelligence's eastern regional office. Sentenced to life imprisonment for genocide, and to life imprisonment and 10 years imprisonment for willful killing and deportation or forcible transfer as crimes against humanity.

-- Taher Tawfiq al-Ani, former governor of Mosul and head of the Northern Affairs Committee. Charges were dropped for lack of evidence, as requested by the prosecution.

    Sentences in Iraq's Anfal Trial, NYT, 24.6.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/world/AP-Iraq-Anfal-Trial-Sentences.html

Hussein Cousin Is Sentenced to Hang for Campaign Against Kurds

June 24, 2007
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 6:56 a.m. ET
The New York Times

BAGHDAD (AP) -- Two decades after Iraq's military laid waste to Kurdish villages, the Iraqi High Tribunal on Sunday sentenced Ali Hassan al-Majid, known as ''Chemical Ali,'' and two others to death for their roles in the bloody campaign against the restive ethnic minority.

Al-Majid, a cousin of executed former president Saddam Hussein, was convicted of genocide, crimes against humanity and war crimes for ordering army and security services to use chemical weapons in an offensive said to have killed some 180,000 people during the 1980-88 Iran-Iraq war.

As the verdicts were read out in Baghdad, to the north some 10,000 American troops were in their sixth day Sunday of a major offensive to oust al-Qaida fighters from the city of Baqouba.

The commander of the U.S. operation said U.S. troops have cleared about 60 percent of western Baqouba of militants, but Iraqi security forces are ''not quite up to the job'' yet of holding the gains long term.

Brig. Gen. Mick Bednarek, of the Army's 25th Infantry Division, said it will take weeks or months before Iraqi security forces are ready to police the reclaimed area on their own.

The defendants in what was known as the ''Anfal'' case, for the code name of the anti-Kurdish campaign, had claimed they were acting on orders at a time when the Baghdad leadership, under President Saddam, viewed the rebellious, independence-minded Kurds as allies of Iran during the 1980s war.

Saddam had been a defendant in the case but was executed Dec. 30 after his conviction for the killing of 148 Shiite Muslims in Dujail after a 1982 attempt on his life.

Al-Majid, who had headed the then-ruling Baath Party's Northern Bureau Command in the 1980s, stood silently for Sunday's verdict and said, ''Thanks be to God,'' as he was led from court.

Two others sentenced to hang for anti-Kurdish atrocities were former defense minister Sultan Hashim Ahmad al-Tai and Hussein Rashid Mohammed, a former deputy director of operations for the Iraqi armed forces.

Interrupting the judge as the verdict was read, Mohammed said the defendants were defending Iraq against Kurdish rebels. ''God bless our martyrs. Long live the brave Iraqi army. Long live Iraq. Long live the Baath party and long live Arab nations,'' he declared.

Two other former regime officials -- Sabir al-Douri, former director of military intelligence, and Farhan Mutlaq Saleh, who was head of military intelligence's eastern regional office -- were sentenced to life in prison. All charges were dropped against Taher Tawfiq al-Ani, a former governor of Mosul, because of insufficient evidence.

The operation in Baqouba, 35 miles northeast of Baghdad, is part of a quartet of U.S. offensives to oust al-Qaida groups from the capital's outskirts.

Bednarek said U.S. forces now control about 60 percent of Baqouba's west side, but ''the challenge now is how do you hold onto the terrain you've cleared? You have to do that shoulder-to-shoulder with Iraqi security forces. And they're not quite up to the job yet.''

Across Diyala province, where Baqouba is the capital, Iraqi troops are short on uniforms, weapons, ammunition, trucks and radios, he said.

The American general predicted it would be several weeks before Iraqi police and soldiers could keep al-Qaida out of western Baqouba, and months before they could do the same on the city's east side and outlying villages.

Bednarek said the U.S. force has killed between 60 and 100 suspected al-Qaida fighters so far in western Baqouba, about 60 insurgents have been detained, and fewer than 500 civilians displaced from their homes. One American soldier has died in the fighting, he said.

He estimated between 50 and 100 insurgents remained inside a U.S. security ''noose'' closing on the Khatoon neighborhood of western Baqouba.

The U.S. command in Baghdad, meanwhile, reported a total of 10 soldiers killed on Saturday, including seven killed by roadside bombs, four by a single blast near Baghdad. The deaths raised to at least 30 the number of American soldiers killed in the past week.

In other violence, a car bomb in the southern city of Hillah on Saturday evening killed at least two people and wounded 18 others, a hospital official reported.

The parked car targeted a gathering of civilians in central Hillah, 60 miles south of Baghdad, said Muthana Khalid, a spokesman for Babil provincial police. The predominantly Shiite Muslim city has been the target of some of the deadliest car bomb attacks by suspected Sunni Muslim extremists in the four years of insurgency and sectarian killings in Iraq.

On the political front, two Sunni blocs in the Iraqi parliament, holding 55 seats, began a boycott of the 275-seat house on Sunday, demanding reinstatement of the Sunni speaker, Mahmoud al-Mashhadani.

Parliament had voted June 11 to ask al-Mashhadani, whose erratic behavior had embarrassed even his Sunni Arab allies, to step down while one of the Sunni blocs named a replacement.

The Sunni boycott threatens to further disrupt the work of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki's Shiite-dominated government as it seeks to enact legislation, under pressure from the United States, to reconcile the differences among Iraq's Shiite, Sunni and Kurdish groups.

    Hussein Cousin Is Sentenced to Hang for Campaign Against Kurds, NYT, 24.6.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/world/AP-Iraq.html?hp

Militants Said to Flee Before U.S. Offensive

June 23, 2007
The New York Times
By JOHN F. BURNS

BAGHDAD, June 22 — The operational commander of troops battling to drive fighters with Al Qaeda from Baquba said Friday that 80 percent of the top Qaeda leaders in the city fled before the American-led offensive began earlier this week. He compared their flight with the escape of Qaeda leaders from Falluja ahead of an American offensive that recaptured that city in 2004.

In an otherwise upbeat assessment, Lt. Gen. Raymond T. Odierno, the second-ranking American commander in Iraq, told reporters that leaders of Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia had been alerted to the Baquba offensive by widespread public discussion of the American plan to clear the city before the attack began. He portrayed the Qaeda leaders’ escape as cowardice, saying that “when the fight comes, they leave,” abandoning “midlevel” Qaeda leaders and fighters to face the might of American troops — just, he said, as they did in Falluja.

Some American officers in Baquba have placed blame for the Qaeda leaders’ flight on public remarks about the offensive in the days before it began by top American commanders, including Gen. David H. Petraeus, the overall commander in Iraq. But General Odierno cast the issue in broader terms, saying Qaeda leaders were bound to know an attack was coming in light of President Bush’s decision to pour nearly 30,000 additional troops into the fight in a bid to secure Baghdad and areas around the capital that have been insurgent strongholds. That included Baquba, which lies 40 miles north.

“Frankly, I think they knew an operation was coming in Baquba,” General Odierno said in a teleconference briefing with Pentagon reporters from the American military headquarters in Baghdad. “They watched the news. They understood we had a surge. They understood Baquba was designated as a problem area. So they knew we were going to come sooner or later.”

Still, he implied American commanders may have played a part by flagging the offensive in advance. “I think they were tipped off by us talking about the surge, the fact that we have a problem in Diyala Province,” he said.

In his news conference, General Odierno offered the broadest assessment yet of the multipronged American offensive around Baghdad that got under way this week, using the additional troops sent to Iraq as part of Mr. Bush’s troop buildup. Despite the flight of the Qaeda leaders from Baquba — a pattern that appears to have been replicated in other areas included in the new offensive, including Qaeda strongholds along the Tigris River south of Baghdad — he adopted an upbeat tone, saying the offensive held “a good potential” for reducing the Qaeda threat to the point that American force levels in Iraq could be reduced by next spring.

First, he said, American and Iraqi troops would need to sustain their crackdown long enough for Iraqi forces to move into neighborhoods cleared of Qaeda fighters and hold them. This is a pattern American commanders have tried unsuccessfully before, as in a failed attempt to secure wide areas of Baghdad last summer. But General Odierno said Iraqi forces were “getting better,” “staying and fighting,” “taking casualties” and adding an additional 7,500 soldiers to their overall strength every five weeks.

“If you ask me today, I think by the spring, or earlier, they will be able to take on a larger portion of their security, which means I think potentially we could have a decision to reduce our forces,” he said. But he quickly tempered his optimism, aware that top generals here have made repeated forecasts of a turnarounds in the war, only for the situation to get progressively worse. “You know, there’s so many things that could be happening between now and then, as we’ve all learned,” he said.

The forecast of a possible troop reduction by the spring of 2008 had strong political echoes, coinciding as it did with the date for beginning an American troop withdrawal that has been favored by some leading Democrats in Congress. It also coincides with the April 2008 date that American commanders in Iraq have said they have been given by the Army and Marine Corps leadership in Washington as the last point at which the current American force level of about 156,000 — augmented by the additional five Army brigades and Marine units deployed as part of the so-called surge — can be sustained, given staffing constraints.

Addressing the problems facing American troops in Baquba, General Odierno played down the significance of the Qaeda leaders fleeing ahead of the offensive, saying American forces would hunt them down. “I guarantee you, we’re going to track down those leaders,” he said. “And we’re in the process of doing that. We know who they are, and we’re coming after them, and we’re going to work that extremely hard.”

Before the Baquba operation, American commanders had said that one difference from previous offensives that had failed to net top Qaeda leaders would be the use of “blocking maneuvers” around the city to close off escape routes.

Although that appears to have failed, American commanders in Baquba said Friday that several hundred Qaeda fighters — about 80 percent of the recruits who were there when the offensive began Tuesday — remained in the western half of the city, and that there would be tough fighting to root them out for units of the 10,000-person force of American and Iraqi troops committed to the battle.

The force is one of the largest assembled for any operation outside Baghdad since the recapture of Falluja, and closely resembles, in its aims, the Falluja offensive of November 2004.

American hopes that the Falluja offensive would deal a mortal blow to Al Qaeda were thwarted when the leaders who fled the city moved elsewhere, and resumed the Islamic militants’ trademark pattern of suicide bombings and assassinations at a higher intensity than before. Since Falluja, Qaeda groups have shown a remarkable resilience in the face of relentless pursuit by the American forces, regrouping time and again after American offensives. Even Falluja has not escaped. American commanders said this week that, more than 30 months after the city was recaptured, Qaeda groups have reinfiltrated the city, mounting suicide bombing attacks, assassinating police and city council leaders and forcing a fresh American and Iraqi offensive this month that has been aimed at capturing or killing the Qaeda fighters.

After more than three years of saying publicly that they had all the troops they needed for the war here, American commanders have begun acknowledging in the past year that the ability of the Qaeda groups to establish new strongholds after old ones are destroyed — and to regenerate their leadership — has owed much to the fact that American manpower has been severely stretched.

But with all the additional Army brigades ordered into the war by Mr. Bush now in the field, along with additional Marine units, the commanders here now have more firepower than they have had at any time since the American invasion in 2003. With that, the American generals face what they have acknowledged to be the best, and possibly last, chance to persuade critics in Congress and a disillusioned American public that persisting in Iraq is worthwhile.

General Odierno, at his news conference, sketched the sweep of the new offensive. He said the main thrust was aimed at Qaeda strongholds in Diyala Province, with its capital at Baquba; at the Arab Jabour area south of Baghdad, where Qaeda groups have sent wave after wave of car and truck bomb attacks into the capital; in scattered training areas and safe havens west and northwest of the capital; and in Baghdad itself, where major American operations have begun in the past weeks in the districts of Adhamiya, Rashid and Mansour.

“So far, within Baquba,” General Odierno said, “there have been many successes: four weapons caches have been found and cleared; three truck and car bombs have been captured and destroyed; over 25 deep-buried I.E.D.’s have been found and cleared, many of them pointed out by the local populace; and 10 house-bound I.E.D.’s have been destroyed — those are 10 houses that have been rigged with thousands of pounds of explosives to try and kill us as we enter.” I.E.D., or improvised explosive device, is military jargon for a homemade bomb.

Michael R. Gordon contributed reporting from Baquba, Alissa J. Rubin from Baghdad and Richard A. Oppel Jr. from Arab Jabour.

    Militants Said to Flee Before U.S. Offensive, NYT, 23.6.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/23/world/middleeast/23iraq.html?hp

Lowering Flag for War’s Dead Brings a New Rift

June 23, 2007
The New York Times
By IAN URBINA

IRON MOUNTAIN, Mich., June 19 — The Stars and Stripes in front of the Veterans of Foreign Wars lodge here flies at half-staff because Gov. Jennifer M. Granholm issued a statewide order to lower the flag for 24 hours to honor a Michigan soldier killed in Iraq.

Just blocks away, however, at the veterans’ hospital run by federal officials who say they do not answer to the governor the flag flutters at full staff.

A revered and emotionally fraught symbol, the flag is no stranger to differing opinions about its proper handling. Soldiers have laid down their lives for it, protesters have burned it and lawmakers have considered altering the Constitution to protect it.

But in Michigan, the differing response to Ms. Granholm’s order is part of a broader and, perhaps, more universal wrangle over how to commemorate tragedy when there is so much of it and whether lowering the flag each time a soldier is killed cheapens the tribute by doing it too often.

Since the start of the Iraq war, more than half the states have decided to lower their flags for 24 hours or more when a local soldier dies in combat.

Opponents of lowering the flag see it as a subtle antiwar gesture that may run counter to federal guidelines, which reserve the action for “officials,” not soldiers.

Others say that governors have the authority to order such tributes and that fallen soldiers are at least as deserving as politicians.

“In the past, soldiers have not been treated well, even though they are giving their lives, so any sign like this of respect is appreciated,” said Patricia Walker, legislative chairwoman of the 6,000-member Society of Military Widows. “For military wives, the American flag is part of our family, and showing respect for it and us is deeply important.”

Last week, federal lawmakers passed a measure that would give governors the authority to order all officials in their states, including federal authorities, to lower the flag. President Bush has until next week to sign or veto the measure.

Although Congressional staff members involved with the measure say Mr. Bush may want to sign it for patriotic reasons, he may also be reluctant to appear to be ceding power over federal officials to the states.

Under the bill, Mayor Adrian M. Fenty of Washington, a Democrat, would have the same authority as governors, meaning that he could instruct the White House and other federal buildings in the capital to lower the flag.

In states where flags are lowered, the extent of the governors’ orders varies.

Each time a soldier from California is killed, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, a Republican, orders American and state flags lowered at the Capitol. In Wisconsin, Gov. James E. Doyle, a Democrat, lowers the flag at all state buildings in such cases. Virginia and New Mexico, both with Democratic governors, lower just state flags.

In Michigan, Ms. Granholm has ordered the lowering of all flags at all state buildings, and urged the same for rest of the state, each time a soldier from the state was killed, or 127 times since December 2003, when she began the practice.

“It is not a statement about the war, but it is a statement about service and about soldiers who have made the ultimate sacrifice,” she said.

Signed into law in 1942, the United States Flag Code offers nonmandatory flag etiquette guidelines.

Joyce Doody, executive director of the National Flag Foundation in Pittsburgh, said governors had the authority to order flags flown at half-staff, though her organization suggests lowering state, not American flags, for fallen soldiers.

In times of conflict, the flag should remain at full staff except when a significant numbers of lives are lost, Ms. Doody said. “Of course, one is a significant number lost for the family of the fallen soldier,” she added.

In 2004, Paul Vogel of Barrington, Ill., a member of Military Families Speak Out, an antiwar group, helped persuade Gov. Rod R. Blagojevich of Illinois, a Democrat, to lower flags at state buildings for soldiers from the state killed in combat. Last week, state lawmakers passed a law requiring the governor to lower the American and state flags at all state and local buildings.

“The half-staff tribute is a way to honor the warrior, not the war,” said Mr. Vogel, whose son served in Iraq for a year in 2004.

Other critics of the war take a different view.

“I think there is a lot of cheap patriotism, and that includes coming from the president,” said Gov. Ted Strickland of Ohio, a Democrat who opposes the war but does not lower flags for killed Ohio soldiers. “I think putting the flag at half-staff is a strong symbolic thing to do. But quite frankly, it’s a fairly easy thing to do. It doesn’t require anything of us either as political leaders or as citizens.”

Asked whether lowering the flag might be interpreted as antiwar, a spokesman for Mr. Schwarzenegger, Aaron Mclear, said, “There is no politics involved when it comes to honoring the bravery of California’s fallen soldiers.”

Representative Bart Stupak, a Michigan Democrat who sponsored the measure passed last week, said, “No matter what you think of the war, it really hurts military families when there is a lack of consistency in the show of respect.”

He said that when the funeral procession for Specialist Joseph P. Micks, after whom the bill was named, passed through the three neighboring towns where he had lived, grown up and worked, some flags at post offices and other federal buildings were up and that others were at half-staff.

“The family said it really hurt and confused them why that was the case,” Mr. Stupak said.

Behind the counter at the post office in Crystal Falls, Gary Burk said the flag in front was not lowered despite the governor’s order because the decision lay with the postal director of each district.

“When we lower it now, people notice it and ask why,” Mr. Burk said. “If you lower every time a soldier dies, it will be down so often that people will only notice and ask when it’s up.”

Alain Delaquérière contributed reporting.

    Lowering Flag for War’s Dead Brings a New Rift, NYT, 23.6.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/23/us/23flag.html?hp

U.S. Airstrikes in Iraq Kill 17 Fighters

June 22, 2007
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 12:33 p.m. ET
The New York Times

BAQOUBA, Iraq (AP) -- American attack helicopters fired on al-Qaida militants trying to slip past an Iraqi checkpoint on Friday, killing 17 of them in the fourth day of an offensive to oust the fighters entrenched in this city an hour's drive north of Baghdad.

More than three-quarters of the city's al-Qaida leadership fled before the Americans moved in to Baqouba this week, U.S. officials said Friday, but not before drone planes spotted fighters planting dozens of roadside bombs on the main highway into the city, capital of volatile and extremely dangerous Diyala province.

Brig. Gen. Mick Bednarek, assistant commander for operations with the 25th Infantry Division, estimated that several hundred low-level al-Qaida fighters remain.

''They're clearly in hiding, no question about it. But they're a hardline group of fighters who have no intention of leaving, and they want to kill as many coalition and Iraqi security forces as they possibly can,'' Bednarek told The Associated Press and another news agency on Friday.

Lt. Gen. Raymond Odierno, the top day-to-day commander of U.S. forces in Iraq, said the U.S. may be able to reduce combat forces in Iraq by next spring, if Iraq's own security forces continue to grow and improve.

Odierno did not predict any U.S. reductions but said it may be feasible by spring. There are currently 156,000 U.S. troops in Iraq.

''I think if everything goes the way it's going now, there's a potential that by the spring we will be able to reduce forces, and Iraq security forces could take over,'' Odierno said. ''It could happen sooner than that. I don't know.''

Speaking to reporters at the Pentagon from his headquarters outside Baghdad, Odierno gave an update on the series of U.S. offensives that are under way in Diyala and in areas south and west of the capital. He said U.S. and Iraqi troops have made important progress.

On Thursday, operation battalion commanders met at a bombed-out hospital here to plot their next moves.

Soldiers spread maps across rubble and pulled up charred concrete blocks as stools inside the crumbling building. Controlled explosions of roadside bombs boomed in the distance. Soldiers laden down by body armor mopped sweat from their faces.

''It's 24-7 for us here, and it's probably the same for our adversary as well,'' Bednarek said. ''It's house-to-house, block to block, street to street, sewer to sewer -- and it's also cars, vans -- we're searching every one of them.''

The al-Qaida leaders abandoned a field hospital, complete with oxygen tanks, heart defibrillators and other sophisticated medical equipment, said Col. Steve Townsend, commander of the 3rd Brigade, 2nd Infantry Division. They also left behind at least seven homes booby-trapped with trip wires, said Townsend, 47, from Griffin, Ga.

U.S. attack helicopters firing missiles killed the 17 al-Qaida fighters Friday as the militants tried to bypass Iraqi police and infiltrate a Shiite enclave northwest of Baqouba, the military said in a statement.

More than three-quarters of the senior al-Qaida leaders holed up escaped as the offensive began Monday, Odierno said Thursday during a one-day trip to the battlefield.

''We believe 80 percent of the upper level (al-Qaida) leaders fled, but we'll find them,'' Odierno said after meeting with battalion commanders in the bombed-out hospital. ''Eighty percent of the lower level leaders are still here.''

Days before the offensive, unmanned U.S. drones recorded video of insurgents digging trenches with back-hoes, said Maj. Robbie Parke, spokesman for the 3rd Brigade, 2nd Infantry Division that is doing most of the fighting in western Baqouba.

About 30 roadside bombs -- known as improvised explosive devices or IEDs -- were planted on Route Coyote, the U.S. code name for a main Baqouba thoroughfare, said Parke, 36, from Rapid City, S.D. ''So they knew we were coming.''

Odierno, who was in charge of Baqouba as head of the 4th Infantry Division in 2003 and 2004, said he was shocked at how entrenched al-Qaida had become.

''This is not the Baqouba I knew, and we can't let this happen again,'' he said. Militant activity spiked in Baqouba in the summer of 2006, Odierno said. A U.S. airstrike killed al-Qaida in Iraq leader Abu Musab al-Zarqawi near Baqouba in June 2006, but by then the city was already a major base for his terror network.

Since last fall, the U.S. has kept a single brigade -- 3rd Brigade, 1st Cavalry Division -- in charge of all of Diyala province. It was enough to conduct sporadic attacks on al-Qaida, but not enough to hold the entire province, Odierno said.

He encouraged battalion commanders to come up with a plan to prevent al-Qaida's return, after the major fighting is over. ''It's down the road, but it's what you should be thinking about right now,'' warning ''the heavy fighting still might be ahead of you.''

By the time American units moved in to block the militants' escape, many were already gone, Odierno said.

''It's like jelly in a sandwich -- it squirts when you squeeze it,'' Parke said. ''We're fooling ourselves if we think we can hold them in.''

Separately, the U.S. military reported another American soldier killed, raising to at least 16 the U.S. death toll over the past three days.

In Fallujah, a suicide attacker wearing an explosives vest struck a police patrol, killing two officers.

AP writer Pauline Jelinek in Washington contributed to this report.

    U.S. Airstrikes in Iraq Kill 17 Fighters, NYT, 22.6.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/world/AP-Iraq.html

US May Reduce Forces in Iraq by Spring

June 22, 2007
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 12:30 p.m. ET
The New York Times

WASHINGTON (AP) -- The U.S. may be able to reduce combat forces in Iraq by next spring, if Iraq's own security forces continue to grow and improve, a senior American commander said Friday.

Lt. Gen. Raymond Odierno, the top day-to-day commander of U.S. forces in Iraq, did not predict any U.S. reductions but said it may be feasible by spring. There are currently 156,000 U.S. troops in Iraq.

Speaking to reporters at the Pentagon from his headquarters outside Baghdad, Odierno gave an update on the series of U.S. offensives that are underway in Diyala province northeast of Baghdad and in areas south and west of the capital. He said U.S. and Iraqi troops have made important progress.

''I think if everything goes the way it's going now, there's a potential that by the spring we will be able to reduce forces, and Iraq security forces could take over,'' he said. ''It could happen sooner than that. I don't know.''

He also cautioned that, because the insurgents in Iraq have proven so resilient and adaptive, making any prediction is risky.

''There's so many things that could happen between now and then,'' he said, referring to next spring.

He also said it's too early to say how long the recent addition of almost 30,000 U.S. troops should be maintained. The overall U.S. commander in Iraq, Gen. David Petraeus, is due to report to Washington in September on what the troop buildup is accomplishing, and he has said he intends also to recommend a way forward.

    US May Reduce Forces in Iraq by Spring, NYT, 22.6.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/us/AP-US-Iraq.html

In Sweep of Iraqi Town, Sectarian Fears Percolate

June 22, 2007
The New York Times
By MICHAEL R. GORDON

BAQUBA, Iraq, June 21 — After two days of clawing their way toward insurgent strongholds in western Baquba, American troops on Thursday began one of the most delicate phases of the operation: reintroducing the city’s residents to their own army.

For the first time since the assault began, Iraqi soldiers joined the operation in significant numbers. What made the task especially complex was that many of the Sunni residents had little trust for the Shiite-dominated army, a message that became clear during Company A’s sweep through the northwestern part of the city.

The Sunnis have bad recent experiences with the Iraqi Army. The commander of Iraq’s Fifth Division, a Shiite, was replaced by the government this year after American officers accused him of pursuing an overtly sectarian agenda by arresting and harassing Sunnis.

In the face of American pressure, the government rearranged its military command here in Diyala Province. But some residents still have unhappy memories of Iraqi soldiers, who they say ransacked their homes when conducting searches and were generally abusive. Feelings are raw.

Many residents say they feel as if they have been caught between fighters from Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia, Shiite militias and an Iraqi security force that they believe looks at them as little more than insurgents’ allies.

“They used bad words against people,” said a young man in the Mufrek neighborhood, referring to the Iraqi Army.

Still, the Iraqis’ role is essential. The nearly 500 Iraqi soldiers who hit the streets on Thursday represent a fraction of the 2,500 American soldiers who are involved in the Baquba operation, but they nonetheless add to a force that is scouring homes and streets for insurgents, arms caches and the seemingly ever-present buried bombs.

More important, the Iraqi forces represent a critical element of the long-term strategy to maintain control of the city. When the Americans eventually pull back from Baquba, there needs to be some kind of Iraqi force in place to prevent the insurgents from filtering back. The Americans have dominated the assault, but it is the Iraqi security forces that must consolidate the gains.

That mission has proved to be a daunting one for the Iraqis in Baghdad, where the policy of “clear, hold, build” has faltered in the past.

Capt. Kevin A. Salge, the commander of Company A for the First Battalion, 22nd Infantry Regiment, led his soldiers on Thursday on a sweep for insurgent fighters in the northwest section of the city. The Iraqi company that joined the operation essentially doubled the number of troops involved.

They also compensated somewhat for the shortage of interpreters that emerged when half of Company A’s translators declined to venture north from Baghdad for this operation.

Mindful of the strained relationship between the residents and the security forces, the American military seeded the Iraqi soldiers in their own units instead of giving them their own sector to clear. The thought was that this would alleviate some of the residents’ concerns and also enable the Americans to exert more control over the Iraqi soldiers.

“The large Sunni areas distrust the I.A. because of the number of Shias that are in the army,” said Sgt. First Class Eric Beck, using the abbreviation for the Iraqi Army. He added that there was a risk that the Iraqi troops would be too harsh on residents if they were not supervised by the Americans.

“We are hanging out and walking them through these areas,” Sergeant Beck said. “Some of these I.A. guys believe what they hear. So when they come in here and see the people that live here, it might change their mind about the area that they are going into. We are bonding the population of this area with the I.A. and giving them a chance to actually see them and gain trust in them.”

The efforts to bridge the divide were somewhat tentative. As Thursday morning began, the soldiers raced across a rocky field under a cloud of smoke that the Americans had generated to protect themselves against the threat of snipers (“precision shooters,” in the vernacular).

After reaching the homes on the other side, the soldiers banged on a door. The startled residents let the soldiers in. Captain Salge and his interpreter pulled the owner, a 50-year-old Iraqi who had left Baghdad to escape the sectarian fighting, into a small room so they could question him alone, apart from the Iraqi soldiers who milled through the rest of the house.

The questioning soon turned into a debate on the Americans’ conduct in Iraq. The Iraqi claimed that American troops had shot a man the previous evening for no good reason. Captain Salge insisted that the man had been seen pouring gasoline on the road. Insurgents commonly set the road on fire so they can soften up the pavement and bury bombs.

As the session came to an end, it was clear that the Iraqi had no sympathy for fighters from Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia, who he said had intimidated the city’s residents and sought to force them to adhere to a strict Islamic code. Nor did he have a high opinion of Iraq’s security forces, whom he viewed as allies of renegade Shiite militias.

“Most of the people living in this neighborhood trust the Americans more than the Iraqi Army,” he said.

    In Sweep of Iraqi Town, Sectarian Fears Percolate, NYT, 22.6.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/22/world/middleeast/22baquba.html?hp

U.S. Military Says 14 U.S. Troops Killed

June 21, 2007
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 9:13 a.m. ET
The New York Times

BAGHDAD (AP) -- The U.S. military announced the deaths of 14 American troops, including five killed Thursday in a single roadside bombing that also killed four Iraqis in Baghdad.

Elsewhere in Iraq, a suicide truck bomber struck the Sulaiman Bek city hall in a predominantly Sunni area in northern Iraq, killing at least 13 people and wounding 70, an Iraqi commander said.

The U.S. deaths raised to at least 3,545 the number of U.S. troops who have died since the war began in 2003, according to an Associated Press count.

The deadliest attack was a roadside bomb that struck a convoy in northeastern Baghdad on Thursday, killing five U.S. soldiers, three Iraqi civilians and one Iraqi interpreter, the military said.

A rocket-propelled grenade struck a vehicle in northern Baghdad about 12:30 p.m. Thursday, killing one soldier and wounding three others, another statement said.

Four other U.S. soldiers were killed and one was wounded Wednesday when their convoy was struck by a roadside bomb in a western neighborhood in the capital, the military said separately.

Southwest of Baghdad, two U.S. soldiers were killed and four were wounded Wednesday when explosions struck near their vehicle, according to a statement earlier in the day.

Two Marines also were killed Wednesday while conducting combat operations in Anbar province, west of Baghdad, the military said.

    U.S. Military Says 14 U.S. Troops Killed, NYT, 21.6.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/world/AP-Iraq.html

Heavy Fighting as U.S. Troops Squeeze Insurgents in Iraq City

June 21, 2007
The New York Times
By MICHAEL GORDON and ALISSA J. RUBIN

BAQUBA, Iraq, June 20 — Fighting was heavy in parts of Baquba on Wednesday as American troops continued to squeeze a large section of the city in an effort to rid it of insurgents believed to be part of Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia.

Soldiers moved block by block through the city, the capital of Diyala Province, clearing houses and removing roadside bombs. As they pressed in, American troops discovered a medical aid station for insurgents — another sign that the Qaeda fighters had prepared for an intense fight. The hospital, uncovered by troops from the Fifth Battalion, 20th Infantry, was equipped with oxygen tanks, defibrillators, generators and surgical equipment, as well as pieces of insurgent propaganda.

The American effort got off to a slow start in the morning when blowing sand precluded reconnaissance and medevac flights. But as the weather cleared, the soldiers advanced into the western section of the city. Soldiers said they had received useful tips from some residents on the location of buried bombs and booby-trapped houses. In the Mufrek neighborhood, several residents said they had been terrorized for months by Qaeda fighters, who commandeered houses to use as positions to shoot at American forces.

The insurgents have imposed a strict Islamic creed, and some have even banned smoking, one resident told Capt. Jeff Noll, the commander of Company B of the First Battalion, 23rd Infantry, during his patrol through the neighborhood.

While the soldiers searched the houses, loud explosions rumbled through the city. Americans were using satellite-guided bombs and rockets where underground bombs were believed to have been buried. The American troops have found 25 improvised explosive devices and have destroyed five homes that were rigged with explosives, the military said in a statement.

Not all the buried bombs were found in time. At least three have exploded, in one case overturning a Bradley Fighting Vehicle and in another damaging a heavily armored Buffalo mine-clearing vehicle. One American soldier has been killed and 12 wounded in those attacks.

In a statement, the American military said it had killed 41 Qaeda operatives. Some wounded insurgents were reported to have escaped when they were taken into a nearby home by a group of woman and children, and American troops held their fire.

The Americans said they had not found any indication that insurgent fighters had fled Baquba.

Elsewhere in Diyala Province, attacks continued on checkpoints and civilians. At least six civilians were killed, two of them by fire from allied troops, according to an Interior Ministry official in the province. Three soldiers also died when militants attacked their checkpoint, and the checkpoint building was mostly destroyed by a bomb.

In the northern city of Mosul, eight Christian students and their professor were kidnapped by armed men who surrounded the minibus they were riding in.

In Baghdad, the toll from Tuesday’s bombing at a busy square rose to 87 as more bodies were recovered and some of the wounded died.

South of Baghdad, in Shiite-dominated areas, violence appeared to be on the rise. In Hilla, three Sunni Arab mosques were bombed.

Nasiriya, the capital of Dhi Qar Province, about 225 miles south of Baghdad, was mostly quiet on Wednesday after American forces intervened in recent days in a battle between the police and Mahdi Army militiamen loyal to the cleric Moktada al-Sadr, according to a statement from the American military and from the Sadr office in Nasiriya.

Several Nasiriya police officers were badly wounded in fighting on Monday and Tuesday, and Iraqi Army forces tried to rescue them. The soldiers came under heavy fire from the Sadr militiamen, who were positioned on rooftops, the American military said. Iraqi soldiers were unable to drive off the gunmen.

Later, the American troops called in an airstrike against the militiamen, according to the American military’s statement. A spokesman for Mr. Sadr in Nasiriya, Hussein al-Araji, said that by the time the American strike came, the militiamen were trying to retreat after receiving orders from Mr. Sadr.

Over the past three days, three Sadr gunmen were killed and 45 wounded, according to an American military statement. The Americans said Iraqi security forces had taken 30 casualties, but it was not clear whether any of those were deaths.

The American military in Baghdad announced that it had rescued 24 severely malnourished and maltreated orphan boys, some of whom appeared to be mentally disabled. The soldiers discovered the orphanage on June 10; the discovery was first reported by CBS News on Monday. The children, ranging in age from 3 to 15, were found naked and emaciated in a darkened room, some of them in pools of their own excrement. Some were tied to their beds.

The Iraqi Army and the local neighborhood council helped rescue the children, and American medics gave them initial care.

Michael Gordon reported from Baquba, and Alissa J. Rubin from Baghdad. Iraqi employees of The New York Times contributed reporting from Diyala, Hilla, Mosul, Kut and Diwaniya.

    Heavy Fighting as U.S. Troops Squeeze Insurgents in Iraq City, NYT, 21.6.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/21/world/middleeast/21iraq.html

Shiite Rivalries Slash at a Once Calm Iraqi City

June 21, 2007
The New York Times
By ALISSA J. RUBIN

DIWANIYA, Iraq — The Shiite heartland of southern Iraq has generally been an oasis of calm in contrast to Baghdad and the central part of the country, but now violence is convulsing this city. Shiites are killing and kidnapping other Shiites, the police force is made up of competing militias and the inner city is a web of impoverished streets where idealized portraits of young men, killed in recent gun battles with Iraqi and American troops, hang from signposts above empty lots.

The unrest in Diwaniya, mirrored in Nasiriya to the south, reflects the emergence of a poisonous political landscape in which competing Shiite groups no longer look to the political system to allocate power. The government’s authority appears to have broken down, with the governor calling this spring for Iraqi Army units, backed by American troops, to restore order. Civilians, not sure where to look for protection, are caught in the deepening fear and uncertainty.

Even now, with a large Iraqi Army force and American troops in the area, the violence has continued. In the first 10 days of June, two police officers were shot dead, an American soldier died from a roadside bomb and the brother and nephew of a prominent militia official were killed. While still less dangerous than central Iraq, where militant Sunni Arabs and Shiites battle for control, the situation has worsened since violence first broke out here last August.

In a daylong visit to Diwaniya earlier in June, Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki warned, “We cannot build a state that has another state inside it, we cannot build an army that has armies inside it,” referring to the militias within the province that answer to their leaders rather than to elected officials.

Diwaniya is the capital of the almost completely Shiite farming province of Qadisiya, known for its marshy fields where farmers grow aromatic ambar rice, similar to India’s basmati. Even in town, many people patch together a livelihood with seasonal jobs working the rice fields or tending date palms.

It is a poor province, and poorer now because of a recent decline in the farming sector, making it fertile ground for groups allied with the anti-American cleric, Moktada al-Sadr. The cleric, whose legendary father was beloved here, has reached out to the poor, both in town and in the country.

“Diwaniya was never really quiet, never really peaceful, it was only sleeping,” said Abu Faris, a senior official who works with the provincial council. “There were always troubles below the surface, and now they are coming out.”

The city of about 400,000 people has a history of rebellion; it was the first city in southern Iraq to rise against Saddam Hussein in the wake of the 1991 Persian Gulf war. But when the rebellion failed, Mr. Hussein exacted a deadly retribution, arresting hundreds of men and boys and killing many of them. Underlying Diwaniya’s troubles is a fight between factions allied with rival Shiite clerics, Mr. Sadr and Abdul Aziz al-Hakim, who leads the Supreme Islamic Iraqi Council.

Mr. Hakim, who has close ties to the Americans, is allied with an older generation of middle-class, more educated Shiites, many of whom spent some of the Hussein era in Iran or Syria.

By contrast, Mr. Sadr blames the Americans for the havoc in Iraq and refuses to meet with any representatives of the Bush administration. Mr. Sadr is linked more closely with the young, impoverished Shiites who stayed in Iraq during the years of Mr. Hussein’s rule. Mr. Sadr’s movement has only 5 members on the 40-member provincial council but enjoys wide local popularity. Both clerics have ties to armed militias, which local residents say have infiltrated the local police and security forces.

Although Mr. Hakim’s Supreme Islamic Iraqi Council is known for its tightly run political arm, that has not always translated into grass-roots support. Diwaniya’s governor, Khalil Jalil Hamza, is from the party, but lived in Iran for many years, returning only after the American invasion, and many local people have criticized his performance. The party also holds the majority on the provincial council.

The result is a governor with little ability to control his territory.

“When problems emerged, assassinations, kidnappings, and when the Sadrists began to move on their own, the governor did not deal with it because he did not know the area, and the problems snowballed,” said Hussein Ali al-Shalaan, a Shiite sheik who represents the province in the Iraqi Parliament and comes from the more secular and moderate Iraqiya coalition.

In March more than 50 people were killed in the province. Now, hardly a day goes by when there is not an attempt to shoot some official. Roadside bombs, unseen in most of southern Iraq, have been aimed at Iraqi and American forces operating in the area.

With no sign of improvement, the governor called in Iraqi Army troops, backed by Americans. In early April the soldiers entered the impoverished warrens at the center of the city, the stronghold of the Sadr loyalists. The area is crushingly poor. The low houses, made of crumbling mud bricks, look as if they would melt in the rain; they have such small doors that men sometimes must stoop to enter them.

Heavy fighting raged for several days, as young men, hiding behind low walls, fired rocket-propelled grenades and AK-47s before running away only to pop up again a few streets away, according to accounts from residents. At least 10 men were killed and 50 wounded in the fighting.

More than a month later the area still looked like a war zone with dangling electrical wires and a wary atmosphere. The neighborhood was surrounded by Iraqi Army checkpoints, the soldiers tense and unsmiling as they checked identification cards and opened car trunks to search for guns. The units were not from Diwaniya.

The head of Mr. Sadr’s Diwaniya office, Sheik Haider al-Nadir, fled to Najaf. “I was afraid of being arrested,” he said. “Sometimes they arrest people with no excuse.”

A soft-spoken cleric, Mr. Nadir said Mr. Sadr’s organization was being wrongly accused of fomenting the troubles in Diwaniya, but granted that many groups involved in “bad activities” were using Mr. Sadr’s name. Others agree that some criminal gangs are trying to burnish their image by claiming a connection to Mr. Sadr.

With provincial elections approaching, the Sadr movement believes that the Supreme Iraqi Islamic Council and the governor want to weaken them by accusing those aligned with Mr. Sadr of causing the problems in the city. The election has been delayed, and Mr. Sadr’s supporters believe that the reason was to give the Supreme Islamic Iraqi Council time to reduce his appeal.

For people here, the competing rivalries breed confusion and fear. They do not know whom to trust. “You couldn’t tell which side was responsible for kidnappings, for killings,” said Abu Faris, the senior Diwaniya official who works with the provincial council.

“And if you looked at the victims, they were all kinds of people: police, workers, professors,” he said. “They were from different groups.”

The unease was palpable on a recent visit to Diwaniya. At a checkpoint at the city’s borders, the police stopped several cars with out-of-town license plates and held the occupants, including a reporter for The New York Times, saying the city was not safe. After relenting, they begged the visitors not to tell the next checkpoint, run by the Iraqi Army, that the police had let them into the town.

“They do not like us, they will try to make trouble for us,” said a police lieutenant, Hussain Ali. He added that there were rumors that the governor was going to dismiss 350 members of the police force. “Why are they trying to do this? We will be left penniless, our families and children without a livelihood, and we are accused of nothing.”

At the next checkpoint, stony-faced Iraqi soldiers looked suspiciously at the Baghdad license plates but let the cars through. A few hundred feet farther on, however, outside the compound that housed the governor’s office, uniformed gunmen who would not say whether they were with the police or the army blocked entry even to the government parking lot. There seemed to be no communication between the various checkpoints and no agreed upon rules.

By the time the reporter left the city, the tone of the encounter with the police had changed from threatening to a plea for help. Mr. Ali and two of his police officer colleagues apologized for not having air-conditioning at the police station, but explained that their generator was broken. They were making tea on a small gas stove. But the worst came at night, Mr. Ali said.

“Please, if you speak to the governor, please ask him to fix our generator,” he said. “At night our checkpoint sinks into darkness and we cannot see if someone is about to attack us.”

An Iraqi employee of The New York Times contributed reporting.

    Shiite Rivalries Slash at a Once Calm Iraqi City, NYT, 21.6.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/21/world/middleeast/21shiites.html?hp

78 Killed by Bombing at Baghdad Mosque

June 19, 2007
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 2:54 p.m. ET
The New York Times

BAGHDAD (AP) -- A truck bomb struck a Shiite mosque Tuesday in central Baghdad, killing 78 people and wounding more than 200, even as about 10,000 U.S. soldiers northeast of the capital used heavily armored Stryker and Bradley fighting vehicles to battle their way into an al-Qaida sanctuary.

The troops, under cover of attack helicopters, killed at least 22 insurgents in the offensive, the U.S. military said.

The thunderous explosion at the Khulani mosque in the capital's busy commercial area of Sinak sent smoke billowing over concrete buildings, nearly a week after a bombing brought down the twin minarets of a revered Shiite shrine in the northern city of Samarra and two days after officials lifted a curfew aimed at preventing retaliatory violence from that attack.

Gunfire erupted after the blast, which police said occurred in a parking lot near the mosque, causing the outer wall and a building just inside it to crumble.

Police and hospital officials, speaking on condition of anonymity because they feared retribution, said at least 78 people were killed and 218 were wounded, adding that the toll could rise as bodies were pulled from the debris.

One officer said the explosives-packed truck was loaded with fans and air coolers to avoid arousing the suspicions of security forces guarding the surrounding area, which is full of shops selling electrical appliances.

Six of those killed lived in a house behind the mosque that also collapsed, the officer said, adding that 20 cars were burned and 25 shops were damaged.

The mosque's imam, Sheik Saleh al-Haidari, said it was a truck bomb and the explosion hit worshippers as they left afternoon prayers.

''This attack was planned and carried out by sick souls, damaging the mosque's outer wall and collapsing my office and the room above it,'' al-Haidari told The Associated Press by telephone.

''There are number of bodies being pulled from the rubble and a number of worshippers were killed or injured,'' he said, adding that he was not inside the mosque when the blast occurred.

The Khulani mosque is named after a revered Shiite figure who, according to Shiite tradition, was one of four deputies anointed by the Imam Mohammed al-Mahdi, who disappeared in the 9th century and will return to restore justice to humanity.

AP Television News video showed a huge pile of rubble where the wall used to be, but its turquoise dome was intact. The Imam Ali hospital in the Shiite district of Sadr City was packed with victims, many badly burned.

Karim Abdullah, the 35-year-old owner of a clothing store, said he was making his way by motorcycle to pray at the mosque when the explosion forced him to pull over.

''I stopped in shock as I saw the smoke and people on the ground. I saw two or three men in flames as they were getting out of their car,'' he added.

The raids, dubbed ''Operation Arrowhead Ripper,'' took place in Baqouba, the capital of Diyala province, and involved air assaults under the cover of darkness, the military said. The operation was still in its opening stages, it added.

The commander of Iraqi military operations in Diyala, Maj. Gen. Abdul-Karim al-Rubaie, said handcuffs, swords and electricity cables -- apparently used as torture implements -- had been seized from militant safe houses in the area.

The operation was part of new U.S. and Iraqi attacks on Baghdad's northern and southern flanks, which military officials said were aimed at clearing out Sunni insurgents, al-Qaida fighters and Shiite militiamen who had fled the capital and Anbar during a four-month-old security operation.

A top U.S. military official said American forces were taking advantage of the arrival of the final brigade of 30,000 additional U.S. troops to open the concerted attacks.

''We are going into the areas that have been sanctuaries of al-Qaida and other extremists to take them on and weed them out, to help get the areas clear and to really take on al-Qaida,'' the senior official said on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak about the operation. ''Those are areas in the belts around Baghdad, some parts in Anbar province and specifically Diyala province.''

The hard-line Sunni Association of Muslim Scholars denounced the joint operations in Diyala, calling them ''barbaric acts'' and promising they ''will not stop the people from persisting in their efforts to gain their liberty, unity and independence.''

Al-Qaida has proven to be an extremely agile foe for U.S. and Iraqi forces, as shown by its ability to transfer major operations to Baqouba from Anbar province, the sprawling desert region in western Iraq. There is no guarantee that driving the organization out of current sanctuaries would prevent it from migrating to other regions to continue the fight.

In recent months, the verdant orange and palm groves of Diyala have become one of the most fiercely contested regions in Iraq. The province is a tangle of Shiite and Sunni villages that has played into the hands of al-Qaida and allied militants who have melted into the tense region and sought to inflame existing sectarian troubles.

Al-Qaida has conducted public killings in the Baqouba main square and otherwise sought to enforce an extreme Taliban-style Islamic code. The terror organization's actions in the province have caused some Sunni militants, al-Qaida's natural allies, to turn their guns on the group with U.S. assistance and blessing. Some militant Shiites are likewise joining government forces in a bid to oust the foreign fighters and Muslim extremists.

Separately, the U.S. military announced the death of an American soldier in Baghdad. The soldier was killed by small arms fire during combat in an eastern section of the capital, a military statement said. No other soldiers were wounded in the attack, which took place Monday, it said.

The death brought to at least 3,528 the number of U.S. military personnel who have died since the beginning of the Iraq war in March 2003, according to an AP count. The figure includes seven military civilians. At least 2,889 died as a result of hostile action, according to the military's numbers.

In southern Iraq, police and hospital officials said the death toll reached 30 in clashes that continued into a second day between Mahdi Army fighters and Iraqi security forces in Nasiriyah, about 200 miles southeast of Baghdad.

Some 150 people were wounded, authorities said. The officials, who declined to be identified because they feared retribution, said most of the casualties were police or militiamen. A delegation from radical Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr's office arrived in the city to try to end the fighting, according to the city council.

A curfew was imposed Monday on Nasiriyah and remained in effect.

Iranian-made rockets were seized in raids in central Nasiriyah, police said.

In other violence reported by police, a roadside bomb killed the head of a Shiite tribe and two people traveling with him near Hillah, about 60 miles south of Baghdad.

A roadside bomb missed a police patrol but hit two civilian cars in the Shiite neighborhood of Zafaraniyah in southeastern Baghdad, killing two people and wounding five.

------

Associated Press writers Hamid Ahmed and Sinan Salaheddin contributed to this report.

(This version CORRECTS spelling of mosque to Khulani, not Khillani.)

    78 Killed by Bombing at Baghdad Mosque, NYT, 19.6.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/world/AP-Iraq.html

Bomb kills 78 in Baghdad, U.S. in big offensive

Tue Jun 19, 2007 1:06PM EDT
Reuters
By Dean Yates

BAGHDAD (Reuters) - A suspected al Qaeda bomber killed 78 people when he rammed a truck into a Shi'ite mosque in Baghdad on Tuesday, just hours after 10,000 U.S. troops began an offensive against the Sunni Islamist group north of the capital.

The offensive around the city of Baquba in Diyala province is partly aimed at al Qaeda car bomb networks that cause carnage in Baghdad. It is one of the biggest military operations since the invasion of Iraq in 2003.

One witness said the bomber drove his truck into the Khilani mosque in Baghdad, destroying one wall and wrecking part of the building's interior. The mosque's signature turquoise dome appeared to have suffered little damage.

Shi'ite Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki blamed the attacks on "Saddamists and Takfiris", a term commonly used by Iraqi officials to describe al Qaeda. "It shows (their) determination to ignite sectarian violence," Maliki said in a statement.

Police said 78 people had been killed, including at least nine women, and 224 others were wounded. Rescuers dragged bodies from the mosque while the charred remains of others could be seen in burned out minibuses around a nearby traffic circle.

It was the second worst bombing in Baghdad since U.S. and Iraqi forces launched a crackdown in February in the capital aimed at halting Iraq's spiral into all-out sectarian civil war. A car bomb on April 18 killed 140 near a Baghdad market.

"Iraqis in this country are being killed every day. No one takes care of them," shouted one old man at the scene.

Iraqi military spokesman Brigadier-General Qassim Moussawi said the truck had been loaded with gas canisters and half a metric ton of explosives.

The explosion followed a relatively quiet period in Baghdad after a four-day curfew was imposed last week in the wake of an attack on a revered Shi'ite shrine in the city of Samarra that was also blamed on al Qaeda.

Militants also fired a barrage of mortar bombs at Baghdad's Green Zone in one of the heaviest attacks in weeks on the compound that houses the U.S. embassy and government offices.

The U.S. embassy said no U.S. citizens were killed or wounded in the attack just before sundown. There was no other information about possible casualties.

ATTACK HELICOPTERS

The U.S. military said 22 militants were killed in the early hours of the offensive against al Qaeda around Baquba. Diyala province is a stronghold of the Sunni Islamist group but it also has significant Shi'ite and Kurdish populations.

"The end state is to destroy the al Qaeda influences in this province and eliminate their threat against the people," Brigadier-General Mick Bednarek, deputy commanding general, operations, 25th Infantry Division, said in a statement.

"That is the number one, bottom-line, up-front, in-your-face, task and purpose."

The statement said about 10,000 soldiers, backed by attack helicopters, close air support and armored fighting vehicles were taking part in Operation Arrowhead Ripper.

It did not say how long the offensive would last. But it coincides with smaller operations launched in recent days against al Qaeda targets around Baghdad.

"It's certainly one of the largest since the end of ground operations in 2003," U.S. military spokesman Lieutenant-Colonel Christopher Garver told Reuters when asked to describe the significance of the operation.

Residents in Baquba, capital of Diyala, said heavy and continual explosions echoed around the city since before dawn. Baquba, 65 km (40 miles) north of Baghdad, was under total curfew, they added.

The operation comes just days after the U.S. military said it had completed its troop build-up in Iraq to 160,000 soldiers.

South of the capital, gunmen loyal to Shi'ite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr battled police linked to a rival Shi'ite faction for a second day in the city of Nassiriya. Hospital officials said 35 people had been killed over the past two days.

The fighting underscored frictions between Sadr's political movement and the Supreme Iraqi Islamic Council (SIIC), which have raised fears of a battle for control of Iraq's more stable Shi'ite southern regions.

(Additional reporting by Paul Tait, Alister Bull, Ross Colvin, Waleed Ibrahim and Aseel Kami)

    Bomb kills 78 in Baghdad, U.S. in big offensive, R, 19.6.2007, http://www.reuters.com/article/topNews/idUSCOL02152020070619?&src=061907_1309_TOPSTORY_baghdad_blast_kills_78

Truck Bomb Hits Baghdad Mosque as U.S. Presses Assault

June 19, 2007
The New York Times
By MICHAEL R. GORDON and DAMIEN CAVE

BAQUBA, Iraq, June 20 — A truck bomb exploded at a Shiite mosque in central Baghdad today, killing more than 60 people and wounding more than 130.

The explosion came on the second day of a major offensive against Sunni insurgents in and around Baghdad. More than 10,000 coalition troops pushed their way through Diyala province and thousands more engaged in operations near the capital.

Baghdad residents were angered by the blast at the Khillani mosque, which was especially deadly and came after a curfew in the area had been lifted on Sunday.

“Five days of curfew stopped us from coming to work, and today a car bomb,” said a shop owner near the site of the blast. “How am I going to cope with that and run my family?”

Survivors complained that they were not allowed to help victims because they were kept out of the area by American and Iraq forces.

Najim Abdul-Wahid, 45, a carpenter working in the area, said: “I saw many charred bodies in the streets. People were screaming, calling for help. I saw many people burning inside their cars, and we were helpless because the U.S. and the Iraqi army didn’t let anyone to move inside the scene.”

Gunfire erupted shortly after the blast, which a police officer said went off in the commercial area of Sinak, according to The Associated Press.

The explosion was the latest in a series of attacks on mosques that began last week when insurgents destroyed the two remaining minarets of a Shiite shrine in Samarra. Several Sunni mosques in southern Iraq were destroyed in retaliation.

The coalition offensive, which began last night, is aimed at blunting the persistent car and suicide bombings that have terrorized Iraqis and thwarted political reconciliation.

The fighting is expected to be hard. By daylight today, attack helicopters and ground forces had killed 22 suspected insurgents in and around Baquba, the capital of Diyala province, the military said in a statement. Lt. Colonel Christopher Garver, a military spokesman here, said this afternoon that he had received no reports of American casualties so far.

The assault is unusual in its scope and ambition, representing a more aggressive strategy of attacking several insurgent strongholds simultaneously to tamp down violence throughout the country.

It reflects an acknowledgment that as fresh infusions of American troops focused on Baghdad in recent months, insurgents moved their bases outside the city. Commanders said the goal of the operation, which is called Arrowhead Ripper, was to break the cycle of sectarian killings and retribution that has swept Iraq.

Diyala Province, the scene of the offensive, has emerged, in recent months, as a center of the Sunni Arab insurgency as Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia and other groups have made it their deadliest base of operations, supplanting Anbar Province. Violence in Anbar dropped after Sunni Arab tribes joined forces with the Americans to drive out Qaeda fighters.

American military officials say Diyala is now home to as many as 2,000 fighters who have flocked there from throughout the country, not only from Anbar but also from Mosul and, since the security crackdown, Baghdad.

But American commanders say the Baquba insurgents, a mix of former members of Saddam Hussein’s army and paramilitary forces, embittered Sunni Arab men, criminal gangs and Qaeda Islamists, are increasingly well trained and highly disciplined. In the past year or more, the militias have terrorized the mixed Sunni and Shiite population, wiping out Shiite families and turning the city into a ghost town.

The tense political situation in Baquba and surrounding Diyala Province, which is north and east of Baghdad, has been further inflamed over the past year by Shiite-dominated militias, some of whom had infiltrated the security forces and persecuted Sunni Arabs. They proved ill prepared to take on the insurgents.

Some of the fighters are also believed to be natives of the province who shifted to the western part of Baquba after an American battalion began operating in the eastern section of the capital several months ago. It is not clear if senior insurgent leaders are still in the city, but some American officials suspect they may have moved to other parts of Diyala in anticipation of the assault.

The Baquba operation is being led by the Third Stryker Brigade Combat Team, Second Infantry Division, with support from units from two other brigades. The American troops are either directly involved in the assault or in supporting efforts on the flanks, along with combat aircraft and artillery.

In the initial attack early Tuesday, American forces cut off the western portion of Baquba, where the commander of the brigade, Col. Steve Townsend, said 300 to 500 Qaeda fighters are believed to have been operating. Helicopters took part in the assault to cut off escape routes and tank fire could be heard down the streets.

In the next phase, American forces will begin the dangerous and painstaking process of clearing the city, which is still occupied by thousands of civilians. Iraqi security forces will have a role in securing the western section of the city after it has been captured by American troops, but are not involved in the initial assault.

The Qaeda and insurgent strongholds in Baquba are strongly defended, according to American intelligence reports. The insurgents’ defenses include enormous buried bombs that are powerful enough to destroy or disable an armored vehicle. Combat engineers recently cleared a main road in Baquba of 17 roadside bombs in a stretch of less than a mile, Colonel Townsend said. Of those, 14 were disarmed and three exploded but did not cause casualties.

Houses are believed to have been rigged with explosives, and enemy fighters — including expert snipers — are believed to have machine gun nests.

American forces are already operating in the eastern section of Baquba. A Stryker battalion began clearing the area several months ago and succeeded in the face of tough resistance. But those operations channeled some fighters to the western part of the provincial capital.

Initially, however, in at least some parts of the city, resistance seemed to be limited.

In what appeared to be a preliminary operation in Baquba, police officials and witnesses said that early on Monday, a small contingent of Iraqi security forces moved into one area of Baquba, encountering little fire.

The Iraqi forces were joined by some members of the 1920s Revolutionary Brigade, a Sunni Arab group with units that have recently repudiated a longstanding alliance with Al Qaeda, and witnesses said the two groups were welcomed by the residents. American helicopters could be heard overhead, ready to assist, but residents told the Iraqis they wanted help stopping the sectarian bloodshed and ridding Iraq of the Americans.

“Why didn’t you do this in the past?” said a man in who gave his name as Abu Muhammad, as he pulled together the hands of a police captain and a brigade commander. He added: “If you work together you can secure Iraq, and the occupation will have no choice but to leave. But if you stay divided Al Qaeda will stay and the occupation will stay.”

In what appeared to be a separate operation deep in the south near the Iranian border, a ferocious battle between American troops and Shiite militants left at least 20 people dead and wounded scores more, Iraqi and American officials said.

The clashes, in Amara and Majjar al-Kabir, a pair of mostly Shiite towns just north of Basra, started early Monday. They were sparked by raids on what American officials described as a secret network involved in transporting “lethal aid” from Iran to Iraq, particularly deadly roadside bombs known as explosively formed penetrators, or E.F.P.’s.

Lt. Col. Christopher Garver, an American military spokesman in Iraq, said American troops have intensified their focus on finding and dismantling places where those weapons are built, like the towns raided Monday, because the weapons were especially hard to stop at the border. “It’s hard to catch because they are shipped as components, not completed weapons,” he said.

According to officials aligned with the Shiite cleric Moktada al-Sadr in Basra, the fighting involved members of Mr. Sadr’s Mahdi Army militia. The battle appeared to be the largest clash with Mr. Sadr’s loosely affiliated gunmen since the start of the new American security plan in February.

In addition to the 20 dead, six suspects were wounded and one was detained, officials said. A hospital official said that at least 60 people were wounded.

A few hours later, members of the Mahdi Army marched alongside the coffins of those killed, but the battle did not resume, said Abdul Karim al-Muhammadawi, a senior tribal and political figure in Amara. By Monday afternoon, he said, “The armed presence of the Mahdi Army was gone.”

Despite the heightened military operation, violence churned on elsewhere in Iraq. In southern Baghdad, two consecutive car bombs near a gas line killed at least seven people and wounded 29, an Interior Ministry official said. Baghdad authorities found 33 unidentified bodies, many showing signs of torture, as mortar shells, shootings and bombs across the capital killed at least nine people, including a national police commander.

Between violence in Anbar, west of Baghdad; Hilla, south of Baghdad; and Kirkuk, to the north, eight people were killed and more than a dozen wounded. The United States military said one soldier was killed late Sunday when an improvised explosive device exploded near a foot patrol in a southern part of the capital.

In Samarra, where insurgents destroyed the two remaining minarets of a Shiite shrine on Wednesday, gunmen and a suicide bomber attacked the headquarters of the area’s national police commandos, killing four policemen and wounding eight, security officials said. A civilian was also killed in the assault, which came the day after the lifting of a curfew that was imposed when the shrine was bombed.

Michael R. Gordon reported from Baquba, and Damien Cave from Baghdad. Reporting was contributed by Ali Adeeb, Karim Hilmi and Alissa J. Rubin from Baghdad, Iraqi employees of The New York Times from Basra and Baquba, and Jon Elsen from New York.

    Truck Bomb Hits Baghdad Mosque as U.S. Presses Assault, NYT, 19.6.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/19/world/middleeast/19cnd-iraq.html?hp

U.S. and Iraqi Forces Move on Insurgents

June 18, 2007
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 3:17 p.m. ET
The New York Times

BAGHDAD (AP) -- U.S. and Iraqi forces launched attacks on the capital's northern and southern flanks to clear out Sunni insurgents, al-Qaida fighters and Shiite militiamen who were chased from the capital and Anbar province during the first four months of the Baghdad security operation, military officials said Monday.

A top U.S. military official said American forces were taking advantage of the arrival of final brigade of 30,000 addition American forces to open the concerted attacks.

''We are going into the areas that have been sanctuaries of al-Qaida and other extremists to take them on and weed them out, to help get the areas clear and to really take on al-Qaida,'' the senior official said on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak about the operation. ''Those are areas in the belts around Baghdad, some parts in Anbar province and specifically Diyala province.''

Al-Qaida has proved an extremely agile foe for U.S. and Iraqi forces, as shown by its ability to transfer major operations to Baqouba from Anbar province, the sprawling desert region in western Iraq. There was no guarantee driving the organization out of current sanctuaries would prevent it from migrating to other regions to continue the fight.

The death toll in sectarian violence Monday skyrocketed after a brief period of relative peace. At least 110 people were killed or found dead Monday, with 33 tortured bodies showing up in Baghdad alone.

The U.S. military also announced a soldier was killed by a roadside bomb while on a foot patrol the day before in southern Baghdad. The death raised to at least 3,527 members of the U.S. military who have died since the Iraq war started in March 2003, according to an Associated Press count.

Well to the south, Iraqi officials reported as many as 36 people were killed in fierce overnight fighting that began as British and Iraqi forces conducted house-to-house searches in Amarah, a stronghold of the Shiite Mahdi Army militia.

The U.S. military issued a statement that said at least 20 people were killed in clashes with coalition forces, without disclosing their nationality. A spokeswoman for Britain's Ministry of Defense said that the British soldiers played a supporting role to Iraqi security forces during the raid and fighting. She spoke on condition of anonymity, which is ministry policy.

The operations on Baghdad's flanks were opened by the U.S. 3rd Infantry Division, which has taken over dangerous al-Qaida-infested regions to the south. The division began its drive into the Salman Pak and Arab Jabour districts on the city's southeastern fringe over the weekend.

At the time ground forces commander Lt. Gen. Raymond Odierno said U.S. troops were heading into those areas in force for the first time in three years.

The military said in a statement Monday fighter jets dropped ''four precision-guided bombs'' in support of 1,200 U.S. soldiers from the 3rd Infantry as they started moving on al-Qaida targets.

Military officials said Multi-National Division-North forces likewise were increasing pressure on al-Qaida sanctuaries in the verdant orange and palm groves of Diyala province and its capital Baqouba, now one of the most fiercely contested regions in Iraq.

The province is a tangle of Shiite and Sunni villages that has played into the hands of al-Qaida and allied militants who have melted into the tense region and sought to inflame existing sectarian troubles.

Al-Qaida has conducted public executions in the Baqouba main square and otherwise sought to enforce extreme Taliban-style Islamic code. The terror organization's actions in the province have caused some Sunni militants, al-Qaida's natural allies, to turn their guns on the group, with American assistance and blessing. Some militant Shiites are likewise joining government forces in a bid to oust the foreign fighters and Muslim extremists.

Multi-National Division-Baghdad, which has run the security operation in the capital since it began on Feb. 14, has increased pressure on districts to the northwest of the city to cut supply and reinforcement lines from Ramadi, the capital of Anbar province in western Iraq, to the Baqouba region.

''We're focusing up in the northwest to apply force in an area that's been important to al-Qaida and its associates as they move between Ramadi and Baqouba. That work together with the developing efforts to provide local security through the (Sunni) tribes in Abu Ghraib and Amariyah is putting pressure on al-Qaida,'' said Lt. Col. Scott Bleichwehl, division spokesman.

The U.S. military said its Baghdad force had uncovered six Iranian-made rockets Sunday in a school yard that was suspected of being a launching site against the heavily fortified Green Zone in the capital.

Some Sunni tribes, who had fought with or offered sanctuary to al-Qaida in Anbar province, have risen up against the group and are now receiving arms and training from U.S. forces. American military officials are trying to spread that success to al-Qaida areas now under attack.

Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, however, told visiting Defense Minister William Gates last week that the United States should stop arming Sunnis who may have been part of the insurgency, according to officials in his office, who spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to release the information. Al-Maliki repeated that challenge in a television interview in Baghdad on Monday.

The fighting in Amarah, the U.S. military said in a statement, was a targeted operation against what the coalition said were members of a ''secret cell'' that imported deadly armor-piercing weapons made in Iran known as ''explosively formed penetrators,'' or EFPs. The cells were also were suspected of bringing militants from Iraq to Iran for terror training.

A doctor at Amarah's general hospital said 36 bodies had been taken to his facility, though he could not determine how many were militiamen and how many were civilians. He spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to talk to media.

More than 100 people were injured in the fighting, and at least three of those killed were Iraqi policemen, police and hospital officials said.

Coalition forces came under small arms fire and rocket-propelled grenade attacks during the raids, and called in air support, the U.S. military statement said. The suspects were killed by fire from aircraft, it said, without disclosing whether the forces were American or British.

Iraqi police said the Mahdi Army, the militia commanded by radical Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr, was involved in the clashes, which lasted for about two hours before dawn.

Amarah is the provincial capital of Maysan province, a predominantly Shiite region that borders Iran. Iraqi forces took over control of security from British troops there in April.

The city has seen intense militia fighting, most recently in October 2006, when the Mahdi Army briefly took control of the city and fought prolonged gunbattles with local police. At the time, Amarah's police force was believed to be dominated by a rival militia, the Badr Brigades. More than 30 people were killed in the standoff.

AP correspondent Kim Gamel contributed to this report from Baghdad.

    U.S. and Iraqi Forces Move on Insurgents, NYT, 18.6.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/world/AP-Iraq.html

U.S. and Iraqi Troops Begin Big Offensive

June 18, 2007
The New York Times
By DAMIEN CAVE

BAGHDAD, June 18 — American and Iraqi troops began major military operations north and south of Baghdad today, while deep in the south near the Iranian border, a ferocious battle between American troops and Shiite militants left at least 20 dead and wounded scores more, Iraqi and American officials.

The clashes in Amara and Majjar al-Kabir, a pair of mostly Shiite towns just north of Basra, came as troops fanned out across Iraq in what American commanders have described as a broad offensive against Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia in the provinces surrounding the capital.

In Diyala province, the site of particularly vicious sectarian violence, witnesses said that Iraqi security forces moved into an area of Baquba before dawn, encountering little armed resistance. The Iraqi forces were joined by members of the 1920s Revolutionary Brigade, who have rejected a long-standing alliance with Al Qaeda, and witnesses said the combined force was welcomed with demands from residents for more help in stopping the bloodshed and ridding Iraq of the Americans.

“Why didn’t you do this in the past?” said a man who gave his name as Abu Muhammad. He held the hands of a police captain and a 1920s Brigade commander, and said: “If you work together you can secure Iraq, and the occupation will have no choice but to leave. But if you stay divided, Al Qaeda will stay and the occupation will stay.”

The operation led to the deaths of at least four terrorists as of this afternoon, Iraqi police said. Another 14 were arrested, and a large arms cache was seized, the police said.

Lt. Col. Christoper Garver, an American military spokesman in Baghdad, confirmed that operations had begun, but he did not go into detail on their scope or location.

“We have started some operations and we’re going to start some more,” he said.

In Amara, the fighting started early this morning during raids on what American officials described as a secret network involved in transporting “lethal aid” from Iran to Iraq, particularly deadly roadside bombs known as explosively formed penetrators, or E.F.P.’s.

Colonel Garver said that American troops have intensified their focus on finding and dismantling places where E.F.P.’s are built, like those raided today, because the weapons are especially hard to stop at the border.

“It’s hard to catch because they are shipped as components, not completed weapons,” he said.

The fighting involved members of the Mahdi militia, loyal to the Shiite cleric Moktada al-Sadr, according to Sadr officials in Basra, and the battle appeared to be the largest clash with Sadr’s loosely affiliated gunmen since the start of a new security plan in February.

American troops led the raid, and suffered no reported casualties, Colonel Garver said. British forces played a support role, a British military official said.

According to an American military statement, troops came under withering small-arms fire and rocket-propelled grenade attacks, forcing commanders to call in air support. Attack aircraft strafed the buildings and destroyed a vehicle being used “as a fighting position,” the statement said, wounding six suspects and leading to the detention of one of the gunmen.

At least 60 people were wounded, according to a hospital official.

A few hours later, members of the Mahdi militia marched alongside the coffins of those killed, said Abdul Karim al Muhammadawi, a senior tribal and political figure in Amara. “They left because there was no one to fight,” he said, adding that by this afternoon, “it was quiet. The armed presence of the Mahdi army was gone.”

Elsewhere in Iraq, despite the heightened military activity, violence continued. In northern Baghdad, a roadside bomb targeting an Iraqi military convoy killed three soldiers and wounded two, an interior ministry official said. Two consecutive car bombs exploded in an area of southern Baghdad, killing at least seven people and wounding 29, the official said.

The authorities in Baghdad also found 33 unidentified bodies throughout the city, as mortar shells across the capital killed at least two people wounded seven.

In Adhamiya, a Sunni enclave in eastern Baghdad, gunmen opened fire on a civilian minibus filled with employees of the neighborhood government. One person was killed and two were injured, an interior ministry official said. A car bomb targeting a communication center in downtown Falluja, in Anbar province, killed at least two people and wounded 10, according to a Falluja police official.

Near Hilla, south of Baghdad, gunmen killed two women in a drive-by shooting, the police said.

In Mosul, north of Baghdad, where Sunni extremists have sought to cleanse the city of Kurds, at least five people were killed or found dead today, the police said.

In Kirkuk, a spray of bullets fired at a police checkpoint south of the city killed a policeman and gravely wounded two others, said Brigadier Burhan Habeeb Tayeb, the city’s chief of police.

Gunmen also assaulted two truck drivers carrying vegetables and killed both of them as they entered a market south of the city, he said.

Ali Adeeb, Karim Hilmi and Alissa J. Rubin contributed reporting from Baghdad; additional reporting was contributed by Iraqi employees of the New York Times in Basra and Baquba

    U.S. and Iraqi Troops Begin Big Offensive, NYT, 18.6.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/18/world/middleeast/18cnd-Iraq.html?hp

G.I.’s in Iraq Open Big Offensive Against Al Qaeda

June 17, 2007
The New York Times
By THOM SHANKER and MICHAEL R. GORDON

BAGHDAD, June 16 — With the influx of tens of thousands of additional combat troops into Iraq now complete, American forces have begun a wide offensive against Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia on the outskirts of Baghdad, the top American commander in Iraq said Saturday.

The commander, Gen. David H. Petraeus, in a news conference in Baghdad along with Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates, said the operation was intended to take the fight to Al Qaeda’s hide-outs in order to cut down the group’s devastating campaign of car bombings.

The comments by General Petraeus were a signal that the United States military had yet again entered a new phase in Iraq, four months after the start of the so-called troop surge and a security plan focused on dampening sectarian violence within Baghdad. They reflected an acknowledgment that more has to be done beyond the city’s bounds to halt a relentless wave of insurgent attacks that have undercut attempts at political reconciliation.

The offensive also comes at a time in the war when there are increasing American casualties and rising domestic pressure to show results or begin troop withdrawals, and just three months before a formal assessment of the military buildup President Bush ordered.

The new emphasis on attacking the insurgent cells and bomb-making factories outside the capital is expected to be a sustained one, involving tough fighting. But creating lasting effects from such pushes has been challenging; in the past, insurgents have repeatedly been driven from one location only to resurface in another.

The heart of the American buildup of 30,000 extra troops is the deployment of five American brigade combat teams, a fighting core of more than 20,000 soldiers. Along with an additional Marine Expeditionary Unit, the last of those forces arrived in the past few days, bringing the total number of American troops in Iraq to about 155,000.

The additional American forces, General Petraeus said Saturday, would allow the United States to conduct operations in “a number of areas around Baghdad, in particular to go into areas that were sanctuaries in the past of Al Qaeda.”

Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia, a largely Sunni Iraqi group thought to have foreign leadership, has intensified its bombing campaign recently. Its attacks are thought to include the bombing this week of the Shiite shrine in Samarra, which was heavily damaged in a previous bombing last year.

Shiites have been the most heavily hit by the insurgent attacks, and officials in the Shiite-led government have bluntly said that no political deal with Sunni Arabs would be possible until the violence eases.

The scope, timing and details of the new American operations are classified. But one sign of the stepped-up activity was apparent in a recent operation reported by the Third Infantry Division, which is operating in the Sunni Arab belts south of the capital. In that case, American attack helicopters and Iraqi forces struck an insurgent cell, killing several and capturing others.

The decision to mount more attacks in the Sunni belts is a trade-off in a military sense because it will limit the number of American forces available to secure neighborhoods in the capital. General Petraeus appeared to allude to that on Saturday.

“There has never been a military commander in history who wouldn’t like to have more of something or other,” he said. “That characterizes all of us here.

“The fact is, frankly, that we have all that our country is going to provide us in terms of combat forces — that is really it, right now.”

This is not the first time that American forces have taken on Qaeda strongholds. Over the past year, for instance, the military has had success in driving insurgents out of Ramadi, the capital of Anbar Province, west of Baghdad.

The military has also begun working with Sunni tribes in Anbar who oppose Al Qaeda, and is hoping to expand this approach to other areas.

But even that partial success has highlighted the flexibility of the insurgents. As gains have been made in Anbar, commanders say, the group has shifted their fighters to Diyala Province and elsewhere, flowing away from pressure and creating new pockets of violence.

In the Baghdad news conference, Defense Secretary Gates insisted that the military buildup was beginning to show dividends.

“The full impact of the surge is just beginning to be felt,” said Mr. Gates, who was making his fourth visit to Iraq in his six months as defense secretary.

Mr. Gates arrived in Iraq to express Washington’s disappointment with the pace of political reconciliation under Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki, and to urge accelerated efforts to reach a series of political benchmarks to lower tensions among Sunnis, Shiites and Kurds.

Mr. Gates also met with the American ambassador, Ryan C. Crocker, who said that no outside power could compel the Iraqis to reach accommodation.

“These have to be Iraqi decisions and Iraqi compromises if they are really going to take effect,” Ambassador Crocker said. “We can’t come up with solutions as the United States and expect to impose them or impose timelines and say, ‘You’ve got to do this for the future of your country.’ ”

Earlier Saturday, Mr. Gates visited a joint security station in the Karada region of southeastern Baghdad, where American forces conduct missions along with Iraqi military and police units from inside a secured, walled compound.The American commander at the compound, Maj. Christopher Wendland, of the Second Battalion, 17th Field Artillery, said attacks in his area had dropped to 5 or 6 per week from 15 to 16 per week about a month ago. But at the same time, the number of improvised bombs planted in the area had gone up.

Earlier, in the news conference, General Petraeus acknowledged that the results of the Baghdad security push had been mixed so far.

“We are ahead in some areas and behind in others,” he said.

He said troops would continue operating in neighborhoods of Baghdad to calm Sunni-Shiite tensions and “ensure that fault lines do not once again produce a spiral of violence.” In addition, the general said, Iraqi and American forces will be operating more intensively in larger population centers outside of Baghdad, like Diyala Province and other areas where Al Qaeda has moved in.

Alissa J. Rubin contributed reporting.

    G.I.’s in Iraq Open Big Offensive Against Al Qaeda, NYT, 17.6.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/17/world/middleeast/17iraq.html?hp

In Iraq, Gates Says Progress Toward Peace Is Lagging

June 16, 2007
The New York Times
By THOM SHANKER

CAMP VICTORY, Iraq, June 15 — Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates arrived here late on Friday bluntly expressing disappointment with the pace of political reconciliation under Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki, even as the final units of the American troop increase were moving into position and bombings threatened to inspire more sectarian violence.

Mr. Gates, making his fourth trip to Iraq in six months as defense secretary, said his message to the Iraqi leadership would be that “our troops are buying them time to pursue reconciliation and that, frankly, we are disappointed in the progress thus far.”

In what appears to be a coordinated campaign by the Bush administration, the defense secretary will be reinforcing a message delivered to the Maliki government in person over recent days by Adm. William J. Fallon, the American commander in the Middle East, and John D. Negroponte, the deputy secretary of state.

Although Mr. Gates described his goal as encouraging efforts by the Maliki government in Baghdad, he also expressed a desire to increase cooperation with provincial political leaders and local tribal sheiks.

He said that “perhaps we have gotten too focused on the central government, and not enough on the provinces, and on the tribes and what is happening in those areas.” He said he hoped to spark greater attention to this “ground-up effort.”

In comments to reporters before arriving at the American military headquarters on the Baghdad outskirts, Mr. Gates disagreed with recent assessments by Democratic Party leaders in Washington, who said that senior American officers had not accurately described the true, and chaotic, state of affairs in Iraq.

Mr. Gates said the generals he met “have been very realistic,” and he characterized Gen. David H. Petraeus, the senior American commander in Iraq, as one who “has not pulled his punches” and has the “ability and willingness to call it like he sees it.”

The defense secretary cautioned that an official assessment on the impact of the troop increase due in September and ordered by Congress might not present a full picture of the situation in Iraq.

“There still will be a lot of uncertainty,” he said. “But I think we will have some sense of direction and trends.”

As part of this previously unannounced visit, Mr. Gates said he would discuss with the Iraqis how to make certain that the bombing of a revered mosque in Samarra — and a feared round of reprisals — “won’t further disrupt or delay the process” of political reconciliation.

He acknowledged that Mr. Maliki and his government were facing “enormous obstacles,” but he said that the prime minister must do more to demonstrate to the Iraqi people that his government would “lay the groundwork for a future Iraqi state in which all of the different elements can live in peace with one another.

“I think the prime minister is trying to address that challenge as well as he can, and I think he deserves our support,” Mr. Gates said.

He agreed that the security situation is “a very mixed picture.” He urged patience until the fifth and final Army brigade ordered by President Bush to bolster forces in Iraq could begin full operations. That brigade arrived this month.

    In Iraq, Gates Says Progress Toward Peace Is Lagging, NYT, 16.6.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/16/world/middleeast/16gates.html

Second Sunni Mosque Is Blown Up in Basra

June 16, 2007
The New York Times
By DAMIEN CAVE

Hooded gunmen clad in black blew up a second Sunni mosque in the southern city of Basra today after ordering the police at the mosque to flee, and despite a curfew imposed by Iraq’s central government, witnesses and security officials said.

The blast at the al-Ashrah al-Mubashra mosque in central Basra, a day after a blast razed another Sunni mosque in the city, suggested that Shiite militias south of the capital have rejected calls for restraint from Iraqi leaders after explosions Wednesday toppled two minarets at a revered Shiite shrine in Samarra.

The latest Basra attack immediately heightened tensions between Sunni and Shiite officials, and for some, seemed to confirm that Iraq’s central government has lost the ability to exert much influence not just on areas of the Kurdish north, but also majority Shiite strongholds in the south.

“The security situation is out of control in the city,” said Wael Abdul Latif, a Shiite former governor of Basra and member of the Iraqi List, a moderate party headed by Ayad Allawi. “The power of the state is weak, and the forces of the Interior Ministry and Defense Ministry are confused and afraid even though handing such matters requires toughness.”

The attack occurred around 8 a.m., witnesses and a Basra security official said, when at least a half-dozen men approached the mosque in four vehicles, including a minibus loaded with explosives. They said the gunmen told the Iraqi security forces guarding the mosque to leave, which they did without resistance, at which point the gunmen packed the building with explosives.

After the blast collapsed the building into dust and rubble, the gunmen celebrated and cheered, according to several witnesses who refused to give their names for fear of reprisals. The police, they said, did not immediately respond.

Sunni religious leaders and politicians said the attack reflected the troubling militia infiltration of Iraq’s army and police and the risks of relying on a mostly Shiite force to protect a country of many sects and ethnicities.

“This tells us that there is a huge penetration into the security forces in Basra by militias and this was admitted by the emergency force commander there,” said Ahmed Abdul Ghafour al-Samaraie, head of the Sunni Endowment, which oversees the country’s Sunni mosques. “If the army ignores the militia and lets them enter the mosques and do what they want then it is a catastrophe. And if the army knows what they aim at doing then it is a bigger catastrophe.”

It was unclear today whether the defiance in Basra would spread. The majority Shiite city is dominated by several rival Shiite groups, who periodically fight for control, yielding what officials and residents describe as a high degree of disorder.

A government-imposed curfew that prohibited vehicles from traveling on the city’s roads has not been universally enforced, residents said. Cars sped by police checkpoints today without concern for the traffic ban.

In other cities, like Baghdad, curfews since Wednesday’s attack in Samarra have largely minimized high-profile sectarian reprisals. A handful of Sunni mosques have been shot at or bombed, but there have been no reports of casualties — far less violence than what occurred after the first attack on the Samarra shrine last year.

Today, two of Iraq’s most powerful Shiite clerics issued statements lamenting the loss of Muslim shrines rather than calling for vengeance.

Hamid Al-Khaffaf, a spokesman for the office of Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani said: “His eminence strongly condemns and denounces the attacks on the mosques of Talha Bin Ubeidallah and Al-Ashra Al-Mubashara in Basra. He calls on all citizens to prevent, as much as they can, such attacks on all shrines and mosques.”

The populist cleric Moktada al Sadr, whose Mahdi militia was blamed for much the violence that followed last’s year’s attack on the Samarra shrine, called on his supporters to hold a peaceful march to the site next month.

His latest message was another example of Mr. Sadr’s makeover from sectarian rabblerouser to nationalist demagogue. There were hints today that some Sunni and Shiite officials not typically aligned with Mr. Sadr would follow the pattern, focused on contrasting the supposed unity of Iraq’s people with meddlesome divisiveness of foreign powers and extreme religious groups.

Mr. Samaraie of the Sunni Endowment asked Iraqis to “be united and love each other and block the road before those holding foreign agendas.”

Mr. Latif, the Shiite former governor of Basra, said that Shiites are playing right into the hands of Al Qaeda of Mesopotamia and other Sunni groups believed to be responsible for the Samarra attacks.

“Al Qaeda did not attack Talha or Al-Ashra mosques but those who did are following the ideas of Al Qaeda,” he said.

He added that Basra’s separation from the central government’s rule of law would only hurt the area.

“Let’s assume that one of the neighboring countries, Iran or Saudi Arabia, invaded Basra,” he said. “Would the militias be able to stand up against them? They won’t last for an hour.”

Iraqi employees of The New York Times contributed reporting from Basra; Ali Adeeb, Khalid al-Ansary and Ahmad Fadam contributed reporting from Baghdad.

    Second Sunni Mosque Is Blown Up in Basra, NYT, 16.6.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/16/world/middleeast/16cnd-baghdad.html?hp

Identification Cards of 2 Missing U.S. Soldiers Found in Iraq

June 16, 2007
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 10:26 a.m. ET
The New York Times

BAGHDAD (AP) -- The identification cards of two American soldiers missing since an attack on their unit in May were found in an al-Qaida safe house north of Baghdad, the U.S. military said Saturday.

Separtely in Basra, an explosion leveled a Sunni mosque, residents said, in the second retaliatory attack in as many days for the toppling of minarets at a prized Shiite shrine in Samarra.

Iraqi police did not immediately respond to the bombing of the al-Ashrah al-Mubashra mosque, witnesses said, raising fears that the city's Shiite-dominated security forces were unwilling to stop sectarian attacks on Sunni landmarks.

The cards for Spc. Alex R. Jimenez and Pvt. Byron Fouty were discovered along with computers, video production equipment, rifles and ammunition at the otherwise empty house near Samarra, 60 miles north of Baghdad.

The two were snatched in a raid on their 10th Mountain Division unit more than a month ago near Youssifiyah, 12 miles south of Baghdad. The body of a third soldier who was taken in the raid, Pfc. Joseph Anzack Jr., was found floating in the Euphrates River.

The Islamic State of Iraq, a front group for al-Qaida, claimed in a video posted on the Internet this month that all three missing soldiers were killed and buried. The militants showed images of the military IDs of Jimenez, 25, of Lawrence, Mass., and Fouty, 19, of Waterford, Mich., but offered no proof that they were dead.

    Identification Cards of 2 Missing U.S. Soldiers Found in Iraq, NYT, 16.6.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/world/AP-Iraq.html

5 G.I.’s Killed in Iraq, Military Says

June 15, 2007
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 8:54 a.m. ET
The New York Times

BAGHDAD (AP) -- Five American soldiers died in Iraq, the U.S. military announced Friday, a day after extremists fired shells into Baghdad's Green Zone during a visit by the State Department's No. 2 official.

The prime minister imposed an indefinite curfew on Basra, Iraq's second largest city and gateway to the Persian Gulf, after bombers leveled a Sunni shrine just outside the city.

Gunmen armed with rocket-propelled grenades attacked the Talha Bin al-Zubair shrine about 13 miles outside Basra late Thursday, damaging the building, police said. They returned early Friday, planting bombs inside the structure that destroyed it, police said. No injuries were reported.

Gen. Ali al-Mussawi, a top Basra security official, said the bombers were disguised as cameramen who asked guards for permission to film inside the shrine. Minutes after they left, a huge explosion rocked the building, destroying the dome and minaret, he said.

The guards were detained afterward for questioning, al-Mussawi said.

Talha Bin al-Zubair was one of the Prophet Muhammad's companions and commands high respect among Sunnis. The shrine was renovated in late 1990s, during Saddam Hussein's rule. Sunni pilgrims from India, Pakistan and Turkey frequently visit the shrine.

Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki's office issued a statement calling the bombing of the Sunni shrine another of the ''crimes aimed at sowing sedition and inflaming sectarian strife among the people.''

He said those who are attacking places of worship were ''the enemies of God, the homeland and the people and they should not be tolerated.''

Three of the U.S. soldiers were killed when a bomb exploded near their vehicle Thursday during operations in Kirkuk province, in northern Iraq, the U.S. military said in a statement. Another soldier was wounded in the blast.

A fourth soldier was killed by small arms fire the same day in Diyala province, northeast of Baghdad, another statement said. And another soldier died Wednesday in a non-combat related incident, which the military said it was investigating.

A Baghdad-wide clampdown continued Friday, with a curfew still in place two days after suspected al-Qaida bombers blew the minarets off a sacred Shiite shrine and stoked fears of a bloody sectarian backlash.

At least four Sunni mosques were attacked within hours of the Shiite shrine blasts in Samarra on Wednesday, and police in Basra reported four people killed in retaliatory violence there.

Thursday's barrage of rockets and mortars included one that hit on a street close to the Iraqi parliament less than a half hour before U.S. Deputy Secretary of State John Negroponte passed nearby.

The attack again showed militants' resilience -- including their ability to strike the heavily protected zone -- despite a U.S.-led security crackdown across the city that began four months ago. But officials paid much closer attention to any signs that Shiites could unleash another wave of retaliation against Sunnis for the explosions at the Askariya mosque compound in Samarra.

The first attack on the site in February 2006 sent the country into a tailspin of sectarian violence that destroyed Washington's hopes of a steady withdrawal from Iraq. On Wednesday, bombers toppled the two minarets that stood over the ruins of the mosques famous Golden Dome about 60 miles north of Baghdad.

The U.S. ambassador to Iraq, Ryan Crocker, echoed Washington's claim that the latest attack was the work of al-Qaida.

''I just don't think there's any doubt that it was al-Qaida that first struck the Askariya in February 2006, and the method this time was very similar to that -- (explosive) charges very carefully placed to devastating effect,'' Crocker told a group of reporters.

Negroponte called the Samarra attack a ''deliberate attempt by al-Qaida to sow dissent and inflame sectarian strife among the people of Iraq.''

The U.S. military issued a statement Thursday saying Iraqi forces had arrested the commander and 12 policemen responsible for security at the shrine, which holds the tombs of two revered 9th century Shiite imams. It was not immediately clear whether the police arrested are suspects in the attack or held for questioning.

Meanwhile, insurgents linked to al-Qaida released a videotape showing the execution-style deaths of 14 Iraqi soldiers and policemen after the expiration of a 72-hour deadline for the Iraqi government to meet their demands.

In a statement that preceded the video footage, the Islamic State of Iraq said its religious court ''ruled that God's verdict should be implemented against the renegades'' after its demands were not met. In an earlier video, the group demanded the release of all female prisoners in Iraqi prisons.

The killings took place in what looked like a rural area, with a grass field and several tall eucalyptus trees. A small wooden shack stood in the background.

The authenticity of the 1 1/2-minute video could not be verified, but it appeared on a Web site commonly used by Islamic militants and carried the logo of the Islamic State of Iraq's media production wing, al-Furqan.

The U.S. soldier deaths announced Friday brought to at least 3,520 the number of American military personnel who have died since the beginning of the Iraq war in March 2003, according to an Associated Press count. The figure includes seven military civilians. At least 2,889 died as a result of hostile action, according to the military's numbers.

    5 G.I.’s Killed in Iraq, Military Says, NYT, 15.6.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/world/AP-Iraq.html?hp

Several Mosques Attacked, but Relative Calm in Iraq

June 14, 2007
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 5:32 a.m. ET
The New York Times

BAGHDAD (AP) -- A handful of Sunni mosques were attacked or burned Thursday, but curfews and increased troop levels kept Iraq in relative calm a day after suspected al-Qaida bombers toppled the towering minarets of a prized Shiite shrine.

Wednesday's attack on the Askariya shrine in Samarra, which was blamed on Sunni extremists with links to al-Qaida, stoked fears of a surge in violence between Muslim sects. A bombing at the same mosque complex in February 2006 that destroyed the shrine's famed golden dome unleashed a bloodbath of reprisals.

Increased U.S. and Iraqi military patrols crisscrossed the streets of the Iraqi capital, and additional checkpoints were set up along roads leading to Sadr City, witnesses said.

Hundreds of residents marched peacefully through the streets of that teeming neighborhood, a stronghold of Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr's Mahdi Army militia. Demonstrations also took place in Kut, Diwaniyah, Najaf and Basra -- all predominantly Shiite cities in the south.

A ban on vehicular traffic was expected to remain in place in Baghdad until Saturday.

Attacks on Sunni mosques began within hours of Wednesday's bombings in Samarra.

Police in the southern city of Basra said Thursday that four people were killed and six wounded in attacks on the Kawaz, Othman, al-Abayshi and Basra Grand mosques on Wednesday, all involving rocket-propelled grenades that also damaged the buildings. Basra is Iraq's second-largest city, 340 miles southeast of Baghdad.

Four Sunni mosques near Baghdad also were attacked or burned within several hours of the Samarra bombings, police said.

One of those mosques, which had been only partly destroyed, was a target again Thursday, police said. Around 4 a.m., attackers broke into the Hateen mosque in Iskandariyah, 30 miles south of Baghdad, and planted bombs inside.

Flames from a huge explosion destroyed most of the building, and a woman and child in a nearby apartment were wounded, an Iskandariyah police officer said on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to release the information.

Gunmen also tried to storm the nearby al-Mustafa mosque early Thursday, and exchanged fire with guards before Iraqi soldiers arrived and stopped them, police said. There were no immediate reports of casualties.

In Mahaweel, 35 miles south of Baghdad, gunmen opened fire on the al-Basheer mosque at dawn Thursday, police said. They forced guards to leave, then set fire to the mosque, a local police officer said on the same condition of anonymity. The building was partly damaged, he said.

The Samarra site contains the tombs of the 10th and 11th imams -- Ali al-Hadi, who died in 868, and his son Hassan al-Askari, who died in 874. Both are descendants of the Prophet Muhammad, and Shiites consider them to be among his successors.

The shrine also is near the place where the 12th imam, Mohammed al-Mahdi, disappeared. Al-Mahdi, known as the ''hidden imam,'' was the son and grandson of the two imams buried in the Askariya shrine. Shiites believe he will return to Earth to restore justice to humanity.

Also Thursday, the U.S. military said it detained 25 suspects in raids against al-Qaida in Iraq over the past two days. One taken into custody near Tarmiyah, 30 miles north of Baghdad, was believed to be a close associate of Omar al-Baghdadi, who heads the al-Qaida front group Islamic State in Iraq.

    Several Mosques Attacked, but Relative Calm in Iraq, NYT, 14.6.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/world/AP-Iraq.html

Editorial

A Failure to Protect Our Troops

June 14, 2007
The New York Times

The Bush administration and military leaders in Washington are always claiming that they will do anything to support American troops fighting in Iraq. That makes it all the more infuriating to learn that, for more than two years, the Pentagon largely ignored urgent requests from field commanders for better armor-protected vehicles that could have saved untold lives and limbs.

Improvised explosive devices, or I.E.D.’s, can blast through the flat underbelly of the military’s standard Humvees, maiming and killing the soldiers within. These devices, a low-tech response to America’s overwhelming military power, are now causing 70 percent to 80 percent of the American combat deaths in Iraq.

More than two years ago, according to newly disclosed documents, Marine commanders in Al Anbar Province, a center of the Sunni insurgency, submitted an urgent request for more than 1,100 Mine Resistant Ambush Protected Vehicles, or MRAPs, that have V-shaped bottoms able to deflect blasts from below. For reasons yet to be satisfactorily explained, military officials initially sat on the request and then ordered relatively few.

Some, second-guessing the judgment of the battlefield commanders, apparently felt that Humvees with upgraded armor could do the job. Others may have been reluctant to invest billions of dollars in vehicles that might have little use after Iraq. Turf battles were probably also a factor, as a large-scale purchase might threaten future weapons programs. But Iraq is the war that Americans are fighting and dying in today.

Only now are Pentagon leaders, prodded by Senator Joseph R. Biden Jr. and other critics on Capitol Hill, rushing to ramp up production. Congress has accelerated funding to buy more than 7,000 of the vehicles by early next year, and the military services are seeking some 21,000 in all, at a cost that could exceed $20 billion. Defense Secretary Robert Gates has declared his determination to “produce as many of these vehicles and get them into the field as fast as possible,” though the precise number needed has yet to be established.

Unfortunately, the MRAPs will remain vulnerable to the deadliest I.E.D.’s, known as “explosively formed penetrators,” which destroy vehicles from the side. The military is looking for ways to add armor to the MRAPs and is testing another new vehicle to counter that threat.

If the small companies that make these vehicles are not able to produce the quantities needed quickly, President Bush and Secretary Gates ought to make this a crash program and enlist major manufacturers.

There can be no excuse for failing to provide the best possible protection for American troops in this disastrous war.

    A Failure to Protect Our Troops, NYT, 14.6.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/14/opinion/14thu1.html

Violence Rising in Much of Iraq, Pentagon Says

June 14, 2007
The New York Times
By DAVID S. CLOUD

WASHINGTON, June 13 — Violence increased throughout much of Iraq in recent months, despite a security crackdown in Baghdad that at least temporarily reduced sectarian killings there, according to a quarterly assessment of security conditions issued Wednesday by the Pentagon.

The report, which analyzed data from February through early May, said it was too early to say whether the security effort in Baghdad would achieve lasting security gains. And it described in more detail than officials had until now how security conditions in other parts of the country had worsened when American and Iraqi forces shifted in large numbers into the capital.

“The aggregate level of violence in Iraq remained relatively unchanged during this reporting period,” the report said. “Violence has decreased” in Baghdad and in Anbar Province, which have long been the country’s most violent areas, “but has increased in most provinces, particularly in outlying areas around Baghdad and in Nineva and Diyala Provinces.” Attacks have also increased in Basra Province in the south, because of fighting between rival Shiite militants, some of whom fled Baghdad because of the security crackdown, it added.

Although precise data are not included in the report, attacks on civilians and Iraqi and American troops increased by 2 percent from the previous quarter, the report said. The average number of attacks has exceeded 1,000 per week since the beginning of this year through early May, the highest level since the American invasion in 2003, it said.

Even the decrease in violence in Baghdad may be temporary, the report noted. Gen. David H. Petraeus and other American commanders have recently confirmed that the number of sectarian killings in Baghdad, while still below levels seen last year, has begun climbing again.

The report also criticized Iraq’s leaders for failing to take advantage of the additional security in Baghdad to reach agreements on draft laws, like measures apportioning oil revenue and setting a timetable for new provincial elections, that the United States says are vital to improve prospects for reconciliation.

“Reaching consensus among a wide array of political factions with competing agendas has proven difficult, and efforts to pass this legislation are progressing more slowly than desired,” the report concluded.

In addition, the average number of Iraqi civilian casualties each day exceeded 100, also a record level. Much of the increase can be attributed to suicide attacks, often involving vehicles packed with explosives, which went up to 58 in March from 26 in January and increased again in April.

American troops are increasingly being attacked by deadly hidden bombs, called explosively formed penetrators, or E.F.P.’s. Attacks using these munitions were at an all-time high in April, the report said.

The 230 American deaths in April and May was the highest total for any two-month period since the war began, and 80 percent of the deaths were caused by makeshift explosives, the highest level ever, up from 50 percent in January.

The Bush administration officials have said they lack evidence that Iran’s top leaders are knowingly involved in sending the bombs into Iraq. But the report directly blames the Quds Force, a militant wing of Iran’s Revolutionary Guards Corps, for giving E.F.P.’s and other aid to Shiite militants in Iraq.

At a news conference on Wednesday, Lt. Gen. Martin Dempsey, who recently finished a two-year tour overseeing the training and equipping of Iraqi forces, said that Iraqi units arriving in Baghdad as part of the security effort were on average at only 75 percent of their mandated strength. He added that one in six Iraqi policemen who had been trained by the Americans had been killed or wounded, had deserted or had otherwise disappeared.

General Dempsey, who is taking over as deputy commander of the Central Command, which has responsibility for Iraq, repeated a concern expressed by other American commanders. He said he believed that the Iraqi security forces would have to be expanded again next year to meet requirements for forces in Baghdad. General Petraeus has previously said 20,000 more Iraqi troops may have to be added.

General Dempsey’s assessment closely tracked that of the Pentagon report released Wednesday. When American officials announced the new Baghdad security plan in January, they said Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki had pledged that his largely Shiite government would not interfere in the security crackdown by limiting where troops could go and which units would be involved.

“To date, operations in Baghdad indicate that Iraqi government delivery on these commitments has been uneven,” the report said. “For example, there have been reports of political involvement by some leaders in tactical and operational decisions that bypass the standard chain of (military) command.”

Asked whether he expected that the next Iraqi units to rotate into Baghdad would be even more thinly staffed and less capable than those in the capital now, General Dempsey replied, “I’m absolutely convinced that’s exactly what we’ll see.”

    Violence Rising in Much of Iraq, Pentagon Says, NYT, 14.6.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/14/washington/14military.html

Iraqi PM Sees Parallels to US Civil War

June 13, 2007
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 12:00 p.m. ET
The New York Times

NEW YORK (AP) -- Iraq's embattled prime minister compared the fight for order in Iraq to the U.S. Civil War almost 150 years ago, saying the current struggle ''is perhaps even more complicated.''

Nouri Al-Maliki's comments in an opinion piece in Wednesday's edition of The Wall Street Journal come as his Shiite-led government faces growing pressure at home and from abroad.

U.S. lawmakers, particularly Democrats, have pushed for a timeline for a withdrawal of U.S. forces, arguing that the government in Baghdad is not moving swiftly enough to stop sectarian violence.

The Bush administration has said a timeline would encourage insurgents to simply wait until foreign forces leave Iraq. But administration officials, faced with mounting domestic opposition to the U.S. troop deployment, are pressing the Iraqi government to hurry the pace of reforms.

Al-Maliki described the two countries as fighting for the principles of freedom, in battles that claimed hundreds of thousands of lives.

''Our struggle in Iraq is similar to the great American quest, and is perhaps even more complicated,'' he wrote.

''A fundamental struggle is being fought on Iraqi soil between those who believe that Iraqis, after a long nightmare, can retrieve their dignity and freedom, and others who think that oppression is the order of things and that Iraqis are doomed to a political culture of terror, prisons and mass graves,'' al-Maliki said.

He said one key reform, the much-anticipated and much-delayed oil law, is ''well on its way'' to being approved. The law would divide revenues among provinces based on their share of the total population -- a nod to Sunni Arabs who feared being cut off from the country's main revenue source by the Shiites and Kurds who control Iraq's oil-producing regions.

He added that the national budget this year is the largest in Iraq's history.

''Our path has been made difficult by the saboteurs and the terrorists who target our infrastructure and our people,'' he said.

On Wednesday, bombers destroyed the two minarets of a revered Shiite shrine, triggering fears of a new burst of sectarian fighting. The Askariya shrine had also been targeted in a 2006 bombing that shattered its golden dome -- an attack that unleashed a wave of retaliatory violence between Shiite and Sunni Muslims.

Al-Maliki also described the difficulties of recovering from the earlier destruction created by the regime of Saddam Hussein.

''Today when I hear the continuous American debate about the struggle raging in Iraq, I can only recall with great sorrow the silence which attended the former dictator's wars,'' al-Maliki wrote.

But he added that he understands and even admires the current American debate over the war in Iraq. ''I harbor no resentment and fully understand that the basic concerns of Americans are the safety of their young people fighting in our country and the national interests of their society.''

Stressing his admiration for the importance of liberty in America, he asked for the chance to let Iraq pursue the same, in a struggle to free the country not only from warring militias but from ''regional powers that have reached into our affairs.''

''We will not permit Iraq to be a battleground for other powers,'' al-Maliki concluded. ''In the contests and ambitions swirling around Iraq, we are neutral and dedicated to our country's right to prosperity and a new life, inspired by a memory of a time when Baghdad was -- as Washington is today -- a beacon on enlightenment on which others gazed with admiration.''

    Iraqi PM Sees Parallels to US Civil War, NYT, 13.6.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/us/AP-US-Iraq-Prime-Minister.html

A Look at Shiite Shrine in Samarra

June 13, 2007
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 9:22 a.m. ET
The New York Times

BAGHDAD (AP) -- The Askariya Shrine in Samarra is among Iraq's most sacred sites for Shiite Muslims and was famous for its towering golden dome, which was destroyed in a bombing last year blamed on Sunni militants linked to al-Qaida. Similar factions are believed responsible for blasts that brought down the shrine's two minarets Wednesday.

The shrine contains the tombs of the 10th and 11th Shiite imams who lived more than 1,200 years ago, Ali al-Hadi and his son, Hassan al-Askari. The compound also is near the place where the last of the 12 Shiite imams, Mohammed al-Mahdi, disappeared. Al-Mahdi, known as the ''hidden imam,'' was the son and grandson of the two imams buried in the Askariya shrine. Many Shiites believe al-Mahdi will return as a savior.

The landmark golden dome was completed in 1905.

Samarra, about 60 miles north of Baghdad, one of the four Shiite holy cities in Iraq. The city is also the site of the 9th-century Great Mosque with a 170-foot spiral minaret that is one of the most recognized landmarks in Iraq.

    A Look at Shiite Shrine in Samarra, NYT, 13.6.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/world/AP-Iraq-Mosque.html

Minarets Destroyed at Shiite Shrine in Iraq

June 13, 2007
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 6:56 a.m. ET
The New York Times

BAGHDAD (AP) -- Suspected al-Qaida insurgents on Wednesday destroyed the two minarets of the Askariya Shiite shrine in Samarra, authorities reported, in a repeat of a 2006 bombing that shattered its famous Golden Dome and unleashed a wave of retaliatory sectarian violence that still bloodies Iraq.

Police said the attack at about 9 a.m. involved explosives and brought down the two minarets, which had flanked the dome's ruins. No casualties were reported.

The attack immediately stirred fears of a new explosion of Sunni-Shiite bloodshed. State television said Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki quickly imposed an indefinite curfew on vehicle traffic and large gatherings in Baghdad as of 3 p.m. Wednesday.

The Iraqi leader also met with the U.S. commander in Iraq to ask that American reinforcements be sent into Samarra to help head off new violence in the flashpoint city 60 miles north of Baghdad, al-Maliki's office said.

Al-Maliki's Dawa Party issued a statement blaming al-Qaida for attempting to ''burn Iraq with the fire of sectarian strife'' and calling for an immediate investigation.

''We call upon our Iraqi people to exercise self-restraint and not be dragged into reactions like those planned by the killers,'' it said.

A U.S. military official in northern Iraq confirmed that the towers were destroyed, and said Samarra remained calm by early afternoon Wednesday. He spoke on condition of anonymity because he wasn't authorized to release the information.

The powerful blasts shook the town, sending a cloud of dust billowing into the air, said Imad Nagi, a storeowner 100 yards from the shrine. ''After the dust settled, I couldn't see the minarets any more. So, I closed the shop quickly and went home.''

It wasn't immediately clear how the attackers evaded the shrine's guard force, which had been strengthened after the 2006 bombing.

Later, the U.S. military released a statement saying ''the Iraqi police on site described hearing two near-simultaneous explosions coming from inside of the mosque compound, but they did not see any attackers in the vicinity.''

The Askariya shrine's dome was destroyed on Feb. 22, 2006, in a bombing blamed on Sunni Muslim militants believed linked to al-Qaida. The mosque compound and minarets had remained intact but closed after that bombing.

Iraq has been plagued by violence since the war started in 2003, but the carefully orchestrated 2006 explosion, in which suspected al-Qaida assailants wearing uniforms set off two bombs, touched a nerve. The bombing unleashed Shiite militias, who ignored appeals for calm and instead attacked Sunni clerics and mosques. Nearly 140 people were killed the next day.

In the aftermath of Wednesday's explosions, police in the shrine area began firing into the air to keep people away, witnesses said, and Iraqi army and police reinforcements poured in. A national police force under command of a major general was ordered to move immediately to Samarra, said an Interior Ministry official.

Black banners were hoisted outside the Najaf residence of radical Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr, who held a news conference to call for a three-day mourning period to mark the minarets' destruction and criticized the government for not doing enough to protect the site.

Al-Sadr also called for peaceful demonstrations following the blasts ''to show that the only enemy of Iraq is the occupation and that's why everyone must demand its departure or scheduling its presence.''

Al-Sadr uses the word ''occupation'' to refer to the presence of U.S. troops in Iraq.

Meanwhile, some 200 protesters marched to the house of Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, Iraq's top Shiite cleric, denouncing Wednesday's bombing. They carried pictures of the Iranian-born cleric and Abdul-Aziz al-Hakim, leader of Iraq's largest Shiite party and a close ally of al-Sistani.

In neighboring Iran, which has been accused of funding and arming Shiite militias in Iraq, President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad blamed U.S. forces for failing to prevent the mosque attack, and threatened to halt regional cooperation to stop Iraq's spiraling violence.

''You, by supporting theses activities, will be cornered,'' Iranian state television quoted Ahmadinejad as addressing the ''occupiers of Iraq.''

Police imposed an indefinite curfew on the Sunni city, located 60 miles north of Baghdad, amid fears the bombing might further inflame the sectarian hatreds that swept Baghdad and other areas of Iraq in the months that followed the destruction of the shrine's dome.

The execution-style killings largely blamed on Shiite militias had begun to decline in February, at the start of a major U.S.-Iraqi security push to pacify Baghdad, but the numbers have seen a recent rise as the bombings continued.

But while the numbers of people killed are down in Baghdad, violence has been on the rise elsewhere in Iraq after militants fled the security operation.

The United Nations warned earlier this week that the ''situation in Iraq remains precarious.''

''Insurgent attacks persist and civilian casualties continue to mount,'' the report read. ''While there was a brief lull in the level of sectarian violence early in the reporting period, it now appears that militia forces are resuming their activities, including targeted killings and kidnappings,'' the U.N. said in a report on Iraq covering the period from early March to early June.

After Wednesday's bombing, al-Maliki, a Shiite, went into urgent talks with Saleh al-Haidari, chairman of the Shiite Waqf, the government agency that looks after Shiite mosques and religious schools, according to officials in al-Maliki's office.

He later met with the interior and defense ministers, along with other top advisers and security commanders to discuss measures to contain any possible explosion of sectarian violence following the bombing, al-Maliki's office said.

The Askariya mosque contains the tombs of the 10th and 11th imams -- Ali al-Hadi, who died in 868, and his son Hassan Askariya, who died in 874. Both are descendants of the Prophet Muhammad, and Shiites consider them to be among his successors.

The shrine also is near the place where the 12th imam, Mohammed al-Mahdi, disappeared. Al-Mahdi, known as the ''hidden imam,'' was the son and grandson of the two imams buried in the Askariya shrine. Shiites believe he will return to Earth restore justice to humanity.

After last year's bombing, the mosque was guarded by about 60 Federal Protection Service forces and 25 local Iraqi police who kept watch on the perimeter, according to Samarra city officials.

In the immediate aftermath of that bombing, U.S. officials and others had promised to help rebuild the landmark dome, completed in 1905, but no rebuilding has begun.

In other violence Wednesday, Iraqi police said suspected militants blew up part of a bridge in northern Iraq in the country's fourth bridge attack in as many days.

Wednesday's bridge attack targeted the Zikaytoon overpass southwest of Kirkuk, 180 miles north of Baghdad. Suspected insurgents planted explosives under the bridge, and the blast went off around 6 a.m., said police Brig. Sarhat Qader. Part of the bridge was destroyed, but no one was injured, Qader said.

Also Wednesday, a suicide bomber blew himself up at a police station near the Iranian border, killing five Iraqi policemen and wounding 10, the town's mayor said.

The state-owned al-Sabah newspaper issued a news release saying that its editor-in-chief, Flayeh Wadi Mijdab, had been kidnapped. Unknown gunmen ambushed Mijdab in eastern Baghdad on Wednesday morning as he was heading to work, police said. His 25-year-old son and driver were left behind, police added.

Associated Press Writer Abdul-Hussein Al-Obeidi in Najaf, Iraq contributed to this report.

    Minarets Destroyed at Shiite Shrine in Iraq, NYT, 13.6.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/world/AP-Iraq.html

U.S. Toll Tops 3, 500 in Iraq

June 7, 2007
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 3:14 p.m. ET
The New York Times

BAGHDAD (AP) -- Another U.S. soldier was killed by a roadside bomb in Iraq, the military said Thursday, pushing the four-year death toll for American forces to 3,501, according to an Associated Press tally.

The count includes 23 deaths in the first six days of June, an average of about four per day.

The soldier was killed Wednesday when a roadside bomb exploded during combat operations in a southwestern section of Baghdad, a military statement said. It added that two other soldiers were wounded in the attack and evacuated to a coalition medical facility.

The soldiers' names were withheld pending notification of relatives.

The Bush administration has warned that the current troop buildup in and around Baghdad will result in more U.S. casualties as American troops increasingly come into contact with enemy forces.

Brig. Gen. Kevin J. Bergner told reporters Wednesday that the last of five brigades earmarked for the buildup will arrive in the ''next couple of weeks,'' but may take up to two months to establish itself as fully operational.

Meanwhile, bombers struck across the country again Thursday, from a restaurant in Baghdad's teeming Sadr City to a police station leveled by a blast near the Syrian border. At least 15 people were reported killed.

In the capital's eastern Sadr City district, a Shiite Muslim stronghold, a bomb beneath a parked car exploded at lunchtime outside a falafel restaurant, police reported. At least three people were killed and eight wounded, said a police officer, speaking on condition of anonymity because he wasn't authorized to release the information.

Sadr City has been repeatedly targeted by Sunni extremists seeking to terrorize the Shiite majority and inflame hostilities between the Muslim sects.

Earlier, in the day's first reported attack, a suicide bomber blew up his explosives-laden truck at about 9 a.m. at a police station in Rabia, near Iraq's border with Syria, killing at least four policemen and five civilians, and wounding 22 other people, an Iraqi army spokesman said.

A guard shot the driver as he approached the building, but the truck still penetrated its blast walls and exploded, destroying the one-story structure, said Capt. Mohammed Ahmed of the army's Third Division. Rabia is 50 miles west of Mosul and about three miles from Syria.

An hour later, in Ramadi, 70 miles west of Baghdad, police said three policemen were killed and four wounded when a suicide driver blew up his automobile at their checkpoint near the traffic police headquarters.

U.S. military spokesman Maj. Jeff Pool disputed the report and offered different details, saying Iraqi police foiled the attack by shooting at a dump truck, causing it to explode. He said several civilians were wounded, but nobody was killed except the attacker.

In other attacks Thursday, mortar shells landing in two districts of western Baghdad killed two civilians and wounded 12 others, police reported.

On the offensive early Thursday, a joint Iraqi-American force raided locations in Baghdad's Sadr City and detained 16 suspected members of a ''secret cell terrorist network'' believed helping transport weapons, including advanced roadside bombs, from Iran to Iraq, the U.S. command reported.

An Iraqi police officer said two on-duty policemen in the area were wounded by random fire from the raiding party.

At midday, in another incident, an exploding roadside bomb targeting a U.S. patrol wounded two Iraqi civilians in the Neiriya area of eastern Baghdad, and two others were wounded when the Americans opened fire randomly at the scene, an Iraqi police officer said.

All the Iraqi police officers spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to release the information and feared repercussions.

The U.S. command press information center said it had no immediate information on the casualties in those two incidents.

In another development, the British ambassador to Iraq, Dominic Asquith, issued an appeal to the kidnappers of five Britons, held since May 29, to release them or open negotiations.

The five -- four security guards and a consultant -- were abducted from the Iraqi Finance Ministry by some 40 heavily armed men who then rode off with them in the direction of Sadr City.

Iraqi officials have said they believe they were taken by the radical Shiite Mahdi Army militia, possibly in retaliation for the killing by British forces of the militia's commander in the southern city of Basra.

''I ask those holding them to release them so they may return to their families,'' Asquith said. Then, in a clear offer to consider demands, he added, ''We have people here in Iraq who are ready to listen to any person about this incident, or any person who may be holding these men and who may wish to communicate.''

Much of the Mahdi Army is believed loyal to Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr, who said Thursday that he maintains ''friendship and good relations'' with Iran but rejects any interference by Tehran in Iraq's affairs.

Al-Sadr made the comments in an interview on Iraqi state television, nearly two weeks after he re-emerged in public after dropping out of sight amid a U.S.-Iraqi security crackdown nearly four months ago.

The anti-American cleric dodged a question about his disappearance from public view during which he was believed to have been in Iran. But he said he rejected Iranian interference in Iraqi affairs.

''I must maintain friendship and good relations with Iran but nothing else,'' he said.

The Mahdi Army, which fought U.S. forces in 2004, has been blamed for many of the Sunni-Shiite sectarian attacks in Iraq. The U.S. accuses Iran of fueling the violence by providing weapons and training fighters.

    U.S. Toll Tops 3, 500 in Iraq, NYT, 7.6.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/world/AP-Iraq.html

Iraqi Group Makes Video Related to Abduction of 3 G.I.'s

June 4, 2007
The New York Times
By JON ELSEN and CHRISTINE HAUSER

An insurgent group that claims responsibility for the seizure of three American soldiers in an ambush in Iraq last month has made a video related to the attack, including images of identification cards belonging to the two soldiers who are still missing.

The Islamic State of Iraq, an umbrella group of insurgent groups including Al Qaeda that made the video, said it plans to post the video on the Internet, according to the SITE Institute, which tracks jihadist Web sites.

A copy of the video shows the identification cards for the two missing soldiers, Specialist Alex R. Jimenez, 25, of Lawrence, Mass. and Pvt. Byron W. Fouty, 19, of Waterford, Mich.

The body of the third seized soldier, Pfc. Joseph J. Anzack Jr., 20, of Torrance, Calif., was found in the Euphrates River on May 23, 11 days after the ambush in which they were taken. Four other Americans and an Iraqi soldier were killed in the ambush.

The video, which runs for more than 10 minutes, also shows credit cards, American cash and other currency; a handgun; a watch; and a metal cross. A narrator is heard saying the items were taken from the American soldiers.

“Some of the booty of the mujahideen from the Americans,” a caption in the video said.

The narrator says President Bush and his policies are the reason the soldiers were seized, and mentions the extensive search by American and Iraqi forces for the missing men.

The video includes images that are said to be of the attack when the American soldiers were seized. In a shaky segment filmed in low light, a trembling voice, apparently that of the camera operator, is heard amid the sounds of machinegun fire, beseeching Allah to grant the attackers victory.

It also includes scenes of a group of men wearing black masks, standing or kneeling in the woods, with what is described as one of their leaders organizing them into groups and briefing them on the terrain in preparation for the attack. And it incorporates television news reports on the attack itself and on the subsequent search by thousands of American and Iraqi troops.

Lt. Col. Christopher Garver, an American military spokesman in Baghdad, said the military would review the video. “We would not want a video like that released, for the sensitivity of the families,” he said. “No one likes to see the soldiers used as propaganda tools by Al Qaeda or affiliated groups.”

The body of Private Anzack was recovered about 40 miles south of Baghdad, near Musayyib and 20 to 25 miles south of Mahmudiya, in an area known to be a safe haven for Sunni insurgents.

Damien Cave contributed reporting from Baghdad.

    Iraqi Group Makes Video Related to Abduction of 3 G.I.'s, NYT, 4.6.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/04/world/middleeast/04cnd-Iraq.html

Commanders Say Push in Baghdad Is Short of Goal

June 4, 2007
The New York Times
By DAVID S. CLOUD and DAMIEN CAVE

BAGHDAD, June 3 — Three months after the start of the Baghdad security plan that has added thousands of American and Iraqi troops to the capital, they control fewer than one-third of the city’s neighborhoods, far short of the initial goal for the operation, according to some commanders and an internal military assessment.

The American assessment, completed in late May, found that American and Iraqi forces were able to “protect the population” and “maintain physical influence over” only 146 of the 457 Baghdad neighborhoods.

In the remaining 311 neighborhoods, troops have either not begun operations aimed at rooting out insurgents or still face “resistance,” according to the one-page assessment, which was provided to The New York Times and summarized reports from brigade and battalion commanders in Baghdad.

The assessment offers the first comprehensive look at the progress of the effort to stabilize Baghdad with the heavy influx of additional troops. The last remaining American units in the troop increase are just now arriving.

Violence has diminished in many areas, but it is especially chronic in mixed Shiite-Sunni neighborhoods in western Baghdad, several senior officers said. Over all, improvements have not yet been as widespread or lasting across Baghdad, they acknowledged.

The operation “is at a difficult point right now, to be sure,” said Brig. Gen. Vincent K. Brooks, the deputy commander of the First Cavalry Division, which has responsibility for Baghdad.

In an interview, he said that while military planners had expected to make greater gains by now, that has not been possible in large part because Iraqi police and army units, which were expected to handle basic security tasks, like manning checkpoints and conducting patrols, have not provided all the forces promised, and in some cases have performed poorly.

That is forcing American commanders to conduct operations to remove insurgents from some areas multiple times. The heavily Shiite security forces have also repeatedly failed to intervene in some areas when fighters, who fled or laid low when the American troops arrived, resumed sectarian killings.

“Until you have the ability to have a presence on the street by people who are seen as honest and who are not letting things come back in,” said General Brooks, referring to the Iraqi police units, “you can’t shift into another area and expect that place to stay the way it was.”

When planners devised the Baghdad security plan late last year, they had assumed most Baghdad neighborhoods would be under control around July, according to a senior American military officer, so the emphasis could shift into restoring services and rebuilding the neighborhoods as the summer progressed.

“We were way too optimistic,” said the officer, adding that September is now the goal for establishing basic security in most neighborhoods, the same month that Bush administration officials have said they plan to review the progress of the plan.

Lt. Gen. Raymond T. Odierno, the senior American ground commander in Iraq, said in a brief interview that he never believed that a midsummer timetable for establishing security in Baghdad was realistic. “This was always going to be conditions-driven,” he said, noting that he always had expected it would take until fall to establish security across much of the city.

But in order to meet that timetable, he added, the Iraqi Security Forces would have to make strides in coming months at maintaining security. “Ultimately the I.S.F., and specifically the police, are the key to holding an area,” he said. “We have to within the next four months move them more toward holding the areas we have cleared.”

The last of the five combat brigades ordered to Iraq as reinforcements as part of the security plan will increase the number of American troops in the city to around 30,000, up from 21,000 before the operation, an American officer said.

In addition, around 30,000 Iraqi Army and national police forces and another 21,000 policemen have been deployed in Baghdad. Many of the Iraqi units have turned up at less than full strength and other units have been redeployed from the capital, General Brooks said, leaving fewer than expected.

American commanders have also had to send troops outside the capital, to deal with a sharp rise in violence in Diyala Province and to search for American soldiers kidnapped south of the capital.

In some parts of the city, commanders have yet to attempt large-scale clearing operations. For example, American forces have moved into only a small portion of Sadr City, the vast slum on the city’s east side that is a Shiite stronghold.

Sending large number of troops in there could incite heavy violence and opposition from Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki’s largely Shiite government, several officers said.

The problems facing American troops are illustrated in troubled western Baghdad. In the Rashid district there, the First Battalion, Fourth Brigade of the First Infantry Division has been working since March to carry out the security push.

When the battalion, commanded by Lt. Col. Patrick Frank, moved in, it was replacing a lone American Army company of 125 soldiers. Yet even with three times as many soldiers patrolling the area, violence has worsened. Last month, 249 bodies were found in the sector, up from 98 the month Colonel Frank arrived, according to statistics compiled by the battalion.

Lately, his troops have been hit by a wave of roadside bomb attacks that have killed five of them and wounded 13 others. “We have a tough fight ahead of us,” he said.

The district includes Ameel, Baya, Jihad and Furat, mostly mixed Sunni-Shiite neighborhoods abutting the road to the Baghdad airport where his troops have established three patrol bases. Before the new strategy, there were none.

The area, a mixture of poorer urban slums and middle-class dwellings, once home to many retired professionals, has been troubled for years. Violence dipped there and across the city in the first months of the year, but has since worsened.

Militants, many associated with the Mahdi Army of the Shiite cleric Moktada al-Sadr, have resumed a push to drive Sunnis from their few enclaves, American commanders said. One of the area’s last Sunni mosques was bombed Wednesday.

“This area used to be primarily Sunni, but in the last six months Jaish al-Mahdi has conducted essentially a cleansing campaign,” said Colonel Frank, using the Arabic name for the Mahdi Army.

In addition to carrying out sectarian killings, the Mahdi Army controls two of the area’s three gas stations, which refuse to sell to most Sunnis. Gunmen regularly attacked trash trucks when they entered Sunni areas until the American military began providing security. Sunni homes are also the targets of arson attacks if their occupants fail to heed warnings to leave, he said.

Sunni insurgents have fought back as well, with two large car bomb attacks in largely Shiite sections of Baya and Ameel that killed more than 60 people, officers said.

The sectarian violence was especially disheartening to some American officers because it occurred in May, the same month that they were undertaking the centerpiece of the Baghdad security plan — a neighborhood clearing operation.

The battalion’s troops, augmented by more than 2,000 soldiers in armored Stryker vehicles, went block by block through the neighborhood, arresting suspected insurgents and destroying arms caches.

But since the Stryker unit has moved on to a different area of Baghdad, “there’s been a reinfiltration” by Shiite fighters and intimidation squads, who had left the area when the operation began, said Capt. Tim Wright, the company commander responsible for the neighborhood.

In addition to the dumped bodies being found every day, more Sunni families are departing. Soon, he said, they may all be gone.

Colonel Frank, of Cuba, N.Y., who served a previous Iraq tour in Mosul in 2003 with the 101st Airborne Division, said his forces were having some success in neighboring Ameel at keeping sectarian violence under control. Thirty Sunni families have returned to the neighborhood recently, he said.

But American officers worry that many members of the largely Shiite police force sympathize or collaborate with the Mahdi Army.

The local commander of the Iraqi national police, a force run by the Shiite-run Interior Ministry, has been replaced three times since March.

One of those commanders, Col. Nadir al-Jabouri, a Shiite described by Colonel Frank as the most aggressive and even-handed Iraqi officer he had seen. But he was detained in late March by the Interior Ministry and accused of having ties to insurgents.

“He was not a protector of the people; he was a terrorist,” said Col. Vhafir Kader Jowda, his Shiite replacement.

American patrols have been attacked in a wave of deadly bombings recently, sometimes within sight of police checkpoints, officers said.

Ten soldiers under Colonel Frank’s command have been killed since March. At least eight of the recent attacks in the area have used explosively formed penetrators, or E.F.P.’s, powerful bombs able to pierce armored Humvees.

When Colonel Frank went to the Ameel police station recently accompanied by a reporter and asked for help in capturing a local Shiite sheik believed to be behind the bombings, the police official he was meeting with spoke in a whisper. “They listen to us,” he said, pointing to a ventilation grill on his wall. “I am in danger just by meeting with you.”

A few weeks earlier, angered by the attacks on his soldiers, Colonel Frank ordered a video camera hidden near an abandoned swimming pool along a main road in Ameel, near a police checkpoint, where patrols had been hit repeatedly.

When the video was examined after another attack, it showed two Iraqi policemen talking with companions, who were heard off-camera, apparently laying an explosive device. Minutes after the policemen were seen driving away, the camera showed a powerful bomb detonating as an American Humvee came into view.

The video of the attack, which just missed the vehicle and caused no casualties, was shown to a reporter from The New York Times.

After police commanders were confronted with the video in mid-May, six Iraqi officers were arrested, Colonel Frank said.

But the episode has not been forgotten. At a weekly meeting where military commanders and police chiefs sit around a horseshoe-shaped conference table at one of the American bases, Capt. Adel Fakry, the Ameel police commander, complained that American soldiers on patrol were showing “distrust” toward his officers.

“The reason there is distrust,” Colonel Frank responded, his voice rising, “is because I have a video of six Iraqi officers placing a bomb against my soldiers, and they came from your station.”

There had been “some mistakes,” Captain Fakry responded, looking taken aback by the confrontation. Not all of the six officers were from his station, he added before ending the conversation by flipping open his cellphone and making a call while the meeting continued.

The same distrust has hampered relations throughout Baghdad since the strategy began. In Shula, a neighborhood just east of Kadhimiya, north of Rashid, American troops in March discovered a group of Iraqis in police uniforms setting up an E.F.P. near a bridge. They were using police vehicles to provide cover.

The American soldiers killed two of the bomb planters. They later discovered that one had a badge granting him wide access to the Green Zone, the fortified area in central Baghdad where the American Embassy and most Iraqi government buildings are situated.

“That’s the level of penetration that these guys have,” said Lt. Col. Steven M. Miska, deputy commander of the Second Brigade, First Infantry Division, which is charged with controlling northwestern Baghdad.

    Commanders Say Push in Baghdad Is Short of Goal, NYT, 4.6.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/04/world/middleeast/04surge.html?hp

Marine Vet Faces Hearing Over Protest

May 31, 2007
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 3:32 a.m. ET
The New York Times

KANSAS CITY, Mo. (AP) -- An Iraq war veteran could lose his honorable discharge status after being photographed wearing fatigues at an anti-war protest.

Marine Cpl. Adam Kokesh and other veterans marked the fourth anniversary of the war in Iraq in April by wearing their uniforms -- with military insignia removed -- and roaming around the nation's capital on a mock patrol.

After Kokesh was identified in a photo cutline in The Washington Post, a superior officer sent him a letter saying he might have violated a rule prohibiting troops from wearing uniforms without authorization.

Kokesh, a member of Iraq Veterans Against the War, responded with an obscenity.

Now, a military panel has been scheduled to meet with Kokesh on Monday to decide whether his discharge status should be changed from ''honorable'' to ''other than honorable.''

''This is clearly a case of selective prosecution and intimidation of veterans who speak out against the war,'' Kokesh said. ''To suggest that while as a veteran you don't have freedom of speech is absurd.''

Kokesh is part of the Individual Ready Reserve, a segment of the reserves that consists mainly of those who have left active duty but still have time remaining on their eight-year military obligations.

His attorney, Mike Lebowitz, said Kokesh's IRR status ends June 18. He said at least three other veterans have been investigated because of their involvement at demonstrations.

Kokesh, 25, enlisted in the Marines while still attending high school in New Mexico. He was a reservist in an artillery unit, assigned to the November Battery, 5th Battalion, 14th Regiment of the 4th Division based out of Pico Rivera, Calif., near Los Angeles.

Kokesh said he had reservations about Iraq even before the United States invaded, but wanted to go there to help rebuild schools and mosques after Saddam Hussein's regime was toppled. He even learned Arabic.

He said he grew disillusioned with the war during his first tour, and now believes there is no way for the country to achieve the rule of law with a foreign military imposing martial law.

He was supposed to go to Iraq a second time, but was demoted from sergeant to corporal and not allowed to return after it was learned that he brought a pistol back after his first tour in 2004.

Kokesh argues that he was not representing the military at the protest in Washington, and he made that clear by removing his name tag and other military insignia from his uniform.

Lebowitz said Kokesh technically is a civilian unless recalled to active duty and had the right to be disrespectful in his response to the officer. He called the proceedings against Kokesh highly unusual and said the military usually seeks to change a veteran's discharge status only if a crime has been committed.

If his discharge status is changed, Kokesh said he could lose some health benefits and be forced to repay about $10,800 he received to obtain his undergraduate degree on the GI Bill.

Kokesh said he holds no ill will toward the Marines.

''I love the Marine Corps,'' he said. ''I always have loved the Marine Corps, and that is why I'm particularly offended to see it being used for political ends.''

    Marine Vet Faces Hearing Over Protest, NYT, 31.5.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/us/AP-Military-Protest-Hearing.html

Bush Sees South Korea Model for Iraq

May 31, 2007
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 1:46 a.m. ET
The New York Times

WASHINGTON (AP) -- President Bush envisions a long-term U.S. troop presence in Iraq similar to the one in South Korea where American forces have helped keep an uneasy peace for more than 50 years, the White House said Wednesday.

The comparison was offered as the Pentagon announced the completion of the troop buildup ordered by Bush in January. The last of about 21,500 combat troops to arrive were an Army brigade in Baghdad and a Marine unit heading into the Anbar province in western Iraq.

Brig. Gen. Perry Wiggins, deputy director of operations for the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said there are now 20 combat brigades in Iraq, up from 15 when the buildup began. A brigade is roughly 3,500 troops. Overall, the Pentagon said there are 150,000 U.S. troops in Iraq. That number may still climb as more support troops move in.

The administration warns that the buildup will result in more U.S. casualties as more American soldiers come into contact with enemy forces. May already is the third bloodiest month since the war began in March 2003. As of late Tuesday, there were 116 U.S. deaths in Iraq so far in May -- trailing only the 137 in November 2004 and the 135 in April 2004. Overall, more than 3,460 U.S. service members have died.

Presidential spokesman Tony Snow said Bush has cited the long-term Korea analogy in looking at the U.S. role in Iraq, where American forces are in the fifth year of an unpopular war. Bush's goal is for Iraqi forces to take over the chief security responsibilities, relieving U.S. forces of frontline combat duty, Snow said.

''I think the point he's trying to make is that the situation in Iraq, and indeed, the larger war on terror, are things that are going to take a long time,'' Snow said. ''But it is not always going to require an up-front combat presence.''

Instead, he said, U.S. troops would provide ''the so-called over-the-horizon support that is necessary from time to time to come to the assistance of the Iraqis. But you do not want the United States forever in the front.''

The comparison with South Korea paints a picture of a lengthy U.S. commitment at a time when Americans have grown weary of the Iraq war and want U.S. troops to start coming home. Bush vetoed legislation that would set timetables for U.S. troop withdrawals, and forced Congress to approve a new bill stripped of troop pullout language.

Asked if U.S. forces would be permanently stationed in Iraq, Snow said, ''No, not necessarily.'' He said that the prospect of permanent U.S. bases in Iraq were ''not necessarily the case, either.''

Later, Snow said it was impossible to say if U.S. troops would remain in Iraq for some 50 years, as they have in South Korea. ''I don't know,'' he said. ''It is an unanswerable question. But I'm not making that suggestion. ... The war on terror is a long war.''

South Korea is just one example of U.S. troops stationed more than a half-century after war. Germany and Japan are two other examples. American forces are deployed in roughly 130 countries around the world, performing a variety of duties from combat to peacekeeping to training foreign militaries, according to GlobalSecurity.org, a defense-oriented think tank.

In South Korea, about 29,500 U.S. troops are stationed as a deterrent against the communist North, but that number is to decline to 24,500 by 2008 as part of the Pentagon's worldwide realignment of its forces. The two Koreas remain technically at war since the 1950-53 Korean War ended in a cease-fire, not a peace treaty.

Adm. William Fallon, the top U.S. commander in the Middle East, seemed a surprising choice when he got the job earlier this year, yet his experience as U.S. commander in the Pacific overseeing the Korean peninsula would serve him well if the U.S. military adopts a Korea model in Iraq.

AP writer Lolita C. Baldor contributed to this report from the Pentagon.

    Bush Sees South Korea Model for Iraq, NYT, 31.5.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/us/AP-Bush-Iraq.html

Strife in North Iraq as Sunni Arabs Drive Out Kurds

May 30, 2007
The New York Times
By EDWARD WONG

MOSUL, Iraq — The letter tossed into Mustafa Abu Bakr Muhammad’s front yard got right to the point.

“You will be killed,” it read, for collaborating with the Kurdish militias. Then came the bullet through a window at night.

A cousin had already been gunned down. So Mr. Muhammad and three generations of his family joined tens of thousands of other Kurds who have fled growing ethnic violence by Sunni Arab insurgents here and moved east, to the safety of Iraqi Kurdistan.

“We had our home in Mosul and it was good there, but things are now very bad between Arabs and Kurds,” said Mr. Muhammad, 70, standing outside his new, scorpion-infested cinderblock house in the nearby town of Khabat.

While the American military is trying to tamp down the vicious fighting between rival Arab sects in Baghdad, conflict between Arabs and Kurds is intensifying here, adding another dimension to Iraq’s civil war. Sunni Arab militants, reinforced by insurgents fleeing the new security plan in Baghdad, are trying to rid Mosul of its Kurdish population through violence and intimidation, Kurdish officials said.

Mosul, Iraq’s third largest city, with a population of 1.8 million, straddles the Tigris River on a grassy, windswept plain in the country’s north. It was recently estimated to be about a quarter Kurdish, but Sunni Arabs have already driven out at least 70,000 Kurds and virtually erased the Kurdish presence from the city’s western half, said Khasro Goran, the deputy governor of surrounding Nineveh Province and a Kurd.

The militants “view this as a Sunni-dominated town, and they view the Kurds as encroaching on Mosul,” said Col. Stephen Twitty, commander of the Fourth Brigade, First Cavalry Division, which is deployed in Nineveh. Some Kurdish and Christian enclaves remain on the east side, though their numbers are dwindling. Kurdish officials say the flight has accelerated in recent months, contributing to the wider ethnic and religious partitioning that is taking place all over Iraq.

Nineveh is Iraq’s most diverse province, with a dizzying array of ethnic and religious groups woven into an area about the size of Maryland. For centuries, Arabs, Kurds, Christians, Turkmens, Yezidis and Shabaks lived side by side in these verdant hills, going to the same schools, bartering in the same markets, even intermarrying on occasion.

But what took generations to build is starting to unravel in the shadow of the Sunni Arab insurgency, which is tapping into several wells of ethnic resentment.

Already embittered at the toppling of the Sunni Arab government of Saddam Hussein, insurgents here have been further enraged by their current political disenfranchisement, a result of their boycotting the 2005 elections. The main Kurdish coalition now holds 31 of 41 seats on the provincial council and all the top executive positions, even though Kurds make up only 35 percent of the province. Most Kurds are of the Sunni sect, but they have little in common with the Arabs.

Sunni Arabs have asked for new provincial elections and are growing frustrated that the Shiite- and Kurdish-dominated national government seems to be ignoring their requests.

“We demanded elections a year ago, but it never happened,” said Muhammad Shakir, the local leader of the Iraqi Islamic Party, the province’s most prominent Sunni Arab political group. “The current council does not represent the governorate.”

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Some officials in the national government say conditions will not permit provincial elections until next year.

Just as worrisome for the Arabs is a growing push by the autonomous region of Iraqi Kurdistan to annex large swaths of eastern and northern Nineveh. A contentious measure in the Constitution gives the regional Kurdish government the right to take the land by the end of 2007 through a popular referendum.

The parts of the province that Iraqi Kurdistan wants are called the “disputed territories” along its border, areas that were historically Kurdish until Saddam Hussein moved in Arabs and forced out half a million Kurds to strengthen Arab control, Kurdish officials say.

Mr. Goran, the deputy governor, said six of Nineveh’s nine districts — with at least 30 percent of the province’s 2.7 million people — could vote to join Iraqi Kurdistan. Before the vote is held, however, the Iraqi government must find a way to move out the Arab settlers and move back the original Kurdish residents. Some of this relocation has already taken place, but many more original residents still need to return, Mr. Goran said.

If the vote is put off, he said, violence will soar even further between Kurds and Arabs as each group struggles for the land. “This is a good time to solve the problem,” he said, “because if not, we will open another front in the north between Kurds and Arabs.”

To ensure control of the lands, the Kurdish parties are encouraging settlers to move to eastern Nineveh, just as they have been doing in disputed areas in Diyala Province and around the oil-rich city of Kirkuk. Kurdish militias have also been operating in Nineveh and the streets of Mosul, stoking Sunni Arab fears of Kurdish domination, Colonel Twitty said.

The violence here against the Kurds and other minorities is vicious and unrelenting, Kurdish and American officials say. More than 1,000 Kurdish civilians have recently been killed in Mosul, and at least two or three are gunned down each day now, Mr. Goran said. One well-known Kurdish singer was murdered because he had the same last name as Mr. Goran.

“Everyone gets threats or can feel threatened here,” said James Knight, the head of the State Department’s provincial reconstruction team in Nineveh. “The intimidation of people is one of the dramatic ongoing problems we have.”

Mr. Knight said 70,000 was a reasonable estimate for the number of people who have fled Mosul, but he did not know how many were Kurds.

[On May 13, in the mostly Kurdish district of Makhmur, a suicide truck bomber rammed into the local headquarters of the Kurdistan Democratic Party, killing at least 50 people and wounding at least 115. On May 9, a truck bomb exploded in front of Kurdish government offices in Erbil, the relatively secure capital of Iraqi Kurdistan, killing at least 19 and wounding at least 70.]

While the Americans are fighting the Sunni Arab insurgency, they are also vigorously supporting what they say are legitimate Sunni Arab demands, like the call for provincial elections. The Arabs and Kurds have to reach a power-sharing arrangement, American officials say.

But the surge in ethnic violence has sharpened the animosity of Kurds toward Arabs, and few Kurds are ready to forgive the atrocities committed by Mr. Hussein’s Sunni Arab government.

“I compare the Sunni Arabs to Bosnian Serbs: their behavior, their way of thinking, their way of acting,” Mr. Goran said in an interview at the fortified government center downtown. “They are for killings, they are for mass graves. Not all of them, but the majority of them.”

So far, Kurdish militias have refrained from engaging in the kind of wide-scale reprisals against Sunni Arabs that Shiite militias have carried out in Baghdad. But the Kurds are capable, Mr. Goran warned.

“We can kill every day 50 Arabs in the streets,” Mr. Goran said with a quick smile. “Every day, everywhere, in Mosul and outside of Mosul. But we don’t do that, because we know they want us to do that.”

The insurgency here is a caldron of prominent Sunni Arab groups that include Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia and Ansar al-Sunna. The city was a recruitment base for commanders of the old Iraqi Army, and former officers are now among the leaders of the local guerrilla movement.

During a November 2004 uprising, much of the Mosul police force defected to the insurgency, and Mr. Goran said he suspects that a third to half of the existing police force still aids or sympathizes with the insurgency. After the execution of Saddam Hussein in December, he said, some policemen put Mr. Hussein’s picture in their cars. A new police chief who is a Sunni Arab, Maj. Gen. Wathiq Muhammad al-Hamdani, is trying to clean house, he said.

There are some positive signs, American commanders say. As in Anbar Province, some Sunni militants are chafing at the Islamist agenda of Al Qaeda, said Lt. Col. Eric Welsh, leader of the Second Battalion, Seventh Cavalry, the single American combat battalion in Mosul.

And one of the two, mostly Kurdish, Iraqi Army divisions in Nineveh has been working well under a respected Sunni Arab general, Brig. Gen. Moutaa Jassim Habeeb, Mr. Goran said. But conservative Sunni Arab politicians in Baghdad are pushing to replace him with a hard-line commander, Mr. Goran added.

If that happens, he said, “no Kurdish soldier will remain in the division.”

Despite their heavy presence in the army, Kurdish soldiers have been unable to end the violence that is driving so many Kurds from Mosul.

Sanaa Saadan and her husband are known as “Mosulis.” They were born and raised there, but they could be the last in their families to lay claim to that title.

Last year, Ms. Saadan and her husband moved with their three sons into the home of her older sister in Khabat, 30 miles to the east. The two said they knew at least seven Kurds who had been murdered in Mosul.

Khabat, just inside Iraqi Kurdistan, has become a place of refuge. Rents have skyrocketed, said the mayor, Rizgar Mustafa Muhammad. At least 1,300 families have moved there from Mosul. More than 120 came in April alone, the most of any month, he said. Soon, he said, tent camps will be needed.

“We were unhappy to leave Mosul,” said Ms. Saadan, 28, as she watched over her youngest son in his crib. Her husband, a wedding singer, finds work scarce in Iraqi Kurdistan. Their two oldest sons had a tough time adjusting to school lessons in Kurdish rather than Arabic.

The highway from Khabat to Mosul runs past Ms. Saadan’s home and through a checkpoint a mile to the west, on a concrete bridge spanning a river that marks the border with Nineveh. Kurdish soldiers check the identification cards of people driving in. They say Kurds arrive regularly in cars packed with furniture and household goods.

“If we’re ordered to go protect residents of Mosul, we’ll do it,” said the commander, Maj. Ghafour Ahmed Hussein.

He stared out at the green hills to the west. Beyond lay the city and its newly emptied houses.

Yerevan Adham contributed from Erbil, and an Iraqi employee of The New York Times from Mosul.

    Strife in North Iraq as Sunni Arabs Drive Out Kurds, NYT, 30.5.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/30/world/middleeast/30mosul.html?hp

Troops in Iraq Fight Fear and Boredom

May 30, 2007
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 3:33 a.m. ET
The New York Times

WASHINGTON (AP) -- Life for U.S. troops in Iraq can be boring and commanders can sometimes seem petty.

Morale for each Army soldier and Marine in the war depends foremost on how much combat they have seen. But it also is about the trivial and mundane -- a lack of privacy or a resented rule that dictates the color of T-shirts they must wear.

It's about the triumphs, too.

''It's up and down,'' said Spc. Christopher Hagen, assigned to Baqouba in the increasingly violent Diyala province north of Baghdad.

When troops score a success against militants, ''morale goes through the roof,'' said Hagen. ''But when you hear one of your friends gets hurt, it drops to an all-time low.''

A recently released Pentagon mental health study of troops in Iraq found 45 percent of junior enlisted Army soldiers rated their unit's morale as low or very low. Twenty percent of soldiers and 15 percent of Marines were found to have a mental health problem, defined as anxiety, depression or acute stress.

Researchers found both depend partly on how long each person has been there, how many tours of duty they've served and what their personal experiences have been.

''We have it pretty good here,'' said Sgt. Jesus Cruz, who organizes helicopter flight logistics in Baghdad's Green Zone. The heavily fortified zone houses Iraqi government offices and is only sporadically hit by mortar. Assignment there means good dining hall food, regular work schedules and access to the U.S. Embassy swimming pool.

''A lot of guys out there have it a lot tougher,'' Cruz said.

About two-thirds of those surveyed said they knew someone who had been killed or injured. More than three-quarters of soldiers and Marines said they had been in situations where they could have been killed or seriously injured.

Events that made them feel ''intense fear, helplessness or horror,'' were described by nearly 40 percent.

Reported anonymously in the publicly released version of the study, the events included:

--''My sergeant's leg getting blown off.''

--''A huge ... bomb blew my friend's head off like 50 meters from me.''

--''Doing raids on houses with bad intel.''

--''Working to clean out body parts from a blown up tank.''

--''Convoy stopped in dangerous areas due to incompetent commanders.''

--''A Bradley (tank) blew up. We got two guys out, three were still inside. I was the medic.''

The report, released May 4, was based on data collected from some 1,300 soldiers and nearly 450 Marines in Iraq last fall. When it was released, most attention focused on the study's first-ever survey of ethics among troops at the front.

The report also found:

--The ratings on morale and instances of mental health problems were at about the same levels as in the previous study, done in mid-2006.

--Fifty-six percent of soldiers were highly concerned about the long tours.

--Eleven percent of those deployed for the first time had a mental health problem, compared to 27 percent of those on repeat tours.

-- Lack of privacy was a major concern among 39 percent of soldiers, whose housing ranges from two-person trailers to 20-person tents.

-- Boring and repetitive work was a main concern for 39 percent of soldiers and 33 percent of Marines.

--Among soldiers exposed to a low level of combat, 11 percent had a mental health problem; it was 30 percent among those who saw a high level of combat.

--More than a third of soldiers and Marines reported being in threatening situations where they weren't allowed to use force. After Iraqis began throwing gasoline-filled bottles at them, for instance, troops were banned from responding with force for nearly a month until the rules of engagement were changed.

--Many resent senior leaders for what they say are harassing rules -- like the one on the T-shirt rules.

When asked in focus group interviews specifically what affected morale, troops consistently mentioned two things: base rules they disliked and what they saw as an unfair system on morale-boosting programs, the study said.

In some places, soldiers were not allowed to wear tan Army T-shirts with black Army shorts -- they could only wear gray T-shirts with the black shorts.

In one unit, it was ordered that when two or more soldiers were walking together, they had to be dressed alike.

Such rules can be aimed at maintaining order and discipline, but troops felt ''they had no other practical purpose other than to harass'' them, said the report.

Soldiers also said those who went off-base to do the most dangerous duty had to wait in long lines to use phones or e-mail, could rarely take the afternoon off to attend concerts or other events, and found it harder to take R&R because they are needed in the fight.

Those who rarely, if ever left base had unfettered access to those morale-boosting programs -- not to mention got ''first dibs'' on new items coming into the post commissary.

''It is probably not any single'' thing, but rather ''the accumulation of all of them that tends to wear down the soldiers' and Marines' morale,'' the study said.

Associated Press Writer Todd Pitman contributed to this report from Baghdad.

------

On the Net:

Public version of the Pentagon study: http://tinyurl.com/38zfmq

    Troops in Iraq Fight Fear and Boredom, NYT, 30.5.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/us/AP-Troop-Morale.html

U.S.: 10 Memorial Day Deaths in Iraq

May 29, 2007
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 12:05 p.m. ET
The New York Times

BAGHDAD (AP) -- Ten American soldiers were killed in roadside bombings and a helicopter crash in a restive province north of Baghdad, the U.S. military reported Tuesday, making May the deadliest month of the year for U.S. troops in Iraq.

In other violence, at least three Westerners were kidnapped Tuesday from an Iraqi Finance Ministry office in Baghdad, according to Iraqi government officials, and two car bombings killed 40 people and destroyed a Shiite mosque in the capital, police said.

The Americans -- all from Task Force Lightning -- were killed Monday in Diyala as the United States commemorated Memorial Day, bringing the number of American forces killed this month to at least 110, according to an Associated Press count assembled from U.S. military statements.

In statements issued Tuesday by the public affairs office of the Multi-National Corps-Iraq office at Camp Victory at Baghdad Airport, the military said six of the soldiers died in explosions near their vehicles and two others were killed in the helicopter crash. The statements did not say if the helicopter was shot down or suffered mechanical problems.

There were conflicting reports on the nationality and number of those kidnapped. A high-ranking Iraqi government official, who would only release the information on condition that he not be named or identified by the ministry he worked in, said three Germans working for a German computer company had been abducted.

However, an official in the Finance Ministry, who spoke on condition of anonymity for fear he would be fired for speaking with the media, said four people were abducted -- one German and three Britons.

The men were kidnapped by a group of gunmen wearing police commando uniforms who arrived at the ministry office -- down the road from the main Finance Ministry building -- in a huge convoy of white sports utility vehicles, which are often used by police, according to the two government officials and a police officer, who said use of his name could put his life in danger. Police have been accused of involvement in attacks in the past.

In Hamburg, Germany, Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier said German officials have been unable to confirm the kidnapping: ''So far such reports, thank God, could not be substantiated and I hope it stays that way.''

Britain's Foreign Office declined to confirm reports that British citizens were involved, but a government's crisis committee was to meet Tuesday in response to the reported incident, the Cabinet Office said.

Earlier this year, militants here kidnapped German citizens Hannelore Marianne Krause, and her adult son, Sinan, and threatened to kill them if Germany did not pull its troops from Afghanistan. German officials have not said what the mother and son were doing in Iraq, where they disappeared on Feb. 6. The fate of the two remains unknown.

Also, Tuesday afternoon, a parked minibus packed with explosives blew up in Tayaran Square, riddling cars with shrapnel, knocking over pushcarts and sending smoke into the sky, witnesses said. The blast killed 23 people and injured 68 others, a police official in the district said on condition he not be named. The official said his superiors refused to allow him to speak to reporters. Firefighters rushed to the scene and rescuers tried to pull the wounded out of cars, they said.

Yousef Qasim, 37, was working in his clothing shop 200 yards away when the blast tore through a line of buses waiting at the square, he said.

''I rushed there to see about four or five burning bodies,'' he said. ''I saw flesh on the ground and pools of blood.''

Shop owners grabbed their wares and tried to flee, fearing a second blast, said Talib Dhirgham, who owns a nearby laundry. Police who arrived at the scene confiscated the cameras of journalists who came to cover the attack, according to AP photographers and television cameramen who went to the scene.

More than an hour later, a pickup truck parked next to a Shiite mosque in the Amil district in western Baghdad exploded, completely demolishing the mosque, killing 17 people and wounding 55 others, according to a second police official, who also spoke on condition of anonymity because he felt use of his name would put his life in danger. The mosque was reduced to rubble and piles of brick, according to AP Television News footage. Cars were flipped over, charred and dented. Residents pushed debris off nearby roofs.

In other violence, gunmen in Samarra, 60 miles north of Baghdad, set up fake checkpoints on the outskirts of the city and abducted more than 40 people, most of them soldiers, police officers and members of two tribes that had banded together against local insurgents, a police official in the city said on condition of anonymity because he feared retribution.

The attacks came a day after U.S. and Iranian officials met in Baghdad under the auspices of Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki to try to end the violence here.

Anti-American Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr on Tuesday criticized the talks as interference in Iraq's internal affairs and warned Iraqi officials not to participate in them.

''I call on the brave people to reject these negotiations,'' he said in a statement released by his office in the holy city of Najaf.

On Monday, 36 people were killed across Baghdad in a wave of attacks, according to an AP tabulation of reports from police officials who said they could lose their jobs if they provided the information. Another 33 bullet-riddled bodies were found dead, tortured and abandoned in different parts of the capital, the apparent victims of ongoing sectarian violence, said an official in an Iraqi ministry who has access to daily reports. The official said he would be dismissed if his superiors knew he was releasing the information to Western media outlets.

    U.S.: 10 Memorial Day Deaths in Iraq, NYT, 29.5.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/world/AP-Iraq.html

'It's Up to You Now': Sheehan Quits

May 29, 2007
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 11:21 a.m. ET
The New York Times

FORT WORTH, Texas (AP) -- Cindy Sheehan, the soldier's mother who galvanized an anti-war movement with her monthlong protest outside President Bush's ranch, said Tuesday she's done being the public face of the movement.

''I've been wondering why I'm killing myself and wondering why the Democrats caved in to George Bush,'' Sheehan told The Associated Press while driving from her property in Crawford to the airport, where she planned to return to her native California.

''I'm going home for awhile to try and be normal,'' she said.

In what she described as a ''resignation letter,'' Sheehan wrote in her online diary on the Daily Kos blog: ''Good-bye America ... you are not the country that I love and I finally realized no matter how much I sacrifice, I can't make you be that country unless you want it.

''It's up to you now.''

Sheehan began a grass roots peace movement in August 2005 when she camped outside Bush's Crawford ranch for 26 days, demanding to talk with the president about her son's death. Army Spc. Casey Sheehan was 24 when he was killed in an ambush in Baghdad in 2004.

Cindy Sheehan's protest started small but swelled to thousands and quickly drew national attention. Over the next two years, she drew huge crowds as she spoke at protest events. But she also drew criticism for some actions, such as meeting with Hugo Chavez, Venezuela's leftist president.

''I have endured a lot of smear and hatred since Casey was killed and especially since I became the so-called ''Face'' of the American anti-war movement,'' Sheehan wrote in the diary.

Kristinn Taylor, spokesman for FreeRepublic.com, which has held pro-troop rallies and counter-protests of anti-war demonstrations, said dwindling crowds at Sheehan's Crawford protests since her initial vigil may have led to her decision. But he also said he hopes she will now be able to heal.

''Her politics have hurt a lot of people, including the troops and their families, but most of us who support the war on terror understand she is hurt very deeply,'' Taylor said Tuesday. ''Those she got involved with in the anti-war movement realize it was to their benefit to keep her in that stage of anger.''

When Sheehan first took on Bush, she was a darling of the liberal left. ''However, when I started to hold the Democratic Party to the same standards that I held the Republican Party, support for my cause started to erode and the 'left' started labeling me with the same slurs that the right used,'' she wrote in the diary.

She said she sacrificed a 29-year marriage and endured threats to put all her energy into stopping the war. What she found, she wrote, was a movement ''that often puts personal egos above peace and human life.''

She said the most devastating conclusion she had reached ''was that Casey did indeed die for nothing ... killed by his own country which is beholden to and run by a war machine that even controls what we think.''

Sheehan told the AP that she had considered leaving the peace movement since last summer while recovering from surgery.

She decided on Memorial Day to step down and spend more time with her three other children. She said she was returning to California on Tuesday because it was Casey's birthday. He would have been 28.

''We've accomplished as much here as we're going to,'' Sheehan said, saying she was leaving to change course. ''When we come back, it definitely won't be with the peace movement with marches, with rallies and with protests. It will be more humanitarian efforts.''

Last year, with $52,500 in insurance money she received after her son's death, Sheehan bought 5 acres near downtown Crawford as a permanent site for protests.

''Camp Casey has served its purpose,'' she wrote in the diary. ''It's for sale. Anyone want to buy five beautiful acres in Crawford, Texas?''

    'It's Up to You Now': Sheehan Quits, NYT, 29.5.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/us/AP-Cindy-Sheehan.html

Bush to Visit Arlington Today

May 28, 2007
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 8:08 a.m. ET
The New York Times

WASHINGTON (AP) -- President Bush will pay tribute to America's war dead this Memorial Day with a visit to Arlington National Cemetery.

The president will lay a wreath at the Tomb of the Unknowns before a speech to pay tribute to those who made the ultimate sacrifice.

In his Memorial Day proclamation, the president said the nation mourns those who fought and died defending freedom in Iraq and elsewhere. He says they have set an example of strength and perseverance that gives us resolve.

This will be Bush's sixth Memorial Day at Arlington as a wartime president. He missed 2002, when he was in Normandy, France, for D-Day observances.

    Bush to Visit Arlington Today, NYT, 28.5.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/us/AP-Bush.html

Obama Urges Better Veterans' Services

May 28, 2007
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 9:29 a.m. ET
The New York Times

LITTLETON, N.H. (AP) -- Though he said Memorial Day shouldn't be politicized, Democratic presidential hopeful Barack Obama used a visit to a war monument Monday to repeat his call for better services for veterans.

Obama, campaigning in the first-in-the-nation primary state with his wife and daughters, laid a wreath at a war monument before attending a town hall-style meeting.

''This is a day on which we reflect on those who have fallen and reflect on the sacrifices they have made for all of us,'' Obama said, talking with reporters after the brief ceremony. ''This is a great day to think about what we're doing on behalf of our veterans, and what we're not doing on behalf of our veterans.''

Obama has made his opposition to the war in Iraq a central part of his campaign. At a town hall forum Sunday in Conway, his comments on the war prompted a standing ovation, complete with whoops and hollers.

The Illinois senator said he supports the troops, just not their mission.

''There's nobody who doesn't support the troops,'' Obama said. ''This really is a political argument that is designed to deflect criticism of the president's policies in Iraq.''

On Sunday, Obama said the country is not providing enough mental health services for active duty troops and veterans. He proposed spending hundreds of million dollars more each year for better care.

''We cannot expect our young men and women to serve in our armed forces, if we are not making sure they get the treatment they deserve,'' Obama said.

Obama is urging the Pentagon to recruit more mental health professions to help identify and treat problems. He said improvements are needed at every stage of military service: recruitment, deployment and re-entry into civilian life.

    Obama Urges Better Veterans' Services, NYT, 28.5.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/us/AP-Obama-Memorial-Day.html

Bomb Near Baghdad Mosque Kills at Least 21

May 28, 2007
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 9:52 a.m. ET
The New York Times

BAGHDAD (AP) -- A suicide car bomber struck a busy commercial district in central Baghdad on Monday, killing at least 21 people and damaging a Sunni shrine, police and hospital officials said.

The bomb went off at 2 p.m. in the Sinak commercial district on the east side of the Tigris River near the Abdul-Qadir al-Gailani mosque.

AP Television News video showed dozens of astonished people at the scene of the Sinak explosion as they walked around charred cars and debris that littered the scene. Firefighters in yellow helmets struggled to extinguish the fire as ambulances rushed to evacuate the wounded.

Ghaith Karim, a 38-year-old Shiite cloth merchant, was heading to the bus station near Sinak when he saw a fireball and heard the loud blast: ''It was tremendous. I felt the ground was shaking.''

The cleric in charge of the mosque, Mahmoud al-Issawi, said the blast also damaged the building's dome, while the footage showed damage to its minaret.

''The enemies of Iraq are the only one who get benefit out of that bombing. These enemies have targeted our homeland, religion and our brotherhood,'' al-Issawi told Iraqiya TV.

Also in central Baghdad, a battle raged after insurgents hijacked two buses and kidnapped at least 15 passengers, police said. At least three policemen were killed.

The small buses where traveling through the Fadhil neighborhood, a Sunni enclave in central Baghdad, when they were waylaid by gunmen in three cars.

The insurgents abducted at least 15 passengers and took them to an abandoned government building neaby, a police officer said on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to talk to reporters.

Security forces arrived within 30 minutes and came under attack from militants firing at them from nearby alleys. According to Iraqi police, at least two U.S. helicopters hovered overhead and Americans took up positions near the fighting, but were not directly involved.

Nine militants were arrested.

Separately, police said that a roadside bomb killed two people and injured nine when it detonated under a parked car in the central Baghdad district of Bab al-Muadham. Another two people were killed and six were wounded after two mortar rounds slammed into a street in Karrada, a Shiite-dominated neighborhood in downtown Baghdad, police said.

    Bomb Near Baghdad Mosque Kills at Least 21, NYT, 28.5.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/world/AP-Iraq-Violence.html?hp

U.S., Iraqi troops find Qaeda prison camp in Iraq

Mon May 28, 2007
5:04AM EDT
Reuters

BAGHDAD (Reuters) - U.S. and Iraqi troops raided a suspected al Qaeda prison camp north of Baghdad and freed 41 men, some of whom said they had been held for four months, the U.S. military said on Monday.

The air and ground operation on Sunday followed a tip-off from a local resident. The camp was six miles south of Baquba in Diyala province, where many insurgents have set up new bases to escape a major security crackdown in Baghdad.

U.S. military spokesman Lieutenant-Colonel Christopher Garver said soldiers had found evidence of torture. Some prisoners had broken bones and others said they had been hung from the ceiling.

"The individuals, who were living in a small, concrete and mud compound ... were sleeping in cramped rooms on dirty blankets and pillows," the military said in a statement.

Iraqi police confirmed the raid and said the whereabouts of the prisoners' captors were not known.

Al Qaeda militants typically kill their captives soon after abducting them and have not been known to operate such camps.

The U.S. military said the freed men had been taken to a nearby combat outpost, where they had been given food and water.

Diyala, a large, ethnically mixed region northeast of Baghdad, has seen some of the worst violence since the U.S.-led invasion in 2003. Violence has surged further in recent months and the U.S. commander in the region has asked for more troops.

    U.S., Iraqi troops find Qaeda prison camp in Iraq, R, 28.5.2007, http://www.reuters.com/article/newsOne/idUSCOL82162520070528?src=052807_0529_TOPSTORY_u.s._and_iran_meet

U.S. and Iran Begin Rare Talks on Iraq Security

May 28, 2007
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 4:17 a.m. ET
The New York Times

BAGHDAD (AP) -- Iran and the United States resumed public diplomacy Monday for the first time in more than a quarter century. The meeting in Baghdad between ambassadors on security in Iraq could produce a chapter in world history for its success or a footnote for its failure.

U.S. Ambassador Ryan Crocker represented Washington. Iranian Ambassador Hassan Kazemi Qomi spoke for Iran at the talks, which were held at Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki's office in the Green Zone compound in Baghdad.

Just before 10:30 a.m., al-Maliki greeted the two ambassadors, who shook hands, and led them into a conference room, where the ambassadors sat across the table from each other. Al-Maliki then made a brief statement and left the room.

He told both sides that Iraqis want a stable country free of foreign forces and regional interference. The country should not be turned into a base for terrorist groups, he said. He also said that the U.S.-led forces in Iraq were only here to help build up the army and police and the country would not be used as a launching ground for a U.S. attack on a neighbor, a clear reference to Iran.

''We are sure that securing progress in this meeting would, without doubt, enhance the bridges of trust between the two countries and create a positive atmosphere'' that would help them deal with other issues, he said.

Speaking in Tehran, Iranian Foreign Minister Manouchehr Mottaki said Monday the talks could lead to future meetings, but only if Washington acknowledges that its Middle East policy has not been successful.

''We are hopeful that Washington's realistic approach to the current issues of Iraq by confessing its failed policy in Iraq and the region and by showing a determination to changing the policy guarantees success of the talks and possible further talks,'' Mottaki said.

Monday's talks were to have a pinpoint focus: What Washington and Tehran -- separately or together -- could do to contain the sectarian conflagration in Iraq.

Washington wants Tehran to stop arming, financing and training militants, particularly Shiite militias that are fighting American and Iraqi troops. Tehran wants Washington out of Iraq, period.

But much more encumbers the narrow agenda, primarily Iran's nuclear program and more than a quarter-century of diplomatic estrangement after the 1979 Islamic revolution in Iran.

Further, the Iranian Shiite theocracy fears the Bush administration harbors plans for regime change in Tehran and could act on those desires as it did against Saddam Hussein in Iraq.

Washington and its Sunni Arab allies, on their side, are deeply unnerved by growing Iranian influence in the Middle East and the spread of increasingly radical Islam.

Compounding all that is Iran's open hostility to Israel.

Those issues, combined, are what make this opening of the U.S.-Iranian minuet both so important and so interesting.

Will this first meeting, as the Iraqis openly hope and as the Iranians and Americans may quietly aspire, be sufficiently cordial and productive that a second meeting becomes possible? Should that happen, will a future dialogue involve higher-level officials -- perhaps Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and Iranian Foreign Minister Manouchehr Mottaki?

On Saturday, Crocker was circumspect when asked about prospects for further meetings.

''It's going to start with one meeting and see how it goes,'' Crocker said. ''We're coming prepared to talk about Iraq.''

A political aide to al-Maliki told The Associated Press that Iraq hoped to play a mediator's role in easing tensions between the Americans and Iranians, which Iraqi officials have routinely said are being played out in Iraq.

The adviser, who spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak on the matter, said Iraq would remain neutral as regards to its position in the disputes.

''But we want to try to close the gap, to be partners in the dialogue,'' the official said. ''It is time to look forward, not backward.''

Many small issues could cloud the talks before they begin. There were U.S. Navy exercises in the Persian Gulf last week and tough talk from President Bush about new U.N. penalties against Tehran over its nuclear program. The United States says Tehran is trying to build a bomb, while Iran says it needs nuclear technology for energy production.

Further complicating the talks, Iran said Saturday that it had uncovered spy rings organized by the United States and its Western allies.

Iran accuses the U.S. of improperly seizing five Iranians in Iraq this spring. The U.S. military is holding the five. Iran says they are diplomats; Washington contends they are intelligence agents.

The U.S. also has complained about the detention or arrest of several Iranian-Americans in Iran in recent weeks. State Department spokesman Tom Casey said that issue was not on the U.S. agenda for Monday.

Regardless, the Baghdad talks are the first of their kind and a small sign that Washington thinks rapprochement is possible after nearly three decades of animosity. Iran, angry over the blunt show of U.S. military power off its coast, almost refused to come.

    U.S. and Iran Begin Rare Talks on Iraq Security, NYT, 28.5.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/world/AP-Iraq-US-Iran-Talks.html?hp

Ohio Woman Wants Contractors Honored

May 28, 2007
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 4:52 a.m. ET
The New York Times

BRATENAHL, Ohio (AP) -- As the nation pauses on Memorial Day to honor its war dead, one woman is working to keep alive the memory of her son, who was killed in Iraq while serving as a civilian contractor.

Donna Zovko wants Americans to remember her son Jerko ''Jerry'' Zovko and other contractors along with the fallen members of the nation's military.

''On my Jerry's headstone there's no 'contractor','' said Donna Zovko. Jerry Zovko, 32, was killed along with three other contractors in a March 31, 2004, ambush in Fallujah. Their mutilated bodies were burned and two were hung from a bridge.

Jerry Zovko, an Army veteran, was working for Pentagon contractor Blackwater USA hauling food to American troops.

''How will Americans treat or remember my son as a contractor that was killed?'' she asked. ''It's their choice, but he was there to protect our freedom and to help the Iraqis. He was not there for the money.''

Zovko has waged a high-profile campaign for tighter oversight of military contractors, appearing in a documentary film, ''Iraq for Sale: the War Profiteers,'' and testifying before a congressional committee Feb. 7.

More than 3,400 members of the U.S. military have died since the start of the Iraq war in March 2003. More than 900 civilian employees of U.S. government contractors have also been killed.

Zovko rejects the suggestion that contractors in Iraq are only motivated by big paychecks.

''I prefer to think of (Jerry) the way he told me,'' Zovko said. ''That he was needed there and the skills that he learned in the military were needed and he went.''

While the military takes care of its own, Zovko said, ''In private contracting no one is responsible. They put it under the carpet and go on. It's not talked about. It's not answered to.''

She understands the honors accorded military victims but hopes people remember the contributions made by those hired by the Pentagon to free soldiers and Marines for combat duty.

Zovko said she especially feels for civilian contractors lacked a military background. Her son was buried with military honors at the Ohio Western Reserve National Center near Akron.

''My heart breaks for them because if it was 9/11 that moved those young men to go and become contractors and to go there with such a pure heart and a good will and lose their lives, their families cannot count on those companies that contracted their son,'' she said.

She blames contractors for thinking more about profits than the safety of their employees.

Blackwater has argued that it abided by its contractual obligations.

''The four men lost in Fallujah weigh heavily on the hearts of everyone at Blackwater and our sympathies remain with the families,'' the company told The Associated Press in an e-mail on Friday.

Blackwater does not release the names of those killed and memorializes its dead in private. At its headquarters in Moyock, N.C., the company engraves a stone in its memorial rock garden for each contractor killed while serving.

Nancy Taylor, who teaches future school counselors at John Carroll University in nearby University Heights, said Zovko's advocacy on military contractor oversight could bring attention to the issue of contractor deaths.

''As an American public, if we're not tuned into them, we need to be aware about them. That's something that Donna Zovko seems to be doing, making people aware of her son so that people can appreciate their efforts and support what they stood for,'' Taylor said.

Associated Press writer Mike Baker in Raleigh, N.C., contributed to this report.

------

On the Net: http://blackwaterusa.com 

    Ohio Woman Wants Contractors Honored, NYT, 28.5.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/us/AP-Iraq-Contractors-Mom.html

Marine's Memorial Funds Arlington Visits

May 28, 2007
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 3:37 a.m. ET
The New York Times

ARLINGTON, Va. (AP) -- Just a few years ago, Lance Cpl. Steven Szwydek was a classmate of students at a high school in the mountains of Pennsylvania's Fulton County. Now the fallen Marine is part of their history lesson. On separate days this spring, students from all three high schools in his home county visited Arlington National Cemetery, where they stopped for a moment of silence at his white tombstone. The bus trips were paid for by a memorial fund established by Szwydek's parents.

Their quiet son -- a history buff who loved to hunt deer -- was 20 when he was killed in 2005 by a roadside bomb during his second tour in Iraq.

His mother, Nancy Szwydek, is a strong supporter of President Bush and the Iraq war but said the trips are not about politics or trying to influence students to join the military. She and her husband don't accompany the classes on the trips.

She sees the annual visits as a way to teach students ''to respect our freedom.'' Teachers say the trips are as much about establishing connections -- between kids growing up in a rural county, and world events.

Nancy and Michael Szwydek, who own a country store, decided a college scholarship in their son's name would not have made sense because he chose the Marines over college.

''I think he would not want himself being the focus ... but I think he'd be real happy the students have had a history lesson,'' Nancy Szwydek said during an interview at her home in Warfordsburg, Pa., near the Maryland border.

For some of the students, the stop at Szwydek's grave is personal because they attended school with him at Southern Fulton Junior/Senior High. They recalled seeing their teachers cry the day it was learned he had died.

''It was very nice of them to let us experience this, and we're supporting Steven and that's the main reason we're down here,'' said Miranda Blackburn, 17, during her visit to Arlington.

A student from another high school, Kirstie Barton, also 17, said the cemetery brings home the reality of the war.

''It's kind of hard to grasp that people go over there and they die every day and their families are missing them,'' she said.

Tim Mills, 17, said two relatives have served in Iraq and he is considering joining the Pennsylvania National Guard.

''If I die, I die. There's no stopping that. That's God's plan. Just, that's how I look at it. I'm ready to go. Maybe I'll be here one day,'' he said.

Angie Booth, a teacher from Szwydek's school who helped lead one of the trips, grew up next to him and baby-sat him.

She pointed out to her students that since a school trip last year, two new rows of graves of soldiers killed in Iraq had been added near Szwydek's. Some were so fresh they didn't have tombstones yet -- just flowers.

Booth said she wants the students to learn that, ''even though we're a very rural community, we're not isolated from this either.''

Szwydek joined the Marines when he was 17, leaving for boot camp four days after graduating from high school.

On his original paperwork, he wrote that he wanted to be buried at sea.

''I said, 'Steven, why do you want to be buried at sea?' At this time, it was a joke,'' said Nancy Szwydek.

''He said, 'No special reason, Mom, I just thought it would be cool.' And I said, 'Change it,' so he just put buried with full military honors.''

----------

On the Net:

Arlington National Cemetery: http://www.arlingtoncemetery.org/

    Marine's Memorial Funds Arlington Visits, NYT, 28.5.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/us/AP-Lessons-from-Arlington.html

Silence Speaks Volumes at Intersection of Views on Iraq War

May 28, 2007
The New York Times
By IAN URBINA

LEWES, Del. — No one talks, but a lot is said at the intersection of Savannah Road and Kings Highway.

Every Sunday for more than two years, rain or shine, they have shown up here, nodded politely to each other across Savannah Road, and stood motionless for 45 minutes like sentinels. They differ in politics but share a faith in the power of silence.

On one side of the street, Jeff Broderick stands alone while he holds a sign. “Their only plan is to cut and run again. It never ever works,” the sign says.

On the other side, Patricia Kirby Gibler stands shoulder to shoulder with dozens of others, staring toward Mr. Broderick and silently holding small cardboard posters with black numbers. One poster states, “3,415 American Dead.” Another reads, “70,023 Iraqi Dead.”

[For Memorial Day weekend, one peace protester broke the silence Sunday afternoon to read the names of soldiers killed in the past week.]

Supporters of both sides in the debate over the war in Iraq have gathered here every week since September 2004 at the busiest intersection of this tranquil shore town of about 3,000 residents. In January, an additional group began congregating in silence on a third corner, their signs calling for the president’s impeachment.

They stand just about 35 miles from Dover Air Force Base, the arrival point for the bodies of soldiers shipped back from Iraq. But in this state, which has suffered a disproportionate number of war casualties, these protesters bring as much civility as fervor to this intersection of American public opinion.

“I have the utmost respect for him and his persistence,” said Ms. Kirby Gibler, looking across the street at Mr. Broderick as she wheeled her red wagon full of signs toward the corner. “When the war ends, all of us will stop coming here.”

Mr. Broderick conveys a similar respectful steadfastness. “They’re good people,” he said before taking his position. “We just don’t happen to agree.”

It was not always so civil at this corner.

After the peace vigil began in 2004, a group of counterprotesters began convening across the street. Some of the younger members of that group brought a radio and blared John Philip Sousa marching songs and patriotic music like “The Star-Spangled Banner.” Occasionally they yelled unkind things through a megaphone. At one point, fish guts and manure were strewn along the grass where the peace vigil meets.

“It was unnecessary,” said Mr. Broderick, who emerged from the group and moved about 10 feet away until the winter weather drove the rest of them indoors. Most weekends he stands alone.

Now, from 1 p.m. to 1:45 p.m. on Sundays, one of the few sounds to be heard here is the occasional toot of a passing car’s horn in support of one side or another. When some drivers stop at the light, they glance back and forth out their side windows with a bemused look as if they have found themselves in the middle a staring contest.

“I think we all agree that silence leaves space for contemplation, and we want to remind people of the sacrifices being made in the war,” Ms. Kirby Gibler, 59, said.

Ms. Kirby Gibler, a business consultant who moved here several years ago from the Washington area, described seeing the suffering of a cousin who was severely injured in Vietnam as an important political turning point for her. It was only after the number of Americans killed in Iraq surpassed 1,000, however, that she felt moved to protest, she said.

“It reminded me of Vietnam, but this time I wanted to step forward earlier,” she said. Behind her was the Zwaanendael Museum, which commemorates the state’s first European settlement in the area, by the Dutch, and a large stone monument with a plaque honoring those who served in World Wars I and II.

“We used to get a lot of middle fingers as people passed,” said Dorothy P. Greet, a former United Church of Christ clergywoman who stands on the third corner with a sign that simply says “Impeach.” “But now it’s mostly thumbs up.” Ms. Greet said she believed that the public temperament had shifted toward her opinion of the war.

Like the 10 others holding the same sign, Ms. Greet, 66, was once part of the peace vigil. She took up a third corner as an extension of the peace vigil, not in opposition to it, she said.

“I just wanted to express more,” she said, adding that she was motivated in part by the growing realization that Democrats in Congress were not going to pursue impeachment of President Bush, nor were they going to block financing for the war. The impeachable offenses, Ms. Greet said, include the war’s being based on false information, the torture of prisoners and the unlawful wiretapping of American citizens.

Small and largely rural towns like this are bearing a disproportionate burden of war. About half of American military casualties in Iraq have come from towns with fewer than 25,000 residents. Among rural states, Delaware has the second-highest death rate, with 60 deaths per million military-age people, according to an analysis by William O’Hare of the Carsey Institute, a rural research center based at the University of New Hampshire, which has studied the demographics of soldiers fighting in the war.

“Death counts do not honor the troops,” said Mr. Broderick, 70, who for more than a decade owned a chain of women’s retail stores in Maryland before retiring to Lewes. The United States should not make the same mistake it did in Somalia or Vietnam, he said, which was to withdraw prematurely and convey a message of weakness. “These actions speak louder than words,” he said.

A quiet man with an intense gaze, Mr. Broderick walks with a slight limp. Local news reports say he is a veteran of the Korean War and the Vietnam War, but when asked about these experiences he fell silent and looked to the ground.

“That’s not important; please don’t ask me again,” he said. He paused before adding, “This is about the message, not the messenger.”

    Silence Speaks Volumes at Intersection of Views on Iraq War, NYT, 28.5.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/28/us/28vigil.html

As Allies Turn Foe, Disillusion Rises in Some G.I.’s

May 28, 2007
The New York Times
By MICHAEL KAMBER

BAGHDAD — Staff Sgt. David Safstrom does not regret his previous tours in Iraq, not even a difficult second stint when two comrades were killed while trying to capture insurgents.

“In Mosul, in 2003, it felt like we were making the city a better place,” he said. “There was no sectarian violence, Saddam was gone, we were tracking down the bad guys. It felt awesome.”

But now on his third deployment in Iraq, he is no longer a believer in the mission. The pivotal moment came, he says, this February when soldiers killed a man setting a roadside bomb. When they searched the bomber’s body, they found identification showing him to be a sergeant in the Iraqi Army.

“I thought: ‘What are we doing here? Why are we still here?’ ” said Sergeant Safstrom, a member of Delta Company of the First Battalion, 325th Airborne Infantry, 82nd Airborne Division. “We’re helping guys that are trying to kill us. We help them in the day. They turn around at night and try to kill us.”

His views are echoed by most of his fellow soldiers in Delta Company, renowned for its aggressiveness.

A small minority of Delta Company soldiers — the younger, more recent enlistees in particular — seem to still wholeheartedly support the war. Others are ambivalent, torn between fear of losing more friends in battle, longing for their families and a desire to complete their mission.

With few reliable surveys of soldiers’ attitudes, it is impossible to simply extrapolate from the small number of soldiers in the company. But in interviews with more than a dozen soldiers in this 83-man unit over a one-week period, most said they were disillusioned by repeated deployments, by what they saw as the abysmal performance of Iraqi security forces and by a conflict that they considered a civil war, one they had no ability to stop.

They had seen shadowy militia commanders installed as Iraqi Army officers, they said, had come under increasing attack from roadside bombs — planted within sight of Iraqi Army checkpoints — and had fought against Iraqi soldiers whom they thought were their allies.

“In 2003, 2004, 100 percent of the soldiers wanted to be here, to fight this war,” said Sgt. First Class David Moore, a self-described “conservative Texas Republican” and platoon sergeant who strongly advocates an American withdrawal. “Now, 95 percent of my platoon agrees with me.”

It is not a question of loyalty, the soldiers insist. Sergeant Safstrom, for example, comes from a thoroughly military family. His mother and father have served in the armed forces, as have his three sisters, one brother and several uncles. One week after the Sept. 11 attacks, he walked into a recruiter’s office and joined the Army.

“You guys want to start a fight in my backyard, I got something for you,” he recalls thinking at the time.

But in Sergeant Safstrom’s view, the American presence is futile. “If we stayed here for 5, even 10 more years, the day we leave here these guys will go crazy,” he said. “It would go straight into a civil war. That’s how it feels, like we’re putting a Band-Aid on this country until we leave here.”

Their many deployments have added to the strain. After spending six months in Iraq, the soldiers of Delta Company had been home for only 24 hours last December when the news came. “Change your plans,” they recall being told. “We’re going back to Iraq.”

Nineteen days later, just after Christmas, Capt. Douglas Rogers and the men of Delta Company were on their way to Kadhimiya, a Shiite enclave of about 300,000 people. As part of the so-called surge of American troops, their primary mission was to maintain stability in the area and prepare the Iraqi Army and the police to take control of the neighborhood.

“I thought it would not be long before we could just stay on our base and act as a quick-reaction force,” said the barrel-chested Captain Rogers of San Antonio. “The Iraqi security forces would step up.”

It has not worked out that way. Still, Captain Rogers says their mission in Kadhimiya has been “an amazing success.”

“We’ve captured 4 of the top 10 most-wanted guys in this area,” he said. And the streets of Kadhimiya are filled with shoppers and the stores are open, he said, a rarity in Baghdad due partly to Delta Company’s patrols.

Captain Rogers acknowledges the skepticism of many of his soldiers. “Our unit has already sent two soldiers home in a box,” he said. “My soldiers don’t see the same level of commitment from the Iraqi Army units they’re partnered with.”

Yet there is, he insists, no crisis of morale: “My guys are all professionals. I tell them to do something, they do it.” His dictum is proved on patrol, where his soldiers walk the streets for hours in the stifling heat, providing cover for one another with crisp efficiency.

On April 29, a Delta Company patrol was responding to a tip at Al Sadr mosque, a short distance from its base. The soldiers saw men in the distance erecting barricades that they set ablaze, and the streets emptied out quickly. Then a militia, believed to be the Mahdi Army, began firing at them from rooftops and windows.

Sgt. Kevin O’Flarity, a squad leader, jumped into his Humvee to join his fellow soldiers, racing through abandoned Iraqi Army and police checkpoints to the battle site.

He and his squad maneuvered their Humvees through alleyways and side streets, firing back at an estimated 60 insurgents during a gun battle that raged for two and a half hours. A rocket-propelled grenade glanced off Sergeant O’Flarity’s Humvee, failing to penetrate.

When the battle was over, Delta Company learned that among the enemy dead were at least two Iraqi Army soldiers that American forces had helped train and arm.

Captain Rogers admits, “The 29th was a watershed moment in a negative sense, because the Iraqi Army would not fight with us,” adding, “Some actually picked up weapons and fought against us.”

The battle changed the attitude among his soldiers toward the war, he said. “Before that fight, there were a few true believers.” Captain Rogers said. “After the 29th, I don’t think you’ll find a true believer in this unit. They’re paratroopers. There’s no question they’ll fulfill their mission. But they’re fighting now for pride in their unit, professionalism, loyalty to their fellow soldier and chain of command.”

To Sergeant O’Flarity, the Iraqi security forces are militias beholden to local leaders, not the Iraqi government. “Half of the Iraqi security forces are insurgents,” he said.

As for his views on the war, Sergeant O’Flarity said, “I don’t believe we should be here in the middle of a civil war.”

“We’ve all lost friends over here,” he said. “Most of us don’t know what we’re fighting for anymore. We’re serving our country and friends, but the only reason we go out every day is for each other.”

“I don’t want any more of my guys to get hurt or die,” he continued. “If it was something I felt righteous about, maybe. But for this country and this conflict, no, it’s not worth it.”

Staff Sgt. James Griffin grew up in Troy, N.C., near the Special Operations base at Fort Bragg. His dream was to be a soldier, and growing up, he would skip school and volunteer to play the role of the enemy during Special Operations training exercises. When he was 17, he joined the Army.

Now 22, Sergeant Griffin is a Delta Company section leader. On the night of May 5, as he neared an Iraqi police checkpoint with a convoy of Humvees, Sergeant Griffin spotted what looked like a camouflaged cinderblock and immediately halted the convoy. His vigilance may have saved the lives of several soldiers. Under the camouflage was a massive, six-array, explosively formed penetrator — a deadly roadside bomb that cuts through the Humvees’ armor with ease.

The insurgents quickly set off the device, but the Americans were at a safe distance. An explosive ordnance disposal team arrived to check the area. As the ordnance team rolled back to base, they were attacked with a second roadside bomb near another Iraqi checkpoint. One soldier was killed and two were wounded.

No one has been able to explain why two bombs were found near Iraqi checkpoints, bombs that Iraqi soldiers and the police had either failed to notice or helped to plant.

Sergeant Griffin, too, understands the criticism of the Iraqi forces, but he says they and the war effort must be given more time.

“If we throw this problem to the side, it’s not going to fix itself,” he said. “We’ve created the Iraqi forces. We gave them Humvees and equipment. For however long they say they need us here, maybe we need to stay.”

    As Allies Turn Foe, Disillusion Rises in Some G.I.’s, NYT, 28.5.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/28/world/middleeast/28delta.html?hp

Militants Widen Reach as Terror Seeps Out of Iraq

May 28, 2007
The New York Times
By MICHAEL MOSS and SOUAD MEKHENNET

When Muhammad al-Darsi got out of prison in Libya last year after serving time for militant activities, he had one goal: killing Americans in Iraq.

A recruiter he found on the Internet arranged to meet him on a bridge in Damascus, Syria. But when he got there, Mr. Darsi, 24, said the recruiter told him he was not needed in Iraq. Instead, he was drafted into the war that is seeping out of Iraq.

A team of militants from Iraq had traveled to Jordan, where they were preparing attacks on Americans and Jews, Mr. Darsi said the recruiter told him. He asked Mr. Darsi to join them and blow himself up in a crowd of tourists at Queen Alia Airport in Amman.

“I agreed,” Mr. Darsi said in a nine-page confession to Jordanian authorities after the plot was broken up.

The Iraq war, which for years has drawn militants from around the world, is beginning to export fighters and the tactics they have honed in the insurgency to neighboring countries and beyond, according to American, European and Middle Eastern government officials and interviews with militant leaders in Lebanon, Jordan and London.

Some of the fighters appear to be leaving as part of the waves of Iraqi refugees crossing borders that government officials acknowledge they struggle to control. But others are dispatched from Iraq for specific missions. In the Jordanian airport plot, the authorities said they believed that the bomb maker flew from Baghdad to prepare the explosives for Mr. Darsi.

Estimating the number of fighters leaving Iraq is at least as difficult as it has been to count foreign militants joining the insurgency. But early signs of an exodus are clear, and officials in the United States and the Middle East say the potential for veterans of the insurgency to spread far beyond Iraq is significant.

Maj. Gen. Achraf Rifi, general director of the Internal Security Forces in Lebanon, said in a recent interview that “if any country says it is safe from this, they are putting their heads in the sand.”

Last week, the Lebanese Army found itself in a furious battle against a militant group, Fatah al Islam, whose ranks included as many as 50 veterans of the war in Iraq, according to General Rifi. More than 30 Lebanese soldiers were killed fighting the group at a refugee camp near Tripoli.

The army called for outside support. By Friday, the first of eight planeloads of military supplies had arrived from the United States, which called Fatah al Islam “a brutal group of violent extremists.”

The group’s leader, Shakir al-Abssi, was an associate of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the leader of Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia who was killed last summer. In an interview with The New York Times earlier this month, Mr. Abssi confirmed reports that Syrian government forces had killed his son-in-law as he tried crossing into Iraq to collaborate with insurgents.

A Danger to the Region

Militant leaders warn that the situation in Lebanon is indicative of the spread of fighters. “You have 50 fighters from Iraq in Lebanon now, but with good caution I can say there are a hundred times that many, 5,000 or higher, who are just waiting for the right moment to act,” Dr. Mohammad al-Massari, a Saudi dissident in Britain who runs the jihadist Internet forum, Tajdeed.net, said in an interview on Friday. “The flow of fighters is already going back and forth, and the fight will be everywhere until the United States is willing to cease and desist.”

There are signs of that traffic in and out of Iraq in other places.

In Saudi Arabia last month, government officials said they had arrested 172 men who had plans to attack oil installations, public officials and military posts, and some of the men appeared to have trained in Iraq.

Officials in Europe have said in interviews that they are trying to monitor small numbers of Muslim men who have returned home after traveling for short periods to Iraq, where they were likely to have fought alongside insurgents.

One of them, an Iraqi-born Dutch citizen, Wesam al-Delaema, was accused by United States prosecutors of making repeated trips to Iraq from his home in the Netherlands to prepare instructional videos on making roadside bombs, charges he denies. He was extradited to the United States in January and charged with conspiring to kill American citizens, possessing a destructive device and teaching the making or use of explosives.

In an April 17 report written for the United States government, Dennis Pluchinsky, a former senior intelligence analyst at the State Department, said battle-hardened militants from Iraq posed a greater threat to the West than extremists who trained in Afghanistan because Iraq had become a laboratory for urban guerrilla tactics.

“There are some operational parallels between the urban terrorist activity in Iraq and the urban environments in Europe and the United States,” Mr. Pluchinsky wrote. “More relevant terrorist skills are transferable from Iraq to Europe than from Afghanistan to Europe,” he went on, citing the use of safe houses, surveillance, bomb making and mortars.

A top American military official who tracks terrorism in Iraq and the surrounding region, and who spoke on condition of anonymity because of the sensitive nature of the topic, said: “Do I think in the future the jihad will be fueled from the battlefield of Iraq? Yes. More so than the battlefield of Afghanistan.”

Militants in Iraq are turning out instructional videos and electronic newsletters on the Internet that lay out their playbook for a startling array of techniques, from encryption to booby-trapped bombs to surface-to-air missiles, and those manuals are circulating freely in cyberspace.

And tactics common in Iraq are showing up in other parts of the world. In Somalia and Algeria, for example, recent suicide bombings have been accompanied by the release of taped testimonials by the bombers, a longtime terrorist practice embraced by insurgents in Iraq.

Problems in Jordan

It is perhaps not surprising that Jordan, the site of the failed airport plot, would be among the first countries to feel the effect of an expansion of the war beyond Iraq. The countries share a border, and Jordan is an American ally. Mr. Zarqawi, who was Jordanian, is believed to have been behind a failed rocket attack on two United States Navy ships anchored off the coast of Jordan in 2005 and, later that year, suicide bombings at three hotels in Amman that killed 60 people.

Last week, President Bush asserted that in early 2005 Osama bin Laden ordered Mr. Zarqawi, his designate in Iraq, to organize terrorist attacks against the United States and other countries.

Whether the plot against the Amman airport last year was connected to Al Qaeda is not clear. Some of the conspirators who were convicted in Amman in April told Jordanian investigators that Mr. bin Laden’s group sponsored their mission, although the investigation did not confirm any link, according to records of the case obtained by The Times.

But the investigation did establish a connection between the people who planned the attack and militants from Iraq. The plot, pieced together from a 130-page record in Jordan’s secret security court, along with interviews with intelligence officials and defense attorneys, shows why intelligence officials are concerned about the reverberations from Iraq.

The Iraqi identified by authorities as the organizer of the attack, Youssef al-Abidi, moved freely through Iraq, Syria and Jordan, ferrying cash, explosives and conspirators, court records show. He crossed national boundaries that officials concede they cannot control, and although he was convicted in absentia, he remains at large.

The logistics team included at least one recent refugee from Iraq, a 34-year-old former Iraqi Army soldier named Mohsen al-Wissi. He was among the estimated 1.5 million to 2 million Iraqis now living in Jordan and Syria.

The bomb maker, Saad Fakhri al-Naimi, 40, arrived on a commercial flight from Baghdad to prepare a suicide duffel bag for Mr. Darsi, using eight pounds of plastic explosives hidden in a child’s toy.

The airport plot got under way in Zarqa — the birthplace of Mr. Zarqawi — a city north of Amman where community and religious leaders say the growing Islamic conservatism among its mostly Sunni residents has turned hostile toward Shiites as well as the United States.

When the Zarqa police raided a house used by two Iraqis in the plot, they found a computer and 375 CDs filled with anti-Shiite propaganda.

But according to Jordanian prosecutors, Mr. Abidi, the organizer, wanted to focus on resort hotels in Jordan “due to the fact that these hotels are resided in by Americans and Jews.” As part of that goal, the prosecutors said, they selected the Queen Alia Airport in Amman.

During one meeting, Mr. Abidi showed Mr. Naimi, the bomb maker, a black sports bag labeled “Polo World” that contained the explosive PE-4A, which is used by insurgents in Iraq. According to court records, he told Mr. Naimi that he would earn $20,000 for wiring it into a bomb that could be carried in the bag.

They needed someone to set off the bomb at the airport, someone willing to kill himself. That is when they found Muhammad al-Darsi, the militant recently released from prison in Libya.

Disrupting a Plot

In his confession, Mr. Darsi said that he had been jailed in Libya for six years for associating with a militant group there, and that when he got out he wanted to rejoin the fight. He found a recruiter and, at the recruiter’s e-mail directions, Mr. Darsi said he flew to Istanbul, then traveled south to Damascus. By prearrangement, he dressed in black pants and a black sweater and met the recruiter on the bridge just after evening prayers.

“I told him I want to join the mujahedeen in Iraq,” Mr. Darsi said in his statement, each page of which bears his signature and thumbprint. Through his lawyer, Mr. Darsi agreed to be interviewed in prison, but Jordanian officials declined to make him available.

Mr. Darsi, in his statement, said the recruiter “told me that he will not send me to Iraq, that he will put me in charge of a military operation inside Jordan.”

Over the next few days, Mr. Darsi says, he was blindfolded and taken to safe houses in Syria where he was prepared for his mission. To maximize civilian deaths, he was told to survey incoming flights and then detonate his bomb after joining a crowd of arriving tourists as they boarded a bus outside the terminal. In his statement he said he was told that the bag of explosives would have buttons “and that by pressing the buttons, the explosion will take place.”

With a Nokia phone and a contact’s phone number in hand, Mr. Darsi drove south to Amman in a borrowed car.

Officials at the General Intelligence Department in Jordan had picked up vague references to the planned attack from sources in Syria. But the investigation was complicated by the fact that the plotters were moving between Jordan and Syria, which have strained relations.

American officials have accused the Syrians of being indifferent to the way militants use their country as a gateway to Iraq. In Damascus, Mounir Ali, a Ministry of Information spokesman, conceded that controlling Syria’s long border with Iraq was difficult and blamed the Americans for not supplying border-control technology. But he said that Syria, too, was apprehensive about militant attacks. “We are very afraid of this problem created in Iraq,” he said. “The religious problem. The sectarian one. It is going to affect everybody and primarily Syria.”

Although the Jordanians identified the safe houses in Syria used by the airport plotters, they could not raid them. Instead, they broke the case when they picked up the two men in Zarqa and then arrested Mr. Naimi as he arrived from Baghdad, according to court records and interviews with government officials.

Those men, in turn, gave up Mr. Darsi, who was grabbed as he crossed from Syria into Jordan.

The Jordanian Security Court acquitted one man and convicted six others in connection with the airport plot, three of whom remain fugitives, including a Saudi identified as Turki Nasr Abdellah, who is believed to have helped recruit Mr. Darsi.

Mr. Abidi, whose nickname is the Father of Innocence, is believed to still be in Syria.

At the hearing last month, in which he was sentenced to life in prison, Mr. Darsi struck a defiant tone. Although he never made it to Iraq, he said he had pursued his vision of jihad, according to his lawyer, Abdel Rahman al-Majali.

Mr. Darsi stood at the barred wooden defendant’s box, shouted “God is great!” and recited verses from the Koran aimed at justifying violent jihad, according to Mr. Majali. Before being led away, Mr. Darsi told the court, “I came here to fight against Zionists and occupiers.”

Margot Williams contributed reporting.

    Militants Widen Reach as Terror Seeps Out of Iraq, NYT, 28.5.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/28/world/middleeast/28exodus.html?hp

Report: Iraq Problems Were Anticipated

May 25, 2007
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 12:27 p.m. ET
The New York Times

WASHINGTON (AP) -- U.S. intelligence analysts predicted, in two papers widely circulated before the 2003 Iraq invasion, that al-Qaida would see that as an opportunity to increase its operations and that Iran would try to shape the post-Saddam era.

The top analysts in government also said that establishing a stable democracy in Iraq would be a long, turbulent challenge.

Democrats said the documents, part of a Senate Intelligence Committee investigation released Friday, make clear that the Bush administration was warned about the challenges it now faces as it tries to stabilize Iraq.

''Sadly, the administration's refusal to heed these dire warnings -- and worse, to plan for them -- has led to tragic consequences for which our nation is paying a terrible price,'' said Senate Intelligence Chairman Jay Rockefeller, D-W.Va.

But some Republicans rejected the committee's work as flawed. The committee's top Republican, Sen. Kit Bond of Missouri, said the report's conclusions selectively highlight the intelligence agencies' findings that seem to be important now, distorting the picture of what was presented to policymakers.

He said the committee's work on the Iraq intelligence ''has become too embroiled in politics and partisanship to produce an accurate and meaningful report.''

Asked about the report at his Thursday news conference, President Bush stood by his decision to topple the Iraqi regime. He said he firmly believes the world is better off without Saddam Hussein in power.

''Going into Iraq, we were warned about a lot of things, some of which happened, some of which didn't happen. And, obviously, as I made a decision ... I weighed the risks and rewards of any decision,'' he said.

    Report: Iraq Problems Were Anticipated, NYT, 25.5.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/us/AP-Iraq-Missed-Warnings.html

Gates: Violence in Iraq Likely to Go Up

May 24, 2007
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 3:36 p.m. ET
The New York Times

WASHINGTON (AP) -- Defense Secretary Robert Gates said Thursday he expects the insurgents and terrorists in Iraq to accelerate their bombings and other attacks this summer before Gen. David Petraeus reports to Washington on whether he thinks the new U.S. strategy for securing Baghdad is working.

At a Pentagon news conference, Gates indicated that he believed the insurgents would step up the violence as a way of influencing decisions in Washington about whether and when to reduce U.S. forces in Iraq.

Petraeus' report, due in September, will be his first comprehensive assessment of the Baghdad plan since he took command in February.

''We are dealing with a smart, agile, thinking enemy,'' Gates said. ''They are technologically sophisticated and therefore they know what's going on in this country. We should be prepared for them to make a very strong effort to increase the level of violence in July and August. My hope is that anticipating it will allow us to thwart it.''

The Petraeus report is seen as a potentially decisive moment in the war, possibly leading to decisions on whether to continue the current higher levels of U.S. forces on the ground or to begin a phased withdrawal.

Gen. Peter Pace, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, appearing with Gates, said that attempts by the insurgents to target the events of September ''would make sense from their standpoint,'' since they know that Washington can be influenced by changes in the level of violence in Iraq.

President Bush, in a White House news conference earlier Thursday, made a similar point. He acknowledged that the September reporting date gives the insurgents a U.S. decision-making juncture to try to influence through violence.

''It could make August a tough month, because, you see, what they're going to try to do is kill as many innocent people as they can to try to influence the debate here at home.,'' Bush said.

    Gates: Violence in Iraq Likely to Go Up, NYT, 24.5.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/us/AP-Gates.html

Bush Supports $120 Billion Iraq War Compromise

May 24, 2007
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 3:28 p.m. ET
The New York Times

WASHINGTON (AP) -- President Bush said he supports a $120 billion war spending bill on track to pass Thursday, ending weeks of wrangling with Democrats on whether to end the war.

The bill funds the war through September as Bush wanted and does not set a date for U.S. troop withdrawals. In exchange for dropping restrictions on the military, Bush agreed to some $17 billion in spending added by Democrats to fund domestic and military-related projects.

''By voting for this bill, members of both parties can show our troops and the Iraqis and the enemy that our country will support our service men and women in harm's way,'' Bush said in a Rose Garden news conference.

The House voted 218-201 to advance the measure, paving the way for a final vote later that day. Democrats, who said they were disappointed with the White House deal, agreed not to block debate so long as the House would vote later this year on a separate proposal to bring troops come home before July 2008.

''I hate this agreement,'' said Rep. David Obey, D-Wis., chairman of the Appropriations Committee.

Obey said the deal was the best that Democrats could do manage because ''the White House is in a cloud somewhere in terms of understanding the realities in Iraq.''

The bill includes the nearly $100 billion that President Bush requested for military and diplomatic operations in Iraq and Afghanistan as well as billions in domestic spending, including $6.4 billion in hurricane relief and $3 billion in agricultural assistance.

Republicans were unhappy about the added domestic spending, but said they were relieved the final measure did not attempt to set a timetable on the war.

''We cannot and will not abandon the Iraqis to be butchered by these terrorists in their midst,'' said Rep. David Dreier, R-Calif. ''And we cannot and will not abandon our mission just as real progress is starting to be made.''

While the measure does not include a timetable on the war, it does threaten to withhold U.S. aid dollars for Iraq if Baghdad fails to make progress on political and security reforms. The president, however, could waive that restriction.

The bill also for the first time explicitly states that the U.S. would leave Iraq if asked by the Baghdad government.

Bush said Iraq's ability to meet the benchmarks outlined in the bill would be difficult.

''It's going to be hard work for this young government,'' he said. ''After all, the Iraqis are recovering from decades of brutal dictatorship.''

The hefty spending bill has become a lightning rod for political attacks on Bush and his handling of the deeply unpopular war, which has killed more than 3,400 U.S. troops and cost more than $300 billion. But it also has exposed a sharp divide among Democrats on how far Congress should go to end the war.

Democratic presidential contenders on Capitol Hill are vying for the anti-war vote, but at the same time do not want to appear as though they are turning their backs on the military.

''I believe as long as we have troops in the front line, we're going to have to protect them,'' said Sen. Joseph Biden, D-Del. ''We're going to have to fund them.''

Biden was alone among the potential Democratic candidates in immediately pledging his support for the bill.

Two front-runners, Sens. Hillary Rodham Clinton of New York and Barack Obama of Illinois, declined to say how they intended to vote on the measure.

Challengers Sen. Christopher Dodd of Connecticut and Rep. Dennis Kucinich of Ohio said they would oppose the measure because in their view it issued a blank check to President Bush on the Iraq war.

''Half-measures and equivocations are not going to change our course in Iraq,'' Dodd said in a statement. ''If we are serious about ending the war, Congress must stand up to this president's failed policy now -- with clarity and conviction.''

Democratic leaders planned multiple votes in the House on Thursday to ensure the measure would ultimately pass because of disagreements among members on elements of the bill. One vote was to be on war funding, while another would be to approve the extra money for domestic and military-related projects.

While liberal Democrats were expected to vote against the war funds measure, GOP members were expected to make up for the losses. On the added spending, Democrats likely were to be unified in their support for the measure, overcoming GOP objections.

    Bush Supports $120 Billion Iraq War Compromise, NYT, 24.5.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/us/AP-US-Iraq.html

Body Found in Iraq Is That of Missing G.I.

May 24, 2007
The New York Times
By DAMIEN CAVE

MAHMUDIYA, Iraq, May 24 — The American military confirmed today that a body found in the Euphrates River on Wednesday is that of Army Pfc. Joseph Anzack Jr., one of three American soldiers seized in an ambush on May 12.

A military official said that the body, which was pulled from the river several miles south of where the attack occurred, had been identified late Wednesday and that the family of Private Anzack, 20, of Torrance, Calif., had been notified.

The discovery brought the first signs of closure to a massive manhunt that has gone on for 11 days, with thousands of American and Iraqi troops searching day and night for the missing soldiers. But for the men and women who lost friends, it was hardly enough.

Lt. Michael Nunziato, 24, a member of the Second Brigade Combat Team of the 10th Mountain Division — a unit that lost a soldier on Saturday when a bomb exploded as they were searching for the missing Americans — said the discovery brought a mix of sadness and relief to the search parties.

“It’s good to have the finality of it,” said Lt. Nunziato, 24, of Buffalo, N.Y. “You never want it to be that he passed away, but you have to keep up hope for the remaining two. You have to keep up hope.”

The search for the two other soldiers — Specialist Alex R. Jimenez, 25, of Lawrence, Mass., and Pvt. Byron W. Fouty, 19, of Waterford, Mich. — continued on Thursday, with troops moving throughout the area.

Several platoons in Humvees rolled out early this morning from the main base in Mahmudiyah while helicopters shuddered overhead.

Word of the body being discovered spread quickly on Wednesday night among the troops. American military officials said Iraqi police officers had recovered the body near Musayyib, about 40 miles south of Baghdad, in an area known to be a safe haven for Sunni insurgents.

Military officials on Wednesday declined to provide details on the location or condition of the body and cut off Internet and telephone access for soldiers at bases to limit rumors. “We will give the truth to the families first,” said Maj. Webster Wright, a spokesman for the Second Brigade Combat Team, which has been leading the search.

Iraqi police officials said the body was partly clothed in an American military uniform and had a tattoo on one arm, bullet wounds and possible signs of torture. Residents said it was found floating in the Euphrates on Wednesday morning, several miles south of the road by the river where the attack occurred.

“Some people from our town — and I was with them — dragged the body from the river,” said Ali Abbas al-Fatlawi, 30, a resident of Musayyib. “We saw the head riddled with bullets, and shots in the left side of the abdomen. His hands were not tied, and he was not blindfolded.”

Ali Khalid, 27, a carpenter who lives near the river, said he had used his boat to take the body to shore. Residents say the police took the body to a local hospital, where American soldiers later collected it.

American military officials did not confirm the local accounts. A group of soldiers who had been searching near Musayyib this week — and who requested anonymity because they were not authorized to speak about the operations — said American troops might have cornered the gunmen, who then killed the soldier and dumped his body as they fled.

The area, they said, has one of the most entrenched insurgent populations in Iraq, with American troops regularly facing attack when they enter.

In the dining hall at a United States base here on Wednesday night, American soldiers gathered around televisions, anxiously watching cable news reports about the discovery of the body.

Pfc. Ryan McClymonds, 21, of Miami, said that if the body found in the river proved to be that of one of the missing Americans, its discovery would at least represent some progress in a frustrating search dominated by false leads. “Something is better than nothing for the families,” Private McClymonds said. He said the troops hungered for something to show for their effort.

At least two soldiers have already died during the search for their missing comrades, and several others have been wounded. Iraqi and American officials have reported that roughly 1,000 people have been detained since the search began. Of those, commanders have said, roughly 15 are believed to have direct knowledge of the ambush.

Seven of the nine American service members killed Monday and Tuesday were soldiers. Six were killed by roadside bombs and the seventh was hit by small arms fire, the military said in statements.

The other two were marines killed in combat in Anbar Province, the military said.

The military also reported on Wednesday that nine American service members had been killed in roadside bomb attacks and gun battles across Iraq on Monday and Tuesday, and a suicide bomber struck Wednesday in an area where Kurds and Arabs are battling for control, killing as many as 20 people.

The bomber walked into a coffee shop in Mandali, 60 miles east of Baghdad in Diyala Province, and blew himself up. A police official said the blast had killed 11 people and wounded 25; news agencies reported that the police said at least 20 people had been killed.

It was at least the second major attack in a week in the area and seemed to reflect rising tensions between Kurds and Arabs over a disputed section of the province that Kurdish leaders are seeking to incorporate into Iraqi Kurdistan. On May 19, gunmen wearing Iraqi Army uniforms dragged 15 Shiite Kurds into the street in a nearby village and shot them dead, Iraqi government officials said.

Diyala, a religiously mixed area that has become one of Iraq’s deadliest regions, was also the site of several gun battles and bombings on Wednesday.

Security officials in Jalawla said three Iraqi soldiers had been among six killed there in a series of clashes. A bomb in the nearby city of Buhruz killed two women, officials said. And in Muqdadiya, two other civilians and a policeman were killed in separate attacks.

In Baghdad, the authorities found 30 bodies throughout the city, an Interior Ministry official said. Bombs and mortars killed at least four people, the official said.

Gunmen in armored vehicles also opened fire near the Shorja market, leading to clashes that killed at least five people and wounded 17, according to witnesses and the police.

Mustafa Hatem, 35, said the shots had set fire to his electrical goods store, causing more than $10,000 worth of damage. The Iraqi government, he said, should consider augmenting its own government forces and allowing Iraqis to create their own private security companies.

“I was expecting good things from the government succeeding Saddam’s, but unfortunately things have gone in the opposite direction to our hopes and dreams,” he said. “I wonder, how has the security plan benefited us?”

The United States military said gunmen attacked a convoy of State Department officials in Baghdad on Wednesday, requiring help from attack helicopters and American troops in the area. No American soldiers or civilians were hurt.

    Body Found in Iraq Is That of Missing G.I., NYT, 24.5.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/24/world/middleeast/24cnd-iraq.html

Iraqis Say Body Found of U.S. Soldier

May 23, 2007
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 4:57 p.m. ET
The New York Times

BAGHDAD (AP) -- Iraqi police dragged a body from the Euphrates River on Wednesday and said it was one of three American soldiers abducted in an ambush claimed by al-Qaida. The U.S. military has yet to identify the victim and pressed ahead with its search through sweltering flatlands south of Baghdad.

According to a U.S. military official, a second body was found in the area near where the first body was discovered. The official, who requested anonymity because the information has not yet been released, said there was no indication yet whether the body was another of the three missing soldiers.

American forces also disclosed nine more deaths, raising to 20 the number of U.S. troops killed in four days.

The spike in American deaths and the discovery of the bodies come at a difficult moment for Washington, where the Bush administration and Congress are struggling to agree on funding for the unpopular war. The search for the captured soldiers has also taken thousands of troops out of the pool of forces for the Baghdad security crackdown.

Nationwide at least 104 people were killed in sectarian violence or found dead Wednesday, including 32 who perished in suicide bombings. One bombing took place 60 miles west of the capital, the other in a city to the east near the Iranian border.

In the search for three U.S. soldiers ambushed and captured May 12, thousands of U.S. and Iraqi forces have trudged in temperatures above 110 degrees through desert and lush farmland, sometimes wading in sewage-polluted irrigation ditches. Four other troopers and an Iraqi were killed in the ambush, subsequently claimed by al-Qaida.

Maj. Gen. William Caldwell, the chief U.S. military spokesman in Iraq, told reporters that U.S. authorities took custody of the body found Wednesday.

''Iraqi police did find the body of a man whom they believe may be one of our missing soldiers,'' Caldwell said. ''We have received the body and we will work diligently to determine if he is in fact one of our missing soldiers.''

Iraqi police using civilian boats searched for other bodies on the river in Musayyib, about 40 miles south of Baghdad, and U.S. troops intensified their presence on a nearby bridge as helicopters flew overhead, witnesses said.

Hassan al-Jibouri, 32, said he saw the body with head wounds and whip marks on its back floating on the river Wednesday morning. He and others then alerted police.

A senior Iraqi army officer in the Babil area told The Associated Press that the body was that of an American soldier. The officer spoke on condition of anonymity because he is not authorized to speak to the media. One report said the body bore a tattoo on the left hand.

The military has warned that U.S. casualties were likely to increase as troops made more frequent patrols during the U.S.-led security crackdown in Baghdad, now in its fourth month.

The captured soldiers are Pfc. Joseph J. Anzack Jr., 20, of Torrance, Calif.; Spc. Alex R. Jimenez, 25, of Lawrence, Mass.; and Pvt. Byron W. Fouty, 19, of Waterford, Mich.

In the soldiers' hometowns, friends and relatives anxiously awaited word.

''Everyone here is just on pins and needles waiting and hoping,'' said Scott McDowell, principal of South High School in Torrance, which Anzack attended before enlisting. ''Half the computers here are logged on to CNN looking for any news. ... It's been tough sitting and waiting.''

McDowell also said some students and their families are wearing yellow ribbons to show support for Anzack.

In Lawrence, Mass., Francisco Urena, the veteran services director and a former Marine who served as a tank commander in Iraq, said he could hardly contain himself as he awaited news about Jimenez. ''I just wish I could grab my pack and start searching for himself,'' he said.

Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, meanwhile, announced he was ready to fill six Cabinet seats vacated by politicians loyal to radical anti-American Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr in a mass resignation last month.

Al-Sadr, who went into hiding in Iran at the start of the Baghdad security crackdown, ordered his ministers to quit the government over al-Maliki's refusal to call for a timetable for U.S. withdrawal.

The deaths of the seven soldiers and two Marines in a series of attacks Monday and Tuesday brought the American death toll for the month to at least 80. Last month, 104 U.S. troops were killed in Iraq.

One of Wednesday's suicide bombings hit a cafe in the town of Mandali, on the Iranian border 60 miles east of Baghdad. The attacker walked into the packed cafe and blew himself up, killing 22 people and wounding 13, police said.

The cafe in the mixed Sunni, Shiite and Kurdish city was popular with police officers -- but none was there at the time, police said. A man in his 30s wearing a heavy jacket despite the heat was seen walking into the cafe seconds before the blast, according to police.

In the second suicide assault, a bomber blew himself up in the house of two brothers who were supporting a Sunni alliance opposed to al-Qaida in Anbar province, killing 10 people, including the men, their wives and children, police Lt. Col. Jabar Rasheed Nayef said.

The attacker, a 17-year-old neighbor, broke into the house of the two men, Sheik Mohammed Ali and police Lt. Col. Abed Ali, and detonated his bomb belt late Tuesday in Albo Obaid, about 60 miles west of Baghdad.

The targeted men were part of the Anbar Salvation Council, a group of Sunni tribal leaders backing the government's fight against al-Qaida.

In Washington, National Security Council spokesman Gordon Johndroe said U.S. and Iraqi officials were planning to increase again the number of Iraqi security forces to help quell violence in the country.

The review was undertaken as President Bush's new military-political team in Iraq -- commander Gen. David Petraeus and U.S. Ambassador Ryan Crocker -- assessed strategy for the four-year-old war.

''Gen. Petraeus and Ambassador Crocker have been working on the specific tactics'' needed for the strategy President Bush announced in January -- a troop buildup to calm Baghdad so Iraqis can make political and economic progress, Johndroe said.

About 337,000 Iraqi police and soldiers had been trained and equipped as of May 9, according to Defense Department statistics. Officials hope to have the currently planned 365,000 in place by the end of the year, Brig. Gen. Michael Jones, deputy director for political-military affairs in the Middle East for the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told lawmakers Tuesday.

AP correspondents Lolita Baldor in Washington, Glen Johnson in Lawrence, Mass., David Aguilar in Commerce Township, Mich., and Jeremiah Marquez in Torrance, Calif., contributed to this report.

    Iraqis Say Body Found of U.S. Soldier, NYT, 23.5.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/world/AP-Iraq.html

Bush: Iraq at Center of Terror Fight

May 23, 2007
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 4:26 p.m. ET
The New York Times

NEW LONDON, Conn. (AP) -- President Bush portrayed the Iraq war as a battle between the U.S. and al-Qaida on Wednesday and shared nuggets of intelligence to contend Osama bin Laden was setting up a terrorist cell in Iraq to strike targets in America.

Bush, who faces a public weary of war and is at odds with Democrats in Congress over funding troops, said that while the Sept. 11 attacks occurred in 2001, Americans still face a major threat from terrorists.

''In the minds of al-Qaida leaders, 9/11 was just a down payment on violence yet to come,'' Bush said during a commencement speech at the U.S. Coast Guard Academy in which he defended his decision to order a troop buildup in Iraq. ''It is tempting to believe that the calm here at home after 9/11 means that the danger to our country has passed.''

''Here in America, we are living in the eye of a storm,'' he said. ''All around us, dangerous winds are swirling and these winds could reach our shores at any moment.''

Critics of the war insist that U.S. troops are in the middle of fights among Shiites, Sunnis and Kurds.

''As global terror threats remain very real, President Bush is sinking more money and sending more troops to referee Iraq's civil war, when those precious resources would be better spent in finishing the mission left unaccomplished in Afghanistan,'' said Brian Katulis, a national security expert at the Center for American Progress think tank.

The White House has repeatedly said the U.S. and its allies will be successful when the Iraqis can sustain, govern and defend themselves, yet Bush used his speech to stress the threat from al-Qaida activities in Iraq.

''Hear the words of Osama bin Laden: He calls the struggle in Iraq a `war of destiny,''' Bush said. ''He proclaimed `The war is for you or for us to win. If we win it, it means your defeat and disgrace forever.'''

Much of the intelligence information Bush cited in his speech described terrorism plots already revealed. But he declassified information to flesh out details and highlight U.S. successes in foiling planned attacks orchestrated by bin Laden, the al-Qaida boss.

''Victory in Iraq is important for Osama bin Laden, and victory in Iraq is vital for the United States of America,'' Bush told the graduating class seated in a stadium under bright sunshine along the Thames River.

Bush said intelligence showed that in January 2005, bin Laden tasked Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, his senior operative in Iraq, to organize a terrorist cell and use Iraq as a staging ground for attacking the United States.

This information expanded on a classified bulletin the Homeland Security Department issued in March 2005. The bulletin, which warned that bin Laden had enlisted al-Zarqawi to plan potential strikes in the United States, was described at the time as credible but not specific. It did not prompt the administration to raise its national terror alert level.

Bush said that in the spring of 2005, bin Laden also instructed Hamza Rabia, a senior operative, to brief al-Zarqawi on an al-Qaida plan to attack sites outside Iraq.

''Our intelligence community reports that a senior al-Qaida leader, Abu Faraj al-Libi, went further and suggested that bin Laden actually send Rabia, himself, to Iraq to help plan external operations,'' Bush said. ''Abu Faraj later speculated that if this effort proved successful, al-Qaida might one day prepare the majority of its external operations from Iraq.''

Bush said another suspected al-Qaida operative, Ali Salih al-Mari, was training in poisoning at a camp in Afghanistan and dispatched to the United States before the Sept. 11 attacks to ''serve as a sleeper agent ready for follow-on attacks.''

Bush said bin Laden attempted to send a new commander to Iraq, an Iraqi-born terrorist named Abd al-Hadi al-Iraqi. Al-Iraqi, who was al-Qaida's top commander in Afghanistan, was captured last year and recently transferred to Guantanamo Bay.

Democrats and other critics have accused Bush of selectively declassifying intelligence, including portions of a sensitive National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq, to justify the U.S.-led invasion on grounds that Saddam Hussein's government possessed weapons of mass destruction. That assertion proved false.

Rand Beers, national security adviser to John Kerry's 2004 Democratic presidential campaign, contended Wednesday that the Bush administration was releasing intelligence to buttress the argument that Iraq is the central front in the war on terrorism while a number of intelligence sources say the most recent attacks or planned attacks against the U.S. and its allies have originated in Pakistan instead.

''Bin Laden is using Iraq to kill and demonize the United States while remaining secure and planning further operations in Pakistan,'' Beers said.

Frances Fragos Townsend, the White House homeland security adviser, said new details about the plots were declassified because the intelligence community had tracked all leads from the information and the players were either dead or in U.S. custody.

In May 2005, al-Libi was captured. Several months later, in December 2005, al-Rabia was killed in Pakistan. In June of 2006, al-Zarqawi was killed in Iraq in a U.S. airstrike.

Actually, making the new information public earlier might have allowed Bush to use it to his political advantage, Townsend said. ''This is kind of late to be able to bring this to the game,'' she said, adding that intelligence officials needed time to exploit the information.

------

On the Net:

White House: http://www.whitehouse.gov

    Bush: Iraq at Center of Terror Fight, NYT, 23.5.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/us/AP-US-Terrorism.html

U.S. Trying to Identify Body Found in Iraq

May 23, 2007
The New York Times
By DAMIEN CAVE

MAHMUDIYA, Iraq, May 23 — The American military is examining a body found in the Euphrates River today that Iraqi authorities and local residents believe is one of three American soldiers seized in an ambush on May 12.

Roadside bombs and gun battles across Iraq also killed nine more American service members on Monday and Tuesday, military officials said today, and a suicide bomber in an area east of Baghdad blew himself up, killing at least 11 people.

American military officials said the Iraqi police officers recovered the dead body south of Mahmudiya, near Mussayib, in an area known to be a safe haven for Sunni Arab insurgents. They declined to provide details on the location or state of the body, and they cut off Internet services for soldiers at bases to limit any rumors.

“We will give the truth to the families first,” said Maj. Webster Wright, a spokesman for the Second Brigade of the 10th Mountain Division, which has been leading the search.

The attack on May 12 killed four Americans and an Iraqi soldier. For the past 11 days, thousands of American and Iraqi troops spent day and night searching for the missing soldiers. The discovery, if validated, would be the first big break of the case.

The Iraqi police in the area said the body was partly clothed in an American military uniform, had a tattoo on one arm and bullet wounds. Residents said it was found about 40 miles south of Baghdad in the Euphrates River.

“Some people from our town — and I was with them — dragged the body from the river,” said Ali Abbas Al-Fatlawi, 30, one local resident. “We saw the head riddled with bullets, and fire shots in the left side of the abdomen. We also saw a tattoo of an eagle on his back. His hands were not tied, and not blind folded.”

Residents said the police took the body to a local hospital where they said American military officials later retrieved it.

American military officials did not confirm local accounts. But commanders said that the search for the missing soldiers would continue.

“Until we know, we’re going to continue searching,” said Lt. Col. Robert Morschauser, commander of Task Force 2-15, Second Brigade Combat Team, 10th Mountain Division. “We have operations planned and we’ll continue to search until all three soldiers are found.”

“My men are tired but extremely motivated,” he said, adding, “We need closure for the families.”

In the dining hall at the base here in Mahmudiya, American soldiers gathered around televisions, anxiously watching the latest cable news reports about the discovery of the body.

Pfc. Ryan McClymonds, 21, of Miami, said that if the body found in the river did prove to be one of the missing Americans, it would at least represent some progress in what has so far been a frustrating search.

“Something is better than nothing for the families,” Private McClymonds said.

After several days chasing leads and coming up empty, he said, “If we find out it’s nothing, it hurts. We just want to give some comfort to the families.”

“It’s just three guys — we should be able to find them,” he said. “But we are having a really hard time.”

Of the nine American service members killed, six soldiers were killed by roadside bombs and the seventh was killed by small arms fire. The military said the two Marines were killed in combat operations in Anbar Province.

Elsewhere in Iraq, the violence continued. A suicide bomber wearing an explosive belt walked into a coffee shop in Mandali, 60 miles east of Baghdad, and blew himself up, killing 11 people and wounding 25 others, the police said.

Security officials in Jalawla, in the restive Diyala Province, said six people were killed in clashes between gunmen and the Iraqi Army. Three of the six who died were Iraqi army soldiers, the officials said.

A bomb in the nearby city of Buhruz killed two women, officials said. And in Muqtadiya, two other civilians and a policeman were killed in separate attacks.

Reporting was contributed by Wisam A. Habeebe, Ali Adeeb and Khalid W. Hassan from Baghdad, and Iraqi employees of The New York Times from Mahmudiya.

    U.S. Trying to Identify Body Found in Iraq, NYT, 23.5.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/23/world/middleeast/23cnd-Iraq.html

As Comrades Search, Fatal Bomb Wreaks Havoc

May 23, 2007
The New York Times
By DAMIEN CAVE

MAHMUDIYA, Iraq, May 22 — The ground exploded under an ashen sky at dawn. Dust, dirt, blood and military equipment filled the air, clearing after several seconds to reveal a frenzied scene of horror.

Where Sgt. Justin D. Wisniewski, 22, had just been standing there was now a crater five feet wide and three feet deep. His body lay nearby. The wounded were scattered around him.

The soldiers swore.

“It was Ski,” one said, using the sergeant’s nickname.

Sgt. Joshua Delgado, 23, the unit’s medic, rushed in and went to work on the most seriously wounded soldier, who lay with shrapnel wounds to the face, arm and side. Two other Americans and an Iraqi were also hurt.

One of the wounded, Staff Sgt. Robert Simonovich, 31, knelt off to the right. He had taken his body armor off and, with just a T-shirt on, it was clear he had not walked far enough yet to sweat. His hands rested on his knees, his head tilted down. Eyes closed, he said he couldn’t see.

“It’s not one of our guys, is it?” he said. No one answered.

Capt. Blake Keil, 31, who commanded the group of 11 Americans working with about 50 Iraqis, called for a medevac helicopter.

The bomb was the third planted away from a road that the soldiers had discovered since May 12, when they began searching for three soldiers from their unit who had been captured after an ambush that left four Americans and an Iraqi soldier dead.

After the attack on Saturday, the reality of the threat set in: the fields they had been crossing on foot for months might now be as dangerous as the roads they had learned to avoid. What they had just witnessed — a homemade land mine, or what the military calls a dismounted improvised explosive device — could be anywhere.

Some of the soldiers began to move more slowly. Seeking cover, they traced one another’s footsteps to an abandoned house. Sergeant Simonovich continued to kneel alone.

“I’m worried about my guy out front, Sergeant Wisniewski,” he said. His Ohio accent was thick enough to sound southern. Blood had splattered his face, which was bruised but intact. “I have a question,” he said, pointing to the left side of his head. “Is my ear still there?”


***

The army has a creed — no soldier left behind. The soldiers of Second Platoon, A Battery, Task Force 2-15, Second Brigade Combat Team, 10th Mountain Division, lost one of their own on Saturday in an effort to follow that creed. Sergeant Wisniewski, 22, died at the start of a 10-mile trek through farms and over canals with the goal of finding the three missing Americans.

Both that ambush and the bomb that exploded beneath Sergeant Wisniewski reflected the changing dynamic the soldiers face in an area with unique terrain and a fresh set of American tactics intended to secure it.

Here, south of Baghdad, in the area known as the “triangle of death,” Iraq’s desert gives way to lush green vegetation. Sunni tribes are dominant, and irrigation canals are perhaps the area’s defining characteristic.

Since 2003, insurgents have focused on hitting military vehicles to undermine the American effort in Iraq. Most of those devices were planted along the major roads that could handle the weight of American vehicles. The craters appear everywhere, and American troops have named many of them, making them landmarks.

Because of that risk and the stepped-up counterinsurgency effort, troops have increasingly moved out of forward operating bases to smaller outposts where they can maneuver on foot.

But the shift to foot patrols has brought a progressively greater toll as insurgents have adjusted to the new tactics and begun placing bombs along footpaths and back roads. Since taking over the command in September, 42 soldiers from the Second Brigade, 10th Mountain Division, have been killed in hostile attacks. Of those, 14 were killed during dismounted patrols. The search has added to the risks.


***

“I’m not out here to win any medals,” said Capt. Michael Abercrombie, leader of a platoon from B Battery, which had the unenviable task of replacing Captain Keil’s unit. “If you see soft ground, walk around.”

The Iraqi and American soldiers moved slowly through the area, reminding one another to walk 10 feet apart so that if another explosion hit, casualties would be limited. After about 15 minutes, they came across a one-story stone house with a wide grass lawn, a cattle pen and five young men whom the Iraqi soldiers had lined up against a wall. Their names were checked against a list of insurgents wanted for questioning in relation to the May 12 attack.

None of their names appeared, but Captain Abercrombie ordered them arrested anyway, in light of the bomb attack that morning.

“I’m detaining them all,” he said. “For proximity.”


***

Ski, as he was known, was a sarcastic joker. A native of Standish, Mich., he was tall, blond and decisive. He was young for a platoon sergeant. A winner of the Bronze Star and a Purple Heart, he was promoted by his commanders because he had the ability to inspire. And to goad.

At one point, his friends said, he made his soldiers wear their helmets and goggles on base — where no one else does — so that they would remember to keep them on at all times while on patrol.

In return, on his 22nd birthday, his friends gave him a gift they thought he would appreciate: they threw him in a Dumpster.

Losing Ski and seeing three other friends wounded brought out a mix of uncharacteristic honesty and anger in the platoon. Immediately after the explosion, the soldiers swore and kicked whatever they could find. One said he wanted vengeance.

But “I love you, man” was far more common. Huge, strong men hugged, tears streaming down their faces. When it was not clear whether the seriously wounded soldier on the ground would make it, “I love you” was said repeatedly, blurted out as if it was something they wished they had told Sergeant Wisniewski.

When one of the wounded soldiers insisted that the mushy stuff had gone too far, there was friendly resistance. “What, I can’t love someone now?” a soldier said.

“I love you,” he said. “I can say ‘I love you’ if I want to.”

The group had been fighting together for 10 months. Covering central Mahmudiya and parts of the surrounding area, they had been attacked by rockets, gunfire, mortar shells, grenades and roadside bombs. They had always survived. Ski was their first killed in action.

“I haven’t really accepted it,” Sergeant Simonovich said, after returning to his unit with minor shrapnel wounds to his face and a burst eardrum. “I haven’t accepted it.”

His eyes were open and intact. He had been wearing his goggles when the bomb exploded.


***

Four hours into Saturday’s search, the soldiers received more news they did not want to accept: a sniper shot hit another member of A Battery in the head. He had been on the roof of a house that was being searched, oblivious to the threat.

Capt. Aaron Bright’s unit, a platoon of B Battery, received the news, too. It was a few hundred yards north of Captain Abercrombie’s group when the call came in. The men were disappointed, angry, frustrated.

Seconds later, the word came down that the unit up ahead did not have a medic. Captain Bright’s unit did, so the group ran several miles to the house only to find that a helicopter had already picked up the wounded soldier. His friends sat on the floor, on stairs, their faces showing they had been crying. A flak jacket with some blood on it rested next to a soldier leaning against a set of white kitchen cabinets. The body armor belonged to the soldier who was shot.

Captain Bright, 29, the battery commander, said the group would have to keep moving. “We have some more objectives we have to hit,” he said.


***

The search operation continued in the midday heat. Captain Abercrombie’s unit walked through farms, searched houses and struggled through a wide swath of mud that nearly claimed a few pairs of boots.

In a house close to where helicopters would later deliver bottles of water in black body bags, they rested once again. Sgt. Stephen Byers, 31, of Detroit said that Friday night was the first time he had a chance to call his wife and kids since the search started.

He said that he was too tired to say very much, but that his wife was clearly worried. He had begun to wonder himself if the search was becoming more dangerous. “The more we chase them around,” he said, “the more they know where we’re at.”

But, he said, in a war without front lines and goals that are hard to achieve, the search offered the comfort of certainty, of a clear and noble goal. “If we find them, we accomplish something specific,” Sergeant Byers said. “It’s not like trying to bring peace to the area then finding out later that you didn’t.”


***

Saturday’s searching turned up nothing significant. The three soldiers — Pfc. Joseph J. Anzack Jr., 20, of Torrance, Calif.; Specialist Alex R. Jimenez, 25, of Lawrence, Mass.; and Pvt. Byron W. Fouty, 19, of Waterford, Mich. — were not found.

On Sunday, the group welcomed the return of two of its wounded soldiers — Sergeant Simonovich and Pfc. Nicholas Barker, who had slight shrapnel wounds to the face. American soldiers are not allowed to drink alcohol here, so they had a barbecue. They celebrated. They talked.

And on Monday, it was back to work. The men of Second Platoon prepared their Humvees for another day of walking, another day of searching. They reviewed the route for what would be a seven-mile march that they hoped to do in three hours.

Wearing dark glasses, his uniform bloodstained from two days earlier, Sergeant Delgado, the medic, was a picture of calm. “We had our time to grieve, but after that you have to detach from your emotions and drive on,” he said. “We’re going to be here for another six months.”

Diana Oliva Cave contributed reporting.

    As Comrades Search, Fatal Bomb Wreaks Havoc, NYT, 23.5.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/23/world/middleeast/23cnd-Iraq.html

U.S. Embassy in Iraq to Be Biggest Ever

May 19, 2007
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 7:26 p.m. ET
The New York Times

WASHINGTON (AP) -- The new U.S. Embassy in Baghdad will be the world's largest and most expensive foreign mission, though it may not be large enough or secure enough to cope with the chaos in Iraq.

The Bush administration designed the 104-acre compound -- set to open in September in what today is a war zone -- to be an ultra-secure enclave. Yet it also hoped that downtown Baghdad would cease being a battleground when diplomats moved in.

Over the long term, depending on which way the seesaw of sectarian division and grinding warfare teeters, the massive city-within-a-city could prove too enormous for the job of managing diminished U.S. interests in Iraq.

The $592 million embassy occupies a chunk of prime real estate two-thirds the size of Washington's National Mall, with desk space for about 1,000 people behind high, blast-resistant walls. The compound is a symbol both of how much the United States has invested in Iraq and how the circumstances of its involvement are changing.

The embassy is one of the few major projects the administration has undertaken in Iraq that is on schedule and within budget. Still, not all has gone according to plan.

The 21-building complex on the Tigris River was envisioned three years ago partly as a headquarters for the democratic expansion in the Middle East that President Bush identified as the organizing principle for foreign policy in his second term.

The complex quickly could become a white elephant if the U.S. scales back its presence and ambitions in Iraq. Although the U.S. probably will have forces in Iraq for years to come, it is not clear how much of the traditional work of diplomacy can proceed amid the violence and what the future holds for Iraq's government.

''What you have is a situation in which they are building an embassy without really thinking about what its functions are,'' said Edward Peck, a former top U.S. diplomat in Iraq.

''What kind of embassy is it when everybody lives inside and it's blast-proof, and people are running around with helmets and crouching behind sandbags?''

The compound will have secure apartments for about 615 people. The comfortable but not opulent one-bedrooms have offered hope for State Department staff now doubled up in tinny trailers.

Morale is at an ebb among the embassy staff, most of whom rarely leave the heavily fortified Green Zone during their one-year tours in Iraq. The barricaded zone houses both the current, makeshift U.S. Embassy and the new compound about a mile away. A recent string of mortar attacks has meant further restrictions.

On Saturday, three mortar shells or rockets slammed into a Green Zone compound where British Prime Minister Tony Blair was meeting with Iraqi leaders. The attack wounded one person. One round hit the British Embassy compound.

The new U.S. ambassador, Ryan Crocker, is reviewing staffing and housing needs, and fielding complaints about any suggestion employees either double up again or live elsewhere.

''We do believe that the embassy compound was right-sized at the time that it was presented to the Congress,'' Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice told a Senate panel this month. ''There have been some additional issues since that time. ''

Rice's senior adviser on Iraq, David Satterfield, said the embassy is not disproportionately expensive and will serve U.S. interests for years. The second-most expensive embassy is the smaller $434 million U.S. mission being built in Beijing.

''We assume there will be a significant, enduring U.S. presence in Iraq,'' Satterfield said.

The Baghdad Embassy will open in September and be fully staffed by the end of the year, Satterfield said. U.S. diplomats will move from a dogeared Saddam Hussein-era palace they have occupied since shortly after the 2003 invasion, to the growing irritation of many Iraqis.

The International Crisis Group, a nongovernmental organization that seeks to prevent and resolve conflicts, has identified the complex as the world's largest embassy. The organization notes that the embassy is a sore point with Iraqis who are fed up with war, violence and roadblocks and chafing under the perception the U.S. still calls the shots more than four years after Saddam's ouster.

The embassy also is a prime target.

The area around the construction site was hit with mortar fire this month. Other areas of the U.S.-controlled Green Zone were hit on consecutive days last week.

The increase in mortar and rocket attacks on the Green Zone has raised concern, especially because they are occurring during a U.S.-led security crackdown in Baghdad.

The embassy has ordered its staff to wear flak jackets and helmets while outdoors or in unprotected buildings. The order was issued one day after a rocket attack killed four Asian contractors in the Green Zone this month.

It is unclear who is responsible for the recent attacks. Some barrages came from Shiite-dominated areas in eastern Baghdad. But the Green Zone also is within range of Sunni militant strongholds to the south.

The State Department and Congress have tussled this year over a $50 million request for additional blast-resistant housing. The department says it did not anticipate needing so many fortified apartments when the embassy was in the planning stages three years ago and Iraq was a less violent place.

The new Democratic-controlled Congress has grumbled about the approximately $1 billion annual cost of embassy operations in Iraq and told the administration the embassy is overstaffed at roughly 1,000 regular employees. Add security contractors, locally hired staff and others and the number climbs to more than 4,000.

''This is another case where poor planning, skyrocketing costs and security concerns are colliding in the Bush administration's policies in Iraq, and we need to make adjustments,'' said Sen. Patrick Leahy, chairman of the Senate panel that pays for State Department operations.

''They want hundreds of additional embassy staff who they cannot safely house within the new embassy compound. It's time for a reality check,'' said Leahy, D-Vt.

------

Associated Press writer Robert Reid in Baghdad contributed to this report.

------

On the Net:

U.S. Embassy site: http://iraq.usembassy.gov/iraq/

    U.S. Embassy in Iraq to Be Biggest Ever, NYT, 19.5.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/us/AP-Worlds-Largest-Embassy.html

Bombs Imperil G.I.’s Searching for Captured Comrades

May 20, 2007
The New York Times
By DAMIEN CAVE

LATAFIYA, Iraq, May 19 — The thousands of American soldiers searching for their three comrades who were captured a week ago have been dogged by a deadly threat: bombs buried far from roads that strike them as they fan out to cover the area’s rural terrain.

At least four of the devices — called “dismounted improvised explosive devices” or dismounted I.E.D.’s — have hit foot patrols in the lush Sunni stronghold south of Baghdad where the men were captured May 12, Iraqi and American military officials said. The only two soldiers known to be killed during the weeklong hunt died after stepping on or near bombs that commanders describe as an effort to scare them back into their Humvees.

“They’re putting them in places where we’re more likely to be dismounted,” said Lt. Col. Robert Morschauser, commander of the Second Battalion, Second Brigade Combat Team of the 10th Mountain Division, which controls Mahmudiya and the surrounding villages.

“We’ve seen it before,” he said. “But they’re using more of it.”

The bombs have added fresh sorrows and fears to the already urgent effort by 4,000 American soldiers and 2,000 Iraqi soldiers, working long days with little rest to follow leads that have taken them across wide swaths of farmland.

On Thursday, an American searching on foot was killed in the village of Rushdimullah by an underground bomb. In a separate incident, three Iraqi soldiers were wounded when a bomb struck a group of walking soldiers.

A fourth bomb that exploded Friday near a bridge in Latafiya hurt no one because it misfired, blowing the blasting cap into the dirt instead driving shrapnel upward, said soldiers who witnessed it.

On Saturday, a bomb killed an American soldier instantly as he and his comrades walked over a dirt plain near underbrush more than 100 yards from a road near Latafiya. Three other Americans and one Iraqi soldier were wounded by shrapnel. After the attack, the joint force, which had been on its way to search several homes in an area of farmland and wildflowers, returned to their base instead.

Gen. David H. Petraeus, the top commander of American forces in Iraq, pointed Saturday to progress in the search. He said that military officials thought they knew who had taken the three soldiers in the ambush, which also left four Americans and an Iraqi soldier dead. “We know who that guy is,” the general told the Army Times Web site. “He’s the big player down in that area. We’ve tangled with him before.”

He said that the military believed that at least two of the missing soldiers were still alive.

American troops continued widespread raids to gain more information about the attack, detaining nine people on Saturday in Anbar Province, dozens of miles north of where the ambush took place. Several Iraqis near Latafiya were also held in an investigation that has already led to the arrest of hundreds. Many of the troops taking part in the search south of Baghdad are already stationed near here, spread out in an increasing number of checkpoints and outposts as part of the new American counterinsurgency approach. Commanders have encouraged units to patrol wider arcs and talk to local residents, despite the added risks in an area where insurgents have learned to blend with the mostly Sunni population.

Earlier this week, soldiers from one American unit left of their base to question residents about the missing soldiers. They walked along a canal with high reeds, a common hiding spot for snipers. The commanding officer said he planned to chop them down.

Bombs placed underground in an area like this could take years, even decades to find. Commanders said that preventing them from being buried would be nearly impossible given that a single brigade of about 3,200 had to cover 330 square miles.

“You can’t put soldiers everywhere,” Colonel Morschauser said. “You can’t cover every piece of terrain. You do the best you can.”

A few of the officers said that insurgents’ increased use of buried bombs were actually a bitter signal that the American security push was having some success.

As small towns like Rushdimullah have come under American control, they said, roads where vehicles had been bombed daily can be driven now with few if any explosions.

Commanders and soldiers said detection has also improved, with more than half of the roadside bombs discovered before detonation. Vehicles, too, have been strengthened.

“A lot of the I.E.D.’s now in the road, with the armor we have, blow things up but don’t wound or kill soldiers,” said Sgt. First Class Robert Porter, 37, a platoon sergeant with a military police battalion working alongside the Second Brigade Brigade Combat Team. “That’s why the dismounted I.E.D.’s have increased.”

    Bombs Imperil G.I.’s Searching for Captured Comrades, NYT, 20.5.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/20/world/middleeast/20search.html

Death Toll for Contractors Reaches New High in Iraq

May 19, 2007
The New York Times
By JOHN M. BRODER and JAMES RISEN

WASHINGTON, May 18 — Casualties among private contractors in Iraq have soared to record levels this year, setting a pace that seems certain to turn 2007 into the bloodiest year yet for the civilians who work alongside the American military in the war zone, according to new government numbers.

At least 146 contract workers were killed in Iraq in the first three months of the year, by far the highest number for any quarter since the war began in March 2003, according to the Labor Department, which processes death and injury claims for those working as United States government contractors in Iraq.

That brings the total number of contractors killed in Iraq to at least 917, along with more than 12,000 wounded in battle or injured on the job, according to government figures and dozens of interviews.

The numbers, which have not been previously reported, disclose the extent to which contractors — Americans, Iraqis and workers from more than three dozen other countries — are largely hidden casualties of the war, and now are facing increased risks alongside American soldiers and marines as President Bush’s plan to increase troop levels in Baghdad takes hold.

As troops patrol more aggressively in and around the capital, both soldiers and the contractors who support them, often at small outposts, are at greater peril. The contractor deaths earlier this year, for example, came closer to the number of American military deaths during the same period — 244 — than during any other quarter since the war began, according to official figures.

“The insurgents are going after the softest targets, and the contractors are softer targets than the military,” said Lawrence J. Korb, a former assistant secretary of defense for manpower during the Reagan administration. “The U.S. is being more aggressive over there, and these contractor deaths go right along with it.”

Truck drivers and translators account for a significant share of the casualties, but the recent death toll includes others who make up what amounts to a private army.

Among them were four American security guards who died in a helicopter crash in January, 28 Turkish construction workers whose plane crashed north of Baghdad the same month, a Massachusetts man who was blown up as he dismantled munitions for an American company in March and a Georgia woman killed in a missile attack in March while working as a coordinator for KBR, the contracting company.

Donald E. Tolfree Jr., a trucker from Michigan, was fatally shot in the cab of his vehicle while returning to Camp Anaconda, north of Baghdad, in early February. His daughter, Kristen Martin, 23, said Army officials told her he was shot by an American military guard confused about her father’s assignment. The Army confirms the death is under investigation as a possible friendly-fire episode.

Ms. Martin said she waited three weeks for her father’s body to be returned home, and expressed resentment that dead contractors were treated differently from soldiers who fall in battle.

“If anything happens to the military people, you hear about it right away,” she said in a telephone interview. “Flags get lowered, they get their respect. You don’t hear anything about the contractors.”

Military officials in Washington and Baghdad said that no Pentagon office tracked contractor casualties and that they had no way to confirm or explain the sharp rise in deaths this year.

Maj. Gen. William B. Caldwell IV, the top spokesman for the American military in Iraq, declined through an aide to address the matter. “Contractors are out of our lane, and we don’t comment on them,” said the aide, Lt. Matthew Breedlove.

Companies that have lost workers in Iraq were generally unresponsive to questions about the numbers of deaths and the circumstances that led to casualties. None acknowledged that they had seen an increase this year.

But a spokesman for American International Group, the insurance company that covers about 80 percent of the contractor work force in Iraq, said it had seen a sharp increase in death and injury claims in recent months. The Labor Department records show that in addition to the 146 dead in the first three months this year, another 3,430 contractors filed claims for wounds or injuries suffered in Iraq, also a quarterly record. The number of casualties, though, may be much higher because the government’s statistical database is not complete.

The Labor numbers were provided in response to a Freedom of Information Act request from The New York Times. Other figures came from a variety of government agencies, private contractors and insurers handling casualty claims.

American military casualties in Iraq have mounted to almost 3,400 dead. The new contractor statistics suggest that for every four American soldiers or marines who die in Iraq, a contractor is killed.

Senator John McCain, the Arizona Republican who pushed for the buildup of military forces in Iraq, said the contractor casualties were a symptom of a larger failure to send enough troops earlier to provide security throughout Iraq.

“We’re now putting these people in danger that I never thought they’d be under because we cannot secure the country,” he said.

Other lawmakers also expressed concern about the numbers. Representative John P. Murtha, the Pennsylvania Democrat who is chairman of the defense subcommittee of the House Appropriations Committee, said that he was shocked at the extent of casualties among contractors and that he planned to hold hearings this fall on the use of private workers in Iraq.

Representative Jan Schakowsky, an Illinois Democrat, has introduced legislation to force the government to release detailed records on the use of contractors in Iraq and the names and job descriptions of all those killed and injured, information that is virtually impossible to get right now. The military releases names and biographical information about its wartime casualties, but businesses are not required to provide such information, and the Labor Department refuses to do so, citing privacy laws.

“By keeping the knowledge of this force hidden, it changes one’s perception and one’s evaluation of the war,” Ms. Schakowsky said. “There are almost a thousand dead and a large number of injuries. I think it masks the fact that we are privatizing the military in this country.”

Contract workers say that as the tempo of military operations has increased in recent months, so have the attacks on contractors. Convoys of trucks operated by companies are often not as well armored or protected as military units, they say.

A top security industry official said he was told recently by American military and contracting officials that 50 to 60 percent of all truck convoys in Iraq were coming under attack. Previously, he said, only about 10 percent had been hit.

“There is a definite spike in convoy attacks,” said the official, who would speak only on condition of anonymity because the information was confidential. Gordon Dreher, 48, who drove a fuel truck supplying American troops in Iraq, said he and other drivers faced almost constant attacks from insurgents.

“I’ve been shot at, had my truck blown out from under me, had an I.E.D. hit about six feet away from me, and lost part of my hearing,” he said, referring to an improvised explosive device. “I’m used to getting shot at now, having tracer rounds hit off my truck. I got ambushed twice on one convoy run.”

Mr. Dreher broke his back in January from driving fast on rough roads, and is back home in Brick, N.J., awaiting surgery. “When they do a surge, they need more fuel for choppers and tanks,” he said. “My buddies who are still there tell me that they have been getting spanked pretty good lately.”

Mark Griffin, a 53-year-old truck driver from Georgia who left Iraq last November, said even then attacks were accelerating. “It got progressively worse pretty much every month I was there.”

He worked for KBR driving trucks in Anbar Province to supply Marine bases with ammunition, water and other essentials. He said that by late 2006 truck drivers and their Marine convoy escorts were finding 20 to 30 roadside bombs on each convoy trip through Anbar, the restive Sunni heartland. “The number of I.E.D.’s got worse, and the size and damage got worse, progressively, over time,” he said.

Labor Department statistics show that deaths and injuries among contractors have risen during times of heightened American military activity. For example, the number of contractors killed from January through March tops the previous quarterly record of 112 killed at the end of 2004, during the American military offensive in Falluja and related operations nearby.

The worsening casualty trends appear to be continuing into the second quarter of this year, as insurgents launch a wave of mortar and rocket attacks on Baghdad’s Green Zone, the heavily fortified government center. Earlier this month, for example, two Indians, a Filipino and a Nepalese working for the American Embassy in Baghdad were killed by rocket fire in the Green Zone.

Nearly 300 companies from the United States and around the world supply workers who are a shadow force in Iraq almost as large as the uniformed military. About 126,000 men and women working for contractors serve alongside about 150,000 American troops, the Pentagon has reported. Never before has the United States gone to war with so many civilians on the battlefield doing jobs — armed guards, military trainers, translators, interrogators, cooks and maintenance workers — once done only by those in uniform.

In the Persian Gulf war of 1991, for example, only 9,200 contractors — mostly operating advanced weapons systems — served alongside 540,000 military personnel. But at the end of the cold war, Congress and the Pentagon were eager to seize on the so-called peace dividend and drastically scale back the standing Army. The Bush administration expanded the outsourcing strategy to unprecedented levels after the invasion of Iraq.

Many contractors in the battle zone say they lack the basic security measures afforded uniformed troops and receive benefits that not only differ from those provided to troops, but also vary by employer. Weekly pay ranges from $60 for Iraqi translators and laborers to $1,800 for truck drivers to as much as $6,000 for private security guards employed by companies like Blackwater. Medical and insurance benefits also vary widely, from excellent to minimal.

Conditions in Iraq are harsh, and many civilians who arrive there, drawn by patriotism, a sense of adventure or the lure of money, are overwhelmed by the environment. If they raise questions about the 12-hour workdays, the lack of armor plating on trucks or the periodic shelling of bases, supervisors often tell them to pack up and go home.

Cynthia I. Morgan, a Tennessee trucker who spent more than a year in Iraq as a convoy commander, said that the common answer from her bosses to such complaints was, “Aisle or window, chicken or pasta” — meaning “Get on the next plane out of here.”

    Death Toll for Contractors Reaches New High in Iraq, NYT, 19.5.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/19/world/middleeast/19contractors.html?hp

Editorial

Rose Garden Charade

May 18, 2007
The New York Times

Confronted with soaring gasoline prices, a Congress growing more restless by the day about oil dependency and a Supreme Court demanding executive action on global warming emissions, President Bush stepped before the cameras in the Rose Garden the other day and said, essentially, nothing.

He announced that he had ordered four federal agencies to “work together” to devise regulations reducing greenhouse gases. He also renewed his call for greater investments in alternative fuels. But neither he nor the cadre of designated briefers who followed him provided any detail, so nobody knows whether he will in fact end up asking for more efficient cars or what sort of alternative fuels he has in mind or, more broadly, what sort of reduction in greenhouse gas emissions he hopes to achieve.

What we did learn was that he has chosen to make the process as cumbersome and time-consuming as possible. We also learned that nothing concrete will happen until the regulatory process is completed at the end of 2008 — a mere three weeks before Mr. Bush walks out the White House door. As Edward Markey, a Massachusetts Democrat, aptly noted, this “will leave motor vehicle fuel economy stuck in neutral until Bush’s successor takes office.”

This is, in short, yet another of Mr. Bush’s faith-based energy strategies, in which the operative words are “trust me.” The White House says that good regulations need time to develop. That is true, but we would be more inclined to cut Mr. Bush some slack if not for the fact that speedier routes are readily available.

For one thing, he could have simplified matters by letting the Environmental Protection Agency run the whole regulatory show, which is what the Supreme Court had in mind. He could also have ordered the E.P.A. to grant California the permission it has been seeking for more than two years to impose its own emissions standards on cars and light trucks, which it can do under the Clean Air Act once it gets a federal waiver. But the automakers desperately do not want California or the 11 other states that plan to imitate California to get that authority, and Mr. Bush is obviously in no hurry to grant it.

What we are seeing is the obligatory response of a president who finds himself boxed into a corner by Congress and the court and forced to appear to be doing something. At bottom, his administration doubts the urgency of the climate change issue and remains deeply averse to mandates and regulatory timetables.

Nowhere has this been more clear than in Germany, where administration officials have spent the last few weeks trying to water down commitments for next month’s Group of 8 meeting.

Specifically, it has objected to any treatment of global warming as an urgent problem and rejected long-term emissions targets backed by other nations and, increasingly, by many of Mr. Bush’s natural allies in the business community. For a clear view of administration policy, one must turn not to the Rose Garden but to Europe.

    Rose Garden Charade, NYT, 18.5.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/18/opinion/18fri1.html

White House Memo

Unlikely Comrades Share Parting Moment

May 18, 2007
The New York Times
By SHERYL GAY STOLBERG

WASHINGTON, May 17 — There was a moment, as Prime Minister Tony Blair of Britain and President Bush stood together in the bright sunshine on Thursday for their last joint appearance in the Rose Garden, when the shouts of antiwar protesters gathered outside the gates of the White House threatened to drown out their words.

Mr. Bush ignored the uproar. But Mr. Blair, whose support of the American president and the war in Iraq has brought him derision at home, addressed the dissent head on.

“I can’t make out the words that they’re shouting over there, but I bet they’re not totally complimentary to us,” Mr. Blair said, easing the tension before he began an impassioned defense arguing that “history will make a judgment” about Iraq.

Moments earlier, Mr. Bush had offered his own parting embrace of the British prime minister, who steps down next month after 10 years in power.

“Trying to do a tap dance on his political grave, aren’t you?” the president said, upbraiding a British reporter who suggested that Mr. Blair should move on. “You don’t understand how effective Blair is, I guess, because when we’re in a room with world leaders and he speaks, people listen.”

It was a revealing and at times emotional scene for the two world leaders, unlikely partners — the British social liberal and the Texas conservative — who began clinging to one another even before Sept. 11, 2001. Mr. Bush insisted that their meeting was a working policy visit, not “a farewell deal,” but it certainly had that air.

Reginald Dale, an expert in British-American relations at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, assessed the verbal repartee this way: “They were giving each other gifts the whole time.”

Mr. Blair, for instance, issued a veiled message to Congress not to mess with war financing, warning, as has Mr. Bush, that “our enemy takes heart” from any perception that political will is weakening. Mr. Bush said he and Mr. Blair shared “common ground” on global warming, an issue of utmost importance to Mr. Blair.

There were gifts in private as well. The president and the prime minister shared an intimate dinner in the White House residence on Wednesday — just the two of them, dining on she-crab soup and Wagyu beef. And Mr. Blair received the ultimate Bush perk, even bigger than an invitation to the president’s Texas ranch: an offer to spend the night at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, ordinarily reserved only for family or friends. Mr. Blair accepted, sleeping in the Queen’s Bedroom, of course — the very same room where Winston Churchill stayed after Japan bombed Pearl Harbor.

From the start, theirs was an unexpected bond. Mr. Blair had been especially close with Bill Clinton — the two shared a vision of a “third way” in domestic politics and would spend hours bandying about ideas — but few expected the same from Mr. Bush and Mr. Blair. At their first meeting at Camp David, in February 2001, they were asked what they had in common.

“Well, we both use Colgate toothpaste,” Mr. Bush said wryly, prompting Mr. Blair to interject, “They’re going to wonder how you know that, George.”

Irwin M. Stelzer, an economist and a columnist for The Sunday Times of London who is a close friend of Mr. Blair’s, said the two found themselves to be foreign policy soul mates, even before the Sept. 11 attacks. At that first Camp David meeting, they talked about how to contain Saddam Hussein.

“When they first met,” Mr. Stelzer said, “Tony came away with almost an exalted impression of the president, and he’s told me this.” He said Mr. Blair liked Mr. Bush’s directness, and felt confident that with Mr. Bush, “he would never get zapped” by a president who went back on his word. Mr. Blair, he said, felt strongly that the role of Britain in the world would be enhanced by a close relationship with the United States.

“He saw himself as a bridge between the United States and Europe,” Mr. Stelzer said, “and I always used to joke with him that a bridge is something people walk on, so you’d better be careful.”

Indeed, by the time Mr. Blair announced that he would leave office in June, he had been assailed for years in the British press as “Bush’s poodle.” The prime minister was so sensitive to the criticism that he never collected the Congressional Medal of Honor he was awarded in 2003.

“It would have been politically dangerous for him to be seen getting a medal draped around his neck by President Bush,” Mr. Stelzer said.

Thursday’s news that Gordon Brown, the chancellor of the Exchequer, would succeed Mr. Blair brought more tough questions. One British reporter asked the prime minister whether he should step down earlier than next month, while another asked Mr. Bush if Mr. Blair was “really still the right man to be talking to.”

The president, clearly irritated, shot back, “That’s a lovely question.”

Mr. Bush praised Mr. Brown as ‘“a good fellow,” but the consensus on both sides of the Atlantic is that the bond will not be nearly as tight. “The chemistry is unlikely to be the same,” Mr. Dale said, “because Brown is a much more introverted, less affable type. And he’s calculating; he doesn’t have a very good reputation for people skills.”

Mr. Blair’s people skills were in rare form on Thursday, as he held forth with a poignant soliloquy — an echo of the ‘“hand on heart, I did what I thought was right” speech the prime minister delivered in London last week to a roomful of tearful Labor Party supporters.

As the protesters shouted in the distance, Mr. Blair spoke with characteristic eloquence, winding up to a big finish: “One thing I know is that what we represent coming here today, speaking in the Rose Garden to you people and getting your questions and being under your pressure, that is a finer and better way of life than either a brutal, secular dictatorship or religious extremism. It’s a better way of life and it’s the way of life, actually, people anytime they are given the choice, choose to have.”

When Mr. Bush opened his mouth, he chose not to step on Mr. Blair’s moment. Instead, the president uttered two sentences praising the prime minister as “a courageous man,” following up with a quick, “Thanks for coming.”

At that, the two leaders turned their back and, for the last time together, exited the Washington stage.

    Unlikely Comrades Share Parting Moment, NYT, 18.5.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/18/washington/18memo.html

Hunt for 3 G.I.’s in Iraq Slowed by False Trails

May 18, 2007
The New York Times
By DAMIEN CAVE

RUSHDIMULLAH, Iraq, May 17 — The stories have come in by the dozens.

One man swore that he had personally buried two Americans. As soldiers quickly began digging, another man came up and asked why they were unearthing his cousin.

Other Iraqis have said they saw the Americans walking, encircled by their captors, and still more have fingered people who they thought might have something to do with the ambush on Saturday that killed four American soldiers and one Iraqi.

Thousands of soldiers are searching for three missing Americans taken during the attack, and sifting through the tips has become the hub of the manhunt. A few have panned out, while most have led nowhere — deliberately so in some cases, many Americans suspect.

The false alarms highlight the challenge American troops face here in a Sunni stronghold where many residents resent the American presence. And for the soldiers who are searching, the disappointments can be heartbreaking.

Sgt. First Class Phitsidane Panpradith, 34, was with the first unit to arrive at the scene of the attack on Saturday. He rushed in from a patrol base a few hundred yards away, and maneuvered around two roadside bombs to get there.

What he saw — two burning vehicles, dead soldiers — horrified him. Searching for his missing friends, he said, offered some of the only comfort he could find.

So when an Iraqi informer said the three Americans could be found near the Caveman canal outside Cargouli village, Sergeant Panpradith moved quickly.

He gathered about 15 men and set out on a grueling 12-mile march through fields and orchards, avoiding the bomb-strewn roads, in the baking afternoon sun. He said he really thought they would find the missing soldiers. The men searched for several hours, racing the setting sun. They pushed through reeds, scoured houses. But they found nothing.

“It was dry,” Sergeant Panpradith said Thursday, at a combat outpost on the same road where the attack had occurred. “That’s just like everything else out here — it’s just sifting through it all and trying to find what we can.” Separating fact from fiction, good intelligence from bad, has defined the war in Iraq since it started. But the units searching for their missing comrades here in the lush farmland known as the Triangle of Death face an especially daunting challenge.

Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia, and a number of other Sunni insurgent groups, have become so interwoven into the rural towns and villages here that separating disinformation from fact or rumor requires the skill of prosecutor, interrogator and cleric combined.

The mutual distrust between the Americans and the Iraqis seemed to ensure an endless circle of suspicious glares and accusations.

“The Iraqis think we want to take over their country,” said Sergeant Panpradith, of Company A, Fourth Battalion, Second Brigade, 10th Mountain Division. At the same time, he said, “We have to keep going back to them.”

“They know something,” he said. “A lot of them know something.”

Sergeant Panpradith and several other soldiers said the Iraqis seemed to be intentionally passing on incorrect information, trying to hide involvement, trying to use tips to ingratiate themselves with American officers, or maybe just telling stories for attention.

In the hope of separating the credible from the ridiculous, commanders are offering a $200,000 reward for information that leads to the soldiers’ recovery.

As of Wednesday at noon, the unit responsible for the area — Second Brigade, 10th Mountain Division — said it had received more than 140 tips, in addition to intelligence gleaned from the more than 700 detainees arrested since the search started.

Commanders said a rush of information also arrived last June, after two Americans from the 101st Airborne Division were kidnapped from a small patrol base a few miles from where Saturday’s attack occurred.

This time, commanders said, witness accounts have proved less reliable. There have been no known public displays, live or through video — a tactic used during other high-profile kidnappings.

From the start of the hunt, credible information seemed mixed in with the dubious.

Col. Michael Kershaw, the brigade’s commander, said that within six hours of the attack, American and Iraqi forces detained two local residents who appeared to have been wounded during the ambush, including a teenager with his hand blown off by an explosion.

They confessed to taking part in the attack, he said. But there was a problem: their description of what had happened did not fit with what the Americans knew from forensic evidence.

American officials say they believe that the attack included several elements, including roadside bombs placed nearby to prevent reinforcements from arriving quickly. Either the detainees were lying or “maybe they were just paid to do certain things.”

Other leads have snaked into dead ends, too. Soon after the attack, the Americans heard that the soldiers were being kept at a house nearby. Troops and helicopters rushed to the area.

“I had a cavalry troop fly in all the way from Camp Striker,” Colonel Kershaw said, referring to a base near Baghdad. “Again, nothing significant.”

In interviews at several combat outposts in the area, American soldiers said the constant false alarms were beginning to take a toll. In many areas, soldiers have gone back to the same houses three and four times because they believed residents had information that they just were not passing on, or because the Iraqis’ initial account failed to check out.

Sergeant Panpradith, 34, said that he still had not fully accepted that his comrades might never be found, and that he would continue to knock on doors and ask questions.

“The searching helps,” he said. “Knowing that we’re doing something to help find our guys. It compensates for the feeling of helplessness we felt when we got to the site that morning.”

Staff Sgt. Tony Smith, 28, from Greenville, S.C., spoke for all the soldiers when he said they just wanted to do more. “They’re your comrades, your teams, your buddies,” he said. “It’s just you feel there’s always going to be that reason — you feel you could just do that one more thing to help. But you do what you can and you do what you’re told.”

    Hunt for 3 G.I.’s in Iraq Slowed by False Trails, NYT, 18.5.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/18/world/middleeast/18search.html

U.S. Forces Kill 6 Insurgents in Iraq

May 18, 2007
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 2:35 p.m. ET
The New York Times

BAGHDAD (AP) -- About 50 suspected insurgents attacked a U.S. base in the center of a city north of Baghdad on Friday, sparking a battle with U.S. soldiers and helicopters that left at least six militants dead, the Iraqi army said.

The fighting took place in Baqouba, a Sunni insurgent stronghold that has seen a recent spike in violence largely blamed on militants who fled a three-month-old security crackdown in Baghdad.

In the capital, two Iraqi journalists working for ABC News were slain as they drove home from work, the network said.

Unidentified assailants waylaid the car carrying cameraman Alaa Uldeen Aziz, 33, and soundman Saif Laith Yousuf, 26, and shot them dead, the network said.

Journalists have been frequently targeted by extremists in Iraq, with more than 100 reported killed since the war began.

Also in Baghdad, two U.S. soldiers were killed and nine wounded in separate attacks Thursday, the military said Friday. The deaths, along with three others Thursday south of Baghdad, raised to at least 3,405 the number of members of the U.S. military who have died since the beginning of the Iraq war in March 2003.

Meanwhile, the massive search for three missing U.S. soldiers believed to have been kidnapped by al-Qaida-linked insurgents entered its seventh day.

Col. Michael Kershaw, the commander of the 2nd Brigade Combat Team, 10th Mountain Division, who was overseeing the mission, said the teams were talking to locals, hoping to find information that would lead them to the soldiers.

''Everyone is motivated and knows the importance of finding the soldiers,'' he said in a statement from Quarghuli, a village 12 miles south of Baghdad where a May 12 ambush killed four U.S. soldiers and an Iraqi, and left three American troops missing.

The fighting in Baqouba began about 7 a.m. Friday, the day of rest in Muslim Iraq, when insurgents opened fire on a U.S.-Iraqi base in the center of the city, about 35 miles northeast of Baghdad.

About a half-hour later, U.S. reinforcements arrived, killing at least six insurgents, the Iraqi army officer said. He spoke on condition of anonymity because he is not authorized to speak to the media.

Residents said the fighting sent smoke billowing up from neighborhoods in the area.

One resident, who spoke on condition of anonymity for fear of reprisals from militants, said he heard heavy machine gun fire and then men shouting ''Allahu akbar,'' or ''God is great'' in Arabic. Others said they saw U.S. armored vehicles driving through the street, while aircraft flew overhead.

The fighting ended about noon, but several hours later, suspected insurgents fired a mortar round at a nearby police headquarters, the army officer said. No casualties were reported.

The U.S. military had no immediate comment on the fighting.

The base was set up two months ago in a three-story city office building that was abandoned because of the violence in the area, the Iraqi officer said.

About 4,000 U.S. soldiers and 2,000 Iraqis have been involved in the search for the three missing American troops, who were captured in an attack last weekend that left four Americans and one Iraqi dead.

The soldiers had been at an observation post for several hours when an insurgent force crept through the foliage, cut concertina wire and attacked from all sides with automatic weapons, said Maj. Webster Wright, a U.S. military spokesman.

Attackers apparently planned to capture soldiers because there were signs that a getaway car was used, he said.

On Thursday, U.S. officials expressed cautious optimism that the missing soldiers were still alive even as troops drained canals and questioned children in the search. FBI agents and Australian forensic experts also took part.

About 900 people had been questioned so far and 36 were detained, Webster said. U.S. forces also dropped 250,000 leaflets over the area.

Lt. Col. Randy Martin, another U.S. military spokesman, said searches had produced a number of leads that ''point to the fact that these men are still alive.''

''There are also reports to the contrary. But we have an obligation to follow on every intelligence tip,'' Martin said. ''There is cautious optimism that in fact these soldiers can be found alive. That's what we pray for, that's what we hope for.''

While the search was under way Thursday, three American soldiers were killed and another was wounded in a roadside bombing south of Baghdad, the U.S. military said. It was unclear if the victims were part of the search.

Meanwhile, the U.S. military said it detained six suspected insurgents Friday during raids in northeast Iraq. It accused them of being members of a cell that imports powerful weapons from neighboring Iran, and brings Iraqis to Iran for training as insurgents.

On May 28, talks between U.S. and Iranian officials are to begin in Baghdad to discuss the security situation in Iraq. Washington has often accused Iran of arming insurgents and militias.

Elsewhere Friday:

-- A 24-hour curfew remained in place in Mosul, 225 miles northwest of Baghdad, for a third day. It was imposed after insurgents used five suicide vehicle bombs, mortars and small arms fire to destroy two bridges and attack a police station and a jail where suspected insurgents were being held. The attacks killed 15 insurgents, 10 Iraqi policemen, one Iraqi soldier and one civilian. About 47 people were wounded, the U.S. military said.

-- A suicide car bomber hit a police patrol in the Sunni-dominated town of Jurf al-Sakhar, 40 miles south of Baghdad, killing three officers and wounding two, police said.

-- In the oil-rich city of Kirkuk, 180 miles north of the Iraqi capital, drive-by shooters killed an Iraqi army officer as he was heading to work, police said.

    U.S. Forces Kill 6 Insurgents in Iraq, NYT, 18.5.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/world/AP-Iraq.html

Reward for Info on Missing U.S. Troops

May 16, 2007
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 1:25 p.m. ET
The New York Times

BAGHDAD (AP) -- The U.S. military has offered rewards of up to $200,000 for information leading to the return of three missing American soldiers, a U.S. general said Wednesday.

Maj. Gen. Rick Lynch, commander of U.S. troops south of Baghdad, said the offer was made on 50,000 leaflets distributed in the area where the troops disappeared after a pre-dawn ambush Saturday in which four American troops and an Iraq soldier were killed.

Word of the reward was also broadcast over loudspeakers as part of a massive search involving 4,000 U.S. troops and 2,000 Iraqis, Lynch told The Associated Press.

He said the reward was one of several measures being taken as part of the search. Troops have pursued 143 intelligence leads, have staged eight air assault operations, and established blocking positions to keep those behind the abductions from fleeing with their captives.

''We've done so much as to drain canals after a report that the bodies were in a canal,'' he said. ''So we're leaving no stone unturned.''

The U.S. command has said the searchers were trying to isolate areas where they suspect the captives may have been taken after the attack, which occurred near Mahmoudiya, 20 miles south of Baghdad.

An al-Qaida front group -- the Islamic State of Iraq -- has said it captured the soldiers and warned the Americans in a Web statement on Monday to call off the hunt ''if you want their safety.''

The soldiers attacked Saturday were assigned to a small patrol base set up as part of the new U.S. strategy to move troops from large, heavily defended garrisons to live and work among the people.

Critics of the strategy had warned that such small outposts are more vulnerable to attack. Last month, nine American soldiers were killed when a suicide bomber detonated his explosives-laden vehicle near a small patrol base northeast of Baghdad.

Lynch said he was optimistic that the three soldiers would be found alive and the search remained focused on the area where they went missing.

''We're pursuing all intelligence,'' he said. ''Some of those leads tell us that the soldiers have been taken out of the area but the majority tell us that they're still in the area.''

    Reward for Info on Missing U.S. Troops, NYT, 16.5.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/world/AP-Iraq-Missing-Soldiers.html

Missing Soldiers in Iraq From Fort Drum

May 15, 2007
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 11:22 a.m. ET
The New York Times

FORT DRUM, N.Y. (AP) -- The seven American victims of a weekend ambush in Iraq were members of the 10th Mountain Division's 2nd Brigade Combat Team, Army officials in Iraq said Tuesday.

The attack near Mahmoudiya, in a Sunni stronghold 20 miles south of Baghdad, left four U.S. soldiers and an Iraqi translator dead, and three other soldiers missing.

On Monday, the Pentagon acknowledged for the first time that it believes the missing soldiers are in terrorist hands. The Islamic State of Iraq -- an al-Qaida front group that has claimed to have captured the soldiers -- has warned the U.S. to stop its massive search for the missing.

Military officials have not released the names of the soldiers but confirmed they were assigned to Company D, 4th Battalion, 31st Infantry Regiment, nicknamed the ''Polar Bears,'' said Staff Sgt. Angela McKinzie, a public affairs officer at the Multi-National Division headquarters in Baghdad.

Fort Drum commanders referred all questions about Saturday's incident to Army officials in Iraq.

Families of the soldiers released the names of two of the dead on Monday -- Sgt. 1st Class James David Connell Jr., 40, of Lake City, Tenn., and Pfc. Daniel Courneya, 19, of Vermontville, Mich.

Connell's family learned of his death Saturday afternoon, they said.

The soldier had just recovered from a shrapnel wound to the leg and had visited his family on leave earlier this month. The family is now planning a memorial service in Lake City and a burial at Arlington National Cemetery, according to his brother, Jeff Connell.

''I'm proud of my dead, because he didn't really fight for himself, he fought for the country,'' Connell's teenage daughter, Courtney, told Knoxville's WATE-TV.

In Michigan, students at Maple Valley High School created a memorial for Courneya, who graduated in 2005 and was well-known in the small community southwest of Lansing. He was a member of the school's track and soccer teams and played clarinet in the band.

''It's a tribute of photos, posters, plaques and a picture of him in his uniform,'' school official Kelly Zank told The Associated Press on Tuesday.

His death was announced Monday over the school's public address system, and a moment of silence was observed, she said.

Courneya's mother, Wendy Thompson, said his wife, Jennifer, called family members Saturday night to tell them he had been killed. Thompson said her husband, Army Spc. David Thompson, was in Iraq and returning home after learning of his stepson's death.

If all three soldiers now missing were taken alive, it would be the biggest single abduction of U.S. soldiers in Iraq since March 23, 2003, when Pvt. Jessica Lynch and six others were captured in an ambush near Nasiriyah that also left 11 Americans dead.

    Missing Soldiers in Iraq From Fort Drum, NYT, 15.5.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/us/AP-Fort-Drum-Missing-Soldiers.html

al - Qaida: Stop Search for U.S. Soldiers

May 14, 2007
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 11:43 a.m. ET
The New York Times

BAGHDAD (AP) -- An al-Qaida front group that claims it has captured American soldiers warned the United States on Monday to stop searching for them and suggested it attacked the U.S. convoy as revenge for the rape and murder of a local teenager last year.

The U.S. military also said for the first time it believes the three missing soldiers were abducted by al-Qaida-linked militants after an attack that included three roadside bombs.

''What you are doing in searching for your soldiers will lead to nothing but exhaustion and headaches. Your soldiers are in our hands. If you want their safety, do not look for them,'' the Islamic State of Iraq said on a militant Web site.

''You should remember what you have done to our sister Abeer in the same area,'' the statement said, referring to five American soldiers who were charged in the rape and killing of 14-year-old Abeer Qassim al-Janabi and the killings of her parents and her younger sister last year.

Three soldiers have pleaded guilty in the case -- one of the most shocking atrocities committed by U.S. troops in the Iraq war.

Three U.S. soldiers have been missing since Saturday, since a deadly attack on their convoy in Mahmoudiya, about 20 miles south of Baghdad. The attack also killed four U.S. soldiers and an Iraqi soldier, according to the military, which had described the Iraqi as an interpreter.

On Sunday, the Islamic State of Iraq claimed that it had captured U.S soldiers in the deadly attack in the Sunni area, which is known as the ''triangle of death'' and is an al-Qaida stronghold.

If the claim proves true, it would mark one of the most brazen attacks by the Islamic State of Iraq, a coalition of eight insurgent groups, including al-Qaida in Iraq.

About 4,000 U.S. troops backed by aircraft, intelligence units and Iraqi forces have been scouring the farming area around Mahmoudiya and the nearby town of Youssifiyah for three days, as the military promised to make every effort available to find the missing soldiers.

On Monday, U.S. military spokesman Maj. Gen. William B. Caldwell, IV said: ''At this time, we believe they (the three soldiers) were abducted by terrorists belonging to al Qaida or an affiliated group, and this assessment is based on highly credible intelligence information.''

Lt. Col. Christopher Garver, another U.S. military spokesman in Baghdad, pointed out earlier Monday that the terror network also had claimed responsibility for killing two U.S. soldiers whose mutilated bodies were found in the same area last year.

Late last month, the group named a 10-member ''Cabinet'' complete with a ''war minister,'' an apparent attempt to present the Sunni coalition as an alternative to the U.S.-backed Shiite-led administration of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki.

The family of Army Sgt. 1st Class James David Connell Jr., 40, of Lake City, Tenn., said he was among one of the four soldiers killed in the attack near Mahmoudiya.

In another attack on Monday, two U.S. soldiers on a foot patrol southeast of Baghdad were shot to death, the military said.

A roadside bomb near the southern city of Basra also killed one Danish soldier and wounded five, according to Maj. Kim Gruenberger of the Danish Army Operational Command. An Iraqi translator also was wounded.

Seven Danish soldiers have been killed in Iraq since the war began. In February, the Danish government said it would withdraw its 460-member contingent from Basra by August and replace it with a smaller helicopter unit.

In Mahmoudiyah, residents complained on Monday that coalition forces had searched through their homes, and AP Television News footage showed on one apartment that appeared to have been ransacked in the search.

One man said three residents in the area, including two guards at a local mosque, had been detained by coalition forces, but that could not be immediately confirmed.

U.S. and Iraqi forces also exchanged fire with gunmen near the town of Youssifiyah during the house-to-house search operation for the missing American soldiers, killing two suspected insurgents and injuring four others, a top Iraqi army officer in the area said.

He said the fighting began at about 3:30 a.m. and lasted for about 30 minutes. The officer, who spoke on condition of anonymity due to security concerns, said the coalition's search operation in the region has detained more than 100 suspects. The U.S. military did not immediately comment on the report.

Deadly violence also struck other areas of Iraq on Monday.

The worst attack occurred in the Diyala capital of Baqouba, 35 miles northeast of Baghdad, when gunmen in two cars opened fire on a police checkpoint, killing three policemen and two civilians, police said. Two policemen and four civilians were wounded in the 9:30 a.m. attack, which ended when the assailants fled the scene, police said.

On Sunday, five civilians were killed execution style on the streets of Baquoba by gunmen who appeared to be accusing them of collaborating with the U.S.-led coalition.

The U.S. military has noted an uptick in violence in the volatile region and sent 3,000 additional forces to try to tame the violence.

    al - Qaida: Stop Search for U.S. Soldiers, NYT, 14.5.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/world/AP-Iraq.html

U.S. Forces Search Iraq Area for 3 Missing Soldiers

May 14, 2007
The New York Times
By KIRK SEMPLE

BAGHDAD, May 13 — About 4,000 American ground troops, supported by surveillance aircraft, attack helicopters and spy satellites, swept towns and farmland south of Baghdad on Sunday, searching for three American soldiers who disappeared Saturday after their patrol was ambushed, military officials said.

The Islamic State of Iraq, an umbrella insurgent group that includes Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia, said it had captured the three missing Americans and claimed responsibility for the attack, which killed four other American soldiers and an Iraqi Army soldier. The group offered no proof for its claims.

The intensive search coincided with two deadly car bombings in Baghdad and northern Iraq that killed at least 55 people, wounded 155 and further underscored the challenges facing the American and Iraqi security forces, which have been unable to thwart such attacks by the Sunni Arab-led insurgency despite the infusion of new American troops.

The ambush of the Americans occurred near Mahmudiya, a predominantly Sunni Arab farming town south of the capital that has been a battleground between Sunni Arab insurgents, Shiite militias and Iraqi and American security forces.

Lt. Col. Christopher Garver, an American military spokesman in Baghdad, said Sunday that three of the American soldiers killed in the attack had been identified, but that “we’re still going through the process of identifying” the fourth, suggesting that the soldier had been seriously disfigured. American military officials said the soldiers were attacked while traveling in two vehicles, which burst into flames.

The military command has not released the names of the victims they have already identified.

American military officials offered few details on Sunday about the search but said they were sparing no resources.

“Everybody is fully engaged, the commanders are intimately focused on this,” Maj. Gen. William B. Caldwell IV, the top American military spokesman, said at a news conference with reporters from the Iraqi news media, according to The Associated Press. He said the searchers were utilizing “every asset we have, from national assets to tactical assets.”

Troops surrounded the town of Yusufiya, near Mahmudiya along the eastern bank of the Euphrates River, conducted house-to-house searches and checked all cars entering and leaving town, The A.P. reported.

The Islamic State of Iraq posted its claims of responsibility on jihadist Web sites on Sunday. “Clashes between your brothers in the Islamic State of Iraq and a Crusaders’ patrol in Mahmudiya, southern Baghdad province, has led to the killing and arresting of several of them,” the message said.

If history is any measure, the chances of the Americans surviving capture would be slim. The organization has claimed responsibility for numerous killings of prisoners.

Last June, insurgents captured two American soldiers during a surprise attack near Yusufiya. After a four-day search by 8,000 American and Iraqi troops, the soldiers’ bodies were found about three miles from the site of their kidnapping. They had been tortured, and insurgents had booby-trapped the road leading to the bodies.

The Mujahedeen Shura Council, an umbrella insurgent group that was a precursor to the Islamic State of Iraq and included Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia, claimed responsibility for those killings.

Controlling the predominantly Sunni towns on the periphery of the capital, such as Mahmudiya and Yusufiya, has become an important element of the American command’s latest strategy for trying to pacify the capital. American commanders say the insurgency has been using these outlying, rural towns — comprising what the Americans call “the Baghdad belts” — to store munitions, build car bombs, hide fighters and stage attacks on the capital.

But in public comments in the past two weeks, the American military commanders who control access routes into the capital from the north and south have described in unusually frank terms the challenges they face.

On Friday, Maj. Gen. Benjamin R. Mixon, who commands American troops north of Baghdad, said he did not have enough troops to fight the insurgency in Diyala Province, which has become one of the most violent areas and among the deadliest for American forces.

On May 5, Maj. Gen. Rick Lynch, who oversees about 26,000 American troops in an area bounded by the Tigris and Euphrates rivers south of Baghdad, including Mahmudiya and Yusufiya, described the struggle in Iraq as “three-dimensional chess in the dark — and that’s an understatement.”

“There’s no simple solution here,” he told reporters. He said the American military’s work is “not an impossible task, but it’s going to take a long time.”

In the first 45 days after his division’s deployment in March, his troops suffered 13 deaths, he said, adding that he expected the number to rise as American troop levels increase over the summer.

Both Mahmudiya and Yusufiya are situated east of the Euphrates, which is bracketed by thick date-palm orchards used by insurgents as hideouts because the dense foliage shields them from American aerial reconnaissance. General Lynch said that while Sunni and Shiite militants operate in his area, he regarded Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia as his most serious problem.

“It’s like a hydra,” he said. “It keeps regenerating its heads.”

In violence elsewhere, the American military said Sunday that two American soldiers died in separate attacks — one on Saturday near Haditha, in Anbar Province, the other on Sunday in Salahuddin Province.

In the deadliest attack on Sunday, a suicide car bomb exploded outside an office of a leading Kurdish political party in the northern town of Makhmur, killing at least 50 people and wounding 115, said Brig. Mohammed al-Wagaa, an Iraqi Army commander in Mosul.

The attack occurred at the gate of a government compound that includes the offices of the Makhmur mayor and the Kurdistan Democratic Party, the organization led by Massoud Barzani, president of the region of northern Iraq known as Iraqi Kurdistan. Makhmur is located just south of the region but has a sizable Kurdish population.

The blast destroyed several buildings and houses, “many cars” and a gas station, according to Abdulrahman Belaf, the mayor of Makhmur, who was in his office at the time and was wounded in the attack. The town’s police chief died in the blast, officials said.

It was the second vehicle bombing in five days against Kurdish targets in northern Iraq.

Makhmur falls within an area that the authorities in the Kurdistan region want to annex. The Iraqi Constitution calls for a referendum before the end of year on whether a swath of territory in three northern Iraqi provinces, including the oil capital of Kirkuk, should become part of the Kurdish-controlled region.

American and Iraqi officials say they expect a sharp rise in violence as the referendum nears, mainly led by Sunni Arab insurgents opposed to a geographic expansion by the Kurds.

Kurdish officials said Sunday that they did not yet know who was responsible for the attack in Makhmur or whether it was related to an attack last week in Erbil, the capital of the Kurdistan region, in which a truck loaded with explosives was detonated in front of offices of the Kurdish regional government, killing at least 19 people and wounding more than 70.

In Baghdad, a car bomb exploded at the Sadriya market in a predominantly Shiite quarter in the eastern part of the city, killing at least 5 people and wounding 40, an official at the Interior Ministry said.

The neighborhood has been a repeated target of attacks in recent months. On April 18, at least 140 people were killed and 150 wounded when a bomb exploded in an informal bus station near the market. On Feb. 3, a truck bombing killed at least 137 people, wounded 305 and obliterated part of the market.

In another attack on Sunday, gunmen broke into a flour factory in the Uaireej district south of Baghdad, killing five people and wounded four, the Interior Ministry official said.

The Iraqi authorities reported finding at least 11 bodies dumped around the capital, and 10 bodies in the streets and empty lots of Baquba, the capital of Diyala Province. A former senior official in the Baath Party in Mosul was killed by gunmen, officials said.

John F. Burns, Damien Cave and Wisam A. Habeeb contributed reporting from Baghdad, Yerevan Adham from Erbil, and an Iraqi employee of The New York Times from Mosul.

    U.S. Forces Search Iraq Area for 3 Missing Soldiers, NYT, 14.5.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/14/world/middleeast/14iraq.html

The World

See You in September, Whatever That Means

May 13, 2007
By SHERYL GAY STOLBERG
The New York Times

WASHINGTON

PROGRESS by September.

That, in three words, is the latest mandate from some nervous Republicans to President Bush over the war in Iraq. As the Democratic-controlled House passed yet another war spending bill last week, and Mr. Bush promised yet another veto, some members of his own party went to the White House with a blunt warning: We’re with you now, but if there is no progress by September, all bets are off.

There’s just one problem. Nobody in Washington seems to agree on what progress actually means — or how, precisely, it might be measured.

After his surprise trip to Iraq last week, Vice President Dick Cheney was asked by Fox News if he saw signs of “decisive progress.” He responded by talking about Anbar Province, where Sunni tribal sheiks are turning against Al Qaeda, he said. Mr. Bush, speaking to the party faithful last week in Washington, offered his own evidence that things are looking better, even before all five brigades of his troop buildup are in place.

“Sectarian murders are down,” the president declared, though he neglected to mention that car bombings and deaths of American soldiers are up.

That is not enough for lawmakers, especially Republicans who are uneasy about how they can go back home and justify their support for an increasingly unpopular war. Congress is grappling with legislation that would prod the Iraqi government into meeting so-called political benchmarks, like passing an oil-revenue-sharing law and holding provincial elections. But some in Washington are grasping for a more complete and accurate way to quantify progress.

“No one knows how to define progress in such a mixed-up situation,” said Representative Jack Kingston, Republican of Georgia and a member of the subcommittee that overseas military spending. “We’re having trouble measuring it. Imagine building a house without a ruler.”

Mr. Kingston, who holds weekly breakfast meetings with the Republican “theme team,” a group of about 30 lawmakers, is trying. The star of last week’s session, held in the basement of the Capitol, was the deputy prime minister of Iraq, Barham Salih, a Kurd. But equally important to Mr. Kingston was the other guest: Jason Campbell, a scholar at the Brookings Institution who is a co-author of something called the Iraq Index.

The Iraq Index is a huge compilation of data tracking life in Iraq — everything from the monthly car-bomb rate to how many foreign nationals are kidnapped to how many Iraqis have electricity and Internet access. It is long on numbers and short on analysis, though the latest report, dated April 30, includes a brief, and somewhat gloomy, summation in which the authors write that “on balance, the picture in Iraq has some signs of hope, but continues to present more grounds for worry than for confidence.”

Mr. Kingston has been circulating the index on both sides of the aisle and has asked its authors to winnow down the indicators to a manageable number — say, fewer than a dozen — that could serve as a standard bipartisan metric. Given that Brookings is a left-leaning institution, he said, he hoped Democrats might sign on.

“It would be like the Dow Jones,” he said. “Nobody accuses the Dow Jones of being biased. It would be good information for all of us. And then you could say who’s winning and losing.”

So far, Republicans like Mr. Kingston are hanging with the president on the spending bill. They voted overwhelmingly against a measure, vetoed by Mr. Bush earlier this month, to set a timeline for troop withdrawal. But they must also worry about re-election in 2008 — a worry the president no longer has. Having already lost control of Congress, they can ill afford another election in which Iraq is the dominant issue. A standardized metric might give them a useful exit strategy.

But Michael O’Hanlon, the lead author of the Iraq Index, is skeptical. He says metrics are “important grist for a fact-based debate,” but history shows it is dangerous to rely on too few of them.

“Metrics were used in Vietnam, and we had the wrong ones, and in my opinion they did net harm to the debate,” Mr. O’Hanlon said, adding, “I’m afraid that Congressman Kingston is going to continue to be frustrated, because we can’t be exactly precise about which indicators are the conclusive ones.”

In any event, such an index would be politically unpalatable to the White House, which does not want to back itself into a corner by agreeing to someone else’s standard for progress. The White House says the only progress report that counts is the one from Gen. David H. Petraeus, the new top commander in Iraq, and Ryan Crocker, the new ambassador, who are expected to testify on Capitol Hill in September.

The two are apparently trying to prepare. They have spent the last month in Iraq consulting with a team of independent advisers who have been asked to “think through the question of, Is the current strategy for waging war going well or not?” said Stephen Biddle, a defense policy expert at the Council on Foreign Relations and member of the team. Mr. Biddle could not talk about his work, he said, but he did fault the White House for not being more open with the public about its own idea of what constitutes progress.

“By being unbelievably vague about everything,” he said, “they’re making it very hard for congressmen and senators to go to their constituents and say, ‘Look, here’s why things are going better than you might imagine.’ ”

Some say measuring progress is simple: you will know it when you see it.

“I want to see life starting to come back,” said Senator Robert Bennett, Republican of Utah, who has been generally supportive of the president. “I want to see people in markets. I want to see couples strolling down the street, folks sitting at outdoor cafes.”

Others, like Senator Susan Collins, the Maine Republican who is facing a strong Democratic challenger next year, have their own specific ideas. Ms. Collins says she is looking for provincial elections, an oil law to be signed and put in place, and “a significant reduction in violence and attacks accompanied by a transfer of more and more authority to the Iraqi forces.”

Ms. Collins, like Mr. Bennett, says much will depend on General Petraeus’s progress report. But she acknowledges that one man’s progress may be another man’s failure.

“To me,” she said, “the difficult question is going to be if the analysis is mixed, and I suspect it may well be. And for me, a mixed report is not sufficient to continue to have an open-ended commitment of troops.”

Some Republicans are not waiting until the fall to re-evaluate. Senator Lamar Alexander of Tennessee announced last week that while he would support funding the troops, he also intends to introduce legislation to put the bipartisan Iraq Study Group report into effect. The report sets a goal of withdrawing combat forces by March 2008, a timeline Mr. Bush explicitly rejected when he announced the troop buildup in January.

Mr. Alexander said he was simply trying to bring a divided country together. “I don’t see any way for us to maintain a long-term presence in Iraq,” he said, “without more bipartisan support.”

For Mr. Bush, then, the clock is ticking. Mr. Kingston says he expects the debate to “become a lot more democratic” in the next few months, as more Republicans grow queasy and defect.

In the meantime, he hopes to come up with some useful way of figuring out whether he and his colleagues should abandon their president in September, or remain supportive for a little while longer:

“I’ve heard three years of nearly happy-talk in testimony,” Mr. Kingston said. “We always seem to be about to be around this elusive corner, but we never get there.”

    See You in September, Whatever That Means, NYT, 13.5.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/13/weekinreview/13stolb.html

Army Career Behind Him, General Speaks Out on Iraq

May 13, 2007
The New York Times
By THOM SHANKER

ROCHESTER, May 10 — John Batiste has traveled a long way in the last four years, from commanding the First Infantry Division in Iraq to quitting the Army after three decades in uniform and, now, from his new life overseeing a steel factory here, to openly challenging President Bush on his management of the war.

“Mr. President, you did not listen,” General Batiste says in new television advertisements being broadcast in Republican Congressional districts as part of a $500,000 campaign financed by VoteVets.org. “You continue to pursue a failed strategy that is breaking our great Army and Marine Corps. I left the Army in protest in order to speak out. Mr. President, you have placed our nation in peril. Our only hope is that Congress will act now to protect our fighting men and women.”

Those are powerful, inflammatory words from General Batiste, a retired major general who spent 31 years in the Army, a profession sworn to unflinching loyalty to civilian control of the military. Many senior officers say privately that talk like this makes them uncomfortable; when you pin that first star on your shoulder, they say, your first name becomes “General” for the rest of your life.

But General Batiste says he has received no phone calls, letters or messages from current or former officers challenging his public stance, although he occasionally gets an anonymous e-mail message with the heading “Traitor.” Having quit the Army in anger at what he calls mismanagement of the Iraq war, he says he chose a second career far from Washington and the Pentagon so that he could speak freely on military issues.

“I am outraged, as are the majority of Americans,” General Batiste said over sandwiches in a blue-collar diner here. “I am a lifelong Republican. But it is past time for change.”

A White House spokeswoman, Emily Lawrimore, said in response to the advertising, “We respectfully disagree.” Ms. Lawrimore said President Bush conferred routinely with senior officers, citing a three-hour meeting on Thursday with the Joint Chiefs of Staff and a conversation earlier in the week with Gen. David H. Petraeus, the senior American commander in Iraq.

“The decisions the president has made have been based on information he receives from commanders and generals on the ground,” she added.

A conversation with General Batiste offers one more window into the debate on Iraq. While some former commanders, like General Batiste, have been speaking out against the war, others, such as Gen. Jack Keane, the retired Army vice chief of staff, have offered advice to the White House on Iraq.

General Batiste said he chose to go public with his critique of the war effort only after 30 years of honoring the Army’s rules of silence. He said it was that time commanding 22,000 troops in combat, in 2004 and 2005, that convinced him that American fighting in Iraq was short of vision as well as troops.

“There was never enough. There was never a reserve,” he said. “Again and again, we had to move troops by as many as 200 miles out of our area of operations to support another sector. We would pull troops out of contact with the enemy and move them into contact with the enemy somewhere else. The minute we’d leave, the insurgents would pick up on that, and kill everybody who had been friendly.”

General Batiste was among a handful of retired generals first calling last year for the resignation of Donald H. Rumsfeld as defense secretary. He says he realizes lending his name to television advertisements aimed at the president and Republican members of Congress in an election cycle is different.

Officials of VoteVets.org, an Internet-based veterans advocacy organization, say the television spots will run in the home districts of more than a dozen members of Congress, among them Senator John W. Warner, the Virginia Republican who, as former chairman of the Armed Services Committee, is considered one of Capitol Hill’s experts on the military.

“Like other citizens, retired generals have the constitutional right to engage in robust debate on one of the most important issues of our time,” said John Ullyot, the senator’s spokesman. “Senator Warner appreciates hearing from people on all sides of the debate, and Virginians have a clear understanding of his views on Iraq.”

VoteVets.org says it has tried to calibrate its message carefully, although there is a limit to the nuance that can fit into 30-second television spots. (Two other retired generals, Paul D. Eaton and Wesley K. Clark, speak in the campaign’s other advertisements.)

As described by General Batiste, the message is not antiwar; it argues that continuing the war in Iraq as a civil, sectarian conflict that cannot be won by outside forces is crippling the Army and the Marine Corps. It does not deny the danger of violent Islamic extremism, he says, but contends that the war in Iraq prevents the armed services from preparing to battle other global security threats.

And it says that if terrorism, and especially terrorists armed with unconventional weapons, truly threaten America’s very survival, then the rest of the country — not just the military — should be called to sacrifice.

On Thursday, General Batiste drove from the steel factory he now runs to a veterans’ center where he is president of a nonprofit association of local business leaders who support veterans in the region. He parked behind a shop selling American flags (sales are up 42 percent over last year, with profits going to aid veterans).

“In the Army, you communicate up the chain of command, and I communicated vehemently with my senior commanders while I was in Iraq,” he said. Of his departure from the Army, he said: “It was the toughest decision of my life. I paced my quarters for days. I didn’t sleep for nights. But I was not willing to compromise my principles for one more minute.”

[CBS announced this week that it was terminating its contract with General Batiste as a consultant because of the advertisements.]

His retirement from the Army in November 2005 meant turning his back on a third star and command of day-to-day combat missions in Iraq, the No. 2 military position in Baghdad. Having cast aside his military career, General Batiste cast his eyes away from the defense industry to join Klein Steel Service, which cuts and processes steel for commercial, civilian enterprises — and does no military work.

    Army Career Behind Him, General Speaks Out on Iraq, NYT, 13.5.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/13/us/13generals.html

5 Killed and 3 Missing in Attack on U.S. Patrol

May 13, 2007
The New York Times
By DAMIEN CAVE

BAGHDAD, May 12 — A coordinated attack on seven American soldiers and an Iraqi Army interpreter Saturday morning south of Baghdad left five of them dead and three missing, the United States military said.

The attack occurred near Mahmudiya, a rural area that is a stronghold of militants in Al Qaeda, and military officials said they were not sure if the interpreter was among the dead. That suggested that the five bodies found at the site of the attack, near two burned vehicles, were unrecognizable.

An extensive search for the missing three began right after the five bodies were recovered, military officials said. Helicopters, planes and ground troops secured a wide perimeter, set up checkpoints, searched streets and contacted local leaders for assistance.

“Make no mistake,” said Maj. Gen. William B. Caldwell IV, the top American military spokesman in Iraq. “We will never stop looking for our soldiers until their status is definitively determined, and we continue to pray for their safe return.”

The attack took place as roughly 30,000 more American troops have been sent to Iraq for what many consider a final attempt to pacify the country. Most have been assigned to Baghdad, and American military officials have acknowledged that areas outside the capital have grown more violent as militants shift to parts of the country with lighter concentrations of Iraqi and American troops.

The area just south of Baghdad has proven particularly hard to control. An American soldier was killed Friday in the region in a bomb attack, and troops have been captured there at least twice before.

The United States military said in a statement that a soldier from the 89th Military Police Brigade had died of wounds from a roadside bombing on Friday night near Iskandariya, about 15 miles south of Mahmudiya.

In January, gunmen dressed in fake American military uniforms stormed the provincial governor’s office in Karbala, killing a soldier and capturing four who were later found dead in or near abandoned sport utility vehicles.

Last June, two American soldiers disappeared after being ambushed near Mahmudiya. Their bodies were found days later, mutilated and booby-trapped.

General Caldwell said the attack on Saturday apparently started with a bomb at 4:44 a.m. A unit nearby heard explosions “and attempted to establish communications, but without success,” he said.

Fifteen minutes later, pilotless aerial reconnaissance found two military vehicles on fire.

It was unclear why the patrol seemed to have had only two Humvees. Typically, convoys have three or four vehicles.

At 5:40 a.m., a quick-reaction force arrived and found five bodies. Lt. Col. Christopher Garver, a military spokesman, said the five might have been killed by the explosion or small-arms fire.

Three Iraqi security officials in the area said that the attackers also used rocket-propelled grenades and that the charred vehicles were Humvees. They said the soldiers were on patrol, driving toward Anbar Province, when the gunmen attacked, possibly after setting up a fake checkpoint.

The security officials also asked why it took roughly an hour after the ambush for American reinforcements to arrive.

Colonel Garver said the quick reaction force arrived as quickly as possible given the situation at the scene. “You have to maintain your combat awareness moving into an area,” he said. “You don’t want to rush into there without a full awareness of what the enemy situation is.”

He said a search began as soon as American forces found that three people were missing. “We’ll be out looking for these guys,” he said. “And hopefully we’ll find them alive.”

Violence also raged elsewhere in Iraq. In Baghdad, 17 bodies were found across the city, mostly in its largely Sunni western half, an Interior Ministry official said. In Adhamiya, an eastern Sunni enclave, gunfire killed two people and wounded one, the official said. Two mortar shells crashed into the fortified Green Zone about 4:30 p.m. No injuries were reported.

North of the capital, in Mosul, the police said that Adeeb al-Jalabi, a prominent doctor and the chief of an Islamic medical society in Iraq, was shot and killed as he exited the clinic where he worked. A roadside bomb in western Mosul killed at least one, and three bodies were found, the authorities said.

Two roadside bombs, one in eastern Baghdad and the other in the west, struck American convoys, an Interior Ministry official said. It was unclear if there were casualties.

In Diyala Province, two women were killed and two other people were wounded when a roadside bomb exploded in northern Baquba, the police said. A second bomb nearby killed at least two people and wounded three.

On Friday, bombs tore through two bridges over the Diyala River on Baghdad’s southern outskirts, and a third bomb exploded on a bridge north of Baghdad.

Cheney Arrives in Saudi Arabia

TABUK, Saudi Arabia, May 12 (Agence France-Presse) — Vice President Dick Cheney arrived in Saudi Arabia on Saturday to seek its help in Iraq, two months after King Abdullah criticized the “illegitimate foreign occupation” there.

Mr. Cheney, who arrived in the northern town of Tabuk from Abu Dhabi, was to have talks and dinner with the Saudi monarch during a brief visit to the kingdom.

Despite the long alliance between the United States and Saudi Arabia, King Abdullah opened an annual Arab summit meeting in Riyadh in March with a speech denouncing the occupation of Iraq.

Mr. Cheney was to next visit Egypt and Jordan to wrap up a weeklong Middle East visit.

    5 Killed and 3 Missing in Attack on U.S. Patrol, NYT, 13.5.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/13/world/middleeast/13iraq.html?hp 

Billions in Oil Missing in Iraq, U.S. Study Finds

May 12, 2007
The New York Times
By JAMES GLANZ

Between 100,000 and 300,000 barrels a day of Iraq’s declared oil production over the past four years is unaccounted for and could have been siphoned off through corruption or smuggling, according to a draft American government report.

Using an average of $50 a barrel, the report said the discrepancy was valued at $5 million to $15 million daily.

The report does not give a final conclusion on what happened to the missing fraction of the roughly two million barrels pumped by Iraq each day, but the findings are sure to reinforce longstanding suspicions that smugglers, insurgents and corrupt officials control significant parts of the country’s oil industry.

The report also covered alternative explanations for the billions of dollars worth of discrepancies, including the possibility that Iraq has been consistently overstating its oil production.

Iraq and the State Department, which reports the numbers, have been under relentless pressure to show tangible progress in Iraq by raising production levels, which have languished well below the United States goal of three million barrels a day. Virtually the entire economy of Iraq is dependent on oil revenues.

The draft report, expected to be released within the next week, was prepared by the United States Government Accountability Office with the help of government energy analysts, and was provided to The New York Times by a separate government office that received a review copy. The accountability office declined to provide a copy or to discuss the draft.

Paul Anderson, a spokesman for the office, said only that “we don’t discuss draft reports.”

But a State Department official who works on energy issues said that there were several possible explanations for the discrepancy, including the loss of oil through sabotage of pipelines and inaccurate reporting of production in southern Iraq, where engineers may not properly account for water that is pumped along with oil in the fields there.

“It could also be theft,” the official said, with suspicion falling primarily on Shiite militias in the south. “Crude oil is not as lucrative in the region as refined products, but we’re not ruling that out either.”

Iraqi and American officials have previously said that smuggling of refined products like gasoline and kerosene is probably costing Iraq billions of dollars a year in lost revenues. The smuggling of those products is particularly feared because officials believe that a large fraction of the proceeds go to insurgent groups. Crude oil is much more difficult to smuggle because it must be shipped to refineries and turned into the more valuable refined products before it can be sold on the market.

The Shiite militia groups hold sway around the rich oil fields of southern Iraq, which dominate the country’s oil production, the State Department official said. For that reason, he said, the Shiite militias are more likely to be involved in theft there than the largely Sunni insurgents, who are believed to benefit mostly from smuggling refined products in the north.

In the south, the official said, “There is not an issue of insurgency, per se, but it could be funding Shia factions, and that could very well be true.”

“That would be a concern if they were using smuggling money to blow up American soldiers or kill Sunnis or do anything that could harm the unity of the country,” the official said.

The report by the accountability office is the most comprehensive look yet at faltering American efforts to rebuild Iraq’s oil and electricity sectors. For the analysis of Iraq’s oil production, the accountability office called upon experts at the Energy Information Administration within the United States Department of Energy, which has long experience in analyzing oil production and exports worldwide.

Erik Kreil, an oil expert at the information administration who is familiar with the analysis, said a review of industry figures around the world — exports, refinery figures and other measures — could not account for all the oil that Iraq says it is producing. The administration also took into account how much crude oil was consumed internally, to do things like fuel Iraqi power plants and refine into gasoline and other products.

When all those uses of the oil were taken into consideration, Mr. Kreil said, Iraq’s stated production figures did not add up.

“Either they’re producing less, or they’re producing what they say and the difference is completely unaccounted for in any of the places we think it should go,” Mr. Kreil said. “Either it’s overly optimistic, or it’s unaccounted for.”

Several analysts outside the government agreed that such a large discrepancy indicated that there was either a major smuggling operation in place or that Iraq was incapable to generate accurate production figures.

“That’s a staggering amount of oil to lose every month,” said Philip K. Verleger Jr., an independent economist and oil expert. “But given everything else that’s been written about Iraq, it’s not a surprise.”

Mr. Verleger added that if the oil was being smuggled out of Iraq, there would be a ready market for it, particularly in smaller refineries not controlled by large Western companies in places like China, the Caribbean and even small European countries.

The report also contains the most comprehensive assessment yet of the billions of dollars the United States and Iraq spent on rebuilding the oil and electricity infrastructure, which is falling further and further behind its performance goals.

Adding together both civilian and military financing, the report concludes that the United States has spent $5.1 billion of the $7.4 billion in American taxpayer money set aside to rebuild the Iraqi electricity and oil sectors. The United States has also spent $3.8 billion of Iraqi money on those sectors, the report says.

Despite those enormous expenditures, the performance is far short of official goals, and in some cases seems to be declining further. The average output of Iraq’s national electricity grid in 2006, for example, was 4,300 megawatts, about equal to its value before the 2003 invasion. By February of this year, the figure had fallen still further, to 3,800 megawatts, the report says.

All of those figures are far short of the longstanding American goal for Iraq: 6,000 megawatts. Even more dispiriting for Iraqis, by February the grid provided power for an average of only 5.1 hours a day in Baghdad and 8.6 hours nationwide. Both of those figures are also down from last year.

The story is similar for the oil sector, where — even if the Iraqi numbers are correct — neither exports nor production have met American goals and have also declined since last year, the report says.

American reconstruction officials have continued to promote what they describe as successes in the rebuilding program, while saying that problems with security have prevented the program from achieving all of its goals. But federal oversight officials have frequently reported that the program has also suffered from inadequate oversight, poor contracting practices, graft, ineffective management and disastrous initial planning.

The discrepancies in the Iraqi oil figures are broadly reminiscent of the ones that turned up when some of the same energy department experts examined Iraq’s oil infrastructure in the wake of the oil-for-food scandals of the Saddam Hussein era. In a United Nations-sponsored program that was supposed to trade Iraq’s oil for food, Mr. Hussein and other smugglers were handsomely profiting from the program, investigations determined.

In reports to Congress before the 2003 invasion that ousted Mr. Hussein, the accountability office, using techniques similar to those called into play in its most recent report, determined that in early 2002, for example, 325,000 to 480,000 barrels of crude oil a day were being smuggled out of Iraq, the majority through a pipeline to Syria.

But substantial amounts also left Iraq through Jordan and Turkey, and by ship in the Persian Gulf, routes that could also be available today, said Robert Ebel, a senior adviser at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington.

“Any number of adjacent countries would be glad to have it if they could make some money,” Mr. Ebel said.

Mr. Ebel said the lack of modern metering equipment, or measuring devices, at Iraq’s wellheads made it especially difficult to track smuggling there. The State Department official agreed that there were no meters at the wellheads, but said that Iraq’s Oil Ministry had signed a contract with Shell Oil to study the possibility of putting in the meters.

The official added that an American-financed project to install meters on Iraq’s main oil platform in the Persian Gulf was scheduled to be completed this month.

As sizable as a discrepancy of as much as 300,000 barrels a day would be in most parts of the world, some analysts said it could be expected in a country with such a long, ingrained history of corruption.

“It would be surprising if it was not the case,” said John Pike, director of GlobalSecurity.org, which closely follows security and economic issues in Iraq. He added, “How could the oil sector be the exception?”

    Billions in Oil Missing in Iraq, U.S. Study Finds, NYT, 12.5.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/12/world/middleeast/12oil.html?hp

Gen. in Iraq: I need more troops

11.5.2007
AP
USA Today

WASHINGTON (AP) — The U.S. commander in northern Iraq said Friday he doesn't have enough troops for the mission in increasingly violent Diyala province.

Maj. Gen. Benjamin Mixon also said that Iraqi government officials are not moving fast enough to provide the "most powerful weapon" against insurgents — a government that works and supplies services for the people.

Mixon commands the area that includes Diyala province, north of Baghdad. It was a hotbed of the Sunni insurgency before the start of the Baghdad security crackdown and has worsened since militants fled there to avoid the increased U.S.-led operations started in the capital in February.

His comments on the Iraqi government were unusually candid and in keeping with the sentiment in Congress and among some administration officials as well as an American electorate becoming ever more impatient with the war.

Mixon has already received extra troops, but violence in Diyala is on the rise, he said, both because more militants have moved in and because coalition forces are taking the offensive.

"We are sure there are elements of both Sunni extremists and Shia extremists that have moved out of Baghdad and relocated into not only Diyala province, but also into Salah ad Din province," he said.

The U.S. is taking increasing casualties in Diyala. One soldier was killed Thursday from an explosion during combat operations in the province; one was killed and four others were wounded Tuesday in a shooting attack; and six U.S. soldiers were killed Sunday when a massive bomb destroyed their vehicle.

"I do not have enough soldiers right now in Diyala province to get that security situation moving," Mixon said. "We have plans to put additional forces in that region."

He declined to give details but said Lt. Gen. Raymond Odierno, the No. 2 commander in Iraq, is planning to send more forces.

"I laid out a plan for General Odierno on the numbers of forces that I would need," Mixon told Pentagon reporters by video conference from Iraq. "We have made progress ... we have taken terrain back from the enemy. General Odierno intends to give me additional forces as they become available."

Additional troops have been flowing into Iraq for months as part of President Bush's plan to try to get a handle on violence in the four-year-old war.

Initially, Bush ordered an extra 21,500 combat troops to the country — mainly to be used in Baghdad, but also in Anbar province. An additional 7,000 are going in support positions.

The last of five extra brigades planned in the increase is to arrive by June. There are some 146,000 U.S. troops in Iraq now.

Mixon has about 3,500 troops in Diyala and there are about 10,000 Iraqi soldiers and several thousand Iraqi police, with 3,000 more police approved but not yet hired and trained.

Vice President Dick Cheney this week visited Iraq and pressed the government to make more progress, while Defense Secretary Robert Gates said there last month that "the clock is ticking" on reconciliation and other measures of progress in Iraq.

Mixon said Diyala's government is so ineffective at providing services that it could be described as non-functioning.

He also blamed national ministries in Baghdad and said the weak government hampers coalition efforts to make the country more secure. Showing Iraqis that their government can provide for them "will be the most powerful weapon against this insurgency," Mixon said.

    Gen. in Iraq: I need more troops, UT, 11.5.2007, http://www.usatoday.com/news/washington/2007-05-11-iraq-troops_N.htm

A Tough Fight Still Looms, Cheney Warns G.I.’s in Iraq

May 11, 2007
The New York Times
By ALISSA J. RUBIN

BAGHDAD, Friday, May 11 — Vice President Dick Cheney spoke Thursday to American troops stationed near Saddam Hussein’s birthplace, Tikrit, telling them in somber tones that they were the front line in the fight against global terrorism and making no promise that an end was in sight.

“We are here, above all, because the terrorists who have declared war on America and other free nations have made Iraq the central front in that war,” his prepared text said.

His assessment was a stark contrast to the one he made two years ago when he declared in an interview on CNN that the insurgency was in its “last throes.”

Mr. Cheney made his visit as the Iraqi High Tribunal heard the closing arguments in the trial of six colleagues of Mr. Hussein who, prosecutors said, planned and ordered attacks during the 1980s that killed as many as 180,000 Kurds in the so-called Anfal military campaign.

Mr. Hussein was one of the defendants in the trial until his execution in January. The remaining defendants, led by Ali Hassan al-Majid, a cousin of Mr. Hussein’s who became known among Iraqis as Chemical Ali for his role in the poison-gas attacks that were central to the campaign, have pleaded not guilty to charges of war crimes and genocide.

Baghdad was relatively quiet on Thursday until nightfall, when a car bomb exploded in the Karada neighborhood as an American convoy passed, an Interior Ministry official said. A second bomb exploded in that neighborhood just after midnight.

The American military also announced Thursday that a marine had died in combat on Wednesday in western Iraq.

The ministry also reported that 20 bodies had been found around the city, and that two people had been killed by mortar fire.

Elsewhere in Iraq, at least 20 people were killed or found dead. Among them were five Iraqi Army soldiers and four police officers.

In a video released Thursday by the Islamic State of Iraq, which is another name for Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia, those nine men were shown being shot in execution style by men in black clothes and hoods. The men were abducted in Diyala Province this week, according to the videotape and Diyala police officials.

In the tape, a voice said to belong to the insurgent group’s leader, Abu Ayyub al-Masri, said the men had been killed because they were apostates, a label often applied by militants to those who aid the government.

In Salahuddin Province, where Mr. Cheney was visiting, there was a mortar attack near Baiji that wounded seven people, and a roadside bomb wounded seven police officers, according to Iraqi officials at the Joint Security Center in Tikrit. Two bodies were also found, an official said.

On this visit to Iraq, Mr. Cheney’s second as vice president, he seemed to want to send the message that the administration realized it was asking a great deal of American soldiers and that it was a brutal fight.

“Extremists from inside and outside the country want to stir an endless cycle of violence, and Al Qaeda is operating and trying to open new fronts,” he said in his speech, to soldiers from the 25th Infantry Division and Task Force Lightning stationed at Camp Speicher.

He cited the comments of Gen. David H. Petraeus, the American commander in Iraq, who was traveling with him. “General Petraeus has underscored the fact that the enemy tactics are barbaric,” Mr. Cheney said, according to a report by The Associated Press, which had a reporter at the base. “We can expect more violence as they try to destroy the hopes of the Iraqi people,” he said, still quoting General Petraeus.

Mr. Cheney also acknowledged the discouraging effects of the latest three-month extension for many troops deployed in Iraq. “That puts unexpected hardship on you and your families,” he said. “I want you to know the extension is vital to the mission.”

He also presented medals to 11 soldiers, The A.P. reported.

Mr. Cheney is the highest-ranking Bush administration official to spend the night in Iraq. Extensive security measures were employed, including a news blackout from the end of his public appearance on Wednesday until he spoke to the troops at midday.

People who live in Tikrit were unaware of the vice president’s visit until after he had left, when it became public on television and radio. Camp Speicher, at the site of the former Iraqi Air Force academy, is about seven miles outside the town. It is heavily secured and covers a huge area, making it possible to keep a high-profile visitor all but invisible.

After leaving Tikrit, Mr. Cheney flew to Abu Dhabi, in the United Arab Emirates, the next stop on his weeklong tour of the Middle East, which will include visits to Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Jordan.

John F. Burns and Khalid al-Ansary contributed reporting from Baghdad, and Iraqi employees of The New York Times from Diwaniya, Diyala, Salahuddin and Mosul.

    A Tough Fight Still Looms, Cheney Warns G.I.’s in Iraq, NYT, 11.5.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/11/world/middleeast/11iraq.html

Cheney Addresses U.S. Troops in Tikrit

May 10, 2007
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 8:38 a.m. ET
The New York Times

CAMP SPEICHER, Iraq (AP) -- Vice President Dick Cheney saluted U.S. troops stationed near former Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein's hometown on Thursday and defended the Bush administration's recent decision to extend military deployments as ''vital to the mission.''

''The Army and the country appreciate the extra burden you carry,'' Cheney said.

He vowed to ''stay on the offensive'' despite growing public opposition in the United States to the war and efforts by the Democratic majority in Congress to restrict spending.

Cheney, who was defense secretary in the first Bush administration, spent the night on the base, about seven miles from Tikrit, Saddam's former hometown and an area populated mostly by minority-party Sunnis.

Cheney had breakfast with troops and participated in classified briefings from military commanders.

''It was a good report and I come away with even more appreciation for all you do, and greater confidence for the days ahead,'' Cheney said,

Between 10,000 and 12,000 troops are stationed at the base, which is located on the grounds of the former Iraqi Air Force Academy and is about 100 miles north of Baghdad, where Cheney spent Wednesday.

It was the first time Cheney spent the night in Iraq, and his whereabouts was closely guarded by the White House until Thursday's speech to the troops.

Cheney spoke to several thousand mostly Army forces in a huge tent that is scheduled to be a gymnasium. He was enthusiastically cheered and greeted when he stepped up on stage, but only politely applauded when he talked about deployment extensions.

Later, he set out for Abu Dhabi in the United Arab Emirates on a weeklong tour of the Middle East that will also take him to Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Jordan.

''Extremists from inside and outside the country want to stir an endless cycle of violence, and al-Qaida is operating and trying to open new fronts,'' Cheney said. ''Some seem to have no interest in seeing the emergence of a strong, secure and democratic Iraq.

''A violent minority is trying to tear down the institutions of peaceful self-government that Iraqis are trying to build,'' he said.

The president recently increased military deployments from 12 months to 15 months. That meant a blanket three-month extension for nearly every one on the base, said Maj. Tage Rainsford, a public affairs officer on the base.

Said Cheney: ''Many of you have had your deployments extended and that puts unexpected hardship on you and your families. I want you to know the extension is vital to the mission.''

Cheney visited to Iraq to assess the impact of the president's decision to send roughly 30,000 additional troops to Iraq to help stabilize the country, especially around Baghdad. In meetings with Iraqi leaders on Wednesday, he also pressed for Iraq to do more to reconcile tensions among rival Shiite and Sunni factions.

Success on the path to reconciliation, progress and peace, Cheney told the troops, ''depends on Iraq's leaders themselves, and the ultimate solution in this country will be a political solution.''

''But that requires basic security, especially in Baghdad, where Americans are working beside Iraqi forces to carry out our new strategy.''

Cheney was not upbeat, giving a grim assessment of the war being waged, citing comments by Gen. David Petraeus, the chief U.S. commander in Iraq, who was with him.

''General Petraeus has underscored the fact that enemy tactics are barbaric ... that we can expect more violence as they try to destroy the hopes of the Iraqi people,'' Cheney said. But he cited some progress in terms of battling al-Qaida, seizing weapons and getting improved intelligence.

Gen. Benjamin R. (Randy) Mixon, commander of coalition forces in northern Iraq, told reporters that since President Bush announced his military buildup earlier this year, some al-Qaida and other militants have migrated from Baghdad to other areas of Iraq, including some in northern areas under his command.

As to the extensions of duty on troops at Camp Speicher, Mixon said, ''They understand perfectly the reason the mission's been extended. The morale is good, in terms of staying focused on the mission. They want to know the exact day their going back. That gives them something to focus on.''

''This budget battle has been particularly frustrating to us,'' Mixon said of congressional efforts to set timetables for troop withdrawals.

''We cannot stay here forever, we all know that,'' he said. He said the solution to the problem is to keep training the Iraqi army and police.

Specialist Eric Emo, 23, of Sedalia, Mo., whose Army unit is based in Fort Riley, Kan., said most of his fellow soldiers are unhappy about the deployment extensions, but understand the need for it.

In terms of hostile activity, he said, ''conditions around here have gotten a lot worse.'' He said there has been a particularly sharp increase in the number of roadside bombs.

    Cheney Addresses U.S. Troops in Tikrit, NYT, 10.5.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/world/AP-Cheney.html

Cheney Makes Visit to Baghdad

May 9, 2007
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 2:22 a.m. ET
The New York Times

BAGHDAD, Iraq (AP) -- Vice President Dick Cheney sought to encourage reconciliation among rival Iraqi factions on Wednesday in an unannounced visit to Baghdad, emphasizing that the current U.S. military buildup alone is not end the conflict.

Cheney made Iraq the first stop of a weeklong trip to the Middle East aimed at redoubling efforts to end divisive infighting among Iraq's ethnic factions.

He got a firsthand briefing on conditions from Gen. David Petraeus, the top U.S. commander in Iraq, and the new U.S. ambassador here, Ryan Crocker.

In what was to be a full daylong meeting, Cheney was to meet with Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, as well as with Iraq's Kurdish president and its Sunni and Shiite vice presidents.

Aides said Cheney's mission was both to get a sense of the situation on the ground in Iraq and to deliver a message that more work is needed on the political front to overcome divisions and delays.

That included a renewed request that the Iraqi parliament not take a two-month vacation as many lawmakers here have urged.

Cocker told reporters traveling with Cheney that urging the parliament to stay in session through these difficult times was clearly on the vice president's agenda.

"For the Iraqi parliament to take a two-month vacation in the middle of summer is impossible to understand," said Crocker, who traveled with Cheney from Washington.

    Cheney Makes Visit to Baghdad, NYT, 9.5.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/world/AP-Cheney.html

Pentagon Prepares 35, 000 Troops for Iraq

May 9, 2007
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 1:27 a.m. ET
The New York Times

WASHINGTON (AP) -- The Pentagon on Tuesday alerted more than 35,000 Army soldiers that they could be sent to Iraq this fall. In Congress, House Democrats defiantly pushed a plan to limit war funding to two-month installments.

The deployment orders signed by Defense Secretary Robert Gates would allow commanders to maintain the buildup of troops through the end of the year if needed. President Bush has ordered nearly 30,000 additional troops to Iraq to quell a spike in violence, particularly in and around Baghdad. There are currently about 146,000 U.S. troops in Iraq.

Pentagon spokesman Bryan Whitman said the orders do not mean the military has decided to maintain the increased force levels through December. The Pentagon ''has been very clear that a decision about the duration of the surge will depend on conditions on the ground,'' he said.

The announcement comes as Bush is under increasing pressure to pull troops out of Iraq. Bush last week vetoed $124.2 billion legislation that would have funded the war while requiring troops to start coming home this fall. According to a CNN-Opinion Research Corp. poll released Tuesday, just over half of Americans disapproved of the veto.

House Democratic leaders briefed party members Tuesday on new legislation that would fund the Iraq war through July, then give Congress the option of cutting off money after that if conditions do not improve. Bush requested more than $90 billion to fund the war through September.

The proposal is aimed at appeasing Democratic lawmakers who want to end the war immediately and are urging leaders not to back down after Bush's veto last week. But lacking a firm endorsement by the Senate, the challenge by House Democrats seemed more for political show than a preview of another veto showdown with Bush.

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., told reporters before meeting with House Speaker Nancy Pelosi that ''nothing's been ruled out and nothing's been ruled in'' as he would continue to try to work with the White House.

House Democratic leaders struck a more defiant tone.

''I didn't commit to any compromise'' with the White House, said Pelosi, D-Calif.

Asked whether Democrats were still talking with the White House, Rep. Rahm Emanuel, D-Ill., said, ''They know what we're doing obviously. I don't think their subscriptions to the newspapers ended at any time recently.''

Democratic leadership aides said Reid and Pelosi acknowledged in their meeting Tuesday that the House plan would be considerably more difficult to pass in the Senate, where 60 votes are often required and that the two chambers may have to pursue different tracks.

Earlier in the day, Bush met with more than a dozen Democrats, most of whom with fairly conservative voting records.

''They (the White House) seemed to be concerned about their relationship with a number of us, and I think they should be,'' said Rep. Bud Cramer, D-Ala., one of the members who attended. ''It's perplexing why we couldn't have had a couple of these meetings earlier.''

The House bill would provide $30 billion to fund military operations through July, as well as more than $12 billion more to pay for equipment, training security forces in Iraq and Afghanistan and defense health. Some $15 billion more would be provided for other high-priority projects, including $6.8 billion for hurricane relief, $3.1 billion for base closings and $2.2 billion for homeland security.

Under the proposal, Bush would have to update Congress by July 13 on whether the Iraqi government was meeting certain political and security reforms. Congress would decide 10 days later whether to end the war and bring troops home or provide funding through September.

The House would vote separately this month on a bill providing about $3.5 billion in agricultural assistance and about $1 billion for rural schools, wildfire relief and aid to salmon farmers.

''We're trying to prepare a second option so that if the administration wants to continue to just hold its breath and turn blue until they get their money, we're going to have another alternative,'' said Rep. David Obey, D-Wis., who planned to brief White House chief of staff Josh Bolten on Tuesday.

White House spokesman Tony Snow called the approach ''just bad management.''

''We think it is appropriate to be able to give commanders what they are going to need, and also forces in the field, so that you can make long-term decisions in trying to build the mission,'' Snow said.

Congressional Republicans also dismissed the Democratic proposal as unfairly rationing funds needed in combat and said their members would not support it.

Democrats ''should not treat our men and women in uniform like they are children who are getting a monthly allowance,'' said Rep. John Boehner, R-Ohio, his party's leader.

Gates and his military leaders have said that commanders in Iraq will make recommendations in September on whether the buildup has been successful and whether it should continue or if troops can begin coming home.

Snow and other administration officials have tried to tamp down expectations of the September review, although several senior Republicans say it will prove critical to whether the GOP continues to support the war.

Sen. Olympia Snowe, R-Maine, introduced legislation Tuesday that would require the Iraqi government to meet certain benchmarks within four months. If Baghdad fails, military commanders would begin planning to bring some troops home and refocusing remaining forces on noncombat missions, such as training the Iraqi security forces. Snowe's bill, co-sponsored by Sen. Evan Bayh, D-Ind., sets a nonbinding goal of ending combat six months later.

------

Associated Press writer Ben Evans contributed to this report.

------

On the Net:

Defense Department: http://www.defenselink.mil

    Pentagon Prepares 35, 000 Troops for Iraq, NYT, 9.5.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/us/AP-US-Iraq.html

Report: Iraq Child Mortality Rate Soars

May 8, 2007
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 2:35 a.m. ET
The New York Times

LONDON (AP) -- The chance that an Iraqi child will live beyond age 5 has plummeted faster than anywhere else in the world since 1990, according to a report released Tuesday, which placed the country last in its child survival rankings.

One in eight Iraqi children died of disease or violence before reaching their fifth birthday in 2005, according to the report by Save the Children, which said Iraq ranked last because it had made the least progress toward improving child survival rates.

Iraq's mortality rate has soared by 150 percent since 1990. Even before the latest war, Iraq was plagued by electricity shortages, a lack of clean water and too few hospitals.

The publication, which used data from 1990-2005, also determined that gains in survival rates in some of the world's poorest countries -- including Botswana, Zimbabwe and Swaziland -- were declining.

The vast majority of child deaths -- more than nine in 10 -- occur in just 60 developing countries, the report said. Of the approximately 10 million children under age 5 who die every year, most could be saved with cheap solutions, like nets to protect against mosquito-borne malaria or antibiotics to treat pneumonia, according to the report.

''These aren't intractable problems,'' Dr. William Foege, of the Emory University School of Public Health, wrote in a foreword to the report. ''It is simply wrong for only the few to have access to all of the tools for survival because of where they live.''

About 4 million children die of complications in the first month after birth every year, according to Save the Children. Other causes of death for young children include diarrhea, pneumonia and measles, the group reported.

Among industrialized countries, Iceland had the best child survival rate, and Romania the worst. The U.S. placed 26th, tied with Croatia, Estonia and Poland. Nearly seven children die for every 1,000 live births in the United States. That was more than double the rate in Iceland, and 75 percent higher than rates in the Czech Republic, Finland, Japan and Slovenia.

Among developing countries, Egypt fared the best -- lowering its child mortality rate by 68 percent largely by improving care for pregnant women, ensuring the presence of a skilled attendant during childbirth, and providing better family planning help.

Since 1994, Egypt has also increased health spending by more than 200 percent.

------

On the Net:

http://www.savethechildren.org/ 

    Report: Iraq Child Mortality Rate Soars, NYT, 8.5.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/world/AP-Child-Deaths.html

White House: U.S. should brace for more casualties

Mon May 7, 2007
11:13AM EDT
Reuters

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - After another bloody weekend for U.S. troops in Iraq, the White House said on Monday Americans should brace for more U.S. casualties in the push for greater security in Baghdad.

Eight U.S. soldiers were killed on Sunday in roadside bomb attacks and were among 12 whose deaths were announced, following an April in which more than 100 died.

White House spokesman Tony Snow said the deaths were attributable to efforts to bring security to Baghdad as part of a 3-month-old troop buildup.

"We are getting to the point now with the Baghdad security plan where there is going to be real engagement in tougher neighborhoods and you're likely to see escalating levels of casualties," Snow said.

"We've known that, been saying it all along. We're getting into some of the grittiest security operations," Snow said.

More than 3,300 Americans have died in the 4-year-old Iraq war. The Bush White House and the Democrats in charge of the U.S. Congress are currently deadlocked on providing a fresh infusion of cash to fund the war.

Bush last week vetoed a Democratic bill that would have forced him to start withdrawing U.S. troops from Iraq this year, legislation that al Qaeda's No. 2, Ayman al-Zawahri, said in a Web video on Saturday was proof of Washington's defeat.

Bush has vowed never to accept a withdrawal deadline and his aides are engaged in negotiations with key legislators on Capitol Hill trying to find an agreement that would provide $100 billion for the Iraq and Afghanistan wars.

    White House: U.S. should brace for more casualties, R, 7.5.2007, http://www.reuters.com/article/topNews/idUSN2530041620070507?src=050707_1251_TOPSTORY_casualty_warning

News Analysis

Stress on Troops Adds to U.S. Hurdles in Iraq

May 6, 2007
The New York Times
By BENEDICT CAREY

WASHINGTON, May 5 — The detailed mental health survey of troops in Iraq released by the Pentagon on Friday highlights a growing worry for the United States as it struggles to bring order to Baghdad: the high level of combat stress suffered during lengthy and repeated tours.

The fourth in a continuing series, the report suggested that extended tours and multiple deployments, among other policy decisions, could escalate anger and increase the likelihood that soldiers or marines lash out at civilians, or defy military ethics.

That is no small concern since the United States’ counterinsurgency doctrine emphasizes the importance of winning the trust and support of the local population.

The report was provided in November to Gen. George W. Casey Jr., then the senior American commander in Iraq.

Pentagon officials have not explained why the public release of the report was delayed, a move that kept the data out of the public debate as the Bush administration developed its plan to build up troops in Iraq and extend combat tours. Rear Adm. Richard R. Jeffries, a medical officer, told reporters on Friday that the timing was decided by civilian Pentagon officials.

The survey of 1,320 soldiers and 447 marines was conducted in August and September of 2006. The military’s report, which drew on that survey as well as interviews with commanders and focus groups, found that longer deployments increased the risk of psychological problems; that the levels of mental problems was highest — some 30 percent — among troops involved in close combat; that more than a third of troops endorsed torture in certain situations; and that most would not turn in fellow service members for mistreating a civilian.

“These are thoughts people are going to have when under this kind of stress, and soldiers will tell you that: you don’t know what’s it’s like until you’ve been there,” said Dr. Andy Morgan, an associate clinical professor of psychiatry at Yale University who has worked extensively with regular and Special Operations troops. “The question is whether you act on them.”

The Pentagon’s analysis also identified sources of anger besides lengthy and repeated deployments that could lead to ethics violations, which would not be apparent from the outside: eight-day rest breaks that involved four days of transit; long lines to get into recreation facilities, especially for those who perform missions outside the relative safety of base camps; and inconsistent dress-code rules.

Most of all, there were uncertainties about deployment: 40 percent of soldiers rated uncertain redeployment dates as a top concern.

The military has evaluated the emotional state of soldiers in the past, from the cases of shaking and partial paralysis known as shell shock after World War I, to the numb exhaustion identified as combat fatigue in World War II. The flashbacks and irritability reported in the years after the Vietnam War came to define another diagnosis: post-traumatic stress disorder.

But since the Persian Gulf war in 1991 the Pentagon’s efforts to track mental health have become far more sophisticated, and now provide a deeper X-ray into the day-to-day realities of life on the ground, in real time — a glimpse of how the stresses of both combat, and policy decisions, can affect the behavior of troops.

When the administration decided in January to send more troops to Baghdad to try to reverse the spiraling sectarian violence in Iraq, it sought to ease the strain on the armed forces by announcing its intention to expand the active duty Army and Marine forces by 92,000 troops.

But it takes years to recruit, train and equipment an expanded ground force, and the decision to increase the size of the military was made too late to relieve the stress on the forces now in Iraq.

To sustain the current elevated troop levels, Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates announced in April that the Army was increasing combat tours to 15 months, rather than the traditional one-year tour.

“The Army is spread very thin, and we need it to be a larger force for the number of missions that we were being asked to address for our nation,” said Maj. Gen. Gale S. Pollock, the Army’s acting surgeon general and head of the Army’s Medical Command, on Friday, as the report was released.

To better cope with the current strains, the report recommended that suicide prevention program be revised, that soldiers and marines who have combat positions outside large bases have better opportunities for occasional rest and recreation, and that a more determined effort be made to teach battlefield ethics on dealing with civilians.

The military team that conducted the survey recommended that soldiers spend 18 to 36 months at home between deployments abroad, in contrast to the current Army policy of 12 months.

Col. Carl Castro of the Army, who led the team that carried out the survey, asserted that the military began to carry out the report’s recommendations immediately after it was completed.

The report noted a direct relationship between involvement in intense combat and soldiers who exhibited signs of anxiety, depression and acute stress. Almost 30 percent of soldiers who were engaged in “high combat” were discovered to be suffering from “acute stress,” according to the report.

But the length of tours in Iraq was another important factor. Soldiers who were deployed for more than six months were one and a half times more likely to exhibit depression or anxiety than those with shorter tours of duty.

Those who had repeatedly served in Iraq were also more likely to suffer from psychological ailments than those who were serving their first tour. The survey showed that 24 percent of those who had done multiple tours suffered from “acute stress,” compared with 15 percent who were on their first tour.

According to the survey, suicide rates for soldiers in Iraq from 2003 to 2006 were 16.1 per 100,000, compared with the average Army rate of 11.1.

In general, soldiers experience higher rates of mental health problems than do marines. The morale of the soldiers also tended to be lower than that of marines, who unlike those in the Army typically serve seven-month combat tours in Iraq.

The report said psychological ailments and built-up anger resulting from combat stress increased the likelihood that the troops would lash out at civilians. The survey noted that only 47 percent of the soldiers and 38 percent of marines agreed that noncombatants should be treated with dignity and respect. Troops who had high levels of anger were twice as likely to violate ethical standards, the report found. The survey found that 40 percent of troops who scored high on measures of personal anger reported insulting or cursing at a civilian, and 7 percent reported having hit or kicked a civilian. Among those low on measures of anger, only 1 percent said they had hit a civilian, and 16 percent reported insulting noncombatants.

The Iraq war, experts say, is a new kind of war — a 360-degree battle space, with no front or rear, no safe zone outside the large fortified bases, and the compounded physical uncertainty of roadside bombs and mortar attacks. The lack of any control over these factors, and the generally limited sense of progress, only intensifies the stress for troops.

“You can endure a lot of physical and mental exhaustion as long as you feel you’re having an impact, you’re accomplishing something and that you have some control over your situation,” Dr. Morgan said. “If you don’t feel you have any of that, you quickly get to a point where the only thing that’s important is keeping yourself and your buddies alive. Nothing else much matters.”

Michael R. Gordon contributed reporting.

    Stress on Troops Adds to U.S. Hurdles in Iraq, NYT, 6.5.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/06/washington/06military.html

Propaganda Fear Cited in Account of Iraqi Killings

May 6, 2007
The New York Times
By PAUL von ZIELBAUER

Recently unclassified documents suggest that senior officers viewed the killings of 24 Iraqi civilians in Haditha in late 2005 as a potential public relations problem that could fuel insurgent propaganda against the American military, leading investigators to question whether the officers’ immediate response had been intentionally misleading.

Col. R. Gary Sokoloski, a lawyer who was chief of staff to Maj. General Richard A. Huck, the division commander, approved a news release about the killings that investigators interviewing him in March 2006 suggested was “intentionally inaccurate” because it stated, contrary to the facts at hand, that the civilians had been killed by an insurgent’s bomb.

According to a transcript of the interview, Colonel Sokoloski told the investigators, “We knew the, you know, the strategic implications of being permanently present in Haditha and how badly the insurgents wanted us out of there.”

But Colonel Sokoloski told them he believed that the news release was accurate as written. “At the time,” he said, “given the information that was available to me and the objective to get that out for the press” before insurgents put out their own information, “that is what we went with.”

The documents also show that derailing enemy propaganda was important to senior Marine commanders, including Col. Stephen W. Davis, a highly regarded regimental commander under General Huck, who played down questions about the civilian killings from a Time magazine reporter last year, long after the attacks and the civilian toll were clear to the military.

“Frankly, what I am looking at is the advantage he’s giving the enemy,” Colonel Davis said of the reporter, Tim McGirk, whose article in March 2006 was the first to report that marines had killed civilians in Haditha, including women and children. In their sworn statements, General Huck and his subordinates say they dismissed Mr. McGirk’s inquiries because they saw him as a naïve conduit for the mayor of Haditha, whom the Marines believed to be an insurgent.

Four officers were charged with failing to properly investigate the civilian killings. The first hearing against one of the officers, Capt. Randy W. Stone, is set for Tuesday morning, in a military courtroom at Camp Pendleton, Calif. Three enlisted marines are charged with the killings. Their hearings, to determine whether the charges warrant general courts-martial, are set to begin in the coming weeks. As Marine Corps prosecutors prepare their evidence against Captain Stone and his fellow officers, the unclassified documents suggest that senior Marine commanders dismissed, played down or publicly mischaracterized the civilian deaths in ways that a military investigation found deeply troubling. The documents suggest that General Huck ignored early reports that women and children were killed in the attack, and later told investigators that he was unaware of regulations that required his staff to investigate further.

The documents, including a report by Maj. Gen. Eldon A. Bargewell of the Army, copies of e-mail messages among Marine officers in Haditha and sworn statements from several ranking officers, focus only on how the Marine chain of command handled the killings and have not been made public. Portions of the report and commanders’ reactions to the killings were reported by The Washington Post in January and April. The documents were provided to The New York Times by people familiar with the investigation only on condition that they not be identified.

Captain Stone, 34, of Dunkirk, Md., is accused of failing to investigate reports of the civilian deaths. In an interview that repeated similar frustrations voiced by lawyers for other accused officers, Captain Stone said he did not investigate the killings because his superiors told him not to.

“The regimental judge advocate informed me that we don’t do investigations for ‘troops in contact’ situations,” said Captain Stone, referring to the regiment’s lawyer, Maj. Carroll Connelly. Troops in contact is military language for combat against enemy fighters.

“That’s my understanding of what higher wanted,” Captain Stone said, referring to his superior officers, “and that’s why there was no investigation.”

“I don’t think I did anything wrong,” he went on. But he added, “There is a certain level of disappointment that the Marine Corps decided that, in the entire chain of command, that I am the one who should be held accountable.”

Major Connelly, who was not charged with any crime, has been granted immunity to testify at the coming hearings, said Captain Stone’s civilian lawyer, Charles W. Gittins.

After weighing evidence and arguments from prosecutors and defense lawyers, an investigating officer presiding over the hearing will determine whether there is sufficient evidence to recommend a general court martial. The other three officers facing dereliction charges are: Capt. Lucas M. McConnell, the company commander; First Lt. Andrew A. Grayson, a Marine intelligence officer; and Lt. Col. Jeffrey R. Chessani, the battalion commander.

The Haditha investigators pored over thousands of e-mail messages, slide presentations, sworn statements and field reports, sifting through sometimes contradictory information and conflicting points of view to determine what officers at each level knew and when they knew it.

The documents and interviews produced in the Bargewell investigation indicate that investigators had suspected possible wrongdoing, at least initially, at even higher levels.

“As you go up the chain of command, the question always becomes, ‘Where do you stop?’ ” said John D. Hutson, a former Navy judge advocate general, now the dean of the Franklin Pierce Law Center in New Hampshire. “You have to be reasonably certain that you’ll get a conviction.”

Intangible considerations can also influence military lawyers in deciding whether to recommend charges when wrongdoing is more ambiguous. “If you know the guy and he’s done well and he’s never done anything dishonest before,” Mr. Hutson said, “you might give him the benefit of the doubt.”

Documents declassified by the military last week include an e-mail message within three hours of the Haditha attack from a battalion operations officer to the regiment, a superior command, saying that 15 civilians had been killed, “seven of which were women and kids.”

Senior commanders told investigators that such early field reports were passed on to General Huck’s staff.

In a statement he gave at Camp Lejeune, N.C., in April, nearly five months later, General Huck told investigators that he could not recall being informed of reports that 15 civilians had been killed. He said he was overseeing several combat operations at the time, and that he had no reason to believe that the civilians killed in Haditha were not enemy fighters.

“I didn’t know at the time whether they were bad guys, noncombatants, or whatever,” General Huck said, according to a transcript of the interview. Later in the interview, he added, “They may have been guys pulling the trigger, for all I know.”

General Huck, who is expected to testify at the accused officers’ hearings, told investigators he did not recall orders, called commanders critical information requirements that required him to alert his superiors and investigate the circumstances of any attack that killed at least three times as many civilians as American forces.

General Huck said that three days after the Haditha episode, in the midst of two combat operations, he visited Colonel Chessani, the battalion commander, who showed him an electronic slide show of the attacks that, according to investigators, did not mention the civilian deaths.

“I sat there and took the brief and no bells and whistles went off,” General Huck told investigators.

The bells, the general said, sounded two and a half months later, on Feb. 12, after he sent his boss, Lt. Gen. Peter W. Chiarelli, the commander of ground operations in Iraq at the time, an e-mail message with Colonel Chessani’s slide presentation attached to it.

“I support our account and do not see a necessity for further investigation,” General Huck wrote in the message to General Chiarelli in Baghdad, adding: “Allegedly, McGirk received his info from the mayor of Haditha, who we strongly suspect to be an insurgent.”

Less than five hours later, records show, General Chiarelli forwarded the e-mail message to his chief of staff, Brig. Gen. Donald Campbell, with a note.

“Don: We need to get together at the first possible moment tomorrow morning,” he wrote. “We’re going to have to do an investigation.”

    Propaganda Fear Cited in Account of Iraqi Killings, NYT, 6.5.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/06/world/middleeast/06haditha.html?hp

Al-Qaeda No. 2 mocks American 'failure'

5.5.2007
USA Today
AP

CAIRO (AP) — A new video of al-Qaeda's No. 2 leader mocks U.S. President George W. Bush and American legislation requiring the withdrawal of U.S. troops from Iraq, saying the bill would rob the group's fighters of the chance to kill more Americans.

Osama bin Laden's deputy Ayman al-Zawahri derided the new U.S.-backed Baghdad security plan, recounting an April 12 suicide bombing in Baghdad's heavily protected Green Zone when an attacker slipped through security and killed a Sunni legislator in the Iraqi parliament's cafeteria. An al-Qaeda-led amalgam of Sunni insurgents in Iraq claimed responsibility.

"And lest Bush worry, I congratulate him on the success of his security plan, and I invite him on the occasion for a glass of juice, but in the cafeteria of the Iraqi parliament in the middle of the Green Zone," al-Zawahri said in the video released Saturday.

The video was obtained Saturday by U.S.-based monitoring groups who released a transcript to media.

Al-Zawahri, shown seated before a bookshelf in a white robe and turban, addresses legislation pushed by Democratic leaders, and vetoed by Bush, that would have required the first U.S. troops in Iraq to be withdrawn by Oct. 1 with a goal of a complete pullout six months later.

"This bill will deprive us of the opportunity to destroy the American forces which we have caught in a historic trap," al-Zawahri said, according to a transcript released by the monitoring group SITE. The bill is evidence of American "failure and frustration," he added.

"We ask Allah that they (U.S. troops) only get out of it after losing 200,000 to 300,000 killed, in order that we give the spillers of blood in Washington and Europe an unforgettable lesson," he said.

He made no mention of Bush vetoing the bill on Thursday — an indication the video may have been made beforehand.

Al-Zawahri encouraged minorities around the world to join the holy war, or jihad.

"Al-Qaeda is not merely for the benefit of Muslims," he said. "That's why I want blacks in America, people of color, American Indians, Hispanics, and all the weak and oppressed in North and South America, in Africa and Asia, and all over the world."

Al-Zawahri claimed al-Qaeda fighters in Iraq were "nearing closer to victory over their enemy, despite this sectarian fighting" that has convulsed the country.

He discussed other topics as well in the 67-minute video, including fighting in Afghanistan, Chechnya, Algeria, and Somalia. He made references to Saudi Arabia, Egyptian constitutional changes meant to cement the government's hold on power, and the Pentagon's release of the confessions of al-Qaeda No. 3, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed — the alleged Sept. 11 mastermind who was captured in Pakistan in March 2003.

Saturday's video was the fifth message — including posted video and audio tapes — by al-Zawahri this year. Osama bin Laden has not surfaced in any communications since mid-2006.

    Al-Qaeda No. 2 mocks American 'failure', UT, 5.5.2007, http://www.usatoday.com/news/world/iraq/2007-05-05-alqaeda-video_N.htm

Not All Troops Would Report Abuse, Study Says

May 5, 2007
By REUTERS
The New York Times

WASHINGTON, May 4 (Reuters) — Only 40 percent of American marines and 55 percent of soldiers in Iraq say they would report a fellow service member for killing or injuring an innocent Iraqi, a Pentagon study published Friday showed.

The study, which showed increasing rates of mental health problems for troops on extended or multiple deployments, also said well over one-third of soldiers and marines believed that torture should be allowed to gain information that could save the lives of American troops, or knowledge about insurgents.

Of the 1,320 soldiers and 447 marines who took part, about 10 percent said they had mistreated civilians through physical violence or damage to personal property.

The study was conducted by Army medical experts from Aug. 28 to Oct. 3 last year.

“Soldiers with high levels of anger, who had experienced high levels of combat or who screened positive for mental health symptoms, were nearly twice as likely to mistreat noncombatants,” the acting Army surgeon general, Maj. Gen. Gale S. Pollock, told reporters.

The findings are posted at www .armymedicine.army.mil.

The survey data came out a month after Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates extended tours for soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan to up to 15 months, from 12. American forces in Iraq are being increased under a security plan ordered by President Bush.

The report, the fourth prepared by the Army’s Mental Health Advisory Team since the war in Iraq began in 2003, showed that mental health problems like acute stress, anxiety and depression rose among troops facing longer deployments or their second or third tour in Iraq.

Over all, about 20 percent of soldiers and 15 percent of marines showed symptoms of anxiety, depression or acute stress. The rate was at 30 percent among troops with high combat experience.

Among soldiers, 27 percent of those with more than one tour of duty tested positive for a mental health problem, versus 17 percent for soldiers on their first deployment.

The rate of anxiety, depression and acute stress stood at 22 percent among soldiers deployed for more than six months and at 15 percent for troops in Iraq for less than six months. Army experts recommended that the Pentagon extend the interval between deployments to 18 to 36 months so that troops could recover mentally.

Mr. Gates said last month that troops in the region could expect to spend 12 months at home between deployments.

    Not All Troops Would Report Abuse, Study Says, NYT, 5.5.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/05/washington/05military.html?hp

5 U.S. Soldiers Reported Killed in Iraq

May 4, 2007
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 1:10 p.m. ET
The New York Times

BAGHDAD (AP) -- American forces broke up a Shiite militant cell believed to be smuggling an armor-piercing Iranian weapon responsible for killing an increasing number of Americans and Iraqis, the military said. Separately, the U.S. announced the deaths of five American soldiers and an Iraqi interpreter.

Roadside bombs were responsible for three of the American deaths announced Friday and have long been the No. 1 killer of U.S. and Iraqi forces in Iraq, but the use of the Iranian explosively formed penetrators, or EFP's, is rising. The weapons, which hurl a fist-sized lump of molten copper, can pierce even U.S. armored vehicles newly designed to deflect roadside bombs.

The military said its forces had discovered and destroyed several caches of weapons over the last few months south of Baghdad, including Iranian-made rockets and mortars.

Roadside bombs have long been the No. 1 killer of U.S. and Iraqi forces in Iraq, but the use of the Iranian explosively formed penetrators, or EFP's, is rising. The weapons, which hurl a fist-sized lump of molten copper, can pierce even U.S. armored vehicles newly designed to deflect roadside bombs.

In Sadr City, the Baghdad slum that is home to Shiite militias allied with radical anti-American cleric Muqtada al-Sadr, coalition raids rounded up 16 suspected members of a militant cell that brought in the Iranian weapons, as well as militants seeking terrorist training, the U.S. said. Intelligence reports also indicate the cell is linked to kidnappings in Iraq, the statement said.

The military said over the last six months U.S. forces have found and destroyed four caches of Iranian-linked weapons around Mahmoudiya, a mostly Shiite enclave surrounded by Sunni-dominated areas about 20 miles south of Baghdad. Sectarian violence and attacks by militias and insurgents on American and Iraqi forces are common in the area.

Iranian officials deny importing weapons or militants into neighboring Iraq, but The Washington Post reported Friday that attacks in Iraq involving Iranian-made EFPs reached a record high last month.

Quoting Lt. Gen. Raymond T. Odierno, who oversees day-to-day U.S. military operations in Iraq, the paper said the number of attacks with the projectiles rose to 65 in April, most of them in predominantly Shiite eastern Baghdad. Officials said the projectiles are used almost exclusively by Shiite fighters against U.S. military targets.

EFPs were first reported used in Iraq in 2005 against British forces in the south, but have grown increasingly common, primarily in Baghdad.

The Post quoted Odierno as saying that before April, the month with the greatest number of projectile attacks was December 2006, with 62. It said the use of projectile weapons has risen over time as other types of bombs have become less effective against added U.S. armor.

Overall attacks using roadside bombs doubled in Iraq from 2006 to 2007 and number about 1,200 a month, the Post said. They cause roughly 70 percent of the casualties suffered by U.S. troops, the paper said.

Also Friday, the U.S. military identified two more top al-Qaida aides killed during an operation earlier this week targeting Muharib Abdul-Latif al-Jubouri, a senior propagandist for the terror network.

The American operation north of Baghdad led to days of conflicting reports from the Iraqi government that the leaders of al-Qaida and its front group, the Islamic State of Iraq had been killed.

The chief U.S. military spokesman on Thursday said the U.S. did not have the bodies of al-Qaida boss Abu Ayyub al-Masri or Islamic State leader Abu Omar al-Baghdadi and did not know ''of anybody that does.''

The military on Friday identified two of the other slain militants as al-Jubouri's spiritual guide Sabah Hilal al-Shihawi and a foreign fighter, Abu Ammar al-Masri, who it said was helping with insurgent activity and infrastructure support for al-Qaida.

Lt. Col. Christopher Garver, another U.S. military spokesman, said Friday that Abu Ammar al-Masri is unrelated to the al-Qaida boss.

Also Friday, a U.S. soldier was killed and two were wounded when their patrol was hit by a roadside bomb south of Baghdad. Since the start of the Iraq war in March 2003, at least 3,357 members of the U.S. military have died, according to an Associated Press count.

Separately, a roadside bomb killed five Iraqi policemen on a patrol in western Baghdad.

Seven bodies were found floating in the Diyala River in Baqouba, 35 miles

northeast of Baghdad, and snipers were preventing police and medical teams from recovering from the remains along with other bodies spotted in recent weeks from the waterway, police said.

    5 U.S. Soldiers Reported Killed in Iraq, NYT, 4.5.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/world/AP-Iraq.html

In Jihadist Haven, a Goal: To Kill and Die in Iraq

May 4, 2007
The New York Times
By SOUAD MEKHENNET and MICHAEL MOSS

ZARQA, Jordan — Abu Ibrahim considers his dead friends the lucky ones.

Four died in Iraq in 2005. Three more died this year, one with an explosives vest and another at the wheel of a bomb-laden truck, according to relatives and community leaders.

Abu Ibrahim, a lanky 24-year-old, was on the same mission when he left this bleak city north of Amman for Iraq last October. But he made it only as far as the border before he was arrested, and is now back home in a world he thought he had left for good — biding his time, he said, for another chance to hurl himself into martyrdom.

“I am happy for them but I cry for myself because I couldn’t do it yet,” said Abu Ibrahim, who uses this name as a nom de guerre. “I want to spread the roots of God on this earth and free the land of occupiers. I don’t love anything in this world. What I care about is fighting.”

Zarqa has been known as a cradle of Islamic militancy since the beginning of the war in Iraq. It was the home of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the leader of the insurgent group Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia, who was killed last summer. Today it is a breeding ground for would-be jihadists like Abu Ibrahim and five of his friends who left about the same time last fall, bound for Iraq.

Interviews with Abu Ibrahim and relatives of the other men show that rather than having been individually recruited by an organization like Mr. Zarqawi’s, they gradually radicalized one another, the more strident leading the way. Local imams led them further toward Iraq, citing verses from the Koran to justify killing civilians. The men watched videos depicting tortured and slain Muslims that are copied from Internet sites.

“The sheik, he was a hero,” Abu Ibrahim said of Mr. Zarqawi. But, he added, “I decided to go when my friends went.” For the final step, getting the phone number of a smuggler and address of a safe house in Iraq, the men used facilitators who act more like travel agents than militant leaders.

“Most of the young people here in Zarqa are very religious,” an Islamist community leader said. “And when they see the news and what is going on in the Islamic countries, they themselves feel that they have to go to fight jihad. Today, you don’t need anyone to tell the young men that they should go to jihad. They themselves want to be martyrs.”

The anger is palpable on the streets of Zarqa. “He’s American? Let’s kidnap and kill him,” one Islamist activist said during an interview with a reporter before the host of the meeting dissuaded him.

The stories of the men from Zarqa help explain the seemingly endless supply of suicide bombers in Iraq, most of whom are believed to be foreigners.

Suicide bombings in Iraq are averaging roughly 42 a month, American military officials said.

[In April, a pair of truck bombers killed nine American soldiers, another bomber blew himself up in the Green Zone killing one member of Parliament, and others killed more than 290 civilians.]

Rising Anger at Shiites

The anger among militants in Zarqa, a mostly Sunni city, is now directed at Shiites as much as Americans, reflecting the escalation in hostility between the two branches of Islam since Shiites gained dominance in the new Iraqi government. “They have traditions that are un-Islamic and they hate the Sunnis,” said Ahmad Khalil Abdelaziz Salah, an imam whose mosque in Zarqa was attended by some of Zarqa’s bombers.

Asked to name his targets, Abu Ibrahim said: “First, the Shiites. Second, the Americans. Third, anywhere in the world where Islam is threatened.”

Among a small circle of young Islamists and relatives here, the fates of the six young men are well known. Three of the men are said to have died: two as suicide bombers and one apparently by gunfire. One has been held in Iraq and the other two, including Abu Ibrahim, were turned back.

Abu Ibrahim, who spoke on the condition that his name and some personal details be withheld, told his story in interviews over five hours. To back up his account, he agreed to show reporters his passport, which confirmed he entered Syria last fall. Relatives of another one of the young men quoted from a letter he had written saying goodbye and indicating he was going to Iraq. The family of a third man, who was captured and is being detained by American troops, provided a copy of his detention records from the International Committee of the Red Cross.

The six men left Zarqa last fall, all apparently with the same goal, but driven by their own individual circumstances.

The youngest, 19-year-old Amer Jaradad, left without telling his family where he was going. But they were not surprised.

One of his six brothers, Jihad — named for the Islamic obligation to defend the religion — had already died fighting in Falluja in 2005, said his father, Kasem Mufla Jaradad.

“Amer was very close to Jihad, and when Jihad became a martyr Amer was in the last year of school. He began spending his time reading Islamic books,” Mr. Jaradad said.

That same year, 2005, Amer called to say he, too, had gone to Iraq, Mr. Jaradad said. Mr. Jaradad sent two of his older sons to Baghdad and they brought Amer home. “As a father I was thinking and hoping that we lost one son and that was enough,” Mr. Jaradad said. “But I could tell Amer was thinking, ‘This life doesn’t count anymore and I will follow the way of my brother.’ ”

“One time I tried to get him away from these things,” his father said. “I said, ‘Shall we get you a wife,’ and he said, ‘No, this is not important to me. Jihad is.’ ”

Amer left again for Iraq on Oct. 19 last year, near the end of Ramadan, when security at the borders is more relaxed. And once again, he phoned home three weeks later to say he had made it. That was the last they heard of Amer until one of his brothers got a call on Jan. 19 on his cellphone — the number of which Amer had taken with him — saying Amer was blown up in the truck he was driving with a bomb in it.

News reports cite a truck bombing in Kirkuk on the day he was said to have died, but his father and brothers say they cannot be sure that Amer was the bomber.

Praise for Suicide Bombers

At his crowded funeral in Zarqa, one of his brothers praised Amer and other suicide bombers. “They are the best youths and good persons,” he said. “He was successful in life, but decided to fight the Americans in Iraq.”

The mother of another of the young men, a 20-year-old engineering student, still believes that her son went to Iraq looking for a job. At the family’s home recently, she sank to her knees, weeping and clutching his physics book.

He walked out the door of his family’s two-room apartment, telling his mother he was meeting friends for breakfast. The next his family heard was notification from the Red Cross that he had been detained by American troops in Iraq, according to one of his sisters, who asked that her brother not be identified for fear of jeopardizing his education should he be released.

His family was large and poor, with 17 children. Going to college gave him a glimpse of opportunities, but he failed to win a scholarship to study medicine in England, the sister said.

“Rich people go to his university,” she said. “He wanted to be somebody and he couldn’t.”

At the same time, he adopted a strict adherence to Islam. “I noticed the change two years ago,” his sister said. “He stopped listening to music. He isolated himself from us. At family gatherings, he sat by himself, thinking.”

Unlike his mother, the man’s sister concedes that he probably went to Iraq to fight. In March 2007, when another of the six friends, a 19-year-old laundry worker named Abdullah Fasfous, died in Iraq, the sister showed her mother his picture.

“Oh, this poor guy,” she said her mother told her. “They also told him they would get him a job.”

Mr. Salah, the imam, said the young man prayed at his mosque and tutored youngsters in the Koran. Mr. Salah said if he had known his plans, he would have tried to dissuade him from going to Iraq.

“It’s very difficult at the moment,” Mr. Salah said. “If you do a suicide operation, the Muslims are mixed up with non-Muslims and maybe you kill Muslims.”

But he is hardly a voice of restraint. Mr. Salah counts Shiites among the non-Muslims. He joined the recent call for retribution against them, which gained fervor well beyond Zarqa after Shiite executioners were videotaped jeering as Saddam Hussein was hanged in December.

In his home he showed visitors a newly released video titled “The True History and Aims of the Shiites.” It portrays Shiites deriding the first three caliphs, or leaders of the ancient Islamic world, and saying that the youngest wife of the Prophet Muhammad, Aisha, had been a prostitute.

“You see, they hate our caliphs and they hate the Sunnis,” Mr. Salah said.

When the video showed scenes of Sunnis tortured and killed by a Shiite militia in Iraq, he added, “We didn’t see the Shiites like that before, but now in Iraq they showed their real face.”

Just a few years ago, Abu Ibrahim was hardly concerned with the religious intensity of people like Mr. Salah.

Abu Ibrahim, the oldest of the six friends who left for Iraq last fall, said his early days in Zarqa were filled with billiards, pop music and chasing girls. He wanted to play soccer professionally.

“I was just looking to have fun, but I was not alive,” Abu Ibrahim said. “I was missing something. I didn’t know what it was, but I felt it inside.”

“They asked me, ‘why are you not praying? Why not follow the rules of God?’ ”

Zarqa was undergoing a shift toward conservative Islam. One of the new adherents, who wears a niqab, which veils her face, sat in the women’s prayer room of the mosque recently and said: “Religion was something we just got from our parents. But after the war started, we decided we have to show the world we are Muslims. I started wearing the niqab to show the world I am Muslim.”

Giving Up Their Lives for God

Some of Zarqa’s young men began displaying their commitment to Islam by going to fight in Iraq, and the funerals back home seemed to have had a profound effect on young men.

“Four of my friends died,” Abu Ibrahim said. “I was happy for them because they were going to paradise, but I was upset at myself.”

Abu Ibrahim said he was frank with his parents. “I started to tell them that God wants us to give up our lives for jihad. They didn’t like it. They told me, ‘You’re still too young, wait.’ You know how mothers and fathers are. They didn’t want to hear such things.”

He left home in October with only a sports bag full of clothes. His seat in a group taxi to the Syrian border cost $11. Neither the Jordanian nor Syrian border guards asked many questions, he said.

He slept in a Damascus hotel, and then took a six-hour bus ride east to the Iraq border area, where he had the name of a smuggler who took travelers across the border for about $150 apiece. But the police pulled him off a bus, questioned him and detained him before he could reach his contact. He said he had memorized the address of his destination, and gave the police a false one. But after four days in a Syrian prison — tiny cells with no heat and no light — he said he confessed.

“Later, they put me in a cell with other prisoners and most of them had been less religious ones, so we, the religious ones, took one corner and we prayed and talked about the Koran,” he said.

After three more weeks, he said, the Syrians handed him to Jordanian authorities, who kept him for several days. “I became much stronger,” he said of his prison experience. “But most of the days I was very upset I didn’t arrive and I pray to God that he will get me what I wish to get.”

Back in Zarqa, he said his parents told him: “Enough, Abu Ibrahim. You tried to go and God doesn’t want you to go. So sit down and get married.”

“It is hard to leave our families,” Abu Ibrahim said. “But it is our duty, and if we don’t defend our religion who should do it? The old people or the children?”

He spends his days now in Zarqa at work with his brothers, then evenings with friends who share his convictions. They visit Islamic Web sites, discuss the news from Afghanistan, Somalia and Iraq.

“I still have the same aim, fulfilling the rules of God,” he said. “I wouldn’t do the same mistakes the next time and hope that God would open the way.”

    In Jihadist Haven, a Goal: To Kill and Die in Iraq, NYT, 4.5.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/04/world/middleeast/04bombers.html

3 U.S. Soldiers Killed in Baghdad; New Army Reinforcements Arrive

May 3, 2007
The New York Times
By ALISSA J. RUBIN

BAGHDAD, May 2 — Three American soldiers were killed in combat operations in the capital on Wednesday and two were wounded, according to a statement from the military, on a day when thousands more troops arrived in the country.

Elements of the newly arrived Fourth Brigade of the Second Infantry Division from Fort Lewis, Wash., will be deployed around Iraq, according to the military. The brigade, one of the Army’s new Stryker Brigade Combat Teams, is the fourth of five additional brigades scheduled to be deployed in Iraq by the end of May. It has about 3,700 soldiers.

The capital seemed largely quiet, with a few pockets of violence, until evening, when a volley of mortar fire hit the Green Zone, where the Americans, the British and many Iraqi government officials have their embassies, homes and offices.

A suicide car bomber set off his explosives in the Sadr City district of the capital earlier in the day near a police station, killing four people, two of them police officers, and wounding 25, according to an official at the Interior Ministry who spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak to the press.

Elsewhere in Baghdad, two people were killed by mortar strikes. A roadside bomb killed one person, and several people were wounded in other attacks.

The police recovered 30 bodies in Baghdad, a higher number than had been typical for the past several weeks, an Interior Ministry official said. The number of bodies recovered has been used as a rough gauge of the prevalence of sectarian killings.

Near Hilla, two bodies were found, both shot in the head, according to the local police. A roadside bomb planted near a house killed a man and wounded his wife, and in the turbulent Haswa area north of Hilla, a mortar shell killed a child, the police said.

In the northern city of Mosul, two men were killed: a professor of computer science at Mosul University; and a teacher, said Brig. Gen. Saeed al-Jubouri of the Nineveh Police Press Department.

In Basra, the political situation remained tense as followers of an anti-American cleric, Moktada al-Sadr, threatened to avenge the detention by British forces of Sheik Saleh Agezani, a Sadrist leader. The troops also arrested five of the sheik’s brothers, according to Mr. Sadr’s supporters.

    3 U.S. Soldiers Killed in Baghdad; New Army Reinforcements Arrive, NYT, 3.5.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/03/world/middleeast/03baghdad.html

U.S. Jailer in Iraq Admits Mistakes,

Investigator Says

May 2, 2007
The New York Times
By DAMIEN CAVE

BAGHDAD, May 1 — A senior commander in the American military’s main detention center here lent prisoners his government cellphone, regularly exchanged e-mail messages with the daughter of a high-value detainee and used public funds to supply Saddam Hussein with hair dye and Cuban cigars, investigators said at a military hearing on Tuesday.

Lt. Col. William H. Steele, 51, a reservist from Prince George, Va., faces nine charges relating to his command at the detention center, Camp Cropper, from October 2005 to October 2006. The suspected cellphone misuse led to an accusation of “aiding the enemy” — potentially a capital offense. But testimony by military investigators at the second and last day of the hearing suggested that the cellphone issue was a sign of Colonel Steele’s lenient approach to detention.

Colonel Steele, the testimony showed, took pride in trying to make Camp Cropper the antithesis of Abu Ghraib, where prisoners were tortured and abused. One military investigator said Colonel Steele told him he was willing to “do things under the table” to complete his mission.

Prosecutors at the hearing on Tuesday seemed intent on showing that he had gone too far, and had lost sight of how to manage the dangerous men he was guarding.

“Did he express empathy toward high-value detainees and say he understood the personal anguish they were under and wanted to make their lives better?” one of the government’s lawyers asked Special Agent John Nocella, a counterintelligence investigator who interrogated Colonel Steele in February.

“Yes,” Mr. Nocella said.

Did Colonel Steele say that some detainees were innocent “and should be allowed as many privileges as possible?” asked one of the prosecutors.

“Yes, he did,” Mr. Nocella said.

He added that Colonel Steele was aware that phone calls by detainees were to be made only on authorized phones with an interpreter and an American soldier present, but that he skirted those rules when there were no appropriate phones available.

Mr. Nocella said Colonel Steele’s admission was made during questioning in Iraq by several agents that lasted more than an hour and a half; no lawyer was present. He said Colonel Steele, after an initial interview a day earlier, had come to his office the morning of Feb. 23, then returned at 4:30 p.m., agitated and wanting to talk. Over the course of the interrogations, according to a report by Mr. Nocella, Colonel Steele provided a blunt confession.

“What I have done is wrong,” the report quoted him saying. “I am guilty. I will lose my commission for this.”

His appointed military defense lawyers did not dispute the substance of his confession. Capt. Yolanda McCray, one of the lawyers, instead tried to get Mr. Nocella to acknowledge that Colonel Steele did not indicate which accusation or accusations he had confessed to.

Under questioning from Captain McCray, Mr. Nocella also said that he knew of only one case in which Colonel Steele had been seen letting detainees use his cellphone, and that involved juveniles calling their parents.

Mr. Nocella also said the high-value detainee’s daughter had told him there was no improper relationship between them despite the exchange of two to three e-mail messages a week. The gift that Colonel Steele gave her, which contributed to the charge of fraternization, was architectural software “for her studies.”

“It was software she could not obtain in Iraq,” he said.

With many of the other charges, the defense lawyers tried to show that Colonel Steele had acted roughly within the prison’s accepted norms. Brig. Gen. Kevin R. McBride, the commander of a military police brigade that oversaw detention facilities, said the purchase of Cuban cigars for Mr. Hussein had been a practice approved by the command for more than a year.

Maj. Gen. John D. Gardner, deputy commanding general of detainee operations in Iraq, acknowledged that some senior Baath Party officials had been allowed to tend gardens to help ease the tedium of their stay, but said that he did not know about the cigar purchases. The Americans also paid for dry cleaning in the case of detainees appearing in court, and televisions so they could watch news programs selected by the military, he said.

Some lawyers for detainees at Camp Cropper said Colonel Steele may have been the target of ire from some of the military’s top commanders because he did not favor rougher treatment for prisoners.

“In the last year, Steele developed a strong reputation for protecting prisoners and attempting to improve the conditions of their incarceration — including greater flexibility in family visits and interaction,” said Scott Horton, a law professor at Columbia University who represented a CBS cameraman held at Camp Cropper.

But some of the evidence against Colonel Steele may prove harder to dismiss as a result simply of compassion. It emerged at the hearing that he was reprimanded at Camp Cropper for intimidating tower guards with a pistol.

Investigators also said they found 18,000 classified documents on two computers, in a briefcase and elsewhere at his workspace and living quarters on a sprawling base in Baghdad, though they did not suggest that he had passed any of the documents to unauthorized people.

With the evidentiary hearing complete, the investigating officer, Col. Elizabeth Fleming, will decide if there is cause to recommend that the case proceed to a court-martial, which would have to be approved by Lt. Gen. Raymond T. Odierno, the commander of daily operations in Iraq. The decisions usually take anywhere from days to months.

    U.S. Jailer in Iraq Admits Mistakes, Investigator Says, NYT, 2.5.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/02/world/middleeast/02steele.html

Bush Vetoes Bill Tying Iraq Funds to Exit

May 2, 2007
The New York Times
By SHERYL GAY STOLBERG and JEFF ZELENY

WASHINGTON, May 1 — President Bush vetoed a $124 billion war spending bill on Tuesday, setting up a second round in his long battle with Congressional Democrats who are determined to use the financing measure to force the White House to shift course in Iraq.

The veto was only the second of Mr. Bush’s presidency. In a six-minute televised speech from the White House, the president called the measure a “prescription for chaos and confusion,” and said, as he has for weeks, that he could not sign it because it contained timetables for troop withdrawal.

“Setting a deadline for withdrawal is setting a date for failure, and that would be irresponsible,” Mr. Bush said. He said the measure would “impose impossible conditions on our commanders in combat” by forcing them to “take fighting directions from politicians 6,000 miles away in Washington, D.C.”

The veto added new punctuation to a major war powers clash between Democrats in Congress — buoyed what they regard as a mandate in last November’s elections and seeking to force an end to the fighting in Iraq — and a president working to defy what he regards as an incursion on his authority as commander in chief.

Democrats concede they do not have enough votes to override the veto. But, speaking in the Capitol shortly after Mr. Bush’s remarks, the House speaker, Nancy Pelosi of California, and the Senate Democratic leader, Harry Reid of Nevada, said they would not be deterred from pushing the president as hard as they could to bring the troops home.

“If the president thinks by vetoing this bill he will stop us from working to change the direction of the war in Iraq, he is mistaken,” Mr. Reid said. He added, “Now he has an obligation to explain his plan to responsibly end this war.”

The fight has been brewing for nearly three months, ever since Mr. Bush sent Congress his request for emergency financing for operations in Iraq and Afghanistan, including money to support his troop buildup. The next chapter begins Wednesday, when Congressional leaders are expected to meet Mr. Bush at the White House to open negotiations on a new bill. They are expected to look for ways to preserve the benchmarks for Iraqi progress that were included in the initial bill while eliminating the timetables for troop withdrawal that Mr. Bush has emphatically rejected.

Several Republican leaders said Tuesday that they were likely to support such benchmarks, and White House aides said Tuesday that Mr. Bush, who has supported goals and benchmarks for the Iraqi government, might back such a measure — but only if the benchmarks are nonbinding.

Mr. Bush issued the veto from the Oval Office at about 5:30 p.m., using a pen given to him by the father of a fallen marine. It came just hours after Democrats had themselves staged an unusual signing ceremony in the Capitol, timed to coincide with the four-year anniversary of the so-called Mission Accomplished speech, when Mr. Bush stood on an aircraft carrier and declared that major combat operations in Iraq had ended.

Mr. Bush spent much of the day in Tampa, Fla., at MacDill Air Force Base, headquarters of the United States Central Command, which coordinates Iraq operations. While he did not directly address the Iraq spending bill there, he warned that an early exit could turn Iraq into “a cauldron of chaos.”

Even as the political stagecraft played out on both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue — and in Florida — on Tuesday, there were signs that Republicans and Democrats might be able to compromise on establishing benchmarks for the Iraqi government to show progress. But it remained an open question whether broad agreement was possible within Congress, much less with the White House, about whether to insist on consequences if those benchmarks were not met.

“There are a number of Republicans who do think that some kind of benchmarks, properly crafted, would actually be helpful,” said Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the Republican leader.

Representative Roy Blunt of Missouri, the Republican whip, did not reject the concept of establishing benchmarks but said any hard-and-fast timetables or deadlines would be resisted. “Our members will not accept restraint on the military,” Mr. Blunt said.

Financing for the troops is likely to run out by June. With the Democrats still wrestling over what approach to take, some are discussing passing two bills, one to provide short-term financing for the troops, the other to deal with questions of Iraq policy. Throughout the day, Democrats lined up to deliver floor speeches observing the fourth anniversary of the president’s speech on the aircraft carrier Abraham Lincoln. At the front of the House chamber, Democrats positioned a blown-up photograph of Mr. Bush standing on the carrier deck on May 1, 2003.

Aides to the president were openly angry about the reminders, and the Democrats’ unusual legislative signing ceremony.

“It’s a trumped-up political stunt,” Dana Perino, the deputy White House press secretary, told reporters traveling aboard Air Force One. Others grumbled privately that Congress had sent plenty of bills to Mr. Bush without such pomp and circumstance.

“We’ve got the lights, we’ve got the characters, we’ve got the action for some fine political theater in the House of Representatives today,” said Representative Lynn A. Westmoreland, Republican of Georgia. “It’s time for the majority to take off their costumes and exit stage left. We owe it to our nation and our troops to see the ending of this story.”

In Tampa, Mr. Bush made his case for the spending bill without ever specifically mentioning it. After huddling with American military commanders, including Gen. David H. Petraeus, the top commander in Iraq, Mr. Bush addressed a conference of representatives from some of the roughly 90 countries that the United States considers allies in the global campaign against terrorism.

“Failure in Iraq should be unacceptable to the civilized world,” Mr. Bush said. “The risks are enormous.” He added that there were “signs of hope” even though the troop buildup was in its early stages.

The veto, announced by Mr. Bush at 6:10 p.m., just before the network news broadcasts began, was quickly seized on by Democratic groups.

Americans Against Escalation in Iraq, a group financed, in part, through labor union money, presented a television advertisement criticizing the White House and Congressional Republicans. The group also planned a series of rallies across the country. In the Capitol, several Democrats and Republicans said they were eager to find common ground on the Iraq spending bill and bring an end to the bitter fight.

“Unfortunately, people are getting locked down in their respective positions,” said Senator Olympia Snowe, Republican of Maine. “The White House wants to have open-ended latitude on how to conduct a war, but I don’t think that is simply an option at this point.”

Carl Hulse contributed reporting.

    Bush Vetoes Bill Tying Iraq Funds to Exit, NYT, 2.5.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/02/washington/02policy.html?hp

Text

President Bush’

Speech on the Iraq Spending Bill

May 1, 2007
The New York Times

The following is a transcript of President Bush's speech regarding his veto of the Iraq war supplemental spending bill as transcribed by the Federal News Service, a private transcription agency.

President Bush: Good evening.

Twelve weeks ago, I asked the Congress to pass an emergency war spending bill that would provide our brave men and women in uniform with the funds and flexibility they need. Instead, members of the House and the Senate passed a bill that substitutes the opinions of politicians for the judgment of our military commanders. So a few minutes ago, I vetoed the bill.

Tonight I will explain the reasons for this veto and my desire to work with Congress to resolve this matter as quickly as possible. We can begin tomorrow with a bipartisan meeting with the congressional leaders here at the White House.

Here's why the bill Congress passed is unacceptable. First, the bill would mandate a rigid and artificial deadline for American troops to begin withdrawing from Iraq. That withdrawal could start as early as July 1st, and it would have to start no later than October 1st regardless of the situation on the ground.

It makes no sense to tell the enemy when you plan to start withdrawing. All the terrorists would have to do is mark their calendars and gather their strength and begin plotting how to overthrow the government and take control of the country of Iraq. I believe setting a deadline for withdrawal would demoralize the Iraqi people, would encourage killers across the broader Middle East and send a signal that America will not keep its commitments. Setting a deadline for withdrawal is setting a date for failure, and that would be irresponsible.

Second, the bill would impose impossible conditions on our commanders in combat. After forcing most of our troops to withdraw, the bill would dictate the terms under which the remaining commanders and troops could engage the enemy. That means America's commanders in the middle of a combat zone would have to take fighting directions from politicians 6,000 miles away in Washington, D.C. This is a prescription for chaos and confusion, and we must not impose it on our troops.

Third, the bill is loaded with billions of dollars in non- emergency spending that has nothing to do with fighting the war on terror. Congress should debate these spending measures on their own merits and not as a part of an emergency funding bill for our troops.

The Democratic leaders know that many in Congress disagree with their approach and that there are not enough votes to override the veto. I recognize that many Democrats saw this bill as an opportunity to make a political statement about their opposition to the war. They sent their message, and now it is time to put politics behind us and support our troops with the funds they need.

Our troops are carrying out a new strategy with a new commander, General David Petraeus. The goal of this new strategy is to help the Iraqis secure their capital so they can make progress toward reconciliation and build a free nation that respects the rights of its people, upholds the rule of law and fights extremists and radicals and killers alongside the United States in this war on terror.

In January, General Petraeus was confirmed by a unanimous vote in the United States Senate. In February, we began sending the first of the reinforcements he requested. Not all these reinforcements have arrived in Baghdad, and, as General Petraeus has said, it will be the end of the summer before we can assess the impact of this operation. Congress ought to give General Petraeus's plan a chance to work.

In the months since our military has been implementing this plan, we've begun to see some important results.

For example, Iraqi and coalition forces have closed down an al Qaeda car-bomb network, they've captured a Shi'a militia leader implicated in the kidnapping and killing of American soldiers, they've broken up a death squad that had terrorized hundreds of residents in a Baghdad neighborhood.

Last week, General Petraeus was in Washington to brief me, and he briefed members of Congress on how the operation is unfolding. He noted that one of the most important indicators of progress is the level of sectarian violence in Baghdad, and he reported that since January, the number of sectarian murders has dropped substantially.

Even as sectarian attacks have declined, we continue to see spectacular suicide attacks that have caused great suffering. These attacks are largely the work of al Qaeda -- the enemy that everyone agrees we should be fighting. The objective of these al Qaeda attacks is to subvert our efforts by reigniting the sectarian violence in Baghdad and breaking support for the war here at home.

In Washington last week, General Petraeus explained it this way, "Iraq is, in fact, the central front of all al Qaeda's global campaign." Al Qaeda -- al Qaeda's role makes it -- the conflict in Iraq far more complex than a simple fight between Iraqis. It's true that not everyone taking innocent life in Iraq wants to attack America here at home, but many do. Many also belong to the same terrorist network that attacked us on September the 11th, 2001 and wants to attack us here at home again. We saw the death and destruction al Qaeda inflicted on our people when they were permitted a safe haven in Afghanistan. For the security of the American people, we must not allow al Qaeda to establish a new safe haven in Iraq.

We need to give our troops all the equipment and the training and protection they need to prevail. That means that Congress needs to pass an emergency war-spending bill quickly. I've invited leaders of both parties to come to the White House tomorrow and to discuss how we can get these vital funds to our troops. I'm confident that with good will on both sides, we can agree on a bill that gets our troops the money and flexibility they need as soon as possible.

The need to act is urgent. Without a war-funding bill, the military has to take money from some other account or training program so the troops in combat have what they need. Without a war-funding bill, the armed forces will have to consider cutting back on buying new equipment or repairing existing equipment. Without a war-funding bill, we add to the uncertainty felt by our military families. Our troops and their families deserve better, and their elected leaders can do better.

Here in Washington we have our differences on the way forward in Iraq and we will debate them openly. Yet whatever our differences, surely we can agree that our troops are worthy of this funding and that we have a responsibility to get it to them without further delay.

Thank you for listening.

May God bless our troops.

President Bush’s Speech on the Iraq Spending Bill, 1.5.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/01/washington/02bush-text.html