James Cogan | ukwatch.net

US/NATO casualties climb in Afghanistan

tim — Tue, 15 Jul 2008 16:38:46 +0000

The US/NATO occupation force in Afghanistan on Sunday suffered the largest number of casualties in a 24-hour period in more than three years. Nine American troops lost their lives and as many as 15 were wounded in a day-long battle with insurgents who attacked a US base in the eastern province of Kunar. Another soldier, also believed to be an American, was killed in a roadside bombing in the volatile Sangin district of Helmand province.

Sunday’s attack was one of the most effective insurgent operations in the six-and-a-half year war. The US military and Afghan government forces had only established a base in Wanat, a village near the Pakistani border, three days earlier. A sizeable force of guerillas converged on the base in the middle of the night. According to an Associated Press report, they evacuated the civilian community and took up firing positions in buildings surrounding the facility. At approximately 4.30 a.m., the insurgents launched an assault.

Fighting lasted throughout the day, with the anti-occupation fighters repeatedly engaging the base with mortars, machine-guns and rocket-propelled grenades. According to some reports, militants managed to get inside the US compound. Multiple US air strikes had to be called in to drive off the attackers.

A spokesman for NATO’s International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) told journalists: “We defended the base. There are still some operations on-going. The insurgents were repulsed and there is no fighting now, but they might pop up again.” NATO sources claim that dozens of insurgents were killed.

Wanat is near the district of Deh Bala, in the adjacent province of Nangahar, where US fighters bombed a wedding party on July 7. As many as 27 men, women and children were slaughtered. The assault on the American base may well have been a revenge attack.

The attack, however, is part of a trend over recent weeks of set piece battles against the occupation forces. In late June, a large force of guerillas seized a number of villages in the Arghandab Valley to the northwest of Kandahar. Scores were killed during the US/Afghan government operation to take back control of the district.

Anti-occupation fighters also attempted several offensive operations in Sangin last week, crossing the Helmand River to attack NATO and Afghan Army personnel. US retaliatory air strikes on Sunday reportedly resulted in the deaths of at least 40 guerillas, as well as the destruction of several improvised bridges and dozens of small boats.

Also on Sunday, a suicide bomber detonated an explosion at a crowded bazaar in the town of Deh Rawood in Uruzgan province, killing five Afghan police and as many as 19 civilians, including a number of young children. The suicide attack came in the wake of a massive blast that struck the Indian embassy in Kabul, killing 41 people and injuring over 140.

Most US and NATO casualties continue to be the result of remotely-detonated roadside bombs. A total of 20 occupation personnel have already lost their lives in July, including a 42-year-old American junior officer who appears to have committed suicide on July 4.

Among the recent casualties was a Hungarian explosives expert who was killed by a bomb on Saturday in the northern province of Baghlan. The 32-year-old had only arrived in Afghanistan several weeks ago—to replace a Hungarian explosives expert who was killed trying to defuse a bomb on June 10.

A roadside bomb in Paktika province took the lives of two US National Guardsmen from Guam last Thursday. More than 15 percent of all American troops serving in Afghanistan are part-time civilian soldiers.

Nine UK troops were wounded near Sangin on Wednesday when a British helicopter gunship, which had been called in to rescue them from an ambush, mistakenly fired on their position. Three of the men suffered serious injuries. One had to be flown back to Britain for specialised medical treatment. He is said to be in a stable condition.

An Australian special forces soldier was killed and three others wounded by a roadside bomb in Uruzgan province on Tuesday. This was the fifth Australian fatality in the past nine months. The same day, an American soldier was killed in a bombing near Bagram airport.

The insurgency is based among the fiercely independent Pashtun tribes on both sides of the Afghanistan and Pakistan border. Some guerilla groups are loyal to the fundamentalist Taliban movement that was overthrown by the US invasion in 2001. Others follow Pashtun Islamist warlords such as Gulbuddin Hekmatyar and Jalaluddin Huqqani—both of whom received huge amounts of money and arms from the CIA to conduct a guerilla war against the Soviet force occupying Afghanistan in the 1980s.

Fighting has been taking place inside Pakistan over the past several weeks. The Pakistani government, responding to pressure from Washington to curb the movement of guerillas into Afghanistan, has ordered its security forces to crack down on various militant groups operating in the tribal provinces along the Afghan border. The focus of the operations has been the area surrounding Peshawar—the largest city on the road through to the Khyber Pass in Afghanistan.

Insurgents retaliated over the weekend, ambushing a convoy of Pakistani Frontier Corps—the paramilitary force responsible for security in the tribal regions—on Saturday near the border city of Hangu, to the south west of Peshawar. According to Pakistani media sources, eight troops were killed and eight others who were captured were executed by firing squad. Local Taliban groups claimed they had captured and were still holding a further 29 soldiers and police.

The attack coincided with an unannounced visit to Pakistan by US chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Admiral Michael Mullen. He met with President Pervez Musharraf, Prime Minister Yousaf Raza Gilani and the head of the armed forces, General Ashfaq Kiyani.

The purpose of Mullen’s trip was to deliver a blunt message to the Pakistani establishment to step up operations in the border regions against Pashtun militants. The Bush administration and NATO countries have repeatedly accused Islamabad of not doing enough to stop insurgent activity and thereby facilitating the rise in attacks on their troops in Afghanistan. Mullen repeated the claim on Saturday, telling a press conference that the “border is more porous than it was a year ago. It’s very important that action be taken to respond to that.”

The Afghan government of President Hamid Karzai has gone further and accused the Pakistani intelligence agency, the Inter Services Intelligence (ISI), and sections of its military of assisting the Taliban insurgency. An Afghan government spokesman blamed the ISI for last week’s bombing of the Indian embassy. Other Afghan figures have implied it was involved in the assassination attempt on Karzai in June.

Yesterday, Karzai repeated the accusations, declaring: “The murder, killing, destruction, dishonouring and insecurity in Afghanistan is carried out by the intelligence administration of Pakistan, its military intelligence institutions…. We have told the government of Pakistan and the world and from now on it will be pronounced by every member of the Afghan nation.”

The implicit threat facing Musharraf and Gilani is that the US military will step up its own operations inside Pakistan’s tribal regions unless the situation is brought under control. Just days before Mullen’s visit, nine Pakistani troops and several civilians were wounded when a border outpost was bombed in South Waziristan on Thursday. Local tribesmen told the Associated Press that the bombing was a US air strike. The Pakistani government, anxious not to further inflame the mass resentment and hostility over its collaboration with the US, stated that casualties were inflicted by mortars fired from Afghanistan and that the attacker had “yet to be determined”.

The escalating war in Afghanistan is fuelling calls for the deployment of additional US troops to the war zone. Significantly, Barack Obama, the Democratic Party presidential candidate, who has supported US military action against insurgent bases inside Pakistan, was among them. He called in an op-ed in yesterday’s New York Times for the dispatch of an additional two combat brigades, or more than 10,000 troops. “We need more troops, more helicopters, better intelligence gathering and more non-military assistance to accomplish the mission there,” he wrote.

US Prepares Basra Operation Following UK's Withdrawal

Tim Holmes — Wed, 02 Jan 2008 18:14:12 +0000

In the wake of the formal conclusion on December 17 of day-to-day policing by British troops in the Iraqi city of Basra, there are signs that the US military and the Iraqi government are preparing a new operation to shatter Shiite fundamentalist influence in the city and its surrounds, including the oil industry and the country’s only port, Umm Qasr.

The strongest faction in the city is Fadhila or the Islamic Virtue Party, which controls the Basra government, the management of most oil facilities, the Basra Oil Union and a 25,000-strong oil industry security force. The current governor of Basra is Fadhila leader Mohammed al-Waili. Fadhila is a Basra-centred break-away from the Sadrist movement of cleric Moqtada al-Sadr, which has its own power bases in the city. The Sadrist Mahdi Army militia allegedly controls the working class districts and the docks.

Pitted against them, in a ruthless struggle for political hegemony in the majority Shiite-populated southern provinces of Iraq, is the Supreme Islamic Iraqi Council (SIIC), the main Shiite party in the pro-occupation government in Baghdad. The SIIC holds the largest number of seats in the Basra provincial council or legislature and has the loyalty of Iraqi army divisions based in the south. Since the beginning of the year, SIIC has been seeking to bring down Waili and install one of its own as head of the Basra government before new provincial elections are held in April. Whichever party controls the governorship in the lead-up to the vote, and therefore controls the electoral authority, will also control the conduct of the elections.

Over the past several weeks, a propaganda campaign has been launched in the Iraqi and international media to establish the pretext for an Iraqi army intervention into Basra and the removal of Waili. Amid the daily sectarian carnage taking place across the country, a series of reports has focused on the brutal conduct of fundamentalist militias in Basra and the refusal of the governor to act against them. At least 48 women have been murdered during the last six months by religious extremists for wearing make-up or not covering themselves with a hajib. The police, according to residents cited in a December 16 feature in the British Sunday Times, are not investigating. A local businessman told Times reporter Marie Colvin: “Everyone knows the militias are doing this, but the police live in fear of them. We all do.”

The ceremony to mark the British handover of security in Basra to Iraqi forces was accompanied by threats that if Waili did not move against the militias, the Baghdad government and the US military would. Iraqi national security advisor Muwaffaq al-Rubaie hysterically warned Waili that Baghdad was watching to see “what you are going to do with security… whether you will support the militias, whether you will fight corruption, whether you will cooperate with terrorism”. US commander in Iraq, General David Petraeus reinforced the statement with his own threat: “The provincial and military leadership still have work to do and we will assist as requested.”

While cleansing the city of militia violence is likely to be the official justification for a US-backed intervention, the real concern of the US occupation and its main collaborators among the Shiite ruling elite is their lack of control over the oil industry and related economic infrastructure. Basra is the hub for 80 percent of the country’s oil production, which generated $31 billion in oil revenues in 2006 and provides the bulk of the Baghdad government’s budget.

US analysts and the Baghdad government repeatedly criticised the British military for doing nothing to stop the local Basra factions from carrying out the wholesale looting of Iraq’s oil exports. According to national security advisor Rubaie, as many as 6,000 barrels of oil produced each day in the south—more than $200 million worth per year—is routinely stolen. Fadhila is accused of being the main beneficiary of oil racketeering.

The Baghdad-appointed Basra police chief, Major General Jalil Khalaf, spelt out other occupation accusations to the Sunday Times:

“The problems are like an interlocking chain. The militias control the ports, which earns them huge sums of money. That money they use to fund their own activities. Second, the borders. There is a 280 kilometre border [with Iran]. Smugglers cross the border with guns and weapons and these go to the militias. We don’t have enough guards or the sophisticated equipment you need to stop them. You could smuggle a tank across that border if you wanted.” According to Khalaf, hundreds of vehicles supplied to the Basra police were stolen and sold on the black market.

On April 28, SIIC initiated a political move to gain control of Basra. With the support of Sadrist-linked legislators on the Basra provincial council, the party moved a no-confidence motion in Mohammed al-Waili. Waili refused to accept the outcome or to leave office. Fadhila simply declared that the vote of 27 for and 12 against did not add up to the necessary two-thirds majority. There are supposed to be 41 legislators in the council, but two had resigned.

In the months since, Waili’s stock response to accusations of corruption and militia violence has been to blame rebel factions of the Mahdi Army. He has ignored a motion by the provincial council labelling his government illegal and dismissed demands by Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki that he steps down to end the standoff. In August, he bluntly told the Washington Times that his rivals could not remove him, “because we are stronger than they are”.

The British withdrawal creates a window of opportunity for SIIC to alter the balance of forces. In all, 30,000 government troops are in the vicinity of the city and under the complete control of Petraeus and Baghdad, not British commanders. The largest and best equipped Iraqi army division in the area, the 10th Division, was one of the first recruited under the US occupation and is primarily made up of members of SIIC’s pre-invasion Iranian-trained Badr Brigade militia, which returned en masse from Iran in April 2003.

Waili and Fadhila, as well as the Basra Sadrists, are now being confronted with the prospect of their factional rival moving into their own power base under the cloak of the deployment of national government troops to establish security. While the combined militias of Fadhila and the Sadrists most likely outnumber the government forces, they do not have the backing of the American jet fighters, helicopter gunships and Abrahm tanks.

For his part, Moqtada al-Sadr, anxious to preserve his relations with the US occupation, has already effectively disowned his Basra supporters, leaving them to their fate. It is likely that the upper echelons of Fadhila and the Sadrists in Basra are also seeking a deal that will preserve at least some of the privileges they have built up over the past four-and-a-half years. Such a deal will have a price, however. SIIC will be seeking revenge for the numerous losses and setbacks it has suffered. The Mahdi Army, for example, is blamed for the assassination of two SIIC governors in other provinces and numerous other killings of SIIC supporters.

If the Iraqi army moves into Basra, mass detentions of the Sadrist militiamen and the general crushing of the Mahdi Army are a virtual certainty. It is also all but guaranteed that an attempt will be made to smash the Fadhila-controlled Basra Oil Union. SIIC considers the union a particularly annoying obstacle to its ambitions.

In August 2004, the oil union called a general strike in the oilfields against the SIIC-supported US occupation attack on the Sadrist uprising in the city of Najaf. The crippling of oil production contributed to the US military agreeing to a settlement with Sadr, which has allowed him to develop a political role and to challenge SIIC’s influence within the Shiite population.

In June this year, the union called strikes in the oilfields against proposed oil laws favoured by SIIC. The terms of the oil legislation would advance SIIC’s long-term goal of forming a southern regional government, including all nine of the majority Shiite-populated provinces of the country, with a high degree of autonomous control over oil production in its territory. Fadhila, conscious that such a change would inevitably lead to the supplanting of the Basra elite from its monopoly over the oil industry, has opposed what it denounces as “sectarian regionalism”. It calls instead for a Basra-based mini-region consisting of Basra and two neighbouring oil-rich provinces. Industrial action by the oil union has been used to agitate for this perspective.

In response, the Baghdad government invoked laws introduced by Saddam Hussein to make membership of a union illegal in the oil and related industries. Troops were deployed around the major oilfields and have been waiting there since July for orders to seize the facilities. The withdrawal of British policing from Basra is shaping up as the prelude to a bloody escalation of occupation-inspired violence in the city.

Failure in Basra

Tim Holmes — Fri, 06 Jul 2007 03:22:05 +0000

The situation in the southern city of Basra is a microcosm of how the policies of the US-led invasion and occupation of Iraq have destroyed the country’s institutions, shattered its national cohesion and set the stage for intractable violence. That is the conclusion of a June 25 report by the Brussels-based International Crisis Group (ICG), “Where is Iraq Heading? Lessons from Basra”.

Released amid the Bush administration’s “surge” of close to 30,000 additional troops in Iraq, the ICG report is among the bleakest produced by any Western think-tank. According to the report, British forces occupying the south of the country have lost effective control over Basra. The city is now a battleground of rival Islamic fundamentalist groups, none of which have any loyalties to the US-backed central government in Baghdad. The 5,500 British troops still stationed in and around the city have been driven by “relentless attacks” into “increasingly secluded compounds”.

The ICG warns that American surge is on the same road to failure, with profound consequences for the strategic and economic interests of the US and European powers.

The executive summary declared: “Basra’s experience carries important lessons for the capital and nation as a whole. Coalition forces have already implemented a security plan there, Operation Sinbad, which was in many ways similar to Baghdad’s current military surge. What U.S. commanders call ‘clear, hold and build’, their British counterparts earlier had dubbed ‘clear, hold and civil reconstruction’. And, as in the capital, the putative goal was to pave the way for a takeover by Iraqi forces. Far from being a model to be replicated, however, Basra is an example of what to avoid. With renewed violence and instability, Basra illustrates the pitfalls of a transitional process that has led to collapse of the state apparatus and failed to build legitimate institutions….”

The ICG left little doubt as to why it considers the city to be crucial. “To neglect Basra is a mistake. The nation’s second largest city, it is located in its most oil-rich region. Basra governorate is also the only region enjoying maritime access, making it the country’s de facto economic capital and a significant prize for local political actors. Sandwiched between Iran and the Gulf monarchies, at the intersection of the Arab and Persian worlds, the region is strategically important.”

In other words, control of Basra is vital from the standpoint of realising the real aims of the invasion of Iraq: opening up the country’s oil reserves to transnational energy conglomerates and asserting US strategic and economic dominance in the Middle East.

Basra, the report noted, was once one of the most cosmopolitan and diverse cities in the Middle East. Christians and members of other minorities lived in general harmony alongside the Muslim population. While Shiites were the majority, much of the upper and middle classes adhered to the Sunni branch of Islam. The city had “a tradition of tolerance and open-mindedness”.

Dramatic changes were brought about, however, by the Iran-Iraq war of the 1980s, the first US war against Iraq in 1991 and the UN sanctions regime for the following 12 years.

The city suffered severe damage during both wars and its population fell from 1.5 million to less than 900,000. In the final days of the Gulf War, Basra was the focus of a Shiite uprising against Hussein’s regime. Thousands of people were slaughtered by the predominantly Sunni Republican Guard, leaving a legacy of sectarian tension. Throughout the 1990s, UN sanctions and Hussein’s economic restrictions on the city produced a staggering decline in living standards and public services. The social crisis in Basra was aggravated by the influx of tens of thousands of Marsh Arabs who had been forced from their traditional lands by Baathist repression and the deliberate draining of the Euphrates River marshes. By 2003, the city’s population had swelled to over two million, with many living in poverty-stricken slums and shantytowns.

The urban poor in Basra—as they did in Baghdad and numerous other Iraqi cities—turned in the 1990s toward the Shiite fundamentalist movement headed by Mohammad Sadeq al-Sadr. Sadr combined strict Islamic morality with populist denunciations of the oppression of the Iraqi people by both the US and the Baathists. To a desperate population, the Sadrist current held out the false promise of a Shiite theocratic state bringing social order and prosperity.

Sadr was assassinated by Hussein in 1999 but his movement continued under the leadership of his son, Moqtada al-Sadr, and Mohammad al-Yaqubi, a prominent cleric who had considerable influence in Basra. The other major Shiite force in the city was the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI)—a pro-Iranian tendency that directed its activities in Iraq from exile in Tehran.

The US and British forces who entered Iraq in 2003 did so with little comprehension of the influence these Shiite fundamentalist movements exerted. The view prevailing in Washington was that the invasion’s “shock and awe” tactics would intimidate the Iraqi population into accepting a puppet government made up of relatively unknown pro-US political exiles.

Instead, the US military was rapidly confronted with a guerilla war in Sunni areas of the country and barely restrained hostility among the majority Shiite population. The only political forces with sufficient influence to prevent a broader anti-occupation rebellion were Shiite clerics and religious parties. In a policy shift with far-reaching consequences, the Bush administration elevated Shiite fundamentalists at the expense of the predominantly Sunni and secular Baathist elite. Each of the various governments that Washington has installed in Baghdad has been dominated by Shiite factions, allied with Kurdish nationalist organisations, seeking to appropriate the power and privileges of the former ruling class.

The marginalisation of Sunnis has been the main factor in entrenching the anti-occupation insurgency and triggering the bloody sectarian conflict that is raging in Baghdad and other areas of the country.

Factional conflict

In Basra, the British also encouraged Shiite fundamentalists to take over the post-Hussein state. Followers of Mohammad al-Yaqubi, who formed the Islamic Virtue Party or Fadhila in 2003, control most of the ministries in the provincial government and effectively control the Oil Protection Force, a paramilitary unit that is supposed to protect oil infrastructure. Supporters of Moqtada al-Sadr are believed to control Basra’s port. Thousands of Sadrist and SCIRI militiamen have joined the local units of the Iraqi army and the Basra police. A smaller Shiite faction, Hizbollah, is believed to control the Basra branch of the Customs service.

The ICG report stated: “The end result has been monopoly control by a variety of armed Islamist parties over Basra politics. In the occupation’s early stages, they focused attacks on former regime members such as Baathists and military officers. Over time, their target list extended to anyone potentially threatening their political or economic interests, be they Sunni or Shiite, doctors, engineers, journalists, tribal chiefs or independent traffickers. Engaged in a brutal scramble for resources and a vicious cycle of attacks and counter-attacks, militias have become by far Basra’s principle source of violence. This could well foreshadow what will happen to the rest of the country once other causes of strife—mainly the fight against coalition forces and sectarian violence—recede.”

The parties, the ICG noted, “fight most intensely over the three most valuable assets: oil trafficking, control over security forces and access to public services and resources. Evidence suggests that local parties are massively involved in oil trafficking…” A representative of Basra Sadrists told the ICG: “All parties, without exception, steal and smuggle oil.” While smuggling and corruption have created fortunes for some, the bulk of Basra’s population is enduring conditions that have only worsened since the 2003 invasion.

Disputes over control of oil have produced what can only be described as the ingredients for an intra-Shiite civil war in Basra, which could erupt at any time. The Sadrists, whose main base of support is in Baghdad, are demanding that oil revenues should accrue to the federal Iraqi government and be shared across the entire the country. SCIRI has called for control of all new oil production to be ceded to a southern Iraqi “region,” consisting of nine majority Shiite provinces and governed from its power base, the Shiite religious centre of Najaf.

Factions within Fadhila are bitterly opposed to both federalism and regionalism, advocating instead that the city model itself on the small Gulf states, establish autonomy from both Baghdad and the rest of southern Iraq and take the lion’s share of revenues from the oil produced in Basra province.

In response to a spike of factional violence, the British military announced in September 2006 that it was launching Operation Sinbad to rid Basra of militias. As has happened in the areas being targetted by the US “surge,” the Basra militias and armed groups simply went to ground, while at the same time stepping up guerilla attacks on British troops. A British soldier told the English press: “On the last tour we were not mortared very often. This tour, it was two or three times a day… Toward the end of January to March, it was like a siege mentality. We were getting mortared every hour of the day. We were constantly being fired at. We basically didn’t sleep for six months….”

By April, the British had called off Operation Sinbad. Within weeks, the militias were back in the streets. The local Sadrist and SCIRI branches have since formed an alliance and launched an attempt to unseat the Fadhila provincial governor. Once Fadhila has been defeated, the ICG predicts, the Sadrists and SCIRI will turn against each other. The only thing that has prevented them from physically disposing of Fadhila thus far is the threat that British troops will be deployed in his defence.

The ICG concluded its report: “The British appear to have given up on the idea of establishing a functioning state… In any event, time is running out…. Over time, local government in the south could well resemble a small failed state; the government might collapse, a victim of the ruthless struggle between unregulated and uninhibited militias…. Basra teaches that as soon as the military surge ends and coalition forces diminish, competition between rival factions will itself surge. In other words, prolonging the same political process with the same political actors will ensure that what is left of the Iraqi state gradually is torn apart. The most likely outcome will be the country’s untidy breakup into myriad fiefdoms, superficially held together by the presence of coalition forces.”

The most significant aspect of the ICG’s prediction for Iraq—a future of warlords, militias and civil war—is that it cannot advise a course of action that would produce a different outcome. Apart from lecturing the US and British governments on the need for the various Iraqi factions to adopt “genuine political compromises and a more inclusive system”, the think-tank has nothing to say. The truth is that the longer the US occupation continues the more Iraqi people are being inflicted with ever-greater forms of barbarism.