astralis

it's time to screw JAM to the wall!

if the US military can capitalize on this, this will represent a major tactical victory. if that happens, the stage is set for what will be the most decisive battle of this entire campaign, which is in creating at least a somewhat unified national gov't that can present a clear, reliable alternative authority to that of the militias.

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http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/12/wo...hp&oref=slogin

Relations Sour Between Shiites and Iraq Militia

Johan Spanner for The New York Times

Mahdi Army members operating checkpoints in Baghdad in January. Today, many Shiites regard the militia as a band of thugs.

By SABRINA TAVERNISE
Published: October 12, 2007

BAGHDAD, Oct. 11 — In a number of Shiite neighborhoods across Baghdad, residents are beginning to turn away from the Mahdi Army, the Shiite militia they once saw as their only protector against Sunni militants. Now they resent it as a band of street thugs without ideology.

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The hardening Shiite feeling in Baghdad opens an opportunity for the American military, which has long struggled against the Mahdi Army, as American commanders rely increasingly on tribes and local leaders in their prosecution of the war.

The sectarian landscape has shifted, with Sunni extremists largely defeated in many Shiite neighborhoods, and the war in those places has sunk into a criminality that is often blind to sect.

In interviews, 10 Shiites from four neighborhoods in eastern and western Baghdad described a pattern in which militia members, looking for new sources of income, turned on Shiites.

The pattern appears less frequently in neighborhoods where Sunnis and Shiites are still struggling for territory. Sadr City, the largest Shiite neighborhood, where the Mahdi Army’s face is more political than military, has largely escaped the wave of criminality.

Among the people killed in the neighborhood of Topchi over the past two months, residents said, were the owner of an electrical shop, a sweets seller, a rich man, three women, two local council members, and two children, ages 9 and 11.

It was a disparate group with one thing in common: All were Shiites killed by Shiites. Residents blamed the Mahdi Army, which controls the neighborhood.

“Everyone knew who the killers were,” said a mother from Topchi, whose neighbor, a Shiite woman, was one of the victims. “I’m Shiite, and I pray to God that he will punish them.”

The feeling was the same in other neighborhoods.

“We thought they were soldiers defending the Shiites,” said Sayeed Sabah, a Shiite who runs a charity in the western neighborhood of Huriya. “But now we see they are youngster-killers, no more than that. People want to get rid of them.”

While the Mahdi militia still controls most Shiite neighborhoods, early evidence that Shiites are starting to oppose some parts of the militia is surfacing on American bases. Shiite sheiks, the militia’s traditional base, are beginning to contact Americans, much as Sunni tribes reached out early this year, refocusing one entire front of the war, officials said, and the number of accurate tips flowing into American bases has soared.

Shiites are “participating like they never have before,” said Maj. Mark Brady, of the Multi-National Division-Baghdad Reconciliation and Engagement Cell, which works with tribes.

“Something has got to be not right if they are going to risk calling a tips hot line or approaching a J.S.S.,” he said, referring to the Joint Security Stations, the American neighborhood mini-bases set up after the troop increase this year.

“Everything is changing,” said Ali, a businessman in the heavily Shiite neighborhood of Ur, in eastern Baghdad, who, like most of those interviewed, did not want his full name used for fear of being attacked. “Now in our area for the first time everyone say, ‘To hell with Mahdi Army.’

“Not loudly on the street, but between friends, between families. Every man, every woman, say that.”

The street militia of today bears little resemblance to the Mahdi Army of 2004, when Shiites following a cleric, Moktada al-Sadr, battled American soldiers in a burst of Shiite self-assertion. Then, fighters doubled as neighborhood helpers, bringing cooking gas and other necessities to needy families.

Now, three years later, many members have left violence behind, taking jobs in local and national government, while others have plunged into crime, dealing in cars and houses taken from dead or displaced victims of both sects.

Even the demographics have changed. Now, street fighters tend to be young teenagers from errant families, in part the result of American military success. Last fall, the military began an aggressive campaign of arresting senior commanders, leaving behind a power vacuum and directionless junior members.

“Now it’s young guys — no religion, no red lines,” said Abbas, 40, a Shiite car parts dealer in Ameen, a southern Baghdad neighborhood. Abbas’s 22-year-old cousin, Ratib, was shot in the mouth this spring after insulting Mahdi militia members.

“People hate them,” Abbas said. “They want them to disappear from their lives.”

One of the most notorious killers in Topchi, who residents say was a Mahdi Army fighter, Haidar Rahim, was born in 1989. On a hot August afternoon, he and two accomplices shot and killed a woman named Eman, a divorced mother, in front of her house, residents said. The fighters said she was a prostitute, but shortly after her death they brought tenants to rent her house.

“They are kids with guns, who have cars and money,” said Eman’s neighbor, referring to the fighters. “Being kids, they are tempted by all of this.”

Residents’ fear was so great that Eman’s body lay untouched in a pool of blood for more than an hour, until the Iraqi authorities took it away, said the neighbor. She watched Eman’s 8-year-old son crying next to his mother’s body.

“They are bloodthirsty,” said a man whose father, a neighborhood council member from Topchi, was killed on Sept. 26. “They can kill an entire family for a $10 mobile phone scratch card.”

Mr. Rahim was killed a month later. His young face is emblazoned on a memorial sign, planted near a giant wheel of rotisserie chicken in Topchi. Some said Americans killed him. Others said Iraqis.

A spokesman for the Sadr office in Shuala, the large Shiite neighborhood north of Topchi, said that he had no information on the killings, but that any illegal actions were the work of criminals who merely called themselves Mahdi Army members.

“The claims of membership in the Mahdi Army are huge at this time,” said the spokesman, who goes by Abu Jafar. “The Sadr office is not responsible for anyone who terrorizes the people, Sunnis or Shiites.”

Patterns of violence are different in the Shiite south, where competing Shiite militias with political ties are vying for power.

The militia in Baghdad, always loosely organized, swelled with recruits after a bombing of a Shiite shrine in February 2006. The change disrupted the organization and injected it with angry young men, some with criminal pasts, who were thirsty for revenge.

Criminals began to give the organization a bad name. The price for used cars plummeted as militiamen sold vehicles that had belonged to their dead victims. A Sadr City sheik issued a religious edict permitting the confiscation of the property of Sunni militants who see Shiites as heretics. But many took it as a blank check to seize property, as long as the victim was Sunni.

A 36-year-old Mahdi Army leader from western Baghdad described a system in which victims’ cars were shipped to northern Iraq in convoys of Kurdish soldiers returning from military leave. New documents were drawn up there.

For Yasir, 35, a former member of the militia who had witnessed its breakdown firsthand, a final blow came when his cousin, a wealthy businessman, was kidnapped by young Mahdi members from the neighborhood. He was later killed.

“Don’t call it the Mahdi Army,” Yasir said. “It was the Mahdi Army when people in it had a conscience.”

In a last-ditch effort to re-establish control and respect, Mr. Sadr issued an order halting all Mahdi Army activity in August.

Abu Jafar, the spokesman, said that “the goal of this statement is to uncover the bad people that claim membership in the Mahdi Army and to let the security forces deal with them.”

While the turbulence continued in Topchi, a frontier neighborhood where local militia members are poorer, much of the activity stopped in Sadr City, the base for the most senior leaders, who have grown wealthy and are established politically, residents said.

“At first, we couldn’t drive our cars, we couldn’t walk because they have weapons, AK, pistols on the street,” said Ali, the Ur businessman. “Now they disappeared. There is nothing. You can’t see anything from these people.”

Like many Shiites, Abbas, the car parts dealer, attributes part of the drop-off to a new precision in American arrests, fed by tips from Shiite residents. Abbas said he and his friends had a name for the Americans, the Janet Brothers, a tongue-in-cheek term of tribal respect that plays off an American name. Another name, Madonna Brothers, refers to the American pop star.

American commanders like Lt. Col. David Oclander, of the Second Brigade Combat Team of the 82nd Airborne Division, whose area includes Sadr City and other Shiite neighborhoods in Baghdad, have seized on that cooperation. In the past month and a half, he said, Shiite leaders have begun to make contact with the Americans. The brigade is now working with 25 sheiks in the Shiite neighborhoods of Shaab and Ur and is interviewing up to 1,200 candidates for semiofficial neighborhood guard positions.

The lieutenant colonel compares the shift among the Shiites to the one in Sunni neighborhoods that began to turn against Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia, the homegrown Sunni extremist group that American intelligence agencies say is foreign led.

In some cases, residents seem more willing to stand up to the Mahdi Army. In Topchi, several businessmen refused to pay protection money to Mahdi Army members this month. The news spread through the neighborhood. Four months ago, a truck driver was killed in Lieutenant Colonel Oclander’s sector, after the driver’s boss refused to pay protection money. Such retribution is much rarer now, he said.

Ali, the Ur businessman, said he expected the Mahdi Army to be much smaller in the future. People simply do not believe its leaders anymore. “There is no ideology among them anymore,” he said.

As proof, he told a story from his neighborhood about a religious man and a car acquisition.

“He was a poor man, but now he has a Mercedes-Benz,” Ali said. “The Prophet Muhammad, he didn’t even have a horse.”

__________________
Never let the future disturb you. You will meet it, if you have to, with the same weapons of reason which today arm you against the present.

-Marcus Aurelius, Meditations

astralis

America's New Shi'a Allies - TIME

America's New Shi'a Allies
Thursday, Oct. 11, 2007 By DARRIN MORTENSON/MUSAYYIB
U.S. Troops on patrol south of Baghdad.

The vaunted U.S. strategy in Anbar province that has put a dent in Al Qaeda in Iraq involved establishing ties with Sunni tribes. But there has always been skepticism whether the same strategy would work in Shi'ite areas of the country. However, that may be changing. In Musayyib, 40 miles south of Baghdad and not far from the holy city of Karbala, American officers are taking advantage of a network of "concerned citizens" in this predominantly Shi'ite area to help quell violence stemming from both Sunni insurgents and erratic elements of powerful Shi'a militias. Just as in Anbar, it was the tribes that asked the Americans for help.

Over the past two months these "concerned citizens" groups have manned checkpoints and established a network of informants that have helped keep out Sunni extremists and finger Shi'ite militants who assassinate rivals and set bombs on roadways to kill American soldiers. While leaders concede that operations in surrounding areas and a growing public antipathy toward the radicals have contributed to diminishing violence, they point to the numbers and say the civilian patrols are having an effect. Soldiers say 57 improvised explosive devises, or IEDs, exploded or were discovered in May. In August, however, only six went off or were found. "It's pretty much shut 'em down," says Maj. Craig Whiteside, the executive officer for the 1st Battalion, 501st Parachute Infantry Batallion.

Seeing a window of opportunity in their own sector, officers quickly mobilized, taking cues from the Anbar program and redesigning it to fit local conditions, enlisting volunteers from the town of Musayyib and surrounding villages to be part of ad-hoc militias supported and paid by the U.S. military. It's still a work in progress and sometimes dangerously clumsy. Members of the American battalion here recently shot and killed three of the new local volunteers at a checkpoint just north of town, saying they mistook them for insurgents planting roadside bombs.

The volunteer militias sprang up here in Babil province over the last two months under local leadership after the tribes saw successes scored by Sunni tribesmen in adjacent Anbar Province. Those homegrown groups in Anbar turned on al-Qaeda and teamed up with American forces to clear their regions of extremists, or at least put them on the run, reaping a windfall of American aid money in the process. What has surprised military officials about the groups around Musayyib, though, is that they are Shi'ite or of mixed sect, containing both Sunnis and Shiite residents who rejected the excesses of the Jaish al Mahdi, the Shi'ite militia nominally loyal to anti-American cleric Moqtada al Sadr. Almost 500 Shi'ites and at least as many Sunnis have already signed on. Shi'ite communities in the capital of Baghdad are also reportedly growing unhappy with al-Sadr's militia.

The newly armed and deputized groups have contributed to the biggest dip in violence and the lowest casualty rates since the battalion arrived a year ago. "Fewer of my guys have been killed than at any time before," Lt. Col. Robert Balcavage told TIME. Balcavage, commander of the 1st Battalion, 501st Parachute Infantry Regiment of the 25th Division, said the locally organized Sunni groups have already driven al-Qaeda out of the urban areas and into a rough no-man's land to the north, sandwiching them precariously between his paratroopers and elements of the 10th Mountain Division. In and around Musayyib to the south, the Shi'ite groups have manned checkpoints along roadways that once hid bombs. Since late July, roughly about the time the militias started working, no one has attacked the paratroopers there.

While the real key to stability in the region is training and fielding Iraqi police and army forces loyal to the central government instead of their particular tribe or sect, officers say the concerned citizen militias create a surge effect, picking up some of the slack and creating a pipeline for new and better qualified recruits.

A measure of skepticism is built into the program. Sunni and Shi'ite insurgents who once fought or still fight the Americans are surely among the new militias — as they are in the police and army. But deputizing them allows the Americans to gather personal information, take fingerprints and track their whereabouts for a least part of the time. The volunteers sign three-month contracts, wear only special armbands instead of uniforms and use their own weapons, but they get paid three quarters of what Iraqi police recruits receive and are given preference for joining the police and army. "It gives them a stake in the system. It's really the first step to becoming IP [Iraqi Police] or IA [Iraqi Army]," Balcavage said. In the absence of good alternatives, he said he was willing to give it a chance. "I guess it's making the best of a bad situation," he said.

Bluesman

You hit on a definite MAJOR news item here, and I think I don't go too far when I say it MAY/MAY be the turning point we've all been looking for.

I've claimed since this whole thang started that the road to victory passes through Tehran. Iranian meddling has been as bad as Democratic defeatism, and has come closest to beating us.

But if their muscle, their surrogate, has lost the support of the majority of Shia...baby, this could be IT.

With aQ all but defeated and currently being routed everywhere in the country, the former regime guys negotiating on how to get involved into the political process again, and now even the Iranian-controlled pieces being checked...

And you're right about getting JAM NOW. We let 'em off the hook twice before, and it is now not even debatable that, with hindsight, we can see that it was a mistake, BOTH TIMES.

We better not miss THIS chance, because one thing is known: they'll be back, and no more helpful than they were the previous times. And another in unknown: if we'll get another chance to justifiably crush 'em in the future.

__________________
"The quickest way of ending a war is to lose it, and if one finds the prospect of a long war intolerable, it is natural to disbelieve in the possibility of victory."
- George Orwell

zraver

To cement this we need the operators from Blackwater who killed those Iraqies to be sent to jail with no hope of ever seeing daylight again. We may be seeing this beginning as the owner of BW (Prince) said things where he basically threw his guys to the wolves. Going to be tough on the Operators, but thats what they get for trading in the flag for the dollar.

WHDH-TV - National News - Blackwater chairman says company acted appropriately

Prince repeatedly refused to say whether former Blackwater employees were guilty of murder and said it should be up to the Justice Department to pursue charges against contractors who commit crimes overseas.

In the case of the Christmas eve shooting, Prince said the company fired and fined the individual.

"But we, as a private organization, can't do any more," he told the House panel. "We can't flog him. We can't incarcerate him. That's up to the Justice Department. We are not empowered to enforce U.S. law."

The Blackwater chairman said he supports legislation that would guarantee his employees and other private security companies working for the State Department are subject to prosecution in U.S. courts. The House was expected to consider such a bill, sponsored by Rep. David Price, D-N.C., on Wednesday.

dalem

I know that this is a simple ape-brain comment, but WHY didn't we whack Sadr way back when? Of what POSSIBLE value was he alive?

-dale

Shek

Dale,

The CPA way underestimated Darth Sadr as they didn't fully appreciate the standing of his father, whose coattails Sadr rode to prominence (using both his fathers name and the Hizbollah model of social services). Assassins Gate and Night Draws Near are two great books to read about this.

Shek

__________________
"So little pains do the vulgar take in the investigation of truth, accepting readily the first story that comes to hand." Thucydides 1.20.3

Julie

"Rice said she would shuttle between Israel and the West Bank over the next three days to "help them narrow differences that they may have about what the nature of this document has to be."

Why isn't she doing this in Iraq to establish stability in the Iraq Government?

dalem

I'm sure it's Bushitler's fault.

-dale

gunnut

Rice would talk to Abbas, who has control over the West Bank and Israel, who has full control of the Israeli forces.

What factions would she talk to in Iraq? Do they have full control over the tribal chiefs and their militia?

__________________
"Only Nixon can go to China." -- Old Vulcan proverb.

smilingassassin

I have a better question, why are democrats trying to make the northern border with Turkey unstable with their recent support for a bill that recognises the Armenian Genocide NOW instead of anytime durring the last few decades? Kind of conveinient that they find their morals NOW on THAT particular issue. But of course the only thing that will get noticed from THIS little bill is that Bush was against it. Just when real big strides are being made the Democrats try and find another way to lose the war.

__________________
Facts to a liberal is like Kryptonite to Superman.

-- Larry Elder

Bluesman

BINGO - right on the button.

smilingassassin

...and before Julie counts one for the Blue team heres an interesting notion, about 70% of U.S. air cargo headed for Iraq goes through Turkey, as does one third of the fuel used by the U.S. military in Iraq. U.S. bases also get water and other supplies by land from Turkish truckers who cross into the northern region of Iraqi Kurdistan.

So while Iraqi's are starting to get sick of Sadr and Maliki's stumbling and are working towards reconciliation on their own, the democrats are working to create a new front in Iraq, with an entirely new faction, a NATO member at that. So not only are they all about losing the war in Iraq, their all about keeping Iraq in a state of war....

Julie

I don't agree with the Resolution vote regarding Turkey no more than you do. Maybe if the Democrats can't beat them, they should join them? I dunno.

smilingassassin

The real point is that Armenians groups in the U.S. have been lobying for this kind of recognition for decades and they only just now at the most inconveinient time get their wish?!!

I seriously doubt the vote was a result of compassion towards the Armenians which really makes me sick to my stomach, its cheap dirty politics and nothing else.

JAD_333

Excellent developments. This tells me ordinary Iraqis are finally fed up with all the death and destruction, and are ready to accept any practical means to end it, even if it means working with the Great Satan.

__________________
To be Truly ignorant, Man requires an Education. (Plato)