Blogging on Meds

Inside a half-finished five star hotel in Djibouti this past July, several hundred foreign dignitaries, investors and journalists gathered for the first look at an ambitious plan to unite continents. Dubai-based Al Noor Holding Investment Company hopes to build a bridge — to be the world’s largest suspension structure, at points boasting 800-meters-tall pilings — between Africa and the Arabian Peninsula. The bridge, spanning 29 kilometers of the Red Sea between Djibouti and Yemen, will be anchored by brand new cities on each side bearing the same name, Al Noor City, or City of Light. The estimated cost of the whole venture is somewhere around $200 billion. The visionary of this project, Tarek bin Laden, Saudi oligarch and brother-in-law of the notorious Osama, hopes in 15 to 20 years time to see his dream of the bridge and both cities become reality. But just how realistic is it?

Perhaps Djibouti’s only real asset today is its location at the junction of the Red Sea and the Gulf of Aden. It has one of Africa’s smallest populations, estimated at around 500,000, and its land size is comparable to the US state of Massachusetts. It is also bordered by Ethiopia, Eritrea and Somalia — three nations who are embroiled in multiple conflicts and whose names have long generated images of famine, despotism and anarchy.

Along the road between the Djibouti-Ambouli Airport and the hotel hosting the project launch, people wandered between single-storey concrete buildings and shacks — some carried jerrycans or bundles of sticks, but most walked empty handed. Less than a kilometer away from the hotel, a naked child squatted beside a wall while groups of shirtless men slept in ditches beneath the shade of trees.

The “Bridge of the Horn” is to have a six-lane highway and three light rail lines for passenger and commercial traffic, with a goal of one day handling 100,000 cars and 20,000 rail passengers per day. There are also plans for a natural gas pipeline to run the length of the bridge from Djibouti into Yemen and onto the Persian Gulf.

If completed, the bridge will cross the aptly named Bab el Mandeb, the Gateway of Tears. It is the shortest point between Yemen and Djibouti and is named after the treacherous waters made famous for centuries of taking ships and lives. There is also the deadly threat of Somali pirates operating in the area, enough to warrant the permanent basing of an international pirate task force and several thousand French Foreign Legion and US military troops. Europe’s supply of oil from the Gulf passes through these straits making security here all the more vital.

And just as the Suez Canal controls sea traffic at the northern end of the Red Sea, the Gateway of Tears owns the shipping lanes of the south. Not far from the hotel there was a sight common to every port city from Buenos Aires to Shanghai: shipping containers. Stacked like a multi-colored set of Legos, rows of metal boxes waited to be filled with goods, loaded onto ships and sent out across the globe. This is the Horn of Africa. (more…)

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I haven’t posted in a long ass time, but Mauritania — one of the strangest, hottest and most desolate places I’ve ever been — is in the midst of overthrowing their elected government. Oh, how I love coups.

Turns out the president canned the presidential guard leader, General Mohamed al-Abdul Aziz, and he in turn arrested the president, the prime minister and the minister of the interior. Now the prez guard is running the show from the prez palace. Oh, and guess what? They have a shitload of oil. And the longest train in the world that carries iron ore from one remote place to another even more remote place. And there are bad guys running around who like to kidnap and kill whitey. It’s on the north west coast of Africa, below Western Sahara and Morocco and above Senegal.

I was there in 2006 with my girlfriend and it was pretty damn boring. We slept in huge tents, saw the 7th holiest site in Islam and basically wandered around in the Sahara Desert for a while — sweating a lot and getting chapped lips and eating really, really bad food. Not exactly a romantic getaway but it beat going to Cancun with a bunch of orange frat boys.

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The Taliban Summer

Today: Jamaat-i-Islami protest US “War on Muslims” in Lahore, Pakistan—note the “Stop Bombardment on Muslims” posters

Breaking: Western Ignorance and Idiocy in Pasthuland

Hot off the wires:

DVCM) 09:58 DJ Pakistan Tribesmen Say NATO Forces Massing On Afghan Border

MIRANSHAH, Pakistan (AFP)–Tribal elders on Tuesday raised the alarm over a buildup of hundreds of NATO-led troops on the Afghanistan side of the border, but Pakistan’s military downplayed fears of any intrusion.

“We have heard there is a buildup of foreign troops,” said Malik Mohammad Afzal Khan Darpakhel, a local tribal leader in North Waziristan who isn’t affiliated with the Taliban.

“We want to warn them that 3 million tribesmen will rise against them if they try to move in,” Darpakhel told a news conference held by five elders in Miranshah, the main town in the region. Intelligence sources said some 300 NATO soldiers equipped with tanks, armored vehicles and heavy weaponry have been moved very close to Lwara Mundi, a border village in North Waziristan.

Meanwhile, the Times gets the story on what happened at the American base where nine troops were killed Sunday, when 200 Taliban launched a surprise attack. In short, the insurgents were likely retaliating for civilian deaths caused by an airstrike on July 4, which killed 47 mostly women and children. The base was less than a kilometer from the bomb site. (I noted here that the entire UK press was covering that story as the US media ignored it.) “Insurgents have been present in the area for months, including Pakistani militant groups like Lashkar-e-Taiba, a group that was originally formed to fight in Kashmir,” the Times reports.

I’ve long been calling for a regional, US-brokered Kashmir summit. The respective Jihads in Afghanistan and Kashmir against the US and India are one in the same, ie ISI and MMA supported.

Hassna Chop writes…

[Sunday's attack on the US base] may or may not be true that it was a response to the air strikes. Militants have been hitting these small NATO outposts more regularly in the last few months. These outposts are small and usually only house a couple of dozen soldiers, and they’re in brutal terrain that gives the militants an edge, since they know the area better and have plenty of cover.

I wasn’t surprised to read that they were able to get inside the walls of the NATO outpost, especially since there were about 200 of them.

My guess is that this story about NATO building up troops along the border has more to do with having a larger force around to help protect these outposts and respond more quickly to attacks than invading Waziristan…because that would be suicidal.

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Getty

I love “human interest” stories. Of course, every British paper picked this wire story up. Nothing like a history of Iraqi booze habits to enliven a slow UK news week. Reuters:

Alcohol is openly for sale once more in Baghdad. All over the Iraqi capital, drink stores, which closed their doors in early 2006 when sectarian strife was raging, have slowly begun to reopen. Two years ago, al-Qa’ida militants were burning down liquor stores and shooting their owners. Now around Saadoun Street, in the centre of the city, at least 50 stores are advertising that they have alcohol for sale.

The fear of being seen drinking in public is also subsiding. Young men openly drink beer in some, if not all, streets. A favourite spot where drinkers traditionally gathered is al-Jadriya bridge, which has fine views up and down the Tigris river. Two years ago even serious drunks decided that boozing on the bridge was too dangerous. But in the past three months they have returned, a sign that militant gunmen no longer decide what people in Baghdad do at night. “I drink seven or eight cans of beer a day and a bottle of whiskey on Thursday evenings,” said Abu Ahmed, a former military intelligence officer who now makes a living driving a taxi.

Iraq was one of the most secular of Arab countries until the early 1990s. Restaurants all served alcohol and there was a plentiful supply of nightclubs. None of the prohibition on alcohol seen in Saudi Arabia or Kuwait held sway. In Basra, in the late 1970s, the main local complaint was that Kuwaitis were pouring across the border and drinking the city dry. In Baghdad it was possible to sit in one of the restaurants off Abu Nawas Street on the bank of the Tigris River eating fish grilled over an open fire and drinking beer and arak (a spirit made from dates and flavoured with aniseed).

(more…)

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Today, McCain flip-floppity-flopped by reverting to an earlier promise to balance the federal budget by the end of his first term in 2013, a promise that he’d abandoned as recently as April. No, he’s not reneging on his promise to extend the Bush tax cuts or cut the corporate income tax rate. Instead, McCain claims that since he’ll have basically won the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan by 2013, all the money saved from waging the wars will go to eliminating the deficit. From Politico:

The McCain administration would reserve all savings from victory in the Iraq and Afghanistan operations in the fight against Islamic extremists for reducing the deficit. Since all their costs were financed with deficit spending, all their savings must go to deficit reduction.

In other news, McCain has also found a cure for cancer, diabetes, and obesity, all of which will save the US health care system so much money that every American will have health care.

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Blast in Kabul was ISI’s fault, says Indian government. Protests that led to Indian-Kashmir’s gov’t’s fall is ISI’s fault, says Indian government.

Today, two events rocked the opposite ends of the Central Asian Jihadi pipeline. In both cases, India lost to Islam. A huge car bomb at the Indian Embassy in Kabul killed 40, including a dozen Indians. And in Srinagar, the capital of India’s Kashmir province,the government dissolved after a land dispute between the Muslim-majority and Hindu-minority about the use of 100-acres for a Hindu shrine led to a week-long mass protests.

I love how whenever anything bad happens to something India, Pakistan is to blame. The Times of India on Kabul blast: 

The involvement of Pakistan’s intelligence agency ISI is suspected in the terror strike at the Indian embassy in Kabul, whose main targets appear to have been the two senior officials, including the Defence Attache killed in the attack.

And literally anything negative that happens in Indian-held Kashmir is Pakistan’s fault, at least according to the Indian government. Here in the West, it’s easy to forget just how much Pakistan and India hate each other. (It was international news when Pakistan allowed a Bollywood movie to be played in Karachi for Christ’s sake!)

The Kashmir land dispute is Central Asia’s Israel-Palestine. Just as peace in the Middle East must begin with a resolution of that conflict, the Jihad in Central Asia will continue as long as 700,000 Indian troops occupy the Kashmir Valley. Kashmir is just as intractable a conflict as Israel. And it’s possibly as important to US national security, given that the Jihad it creates houses Osama Bin Laden and trains the Taliban, and both Pakistan and India have nukes.

If Obama really places Afghanistan and Pakistan at the top of his foreign policy concerns (above Iraq!?), as Politico reports, he needs to push for a US-led mediation of the Kashmir dispute. Otherwise the Jihad in Central Asia will never end.

Meanwhile, all this comes on day when India’s enemy Pakistan is dealing with mass terror. Today a string of bombings struck across Karachi, just one day after a bomb in the capital of Islamabad killed 18. Thus the bad news spreads from Kabul east 300 miles to Islamabad and a further 500 miles east to Srinagar, covering the whole Jihadi pipeline, but not forgetting Karachi, the Islamists’ prime recruiting hub 1000 miles to the south…

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Kashmiris vs Indian Army

India has some 700,000 troops occupying Kashmir. A 30-year insurgency, backed by Pakistan, has claimed some 70,000 lives. For the past five days, Kashmir’s been paralyzed by street beef. These are the largest protests in 20 years. This may seem unimportant to America, but the Jihad being waged in Kashmir is tied to the one being fought against America in Afghanistan. A pipeline of Islamic militancy flows from Pakistan’s North West Frontier Province through Azad (free) Kashmir and into IHK. Most Pakistanis do not differentiate between Indian and US aggression—both are foreign occupation of Muslim lands—though they hate India more. If these protests turn into a large-scale Intifada, the whole region would further destabilize.

AP:

SRINAGAR, India (AFP) - Tens of thousands of people poured onto the streets of Indian Kashmir’s main city on Friday in some of the biggest pro-freedom protests in the Muslim-majority region in almost two decades.

The demonstrations, which marked the fifth straight day of upheaval in the disputed Himalayan province, began as displays of anger over the transfer of land to a Hindu pilgrim body before growing into larger anti-India rallies.

“It is one of the biggest pro-freedom marches I have witnessed,” said Joginder Singh, a resident of the Lal Chowk commercial area, one of several spots in Srinagar where thousands gathered.

Chanting “We want freedom” and “Stop the sale of Kashmir,” the marchers passed through stone and brick-littered streets and tore down banners and billboards of pro-India parties as federal troops watched from a distance, an AFP reporter and witnesses said.

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US troops train the Ethiopian Army who then wage a scorched earth campaign against their own people.

America is the China of the Horn of Africa

A new Human Rights Watch report claims the US is complicit in Ethiopian war crimes. For some reason, the NYT did not mention this story today. The Boston Globe picked it up from AP:

Ethiopia’s government is committing war crimes in its military campaign against rebels in the Ogaden region, a rights group charged Thursday in a report that complained the U.S. and other Western governments willfully ignored abuses.

New York-based Human Rights Watch said Ethiopian troops are beating and strangling civilians, staging public executions and burning villages in Ogaden. It said the allegations were based on more than 100 eyewitness accounts.

Washington looks to Ethiopia for help in the fight against Islamic extremists in East Africa, where al-Qaida has claimed responsibility for several attacks, including the 1998 bombings of the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania that killed 225 people. Ethiopia is helping the U.N.-backed government in neighboring Somalia against Muslim insurgents.

“The silence of the U.S. government is not a silence based on ignorance,” said Peter Bouckaert, the emergencies director at Human Rights Watch. “They are ignoring the information available to them.”

Ethnic Somalis have been fighting for more than a decade seeking greater autonomy in the desolate Ogaden, which is being explored for oil and gas. Ethiopian forces stepped up operations after rebels attacked a Chinese-run oil exploration field in April 2007, killing 74 people.

“The Ethiopian army’s answer to the rebels has been to viciously attack civilians in the Ogaden,” said Georgette Gagnon, Africa director for Human Rights Watch.

The group also said the rebel Ogaden National Liberation Front has violated humanitarian law by conducting the oil attack and by setting land mines along roads. Ethiopia accuses the rebels of being financed by its archenemy, Eritrea.

Gagnon chided Ethiopia’s leading donors, including the United States, Britain and the European Union, accusing them of ignoring what is happening in Ogaden.

“These widespread and systematic atrocities amount to crimes against humanity,” she said. “Yet Ethiopia’s major donors, Washington, London and Brussels, seem to be maintaining a conspiracy of silence around the crimes.” Gagnon said Western governments and institutions give at least $2 billion in aid to Ethiopia every year.

“Influential states use many excuses, such as lack of information and strategic priorities, to downplay the grave human rights concerns in Somali Region,” she said. “But crimes against humanity can’t be swept under the carpet.”

The US provides some $500 million in military to Ethiopia. This money surely contributes to the Ogaden scorched earth campaign, but it is mainly to be used for the occupation of Somalia by Ethiopian troops.

Complain all you want about China’s complicity in Darfur. Changing Beijing and and Khartoum’s minds isn’t going to be easy. However, America is the China of the Horn, and we can most definitely stop the Ethiopians by withholding aid. Dead Ogaden children are no less tragic than Darfuri children, and this is a case where you, the American taxpayer, is footing the bill.

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Former NYT Baghdad reporter Dexter Filkins, whose million dollar advance book The Forever War (Knopf) comes out in Sept (and has been optioned by Tom Cruise), weighs in on Patrick Cockburn’s new bio of war criminal Moqtada al Sadr for TNR today.

The Wild Card
Dexter Filkins, The New Republic Published: Wednesday, June 11, 2008

Muqtada: Muqtada Al-Sadr, the Shia Revival, and the Struggle for Iraq

By Patrick Cockburn

(Scribner, 227 pp., $24)

To feel the power of Muqtada al-Sadr, the young Shiite cleric and tormentor of the Americans in Iraq, all you needed to do, in the years after the invasion, was go to the Mohsin Mosque in eastern Baghdad. There, spread in the street for a half a mile, as many as fifteen thousand young men would stand assembled, prayer mats in hand, waiting for the service to begin. The scene was safe: Mahdi Army gunmen searched the cars and the supplicants for bombs. There were no American soldiers in sight. And then, as the thousands fell to their knees, an imam would exit the mosque, climb onto a raised wooden platform, and signal the beginning of prayer. As he began, the crowd started to chant.

May God speed his appearance!
May God curse his enemies!
May God make his son triumphant!
Muqtada!
Muqtada!
Muqtada!

The “his” in the first three chants referred to the Mahdi–the messiah of Shia Islam–and the last three lines established a momentous equivalence between this redeemer and Muqtada al-Sadr. But Muqtada never showed his face; he almost never does.

(more…)

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Photos, Zack Baddor and John Moore

Story of the day: America sucks. The Guardian breaks news that extraordinary rendition continues as US policy:

The analysis, due to be published this year by the human rights organisation Reprieve, also claims there have been more than 200 new cases of rendition since 2006, when President George Bush declared that the practice had stopped.

It is the use of ships to detain prisoners, however, that is raising fresh concern and demands for inquiries in Britain and the US.

According to research carried out by Reprieve, the US may have used as many as 17 ships as “floating prisons” since 2001. Detainees are interrogated aboard the vessels and then rendered to other, often undisclosed, locations, it is claimed.

The Reprieve report focuses on the Horn of Africa, the War on Terror’s least newsworthy front. There, our ally Ethiopia has been propped up by $500 million US aid to occupy Somalia, in order to keep Islamists from power. But Ethiopia is under dictatorship. And its government is waging a scorched earth war against its own people people in Ogaden, making the US partners in ethnic cleansing, or the China of the Horn. Now comes word that we’re also running illegal prison ships. State sanctioned piracy, sweet!:

Reprieve will raise particular concerns over the activities of the USS Ashland and the time it spent off Somalia in early 2007 conducting maritime security operations in an effort to capture al-Qaida terrorists.

At this time many people were abducted by Somali, Kenyan and Ethiopian forces in a systematic operation involving regular interrogations by individuals believed to be members of the FBI and CIA. Ultimately more than 100 individuals were “disappeared” to prisons in locations including Kenya, Somalia, Ethiopia, Djibouti and Guantánamo Bay.

A shocking number of people have been held in illegal detention since 2001:

“By its own admission, the US government is currently detaining at least 26,000 people without trial in secret prisons, and information suggests up to 80,000 have been ‘through the system’ since 2001. The US government must show a commitment to rights and basic humanity by immediately revealing who these people are, where they are, and what has been done to them.”

How do you repent after locking up without trial the population of a small city?

Another story today, from the Times, illustrates changes in the US prison system in Iraq. It still doesn’t sound like swift justice, or even justice for that matter, but things are improving in Iraq. Still:

Criticism also remains high that the American military detains too many people, deprives them of due process and holds them too long, even if innocent. Many are taken in only because they were near an insurgent attack.

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Gross! New pictures considered evidence against Warren Jeffs (puke) the fundamental polygamist Mormon leader have surfaced and wow! For all you pervs out there, they do not disappoint!

The Dallas Morning News is reporting that one of the girls in the pictures was twelve at the time. Keepin it old school! Keepin it Old Testament!

It would be so typical of me to mention how hypocritical our nation is for our finger pointing of womens issues within fundamentalist Islam when we obviously still have those same issues here, but that would super obvious and unnecessary.

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I don’t know about you, but I’m dying to time travel to 2013, when John McCain says that some of America’s biggest problems will magically have been solved, including Iraq (mostly anyway)! Education will be better, taxes will be fairer, Iran will no longer be pursuing nuclear weapons and North Korea will be getting rid of its, the “League of Democracies” will have managed to convince the government of Sudan to accept a multi-national peacekeeping force that puts a stop the genocide in Darfur (no word yet on whether the negotiations were held at the Hall of Justice), and America will no longer be dependent on foreign oil! Seriously, how sweet is future America? Here’s how sweet:

: We beat al-Qaeda and al-Qaeda in Iraq, and we killed or captured Osama bin Laden! We rock. I knew we’d get that son of a bitch sooner or later. We also managed to teach the Pakistanis those insurgency tactics that helped us pacify Iraq and Afghanistan, so now the militants in the tribal areas are on the run. Seriously, who saw this coming? I know I didn’t. I mean, John McCain gave a speech in July 2007 where he was talking about all the things he’d do as President, and he said that “These are not measures that will pay quick dividends. We must understand that we confront a lengthy struggle - a long war - that will not be won quickly or easily. But we will win it.” And win it he did, in just five years! He must have been joking later in that same speech when he said that “While our ultimate victory is not in doubt, the length and intensity of this struggle remain to be determined.” And I’m sure he didn’t mean that “We are in a long twilight struggle with radical Islamic extremism.”  Very sly John McCain…why didn’t you tell me it’d only take five years to accomplish all this, you kidder?

: Our economy, which was on the brink of recession in mid-2008, has just “experienced several years of robust economic growth.” We also cut the capital gains tax, corporate taxes, fixed the AMT, and enlarged tax breaks. How’d we afford this? Well, we managed to save money because Congress was way too afraid of John McCain’s veto power and stopped sending him any bills with earmarks in them, plus we saved a bunch of money when John McCain fixed social security and cut programs that “serve no important purpose” (like social security and medicare). Oh yeah, there’s also a flat tax. About time. Everyone knows that the rich pay way too much.

: The food crisis is over and prices for commodities and goods have leveled off! Thanks, John McCain.

: Not only did John McCain make our country better, he also helped to improve the lives of people in some of the most impoverished countries in the world. Has there ever been a better President?

: Test scores and graduation rates are rising, while obesity is down! John McCain made us smarter and slimmer. Oh yeah, everyone some people have health care!

You like? There’s lots more where that came from in his speech. If you want the 30-second version, check out the .

John McCain: the number one pick in fantasy leagues around the country this year.

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(Badr 2 the Bone)
It’s a shame the Speaker of the House is a moron. Nancy Pelosi has been a less effective majority leader than Newt Ginrgrich—if that’s possible. And she seems to know as much about Iraq as John McCain. Today Politico runs a story where Pelosi threatens Petreaus with nonsense:

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) warned Army Gen. David Petraeus and Ambassador Ryan Crocker on Thursday not to “put a shine on recent events” in Iraq when they testify before Congress next week. “I hope we don’t hear any glorification of what happened in Basra,” said Pelosi, referring to a recent military offensive against Shiite militants in the city led by the Iraqi government and supported by U.S. forces.

Although powerful Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr agreed to a ceasefire after six days of fighting, Pelosi wondered why the U.S. was caught off guard by the offensive and questioned how the ceasefire was achieved, saying the terms were “probably dictated from Iran.”

“We have to know the real ground truths of what is happening there, not put a shine on events because of a resolution that looks less violent when in fact it has been dictated by al-Sadr, who can grant or withhold that call for violence,” Pelosi said.

What does that even mean, Nancy? What exactly was dictated from Iran? Maliki’s Sciri-Dawa governing coalition has more Iranian ties than Sadr. And today’s WaPost says:

Sadr apparently hopes to bolster his credentials as an Iraqi nationalist.

There’s no evidence Sadr’s 9-point truce had anything to do with Iran. In fact, Maliki is arguably more of an Iranian puppet than Sadr. During last week’s fighting, Maliki merged the Badr Brigade, Sciri’s Iranian trained militia, with the Iraqi Army.

Again, who is taking orders from Iran? I can’t find a full copy of Pelosi’s speech, but from this reading it seems she’s just throwing the I(ran)-word out there for no reason. I agree that Petreaus ought not try and spin Basra as anything but a victory for Sadr. But the Dems need to back their questions and criticism with solid rhetoric. Don’t just throw Iran into a sentence sans context. All it does is make you sound dumb.

Ladies and gentlmen, meet your new Iraqi National Army:

What is the Badr Organization?
It is the Iranian-trained wing of the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI), the largest Shiite party in Iraq. During the U.S.-led occupation government’s crackdown on militia groups in 2003, the 10,000-strong militia changed its name from the Badr Brigade to the Badr Organization of Reconstruction and Development and pledged to disarm. The group, however, has reportedly remained armed, and today operates mainly in Shiite-controlled southern Iraq, where a number of regional governments are dominated by SCIRI representatives. One of Badr’s recent offshoots is a feared, elite commando unit linked to the Iraqi Interior Ministry called the Wolf Brigade. Sunni leaders have recently accused the Badr Organization of revenge killings against Sunni clerics and unlawful kidnappings.

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It seems the Horn and, in particular, Somalia, are always “on the brink”. But suffering from years of war, famine, and the complete absence of any type of government, it’s no wonder Somalia is constantly in a fragile state, and one of the most — if not the most — dangerous places in the world for aid workers, foreign or otherwise.

The NY Times ran an amazing story this weekend on the imminent collapse of the Somali “government” (or Transition Federal Government that the US and its Ethiopian proxies installed after the December invasion) based on a number of factors that are identical to the ones preceding the country’s ravaging famine in the 1990s: war, drought, displacement, and skyrocketing food prices. Government troops and Islamist forces are clashing on the streets over grain — a commodity that has, along with rice and flour, become rare worldwide — while Jeffrey Gettleman reports that:

“The Islamists have been gaining recruits, overrunning towns and becoming bolder… By its own admission, the Transitional Federal Government of Somalia is on life support.”

In some of the best lines of the articles, Gettlemen says that the government, as illegitimate as it may be (those are my words), is currently left with about “$18 million a year to run a state of nine million of the world’s neediest, most collectively traumatized people…And a failed state may be a generous term. In many ways, Somalia is not a state at all, but more a lawless space between its neighbors and the sea… Sometimes it seems that if anything binds this country together, it is scar tissue.”

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(Photographer Essan al Sundani has done incredible work from Basra. Here, an Iraqi commando holds a poster of Prime Minister Maliki.)

Many Iraqis favor a military coup. An Iraqi journalist says, “Going back to the dictatorship definitely would help,” and this view, Ferguson writes, “is surprisingly popular among educated, secular Iraqis.”

—-Barry Gewen in Sunday’s NYT Book Review on the future of Iraq

Why did Iraqi PM Nouri al Maliki gamble his power and legacy by invading Basra and pissing off every poor Shiite? That’s the question of the day.

To recap, last week 30,000 Iraqi Army and police forces—mostly Shia—assaulted Iraq’s second biggest city, Basra, home to 2.7 million—again, majority Shia. As Iraq’s main southern port, Basra ships 1.5 million barrels of oil a day. In a country that ships just over 2 million barrels, the city’s economic importance cannot be underestimated: Control of Basra equals control of Iraq.

Unfortunately, the US let the British rule Basra for the past 5 years. The Limeys took a hands-off approach. When they “formally” handed the city back to Iraq in December, Basra was anarchic and controlled by militias. Three Shiite political parties (and their militias)—Dawa-Sciri, Fadhila, Sadr/Mahdi Army—carved the city into fiefs. All three groups have ties to Iran, though Sciri and Dawa, who also back Iraqi PM Maliki, are closer to Tehran. Maliki ordered the invasion in order to wrest control of Basra from the Sadrists before Iraq’s October provincial elections. But Maliki severely underestimated the government’s power and Sadr’s popularity.

If the Iraq war has one running theme, it’s been underestimating Moqtada al Sadr. In 2003-4 the US ignored Sadr’s rise only to have to fight his militia for six months. After which Sadr’s power only increased: In 2005 Sadr’s party won the most seats in Parliament. It happened again in 2006, when a Shiite shrine in Samarra was bombed. In the aftermath, to the baffled inaction of US forces, the Mahdi Army unleashed civil war upon Sunni, killing around 100 a day until the Surge began last summer and Sadr declared a cease-fire.

Make no mistake about it, Moqtada al Sadr is the most powerful man in Iraq. When Basra was invaded early last week, Maliki claimed “no surrender” until victory. But by Saturday the Mahdi still controlled most of the city and fighting had spread to every city in Southern Iraq. Over 500 had been killed. (488 in Basra alone; another 150 in Baghdad! Making last week among the war’s most violent spans.)

Meanwhile, Sadr spent last week holed up in Qum, the Iranian holy city. Defying Maliki, two Iraqi legislators went to Iran to meet Sadr: “Ali al Adeeb, a member of Prime Minister Nouri al Maliki’s Dawa party, and Hadi al Ameri, the head of the Badr Organization, the military wing of the Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq, with two aims, lawmakers said: to ask Sadr to stand down his militia and to ask Iranian officials to stop supplying weapons to Shiite militants in Iraq,” McClatchy reports. (These talks were mediated by Iran’s Revolutionary Guard—a US deemed terrorist organization.)

Yes, the leader of the Maliki’s party and the head of his militia-backer defied the Prime Minister and negotiated with enemy. How much power does Maliki have if he can’t control his two closest allies? Now, by tentatively agreeing to Sadr’s terms, Maliki is admitting control of Iraq lies in the Mahdi Army’s hands.

So Sadr ends the week-long siege with more power than ever before, with a clear ability to both beat the Iraqi government in battle and generate popular support. Long since Iraq’s kingmaker, Sadr’s accidental coup now firmly places him in de facto control of Baghdad’s security and oil-rich Basra.

I wonder if an officially Sadr-ruled Iraq would be acceptable US policy? The guy is a murderous thug, but Maliki proved he’s no better this week. And Sadr is foremost an Iraqi nationalist. His support comes from poor Shiites who largely distrust Iran.

Nonetheless, whether the US likes it or not, Sadr’s path from de facto to de jure rule of Iraq will likely happen democratically over time. Unless the US upends democracy in Iraq, that is.

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(Mahdi Army. Reuters.)

Bad, bad, bad—Iraq is in a state of all out war. After a week of mostly intra-Shiite fighting between Iraqi government forces and Moqtada al Sadr’s Mahdi Army, America fully engaged in the battle today, launching a ground assault into Sadr City and mounting an air campaign over Basra.

To express the panoramic scope of the violence, here’s a lowlight reel from today’s major news reports.

In Baghdad, the Mahdi Army took over neighbourhood after neighbourhood, some amid heavy fighting, others without firing a shot.

Four U.S. Stryker armored vehicles were seen in Sadr City by a Washington Post correspondent, one of them engaging Mahdi Army militiamen with heavy fire. The din of American weapons, along with the Mahdi Army’s AK-47s and rocket-propelled grenades, was heard through much of the day. U.S. helicopters and drones buzzed overhead. American forces were involved in approximately a dozen firefights on Thursday in Baghdad alone, with fighting spread across six neighborhoods. In all, U.S. troops killed 42 in Thursday’s Baghdad fighting, a sign of their growing engagement in the Iraqi-designed offensive.

Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri Maliki today extended a deadline for militiamen battling government troops to disarm until April 8th. A spokesman for Iraq’s Interior Ministry, Abdul Kareem Khalaf, said today that “no one handed over his weapons” after Maliki issued his first order Wednesday. In Basra, which remained under curfew, gunmen killed the manager of one of the city’s hospitals yesterday.

A U.S. helicopter fired a Hellfire missile during fighting in a Shiite militia stronghold of Baghdad Friday, killing at least four people as deadly clashes broke out in Iraq’s oil-rich south for the fourth day. American jets also dropped bombs overnight in Basra. At least 22 people — six civilians, four Iraqi security forces and 12 militants — were killed Friday in fierce fighting in the southern cities of Mahmoudiya, Nasiriyah and Kut.

An Iraqi employee of The New York Times, driving on the main road between Basra and Nasiriya, observed numerous civilian cars with coffins strapped to the roofs, apparently heading to Shiite cemeteries to the north. Violence also broke out in Kut, Hilla, Amara, Kirkuk, Baquba and other cities.

An irony Bush may or may not comprehend is that he has put himself in the position of backing rivals of Sadr - Maliki’s Dawa party and the Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq - that are intimately entwined with the Iranian regime. They would benefit enormously by taking over completely the lucrative port and oil pipelines of Basra and crushing the Mahdi Army before next October’s provincial elections.

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(Old bad-asses from Sadr City protest US/Iraqi aggression. Pics by AHMAD AL-RUBAY and Wathiq Khuzaie.)

Iraq’s street beef moved to day two and more of the same: all out war in Basra, Iraq’s second largest city (2.7 million), involving some 30,000 Iraqi troops backed by US air power fighting Shiite militias; siege in Baghdad’s Sadr City, the nation’s largest slum (2 million); mortar and rocket attacks on the Green Zone, the walled-off seat of US and Iraqi power; clashes between the US and Shiites in Hilla and Kut; and protests by Moqtada al Sadr’s supporters. Not good.

Casualties in Basra: 44 killed and 225 wounded. In Sadr City, 20 were killed and 115 injured in overnight beef.

Michael Kamber snuck into Baghdad’s deadliest war zone:

Sadr City, the Baghdad neighborhood that is the center of the Mahdi Army’s power, was sealed off by a cordon of Iraqi troops and what appeared to be several American units.

A New York Times photographer who was able to get through the cordon found more layers of checkpoints, each one run by about two dozen heavily armed Mahdi Army fighters clad in tracksuits and T-shirts. Tires burned in the city center, gunfire echoed against shuttered stores, and teams of fighters in pickup trucks moved about brandishing machine guns, sniper rifles and rocket-propelled grenade launchers.

“We are doing this in reaction to the unprovoked military operations against the Mahdi Army,” said a Mahdi commander who identified himself as Abu Mortada. “The U.S., the Iraqi government and Sciri are against us,” he said, referring to a rival Shiite group whose name has changed several times, and is now known as the Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq, which has an armed wing called the Badr Organization. “They are trying to finish us,” the commander said. “They want power for the Iraqi government and Sciri.”

Meanwhile, Time’s Bobby Ghosh reports this is Iraqi PM “Maliki’s Moment of Truth”:

Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki arrived in Basra on Monday, accompanied by his ministers for defense and the interior, to personally supervise the operation. For Maliki, this is a crucial show of force. For much of the past three years, the Iraqi government has had little influence over Basra. As British troops have steadily withdrawn from the city, it has fallen into the control of three major Shi’ite militias — Moqtada al’Sadr’s Mahdi Army, the Iran-backed Badr Brigades and a local group associated with the Fadila Party. The three have recently fought turf battles over large swaths of the city, claiming hundreds of lives.

Maliki has given Basra’s militias 3 days to lay down arms. Most likely, this means a backdoor truce will come about by the weekend.

Others say this is but a sign of things to come. LAT:

Analysts warned that the fighting could spread as the Shiite factions use their influence within Iraq’s security forces to weaken their rivals ahead of the Oct. 1 elections.

Tuesday’s violence “looks like a preview of what will happen as we approach provincial elections in the fall,” said Joost Hiltermann, Middle East director for the International Crisis Group. Hiltermann said Maliki’s government was right to try to assert control in Basra. But he said he was not “overly optimistic” that it would succeed — “partly because the central government and its security forces aren’t very strong, and partly because this is really a fairly transparent partisan effort by the Supreme Council dressed in government uniforms to fight the Sadrists and Fadila.”

Here’s a briefing on Iraq’s main Shiite players.

(Day 2 of Basra’s Cool Guy Convention: Mahdi Army takes aim. Pics by ESSAM AL-SUDANI)

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Pakistan’s National Assembly elected its first female speaker ever today, as Fehmida Mirza, a Bhutto loyalist, got the nod. I’m sure that the Pakistani Taliban will be thrilled. The three-time parliamentarian won 249 of the 324 votes cast, and will lead the lower house. While this is good news in many ways, the new ruling coalition has a lot of work to do.

(more…)

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(Yesterday, Wathiq Kuzzai, displaced child.)
Today marks five years of war in Iraq. Here’s a look at what went wrong.

Four years ago I was in Baghdad. The city was in anarchy but of the free-market variety. Violence was sporadic. Hope still a viable concept. February 2004 was the most peaceful month of the last five years. But the rule of L Paul “Jerry” Bremer III and his Coalition Provisional Authority crashed so quickly—CPA Iraq may end up holding the land speed record for national collapse.

March 2004: foreigners could still walk the streets without fear of kidnapping. After dark there were dinner parties, Chinese karaoke, wood oven pizzerias, discos even. Yes, there were bombings and a small Sunni insurgency. Overall, however, the Iraqis my pal Jeff and I met (and we were on the streets as much as any foreigners in Baghdad) still radiated optimism for the future.

But as March moved forward, historical fissures combined with terrible CPA policies (disbanding the Army, ignoring the rise of Moqtada Al Sadr’s Mahdi Milita) in destroying any hope for a democratic Iraq. It happened so fast. March kicked off with a twin bombing in Karbala that killed 180. March 16th saw the first night attack in central Baghdad—a 1000 pd bomb at a hotel in cosmopolitan and foreigner heavy Karrada. A few days later, the CPA raided Moqtada Sadr’s office after he suggested opening a Hezzbollah branch in Sadr City. Many says the order came from DC via Ariel Sharon in Israel, a “No Hezz in Iraq” type of thing.

So, in the last week of March, Sadr’s followers—the Mahdi Militia—took to Baghdad’s streets. On the same day that 10,000 Shiites protested at the gates of the Green Zone, four Blackwater mercenaries were ambushed in Fallujah, dragged from their SUV Somalia style. That night I was in the Republican Palace, a gaudy neo-Islamic uber-bunker—the former seat of Saddam’s Baath Part, then the CPA’s HQ, and now the US Embassy. I could hear the Sadr’s followers chanting as I watched the Blackwater guys’ charred, broken corpses dangle from a green bridge on TV. A high-level diplomat (FS-1) was among those in the room, a large command center looking office ominoisly dubbed “Baghdad Central.”

“Civil war is closer than ever,” the conversation went. “These Shiites could take this place in a few hours. We couldn’t stop 10,000 men. It would be choppers on the roof,” ala Saigon. Considering three weeks earlier I’d sat in that very room for a meeting on “civil society taking root in Iraq,” a civil war’s sudden arrival was the shock of my young life.

(Blackwater hangs in Fallujah)

If March 2004 was the month the pot started bubbling, April 4th—Black Sunday as it was later known—was the day Iraq boiled over. Suddenly Iraq was engulfed in a two-front nation-wide uprising. To the west, the Sunnis in Fallujah, a city of 300,000, were fighting 10,000 US troops, who invaded to avenge the Blackwater slaughter. In Baghdad’s Sadr City slum and across Iraq’s Shia south, Sadr’s Mahd