Iraq’s New Death Squad

Friday, June 05, 2009 - The Nation

Just after the U.S. took Baghdad in 2003, American Special Forces began training young Iraqis with no prior military experience in the desert of Jordan. The resulting brigade—the Iraq Special Operations
Forces—was a deadly, elite, covert unit, fully fitted with American equipment, that would operate for years under U.S. command and be
unaccountable to Iraqi ministries and the normal political process. It’s probably the largest special forces outfit ever built by the US and it is free of many of the controls that most governments employ to rein in such lethal forces.

Iraqis call them the “Dirty Brigade.” Many charge that they are an elite, private force for the Americans and Prime Minister Nouri Al-Maliki and accuse them of engaging in collective punishment. One American Lt. Colonel I talked to called them “shit hot.”

I broke this story in The Nation magazine. You can read the story at The Nation, or click “read full entry” below.

Research support was provided by New America Media, the Nation Institute, and the Center for Investigative Reporting.

Muslims in Syria Like Obama’s Tone but Want New Policy

Thursday, June 04, 2009 - New America Media

DAMASCUS, Syria--Muslim shopkeepers, activists, and analysts in Damascus who watched Obama’s speech Thursday appreciated what they saw as a clear change in the U.S. attitude toward the Muslim world. But most are skeptical, saying they want a fundamental shift in American policy, not just a shift in rhetoric.

Al-Qaeda Violence Rising as US Stretegy Unravels in Iraq

Monday, May 11, 2009 - New America Media

The U.S. military’s temporary strategy to use Sunni militias to bring stability to Iraq is starting to unravel, causing more violence than the country has seen in seven months.

Government statistics show that 355 Iraqis were killed in April, 290 of whom were civilians. Almost all of those deaths were caused by suicide bombings, and all of the attacks targeting civilians seemed to be aimed at the Shia. Eighty Iranian pilgrims were also slain.

Three of the April attacks killed more than 50 people each--a third of all attacks of this size in Iraq for all of 2008.

The steady increase in violence can be attributed in large part to the fact that the Iraqi government has been increasingly targeting the Sahwa, or Awakening Councils, often with the support of U.S. forces. As a result, many Sunni fighters credited for bringing down sectarian violence in Baghdad have been leaving their posts, making room for al Qaeda to resume its operations in the Iraqi capital.

Violence in Iraq is not News

Saturday, February 21, 2009

At the front desk, the hotel manager tells me to settle up my tab, it’s been a long time and the bill is rising. “Tomorrow,” I tell him. He places his hand on his chest and bows his head. “No problem. Anytime,” he says in typical Iraqi politeness. I go to my room, pull out the chair at my desk to settle in for a night in front of my computer.

Boom! A blast hammers the night. A woman’s scream tails it. I grab my camera and rush outside. I run past people walking toward the exit of our guarded compound. Did someone blow themselves up at the entrance? This place hadn’t been a target since 2005, when someone blew up their car outside. I smell sulphur in the air, but I’m not sure where it’s coming from. People are standing at the entrance, around the AK-47 toting Iraqi security contractors hired by one of the news outlets based in the hotel next to mine. No one knows what happened. Some look down the street, others shrug their shoulders and walk back to their hotels.

I walk down the street with a colleague. People are sitting outside a restaurant on plastic tables, eating with their families. Men are carving chicken shwarma off giant skewers. A couple is chatting in thefront seat of a parked car. A boy whizzes past on a bicycle. “Where did the blast come from?” I ask a man at a kiosk. He tells me he doesn’t know. He is clearly disinterested.

We go back to the hotel and go onto the roof to look for signs of emergency in the surrounds. I see a flame in the distance, but quickly realize it’s coming from the smoke stack of an oil refinery. The nighttime air is dusty and we debate whether we see smoke rising from another direction. “Whenever explosions happen the sound always seems like it’s coming from the opposite direction,” a hotel attendant tells us.

I go back to my room and turn on the TV. I flip through the news channels. Iraq has over a dozen news channels. I find nothing. I turn on my computer and type “Iraq” in the search engine on my web browser’s toolbar. I scan the page for words like “blast,” “killed,” and “Karada,” the Shia-dominated neighborhood I am living in. Still nothing. Almost everything is about the trial of the man that threw his shoes at George Bush.

I think back to a conversation I had with an Iraqi journalist who lives in South Baghdad. He told me about the fights that would happen between his Sunni neighborhood and its Shia neighbors in 2006. Whenever the militias would near, he told me, everyone would get on their roofs and fire in all directions with AK-47s to prevent them from getting too close. Another time militias fired mortars into his neighborhood throughout the night from miles away. He said he could count ten seconds between their firing and landing. These incidents, like so many in the frenzy of violence in 2006, never made the news.

Apparently, the news hangover of violence in Iraq still persists. The distant firefights I hear, though occasional, are almost never reported. Killing has dropped sharply in the last year, but there is still a background of violence, the occasional distant booms or cracks of gunfire. I still don’t know what happened with that blast last night. No body here seems terribly interested. Violence in Iraq isn’t news.

Friday Afternoon at the Shandabar

Monday, February 16, 2009

Hisham Mustafa lives for Habermas. In a corner of the Shandabar café, he is taken away by his love for the German philosopher. “I cannot say that I study him. Study is such a big word,” the literary critic says modestly, looking at me with gentle eyes through coke bottle glasses. “I simply try to understand him and apply his criticisms to Arabic literature.” He pauses to take a long puff on his water pipe, then waxes on: “You know? Things are always changing. Language is alive. Religion gives us a view of the past. Nothing is static. Nothing is absolute. This is what I have taken from Habermas.”

It’s Friday, the Muslim day of rest and the day of gathering at the Shandabar café. During my visit, the only beverage being served is lemon tea, a distinctly Iraqi drink. Plumes of sweet nargilla smoke twirl into the air and pairs of elderly men are enraptured in animated conversations. The yellow brick walls are covered in ancient black and white portraits of old Iraqi sheikhs and prints of colorful landscapes. The café’s patrons take pride in the fact that backgammon and cards aren’t allowed. This isn’t a place for idlers. It’s a place of culture.

Outside, people pick through stacks of books on Mutanabi Street. Great works of Arabic literature stand next to collections of Picasso, military books from Saddam, and tattered copies of Stephen King novels and Mark Bowden’s Black Hawk Down. At one end of the pedestrian avenue, an Iraqi hummer guards the entrance. At the other end, people sit on benches along the east bank of the Tigris. Here, the oldest part of Baghdad is just a replica of what it used to be. Blown to rubble throughout the war, it was recently rebuilt in its image. Today it’s bustling.

The fact that we had to wait to find a seat in the Shandabar café is symbolic of the fact that Iraq’s intellectual scene is slowly coming back to life. The doors of the 92-year-old café—originally Baghdad’s first steam-powered printing press—reopened a month and a half ago. It was rebuilt a year and a half after being devastated by a suicide bomber in a bomb-laden truck. Thirty people were killed. Portraits of its old managers hang on the wall under a sign that reads “café of martyrs.”

Hisham says Iraq is undergoing a new, slow renascence, coming to life after intense restriction on intellectual freedom by Saddam and violent repercussions by militias after the American invasion. He calls the new government a tribal one, where politicians answer to their kin and religious sects before anyone else. Several of his friends are bedridden, but he is clearly excited with the fact that he and his colleagues to sit together in one place. They even publish a philosophical newspaper. Before I get up to go, he asks if I would like to attend one of their twice-weekly discussions next week. They will be discussing Hegel.