- Iraq this weekend is a country out of control. Iyad
Allawi,
the interim Iraqi Prime Minister, meets Tony Blair today amid a crisis
over a British engineer kidnapped with two American colleagues, a spate
of suicide bombings and armed clashes from one end of the country to the
other.
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- Mr Allawi himself has full authority only within the
heavily fortified Green Zone in Baghdad. A few hundred yards away, the
Haifa Street district, a stronghold of the resistance, can be penetrated
only by US tanks and infantry backed by helicopters.
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- When the US and Britain as the occupying powers in Iraq
transferred sovereignty to an interim government led by Mr Allawi on 28
June, many Iraqis expressed hopes that security would improve. Instead
it has got worse. Last week suicide bombs ripped through the centre of
Baghdad. The number of attacks on US troops is increasing. Casualties from
American air strikes pour into the hospital in Fallujah, its floor awash
with blood.
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- The severity of the violence has increased, with some
300 people killed in the past week, but so has the geographical area in
which it is occurring. Last week there was fighting from Tal Afar, a city
in the north bordering Turkey, to Basra in the far south, on the border
with Kuwait.
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- The extent to which the situation is deteriorating may
not be obvious to the Iraqi government itself, or to its American allies.
Mr Allawi lives under the protection of US security men. He and his
ministers
are under constant threat of assassination, while their officials
frequently
have to take cover from mortar bombs lobbed into the Green Zone (now
officially
called the international zone). The US embassy, equally isolated, is
spending
$200m (£110m ) fortifying and refurbishing Saddam Hussein's old
Republican
Palace to house some of its 900 staff members.
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- The US public is just as ignorant of the surging violence
in Iraq because, ironically, it is now too dangerous for American
television
crews and print journalists to cover it. In the battle for Najaf in August,
US correspondents with the dateline "Najaf" on their copy, or
reports to camera, were often "embedded" with US forces several
miles away from the fighting. The result? Network news in the US gives
the quite false impression that Iraq is a crisis under control.
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- Security for foreigners - including the foreign media
- has got even worse since Najaf. Kidnappers are better organised and more
brazen, as the expert seizure of the British hostage, Kenneth Bigley, and
his two US colleagues demonstrates. They were snatched from their villa
in the affluent al-Mansur district of Baghdad, while two Italian women
aid workers, who are still missing, were kidnapped by a large gang in their
office in the centre of Baghdad in the middle of the day. Even Iraqi
journalists
with local contacts travel with trepidation down the main road south from
Baghdad through the resistance bastion of Mahmoudiyah, or west through
Fallujah and Ramadi.
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- Mr Allawi, an avuncular-looking man resident in London
for 30 years, always had a difficult task. He has almost no political base
in Iraq and is therefore reliant on the 138,000-strong US military. His
first concern should have been to make friends and try to expand the
constituencies
supporting him, but his dilemma is that the one of the few things that
unites Iraqis outside Kurdistan is dislike of the US military occupation
- polls in June showed it had the support of 2 per cent of the Arab
population.
Mr Allawi needs to distance himself from the Americans, but he cannot,
because he depends on them.
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- To his credit, he did try at first to chart a more
independent
course. In early July he mooted an amnesty for insurgents who had not
launched
suicide bombs against Iraqis, but had killed American troops. US officials
were aghast, since this was a tacit admission that attacks on American
soldiers are popular.
-
- Mr Allawi also tried at first to conciliate the Shia
militant Muqtada al-Sadr and his followers, but by August he was locked
into a battle in Najaf with Mr Sadr's Mehdi Army. The Prime Minister wanted
to show that he was not going to be pushed around, but some 400 Iraqis
were killed and 2,500 wounded, according to the Health Ministry in Baghdad.
Worse, the fighting was almost all done by the US army and air force, and
although the Mehdi Army finally withdrew, the battle failed to eliminate
Mr Sadr or his militiamen as a powerful force in Iraqi politics.
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- Mr Allawi has made conciliatory statements in recent
weeks, but as he speaks the US launches air strikes against
"terrorist"
targets in Fallujah, Ramadi and Sadr City. Against American claims that
these are carried out with pinpoint accuracy, Iraqis see television footage
of children, swathed in bandages, being carried into hospitals by weeping
parents. In Haifa Street last week, US helicopters fired twice into a
crowd,
killing 13 people, while claiming that they had come under anti-aircraft
fire. But footage of the moments before the rockets struck, killing the
al-Arabiyah satellite television correspondent, proved that there was no
gunfire.
-
- The police and the Iraqi army are being rapidly built
up - its would-be recruits are frequently slaughtered as they queue for
jobs - but these are not combat troops. Mr Allawi needs some kind of
accommodation
with Iraqi militants, but he cannot do so, because Washington wants to
persuade US voters before the presidential election in November that it
has the crisis in Iraq under control. This rules out compromising or
negotiating
with what the White House claims are a tiny minority of militants - the
battered remnants of Saddam Hussein's regime or foreign fighters linked
to al-Qa'ida.
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- Given such oversimplification, the US and the interim
government cannot avoid alienating a country fragmented by ethnic,
religious,
social and political divisions. The most important communities are the
Shia Arabs (60 per cent of the population), the Sunni Arabs (18 per cent)
and the Kurds (18 per cent). But Iraqis also live in a world of strong
family, clan, tribal and regional loyalties, providing a multitude of
friction
points.
-
- This month, for instance, US and Iraqi government forces
have besieged Tal Afar, a city west of Mosul with a population of 250,000.
In two weeks some 50 people have been killed. The US claims it is battling
foreign fighters from nearby Syria, former Baath party members and Sunni
Arab guerrillas. But Tal Afar is inhabited 90 per cent by Turkmens, an
Iraqi minority who are also Shias. They are in conflict with Kurds who
inhabit this part of Mosul province, and the Turkmens say the Kurds, close
allies of the Americans in the war last year, have manipulated the US army
into an assault on their ethnic rivals.
-
- A map cannot show the exact distribution of power in
present-day Iraq because insurgents, the US military, the Iraqi police
and the Iraqi army may all be present at the same time. One Iraqi friend
who had a minor traffic accident in central Baghdad last week was horrified
to discover that the vehicle he had run into was filled with fighters
clutching
machine guns and rocket-propelled grenade launchers.
-
- Iraqis are desperate for security, but the country is
getting more dangerous by the day, and Mr Allawi is blamed. American
officials,
however, are more interested in putting an optimistic gloss on what is
happening in the run-up to the presidential election. "We never
thought
it would be easy," said US Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage
last week. "We do expect an increase in violence as we approach the
January elections."
-
- Mr Armitage could hardly have missed the point more
comprehensively.
Not only would Mr Allawi lose any kind of vote today, elections acceptable
to most Iraqis cannot be held in a country so divided and racked by
violence.
The struggle for power in Iraq is only beginning - and it will be fought
with guns, not at the ballot box.
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- ©2004 Independent Digital (UK) Ltd. All rights
reserved
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