Iraqi Premier Gives Sobering Account of Insurgency nytimes.com
[ Meanwhile, on the conventional reality front, Allawi apparently had a somewhat different take on the "rosy" situation in Iraq after he got away from W's handlers and the other architects of the happy talk propaganda campaign du jour. Or maybe the liberal press conspiracy managed to brainwash him on the way home. Who can say? A clip:
Dr. Allawi, who has tried hard to cast himself as a tough and confident leader since taking office in late June, asserted that general elections would go ahead in January as planned, but acknowledged that there were significant obstacles standing in the way of security and reconstruction. The nascent police force is underequipped and lacks the respect needed from the public to quell the insurgency, he said, and foreign businessmen have told him they fear investing in Iraq because of the rampant violence here.
The tone of the speech was a sharp departure from the more optimistic assessment Dr. Allawi gave to the American public on his visit to the United States last month. At his stop in Washington, Dr. Allawi made several sweeping assertions about the security situation in Iraq, including that the only truly unsafe place in Iraq was the downtown area of Falluja, the largest insurgent stronghold in Iraq, and that only 3 of 18 provinces had "pockets of terrorists." Dr. Allawi did not directly contradict those statements in his appearance today, but his words reflected a darker evaluation of the state of the war.
"It is true that the security situation in our country is the first concern for you, and maybe for your inquiries, too," Dr. Allawi said to the roughly 130-member national assembly, which asked him combative questions following his speech in the nearly hourlong session. "It is true that it is a source of worry for many people concerned about the future of Iraq and the process of democracy in Iraq."
The insurgents "are today a challenge to our will," he continued. "They are betting on our failure. Should we allow them to do that? Should we sit down and watch what they are doing and let them destabilize the country's security?"
Though Dr. Allawi joined President Bush last month in boasting of having 100,000 fully trained and equipped Iraqi policemen, soldiers and other security officials, he acknowledged today that there were difficulties in fielding an adequate security force.
"It's clear that since the handover, the capabilities are not complete and that the situation is very difficult now in respect to creating the forces and getting them ready to face the challenges," he said, adding that "the police force is not well equipped and is not respected enough to lay down its authority" without the backing of a strong army.
In full : ]
By EDWARD WONG
BAGHDAD, Iraq, Oct. 5 — In his first speech before the interim national assembly here, Prime Minister Ayad Allawi gave a sobering account today of the threat posed by the insurgency, saying the country's instability is a "source of worry for many people" and that the guerrillas represent "a challenge to our will."
Hours later, the American military said it had launched its second major offensive of the last week, sending 3,000 troops, some of them Iraqis, in a sweep across the Euphrates River south of Baghdad. Led by the 24th Marine Expeditionary Unit, the troops overran a suspected insurgent training camp and detained 30 suspects, the military said in a statement. The force also seized control of a bridge believed to be part of a corridor allowing insurgents to move between strongholds in central Iraq, the military said.
The push followed a much larger and bloodier weekend offensive in the insurgent-controlled city of Samarra, 60 miles north of Baghdad. American and Iraqi officials have been saying they intend to take back rebel territory this fall to lay the groundwork for general elections scheduled for January. The operation on Tuesday took place in northern Babil Province, a region that once served as a munitions production base for the old Iraqi Army and that has become a caldron of loosely knit insurgent cells.
Bisecting the area is a crucial north-south artery called the Highway of Death, so named because scores of people have been ambushed and killed in small market towns along its length by insurgents and bandits.
Dr. Allawi, who has tried hard to cast himself as a tough and confident leader since taking office in late June, asserted that general elections would go ahead in January as planned, but acknowledged that there were significant obstacles standing in the way of security and reconstruction. The nascent police force is underequipped and lacks the respect needed from the public to quell the insurgency, he said, and foreign businessmen have told him they fear investing in Iraq because of the rampant violence here.
The tone of the speech was a sharp departure from the more optimistic assessment Dr. Allawi gave to the American public on his visit to the United States last month. At his stop in Washington, Dr. Allawi made several sweeping assertions about the security situation in Iraq, including that the only truly unsafe place in Iraq was the downtown area of Falluja, the largest insurgent stronghold in Iraq, and that only 3 of 18 provinces had "pockets of terrorists." Dr. Allawi did not directly contradict those statements in his appearance today, but his words reflected a darker evaluation of the state of the war.
"It is true that the security situation in our country is the first concern for you, and maybe for your inquiries, too," Dr. Allawi said to the roughly 130-member national assembly, which asked him combative questions following his speech in the nearly hourlong session. "It is true that it is a source of worry for many people concerned about the future of Iraq and the process of democracy in Iraq."
The insurgents "are today a challenge to our will," he continued. "They are betting on our failure. Should we allow them to do that? Should we sit down and watch what they are doing and let them destabilize the country's security?"
Though Dr. Allawi joined President Bush last month in boasting of having 100,000 fully trained and equipped Iraqi policemen, soldiers and other security officials, he acknowledged today that there were difficulties in fielding an adequate security force.
"It's clear that since the handover, the capabilities are not complete and that the situation is very difficult now in respect to creating the forces and getting them ready to face the challenges," he said, adding that "the police force is not well equipped and is not respected enough to lay down its authority" without the backing of a strong army.
Dr. Allawi's speech, given inside the fortified government headquarters on the west bank of the Tigris River, comes at a crucial juncture for Iraq, as insurgents have stepped up a bloody campaign of car bombings and assassinations to cripple the interim government while American-led forces try to take back rebel territory.
At stake now are the general elections scheduled for January, which will depend on large voter turnout — even in virulently anti-American regions — to have any chance of appearing legitimate. In recent months, experts have voiced increasing doubts about the ability to hold such elections.
A nationwide poll of 3,500 Iraqis just completed by the Iraq Center for Research and Strategic Studies shows that the number of Iraqis who say they are "very likely" to vote in the elections has dropped to 67 percent, from 88 percent in June. About 25 percent say they will "probably" vote. The poll has a margin of error of 3.5 percent.
Violence continued flaring up across the country today. At noon, a car bomb exploded next to a military convoy in the northern city of Mosul, killing at least three civilians in a car behind the convoy, the American military said. Right after the explosion, insurgents ambushed the convoy with rocket-propelled grenades and small-arms fire. Four soldiers were wounded and taken to a military hospital in Mosul.
The police officials in Mosul said that they had discovered four headless bodies — a local woman and her family. The woman had been running a prostitution house and was apparently decapitated, along with her relatives, by a fundamentalist Islamic group, the officials said.
Several mortar blasts rocked Baghdad in the morning. One shell landed at a passport office in the center of the city, seriously wounding one person, the police said. The mortar had been fired from a vehicle driving along a highway.
Hospital officials in Sadr City, a vast slum in northeast Baghdad that is overwhelmingly hostile to the American occupation, said one person had been killed in an overnight airstrike by the Americans. For weeks, the military has been deploying an AC-130 gunship and fighter jets over the area to try to rout the Mahdi Army, a militia loyal to the firebrand Shiite cleric Moktada al-Sadr.
Dr. Allawi said at his appearance this afternoon that he had met earlier in the day with leaders in Sadr City and that the two sides were working to reach an agreement to end the presence of heavy arms in the area.
In the evening, he appeared on Iraqi television and said local sheikhs had agreed to allow police to patrol Sadr City. But a senior Sadr aide, Abdul Hadi Daraji, said in an interview that the Sadr organization did not agree with some of the conditions laid out by the government.
The airstrikes continued late into the night, with explosions and the jackhammer sound of the AC-130's cannons heard for miles around.
In his speech, Dr. Allawi said it was time to start supplying the new Iraqi Army with enough heavy weapons and armored vehicles to fight the insurgency, which is well armed with AK-47 rifles, rocket-propelled grenades, mortars and various types of artillery shells. To that end, Dr. Allawi said, he had begun discussions with neighboring Arab countries and with the leaders of Russia and Ukraine to help arm the Iraqi forces. "We need to build our military capacity and increase the number of people to face the challenges that we have," he said.
In May 2003, L. Paul Bremer, the top American administrator in Iraq at the time, ordered the disbanding of the Iraqi Army, a move widely seen now as a critical mistake that helped create the current power vacuum. He reversed that decision last spring, and the American military is now working feverishly to train and equip enough Iraqis to take over policing duties from the 140,000 American troops here. Mr. Allawi said that building the leadership structure and chain of command "needs more work."
In the question-and-answer session, Towfeek al-Yassari, the head of the national assembly's security committee, criticized Mr. Allawi for the weakness of the Iraqi forces, saying, with considerable understatement, that "this might be one of the reasons for the security violations."
An Iraqi employee of The New York Times contributed reporting from Mosul for this article. |
