A good month for the GOP......how do you plan to celebrate?
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400 and counting: IRAQ’s Grim death toll for may
By Trevor Royle, Diplomatic Editor
“WE don’t do body counts,” was the infamous retort by US general Tommy Franks when he was asked about Iraqi civilian deaths. To date nobody knows the exact figure, but one thing is clear: it is being added to with a relentlessness which is enraging Iraqis and worrying coalition commanders.
Yesterday eight Iraqis – including five civilians – were shot dead by US forces in Mosul, four were killed by a suicide car bomb attack in central Baghdad, and in the west of the city a hand grenade attack left one policeman dead. In the middle of the day gunmen assassinated senior foreign ministry official Jassim al-Muhammadawy in Baghdad.
The US military also revealed yesterday that 100 insurgents and nine American troops have been killed in the past week in an operation near the Syrian border, bringing the total number of US troops killed since the conflict began to 1614. The brunt of the killings, however, has been felt by Iraqi civilians as the country is put on the rack by a sharp increase in the levels of attacks by insurgents.
In May alone, more than 400 Iraqis have been killed, and the recent bloodshed shows no sign of receding. One scene encapsulated the sense of frustration and anger felt by the people of Iraq as they helplessly watch the spate of violence. Following a car bomb explosion in Baghdad on Thursday, which left nine people dead, an Iraqi policeman vented his frustration on uncomprehending US soldiers who were doing their best to help the victims. He screamed at them: “This is all your doing. Why don’t you leave us and go home?”
In an attempt to put the violence into context, US commanders claim that the number of attacks has dropped while their intensity has increased, but that prognosis is not borne out by the facts.
In February, the month after the elections were held, there was a downturn in the violence, with the average number of attacks running at 30 to 40 a day, but in the last fortnight the figure has doubled. In Tikrit, Saddam’s hometown, a suicide bomber crashed his car into a small market, detonating his bomb and leaving 33 dead with at least three times that number badly wounded. In Hawija, north of Baghdad, another bomber targeted a queue of men outside a police and army recruitment centre, killing 30 people . And it is not just people who are facing the wrath of the insurgents. In British-controlled Basra, bombs almost destroyed the country’s largest fertiliser factory and ruptured a gas pipeline .
For the coalition forces, the intensity of the recent attacks has brought into sharp focus the scale of the problem they are facing. Asked on Friday if he thought the insurgency could be contained, General Richard B Myers, chairman of the US Joint Chiefs Of Staff, offered a brutally forthright assessment. “This requires patience,” he said. “I wouldn’t look for results tomorrow. One thing we know about insurgencies is that they last from three or four years to nine years.”
He also knows that time is running out. The UN mandate for occupation of Iraq will have to be renewed in December and President Bush is under pressure to start withdrawing US forces next year. But this can hardly happen if the country remains in its current state of chaos. Knowing when to break off the engagement is turning out to be a matter of fine political and military judgement for the coalition.
“Time it wrongly and you lose the battle,” argues Amyas Godfrey, head of the UK armed forces programme at the Royal United Services Institute for Defence Studies. “Withdraw too quickly and all one’s efforts leading up to that point could have been in vain. Yet stay too long and slow, indecisive withdrawal starts to become part of the problem itself.”
One issue is that the presence of coalition forces acts as a magnet for violence; another is that senior commanders know that their counter-insurgency operations are not producing the desired results.
A senior British army officer with experience of the terrorist war in Northern Ireland told the Sunday Herald that there could be no quick fixes . “We are not fighting against random groups of terrorists with a grudge but against a well- trained and highly efficient group of expert killers,” he said.
“Many will have served in the Iraqi army, they plan their operations in detail and we find it extremely difficult to get inside their thinking. Look at how long we took to infiltrate Provisional IRA. It took years, but at least we were operating within a known cultural context. Here it’s rather different.”
Most of the recent attacks have been mounted by suicide bombers who have either been recruited outside the country or have made their way into Iraq, usually from neighbouring Syria, to take part in the jihad against the coalition forces. As the Israelis have found in their war against Islamic terrorists, combating suicide bombers is a difficult and time-consuming business which demands the deployment of huge resources without any guarantee of getting a result.
It is no different in Iraq. In an attempt to hit back, US marine forces last week mounted Operation Matador, aimed at clearing suspected safe-houses and insurgent rat-runs in the Jazirah Desert region, close to the Syrian border. Supported by F-18 Super Hornet strike aircraft, US ground forces operated a series of sweeps and drives across the desert and claimed some successes. The arrest of a so-called “super terrorist” yielded information about a possible target which was attacked and destroyed, but, as happens so often in this kind of counter-insurgency warfare, it was impossible not to involve the local population in the operations.
In post-operation briefings, US commanders maintained that many of the desert people had co-operated with them and were fed up with the insurgency. But the sight of destroyed buildings clearly angered others. Local tribal leader Samran Mukhlef Abed told television reporters embedded with the US forces: “The situation is very bad. Most of the people have fled to the desert. The Americans are all around and medical services do not exist here.”
The US operation in the Jazirah Desert is a neat summary of the difficulties facing the coalition. To contain the insurgency they have to take military action, yet all too often the presence of US forces enrages locals. At the same time, commanders are aware that the insurgency could easily topple over into outright civil war.
“What we’re seeing is really an attempt to discredit this new cabinet and new government,” argued General Myers at his press conference in Washington.
“This is Iraqis blowing up other Iraqis. And I don’t know how they expect to curry favour with the Iraq population when we have Iraqi-on-Iraqi violence.”
Against that, optimists in the US State Department (now responsible for managing US affairs in Iraq) argue that the violence might have peaked. They point to the thousands of people prepared to run risks in the streets of Iraq’s cities and to the willingness of men to defy the suicide bombers and enlist in the security forces.
There are also high hopes that the new administration run by Ibrahim al-Jaafari will be able to counter the fear of internecine warfare by proving that it can operate in the best interests of all Iraqis.
It remains a tall order. The absence from the recent swearing-in ceremony of the Sunni vice-president Sheikh Ghazi al-Yawar was an ominous reminder of the fragility of the new democracy, and yesterday there was no sign that the men of violence had finished with their killing and maiming.
15 May 2005
sundayherald.com |
