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News Analysis
Iraq: the scourge of the bombers

From Neil MacDonald in Baghdad

July 21st, 2005 -- With insurgent suicide bombs already going off at a rate of at least one per day, Iraq witnessed a new upsurge in violence in mid-July, with the bloodiest attacks apparently directed at Shi’ite civilian targets.

A suicide bombing at a petrol station next to a Shi’ite mosque in al-Musayyib killed more than 90 and wounded over 150 on 16 July, as worshippers gathered at the mosque and families were out for an evening stroll. The attack in the mixed Sunni-Shi’ite town, 65km south of Baghdad, inflicted more casualties than any other single incident since Iraq’s elected government was formed at the end of April.

The impact of the bomber’s explosive vest was magnified by the presence of a flammable tanker truck. Local residents believed the truck’s driver was an accomplice in the bombing, and an angry crowd the next morning blamed police for allowing the vehicle into a town from which lorries are supposed to be banned.

The upsurge in violence came as the National Assembly’s constitutional committee worked overtime to hammer out a draft for a permanent constitution, the next major step in the political reconstruction process. Meanwhile, the Iraq Special Tribunal (IST), the national court created to try ex-regime members, announced the first formal charges against ousted dictator Saddam Hussein, following evident pressure from the government to speed up the wheels of justice.

Deputy Prime Minister Ahmad Chalabi, a secular-leaning politician with a strong Shi’ite support base, visited Musayyib two days after the outrage and met survivors in hospital. American overseers at a nearby oil refinery and electricity generating station — a US post-war reconstruction project — reported dozens of workers absent or missing.

Suicide bombs have been almost a daily occurrence in Iraq since the end of April, when Prime Minister Ibrahim al-Ja’fari announced the formation of a government based on a Shi’ite-Kurdish parliamentary coalition. The insurgency responded with a sustained wave of suicide attacks in Baghdad and elsewhere. One recent week brought 23 car bombs, including six suicide bombs, apparently the lowest figure since April. Suicide bombers on foot, while also a frequent form of attack, account for lower casualty figures, said Brig. Gen. Donald Alston, the US military’s senior spokesman in Iraq.

The description of suicide bombers as a foreign scourge is less clearly provable by statistics. Alston said he was “aware of a handful of suicide bombers established to be Iraqis,” but denied any “shift in the figures” indicating growing Iraqi participation in such attacks. While identifying suicide bombers after the fact is generally difficult, Alston said he was confident “foreign fighters” represent the overwhelming majority of them. But most foreign fighters are probably Sunni Arabs with ethnic and sectarian ties to Iraqi Sunni insurgents.

Civilian suffering

Car bombs — whether by suicide, remote control or timer-detonated — have reportedly inflicted the most casualties among US-led Coalition forces during the past three months, closely followed by improvised explosive devices (IEDs), usually in the form of hidden roadside bombs. But Iraqi security forces, mostly lacking armour, have borne the brunt of attacks on convoys and checkpoints.

Newspapers reported on 14 July that Iraqi civilians and police officers were being killed by insurgents at a rate of more than 800 per month, or roughly one every hour, according to figures released by the Interior Ministry. The data covered the period from August 2004 to May 2005. Separate figures compiled from different government ministries appeared to confirm that civilian casualties outweigh military ones. Yet the picture remains fuzzy, as Iraqi police units are “militarized” to varying degrees, while most of those who died in attacks on Iraqi army recruiting stations are probably classed as civilians.

According to an Associated Press count, attacks on 10 July raised to 1,500 the total number of people killed in violence in Iraq since Ja’fari announced his new government on 28 April. In one attack that day, a man wearing an explosive vest detonated himself in a crowd of around 400 applicants at the gate of a recruiting centre at Muthanna military airfield in west Baghdad, police said. Local hospital officials said the blast killed 25 people and wounded 47.

Survivors at the scene told Al-Arabiya television that only two soldiers had been posted at the gate to search the would-be recruits, creating a dense crowd in which the attacker passed unnoticed. While recruiting centres, like other government buildings, are heavily guarded, job-seekers often wait in long queues outside, leaving them vulnerable to insurgent attacks. Recruits — mostly Shi’ites — had reportedly been attacked at the same recruiting centre as many as five times before.

Shi’ite anxieties were raised further on 12 July, when what appeared to be an attempted ambush of US troops killed more than 30 residents of a Shi’ite district in New Baghdad, most of them children. Residents said three US military vehicles had entered the normally quiet street and told people to clear the area, as a bomb was believed to be planted there. But some of the soldiers reportedly started handing out sweets, attracting a crowd of children around one of the vehicles, just before a suicide car bomber drove out of an alley and rammed it. One US soldier died in the attack.

Last September, bombs killed 35 children as US troops handed out sweets at the inauguration of a sewage plant in west Baghdad, resulting in Iraq’s largest death toll for children from any insurgent attack since the invasion in 2003. In both incidents, some grieving relatives blamed the Americans for attracting the attack. In New Baghdad, some residents alleged that the soldiers were trying to use the children as a “human shield”.

Call to arms

While the latest attacks put Shi’ite towns and urban districts on alert, the Musayyib bombing revived questions about the effectiveness, and the loyalties, of the government’s security forces.

The day after the bombing there, Shi’ite parliamentarian Khudayr al-Khuzai called on the government to “bring back popular militias” to protect vulnerable Shi’ite communities. “The plans of the Interior and Defence Ministries to impose security in Iraq have failed to stop the terrorists,” he told the National Assembly. More prominent members of the Shi’ite-led majority bloc also expressed support for a militia role to help prevent suicide bombings. In the days that followed, residents of Shi’ite areas improvised barricades and organized their own local patrols and checkpoints. Armed men in the patrols reportedly carried permits from local Iraqi army units.

The Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq, the largest party in the Shi’ite coalition, controls the roughly 7,000-strong Badr Brigade militia, which has repeatedly been accused by Sunni leaders in recent months of torturing and killing innocent Sunni civilians, including clerics. Kurdish party-controlled militias, which collaborated closely with United States forces during the invasion, continue to play a key security role in northern Iraq, and are also seen in Baghdad at Kurdish-led government departments.

Under US-drafted provisional legislation, non-governmental militias are meant to be either disbanded or integrated into the government security apparatus as part of Iraq’s transition to democracy and the rule of law. But with no side willing to give up its firepower, the militia issue appears to have been side-stepped during current inter-communal constitutional talks.

Constitutional progress

Despite sharp differences on key issues, Iraqi politicians are busily engaged in keeping the political process on track and drafting a permanent constitution. The main Shi’ite, Kurdish and Sunni factions on the parliamentary drafting committee said they were working “day and night” to hammer out a mutually acceptable draft by 15 August, the deadline for parliament to approve the document prior to a nation-wide referendum by October.

According to some committee members, keeping to the schedule will help prevent the country from sliding into full-scale civil war.

The Transitional Administrative Law (TAL) — Iraq’s current, US-drafted provisional constitution — allows the drafting committee to take up to six extra months, if necessary, before the current government’s term expires. Yet delays in drafting would slow down the whole political process, and Iraq’s second parliamentary elections, currently scheduled for 15 December, might have to be held off until well into 2006.

Excessive delays, moreover, would “open a Pandora’s Box of doubts” about Iraq’s long-term viability as a nation, according to Sunni parliamentarian Adnan al-Janabi, elected on the list of the former interim prime minister, Iyad Allawi.

One Western diplomat in Baghdad told MEI that the political process was still on track, despite the three months it took to form a government after the 30 January elections and the further weeks lost in working out how to include the under-represented Sunni Arabs on the constitutional committee. “If you look at the path we were meant to be on, we’re still on it,” the diplomat said. “Various groups, for their own reasons, are keen to stick to the timetable.”

For many Sunnis, the next elections appear to hold greater importance than the constitution. Voting in elections will bring genuine representation at a national level, in contrast to the failed boycott strategy they adopted in January. A loose-knit gathering of Sunni politicians and religious leaders met on 11 July to urge their community to register for voting in order to ensure a voice in national political debate.

Shi’ite sectarian parties, in contrast, are placing a heavier emphasis on constitutional issues, with questionnaires distributed in mosques asking respondents for their views on such issues as federalism, the role of Islam in the state and women’s rights.

According to some committee members, a broad consensus has been reached on the role of religion. Rather than insisting on Islam as a “source” of legislation, Shi’ite clerics say they would accept the line that “no law may contradict Islam”. But Kurdish committee members, adhering to a secular line, said they could only accept this with an added guarantee that no law will contradict human rights, democracy and individual freedom, similar to what is already found in the TAL.

The main remaining stumbling-block, however, is over how to define federalism as an administrative structure for the state. Kurdish autonomy in the north is virtually assured, but the Shi’ite bloc is demanding the option of similar decentralization, including financial autonomy for regions composed of three provinces, all around the country. Fiscal federalism would determine how oil revenues are shared out, potentially keeping more wealth in the Shi’ite-dominated south.

Sunni committee members say they have accepted special status for the Kurds, but not the “splintering of Iraq”. But rather than empowering provincial or regional governments, some Sunni members would like to see national parliamentary seats tied to provinces, a system that would ensure a fair share of seats for the Sunni-dominated parts of the country, even if insurgents again disrupt elections.

While the basic outline of federalism cannot really be left unaddressed, specific problems like the status of Kirkuk are sure to be deferred until later. The Kurds claim the ethnically mixed, oil-rich northern city as their historic capital and aspire to add it to their self-governed territory. But the constitution need not resolve every dispute, as long as it establishes clear mechanisms for later decisions. “Everything can be deferred until Judgement Day if we get consensus on a draft,” Janabi said.

Drawing down?

A recently leaked memo from Britain’s Ministry of Defence cited plans for a “draw-down” of both US and British troop strength by more than half by the middle of next year. But the proposed time-line assumes that “everything went right” with the constitution and the next parliamentary elections, according to the Western diplomat in Baghdad. The document presents an optimistic, but not unrealistic, scenario for early 2006, he said.

The memo outlines a possible reduction in American troop strength from 140,000 to just 66,000, while the British force could be reduced from its current 8,500 to only 3,000. The switch from foreign to Iraqi security control could begin in southern Iraq, where British troops control a relatively quiet, predominantly Shi’ite Arab population. “Given the stability of the south-east, it might be there first,” the diplomat confirmed. But Washington and London must agree on any British withdrawal “in full consultation” as coalition partners, and the Iraqi government will also be “closely involved”.

The British memo cites US planning assumptions that 14 of Iraq’s 18 provinces “could be handed over to Iraqi control by early 2006”. But withdrawal from any part of the country still hinges on security conditions rather than specific dates. The memo hints at a more cautious outlook by multinational commanders on the ground, as opposed to a “bold reduction” approach by top-level US defence officials. The proposed handover will depend on “the strength of Iraqi security forces and their ability to take over”, the diplomat said.

Prime Minister Ja’fari has called for accelerated training and equip-ping of Iraqi security forces, while acknowledging that foreign troops must not leave yet. Since the formal transfer of sovereign authority to an interim government in June 2004, coalition commanders have insisted their forces are in the country at the invitation of the Iraqi authorities.

The tentative handover timeline emerged amid concerns about brutality by Iraqi security units, especially towards the disaffected Sunni Arab community whose cooperation will be vital for Iraq’s political reconstruction. Sunni leaders blamed the government after at least nine detainees suffocated to death in the back of a police van on 4 July. Iraq’s mostly Shi’ite-led police commandos are known for their rough treatment of Sunni prisoners.


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