Anger and acrimony after Iraq's security
failure By Charles Recknagel
Several top Shi'ite leaders are strongly
criticizing the United States-led coalition for what
they say were inadequate security measures to protect
their community from Tuesday's deadly bombings in
Baghdad and Karbala.
A spokesman
for pre-eminent Shi'ite cleric Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani
blamed the coalition for both failing to
provide sufficient security itself, and failing to give Iraqi
police enough equipment to do the job. Spokesman Sayyed
Ahmad Saffi said: "We put the responsibility on
the occupation forces both directly and indirectly." He did
not say whether al-Sistani personally endorsed his
comments. The attacks killed more than 150 people,
with Iraqi officials saying that the toll could rise above 270
dead.
The head of the best-organized Shi'ite
political party, the Supreme Council for the Islamic
Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI), also faulted the coalition.
"The occupying army bears responsibility for all the
attacks on the Iraqi people, because they are in charge,
but they failed to protect the Iraqi people," Abd
al-Aziz al-Hakim said. "At the same time, they are not
allowing Iraqis to defend themselves in a proper way."
Added Adel Abdel-Mehdi, the SCIRI's political director:
"These attacks make it very clear that we need to take a
different approach to security. We know the security
issue better than they know it."
The US-led
coalition rejects the charges, saying that it provided
essential security services for the Shi'ite community's
observance of their holy day of Ashura. But, coalition
officials say, those services were restricted to
providing an outer cordon of security in shrine areas,
while direct on-site security was in the hands of Iraqi
security forces by agreement with city officials.
On Wednesday, the commander of the US Central
Command, General John Abizaid, said in testimony before
the House Armed Services Committee that the US military
had advance warning of the attacks and launched raids by
Special Forces teams to head them off.
But the
intelligence was too vague, said Abizaid, to enable US
troops to stop the terrorists from carrying out their
synchronized suicide bombings and mortar attacks on
mosques in Baghdad and Karbala. "The terrorists have
gotten themselves established," said Abizaid.
Abizaid said that the terrorists' plan was to
create even greater carnage and blame the US. Pamphlets
prepared by the terrorists claimed that the blasts were
US mortars. Several additional planned car bombings were
thwarted, such as in the Shi'ite city of Basra in
southern Iraq, he said.
Brigadier-General Mark
Kimmitt, deputy director of operations for the US Army
in Iraq, said that arrangements in Baghdad were made to
respect Shi'ites' religious feelings. "With regards to
the notion of not having coalition forces in the direct
vicinity of the mosque, the plan was specifically meant
to respect the cultural requirements and the cultural
desires of those planning these events," he said.
"The military forces, the coalition forces, set
an outer cordon, the ICDC, the Iraqi Civil Defense
Service, as well as the Iraqi police service set the
inner cordon, these were coordinated plans that were
done not only among ourselves but among other officials
within the city and within the organizations," Kimmitt
said.
The Polish spokesman for the
multinational force in the Karbala region said that local
authorities there also wanted security to be mostly handled
by Iraqis. Lieutenant-Colonel Robert Strzelecki said
his group met with religious leaders and local
authorities beforehand and were told that those bodies
wanted to be self-sufficient.
The debate over
the security arrangements is heated because it again
raises the sensitive question of how quickly and in what
manner the coalition should hand over power to Iraq's
political leaders by June 30. The US has pursued a
"ground-up" strategy of first disbanding then reforming
Iraq's military and police forces in an effort to assure
members are free of ties to the former regime of Saddam
Hussein.
But many Iraqi leaders say that this
time-consuming approach has led to security shortfalls.
Some leaders of former exile groups that have their own
armed wings have long called for the coalition to let
their militias help assure security, at least until the
new Iraqi army and police are fully operational.
SCIRI head al-Hakim, a member of the
US-appointed Iraqi Governing Council, has called again
for the coalition to hand over some authority for local
security to his group. He said: "There is no getting
around relying on forces on the ground that have had a
role in facing the regime."
He is reported to
have been referring to the SCIRI's Badr Brigades, a
militia of several thousand men who launched guerilla
raids against Saddam's regime from their bases in exile
in Iran. The Badr Brigades are believed today to control
substantial areas of southern Iraq, making the SCIRI the
de facto power in them even as it participates in the
US-led plans to transfer power to a sovereign
government.
The coalition has previously called
for disbanding the Badr Brigades and other militias tied
to political parties because they could be rival centers
of power to the new Iraqi army and police. But the
coalition has made an exception for the militias of the
two main Kurdish factions, which maintain security in a
large area of northern Iraq. The Kurdish militias,
unlike the formerly Iran-based SCIRI, have long-standing
ties with Washington and were allied with coalition
forces in toppling Saddam last April.
Analysts
say
Tuesday's tragedy is not likely to cause the coalition
to alter its security strategy in Iraq. But it may
cause Washington to try to further speed up the training
and deployment of Iraq's fledgling state security
forces. General Richard Myers, the chairman of the
Joint Chiefs of Staff, announced such a speed-up after
an armed attack on an Iraqi police station in Fallujah
last month. Myers, who is the United States'
top military leader, said he wants to accelerate the
building of Iraq's security forces, which now number
over 200,000 and include police, border guards, a civil
defense corps and guards for key facilities.
Meanwhile, US forces will likely continue their
policy of reducing their presence on streets in many
Iraqi cities and towns and withdrawing to military bases
instead. That enables them to provide backup for the
Iraq security forces while reducing tensions with local
communities. It also potentially minimizes US
casualties.
Phillip Mitchell, a military
analyst at the International Institute for Strategic Studies
in London, says the coalition strategy is for there to
be a gradual process of Iraqis taking over security for
cities and towns as US troops withdraw. "I think we are
seeing that effort being successful in the amount of
both weapons that are being found and the arrests that
are being made," he said. "But there is still a long way
to go, I mean, these attacks in Karbala show there is
still a long way to go."
No group has
claimed responsibility for the bombings - a group
representing al-Qaeda has denied responsibility - but US
officials say suspicion falls on an Islamist group operating
in Iraq led by Jordanian extremist Abu Mussab
al-Zarqawi.
Charles Recknagel is a
senior correspondent for Gulf Affairs and related issues
in Prague. He has reported from Iraq, Afghanistan,
Pakistan and Turkey, among other countries, and written
extensively on Iran.
Copyright 2004
RFE/RL Inc. Reprinted with the permission of Radio Free
Europe/Radio Liberty, 1201 Connecticut Ave
NW, Washington, DC 20036
