It turns out that the election results in Iraq were even dicier than we’d thought:
Supporters of al-Qa’eda in Iraq have used the elections staged by the United States to gain positions of political power, the American military believes. According to senior officers based in Anbar province, an insurgent stronghold in western Iraq, al-Qa’eda-linked politicians have gained seats in local elections to provincial assemblies…[T]hey are convinced that al-Qa’eda influence is particularly prevalent in the border towns of Qaim and Hit….
[t]he news that some of the organisation’s supporters have gained seats at the local level illustrates both how it has adapted its tactics and the level of penetration it has achieved in Iraqi society. American intelligence has also learnt that not only are some of its supporters now politicians but that a number of its leaders have married into leading local tribes to secure alliances. Although the organisation, headed by the Jordanian Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, originally consisted primarily of foreign fighters, it now has many Iraqi supporters.
Now that’s quite a turn of events. What could be the matter with a small, remote city like Qaim that it would turn to al Qaeda, of all groups?
Al Qaeda is not universally beloved among the Sunnis of Iraq, or so we have been told. On Jan. 29, the LA Times reported that “insurgents in Qaim, on the Syrian border, fought with al-Zarqawi’s followers during the summer [of 2005] and eventually drove them out of the city, Iraqi officials said.” This article from the WaPo of Sept. 6, 2005 depicts general disgust and fear of al Qaeda among residents of Qaim, during one of those periods when it was under the group’s domination. Furthermore, in early January we were told by the NYT that tensions between local tribal and insurgent leaders, and al Qaeda, had become increasingly bitter in Sunni areas. At the same time, this military site reported that “some tribal leaders have become concerned with the increasing influence Al Qaeda-in-Iraq has in the [Anbar] province, not to mention the Islamist movement’s targeting of civilians.”
I admit then to being puzzled at al Qaeda’s electoral success in Qaim, only a few months after they’d been driven out by the locals. There’s not much in the news about that town to explain why the locals had patched up their differences with al Qaeda. A diligent search did turn up a few odds and ends, not much really, but you be the judge whether any of it fills in the picture.
For one thing, here’s a story about large scale suffering
RAMADI, 31 January (IRIN) – Relief workers in Anbar governorate say that humanitarian aid is still badly needed for isolated groups of displaced persons who fled their homes due to recent fighting between insurgents and US troops….
According to Anbar municipality officials, 1,000 people have been displaced from the cities of al-Qaim, Romanna and Ramadi since the end of November, and continue to live in tenuous circumstances. Many have lost their jobs and had their homes destroyed during fighting in the area.
An estimated 20,000 people were registered by the IRCS as having fled their homes three months ago, mostly from al-Qaim and Romanna, some 20 km east of the Syrian border….
According to Karam Obaid, a senior official at the human rights ministry, the government has been preoccupied over the past few months with December’s parliamentary elections and security issues. But he insisted that a fund would be set up for displaced families as soon as a new government was formed in February.
The suffering is due to the aggressive attacks upon the town last fall.
In November 2005, indiscriminate U.S. bombings of civilian centres killed 18 innocent Iraqi children in Ramadi, 97 civilians in Husaybah, and 40 civilians in Qaim. Westerners need to take a hard look in the mirror to see who the real terrorists are. Not surprisingly, these crimes of Western terrorism against the Iraqi people have become daily routine in a country ruled by foreign occupying forces…
That’s not to minimize the significance of ordinary, day-to-day mayhem.
In the border city of Qaim, a civilian was killed by U.S. fire when a convoy hit a roadside bomb, police said….U.S. troops opened fire immediately after the blast, killing a bystander.
I suppose we also ought to look back beyond the events of the last half year, since memories of U.S. operations can linger far longer than transient military successes on the ground. One memory that perhaps remains strong is the night of May 19, 2004 when U.S. helicopters bombed a wedding party outside Qaim, killing more than 40 civilians.
Lieutenant Colonel Ziyad al-Jbouri, the deputy police chief for Ramadi, 80 miles west of Baghdad, told AP that the dead included 15 children and 10 women….
“This was a wedding and the planes came and attacked the people at a house. Is this the democracy and freedom that Bush has brought us? There was no reason,” said Dahham Harraj, one man filmed in an AP video.
Television footage broadcast last night on the al-Arabiya television channel showed a truck laden with bodies. Men carried the bodies wrapped in blankets from the back of the truck into deep graves in the desert on the outskirts of Ramadi. One body, carried in a white blanket, was that of a young girl aged five or six. Other bodies, laid on the ground in a line, had clearly suffered horrific injuries.
After the aerial assault, U.S. troops appeared and began killing the survivors, according to eyewitnesses:
It was 10.30pm in the remote village of Mukaradeeb by the Syrian border and the guests hurried back to their homes as the party ended. As sister-in-law of the groom, Mrs Shihab, 30, was to sleep with her husband and children in the house of the wedding party, the Rakat family villa. She was one of the few in the house who survived the night.
“The bombing started at 3am,” she said yesterday from her bed in the emergency ward at Ramadi general hospital, 60 miles west of Baghdad. “We went out of the house and the American soldiers started to shoot us. They were shooting low on the ground and targeting us one by one,” she said. She ran with her youngest child in her arms and her two young boys, Ali and Hamza, close behind. As she crossed the fields a shell exploded close to her, fracturing her legs and knocking her to the ground.
She lay there and a second round hit her on the right arm. By then her two boys lay dead. “I left them because they were dead,” she said. One, she saw, had been decapitated by a shell.
“I fell into the mud and an American soldier came and kicked me. I pretended to be dead so he wouldn’t kill me. My youngest child was alive next to me.”
Residents of Qaim may also remember that the U.S. army attempted an insulting cover up, claiming that U.S. troops had been attacked by members of the wedding party.
“During the operation, coalition forces came under hostile fire and close air support was provided,” [the U.S. military] said in a statement. Soldiers at the scene then recovered weapons, Iraqi dinar and Syrian pounds (worth approximately £800), foreign passports and a “Satcom radio”, presumably a satellite telephone.
“We took ground fire and we returned fire,” said Brigadier General Mark Kimmitt, deputy director of operations for the US military in Iraq. “We estimate that around 40 were killed. But we operated within our rules of engagement.”
Major General James Mattis, commander of the 1st Marine Division, was scathing of those who suggested a wedding party had been hit. “How many people go to the middle of the desert … to hold a wedding 80 miles (130km) from the nearest civilisation? These were more than two dozen military-age males. Let’s not be naive.”
When reporters asked him about footage on Arabic television of a child’s body being lowered into a grave, he replied: “I have not seen the pictures but bad things happen in wars. I don’t have to apologise for the conduct of my men.”
Iraqis may also remember that, long after the U.S. version of events was thoroughly discredited, the military continued to cling to it. There’s much more evidence of that here
It’s likely that residents of Qaim also were aware of another scandal from the previous year, the interrogation and death of a former general under Saddam Hussein in the local version of Abu Ghraib.
The interrogations took place at a converted train station outside of the western Iraqi city of Qaim. [Major General Abed Hamed] Mowhoush was believed to be directing attacks in the region and had surrendered himself to authorities in hopes of helping his sons, who were also in U.S. custody.
Of course at the time of the December elections, the residents of Qaim could not yet know that the General’s murderer, Chief Warrant Officer Lewis Welshofer, would be let off with a reprimand but no jail time, or that this verdict would be cheered from the gallery by fellow soldiers.
Yet residents may have known disturbing details which have since been reported even in the U.S., for example that their town had to contend with more than simply an Army camp.
Evidence showed that two days before he died, Welshofer’s prisoner was beaten by reported CIA contract workers in the presence of a possible CIA agent.
Qaim residents may have known further details, such as those gathered together from published reports by Nat Hentoff:
Army officer Welshofer, interrogating the prisoner on November 26, 2003, at Qaim, Iraq, shoved him into a sleeping bag and sat on his chest before “waterboarding” him to simulate drowning. No information was obtained, because the prisoner stopped breathing.
Shortly before being stuffed into the sleeping bag, General Mowhoush–as Josh White reported in the January 25 Washington Post–“had been beaten by Iraqi paramilitaries code-named ‘Scorpions,’ who were working with the CIA, according to classified documents.”…
The son of the murdered prisoner, Mohammed Mowhoush, did not applaud [the verdict against Welshofer]. In a conference call with several reporters organized by David Danzig of Human Rights First (formerly the Lawyers Committee for Human Rights) and reported by Josh White in the January 25 Washington Post, the murdered man’s son said of the American officer who executed his father, “His punishment is not justice.”
The son also revealed that when he was 15 he and his three brothers were snatched from their Qaim home on October 27, 2003, during a raid by U.S. soldiers’ helicopters and armed vehicles in search of their father. The U.S. troops threatened that if the father didn’t give himself up, the boys would be sent to Guantánamo. As Josh White writes: “Arresting someone to entice relatives to turn themselves in is considered by human rights organizations to be a form of hostage taking. It is considered illegal in wartime, but military investigative documents reveal it occurred in Iraq.”
Interrogated for days without charges, the son was stripped of his clothes, had cold water poured on him, and was twisted into painful “stress” positions. Then he was taken into a room where his father was being assaulted. Yelling at the father, the guards said if he did not tell the truth, his son Mohammed would be executed. (Hussein’s torturers used to use that technique. )
By then, his father couldn’t respond. “He was tired,” his son remembers, “and I saw wounds on his body. He was tired because they beat him so much, they made a lot of pain on him, and he didn’t even talk to me.”
The account by Josh White in the Washington Post has many more disturbing details:
Mohammed Mowhoush yesterday recalled his own arrest on Oct. 27, 2003, when he and his three brothers were taken from their Qaim home as U.S. forces searched for his father. Mohammed, then 15, said U.S. troops arrived in the early morning darkness with helicopters and armored vehicles, and demanded to see his father.
“They said if my father did not come and give up, they will send us to Guantanamo,” Mowhoush said, adding that he and his family had been observing Ramadan, but that his father was not home at the time. “That celebration turned into a real tragedy for us. They said if my father does not come, you will never see your family back.”
It’s just possible that some such information had leaked out to the residents of Qaim by the time they decided to turn back to al Qaeda for support last year.
Crossposted at Daily Kos
