11 Afghan Police Killed in Taliban Attack

By TAIMOOR SHAH and CARLOTTA GALL

KANDAHAR, Afghanistan — Taliban insurgents attacked a police checkpoint north of the city early Monday, killing 11 police officers and burning their vehicles before disappearing into the night.

The attack, on the main road between the southern provinces of Kandahar and Oruzgan, where the Taliban remains strong, was another illustration of how weak Afghanistan’s police force remains despite efforts to improve training and upgrade its equipment.

The policeman on watch on the roof was strangled, and was found in a room with two other policemen who had been bound and shot in the head at close range, said Nazar Jan, a policeman on guard at the scene Monday morning. Eight other policemen were found shot dead in the room where they slept, he said. Their bloodied blankets still lay in the room. One policeman escaped and was shot in the feet as he fled, Mr. Jan said.

Mr Jan said he had heard the shooting from his checkpoint, but since it did not last long, he and his colleagues did not think much of it. He did not appear surprised that the Taliban had attacked, saying there were insurgents present in the district, Argandab. The Taliban took the officers’ weapons, he added.

A spokesman for the Taliban, Qari Yousuf Ahmadi, claimed responsibility for the attack by telephone. The Interior Ministry confirmed the details in a statement issued in the capital, Kabul.

After their attack the Taliban left for their sanctuaries, and auxiliary police retook the checkpoint, the ministry said, adding that the wounded policeman was out of danger.

The Afghan police continue to bear the brunt of the Taliban insurgency, since they are often posted in small stations and come under attack at night. Eight more police officers were killed in two separate attacks in other areas of southern Afghanistan on Saturday.

In a separate attack Sunday west of Kandahar, two British soldiers were killed in an explosion and two others were wounded, the British Defense Ministry announced in a statement issued in London. The deaths brought to 93 the number of British soldiers killed since 2001. Forty foreign soldiers have died in Afghanistan this year.

The president of the International Committee of the Red Cross, Jakob Kellenberger, said his organization had seen an increase in war wounded since 2006 and through 2007, in particular in a hospital it supports in Kandahar, where, he said, 27 percent of hospital patients are war wounded. During his weeklong visit to Afghanistan he called on all parties in the conflict, including NATO and American military representatives and members of the “armed opposition,” to protect civilians and medical facilities.

Because of the increase in fighting, the Red Cross was concerned that many civilians in remote areas were suffering unseen, and it and is expanding its first aid posts in the southern provinces.

“Our suspicion is that there are a lot of uncovered humanitarian needs related to the conflict in remote areas,” he said. “There must be made a distinction between civilians and those who are participating in the combat,” he said.

Mr. Kellengerger said he always emphasized that attacks should be proportional to the threat, a reference to some of the heavy bombardment NATO and United States forces have used against insurgents, which often results in heavy civilian casualties.

Out of Guantanamo and Bitter Toward Bin Laden

By Faiza Saleh Ambah
Washington Post Foreign Service
Monday, March 24, 2008; A08

JIDDAH, Saudi Arabia -- A calling to defend fellow Muslims and a bit of aimlessness took Khalid al-Hubayshi to a separatists' training camp in the southern Philippines and to the mountains of Afghanistan, where he interviewed for a job with Osama bin Laden.

Hubayshi, 32, a Saudi native, was among the Arab fighters dug in with bin Laden in the mountains of Tora Bora during the U.S. bombardment of Afghanistan in 2001. He later spent time in the military prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and in a Saudi jail.

He was released in 2006 into a world radically altered by the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. Muslim fighters were no longer viewed in Arab countries as larger-than-life heroes, and clerics had stopped urging young Muslims to fulfill their religious duties by fighting on behalf of their brethren.

Hubayshi had also changed. He had grown disillusioned with bin Laden, whose initial idealism had turned into terrorism, he said, adding that his family, "not bin Laden," had suffered when he was at Guantanamo.

U.S. government documents and a series of interviews with Hubayshi provide a rare look into the mind and motivation of a man who trained for religious warfare, never fought in combat and now says he believes in the political process.

His life today in the city of Jiddah is comfortably routine. On most days, he wakes before dawn, drinks an espresso made by his wife and takes a 90-minute bus ride to his job as a controller at a utilities company. But "if the government had not helped me marry and get my job back," he said, "I might be in Iraq now."

In 1995, Hubayshi was a 19-year-old college student looking for more meaning in his life. Bin Laden was a hero to many Muslims, and aiding Muslims in distress seemed like the most admirable and altruistic route. He was initially inspired by a fiery taped sermon extolling the virtues of waging war against the enemies of Islam, but a series of videotapes produced by Arabs fighting in Bosnia completed his transformation.

The tapes showed Muslim women and children sprawled dead and bloodied in a market. One woman's head had been blown off. Muslim civilians with rifles were shown fighting the Serbian army, and the only ones helping them, Hubayshi said, were Arab fighters trained in Afghanistan during the war against the Soviets.

"I couldn't sleep at night knowing that women were being raped and children slaughtered, just because they were Muslim," he said. "I had to do something."

By the time he got in touch with the Arabs fighting in Bosnia, the war was over. So Hubayshi took a five-week vacation from his new job at the utilities company and made his way to the southern Philippines, where he lived in wooden shacks in a humid jungle camp for Arab fighters. He said he slept well for the first time since seeing the Bosnia tapes.

But the Philippine separatists lay low most of the time he was there, and he soon felt restless and yearned for better training.

His contacts arranged for him to go to Afghanistan, and in 1997 he went to a camp in the southeastern city of Khost. He learned to fire antiaircraft missiles, antiaircraft machine guns, antitank weapons and rocket-propelled grenades and became an expert in explosives.

By 1999, the fighting in Afghanistan had become mostly ethnic. He packed his bags to return to Saudi Arabia. "I was not there . . . to help Afghans fighting Afghans for political gain," he said. "If I was going to die, I wanted to die fighting for something meaningful."

As he was making his way home, he was arrested in Pakistan at the Peshawar airport and sent to prison.

Hubayshi said that he was released two months later but that the Pakistanis kept his passport. He traveled on a fake passport to Yemen and was smuggled into Saudi Arabia, where he returned to work at the utilities company.

Two years later, he learned that he was wanted for questioning by Saudi authorities. Not willing to risk jail, he left the country on a fake passport and returned to Afghanistan in May 2001, he said.

In the years that he had been away from Afghanistan, al-Qaeda's influence had spread and the organization had become more like a corporation, he said, with company cars and many safe houses. The Taliban, a radical Islamist militia that had taken control of most of the country by 1996, had also grown more powerful.

Hubayshi became adept at making remote-controlled explosive devices triggered by cellphones and light switches. Impressed by his skills, an associate of bin Laden's asked him to join al-Qaeda, or at least meet with bin Laden, he said.

In the summer of 2001, Hubayshi recalled, he spent half an hour with bin Laden at a converted military barracks near the city of Kandahar. The two sat on carpets in bin Laden's office and shared a fruit platter.

"What are my duties toward you, and what are your duties toward me, if I join with you?" Hubayshi said he asked.

"That you don't betray us and we don't betray you," bin Laden responded, and offered him a plot of land, Hubayshi said.

But bin Laden's "fight had changed from defending Muslims to attacking the United States. I wasn't convinced of his ideology. And I wanted to be independent, not just another minion in this big group."

On Sept. 11, 2001, Hubayshi said, he was training Chechen fighters in explosives in the eastern city of Jalalabad. In October, when the first U.S. airstrikes hit Jalalabad, the Afghans "blamed us . . . and forced us out of the city at night. We slept by the river for two weeks."

Weeks later, an associate of bin Laden came seeking experienced fighters, and those without families left for Tora Bora. In the trenches there, the fighters ate and slept and cleaned their weapons, surrounded by the distant sounds of bombardments.

"Bin Laden was convinced the Americans would come down and fight. We spent five weeks like that, manning our positions in case the Americans landed," he said.

As the airstrikes moved closer, and with the United States' Afghan allies advancing, bin Laden decided to retreat and left one morning. His aides told 300 Arab fighters to make their way to Pakistan and surrender to their embassies.

Pakistani authorities stopped the fighters near the border and handed them over to the U.S. military, which sent them to Guantanamo Bay.

Hubayshi remains bitter about what he considers bin Laden's betrayal: calling the fighters to Tora Bora and then abandoning them there. "The whole way to Cuba, I prayed the plane would fall," he said. "There was no dignity in what he made us do."

Hubayshi said he is sorry that Muslims carried out the Sept. 11 attacks because they targeted civilians: "That was wrong. Jihad is fighting soldier to soldier."

His wife of one year said she had been looking for a husband who did not take drugs or drink alcohol, who was polite and had a kind mother. "He is a very good husband," the 26-year-old said on condition that her name not be published. Some segments of Saudi society follow strict social codes that deem it shameful for a woman's name to be made public.

In all the years he spent trying to help Muslims, Hubayshi said, he regrets he did not do more.

"My dream was that I would fight when there was fighting, and teach children when there was peace," he said. "I'm sorry we left Afghanistan with so much war and death. I wish we had built hospitals or schools."

Fuel Trucks for U.S. Forces in Afghanistan Destroyed

By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

PESHAWAR, Pakistan (AP) — Twenty-five trucks carrying fuel to American-led forces in Afghanistan were destroyed Sunday in a possible bombing on the Pakistani border, local government officials said.

Dozens of people were injured, they said.

Muhammad Sadiq Khan, a local government official, said that the explosions occurred late Sunday on the Pakistani side of border near the customs checkpoint at Torkham. At least 50 people were injured, eight of them seriously, officials said.

Fida Muhammad, the commander of a paramilitary force that helps provide security at the border crossing, said authorities suspected that the blasts were caused by bombs, but he said that an investigation was under way.

Fuel tankers headed for American and NATO bases in Afghanistan have been repeatedly singled out by militants close to the Pakistani border.

Meanwhile, Afghan and NATO forces killed more than 40 insurgents in an air and ground battle on Saturday in southern Afghanistan, a security official announced Sunday.

Troops seized dozens of weapons — including rocket-propelled grenades and heavy machine guns — after Saturday’s battle in Dihrawud, a district in Oruzgan Province, the Afghan Defense Ministry said in a statement. It said many militants were killed, including a commander, but provided no figures.

An official at the ministry, speaking on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to release details about the battle, put the number of dead at more than 40.

Also on Saturday, American-led coalition troops hit a roadside bomb in Kandahar Province as they were conducting a security patrol with Afghan soldiers, the coalition said in a statement released Sunday. Two soldiers died, it said, without releasing their nationalities.

Vatican Security Worries Over bin Laden Tape

By IAN FISHER

ROME — The Vatican on Thursday rejected an audiotaped accusation from Osama bin Laden that Pope Benedict XVI was leading a “new Crusade” against Muslims, but Italian security officials were concerned about the threats included in Mr. bin Laden’s new message.

“These accusations are absolutely unfounded,” the Rev. Federico Lombardi, the pope’s chief spokesman, said in a telephone interview. “There is nothing new in this, and it doesn’t have any particular significance for us.”

The audio message attributed to Mr. bin Laden was released Wednesday night and was addressed to “the intelligent ones in the European Union.” It was posted on a militant Web site on Wednesday, and an English transcription was distributed Thursday by the SITE Intelligence Group in Bethesda, Md., which tracks postings by Al Qaeda on the Internet.

The audiotape listed broad grievances, but specifically mentioned the pope, and coincided with the busiest week of the year at the Vatican, the week leading up to Easter Sunday. The pope, who turns 81 next month, will appear at several public events, including the annual Good Friday procession of the Stations of the Cross at the Colosseum.

In the five-minute message, the speaker said there would be a “severe” reaction against the publication in Europe of cartoons many Muslims considered offensive to the Prophet Muhammad. He said the cartoons — one reprinted last month in Denmark, more than two years after they were first published there — “came in the framework of a new Crusade in which the pope of the Vatican has played a large, lengthy role.”

Without naming any specific action or target, the speaker said, “The response will be what you see and not what you hear, and let our mothers bereave us if we do not make victorious our messenger of God.”

Father Lombardi dismissed the accusations, noting that the pope had condemned the cartoons several times and stressed that “religion must be respected.”

Al Qaeda and its supporters have issued several threats against the pope since he quoted a medieval Byzantine emperor in a speech in Germany two years ago referring to Islam as “evil and inhuman.” The pope apologized for the anger caused by the speech, saying that the view expressed in the quotation was not his own.

Asked about heightened security concerns, Father Lombardi said the recording “does not in any way affect the conduct of the pope.” He said the Vatican had no plans for any more security than what was already in place for the public events leading up to Easter.

An Italian security official, however, was quoted anonymously on Thursday by the ANSA news agency as saying that officials were taking the threats “seriously.” A spokesman for the nation’s Interior Ministry declined to answer specific questions about the threat, referring a reporter to the ANSA report.

The report stated that Italian antiterrorism officials would meet Friday to analyze the tape. It said the message would be “examined with attention to the threat surrounding the pope.” Though the Vatican is technically a separate and sovereign state, Italy provides policing and security for the pope.

After violent demonstrations against his speech two years ago, the pope has called frequently for dialogue between Christians and Muslims. A delegation of Muslim scholars met with Vatican officials this month to prepare for broader talks between the pope and Muslim representatives later this year.

Benedict XVI is scheduled to make his first visit as pope to the United States from April 15 to 20, with stops in New York and Washington. The Secret Service and the New York Police Department, responsible for the pope’s security on the trip, had no comment on the bin Laden audiotape.

Paul J. Browne, a deputy police commissioner in New York, said in an e-mailed statement that the department “has been working closely with the United States Secret Service to provide the highest level of protection possible for the pope during his visit to New York.”

Daniele Pinto contributed reporting.

In Iraq, U.S. seeks jobs for surplus hired guns

As calm returns to some areas, the U.S. military is faced with the question of what to do with the tribesmen it hired to defend their neighborhoods.

By Alexandra Zavis
Los Angeles Times Staff Writer

March 21, 2008

HAWR RAJAB, IRAQ — A man in a dusty track suit elbowed his way through the crowd that had formed as soon as U.S. soldiers pulled up in this war-damaged village on Baghdad's southern outskirts.

The man, who gave his name as Nasir, told the soldiers that he used to earn a living as a wedding singer. But the masked gunmen who took over Hawr Rajab in the name of their austere version of Islam considered such work sacrilegious and burned down his house.

When the Sunni Arab villagers decided to fight back with the help of U.S. forces, Nasir said, he was one of the first to sign up for the $10-a-day paramilitary work. So he was less than pleased when he was informed last month that security had increased to the point that his services as a gun-for-hire were no longer needed.

"I don't want to make trouble," he told the soldiers urgently. "I just want to live my life, and I need work."

After five years of trial and error, the strategy of recruiting tribesmen to help defend their neighborhoods against Islamic extremists has proved one of the most effective weapons in the U.S. counterinsurgency arsenal.

But restoring a measure of calm to what were some of the most violent places in Iraq has in turn presented the U.S. military with one of its biggest headaches: what to do with the more than 80,000 armed men whose loyalty has been bought with a paycheck that cannot go on forever.

"We don't want to pay people to stand on street corners with guns if they don't need to be there. What we want to do is we want to get them into a transition to more gainful employment," said Army Col. Martin Stanton, who oversees the effort.

After months of U.S. entreaties, Prime Minister Nouri Maliki's Shiite-led government grudgingly agreed in December to hire a portion of the mostly Sunni Arab fighters for the official security forces. But the process of vetting and approving the job candidates is painfully slow -- some say deliberately so -- and less than a third of them are expected to qualify.

U.S. and Iraqi officials are now hammering out details of a plan to revive local economies and create new opportunities for the fighters through vocational training, public works schemes, farm revitalization programs, micro-grants and business start-up loans. The two governments have committed $155 million apiece to the projects.

But these are long-term strategies, and the fighters need jobs now. If not, many openly declare they will have no choice but to work for the insurgency, which has tried to lure some of them back with offers of more money.

Already, cracks are appearing in what one senior official describes as the central plank of the U.S. counterinsurgency strategy. Hundreds of Sunni guards abandoned their posts for weeks last month in the Diyala provincial capital, Baqubah, demanding the replacement of a provincial police chief, a Shiite Muslim they accused of brutality against Sunnis. Errant U.S. airstrikes, which have killed a number of the fighters, prompted a similar walkout in Jurf al Sakhar, south of Baghdad.

Sunni Arab tribesmen first approached the U.S. military in Anbar province in 2006 for help in driving out the Islamic extremists they once backed.

When commanders saw how effective the tribesmen were, they began using the power of the dollar to court allies in other insurgent bastions where residents had grown disenchanted with the militants' ideology and brutality. The U.S. military has signed contracts worth $143 million with the tribesmen, which it now calls Sons of Iraq, to help guard roads, bridges and other key infrastructure.

A stopgap

U.S. commanders say the three-month deals were never intended to be more than stopgap measures in areas where U.S. and Iraqi forces did not have the numbers to provide security. But the fighters argue that they have proved their worth and deserve permanent jobs.

Adding urgency to their demands is a mounting death toll among the guards, as Sunni insurgents take aim at the neighborhood security groups that threaten their networks. Shiite militiamen also have attacked the guards in some areas. But though the Iraqi government will make so-called martyr payments to the families of slain Iraqi soldiers and police officers, there is no such provision for the guards.

A senior guard leader in Baqubah estimated that as many as 450 members, mostly Sunnis, had been killed in Diyala province alone, a key battleground in the fight against the Sunni militant group Al Qaeda in Iraq and its affiliates.

"These people have sacrificed for Diyala," said the leader, who goes by the nickname Abu Talib. "They shouldn't just be dropped."

The village of Hawr Rajab in Diyala in many ways epitomizes the work of the guard program. Four months ago, U.S. soldiers found headless bodies in the largely deserted streets. Now, many residents who had fled in fear are back, and the village bustles with activity.

American soldiers are handing out micro-grants to help businessmen repair their stores and buy stock. Seed and plastic have been distributed to farmers. An Iraqi contractor is revamping the clinic and building classrooms. And there are plans to convert the abandoned shoe factory into an ice-making plant by the summer.

"Men with weapons can only provide so much security," said Lt. Col. Mark Solomon, who commands the U.S. cavalry squadron responsible for the area. "The rest has to come from governance and economic growth."

Security has improved to such a degree that Solomon decided to shift 200 of the 500 villagers employed as security guards to a pilot public works crew, to provide much-needed services.

Nasir, the unemployed wedding singer, readily agreed to join the new program. But it has not been easy to persuade the proud tribesmen to trade in their AK-47s for trash bags and brooms. Some were wealthy landowners under Saddam Hussein's Sunni-led regime. Many hold university degrees.

"I graduated from the teaching college. I don't want to sweep the streets," said Daoud Salman, a tall man in traditional Arab robes.

Salman, a father of four, said his former comrades-in-arms laugh at him when they see him picking up trash and burning reeds to clear canals supplying water to farms.

He isn't the only one disgruntled with the job switch. On a recent drive through the village, most of the workers energetically sweeping the streets with palm fronds were younger than 15, many of them the children of men killed in recent fighting.

"The older ones don't work," said Adil Abbas Khodier, who is in charge of the program. "They all want to be sheiks."

This month, U.S. Air Force technicians began teaching a class of 50 from the public works crew how to become builders, masons, electricians and plumbers, skills they can put to work repairing the village's nearly 100 damaged homes. Once they qualify, their salaries will go up to about $15 a day, while those for the guards will drop to about $8.

But despite the pay incentive, most of the fighters tell their tribal leaders that they would prefer to remain on the checkpoints or to join the police, the only reliable source of local employment.

About 10,000 guard members have been absorbed into the police force in overwhelmingly Sunni Anbar, where there was a virtual security vacuum until the tribesmen rebelled against the Al Qaeda in Iraq extremists in their midst. But authorities in Baghdad and other religiously mixed parts of the country have been more resistant to the idea of bringing Sunni guards into the largely Shiite police force. So far, they have accepted fewer than 8,000 applicants.

The country's Shiite leaders are suspicious of the Sunni fighters, who include many former insurgents, and want them carefully vetted before allowing them into the official security forces.

There is a limit to how many can join the local police force. The army, on the other hand, has space, but most of the fighters aren't interested in a military career because they want to stay close to their families.

Hawr Rajab's leaders have been pressing authorities in Baghdad for a police station and have collected 700 applications. But with a population of less than 10,000, the village does not qualify to have its own station, a district official informed them last month.

'Government is too slow'

If villagers want to become police officers, the envoy in a crisp suit and polished shoes told a smoke-filled room, they will have to work in neighboring Abu Dasheer, a mostly Shiite village that is a stronghold of the feared Mahdi Army militia. Fighters from the two villages have clashed for years, and occasional shots are still fired between them.

A stunned silence fell over the room.

Ali Majeed Msir was one of two tribal sheiks who launched the guard program in Hawr Rajab. Because of his family's stand, he says, insurgents killed his father, stole the family's money and slaughtered its cattle.

He now chairs a council set up to run the village since the insurgents fled, an unpaid group that is campaigning for recognition from higher levels of government.

"This project is successful right now . . . but the government is too slow," Msir said glumly, pulling a pair of dark sunglasses over his eyes.

If the government won't take care of his men, he said, they might have no choice but to return to the battlefield.

"We want to be part of the government," he said. "But if the government keeps refusing, we will have to be a militia."

alexandra.zavis@latimes.com

War-ravaged Iraq city 'alive again'

Fallouja has been rebuilt since the 2004 battles. Stores again are doing a brisk business, and the population is nearly back up to 300,000.
By Tony Perry
Time Staff Writer

March 21, 2008

FALLOUJA, IRAQ — The one-lane bridge over the Euphrates River where a mob hung the charred bodies of slain Americans four years ago is now a focal point in the revitalization of this war-ravaged city.

The Iraqi government and the U.S. plan to widen the pedestrian pathways on either side of the bridge so shoppers can stream into Fallouja's western neighborhood and buy food, clothing and other goods from stores that again line the streets of a city once given up for dead.

The comeback of Fallouja, the site of two major battles between Marines and insurgents in 2004, surprises even the most optimistic U.S. planners.

"It continues to outpace all expectations," said Navy Capt. John Dal Santo, part of a State Department-funded effort called the Provincial Reconstruction Team for Fallouja.

City Council leader Sheik Hamed Ahmed said that he was pleased with the city's progress but that he needed more generators for his neighborhood. Ahmed's three predecessors were assassinated by insurgents, but he has refused to back down.

"Fallouja is alive again," he said.

Restaurants, bakeries, photo shops, tire stores, Internet cafes, a body-building studio and other businesses line the avenues and side streets. BMWs share lanes with donkey carts on congested thoroughfares.

The Anbar provincial government and the central government in Baghdad have poured tens of millions of dollars into street repair, rubble removal and school reconstruction. The governor has assigned what Americans might call ward heelers to tend to the needs of the city's nine districts.

In 2004, Fallouja was a major base for the emerging Sunni Arab insurgency. On March 31 of that year, it was also the site of one of the most macabre images since the 2003 U.S.-led invasion of Iraq: young Iraqi men dancing in glee as the burned remains of American private security workers hung from the aging bridge.

Most civilians fled the city before the second Marine assault, in November 2004. And there are still signs of the fierce battles: crumpled buildings, downed power lines and bullet-riddled homes.

Other problems also remain: an undersized police department; shortages of electricity, clean water and gasoline; high unemployment; and a small but resistant cadre of insurgents waiting to launch a counterattack.

Yet Fallouja is vibrant again, and its population has climbed back close to its pre-assault level of about 300,000.

Police are on the streets. A new hospital is set to open this spring, funded by the U.S. and the Iraqis. Marines have removed many of the barriers and concertina wire that gave the city what one officer called the "Berlin 1945 look."

There have been soccer tournaments and art contests. And there are plans for a soft-drink bottling plant.

"Fallouja has gone through a metamorphosis -- these people want their lives back," said Lt. Col. Christopher Dowling, commander of the 3rd Battalion, 5th Marine Regiment. "Fallouja has its soul back."

Several hundred Marines live side by side with Iraqi police officers in outposts across the city. In five months, Dowling's Marines have carried out 7,000 patrols in the city and its suburbs without suffering a fatality or major injury.

To ensure continued security progress, Marines conduct late-night raids several times a week after picking up intelligence about possible insurgent activities. The troops also have sought to provide employment to young Falloujans to help win their loyalty.

One of Dowling's more successful efforts has been to pay youths $10 a day to pick up trash. Many of the main streets are now among the cleanest of any city in Anbar province.

Fallouja also has a court system and judges, unlike most cities in the province, which lies west of Baghdad. Elsewhere, judges who fled the country have not returned.

"Two years ago, even after the war was over, people were stealing and hiding," Iraqi police officer Jassim Hamid Khousan said. "Now is better. God willing, if the insurgents come back, we will fight."

Haji Mohammed Hussin feels safe enough to reopen and expand his kebab restaurant, closed when the city was controlled by insurgents. He also owns a restaurant in Baghdad that remains closed, he said, because it has been confiscated by Shiite Muslim militiamen.

When Dowling stopped by to drink tea, Hussin had a request: Extend the hours at the main checkpoint so more people can come in from the suburbs for a late dinner.

"We need more people," Hussin said.

Done. The checkpoint will stay open an hour later.

An estimated 20,000 people a day stream through five checkpoints to shop or work in the city. The checkpoints are staffed by Marines, Iraqi police and an all-female contingent called the Sisters of Fallouja.

This is the second Fallouja assignment for the Camp Pendleton-based 3rd Battalion, 5th Marine Regiment. It was a lead unit in the November 2004 assault, suffering 19 fatalities. Most of the current officers and enlisted are new to the battalion.

But some are veterans from 2004, including Staff Sgt. Terrance Gant, who remembers the fight to recapture the bridge. Marines attacked insurgent strongholds from the north, south and east -- pushing west toward the bridge was one of the final objectives.

Gant visited the bridge and adjoining streets the other day and found small boys selling ice cream, a fishmonger hawking catfish, and food and trinket stores doing a brisk business.

"This is a step forward," Gant said. "It shows me my Marines didn't die in vain."

tony.perry@latimes.com

Foreign fighters in Iraq seek recognition, U.S. says

Interrogations of 48 detainees to understand their motivations provide a picture of typically young, lonely recruits.
By Alexandra Zavis
Los Angeles Times Staff Writer

March 17, 2008

BAGHDAD — Young, lonely and struggling to make a mark.

The U.S. military Sunday presented a profile of foreign fighters, who are blamed for about 90% of the suicide bombings that have claimed thousands of lives in Iraq. It was based on interrogations of 48 men captured by U.S.-led forces here in the last four months, Navy Rear Adm. Gregory Smith told reporters at a briefing inside Baghdad's fortified Green Zone.

Smith said most militants were single men in their late teens and early 20s recruited by Al Qaeda in Iraq, a largely homegrown Sunni Arab militant group that the U.S. military says is led by foreigners. They typically come from large, lower-income families in which they struggled to be noticed.

"Most of these young men wanted to make an impression, but paradoxically they did not tell their families they were going off to Iraq to fight for Al Qaeda out of fear of disapproval," said Smith, a U.S. military spokesman.

Smith's presentation comes at a time when the number of high-profile suicide attacks in Iraq has inched up, many of them carried out by bombers with explosives strapped to their waists.

U.S. officers stress that the number of attacks overall remains down since the military finished sending an additional 28,500 troops to Iraq in June. But Smith acknowledged that a modest rise in attacks using explosives vests, including 18 in February, was troubling.

"It is a difficult target to stop, and the only effective way is to take down the networks that feed this type of terrorism," he said.

In the latest such attack, a man blew himself up Sunday in front of a Kurdish political party office in the northern city of Mosul, injuring a guard and six civilians, police said. Two policemen were injured by a roadside bomb on their way to the scene, police said.

Fighters also have started to wear explosives vests and blow themselves up when captured, Smith said, a tactic previously used only by senior leadership.

The interviews conducted with detainees are helping U.S. forces to understand the backgrounds, motivations and recruitment of foreign fighters. Smith said most were from the Middle East and North Africa, including about 40% from Saudi Arabia.

More than half of the approximately 240 foreign fighters in U.S. custody come from Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Syria, according to figures provided separately by the military.

Smaller numbers were recruited in Jordan, Sudan, Libya, Yemen, Kuwait, Tunisia, Morocco and Algeria. In addition, several hundred foreign fighters are in Iraqi custody.

Most described their upbringing as religious but not extremist, Smith said. Many said their fathers were harsh and often abusive. Most reported little or no previous military experience. Before they were recruited, many worked as taxi drivers, construction workers and in other low-paying jobs. Others were students.

Their recruiters preyed on their desire for recognition, acceptance and friendship, Smith said.

Many detainees told their interrogators that they were first approached at their mosques. Others were approached at work and invited to attend discussions at the mosque.

These conversations would begin as a harmless discussion about Islam that over several weeks would shift to the war against U.S.-led forces in Iraq, he said.

The recruits were often shown videos of Americans purportedly abusing Iraqis and were urged to help avenge the mistreatment by killing Americans, Smith said. Insurgent strikes against U.S. forces also were shown.

Once they agreed to join the fight, most of the young men were flown to Syria and then smuggled into Iraq by road, he said. The facilitators who met them in Syria often entertained them at nightclubs and bars during the months it sometimes took to get them to Iraq, Smith said.

But when they reached Iraq, those destined for suicide missions were sequestered in safe houses with copies of the Koran and few other amenities. They complained that their Iraqi handlers looked down on foreigners, did not give them enough food and treated them harshly, Smith said.

Some spoke of their disillusionment on discovering that most of the attacks carried out by insurgents were directed against the Iraqi people rather than U.S. forces.

"Again and again, we heard this reality bothered the recruits," Smith said. "They had not come here to kill Iraqi civilians. . . . They felt misled."

Eventually, most just wanted to go home, he said. But their handlers had their passports and their money, so they felt trapped.

All 48 fighters interviewed by U.S.-led forces were men, but a growing number of suicide attacks have been conducted by Iraqi women.

U.S. officers have suggested that the insurgents are using women because they attract less attention. The insurgents may also be having difficulties recruiting foreign volunteers.

About 120 foreign fighters were entering Iraq each month at the peak of the influx in mid-2007, but that figure has dropped to about 40 to 50, Smith said.

alexandra.zavis@latimes.com

A special correspondent in Mosul contributed to this report.

A Jailhouse Conversion Splits Terrorists, and In-Laws

The Saturday Profile

By SETH MYDANS

JAKARTA, Indonesia

SENTENCED to death for a terrorist bombing, the brother-in-law of Nasir Abas writes to him from prison calling him an infidel and an enemy of Islam.

“I don’t reply,” Mr. Abas said. “I feel sympathy for him because he is under pressure in jail. He is not in a normal emotional state.”

But even in a normal emotional state, a convicted terrorist could be excused for being furious with Mr. Abas.

Once a high-ranking commander in the region’s deadliest terrorist group, Mr. Abas, 38, has been born again as an anti-terrorism evangelist. Working with the police, he visits his former comrades in jail in an effort to persuade them to cooperate and to mend their ways.

He appears at public forums and he has published a book called “Exposing Jemaah Islamiyah,” the terrorist group he once belonged to, which is linked to Al Qaeda and is behind most of the major attacks in the region in recent years.

His philosophical conversion is a boon to the police, who have taken what Indonesia’s counterterrorism chief, Asyaad Mbai, calls a “soft, humane approach” to detainees, treating them as wayward brothers rather than as criminals. They are given special privileges in prison, and in some cases their families receive financial support.

“It has the dual function of tainting some who accept and also winning members to a cooperative stance, so the police get more intel than before,” said Sidney Jones, senior adviser to the International Crisis Group and an expert on terrorism.

As part of this approach, Mr. Abas said he tried to convince detainees that their view of holy war is misguided, that the police are not evil and that cooperating with them is not a sin.

“I explain to them that it is wrong killing people with bombs,” Mr. Abas said. “This is not jihad in Islam. You are killing unarmed civilians. It is a shameful thing.”

He tried telling that to his brother-in-law, Ali Ghufron, when he was still able to visit him in prison, and they ended up shouting at each other, he said.

“He will not return my salaam,” Mr. Abas said, referring to a Muslim greeting. “He does not want to see me any more.”

His brother-in-law, known as Mukhlas, is one of three men scheduled to be executed soon for the bombings in 2002 of two nightclubs in Bali that killed more than 200 people.

“He says it’s a war,” Mr. Abas said. “America killed our civilians in Chechnya and Afghanistan and so on, so we are taking revenge on them.”

THEIR dispute reflects a rift that has caused Jemaah Islamiyah to move away from large-scale terrorist acts; there has not been a major attack since 2005, a second bomb attack in Bali.

“The broad picture is of a highly fractured movement which for now is weakened in capacity but in a constant state of flux, mutation and realignment,” said Ms. Jones, the terrorism expert.

For Mr. Abas, this schism plays itself out as a domestic dispute.

Family ties, including intermarriages, are a common way of cementing relationships within the terrorist movement. Fathers, sons, cousins and in-laws are connected by complex family networks.

But there has never been a rupture as public and personal as this clash between one of the group’s most aggressive killers and its highest-profile defector.

Caught in the middle is Mr. Abas’s sister Farida, who he said simply tries to duck as her husband and brother snap at each other.

“I say to my sister, ‘Mukhlas says I’m an infidel. Do you believe that?’ ” Mr. Abas said. “She says, ‘I don’t want to think about what you two have quarreled about. This is a problem between you and it is not my problem.’ ”

During a long sushi dinner recently at a downtown restaurant, his switch from terrorist to counterterrorist remained a bit of a mystery — a combination perhaps of impulse, self-interest and rationalization.

One day, as he tells the story, he was charging at his police captors, hoping to die for his cause; the next morning he was theirs, informing on his comrades and advising on tactics to combat them. He insists that he was not mistreated or coerced.

It all started, he said, because he hated to do his high school homework. Born in Singapore and raised in Malaysia in a working-class family, he was delighted to discover a Muslim boarding school where the curriculum mostly involved the reading of the Koran.

One thing led to another, as it often did in those days, and he soon felt a calling to fight for his fellow Muslims in Soviet-occupied Afghanistan. There, at a Qaeda training camp, he discovered a knack for weaponry, and quickly became an instructor.

After six years there, he helped establish a terrorist training camp in the southern Philippines, then rose to command one of four territorial divisions of Jemaah Islamiyah. Some of the detainees he visits now are his former subordinates, he said.

By the time he was arrested in Indonesia in 2003, he said, he had already turned against the killing of civilians, calling it bad tactics and bad religion.

When he talks with detainees, he said, it is the story of his detention and overnight conversion that interests them the most. He presents it as a parable of pragmatism, and his listeners are welcome to take him at his word.

THROUGHOUT his night of interrogation he kept silent, Mr. Abas said he tells them, offering nothing but a prayer to God. But throughout, he said, he was thinking.

“I told myself, you must accept the reality that you got arrested,” he said. “God did not let me die, so there is something God wants me to do.”

By morning, he said, he was ready. He said a prayer and began to talk, offering the police a flood of detail about the structure and activities of Jemaah Islamiyah.

Nothing he did was inconsistent, he insists; simply an adaptation to circumstances.

“My change was that I agreed to continue my same mission together with the police,” he said. “My mission is to stop the crimes, stop the violence, stop the deviants. Bombing is an evil deed, and my obligation is to stop evil deeds.”

From this perspective, no one deserves punishment more than his brother-in-law, a mastermind of the deadliest terrorist act the region has seen.

But with his execution, Mr. Abas’s sister will become a widow and her children will lose their father. As if in a gesture of penance for the rift, Mr. Abas seems almost obsessive in describing his brother-in-law as a wonderful husband.

“Mukhlas stayed in the house,” he said. “He cooked. He washed clothes. He taught the children. He cleaned the home. He read books to the family. He never hurt the children. He never raised his voice. That is how good a husband he was.

“Not like me,” Mr. Abas said. “I’m not a good husband. I am away from my family. I never wash my family’s shirts and I never cook. Thank God my wife still loves me.”

Pentagon Cites Tapes Showing Interrogations

By MARK MAZZETTI and SCOTT SHANE

WASHINGTON — The Defense Department is conducting an extensive review of the videotaping of interrogations at military facilities from Iraq to Guantánamo Bay, and so far it has identified nearly 50 tapes, including one that showed what a military spokesman described as the forcible gagging of a terrorism suspect.

The Pentagon review was begun in late January after the Central Intelligence Agency acknowledged that it had destroyed its own videotapes of harsh interrogations conducted by C.I.A. officers, an action that is now the subject of criminal and Congressional investigations.

The review was intended in part to establish clearer rules for any videotaping of interrogations, Defense officials said. But they acknowledged that it had been complicated by inconsistent taping practices in the past, as well as uncertain policies for when tapes could be destroyed or must be preserved.

The officials said it appeared that only a small fraction of the tens of thousands of interrogations worldwide since 2001 had been recorded.

The officials said the nearly 50 tapes they identified documented interrogations of two terrorism suspects, Jose Padilla and Ali al-Marri, and were made at a Navy detention site in Charleston, S.C., where the two men have been held.

The initial findings of the Pentagon review represent the first official acknowledgment that military interrogators had videotaped some sessions with detainees and could widen the controversy over the treatment of prisoners in American custody. A Pentagon spokesman, Geoff Morrell, cautioned that the review was incomplete, and a spokesman for the Defense Intelligence Agency, Don Black, said that interrogation videotapes had been routinely destroyed if they were judged to have no continuing value.

The only tape the officials described is of Mr. Marri, a citizen of Qatar who was arrested in December 2001 while in college in Illinois and moved five years ago to the jail after being designated an “enemy combatant.” Government officials say they believe he was an operative for Al Qaeda who was plotting attacks.

Two government officials said that the tape showed Mr. Marri being manhandled by his interrogators, but did not show waterboarding or any other treatment approaching what they believed could be classified as torture. According to one Defense Department official, the interrogators dispensing the rough treatment on the tape were F.B.I. agents.

An F.B.I. spokesman declined to comment, citing a continuing review of detention practices that is being carried out by the Department of Justice’s inspector general.

Mr. Black, the spokesman for the Defense Intelligence Agency, said its director, Lt. Gen. Michael D. Maples, had reviewed the tape and was satisfied that Mr. Marri’s treatment was acceptable.

He said that Mr. Marri was chanting loudly, disrupting his interrogation, and that interrogators used force to put duct tape on his mouth, while Mr. Marri resisted. Mr. Black said most of the videos showing Mr. Marri’s interrogations had been destroyed. The government has never charged Mr. Marri, but because of his designation as an enemy combatant, the Pentagon is allowed to hold him indefinitely.

The scale of detention and interrogation by the military, with tens of thousands of prisoners in Iraq, Afghanistan and at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, dwarfs that of the C.I.A., which has held fewer than 100 high-level Qaeda suspects. The C.I.A. has acknowledged videotaping only two terrorism suspects, in 2002, and military officials said that the review, ordered in late January by James R. Clapper, the Pentagon’s senior intelligence official, had similarly found that only a small number of detainee interrogations had been videotaped.

“This is not a widespread practice,” said Mr. Morrell, the Pentagon press secretary. He said that it was up to individual military commanders whether to tape interrogations and that the videotapes were often used as the basis of written intelligence reports. In addition to the existing interrogation videotapes, there are existing recordings that show interactions between military guards and terrorism suspects, including detainees’ forcible removal from cells at Guantánamo, military officials said.

Images of rough treatment of detainees is a delicate subject for the Pentagon. Soldiers’ snapshots of the abusive treatment of detainees at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq set off a firestorm and led to prison terms for a number of military personnel.

Congress imposed a ban in 2005 on all harsh interrogation methods by the military but left a loophole for the C.I.A. Last month, Congress voted to extend the ban to the C.I.A., but President Bush vetoed the bill.

The C.I.A. acknowledged in December that in 2005 it had destroyed the only interrogation videotapes that its officers had made; the tapes showed two detainees, Abu Zubaydah and Abd al- Rahim al-Nashiri.

Lawyers for Mr. Marri, who have challenged his imprisonment in court, sought access to any tapes or other records of his interrogations, but in 2006 a federal judge in South Carolina said the government did not have to produce any tapes. That decision is being appealed.

Jonathan Hafetz, one of the lawyers, said Mr. Marri had heard guards describe “a cabinet full of tapes” showing his interrogations, but had never had independent confirmation that such tapes existed. Mr. Marri has alleged that earlier in his imprisonment he was deprived of sleep, isolated and exposed to prolonged cold.

Mr. Hafetz said he planned to file papers in court on Thursday describing the psychological harm done to Mr. Marri. “Locking someone up for five years without charges is a disgrace and a betrayal of American and constitutional values,” he said.

The difficulties in the Pentagon’s review can be glimpsed in a seven-page court filing last month by Rear Adm. Mark H. Buzby, the military commander at Guantánamo Bay.

Admiral Buzby’s report describes an array of digital video recorders used to capture “activities” — it does not specify whether interrogations are included — in at least four subcamps at Guantánamo. But the systems automatically recorded over older material when they reached capacity, he wrote.

In some cases, Admiral Buzby wrote, “We suspect that the recording devices contain recorded data but we are unable technologically to confirm whether data remains.”

Afghanistan: Al-Qaeda Bloggers' Sparring With Taliban Could Signal Key Differences

By Ron Synovitz

An Internet-fueled squabble between Taliban leaders and influential Al-Qaeda sympathizers over nonviolent tactics and foreign influence in Afghanistan hints at deep disagreements that could alter counterinsurgency efforts in that country.

Islamic extremists who regularly post messages to a pro-Al-Qaeda website in Egypt are accusing Afghanistan's Taliban of straying from the path of global jihad. Prominent Taliban have responded by lashing back with criticism of their own.

The development suggests a rift is emerging between the Taliban leadership and religious extremists in the Arab world -- including the Al-Qaeda network that the Taliban had hosted in Afghanistan while it planned the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks in the United States.

Such a break could affect Afghan government efforts to convince Taliban fighters to lay down their weapons and peacefully resolve their differences with officials, which could in turn influence whether non-Afghan Al-Qaeda fighters continue to be welcomed among the Taliban.

Internet criticisms of the Taliban follow a February statement from Taliban leader Mullah Mohammad Omar announcing that his movement wants to maintain positive and "legitimate" relations with countries neighboring Afghanistan.

Mullah Omar, who heads a Taliban leadership council that was purportedly formed in 2003, also has said that the Taliban is exploring the possibility of holding peace negotiations with Afghan President Hamid Karzai's government.

"We want to have legitimate relations with all countries of the world," Mullah Omar's statement said. "We are not a threat to anyone. America believes that the Taliban is a threat to the whole world. And with this propaganda, America wants to use all other countries to advance their own interests."

Pro-Al-Qaeda bloggers who were angered by Mullah Omar's statement were further outraged in early March when the Taliban expressed solidarity with Iran by condemning the latest round of sanctions imposed on Tehran by the UN Security Council over its nuclear activities.

'Nationalist Trend'

Anyone with a password can post messages to the Al-Qaeda linked website. But some of the harshest remarks about the Taliban leadership have come from writers who are labeled as among the most influential on the website.

One of those bloggers -- who calls himself "Miskeen" or "The Wretched" -- responded to the Taliban declaration on Iran by writing: "This is the worst statement I have ever read.... [T]he disaster of defending the [Iranian] regime is on par with the Crusaders in Afghanistan and Iraq."

Mullah Salam Zaief has been a prominent spokesman for the Taliban since the 2001 ouster"Miskeen" also wrote that a "nationalist trend" appears to be penetrating the Taliban. Other pro Al-Qaeda bloggers have called for Al-Qaeda leaders Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahri to censure the Taliban over their recent statements.

But the Taliban's former ambassador to Pakistan -- Mullah Salam Zaief -- tells RFE/RL's Radio Free Afghanistan that the bloggers have no understanding of the topic.

"Somebody who is speaking from Egypt really doesn't have knowledge of the exact situation on the ground in Afghanistan," Zaief says. "He doesn't even convey the policies of the whole organization [of Al-Qaeda]."

"The conflict in Afghanistan doesn't mean [the Taliban] has to confront the world," Zaief continues. "Afghans are very tired of war. They want their homeland. They want peace in their country. They want independence. Whether they are Taliban or other Afghans, I don't think either wants to confront the entire international community. The Taliban doesn't want to rule the world."

A Path To Talks?

Independent analysts link the Taliban's quest for international legitimacy to the possibility of future negotiations with Karzai's government.

Karzai said in September that he was ready to negotiate with the Taliban, including Mullah Omar himself, in order to put an end to the Afghan insurgency. In December, U.S. Ambassador to Afghanistan William Wood said he would support reconciliation talks -- with some conditions.

One of the main sticking points for negotiations between Kabul and the Taliban appears to be the fate of Al-Qaeda. Formal negotiations could lead to the expulsion of Al-Qaeda fighters from Afghanistan if they did not commit themselves to supporting Karzai's government.

When asked what the Taliban thinks about Al-Qaeda extremists trying to dictate Taliban policies in Afghanistan, Zaief said foreign extremists are more interested in their own benefit than what is good for Afghans.

"I think every Afghan now has the experience that with intolerance toward each other -- if people do not live in peace and harmony with each other -- the bloodshed and devastation will continue for a long time," Zaief said. "Nobody has the right to ignore the importance of stability in Afghanistan. They should at least not be making such irresponsible comments. [The Al-Qaeda bloggers] were raising the question of the foreign-troop presence in Afghanistan. But now, I think Afghans have to tolerate the presence of foreign troops in the country because they have no other option."

Although Zaief lives in Kabul and his location is known by Karzai's government, he is still considered a prominent member of the Taliban whose views reflect those of the Taliban leadership. But his remarks about the need for Afghans to tolerate the presence of foreign troops were not supported by a Taliban statement on the issue released on March 11.

That statement says the Taliban's fight is aimed only at driving U.S.-led coalition forces from Afghanistan. It calls on U.S. allies to withdraw their troops from Afghanistan. It also calls on Afghanistan's former mujahedin factions to help the Taliban drive U.S. troops from the country.

Leaders of some of those mujahedin factions helped U.S. forces drive the Taliban regime from Kabul in late 2001 and now hold positions within Karzai's cabinet or are prominent members of the Afghan parliament.

RFE/RL's Radio Free Afghanistan contributed to this report from Kabul and Prague

U.N. Says Taliban Are Impeding Aid

By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

KABUL, Afghanistan (AP) — A tenth of Afghanistan is off limits to aid workers because of attacks by Taliban insurgents, hindering the delivery of assistance to vulnerable Afghans, a United Nations report says.

The assessment echoes a finding by the director of national intelligence, Mike McConnell, who told a Senate committee last month that Taliban insurgents controlled about 10 percent of the country.

Afghanistan’s intelligence chief, Amrullah Saleh, said in response this month that only 8 of Afghanistan’s 364 districts were not under government control.

But the United Nations report, released in New York on Monday, said 36 districts — including most of those in the east, southeast and south — are largely inaccessible to Afghan officials and aid workers.

“Despite tactical successes by national and international military forces, the antigovernment elements are far from defeated,” the report said.

It said violence last year was at the highest level since an offensive led by the United States toppled the Taliban in late 2001.

There were 160 suicide attacks and 68 thwarted attempts in 2007, compared with 123 suicide attacks and 17 failed attempts in 2006, it said.

Afghanistan had more than 8,000 conflict-related deaths last year, including 1,500 civilian deaths, the United Nations said.

Iraq Attacks Lower, but Steady, New Figures Show

By JAMES GLANZ and ERIC SCHMITT

BAGHDAD — Newly declassified statistics on the frequency of insurgent attacks in Iraq suggest that after major security gains last fall in the wake of an American troop increase, the conflict has drifted into a stalemate, with levels of violence remaining stubbornly constant from November 2007 through early 2008.

The new figures, presented Tuesday at a Senate hearing in Washington by David M. Walker, the top official at the Government Accountability Office, emerged a day after eight American soldiers were killed in bomb attacks, five in downtown Baghdad and three in Diyala Province. And the trend appeared to continue Tuesday, as bombings and small-arms attacks led to casualties among Iraqi civilians and security forces in or near at least eight cities.

In the deadliest of those attacks, a roadside bomb between the southern cities of Nasiriya and Basra struck a bus full of Iraqi civilians, killing at least 16 and wounding 22, Iraqi police officials said. But Iraqi security forces also reported deadly attacks in Hilla, Karbala, Baquba, Mosul, Kut, Baghdad and Dulia, just north of the capital.

In a report presented to the Senate Appropriations Committee, Mr. Walker, the comptroller general, acknowledged that the insurgent attacks tallied by the American military had decreased to an average of about 60 a day in January, in the latest available count, from about 180 a day in June 2007.

But that lower number, which is roughly equivalent to the levels of violence in the spring of 2005, has remained essentially unchanged since the last significant decrease between October and November.

“While security has improved in Iraq, a permissive security environment has yet to be achieved,” Mr. Walker wrote, using a term meaning an environment safe for ordinary business and social activity.

Mr. Walker and two other federal officials also testified about concerns over corruption in contracting and about problems tracking arms shipments to Iraqi and American forces.

American commanders in Iraq have been warning for months that the security gains were far from irreversible, particularly since progress in Iraqi political reconciliation, which would presumably address the tensions underlying the violence, has been halting.

Smaller security improvements in the past have been followed by surges in violence. Modest gains in security near the end of 2005, for example, were obliterated a few months later when the bombing of a sacred mosque in Samarra set off nearly a year of sectarian killings.

Based on reports from February, violence may already be increasing. An independent tally by The Associated Press recorded a jump last month in the average number of Iraqis killed per day compared with January’s figures.

The accountability office figures use a different measure, the number of attacks recorded against security forces and Iraqi civilians.

Daily reports of violence are, by their nature, grainy and uncertain measures of trends in Iraq, but following the large American death toll the day before, the attacks on Tuesday were strikingly widespread.

A health directorate official in Kut said clashes between the police and the Mahdi Army, the dominant Shiite militia, left 14 people dead and 47 wounded. In Dulia, a police official said, a suicide car bomber detonated his explosives at a checkpoint, killing five and wounding 30.

And in Baghdad, a bomb exploded in a neighborhood council meeting, killing one council member and wounding eight others, while gunmen in another part of the city attacked a prison for juveniles, wounding three guards and freeing three inmates, an Interior Ministry official said.

The Senate hearing also dealt with findings by both the accountability office and an independent federal oversight agency, the Office of the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction, that thousands of pistols, automatic rifles and other equipment delivered to Iraq cannot be accounted for.

Under questioning by Senator Patrick J. Leahy, Democrat of Vermont, the Defense Department’s inspector general, Lt. Gen. Claude M. Kicklighter, said a system was in place to prevent “a major leakage” of weapons to insurgents or the black market. He said weapons of Iraqi forces and the American-led coalition were now accounted for by serial number, down to the company level.

“That’s not awfully comforting,” Mr. Leahy said. “I mean, I’m not trying to quibble words here, but obviously the first sets of weapons came out with really no adequate way of checking them.”

James Glanz reported from Baghdad, and Eric Schmitt from Washington. Mudhafer al-Husaini contributed reporting from Baghdad, and Iraqi employees of The New York Times from Ramadi, Kut, Karbala, Basra, Diyala and Salahuddin.

U.S. role in Philippine raid questioned

A Philippine general says American intelligence guided his troops in a hunt for militants, but eight villagers were slain.
By Paul Watson
Los Angeles Times Staff Writer

March 9, 2008

IPIL, PHILIPPINES — In a hut on stilts with paper-thin walls of bamboo strips, an off-duty Philippine soldier was asleep alongside four members of his family when the crackle of assault rifle fire and shudder of grenade blasts awakened them early last month.

Within minutes, Cpl. Ibnun Wahid, 35, was dead, along with seven other villagers, including two children, age 4 and 9, two teenagers and two women, one of them pregnant. All were shot at close range, witnesses said in interviews and sworn affidavits gathered by the provincial governor's staff to support expected criminal charges.

Like many on Sulu island, provincial Gov. Abdusakur Tan believes the dead were victims of coldblooded killings by government troops. The independent Commission on Human Rights of the Philippines has called for charges to be filed against troops and officers involved in gathering intelligence for and planning the operation, as well those directly responsible for the deaths.

Gen. Ruben Rafael, commander of Philippine troops on the island, also known as Jolo, said in an interview that a U.S. military spy plane circling high above this seaside village provided the intelligence that led to the Feb. 4 assault. He said the crew of the P-3 Orion turboprop, loaded with a sophisticated array of surveillance equipment, pinpointed the village as a stronghold and arms depot for the radical Islamist Abu Sayyaf movement. Government soldiers were ambushed in the area in August, Rafael said.

"The intelligence was very excellent because they have identified the houses, the men with the guns and all the armed men who were occupying these houses," the general said. Rafael said the U.S. military also warned his troops during a firefight that dozens of militants were approaching to counterattack -- information he said was also gathered from the spy plane.

"Because of that, we had to fly our choppers and they were able to prevent these people from reinforcing" insurgents already in the village, the general said. "So that was very crucial support given to us by the U.S."

Maj. Eric Walker, commander of U.S. forces on the island, declined an interview request, and the U.S. military spokesman for the region referred questions to the U.S. Embassy in Manila.

Without specifically confirming any flights over Ipil, U.S. Embassy spokeswoman Karen Schinnerer said that "an aerial reconnaissance vehicle" gathered intelligence over Sulu "at the request of, and in coordination with," Philippine forces.

No witnesses have said there were U.S. forces on the ground when the killings occurred, and Schinnerer said that none were. She also said that intelligence gathering does not violate a prohibition against U.S. forces engaging in combat here.

The human rights commission report recommending criminal and administrative proceedings against troops and officers involved in the operation was written before a Times reporter informed the panel of Rafael's account of U.S. surveillance. The commission gets its mandate from the Philippine Constitution.

Asked whether the U.S. military would assist Philippine authorities in any prosecution arising from the assault, Schinnerer said, "It would be inappropriate to speculate on what remains a hypothetical situation." But, she added, "as a general rule, the U.S. would provide such support to the [Philippine government] if asked."

Under the Philippine Constitution, the hundreds of U.S. military advisors in the southern Philippines are not allowed to engage in combat while helping train local forces in the hunt for militants with Abu Sayyaf and the Indonesia-based Jemaah Islamiah.Both groups are allied with Osama bin Laden's Al Qaeda network.

The guerrilla force that Rafael said the Orion spotted would have been unusually large for Sulu. No insurgents were captured, wounded or killed approaching the village, according to the military's accounts. A small arms cache, including a .45-caliber handgun, an M-16 assault rifle and some rifle grenades were seized in the raid, Rafael said.

Two soldiers were killed and five wounded in the Ipil operation, statistics the army cites as proof of a battle with militants. Villagers contend that the soldiers were killed in their own crossfire. Commission investigators found that was a possibility, but suggested Wahid may have opened fire on the troops as they swarmed around his house.

The Philippine military said an internal investigation had cleared its troops of any wrongdoing, which many here see as a whitewash.

While condemning the findings, attorney Jose Manuel Mamauag, regional director of the Commission on Human Rights, said he was glad the military had issued its conclusions, allowing the commission to take the next step.

"Definitely, we will file charges against the soldiers," Mamauag said.

Sulu Gov. Tan, taking a rare stand against the powerful military, has directed provincial officials and police to build a separate criminal case against as yet unidentified soldiers and commanders involved in the Ipil assault.

Counterinsurgency missions on Sulu have been held up as a model in the battle against militants because a combination of aid programs and military force has brought relative peace to the island. But insurgents are staging a comeback, and clashes have escalated over the last year.

With kidnappings and decapitations fairly common, tourists rarely risk coming anymore. Yet anger and suspicion toward Philippine forces and U.S. advisors also run deep here, even though, Rafael said, U.S. aid for projects including new schools, roads and drainage is expected to total more than $12 million over the next 18 months.

Ipil is a small village on Sulu's southern shore, accessible only by water. Most of its people earn a meager living farming seaweed that yields agar, used as a laxative as well as a gelatin substitute and thickener for soups, desserts and pharmaceuticals.

The Philippine military says a dense network of seaside mangroves here are prime Abu Sayyaf turf and that the assault, which included U.S.-trained Special Forces, was an effort to rout them. Since the troops didn't identify themselves, Wahid, a former rebel who joined the army as part of a 1996 peace pact, feared they were bandits or insurgents, relatives said.

He drew his licensed .45-caliber handgun from its holster and went out on the rickety bamboo porch, ready to defend his family, which insists he did not fire it. When he saw fellow soldiers, he put the gun down, raised his hands and shouted, "Papa Alpha, Papa Alpha," signaling he was in the Philippine army, said his wife, Rawina Lahim Wahid, 24.

Within minutes, Wahid, his wife and parents, and 9-year-old nephew, Nurjimer Lahim, were ordered to lie face-down on the white sand, according to his widow and parents, Udam Lahim, 70, and Andiyang Lahing, 65.

Soldiers tied Wahid's hands behind his back. Then one leveled an assault rifle at his head, and pulled the trigger, his widow said. The weapon jammed. The soldier recocked the M-16 and fired a bullet into Wahid's head, said family members, who were later released.

On the other side of the small, southern Philippine village, 17 members of three families were fleeing the gunfire in a long canoe. They headed straight toward a blocking unit of Philippine soldiers on the edge of a thick mangrove swamp.

From a few yards away, the soldiers opened fire, and kept shooting, ignoring the screaming villagers' pleas, witnesses said.

"It was not an accident," said Saida Failan, 21, whose 4-year-old daughter, Marisa, was shot dead. "We were shouting, 'Stop firing, we are civilians!' and children were crying."

When the shooting stopped, six people in the boat were dead. Villagers also found the body of a local councilor, Eldisim Lahim, shot dead outside his home.

Soon after sunrise, Philippine troops prepared to move the bodies by boat, but Rawina Wahid refused to let them take her husband's corpse without her. "I was afraid they were going to throw him in the ocean, so there would be no evidence," she said.

She said she joined them and was taken to a naval vessel offshore, which she was unable to identify. Rafael said it was a Philippine military "support ship."

As she stepped onto the boat, she said, she saw four foreign men in American camouflage fatigues, each armed with an assault rifle, standing next to a second deck railing.

"They were smiling," she said. "They were happy."

She said she had no way of knowing what the men, who she assumed were Americans, were doing on the ship, or whether they were aware of the horrors she and her neighbors had suffered.

"That's not important, as long as justice is done," she said.

paul.watson@latimes.com

Joint Chiefs Chairman Emphasizes U.S. Role in Pakistan

By THOM SHANKER

ISLAMABAD, Pakistan — The chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Adm. Mike Mullen, arrived here Monday to emphasize America’s eagerness to help Pakistan in its fight against foreign terrorists and home-grown militants operating in the northwestern tribal areas.

Admiral Mullen said the United States was willing to offer assistance for such things as training, transport helicopters and night-combat operations, but stressed that he was carrying no specific proposals on this visit and would await formal requests from Pakistan’s military.

The trip here by Admiral Mullen, America’s highest-ranking military officer — his second here in less than a month — underscored Washington’s view of the vital role Pakistan plays in the global counter-terrorism effort.

But it also highlighted the delicate nature of the relationship between the two countries in which the United States cannot be seen as dictating combat missions on Pakistan’s sovereign territory. This is especially true as the nation struggles to form a new government after a humiliating election loss for the ruling party of President Pervez Musharraf, a close Bush administration anti-terror ally.

“This military-to-military relationship is really critical,” Admiral Mullen said. He summarized his message to Pakistan’s military leadership as: “We are anxious to assist. Tell us where you need assistance.”

During his visit here, Admiral Mullen will meet with Gen. Ashfaq Parvez Kayani, who last year became Pakistan’s new army chief, a pillar of national power, when Mr. Musharraf gave up that post to serve solely as a civilian president. The admiral will also meet with Gen. Tariq Majid, chairman of the Pakistani Joint Chiefs of Staff Committee.

Speaking to reporters aboard his airplane as he flew into Pakistan after a two-day inspection tour of Iraq, Admiral Mullen was asked whether General Kayani was at risk of being seen as too close to the United States.

“One of the messages that I want to make sure that I am very consistent with is: We are there to assist where he wants us to assist,” Admiral Mullen said.

Admiral Mullen did not discuss any of the various proposals now being drawn up by the American military to assist Pakistan.

But one American plan described by senior officials and now under review by the United States military’s Central Command would send about 100 troops to help train the Frontier Corps, a Pakistani paramilitary force that both nations describe as the vanguard in the fight against Al Qaeda and Taliban groups in the restive tribal areas along the border with Afghanistan.

During his visit last month, Admiral Mullen met with the head of the Frontier Corps.

As he arrived in Pakistan on Monday, the admiral said the United States had developed “a fairly comprehensive plan” of assistance to the Frontier Corps, a force of about 85,000 that is recruited from ethnic groups on the border and thus know the region’s dialects and culture.

“There are needs in helicopters,” Admiral Mullen said. “There are needs to operate at night.”

He emphasized that those needs are in training and maintenance skills, and made no mention of American troops entering Pakistan to conduct combat missions, nor even to join Pakistan forces on such operations.

The Pentagon already has spent about $25 million to equip the Frontier Corps with equipment, including vehicles, radios and surveillance devices, and plans to spend another $75 million over the next year. Administration officials say the United States will spend more than $400 million over the next several years to help the Frontier Corps enhance its combat capabilities.

Americans Fire Missiles Into Somalia

By JEFFREY GETTLEMAN and ERIC SCHMITT

NAIROBI, Kenya — American naval forces fired missiles into southern Somalia on Monday, aiming at what the Defense Department called terrorist targets.

Residents reached by telephone said the only casualties were three wounded civilians, three dead cows, one dead donkey and a partly destroyed house.

Bryan Whitman, a Pentagon spokesman in Washington, said the target was a “known Al Qaeda terrorist,” and another American military official said the attack was carried out with at least two Tomahawk cruise missiles fired from a submarine. The official said the missiles were believed to have hit their targets, but did not elaborate on the targets.

Witnesses on the ground, though, described the attack differently.

“I did not know from where they were launched, but what I know is that they hit a house in this town,” said Mohammed Amin Abdullahi Osman, a resident of Dhobley, a small town in southern Somalia near the Kenyan border.

Mr. Mohammed said two missiles crashed into the house around 3:30 a.m.

It was not the first time that American forces fired missiles into Somalia in pursuit of what the Pentagon has called terrorist operatives in the country. They did so at least three times last year.

Dhobley lies in the growing swath of southern Somalia that seems to be falling under the control of the country’s Islamist movement once again. The Islamists rose to power in 2006 and brought a degree of law and order to Somalia for the first time since the central government collapsed in 1991.

But they were driven out of Somalia in late 2006 and early 2007 by a joint Ethiopian-American offensive. The Americans and Ethiopians suspected Somalia’s Islamists of harboring Qaeda terrorists, including men connected to the bombings of the American embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998. Thousands of Ethiopian troops poured across the border, backed up by American airstrikes and American intelligence. The Islamist movement then went underground.

But in the past several months, the Islamists seem to be making a comeback, taking over towns in southern Somalia, including Dhobley, and inflicting a steady stream of casualties on Ethiopian forces with suicide bombs and hit-and-run attacks. Efforts by foreign diplomats and the United Nations to broker a truce have failed, and concerns are rising that Somalia could be headed toward another war-induced famine like the one it suffered in the early 1990s.

Jeffrey Gettleman reported from Nairobi, and Eric Schmitt from Washington. Mohammed Ibrahim contributed reporting from Mogadishu, Somalia.

Taking Back a Qaeda Stronghold

ARAB JABOUR, Iraq - A former stronghold of Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia, this rural and overwhelmingly Sunni area south of Baghdad on the west bank of the Tigris was once a country getaway for Saddam Hussein’s cronies. His sons Uday and Qusay had a weekend house here.

After the invasion in 2003, it became a virtual no-go zone for the Iraqi police and army, which faced a resentful and embittered population uniformly hostile both to the Americans and to any security forces loyal to the Shiite-led government that had replaced “their” regime.

Jihadists flourished here, American commanders say, manufacturing car bombs and sending them up the road for the short trip into the capital.

But last year, violence fell drastically. American commanders cite three main reasons: the United States troop surge, which provided the combat power to take on the insurgents, the decision to withdraw troops from large bases far outside Iraqi towns and put them closer to the population, and the decision by local Sunnis to follow the model of the Anbar Province tribal Awakening by turning against Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia and cooperating with the Americans to fight it.

It is a fertile area heavily dependent on agriculture, and the Americans have sought to restore irrigation projects, injected millions of dollars in microgrants and aid projects to revitalize the economy, and used “helicopter diplomacy” to bring Shiite government officials to talk to Sunni leaders.

The American military has also created and paid for armed tribal Awakening security patrols, which include many former Sunni insurgents, to guard their own neighborhoods. They were formerly known as Concerned Local Citizens here, but were recently rebranded Sons of Iraq.

However, Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia, a homegrown Sunni insurgent group that American intelligence says is foreign led, continues to be a threat, especially in southern Arab Jabour. Hence the curious sight in recent weeks of members of the civilian patrols, in sandals and checkered head scarves, alongside heavily armed American troops as they helicoptered into villages where the extremists until recently had virtual free rein.

American officials say these locals know the area far better than they do, and can point to bombs, weapons caches and insurgent hide-outs.

But they are consistently warned by local Sunni leaders that unless jobs and government positions materialize soon, some of their people will drift back to the extremists.

“We have to be part of the government,” Mustafa Kamel, a local civilian guard leader, cautioned an American general.

“If we are not going to be part of the government, the terrorists will come back and the situation will get worse here.”

Suicide Blast Kills 40 in Northwest Pakistan

By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

Filed at 11:10 a.m. ET

PESHAWAR, Pakistan (AP) -- A suicide bomber blew himself up Sunday at a large meeting called by tribal elders pushing for peace in northwestern Pakistan, killing at least 40 people and injuring more than 100, witnesses and officials said.

It was the third suicide bombing in as many days in the volatile northwest, where security forces were battling pro-Taliban Islamic militants.

Thousands of people were at the meeting in Darra Adam Khel in North West Frontier Province about 25 miles south of the provincial capital, Peshawar. The five tribes involved wanted to finalize a resolution calling for punishing anyone who sheltered or helped militants, including those of al-Qaida and the Taliban, Interior Ministry spokesman Javed Iqbal Cheema said on state-run Pakistan Television.

Alam Khan, a tribesman who attended, said a young man walked up to a group of elders and blew himself up.

''It was a huge explosion and left body parts and blood scattered on the ground,'' said Ramin Khan, whose left leg and face were wounded.

President Pervez Musharraf said the attack was an attempt to sabotage the peace process and reiterated the government's ''resolve and commitment'' in the fight against terrorism and extremism.

Dr. Hamid Afridy, the area's chief medical officer, said he counted 40 bodies, some with severed limbs and mutilated faces, at the site.

''We have dispatched more than 100 injured to .. hospitals'' in Peshawar and Kohat town, he told The Associated Press. He said he feared the death toll could rise because many of the injured were in critical condition.

Pakistan Television said the suspected bomber's severed head was found.

Television footage showed blood, shoes and caps littering the bombing site -- a tree-lined ground amid wheat fields that is only a few yards away from brick homes.

On Friday, a suicide bomber blew himself up at the funeral of a slain police officer in Mingora town in Swat Valley, killing more than 40 people and injuring at least 60. The next, day another suicide bombing in nearby Bajur killed one person and wounded 19 others, mostly security personnel.

Friday's bombing was the bloodiest attack in the Swat Valley since militant followers of a pro-Taliban cleric, Maulana Fazlullah, grabbed control of large parts of the scenic corner of Pakistan's restive northwest, an apparent reflection of how Musharraf's government has lost control of parts of the region.

Meanwhile, a prominent opposition lawyer who had been under house arrest since Musharraf declared a state of emergency more than three months ago was freed Sunday, police said.

The attorney, Aitzaz Ahsan, said the police who had been restricting him to his home in Lahore have left.

Ahsan, a strong critic of the president, had been under house arrest since Nov. 3, when Musharraf declared a state of emergency and fired dozens of independent-minded judges, including the country's Supreme Court justices, who had been expected to rule on the legitimacy of his October re-election.

Ahsan, who is president of the Supreme Court Bar Association, has been at the forefront of demands that Musharraf reinstate the justices. Hours after being freed he led a rally of lawyers and called for the judges to be reinstated.

------

Associated Press reporters Zarar Khan and Sadaqat Jan in Islamabad contributed to this report.

U.S. Plan Widens Role in Training Pakistani Forces

By ERIC SCHMITT and THOM SHANKER

WASHINGTON — The United States military is developing a plan to send about 100 American trainers to work with a Pakistani paramilitary force that is the vanguard in the fight against Al Qaeda and other extremist groups in Pakistan’s restive tribal areas, American military officials said.

Pakistan has ruled out allowing American combat troops to fight Qaeda and Taliban militants in the tribal areas. But Pakistani leaders have privately indicated that they would welcome additional American trainers to help teach new skills to Pakistani soldiers whose army was tailored not for counterinsurgency but to fight a conventional land war against India.

Even though the training program would unfold over several months, it is being disclosed at a time of heightened operations in the unruly tribal areas along the Afghan border. At least eight people suspected of being Islamic militants were killed Thursday in a triple missile attack on a house used for training in the tribal areas.

For several years, small teams of American Special Operations forces have trained their Pakistani counterparts in counterinsurgency tactics. But the 40-page classified plan now under review at the United States Central Command to help train the Frontier Corps, a paramilitary force of about 85,000 members recruited from ethnic groups on the border, would significantly increase the size and scope of the American training role in the country.

United States trainers initially would be restricted to training compounds, but with Pakistani consent could eventually accompany Pakistani troops on missions “to the point of contact” with militants, as American trainers now do with Iraqi troops in Iraq, a senior American military official said. Britain is also considering a similar training mission in Pakistan, officials said. A spokesman at the British Embassy here declined to comment.

“The U.S. is bringing in a small number of trainers to assist Pakistan in their efforts to improve training of the Frontier Corps,” Elizabeth O. Colton, a spokeswoman for the United States Embassy in Islamabad, said in an e-mail message. “The U.S. trainers will be primarily focused on assisting the Pakistan cadre who will do the actual training of the Frontier Corps troops.”

Ms. Colton declined to specify how many American trainers would participate or where their bases would be. But Defense Department officials said that the number of American trainers could grow to about 100. Along with intensified missile strikes in Pakistan against suspected militants, the increased training program is another sign of the Bush administration’s growing concern and frustration with Pakistan’s failure to do more about Al Qaeda’s movements in the tribal areas.

The proposed expanded training program is modest compared with the training efforts under way in Iraq and Afghanistan, and is said to offer scant likelihood of blossoming into a much larger American combat presence. American officials are also acutely aware of Pakistani sensitivities to any United States military presence in the country, even trainers, and spoke largely on the basis of anonymity because of the diplomatic concerns and because the plan had not been formally approved.

Until now, American officials have worked closely with President Pervez Musharraf on counterterrorism policies, including training programs. The landslide victory by Pakistan’s opposition parties in last month’s parliamentary elections adds a degree of complication and confusion to any long-term military planning of this sort because it is unclear to what extent new leaders, like Asif Ali Zardari, the head of the victorious Pakistan Peoples Party and the widower of former Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto, will embrace those policies.

American officials are also taking a number of other steps to help increase Pakistan’s long-term ability to battle a newly resurgent Al Qaeda and other extremist groups in the tribal areas.

At the request of Pakistan’s new army chief, Gen. Ashfaq Parvez Kayani, the Central Command two weeks ago sent a four-member intelligence team, led by a lieutenant colonel, to work closely with Pakistani intelligence officers in Islamabad. The Americans are helping with techniques on sharing satellite imagery and addressing Pakistani requests to buy equipment used to intercept the militants’ communications, a senior American officer said.

The United States is also helping to establish border coordination centers in Afghanistan just across the Pakistan border, where Afghan, Pakistani and American officials can share intelligence about Al Qaeda and other Islamic extremist groups in and around the tribal areas.

The Pentagon has spent about $25 million so far to equip the Frontier Corps with new body armor, vehicles, radios and surveillance equipment, and plans to spend $75 million more in the next year. Over all, a senior Bush administration official said, the United States could spend more than $400 million in the next several years to enhance the Frontier Corps, including building a training base near Peshawar.

The training proposal now under review at Central Command headquarters in Tampa, Fla., which oversees military operations in the Middle East and much of South Asia, is subject to the approval of the commander, Adm. William J. Fallon, and top Pentagon officials, including Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates.

Admiral Fallon said in an interview at his headquarters last week that additional trainers would be part of “a comprehensive approach” to address Pakistan’s security needs. “They want to do as much of this as they can themselves,” Admiral Fallon said.

Pakistani officials said they were aware of the Pentagon’s general offer for more trainers, but were not familiar with the details of the Central Command plan.

That document, titled “Plan for Training the Frontier Corps,” envisions a combination of Special Forces and regular Army troops working with the Frontier Corps in basic marksmanship, infantry skills and counterinsurgency techniques, Defense Department officials said.

Until recently, the Frontier Corps had not received American military financing because the corps technically falls under the Pakistani Interior Ministry, a nonmilitary agency that the Pentagon ordinarily does not deal with. But American and Pakistani officials say the Frontier Corps is drawn from Pashtun tribesmen, who know the language and culture of the tribal areas, and in the long term is the most suitable force to combat an insurgency there.

American and Pakistani officials acknowledge that it will take several years to build the Frontier Corps into an effective counterinsurgency. American officials say they have seen some Frontier Corps members wearing sandals on patrol and wielding barely functional Kalashnikov rifles with little ammunition.

The need for the training is evident. In January, hundreds of Islamic militants attacked a paramilitary fort in the restive South Waziristan tribal region in northwest Pakistan, killing 22 soldiers and taking several others hostage. A Pentagon official said the fort was overrun in part because the commander had failed to range his artillery properly before the attack.

“Pakistani military operations in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas have had limited effect on Al Qaeda,” Lt. Gen. Michael D. Maples, the director of the Defense Intelligence Agency, told the Senate Armed Services Committee last week. “Pakistan recognizes the threat and realizes the need to develop more effective counterinsurgency and counterterrorism capabilities to complement their conventional forces.”

Robert L. Grenier, a former director of the C.I.A.’s Counterterrorism Center, told a panel of the Council on Foreign Relations last week that any high-profile American military presence in the tribal areas or the neighboring North-West Frontier Province would be “the kiss of death.”

But Pakistan, he said, would welcome small numbers of trainers who kept a low profile, and were not involved in combat operations. “To an increasing degree as they see that it doesn’t cause the sky to fall, they will be willing to accept low-level support from the Americans, particularly in the form of training,” said Mr. Grenier, a former C.I.A. station chief in Islamabad.

Mr. Grenier added that the role American trainers played would rest largely with General Kayani, the new army chief. “He’s a very conservative, very cautious fellow,” Mr. Grenier said. “He will want to make his own decisions as to what is sustainable and what is not in the way of U.S. support.”

Pakistani Police Accuse Militant in Bhutto Death

By CARLOTTA GALL

ISLAMABAD, Pakistan — The Pakistani police formally accused the militant leader Baitullah Mehsud on Saturday of planning the assassination of the former prime minister and opposition leader Benazir Bhutto.

The police filed preliminary charges against Mr. Mehsud and four other suspects, all of whom remain at large, before an anti-terrorism court in the city of Rawalpindi, the chief investigator on the case, Chaudhry Abdul Majeed, told reporters. The court issued arrest warrants for the five, news agencies reported.

Mr. Mehsud is the leader of the Tehrik-e-Taliban, an umbrella movement of Pakistani Taliban groups, and operates out of South Waziristan. He has been accused of masterminding many of more than 60 suicide attacks that have killed hundreds of Pakistanis in the last year.

The Pakistani Army mounted an operation against him and his followers in January, but then agreed to a cease-fire with him before national elections on Feb. 18. Mr. Mehsud has threatened to send suicide bombers against targets in Pakistan but has denied any role in the attack on Ms. Bhutto, who was killed Dec. 27 in a shooting and suicide bombing.

Ms. Bhutto’s husband, Asif Ali Zardari, and members of her Pakistan Peoples Party have expressed a lack of confidence in the police investigation and have called for an investigation led by the United Nations into her death. United States officials have said that Mr. Mehsud was behind her death.

The investigator, Mr. Majeed, recently said that Mr. Mehsud gave the equivalent of about $6,500 to a man named Qari Ismail, who belongs to a religious seminary known for its connections to the Taliban, to organize the assassination, the state news agency, The Associated Press of Pakistan, reported.

Dozens killed in Pakistan blast

Suicide bomber targets funeral of policeman in militant-ridden northwest
BREAKING NEWS
MSNBC News Services
updated 12:46 p.m. ET, Fri., Feb. 29, 2008

PESHAWAR, Pakistan - A suicide bombing at a funeral for a police officer killed at least 30 people and wounded 62 others Friday in northwestern Pakistan, a police official said.

The attack occurred in a government high school in the town of Mingora while funeral prayers were being held for a police officer killed in a roadside bombing earlier in the day, said Deputy Inspector General of Police Syed Akhtar Ali Shah.

Interior Ministry spokesman Javed Iqbal Cheema said the attack occurred in Swat, a mountainous region where Pakistani security forces have been battling Islamist militants for months.

Waqif Khan, a senior police officer in the region, said officials have been trying to gain a better handle on the death toll.

The policeman being buried was one of three killed by a roadside bomb in Bannu, a town at the gateway to the troubled North Waziristan tribal region.

Pakistan's army deployed to Swat earlier this year to quell an uprising led by a pro-Taliban cleric, and claims it has dispersed thousands of militant followers but attacks persisted. Last Friday, a roadside bomb hit a wedding party, killing 12 people.

Taliban militants have stepped up attacks and taken control of tracts of northwestern Pakistan bordering Afghanistan in the past couple of years. Before militants took root last summer, Swat was once a draw for tourists because of its fine mountain scenery.

Please check back for details on this breaking story.

Reuters and The Associated Press contributed to this report.
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