In Fallujah, Peace Through Brute Strength

Iraqi City's Fragile Security Flows From Hussein-Era Tactics

By Sudarsan Raghavan
Washington Post Foreign Service
Monday, March 24, 2008; A01

FALLUJAH, Iraq -- The city's police chief, Col. Faisal Ismail al-Zobaie, a husky man with a leathered face and a firm voice that resonates with authority, ordered an aide to shut his office door. He turned to his computer. Across the screen flashed a video, purportedly made by the Sunni insurgent group al-Qaeda in Iraq.

In the video, branches are thrown into a pit the size of a coffin, then doused with kerosene and ignited. The camera pans to three blindfolded men, kneeling, mouths sealed with tape. Six armed men in black masks stand behind them. One declares: "These three men fought and killed al-Qaeda. We will punish them according to Islam." The masked men then kick the three into the burning grave.

Zobaie angrily turned off the video. "How can we show mercy to those people?" he asked. "Do you want me to show mercy to them if I capture them?"

Zobaie, 51, knows the nature of the men in black masks. He is a former insurgent. Now, as the police chief, he has turned against the insurgency, especially al-Qaeda in Iraq. The U.S. military showcases Fallujah as a model city where U.S. policies are finally paying off and is spending hundreds of millions of dollars in the region to promote the rule of law and a variety of nation-building efforts.

But the security that has been achieved here is fragile, the result of harsh tactics recalling the rule of Saddam Hussein, who was overthrown five years ago. Even as they work alongside U.S. forces, Zobaie's men admit they have beaten and tortured suspects to force confessions and exact revenge.

In the city's overcrowded, Iraqi-run jail, located inside a compound that also houses a U.S. military base and U.S. police advisers, detainees were beaten with iron rods, according to the current warden. Many were held for months with no clear evidence or due process. They were deprived of food, medical care and electricity and lived in utter squalor, said detainees, Iraqi police and U.S. military officers, who began to address the problems three weeks ago. Last summer, the warden said, several detainees died of heatstroke.

In Zobaie's world, to show mercy is to show weakness. In a land where men burn other men alive, harsh tactics are a small price to pay for imposing order, he said.

"We never tortured anybody," he said. "Sometimes we beat them during the first hours of capture."

His men, he added, abuse suspects because "they don't surrender easily. They don't confess. They say: 'I am innocent. I haven't done anything.' They start to defend themselves."

The story of Zobaie and his police force opens a window onto the Iraq that is emerging after five years of war. American ideals that were among the justifications for the 2003 invasion, such as promoting democracy and human rights, are giving way to values drawn from Iraq's traditions and tribal culture, such as respect, fear and brutality.

"We don't have any Thomas Jeffersons here," said Capt. Sean Miller, a member of the 3rd Battalion, 5th Marine Regiment, 1st Marine Division from Fairfax, Va., who works closely with Zobaie. "What we do have here is generally a group of people who are trying to save a city. It won't fulfill our ideals or what we desire."

Once a member of Hussein's elite Republican Guard, Zobaie is driven by allegiance neither to the United States nor to Iraq's Shiite-run central government. He wants U.S. troops to leave Iraq. But for now, he needs the United States to bolster him with military muscle and funds. And the U.S. military today depends on men such as Zobaie to help bring about the order and security in Iraq that could eventually lead to the end of the American occupation.

"I have realized that Americans love the strong guy," Zobaie said.

A Turning Point

After the U.S. invasion of Iraq, Zobaie contacted other Republican Guards and military officers. Many had lost their jobs when U.S. administrator L. Paul Bremer ordered the disbanding of the Iraqi army. For the next two years, Zobaie said he was a commander in the Sunni insurgency. "Everywhere I could reach, I fought the Americans," he said. "I didn't feel well until I hit the Americans. Then I felt comfortable."

But a turning point came in 2004. U.S. troops and insurgents fought fiercely in Fallujah. Zobaie battled U.S. forces in the nearby town of Zaidan, where he grew up. By mid-2005, he had grown wary of the foreign fighters and radicals, with their brutal tactics and rigid interpretation of Islam. They banned smoking, satellite television, even Pepsi, because the prophet Muhammad never drank it. One day, Zobaie said, he was stopped at a checkpoint in Zaidan and forced by fighters to watch three men saw off another man's head with a knife.

By April 2006, Zobaie had had enough. He joined the new Iraqi army and was appointed a brigade commander. Then senior Shiite officers had him removed. When al-Qaeda in Iraq militants learned he had enlisted, they kidnapped one of his cousins, who had also joined the army. Zobaie never saw him again. Zobaie said he decided to return to fighting, but against a new enemy: "On that date, it became a public war between us and al-Qaeda."

In November, a relative who was a member of al-Qaeda in Iraq kidnapped Zobaie's brother, Ahmed, and beheaded him with a shaving razor. Zobaie found his head and body four days later. The relative disappeared. A week later, Ahmed's wife gave birth to a daughter.

Zobaie become Fallujah's police chief that December. He sent his wife and seven of his eight children to Iraq's Kurdish semiautonomous region for their safety. When it was time to select a code name to speak over police walkie-talkies, he chose "Ahmed."

'Difficult Decisions'

Zobaie opened his office door. Outside, policemen in blue and white uniforms saluted. Down a narrow corridor he walked past 126 small portraits of officers killed on duty. A tall, wiry policeman followed Zobaie -- his 21-year-old son, Saif. He's the man Zobaie trusts most on his force.

The police headquarters, built with U.S. funds, sits inside a large compound ringed by layers of blast walls in the heart of Fallujah, a dusty city of tan buildings, palatial houses and wide streets about 35 miles west of the capital, Baghdad.

Zobaie lives here and sees his family once every 40 days. He wakes at 5 a.m. to pray and polishes his shoes every morning. He's gracious, but once he threw Saif in prison for showing up to work late. When they visit neighborhoods, Zobaie and his senior officers hand out soccer balls and candy to children.

The jail is to the left of his office; to the right is a building housing U.S. advisers and police trainers. U.S. Marines also live nearby in a joint security station.

A year ago, snipers awaited anyone who wandered outside. Hand grenades were often thrown at the gates. Mortar shells landed nearly every day.

To fight back, Zobaie recalled, he began to think like the insurgents. He ordered his force of 1,200 men to monitor car mechanic shops to avert bomb-making. He ordered oxygen tanks inside hospitals counted at the end of each day because the canisters were often used for bombs. Backed by U.S. troops, his men staged raids and detained scores of al-Qaeda in Iraq members. He has also launched a network of intelligence operatives around the city, a system that was the backbone of Hussein's security apparatus, police officials said.

"He made very brave and difficult decisions," said Maj. Mohammed Fayadh al-Esawi, police commander in the city's Andalus neighborhood. "He proved that in a critical era, he was the right person, at the right time, to be police chief."

A City 'Like a Big Jail'

Fallujah today is sealed off with blast walls and checkpoints. Residents are given permits to enter the city. All visitors and their weapons are registered, and police check every car. The U.S. military has divided the city into nine gated communities, each with its own joint security station staffed by U.S. troops and Iraqi police. It also has been buying the loyalties of former Sunni insurgents, paying them $180 a month to join a neighborhood force that works with the police.

Those tactics have damped down the violence. Shops stay open longer, streets are clogged with traffic, and soccer fields brim with children and young men. But for many residents, Fallujah remains a shadow of its former self. "The city is like a big jail," said Abu Ahmed, a well-known doctor who asked that his nickname be used because he has treated people who were brutalized by Zobaie's men.

Zobaie ordered imams at mosques to stop preaching in support of the insurgency and against American troops. The mosques have long been a breeding ground for insurgents. Sheik Abu Abdul Salman, an influential 67-year-old imam, didn't like Zobaie's order. "He's worse than Saddam Hussein," Salman said.

When Zobaie heard of the remark, his voice rose in anger. "Sometimes people are just saying that I did this, I did that. . . . Okay, I tell them, 'Where were you when al-Qaeda was running this city?' "

Meeting the Public

Zobaie drove out of his compound in a gray sport-utility vehicle, with a Glock pistol, issued by the U.S. military, on his left hip. A blue and white police pickup truck mounted with a large machine gun followed. His son Saif manned the gun.

Zobaie's convoy pushed through the city center along a wide, dusty road, past buildings pocked by mortar rounds and bullets. At a taxi stand, Zobaie stepped out, with Saif behind him. A crowd, recognizing the police chief, gathered around him.

"How's the situation?" he asked, smiling as he shook hands. Some said it was good. But a man pushed through the crowd and confronted him, complaining of mistreatment by the police as he entered the city. Zobaie turned serious. He realized, he said, that he had to gain people's trust and confidence.

"Any policeman who does something bad will be punished," he assured the crowd. He then yelled out his cellphone number, in case anyone had more complaints about his men. Many punched his number into their phones.

Obeying 'Only the Force'

Inside a joint security station in the Sinaa neighborhood, Wissam Fezaa, 20, was screaming into a police radio: "Arrest him! Arrest him!" A man did not have the proper badge to drive his truck.

"He will stay for 30 to 40 days in prison as punishment so he'll never do it again," said Fezaa, who was wearing a blue T-shirt with "Fallujah Police" emblazoned on the back. Asked whether the punishment was too harsh, he replied, "If we were not strong, we cannot control the city."

That is how Zobaie's men control Fallujah. With two U.S. Marines a few feet away, Fezaa said that if he caught a criminal or terrorism suspect in front of people, he would not hurt him. And if he captured him alone? "I wouldn't even let him walk afterward," he said. He pulled an electric stun gun from his leg holster. "I've used this before," he declared.

Capt. Mohammed Yousef, a ruddy-faced police investigator in another joint security station, said he sometimes has to beat suspects to make them confess. He has interrogated suspects since 1994, he said, and sees no need to change his methods.

"Since Saddam Hussein until now, Iraq obeys only the force," Yousef said. "We are practicing the same old procedures."

Abu Rahma, 43, a taxi driver and father of four, was a victim of that approach. He was taken into custody last March and tortured in Fallujah's jail. "They kept beating me to force me to confess," he said. "I told them I am not with al-Qaeda, and neither is my brother. They beat me everywhere on my body. . . . Some of my nails were taken out."

Abu Rahma spent 64 days in the cell. On the 65th day, he was released. "It was like being born again," he said.

Zobaie's harshest critics also acknowledge that Fallujah needs a man like him.

Salman, the imam, said Zobaie controls the city with "a fire fist."

"But to be honest, security is restored under this guy," he said. "We have a saying in Iraq: 'Fever is better than death.' We were dead. Life stopped at 2 p.m. Everybody was afraid of themselves, including me. If he didn't use the force, the security wouldn't be restored. We don't like the weak man."

Dire Conditions

The U.S. military advisers give courses in ethics, the rule of law and human rights to Zobaie's force. They teach the men how to gather evidence, write proper records and follow judicial procedures. But newly arrived senior U.S. officers were stunned when they made a surprise visit to Fallujah's jail last month.

Inmates were not given meals. For food, they relied on relatives or bribed corrections officers. There was no money to buy fuel for generators, no power for air conditioners and heaters. Last summer, six detainees died of heatstroke, said Lt. Col. Daoud Suleiman, who was promoted to warden two weeks ago.

Prisoners suffered from skin diseases, Suleiman said. The sewage system was broken. Corrections officers beat the soles of detainees' feet with rods. Doctors visited only once a month.

Iraq's central government, which has long neglected Fallujah, offered no funds for the prison. U.S. military officers had visited routinely for months but taken no action. "It's a typical Iraqi jail," said Maj. Mike Cava, a military judge advocate. "Their standards are different than ours. They just do things the Iraqi way."

Suleiman said he had asked U.S. military officers for help several times. Lt. Col. Mike Callanan, who works on rule of law issues, said fixing the jail was not a focus of the U.S. military until recently. Three weeks ago, the U.S. military started providing meals, clothing, blankets and hygiene kits to detainees.

Callanan said the U.S. military has warned police officials that it does not "condone torture and beatings of prisoners."

Zobaie denied that conditions were bad at the prison and offered to give a tour to a reporter. "This is my prison. This has nothing to do with the Americans," he said. Moments later, he turned to Suleiman and said: "Take him and show him the prison. The Americans are hurting our reputation." But the Marines who secure the compound barred entry to the jail, despite repeated requests to their commander.

Zobaie didn't fire the abusive jail staff. He transferred them to other precincts.

"If you go through the history of Iraq, you will see that only the tough guy can control the country," he said. He rattled off the names of every leader since Iraq's monarchy ended in 1958 with a bloody coup. Hussein, he said, had lasted the longest in power.

Aid and Mistrust

With American help, Zobaie's influence is growing. He presides over school graduations and launches municipal projects. He helps approve reconstruction contracts and meets with tribal sheiks. Last week, a member of parliament visited his office: He needed Zobaie's help to settle a land dispute.

"This politician came to me to solve the problem and not the city council," Zobaie said, beaming. He was wearing a dark suit with a black and silver tie, not his uniform.

An hour later, Zobaie met Maj. Robert C. Rice, of the 3rd Battalion, 5th Marine Regiment, and a Fallujah government official to plan a sports day for next month. "You will need to spend a lot of money on it," Zobaie told Rice. "We want this to be a special day." Then, with a wave of his hand, he said he would donate his monthly salary and send a team of policemen to play in the soccer tournament.

Rice was wary. U.S. commanders are concerned that Zobaie's force could become a militia someday. Ninety-five percent of the men are Sunnis from Fallujah, more loyal to sect and tribe than to the government. Three weeks ago, U.S. troops raided the office of Suleiman, the prison warden, searching for illegal weapons, Suleiman said, exposing the mistrust. Rice, referring to the sports day, told Zobaie, "We want to be careful that it does not come across as an Iraqi police-dominated event."

Zobaie has asked the U.S. officers to help obtain more aid for the city from the regional and central governments. Already, the U.S. military is employing street cleaners, building schools and putting up $9 million worth of solar street lights. But some U.S. officers question why insurgents once determined to kill them have so quickly embraced them.

"Every time they talk to you there's an agenda," said Miller, the captain who works closely with Zobaie. "You have to figure out what they want right now. If it is this easy, it begs the question: What are we giving them that we don't know that we're giving them?"

What Zobaie wants is for the U.S. military to hand over full control of Fallujah. He believes Iraq's current leaders are not strong enough. Asked whether democracy could ever bloom here, he replied: "No democracy in Iraq. Ever."

"When the Americans leave the city," he said, "I'll be tougher with the people."

Special correspondent Zaid Sabah contributed to this report.

Iraq Seeks Bids to Develop Gas Field

By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

BAGHDAD (AP) — The Iraqi Oil Ministry said on Sunday that it had invited local and international oil companies to bid for contracts, including one to develop a natural gas field in a Sunni area in the western part of the country.

The ministry has set a deadline of April 24 for companies to submit detailed plans to help develop the Akkas gas field in the former Sunni insurgent stronghold of Anbar province, the ministry said on its Web site. The Akkas field has estimated reserves of more than 2.15 trillion cubic feet.

Most of Iraq’s vast petroleum wealth is located in the Kurdish north and Shiite south. Development of the Akkas field could bolster the economy in Sunni areas, where support for the government remains tenuous.

It could produce up to 50 million cubic feet a day as a first stage. That could be increased to 500 million cubic feet a day, which could be pumped through Syria to consumers in Europe.

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

As Tensions Rise in Lebanon, Residents Again Fear the Worst

By Alia Ibrahim, Robin Wright and Ellen Knickmeyer
Washington Post Foreign Service
Friday, March 21, 2008; A14

BEIRUT -- Posters slapped up on the walls of Beirut's Shiite Muslim southern suburbs show the face of a slain Hezbollah leader and declare that his death is a "sign of the coming victory."

Just out of sight from Beirut's shores, U.S. warships ply the waters. Their presence, the Bush administration says, is the United States' own warning, directed at Syria, Iran and their local ally, the Shiite armed movement Hezbollah: The Americans are watching troubled Lebanon.

Lebanon's people, survivors of a 1975-90 civil war and persistent sectarian strife thereafter, are used to rumors of war sweeping the country. Now tensions are rising again among many Lebanese, as well as the regional and international powers that claim a strategic interest in the country's internal affairs.

The sharpest fears here center on the possibility of renewed clashes between Hezbollah and Israel, which fought for 33 days in 2006 after Hezbollah captured two Israeli soldiers in a cross-border raid. The war killed more than 1,000 Lebanese, most of them civilians, and more than 150 Israeli soldiers and civilians.

Today, normally sleepy towns in the country's south are abuzz with stories of Hezbollah fighters getting ready for a new war. Some Lebanese are renting second apartments in neighborhoods far from possible areas of conflict. Barbers offer up chatter to their customers about when and where trouble might start.

Saudi Arabia, France and the United States in recent weeks have issued warnings to their citizens in Lebanon or scaled back some embassy operations, citing security. Applications for Lebanese passports have increased 30 percent in recent weeks, according to local media reports.

"I don't know where I would go -- I have nephews in different countries. If the war breaks out, I will go to them," Khadija Hamadeh, a 47-year-old Lebanese woman, said at a passport office in the southern district of Beirut. Hamadeh clutched a paper ticket, waiting for the number on it -- 97 -- to be called for her first-ever passport application.

"I'm tired," she said. "And I really couldn't stand another war."

This week, followers of a senior Hezbollah figure, Imad Mughniyah, who was killed in a bombing in Syria's capital, Damascus, will end the traditional 40 days of mourning.

Hezbollah blamed Israel for Mughniyah's killing and pledged "open war" to avenge him. Israel has placed its armed forces on high alert.

Because of the ambiguous outcome of Israel's 2006 battle with Hezbollah, many regional analysts say Israel's response in any renewed fighting would reach beyond Hezbollah's southern stronghold and hit targets all over Lebanon, and in Syria, which supports the movement.

"This is a very risky time, and people's worries, unfortunately, are justified," said Paul Salem, director of the Carnegie Middle East Center in Beirut.

Lebanon has been in internal political crisis since the Feb. 14, 2005, assassination of a former prime minister, Rafiq al-Hariri.

The country has been without a president since November, owing to rivalries between the U.S.-allied government and the Syrian-backed opposition, led by Hezbollah.

U.S. officials accuse Syria of prolonging Lebanon's political stalemate in part to try to stave off an international tribunal in Hariri's bombing death. Opposition leaders, in turn, accuse the United States of wanting the deadlock to continue to prevent a less sympathetic figure from becoming president.

In recent weeks, Saudi Arabia and the United States have pushed other governments in the region to isolate Syria as punishment for Lebanon's continuing political crisis. Hariri was a close friend of the Saudi royal family, which granted him Saudi citizenship.

When President Bush toured the Middle East in January, Saudi King Abdullah won U.S. agreement to dispatch the USS Cole and two other ships to the Lebanese coast. Senior Pentagon and State Department officials said the Cole will stay just off the coast, except for brief missions elsewhere, until Lebanon elects a president.

Abdullah, once considered Syria's closest ally among the Saudis, dispatched Foreign Minister Saud al-Faisal in February to Washington, Paris, London, Berlin and Moscow to ask for a united stand on Lebanon and continued pressure against Syria, said U.S. and Saudi officials, speaking on condition of anonymity.

The Saudi intelligence chief, meanwhile, went to Beijing and Persian Gulf countries to seek cooperation, the officials said. The United Arab Emirates, Egypt, Jordan and even Russia -- an ally and arms supplier to Syria -- all have informed Syria that the world holds it responsible for ending Lebanon's internal crisis, officials said.

Saudi Arabia has also organized a high-level boycott of a March 29-30 Arab League summit in Damascus. Abdullah and several other Arab kings and presidents are slated to send foreign ministers and other representatives to the summit, rather than attend themselves. Iran, Syria's ally, said this week that it, too, would send only its foreign minister.

Abdullah sent his foreign minister to Syria last month to warn of the summit boycott and urge Syria to avert it by using its influence in Lebanon to ease the crisis there. Syrian officials indicated that they might help, officials said -- but only if the international tribunal was reined in. Its investigators want to question senior Syrian officials in Hariri's killing.

The tribunal tentatively is scheduled to begin proceedings this summer. The United States has increased its financial pledge for the court from $7 million to $14 million.

Syria last week formally invited the Lebanese government to attend the summit, a conciliatory gesture that eased feelings slightly. But many analysts see strong tensions continuing. The polarization is now "extreme," said Ahmed Youssef, director of the Institute for Arab Research and Studies, a Cairo-based center affiliated with the Arab League. "I don't have the impression any of these actors in Lebanon are willing to end action until their interests" in the country are addressed.

On the Corniche, Beirut's famous waterfront road, 69-year-old retiree Samir Eid stared out at the Mediterranean last week. Eid's son was due to leave Lebanon in a few days, following the lead of Eid's three other children, who found it impossible to make a living in Lebanon's conflict-blighted economy. But Eid looked dreamy, and pleased.

"We really have no choice -- what can we do?" Eid asked. "We wait, we live day by day, we try to steal some moments of peace, like now. Today is perfect, but what tomorrow brings could be a living hell."

Wright reported from Washington and Knickmeyer from Cairo. Correspondents Anthony Shadid in southern Lebanon and Faiza Saleh Ambah in Jiddah, Saudi Arabia, contributed to this report.

Five Years

By JOHN F. BURNS

LONDON

FIVE years on, it seems positively surreal.

On the evening of March 19, 2003, a small group of Western journalists had grandstand seats for the big event in Baghdad, the start of the full-scale American bombing of strategic targets in the Iraqi capital. We had forced a way through a bolted door at the top of an emergency staircase leading to the 21st-story roof of the Palestine Hotel, with a panoramic view of Saddam Hussein’s command complex across the Tigris River.

The bombing had been jump-started 16 hours earlier, when President Bush ordered two B-1 bombers to attack the Dora Farms complex in south-central Baghdad in a dawn raid intended to kill Mr. Hussein and end the war before it began. That caught everyone by surprise, including Saddam, who somehow survived. But by nightfall, the city was braced. The BBC reported B-52 bombers were taking off from a base in England in early afternoon, and we knew, from the flying time, that zero hour for Baghdad would be about 9 p.m.

At precisely that moment — not a few seconds early, nor late — the first cruise missile struck the vast, bunker-like presidential command complex in what would become, under the American occupation, the Green Zone. For 40 minutes, followed by a break, and then another 40 minutes, a fusillade of missiles and bombs struck palaces, military complexes, intelligence buildings, the heart of Saddam Hussein’s years of murderous tyranny. In Washington, they called it “shock and awe.” In Baghdad, Iraqis yearning for their liberation from Saddam called it, simply, “the air show.”

On that hotel roof were experienced Western foreign correspondents, men and women for whom impartiality was their coda. We feared the bombing would remove the last reason for the secret police to spare us, since our Iraqi “fixers” had warned us that the only thing protecting us in those final days was the regime’s concern that harming Western reporters would speed the course to war. Demonstrating our impartiality, once the first missiles struck, thus assumed an intensely personal, as well as professional, dimension — the measure, perhaps, of whether we would survive the time it took for Saddam’s regime to finally collapse.

But from that first impact, among many on the roof, the mood was scarcely one of cool detachment, or at least not as cautioned as it might have been by the longer-term implications of what we were seeing. Part of it, no doubt, was the air show — the sheer, astonishing, overwhelming demonstration of power, more like an act of God than man, unleashing in those watching from the roof something approaching awe. But the larger part, the one that seems surreal now in the light of all that has followed, was the sense that, with the beginning of the end of Saddam Hussein’s evil, the suffering of millions of ordinary Iraqis that we had chronicled, and pitied, was ending.

As they must have to many Americans watching the live television coverage, those missiles and bombs seemed, in the headiness of that moment, to be fit retribution for a ruthless dictator, and the medieval wretchedness he had visited on Iraq’s people. That it took such force to accomplish seemed mitigated, at least somewhat, by the precision of the strikes, with only isolated instances, during the 19 days before American troops reached Baghdad, of errant missiles killing innocent civilians. Early one morning, I went to the smoking wreckage of the city’s central telephone exchange, only to find patients from Iraq’s main heart hospital, 150 feet away, across a narrow lane, uninjured, out in the garden in their pajamas watching the commotion.

It was not long, of course, before events in Iraq began giving everybody cause to reconsider. On April 9, the day the Marines entered Baghdad and used one of their tanks to help the crowd haul down Saddam’s statue in Firdos Square, American troops stood by while mobs began looting, ravaging palaces and torture centers, along with ministries, museums and hospitals. Late in the day, at the oil ministry, I discovered it was the only building marines had orders to protect. Turning to Jon Lee Anderson, a correspondent for The New Yorker who had been my companion that day, I saw shock mirrored in his face. “Say it ain’t so,” I said. But it was.

Looking back, it has been fashionable to say the Americans began losing the war right then. At the least, it was the first misstep in what quickly became a long chronicle: the failure to find weapons of mass destruction, the primary cause the Bush Administration had given for the war; the absence of a plan, at least any the Pentagon intended to implement, for the period after Baghdad fell; the disbanding of the Iraqi Army, and thus casting aside the help it might have given in fighting the insurgency that began flickering within 10 days of American troops entering Baghdad; the lack of an effective American counterinsurgency strategy, at least until the troop increase last year finally began bringing the war’s toll down.

Beyond these, there were the instances when America’s intentions were betrayed by its troops in more personal ways, with the abuse and torture of Iraqi detainees at Abu Ghraib, with the shooting deaths of 24 civilians in Haditha and with the rape and murder of a 14-year-old girl at Mahmudiya, along with the killing of three other members of her family, all leading to court-martial hearings that tore at the heart of anyone who starts from a position of admiration for the American armed forces. The Marine offensive that recaptured Falluja from Islamic militants in November 2004, virtually flattening the city without achieving more than a temporary change in the arc of the war, may also draw its share of condemnation.

At the fifth anniversary, the conflict’s staggering burden is a rebuke to any who hoped Mr. Hussein’s removal might be accomplished at acceptable cost. Back in 2003, only the most prescient could have guessed that the current “surge” would raise the American troop commitment above 160,000, the highest level since the invasion, in the war’s fifth year, or that the toll would include tens of thousands of Iraqi civilians killed, as well nearly 4,000 American troops; or that America’s financial costs, by some recent estimates, would rise above $650 billion by 2008, on their way to perhaps $2 trillion if the commitment continues for another five years. Beyond that, there are a million or more Iraqis living as refugees in neighboring Arab countries, and the pitiful toll of fear and deprivation on Iraqi streets.

Those of us who witnessed the war at first hand have more personal reckonings. These pressed home, for me, on countless occasions during the years since the invasion, up to my departure from Baghdad late last summer, when I completed a five-year assignment in Iraq and moved to a new posting in London. Worst of all were the moments when war and its arguments were reduced from the remote, and political, to the intensely personal, and to that terrible sense, familiar to anybody who has experienced war, that nothing, or almost nothing, can justify its wounds.

They are scenes that do not fade: Watching American soldiers being slipped into body bags for the journey home, and knowing, at that instant, that the lives of unknowing families thousands of miles away have been shattered; surveying the aftermath of suicide bombings, with severed limbs in the street, and hearing the wailing of the Iraqi bereaved. Or, an experience we endured twice at The New York Times, having a young Iraqi man working on our news staff gunned down by militiamen and insurgents, leaving children, some barely old enough to be in school, to cope with life without a beloved father and a brother, and to have no sense of why.

In time, those who launched the war will answer in history, as much as they will claim the credit if America ultimately finds a way home with honor, and without destroying all it went to Iraq to achieve. But reporters, too, may wish to make an accounting. If we accurately depicted the horrors of Saddam’s Iraq in the run-up to the war, with its charnel houses and mass graves, we have to acknowledge that we were less effective, then, in probing beneath the carapace of terror to uncover other facets of Iraq’s culture and history that would have a determining impact on the American project to build a Western-style democracy, or at least the basics of a civil society.

It was not easy, with a reporter’s every move scrutinized by Saddam Hussein’s lugubrious minders, to undertake that kind of in-depth reporting. But from the exhaustive reporting in the years since, Americans now know how deeply traumatized Iraqis were by the brutality of Saddam, and how deep was the poison of fear and distrust. They also know, in detail, through the protracted trials of Mr. Hussein and his senior henchmen, of the inner workings of the merciless machinery that transported victims to the torture chambers and mass graves.

They know, too, through coverage in this newspaper and others, of the deep fissures, of ethnicity, sect and tribe, that were camouflaged by the quarter-century of Mr. Hussein’s totalitarian rule. As much as America’s policy failures, it has been these factors that have contributed to the Iraqi quagmire. Properly weighed, in time, they might have given cause for second thoughts about the wisdom of the invasion. What seems certain is that those entrusted with the task of fulfilling the American mission were confronted, from the beginning, by an odds-against calculus. Iraq, in 2003, could scarcely have been less prepared than it was to embrace democracy, dependent as that is, everywhere, on a minimum of popular consent and trust.

The harsh reality is that many Iraqis, at least by the time of the two elections held in 2005, had little zest for democracy, at least as Westerners understand it. This, too, was not fully understood at the time. To walk Baghdad’s streets on the voting days, especially during the December election that produced the Shiite-led government now in power, was inspiriting. With 12 million people casting ballots, a turnout of about 75 per cent, it was natural enough for President Bush to say Iraqis had embraced the American vision. In truth, what the majority produced was less a vote for democracy than a vote for a once-and-for-all, permanent transfer of power, from the Sunni minority that ruled in Iraq for centuries, to an impatient, and deeply wounded, if not outright vengeful, Shiite majority.

What has followed has been predictable. For close to two years, the Shiite religious parties that won the December 2005 election have clung tenaciously to their new-found power, and the Sunni parties, mostly unreconciled to an Iraq ruled by Shiites, have maneuvered in ways intended to keep open the possibility, ultimately, of a Sunni restoration. Nothing, in short, has been settled. Americans officials bridle at the failure to tackle decisively any of the issues they identified as crucial to “reconciliation,” including the critical issue of the future share of oil revenues. Meanwhile, the rival Iraqi blocs, taking the long view, look beyond the American occupation to a time when these central issues of power will be settled among themselves.

American hopes are that Iraqis, with enough American troops still present to stiffen the new Iraqi forces and prevent a slide backward toward all-out civil war, will ultimately tire of the violence in the way of other peoples who have been plunged into communal violence, as many Lebanese did during their 15-year civil war. Those hopes have been buoyed by a reduction in violence in the last year that can been traced to the American troop increase and to the cooperation or quiescence of some previously militant groups, both Sunni and Shiite.

They are hopes shared by many ordinary Iraqis. Opinion polls, including those commissioned by the American command, have long suggested that a majority of Iraqis would like American troops withdrawn, but another lesson to be drawn from Saddam Hussein’s years is that any attempt to measure opinion in Iraq is fatally skewed by intimidation. More often than not, people tell pollsters and reporters what they think is safe, not necessarily what they believe. My own experience, invariably, was that Iraqis I met who felt secure enough to speak with candor had an overwhelming desire to see American troops remain long enough to restore stability.

That sentiment is not one that many critics of the war in the United States seem willing to accept, but neither does it offer the glimmer of cheer that it might seem to offer to many supporters of the war. For it would be passing strange, after the years of unrelenting bloodshed, if Iraqis demanded anything else. It is small credit to the invasion, after all it has cost, that Iraqis should arrive at a point when all they want from America is a return to something, stability, that they had under Saddam. For America, too, it is a deeply dispiriting prospect, promising no early end to the bleeding in Iraq.

For one Iraqi general, a tale of lost hope and honor

'I thought I was setting Iraq on the right path,' says Jawad Rumi Daini, a retired soldier who joined the new force after the U.S.-led invasion, hoping to use his experience. But tragedy and controversy followed.

By Ned Parker
Los Angeles Times Staff Writer

March 16, 2008

CAIRO — Late at night, when he can't sleep, the Iraqi general paces past the dimly lighted model homes and construction sites of his Cairo neighborhood. He avoids the main streets, crammed with shopping malls and restaurants. He doesn't want to run into other Iraqis. He has enemies.

He slips back in after 1 a.m., careful not to disturb his wife, children and grandchildren. But still he can't drift off. It will be close to dawn when finally he shuts his eyes, after exhausting himself thinking about how he will protect his family, how long his money will last. How he fell so far and ended up banished by the Iraqi government and forgotten by the Americans.

The fate of Maj. Gen. Jawad Rumi Daini is more than the story of one man's disgrace. As the fifth anniversary of the invasion to oust Saddam Hussein nears, he serves as a singular witness to the hopes and horrors of the last five years: a man haunted by his role in a terrible stampede on a Baghdad bridge that left nearly 1,000 people dead; a man targeted for his involvement in the discovery of a Shiite police torture chamber; a man devastated by the killing of his son.

Some call Daini an honorable officer who sacrificed for his country. Others brand him a coward who accommodated Shiite militias and Sunni fighters alike.

In today's Iraq, where nothing is black and white and motives are inscrutable, the answer may be somewhere in between. Even with fresh talk of reconciliation in his homeland, the 59-year-old has no hopes of returning: He saw too much as the country slid into civil war.

"I joined the old army and the new," he said, "and lost both."

The beginning

Daini watched the U.S. tanks and soldiers stream into Baghdad in April 2003. As an army veteran, he had been ordered by Hussein's Baath Party to help lead his neighbors in resisting the Americans, but as soon as he saw their tremendous firepower, Daini recognized it as a lost cause.

He had fought in the 1980-88 war with Iran, and his reputation as a commander was sterling. But he was forced into retirement in July 1990, a month before Hussein's ill-fated Kuwait invasion, after it was discovered that his brother had joined the Badr Brigade, an armed Shiite group then based in Iran that was dedicated to the overthrow of the Sunni-dominated regime in Baghdad.

"Daini was a big name," recalled a Shiite politician who knew him in the Hussein years. Like others, he agreed to speak about Daini only on condition of anonymity, citing the sensitivity of the events in which Daini was involved. "He was a person who was independent, who did not follow a party or political direction."

Retired, Daini dabbled in real estate and ran a farm south of Baghdad. But he was a soldier. The army was in his blood. "How can you be at home when the nation needs a man to protect it?" he said.

After the fall of Hussein, everyone was watching him -- insurgents and Iraqi officials. He was among the elite of the old Iraqi military, and he couldn't stay neutral. People knew he would have to either join the nation's new order or his old army comrades in the insurgency. The alternative was to risk being killed -- whether by gunmen affiliated with Shiite political parties or the so-called resistance. Within months, some Iraqi politicians had approached him and asked whether he would serve in the new U.S.-backed army.

"I thought it was appropriate for me to go back," Daini said.

He reported for duty in January 2004. On the job, he and other officers started to counsel the Americans on how they should change their behavior. Civilians complained that U.S. soldiers pushed women and the elderly and locked up the wrong people on false tips. Daini recommended measures for searching houses and avoiding confrontation.

"I thought I was setting Iraq on the right path."

His move was viewed as betrayal by former commanders who had joined the insurgency. Asked about Daini, one former general snapped, "Don't talk to me about Jawad Rumi. Nobody does what he did."

In October 2004, Daini established the 2nd Brigade of the 6th Division in east Baghdad, a territory encompassing the Sunni enclave of Adhamiya, which harbored Sunni insurgents, and Sadr City, the teeming slum where Shiite cleric Muqtada Sadr's Mahdi Army militia held sway.

Daini prayed at both Sunni mosques and Shiite mosques to show that he represented all Iraqis. He perched children on his lap and read them stories. No one knew whether he was Shiite or Sunni. He consciously kept people in the dark about his sect.

"His biggest strength was he was a patriot," a senior U.S. officer who worked closely with Daini told The Times. "He held himself above any ethnocentric focus. He was in it for Iraq to be a stable nation."

In those early months, his men faced car bombings, suicide attacks and ambushes. Daini survived at least five assassination attempts. Despite his age, his slight paunch and double chin, he still could move quickly, and if shot at, he'd grab his rifle. After one ambush on his convoy, he charged down the street with his bodyguards, sprayed gunfire at the assailants and burned their house to the ground.

Like other officers in the new army, he quickly learned the limits of his power. Arresting Sunni or Shiite militants prompted complaints from the sects' respective political leaders.

"When he captured some people from the Mahdi [Army], or some criminals or outlaws, some parties and people in Sadr City didn't like him. It was the same thing in [Sunni] Adhamiya," the Shiite politician lamented. "At that time, we said, 'The one who works in these areas will be sacrificed.' "

The bridge

The songs rang out under a clear blue sky and searing heat for Imam Musa al Kadhim, a Shiite saint believed to have been poisoned in 799 by the caliph, a Sunni. At least 2 million Shiite pilgrims paraded through Baghdad on the anniversary of his death that August day in 2005.

They streamed into Adhamiya, an enclave of support for the insurgency; the green flags of Islam and the black flags of mourning fluttered in the streets. From there they crossed the steel-spanned Two Imams bridge over the Tigris to the saint's tomb in west Baghdad -- in the imposing Imam Kadhim mosque complex with its twin gilded domes and towering minarets.

Daini stood on the Adhamiya side of the bridge, where he was in charge. He had prepared for 20 days with the Americans and his counterpart in Kadhimiya, Gen. Abdul Jalil Khalaf. With sectarian tensions at a boil and fearing a massive attack on Shiite pilgrims, they had searched the roads for bombs and snipers. The bridge had been sealed off with concrete barriers months before.

In the final hours before the pilgrimage, orders came down from the Defense Ministry: Open the bridge.

According to interviews with Iraqi and Western officials in the last year, the U.S. command in Baghdad had wanted to keep the bridge closed for the holiday, but a senior member of a Shiite party in the government called the defense minister and insisted that the barriers be removed. The Iraqi officers had no choice but to follow orders.

Daini removed the concrete blocks on his side of the bridge, but Khalaf cleared only a small pathway.

Shortly after 11 a.m., several mortar shells fell on the west side of the river, and shots were fired. The crowd panicked.

There was shouting about a suicide bomber, and the masses pushed and shoved on the bridge. With one side partially closed, some were crushed underfoot in the stampede and others dived into the river.

By the time it was over, nearly 1,000 people had been trampled or drowned, the worst death toll in a single event since the invasion in 2003.

Immediately after the disaster, Shiite clerics alleged that the army had been infiltrated by Sunni terrorists. Daini and Khalaf were called in for the first of several government inquiries.

At first, both he and Khalaf were cleared of blame. But the two men's accounts conflicted. Daini insisted that he had informed Khalaf of orders to open the bridge, but Khalaf denied this. Both men had American commanders backing their version of events.

"Jawad was a kind of bumbling, unwitting stooge," said another senior U.S. officer, "a small player in a greater plot which he did not understand."

The Jadriya bunker

Violence continued as the December 2005 national elections approached. Sunni militants carried out a campaign of suicide bombings and Shiite militias abducted Sunni men, with many of their bodies dumped beside a sewage plant in east Baghdad.

Sunnis in Adhamiya held a protest, demanding to know the whereabouts of their relatives who had disappeared or been jailed by the national police, an elite force that included Shiite militiamen.

A tip from Daini about a missing 15-year-old boy helped track the teenager to a police bunker in the middle-class district of Jadriya. U.S. officers in Baghdad decided to raid the center and, knowing the move could strain U.S. relations with the Shiite elite, asked Daini to come along.

When they arrived, the building supervisor insisted that there were few detainees there. The Americans ignored him and broke down a locked door. It led into a cramped, dark hallway holding more than 160 detainees.

The troops gave IV fluids to the emaciated detainees, some bruised and some covered with blood.

They couldn't find the boy they were looking for, but Daini recognized a teenager from his neighborhood who had been stopped by police at a checkpoint, clubbed with a rifle and taken away. His family had assumed he was dead and had held a funeral for him.

Afterward, Daini was criticized within the Iraqi army for not tipping them off about the raid.

"He was getting a lot of pressure from Ministry of Defense officials to lay low," said the U.S. commander who supported Daini. "He stuck his neck on the line."

After Samarra

After insurgents blew up the gold-domed Shiite shrine in Samarra in February 2006, Shiite militias roamed Baghdad. The capital was in the throes of sectarian war and Daini tried to help reassert control. He negotiated with the militias to release hostages and to abandon Sunni mosques, he said, but still fell afoul of them.

In June, Daini's soldiers arrested four Mahdi Army members with a blood-coated knife and a list of 30 names, 20 of them crossed out. Daini said he soon got phone calls from the office of newly sworn-in Shiite Prime Minister Nouri Maliki asking for the men to be freed. Daini refused.

The prime minister's office has denied interfering with Daini's operations. However, U.S. military officers have confirmed that Maliki's office often phoned army commanders with demands regarding arrests and operations.

Late on the night of July 2, Daini was inspecting checkpoints when he got a message on the radio: Come back to the base. A letter from the Cabinet had arrived releasing him from the army.

He headed home and slept. The next morning, he went to the base he had helped establish and collected his things.

U.S. commanders say Daini was fired over the Kadhimiya bridge disaster and the Jadriya bunker, calling the raid "a black eye" for the government. A senior Iraqi security official told The Times that the Defense Ministry had to make someone the fall guy for the stampede -- Khalaf had been more shrewd in cultivating people in power, so Daini was sacrificed.

Daini spoke on the phone and met with interpreters for U.S. Maj. Gen. J.D. Thurman, who commanded the Army in Baghdad, and Gen. George W. Casey Jr., head of U.S. forces. Their conversations always ended with apologies -- there was nothing they could do. The Iraqi government had the right to choose its commanders.

Some Iraqis and Americans had soured on him over allegations that he had contacts with armed Sunni and Shiite groups; others believed he was trying to broker deals to end violence in his areas. Regardless, U.S. commanders decided Daini wasn't worth trying to save.

"Jawad tried to do the best he could, but he was scared to death of those factions out there that threatened him or his family," said the U.S. commander who had been critical of Daini.

Then, on Nov. 23, there was a massive car bombing in Sadr City. Nearly 150 people were killed. Daini watched on TV as Hakim Zamili, the deputy health minster and a Sadr supporter, branded Daini a terrorist, accusing him of countenancing past attacks in east Baghdad. Daini turned to his 28-year-old son, Haidar, and said, "It is time to leave."

Within days, Daini's enemies struck. Armed men kidnapped Haidar one morning as he was on his way to work. By 10 p.m., his body had been found in a neighborhood controlled by the Mahdi Army. Daini believed the militia had killed his son.

Daini sent his wife and two daughters to Egypt. He stayed on, convinced that he could sell off their belongings, but no one would buy his home in west Baghdad or the family farm south of the capital. He sold his wife's jewelry -- more than a pound of gold necklaces and bracelets.

He switched houses for safety almost daily as he continued to nurture a hope of selling his property. Finally, his wife phoned from Cairo and demanded that he leave. He couldn't risk failing his wife and children, so he fled his homeland.

"My heart was hemorrhaging," he said.

Egypt

On television, Daini watches Iraqi channels, where he spots his old colleagues. Sometimes Khalaf, the other general involved in the Kadhimiya stampede, appears. He has been appointed police chief in Basra. Daini wonders why Khalaf survived and he did not.

He believes that Khalaf, a close friend of Iraq's current defense minister, had ties to militias and set him up to take the fall.

The month Daini's son was killed, arrest warrants were issued against Khalaf and four of his officers accusing them of murder, extortion and complicity with militias. Within a week, the charges had been dropped and the case's lead witness, an Iraqi lieutenant colonel, killed. Khalaf insists that the charges were trumped up.

Daini sounds bitter, and bereft, as he ponders his fate. The Defense Ministry cut his pension last fall and he worries that he will be arrested or killed if he returns home.

"Many Iraqi officers are all living happily. I am the only one who has suffered such tragedies: the death of my son, the destruction of my whole life," he said.

"I never hurt anybody."

ned.parker@latimes.com

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.

Upswing in Iraq attacks not a trend: U.S. military

Sun Mar 9, 2008 3:42pm EDT

By Michael Holden

BAGHDAD (Reuters) - The U.S. military said on Sunday a recent increase in bombings was not the start of a wider trend in Iraq and violence had decreased overall.

U.S. military spokesman Rear Admiral Greg Smith said he did not think recent security gains were being reversed.

"I would not look at the last few weeks as an increase or a trend, but there has been a sporadic series of events that ... have resulted in significant loss of life," Smith told a news conference.

Smith said the spate of recent attacks needed to be compared with a year ago, when thousands of civilians were dying in sectarian violence between majority Shi'ites and minority Sunni Arabs, with U.S. troops also suffering heavy casualties.

Iraqi police said 68 people died when two bombs exploded within minutes of each other in a popular, crowded shopping area in central Baghdad on Thursday evening, the deadliest single bombing in the capital since last June.

Overall levels of violence are sharply down since last June, when 30,000 extra U.S. soldiers were deployed.

That coincided with a ceasefire by Shi'ite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr's Mehdi Army militia and a decision by mainly Sunni Arab tribal sheiks to turn against Sunni Islamist al Qaeda.

The fiercely anti-U.S. Sadr issued his second statement in three days on Sunday, telling followers they could still defend themselves despite his decision last month to extend a ceasefire for his feared Mehdi Army militia for another six months.

"If a military war is conducted against us by the occupiers we will defend ourselves," Sadr said in a statement bearing his personal seal, his second in three days.

Sadr appeared to be reacting to complaints by members of the militia that rival Shi'ite factions and the U.S. and Iraqi security forces could exploit the ceasefire to attack them.

HEADACHES

The number of violent civilian deaths rose sharply in February, the first increase in six months, after bombings which Smith blamed on al Qaeda killed more than 160 people.

Any upsurge in violence could pose headaches for Washington over its plans to withdraw some U.S. troops from Iraq.

Five of 20 combat brigades in Iraq are due to be pulled out by July 31, reducing the overall U.S. military presence from about 160,000 to around 140,000.

On Thursday, the U.S. military said the second of the brigades would be returning from Baghdad, while another based in the city was also earmarked for withdrawal.

"There has been substantial progress -- levels of violence are down by 60-70 percent, civilian deaths and a variety of other categories that we watch are all down," General David Petraeus, the U.S. military commander in Iraq, told Sky News.

U.S. commanders say al Qaeda is the greatest threat to Iraq's security but they are also concerned about "rogue" Shi'ite militias, many which have split from Sadr and which the U.S. military accuses Iran of financing, training and arming.

Tehran has denied the charges, blaming the U.S. presence in Iraq for the violence.

Iranian, U.S. and Iraqi officials held three round of talks in Baghdad last year on ways to end the violence, easing a diplomatic freeze between Washington and Tehran.

But a fourth round of talks has been repeatedly delayed with Washington and Tehran blaming each other for the impasse.

"Direct talks with the United states are not on Iran's agenda but Iran-U.S. talks on Iraq have been delayed due to technical issues," said Iranian Foreign Minister Manouchehr Mottaki on Sunday.

(Additional reporting by Luke Baker in London, Edmund Blair in Tehran, Khaled Farhan in Najaf and Waleed Ibrahim and Mohammed Abbas in Baghdad; Editing by Jon Boyle)

Ominous Rise in Baghdad Bombings

By Charles Crain/Baghdad

Thursday's double bombing in Baghdad, which killed nearly 70 people and left hundreds more wounded, was the worst attack in Iraq since June 2007. It continues a troubling trend: a slow but steady increase in deadly bombings across the country. The troop surge is ending and the U.S. has begun withdrawing soldiers from Baghdad, but these attacks may indicate that a military or political solution to the Sunni insurgency may be as far off as it was a year ago.

The attacks capped off a violent week. Last Sunday more than 20 people died in bombings across the capital. And last month nearly 100 people were killed when two women detonated suicide vests in a crowded Baghdad market. According to statistics released by the U.S. military such attacks declined sharply for most of 2007, bottoming out in December. Since late last year, though, car bombings and suicide vest bombings have increased steadily.

Despite this week's carnage the absolute number of bombings is still far lower than it was one year ago. The problem, however, is not simply lives lost, but also what the slow increase in attacks says about the resiliency of the Sunni insurgency. Battered by Shi'ite militias, the U.S. military and the defection of more moderate insurgents, al-Qaeda in Iraq and other radical insurgent groups are much weaker now than they were just last summer. But, as U.S. officials are quick to acknowledge, they still have the men, the money and the organization to pose a serious threat.

The question now is how that threat will be kept under control. American troop levels in Baghdad and the rest of Iraq will return this year to about the same level as 2006 — the year that saw the worst of the country's sectarian violence. Helping to fill that void, supposedly, will be former members of the Sunni insurgency: thousands have become U.S.-paid counter-insurgents and, in some cases, members of the Iraqi government security forces. Unlike the mostly Shi'ite Iraqi army and police, these Sunnis have credibility in their towns and neighborhoods and have proven effective in fighting their former insurgent allies.

The trouble is that this ground-level military solution may be in conflict with other government efforts to reduce the violence and foster stability in Iraq. The Karrada bombing came on the heels of a state visit by Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, and struck a neighborhood that is home to Iraq's largest Shi'ite political party and many Shi'ite government officials. The timing and location of this bombing may have been a coincidence, but Karrada makes a nice target for Sunni militants who frame their fight as a struggle against Iranian domination.

The long-term difficulty for the United States and the Iraqi government is that this suspicion of Iran is not simply a fantasy of radical Sunni insurgents. It is a very real fear of Sunni former insurgents currently cooperating in the fight against al-Qaeda. Former insurgent leaders routinely scorn the Iraqi government's intentions, casting it as a pawn of the Iranians. So, as the Iraqi government strives to reduce violence by improving its relationship with Iran, it may be setting the stage for continued conflict with disaffected Sunnis.

Is Mosul on the Mend?

By Mark Kukis/Mosul

U.S. military officials say violence is dropping around Mosul, where insurgents have for months escalated attacks. In January, U.S. military data show there were more than 500 attacks across Ninewa Province, where Mosul is the largest and most volatile city by far. A senior military official speaking on condition of anonymity said the attacks in the province in February were expected to total roughly 400.

Even if the projections bear out, Mosul still remains a vicious battleground for Iraq, which has seen overall violence fall dramatically in recent months in the wake of the surge. And the city of 1.8 million people continues to vex U.S. military leaders, who have watched its troubles ebb and flow over the years.

In late 2003, Mosul was largely peaceful by comparison with the rest of Iraq at the time. The burgeoning insurgency, then beginning to spread across other areas of Iraq, was slower to take hold in Mosul for a number of factors. Mosul drew a measure of stability from its history as place of relative wealth and sophistication, whereas early insurgent havens like Fallujah and Ramadi were poor, troubled places even under Saddam Hussein. And some leaders among Mosul's Sunni community for a time held out hope of finding a role in the emerging post-invasion power structures even when Sunnis elsewhere were quickly adopting a rejectionist mentality. General David Petraeus, who was then head of U.S. forces in northern Iraq, says Mosul's first real plunge into violence came in 2004, after he handed over command of the area. The police force collapsed, and insurgents moved in. "Once the roots go in, then you have a real challenge," Petraeus says of the insurgency. "You just start to spiral downward."

In the years afterward, violence in Mosul fluctuated as insurgents kept up a presence in the city. But the situation there seemed much more stable than many parts of Iraq such as Baghdad and Ramadi. Then in 2007, as surge forces began reducing violence across Iraq, the picture in Mosul worsened, leaving it the only place in the country where violence was rising as the year closed. Iraqi and American officials agree that Mosul is now probably the last urban stronghold of the insurgency. Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki dispatched additional Iraqi army troopers to the area, promising a "decisive battle" that has yet to materialize. But in any case Petraeus and other U.S. commanders believe that efforts to fix Mosul this time are destined to work better, chiefly because nationalist Sunni fighters are rethinking their alliances with al-Qaeda in Iraq and, in some cases, becoming open to reconciliation.

"Sunni Arabs have evolved," Petraeus says. "They realize that al-Qaeda has brought them nothing but indiscriminate violence and bloodshed and in many cases oppressive practices such as forced marriages. And in some cases bizarre practices such as breaking fingers of people who smoke."

The military strategy in Mosul for both U.S. troops and Iraqi security forces is much the same approach used elsewhere in Iraq over the years, with mixed results. Absent, however, is one key aspect that shaped progress in other places over the past year: local volunteer security forces who, in many cases, were nationalist insurgents who broke with al-Qaeda in Iraq. U.S. officials say that strategy won't work in Mosul, because standing up bands of irregulars could inflame existing ethnic and sectarian divisions in the city. So many U.S. military officials see provincial elections as a way to sap the insurgency's strength in Mosul. In the 2005 elections, many Sunnis across Iraq simply did not participate, a defiance that left them dejected and marginalized — and susceptible to the embrace of insurgent elements. Petraeus and other American officials in Baghdad think Sunnis will take part in elections this time and rejoin the civic process rather than rage against it. "They want their seats at the table back," Petraeus says.

Still, an opportunity for reconciliable Sunnis to turn from the insurgency to participation in the government does not appear to be near. Last week, Iraq's presidential council blocked a proposal for new provincial elections, sending the measure back to the parliament for reconsideration. So U.S. and Iraqi forces in Mosul are left to slog on against the insurgency rooted there without the prospect of a change in the political dynamic that might alter the situation in the way the tribal revolt in Anbar Province against al Qaeda in Iraq did last year.

Daily missions by U.S. and Iraqi troops continue in Mosul, a pivotal hub for insurgents operating throughout Iraq. Petraeus says U.S. and Iraqi forces are eliminating one insurgent roadside bomb team a night and taking out key insurgent leaders. "You've got to chip away at the enemy," he says. "Al-Qaeda knows they can't win without Baghdad, but they can't survive without Mosul."

Case Is Dropped Against Shiites In Sunni Deaths

Ex-Officials' Trial Seen as Test of System

By Amit R. Paley and Zaid Sabah
Washington Post Foreign Service
Tuesday, March 4, 2008; A12

BAGHDAD, March 3 -- Two former high-ranking Shiite government officials charged with kidnapping and killing scores of Sunnis were ordered released Monday after prosecutors dropped the case. The abrupt move renewed concerns about the willingness of Iraq's leaders to act against sectarianism and cast doubts on U.S. efforts to build an independent judiciary.

The collapse of the trial stunned American and Iraqi officials who had spent more than a year assembling the case, which they said included a wide array of evidence.

"This shows that the judicial system in Iraq is horribly broken," said a U.S. legal adviser who spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to discuss the case publicly. "And it sends a terrible signal: If you are Shia, then no worries; you can do whatever you want and nothing is going to happen to you."

Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki's decision to allow the case to proceed to trial was considered a significant step toward proving his Shiite-led government could hold Shiite officials accountable for sectarian crimes. The case was heard at the multimillion-dollar Rule of Law Complex, protected and supervised by the United States, which has said that the development of an impartial justice system is essential to Iraq's long-term stability.

On Monday a three-judge panel ordered the former Health Ministry officials released after a prosecutor unexpectedly asked that the charges be dismissed for lack of evidence. The request caught U.S. officials off guard and came on the second day of what was expected to be at least a four-day trial; evidence had been presented completely on only some of the allegations against the defendants.

The trial of Hakim al-Zamili, a former deputy health minister, and Brig. Gen. Hamid Hamza Alwan Abbas al-Shamari, who led the agency's security force, was the most public airing of evidence that Baghdad hospitals had become death zones for Sunnis seeking treatment there. The officials, followers of anti-American Shiite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr, the leader of the feared Mahdi Army militia, were accused of organizing and supporting the murder of Sunni doctors; the use of ambulances to transfer weapons for Shiite militia members; and the torture and kidnapping of Sunni patients.

Zamili and Shamari said they were innocent and unaware of the ministry being used for crimes against Sunnis. Their attorneys accused the government and American officials of trying to lead a campaign against the Sadrist movement. Sadr has been both a key supporter and a critic of Maliki's government; the cleric has recently won praise from U.S. officials for continuing to order his militia to refrain from violence.

Zamili, 43, of Sadr City in Baghdad, and Shamari, 49, of the capital's Baladiyat district, were taken into custody by the U.S. military last February.

"The very fact that the charges were heard and investigated does show modest progress toward the rule of law," said Mirembe Nantongo, a spokeswoman for the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad.

But the case hit roadblocks immediately. The trial court sent it back at least three times to the investigative court, asking for more information, according to American officials, who said the unusual requests were unnecessary and dangerous to carry out.

"The fact that the trial panel would find what we did insufficient was a great disappointment," Michael F. Walther, a Justice Department official who advised the Iraqi legal system, said in December. "I do think that they may have applied a different standard of proof than they would have for an ordinary criminal."

Eventually the panel announced that the trial would begin on Feb. 19, but three hours after it was scheduled to begin, a spokesman for the Iraqi court system, Judge Abdul Satar Ghafur al-Bayrkdar, said the case would be delayed until March 2 because witnesses had failed to appear.

American officials, however, said evidence had emerged that one of the trial judges had promised to find the defendants not guilty and that a senior judge had ordered him to be replaced.

Witness intimidation has been one of the most significant concerns in the trial.

Many of the witnesses agreed to testify only because they believed their names would be kept secret, but their names were leaked and supporters of the former Health Ministry officials threatened to kill them or their families if they didn't recant their testimony, American officials said. Many of the witnesses did not show up at the trial, though Iraqi law allows their testimony to be read if they do not attend.

One witness who did appear on Monday, Nazar Mehdi Abdul Rasul, the Health Ministry's chief legal representative, contradicted his sworn testimony in October that he witnessed an old man begging Zamili to help secure the release of the man's kidnapped brother.

"I heard Hakim Zamili call the kidnappers on his cellphone and ask them to release the brother of this old man," Rasul testified in October. "And after a long pleading I heard Zamili saying, 'Don't kill him, just throw him on Canal Street.' "

But on Monday, Rasul, who trembled and kept glancing at Zamili, said Zamili was a pious man and competent administrator. Rasul said he had misspoken during his earlier testimony because he was weak from fasting for Ramadan. The angered chief judge chastised Rasul and said he could submit his testimony in writing if he feared speaking in the courtroom.

Attorneys for the defendants called a number of witnesses, many Sadrists and current employees of the ministry, who defended Zamili and Shamari and suggested that others were behind the kidnappings and killings. But the judge also read the testimony of witnesses who accused Zamili and Shamari of being sectarian killers.

At the end of a long day Monday, the prosecutor got up and read what Americans described as a long statement. "The evidence against Hakim and Hamid is not enough to convict them. I ask to drop these charges and release them right away unless they are wanted for another case," said the prosecutor, whose name was not released as a security precaution.

"The bottom line is that we're reserving judgment on the Iraqi court's decision today," said Nantongo, the U.S. Embassy spokeswoman. "We remain concerned about this case."

A U.S. official said Zamili and Shamari are likely to be freed within 24 hours. Preparations were being made to tighten security for witnesses who testified against them.

Also Monday, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad wrapped up a historic two-day visit to Iraq by calling on U.S. forces to leave the country.

"They should leave this area, and they should hand over the running of affairs to the government and the people of this region," he said. "The people in the region despise them and don't welcome them. None of the people in the region love those forces."

Despite tightened security measures that shut down much of Baghdad, two suicide bombers staged separate attacks that killed at least 18 people and wounded 23 others, Iraqi officials said.

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.”

Iranian Leader Arrives in Iraq

By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

Filed at 10:45 a.m. ET

BAGHDAD (AP) -- Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said Sunday his landmark visit to Iraq opened a new chapter in ''brotherly'' relations between the two countries, which were once bitter enemies.

The Iranian president’s trip is a historic one, the first since Iran and Iraq fought an eight-year war in the 1980s. The trip not only highlights his country's growing influence on its Arab neighbor in the post-Saddam Hussein era, but it also serves as an act of defiance toward the U.S., which accuses Iran of training and giving weapons to Shiite extremists in Iraq.

The Iranian leader went from Baghdad's airport to a meeting with Iraqi President Jalal Talabani, who gave him a red-carpet welcome. The two kissed four times on the cheek in the traditional fashion and a band played the two countries' national anthems.

''We had very good talks that were friendly and brotherly. ... We have mutual understandings and views in all fields, and both sides plan to improve relations as much as possible,'' Ahmadinejad said in a news conference with Talabani at the Iraqi president's residence, located across the Tigris River from the new U.S. Embassy in the fortified Green Zone.

Talabani said the two discussed economic, political, security and oil issues and planned to sign several agreements later. But he said the issue of borders, including the disputed Shatt al-Arab waterway between the two countries, was not discussed.

Ahmadinejad stressed that his country wanted a stable Iraq that would benefit the region.

''A united Iraq, a sovereign Iraq and an advanced Iraq is to the benefit of all regional nations and the people of Iran,'' he said.

Though much of the public talk focused on the warming relations between the two countries, Ahmadinejad denounced U.S. accusations that Iran was training and supplying Shiite militia fighters in Iraq with weapons designed to kill American troops.

''Such accusations increase the problems of the Americans in the region and they are not going to solve their problems,'' Ahmadinejad said in a separate press conference with Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki after discussions with Talabani.

Al-Maliki emphasized that the Iranian leader's visit was ''an expression of the strong desire to enhance the relations and develop mutual interests after the past tensions during the dictatorship era.''

The news conference appeared to end abruptly after a reporter asked Ahmadinejad about the People's Mujahedeen Organization of Iran, which was allied with Saddam during the bitter 1980s war between the two countries. The group has opposed Iran's Islamic republic and has operated out of Iraq. The U.S. and European Union list it as a terrorist organization.

Talabani interjected, saying: ''This issue has been discussed earlier and the presence of those as a terrorist organization is constitutionally not allowed. We will endeavor to get rid of them out of the Iraqi territory soon.''

The U.S. has said it will have no involvement in Ahmadinejad's visit. Ahmadinejad arrived in Iraq a day after Adm. Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, came to Baghdad on an unannounced visit with commanders and Iraqi officials.

Iraqi Foreign Minister Hoshyar Zebari told The Associated Press that Ahmadinejad plans to leave Monday morning.

Though both are Shiite-majority countries, Iran and Iraq were hostile to each other throughout Saddam's regime. Their eight-year war after Saddam invaded Iran in 1980 cost about 1 million lives.

But when Saddam's Sunni-dominated regime fell and Iraq's Shiite majority took power after the 2003 U.S.-led invasion, long-standing ties between the Shiites of both countries flourished again, though the two neighbors have yet to sign a peace treaty.

Many of Iraq's Shiite leaders lived in exile in Iran during Saddam's rule, and Talabani, a Sunni Kurd, speaks fluent Farsi.

With the trip, Ahmadinejad also may be trying to bolster his support back home ahead of parliamentary elections later this month. They are seen as referendum on the Iranian president, who has come under criticism in his country for spending too much time on anti-Western rhetoric and not enough on Iran's economic problems.

The U.S. has tried to downplay Ahmadinejad's visit. It has said it welcomed Iran's stated policy of promoting stability but that its actions have done just the opposite.

Rear Adm. Gregory Smith said the Iraqi government would provide the principal security for Ahmadinejad and had the capacity and equipment to do so.

''Iraq has a responsibility as a neighbor to provide security,'' he said during a press conference in the Green Zone, adding that the U.S. hoped the visit ''produces real and tangible results.''

President Bush denied that Ahmadinejad's visit undermined U.S. efforts to isolate Tehran, but had some advice for what al-Maliki should say to the Iranian leader.

''He's a neighbor. And the message needs to be, quit sending in sophisticated equipment that's killing our citizens,'' Bush said.

In Tehran, Iran Foreign Ministry spokesman Mohammad Ali Hosseini criticized Bush.

''His remarks are an intervention in the friendly, brotherly and sincere relations between Iran and Iraq,'' Hosseini told reporters Sunday after Ahmadinejad left Iran. ''Americans do not want the relations to grow.''