11 Afghan Police Killed in Taliban Attack

By TAIMOOR SHAH and CARLOTTA GALL

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Iraq and U.S. to pressure Iran with diplomacy, force

By Randall Mikkelsen

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Iraq is prepared to pressure Iran diplomatically to stop supporting violence, while the United States helps the military effort to halt aid to "surrogate" forces, the White House national security adviser said on Sunday.

However, U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Gates said chances of a violent confrontation with Iran were slim.

White House adviser Stephen Hadley said Iran must choose between good relations with Iraq, or its "destabilizing" activities in the country.

"The Iraqi government now understands more clearly what they (the Iranians) are doing. They will put diplomatic pressure to bear on Iran. That's a good thing," Hadley said on the "Fox News Sunday" television show.

"In addition, we will continue to do with Iraqi security forces what we've been doing for some time. We will go after their surrogate operations in Iraq that are killing our forces, killing Iraqi forces.

"We will disrupt their networks by which they move fighters, weapons and funds in and around Iraq. And we will cut off as best we can the flow of fighters, weapons and arms into Iraq," he said.

Washington accuses Iran of stoking violence in its neighbor. Iran denies this and blames the presence of U.S. troops for the bloodshed.

Iraqi Foreign Minister Hoshiyar Zebari described Iran as a neighbor that must be treated with respect.

"We are destined to live with them. Really, we need to assume some good faith in dealing with them, trying to ... activate this tripartite dialogue between the United States, Iran and Iraq," Zebari said on CNN's "Late Edition."

Gates, speaking on CBS's "Face the Nation," said Iraqi forces were steadily assuming control of more areas in Iraq, and he cited reports of a backlash among some local Shi'ite leaders in Basra against violent Shi'ite factions.

"I think the chances of us stumbling into a confrontation with Iran are very low. We are concerned about their activities in the south," he said. "But I think that the process that's under way is ... headed in the right direction."

House of Representatives Speaker Nancy Pelosi, a California Democrat, called the Iraqi government the main obstacle to ending factional and sectarian violence, and said on "Face the Nation" that an early withdrawal of U.S. troops would force the government to make political decisions needed for peace.

(Editing by Eric Beech)

A cleric, a pol, a warrior

In Iraq, Muqtada Sadr's clout and experience make any effort to subdue him a dangerous strategy.
By Patrick Cockburn

April 12, 2008

The Iraqi government has decided that the moment has come to crush the Mahdi Army and the followers of Muqtada Sadr once and for all. Despite its failure to eliminate his militiamen in Basra at the end of March, the government, with American backing, is determined to try again, according to senior Iraqi officials.

It is a dangerous strategy for both Prime Minister Nouri Maliki and the U.S. Sadr remains one of the most powerful and revered leaders of the Shiite community -- and the Shiites make up 60% of Iraq. What's more, the 34-year-old Sadr is not exactly the mercurial "firebrand" or "renegade" cleric portrayed by journalistic cliche-mongers; rather, he has repeatedly shown himself to be a cautious and experienced political operator.

Ever since he unexpectedly emerged as a central figure in Iraqi politics in the days after the overthrow of the old regime in 2003, Sadr's many enemies have invariably underestimated him and the commitment of his followers. When the U.S. viceroy in Iraq, L. Paul Bremer III, moved against Sadr in April 2004, he was astonished when the Sadrists took over much of southern Iraq in response. Maliki had a similar experience in March: He demanded that the Mahdi Army militiamen hand over their weapons within three days -- only to see pictures on TV of disaffected troops and police surrendering their guns to the militia instead.

Sadr enjoys such great religious and political authority because he is the scion of the most respected Shiite clerical family in Iraq. His father, Ayatollah Mohammed Sadeq Sadr, and two of his brothers were killed, presumably by Saddam Hussein's gunmen, in 1999. His cousin and father-in-law, Mohammed Baqir Sadr, a revered Shiite theologian, was executed by the old regime in 1980.

It was Sadeq Sadr who created the Sadrist movement, whose mixture of puritanical Islam, nationalism and social relief appealed to the millions of Shiite poor, impoverished by war and economic sanctions. Although Hussein initially saw Sadeq Sadr as a potential ally, he realized late in the day that he was fostering a dangerous enemy and ordered Sadeq Sadr's assassination.

Muqtada Sadr became so important so fast after the fall of Hussein because he inherited his father's movement -- and it is still the basis of his influence. He only narrowly avoided being killed at the same time as Sadeq Sadr and was held under house arrest, allowed to live only because Iraqi security believed he was no threat.

Living so close to death for so many years helps explain Muqtada Sadr's secretive character. "Even his closest lieutenants sitting beside him do not know what is going on in his head," one of his aides said. Highly intelligent with a quick, nervous manner, he illustrates his words with rapid hand movements in apparent imitation of his father's manner.

Muqtada Sadr created the Mahdi Army in 2003 and rapidly turned it into the most powerful militia in Iraq. Lightly armed and poorly trained, it suffered terrible losses fighting the U.S. Marines in two battles in Najaf in 2004, but the outgunned militiamen did not surrender. The Sadrists have always seen political and social activism as essential to Islamic practice. They criticized the rival Shiite leader, Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani, and the established Shiite clergy for their "quietism" and their failure to actively oppose Hussein (and later, the American occupation).

What makes Sadr different from other Shiite leaders, and gives him credibility among the Shiite masses, is that he opposed the U.S. occupation from the beginning. When the U.S. invasion overthrew Hussein, Sadr said that "the big snake has succeeded the small snake." He pulled his followers out of the Iraqi government in 2006 because Maliki would not condemn the occupation. He also became increasingly reliant on Iran in the face of U.S. hostility.

The once impressive political unity of the Shiite community is now collapsing. Maliki (who is a Shiite) and his small Dawa Party, along with his main ally, the Supreme Islamic Iraqi Council, believe that they can isolate the Sadrists and, with American help, marginalize them before the October provincial elections in which the Sadrists were expected to do well. The long rivalry of the Sadr family and the Hakim family (the founders of the Supreme Islamic Council in 1982) has once again exploded. The U.S. may come to regret taking sides against the Sadrists in this intra-Shiite feud.

Ever since the battles for Najaf four years ago, Sadr has tried to avoid direct military confrontation with U.S. military forces. He has agreed to truces and cease-fires, and two weeks ago, he even called his militiamen off the streets in Baghdad and Basra when they seemed to be winning.

But for the Iraqi government, those clashes were only the first round in a battle to crush the Sadrists as a political and military force. Going by past experience, Sadr will try to arrange a compromise to avoid the destruction of his movement. But if he is forced to fight, the U.S. will face a whole new front in the war in Iraq.

Patrick Cockburn is the Iraq correspondent for the Independent in London and the author of "Muqtada: Muqtada Al-Sadr, the Shia Revival, and the Struggle for Iraq."

Iraq Dismisses 1,300 After Basra Offensive

By STEPHEN FARRELL

BAGHDAD — The Iraqi government announced Sunday that it had dismissed 1,300 soldiers and policemen for refusing to fight or performing badly during last month’s offensive against Shiite militias in the southern city of Basra.

Maj. Gen. Abdul-Kareem Khalaf, an Interior Ministry spokesman, said that 500 soldiers and 421 policemen were fired in Basra, including 37 senior police officers up to the rank of Brigadier General. Police officials said the remainder were fired in Kut, where fighting also spread.

“Some of them were sympathetic with these lawbreakers, some refused to battle for political or national or sectarian or religious reasons,” General Khalaf said in Basra.

The dismissals were an implicit admission of failures during the government offensive, which was widely criticized as being poorly planned. Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki’s forces failed to disarm Shiite militias, in particular the Mahdi Army militia loyal to the cleric Moktada al-Sadr. However, they claim to have restored order to the streets, and the nearby ports vital to Iraq’s oil industry.

American officials, who praised the Iraqi forces’ progress in being able to move 6,600 reinforcements south to Basra so quickly, conceded that they had not been fully consulted in advance.

The Basra clashes pitched the country’s two most powerful Shiite forces against each other — the Mahdi Army and the government security forces dominated by Mr. Sadr’s most powerful internal Shiite rival, the Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq.

On April 3, Mr. Maliki promised to dismiss and prosecute the worst offenders among the more than 1,000 who deserted, laid down their weapons or refused to fight against their fellow Shiites and tribesmen. At the time one of his senior officials acknowledged that fear of the militias was a principal factor. “One of the main reasons is that they felt the other party was too strong, and too courageous and they couldn’t confront them,” he said.

Putting further political pressure on Mr. Sadr, Ali al-Dabbagh, an Iraqi government spokesman, said Sunday that the cabinet had agreed on a draft law that would ban any party from taking part in the October provincial elections unless they disband their militias. But it was unclear how much effect any law could have, given that the two dominant Shiite parties in government — the Sadrists and the Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq — are both closely affiliated with their armed wings.

In Baghdad, the Mahdi Army’s Sadr City stronghold was reported to be quieter on Sunday, after a week of heavy clashes with Iraqi government and American troops.

The Iraqi and American forces have taken control of southern neighborhoods in an effort to deprive the Mahdi Army of areas from which it can fire rockets and mortars at Baghdad’s high-security Green Zone three miles to the west.

Iraqi and U.S. Forces Battle Shiite Militia

By MICHAEL KAMBER and JAMES GLANZ

BAGHDAD — Heavy fighting broke out Tuesday in two of Iraq’s largest cities, as Iraqi ground forces and helicopters mounted a huge operation to break the grip of the Shiite militias controlling Basra, and Iraqi forces clashed with militias in Baghdad. The fighting threatened to destabilize a long-term truce that had helped reduce the level of violence in the five-year-old Iraq war.

The battles, along with indications in recent weeks that militia and insurgent attacks had already been creeping up, raised fears across Iraq that Moktada al-Sadr, the renegade Shiite cleric, could pull out of a cease-fire he declared last summer. If his Mahdi Army militia does step up attacks, that could in turn slow American troop withdrawals.

There were also serious clashes in the southern cities of Kut and Hilla.

In Basra, American and British jets roared through the skies, providing air support for the Iraqi military. A British Army spokesman for southern Iraq, Maj. Tom Holloway, said that while Western forces had not entered Basra, the operation already involved nearly 30,000 Iraqi troops and police forces, with more arriving. “They are clearing the city block by block,” Major Holloway said.

The scale and intensity of the clashes in Baghdad kept many residents home. Schools and shops were closed in many neighborhoods and hundreds of checkpoints appeared; in some neighborhoods they were controlled by the government and in others by militia members.

Barrages of rockets and mortar shells pounded the fortified Green Zone area for the second time in three days. An American military spokesman said there were two minor injuries to civilians in the Green Zone.

Even before the crackdown on militias began on Tuesday, Pentagon statistics on the frequency of militia and insurgent attacks suggested that after major security gains last fall, the conflict had drifted into something of a stalemate. Over all, violence has remained fairly steady over the past several months, but the streets have become tense and much more dangerous again after a period of calm.

It is not clear how responsible the restive Mahdi militia commanders are for stalling progress in the effort to reduce violence. In recent weeks, commanders have protested continuing American and Iraqi raids and detentions of militia members.

If the cease-fire were to unravel, there is little doubt about the mayhem that could be stirred up by Mr. Sadr, who forced the United States military to mount two bloody offensives against his fighters in 2004 as much of the country exploded in violence.

Sadiq al-Rikabi, the prime minister’s political adviser, and other Iraqi officials said that just how the unrest in Baghdad was related to the crackdown in Basra was unknown.

Sadr City, the Baghdad neighborhood that is the center of the Mahdi Army’s power, was sealed off by a cordon of Iraqi troops and what appeared to be several American units. A New York Times photographer who was able to get through the cordon found more layers of checkpoints, each one run by about two dozen heavily armed Mahdi Army fighters clad in tracksuits and T-shirts. Tires burned in the city center, gunfire echoed against shuttered stores, and teams of fighters in pickup trucks moved about brandishing machine guns, sniper rifles and rocket-propelled grenade launchers.

“We are doing this in reaction to the unprovoked military operations against the Mahdi Army,” said a Mahdi commander who identified himself as Abu Mortada. “The U.S., the Iraqi government and Sciri are against us,” he said, referring to a rival Shiite group whose name has changed several times, and is now known as the Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq, which has an armed wing called the Badr Organization.

“They are trying to finish us,” the commander said. “They want power for the Iraqi government and Sciri.”

Basra, which until 2005 enjoyed relative peace, has since been riven by power struggles among the Mahdi Army and local Shiite rivals, like the Badr Organization and a militia controlled by the Fadhila political party, a group that split from the Sadr party.

In the weeks leading up to the operation, Iraqi officials indicated that part of the operation would be aimed at the Fadhila groups, which are widely believed to be in control of Basra’s lucrative port operations and other parts of the city. The ports have been plagued by corruption, draining revenue that could flow to the central and local governments. But the operation also threatens the Mahdi Army’s strongholds in Basra.

Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki’s government depends on support from the Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq but is less dependent now on coalitions with the Mahdi Army.

In Basra, Iraq’s most important oil-exporting center, thousands of Iraqi government soldiers and police officers moved into the city around 5 a.m. and engaged in pitched battles with Shiite militia members who have taken over big areas of that city.

The Basra operation, which senior Iraqi officials had been signaling for weeks, is considered so important by the Iraqi government that Mr. Maliki traveled to the city to direct the fighting, several officials said.

Although Sadr officials said the cease-fire was still in effect, on Monday Mr. Sadr called for a nationwide civil disobedience campaign in response to what his followers said was an unwarranted crackdown. Some Mahdi commanders referred to an edict by Mr. Sadr saying their militias had the right of self-defense.

A member of Mr. Sadr’s political party in Basra, Sheik Abdul Sattar al-Bahadli, complained bitterly about the enormous operation, claiming that it was aimed at innocent people in Basra.

“We never witnessed such attacks even under the regime of Saddam Hussein,” Mr. Bahadli said. “Maliki gave orders and said, ‘Erase them.’ ”

But Mr. Maliki said in a statement that the operation was intended to root out “outlaws” who, he said, were working with local confederates inside and outside the government.

“The federal government, pressed by its obligations to support the local government in Basra and support its officials, has decided to restore security and stability and impose the law,” the statement said

An American military official said the American-led coalition forces had provided air transportation for the operation and were keeping “quick reaction forces” on standby.

The official said coalition forces had supported Iraqi security forces in clashes around Sadr City with “special groups” — a term reserved for what American commanders say are Iranian-backed Shiite splinter groups, which include portions of the Mahdi Army.

“A coalition forces helicopter also engaged targets north of Sadr City in support of this operation,” the official said, asserting that despite the fighting, most of Baghdad had been peaceful and that there were still signs of progress on security in most areas of Iraq and its capital.

“We feel that the cease-fire is being honored” by those loyal to Mr. Sadr, the official said. The cease-fire, he said, “is in the best interest of all Iraqis.”

Many places in Baghdad were tense. At a checkpoint downtown, a policeman’s radio crackled with the news of the sniper shooting of a police officer in a nearby neighborhood. “We’ve heard that Sadr has canceled the cease-fire, is this true?” he asked motorists whose car he was searching.

In a statement issued late Tuesday, the military said an American soldier was killed in Baghdad about 5.p.m. No other details were provided.

Witnesses in Basra said jets flew overhead as armored vehicles raced through the city and machine gun and canon fire reverberated through the streets. Civilians took refuge in their homes. Iraqi television showed images of civilian gunmen with grenade launchers taking up positions and ambulances ferrying the wounded to hospitals.

On Tuesday night, after about six hours of silence, armored vehicles and helicopters could again be heard moving through the city, witnesses said. Gunfire and shelling could be heard to the north.

In Baghdad, some areas were deserted as clashes broke out across the city. In downtown Baghdad, checkpoints blocked sparse traffic every 100 yards.

Saeed Ammar, a government employee, said he was standing near policemen in the Huriya neighborhood on Tuesday morning when he was approached by Mahdi Army members. “They told me not to stand near checkpoints. They said, ‘We are waiting for the word from Moktada Sadr to attack the checkpoints — it may come at any moment.’ ”

Despite the armed actions by many Sadr followers, members of Mr. Sadr’s party said the cease-fire was still in effect and called for peaceful civil disobedience. In Najaf, hundreds of followers carrying Korans and olive branches mounted a sit-in, chanting, “No to occupation, no to terrorism.”

Sahar Gani, a teacher, was taking students home along a nearly deserted Baghdad sidewalk. “The security situation is getting worse day by day,” she said. “The city is getting very bad now. We’ve been through this before, so we find it natural. But we don’t know what to do.”

Reporting was contributed by Joao Silva, Anwar J. Ali and Hosham Hussein from Baghdad, and employees of The New York Times from Baghdad, Basra, Hilla, Diwaniya and Kut.

Iraqi Forces Battle Gunmen in Basra

By Sholnn Freeman and Sudarsan Raghavan
Washington Post Foreign Service
Tuesday, March 25, 2008; 11:39 AM

BAGHDAD, March 25 -- Gun battles erupted between Iraqi security forces and Shiite armed groups in the southern oil city of Basra on Tuesday as the government launched a security offensive against the feuding militias that have turned the city into one of Iraq's most dangerous zones.

The targeted groups include members of Shiite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr's Mahdi Army, further risking the breakdown of a ceasefire imposed by Sadr over the organization last summer. The ceasefire has been credited with tamping down violence throughout the country but seemed to be fraying as armed groups clashed with security forces in Basra and in several eastern Baghdad neighborhoods.

The Associated Press also reported fighting in the southern Iraqi town of Kut, where Sadr loyalists had reportedly taken control of several neighborhoods.

In addition, U.S. Embassy officials confirmed additional shelling Tuesday of the protected Green Zone, where the U.S. Embassy and the Iraqi government are housed. A spokeswoman said the embassy had no information on casualties. Officials said that one Army employee had died as a result of a day-long Green Zone shelling attack Sunday and that a Jordanian Embassy employee remains hospitalized.

Residents in Basra reported sporadic clashes beginning early Tuesday morning in the neighborhoods of Hayania, Jubaila and Jumhuria -- known Sadr strongholds. In telephone interviews, they described seeing military vehicles, soldiers and policemen exchanging fire with armed groups.

As of Tuesday afternoon, 13 gunmen had been killed, along with three Iraqi policemen, and six civilians were dead, police said. Scores more were injured, and at least five military vehicles were set ablaze, according to police.

"No one is on the street," said Mohammed Kadhim, who owns a clothing shop in the center of the city. As he spoke, the sound of gunfire could be heard in the background. "I am not able to go out of my house." He said one of his neighbors was shot in the face and was in critical condition.

By Tuesday afternoon, there were reports of clashes unfolding in several neighborhoods in eastern Baghdad between Iraqi security forces and armed groups, as well as between rival Shiite gangs.

In an interview, an Iraqi interior ministry said Mahdi Army gunmen stormed two offices of the Dawa Party, led by Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, and clashed with guards. The clashes left five Mahdi Army gunmen and two Dawa Party guards dead, police said.

The clashes came as Sadr's movement mounted a nationwide civil disobedience campaign in many parts of eastern and central Baghdad, demanding the release of Sadr's followers from detention centers and an end to Iraqi government raids. Sadrist leaders ordered stores to be shut down and taxi and bus drivers to stop operating. Television footage Tuesday showed neighborhoods turned into virtual ghost towns, their usually busy streets all but empty.

In a statement, Sadr called upon Iraqis to stage sit-ins and threatened a nationwide "civil revolt" if U.S. and Iraqi forces continue attacking and arresting his followers.

The actions were the latest sign that the ceasefire imposed by Sadr on his Mahdi Army militia is under strain.

U.S. military commanders have commended the ceasefire. They view it as a key reason why violence levels have dropped in recent months across Iraq, along with a U.S.-troop buildup and the rise of a Sunni movement, fueled by tribesman and former insurgents, against radical jihadists.

But in recent weeks, many Mahdi Army leaders and Sadr loyalists have urged the cleric to remove the ceasefire, as Iraqi security forces and U.S. troops have raided and detained hundreds of Sadr followers in several southern cities in the past few months.

"The plan that is being implemented in Basra is meant to pass political agendas and not bring security," Harith al-Ithari, the head of Sadr's office in Basra, said in a phone interview with Iraq's al-Sharqiya television network. "But we are working together with all sides to bring back stability to the city."

Violence has gripped Basra since December, when British troops handed over control of the province to the Iraqi government. A power struggle between the Mahdi Army and its main rival, the Supreme Islamic Iraqi Council and its armed wing, the Badr Brigade, has battered the city in recent months.

But smaller Shiite militias are also locked into fighting. Tuesday's clashes erupted a day after Maliki traveled to Basra to oversee a security crackdown.

Ahead of the offensive, the Iraqi government closed off land access to the city from Tuesday through Thursday and imposed a nighttime curfew until further notice. The government ordered schools, institutes and universities to cancel classes Tuesday through Thursday and banned all movement of vehicles to Basra from other provinces until further notice.

A Maliki adviser, Sadiq al-Rikabi, said Monday that the prime minister was determined to bring the area under control and not leave the security of the people "threatened by gangs and murders."

Maj. Tim Holloway, a spokesman for the British military, said fighting was unfolding in districts in the center of Basra. British forces are standing by, he said, but are not involved in the security crackdown. He said coalition forces were providing surveillance support with aircraft flying overhead.

"Iraq can deal with the challenges in Basra," Holloway said. "It's an indication of the Iraqi military's confidence in their own ability and their willingness to do so." He described the security crackdown as "enormously encouraging."

The British have about 4,100 troops in the area, most at the city's airport and none inside Basra proper. Since handing over the province to the Iraqi government, the British have limited their role to training Iraqi security forces.

Special correspondents K.I. Ibrahim, Zaid Sabah, Dalya Hassan and Naseer Nouri in Baghdad contributed to this report.

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

Report: Kenya's Post-Election Violence 'Meticulously' Organized

By Stephanie McCrummen
Washington Post Foreign Service
Monday, March 17, 2008; 6:40 AM

Nairobi, March 17-- Post-election attacks on villagers in Kenya's western Rift Valley were often "meticulously" organized by local opposition leaders who called for "war" against people from President Mwai Kibaki's Kikuyu ethnic group, according to a report by the group Human Rights Watch released Monday.

The report also detailed widespread killings by Kenyan police of opposition supporters, especially in the opposition stronghold of Kisumu in western Kenya. It also found circumstantial evidence to suggest that senior government officials were aware of planned reprisal attacks by Kikuyu gangs against opposition supporters in several other western towns.

A prominent Kenyan diplomat told The Washington Post that it was an "open secret" that certain Kikuyu politicians provided funding for gangs of young Kikuyu men and ferried them to the town of Naivasha, where they helped carry out one of the most brutal revenge attacks in late January.

"This was not done by ordinary citizens, it was arranged by people with money," said one young man who took part in the attacks, according to the report. "They brought the jobless like me. We need something to eat each day."

Violence following Kenya's disputed Dec. 27 presidential elections is estimated to have killed at least 1,000 people and displaced a half million, with most of the violence taking place across the volatile Rift Valley, where longstanding grievances over land fueled much of the violence.

The violence tarred Kenya's image as one of Africa's political success stories, rekindling tribal animosities and controversy over land use and government corruption. After weeks of international negotiation, Kibaki and opposition leader Raila Odinga reached a power sharing agreement meant to defuse the crisis.

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)

Gains Cited in Hunt for Liberia Ex-Warlord’s Fortune

By MARLISE SIMONS

THE HAGUE — For two years, Charles Taylor, the West African warlord and former president of Liberia, has been locked in a Dutch high-security jail, leaving the compound only in an armored car that speeds across The Hague as it delivers him to his war crimes trial.

But while he is in the dock, the hunt is still on for his legendary missing fortune. Prosecutors say the most exhaustive effort to date is under way to pinpoint the money the former dictator is believed to have amassed by pilfering the coffers of his country and running smuggling operations, particularly of diamonds, deep inside neighboring states.

No money has been seized, but investigators say they have made some breakthroughs recently.

“We have new information that more than $1 billion passed through Taylor’s personal bank accounts between 1997 and 2003 when he was president,” said Stephen Rapp, the chief prosecutor of the Special Court for Sierra Leone, which is trying Mr. Taylor at an outpost in The Hague. Last year, experts advising the United Nations Security Council estimated Mr. Taylor’s fortune at half that amount.

Newly traced bank records and other documents show Liberian money flowing into Mr. Taylor’s accounts, as well as large cash withdrawals and transfers to foreign banks, Mr. Rapp said. “The records showed he controlled enormous funds which he hid,” the prosecutor said. “The big question is how much of that wealth is still left.”

The court now has the aid of a London law firm with experience in recovering wealth stolen by dictators and other leaders. Court officials said the firm was being paid by Western governments but they would not release other details, saying that could jeopardize the investigation.

Mr. Taylor, 60, has been charged with pillaging, but his hidden accounts and assets are also central to his prosecution on charges of war crimes and crimes against humanity. The prosecutors want to demonstrate how he financed operations that dragged neighboring Sierra Leone into a civil war that lasted more than a decade.

Prosecutors argue that in his drive to expand his power in the region, Mr. Taylor used stolen millions, including profits from smuggled diamonds, to buy the loyalty, weapons and supplies for rebels in Sierra Leone and other neighboring countries. His indictment holds him accountable for the rebels’ barbaric methods, as they pillaged, killed, raped, used children as soldiers and hacked off hands or feet of innocent civilians.

No one knows how much money was stolen in the region or raised from the diamond fields of Sierra Leone and parts of Guinea. Evidence presented at the trial showed that enslaved laborers were often forced to dig for diamonds at gunpoint and could be executed for keeping a stone. Court investigators have said diamonds were often sold cheaply and used to pay for clandestine weapons shipments.

Millions of dollars of income from government timber concessions and Liberia’s shipping flags of convenience often went directly to Mr. Taylor, Western diplomats have said.

If the international judges’ panel finds him guilty of pillaging, the court can seize assets proved to belong to him or his associates and use the money for restitution.

The list of claimants is likely to be long. Trust funds have been set up in Liberia and Sierra Leone for war victims, among them the thousands who were mutilated by machetes. Each country may have claims for war damages and for pilfering state coffers and resources like diamonds and timber, prosecutors have said.

Not least, the court could claim funds for its expenses on Mr. Taylor’s defense.

The former Liberian dictator, who arrives for court in tinted glasses and impeccable suits, has insisted he has almost no money and cannot even pay for his defense. The governments of Nigeria and Liberia, where Mr. Taylor is believed to have considerable investments and real estate, have not cooperated with the court’s requests for information and freezing his assets, prosecutors said.

As a result, the court is paying $70,000 per month to his defense team, which includes a dozen people. It pays an additional $30,000 per month in other expenses, like the team’s office rent and salaries for the four investigators assigned to him.

Mr. Taylor, who had fretted about what he called the “low level” of his court-appointed defense team, obtained a court order last summer providing him with a large team of more senior lawyers.

If Mr. Taylor’s assets are found, the court could bill him for his defense, expected to cost $3 million to $4 million. Such costs are now paid by the governments who help finance the United Nations-backed court. The United States, which had high hopes for Mr. Taylor in 1997 when he was elected president, and backed him with aid and assistance, is a major donor.

Investigators say Mr. Taylor has demonstrated his skills in hiding money and fooling people, including the court, before. He built his first fortune as a government official in the 1980s and pocketed more than $900,000 before fleeing an embezzling charge. He was arrested in Boston, but while awaiting extradition he escaped from a Massachusetts jail and disappeared.

He is believed to have collected millions as a warlord in the 1990s from entrepreneurs in exchange for favors.

“We know now that many of Taylor’s assets are hidden off-shore or behind the names of his associates,” said Mr. Rapp, the chief prosecutor. But large cash withdrawals during his tenure as president suggest that he spent much of it on the war effort, according to investigators.

The United Nations has frozen $6 million in assets, in the name of Mr. Taylor or his associates, in 10 countries. “It’s a start, but it can’t be seized until we prove it’s Taylor’s money,” Mr. Rapp said.

The London lawyers are enlisting law enforcement agencies to press banks in several financial havens to cooperate, according to Mr. Rapp, who said that some countries, including the Bahamas and Switzerland, are already helping.

“Enough progress has already been made to show that more can be found,” he said.

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.

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.”

After suspense, Iraqi cleric extends truce

In well-planned move, Sadr asserts his rising authority and status.
By Alexandra Zavis
Los Angeles Times Staff Writer

February 23, 2008

BAGHDAD — Everything about Muqtada Sadr's announcement Friday that he was renewing a six-month cease-fire by his Mahdi Army militia appeared choreographed to reinforce his ascent from rabble-rouser to respected Shiite Muslim cleric and political power-broker.

Until the last minute, Sadr kept Iraq on tenterhooks about whether he would extend the truce, which has been credited with helping to reduce sectarian violence and attacks against U.S. forces.

The order to extend the cease-fire for another six months was delivered to loyalist clerics in sealed envelopes and revealed to followers during midday prayers in a flourish highlighting the importance of his cooperation as the U.S. starts to draw down extra troops deployed last year.

In a statement welcoming the announcement, Prime Minister Nouri Maliki's office said Sadr's movement was "an essential pillar in the political process and the march toward a new Iraq."

The U.S. military signaled that it was ready for dialogue with Sadr's followers. U.S. officials, who a year ago described Sadr's movement as the single greatest threat to Iraq, have begun referring to him as "the honorable" Muqtada Sadr. They say his cease-fire has contributed to a 60% decline in violence since June.

Sadr vehemently opposes the presence of U.S. forces and spearheaded two violent uprisings in 2004.

He announced the six-month cease-fire in August after embarrassing clashes between his Mahdi Army fighters and a rival Shiite militia during a religious festival left at least 52 people dead in the holy city of Karbala.

Sadr had said the truce would allow him to instill discipline in the ranks, ridding the militia of thugs who were giving it a bad name. Analysts suggested that he may also have wanted to avoid going head-to-head with U.S. forces, whose numbers were boosted by 28,500 last year under President Bush's troop buildup.

Sadr's black-clad fighters were a driving force in the retaliatory killings between Shiites and Sunnis unleashed by the bombing of a revered Shiite shrine in Samarra two years ago. The sectarian bloodshed accounted for nearly 800 deaths in Baghdad last February, compared to fewer than 40 last month, Navy Rear Adm. Greg Smith said this week.

In a statement Friday, the U.S. military said the extension would allow U.S. and Iraqi forces to concentrate on the Sunni militant group Al Qaeda in Iraq, which it now considers the No. 1 threat.

It promised to treat those who honor Sadr's pledge with "respect and restraint," but said it would pursue any elements that wage attacks.

"We also welcome an opportunity to participate in dialogue with the Sadr trend and all groups who seek to bring about reconciliation in building the new Iraq," the statement said.

Sadr is unlikely to agree to a direct meeting, but his followers have had contacts with the U.S. military at a local level.

In the weeks leading up to the announcement Friday, Sadr's aides and loyalists in parliament had complained that their foes were using the cease-fire to try to crush his movement politically and militarily.

They accused U.S. and Iraqi security forces of targeting supporters in their strongholds, such as Baghdad's Sadr City neighborhood, and in Iraq's largely Shiite south, where they are vying for power with the Supreme Islamic Iraqi Council. That party, led by Shiite rival Abdelaziz Hakim, is a key U.S. ally. Members of its Badr Organization militia dominate the upper echelons of the Iraqi security forces in southern Iraq.

Sadr had sent mixed signals about his intentions, first warning that he might order his militia back into action, then instructing his followers to respect the cease-fire. His comments were followed by an increase in rocket attacks blamed on breakaway factions of his militia who are unhappy with the truce.

Sadr's spokesman, Salah Ubaidi, said the decision to renew the cease-fire was based on religious concerns. But Vali Nasr, a professor of international politics and an Iraq expert at Tufts University, said Sadr was well aware of the tactical and political implications.

"I think this whole maneuver was designed to make sure everybody understood the value he had," Nasr said.

He said U.S. officials and Sadr's Shiite rivals had long underestimated the cleric, who draws his strength from the Shiite street.

"He has proven to be a master tactician, who is able to keep one foot in the political process and maintain the image of an outsider," Nasr said.

By rarely appearing in public, Sadr maintains the image of the underground rebel. Yet he has 30 representatives in parliament and provided crucial backing enabling Maliki's ascent to prime minister.

Sadr, the son of a beloved religious figure slain under Saddam Hussein's regime, has built Iraq's largest social movement, providing assistance to hundreds of thousands of destitute Shiites. He is furthering his religious studies so he can become an ayatollah with the authority to issue religious edicts known as fatwas. And he commands what is arguably the country's largest militia.

But retaining control of his forces probably will remain one of his greatest challenges. In the southern oil hub of Basra, a senior member of Sadr's movement said Friday that many followers had wanted the cease-fire to end.

"I think that our enemies didn't respect this freeze of activities before, and therefore won't respect it now and will consider it a weakness on our part," said the official, who asked not to be identified because he is not authorized to speak to the media. However, he said followers in Basra would support Sadr's decision.

In his message, read by Sheik Assad Nasiri at a mosque in Kufa, Sadr thanked his followers for their "understanding and patience."

More than 5,000 worshipers attended, many of them pilgrims on their way to the holy city of Karbala for a holiday. They waited anxiously for Nasiri to deliver his sermon, and smiled with relief after he said the cease-fire was extended.

"God bless Muqtada for freezing the Mahdi Army," said Gazwan Jabar, a 25-year-old worshiper. "By that action, the security situation was appeased."

alexandra.zavis@latimes.com

Times staff writer Tina Susman in Baghdad, special correspondent Saad Fakhrildeen in Kufa and a special correspondent in Basra contributed to this report.

The IED problem is getting out of control. We've got to stop the bleeding.

By Rick Atkinson
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, September 29, 2007; A12

BAGRAM AIR BASE, Afghanistan -- By the late summer of 2002, as the first anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks on New York and Washington approached, an American victory in Afghanistan appeared all but assured. A pro-Western government had convened in Kabul. Reconstruction teams fanned out through the provinces. U.S. and coalition troops hunted Taliban and al-Qaeda remnants in the mountains along the Pakistani border.

Among the few shadows on this sunny Central Asian tableau -- besides the escape of Osama bin Laden -- was the first appearance of roadside bombs triggered by radio waves.

There were not many. U.S. forces would report fewer than two dozen improvised explosive devices of all sorts in Afghanistan in 2002. But the occasional RC -- radio-controlled -- bombs were much more sophisticated than the booby traps with trip wires typically seen by American troops.

A triggerman with a radio transmitter could send a signal several hundred yards to a hidden bomb built with a receiver linked to an electrical firing circuit, which in turn detonated an attached artillery shell or a scavenged land mine.

That receiver included a slender box about three inches square housing a modified circuit board resembling a long-legged spider. The Spider Mod 1, as the device was dubbed, would remain a weapon of Afghan bombmakers in various iterations for more than five years -- and an emblem of defiance against the world's only military superpower

Captured Spider devices were shipped to the United States for forensic examination. Maj. Gen. John R. Vines, commander of the U.S. task force in Afghanistan, had a sense of what his troops were up against. "What can we do to protect our forces?" he asked his subordinates. "I'll take a 30 percent solution. That's better than zero."

Even that modest request seemed daunting. U.S. soldiers and Marines had no mobile electronic countermeasures capable of disrupting RC triggers by blocking the radio signal.

Bomb squads -- known in the military as EOD teams, for explosive ordnance detachment -- carried a feeble jammer called the Citadel, which created a stationary protective "bubble" around technicians defusing a device. But the few Citadels in service could not be mounted on vehicles to protect patrols and convoys, and they were too weak to provide protection beyond a few yards.

Special Operations units employed electronic countermeasures, and the Secret Service used powerful mobile jammers to shield presidential motorcades and other prominent targets. Yet such gadgets were also few in number, much in demand and highly classified.

That left the Navy as a solution. For decades, electronic countermeasures had been a vital part of airborne combat for Navy fliers. Submariners also considered it a "core mission," as did surface ship officers. "It's how I deal with cruise missiles coming at me," said Rear Adm. Arch Macy, commander of the Naval Surface Warfare Center in Washington.

After a yellow Mercedes-Benz truck stuffed with explosives killed 241 U.S. troops in Beirut in October 1983, the Navy began investing in a top-secret program in counter-RC technology. That led to a family of jammers, known as the Channel series, intended to protect ships arriving at foreign ports where RC bombs could be hidden in the docks.

By 2002, some of these devices were considered obsolete and had been consigned to a warehouse shelf. But Navy specialists in Indian Head, Md., 30 miles south of Washington, reconfigured a jammer they called Acorn, which neatly matched the frequencies used by the Spider Mod 1 in Afghanistan. In November 2002, 45 days after the first plea for help from Afghanistan, several dozen Acorns began arriving at Bagram Air Base.

Army EOD experts distributed each device, mounting the gray box and antenna on Humvees and Special Forces sport-utility vehicles. Instructing soldiers in the nuances of wave propagation and other electronic mysteries proved challenging; one device reportedly was installed on a water truck that never left the base. Successful jamming meant troops had no way of recognizing that they were even under attack by a radio-controlled IED. Acorns could also interfere with radios and other electronics.

Still, Vines's "30 percent solution" was more than fulfilled. As one retired Navy captain later recalled of Acorn: "We expected it to last six months before the bad guys figured it out." Instead, more than 2,000 Acorns eventually outfitted the force in Afghanistan where, like the Spider, it would remain a fixture on the battlefield for the next five years.

* * *

While U.S. forces parried the fledgling IED threat in Afghanistan, secret planning for the invasion of Iraq had accelerated. Little thought was given to roadside bombs as a serious obstacle to the American juggernaut. But U.S. strategists feared that Saddam Hussein would destroy his own oil production facilities rather than let them be captured. Scorched-earth tactics by retreating Iraqi troops in 1991 had turned Kuwait's oil fields into an inferno.

U.S. intelligence in early 2003 reported that wellheads in southern Iraq had been wired for detonation, and that Iraqi forces probably had the ability to use radio-controlled triggers to detonate those demolition charges. Jammers would be needed to secure the fields.

Even as the Navy converted Acorn into a battlefield countermeasure, Army engineers at Fort Monmouth, N.J., were working on their own mobile jammers. First in a laboratory and then in field tests, they modified an old system called Shortstop, originally built in 1990 as a footlocker-sized gadget to confound the proximity fuses in incoming artillery and mortar shells.

By intercepting and modifying the radio signals emitted by such fuses, Shortstop tricked the shells into believing they were approaching the ground, causing them to detonate prematurely. Shortstop had been completed too late for use in the 1991 Persian Gulf War, and it was deployed to Bosnia only briefly. A Pentagon inventory showed that the Army had almost 300 systems in storage.

With different computer chips and a cleverly modified ham radio antenna, Shortstop made an admirable jammer. The wife of one Fort Monmouth engineer collected miniature kitchen witches that inspired a new name for the device: Warlock Green. After final fixes in California, five Warlocks were shipped to Kuwait in time to accompany the invasion forces plunging into Iraq in March 2003, according to a senior officer involved in the effort.

The countermeasure proved unnecessary. Not a single oil well was rigged for radio-controlled detonation. Some oil facilities were sabotaged, but the damage was less grievous than feared.

Yet the Army jammer had found a home on the battlefield. As Shortstops were transformed into Warlock Greens -- each device cost about $100,000, according to a contractor involved in the program -- they were shipped in large Rubbermaid storage cases to Afghanistan, where a technician laminated his business card onto the devices so soldiers knew whom to call for help. Others would be packed up, driven to the Baltimore-Washington international airport in a rented van and flown to Iraq.

By late summer 2003, almost 100 Warlocks had been deployed, according to an Army document that said IEDs were "increasing in number and complexity at an alarming rate." Another Navy jammer, originally designed to protect four-star flag officers, also began arriving in the theater -- first six, then 30 and eventually 300.

If no one foresaw that within four years more than 30,000 jammers of all sorts would be in Iraq, a few suspected that something big had started. "We're going to need a lot more jammers," Col. Bruce Jette, who commanded the Army's Rapid Equipping Force at Fort Belvoir, told a Fort Monmouth engineer in August 2003. "And eventually we're going to need a jammer on every vehicle."

***

Bombmaking by definition required explosives, and in that commodity, as in oil, Iraq was richly endowed. "The entire country was one big ammo dump," Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates would observe this past March. "It's just a huge, huge problem."

The problem was also huge in 2003. Yet U.S. strategists, who before the invasion failed to anticipate an insurgency, also drafted no comprehensive plans for securing thousands of munitions caches, now estimated to have held at least 650,000 tons and perhaps more than 1 million tons of explosives. "There's more ammunition in Iraq than any place I've ever been in my life, and it's not securable," Gen. John P. Abizaid told the Senate Appropriations Committee shortly after taking over U.S. Central Command in July 2003. "I wish I could tell you that we had it all under control. We don't."

To forestall looting, U.S. forces tried spreading putrid substances across the dumps, as well as cementing artillery rounds together or burying large caches. "We're now finding people tunneling 30 feet down and carting the stuff away," an analyst noted earlier this year. Sloshing diesel fuel across the dumps and lighting it, among several haphazard "blow and go" techniques, often simply scattered the rounds. More than a year after the invasion "only 40 percent of Iraq's pre-war munitions inventory was secured or destroyed," the Congressional Research Service reported this summer.

Tens of thousands of tons probably were pilfered, U.S. government analysts believe. (If properly positioned, 20 pounds of high explosive can destroy any vehicle the Army owns.) The lax control would continue long after Hussein was routed: 10,000 or more blasting caps -- also vital to bombmaking -- vanished from an Iraqi bureau of mines storage facility in 2004, along with "thousands of kilometers" of detonation cord, according to a Defense Intelligence Agency analyst.

In the summer of 2003, pilfered explosives appeared in growing numbers of IEDs. Main Supply Route Tampa, the main road for military convoys driving between Baghdad and Kuwait, became a common target. Three artillery shells wired to a timer west of Taji, discovered on July 29, reportedly made up the first confirmed delay bomb. Others were soon found using egg timers or Chinese washing-machine timers.

Radio-controlled triggers tended to be simple and low-power, using car key fobs or wireless doorbell buzzers -- Qusun was the most common brand -- with a range of 200 meters or less. Radio controls from toy cars beamed signals to a small electrical motor attached to a bomb detonator; turning the toy's front wheels completed the circuit and triggered the explosion.

U.S. troops dubbed the crude devices "bang-bang" because spurious signals could cause premature detonations, sometimes killing the emplacer. Bombers soon learned to install safety switches in the contraptions, and to use better radio links.

Camouflage remained simple, with bombs tucked in roadkill or behind highway guardrails. (Soldiers soon ripped out hundreds of miles of guardrail.) Emplacers often used the same "blow hole" repeatedly, returning to familiar roadside "hot spots" again and again. But early in the insurgency, before U.S. troops were better trained, only about one bomb in 10 was found and neutralized, according to an Army colonel.

Coalition forces tended to concentrate at large forward operating bases with few entry roads. "Insurgents seized the initiative on these common routes," according to a 2007 account of the counter-IED effort by Col. William G. Adamson. "The vast majority of IED attacks occurred within a short distance of the FOBs."

Each week, the cat-and-mouse game expanded. When coalition convoys routinely began stopping 300 yards from a suspected IED, insurgents planted easily spotted hoax bombs to halt traffic, then detonated explosives that had been hidden where a convoy would most likely pull over.

By the early fall of 2003, IED attacks had reached 100 a month, according to a House Armed Services Committee document. Most were a nuisance; some proved stunning and murderous. A large explosion along a roadbed near Balad in October of that year flung a 70-ton M1A2 Abrams tank down an embankment, shearing off the turret and killing two crewmen. Even more horrifying was a truck bomb at 4:45 p.m. on Aug. 19 that demolished the United Nations headquarters in Baghdad, killing the U.N. special representative and 22 others.

Day by day, as Adamson would write, "the concept of a front, or line of battle, vanished" in Iraq, giving way to "360-degree warfare."

***

IEDs had quickly moved to the top of Abizaid's anxieties at Central Command. A Lebanese American who spoke Arabic and who had studied as an Olmsted scholar at the University of Jordan in Amman, the four-star general had seen for himself the aggravation that roadside bombs caused Israeli forces in Lebanon in the 1980s.

Two weeks after taking command from the retiring Gen. Tommy R. Franks, Abizaid publicly described resistance in Iraq as "a classical guerrilla-style campaign," a blunt appraisal that reportedly irked the Pentagon's civilian leadership. But the amount of unsecured ammunition in Iraq, particularly in Sunni regions, alarmed him. So did the realization that many Iraqi military officers -- unemployed and disgruntled after the national army was disbanded in late May -- possessed extensive skill in handling explosives.

Abizaid hoped that American technical savvy would produce a gadget that could detect bombs at a distance, "a scientific molecular sniffer, or something," as he put it. "We thought the problem would spread," Abizaid later reflected, "but it didn't appear overly sophisticated." Underestimating the enemy's creativity and overestimating American ingenuity, a pattern established before the war began, continued long after the capture of Baghdad.

Lt. Gen. Ricardo S. Sanchez, the senior U.S. ground commander in Iraq, told Pentagon strategists that he hoped to minimize the military's "footprint" in Iraq by maintaining an occupation force that was two-thirds motorized and only one-third mechanized. "What I don't want is a lot of tanks and Bradleys," Sanchez said, according to a senior Army commander.

That meant mounting most troops on Humvees, few of which were built to withstand bombs or even small-arms fire. Soldiers had begun fashioning crude "hillbilly armor" for their vehicles from scrap metal. Even factory-built armored vehicles had been designed to resist projectiles fired at a distance, according to a senior Army scientist, and not against point-blank explosions in which steel fragments and blast overpressure -- from gases hotter than 3,000 degrees Fahrenheit forming in 1/10,000th of a second -- struck simultaneously.

Production of the stout "uparmored" Humvee started in 1996, but as a specialty vehicle for military police and Special Forces; an average of one per day had been built before the war, according to congressional documents. The entire fleet of uparmored Humvees in the theater in 2003 totaled 235, the Army chief of staff would later report.

With no master list of where uparmored Humvees were deployed, logisticians searched U.S. motor pools around the world. Seventy were found in Air Force missile fields in North Dakota and elsewhere, according to a former senior officer on the joint staff, but it took a four-star order to pry them away for duty in the Middle East.

Protecting individual soldiers was a bit simpler. In June 2003, the Pentagon decided to outfit every trooper in theater with tough interceptor body armor. By December, eight vendors would produce 25,000 sets a month, according to congressional documents, and by April 2004 all U.S. military personnel in Iraq had received high-quality protection. The documents show that Congress has appropriated more than $4 billion for body armor so far.

But as summer yielded to fall in 2003, the final defense against roadside bombs often fell to a few hundred EOD technicians, whose informal motto -- "Initial success or total failure" -- suggested the hazards in what was known as "the long walk."

Summoned to neutralize a suspected bomb, a tech donned a cumbersome, blast-resistant outfit that resembled a deep-sea diving suit, with a transparent face shield and extra padding to protect femoral arteries, genitals and the spinal column. The robots then available to "interrogate" a device were crude and few in number, forcing the tech to conduct the examination himself.

"All you can hear is the fan in your helmet, your heart beating and your breathing," recalled Sgt. First Class Troy Parker, who served in Iraq in 2003. "And you're wondering if this is the last walk you're ever going to take."

Sometimes it was. On Sept. 10, 2003, in Baghdad, Staff Sgt. Joseph E. Robsky Jr. was trying to disarm an IED when an apparent RC-trigger detonated a mortar shell packed with C-4 plastic explosive. Robsky, 31, would be among more than 50 EOD technicians killed in Iraq and Afghanistan by the late summer of this year.

Within hours of his death, a call went out to assemble all EOD robots in Baghdad at the international airport for an inventory, according to a senior Navy EOD officer in Iraq at the time. They found 18 robots, and only six of them worked.

***

By late September 2003, Lt. Gen. Richard A. Cody, the Army's operations chief, believed that IEDs not only threatened soldiers in Iraq, who included his two sons and a nephew, but also posed a strategic risk to U.S. ambitions in the region. "The IED problem is getting out of control," he told Col. Christopher P. Hughes, a staff officer. "We've got to stop the bleeding."

A Lebanese American West Point graduate like Abizaid, Cody was the son of a Chevrolet dealer in Montpelier, Vt. Stocky and intense, with thick hair the color of gunmetal, he had fired the first shots of the Gulf War in January 1991 while attacking an Iraqi radar site as commander of an Apache helicopter battalion. His appetites ran to hard work, New York Times crossword puzzles, Red Man chewing tobacco, Diet Coke and two-pound bags of peanut M&Ms, which he could eat in one sitting.

Hughes drafted a sheaf of PowerPoint slides labeled "IED Task Force: A Way," which proposed forming a small unit with a Washington director and two field teams "designed to respond to incidents." To recruit active-duty Special Operations troops would take at least nine months, so with Cody's approval and a chit for $20 million, Hughes hired Wexford Group International, a security consultant in Vienna, Va. Two retired Delta Force soldiers soon arrived in room 2D468 of the Pentagon to begin assembling the field teams from a "black Rolodex" of former special operators.

To run his task force, Cody chose one of the Army's most charismatic young officers, Joseph L. Votel, then 45, who had just been selected for promotion to brigadier general. A tall, good-humored Minnesotan, Votel had commanded the 75th Ranger Regiment in Afghanistan in 2001 and 2002. More recently, in Iraq, three of his Rangers had been killed near Haditha with a suicide bomb detonated by a pregnant woman; two other Rangers had died in a roadside bombing on Route Irish, near the Baghdad airport.

Votel expected the job of controlling IEDs to take six months, maybe eight. "And then we move on," he said. He moved his small staff into a shabby, malodorous corner of the Army operations center in the Pentagon basement and posted a sign on the wall: "STOP THE BLEEDING."

Even by Pentagon standards, the hours were brutal. Those who lived in the Washington exurbs typically rose at 3:45 a.m. to be at their desks by 5:30, where they remained until 9 p.m. or later. To avoid bureaucratic friction with other agencies, Votel advised: "Stay small, stay light, be agile, move quickly. . . . There's goodness in smallness."

About a dozen former Delta Force operators were hired as contractors for the nucleus of the field teams. Some would earn $1,000 a day while deployed, according to two knowledgeable officers. Cody sent them to Walter Reed Army Medical Center to interview soldiers wounded by IEDs, to learn "what they wished they had done" before being blown up.

To arm the teams, the task force borrowed rifles from the Old Guard ceremonial regiment at Fort Myer and drafted permission slips for the contractors to carry weapons in Iraq. Instead of standard Army pistols, the men requested the Glock 9mm. "Sir," Votel told Cody, "these guys want Glocks." Cody gestured impatiently. "So get them Glocks."

In his diary on Nov. 17, 2003, Cody scribbled: "We have to make sure our commanders and soldiers are not at the end of this process but are engaged throughout the process." Toward that end, Votel and Hughes flew to Baghdad to secure a small compound at Camp Victory and to explain the task force to senior officers in Iraq.

The intent was to train troops to recognize and counter IEDs, Votel said, and to "build an architecture between the theater and Big Army" back in the States. IED incidents would be documented in detail at Fort Leavenworth, Kan., and notably effective tactics and techniques would be disseminated to units preparing to deploy.

Eventually, Votel added, the effort would move "left of boom" by attacking bomber networks before devices could be placed and detonated. In the IED battle, the task force was to help "protect, predict, prevent, detect and neutralize" -- known as "tenets of assured mobility" -- which Votel borrowed as his conceptual framework from the Army Engineer School.

"Why are you bringing me a 7,000-mile screwdriver to fix this from D.C.?" asked one skeptical general in Baghdad. "Nothing good ever comes from Washington." Still, most commanders welcomed the assistance.

The first seven-man field team flew to Iraq on Dec. 12, 2003. Several others were to follow, including one sent to Afghanistan. Working initially with the 4th Infantry Division, and shuttling between bases in unarmored Chevy Suburbans, the team members in Iraq advocated infantry basics: "shoot, move, communicate, clear routes, don't set patterns." Troops were advised to watch for wires and triggermen away from the road, to be unpredictable, to use a "porcupine approach" in patrols and convoys, with all guns bristling and flank guards deployed.

By February 2004, the number of IED attacks in Iraq approached 100 a week. About half detonated, a proportion that would remain relatively constant for the next three years. The bleeding had hardly stopped, but to Central Command it seemed to have stabilized.

The casualty-per-blast ratio was dropping. Troops quickly learned counter-IED survival skills. Some bombers were arrested or killed. On good days the number of attacks dwindled to single digits, and U.S. bomb fatalities in February totaled nine, fewer than half the number in January.

"It looks to me like we're winning this thing," Air Force Lt. Gen. Lance Smith, the Centcom deputy commander, told Abizaid at their forward headquarters in Qatar. "We're kicking ass."

Abizaid gave a thin smile. "Stand by," he said. "They're just plotting."

***

On March 28, 2004, U.S. troops shut down the incendiary newspaper of Moqtada al-Sadr, a Shiite cleric with a volatile following in the Baghdad slums. "All hell broke loose," a Centcom officer later noted. By late spring, IED attacks had nearly doubled, with bombers apparently drawn from the ranks of disaffected Shiites as well as Sunnis.

IEDs had become "the greatest casualty producer" in Iraq, Abizaid told Congress, surpassing RPG-7s, a rocket-propelled grenade. Insurgents increasingly promoted their deeds with videotapes released to al-Jazeera and other Arab media outlets. Spectacular explosions of Abrams tanks and other "icon vehicles," as U.S. officers called high-value targets, soon filled airwaves and Web sites.

For Joe Votel and his task force in Washington, the IED fight had become a complex exercise in phenomenology. How did blast and shrapnel interact at close range? How did bomber cells thrive? Why did jammers seem to work in some areas and not others? The six- to eight-month time frame he foresaw for controlling IEDs would require an extension.

More than 500 mobile jammers had reached Iraq, but thousands more were needed. By late spring 2004, the task force had finally established a jammer strategy: get as many systems into theater as possible -- including Warlock Green, a sister device known as Warlock Red, and a Navy jammer called Cottonwood, which was removed from the Suburban in which it typically rode, installed in an armored vehicle and renamed Ironwood. Meanwhile, engineers would develop a single powerful variant that covered as much of the RC spectrum as possible.

Rep. Duncan Hunter (R-Calif.), a former paratrooper and Vietnam veteran from San Diego who chaired the House Armed Services Committee, watched the Army's response to IEDs with impatience. In February 2004, a committee memo to the service noted that "arsenals, depots, industry, and steel mills" were not at full capacity in making heavy plates for uparmored Humvees. House staffers visited the steel plants, extracting pledges to defer commercial work until almost 7,000 Humvee armor kits were finished in May, six months ahead of the Army's original schedule.

Hunter was particularly incensed to find skittish troops bolting thin steel and even plywood to military trucks traveling along Route Tampa and other hazardous Iraqi roads. In January, he had asked Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory near San Francisco to design an armored gun truck similar to those used in the Vietnam War, the sole surviving example of which he found in the Army's transportation museum at Fort Eustis, Va. In March, a five-ton prototype, with steel and ballistic fiberglass protection added to the cab and truck bed, was shipped for testing to Aberdeen Proving Ground in Maryland.

On June 4, Hunter appeared at the Pentagon's River Entrance with a freshly painted gun truck and placards, mounted on easels, listing its virtues. Cody and others from the top brass wandered out to kick the tires. No one wanted to buck the powerful chairman, but several paratroopers soon appeared to inform Hunter "how much they loved the Humvee better than these big things, how nice and small and agile it was," he later recalled.

Hunter was not dissuaded. Nearly 100 gun-truck kits would be sent to Iraq, at $40,000 each, and 18 to Afghanistan. Some soldiers sang the truck's praises, while others found it top-heavy and "something of a grenade basket," according to a senior commander in the 10th Mountain Division. Still, of more than 9,000 medium and heavy military transport trucks rolling through Iraq in late 2004, only about one in 10 had armor, according to GlobalSecurity.org. The convoys remained vulnerable.

A Vietnam-era relic would hardly solve the IED threat permanently. Several influential voices in Washington now questioned the Pentagon's approach. Retired Adm. Dennis C. Blair, the president of the Institute for Defense Analyses and a former U.S. commander in chief in the Pacific, complained to the joint staff about the lack of systematic, rigorous analysis of IED trends. "The Army is not dealing with the IED problem well, because it's not in their nature," Blair said. "They're used to taking off from the line of departure, capturing the enemy capital and having a victory parade."

Moreover, the emphasis on defeating the device, Blair added, was "like playing soccer and you're spending all your money and attention on the goalie's gloves. At that point, not only is this the last line of defense, but the ball is already in the air."

At Centcom, Smith also was frustrated by the lack of urgency. Four months after concluding that "we're winning this thing," he now had doubts about the national commitment to overcoming IEDs. "We have got to get at this thing in a different way than we're addressing it right now," he advised Abizaid in Qatar in June 2004. "We've got to have something like the Manhattan Project."

The allusion to the crash program that had built the atomic bomb in World War II -- an effort eventually employing 125,000 people and many of the nation's finest scientific minds -- appealed to Abizaid's imagination. Several days later he wrote a personal message to the Pentagon leadership asking for a "Manhattan Project-like" approach to IEDs.

"What the [expletive] does he think we're doing?" Cody snapped upon learning of the request. But the Centcom commander's plea could hardly be brushed aside. In a meeting with Cody and Votel, according to a participant in the session, Air Force Gen. Richard B. Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, asked whether the Army could meet Abizaid's request.

The Army believed it could, particularly if the service was made the executive agent for an expanded effort that involved the entire Defense Department. That meant getting the other services to relinquish money, personnel and bureaucratic control, an encroachment that quickly triggered alarms.

Meetings convened, exchanges grew stormy. The Navy and Marine Corps had pursued their own counter-IED programs, and the Air Force particularly resisted putting the Army in charge of a Pentagon-wide enterprise.

Deputy Defense Secretary Paul D. Wolfowitz believed change was necessary. Why, he had asked his staff, did it take so long for armor, jammers and other counter-IED materiel to reach Iraq and Afghanistan? "Where is all this stuff?" he complained. "When is it going to get to theater?"

The effort seemed fragmented and ad hoc -- "sucked into technology rabbit holes," as Votel put it. A survey by the Joint Forces Command in Norfolk that spring had found that at least 132 government agencies were now involved in IED issues, from the FBI and CIA to the National Security Agency and the National Ground Intelligence Center in Charlottesville, Va., according to an Army brigadier general.

The battle against IEDs exceeded the management capacity of a single service, Wolfowitz concluded. On July 12, 2004, he signed a one-paragraph order that transformed the Army task force into a joint task force. Votel would remain director, with cramped offices in the Army operations center. But he now reported to Wolfowitz rather than to Cody, and the task force would draw expertise from all services.

Cody, who became the Army's four-star vice chief of staff in late June, accepted the decision graciously, even as he told one senior Army officer who now worked for Wolfowitz, "Don't forget where you came from."

Creation of the Joint IED Task Force would dramatically expand the U.S. effort. A $100 million budget in fiscal 2004 would mushroom to $1.3 billion in 2005. In subsequent meetings with industry executives and the national research laboratories, Wolfowitz declared that there was no higher priority. Within the Defense Department, countering IEDs would be second only to exterminating Osama bin Laden.

"This is a major strategic effort," Wolfowitz told one group. "What can you put into it?"

Staff researcher Madonna Lebling contributed to this report.

Monday: The IED Blitz