Summaries here and here and here.

Two aides to Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani were killed in shootings within hours, prompting his Basra followers to boycott Friday sermons in protest amid fears that an internal Shiite power struggle was increasingly targeting Iraq’s top Shiite cleric. Article

So let’s get this straight: existing force training isn’t paying off. Solution? Arming yet more groups, with even less training.

Iraqi forces have taken the lead for security in only about eight percent of Baghdad’s neighborhoods more than eight months after the start of the US troop surge, a senior US commander said Friday.

Major General Joseph Fil said violence has declined sharply in the city and more than half of its 474 neighborhoods, or “mahalas,” are under the joint control of US and Iraqi forces, up from about 19 percent in June.

But the percentage of neighborhoods that have moved to what the military terms the “retain” phase of the security operation, in which Iraqi forces are in the lead and US troops are on standby, has remained stubbornly small.

[snip]

But in the meantime US forces have recruited and are training 8,000 “volunteers” to protect their own neighborhoods, the general said, making clear that US plans on securing the city hinge on them. Article

Related:

The Pentagon report cited a litany of problems with the police. For example, it said as few as 40 percent of those trained by coalition troops in recent years are still on the job. Also, due to combat loss, theft, attrition and poor maintenance, a “significant portion” of U.S.-issued equipment is now unusable. Source

Also topically related, and with valuable info about the shadowy ERUs.

…The trainings began under General David Petreaus as an effort to bolster security in Iraq, and soon evolved into a system for providing support to the deeply sectarian Ministry of the Interior.

Beginning in May 2004, U.S. authorities contracted with USIS [U.S. Investigations Services] to create the first ERU [Emergency Response Unit]. The non-sectarian force is supposed “to respond to national-level law enforcement emergencies. The four-week training runs recruits through SWAT-type emergency response training focusing on terrorist incidents, kidnappings, hostage negotiations, explosive ordnance, high-risk searches, high-risk assets, weapons of mass destruction, and other national-level law enforcement emergencies” according to the Pentagon.

[snip]

The ERUs are now officially controlled and paid by the Iraqi Ministry of Interior and are accompanied by U.S. trainers or soldiers throughout their training. But a high-level State Department report issued in 2005 explains that the Iraqi commandos were initially rejected by the very Ministry of the Interior that they were intended to support when they were created more than three years ago. Instead, U.S. officials and contractors controlled the ERUs, which became an unofficial Iraqi face to provide local cover for U.S. operations. With no support from the Iraqi government at the time, the ERU had to rely on USIS for salaries, thereby becoming a privately financed militia.

[snip]

Dozens of interviews conducted by CorpWatch with high-ranking military and government officials over the past 12 months suggest that even at the level of Petreaus’s staff, few appeared to know the specific role and scope of ERU activity. What is clear is that the ERU is just one of at least six different U.S. “security” training programs worth over $20 billion that a variety of U.S. agencies have provided to the many factions in Iraq. (See accompanying boxes for examples of other programs.)

It is becoming increasingly clear that such training programs may be causing or at least exacerbating civil war. Part of the blame lies within the complex failures of the U.S. occupation and part with the loyalties and skills of the forces recruited into the myriad security training programs that are associated with different ministries and thus with different, and often rival, political factions.

“Of course, they are f**king things up,” Robert Young Pelton, author of “Licensed to Kill, Hired Guns in the War on Terror” told CorpWatch. “Because the U.S. is arbitrarily putting weapons and power in the hands of those who choose to fight, rather than those who are in the moral right,” explaining that few who sign up have any previous law enforcement credentials.

[snip]

…early ERU training was conducted under a $64.5 million no-bid contract issued in May 2004(10) to U.S. Investigations Services (USIS), a former federal agency that started out conducting background investigations for civil service personnel. At first, the CPA officials who controlled the purse strings of the Iraqi Ministry of Finance, used oil revenues to finance the contract. Today, the USIS contract, which has been renewed twice, is paid for with Pentagon (and thus U.S. taxpayer) funds. Most of the trainers are retired military personnel plus a few police officers and federal agents.

U.S. control was further enhanced by conducting the trainings at U.S. military bases. At Camp Dublin, near the Baghdad International Airport, new ERU recruits were expected to live alongside their USIS trainers. The four- to eight-week trainings took place at a special facility inside Dublin that was built on a bare plot of land by First Kuwaiti, a contractor that later won the bid to build the U.S. embassy in Baghdad.

USIS also trains ERUs at Camp Solidarity (originally dubbed Camp Gunslinger) in the Sunni neighborhood of Aadhamiya.

[snip]

Once trained, the ERUs were quickly dispatched to “lead” counter-insurgency operations beside U.S. forces, often in combat zones. “They conduct their missions with us on the sidelines,” Lieutenant Voss, the ERU program head, told The Advisor, a newspaper published by the U.S. military security training program in Baghdad.

[snip]

The contract to provide commando training in Iraq was a departure for USIS, which had no previous involvement in security training. And it was just the first of several government projects that USIS took over from federal agencies.…

[snip]

The ERU initial training also came under fire for alleged human rights abuses. In the spring of 2005, Colonel Ted Westhusing, a military ethics expert from Oklahoma who was in charge of the USIS contract, received an anonymous four-page letter accusing USIS of deliberately reducing the number of trainers to increase its profit margin. Westhusing was supervising the ERU program at the time. The letter, which was eventually released to Texas journalist Robert Bryce earlier this year under the Freedom of Information Act, detailed two incidents in which USIS contractors allegedly witnessed or participated in killing Iraqis during the assault on Fallujah in 2004. “ERU Mentors [USIS contractors] are conducting real world ops [operations]. They shot their weapons and killed Iraqis,” wrote the whistle-blower. “(Name deleted) was telling me how many Iraqis he had killed until I told him to shut the hell up. I was appalled by this. I have talked to the Mentors and am told that if they don’t go with the Iraqis the Iraqis won’t fight.”

Worried that “it would put his contract at risk,” an unnamed USIS manager did not report the accusations to the U.S. military supervisors according to a November 2005 investigative article by T. Christian Miller in the Los Angeles Times.

[snip]

USIS training continues today under a new contract issued earlier this year, although few details have been made public. Occasionally the Pentagon’s public affairs office publishes short descriptions of ERU missions. A July 21, 2007 press release, for example, describes one group, accompanied the previous day by U.S. military advisors, that “detained three suspected members of a rogue Jaysh al-Mahdi militia group.” Also known as the Mahdi Army, the militia is led by the powerful and popular Shia leader, Moqtada al-Sadr, and is based in Sadr City, the poor Shia neighborhood in northwestern Baghdad.

Such raids are fraught with problems: The perception that the U.S. or the Iraqi government is backing raids on groups with popular support and parliamentary representation, such as the Mahdi Army, could fuel civil war.

Indeed some fear that U.S.-trained militias, rather than adding security, are already exacerbating sectarian strife. “We have been going about pumping out so many individuals with weapons, with uniforms, that my greatest fear is that in our effort to train and equip the Iraqi security forces, what we have been doing is equipping Iraqis for civil war,” Matt Sherman, a civilian advisor to Iraq’s Interior ministry, told Frontline.

“It is like raising a crocodile,” Saad Yousef al-Muttalibi, told the Washington Times when asked about the various “third force” training schemes. The Al-Maliki cabinet member, who is in charge of negotiating reconciliation agreements, continued: “It is fine when it is a baby, but when it is big, you can’t keep it in the house.”

Others point out that these trainings are a throwback to colonial divide-and-conquer techniques. “The ERUs represent a return to not only the old Special Forces/CIA counterinsurgency model [fighting fire with fire], but the older British model of sepoys or local fighters paid strictly to bolster foreign forces with little if any concern about the local power balance. The same recipe was used in Afghanistan, Latin America and other proxy wars,” Robert Young Pelton told CorpWatch. Article

Related to the above particularly a to the picture it paints of the (already known) dysfunctional Interior ministry.

A damning report by the US embassy detailing corruption in the Iraqi government was made public on Friday, days ahead of a meeting between Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki and US President George W. Bush.

[snip]

The 82-page corruption report is marked “sensitive but not classified” and labelled a “working draft.”

US embassy spokeswoman Mirembe Nantongo told AFP the report is still in draft form and that there are questions about the reliability of some of the sources.

The Commission of Public Integrity (CPI), which is tasked with rooting out corruption from state institutions, is “a passive rather than a true investigative agency,” the report says.

“Though legally empowered to conduct investigations, the combined security situation and the violent character of the criminal elements within the ministries make investigation of corruption too hazardous for all but a tactically robust police force with the support of the Iraqi government.

“Currently this support is lacking,” it says, adding that this has allowed the “corruption to be the norm in many ministries.”

“(CPI investigators) cannot be trusted to truthfully reveal criminal activity against anyone protected by the violent or powerful,” the report says.

“The court system in Iraq remains weak, intimidated, subject to political pressure, and clogged with minor cases.”

The interior ministry is seen by Iraqis as untouchable while corruption investigations in the defence ministry are judged to be ineffectual, it says.

“Several ministries are so controlled by criminal gangs or militias as to be impossible to operate (in the absence of) a tactical force protecting the investigator.”

It said there is a pattern of “loose accountability and a lack of clear rules” throughout the Iraqi government.

“This lack of accountability and transparency has resulted in both promoting corruption and manipulation of the criminal justice system against otherwise innocent people.”

There was also manipulation of investigations within the oil ministry and investigators “are completely ill-equipped to handle oil theft cases.”

There had also been “a clear sectarian shift” in those who have been appointed investigators since Maliki’s Shiite alliance took control of the government, the report said.

“Without a commitment to withdraw partisan and sectarian politics from the selection of senior inspectors general leadership, there is the likelihood that investigations will not have credibility.” Article

Shredding even the pretense of sovereignty.

#1:

Despite opposition from Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki, US security company Blackwater was back on the streets of Baghdad on Friday, four days after being grounded over a fatal shooting incident.

Maliki, meanwhile, was in the firing line over a damning report by the US embassy made public Friday detailing corruption plaguing his government, which called his office’s attitude to tackling the problem “openly hostile.”

Blackwater guards, whom a furious Maliki wanted replaced after they opened fire in Baghdad killing 10 people, were on Friday protecting US personnel on limited missions, US spokeswoman Mirembe Nantongo told AFP.

“We have resumed limited movement today. It is very limited and all missions need to be pre-approved,” she said.

“The decision was taken by us in consultation with the Iraqi government. All convoys will be protected by PSDs (private security details). Yes, it is Blackwater.”

[snip]

Maliki demanded that Blackwater be replaced for the security duties. The firm provides guards for US officials and civilian employees in the war-torn country. Article

#2:

Iraq’s Ministry of Interior has concluded that employees of a private American security firm fired an unprovoked barrage in the shooting last Sunday in which at least eight Iraqis were killed and is proposing a radical reshaping of the way American diplomats and contractors here are protected.

[snip]

In the first comprehensive account of the day’s events, the Iraqi Ministry of Interior said that security guards for Blackwater fired on Iraqis in their cars in midday traffic.

The document concludes that the dozens of foreign security companies here should be replaced by Iraqi companies, and that a law that has given the companies immunity for years be scrapped.

Four days after the shooting, American officials said they were still preparing their own forensic analysis of what happened in Nisour Square. They have repeatedly declined to give any details before their work is finished.

[snip]

“The Blackwater company is considered 100 percent guilty through this investigation,” the report concludes.

[snip]

The Interior Ministry report recommends scrapping Order No. 17, the rule that was written by American administrators before Iraqis took over the running of their own government and gives private security companies immunity from Iraqi law. It recommends applying criminal law No. 111, part of Iraq’s penal code that was issued in 1969.

Another of the report’s recommendations is for the company to pay compensation to the families of the dead.

Perhaps the part that will bring the most debate is the recommendation to limit foreign security companies.

“We recommend replacing all the foreign security companies with Iraqi security companies in the future,” it said. “These American companies were established in a time when there was no authority or Constitution.”

[snip]

Blackwater had been operating without a license for more than a year, though it had made an attempt to register this spring. Mr. Bolani said that the government was not moving forward with its registration, but that not being registered would not set the company apart from many other foreign security companies operating here. Only 23 foreign companies have licenses, Mr. Bolani said. Article

#3:

…The Iraqi government is certainly justified in raising questions about how these companies operate, especially regarding the still unclear legal status of PSC personnel. But the Iraqi government has reacted mildly to the dozen or so previous incidents that have reached the Western press, making Maliki’s outraged calls for the expulsion of Blackwater and a review of all PSCs working in Iraq seem puzzling at first. One wonders, though, if Maliki’s reaction to this incident is driven by a desire to take the spotlight off the Iraqi government’s failures and buy it some bargaining room, both in domestic circles and with the Americans. Practically, the United States cannot operate in Iraq without PSCs—and Maliki knows this. The chance to point a finger at one of the more controversial elements of U.S. strategy and put the United States on the hot seat even while sticking up for Iraqi sovereignty in a Sunni neighborhood in Baghdad is probably too good for him to pass up. Source

A quartet of stories on the chaotic devolution of health services.
,br />

#1:

The [Kirkuk] facility receives about 80 per cent of patients in the province, or about 500 patients per day. Most days, five to ten surgeries are conducted, but when the bombs strike, victims come through the emergency department by the dozens.

“It’s not an exaggeration to say that healthcare in Kirkuk is in a crisis,” said Dr Nabil Sabir, a gastroenterologist. “It’s getting worse and needs to be addressed immediately.”

[snip]

The hospital and other public health services in Kirkuk are further strained by the increasing violence and the growing number of displaced people who have come here from more troubled parts of the country.

Despite the pressures on the hospital, the central authorities are slow to provide supplies of medicines and it has to rely on support from aid agencies, such as the International Committee of the Red Cross, in emergencies.

The United States military has sought to alleviate some of the problems by supplying basics such as intravenous bags and burn blankets, so too has the Kurdistan Regional Government, which hopes to incorporate Kirkuk into Iraqi Kurdistan.

But what’s provided does little to address the hospital’s needs - as a result of which many of the poor in the province, particularly the displaced, go without care.

“No supplies,” said Khadija Hama-Rashid, a nurse who manages the hospital’s operation room. “That’s why we only treat emergency cases.”

Nadhim Jihad, manager of the hospital’s warehouse where medicine and other supplies are stocked, reports that the hospital only has 20 per cent of the resources it needs.

The Kirkuk directorate of health estimates that the province as a whole receives 60 per cent of the medical supplies required by the hospital and other public clinics.

“We send patients’ family to get drugs from the markets,” said Mustafa Hussein, director of the intensive care unit in the hospital.

Murad al-Salihi, the hospital’s deputy director, said demand for drugs and other supplies has soared as violence has spiralled. Medical staff have had to treat dozens of serious injuries in the aftermath of devastating bomb attacks, yet central government rarely sends enough supplies - and those that it dispatches are vulnerable to sabotage by insurgents.

“Trucks transport drugs and [other] supplies that we cannot receive by air, and they are frequently attacked [on the trip from Baghdad],” said Salihi. “It’s a difficult process.” Article

#2:

For Sunni Arabs in the capital, getting medical treatment can be a death sentence.

Public hospitals here are operated by Iraq’s Shia-run health ministry and allegations are common that hospital staff have helped militia members abduct and kill Sunni patients.

[snip]

…In November last year, Britain’s Channel 4 television broadcast a documentary about the death squads. The programme showed photos of 14 Sunnis abducted from a hospital in Baghdad, then forced into a rubbish container and shot dead.

Last December, a Sunni surgeon was quoted in The Sunday Times as saying that in some hospitals porters and cleaners who support the Mahdi army, a militia loyal to the Shia cleric Muqtada al-Sadr, offered doctors 300 US dollars to identify Sunni patients.

“I found that many patients were dying. Most were well and ready to walk out of the hospital. Instead, they left in wooden boxes,” the surgeon told the newspaper.

According to him, most of the support staff in the hospitals comes from the Shia slums of Sadr City, a stronghold of the Mahdi army, a group which has been accused of leading Shia death squads. In one case, he said, two patients from the mainly Sunni Diyala province were placed on trolleys to be taken to the x-ray department. The patients were never seen again.

Such stories are common, and several Sunni officials accuse Iraq’s health system of having links to Shia militias or death squads.

Shatha al-Abbusi, a member of parliament from the Sunni Iraqi Accord Front, said, “There is organised terror by militias [who are] assassinating Sunni Arabs in hospitals.”

Health personnel from other hospitals in Baghdad confirm such incidents.…

[snip]

The numerous and detailed accounts of relatives, doctors and nurses appear to corroborate a US intelligence report from December 2006, which said hospitals had become command centres for the Mahdi army, and Sunni patients were being dragged from their beds. The report was denied by Iraq’s health minister, Ali al-Shamari, who is a Sadr loyalist. Article

#3:

A state-of-the-art children’s hospital which was meant to improve the quality of healthcare in the southern province of Basra has been severely delayed as a result of attacks on project staff.

Since the project to build the new paediatric and teaching hospital in Basra began, dozens of people working on it have been killed; it has run significantly over-budget; and some doubt if it will ever be finished.

Hospitals in Basra, which is home to two million people and some of the country’s largest oil reserves, lack vital medicine, supplies and staff. A healthcare crisis has now hit the province, which has seen a rise in life-threatening diseases, such as typhus and kala azar - a potentially fatal illness transmitted by a sandfly parasite.

In May 2005, hopes were raised that healthcare for children in the province would improve when the cornerstone of a state-of-the-art paediatric and teaching hospital was laid. Among those promoting the construction of the Basra Children’s Hospital were United States Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and Laura Bush, wife of US president George W Bush.

The project was set to finish on December 31, 2005, but more than a year and a half after its scheduled completion date, the planned new facility remains a building site.

The US Agency for International Development, USAID, gave the 50-million US dollar contract for the hospital to Bechtel Corporation - the largest engineering company in the US - in August 2004. Project HOPE, a non-governmental organisation, promised to provide 30 million dollars in medical equipment and training for hospital staff.

[snip]

The security problems have caused massive delays in the project, which has also run vastly over budget.

In mid-2005, Bechtel warned USAID of delays and increased costs as a result of violence and labour disputes. In March 2006, it estimated that that the hospital would not be complete until July 2007 and that costs had soared to 98 million dollars.

Just three months later, the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction estimated that the project would cost 150 million to 170 million dollars.

The US government then dropped Bechtel for falling nearly a year behind schedule and exceeding the budget. The construction company consistently cited security problems as the main reason for increased costs.

Work on the project resumed in August 2006 with the US Army Corps of Engineers taking over as project management in the autumn of 2006, and Mid Construction staying on as the primary subcontractor.

As of spring 2007, about 60 per cent of the construction work had been completed.

Mumm, whose employer Bechtel no longer works in Iraq, said he doubted that the hospital could be finished under the current circumstances in Basra, which is now controlled by rival Shia militias. Article

#4:

Karbala’s shortages of drugs and qualified medical professionals are undermining the provision of healthcare in the province.

The problems in Karbala, the Shia holy city located 100 kilometres southwest of Baghdad, reflect the catastrophic effects of the war and corruption on Iraq’s healthcare system as a whole.

The country has a centralised system in which drugs and other medical supplies are distributed to the provinces from warehouses in Baghdad, but distribution is often sabotaged by graft and violence.

Many times, Hussein ends up buying his insulin on the black market. That is where much of the drugs and other medical supplies sent to state clinics and hospitals end up, while public facilities suffer shortages of medicines to treat heart disease, high blood pressure, asthma and sedatives, according to Dr Mohammed al-Fartusi, who works in Karbala.

He attributed some of the shortages to corruption in government warehouses in Baghdad, where some employees allegedly steal medicine and sell it on the black market. Another problem is that drugs have sometimes expired by the time they reach the hospitals from the warehouses, he said.

Violence in Baghdad has exacerbated the situation. The ministry’s central warehouses in Baghdad are located in Dabbash, and employees of the Shia-run ministry have to cross through the Sunni insurgent stronghold neighbourhoods of Adil and Jamia. Many of them fear going to the warehouses, particularly after two were killed.

[snip]

n a report issued in July, the international medical organisation Oxfam and the NGO Coordination Committee in Iraq called health services across the country “catastrophic”. Oxfam stopped working in Iraq in 2003 but supports healthcare organisations inside the country.

The two groups noted that Iraq’s state-owned medical supply company, Kemadia, is not providing sufficient supplies for 90 per cent of the 180 public hospitals in Iraq.…

[snip]

The current supply of drugs and medical equipment to Karbala is so dire that a report earlier this year by Paul Foreman, former head of the Doctors Without Borders’ mission in Iraq, noted that medics at state hospitals frequently “ask the relative of injured patients to search local pharmacies for blood bags, sutures and infusions before they could start emergency surgery”.

[snip]

Shortages of doctors are also a major problem. IRIN, the United Nations’ humanitarian news agency, has reported that 50 per cent of Iraqi doctors have fled to neighbouring countries.

The province has not tracked how many healthcare professionals have left Karbala, but medical personnel here say that shortages are acute - stemming from not enough doctors being trained locally and the loss of many Sunni Arab doctors who have left the majority Shia province as the sectarian conflict has escalated. Article

Analysis du jour:

All theater, all storytelling, rests on the power of illusion and the willing suspension of disbelief. Bush and the Republicans have repeatedly given millions of doubters a chance to suspend their post-Vietnam disbelief in traditional tales of American character; the Democrats have given millions of doubters a chance to suspend their disbelief that the will of the people can make any difference whatsoever. The two parties join together to give the whole nation a chance to believe that a fierce debate still rages about whether or not to end the war. That political show we can expect to go on at least until Election Day 2008.

And we can expect both parties, and the media who keep the show going, to abide by an unspoken agreement that one kind of question will never be asked, because the tension it raises might be unbearable: Is it moral for our troops to occupy another country for years, bomb its cities and villages, and kill untold numbers of people halfway across the planet? If the script ever makes room for that question, we’ll be able to watch — and participate in — a far more profound debate about the war. Article

Noted FYI:

Not to be outdone by the establishment of the American University of Iraq in the northern Iraqi city of Suleimaniya, a ballsy Russian businessman, Vitaly Kouznetzov, has helped bring another, sexier, slice of American life to the Iraqi Kurds: he’s brought a touch of Las Vegas to that same Kurdish cultural capital with the launch of an American-style casino. Take that, al-Qaeda.

Suleimaniya is located near the border with Iran, and has long been considered a bastion of liberalism in a part of the world known more for intolerance and chaotic bloodshed.…

[snip]

…Of course everyone is armed. Everyone carries Kalashnikovs, but we have a room by the door where they can check them, one hour, two hours, however long they need.

Booze? Just beer.… Article