Compounding atrocity with inertia.

It is a fetid space indeed inside that nutshell, but — in a nutshell — this snippet from a Q&A piece stands as a sage summation:

Have we done something that can’t be undone in Iraq?

Iraq is already undone. Remember this: There is nothing in Iraq that constitutes a genuine threat to the United States of America. Iraq is purely a domestic war. It’s a war that’s being fought right here in America. As soon as our politicians decide there’s nothing to be gained politically from staying in Iraq, we’ll cut and run. We’ll dump Iraq like we dumped Vietnam.

Haven’t we reached that point? Or gotten close?

No. There are still too many politicians in D.C. who’ve invested too much political capital into Iraq. The American people have to get completely fed up with the war, and we’re not there yet. The majority of Americans are frustrated and don’t like the war but it’s a superficial frustration. Right now, we have these misleading statistics. People don’t realize that April was the bloodiest month in Iraq in the last seven months. The surge is over. It’s lost. It’s gone. Every benchmark of success the surge was based on has collapsed. Source

A 21^st century law of diminishing returns: The more mass media outlets we have, the less the masses appear to know.

Poignant and moving, but cannot be uttered enough.

© 2008 Used With Permission

Don’t know what prompted the thought, but via quick and rough calculation, come this summer the U.S. will have been engaged in boots on the ground warfare for longer than it officially was in World Wars I and II, combined.

WWI: Declaration of war - early April 1917. Armistice Day - mid-November 1918. Approximately 19 months.

WWII: Declaration of war - early December 1941. VJ Day - mid-August 1945. Approximately 45 months.

Total: approximately 64 months.

Iraq: late March 2003 to today - coming up now on 61 months.

The operations in Afghanistan, of course, have long surpassed that length, currently being in month 78.

It is, frankly, distressing in extremis to realize that every single child here aged 6½ or younger has never lived in an America not actively waging war.

Summaries here and here and here.

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Just one telling excerpt from a radio interview with a top-ranked reporter covering Baghdad.

…What you find is a real loathing and contempt for Blackwater and the other private security contractors, a feeling that they’re a bunch of cowboys. You know, they come into an area an American commander’s trying to deal with and they mess things up, and you don’t know they’re there. They don’t coordinate. They don’t tell you they’re coming through. And most of all, that they don’t have the best interest of the country in mind. All they’re there is to make a buck by executing their contract, and their contract is to keep their principal alive, to perform their bodyguard function, at the expense of everything else. American troops know that sometimes you might have to die in the course of your duty rather than, say, kill a bunch of kids. And they really make sacrifices in executing their duty.

And they’re very unhappy when they see these boys cowboying it up, is the term they use, acting like a bunch of cowboys. I was actually talking to a brigade commander about this, and I said, `Would you want the responsibility of having these guys in your chain of command, of having to discipline them?’ And he said, `Absolutely.’ He said, `It would be a lot of extra work to try to keep tabs on these guys, but it’s a lot better than having them just shoot through my’–what he calls–`my battle space, my area, without me knowing about it and messing up the area and maybe undercutting my progress.’

I think that the security contractor situation has really come into relief this year, though, because, for years, some American units acted in a way not unlike the way the security contractors act.… Audio Link

Summary here.

Two top generals of the US army assured Turkey on Wednesday that the terrorist Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) will be eliminated by May next year, a top military official said on Wednesday.

[snip]

They also expressed that Turkey had the right to launch a cross-border operation into northern Iraq for purposes of self-defense. The two US commanders expressed the opinion that an air-offensive into northern Iraq to root out terrorist bases there might be better than conducting an operation on land.

Turkey and the US should decide on the exact date and time of such an air operation in a coordinated manner so that Turkish warplanes will not run into US planes, the sides agreed. The US would also assist Turkey by not having its fighter jets fly in that zone and opening Iraqi airspace to Turkish planes.

Cartwright and Petraeus also reported that troops of the Kurdish administration in northern Iraq would retreat to their own positions as soon as Turkey launches a cross-border operation.

Reportedly, after Turkish warplanes hit PKK targets in northern Iraq, Turkish and US officials have agreed that instead of sending large amounts of troops to the region, Turkey should launch operations against the PKK camps using the 20 squads currently positioned in the Turkish military base in Bamerni in northern Iraq. This deal is considered the strongest indication of the fact that Turkey will not launch a comprehensive land operation into northern Iraq. Article

Summaries here and here and here.

Anti-women violence in Basra, Iraq’s second largest city, about 600 km south of the capital, Baghdad, has increased markedly in recent months and has forced women to stay indoors, police and local NGOs have said.

“Basra is facing a new type of terror which leaves at least 10 women killed monthly, some of them are later found in garbage dumps with bullet holes while others are found decapitated or mutilated,” the city’s police chief Maj. Gen. Abdel Jalil Khalaf told IRIN in a telephone interview.

[snip]

Like other parts of Iraq, Basra before the US-led invasion in 2003 was known for its mixed population and active night life with social and night clubs. Basra women had the right to choose their own life-style although it was considered a tribal society.

But now vigilantes patrol the streets of Basra on motorbikes or in cars with dark-tinted windows and no license plates. They accost women who are not wearing the traditional dress and head scarf known as hijab. They also attack men for clothes or haircuts deemed too Western. Article

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Shorter version: Tooth(less) or consequences.

Iraq’s government turned up the heat on private security firms on Tuesday, threatening to deal firmly with those that act outside the law and opening an investigation into the shooting of a woman in central Baghdad.

Monday’s shooting was the latest in a string of incidents that have triggered widespread anger and prompted the Iraqi government to propose a change to the laws under which foreign security contractors operate.

[snip]

The U.S. military said those responsible for the shooting in Baghdad on Monday could be charged under Iraqi law because the company involved, Dubai-based ALMCO, is a logistics contractor for food supply, construction and training, not a security firm.

Contacted in Dubai, ALMCO declined comment on the incident.

“We demand that all security companies obey the law and orders released by the Iraqi government, otherwise the security forces will be obliged to deal firmly with these companies,” Baghdad security spokesman Brigadier-General Qassim Moussawi told a news conference.

Moussawi said Iraqi officials would try to bring charges against those responsible for seriously wounding the woman.

“There was a violation of Iraqi law,” he said. “They were driving on the wrong side of the road, there was a random shooting and they hit a woman in her legs.”

An investigation has been launched into the incident, government spokesman Ali al-Dabbagh said in a statement.

Statements from the firm’s employees, taken in front of a civil judge, “revealed attempted murder of Iraqi civilians and other violations”, Dabbagh said.

“The Iraqi government will release those not found guilty in the Karrada incident once the investigation is concluded.”

Moussawi and government officials identified 43 people detained at an Iraqi checkpoint after the shooting as including 21 Sri Lankans, nine Nepalis and one Indian.

There were 12 guards — 10 Iraqis and two Fijians — with the convoy of four vehicles, they said. Article

More:

Iraqi authorities on Monday detained at least 33 foreigners, including two men with U.S. Department of Defense-issued identification cards, in connection with a shooting incident in central Baghdad that injured a woman, the U.S. military said.

[snip]

Also on Monday, the governor of Muthanna province said U.S. troops were no longer welcomed in the town of Samawa after U.S. troops opened fire on civilians there Sunday. Two people were reported dead in that incident on Sunday; a hospital worker said a third died Monday.

“We don’t want the American troops to enter Samawa, and we will oppose if they enter,” said the governor, Ahmed Marzook al Salal, who suspended cooperation with U.S. reconstruction efforts Sunday to protest the shooting. “We were handed responsibility for security a year ago, and we are not in need of the American troops.”

[snip]

Maj. Bradford Leighton, a spokesman for the U.S. military, said it was unclear whether the men were on business related to their contracts. Leighton said that the company wasn’t contracted as a security firm and that it was required to provide its own security. The men were detained by Iraqi police and are being held at an Iraqi army base that they share with U.S. troops. A few coalition soldiers are staying with the men, Leighton said.… Article

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Oil-related news:

Iraqi Kurds issued a scathing rebuke of Iraq’s oil minister, who has warned companies signing deals in the north will be kept out of the rest of the country.

“Our contracts with the (international oil companies) are both constitutional and legal within the framework of the Kurdistan Oil and Gas Law, the only existing framework regulating our oil industry in the post-Saddam era,” the Kurdistan Regional Government said in a statement Tuesday.

[snip]

“It is amazing that a Minister in Baghdad should continue to threaten international oil companies with sanctions and punishment because they have decided to invest in one of the secure and safe parts of Iraq,” the statement said. Article

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Destroyed, seized, pinched or stolen? No matter how it is sliced, the loss is immense, and the onus lies with the woebegone G. Walker administration.

Thousands of manuscripts have disappeared among them priceless copies of the Holy Koran, an Iraqi librarian said.

The librarian, who wanted his name kept secret, said the manuscripts were “expropriated” by a U.S.-led force shortly after the 2003 invasion of Baghdad.

The former government had moved the manuscripts from the national library shelves to a cellar close to the Umm al-Teboul mosque in Baghdad for fear of damage or theft.

The librarian said the troops removed the manuscripts from the cellar but there is no trace of them.

[snip]

Eyewitnesses say they still remember the troops carrying the manuscripts from the cellar onto vehicles.

U.S. troops say they have no knowledge of the manuscripts and their spokesman, Abdullatif Rayan, denied that U.S. troops had entered the cellar where the books were kept.

Most of these manuscripts were at least 1,000 years old, added the librarian. Article

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Noted FYI:

The Iraqi Football Association said [Tuesday] it plans to block three players from joining foreign clubs and may try to ban them from international matches after they sneaked off after an Olympic qualifier in Australia with plans to seek asylum.

The association’s Secretary-General Ahmed Abbas said it was considering “severe punishment” against the players, who secretly left their team hotel just hours after losing 2-0 in a 2008 Olympic qualifier on Saturday.

Midfielder Ali Abbas, one of the heroes of Iraq’s stunning Asian Cup triumph in July, was among the defectors.… Article

Summary here.

The Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) has said it will not allows news agencies to send journalists to interview members of the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) at their bases near Iraq’s northern border…. Article

Summaries here and here and here.

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Cultural chaos: Irreplaceable loss of the ties of history and heritage.

Tall Asmar, the famous ancient Sumerian settlement, has been stripped of its contents and digging implements, the Antiquities Department said in a statement.

The site in the restive and violent Diyala Province is Iraq’s most important and significant Sumerian settlement in central Mesopotamia.

Known as Eshnunna among Mesopotamian scholars, it has given the Iraq Museum its famous and priceless collection of votive stone and marble sculptures representing tall and bearded figures with huge, staring eyes and long, pleated skirts.

“An armed group stormed the archaeological site, handcuffed the guards and stole its possessions,” the department said in a statement. Article

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Damning preliminary fidndings fron ;our’ side. No study or report has yet been set up, though, to determine whether the mercenary mayhem is not an aberration but rather S.O.P.

Early findings by the FBI on a September shootout in Baghdad involving private security firm Blackwater show that at least 14 Iraqis were killed for no reason, The New York Times reported Wednesday.

In all, 17 people were killed when Blackwater private security guards opened fire in a crowded Baghdad neighborhood as they protected a State Department convoy. Blackwater said the guards came under attack.

At least 14 of the shootings broke rules for private security guards in Iraq regarding the use of deadly force, the Times reported, citing unnamed civilian and military officials briefed on the case.

[snip]

Federal Bureau of Investigation agents also found no evidence that the convoy was attacked by Iraqis, as Blackwater claims.

“I wouldn’t call it a massacre,” an unnamed government official told the Times. “But to say it was unwarranted is an understatement.” Article

Related: movement from “there’s nothing we can do” to CYA.

The US security company Blackwater promised [Wednesday] that any of its guards complicit in wrongdoing would be held to account after FBI investigators were reported to have concluded the fatal shooting of 14 Iraqis was unjustified. Article

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Overstretch.

More airmen will be doing soldier-type jobs in Iraq, and those that already are can expect to be deployed longer and more often than most in the Air Force.

The Air Force next year will triple the number of airmen working under and helping the Army and the Marine Corps as part of its own “surge” in troops to Iraq, an Air Force commander said earlier this month.

[snip]

Since March 2004, the Air Force has provided airmen to serve combat support roles. The airmen include civil engineers, security forces officers and intelligence analysts serving six-month tours or longer. Many doing six-month tours can expect to return home for a year and then return to Iraq, Bosworth said.

“They’re very stressed,” he said. “[But] they know they’re coming back.”

Air Force Chief of Staff Gen. T. Michael Moseley has sounded warnings about having airmen filling Army jobs they are not trained to do. Article

Summaries here and here and here.

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Mm-hm.

The government of Iraq has notified private security firms their immunity from Iraqi law is about to end….

The title of a letter sent by the interior ministry - and obtained exclusively CBS News - says it all: “Removing the legal immunity.” Until now, security firms like Blackwater have operated under a grant of immunity issued in 2004 by the then-top American in Iraq, L. Paul Bremer.

But the draft of a new law says “all immunities … shall be cancelled.”

That law still must be ratified by the Iraqi parliament, and if and when it is, private security firms would almost certainly pull out of Iraq. Article

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Oil-related news:

Iraq’s Parliament will amend a law on investment in the oil refinery sector, a law it had already approved.

[snip]

It’s unclear exactly why the law, which was approved by Parliament but never officially published, thus never officially enacted, was retooled. Article

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Keeping up with the courts-martial:

A United States Marine told a military tribunal on Tuesday he would not enter a plea until his trial on charges of involuntary manslaughter and aggravated assault in the killings of several Iraqi women and children in the town of Haditha.

Marine Lance Corporal Stephen Tatum, who was arraigned on Tuesday, faces trial starting on March 28 in the highly publicised 2005 case in which US Marines killed 24 men, women and children. Tatum, an enlisted man from Oklahoma, faces a maximum penalty of 19 years imprisonment if found guilty. Article

Summary here and here.

Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan said Turkey will attack bases of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party, or PKK, in northern Iraq “soon,” according to a senior lawmaker of his ruling Justice and Development Party.

Turkey is gathering intelligence on the whereabouts of PKK positions in northern Iraq before starting the operation, Erdogan told party officials in Ankara late yesterday after talks with Ergin Saygun, deputy head of the Turkish military, according to a lawmaker who attended the meeting and requested anonymity. Article

Summaries here and here and here. Also this.

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Whenever Karbala is mentioned, always recall that there in a hefty undercurrent of jockeying not only for civic authority but for a piece of the action — for control of and over the lucrative streams of cash fom multiple pilgrimages and their associated throngs.

Accusations of abuse of power, murder, and other illegal acts are flying back and forth between supporters of Shiite cleric Moqtada al- Sadr and the mainly Shiite local police force in Karbala, with Sadrists claiming that the police have systematically attacked and tortured civilians, including women and children.

[snip]

[Senior police officer Raed] Shaker added that arrest warrants had already been issued against four members of the Karbala city council who belong to the Sadr movement.

‘They have been arrested on charges relating to terrorism. In addition they constantly intervene to get a number of people released who have been held for violent crimes, robbery or explosions.’

Bahaa al-Aarji, a leader of the Sadr movement and one of the four wanted by the police, branded the warrants ‘fabricated.’

‘The grounds for the arrests are differences in points of view,’ he told al-Sabah newspaper in its Wednesday edition. Article

Related:

In the shrine city of Karbala, where fighting in August between Sadrists and forces loyal to SIIC and Badr led to Sadr’s decision to freeze his militia, the deputy governor, who is a Sadrist loyalist, fled the city and is in hiding now in Baghdad. In a telephone interview with Al-Arabiya television, he accused pro-Iranian forces of plotting to kill him. Article

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Noted FYI:

The Iraqi Supreme Criminal Court has sacked its official spokesman Mounir Hadad, the judge who supervised ex-dictator Saddam Hussein’s hanging, news reports said on Wednesday.

‘The move came after statements made by Hadad to a newspaper regarding the execution of former president Saddam Hussein,’ a source from the court told Voices of Iraq news agency.

Haddad is still the head of the Court of Cassation and a judge in the Supreme Criminal Court, but he was dismissed from being the spokesman for it.

In an interview with pan-Arab newpaper al-Sharq al-Awsat published last Monday, Haddad said that Saddam was neither brave nor cowardly in the last moments prior to his execution.

‘I cannot say Saddam was disparate [sic] or cowardly,’ Haddad said. ‘Nor can I say he was brave and provoke public opinion.’ Article

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As reiterated here many, many times, flawed policy begets flawed results.

CBS News’ 60 Minutes exposure [Sunday] night of the Iraqi agent known as CURVEBALL has put a major aspect of the Bush administration’s case for war against Iraq back under the spotlight.

Rafid Ahmed Alwan’s charges that Iraq possessed stockpiles of biological weapons and the mobile plants to produce them formed a critical part of the U.S. justification for the invasion in Spring 2003. Secretary of State Colin L. Powell’s celebrated and globally televised briefing to the United Nations Security Council on February 5, 2003, relied on CURVEBALL as the main source of intelligence on the biological issue.

Today the National Security Archive posts the available public record on CURVEBALL’s information derived from declassified sources and former officials’ accounts.

While most of the documentary record on the issue remains classified, the materials published here today underscore the precarious nature of the intelligence gathering and analytical process, and point to the existence of doubts about CURVEBALL’s authenticity before his charges were featured in the Bush administration’s public claims about Iraq. Article

Summary here.

#!:

About 100 Turkish commandos scaled the slopes of a mountain near the Iraqi border in a mock exercise Wednesday, as Turkey’s president called for “soldier-to-soldier” dialogue with U.S. troops to coordinate a possible cross-border offensive against Kurdish rebels.

[snip]

“On this issue, we have made our decision. We have decided that soldier-to-soldier relations should start, and not diplomat-to-diplomat,” daily Radikal quoted President Abdullah Gul as telling a group of reporters on board a plane on his way to Azerbaijan on Tuesday.

[snip]

On Wednesday, commandos took positions on Mount Cudi, near the Iraqi border, as helicopters hovered above in an exercise witnessed by an Associated Press photographer in the area.

Deeper inside Turkey, government troops clashed with guerrillas throughout the night in Tunceli province, in a fight that left three rebels and one soldier dead, the military said. Article

#2 — chock full of beneficial information.

As Turkey continues to mull its options against elements of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) based in northern Iraq, the center-right daily Milliyet has been running a series of interviews with former leading Turkish commanders evaluating the costs and benefits of a cross-border military operation and the broader question of greater cultural and political rights for Turkey’s Kurdish minority. Article

#3:

Viewed from the outside, Iraqi Kurdistan looks close to war. Tens of thousands of Turkish troops are amassed on the border.

And thousands of Iraqi Kurdish pesh merga fighters have taken up positions in the Mateen Mountains, ready for a counterattack, their local commanders say, should any Turkish operation hit civilians.

But wander the markets and byways here and a different reality comes into view, helping to explain why, despite bellicose Turkish threats, an all-out armed conflict may be less likely than is widely understood: The growing prosperity of this region is largely Turkish in origin.

In other words, while Turkey has been traditionally wary of the Kurds of Iraq, it is heavily invested here, an offshoot of its own rising wealth. Iraqi Kurdistan is also a robust export market for Turkish farmers and factory owners, who would suffer if that trade were curtailed.

[snip]

About 80 percent of foreign investment in Kurdistan now comes from Turkey. In Dohuk, the largest city in northwestern Kurdistan, the seven largest infrastructure and investment projects are being built by Turkish construction companies, said Naji Saeed, a Kurdish government engineer who is overseeing a 187-room luxury hotel with a $25 million price.

Some of the projects, including overpasses, a museum and the hotel, are financed or owned by the Kurdistan Regional Government, Saeed said, underscoring the direct financial partnership. Turkish investors are also building three large housing projects, including a $400 million venture that will feature 1,800 apartments as well as a health clinic, school, gas station and shopping center.

At the construction site for a 15-story office building in central Dohuk, all of the engineers and managers are Turkish, as are dozens of laborers. “There are not any Kurdish engineers for a big project like this,” said Ahmed Shahin, the Turkish engineering manager.

[snip]

But if a large attack were to occur, Turkish soldiers would encounter thousands of Kurdish pesh merga fighters who have formed a loose defensive line that parallels the Turkish border along the ridges of the Mateen Mountains. Kurdish leaders speak only generally about repelling an invasion, but political and military commanders here have specific instructions: Attacks on civilian villages will draw a fierce counterattack.

“If the civilians face any problems, that is our 100 percent red line,” Muhammad Muhsen, a regional leader of the Kurdistan Democratic Party office in Amedi, said in a recent interview, before Kurdish authorities prohibited local commanders from discussing the conflict with Turkey. Amedi anchors a large border region where fighters are camped on south-facing slopes as trucks bring pesh merga fighters and weapons up curvy roads.

[snip]

Yet years of fighting the PKK have made for strange bedfellows, especially in Bamarni, a village north of Dohuk. In the mid-1990s the Kurdistan Democratic Party, the dominant power in western Kurdistan, allowed the Turkish military to occupy several bases on the Iraqi side of the border, when both were fighting the PKK. The Turks now have about 1,500 soldiers at these bases, said a senior American military official in Baghdad who was not authorized to speak for the record.

In Bamarni, Kurdish pesh merga fighters are now stationed at a camp beside a Turkish air base that is home to dozens of tanks and armored vehicles. Turkish soldiers routinely dash out in gun trucks to deliver food to soldiers operating tanks that oversee the air base. They also buy supplies at local shops, said Ahmed Saeed, a local political official at a Kurdish outpost nearby. Article

Summaries here and here and here. Also this.

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Contours of chaos.

one of every seven Iraqis – 14 percent of Iraq’s population – is now displaced by the war.… Article

Much more:

The number of Iraqis kicked out of their homes has surged 16 percent in October despite claims by the government that it has declined.

The Red Crescent, Iraq’s Red Cross equivalent, said at least 100,000 more Iraqis were forced to leave their homes in October.

“The number of internally displaced people in the country has surged to 2.3 million from 2.2 million,” said Amal al-Karbouli, Red Crescent’s deputy head.

“The promises may by the government of Nouri al-Maliki to help the displaced people return to their homes have not been honored,” Karbouli added.

[snip]

The fleeing Iraqis blame ongoing U.S. military activities in which heavy weapons including tanks, warplanes and helicopter gun ships are deployed as well as sectarian killings and coercion for most of their suffering.

Karbouli said Maliki was almost doing nothing to help Iraqi refugees whether inside or outside the country. Article

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When the immunity shoe so adamantly touted by the woebegone G. Walker administration is on the other foot:

An Iraqi judge has ruled that there is enough evidence to try two former Health Ministry officials, both Shiites, in the killing and kidnapping of hundreds of Sunnis, many of them snatched from hospitals by militias, according to American officials who are advising the Iraqi judicial system.

The case, which was referred last week to a three-man tribunal in Baghdad, is the first in which an Iraqi magistrate has recommended that such high-ranking Shiites be tried for sectarian violence. But any trial could still be derailed by the Health Ministry, making the case an important test of the government’s will to administer justice on a nonsectarian basis.

The Iraqi investigation has confirmed long-standing Sunni fears that hospitals had been opened up as a hunting ground for Shiite militias intent on spreading fear among Sunnis and driving them out of the capital. Even before the case, Baghdad residents told of death threats against doctors who would treat Sunnis, of intravenous lines ripped from patients’ arms as they were carried away, and of relatives of hospitalized Sunnis who were killed when they came to visit.

[snip]

…The former officials were taken into custody in February and March amid reports that they had been implicated in sectarian violence and corruption. But the status of the judicial inquiry into their activities and its findings have not previously been reported.

The inquiry included testimony from nine witnesses, some of whom have been granted visas to live in the United States for their protection.

If the trial goes ahead, it would be held in a new Rule of Law complex in the Rusafa section of the capital. The installation was built by the American military this year and the government has allocated $49 million to operate it. Judges live at the heavily fortified compound to protect them from assassins and renegade militias. The proceedings, which could happen in the next few weeks, would be videotaped and, according to Iraqi law, open to the public.

But one looming question is whether the Iraqi government will move forward with the trial, which would shine a light on some of the most serious sectarian abuses committed under government cover. The Health Ministry could try to block the case by invoking a section of the Iraqi criminal law that precludes prosecution of officials who are carrying out their official duties. The Interior Ministry has used this tactic to preclude investigation of a senior National Police officer accused of sectarian crimes.

The Iraqi judges slated to try the case have informed the Health Ministry that they want to proceed and have asked for the agency’s approval. The Health Ministry has yet to respond.

[snip]

Michael Walther, an American Justice Department official who is leading a task force that is advising the Iraqis on how to investigate crimes and conduct trails, said the trial could help ease sectarian differences. “There is a perception among the Sunni population that the court is nothing more than an instrument for the tyranny of the majority,” he said in a telephone interview. “This would demonstrate that the court can be a balancing factor.” Article

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Noted FYI:

Iran opened two consulates in northern Iraq on Tuesday in a bid to improve ties with the Kurdish region, one in a building that was raided by US forces in January.

The two missions were opened in the Kurdish cities of Arbil and Sulaimaniyah, taking to four the number of Iranian consulates in Iraq, in addition to an embassy in Baghdad.

The Arbil consulate was opened in a building that was raided in January by US forces who detained five Iranians, accusing them of aiding the insurgency.

The building had been closed since then and the five Iranians — who Tehran insists are diplomats — are still in US military custody.

At the opening ceremony in Arbil, Tehran’s ambassador to Baghdad, Hassan Kazemi Qomi told reporters that the continued detention of the five was an “illegal act against the Iraqi sovereignty.”

“They are still in custody. We hope they would be released.”

A senior US military official said later that two of the five were among nine Iranians who would be released as they posed no threat.

[snip]

It was also agreed that Tehran would allow Iraq to open two consulates in the Iranian cities of Kermanshah and Orumiyeh.

Shiite Iran already has two consulates in the Iraqi Shiite cities of Karbala and Basra. Article

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Oil-related news:

Iraq’s Kurdistan Regional Government has signed seven more oil deals, moves that are bound to irk Baghdad, which has called previous deals illegal.

The KRG announced the deals Tuesday as it moves forward in developing its own hydrocarbons sector. The leadership in Iraq’s national government has largely condemned the Kurdish moves, saying the region should wait until a national strategy for developing the country’s oil and gas reserves is agreed to.

[snip]

The KRG signed deals for two exploration blocks each with India’s Reliance Energy Ltd. and a subsidiary of Austria’s OMV.

One block each was awarded to a venture between subsidiaries of MOL Hungarian Oil and Gas and Gulf Keystone Petroleum Ltd.; a venture between Gulf Keystone Petroleum International Limited, Texas Keystone Inc. and Kalegran Ltd.; and another “western company, with details to be announced in coming days.” Article

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Developments as regards mercenary mayhem:

Iraqi torture victims and their relatives can proceed with a lawsuit against a defense contractor that provided interrogators to the U.S. military in Iraq, a federal judge ruled on Tuesday.

The lawsuit was filed in 2004 on behalf of Iraqi nationals who say they or their relatives had been tortured or mistreated while detained by the U.S. military at Abu Ghraib and other prisons in Iraq.

The plaintiffs sued CACI International Inc, which provided interrogators at Abu Ghraib, and L-3 Communications Holdings Inc.’s Titan unit, which provided interpreters to the U.S. military in Iraq.

U.S. District Judge James Robertson dismissed the claims against Titan because the translators performed their duties under the direct command and under the exclusive operational control of military personnel.

But he ruled the lawsuit against CACI can go forward. He said CACI interrogators were subject to a dual chain of command involving company and military officials, with significant independent authority retained by CACI supervisors in Iraq.

The judge also said the interrogators had a requirement to report abuse not only up the military chain of command but also to CACI. CACI argued that it was acting on behalf of the military and cannot be held liable. Article

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Buried under bureaucracy and image management: Sweep enough under the rug and it becomes an unignorable mound of muck (emphasis added).

Pretty much alone in the media, E&P for weeks had been charting a troubling increase in non-combat deaths among U.S. troops in Iraq. So it came as no surprise recently when the Pentagon announced that it would probe the perplexing trend. Lt. Gen. Carter Ham, operations director of the Joint Staff, said commanders in Iraq were concerned enough about the spike in non-combat deaths — from accidents, illness, friendly-fire or suicide — that it had asked for an assessment by an Army team.

According to Pentagon figures, 29 soldiers lost their lives in August for non-hostile reasons, and another 23 died of non-combat causes in September. Compare that with the average for the first seven months of this year: fewer than nine per month. The spike has coincided with extended 15-month deployments, one senior military official said.

The military officially counts about 20% of the nearly 3900 U.S. fatalities in Iraq as “noncombat.” It has officially confirmed 128 suicides in Iraq since 2003, with many others under investigation (and still more taking place on the return home). Article

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Noted FYI:

Former chief United Nations weapons inspector Hans Blix says he fears the United States has a secret plan to keep its troops in Iraq.

Dr Blix, who warned against the invasion of Iraq after his inspectors found no evidence that weapons of mass destruction were being held by Saddam Hussein, is in Sydney to receive the Sydney Peace Prize.

“One fear I would have is that the US has a hidden thought to remain in Iraq,” Dr Blix told ABC radio on Wednesday.

“One reason why they wanted in was that they felt they must leave Saudi Arabia.

“After the Gulf War in 1991 they left their troops in Saudi Arabia to protect pipelines,” he explained.

“And when they felt they could no longer stay in Saudi Arabia, Iraq was the next best place because it was more secularised than Saudi Arabia and had the second biggest oil reserves in the region.”

Mr Blix also said the US military wanted to be very close to Iran, to which it has a very fierce attitude.

[snip]

Dr Blix recalled the UN team’s failure to find any weapons of mass destruction in 700 searches of 500 sites in Iraq.

“The aims of the war were, first of all, to eliminate weapons of mass destruction that did not exist,” he said.

“Secondly, to establish a democracy, and what they ended up with was anarchy; and thirdly, they wanted to weed out al-Qaeda which was not there but which came there (after the invasion).”

He said the elimination of former Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein was the war’s only positive outcome. Article

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Beyond parody: Fact trumps fiction any day. In this case, in the form of a ‘tourist’s guide to the Green Zone.’

Summary here and here.

Tens of thousands of Turkish troops were poised Tuesday on the border with Iraq awaiting the order to attack Kurdish fighters, and President Abdullah Gul said the country will do “what it believes to be right” to tame the rebels.

But with winter rapidly approaching in the mountainous region, and pressure from the U.S. to avoid an all-out cross-border incursion, officials and experts said Turkey will likely be looking toward a limited offensive involving raids and aerial assaults.

Several possibilities are currently being discussed, including F-16 strikes on rebel positions, helicopter raids and special forces missions, according to a government official familiar with the planning.

“The area is heavily mined and a big incursion with tens of thousands of troops is out of the question,” he said, speaking on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak to the press.

With the Turkish government talking openly for weeks about the likelihood of an attack, the official said intelligence information shows the guerrillas have been evacuating their camps and melting away into cities and other regions.

[snip]

In northern Iraq, Osman Ocalan, brother of imprisoned PKK leader Abdullah Ocalan, told AP some fighters had moved toward Iran, and that there were now more PKK fighters there than in northern Iraq. [This smacks of being a red herring. The border with Iran: probably. Cross-border? Likely not in any significant numbers. — voxd]

[snip]

“PKK forces are split into three parts situated in Turkey, Iraq and Iran,” Ocalan said. “If there is Turkish pressure on our forces in Iraq, the fighters will head toward Iran.” Article

#1 — analysis du jour:

Washington backed the Turkish government by agreeing that the PKK was a terrorist organization, which means using force against it is justified, unless such actions undermine regional stability. In other words, Turkey will refrain from sending troops to Iraq without Baghdad and the Iraqi Kurdistan government’s permission. In exchange, Bush pledged full support to Turkey including intelligence sharing to help combat the terrorists. The Turkish prime minister said that the talks were “a very positive meeting.”

Even though Bush did not elaborate on the specific commitments to help Ankara, Erdogan seemed to be expecting much. “I do not think I have to explain what I mean by ‘enemy’,” he said after the talks.

He certainly did not have to explain what he meant. Even before Erdogan’s visit to Washington, State Secretary Condoleezza Rice said that, although the PKK had been there long before the U.S. invasion of Iraq, now Washington bears responsibility for everything that happens in that country. The U.S. confirmed that Iraq would never be used as shelter for terrorist organizations, including the PKK.

On the other hand, this does not mean that Americans will immediately redeploy their forces to the regions where PKK fighters are hiding, which is in fact the calmest part of Iraq.

What they would rather offer is intelligence sharing with Ankara and economic sanctions against those cooperating with the PKK. They might also pressure the Iraqi government to join Turkey in its fight against the organization.

Washington has made it very clear that Ankara will be its partner of choice if the choice is between the Iraqi Kurds and the Turks, unless the Kurds stabilize their own territory.

Bush provided Erdogan with powerful motivation to withstand the growing pressure on him within his country. He does not have to hit back right away and unleash a war that no one needs, least of all Turkey. Now much will depend on how good Washington, Baghdad and Iraqi Kurds are on their pledges to stem the PKK’s terrorist activity. Article

#2:

Northern Iraq’s Kurdish regional government (KRG) said Monday it has tightened its measures to isolate the separatist Kurdish Workers’ Party (PKK), a Kurdish source said.

“The cabinet of the regional Kurdish government approved instructions to the security forces to cut off all kinds of aid that may reach the PKK fighters,” the source close to the Kurdish government told Xinhua on condition of anonymity.

The cabinet’s instructions also recommended additional checkpoints on a road leading to the Iraqi-Turkish borders, the source said. Article

#3:

Turkey must avoid “any disproportionate action” in dealing with attacks by Kurdish rebels in Iraq, the European Commission urged Tuesday.

While the international community supports Turkish efforts to fight terrorism it must do so “while respecting the rule of law, observing regional peace and refraining from taking any disproportionate action,” said European Union Enlargement Commissioner Olli Rehn. Article

#4:

The manner in which the eight Turkish soldiers captured by the Kurdish PKK rebels were released on Sunday says much about the complex politics surrounding the current border crisis between Turkey and northern Iraq.

In an obviously pre-arranged scenario, the eight men were marched down from the remote border mountains where they had been held by the PKK, to a meeting point where a reception delegation was waiting for them.

[snip]

The KRG team was carefully balanced between the two main parties that dominate Iraqi Kurdish politics, the Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP) of Massoud Barzani, who is president of Iraqi Kurdistan, and the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK), led by Jalal Talabani, who is president of Iraq.

That was a signal that both parties agreed to share either the blame or the credit for acting as midwives to the release.

Also present at the initial handover in the mountains were three Kurdish members of the Turkish parliament who had crossed the border to try to help bring about the release of the soldiers.

The three, who are among the 20 MPs of the Democratic Society Party, are now being accused by some senior government figures in Ankara of complicity with the PKK.

From the mountains, the freed soldiers were taken in a convoy of KRG vehicles to the regional capital, Erbil.

There, they were handed into the custody of an Iraqi government delegation headed by Defence Minister Abdul Qader al-Obeidi.

Also present was the Commander of the Multinational Forces in Iraq, Gen David Petraeus.

Both men then joined the liberated Turks on a US military aircraft that flew them, not home to Turkey, but to a Turkish-controlled airstrip at Bamarni, inside northern Iraq - one of several little-publicised bases the Turks have maintained there since the 1990s.

At Bamarni, the soldiers were finally signed over to the Turkish military and put on a Turkish military flight home, as Ankara had insisted.

[snip]

The timing of the release was probably no coincidence. It gave US President George W Bush something new and positive to point to when he met an angry Turkish Prime Minister, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, in Washington the following day. Article

Related:

Comments by Deputy Prime Minister Cemil Çiçek and Justice Minister Mehmet Ali Sahin on eight soldiers abducted and later released by the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) have drawn reactions from human rights groups and activists.

The eight Turkish soldiers kidnapped during a PKK ambush on Oct. 21 were released and flown back to Turkey on Sunday — but not everyone was happy about their safe arrival. Some in the media and a statement made by S,ahin on Monday implied that the soldiers would have done a deed more honorable had they killed themselves or died fighting instead of falling hostage to the PKK.

“I can’t be happy about the eight soldiers being released,” were the words of welcome of the justice minister on Monday. “None of the members of the Turkish Armed Forces [TSK] should have ever been in this situation. For that reason, I can’t be happy about them being released,” Sahin explained.

Human rights organizations were justifiably agitated by the attitude toward the soldiers and Democratic Society Party (DTP) officials.

“The militarist discourse is influential both at a government level and in the media,” head of the Human Rights Association (I.HD) Hüsnü Öndal shared as his observation.

“This is an approach that holds being taken as hostage as equivalent to being guilty,” he stated. “If that is the case, then we could say ‘the best soldier is a dead one’.”

[snip]

On Monday, a military prosecutor started investigating the abduction, questioning the eight men. If the prosecutor rules that the eight men surrendered before surrender was the last resort, they will face legal action. The investigation was ongoing in Diyarbak?r on Tuesday. Meanwhile, on Monday, a prosecutor in Ankara started a probe into the three DTP deputies who played a role in saving the soldiers from the terrorists. Article

#5:

Russia could mediate in the ongoing conflict between Kurdish separatists and Turkish troops on the Iraqi border, a Kurdish envoy said on Tuesday.

[snip]

“Russia has a historically good relationship with the Kurds, and I believe it is quite possible for Russia to play a mediating role,” Babakr Khoshavi, the representative of Iraqi Kurdistan to the Commonwealth of Independent States told a RIA Novosti news conference.

He said Masoud Barzani, the head of the Kurdish administration in north Iraq, recently wrote a letter to the Russian leadership asking it to broker a peace settlement. Article

#6: Doubling — or “redoubling” — zero equals zero.

In Ankara on Friday, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice pledged to “redouble” US efforts to combat the Kurdish fighters, but stressed it would take time and effort to flush them out of their mountainous redoubts. Article

Summaries here and here and here.

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With a pre-Ramadan high of over 25,000 held and uncharged reported, this is a drop in the bucket. And the bucket does not lack for being refilled daily.

At least 683 detainees held in U.S.-run prisons across Iraq have been released since the middle of last month, a statement from Iraqi Vice President Tareq al-Hashemi’s office said on Monday.

Of those released, 283 were freed last week, it said. Article

Topically related:

The U.S. military said on Tuesday it would soon release nine Iranians being held in Iraq, just days after U.S. officials noted several positive developments in Iran’s role in Iraq.

U.S. military spokesman Rear Admiral Greg Smith said the nine to be released included two who were among five detained in northern Iraq on suspicion of providing support to Shi’ite militias. The others were detained over the past several years. Article

The inner cynic has to ask whether this is a quid pro quo for under the table Iranian cross-cooperation regrading PKK/PJAK on the Kurdish north.

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Noted FYI, especially for the choice of descriptive language reagrding yet another wall.

Saudi Interior Minister, Prince Naif bin Abdulaziz, has confirmed the Kingdom’s plan to build a security wall along the borders with Iraq.

The Saudi Ministry received 14 applications from local and international firms to build the iron curtain-style security wall, Prince Naif said in statements Sunday night noting that the offers were being studied. Article

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Lots of empty seats means litle of productive activity.

The Iraqi Parliament’s Speaker Mahmoud al-Mashhadani called on the parliamentary blocs to commit to the parliament’s decision to replace members who do not attend more than 20 sessions, while the Iraqi Accordance Front (IAF) rejected accusation made by a member of the Unified Iraqi Coalition to the Vice President Tareq al-Hashemi, who was described as “practicing dictatorship.”

Al-Mashhadani threatened to activate the “absence law,” which stipulates sacking any member who does not attend 20 sessions during one legislative term, noting that the parliament will force his bloc to replace him.

Only 141 deputies attended today’s session out of the 275 members.

[snip]

The deputies were unable to vote on the draft laws included on today’s agenda because of the lack of quorum. Article

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In a word, SNABU.

More than a year after the Parsons Corporation, the American contracting giant, promised Congress that it would fix the disastrous plumbing and shoddy construction in barracks the company built at the Baghdad police academy, the ceilings are still stained with excrement, parts of the structures are crumbling and sections of the buildings are unusable because the toilets are filthy and nonfunctioning.

[snip]

The project also became an argument for the value of government oversight when, in response to the inspectors’ findings, a Parsons executive told Congress in September 2006 that the company would fix the problems at no cost to the United States. Parsons now says that it did so, directing an Iraqi subcontractor to correct deficiencies at no additional charge.

But Iraqi police recruits, instructors and officers at the Parsons-built barracks and classrooms on Sunday complained bitterly about the buildings’ condition, calling the contractor negligent and asking why the problems had not yet been fixed. The structures were refurbished or built from scratch at an overall cost of $72 million in American taxpayer money.

Recruits in some of the buildings had recently been ordered not to use any of the toilets on the upper floors because the urine and fecal matter consistently leaked onto the lower floors, several American officials at the academy said.

An American officer affiliated with a major new project to fix the problems said he shared the unhappiness of many of the Iraqis.

“What I’ve seen here disgusts me as a taxpayer,” said the officer, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak publicly about the project. “When it’s for something good, I don’t mind flipping the dime, but this money just went from my pocket to a contractor.”

[snip]

…on Sunday, the American officer affiliated with the new project to repair the problems described an elaborate and costly effort to tear out and replace the plumbing on entire floors. The problems were so severe, the officer said, that the military had also been obliged to build new latrines outside and demolish some structures entirely and start over. Article

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Noted FYI:

The Pentagon has begun equipping troops in Iraq with the latest Mine Resistant Ambush Protected (MRAP) vehicles that will give soldiers more protection, The Stars and Strips reported Monday.

However, although the Pentagon had planned to have 7,000 of the vehicles in use in Iraq by summer 2008, that number has been downgraded by military officials.

The head of the Department of Defense MRAP task force originally said 3,500 MRAPs would be in Iraq this year, but he later scaled that back to 1,500, saying his first estimate was made “on the fly.”

The first batch of the vehicles is being sent to units near Baghdad. Article

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Tepid is too tame a term; pathetic is more like it.

Diplomats at the American embassy in Baghdad on Monday pleaded to their state department colleagues back home to come to work in Iraq — a posting seen as one of the most dangerous in the world.

“There are all kinds of opportunities here,” said Patricia Butenis, the deputy chief of the US mission.

“There are people who think we live under a constant barrage of mortar attacks, but it isn’t that way all the time.”

[snip]

Charles Reis, another senior official in the Baghdad mission, said Iraq was the “biggest policy issue” for US diplomats.

[snip]

“Frankly speaking, service here is not as rough as I thought it was. The AC is functioning!” Article

Summary here.

The presence of pro-Kurdish parliamentarians at the release by Kurdish rebels of eight Turkish soldiers proves their party has links to the militants, Turkey’s Deputy Prime Minister Cemil Cicek said on Monday. Article

#1:

Bush insisted that the United States stood shoulder to shoulder with its NATO ally Turkey over a spate of deadly cross-border attacks by the outlawed Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK).

“PKK is a terrorist organization. They’re an enemy of Turkey. They’re an enemy of Iraq. And they’re an enemy of the United States,” Bush told reporters after the White House meeting. [Conspicuous by its absence is mention of Iran, the target of the offshoot/affiliated PJAK (see next snippet). — voxd]

The president announced a new three-way military partnership grouping the United States, Turkey and Iraq to improve the sharing of real-time intelligence on the PKK. Article

#2:

The trail is a well-known route for smugglers, and they pass by frequently, crossing between Iraq and neighboring Iran, a steady procession of donkeys hauling food, fuel canisters and boxes filled with who knows what.

As each smuggler passes, the sentry stretches out his hand and the smuggler pays, sometimes a dollar’s worth of Iranian tumans, sometimes $5 worth.

The sentry identifies himself as a member of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party, the PKK, the rebel group that has inflamed Turkish anger with attacks that have killed 30 Turkish soldiers in the last month. The U.S. State Department has included the group on its terrorist list for years.

The sentry, however, is hardly in hiding. He’s in plain view of a checkpoint atop a nearby bluff, manned by a member of the peshmerga, the regional militia of the Kurdish Regional Government, the U.S.-allied rulers of northern Iraq.

[snip]

…Turkish officials have expressed skepticism that the U.S. and Iraq are sincere in their pledges to disband the PKK or its sister organization, PEJAK, which launches attacks inside Iran. The PKK sentry said there’s no difference between his group and PEJAK, the initials for Party for a Free Life in Kurdistan.

“We are the same. We are fighting for the same purpose,” said the sentry here. Ordinarily, he said, PEJAK mans this location. The man refused to give his name and wouldn’t permit photographs.

Days of traveling throughout northern Iraq show that the PKK can count on widespread support from local residents, despite recent official statements from the region’s two dominant political parties that “we do not support the PKK, or allow any assistance to be provided to them.”

By most accounts, the guerrillas of the PKK and PEJAK are allowed to roam freely in Iraq’s Kandil Mountains, a seemingly impenetrable terrain of jagged spires that is believed to be a safe haven and training ground for thousands of Kurdish fighters. Neither the peshmerga nor Iraq’s national military have moved to root out the guerrillas. The United States has expressed no willingness to do so either.

Expressions of sympathy are frequent. Few here see the PKK as a terrorist group. Article

Summaries here and here and here. Also this.

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Oil-related news:

Guided by American legal advisers, the Iraqi government has canceled a controversial development contract with the Russian company Lukoil for a vast oil field in Iraq’s southern desert, freeing it up for potential international investment in the future.

In response, Russian authorities have threatened to revoke a 2004 deal with creditor nations to forgive $13 billion in Iraqi debt, a senior Iraqi official said. Article

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Perhaps just a grab to take credit for the handwriting on the tinderbox wall?

Iran has urged Iraq to postpone a divisive referendum to decide the fate of Kirkuk, an ethnically mixed city that sits on giant oil fields, as part of a series of measures to stabilize the country.

The plan was presented on Saturday by Foreign Minister Manouchehr Mottaki at a meeting of Iraq’s neighbors in Istanbul but was little noticed amid the frantic diplomacy to avert a Turkish incursion into Iraq to hunt down separatist rebels. Iran’s official IRNA news agency said Mottaki proposed a two-year delay for the referendum, due by Dec. 31, which will decide whether the city is incorporated into Iraq’s largely autonomous Kurdistan region. An Iranian official familiar with the plan said Tehran believed Baghdad was already juggling too many divisive political issues, including how to share oil revenues equitably. Kirkuk was seen as one hot potato too many.

[snip]

Under the constitution, the referendum is due to be held by the end of the year, but the government has made no preparations, including holding a census. While everyone agrees it is now too late to hold the referendum by Dec. 31, the government has yet to make an announcement postponing it and setting a new date.

But, asked whether the referendum would be held on time, Dabbagh said: “I don’t expect that. Because of the security situation in Kirkuk we have not done a census, which needs to be done before a referendum.” Senior Kurdish politician Najat Hasan, from the Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP), said a delay of a month or two was acceptable, but any longer would be a “gross violation of the constitution.” Article

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Zakho: On edge; first in the line of fire.

Summary here.

#1:

Security forces killed a Kurdish protestor and wounded four other in northeastern Syria while breaking up a protest against a possible Turkish incursion into Kurdish-run northern Iraq, witnesses and Kurdish activists in Syria said on Sunday.

[snip]

Syrian President Bashar al-Assad expressed support for Turkey’s policy toward the PKK on a visit to Ankara last month, although Information Minister Mohsen Bilal later said Assad did not back a Turkish attack on Iraq. Relations between Ankara and Damascus improved sharply in recent years as Kurdish power has risen in Iraq. In an interview with al-Jazeera television, Kurdish leader Masoud Barzani described Syria’s position toward Iraqi Kurdish region as “negative.”

Syria’s overtures toward Turkey have not gone down well with Syria’s own Kurdish minority which includes thousands of disenfranchised Kurds without passports or official documents to own property or use government services. Syria banned the PKK after a confrontation with Turkey in 1998 over the group’s activities. The two countries came close to a military conflict before Damascus met Turkey’s request to expel PKK leader Abdullah Öcalan, who was later arrested and jailed by Turkey. Article

#2:

Turkish Chief of General Staff Gen. Yas,ar Büyükanit has reportedly pledged to the US that Ankara will inform the US in the event of a Turkish military incursion into northern Iraq in an attempt to render outlawed Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) terrorists ineffective.

While allegedly making promises to the US that it will informed in advance of any military incursion into northern Iraq, Gen. Büyükan?t has so far avoided telling the US when exactly they will inform Washington about a possible incursion.

“Whether Turkey will notify the US just few minutes before the operation or earlier is not clear. The US has also refrained from asking Turkey the exact timing of this notification because Washington has been against any Turkish military operation in northern Iraq from the outset. Any inquiries by the US over the exact timing of when Turkey will notify the US about a possible operation would have given an impression that US is giving Turkey a green light for an incursion. The US has sought to avoid such an impression,” said a Turkish government official in an interview with Today’s Zaman.

Since Iraqi airspace is controlled by US forces, it will also be dangerous for the Turkish side to stage an incursion without informing Washington at least at the last minute.

[snip]

It is, however, not clear whether the US has been providing Turkey with actionable intelligence apart from data collected by U-2 spy plane unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) in the region as part of its additional intelligence supply to Ankara.

Due to a bitter experience for the US in the late 1980s and early 1990s, during which Turkey gravely violated the principles of human rights, abusing this kind of intelligence supply by killing civilians, Washington stopped giving Ankara actionable intelligence information. Article

Summaries here and here and here.

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Looking for a piece of the pie?

Sunni leaders from Iraq’s Anbar province on Friday said they want billions of dollars as compensation for joining U.S. forces in the fight against al Qaeda militants.

Sheikh Ahmed Abureeshah, a local tribal leader, said Anbar needs some $2 billion to rebuild roads, communications networks and other infrastructure that were destroyed before tribal leaders sided with American troops to fight al Qaeda in Iraq militants.

Anbar province was once a stronghold for al Qaeda in Iraq and the site of some of the worst fighting during four years of war. But it is now relatively safe, thanks to cooperation between local residents and U.S. authorities.

“Al Qaeda followed your army to Iraq after they attacked you here in the United States,” Abureeshah said through an interpreter.

“The people of Anbar united with the American army and they started fighting al Qaeda together, and they have been successful,” he said. “So we are asking now that we compensate this province for all of the destruction they have faced.”

Pentagon spokesmen were not immediately available to comment on the request to compensate Anbar for cooperating with U.S. and Iraqi troops.

[snip]

Anbar Gov. Maamoon Sami Rasheed said the province also would like American corporate investments to help revive its flagging economy. He said he was especially interested in U.S. oil company money for petroleum and natural gas reserves in the province’s southern Akaz region. Article

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A ruckus over a provocative map and, also:

…the Iraqi newspaper al-Zaman reported yesterday that Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki mocked calls for national reconciliation and dismissed those calling for such reconciliation as conspirators. Source

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a) Precedent-setting.

b) From which budget item does this more than a half million dollars come?

c) Compare the sums to any offered as ‘compenstaion’ for deaths of Iraqis or Afghans.

In a groundbreaking move, the Pentagon is compensating servicemen seriously hurt when an American tank convoy forced them off the road.

The Pentagon has agreed to pay more than £300,000 in compensation to British soldiers who were seriously injured when their vehicle was in a collision with a US tank convoy on an Iraqi road. The landmark decision is the first time that the US military has offered money to British troops injured by US forces after admitting liability. The decision could, say lawyers, pave the way for more payouts to British servicemen accidentally injured in Iraq and Afghanistan by the Americans.

Corporal Jane McLauchlan, Staff Sergeant James Rogerson, Corporal Stephen Smith and their interpreter, Khalid Allahou, have been told they will receive collective compensation of £320,000 [$668,7733 at today’s exchange rate — voxd] from the US authorities after the accident more than four years ago. Initially, the American military denied it had any record of the incident. Later it emerged that the collision had been officially recorded at the time. Lawyers for the British troops have accused the US authorities of attempting to ‘dump’ their inquiry in a move to block the compensation claim, the first private action involving coalition allies in Iraq.

[snip]

In the incident a Royal Military Police Land Rover was struck twice from behind by a US tank transporter. Corporal McLauchlan, who was at the wheel of the Land Rover, was unable to keep control and crashed off the road. Initially, the Royal Military Police launched a detailed inquiry into the incident and named the US unit and driver involved, before the Pentagon said it would take over the investigation. Only after substantial pressure did the Pentagon admit the existence of a three-page statement by the US National Guard convoy involved in the incident, which mentioned that they ‘had run some guys off the road’. Article

Summary here and here.

Turkish officials indicated Saturday that Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice had failed during two days of talks to persuade them not to send troops across the Iraqi border to attack Kurdish rebels based there.

Even before Rice’s plane had left the ground here to take the secretary to Israel for Mideast peace talks there, Turkish officials briefing reporters said they’d heard nothing new during her visit and that tens of thousands of Turkish troops would remain poised at the Turkey-Iraq border.

[snip]

Erdogan has noted that recently captured PKK fighters have been armed with U.S. weapons, including M-16 rifles. Turkish experts believe the rebels also have U.S. ground to air weapons, a threat to Turkish helicopters.

“Turkey wants to trust the U.S., but we feel we have been very patient in dealing with a national threat, and the current mood is not simply that we have been ignored by the U.S. in this matter, but that we have been betrayed,” said Faruk Logoglu, a former Turkish ambassador to the United States. Article

#1:

Eight Turkish soldiers captured by Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) rebels on October 21 are expected to be released Sunday, a news agency close to the PKK reported.

The soldiers would be handed over to pro-Kurdish MPs at an undisclosed location, the Brussels-based Firat news agency, generally considered a mouthpiece for the PKK, reported Saturday.

The soldiers were captured when their unit was ambushed near the border with Iraq.

The attack also left 12 other soldiers dead, raising regional tensions as Turkey threatened to launch military strikes in Iraqi territory to root out the rebels from their bases.

A PKK official had earlier told AFP that negotiations were continuing for the soldiers’ release.

“There is still no decision as to when the soldiers will be released,” a PKK spokesman told AFP in Arbil, northern Iraq, by telephone from the group’s hideout in the Qandil mountains along the Iraq-Turkey border.

The Turkish army never officially acknowledged the soldiers’ capture, listing them instead as missing in action. Article

#2:

Iraqi officials said here Saturday they had enacted new measures to curb rebels of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) in northern Iraq, but stopped short of promising a clampdown on their camps in remote mountains.

“It is a plan we started today, Saturday, in the Kurdistan region. Today is the first day of its implementation,” Iraqi government spokesman Ali Dabbagh told reporters on the sidelines of an international conference on Iraqi security.

“There are security measures being taken, the checking of any suspect officer of the PKK in the Kurdistan region and in all Iraq,” he said.

He added that the measures would cut off all “possibility” of logistic support to the PKK. Article

A bit more:

n the first sign of a crackdown on Kurdish rebels, the regional government of northern Iraq closed the Kurdistan Democratic Solution Party’s headquarters in Arbil and a branch office in Sulaimaniyah, a regional official told AFP.

The move comes nearly two weeks after Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki pledged to close PKK-linked offices and not allow the “terrorist” group to operate on Iraqi soil, amid the threats of a Turkish military incursion.

“We started this morning to close the office of the Kurdistan Democratic Solution Party which sympathizes with the PKK,” the official said.

“We have decided to shut down all such offices of local Kurdish parties which sympathise with the PKK.”

The administration first closed the main office in Arbil and later in Sulaimaniyah.

“The office of the party was closed because the group is not recognised by the government of the region,” Sulaimaniyah security chief Saif al-Din Ali Ahmed said.

“Lately the party also made several statements considered to be against the interests of the Kurdistan region. So the administration decided to close its offices.”

The Kurdistan Democratic Solution Party was founded in 2003 by Fa’aq Kolbi, a Kurd from northern Iraq.

The party contested the national elections in 2005 but did not win a single seat, and it also has no representation in the Kurdish parliament of northern Iraq.

Kolbi denounced the action against his party.

“We are a political party supporting the struggle of our people in Turkish Kurdistan and the decision has been taken under the pressure of the Turkish government,” he said in a statement.

“We denounce the closing of our headquarters and we consider it as a wrong step taken by the regional government.” Article

And also:

A Kurdish security force in the city of al-Sulaimaniya closed down the Kurdistan Democratic Solution Party after closing its headquarters in Arbil earlier on Saturday for backing the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK).

“My party will continue to support the free revolutionaries in Turkey’s Kurdistan,” said a defiant Faeq Colby, the leader of the Kurdistan Democratic Solution Party.

The measures coincide with the inauguration of the Iraq Neighbors conference hosted by the Turkish city of Istanbul earlier on Saturday.

“A security force of 50 armed men raided the Kurdistan Democratic Solution Party, cordoned its headquarters and denied access to any journalists,” the correspondent of the independent news agency Voices of Iraq (VOI) in Sulaimaniya said.

“After the closing of our party headquarters in Arbil, another security force closed down our headquarters in Sulaimaniya,” Colby told VOI.

[snip]

Earlier in the day a high-level source in Arbil security department said that Kurdish security forces in Arbil closed the headquarters of pro-PKK Kurdish parties, starting with the Kurdistan Democratic Solution Party.

“We have decided to close down all headquarters of pro-PKK Kurdish parties in Arbil, and we already started with the Kurdistan Democratic Solution Party,” the source, who asked not to have his name mentioned, told VOI.

The source did not reveal the standards through which parties would be included in these measures nor their numbers.

On whether members of these parties would be arrested, he replied that as a beginning “their headquarters will be closed down and if they continued their activities we would arrest their members too.”

The Kurdistan Democratic Solution Party, led by Dr. Colby, was founded in 2003 and so far failed to obtain a license to work in the autonomous Iraqi Kurdistan Region although it received the go-ahead from the Iraqi government. Article

#3 — analysis du jour:

From [Nov. 5], we start the final countdown. The meeting between Turkey’s Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan and President George Bush, so eagerly anticipated, will redefine the very nature of US-Turkish relations. Let’s lend an ear to Mark Parris, former ambassador of the US to Turkey, in an analysis he did at the Brookings Institute. “It won’t be easy. America’s fifty-plus year strategic partnership with Turkey has been in freefall since early 2003. While Erdogan’s government has contributed the occasional sin of commission or omission to the process, it has by and large found ways to support US policy on issues we really care about: Iraq, Iran, Arab-Israeli relations, energy.”

“The same, unfortunately, cannot be said for Washington. The Bush administration has periodically (most recently in a September speech by Under Secretary of State Nicholas Burns at the Atlantic Council) ‘talked the talk’ about Turkey’s importance and the advantages of strategic partnership. But it has simply not delivered on matters of greatest importance to Turkey.”

[snip]

“If Erdogan hears from Bush credible assurances that Washington is finally prepared to act on its designation of the PKK as a terrorist organization (and if Washington acts on those assurances in a timely manner), the Administration will likely be able to patch up the vessel of US-Turkish relations enough to keep it afloat for the next 14 months. If he does not, given the pressures he is under in Turkey to ‘do something’ about the PKK, and pervasive revulsion there against a partner so discriminating in its choice of terrorists, the prime minister will have to draw conclusions. That will almost certainly mean Turkish military intervention of some sort in northern Iraq before the snow falls. It could also mean that putting US-Turkish strategic cooperation back on solid footings will wait until the Oval Office has a new occupant.” Article

#4 — noted FYI:

Germany’s foreign minister has called on Turkey to withdraw a threat to launch a military attack on Kurdish rebels in northern Iraq.

Frank-Walter Steinmeier, who is taking part in an international conference on Iraq in Istanbul, said in a television interview broadcast late Friday that there was a “sensitive situation” on the Turkey-Iraq border because of the threats. Article