Author:
Publication: Times Online
Date: December 16, 2007
URL: http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/iraq/article3056726.ece
As one of the first journalists to visit Basra
without military protection in recent years, Marie Colvin finds Islamic militias
are waging a brutal campaign for control in Iraq's second city
There are two photographs in every police
file. One is a long shot of a woman's discarded body, the other a close-up
of her last expression.
All the women fell foul of the unwritten rules
of the new Basra - they dressed wrongly, they left the home to work, or perhaps
they were merely rumoured to have a boyfriend.
Forty-eight manila files have been opened
in the past six months. Not one case has been solved. The bare number cannot
begin to conjure the horror of these deaths at the hands of Islamic extremists
who have the port city in a tightening grip of fear.
In one folder at the Basra police station,
the young woman in the autopsy photograph seems to be straining upward in
agony, her eyes popping in terror. She is "female unknown identity, found
in Hayer Hussein neighbourhood, behind the electric station. 24/8/2007".
In another, a woman's nose has been crushed.
Trails of blood run from her closed right eye like lines of tears. She is
"female unknown identity, found in Al-Mishraq al-Jaid neighbourhood,
behind the car dealer. 7/11/2007".
Their autopsies revealed painful deaths. One
woman found in "a red dress" had a 9mm bullet wound in her left
hand, three in her right hand, three in her right upper arm, and three in
her back. Two of the women were beheaded, one with a saw.
Residents say police have not been investigating.
"Everyone knows the militias are doing this, but the police live in fear
of them. We all do," said a middle-aged businessman who was too afraid
to give his name.
The walls of Basra would be a good place to
start looking for the killers. One graffito on a wall bordering the main Al-Dijari
road reads: "We warn all women of Basra, especially those who are not
wearing abbaya [a long, loose black cloak worn over everyday clothes], that
we will kill you." It is signed in the name of an offshoot of the Mahdi
Army, the strongest militia in Basra.
It is not just women who live in fear. Professionals
such as engineers, doctors and scientists have been dragged from their homes
and murdered.
Yet last week Gordon Brown responded angrily
in the House of Commons when challenged over the security situation in Basra.
"Iraq is now a democracy," the prime minister said. "Millions
of people have voted. When I went to Basra, only two days ago, I found that
there had been a 90% fall in violence over the past few months. We are now
able to hand over Basra to provincial Iraqi control . . . This is Iraqis taking
control over their own security."
But what kind of security will the British
be passing on to local forces in a ceremony at Basra's international airport
today? Will David Miliband, the foreign secretary, who is flying in to represent
the government at the formalities, genuinely be able to remark upon a job
well done? Or are the Basrawis being delivered into the hands of the militias?
THE phone rang on the walnut desk of Major-General
Jalil Khalaf's office at midnight. He is the new police commander of Basra
and had just been telling me about his determination to stop the killing spree.
The call sent him into agitated overdrive.
He picked up another receiver and started barking orders: "Put check-points
around the area. Seal it. Quickly. Quickly. The car is white model Crown.
All check-points, arrest all cars of that description."
Half an hour earlier, a young Christian woman
had been kidnapped in the Kharj neighbourhood, and he feared the worst.
Khalaf, a dapper dresser in a sharply tailored
black suit with matching waistcoat, arrived in mid-June and appears to be
the first commander to start taking any action. Brown's figures suggest it
is taking effect.
"I have reopened all 48 women's files
and started investigating them," he said. "They are also slashing
their faces for wearing make-up. These groups declare 'We are religious',
but this is not religion."
He believes the true death toll is higher.
Families have buried their dead rather than face what is considered a loss
of honour, whether the victim is blameless or not.
He has sent a 100-page report back to the
national government in Baghdad, detailing Basra's problems. They differ from
those in Baghdad, which had descended into fighting between Sunni and Shi'ite
factions before the American "surge" policy of increasing troop
numbers brought some semblance of order this autumn.
Basra's 2m residents are almost all Shi'ite
- the fighting is among the main three parties that represent this branch
of Islam who are vying for wealth and power.
The stakes are high. Basra, through Umm Qasr
just to the east, is the country's only port and the outlet for most of Iraq's
oil, of which the province has the country's greatest reserves. Most of the
nation's imports come across its docks too.
It should be a wealthy city, but to drive
around reveals the extent of its deterioration. The whole place stinks. The
governor, a member of Fadila, the region's third most powerful militia, couldn't
fix the sewage pipes, so he diverted them into the Ashar river.
The city is mostly low concrete buildings,
many crumbling, and whole neighbourhoods are inhabited by squatters who have
thrown up illegal and badly built brick or shanty houses. There are daily
cuts in electricity and water supplies.
The only civic project that seems to be going
well is the provision of new pavements with red tiles. This despite the fact
that the city's roads are pitted with potholes. Strange until one learns that
the province's governor has just opened a tile factory.
Khalaf's efforts to bring order to the city
have given him black bags under his eyes. He describes a world in which the
police and the political parties and militias are separate and competing forces.
So far the militias are winning.
"The problems are like an interlocking
chain," he said.
"The militias control the ports, which
earns them huge sums of money. That money they use to fund their own activities.
"Second, borders," he continued.
"There is a 280km border between us [and Iran]. Smugglers cross the borders
with guns and weapons and these go to the militias. We don't have enough guards
or the sophisticated equipment you need to stop them. You could smuggle a
tank across that border if you wanted."
The militias are exporting oil products and
animals, too, he said.
His efforts to stop them and weed the militias
out of his own force have not gone unnoticed. So far he has survived seven
assassination attempts. Many of his bodyguards have been killed. He believes
most of the attempts came from within his own force.
"I will enter the Guinness Book of Records
for assassination attempts," he said.
The root of the problem, Khalaf believes,
was the misguided manner in which the British set up the security forces,
particularly the police.
"They relied on the political parties
and allowed them to nominate people for positions in the police," he
said. "Of course, the parties nominated their own members."
Khalaf's personal stock-taking revealed huge
quantities of police communications equipment had been delivered directly
from police warehouses to the militias, and 1,000 cars had disappeared.
"They were cars with police insignia
painted on the side!" he said, exasperated.
Khalaf also found he was paying 3,500 members
of the force, at the cost of millions to the Iraqi national treasury, who
were actually serving with the militias. They didn't even bother to show up
for work.
His report to the government detailed 28 militias
or their offshoots. "All of them have weapons, all are well-trained,"
he said. "They have RPGs [rocket-propelled grenades], many rifles, bombs,
mortars. Their weapons are stronger than ours."
So worried was he for my safety at the end
of my interview that he gave me four trucks of soldiers as an escort to the
building I was staying in, and his personal Koran for extra safety. I was
already forced to travel under cover of traditional abbaya for fear of identification
as a westerner.
THE level of lawlessness is striking even
during a short visit to Basra. On my first day,a male relative of the family
I was staying with was kidnapped driving into Basra. A series of desperate
calls began to try to find him. It has become a well-established ritual.
The next day, waiting in the anteroom of Major-General
Farid Mohan, commander of the army in Basra, I asked the man next to me if
he was okay. He had two black eyes and lumps on his bald head.
It turned out he was the leader of the first
ministry of finance delegation to visit Basra in five months. He had been
kidnapped and tortured. Mohan had negotiated his release hours earlier.
Iyad Ahmed sat slumped forward in the grey
dishdasha (robe) and leather sandals that he had on when he was kidnapped
from his room at the Qusr Al-Sultan, the best hotel in Basra. He had arrived
20 days earlier to investigate the ports and borders.
"When I was kidnapped, I was investigating
the theft of 653 new cars stolen from the international free zone in the middle
of the afternoon. The thieves killed the guard at the gate as they drove the
cars out."
Following the trail, the ministry team found
that 90 of the cars had been used in assassinations, and 35 in suicide bomb
attacks.
Ahmed thinks he was targeted when he started
investigating free zone officials for what he believed was their involvement
in the car hijacking. The free zone is said to be controlled by the Badr organisation,
the Islamic party controlled by Abdul Aziz Hakim, the second most powerful
Islamic party in Basra.
"I was threatened," said Ahmed in
an outraged voice. "A Mr Falah, the senior man, told me, 'See what we
will do to you today'."
About 11.30 that evening eight new 4x4s full
of gunmen stormed into the hotel.
"They dragged me out of my room in just
this," he said slapping his dirty robe. "I was shouting, 'I am a
government employee'. I thought at first they were after the two women working
on my team."
He was blindfolded, driven to what he believes
was a farm because of the noises and tortured for 24 hours. "They beat
me all over, they kicked me, and they hung me by my wrists for three hours."
Mohan secured his release by promising the
kidnappers a "gift" if they gave him Ahmed. It is a mark of the
hypocrisy of some Islamic extremists that because the Koran forbids them from
extorting money they pretend that their ransom for a kidnapping is a "gift".
Ahmed vowed to keep working, although rather
fearfully. "These militias are bigger than the government," he said.
The government of Nouri al-Maliki, the prime
minister, appears finally to have acknowledged the problem in Basra, but it
is unclear if it has the will to wrest the city from the grip of the Islamic
parties and their thugs.
"The government is trying to support
the forces in Basra," said Ali Dabbagh, its spokesman. "We're not
trying to hide the fact that there is a threat in Basra, but we think most
of the threat is coming from organised criminal gangs who are hiding behind
the slogans of JAM [local shorthand for the Mahdi Army]."
He pointed out that 15,000 police had been
fired from forces across Iraq because they were engaging in criminal activity
or belonged to a militia.
He said that another part of the problem in
Basra was that there was a "political struggle - [Islamic] parties are
fighting each other". He said, however, that he thought today would witness
"a smooth transfer of power to Iraqi security forces. They are capable
of dealing with Basra and we can ask the Iraqi security forces or multinational
forces to intervene if there is a problem".
Yet it is hard for the Baghdad government
to move against the religious militias because it is itself led by Shi'ite
religious parties. In the cauldron of Iraqi politics, being seen to attack
one's coreligionists is not a good idea.
The Mahdi Army is in theory observing a six-month
cease-fire, which it announced in late August. Huge murals of Moqtada and
his father Mohammed Sadiq al-Sadr line the main roads, rather as larger-than-life
portraits of Saddam Hussein did when he was president.
The Sadr office in Basra is a rival centre
of power to the official government. Pickup trucks, new Toyotas, even two
police cars are parked outside the gates of the compound. Inside the activities
are not just military. There are departments for welfare and even a tribunal
run on sharia principles.
I met Sheikh Ali As-Sayeedi, one of the Mahdi
Army leaders, in his office, furnished with faux-Louis XIV furniture, korans
and kitsch plastic ivy.
Many leaders used to declaim openly that their
ambition was to take power in the city. But now that the British troops are
leaving and Iraqis are taking over, they are more cautious in their language.
Sayeedi, however, insisted that the Mahdi
Army had driven British forces from Basra and that they would not give up
fighting until the American-led coalition left Iraq.
"It is a good next step for Iraqis to
take back their sovereignty in Basra," said Sayeedi. "We believe
all forces should leave the country. We don't respect any agreement with these
forces. Our people are freedom fighters not militias.
"Our programme is to help the Iraqi people
and make everyone happy in Basra."
Why then, I asked him, is everyone in Basra
blaming the Mahdi Army for the violence in the streets?
"People here support us," he insisted,
leaning forward and visibly angering. "Criminals do crime and then say
that they are the Mahdi Army to appear stronger."
It is not hard to find the signs of muscle-flexing
on the streets, however. On Friday, the Muslim day of prayer, Mahdi checkpoints
closed down the city's main roads for their new custom of busing in hundreds
of followers to pray in the middle of the main arteries. Traffic snarled as
drivers wove through dirty side roads to get around the jams.
As prayers broke up, men wearing the black
turbans of the Mahdi Army strolled away, machineguns slung casually over their
shoulders.
THE British gave up the battle for control
of the streets of Basra months ago. In September they withdrew from Basra
Palace, their base for four years, to the airport.
They say they expect the transition to be
smooth. The Iraqis have been policing themselves for four months without calling
for help. The British insist the handover is no defeat but the next step in
the nationwide transition to Iraqi control.
"The formal handover allows them to deliver
Iraqi solutions in an Iraqi way," said Major-General Graham Binns, the
commanding officer for British forces in Basra province. "The way forward
is to have the Iraqis take the next step."
He insisted the British were not cutting and
running. They will remain at the airport, reducing to 2,500 by next spring.
The Basra government can call on them for support that ranges from surveillance
to reentry.
Binns confessed to regrets. "I was more
of an idealist when I arrived and perhaps too ambitious," he said. "I
didn't think it would end this way.
"I'm proud of the way we built up the
Iraqi security forces, but we were unable to meet the aspirations of the Iraqi
people. I would like to have done better."
Tomorrow the Iraqi police and army will mark
their first day of independent control of Basra with a military parade at
Basra Palace.
Last Thursday, Iraqi army guards lounged in
sociable groups at the massive arch that leads into the compound on the Shatt
al-Arab waterway. Three drank tea together, their weapons leaning against
the concrete blast wall installed by the departed British.
They seemed unworried, unlike the civilians
outside the walls of the new army headquarters. They certainly didn't look
like soldiers ready to take on the well-armed militias.
Few in Basra would say that the British have
met their goal, "to establish the security necessary for the development
of political institutions and for economic reconstruction".
An opinion poll published today suggests that
70% of Basrawis believe security will improve after the British have left
- mostly because they have been removed as a target - but everyone I spoke
to said this was their number one worry.
"I must look over my shoulder every minute
when I am on the street," said Rula, a 36-year-old mother of four who
has refused to quit journalism despite threats. "I look hard at the face
of my daughter before I leave for work. Someone might cut my throat and I
will not come home again."
Fears that the militias will begin an all-out
battle for Basra or that the city will descend into chaos are unlikely to
materialise. The factions will no doubt clash as they jockey for power, but
they have carved out their lucrative spheres of influence and have too much
to lose to go to war.
Iran will play a key role in the future of
Basra. Tehran has more influence here than anywhere else in Iraq. The mullahs
fund all the Shi'ite groups rather like a wealthy donor hedging his political
bets.
Essentially, the political players are happy
with their lot. It is the rest of the people in Basra who will suffer, most
likely for years to come.
"I went to university because I had dreams
for my future," said 18-year-old Nayla. "NowI only go to classes
twice a week because I am so afraid to leave the house. I have no future."
