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Insurgent violence escalates in iraq { April 24 2005 } Original Source Link: (May no longer be active)
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A12417-2005Apr23.htmlhttp://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A12417-2005Apr23.html
Insurgent Violence Escalates In Iraq
Over 100 Killed As Post-Election Calm Dissipates
By Ellen Knickmeyer
Washington Post Foreign Service
Sunday, April 24, 2005; Page A01
BAGHDAD, April 23 -- Violence is escalating sharply in Iraq after a period of relative calm that followed the January elections. Bombings, ambushes and kidnappings targeting Iraqis and foreigners, both troops and civilians, have surged this month while the new Iraqi government is caught up in power struggles over cabinet positions.
Many attacks have gone unchallenged by Iraqi forces in large areas of the country dominated by insurgents, according to the U.S. military, Iraqi officials and civilians and visits by Washington Post correspondents. Hundreds of Iraqis and foreigners have either been killed or wounded in the last week.
"Definitely, violence is getting worse," said a U.S. official in Baghdad, who spoke on condition of anonymity. "My strong sense is that a lot of the political momentum that was generated out of the successful election, which was sort of like a punch in the gut to the insurgents, has worn off." The political stalemate "has given the insurgents new hope," the official added, repeating a message Americans say they are increasingly giving Iraqi leaders.
This week, at a checkpoint bunker in Tarmiya where insurgents downed a helicopter, a teenager in sunglasses clutching an AK-47 marked the limits of the Iraqi army's authority. "I wouldn't advise going there," the young Shiite Muslim recruit said, referring to Tarmiya, a Tigris River town a few hundred yards up the road that is dominated by Sunni Muslim landowners who were loyal to Saddam Hussein. "Those are some bad people there."
Up the road, insurgents run relatively free, and last week they appeared to have used a hilltop outside of town to fire what they later said was a shoulder-launched, heat-seeking missile. The missile hit a chartered Russian-made helicopter Thursday, killing six Americans and five other foreigners, including a survivor executed by the guerrillas afterward.
Another U.S. soldier was killed on Saturday when a roadside bomb exploded near a military convoy west of Baghdad, the Reuters news agency reported.
The U.S. official said this week that overall attacks had increased since the end of March. Roadside bombings and attacks on military targets are up by as much as 40 percent in parts of the country over the same period, according to estimates from private security outfits.
Meanwhile, the Iraqi leadership remains in limbo.
The attacks, coming as officials continued to haggle over government posts, have eroded some of the hope that followed the elections. Shiite, Sunni, Kurdish and secular leaders, most of whom are building the first democratically elected Iraqi government of their adult lives, have let power struggles fill nearly one-third of their government's planned 11-month run.
At best, deal-making on some key posts appears stuck where it was two weeks ago, when Ibrahim Jafari, a formerly exiled Shiite leader, accepted the prime minister's job and the task of forming a promised national-unity government.
There was increasing talk that dissenters within the governing coalition, led by Shiites and Kurds, are trying to prolong negotiations until Jafari misses an early May deadline to form a government. This could put the prime minister job into the hands of another Shiite candidate.
Soldiers and police across much of Iraq have fallen into inaction. The Defense and Interior ministries are run by interim chiefs slated for replacement. Initiatives by the Iraqi forces against the insurgents have all but ceased.
The insurgency has found new hideouts, gathering points and recruiting areas in western and central Iraq, and in eastern Iraq along the Tigris River, as well as in other locations.
"The government is useless! I have stopped depending on it," Ali Hali, a 29-year-old Shiite, cried last week. He was among hundreds of wailing residents of the southern city of Najaf who gathered in anger after scores of bodies were found in the Tigris. How the people were killed is not known, but Shiites said they presumed them to be victims of Sunni extremists.
Tensions over the killings in the area focused on the town of Madain, where rumors that Sunnis are kidnapping and killing Shiite townspeople were rife. Some Shiite national leaders have warned of sectarian war. In Shiite strongholds, there were threats of retaliatory violence against innocent Sunnis.
Even with accusations about Madain circulating on the streets, in newspapers and on television, Iraq's Interior Ministry waited a day to place a call to the town to ask about the situation.
The ministry's police had withdrawn from the town long ago, and phone lines were bad, said Sabah Kadhim, a ministry spokesman. Journalists noted that police waited three more days, after plenty of notice, to send forces sweeping through the town, only to say they had found neither kidnappers nor hostages.
Meanwhile, officials describe setbacks in the security situation in the Sunni Muslim city of Husaybah on the Syrian border, near the area where fighters tied to al Qaeda had staged the second of two well-planned attacks on a U.S. military installation this month. An Iraqi army unit that had once grown to 400 members has dwindled to a few dozen guardsmen "holed up'' inside a phosphate plant outside of Husaybah for their protection, a Marine commander said.
Maj. John Reed, executive officer for the 3rd Battalion, 2nd Marine Regiment, which has a company in Husaybah, said the Iraqi guardsmen retreated to the phosphate plant compound with their families after insurgents attacked and killed scores of people in recent months.
"They will claim that they've got hundreds ready to come back and fight," said Reed, whose company seldom patrols inside Husaybah. "Well, there are no more than 30 of them on duty on any given day, and they are completely ineffective."
At Tarmiya, along the heavily Sunni-populated banks of the Tigris, Shiite recruits sent by the government usually stay well out of town unless accompanying U.S. patrols, a correspondent for The Post observed. Police officers man a station inside Tarmiya, but they are Sunnis from the same tribes as the townspeople. Even they are seldom seen.
In city after city and town after town, security forces who had signed up to secure Iraq and replace U.S. forces appear to have abandoned posts or taken refuge inside them for fear of attacks.
''We joined the police, and after this, the job became a way of committing suicide,'' said Jasim Khadar Harki, a 28-year-old policeman in Mosul, where residents say patrols are dropping off noticeably, often appearing only in response to attacks.
Tips from Mosul's residents have dropped off as well, with residents doubtful that police can protect informants from retaliation. When a school principal in Mosul saw insurgents place explosives outside the gates of a police station next door, the principal didn't tell police -- only quietly dismissed pupils for the day, townspeople said.
The Interior Ministry is a distant force to which the police appeal for supplies, Harki said, "but they rarely respond."
Guerrilla campaigns also are fought psychologically, by intimidation, Bruce Hoffman, a terrorism expert at the Rand Corp., said in a telephone interview. Along that line, this month has shown a return of grim videos showing distraught hostages and executions, while daily bombings make every trip out of the house a calculated risk for Iraqis.
"Insurgencies can't necessarily be measured in attacks but in overall security," Hoffman said. "It's still enormously uneven even in country's capital."
He pointed to the downing of the helicopter north of Baghdad's airport and to bombings along the airport road that have claimed dozens of injured and dead this month.
Iraq's political leaders acknowledge increasing pressure from the United States and Iraqis to wrap up a government to deal with the violence.
"It's natural that our friends would be pointing" to the problem, "as well as our constituents," said Barham Salih, the former interim deputy prime minister and a lead figure for the Kurds in the government formation talks.
"There is a serious security challenge, and we will be held to account," he said.
For residents of Baghdad, where security forces that are comparatively well engaged have been unable to stop daily bombings, the return to violence has already brought some residents to despair.
"This is terrible," said Waleed Sharhan, outside a mosque where two children were among the nine dead from a bombing Friday. "There is no hope that this country will be better."
Correspondent Steve Fainaru at the Syrian border and special correspondents Naseer Nouri at Tarmiya, Marwan Ani in Mosul and Saad Sarhan in Najaf contributed to this report.
© 2005 The Washington Post Company
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