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Iraq Premier-Designate Has His Work Cut Out For Him

Iraq Premier-Designate Has His Work Cut Out For Him

By Shashank Bengali and Brian Bennett, Tribune Washington Bureau

WASHINGTON — Early in 2007, with Iraq embroiled in sectarian violence, American diplomats in Baghdad tried to persuade a key Shiite Muslim lawmaker to support the easing of a ban on the Sunni Arab-dominated Baath Party.

At a meeting at the U.S. Embassy, the lawmaker, Haider al-Abadi, was noncommittal, saying that changes to the laws forbidding political activity by Saddam Hussein’s old party would be a tough sell with Shiites. But al-Abadi, a British-educated engineer, also expressed hope that the rival sects would find common ground in opposition to Sunni-led al-Qaida extremists.

Sunni lawmakers “are looking for allies,” al-Abadi said, according to a State Department dispatch obtained by the anti-secrecy website WikiLeaks. “We are ready.”

That encounter was quintessential al-Abadi, according to former U.S. officials and analysts who have followed the career of the man who was tapped this week to serve as Iraq’s next prime minister.

Seen as less ideological and more moderate than many leading Shiite politicians — including the man he would replace, divisive two-term Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki — he is at the same time a cautious party man who has rarely broken with the Shiite mainstream on crucial issues such as “de-Baathification” and power sharing.

With the United States now seeking to reverse the momentum of the Islamic State, an al-Qaida breakaway group that has swept across northern and western Iraq, Obama administration officials hope that al-Abadi will make good on previous overtures toward minority Sunni Arabs and Kurds and form a more inclusive, moderate government. As a former businessman and chairman of the parliament’s finance committee, he earned a reputation for pragmatism and support of private enterprise.

“Abadi is known in Iraq as someone who can reach across the party aisle and has earned respect as a skilled negotiator,” said a U.S. official who spoke on condition of anonymity in discussing internal assessments.

Yet even if al-Abadi is able to form a ruling coalition, he may still struggle to win the crucial support of Sunnis, whose disaffection with al-Maliki’s sectarian policies has fueled the rise of the Sunni extremists. Al-Abadi secured the prime ministerial nomination Monday with the backing of a Shiite coalition that includes supporters of former Oil Minister Hussein Shahristani, who has angered Sunni Arabs and Kurds by insisting that all Iraqi oil be controlled by the Shiite-led central government, and the radical cleric Muqtada al-Sadr.

“Neither he nor his coalition are auspicious in terms of expecting a significant change,” said Kirk Sowell, a political analyst who edits the Inside Iraqi Politics newsletter and is based in Jordan.

“There were people around Maliki who were flamethrowers; (Abadi is) not a flamethrower. But at the same time, Abadi has never been known as someone who’s pushing reforms.”

On Wednesday, al-Maliki said in a weekly televised address that he would not give up power until Iraq’s high court rules on his claim to office, but he pledged not to use force to keep his post. With support for al-Maliki evaporating, al-Abadi is moving ahead with forming a new Cabinet under a constitutionally mandated 30-day deadline.

Like al-Maliki, the Baghdad-born al-Abadi is a longtime member of the Islamic Dawa Party, a Shiite opposition group banned during Saddam’s long rule. But the two men took different paths as exiles pushing for the dictator’s overthrow.

In the 1980s, while al-Maliki took part in clandestine efforts from Syria and Iran to destabilize the Baathist-led government, al-Abadi lived in Britain, where he earned a doctorate in engineering from the University of Manchester. According to a biography on his Facebook page, two of his brothers were executed in Iraq in 1982 for being Dawa members.

Al-Abadi remained with his family in Britain and ran a small company that, among other things, helped to modernize London’s transportation system. He returned to Baghdad in 2003 after the U.S.-led invasion that toppled Saddam and became minister of communications in the Coalition Provisional Authority under American civilian administrator L. Paul Bremer III. Al-Abadi was elected to Iraq’s re-formed parliament in 2006.

Balding, with a neatly trimmed gray beard, al-Abadi is better known to Iraqis than al-Maliki was when U.S. officials plucked the latter from obscurity and backed him for the premiership. American diplomats who have since worked behind the scenes for al-Maliki’s ouster believe al-Abadi may be more open-minded toward Washington and other Western allies, officials said.

Before the Obama administration launched airstrikes last week against Islamic State militants in northern Iraq, al-Abadi was a vocal proponent of U.S. military intervention. He told the Huffington Post in June that renewed U.S. involvement would mean the Iraqi government would not have to rely solely on military support from Iran.

“There are some reasons to think he is not beholden to or enamored with Iran as Maliki has been,” said David Pollock, a Middle East expert at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy.

In the same interview, al-Abadi acknowledged that Iraqi security forces had committed “excesses” that should be investigated, without elaborating. Under al-Maliki, the security forces were accused of abducting and torturing untold numbers of civilians, most of them Sunnis, who were being held without charges.

But al-Abadi rejected allegations that al-Maliki persecuted or marginalized Sunnis. He has also drawn the ire of Kurds for saying their demands for a greater share of oil revenue from the semiautonomous northern Kurdish region could cause Iraq’s “disintegration.”

Experts say that as prime minister, al-Abadi would have to take swift steps to reform Iraq’s security establishment and share sufficient power with Sunni Arabs and Kurds to build support for fighting the Islamist militants.

“He’s going to face every single challenge that Maliki faced,” said Hayder al-Khoei, an Iraq expert at Chatham House, a British-based think tank. “That has nothing to do with personalities. There are systematic failures having to do with governance, nepotism, corruption that are not going to go away overnight.”

Bengali reported from Mumbai, India, and Bennett from Washington.

AFP Photo/Jean-Philippe Ksiazek

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Al-Maliki Urges Iraq’s Neighbors To Join Fight Against Islamists

Al-Maliki Urges Iraq’s Neighbors To Join Fight Against Islamists

By Mitchell Prothero, McClatchy Foreign Staff

IRBIL, Iraq — Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki called Wednesday for support from neighboring countries in his government’s struggle against Islamist insurgents, saying the formation of an Islamic caliphate in much of Iraq and Syria threatens the entire region.

The declaration of the caliphate by the radical terrorist group Islamic State and the call by its leader, Abu Bakr al Baghdadi, for Muslims the world over to join it in a holy war puts every nation in the region “within a red circle,” al-Maliki said.

The prime minister’s message appeared to be an appeal not just to Iraqi Sunni Muslims, some of whom have openly supported the Islamic State’s offensive in Iraq, but also to countries such as Jordan, Saudi Arabia, and Kuwait, which have openly opposed assistance to the Shiite Muslim-led Iraqi government.

He urged politicians in his own country to come together to pick a new government. On Tuesday, Iraq’s parliament failed to select a new speaker after Sunni Arab and Kurdish members stormed out a few minutes into the opening session. Al-Maliki described the failure to form a government as a “state of weakness.”

“God willing, in the next session we will overcome it with cooperation and agreement and openness,” he said. The parliament is scheduled to convene again next week.

Al-Maliki, a Shiite nationalist, has so far resisted rather broad calls to either form a national unity government quickly or step aside for a new leader, amid claims by allies and foes alike that his policies toward Iraq’s Sunni minority had led many of the country’s tribes to join the Islamic State rebellion.

Al-Maliki also addressed on Wednesday growing division with Iraq’s Kurds, whose Kurdistan Regional Government is largely autonomous but remains part of the country. As the Iraqi army collapsed last month before the Islamic State’s onslaught, the Kurds expanded their control to the disputed oil-rich city of Kirkuk. Kurdish President Massoud Barzani also has said he will hold a referendum on independence.

Al-Maliki noted that the Iraqi Constitution allows for a federal system but contains no provisions for such a move to independence. He angrily charged that the Kurds were “trying to take advantage of the situation” with their occupation of Kirkuk, and he described the situation as unresolved.

It was unlikely that al-Maliki’s call for support from his neighbors would be greeted positively. With the exception of Iran, which like Iraq is ruled by Shiites, and Syria, where the Shiite-linked Alawite sect holds sway, al-Maliki’s neighbors are ruled by Sunni monarchies, and they’ve bitterly opposed his leadership. Even Baghdadi’s Ramadan message, in which he singled out Sham — an Arabic geographic term that would include Lebanon and Jordan — and Egypt from the Arabian Peninsula as regimes that oppress Muslims, was unlikely to rally those countries to al-Maliki’s side.

AFP Photo/Ali al-Saadi

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Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki Faults U.S. In Crisis

Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki Faults U.S. In Crisis

By Shashank Bengali, Los Angeles Times

BAGHDAD — Iraq’s parliament will meet next week to begin the process of forming a new government, officials said Thursday, as Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki blamed the United States for his army’s inability to stop Sunni Muslim insurgents who are threatening his grip on the country.

In an interview with the BBC’s Arabic-language service, al-Maliki said the Iraqi army would have been able to block the insurgents’ advance into northern and western Iraq if the United States had moved more quickly to deliver fighter planes that Baghdad had purchased.
Apparently referring to F-16 jets that U.S. officials have said would arrive no earlier than September, al-Maliki said Iraqi officials had bought 36 of the planes and thought they would have received them by now.

“I’ll be frank and say that we were deluded when we signed the contract,” al-Maliki told the British broadcaster in his first interview with an international news organization since the insurgents seized Mosul, Iraq’s second-largest city, earlier this month.

“We should have sought to buy other jet fighters like British, French, and Russian, to secure the air cover for our forces,” he said. “If we had air cover, we would have averted what had happened.”

Iraq’s military, trained by the United States, suffers from an almost total lack of air power. It has two Caravan combat turboprop aircraft that are equipped to launch Hellfire missiles, but briefly ran out of the projectiles at the height of the crisis.

Separately, Iraq’s vice president, Khader Khuzai, issued a decree saying that the parliament would convene on Tuesday.

The announcement came amid growing pressure on Maliki, a Shiite, to share more political power with minority groups, including Sunnis and ethnic Kurds.

Al-Maliki, whom critics accuse of running a Shiite-dominated dictatorship, has said he is open to forming a coalition government including all religious and ethnic groups. But he has not signaled he would be willing to forgo a third term as prime minister.

Al-Maliki’s State of Law coalition won a plurality of seats in the April parliamentary elections. But many Sunni and Kurdish lawmakers say he must step aside, blaming his leadership for fueling the insurgency.

Iraqi forces and insurgents — led by an al-Qaida offshoot known as the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria — continued to battle Thursday on multiple fronts.

Private Iraqi media reported that the country’s forces airlifted commandos to a university in Tikrit, hometown of the late dictator Saddam Hussein, and the helicopters came under heavy fire from insurgents. The city about 100 miles north of the capital, Baghdad, was seized by insurgents two weeks ago in a dramatic offensive that has seen most Sunni-majority areas of northern and western Iraq fall out of government hands.

AFP Photo / Brendan Smialowski

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Al-Maliki Seeks State Of Emergency After ISIS Seizes Second Largest Iraqi City

Al-Maliki Seeks State Of Emergency After ISIS Seizes Second Largest Iraqi City

By Mitchell Prothero and Hannah Allam, McClatchy Foreign Staff

ISTANBUL — Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki urged his parliament Tuesday to declare a nationwide state of emergency after militants from an al-Qaida offshoot seized control of a large swath of Mosul, Iraq’s second-largest city, in a humiliating sequence of events that saw Iraq’s U.S.-trained security forces abandon their posts and weapons and flee.

Witnesses’ accounts from Iraq said insurgents belonging to the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria had taken control of military bases, government offices and television stations and had released thousands of prisoners from local jails. There were reports that the group also had captured Iraqi assault helicopters, though that wasn’t immediately confirmed.

Mosul’s fall into chaos marked the most significant military victory yet for ISIS, which has been pushing for more than a year to establish an Islamic state in western Iraq and eastern Syria. If the capture of Mosul — a city of 2 million people — stands, ISIS would become unquestionably the most significant jihadist organization in the world, eclipsing core al Qaida, to which ISIS once pledged allegiance but that in recent months has become its bitter rival.

“Where has any other jihadi group achieved this level of success in terms of territorial control and the workings of an actual state?” asked Aymenn al-Tamimi, an analyst of Syrian and Iraqi extremist groups for the Philadelphia-based Middle East Forum.

Al-Tamimi said it was now clear that ISIS no longer could be considered merely an insurgent group, but a state of its own, with police forces, Islamic court systems and the ability to provide services such as electricity and trash pickup. Its alliances with conservative tribes in Iraq’s Nineveh and Anbar provinces and Syria’s Raqqa province are evidence that it’s gone far beyond al-Qaida’s power and influence.

“There’s never been anything like it,” al-Tamimi said.

ISIS’s sudden prominence presents a conundrum for U.S. policymakers, not just in Iraq — where the group quickly routed American-trained forces and now challenges the hold of an Iraqi government the United States helped install — but also in Syria, where the U.S. has been encouraging so-called moderate rebel groups to contest ISIS’s growing presence.

Al-Tamimi predicted that the victory in Iraq would discourage those moderate forces in Syria who’ve been battling ISIS since January and would allow ISIS to consolidate control in Syria’s Deir el Zour province.

State Department spokeswoman Jen Psaki called events in Mosul “extremely serious” and said the U.S. would provide “all appropriate assistance” to the Iraqi government, but she didn’t specify what such emergency aid would entail. The United States has declared ISIS an international terrorist organization.

The group’s surge is also likely to prove troubling to the autonomous Kurdistan Regional Government in Iraq, as well as to Turkey, which has recently come to the realization that the civil war to topple Syrian President Bashar Assad has allowed radical Islamists to thrive along the Turkish-Syrian border.

The speed with which ISIS took control of Mosul was breathtaking. It began with what the Iraqi government initially dismissed as a hit-and-run operation, then turned into a frontal assault on key military bases and government centers by hundreds of fighters backed by heavy weapons.

After overrunning the government’s key symbols of authority late Monday night, the militants quickly moved to consolidate control over military bases filled with advanced American weaponry, including dozens of armored vehicles, artillery and, reportedly, attack helicopters.

Iraqi television showed footage of Iraqi military uniforms abandoned by the side of the road as well as huge traffic jams of residents attempting to flee the fighting — and apparent jihadist occupation — into nearby Kurdish-controlled areas thought to be safe for now.

Kurdish officials in nearby Irbil said hundreds of thousands of people were expected to flee into that area and that the Kurdistan Regional Government, a semiautonomous body that administers the ethnic Kurd enclave, had mobilized its security forces to prepare for fighting with militants along Iraq’s major highway linking Mosul to the south.

Sabaa al-Barzani, a security official from Irbil, said Kurdish units of the Iraqi army were being moved to the confront the militants and that the Kurds’ famed peshmerga militia had already been deployed.

“We have at least 200,000 people fleeing the terrorists from Mosul and the roads are full,” he said by telephone. “We’re pushing the peshmerga into position to confront any advance and reinforcing the Kurdish neighborhoods in (eastern) Mosul. It’s a disaster. We’re going to have to fight alone because the Arab army and police units have fled.”

Atheel al-Nujafi, the governor of Nineveh province, of which Mosul is the capital, initially called on Mosul residents to form committees to defend the city, but he was forced to flee after hundreds of militants assaulted his office complex late Monday night.

Southern, central and western Mosul appeared to be entirely in the hands of ISIS by Tuesday’s end. The Reuters news agency quoted three Iraqi military officers as saying militants had advanced to within two miles of the main military operations center for northern Iraq, at Mosul’s international airport on the outskirts of the city. ISIS claimed that the airport and the military camp had fallen.

The loss of the airport and command post, if confirmed, would greatly complicate the central government’s ability to mount a counterattack. Without an air facility, forces deployed from Baghdad would be forced to drive for hours along highways through areas that are often the scene of ISIS attacks on Iraqi government forces.

Unconfirmed reports from ISIS sources claimed the group also had taken control of the main highway linking Mosul with Kirkuk, the next closest city held by the central government, where reports were circulating that ISIS fighters were besieging another government military facility Tuesday night.

Twitter accounts associated with ISIS released footage of captured equipment, some of which already had been sent to support its fighters in neighboring Syria. One series of photographs posted online showed a Chechen ISIS commander, Omar Shishani, examining an apparently brand-new armored American Humvee. The date the photo was taken couldn’t be immediately confirmed but was consistent with claims that large amounts of American equipment had been seized.

The events unfolding in northern Iraq came as ISIS appeared to be on the verge of consolidating its positions in Syria’s Raqqa province as well as in Deir el Zour province, where it’s besieging the capital, also called Deir el Zour, and the city of Abu Kamal, which controls large oil fields as well as a border crossing to Iraq’s Anbar province. Those areas currently are controlled by al Qaida’s official franchise in Syria, the Nusra Front, which has been an odds with ISIS over leadership and other issues for the past year.

According to the monitoring group the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, more than 600 fighters on both sides have been killed in recent fighting in Deir el Zour province, along with hundreds of civilians. More than 150,000 people have fled the area because of the sustained fighting.

Al-Tamimi, the Middle East Forum analyst, said ISIS’s victory was likely to persuade tribes in Syria, and perhaps even some Nusra commanders, that an ISIS win was inevitable in Deir el Zour.

The events in Mosul will “ramp up efforts to take Deir el Zour,” he said.

In Iraq, news of the Mosul takeover spread quickly via phone conversations and social media, fueling panic as rumor and fact became indistinguishable in the fast-moving crisis.

Iraqis reached by telephone worried that the militants, who already have custody of a major dam in Fallujah, had seized the Mosul Dam, a development that would effectively give them control of the country’s water supply.

A resident of Tikrit, the central Iraqi city that was Saddam Hussein’s hometown, said government workers at the nearby Bayji refinery, Iraq’s largest, were handing over their official vehicles to administrators for fear they’d be killed for them if militants made it into the area.

In the southern holy city of Najaf, south of Baghdad, locals cringed at planes flying overhead because of worries that militants had seized aircraft and might try to slam them into holy sites such as the Imam Ali shrine.

Zaid Mohammed, 27, a teacher in Mosul who spoke to McClatchy by phone from the besieged city, said clashes that had erupted Thursday night between unknown gunmen and the army and national police units foreshadowed the ISIS push.

“We used to see gunmen attack and then withdraw. This time, they weren’t withdrawing. This time, they were standing their ground,” he said.

After a lull Friday, he said, the situation had “exploded” Saturday and he and other residents watched in astonishment as Iraqi forces swapped their uniforms for tracksuits and abandoned their posts, “neighborhood by neighborhood.”

“I asked one soldier I know why he was leaving,” Mohammed said. “He told me, ‘We came here for salaries, not to die.’ “

Mohammed said he’d ventured outside Tuesday and seen militants — wearing ordinary street clothes and not brandishing black jihadist flags — patrolling the streets in apparently captured Humvees, police vehicles and SWAT cars.

Speaking in what Mohammed called “Mosul village” accents, the militants used loudspeakers to tell soldiers that they’d be safe if they laid down their weapons and deserted. He said he couldn’t ascertain the ideology of the fighters; there are reports that former followers of Saddam, tribesmen and other armed groups had joined in the fight because of long-standing grievances with the Maliki administration’s marginalization of Sunni Muslims.

“Whoever this is doing the fighting is different from those we saw in 2005, 2006 and 2007,” Mohammed said. “Back then, they would kill soldiers whether they surrendered or not.”

He said the militants also appeared to be taking pains to portray themselves to locals as their protectors, by opening roads to allow families to flee to the north and by assigning guards to banks, clinics and other public facilities in order to prevent the looting that’s occurred in previous crises.

“They opened the roads, removed checkpoints and moved concrete slabs, and now the roads are open. Mosul is now like 2003; no more roadblocks,” Mohammed said. “They lifted the curfew, and after that so many families started to leave toward Kurdistan. People are leaving; they’re afraid of the army randomly shelling Mosul like they do in Fallujah.”

AFP Photo