Iraq: As Many as 90 Killed
Badr Demands Khalilzad's Expulsion
By Juan Cole
03/28/06 "ICH" -- -- A suicide bomber struck an army recruiting
station near Tal Afar in northern Iraq, killing 40 and wounding
20. President Bush recently lauded the situation in Tal Afar and
environs as a US success story.
About 29 corpses corpses showed up in the streets of Baghdad,
most of them strangled and tortured.
A rocket attack on a building resulted in several casualties.
The building housed political offices for the Fadhila (Virtue)
and Dawa Parties. Both are Shiite religious parties.
A young physician in Kirkuk confessed on Kurdistan television
Monday to having been an serial killer on behalf of the
guerrillas, giving lethal injections to more than 40 Iraqi
soldiers and police or denying them oxygen. At the same time, he
was secretly treating wounded members of the guerrilla movement.
Guerrillas abducted 16 employees of an Iraqi trading company on
Monday, according to the Iraqi Interior Ministry.
The governor of Baghdad province, Hussein al-Tahan, announced
Monday “Today we decided to stop all political and service
cooperation with the US forces until a legal committee is formed
to investigate this incident.” [i.e. the US/Iraqi attack on the
Mustafa Husayniyah in the Ur district on Sunday, which left some
20 persons dead).
Officials of the United Iraqi Alliance of Shiite
fundamentalists, the largest single bloc in parliament, demanded
Monday that security matters be turned over to Iraqis and taken
out of US hands. Reuters says, ' “The Alliance calls for a rapid
restoration of (control of) security matters to the Iraqi
government,” Jawad Al Maliki, a senior Alliance spokesman and
ally of Prime Minister Ibrahim Al Jaafari, told a news
conference. '
I have to say that if the US military doesn't even know, as its
spokesmen admitted, to which branch of Islam the persons its
joint operation killed on Sunday belonged, it really is acting
as a bull in a china shop.
The Intrepid Ann Garrels and Joost Hilterman report that some
Shiites are speaking now of a second great betrayal by the
Americans of the Shiites, as they fear that the US it tilting
now toward the Sunni Arabs. In spring of 1991, the US stood by
while Saddam's forces massacred rebelling Shiites after the Gulf
War.
Some Shiites, according to al-Hayat, are saying that the US
is deliberately attempting to provoke a civil war in Iraq. Among
their concerns was the US military's announcement that the
attack on the Mustafa Husayniyah in Ur was the work of an Iraqi
military unit. Which unit? Where? To whom does it report? Is it
little more than a death squad? Is it commanded by the
Americans? Why didn't the Prime Minister know about this attack,
which spilled over on Dawa Party offices? PM Jaafari is a member
of the Dawa Party.
The Badr Organization, a political party that represents the
paramilitary Badr Corps, the Shiite militia of the Supreme
Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq, demanded Monday that
Zalmay Khalilzad, the US ambassador to Iraq, be expelled from
that country.
This moment is therefore a particularly inauspicious one for
Khalilzad to press for the sidelining of Ibrahim Jaafari as
candidate for prime minister of the United Iraqi Alliance.
Jaafari narrowly won an internal party vote, but was backed by
Muqtada al-Sadr and opposes loose federalism and unrestrained
capitalism. For all these reasons he is unacceptable to the
Kurds and to the US.
Izzat Ibrahim Duri, one of Saddam's key officials, is said
to have issued a tape on Monday. It was played on Aljazeera but
has not been authenticated. The tape calls on the Arab League to
recognize the Iraqi insurgency as the true government of Iraq,
and condemns the blowing up of the Askariyah shrine in Samarra,
an anti-Shiite strike. Al-Duri led the charge to repress and
massacre the Shiites in sping of 1991 when they rose against
Saddam, so he is unlikely to get any points for his defense of
the Askariyah.
Iraqi officials are concerned about a big spike in drug
smuggling and use in Iraq.
Juan Cole is Professor of History at the University of
Michigan
