Sectarian Bloodshed Reveals Strength of Iraq Militias By EDWARD WONG and SABRINA TAVERNISE BAGHDAD, Iraq, Feb. 24 — The sectarian violence that has shaken Iraq this week has demonstrated the power that the many militias here have to draw the country into a full-scale civil war, and how difficult it would be for the state to stop it, Iraqi and American officials say.
The militias pose a double threat to the future of Iraq: they exist both as marauding gangs, as the violence on Wednesday showed, and as sanctioned members of the Iraqi Army and the police.
The insurgent bombing of a major Shiite shrine on Wednesday, followed by the wave of killings of Sunni Arabs, has left political parties on all sides clinging to their private armies harder than ever, complicating American efforts to persuade Iraqis to disband them.
The attacks, mostly by Shiite militiamen, were troubling not only because they resulted in at least 170 deaths across Iraq, but also because they showed how deeply the militias have spread inside government forces. The Iraqi police, commanded by a Shiite political party, stood by as the rampage spread.
Now, after watching helplessly as their mosques and homes burned, many Sunni Arabs say they should have the right to form their own militias.
For their part, Shiite political leaders and clerics say they are justified in keeping — and even strengthening — their armies, including those units in the government security forces, to prevent insurgent attacks like the one that destroyed the golden dome of the Askariya Shrine in Samarra on Wednesday.
That stance threatens to derail recent American efforts, especially those of Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad, to persuade Shiite leaders to dissolve their militias and weed out police officers and soldiers whose allegiances lie with their own sect and not with the state. That is essential for the process of forming a government that would be credible to all of Iraq's religious and ethnic groups.
Shiite leaders' denunciations of Mr. Khalilzad, who hinted Monday that Americans might not pay for security forces run by sectarian interests, made it clear that positions had hardened. "We have decided to incorporate militias into the Iraqi security forces, and we are serious about this decision," Hadi al-Amari, the head of the Badr Organization, a thousands-strong Shiite militia, said in a telephone interview. Since the Shiites took control of the Interior Ministry last spring, Badr members have swelled the ranks of the police.
Mr. Khalilzad was trying "to prevent the Shiites from getting the security portfolio," he added. "The security portfolio is a red line, and we will never relinquish it."
Since the toppling of Saddam Hussein, American officials tried unsuccessfully to disband Iraq's myriad private armies, from Kurdish pesh merga in the mountainous north to the black-clad Mahdi Army patrolling poor Shiite enclaves in Baghdad and Basra. The Coalition Provisional Authority had plans to force Iraqi leaders to dissolve their militias, but never followed through. Nor did the Americans press the case even after putting down two uprisings by the Mahdi Army in 2004.
The persistence of the Mahdi Army, the militia of Moktada al-Sadr, the firebrand Shiite cleric, illustrates the challenge facing the Americans in Iraq. A grass-roots organization, it operates both openly in the streets, as it did this week, when young men with Kalashnikov rifles attacked Sunni mosques, and inside the system, where members serve as police officers wearing uniforms and cruising around in patrol cars.
Though many Shiite leaders denounced the anti-Sunni reprisals this week, none of them chastised the Mahdi Army or called for disbanding it. That itself was a clear indication of how the politicians were looking to the militia as a protector of Shiite interests in the wake of the shrine attack.
Those political leaders who have no militias, particularly Sunni Arabs, say they feel more helpless than ever in this shifting landscape of private armies.
"Anybody who has a militia now has power," said Adnan Pachachi, a former foreign minister and member of the newly elected Parliament. "The Mahdi Army, Badr, the insurgents, these are the ones who wield power. They have weapons, they can move around and they are determined. It's not a question of political personalities, but of arms and weapons."
Mahmoud al-Mashhadany, a senior official in the main Sunni political bloc, said the rampaging Shiite militiamen this week, and the passivity of the police, showed that "we have been left alone in the field." He added: "The Kurds have their militia, and they're part of the army. The Shiites run the government. We've been left alone with our mosques in the field."
Even before the eruption of violence, Sunni neighborhoods in Baghdad were holding discussions about organizing their own neighborhood protection forces. In Sunni-dominated Anbar Province, the western stronghold of the insurgency, reports have emerged of people forming a private army called the Anbar Revolutionaries.
Mr. Khalilzad has been trying to assuage Sunni fears by pressing for conservative Shiites to give up control of the Interior Ministry, which oversees the 120,000-member police and commando forces. They are being trained by American military advisers who monitor them but do not directly control them.
The shrine attack has left the ambassador with considerably less leverage, because the Shiites now say their welfare depends on their command of the security forces. On Friday, Mr. Khalilzad, speaking to reporters, did not lay out any American plan to deal with the militias, and simply said the problem would have to be solved by the four-year Iraqi government, which has yet to be formed.
"The militias are an issue that the next government will have to deal with," he said. "Iraq needs a strong national army, a strong national police. It needs weapons in the hands of those who are authorized to have them."
On Friday, the Pentagon released a quarterly assessment report required by Congress that included a warning about the continued sectarian nature of the police forces. "Insurgent infiltration and militia influence remain a concern for the Ministry of the Interior," the report said. "Many serving police officers, particularly in the south, have ties to Shia militias."
The ascent of the militias inside the security forces was quick and quiet. Soon after the Shiite-led government swept into power last spring and Bayan Jabr, a senior Shiite politician, become interior minister, a housecleaning began, in which about 140 high-ranking officials were dismissed and political allies of the Shiites were put in their place, according to several former ministry officials who feared reprisals if they gave their names. In addition, recruitment drives brought hundreds of ordinary Shiites into the security forces, many of whom identified more strongly with their political parties than with the Iraqi state.
By summer, an American government adviser to the ministry, Mathew Sherman, recalled writing in his notes that "the ministry is quickly being infiltrated by militia and by Badr people."
When Mr. Sherman brought up his concerns, Mr. Jabr, a bookish, fluent English speaker, pledged to address them. Mr. Jabr has acknowledged that 2,500 members of the Badr Organization have been added to the payroll, but American and Iraqi officials say the number is far higher.
"There was a lot happening behind the scenes," said Mr. Sherman, who left his job in December. "By the time we put all the pieces together, everything was falling apart."
Even if it wants to do so, the new government will face a serious challenge in extricating the militias from the security forces. In the last two months, a new round of purges has taken place in the ministry, according to Mr. Sherman and three Iraqi officials who still work in the ministry. About 20 senior officials, mostly Sunni Arabs, have lost their jobs, including the Baghdad police chief, who was widely respected among Iraqis and American military officials. The move, the former officials said, was an attempt by Shiite parties to strengthen their grip on the ministry before the new government is assembled.
The militias use their police positions to further the ambitions of their political parties. Mahdi Army fighters — most often found in Baghdad among the city police and a paramilitary force called the Public Order Brigade, as well as in police units in the south — were discovered last fall using police patrol cars to enforce the rulings of so-called Islamist "punishment committees," according to a senior American military official whose forces discovered the practice but was not authorized to speak publicly about the issue.
In addition, the official said, the transportation minister, a Sadr aide, tried to consolidate control over Baghdad International Airport by recruiting Mahdi members into security forces protecting it.
Beyond the now-familiar reports of death squads and torture chambers operated under government cover, there have also been instances of men dressed in police uniforms committing ordinary crimes, further undermining public confidence in an already weak institution.
Fatin Sattar, a homemaker in southeast Baghdad, said her husband was shot and killed last year by several men dressed as Iraqi policemen who were carrying out a robbery at a neighbor's home. Assuming they had come as police officers, the husband, himself an official in the Interior Ministry, had approached the men in a friendly manner.
Behind the scenes, the American military has been making efforts to rein in the police units heaviest with militiamen. American officials say they are considering a plan that would place more American advisers with the Iraqi police and commando units. Last fall, American officials even proposed transferring oversight of the often unruly commando forces from the Interior Ministry to the Defense Ministry, where the American military has direct operational control. Shiite leaders resisted.
Reporting for this article was contributed by Robert F. Worth, Qais Mizher and Abdul Razzaq al-Saiedi from Baghdad, and Thom Shanker from Washington.
Amid all the geopolitcal speculation and maneuveriing we must never lose sight of the fact that the US aggression against Iraq was a monstrous crime of Hitlerian proportions that has inflicted immense suffering and death on a nation of 25 million people.
WASHINGTON - A large majority of the US public believes that President George W Bush, whose carefully cultivated image of no-nonsense cowboy toughness has been a hallmark of his presidency, has become the Rodney Dangerfield of international politics, according to the latest in a series of annual surveys by the Gallup polling firm.
Dangerfield, a much-loved comedian who died last October, was best known for his one-line complaint, "I don't get no respect" - the theme on which he based most of his material beginning in the early 1970s.
Now, according to the Gallup's latest World Affairs survey released late last week, only a third of the US public believe that world leaders "respect" Bush, while nearly two-thirds, or 63%, think his foreign counterparts "don't respect him much".
It was his worst showing since he became president five years ago, and marked a dramatic decline from his best performance on this question shortly after the US-orchestrated ouster of the Taliban in Afghanistan in February 2002, when three out of four respondents said Bush was well respected abroad.
The survey conducted between February 6 and 9, based on telephone interviews with a random sample of 1,002 adults, also found that only 43% of the US public is satisfied with Washington's image in the world today, down from a high under Bush of 71% after the Taliban's ouster and another high of 69% during the invasion of Iraq in April 2003.
And, in a sign of possible things to come, the new survey found that for the first time since Bush became president, Iran is the country considered by a plurality of the public - nearly one-third - as Washington's greatest foreign enemy, significantly ahead of Iraq (22%), North Korea (15%), and China (10%).
When asked to name Washington's greatest foe in two previous World Affairs polls in 2001 and 2005, respondents placed Iran third behind either Iraq and China or Iraq and North Korea.
The Iran findings, which come amid a sharp rise in tensions between Tehran and Washington over Iran's nuclear program and controversial statements by President Mahmud Ahmedinejad over the past six months, echo those of a similar survey released by the Pew Research Center for People and the Press.
The survey, combined with another two polls conducted by Gallup (on behalf of CNN and USA Today) and CBS, offers new evidence that the public is increasingly disillusioned with Bush's management of foreign policy. In the CBS poll, Bush's overall job rating has fallen to 34%, down from 42% in January. Fifty-nine percent disapprove of the job the president is doing. For the first time in this poll, most Americans say the president does not care much about people like themselves. Fifty-one percent now think he doesn't care, compared with 47% last autumn. Just 30% approve of how Bush is handling the Iraq war, another all-time low.
In the former survey, conducted between February 9 and 12, Gallup's pollsters found that 55% of the US public now believe Washington made a mistake in sending troops to Iraq - the highest percentage recorded since the invasion except for a brief period after Hurricane Katrina last September, when 59% of respondents said it was a mistake.
Gallup analyst Jeffrey Jones noted in an article accompanying the poll results that of the six major conflicts in which the US was engaged after World War II, only the Vietnam War provoked greater public opposition while the conflict was still taking place.
In two Vietnam-era surveys - in 1971, when the administration of Richard Nixon was already embarked on a major withdrawal of US troops; and in 1973, on the eve of the signing of Paris Peace Accords - some 60% of the public said the war was a "mistake".
The more recent survey also found the public to be more pessimistic about progress in the Iraq war than ever before, with only 31% saying the US and its allies are winning.
That finding could bode particularly ill for the administration's hopes of resisting growing demands that Washington withdraw its troops earlier rather than later, particularly in the wake of last week's bombing of the Golden Mosque in Samarra and the sectarian violence that followed it. Most analysts here believe that pressure on the administration to withdraw US troops will grow sharply if Iraq tips into civil war.
The latest poll results come amid growing political troubles for Bush, who is having an increasingly difficult time keeping even Republican lawmakers in line on a number of national-security issues.
The current flap over the administration's decision to approve, without a major national-security review, the lease of some 20 terminals in six major east coast ports to a Dubai company provoked an unprecedented revolt by the Republican congressional leadership over an issue that has heretofore been considered Bush's strong point: national security.
"The revolt showed that Bush's strength in Congress has significantly eroded as he begins his sixth year as president," noted Fred Barnes, the executive editor of the neo-conservative Weekly Standard and a staunch White House loyalist. "In effect, his Republican base is no longer secure."
Bush is also facing questions from both Democrats and Republicans about a proposed nuclear-power deal with India that he hopes to nail down in a much-ballyhooed trip to New Delhi and Islamabad this week. The White House had hoped that the tour - especially to India, which is seen increasingly as a strategic ally - would help restore his image as a decisive and visionary leader rallying the world behind him.
But that image appears increasingly hollow, according to the World Affairs survey, which suggests that most of his own compatriots have come to believe he has lost the respect of his foreign counterparts.
The poll noted that the US public was fairly skeptical of Bush as a respected world leader until the attacks on New York and the Pentagon on September 11, 2001, with an average of only 45% saying he was respected during his first six months in office, about the same as his predecessor, Bill Clinton. After September 11 and the ouster of the Taliban, however, public opinion rallied to his side.
From early February 2002, however, it has been downhill. Indeed, since February 2003 - one month before the Iraq invasion - pluralities said they believed Bush didn't have much respect from the leaders of other countries, and, as of February 2004, those pluralities became majorities.
But the latest poll showed further significant erosion, with only one-third of respondents insisting that he retains respect overseas, compared with nearly 40% one year ago.
In addition, for the second year in a row, more US citizens believe that the overall perception of the US in the rest of the world is unfavorable than those who believe it is favorable.
This belief is certainly borne out by recent polls. One conducted between October and January of citizens of 33 nations for the BBC World Service found that positive ratings of the US had dropped 5 points overall since 2004, and had significantly declined in 10 countries, including European allies such as Britain and Italy.
And a Pew poll last June found that in 13 of the 14 countries in Europe, Asia and the Middle East surveyed - the exception being Poland - pluralities or majorities said Bush's re-election made them feel worse about the United States.
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