[casi] News, 09-16/04/03 (4)

[Peter Brooke <pbrooke@DELETETHISukonline.co.uk>]

News, 09-16/04/03 (4)

MR HOON'S 'GOOD PRATICE'

*  Carry on looting, Hoon tells civilians in Basra
*  "USA encouraged ransacking"
*  Who is to blame for the collapse in morality that followed the
'liberation'?
*  Pillagers Strip Iraqi Museum of Its Treasure
*  Help End Looting Anarchy, Troops Urge Iraqi Police

FALL OF BASRA

*  Basra residents call for more food
*  Inside Basr
*  Three weeks on, and still no water. Now doctors fear an epidemic  Lack of
security holds up agencies
*  Basra contests official view of siege


MR HOON'S 'GOOD PRATICE'

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=%2Fnews%2F2003%2F04%2F08%2Fnh
oon08.xml

*  CARRY ON LOOTING, HOON TELLS CIVILIANS IN BASRA
by George Jones, Political Editor
Daily Telegraph, 12th April

Iraqi civilians were given the go-ahead by Geoff Hoon, the Defence
Secretary, to help themselves to furniture and other items from headquarters
and palaces of Saddam Hussein's regime.

He told the Commons yesterday that most looting was so far confined to Iraqi
citizens "liberating" items from facilities of the regime - "redistributing
that wealth among the Iraqi people".

To laughter, he said: "I regard such behaviour perhaps as good practice, but
that is not to say we should not guard against more widespread civil
disturbances."

Bernard Jenkin, Tory defence spokesman, had asked about reports of
"increasing chaos and looting on the streets" of Basra.

He said the Armed Forces' efforts to distribute food and water were severely
limited because they did not have the manpower.

Mr Hoon said non-governmental organisations were beginning to enter the
south of Iraq with humanitarian assistance.

He assured MPs that Saddam's weapons of mass destruction would be found,
even though allied troops have so far failed to produce convincing proof of
the existence of chemical and biological weapons.

He said before the war, the Iraqi regime had removed many of the more
obvious elements of its weapons of mass destruction and sought to hide them
in the more remote parts of the country as well as keep them mobile.

Once the allied troops had gained control of Iraq, they would be able to
search for the weapons and would expect co-operation from people in the
country in finding the hiding places.

Some "interesting finds" of chemical agents were already being investigated.

Boris Johnson, Conservative MP for Henley, asked Mr Hoon whether the
conflict would be deemed illegal if the weapons of mass destruction were not
discovered. Mr Hoon replied: "We will find them."

Allied forces now had access to all parts of Basra and UK troops had been
"warmly received by crowds of local people, demonstrating that the coalition
is winning the confidence and support of the Iraqi population", he added.

Earlier, at a briefing for journalists, Mr Hoon said that the British troops
established in Basra would not be leaving. "They are now in Basra to stay,"
he said.

He said that coalition forces would still have a job to flush out
"irregulars, thugs and fanatics" who had attached themselves to the regime.

Mr Hoon said the allies were "still not sure of the location of Saddam
Hussein or his sons", though reports were beginning to come in of their
whereabouts.


http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article2842.ht

*  "USA ENCOURAGED RANSACKING"
by Ole Rothenborg
Dagens Nyheter (Sweden), 11th April

This is a translation of an article from April 11 from Dagens Nyheter,
Sweden's largest newspaper, based in Stockholm. The article was written by
Ole Rothenborg and translated by Joe Valasek. Khaled Bayomi, has taught and
researched on Middle Eastern conflicts for ten years at the University of
Lund where he is also working on his doctorate.

Khaled Bayomi looks surprised when the American officer on TV complains that
they don't have the resources to stop the plundering in Baghdad. "I happened
to be right there just as the American troops encouraged people to begin the
plundering."

Khaled Bayomi traveled from Europe to Baghdad to be a human shield and
arrived on the same day that the war began. About this he can tell many
stories but the most interesting is certainly his eyewitness account of the
wave of plundering.

"I had gone to see some friends who live near a dilapidated area just past
Haifa Avenue on the west bank of the Tigris. It was the 8th of April and the
fighting was so intense that I was unable to return to the other side of the
river. In the afternoon it became perfectly quiet and four American tanks
took places on the edge of the slum area. The soldiers shot two Sudanese
guards who stood at their posts outside a local administration building on
the other side of Haifa Avenue. Then they blasted apart the doors to the
building and from the tanks came eager calls in Arabic encouraging people to
come close to them. "

"The entire morning, everyone who had tried to cross the road had been shot.
But in the strange silence after all the shooting, people gradually became
curious. After 45 minutes, the first Baghdad citizens dared to come out.
Arab interpreters in the tanks told the people to go and take what they
wanted in the building."

"The word spread quickly and the building was ransacked. I was standing only
300 yards from there when the guards were murdered. Afterwards the tank
crushed the entrance to the Justice Department, which was in a neighboring
building, and the plundering continued there".

"I stood in a large crowd and watched this together with them. They did not
partake in the plundering but dared not to interfere. Many had tears of
shame in their eyes. The next morning the plundering spread to the Modern
Museum, which lies a quarter mile farther north. There were also two crowds
there, one that plundered and one with watched with disgust."

"Are you saying that it was US troops who initiated the plundering?"

"Absolutely. The lack of jubilant scenes meant that the American troops
needed pictures of Iraqis who in different ways demonstrated hatred for
Saddam's regime."

"The people pulled down a large statue of Saddam?"

"Did they? It was an American tank that did that, right beside the hotel
where all the journalists stay. Until lunchtime on April 9, I did not see
one destroyed Saddam portrait. If people had wanted to pull down statues
they could have taken down some of the small ones without any help from
American tanks. If it had been a political upheaval, the people would have
pulled down statues first and then plundered."

"Isn't it good that Saddam is gone?"

"He's not gone. He has broken his army down into very small groups. That's
why there hasn't been a large battle. About the official state, you could
say that Saddam dissolved that already in 1992 and he's built a parallel
tribal structure that is totally decisive in Iraq. When the US began the
war, Saddam abandoned the state completely and now depends on the tribal
structure. That was why he abandoned the large cities without a fight."

"Now the US is compelled to do everything themselves because there's no
political body within the country which will challenge the existing
structure. The two who came in from outside the country were annihilated at
once. (The reference here is to General Nazar al- Khazraji, who returned
from Denmark and the Shiite Muslim leader, Abdul Majid al-Khoei.) They were
cut to pieces with swords and knives by a furious crowd in Najaf because
they were thought to be American puppets. According to the Danish newspaper
BT, al-Khazraji was brought from Denmark to Iraq by the CIA."

"Now we have an occupying power in place in Iraq that has not said how long
it intends to remain, has not given any plan for civilian rule and no date
for general elections. Enormous chaos is now to be expected."


http://argument.independent.co.uk/commentators/story.jsp?story=396346

*  WHO IS TO BLAME FOR THE COLLAPSE IN MORALITY THAT FOLLOWED THE
'LIBERATION'?
by Robert Fisk
The Independent, 12th April

Let's talk war crimes. Yes, I know about the war crimes of Saddam. He
slaughtered the innocent, gassed the Kurds, tortured his people and - though
it is true we remained good friends with this butcher for more than half of
his horrible career - could be held responsible for killing up to a million
people, the death toll of the 1980-88 Iran-Iraq war. But while we are
congratulating ourselves on the "liberation" of Baghdad, an event that is
fast turning into a nightmare for many of its residents, it is as good a
time as any to recall how we've been conducting this ideological war.

So let's start with the end - with the Gone With The Wind epic of looting
and anarchy with which the Iraqi population have chosen to celebrate our
gift to them of "liberation" and "democracy". It started in Basra, of
course, with our own shameful British response to the orgy of theft that
took hold of the city. Our defence minister, Geoff Hoon, made some
especially childish remarks about this disgraceful state of affairs,
suggesting in the House of Commons that the people of Basra were merely
"liberating" - that word again - their property from the Baath party. And
the British Army enthusiastically endorsed this nonsense.

Even as tape of the pillage in Basra was being beamed around the world,
there was Lieutenant Colonel Hugh Blackman of the Royal Scots Dragoon Guards
cheerfully telling the BBC that "it' s absolutely not my business to get in
the way." But of course it is Colonel Blackman's business to "get in the
way". Pillage merits a specific prevention clause in the Geneva Conventions,
just as it did in the 1907 Hague Convention upon which the Geneva delegates
based their "rules of war". "Pillage is prohibited," the 1949 Geneva
Conventions say, and Colonel Blackman and Mr Hoon should glance at Crimes of
War, published in conjunction with the City University Journalism Department
- page 276 is the most dramatic - to understand what this means.

When an occupying power takes over another country' s territory, it
automatically becomes responsible for the protection of its civilians, their
property and institutions. Thus the American troops in Nasiriyah became
automatically responsible for the driver who was murdered for his car in the
first day of that city's "liberation". The Americans in Baghdad were
responsible for the German and Slovak embassies that were looted by hundreds
of Iraqis on Thursday, and for the French Cultural Centre, which was
attacked, and for the Central Bank of Iraq, which was torched yesterday
afternoon.

But the British and Americans have simply discarded this notion, based
though it is upon conventions and international law. And we journalists have
allowed them to do so. We clapped our hands like children when the Americans
"assisted" the Iraqis in bringing down the statue of Saddam Hussein in front
of the television cameras this week, and yet we went on talking about the
"liberation" of Baghdad as if the majority of civilians there were
garlanding the soldiers with flowers instead of queuing with anxiety at
checkpoints and watching the looting of their capital.

We journalists have been co-operating, too, with a further collapse of
morality in this war. Take, for example, the ruthless bombing of the
residential Mansur area of Baghdad last week. The Anglo-American armies - or
the "coalition", as the BBC still stubbornly and mendaciously calls the
invaders - claimed they believed that Saddam and his two evil sons Qusay and
Uday were present there. So they bombed the civilians of Mansur and killed
at least 14 decent, innocent people, almost all of them - and this would
obviously be of interest to the religious feelings of Messrs Bush and Blair
- Christians.

Now one might have expected the BBC World Service Radio next morning to
question whether the bombing of civilians did not constitute a bit of an
immoral act, a war crime perhaps, however much we wanted to kill Saddam.
Forget it. The presenter in London described the slaughter of these innocent
civilians as "a new twist" in the war to target Saddam - as if it was quite
in order to kill civilians, knowingly and in cold blood, in order to murder
our most hated tyrant. The BBC's correspondent in Qatar - where the Centcom
boys pompously boasted that they had "real-time" intelligence (subsequently
proved to be untrue) that Saddam was present - used all the usual military
jargon to justify the unjustifiable. The "coalition", he announced, knew it
had "time-sensitive material" - ie that they wouldn't have time to know
whether they were killing innocent human beings in the furtherance of their
cause or not - and that this "actionable material" (again I quote this
revolting BBC dispatch) was not "risk-free".

And then he went on to describe, without a moment of reflection, on the
moral issues involved, how the Americans had used four 2,000lb
"bunker-buster bombs to level the civilian homes". These are, of course, the
very same pieces of ordnance that the same US air force used in their vain
effort to kill Osama bin Laden in the Tora Bora mountains. So now we use
them, knowingly, on the flimsy homes of civilians of Baghdad - folk who
would otherwise be worthy of the "liberation" we wished to bestow upon them
- in the hope that a gamble, a bit of faulty "intelligence" about Saddam,
will pay off.

The Geneva Conventions have a lot to say about all this. They specifically
refer to civilians as protected persons, as persons who must have the
protection of a warring power even if they find themselves in the presence
of armed antagonists. The same protection was demanded for southern Lebanese
civilians when Israel launched its brutal "Grapes of Wrath" operation in
1996. When an Israeli pilot, for example, fired a US-made Hellfire missile
into an ambulance, killing three children and two women, the Israelis
claimed that a Hezbollah fighter had been in the same vehicle. The statement
proved to be totally untrue. But Israel was rightly condemned for killing
civilians in the hope of killing an enemy combatant. Now we are doing
exactly the same. And Ariel Sharon must be pleased. No more namby-pamby
western criticism of Israel after the bunker-busters have been dropped on
Mansur.

More and more, we are committing these crimes. The mass slaughter of more
than 400 civilians in the Amariyah air raid shelter in Baghdad in the 1991
Gulf War was carried out in the hope that it would kill Saddam. Why? Why
cannot we abide by the rules of war we rightly demand that others should
obey? Why do we journalists - yet again, war after war - connive in this
immorality by turning a ruthless and cruel and illegal act into a "new
twist" or into "time-sensitive material"?

Wars have a habit of turning normally sane people into cheerleaders, of
transforming rational journalists into nasty little puffed-up fantasy
colonels. But surely we should all carry the Geneva Conventions into war
with us, along with that little book from the City University. For the only
people to benefit from our own war crimes will be the next generation of
Saddam Husseins.


http://www.nytimes.com/2003/04/12/international/worldspecial/12CND
BAGH.html?pagewanted=print&position=top

*  PILLAGERS STRIP IRAQI MUSEUM OF ITS TREASURE
by John F. Burns
New York Times, 12th April

BAGHDAD, Iraq, April 12 ‹ The National Museum of Iraq recorded a history of
civilizations that began to flourish in the fertile plains of Mesopotamia
more than 7,000 years ago. But once American troops entered Baghdad in
sufficient force to topple Saddam Hussein's government this week, it took
only 48 hours for the museum to be destroyed, with at least 170,000
artifacts carried away by looters.

The full extent of the disaster that befell the museum only came to light
today, after three days of frenzied looting that swept much of the capital.

As fires in a dozen government ministries and agencies began to burn out,
and as some of the looters tired of pillaging in the 90-degree heat of the
Iraqi spring, museum officials reached the hotels where foreign journalists
were staying along the eastern bank of the Tigris River. They brought word
of what is likely to be reckoned as one of the greatest cultural disasters
in recent Middle Eastern history.

A full accounting of what has been lost may take weeks or months. The museum
had been closed during much of the 1990's, and like many Iraqi institutions,
its operations were cloaked in secrecy under Mr. Hussein.

So what officials told journalists today may have to be adjusted as a fuller
picture comes to light. It remains unclear whether some of the museum's
priceless gold, silver and copper antiquities, some of its ancient stone and
ceramics, and perhaps some of its fabled bronzes and gold-overlaid ivory,
had been locked away for safekeeping elsewhere before the looting, or seized
for private display in one of Mr. Hussein's myriad palaces.

What was beyond contest today was that the 28 galleries of the museum and
vaults with huge steel doors guarding storage chambers that descend floor
after floor into darkness had been completely ransacked.

Officials with crumpled spirits fought back tears and anger at American
troops, as they ran down an inventory of the most storied items that they
said had been carried away by the thousands of looters who poured into the
museum after daybreak on Thursday and remained until dusk on Friday, with
only one intervention by American troops, lasting about half an hour, at
lunchtime on Thursday.

Nothing remained, museum officials said, at least nothing of real value,
from a museum that had been regarded by archaeologists and other specialists
as perhaps the richest of all such institutions in the Middle East.

As examples of what was gone, the officials cited a solid gold harp from the
Sumerian era, which began about 3360 B.C. and started to crumble about 2000
B.C. Another item on their list of looted antiquities was a sculptured head
of a woman from Uruk, one of the great Sumerian cities, from about the same
era, and a collection of gold necklaces, bracelets and earrings, also from
the Sumerian dynasties and also at least 4,000 years old.

But an item-by-item inventory of the most valued pieces carried away by the
looters hardly seemed to capture the magnitude of what had occurred. More
powerful, in its way, was the action of one museum official in hurrying away
through the piles of smashed ceramics and torn books and burned-out torches
of rags soaked in gasoline that littered the museum's corridors to find the
glossy catalog of an exhibition of "Silk Road Civilizations" that was held
in Japan's ancient capital of Nara in 1988.

Turning to 50 pages of items lent by the Iraqi museum for the exhibition, he
said that none of the antiquities pictured remained after the looting. They
included ancient stone carvings of bulls and kings and princesses; copper
shoes and cuneiform tablets; tapestry fragments and ivory figurines of
goddesses and women and Nubian porters; friezes of soldiers and ancient
seals and tablets on geometry; and ceramic jars and urns and bowls, all at
least 2,000 years old, some more than 5,000.

"All gone, all gone," he said. "All gone in two days."

An Iraqi archaeologist who has participated in the excavation of some of the
country's 10,000 sites, Raid Abdul Ridhar Muhammad, said he had gone into
the street in the Karkh district, a short distance from the eastern bank of
the Tigris, about 1 p.m. on Thursday to find American troops to quell the
looting. By that time, he and other museum officials said, the several acres
of museum grounds were overrun by thousands of men, women and children, many
of them armed with rifles, pistols, axes, knives and clubs, as well as
pieces of metal torn from the suspensions of wrecked cars. The crowd was
storming out of the complex carrying antiquities on hand carts, bicycles and
wheelbarrows and in boxes. Looters stuffed their pockets with smaller items.

Mr. Muhammad said he found an American Abrams tank in Museum Square, about
300 yards away, and that five marines had followed him back into the museum
and opened fire above the looters' heads. This drove several thousand of the
marauders out of the museum complex in minutes, he said, but when the tank
crewmen left about 30 minutes later, the looters returned.

"I asked them to bring their tank inside the museum grounds," he said. "But
they refused and left. About half an hour later, the looters were back, and
they threatened to kill me, or to tell the Americans that I am a spy for
Saddam Hussein's intelligence, so that the Americans would kill me. So I was
frightened, and I went home."

Mohsen Hassan, a 56-year-old deputy curator, returned to the museum this
afternoon after visiting military commanders a mile away at the Palestine
Hotel, with a request that American troops be placed in the museum to
protect the building and items left by the looters in the vaults. Mr. Hassan
said the American officers had given him no assurances that they would guard
the museum around the clock, but other American commanders announced later
in the day that joint patrols with unarmed Iraqi police units would begin as
early as Sunday in an attempt to prevent further looting.

Mr. Hassan, who said he had spent 34 years helping to develop the museum's
collection, described watching as men took sledgehammers to locked glass
display cases and in some instances fired rifles and pistols to break the
locks.

He said many of the looters appeared to be from the impoverished districts
of the city where anger at Mr. Hussein ran at its strongest, but that others
were middle-class people who appeared to know exactly what they were looking
for.

"Did some of them know the value of what they took?" he said. "Absolutely,
they did. They knew what the most valued pieces in our collection were."

Mr. Muhammad spoke with deep bitterness toward the Americans, as have many
Iraqis who have watched looting that began with attacks on government
agencies and the palaces and villas of Mr. Hussein, his family and his inner
circle broaden into a tidal wave that targeted just about every government
institution, even ministries dealing with issues like higher education,
trade and agriculture, and hospitals.

American troops have intervened only sporadically, as they did on Friday to
halt a crowd of men and boys who were raiding an armory at the edge of the
Republican Palace presidential compound and taking brand-new Kalashnikov
rifles, rocket-propelled grenades and other weapons.

American commanders have said they lack the troops to curb the looting while
their focus remains on the battles across Baghdad that are necessary to mop
up pockets of resistance from paramilitary troops loyal to Mr. Hussein.

Mr. Muhammad, the archaeologist, directed much of his anger at President
Bush. "A country's identity, its value and civilization resides in its
history," he said. "If a country's civilization is looted, as ours has been
here, its history ends. Please tell this to President Bush. Please remind
him that he promised to liberate the Iraqi people, but that this is not a
liberation, this is a humiliation. If we had stayed under the rule of Saddam
Hussein, it would have been much better."

The looting appeared to have its heaviest impact on a security guard at the
museum, Abdul Rahman, 57, who said he had tried to stop the first band of
looters breaking through to steel gates at the rear of the compound on
Thursday morning. He said he gave up when the looters started firing in the
air with pistols and rifles. "They were shouting, `There's no government,
there's no state, and we will do what we like. We will take anything we
want.' They said `Open up, open up, there's no more Saddam so we can do what
we like.' "

Mr. Rahman said he returned to his room and remained there for two days,
hiding and heartbroken.

Under Mr. Hussein, he said, he had learned to keep his thoughts to himself.
"I've learned how to mind my own business," he said. "I'm a security guard.
I don't bother myself with other people's affairs."


http://news.scotsman.com/latest.cfm?id=5979169

*  HELP END LOOTING ANARCHY, TROOPS URGE IRAQI POLICE
The Scotsman, 12th April

Coalition forces were trying to encourage Iraqi policemen back on to the
streets of Baghdad today to restore order amid widespread scenes of looting
and civil unrest.

The move came as official buildings, shops and even hospitals were ransacked
in the capital and the other captured cities of Mosul and Kirkuk, in the
north.

[.....]

The anarchic scenes of looting and vigilantism in parts of Iraq since
Saddam's statue came symbolically crashing down in central Baghdad on
Wednesday have led aid agencies to express fears of a humanitarian crisis.

The UN Office of the Humanitarian Co-ordinator for Iraq said coalition
forces were breaching the Geneva Convention by failing to protect hospitals
in the Iraqi capital from looters.

The Red Cross said the medical system in Baghdad had "virtually collapsed".

Save the Children warned of a "full-scale crisis" unless there was "a
massive humanitarian effort".

So US forces were trying to persuade Baghdad's policemen to return to work.

US Marine Colonel Peter Zarcone, in charge of civil affairs in Baghdad,
said: "We've been trying to contact police officials, we've put out the word
over the airways, we've talked to three individuals.

"What we are reassured by is that most of the people we've spoken to, who
have been living here, say the local police are not closely allied to the
former regime and the atrocities committed by them," Col Zarcone told BBC2's
Newsnight programme.

But he went on: "Its a fairly complex task ... right now communications are
a serious problem, trying to get the word out ... there's no phone system
for instance."

Prime Minister Tony Blair's official spokesman said the unrest was "a
pattern that's been played out in other countries where a repressive regime
has fallen."

And US Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, speaking in Washington, described
the looting as "untidy".

"And freedom's untidy. And free people are free to make mistakes and commit
crimes and do bad things," he said.

[.....]


FALL OF BASRA

http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/1/hi/uk/2935937.stm

*  BASRA RESIDENTS CALL FOR MORE FOOD
by Keith Harrison, In Basra
BBC Online, 10th April 2003

Ordinary Iraqis around Basra claim they have only four days worth of food
left and are calling for coalition forces to pull out of their war-torn
country. "Now they have got rid of Saddam, they have no reason to fight
against the Iraqi people," said Moaed Abd Alih, a 23 year-old student, amid
a crowd of cheering locals.

At a British aid distribution point in Zabiyr he spoke for 300 men, women
and children who constantly shouted at him to get their points across.

"We have nothing," he summed up. "We have no power, no work and no lives.

"There is not enough to eat or drink and our money is worthless."

Despite recent food hand-outs by the British and the delivery of more than
100,000 litres of water to his town for free yesterday, he insisted: "No-one
does anything to help us. The British make things worse.

"The water is not clean. It will make the children ill. What use is that?"

"When Saddam was in charge we had ordinary lives, now look at us. We have
only four days food left, then we will have to go to Basra to find more."

He added: "There are thieves everywhere, stealing cars, tractors, food,
water, whatever they can. If we catch them we will kill them but there is no
authority any more.

 "We need the British to pull out now they have got rid of Saddam to let us
live our lives in peace. We want to rule ourselves." Another man, who did
not want to give his name, tactfully pointed out to a pick-up truck flying a
white flag nearby.

"Government, they watch even now," he said.

He then pointed to the wreckage of a burned out car at the roadside and
said: "This car was not Saddam's. It was a person's car. Why blow it up?"

However, 2nd Lt Mark Irons of 10 Transport Regiment, Royal Logistic Corps,
said: "We are delivering food aid but water is the most pressing priority.
People are not starving."


http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,5944-643560,00.html

*  BAATHIST APPOINTED TO POLICE BASRA
>From David Charter at Central Command, Qatar
The Times, 12th April

BRITISH officials were compelled to defend their choice of a former
brigadier-general in Saddam Hussein's army to help to restore order in Basra
yesterday as looting continued in the southern city.

Efforts to restore order required the appointment of Sheikh Muzahim Mustafa
Kanan Tameemi because he was a tribal elder who held sway over large parts
of the population, a senior official at Centcom said.

Sheikh Tameemi ‹ known until yesterday as the secret sheikh ‹ was just the
first of a "council of elders" from all parts of the community being formed
to oversee civil government in Basra, the official added.

His appointment looked like backfiring on Thursday when British troops had
to calm a mob outside his house that was accusing the sheikh of being a
Saddam supporter.

But the slow process of restoring normality to Basra continued that night
when an initial meeting of the council agreed the terms for the inaugural
patrol of the city's own civil police today. The force numbers about 1,000
and officials hope that several hundred will join unarmed patrols
accompanied by British forces. The council also named new heads of police,
traffic police and civil defence departments.

The lawlessness across Iraq, initially welcomed by coalition forces as a
sign of the regime's demise, is now causing serious problems for the troops.
In one incident five bank robbers were killed by British troops in a
gunfight on Thursday that left an Irish Guardsman seriously wounded.

Sheikh Tameemi, 50, is a former Baath party member ‹ like almost every
prominent member of Iraqi society. He is said to be a Shia, but also to be
the leader of a large, mostly Sunni tribe with members in neighbouring
Kuwait and Saudi Arabia.

His brother was killed in 1994, according to relatives, after secret police
took him away. His body turned up with a bullet wound in the head and he is
widely considered to have been a victim of the Hussein regime.

The British official added: "We have asked Sheikh Tameemi to identify
similar people from across the ethnic spectrum in the region to form a
council of elders so they can all use their influence on different groups.

"You are not going to find anyone in the country who is relatively senior
who has not got some sort of linkage with the regime in some sort of way.
But all his links are historic.

"He is clearly not to everyone's liking but you are not going to find one
person around whom this whole community will coalesce. He has influence over
a sphere of people which is why we are recruiting others from other
spheres."

News of the apointment caused a near riot by members of the rival Sadoon
tribe, according to The Washington Post, whose reporter saw them throwing
stones at Sheik Tameemi's home in the suburb of Zubair.

A doctor who watched the protest said: "We are seeing the future of Iraq
right here, and it is not good."


http://www.time.com/time/europe/magazine/article/0,13005,901030421
443146,00.html

*  INSIDE BASRA
by Terry McCarthy/Basra
Time, 21st April, Vol. 161, No. 16

Saadi al Shuwaili was shaken from his bed by the rumbling of U.S. bombers
over his neighborhood, the Tuwasah district of Basra. About an hour later ‹
5:30 a.m. on April 5 ‹ he heard six deafening blasts, two of which came from
a house 500 m from his own. British intelligence had a solid tip that Ali
Hassan al-Majid ‹ known as Chemical Ali for his role in gassing the Kurds in
1988, and now the general commanding the Iraqi military in the south ‹ was
meeting at the house with Ba'ath party officials. The bombs incinerated the
building, and with it went Iraqi resistance in Basra. News traveled fast
that Chemical Ali was gone. "The next morning, everything was over," says
Saadi, a 53-year-old math teacher at Tahrir Intermediate Boys' school. "The
fedayeen [militia] all disappeared by 10 in the morning." Then the British
marched into Basra to face not gunfire but cheering crowds.

This was exactly the scene that British and American war planners hoped to
see: jubilant Iraqis welcoming coalition troops into a liberated city. For
two weeks, the residents of Basra had shown enormous fortitude and
resilience as their city was pounded by British artillery and American
bombs. Caught in a standoff between the British forces surrounding the city
and the Ba'athist loyalists who still controlled it, they suffered food and
water shortages and power failures; families faced the threat of execution
by the fedayeen if their men refused to fight. Somehow they managed to get
on with their lives ‹ and finally Basra fell. But there was more to survive.
The joy of liberation was soon followed by anarchy as mobs rampaged through
the city in an orgy of looting. Thieves roamed the streets of the business
district armed with crowbars and some firearms, and after dark there were
running firefights between rival gangs. One afternoon a small group of
looters was busy removing weapons and ammunition from a red shipping
container abandoned by fleeing Iraqi soldiers. They were watched by two
British snipers positioned on the roof of the Basra Teaching Hospital, about
350 m away. With Basra on the brink of anarchy, the last thing the city
needed was more weapons on the streets. But the snipers were not authorized
to shoot unless the looters stormed the hospital or threatened doctors or
British forces.

"It's bloody frustrating," said Lance Corporal Nick Young, an eight-year
veteran of the British Royal Marines. "We can't do a thing. They won't even
let us put warning shots down." Young was eventually allowed to fire
warnings that dispersed the gang, but only after they had already grabbed
most of the weapons cache. Security around the city had deteriorated so
badly that by the weekend British troops were mounting patrols with local
police officers to keep the peace. The battle to restore law and order had
begun.

Some people expected the worst from the start. Even before the invasion
began, Abu Fawez, the owner of the 49-room Al Rashed Hotel off Al Wattana
Street in the city center, was bricking up doors and windows ‹ not against
war damage, but against the looting that was sure to follow the fighting.
"We knew what was coming," he says. As the first bombs fell on Baghdad,
coalition planes dropped leaflets over Basra explaining that the British
were coming as liberators and promising to bring food and water. A few days
later, British Challenger tanks and artillery were engaging Iraqi military
positions on the outskirts of the city.

During the first few days of fighting the city closed down; shops remained
shuttered and people mostly stayed at home. But when it became clear that
most artillery and air strikes were hitting only government and military
buildings, the streets sprang to life again, at least during daylight hours.
"It was a bit bizarre," says Andres Kruesi, the head of the International
Committee of the Red Cross delegation in Basra. "Life in the city went on
much as normal, while a couple of miles outside the city the fighting was
going on."

As the British inched closer, the fedayeen, many dressed in black and
driving white Toyota pickups, cruised the streets for young men to pressgang
into fighting. Basem Hussain, 50, a teacher of mechanics at the local
technical college, made his two sons, Ali, 18, and Mohar, 20, stay inside.
"I was scared they would take both of them," he says. Hussain watched in
terror as the fedayeen drove down his street several times, but they never
entered his house. His wife had stockpiled enough rice, flour, vegetable oil
and canned food for several months, and at night the whole family watched
the news on Kuwait TV. "Iraqi TV was all lies, but we believed Kuwait TV
because they had pictures of the Americans in Nasiriyah and Najaf," Hussain
says. Every time a bomb fell, his 9-year-old daughter Shehed jumped into his
arms for comfort.

Despite the devastation, some Basrans were glad to see the bombs fall. Ahmed
Al Abadi, 42, who lost his technician's job after the failed 1991 Shi'a
rebellion against Saddam, went out on his roof to watch: "I was not afraid.
We all knew the bombing was very precise. When they hit the Ba'ath party
office, I was happy to see it blown up." But not all bombs hit their
targets, and there was a constant stream of casualties to the Basra Teaching
Hospital. By the end of the battle for Basra, the Teaching Hospital had
received 700 casualties, 75 of whom died.

After two weeks of siege, the British began pushing forward against the
fedayeen positions. The 7th Armoured Brigade crossed the bridge on the main
southern approach to the city and captured the Technical College. Many of
the fedayeen retreated into the city center. "A lot of them moved into the
Al Khansa girls school in Tuwasah," says Saadi Al Shuwaili. Anti aircraft
guns were set up in the school courtyard, and large supplies of rockets and
ammunition were stockpiled inside the school buildings. But people sensed
the end was near, as reports on Kuwait TV showed the Iraqi army collapsing
all around the country. Then came the strike that apparently took out
Chemical Ali.

Several bombs went astray that morning ‹ one landed on the house of Dr.
Akram Abad Hassan, the widely admired director of the Teaching Hospital. Dr.
Akram was working in the hospital at the time, but 10 of his family members
were killed ‹ his mother, sister, brother, three of his siblings' children
and four of his own. "That was our worst day," says Dr. Ahmed Al Ghalib, 30.
"How could we treat others when Dr. Akram's family was all dead?"

The British 7th Armored Brigade and the Royal Marines marched virtually
unopposed into Basra the following day, the streets lined with people
cheering their arrival. Then the looting started. After 24 years of brutal
oppression, Basrans are getting reacquainted with the joys and perils of
freedom.


NO URL (sent through list)

*  THREE WEEKS ON, AND STILL NO WATER. NOW DOCTORS FEAR AN EPIDEMIC  LACK OF
SECURITY HOLDS UP AGENCIES
 by Ewen MacAskill in Basra
The Guardian, 14th April

Doctors in Iraq's second city, Basra, warned yesterday of an epidemic as a
majority of the 1.3 million residents were still without safe drinking water
three weeks after the war began.

Attempts to restore the supply have failed, despite hopes expressed in the
first week that it would take a matter of days. Help from aid agencies is
only trickling in.

Tamara al-Rifai, the representative of the International Committee of the
Red Cross based in Kuwait, said looting was partly to blame. Lack of
security was making it difficult for aid agencies to enter the town, and
looters had taken pipes before they could be installed to help distribution.

"The fact that we have gone a few steps back makes it even more serious,"
she said.

Uday Abdul Bakri, general surgeon at the 600-bed Basra general hospital,
said the hospital was dealing with many diarrhoea cases and the risk of
water-acquired diseases, such as cholera and dysentery, was high.

"I think there will be an epidemic," he said.

The shortage of drinking water is a problem across southern Iraq.

There is huge resentment in Basra against the British forces because of the
lack of water and electricity. Residents also blame them for failing to
control the looters.

One resident in the centre of Basra said: "Bush bad. Blair bad. They
destroyed our water and electricity."  Another, Axad Toblanid, 50, an
engineer, said: "We are unhappy with this  freedom. We have no water. We
have complained to the British army about this  but they are not doing
anything.

"It is not safe. The British army say, 'we are not policemen.' It is the
rule of international law that any town where the army is in control must
protect us, but they don't."  The army is to draft in two British police
officers to Basra to give advice.

There are reports that a few hundred Fedayeen, the fighters that were
reputed to be most loyal to Saddam Hussein, are still holed up in the city,
Shots could be heard in Basra throughout Saturday night as looting
continued. But during the day, tension is seeping out of the city.

The change in mood began on Saturday. In the morning, the city was largely
deserted, with people staying indoors and shops closed, protected by metal
grilles. But in the afternoon, though the shops remained closed, street
markets opened, selling fruit and vegetables, and residents tentatively left
their houses.

The busiest areas were the riverside and slime-covered canals, where people
were filling plastic water containers. Both are used for sewage.

Joint patrols by British military forces and Iraqi police started in Faw,
south of Basra, yesterday. Royal Marine Lee Haworth and Lieutenant-Colonel
Moyer Abdul Jabar walked side by side through the streets to the fascination
of a large crowd following them, Tom Newton Dunn of the Daily Mirror
reported in a pooled dispatch. It was the first joint British military and
Iraqi police patrol in the country.

Col Jabar, 45, a former firefighter, is the only police officer in the
10,000-strong town, and took up the job on Saturday. Former police officers
in Basra are also being vetted for links to the Ba'ath party before being
allowed to return to their jobs. About 300 have volunteered and have started
manning checkpoints around the city.

Russia expressed its "growing concern" about the humanitarian situation in
Iraq and emphasised yesterday that it was up to the "occupying forces" to
take care of the needs of the country's people.

King Abdullah of Jordan also expressed concern over the deterioration of the
living, health and security situations of millions of Iraqis. His remarks
came during a meeting with the UN coordinator for humanitarian affairs in
Iraq, Romero Lopes da Silva.

King Abdullah told the UN representative that he had ordered his government
and armed forces to send two field hospitals with medical teams and
equipment to Iraq, and called for a national effort to deliver medical aid
and food to Iraqis, especially children.

The king has also launched a nationwide blood donation campaign and has
asked officials to see if it is possible to bring wounded Iraqi civilians to
Jordan for medical treatment.


http://www.msnbc.com/news/900403.asp?0si=-&cp1=1

*  BASRA CONTESTS OFFICIAL VIEW OF SIEGE
by Keith B. Richburg
MSNBC from Washington Post, 15th April

BASRA, Iraq, April 15 ‹  There was nothing resembling a popular uprising
against the Iraqi militiamen who controlled this city during its 13-day
siege by British forces. Life continued largely as normal in many
neighborhoods, with police directing traffic and residents doing their best
to avoid fighting.

DOCTORS AT LOCAL HOSPITALS treated scores of civilians wounded by British
artillery and U.S. bombs during the siege, despite briefing-room claims of
pinpoint accuracy. Many others were killed.

These conclusions about life under siege emerge from a week of interviews in
Basra and they differ in many ways from accounts offered by military and
other sources before the city's fall. Reports of large numbers of Basra
residents being forced to take up arms and militiamen firing from behind
human shields were similarly not borne out in the interviews.

People expressed more dismay at the looting and general lawlessness that
followed the British entry into the city on April 6 than at the behavior of
the Iraqi militiamen. People say they were largely able to stay away from
the fighters, though sometimes they mingled with them in a false show of
solidarity.

Hamid Azzawi, a medical school professor who lives a block away from what
was the city's intelligence headquarters, said he served refreshments to
militiamen who took up positions in sandbagged emplacements on his street.
"They might say, you are obliged to leave this house," he recounted. "So you
needed to supply them with tea, water and a big smile."

Basra was supposed to be easy pickings for U.S. troops and British soldiers
who crossed the border from Kuwait on March 20. According to the original
plan, British officers said, U.S. Marines would sweep through the city on
their way north, and then hand it over to British troops to clean up
remaining pockets of resistance.

But as one British officer said, when he arrived at Basra's southernmost
highway bridge, which was supposed to be secure, there was intense firing
from Iraqi mortars and rocket propelled grenades. "Here it is ‹ it's all
yours," the officer recalled a Marine telling him.

British commanders debated whether to enter the city, but decided a
full-scale assault might cause many civilian casualties. So they stayed put,
and a cat-and-mouse battle ensued.

The Iraqis had moved their T-55 tanks to the southern gateway to the city,
near Basra University and facing the highway bridge. But whenever the
British moved forward to engage those tanks, the Iraqis withdrew toward the
city and the British held back.

At Basra University, Kadhin Ali, an English professor, said those tanks
never moved far into the city and generally remained at the edge, to guard
the gateway.

Like most professors on campus, Ali was part of a security team that was
supposed to protect the university grounds. He initially turned out carrying
an old AK-47 assault rifle. But he said that after the first few days, he
and most of the other professors became frightened and fled to friends'
homes, leaving only about a dozen hard-core members of the Fedayeen militia
on the campus.

Most of these fighters were young, teenagers even, with no military
training. They were responsible for most of the rocket-propelled grenade and
mortar attacks on British positions during the standoff.

According to one Iraqi resident familiar with their tactics, the Fedayeen
members would typically go in a group of 20 to the southern edge of Basra,
to the highway bridge linking the city to the town of Zubair. From there,
they would split into three or four smaller groups and fire mortars or
rocket-propelled grenades at British troops stationed on the bridge.

The Iraqis sometimes used the tanks stationed at the southern gateway to the
city as cover, allowing them to operate out of the buildings of a technical
college about a mile farther south, closer to British positions.

This Iraqi resident said British return fire was so accurate that out of
those teams of 20 fighters, typically only three would return. British
troops later overran the technical college, killing as many as 20 Iraqis
inside, said Maj. John Cotterill, who is attached to the Irish Guards.

As for fighters situating themselves near civilians, Iraqis said in
interviews that it was common practice for top government and ruling Baath
Party officials to operate out of houses around the city, mostly in such
affluent civilian areas as Ashshar that were home to academics, doctors and
other professionals. "What happened is these people, Saddam's men, if you
like . . . rent civilian homes and use that for their business," said
Azzawi, the medical professor.

U.S. intelligence officials found out about this and targeted some of those
houses. One airstrike, on April 5, hit a house that was believed to be used
by top Iraqi intelligence agency officials. Two bombs turned the house into
a large crater but also demolished the home of Abid Hassan Hamoodi next
door, killing 10 members of his family, including seven children.

"If they had any suspicion of anything there, they should have notified us
to move from there," Hamoodi, 72, said in an interview.

British officers said they believed their targeting was accurate overall,
and that many times requests to strike at targets were denied by senior
commanders because of the risk of harming civilians. But they said that in
any war, some civilian casualties are unavoidable.

British officers said throughout the standoff that their artillery fire was
"degrading" the Baath Party's grip on power. "We were creating the
conditions to enter," said Capt. Richard Coates, a British military
spokesman inside the city. "We dislodged them."

However, many residents inside the city disputed whether the coalition
strikes had any effect in loosening the government's control. Instead, they
described a city that functioned relatively normally until the British
entered ‹ and many said the main fear was of artillery and airstrikes.

Andres Kruesi, a worker for the International Committee of the Red Cross who
lived in Basra for 18 months, returned to the city during the siege to find
it "firmly in Iraqi control."

Asked about a civilian uprising and militiamen firing on crowds to suppress
it, Kruesi said: "I didn't see any of that happening. In the city, it was
similar to before. It was the same city I had worked in for the last year
and a half."

"The police were out. There was even traffic enforcement," he said. "My
impression was they were in control."

Archbishop Gabriel Kassab, the Chaldean Catholic prelate in Basra who
represents most of the area's small Christian community, said scores of
people spent nights in St. Ephrem's Church, mainly to escape the artillery
and air bombardment, but there was never a problem from the militia or Baath
Party fighters in the city. "We left all the churches open 24 hours a day,"
he said.

Holding up a piece of shrapnel from a bomb he said landed just a few yards
from his residence, the archbishop said: "Look here ‹ that is a gift, from
[President] Bush to me. I will take it with me when I go to the United
States."

On April 5, U.S. and British commanders thought they scored a major victory
in Basra when they destroyed a compound that they believed was the hiding
place of Iraq's local commander, Ali Hassan Majeed, a cousin of Saddam
Huseein known as "Chemical Ali" for his use of chemical weapons against the
Kurds in the 1980s. Some officers believed his death may have weakened the
resistance and made it easier for British troops to eventually enter Basra.

Now some officers say they are unsure what happened. "He may be dead, or he
may be alive," Coates said. "We think he's dead, but we don't know." He
added, "Obviously, Elvis is alive for some people."

At one of Majeed's guesthouses, Mohammed Yahya, an unemployed 32-year-old,
was scavenging recently for whatever the looters left behind. Yahya, who
lives near the guesthouse on the banks of the Shatt al Arab waterway, said
he saw a convoy of six or seven four-wheel-drive vehicles leave the compound
early on April 6, heading for a northbound military road that cuts between
palm trees close to the Iranian border.

Yahya, who said he often watched the comings and goings from the guesthouse,
said the cars belonged to "some very important people." He added: "We don't
know who occupied the cars. But it might have been Ali."

The British entered Basra that day with little resistance, finding most of
the Iraqi fighters had abandoned the sandbagged emplacements they had built
at government buildings throughout the city. Coates and others said Iraqis
may have concluded that continued resistance was futile.

Other accounts suggest that the Iraqi withdrawal was an organized retreat,
not a last-minute flight. Several Iraqis who claim to have friends in the
militia said an order went around early on April 6 that the fighters should
stop resisting. Several people said the looting began even before the
British entered, indicating that police, government security guards and
militiamen had already left their posts.

Mochdad Fadhil, 44, a mechanical engineer, recounted that early that day,
some army guards at a nearby compound often used by Majeed during the
standoff came to him asking a favor. "The guards came and borrowed some
civilian clothes," he said. "They came in their underwear."

"They needed a place to change," he said, adding: "There was no officer left
when they came. All the officers were gone."




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