Relations Sour Between Shiites and Iraq Militia

By SABRINA TAVERNISE
The New York Times
October 12, 2007

BAGHDAD, Oct. 11 — In a number of Shiite neighborhoods across Baghdad, residents are beginning to turn away from the Mahdi Army, the Shiite militia they once saw as their only protector against Sunni militants. Now they resent it as a band of street thugs without ideology.

The hardening Shiite feeling in Baghdad opens an opportunity for the American military, which has long struggled against the Mahdi Army, as American commanders rely increasingly on tribes and local leaders in their prosecution of the war.

The sectarian landscape has shifted, with Sunni extremists largely defeated in many Shiite neighborhoods, and the war in those places has sunk into a criminality that is often blind to sect.

In interviews, 10 Shiites from four neighborhoods in eastern and western Baghdad described a pattern in which militia members, looking for new sources of income, turned on Shiites.

The pattern appears less frequently in neighborhoods where Sunnis and Shiites are still struggling for territory. Sadr City, the largest Shiite neighborhood, where the Mahdi Army’s face is more political than military, has largely escaped the wave of criminality.

Among the people killed in the neighborhood of Topchi over the past two months, residents said, were the owner of an electrical shop, a sweets seller, a rich man, three women, two local council members, and two children, ages 9 and 11.

It was a disparate group with one thing in common: All were Shiites killed by Shiites. Residents blamed the Mahdi Army, which controls the neighborhood.

“Everyone knew who the killers were,” said a mother from Topchi, whose neighbor, a Shiite woman, was one of the victims. “I’m Shiite, and I pray to God that he will punish them.”

The feeling was the same in other neighborhoods.

“We thought they were soldiers defending the Shiites,” said Sayeed Sabah, a Shiite who runs a charity in the western neighborhood of Huriya. “But now we see they are youngster-killers, no more than that. People want to get rid of them.”

While the Mahdi militia still controls most Shiite neighborhoods, early evidence that Shiites are starting to oppose some parts of the militia is surfacing on American bases. Shiite sheiks, the militia’s traditional base, are beginning to contact Americans, much as Sunni tribes reached out early this year, refocusing one entire front of the war, officials said, and the number of accurate tips flowing into American bases has soared.

Shiites are “participating like they never have before,” said Maj. Mark Brady, of the Multi-National Division-Baghdad Reconciliation and Engagement Cell, which works with tribes.

“Something has got to be not right if they are going to risk calling a tips hot line or approaching a J.S.S.,” he said, referring to the Joint Security Stations, the American neighborhood mini-bases set up after the troop increase this year.

“Everything is changing,” said Ali, a businessman in the heavily Shiite neighborhood of Ur, in eastern Baghdad, who, like most of those interviewed, did not want his full name used for fear of being attacked. “Now in our area for the first time everyone say, ‘To hell with Mahdi Army.’

“Not loudly on the street, but between friends, between families. Every man, every woman, say that.”

The street militia of today bears little resemblance to the Mahdi Army of 2004, when Shiites following a cleric, Moktada al-Sadr, battled American soldiers in a burst of Shiite self-assertion. Then, fighters doubled as neighborhood helpers, bringing cooking gas and other necessities to needy families.

Now, three years later, many members have left violence behind, taking jobs in local and national government, while others have plunged into crime, dealing in cars and houses taken from dead or displaced victims of both sects.

Even the demographics have changed. Now, street fighters tend to be young teenagers from errant families, in part the result of American military success. Last fall, the military began an aggressive campaign of arresting senior commanders, leaving behind a power vacuum and directionless junior members.

“Now it’s young guys — no religion, no red lines,” said Abbas, 40, a Shiite car parts dealer in Ameen, a southern Baghdad neighborhood. Abbas’s 22-year-old cousin, Ratib, was shot in the mouth this spring after insulting Mahdi militia members.

“People hate them,” Abbas said. “They want them to disappear from their lives.”

One of the most notorious killers in Topchi, who residents say was a Mahdi Army fighter, Haidar Rahim, was born in 1989. On a hot August afternoon, he and two accomplices shot and killed a woman named Eman, a divorced mother, in front of her house, residents said. The fighters said she was a prostitute, but shortly after her death they brought tenants to rent her house.

“They are kids with guns, who have cars and money,” said Eman’s neighbor, referring to the fighters. “Being kids, they are tempted by all of this.”

Residents’ fear was so great that Eman’s body lay untouched in a pool of blood for more than an hour, until the Iraqi authorities took it away, said the neighbor. She watched Eman’s 8-year-old son crying next to his mother’s body.

“They are bloodthirsty,” said a man whose father, a neighborhood council member from Topchi, was killed on Sept. 26. “They can kill an entire family for a $10 mobile phone scratch card.”

Mr. Rahim was killed a month later. His young face is emblazoned on a memorial sign, planted near a giant wheel of rotisserie chicken in Topchi. Some said Americans killed him. Others said Iraqis.

A spokesman for the Sadr office in Shuala, the large Shiite neighborhood north of Topchi, said that he had no information on the killings, but that any illegal actions were the work of criminals who merely called themselves Mahdi Army members.

“The claims of membership in the Mahdi Army are huge at this time,” said the spokesman, who goes by Abu Jafar. “The Sadr office is not responsible for anyone who terrorizes the people, Sunnis or Shiites.”

Patterns of violence are different in the Shiite south, where competing Shiite militias with political ties are vying for power.

The militia in Baghdad, always loosely organized, swelled with recruits after a bombing of a Shiite shrine in February 2006. The change disrupted the organization and injected it with angry young men, some with criminal pasts, who were thirsty for revenge.

Criminals began to give the organization a bad name. The price for used cars plummeted as militiamen sold vehicles that had belonged to their dead victims. A Sadr City sheik issued a religious edict permitting the confiscation of the property of Sunni militants who see Shiites as heretics. But many took it as a blank check to seize property, as long as the victim was Sunni.

A 36-year-old Mahdi Army leader from western Baghdad described a system in which victims’ cars were shipped to northern Iraq in convoys of Kurdish soldiers returning from military leave. New documents were drawn up there.

For Yasir, 35, a former member of the militia who had witnessed its breakdown firsthand, a final blow came when his cousin, a wealthy businessman, was kidnapped by young Mahdi members from the neighborhood. He was later killed.

“Don’t call it the Mahdi Army,” Yasir said. “It was the Mahdi Army when people in it had a conscience.”

In a last-ditch effort to re-establish control and respect, Mr. Sadr issued an order halting all Mahdi Army activity in August.

Abu Jafar, the spokesman, said that “the goal of this statement is to uncover the bad people that claim membership in the Mahdi Army and to let the security forces deal with them.”

While the turbulence continued in Topchi, a frontier neighborhood where local militia members are poorer, much of the activity stopped in Sadr City, the base for the most senior leaders, who have grown wealthy and are established politically, residents said.

“At first, we couldn’t drive our cars, we couldn’t walk because they have weapons, AK, pistols on the street,” said Ali, the Ur businessman. “Now they disappeared. There is nothing. You can’t see anything from these people.”

Like many Shiites, Abbas, the car parts dealer, attributes part of the drop-off to a new precision in American arrests, fed by tips from Shiite residents. Abbas said he and his friends had a name for the Americans, the Janet Brothers, a tongue-in-cheek term of tribal respect that plays off an American name. Another name, Madonna Brothers, refers to the American pop star.

American commanders like Lt. Col. David Oclander, of the Second Brigade Combat Team of the 82nd Airborne Division, whose area includes Sadr City and other Shiite neighborhoods in Baghdad, have seized on that cooperation. In the past month and a half, he said, Shiite leaders have begun to make contact with the Americans. The brigade is now working with 25 sheiks in the Shiite neighborhoods of Shaab and Ur and is interviewing up to 1,200 candidates for semiofficial neighborhood guard positions.

The lieutenant colonel compares the shift among the Shiites to the one in Sunni neighborhoods that began to turn against Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia, the homegrown Sunni extremist group that American intelligence agencies say is foreign led.

In some cases, residents seem more willing to stand up to the Mahdi Army. In Topchi, several businessmen refused to pay protection money to Mahdi Army members this month. The news spread through the neighborhood. Four months ago, a truck driver was killed in Lieutenant Colonel Oclander’s sector, after the driver’s boss refused to pay protection money. Such retribution is much rarer now, he said.

Ali, the Ur businessman, said he expected the Mahdi Army to be much smaller in the future. People simply do not believe its leaders anymore. “There is no ideology among them anymore,” he said.

As proof, he told a story from his neighborhood about a religious man and a car acquisition.

“He was a poor man, but now he has a Mercedes-Benz,” Ali said. “The Prophet Muhammad, he didn’t even have a horse.”

Reporting was contributed by Johan Spanner, Ahmad Fadam, Kareem Hilm and Qais Mizher from Baghdad.

World's Muslim Leaders Ask Christians for Common Ground

By Michelle Boorstein
Washington Post Staff Writer
October 11, 2007

Dozens of Muslim leaders from around the world released a letter today to "leaders of Christian churches everywhere" emphasizing the shared theological roots of the two faiths and saying the survival of the world depends on them finding common ground.

The document, "A Common Word between Us and You," was signed by 138 clerics, scholars and other Muslim leaders and released at news conferences in London, Abu Dhabi, and Washington.

The effort was organized by The Royal Academy, the same Jordan-based group behind a letter sent last October to Pope Benedict accepting his apology after he delivered a controversial lecture about Islam that set off protests.

Noting that Christians and Muslims together are more than half the world's population, the letter says "If Muslims and Christians are not at peace, the world cannot be at peace . . . our common future is at stake. The very survival of the world is perhaps at stake," it reads.

The letter is addressed to more than 30 Christian leaders, including the Pope and the leaders of the world's Orthodox Christians and Anglicans. Its signatories include present and former grand muftis of Syria, Slovenia, Palestine and Egypt, as well as professors, political leaders and advocates such as the co-founder of the Council on American-Islamic Relations.

In Washington, John Esposito, director of the Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding at Georgetown, said that the letter was a feat partially because it was able to bring together Muslim leaders from a wide range of theological schools across Sunni, Shia, Salafi and Sufi traditions.

"This is a challenge to Christianity. It will be wonderful to see their responses," he said.

The 29-page letter's main point is that Christianity and Islam share two key foundations: love of one God and love of one's neighbor. "Thus in obedience to the Holy Qu'ran, we as Muslims invite Christians to come together with us on the basis of what is common to us, which is also what is most essential to our faith and practice: the two commandments of love."

In Egypt, A Son Is Readied for Succession

On Streets, Dynasty Viewed as 'a Given'
By Ellen Knickmeyer
Washington Post Foreign Service
October 11, 2007; A01

CAIRO -- Tall and gangly, his hairline edging toward the back of his head, the man on stage in khakis and shirt sleeves spoke woodenly despite the energy and friendliness evident in his audience of well-off Egyptian college students and recent graduates.

The speaker's hand gestures lagged behind his words. Passion flowed into his voice only when he talked about trade liberalization and market reform. His listeners at the youth forum applauded, but not as much as they had for some other speakers.

Gamal Mubarak, son of Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak and the man most widely expected to succeed him, had not made much of an impression. Then again, Egyptians say, Gamal Mubarak probably doesn't have to.

Egyptians have never experienced a democratic transfer of presidential power. As Hosni Mubarak, 79, begins the 27th year of his rule this month, many say they expect Mubarak's family and ruling party, military officers and security officials to decide on his successor.

Egypt's National Democratic Party is now the only party legally eligible to field a presidential candidate; an independent candidate would need to secure approval to run from commissions dominated by ruling party members.

If power passes to Gamal Mubarak, Egypt would join Syria, Jordan and Morocco -- the latter two officially kingdoms -- on the growing list of modern Middle East dynasties in which sons have taken over from fathers in governments of elites backed by the military and security services. In Libya and Yemen, sons are also seen as the leading candidates to succeed their fathers.

In Egypt, "we didn't choose Sadat, we didn't choose Mubarak, and we're not choosing the next one," Zakaria Nahla, a 52-year-old salesman of cheap furniture, said in a Cairo market crowded with beeping scooters and veiled women picking through racks of clothes.

Asked if they expected to have any say about Mubarak's succession, a group of men with their arms full of round loaves of bread answered in unison, "No, no, no." One underscored the point by wagging a finger and shaking his head.

"We take it as a given" that it will be Gamal Mubarak, said Sayida Amin, 46, a nanny who works for a family in one of Cairo's wealthier districts. "People don't know who he is. We only know he's the president's son, and he's imposed on us."

"We should give him the benefit of the doubt," Amin added, and laughed. "Because he's going to come anyway."

Hosni Mubarak, who rose from the vice presidency when Islamic radicals assassinated President Anwar Sadat in 1981, has never appointed a vice president or announced his preference for a successor. Under the constitution, elections for a new president must follow within 60 days if the president yields power.

While authorities have never confirmed any ailments more serious than back problems for Mubarak, his age has helped fuel cycles of rumors that he is dying or dead.

Gamal Mubarak denies any interest in the presidency, but he is accumulating power in the ruling party and as his father's economic adviser.

Most Egyptians call Gamal "Jimmy." Educated in Egypt, Gamal, 43, left a job as an investment banker in London in 2000 to return home, and took a post as head of the ruling party's policy committee. He married for the first time this year.

Acquaintances of the family say that his shyness makes him appear reserved and that he is a devoted uncle who films his older brother's children at school events. Young members of the ruling party call him funny and relaxed in private.

Gamal Mubarak is credited with putting his wonky inclinations to work by helping build a team of savvy, energetic officials around his father, including Prime Minister Ahmed Nazif, to overhaul the socialist-oriented economic policies inherited from President Gamal Abdel Nasser.

Cautious but business-friendly changes such as cutting the overvalued Egyptian pound have helped the country achieve a 7 percent growth rate this year and attract $11 billion in direct foreign investment. That's up from less than $500 million three or four years ago, said Simon Kitchen, a private economist in Cairo.

"I think with Gamal, maybe, his influence is in . . . explaining or advocating the ideas of economic reform to his father because, obviously, he has that access," Kitchen said.

Gamal Mubarak and his economic engineering seem remote to many Egyptians.

Forty percent of the country's people live in poverty, according to U.S. development figures, and 80 percent are labeled low-income by the Egyptian government. Inflation, caused in part by the policy changes, has eaten away at buying power, especially for those with low salaries. Teachers, for example, generally earn much less than $100 a month.

"Gamal has never taken a bus, never stopped at a red light, never met anyone who wasn't cleared by security services," said Ibrahim Eissa, editor of Cairo's al-Dustor newspaper. The government filed criminal charges against Eissa for reporting on rumors about the president's health, but Eissa said he suspects he actually is being targeted for an article in which he alleged that first lady Suzanne Mubarak was prodding her husband to yield power to their son.

But Gamal Mubarak's pro-market economic views already have won him the support of many in the business community, said Steven A. Cook, a specialist on civilian-military relations in the Middle East and a fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations in New York.

Salah Diab, a leading businessman, praised Gamal Mubarak warmly for helping to bring new thinking to the country's economic policies. Asked about the prospect of a Gamal Mubarak presidency, Diab said, "I wouldn't mind at all." But like others here, weary of leaders who leave office only when death ushers them out, Diab said he wants Egypt's presidency limited to one or two terms.

"If he thinks he's coming to be the fourth pharaoh in a row" -- after Nasser, Sadat and Hosni Mubarak -- "I don't think that's going to be acceptable to anyone," Diab said.

Egypt's military has picked the country's rulers for more than half a century. Nasser, Sadat and Hosni Mubarak came from the officer corps, whose endorsement is still seen as essential for whoever wishes to be president.

What Egypt's military and security services are looking for, some analysts argue, is Hosni Mubarak II -- a leader who will preserve the Camp David accord with Israel and the U.S. military aid that comes with it, maintain relations with the United States and Europe, and continue medical, housing and other benefits for military officers.

"The security services, the army, basically are interested in maintaining the status quo," Cook said, adding that Gamal Mubarak and his allies are said to be building relations with senior officers to overcome his perceived handicap of not having served in the military.

The ruling party is a third constituency vital for the next president.

Since taking control of the party's policy committee, Mubarak has helped push through initiatives expanding the party's powers and blocking opposition challengers. Among the changes was a constitutional amendment adopted this spring banning religious political groups.

That helped shut out the Muslim Brotherhood, the country's largest opposition movement, in June elections for parliament's upper house after the group's strong showing in 2005 elections for the lower house.

Across the Middle East, the sons who assumed power in the 1990s and earlier this decade did so while promising greater freedoms than their fathers allowed.

"It never happens," said Marc Lynch, a Middle East expert at George Washington University. "People always think, 'He uses the Internet and he speaks good English and therefore he won't be like his parents,' but it never seems to work out that way," Lynch said by telephone.

At the youth conference where Gamal Mubarak spoke, held last month at the Red Sea resort of Sharm el-Sheikh, he sounded much like his father -- stressing stability rather than democratic reforms.

"Here in Egypt we are enjoying peace and security, and that is why we are moving forward in progress and change," he said.

The forum was convened by Suzanne Mubarak and gathered mostly middle-class and upper-class young Egyptians. One of the young women grilling Gamal Mubarak from the audience wore a Rolex on the arm she raised to hold the microphone.

Organizers hope such events will help rally Egypt's upper class, as the Muslim Brotherhood has rallied Egypt's poor, an official with the government said, speaking on condition he not be identified.

"There's nothing wrong with having haves and have-nots," the official said, adding that the affluent young needed help overcoming their "shame" at coming from educated, cultured and well-off families.

Seeing Gamal Mubarak left some of them unconvinced.

"I think he has to reveal to us what he can do and what is the significant thing he has as a person," Noha Ahmed, a 26-year-old with a master's degree, said after Mubarak spoke. "We all need to feel if he's going to do it, then it's his own effort."

The human cost of secrecy

Even if the Supreme Court turned away a torture victim's case, El-Masri deserves an apology and compensation.
Editorial
Los Angeles Times
October 11, 2007

With no explanation, the Supreme Court has denied a day in court to a German citizen of Lebanese descent who says he was kidnapped by the CIA and imprisoned and tortured, all because he was mistaken for a terrorist with a similar name. The justices on Tuesday refused to review a decision by a federal appeals court that Khaled El-Masri couldn't sue former CIA Director George J. Tenet for damages because a trial might reveal "state secrets."

It's disappointing that the court, which repeatedly has reproached the Bush administration for cutting legal corners in the war on terror, decided to remain on the sidelines in this case. Perhaps the justices thought El-Masri's lawsuit against Tenet was not the best vehicle for a pronouncement on the state secrets privilege asserted by the government. They may prefer to address the scope of that privilege, first announced by the high court in 1953, in a different case. One possibility is a lawsuit involving the administration's electronic surveillance program that is now before a federal appeals court in California.

Whatever the explanation, the court's refusal to hear El-Masri's appeal shouldn't be the end of the story. This country has an obligation to apologize to -- and compensate -- victims of an anti-terrorist operation gone awry. And judicial inaction actually strengthens the case for action by Congress to prevent the CIA from committing such outrages in the future. Even when there is no case of mistaken identity, the United States shouldn't be spiriting suspects away to secret prisons abroad where they can be subjected to "enhanced interrogation techniques."

Aside from its inhumanity, this so-called rendition policy has blackened America's image abroad and complicated relations with allies. The El-Masri case has been a source of friction between the Bush administration and Germany. Meanwhile, Canada's prime minister has pleaded with the administration to "come clean" about the case of Maher Arar, a Canadian citizen who was sent to his native Syria by the United States after erroneously being placed on a watch list by Canadian officials. Arar, who says he was tortured in Syria, filed a lawsuit against former Atty. Gen. John Ashcroft that also was dismissed on state secrets grounds. Ashcroft's successor, Alberto R. Gonzales, defended the transporting of Arar to Syria, calling it a deportation, not a rendition.

It may be that it would be impossible for these lawsuits to be tried without the exposure of national secrets, though judges should do their utmost to make such trials possible. But the courts aren't the only remedy for the outrageous rendition policy. As with so many aspects of the war on terror, Congress has been just as compliant as the courts, allowing the administration to persist with a double standard that allows the CIA more leeway in interrogations than the U.S. military. It must be more assertive in the future.

For the moment, however, the need is simpler. El-Masri deserves an apology from the president and compensation from Congress. Just because the courts can't help him does not mean that the government doesn't owe him at least that.