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03/16/2006:

"American security contractor briefly held in Iraq"

BAGHDAD (Reuters) - Iraqi police detained an American private security contractor working at a U.S. military base in northern Iraq for several hours on Tuesday, a U.S. military spokesman said.

The spokesman said the man was arrested at a checkpoint in the northern town of Tikrit. He denied initial reports that explosives were found in the car, but said two AK-47 assault rifles were in the vehicle.

"He was picked up by Iraqi police after being detained at a checkpoint in Tikrit," the spokesman said, adding police later released him. "We are looking at why he left the base unescorted."

Abdullah Jebara, deputy governor of Salahaddin province, earlier told Reuters the man was arrested in Saddam Hussein's hometown of Tikrit on Monday and that U.S. forces removed him from the provincial government building on Tuesday.

The man was stopped by police for violating a daytime curfew in Tikrit, a security source said. American security personnel rarely travel alone.

A spokesman for the major crimes unit in Tikrit said he was first brought to their headquarters but they refused to take him into custody, adding police were told to take the man to the provincial council building.
yahoo.com

A pretty euphemism, calling a paid mercenary a 'security contractor.'


Mass grave find fuels sectarian tension in Iraq
Iraq moved closer to sectarian civil war as police found the bodies of 87 men killed in Baghdad, many of them showing signs of torture. The dead appear to be Sunni Muslims killed in retaliation for the bombs that slaughtered 58 people and wounded 200 when they exploded in crowded markets in the strongly Shia area of Sadr City.

Some 29 dead men were found yesterday buried in a pit in a playing field. "Some children were playing soccer and they smelt something strong and the police were notified," said a police spokesman. Members of a Shia militia dug in a pit to unearth the bodies. They found that the men had been gagged and bound and were in their underwear. Many of them had been tortured before being shot dead.

The Interior Ministry spokesman, Lt-Col Falah al-Mohammedawi, said that the men appeared to have been killed in Kamaliyah, a mostly Shia district in east Baghdad, about three days ago. Local residents offered sheets to cover the bodies as they were dragged from the earth.

A photographer for the Associated Press agency who took pictures of the grave was warned not to publish them. The location of the grave suggests that the dead men were Sunni.

The fear now in Baghdad is that the bombs detonated by Sunni insurgents in Shia neighbourhoods are leading to immediate retaliation against Sunnis.

Until a bomb attack destroyed the holy Shia shrine in Samarra on 22 February, Shias had been restrained in their reaction to repeated attacks on them since 2003. They were also cautioned against being provoked into seeking vengeance by influential Shia clerics such as the Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani. Since the Samarra bomb the Shia willingness to heed his calls for patience is much reduced.

In another atrocity, 15 bodies of men who had been strangled were found in an abandoned minibus parked between two Sunni districts in west Baghdad. In Sadr City, a further four men were shot in the head and their bodies hanged from electricity pylons. Elsewhere in Baghdad another 40 bodies, both Shia and Sunni, were found said Lt-Col Mohammedawi.

..."May God damn you," said Mr Sadr of Mr Rumsfeld. "You said in the past that civil war would break out if you had to withdraw, and now you say that in face of civil war you won't interfere."


Humanitarian situation remains critical in Kirkuk as ethnic tensions rise
BAGHDAD, 14 March (IRIN) - The oil-rich city of Kirkuk in northern Iraq has been the scene of ongoing displacement and rising ethnic tensions in the past six months, according to local officials.

"The humanitarian situation in the city is very bad and thousands of innocent people are still displaced," said Nuri al-Salihi, a spokesman for the Iraqi Red Crescent Society (IRCS). "But nothing has been done to help them because of a recent increase in sectarian violence that has delayed the work of many local NGOs."

According to IRCS officials in Kirkuk, located some 255 km north of Baghdad, little aid has come from the main IRCS branch in the capital in the past eight months. This, they say, is due to major displacements in the western Anbar governorate and recent flooding there that forced thousands of residents to flee their homes.

Ahmed Mashhdanny, a senior Kirkuk governorate official, said that more than 200,000 Kirkuk residents have been displaced since 2003 and more than 300 have been killed in ethnic fighting over land. "The return of the Kurds to the city left thousands of Arabs displaced in deteriorating conditions and has increased ethnic aggression between the two groups," he said.

Under an "Arabisation" programme initiated under the former regime of Saddam Hussein, tens of thousands of Kurds and other non-Arabs were driven out of the city, to be replaced with pro-government Arabs from the impoverished south. After Hussein's ouster by coalition forces in April 2003, however, Kurds began returning to the area to reclaim their property.

This, in turn, led to the displacement of thousands of Arabs, Mashhdanny explained. "Thousands of displaced people from different ethnic groups – mainly Arabs – can now be seen in improvised camps on the outskirts of Kirkuk, as well as in abandoned government buildings and schools," he said. "Kurds, Arabs and Turcomans are suffering because measures haven't been taken to secure their rights."


Iraqis say US raid on home killed 11 family members
TIKRIT, Iraq (Reuters) - Eleven members of an Iraqi family were killed in a U.S. raid on Wednesday, police and witnesses said. The U.S. military said two women and a child died during the bid to seize an al Qaeda militant from a house.

Television pictures showed 11 bodies in the Tikrit morgue -- five children, two men and four women. A freelance photographer later saw the bodies being buried in Ishaqi, the town 100 km (60 miles) north of Baghdad where the raid took place.

The U.S. military said in a statement its troops had attacked a house in Ishaqi early on Wednesday to capture a "foreign fighter facilitator for the al Qaeda in Iraq network".

"Troops were engaged by enemy fire as they approached the building," U.S. spokesman Major Tim Keefe said. "Coalition Forces returned fire utilising both air and ground assets.

"There was one enemy killed. Two women and one child were also killed in the firefight. The building ... (was) destroyed."

Keefe said the al Qaeda suspect had been captured and was being questioned.


US 'may want to keep Iraq bases'
he United States may want to keep a long-term military presence in Iraq to bolster moderates against extremists in the region and protect oil supplies, the army general overseeing US operations in Iraq has said.

While the Bush administration has downplayed prospects for permanent US bases in Iraq, General John Abizaid told a House of Representatives subcommittee on Tuesday he could not rule that out.

Abizaid said that policy would be worked out with a unified, national Iraqi government if and when that is established, "and it would be premature for me to predict".

Many Democrats have pressed President George Bush to firmly state that the United States does not intend to seek permanent military bases in Iraq, a step they said would help stem the violence there.

Abizaid also told the Appropriations subcommittee on military quality of life that while an Iraqi civil war was possible, "I think it's a long way from where we are now to civil war".


Electricity Hits Three-Year Low in Iraq
BAGHDAD, Iraq (AP) - Electricity output has dipped to its lowest point in three years in Iraq, where the desert sun is rising toward another broiling summer and U.S. engineers are winding down their rebuilding of the crippled power grid.

The Iraqis, in fact, may have to turn to neighboring Iran to help bail them out of their energy crisis - if not this summer, then in years to come.

The overstressed network is producing less than half the electricity needed to meet Iraq's exploding demand. American experts are working hard to shore up the system's weaknesses as 100-degree-plus temperatures approach beginning as early as May, driving up usage of air conditioning, electric fans and refrigeration.

If the summer is unusually hot, however, ``all bets are off,'' said Lt. Col. Otto Busher, an engineer with the U.S. Army's 4th Infantry Division.