August 2006 – Page 14

Former Leb PM al-Hoss: Bush is a terrorist

Former Lebanese Prime Minister Salim al-Hoss in an open letter to George W. Bush in the Daily Star:

You repeatedly claim that Israel is acting in self-defense. How preposterous! Self-defense on other people’s occupied territory is tantamount to one thing: blatant aggression.

You call Hizbullah a terrorist organization. We call it a legitimate resistance movement. There would have been no military wing of Hizbullah if there had been no Lebanese territory under Israeli occupation, if there had been no Lebanese hostages languishing in Israeli jails, and if Lebanon had not been exposed to almost daily Israeli intrusions into its airspace and territorial waters, and to sporadic incursions into Lebanese land and bombardment of civilian targets.

You cannot eliminate a party by demolishing a whole country. This would have been achieved peacefully by Israel withdrawing from the land it occupies, releasing Lebanese prisoners, and desisting from further acts of aggression against Lebanon.

Israel is the most horrendous terrorist power. And you, Mr. President, are unmistakably a direct partner, and hence a straight terrorist.

Ayman Nour to undergo surgery

Press reports today say imprisoned Ghad party leader Ayman Nour has been hospitalized and will undergo heart surgery within a few days.

Pictures of attacks on Lebanon – early August

A new set of pictures has been uploaded to the Flickr account. They were sent by Hanady Salman of as-Safir and show some of the effects of the last few days of bombing in Lebanon.

An Israeli strike on a suburb of Beirut.

Fishing boats covered in ashes and surrounded by an oil slick in a port south of Beirut.

Rescuers inspect a destroyed vehicle on a bombarded road.

Shit’s Creek (16)

August 6, 2006

We were nearing the end of our patrol when we got a call about a UXO incident – unexploded ordnance. Someone, somewhere had found some kind of exploded bomb and we were sent to deal with it.

Actually, our patrol was just there to secure the area and provide security while the EOD (explosives ordnance disposal or something, I swear, it’s a new acronym every day) was called in to clean up the mess of the war.

It turned out to be an unexploded mortar shell in a particular poor area somewhere in southwest Baghdad, a Shiite neighborhood not far from a Sunni neighborhood, another one of these fault lines in the city.

The young men and kids that came gathered at the arrival of the Americans and their humvees (we even had a Bradley tank with us, very impressive) said, why yes, someone did mortar us just the other day. Apparently not all of them went off.

One officer described it to me as the “new face of violence in Baghdad is senseless indirect fire.” It’s called indirect fire because you don’t see where it goes. He said once it was bombs in market places or in front of mosques, these days it was just a bunch of guys with mortar launcher and some shells shooting off a few into the nearby neighborhood and then running away. Not particularly aiming at anything, just shooting.

There are so many mortar shells in Iraq, it’s hard to grasp. Everyday the US army issues another press release about some massive “terrorist” weapons cache they have discovered containing hundreds of 60mm or 80mm mortars.

These are the raw materials for roadside bombs, incidentally. Usually they are wired together, attached to a mobile phone, and then when a US or Iraqi army patrol drives by, the insurgent makes a phone call.

Now, however, they are more and more being used for their intended purpose of being shot at people.

It was just a little 60mm mortar, sitting in the middle of a vacant, trash-filled lot in this poor grubby neighborhood. So the soldiers settled down to wait for the bomb squad, all the while grumbling because EOD was known to take a long time and it was already getting near dusk and the patrol should have been near its end.

I was near my own end. It was my second patrol of the day, it was really hot, and I had a throbbing headache so that I really didn’t care what happened to the little rocket over in the trash pile.

Then one of the soldiers comes over and said that one of the locals had told the interpreter that there were two more unexploded mortars nearby. “Who told you this?” asked the sergeant. “Guy with the dark hair and the yellow man-dress on.”

That didn’t narrow it down to much, but we eventually found the guy wearing the yellow dish-dash who directed us down through some buildings.

We come to another vacant trash filled lot, this time filled with sheep and an old shepherd (I mean what better place to pasture the flock than in an urban slum?). We asked him if he’d seen any mortar shells around and so he barked over at one of his teenage sons…

… who proceeded to come walking over to us carrying a pair of mortar shells in his bare hands! There was a collective gasp as everyone shouted for the interpreter to tell him to put them down, very gently. Which he did rather nonchalantly, clearly not sure why four huge soldiers with weapons and body armor were cringing away from him.

Turns out when the shepherd had come across them he’d neutralized them the best way he knew how and, as the soldiers put it, “tossed them into the shit creek” that passed for plumbing in this neighborhood.

Not long afterwards, the bomb squad showed up and was briefed on the situation. And the first thing the bomb guy did was go up to our two shit creek bombs and pick them up himself and carry them over to the other trash pile bomb.

We gave him a lot of room.

They then dug a hole, placed the mortar shells in there, put plastic explosives on top and then put a tire around the whole thing, took cover, and blew the whole mess up.

All in all it took a few hours and these happen all the time. We were minutes from the base when the patrol got a call about another UXO incident (lot of dud mortar shells out there it seems), and we were diverted in the pitch black night to go provide security for another team dealing with an errant mortar shell.

By this time my pounding headache had left me half blind and a little fed up with the whole situation so that as we stood around and provided pointless security, I vented bitterly to the sergeant, who was so amused (and shared my feelings) that he passed on my sentiments to the lieutenant. Who seemed to lack quite the same sense of humor.

We weren’t far from the main US base around there and one of the interpreters, who went around masked like most of them do, described the nearby village as an “insurgent village”. Apparently they would watch for the interpreters to leave the base on their breaks, follow them and then sell their identities to the insurgents.

I heard somewhere once that the insurgents will pay thousands of dollars for the name and address of an interpreter for the coalition forces.

Later I was eating with the soldiers. We’d spent enough time together inside a humvee that it only seemed normal that I sat with them in the chow hall. One sergeant was predicting that their tours were going to be extended this time around.

The 4th Infantry Division came into Baghdad in December so theoretically they should be leaving in November… but new troops were just moved into Baghdad to try to stop the brewing civil war. The new people had been stationed up in Mosul and had been set to go home themselves, now they’ve been moved to Baghdad and extended for three months.

This one sergeant felt pretty sure that they wouldn’t be allowed to go home either, not in the middle of the battle to retake the city.

Part of the sergeant’s skepticism stemmed from his first time in Iraq, he rolled in from Kuwait with the 2nd Armored Division in March 2003 and after one year, they were set to go home, sitting in the airport in Kuwait, six hours from ending the most exhausting year of their life when word came they had to go back.

Days later they were fighting the Mahdi Militia across southern Iraq and stayed another five months through the blazing summer in 2004.

Then they went home for a year and came back 2005. Matching his joking tone, I made some comment about it must be hard to stay normal with all that.

He stopped walking, turned and look at me, suddenly serious with a strange catch in his voice, “normal? I don’t think any of us are normal any more. There is no normal.”

Sarko and French Arabs

Interesting post at Aqoul on the fury of French Arabs at Nicholas Sarkozy’s pro-Israel comments during this war:

So Sarkozy bridged part of the gap between conservatives and xenophobes that weakened the classical French right. By doing so, he’s built a voter base large enough to make him the likely next conservative president. And unlike Jospin who lost Arab votes precisely after infuriating them by his statements against Hezbollah – the Sarkozy right-wing base is strong enough not to need Arabs as referees and there will probably be no conjunction of factors which could make Arab votes such a key factor again for the 2007 elections. All the talk about an Arab voter base which suddenly appeared in the aftermath of the 2002 election and on which Arabs could have capitalized is gone. Despite more Arab-related arguments against Sarkozy in 2007 than against Jospin in 2002, Arabs will be virtually powerless. Probably a proof that a spontaneous success gotten by luck more than by political organization and maturity dies away as quickly as it comes.

I tried to leave a comment but got an error message, so here it is (it makes more sense if you read the full article):

I am not so sanguine about the CFCM – it puts Islamists and people who are essentially agents for the Moroccan and Algerian governments in charge of representing the entire Maghrebi-Arab community.

I interpret Sarko’s pro-Israel stance not as an appeal to the far-right (which is not necessarily pro-Israel, sometimes for anti-Semitic reasons) but rather the mainstream Atlanticist right and part of the hawkish left. Basically his position dovetails nicely with the growing number of French intellectuals who are taking a pro-American stance, such as BHL, Alain Finkelkraut, and others. This is the fundamental split between the Chiracquistes and Sarko: it’s about their position on the US as an ally and as a model to change French society.

As for an “Arab vote” in France, as far as I can see it is not organized, so it’s hard to predict its impact.

Baathist coup foiled in Iraq?

Reports are emerging that exiled Iraqi Baathists met in Damascus (a while ago, but not clear when) to plan a coup against the Maliki government that they believe would be welcomed by the US:

We have learned from authoritative sources based in Damascus that a group of approximately 400 former Iraqi military ex-officers (primarily cadre who are Baathist and secular non-Baathists) held a conference in the Syrian capital to coordinate efforts to carry out a coup d’état to topple the new Government of Iraq. While the source has impeccable credentials, the advisability and practicality of putting in place this conspiracy seems extreme. More particularly, the plan resulted from the strange certainty of some former Baathist officers and senior political officials that, once the coup was underway, the U.S. would support it — reputedly because American officials, Baathists maintained, were fed up with the continued incompetence of the al-Jaafari/al-Maliki governments.

The belief of the ex-Baathists was that American officials were yearning for the Saddam Hussein era — a period of vicious dictatorship, albeit without the instability currently eviscerating the country. The ex-Baathists viewpoint seemed underpinned by a report that the United States had once groomed a strong-man to take over the country in the wake of Saddam Hussein’s toppling. The rumour was that General Nizar al-Khazrachi, who had defected to Denmark in the run-up to the second Iraq War, had once been contacted by the Americans with an offer of a return to Iraq to lead a military-style government. The rumour was that the Americans had finally induced Khazrachi to return to Iraq, and set him up in a makeshift suite of offices at the Baghdad International Airport — from where he could plot against the elected Government.

The Damascus group included some of the more well-known lights of the former Baathist regime, who fled the country on the eve of the war, to take up residence in Qatar, Jordan and other nearby countries. The conference was interrupted by news that the Americans had succeeded in killing the head of Al-Qaeda in Iraq, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi — and so the discussion quickly turned to the impact that killing would have on the Iraqi resistance. The tenor of the discussion resulted in a consensus that Zarqawi’s death would weaken the resistance, if only for a short time, until a more coherent leadership cadre could exert its influence. “The resistance is more broad-based than many Americans believe,” one attendee at the conference noted. “It may be that Zarqawi’s death will even strengthen the resistance, providing a rally point for increased numbers of fighters coming from foreign countries”.

I don’t even understand how they thought this might work and how they thought they might get the Shia militias to cooperate…

Via Praktike.

Reality hits

Israeli misgivings about Olmert’s and Peretz’s grandstanding:

It is doubtful that Olmert and Peretz, even in their worst nightmares, ever envisioned this spontaneous operation extending and transforming into the longest war to which the Israeli home front has been exposed since the War of Independence (not counting the terror attacks). But the enchanting myth of a “speedy, strong and elegant” IDF that “supplies the goods” within two or three days is blowing up in their faces, just as it blew up in the faces of their predecessors.

The article raises the big question: would Ariel Sharon have done this?

Beirut theater welcomes refugees

Because sometimes you need feel-good stories:

BEIRUT, Lebanon – Al-Madinah Theater was supposed to show art films this summer. Instead it has become a home to scores of refugees, and a cultural oasis where their children can act, draw and watch movies.

So far, 85 people have taken shelter from Israeli attacks, laying mattresses in the dressing rooms and wide corridors of two underground floors. In an office building above the theater, 125 others have taken refuge.

Volunteers show up daily at the theater on Hamra Street — several miles from Israel’s relentless bombardment of southern Beirut — to give art and drama workshops to help the displaced youth channel pent-up fears and anger into creative expression.

On the main stage, children scamper around their drama teacher, their giggles echoing through the cavernous theater. On a lower floor, youths bend over sheets of paper, drawing trees, butterflies and, in some cases, scenes from the hostilities that have forced them out of their homes in Beirut’s suburbs and southern Lebanon, where Israel is focusing its strikes on Hezbollah militants.

Word of the workshops has reached other refugee centers, and the number of children attending has swelled from about 30 to more than 100 on some days.

Read the rest.

Zawahri: Gamaa Islamiya members join Al Qaeda

Ayman Al Zawahri just showed up on Al Jazeera with a tape saying that several members of the Egyptian Gamaa Islamiya had now joined Al Qaeda. Here’s an initial wire report:

AP 05.08.06 | 22h14

Al-Qaida’s No. 2 leader announced in a new videotape aired Saturday that an Egyptian militant group has joined the terror network. The Egyptian group, Gamaa Islamiya, is apparently a revived version of a militant group that waged a campaign of violence in Egypt during the 1990s but had largely been suppressed by a government crackdown. «We announce to the Islamic nation the good news of the unification of a great faction of the knights of the Gamaa Islamiya … with the Al-Qaida group,» Ayman al-Zawahri, the deputy leader of al-Qaida said in the videotape aired on the Al-Jazeera news network.

While it’s not clear what the immediate significance of this in terms of Al Qaeda’s operational abilities, it is quite a momentous even from an Egyptian perspective. Firstly, it casts a shadow over the decade-long process of re-integration of former Gamaa Islamiya militants, starting with the public recantation of a good deal of the imprisoned leadership and the release of hundreds of prisoners.

Secondly, on a symbolic level it marks the reunificaiton of the Gamaa Islamiya and Islamic Jihad, groups that parted over method in the late 1970s and went on two different paths: a popular militant movement borne out of universities in Upper Egypt in the 1970s and 1980s that originally had government backing before it turned terrorists/insurrectionist for Gamaa Islamiya; and a cell-structured highly secretive group that carried out political assassinations as well as terror attacks for Islamic Jihad.

Islamic Jihad now only exists (aside potential sleeper agents) as Al Qaeda since Zawahri teamed up with Bin Laden in the 1990s; Gamaa Islamiya was on its way towards social reintegration (former member Montasser Al Zayat, a prominent lawyer, was a parliamentary election candidate in 2005). Tonight’s announcement spells out the possibility of a dissident wing of Gamaa Islamiya that had refused the recantation of the prison leadership (actually we know there are several dissident wings) joining Al Qaeda, and possibly making use of old networks in Egypt. So how worried should we be?

Probably not too much. The exiled Gamaa Islamiya leadership in Europe and elsewhere did not have mass appeal, indeed post-9/11 it became very difficult for it to do anything at all — especially after Londonistan began to be closed down. We will probably see in the next few days a statement by the imprisoned leadership condemning their old comrades and reiterating the recantation orchestrated by the Egyptian security services in the late 1970s.

I just spoke to Arabist contributor Hossam al-Hamalawy, who follows Islamist movements closely and has worked on rendition issues for human rights groups (read this article by him for background on the recantation). Hossam saw the Zawahri video, which I missed, he remembers three names mentioned by Zawahri:

1. Mohammed Shakwi al-Islambuli, the brother of Sadat assassin Khaled al-Islambuli, who lived in Iran (where his brother is a hero) at least until 9/11 and has been on the record for being against the imprisoned leadership’s recantation.

2. Mustafa al-Murq’, alias Abu Issar, who was based in London and was famously against the Algerian FIS’ killing of civilians. He also operated many of the Gamaa Islamiya’s outpost in Afghanistan during the Afghan civil war.

3. Most strangely, Rifai Ahmed Taha, who is believed to have been rendered from Syria to Egypt in 2001 and in prison ever since (although some believe he was executed.) Taha was known as the Gamaa’s “military commander” has also spent time in Afghanistan, and was even reported in 1998 to have signed the founding charter of Al Qaeda (which would mean he was already operating under Al Qaeda’s aegis.) Taha has reportedly received visits from his family in prison, but some say he was also heavily tortured. There is virtually no way he would have agreed to this while in prison, since he’d be signing his own death warrant.

What all this points to is that it’s unlikely to be more than a publicity stunt by a once major militant Islamist group that is now for the most part irrelevant in the world of Jihadis. As for membership of Al Qaeda, beyond allegiance to “Emir” Osama, it probably doesn’t mean any real operational co-ordination but following Al Qaeda’s general guidelines and stances on current events as highlighted in these kinds of tapes.

Pentagon to train Lebanese army?

The interesting thing about this AP story about US military training for the Lebanese army, written by hardcore pro-Israel hack Barry Schweid, is that it makes absolutely no mention of the Lebanese reaction to the proposal — whether in the Lebanese government or Lebanese army. It’s clear what the idea is, though:

The administration is striving for a resolution that would end the conflict between Israel and Hezbollah, now in its fourth week, and also establish conditions for a lasting cease-fire. Many other countries favor an immediate cease-fire.

I put this paragraph in just to show Barry Schweid’s work: no question of the administration’s definition of a “lasting ceasefire,” and a throwaway about what other countries want — the implication being they want an immediate, but not a lasting, ceasefire.

But I digress. It continues:

The military training would be designed to help the Lebanese armed forces “exercise control and sovereignty over all of Lebanese territory once we have an end to the fighting in such a way that is durable,” McCormack said.

So how are we to know that the White House or Pentagon has even discussed this with the Lebanese armed forces? And who exactly is going to disarm Hizbullah? A US-trained Lebanese army? Will they train them like they did many armies and security services across the region — SAVAK in Iran during the 1960s and 1970s for instance? Or just supply them with tools like tear gas (riot-control police in Egypt) and legcuffs or electric batons (Saudi Arabia and elsewhere, used for torture? Is US policy really encouraging the Lebanese army to take on Hizbullah — i.e. start another civil war? I’m not surprised we don’t see a Lebanese general confirming this.