By Rod Nordland
New York Times
BAGHDAD — Iraqis are in many ways taking to heart the adage that all politics is local, as Americans hand over to them ever greater control of affairs in the provinces. That local control, however, has brought more horror stories than successes in the past few days.
The New York Times
The crime rate has reportedly risen sharply in the last two months in Wasit Province.
In Anbar Province, six former Camp Bucca detainees were on their way home on Friday when local police officers abducted and killed them in revenge for their days as insurgents, according to relatives of the victims.
In Wasit Province, a hard-line new police chief appointed by the prime minister has been transferring corrupt policemen out of the area, but local political opponents say that is the reason the local murder rate seems to have doubled.
And in a remote part of northern Diyala Province, Iraqi soldiers surrounded a refugee camp for Iranian dissidents, Camp Ashraf, blockading food and water to the roughly 3,500 residents there. A spokesman for the dissidents’ group, the People’s Mujahedeen Organization of Iran, said Sunday that only the presence of Americans had prevented an attack on them.
At Iraqi request, Americans are still running the sprawling Camp Bucca prison, near Basra, but they have been steadily releasing all but the most hard-core insurgents. On Friday, a group of 74 Bucca prisoners was taken to Mosul, in Nineveh Province, screened by local officials and released.
Six of them had returned to their homes in Baiji when they heard that the police in Anbar were looking for them. They fled, but a police posse from Haditha hunted them down, handcuffed them and shot them repeatedly, killing all six, according to a leader of their Al Bonemir tribe, Salah Rasheed al-Goud, who was interviewed Saturday.
“One of the police officers thought they had killed his brother more than a year ago,” Mr. Goud said.
A police commander in Anbar Province, Tariq Yousif, confirmed that the police in Haditha had recovered the bodies of six former detainees. “We do not have details; an investigation is under way,” he said.
The killings in the southern province of Wasit were not themselves political, but many there blame the political squabbling between supporters of Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki and other parties for the increase in crime.
Last December, Mr. Maliki replaced the police chief with Maj. Gen. Raed Shakir Jawdat, who had been the police chief in Karbala when Mr. Maliki ordered a heavy-handed crackdown there on followers of the Shiite cleric Moktada al-Sadr.
“The crime rate in Wasit increased 50 percent during the last two months, 10 to 12 kidnappings, and even murders targeting women,” said Aziz al-Amara, commander of the Interior Ministry’s security force in Kut, the capital of Wasit Province. “The party competition among Maliki and his rivals after he gained huge power from the election in Wasit has led to this increase in the crime rate.”
Records at the morgue in Kut list 47 killings since January. Six of them were women, which is double the normal rate, according to an official there who spoke on the condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak on the record. That number did not include so-called honor killings, he added, in which women are killed for transgressions against Islam’s moral code.
Reached by telephone, the police chief vigorously defended his actions, but also said he was “honored” that he owed his job to support from Mr. Maliki’s Dawa Party.
“The crime rate reduced 80 percent,” General Jawdat said of his tenure. “Some of the armed robberies had been carried out by men in police uniforms using police cars, and I went after these guys.”
Sheikh Muhammed al-Nuamani, a religious leader in Kut and a friend of the prime minister’s, called General Jawdat “the greatest leader who has ever been appointed police chief.”
Far to the north, the Iranian refugees at Camp Ashraf have been a renewed source of concern ever since American forces handed over responsibility for the camp’s protection to the Iraqi Army on Jan. 1.
Last Friday, however, Iraqi forces surrounded the camp and cut off supplies, according to Shahin Gobadi, a spokesman for the dissidents, reached by telephone in Paris. Then, on Sunday morning, the refugees resisted an attempt by Iraqi soldiers to enter one of the camp’s buildings, leading to scuffles and beatings of residents that stopped only when American officers there as observers intervened.
“If the Americans leave, you will see a very serious human catastrophe and a massacre in this camp,” said a camp spokesman, Shahriar Kia, who was reached by telephone. So far, though, no one has been seriously injured or killed.
In other developments on Sunday, the deputy commander of American forces in Baghdad said 90 percent or more of American troops in the capital would withdraw to bases on the outskirts of the city by June 30, as mandated by the Status of Forces Agreement between Iraq and the United States.
The officer, Brig. Gen. Frederick Rudesheim, said American forces would focus on preventing infiltration of insurgents from hiding places in the rural areas surrounding Baghdad. He stressed that American combat operations into Baghdad would continue in July, although only on Iraqi request. “We have to do everything by, with and through the Iraqis,” he said.
Suadad al-Salhy and Abeer Mohammed contributed reporting from Baghdad, and Iraqi employees of The New York Times from Mosul, Salahuddin and Kut, Iraq.
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