Stories by Journalist Jill Carroll written from Iraq for The Christian Science Monitor:

Stories by Journalist Jill Carroll written from Iraq for The Christian Science Monitor:
http://humane-rights-agenda.blogspot.com/2006/01/stories-by-journalist-jill-carroll.html

04/15/05
Ordinary Iraqis bear brunt of war
http://www.csmonitor.com/2005/0415/p06s01-woiq.html

05/04/05
Old brutality among new Iraqi forces
http://www.csmonitor.com/2005/0504/p01s04-woiq.html

10/13/05
Sectarian strife tears at neighbors
http://www.csmonitor.com/2005/1013/p06s01-woiq.html

12/14/05
What Sunni voters want
http://www.csmonitor.com/2005/1214/p01s04-woiq.html

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From the April 15, 2005 edition
Ordinary Iraqis bear brunt of war
http://www.csmonitor.com/2005/0415/p06s01-woiq.html

By Jill Carroll | Correspondent of The Christian Science Monitor

BAGHDAD – Little Zeinab Yasseen was still asleep as the third Ramadan of her young life dawned. Like every night, she had drifted off listening to the chatter of the 26 relatives who also shared the house in Baghdad's poor Al Shaab neighborhood.

She awoke to her home collapsing on her. A car bomb exploded in front of the police station down the street, but it brought the roof down on Yasseen and her family. Somehow, everyone survived.

But 17 months later, Zeinab still can't move her legs. And the family is still recovering - emotionally, financially, and physically - from that instant of devastation.

Each explosion of this kind deepens Iraqis' doubts about the US and Iraqi government's ability to bring order. But whatever each attack costs the this government in credibility, it is ordinary Iraqis who pay the highest price.

Thursday's bombings in Baghdad brought more of the same.

After a steady decline in attacks during the last three months, insurgents launched a string of assaults this week, including coordinated car bombings, a reminder they continue to have the resources and expertise to strike apparently at will. Two car bombs went off a minute and a few hundred yards apart Thursday around 10 a.m. in the Baghdad neighborhood of Jadriyah.

US soldiers at the scene said 14 Iraqis were killed and 38 were wounded. Among the dead were a 14-year-old and a 17-year-old, brothers who were working painting the street curb. The series of attacks may signal a return to the levels of attacks seen before the Jan. 30 elections, a pattern predicted by many US military analysts who say history shows that the average insurgency takes about 10 years to put down.

Near the site of the first bomb, the back window of a car was blown out and lay on the ground littered with twisted black metal. A yellow decal on the cracked window read in Arabic: "In the name of God the compassionate, the merciful." The opening line of the first chapter of the Koran was meant to protect the car's owner.

For Zeinab's family, Thursday's attacks stir painful memories. The same October morning in 2003 when Zeinab was injured, four other car bombs ripped across Baghdad, killing some 43 people in one of the best orchestrated attacks up to that point. The day solidified the car bomb as the new weapon of choice in the escalating insurgency.

And almost a year-and-a-half later, Zeinab's family is still recovering. "The doctor said maybe it will get better," says Ashwaq Muhsin, Zeinab's mother. She has sold her jewelry to put food on the table. "She needs new clothes," adds Mrs. Muhsin. The family - all 27 of them - now live in four 15-foot by 20-foot municipal buildings since their home was destroyed.

Iraqi families like the Yasseens fall between the cracks of the meager state support networks that exist in Iraq. The US military offers compensation, but only for damage or death caused by the military. Victims of car bombings and other violence don't qualify. Most humanitarian organizations fled Iraq when the United Nations headquarters was attacked with a car bomb in August 2003.

Zeinab's sister Nisreen, 4 years old at the time, was uninjured. The day after the blast, she sat in a dirty pink shirt watching the adults pick through the rubble, surrounded by the few things the family had been able to salvage: Coffee pots, rolled-up mattresses, bits of clothing, and cups.

Now Nisreen is an energetic 5-year-old, bounding around the small room that is her house. Her younger sister, Zeinab, is now 4 but looks half that age and seems to have lost the ability to speak, as well as walk, since the explosion, her mother says.

Since the bombing, some of the neighbors have rebuilt their homes, and to everyone's horror, the police station has reopened. They don't see it as a source of security, but rather a fresh target for the insurgents.

The conservative Shiite family calls the people who set off the bomb "terrorists." But they also blame the American forces for not securing the country or giving them help. But most days, politics and religious ideology are far from their minds. Their focus is survival.

The family had hoped before the bomb to raise themselves above the subsistence level by operating a taxi.

"My son worked 10 years in Jordan to collect money for this car," says Jabbar Kathem Hassan, the 80-year-old patriarch of the family while pointing to a crumpled, blackened frame they had planned to use as taxi. "This was all we had and now it's gone."

Zeinab's father points to the room with no heat, electricity or indoor plumbing that opens onto a small, walled-in courtyard. The packed dirt yard serves as bathroom and kitchen, explains Mr. Kathem, a tall, thin man with a deeply lined face. Wet clothes are strung above it. A spigot that is the only water source juts out of the ground near toothbrushes hanging in a faded red basket on the wall.

Some 17 months after the bombing, his son, Hamid Hussein, provides the household's only regular source of income. His teacher's salary was recently doubled to 200,000 dinars a month, about $142. Most of that goes towards their huge hospital debts from that day. "The [extended] family helped us but couldn't pay to treat everyone so some people still have glass in their bodies," says Hamid.

Hamid had squirreled away $1,200 and bought the requisite gold jewelry so he could to marry his fiancée. It was all stolen from the rubble by looters after the blast, he says. His wedding day has been indefinitely postponed.

"I am busy giving my salary to the people who lent us money for operations. Life is expensive," he says, looking down at the floor of his bare cement room. "It's not enough. We only have one meal a day instead of three."

With no outside aid, Kathem knows they must rely on themselves and so he and the other men in the family try to find work as day laborers. Most days they come back empty handed.

"We're waiting for God's help," Kathem says. "I will work doing anything."
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From the May 04, 2005 edition
Old brutality among new Iraqi forces
http://www.csmonitor.com/2005/0504/p01s04-woiq.html
  
READY FOR ACTION? Iraqi policemen demonstrated techniques at a graduation in Samawa last month. US officials say they have conducted investigations into allegations of abuse by Iraqi police and soldiers. EDWARD HARRIS/AP

Allegations of rights abuses have risen over several months.

By Jill Carroll | Correspondent of The Christian Science Monitor

BAGHDAD – Iraqi special forces soldiers Ali Jabbar and Mohammed Ali insist they mete out justice fairly. They beat only the prisoners they know did something wrong, not the innocent ones.
In March, when a rocket attack on one of their bases missed the target but angered the soldiers, they searched the area and found two suspects.

"You want to know the truth? My arms are still tired from hitting those guys," laughs Mr. Jabbar in an interview along with Mr. Ali in Baghdad.

Throughout the war in Iraq, the brutality of the battlefield has occasionally spilled into interrogation rooms and prisons. The central figure in the Abu Ghraib prison-abuse scandal, Pfc. Lynndie England, pleaded guilty Monday to seven counts of mistreating prisoners.

But with Iraqis taking a greater role in battling the insurgency and patrolling their own streets as the new government begins work, accusations of human rights abuses are shifting away from the Americans and onto Iraqi police officers and soldiers.

The accusations of abuse range from reports of prisoner torture and death of detainees to the arbitrary arrest and abuse at the hands of inexperienced and untrained police officers.

Jabbar told the Monitor that during a raid he was on in January at a suspected insurgent hideout, three detainees died after being severely beaten by Iraqi security patrols.

The Iraqi Association to Defend Journalists is investigating several cases in which security forces allegedly beat or intimidated Iraqi journalists. And in a report issued in January, Human Rights Watch said that torture and abuse by Iraqi authorities had become "routine and commonplace."

The report detailed methods of interrogation in which prisoners were beaten with cables and pipes, shocked, or suspended from their wrists for prolonged periods of time - tactics that are more associated with Saddam Hussein's dictatorship than the democracy that is beginning to take root in that country.

While the US military has been training Iraqi police and soldiers for almost two years, critics say it has offered recruits abbreviated courses that are ill-suited for Iraq's security situation. The classes may have covered the basics, but have left many Iraqi police unprepared for the harsh conditions of their jobs.

This, combined with a nascent justice system that has an erratic record of prosecuting insurgents, has spawned a return of Hussein-era tactics among many of the country's security forces, say rights groups and analysts.

In fact, many of the old members of Saddam Hussein's security forces are filling the ranks of the new police units and security forces. And many of these hardened soldiers practiced in the brutality of his regime initially received no Western-style training, says Robert Perito, an expert on post conflict security at the US Institute of Peace.

"In the long run, with the assistance of the US military unfortunately ... [we are creating] a security force which is very much like the old Saddam security forces," says Perito. "That's not what we set out to do."

Shortcomings

Perito says 40,000 Iraqi police officers from Mr. Hussein's regime went through a rapid, 21-day program after the war that was little more than an introduction to policing using Western standards of human rights and law-enforcement practices.

He says another 20,000 trained in Jordan took a two-month course modeled on police training program in Kosovo. In Kosovo, however, the training lasted for five months in addition to four months of field work.

"They are getting the bare bones of that effort. They are getting what amounts to an introduction to community policing," Perito says, and the program assumes the officer is going to graduate into a benign environment. "Instead, the US military has put them on the fight against the insurgents."

US officials admit to shortcomings in the training. In response, police officers are now taught survival skills tailored to Iraq's dangerous environment and the use of heavier weapons needed to combat well-armed insurgents. They have also been spending more time on lessons in human rights, and forces raised by the Iraqi government are receiving Western training, says Col. Richard Hatch, staff judge advocate for the military's Security Transition Command in Iraq.

"We recognize it and take it very seriously," says Colonel Hatch, of security forces abusing Iraqis. "What the Iraqi security forces can't do is lose the support of the Iraqi people."

He says there have been several investigations into allegations of abuse by Iraqi police and soldiers.

"What we emphasize is the need to break from the past practices of the former regime," says Hatch. "Another thing is to convince them that these tactics and procedures are less effective. By treating detainees humanely, we have seen information is more accurate than from coerced sources."

That has not been lost on one Iraqi police officer who first became an officer four years ago under Hussein's police force, which was notorious for corruption and abuse. Now, he says, he takes pride in his respect for human rights and proper handling of prisoners.

"We don't hit them because they are not animals and we are not animals," says the officer, who refused to give his name. He says he didn't have permission from the Ministry of Interior to speak to the media.

But Jabbar and Ali say instinct often takes over when they arrest someone whom they are sure is an insurgent. They also say they're concerned that if they don't exact some justice, no one will.

"It's soldiers' democracy," says Jabbar. "The reason we want to kill them is because of rumors that the Americans will release them."

CLICK: A US soldier teaches the use of handcuffs in Mosul, Iraq. The US says it now puts more emphasis on human rights in training. MOHAMMED AMEEN/REUTERS

Vigilante justice: Perito says such vigilante justice among security forces is common in countries with a weak justice system and prisons that allow the guilty to go free.

Police in Haiti in 1996 and 1997 shot prisoners that had been arrested and then released by corrupt prisons or judges on several occasions for fear they would seek retribution against the officers.

"It's not to be condoned but it's not unexpected," Perito says. "You need to develop police, courts, and prisons simultaneously."

But Jabbar and Ali's motivations don't stem from corruption or blood thirst. To them, beating people that they feel are guilty is avenging the deaths of fellow soldiers or ridding their country of the people trying to destroy it.

They abuse prisoners only when, Ali says, they "find evidence they are real terrorists. If there is no evidence, we respect them." He says that his superior officers don't condone the abuse. "If they kill [a prisoner] and he is unarmed, they will punish us," he says.

Deadly force: But Jabbar shows little remorse for the January raid on a house in Baghdad's Hurriyah neighborhood, in which, he says, three detainees were beaten so badly that they died.

When he and fellow soldiers broke down the door, they found six men inside. They had cellphones that contained pictures taken surreptitiously of soldiers, which Jabbar and the others took as signs they were marking targets.

"These guys kill our colleagues and friends and we beat them, but they didn't feel anything because they had been drinking. We didn't hit them in the head. Only on the body, and using the donkey stick but three guys died from that," says Jabbar, using the nickname they have given a long stick they often hit detainees with.

"The police investigated and [found that] they were terrorists and they were dangerous guys. They attacked police and police stations," he says.

They also point out that the rampant violence and instability of the country means many Iraqis are willing to tolerate harsh practices of their security forces if it means bringing some order.

"Medfee!" says Ali, an Arabic phrase that means "it's not worth it," of using more humane approaches with people they arrest.

"Diplomacy does not work with those guys," he says.
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From the October 13, 2005 edition
Sectarian strife tears at neighbors
http://www.csmonitor.com/2005/1013/p06s01-woiq.html

Iraqis vote Saturday on a constitution aimed at unifying the country. But in Baghdad, the Sunni-Shiite divide widens.

By Jill Carroll | Correspondent of The Christian Science Monitor

BAGHDAD – The soft grass of Wisam Ali's front garden in the southern Baghdad neighborhood of Sadiyah once beckoned to his friends, sometimes a dozen at a time, to gather and catch up on the news.

But now, "only three or four are left. Most of them were killed," says Mr. Ali, sitting on lawn furniture on the untrampled grass of his home.

In a crescent of neighborhoods on Baghdad's western and southern edges - Abu Ghraib, Sadiyah, Amriyah, and Dora - average Iraqis say sectarian violence has driven people from their homes, shuttered businesses, and killed untold numbers in what appears to be a campaign by armed groups on both sides to drive deeper the wedge between Sunnis and Shiites.

The constitution that will be put to the Iraqi people for a vote this weekend was meant to prevent such violence by unifying the diverse country. But the referendum comes at a time when the country has never seemed more divided.

Shiites describe threatening leaflets fluttering down on their front stoops that are backed up by bombings and shootings by Sunni insurgent groups. Sunnis fear arrests by Shiite-dominated Iraqi police and army or Shiite militias like the government-sanctioned Badr Brigade.

While Baghdad is a teeming metropolis, at the neighborhood level the communities are small and most people know each other, including their religious affiliations. This closeness has spurred many marriages and lifelong friendships between the city's diverse groups. But now such closeness can be a liability for those living in neighborhoods closest to the troubled western areas of Iraq.

The killings and other violence in the neighborhood have driven out most of Ali's neighbors. Those left have closed off their small street from the main road with concertina wire and debris.

Shiites appear to be more often killed in such violence, based on interviews and the frequency of car bombs and other violence directed at Shiites. But Sunnis say ever since the Shiite Islamist party, the Supreme Council of the Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI), swept January's elections, its Badr Brigade militia has stepped up targeted assassinations of prominent Sunnis.

The sounds of war

Helicopters often roar overhead and tanks rumble loudly down a main street in the west Baghdad Amriyah neighborhood, a stone's throw from the airport and the American base there.

"Really, I am afraid," says Iyad Ahmed, a Sunni who sells paint and hardware supplies in a shop he is considering closing because of attacks on his street.

He reaches down to a bottom drawer in a desk and reveals the AK-47. "The Iraqi soldiers are not normal soldiers. They come from the [Shiite political] parties ... they come in the clothes of police and kill people."

He charges that his cousin's son was taken by Iraqi security forces, and that he found him dead at a hospital with signs he had been beaten. "I asked the neighbors what happened and they said he was always talking to people about Sunni and Shiite. Only speaking!" exclaimed Mr. Ahmed. "After this I thought the problem [of Sunnis being targeted] in Iraq was very bad."

A little farther west is Abu Ghraib, a town within Baghdad's environs and home to the prison infamous for abuses under Saddam Hussein and US forces.

Abu Abdullah's prominent Shiite family in Abu Ghraib participated in the first celebrations of major Shiite holidays there after the fall of Baghdad. Their Sunni neighbors even helped guard the traditional processions marking the death of the Shiite saint Imam Hussein. But a year-and-a-half later, the 18-member family fled their two large homes for another Baghdad neighborhood after they were warned of threats against them and a close family friend was killed.

"The insurgents started to kill the Shiites and we saw no reaction from the Sunnis against them," says Abdullah, who used a false name.

"The people who were killed by the outlaws, their names were on a blacklist hung in the market," he says. "After that, they were killed and some other people received threats."

But the southern Baghdad neighborhood of Dora has seen some of the worst sectarian violence. Abu Mohammed, a Shiite resident, says eight of the 20 Shiite families that once lived on his street had at least one member of the family killed. He says one was killed after being accused of being a Badr Brigade member.

"We are the only Shiite family left" on his street, says Abu Mohammed, who also feared using his real name. "We heard from a neighbor that we should move as our name was on a list."

Fellow Dora resident, Abu Omar, has different fears as a Sunni. "We are terrified the most of Iraqi Army and special forces," says Abu Omar, who also used a false name. He says he fears being accused of being a terrorist.

"Once I used to feel sorry when someone attacked the police or killed soldiers and special forces. I changed this point of view after I saw a raid on my neighbors at 5 a.m., catching them barely dressed," he says.

No money to move

Abu Omar and Abu Mohammed say Dora has been virtually lawless since a few months after the US invasion. The violence has depressed real-estate prices so residents can't rent or sell their homes for enough money to be able to move. Commerce has also been curtailed.

In Sadiyah, Wisam Ali says homes have lost a third of their value. "If you stop a taxi driver and tell him 'Sadiyah', he won't take you," says Saif Ali, Wisam Ali's brother.

But for as many examples as residents rattle off of the sectarian violence, they are adamant that the Sunni-Shiite divide is created by outside forces and will list the diversity of their family and friends to prove it. They say they feel like pawns.

"I woke up one morning and someone wrote, 'this nation will live only by jihad' on my fence," says Abu Mohammed, from Dora.

"The problem," he adds, "is that I can't erase what the insurgents put on my fence. But if the Americans see it...." His voice trails off, but he indicates that he worries US forces might search his home or arrest him.

With no choice but to lock his door and hope it protects him, Wisam Ali in Sadiyah says he is turning to the only authority he still believes in.

"Where will we go? We have no one outside Iraq to support us. We think about [leaving] but it's hard," he says. "God will protect us."

SOURCE: NEMA; AP; RICH CLABAUGH - STAFF
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From the December 14, 2005 edition
What Sunni voters want
http://www.csmonitor.com/2005/1214/p01s04-woiq.html
  
THE MINORITY VOTE: Iraqis hung posters Tuesday of Sunni Arab candidates. Iraq's Sunni Arab minority is expected to turn out in force for Thursday's parliamentary elections.
SAMUEL ARANDA/AFP/GETTY IMAGES

By Ilene R. Prusher and Jill Carroll

BAGHDAD AND HUSEYBAH, IRAQ – In a complete turnabout from last January's vote to select an interim assembly, Sunni Arabs are expected to turn out in large numbers Thursday to select Iraq's new parliament.

In some cases, they are being driven to participate by a sense of disenfranchisement and a desire to gain more political sway in a country many see as being dominated by a powerful Shiite and Kurdish alliance.

They are also motivated by a strong anti-US sentiment that runs throughout much of the Sunni community. In fact, some Sunni politicians are even using images of dead insurgents to attract support among those who are sympathetic to Iraq's violent rebellion.

While most agree Iraq's permanent parliament will have greater Sunni representation, it will be an uphill battle for this minority to regain a foothold in the country they once dominated.

Sunni anger grew Tuesday as news spread that Mizhal al-Duleimy, a prominent Sunni politician, was fatally shot while campaigning in the city of Ramadi, west of Baghdad. That comes on top of fresh reports that Sunnis arrested by Shiite forces are being mistreated and tortured in underground prisons. Iraq's interim prime minister, Ibrahim Jafaari, acknowledged that more abused prisoners have been found inside jails run by his interior ministry.

"We kept telling the US and the UN that there are such prisons, and that all the prison are full of Sunnis," says Nabil Mohammed Yunis, a political scientist and consultant with the Iraqi Islamic Party, which is one of the prominent groups in a multiparty Sunni slate named the Iraqi Consensus Front. The prisons are an "issue that will push others to participate in the elections. People want to see that there will be a political balance in the government, so that such prisons will be closed, because most of the people in them are innocent."

At an appliance shop in downtown Baghdad, several Sunni shop managers talk about the elections in hushed tones, stopping the conversation when their Shiite employees come within earshot.

"A lot of bad things have been happening on the ground since Shiites captured the government," says Bassem As-Shumari, one of the managers. The men say that most government-employed Sunnis have been thrown out of their jobs, and there has been an increase in random arrests and disappearances.

Co-worker Taha Sheikhli says that his brother-in-law was among a group of Sunnis brought before a Shiite-run court in Sadr City. He says his brother-in-law was released with the demand he pay 2 million Iraqi dinars [about $1,380] in protection money or see his family killed; they fled to Syria instead.

"This is not a pure democracy," says Mr. Sheikhli. "We'll do our duty, so I'll vote for a Sunni party, but I what I really want is someone to unify the country, not increase divisions."

Theirs is a familiar theme heard across Iraq's complicated ethnic and political spectrum. Sheikhli and Mr. As-Shumar, like many Sunnis, say they are voting for the Iraqi Consensus Front - a slate consisting of the three main Sunni parties - but say they also support Iyad Allawi, the former prime minister, who is a secular Shiite.

"I like Allawi," says As-Shumar, "because he cares about Iraq, not which sect you're from." If they were able to cast two ballots, the men said, they'd give their vote for parliament to the Sunni parties, and a second vote to Mr. Allawi for prime minister.

Indeed, they view Allawi as the figure who can crack down on Iraq's spiraling insecurity. But that tough image is read differently by others. Religious Shiites have been painting Allawi as a neo-Baathist, attacking him with posters that compare him to Saddam Hussein.

Beyond the allegations of prisoner abuse, many Sunnis are heading to the ballot box hoping to prevent the country from being partitioned.

The draft of the Iraqi constitution, passed in a referendum in October, raises the prospect of a federalist system that will increase autonomy for Kurds in the north and Shiites in the south. Many Sunnis fear that will leave them increasingly powerless - and potentially deprived of oil-wealth - in the middle.

"Our campaign is against sectarian divisions, and so our first priority is to rewrite the constitution," says Naseer Al-Ani, a political officer for the Iraqi Islamic Party, one of the leading parties on the Sunni slate. The party's vice president, Ayad al-Samaray, says he fears interference in the election process at polling stations around the country, which are likely to be under the thumb of parties trying to get elected.

In western Iraq, in the heart of the Sunni insurgency, voter turnout is also expected to be high. In the town of Huseybah, the campaign posters feature dead Iraqis, labeled as "martyrs." The posters promote a list of candidates headed by Adnan Dulaimi, a Sunni Arab leader whose tribe is one of the most influential in the region and is believed to have credibility with insurgents.

He has made clear his opposition to the presence of American troops in Iraq, which has boosted his popularity in the eyes of many Arab Sunnis. His decision to participate and to encourage Sunnis to vote is seen by some American officials as a sign that Sunni leaders would depart from their murky support for insurgents, and instead use the political process to address their grievances.

But as Mr. Dulaimi popularity indicates, some voters see democracy and support for the insurgency not as mutually exclusive ideas. Many Iraqis here say they support the American and Iraqi military presence in town to keep it safe, but they also plan to vote for Dulaimi or rival Sunni candidate Saleh Mutlaq. Both candidates have made opposition to the American military presence the cornerstone of their appeal to average Sunnis.

"Saleh Mutlaq is personable and straigthtforward. He's a good man and he knows his country,'' says Watha Naqab, standing in a narrow street as US marines and Iraqi soldiers hand him a leaflet encouraging him to vote.

"We want Adnan Dulaimi because we've known [his organization] for a long time,'' says Mohammed Mahdi, squatting next to an 18-wheel truck he's repairing. He lists the benefits he expects from the election. "We want security. Hopefully after the election everything will be better."

The Sunni candidates here are also playing on themes of Sunni disenfranchisement and opposition to the new constitution.

The more Sunnis that win seats in this national election, the greater their chance to alter the constitution when the body sits. "The Sunni parties have done a pretty good job about getting the word out about disenfranchisement,'' says Lt. Col. Robert Glover, who heads the Marines rebuilding and compensation programs in the area.
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