[Mb-civic] NYTimes.com Article: Iraq Chief Gives a Sobering View About Security

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Iraq Chief Gives a Sobering View About Security

October 6, 2004
 By EDWARD WONG 



 

BAGHDAD, Iraq, Wednesday, Oct. 6 - In his first speech
before the interim National Assembly here, Prime Minister
Ayad Allawi gave a sobering account on Tuesday of the
threat posed by the insurgency, saying that the country's
instability is a "source of worry for many people" and that
the guerrillas represent "a challenge to our will." 

Hours later, the American military said it had launched its
second major offensive of the last week, sending 3,000
troops, some of them Iraqis, in a sweep across the
Euphrates River south of Baghdad. Led by the 24th Marine
Expeditionary Unit, the troops overran a suspected
insurgent training camp and detained 30 suspects, the
military said in a written statement. They also seized
control of a bridge believed to be part of a corridor
allowing insurgents to move between strongholds in central
Iraq, the military said. 

The push followed a much larger and deadlier weekend
offensive in the insurgent-controlled city of Samarra, 60
miles north of Baghdad. American and Iraqi officials have
been saying they intend to take back rebel territory this
fall to lay the groundwork for general elections scheduled
for January. 

The operation on Tuesday took place in northern Babil
Province, a region that once served as a
munitions-production base for the old Iraqi Army and has
become a field of loosely knit insurgent cells in towns
like Mahmudiya and Latifiya. 

Bisecting the area is Highway 8, a crucial north-south
artery nicknamed the Highway of Death because dozens of
people have been ambushed and killed in small market towns
along its length by insurgents and bandits. 

In his speech, Dr. Allawi, who has cast himself as a tough
leader since taking office in late June, insisted that
elections would go ahead in January as planned, but he
acknowledged that there were significant obstacles standing
in the way of full security and reconstruction. The nascent
police force is underequipped and lacks the respect needed
from the public to quell the insurgency, he said, and
American business executives have told him that they fear
investing in Iraq because of the rampant violence here. 

His tone was a sharp departure from the more optimistic
assessment he gave to the American public on his visit to
the United States last month. At his stop in Washington,
Dr. Allawi made several sweeping assertions to reporters
about the security situation in Iraq, including saying that
the only truly unsafe place in the country was the downtown
area of Falluja, the largest insurgent stronghold, and that
only 3 of 18 provinces had "pockets of terrorists." 

He did not directly contradict those statements on Tuesday,
but his latest words reflected a darker take on the state
of the war. 

"It is true that the security situation in our country is
the first concern for you, and maybe for your inquiries,
too," Dr. Allawi said in the 100-member National Assembly,
which asked him combative questions after his speech in the
nearly hourlong session. 

The insurgents "are today a challenge to our will," he
continued. "They are betting on our failure. Should we
allow them to do that? Should we sit down and watch what
they are doing and let them destabilize the country's
security?" 

Though Dr. Allawi joined President Bush last month in
boasting of having 100,000 fully trained and equipped Iraqi
policemen, soldiers and other security officials, he
acknowledged Tuesday that there were difficulties in
creating an adequate security force. 

"It's clear that since the handover, the capabilities are
not complete and that the situation is very difficult now
in respect to creating the forces and getting them ready to
face the challenges," he said. 

He added that "the police force is not well equipped and is
not respected enough to lay down its authority" without
backing from a strong army. 

Dr. Allawi's talk, given inside the fortified government
headquarters on the west bank of the Tigris River, comes at
a crucial juncture for the American enterprise in Iraq.
Insurgents have stepped up a deadly campaign of car
bombings and assassinations even as American-led forces
push back into guerrilla territory. The successes of the
American offensives in Samarra and Babil Province will
ultimately depend on whether the Iraqi security forces can
combat the insurgency on their own after the American
troops withdraw to their bases. 

At stake now are the scheduled elections, which will appear
legitimate only if there is a large voter turnout. In
recent months, experts have voiced increasing doubts about
the ability to hold such elections, given the instability
here. 

A nationwide poll of 3,500 Iraqis just completed by the
Iraq Center for Research and Strategic Studies shows that
the number of Iraqis who say they are "very likely" to vote
in the elections has dropped to 67 percent, from 88 percent
in June. About 25 percent say they will "probably" vote.
The poll has a margin of error of 3.5 percentage points. 

More than 52 percent of those polled said they would not
vote for a candidate who was not from their ethnic,
religious or linguistic group. 

Violence flared up in other areas on Tuesday. Two car bombs
exploded in the city of Ramadi, an insurgent stronghold
west of Baghdad, killing four Iraqis and igniting a gun
battle between insurgents and American soldiers, The
Associated Press reported. 

At noon, a car bomb exploded next to a military convoy in
the northern city of Mosul, killing at least three
civilians riding in a car behind the convoy, the American
military said. Right after the explosion, insurgents
ambushed the convoy with rocket-propelled grenades and
small-arms fire. Four soldiers were wounded and taken to a
military hospital in Mosul. 

Police officials in Mosul said Tuesday that they had
discovered four headless bodies. The bodies were those of a
local woman and her family, the officials said. The woman
was running a prostitution house and was apparently
decapitated, along with her relatives, by a fundamentalist
Islamic group, they added. 

Several mortar blasts rocked Baghdad in the morning. One
shell landed at a passport office in the center of the
city, wounding one person seriously, the police said. The
mortar had been fired from a vehicle driving along a
highway. 

Hospital officials in Sadr City, a vast slum in northeast
Baghdad that is overwhelmingly hostile to the American
occupation, said one person had been killed in an overnight
airstrike by the Americans. For weeks, the military has
been deploying an AC-130 gunship and fighter jets over the
area to try to rout the Mahdi Army, a militia loyal to the
firebrand Shiite cleric Moktada al-Sadr. 

The airstrikes continued late Tuesday night and early
Wednesday, with explosions and the jackhammer sound of the
AC-130's cannons heard for miles around. 

Dr. Allawi said at his appearance on Tuesday afternoon that
he had met earlier in the day with leaders in Sadr City and
that the two sides were working to reach an agreement to
end the presence of heavy arms in the area. In the evening,
he appeared on Iraqi television and said local sheiks had
agreed to allow the police to patrol Sadr City. But a
senior Sadr aide, Abdul Hadi Daraji, said in an interview
that the Sadr organization had not agreed with some of the
conditions laid out by the government. 

An Iraqi employee of The New York Times contributed
reporting from Mosul for this article. 

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/06/international/middleeast/06iraq.html?ex=1098086266&ei=1&en=a7b8c8dcec50f7f6


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