Security officials in Diyala province have withdrawn permits allowing some 10,000 Sunni Awakening members to carry weapons (عربي).
A spokesman for the Iraqi military said the Awakening members are civilians, "so it is not reasonable to authorize around 10,000 personnel to carry weapons in this province." Awakening leaders responded by threatening to withdraw their men from checkpoints in Diyala.
I had to laugh this morning when I read Saudi prince Turki al-Faisal's criticism of Iraqi prime minister Nouri al-Maliki.
"Adding to the brutal mayhem taking place there, we are watching a deliberate effort on the part of the incumbent prime minister, Mr al Maliki, to hijack the results of the election and deny the Iraqi people their legitimately elected government," he said.
The substance of his criticism is actually fair: Maliki and his allies spent weeks complaining about fraud and questioning the validity of the election, but the recently-concluded Baghdad recount found virtually zero evidence of tampering.
But... a member of the Saudi royal family criticizing anyone for being insufficiently democratic? Seriously?
The Washington Post does a little concern-trolling today about the Iraq withdrawal deadline, noting that the Obama administration still plans to withdraw on schedule despite "political uncertainties in Iraq."
A series of coordinated attacks across Baghdad today -- 23 separate incidents, in Baghdad and seven other cities -- killed close to 100 people.
There's little to say about the violence, honestly. We've assembled a list of the attacks, and the casualty counts, after the jump. The scope is stunning: A dozen attacks on police and army checkpoints in Baghdad; coordinated car and suicide bombings in Hilla, Suweira and Fallujah; and other brazen attacks against security and political officials.
Iraq's political class -- distracted by the government formation process -- hasn't said much about the violence. Prime minister Nouri al-Maliki hasn't released an official statement on the violence, and I haven't seen him (or any other Iraqi officials) quoted in the Iraqi/Arabic press.
Ali al-Dabbagh, Maliki's spokesman, did say tonight (عربي) that the attacks "have the hallmarks" of Al-Qaeda in Iraq.
More than 60 people have been killed in a series of bombings across Baghdad and Anbar province.
The bombings in Baghdad targeted civilian areas in several different neighborhoods. Two car bombs reportedly went off in Sadr City, killing nearly 40 people. One bomb struck a market; the other went off near Moqtada al-Sadr's headquarters (عربي).
I was out of town all weekend -- no laptop or anything! -- and apparently picked the worst possible weekend for a trip, because three major Iraq stories broke in the span of 72 hours. So here's my belated attempt to play catch-up -- and an effort to push forward each story based on today's reporting/analysis.
I don't really want to wade into yesterday's debate on whether or not the Iraq surge "worked," which Andrew Exum started and Michael Cohen (and others) continued. (Haven't we already had this argument a few dozen times in the blogosphere?) It's an almost-impossible question to answer, because it requires disentangling the surge itself -- the infusion of troops -- from the Sunni Awakening and the ethnic cleansing in Iraq.
Suffice it to say that I disagree with Exum; I think the surge was a tactical success and a strategic failure. But in Exum's defense, I do want to correct one thing from Andrew Sullivan's response.
A series of explosions across Baghdad this morning killed at least 34 people and left scores more wounded. Baghdad police counted a total of seven bombs (عربي) in residential areas; the bombers targeted both Sunni and Shi'ite areas.
(Updated below) There's been a lot of buzz lately about Wikileaks, the whistle-blowing Web site, which announced last week that it would release video of a Pentagon "murder-coverup."
The video is out -- and embedded here after the jump -- and shows an Apache helicopter gunning down a group of Iraqis, including two journalists, in a square in eastern Baghdad.
I don't want to speculate too much about the motives behind two brutal insurgent attacks in and around Baghdad this weekend. One seems to be a revenge attack; the other, I'm not so sure.
The first attacks happened yesterday: A group of gunmen raided three homes in Hawr Rajab, a village on the highway running south from Baghdad to Mahmoudiya. 19 men and five women were handcuffed and killed; many were tortured, according to Iraqi police, who reported finding victims with broken bones.
Refugees International has a new report out on the grievous humanitarian situation confronting the millions of Iraqi refugees and IDPs displaced by the war.
The United Nations estimates that more than 2.2 million Iraqis have fled since the U.S. invasion in 2003. Just 426,000 -- less than one-fifth -- have returned, according to the RI report. Some are too traumatized to come back; others would like to, but worry about a lack of jobs or housing, neither of which are provided adequately by the Iraqi government.
President Obama issued a few brief remarks yesterday afternoon, after polls closed in Iraq. Most of it was fairly standard stuff -- glad to see the brave Iraqi people exercising their right to vote, terrorists tried and failed to disrupt the election, etc. -- but he also made a slightly interesting comment about the withdrawal timetable.
Polls closed in Iraq a few minutes ago after 10 hours of voting. The ballot was marred by a few dozen insurgent attacks around the country -- but casualties are remarkably low, and voter turnout (anecdotally at least) seems to be fairly high.
We'll update this thread throughout the day with new developments. Today's news will largely come from non-Iraqi sources: Many Iraqi newspapers suspended publication for the day to allow their staffs time to vote. Here's Al-Rafidayn's statement on the suspension (عربي), for example; As-Sabaah has a banner across its homepage (عربي). So most of today's news comes from Western and pan-Arab news sources.
I forgot to make this point in yesterday's Maliki/SOFA post -- thanks to Joel Wing (in comments) and Michael Hanna (via e-mail) for reminding me.
I do think the Iraqi and American governments will renegotiate the status of forces in a very limited sense, either later this year or next, to provide for a small contingent of U.S. trainers in Iraq. This is standard practice in countries that receive U.S. military aid: If the Pentagon gives high-tech military hardware to another army, someone has to teach that army how to use its new equipment. And Iraq will continue to receive billions in military aid for years to come.
But we're talking about, at most, a few thousand troops -- not the Korea on the Tigris envisioned by Tom Ricks. When I said yesterday that Maliki is unlikely to renegotiate the SOFA, I was referring to that latter scenario.
I nearly fainted earlier today when I glanced up at CNN and saw a reporter doing a live shot from... Iraq! I thought U.S. networks forgot the country existed -- but for a week, at least, it's back on television.
The reporter in question was CNN's Arwa Damon, and she was rolling clips of an interview with Iraqi prime minister Nouri al-Maliki, who hinted at asking U.S. troops to stay beyond 2011 -- a decision that would require amending the Status of Forces Agreement.
Nir Rosen reports from Iraq in The National's weekly Review, and it's worth a read, as is most of Rosen's work. In many ways, today's piece is similar to his April 2009 Review piece: Rosen argues that the Sunni-Shi'ite sectarian war is over, because the Iraqi state is too strong.
There are still militias active in Iraq, and the level of deadly violence would be unacceptable almost anywhere else on Earth. But the fears frequently voiced by foreign analysts and reporters - that the civil war is merely in abeyance, and that sectarian fury could break out again at any moment after a series of deadly attacks, or an unfavourable election result - are overblown.
But you nonetheless see some ominous signs for the future throughout Rosen's piece.
The other big Iraq story this morning, aside from the Moqtada al-Sadr warrant, is a spate of suicide bombings in Diyala province which killed about 30 people.
Two car bombs went off simultaneously this morning, around 9:30 local time, at the provincial government's main building in Baquba (the capital of Diyala) and in a nearby intersection. A third bomber, reportedly wearing a police uniform with the rank of lieutenant, blew himself up at Baquba's main hospital -- as casualties from the first two bombings began arriving for treatment.
I promised to stop writing about calls for delayed withdrawal in Iraq, so I'll keep this short. But Tom Ricks has a new CNAS policy paper repeating his call for a delayed withdrawal. It's basically a longer version of yesterday's op-ed, with a couple of photos and a graph about coalition troop strength (which contributes nothing to the reader's understanding of current events in Iraq).
I've long believed that folks in Washington who want the U.S. to delay its withdrawal from Iraq are really advocating a long-term U.S. military presence in the country. Their basic argument -- Iraq still has problems, so the U.S. can't leave yet -- creates a slippery slope towards lengthy occupation. Tom Ricks is at least honest about this point in his New York Times op-ed today.
The military is drawing up plans to delay the U.S. withdrawal from Iraq, according to the Washington Post. I'm staunchly in the "withdraw on time" camp -- but (as I mentioned on Twitter yesterday) I'm honestly not too concerned about these reports. First, the backstory:
But Army Gen. Ray Odierno, the top U.S. commander in Iraq, said Monday that he had briefed officials in Washington in the past week about possible contingency plans.
Odierno declined to describe the plans in detail and said he was optimistic they would not be necessary. But he said he was prepared to make the changes "if we run into problems" in the coming months.
This is where I always like to point out that the Pentagon has a plan on the books for invading Canada. That's why you have military planners: to prepare for contingencies. And with all the talk in recent months about how the U.S. should delay its withdrawal, I'm not surprised Odierno has a plan for that scenario.
