-->BAGHDAD DISPATCH
Beirut Redux
by Hassan Fattah

Post date: 05.15.03
Issue date: 05.26.03
Every night for the past month, Mazen Al Bakir and his sister Layla have prepared themselves for the worst. Around 9 o'clock in the evening, the nightly security detail begins at their home in the southern Baghdad district of Saydiya. Bakir pulls a loaded pistol out of the closet, secures his front gate and doors with massive locks, and hides the keys. For the rest of the evening, the Bakirs stand guard at their home as sporadic gunfire from across their neighborhood ushers in another sleepless night in Iraq's capital.

The Bakirs' situation is hardly unique. Since the American takeover, Baghdad has turned into an Arab version of the Watts riots. Burning buildings dot the city skyline. Armed looters terrorize the population, tearing into homes and emptying them of their possessions. Petty crime has become rampant on the streets, virtually no one feels secure, and homes are never left unguarded at night.

The really scary part, however, may be yet to come. Thus far violence in Baghdad has been limited to unorganized gangs of looters carrying Kalashnikovs. But Iraqi security experts and other sources in the capital say that, under the nose of the American forces, Iraq's nascent political groups are forming armed militias and storing weapons as they prepare for a potential civil war for control of the country. In fact, The New Republic has learned, several Iraqis say even Hezbollah has formed a branch in Baghdad. Ultimately, if Baghdad's power vacuum is not filled soon, the rise of organized armed factions could turn Iraq's capital into a twenty-first-century version of 1980s Beirut.

General insecurity and looting has been the norm in Baghdad almost since the first Saddam Hussein statue fell. With small arms easily available from former members of Saddam's military and security services, many Iraqis have armed themselves and begun cleaning out the homes of Baghdad's wealthy and middle class. Street crime was infrequent under Saddam, but today random rapes, carjackings, and murders have become commonplace in many parts of the city, and as a result women have virtually disappeared from the streets. At Baghdad's Al Nouman Hospital, sources say 35 women who were raped and left for dead have been brought into the ward in recent weeks. Iraqis have become paranoid, reaching for their guns any time a suspicious-looking pedestrian passes in front of their homes."This is not a normal life--you just can't continue like this," says Fadi, a young Kurdish man who lives in the Karrada section of Baghdad. Days earlier, Fadi had watched thieves hijack a car and then fight each other over it.

But, in recent days, Iraqi security experts, ranking members of several Iraqi political groups, and average Iraqis have told TNR that a greater danger than carjacking may be in the cards: inter-factional warfare. Since the fall of Saddam, more than 30 different political parties have established themselves in Baghdad, ranging from the Kurdish People's Front to the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI), a theocratic group under the authority of newly returned Shia leader Mohammed Bakr Al Hakim. This should be a healthy sign. Except that, according to security sources, many of these parties have formed organized armed militias ranging in size from 500 men for Hizb Al Dawa, a leading theocratic Shia group, to more than 2,000 fighters for SCIRI, whose armed wing is called the Badr Brigade. SCIRI, like several of these organizations, allegedly received training for their militias from Iran's Revolutionary Guards. Even the long-repressed Iraqi Communist Party, led by aging Marxists, has supposedly set up a 600-man force.

Meanwhile, according to several security sources, even more dangerous groups may be setting up in Iraq. A group made up of former Baathists is attempting to constitute a militia of Saddam loyalists. And security sources in Baghdad say that Hezbollah, one of the most dangerous terrorist groups in the world, is forming an Iraqi branch."If nothing is done, these guys may export their movement outside of here and Iraq could become a base of operations," says one security source in the capital.

The militias have already begun to roam unchecked throughout Baghdad--except within a security perimeter surrounding the area where the American troops and most foreign journalists stay--and many other parts of the country. Some Iraqis even accuse Iraqi National Congress (INC) leader Ahmed Chalabi of turning his Pentagon-backed Free Iraqi Forces, who currently number more than 500 armed men, into a militia and claim that Chalabi's organization has in recent days attempted to recruit more fighters at Baghdad's Al Mustansiriya University. (Chalabi's security chief insists that the INC has actually been downsizing the armed group as he begins recruiting locals to form an established political party.) In total, security experts say, thousands of men from these armed factions are now wandering the streets of Baghdad and other cities, where they are claiming certain neighborhoods as turf, an ominous flashback to Lebanon's civil war, in which various factions staked out areas of Beirut and killed members of other groups who strayed onto their ground. Indeed, in just a few days in Baghdad, I have heard rampant rumors about the territoriality of these militias.

According to Iraqis, the militias have become prevalent in southern, Shia-dominated towns as well, while, in northern Iraq, Kurdish militias--the offspring of the Kurdish peshmerga fighters who battled Saddam's army alongside American Special Forces--are defining their turf. Meanwhile, a Sunni Wahhabi party is said to have created an armed militia in Falluja, a town outside Baghdad.

Though the armed wings of political parties already possess small arms, security sources say they are storing heavier weapons around Baghdad and other cities. In fact, says Sadoun Dulaimi, a one-time high-ranking Baghdad police official who recently returned to Iraq after fleeing the country in 1991 when Saddam sentenced him to death, what makes the militias so dangerous is their access to heavy weaponry, such as rocket-propelled grenades. In the north, Kurdish militias have taken over former storehouses of Saddam's army and have allegedly been helping themselves to the contents. In Baghdad, security sources say that militias have stored sophisticated arms, taken from former Iraqi army troops, in hidden caches throughout the Shia stronghold of Sadr City (formerly known as Saddam City). Even tanks left around Baghdad by the retreating Iraqi army may have fallen into militias' hands. Ultimately, Iraqis fear, a Lebanon-style civil war could be in the offing."Things keep snowballing, and, if they [the United States] don't control it, this will never end. This will only encourage a civil war," says former Judge Tariq Ali Saleh, who fled Iraq during Saddam's time but has returned to the country.



hough the United States has vowed to find and destroy matériel left over by Saddam's army, it has taken few steps to seek out and disarm the militias. The long-planned cleanup of arms has only just begun, after many militias already helped themselves to Saddam's most sophisticated weapons. What's more, says Dulaimi, one of around 100 technocrats assembled by the Bush administration to plan Iraq's reconstruction, he urged Jay Garner and other American leaders not to allow Iraqi political parties to form for six months after the takeover. Yet the American occupation force has not stopped parties from developing and then arming. Dulaimi resigned his position two weeks ago in protest of U.S. policies.

In part, U.S. reluctance to take on the militias may be a product of the relative security of the part of Baghdad where most Americans are billeted. Though most of the capital remains highly unsafe, and militias are becoming increasingly prevalent, American officials and journalists do not often see the armed groups because they generally stay within the small area surrounding the U.S. compounds and the Palestine and Sheraton Hotels, an area protected by Abrams tanks and machine-gun-wielding soldiers."The Third Infantry Division has provided a secure environment for Iraqis," insists U.S. Army spokesman Lieutenant Colonel Anthony Healy, standing in one of Saddam's former palaces. He must not have met Mazen Al Bakir.




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