All Sorts Of Iraq War News

The U.S. strategy in Iraq, the "we'll stand down as the Iraqi military stands up" took a hit yesterday with the assassination of the Iraqi General in charge of the capital, Baghdad.

The top commander of the Iraqi army division in Baghdad was killed Monday when his car came under small-arms fire while traveling through the capital, the U.S. military said. Maj. Gen. Mubdar Hatim Hazya al-Dulaimi was one of the highest-ranking members of the new Iraqi army to be killed in insurgent violence. Under his leadership, the 6th Iraqi Army Division has been gradually assuming control of parts of the capital from U.S. forces.

His killing could set back security efforts in Baghdad, particularly following the recent outbreak of sectarian violence, according to a senior U.S. commander who worked closely with him.

By most accounts, Dulaimi was one of the most effective flag officers in the Iraqi Army.

The Iraqi general, in his mid-fifties, was an aggressive, inspirational leader and rising star within the army, (Maj. Gen. William G. Webster Jr., commander of the Army's 3rd Infantry Division) said. A Sunni Arab sheik from southern Baghdad, Dulaimi led a division under Saddam Hussein during the Iran-Iraq war in the 1980s, and since Hussein's fall had commanded two other divisions before being selected by the Defense Ministry for the critical job in Baghdad. "He was certainly destined to be a senior leader of all the armed forces," Webster said.

The U.S. is currently trying to improve it's chances in Iraq by figuring out how many insurgents and militiamen have infiltrated the Iraqi armed forces.

As the threat of full-scale sectarian strife looms, the American military is scrambling to try to weed out ethnic or religious partisans from the Iraqi security forces.

The United States faces the possibility that it has been arming one side in a prospective civil war. Early on, Americans ceded operational control of the police to the Iraqi government. Now, the police forces are overseen at the highest levels by religious Shiite parties with militias, and reports of uniformed death squads have risen sharply in the past year...

The Iraqi Army poses less of a problem than the police, because the American military has direct operational control over it, and because the Americans took more care in building it up. Kurdish militiamen, though, make up a significant part of it...

The units believed to be most plagued by militia recruitment and sectarian loyalties are the police paramilitary forces, which have a total of 17,500 members, the American military says. The regular blue-uniformed police force numbers 89,000, and the border force totals 20,000. But there are serious doubts about whether anyone has an accurate overall tally.

The paramilitary forces are divided three ways ,— the commandos, the public order brigades and a mechanized brigade that will soon be shifted to the army. Matthew Sherman, a former Interior Ministry adviser, said Shiite parties were especially keen to seize control of those forces because they can operate anywhere in the country and have great autonomy.

The Interior Ministry is accused of sponsoring death squads in police or paramilitary uniforms...

American commanders say they have recently learned that virtually all the members of the 7,700-member public order brigades, which do light infantry duty, were Shiites...

"When we stood them up, we didn't ask, 'Are you Sunni or are you Shia?' " Maj. Gen. Joseph F. Peterson, in charge of police training, said in an interview at a base in Taji, north of Baghdad, as he was visiting soldiers newly assigned to the Iraqi police. "They ended up being 99 percent Shia. Now, when we look at that, we say, 'They do not reflect the population of Iraq.' "

Nice.

Speaking of sectarian troubles in Iraq, the U.S. ambassador is saying that now is not the time for American forces to pull out of the country which we have ruined.

The top U.S. envoy to Iraq said Monday that the 2003 toppling of Saddam Hussein's regime had opened a "Pandora's box" of volatile ethnic and sectarian tensions that could engulf the region in all-out war if America pulled out of the country too soon.

In remarks that were among the frankest and bleakest public assessments of the Iraq situation by a high-level American official, U.S. Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad said the "potential is there" for sectarian violence to become full-blown civil war...

Military officials must decide this month whether to cancel deployments of several Army combat brigades ,— a cancellation that would lead to a reduction in the total number of U.S. troops in Iraq by midyear, from about 130,000 to about 100,000. For nearly a year, Casey has said that a "substantial reduction" in troops could occur in 2006, and cited spring as the time when the critical decisions would be made.

Some U.S. servicemen are unilaterally canceling their deployments.

At least 8,000 members of the all-volunteer U.S. military have deserted since the Iraq war began, Pentagon records show...

Since fall 2003, 4,387 Army soldiers, 3,454 Navy sailors and 82 Air Force personnel have deserted. The Marine Corps does not track the number of desertions each year but listed 1,455 Marines in desertion status last September, the end of fiscal 2005, says Capt. Jay Delarosa, a Marine Corps spokesman...

Most deserters return within months, without coercion. Commander Randy Lescault, spokesman for the Naval Personnel Command, says that between 2001 and 2005, 58% of Navy deserters walked back in. Of the rest, the most are apprehended during traffic stops. Penalties range from other-than-honorable discharges to death for desertion during wartime. Few are court-martialed.