August 24, 2007
More Iraqis Said to Flee Since Troop Rise

By JAMES GLANZ and STEPHEN FARRELL
BAGHDAD, Aug. 23 — The number of Iraqis fleeing their homes has soared since the American troop increase began in February, according to data from two humanitarian groups, accelerating the partition of the country into sectarian enclaves.

Despite some evidence that the troop buildup has improved security in certain areas, sectarian violence continues and American-led operations have brought new fighting, driving fearful Iraqis from their homes at much higher rates than before the tens of thousands of additional troops arrived, the studies show.

The data track what are known as internally displaced Iraqis: those who have been driven from their neighborhoods and seek refuge elsewhere in the country rather than fleeing across the border. The effect of this vast migration is to drain religiously mixed areas in the center of Iraq, sending Shiite refugees toward the overwhelmingly Shiite areas to the south and Sunnis toward majority Sunni regions to the west and north.

Though most displaced Iraqis say they would like to return, there is little prospect of their doing so. One Sunni Arab who had been driven out of the Baghdad neighborhood of southern Dora by Shiite snipers said she doubted that her family would ever return, buildup or no buildup.

“There is no way we would go back,” said the woman, 26, who gave her name only as Aswaidi. “It is a city of ghosts. The only people left there are terrorists.”

Statistics collected by one of the two humanitarian groups, the Iraqi Red Crescent Organization, indicate that the total number of internally displaced Iraqis has more than doubled, to 1.1 million from 499,000, since the buildup started in February.

Those figures are broadly consistent with data compiled independently by an office in the United Nations that specializes in tracking wide-scale dislocations. That office, the International Organization for Migration, found that in recent months the rate of displacement in Baghdad, where the buildup is focused, had increased by as much as a factor of 20, although part of that rise could have stemmed from improved monitoring of displaced Iraqis by the government in Baghdad, the capital.

The new findings suggest that while sectarian attacks have declined in some neighborhoods, the influx of troops and the intense fighting they have brought are at least partly responsible for what a report by the United Nations migration office calls the worst human displacement in Iraq’s modern history.

The findings also indicate that the sectarian tension the troops were meant to defuse is still intense in many places in Iraq. Sixty-three percent of the Iraqis surveyed by the United Nations said they had fled their neighborhoods because of direct threats to their lives, and more than 25 percent because they had been forcibly removed from their homes.

The demographic shifts could favor those who would like to see Iraq partitioned into three semi-autonomous regions: a Shiite south and a Kurdish north sandwiching a Sunni territory.

Over all, the scale of this migration has put so much strain on Iraqi governmental and relief offices that some provinces have refused to register any more displaced people, or will accept only those whose families are originally from the area. But Rafiq Tschannen, chief of the Iraq mission for the migration office, said that in many cases, the ability of extended families to absorb displaced relatives was also stretched to the breaking point.

“It’s a bleak picture,” Mr. Tschannen said. “It is just steadily continuing in a bad direction, from bad to worse.”

He also cautioned that reports of people going back to their homes were overstated. As the buildup began, the Iraqi government said that it would take measures to evict squatters from houses that were not theirs and make special efforts to bring the rightful owners back.

“They were reporting that people went back, but they didn’t report that people left again,” Mr. Tschannen said. He added that Iraqis “hear things are better, go back to collect remuneration and pick up an additional suitcase and leave again. It is not a permanent return in most cases.”

American officials in Baghdad did not respond to a request for comment, but the national intelligence estimate released Thursday confirmed that Iraq continues to become more segregated through internal migration. “Population displacement resulting from sectarian violence continues,” it found, “imposing burdens on provincial governments and some neighboring states.”

Dr. Said Hakki, director of the Iraqi Red Crescent Organization, said that he had been surprised when his figures revealed that roughly 100,000 people a month were fleeing their homes during the buildup. Dr. Hakki said that he did not know why the rates were so high but added that some factors were obvious.

“It’s fear,” he said. “Lack of services. You see, if you have a security problem, you don’t need a lot to frighten people.”

It is clear that military operations, both by American troops and the Iraqi forces working with them as part of the buildup, have something to do with the rise in displacement, said Dana Graber Ladek, Iraq displacement specialist for the migration organization’s Iraq office.

“If a surge means that soldiers are on the streets patrolling to make sure there is no violence, that is one thing,” Ms. Ladek said. “If a surge means military operations where there are attacks and bombings, then obviously that is going to create displacement.”

But Ms. Ladek added that, in contrast to the first years of the conflict, when major American offensives were a main cause of displacement, the primary driving force had changed.

“Sectarian violence is the biggest driving factor — militias coming into a neighborhood and kicking all the Sunnis out, or insurgents driving all the Shias away,” Ms. Ladek said.

Her conclusions mirrored the experiences of Iraqis who had fled their homes.

Aswaidi and her family were driven out of the Dora section of Baghdad five months ago when Shiite snipers opened fire on their Sunni neighborhood from nearby tower blocks, shooting through their windows “at all hours of day and night.”

Returning covertly to check on the property in mid-August, she found Sunni insurgents occupying the building and neighboring homes, walking unchallenged through the deserted streets. Nearby, she claims, the same insurgents captured one of the Shiite snipers who drove the residents away, and claimed that he was a 16-year-old Iranian.

She now fears that her entire neighborhood will be taken over by Shiite militias like the Mahdi Army, which is loyal to the radical Shiite cleric Moktada al-Sadr.

“I don’t want them to take my town, but I think they will,” Aswaidi said. “It will change from Sunni to Shia. The Americans can’t stop it.”

Shiites face similarly overwhelming odds. In Shualah, on the northern outskirts of Baghdad, 400 Shiite families now live in a makeshift refugee camp on wasteland commandeered by Mr. Sadr’s followers.

In a sprawl of cinder block hovels and tin and bamboo-roofed shacks, families have stories of being expelled from their homes by Sunni insurgents.

Ali Edan fled Yusifiya, a Sunni insurgent haven south of Baghdad, when his uncle was killed. He has no intention of returning, even though American commanders claim Sunni sheiks there have begun cooperating with them. “It is still an unsafe area,” said Mr. Edan.

Both humanitarian groups based their conclusions on information collected from the displaced Iraqis inside the country. The Red Crescent counted only displaced Iraqis who receive relief supplies, and the United Nations relied on data from an Iraqi ministry that closely tracks Iraqis who leave their homes and register for government services elsewhere.

Before the troop buildup, by far the most significant event causing the displacement of Iraqis was the bombing of a revered Shiite mosque in Samarra in February 2006. The bombing set off a spasm of sectarian killing, but the rate at which Iraqis left their homes leveled off toward the end of that year before accelerating again as the buildup began, the Red Crescent figures show.

The United Nations figures also include a little over a million people it says were displaced in the decades before the Samarra bombing, including the Iran-Iraq war of the 1980s. The Red Crescent data does not include them.

In Baghdad, the latest migration involves an enormously complex landscape in which some people flee one district even as others return to it.

In Ghazaliya, a mixed but Sunni-majority district of north Baghdad, one 30-year-old Shiite said his family was driven out by Sunni insurgents a year ago with just two hours notice to leave their home.

Five months ago, the troop buildup brought American soldiers and the Shiite-dominated Iraqi Army onto his street and his family returned. But even as it did, Sunni neighbors fled, knowing that the army had been infiltrated by Shiite militias.

“They are afraid, because the army has good relations with the Mahdi Army,” said the 30-year-old man, who said he was too afraid to give his name. “My area used to have a lot of Sunni. Now most are Shia, because Shias expelled from other places have moved into the empty Sunni homes.”

August 23, 2007
Pakistan Court Allows Return of Exiled Leader

By CARLOTTA GALL and GRAHAM BOWLEY
ISLAMABAD, Pakistan, Aug. 23 — Pakistan’s Supreme Court ruled today that the former prime minister Nawaz Sharif, who was thrust into exile in 2000 after a military coup, could return to the country, in what could be a direct political challenge to Pakistan’s president, Gen. Pervez Musharraf.

Mr. Sharif, a critic of the current government, leads one of the strongest political movements against General Musharraf, and he wants to run against him for president in elections later this year. The ruling could lend momentum to the return to the country of Benazir Bhutto, Mr. Sharif’s predecessor as prime minister, who has also been living in exile and is another potential challenger to the president.

As a rival to both General Musharraf and Ms. Bhutto, Mr. Sharif’s return could challenge Washington’s strategy of backing the president as the linchpin of its fight against Al Qaeda and the Taliban in the region, and some American officials’ preference to see the general and Ms. Bhutto in a power-sharing agreement in the country.

General Musharraf seized control from Mr. Sharif in a bloodless coup in 1999. Mr. Sharif was imprisoned on corruption and other charges and then entered an understanding with the government to go abroad for 10 years in return for having the charges against him dropped. He has been living in exile in Saudi Arabia. Today at a news conference in London, he said he intended to return to Pakistan as soon as possible.

“It is the beginning of the end of Musharraf,” he said, according to Reuters.

He and his brother, Shahbaz Sharif, who was also forced into exile in 2000, filed a petition to the Supreme Court earlier this month to return to Pakistan, arguing that they were unconstitutionally forced from the country.

“They have an inalienable right to come back and stay in the country,” Chief Justice Iftikhar Muhammad Chaudhry told the court today, Reuters reported.

The ruling is a measure of the strength of the Supreme Court, which has gained power since the reinstatement of the chief justice on July 20. Mr. Chaudhry was reinstated after his own successful battle against a dismissal attempt by General Musharraf.

The president’s critics accused him of trying to remove Mr. Chaudhry and install someone more likely to bend to his authority in advance of likely legal challenges to his continued rule as president and army chief of staff, a dual role that violates Pakistan’s Constitution.

Mr. Chaudhry’s suspension prompted nationwide protests and street violence, and severely weakened General Musharraf even as he prepared to run for re-election this fall.

Mr. Chaudhry’s reinstatement by the Supreme Court was a strong rebuke for the general, raising new questions about his ability to continue his rule past this year. Today’s ruling is another blow.

The court ruling today will make it difficult for General Musharraf now to oppose Mr. Sharif’s return. It is unclear whether the government will be able to resurrect the charges originally leveled against the former prime minister. He was accused of hijacking General Musharraf’s plane as well as other corruption charges.

Amid the deepening political crisis in Pakistan, as General Musharraf tries to retain power in the face of profound challenges from both the left and right and perhaps even consider the imposition of emergency rule, Ms. Bhutto has been put forward as a potential political ally for him. However, some of her followers reject a possible alliance with a man they see as a dictator.

Earlier this month, in the first significant ruling since Mr. Chaudhry’s reinstatement, the Supreme Court ruled to free one of the country’s main opposition leaders and another vocal opponent of the president, Javed Hashmi, who had been serving a sentence for treason and inciting mutiny in the armed forces. He belongs to the same opposition political party as Mr. Sharif.

General Musharraf has been an important ally of the United States since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, but he has lost much domestic support in recent months. Also, intelligence agencies in the United States have increasingly lost confidence in his ability to root out militants from Al Qaeda and the Taliban.

Nevertheless, in an attempt to keep General Musharraf in power some American officials have suggested that an alliance with Ms. Bhutto would be his best chance of remaining president.

The two met in an unannounced session in Abu Dhabi on July 27, but neither has publicly admitted to the meeting.

Carlotta Gall reported from Islamabad, and Graham Bowley from New York. Hassan M. Fattah contributed reporting from New York.

Republican senator: Bush should begin Iraq withdrawal


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WASHINGTON (Reuters) - President George W. Bush should announce on September 15 an initial pullout of U.S. troops from Iraq to spur the Iraqi government to take steps toward political reconciliation, an influential Republican senator said on Thursday.

Virginia Sen. John Warner said Bush should "announce on the 15th that in consultation with our senior military commanders he has decided to initiate the the first step in a withdrawal of our forces."

Intel Report Questions Iraq's Progress

Aug 23 11:44 AM US/Eastern
By PAULINE JELINEK and KATHERINE SHRADER
Associated Press Writer

WASHINGTON (AP) - The Iraqi government will become more precarious over the next six to 12 months and its security forces have not improved enough to operate without outside help, intelligence analysts conclude in a new National Intelligence Estimate released Friday.
Despite uneven improvements, the analysts concluded that the level of overall violence is high, Iraq's sectarian groups remain unreconciled, and al-Qaida in Iraq is still able to conduct its highly visible attacks.

"Iraqi political leaders remain unable to govern effectively," the 10- page document concludes. A copy was obtained by The Associated Press in advance of its release Thursday.

The report represents the collaborative judgments of all 16 U.S. intelligence agencies, including the CIA, Defense Intelligence Agency and the intelligence organization of each military service. It comes at a time of renewed tensions between Washington and Baghdad.

The report says that Iraqi Security Forces, working alongside the United States, have performed "adequately." However, it says they haven't shown enough improvement to conduct operations without U.S. and coalition forces and are still reliant on others for key support.

Copyright 2007 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

August 23, 2007
Report Cites Grave Concerns on Iraq’s Government

By JIM RUTENBERG, SHERYL GAY STOLBERG and MARK MAZZETTI
This article is by Jim Rutenberg, Sheryl Gay Stolberg and Mark Mazzetti.

WASHINGTON, Aug. 23 — The administration is planning to make public today parts of a sober new report by American intelligence agencies expressing deep doubts that the government of the Iraqi prime minister, Nuri Kamal al-Maliki, can overcome sectarian differences. Government officials who have seen the report say it gives a bleak outlook on the chances Mr. Maliki can meet milestones intended to promote unity in Iraq.

As the end of the Congressional recess draws closer, the debate over Iraq policy will only intensify, and the new intelligence assessment, called “Prospects for Iraq’s Stability” is likely to play an important role in that discussion. Officials said the assessment concluded that Mr. Maliki retained support among Shiite groups in part because putting together a new government would be arduous. Officials in Washington and Baghdad have said for months that any military gains would be ephemeral if Iraqi politicians were not able to bridge sectarian divides.

The officials spoke on condition of anonymity because the report will be issued this morning, and spokesmen for both the White House and the director of national intelligence declined to comment. “The report says that there’s been little political progress to date, and it’s very gloomy on the chances for political progress in the future,” said one Congressional official with knowledge of its contents.

The new report also concludes that the American military has had success in recent months in tamping down sectarian violence in the country, according to officials who have read it.

The report, which was intended to help anticipate events over the next 6 to 12 months, is “more dire in its assessments” than the administration has been in its own internal discussions, according to one senior official who has read it. But the report also warns, as Mr. Bush did in a speech to the Veterans of Foreign Wars on Wednesday, that an early withdrawal would lead to more chaos.

“It doesn’t take a policy position,” one official said. “But it leaves you with the sense that what we’ve been doing hasn’t been working, but we can’t let up, or it’ll get worse.”

Officials said the report, an update of a National Intelligence Estimate made public in February, also concludes that a withdrawal of American troops would likely reignite waves of sectarian violence. While some Iraqi units have become more capable in recent months, the officials said those gains had not been enough to alter significantly the earlier assessment that Iraqi troops and police would be “hard pressed” to operate independently of American troops well into next year.

The new assessment is likely to be used both by the White House and its opponents to bolster competing positons about when the United States should begin cutting troop levels in Iraq.

The assessment issued in February included projections for the next 12 to 18 months, and said that during that period Iraqi troops and police units would have a difficult time assuming significantly greater responsibilities. The officials said the new estimate applied to the same time frame, and would reach a similar conclusion.

On Wednesday, as a second Democratic senator, Hillary Rodham Clinton of New York, called for Mr. Maliki to quit, he lashed out at American lawmakers who have questioned his competence. Mr. Bush — who on Tuesday confessed to “a certain level of frustration” with the Iraqi government — responded by using Wednesday’s speech to try to shore up Mr. Maliki. “Prime Minister Maliki is a good guy, a good man with a difficult job,” he said, “and I support him.”

All this month, members of Congress have been visiting Iraq to make their own assessments of the troop buildup and Mr. Maliki. While Republicans and even some Democrats say they are seeing military gains, Democratic leaders and party strategists, citing the lack of political progress, vowed Wednesday to renew their efforts to end the war.

President Bush delivered a rousing defense of his Iraq policy on Wednesday, telling a group of veterans that “a free Iraq” is within reach and warning that if Americans succumb to “the allure of retreat,” they will witness death and suffering of the sort not seen since the Vietnam War.

“Then as now, people argued that the real problem was America’s presence and that if we would just withdraw, the killing would end,” Mr. Bush declared in a 45-minute speech before the group’s national convention in Kansas City, Mo. He added, “The world would learn just how costly these misimpressions would be.”

The speech was the beginning of an intense White House initiative to shape the debate on Capitol Hill in September, when the president’s troop buildup will undergo a re-evaluation.

As the battle lines are drawn, a new advertising war is beginning to heat up, focusing on lawmakers, especially Republicans, who face tough re-election campaigns. On Wednesday, a new interest group, Freedom’s Watch, led by allies of the Bush administration — including Sheldon G. Adelson, a Las Vegas casino magnate who ranks sixth on Forbes Magazine’s lists of the world’s billionaires — began a monthlong, $15 million campaign intended to support the president’s policy.

Ari Fleischer, former press secretary to Mr. Bush and a member of the group’s board, said the ads would run in 20 states, in more than five dozen Congressional districts. “Anybody who is considering switching their vote is somebody we care about,” he said.

Presidential candidates are also staking out their positions. The president was just one of several elected officials who spoke before the Veterans of Foreign Wars this week. Two top Democratic contenders — Senator Clinton and Senator Barack Obama of Illinois — have appeared, as has Senator John McCain, Republican of Arizona.

Military audiences are generally safe for Mr. Bush, and Wednesday’s crowd came through with repeated applause. But the views expressed by the former soldiers in interviews here were hardly uniform. One, Charles Muckleston, a 77-year-old former Army sergeant from Manchester, N.J., who fought in Korea, said he did not bother to go to the hall to hear Mr. Bush. “It didn’t seem worthwhile,” he said. But Todd Struwe, 44, who served on the Korean Peninsula, said Mr. Bush’s address was “the best one we’ve heard so far from all of the candidates.”

In the speech, Mr. Bush sought to paint the conflict in Iraq in the broader context of American involvement in Asia. In one fell swoop, the president likened the Iraq war to earlier conflicts in Japan and Korea — which produced democratic allies of the United States — as well as to the war in Vietnam, asserting that the American pullout there 32 years ago led to tens of thousands of deaths in that country and Cambodia. “The question now before us,” he said, referring to Japan and Korea, “comes down to this: Will today’s generation of Americans resist the deceptive allure of retreat and do in the Middle East what veterans in this room did in Asia?”

And, in a passage that set off a bitter debate even before the speech’s end, Mr. Bush suggested a quick pullout from Iraq could bring the kind of carnage that drenched Southeast Asia three decades ago.

“In Cambodia, the Khmer Rouge began a murderous rule in which hundreds of thousands of Cambodians died by starvation and torture and execution,” Mr. Bush said. “In Vietnam, former allies of the United States, and government workers and intellectuals and businessmen were sent off to prison camps, where tens of thousands perished. Hundreds of thousands more fled the country on rickety boats, many of them going to their graves in the South China Sea.”

With his comments Mr. Bush was doing something few major politicians of either party have done in a generation: rearguing a conflict that ended more than three decades ago but has remained an emotional touch point.

Democrats, not surprisingly, rejected the comparison, including John Kerry, the Vietnam War veteran who ran unsuccessfully against Mr. Bush in 2004. “Invoking the tragedy of Vietnam to defend the failed policy in Iraq is as irresponsible as it is ignorant of the realities of both of those wars,” Mr. Kerry said.

At the same time, Mr. Bush was giving rare political voice to those — many of whom were in the hall — who believe the American pullout was a mistake.

“Amen,” said Bob McKay, 63, who served in the Army during the Vietnam War. “That’s what I fear most: We’re going to pull another Vietnam.”

But two World War II veterans, John Rocca and Anthony Cellucci, said they had qualms about Mr. Bush’s speech. They said they agreed with Mr. Obama’s call for United States troops to refocus their efforts to find Osama bin Laden and his deputies in Afghanistan and Pakistan.

“I don’t think we belong over there,” Mr. Cellucci said. “Bring the troops home.” He added, “You fight a war, you fight it and get it over with.”

Mark Mazzetti and Sheryl Gay Stolberg reported from Washington and Jim Rutenberg from Kansas City, Mo. Damien Cave contributed from Baghdad, and Eric Schmitt from Washington.