March 16, 2008
Spain’s Many Muslims Face Dearth of Mosques

By VICTORIA BURNETT
LLEIDA, Spain — As prayer time approached on a chilly Friday afternoon and men drifted toward the mosque on North Street, Hocine Kouitene hauled open its huge steel doors.

As places of worship go, the crudely converted garage leaves much to be desired, said Mr. Kouitene, vice president of the Islamic Association for Union and Cooperation in Lleida, a prosperous medieval town in northeastern Spain surrounded by fruit farms that are a magnet for immigrant workers. Freezing in winter and stifling in summer, the prayer hall is so cramped that the congregation, swollen to 1,000 from 50 over the past five years, sometimes spills onto the street.

“It’s just not the same to pray in a garage as it is to pray in a proper mosque,” said Mr. Kouitene, an imposing Algerian in a long, black coat and white head scarf. “We want a place where we can pray comfortably, without bothering anybody.”

Although Spain is peppered with the remnants of ancient mosques, most Muslims gather in dingy apartments, warehouses and garages like the one on North Street, pressed into service as prayer halls to accommodate a ballooning population.

The mosque shortage stems partly from the lack of resources common to any relatively poor, rapidly growing immigrant group. But in several places, Muslims trying to build mosques have also met resistance from communities wary of an alien culture or fearful they will foster violent radicals.

Distrust sharpened after a group of Islamists bombed commuter trains in Madrid in March 2004, killing 191 people, and in several cities, local governments, cowed by angry opposition from non-Muslims, have blocked Muslim groups from acquiring land for mosques.

The result, Muslim leaders say, is that some Muslims feel anchorless and marginalized.

“A proper mosque would act as a focus, a reference point for Islam here,” said Mohammed Halhoul, spokesman for the Catalan Islamic Council. A quarter of Spain’s Muslims live in Catalonia, the northeastern region that is home to Lleida, but the area has no real mosques.

“I feel like a Catalan,” Mr. Halhoul said, “except when it comes to the question of the mosque.”

Muslims ruled much of Spain for centuries, but after they were ultimately vanquished in the 1400s, their mosques were either left to ruin or converted into churches. Since then, fewer than a dozen new mosques have been built to serve Spain’s Muslim population, which has grown in the past 10 years to about one million from about 50,000 as immigrants have poured into the country.

That rise has coincided with a decline in church attendance in overwhelmingly Catholic Spain, giving new echo to an old rivalry between the two religions. It was the Catholic king and queen, Ferdinand and Isabella, who defeated the last Moorish ruler in Spain in 1492 and oversaw the expulsion of Jews and Muslims. Now, as churches struggle to draw a dwindling flock, Muslim prayer halls are overflowing.

“The reality of this country has changed much faster than that of other countries,” Ángel Ros, Lleida’s mayor, said in an interview. “A process that took 30 years in Italy or France has taken 10 years in Spain.”

Lleida is a case in point: a city whose 13th-century cathedral looms from a fortified hilltop over plains that produce half of Spain’s pears and apples, it has drawn a flood of immigrants. They now make up nearly a fifth of the city’s 125,000 residents, compared with 4 percent in 2000. A quarter of them are from Muslim countries. Friday, the Muslim day of prayer, has replaced Saturday as a day off in addition to Sunday on many local farms.

The North Street prayer hall faced opposition from the outset. Marta Roigé, head of the local neighborhood association, said residents tried to block it five years ago by renting the garage themselves, but backed down after the landlord started a bidding war. They have since sued the local council to close it down on the basis that it is a health and safety hazard.

“The tension has grown as the numbers have grown,” Ms. Roigé said. “They’ve set up shops, butchers, long-distance call centers and restaurants.” These businesses, catering to Muslim immigrants, line the surrounding streets.

She added: “They are radicals, fundamentalists. They don’t want to integrate.”

Muslim leaders, however, say the lack of proper mosques is one barrier to integration. And Spanish authorities and Muslim leaders say the potential for extremism would be easier to monitor at fewer, larger mosques than at the 600 or so prayer halls scattered throughout the country.

Some Muslim leaders believe the tide is starting to turn in their bid to return minarets to Spanish skylines. Following a pact between the Islamic Association and Lleida’s town hall in December, the city may become the first in Catalonia to build a mosque.

The association secured a 50-year lease on a plot of government land on the edge of town, and Mr. Kouitene says the group hopes to break ground next year if it can raise the money.

Several other Muslim communities are on the verge of similar breakthroughs. In the southern city of Seville, Muslims are close to obtaining a plot of land for a mosque after years of bitter local resistance; in 2005 protesters dumped a pig’s head on a plot originally chosen.

Meanwhile, the ruling coalition in Catalonia submitted a bill in the regional parliament in December that would oblige local governments to set aside land for mosques and other places of worship. Representatives of Muslim organizations hope it will inspire a similar national law.

“People are realizing the world has changed and they can’t look the other way,” said Mohammed Chaib, a member of the Catalan parliament and the only Muslim lawmaker in Spain.

Some Catholic clerics see things differently. Cardinal Luis Martínez Sistach, archbishop of Barcelona, opposes the bill, which would entitle all religious groups to land on an equal basis. He argues that Catholicism requires different rules.

“A church, a synagogue or a mosque are not the same thing,” he said, according to the conservative Spanish newspaper ABC. The bill, he said, “impinges on our ability to exercise a fundamental right, that of religious liberty.”

While no law on religious land use exists, the wealthy Catholic Church faces no difficulty acquiring land, experts in law and religion say.

Álex Seglers, an expert on church-state relations, is skeptical that the bill will be effective. The bill is vague and gives local governments too much discretion over what land it provides to which group, he says.

For the worshipers at North Street, the next big hurdle is money. Spain’s secular state cannot finance religious buildings, though it has a special arrangement to subsidize the Catholic Church.

“We have a saying in our religion,” Mr. Kouitene said. “Anywhere there are even a few Muslims, you must build a mosque for joint prayer. Otherwise, the devil rules in that place.”

Mayor Ros, for one, welcomes the building.

“We used to have a dominant religion, and now we have many religions and we have to find a way of respecting that fact,” he said. “Churches were the great public works of the Middle Ages and of the Renaissance. Now I see a day when every large city in Spain will have a mosque.”

OP-ED COLUMNIST
The Pimps’ Slaves


By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF
Published: March 16, 2008
Reading between the sheets, the world of “Kristen” and Eliot Spitzer may seem relatively benign. She may have been abused as a child, and tangled with drugs and homelessness, but she was also a consenting adult who apparently kept half the cash that customers paid for her.

Fred R. Conrad/The New York Times
Nicholas D. Kristof
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Times Topics: Prostitution
That’s a dangerously unrepresentative glimpse of prostitution in America. Those who work with street prostitutes say that what they see daily is pimps who control teenage girls with violence and threats — plus an emotional bond — and then keep every penny the girl is paid.

“Sometimes I meet a girl who says, ‘I have a really good pimp — he beats me only with an open hand,’ ” said Rachel Lloyd, a former prostitute who runs a program for underage prostitutes in New York City. “Many of the girls see the pimps as boyfriends, but violence is integral to everything that happens in the sex industry. That’s how you get punished for not bringing in your quota for that evening, or for looking your pimp in the eye.”

Bradley Myles, who works in Washington for an antitrafficking organization called Polaris Project, says it is astonishing how similar the business model is for pimping across the country. Pimps crush runaway girls with a mix of violence and affection, degradation and gifts, and then require absolute obedience to a rigid code: the girl cannot look the pimp in the eye, call him by his name, or keep any cash.

Every evening she must earn a quota of money before she can sleep. She may be required to tattoo the pimp’s name on her thigh. And in exchange he may make presents of clothing or jewelry.

It’s complicated: What keeps her isn’t just fear, but also often an emotional connection.

“When somebody wields power over you to kill you and doesn’t, you feel this bizarre thankfulness,” Mr. Myles said. “It’s trauma bonding.”

When a middle-class white girl ends up controlled like this — think of Elizabeth Smart, the Utah girl who was kidnapped in 2002 and apparently did not try to escape — then everybody is outraged at the way the kidnapper manipulated her. But when the girls are black, poor and prostituted, there is either indifference or an assumption that they are consenting to the abuse.

“It’s about race and class,” said Ms. Lloyd, who is bewildered when she sees Amber alerts for abducted children. Last year she worked with 250 teenage girls who had been prostituted, and not one of them ever merited an Amber alert.

“If we served 250 white girls from upstate middle-class homes, we’d be rolling in money,” she added, “and we’d be changing the law.”

Changing the law is on the agenda. The House of Representatives passed a landmark bill in December, by a vote of 405 to 2, that would make the federal authorities much more involved in cracking down on pimps and trafficking.

But the Justice Department is fighting the House bill, and Senator Joe Biden, who is chairman of a crucial subcommittee, has dawdled on it. A broad coalition of antitrafficking leaders from left and right sent the Justice Department a furious letter scolding it for being soft on pimps.

That may be the only letter in history signed by both Gary Bauer and Gloria Steinem, by executives of the National Organization for Women and the National Association of Evangelicals.

Of the 100,000 prostitution-related arrests each year, the great majority of them are of women and girls; pimps and johns are much less likely to be arrested.

All those girls will never get a tiny fraction of the attention of the Elizabeth Smarts or Natalee Holloways, who fill the cable television niche for a “missing blonde” story. So let’s not let “Kristen” displace the broader reality.

Sure, there are young women who voluntarily sell sex; some of them have posted lately on my blog, nytimes.com/ontheground. Reasonable people can disagree about whether the police should devote resources to such cases.

With prostitution as with narcotics, no legal model has worked perfectly. I’ve argued that the approach with the best record is the Swedish model — decriminalizing the sale of sex, while making it an offense to pimp or to buy sex.

But whatever one thinks of legalizing prostitution, let’s face reality: The big problem out there is the teenage girls who are battered by their pimps, who will have to meet their quotas tonight and every night, who are locked in car trunks or in basements, who have guns shoved in their mouths if they hint of quitting. If the Spitzer affair causes us to lose sight of that, then the biggest loser will be those innumerable girls, far more typical than “Kristen,” for whom selling sex isn’t a choice but a nightmare.

Comment on this column on my blog at: www.nytimes.com/ontheground.

March 16, 2008
Iraq Insurgency Runs on Stolen Oil Profits

By RICHARD A. OPPEL Jr.
BAIJI, Iraq — The Baiji refinery, with its distillation towers rising against the Hamrin Mountains, may be the most important industrial site in the Sunni Arab-dominated regions of Iraq. On a good day, 500 tanker trucks will leave the refinery filled with fuel with a street value of $10 million.

The sea of oil under Iraq is supposed to rebuild the nation, then make it prosper. But at least one-third, and possibly much more, of the fuel from Iraq’s largest refinery here is diverted to the black market, according to American military officials. Tankers are hijacked, drivers are bribed, papers are forged and meters are manipulated — and some of the earnings go to insurgents who are still killing more than 100 Iraqis a week.

“It’s the money pit of the insurgency,” said Capt. Joe Da Silva, who commands several platoons stationed at the refinery.

Five years after the war in Iraq began, the insurgency remains a lethal force. The steady flow of cash is one reason, even as the American troop buildup and the recruitment of former insurgents to American-backed militias have helped push the number of attacks down to 2005 levels.

In fact, money, far more than jihadist ideology, is a crucial motivation for a majority of Sunni insurgents, according to American officers in some Sunni provinces and other military officials in Iraq who have reviewed detainee surveys and other intelligence on the insurgency.

Although many American military officials and politicians — and even the Iraqi public — use the term Al Qaeda as a synonym for the insurgency, some American and Iraqi experts say they believe that the number of committed religious ideologues remains small. They say that insurgent groups raise and spend money autonomously for the most part, with little centralized coordination or direction.

Money from swindles in Iraq and from foreign patrons in places like Saudi Arabia allows a disparate, decentralized collection of insurgent cells to hire recruits and pay for large-scale attacks. But the focus on money is the insurgency’s weakness as well as its strength, and one reason loyalties can be traded. For now, at least 91,000 Iraqis, many of them former enemies of the American forces, receive a regular, American-paid salary for serving in neighborhood militias.

“It has a great deal more to do with the economy than with ideology,” said one senior American military official, who said that studies of detainees in American custody found that about three-quarters were not committed to the jihadist ideology. “The vast majority have nothing to do with the caliphate and the central ideology of Al Qaeda.”

The corruption that drives money to the insurgency is hardly limited to the Baiji refinery, which a reporter visited last month. In Mosul, for example, insurgents have skimmed profits from soda and cement factories, American officers said.

Insurgents in Mosul also make money from kidnapping for ransom and by extorting 5 to 20 percent of the value of contracts local businessmen get from the government, said Khasro Goran, the deputy governor of Nineveh Province.

A military official familiar with studies on the insurgency estimated that half of the insurgency’s money came from outside Iraq, mainly from people in Saudi Arabia, a flow that does not appear to have decreased in recent years.

Iraq’s Black Market

Before the invasion of Iraq, eight gasoline stations dotted the region around Sharqat, an hour north of the refinery at the northern edge of Saddam Hussein’s home province, Salahuddin. Now there are more than 50.

Economic growth? Not exactly. It is one of the more audacious schemes that feed money to the black marketeers. Most tanker trucks intended for Sharqat never make it there. “It’s all a bluff,” said Taha Mahmoud Ahmed, the official who oversees fuel distribution in Salahuddin. “The fuel is not going to the stations. It’s going to the black market.”

Gas stations are often built just to gain the rights to fuel shipments, at subsidized government rates, that can be resold onto the black market at higher prices. New stations cost more than $100,000 to build, but black market profits from six or seven trucks can often cover that cost, and everything after that is profit, said officials who have studied the scheme.

The plan also requires bribing officials in the province and Baghdad, said Col. Mohsen Awad Habib, who is from Sharqat and is now police chief in Siniya, near Baiji. He said owners of bogus gas stations told him they paid $20,000 bribes to an Oil Ministry official in Baghdad to get their paperwork approved. Local and provincial officials then extort their own cut. “In each station you’ll find high Iraqi officials who have shares,” he said.

In Baiji, dozens of active insurgent groups feed off corruption from the refinery, said Lt. Ali Shakir, the commander of the paramilitary Iraqi police unit here. “If I give you all the names, your hand is going to be tired” from writing them down, he said.

Lieutenant Shakir said the more hard-core insurgent groups had a lot of money to pay other fighters, and he grumbled that part of the reason they thrived was that obvious thievery was never prosecuted.

Another scheme, he said, involves a trucking company owned by a man tied to the insurgency who is also a relative of Baiji’s mayor. The trucks take fuel from the refinery but are then unloaded just south of Tikrit. Making arrests would be a waste of time, he said, because provincial officials would let the perpetrators go.

“What can I do?” he said. “After a half hour, they would be released.”

Last year, the Pentagon estimated that as much as 70 percent of the Baiji refinery’s production, or $2 billion in fuels like gasoline, kerosene and diesel, disappeared annually into the black market. Baiji supplies eight provinces.

Some of the most obvious corruption and theft, like tanker trucks hijacked at gunpoint from distribution pumps, has been curbed by Captain Da Silva and his predecessors. The American troops live inside the compound.

Moreover, American officials say they believe that in recent weeks, some illicit profits flowing from the refinery have diminished. The refinery has been operating at almost full capacity, they say, pouring more fuel on the market and narrowing the spread between government-mandated rates for fuel and what it fetches on the black market.

Exploiting that spread is one key to illicit profits from the refinery. For example, in January a tanker filled with kerosene that was supposed to be worth about $10,000 was going for $19,000 in Baiji, according to surveys of black market prices for the American military. In Samarra, it cost $35,000, a result of what soldiers described as the former mayor’s efforts to manipulate fuel prices.

Most theft occurs outside the refinery, but fraud still abounds inside, too. At one refinery office, a broken control-room machine has a hole where an object has been jammed through the glass to stop a dial from turning. Most everything is recorded using paper, and tubes of correction fluid sit on the desks of clerks overseeing the flow of fuel. It is regularly used to cover up huge discrepancies in production and distribution tallies that soldiers say can only be explained by theft.

“We’d all be hanged” if the refinery had operated this way under Mr. Hussein’s government, one senior refinery official confided to American soldiers.

Refinery workers plead for jobs dispensing fuel, offering to work for no pay. Far more money can be made conspiring with tanker truck drivers to skim gas from the pumps, a job some soldiers liken to being a valet parking attendant at a Las Vegas casino.

The Flow of Illicit Profits

American and Iraqi officials struggle to say exactly how much the insurgency reaps from its domestic financing activities. In the past, Iraqi officials have estimated that insurgents receive as much as half of all profits attributable to oil smuggling. And before the troop buildup began a year ago, an American report estimated that insurgents generated as much as $200 million a year.

Nor is the skimming limited to the insurgency; illicit earnings from the Baiji refinery also flow to criminal gangs, tribes, the Iraqi police, local council members and provincial officials who also smuggle fuel, Iraqi officials say.

Barham Salih, the Iraqi deputy prime minister, said he believed that the pool of money available to insurgents across Iraq had fallen in the past year, but he declined to provide an estimate himself. He said Iraqi security analysts estimated that Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia received $50,000 to $100,000 per day from swindles related to the Baiji refinery. “It’s a serious problem,” he said.

Those amounts are significant given the hard realities of Iraq, especially in Sunni areas where unemployment and discontent with the Shiite-run government run high. Men can be hired to hide roadside bombs for $100, officers say. And while American troops have captured stockpiles of artillery shells from Mr. Hussein’s days, insurgents have adapted, building bombs from cheap materials like fertilizer and cocoa.

The insurgents appear to understand how valuable the Baiji refinery is to their operations. “They have not attacked the oil refinery, because they don’t want to damage their cash cow,” said First Lt. Trent Teague, who commands the Third Platoon in Captain Da Silva’s unit, the headquarters company of the First Battalion, 327th Infantry.

Instead, when the insurgents want to send an angry message to someone at the refinery, they attack neighborhoods where oil workers live. Two suicide bombings in these Baiji neighborhoods in December killed at least 30 people and wounded more than 100. “It was the refinery being hit, without it being hit,” Lieutenant Teague said.

But the insurgents do have agents inside, and some are the very people who are supposed to thwart graft and the insurgents’ influence. In February, American troops detained Ghalib Ali Hamid, the intelligence and internal affairs chief of the Oil Protection Force at the refinery, on suspicion of skimming fuel profits and having ties to insurgents.

Among other things, officers said Mr. Hamid had issued a stern warning to one of his superiors at the refinery: “If you’re going to work here, you’ve got to be friends with the Islamic State of Iraq,” a reference to an insurgent group with ties to Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia.

Last year, a new Iraqi Army brigade commander, Col. Yaseen Taha Rajeeb, was assigned to the refinery. He helped stop some of the most blatant theft. But the colonel’s paychecks were stopped soon after he began cracking down, and he was fired this year.

While black market fuel prices and profit margins have dropped recently, they could rise again, especially if refinery production falls off.

Capt. Stephen Wright, who works at the refinery with Captain Da Silva, is concerned about whether there may be unseen problems looming, like the sort of fatigue that ruptured a propane unit in January. “If something happens to this refinery from neglect, you won’t have fuel for eight provinces,” he said, “and we’ll have 6,000 unemployed Sunnis, who are people we definitely don’t want unemployed.”

The money feeds an insurgency that is constantly adapting, and information about its exact composition and organization has continued to elude the Americans.

The Motivations of Insurgents

Some American officials and politicians maintain that Sunni insurgents have deep ties with Qaeda networks loyal to Osama bin Laden in other countries. Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia, whose members are mainly Iraqi but whose leadership has been described by American commanders as largely foreign, remains a well-financed and virulent force that carries out large-scale attacks.

But there are officers in the American military who openly question how much a role jihadism plays in the minds of most people who carry out attacks. As the American occupation has worn on and unemployment has remained high, these officers say the overwhelming motivation of insurgents is the need to earn a paycheck.

Nor do American officers say they believe that insurgent attacks are centrally coordinated. “As far as networked coordination of attacks, we are not seeing that,” said a military official familiar with studies on the insurgency.

Opposition to the occupation and fear of the Shiite- and Kurdish-dominated government and security forces “clearly are important factors in the insurgency,” the official said. “But they are being rivaled by the economic factor, the deprivation that exists.”

Maj. Kelly Kendrick, operations officer for the First Brigade Combat Team of the 101st Airborne Division in Salahuddin, estimates that there are no more than 50 hard-core “Al Qaeda” fighters in Salahuddin, a province of 1.3 million people that includes Baiji and the Sunni cities of Samarra and Tikrit.

He said most fighters were seduced not by dreams of a life following Mr. bin Laden, but by a simpler pitch: “Here’s $100; go plant this I.E.D.”

“Ninety percent of the guys out here who do attacks are just people who want to feed their families,” Major Kendrick said.

The First Brigade’s commander, Col. Scott McBride, concurs. “I don’t know that I’ve ever heard one person say, ‘I believe in a caliphate,’ ” he said.

Abu Azzam, a prominent leader of American-backed Sunni militiamen in Nasr Wa Salam, between Baghdad and Falluja, estimated that only 10 percent of Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia’s members adhered to extremist jihadist doctrines.

“Many joined Qaeda for financial and personal reasons,” said Abu Azzam, whose militia includes former insurgents. “The others joined Qaeda because they hate the government, or they hate the American army, or for revenge.”

The focus on Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia obscures the activities of other major guerrilla groups in the country. Some, like Jaish-e-Muhammad, or the Army of Muhammad, which includes ex-Baathists and former military officers, continue to battle American forces. Some American officers consider another organization, the Islamic State of Iraq, to be a front group for Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia.

But some members of other groups, including the 1920s Revolutionary Brigades and Jaish al-Islami, or the Islamic Army, have agreed to support American-financed Sunni militia forces.

Paying former insurgents to stop attacking American forces and join neighborhood militia forces has played a crucial role in turning around security in many Sunni parts of Iraq. But American officers worry that the failure to incorporate these Sunni militiamen into the government of Iraq or find them other jobs could portend trouble.

“There’s got to be an outlet,” the senior military official said, referring to a job and salary not related to the insurgency. “Without that outlet, a lot of guys will gravitate back. They are not going to starve their families. You have got to do what you have got to do to survive.”

Reporting was contributed by Michael R. Gordon, Solomon Moore and Anwar J. Ali from Baghdad, and Iraqi employees of The New York Times from Salahuddin, Falluja, and Diyala.

Track Tom's book progress
This is a post to track Tom's entries on writing the new book:
+ The great sorting on the book
+ Still sorting ...
+ I've started writing the book
+ Getting better all the time . . .
+ I'm feeling about as low as one can in this cruel world ...
+ Done for today
+ Back in the saddle ...
+ 4 done, 10 to go
+ Chapter 5 in works
+ Chapter 5 still . . . working
+ Joy and suffering
+ Feeling five-by-five
+ Achieving the near brain-dead experience
+ Still chugging, but oh so close on 5
+ A quick 2k to end the WWI-WWII section
+ My Grendel is dead!
+ The next chapter planned
+ Oops! Day just got tougher!
+ Chapter 6 and Part II are now in the box
+ I stuck in my thumb, and pulled out a short introduction to Part III
+ Deep into Chapter Seven (Economic Realignment)
+ Deeper still into Chapter 7
+ Gave one interview, deeper into Chapter 7

UN: Drop in Iraq violence may not last
By RYAN LENZ, Associated Press Writer
4 minutes ago
The influx of thousands of U.S. forces has driven down insurgent attacks in Baghdad, but violence elsewhere in Iraq raises questions about whether killings will continue to drop as American forces begin to leave, the United Nations said Saturday.

As security improved in Baghdad, violent attacks spread last year to other parts of the country, including Diyala Province and Mosul, al-Qaida's last urban stronghold, according to the report from the United Nations Assistance Mission for Iraq.

"The government of Iraq continued to face enormous challenges in its efforts to bring sectarian violence and other criminal activity under control against a backdrop of political instability," the report, which examined the last six months of 2007, said.

"This is a window of opportunity for Iraq," Staffan de Mistura, the U.N. chief in Iraq, said at a news conference in Baghdad.

The U.S. military has said a 60 percent reduction in attacks followed the influx of more than 20,000 additional troops, known as the surge. Military officials did not respond to requests for comment.

De Mistura said so-called Awakening Councils, groups composed of former Sunni fighters who have accepted U.S. funding to switch allegiances and fight al-Qaida in Iraq, have played an important role in stopping violence.

Thousands of U.S. forces went to Iraq starting last year as part of a strategy by Gen. David Petraeus, the commander of U.S. forces in Iraq, to secure the capital and give Iraq's politicians breathing room to cut deals that would bring minority Sunni Arabs into the government and weaken the insurgency.

The U.N. report cautioned against hasty conclusions because "the extent to which the decrease in violence was sustainable remained unclear."

Violent attacks have grown more frequent in recent weeks.

Thirteen U.S. soldiers have been killed in a week, including a soldier who was killed Saturday when he was shot during combat operations in Baghdad. Five others died in a single suicide attack in central Baghdad last week. In a separate attack a week ago, two massive bombs hit Baghdad's Karradah neighborhood, killing 68 people.

On Saturday, Iraqi security forces clashed with a breakaway faction of Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr's Mahdi Army in Kut, leaving six dead and 21 others injured, police said on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to release information. A roadside bomb hidden in a trash can also killed a street sweeper and injured eight others in Baghdad's Karradah neighborhood, a police officer said on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to release the information.

The U.S. military also said Saturday that Iraqi police, led by an informant, discovered a large weapons cache that included dozens of rockets and mortars, machine guns and parts to build nearly 100 armor-piercing bombs known as explosively formed penetrators, or EFPs, which U.S. officials say come from Iran.

A suicide bomber detonated an explosive vest a day earlier at a checkpoint near the Syrian border, killing an interpreter and wounding six others, including two coalition soldiers, military officials said. No other details were immediately available.

The report, the 12th issued from the U.N. in Iraq, comes in the wake of the first sizable reduction in troops since a security plan began last year.

Three months ago, U.S. military officials sent home one brigade numbering about 5,000 troops. Further reductions, however, are being delayed for three months so military commanders in Iraq can assess progress.

Violence in the capital has fallen considerably thanks to a maze of walls and barriers that divide Shiite from Sunni neighborhoods, a key Shiite militia's cease-fire and the decision by many Sunnis to turn against al-Qaida in Iraq.

But Iraqi politicians are still gridlocked over sharing power, and citizens appear to have little hope that Iraqi forces could control al-Qaida in Iraq and renegade Shiite militias if U.S. forces continue a drawdown.

The report also raised questions about human rights violations at detainment facilities in Kurdistan, and the conduct of private security firms such as Blackwater Worldwide, which remains at the center of a federal probe following the deaths 17 Iraqi civilians last year.