Violent Protest In Southern Iraq
Iraqi police opened fire Tuesday on hundreds of stone-throwing former Iraqi soldiers demanding monthly stipends promised by the U.S.-led coalition, and reporters saw at least four protesters shot in the southern town of Basra.
Protesters marched on the Central Bank and then tried to force their way in to get money, pelting the building with stones and then turning on police who first tried to stop them by wielding batons. Police then opened fire.
British forces arrived on the scene and calmed the situation, using loudspeakers to say in Arabic "You will get what you deserve, but not in this way." They did not fire, even after one was hit in the leg by a stone.
At the hospital, officials said one ex-soldier had been killed, and relatives said they had come to collect the body of 40-year-old Abbas Kadhim, a non-commissioned officer. Hospital officials said they were treating three wounded men.
The soldiers said they had not been paid a monthly stipend equivalent to $50 since September.
The Coalition Authority had been dogged by protests by ex-servicemen after it disbanded Iraq's military in May, leaving more than 250,000 ex-soldiers destitute. In one incident in June, U.S. forces killed two demonstrators when a protest turned violent. Later, authorities agreed to pay monthly stipends of $50 to $150 to rank-and-file troops of the former Iraqi Army.
In other developments:
Iraqi rebels have been communicating with such outsiders through e-mail, telephone and personal visits, said Maj. Thomas Sirois, chief intelligence officer of the Army's 3rd Corps Support Command, which occupies this sprawling base north of Baghdad. He declined to identify the types of communication American intelligence officers have intercepted.
"I think they share information," Sirois said. "Individuals here who are fighting against us I'm sure are reaching out to see what has been successful in other locations, and probably trying to adapt those procedures here."
Some ambush techniques observed in Chechnya against the Russians and in Afghanistan against U.S. forces by al Qaeda and former Taliban militants "we've seen employed here" in Iraq, Sirois said.
Like Iraq, recent conflicts in Chechnya and Afghanistan saw Islamic guerrillas hiding at roadsides to ambush military convoys with booby-trapped bombs and rocket-propelled grenades.
One Middle East military analyst said information being shared from Afghan and Chechen sources is probably technical assistance with fuses, remote-control detonators — like cell phones — and assembling the complex daisy-chained bombs that began appearing in Iraq in late summer.
Since the beginning of military operations in Iraq, with the March invasion, 483 American troops have died, according to the Defense Department. Of those, 330 died as a result of hostile action.
But Sirois said the ambushers' influence on American convoys was slipping, with 250 attacks in November and 200 in December. Perhaps more significantly, the rebels' bombs have grown smaller, less complex and less deadly, he said.
Sirois identified these four major hotspots for guerrilla attacks on U.S. military convoys in Iraq: on the main roads through Baghdad, south of Baghdad, west of Baghdad between the western cities of Ramadi and Fallujah, and north of Baghdad along the main highway to Samarra.
Soldiers from the U.S. Army's Psychological Operations unit are trying with limited success to get fellow soldiers to erase threatening messages painted on battle gear and ease their treatment of Iraqi residents during nighttime raids.
"In the worst case scenario we want Iraqis to see us as a necessary evil. In the best case, we are a solution," said Sgt. Ervin Willis, from the Army's 362nd Psychological Operations Company, which supports the 4th Infantry Division in Tikrit.
One lesson Willis has taken back to soldiers heading out on nighttime operations is to show more respect for cultural values while searching homes for weapons and suspects, in particular, to respect women's privacy by allowing them to gather in a separate room.