1.

International

Middle East

MAYOR OF BAGHDAD IS DEPOSED; INSURGENTS KILL 4 U.S. TROOPS
By James Glanz

New York Times
August 10, 2005

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/08/10/international/10cnd-iraq.html

BAGHDAD -- Armed men entered Baghdad's municipal building during a blinding dust storm on Monday, deposed the city's mayor, and installed a member of Iraq's most powerful Shiite militia.

In continuing violence, the United States military announced today that four American soldiers were killed on Tuesday and six others were wounded when insurgents attacked a patrol near Baiji in northern Iraq. Two Iraqi policemen and four civilians were killed in a suicide car bombing today in western Baghdad, the Interior Ministry said.

The deposed mayor, Alaa al-Tamimi, who was not in his offices at the time, recounted the events in a telephone interview on Tuesday and called the move a municipal coup d'état. He added that he had gone into hiding for fear of his life.

"This is the new Iraq," said Mr. Tamimi, a secular engineer with no party affiliation. "They use force to achieve their goal."

The group that ousted him insisted that it had the authority to assume control of Iraq's capital city and that Mr. Tamimi was in no danger. The man the group installed, Hussein al-Tahaan, is a member of the Badr Organization, the armed militia of the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq, known as SCIRI.

The militia has been credited with keeping the peace in heavily Shiite areas in southern Iraq but also accused of abuses like forcing women to wear the veils demanded by conservative Shiite religious law.

"If we wanted to do something bad to him, we would have done that," said Mazen A. Makkia, the elected city council chief who led the ouster on Monday and who had been in a lengthy and unresolved legal feud with Mr. Tamimi.

"We really want to establish the state of law for every citizen, and we did not threaten anyone," Mr. Makkia said. "This is not a coup."

Mr. Makkia confirmed that he had entered the building with armed men but said that they were bodyguards for him and several other council members who accompanied him. Witnesses estimated that the number of armed men ranged from 50 to 120. Mr. Makkia is a member of a Shiite political party that swept to victory during the across-the-board Shiite successes during January's elections.

Mr. Tamimi, the deposed mayor, was appointed by the central government and held ministerial rank. He was originally put in place by L. Paul Bremer III, the top American administrator in the country until an Iraqi government took over in June 2004.

Baghdad is the only city in Iraq that is its own province, and the city council had previously appointed Mr. Tahaan as governor of Baghdad province, with some responsibilities parallel to Mr. Tamimi's. But the mayor's office was clearly the more powerful office, a fact that proved to be a painful thorn in the side of Mr. Makkia, who believed that the council, which he controls, should hold sway in Baghdad.

Mr. Makkia provided a phone number for Mr. Tahaan, but the phone did not appear to be turned on. A spokesman for the American Embassy in Baghdad said that he was aware of the developments but that he had no immediate comment.

When asked whether the Iraqi prime minister, Ibrahim al-Jaafari, a politician with another Shiite Islamic party, Dawa, was concerned about developments at the municipality, a spokesman, Laith Kubba, said, "My guess is, yes, he is."

Mr. Kubba said he had not yet had a chance to talk with the prime minister about the issue. But gave clear indications that the prime minister would not stand in the way of the move.

Weeks ago, Mr. Tamimi had offered to resign or retire, saying that the budget he had been given was not adequate. For a city of six million people, the central government had given him a budget of $85 million; he had requested $1 billion.

As of Tuesday, the prime minister still had not formally accepted the offer, Mr. Kubba said. But he said the offer could be used to find a way to formally remove Mr. Tamimi.

"It's more or less a fait accompli that he's not going back to office," Mr. Kubba said. He added that Mr. Tahaan would be considered an interim mayor until the prime minister settled on someone to take the post permanently.

Leaders of the country's major political parties, meanwhile, resumed a summit meeting to break the deadlock over Iraq's new constitution, which was delayed by the same sandstorm on Monday.

The deadline for the constitution is in five days and the parties have so far failed to resolve several crucial issues like the role of Islam in the government, the future of the ethnically mixed and oil-rich city of Kirkuk and the scope of self-rule for regions outside Iraqi Kurdistan.

After the meeting, the Iraqi president, Jalal Talabani, said discussion focused mainly on the issue of autonomy and the distribution of oil revenues. He expressed confidence that the group would complete the constitution on time, but added, "As the English people would say, the devil is in the details."

The four American soldiers killed in northern Iraq on Tuesday were under the command of the 42nd Infantry Division of New York, the military said today. Six others were wounded in the attack.

The three Iraqi policemen were members of a group on patrol in the western Baghdad suburb of Ghazaliya, an Interior Ministry official said. A fourth officer was wounded.

Insurgents also fired a mortar round into Antar Square in the Adamiya neighborhood, killing a traffic policeman and wounding seven other people, the ministry official said.

In other violence on Tuesday, an American soldier was killed and two were wounded when a car bomb exploded as a patrol passed through a crowded square in central Baghdad, the military said. An official at the Interior Ministry said at least three civilians were killed and 54 wounded in the same blast. Mortars landed near a mosque in southern Baghdad, killing two civilians and wounding four, the official said.

At least nine security officials were killed in four separate shooting incidents around Baghdad on Tuesday. An American marine was killed by small-arms fire on Monday in Ramadi, west of Baghdad, the military said, and a soldier assigned to the marines was killed by small-arms fire near Habbaniya, also west of the capital.

In Washington, Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld said Tuesday that Iran had become a conduit for weapons smuggled into Iraq and used by insurgents, and he criticized Tehran for not doing more to prevent the smuggling.

"Weapons clearly, unambiguously from Iran have been found in Iraq," he said at a Pentagon briefing. He added: "It's a big border. It's notably unhelpful for the Iranians to allow weapons of those types to cross the border."

Defense officials have said recently that components and fully manufactured bombs from Iran began appearing about two months ago and that a large shipment was captured last month in northeast Iraq after coming across the border.

Mr. Rumsfeld's comments were the first confirmation by a senior American official that such smuggling was occurring. Mr. Rumsfeld said it was not clear who in Iran was responsible for the shipments, which some specialists have said could be the work of smugglers or splinter insurgent groups, rather than the government of Iran.

Gen. Richard B. Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, also said at the briefing that Iraqi and American forces have made arrests in Haditha, where 20 marines were killed in two ambushes last week, after tips from Iraqis in the area. "The public came forward and said these are the folks," General Myers said.

Mr. Tamimi, the ousted mayor, said he believed that Shiite political parties had forced the takeover in Baghdad in order to position themselves for the elections once a constitution is agreed upon.

For his part, he said, he had lost the sense of enthusiasm that had brought him back to Iraq after nearly a decade in exile.

"When I left in 1995, every day, it is years for me," Mr. Tamimi said. "But now when I leave I don't think I will be sorry. I leave because I cannot live in such conditions."

--Dexter Filkins, Khalid al-Ansary and Kirk Semple contributed reporting from Baghdad for this article, and David S. Cloud from Washington.

2.

War in Iraq

Column

Shadowland

HIZZONER THE MAYOR
By Christopher Dickey

** One of the many fathers of the Iraqi atomic bomb (almost) has the job of restoring Baghdad to greatness as a world capital **

Newsweek
July 21, 2004

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/5470140/site/newsweek/

[PHOTO CAPTION: Baghdad mayor Alaa Al-Tamimi: All the virtues of an accomplished technocrat]

The first time the new mayor of Baghdad paid an official visit to the Green Zone, just a few weeks ago, a U.S. soldier stopped him amid the blast walls and concertina wire at the gate, and told him he had to be searched. Those are the rules and the soldier was under orders. But Alaa Al-Tamimi refused: “Because I am the mayor,” he said. This was his country, this was his city, and there were limits to the indignities he’d accept just because of the American occupiers’ rules and regulations. A pat-down would be an affront to his office.

So Al-Tamimi, 52, stood his ground in the 100-plus heat. A senior U.S. officer was called, rules were bent and finally the un-frisked mayor of Baghdad proceeded to his meeting with L. Paul “Jerry” Bremer, the outgoing American pro-consul.

Patient, persistent, exacting and precise, Al-Tamimi has all the virtues of an accomplished technocrat. And he ought to. He learned the ropes in the toughest, most elite Iraqi bureaucracy of all -- the nuclear program. From 1987 to 1993, as his country came within months of producing an atomic bomb, Al-Tamimi was one of several “director generals” in the overall nuclear project. If Saddam Hussein had not invaded Kuwait, and provoked the first war with the United States, the dictator would have had his bomb, says Al-Tamimi, and the world would be a very different place. But now, says the mayor, he’s glad that never happened. “We have a strategic relationship with the United States,” he told me the other night at his house. “We will not need such things.”

In the Bush administration, until recently, anyone who served the old regime was highly suspect, and Al-Tamimi’s background might have set alarm bells ringing. But as the manifest failures of the occupation became obvious -- and all but inescapable -- U.S. officials on the ground started wising up to a simple fact: among the thousands of people Saddam drafted into his weapons programs were many, if not most, of the nation’s best and brightest minds. And they have just the kinds of skills needed to rebuild the country.

“They know how to run projects and make things happen,” says David Albright, a former weapons inspector who now heads the Institute for Science and International Security in Washington. “A lot of them, in the ’90s [under the U.N. embargo], learned how to live with very little and get things done.”

Many of these scientists and technocrats were members of the Ba’ath Party, but many were not, says Albright, “because the regime valued its scientists so much.” They might have been put to work immediately on reconstruction. But after the invasion last year, the American obsession with uncovering the unfound (and perhaps unfindable) weapons of mass destruction took first priority. “The U.S. just scared the hell out of these people,” says Albright.

Al-Tamimi was out of the country at the time. He was not a party member, and he and his wife and son had managed to escape in 1995, despite Saddam’s strict prohibition on travel. Saddam’s secret police threatened and cajoled Al-Tamimi, trying to persuade him to return. Instead, he took a job in the gleaming emirate of Abu Dhabi as a senior planning advisor.

Then last spring, the fledgling Baghdad city council formed under Bremer’s tutelage put out a sort of tender for the man-who-would-be-mayor. Minimum age: 40. Experience: at least 10 years of engineering, urban planning or city management. Candidates also had to embrace “the principles of democracy.” According to a Washington Post article last April, more than 90 people applied, but when the final votes were cast by the council, Al-Tamimi got the job by a big majority. He took office on May 29.

Since then, he’s been working with Maj. Gen. Peter Chiarelli of the 1st Cavalry Division to open up and revitalize a city damaged by war, weakened by almost 13 years of draconian sanctions, abused by Saddam and finally pillaged by looters after the Americans rolled into town.

A first step is to take down some of the massive concrete barriers and blast walls that have been squeezing Baghdad traffic into countless convoluted snarls, and one of the first places such barriers have been removed is around Al-Tamimi’s own offices in the municipal building. “If I want to ask anyone to do something, I should begin with myself,” he says. “As a manager, I am telling people there is a new situation in Baghdad.”

Al-Tamimi is, in fact, a big fan of President Bush for ending Saddam’s rule. Without the Americans the dictator and his family would be running Iraq and ruining Iraqi lives for generations more, he says. If the embargo had ever been lifted, Al-Tamimi told me with the assurance of an insider, Saddam would have re-launched all his weapons programs instantly. But that doesn’t excuse the disasters of the last 14 months. “We were living under darkness, and then there is a light -- and then? The situation we are living now is the result of many mistakes.”

“Iraq is not a simple country and not a simple people,” Al-Tamimi explained as he jumped into his car to pay surprise visits at work sites around the city. His own complicated background is suggestive. He’s from a Shiite tribe in the Sunni stronghold of Fallujah, but identifies himself with the cosmopolitan vision of the capital that many educated Iraqis cherish. This is, after all, a great city. In the 8th century, under the mythic Caliph Harun al-Rashid (immortalized in the many tales of “The Thousand and One Nights”) it was unrivaled by any European capital. From the 1930s to the 1970s it developed into a modern metropolis with some of the most accomplished contemporary artists, thinkers -- and scientists -- in the Arab world.

Next on Al-Tamimi’s project list is the opening up of Abu Nawas Street along the banks of the Tigris. The boulevard is now blocked by concrete mazes and main battle tanks because foreign contractors, officials, and some of the foreign press have taken up residence in its high-rise hotels and once-luxurious villas. Al-Tamimi wants to do away with those concrete labyrinths. “Abu Nawas used to be the center of the life of the city,” says Al-Tamimi. “It will be again.”

The greatest obstacle of all to restoring the city’s sense of itself, however, is the Green Zone. Its walls encompass several of Saddam’s old palaces, Baghdad’s biggest hotel, even the city zoo. More than three square miles were cut out of the very center of the capital so that occupation forces could cobble together an ersatz America filled with soldiers, contractors, diplomats and spies. No unauthorized traffic is allowed. (There are checkpoints within checkpoints.) And while the official occupation may have ended on June 28, the Green Zone endures intact.

The new U.S. ambassador, John D. Negroponte, insists his operation inside the zone “is not a mega-embassy, it’s not a super-embassy, it’s an embassy.” But he also insists “at the moment, the imperatives of security require that we take certain measures.”

In fact, there’s no good reason for Americans to take up 10 per cent of the center of Baghdad. As Anthony Cordesman at the U.S. Center for International and Strategic Studies has pointed out, this doesn’t even make sense militarily. It’s pure hubris that has “created a no-go zone for Iraqis and has allowed the attackers to push the U.S. into a fortress that tends to separate U.S. personnel from the Iraqis. This follows a broader pattern where terrorists know that attacks tend to push the US into locating in ‘force protection’ enclaves and cut Americans off from the local population."

Al-Tamimi has a better idea. “I don’t want Americans in the Green Zone, or outside the Green Zone. I want them outside Baghdad in their camps,” he says. As for himself, he insists and on living and working out here in what’s generally called the Red Zone.

I like Al-Tamimi, as you might have guessed, and I worry about him. Assassins are waging a ferocious campaign to kill anyone they can in government. Over the last few days they’ve knocked off top officials in Mosul and Basra, and narrowly missed the justice minister. But Tamimi seems to regard the risks as just another bureaucratic obstacle, and he’s facing them down with the same stubborn persistence he showed the guard at the edge of the Green Zone. Call it foolish pride, or simple Iraqi patriotism.

“I think he’ll make it,” says a European diplomat. “He defied Saddam. He escaped the secret police. Now he’s the mayor of Baghdad. This man will survive.” And if more people like him are allowed to do their jobs, so might Iraq.