As Iraqi Militants Flee, Families Are Targets of Blood Reckoning

But someone needed to pay. Late last year, Faras’s younger brother Yousef was kidnapped, shot in the head and dumped in an abandoned lot. The police called it a lawless act of revenge — one brother dying for the sins of another.

Tribal leaders say that scores of other family members of insurgents have been attacked and killed in recent years as Iraqis turned against Al Qaeda and other militant groups. Insurgents’ families have also been driven from their homes and villages, accused of being complicit in their loved ones’ crimes or simply guilty by association.

The attacks represent a small fraction of the overall violence, but they illustrate one of Iraq’s greatest struggles as it tries to break a vicious cycle of killing and revenge. As Iraq tries to evolve into a more settled nation, one based on the rule of law instead of codes of blood, its leaders struggle to persuade Iraqis to put their faith in a flawed, sometimes ineffective, legal system. “This is the problem in Iraq,” said Zuhair al-Chalabi , Iraq’s national reconciliation adviser, who spends his days trying to mediate blood disputes between warring militias and tribes. “Iraqis have to forget their wounds. Time. We need time.”

But not everyone is patient, or ready to forgive. “The law and the courts do not help us,” said Jasim al-Ajili, a Shiite Muslim in the northeastern city of Baquba, who lost two nephews to Qaeda assassinations. He said he had identified the family responsible for the murders and is planning his revenge.

“I will arrest him, kidnap him, record his confessions,” he said. “Then I will kill him if the judiciary does nothing.”

There is little sympathy for families associated with the foreign and homegrown Qaeda fighters who slaughtered tens of thousands of Iraqis and tilted the country toward chaos. The militants’ wives and widows are pariahs. Their young children are not legally recognized by Iraq’s government.

In the rural stretches of Diyala Province, in northeastern Iraq, militant recruiters found fertile soil in the seething ranks of poor, young Sunni men. Scores of the tribesmen of one local sheik, Yousef al-Hilan, joined Qaeda. They bombed cars; guarded checkpoints where they shot and killed passing Shiite motorists; and controlled entire villages.

Now, Sheik Hilan estimated, about half of their families had been killed or displaced by reprisal attacks.

“We had many families whose sons joined Al Qaeda,” said Sheik Hilan, who lost four sons to tit-for-tat slayings. “All of the pain lands on them. People want their revenge. They’ll storm the house and kill everyone there. They just want to be satisfied.”

A Diyala provincial council member said revenge killings accounted for about 5 percent of all murders over the past two years.

The killings and attacks reflect deeply rooted tribal cultures that permit — even demand — a harsh accounting, in which blood is paid with blood. Kareem Mohammed Abu Hatem said his home, car and small oil and gasoline store in the village of Bohruz were burned down as payback for his stepson’s work with Al Qaeda. The culprits were never caught, making it impossible to verify his account.

Shortly after the 2003 invasion, Arab men with long beards, foreign accents and a veneer of righteous anger arrived at Ahmed Mustafa’s village in Diyala and urged its young men to fight the American occupier. Mr. Mustafa’s oldest son, Waleed, was enraptured, and left home with the militants.

As the bodies of beheaded Iraqis began appearing in the streets, Mr. Mustafa said he urged his son to stop fighting. Then, Mr. Mustafa said, he received a letter that warned, “We will cut your tongue and kill you.” In 2007, his 17-year-old son was killed while leaving the family farm. The next year, his other son was shot to death while shopping with his mother.

Fearful for his life, Mr. Mustafa and his wife moved to a village where few people know him. “I am an innocent man,” he said.

Still, he worries that he will die next.

For the Awad family in Kirkuk, the story of their two oldest sons unspooled like Cain and Abel in the age of Al Qaeda.

Durain Adnan contributed reporting from Iraq.

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Militants Storm Afghan Government Building

KABUL – Insurgents wearing police uniforms and armed with suicide vests stormed a police compound in eastern Afghanistan early Sunday morning, killing three policemen in a gunfight that lasted four hours before Afghan and NATO security forces regained control of complex, government officials said.

The dawn attack occurred a mile east of the provincial capital of Khost, a volatile province bordering the tribal areas of Pakistan that have served as a haven for militants crossing into Afghanistan. It follows a pattern of attacks this spring in which insurgents wearing Afghan military or police uniforms have attacked fortified government compounds. On Saturday, a suicide bomber believed to be wearing an army uniform blew himself up in a tent on the grounds of the national military hospital in the Afghan capital of Kabul, killing at least six people who were training to be medics and wounding more than 20 others.

In Sunday’s attack, four men in Afghan border police uniforms got out of a corolla station wagon and rushed toward the traffic police department and killed the gate security guard, according to a police officer who witnessed the assault just as we was coming on duty.

“They were in ABP uniforms,” the officer, who asked not to be named, said. “I thought, what do they want this early in the morning at the traffic police department. Then they shot the guard.”

The militants ran inside and then began firing down from the top floors onto a small police base below that housed a detachment of quick reaction forces, said Mohammed Yaqoob Noorzia, the deputy provincial police chief. The men were wearing vests laden with explosives and were armed with rocket propelled grenades and AK-47s, he said.

Afghan and NATO security forces surrounded the compound and firefight ensued. A spokesman with the NATO-led International Security Assistance Force could not say if NATO troops engaged in the firefight. “We’re still getting information on it, everything is sketchy right now,” the spokesman said.

The shooting finally stopped four hours later, leaving three police officers dead and wounding four others, including a civilian who was passing by, Mr. Noorzia said. The fate of the gunmen was not immediately known.

“We don’t know how many of the suicide bombers blew themselves up and how many were killed in the firefight with police,” Mr. Noorzia said.

The attacks have raised concerns about Taliban infiltration in the Afghan national security forces, but also underscore the ease with which militants, posing as soldiers or police officers, can blend into the ranks and bypass security checkpoints.

Meanwhile, two women were killed and five other people were wounded in Zabul province in southeastern Afghanistan Sunday when their vehicle hit a roadside mine, officials said.

An employee of The New York Times in Khost contributed reporting.

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Chicago Trial May Unmask Pakistan’s Links to Militants

Mr. Headley told Indian investigators that the officer, known only as Major Iqbal, “listened to my entire plan to attack India.” Another officer with the intelligence service, the Inter-Services Intelligence Directorate, “assured me of the financial help,” Mr. Headley said.

As the United States presses Pakistan for answers about whether the ISI played a role in harboring Osama bin Laden, Mr. Headley is set to recount his story of the Mumbai attack in a federal courthouse in Chicago. What he discloses could deepen suspicions that Pakistani spies are connected to terrorists and could potentially worsen relations between Washington and Islamabad.

India, the site of the November 2008 attacks, will be monitoring the trial for evidence of the ISI’s duplicity. Pakistan will also be listening to — and is likely to deny — Mr. Headley’s every word. Islamabad has been dismissing his accusations against the ISI as little more than a desperate performance by a man hoping to avoid the death penalty.

An American official who spoke on the condition of anonymity said that the United States government’s view of Mr. Headley — like the debate that has raged in Washington about the ISI for the last decade — was bitterly divided. No agreement exists in Washington on whether the ISI guided Mr. Headley and the attacks on Mumbai.

“It’s not very clear,” the official said. “A lot of this is going to come out of the trial. His claim could just be his claim.”

Still, the very fact that the government is presenting Mr. Headley as a prosecution witness suggests that at least some in the government believe he is telling the truth. And the authorities said they expected the government to present e-mails and tapes of telephone conversations to support his story.

Any new evidence of ISI malfeasance that emerges from the trial will reverberate in Washington, with the relationship between the United States and Pakistan at its most tenuous in years.

A growing chorus on Capitol Hill argues that the discovery of Bin Laden’s hideout and the evidence in Mr. Headley’s case leave no doubt that the ISI and its Pakistani military overseers have played a cynical double game with the United States. Pakistan has received $20 billion in military and development assistance since 2001, and its military, they say, has sheltered Bin Laden, supported Afghan Taliban who kill American troops and guided the militants who attacked Mumbai.

Mr. Headley himself is not on trial. But he will be the main witness against Tahawwur Hussain Rana, a Chicago businessman who is accused of providing financial and logistical support for the 2008 siege in Mumbai. The attack, a barrage of gunfire and grenades, killed at least 163 people, including six Americans. Mr. Rana’s defense is that he agreed to support Mr. Headley’s activities in India because he was led to believe he was working for the ISI, and therefore the Pakistani government.

Bruce O. Riedel, a terrorism expert at the Brookings Institution and former Central Intelligence Agency officer, predicted that the trial would be “the next nail in the coffin of U.S.-Pakistan relations, as the ISI’s role in the murder of six Americans is revealed in graphic detail.”

American authorities have kept much of the evidence secret. Citing national security concerns, they have successfully moved to quash the defense lawyers’ subpoenas for State Department cables and records held by the F.B.I. that discuss Pakistan’s links with militants.

And though the government has charged four other men, including the officer known as Major Iqbal, with aiding and abetting the murder of American citizens, the indictment refers to them either as commanders or associates of the militant group Lashkar-e-Taiba, not as having links to the ISI.

In interviews in recent days, American military and intelligence officials who have served in Pakistan argued that the ISI’s story is complex. Some of them portray it as an unwieldy bureaucracy that even Pakistani generals struggle to control. The United States should try to reform the ISI, they argue, not abandon it.

 

Denying Links to Militants, Pakistan’s Spy Chief Denounces U.S. Before Parliament

Rather, the spy chief, Lt. Gen. Ahmed Shuja Pasha, blamed an intelligence failure for the presence of Bin Laden in the city of Abbottabad, where a top military academy is located and where the leader of Al Qaeda was killed in an American raid on May 2.

General Pasha said he had offered his resignation twice to the leader of the army, Gen. Ashfaq Parvez Kayani. As his presence before Parliament made clear, it was not accepted.

The two generals were called before the extraordinary 11-hour session to answer to the failures of the military and the intelligence agency that allowed a team of American commandos to enter and leave Pakistan in a stealth helicopter operation undetected.

Unusually vibrant criticism by some politicians and the Pakistani press after the raid compelled them to try to repair the reputation of the military and the intelligence agency, which the army controls.

But after recognizing the lapse, General Pasha rallied Parliament behind him, several legislators said, with strong criticisms of the United States that elicited thumps of approval from the chamber, including leading members of the Pakistan Peoples Party, the major partner in the coalition that the Obama administration supports.

At the end of the session, the leader of the opposition party, Pakistan Muslim League-N, Chaudhry Nisar Ali Khan, who has been one of the most severe critics of the military since the raid, closed ranks behind the military. The session was organized so that “a positive message should go out to the masses,” Mr. Khan said.

A resolution that was passed at the session said Pakistan would revisit its relationship with the United States “with the view to ensuring Pakistan’s national interests were fully respected.”

In that vein, Pakistan’s chief spy agency, the Inter-Services Intelligence Directorate, or ISI, will not allow the Central Intelligence Agency to conduct operations in Pakistan without the full knowledge of the ISI, General Pasha said.

The spy chief did the talking. General Kayani attended the session, along with the heads of the air force and the navy, but did not speak, apparently to be spared the humiliation. Senior military officials, considered to be above civilian law and a power unto themselves, rarely appear before Parliament, or even its defense committees.

General Pasha told Parliament he had a “shouting match” with the C.I.A. director, Leon E. Panetta, over C.I.A. activities in Pakistan when they met recently in Washington, several lawmakers who attended the session said.

Reviewing the history of American relations with Pakistan, General Pasha declared that the United States, which has provided Pakistan with about $20 billion in aid over the last decade, had let Pakistan down at every turn since the 1960s, including imposing sanctions on the country in the 1990s.

“And now they have conducted a sting operation on us,” General Pasha said, according to one lawmaker. The intelligence chief was referring to the fact that the Obama administration had decided not to inform Pakistan in advance of the raid because of fears that the Pakistanis could not be trusted.

Before answering questions from the more than 400 members of Parliament from both chambers, the military gave a PowerPoint presentation that included photographs of Qaeda militants captured or killed by the ISI since the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.

General Pasha then explained that Pakistan should be given credit for dismantling Al Qaeda even before the United States killed Bin Laden, according to the accounts from lawmakers after the session.

In a direct assault on statements by American officials that the ISI supports jihadist militant groups, including the Haqqani network in North Waziristan, General Pasha said there was no such policy. “We have nothing to do with the Haqqani network,” he was quoted as saying.

American officials have long maintained suspicion that the Haqqani group, along with the Taliban, has been sheltered and sponsored by Pakistan, which uses them to push Pakistani interests in Afghanistan, where the insurgents attack NATO forces.

Some of the legislators asked for explanations of why the Pakistani Air Force did not detect the American helicopters that ferried the team of Navy Seal commandos into Abbottabad and out again.

The deputy chief of Air Staff Operations, Air Marshal Muhammad Hassan, said the American helicopters were equipped with stealth technology that enabled them to evade radar.

By the time the air force learned about the raid from ground reports at Abbottabad and launched fighter jets, the helicopters had completed their mission and flown out of Pakistan, he said.

But the air marshal, in answer to a question, said that the F-16 jet fighters provided by the United States to Pakistan were capable of shooting down the drones that the C.I.A. flies over the tribal areas to attack militants. The drone campaign has become increasingly unpopular among Pakistan’s politicians even as the Obama administration insists that it has no intention of halting the flights.

For the first time, according to one lawmaker, Air Marshal Hassan acknowledged that Pakistan allowed the United States to fly the drones out of Shamsi Air Base in Baluchistan.

The Pakistani government has always maintained in public that it does not condone the drone campaign, while in private it has given permission for the flights.

Salman Masood contributed reporting.

 

13 Algerian Soldiers Killed by Militants

 VOA News ?April 16, 2011

People listen to the speech of Algeria's President Abdelaziz Bouteflika on a giant television screen in Algiers, April 15, 2011

In Algeria, suspected militants opened fire on an army post east of Algiers, killing at least 13 soldiers.

Security officials and residents said at least one attacker was killed.? The attack took place late Friday, just as President Abdelaziz Bouteflika was announcing a series of constitutional reforms in a speech to the nation.

A news report by The Associated Press quotes officials who said Saturday that security forces searched the attack scene, about 130 kilometers from the capital, and Yakouren, an adjacent forested area, known as a hideout for members of the terror group al-Qaida in the Islamic Maghreb.

In his televised address, Bouteflika said he intends to change the country's electoral laws, revise the constitution and ensure free and fair elections in the future - all in the interest of strengthening democratic conditions in Algeria.

President Bouteflika has faced growing pressure from a pro-democracy movement that has staged several public protests calling for reform.

On Tuesday, thousands of demonstrators - mostly students - marched toward the presidential palace in Algiers.? News reports said some demanded the resignation of Education Minister Rashid Hawarbia, and others chanted slogans calling for a complete change of government.

As a concession to the opposition two months ago, President Bouteflika lifted the state of emergency in effect in Algeria for 19 years, when the country was in a state of civil war. ?

Bouteflika rose to the presidency in 1999, more than six years after the emergency was declared.? He had strong backing from the military that had ruled the country earlier, and won 94 percent of the vote - a figure that was criticized as false - after all opposition candidates dropped out of the race.

Some information for this report was provided by AP and AFP.

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Pakistan militants 'expand' reach

 13 April 2011 Last updated at 10:47 ET  Adm Willard said that India remained LeT's main target A senior US general has expressed concern over the "expanding reach" of the Pakistan-based Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT) militant group.

Admiral Robert Willard, head of the Pacific Command, told a Senate hearing that the group was no longer solely focused on India or South Asia.

LeT is one of the largest and best-funded militant groups in the region.

It is blamed for the November 2008 attacks on Mumbai (Bombay), in which gunmen killed more than 165 people.

Adm Willard said the group had declared a jihad (holy war) on America and had carried out attacks on US forces in Afghanistan, although India continued to be its main target.

He said that the US had evidence of LeT's presence in Europe, the broader Asia-Pacific region and even in Canada and the US itself.

"Unquestionably they have spread their influence internationally and are no longer solely focused in South Asia and on India," Adm Willard told the Senate Armed Services Committee.

He said that the relationship of the Pakistani government to LeT "is a very sensitive one".

The US was working with Nepal, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, the Maldives and India to help build their capacities to contain the militant group, he said.

Adm Willard's comments on Tuesday came on the same day that reports emerged saying Pakistan had asked the US to reduce the number of CIA agents in the country and to limit drone strikes along the Afghan border.

'Turmoil'

Correspondents say that LeT was cultivated by Pakistan's security apparatus 20 years ago to fight a guerrilla war to wear down Indian security forces in Kashmir.

Adm Willard said that the relationship of the Pakistani government with LeT was 'sensitive'

The group is outlawed in Pakistan, but India maintains that Pakistan's security forces retain ties to the militants.

Adm Willard also said that India and Pakistan were unlikely to resolve their dispute over Kashmir in the immediate future because of the fragile government in Islamabad.

"Unquestionably there remains a level of tension across the border that is very hard to impact," he said.

"And given the turmoil that has been in Pakistan for the past couple of years, it's hard to imagine that the fragile governance in Islamabad is going to rise to a level where the impasse can be broken in the near term."