Both the Post and the Times use the attack on the Mansour to talk about the wave of bombings that swept Iraq yesterday. Richard Oppel Jr. and Ali Adeeb of the Times report on A1 that four sheikhs were killed, not six, but have good detail from inside the hotel, talking with more staff members and witnesses than the Post. Oppel and Adeeb note that this was an attack on "one of the rare bright spots for the American military," the alliance of Sunni tribal sheikhs against jihadists in Anbar province, and manage to talk to Ali al-Hatim al-Suleiman, a senior leader of the Anbar Salvation Front, the grouping of tribal sheikhs allied with the U.S. "His voice filled with fury," al-Suleiman expressed doubt the damage could have been caused by a suicide belt alone, suggesting a planted bomb, and hinted that the government had a hand in the attack. "There are a lot of security measures around the hotel, checkpoints and security forces,” he said. “How would they manage to go through all these measures? This is silly to suggest that Al Qaeda did this. We can not blame Al Qaeda for everything!" Suleiman's uncle was at the meeting, but escaped without injury.
The Post stuffs the news of the Mansour hotel attack, by John Ward Anderson and Naseer Nouri, and use it to top their roundup. They manage to place the bombing in the context of the larger violence: five bombings in Iraq killed 54 people, and the hotel attack wasn't even the deadliest one. (See below.) The duo report that the meeting included Sheikhs who had broken with the Anbar Salvation Front, and adding further intrigue to the attack, the Iraqi Interior Ministry is focusing its investigation on people inside the hotel -- either guests or staff. A source there told the Post the explosive vest used to was too big to go unnoticed by hotel security. Maybe Suleiman is right that it was an inside job with a planted bomb?
Howard LaFranchi and Sam Dagher of the Christian Science Monitor use the attack to write an excellent front page riff on the effectiveness and wisdom of the U.S. strategy of allying with tribal sheikhs, which has come under fire from more than just suicide bombers. The two note, "the approach is facing growing criticism from both Iraqi politicians and military experts. Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki has complained that the initiative is creating militias outside its control and undermining his plan to strengthen the central government's control over security forces." The reporters find civilian and military critics, who charge that this alliance will only be a temporary one. "They are doing it for reasons of financing, to make money, and to control turf in the Sunni parts of the country," said Bruce Reidel, of the Saban Center for Middle East Policy at the Brookings Institution in Washington "It's unlikely they will be reliable allies in the long term." He points to a sheikh he calls a "highwayman," who once worked with al Qaida in Iraq robbing travelers on the Baghdad-Amman highway and divvying up the loot. "At some point such 'allies' can be bought back by the opposing side," he adds, "and then it becomes a bidding war."
Kudos to the Post for fronting the effect of the war on Iraq's children. In today's must-read, Sudarsan Raghavan highlights the trauma the Iraq's youths are enduring, and the likely effects on Iraqi society when they grow up. Hint: It won't be good. The violence and trauma to children who have witnessed the murder of parents, relatives and friends is straining the few resources Iraq has to care for its children. Girls as young as 13, such as the lead protagonist, Marwa, are caring for even younger siblings after being orphaned, becoming surrogate parents before they've had time to leave their own childhood. "The societal impact is going to be very bad," predicted Haider Abdul Muhsin, one of the country's few child psychiatrists. "This generation will become a very violent generation, much worse than during Saddam Hussein's regime." Raghavan offers these frightening statistics:
Since the U.S.-led invasion, 4 million Iraqis have fled their homes, half of them children, according to the United Nations Children's Fund. Many are being killed inside their sanctuaries -- at playgrounds, on soccer fields and in schools. Criminals are routinely kidnapping children for ransom as lawlessness goes unchecked. Violence has orphaned tens of thousands.
Only about 60 psychiatrists remain in Iraq, most of whom specialized in treating adults before the war. The World Health Organization surveyed 600 children between ages 3 and 10 last year and found 47 percent had been exposed to "a major traumatic event" over the last two years. Another study of 1,090 youths in Mosul found that 30 percent showed symptoms of PTSD. Toy weapons are among the best-selling items in markets. Children playing in the street pretend to blow up passing cars with imaginary RPGs. At schools, kids are asking who is Sunni and Shi'ite, despite teachers' attempts to emphasize their common Muslim faith. Teachers report kids fighting on the playground invoke militias, such as the Mahdi Army or the "resistance," as a threat to other kids. Older children are looking to join militias themselves. Perhaps most awful, child specialists think that 80 percent of traumatized Iraqi children never get help because of the stigma attached to going to a psychiatrist. In all, a bleak but important story.
ARROWHEAD RIPPER
The news from Baqoubah is mixed today, with both the Times and Post noting that U.S. forces aren't facing the stiff resistance they expected but that there are a large number of booby-trapped houses in the city. Both papers also note the probable escape of much of the Sunni militants the U.S. intended to flush out or kill.
Joshua Partlow of the Post offers a wide-ranging piece, describing the house-by-house clearing operations U.S. troops are conducting as well as several scooplets. The western side of the city is under U.S. and Iraqi control, he writes, but senior commanders in the operation expect the insurgents to retun "in about two weeks." Partlow also notes that U.S. troops are building concrete barriers around neighborhoods in the western half of the city, mirroring a controversial plan in Baghdad that many residents complained was designed to divide Sunnis and Shi'ites from one another. Partlow also gets at the human motivation behind Arrowhead Ripper, reporting that the operation's genesis was earlier this year when Col. Steve Townsend, who is in charge of the operation, sent a battalion of Stryker combat vehicles to help out the local commander in Baqoubah. Both Townsend and Col. David Sutherland, the local commander, agreed after one deadly day that should an operation such as this one go down, they would work the province together. And both men said they wished their higher-ups had moved sooner. At least 49 people have been killed in the operations and perhaps as many as 100, Partlow reports, with U.S. and Iraqi forces capturing at least 65 people. More than 48 IEDs have been found and a bomb factory discovered. Partlow also reports that intelligence reports say the insurgents have fled to towns such as Samarra, Khalis and Khan Bani Saad.
While the Post goes wide-ranging, the Times looks through the other end of the telescope, focusing on the travails of the men of Comanche Company’s First Platoon as they navigated an urban minefield. Michael Gordon paints a terrifying picture, of pressure plates linked to mines in the front doors of empty houses and of streets spider-webbed with copper cables used by insurgents to trigger buried IEDs. Soldiers are faced with a choice of endangering themselves or calling in air strikes to level entire city blocs. Gordon writes: "The use of house bombs is not a new trick, but as the soldiers were to learn, the scale was daunting. The entire neighborhood seemed to be a trap." In one case, the platoon found one house bomb, or H-BIED in the military's jargon, and retreated to another house to call in an airstrike to destroy the booby-trapped structure. The second story of their haven, however, was also booby-trapped forcing the soldiers to scramble out of there, too. They retreated to a cleared building where they were safe, but they were back where they started. The insurgent strategy is dastardly and brilliant at the same time: "The insurgent strategy appeared to be to use deep-buried bombs under the road and small-arms fire to force the soldiers to take refuge in the houses adjoining the route — and then to blow them up," Gordon writes. Townsend said the network of housebombs was the most extensive he had ever seen in Iraq. The question that wasn't answered in this on-the-ground look is how did the insurgents have so much time to wire entire neighborhoods?
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Of the three stories, Partlow of the Post gets maybe the best line in, though: Baqoubah "feels like a long-abandoned metropolis on a planet too close to the sun." Ah, Iraq.
ROUNDUPS
The day's roundups are folded into the larger story of the attack on the Mansour Hotel, but the Post still manages to give a good account. (The Times offers but a single paragraph in its story.) The Post's Anderson and Nouri, as mentioned above, report that beside the hotel attack, four bombs exploded around Iraq, with the deadliest attack being a suicide attack using a loaded oil tanker against a police station in Baiji, about 125 miles north of Baghdad. The explosion killed 30 policemen and prisoners and wounded 55 other people. U.S. military officials say, however, that the police station was hit by two car bombs, followed by an insurgent attack with small arms and RPGs. No explanation is given for the conflicting accounts. Another suicide attacker ran a black Chevy Caprice into a group of police cadets waiting outside the Hilla police station 60 miles south of Baghdad and blew himself up, killing eight and wounding 31. A car bomb in Mosul killed two policemen and killed 20 and the Post quotes Reuters as saying yet another suicide car bomb blew himself up at a police checkpoint in Siniyah, nine miles west of Baiji, killing two soldiers and wounding three. The Time's account of the Baiji account has 27 people killed, including 13 police officers and 60 wounded. The car bomb in Hilla was reported to have killed eight and wounded 25. Anderson and Nouri also mention the latest report from the International Crisis Group that says the descent of Basra into chaos while under British occupation is an example of Baghdad's probable future.
In other coverage
WASHINGTON POST
Ann Scott Tyson reports from Washington that Iraqi forces are far from self-sufficient and won't be ready to assume responsibility for Iraq for at least two years. Brig Gen. Dana J.H. Pittard, the commander of the Iraqi Assistance Group, warned that the training shortfalls should make the U.S. cautious about reducing the number of troops in Iraq from 157,000. Pittard seems to be pushing back against last week's optimistic statements from MNC-I commander Lt. Gen. Raymon Odierno, who said by spring 2008, it might be possible for Iraqi troops to take over more security and "potentially we could have a decision to reduce our forces." Maybe for parts of Iraq, Pittard said, but not for areas like Diyalah, where a decision to reduce forces by two-thirds from 2005-2006 allowed insurgents to regain control of the city.
Philip Kennicott take a fresh look at the online presence of the global jihadist movement, focusing on the groups in Iraq, based on a report by Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty. Much of this kind of stuff has been reported before, but this is the first publicly released report on the phenomenon. One of the study's authors, Daniel Kimmage, notes that almost all of the material comes from the Sunni side of the insurgency because the Shi'ite fighters in Iraq have access to government newspapers and other media outlets. The Sunnis have been forced to go guerilla media, and have been very successful. Most worrisome, however -- and somewhat buried in the story for some reason -- is the amount of religious hatred toward Shi'ites, causing him to worry about "religiously fueled genocide." "To get more conclusive evidence, we have to do the homework that the world failed to do before Rwanda," Kimmage said. Kennicott explains it further: "The basic communications climate for genocide is already in place -- the ability to spread information rapidly, a pool of suspicion and animosity, a tendency to inflate grievances into hysterical rhetoric."
CHRISTIAN SCIENCE MONITOR
Dan Murphy reports on the immigration path of one of the Monitor's former drivers, Adnan Abbas and his family, who are some of the lucky few to have been accepted into the U.S. as refugees, part of an expected wavelet of 7,000 Iraqis who will be admitted this year. Abbas' story is poignant, as he was the driver who witnessed the kidnapping of Jill Carroll and the killing of translator Allan Enwiyah. He was pushed to the front of the line from his haven in Jordan, where he fled after the incident, because his name was widely publicized as connected to an American media outlet. One of his brothers was killed, and the murderers reportedly asked, "Where's Adnan?" just before they killed him. Murphy notes that most of the Iraqi refugees will be heading to Michigan, home of America's largest Arab population, and that Iraqi Christians are disproportionately represented in Iraq's refugees.
WALL STREET JOURNAL
No original Iraq coverage
USA TODAY
No original Iraq coverage
