Fourteen shot at a trading company. At least 90 kidnapped at other businesses. Bodies dumped nightly, bound, some tortured. A new brand of violence -- a deadly mix of organized crime and sectarian murder -- is tearing at Iraq.
Its origins are murky. But the savagery has turned this month into a pivotal one in the three-year war -- a month of gruesome news, mixed with some good. A sharp decline in US deaths appears to be the payoff for handing more duties to the Iraqi army, leaving US forces less exposed to attack.
At the same time, there has been the rise in the number of slayings of civilian Iraqis, the reasons for which are hard to find.
Not so many weeks ago, this was a conflict with straightforward, if brutal, terms. Sunni insurgents and al-Qaeda terrorists used car bombs, roadside bombs, suicide bomb belts and sniper rifles to target US troops, Iraqi soldiers, police and civilians -- mainly Shiites, the newly ascendent majority after years of former Iraqi president Saddam Hussein's oppression.
Those groups still operate and still kill. But their war has been dwarfed by the shadowy and incipient terror stalking the capital of Baghdad and nearby provinces.
Or perhaps -- as some Iraq officials believe -- the insurgents simply switched their targets, moving from US and Iraqi troops to targeting businesses and Iraqi civilians as a way to cause chaos or to fund their terror work.
Either way, the staggering shift makes it difficult to predict how the US military will or can react to the new climate of violence, and what it might mean for hopes to begin a troop pullout this summer.
Bombs still rattle the capital and elsewhere, but far less regularly. US helicopters still thunder through the sky, darting here and there and raising a racket that disturbs sleep and sends packs of wild dogs into a howling nighttime frenzy.
The tanks in the streets these days aren't American, by and large, but old Russian T-72s driven by Iraqi soldiers. Faces at military checkpoints are increasingly Iraqi.
As of Wednesday, 27 US military personnel had died this month -- the lowest monthly US death count since February 2004 and the second-lowest of the war, according to an Associated Press count.
Coincidental with the sharp drop in US deaths was the huge rise in the number of execution-style killings among Iraqis. Since the beginning of the month, at least 385 people -- an average of more than 13 a day -- have been found slain, the apparent victims of sectarian hatred and settling of old scores after a Shiite shrine was bombed on Feb. 22.
The count climbs to at least 486 when the last six days of February are added, according to figures compiled from daily AP reports based on police accounts.
Since the start of this month, gunmen -- mostly masked, many wearing police uniforms -- have stormed at least six Baghdad businesses. Execution-style killings and kidnappings of civilians happened before late last month, of course -- but not nearly in such big numbers.
In one rough accounting of the rise, for example, the AP reported 36 bodies found in Iraq in December, 150 in January and 195 last month. To date this month, the AP has reported 374 bodies found.
It is not always easy in war zones to separate criminal thugs from political thugs, and Iraq's insurgency has always been made up of several disparate groups.
However, organized crime may now account for a majority of the violence in the country, said Matthew Sherman, who has just finished a two-year stint advising the Interior Ministry.
‘UNUSUAL EVENT’: The Australian defense minister said that the Chinese navy task group was entitled to be where it was, but Australia would be watching it closely The Australian and New Zealand militaries were monitoring three Chinese warships moving unusually far south along Australia’s east coast on an unknown mission, officials said yesterday. The Australian government a week ago said that the warships had traveled through Southeast Asia and the Coral Sea, and were approaching northeast Australia. Australian Minister for Defence Richard Marles yesterday said that the Chinese ships — the Hengyang naval frigate, the Zunyi cruiser and the Weishanhu replenishment vessel — were “off the east coast of Australia.” Defense officials did not respond to a request for comment on a Financial Times report that the task group from
Asian perspectives of the US have shifted from a country once perceived as a force of “moral legitimacy” to something akin to “a landlord seeking rent,” Singaporean Minister for Defence Ng Eng Hen (黃永宏) said on the sidelines of an international security meeting. Ng said in a round-table discussion at the Munich Security Conference in Germany that assumptions undertaken in the years after the end of World War II have fundamentally changed. One example is that from the time of former US president John F. Kennedy’s inaugural address more than 60 years ago, the image of the US was of a country
DEFENSE UPHEAVAL: Trump was also to remove the first woman to lead a military service, as well as the judge advocates general for the army, navy and air force US President Donald Trump on Friday fired the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Air Force General C.Q. Brown, and pushed out five other admirals and generals in an unprecedented shake-up of US military leadership. Trump wrote in a post on Truth Social that he would nominate former lieutenant general Dan “Razin” Caine to succeed Brown, breaking with tradition by pulling someone out of retirement for the first time to become the top military officer. The president would also replace the head of the US Navy, a position held by Admiral Lisa Franchetti, the first woman to lead a military service,
BLIND COST CUTTING: A DOGE push to lay off 2,000 energy department workers resulted in hundreds of staff at a nuclear security agency being fired — then ‘unfired’ US President Donald Trump’s administration has halted the firings of hundreds of federal employees who were tasked with working on the nation’s nuclear weapons programs, in an about-face that has left workers confused and experts cautioning that the Department of Government Efficiency’s (DOGE’s) blind cost cutting would put communities at risk. Three US officials who spoke to The Associated Press said up to 350 employees at the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) were abruptly laid off late on Thursday, with some losing access to e-mail before they’d learned they were fired, only to try to enter their offices on Friday morning
RSS