IRAQ. Patrick Cockburn

likely, the ambushers did not know who she was or what she was doing. Jill Carroll, the Christian Science Monitor correspondent, was kidnapped in similar circumstances in January last year after leaving the office of a political party.

      There was little the guards could do. The first vehicle of the little convoy escaped and then returned to help the two survivors who had been wounded. Ms Parhamovich appears to have died in the first assault.

      Much of west Baghdad is under the control of the insurgent fighters. "With God's assistance, we have succeeded in the destruction of two SUV vehicles belonging to the Zionist Mossad, attacking them by light and medium weapons," wrote one group on a Sunni insurgent website. The insurgents sometimes have armed units waiting in basements and safe houses for opportunities to attack as soon as they are tipped off by security guards, shopkeepers and cigarette sellers.

      The extent of insurgent dominance in Baghdad is such that it will be extremely difficult for Mr Bush's "surge" in troop numbers to work effectively. It is easy enough for guerrillas to pull back, stockpile weapons or even leave Baghdad for a period. Mr Bush's answer is that US troops will stay in place instead of withdrawing as they did in the past. But saturation of whole districts of Baghdad with troops over an extended period would require a far bigger army than the US is ever likely to field in Iraq.

      The Mehdi Army, the largest Shia militia, has been removing its checkpoints and adopting a low profile in order to avoid a confrontation with US troops. The Iraqi government has even arrested some of its militants and is holding them in what appears to be a carefully calculated ploy to make it difficult for the US to assault Shia neighbourhoods.

      The Mehdi leaders may also calculate the natural friction between US troops and local people - particularly if US forces use heavy artillery and air power inflicting heavy civilian casualties - will ultimately work in their favour. The "surge" in US troop numbers does not resolve the problem that few Iraqi military units are loyal to the state before their own communities.

      In one Sunni area of west Baghdad, US troops have distributed leaflets telling people to ring a hotline telephone number if they come under attack from sectarian militias. "But we don't know how long the Americans are going to be around," said one resident. "Maybe calling them on the phone is not a great idea."

      The killing of Ms Parhamovich is typical of ambushes and assassinations in Baghdad. Kidnappings of foreigners - unlike the abduction of Iraqis- have tailed off in recent months because there are few foreigners outside the Green Zone and other heavily defended localities in Baghdad. The US has hinted that if the Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki does not move against the Shia militias, he might well lose Washington's support. That has led to a recurrence of rumours there might be so-called "moderate" government installed. But that would mean ignoring the results of the elections of 2005 won by the Shia parties. Washington's closest allies performed dismally at the polls then and are even more unpopular now. A new coalition would be more dependent on the US than that of Mr Maliki and would have less credibility among Iraqis.

      Sunday, 18 February 2007

ROADSIDE BOMBS ARE NOTHING NEW

      There is something ludicrous about the attempt by the US military in Iraq to persuade the world that the simple but devastating roadside bomb or IED (improvised explosive device) is a highly developed weapon requiring Iranian expertise. Here is the official police report of one IED attack. It reads: "At about 8.25am, 100 men of the X Regt with their colonel in charge, marched with their band from the military barracks at Y to their rifle range via fixed route. When they got to place Z a land mine exploded, killing three outright and wounding 22 others, three of these died shortly afterwards. The mine was connected to an electric battery by about 150 yards of cable. It is believed that there were only two men involved in carrying out this outrage."

      This is fairly typical of a roadside bomb. It might have happened in Iraq yesterday- except it didn't. The IED in question exploded in the town of Youghal in County Cork on 21 June 1921. I happen to have read the Royal Irish Constabulary report on the incident, because I was born 29 years later about two miles away from the site.

      IEDs have not changed much in the decades that followed. They have been used everywhere from Cyprus to Vietnam. They are cheap and easy to make, and can be detonated by a single person. They came as a nasty shock to the incoming US soldiers who invaded Iraq in 2003 because they were so well equipped to fight the Soviet army - American military procurement long ago detached itself from real conditions on the battlefield.

      In early 2004 I met some US combat engineers, or sappers, charged with the lethal job of finding these bombs, which were nicknamed "convoy killers". Because the Pentagon was in a state of denial about their very existence, the sappers had received no training in locating them. A sergeant told me that he had obtained with great difficulty an old but still valid US army handbook, printed during the Vietnam War, about IEDs. The book had not been reissued because to do so might appear to contradict the Pentagon's line that Iraq was not like Vietnam. The US Army is pretending that "explosively formed penetrators" are a new form of weapon which could only have been obtained in Iran. It claimed last week that the so-called EFPs had been supplied to the Shia militias and had killed 170 US troops. But the US has been primarily fighting a Sunni insurgency, and has had only intermittent clashes with Shia militiamen.

      Sophisticated weapons may be obtained in Iraq, if the money is there to pay for them. Until recently smugglers were moving weapons out of Iraq into Saudi Arabia - prices were higher there. A favourite method of moving them was to tie the guns under sheep, so they were concealed by the wool, and to pay the shepherds to drive them across the frontier.

      Wednesday, 28 February 2007

MAKING THE WORLD A MORE TERRIFYING PLACE

      Innocent people across the world are now paying the price of the "Iraq effect", with the loss of hundreds of lives directly linked to the invasion and occupation by American and British forces.

      An authoritative US study of terrorist attacks after the invasion in 2003 contradicts the denials of George Bush and Tony Blair that the war is not to blame for an upsurge in fundamentalist violence worldwide. The research is said to be the first to attempt to measure the "Iraq effect" on global terrorism. It found the number killed in jihadist attacks around the world has risen dramatically since the Iraq war began. The count, excluding the Arab-Israel conflict, shows in the 18 months between 11 September 2001 and the start of the Iraq war in March 2003 some 729 people were killed, while in the following 42 months to September 2006, the number of deaths rose to 5,420 - a three-fold rise in the number of deaths per year, from 486 to 1,549. As well as strikes in Europe, attacks have also increased in Chechnya and Kashmir since the invasion. The research was carried out by the Centre on Law and Security at the NYU Foundation for Mother Jones magazine. Iraq was the catalyst for a ferocious fundamentalist backlash, according to the study, which says that the number of those killed by Islamists within Iraq rose from seven to 3,122. Afghanistan, invaded by US and British forces in direct response to the September 11 attacks, saw a rise from very few before 2003 to 802 since then. In the Chechen conflict, the toll rose from 234 to 497. In the Kashmir region, as well as India and Pakistan, the total rose from 182 to 489, and in Europe from none to 297.

      Two years after declaring "mission accomplished" in Iraq President Bush insisted: "If we were not fighting and destroying the enemy in Iraq, they would not be idle. They would be plotting and killing Americans across the world and within our borders. By fighting these terrorists in Iraq, Americans in uniform are defeating a direct threat to the American people."

      Mr Blair has also maintained that the Iraq war has not been responsible for Muslim fundamentalist attacks such as the 7/ 7 London bombings which killed 52 people. "Iraq, the region and the wider world is a safer place without Saddam[Hussein]," Mr Blair declared in July 2004. Announcing the deployment of 1,400 extra troops to Afghanistan earlier this week- raising the British force level in the country above that in Iraq- the Prime Minister steadfastly denied accusations by MPs that there was any link between the Iraq war and unravelling of security elsewhere.

      Last month John Negroponte, director of National Intelligence in Washington, said he was "not certain" that the Iraq war had been a recruiting