BAGHDAD, 20 December 2006 — Iraq is on the brink of total disintegration and could drag its neighbors into a regional war, a leading think tank said yesterday, after the Pentagon confirmed violence was at an all-time high. The warning from the International Crisis Group came amid lawless chaos in Baghdad, where police were hunting for 16 kidnapped aid workers and a former minister who escaped from jail, allegedly with the help of US hired guns.
The ICG’s report called on Washington to distance itself from Prime Minister Nuri Al-Maliki’s beleaguered government, which has failed to tackle sectarian militias, and reach out to the United States’ archfoes Iran and Syria. The permanent members of the UN Security Council and Iraq’s six neighbors should engage with all the parties to Iraq’s spiraling conflict, it urged, while nevertheless holding out little prospect of success.
“Implementation of the various measures mapped out in this report is one last opportunity. It is at best a feeble hope,” the ICG paper said. “But it is the only hope to spare Iraq from an all-out disintegration, with catastrophic and devastating repercussions for all,” it warned.
The Interior Ministry’s head of operations, Brig. Gen. Abdel Karim Khalaf, told AFP that a high-level investigation had been launched into the capture of Red Crescent staff, the latest in a series of mass kidnaps. “It was repeated, and might be repeated again,” he said, linking Sunday’s raid on a Red Crescent office in Baghdad to another last Thursday in which several dozen shopkeepers were taken.
In both assaults, a large group of gunmen using security force uniforms, weapons and SUV trucks sealed off a central area of the capital and hauled off dozens of civilians, unchallenged by local law enforcement.
Iraqi Red Crescent Secretary-General Mazen Abdullah said that 10 more of the hostages had been released yesterday, but revised upward the number known to have been taken, leaving 16 still unaccounted for. Mass kidnappings have become the latest signature crime of the vicious turf war under way between Baghdad’s criminal and sectarian factions, denting public confidence in the police and sowing paranoia.
Meanwhile, bomb and gun attacks killed three people in Baquba, north of Baghdad, and the bodies of eight more shooting victims were found, police said. An army officer was killed in Diwaniyah. US troops shot dead one insurgent in Baghdad, and found and cleared at least eight roadside bombs, according to statements from the US military.
Judge Radhi Hamza Al-Radhi, head of Iraq’s Public Integrity Commission, told AFP that former Electricity Minister Ayham Al-Samarrai — who has joint US and Iraqi citizenship — had been sprung on Sunday and was on the run.
“As he has American citizenship, it had been agreed that guards from a private US security company would be allowed to protect him and to be posted around the police station in which he was being held,” the judge said. “They took advantage of the absence of many of the police from the station, who were called away to another mission, and entered the building to remove Samarrai,” he added.
Meanwhile, the Pentagon’s quarterly report into the US military mission in Iraq said violence has soared to the highest level on record, with an average of 959 attacks per week over the past four months, up 22 percent. Even this figure is likely to be a gross underestimate of the bloodshed because, as was noted in a highly critical bi-partisan review of US policy released earlier this month, the Defense Department’s figures exclude most attacks.
In another development, the chief prosecutor in Saddam Hussein’s trial presented memos from the ousted president’s office approving chemical attacks against Kurdish villages, the most serious evidence against him in his genocide trial. Munqith Al-Faroon on Monday showed the Iraqi court trying Saddam and six other former regime members about 25 documents, including some presidential letters instructing the army to use “special ammunition” - identified as “mustard gas” - to quell a Kurdish rebellion in 1987. Some of the documents bore Saddam’s signature, Al-Faroon said.
Documents from Saddam’s government played a crucial role in his first trial, for the 1987 killing of Shiites in the town of Dujail. In that trial, which ended with Saddam being sentenced to death, prosecutors presented memos with his signature approving death sentences for Shiites and rewarding intelligence agents for their role in the Dujail crackdown.
