April 16, 2004
Iraqi Spring Offensive Forces Reshuffle of US Middle East Cards
Second Iraqi War
1. Emerging Shiite “Vatican” Portends Iraq’s Fragmentation
The turbulence overtaking Iraq this April took up much of the televised news conference President George W. Bush held at the White House on Tuesday, April 13. He admitted it had been a tough week but rejected the analogy with Vietnam as false and insisted that “a free Iraq” is vital to the defeat of violence and terror elsewhere.
On the radical Shiite uprising, he said: Coalition forces face riots and attacks that are being incited by a radical cleric named al-Sadr. He has assembled some of his supporters into an illegal militia, and publicly supported the terrorist groups, Hamas and Hizballah. Al Sadr’s methods of violence and intimidation are widely repudiated by other Iraqi Shia. He’s been indicted by Iraqi authorities for the murder of a prominent Shia cleric.
At another point, Bush noted: In addition, members of the Governing Council are seeking to resolve the situation in the south. Al-Sadr must answer the charges against him and disband his illegal militia.
What the president omitted to tell the world was that Washington had made an urgent appeal to Tehran for help in quelling the radical Shiite uprising in Iraq and silencing the defiant Moqtada Sadr. The appeal was relayed through several channels - via the British representative in Baghdad, Sir Jeremy Greenstock, prime minister Tony Blair and foreign secretary Jack Straw, as well as by dispatching Shiite Governing Council member Ibrahim Jaffry to the Iranian capital.
This SOS was relayed to Tehran exactly ten days after US troops knocked on the door of the Iranian charge d’affaires in Baghdad Sadegui Ghomi and gave him one hour to pack his bags and drive himself across the border to Iran. The troops were acting on hard evidence reaching US intelligence that Ghomi, a veteran Revolutionary Guards officer, had been liaising between Tehran and Sadr’s Mehdi Army militia.
Ghomi was a familiar subject for US undercover agents from his lurid past as Iran’s facilitator in the 1980s for military and intelligence work with the Hizballah in Lebanon and his duties in the 1990s in conjunction with Osama bin Laden and Ayman Zuwahiri in Afghanistan.
US defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld said on April 7: “We know the Iranians have been meddling and it’s unhelpful to have neighboring countries meddling in the affairs of Iraq.”
Monday, April 12, the day before the Bush news conference, the head of US Central Command Gen. John Abizaid said curtly: “Syria and Iran are involved in Iraq, and their involvement is not meant to assist the US-led coalition there.”
Tehran wants payment in nuclear currency
Nonetheless, that same night, as DEBKA-Net-Weekly’s sources report from Washington and Tehran, the commander- in-chief in the White House performed an abrupt somersault and decided to turn to Iran for help. The Iranians could scarcely believe their good fortune. This was what they had been after when they put young Sadr up to his uprising. But they had not expected success to fall into their laps so soon.
In the ensuing exchange of messages between Washington and Tehran, neither side referred to Iran’s price for taking care of the Sadr imbroglio, but it was very clear in the minds of the two top Iranian clerics, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and Hashem Rafsanjani, who took personal charge of the interchanges. They meant to achieve US acceptance of Iran’s weapons-capable nuclear program and the end of America’s drive against uranium enrichment processing.
Iran’s rulers are willing to consider only one limitation, to refrain from actually assembling a nuclear device after all its components are but a single step away from the final one. They want an end to international pressure and sanction threats and world recognition of their standing as a nuclear power on an equal footing with Israel, India and Pakistan. The rulers of the Islamic Republic regard this as a fair quid pro quo for pulling the Bush administration out of a hole in Iraq - albeit a hole dug by Iranian hands.
Before the appeal was relayed to Tehran, an estimate of Iran’s potential price and its nuclear ramifications were aired in White House discussions. Some of the president’s advisers favored letting the nuclear issue ride until the June International Atomic Energy Agency board meeting in Vienna and giving top priority to the spiraling American and Iraqi bloodshed before matters in Iraq get out of hand.
Tehran has thus won two months’ grace for its nuclear program by dint of the trouble it fomented in Iraq.
In response to the American request, a large Iranian delegation consequently set out for Baghdad Monday, headed by the deputy minister on Persian Gulf affairs, Hossein Sadeghi. However, in true Iranian style, the big delegation was according to our sources a decoy to distract attention from the key team of high Revolutionary Guards intelligence officers. They did not linger in Baghdad but proceeded under heavy US protection directly to Najef.
Tuesday night, April 13, at about the time Bush was holding forth in the White House, the Iranian officers began a marathon bargaining session with the four Grand Ayatollahs of Najef, led by Ali Sistani.
DEBKA-Net-Weekly’s Iranian sources report they are arguing the relative merits of two different proposals:
1.
Sistani’s formula: The holy cities of Najef and Karbala and their satellite towns will form a new enclave ruled over by the four Grand Ayatollahs and closed to US and coalition forces. American troops will pull back from their present deployment on the environs of Najef and hand security and the preservation of order in the enclave over to armed militias 15,000-strong that are loyal to the Grand Ayatollahs. An “Ansar Karbala” has already been set up in that city.
The new force will drive Sadr’s fighting men off the streets of Shiite holy cities and partially disarm them. A place will be chosen for Sadr’s retirement with a close band of followers under conditions of virtual house arrest. The Four Ayatollahs will vouch for his safety and ascertain that he does not slip out and set up a new operation elsewhere in Iraq.
2.
Tehran formula: The visiting Iranians would carry Sadr back with them to Tehran and keep him there for an unlimited period in the care of the Revolutionary Guards. After he departs Iraq, his Mehdi Army militia will be disbanded.
Eclipse of Sadr uprising poses new threat to June 30 handover
Both formulae have run into a hindrance. The family of the late Ayatollah Abdel Majid al-Khoei, son of a grand ayatollah and the rival whom Sadr has been indicted for murdering a year ago at Najef’s Imam Ali shrine, are intent on justice. They insist on his being arrested and tried on the warrant issued by the provisional Iraqi government.
Khoei’s assassination has been depicted simply as the murder of a pro-Western Shiite cleric. It was much more portentous. The young cleric was recruited by the Americans and British a year before the onset of the Iraq war; they helped him set up a Shiite militia of several thousand armed Khoei clan loyalists. This militia entered Iraq on the heels of the US-British invading forces as the main force tasked with taking over Shiite centers in southern Iraq and dropping an anchor there to solidify American control.
At their first stop in Basra, difficulties arose: militiamen began deserting or quarreling with local townsmen. The Americans pulled Khoei hastily out of the southern port city and relocated him in Najef, where too he found it hard to make an impact. Before long he was murdered in brutal fashion by Sadr’s militiamen on orders from Tehran.
Now, the Americans are hard pressed to resist the demand to get him tried and sentenced to death for murder, since the demand comes from the most powerful clan in the Shiite world, one that moreover controls its richest charity establishment. They know they must think twice before allowing the hotheaded Sadr to escape the wrath of the Khoeis.
Whatever formula is adopted, the young cleric has bowed to the authority of the Four Ayatollahs. The Iranians by pulling the rug from under his feet have effectively extinguished the Shiite uprising that erupted in southern Iraq and the Shiite suburbs of Baghdad on April 4.
However, the moderate Shiite leaders have laid down a condition that could presage a radical change in Iraq’s post-Saddam map. As read by DEBKA-Net-Weekly’s Iraq and Iran analysts, the removal of coalition forces from a key Shiite enclave in Iraq to create a sort of Shiite Vatican is bound to be a precedent leading to the formation of additional autonomous enclaves governed by ethnic or religious groups outside US military control. A mechanism is thus put in place for dividing Iraq into self-ruling sectors whose forces will appropriate security authority from central government. This trend if it is allowed to advance would place in question the transfer of sovereignty to Iraq on June 30.
US Autumn Offensive Planned
With the radical Shiite uprising disposed of, the US military command can give its full attention to the ferocious Sunni-Baathist insurgency, centering on Fallujah. Although moves for its suppression have been slowed by the presidential directive to hold down Iraqi civilian casualties, it is only a matter of time before the fighting elements are destroyed or surrender. The Sunni “corridor” running from Baquba in the east, through Fallujah and up to Ar Ramadi in the west has not been cleared of rebel forces, and Shiite-Sunni elements remain operational in the Turkeman belt running from the Tharthar and Habbaniya lakes to Tuz Khurmatu. They have not yet been dealt with. At the same time, there are no indications of any major Iraqi town preparing to join Fallujah’s revolt against the US presence.
If the military situation in Iraq is stabilized from now on and there are no fresh surprises, like the unexpected Sunni-radical Shiite collaboration last week or a fresh round of hostage-taking, President Bush and his advisers will strive to use the low-intensity combat level to move on with their timetable. The president has reiterated his determination to transfer sovereignty to Iraq on June 30. For late September or early October, depending on the temperatures in Iraq, the US command plans an Autumn Offensive to wipe out remaining Sunni resistance and bands of foreign fighters and also dispose of any local elements hindering America’s political and economic master plan for the country. Cities or urban districts hosting these elements will be taken over and insurgents pursued relentlessly.
This timeline has been set as the stage on which President Bush will rise above the US election campaign as the archetypal war leader. At the same time, the White House is fully aware that the same Iranian-Hizballah-al Qaeda axis which lit the current flame in Iraq may have more nasty surprises up its sleeve to wreck the president’s chances of re-election. This Bush’s advisers hope the projected Autumn Offensive will pre-empt. In any case it will go forward.
2. Bush Holds Back until Kerry Picks Running Mate
According to DEBKA-Net-Weekly’s Washington sources, President George W. Bush is biding his time before firing all his campaign guns in his bid for re-election. First he wants to see who the Democratic presumptive candidate John Kerry picks for vice president. That will tell him where to concentrate his resources.
Kerry’s choice will likely be governed by the strategy he opts for the next stage of the campaign. He must choose between attempting to wrest the South from Bush or focusing primarily on the Midwest where the Democratic contender is on firmer ground. If he decides to tackle the president in the South, he will have to put up a heavy infusion of campaign cash and pick an attractive Southern running mate to support his bid.
Former Energy Secretary and UN ambassador under the Clinton administration, New Mexico Governor Bill Richardson is a leading candidate; so is the last contender Kerry defeated in the Democratic primaries, Senator John Edwards of North Carolina.
But if the Democratic nominee decides not to waste money and energy on an uphill fight for the South but to concentrate instead on a lite fight for the Midwest, his choices of issues to hammer and a partner to run with will be of a different order.
The names coming to the fore in the second case are Rep. Dick Gephardt of Missouri and Senator Evan Bayh (Indiana).
The key battles will then be fought by the two candidates in Pennsylvania, Illinois and Wisconsin as well as the pivotal state of Ohio, which Bush’s campaign advisers are confident he can carry against Kerry.
In the last few days, the president carries himself with a lot more confidence in his re-election for another term. This confidence characterized his televised statement on Tuesday, April 13, and the way he reacted to reporters’ questions, especially when he was asked why he did not admit to making mistakes. That judgment, he rapped out, would be left to the voter when they came to elect the next president.
Bush derives his assurance from the latest opinion polls in the hands of his campaign managers that show him ahead both among electors and the general public.
Bush’s decision on a running mate likewise depends on Kerry’s choice of primary battle arena. Although Vice President Dick Cheney reiterates that the president has asked him to stand again, DEBKA-Net-Weekly’s sources say that this is far from certain. Cheney’s supporters are pretty much in Bush’s pocket already, which reduces his assets if it comes to a knockdown fight in the Midwest. Bush would need a fresh partner with special appeal for that part of the country as well as the expenditure of the bulk of the campaign funds he has raised.
Not relying on the volatile issues of Iraq and the war on terror, the Bush campaign is focusing primarily on the economy where the president’s performance is seen to be robust and steady. One formula claims that no president has ever lost a second-term election with 3 percent annual growth behind him. Bush will be able to point to 4 percent growth in 2004.
But, just as nothing in Iraq can be taken for granted, so too the Democratic challenger is almost certain to have one or more surprises up his sleeve for the final lap of the campaign.
3. CIA’s Secret Iraqi Protégé Tipped as Iraq’s Next Ruler
On May 5, 1989, Iraqi defense minister General Adnan Khairallah Tulfa, 49, died in an “accidental” helicopter crash that Saddam Hussein’s secret services engineered. Being the Iraqi ruler’s first cousin and married to his sister did not save the general. In the bloody Iraq-Iran War that decimated a generation between 1980 and 1987, Tulfa had grown into an authentic popular hero, credited alone of Iraq’s leaders with repulsing the hordes of Iranian suicide fighters beating against Iraq’s borders.
Increasingly irked by his burgeoning popularity, Saddam and his cronies, especially Izzat Ibrahim Douri and Taha Yassin Ramadan, decided to do away with the national idol before he posed a challenge to their rule.
Within hours of his murder, secret service agents raided the homes of General Tulfa’s relations and friends, dragged them out and butchered them in cold blood. Their purpose was to root out any future sources of opposition that might rise in his memory. But one member of his circle did survive, his most trusted aide, Maj.-Gen Mohammad Abdullah Mohammad al-Shehwani, who was born in Mosul in 1947. He was saved very simply by being away from the country on a mission for Tulfa in Paris.
Upon hearing of his boss’s death, Al-Shehwani made three quick decisions.
First, to avoid his own country like the plague as long as Saddam was in charge. Second, to refrain from using his access to Tulfa’s secret bank accounts to draw funds so as not to lead Iraqi undercover trackers to his location. For the same reason, he shunned the proliferating opposition groups in exile, knowing they were riddled with Saddam’s informers. Third, to find a protector.
DEBKA-Net-Weekly’s intelligence sources reveal that, thanks to his first two actions, Al-Shehwani was able to leave his Paris hotel, move to London and drop out of sight - and eventually from memory. Friends who tried to find him found no clues to tell them if he was alive or dead. As the years went by, his name was forgotten. He even failed to surface when Saddam had three of his sons murdered.
The effectiveness of his vanishing act tied in closely with his third decision. The US Central Intelligence Agency secreted him to the United States and kept him under its protection for fifteen years, allowing him to live in total anonymity.
The protégé surfaces
On March 24, 2004, eight days before the latest round of fighting erupted in Iraq, Al-Shehwani name was briefly mentioned by US administrator Paul Bremer as Director-General of Iraq’s new National Intelligence Service. It was only then that Iraqis discovered he was alive.
According to our sources, the CIA did a lot more than provide the Iraqi exile with a safe haven. While out in the open, the Pentagon and State Department were busy preparing rival exiled leaders like Ahmed Chalabi and Adnan Pachachi for high office in post-Saddam Baghdad, the CIA’s best instructors and mentors secretly coached the former major general for eventual accession to the top post in Baghdad.
During the 1990s, the secret exile quietly influenced some of Washington’s most important decisions on Iraq. It was on his behind-the-scenes advice that President Bill Clinton spurned the deal offered in 1995 by Saddam’s defecting son-in-law Lt.-Gen Hussein Kemal al Majid, to reveal where Iraq was secretly manufacturing forbidden weapons of mass destruction in return for US backing for a coup to bring him to power. Majid, having lost hope, allowed himself to be lured back to Iraq by an offer of immunity, only to be murdered on February 26, 1996, presumably by Uday Hussein.
Even after the American invasion of Iraq last March, Al-Shehwani was kept under tight wraps. Unlike well-known opposition leaders, he was never invited to Gen. Tommy Franks’ war headquarters; neither was he seen in Baghdad after its fall last April. The decision to bring the secret CIA candidate out into the open was reached in Washington about a month before US-led coalition forces were caught up in the current round of two-front warfare against the radical Shiite cleric Moqtada Sadr and pro-Baath, Arab fighters and al Qaeda. It was then that the Bush administration came to the conclusion that Bremer’s Iraqi strategy was stuck in the sand. The CIA director George Tenet - not for the first time - asked President George W. Bush to approve Al-Shehwani’s transfer to Baghdad.
By taking control of Iraqi intelligence, the CIA protégé becomes in effect strongman of Iraq, barring the Kurdish regions (a point developed in next article).
DEBKA-Net-Weekly’s Washington sources reveal that President Bush has allocated the coming man operating funds separate from regular US appropriations for Iraq.
The current flare-up of hostilities in Iraq finally convinced the White House and CIA that the former officer of Saddam’s army, Iraq’s former weight-lifting champion, would be the best man to carry Iraq’s heavy woes at this time.
4. A Kurdish Deputy for Next Iraqi Leader
United Kurdish Party intelligence chief Kosart Rasul had made a name for his loyalty to two parties, his leader Jalal Talabani and the US Central Intelligence Agency. Rasul led the Americans to Saddam Hussein’s hidey hole in December 2003, on top of many other services. He has therefore been selected, according to DEBKA-Net-Weekly’s intelligence sources, as the new Director of Operations of the Iraqi National Intelligence Service, to serve as deputy of its new chief, Maj.-Gen Mohammad Abdullah Mohammad al-Shehwani, who has just been restored to Iraq after long hiding in exile under CIA protection.
The choice of Rasul as his deputy is designed to achieve five goals:
1.
To strengthen Shehwani’s back in his new job with a mainstay trusted by Washington so that he need not turn for support to fellow Iraqi Sunnis.
2.
To provide Shehwani with a seasoned operational arm, Rasul’s special operations units.
3.
Posting a powerful Kurdish intelligence figure in the heart of a body controlling the Sunni Triangle and Baghdad will provide Kurdish leader Talabani with a strong foothold in the future government in Baghdad. The Bush administration values Talabani as one of its most prized assets in Iraq.
4.
Rasul’s intelligence outfit is the most effective organ to have penetrated bastions of the Sunni establishment including the local tribes.
5.
His presence at the side of al-Shehwani will alleviate the suspicion common to many Kurds in northern Iraq that the Americans intended reviving the Sunni Baath army’s grip on power. This suspicion was fed this week when the US administration began recalling large numbers of former officers and men from Saddam’s armed forces. Until now, this did not happen. However, members of the new Iraqi army, police and security forces performed disappointingly in the current round of fighting, some turning tail rather than join US troops in combat, and a decision was therefore taken to bring back Saddam’s veteran combat troops.
Kurds torn by recurrent rivalries
Like most of Iraq’s ethnic and religious groups, the Kurdish community is riven by internal feuding. Jalal Talabani and Massoud Barzani, each at the head of his own fiefdom are quarreling again as they have many times before they were reconciled by US peacemakers ahead of the Iraq War. Barzani argues that the evolving emergence of new Shiite and Sunni enclaves makes it incumbent on the Kurds to quietly draw their two regions together into full union. He also wants the two Kurdish governments to merge into a single administration. The two steps would bring the Kurds that much closer to a united Kurdish state in northern Iraq.
Talabani, for his part, is not fundamentally opposed to full statehood, but he wants first to give a chance to a federal government in Baghdad under which self-governing entities will be allowed to exist. Talabani knows Barzani suspects him of clinging to the federal formula because he is assured of a powerful personal position in the central federal administration. To reassure Barzani, Talabani made him an offer. After the June 30 transfer of sovereignty, Iraq will be ruled by three rotating presidents. He offered the Kurdish position to Barzani on a permanent basis.
The offer was refused. According to DEBKA-Net-Weekly’s Kurdish sources, Barzani is afraid to leave his Arbil power base and the extensive business empire he has established in northern Iraq unsupervised.
The Kurdish enclave Barzani rules extends to the Turkish border. His men control the border crossings, especially the one at al Habur, and collect for him a toll on every car and all merchandize entering Iraq from Turkey, including goods transported by the US army. Barzani’s revenues from this traffic are colossal, running into millions of dollars per month. He has spent the money creating a vast machine made up of tens of thousands of Kurdish tribesmen linked to him by family, religious or business ties, which controls not only his own enclave but the strong offshoots he has planted across the Persian Gulf and the Middle East.
Talabani’s rival and partner has therefore lost all interest in the power plays of Baghdad, Fallujah or Najef. All he cares about is that nothing in those flashpoints of trouble will present a political or military threat to his vast holdings.
He also maintains a suspicious watch on Talabani to make sure he does not move in on the sources of his affluence.
The result is that the two Kurdish enclaves are inching towards unification and are within a hair’s breadth of complete independence. At the same time, a reverse process is underway whereby each of the two enclaves strives to build up its own strength.
These countervailing trends are not lost on the Kurds’ Turkeman neighbors to the south.
5. Turkemen Offer Buffer Belt between Tikrit and Kirkuk
A map with written material was recently delivered to the administration in Washington with an offer from Iraq’s Turkeman community to create a long thin belt under their control which would act as a buffer between the Kurds of the north and the Sunnis of central Iraq.
They suggest that their region would counterbalance the autonomous enclaves taking shape in the country at a pace accelerated by the latest round of hostilities.
The other advantage the Turkemen offer is that, uniquely, of all the Iraqi groups, they are non-Arab and predominantly Sunni Muslim with a substantial Shiite Muslim minority.
DEBKA-Net-Weekly’s sources, who have seen the Turkeman package, describe their domain as a strip 50 km wide at its broadest point running from the Syrian border in the west and ending at the Iranian border in the east.
Since the strip passes between Tikrit and Kirkuk, the Turkeman are ideally placed to defend Kirkuk’s oil fields from dangers coming from the south.
Included in the Turkemen offer is a pledge of equal standing in government and security forces for the Assyrian Christians.
The key item of the proposal pertains to the final status of Kirkuk as a city shared among Turkemen, Kurds and Arab tribes in the vicinity. The Turkemen calculate that those tribes, cut off as they are from the Sunnis of central Iraq and isolated inside Jalal Talabani’s Kurdish enclave, will prefer to throw in their lot in with the Turkemen rather than live under Kurdish rule.
The heads of the national security council in Washington, while studying the details of the Turkeman proposal, are conscious of two detrimental factors that are not covered in the package. One is that Mogtada Sadr was helped by Turkeman Shiites to insinuate his militiamen into Ar Ramadi to attack the Americans at the outset of his uprising.
The other is the recent arrival of Turkmenistani agents from Central Asia which only aggravates the deep concern in the US military command in the region over the penetration of al Qaeda operatives from that former Soviet republic. An influx of Osama bin Laden’s terrorists under cover of visitors from Turkmenistan is one headache the American command in Iraq can live without.
Central Asia
Al Qaeda terrorists head for Turkmenistan
From May 1, no new mosques will be built in Muslim Turkmenistan and repairs on old structures will require a special government license. The three mosques under construction will be finished. But as far as the Turkmen authorities are concerned, the people have enough mosques to last them for years to come.
This order may remove the last straw holding up the regime of President Saparmurat Niyazov against the incoming Islamic terrorist threat.
Their president is already an object of deep concern to his people after he advised them to stop capping their teeth with gold, banned beards and listening to car radios and declared a national holiday in honor of a melon.
Al Qaeda may therefore feel it can waltz into the perplexed Central Asian nation without too much resistance. According to DEBKA-Net-Weekly’s counter-terror sources, Osama bin Laden’s group has ordered a number of cells to penetrate Turkmenistan from neighboring Afghanistan and set up terror bases. Some are Turkmenistani natives who spent years in Afghanistan for training and guidance under the former Taliban regime and who lately served with al Qaeda. Most of them were happy to return home and escape the joint US-Pakistan pursuit operation carried out in southeast Afghanistan in March.
In recent weeks, since the al Qaeda-linked Uzbek Islamic Party blew up buildings in Tashkent, its members have been relentlessly pursued by Uzbek forces. Escapees from Uzbekistan and al Qaeda infiltrators from Afghanistan are finding sanctuary in Turkmenistan.
Since becoming president in 1991, Niyazov has sworn to fight the spread of Islamic extremism in his country, a blight that gives sleepless nights to him, Washington and the American companies heavily invested in the development of oil pipelines to carry oil and gas from Central Asia to Afghanistan and Pakistan via Turkmenistan. He has ordered the zakat (believers’ donations to charity) to be deposited with a special commission appointed by the president instead of being freely handed out by the imams as was customary.
The sudden withholding of these revenues has hit the clerical establishments disseminating Islamic propaganda. With no cash to hand out, the clerics have lost popular respect and have nothing to offer the Islamic terrorist groups.
The president’s standstill order on mosque construction is treated by Muslim organizations as a declaration of war and pushed some who never engaged in violence into joining external terrorist groups. Most Islamic analysts in Central Asia expect Turkmenistan to go the way of Uzbekistan and attract terrorist attacks and even attempts on the president’s life. He will hardly find support among the many poor in the country or those who feel they have fallen prey to a modern Asian Caligula.
HOT POINTS
2 April: The building in the picture, the five-star Le Meridien Hotel, in the Shmeisani district of Amman, walking distance from the Hussein sports center and the Palace of Culture, was projected for reduction to charred rubble Friday, April 2 by a joint Hizballah-al Qaeda bomb team. This is revealed by DEBKAfile’s exclusive counter-terror sources. But part of that team was captured by Jordanian forces as it entered the kingdom from Syria at the Ramtha crossing Wednesday, March 31, driving a suspicious looking pickup truck found on examination to be loaded with hundreds of kilos of explosives. The four detainees, questioned at Jordanian army security headquarters in Amman, soon gave the game away. They also disclosed that another one or two explosives-laden trucks with the rest of the terror team had managed to slip into Jordan before them and was at large - whereupon the royal security forces shot into pursuit mode and placed armed guards on the palaces, the US and Israeli embassies and strategic sites.
The al Qaeda-Hizballah terrorist plot would have left several hundreds of people dead in Amman - a catastrophe several times greater than the Madrid train bombings.
The terrorists driving the missing truck or trucks were to have rendezvoused at an unknown location with a second team of fellow al Qaeda operatives who were to have collected the explosives and used them for suicide car bombings inside Amman. The truck seized at the border was to have blown up Le Meridien.
Jordanian media named the notorious al Qaeda operative Musab Zarqawi as the suspected mastermind of the attempted al Qaeda-Hizballah Hamas mega-strike in Amman. DEBKAfile’s terror experts note that the familiar al Qaeda names bandied about after every terrorist action belong to the fundamentalist network’s command level current until the end of 2002. They are yesterday’s men. A new generation has meanwhile risen from the middle ranks whose names are unknown. Their anonymity has become the biggest obstacle facing Western intelligence in fighting or predicting al Qaeda actions. Zarqawi is a Jordanian himself and still active, but it is hardly credible that one man is capable of wreaking devastation over a short period in Baghdad, Karbala, Arbil, Madrid, Amman, Istanbul and every other world site targeted for terror.
5 April: US-led coalition troops are embattled in most of southern and central Iraq, from Basra in the south up to Baghdad and the Sunni Triangle. Western Iraq and the Kurdish-ruled north are relatively calm although Iraqi guerrillas still operate there too.
The real cause underlining the Sadr rebellion is brought to light by DEBKAfile’s intelligence and counter-terror sources. They stress it was prepared at the behest of Tehran - with the collaboration of Damascus and the Hizballah - by the Shiite master terrorist Imad Mughniyeh. Its purpose: to trigger Iran’s Spring Offensive against the Americans in Iraq.
In March 2003, days after the American invasion of Iraq, Tehran sent al-Sadr into the country, well-padded with Iranian weapons, intelligence, combatants and cash, which are still on tap. The Iranians may feel they are still in sufficient control to decide whether to go forward and back his anti-American campaign to the bitter end, or hold back and cash in on their gains. According to DEBKAfile’s sources in Tehran, the ayatollahs will be guided by two considerations:
1. Will the violence incurred until now push Washington hard enough to abandon its international campaign against Iran’s nuclear program? If the Bush administration agrees to let this pass, Tehran will call al-Sadr and his militia to heel and instruct him to come to an arrangement with the Americans for calm.
2. The Mehdi Army is riddled with hundreds of Iranian Revolutionary Guards officers and agents, dominated by the most extremist and belligerent elements in the Iranian regime. If ordered to hold their fire, these fire-eating combatants may well switch their loyalties to the most implacable factions of the Revolutionary Guards to which Mughniyeh also belongs.
The decisions facing the Assad regime are equally complex. While Tehran may believe it has acquired a nuclear bargaining chip in the Sadr rebellion, Damascus may use it as leverage to fend off US economic sanctions and force Washington to accept the Hizballah and Palestinian terrorist organizations based in Damascus as legitimate arms of a national liberation movement, rather than terrorists.
However, the Syrian ruler is not a free agent. In the summer of 2003, he allowed Mughniyeh to cross Syria into Iraq from his hiding place in Lebanon to program the Shiite offensive. Last November, he was allowed to return by the same route. With the onset of the Shiite uprising, Mughniyeh took command of Hizballah forces, pushing Hassan Nasrallah into second place. Damascus can therefore no longer act on its own.
10 April: On Friday, April 9 - Day Six of the Shiite radical uprising - the tide turned in the Iraq war. US-led forces were thrown back to the point they had reached exactly one year ago when Saddam Hussein’s colossal statue was toppled by joyous Iraqis.
They were faced, according to DEBKAfile’s exclusive military and intelligence sources, with a row of devastating setbacks: ministers were quitting the provisional Iraqi Governing Council set up to hold the fort of government until the handover of sovereignty on June 30; large parts of the New Iraqi Army, police, border guard, protective units for oil installations and intelligence, trained and financed by Washington, were breaking down. Some Iraqi units were handing their weapons and surrendering to the nearest insurgent militias, whether the rebellions radical Shiite Mehdi Army or other guerrilla groups, including al Qaeda.
US troops were ordered to de-escalate military action and pull back from the major fronts of Baghdad’s sprawling northern Shiite slum known as Sadr City, the northern oil city of Mosul and Ar Ramadi at the western tip of the Sunni Triangle. They were told that further coalition troop advances were bound to cause an unacceptable level of civilian and troop casualties.
This was the real background to the unilateral US suspension of hostilities on April 9 in the hotbed town of Fallujah.
DEBKAfile’s military sources reveal that, several weeks ago, Mehdi Army commanders struck a deal with local Sunni and Turkomen tribal chiefs to allow several hundred secretly trained Shiite fighters to cross their lands en route from Baghdad and Samarra to points north. The militiamen have joined up with the Sunni guerrillas and al Qaeda bands. The have fetched up together outside Kirkuk. The American non-advance leaves this dangerous enclave in northern Iraq free to build up its strength - but for another factor:
5. To meet the encroaching peril, the Kurds of the north have moved military units out of Suleimaniyah and Kirkuk and redeployed them further south at the Turkoman town of Tuz Khumato. The two Kurdish leaders Jalal Talabani and Massoud Barzani have warned Washington that if Shiite and Sunni militias move any further north towards Kirkuk, the Kurdish armies will push southward and smash them - a threat that raises the dread specter of an ethnic bloodbath.
13 April: The role Iran has played in this flare-up will no doubt figure large in the Bush-Blair parley. The president left much of the handling of the Iran issue in British hands when earlier this year he accepted Blair’s offer of a European front for handling this chestnut. Blair proposed a concerted European effort to check Iran’s advance towards nuclear weapons and halt its uranium enrichment, while at the same time laying the groundwork for a Washington-Tehran diplomatic accommodation over Iraq. However, British foreign secretary Jack Straw, who was charged with the maneuver, failed completely. Iran failed to give way on its nuclear program even though the European Union suspended a trade accord that Tehran badly wants. Instead, it marched forward defiantly in three spheres:
1. The Isfahan centrifuge plant was fully assembled and began operating in breach of a solemn Iranian undertaking to the EU and the International Atomic Energy Agency in Vienna.
2. Work was accelerated on the heavy water reactor in Arak, 200 km southwest of Tehran, where building begins in June. This reactor will produce enough plutonium to make one nuclear weapon per year. It will enable Iran to make up the fuel shortfall created by Russian president Vladimir Putin’s promise to Bush to withhold 8000 fuel rods from the big Bushehr reactor. Bushehr is now preparing to get its fuel from Arak.
3. Through its agents, Revolutionary Guards officers and Hizballah cells in Iraq, Tehran propelled the turbulent young Shiite cleric into staging an uprising against the US-led coalition in the Shiite centers of Baghdad and southern Iraq. At the same time, Iran-based al Qaeda operatives who move in and out of Iraq through the Iranian and Syrian borders were sent to broker tactical links between Sadr’s militia and the Sunni insurgents in Falluja and Ar Ramadi. Once the flame was kindled and Sunni and radical Shiite insurgents engaged in hostilities in the first week of April, Tehran, according to DEBKAfile’s sources, told its agents to break away and maintain a low profile lest Washington be provoked into dealing out punishment.
http://www.debka.com