[NYTr] Iraq to Authorize "Raids" on US Mercs?

[All the News That Doesn't Fit]

The New York Times - Nov 8, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/08/world/middleeast/08ministry.html

Iraq Plans to Confront Security Firms on Guns

By JAMES GLANZ

BAGHDAD, Nov. 7 — The Iraqi interior minister said Wednesday that he
would authorize raids by his security forces on Western security firms
to ensure that they were complying with tightened licensing
requirements on guns and other weaponry, setting up the possibility of
violent confrontations between the Iraqis and heavily armed Western
guards.

The tightening of the requirements followed a shooting in September by
one of those firms, Blackwater, that Iraqi authorities said left 17
Iraqis dead.

“Every company will be subject to such examination, and any company
that does not follow the law will lose its license,” the minister,
Jawad al-Bolani, said of the planned raids. “They are called security
companies. They are not called violate-the-law companies.”

During a tour of the Interior Ministry compound in eastern Baghdad,
Iraqi government officials also said for the first time that they
accepted estimates by American oversight officials that some 190,000
pistols and automatic rifles supplied by the United States to Iraqi
forces in 2004 and 2005 were unaccounted for.

Iraqi officials have created an elaborate computerized database to help
recover the weapons and ensure that no more are lost, and officials
took great pains on Wednesday to show the system to this reporter and
his interpreter.

“We have 190,000 lost weapons because they were not distributed
properly,” said Maj. Gen. Abdul Karim Khalaf, an Interior Ministry
spokesman. “So we built this database.”

Many of those weapons were distributed when Gen. David H. Petraeus, now
the American commander in Iraq, was in charge of training and equipping
Iraqi security forces in 2004 and 2005. General Petraeus has said that
he decided to arm the Iraqi forces as quickly as possible, before
tracking systems were fully in place.

On Wednesday, Iraqi officials delicately placed blame for the loss of
the weapons on the American military, saying that it had been
impossible for the Iraqis to account for the weapons when they were not
given necessary tracking information, such as serial numbers.

Within Baghdad’s relatively safe and heavily guarded Green Zone, there
have been early indications of a battle over who controls Iraqi
streets. Private security guards say that Iraqi police officers have
already descended on Western compounds and stopped vehicles driven by
Westerners to check for weapons violations in recent weeks.

Any extension of those measures into the rest of the country, known as
the Red Zone, could quickly turn into armed confrontation. Westerners
are wary of Interior Ministry checkpoints, some of which have been
fake, as well as of ministry units, which are sometimes
militia-controlled and have been implicated in sectarian killings.
Western convoys routinely have to choose between the risk of stopping
and the risk of accelerating past what appear to be official Iraqi
forces.

And because Western convoys run by private security companies are often
protecting senior American civilian and military officials, the Iraqi
government’s struggle with the companies has in some cases become a
sort of proxy tug-of-war with the United States.

That dynamic was laid bare in the weeks immediately after the shooting
on Sept. 16 in Nisour Square in Baghdad. The Iraqi government at first
suggested that it would ban Blackwater, which has a contract to protect
American diplomats, from working in Iraq. But the government was
embarrassed when it discovered that its legal options were limited, and
the United States — after placing a few new restrictions on the company
— quickly sent it back onto the streets.

Based on its own investigation, the Iraqi government has concluded that
the Blackwater guards who opened fire committed murder. An American
investigation led by the F.B.I. has not yet publicly announced any
results.

The outlines of a struggle for primacy on the streets also seem
apparent in what the Interior Ministry says is a decision to insist
that weapons carried by members of Shiite-controlled militias that
protect certain neighborhoods must also be registered. Asked about the
vast areas of Baghdad patrolled by the powerful Mahdi Army, which was
founded by the radical Shiite cleric Moktada al-Sadr, General Khalaf
said that it too would be challenged.

“In the near future there is a campaign that will happen,” General
Khalaf said. “We are delaying this campaign until we finish this
database.”

Privately, Interior Ministry officials say that they had been surprised
that the Iraqi investigators’ findings of culpability by the Blackwater
guards had found such a sympathetic hearing elsewhere in the world,
where for years there had been questions about the loyalties and
capability of Interior Ministry officials.

In one sense, by emphasizing the new steps it is taking to control
weapons, the Interior Ministry seems determined to leverage the respect
shown for its investigators in such a high-profile case into an
improved image over all. The strategy appears to be to concede that
both American and Iraqi security forces have made mistakes in the past
but that both were taking steps to put those problems behind them.

During one remarkable session on Wednesday, an administrative official
at the ministry said that it had had problems with “ghost payrollers,”
or fictitious employees, and political pressure in the past. But the
official, Maj. Gen. Jihan Hussein, said that the ministry was squarely
facing those problems.

“If you knew the pressures we have from members of Parliament to have
their relatives employed by the ministry, you wouldn’t believe it,”
General Hussein said.

But he said the ministry would not bow to those pressures. In a similar
vein, Mr. Bolani said that the ministry’s strict new approach to
weapons licenses would try to redress past mistakes.

And Mr. Bolani said he believed that legal action against Blackwater in
Iraq was still possible in spite of immunity given to Western security
contractors under Iraqi law. He said that third parties like
nongovernmental organizations or the Iraqi Bar Association could bring
suits on behalf of the victims of the Sept. 16 shootings.

“We are fully aware that the people must be given their rights, and
there are cases that will be brought against the criminals,” Mr. Bolani
said.

Ahmad Fadam contributed reporting.