A Karbala Whodunit

So who ambushed the U.S. post in Karbala last January, and killed five American soldiers? Was it Sunni militias? Was it Shiite militias? Or was it - Satan? (sorry, I meant Iran....)

It's important to at least give the question some thought, because the Bush Administration is increasingly using this ambush as Exhibit A in its efforts to go to war with Iran.

At the time, knowledgable observers like Juan Cole thought it sounded like a Sunni plot, since the kidnapped Americans were found in a mixed Sunni-Shiite area, but it still had a mysterious edge:

AP is reporting new details on the killing of 5 US troops in an operation that began at Karbala a few days ago. The troops were helping plan security precautions to stop Shiite pilgrims being blown up during the Muharram commemorations of the martyrdom of the Prophet's grandson, al-Husayn. Guerrillas dressed in US uniforms and speaking English showed up, infiltrated the building, killed a GI, and captured 4 others, taking them to Mahawil in Babil province, and then executing them there.

Mahawil, a mixed Sunni-Shiite city, is a Sunni Arab guerrilla arena of action, and it now seems likely to me that this was a Sunni Arab operation aimed at harming security arrangements. Shiite Mahdi Army ghetto militiamen don't know English. If I were in charge of Karbala, I'd put extra extra security around the city for Tuesday's Ashura commemoration of Imam Husayn's martyrdom. The only thing I can't figure out is that it clearly was an inside job, and so how would there have been Sunni Arab guerrilla sympathizers at this police and army meeting at Shiite Karbala. Maybe mixed units were involved?

Still, because of the location of the attack, in heavily Shiite Karbala, Cole's initial impulse a few days earlier had been to blame the Sadrists:

The killing of US troops in Shiite Najaf and Karbala has been a rare event since hostilities ending in late August 2004 between the American military and the Mahdi Army of Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr. The resurgence of lethal hostility in this Shiite area almost certainly has to do with the ongoing US crackdown on the Sadr Movement

Neoconservative desire to blame Iran for everything makes this incident ripe for abuse, as other incidents have been abused too:

The big briefing planned by the Bush administration on supposed Iranian weapons shipments to Iraq had to be postponed because the presentation was judged exaggerated and unsubstantiated by Secretary of State Condi Rice and by Secretary of Defense Robert M. Gates. So that raises the question of who was spearheading this presentation inside the Bush administration? Getting Iran is an obsession of the Neoconservatives at the American Enterprise Institute and their plants inside the administration, such as Iran-Contra felon Elliot Abrams in the National Security Council and David Wurmser and John Hannah on Cheney's rump Veep national security council. Many Neoconservatives and other sorts of wingnut have a secret alliance with the Marxist Islamist MEK terrorist organization, which feeds them allegations about Iran in Iraq just as Ahmad Chalabi used to with regard to the Baath regime in Iraq.

So have the Cheney Neoconservatives been at least somewhat reined in by a new Rice-Gates axis of Realists?

As for the Karbala operation where US troops were kidnapped, a reader with experience in Iraq sends along extensive evidence for the ability of the Sunni Arab guerrillas to pull off sophisticated such attacks, including the infiltration of the lunch room at a US base at Mosul.

Yet, just in July, a Sadr cell in Karbala was uncovered. Is it a coincidence?:

The US military raided a rogue Mahdi Army cell in the Shiite holy city of Karbala on Friday. US troops captured the cell leader but then took small arms fire from his supporters, leading to a vigorous clash. Iraqi sources claimed that 9 militiamen and a civilian woman were killed and 25 persons were wounded, including women and children. The US maintained that the death toll was 6, all militiamen. Any foreigners fighting in Karbala are likely to raise tensions, but this action was almost certainly requested by the city's power elite, which sides with the Supreme Islamic Iraqi Council and its Badr Corps paramilitary against the Sadrists and the Mahdi Army. US troops no longer routinely patrol downtown Karbala, but come in to the city from a base outside it when requested by Iraqi security forces.

Richard Mauer from McClatchy recently reported that a February report recently released due to a Freedom of Information Act request about the Karbala incident contains an allegation of Iranian blame by a mysterious Maj. Gen. Khalid:

It was Jan. 20. The American soldiers had been at the garrison for a week, working with Iraqi police and provincial officials to ensure security for the 10-day Ashoura religious commemoration, which was about to begin.

As Millican, 20, tapped away on his keyboard, a fleet of SUVs raced toward the Karbala Provincial Joint Coordination Center, about 55 miles southwest of Baghdad: two or three Suburbans, a black Chevy Tahoe or two, and at least three white Toyotas. The Suburbans had big cylindrical antennas on their front bumpers, the kind you see on Army Humvees and contractor SUVs to jam signals used to trigger roadside bombs. And, like contractor and U.S. Army vehicles, there were placards in the rear windows, warning motorists in English and Arabic to stay back 100 meters.

The men inside were dressed in U.S. Army camouflage and carried American weapons. They knew enough English to bark simple commands and offer polite greetings. They knew exactly how the U.S. soldiers would defend the compound. They knew that the compound's most important room was the command and control center with its radio base stations. And they knew that at 6 p.m., the soldiers in the room would be off guard and relaxing. They even knew that the two most senior American officers in Karbala would be in the room next door.

Who paid for and trained the force that was about to attack U.S. forces and who betrayed the Americans have become one more troubling question in the Iraq war. Senior U.S. officers said the lightning assault was one of the most sophisticated and complex attacks on coalition forces since Baghdad fell.

Recently in Baghdad, a military spokesman disclosed new suspicions of high-level Iranian involvement in the sneak attack, including the alleged use of Lebanese proxies to train the force.

But while U.S. officials talk about an Iranian role in planning the attack, they've said little about how Iranians would have obtained the detailed intelligence needed for the raid or who carried it out. ... The investigation also raised serious questions about the role of Iraqi police -- the coalition's ally in Iraq.

Not only were police negligent in surrendering their guard positions to the intruders without firing a shot or warning the Americans, the report said, but investigators found strong circumstantial evidence that police officials gave the attackers key intelligence and may have been complicit in allowing an advance force of attackers into the compound.

...About 1:30 p.m. on Jan. 20, the day before thousands of pilgrims would start arriving for the religious commemoration, Millican and another soldier were on guard shift when an odd-looking outfit of 15 to 20 Iraqi police officers arrived from Baghdad. They were dressed in purple-on-black camo, and some took pictures of the secured area. Most were young and fit and appeared to be a personal security detail to three older, heavy-set men who were wearing the insignia of a general in the Iraqi national police.

One of the soldiers described a fourth man who stood out: "A tall man, probably late 30s, with Arabic lettering tattooed on his left hand. ... He didn't fit in with the rest."

None of the Americans knew of any scheduled meetings that day that would involve the visitors from Baghdad, and they wondered what was up. A U.S. soldier who was on his way to a quick meeting with the senior Iraqi police commander in Karbala, identified in the report only as Gen. Mohammed, encountered the odd group in the hallway.

"My interpreter talked with a commando, a fat guy, and he said they were there to meet with the general to talk about Ashoura," the soldier later told investigators.

...Other odd things were happening at the compound, but no one pieced them together until later. All pointed to complicity or collusion on the part of Iraqis who'd spent many days alongside the Americans.

The local barber who had a shop in the compound and who never left before 10 p.m. closed early and vanished. So did the guy who ran a small grocery.

A kid who spoke excellent English and worked as a runner for some of the soldiers, buying cigarettes and sodas and doing other odd jobs, didn't show up.

Another U.S. soldier said that an Iraqi she saw every morning told her he wouldn't be there Jan. 20. The man left at 10 a.m. and didn't return. "He said that he was not going to come back again." An Iraqi carpenter and his teenage son were always around until 10 p.m., working in a second-floor room. On Jan. 20, they, too, didn't show up for work.

The back courtyard usually was filled with lingering Iraqi police officers. However, as evening grew close, the courtyard was deserted. Only two Iraqi police officers remained on guard, and they're thought to be responsible for unlocking a back gate about 10 minutes before the attack, then they, too, disappeared. U.S. soldiers noticed that two police guard towers over adjacent streets had been deserted.

...The attackers appeared to know that they had to kill or disable the people in the command and control center before they could carry out their primary mission: Capturing the senior U.S. officers next door, according to the Army investigation.

..."We grabbed our body armor; we were attempting to put it back on again. This time the door was kicked open." In the doorway, Wallace saw what looked like an Iraqi soldier. The man was dressed in the "chocolate chip" brown desert camouflage used by the Iraqi army, Wallace said.

Investigators found Wallace's observation significant. The men who arrived in the SUVs were dressed in gray U.S.-type uniforms, and they carried M-4 and M-16 rifles, not AK-47s. The observation added to suspicions that some of the attackers had been in the building or compound all day.

...Some of the U.S. soldiers noticed men in purple camouflage uniforms and shot at several of them. It was the same purple uniform worn by more than a dozen Iraqis -- who described themselves as a police detail from Baghdad -- who'd arrived shortly after noon and were seen taking pictures.

"It seemed like some stayed around and a couple were hanging back so they could be in the attack," one of the U.S. defenders from the barracks told investigators.

...The battle was brief, maybe 15 minutes. The SUVs fled. Before the Americans knew it was safe, they saw Iraqi police returning to normal activities.

"What was strange was when we were still scared s---less, they were all walking around like they knew everything was over," a soldier recounted later to investigators. ... "After it was all over, the fat little (police) colonel was talking on his cell phone in the courtyard. He was laughing. He walked out there like there was no problem, talking on the cell phone." Another soldier said it was "odd" that no Iraqi police had died in the raid.

"Nobody even sprained an ankle running from the fight," Wallace said of the Iraqi police.

Someone else heard the Karbala governor giving an order on the local police radio that no one was to respond to the attack without his personal authorization, according to the Army report.

...Wallace said he knew right away that something bad had happened to the officers, Fritz and Freeman...Someone took a squad upstairs to look for the missing men. They were denied permission to search by the same Iraqi police colonel seen laughing into his cell phone.

...At 7:30 p.m., five SUVs raced through Iraqi army Checkpoint 21J north of the town of Mahawil. The occupants of a Chevy Caprice and a Toyota that had been hanging around most of the afternoon yelled at the Iraqi soldiers not to shoot the SUVs "because the people in the vehicles are Israeli and American."

The three people in the two cars were arrested for aiding the fleeing attackers. One turned out to be a second lieutenant in the Iraqi police, and another was a leading local official from the Mahdi Army, the militia of radical Shiite Muslim cleric Muqtada al Sadr.

The insurgent convoy appeared to be confounded by checkpoints, roadblocks and pursuing security forces. If the militants' intent was to obtain hostages for bargaining or propaganda, that plan unraveled.

At 8 p.m., police found the vehicles abandoned on a narrow dead-end road near Mahawil. When they saw a canister with wires in the front seat of the lead vehicle and heard a "ding ding ding," they backed away and waited for the Iraqi army. .... [T]he bomb was genuine. They defused it and discovered the U.S. soldiers handcuffed together. Fritz, Falter and Chism had been executed, but Freeman was alive -- barely -- with a bullet wound to the head. He was rushed by ambulance to the hospital but died on the way.

...The Army report concluded that Freeman and Fritz had been the prime targets of the operation. The investigation quoted a police commander from Baghdad, identified only as Maj. Gen. Khalid, who thought that Iranian intelligence was behind the attack. Khalid suspected that the Iranians wanted to obtain hostages to trade for five suspected Iranian intelligence officers whom U.S. troops had seized in the northern Iraqi city of Irbil on Jan. 11.

Khalid conducted his own investigation for the Iraqi police and determined that police officers "were involved in the plot."

The U.S. Army report concluded that the attackers knew plenty about the Americans before they got there.

Senior Iraqi police leadership at the station, the report said, "knew the coalition forces' battle drills and often watched them practice. The attackers knew exactly where to find the officers and which rooms were occupied by Americans."

The Americans had earlier arrested the Irbil Iranians despite diplomatic cover, raising tensions throughout the region, so the Iranian angle has at least a superficial plausibility. Nevertheless I find it odd that a thoroughly-infiltrated US outpost, an intelligence bonanza, would have been sacrificed by the Iranians for that reason. And who is this "Maj. Gen. Khalid"?

To me, the evidence that a "second lieutenant in the Iraqi police, and another was a leading local official from the Mahdi Army" seals the plot as deriving from the Sadrists. But interpretations may vary since it is, after all, Iraq: Pandora's Box opened!

Beware the Bushies and their plans for war with Iran - a bright, new Pandora's Box!