[A-List] US imperialism: Iraq

["Michael Keaney" <michael.keaney@xxxxxx>]

US turns to former enemies to restore order
By Charles Clover
Financial Times: June 24 2003

On May 9, Hussein Jassem Ijbara was returning from a trip to his home in
'Amer, Iraq, when a friend met him on the way and said his house was
surrounded by American soldiers. Being a former general in the Iraqi
Republican Guards, Mr Ijbara assumed they were there to arrest him. Not
wanting trouble, he went to his house to surrender.

"They said 'We're not here to arrest you' " - as he tells it. "Instead, they
asked me if I would agree to be governor of Salahadin province."

Mr Ijbara has traded his military fatigues for a suit and sits in a
well-appointed office at the government palace in Tikrit - Salahadin's
capital and home town of Saddam Hussein.

Asked why the US would have trusted him with such a job, in such an
enormously sensitive region of Iraq, Mr Ijbara says flatly that he had had
no prior contacts with the US military.

"I don't think it mattered whether they trusted me," he says. "In my
opinion, they needed someone strong who could run Salahadin province in the
place of Saddam Hussein. That's just my opinion, I don't know. But people
know me here, I think that's obvious."

While he presents himself as part of a new generation of Iraqi leaders, it
is clear that some of Mr Ijbara's ideas hark back to an earlier period of
Iraqi history.

Asked about his formula for governing the province, he says: "We have a
system now very much like they have in the United States. Our province is
like an American state. In other words, I have all the power."

Despite an order issued on May 16, banning the Ba'ath party, and another
from May 22, dissolving the Iraqi military, US forces increasingly seem to
be relying on selected strongmen like Mr Ijbara to run cities and provinces
in the areas under their control.

In the southern city of Najaf, for example, local elections were scrubbed at
the beginning of the month. The US-appointed mayor, Abdul Min'im Amer Aboud,
a former colonel in the Iraqi artillery forces who rode into Najaf on US
special forces trucks in early April, continues to rule.

Elections were also cancelled in the city of Samarra, in Salahadin province,
by Mr Ijbara himself. "They just couldn't agree among themselves, I had to
step in," he says. He appointed Shakir Mahmoud, another former Ba'ath party
official, as the city's mayor.

The increasing reliance on former regime figures to govern locally occurs as
US troops come to terms with the fact tha t they cannot maintain security
themselves.

Major Josslyn Aberle, of the US 4th infantry division, based in Tikrit,
says: "The decision to appoint [Mr Ijbara] was done with great
consideration. Background checks were done by our intelligence assets, as
well as interviews with community leaders in Tikrit. He immediately signed
an oath renouncing the Ba'ath party."

"So far, his performance has shown that improving the general welfare of the
people in the province and working with coalition forces are his
priorities," she adds.

Mr Ijbara claims he has virtually stopped attacks against US forces in his
province, mainly by giving demobilised soldiers work as policemen and by
keeping former Ba'athists on the payroll.

With Tikrit the heart of the former regime, Mr Ijbara says he has 90,000
high- ranking Ba'athists in his province alone. "If I fired them all, we'd
have 10,000 new revolutionaries," he says. "Instead they have become
important contributors to the new system."

Not all has been smooth, though. When 4,000 US troops raided the village of
Thuluiya, in Salahadin province, two weeks ago, Mr Ijbara (who is related to
many in the village) complained bitterly to the Americans that they had made
a mistake.

He says he agreed to become governor provided the US forces allowed his
police to carry weapons, and that they took care of salaries, schools, and
hospitals. The wage bill for the first month, 7bn dinars ($5.4m ?4.7m £3.2m)
, was paid by scrounging from state enterprises. But he made clear he
expected the coalition to pay salaries from now on.

Local residents credit him with a sharp drop in crime, and say the regional
government has even returned cars looted by gangs in the post-war chaos
there.

Other cities in the province complain he is heavy-handed. Many in Samarra
criticise him for cancelling the recent election. And when Mr Ijbara visited
the nearby city of Balad two weeks ago, he was attacked by a mob after a
local sheikh cried through the loudspeakers of a mosque "Jihad! Jihad! The
Ba'athists have come!"

Mr Ijbara brushes this off: "The people of Balad are my people. Some day, we
will overcome our differences."