Welcome to the Other Talisman Gate

The Talisman Gate, Baghdad, Iraq, circa 1907

"Kazimi, whose Talisman Gate blog is widely read by Iraq experts and commentators in the United States..." The Washington Post, July 19, 2007

Welcome to my blog. This is the place where I explore issues like whether Nostradamus had predicted the whole Zarqawi phenomena, and is Walid Junbulatt the real Hariri killer? In other words, this space is devoted to all the stuff that would peg me a crank should I try to put it out in print. But what the hell, journalistic credibility is way too over-regarded. Plus, blogging is an exercise in vanity; it is the joy-ride of ego-trips. So, excuse my pompous self-righteousness, and try to enjoy your stay.

Interesting: Abu Suleiman al-'Uteibi Killed in Afghanistan

Abu Suleiman al-'Uteibi (identified in the Saudi press as Muhammad al-Thubaiti, a young Saudi cleric) was killed in Afghanistan's Paktia Province during a skirmish with coalition forces there, according to a press release from Al-Qaida in Afghanistan today. The statement clarifies that al-'Uteibi had arrived in Afghanistan six months ago after leaving Iraq. Al-'Uteibi seems to have been a favorite of Abu Musaab al-Zarqawi's, having arrived in Iraq from Saudi Arabia shortly before the latter's death in June 2006. Al-'Uteibi makes his first public appearance in a video released on April 11, 2007 and is identified with the lofty title of "Chief Religious Judge of the Islamic State of Iraq", even though he was only 28 years old at the time.

But shortly afterwards, Abu Omar al-Baghdadi declared the names of his cabinet (on April 19, 2007), and he didn't pick al-'Uteibi as his Minister of Religious Courts:

3-Professor Sheikh Abu ‘Uthman al-Tamimi, Minister of Religious Courts (Apparently the first choice that was read out by the “spokesman” was changed at the last minute, because a voice-over is done in someone else's voice with al-Tamimi’s name substituted for the first choice; the Bani Tamim are one of Iraq’s major tribes, and they are mostly Shi’a with important Sunni subsections. There are also Tamimis in Saudi Arabia—Muhammad bin Abdel-Wahhab, the founder of Wahhabism in the 18th century belonged to this tribe—so this fellow could be a non-Iraqi too. The first choice could have been Sheikh Abu Suleiman al-Uteibi, a Saudi, who was recently identified as the chief religious judge of the ISI; I have no idea why they would have changed it.)

Al-Baghdadi officially sacked al-'Uteibi in statement released for that purpose on August 25, 2007, and appointed an Iraqi sheikh, Abu Ishaq al-Juburi, in his place. It seems that shortly after being fired, al-'Uteibi left Iraq for Afghanistan.

It would be interesting to discover the background to the al-Baghdadi-al-'Uteibi rift, and what al-'Uteibi had to say about it to the mujaheddin in Afghanistan, and whether there's a deeper rift between the outlooks of the jihadists in Iraq and those in Afghanistan.

UPDATE:


picture of Abu Suleiman al-Otaibi as he appeared in a propaganda video

I guess I've been asleep, but can somebody tell me when did "tandheem qa'idet aljihad fi afghanistan تنظيم قاعدة الجهاد في افغانستان" come into being? When did OBL's and Zawahiri's Al-Qaeda become "Al-Qaeda in Afghanistan"? Is this a new franchise? Is it a split within Al-Qaeda? Does this mean that it is an admission that OBL/Zawahiri are no longer in Afghanistan, thus it was necessary to find a new leadership/organization/hierarchy there? I'm not certain, but it seems that the first time we had heard from this organization was when Zarqawi was killed; is this Zarqawi's outfit in Afghanistan?

New Column: What Happened in Basra?

So I finally got around to writing a new column. My editors are indeed saints for the patience they've shown after an absense of six months. I guess my only excuse is that I've been stuck doing new strategic math, such as the import of Russia's aggressive engagement all over the Middle East, including finding channels to the jihadists. I've also been spending a lot of time learning about and traveling around Turkey and the Ottoman imperial legacy.

I should also update my profile since I am now a 'contributing editor' rather than a columnist for the New York Sun, and I'm done writing for the Prospect. The Prospect gave me a column for a year, and it was a great opportunity to get exposure to a European audience through a prestigious magazine, but I believed that as Iraq stabilized the Iraq story would become too boring to warrant a monthly column. I look forward to writing longer pieces for them in the future. I will also post my Prospect columns on Talisman Gate when I get around to it.

My new column is: What Happened in Basra?

Regarding the unique corporate identity of 'original' Basrans, one should consider the case of the Bani Tamim tribe: Basra was founded as both a military base, and a social one for Islam in a land infested with Jews, Christians and Manichean peasants, all of various Semitic extractions, as well as the human flotsam of whatever ancient empire has raped and raided through Mesopotamia. It is debatable whether founding a garrison town was a conscious effort towards preserving ethnic homogeneity, but what is clear is that Basra pivoted Arab troops towards future campaign to sweep up Persia. One of the tribes that were settled in the new metropolis were the Bani Tamim, today they constitute the second largest tribe in Basra Province, after those initial settlers played host to subsequent migrations of their kinsmen out of arid Arabia into greener pastures.

Those first Tamimis eventually absorbed countless natives and bestowed their tribal affiliation, and protection, upon them. They even absorbed a large number of Persian mercenaries, brought in and paid for as cavalrymen in the service of the new, martial faith bent on imperial expansion. Some Tamimis moved on as the borderlands shifted north and east, forgotten in some geographical recess in Central Asia or the Caucases, forgetting who they are as they themselves were absorbed into native affiliations.

Throughout most of these 1400 years, the Tamimis of Basra remained Sunni—or whatever counted as the ruling state’s orthodoxy—as did most of the town proper and the hinterland around them. But they must have been swayed by the various heresies and rebellions that were sparked in their midst, or erupted all around them, led by gypsies, slaves and mystics. And within the mishmash of Portuguese and Philippino ancestry, and Hindu worship, and pagan deities refashioned as Muslim saints, and the chaos left as central authority receded, the pure-bred Arabs of the Bani Tamim and the other tribes that settled south of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers confluence, were infected with dissent, and turned Shiite in larger numbers in the last two centuries or so.

'Basrawi' identity was centuries in the making.

It is therefore interesting that the Tamimis were the first to respond to Maliki's call to arms. These 'original' Basrans rallied to the government's side against the newly arrived 'squatters' who form the bulk of Sadrist support in Basra and elsewhere; new in the sense that they've only been around for less than a century.

One of my column's un-PC points is that whereas civic pride and sense of self among native Basrans was solid, these transplants from Amara into the slums of Basra and Sadr City suffered from a muddled identity. Therefore, when the Iranians relied on the Sadrists they were placing their bets on ghetto thugs rather than ideologues in the cut of Hezbollah; being a Sadrist was more akin to joining the Crips or the Bloods rather than marching in the civil rights movement. That’s why the presence of so unconvincing a leader as Mr. al-Sadr at the helm didn’t really matter: he himself was irrelevant since this wasn’t a revolution, but his last name gave the progeny of those ‘shroogis’ their gang colors.

On Abu Hamza al-Muhajir: I'm still waiting for word from Mosul, but I just want to re-iterate: Abu Hamza al-Muhajir is not necessarily one and the same as Abu Ayyub al-Masri, since this association is basely solely on the conjecture of US intelligence agencies. It may be correct, but there's still a large margin for surprises. This is what I wrote back in February 2007:

BTW: I ready to acknowlegde this now: al-Muhajir, although speaking in classical Arabic, pronounces some words with a muted Egyptian accent. I have been reluctant to belief that he's actually Abu Ayyub al-Masri, as claimed by US intelligence, and that for a variety of reasons; I'm warming up to the idea at this point, or at least the idea that he's originally from Egypt.

How the Outcome in Sadr City Led to Today’s Clashes in Beirut

The Siniora cabinet and the March 14 political coalition that props it up have been doing and saying many provocative things from Hezbollah’s vantage point over the last two years from, yet Hezbollah chose to be provoked yesterday and today; why is that?

Ostensibly, Hezbollah is responding to the Lebanese government’s decision to sack the security chief of Beirut’s international airport, and to dismantle Hezbollah’s secure landline-based communications network that had been expanded recently.

What could have spurred-on this over-reaction on Hezbollah’s part, which has been manifested so far with flexing its muscles in the Sunni area of Beirut, seemingly showing-up the government as weak and vulnerable?

I believe Iran needed to show the United States and its Arab allies that it can humiliate them by overrunning the government they back in Beirut and that they’d be unable to do anything about it, and I believe that Iran needed to make this point now because the Mahdi Army in Iraq has collapsed.

Iran has been backing certain factions of the Mahdi Army with training and arms as an investment in a force for chaos, which can be held in reserve and unleashed against the Americans in Iraq in the event that George Bush may order a bombing run against Iran’s illicit nuclear program this summer—something he’s be egged-on to do by U.S. allies such as Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Jordan.

Iran’s earlier acolytes such as the Hakim family had comfortably nestled into the very fabric of the Iraqi state, and could not be counted on to be Iran’s agents of disorder—especially since they now enjoyed financial independence from Iran by their exposure to Iraq’s own ample resources. Iran needed a different, more desperate beast to do its bidding, thus the ‘Special Groups’, as they Iranian-managed offshoots of the al-Sadr’s rag-tag Mahdi Army are called, were conveniently cobbled together from the gangsters and hoodlums of Iraq’s dislocated Shia masses.

But ever since Prime Minister Maliki launched Operation Cavalry Charge on March 25 in Basra, the Iraqi government, with some U.S. air cover and logistical support, has been engaged in a war of attrition with the Mahdi Army; witling away the once-sharp and threatening capability of Iran’s investment in terror. Whereas these ‘Special Groups’ could launch 30 to 40 projectiles into the Green Zone a few weeks ago, today they can only manage one or two rockets. The Iraqi Army and the US military have pushed on into all the redoubts of the Sadrists, notably Sadr City where some 1200 fatalities (a significant number of them non-combatants) have occurred.

Maliki has also ordered the Iraqi Red Crescent to prepare an initial contingency plan to absorb 100,000 refugees from Sadr City, indicating that he is not backing down. Moreover, there’s word from parliament that the government has asked for the removal of legal immunity from several parliamentarians, some of whom are Sadrists, over charges of inciting violence against government troops. Particularly vulnerable is Sadrist MP Baha’ al-‘Araji.

Clearly, Maliki feels that he’s come out on top in his scuffle with the Sadrists, and recent confrontations in Basra, Kut, Hillah, Shatrah, Karbala, Shula City (Baghdad), Nassiriya and Suq al-Shuyukh have shown that the Sadrists are no match for the Iraqi Army and police who continue to arrest Sadrist leaders and evict the movement from its offices.

The Sadrists and the Iranians have been reduced to bravado and PSY-OPS: one account has it that the Sadrists have a plan to take over the Green Zone within seven hours, and that they can take over Basra within 24 hours. Another is that General Suleimani of Iran’s Revolutionary Guard actually controls events in Iraq.

But in effect, Iran has lost the deterrence value of its investment in the Sadrists.

That’s why Iran needed to flex its might in downtown Beirut, to embarrass the Saudis and others who can do very little to bail-out Siniora’s government. The ruse seems to have worked: Saad al-Hariri basically rescinded the government’s orders against the airport security chief and the communications network today.

Abu Omar al-Baghdadi Revealed?

Alleged picture of Hamed al-Zawi, "Abu Omar al-Baghdadi", as supplied by the Haditha police chief to Al-Arabiya

This is a response I posted to a comment earlier today about whether Abu Omar al-Baghdadi's true identity has been revealed:

Hi Ali/Iraq,

This is an interesting revelation from the police chief of Haditha, who spoke about AOB to Al-Arabiya.

Hamid Dawood Muhammad Khalil al-Zawi! He's supposed to have been an officer in the Amn al-'Aameh [General Security Directorate] under Saddam!

This account has credibility in so far as the Zawis of Haditha and Anah claim descent from Al-Hussein [much disputed by genealogists], and AOB in his last speech singled out the Jughaifis in his last speech and seemed to be knowledgeable about the tribes in that area above Haditha. He even mentioned the Zawiyeen even though they are a very small clan.

In fact, I remember reading a year ago, around the time when Muharib al-Juburi was killed, that someone on a jihadist chatroom made the assertion that al-Zawi was AOB.

So it could be Hamid al-Zawi afterall. However, I would have thought that Al-Qaeda would have been very sensitive about placing a former Saddam officer at the helm of their organization, and would have looked for someone completely unconnected to the ex-regime. Furthermore, this could be a very local problem between the police chief of Haditha who is accusing a top terrorist commander from his town to be the top dog of Al-Qaeda in Iraq.

One more thing, if he was from Anbar, then why call himself al-Baghdadi? Such a title would come back to haunt him if he goes public with his identity in the future, exposing him to mockery.

We shall have to wait and see if the Islamic State of Iraq is going to respond in a public statement to this assertion.

I'll still kind of convinced that it could be Khalid Khalil Ibrahim al-Mashhadani, Abu Zaid, but we've not seen anything to verify that. This claim that Hamid al-Zawi is AOB constitutes the most serious challenge to my AOB as al-Mashhadani theory.

Either way, I never bought the idea that he was a fictional character.

Let's wait and see.

Best,

Nibras

10:47 AM, May 07, 2008

UPDATE: Here is a link to the chat forum post that revealed Abu Omar al-Baghdadi's real identity as that of "Hamid Daoud al-Zawi" back in July 2007 (Arabic text). As one can see, the news was out there way before today's revelation by the Haditha police chief to Al-Arabiya TV.

The July 2007 post adds some interesting biographical information: Hamid al-Zawi was born in 1958, and he is known as "Abu Mahmoud". He's a retired police officer from the Haditha Police Department, who worked after retirement as a oil heater repairman in the Anbar town of Haqlaniyah. His current address is cited as Ghazaliya, Baghdad.

There's still no official word from either Al-Hesbah or Al-Ekhlas (websites associated with Al-Qaeda) on whether this information is true or not.

McClatchy News Agency Purposely Distorts Quotes, Publishes Unattributed Gossip

McClatchy Newspapers put out a news wire on April 29 under the byline of Hannah Allam (McClatchy’s Middle East bureau chief in Cairo, who traveled to Iraq for this story), with Jonathan Landay and Warren Strobel—two reporters known for their sources within U.S. intelligence, specifically the CIA—reporting from the United States. Landay and Strobel are also known as two activist reporters with a strong bias against the Iraq war.

The report tried, with plenty of hyperbole, to paint General Qassem Suleimani, the head of the Quds Force of Iran’s Revolutionary Guard, as the most influential man in Iraq.

This served as a follow-up story to another of McClatchy’s reports published on March 30 under Leila Fadel’s byline in Baghdad (she’s their bureau chief there) which claimed that an Iraqi parliamentary delegation had met with Suleimani in Tehran and beseeched him to stop the fighting in Basra with the Sadrists, something that he was allegedly able to pull off within hours. Fadel had cited “parliamentary sources” for that story, yet one of my own sources dismissed this account at the time as a “naïve fabrication”.

Yet the big news in Allam’s piece was an allegation that on the weekend of March 28-29, Iraqi President Jalal Talabani held a meeting with Suleimani at the Mariwan crossing on the Iraq-Iran border and pleaded for an end to the fighting.

To bolster this allegation, Allam cites three Iraqi officials and a single Iraqi politician all of whom remained anonymous in her piece. What’s more is that the political or professional affiliations of these four anonymous sources were not clarified in any such manner to convincingly argue that they would indeed be privy to highly secretive information of this nature. The report adds a disclaimer that McClatchy tried to reach Talabani for a comment, but he was unavailable. Yet Allam could have alternatively posed this question to Talabani’s office or his spokesman but she didn’t; maybe it was because she purposely avoided dealing with an on-the-record denial from Talabani’s people, which would have rendered the anonymous allegations journalistically questionable.

It should be noted that neither Allam (who is of Egyptian and American parentage) or Fadel (who’s of Lebanese and American parentage) can claim to be proficient Arabic speakers, and must always rely on translators when conducting interviews. I should also add that I know them both personally.

This point about language proficiency becomes a salient one when it turns out that the only person who ostensibly confirms a meeting with Suleimani in Allam's piece has been woefully misquoted: Ammar al-Hakim is the only person who is quoted by name and affiliation saying that the parliamentary delegation had indeed met with Suleimani, thus seemingly confirming Fadel’s earlier account.

This is how it is written-up in McClatchy’s version:

"A delegation went to speak to the officials in Iran in the name of the alliance, to ask them to encourage these groups to stay within the boundaries of the law," said Ammar al-Hakim, the son and senior aide of the leader of Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq. "They met with a number of officials, and Mr. Suleimani was one of them."

However, it seems that in fact al-Hakim didn’t confirm anything of this nature because in the Arabic transcript of his interview with McClatchy, which was posted on the website of the Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq-Presidency Office (…his daddy’s outfit) on April 20, he was non-committal about any meetings with Suleimani:

The meetings did not occur on the border; the delegation went to the capital Tehran and met with a number of officials, one of whom could have been Mr. Qasim Suleimani.

Thus Hakim is not confirming or denying such a meeting; he’s merely speculating because he simply doesn’t know. Hakim must have been speaking in Arabic since he doesn't know English.

He said these words in response to a direct question about Suleimani from the McClatchy reporter (likely to be Allam) who asked “Why would delegations go to Iran and meet General Suleimani, and also meetings occurred with him on the border?”

Al-Hakim is also misquoted later in the article, when the order of his sentences is reversed:

"This man is like other men," al-Hakim said of Suleimani. "He may have significant intelligence capabilities, he may have his good points and his bad points. But it's not logical that we exaggerate these points to the extent of giving a surreal picture.

"We have all enjoyed watching the American films in which the 'hero' is capable of doing the impossible, and anyone can die in the film except him, but no sooner does the film end than we return to the reality that only God is omnipotent," al-Hakim said.

But in the ISC’s transcript, the second sentence precedes the first sentence, thus changing the meaning of al-Hakim’s words, which served to point out that all this hullabaloo concerning Suleimani’s influence was overblown, much like a Hollywood action-hero movie.

The transcript add that the interview with the McClatchy reporter occurred on April 18.

Moving on, the McClatchy story resorts to other rhetorical tricks, which I find awfully cheap. Check this one out:

One member of the delegation that met with Suleimani, Ali al-Adeeb, a top Dawa Party leader, said that the Iranian officials swore that they weren't arming al-Sadr's forces.

"We reminded them that the security of Iraq would affect the security of Iran," Adeeb said in an interview at his Baghdad headquarters. "And that any support they give to the Sadrist movement would send a message to the United States to stay in Iraq because it's still too unstable."

McClatchy matter-of-factly asserts that Ali al-Adib met with Suleimani, but their reporters couldn’t get al-Adib to say and verify that on the record, so they quoted his out of context, just to make it seem as if he did! Al-Adib led the delegation to Tehran, but has never been quoted as saying that he’d met with Suleimani while he was over there. I'm pretty sure the reporter posed that question to him, and he must have denied it. But why didn't the reporter print the denial?

Another similar trick is to quote another parliamentarian who accompanied al-Adib, and that would be Hadi al-Ameri by posing a hypothetical concerning Talabani’s alleged meeting with Suleimani on the border:

"As long as the dialogue is about Iraq, meetings will be held on the soil of Iraq as well as the other places," said Hadi al-Ameri, an Iraqi legislator who commands the Badr Organization. "Maybe the president going to the border can be questioned as far as protocol, but protocol is not our main concern. Our main concern is putting out the fires."

Notice al-Ameri is not denying or confirming a Talabani-Suleimani meeting, he is seemingly answering a hypothetical question about whether it is appropriate, from a protocol point of view, for an Iraqi president to be meeting an Iranian general at a border crossing!

The other fishy aspect about this story is that it quotes Iraqi Vice President Adil Abdul Mahdi as saying that Suleimani brokered the premiership of Nouri al-Maliki in April 2006. However, there’s a glaring omission that Abdul-Mahdi himself was angling to become Prime Minister during that time, and that his current statements could be colored by a lingering bitterness over losing the job to al-Maliki. Not only that but he’s still campaigning for the post; denouncing Maliki as Suleimani’s man would help Abdul Mahdi’s chances. Furthermore, anyone who followed the mechanics of how Maliki was picked over all the other candidates through a political maneuver by Sistani’s son would realize that Suleimani’s role in that whole farce was negligible at best.

So there you have it, McClatchy tried to make these rumors of Suleimani’s omnipotence stick through distorting quotes and propagating innuendo. Al-Hakim’s words were published in transcript form on his organization’s website nine days before McClatchy went to print, and thus this particular distortion could have been averted. Yet the reporters chose not to correct their translations—why is that?

McClatchy tried to turn Suleimani into the Loch Ness monster; reporting murky anecdotes and relying on anonymous sources for his sightings. They tried to peddle the storyline that Iran controls Iraq. I wonder how McClatchy will further distort the news when reporting about the parliamentary delegation that just went to Iran a couple of days ago to confront the leadership there with evidence of Iran's support for terrorism and criminality…Yep, I wonder…

One month after the launch of Operation Cavalry Charge...

Deborah Haynes of the The Times becomes the first western journalist to see the situation in Basra with her own eyes, exactly one month to the day since the launch of Operation Cavalry Charge. She is taken along on a tour of Hayyaniya of all places by Gen. Fraiji, who's been described by some anonymous British military sources in earlier media reports as a "dangerous lunatic"; oddly enough, he doesn't come off that way in Haynes' piece.

Haynes paints the picture of a city that has undergone dramatic changes for the better.

Radio Dijla is reporting that the Emiratis have handed over Ismail al-Wa'ili, the brother of Basra's governor, who is wanted by an Iraqi arrest warrant on charges of oil smuggling and other criminal activity. I had heard that he was hiding in Kuwait rather than Dubai ever since Operation Cavalry Charge began. The story of the arrest warrant is true but I'm unsure about the handover, but if it checks out then that's an indication that Maliki is also moving against the Fadhila Party.

Another criminal kingpin who was once affiliated with the Sadrists, Sattar al-Bahadili, was also arrested a couple of days ago.

And in other news, Muqtada al-Sadr backs down once again, calling upon his supporters to be the "nation of peace" as well as the "nation of Islam" in a communique read out during Friday prayers today. I wonder why al-Sadr keeps shying away from an "open war": clearly he's hasn't gone pacifist all of a sudden, so it must be something else. No, no, it can't be that he's much, much weaker now due to a variety of factors; no, that can't be it because the 'experts' have been telling 'reporters' that al-Sadr is still the most formidable force on the Iraqi scene, and we all know that those 'experts' and the 'reporters' who quote them know what they're talking about.

Can someone get an online petition going to goad the New York Times and the Washington Post into sending a reporter to Basra? Isn't about time to get a first hand account out of a place that made front-page news all throughout last month?