海角大神

The New York Times, one of the few American newspapers left with full-time staff in Iraq, reported last week that 15 members of neighborhood governments in Baqouba, a city north of Baghdad, recently resigned because of fears they'd be murdered by Sunni jihadis.

The paper quoted the head of the Baqouba city council as saying the officials resigned 鈥渢o save their family members鈥� lives because of living under threats from Al Qaeda and militants.鈥�

They had good cause for concern. The official, Abdullah al-Hiali, told the paper that eight neighborhood representatives, known as mukhtars, have been murdered in Baqouba this year, and that half of the 100 or so mukhtars in Baqouba have resigned under growing militant pressure.

The Islamic State in Iraq, a Sunni militant group that describes itself as affiliated with Al Qaeda, has been seeking to reassert its presence in the cities it plagued during the height of Iraq's civil war. Local officials have long been targeted by insurgents in Iraq, and it's a problem that really never went away. How many have been murdered over the years? The number is almost certainly in the thousands, though it doesn't appear there's ever been a systematic effort to track assassinations of politicians and local government officials.

Shortly after the US invasion of Iraq in 2003, the US gave a contract worth up to $460 million to the Research Triangle Institute of North Carolina to set up neighborhood councils in a project that US officials said would build Iraqi democracy from the ground up. The results were different. Across Baghdad, the councils were devastated by murders and threats, and by early 2005, they had dissolved.聽

In 2004 I closely tracked two of the councils in Baghdad in what the Monitor hoped would be a series documenting progress building a new order in Iraq. At least five of the members of the councils I followed, who were generous with their time over the months, ended up dead, and many more went into hiding as Iraq's civil war raged.

Though no longer making the headlines, many of Iraq's problems remain unsolved. And it's not just coming from militants. Amnesty International complains today, in highlighting the sentencing of an elderly man for terrorism offenses, that torture remains a popular practice under the government of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki and that Iraqi "justice" often appears to be of the same standard as under Saddam Hussein.聽

Amnesty says Ahmed was convicted based on secret evidence. He had returned home in November 2009 to seek the release of his son and was arrested in Mosul on Dec. 7 of that year.

"For nearly four months he was held in a secret prison near Baghdad, during which time his whereabouts were completely unknown to his family. During this period Ahmed alleges he was tortured 鈥� including with electric shocks to his genitals and suffocation by plastic bags 鈥� into making a false 鈥渃onfession" to terrorist offenses," the group writes.

That, like the assassinations in Baqouba, sounds familiar. Here's a piece of mine from November 2005:

The more things change...

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