Window Dressing in Iraq.

AuthorEnders, David
PositionAmerican soldiers' wall-building mission in Iraq - Essay

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AS U.S. SOLDIERS BUILT another wall in Sadr City, the four Iraqi soldiers who looked on were less than excited. They stood by, smoking cigarettes, until a U.S. soldier ordered them to guard the perimeter.

They were always picked to accompany the Americans on missions like this, they complained. It was a short-straw type of thing.

The Iraqis' presence on this mission was mandated by the Status of Forces Agreement between the Iraqi and U.S. governments that went into effect on January 1st of this year. In fact, the mission had been delayed half an hour because the Iraqi troops were late. Once on the ground, they did provide some translation for a man in a nearby house who had to move his truck lest it be crushed by the twelve-foot tall barriers the U.S. military was erecting with the help of KBR contractors who had driven the concrete slabs down from Camp Taji, about twelve miles north of Baghdad.

The U.S. military, since January 1, has reduced its presence on the ground and altered its flight paths to make them less bothersome to populated areas. It has also stopped making arrests. At the same time, five of the country's provinces have yet to be "handed over" to the government. The U.S. military, though it consults its Iraqi counterparts on missions, appears to frequently just receive a rubber stamp in the form of a few Iraqi soldiers, and in some cases, it is still not asking at all.

Take, for example, the January 23 raid that left a woman and her husband dead and their nine-year-old daughter injured in Hawija, in the northern part of the country.

Ali Dabbagh, a spokesman for Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri Al-Maliki's office, told McClatchy Newspapers that the U.S. military did not inform the Iraqi government of the raid, and Mohammed Askari, a spokesman for the ministry of defense, confirmed this.

"In some cases, the U.S. army did not inform the Iraqi authorities," Askari said. "Soon we are going to meet with them to discuss that. We should not expect that violations won't happen."

Other tensions persist.

The five provinces still under U.S. control--Ninewa, Tameem, Salahedeen, Baghdad, and Diyala--represent more than 40 percent of the country's population, and include the volatile and strategically important cities of Baghdad, Mosul, and Kirkuk. Askari said the handover for those provinces is expected to take place in July.

Nor has the United States begun handing over prisoners to the Iraqi. Though it has released more...

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