Iraq in the modern ages!!

The Russians and the Iraq’s

When the journalist were searching through the rubble of Iraqi government buildings, in Baghdad, they found many documents that a former Deputy Defense Minister from the U.S.S.R., Achalov went many times with other Russian Brass to Iraq to meet with Saddam Hussein to give military advice. It is for sure that Russia provided Iraq with GPS-jammers designed to interfere with American precision-guided munitions and Kornet missiles that were used to take out several Coalition tanks and both of these systems were not allowed to be exported to Iraq under U.N. sanctions.

London’s Sunday Telegraph newspaper obtained documents that were taken from the headquarters of the Iraqi secret police, (The Mukhabarat.) that indicated that the Russian spy service, (The SVR) had been sharing intelligence reports, with Iraq. Also other documents were found by the San Francisco Chronicle that said the Iraqi agents were being trained in eavesdropping and surveillance in a special Training Center in Moscow.

The damage that has been done to American-Russian relationship will take a long time to heal. Washington needs Russia to help contain the terrorist around the world.

It will be seen as this story evolves that the Iraqi secret service was rather simple minded. After all Saddam hired people not for their intelligence, but for their loyalty and what they would tell Saddam to please him. Not well educated people, but people who worked out of fear of not pleasing Saddam Hussein and so faked a lot of their reports, just so that Saddam would have something to look at and think that his people were doing a good job!! You know, never tell Saddam any thing unpleasant that would anger him, just in case Saddam might replace you or even shoot you. Saddam has been known to take a man that had displeased him out into a back room and shoot him, even at a meeting!!

Ghaleb Kubba was something of a novelty in Saddam’s Iraq. Kubba was wealthy and prosperous. The owner of a couple of banks and a Pepsi bottling factory in Basra. Kubba had to pay bribes to the Baath (Saddam Hussein, political party.) each and every month. He paid more in bribes then he did in wages to the bottling company and his banks. Yet this didn’t insulate Kubba from witnessing the almost casual slaughter of his fellow Iraqi citizens while driving his Mercedes through Basra’s Saad Squar. Where 600 men were detained while their ID’S were checked and because the men didn’t have the proper papers, a man called Chemical Ali (Hassan al-Majid ) who was a half brother to Saddam Hussein said sense the men didn’t have the proper paper work, that they (Baath party members.) should shoot all of them. Witch is what they did right in front of this local banker called Kubba. This Chemical Ali was latter found dead during a bombing raid at the start of the war-April 2003.

When the war started in Iraq, a call went out across all the Arab countries for the faithful to come to Iraq and fight the Coalition. About 200 of these faithful from Lebanon passed through Syria and boarded Syrian food trucks to go to Baghdad. Some of these volunteer solders were detailed to guard the local shrines and the rest went on to Baghdad and died in the fighting. When Washington complained to Damascus they did close down the boarder between Syria and Iraq, but not before hundreds had passed into Iraq, A man named Watban al-Tikrite who is a half brother to Saddam (Saddam has many half brothers.) is known to be in Damascus. Farouq Hijazi who was an ambassador to Tunisia and may have had a part in planning to try to attack former President George H. W. Bush.

Damascus has links to Hizbullah and other Islamic terrorist groups that are trying to start trouble in Iraq and other places. Sense the war ended in Iraq these people are having organized marches in the streets of Baghdad to try and get the U.S. Army to leave Iraq. Also they are trying to get political power, to make Iraq an Islamic state instead of a democrat country.

A man by the name of Abdulaziz Hakim who was a Shiite leader had spent decades fighting Saddam Hussein and was to be thought to be the ideal person that the Americans would want to have in southern Iraq. He even had met with Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld, but after the war was over America was having second thoughts. The Shiite leader said he liked the Americans because they were very religious and the Europeans didn’t believe in religion.

The smiling Abdulaziz is the leader of the 10,000 armed member Badr Brigades that is backed by the Iranian Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq. This man boycotted the American sponsored gathering of former opposition leaders in An Nasiriya, Iraq.

A wave of anti-American sentiment is spreading through southern Iraq. Americans now think that the Badr Brigades had always planned to move into Iraq as soon as Saddam’s men were gone, and to have their own political agenda. Hakmin told Newsweek magazine that there maybe 1000’s of men ready to hold arms and fight in each town in Iraq.

When the coalition liberated Basra, not a shot was fired at the British troops. So things should not have been so difficult, but they were. Coalition bombing was relative light to the infrastructure. But basic services collapsed anyway as the Iraqi authorities shut down the power grid on their way out of town and to get the power grid back up and running is a much harder job. Some vandals are beating up the engineers who are trying to restore electricity. The thinking is that there are some people who don’t want the Coalition to succeed with their efforts to make Iraq a nice place to live!!

There is a huge yet delicate task of establishing a new national government and getting the water and electric turned back on, not to mention getting the telephones to work and the National Railroad to run again.

When the war was over for southern Iraq, the engineers started to repair the pumping stations only to find the local people started to tap into the drinking water lines to take a shower. Looters prowl the streets at night time and not really much got done. The Coalition is trying to set up a police service made up of Iraqi, but everyone wants to be a policeman and not everyone is qualified. There is much training that needs to be done for an Iraq man to be a policeman, in the new Iraq, as the police before under Saddam would just beat the people that they stopped and either shoot the people or throw them in jail. So a new mentality needs to be installed in the new police, that will be hired in Iraq. Even the police don’t have uniforms or know who is going to pay them, so bribe taking is still a way of life!!

The Coalition learned the hard way. In their haste the British hired local tribe leaders and retired Sheik Muzahim Kanan al-Tamimi, a retired Iraqi Army General, who refused to condemn Saddam Hussein and even called the British troops invaders and protesters took to the streets and denounced Kanan for being a Baathist party member and this is what he turned out to be. The unruly crowds of Basra and all over the country are doing a lot of protesting because they can, because under Saddam it was not allowed.

One week ago about the 28 of April 2003, in a city called Al Fallujah, which is about 65 miles north and west of Baghdad, the American Army made a very, very stupid mistake!! When they went into this city they set up headquarters in a local school. This is one of the things the Americans complained that the Saddam Regime did wrong and that was using the local schools as a base of operation.

So there were the local people, wanting their school back and the Americans refusing to move out of the school. Really dumb!!!! Anyway the locals were demonstrating and someone fired a shot at the Americans and the Americans fired back, killing 15 local people and wounding another 70 people. It may be true that the locals fired first or the people left over from Saddam’s people, saw an opportunity and decided to create an incident.

Anyway if the American Army would not have been in the school building, there would not have been a chance for the former Saddam Regime people to cause trouble. The next day saw more trouble and deaths and more hard feelings between the American and the people of al Fallujah. Everything could have been avoided.