The release of thousands of classified Iraq war records quickly became part of Iraq’s fraught political terrain on Saturday, with Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki denouncing the leak as a move to derail his bid for a second term.
Maliki, who has been mired in a stalemate with his political rivals since parliamentary elections in March, defended his administration against allegations it had permitted the abuse of prisoners and other misuses of power. In a statement, he dismissed the records as a politically timed smear and a series of “media games and bubbles.”
“The Iraqi people know who their leaders are,” he said.
His opponents called the records an indictment of his administration and some compared the accounts of whippings and beatings of prisoners by Iraqi guards, often under the gaze of Americans, to the tactics of former Iraqi president Saddam Hussein.
Much of the attention focused on a report from October 2006, shortly after al-Maliki took office, which describes the arrest of 17 men wearing Iraqi Army uniforms in Baghdad’s Mansour neighborhood on suspicion of committing robberies. According to the report published by WikiLeaks, the men said they were Iraqi special forces “working for the prime minister’s office.”
Al-Maliki’s political opponents said the report supported their claims that the prime minister had used state forces for nefarious ends.
“For years we have been talking about the armed groups that are working under the name of the Ministry of Interior and Ministry of Defense that have direct connections with some leaders in the government,” said Maysoon al-Damluji, a spokeswoman for Iraqiya, the secular political bloc that finished first in Iraq’s March 7 elections, slightly ahead of Maliki’s State of Law bloc.
She also said that the reports of abuses of Iraqi prisoners by Iraqi soldiers and police officers were a powerful indictment of al-Maliki’s government.
“I do not think that [al-]Maliki has any chance for the prime minister’s position, now he only has Iran and the Sadrists,” she said, referring to the party of the anti-US Shiite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr, who endorsed Maliki’s list of candidates this month, giving him an edge.
The reports threatened to further divide Iraq along sectarian lines. For many Sunnis, they confirmed longstanding allegations of abuse at the hands of al-Maliki’s Shiite-led government.
“We have said, and say again, that [al-]Maliki should be sentenced to justice and be held -accountable for what he has done to the Iraqi people,” said Waleed Aboud al--Mohamadi, a member of Iraq’s parliament from Anbar Province.
Al-Maliki and his partisans rejected the allegations, insisting that they had followed the law and denying any abuse of prisoners. They also tried to discredit the leaked documents.
“These are all just fakes from the Internet and Photoshop,” said Hassan al-Sneid, a leader of al--Maliki’s governing coalition. “This is just to be seen in the context of a war against [al-]Maliki.”
The Pentagon, while deploring the release of the documents, has not challenged their authenticity.
MONEY MATTERS: Xi was to highlight projects such as a new high-speed railway between Belgrade and Budapest, as Serbia is entirely open to Chinese trade and investment Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic yesterday said that “Taiwan is China” as he made a speech welcoming Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) to Belgrade, state broadcaster Radio Television of Serbia (RTS) said. “We have a clear and simple position regarding Chinese territorial integrity,” he told a crowd outside the government offices while Xi applauded him. “Yes, Taiwan is China.” Xi landed in Belgrade on Tuesday night on the second leg of his European tour, and was greeted by Vucic and most government ministers. Xi had just completed a two-day trip to France, where he held talks with French President Emmanuel Macron as the
With the midday sun blazing, an experimental orange and white F-16 fighter jet launched with a familiar roar that is a hallmark of US airpower, but the aerial combat that followed was unlike any other: This F-16 was controlled by artificial intelligence (AI), not a human pilot, and riding in the front seat was US Secretary of the Air Force Frank Kendall. AI marks one of the biggest advances in military aviation since the introduction of stealth in the early 1990s, and the US Air Force has aggressively leaned in. Even though the technology is not fully developed, the service is planning
INTERNATIONAL PROBE: Australian and US authorities were helping coordinate the investigation of the case, which follows the 2015 murder of Australian surfers in Mexico Three bodies were found in Mexico’s Baja California state, the FBI said on Friday, days after two Australians and an American went missing during a surfing trip in an area hit by cartel violence. Authorities used a pulley system to hoist what appeared to be lifeless bodies covered in mud from a shaft on a cliff high above the Pacific. “We confirm there were three individuals found deceased in Santo Tomas, Baja California,” a statement from the FBI’s office in San Diego, California, said without providing the identities of the victims. Australian brothers Jake and Callum Robinson and their American friend Jack Carter
CUSTOMS DUTIES: France’s cognac industry was closely watching the talks, fearing that an anti-dumping investigation opened by China is retaliation for trade tensions French President Emmanuel Macron yesterday hosted Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) at one of his beloved childhood haunts in the Pyrenees, seeking to press a message to Beijing not to support Russia’s war against Ukraine and to accept fairer trade. The first day of Xi’s state visit to France, his first to Europe since 2019, saw respectful, but sometimes robust exchanges between the two men during a succession of talks on Monday. Macron, joined initially by EU Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, urged Xi not to allow the export of any technology that could be used by Russia in its invasion