Violent Incidents from Uzbekistan to Thailand reveals a spreading arc of conflict by Paul Rogers OpenDemocracy 11:22am 2nd Apr, 2004   1 - 4 - 2004    A fury of violence in Iraq is targeting foreign civilian workers and Iraqi officials as well as United States forces. But incidents from Uzbekistan to Thailand reveal a spreading arc of dangerous conflict that suggests even worse to come.    The year since the first phase of the Iraq war ended, and the occupation by United States-led forces began, has seen a recurrent pattern of official optimism about the security situation in Iraq being temporarily punctured, but never quite deflated, by succeeding insurgent attacks.    On 1 July 2003, two months after George W. Bush had declared final victory in Iraq, for example, the United States chief administrator in the country, Paul Bremer, expressed a conviction that: “Those few remaining individuals who have refused to fit into the new Iraq are becoming more and more desperate. They are alienating the rest of the population.”    Soon afterwards, the killing in Mosul of Saddam Hussein’s two sons, Qusay and Uday, produced even greater confidence among the occupiers – though this was temporarily disturbed by a series of attacks on mosques, police stations and the United Nations headquarters in Baghdad.    Saddam Hussein’s detention in December was a moment of further celebration. The flow of positive statements from the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) that ensued was not deterred even by evidence of continuing insurgency over the next two months.    The most recent events suggest that at last the pattern might be changing shape, as events on the ground enforce a more settled, reluctant acceptance of persisting high levels of insecurity. What is significant, moreover, is that this might be occurring not simply in relation to Iraq or even Afghanistan, but against the background of wider concerns with the situation in Uzbekistan, the Philippines, Thailand, Spain and now Britain.    An Iraqi frenzy    In Iraq itself, insurgency attacks against the police and security forces and on expatriates have continued and intensified. On Friday 26 March, rockets were fired at a civic building in Mosul, killing four people and wounding nineteen. The same day, several hours of fighting between US marines and insurgents in Fallujah left eight people dead and many injured; in Kirkuk, a police lieutenant was killed by unidentified assailants, and American troops mistakenly killed an Iraqi working for RTI International, a US organisation contracted to USAID.    These were far from the only incidents of a bloody day. Four Iraqi members of the US-trained Civil Defence Corps were killed near Tikrit, and four members of a wedding party were killed and twelve others injured when their vehicles struck an anti-tank mine.    On Sunday 28 March, a British and a Canadian private security official guarding engineers working for General Electric at a power plant near Mosul were killed. In a separate incident in the same city, a senior official appointed by the CPA to head the ministry of public works was attacked while on her way to a meeting in the Kurdish city of Dahuk, north of Mosul. Nesreen Barwari survived the attack, but her driver and bodyguard were killed and two other people injured.    The next day, another high-level target who narrowly avoided assassination was the governor of Diyala province, Abdullah Shahad al-Jaburi, targeted in a bomb attack on 29 March that injured twelve people, including four police officers. Three British troops were injured in a bomb incident in Basra.    This combination of incidents culminated on 31 March in an outburst of intense violence in and around the troubled city of Fallujah, west of Baghdad. Five US marines were killed when an armoured personnel carrier was blown up, and in a separate incident four US civilian security personnel were killed.    The latter attack, accompanied by fierce expressions of hostility to the occupiers, followed ten days of attempts by newly-arrived US marines to pacify the city. In its aftermath, the security situation was so bad that neither the Iraqi police nor the marines attempted to intervene, despite a 4,000-strong marine contingent being quartered near the city.    There is little sign of the violence abating; most of these incidents are not even reported in the United States or Britain except in the more specialist outlets. Furthermore, while many current attacks are directed against Iraqis and civilian expatriates, the problems facing the US military forces are still considerable.    For much of 2003, when US troops were the prime targets, they were typically facing fifteen-twenty attacks every day, with this rising to over thirty a day at times of peak insurgency. US military officials acknowledged last week that, even now, attacks are running at over twenty a day, inflicting frequent serious injuries and several deaths each week.    Thailand and Philippines: southern discomfort    While recent events in Iraq are significant, the last few days have also seen important incidents in Thailand, the Philippines and Britain, and by major developments in Pakistan and Uzbekistan.    In Thailand, separatist moves in southern provinces bordering Malaysia – Yala, Pattani, Narathiwat – have in recent months erupted into an insurgency for the first time in nearly twenty years. Insurgents based in the Islamic minority – who form 5 million of the country’s 66 million population – have left 55 people dead in the last three months; 28 people alone were injured on 27 March in the bombing of a tourist district. The Thai prime minister, Thaksin Shinawatra, postponed a visit to Europe after the weekend attack to oversee a security review.    In the Philippines, President Gloria Arroyo reported the seizure of 36 kilograms of explosive material and the arrest of militants said to be planning an attack on trains and shopping centres. The Abu Sayyaf group that is fighting for a separate Islamic state in the southern, Muslim-majority islands was held responsible. Arroyo, a consistent supporter of the “war on terror”, is seeking re-election in six weeks’ time; it is not yet clear if the news and timing of the detentions was in any way related to the political cycle, or how significant the arrests really are.    In Britain, one of the largest police and security operations ever undertaken involving 700 police in the area around London, arrested eight suspects and impounded half a ton of ammonium nitrate fertilizer that can, with appropriate technical competence, be used to make a substantial crude explosive charge.    The London arrests seem to involve young British people of Pakistani origin. This does not fit the usual pattern of post-9/11 transnational paramilitary operations, wherein experienced militants – often with direct connections to North Africa or the western Gulf states – oversee the key organisational and technical aspects of an operation, while nationals of a country may be involved only at a subordinate level.    The implication here is that either the key people in this intended operation have not been detained, or else a pattern is emerging of more disparate and possibly self-sustaining groups. Either explanation has implications, although most emphasis within Britain will initially be on the probable prevention of a substantial attack.    A Pakistani whimper    In Afghanistan, United States operations against Taliban and other insurgents are continuing, as monitored in recent columns in this series. An additional 2,000 US marines are being sent to the region, based on amphibious warfare ships and ready to be airlifted at short notice to any military operation in Afghanistan or, in principle, Pakistan.    In Pakistan itself, military operations in South Waziristan are slowing after two weeks of fighting; fourteen soldiers and government officials captured by local militias early in the conflict have been released. This period was characterised by frequent, combative statements from the Pakistani military. These most recently included the claim that al-Qaida’s leading intelligence operative had been killed, but (like the earlier signal that the offensive was close to capturing Ayman al-Zawahiri, Osama bin Laden’s deputy) this has now been discounted.    The Pakistani army’s operations have failed to kill or capture significant al-Qaida officials, and they have faced a far higher level of resistance to their incursions than expected, in part a result of the intense local antagonism provoked by the accidental killing of many civilians in the early stages.    A key worry for the Pakistani leadership was the manner in which its troops were attacked far from the core combat area. In addition to hostage-taking and high levels of resistance, this meant that the army actually had to use local religious leaders to negotiate a truce, leading to its withdrawal from much of the region.    In the retreat, the authorities claimed that al-Qaida operatives had themselves evaded capture by using tunnels of over two kilometers in length, which (by implication) had been dug for this purpose. In fact, these were almost certainly water-supply tunnels used for irrigation, a common feature in agriculture in several parts of south-west and Central Asia. The subsequent destruction of these tunnels by the Pakistani army will not do much to win local “hearts and minds”.    The Pakistani army’s failure in Waziristan has implications for the current US strategy of mounting a major combined offensive on both sides of the Afghanistan/Pakistan border. A lack of success on the Pakistan side might call the whole operation, expected to last several months, in question.    In practice, the likelihood is that the Pakistani army will conduct further operations but face the same difficulties. This, in turn, will encourage the United States to consider deploying forces in Pakistan itself. While the government of General Musharraf may just be persuadable on this point, the popular reaction across Pakistan as a whole could be much more hostile.    An Uzbek thunderbolt    On Monday 29 March, a series of bombings and shootings in two major cities of Uzbekistan, Tashkent and Bukhara, killed nineteen people and injured many more. The tight media control in the Central Asian state makes accurate information hard to obtain, but normally reliable sources indicate that these attacks form part of a wider series of disturbances across the country. These include a bombing on 28 March near one of the residences of the autocratic president, Islam Karimov, and an attack on 30 March on a police checkpoint near Tashkent. Karimov’s regime sought to connect the attacks with international Islamic terrorism, although its own severe and long-term repression is likely to have generated widespread internal dissent.    The police seem to have been primary targets of the attacks, although civilians have also been killed and injured. The 29 March attack at the Chorsu market in Tashkent involved two suicide bombers intent on killing police on duty there; the first explosion killed a group of officers as two police shifts were overlapping, the second exploded a device under an hour later when the area had been largely cleared of civilians.    The Uzbek violence has two direct implications for the United States. The first is that the US has worked closely with the Karimov regime, symbolised by its significant military presence at the Khanabad air base – and has broadly overlooked the regime’s poor human rights record in the process. The recent violence has not so far been directed at the American presence, but the sophisticated targeting of Uzbek police units suggests the presence of a paramilitary capability that could well expand to include this.    The second implication is that the attacks challenge the expectation of security analysts that any al-Qaida affiliates in Central Asia would in the initial stages operate more effectively in states with weaker internal security capabilities, such as Tajikistan or Kyrgyzstan – before targeting those, like Uzbekistan itself, with closer American connections. But the immediate problems facing Uzbekistan make it at least possible that a new phase in George W. Bush’s “war on terror” is starting to develop. Visit the related web page
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