Examination of Witnesses (Questions 20-31)
23 NOVEMBER 2004
MR KAMRAN
AL-KARADAGHI
AND MR
DAMIEN MCELROY
Q20 Mr Olner: Finally, you mentioned
that the new battleground after Fallujah might be Mosul. Do you
think that is a battle that has got to be won before elections
can take place in January?
Mr al-Karadaghi: Yes, I think
this will be a very big challenge for the coalition and the government.
Mosul is the second largest city in Iraq. There are some estimates
that at least 200,000 people in Mosul were really dependent on
the former Iraqi regime working in the army, the Republican Guard,
the security and intelligence and, of course, they all became
unemployed immediately when the coalition decided to dismantle
the Iraqi army. Mosul, also, historically, is a stronghold of
Arab nationalism and now, according to the whole indication, the
insurgency is concentrating on Mosul. Mosul is divided into two
parts by the River Tigris. The western part is controlled by Kurds
and the eastern part is controlled by Arab nationalists and, I
would say, by the insurgency. It is very, very difficult for the
government to really distinguish, even among the newly formed
Iraqi forces, the Iraqi police, who is Saddamist and who is not
Saddamist. Just a few days ago the chief of police in Mosul was
arrested and we heard that several thousand Iraqi police in Mosul,
newly established, have already switched to the side of the insurgents.
Also, on the other hand, the Kurds are very nervous about the
situation there and we know there is information that lately something
like 50 Kurds were killed in Mosul by Arabs just because they
were Kurds. If there is a big battle, which the Kurds might join,
then I think this will be a big problem.
Q21 Mr Olner: Could it start a civil
war?
Mr al-Karadaghi: No, I do not
think it will be a civil war but it will be bad.
Chairman: We have now been joined by
Mr McElroy. Mr McElroy, you are a correspondent of The Sunday
Telegraph, you have travelled extensively in Iraq. We welcome
you. Mr Maples will begin the questions.
Q22 Mr Maples: I would like to ask both
of you whether you think elections can successfully and properly
be held in January? Obviously, they will not be perfect but are
they going to be good enough to give credibility to the National
Assembly or the Constitution, or whatever it is, that flows from
that?
Mr al-Karadaghi: My personal,
honest view is that it would be better to postpone the elections.
People are not ready for elections in Iraq. Not only that but,
also, I think, few other groups, except the Shia groups, are happy
with the elections, and that includes the Prime Minister's party.
It is very difficult for him. I think he has been in a dilemma.
I heard one of his very close aides saying "How on earth
can we provide 120,000 policemen to protect the elections?"
This is something very difficult, and that is what is demanded
by the UN in order to provide security. On the other side, for
example, the Kurds are unhappy because now they are saying that
in Kirkuk there will not be any proper voting. A few days ago
on the Kurdish Party's initiative there was a very big meeting
in the north, all the major political parties were invited including
the party of the Prime Minister and the Shia parties, and the
Kurds demanded at that meeting to postpone the elections in Kirkuk.
They have two grievances: one, they say that Kurdish deportees
have not been returned to Kirkuk and Arab settlers have not been
sent back out of Kirkuk. Of course, some of the Shia parties were
against that, but, nevertheless, the meeting decided to establish
a committee from these parties to study the proposal by the Kurds.
The third thing, of course, is because the Arab Sunnis are now
bent to boycott the elections, and no matter what we think about
that it is true that although Arab Sunnis in Iraq might not be
more than 15% of the population it will create a big problem because
the Sunni area is in the heart of Iraq. However, having said this,
I think that if elections are to take place then the coalition
and the government should really make a special effort in Tikrit
because Tikrit is a different situation. Despite the fact that
Saddam Hussein was from Tikrit, Saddam's clan was mainly restricted
to a few villages including al-Owja, which is his birthplace.
Tikrit suffered under Saddam Hussein, especially the tribes. Saddam
did not belong to any prominent clan or tribe in Tikrit, so the
prominent clans became his victims, and the coalition managed
in Tikrit to work well with these tribes. Also, the difference
between Tikrit and Fallujah is that Tikritis are not poor people,
they are well-off. In the beginning they were very frightened
of the fall of the regime because they were convinced that Shias
and Kurds would slaughter them because they belonged to Saddam
Hussein clans. What happened, to their surprise, was that the
coalition forces actually protected them, so I think this made
them behave in a different way. Now we see there are Sunni parties
led by Tikritis which will participate in the elections. So I
think if there are elections there must be a special effort to
make sure that Tikritis will vote, because if you come out of
elections with a majority of Tikritis, which is an important part
of the Arab Sunni population, if you come out with 65/70% of Tikritis
participating, that will of course give a legitimacy to the elections.
Otherwise, if the Sunnis boycott the elections they will not change
their mind, no matter what will happen; they have already in advance
decided that whether now or after elections the government has
no legitimacy and the result of the elections will not be legitimate.
That is another problem. This is why I am saying that people are
not ready.
Mr McElroy: I guess my first big
problem with the question of whether to hold the elections or
not is I do not understand how not having elections will help
you have elections later. The elections have been a focal point
for very many people through this and a lot of people, surprisingly
enough, have not lost heart in the way that you might imagine.
If you postpone elections then you possibly put those people in
the position of losing heart, because their opponents will say,
"There. You see. America never really wanted to have a democratic
Iraq anyway; it just wants to rule by itself." Secondly,
you have the possibility of real unrest in Shia areas if you postpone
the elections, because I do not think Ayatollah al-Sistani would
be quite the restraining force he is if they took away the prospect
of elections in a very few weeks. The security problem is quite
limited. In many ways, if you are looking at the run-up to an
election it is unquantifiable how much the opponents of the election
will target the election process. We can presume they will but
we do not know by how much and where. The places where the election
will be targeted are, presumably, mostly Baghdad and about three
or four cities in the Sunni Triangle—Mosul, Fallujah and
Ramadi (places that I am sure you are familiar with). Will they
be able to achieve a total wipe-out of the electoral process in
these areas? That is doubtful. You could re-run the elections
in certain neighbourhoods if that proved to be the case, because
I do not think they would be able to cause a blanket collapse
of the electoral process in whole swathes of the country. I just
do not think that is going to happen. Sunni participation is a
problem, but elections are about whether you wish to vote or not
wish to vote and there is an evolution in that in which you almost
give the Sunnis an incentive to vote next time if they get excluded
from it this time. I think there is a special problem in Fallujah
in the sense that the city has been more or less cleared—will
these people go back—and whether there is time left to allow
these people to vote in the neighbourhood that they are from.
On the whole, I think the election is a point in the calendar
that much of the effort to normalise Iraq has been aimed at, and
if you take that away, even if you say "There will definitely
be elections in six months after this", then (a) people will
not believe you as much as they did before and (b) you are going
to give ammunition to your opponents. So I think it opens up a
whole panoply of problems. The problems of holding elections are
very clear to us but when you say you do not have elections then,
suddenly, the problems of not holding elections will open up.
So I do not see what there is to be gained.
Q23 Mr Maples: As I understand it, the
way the elections are organised is on a national basis so it would
not be possible to have elections in those parts of the country
where it is felt that elections could be properly held and, maybe,
delay the election in places where it could be different. Am I
right in thinking it would be very difficult to do that?
Mr McElroy: It would be very difficult,
but I guess you could have re-polling and provisional results.
These things could be accommodated, but, yes, it would be difficult.
Q24 Mr Maples: And nationalists are candidates,
are they not? Do you agree with that?
Mr al-Karadaghi: The entire Iraq
will be one electoral constitutency. This is also a problem. You
cannot tell several hundred thousands of voters in Mosul or in
Ramadi to go and vote in Najaf, for example. This will be a problem.
Also, I am not saying that there should not be elections; elections,
I think, until now, will go ahead although I do not exclude surprises
to the run-up to the elections. However, there are many other
problems which have no relation to the security situation. For
example, until now most Iraqis do not know what the election is
about or what the election process is. There was no time in Iraq,
because of the security problems, to educate people about the
elections. Many people have difficulties in understanding the
election process. Then there is another problem of, for example,
how the Iraqis who live abroad will join the elections. There
are more than 3 million Iraqis abroad and the higher election
committee in Iraq estimates 1.1 million of those are eligible
to vote. They identified 14 countries where Iraqis can vote; that
includes Iran, Syria and Jordan in the region and, also, in Europe,
the United Kingdom, and some other countries, but still there
are many countries which are excluded. People say that if it is
a principle, there are many Iraqis in Australia and many as far
as New Zealand; they will not be able to travel to Europe to vote.
So there are these kinds of problems also. This is why I am saying
that people are not ready, really, for elections. It is now too
late to change the agenda because this has been decided. I think,
whether many groups in Iraq who are participants of the political
process and in the government like it or not, they have to go
on with the elections. I, for one, for example, cannot see why,
if there are elections, the insurgency will become weaker.
Q25 Sir John Stanley: When we invaded
Iraq we clearly hoped that we would quite rapidly stabilise the
security situation and it would then improve. In practice, as
we know, the reverse has happened, particularly the downward spiral
starting back in February/March this year when the kidnappings
began in earnest. I would like to ask you, do you think it was
inevitable we were going to get into a deteriorating security
situation in Iraq, or do you feel that we, in part (I say "we"—the
Americans and ourselves), brought it upon ourselves and made mistakes
that could have been avoided?
Mr al-Karadaghi: I would say that,
to be fair, nobody, not even the Iraqis, expected that this would
happen in Iraq. To blame the United States or Britain, the coalition,
and say they brought it on themselves would not be fair because
I do not think there is any Iraqi who thought, expected or predicted
the situation. We knew that there would be problems, we knew that
there would be, in some areas, resistance but not to this extent.
Nobody expected that. Of course, there were big mistakes committed
at the beginning. There was no consistency. The decision to dissolve
the entire Iraqi forces, Iraqi army, the Republic Guard, was a
big problem because I do not think the situation was prepared
for that. For example, many Iraqis thought that it would be a
very good idea to dissolve the Republican Guard, the Special Republican
Guard, and the security and intelligence Fedayeen of Saddam, but
nobody thought that the regular army would also be dissolved.
The regular army in Iraq was somehow a kind of national institution,
and because they were victimised by the Republican Guard people
thought that this regular army could be a nucleus for a new army,
but all the Iraqi armed forces were dissolved. So this was a problem.
Then, for example, the idea of de-Ba'athification. If this process
was properly done it would have very good results. I personally
was a very strong supporter of de-Ba'athification in Iraq but
the way it was conducted was not proper. Then the Iraqi government,
led by Mr Allawi, who himself is a former Ba'athist, decided that
he can gain the minds and hearts of Ba'athists and, until now,
he refuses to blame the Ba'athists as Ba'athists; he always distinguishes
between Ba'athists and Sadammists. The result is that the Ba'athists
infiltrated his own security and he had recently to arrest his
chief of security, who was a former Ba'athist. This was the main
mistake of de-Ba'athification. De-Ba'athification was not managed
properly and it gave very bad results. Now we have seen, really,
a situation where we have re-Ba'athification.
Q26 Sir John Stanley: Did we make mistakes
or was the security deterioration pretty well inevitable?
Mr McElroy: I think the actions
of the coalition allowed it to happen. I think in Iraq there were,
pretty much, no institutions that had penetrated down to the lowest
levels of society after the occupation, and you cannot possibly
hope to police a society—even a western society—if
you do not have that forest of coverage. Many of the elements
who are behind the insurgency were, of course, in Iraq when the
regime fell. A lot of them lay low; a lot of the Ba'athists, a
lot of the regime hierarchy, basically, went back to their sort
of farmyards and their city compounds and lay low for three months
and started networking. They obviously had substantial resources.
So there was this sort of honeymoon period in which they, first
of all, allowed the chaos of looting to happen, which was enormously
symbolic because it allowed people to think that there was this
level of activity that you could engage in against which there
would be no sanction. Obviously, the prisons had been opened so
lots of criminals had also come to the surface during this looting.
Then these people started cherry-picking; they started building
up their insurgency from amongst these types of people and, also,
the disaffected from the army who had been let go. Where was anybody
to stop them? There was not really anybody to stop them. The Americans
did exist in large numbers but they were engaged in building bases,
they were engaged in securing supply lines, they were engaged
in, essentially, setting themselves up on the ground so that they
could operate like the American army operates wherever it goes.
So that is where the fire took light and started to spread. Could
we have stopped it? Yes, if there had been more of a decapitation
strategy within the invasion and there had been, at least, some
level of police and army retained intact. For example, I was in
Mosul on the day it fell; I went to a police station and there
was a police chief who had turned up to work and was trying to
keep three or four people milling about because he maintained
that he was a police chief. I went back five days later and that
police station was abandoned, and during the time that I was in
it, while he was there, helicopters were buzzing it because they
wanted to establish who was in control, so they were buzzing up
and down the city flying very low and creating conditions in which
people would stay in their houses—the Americans are in charge.
That was the level that they came in, and this is well-known to
an extent. They did not appreciate how well-equipped the insurgency
would be or how mentally prepared many of these people were for
an insurgency. I do not know because I have never seen if there
were any plans for insurgency but it certainly seemed that over
a three- to four-month period an insurgency took shape, and these
people were able to roll themselves out as quite competent terrorists.
Q27 Sir John Stanley: Thank you for giving
your perspective on what has happened in the past. Perhaps we
can now look forward, and the perspective I would like to have
from you both, please, is what you think the Iraqi government
and, particularly, the American and British Governments should
be doing to try and reverse the security deterioration that has
taken place and to try and get on top of it, bearing in mind it
is clearly covering all the key arteries as far as the Iraqi nation
state is concerned: they are going for the economy through the
reconstruction, they are going for international organisations,
whether it is the UN or international charities, they are going
for the security forces—the police and the Iraqi Army—and
they are going for the top echelons in the civil service (there
have been a number of very serious assassinations of senior civil
servants in Iraq). It is right across the board. They have shown
that all the key sinews, arteries, of any nation state are vulnerable.
So can you tell us: do the American and British governments, as
the key external players, and the Iraqi Government have a prospect
of getting on top of this and reversing the security position?
Give us your perspective on the way forward and where we are going
to be—leaving the elections aside—in six months to
a year from now?
Mr McElroy: It is obviously very
difficult. You know this from past jobs, but if you have got a
terrorist organisation targeting members of their community who
are working for the government then the government is obviously
depleted in how it acts. I will say that I have met many Iraqis
who are willing to disguise themselves, wander away from home
in the mornings and not tell anyone in their neighbourhood where
they are going or what they are doing, to the point of asking
their children: "What does daddy do?" and, when the
child says: "You work for the British Embassy" or "You
work for the electricity ministry", upbraiding the child
and saying "No, I am an itinerant bookseller", or something.
A large part of that is that there is money and there are jobs
available and so people have to get jobs and earn. The insurgency
is not, as far as I know, providing general community welfare
payments; it may be paying its own people and the people who provide
safe houses, etc, but it is not funding the lifestyle of neighbourhoods,
or anything like that. So people do need money and there has always
been an element of Iraq being a contest between the forces of
chaos and the forces of money. Obviously, you know very well about
the bottlenecks in getting money into Iraq. For much of the time
I was going there the money just was not getting out; what was
being allotted was not spent and what was spent was being spent
on, basically, lots of foreigners who were hired on wages far
beyond what an Iraqi would get. There were good reasons for that
but there also was not the general spend. I am told that general
spending is picking up, that more and more people are being absorbed
in jobs but people need an incentive; they need to feel that the
government is going somewhere, that the government will take root,
that the government will establish itself. Most people do have
a horror of what is happening, a horror of the chaos that they
see on the television or that they experience, so they do not
want it. There is obviously a sizeable minority who facilitate
terrorism; there are militias and alienated communities that those
militias spring from. What will the security situation be like
in six months? I would guess not terribly different from today
but there would be a slow train improvement in the capacity of
the government to deal with it, and I would hope that there would
be far more people employed, Iraqi people, so that they are doing
normal things; going out and earning a living, coming back and
spending that money in the community and looking after their families.
That is the only long-term way it will improve.
Mr al-Karadaghi: I think if things
continue as they are now then the security situation might not
be better, but if there is a change of policy then, I think, within
six months there will be a big difference. The change which is
needed from my point of view is to take the initiative. The problem
of the coalition and the government is that they are merely reactive;
the initiative now is in the hands of the insurgency and in the
hands of, maybe, the Ba'athists who are very organised, much more
than we think. So there is only reaction to what they are doing.
I think this is wrong; there must be a very well-studied plan
to take the initiative, militarily and in terms of security, to
try to change the situation. That is very important. What the
coalition and the government, I think, must do is put more pressure
on some of the neighbouring countries of Iraq: Syria and Iran—especially
Syria. The new Ba'athist leadership is really based in Syria.
We have information that they have recently elected a new leadership;
they had a meeting in the Al-Hasakah area on the Iraqi border,
they elected a new general secretary temporarily because they
still consider Saddam Hussein as their leader. So they have elected
a general secretary from Tikrit, and the sons of Saddam Hussein's
brothers—his relatives—are in Syria, really, establishing
companies so that they have money. Iran, also, is doing a lot.
So I think this is a relevant place where the coalition should
take the initiative and be more aggressive, because failure in
Iraq will not only be failure for Iraqis it will be failure for
the coalition as well. Without a change in the approach of the
security situation things might yet even worsen.
Q28 Sir John Stanley: So you are saying
that, in your view, there is still a substantial movement of people
from both Syria and Iran into Iraq and they are providing the
manpower for the terrorism?
Mr al-Karadaghi: It is not necessarily
the manpower. Syria, for example, may not have the manpower but
the possibility is there of providing, especially to the Ba'ath
Party in Syria, and that is very dangerous. Also, the neighbouring
countries, like Syria—even Jordan in a way—and Saudi
Arabia, can do a lot if they take a very firm stance—if
they were to make very clear to the insurgents inside Iraq that
they are supportive of the Iraqi Government and that they will
not tolerate any anti-Iraqi movement within their own countries,
that they will be more aggressive in this context. The Arab countries
were always used to the fact that Iraq was run by Arabs who were
always part of the larger Arab nationalist group. This has to
be changed because it was not natural, really, for a country to
be run for eight years by 15% of the population. If these neighbouring
countries make their position clear this will affect, also, the
Sunni Arabs inside Iraq and they will, in turn, try and change
their position and their attitude to the new Iraq. Of course,
we always speak about neighbours and we do not mention, for example,
Turkey, which should change its position in regard to Kirkuk because
this has created tension in the area. Although I think Turkey
is a very important country and they showed that they are very
pragmatic and they know the restrictions and they know the fine
lines, but they can be more positive.
Q29 Chairman: Gentlemen, I am going to
ask each of you a final question. How effective do you think the
contribution of the United Kingdom has been and how can it be
improved?
Mr McElroy: I think they tried
very hard obviously and that is what they do. Obviously there
were fairly high-level people put in the CPA when it existed.
I am not sure that they had a contribution which in any way came
out in the wash. Indeed I have heard that they expressed some
frustration with exactly how they were listened to. Essentially,
most of them did not have an executive function. Much of the top-level
executive function in the CPA was done by Mr Bremmer and he was
very jealous about his power and how he exercised it. There were
technical British contributions. I think technically what the
CPA in the south did in terms of restoring infrastructure and
trying to get governments up and running, trying to do district
elections, trying to get the police forces running just aside
from what the Army has done which has been much praised, I think
the actual British-run CPA in the south was a model that the central
and northern CPA operation could have very well emulated and markedly
did not.
Q30 Chairman: How could it now be improved?
Mr McElroy: Well, now of course
the government is an Iraqi Government and there are British diplomats
in these places trying to feed into what they are doing. They
are tremendously hamstrung by the security situation. They cannot
physically leave an area about two miles square without a personal
protection team and when you think about the logistics of just
making an appointment outside the office, well, if you are going
to want to make an approach to someone, in many cases they do
not have an extensive list of contacts and they rely on people
coming to them rather than them getting out to meet people. I
think what DFID is doing is quite effective. At least I have been
briefed by the representative there and he seemed very proactive.
He seemed very determined actually to make the money that he was
spending go into pockets on the ground and he seemed determined
to orientate what they were doing to that effect. British diplomats,
they obviously are engaged. They try very hard, and it is a big
embassy, but I am not sure that they have got really the levers
to pull whenever it comes to a situation where they need to pull
levers.
Mr al-Karadaghi: I really agree
with Mr McElroy's assessments, but I say that despite the fact
that the British were frustrated almost all the time by the way
that the Americans were conducting things, but still I think that
the parts of Iraq where the British were in charge were really
very lucky because of the way that the British conducted themselves
in these areas. There are a lot of problems. It is not becoming
really a problem with the coalition embassies, particularly the
United States and British embassies, because of obviously the
security situation, but sometimes they are becoming out of touch
because they have no means to communicate with people and they
cannot leave these areas, so that is a problem which I really
do not know how it should be solved because it is a security problem,
but communication with people is very important to understand
what is going on. Also I am aware of the activities of DFID which
are very effective.
Q31 Chairman: What should we do which
we are not doing? How could we improve our performance?
Mr al-Karadaghi: Well, I think
one important thing would be maybe to send to Baghdad, to the
embassy, more people who know the area, more experts maybe who
have been in touch with the Iraqis, not necessarily inside Iraq,
but outside Iraq, who work with Iraqis and who have a better understanding
or a very good understanding of the nature of the Iraqi society,
and I think this will help, or at least to involve more people
to advise the diplomats.
Chairman: Gentlemen, your insights have
been extremely helpful to the Committee. May I thank you both.
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