Global Policy Forum

By Alissa J. Rubin

Iraqi leaders in Kirkuk Province have charged that twice in the last two weeks the American military violated the hard-won security agreement signed in November by attacking Iraqi criminal suspects without coordinating with Iraqi security forces. The first episode occurred last month, when American soldiers fatally shot an Iraqi couple in their home near Kirkuk after the wife reached for a pistol hidden under a mattress, American and Iraqi officials said. The couple's 8-year-old daughter was wounded. The shooting was reported at the time, but the charges of failure to coordinate emerged on Friday, hours after an American raid in which a 58-year-old man was shot and killed outside of Kirkuk. The two episodes highlight the difficulties the Americans and Iraqis are encountering as they try to comply with the security agreement's requirement that American troops have "full coordination with Iraqi authorities," particularly in places where there are still active counterinsurgency operations.

In some places, Iraqi and American special forces are conducting many of the raids, but it appears that they do not necessarily contact units stationed in the field. Interviews with witnesses to the Friday raid, including the 58-year-old man's son, suggested it did not involve the military units that regularly patrol in the area. The son, Nihad Muhammad Hassan al-Bachary, 16, described a sudden, brutal invasion of the family home. "The American forces stormed into our house, and they handcuffed me, my two brothers and my uncle," the son said. "When my father came out of his room, they opened fire on him point blank and then they stuffed his body in a large, black plastic bag." The soldiers who came in were directed by an American in a military uniform, the son said, but unlike most soldiers, he had a beard. The other armed men with him were wearing masks and Iraqi commando uniforms and speaking in "Kurdish and inaccurate Arabic," the son said. He said that his father was an Agriculture Ministry employee, and that several other family members were detained elsewhere in the village at the same time. The police chief of the nearby city of Hawija said that he had not been warned of the raid, and that when his officers tried to enter the village, they were stopped by American soldiers. "An American force told us that, ‘There is a special force in there,' " said the police chief, Ibrahim al-Juboori. "The police department for Hawija District had no knowledge of the operation," he said. "The people who were arrested and the one that was killed were not known as terrorists." Hawija was a onetime stronghold for Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia, a homegrown insurgent group that American intelligence believes has foreign leadership. Hussein Ali Saleh al-Juboori, a powerful local politician and the founder of the Hawija Awakening Council, which chased Al Qaeda from the area, warned that such episodes ran the risk of inspiring insurgents. "Hawija will become a center for resistance, not terrorism as it was before," the politician said. "I have spoken with the Americans in Bachary and Kirkuk and the Joint Coordination Center, and they have no knowledge of what happened. "There have been repeated breaches after the signing of the strategic agreement," he said, citing the January case "when a man and his wife were killed and his daughter was injured. We demand immediate investigation."

Iraqi Army commanders underscored the coordination problem. Speaking on condition of anonymity, they said that the men who were detained and the man who was killed were suspected of manufacturing explosives, and that they had resisted arrest. But they said such considerations did not exempt Americans from the requirement to coordinate. Col. Jassim Saadon, head of the Hawija force in the Iraqi Army, said that he, too, knew nothing of the raid until afterward. "There is a lack of coordination between the forces that execute the orders and the local forces," he said. Angriest was a high-ranking Iraqi commander. He said that the Americans had apologized, but said, "Upsetting and violating the families will not help the process at all. And though the Americans came down here to apologize for the incident, we said that we did not want an apology but precoordination." He spoke on the condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to talk to the press on this subject. In the future, he said, military forces undertaking raids outside the city of Kirkuk without coordinating with his division would be treated as "hostile forces." The only exceptions, he said, were "situations where a terrorist is arrested wearing an explosive belt or planting a bomb."