Archive for the ‘Iraq’ Category
Couple Travels to Iraq After Vowing to Visit All 195 Countries Their Experience Goes Viral (Exclusive) – PEOPLE
Globetrotting travelers Hudson and Emily Crider are opening up about their experience in Iraq.
The married content creators are on a mission to explore every country in the world and document their cultural experiences on social media.
The Criders who have visited 179 countries of the total 195, plus all 50 U.S. states have posted videos from their time in New Zealand, Japan, Sierra Leone, Afghanistan and beyond, but their most recent trip to Iraq has grabbed the attention of millions across Instagram and TikTok.
In a series of over 20 videos, the couple details what it's like to be an American tourist in Iraq, offering travel tips and disproving misconceptions along the way.
One video which has over 35,000 views on Instagram opens with several screenshots of comments criticizing Iraq as a travel destination before cutting to footage of Hudson and Emily enjoying their time in the Middle Eastern country.
Courtesy Hudson and Emily Crider
The more we travel, the more we realize that countries are so much more than their governments," the Criders wrote in the caption. There are incredible people all around the world, and some of the friendliest and most hospitable people we've met are in Iraq.
(The U.S. State Department has placed Iraq on the highest travel advisory level, warning against American tourism in the country due to safety and security risks.)
Their latest visit marks the Criders' second time in Iraq, and they've vlogged their journeys to the countrys holy sites, marshlands and major cities, like Baghdad, Karbala and Nasiriyah. The full-time travelers tell PEOPLE that the ancient history in Iraq is "on another level."
Courtesy Hudson and Emily Crider
The cradle of civilization is based in modern day Iraq," the couple says, detailing how they visited historic Mesopotamian locations like Babylon and Ur. "Being able to walk through history was truly amazing, they add.
Hudson and Emily's more contemporary excursions granted them an unshakable new perspective on global affairs, especially during a visit to the city of Mosul, which was under ISIS occupation from 2014 to 2017.
Courtesy Hudson and Emily Crider
Walking with locals through the destruction of their city as they shared their stories is something we will never forget. Despite all the horrific things theyve experienced, the peoples joy is incredibly inspiring. This was also one of the most hospitable places we have ever visited. They said tourism is a sign of hope for them," the Criders tell PEOPLE.
The couple says they were met with no shortage of kindness and generosity from the Iraqi people. On multiple occasions, they said vendors offered them goods for free, just because they wanted us to know we were welcomed in Iraq, the couple says, adding, We had to insist on paying!
Courtesy Hudson and Emily Crider
Their fans and followers' most frequent questions concern safety while traveling in the Middle East. The couple tells PEOPLE they havent felt any threats of danger during their trips to Iraq, though they advise interested travelers to book a local guide.
You can travel to Iraq on your own, but some places are more difficult to reach or to get access to visit, the Criders share.
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Couple Travels to Iraq After Vowing to Visit All 195 Countries Their Experience Goes Viral (Exclusive) - PEOPLE
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Iraq’s Twenty Years of Carnage | Joshua Hammer – The New York Review of Books
Ghaith Abdul-Ahad
A sketch of a street in Iraq by Ghaith Abdul-Ahad from A Stranger in Your Own City
In July 2017, days after the Iraqi army crushed the last ISIS holdouts in the northern city of Mosul and effectively ended the Islamist extremists three-year occupation of large parts of the country, I drove south from Fallujah along the Euphrates River to observe the fallout from the conflict. ISIS had controlled territory as far south as Jurf al-Sakhar, a town surrounded by date palm groves around sixty miles south of Fallujah that I passed on the way. The Hashd al-Shaabi (Popular Mobilization Forces), a coalition of Shia militias, some of them financed and armed by Iran, had expelled ISIS fighters from Jurf al-Sakhar in October 2014 after a two-day battle, and later from all of Babil Governorate, but their success had come at a heavy cost: portraits of hundreds of Hashd al-Shaabi martyrs adorned a large mural outside police headquarters in Hillah, the capital of Babil. It was a faster victory than we had expected, the governorates police chief told me. He was deeply suspicious of the areas Sunnis, who he claimed had allowed ISIS militants to hide among them.
Since then the Hashd al-Shaabi have become the most powerful military force in Iraq. Along the Euphrates, groups of their fighters have carved out an autonomous enclave, which includes Jurf al-Sakhar. They have kept the area off limits to government officials and the Iraqi army and chased away much of the Sunni minority. Lately, though, as the effects of the IsraelHamas war radiate throughout the Middle East, the Hashd al-Shaabi have focused their attention on a different enemy: the United States. Since October 2023, militant Shia groups with close ties to Iran, responding to American support for Israel, have fired about 160 rockets and missiles at military installations in Iraq and Syria used by US troops to pursue a handful of remaining ISIS insurgents encamped in the desert. In November the US bombed two positions in Jurf al-Sakhar, killing eight members of Kataib Hezbollah, a part of the Hashd al-Shaabi coalition backed by the Quds Force, a branch of Irans Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps that equips and trains Shia militias across the Middle East. One source told The New York Times last December that the enclave had become a forward operating base for Iran.
Then, in late January, the ongoing skirmishes between the US and Iran-backed militias took a dangerous turn. A Shia group believed to be Kataib Hezbollah launched an armed drone at a remote US outpost known as Tower 22 in Jordan, near the Syrian border, killing three American soldiers and injuring more than thirty. Reuters reported in February that Esmail Qaani, the commander of the Quds Force, rushed to Baghdad in late January, met representatives of several armed Shia groups, and urged them to refrain from further attacks, and Kataib Hezbollah announced a suspension of its operations. Around midnight on February 3, however, the Biden administration sent B1 bombers to destroy eighty-five targets in Syria and Iraq, including drone bases, weapons storage facilities, and other Hashd al-Shaabi and Quds Force military infrastructure. The attacks left dozens dead. As Iran considers how to respond to the US raid, a wider Middle East conflict, with Iraq at the center of it, remains a possibility.
The story of Iraqs disintegration has been told repeatedly over the past two decades, from the late Washington Post and New York Times correspondent Anthony Shadids Night Draws Near: Iraqs People in the Shadow of Americas War (2005) to James Verinis They Will Have to Die Now: Mosul and the Fall of the Caliphate (2019), an eyewitness account of ISISs last stand in the country. In A Stranger in Your Own City: Travels in the Middle Easts Long War, an extraordinary account of the sectarian animosities, waves of violence, and foreign meddling that have convulsed his homeland since the US invasion in 2003, the Iraqi journalist Ghaith Abdul-Ahad goes further than anyone else in documenting its bloody history. For twenty years, as a reporter for The Guardian and as a photographer, he has moved back and forth across Iraqs sectarian divide, earning the trust of Sunni insurgents and foreign jihadists, interviewing fighters from one of the Shia militias, the Mahdi Army, locked in a civil war with the Sunnis, and living with Iraqi special forces as they battled ISIS suicide bombers and meted out summary executions in Mosul.
Abdul-Ahad was one of the first reporters to cover Hashd al-Shaabi, which rose to prominence months after ISIS fighters invaded Iraq from Syria in late 2013. Following the collapse of the 250,000-man Iraqi army, ISIS captured Mosul, Iraqs second- largest city, and advanced almost to Baghdad. Abdul-Ahad describes a meeting at Kataib Hezbollahs compound in July 2014, where he encountered a disciplined and enthusiastic corps of fighters commanded by a turbaned cleric in a flowing black robe whose office was adorned with a portrait of Irans supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and who saw himself as a holy warrior engaged in a religious conflict unfolding across the Middle East. The cleric, Abdul-Ahad observed, was the apotheosis of a new reality in Iraq set in motion by the US invasion:
A decade after the collapse of the [Iraqi] state, and the continuing civil wars, the sect was no longer simply a set of religious beliefs and cultural practices, it came to substitute for the national identity. The sect was their country, and serving it was a patriotic duty for those men. A new sectarian nationalism had emerged.
Born in 1975 to a middle-class family in Baghdad, Abdul-Ahad grew up under the repressive and stultifying rule of Saddam Hussein, who squandered the countrys oil wealth in an eight-year war against Iran in the 1980s that left hundreds of thousands of soldiers dead on both sides. On TVthey showed footage of trenches piled with the mangled and burned corpses, he writes about his earliest memories. We were told that these were the bodies of Iranian soldiers; mowed down, electrocuted or gassed. After each battle
we watched the Leaderon TV, gathering his generals in the gilded hall of one of his many opulent palaces. He took the Medals of Courage. As he pinned them to the generals chests, you could see them suck in the well-fed bellies that bulged through crisp military uniforms.
A succession of disasters followed: Saddams invasion of Kuwait in August 1990, the Iraqi armys defeat by US-led forces, the imposition of crippling sanctions, and the countrys economic collapse.
Abdul-Ahad was living in a dreary one-room apartment in Baghdad, struggling to survive as an architect on a few dollars a month, when the US launched its shock and awe bombing campaign on March 17, 2003. Days later he watched a contingent of US marines roll into Firdos Square and, with a handful of Iraqi civilians, tear down the statue of Saddam Hussein. While welcoming the downfall of a dictator he despised, he was apprehensive about what would come next. Self-taught in English, mostly from watching the BBC, he began working as a translator for one of the many Western reporters who had flocked to Iraq to witness the countrys liberation. (I was one of them.) Soon he began selling his photographs to news agencies and then reporting for The Guardian as the US occupation devolved into chaos and the country began to split along religious lines. Large numbers of Shia exiles were returning, driven by a sense of madhloumiyahistorical injusticeand determined to grab power from the Sunnis, who despite being a minority had dominated Iraq under Saddams rule and who turned increasingly to armed resistance to preserve their privileges. A belligerent Sunni identity emerged, based on opposition and resistance to the new order, Abdul-Ahad writes. Tragically, their reaction to the Shia communal politics only bred further sectarianism.
Abdul-Ahad went to places that almost no Western reporters dared to go, including Fallujah, the insurgent stronghold in the so-called Sunni Triangle west of Baghdad. There he came to know both local Sunni fighters motivated by humiliation and anger over the US occupation and Islamist jihadists under the command of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. In a back alley of the city he met a young Saudi fighter from al-Tawhid wal-Jihad, a precursor to al-Qaeda in Iraq, who sought guidance from both the Quran and a thick volume entitled The Management of Savagery, which laid out what would become al-Zarqawis strategy: the use of extreme violence, including suicide bombings and the liquidation of hostages in a terrifying manner, to tear apart Iraqi civil society and establish a caliphate.
Abdul-Ahad also struck up an acquaintanceship with a senior rebel commander named Hameed, a former military officer in Saddams army who had once served with distinction in the General Security Apparatus in Basra. Hameed didnt support the slaughter of Shia civilians being carried out by al-Zarqawi and his Islamists, but like many former Baathists and Iraqi soldiers, he had joined forces with them in a marriage of convenience.
A series of US blundersincluding the overnight disbanding of Iraqs army by George W. Bushs viceroy, Paul Bremerfueled the insurgency. But Abdul-Ahad contends that a functioning civil society could never have emerged through the violent removal of the dictator and the imposition of a puppet government dominated by aggrieved Shia returnees and controlled by the American occupiers. A nation cant be bombed, humiliated and sanctioned, then bombed again, and then told to become a democracy, he writes. No amount of planning could have turned an illegal occupation into a liberation. As US troops were dragged deeper into the guerrilla war, Iraq was transformed into a hellscape in which civilians became the main victims. There were many ways to die in Baghdad, Abdul-Ahad writes of the bloody first few years after the US invasion:
killed by car bombs, taken out by militias working in tandem with security forces to target Sunnis; targeted by Sunni insurgents killing Shia and those deemed to be US collaborators. Translators and contractors and government employees were under fire. Journalists and even cleaning women working for the Americans were kidnapped. American retaliation meant the fairly indiscriminate killing of civilians; civilians also died at the hands of militias and insurgents when they found themselves in the midst of the fightingalways the collateral damage of war.
The devils bargain that the Sunnis made with the Islamists backfired when, in February 2006, al-Qaeda blew up the al-Askari Shrine in Samarra, one of the holiest sites in Shia Islam. Shia militants responded by murdering imams in Baghdad and then kidnapping and killing hundreds of Sunni civilians. Sunnis retaliated, and as al-Zarqawi (who was killed in an American drone strike in June 2006) had hoped, the country fell into civil war. After the Samarra bombing, most Western news organizations retreated to the Green Zone, the fortified government compound along the Tigris River in Baghdad.
While reporters cowered behind blast walls, forced to rely on secondhand information provided by their Iraqi drivers and translators, Abdul-Ahad moved back and forth between Sunni and Shia neighborhoods barricaded from each other by tree trunks, barrels and concrete blocks, and later concrete slabs and coiled barbed wire. He visited mortuaries and interviewed both killers and terrified families. The government of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki did nothing to stop the violence, and some officials even sought to profit from it. As random street violence gave way to government-implemented jailings and torture, Abdul-Ahad met Rafiq, a well-connected Shia who sold his services to helpless Sunnis desperate to free their loved ones from the regimes horrific prisons or reduce their abuse while inside:
Rafiq was their savior, their tormentor and the symbol of the new Iraq: confident, brutal and corrupt. When I met him in the last week of December 2011, he was just closing a $5,000 deal with the family of a detainee. He promised them that he would send their son some blankets and food and assured them that the beating and torture would stop. The money was a down payment, the first of many. Further negotiations for a bribe to release him would follow. The threat of kidnappers, militias and insurgents was replaced by that of official arrest, yet the outcome is the same: pay money, keep fingers crossed, get released.
Abdul-Ahad was in Syria during the 20112012 uprising against President Bashar al-Assad and watched the nascent ISIS take advantage of the power vacuum left behind by Assads retreating army. Crossing the border from Turkey into ISIS-controlled territory, he confronted foreign fighters whose robotic hostility was unlike anything he had encountered, even in Fallujah. I wastrembling with fear, he writes of a meeting with an ISIS commander, after which he encountered a twelve-year-old militant who stared into his car as he prepared to leave:
I remember his eyes very vividly; they were filled with anger, ferocious anger, and his small fingers were wrapped tight around his Kalashnikov. I thought that the only thing stopping him from shooting us was his unwavering obedience to his commander; should the order come, he wouldnt hesitate a second.
A Stranger in Your Own City reaches an apocalyptic climax with the Iraqi armys assault on Mosul, which began on October 16, 2016. The last ISIS militants had hunkered down in the Old City, engaged in a fight to the death. As usual, Abdul-Ahad was in the heart of the battle. He captures both the courage of the Iraqi troops and their descent into take-no-prisoners barbarism. They had become so desensitized by the violence that they allowed Abdul-Ahad to watch them interrogate, torture, and execute suspected ISIS fighters, such as one ragged figure who insisted that hed been forced to serve as a medic in an ISIS hospital:
I have nothing to say, hissed the medic. Blood was pouring from the darkness of his mouth. Taha nodded to the soldier, who dropped the pipe and picked up a short M-4 rifle. He pulled the man to his feet, his legs wobbling, and leaned him against one of the large arched windows. In one quick move, the burly soldier flipped him out of the window, but kept a grip on his feet. Are you going to confess now? the soldier asked. What else is left for you? In the dark room, the soldiers and officers looked at the two feet, dirty and cracked, for a few seconds. Then the soldier let go, and they vanished from the window. The medic fell to the yard below with a muffled thud. The soldier leaned out of the window with his rifle and fired five bullets into the body that quivered on the uneven ground.
The damage inflicted on Iraq over the past two decades is almost immeasurable: at least 210,000 people, mostly civilians, killed; the destruction of Mosul; a flood of refugees desperate to escape from the country by any means possible; and millions of traumatized survivors. Even the democracy that was supposed to have emerged from Iraqs defeat of ISIS proved a mirage: one of the last scenes of this riveting book describes the bloody crackdown by Iraqi security forces against thousands of protesters who had gathered in Baghdads Tahrir Square in 2019 to demand an end to governmental corruption and incompetence. Taking stock, Abdul-Ahad offers a somber epitaph to the carnage and chaos:
The dead are forgotten, unknown, and their bodies are swallowed by the fertile earth, but the ruins remain: the destroyed refinery that is now a playground of mangled steel chimneys and rusting tankers; the crippled and desolate villages; the municipal buildings and schools with their flattened roofs like concrete wafersall stand witness to the horrors. The killersbandits, insurgents, militias, soldierswould keep traveling, deploying new tactics, implementing new horrors under different names, but they all remain the same peopleIraqis.
In Wounded Tigris: A River Journey Through the Cradle of Civilization, the Irish writer Leon McCarron recounts his travels through much the same territory from which Abdul-Ahad has reported over the years. He embarked on his journey in 2021, four years after the defeat of ISIS, and his book serves as a kind of coda to the chaos and bloodshed that Abdul-Ahad documented. Conversant in Arabic after a monthslong immersion in the language in Erbil, McCarron begins at the rivers source in the Taurus Mountains of Turkey and reaches its mouth near Basra on the Persian Gulf seventy-one days later. Joining him are a British photojournalist, a Swiss filmmaker, and assorted local fixers, hydrologists, and environmental activists.
McCarron was inspired in part by Austen Henry Layard, the amateur archaeologist who excavated the ruins of the Assyrian Empire and who in April 1840 floated down the Tigris from Mosul to Baghdad on a kelek, a raft made from inflated goatskins. But his hopes for a pure river adventure are immediately dashed by twenty-first-century realities, including low water levels and heightened security along the way. So he and his team improvise a trip by minivan, fishing boat, and other vessels. His jaunty, highly informative, and ultimately sobering book abounds in pristine landscapes, war-ravaged towns, and evidence of environmental degradation.
The travelers set off in eastern Anatolia, where Kurdish political activists live in fear of arrest by the autocratic government of President Recep Tayyip Erdoan and some of Turkeys archaeological treasures have been inundated by the regimes hydroelectric projects. They then pass through a sliver of Syria controlled by Kurdish forces, who drove out ISIS in fierce fighting and now maintain a fragile hold on the territory.
But its in Iraq where McCarrons journey becomes most interesting and most fraught. Four years after ISIS was chased out of Mosul, the country remains on high alert for attacks by insurgents camped in the semidesert. Hashd al-Shaabi forces, Kurdish Peshmerga troops, and units of the Iraqi Counter Terrorism Service, an elite nonsectarian force that had an important part in the recapture of Mosul, maintain tight control over the Tigris, often forcing McCarron and his team to find alternate routes. In some stretches, McCarron learns, people spotted on the river would be shot on sight.
Community after community bears the trauma inflicted by the Islamist militia. In Mosul McCarron meets the owner of a falafel shop [who] lost all his children in an airstrike. A man smoking a cigarette by a blackened wall said it used to be a public hammam where 130 civilians were executed in a day by ISIS. In Hamam al-Alil, a once-pleasant town of sulfur springs that had been occupied by ISIS for two and a half years, he encounters a man whose entire family fell victim to the extremists: ISIS executed one brother and dumped him in the Tigris; killed his cousin with hundreds of others in a mass execution at an agricultural college; and captured his friends father, an unsung hero who had helped hundreds of Iraqi soldiers escape to safety across the river, tore out his eyes, cut off his fingers, and hung his body in the town square.
The prospect of a resurgent ISIS goes hand in hand with other threats. At the Mosul Dam, formerly known as the Saddam Dam, opened by the dictator in 1986 to compete with similar grandiose hydroelectric projects in Syria and Turkey, four hundred billion cubic feet of water are being held back by a wall built on a foundation of porous gypsum that is slowly disintegrating. Engineers have kept the dam from collapsing by grouting the foundationsinjecting holes with liquid cementbut the solution is not sustainable:
In a worst-case scenario, a tsunami wave eighty-five feet high would crash over the earth-fill embankment, reaching the city of Mosul in an hour and forty minutes. Anyone within a three and a half mile radius of the river would be washed away. Further south, the majority of Iraqs wheat fields would be flooded as the wave engulfed Shirqat, Tikrit and Samarra, before arriving sixteen-feet high in Baghdad within four days. Between half a million and a million and a half people could die.
McCarron lingers in the marshes of southern Iraq, which epitomize both the glories and the fragility of life along the river. Formed by the merging of the Tigris and the Euphrates east of Nasiriyah, the marshes historically benefited from abundant winter rainfall in the Taurus Mountains that caused floods in the south. The wetlands absorb[ed] this excess like a sponge, swelling outwards with seasonal growth and then shrinking in the lean summers by draining to the Persian Gulf, McCarron writes. The inundations deposited silt from the mountains that fertilized the land, creating a diverse, lush ecosystem in an otherwise arid environment.
Saddam drained the marshes to root out Shia militants after the 19901991 Gulf War, and despite American and Iraqi efforts to refill them after the 2003 invasion, they have never recovered. Dam projects in Turkey have blocked the winter floods from reaching southern Iraq, and droughts likely caused by climate change have further reduced the flow to a trickle. Iraqi governments periodically promise ambitious projects to restore the rivers, but the lack of action has bred a sense of fatalism. When we asked about the future of the Tigris, McCarron writes,
and what the solution was, or who could help, one of the most common refrains we heard was Bas Allah. Only God. The river today is facing an existential threat, and those who rely on it are looking to the heavens for help, just as their predecessors did for millennia. But it had also become clear to me that the villainwas the avarice and carelessness of mankind, and if that didnt change, from source to the sea, then it was certain this river would dry up, until all of Mesopotamia and Iraq became a lifeless desert.
For most Iraqis, buffeted by the carnage and chaos of the last two decades, the prospect of a dead river, even one as vital as the Tigris, can seem a remote concern. During the past few months, the reverberations from the IsraelHamas war have undermined any sense that the country was gaining political stability. Iraqs prime minister, Mohammed Shia al-Sudani, who owes his position largely to the support of the armed Shia groups that have been firing on American troops, announced in January that he was taking Irans line: he wanted the Americans gone as quickly as possible. The justifications for [their] existence have ended, he said, referring to the threat from ISIS. Al-Sudani reiterated his demand a month later, after a US drone strike on a vehicle in eastern Baghdad on February 7 killed Abu Baqr al-Saadi, a leader of Kataib Hezbollah, and two other people.
Despite Al-Sudanis attempts to downplay the danger posed by ISIS, the Sunni militants remain a destabilizing force in the region. Two bomb blasts on January 3 near the burial site in southern Iran of Qasem Soleimanithe commander of the Quds Force who was assassinated in Baghdad by a US drone in January 2020killed at least eighty-four people in the countrys worst terrorist attack since the revolution of 1979. ISIS, which considers both Shia Muslims and the US its mortal enemies, claimed responsibility. But its Iran and its Shia proxies that appear to present the biggest threat to lasting peace in Iraq. The lethal drone attack on the US base in late January, apparently carried out without Irans prior knowledge, suggests that it has a worrisome lack of control over Kataib Hezbollah and other heavily armed Iraqi militias. And Irans hard-line factions may not be content with sitting idly following the US retaliation. The conflagration in Gaza seems to have opened a new chapter in Iraqs turbulent and bloody recent history.
February 21, 2024
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Iraq's Twenty Years of Carnage | Joshua Hammer - The New York Review of Books
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Thousands of Ugandans may sue over U.S. security work in Iraq, Afghanistan – Semafor
KAMPALA, Uganda Thousands of Ugandans who guarded U.S. government buildings in war zones are preparing to sue their former employers who they claim failed to pay their agreed wages and cover medical bills, leaving many badly injured and mired in debt.
The workers guarded institutions and military bases in Iraq and Afghanistan in the wake of the U.S. invasion of both nations from 2005 to 2022. They were recruited by private security companies contracted by the U.S. Department of Defense (DoD).
The guards, who were cheaper than American personnel, helped meet the need for increased security at U.S. buildings after they became targets for insurgent attacks following the toppling of Saddam Hussein in Iraq and the fight against the Taliban in Afghanistan.
The private security companies included Tennessee headquartered Explosives Ordnance Disposal Technology (EODT), Special Operations Consulting (SOC) and Constellis (formerly Triple Canopy) both based in Virginia and Sabre (Torres) International, among others.
Ugandas government last month gave its backing to former workers seeking restitution after they presented ministers with documents to support their claims, including letters of employment after a campaign by a group of more than 130,000 Ugandan ex-contractors.
Whoever is responsible will need to come clean [because] I havent seen anyone deny that these people were working for the Americans, said Ugandas Security Minister Jim Muhwezi.
The Special Returnees Association (SRA), a Ugandan umbrella organization of former security guards in Iraq and Afghanistan which has more than 130,000 members, told Semafor Africa it may pursue a mass legal action on behalf of thousands of its members to secure financial compensation and pay for the medical costs of those injured.
The claims would be against various companies, especially the biggest contractors, EODT, SOC and Constellis in the U.S. courts. The SRA said litigation would be an option if compensation could not be arranged through diplomatic channels involving Uganda governments security and labor ministries.
EODT, SOC and Constellis did not respond to emails and phone calls from Semafor Africa seeking comment in response to the allegations and the prospect of legal action.
We are aware of the labor dispute some Ugandans allegedly have with private security firms that were operating in Afghanistan and Iraq, Ellen Masi, the U.S. Mission Uganda Public Affairs Counselor, told Semafor Africa. We do not have any additional information at this time.
The Pentagon, in an email, said it was unable to comment and referred Semafor Africa to EODT and SOC.
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Thousands of Ugandans may sue over U.S. security work in Iraq, Afghanistan - Semafor
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Book Review: The Achilles Trap, by Steve Coll – The New York Times
THE ACHILLES TRAP: Saddam Hussein, the C.I.A., and the Origins of Americas Invasion of Iraq, by Steve Coll
People love to imagine that world affairs are a game of chess, played by judicious leaders trying to outwit each other, acting with perfect self-knowledge and a clear understanding of what their opponent might do. But consider Vladimir Putin, Benjamin Netanyahu or Yahya Sinwar. There can be a tragic mismatch between the interests of a nation and the self-interest of its leaders. The people running the show are people. They act on their whims, and with myopic agendas. They screw up. Call it the frail man theory of history.
This cosmic, unavoidable inefficiency is the real subject of Steve Colls excellent The Achilles Trap, a chronicle of the lead-up to the Iraq war. In telling this history, he offers a useful reminder that Americas omniscience is just as likely to be overestimated as are the capabilities and intentions of most world actors.
Coll, a staff writer for The New Yorker and a former dean of the Columbia Journalism School, has written a suite of books about Americas entanglements in the Middle East. The Achilles Trap is clearly intended as a parallel project to his Pulitzer Prize-winning Ghost Wars, a history of the C.I.A.s role in the wars in Afghanistan. The new book stretches from Saddam Husseins earliest days in power to the U.S. invasion of Iraq in March 2003.
At its heart lies an engrossing portrait of Hussein, which is drawn from interviews with U.S. officials, U.N. weapons inspectors and surviving members of the dictators government as well as what Coll calls the Saddam tapes: 2,000 hours of rarely accessed audio from high-level meetings that Hussein recorded as assiduously as Richard Nixon. The resulting details he assembles give a more intimate picture of the dictators thinking about world politics, local power and his relationship to the United States than has been seen before.
The American side of the lead-up to the Iraq war has been well documented, particularly the George W. Bush administrations megalomaniac ideologues and their intelligence failures. (And the C.I.A.s Iraq operation was nicknamed The House of Broken Toys long before anyone was talking about yellowcake or slam dunks.) Coll briskly moves past those preoccupations, which he chalks up, as others have, to confirmation bias: The United States assumed that Hussein was lying when he disavowed plans to possess and use weapons of mass destruction because hed possessed and used them before.
The richer narrative vein that Coll explores is the other confirmation bias thats been much less understood: that of Saddam Hussein, whose great mistake was in thinking that the United States was all-powerful and always competent. As Hussein later told U.S. investigators about his occupation of Kuwait in the early 1990s, If you didnt want me to go in, why didnt you tell me? Hussein also figured the C.I.A. knew he had no W.M.D.s. A C.I.A. capable of getting such a big question dead wrong on the facts, Coll writes, was not consistent with Saddams bedrock assumptions.
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Book Review: The Achilles Trap, by Steve Coll - The New York Times
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