As Iraqi Militants Flee, Families Are Targets of Blood Reckoning

 

But someone needed to pay. Late last year, Faras’s younger brother Yousef was kidnapped, shot in the head and dumped in an abandoned lot. The police called it a lawless act of revenge — one brother dying for the sins of another.

Tribal leaders say that scores of other family members of insurgents have been attacked and killed in recent years as Iraqis turned against Al Qaeda and other militant groups. Insurgents’ families have also been driven from their homes and villages, accused of being complicit in their loved ones’ crimes or simply guilty by association.

The attacks represent a small fraction of the overall violence, but they illustrate one of Iraq’s greatest struggles as it tries to break a vicious cycle of killing and revenge. As Iraq tries to evolve into a more settled nation, one based on the rule of law instead of codes of blood, its leaders struggle to persuade Iraqis to put their faith in a flawed, sometimes ineffective, legal system. “This is the problem in Iraq,” said Zuhair al-Chalabi , Iraq’s national reconciliation adviser, who spends his days trying to mediate blood disputes between warring militias and tribes. “Iraqis have to forget their wounds. Time. We need time.”

But not everyone is patient, or ready to forgive. “The law and the courts do not help us,” said Jasim al-Ajili, a Shiite Muslim in the northeastern city of Baquba, who lost two nephews to Qaeda assassinations. He said he had identified the family responsible for the murders and is planning his revenge.

“I will arrest him, kidnap him, record his confessions,” he said. “Then I will kill him if the judiciary does nothing.”

There is little sympathy for families associated with the foreign and homegrown Qaeda fighters who slaughtered tens of thousands of Iraqis and tilted the country toward chaos. The militants’ wives and widows are pariahs. Their young children are not legally recognized by Iraq’s government.

In the rural stretches of Diyala Province, in northeastern Iraq, militant recruiters found fertile soil in the seething ranks of poor, young Sunni men. Scores of the tribesmen of one local sheik, Yousef al-Hilan, joined Qaeda. They bombed cars; guarded checkpoints where they shot and killed passing Shiite motorists; and controlled entire villages.

Now, Sheik Hilan estimated, about half of their families had been killed or displaced by reprisal attacks.

“We had many families whose sons joined Al Qaeda,” said Sheik Hilan, who lost four sons to tit-for-tat slayings. “All of the pain lands on them. People want their revenge. They’ll storm the house and kill everyone there. They just want to be satisfied.”

A Diyala provincial council member said revenge killings accounted for about 5 percent of all murders over the past two years.

The killings and attacks reflect deeply rooted tribal cultures that permit — even demand — a harsh accounting, in which blood is paid with blood. Kareem Mohammed Abu Hatem said his home, car and small oil and gasoline store in the village of Bohruz were burned down as payback for his stepson’s work with Al Qaeda. The culprits were never caught, making it impossible to verify his account.

Shortly after the 2003 invasion, Arab men with long beards, foreign accents and a veneer of righteous anger arrived at Ahmed Mustafa’s village in Diyala and urged its young men to fight the American occupier. Mr. Mustafa’s oldest son, Waleed, was enraptured, and left home with the militants.

As the bodies of beheaded Iraqis began appearing in the streets, Mr. Mustafa said he urged his son to stop fighting. Then, Mr. Mustafa said, he received a letter that warned, “We will cut your tongue and kill you.” In 2007, his 17-year-old son was killed while leaving the family farm. The next year, his other son was shot to death while shopping with his mother.

Fearful for his life, Mr. Mustafa and his wife moved to a village where few people know him. “I am an innocent man,” he said.

Still, he worries that he will die next.

For the Awad family in Kirkuk, the story of their two oldest sons unspooled like Cain and Abel in the age of Al Qaeda.

Durain Adnan contributed reporting from Iraq.

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Chicago Trial May Unmask Pakistan’s Links to Militants

 

Mr. Headley told Indian investigators that the officer, known only as Major Iqbal, “listened to my entire plan to attack India.” Another officer with the intelligence service, the Inter-Services Intelligence Directorate, “assured me of the financial help,” Mr. Headley said.

As the United States presses Pakistan for answers about whether the ISI played a role in harboring Osama bin Laden, Mr. Headley is set to recount his story of the Mumbai attack in a federal courthouse in Chicago. What he discloses could deepen suspicions that Pakistani spies are connected to terrorists and could potentially worsen relations between Washington and Islamabad.

India, the site of the November 2008 attacks, will be monitoring the trial for evidence of the ISI’s duplicity. Pakistan will also be listening to — and is likely to deny — Mr. Headley’s every word. Islamabad has been dismissing his accusations against the ISI as little more than a desperate performance by a man hoping to avoid the death penalty.

An American official who spoke on the condition of anonymity said that the United States government’s view of Mr. Headley — like the debate that has raged in Washington about the ISI for the last decade — was bitterly divided. No agreement exists in Washington on whether the ISI guided Mr. Headley and the attacks on Mumbai.

“It’s not very clear,” the official said. “A lot of this is going to come out of the trial. His claim could just be his claim.”

Still, the very fact that the government is presenting Mr. Headley as a prosecution witness suggests that at least some in the government believe he is telling the truth. And the authorities said they expected the government to present e-mails and tapes of telephone conversations to support his story.

Any new evidence of ISI malfeasance that emerges from the trial will reverberate in Washington, with the relationship between the United States and Pakistan at its most tenuous in years.

A growing chorus on Capitol Hill argues that the discovery of Bin Laden’s hideout and the evidence in Mr. Headley’s case leave no doubt that the ISI and its Pakistani military overseers have played a cynical double game with the United States. Pakistan has received $20 billion in military and development assistance since 2001, and its military, they say, has sheltered Bin Laden, supported Afghan Taliban who kill American troops and guided the militants who attacked Mumbai.

Mr. Headley himself is not on trial. But he will be the main witness against Tahawwur Hussain Rana, a Chicago businessman who is accused of providing financial and logistical support for the 2008 siege in Mumbai. The attack, a barrage of gunfire and grenades, killed at least 163 people, including six Americans. Mr. Rana’s defense is that he agreed to support Mr. Headley’s activities in India because he was led to believe he was working for the ISI, and therefore the Pakistani government.

Bruce O. Riedel, a terrorism expert at the Brookings Institution and former Central Intelligence Agency officer, predicted that the trial would be “the next nail in the coffin of U.S.-Pakistan relations, as the ISI’s role in the murder of six Americans is revealed in graphic detail.”

American authorities have kept much of the evidence secret. Citing national security concerns, they have successfully moved to quash the defense lawyers’ subpoenas for State Department cables and records held by the F.B.I. that discuss Pakistan’s links with militants.

And though the government has charged four other men, including the officer known as Major Iqbal, with aiding and abetting the murder of American citizens, the indictment refers to them either as commanders or associates of the militant group Lashkar-e-Taiba, not as having links to the ISI.

In interviews in recent days, American military and intelligence officials who have served in Pakistan argued that the ISI’s story is complex. Some of them portray it as an unwieldy bureaucracy that even Pakistani generals struggle to control. The United States should try to reform the ISI, they argue, not abandon it.

France Arrests Six on Suspicion of Planning to Train With Militants

 

PARIS — Six men suspected of planning to go to Pakistan to train with Islamic militants have been arrested in or near Paris, the French interior minister said Tuesday.

But the minister, Claude Guéant, played down fears of domestic terrorism, saying that “nothing indicates that those people were planning an attack in France.”

Five of the men, some of them French citizens, were arrested on Monday night and Tuesday morning during police raids in Paris and in two of its heavily immigrant suburbs.

The sixth suspect was arrested Tuesday morning at Charles de Gaulle Airport, as he arrived on a flight from Algeria. Mr. Guéant described him as the group’s leader and said he had “a high level of technical training.” News agencies reported that he was a native of India and an engineer. None of the suspects were identified.

Mr. Guéant said that the six had been in contact with two French citizens who had been arrested in the Pakistani city of Lahore in January and accused of belonging to the group that carried out the 2002 terrorist attack in Bali, which killed about 200.

There was no indication that the Paris arrests had any connection to intelligence gathered by American troops from Osama bin Laden’s compound in Pakistan after they killed the Qaeda leader.

French intelligence has been trying to disrupt the reach of jihadist networks, but the authorities say that some Islamic militants travel regularly back and forth to the Pakistani-Afghan border area. Bernard Squarcini, the chief of France’s domestic and police intelligence service, recently told the newspaper Le Monde that about 20 French people were currently training in jihadi camps in Pakistan.

France’s terror threat rating, already at its second-highest possible level, was not raised, nor was it raised after Bin Laden’s death.

France has been on high alert over Qaeda threats to attack French citizens unless France pulls its troops out of Afghanistan. Last year, there was a major alert in Europe because of reports that Muslims holding European passports had received training in Qaeda camps and had returned to Europe with the intention of carrying out “Mumbai-style” attacks on civilians. Officials say that the threat continues.

Al Qaeda’s North African affiliate, Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb, is holding four French nuclear workers in Mali. The group, however, denied responsibility for a cafe bombing in Marrakesh, Morocco, late last month that killed 17 people, 8 of them French. Moroccan officials have arrested a man who they said had been influenced by jihadist ideas.