Australia Finally Pulls Troop Out of Iraq

Five years and three months after the coalition invasion began, Australia's combat role in Iraq is over.

The withdrawal of 550 troops, from a mission that resulted in no combat casualties, fulfils an election promise by Prime Minister Kevin Rudd to bring the soldiers home this year.

A flag-lowering ceremony overnight at the Tallil air base, 300 kilometres south of Baghdad, marked the moment Australia handed over its operational role to the Americans.

The soldiers coming home are from Overwatch Battle Group (West) 4, which has been providing security for Iraqi forces in the south, and helping with reconstruction and aid work.

About 1000 troops will remain in the region on naval ships, C130 Hercules, P3C Orions, at coalition HQ and the security detachment for the Australian embassy in Baghdad.

Defence Minister Joel Fitzgibbon said last night that the conclusion of the two missions at Tallil marked the completion of Australia's combat role in Iraq.

"Our soldiers have worked tirelessly to ensure that local people in southern Iraq have the best possible chance to move on from their suffering under Saddam's regime and, as a Government, we are extremely proud of their service," he said.

The withdrawal of the Australians leaves the US with only two other major coalition partners in Iraq - Britain, which has about 4000 soldiers in Basra, and Georgia which has about 2000 deployed in other provinces.

The lowering of the flag overnight closes one chapter in an acrimonious debate that followed Australia's decision to join the invasion in March 2003, a commitment that has cost the country $3 billion.

This includes about $500 million spent on reconstruction and forgiven debt.

Successive Labor leaders pledged to withdraw forces, including Mark Latham's controversial "troops home by Christmas" vow in early 2004, while former prime minister John Howard argued that premature withdrawal from Iraq would boost terrorism.

But in line with Labor's election pledge, the 516 troops from the Overwatch Battle Group and the 60-person Australian Army training team will start returning home over the next fortnight after a six-month deployment.

In recent weeks, the soldiers carried out joint patrols to introduce incoming coalition forces to the area and to local Iraqi leaders.

Not everyone is pleased the Australian troops are leaving.

"We are against … American forces in the area because they are using weapons while the Australians didn't do anything harmful against the people all the time they were in the province," said teacher Hassan Mohsin, 32.

"I think the return of the Americans to the city will cause many problems. They will make many arrests," said shopkeeper Abdullah Muzhir.

More than 3500 Australian troops have served in the two southern provinces, Al Muthanna and Dhi Qar, since Australia took on an oversight role in April 2005, helping train up to 30,000 Iraqi police and security staff. The provinces were among the first to be handed over for control by the new Iraqi security forces, with foreign troops playing a support role.

Australian forces have survived the five-year engagement without a combat death, although 27 troops were wounded, six of them in southern Iraq.

Three Australian casualties during the conflict were a result of mishaps or clashes under foreign command.

SAS Warrant Officer David Nary was killed in a training exercise in Kuwait; Private Jake Kovco died mishandling his weapon in barracks in Baghdad; and Paul Pardoel was serving with the British when his RAF transport plane was shot down in 2005.

Australia's allies have been circumspect about Australia's withdrawal plan, with American leaders saying they accepted it was an election pledge.

On a visit to Canberra last week, British Defence Secretary Des Browne said the Australians would be withdrawing at the right time, declaring Iraq was "in an advanced stage of its own independence in terms of providing its own security".

Mr Browne said that Britain was grateful to Australia and its troops for their "magnificent" contribution in Iraq.

In April, US ambassador to Australia Robert McCallum said Washington harboured no hard feelings over the Federal Government's decision to withdraw Australia's troops.

Australia Defence Association spokesman Neil James said the move would have occurred whether Labor or the Coalition had been elected last year, although Mr Howard as leader might have left a training team behind.

Mr James said the withdrawal would help relieve the overstretched defence force, cutting the proportion of its infantry and cavalry deployed overseas from about half to a little under one-third.

A look at the jouney to and fro Iraq reveals:

January 10, 2003
Prime minister John Howard announces Australia's initial forward deployment will include two naval frigates, an amphibious transport ship and 150 SAS troops.

March 20, 2003
Australia joins the "coalition of the willing". The US-led forces invade after Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein ignores a US deadline to leave. Howard tells the nation that "the Government has decided to commit Australian forces to action to disarm Iraq because we believe it is right, it is lawful and it's in Australia's national interest".

May 1, 2003
US President George Bush declares victory in the "Battle of Iraq".

December 2003 Saddam is captured.

March 2004
Opposition leader Mark Latham pledges to bring Australia's 850 troops in Iraq home by Christmas if elected prime minister, making the future of the troops an election issue.

October 9, 2004
Howard government re-elected.

January 30, 2005
First free elections in 50 years held in Iraq.

February 22, 2005 Australia decides to commit 450 additional troops.

April 2006
Private Jacob Kovco dies in the Baghdad barracks when his fi rearm discharges. December 30, 2006 Saddam is executed.

February 2007
Howard announces he will send up to 70 more Australian troops to Iraq despite growing public and political opposition to the war. New opposition leader Kevin Rudd opposes sending any more troops to Iraq and repeats that a Labor government would pull all 520 Australian combat troops out of the country if elected.

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Osama Bin Laden Attempts To Unite Insurgent Groups In Iraq

In an audio recorded message aired by Al Jazeera television to al Qaeda and other groups in Iraq on Monday, Osama bin Laden urged them to unify their forces and speak with one voice, that of the Islamic nation.

"The interest of the Islamic nation surpasses that of a group ... the interest of the (Islamic) nation is more important than that of a state," said a voice which sounded like the al Qaeda leader's.

"The strength of faith is in the strength of the bond between Muslims and not that of a tribe, nationalism or an organization.

"I advise ... our brothers, particularly those in al Qaeda wherever they may be, to avoid fanatically following a person or a group," he said.

Al Jazeera said the tape was entitled "message to the people of Iraq." It was not clear from the part of the tape aired when it had been recorded.

Bin Laden said he was addressing "mujahideen (holy warriors) in Iraq," Sunni Muslim militant groups fighting U.S.-led forces. Al Qaeda belongs to a school of Islam which regards members of Iraq's Shi'ite Muslim majority as heretics.

Al Jazeera said bin Laden urged Iraqi tribes to uphold their "tradition of resisting" occupation, in an apparent reference to the presence of British forces in Iraq in the last century.

The speaker warned insurgents against enemy attempts to drive wedges between groups by planting agents among them, and said such agents should be punished, but only after their guilt was established through thorough investigations.

Iraq's wing of al Qaeda is one of the key groups fighting U.S.-led forces and the Baghdad government. Bin Laden's followers have angered other Sunni groups and tribes through their hardline interpretations of Islam and indiscriminate killing of civilians.

Some Sunni groups have joined forces with al Qaeda to set up what they call an Islamic State in Iraq, but other groups and tribal leaders have rejected the move.

Last month, bin Laden issued three messages, including a video marking al Qaeda's September 11, 2001, attacks on New York and Washington in which about 3,000 people were killed.

Bin Laden said in the video that United States was vulnerable despite its power and insisted only conversion to Islam would end the conflict.

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Turkey To Strike When Diplomacy Gets To A Deadlock

Thomas Grove
Reuters

Turkey said on Monday it will exhaust diplomatic channels before launching any military strike into northern Iraq to root out Kurdish rebels, who killed at least a dozen Turkish soldiers in fighting over the weekend.

Turkey has built up its forces along the border with Iraq in anticipation of an incursion against rebel bases but Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan has said he will hold off for a few days to let the United States try to curb the Kurdish separatists.

Washington, in turn, urged the Iraqi government on Monday to act swiftly to stop Kurdish rebels from mounting further attacks in Turkey.

"We do not want to see wider military action on the northern border," White House spokesman Tony Fratto said.

Washington and Iraq have been calling on Turkey to refrain from a military push into the largely autonomous Kurdish region, one of the few relatively stable areas since a U.S.-led invasion in 2003.

The office of Iraqi President Jalal Talabani, a Kurd, told Reuters the rebels would announce a ceasefire on Monday evening.

Erdogan is under pressure from his military and the public to strike in Iraq against the outlawed Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) rebels, who have killed some 40 soldiers in the past month.

After speaking with U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice on Sunday, Erdogan agreed to hold off for a few days and he left for an official visit to Britain on Monday.

Erdogan has been resisting a cross-border operation and his foreign minister, Ali Babacan, was quoted on Monday as saying: "We will try all diplomatic means before carrying out any military operation."

But the decades-long fight against the PKK, which wants an independent homeland in southeast Turkey and northern Iraq, is highly emotive and Ankara confirmed eight of its soldiers were missing after the recent fighting.

The pro-PKK Firat news agency said eight soldiers had been captured and gave the names of seven men. Turkey has denied any of its soldiers were captured in the fighting.

MARKETS JITTERY

The Turkish lira currency fell three percent to 1.2360 against the dollar and the Istanbul stock exchange fell five percent on Monday on the concerns of a cross-border offensive.

Turkey's tougher stance has helped propel global oil prices to record highs over the past week. The PKK has said it might target pipelines carrying Iraqi and Caspian crude across Turkey.

The General Staff said 12 soldiers died in Sunday's fighting and 34 rebels had been killed in an army offensive backed up by attack helicopters and artillery over the past two days.

Turkey has deployed as many as 100,000 troops, backed by tanks, F-16 fighter jets and helicopter gunships along its border with Iraq in anticipation of a possible incursion.

A Reuters reporter said he saw army trucks transporting artillery guns and other weaponry towards the border.

Turkey's tougher stance has helped propel global oil prices to record highs over the past week. The PKK has said it might target pipelines carrying Iraqi and Caspian crude across Turkey.

U.S. President George W. Bush condemned Sunday's attacks.

"Attacks from Iraqi territory need to be dealt with swiftly by the Iraqi government and Kurdish Regional authorities," White House National Security Council spokesman Gordon Johndroe said.

(Additional reporting by Gareth Jones and Evren Mesci in Ankara and Emma Ross-Thomas in Istanbul)

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US Army Officer In Iraq Charge For Possessing Secret Military Document

A senior US Army officer in Iraq was found guilty of possessing thousands of secret military documents that the prosecution in his court martial argued could have benefited a foreign power.

Lieutenant-Colonel William Steele, 52, was acquitted on the more serious charge of aiding the enemy, which carried a sentence of life imprisonment, for allowing security detainees to use his mobile telephone for unmonitored calls.

He faces up to 10 years' imprisonment on the secret documents charge. He was also found guilty of having an inappropriate relationship with an Iraqi woman interpreter and refusing to obey an order.

Steele is the former commander of Camp Cropper, a US detention centre near Baghdad airport where he oversaw the detention of Saddam Hussein in the days leading up to the former Iraqi leader's execution on December 30.

Earlier, prosecutor Captain Michael Rizzotti told the court that nearly 12,000 secret documents had also been found in a search of Steele's living quarters in Camp Victory, the main US base in Baghdad.

"(They were) documents that if (they had) fallen into the wrong hands could be used to the injury of the United States or the advantage of a foreign nation. He did not get authority to take these documents," Rizzotti said.

Much of the trial was held in closed session because of the sensitive nature of the documents, but reporters were given a glimpse of one which contained aerial photographs of Kandahar airbase and Bagram airfield in Afghanistan.

The court also heard how Steele sent intimate emails to his interpreter Bahar Ahmed Suseyi, including one saying "there are a few things I need to do with you/to you" and planned to take her with him on a trip to Qatar.

The prosecution had argued that he openly favoured Suseyi over other interpreters and provided her with special privileges. Suseyi herself testified that she had a professional relationship with the colonel and thought of him as a friend.

Prosecutors struggled from the beginning to make the case of aiding the enemy, with the judge, Lieutenant-Colonel Timothy Grammel, warning at the start of the trial that they would have to prove that detainees still qualified as enemies.

Rizzotti told the court that in one instance Steele had allowed an al-Qaeda detainee, identified only as ISN 2184, "responsible for hundreds of deaths of coalition forces" to make a five minute unmonitored telephone call in Arabic.

"We'll never know who was called, we'll never know what was said. ... It's the equivalent of putting an AK-47 in his hand.

"He aided the enemy," Rizzotti said.

Steele opted not to testify, but his defence team argued that allowing detainees to use his mobile phone did not justify such a charge and that the prosecution had failed to prove that the detainees still posed a security threat.

He was the highest-ranking US officer to face a charge of aiding the enemy since Captain James Yee, a Muslim chaplain at Guantanamo Bay, was charged in September 2003. The army eventually dropped the case.

Steele had already pleaded guilty to three other charges, including one of possession of pornography, which each carry a maximum sentence of two years.

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Workers Found From Iraq Phosgene In UN Headquarters

Former United Nations weapons inspectors in Iraq have discovered traces of chemical substances, including the poisonous gas phosgene, in their office in New York and have called on US authorities to investigate, a spokeswoman said Thursday. "There is no immediate risk or dangers and the UNMOVIC staff is still working on the premise," UN spokeswoman Marie Okabe said.

The FBI was called in to help remove the substances.

U.N. deputy spokeswoman Marie Okabe said one of the substances identified on Wednesday was phosgene suspended in oil, "whose present state is unknown but which could be potentially hazardous." Phosgene can be used as a chemical warfare agent.

The material was immediately secured by experts at the U.N. Monitoring, Verification and Inspection Commission, known as UNMOVIC, and the U.N. sought assistance from U.S. authorities in having the material safely removed, she said.

"The office area was screened using UNOMVIC's chemical weapons detection equipment. No toxic vapors were found. There is no immediate risk or danger. UNMOVIC staff are still working on the premises," Okabe said.

The material in a sealed plastic bag includes "unknown liquid substances contained in metal and glass containers ranging in size from small vials to tubes the length of a pen in one of the sealed plastic bags," she said. "The only information we have of the contents of that bag is from an inventory of a 1996 inspection which indicates that one of the items may contain phosgene, an old-generation chemical warfare agent."

Commenting on the discovery, White House spokesman Tony Snow said, "I'm sure that there are going to be a lot of red-faced people over at the U.N. trying to figure out how (the chemicals) got there."

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Ali Hassan al-Majid, AKA "Chemical Ali," Sentenced To Death By Hanging

CHARLES J. HANLEY,

AP Special Correspondent

Some two decades after Iraq's military laid waste to Kurdish villages, the Iraqi High Tribunal on Sunday sentenced Ali Hassan al-Majid, known as "Chemical Ali," and two others to death for their roles in the bloody campaign against the restive ethnic minority.
Al-Majid, a cousin of executed former president Saddam Hussein, was convicted of genocide, crimes against humanity and war crimes for ordering army and security services to use chemical weapons in an offensive said to have killed some 180,000 people during the 1980-88 Iran-Iraq war.
As the verdicts were read out in Baghdad, to the north some 10,000 American troops were in their sixth day Sunday of a major offensive to oust al-Qaida fighters from the city of Baqouba.
The commander of the U.S. operation said U.S. troops have cleared about 60 percent of western Baqouba of militants, but Iraqi security forces are "not quite up to the job" yet of holding the gains long term.
Brig. Gen. Mick Bednarek, of the Army's 25th Infantry Division, said it will take weeks or months before Iraqi security forces are ready to police the reclaimed area on their own.
The defendants in what was known as the "Anfal" case, for the code name of the anti-Kurdish campaign, had claimed they were acting on orders at a time when the Baghdad leadership, under President Saddam, viewed the rebellious, independence-minded Kurds as allies of Iran during the 1980s war.
Saddam had been a defendant in the case but was executed Dec. 30 after his conviction for the killing of 148 Shiite Muslims in Dujail after a 1982 attempt on his life.
Al-Majid, who had headed the then-ruling Baath Party's Northern Bureau Command in the 1980s, stood silently for Sunday's verdict and said, "Thanks be to God," as he was led from court.
Two others sentenced to hang for anti-Kurdish atrocities were former defense minister Sultan Hashim Ahmad al-Tai and Hussein Rashid Mohammed, a former deputy director of operations for the Iraqi armed forces.
Interrupting the judge as the verdict was read, Mohammed said the defendants were defending Iraq against Kurdish rebels. "God bless our martyrs. Long live the brave Iraqi army. Long live Iraq. Long live the Baath party and long live Arab nations," he declared.
Two other former regime officials — Sabir al-Douri, former director of military intelligence, and Farhan Mutlaq Saleh, who was head of military intelligence's eastern regional office — were sentenced to life in prison. All charges were dropped against Taher Tawfiq al-Ani, a former governor of Mosul, because of insufficient evidence.
The operation in Baqouba, 35 miles northeast of Baghdad, is part of a quartet of U.S. offensives to oust al-Qaida groups from the capital's outskirts.
Bednarek said U.S. forces now control about 60 percent of Baqouba's west side, but "the challenge now is how do you hold onto the terrain you've cleared? You have to do that shoulder-to-shoulder with Iraqi security forces. And they're not quite up to the job yet."
Across Diyala province, where Baqouba is the capital, Iraqi troops are short on uniforms, weapons, ammunition, trucks and radios, he said.
The American general predicted it would be several weeks before Iraqi police and soldiers could keep al-Qaida out of western Baqouba, and months before they could do the same on the city's east side and outlying villages.
Bednarek said the U.S. force has killed between 60 and 100 suspected al-Qaida fighters so far in western Baqouba, about 60 insurgents have been detained, and fewer than 500 civilians displaced from their homes. One American soldier has died in the fighting, he said.
He estimated between 50 and 100 insurgents remained inside a U.S. security "noose" closing on the Khatoon neighborhood of western Baqouba.
The U.S. command in Baghdad, meanwhile, reported a total of 10 soldiers killed on Saturday, including seven killed by roadside bombs, four by a single blast near Baghdad. The deaths raised to at least 30 the number of American soldiers killed in the past week.
In other violence, a car bomb in the southern city of Hillah on Saturday evening killed at least two people and wounded 18 others, a hospital official reported.
The parked car targeted a gathering of civilians in central Hillah, 60 miles south of Baghdad, said Muthana Khalid, a spokesman for Babil provincial police. The predominantly Shiite Muslim city has been the target of some of the deadliest car bomb attacks by suspected Sunni Muslim extremists in the four years of insurgency and sectarian killings in Iraq.
On the political front, two Sunni blocs in the Iraqi parliament, holding 55 seats, began a boycott of the 275-seat house on Sunday, demanding reinstatement of the Sunni speaker, Mahmoud al-Mashhadani.
Parliament had voted June 11 to ask al-Mashhadani, whose erratic behavior had embarrassed even his Sunni Arab allies, to step down while one of the Sunni blocs named a replacement.
The Sunni boycott threatens to further disrupt the work of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki's Shiite-dominated government as it seeks to enact legislation, under pressure from the United States, to reconcile the differences among Iraq's Shiite, Sunni and Kurdish groups.

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