Gloomy Assessment by Afghan Defense Minister

UN rights body tells US to shut "secret" jails

I Hate To Say I Told You So

Ethan Heitner

July 24, 2006

Those of us who were labeled America-haters for saying that Iraq was a mess and that our military presence was making things worse  are actually being proven right – by the military’s own documentation.

Fiasco: The American Military Adventure in Iraq, written by Washington Post senior Pentagon correspondent Thomas Ricks and set to be published this summer, is not to be dismissed as the opinions of shifty Iraqis or pointy-headed academics. Instead, for his material Ricks went straight to the good old, blood-and-guts sources, the Armed Services archives themselves – or, as The Washington Post puts it in its excerpts from the book, which started running in the paper Sunday, "a review of more than 30,000 pages of military documents and several hundred interviews with U.S. military personnel."

And what do they tell us ?

...There is ... strong evidence, based on a review of thousands of military documents and hundreds of interviews with military personnel, that the U.S. approach to pacifying Iraq in the months after the collapse of Hussein helped spur the insurgency and made it bigger and stronger than it might have been. ...

What did the army do wrong? Massive troop presence that only served to remind the Iraqis of the constant presence of foreign occupiers. Indiscriminate sweeps that caught up thousands of ordinary Iraqi citizens in the maws of a gulag system without accountability or order, where they were exposed to abuse at every level by U.S. soldiers and enticed by actual members of the insurgency to find vent for their understandable rage. Or, as Hicks has it (again, based on the military's own evaluations):

Feeding the interrogation system was a major push by U.S. commanders to round up Iraqis. ... Sometimes units acted on tips, but sometimes they just detained all able-bodied males of combat age in areas known to be anti-American.

The problem was that the U.S. military, having assumed it would be operating in a relatively benign environment, wasn't set up for a massive effort that called on it to apprehend, detain and interrogate Iraqis, to analyze the information gleaned, and then to act on it. ...

Senior U.S. intelligence officers in Iraq later estimated that about 85 percent of the tens of thousands rounded up were of no intelligence value. But as they were delivered to Abu Ghraib prison, they overwhelmed the system and often waited for weeks to be interrogated, during which time they could be recruited by hard-core insurgents, who weren't isolated from the general prison population.

Or, in Hicks' portrait of one particularly bad unit, the 4th Infantry Division :

The unit, a heavy armored division despite its name, was known for "grabbing whole villages, because combat soldiers [were] unable to figure out who was of value and who was not," according to a subsequent investigation of the 4th Infantry Division's detainee operations by the Army inspector general's office. Its indiscriminate detention of Iraqis filled Abu Ghraib prison, swamped the U.S. interrogation system and overwhelmed the U.S. soldiers guarding the prison.

Lt. Col. David Poirier, who commanded a military police battalion attached to the 4th Infantry Division and was based in Tikrit from June 2003 to March 2004, said the division's approach was indiscriminate. ... "Every male from 16 to 60" that the 4th Infantry could catch was detained, he said. "And when they got out, they were supporters of the insurgency."

This is the draft of history written by the military, for the military:

In language unusual for an officially produced document, the history of the operation produced by the Marines 1st Division is disapproving, even contemptuous, of what it calls the 4th Infantry Division's "very aggressive" posture as the unit came into Iraq.

The history dryly noted that the Marines, "despite some misgivings," turned over the area to the 4th Infantry Division and departed April 21. "Stores that had re-opened quickly closed back up as the people once again evacuated the streets, adjusting to the new security tactics," the final draft of the history reported. "A budding cooperative environment between the citizens and American forces was quickly snuffed out. The new adversarial relationship would become a major source of trouble in the coming months."

Is it any surprise that the result is exactly what we said it would be?

Cumulatively, the American ignorance of long-held precepts of counterinsurgency warfare impeded the U.S. military during 2003 and part of 2004. Combined with a personnel policy that pulled out all the seasoned forces early in 2004 and replaced them with green troops, it isn't surprising that the U.S. effort often resembled that of Sisyphus, the king in Greek legend who was condemned to perpetually roll a boulder up a hill, only to have it roll back down as he neared the top.

Again and again, in 2003, 2004, 2005 and 2006, U.S. forces launched major new operations to assert and reassert control in Fallujah, in Ramadi, in Samarra, in Mosul.

Read the whole thing to get details of how the U.S. military hierarchy ignored common sense, their own experience in Vietnam and all standards of decency to make everything worse.

While I'm on the "things we knew already but it's nice to hear them say," for a long time it's been obvious that military abuses of civillians in Iraq were neither confined to "a few bad apples" at Abu Ghraib prison, nor did they end with the imprisonment of those few. Systematic lack of leadership regarding detainee abuse is another area documented extensively by Hicks:

On the morning of Aug. 14, 2003 Capt. William Ponce, an officer in the "Human Intelligence Effects Coordination Cell" at the top U.S. military headquarters in Iraq, sent a memo to subordinate commands asking what interrogation techniques they would like to use ...

Some of the responses to his solicitation were enthusiastic. With clinical precision, a soldier attached to the 3rd Armored Cavalry Regiment recommended by e-mail 14 hours later that interrogators use "open-handed facial slaps from a distance of no more than about two feet and back-handed blows to the midsection from a distance of about 18 inches." He also reported that "fear of dogs and snakes appear to work nicely."

The 4th Infantry Division's intelligence operation responded three days later with suggestions that captives be hit with closed fists and also subjected to "low-voltage electrocution."

Hicks chillingly details more specific incidents of abuse from the military records. Surprise surprise, they closely parallel the allegations made in a new report by Human Rights Watch. From their summary :

 In the 53-page report, “No Blood, No Foul: Soldiers’ Accounts of Detainee Abuse in Iraq,” soldiers describe how detainees were routinely subjected to severe beatings, painful stress positions, severe sleep deprivation, and exposure to extreme cold and hot temperatures. The accounts come from interviews conducted by Human Rights Watch, supplemented by memoranda and sworn statements contained in declassified documents.  
 
“Soldiers were told that the Geneva Conventions did not apply, and that interrogators could use abusive techniques to get detainees to talk,” said John Sifton, the author of the report and the senior researcher on terrorism and counterterrorism at Human Rights Watch. “These accounts rebut U.S. government claims that torture and abuse in Iraq was unauthorized and exceptional – on the contrary, it was condoned and commonly used.”  
 
The accounts reveal that detainee abuse was an established and apparently authorized part of the detention and interrogation processes in Iraq for much of 2003-2005. They also suggest that soldiers who sought to report abuse were rebuffed or ignored.  ...

In several instances described in the report, detainee abuse was apparently reported to military leadership in Baghdad and Washington, but little or no action was taken to stop it. For instance, an investigation into a detention facility at Mosul airport in early 2004, initiated after a detainee there had his jaw broken, revealed that detainees at Mosul were regularly subjected to abuse. However, no action was taken to punish wrongdoers, and an interrogator stationed there described serious abuse continuing through 2004. A detainee died while undergoing interrogation at the facility in December 2003; another died in April 2004.  
 
Abuses also continued at Camp Nama through much of 2004, even after various military officials registered complaints about abuse at the facility. Col. Stuart A. Herrington, a retired military intelligence officer, was brought to Iraq to assess intelligence gathering. He informed Gen. Barbara Fast, the chief of military intelligence in Iraq, in a memorandum that Task Force 121 was abusing detainees and not registering them either in the military’s detention records or with the International Committee of the Red Cross.  
 
Herrington concluded, “It seems clear that TF 121 needs to be reined in with respect to its treatment of detainees.” Despite this warning, abuses by the task force continued.  
 
Human Rights Watch said that the new report shows how soldiers who felt abusive practices were wrong or illegal faced significant obstacles at every turn when they attempted to report or expose the abuses. For example, an MP guard at the facility near al-Qaim, who complained to an officer about beatings and other abuse he witnessed, was told, “You need to go ahead and drop this, sergeant.” 

Look, all I'm saying is, the facts are actually not hard to obtain.The information is out there. The documentation exists. These are not baseless allegations—they are the eyewitness testimonies of those involved.

Someday there will have to be justice.

Just don't say you didn't know, and don't let anyone currently sitting in a position of power in Washington D.C. claim it either.

Price tag to rebuild Iraq rises by $50b

Auditor says US to pay most of tab

By Bryan Bender, Globe Staff  |  July 19, 2006

WASHINGTON -- The new Iraqi government will need about $50 billion in additional aid to rebuild the country's oil facilities and electrical grids to prewar levels, the US government's top auditor told Congress yesterday. And he warned that the United States is likely to have to pay the vast majority of it.

The funds would be on top of the roughly $30 billion that the United States has already committed to rebuild the war-torn country since the March 2003 invasion -- most of which has been spent. The estimate is also in addition to the steadily rising cost of the American military deployment in Iraq, which has topped $300 billion, according to the latest government figures.

The estimate is the first full accounting of Iraqi reconstruction needs by US Comptroller General David M. Walker , the nation's top fiscal watchdog.

The Bush administration has not offered any recent estimates of Iraqi reconstruction expenses and had given no indication that costs could grow so significantly. The administration's last request for rebuilding dollars, approved in early June, was for $1.5 billion.

Before the war, administration officials said oil revenues would be sufficient for the Iraqi government to pay for the country's reconstruction. But later in 2003, the administration asked Congress for $18.6 billion in reconstruction money, most of it for Iraq, and has since received smaller installments from Congress. The administration has also funneled billions of dollars from the Defense and State departments' regular budgets to Iraqi reconstruction, according to the Congressional Research Service.

Nonetheless, ``additional funds will be needed to finance remaining reconstruction needs and to restore, sustain, and protect the infrastructure that has been built to date," Walker told the House Government Reform Committee. ``Iraqi needs are greater than originally anticipated."

In addition to the $50 billion for oil and electricity needs, he said, the Iraqi government is likely to need additional resources to meet other basics and to support the fledgling security forces .

Walker testified about the rising cost of the Iraq war and the war on terrorism. He appeared along with top Bush administration budget officials, who faced tough questions from Republicans and Democrats about the estimated $430 billion that has been spent on military operations and diplomatic efforts overseas since the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.

Walker, who also runs the Government Accountability Office, said that while military costs -- currently about $1.5 billion a week -- are rising sharply, the US government is likely to have to foot almost all of the bill for the Iraqi government's future rebuilding needs as well.

According to GAO figures, the United States has already allocated about $10.5 billion since 2003 for restoring essential services in Iraq.

But key projects have yet to be completed because of security problems, management lapses, and corruption.

Citing figures compiled by the Department of Energy's Energy Information Administration, Walker estimated that at least $30 billion more will be needed to ``reach and sustain oil capacity of 5 million barrels per day." To sustain the necessary electricity output, ``they will need $20 billion through 2010," he reported, citing US government and industry specialists.

A variety of factors make Iraq unable to support its own infrastructure , according to Walker, even beyond the damaged state of its oil industry. ``Iraqi budget constraints and limited government managerial capacity limits its ability to contribute to future rebuilding efforts," he reported.

Rampant corruption in Iraqi government ministries is also partially to blame, according to a 19-page assessment Walker provided on the war costs to date.

``Reconstruction efforts have not taken the risk of corruption into account when assessing the costs of achieving US objectives in Iraq," the report said.

``The International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, Japan, and the European Union officials cite corruption in the oil sector as a special problem. In addition, According to [State Department] officials and reporting documents, about 10 percent of refined fuels are diverted to the black market, and about 30 percent of imported fuels are smuggled out of Iraq and sold for profit."

The government will need ``significant help" in building the accountability systems to prevent corruption , Walker said.

Bryan Bender can be reached at bender@globe.com.  

Further complicating the GOP outlook to turn things around is a solid percentage of liberals, moderates and even conservatives who say they'll vote Democratic. The party out of power also holds the edge among persuadable voters, a prospect that doesn't bode well for the Republicans.

The election ultimately will be decided in 435 House districts and 33 Senate contests, in which incumbents typically hold the upper hand. But the survey underscored the difficulty Republicans face in trying to persuade a skeptical public to return them to Washington.

The AP-Ipsos poll of 1,000 adults conducted Monday through Wednesday found that President Bush has stopped his political freefall, with his approval rating of 36% basically unchanged from last month. Bush received slightly higher marks for his handling of the Iraq war and the fight against terrorism, weeks after his surprise trip to Baghdad and the killing of Iraqi terrorist Abu Musab al-Zarqawi in a U.S. airstrike last month.

But a Democratic takeover of either the House or Senate would be disastrous for the president, leaving both his agenda for the last two years in office and the chairmanship of investigative committees in the hands of the opposition party. To seize control of Congress, the Democrats must displace 15 Republicans from House seats and six Republicans from the Senate.

The AP-Ipsos survey asked 789 registered voters if the election for the House were held today, would they vote for the Democratic or Republican candidate in their district. Democrats were favored 51% to 40%.

Not surprisingly, 81% of self-described liberals said they would vote for the Democrat. Among moderates, though, 56% backed a Democrat in their district and almost a quarter of conservatives — 24% — said they will vote Democratic.

Democrats also held the advantage among persuadable voters — those who are undecided or wouldn't say whom they prefer. A total of 51% said they were leaning Democrat, while 41% were leaning Republican.

"We still have wind in our face. It's a midterm election in the president's second term," said Rep. Tom Reynolds, R-N.Y., chairman of the National Republican Congressional Committee. "Today is a little bit better in the atmospherics of Washington than it was maybe a month ago."

The president's party historically has lost seats in the sixth year of his service. Franklin D. Roosevelt lost 72 House seats in 1938; Dwight D. Eisenhower 48 in 1958. The exception was Bill Clinton in 1998.

By another comparison, polls in 1994 — when a Republican tidal wave swept Democrats from power — the two parties were in a dead heat in July on the question of whom voters preferred in their district.

"It comes down to a fairly simply question: Can Democrats nationalize all the elections? If Republicans prevent that, they have a shot. If they don't, they lose," said Doug Gross, the GOP gubernatorial candidate in Iowa in 2002 and the state finance director for the 2004 Bush-Cheney campaign.

Overall, only 27% approved of the way Congress is doing its job. Lawmakers get favorable marks from 36% of conservatives, 28% of moderates and 17% of liberals.

Some criticism of Congress has focused on lawmakers' inability to control spending, with lawmakers tucking in special projects for their home districts.

"They used to say there's nothing worse than a tax-and-spend liberal Democrat," said Gary Wilson, 51, a self-described liberal from Gaithersburg, Md. "There is something worse: It's a borrow-and-spend Republican. This is going to come back to haunt us."

One bright spot for the GOP is that Republicans hold an advantage over Democrats on issues such as foreign policy and fighting terrorism — 43% to 33% — and a smaller edge on handling Iraq — 36% to 32%.

The AP-Ipsos poll was conducted after the divisive Democratic debate in the Senate over setting a timetable for withdrawing U.S. forces from Iraq. Potential voters were paying attention to the GOP complaint that Democrats want to "cut and run."

"It seems like the Democrats want to pull out or start to pull out, and I don't think that's the correct thing to do," said Eric Bean, 24, a college minister in Fort Worth. "I'd much rather see a Congress that would support our president. I think George Bush is doing the best he can. I think Republicans will support him."

John Dendahl, the Republican candidate for governor in New Mexico, said Democrats, with the help of some Republicans, have been successful at obstructing legislation in Congress while heaping the blame on the GOP.

Tom Courtney, a Democratic state senator in Iowa, said U.S. voters are ready to trust his party to lead.

"I honestly think it's ours to lose," Courtney said. "My experience, we're not above that. Americans are ready for change."

The poll of adults had a margin of error of 3 percentage points and the survey of registered voters had a margin of error of 3.5 percentage points.

WASHINGTON - Since the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, President Bush's foreign policy has been driven by blunt talk, a willingness to threaten or use military force, and a belief that American power can reorder the world.

"We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality," a White House aide famously told journalist-author Ron Suskind in 2002.

Reality has bitten back.

From the corpse-strewn streets of Baghdad to Iran's uranium-enrichment plants, from Israel's escalating conflicts in Gaza and Lebanon to North Korean missile launch pads, the White House faces developments that appear to be getting worse for U.S. interests.

Virtually every president faces a plethora of global crises, sometimes simultaneously. What's new is that the United States' ability to influence events has shrunk, largely because U.S. troops and treasure remain mired in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the Iraq war has diminished foreign confidence in American leadership, according to foreign policy experts and some U.S. officials.

In Iraq and to some extent Afghanistan, "events have revealed that our military superiority is not as great as we originally imagined. We are tapped out," said Andrew Bacevich, a Boston University international relations professor and West Point graduate.

That has implications for dealing with challenges such as Iran's suspected drive for nuclear weapons and North Korea's recent test launch of missiles in defiance of world opinion, Bacevich and others said.

"We're really not in a position to dictate to others," Bacevich said, a trend that he noted isn't lost on America's adversaries.

Making a virtue of necessity, Bush has shelved tough talk when it comes to dealing with Iran and North Korea - both are members of what he called the "axis of evil" - and has instead emphasized patient diplomacy.

The president, who showed little patience for either diplomacy or the United Nations before the March 2003 invasion of Iraq, said last week after the North Korean missile launches: "One way to send a message is through the United Nations. ... Diplomacy takes a while, particularly when you're dealing with a variety of partners."

But Bush's gradual ditching of tough talk and moral clarity in his foreign policy has left his conservative supporters angry and frustrated.

"I don't know what's happened. ... Is it Iraq? Is it the mid-term elections? Is it weariness? Is it (the influence of Secretary of State Condoleezza) Rice?" said Danielle Pletka, a vice president of the conservative American Enterprise Institute.

"Clearly, there's been a sea-change in our foreign policy."

But it's not clear that diplomacy is working, either.

On Wednesday, Rice and the foreign ministers of China, France, Germany, Great Britain and Russia agreed to bring Iran's nuclear program back to the U.N. Security Council after Tehran refused to give a clear answer to a six-week old international peace proposal.

But it remains far from clear that Russia, which has economic and political interests in Iran, will ever agree to tough sanctions on Iran, especially after it's done hosting this weekend's economic summit in St. Petersburg.

With North Korea, Washington is forced to rely on China, the only nation with any real influence on Pyongyang. But China has threatened to block a U.N. Security Council resolution that would condemn North Korea's missile tests and curb transfers of missiles and missile-related technology to it. Beijing is counseling quiet diplomacy instead.

Bush's recent emphasis on diplomacy is "all fine. But there's no reason to believe any of these diplomatic measures will be successful," said Gary Samore, a nonproliferation expert who worked in the Clinton White House and is now a vice president of the MacArthur Foundation.

Samore, who met recently with a group of Iranians, said they told him that the leadership in Tehran is convinced that the Bush administration cannot attack them. "The Iranians are feeling very protected from U.S. military action" by what has happened in Iraq, he said.

"The administration is seen as so deeply wounded by Iraq and by the fading presidency, that a lot of people (in other capitals) are thinking about the next presidency."

Bush, Rice and other top administration spokesmen argue that the United States is working effectively with other nations to deal with common threats. The European Union, Russia and China have a common interest in preventing a nuclear-armed Iran and reining in North Korea, they say.

While acknowledging serious problems in Iraq, Rice and others predict the country will eventually get on the right path.

One senior State Department official said Rice and her State Department team privately appear to understand the U.S. predicament.

"But what are they going to do? They're going to keep on keeping on," said the official, speaking on condition of anonymity to avoid retribution. "It's not the hand they were dealt. To some extent, it's the hand they dealt themselves."

Samore and other analysts said Bush would have had a much stronger hand if he'd pursued diplomacy earlier - for example, immediately after the Iraq invasion, when Iran, fearing it would be next, quietly proposed talks on a broad range of issues.

But after Saddam Hussein was toppled, Bush and his aides were emboldened, thinking they saw the beginning of a democratic wave that would transform the Arab Middle East.

After an initial outpouring of popular movements in Egypt, Lebanon and the Palestinian territories in early 2005, that hope, too, has been dashed.

The terrorist group Hamas won January 2006 elections in the Palestinian territories. The United States refuses to deal with Hamas, effectively sidelining Washington from a role in Middle East peace negotiations.

Israel, which has pursued its own muscular policies, now finds itself fighting a two-front war against Hamas in Gaza and the Iranian-backed Hezbollah militia along its northern border in Lebanon.

In Iraq, brutal sectarian violence has resurged, with the death toll of the last three days passing 100. U.S. Ambassador to Iraq Zalmay Khalilzad acknowledged this week that new Prime Minister Nouri al Maliki's plan to pacify Baghdad hasn't achieved its goals. But Iraq isn't in a civil war, he insisted.

	Reuters A mother held the IV drip for her daughter, 8, who was wounded by cross-fire during street fights in the Jihad neighborhood of Baghdad on Sunday.

July 10, 2006

Baghdad Erupts in Mob Violence

Correction Appended

BAGHDAD, July 9 — A mob of gunmen went on a brazen daytime rampage through a predominantly Sunni Arab district of western Baghdad on Sunday, pulling people from their cars and homes and killing them in what officials and residents called a spasm of revenge by Shiite militias for the bombing of a Shiite mosque on Saturday. Hours later, two car bombs exploded beside a Shiite mosque in another Baghdad neighborhood in a deadly act of what appeared to be retaliation.

While Baghdad has been ravaged by Sunni-Shiite bloodletting in recent months, even by recent standards the violence here on Sunday was frightening, delivered with impunity by gun-wielding vigilantes on the street. In the culture of revenge that has seized Iraq, residents all over the city braced for an escalation in the cycle of retributive mayhem between the Shiites and Sunnis that has threatened to expand into civil war.

The violence coincided with an announcement by American military officials that they had formally accused four more American soldiers of rape and murder, and a fifth soldier of "dereliction of duty" for failing to report the crimes, in connection with the deaths of a teenage Iraqi girl and three members of her family.

With movement in Baghdad difficult after a military cordon was established to suppress the violence, facts were hard to ascertain. The death toll from the shootings alone ranged from fewer than a dozen, according to the American military, to more than 40 reported by some news services. The bombing near the mosque later claimed at least 19 lives and left 59 wounded, officials said.

The military's announcement about the soldiers brought to six the number implicated in the rape-murder, one more than previously disclosed. The case has enraged Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki and led to apologies by the highest American military and civilian officials in Iraq. A photograph of the girl's passport distributed by news agencies on Sunday showed that she was 14.

Only seven weeks old, Mr. Maliki's government is facing increasingly difficult obstacles. Worsening violence has undermined his intention to disarm the country's sectarian militias. At the same time, the growing furor over criminal accusations against American troops has tested Mr. Maliki's divided loyalties to his American allies and to an Iraqi public that has grown weary of the American presence.

The killings on Sunday in the western Baghdad neighborhood of Jihad began in late morning, near the site of a car bomb explosion in front of a Shiite mosque on Saturday, residents and officials said. Initial reports said the bombing had killed three people, but the American military said Sunday that at least 12 people, including 3 children, had died in the blast, and at least 18 had been wounded.

According to some residents and Sunni Arab officials interviewed by telephone, the gunmen, whom they accused of being members of a feared Shiite militia, the Mahdi Army, set up checkpoints around the neighborhood, indiscriminately pulled scores of Sunni Arabs from their homes and cars and killed them on the street. Other bodies were found with their hands bound behind their backs and gunshots in their heads, residents said.

But as often happens in Iraq, accounts of the violence varied widely. Residents and some Iraqi officials said in interviews that more than 35 people had been killed in the attacks. The Associated Press quoted Lt. Maitham Abdul-Razzaq of the Iraqi police as saying that 41 bodies had been taken to hospitals. And an official at Yarmouk Hospital, the main medical center in western Baghdad, said in a telephone interview that at least 23 bodies had been delivered from Jihad, and 10 people had arrived wounded from the shootings.

But American and some Iraqi security officials said the casualty figures were far lower. Lt. Col. Jonathan B. Withington, spokesman for the Fourth Infantry Division, which oversees security around Baghdad, said the Iraqi police had reported finding only 11 bodies. It was unclear whether that toll included victims delivered to the morgue.

American and Iraqi security officials also said they could not confirm the accounts of the seemingly arbitrary street killings, and Colonel Withington said the Iraqi security forces were mobilized immediately after reports of "sporadic gunfire" in Jihad. By early afternoon, Iraqi and American forces had sealed off the neighborhood, officials said.

Several prominent Sunni Arab political and religious leaders criticized the Iraqi and American security forces for their inability to control the violence. In comments broadcast on Al Jazeera, Salam al-Zubaie, a deputy prime minister and a Sunni, called the events in Jihad "a real massacre," and suggested that the country's Shiite-led security forces were to blame because they had been infiltrated by militiamen. The government forces, he said, "coordinate with these filthy terror groups who are roaming the streets."

Mr. Maliki's office, in a statement, tried to distance itself from Mr. Zubaie's comments, saying "they do not represent the government's point of view." Mr. Maliki, a Shiite, has vowed to crack down on militias regardless of sectarian affiliation and to eradicate militia influence from the government's security forces.

In recent days, American and Iraqi troops have conducted several operations against the powerful Mahdi Army militia, which is loosely under the control of the influential Shiite cleric Moktada al-Sadr, and is regarded by Sunni Arab leaders as a main force behind many sectarian reprisal killings. Iraqi and American forces captured two Mahdi Army leaders on Friday and raided a suspected militia bastion on Saturday.

Some Jihad residents and Sunni Arab leaders accused the Mahdi Army of committing the killings on Sunday, but officials in Mr. Sadr's organization denied that. "The Mahdi Army takes care of the national interest," Abdel Hadi al-Daraji, a spokesman for Mr. Sadr, told Al Jazeera. Mr. Sadr joined other government leaders in publicly calling for calm, and he requested an emergency session of Parliament to discuss the crisis and "prevent a sea of blood," his office said in a statement.

President Jalal Talabani warned Iraqis against falling prey to "acts of violence that some want to look sectarian."

Militias of all stripes appeared to be bracing for fallout from the morning's attacks. Mahdi Army fighters interviewed by telephone said they were preparing for a wider battle. Mahdi militiamen had set up checkpoints in the city's predominantly Shiite neighborhoods and, according to residents, were preparing for Sunni reprisals. A Mahdi Army platoon commander who identified himself only as Sheik Faleh said, "If anything happens, we will attack."

Later in the day, the deadly double-car bombing next to a Shiite mosque in Kasra, a mixed neighborhood in northeastern Baghdad, also seemed intended to stoke sectarian fury.

Seven people were killed and at least eight wounded in various insurgent attacks around Kirkuk, including a bomb that exploded in a bus, killing one civilian and wounding seven, the police said. In Samarra, gunmen assassinated a top official in the Iraqi Islamic Party, a Sunni organization, and two of his guards, the police said, while in Karbala, a police captain was killed.

The American command here said an American soldier was killed early on Sunday in the greater Baghdad area in a "noncombat-related incident," but did not elaborate.

In the rape-murder case, the American military did not identify the five newly accused soldiers, who remain on active duty in Iraq. The first to be implicated was Steven D. Green, a recently discharged private first class arrested June 30 in North Carolina on suspicion of participating in the crimes on March 12.

A affidavit filed in the case against Mr. Green implicated five soldiers: Mr. Green; three soldiers who accompanied him to the farmhouse in the town of Mahmudiya, 20 miles south of Baghdad, where investigators say the rape and murders took place; and another soldier who remained at a checkpoint.

But the new accusations, made Saturday and disclosed Sunday, indicate that another soldier was also inside the farmhouse at the time of the crimes, according to a military official who requested anonymity because he was not authorized to publicly discuss such details.

The soldier who has been accused of dereliction of duty is, according to the military statement on Sunday, "not alleged to have been a direct participant in the rape and killings," suggesting that it was the soldier who was aware of the plan but stayed at the checkpoint.

The formal accusations against the five soldiers set in motion the military's court-martial process. According to military officials, the soldiers will now face an investigation under Article 32 of the Uniform Code of Military Justice, a process similar to a grand jury hearing, which will determine whether enough evidence exists to put the men on trial.

Reporting for this article was contributed by Khalid al-Ansary, Khalid W. Hassan, Hosham Hussein, Mona Mahmoud, Qais Mizher, Sahar Nageeb, Omar al-Neami and Iraqi employees of The New York Times in Baghdad, Kirkuk and Tikrit.

Correction: July 12, 2006 Because of a production error, a front-page article on Monday about an escalation of violence in Baghdad omitted part of a sentence just before the continuation of the article in some copies. It should have read: The death toll from the shootings alone ranged from fewer than a dozen, according to the American military, to more than 40 reported by some news services.

Mohammed Hato/Associated Press
The passport of an Iraqi girl who was raped and murdered in Mahmudiya showed that she was 14.