01/31/07

AP NEWS STORY

Mosques still show damage from attacks in Hurriyah

By SALLY BUZBEE
Associated Press Writer

BAGHDAD, Iraq (AP) -- Four Sunni mosques attacked in late November in the embattled Hurriyah neighborhood of Baghdad still bear scars from the attacks and all are now either under Shiite Muslim control or closed.

Immediately after the Nov. 24 incidents, an Associated Press story quoted an Iraqi police captain saying the four mosques had been attacked and six men doused with fuel and burned alive at one of them. In some early versions of the AP story, which was updated several times as more information became available, the police officer referred to the mosques being burned or blown up.

The report was challenged a day later, when a U.S. military spokesman said it could only confirm an attack on one mosque.

Since then, the AP has confirmed damage at three of the four mosques, including burn damage at two and slight damage at a third.

Today, all four mosques are either clearly under the control of Shiites or closed and nonfunctioning, guarded by Iraqi army troops. The Iraqi army increased its presence in Hurriyah after the November attacks, which drove many Sunnis out of the neighborhood and put it firmly under Shiite control.

The loss of the Sunni mosques is a powerful symbol of how the formerly mixed neighborhood has changed to one where only Shiites are welcome.

An Associated Press reporter who lives in the neighborhood, and whose name has been withheld from this story for security reasons, visited the mosques Friday.

-- At the small Mustafa mosque, where residents said the six men were burned Nov. 24, an AP video taken shortly after the Nov. 24 attacks showed burn damage and the front torn away by explosives.

The reporter who visited it Friday said the mosque was still heavily damaged and unrepaired. A teenager holding a pistol and sitting outside, believed to be a member of the radical Shiite Mahdi Army or its offshoots, pointed to graffiti on a nearby wall that said "TNT mosque," a reference to the fact it had been bombed.

"This is the TNT mosque. ... This name was given to it by Wahhabis" -- the name of an extremist Sunni branch that is used by the Mahdi Army as a derisory label for all Sunnis.

-- The al-Nidaa mosque, where the U.S. military said on Nov. 25 that its Iraqi sources had confirmed a fire, also remains damaged. The reporter who viewed it Friday said most of its dome has been destroyed although some was still in place. The dome's decorative covering has been knocked off and the part of the concrete dome structure that remains is full of holes. Windows are shattered and graffiti on a wall reads "Long live the Mahdi Army." The gates are closed and no one is inside the mosque or guarding it.

-- The third, the al-Muhaimin mosque, had shattered windows and holes in the roof, but a closer examination was impossible because the gate of the wall surrounding the structure was locked, the AP reporter found. It is closed, guarded by the Iraqi army and adorned by a picture of the late Shiite cleric father of Muqtada al-Sadr, the anti-American cleric who heads the Mahdi Army.

-- The fourth mosque named in the AP's original report, the al-Qaqaqa mosque, also known as the al-Meshaheda mosque, has a broken window and is closed, guarded by Iraqi army troops outside and adorned with a picture of al-Sadr's father. It also has Mahdi Army graffiti scrawled on its side, partially whitewashed over but still readable.

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01/31/07

AP NEWS STORY

Mixed Baghdad neighborhood now firmly controlled by Shiite radicals

By SALLY BUZBEE
Associated Press Writer

BAGHDAD, Iraq (AP) -- Teenage gunmen from the Mahdi Army militia patrol the streets. Shops abandoned by Sunni Muslims are reopening under Shiite Muslim operators. Slurs scrawled on Sunni homes are being scrubbed off, and Shiite families moving in.

Formerly Sunni mosques, including some attacked or bombed last fall, are either closed or repaired and redecorated in the Shiite tradition for their new worshippers.

This is Hurriyah today, a Baghdad district with tens of thousands of residents that starkly shows the challenges facing the U.S. military as it sends 21,500 more troops to stop Sunni-Shiite bloodletting here and in turbulent areas to the west.

One key goal, says President Bush, is to rein in armed militias. But if Hurriyah is a guide, the biggest militia -- the Shiite Mahdi Army -- has made deep inroads.

Here and in an arc of formerly mixed neighborhoods across the capital the radical Shiites are firmly entrenched, with only their branch of Islam permitted. Especially in the east, anchored in the Shiite slum Sadr City, the Mahdi Army and its supporters now are so embedded that uprooting them may be impossible.

Vast swaths of the capital have been consumed by violence as the Islamic sects have fought for territory. Some of the bloodiest occurred last summer and fall in Hurriyah, seven miles from Sadr City, when the Shiites made their push.

The fighting included a Nov. 24 attack by Mahdi Army militiamen on a number of Sunni mosques. At one, the AP reported -- based on statements of residents, a local Sunni sheik and a police officer -- six men were doused with fuel and burned alive by Shiite militiamen. A month later, on Dec. 30, the day of Saddam Hussein's execution, three car bombs killed 37 people on a main street in Hurriyah, presumably a revenge attack by Sunni insurgents angered by the hanging.

Until 2005, Hurriyah was a relatively safe, working-class community of shops and single-family homes of Sunnis and Shiites. The sectarian seam was ripped open that year when gunmen from the Sunni extremist Omar's Army began abducting and killing Shiites. Just over a year ago, Mahdi Army militiamen set up an office in the main outdoor market and told Shiites they would protect them.

Last fall, handbills appeared warning that 10 Sunnis would die for every Shiite killed. As promised, the attacks on Sunnis steadily escalated throughout the fall, until by early December almost all Sunnis had fled.

Hurriyah is mostly quiet these days, guarded by young men of the Mahdi Army or its splinter groups, according to an Associated Press reporter who lives in the neighborhood and whose name has been withheld from this story for security reasons. Journalists can be killed for recording the militia's activities.

The main street is blocked by checkpoints run by teenagers, a Mahdi Army auxiliary in blue or black track suits with automatic weapons near at hand and pistols tucked in their belts. They stop and question the driver of each motorbike, and even men pushing carts.

"I'm delivering this to a shop," one man answered on a recent day, gesturing to the boxes on his cart. "What's in them?" a militiaman asked, looking through the boxes before letting the man pass with his cargo of cookies.

Iraqi army units also patrol Hurriyah, in much larger numbers these days than last fall, sometimes positioning themselves not far from the checkpoints.

One recent day, the AP reporter observed a Mahdi militiaman boarding a bus and checking IDs and bags. Two comrades stood outside. Suddenly, a U.S. Army patrol swung by, and the two clambered aboard the bus, hid their weapons, and blended in with the passengers.

In the past month, as U.S. and Iraqi officials have worked to curb the Mahdi Army, militia commanders have ordered their troops to lie low and keep weapons out of sight. They still put up checkpoints, but brandish weapons only when their demands are ignored. If that happens, men with Kalashnikovs quickly materialize to confront the offending motorist.

Some Baghdad Shiites say they're grateful for the Mahdi Army's protection. But one Shiite woman in Hurriyah, a government employee who asked that her name be withheld for her safety, complained about the militia's bus searches.

"It fills me with fear," she said of the young militia members. "They're worsening the situation."

The Shiite-controlled Iraqi government plays down the dramatic changes in the city's population.

One Iraqi army officer in Hurriyah acknowledged that "displacements" of Sunnis have occurred, but claimed that most returned after the Iraqi army increased its patrols. He spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak publicly.

However, a local Shiite resident, Durgham Abdel-Munim, 36, estimated only 5 percent of the neighborhood remains Sunni after "big waves" of people fled. He estimated a third of the neighborhood was Sunni before the purges.

A Sunni family, the Azzawis, said they sent their young sons away for their safety. The father, mother and a daughter stayed behind. The daughter said she tries to sound Shiite and mentions Shiite saints' names while selling vegetables in a market, where she would be especially vulnerable. She asked that her name not be used.

Her fear is typical.

Having seen how the Mahdi Army has killed people, burned homes and businesses and threatened Sunni families, only one of the original Sunni sources who described seeing Hurriyah's extreme violence of Nov. 24 could be located a month afterward. In that case, the meeting was held in a safe location outside of the district, where he no longer resides because of his fear of the militiamen.

The man, insisting on anonymity, again recounted that day in detail, including the burnings of six people from the mosque.

The Iraqi government and U.S. military have said they have no evidence of any burnings of people at the mosque. But the witness said that might be because the victims' bodies were taken almost immediately to be buried in Abu Ghraib, a Sunni district west of Baghdad.

Speedy burials are the norm in Iraq as in other Islamic countries. But the witness said neighborhood residents never took the bodies to the police or morgue because the people feared them.

His account of the burial could not be corroborated. Other reports that day said some burned bodies were received at a hospital or a morgue before families took them for burial, but it was unclear if they were the same victims or from a different attack.

The extreme violence that rattled Hurriyah on Nov. 24 was not unprovoked. It came after extremists Sunnis, possibly al-Qaida militants, attacked Shiites in Sadr City. The government said 215 Shiites were killed.

Preventing such back-and-forth retribution attacks is central to the mission now facing the Iraqi government and the U.S. military.

One sign of how difficult that may be: many of the Sunnis who fled Hurriyah in late November have settled into another nearby mixed neighborhood called Adil. Now there are reports that the Sunnis there are pushing out Shiites.

___

Material and reporting for this story was gathered by the AP staff in Baghdad. It was written by Associated Press Writer Sally Buzbee, the Chief of Middle East News, who is based in Cairo but frequently works in Iraq.

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RELATED MAP GRAPHIC OF BAGHDAD (PDF)

01/31/07

AP STATEMENT

From Linda Wagner
Director of Media Relations & Public Affairs
The Associated Press

All news organizations covering the war in Iraq have faced a severe security situation since the conflict began. The risks have risen dramatically in recent months as sectarian conflicts have escalated.

Some have criticized AP’s use of anonymous sources and its refusal to identify by name all AP staff members who have contributed to reporting about violent incidents in the Hurriyah district of Baghdad.

AP has already lost four staff members killed in Iraq. Upon the death earlier this month of the most recent AP staff member killed there, AP President and CEO Tom Curley said, "The situation for our journalists in Iraq is unprecedented in AP's 161-year history of covering wars and conflicts. The courage of our Iraqi colleagues and their dedication to the story stand as an example to the world of journalism's enduring value."

Without protecting the identities of many of its sources and staff members from the extraordinary dangers in Iraq, it is impossible to provide news coverage of many events in the violent conflict about which the public has the right to know.

AP’s use of anonymous sources and unnamed staff members adheres to its ethics and journalism guidelines, which are among the most thorough and strict in the news media profession.

You can see AP’s ethics and journalism guidelines from the home page of www.ap.org -- click on this link at the top right : The AP Statement Of News Values and Principles. (direct URL: http://www.ap.org/newsvalues)

You can learn more about AP’s concern for the public’s right to know about the war in Iraq and many other public issues by visiting another link from its www.ap.org home page: AP and the People's Right to Know. (direct URL: http://www.ap.org/FOI/index.html)

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01/04/07

AP NEWS STORY


Iraq threatens arrest of police captain who spoke to media

By STEVEN R. HURST
Associated Press Writer

BAGHDAD, Iraq (AP) -- The Interior Ministry acknowledged Thursday that an Iraqi police officer whose existence had been denied by the Iraqis and the U.S. military is in fact an active member of the force, and said he now faces arrest for speaking to the media.

Ministry spokesman Brig. Abdul-Karim Khalaf, who had previously denied there was any such police employee as Capt. Jamil Hussein, said in an interview that Hussein is an officer assigned to the Khadra police station, as had been reported by The Associated Press.

The captain, whose full name is Jamil Gholaiem Hussein, was one of the sources for an AP story in late November about the burning and shooting of six people during a sectarian attack at a Sunni mosque.

The U.S. military and the Iraqi Interior Ministry raised the doubts about Hussein in questioning the veracity of the AP's initial reporting on the incident, and the Iraqi ministry suggested that many news organization were giving a distorted, exaggerated picture of the conflict in Iraq. Some Internet bloggers spread and amplified these doubts, accusing the AP of having made up Hussein's identity in order to disseminate false news about the war.

Khalaf offered no explanation Thursday for why the ministry had initially denied Hussein's existence, other than to state that its first search of records failed to turn up his full name. He also declined to say how long the ministry had known of its error and why it had made no attempt in the past six weeks to correct the public record.

Hussein was not the original source of the disputed report of the attack; the account was first told on Al-Arabiya satellite television by a Sunni elder, Imad al-Hashimi, who retracted it after members of the Defense Ministry paid him a visit. Several neighborhood residents subsequently gave the AP independent accounts of the Shiite militia attack on a mosque in which six people were set on fire and killed.

Khalaf told the AP that an arrest warrant had been issued for the captain for having contacts with the media in violation of the ministry's regulations.

Hussein told the AP on Wednesday that he learned the arrest warrant would be issued when he returned to work on Thursday after the Eid al-Adha holiday. His phone was turned off Thursday and he could not be reached for further comment.

Hussein appears to have fallen afoul of a new Iraqi push, encouraged by some U.S. advisers, to more closely monitor the flow of information about the country's violence, and strictly enforce regulations that bar all but authorized spokesmen from talking to media.

During Saddam Hussein's rule, information in Iraq had been fiercely controlled by the Information Ministry, but after the arrival of U.S. troops in 2003 and during the transition to an elected government in 2004, many police such as Hussein felt freer to talk to journalists and give information as it occurred.

As a consequence, most news organizations working in Iraq have maintained Iraqi police contacts routinely in recent years. Some officers who speak with reporters withhold their names or attempt to disguise their names using different variants of one or two middle names or last names for reasons of security. Hussein, however, spoke for the record, using his authentic first and last name, on numerous occasions.

His first contacts with the AP were in 2004, when the current Interior Ministry and its press apparatus was still being formed out of the chaotic remains of the Saddam-era ministry.

The information he provided about various police incidents was never called into question until he became embroiled in the attempt to discredit the AP story about the Hurriyah mosque attack.

Lt. Col. Christopher Garver, a U.S. military spokesman in Baghdad, said Thursday that the military had asked the Interior Ministry on Nov. 26 if it had a policeman by the name of Jamil Hussein. Two days later, U.S. Navy Lt. Michael B. Dean, a public affairs officer with the U.S. Navy Multi-National Corps-Iraq Joint Operations Center, sent an e-mail to AP in Baghdad saying that the military had checked with the Iraqi Interior Ministry and was told that no one by the name of Jamil Hussein worked for the ministry or was a Baghdad police officer.

Dean also demanded that the mosque attack story be retracted.

The text of the Dean letter appeared quickly on several Internet blogs, prompting heated debate about the story and criticism of the AP.

At the weekly Interior Ministry briefing on Nov. 30, Khalaf cited the AP story as an example of why the ministry had decided to form a special unit to monitor news coverage and vowed to take legal action against journalists who failed to correct stories the ministry deemed to be incorrect.

At the time Khalaf said the ministry had no one on its staff by the name of Jamil Hussein.

"Maybe he wore an MOI (Ministry of Interior) uniform and gave a different name to the reporter for money," Khalaf said then. The AP has not paid Jamil Hussein and does not pay any news sources for information for its stories.

On Thursday, Khalaf told AP that the ministry at first had searched its files for Jamil Hussein and found no one. He said a later search turned up Capt. Jamil Gholaiem Hussein, assigned to the Khadra police station.

But the AP had already identified the captain by all three names in a story on Nov. 28 -- two days before the Interior Ministry publicly denied his existence on the police rolls.

Khalaf did not say whether the U.S. military had ever been told that Hussein in fact exists. Garver, the U.S. military spokesman, said Thursday that he was not aware that the military had ever been told.

Khalaf said Thursday that with the arrest of Hussein for breaking police regulations against talking to reporters, the AP would be called to identify him in a lineup as the source of its story.

Should the AP decline to assist in the identification, Khalaf said, the case against Hussein would be dropped. He also said there were no plans to pursue action against the AP should it decline.

He said police officers sign a pledge not to talk to reporters when they join the force. He did not explain why Jamil Hussein had become an issue now, given that he had been named by AP in dozens of news reports dating back to early 2006. Before that, he had been a reliable source of police information since 2004 but had not been quoted by name.


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12/08/06

AP Statement

Kathleen Carroll
Executive Editor and Senior Vice President
The Associated Press

In recent days, a handful of people have stridently criticized The Associated Press’ coverage of a terrible attack on Iraqi citizens last month in Baghdad. Some of those critics question whether the incident happened at all and declare that they don't believe our reporting.

Indeed, a small number of them have whipped themselves into an indignant lather over the AP's reporting.

Their assertions that the AP has been duped or worse are unfounded and just plain wrong.

No organization has done more to try to shed light on what happened Nov. 24 in the Hurriyah neighborhood of Baghdad than The Associated Press.

We have sent journalists to the neighborhood three different times to talk with people there about what happened. And those residents have repeatedly told us, in some detail, that Shiite militiamen dragged six Sunni worshippers from a mosque, drenched them with kerosene and burned them alive.

No one else has said they have actually gone to the neighborhood. Particularly not the individuals who have criticized our journalism with such barbed certitude.

The AP has been transparent and fair since the first day of our reporting on this issue.
We have not ignored the questions about our work raised by the U.S. military and later, by the Iraqi Interior Ministry. Indeed, we published those questions while also sending AP journalists back out to the scene to dig further into what happened and why others might be questioning the initial accounts.

The AP mission was to get at the facts, wherever those facts took us.

What we found were more witnesses who described the attack in particular detail as well as describing the fear that runs through the neighborhood. We ran a lengthy story on those additional findings, as well as the questions, on Nov. 28.

Some of AP's critics question the existence of police Capt. Jamil Hussein, who was one (but not the only) source to tell us about the burning.

These critics cite a U.S. military officer and an Iraqi official who first said Hussein is not an authorized spokesman and later said he is not on their list of Interior Ministry employees. It’s worth noting that such lists are relatively recent creations of the fledgling Iraqi government.

By contrast, Hussein is well known to AP. We first met him, in uniform, in a police station, some two years ago. We have talked with him a number of times since then and he has been a reliable source of accurate information on a variety of events in Baghdad.

No one – not a single person – raised questions about Hussein’s accuracy or his very existence in all that time. Those questions were raised only after he was quoted by name describing a terrible attack in a neighborhood that U.S. and Iraqi forces have struggled to make safe.

That neighborhood, Hurriyah, is a particularly violent section of Baghdad. Once a Sunni enclave, it now is dominated by gunmen loyal to anti-American Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr. Many people there talked to us about the attack, but clammed up when they realized they might be quoted publicly. They felt understandably nervous about bringing their accusations up in an area patrolled by a Shiite-led police force that they suspect is allied with the very militia accused in these killings.

Here's how AP veteran Patrick Quinn described life in Hurriyah on Oct. 11 this year:

"By early October, Shiite militiamen were roaming the streets of Hurriyah, kidnapping, killing and intimidating Sunnis. Handbills circulating this fall warned that 10 Sunnis would die for every Shiite killed.’’

In a Nov. 22 story on how October was the deadliest month on record for Iraqi civilians, AP Baghdad bureau chief Steve Hurst wrote: “Lynchings have been reported as Sunnis and Shiites conduct a merciless campaign of revenge killings.

“Some Shiite residents in the north Baghdad neighborhood of Hurriyah claim that militiamen and death squads are holding Sunni captives in warehouses, then slaughtering them at the funerals of Shiites killed in the tit-for-tat murders.”

No one from the Iraqi Interior Ministry or the U.S. military complained about those descriptions. In fact, soldiers of the U.S. Army’s 1st Battalion, 17th Infantry, 172nd Stryker Brigade were dispatched to Hurriyah late this summer to try to bring it under control.

AP’s Lauren Frayer, embedded with the 172nd during the Hurriyah deployment, described their efforts in early November. Capt. R. Tyler Willbanks, from Gallatin, Tenn., said “there were 25 dead bodies a day before we got here…" a number they got down to three a day before the latest eruption at the end of November.

The story of the burnings has gotten far more attention in the United States than in Iraq, where vicious torture and death are sadly commonplace. Dozens of Iraqi citizens are gunned down in their cars, dragged from their homes or blown apart in public places every single day.

As careful followers of the Iraq story know well, various militias have been accused of operating within the Interior Ministry, which controls the police and has long worked to suppress news of death-squad activity in its ranks. (This is the same ministry that questioned Capt. Hussein’s existence and last week announced plans to take legal action against journalists who report news that creates the impression that security in Iraq is bad, “when the facts are totally different.”)

The Iraqi journalists who work for the AP are smart, dedicated and incredibly courageous to go into the streets every day, talking to their countrymen and trying to capture a portrait of their home in a historic and tumultuous period.

The work is dangerous: two people who work for AP have been killed since this war began in 2003. Many others have been hurt, some badly.

Several of AP's Iraqi journalists were victimized by Saddam Hussein’s regime and bear scars of his torture or the loss of relatives killed by his goons. Those journalists have no interest in furthering the chaos that makes daily life in Iraq so perilous. They want what any of us want: To be able to live and work without fear and raise their children in peace and safety.

Questioning their integrity and work ethic is simply offensive.

It's awfully easy to take pot shots from the safety of a computer keyboard thousands of miles from the chaos of Baghdad.

The Iraq war is one of hundreds of conflicts that AP journalists have covered in the past 160 years. Our only goal is to provide fair, impartial coverage of important human events as they unfold. We check our facts and check again.

That is what we have done in the case of the Hurriyah attack. And that is why we stand by our story.

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12/06/06

AP NEWS STORY

Iraq panel accuses administration of underreporting the violence in Iraq to suit policy goals

By ROBERT BURNS
AP Military Writer

WASHINGTON (AP) -- U.S. military and intelligence officials have systematically underreported the violence in Iraq in order to suit the Bush administration's policy goals, the bipartisan Iraq Study Group said.

In its report on ways to improve the U.S. approach to stabilizing Iraq, the group recommended Wednesday that the director of national intelligence and the secretary of defense make changes in the collection of data about violence to provide a more accurate picture.

The panel pointed to one day last July when U.S. officials reported 93 attacks or significant acts of violence. "Yet a careful review of the reports for that single day brought to light 1,100 acts of violence," it said.

"The standard for recording attacks acts as a filter to keep events out of reports and databases." It said, for example, that a murder of an Iraqi is not necessarily counted as an attack, and a roadside bomb or a rocket or mortar attack that doesn't hurt U.S. personnel doesn't count, either. Also, if the source of a sectarian attack is not determined, that assault is not added to the database of violence incidents.

"Good policy is difficult to make when information is systematically collected in a way that minimizes its discrepancy with policy goals," the report said.

A request for Pentagon comment on the report's assertions was not immediately answered.

Some U.S. analysts have complained for months that the Pentagon's reports to Congress on conditions in Iraq have undercounted the violent episodes. Anthony Cordesman, an Iraq watcher at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, said in a November report that the Pentagon omits many low-level incidents and types of civil violence.


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11/30/06

AP Statement

From Kathleen Carroll, Executive Editor, The Associated Press

We are satisfied with our reporting on this incident. If Iraqi and U.S. military spokesmen choose to disregard AP's on-the-ground reporting, that is certainly their choice to make, but it is a puzzling one given the facts.

AP journalists have repeatedly been to the Hurriyah neighborhood, a small Sunni enclave within a larger Shiia area of Baghdad. Residents there have told us in detail about the attack on the mosque and that six people were burned alive during it. Images taken later that day and again this week show a burned mosque and graffiti that says "blood wanted," similar to that found on the homes of Iraqis driven out of neighborhoods where they are a minority. We have also spoken repeatedly to a police captain who is known to AP and has been a reliable source of accurate information in the past and he has confirmed the attack.

By contrast, the U.S. military and Iraqi government spokesmen attack our reporting because that captain's name is not on their list of authorized spokespeople. Their implication that we may have given money to the captain is false. The AP does not pay for information. Period.

Further, the Iraqi spokesman said today that reporting on such atrocities "shows that the security situation is worse than it really is." He is speaking from a capital city where dozens of bodies are discovered every day showing signs of terrible torture. Where people are gunned down in their cars, dragged from their homes or blown apart in public places every single day.

At the end of the day, we have AP journalists with reporting and images from the actual neighborhood versus official spokesmen saying the story cannot be true because it is damaging and because one of the sources is not on a list of people approved to talk to the press. Good reporting relies on more than government-approved sources.

We stand behind our reporting.

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11/30/06

AP NEWS STORY

Interior Ministry forms unit to monitor news coverage, threatens legal action

BAGHDAD, Iraq (AP) -- Iraq's Interior Ministry said Thursday it had formed a special unit to monitor news coverage and vowed to take legal action against journalists who failed to correct stories the ministry deemed to be incorrect.

Brig. Gen. Abdul-Karim Khalaf, spokesman for the ministry, said the purpose of the special monitoring unit was to find "fabricated and false news that hurts and gives the Iraqis a wrong picture that the security situation is very bad, when the facts are totally different."

He said offenders would be notified and asked to "correct these false reports on their main news programs. But if they do not change those lying, false stories, then we will seek legal action against them."

Khalaf explained the news monitoring unit at a weekly Ministry of Interior briefing. As an example, he cited coverage by The Associated Press of an attack Nov. 24 on a mosque in the Hurriyah district in northwest Baghdad.

The AP reported that six Sunni Muslims there were burned alive during the attack. The story quoted witnesses and police Capt. Jamil Hussein.

Khalaf said the ministry had no one on its staff by the name of Jamil Hussein.

"Maybe he wore an MOI (Ministry of Interior) uniform and gave a different name to the reporter for money," Khalaf said.

AP Executive Editor Kathleen Carroll rejected the accusation. "The implication that we may have given money to the captain is false. The AP does not pay for information," she said.

Khalaf said the ministry had dispatched a team to the Hurriyah neighborhood and to the morgue but found no witnesses or evidence of burned bodies.

The spokesman said the ministry had a large public relations staff and said they should be contacted by the media to "get real, true news."

U.S. military had no comment on the immolations on the day of the attack but subsequently issued a statement, citing the Iraqi army as saying it had found nothing to substantiate the report.

U.S. Navy Lt. Michael B. Dean, a public affairs officer for the multi-national force, later demanded that the story be retracted because he said police Capt. Jamil Hussein "is not a Baghdad police officer or an MOI employee."

His allegations were checked with the AP reporter, who had been in routine contact for more than two years with Hussein, in some cases sitting in his office in the Yarmouk police station in west Baghdad. Hussein wore a police uniform during the face-to-face meetings.

Hussein confirmed the burning story on three separate occasions. AP reporters also went to the neighborhood and found three witnesses to the immolations who told nearly identical stories. Since then more people in the neighborhood have told about the incident in a similar fashion. Pictures of the Mustafa mosque where the incident occurred show that it is badly damaged by explosives and shows signs of scorching from fire.

Scrawled in what appears to be spray paint on the mosque compound wall is the phrase "blood wanted," which Iraqis say has appeared on many structures in areas of heavy Shiite-Sunni sectarian conflict throughout Baghdad.

The phrase is a warning to the sect that is the minority in the neighborhood, Sunnis in the case of the region around the Mustafa mosque in Hurriyah, that they will be killed if they return.

Under Saddam Hussein's regime, the government imposed censorship on local media and severely restricted foreign media coverage, monitoring transmissions and sending secret police to follow journalists. Those who violated the rules were expelled and in some cases jailed.

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11/28/06



AP Statement about unfounded attacks on its story about an immolation attack


From John Daniszewski, International Editor, The Associated Press

The Associated Press rejects unfounded attacks on its story about six Sunni worshippers burned to death outside their mosque on Friday, November 24.

AP reporters who have been working in Iraq throughout the conflict learned of the mosque incident through witnesses and later corroborated it with police.

The AP received an email communication late Monday signed by a U.S. military public affairs officer, Navy Lt. Michael B. Dean, alleging that the police captain cited in our story "is not a Baghdad police office or MOI (Ministry of Interior) employee" and raising questions about whether or not he actually exists.

In fact, that captain has long been know to the AP reporters and has had a record of reliability and truthfulness. He has been based at the police station at Yarmouk, and more recently at al-Khadra, another Baghdad district, and has been interviewed by the AP several times at his office and by telephone. His full name is Jamil Gholaiem Hussein.

After the AP story was questioned by the U.S. military, Hussein was contacted again and confirmed that the incident took place. The AP also located additional witnesses outside the mosque in the al-Hurriyah district.

According to the witnesses interviewed by the AP, there was no U.S. military present at the time of the incident Friday, and the subsequent U.S. military statement about it cited only reports the U.S. military had received later from the Iraqi army.

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AP NEWS STORY

11/28/06



Witnesses detail immolation attack on six Sunnis in Baghdad last week
 

By STEVEN R. HURST
Associated Press Writer

BAGHDAD, Iraq (AP) -- The attack on the small Mustafa Sunni mosque began as worshippers were finishing Friday midday prayers. About 50 unarmed men, many in black uniforms and some wearing ski masks, walked through the district chanting "We are the Mahdi Army, shield of the Shiites."

Fifteen minutes later, two white pickup trucks, a black BMW and a black Opel drove up to the marchers. The suspected Shiite militiamen took automatic rifles and rocket-propelled grenade launchers from the vehicles. They then blasted open the front of the mosque, dragged six worshippers outside, doused them with kerosene and set them on fire.

This account of one of the most horrific alleged attacks of Iraq's sectarian war emerged Tuesday in separate interviews with residents of a Sunni enclave in the largely Shiite Hurriyah district of Baghdad.

The Associated Press first reported on Friday's incident that evening, based on the account of police Capt. Jamil Hussein and Imad al-Hashimi, a Sunni elder in Hurriyah, who told Al-Arabiya television he saw people who were soaked in kerosene, then set afire, burning before his eyes.

AP Television News also took video of the Mustafa mosque showing a large portion of the front wall around the door blown away. The interior of the mosque appeared to be badly damaged and there were signs of fire.

However, the U.S. military said in a letter to the AP late Monday, three days after the incident, that it had checked with the Iraqi Interior Ministry and was told that no one by the name of Jamil Hussein works for the ministry or as a Baghdad police officer. Lt. Michael B. Dean, a public affairs officer of the U.S. Navy Multi-National Corps-Iraq Joint Operations Center, signed the letter, a text of which was published subsequently on several Internet blogs. The letter also reiterated an earlier statement from the U.S. military that it had been unable to confirm the report of immolation.

The AP received no comment Friday when it first asked the U.S. military for information. It then carried portions of a U.S. military statement Saturday that said the U.S. had been unable to confirm media reports that six Sunni civilians were allegedly dragged out of Friday prayers and burned to death. The U.S. military said that neither police nor coalition forces had reports of such an incident.

The Iraqi Defense Ministry later said that al-Hashimi, the Sunni elder in Hurriyah, had recanted his account of the attack after being visited by a representative of the defense minister.

The dispute comes at a time when the military is taking a more active role in dealing with the media.

The AP reported on Sept. 26 that a Washington-based firm, the Lincoln Group, had won a two-year contract to monitor reporting on the Iraq conflict in English-language and Arabic media outlets.

That contract succeeded one held by another Washington firm, The Rendon Group. Controversy had arisen around the Lincoln Group in 2005 when it was disclosed that it was part of a U.S. military operation to pay Iraqi newspapers to run positive stories about U.S. military activities.

Seeking further information about Friday's attack, an AP reporter contacted Hussein for a third time about the incident to confirm there was no error. The captain has been a regular source of police information for two years and had been visited by the AP reporter in his office at the police station on several occasions. The captain, who gave his full name as Jamil Gholaiem Hussein, said six people were indeed set on fire.

On Tuesday, two AP reporters also went back to the Hurriyah neighborhood around the Mustafa mosque and found three witnesses who independently gave accounts of the attack. Others in the neighborhood said they were afraid to talk about what happened.

Those who would talk said the assault began about 2:15 p.m., and they believed the attackers were from the Mahdi Army militia loyal to radical anti-American cleric Muqtada al-Sadr. He and the Shiite militia are deeply rooted in and control the Sadr City enclave in northeastern Baghdad where suspected Sunni insurgents attacked with a series of car bombs and mortar shells, killing at least 215 people a day before.

The witnesses refused to allow the use of their names because they feared retribution either from the original attackers or the police, whose ranks are infiltrated by Mahdi Army members or its associated death squads.

Two of the witnesses -- a 45-year-old bookshop owner and a 48-year-old neighborhood grocery owner -- gave nearly identical accounts of what happened. A third, a physician, said he saw the attack on the mosque from his home, saw it burning and heard people in the streets screaming that people had been set on fire. All three men are Sunni Muslims.

The two other witnesses said the mosque assault began in earnest about 2:30 p.m. after the arrival of the four vehicles filled with arms. They said the attackers fired into the mosque, then entered and set it on fire.

Then, the witnesses said, the attackers brought out six men, blindfolded and handcuffed, and lined them up on the street at the gate of the mosque. The witnesses said the six were doused with kerosene from a 1.3-gallon canister and set on fire at intervals, one after the other, with a torch made of rags. The fifth and sixth men in the line were set afire at the same time.

The witnesses said the burning victims rolled on the ground in agony until apparently dead, then the gunmen fired a single bullet into each of their heads.

The witnesses said residents, in the meantime, had taken up arms and began a gunbattle with the suspected militiamen that raged in the neighborhood until 4 p.m. They said eight to 10 gunmen were killed and left in the streets. Iraqi law allows each household to own an AK-47 assault rife for protection.

One witness said he and other people from the neighborhood took the six immolation victims to the Sunni cemetery near Baghdad's Abu Ghraib suburb and buried them after the gunbattle. That witness said one of the victims was the Mustafa mosque muezzin or prayer caller, Ahmed al-Mashadani. He did not know the names of the five others, but said they were all members of the al-Mashadani tribe.