The wife and daughter of Izzat Ibrahim, one of the most wanted deputies of Saddam Hussein, were detained for questioning last night in a move that reflects the anxiety of US forces faced with growing insurgency in Iraq.
Commanders have accused Ibrahim, the former vice-chairman of the regime’s revolutionary command council, of orchestrating guerrilla attacks on the US military, but have been unable to track him down.
One of his wives and a daughter were arrested yesterday in a raid in the town of Samarra, about 112 kilometres north of Baghdad. The son of Ibrahim’s doctor was also arrested there.
Lieutenant-Colonel William MacDonald, from the 4th Infantry Division which led the operation, said there was no indication that Ibrahim was in Samarra. It is unlikely that his wife and daughter took part in attacks against American troops but commanders may believe they hold information that could lead them to the senior Ba’athist figure.
Widney Brown, a Human Rights Watch official, said: ”Anybody who is taken into detention must either after questioning be released or know of the charges against them and have access to counsel.”
Meanwhile the US administrator in Iraq, Paul Bremer, was the subject of strong criticism yesterday from his predecessor, Jay Garner, who said the US had made mistakes shortly after the fall of Saddam’s regime.
Gen Garner attacked him for disbanding the Iraqi army, leaving thousands of Iraqis jobless at a time when manpower was needed for rebuilding: ”You’re talking about around a million or more people … that are suffering because the head of the household’s out of work.”
Gen Garner, who was fired a month after the fall of Baghdad, admitted in an interview with the BBC that the military had failed to act quickly enough to restore law and order and key services. ”If we did it over again, we probably would have put more dismounted infantrymen in Baghdad and maybe more troops there,” Gen Garner said.
The arrest of the relatives of Ibrahim yesterday was defended by a member of the 4th Infantry Division, Master Sergeant Robert Cargie.
”It’s not something we commonly do as we try to respect the cultural aspect of detaining women,” he said. ”But when it comes to avoiding attacks and putting an end to some of the activity against the coalition, then it’s something we have to do.”
Last week the US military put a $10-million bounty on the head of Ibrahim, who is sixth on the American list of its 55 most wanted regime figures. Two weeks ago the military called in fighter jets to destroy one of his homes south of Tikrit, Saddam’s hometown.
Ibrahim is believed to have leukaemia, which has led some Iraqis to suggest that his role in the attacks is not as crucial as the US military appears to believe.
The arrests came shortly before an unannounced visit to Baghdad from Jack Straw, the foreign secretary. He got a first-hand taste of the violence that has held back so much of the reconstruction and political progress planned for Iraq.
Just after he flew into the headquarters of the US-led administration, two mortars or rockets were fired at the ”green zone”, the name given to the former palace compound, although no one was hurt.
Straw said he believed that the new timetable to hand sovereignty to an Iraqi administration by the end of next June should help to end the security crisis.
But Iraq’s most powerful Shia leader, Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, made public yesterday his opposition to the new American plan for the handover of power to Iraqis.
Abdul Aziz al-Hakim, head of the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq, said he had met with al-Sistani, who criticised the proposals.
”There should have been a stipulation which prevents legislating anything that contradicts Islam in the new Iraq… It diminishes the role of the Iraqi people in the process of transferring authority to Iraqis,” al-Hakim said
It was Ayatollah al-Sistani’s insistence on elections before a constitution is written that forced the US to revise its political plans.
The Pentagon said yesterday that it would send about 3,000 more Marines to Iraq in early 2004 than it had predicted. – Guardian Unlimited Â