Slayings Point Up Weak Spot in Iraq’s Interim Government

When Iraqi interim Prime Minister Iyad Allawi first met with his fledgling Cabinet this month, one of the top items on the agenda was how to keep all the members alive.

The urgent need for such discussions in Iraq was highlighted today when gunmen killed the cultural affairs officer for the Education Ministry, the second attack on an Iraqi official in as many days. Kamal Jarah was shot outside his Baghdad home as he was leaving for work about 7:30 a.m. He died at Yarmouk Hospital.

On Saturday, a deputy foreign minister, Bassam Salih Kubba, was assassinated as he left his Baghdad home for work.

The shootings underscored the threat to interim government officials, who are viewed as prime targets by insurgents bent on destabilizing the nation. The killing “bears all the hallmarks of leftover supporters of Saddam Hussein’s evil regime,” the Foreign Ministry said in a statement.

But as the June 30 deadline for the scheduled return of sovereignty from the U.S.-led occupation approaches, personal security arrangements of top government ministers are in flux.

For now, each of the 32 ministers is largely responsible for his or her own security, with many preferring to use a tight circle of associates and relatives for personal security details.

But a proposal is being considered -- and was discussed at length during that first Cabinet meeting -- to create a centralized government office that, like the U.S. Secret Service, would offer protection for all ministers and top government officials.

Most predict that the threat will persist and even increase in the period between the hand-over of power and January, when general elections are scheduled.

“I personally am taking my security more seriously,” said the minister of municipalities and public works, Nasreen Mustapha Berwari, who has survived two assassination attempts -- a remote-control bomb attack that struck her convoy south of Baghdad in January and a drive-by shooting in the northern town of Mosul in February.

Such attacks are a fact of life in a nation where dozens of functionaries, including police officers, neighborhood councilmen, well-known politicians and sheiks, have been killed since the U.S.-led ouster of Hussein’s government last year.

The head of the now-defunct Iraqi Governing Council, Ezzedine Salim, was assassinated last month in a suicide car bombing at an entrance to the heavily guarded Green Zone, the headquarters of the U.S.-led occupation authority.

A second council member, Salama Khafaji, escaped injury in an ambush south of Baghdad last month, but her son and her chief bodyguard were killed.

Aqila Hashimi, another female member of the Governing Council and a career diplomat, was assassinated last September.

Security measures for top government officials have tightened noticeably since the interim government was formed two weeks ago.

Paramilitary contractors, dispatched by the U.S.-led Coalition Provisional Authority, guard the top four government officials: Allawi, President Ghazi Ajil Yawer and the two vice presidents.

Access to the four has been restricted to small groups and pool reporters. Armed guards often stand vigil during one-on-one interviews.

For those below the top four, the Interior Ministry provides a contingent of seven police officers and two vehicles for each minister’s personal security detail, officials said.

However, many ministers prefer to organize their own protection through friends, relatives or tribal connections. Others worry about a lack of trusted bodyguard details.

“Some of these [ministers] were university professors living overseas,” said Lt. Col. Walter Davis, the coalition’s liaison with the Public Works Ministry. “Suddenly they have to look around to their friends and relatives -- most of whom are probably middle-aged white-collar professionals -- and say, ‘Who’s going to protect me?’ ”

At the subministerial level, officials are often left comparatively exposed, which may explain a recent spate of attacks on deputy ministers.

Kubba, a career diplomat and ambassador to China under Hussein, was shot Saturday morning by gunmen who ambushed his car in Baghdad’s Adhamiya district, a largely Sunni Muslim neighborhood where anti-U.S. feelings have long run high. It was unclear whether he was traveling with bodyguards.

Kubba was wounded in the abdomen and died on the way to a hospital, authorities said.

A second attack Saturday wounded Gen. Hussein Mustafa Abdel Karim, chief of Iraq’s Border Police Services, who was shot when his sedan was sprayed with bullets, officials said. On Wednesday, a similar assassination attempt against Deputy Health Minister Ammar Safar failed when his driver was able to elude attackers. Safar escaped without injury.

The attacks may lend urgency to the idea of a central government office to provide uniform, professional protection for all top government officials.

U.S. officials have declined to discuss bodyguard arrangements for Iraqi and other officials, citing security concerns. But Dan Senor, a spokesman for L. Paul Bremer III, the chief U.S. administrator here, said Saturday that providing money and training for Iraqi protective services has long been a priority.

Berwari, the public works minister, stands out as a high-profile target because she is a high-ranking Kurdish woman and an outspoken advocate of women’s rights.

“She’s not just a minister,” Davis said. “She’s a target equivalent to Ambassador Bremer.”

Since her two narrow escapes, Berwari has changed her routine for greater safety. Berwari, a former minister for reconstruction in the semi-autonomous Kurdish region that has been under U.S. protection since 1991, used to set aside two days a week to travel the countryside visiting project sites. Now she keeps mostly to her Baghdad office, working with the help of staff members at ministry project sites and inviting project managers and community leaders to Baghdad for meetings.

“It’s limiting but mostly in terms of my personal satisfaction,” she said.

Most Kurdish ministers -- including Berwari, Vice President Rosh Shawais and Minister of Human Rights Bakhtiar Amin -- decline the services of Interior Ministry bodyguards and use personal security details made up largely of former Kurdish militia fighters. They describe the choice as a simple matter of trust and familiarity.

“I have well-trained people,” Amin said. “I know them, and I trust them. When you put your life in the hands of people, you have to trust them 100%.”

But some government officials say trust and familiarity don’t mean greater safety.

Samir Shakir Mahmoud Sumaidy, a former Governing Council member who also served as interior minister, says inner-circle members, no matter how trustworthy, are no substitute for well-trained experts.

“These people are not professionals,” he said. “I brought some nephews, or others brought people with tribal allegiances. OK, some of them had security training or some had graduated as army officers, but that does not qualify them to protect VIPs. We were in situations where they did not know what to do. A number of times, in heavy traffic or congested areas, they were simply at a loss what to do.”

For example, Sumaidy said, the guards often did not know how to keep a low profile when the situation merited it. He recalls an instance when a VIP was traveling incognito in a convoy of unmarked cars.

“But these security guards continued to act as if they were in an official convoy. They were attracting attention instead of playing it down,” he said. “The VIP was supposed to be concealed, but they were making him stick out like a sore thumb.”

The Facilities Protection Service branch of the Interior Ministry, which is responsible for providing ministerial security, is viewed by some ministers as untrustworthy and not up to the task. For example, all of the Kurdish ministers and a sizable number of Arab ministers prefer to use their own men.

But the idea of ministers providing their own bodyguards rankles members of the protection service branch, who complain that they have been sidelined unfairly. “There’s a gap between the ministries and us,” said a protection service branch officer, speaking on condition of anonymity. “They ask for help from their own people because they trust them more than us.”

Though he acknowledges that his men lack facilities and equipment, the officer insists that Iraq’s government officials would be better protected by trained police officers.

“In another country, could a minister just go get their own guards? It would be against the law,” he said. “Try to give us supplies and trust, and we’ll prove that we’re ready.”

But imposing government-supplied bodyguards, no matter how well trained, is likely to meet resistance from some of the ministers.

Amin, the human rights minister, said the use of such guards should be “on a free-will basis.”

Amin emphasizes his respect for the sacrifices and dedication of many Iraqi police officers, but he said he simply was not willing to put his life in their hands. “There are people who are not trustworthy on the police forces,” he said. “There might be infiltrators among them.”

A potential compromise, and something that has already been implemented to an extent, could be to put a minister’s existing security detail through special training.

Of course, not every minister has the luxury of a large contingent of hardened guerrilla fighters from which to pick their bodyguards. One minister, speaking on condition of anonymity, said the idea of forming a Secret Service-type office seemed to lose momentum after that first Cabinet meeting with Allawi. The minister said he hoped that the assassinations would bring the plan back to the top of the governmental priorities list.

“It’s a new government, and things are taking time, but this should be a top priority because we’re all facing a great threat,” the minister said. “We can’t play with people’s lives.”

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Times staff writers Edmund Sanders and Monte Morin and special correspondent Ammar Mohammed in Baghdad contributed to this report.