Mopping up the remnants of Saddam Hussein’s regime and beginning the rebuilding of Iraq, the United States on Thursday announced the capture of another of the dictator’s half brothers and awarded a lucrative contract to repair the country’s battered infrastructure.
Across Iraq, U.S. forces worked to restore order. They broke up an attempted bank robbery in Baghdad and patrolled other cities to cut down on looting.
After two days of deadly shootouts between Marines and angry crowds in the northern city of Mosul, tensions appeared to ease. But rumblings that Kurdish fighters were beginning to evict Arab families from their homes in Kirkuk underscored the deep distrust among Iraq’s ethnic groups.
Speaking at the Pentagon, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld warned that “the war is not over,” a sentiment echoed by Gen. Richard Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
“I wish I could say we’re winding all this down, but we’re not,” Myers said, adding that remaining enemies could “come after us in the most immoral and underhanded manner possible.”
Still, the U.S. sent another aircraft carrier home from the Persian Gulf and hired Bechtel Corp. of San Francisco to review and repair Iraq’s power, water and sewage systems.
Initially worth $34 million, the contract could grow to $680million, though that would be subject to congressional approval.
Some Democrats have complained that the Bush administration invited a handful of companies to submit bids for the contracts rather than opening the jobs to regular bidding.
Earlier in the war, the government awarded a contract worth as much as $7 billion to Halliburton Co., formerly run by Vice President Dick Cheney, to cap and repair Iraqi oil wells. A Halliburton subsidiary lost out on its bid for the contract awardto Bechtel.
The reconstruction of Iraq, a task that experts have said could cost $25 billion to $100 billion, is part of a broad effort to stabilize the country and set up a new government in which the United States is taking the lead role.
U.S. taxpayers will cover the initial contract costs, but Iraqi oil revenue is supposed to eventually pay for much of the reconstruction.
The search went on for Hussein, but in Baghdad, U.S. commandos and Marines arrested his half brother Barzan Ibrahim Hasan, once the feared head of the secret police and intelligence services.
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Barzan most recently served as Iraq’s ambassador to the United Nations in Geneva. Officials believe that in that role he stashed billions of dollars in foreign bank accounts. He also may have played a role in the regime’s program to acquire illegal weapons technology.
Brig. Gen. Vincent Brooks, the U.S. Central Command’s deputy director for operations, described Barzan as “an adviser to the former regime leader with extensive knowledge of the regime’s inner workings.”
U.S. officials hope he will provide information about the whereabouts of Hussein and other top leaders and about the regime’s contacts with terrorist organizations.
“We are currently asking a number of questions–of course, treating him properly,” Brooks said, “finding out whatever we can from this capture.”
Barzan is among the 55 most wanted members of the former regime whose faces appear on packs of playing cards distributed to U.S. troops. He was the five of clubs, and Brooks said he ranked 38th out of the group.
The general offered few details about the operation other than to say that Barzan was alone at the time of his capture and that there were no “friendly or enemy casualties.”
On Saturday, American troops arrested Watban Ibrahim Hasan, the oldest of Hussein’s three half brothers from his mother’s second marriage, as he tried to flee to Syria.
With fewer targets remaining for its planes, the USS Constellation left the region for its home port of San Diego, leaving the USS Nimitz as the last U.S. aircraft carrier in the Persian Gulf. A day earlier, the USS Kitty Hawk left for Yokosuka, Japan.
Two other carriers remain in the Mediterranean Sea, within striking distance of Iraq, officials said.
In Baghdad, U.S. troops quelled a riot at an Iraqi bank after thieves blew open a vault and sent in children to fetch handfuls of cash. As word of the robbery got out, a crowd of people gathered to demand that the thieves give them the money instead. Many of them said they had accounts there.
“They don’t understand that the proper distribution is not first-come, first-served,” said U.S. Army Col. Philip DeCamp, a battalion commander.
A U.S. Special Operations patrol called in reinforcements and along with an Army platoon arrested a dozen men. They also removed about $4 million in U.S. bills and took it away for safekeeping.
Throughout the capital, U.S. troops kept an eye out for looting at banks. At least one suspected looter was shot and killed.
“The looting goes down every day, and I think you will continue to see it go down because the Iraqis are now stepping up and controlling the problems for themselves,” said Gen. Tommy Franks, commander of allied forces in Iraq.
He said 2,200 Iraqi civilians volunteered in the capital Wednesday to work as unarmed police officers.
U.S. officials working to revive the capital’s infrastructure after weeks of bombing said they expected to restore at least one of Baghdad’s power grids by Friday afternoon.
Kurd-Arab conflict
In northern Iraq, U.S. military officials made a grim discovery: an estimated 1,500 unmarked graves on the southern edge of Kirkuk. It was unclear who had been buried there, but thousands of Kurdish men disappeared in the region under Hussein’s 24 years in power.
Fears that the long-standing enmity between Kurds and Arabs in northern Iraq would erupt after the collapse of the regime appeared to be coming true. Arab residents of Kirkuk said Kurds were evicting them from their homes and moving in.
Kurds argue that the land and property is rightfully theirs. An estimated 400,000 of them were kicked out of Kirkuk under Hussein.
As a holy day for the nation’s Shiite Muslim majority approached, the exiled leader of the biggest Iraqi opposition group called on Iraqis to go to the holy city of Karbala to oppose the American-led interim administration of the country.
Ayatollah Mohammed Baqir al-Hakim, leader of the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution of Iraq, said the Tuesday holy day should be used “to oppose any sort of foreign domination and support establishment of an Iraqi government that protects freedom, independence and justice for all Iraqis.”
Al-Hakim and his Iran-based group boycotted the meeting this week that began planning Iraq’s postwar government because of U.S. involvement.
U.S.-Syria showdown eases
On the diplomatic front, tensions between the United States and Syria appeared to ease as Syrian Foreign Minister Farouk Sharaa said his country would welcome a visit by Secretary of State Colin Powell.
“We believe dialogue between the two countries is important,” Sharaa said after meeting in Cairo with Amr Moussa, secretary general of the Arab League.
The Bush administration has accused Damascus of harboring Iraqi fugitives and sending war materiel into Iraq. But Powell’s plans to visit Syria, announced Wednesday, reduced fears among Arabs that the United States was planning to attack Syria next, analysts said.
In his remarks at the Pentagon, Rumsfeld said troops would continue searching for chemical and biological weapons, but he did not expect them to succeed without Iraqi help.
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“I think what will happen is we’ll discover people who will tell us where to go find it,” he said. “It is not like a treasure hunt where you just run around looking everywhere, hoping you find something.”
Hans Blix, chief weapons inspector for the UN, said he was prepared to lead his team back into Iraq to verify whether any weapons of mass destruction are found. But he warned that the team would not work under Americans. “We’re not dogs on a leash,” he said.
Blix noted that while President Bush and other U.S. officials repeatedly have said Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction and cited them as a reason to go to war, his team never found any in months of searching. Nor, he added, have any such weapons been found since the war began.
“We had credibility and we didn’t lend it to their contentions, and I think that we were right and I think so far nothing has proved us wrong,” Blix said.