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WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The United States plans to set up an Iraqi intelligence service to spy on groups and individuals inside Iraq that are targeting U.S. troops and civilians, The Washington Post reported on Thursday. Citing unidentified U.S. officials, the Post said the CIA plans to set up the new service with help from Jordan. Two members of an Iraqi exile group are at CIA headquarters in Virginia this week to work out details of the new program, the Post said. Iraqi Interior Minister Nouri Badran, a secular Shiite Muslim, has been selected to head the service initially, the Post...

GRADUATION DAY: Despite the US invasion of Iraq and the delay of the school year, these Baghdad University graduates are trying to move forward with their lives. SCOTT PETERSON/GETTY IMAGES from the December 09, 2003 edition - http://www.csmonitor.com/2003/1209/p01s03-legn.html Iraq's students say, 'Welcome back, professor' By Christina Asquith | Correspondent of The Christian Science Monitor BAGHDAD - After a decade of sanctions had left his physics lab a crumbling shell, Raad Mohammed decided it was time to go. In 1999, following a route trodden by thousands of the best and brightest of Iraq's academics, Dr. Mohammed escaped to Jordan without a...

<p>BAGHDAD — "Do not think that because you are a woman you will not face the same fate as your father," the voice said to Safia al-Souhail over the phone.</p> <p>Ms. Souhail's father, an exiled opposition leader, was assassinated in Beirut in 1994 by Iraqi agents posing as diplomats.</p>

Rediscovering Iraq Yahia Said 6 - 11 - 2003 Yahia Said, returning to Iraq after a twenty-five year absence, finds a people yearning for freedom, normality – and an end to violence. I could not believe my ears. “I apologise for the inconvenience,” said the Iraqi policeman as he finished searching our car. We were at the checkpoint in front of the Alhamra hotel in Baghdad. Over the past week I had grown accustomed to ‘the rediscovered humanity’, as another policeman put it, of Iraq’s law enforcers. But this was too much. With its policemen behaving like this, it is...

Troops deliver child in Tallil tent city TALLIL AIR BASE, Iraq -- Army Maj. (Dr.) Elizabeth Shanley (right) spends time with the Alrikabi family (left to right) Moslem, Al'aa, Rafah and baby Malach. Shanley, a physician with the 332nd Expeditionary Medical Group, delivered Malach, the first child born here. (U.S. Air Force photo by Master Sgt. Lance Cheung) View Larger Download HiRes by Master Sgt. Don Perrien332nd Air Expeditionary Wing Public Affairs10/31/2003 - TALLIL AIR BASE, Iraq (AFPN) -- The cluster of tents in the corner of tent city here that make up the 332nd Expeditionary Medical Group was bustling with unusual activity...

    Airmen help Iraqi return home BAGHDAD, Iraq -- Khalid Kishtainy steps off a C-130 Hercules at Baghdad International Airport on Oct. 21. Kishtainy is an Iraqi novelist and columnist for the Asharq Al-Awsat Arabic newspaper in London. He was last in Baghdad in 1989 before he left for fear of his life. The former Saddam Hussein regime had two death sentences on Kishtainy for a book he wrote about the regime. The author grew up in Baghdad, and he considers it his hometown. (U.S. Air Force photo by Staff Sgt. Scott T. Sturkol) View Larger Download HiRes...

WASHINGTON, Sept. 28 — An internal assessment by the Defense Intelligence Agency has concluded that most of the information provided by Iraqi defectors who were made available by the Iraqi National Congress was of little or no value, according to federal officials briefed on the arrangement. In addition, several Iraqi defectors introduced to American intelligence agents by the exile organization and its leader, Ahmad Chalabi, invented or exaggerated their credentials as people with direct knowledge of the Iraqi government and its suspected unconventional weapons program, the officials said. The arrangement, paid for with taxpayer funds supplied to the exile group...

WASHINGTON – A former Army intelligence analyst says a number of Iraqi exiles have reported the deposed regime stashed small missiles, weapons and ammunition at mosques in and around Baghdad. U.S. forces have confiscated large caches of weapons in raids of Iraqi homes, but they are barred from raiding religious sites. Guerrilla fighters continue to attack troops with mortars, grenades, homemade explosives and small arms fire on a daily basis. They are tapping into a huge arsenal left behind by the former regime, one that some military officials in Iraq fear could supply fighters for several years. Iraqi exiles from...

Author ArchiveE-mail AuthorSend to a Friend Print Version August 28, 2003, 9:00 a.m.Hating Chalabi, being charmed by “Fidel,” celebrating a glorious couple — and more ne of the vexations and heartaches of the last year or so has been the media's hatred — that's the word for it: hatred — of Ahmad Chalabi, the Iraqi exile leader — former exile leader, I should say — who is working to give his country a future. This is obviously the man most prepared to provide leadership, yet the media pour disdain on him, in imitation of the State Department and the...

U.S. Moved to Undermine Iraqi Military Before War By DOUGLAS JEHL with DEXTER FILKINS ASHINGTON, Aug. 9 — The United States military, the Central Intelligence Agency and Iraqi exiles began a broad covert effort inside Iraq at least three months before the war to forge alliances with Iraqi military leaders and persuade commanders not to fight, say people involved in the effort. Even after the war began, the Bush administration received word that top officials of the Iraqi government, most prominently the defense minister, Gen. Sultan Hashem Ahmed al-Tai, might be willing to cooperate to bring the war to a...

<p>BAGHDAD--Ahmad Chalabi, my father, is here in Iraq, sitting on the Governing Council of Iraqi nationals that will help ours become a free country. Iraqis from all regions and religions line up daily to meet him at his home. They know his lifelong cause is democracy for all Iraqis, not just a chosen few. To them he is a good man, and an attractive leader.</p>

Veteran politician to return home in SeptemberLondon, Iraq Press, August 3, 2003 – A veteran politician and once key opposition figure to the rule of the deposed leader Saddam Hussein is expected to return home by the middle of September.Saad Saleh Jabr, a former prime minister under the Hashemite Monarchy that ruled Iraq until 1958 told Iraq Press that he was homesick and was looking forward to seeing Baghdad again.Jabr was the first to form an active group in exile to oppose the rule of Saddam Hussein.He founded Umma or the Nation Party in 1982, but dissolved it later and...

Expat scientists set up forum to help colleagues at homeLondon, Iraq Press, August 2, 2003 – Iraqi scientists who fled the terror of the deposed leader Saddam Hussein are anxious to help their counterparts back home.There are an estimated four million Iraqis abroad. They include the cream of the Iraqi intelligentsia.Among them are tens of thousands of university professors, scholars, writers, doctors and engineers.In a fax to Iraq Press, a group led by Assad Khafaji, a nuclear scientist, has decided to establish a forum and issue a special journal to bring the expatriate scientists together. They said their aim was...

Not every part of the Pentagon's war plan to topple Saddam Hussein's regime is winning rave reviews, and one target of ridicule these days is the Defense Department's efforts to mold Iraqi exiles into a viable fighting force. In an initiative that morphed into a cross between a Monty Python sketch and the Keystone Kops, the Pentagon worked with two exile groups with maddeningly similar names, the Free Iraqi Freedom Fighters (FIFF) and the Free Iraqi Forces (FIF). The FIF were Iraqis trained in Hungary by the United States before the war. The Pentagon boasted that it would recruit 3,000...

Tears flowed and long-parted relatives embraced as more than 200 Iraqis set foot in their homeland again after years in exile in neighbouring Saudi Arabia. "I feel like my soul has returned to my body," said Ali Salman, his eyes swimming with tears at the Umm Qasr border crossing. "I can't believe I am actually home and that I will see my family again. I just can't believe it." Like most of the 240 men, women and children who were repatriated on Wednesday by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, Mr Salman is a Shiite Muslim who fled to...

BAGHDAD, Iraq (AP) - "Republic of Fear," the chilling portrayal of Saddam Hussein's brutality, was a landmark in its exiled author's long intellectual journey of discovery. Now, Kanan Makiya has returned to an Iraq his words helped expose and says he finds it a vexing and complex landscape. Makiya returned to Baghdad on April 21 for the first time in 34 years. He said the return has been an exhilarating ride - meeting long-unseen relatives, old friends, reclaiming the family's Baghdad home on the Tigris River and negotiating access to government documents in now in U.S. hands. The 54-year old...

Saddam is hiding near Baghdad, says exiled spy chief By Patrick Cockburn in Samarra, Iraq 14 July 2003 Saddam Hussein and Ali Hassan al-Majid, also known as Chemical Ali, are hiding in an area of farmland and small villages on the Tigris river between Baghdad and the city of Samarra, says a former senior Iraqi intelligence officer. General Wafiq al-Samarrai, head of Iraqi military intelligence before he went into exile, is assisting American forces in the hunt for Saddam. He said the deposedleader had been able to escape capture because the area was heavily populated and had thick vegetation. "He...

"Comical Ali" leaves Baghdad, might not return DUBAI, July 11 (Reuters) - Former Iraqi Information Minister Mohammed Saeed al-Sahaf, who earned the nickname "Comical Ali" during the U.S.-led war on Iraq, made a sudden appearance in Abu Dhabi on Friday, saying he might not return to his homeland. "When I leave I always have in my mind that I might not come down this road again, but I'm working and praying to God that I can return to Baghdad one day," he said on Abu Dhabi Television. Sahaf, 63, became an unlikely media star during the war, winning his stripes...

<p>When Azad Ahmed laid eyes on his former home on Nawab Street for the first time since his family was thrown out of it by Saddam Hussein's regime in 1979, he was overcome with tears of joy.</p> <p>But they quickly gave way to anger at what he found inside: the family of Kerim Ali Khdayer, a 69-year-old former teashop owner.</p>

Shouting "Long live the king," some 1,500 Iraqi tribal sheiks and monarchists welcomed Sharif Ali bin Hussein, a cousin of Iraq's last king who returned to the country Tuesday after spending 45 years in exile. The London investment banker, whose family fled Iraq in 1958 when he was two, flew in by chartered jet and then drove to his family mausoleum that still cradles the remains of two of Iraq's previous kings, Faisal I and Ghazi, AP reported. After visiting the interior of the mausoleum, he spoke to those gathered in the garden behind the mosque-like building crowned by an...