A surge of their own: Iraqis take back the streets

Attacks plummet as Shias join Sunnis in neighbourhood patrols to tackle militants and reunite communities

Michael Howard in Baghdad
Thursday December 20, 2007
Guardian
http://www.guardian.co.uk/print/0,,331854116-103550,00.html

Under the embers of the wintry evening sun the Tigris river, usually as brown as old boots, had turned almost blood red. Its waters were calm but its oily sheen was disturbed by the oars of a rower as he sculled his way through the city’s fractured heart.
Alone and apparently indifferent to the threat of a sniper’s bullet, Muhammad Rafiq eased up on his stroke rate and tacked over to the shore. He hauled his craft up the bank to a mosque – the temporary headquarters for his rowing club since US soldiers had commandeered its real boathouse in 2003. Inside the courtyard, his forehead beaded with sweat, Muhammad laid a few old blankets over his upturned boat and padlocked the oars to a railing.

“My friends said I was mad when I started rowing,” said the 22-year-old former science student. “They said I would be sharing the river with dead bodies and that people would shoot at me. But it keeps me fit and it keeps me focused for my night work.” As dusk fell, he checked the contents of his kit bag, slung it over his shoulder and jumped into a waiting taxi.

Fifteen minutes later, he had made it through checkpoints and concrete blast barriers en route to his home in al-Amil district of west Baghdad. At a makeshift barricade close to the street where he was born he greeted the sentries as friends. Then he unzipped his kit bag and pulled out a Kalashnikov. And for the next six uneventful hours he stood guard with his peers behind the straggles of barbed wire.

“I help to keep the peace so that I can row in peace, and that is my passion,” said Muhammad, who asked that neither his real name nor that of his rowing club be used. “Now when I go out on the river, you can hear the birds and the hum of the generators. When I began it was only gunfire and bombs.”

Muhammad is one of the thousands of young Baghdadi men to have joined neighbourhood security groups, which have mushroomed over the last year and are a crucial factor in the dramatic decline in civilian deaths. US soldiers call them “concerned local citizens”; Iraqis just call them sahwa (awakening) after the so-called Anbar awakening in western Iraq, which has seen Sunni tribal sheikhs take on foreign-led Islamists.

There are now an estimated 72,000 members in some 300 groups set up in 12 of Iraq’s 18 provinces, and the numbers are growing. They are funded, but supposedly not armed, by the US military. “It is Iraq’s own surge,” said a western diplomat, “and it is certainly making a difference.”

Major General Joseph Fil, the outgoing US commander for Baghdad, said this week that the number of attacks in the capital had fallen almost 80% since November 2006, while murders in Baghdad province were down by 90% over the same time period, and vehicle-borne bombs had declined by 70%.

The city’s neighbourhood security groups vary greatly in form, content and function. But they all appear to have sprung from a shared desire to rise above the sectarian tensions tearing apart large areas of their city.

Though life in Baghdad is still far from normal, and the security situation still perilous, the capital’s remarkably resilient population has begun to believe that the momentum for peace may be sustainable if it is left up to ordinary citizens. “They are filling a void left by Iraq’s feuding and self-serving political elite, most of whom are hunkered down and out of touch in the Green Zone,” said the western diplomat.

Though they are still dominated by Sunnis, the patrols’ make-up increasingly reflects the ethnic and sectarian community they are guarding. An increasing number of Shia are now joining their ranks, some in a bid to counter the influence of Moqtada al-Sadr’s Mahdi army in their area.

In al-Amil, Muhammad started as a volunteer but now gets about $10 a day from the local US ranking officer. The same goes for his colleagues. The Americans also gave them combat boots and reflective vests as a kind of uniform.

“We grew tired and angry about the killing, and so decided to act,” said Muhammad. He said his group, made up of friends and acquaintances mostly in their early 20s, began patrolling the streets of his neighbourhood six months ago. Sunni militants from a nearby area had driven into his district, which is still home to Shia and Sunni residents, and shot at a popular bakery. Three people were killed and four wounded as they queued for their morning bread.

“We learned we could not trust anyone who is not from our neighbourhood,” said Muhammad. “This is our area, but it is for all people equally, no matter how or whether they pray.”

A typical night sees them questioning strangers to the area or stopping cars. A couple of guards with rifles station themselves on rooftops to provide covering fire if necessary. They also work closely with the official Iraqi security forces and the US army, passing on, and sometimes acting on, local intelligence about the activities of militants.

Not so long ago Sunni and Shia gunmen were fighting for control of the suburb, near the road to Baghdad’s airport. As a result, the once religiously mixed housing projects that lie either side of al-Amil’s main street soon separated into Shia or Sunni enclaves.

But Muhammad, a Sunni Arab, and his Shia colleagues in the neighbourhood watch group are determined to reverse the ethnic cleansing. Last month, the group agreed to protect a Sunni mosque in his street from local Shia militias. They have also been mediating between the divided communities either side of the highway.

The result was an understanding: Sunni families would return to their former homes in the heavily Shia areas, while Shia families crossed back into the mainly Sunni streets. The two communities agreed to guarantee the safety of the returnees. Such was the popular backing for the deal that even the local Mahdi army commander had to acquiesce.

“We’ve been neighbours for 25 years and we feel like brothers,” said Muhammad. “We will help them to guard and respect their mosques, and they won’t harm me or my family.”

The group has also helped organise local services such as rubbish collection. Meanwhile, in al-Amil, the improved security has prompted an upturn in the area’s commercial life. In the still not-quite bustling main food market, Muhammad explained that “five months ago, a word out of place here could have meant a visit from one of the local militia”.

Now the tensions are the subject of humorous exchanges. “You charged me five dinars more for my vegetables just because I’m a Sunni,” one customer joked with a stallholder. “This sectarianism is good for your business.”

But as the number and effectiveness of the neighbourhood groups increase, so too do attacks on patrol members. At the weekend, gunmen and bombers launched three attacks on patrols in Baghdad. In one incident bombers killed two patrol members and wounded 10 in the Adhamiya area of northern Baghdad, until recently a Sunni Arab militant stronghold. Gunmen also attacked a patrol in another northern area, killing one patrol member and wounding four. In the southern Doura neighbourhood, another former Sunni militant stronghold, gunmen wounded three patrol members manning a checkpoint.

There have also been numerous suicide attacks against “awakening” groups in the volatile Diyala province to the north-east.

There are worries too that the neighbourhood groups will, like the police force they are supposed to complement, be prone to infiltration and exploitation by insurgent, militia or criminal gangs. After all, the security groups are often made up of tribal militias and former insurgent forces that not so long ago fired on US and Iraqi forces. Now they have turned on al-Qaida in Iraq, the Mahdi army, and other extremist groups. “It is inevitable that in a force of 70,000 you get a few bad apples,” said General David Petraeus, the senior US commander in Iraq, who has championed the need “to go local” with security. “But we are taking measures to ensure that they don’t become everyone’s worst nightmare.”

Petraeus said he had persuaded a wary Iraqi government to take responsibility for the funding and future status of the local forces. About 20% will be integrated into the security forces while the remaining 80% will receive some civilian training and involve themselves in public works projects. A national civil service corps is being considered.

Major General Abdul-Kareem Khalaf of Iraq’s interior ministry said the government recognised the work done by the sahwa groups but said: “It is important that there must never be armed groups outside the framework of the law.”

Back at the barricade, Muhammad said he had no intention of joining the police or army. “All I want to do is row along the beautiful Tigris and live in peace,” he said.

If you dream of waterfront ….

The nonprofit Worldwatch Institute has released a list of 21 “mega-cities” of 8 million people or more that are in direct danger as a result of global warming and rising seas:
They include Dhaka, Bangladesh; Buenos Aires, Argentina; Rio de Janeiro, Brazil; Shanghai and Tianjin in China; Alexandria and Cairo in Egypt; Mumbai and Kolkata in India; Jakarta, Indonesia; Tokyo and Osaka-Kobe in Japan; Lagos, Nigeria; Karachi, Pakistan; Bangkok, Thailand, and New York and Los Angeles in the United States, according to studies by the United Nations and others.
More than one-tenth of the world’s population, or 643 million people, live in low-lying areas at risk from climate change, say U.S. and European experts. Most imperiled, in descending order, are China, India, Bangladesh, Vietnam, Indonesia, Japan, Egypt, the U.S., Thailand and the Philippines.

China aims to further tame Web

China (Reuters) — Chinese President Hu Jintao on Monday launched a campaign to rid the country’s sprawling Internet of “unhealthy” content and make it a springboard for Communist Party doctrine, state television reported.
With Hu presiding, the Communist Party Politburo — its 24-member inner council — discussed cleaning up the Internet, state television reported. The meeting promised to place the often unruly medium more firmly under propaganda controls.
“Development and administration of Internet culture must stick to the direction of socialist advanced culture, adhere to correct propaganda guidance,” said a summary of the meeting read on the news broadcast.
“Internet cultural units must conscientiously take on the responsibility of encouraging development of a system of core socialist values.”
The meeting was far from the first time China has sought to rein in the Internet. In January, Hu made a similar call to “purify” it, and there have been many such calls before.
But the announcement indicated that Hu wants ever tighter controls as he braces for a series of political hurdles and seeks to govern a generation of young Chinese for whom Mao Zedong’s socialist revolution is a hazy history lesson.
“Consolidate the guiding status of Marxism in the ideological sphere,” the party meeting urged, calling for more Marxist education on the Internet.
The Communist Party is preparing for a congress later this year that is set to give Hu another five-year term and open the way for him to choose eventual successors. In 2008, Beijing hosts the Olympic Games, when the party’s economic achievements will be on display, along with its political and media controls.
In 2006, China’s Internet users grew by 26 million, or 23.4 percent, year on year, to reach 137 million, Chinese authorities have estimated.
That lucrative market has attracted big investors such as Google and Yahoo. They have been criticized by some rights groups for bowing to China’s censors.
The one-party government already wields a vast system of filters and censorship that blocks the majority of users from sites offering uncensored opinion and news. But even in China, news of official misdeeds and dissident opinion has been able to travel fast through online bulletin boards and blogs.
Authorities have also launched repeated crackdowns on pornography and salacious content. The latest campaign against porn and “rumor-spreading” was announced earlier this month.
The meeting also announced that schools and sports groups would be encouraged to use healthy competition as a way to shape youth, the report said.
“Sports plays an irreplaceable role in the formation of young people’s thinking and character, mental development and aesthetic formation,” the meeting declared.

Inside the Islamic group accused by MI5 and FBI

Paul Lewis
Saturday August 19, 2006
Guardian

Thousands of young Muslim men are attending meetings in east London every week run by a fundamentalist Islamic movement believed by western intelligence agencies to be used as a fertile recruiting ground by extremists.
Tablighi Jamaat, whose activities are being monitored by the security services, holds the tightly guarded meetings on an industrial estate close to the area where some of the suspects in last week’s terror raids were arrested.

This week it emerged that at least seven of the 23 suspects under arrest on suspicion of involvement in the plot to blow up transatlantic airliners may have participated in Tablighi events.

The organisation – influenced by a branch of Saudi Arabian Islam known as Wahhabism – has already been linked to two of the July 7 suicide bombers who attended a Tablighi mosque at the organisation’s headquarters in Dewsbury, West Yorkshire. The jailed shoe bomber Richard Reid is also known to have attended Tablighi meetings.

Until now, the leaders of Tablighi Jamaat – which means “group of preachers” – have refused to open their doors to outsiders, shrouding the organisation in mystery.

Tablighi enthusiasts say that the organisation, founded by a scholar in India in the 1920s, has no involvement with terrorism and simply encourages Muslims to follow the example of the prophet and proselytise the teachings of the Qur’an. As one sympathetic imam put it, they were the “Jehovah’s Witnesses of Islam”.

On Thursday evening, the Guardian witnessed around 3,000 men from as far afield as Great Yarmouth and the Isle of Wight stream through the backstreets of Stratford to the meeting. There, at the gates of a seemingly derelict industrial site, men in fluorescent jackets waved those who are known to the Tablighi Jamaat hierarchy under a security barrier, and into one of three fields that surround a cluster of prefabricated buildings which form a temporary mosque.

As the Guardian entered the complex one person spoke admiringly about the “main man” for the south-east division of Tablighi Jamaat. “We can’t call him a prophet,” he said. “No one can be a prophet. But when you meet him you’ll realise. He’s helped a lot of people in Walthamstow to follow the right path, the path of the prophet. He’ll talk to you openly this evening and everything will make sense.”

Seconds later, the main man stood next to his red van in Islamic dress and a smart blue waistcoat as hundreds of men, many carrying suitcases and sleeping bags, filed past him into a network of six rooms cobbled together with planks of wood and corrugated plastic windows. He later said he was from Walthamstow.

The largest room was reserved for the main speaker, an elder from Preston who spoke in Urdu. His sermon was relayed through a microphone to five other rooms in which interpreters provided simultaneous translation into English, Arabic, Sinhala, Turkish and Somali.

The English-speaking room heaved as a sea of faces, white, black and Asian, spilled into the hallway. Most were teenagers and men in their 20s and 30s dressed in Islamic dress, caps and beards. Some came in suits and ties, others in jeans and hoodies. There were old men too, who weaved slowly through to the front of the room, and a few young boys.

The Walthamstow man took a seat in the middle of the room to interpret proceedings. The murmur of hundreds of whispering voices stopped as he put on his headphones. “We come to submit our will to Allah,” he began. “We have to live the life that Allah has prescribed for us. We have been invited into Allah’s house.”

He continued to translate the preacher’s message. “If a person is drowning, the man who saves him needs to take him out of the water. If he has swallowed too much water, that water must come out. At the moment we are in a worldly ocean and we are all drowning. For us to become successful, we must come out of this world for a short period of time.”

Although not a scholar, the interpreter is deeply respected. Quietly, some in the congregation whisper that he has seen miracles – the sign of a truly committed Tablighi.

After an hour the preacher concluded with a call for followers to join the effort and commit to a trip away. “We must leave our houses, our businesses, our families, for a short period of time, and follow the path of Allah and practise the ways of the prophet, going from mosque to mosque,” said the interpreter. “Then [the behaviour] will become second nature to us. We shall go to India and Pakistan for four months to follow these ways.”

What Tablighi followers call “the effort” – travelling around the country for three days or 10 days, depending on their level of commitment – is key to the organisation. Once they have completed the first stage, they may undertake a 40-day trip, which is likely to entail travel around Europe.

Finally, a Tablighi member will be given the opportunity to take a four-month journey to Pakistan or India. During their “efforts” members are encouraged to emulate the life of the prophet and show others “the path”.

On domestic trips, members are sent to communities where they will have most leverage. In September, for example, students will be sent to universities throughout the country.

Later in the evening, the rooms are transformed into dining halls. A small group of men who know several of the Walthamstow suspects gathered round to share out plastic plates of chickpeas, lamb and naan bread, washed down with cans of peach juice and Coke.

“It will shock you but we all used to be deep into drugs and crime and all that,” said one man, in his 20s, who went on a three-day trip to Woking with one of the suspects arrested in last week’s raids. “Walthamstow used to be a dodgy area. Tablighi changed all that.”

A former body builder showed pictures on his mobile of the “pumped-up gym fanatic” he used to be. After spells in prison, he said, he went on a life-changing four-month trip to Pakistan. “I went to places you wouldn’t believe,” he said. “There are people in Pakistan and India who know less about the prophet than people in east London.”

The Urdu interpreter from Walthamstow acknowledged that Tablighi Jamaat had roused suspicions. “I know three or four people who come here regularly who are informants,” he said. “After September 11 the security services met with our elders at our headquarters and told them that they keep the flight records of every Tablighi member who travels abroad. But we are not worried. They can close us down and it will not matter because the effort will continue. We have no fear.”

He said he was not worried about the Walthamstow suspect he knows best, a young man he recently took on a 40-day trip to Scotland. “Anyone who suffers for Islam will be rewarded,” he said.

Asked about the association between Tablighi Jamaat and terrorist groups, he replied: “Tablighi is like Oxford University. We have intelligent people – doctors, solicitors, businessmen – but one or two will become drug dealers, fraudsters. But you won’t blame Oxford University for that. You see, it does not matter if someone speaks in favour or against this effort. Everything happens with the will of God.”

Another follower added: “Sometimes the youngsters say that if they saw President Bush they would chop his head off, and things like that. But we’re discouraged from talking about politics. If elders say these things it is out of anger. They’re not dangerous, they can’t actually do anything.”

By the early hours, 300 followers had volunteered for a three-day trip. One man who knows six of the suspects arrested last week leaned against the wall, the City of London glowing behind his shoulders, and adjusted his cap. “Do you see now?” he said.

“Tablighi is not the problem. It is the solution. It is another world in here, completely different from the world outside.”

Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2006

Canadian, U.S. mayors demand delays in border passport law

Last Updated Thu, 20 Jul 2006 18:49:23 EDT
CBC News

Mayors from Canada and the United States have called for delays in a controversial U.S. plan that would require a passport or security card to cross the border.
The mayors and other top government officials held a day-long meeting in Windsor, Ont.
“We want to have a border that is free and open for the economic and cultural vibrancy of both countries,” said Detroit Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick.  
The U.S. Western Hemisphere Travel Initiative would require that all Canadians and Americans entering the United States by air and sea to carry a passport or secure identification card by Jan. 1, 2007.
The start date for land crossings is scheduled for one year later.
The initiative was part of tougher border security measures devised after the al-Qaeda attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.
Dan Onichuk, the mayor of Fort Frances, Ont., said the passport plan could end the close relationship between his community and International Falls, Minn., just a few hundred metres away across the Rainy River.
“I have six children. For me to get passports to go visit my family, my friends, that’s going to cost me $700,” he said.
“It’s a very scary proposition.”
Other people object as well
The concern over the security measures hasn’t been limited to mayors of cities adjacent to the border. Politicians and business leaders throughout Canada and in several northeastern states have objected that the measures will hurt tourism, slow the flow of people and goods across the border and damage the economy of the border states.
“Our business community is highly integrated with U.S. companies, and our manufacturing sector depends on the efficient cross-border flow of goods,” said Toronto Mayor David Miller.
Approximately 40 per cent of Canadians hold a valid passport, compared to only 23 per cent of Americans.
The U.S. Secretary of Homeland Security, Michael Chertoff, said while at a business summit in Edmonton earlier in the week that certain types of travel would be exempt from the planned regulations.
“In particular, we will not be, for example, including in this set of regulations a requirement for passports for ferries or private watercraft, recognizing that this is a particular form of transportation that we don’t want to interfere with,” said Chertoff.
“We don’t want to force it into the model we might use, for example, with international jet flights or international sea travel.”
While in Washington to visit President George W. Bush earlier in July, Prime Minister Stephen Harper urged the U.S. Congress to push back the current timetable.
The U.S. Senate seemed to share Harper’s concerns, unanimously passing legislation in June that would delay implementation of the border plan to June 1, 2009.
Vermont Senator Patrick Leahy said at the time the travel pass plan would be ”a train wreck on the horizon” if they proceeded on the current schedule.
The U.S. House of Representatives has yet to vote on the matter.

Drone aircraft may prowl U.S. skies

By Declan McCullagh
http://news.com.com/Drone+aircraft+may+prowl+U.S.+skies/2100-11746_3-6055658.html

Unmanned aerial vehicles have soared the skies of Afghanistan and Iraq for years, spotting enemy encampments, protecting military bases, and even launching missile attacks against suspected terrorists.

Now UAVs may be landing in the United States.
A House of Representatives panel on Wednesday heard testimony from police agencies that envision using UAVs for everything from border security to domestic surveillance high above American cities. Private companies also hope to use UAVs for tasks such as aerial photography and pipeline monitoring.

“We need additional technology to supplement manned aircraft surveillance and current ground assets to ensure more effective monitoring of United States territory,” Michael Kostelnik, assistant commissioner at Homeland Security’s Customs and Border Protection Bureau, told the House Transportation subcommittee.

Kostelnik was talking about patrolling U.S. borders and ports from altitudes around 12,000 feet, an automated operation that’s currently underway in Arizona. But that’s only the beginning of the potential of surveillance from the sky.
In a scene that could have been inspired by the movie “Minority Report,” one North Carolina county is using a UAV equipped with low-light and infrared cameras to keep watch on its citizens. The aircraft has been dispatched to monitor gatherings of motorcycle riders at the Gaston County fairgrounds from just a few hundred feet in the air–close enough to identify faces–and many more uses, such as the aerial detection of marijuana fields, are planned.

That raises not just privacy concerns, but also safety concerns because of the possibility of collisions with commercial and general aviation aircraft.

“They’re a legitimate user of the airspace and they need to play by the same rules as everyone else,” Melissa Rudinger, vice president of regulatory affairs at the Aircraft Owners and Pilots Association, said in a telephone interview.

Pilots undergo extensive training on collision detection and avoidance. Planes that fly at night are required to have certain types of lights, for instance. Operating an aircraft near busy airports (in government parlance, “Class B” airports) requires a transponder that broadcasts its altitude. And during all flights that take place in poor weather or higher than 18,000 feet above sea level, the pilot must be in radio contact with controllers.
No such anti-collision rules apply to UAVs. Rudinger is concerned that UAVs–either remote-controlled or autonomous drones–will pose a safety threat to pilots and their passengers. She’s not that worried about larger UAVs operated by the military that have sophisticated radar systems, but about smaller ones that have limited equipment and potentially inexperienced ground controllers.

“The FAA needs to define what is a UAV,” Rudinger said. “And they need to regulate it just like they do any other aircraft, and integrate it into the system. The problem is the technology has advanced, and there are no regulations that talk about how to certify these aircraft, how to certify For its part, the FAA says it’s created a UAV “program office” to come up with new rules of the sky. Preliminary standards for “sense and avoid” UAV avionics are expected in three to four years.

“Currently there is no recognized technology solution that could make these aircraft capable of meeting regulatory requirements for ’see and avoid,’ and ‘command and control,’” said Nick Sabatini, associate FAA administrator for aviation safety. “Further, some unmanned aircraft will likely never receive unrestricted access to (U.S. airspace) due to the limited amount of avionics it can carry because of weight, such as transponders, that can be installed in a vehicle itself weighing just a few ounces.”

Complicating the question of how to deal with UAVs is the fact that there are so many different varieties of them. Some are essentially large model aircraft and weigh only a few ounces or pounds, while some military models are the size of a Boeing 737. Most are designed to sip fuel slowly, so they have long flight times and low airspeeds–meaning that they could be flying at the same altitude as a jet aircraft but at half the speed.
Egging on Congress and the FAA are manufacturers of UAVs, who see a lucrative market in domestic surveillance and aerial photography.

“It is quite easy to envision a future in which (UAVs), unaffected by pilot fatigue, provide 24-7 border and port surveillance to protect against terrorist intrusion,” said Mike Heintz on behalf of the UNITE Alliance which represents Boeing, Lockheed Martin and Northrop Grumman. “Other examples are limited only by our imagination.”

Afghan Judge in Convert Case Vows to Resist Foreign Pressure

New York Times-March 24, 2006
By ABDUL WAHEED WAFA
KABUL, Afghanistan, March 23 — Despite growing international concern, the judge presiding over the prosecution of an Afghan man facing the death penalty for converting from Islam to Christianity said today that international pressure would not affect his rulings in the case.

Ansarullah Mawlavi Zada, the head of the public security tribunal here in the Afghan capital, said he had received no international pressure to date, but vowed to resist it.

“There is no direct pressure on our court so far, but if it happens we will consider it as an interference,” said Mr. Zada. He added that he expects to rule in the case in the next several days.

In Washington, meanwhile, the Bush administration continued to express its dismay and to increase the pressure on Kabul. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice spoke this morning with President Hamid Karzai and discussed the affair “in the strongest possible terms,” said the State Department spokesman, Sean McCormack.

“She called specifically on this topic,” Mr. McCormack said. “And she urged President Karzai’s government to seek a favorable resolution to this case the earliest possible moment.” Mr. McCormack said Ms. Rice also told Afghanistan’s Foreign Minister, Abdullah Abdullah, in a 15-minute meeting in Washington today that she was deeply troubled by the case, and that the prosecution was “contrary to universal democratic values,” which include freedom of religion. Ms. Rice said that the United States fought for those values in Afghanistan, and that the case was contrary to the Afghan constitution, Mr. McCormack said.

The same message came today from the White House, where President Bush’s chief spokesman, Scott McClellan, said the Afghan case “clearly violates the universal freedoms that democracies around the world hold dear. And we are watching it very closely.”

On Wednesday, President Bush issued a statement that the United States expected Afghan officials to “honor the universal principle of freedom” in the case. Germany, Italy and other countries that have deployed troops in Afghanistan have also issued statements of concern.

Afghan prosecutors have requested the death penalty for the 41-year-old convert, Abdul Rahman. Mr. Rahman told a preliminary hearing in Afghanistan last week that he converted to Christianity about 15 years ago while working with a Christian aid group helping refugees. When he recently sought custody of his children from his parents, family members reported his conversion.

Prosecutors have described Mr. Rahman as a “microbe” and said conversion is illegal under Islamic law. Conservative Afghan religious leaders dominate the country’s courts and prosecutorial offices, but Afghanistan’s American-backed constitution guarantees freedom of religion.

The case illustrates the continued tensions between President Karzai, an American-backed religious moderate, and religious hardliners who dominate the country’s courts. Over the last several years conservative judges have threatened to close Afghan television stations that aired material they deemed indecent and charged journalists with publishing material they declared blasphemous.

In the past, President Karzai has defused clashes with conservative judges by failing to implement their rulings or striking closed-door compromises with them. Mr. Rahman’s case has attracted far more attention than others and sparked vocal complaints from American Christian groups.

Today, an aide to Mr. Karzai said that the case would be decided by the Afghan court court system. Mawlavi Muhaiuddin Baloch, Mr. Karzai’s advisor on religious affairs, said the case belonged in court and that Afghanistan’s judiciary was independent.

In the United States this week, Christian talk shows and advocacy groups rallied their supporters, who flooded the White House and the Afghanistan Embassy with complaints.

The embassy released a statement Wednesday saying that it was “too early” to draw conclusions, and that a judge was now “evaluating questions raised about the mental fitness of Mr. Rahman.” The embassy said the results of that evaluation “may end the proceedings.”

President Bush, in a visit to Wheeling, W.Va., on Wednesday was asked about the case. He responded: “I’m troubled when I hear — deeply troubled when I hear that a person who has converted away from Islam may be held to account. That’s not the universal application of the values that I talked about.”

On conservative blogs, a plan for a rally outside the Afghan Embassy in Washington were discussed. While some bloggers expressed satisfaction that the issue was gaining wider attention and drawing a response from the Bush administration, others were exasperated that a regime supported by the United States was considering such a prosecution.

At the State Department briefing today, Mr. McCormack denied that the administration had been slow to respond to the Rahman case. As soon as we learned about it, “we stated our concerns immediately with the foreign minister,” he said. “After our initial conversation with the Afghan government we thought it was important that we spoke in the

strongest possible terms in public on this issue.”

The United States Commission on International Religious Freedom, a bipartisan government group that works closely with the State Department, has previously warned that the Afghan Constitution does not adequately protect religious freedoms, said Tad Stahnke, the commission’s deputy director for policy.

Officials from Germany, Italy and Canada, which all have troops serving in Afghanistan, have voiced their concerns to Mr. Karzai’s government. The Italian foreign minister and deputy prime minister, Gianfranco Fini, said Tuesday that he had received assurance that Mr. Rahman would not be executed, but he did not elaborate.

The Council on American-Islamic Relations, based in Washington, called for Mr. Rahman’s release, saying that the Koran supported religious freedom and that Islam was never compulsory. CAIR said its position was endorsed by the Fiqh Council of North America, a committee of Islamic legal scholars.

David Rohde and Laurie Goodstein contributed reporting from New York.

The Wild Web of China: Sex and Drugs, Not Reform

March 8, 2006
The Wild Web of China: Sex and Drugs, Not Reform
New York Times, 2006

By DAVID BARBOZA
SHANGHAI, March 7 ? By some estimates, there are more than 30,000 people patrolling the Web in China, helping to form one of the world’s far-reaching Internet filtering systems.

But while China’s huge Internet police force is busy deleting annoying phrases like “free speech” and “human rights” from online bulletin boards, specialists say that Wild West capitalism has moved from the real economy in China to the virtual one.

Indeed, the unchecked freedoms that exist on the Web, analysts say, are perhaps unwittingly ushering in an age of startling social change. The Web in China is a thriving marketplace for everyone, including scam artists, snake oil salesmen and hard-core criminals who are only too eager to turn consumers into victims.

Chinese entrepreneurs who started out brazenly selling downloadable pirated music and movies from online storefronts have extended their product lines ? peddling drugs and sex, stolen cars, firearms and even organs for transplanting.

Much of this is happening because Internet use has grown so fast, with 110 million Web surfers in China, second only to the United States. Last year, online revenue ? which the government defines more broadly than it is in the United States ? was valued at $69 billion, up around 58 percent from the year before, according to a survey by the China Internet Development Research Center.

By 2010, Wall Street analysts say China could have the world’s leading online commerce, with revenue coming from advertising, e-commerce and subscription fees, as well as illicit services.

The authorities have vowed to crack down on illegal Web sites and say that more than 2,000 sex and gambling sites have been shut down in recent years. But new sites are eluding them every day.

“It’s a wild place,” Xiao Qiang, director of the China Internet Project at the graduate journalism school of the University of California, Berkeley, said of China’s Web. “Outside of politics, China is as free as anywhere. You can find porn just about anywhere on the Internet.”

On any of China’s leading search engines, enter sensitive political terms like “Tiananmen Square” or “Falun Gong,” and the computer is likely to crash or simply offer a list of censored Web sites. But terms like “hot sex” or “illegal drugs” take users to dozens of links to Web sites allowing them to download sex videos, gain entry to online sports gambling dens or even make purchases of heroin. The scams are flourishing.

A small sampling recently turned up these sites:

�A look-alike Web site pretending to be part of the Industrial and Commercial Bank of China asks visitors to enter their account passwords.

�A Web site that calls itself Honest Company specializes in deception ? selling bugging devices, machines to produce fake credit cards and tools that rig casino slot machines.

�A pornographic Web site asks people to pay $2 a month to download sex videos and chat with other online customers in the nude.

�A Web site advertises the sale of gamma hydroxybutyrate, a drug that acts as a relaxant and is thought to reduce inhibitions. Sometimes called a “date rape” drug, it is sold on the Web in China with instructions about how to use it to assault women.

Even the official New China News Agency seems to have gotten into the act. While the top of its news pages carries dispatches like “China Aims to Achieve Balance of Payments in 2006,” some at the bottom feature links to soft-porn photographs of Chinese movie stars like Gong Li and Zhou Xun.

“The Internet is a reflection of the real world,” says Lu Weigang, an analyst at the China Internet Network Information Center in Beijing. “Everything you have in the real world appears on the Internet.”

Countless Web sites peddle police weapons, pepper spray and even machines to siphon electricity from power lines. Earlier this week, an eBay user in China offered to put up for auction his or her kidney and liver for $100,000. Reached on Monday, eBay said that selling human organs was forbidden on its site and deleted the entry.

And a Web site called the Patriotic Hacker asserts that an instructor “led and initiated attacks on Japanese Web sites more than 10 times.” It says he even managed to shut down the official Web site for the Yasukuni Shrine, dedicated to Japan’s World War II military heroes.

There are also Web sites here that sell “miracle drugs” promising to cure cancer or AIDS, sites that say they will create fake government ID cards; some that even promise to break into the national education database to change official records.

Most of the sites are forbidden by law. On paper, the government’s Internet regulations forbid the display of any information that damages state security, harms the dignity of the state, promotes pornography and gambling, or “spreads evil cults” and “feudal superstitions.”

How does all this get by the Internet patrols in a country where violators risk 3 to 10 years in prison, or in some cases even the death penalty? Analysts say that the growth in the Internet has simply created too many sites to patrol. In contrast, there are too few incentives to close down sites, particularly when government-owned Internet service providers, telecommunications companies and even state-run Web sites are making big profits from them.

“The Chinese government launches campaigns on the Internet to crack down on pornography or the sale of illegal goods once or twice a year, but this is not an efficient way,” Mr. Lu at the China Internet Network Information Center said.

What is successful is online entertainment. Baidu.com, a Google-like search engine, has a daily poll of the top 10 most beautiful women. Sina.com publishes a popular celebrity blog by the actress and director Xu Jinglei.

A social networking Web site, 51.com, opened last August, and months later its owner, a Shanghai-based private company, said the site had more than three million registered users, mostly 15 to 25, who create personalized Web pages and meet online. “Most Internet services are about entertainment,” said Pang Shengdong, 29, who founded 51.com. “What do people do every day other than make money? They entertain themselves.”

Richard Ji, an Internet analyst at Morgan Stanley, said traffic in this country was dominated by young singles, many of them searching for games, dates, entertainment and community. A recent survey found that nearly 38 percent of the nation’s Internet users search for entertainment on the Web. The growing enthusiasm for the Internet in China is one reason some of the biggest Internet and technology companies, like Microsoft, Yahoo and Google, are eager to have a presence here, even if it means submitting to China’s stringent censorship rules.

In the view of Dali L. Yang, a professor of political science at the University of Chicago: “It’s truly remarkable. This is fundamentally a social revolution.”

Mr. Yang says that the social dynamics taking place on the Web might once have been considered political, and certainly marks of a bourgeois lifestyle.

“But now,” he said, “the Communist Party realizes that in a market economy and a globalized economy, they don’t have the manpower to cover it all. It may be political, but it’s not high politics.”