-Tim Cocks is a Reuters correspondent in Iraq.-

This month we reported that the number of civilians dying violent deaths in Iraq had hit a fresh low since the 2003 U.S.-led invasion -- about 125 for September.

Sounds like a lot, but for a country that only two years ago was seeing dozens of bodies pile up in the streets each day from tit-for-tat sectarian killing, it was definitely progress.

And as I prepare to end my assignment in Iraq this week, I need no argument from numbers to convince me that things are better here than when I arrived in Feb. 2008.

During my first few months, militants loyal to to anti-American cleric Moqtada al-Sadr were raising hell in Baghdad, firing mortars and rockets at the Green Zone almost every hour. We could hear or feel them thud on impact, especially when they fell short, on our side of the Tigris.

A rocket hit the BBC building opposite us, causing a blast loud enough to shake our windows, although thankfully no one at the BBC was hurt by the strike.

U.S. airstrikes on Baghdad's Sadr City slum were killing many civilians. Roadside and car bombs were erupting all over the place and the streets were largely deserted after dark.

Eighteen months on and things are hardly back to normal but, as any Iraqi will tell you, Iraq feels safer than it was.

Security forces have been purged of Shi'ite militiamen and are doing a better job of stopping suicide bombings, enabling U.S. combat forces to largely pull out of Iraq's cities in June.

We rarely hear explosions in Baghdad. A semblance of law and order seems to be taking shape.
Reporting from Iraq, as a Westerner or an Iraqi, has been a tough business for some time. For Westerners, apart from the fact that few foreign correspondents here speak passable Arabic, the big headache remains security.

Ever since insurgents started kidnapping Westerners and beheading them in 2004, the foreign press corps here have been living in a kind of semi-incarceration, behind rows of concrete blast walls that make you feel a bit like a lab rat in a maze.

It varies from media organisation to the next, but all of us are pretty restricted in our movements.
We generally keep a low profile, moving around Baghdad in low key armoured cars. We don't wander the streets for long periods of time or frequent bars and nightclubs after work.

The assumption is that any Westerner is a prime target for kidnappers -- for political reasons or for a juicy ransom.

And this is not to say there are no dangers to Iraqi media workers. More than 130 have died in violence since the beginning of the war.

Seven of our colleagues from Reuters have been killed in that time, most of them Iraqis.

Security restrictions have left us heavily dependent on dedicated local journalists who can visit places we cannot and help us cobble together stories we send to the wire.

That's perhaps as it should be in a global news agency with strong local talent, but it's hard not to miss roaming the streets as I would in almost any other country.

As a military correspondent, embedding with U.S. troops has been an experience, though it can hard to get the full picture that way -- for instance, persuading a nervous bystander in the street to talk to you when you're surrounded by heavily-armed American soldiers has proved a real challenge.

As security improves, our leash has been lengthened. I've been able to travel to places with that were once off-limits, like many parts of northern Iraq.

Will it continue getting better? No one can claim to know the answer to that question. Many Iraqis are pessimistic, as well they might be after decades of war, dictatorship, brutal sanctions and sectarian bloodshed. But since Iraq was pulled back from the brink in 2007, it has defied gloomy predictions.

But I'm reminded of comments by the head of the Red Cross Iraq delegation Juan-Pedro Schaerer about avoiding the temptation to write off Iraq's persistent violence as "normal".

This week, one of our journalists, Ahmed, was awoken in the middle of the night by loud gunshots.

Gunmen had stormed the house of his neighbour and family doctor, and shot him in the head. Ahmed took him to hospital, where he remains in critical condition. He may never walk or talk again.
Clearly, that feeling of nearly normality is fragile.

Related blog: A voice in the wilderness?

A little over a year ago, then-Baghdad Bureau Chief Dean Yates, my former boss, wrote an entry on this blog entitled ‘Is the war in Iraq over?’

Before he wrote it, Dean went to a famed Baghdad park to take the pulse of ordinary Iraqis, who were then cautiously venturing out to public places for the first time in years, a tentative sign that Iraq was finally emerging from height of the violence unleashed by the 2003 invasion.

For someone who covered the much of worst of the Iraq war — the car bombs, the suicide attacks, the sectarian executions that peaked in 2006 -2007 – from our sand-bagged bunker, it must have been a small miracle to see families dotting Abu Nawas park, a green stretch of trees, swings and benches along the banks of the Tigris.

Last night, I went back to Abu Nawas, named after a poet and bon vivant of the 8th and 9th centuries, to watch Iraqis celebrate Eid, the four-day holiday marking the end of the Muslim holy month.

This time, it was a cross between Disney World and Woodstock.

We joined hundreds, if not thousands, of Iraqis as we walked along a path overlooking the river, where a yellow crescent moon gleamed back from the barely-moving water.

Packs of young men in tight T-shirts, their hair slicked back, sat on a railing checking out the other teenagers. There were vendors selling nuts, grilled meat and cotton candy.

Some families had claimed patches of the crowded lawn for picnics and others sat at plastic tables eating freshly baked meat pies. Under a tree, men smoked nargile, the water pipe stuffed with sweet tobacco. Farther on in the darkness, a crowd of men and boys danced to the sound of drums.

We were shoulder-to-shoulder with other revellers as we turned to walk home.

In a city dotted with checkpoints, where uniformed men with AK-47s stand at every corner, I didn’t see one policeman or soldier. There was none of the fear or swallowed resentment we’ve become accustomed to seeing on people’s faces as they hurry down the sidewalk or line up to be frisked.

But were other people thinking, as I was, how easily such festive gatherings can turn into tragedy? Suicide bombers continue to strike at crowded mosques, markets or tribal meetings. It was a remarkably quiet Ramadan, but  Iraqi civilians are still unsafe in the most ordinary of situations.

On Aug. 19, almost 100 people were killed at the Foreign and Finance Ministries in two huge truck bombings. People were cut down at their desks or on their way to work.

The question remains, 14 months after Dean’s blog, whether or not the Iraq war is over. What will that mean? Is the war over when the world’s attention shifts to another conflict hundreds of miles away? Is the war over when U.S. casualties plummet and it’s suddenly safer for them in Amara than in some American cities? Will national elections in January cement the positive trajectory of the past 18 months, or will they re-ignite violence and undermine hopes for a secure, stable Iraq?

I don’t have a good answer to those questions. I know it would be hard to tell the families of those killed on Aug. 19 – dubbed “Bloody Wednesday” by Iraqis – or the 126,000 U.S. troops still stationed here that the war is over.

Maybe the best response another question. What will feted Abu Nawas, and the whole of Baghdad, look like a year from now?

(Reuters photo by Thaier al-Sudani: Iraqi men celebrate the holiday marking the end of Ramadan in Baghdad)

The blue-domed memorial Saddam Hussein built in Baghdad to honour Baath party founder Michel Aflaq, a Syrian Christian who started the movement that dominated Iraq for decades and governs Syria today, has been turned into a shopping centre for U.S. soldiers.
Aflaq’s tomb, sitting at the centre of a vault adorned with Koranic verses and Arabesque designs, has been boarded up to make way for a barber shop, a store selling kitschy Iraq souvenirs, a pirate DVD vendor and a ring of other stores.

The new mall at Aflaq’s tomb, located on what is now a U.S. military base in central Baghdad, has thus sealed off a powerful symbol of the deep, and often strained, shared history between Iraq and Syria, one which is being tested in a new feud between Baghdad and Damascus.

Last month, Syria and Iraq recalled their ambassadors after Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki accused Syria of sheltering mebbers of the Iraqi Baath party whom he blames for backing attacks that killed around 100 people in Baghdad last month.

The Aug. 19 bombings marked a U-turn in the slow improvement of relations between Iraq and Syria, which for decades had stunted diplomatic relations. Since 2003, they have been at odds over U.S. and Iraqi accusations that Damascus has allowed foreign insurgents to stream across its border into Iraq.

Damascus refused Maliki’s demand that Syria turn over Iraqi Baathists believed to be behind the August attacks and accused Iraq of being ungrateful for its efforts to care for hundreds of thousands of Iraqi war refugees now living in Syria.

But Syrian President Bashar al-Assad must be unnerved by Maliki’s request at the United Nations for a formal inquiry into the attacks.

Shining a global spotlight on Syria for a second time - in addition to the U.N. tribunal into the death of former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafik al-Hariri - must be an uncomfortable prospect for Assad’s secretive, controlling regime.

The Iraq-Syria squabble also underscores the difficulties that Maliki, and Iraq generally, are having in dealing with powerful elements from the Iraqi Baath party, many living in Syria and Jordan, ahead of an election next year and beyond.

The United States has been pushing Maliki to bring a wider spectrum of Iraqis into efforts to reconcile the country, and has even held unilateral talks with former Baath party members who might one day try to take part in the political process.

But Maliki, a member of Iraq’s Shi’ite Arab majority marginalised under Saddam’s Sunni Arab-led regime, spent decades fighting the Baath party - at least in part from exile in Syria - and it will be hard for Sunnis or Shi’ites to easily forget the sectarian crimes of the last six years.

Which brings us back to Aflaq. Born in Damascus in 1910, Aflaq was educated in Paris before he helped found the Baath party in the 1940s, hoping to wed Arab culture with modern, secularist politics and a rejection of western imperialism.

The Baath party took over in Damascus in 1963, but Aflaq later fled to Baghdad and aligned himself with the rival Iraqi branch of the party. Saddam gave Aflaq, his ideological compass during 24 years in power, a place of honour in Iraq and named him the party’s general secretary. In 1989, Aflaq died in Paris - Saddam claimed he was secretly converted to Islam before his death - and he was buried in Baghdad.

During that time, Syria and Iraq spied on and used political dissidents as leverage against each other. What the two countries may share most now is the need to climb down from their latest neighbourly crisis. Assad’s government is reaching out to the West and Washington, under President Barack Obama, is seeking to engage Damascus for the first time in eight years.

Maliki, meanwhile, is facing pushback on his tough Syria stance from senior officials who could well turn out to be rivals in January’s national elections.

Struggling to stamp out a weakened but active insurgency, Maliki may also not want to risk anything that will further deteriorate security and undermine his main selling point - improved security - when voters go to the polls in January.

By Aws Qusay and Aseel Kami
Just the other day, a friend was complaining about the Iraqi army checkpoints all over Baghdad. “These checkpoints kill all the fun when I go out on a picnic with my family,” he moaned.
The next day, his wife found herself sitting among bleeding and dying colleagues at the Iraqi foreign ministry after a massive truckbomb devastated the facade of the building and cut down dozens of people in a cloud of shattered glass.

“It was judgment day,” his wife said about the scene. “Some people had lost their eyes. Everyone was crying or slaughtered by the flying glass,” she said.

After Wednesday’s bombings, which also targeted the finance ministry, the friend is still complaining about the checkpoints, but for different reasons. “So you wait for a long time in some checkpoint and then you see some a soldier or a policeman turn his back to the waiting vehicles and just start waving them through while he is chatting to someone else. What’s the point in that?” he said.

The checkpoints set up around Baghdad have gone overnight from an irritating and unwanted cause of traffic jams to being criticised as inadequate and unprofessional.  Wednesday’s explosions, in which almost 100 people died and more than 1,000 were wounded, exposed deep flaws in the ability of the Iraqi security forces to defend the population and obvious targets like government ministries against attack.
   

Public anger has led to some calls for the redeployment in city centres of U.S. troops, who pulled out of urban areas in June in compliance with a bilateral security pact that also sets a deadline of end-2011 for a full U.S. withdrawal. Iraqi troops and soldiers form the frontline now against insurgents such as al Qaeda and others who want to pitch Iraq back into sectarian war, undermine the Shi’ite Muslim-led government ahead of an election next year or who just want to sow chaos for the sake of chaos.
  

They are out there for hours on end even when the summer heat becomes unbearable and the air fills with choking dust from Iraq’s regular sandstorms. They can claim some credit for ending the sectarian slaughter between majority Shi’ites and once dominant Sunnis. But they and their checkpoints clearly have done nothing to prevent suicide, car and truck bomb attacks.
   

We Iraqis have in recent months begun to regain some confidence in the future of our country as the violence subsided and Iraq regained its sovereignty with the start of a U.S. withdrawal.
But Wednesday’s bomb blasts blew away that confidence as swiftly as they vaporised the windows and walls of the foreign and finance ministries and cut short the lives of dozens of people inside.

Whenever we think everything is returning to normal, a wave of bloodshed occurs again.
 Driving past the ruined finance ministry, slowing down to gape like everyone else, we are reminded that the building was attacked in a similar manner two years ago. Just like now, an elevated roadway near it collapsed in the blast two years ago.
 

It took the Iraqi government a whole year to rebuild it. What they built in a year collapsed in seconds on Wednesday. They will surely rebuild it again. We can’t help but wonder if it will be brought crashing down for a third time.

Ban Ki-moon isn’t having a good year for public relations. Halfway through a five-year term as U.N. secretary-general, he’s been hit with a wave of negative assessments by the Financial Times, The Economist, London Times, Foreign Policy and other media organizations. In a March 2009 editorial entitled “Whereabouts Unknown,” the Times said Ban was “virtually inaudible” on pressing issues of international security and “ineffectual” on climate change, the one issue that Ban claims he has made the biggest difference on. The Economist gave him a mixed report card, assigning him two out of 10 points for his management skills while praising him on climate change (eight out of 10 points).
    
This week, Norway’s Aftenposten newspaper made an unpleasant situation much worse. It published a confidential memo assessing Ban’s 2-1/2 years in office from Oslo’s deputy U.N. ambassador, Mona Juul, to the Norwegian Foreign Ministry. Juul’s report is scathing — and it comes from a representative of one of the world’s body’s top financial contributors. She says the former South Korean foreign minister suffers from a “lack of charisma” and has “constant temper tantrums” in his offices on the 38th floor of the United Nations building in midtown Manhattan.
    
She describes Ban as a “powerless observer” during the fighting in Sri Lanka earlier this year when thousands of civilians were killed as government forces ended a 25-year civil war against Tamil Tiger rebels, trapping them on a narrow strip of coast in the country’s northeast. In Darfur, Somalia, Pakistan, Zimbabwe and Congo, she wrote, Ban’s “passive and not very committed appeals seem to fall on deaf ears.” She says that his recent trip to Myanmar was a failure and that some people in Washington refer to Ban as a “one-term” secretary-general.
    
Juul’s letter could hardly have come at a more inopportune time. Ban is planning to visit Norway in the coming weeks, where he intends to meet with government officials and visit the Arctic circle to see for himself the effects of global warming and the melting polar ice. Now U.N. officials fear reporters will be more interested in what he says about Juul’s memo than climate change.

So far Ban has not reacted to the letter. However, a Norwegian diplomat told Reuters that Ban’s press office had been instructed to hold off on confirming his visit to Norway shortly after the news of Juul’s memo began to spread.
    
Ban’s PR difficulties didn’t start this year. In March 2008, his chief of staff Vijay Nambiar sent a memo to U.N. employees explaining how to say his boss’s name. “Many world leaders, some of whom are well acquainted with the Secretary-General, still use his first name mistakenly as his surname and address him wrongly as Mr. Ki-moon or Mr. Moon,” Nambiar complained.
 
Then came Ban’s own speech to senior U.N. officials in Turin, Italy last year, in which he described how difficult it was to improve the working culture inside the United Nations. The secretary-general seemed to acknowledge that his internal management style had failed. “I tried to lead by example,” Ban said. “Nobody followed.”
    
Ban’s aides vehemently defend him, saying he’s being treated unfairly by the press. One senior U.N. official suggested privately that Ban could very well turn out to be “the greatest secretary-general ever.” They complain that people continue to compare him to his predecessor Kofi Annan, who was a very different U.N. chief and relied less on “quiet diplomacy” than Ban. Annan became a hero to many people around the world for standing up to the administration of former U.S. President George W. Bush over the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq. Annan called the March 2003 invasion illegal. U.N. officials also complain bitterly about the indefatigable blogger Matthew Lee, whose website Inner City Press regularly accuses Ban and other U.N. officials of hypocrisy and failing to keep their promises to reform the United Nations and root out corruption. (Some U.N. officials accuse Lee of not always getting his facts right, but his blog has become unofficial required reading for U.N. staffers around the world.)
    
Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd, diplomats in New York say, is among those supporting a campaign against a second term for Ban. Juul’s memo said Helen Clark, New Zealand’s former prime minister and current head of the U.N. Development Program, “could quickly become a competitor for Ban’s second term.” But diplomats say they expect the United States, Britain and other major powers to reluctantly back a second term for Ban, if only because there appears to be no viable alternative whom Russia and China would support.
    
A recent article in the Times of London said the best U.N. chief in the organization’s 64-year history was not Swedish Nobel Peace Prize laureate Dag Hammarskjold but the Peruvian diplomat Javier Perez de Cuellar, who held the top U.N. post for 10 years until 1992. Nicknamed “mumbles” because he was so difficult to understand, Perez de Cuellar kept a low profile and, like Ban, preferred backroom diplomacy, not Annan’s bully pulpit. Among the Peruvian diplomat’s successes were managing the end of the Cold War, leading a long-delayed revival of U.N. peacekeeping and encouraging member states to back a U.S.-led military operation to drive Iraq’s invading forces out of Kuwait in 1991.
    
Will Ban’s preference for quiet diplomacy make him as good or better than Perez de Cuellar? That remains to be seen.

A spate of bombs targeting churches in Baghdad this week has Iraq's minority Christian community trembling at the prospect of being the next victim of militants trying to reignite war.

Iraqi Christians, one of the country's weakest ethnic or  religious groups, have usually tried to steer clear of its many-sided conflict. For the most part, they manage.

While Sunni and Shi'ite Muslims killed each other by the dozen at the height of Iraq's sectarian conflict in 2006 and 2007, Christians were rarely targeted, although sometimes they were.

(Photo: A policeman at the site of a car bomb attack on a Baghdad church, 13 July 2009/Saad Shalash)

On Sunday, in apparently coordinated attacks, five bombs went off outside churches in Baghdad, killing four people and wounding 21, including a number of Christians.

Iraqi Christians or "Messihi", as they are called by an Arabic word related to the Hebrew term "Messiah,"  number around 750,000. That makes them a tiny minority in a Muslim nation of 28 million. They are mostly concentrated around Baghdad and the violent northern city of Mosul, which is still struggling to shake off al Qaeda and other Sunni Arab insurgent groups.

Historically, though, they have got on well with their Muslim compatriots. Under Ottoman rule, non-Islamic faiths were generally respected. More recently, Saddam Hussein used to draw attention to his Chaldean Christian Deputy Prime Minister Tareq Aziz, currently doing time for assisting Saddam's mass murders of Iraqi merchants, as an example of the Baath party's religious tolerance.

But partly because they are small, Christians are an easy target. About 2,000 families, an estimated 12,000 people, fled Mosul after a campaign of threats and attacks on Christians there in October last year, but many have since returned.

(Photo: A man cleans up after a bomb attack on a Baghdad church, 13 July 2009/Thaier al-Sudani)

"Attacking Christians can have a big impact on public opinion, because they are a minority and the international media will take this news seriously. That's what the extremists want," William Warida, a Christian and chairman of a Baghdad human rights organisation told me. "And some extremists just don't want the existence of Christians in this country at all."

The country's Christians fall into roughly two denominations, the majority Chaldeans under the authority of the Vatican and the minority Assyrians. "We are like one family, with two brothers: one is Chaldean, one is Assyrian. I have four grandsons: two are Assyrian and two Chladean," says Assyrian Christian parliamentarian Yunadim Kanna. According to the Rome-based news agency Asianews.it, both Chaldean and Assyrian churches were attacked.

Many Iraqi Christians from both branches speak Syriac-Aramic, a semitic tongue related to old Aramaic, the language spoken by Jesus.

Today, many of them live in exile in Jordan or Syria, scared off by the chaos unleashed by the 2003 U.S.-led invasion.

(Photo: Mourners grieve at funeral of bombing victim, 14 July 2009/Mohammed Ameen)

"After Sunday, the Christians that were thinking of coming back from outside, now maybe they will change their minds," said Warida. "This was a message to them not to come back."

The Vatican's procurator for Chaldean Catholics, Chorbishop Philip Najeem, gave the same analysis in an interview with Vatican Radio.

Follow FaithWorld on Twitter at RTRFaithWorld

-Tim Cocks is a Reuters correspondent based in Baghdad.-

For the U.S. military, it's the million dollar question -- or rather the $687 billion question, according to a recent estimate of the Iraq war's total cost. Is Iraq now stable enough for them to take a permanent back seat?

The short answer is no one knows. The only way they were ever going to find out was to leave Iraq's own forces to it and hope the whole thing doesn't come tumbling down. They started doing that on Tuesday when they pulled out of Iraqi cities.

It's been an encouraging start. A big bomb in Kirkuk cast a shadow over Iraq's celebrations of its new-found sovereignty, but since then things have been relatively quiet. Militants might try to take advantage by stepping up attacks, but for the moment they seem content with celebrating a "victory" over the occupation -- and setting off the odd bomb, of course.

The United States' coalition partners have for the most part long since departed. British forces handed over southern Iraq to the Americans in April, but since 2007 their 4,000 odd troops left had been largely confined to Basra airport anyway.

And one thing the crystal ball gazers have learned about Iraq's hugely complicated, many-sided conflict is that the past is rarely a reliable guide to the future.

When optimists thought Iraq was poised to enjoy democracy after the fall of Saddam, it spiralled into years of bloody insurgency and sectarian killing. Later, just when it seemed all hope was lost and Iraq would have to be partitioned, things starting getting dramatically better.

The idea that Iraqi forces aren't ready to take on the country's security usually centre on claims that they are untested, not well trained or infiltrated with militiamen.

But few deny they look more professional and integrated now than anyone would have thought possible two years ago. They might still be full of militiamen, but those militiamen are no longer kidnapping or killing political rivals, as in the past.

And there are clearly some things the Iraqis do better. For one thing, they know the language and understand the culture.

When I was on a U.S. patrol in Iraq's troubled Diyala province, a U.S. unit nearby accidentallly shot and wounded a civilian in Jalawla town, forcing them to vacate it because a public outcry would put other soldiers at risk of attack.

What they had done is fire a warning shot at a vehicle after the driver failed to heed a command -- in English -- to stay back. But few Iraqis in rural areas speak basic English.

The real test will be when U.S. pulls all combat forces out, under President Barack Obama's orders, by September next year.

Many Iraqis I've spoken too seem convinced the insurgents are just biding their time, sharpening their knives and stockpiling explosives waiting to reignite the conflict.

But whether or not Iraq can look after itself, at some point the Americans have to say: Look, we've done our best to get the lid back on Pandora's Box. Now it's over to you.

It’s not quite as bad as it was back in 2003 when Gerhard Schroeder publicly chastised George W. Bush for invading Iraq and Condi Rice introduced a new policy in the White House called ”ignore Germany” (France was to be punished and Russia forgiven for their opposition to the war).

But relations between Berlin and Washington are probably as poor as they’ve been since Angela Merkel replaced Schroeder in 2005 and set Germany on a course of reconciliation with the United States.

After becoming accustomed to dinners in the White House, barbecues and back-rubs with Bush in his Europe-friendly second term, Merkel and her advisers in Berlin are agonising over a series of slights (perceived or real) from Obama since he came to office in January. 

First came the message from Washington that Obama might not continue the regular videoconferences Merkel held with Bush. In the end the White House came around, but it took two months to set one up.

Berlin also got the cold shoulder when Merkel tried to arrange a trip to Washington ahead of a G20 meeting in London at the start of April. Messages from Berlin with proposed dates went unanswered for days until Merkel’s team abandoned the idea completely, an official close to her told me.

This week came the latest signal, at least from Berlin’s perspective, that the Obama team is not taking German concerns seriously. 

The rescue of Opel, the German unit of U.S. carmaker General Motors, has become the central theme of a slow-to-get-started German election campaign that pits Merkel against her Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier. A misstep on Opel and Merkel’s bid for a second term could be doomed.

But when she called an “Opel summit” for Wednesday to try to save the carmaker, her ministers were shocked to see only low-level representation from the U.S. Treasury — a crucial player in the discussions.

Merkel’s team in the Chancellery ended up excluding the envoy from the nitty gritty talks and a teleconference was set up with Ron Bloom, the former investment banker and  United Steel Workers veteran that was brought into the Treasury earlier this year to advise on auto bailouts.

The outrage at the U.S. stance, its nonchalant attitude and lack of preparation for the meeting was palpable in the voices Merkel’s ministers when they emerged from the 12-hour marathon to announce to weary reporters that no deal had been sealed.  

Some in Berlin have suggested that Obama is still punishing Merkel for not allowing him to speak at the Brandenburg Gate when he passed through Berlin last summer in the midst of his rousing campaign for the presidency.

According to this view, her government’s refusal to take on inmates from Guantanamo Bay, the prison for terrorist suspects Merkel lobbied hard to close, has reinforced the resentment in the Obama camp.

This might explain Obama’s decision to avoid Berlin when he visits Germany next week (he will go to Dresden and tour the Buchenwald concentration camp in the eastern state of Thuringia). Because Merkel failed to help him out during his election campaign, Obama is refusing to give her the honour of hosting him during hers.

But the truth may be less complicated. Obama has a daunting list of problems to tackle – from a sinking economy  to a worryingly complex set of foreign policy challenges in North Korea, Pakistan and Iran. Against that backdrop, he may not need Germany or Merkel as much as Berlin would like.

By William Maclean

The flow of foreign militants to Pakistan worries Western governments, which fear the south Asian country has replaced Iraq as the place to go for aspiring Islamists planning attacks on the West.

The camps will probably be smaller and the skills on offer less photogenic to al Qaeda’s online video audience, but that is no deterrent to Arabs, Central Asians and Europeans making their way to the turbulent northwestern tribal areas.

Those arrivals are in addition to a steady flow of Britons of Pakistani descent who have visited the area for many years, security sources say. The assumption among many Western officials is that U.S. success in Iraq since 2006 has diverted some recruits for the anti-Western cause to the Pakistan-Afghan theatre.

While Iraq rarely provided the range of commando-style training available in the 1990s at sprawling al Qaeda camps on the border with Afghanistan, Iraq’s draw as a battlefield in 2003-2006 diverted potential jihadi trainees away from Pakistan.

The goal today for these young men is to fight U.S. forces in neighbouring Afghanistan or to gain the skills to carry out attacks back home in the Middle East, Africa or the West.

Now, porous borders, corrupt officials and inventive smugglers mean a determined foreigner has little problem simply entering Pakistan, experts say, although reaching a camp in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas can be harder due to U.S. drone attacks and tougher security checks by militant groups.

Counter-terrorism experts also say that Somalia and Yemen are also emerging as destinations for aspiring al Qaeda fighters.

The following are a selection of quotes on this topic from security officials and analysts.

Rob Wainwright, Director of the European Union police agency Europol

“We see a pattern which shows Afghanistan and Pakistan seem to have replaced Iraq as preferred destinations for volunteers wishing to engage in armed conflict … We still see that recruits travel to training camps as part of their radicalisation process.

“Those who get training on the Pakistani-Afghan border are from various backgrounds — for example European converts and persons with Arab, North African and Turkish backgrounds.”

“Some of these persons who have been trained in Pakistan were arrested in Europe in connection with cases of attempt of terrorist attacks.”

Brynjar Lia, research professor, Norwegian Defence Research Establishment.

“There is an increased emphasis on Afghanistan and Pakistan as a jihadi arena in al Qaeda’s online propaganda … The appearance of European jihadis in al Qaeda propaganda material, for example martyrdom videos, suggests the numbers are increasing.”

But Pakistan’s “distance from the heart of the Arab world in general, and from Palestine in particular, is a big minus compared to the Iraqi battlefield, according to al Qaeda ideologues.”

Richard Barrett, coordinator of the U.N.’s al Qaeda-Taliban monitoring team.

“Training over the last couple of years has typically taken place in small compounds which you find throughout the area of northwest Pakistan, rather than in large purpose-built camps. I have also heard of it taking place in apartments or houses in places like Karachi. It is hard to spot and quantify.”

Senior Belgian police officer Alain Grignard, quoted by U.S.-based counter-terrorism publication CTC Sentinel.

“Not since before 9/11 have we seen as many people travel towards the Afghanistan-Pakistan conflict region.”

Brian Glyn Williams, Associate Professor of Islamic History at the University of Massachusetts at Dartmouth.

“I’ve seen epitaphs of Kazakhs, Turks, Azerbaijanis, and Uzbekistanis on recent jihadi websites (related to the Afghanistan-Pakistan conflict zone).

British counter-terrorism source

“People are still continuing to go (from Britain). Numbers are hard to judge but it remains a matter of concern.

Drone attacks have had a suppressant effect, making training and communication harder for al Qaeda and linked groups.”

Raphael Perl, Head of the Action Against Terrorism Unit at the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe.

“There’s no question that people are still going and the campaign to recruit people has intensified greatly.

“A small percentage go into active operations immediately. Some are just used for cannon fodder, in that part of Asia. And some of the very capable ones are sent back and told blend into society.”

Jean-Pierre Filiu, associate professor at the Paris Institute of Political Studies.

“The Iraq war bred a new generation of (French-based) jihadis who weren’t involved in violent extremism before … There was the fear of a backlash from people coming back from Iraq, battle-hardened and with new techniques. So the backlash was handled, those people were monitored closely, several networks were dismantled.
“French militants don’t go to Pakistan or Yemen.”

Noman Benotman, Libyan former anti-Soviet fighter in Afghanistan.

“I think the message many Arabs receive from al Qaeda leaders nowadays is - don’t come here (to Pakistan). We don’t need you here: Go to Yemen’.”

“And we have seen a move to Yemen, mainly by Saudis, to strengthen the al Qaeda base there. It represents a big danger.”

Anne Stenersen, the Terrorism Research Group of the Norwegian Defence Research Establishment.

“My general impression is the flow of fighters is definitely not as big as it was in the 1980s, since the situation today is completely different — in the 1980s the jihad against the USSR was more widely accepted, travel was less restricted, etc…

“Today’s fighters who wish to go … would face a number of additional challenges — security services are more alert, drone attacks in the tribal areas, etc.. Also, the groups operating in this region are not a united front, but divided on vital issues such as who to fight — the ‘occupation’ of Afghanistan, or the Pakistani government. (There is) anecdotal evidence of foreign fighters who get caught up in tribal conflicts or end up fighting the Pakistani security forces for self-defence, rather than entering into Afghanistan.”

Mustafa Alani, Gulf Research Centre

(Whether in Pakistan or Yemen), the major al Qaeda investment is in recruitment, not training. Most action now involves suicide bombers or exploding a car by remote control. This mainly requires influencing the mind of the subject, while most of the physical training can be done in a room. The old-style camps we saw on the publicity videos, where fighters climb over obstacles or go across fires, are mostly in the past. The groups have passed this stage. Now it is about how to evade things like monitoring in an airport. And that is a response to the new technology of counter-terrorism.”  

Saman Zarifi, Amnesty International Asia-Pacific Director
“The madrassas are training people, taking over abandoned buildings and schools. Everyone has anecdotal evidence of Arabs and Central Asians. But it’s not the same volume as the past, as the Pakistani state is no longer in that business.”

Pakistani High Commissioner to Britain Wajid Shamsul Hasan

“The foreign militants are there … and with due assistance from our friends in the West, hopefully we can overcome them.”

In 2003, when U.S. troops stormed into Baghdad and the statues of Saddam Hussein were pulled down, I think I must have been elated like many other Iraqis. Today, after the six years of bloodshed and slaughter set off by the U.S.  invasion, it’s hard to remember that feeling, which must have been one of enormous relief and joy.  Instead I am left with mixed emotions, grateful that the horror of Saddam’s rule ended but also deeply saddened by the horrors that followed his fall.

  I was eager to live in an Iraq without Saddam. I always hated his brutal rule of Iraq. He had taken us into wars in which hundreds of thousands of people were killed. Iraqis might also easily face death if they spoke out against Saddam or criticized his government. But if you kept your mouth shut and did not join any political party other than his now outlawed Baath party, you most probably would have been left alone.
    When Saddam was ousted by the invasion, and Baghdad fell to U.S. troops on April 9, 2003, I thought then that Iraq would finally be at peace after a long period of tough times. I never imagined what followed. It never crossed my mind that tens of thousands would be slaughtered simply for being a Shi’ite Muslim or a Sunni, the two Islamic sects in Iraq. Millions would flee their homes. And that bombs laid by insurgents would mow down thousands more.
    I sometimes wondered why did we get rid of Saddam if the killing continued, although for different reasons?
    The violence has begun to ebb, but still my relatives and friends are scattered to the winds.
    As an Iraqi journalist I have explored the social impact of war on my country. I have interviewed orphans and widows, and people whose limbs were blown off by bombs. It has left my heart full of more pain than I ever thought it could bear.
    I have also seen Iraq, amid the violence and fear, embrace new freedoms in politics and also in life: we have cellular telephones and satellite television, both restricted or banned in Saddam’s time. Saddam’s government had long lists of forbidden items.  One of them was satellite television. Anyone caught watching international news shows could be sent to prison for six months.
    It is clear to me that Iraqi society would not have been allowed to develop had Saddam remained in charge. Now despite the dark years that have passed, we can at least cling to hopes of better times. We have a parliament that we elect, and not one-man rule.
    This week, an Iraqi appeals court reduced to one year a three-year prison sentence handed to an Iraqi journalist who dared to throw his shoes at former U.S. President George W. Bush. I was impressed and had to raise my hat to the independence of the judiciary. I asked my parents what they thought the journalist’s sentence would have been had he committed the same offence during Saddam’s times. My mother answered: “He would not only have been executed without trial but all of his family would have been erased from the Iraqi map.”