BAGHDAD — U.S. and Iraqi officials are negotiating Iraq’s demand that security company Blackwater USA be expelled from the country within six months, and American diplomats appear to be working on how to fill the security gap if the company is phased out.
In violence yesterday, a parked car bomb struck worshippers heading to a Shi’ite mosque in Baghdad, killing at least nine persons as Iraqis celebrated a Muslim holiday. Authorities said 18 others died the day before when a suicide truck bomber, followed by a swarm of gunmen, attacked a regional police station.
The Washington Post meanwhile reported the death of one of its reporters, a Tikrit native who was shot in the head yesterday afternoon while taking photographs in Baghdad’s Sadiyah neighborhood. He was the first Post reporter to be killed in the war.
Salih Saif Aldin, 32, had been with the newspaper since early 2004 and had conducted himself with great courage, the Post said. Following a severe beating in Tikrit in 2004, Mr. Aldin refused to leave the city until he was threatened with dismissal, the newspaper said.
The talks about Blackwater’s future flowed from recommendations in an Iraqi government report on a Sept. 16 incident in which, Iraqi officials say, Blackwater guards opened fire without provocation in Baghdad’s Nisoor Square and killed 17 civilians.
The Iraqi investigators issued five recommendations to the government of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, which has since sent them to the U.S. Embassy as demands for action.
One of those points says the Iraqi government “should demand that the United States stops using the services of Blackwater in Iraq within six months and replace it with a new, more disciplined organization that would be answerable to Iraqi laws.”
Sami al-Askari, a top aide to Mr. al-Maliki, said that point was non-negotiable.
“I believe the government has been clear. There have been attacks on the lives of Iraqi citizens on the part of that company. It must be expelled. The government has given six months for its expulsion, and it’s left to the U.S. Embassy to determine with Blackwater when to terminate the contract. The American administration must find another company,” he said.
In talks between American diplomats and the al-Maliki government, Mr. al-Askari said, the U.S. side was not “insisting on Blackwater staying.” He said the Americans have been told that another demand — a Blackwater payment of $8 million in compensation for each victim — was negotiable.
A senior U.S. official in Baghdad said no decision has been made about Blackwater.
“With the investigations and reviews ongoing, it would be clearly premature to say that any definitive determinations have been made about the future of the Blackwater contract.”
But another diplomat, speaking privately, said he did not see how the State Department could insist on keeping Blackwater in place given how “tainted” it had become.
The car and truck bombs of the past two days bore the hallmarks of al Qaeda in Iraq terrorists who had promised an offensive during the Islamic holy month of Ramadan.
The fasting month culminated this weekend with the three-day Eid al-Fitr festival that began on Friday for Sunnis and Saturday for Shi’ites.
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