U.S. expands secret facility in Iraq - Pittsburgh Post-Gazette - 0 views
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IRBIL, Iraq — A supposedly secret but locally well-known CIA station on the outskirts of Irbil’s airport is undergoing rapid expansion as the United States considers whether to engage in a war against Islamist militants who have seized control of half of Iraq in the past month. Western contractors hired to expand the facility and a local intelligence official confirmed the construction project, which is visible from the main highway linking Irbil to Mosul, the city whose fall June 9 triggered the Islamic State’s sweep through northern and central Iraq. Residents around the airport say they can hear daily what they suspect are U.S. drones taking off and landing at the facility. Expansion of the facility comes as it seems all but certain that the autonomous Kurdish regional government and the central government in Baghdad, never easy partners, are headed for an irrevocable split — complicating any U.S. military hopes of coordinating the two entities’ efforts against the Islamic State.
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Overnight, Kurdish troops seized oil fields operated by Iraq’s Northern Oil Co., whose exports had been controlled by the central government, “These two are among the main wells producing oil in Iraq,” said Assam Jihad, the Oil Ministry spokesman. “They are the spine of Iraq’s oil wealth and produce 400,000 barrels a day.” Oil industry publications said they had produced a little less than half that in recent months, but nonetheless represent a significant share of Iraq’s oil production. In 2012, Iraq produced on average of 3 million barrels of oil per day, according to the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries. “Half of this production goes to the local market, and the other half goes for export,” said Mr. Jihad, criticizing the Kurds’ seizure of the field as a “constitutional breach” and “violation of Iraq’s sovereignty.”
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The developments all come as the United States, which has said it won’t come to Iraq’s assistance unless Mr. Maliki takes steps to make his government more inclusive, is expected to announce early next week its assessment of the military situation in the country. Pentagon officials said the assessment might be made public as soon as Monday. But U.S. officials have known for some time that it was likely that they would need to coordinate any steps taken in Baghdad and in Irbil, where the peshmerga has worked closely over the years with the CIA, U.S. special forces and the Joint Special Operations Command, the military’s most secretive task force, which has become a bulwark of counterterrorism operations. Peshmerga forces already are manning checkpoints and bunkers to protect the facility, which sits just a few hundred yards from the highway.
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Other contractors who deal extensively with moving heavy equipment through Irbil’s airport, which has supported a rapidly expanding oil and gas drilling industry, said they were aware of the expansion. One British oil executive said he’d detected a “low-key but steady stream of men, equipment and supplies for an obvious expansion of the facility.” The local Kurdish intelligence official described what was taking place as a “long-term relationship with the Americans.” In a statement July 3, U.S. Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel announced that Irbil would host such a center, in addition to one being set up in Baghdad, and suggested that it had already begun operating. “We have personnel on the ground in Irbil, where our second joint operations center has achieved initial operating capability,” he said then.
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“It’s no secret that the American special forces and CIA have a close relationship with the peshmerga,” said the Kurdish official, who spoke only on condition of anonymity because he was discussing covert military operations. He added that the facility had operated even “after the Americans were forced out of Iraq by Maliki,” a reference to the 2011 U.S. troop withdrawal after the Obama administration and the Iraqi government couldn’t agree on a framework for U.S. forces remaining in the country. The official refused to directly identify the location of the facility but when he was shown the blurred-out location on an online satellite-mapping service he joked, “The peshmerga do not have the influence to make Google blur an area on these maps. I will leave the rest to your conclusions.”
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Two CIA drone bases in Iraq; what could be wrong with that? Remember that CIA staff and contractors, being civilians, aren't included in the head count of American boots on the ground. And the CIA is rather notorious these days for operating drones that kill, not the observation drones that the Pentagon said it would be flying over Iraq. Smells like Obama has decided to run a hot war in Iraq, at least of the covert variety.