Iraq Notebook
Al-Zarqawi terror group alters name

NABIL AL JURANI / AP British troops, patrolling the center of Basra, Iraq, yesterday, may be redeployed to the Baghdad area to back up Americans as they plan a major offensive into Fallujah. Britain may send 600 soldiers from the Black Watch regiment to bolster U.S. operations in mostly Sunni areas west of Baghdad.

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CAIRO, Egypt — Tawhid and Jihad, the Iraqi group of terror mastermind Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, apparently has changed its name two days after announcing its merger with Osama bin Laden's al-Qaida organization.

An Internet statement released yesterday under the purported new name, al-Qaida of Jihad in the Land of Two Rivers, claimed responsibility for an attack on a U.S. military convoy west of the Iraqi city of Fallujah the same day. The two rivers in the new name are the Euphrates and Tigris rivers in Iraq.

Witnesses in Habaniyah, west of the insurgent stronghold of Fallujah, reported seeing three American Humvees burning, but the U.S. military didn't comment on the alleged attack.

"A lion from the martyrdom brigades ... plowed into an American convoy that had entered Habaniyah," the statement said. The authenticity of the statement could not be independently verified.

The claim was posted under the group's new name by Abu Maysara al-Iraqi, a pseudonym al-Zarqawi's Tawhid and Jihad group had said was its legitimate source of information.

More police needed, U.S. general says

BAGHDAD, Iraq — The Iraqi capital is still far short of the numbers of Iraqi police officers needed to secure it, and the force won't be up to strength in time for national elections in January, the U.S. general in charge of security in Baghdad said yesterday.

The blunt assessment contradicts upbeat assessments that the Iraqi force would be able to protect Iraqi voters by the scheduled election, or even earlier.

Maj. Gen. Peter Chiarelli, commander of the Army's 1st Cavalry Division, said Baghdad needs 25,000 police. Of those, 7,000 would patrol Sadr City, home to more than a third of the capital's 6 million residents.

Right now, the city has 15,000 police — most of whom have had just eight weeks of training.
 
He said Baghdad's required contingent of 25,000 police should be on the streets by spring or summer 2005.

Fearing shortages, supply costs soar

ARLINGTON, Va. — The cost of building materials in Iraq has soared as much as tenfold amid fears of shortages, threatening the pace of the already troubled U.S. reconstruction effort, Iraqi and U.S. officials said yesterday.

Local suppliers have jacked up the prices on such basics as lumber, gravel and bricks in expectation that a U.S.-funded building boom is poised to take off in the coming months and will drain existing material, the officials said.

The price of cement, for instance, has increased from about $8 per ton before the U.S.-led invasion in March 2003 to as much $110 per ton today, they said. Concrete blocks have shot from $75 per thousand to $450.

The increase in costs largely reflects profiteering, not actual shortages, Iraqi officials said. Still, the higher charges could result in cutbacks on some projects as more money is spent on basic supplies than expected.

Work has begun on 442 of some 2,800 planned construction projects that include schools, health clinics and water-treatment plants. Of the $18.4 billion set aside by Congress for Iraqi reconstruction, only $1.24 billion has been spent.

The Center for Strategic and International Studies, a nonpartisan think tank based in Washington, estimates that only about 27 cents of every dollar are reaching ordinary Iraqis, with the rest drained away by security, waste and overhead costs among big U.S. companies that have taken the lead in the reconstruction effort.

Google search likely saved Australian

SYDNEY, Australia — Iraqi militants who kidnapped an Australian reporter in Baghdad and threatened to kill him Googled his name on the Internet to investigate his work before deciding to release him unharmed, the journalist's executive producer said yesterday.

John Martinkus, the first Australian confirmed as having been abducted in Iraq, was seized in Baghdad early Saturday and held for about 24 hours before being freed.

Martinkus' executive producer at Australia's SBS network, Mike Carey, said the Internet — often used by Iraqi militants to air grisly images of hostages being beheaded — likely saved Martinkus.

"They checked on him to see if he was who he said he was," Carey told The Associated Press. "They Googled him, and then went onto a Web site — either his own or his book publisher's Web site, I don't know which one — and saw that he was who he was and that was instrumental in letting him go, I think, or swinging their decision."

Martinkus, a freelance reporter who also has covered turmoil in East Timor at the time of its 1999 vote for independence from Indonesia, has written books on subjects including Jakarta's actions in East Timor and on life in Iraq since Saddam Hussein's ouster.