The strongman of Baghdad

13 November 2004

Andrew Gilligan on the murky past of Iyad Allawi, who this week cleared the way for the attack on Fallujah

The INA’s first act was to set up an opposition radio station in Saudi Arabia during the war. But it soon realised that its aims were better served by targeting a narrower, more credulous market, the international intelligence community. Allawi was good at this. Unlike his main rival in Iraqi exile politics, the banker Ahmed Chalabi, he was low-key and persuasive, hinting at highly placed contacts inside the regime who were ready to turn the West’s way. Not for the last time, Iyad Allawi was telling the British, and later the US, governments exactly what they wanted to hear, and the CIA millions started to pour in.

The INA’s most controversial operation during this period was a campaign of what can only be termed terrorism against civilians. In 1994 and 1995 a series of bombings at cinemas, mosques and other public places in Baghdad claimed up to 100 civilian lives. The leading British Iraq expert, Patrick Cockburn, obtained a videotape of one of the bombers, Abu Amneh al-Khadami, speaking from his place of refuge in Iraqi Kurdistan, claiming that the attacks had been ordered and orchestrated by Adnan Nuri, the INA’s Kurdistan director of operations — an account that has not been seriously disputed.

In 1996, with massive CIA backing, Mr Allawi finally got to mount his coup. It was a complete fiasco, not entirely helped by his decision to announce the supposedly top-secret operation to the Washington Post. Even before this, Saddam’s secret police had secretly seized the sophisticated encrypted satphone sent in to Iraq to communicate with the coup plotters and were using it to feed disinformation to the CIA. Once the coup had been crushed and all the plotters arrested, the special line came to life one last time. It was the Iraqis, kindly ringing up the CIA to let them know it was all over.