Strugle for Control in Najaf and Kufa

GWEN IFILL:

Now to our report from Baghdad. I talked a little earlier this evening with Dexter Filkins of the "New York Times." Dexter Filkins, welcome again. Could you bring us up to date on what events happened today, especially the attacks just outside the green zone in Baghdad?

DEXTER FILKINS:

Yeah, there was A… there was an attack today on a civilian convoy that killed two British civilians just outside the green zone, like 100 yards. There was a couple of armored cars that were going towards the green zone, and… and it looks like… it looks like a couple of guys on a roof with a rocket- propelled grenade, you know, hit the car, killed two of them. I think two people survived. I went to the site.

You know, it's the same sad scene that I've seen so much of, you know, particularly recently, and… and I can't say… I can't say the Iraqis who were there were terribly upset about it. I mean, it was… you know, you go to these things and it's just a real eye opener how much hostility there is towards the United States. But that… that was the main… that was the main event here today.

GWEN IFILL:

And over the weekend there was a suicide bombing as well.

DEXTER FILKINS:

There was. There was a suicide bombing on Saturday outside the house of the… one of the deputy interior ministers. Didn't kill him, but killed a number of other people.

GWEN IFILL:

As you know, there has been quite a back-and-forth between U.S. officials and people on the ground about what happened in this so-called wedding tragedy, which is to say American officials are saying that they attacked a suspicious target, and there is now today video which has surfaced appearing to show a wedding. What can you do to bring us up to date on what… where that stands?

DEXTER FILKINS:

Well, there was… this was the wedding… well, the wedding or not, or a gathering of insurgents, as the U.S. claims, about 300 miles west of here at the Syrian border, and I should just start by saying, you know, three months ago the whole press corps in Baghdad would have just driven out to this place, but… and tried to find out what happened. But we can't do that now because it's just so dangerous, and so it's just made trying to figure out, you know, what happened in a place like this that much more difficult.

But basically the dispute has been about 40 people were killed 40 Iraqis were killed; nobody disputes that. The Americans say that they were insurgents. There have been a couple of videos now of weddings, and people say that it was a wedding party. I… a video came out today. I've seen that video. It does show a wedding; it shows a wedding in the desert. It's really hard to say if that is the same wedding that, you know, took place, or allegedly took place the other night. There is a guy, there's a singer in the video who looks a lot like the body of a dead person in one of the… that's shown in one of the videos of the funeral– very similar. And we know that a singer was killed, so… it's tough.

It's really murky. It's really murky stuff, and it, you know, ultimately comes down to the details, but it's just really hard to figure out what happened out there unless you can go out there yourself.

GWEN IFILL:

And among the details apparently is that there were foreign passports and weapons found on that site as well.

DEXTER FILKINS:

There was. I mean, it's… you know, it's… this was a little village on a border… on the border in the middle of the desert, and it's pretty clear that whatever else they were, these guys were smugglers, you know. There were lots of big trucks. There were guns; most smugglers around here carry guns. It was kind of a camp where they lived. I guess it looks like maybe they were carrying some drugs. You know, there were some visa machines and that sort of thing. But I guess the question is whether, you know, these were like serious… I don't think the U.S. bombed this place to take out smugglers.

You know, the question is whether these guys were serious insurgents, and they did show… the U.S. says that they found a few Sudanese passports. I think… the other day they said they found one, and I think today they said that they had found more than one, but it wasn't clear to me how many they had found there.

GWEN IFILL:

As you know, the president is beginning his effort to try to lead up to the hand-over June 30 in Iraq, to basically sell it with a series of speeches. I wonder if in Iraq, especially among those who are in line to take over in the interim government, there is… they're listening very carefully to what the president will have to say.

DEXTER FILKINS:

Well, they definitely will. I mean, I think, you know, Lakhdar Brahimi from the United Nations is here, and he's trying to assemble this caretaker government, and you can be sure that those people will be listening. I think the question that… the question that sort of troubles me or would trouble anybody here is who else is listening to it, and whether the ordinary Iraqis are going to listen to what President Bush has to say. And the way things are going here, and the way they have been going here, it's… he's not… President Bush is not a very popular guy here these days, and so I think the answer is, at the top, yeah, they'll be listening, but I think everywhere else they'll probably turn it off.

GWEN IFILL:

And speaking of not a popular guy in leadership, Ahmad Chalabi, who used to be, as he used to describe himself, as America's best friend in Iraq, obviously has fallen out of favor. Does his fall, the raid that the U.S. conducted on his home, does that have an effect on his power base in Iraq?

DEXTER FILKINS:

Well, Ahmad Chalabi, who's… he comes from an Iraqi family, and it's a very prominent family and they've been in Iraq for a long time. But he was out of Iraq for… you know, for most of his life, and he doesn't have much of a power base in Iraq. He's not a very popular guy here. People associate him with the United States. They associate him with scandals that he was allegedly involved in, a big banking scandal in Jordan. He's not a very popular guy here.

In fact, what's… what's been interesting about to watch this raid– I was at the raid when… or right after the raid– is that Chalabi has tried to use the raid and to say "look, you know, the U.S., these big bad U.S. guys are kicking my door down. You know, I'm with you, the Iraqis, and I don't like the U.S. now." And so he's trying to sort of use that to, pretty clearly, to gain in popularity among ordinary Iraqis. And I don't… it's anybody's guess as to whether it's going to work.

GWEN IFILL:

Okay. Dexter Filkins, thanks a lot again.

DEXTER FILKINS:

Thank you.