[Centraal] Irak na de oorlog - deel 33

quote:

Op dinsdag 4 juli 2006 16:05 schreef zakjapannertje het volgende:
Irak loopt leeg
Brian Conley en Omar Abdullah

BAGDAD, 4 juli (IPS) - Meer dan drie jaar na de invasie in Irak willen steeds meer Irakezen weg uit hun land, zo blijkt uit talloze rapporten. In de praktijk is het echter niet zo makkelijk om Irak te verlaten. In Bagdad verstrekt de overheid maar een beperkt aantal internationale paspoorten.

quote:

3 U.S. soldiers killed in Iraq battle

BAGHDAD, Iraq - Three American soldiers were killed Saturday in fighting in the western province of Anbar, the U.S. military said. They were the first U.S. fatalities reported in
Iraq in four days and only the eighth so far this month.

quote:

Op dinsdag 4 juli 2006 18:09 schreef NightH4wk het volgende:
Laat de VS maar haar troepen wereldwijd terugtrekken, kan iig niemand meer zeiken en is er de komende decennia weer nonstop geweldadige footage voor Hollywood, die films worden steeds matiger.

quote:

20 Sunni Arabs slain in Baghdad ambush

BAGHDAD, Iraq - Gunmen stopped cars in western Baghdad and singled out Sunni Arabs in a dramatic escalation of sectarian violence Sunday. Police said at least 20 people were killed.

The attack in the dangerous Jihad neighborhood was apparently in retaliation for the car bombing of a local Shiite mosque the night before.

Police Lt. Maitham Abdul-Razzaq said 20 bodies were taken to hospitals and police were searching for more victims reportedly left dumped in the streets. He also said U.S. and Iraqi forces had sealed off the area.

quote:

Op zondag 9 juli 2006 13:03 schreef Autodidact het volgende:

[..]

quote:

37 Sunni Arabs slain in Baghdad ambush

BAGHDAD, Iraq - Masked Shiite gunmen stopped cars in western Baghdad on Sunday, singling out Sunni Arabs. At least 37 people were killed in the dramatic escalation of sectarian violence.

quote:

Amerikaanse militairen aangeklaagd wegens moord
BAGDAD - Vier Amerikaanse militairen zijn aangeklaagd wegens moord en verkrachting in Irak. Dat maakte het Amerikaanse leger zondag bekend. In deze zaak is vorige week al een voormalige Amerikaanse militair voor hetzelfde aangeklaagd.

Het gaat om een incident in maart dit jaar vlakbij Mahmudiya ten zuiden van Bagdad. De mannen zouden vier leden van een gezin hebben vermoord nadat ze eerst de tienerdochter hadden verkracht. De (ex-)militairen kunnen de doodstraf krijgen als zij schuldig worden bevonden.

Zaterdag was in verband met deze zaak een zesde Amerikaanse soldaat in staat van beschuldiging gesteld wegens plichtsverzuim omdat hij het incident niet had gemeld bij zijn meerdere.

quote:

Op zondag 9 juli 2006 16:13 schreef Monidique het volgende:
Ondertussen mag het toch wel gewoon 'burgeroorlog' genoemd worden?

quote:

Op dinsdag 4 juli 2006 11:39 schreef Autodidact het volgende:
Ex-GI charged in rape of Iraqi, killings

quote:

Op zondag 9 juli 2006 22:31 schreef Glasnosteraar het volgende:
en nu hebben er weer zo'n 17 shia's boem gedaan.

http://www.faz.net/s/RubD(...)common~Scontent.html

quote:

Op zondag 9 juli 2006 23:13 schreef Autodidact het volgende:

[..]

Even voor het goede plaatje, dat is dezelfde aanslag als die ik eerder meldde.

quote:

Police Abuses in Iraq Detailed
Confidential documents cover more than 400 investigations. Brutality, bribery and cooperation with militia fighters are common, a report says.
By Solomon Moore, Times Staff Writer
July 9, 2006

BAGHDAD — Brutality and corruption are rampant in Iraq's police force, with abuses including the rape of female prisoners, the release of terrorism suspects in exchange for bribes, assassinations of police officers and participation in insurgent bombings, according to confidential Iraqi government documents detailing more than 400 police corruption investigations.

A recent assessment by State Department police training contractors echoes the investigative documents, concluding that strong paramilitary and insurgent influences within the force and endemic corruption have undermined public confidence in the government.

ADVERTISEMENT
Officers also have beaten prisoners to death, been involved in kidnapping rings, sold thousands of stolen and forged Iraqi passports and passed along vital information to insurgents, the Iraqi documents allege.

The documents, which cover part of 2005 and 2006, were obtained by The Times and authenticated by current and former police officials.

The alleged offenses span dozens of police units and hundreds of officers, including beat cops, generals and police chiefs. Officers were punished in some instances, but the vast majority of cases are either under investigation or were dropped because of lack of evidence or witness testimony.

The investigative documents are the latest in a string of disturbing revelations of abuse and corruption by Iraq's Interior Ministry, a Cabinet-level agency that employs 268,610 police, immigration, facilities security and dignitary protection officers.

After the discovery in November of a secret Interior Ministry detention facility in Baghdad operated by police intelligence officials affiliated with a Shiite Muslim militia, U.S. officials declared 2006 "the year of the police." They vowed a renewed effort to expand and professionalize Iraq's civilian officer corps.

President Bush has said that the training of a competent Iraqi police force is linked to the timing of an eventual withdrawal of U.S. troops and a key element in the war in Iraq.

But U.S. officials say the renegade force in the ministry's intelligence service that ran the bunker in Baghdad's Jadiriya neighborhood continues to operate out of the Interior Ministry building's seventh floor. A senior U.S. military official in Iraq, who spoke on condition of anonymity in an interview last month, confirmed that one of the leaders of the renegade group, Mahmoud Waeli, is the "minister of intelligence for the Badr Corps" Shiite militia and a main recruiter of paramilitary elements for Interior Ministry police forces.

"We're gradually working the process to take them out of the equation," the military official said. "We developed the information. We also developed a prosecutorial case."

Bayan Jabr, a prominent Shiite, was interior minister at the time of the investigations detailed in the documents and has been accused of allowing Shiite paramilitary fighters to run rampant in the security forces.

U.S. officials interviewed for this article said the ability of Jabr's replacement, Jawad Bolani, to deal with the corruption and militia influence in the police force will be a crucial test of his leadership.

The challenges facing Bolani, a Shiite engineer who has no policing experience and entered politics for the first time after the U.S.-led invasion in 2003, are highlighted in a recent assessment by police trainers hired by the State Department. According to the report, corruption in the Interior Ministry has hampered its effectiveness and its credibility with Iraqis.

"Despite great progress and genuine commitment on the part of many ministry officials, the current climate of corruption, human rights violations and sectarian violence found in Iraq's security forces undermines public confidence," according to the document, titled "Year of the Police In-Stride Assessment, October 2005 to May 2006."

Elements of the Ministry of the Interior, or MOI, "have been co-opted by insurgents, terrorists and sectarian militias. Payroll fraud, other kinds of corruption and intimidation campaigns by insurgent and militia organizations undermine police effectiveness in key cities throughout Iraq," the report says.

The report increased tensions between the Pentagon, which runs the police training program, and the State Department, which has been pushing to expand its limited training role in Iraq, said a U.S. official who spoke on condition of anonymity.

The report strikes contradictory tones, saying that the Interior Ministry continues to improve and that its forces are on track to take over civil security from U.S. and Iraqi military elements by the end of the year, while outlining shocking problems with corruption and abuse.

"The document basically shows that Interior Ministry management has failed," the U.S. official said. "The document didn't directly address U.S. policy failures, but I guess it does show that too."

Interior Ministry officials have taken steps to "improve detainee life," the report says. "However, there are elements within the MOI which continue to abuse detainees."

Referring to Sunni Arab insurgent groups and Shiite paramilitary organizations, the report says "these groups exploit MOI forces to further insurgent, party and sectarian goals. As a result, many Iraqis do not trust the police. Divisions falling along militia lines have led to violence among police.

"MOI officials and forces are widely reported to engage in bribery, extortion and theft," the report says. "For example, there are numerous credible reports of ministry and police officials requiring payment from would-be recruits to join the police."

The report's findings are borne out in hundreds of pages of internal investigative documents.

The documents include worksheets with hundreds of short summaries of alleged police crimes, letters referring accused officers to Iraq's anti-corruption agencies and courts, citizen complaints of police abuse and corruption, police inspector general summaries detailing financial crimes and fraudulent contracting practices and reports on alleged sympathizers of Saddam Hussein's former regime.

In crisp bureaucratic Arabic, the documents detail a police force in which abuse and death at the hands of policemen is frighteningly common.

Police officers' loyalties appear to be a major problem, with dozens of accounts of insurgent infiltration and terrorist acts committed by ministry officials.

In one case, a ring of Baghdad police officers — including a colonel, two lieutenants and a captain — were accused of stealing communications equipment for insurgents, who used the electronics for remote bomb triggers. In another case, a medic with the Interior Ministry's elite commando force in Baghdad was fired after he was accused of planting improvised explosives and conducting assassinations.

In Diyala province, where last month U.S. forces killed Abu Musab Zarqawi, the leader of Al Qaeda in Iraq, investigators were looking into allegations that a police officer detonated a suicide vest in the bombing of a police station. In a separate case, a brigadier general, a colonel and a criminal judge were accused of taking bribes from a suspected terrorist.

Police officers have also organized kidnapping rings that abduct civilians for ransom — in some of the cases, the victims are police officers. Two Baghdad police commanders kidnapped a lieutenant colonel, stole his ministry car and demanded tens of thousands of dollars from the victim's family, the documents allege. In that case, the two accused, Maj. Gen. Naief Abdul Ezaq and Capt. Methaq Sebah Mahmoud, were fired and taken to court.

The abbreviated notes on the case do not make clear whether the two officers received further punishment, but the fact that the documents mention the courts being involved in the incident at all makes it stand out from the rest of the cases.

In another case, the bodyguards of a police colonel in the Zayona neighborhood of Baghdad kidnapped merchants for ransom, according to the documents. In the capital's Ghazaliya neighborhood, a lieutenant and his brother-in-law kidnapped a man and demanded a huge ransom from his family.

Abuse by police is also a common theme. The victims include citizens who tried to complain about police misbehavior, drivers who disobeyed traffic police commands and, in several cases, other police officers.

But detainees appear to be targeted most often. The U.S. military has been working with the Iraqi government to standardize detention facilities and policies, and the U.S. assessment claims that several site visits turned up no serious human rights abuses. But the ministry documents reveal a brutal detention system in which officers run hidden jails, and torture and detainee deaths are common.

The documents mention four investigations into the deaths of 15 prisoners at the hands police commando units.

In the Rusafa section of Baghdad, a predominantly Shiite area known for its strong militia presence, police tortured detainees with electricity, beatings and, in at least one case, rape, according to the internal documents. Relief was reserved for those detainees whose relatives could afford to bribe detention officers to release them.

The Wolf Brigade, a notorious commando unit, illegally detained more than 650 prisoners, according to the documents. During a mass release of Wolf Brigade prisoners last November, a Times reporter saw dozens of malnourished men among the released detainees; several were so weak that they could not walk without assistance.

Female detainees are often sexually assaulted. According to the documents, the commander of a detention center in the Karkh neighborhood of the capital raped a woman who was an alleged insurgent in August. That same month, two lieutenants tortured and raped two other female detainees.

Among the strongest reprimands — and the most outrageous corruption — detailed in the documents are the cases involving two provincial police chiefs who were removed.


Brig. Gen. Adil Molan Ghaidan, the former Diyala province police chief, was accused of drinking on the job, illegally confiscating real estate from citizens, knowingly paying ghost employees and harboring suspected terrorists. He was removed from the force about six months ago, police sources say.

Before his removal several months ago, Maj. Gen. Ahmad Mohammed Aljiboori, the former Nineveh province police chief, allegedly assigned a private army of 1,400 officers to personal security detail. According to an internal inquiry, Aljiboori claimed the force was not under the Interior Ministry's control.

The document also accuses Aljiboori of detaining 300 Iraqis for two months without charges, wasting thousands of dollars on extravagant banquets and neglecting antiterrorism efforts to focus on arresting car dealers. The document says Aljiboori confiscated most of the cars for personal gain and gave some of them away to friends as gifts.

U.S. officials say they have known about Interior Ministry abuses for years but have done little to thwart them, choosing instead to push Iraqi leaders to solve their own problems.

"The military had been at the bunker prior to the raid in November," said the U.S. official, referring to the Jadiriya facility. "But they said nothing."

Some U.S. military leaders want American officials to have a stronger hand with the Interior Ministry, arguing that continuing corruption and militia influence are dashing any hope for a speedy American withdrawal.

Another senior military official said U.S. policy in regard to the ministry was confused and disengaged. The official, who asked not to be identified because his comments impugned his superiors, said the Pentagon and State Department had failed to coordinate their efforts and were disengaged from the Iraqi police leaders.

"They sit up there on the 11th floor of the ministry building and don't talk to the Iraqis," the official said of U.S. police trainers assigned to the Interior Ministry headquarters tower. "They say they do policy and [that] it's up to the Iraqis — well, they're just doing nothing. The MOI is the most broken ministry in Iraq."

quote:

Op zondag 9 juli 2006 21:03 schreef dontcare het volgende:

[..]

Van mij wel want dat is wat er aan de hand is nu.

quote:

De Iraakse tak van al-Qaida heeft maandag een video online gezet waarop de verminkte lichamen van twee Amerikaanse soldaten te zien zijn. De twee werden in juni ontvoerd en geëxecuteerd uit wraak op de verkrachting van een jonge Iraakse vrouw bij Mahmoediyah, ten zuiden van Bagdad.



Wraak
"Ziehier een film met wat over is van de lichamen van de twee Amerikaanse soldaten die bij Yoessoefiyah (ten zuiden van Bagdad) werden ontvoerd. We tonen deze beelden om onze zuster te wreken die is verkracht door een soldaat van dezelfde divisie," aldus de al-Choura Raad der Moedjahedien, een vereniging van gewapende Soennitische bewegingen in Irak die door al-Qaida wordt gedomineerd, in een voorwoord bij de video.

Kruisvaarder
"Toen de leeuwen van onze eenheid hoorden (van de verkrachting), hebben ze hun verzuchtingen onderdrukt om te vermijden dat de zaak bekendheid zou krijgen, maar ze hebben gezworen hun zuster te wreken," aldus de Raad op zijn website. "Dank zij aan God, want zij zijn erin geslaagd twee soldaten van dezelfde divisie als deze walgelijke kruisvaarder gevangen te nemen. Ziehier hun resten (...) om de harten der gelovigen te doen juichen," zo luidt het. Het filmbestand is ongeveer vijf minuten lang en toont de zwaar verminkte lichamen van de soldaten. Dat de twee waren ontvoerd en vermoord was al bekend. (belga/afp/hln)

quote:

Op dinsdag 11 juli 2006 12:02 schreef klez het volgende:

[..]

Van mij niet.
Het ophitsen door extremistische milities is wat mij betreft geen burgeroorlog.
Ik heb stellig de indruk dat het gros van de Irakezen hier niets mee te maken wil hebben.
Dat was tijdens bijvoorbeeld de Spaanse burgeroorlog wel anders.

quote:

Op dinsdag 11 juli 2006 19:14 schreef Monidique het volgende:

[..]

Denk je dat de Libanezen, Angolezen of Somaliërs te springen stonden om al het bloedvergieten? Natuurlijk niet. Toch was er een burgeroorlog. Elke dag worden er tientallen soennieten en sji'ieten vermoord om hun geloof, wijken worden gezuiverd en de hele samenleving is gepolariseerd. Honderdduizenden mensen zijn vermoord, verminkt of ontheemd ten gevolge van sektarisch geweld. Het maakt echt niet uit of de meerderheid van de Irakezen het wilt, dat is een criterium dat er niet toe doet: Irak is in een staat van burgeroorlog.

quote:

Op dinsdag 11 juli 2006 19:30 schreef zakjapannertje het volgende:

Immediate Withdrawal: Power Vacuums in Gaza and Iraq

By Doron Ben-Atar | Tuesday, July 11, 2006

With Iraq on the brink of civil war, popularity has increased for an immediate withdrawal of U.S. troops from the region. According to Doron Ben-Atar, there exist striking similarities between the proposed U.S. retreat and Israel’s 2005 pull-out from Gaza. He explores the dangers of a U.S. withdrawal while instability looms across Iraq.

quote:

Op dinsdag 11 juli 2006 22:44 schreef Glasnosteraar het volgende:

[..]

je ziet het! men luistert naar mij. Ze hebben blijkbaar mijn Wegwezen uit het Midden-Oosten - Pat Buchanan topic doorgenomen

Wegwezen uit het Midden-Oosten

quote:

Op dinsdag 11 juli 2006 22:49 schreef Dubbelzuurrr het volgende:

[..]

Heel goed, gezichtsverlies waarmee de machtspositie van de VS in de internationale betrekkingen danig aangetast raakt. Ík zou er alleen niet op rekenen dat het ook echt plaatsvindt omdat Dorot-Ben-Hatar het zegt....

quote:

Op dinsdag 11 juli 2006 23:02 schreef Glasnosteraar het volgende:

[..]

De machtspositie van de VS met Bush aan het roer is al dusdanig aangetast dat Bush als een leproos over de wereld rondreist.
En de verandering van opinie merk ik ook op een Amerikaans forum waar ik zo nu en dan rondhang. Of zich dat ook in beleidt vertaald moeten we natuurlijk afwachten, dat hangt in sterke mate af van de volgende president.

quote:

Stubborn Man Tries to Govern in Violent Iraq

Mamoon Sami Rashid is the governor with 29 lives.

That’s the number of assassination attempts he has counted since joining the Anbar provincial government in January 2005.

“You see, over there, that is where the suicide bomber tried to kill me,” Governor Rashid said with a smile as he drove his armored S.U.V. to work. Across the road, where he was pointing, lay the charred shells of half a dozen automobiles.

“Over here,” he said after a time, pointing again, “this is where they tried to shoot me.”

Car bomb, suicide bomber, mortar, gun; in his car, in his house, in a mosque: insurgents have tried to kill Mr. Rashid so many times and in so many different ways that he has nearly lost count. But life being what it is in Ramadi, Anbar’s tumultuous capital, Mr. Rashid probably will need a few more lives to survive until his term expires this year.

“They want to kill me,” he said, spinning the wheel, “because I will not let them have power.”

Mr. Rashid stands as the measure of both the tenacity and the weakness of the American-backed government in Anbar Province, west of Baghdad. Like the battered outpost that he calls his office, Mr. Rashid hangs on even as colleagues and friends have either lost their will or, in some cases, their lives.

His predecessor, Raja Nawaf, was kidnapped and killed. His deputy, Talib al-Dulaimi, was shot to death. Khidr Abdeljabar Abbas, the chairman of the provincial council, was killed in April. Last month, the governor’s secretary was beheaded.

Mr. Rashid, 49, survives largely with — and only with — the protection of American marines. They hold down the Government Center and escort him to and from work. They fly him around Anbar in a helicopter. Indeed, Mr. Rashid is more than just the symbol of the Anbar government; he seems the only functioning part. Most of the senior members of the government refuse to come to work or to show their faces in public.

quote:

Op dinsdag 11 juli 2006 23:02 schreef Glasnosteraar het volgende:

[..]

De machtspositie van de VS met Bush aan het roer is al dusdanig aangetast dat Bush als een leproos over de wereld rondreist.
En de verandering van opinie merk ik ook op een Amerikaans forum waar ik zo nu en dan rondhang. Of zich dat ook in beleidt vertaald moeten we natuurlijk afwachten, dat hangt in sterke mate af van de volgende president.

quote:

Dozens of Shiites kidnapped from Iraq bus station

BAGHDAD (AFP) - Dozens of Iraqi Shiites were kidnapped by gunmen from a bus station in the restive town of Muqdadiyah, northeast of the capital, a leading MP has announced in parliament

"There was a very serious breach of security in Diyala province today when 60-80 Shiites were kidnapped from the bus station in Muqdadiyah," senior Shiite MP Jalaleddin al-Saghir said following the prime minister's speech in front of the chamber.

"The police appear to be complicit in this incident because they pulled out of the area right before the kidnapping," he added Wednesday, echoing a charge more commonly raised by the minority Sunni community against the security forces.

quote:

Suicide bombing in Baghdad kills 7

BAGHDAD, Iraq - A suicide bomber blew himself up in a restaurant in Baghdad on Wednesday, killing seven people and wounding 31, while gunmen kidnapped at least 17 people in an ambush on a bus station north of the capital.

The attack on the restaurant occurred in New Baghdad, a mixed Shiite-Sunni neighborhood in southeastern Baghdad, local police chief Col. Ahmed Aboud said.

Gunmen also stormed a bus station in Muqdadiyah, about 60 miles north of Baghdad, abducting 17 civilians and taking them to an unknown destination, police said.

quote:

In Baghdad streets, little sign of rule of law

BAGHDAD (Reuters) - Private Uday Abdullah is one of 50,000 Iraqi troops and police sent on to Baghdad's streets last month to make the city safe -- but he does not see the point.

Lounging in the shade to escape the midday heat on Tuesday, the soldier said it is gunmen from rival Shi'ite and Sunni parties with clout in the government who rule the streets.

"We arrest lots of gunmen and they just walk free the next day. They're always from the Mehdi Army or the Badr Brigade or the Islamic Party. So what's the point of our job?" he said.

Many in Baghdad wonder the same thing as checkpoints set up as part of Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki's crackdown on violence spawn ever greater traffic jams but have failed to prevent dozens dying in sectarian shootings and bombings this week.

"We do nothing but create huge traffic jams with these checkpoints," Abdullah said.

Pointing to the traffic backed up on Senak Bridge, a major artery over the Tigris river, he said: "I am standing here. But I have no desire to be here."

Raed Abd al-Hafudh Saleem, a lieutenant in Baghdad's traffic department, is equally bemused and cynical.

From his concrete booth in the middle of a busy intersection in upmarket Mansour, he has a clear view of the many vehicles carrying heavily armed men that speed past every day.

"I don't know who these people are. I can't stop them because they never hesitate to point their guns at me."

Every morning, when he reports for duty at his little booth, he finds fresh bullet casings littering the road.

"I don't know where they come from. Everyone carries a gun in this country, from the bodyguards of officials and members of parliament to private security companies.

"How can I distinguish between all those and the insurgents, and militias?" he said.

He told how bodyguards recently fired into the air to clear the road for a ministerial convoy. When he remonstrated with them, one man fired a burst from his AK-47 just past his head.

"He said to me: 'Who are you to say this? I am the state."'

quote:

Iraqis turn to fake IDs for safety

BAGHDAD, Iraq - A bookstore in eastern Baghdad is getting more customers these days, but they aren't looking for something to read. The owner sells fake IDs, a booming business as Iraqis try to hide their identities in hopes of staying alive.

Although it's nearly impossible to distinguish between a Sunni and a Shiite by sight, names can be telling. Surnames refer to tribe and clan, while first names are often chosen to honor historical figures revered by one sect but sometimes despised by the other.

For about $35, someone with a common Sunni name like Omar could become Abdul-Mahdi, a Shiite name that might provide safe passage through dangerous areas.

"I got a fake ID card to protect myself from the Shiite militias who are deploying in Baghdad and hunt Sunnis at fake checkpoints," said Omar Abdul Rahman, a 22-year-old university student. He refused to give the name on his fake ID.

quote:

Op woensdag 12 juli 2006 09:43 schreef klez het volgende:

[..]

Dat is allemaal maar schijn. De Westerse leiders (onze leiders) zijn maar wat blij dat de Amerikanen een allang sluimerend gezwel hebben blootgelegd en de gevechten weten te concentreren in het Midden-Oosten. Al-Qaida en de Arabische fascisten die allang met hun stiekeme oorlog tegen het westen bezig waren kunnen geen kant meer op. Het is nu erop of eronder.
Die terugtrekking op korte termijn komt er helemaal niet; kijk maar wat er in Afghanistan gebeurt.

quote:

Op woensdag 12 juli 2006 14:42 schreef Glasnosteraar het volgende:

[..]

nou, als ik die artikelen van autodidact zo lees, ook die van 2 pagina's, besluipt me toch het gevoel dat dit niet meer goed gaat komen. Deel Iraq maar in drie stukken, en in zowel het shiitische en het sunnitische deel zal alleen een brute dictator de rust nog enigzins weten te bewaren.

quote:

Gekke is trouwens dat ik nog geeneens zo lang geleden een toeristenboekje (eind jaren 70) in handen had van Irak. M'n vader had een aanbod gekregen om te werken in Irak (voor Scania). Ging niet door omdat de oorlog met Iran uitbrak. Merkwaardige gewaarwording was dat.

quote:

Op woensdag 12 juli 2006 17:17 schreef klez het volgende:

[..]

Dat in drieeen delen, daar zal het wel op uit draaien als de Irakis dit niet zelf de kop in weten te drukken. Denk je dat het westen daar lang wakker van ligt...
Dat nut van die dictator zie ik verder niet zo.

quote:

Ik weet niet wat hij nu doet, maar veel "expats" komen buitengoed terecht, weet ik uit ervaring. Irak onder Saddam was nu niet echt een makkelijk land om integriteit te bewaren, lijkt me.

quote:

Sesame Street helps army children



US children's TV show Sesame Street is to be used to help American military families explain why a parent has to leave to serve overseas.

A DVD featuring popular character Elmo and his parents who are preparing for Elmo's dad to be deployed, will be handed out for free in August.

The DVD, produced in both English and Spanish, also features interviews with real-life families.

It also deals with the mixed feelings that occur when families are reunited.

About half a million children up to the age of five belong to families with one or both parents on active duty in the US, said Leslye Arsht, a US government undersecretary for military community and family policy.

Joanna Lopez and her family are featured in the DVD. Her husband has been deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan.

"Some parents don't know how to deal with children when there is a deployment," she said.

"Other kids in school will say, 'My daddy is away killing bad guys.' This prepares the mom or dad to prepare the kids with better things to say."

Story from BBC NEWS:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/hi/entertainment/5180458.stm

Published: 2006/07/14 12:56:01 GMT

© BBC MMVI

quote:

In one of the few comprehensive surveys of how many Iraqis have fled their country since the US invasion, the US Committee for Refugees and Immigrants said last month that there were 644,500 refugees in Syria and Jordan in 2005 — about 2.5 per cent of Iraq’s population. In total, 889,000 Iraqis had moved abroad, creating “the biggest new flow of refugees in the world”, according to Lavinia Limon, the committee’s president.

quote:

Gunmen kill 41 in raid on Iraq market

AGHDAD, Iraq - Dozens of heavily armed attackers raided an open air market Monday in a tense town south of Baghdad, killing at least 41 people and wounding 42, police and hospital officials said.

Some reports put the death toll far higher. Most of the victims were believed to be Shiites.

The attack in Mahmoudiya began about 9 a.m. with a brief mortar barrage, followed by an armed assault by dozens of gunmen. They killed three Iraqi soldiers at a checkpoint, then stormed the market while firing automatic weapons and rocket propelled grenades, police Capt. Rashid al-Samaraie said.

Following the attack, police rushed to the market, arresting people at random in an attempt to find the assailants, witnesses said.

quote:

Bomber kills 26 at cafe in northern Iraq

BAGHDAD, Iraq - A suicide bomber detonated explosives Sunday inside a cafe packed with Shiites in northern
Iraq, killing 26 people and injuring 22, an Iraqi general said. Gunmen seized a top Oil Ministry official, the second major kidnapping in as many days.

The U.S. military said an American soldier was killed in a roadside bombing in south Baghdad. No further details were released.

In the south, a British soldier was killed and another wounded during a raid against a "terrorist suspect" in Basra, the British military said. British troops arrested a top Shiite militia leader in the city, Iraqi police said, but it was unclear if the two events were linked.

quote:

30 at Sports Meeting In Iraq Are Abducted

BAGHDAD, July 15 -- The security guard at the Oil Ministry Cultural Center was bending down to kneel for midday prayer Saturday when someone behind him said, "Turn around and do not move."

The guard, Yasin Ibrahim Mustafa, turned to face the barrel of an AK-47, held by a man wearing an Iraqi police commando uniform. The man told Mustafa to stay in the guard room, then walked into the center in downtown Baghdad and joined dozens of other gunmen in the kidnapping of the head of Iraq's Olympic Committee and more than 30 other people who were attending a sports conference, police and witnesses said.

quote:

Car bomb in Iraq's Kufa kills 15: police

KUFA, Iraq (Reuters) - A car bomb hit a group of laborers near a Shi'ite mosque in the southern Iraqi city of Kufa on Tuesday, killing 15 and wounding 21, police said.

Hospital sources said they had received 17 bodies after the blast hit a crowded market that is next to the mosque. Policemen who arrived in the scene were pelted with rocks by angry protesters. Police fired into the air to disperse the crowds, and a Reuters witness two wounded from the shooting.

quote:

Op dinsdag 18 juli 2006 19:15 schreef Glasnosteraar het volgende:
At least 53 dead in latest Iraq bombing

quote:

Op dinsdag 18 juli 2006 20:41 schreef Autodidact het volgende:

[..]

Dezelfde als deze dus: [Centraal] Irak na de oorlog - deel 33

Alleen dan geactualiseerd (even om het plaatje weer goed te krijgen )

quote:

Op dinsdag 18 juli 2006 20:58 schreef Autodidact het volgende:
Of je leest even de berichten die al geplaatst zijn. Het is wel handig als je geactualiseerde berichten krijgt hoor, maar dat mensen niet gaan denken dat je de twee op kan tellen of zo.

quote:

16 killed in Iraq violence

BAGHDAD (AFP) - At least 16 people were killed in violence around Iraq, including five civilians killed by a blast outside the main courthouse in the northern oil city of Kiruk.
\Twelve civilians were also wounded in the bombing, most of them staff of the court.

In the capital, five people were killed and 20 wounded in a deadly combination of explosions targeting a police patrol and then rescue workers, an interior ministry official said Wednesday.

A car bomb exploded as a police patrol drove by the technology university in the central Rusafa district, wounding three policemen.

quote:

Iraq gunmen kidnap 20 Sunni agency workers

BAGHDAD, Iraq - Gunmen on Wednesday kidnapped 20 employees of a government agency that cares for Sunni mosques and shrines nationwide, and the organization suspended its work until further notice, an official said.

Also Wednesday, at least 20 people were killed in a string of bombings and shootings, mostly in Baghdad, police said. They included a senior Interior Ministry official slain on his way to work, police said.

Sixteen other bodies were found in widely separate parts of the country — apparent victims of sectarian death squads.

The announcement by the Sunni Endowment, a major institution within the Sunni community, further escalated sectarian tensions.

quote:

Iraqi civilian toll 6,000 for May, June

UNITED NATIONS - Nearly 6,000 civilians were slain across Iraq in May and June, a spike in deaths that coincided with rising sectarian attacks across the country, the United Nations said Tuesday.


The report from the U.N. Assistance Mission in Iraq describes a wave of lawlessness and crime, including assassinations, bombings, kidnappings, torture and intimidation.

Hundreds of teachers, judges, religious leaders and doctors have been targeted for death, and thousands of people have fled, the report said. Evidence suggests militants also have begun to target homosexuals, it said.

"While welcoming recent positive steps by the government to promote national reconciliation, the report raises alarm at the growing number of casualties among the civilian population killed or wounded during indiscriminate or targeted attacks by terrorists or insurgents," the U.N. said in a note accompanying the report.

In the last two days alone, more than 120 people were killed in violence in Iraq. In the worst attacks, fifty-three perished in a suicide bombing Tuesday in Kufa, and 50 were slain Monday in a market in Mahmoudiya.

According to the report, 2,669 civilians were killed in May and 3,149 were killed in June. Those numbers combined two counts: from the Ministry of Health, which records deaths reported by hospitals; and the Medico-Legal Institute in Baghdad, which tallies the unidentified bodies it receives.

quote:

Japanese troops return home from Iraq


TOKYO (AFP) - The first batch of Japanese troops has returned home from
Iraq to emotional family reunions as the officially pacifist nation wrapped up its most significant military operation since World War II.

The Iraq deployment was the closest Japanese troops had come to harm's way in more than 60 years, when it renounced the use of force under a US-imposed constitution.

quote:

In Iraq, Civil War All but Declared

BAGHDAD — Retaliatory massacres by gunmen and bombers linked to rival Muslim sects have left more than 130 people dead across Iraq over the last two days, the latest casualties of what some politicians now are calling an undeclared civil war.



At least 57 Iraqis were killed Tuesday and scores more injured when a suicide bomber lured a group of day laborers to his minivan with the promise of work before setting off explosives.

The bombing in Kufa rained blood, burnt debris and charred body parts on a small market across the street from the Muslim bin Aqil mosque, the main platform for radical Shiite cleric and militia leader Muqtada Sadr.

Since the beginning of May, attacks by Sunni Arab and Shiite Muslims have claimed the lives of more than 6,000 Iraqi civilians, according to a United Nations study and Iraqi police reports.

The Kufa blast, coming on the heels of mass killings and bombings attributed to Sadr's Al Mahdi militia and its Sunni Arab enemies, brought the battle to the Shiite cleric's doorstep, igniting fears of a fresh wave of reprisal killings.

"The message is clear, and the message confirms the sectarian differences," said Fadhil Sharih, a leader of the Sadr movement. [n]"It seems clear that it's been moving toward the direction of civil war."[/n]

U.S. and Iraqi government leaders have argued that the 150,000-strong foreign troop presence has kept the country from descending into full-scale civil war. But many Iraqi officials fear the threshold has been crossed.

"What is happening in Iraq is a disaster and a tragedy," Adnan Dulaimi, a Sunni Arab leader, said in an interview.

"It's bloodshed and killing of the innocents, killing the elderly and women and children. It's mass killings. It's nothing less than an undeclared civil war."

Many members of Iraq's political class spoke gravely of the massacres and bombings of the last few days, even as two U.S. Cabinet officials visiting Baghdad's heavily fortified Green Zone this week touted Iraq as a potential bonanza for private investors.

The Iraqi Islamic Party, the largest Sunni Arab political group, warned Tuesday that "Iraq is witnessing a grave escalation in violence," and it called on Iraqis "to return to their senses instead of slipping into the abyss."

The surge in violence has terrified residents of Baghdad and other mixed Sunni and Shiite areas. The Baghdad airport has been flooded with Iraqis of modest means seeking to escape even temporarily the country's upswing in sectarian slayings.

According to a U.N. study based on Health Ministry statistics, 2,669 Iraqi civilians were killed in May and 3,149 were killed in June. And this month, the violence appears to be accelerating, particularly in the Baghdad area that is the target of a sweeping security crackdown aimed at quelling the violence. U.S. and Iraqi troops launched the sweep, to great fanfare, after a visit in mid-June by President Bush.

"Things are getting worse," said Mahmoud Othman, a Kurdish lawmaker.

Even those who hesitate to call Iraq's sectarian violence a civil war have begun saying that defusing the situation will require the international mechanisms used to mediate previous ethnic, religious and political conflicts in Central America, the former Yugoslavia and Sri Lanka.

"I start to feel the need to say that there is a civil war," said Salim Abdullah Jabouri, a Sunni politician, "in order to borrow the tools and solutions of past civil wars to apply them here, and to call upon the international community to deal with Iraq's problems on this basis."

The latest cycle of violence began with the July 8 bombing of a small Shiite mosque in the Jihad neighborhood of southwest Baghdad.

Shiite militiamen took to the streets the next day, pulling Sunnis from their homes and cars and executing them on the spot.

A string of bombings targeting Shiite mosques and markets followed.

In the morgue, the bodies of Sunnis piled up, felled with single bullets to the head, apparently by Shiite death squads.

quote:

Sistani calls for end to violence
Iraq's most prominent Shia cleric, Ali al-Sistani, has called for an end to sectarian "hatred and violence".

The grand ayatollah said the violence would only prolong the presence of US forces in the country.

His call came as the US military admitted the level of violence was little changed since a large security crackdown in Baghdad last month.

A number of people were killed in fresh violence in the capital and other parts of the country on Thursday.

'Blind violence'

Correspondents say the ayatollah's comments were his strongest public statements on the issue of sectarian violence in recent months.

We have not witnessed the reduction in violence one would have hoped for in a perfect world
US Maj Gen William Caldwell

"I call on all sons of Iraq... to be aware of the danger threatening their nation's future and stand shoulder to shoulder in confronting it by rejecting hatred and violence," he said.

Ayatollah Sistani said the bombing in February of a Shia shrine in Samarra had unleashed "blind violence".

Unless halted the violence would "harm the unity of the people and block their hopes of liberation and independence for a long time", he said.

The US military on Wednesday again urged the Sunni and Shia communities to root out militias and death squads.

But the US military admitted on Thursday the massive security clampdown that followed the killing of al-Qaeda leader in Iraq Abu Musab al-Zarqawi had achieved only a "slight downtick" in violence.

The security plan included up to 50,000 police and soldiers on the streets of Baghdad and more checkpoints and raids on violent areas.

US Maj Gen William Caldwell said: "We have not witnessed the reduction in violence one would have hoped for in a perfect world."

The US said attacks had risen from an average of 24 a day between 14 June and 13 July to about 34 a day over the past five days.

The threat of sectarian violence has caused an increasing internal refugee problem.

Iraq's migration ministry said more than 30,000 people had registered as refugees this month alone, bringing the total of people seeking help since the Samarra bombing to 162,000.

In other developments on Thursday:

* A US marine died as a result of hostile action in western Anbar province, the military said

* At least three car bombs exploded in Baghdad - one killing three people and injuring 10 in a market area in Shula, police say

* Iraq's National Security Adviser Mowaffaq al-Rubaie says Iraq will be in charge of security in eight of the country's 18 provinces by the end of the year.

Story from BBC NEWS:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/hi/middle_east/5199162.stm

Published: 2006/07/20 16:10:14 GMT

© BBC MMVI

quote:

Op donderdag 20 juli 2006 20:23 schreef Dr-Islam het volgende:
Al-Sistani heeft al eerder eenzelfde oproep gedaan waaraan de sjiieten een lange tijd gehoor hebben gegeven. Maar het probleem was juist dat de soennieten vanaf het begin t/m heden non-stop sjiieten hebben afgeslacht en sinds een paar maanden doen de sjiieten wat terug. Als Israel het recht heeft om terreuracties te vergelden, dan hebben de sjiieten eenzelfde recht om zichzelf te verdedigen. De sjiieten worden als makke lammen afgeslacht op dit moment door Al-Qaida terroristen (soennieten), Saddam-loyalisten (soennieten) en sectarische psychopaten. Tot nu toe vergelden alleen leden van de Mahdi-leger (minderheid van de sjiieten) van Muqtada al-Sadr de aanvallen van de soennieten. Als er officieel sprake is van een burgeroorlog dan zullen de soennieten pas echt worden afgeslacht. Maar nu, nee, op dit moment houden de sjiieten zich nog redelijk goed in. Sinds tien dagen geleden de Mahdi-leger 40 soennieten heeft doodgeschoten (waaronder per ongeluk enkele sjiieten) zijn al ruim 200 sjiieten vermoord als "reactie". Drie keer raden welke incident het wereldnieuws haalde? Juist, de actie waarbij soennieten omkwamen. Als er sjiieten omkomen, dan is dat bijzaak. Want dat zijn we onderhand toch al wel gewend?

Blijkbaar moeten de sjiieten in Irak zich net zo terroristisch gedragen als een gedeelte van de sjiieten in Libanon (60%), Hezbollah, om het wereldnieuws te halen en om sympathie te krijgen.

Maar goed, blijf je ogen maar sluiten voor het leed van onschuldige mensen totdat de maat een keer goed vol is en je een zware reactie terug kan verwachten. En dan reageren de V.N en de internationale gemeenschap weer verbaasd..

quote:

Op donderdag 20 juli 2006 20:32 schreef Slayage het volgende:

[..]

Ten eerst waarom zo'n username?

Als er nu eenmaal een all out burgeroorlog wordt ontkenetend zal niemand meer veilig en dan zal het gevaar dat het een regionale oorlag wordt alleen maar groter.

Tegen wie heb je het eigenlijk met je laaste alinea? Wie zou zijn ogen blijven sluiten voor het leed van onschuldige mensen?

quote:

Op donderdag 20 juli 2006 21:08 schreef Autodidact het volgende:
Nu niks. Zowel Sji'ieten en soennieten plegen smerige aanslagen op burgers van de andere sekte.

quote:

Op donderdag 20 juli 2006 21:19 schreef Autodidact het volgende:
Ik heb in dit topic van meerdere aanslagen van sji'ieten op soennieten bericht, dus van actief terrorisme is sprake. Kan ik een staatje vinden met de claim dat 5.500 van de 6.000 burgerslachtoffers shi'ieten zijn?

quote:

Op donderdag 20 juli 2006 21:28 schreef Autodidact het volgende:
Ja, ik bericht eigenlijk over alles wat ik op nieuwssites en weblogs lees, dat kun je ook wel zien als je een beetje moeite zou doen. Ik vraag je nogmaals een staatje voor je claim dat 5500 van de 6000 burgerslachtofferse sji'ieten zijn, want ik weet helemaal niet wat de verhouding is. Show me the figures .

quote:

Op donderdag 20 juli 2006 20:39 schreef Autodidact het volgende:
Laat me raden, hierboven twee sji'ieten?

quote:

Op donderdag 20 juli 2006 20:58 schreef Dr-Islam het volgende:


1) Wat is er mis met mijn username?

quote:

Op donderdag 20 juli 2006 21:25 schreef Dr-Islam het volgende:

[..]

En je hebt zeker niet bericht over de aanslagen van soennieten op sjiieten?

quote:

Op donderdag 20 juli 2006 22:52 schreef Slayage het volgende:

[..]

Hoezo? Waaruit zou blijken dat ki Shia ben?

quote:

Op donderdag 20 juli 2006 22:53 schreef Slayage het volgende:

[..]

Met zo'n username prfileer je jezelf als een cyber imam of moet ik dat anders zien?

Maak je maar geen zorgen. Ik ben geen imam
En al helemaal niet de opvolger van die smeerlap Van de Ven.

quote:

Op donderdag 20 juli 2006 21:46 schreef Autodidact het volgende:
Ja, ik ben benieuwd.
In dit topic en de vorige staan bijna alle aanslagen van de laatste maand al vermeld.

quote:

US troops kill five, including child, in Iraq raid



BAQUBA, Iraq (AFP) - US troops in Iraq have killed two suspected insurgents, two women and a child when they called in air support during a raid on an alleged hideout north of Baghdad, a military statement said.

A further 23 people, including several more women and children, were wounded in the assault, which the US said targeted "terrorists associated with senior al-Qaida in Iraq network members".

An Iraqi police officer had earlier said US troops killed six people in the raid northwest of Baquba, and an AFP photographer saw six bodies in the city's hospital following the operation.

"As the troops began to secure the area, they received small arms fire from the rooftop of one of the initial target buildings," the US statement said on Friday, adding that soldiers had shouted warnings before calling in air support.

quote:

Curfew extended as Baghdad violence mounts

BAGHDAD (Reuters) - Bombs blasted worshippers at two mosques in Iraq during Friday prayers and the authorities extended a daytime curfew on Baghdad in an apparent effort to prevent violence after one of the bloodiest weeks this year.

Bombs outside minority Sunni mosques in Khalis, north of the capital, and in the mainly Shi'ite east of Baghdad, each killed one man and wounded two, police said.

quote:

“What do you call the situation in Iraq right now?” asked one person familiar with the situation. “The analysts know that it's a civil war, but there's a feeling at the top that [using that term] will complicate matters.” Negroponte, said another source regarding the potential impact of a pessimistic assessment, “doesn't want the president to have to deal with that.”

quote:

Gunmen attack Iraqi Shiite areas; 18 die

BAGHDAD, Iraq - Gunmen attacked two Shiite neighborhoods Friday in the same town where Sunnis opened fire on a market earlier this week, prompting Iraqi forces to call for American air support in a clash that killed at least 18 people, the Iraqi army said.

The attacks on Shiite neighborhoods occurred in Mahmoudiya, where 50 people were killed this week in a raid by Sunni gunmen on a market. Most of the victims were believed to be Shiites.

The 18 killed Friday included 11 attackers, four Iraqi soldiers and three police officers, the Iraqi army statement said.

quote:

On the eve of a high-profile meeting intended to demonstrate reconciliation among sectarian and ethnic factions before a White House visit by Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki, leaders admitted despair on the chances of averting all-out civil war.

"Iraq as a political project is finished," a top government official told Reuters -- anonymously because the coalition led by the Shi'ite Muslim prime minister remains committed in public to a U.S.-sponsored constitution preserving Iraq's unity.

"The parties have moved to Plan B," said the official, adding blocs representing Sunnis, Kurds and majority Shi'ites were looking at ways to divide power and resources and to solve the conundrum of Baghdad's mixed population of seven million.

"There is serious talk of Baghdad being divided into east and west," said the official, who has long been a proponent of the present government's objectives. "We are extremely worried."

quote:

Op vrijdag 21 juli 2006 00:38 schreef Dr-Islam het volgende:
Maak je maar geen zorgen. Ik ben geen imam
En al helemaal niet de opvolger van die smeerlap Van de Ven.

quote:

Op donderdag 20 juli 2006 23:12 schreef Autodidact het volgende:

[..]

Gevoel...Is het zo?

quote:

Four U.S. soldiers accused of murdering suspected insurgents during a raid in Iraq said they were under orders to "kill all military age males," according to sworn statements obtained by The Associated Press.

The soldiers first took some of the men into custody because they were using two women and a toddler as human shields. They shot three of the men after the women and child were safe and say the men attacked them.

"The ROE (rule of engagement) was to kill all military age males on Objective Murray," Staff Sgt. Raymond L. Girouard told investigators, referring to the target by its code name.

That target, an island on a canal in the northern Salahuddin province, was believed to be an al-Qaida training camp. The soldiers said officers in their chain of command gave them the order and explained that special forces had tried before to target the island and had come under fire from insurgents.

quote:

Fourteen killed as insurgents target Iraqi security forces



BAGHDAD (AFP) - At least eight civilians and six members of the Iraqi security forces have been killed in insurgent ambushes and bomb attacks around the country.

A US soldier was also killed when a roadside bomb targeted his convoy in Baghdad, and the bodies of ten murdered Iraqi civilians were found in two locations near the city.

Gunmen killed seven Shiite civilians as they worked on a house in the Sunni Khadra neighbourhood of west Baghdad, an interior ministry official said.

Two cars drew up outside the partly built house and several armed men charged inside and shot the seven dead. Khadra borders several western Baghdad areas with strong insurgent presences.

quote:

Iraq politician survives suicide bomb attack by own guard



SAMARRA, Iraq (AFP) - The chairman of the council in the Iraqi city of Samarra narrowly survived an assassination attempt by one of his guards who blew himself up as his boss returned home, police said.

Assad Ali Yassin, who has been council chairman of the restive city north of Baghdad for the past three months, had little reason to suspect a member of his own guard detail, a local officer said.

Waed al-Abbasi had been chosen from Yassin's own tribe and served as a guard at the chairman's home in the city's Khadra neighborhood.

But Yassin's personal bodyguards had their suspicions. Late on Tuesday night, as they accompanied Yassin home, they noticed something was amiss with Abbasi -- who then abruptly rushed towards the chairman.

The quick-acting bodyguards opened fire, killing Abbasi and setting off his vest of explosives well before he reached the chairman. One bodyguard was wounded in the blast, the officer said.

It was the third assassination attempt against Yassin, a member of the Iraqi Islamic Party, the main Sunni Arab party in the country.

quote:

U.S. moving more troops into Baghdad

BAGHDAD, Iraq - Seven Shiite workers were gunned down Saturday in a religiously mixed area of west Baghdad, and explosions in the capital killed one American solider and shattered a one-day calm after a ban on private vehicles expired.

The United States was moving to bolster U.S. troop strength in Baghdad to cope with escalating violence between Sunnis and Shiites.

The seven Shiites died in a drive-by shooting near Baghdad International Airport, police Lt. Maitham Abdul-Razzaq said. Two other workers were wounded.

Two large explosions struck eastern Baghdad. One killed a U.S. soldier near the Rasheed military camp, the U.S. military said. Another targeted an Iraqi police patrol but killed a civilian.

Two rockets exploded later Saturday in the heavily guarded Green Zone, which includes the U.S. and British embassies. There was no report of casualties.

U.S. and Iraqi troops sealed off part of east Baghdad following the blasts and searched homes and shops looking for weapons.

A ban on private vehicles had kept down violence Friday after one of the most violent weeks in the capital this year. It expired Friday evening, and within hours, heavy bursts of automatic weapons rang out.

Elsewhere in Iraq, three people were killed and five were injured in a bombing and shooting in the market in Baqouba, where U.S. forces killed five civilians — including two women and a toddler — the day before. The U.S. troops had taken fire from a building during a raid for suspected terrorists.

quote:

Many Iraqis have fled the country, mostly to Jordan and Syria, to avoid the violence. Syria now has 351,000 and Jordan 450,000 of these refugees, including 40 per cent of all Iraqi professionals, according to the US Committee for Refugees and Immigrants.

All of the 18 Iraqi provinces are dangerous, outside the three Kurdish provinces. The health ministry revealed for the first time in June that 50,000 Iraqis have been killed violently since 2003, but added that this was probably an under-estimate. Medical care for the wounded is declining because so many doctors have left the country. The ministry says 106 doctors and 164 nurses have been killed.

Doctors in Baghdad hospitals complain that even the operating theatres are not safe because soldiers or militiamen will order them to stop an operation half way through.

quote:

Op zaterdag 22 juli 2006 23:35 schreef Monidique het volgende:

[..]

_{[ bron ]}

Oftewel: dat land gaat helemaal naar z'n mallemoer. Een nieuw Libanon, of Afghanistan, of Somalië. Een failed state in ieder geval.

quote:

Another sign that factions that prefer violence over dialogue are getting more isolated; this time the radical 'association of Muslim scholars' is being renounced by no less than their former allies in the Islamic Party.

This report from Radio Sawa quotes Omar al-Jubori the head of the human rights office in the Iraqi Islamic Party as saying that Harith al-Dhari, secretary of the association of Muslim scholars was "responsible for 50% of the blood of Sunni Iraqis who were killed in Iraq".

In his statement Mr. Jubori said that Sunni political and religious leaderships were wrong when they prohibited Sunni men from enlisting in the Iraqi police and army (Arabic audio available).

I realize that most of you do not know Arabic so I'm going to pick excerpts from that statement, in a part I found interesting Mr. Jubori said:


Sunni political powers now demand that American troops remain in Iraq for some time…the American forces represent a balancing element between the people and the security forces that are not balanced in their sectarian composition…the Americans should work on correcting this imbalance.
[…]
Harith al-Dhari is responsible for 50% of Sunni deaths in Iraq, the Americans are responsible for 25% and the Shia militias are responsible for the other 25% and this is something that most Sunnis admit…


I kind of agree with the above statement but in somewhat a different way; it is probably correct that al-Dhari and his gangs were responsible directly for 50% of Sunni deaths but they are equally responsible for the other 50% but rather indirectly.
Ever since Saddam was toppled the al-Dhari's association was involved in most of the violence in Iraq in more than one way; they allied with Ba'athists, Saddamists and foreign terrorists and provided them with shelter and support. They preached hatred and sectarianism and provoked violence that we saw in the form of attacks in various regions in Iraq that killed thousands of Iraqis.

quote:

Blast kills 33, wounds dozens in Baghdad

BAGHDAD, Iraq - A suicide bomber blew up a minibus at a Baghdad market on Sunday, killing at least 33 people in addition to himself, police said.

Another 72 people, including women and children, were wounded in the attack in the Shiite district of Sadr City. The minivan exploded around 9 a.m., as the market was starting to get crowded, said police Lt. Kadhim al Garawi.

AP video from the scene showed the van's blackened hulk and an old man with bloody clothing crying for a missing relative.

Iraqi police cleared the area, warning over loudspeakers that anyone staying behind would be questioned.

Hours earlier, U.S. and Iraqi army units raided homes in the same area, killing at least one civilian and arresting seven, police said.

quote:

Car bombs in Iraq kill more than 50

BAGHDAD (Reuters) - A car bomb killed 36 civilians and wounded 72 in a Shi'ite district of east Baghdad on Sunday, a day after an inaugural meeting to start reconciling
Iraq's rival factions produced little tangible result.

Another car bomb exploded in the northern city of Kirkuk, killing at least 15 people near a court house, police and witnesses said.

The Baghdad bomb, near a police station and open-air market, was in the Sadr City neighborhood, a poor area that is a stronghold of Shi'ite militias. Three weeks ago, a car bomb at a market in the same area killed about 60 people, one of a number of very bloody incidents this month that have raised fears of civil war.

Shattered vehicles and stalls showed the power of the latest blast. Blood lay in pools. Some witnesses spoke of a suicide bomber driving a minivan but police said the cause was unclear.

There were also heavy clashes in the district overnight between the Mehdi Army of radical Shi'ite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr and U.S.-led forces, residents and police said.

The U.S. military said in a statement that Iraqi troops raided a site in mainly Shi'ite eastern Baghdad targeting two people believed to be involved in "death squads" -- a term usually applied to Shi'ite militia activity.

It said eight people were detained after a battle involving machineguns and grenades and that two Iraqi hostages were freed.

Two other people were arrested in a similar raid in northwestern Baghdad, the military said.

On Saturday, leaders held the inaugural meeting of the Higher Committee for Dialogue and National Reconciliation, in a show of sectarian and ethnic solidarity before a White House visit by the prime minister. But many remain pessimistic about the chances of tackling rising bloodshed.

The biggest party from the Sunni Arab community, which forms the backbone of a raging insurgency against a Shi'ite-led, U.S.-backed government, did not join the talks.

Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki will visit Washington to meet
President George W. Bush on Tuesday, after a stop in London on Monday, where he is expected to discuss ways of improving security in Baghdad, which is gripped by sectarian violence fuelling fears of civil war.

U.S. commanders have said they are considering sending more troops to the capital, whose 7 million people represent a rich and volatile mixture of all of Iraq's communities.

quote:

Op zaterdag 22 juli 2006 13:54 schreef Monidique het volgende:

[..]

_{[ bron ]}

quote:

Op zondag 23 juli 2006 10:04 schreef klez het volgende:

[..]

Kan Al-Qaida mooi roepen dat het de schuld van het Westen is. Zij hebben er niets mee te maken, tenslotte.

quote:

P.S Autodidact, geloof je me nu wel een beetje dat sjiieten op groter schaal worden afgeslacht?

quote:

In Iraq, Military Forgot Lessons of Vietnam
The real war in Iraq -- the one to determine the future of the country -- began on Aug. 7, 2003, when a car bomb exploded outside the Jordanian Embassy, killing 11 and wounding more than 50.

That bombing came almost exactly four months after the U.S. military thought it had prevailed in Iraq, and it launched the insurgency, the bloody and protracted struggle with guerrilla fighters that has tied the United States down to this day.

There is some evidence that Saddam Hussein's government knew it couldn't win a conventional war, and some captured documents indicate that it may have intended some sort of rear-guard campaign of subversion against occupation. The stockpiling of weapons, distribution of arms caches, the revolutionary roots of the Baathist Party, and the movement of money and people to Syria either before or during the war all indicate some planning for an insurgency.

But there is also strong evidence, based on a review of thousands of military documents and hundreds of interviews with military personnel, that the U.S. approach to pacifying Iraq in the months after the collapse of Hussein helped spur the insurgency and made it bigger and stronger than it might have been.

The very setup of the U.S. presence in Iraq undercut the mission. The chain of command was hazy, with no one individual in charge of the overall American effort in Iraq, a structure that led to frequent clashes between military and civilian officials.

On May 16, 2003, L. Paul Bremer III, the chief of the Coalition Provisional Authority, the U.S.-run occupation agency, had issued his first order, "De-Baathification of Iraq Society." The CIA station chief in Baghdad had argued vehemently against the radical move, contending: "By nightfall, you'll have driven 30,000 to 50,000 Baathists underground. And in six months, you'll really regret this."

He was proved correct, as Bremer's order, along with a second that dissolved the Iraqi military and national police, created a new class of disenfranchised, threatened leaders.

Exacerbating the effect of this decision were the U.S. Army's interactions with the civilian population. Based on its experience in Bosnia and Kosovo, the Army thought it could prevail through "presence" -- that is, soldiers demonstrating to Iraqis that they are in the area, mainly by patrolling.

"We've got that habit that carries over from the Balkans," one Army general said. Back then, patrols were conducted so frequently that some officers called the mission there "DAB"-ing, for "driving around Bosnia."

The U.S. military jargon for this was "boots on the ground," or, more officially, the presence mission. There was no formal doctrinal basis for this in the Army manuals and training that prepare the military for its operations, but the notion crept into the vocabularies of senior officers.

For example, a briefing by the 1st Armored Division's engineering brigade stated that one of its major missions would be "presence patrols." And then-Maj. Gen. Ricardo S. Sanchez, then the commander of that division, ordered one of his brigade commanders to "flood your zone, get out there, and figure it out." Sitting in a dusty command tent outside a palace in the Green Zone in May 2003, he added: "Your business is to ensure that the presence of the American soldier is felt, and it's not just Americans zipping by."

The flaw in this approach, Lt. Col. Christopher Holshek, a civil affairs officer, later noted, was that after Iraqi public opinion began to turn against the Americans and see them as occupiers, "then the presence of troops . . . becomes counterproductive."

The U.S. mission in Iraq is made up overwhelmingly of regular combat units, rather than smaller, lower-profile Special Forces units. And in 2003, most conventional commanders did what they knew how to do: send out large numbers of troops and vehicles on conventional combat missions.

Few U.S. soldiers seemed to understand the centrality of Iraqi pride and the humiliation Iraqi men felt in being overseen by this Western army. Foot patrols in Baghdad were greeted during this time with solemn waves from old men and cheers from children, but with baleful stares from many young Iraqi men.

Complicating the U.S. effort was the difficulty top officials had in recognizing what was going on in Iraq. Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld at first was dismissive of the looting that followed the U.S. arrival and then for months refused to recognize that an insurgency was breaking out there. A reporter pressed him one day that summer: Aren't you facing a guerrilla war?

"I guess the reason I don't use the phrase 'guerrilla war' is because there isn't one," Rumsfeld responded.

A few weeks later, Army Gen. John P. Abizaid succeeded Gen. Tommy R. Franks as the top U.S. military commander in the Middle East. He used his first news conference as commander to clear up the strategic confusion about what was happening in Iraq. Opponents of the U.S. presence were conducting "a classical guerrilla-style campaign," he said. "It's a war, however you describe it."

That fall, U.S. tactics became more aggressive. This was natural, even reasonable, coming in response to the increased attacks on U.S. forces and a series of suicide bombings. But it also appears to have undercut the U.S. government's long-term strategy.

"When you're facing a counterinsurgency war, if you get the strategy right, you can get the tactics wrong, and eventually you'll get the tactics right," said retired Army Col. Robert Killebrew, a veteran of Special Forces in the Vietnam War. "If you get the strategy wrong and the tactics right at the start, you can refine the tactics forever, but you still lose the war. That's basically what we did in Vietnam."

For the first 20 months or more of the American occupation in Iraq, it was what the U.S. military would do there as well.

"What you are seeing here is an unconventional war fought conventionally," a Special Forces lieutenant colonel remarked gloomily one day in Baghdad as the violence intensified. The tactics that the regular troops used, he added, sometimes subverted American goals.

Draconian Interrogation Ideas

On the morning of Aug. 14, 2003, Capt. William Ponce, an officer in the "Human Intelligence Effects Coordination Cell" at the top U.S. military headquarters in Iraq, sent a memo to subordinate commands asking what interrogation techniques they would like to use.

"The gloves are coming off regarding these detainees," he told them. His e-mail, and the responses it provoked from members of the Army intelligence community across Iraq, are illustrative of the mind-set of the U.S. military during this period.

"Casualties are mounting and we need to start gathering info to help protect our fellow soldiers from any further attacks," Ponce wrote. He told them, "Provide interrogation techniques 'wish list' by 17 AUG 03."
Some of the responses to his solicitation were enthusiastic. With clinical precision, a soldier attached to the 3rd Armored Cavalry Regiment recommended by e-mail 14 hours later that interrogators use "open-handed facial slaps from a distance of no more than about two feet and back-handed blows to the midsection from a distance of about 18 inches." He also reported that "fear of dogs and snakes appear to work nicely."

The 4th Infantry Division's intelligence operation responded three days later with suggestions that captives be hit with closed fists and also subjected to "low-voltage electrocution."

But not everyone was as sanguine as those two units. "We need to take a deep breath and remember who we are," cautioned a major with the 501st Military Intelligence Battalion, which supported the operations of the 1st Armored Division in Iraq. "It comes down to standards of right and wrong -- something we cannot just put aside when we find it inconvenient, any more than we can declare that we will 'take no prisoners' and therefore shoot those who surrender to us simply because we find prisoners inconvenient."

Feeding the interrogation system was a major push by U.S. commanders to round up Iraqis. The key to actionable intelligence was seen by many as conducting huge sweeps to detain and question Iraqis. Sometimes units acted on tips, but sometimes they just detained all able-bodied males of combat age in areas known to be anti-American.

These steps were seen inside the Army as a major success story, and they were portrayed as such to journalists. The problem was that the U.S. military, having assumed it would be operating in a relatively benign environment, wasn't set up for a massive effort that called on it to apprehend, detain and interrogate Iraqis, to analyze the information gleaned, and then to act on it.

"As commanders at all levels sought operational intelligence, it became apparent that the intelligence structure was undermanned, under-equipped and inappropriately organized for counter-insurgency operations," Lt. Gen. Anthony R. Jones wrote in an official Army report a year later.

Senior U.S. intelligence officers in Iraq later estimated that about 85 percent of the tens of thousands rounded up were of no intelligence value. But as they were delivered to the Abu Ghraib prison, they overwhelmed the system and often waited for weeks to be interrogated, during which time they could be recruited by hard-core insurgents, who weren't isolated from the general prison population.

In improvising a response to the insurgency, the U.S. forces worked hard and had some successes. Yet they frequently were led poorly by commanders unprepared for their mission by an institution that took away from the Vietnam War only the lesson that it shouldn't get involved in messy counterinsurgencies. The advice of those who had studied the American experience there was ignored.

That summer, retired Marine Col. Gary Anderson, an expert in small wars, was sent to Baghdad by the Pentagon to advise on how to better put down the emerging insurgency. He met with Bremer in early July. "Mr. Ambassador, here are some programs that worked in Vietnam," Anderson said.

It was the wrong word to put in front of Bremer. "Vietnam?" Bremer exploded, according to Anderson. "Vietnam! I don't want to talk about Vietnam. This is not Vietnam. This is Iraq!"

This was one of the early indications that U.S. officials would obstinately refuse to learn from the past as they sought to run Iraq.

One of the essential texts on counterinsurgency was written in 1964 by David Galula, a lieutenant colonel in the French army who was born in Tunisia, witnessed guerrilla warfare on three continents and died in 1967.

When the United States went into Iraq, his book, "Counterinsurgency Warfare: Theory and Practice," was almost unknown within the military, which is one reason it is possible to open Galula's text almost at random and find principles of counterinsurgency that the American effort failed to heed.

Galula warned specifically against the kind of large-scale conventional operations the United States repeatedly launched with brigades and battalions, even if they held out the allure of short-term gains in intelligence. He insisted that firepower must be viewed very differently than in regular war.

"A soldier fired upon in conventional war who does not fire back with every available weapon would be guilty of a dereliction of his duty," he wrote, adding that "the reverse would be the case in counterinsurgency warfare, where the rule is to apply the minimum of fire."

The U.S. military took a different approach in Iraq. It wasn't indiscriminate in its use of firepower, but it tended to look upon it as good, especially during the big counteroffensive in the fall of 2003, and in the two battles in Fallujah the following year.

One reason for that different approach was the muddled strategy of U.S. commanders in Iraq. As civil affairs officers found to their dismay, Army leaders tended to see the Iraqi people as the playing field on which a contest was played against insurgents. In Galula's view, the people are the prize.

"The population . . . becomes the objective for the counterinsurgent as it was for his enemy," he wrote.

From that observation flows an entirely different way of dealing with civilians in the midst of a guerrilla war. "Since antagonizing the population will not help, it is imperative that hardships for it and rash actions on the part of the forces be kept to a minimum," Galula wrote.

Cumulatively, the American ignorance of long-held precepts of counterinsurgency warfare impeded the U.S. military during 2003 and part of 2004. Combined with a personnel policy that pulled out all the seasoned forces early in 2004 and replaced them with green troops, it isn't surprising that the U.S. effort often resembled that of Sisyphus, the king in Greek legend who was condemned to perpetually roll a boulder up a hill, only to have it roll back down as he neared the top.

Again and again, in 2003, 2004, 2005 and 2006, U.S. forces launched major new operations to assert and reassert control in Fallujah, in Ramadi, in Samarra, in Mosul.

"Scholars are virtually unanimous in their judgment that conventional forces often lose unconventional wars because they lack a conceptual understanding of the war they are fighting," Lt. Col. Matthew Moten, chief of military history at West Point, would comment in 2004.

When Maj. Gregory Peterson studied a few months later at Fort Leavenworth's School of Advanced Military Studies, an elite course that trains military planners and strategists, he found the U.S. experience in Iraq in 2003-2004 remarkably similar to the French war in Algeria in the 1950s. Both involved Western powers exercising sovereignty in Arab states, both powers were opposed by insurgencies contesting that sovereignty, and both wars were controversial back home.

Most significant for Peterson's analysis, he found both the French and U.S. militaries woefully unprepared for the task at hand. "Currently, the U.S. military does not have a viable counterinsurgency doctrine, understood by all soldiers, or taught at service schools," he concluded.

Casey Implements a New Tactic

In mid-2004, Gen. George W. Casey Jr. took over from Sanchez as the top U.S. commander in Iraq. One of Casey's advisers, Kalev Sepp, pointedly noted in a study that fall that the U.S. effort in Iraq was violating many of the major principles of counterinsurgency, such as putting an emphasis on killing insurgents instead of engaging the population.

A year later, frustrated by the inability of the Army to change its approach to training for Iraq, Casey established his own academy in Taji, Iraq, to teach counterinsurgency to U.S. officers as they arrived in the country. He made attending its course there a prerequisite to commanding a unit in Iraq.

"We are finally getting around to doing the right things," Army Reserve Lt. Col. Joe Rice observed one day in Iraq early in 2006. "But is it too little, too late?"

One of the few commanders who were successful in Iraq in that first year of the occupation, Lt. Gen. David Petraeus, made studying counterinsurgency a requirement at the Army's Command and General Staff College at Fort Leavenworth, where mid-career officers are trained.

By the academic year that ended last month, 31 of 78 student monographs at the School of Advanced Military Studies next door were devoted to counterinsurgency or stability operations, compared with only a couple two years earlier.

And Galula's handy little book, "Counterinsurgency Warfare: Theory and Practice," was a bestseller at the Leavenworth bookstore.

This is the first of two articles adapted from the book "Fiasco: The American Military Adventure in Iraq" by Thomas E. Ricks. Penguin Press, New York, © 2006.

quote:

Op zondag 23 juli 2006 15:17 schreef Monidique het volgende:
Bomaanslagen, die meestal sji'ietische slachtoffers eisen, komen sneller in het nieuws dan de moordpartijen van de sji'ietische doodseskaders.

quote:

Op zondag 23 juli 2006 15:17 schreef Monidique het volgende:
Bomaanslagen, die meestal sji'ietische slachtoffers eisen, komen sneller in het nieuws dan de moordpartijen van de sji'ietische doodseskaders.

quote:

Op zondag 23 juli 2006 15:14 schreef Autodidact het volgende:

[..]

Ik zou het geloven als je statistiek hebt gedaan. Ten eerste klopte je verhouding (5500-500) niet en ten tweede is dit onderzoekje over twee weken geen conclusie waardig. Ik wacht.

quote:

Op zondag 23 juli 2006 16:14 schreef klez het volgende:
Een lang edoch weer eens uitstekend verhaal in the Washington Post:
[..]
Feeding the interrogation system was a major push by U.S. commanders to round up Iraqis. The key to actionable intelligence was seen by many as conducting huge sweeps to detain and question Iraqis. Sometimes units acted on tips, but sometimes they just detained all able-bodied males of combat age in areas known to be anti-American.
[..]

quote:

Op zondag 23 juli 2006 16:22 schreef Umm-Qasr het volgende:

[..]

Die bomaanslagen komen in het nieuws omdat meestal grote aantallen slachtoffers daarbij betrokken zijn. En de slachtoffers zijn zulke zelfmoordaanslagen zijn bijna altijd Sjie'ieten.

quote:

Vederis het tegendeel van jouw bewering juist: incidenten van Amerikaans mis-conduct tav Sooennieten halen de voorpagina's zoals Haditha en Mahmoudiyyah.

quote:

Op zondag 23 juli 2006 16:30 schreef Dr-Islam het volgende:

[..]

Omgekeerde wereld

quote:

‘Na Abu Ghraib is er nog niks veranderd’

Maandag 24 juli 2006 - NEW YORK – De martelingen en mishandelingen van Irakezen in Amerikaanse gevangenschap gingen onverminderd door, ook nadat het Abu Ghraib-schandaal aan het licht was gekomen.
Bovendien werden de mishandelingen van bovenaf toegestaan en zelfs aangemoedigd, stelt de Amerikaanse mensenrechtenorganisatie Human Rights Watch in een gisteren vrijgegeven rapport.

In het 53 pagina’s tellende document Geen Bloed, Geen Fout: het relaas van militairen over gevangenenmishandeling in Irak, beschrijven Amerikaanse militairen de wantoestanden in de periode 2003-2005.

De onderzochte mishandelingen vonden plaats in drie detentiecentra bij Bagdad, Mosul en langs de grens met Syrië.

Gedetineerden werden stelselmatig afgeranseld, moesten zich gedurende lange tijd in een pijnlijke houding stilhouden, werden lange tijd wakker gehouden en blootgesteld aan extreme hitte en kou. Ook werden gevangenen met honden bedreigd en moesten gedetineerden op hun knieën door gravel kruipen.

„Militairen werd verteld dat de Geneefse Conventies (over het internationale humanitaire oorlogsrecht) niet van toepassing waren en dat de ondervragers ruwe technieken mochten gebruiken om de gevangenen aan het praten te krijgen“, aldus John Sifton, de samensteller van het rapport. Militairen die hogerop hun beklag deden over de martelpraktijken werden genegeerd of kregen te horen dat ze beter hun mond konden houden.

„Deze beschuldigingen weerleggen de lezing van de Amerikaanse regering, dat mishandelingen en martelingen niet van hogerhand zijn goedgekeurd en een uitzondering zijn geweest“, aldus Sifton. Een woordvoerder van het Amerikaanse ministerie van Defensie wees gisteren de beschuldigingen van de hand.

In het voorjaar van 2004 doken foto’s op van Amerikaanse bewakers en ondervragers die zich in Abu Ghraib-gevangenis bij Bagdad schuldig hadden gemaakt aan marteling en seksuele intimidatie van gevangenen. In verband met de zaak zijn tot nu toe elf Amerikaanse militairen veroordeeld, maar geen enkele leidinggevende.
_{bron: http://www.bndestem.nl}

quote:

Sectarian break-up of Iraq is now inevitable, admit officials

"Iraq as a political project is finished," a senior government official was quoted as saying, adding: "The parties have moved to plan B." He said that the Shia, Sunni and Kurdish parties were now looking at ways to divide Iraq between them and to decide the future of Baghdad, where there is a mixed population. "There is serious talk of Baghdad being divided into [Shia] east and [Sunni] west," he said.

quote:

A United Nations assessment issued last week said the death toll in Iraq has been climbing steadily, with a total of nearly 6,000 deaths recorded in May and June. U.S. military commanders say the number of major attacks in Baghdad in July is up nearly 40% from earlier this summer. While some regions remain relatively peaceful, formerly calm areas of the south -- including Basra, the second-largest city -- show growing unrest. Inside Iraq, some political leaders openly admit that communal warfare has broken out between Sunni Muslim Arabs, who constitute some 20% of the nation's population, and the Shiite majority.

"Sectarian war has already begun in Iraq," says Salih al-Mutlaq, one of the country's leading Sunni politicians and a member of its parliament. "What is happening now is a preparation for a civil war."

quote:

Head of Saddam's tribe killed by gunmen

BAGHDAD, Iraq - The head of Saddam Hussein's tribe was killed when gunmen attacked a meeting in the office of a prominent sheik in Tikrit, police said Tuesday.

Mahmoud Ali Hussein al-Nida, head of the Baijat tribe, died following the attack around 7:30 p.m. Monday. The gunmen also killed a lawyer and wounded sheik Mizahim al-Mustafa, police Lt. Ahmed Asaad said. Two other civilians caught in the crossfire also were killed, Asaad said.

The Baijat tribe includes several clans, including Saddam's Albu-Nassir clan. Al-Nida was not directly related to Saddam.

In other violence Tuesday, police in Diyala province said five bodies were found on the streets in Muqdadiyah, about 60 miles north of Baghdad.

At least seven others were injured when a roadside bomb exploded near a passing minivan around 9:30 a.m. in east Baghdad. All were hospitalized, police said.

Gunmen also killed a police officer in front of his office in Mosul, police said.

quote:

Fourteen killed in Iraq attacks

BAGHDAD (AFP) - Six police and eight civilians have been killed in a series of attacks in and around Baghdad, police said.

As night fell on Monday, gunmen ambushed an Iraqi police unit in central Baghdad, triggering a gunbattle in which six officers were killed and 30 were wounded.

The clash took place on Haifa Street near the west bank of the Tigris River, north of the fortified Green Zone, the seat of the Iraqi government and the US embassy.

It underlined the failure of the Iraqi government's six-week-old operation to regain control of Baghdad's streets from anti-regime insurgents and sectarian militias.

On Tuesday, two roadside bombs exploded in the city, killing two civilians and wounding two bystanders and a policeman.

In another attack, a family of Shiite civilians who had been threatened by a sectarian death squad were ambushed by gunmen as they fled a mainly Sunni neighbourhood south of the city, medical and defence officials said.

Two of the family were killed and one was wounded when their removal van was sprayed with bullets.

Four other civilians were shot dead around the capital, two of them in drive-by shootings, while the corpses of two tortured murder victims were also found by the roadside, police said.

quote:

VS-soldaat: collega's doodden Iraakse gevangenen

ANP

TIKRIT - Een twintigjarige Amerikaanse soldaat heeft vier van zijn collega's beschuldigd van het doden van drie Iraakse gevangenen. Bradley Mason zei dat zij vervolgens gedreigd hadden hem te doden als hij er iets over zou vertellen.

Mason deed zijn uitspraak tijdens een hoorzitting op een Amerikaanse basis bij de Iraakse stad Tikrit, die bedoeld is om te bepalen of de vier militairen vervolgd moeten worden wegens moord.

De vier zouden op 9 mei tijdens een aanval op een vermeende basis van de terreurorganisatie Al Qa'ida de opdracht hebben gekregen alle mannen te doden die zouden kunnen vechten. Zij hebben gezegd dat zij de gevangenen hadden doodgeschoten toen die op de vlucht waren geslagen.

De Amerikaanse militairen schoten bij de vermeende terreurbasis een man dood en namen drie anderen gevangen, aldus de lezing van Mason. Deze drie mannen schoten zij even later dood. Mason verklaarde dat hij hun bedreiging met de dood aan zijn adres ‘behoorlijk serieus’ had genomen.

quote:

At least 12 people, many of them children, have been killed in bomb attacks while they were playing football in west Baghdad, police say.

Two blasts hit a makeshift pitch on waste ground in a mainly Shia district. About a dozen other people were hurt.

quote:

Op donderdag 3 augustus 2006 11:57 schreef Godslasteraar het volgende:
Children killed; will there be an outrage?
Topics: Uncategorized

Iraqis children were bombed by terrorists as they were playing soccer.
[..]

Will there be a similar outrage across the ArabWestern world simlar to the one we saw after Qana? Will there be any demonstrations? Will Al Jazeera CNN and friends broadcast gruesome pictures of dead children over and over again? Will they air one sensational program after another?

The answer is no. Why? Because of this.

quote:

Op donderdag 3 augustus 2006 11:57 schreef Godslasteraar het volgende:
Children killed; will there be an outrage?
Topics: Uncategorized

Iraqis children were bombed by terrorists as they were playing soccer.
[..]

Will there be a similar outrage across the Arab world simlar to the one we saw after Qana? Will there be any demonstrations? Will Al Jazeera and friends broadcast gruesome pictures of dead children over and over again? Will they air one sensational program after another?

The answer is no. Why? Because of this.

quote:

Iraq civil war warning for Blair
Civil war is a more likely outcome in Iraq than democracy, Britain's outgoing ambassador in Baghdad has warned Tony Blair in a confidential memo.

William Patey, who left the Iraqi capital last week, also predicted the break-up of Iraq along ethnic lines.

He did also say that "the position is not hopeless" - but said Iraq would remain "messy and difficult" for the next five to 10 years.

The Foreign Office said it did not comment on leaked documents.

However, it added: "Every day the capacity of the Iraqi security forces to manage their own security is growing."

BBC correspondent Paul Wood said although the document does not contradict government denials that civil war is imminent, "it is a devastating official assessment of the prospects for a peaceful Iraq, and stands in stark contrast to the public rhetoric".

'State within a state'

The bleak assessment of the country's future was contained in Mr Patey's final e-cable, or diplomatic telegram, from Baghdad.

You move from optimism and pessimism, it's a thin dividing line. What I don't have is a sense of hopelessness or despair
William Patey
Interviewed on BBC, 27 July
The prospect of a low intensity civil war and a de facto division of Iraq is probably more likely at this stage than a successful and substantial transition to a stable democracy
William Patey
Last official private memo

The distribution list included the UK's prime minister, foreign secretary, defence secretary and House of Commons leader, as well as senior military commanders in both Iraq and the UK.

Mr Patey wrote: "The prospect of a low intensity civil war and a de facto division of Iraq is probably more likely at this stage than a successful and substantial transition to a stable democracy.

"Even the lowered expectation of President Bush for Iraq - a government that can sustain itself, defend itself and govern itself and is an ally in the war on terror - must remain in doubt."

Talking about the Shia militias blamed for many killings, Mr Patey added: "If we are to avoid a descent into civil war and anarchy then preventing the Jaish al-Mahdi (the Mahdi Army) from developing into a state within a state, as Hezbollah has done in Lebanon, will be a priority."

If people are determined to kill one another because of a Sunni/Shia divide there is not a lot that can be done
Phil Dee, Wales

The cable says that "the next six months are crucial" - an assessment which is shared by the coalition's military commanders.

Senior military sources told the BBC it was "make or break" time in Iraq. The Americans are sending thousands of extra troops to Baghdad, starting next week.

The Conservative Party's head of policy, Oliver Letwin, called on ministers to be more honest about the situation.

"It's very difficult to offer the constructive support which we want to offer and for the public to understand what's going on if the government doesn't give a very clear and frank account of the assessment," he said.

Liberal Democrat foreign affairs spokesman Michael Moore said there needed to be a clear strategy for Iraq, including the engagement of neighbouring countries such as Iran, Syria and Turkey.

"Unless we seriously and radically rethink our approach, as the ambassador warns, we will run the serious risk of a descent into civil war," he said.

The BBC has also learned, from military sources, that British troops in Basra are planning to dramatically step up operations against Shia gunmen.

Mr Patey urges the government to ensure that Iraqi troops are brought into this effort as the British forces "can't confront the militias alone".

On Wednesday, President Jalal Talabani said Iraqi police and troops would be taking the security lead throughout the whole country by the end of the year.

Story from BBC NEWS:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/hi/uk_news/5240808.stm

Published: 2006/08/03 08:37:38 GMT

© BBC MMVI

quote:

Op donderdag 3 augustus 2006 12:14 schreef Mutant01 het volgende:

[..]

Die onzin blog van je ook. En dan zeggen dat het geen propblog is.

quote:

Op donderdag 3 augustus 2006 16:12 schreef franske19 het volgende:
Haha dat wordt dan meteen als onzin bestempeld, de users hier zijn al net zo hypocriet als de moslim leiders in het Midden Oosten.

quote:

Op donderdag 3 augustus 2006 16:17 schreef Slayage het volgende:

[..]



wat in die blogs wordt gezet zijn gewoon meningen van mensen, het heeft een hoge entertainment value, maar heeft niet al te veel met objectieve journalistiek te maken

quote:

Op donderdag 3 augustus 2006 16:25 schreef Incomplete het volgende:

[..]

Het bewust doden van kinderen is weinig verheffend.
Het punt wat in die blogs gemaakt wordt, gezien de ophef over Qana, vind ik wel terecht.

Het een is per ongeluk, het ander bewust. Het een wordt wereldwijd uitgemolken, het
ander komt in een 5 regelig achterafberichtje terecht.

Hmm, zet je toch wel even aan het denken.

quote:

Op donderdag 3 augustus 2006 16:26 schreef Slayage het volgende:

[..]

het ene is nu 3 jaar gaande het ander 3 weken, dat is het verschil

quote:

Op donderdag 3 augustus 2006 16:25 schreef Incomplete het volgende:

[..]

Het bewust doden van kinderen is weinig verheffend.
Het punt wat in die blogs gemaakt wordt, gezien de ophef over Qana, vind ik wel terecht.

Het een is per ongeluk, het ander bewust. Het een wordt wereldwijd uitgemolken, het
ander komt in een 5 regelig achterafberichtje terecht.

Hmm, zet je toch wel even aan het denken.

quote:

Op donderdag 3 augustus 2006 17:34 schreef Mutant01 het volgende:

[..]

Nee, ze maken geen punt namelijk. De arabische wereld geeft er evenveel aandacht aan als de rest van de wereld op dit moment, nada dus. Net als dat wij hier niets van Congo meekrijgen e.d. De media hier in het WESTEN hadden het ook alleen maar over Qana, en tussendoor heel kort over Irak. Dat deze persoon een soort van haat jegens arabieren koestert, moet ie zelf weten, maar daardoor is het en blijft het een propblog met extreem eenzijdige berichtgeving.

quote:

Op donderdag 3 augustus 2006 17:55 schreef Incomplete het volgende:

[..]

Zijn de kinderen van Qana meer waard dan die in Irak? Voor de Arabische media wel.
Het lijkt me ook niet interessant als je Israel of de USA niet de schuld
kunt geven maar die schuld bij "broeders" onderling moet gaan zoeken, logisch.
Als het een Amerikaanse bom was geweest dan waren de oproepen tot
wraak niet van de lucht geweest met de daarbij horende hypocriete verontwaardiging.
En in de westerse media heb ik er wel over gelezen maar ook daar miste ik
de grote krantenkoppen.

quote:

Op donderdag 3 augustus 2006 16:31 schreef Incomplete het volgende:

[..]

Ah, ok.

Ik wist niet dat dat voor die kindertjes wat uitmaakte.

quote:

Op donderdag 3 augustus 2006 18:00 schreef Mutant01 het volgende:

[..]

Wat een onzin zeg. De aanval op Qana was overal ter wereld belangrijker dan de aanslagen (waarvan er meer dan 25 per dag plaatsvinden) in Irak. Iets wat overigens OOK de verantwoordelijkheid is van de VS. Ondanks dat hoor ik de Westerse Media ook niet daarover. Terwijl zij toch echt de bezettingsmacht zijn Selectieve verontwaardiging, maar ach, er zijn geen westerse troepen bij betrokken, dus vinden we het niet "erg". Zelfde lompe redenatie Incomplete.

Oftewel, dit is net zo goed selectieve verontwaardiging van de blog zelf, en het is gewoon een leugen. Want binnen de Arabische wereld vinden ze dat ook gewoon erg.

quote:

Op donderdag 3 augustus 2006 18:00 schreef Mutant01 het volgende:

[..]
Wat een onzin zeg

quote:

De aanval op Qana was overal ter wereld belangrijker dan de aanslagen (waarvan er meer dan 25 per dag plaatsvinden) in Irak. Iets wat overigens OOK de verantwoordelijkheid is van de VS. Ondanks dat hoor ik de Westerse Media ook niet daarover.

quote:

Terwijl zij toch echt de bezettingsmacht zijn

quote:

Selectieve verontwaardiging, maar ach, er zijn geen westerse troepen bij betrokken, dus vinden we het niet "erg".

quote:

het is gewoon een leugen

quote:

Op donderdag 3 augustus 2006 18:03 schreef Slayage het volgende:

[..]

loop nou niet te zeiken dude, je weet heus wel waar ik op doel

quote:

Op donderdag 3 augustus 2006 18:30 schreef Incomplete het volgende:

[..]

quote:

Op donderdag 3 augustus 2006 17:34 schreef Mutant01 het volgende:

[..]

Nee, ze maken geen punt namelijk. De arabische wereld geeft er evenveel aandacht aan als de rest van de wereld op dit moment, nada dus. Net als dat wij hier niets van Congo meekrijgen e.d. De media hier in het WESTEN hadden het ook alleen maar over Qana, en tussendoor heel kort over Irak. Dat deze persoon een soort van haat jegens arabieren koestert, moet ie zelf weten, maar daardoor is het en blijft het een propblog met extreem eenzijdige berichtgeving.

quote:

Blasts hit Baghdad football game

At least 12 people, many of them children, have been killed in bomb attacks while they were playing football in west Baghdad, police say.
Two blasts hit a makeshift pitch on waste ground in a mainly Shia district. About a dozen other people were hurt.

Police say the bombs had been buried in the middle of the football pitch.

The attack came hours after Iraq's president said Iraqi forces would take over the security of the entire country from US-led forces by the end of 2006.

President Jalal Talabani told a news conference the transfer would happen gradually but would be completed before the new year.

Iraq has been hit by repeated bomb attacks despite attempts by the government to improve security.

quote:

Op donderdag 3 augustus 2006 13:18 schreef Slayage het volgende:

[..]

gezwets, maar dat je zelf ook natuurlijk

quote:

Op vrijdag 4 augustus 2006 20:05 schreef Godslasteraar het volgende:

[..]

Nee, het is nu juist dé reden dat niemand moslims serieus neemt. (behalve moslims zelf dan hé).
Aan de opmerkingen van Big Pharaoh valt niets toe te voegen wat mij betreft. En dat sommigen zijn blog, en die van Sandmonkey, uit nood dan maar propaganda noemen (voor wie?) was te verwachten.

quote:

Op donderdag 3 augustus 2006 11:57 schreef Godslasteraar het volgende:
Children killed; will there be an outrage?
Topics: Uncategorized

Iraqis children were bombed by terrorists as they were playing soccer.
[..]

Will there be a similar outrage across the Arab world simlar to the one we saw after Qana? Will there be any demonstrations? Will Al Jazeera and friends broadcast gruesome pictures of dead children over and over again? Will they air one sensational program after another?

The answer is no. Why? Because of this.

quote:

Op vrijdag 4 augustus 2006 21:31 schreef Yildiz het volgende:
..............

Mijn (westerse) krant had er 2 grote pagina's vol van. Lijkt me meer dan genoeg.
Wat denk ik ook een beetje meetelt, het is net zoals Israel vs. Palestina een paar jaar geleden. Toen waren er ook geen nieuwe ontwikkelingen, en dan hoorde je tijdens journaal de aantallen slachtoffers tussen het verkeer en het weer, bij wijze van spreken. Een afstompingfactor... hoe erg ook, de nieuwswaarde wordt minder.

quote:

Op vrijdag 4 augustus 2006 23:12 schreef Godslasteraar het volgende:

[..]

het gaat ook niet om Westerse media, maar in dit geval vooral om de publieke opinie in Egypte die zich wel opwindt over misdaden van Israeliërs (al dan niet terecht) maar een complete volkerenmoord (op moslims notabene) in een buurland aan de Zuidgrens volledig negeert.
Op zich is het natuurlijk niet echt verbazingwekkend, we zien dat sektarische groepsdenken waarbij de buitenstaander niemand minder is dan Satans hulpje, brandstof voor de hel, overal in het Midden Oosten.

quote:

Scholen vaker doelwit van taliban

quote:

Irak

commentaar door Jan van Benthem

Een grimmig kijkende president Talabani maakte deze week bekend dat voor het eind van dit jaar het Iraakse leger en de politie de controle over de veiligheid zelf in handen hebben. In de betrekkelijk veilige 'Groene Zone' in Bagdad kun je dat zeggen. Maar buiten op de straten van Bagdad worden zulke woorden overstemd door het toenemende rumoer van een burgeroorlog. De Britten realiseren zich dat, de Amerikanen ook. Beide maken zich op om in de belangrijkste steden van Irak de situatie weer onder controle proberen te krijgen. Bagdad, Basra en Mosul kennen inmiddels een uitgaansverbod, bruggen en wegen zijn afgesloten. Maar de aanslagen verplaatsen zich daarmee nog meer naar de burgers. Bommen worden ingegraven in voetbalveldjes, waar ze de kinderen aan stukken scheuren.

Anders gezegd, ze scheuren de toekomst van Irak aan stukken. Het geweld is anders geworden. Het is niet vooral gericht op het verdrijven van de buitenlandse troepen, het is minstens zo genadeloos gericht tegen Iraakse burgers. Die hebben in achtereenvolgende verkiezingen duidelijk hun wens kenbaar gemaakt voor een gebalanceerde machtsverdeling. Maar in de wreedheid van de dictatuur van Saddam hebben teveel mensen niet anders leren denken dan in termen van macht en repressie. Allereerst waren het de baathisten die hun oude macht niet wilden loslaten. Zij begonnen met het geweld tegen de Amerikaanse militairen en de Iraakse regering. Maar achter de schermen organiseerden zich andere, sektarische groeperingen als het Mahdi-leger van de jonge radicale sjiďtische al-Sadr. Te laat heeft Amerika ingezien dat dit sektarische geweld onmiddellijk de kop moest worden ingedrukt. En hoewel al-Sadr het in Najaf en Karbala uiteindelijk moest opgeven tegen de coalitietroepen, kon hij ongehinderd uitwijken naar de sjiďtische wijken van Bagdad en daar verder bouwen aan zijn meedogenloze machtsbasis.

Twee mannen die de situatie van dichtbij hebben meegemaakt en betrokken waren bij de pogingen vrede en democratie in Irak te brengen, hebben nu hun vrees uitgesproken dat een burgeroorlog in Irak de meest waarschijnlijke uitkomst is van de bevrijding die de Amerikanen en Britten wilden brengen. Het zal de toch al zo ontvlambare regio voor langere tijd bedreigen als een uitslaande brand. En het is, zoals de Amerikaanse bevelhebber Abizaid constateerde, een verlammend conflict. Het beeld van democratie en mensenrechten dat het Westen zo graag uitdraagt is zware schade toegebracht. Het vacuüm aan moreel gezag dat daardoor is ontstaan lokt anderen uit tot meer geweld, zoals Hezbollah-leider Nasrallah dagelijks duidelijk maakt. Of we het willen of niet, het Westen is terecht gekomen in een zwaar en lang conflict waar we ons alleen nog aan kunnen onttrekken ten koste van de burgers van het Midden-Oosten die wel vrede en veiligheid willen, inclusief het volk van Israël.

quote:

04/08 Grote pro-Hezbollah demonstratie in Bagdad

Honderdduizend Iraakse sjiieten hebben vrijdag hun steun betuigd aan de strijd van de Hezbollah tegen Israël. Schreeuwend 'Dood aan Israël' en 'Dood aan Amerika' liepen ze door de wijk Sadr City in Bagdad.
De grootste demonstratie sinds het begin van de gevechten in Libanon ruim drie weken geleden verliep vreedzaam. De invloedrijke geestelijke Muqtada al-Sadr had het protest georganiseerd.
De Iraakse televisie berichtte dat het ministerie van defensie zijn goedkeuring had verleend aan het protest, waaruit de grote invloed van Al-Sadr blijkt en de felheid van de woede onder de Irakezen over het Israëlische offensief, waarbij honderden Libanezen burgers zijn omgekomen.
"Ik beschouw mijn deelname aan dit protest als mijn religieuze plicht. Ik ben er trots op deel uit te maken van deze menigte en ben bereid te sterven voor Libanon," zei de 40-jarige ambtenaar Khazim al-Ibadi.
Veel van de demonstranten zijn lid van Al-Sadrs militie en gevreesd wordt dan ook dat het machtsvertoon van Al-Sadr de spanningen in de Iraakse hoofdstad verder zal opdrijven. Het sektarische geweld tussen sjiieten en soennieten escaleerde na een bomaanslag eind februari op een sjiitisch heiligdom in Samarra en houdt nog steeds aan.

quote:

Gays flee Iraq as Shia death squads find a new target

Evidence shows increase in number of executions as homosexuals plead for asylum in Britain

Jennifer Copestake
Sunday August 6, 2006
The Observer

Hardline Islamic insurgent groups in Iraq are targeting a new type of victim with the full protection of Iraqi law, The Observer can reveal. The country is seeing a sudden escalation of brutal attacks on what are being called the 'immorals' - homosexual men and children as young as 11 who have been forced into same-sex prostitution.

There is growing evidence that Shia militias have been killing men suspected of being gay and children who have been sold to criminal gangs to be sexually abused. The threat has led to a rapid increase in the numbers of Iraqi homosexuals now seeking asylum in the UK because it has become impossible for them to live safely in their own country.

Ali Hili runs the Iraqi LGBT (Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender) group out of London. He used to have 40 volunteers in Iraq but says after recent raids by militia in Najaf, Karbala and Basra he has lost contact with half of them. They move to different safe houses to protect their identities, but their work is incredibly dangerous.

Eleven-year-old Ameer Hasoon al-Hasani was kidnapped by policemen from the front of his house last month. He was known in his district to have been forced into prostitution. His father Hassan told me he searched for his son for three days after his abduction, then found him, shot in the head. A copy of the death certificate confirms the cause of death.

Homosexuality is seen as so immoral that it qualifies as an 'honour killing' to murder someone who is gay - and the perpetrator can escape punishment. Section 111 of Iraq's penal code lays out protections for murder when people are acting against Islam.

'The government will do nothing to tackle this issue. It's really desperate when people get to the stage they're trading their children for money. They have no alternatives because there are no jobs,' Hili says.

Graphic photos obtained from Baghdad sources too frightened to identify themselves as having known a gay man, and seen by the Observer, show other gay Iraqis who have been executed. One shows two men, suspected of having a relationship, blindfolded with their hands tied behind their backs - guns at the ready behind their heads - awaiting execution. Another picture captured on a mobile phone shows a gay man being beaten to death. Yet another shows a corpse being dragged through the streets after his execution.

One photograph is of the mutilated, burnt body of 38-year-old Karar Oda from Sadr City. He was kidnapped by the Badr Brigade in mid-June. They work with the Ministry of Interior and are the informal armed wing of the Supreme Council of Islamic Revolution in Iraq, who make up the largest Shia bloc in the Iraq parliament. Oda's family were given an arrest warrant signed by the Ministry of Interior which said their son deserved to be arrested and killed for immorality as a homosexual. His body was found ten days later.

Dr Haider Jaber is currently seeking asylum in the UK after fleeing Iraq in 2004. He says the abuse started to escalate in his neighbourhood after the invasion. One night, walking home from work, he was surrounded by five men, who told him he had to become a heterosexual Muslim. He says they abused him for wearing jeans and a T-shirt with English writing, and told him he should adopt traditional robes. As a crowd gathered to watch, he was then beaten and kicked to the ground.

The threats continued. Armed militiamen broke into his family home and then his workplace looking for him. Jaber finally left the country in April. His partner, Ali. was not so lucky. Jaber learned of his Ali's murder a few days after leaving Iraq. 'They didn't send the body to the family to have a grave or a flower garden. They said he didn't deserve it because he was an animal,' he said.

Ibaa Alawi has also fled Iraq. A former employee at the British embassy in Baghdad, Alawi met Tony Blair on one of his surprise visits to Iraq. He said Blair was concerned about the safety of the Iraqis working there and praised their bravery. 'Tony Blair said the British government was thankful for our efforts and knew we were putting our lives at risk working for the British embassy in Baghdad.'

Alawi is upset the same government is not willing to help him out. He believes the Home Office will refuse him asylum because it would have to face up to the level of chaos in Iraq, and how much influence is being waged by radical Islamists - and face the fact that, for some, there is still no freedom in Iraq.

· Jennifer Copestake's film on homosexual executions in Iraq will be shown on More4 News on August 7 at 8pm

quote:

Why is it difficult to demonize a demon?
I was reading the news stories this morning about the demonstration that was organized by Sadr in support of Hezbollah when one quote from a senior coalition official caught my attention. The story doesn't make it clear whether that official was general Abizaid himself or someone else but I hope it wasn't Abizaid or any official senior enough to influence the strategy of the coalition in Iraq especially at this critical stage:

In my opinion the part about being careful about "demonizing Sadr militias" because Sadr is "enormously popular" is meaningless after we saw (and see everyday) what Sadr is doing and what his intentions are, and in fact this being "careful" can be so harmful to the efforts of the coalition and PM Maliki in dealing with the issue of militias and of course to the hopes of millions of us in Iraq who want to see an end to the violence.

Popularity should be taken into consideration of course, yet it must not be viewed as a deterrent and must not be allowed to be used as one by the militias, and popularity polls even when they show that some leader or group enjoy wide support, they do not mean that we should allow these numbers to intimidate us and stop us from making the decisions or taking the measures that are crucial for the success of Iraq.
Let's look at it from this angle; Saddam enjoyed the same, if not more, popularity than Sadr does today (yes, Saddam was popular among more or less a million Iraqis not to mention popularity among other Arabs) and the same applies to Nesrallah, Ahmedinejad and Bin Laden who have millions of supporters among Arabs and Muslims, however we didn't find it difficult to "demonize" them, right?
I mean should we allow the bad guys to grow more powerful just because they are popular?! This is totally absurd…

According to this "senior official" we are supposed to think twice and be careful before tackling people like Sadr but my question is; if not now then when? Are we supposed to give them more time to grow more powerful and more popular?
We have seen some examples in recent history when crazy tyrants were not dealt with fast enough or powerfully enough whether by an external force or by their own people; putting an end to Saddam would've been easier if the decision was made in 1991 and dealing with Ahmedinejad immediately will be easier than to deal with him when he acquires nukes and disarming the Sadr militias would've been much more easier if the right decision was made two years ago.

After all, popularity polls do not necessarily reflect the truth and today's demonstration indicates that as well; see, instead of the million figure that Sadr was aspiring to see in Baghdad and out of supposedly 2 million Shia residents of Sadr city only 100 000 showed up and that's only after Sadr summoned demonstrators from the southern provinces and sent busses to fetch them and let's not forget that the demonstration took place in Sadr's own stronghold where it's supposed to take no effort from supporters to show up and march; technically they were asked to march in their own front yard.

Let's suppose that the 30 seats that Sadr's followers have in the parliament reflect his popularity, which is not true because they wouldn't have a chance to win 30 seats without joining the UIA and without Sistani backing them, but even then we have most of the remaining powers demanding immediate disbanding of militias. And these are the ones we should consider, not controversial polls of false popularity.

Some Iraqis including their elected prime minister and elected president said 'thank you America' while others said death to America and Iran is strongly supporting those who wish death to America, so what are you in America going to do while we still have the chance, still have the determined leadership and while there's still hope?

Will you stand with those who believe you came to help them, or will you let Iran remain free to push Iraq to doom?

quote:

Op dinsdag 8 augustus 2006 11:24 schreef klez het volgende:
Een roep om Amerikaans ingrijpen om een eind te maken aan de gewapende militia's:

quote:

Baghdad blasts kill at least 19
At least 19 people have been killed and at least 60 injured in a series of blasts in the Iraqi capital, Baghdad.

Three bombs hit the city centre early in the morning, killing nine. Hours later, two bombs exploded in a market, killing 10 and injuring dozens.

The attacks come despite a new security drive in the city.

Also on Tuesday, the Iraqi army assumed primary responsibility for security in an area of northern Iraq that includes the cities of Tikrit and Kirkuk.

String of bombs

The violence in Baghdad began at about 0645 local time with an explosion which hit a minibus and a taxi in the centre of the city, killing at least nine people.

Two other blasts targeted police, wounding three.



Four hours later, two bombs claimed at least 10 lives and injured at least 50 in a busy market in the al-Shurja district.

Tuesday also saw an armed raid on a bank in the capital. Robbers killed three security guards and two bank officials and escaped with a large quantity of money.

At least 11 other people were killed or found dead in Baghdad or other parts of Iraq. A US soldier died of wounds sustained in fighting, the US military said.

Handover

In Tikrit, the US commander in Iraq, Gen George Casey, and US ambassador Zalmay Khalilzhad attended a ceremony to transfer responsibility for security from the US 101st Airborne Division to the Fourth Iraqi Army Division.

In a statement, the two men said five of the Iraqi Army's 10 division headquarters were now responsible for security in their area, which they called an "important milestone".

They said coalition forces would continue to provide support to the Iraqi army.

The handover came a day after at least 4,000 US troops were deployed on the streets of the capital in an attempt to reduce sectarian killings and kidnappings.

Correspondents say the deployment is being seen as an admission that a two-month-old security operation involving 50,000 mostly Iraqi troops around Baghdad has failed to curb the violence.

Maliki criticism

Meanwhile, Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri Maliki sharply criticised a joint US-Iraqi operation in Sadr City, an area of Baghdad that is a stronghold of the Mehdi Army, a Shia militia.

US military officials said the raid, early on Monday, was aimed at "individuals involved in punishment and torture cell activities". Three people were captured in the raid, the US military said.

Iraqi police said three people, including a woman and child, were killed in the operation during which US aircraft carried out an air strike on a built-up area.

Mr Maliki said he was "very angered and pained" by the operation, warning that it could undermine his efforts toward national reconciliation.

"Reconciliation cannot go hand in hand with operations that violate the rights of citizens this way," Mr Maliki said in a statement on government television.

He apologised to the Iraqi people for the operation and said such incidents would not happen again.

In other violence, two Iraqi journalists have been found shot dead in Baghdad.

Mohammed Abbas Mohammed, who worked for a Shia newspaper, was shot dead in western Baghdad on Monday.

On the same day, police found the body of freelance journalist Ismael Amin, who was kidnapped two weeks ago.
Story from BBC NEWS:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/hi/middle_east/5254976.stm

Published: 2006/08/08 21:46:19 GMT

© BBC MMVI

quote:

Baghdad morgue count rises again
Officials at Baghdad mortuary say they received 1,855 bodies in July, as the capital remains gripped in a wave of violence which has beset it for months.

The figure - the highest yet - is a rise of more than 350 on June. Officials say about 90% of the deaths were as a result of violence.

The mortuary director told the BBC his staff could barely cope with the sheer numbers of corpses they received.

The death toll continued to rise on Wednesday with at least 23 more bodies.

Incidents included:

* Five died in a drive-by shooting in western Baghdad, police said

* Nine bodies were found dumped in streets around the capital

* An explosion in Baquba, north of Baghdad, killed at least four people, police said

* In Iraq's second city of Basra in the south, gunmen killed an Iraqi army colonel, Qasim Abdul Qadir, on his way to work

* A bystander was killed in Baghdad in a roadside bomb apparently targeting a US patrol, police said

* Three US soldiers assigned to the 1st Brigade, 1st Armoured Division were killed in the restive western Anbar province, the US military said

* Divers are searching for two US troopers missing after their Blackhawk helicopter crashed into water in Anbar on Tuesday.

Unidentified bodies

The number of bodies delivered each month to the Baghdad mortuary has risen by almost 700 from January, when the figure was 1,068.

Observers put part of the blame on a wave of sectarian violence which followed the bombing of the al-Askari shrine in Samarra in late February. They caution the real death toll in Baghdad could be even higher.


MORTUARY'S MONTHLY TOLL
January: 1,068
February: 1,110
March: 1,294
April: 1,155
May: 1,398
June: 1,500
July: 1,855
NB: Not all deaths were violent

The mortuary director, Dr Kase Hassan, told the BBC his staff could barely cope, and that many bodies were buried unidentified.

"The rate of bodies [we receive is] between 50 to 70 cadavers per day - about 90% of these are dead by militant injuries or by external injuries," he said.

"About 80% of the cadavers are unknown - this is a bigger problem."

The mortuary does not have the space to store so many unidentified bodies - and every week truckloads are taken away for mass burial.

Almost 12,000 extra troops have been drafted in to the capital to try to stem the violence.

Story from BBC NEWS:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/hi/middle_east/4777419.stm

Published: 2006/08/09 22:52:03 GMT

© BBC MMVI

quote:

Iraqi Death Toll Rose Above 3,400 in July

BAGHDAD, Iraq, Aug. 15 — July appears to have been the deadliest month of the war for Iraqi civilians, according to figures from the Health Ministry and the Baghdad morgue, reinforcing criticism that the Baghdad security plan started in June by the new Iraqi government has failed.

An average of more than 110 Iraqis were killed each day in July, according to the figures. The total number of civilian deaths that month, 3,438, is a 9 percent increase over the tally in June and nearly double the toll in January.

The rising numbers indicate that sectarian violence is spiraling out of control and seem to bolster an assertion that many senior Iraqi officials and American military analysts have been making in recent months: that the country is already embroiled in a civil war, not just slipping toward one, and that the American-led forces are caught between Sunni Arab guerrillas and Shiite militias.

The numbers also provide the most definitive evidence yet that the Baghdad security plan started by Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki on June 14 has not quelled the violence. The plan, much touted by top Iraqi and American officials at the time, relied on setting up more Iraqi-run checkpoints to stymie movement by insurgents. Those officials have since acknowledged the plan has fallen far short of its aims, forcing the American military to add thousands of soldiers to the capital this month and to back away from proposals for a withdrawal of some troops by year’s end.

The Baghdad morgue reported receiving 1,855 bodies in July, more than half of the total deaths recorded in the country. The morgue tally for July was an 18 percent increase over June.

The American ambassador said in an interview last week that Iraq’s political leaders had failed to fully use their influence to rein in the soaring violence, and that people associated with the government are stoking the flames of sectarian hatred.

“I think the time has come for these leaders to take responsibility with regards to sectarian violence, to the security of Baghdad at the present time,” the ambassador, Zalmay Khalilzad, said.

The American military in recent weeks has been especially eager to prove that Baghdad can be tamed if American troops are added to the streets and take a more active role — in effect, a repudiation of earlier efforts to turn over security more quickly to Iraqis.

The American command has added nearly 4,000 American soldiers to Baghdad by extending the tour of a combat brigade. Under a new security plan aimed at overhauling Mr. Maliki’s efforts, some of the city’s most violent southern and western areas are now virtually occupied block-to-block by American and Iraqi forces, with entire neighborhoods transformed into miniature police states after being sealed off by blast walls and concertina wire.

When the tally for civilian deaths in July is added to the Iraqi government numbers for earlier months obtained by the United Nations, the total indicates that at least 17,776 Iraqi civilians died violently in the first seven months of this year, or an average of 2,539 a month.

The Health Ministry did not provide figures for people wounded by attacks in Baghdad but said that at least 3,597 Iraqis were injured outside the city in July, a 25 percent increase over June.

United Nations officials and military analysts say the morgue and ministry numbers almost certainly reflect severe undercounts, caused by the haphazard nature of information in a war zone.

Many casualties in areas outside Baghdad probably never appear in the official count, said Anthony H. Cordesman, a military analyst at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a research group in Washington. That helps explain why fatalities in Baghdad appear to account for such a large percentage of the total number, he said in a recent report.

The United Nations has been tracking civilian casualty figures by collating numbers from the Health Ministry and Baghdad morgue. Last month, it announced that the Iraqi government’s numbers indicated that 3,149 violent deaths had occurred in June, or an average of more than 100 a day. The statistics were significantly higher than previous civilian death tolls, and indicated that the news media had drastically underreported the level of violence in Iraq. The United States government and military have declined to release any overall figures on Iraqi civilian casualties, or even said whether they are keeping count.

But Iraqi and American officials agree that civilian deaths had been much lower before wide-scale sectarian violence erupted in the wake of the Feb. 22 bombing of a sacred Shiite shrine in the town of Samarra, and has only gotten worse since..

In recent weeks, Ambassador Khalilzad and the top generals have warned that Iraq could slide toward full-blown civil war, especially if the capital continues fragmenting into ethnic or sectarian enclaves controlled by militias, as has been happening for months.

Much of the responsibility rests on Iraqi politicians, many of whom have ties to militias, Mr. Khalilzad said. “I believe that there have been forces associated with people in the government from both the Shia and Sunni sides that have participated in this,” he said of the violence.

Iraqi politicians are furiously lashing out at each other. On Monday, the speaker of Parliament, a conservative Sunni Arab, said he was considering stepping down because of animosity from the Kurdish and Shiite political blocs.

The move to oust the speaker, Mahmoud al-Mashhadani, appears to have thrown the main Sunni Arab bloc he belongs to, the Iraqi Consensus Front, into disarray. On Tuesday, a senior member of the bloc, Khalaf al-Elayan, said it rejected any call for Mr. Mashhadani’s resignation. Another Sunni leader, Adnan al-Dulaimi, said in an interview that Mr. Mashhadani should step down. Mr. Dulaimi is considered a possible replacement.

On Tuesday, Shiite gunmen and Iraqi military forces exchanged gunfire in Karbala for several hours near one of Iraq’s holiest Shiite shrines. Witnesses said the fighting forced the Iraqi Army to block entrances to the city and impose a curfew, prohibiting all cars and warning residents not to carry guns.

In Mosul, a suicide bomber detonated a truck packed with explosives, killing at least five civilians and wounding nearly 50 near the offices of the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan, the party of President Jalal Talabani.

One of the deadliest attacks in recent weeks took place in southern Baghdad on Sunday night, when bombs, mortars and rockets killed at least 57 people in a Shiite neighborhood, according to Iraqi officials. The American military said Tuesday that the death toll had grown to at least 63 Iraqis and that the cause had been identified: two car bombs that ignited a gas line.

A day earlier, the American military said the deaths were caused solely by a gas main explosion and not by any attack, but now says that conclusion was based on “incomplete information.”

The well-organized attack on Sunday came despite the fact that American and Iraqi troops have flooded areas of southern Baghdad. The combined operation has focused most visibly on regulating traffic at checkpoints and searching for weapons at every home and building in troubled areas.

The American military said Tuesday that Dawra, the first area searched, was being sealed off with concrete barriers and blast walls. It added that the number of roadside bombs found in the area each week since the operation started Aug. 7 has decreased to 4 from 25.

quote:

Aantal bomaanslagen in Irak bijna verdubbeld

AP

BAGDAD - Het aantal bomaanslagen gericht tegen Iraakse en Amerikaanse troepen is de afgelopen maanden sterk gestegen. Dat hebben Amerikaanse functionarissen, die anoniem wensen te blijven, donderdag gezegd.

De functionarissen bevestigden een bericht in de New York Times dat het aantal bomaanslagen op Iraakse en Amerikaanse soldaten sinds januari bijna is verdubbeld. Het lijkt erop dat de opstand in Irak heviger is dan ooit, ondanks de recente dood van de leider van Al-Qaida in Irak, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi.

In juli zijn volgens de functionarissen in Irak in totaal 2.625 bommen geëxplodeerd of ontdekt voor ze tot ontploffing werden gebracht. In januari waren dat er 'slechts' 1.454. Van de in juli daadwerkelijk ontplofte bommen - 1.666 - was zo'n 70 procent gericht tegen Amerikaanse troepen, 20 procent tegen Iraakse troepen en 10 procent tegen burgers.

Zo'n 3.500 Irakezen kwamen in juli om bij gewelddadigheden; het hoogste aantal in één maand sinds maart 2003, zei de Iraakse onderminister van volksgezondheid Adel Muhsin woensdag. In de regio Bagdad alleen al vielen in juli 1.500 doden. De Verenigde Staten hebben bijna twaalfduizend Amerikaanse en Iraakse soldaten extra naar de hoofdstad gestuurd. Ondanks het toenemende geweld zei de Iraakse premier Nouri al-Maliki dat regeringstroepen in staat zijn om in het grootste deel van het land de orde te handhaven.

Een geparkeerde auto in de shi'itische wijk Sadr City in Bagdad explodeerde donderdag rond het middaguur. Er vielen zeven doden en vijftien gewonden, meldde de politie. De auto stond in de buurt van een markt, maar omdat veel Irakezen vroeg boodschappen hadden gedaan om de voorspelde middaghitte te ontlopen, vielen er volgens de politie relatief weinig slachtoffers. De vermoedelijke daders zijn soennitische opstandelingen.

Een tweede autobom miste een politiepatrouille in Bagdad en doodde drie voorgangers en verwondde er een. Iraakse soldaten vielen twee dorpen ten westen van Kirkuk binnen en pakten vijftig veronderstelde opstandelingen op. Tientallen wapens en explosieven werden in beslag genomen.

quote:

Op donderdag 17 augustus 2006 23:37 schreef Slayage het volgende:

[..]

quote:

Op vrijdag 18 augustus 2006 00:36 schreef Monidique het volgende:

[..]

Last throes.

quote:

Amerikanen: verschil oorlog tegen Irak en terrrorisme

ANP

NEW YORK - Voor het eerst sinds de Amerikaans-Britse aanval op Irak in maart 2003 maakt volgens opiniepeilers het Amerikaanse publiek onderscheid tussen de oorlog tegen Irak en de ‘oorlog tegen het terrorisme’.

De Amerikaanse regering stelt dat de twee onlosmakelijk verbonden zijn, maar een meerderheid van de ondervraagden gelooft dat voor het eerst niet meer, schreef The New York Times woensdag.

De krant peilde deze maand opinies met de zender CBS en concludeerde dat 51 procent geen verband ziet tussen de strijd tegen het terrorisme en de in 2003 begonnen oorlog in Irak. Van de ondervraagden meende 53 procent dat die aanvalsoorlog een vergissing is geweest. 62 procent vond dat het slecht gaat met de pogingen orde en stabiliteit in Irak te vestigen.

quote:

Op woensdag 23 augustus 2006 13:25 schreef Slayage het volgende:

[..]

worden die amerikanen 3 jaar na dato eindelijk een beetje wakker zeg...

quote:

Op woensdag 23 augustus 2006 15:05 schreef Monidique het volgende:
Het werd pas een strijd tegen terroristen toen Amerika ervoor koos Irak te bezetten. Daarvoor had Irak niets te maken met terreur, in ieder geval zeker niet de War on Terror, wat almaar werd gesuggereerd door het regime, en eindelijk beginnen de Amerikanen dat een beetje te begrijpen.

quote:

De krant peilde deze maand opinies met de zender CBS en concludeerde dat 51 procent geen verband ziet tussen de strijd tegen het terrorisme en de in 2003 begonnen oorlog in Irak.

quote:

Op woensdag 23 augustus 2006 15:16 schreef Mutant01 het volgende:
Het klopt gewoon wat Monidique zegt, er valt niks te interpreteren.

quote:

Op woensdag 23 augustus 2006 15:15 schreef klez het volgende:

[..]

Dat is jouw interpretatie. Het staat er niet.
[..]

quote:

Op woensdag 23 augustus 2006 15:21 schreef klez het volgende:

[..]

Nou, ten eerste vind ik het hoogst twijfelachtig te stellen dat Saddam niets met terreur te maken heeft.

quote:

Op woensdag 23 augustus 2006 15:21 schreef klez het volgende:

[..]

Nou, ten eerste vind ik het hoogst twijfelachtig te stellen dat Saddam niets met terreur te maken heeft.
Ten tweede blijkt uit het geposte stukje niet of de vraag is dat de huidige strijd in Irak niets met terrorisme te maken (wat wel degelijk wel het geval is), of dat men vind dat Bush destijds niet had mogen aanvoeren dat men vanwege de "War on Terror" Irak aan heeft gevallen, of om die reden Irak had mogen aanvallen.
Het tweede ben ik het wel mee eens.

quote:

Op woensdag 23 augustus 2006 15:25 schreef Mutant01 het volgende:

[..]

Saddam heeft nooit wat met terreur te maken gehad nee. Het was weliswaar geen lieverdje, maar hij had voor de rest niets met de terreur in Amerika te maken gehad.

quote:

Op woensdag 23 augustus 2006 15:28 schreef klez het volgende:

[..]

Volgens Putin wel.

quote:

Op woensdag 23 augustus 2006 15:22 schreef Monidique het volgende:

Er is in ieder geval hoop dat de Amerikaanse burgers gaan inzien dat het hele terrorisme-probleem in Irak daar is dankzij de idioot in het Witte Huis. En dat hij gestraft zal worden.

quote:

Op woensdag 23 augustus 2006 15:37 schreef klez het volgende:

[..]

Dat stel jij elke keer maar ik vind het nogal gemakkelijk om degene die het deksel van de put aftrekt de schuld te geven.

quote:

Op woensdag 23 augustus 2006 15:37 schreef klez het volgende:

[..]

Dat stel jij elke keer maar ik vind het nogal gemakkelijk om degene die het deksel van de put aftrekt de schuld te geven van alle rotzooi die eruit komt.

quote:

Op woensdag 23 augustus 2006 15:40 schreef Monidique het volgende:

[..]

Ja, dat vind jij ongetwijfeld.

Bush, de Poppenmeester en hun handlangers hebben de situatie gecreëerd, ze hebben met hun bombardementen duizenden Irakezen vermoord, ze hebben een situatie gecreëerd waarin honderdduizenden Irakezen zijn gestorven en ze hebben ervoor gezorgd dat Irak een terroristenbroedplaats is geworden. Ze zijn verantwoordelijkheid voor de rotzooi, ongeacht de verantwoordelijkheden van anderen.

quote:

Op woensdag 23 augustus 2006 15:44 schreef klez het volgende:

[..]

Lulkoek.

quote:

De eerste verantwoordelijkheid voor doden door geweld ligt altijd bij de plegers van dat geweld.

quote:

Jouw redenering volgend kom je in een onontwarbare kluwen van oorzaak en gevolg, waarbij uiteindelijk Eva of Mohammed de schuld krijgt.

quote:

Op woensdag 23 augustus 2006 15:42 schreef Slayage het volgende:

[..]

kom op dude zelfs de amerikanen worden worden wakker

quote:

Op woensdag 23 augustus 2006 15:45 schreef Monidique het volgende:

[..]

Ongetwijfeld.
[..]

Mooi, dan is dat duidelijk.
[..]

quote:

Nee, mijn redenering volgend kom je uit bij Sadr, Zarkawi en Bush.

quote:

Op woensdag 23 augustus 2006 15:47 schreef klez het volgende:

[..]

Ben je het er dan mee eens?

quote:

En welk excuus heeft Sadr? Of Zarkawi?

quote:

Op woensdag 23 augustus 2006 15:46 schreef klez het volgende:

[..]

Interesseert me nauwelijks. Een meerderheid van de Amerikanen houdt er net zulke idiote standpunten op na soms als een meerderheid van de Nederlanders of de Aboriginals. Of het over JFK of 9/11 of Irak gaat.
Dus nu ze Bush niet meer geloven is het opeens wel relevant?

quote:

Op woensdag 23 augustus 2006 15:48 schreef Monidique het volgende:

[..]

Waarmee eens? Dat zij die mensen vermoorden daarvoor verantwoordelijk zijn? Wat denk je zelf?
[..]

quote:

Op woensdag 23 augustus 2006 15:51 schreef Slayage het volgende:

[..]

het is relevant dat ze de waarheid onder ogen beginnen te zien, dat ze genaait zijn door bush uiteraard

quote:

Op woensdag 23 augustus 2006 15:44 schreef klez het volgende:

[..]

Lulkoek. De eerste verantwoordelijkheid voor doden door geweld ligt altijd bij de plegers van dat geweld. Inmiddels een keer of vier zoveel door terroristen en sektarisch geweld dan door Amerikaanse soldaten veroorzaakt.
Jouw redenering volgend kom je in een onontwarbare kluwen van oorzaak en gevolg, waarbij uiteindelijk Eva of Mohammed de schuld krijgt.

quote:

Op woensdag 23 augustus 2006 16:01 schreef Monidique het volgende:
Uit peilingen blijkt dat de oorlog een van de belangrijkste punten is bij de aankomende verkiezingen. Dus ja, voor de gemiddelde Amerikaan is het iets belangrijker.

quote:

Op woensdag 23 augustus 2006 16:01 schreef Monidique het volgende:
Uit peilingen blijkt dat de oorlog een van de belangrijkste punten is bij de aankomende verkiezingen. Dus ja, voor de gemiddelde Amerikaan is het iets belangrijker.

quote:

Op woensdag 23 augustus 2006 15:59 schreef Basp1 het volgende:

En die zogenaamde vrijheid die de amerikanen daar de mensen willen brengen die zie ik voorlopig er nog niet van komen. En die vrijheid is een van de laatste strohalmen van legitieme redenen die niet te ontkrachten zijn als leugens.

quote:

Op woensdag 23 augustus 2006 16:05 schreef klez het volgende:

[..]

Zou kunnen. Ik durf er wel een wedje om te leggen dat de Amerikanen ook na de verkiezingen daar blijven...

quote:

Wereldmachten durven gerust beslissingen te nemen die de publieke opinie trotseren.
Die is nogal vergankelijk namelijk.

quote:

Op woensdag 23 augustus 2006 16:07 schreef Monidique het volgende:

[..]

O RLY?
[..]

Dat kan allemaal wel zo zijn, het is dus wél een issue voor de Amerikanen.

quote:

Op woensdag 23 augustus 2006 16:07 schreef klez het volgende:

[..]

Zeker is in ieder geval dat als de Amerikanen niet ingegrepen hadden die vrijheid er zeker niet was geweest.

quote:

Op woensdag 23 augustus 2006 16:26 schreef Basp1 het volgende:

[..]

Ik kan nu toch niet zeggen dat men nu echte vrijheid heeft, waneer er zoveel bomaanslagen en geweld is. Wat is de verwachting op dit moment dat het eindelijk eens wat rustiger gaat worden in irak.

Zonder goed functionerende overheid met een goede politie en defensie macht zie ik het irakgezwel alleen nog heel lang dooretteren. Wanneer we de VS propaganda praatjes hadden moeten geloven in eerste instantie zou irak nu al een westers land geweest moeten zijn , met zijn allen aan de cola en marlboro . Een groot gedeelte van de infrastructuur ligt nog steeds in puin, daaraan had al veel meer gedaan moeten zijn. Gelukkig draait de olie redelijk door, alhoewel er mag nog wel wat meer reserve capaciteit bij opec landen gemaakt worden.

quote:

Op woensdag 23 augustus 2006 16:32 schreef klez het volgende:

"puppetmaster"

quote:

of moordenaar

quote:

of soortgelijke ronkende retoriek, dan kunnen we Wim Kok ook gelijk wel opsluiten...

quote:

Op woensdag 23 augustus 2006 16:32 schreef klez het volgende:
Dat is allemaal waar, en dat is Bush en co zeker aan te rekenen. Maar het ging erom of de oorlog in Irak niets met terrorisme te maken heeft (volgens mij wel).

quote:

Er is nu eenmaal een verschil tussen politiek domme beslissingen nemen en bewuste genocide zoals Saddam die bijvoorbeeld gepleegd heeft.

quote:

Op woensdag 23 augustus 2006 15:57 schreef klez het volgende:

[..]

Mwahhh. Ik schat zo in dat het afzetten van Saddam niet belangrijker is voor de gemiddelde Amerikaan als de farce van Srebrenica of de betuwelijn voor de gemiddelde Nederlander. Dus genaait...

quote:

Op woensdag 23 augustus 2006 17:04 schreef Basp1 het volgende:

[..]

Als we zo doorredeneren hebben wij door het willen opdringen van onze westerse normen en waarden in landen ook net zoveel met terrorisme te maken als irak.

Oh nee we willen het niet opdringen het gaat vanzelf door de globalisatie. Dat gaat ook vanzelf, maar dat heeft in landen die nog jaren achterlopen met democratiseringsprocessen wat meer tijd nodig. De tijd die het duurt vinden we te langzaam gaan om de globalisering op hetzelfde tempo door te laten gaan dus moet het maar met wat andere methodes. Dat is heel kort samengevat mijn visie op ons westers beleid.

quote:

Dan zullen we het maar niet over het sebrinica (heel bewuste genocide) en de afwikkeling daarvan door het internationale gerechtshof hebben.

quote:

Over bewust genocide, hoeveel doden zijn er alweer onder de hutsies en de tutsies gevallen de afgelopen jaren en hoeveel doen we daar aan als westerse wereld. Maar daar zit ook niet zoveel olie, dat zal wel een samenloop van omstandigheden zijn.

En nu de bevolkingsgroepen in irak tegen elkaar aan het vechten zijn noemen we het geen genocide als soenieten weer een bomaanslag bij sjiieten plaatsen en vice versa?

Nee als westerse wereld met amerika als hoofdman voorop zijn we zo hypocriet als de pest en zoeken we gewoon soms naar redenen om bepaalde gedragingen voor onszelf moreel te proberen te verantwoorden. Maar er zijn zoveel dingen die we niet doen dat het in mijn optiek veelal drogredeneringen zijn die we gebruiken om mistappen goed te praten.

quote:

At least 100 die as militia force Iraqi troops out of town
By Jerome Taylor
Published: 29 August 2006

At least 100 people were killed across Iraq yesterday in a day of intense gun battles and suicide bombings, contradicting US military claims that the security situation in the war-torn nation was improving.

A total of 34 bodies, including seven civilians and 25 Iraqi government soldiers, were brought into the central hospital in the town of Diwaniyah, 80 miles south of Baghdad, after fighting between government forces and gunmen of the Mehdi Army, a Shia militia loyal to the radical cleric Muqtada al-Sadr. Fifty militiamen were also killed in the gunfight, according to the Iraqi defence ministry.

In a separate development, a suicide bomber rammed a car packed with explosives into the Interior Ministry in Baghdad during the midmorning rush hour, killing 16 people, including 13 policemen, and wounding up to 62.

On Sunday, a further 60 people were killed in attacks across the country from Kirkuk in the Kurdish-held north to Basra in the south.

The latest violence was a reminder of how easily Iraq could slip back into the type of endemic sectarian violence that characterised much of the first half of this year after the destruction in February of a Shia shrine in the town of Samarra.

More than 10,000 Iraqis - the vast majority in Baghdad - have been killed in the past four months alone, a figure that would send shockwaves through the international community were it in any other part of the world.

The US military admitted that there had been a spike in violence in Baghdad, but insisted that things were improving since US-led forces launched Operation Forward Together last month in an attempt to pacify the capital.

Maj-Gen William Caldwell, a US military spokesman, said violence in Baghdad had dropped by half since July, and that life was returning to normal in some areas of the capital.

The British Defence Secretary, Des Browne, echoed such sentiments during a visit to Iraq yesterday to meet key Iraqi politicians including the Prime Minister, Nouri al-Maliki.

"I recognise there are continuing challenges and I've seen some violence over this weekend which suggests there's much more work to be done," Mr Browne told a joint news conference with the Iraqi Defence Minister, Abdul Qader Jassim. "But as Prime Minister Maliki said in an interview this weekend, things are improving and the challenge is to maintain that improvement."

The intense fighting in Diwaniyah will be of particular concern to British forces stationed in the Shia-dominated south of Iraq. Reports suggested that militiamen had driven government forces out of the city and had set up checkpoints in the suburbs. If the Mehdi Army has pushed the government out of the Shia-dominated city it will be a major snub to Mr Maliki, who has promised to rid Iraq of militias.

Confronting Mr Sadr's Shia militias was never going to be an easy task. His movement holds 30 parliamentary seats and five cabinet posts, and his militiamen are well-armed and dedicated. The cleric is also undeniably popular among Iraq's Shia majority, particularly the poorer classes.

In 2004, Mr Sadr led an uprising against the American-led coalition which threatened to draw the post-Saddam government and US military into a bitter conflict with Iraq's Shia while simultaneously trying to subdue what was then an emerging Sunni insurgency. The fighting was only stopped when the head of Iraq's Shia community, Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, ordered the Mehdi Army fighters to lay down their arms.

At least 100 people were killed across Iraq yesterday in a day of intense gun battles and suicide bombings, contradicting US military claims that the security situation in the war-torn nation was improving.

A total of 34 bodies, including seven civilians and 25 Iraqi government soldiers, were brought into the central hospital in the town of Diwaniyah, 80 miles south of Baghdad, after fighting between government forces and gunmen of the Mehdi Army, a Shia militia loyal to the radical cleric Muqtada al-Sadr. Fifty militiamen were also killed in the gunfight, according to the Iraqi defence ministry.

In a separate development, a suicide bomber rammed a car packed with explosives into the Interior Ministry in Baghdad during the midmorning rush hour, killing 16 people, including 13 policemen, and wounding up to 62.

On Sunday, a further 60 people were killed in attacks across the country from Kirkuk in the Kurdish-held north to Basra in the south.

The latest violence was a reminder of how easily Iraq could slip back into the type of endemic sectarian violence that characterised much of the first half of this year after the destruction in February of a Shia shrine in the town of Samarra.

More than 10,000 Iraqis - the vast majority in Baghdad - have been killed in the past four months alone, a figure that would send shockwaves through the international community were it in any other part of the world.

The US military admitted that there had been a spike in violence in Baghdad, but insisted that things were improving since US-led forces launched Operation Forward Together last month in an attempt to pacify the capital.

Maj-Gen William Caldwell, a US military spokesman, said violence in Baghdad had dropped by half since July, and that life was returning to normal in some areas of the capital.

The British Defence Secretary, Des Browne, echoed such sentiments during a visit to Iraq yesterday to meet key Iraqi politicians including the Prime Minister, Nouri al-Maliki.

"I recognise there are continuing challenges and I've seen some violence over this weekend which suggests there's much more work to be done," Mr Browne told a joint news conference with the Iraqi Defence Minister, Abdul Qader Jassim. "But as Prime Minister Maliki said in an interview this weekend, things are improving and the challenge is to maintain that improvement."

The intense fighting in Diwaniyah will be of particular concern to British forces stationed in the Shia-dominated south of Iraq. Reports suggested that militiamen had driven government forces out of the city and had set up checkpoints in the suburbs. If the Mehdi Army has pushed the government out of the Shia-dominated city it will be a major snub to Mr Maliki, who has promised to rid Iraq of militias.

Confronting Mr Sadr's Shia militias was never going to be an easy task. His movement holds 30 parliamentary seats and five cabinet posts, and his militiamen are well-armed and dedicated. The cleric is also undeniably popular among Iraq's Shia majority, particularly the poorer classes.

In 2004, Mr Sadr led an uprising against the American-led coalition which threatened to draw the post-Saddam government and US military into a bitter conflict with Iraq's Shia while simultaneously trying to subdue what was then an emerging Sunni insurgency. The fighting was only stopped when the head of Iraq's Shia community, Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, ordered the Mehdi Army fighters to lay down their arms.

quote:

BAGHDAD, Iraq - Four years ago this was a city where people mixed freely — where, in most parts of town, no one cared if a neighborhood was majority Sunni or Shiite. Loyalty to Saddam Hussein was more important than religious identity.

But now a battle for Baghdad is well under way between the two major Muslim sects. Death squads are slaughtering people daily, and an estimated 160,000 Iraqis have fled their homes — mostly here in the capital.

Out of that violence, a new but not better city is emerging. Many Iraqis fear that the result will be a Sunni west and a Shiite east, with the broad Tigris River snaking through the middle as the sectarian boundary.

quote:

Kurdistan president Massoud Barzani has ordered the Iraqi national flag to be replaced with the Kurdish one in his northern autonomous region in what appeared to be another move toward more self-rule in the north, local officials said Friday.
ADVERTISEMENT

The order was issued Thursday and applies to the Kurdish region, said Beshraw Ahmed, a spokesman for the Sulaimaniyah municipality.

According to Azad Jundiyanim, a member of President Jalal Talabani's Patriotic Union of Kurdistan in Sulaimaniyah, Barzani issued a formal message asking for the Iraqi flag to be lowered. The message was also broadcast on Kurdish radio.

quote:

In a dismal assessment, the Pentagon reported to Congress today that the number of attacks and civilian deaths in Iraq have risen sharply in recent months — with casualties increasing by 1,000 a month — as sectarian violence has engulfed larger areas of the country.

The quarterly report, based on new government figures, shows that the number of attacks in Iraq over the last four months increased 15% and the number of Iraqi casualties grew by 51%. In the last three months, the report says, the number of deaths and injuries increased by 1,000 people a month over the previous quarter — to more than 3,000 each month.

Over a longer time horizon, the spike is even more grim. The number of weekly attacks has increased from just over 400 in the spring of 2004 to nearly 800 during recent weeks. And the number of daily casualties has increased from just under 30 a day in 2004 to more than 110 a day in recent weeks.

quote:

I no longer have power to save Iraq from civil war, warns Shia leader
By Gethin Chamberlain and Aqeel Hussein in Baghdad
(Filed: 03/09/2006)

The most influential moderate Shia leader in Iraq has abandoned attempts to restrain his followers, admitting that there is nothing he can do to prevent the country sliding towards civil war.

Aides say Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani is angry and disappointed that Shias are ignoring his calls for calm and are switching their allegiance in their thousands to more militant groups which promise protection from Sunni violence and revenge for attacks.

Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani
Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani

"I will not be a political leader any more," he told aides. "I am only happy to receive questions about religious matters."

It is a devastating blow to the remaining hopes for a peaceful solution in Iraq and spells trouble for British forces, who are based in and around the Shia stronghold of Basra.

The cleric is regarded as the most important Shia religious leader in Iraq and has been a moderating influence since the invasion of 2003. He ended the fighting in Najaf between Muqtada al-Sadr's Mehdi army and American forces in 2004 and was instrumental in persuading the Shia factions to fight the 2005 elections under the single banner of the United Alliance.

However, the extent to which he has become marginalised was demonstrated last week when fighting broke out in Diwaniya between Iraqi soldiers and al-Sadr's Mehdi army. With dozens dead, al-Sistani's appeals for calm were ignored. Instead, the provincial governor had to travel to Najaf to see al-Sadr, who ended the fighting with one telephone call.

Al-Sistani's aides say that he has chosen to stay silent rather than suffer the ignominy of being ignored. Ali al-Jaberi, a spokesman for the cleric in Khadamiyah, said that he was furious that his followers had turned away from him and ignored his calls for moderation.

Asked whether Ayatollah al-Sistani could prevent a civil war, Mr al-Jaberi replied: "Honestly, I think not. He is very angry, very disappointed."

He said a series of snubs had contributed to Ayatollah al-Sistani's decision. "He asked the politicians to ask the Americans to make a timetable for leaving but they disappointed him," he said. "After the war, the politicians were visiting him every month. If they wanted to do something, they visited him. But no one has visited him for two or three months. He is very angry that this is happening now. He sees this as very bad."

A report from the Pentagon on Friday said that the core conflict in Iraq had changed from a battle against insurgents to an increasingly bloody fight between Shia and Sunni Muslims, creating conditions that could lead to civil war. It noted that attacks rose by 24 per cent to 792 per week – the highest of the war – and daily Iraqi casualties soared by 51 per cent to almost 120, prompting some ordinary Iraqis to look to illegal militias for their safety and sometimes for social needs and welfare.

A Moqtada Al Sadr supporter
An Iraqi Shi'ite supporter of cleric Moqtada Al Sadr celebrates near a burning US Army truck

Hundreds of thousands of people have turned away from al-Sistani to the far more aggressive al-Sadr. Sabah Ali, 22, an engineering student at Baghdad University, said that he had switched allegiance after the murder of his brother by Sunni gunmen. "I went to Sistani asking for revenge for my brother," he said. "They said go to the police, they couldn't do anything.

"But even if the police arrest them, they will release them for money, because the police are bad people. So I went to the al-Sadr office. I told them about the terrorists' family. They said, 'Don't worry, we'll get revenge for your brother'. Two days later, Sadr's people had killed nine of the terrorists, so I felt I had revenge for my brother. I believe Sadr is the only one protecting the Shia against the terrorists."

According to al-Sadr's aides, he owes his success to keeping in touch with the people. "He meets his representatives every week or every day. Sistani only meets his representatives every month," said his spokesman, Sheik Hussein al-Aboudi.

"Muqtada al-Sadr asks them what the situation is on the street, are there any fights against the Shia, he is asking all the time. So the people become close to al-Sadr because he is closer to them than Sistani. Sistani is the ayatollah, he is very expert in Islam, but not as a politician."

Even the Iraqi army seems to have accepted that things have changed. First Lieut Jaffar al-Mayahi, an Iraqi National Guard officer, said many soldiers accepted that al-Sadr's Mehdi army was protecting Shias. "When they go to checkpoints and their vehicles are searched, they say they are Mehdi army and they are allowed through. But if we stop Sistani's people we sometimes arrest them and take away their weapons."

Western diplomats fear that the vacuum will be filled by the more radical Shia clerics, hastening the break-up of the country and an increase in sectarian violence.

Sir Jeremy Greenstock, Britain's former special representative for Iraq, said the decline in Ayatollah al-Sistani's influence was bad news for Iraq.

"It would be a pity if his strong instincts to maintain the unity of Iraq and to forswear violence were removed from influencing the scene," he said.

quote:

IRAK:
Kirkuk wacht een onzekere toekomst
Mohammed A. Salih

KIRKUK, 3 september (IPS) - Door toenemend geweld lopen de spanningen tussen etnische groepen in de Noord-Iraakse stad Kirkuk op. In de media klinken geruchten over een burgeroorlog, met Kirkuk als startpunt. Maar de inwoners zelf geloven daar niet in.

Rahman Aziz (37) is met zijn vriend Sa’ad in een vrolijk gesprek verwikkeld. Rahman is Koerdisch, Sa’ad (34) is Turkmeen. “Wij zijn al jaren goede vrienden en we geloven niet dat politiek onze vriendschap kan aantasten”, zegt Rahman.

Kirkuk wordt geclaimd door Koerden, maar telt ook veel Arabieren die zich er vestigden tijdens het bewind van Saddam Hoessein. Daarnaast wonen er veel Turkmenen, Iraki’s van Turkse afkomst.

De Koerden in Kirkuk hadden het onder Saddam Hoessein zwaar te verduren. Saddams troepen dwongen Rahmans familie tien jaar geleden te vluchten uit de voornamelijk Koerdische wijk Imam Qasim. Ze konden maar een handvol bezittingen meenemen.

Een paar dagen na hun vertrek, werd het huis platgewalst door een bulldozer. De familie verhuisde naar Sulaimaniya, 120 kilometer ten oosten van Kirkuk.

Onder de ‘arabiseringspolitiek’ van de Baath-regering, werden tienduizenden Koerden en Turkmenen verdreven uit Kirkuk. Duizenden Arabische families uit het zuiden en de centraal-Arabische regio’s werden aangemoedigd zich in Kirkuk te vestigen om de grip van de regering op de olievelden in de regio te versterken.

Veel Koerdische vluchtelingen keren nu terug naar Kirkuk en hopen op een beter leven. “We willen allemaal graag een nieuwe start maken”, zegt Rahman. Hij wil ten koste van alles conflicten vermijden. “Als we weigeren te vechten tegen elkaar, dan kan niemand ons dwingen.”

Toch is de situatie niet rooskleurig. Kirkuk was na de val van Saddam Hoessein in mei 2003 lange tijd een relatief rustige stad. Maar sinds kort is er sprake van een sterke toename van het aantal moorden. Functionarissen in Kirkuk wijzen al-Qaida en verwante groepen aan als de schuldigen van het geweld, maar ze sluiten ook niet uit dat de breinen achter het geweld sektarische motieven hebben.

Het geweld schaadt de verhouding tussen de verschillende bevolkingsgroepen in de stad. De ingewikkelde sociale structuur in de stad – waar Koerden, Arabieren (soennieten en sji’iten), Turkmenen en christenen wonen – geeft sommige diplomaten en analisten aanleiding te speculeren over een burgeroorlog met Kirkuk als startpunt.

De meeste inwoners van Kirkuk geloven daar echter niet in. Veel van hen beweren dat de geruchten over een burgeroorlog de wereld in geholpen worden door degenen die er belang bij hebben verdeeldheid te zaaien. “Als er een burgeroorlog had gedreigd, dan was die al veel eerder uitgebroken, in de chaotische periode na de val van Saddam Hoessein”, denkt Jawad al-Janabi, een Arabisch lid van de provinciale raad in Kirkuk. “Ik denk dat de gezamenlijke geschiedenis en sociale banden tussen de verschillende nationaliteiten in Kirkuk zo’n oorlog zullen verhinderen.”

Koerdische functionarissen ontkennen eveneens dat er sprake is van etnische conflicten in de stad. “Sommige mensen beweren al drie jaar dat Kirkuk een tijdbom is”, zegt Hasib Rojbayani, eveneens lid van de provinciale raad. “De realiteit in de stad is anders. De situatie is volledig onder controle.”

De meeste inwoners van Kirkuk willen niets liever dan een beter leven. “We willen vreedzaam samenleven en het ongelukkige verleden vergeten”, zegt een christelijke inwoner.

De nieuwe Iraakse grondwet kent een driestappenplan om de situatie in Kirkuk te normaliseren. Artikel 140 staat Koerdische en Turkmeense vluchtelingen toe terug te keren naar de stad. Arabieren die tijdens het regime van Saddam Hoessein naar Kirkuk kwamen, worden opgeroepen de stad te verlaten. Zij krijgen daarvoor compensatie.

De tweede stap is een volkstelling, die eind 2007 gevolgd moet worden door een provinciaal referendum over de vraag of Kirkuk een federale regio blijft of onderdeel wordt van Koerdistan. IPS (JS)(EINDE/2006)

quote:

The government commits itself to the implementation of article 140 of the constitution, that relies on article 58 of the TAL that specifies 3 stages: normalization, census, and referendum in Kirkuk and other areas of unresolved status. Following its formation, the government will start taking the necessary steps for the normalization procedures which include returning towns and villages that were originally part of Kirkuk , this stage ends on March 29, 2007, then the census stage starts from July 31, 2007 and the last stage which is the referendum will be finalized on Nov. 15, 2007. (This point deals with resolving territorial issues created by the tyranny of the former regime of Saddam Hussein.)

quote:

IRAK:
VS-troepen verliezen controle over Irak
Dahr Jamail en Ali Al-Fadhily

RAMADI, 5 september (IPS) - De Amerikaanse troepen in Irak verliezen hun greep op de woelige provincie al-Anbar. Dat zeggen de Iraakse ordediensten en gewone Irakezen. Eigenlijk hebben de Amerikanen daardoor zowat een derde van Irak niet meer onder controle.

In al-Anbar, de provincie ten westen van Bagdad, liggen Falluja, Ramadi en andere steden die het zwaarst hebben geleden onder de bezetting door de Amerikaanse interventiemacht en waar het verzet tegen de nieuwe orde in Irak het grootst is. Falluja en delen van Haditha en Ramadi werden grotendeels verwoest door offensieven tegen het verzet, en toch lijken de rebellen er nu weer de lakens uit de delen. Dat geldt ook voor de rest van de provincie, zegt Abu Ghalib, een regeringsmedewerker in Ramadi. “Geen enkele ambtenaar kan iets ondernemen zonder eerst het verzet te contacteren.”

“Zelfs de gouverneur vroeg eerst altijd hun toelating. Toen hij daarmee ophield, vaardigden de rebellen de doodstraf tegen hem uit. Nu kan hij zich alleen nog onder Amerikaanse bescherming verplaatsen.”

“Er zal geen einde komen aan de opstand in al-Anbar zolang er Amerikaanse soldaten rondlopen”, voorspelt Ahmed Salman, een historicus uit Falluja. Hij wijst erop dat de brandhaard grenst aan Jordanië, Syrië en Saudi-Arabië, wat de opstandelingen nagenoeg ongrijpbaar maakt.

Volgens Salman schiet het Amerikaanse leger zichzelf in de voet. “Bij hun hevige offensieven komen zoveel burgers om, dat de rust niet kan terugkeren onder de inwoners van al-Anbar.”

De voorbije weken voerden de rebellen talloze aanvallen uit op Amerikaanse soldaten in Haditha, Ramadi en Falluja. Op de snelweg tussen Bagdad en Amman, die door al-Anbar voert, werden verscheidene legervoertuigen opgeblazen. Daarbij vielen langs Amerikaanse kant tientallen doden.

Grote delen van de 550 kilometer lange snelweg tussen Bagdad en Amman zijn nu in handen van het verzet. Langs andere stukken zijn misdadigers actief. “Als we voorraden voor het Amerikaanse leger of de Iraakse regering aanvoeren, leggen de rebellen er beslag op”, klaagt de handelaar Hayder al-Mussawi. Als we goederen voor de lokale bevolking vervoeren, vallen die in handen van de rovers.”

Ooggetuigen uit Ramadi zeggen dat er ook veel overvallen in hun stad plaatsvinden. De Amerikaanse troepen in Ramadi beloofden onlangs zich terug te trekken naar hun kampen in Haditha en Habaniyah, bij Fallujah. Hun werk in Ramadi zou worden overgenomen door Iraakse ordediensten.

“Ik denk niet dat dat mogelijk is”, zegt de voormalige Iraakse politiechef Kahtan al-Dulaimi. “Iraakse eenheden zijn niet opgewassen tegen het verzet in al Anbar. Al-Anbar zal de laatste provincie zijn die wordt overgedragen aan de Iraakse ordediensten.

Volgens Iraq Coalition Casualty Count, een groep die bijhoudt hoeveel buitenlandse soldaten er in Irak sneuvelen, zijn er in al-Anbar al 964 soldaten van de bezettingsmacht gestorven, meer dan in gelijk welke andere provincie. Bagdad komt op de tweede plaats met 665 slachtoffers.

Het Amerikaanse leger lijkt niet bij te leren. Inwoners van Ramadi zeggen dat de Amerikanen over een afstand van 500 meter lage huizen aan het slopen zijn in de buurt van de regeringsgebouwen in de stad - Ramadi is de hoofdstad van al-Anbar. Vanuit verlaten huizen in die wijk werden al geregeld aanvallen uitgevoerd op de zetel van de regering. De mensen in Ramadi zijn boos over dat sloopwerk.

In Falluja zijn er dagelijks confrontaties tussen rebellen en Amerikaanse troepen of de Iraakse politie. “Eerder bleef de politie buiten schot”, zegt Abu Mohammed, een inwoner. “Maar nu hebben honderden agenten hun ontslag ingediend omdat ze als doelwit gelden.”

Ook in Haditha, Hit, al-Qa'im en Abu Ghraib worden er bijna dagelijks aanslagen gepleegd op Amerikaanse soldaten of Iraakse regeringstroepen. Volgens een recent rapport van het Amerikaanse ministerie van Defensie is het aantal Iraakse slachtoffers van dat geweld de laatste maanden met 50 procent gestegen, tot 120 per dag. Tussen mei en augustus vonden er gemiddeld 800 aanslagen per week plaats. Het Pentagon noemt de opstand onder de Iraakse soennieten “machtig en duurzaam”. IPS (PD)(EINDE/2006)

quote:

Op zaterdag 9 september 2006 11:12 schreef Monidique het volgende:
Mja, dat is volgens mij al twee jaar zo.

quote:

Op zaterdag 9 september 2006 11:15 schreef zakjapannertje het volgende:

[..]

toch konden daar eerder toch verkiezingen georganiseerd worden dacht ik? lijkt mij dat dat nu ook minder zeker is

quote:

Senaat VS: geen relatie Saddam-al Qaeda

Er zijn geen banden geweest tussen de Iraakse oud-dictator Saddam Hoessein en het terreurnetwerk al-Qaeda.

Bedreiging
Dat is de conclusie van een onderzoek door de Amerikaanse Senaat. Saddam Hoessein heeft al-Qaeda altijd buiten de deur gehouden omdat hij extremistische moslims als een grote bedreiging van zijn regime zag.

President Bush
Het oordeel van de Senaat staat loodrecht tegenover beweringen van de Amerikaanse president Bush. Die heeft altijd beweerd dat Saddam steun gaf aan al-Qaeda-kopstuk al-Zarqawi. Dat beeld wordt nu door de Senaat omvergehaald.

quote:

What is certain is the wretched state of health care in Iraq. In March 2006 the campaign group Medact reported that 18,000 physicians have left since 2003; an estimated 250 of those that remained have been kidnapped and, in 2005 alone, 65 killed. Medact also said that "easily treatable conditions such as diarrhoea and respiratory illness caused 70 per cent of all child deaths", and that "of the 180 health clinics the US hoped to build by the end of 2005, only four have been completed and none has been opened". In May, a survey by the Iraq government and Unicef reported that a quarter of all Iraqi children suffer from malnutrition.

quote:

One Army officer summarized it as arguing that in Anbar province, "We haven't been defeated militarily, but we have been defeated politically — and that's where wars are won and lost."

quote:

Op zondag 10 september 2006 14:02 schreef Monidique het volgende:

What is certain is the wretched state of health care in Iraq. In March 2006 the campaign group Medact reported that 18,000 physicians have left since 2003; an estimated 250 of those that remained have been kidnapped and, in 2005 alone, 65 killed. Medact also said that "easily treatable conditions such as diarrhoea and respiratory illness caused 70 per cent of all child deaths", and that "of the 180 health clinics the US hoped to build by the end of 2005, only four have been completed and none has been opened". In May, a survey by the Iraq government and Unicef reported that a quarter of all Iraqi children suffer from malnutrition.

_{[ bron ]}

Het artikel heeft een wat ander onderwerp, maar deze alinea past hier goed.

quote:

Op maandag 11 september 2006 20:53 schreef Godslasteraar het volgende:

[..]

ook nog berichten dat al het niet islamitisch georienteerd onderwijs personeel wordt vermoord/verjaagd?
Heb daar eens een kort artikel over gelezen, een jaar geleden schat ik, en sindsdien nooit meer iets over gehoord.

quote:

After the fall of Saddam Hussein's government in April 2003, the opportunity to participate in the U.S.-led effort to reconstruct Iraq attracted all manner of Americans -- restless professionals, Arabic-speaking academics, development specialists and war-zone adventurers. But before they could go to Baghdad, they had to get past Jim O'Beirne's office in the Pentagon.
To pass muster with O'Beirne, a political appointee who screens prospective political appointees for Defense Department posts, applicants didn't need to be experts in the Middle East or in post-conflict reconstruction. What seemed most important was loyalty to the Bush administration.

O'Beirne's staff posed blunt questions to some candidates about domestic politics: Did you vote for George W. Bush in 2000? Do you support the way the president is fighting the war on terror? Two people who sought jobs with the U.S. occupation authority said they were even asked their views on Roe v. Wade .

Many of those chosen by O'Beirne's office to work for the Coalition Provisional Authority, which ran Iraq's government from April 2003 to June 2004, lacked vital skills and experience. A 24-year-old who had never worked in finance -- but had applied for a White House job -- was sent to reopen Baghdad's stock exchange. The daughter of a prominent neoconservative commentator and a recent graduate from an evangelical university for home-schooled children were tapped to manage Iraq's $13 billion budget, even though they didn't have a background in accounting.

quote:

Op maandag 18 september 2006 20:50 schreef klez het volgende:
Iraq chiefs vow to fight al-Qaeda
Soennieten. De hopeloosheid van de strijd van de moslimterroristen moet toch langzamerhand tot de grootste fanatiekelingen doordringen.

quote:

Op zaterdag 23 september 2006 09:42 schreef Godslasteraar het volgende:
en nu is er weer fijn een vrachtauto+benzinetank opgeblazen temidden van het publiek. Ben benieuwd of Irak het voorland is van het gehele Midden Oosten. Die richting lijken we wel op te gaan.

quote:

Bomb ignites tanker in Iraq, killing 35

BAGHDAD, Iraq - A bomb blew up a kerosene tanker and killed at least 35 people Saturday in a Shiite slum in Baghdad, while authorities announced the capture of a leader of the group believed to be behind the 2004 attack on a U.S. military mess hall.

An American contractor working for the State Department was killed Friday in a rocket attack in the southern city of Basra, the U.S. Embassy said.

The attack on Baghdad's Sadr City came a day after a death squad gunned down four people in an assault on Sunni Arab homes and mosques in a neighborhood where a Shiite militia last week openly threatened members of the minority.

Meanwhile, authorities said they captured a leader of the Sunni militant group Ansar al-Sunnah, which has claimed responsibility for a number of suicide attacks, including the December 2004 explosion at a U.S. military mess hall in Mosul that killed 22 people.

quote:

Facing Facts on Iraq

While Iraq is a central issue in this year’s election campaigns, there is very little clear talk about what to do, beyond vague recommendations for staying the course or long-term timetables for withdrawal. That is because politicians running for election want to deliver good news, and there is nothing about Iraq — including withdrawal scenarios — that is anything but ominous.

In the real Iraq, armed Shiite and Kurdish parties have divided up the eastern two-thirds of the country, leaving Sunni insurgents and American marines to fight over the rest. Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki and his “national unity cabinet” stretch out their arms to like-thinking allies like Iran and Hezbollah, but barely lift a finger to rein in the sectarian militias and death squads spreading terror across Baghdad and the Shiite south.

The civilian death toll is now running at roughly 100 a day, with many of the victims gruesomely tortured with power tools or acid. Over the summer, more Iraqi civilians died violent deaths each month than the number of Americans lost to terrorism on Sept. 11. Meanwhile, the electricity remains off, oil production depressed, unemployment pervasive and basic services hard to find.

Iraq is today a broken, war-torn country. Outside the relatively stable Kurdish northeast, virtually every family — Sunni or Shiite, rich or poor, powerful or powerless — must cope with fear and physical insecurity on an almost daily basis. The courts, when they function at all, are subject to political interference; street-corner justice is filling the vacuum. Religious courts are asserting their power over family life. Women’s rights are in retreat.

Growing violence, not growing democracy, is the dominant feature of Iraqi life. Every Iraqi knows this. Americans need to know it too.

Beyond the futility of simply staying the course lies the impossibility of keeping the bulk of American ground forces stationed in Iraq indefinitely. They have already been there for 42 months, longer than it took the United States to defeat Hitler. The strain is undermining the long-term strength of the Army and Marines, threatening to divert the National Guard from homeland security and emboldening Iran and North Korea. Yet with the military situation deteriorating, the Pentagon has had to give up any idea of significant withdrawals this year, or for that matter anytime in the foreseeable future.

If there is still a constructive way out of this disaster, it has to begin with some truth-telling. Politicians are not going to press for serious solutions when their constituents have not been prepared to understand what the real options are. Republicans will not talk about genuine alternatives as long as their supporters have been primed to believe victory is possible. Few Democrats will advocate anything that might wind up transferring responsibility for this awful mess to them.

Acknowledging the hard facts of today’s Iraq must be more than a political talking point for the president’s opponents. It is the only possible beginning to a serious national discussion about what kind of American policy has the best chance of retrieving whatever can still be retrieved in Iraq and minimizing the damage to wider American interests.

quote:

Iraqi premier calls for Muslim unity

BAGHDAD, Iraq — Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki called Sunday for Shiites and Sunnis to use the Islamic holy month of Ramadan to put aside their differences, while authorities reported that at least 20 people were killed in scattered violence across the country.

Al-Maliki's plea for peace came a day after a retaliatory bombing killed dozens of Shiites in the capital.

"We are all invited to make use of these days to strengthen the bonds of brotherhood and avoid anything that could hurt the social fabric of the Iraqi people," he said in a statement. "Iraq is living in a very sensitive and historic period."

Al-Maliki also pleaded for support for his nascent government, which received a boost Sunday when parliamentary groups agreed to open debate on a contentious Shiite-proposed draft legislation that would allow the creation of federal regions in Iraq.

quote:

Op zaterdag 23 september 2006 16:04 schreef Monidique het volgende:
Tsja, zulke dingen gebeuren daar praktisch elke dag. Zo gaat dat wel eens in een door buitenlandse interventie in burgeroorlog verzeild geraakte failed state.

quote:

VS/IRAK:
"Amerikaanse leger in Irak op rand van uitputting en revolte" - topmilitairen
Jim Lobe

WASHINGTON, 27 september (IPS) - Topmilitairen van het Amerikaanse leger vrezen dat de soldaten in Irak stilaan hun fysieke grenzen hebben overschreden en dreigen te revolteren als president Bush niet meer geld en meer troepen voor de oorlog vrijmaakt. Een dergelijke beslissing zou serieuze politieke gevolgen kunnen hebben voor de Republikeinen.

Het eerste signaal van revolte bij de legertop werd vorige maand al duidelijk, toen topofficier generaal Peter Schoomaker weigerde om zich akkoord te verklaren met het voorgestelde legerbudget door het Witte Huis. De Los Angeles Times sprak over een "ongezien protest".

Volgens de Times van maandag heeft Schoomaker er bij president Bush op aangedrongen het budget voor de oorlog in Irak tegen 2008 met de helft te verhogen - tot bijna 140 miljard dollar - om de situatie in Irak het hoofd te bieden en te kunnen ingrijpen in noodsituaties.

De actie van de Amerikaanse topofficier volgt nauwelijks enkele dagen na het nieuws dat het leger erover nadenkt om meer troepen van de National Guard en reservisten op te roepen. Als deze beslissing nog voor de Congresverkiezingen van 7 november wordt genomen, zou dit serieuze politieke gevolgen kunnen hebben voor de Republikeinen. De National Guard bestaat namelijk uit "burgersoldaten" - geen beroepssoldaten. Hen oproepen, betekent zo goed als zeker een massale golf van protesten tegen een oorlog die al lang niet meer populair is.

De beslissing zou ook een persoonlijke nederlaag betekenen voor president Bush, die juist had gehoopt om het troepenaantal van 140.000 in Irak tegen het einde van dit jaar met 30.000 eenheden te kunnen verminderen.

Door het opflakkeren van het sektarische geweld in Irak, vooral in Bagdad, lijkt die hoop echter steeds meer ijdel. Generaal John Abizaid, bevelhebber van de Amerikaanse troepen in het Midden-Oosten, bevestigde zelf al eerder aan journalisten dat hij ook volgend jaar minstens 140.000 soldaten in Irak nodig heeft.

Daarnaast worden de Verenigde Staten geconfronteerd met de wederopstanding van de Taliban in Afghanistan. Dat heeft Bush verplicht zijn plan te schrappen om ook daar het aantal soldaten te verminderen, van 19.000 begin dit jaar tot 16.000 eind dit jaar. Momenteel zijn er zelfs meer Amerikaanse soldaten in Afghanistan dan vorig jaar. En als de NAVO er niet in slaagt haar lidstaten (zoals België) te overtuigen meer troepen te sturen, zal het Amerikaanse leger een nog grotere bijdrage moeten leveren

Deze verplichtingen hebben een serieuze tol geëist van de Amerikaanse landtroepen, niet alleen op het vlak van manschappen, maar ook betreffende uitrusting en geld. Daarnaast zijn hoge legerofficieren ook bezorgd over de fysieke uitputting bij hun manschappen, vooral bij het middenkader, en de kwaliteit van de nieuwe rekruten.

De jongste maanden is het Amerikaanse leger beduidend soepeler omgesprongen met toelatingsvoorwaarden voor nieuwe rekruten. Zo zijn de leeftijdsgrens en opleidingscondities versoepeld en worden er meer soldaten met "criminele feiten op hun strafblad" toegelaten. Dit roept bij onafhankelijke waarnemers en bij de topmilitairen veel vragen op. IPS (YDL/ADR)(EINDE/2006)

quote:

Op zondag 24 september 2006 22:16 schreef Godslasteraar het volgende:

[..]

Burgeroorlog? Ik vraag me af of Irak onderhand niet al dieper gezonken is dan Liberia een aantal jaren geleden. De oorlogen in voormalig Joegoslavië waren kinderspel vergeleken met wat er in Irak gebeurt. En dat terwijl er een regering/parlement is, én een buitenlandse troepenmacht.
Of eigenlijk, wat ik zie is een herhaling van Algerije begin jaren negentig.

Begrippen als burgeroorlog en failed state voldoen niet wat betreft Irak.

quote:

Poll: Iraqis back attacks on U.S. troops

WASHINGTON - About six in 10 Iraqis say they approve of attacks on U.S.-led forces, and slightly more than that want their government to ask U.S. troops to leave within a year, a poll finds.

The Iraqis also have negative views of Osama bin Laden, according to the early September poll of 1,150.

The poll, done for University of Maryland's Program on International Policy Attitudes, found: Almost four in five Iraqis say the U.S. military force in Iraq provokes more violence than it prevents.

About 61 percent approved of the attacks — up from 47 percent in January. A solid majority of Shiite and Sunni Arabs approved of the attacks, according to the poll. The increase came mostly among Shiite Iraqis.

An overwhelmingly negative opinion of terror chief bin Laden and more than half, 57 percent, disapproving of Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

Three-fourths say they think the U.S. plans to keep military bases in Iraq permanently.

A majority of Iraqis, 72 percent, say they think Iraq will be one state five years from now. Shiite Iraqis were most likely to feel that way, though a majority of Sunnis and Kurds also believed that would be the case.

quote:

40 tortured bodies found in Baghdad

BAGHDAD, Iraq - The bodies of 40 men who were shot and had their hands and feet bound have been found in the capital over the past 24 hours, police said Thursday.

All the victims showed signs of torture, police Lt. Thayer Mahmoud said. They were dumped in several neighborhoods in both eastern and western Baghdad, he said.

The top U.S. military spokesman in Iraq, Maj. Gen. William B. Caldwell, on Wednesday said murders and executions are currently the main cause of civilian deaths in Baghdad.

Much of the violence has been attributed to death squads, many of which are thought to be offshoots of mainly Shiite militias.

Also Thursday, two Iraqi soldiers were killed and 10 others were injured in suicide car bombing in part of Baghdad where American and Iraqi troops had just conducted a security sweep.

The car slammed into a checkpoint in the northeastern neighborhood of Shaab, a neighborhood in northeastern Baghdad that had just been cleared by troops taking part in Operation Together Forward.

The top U.S. military spokesman in Iraq, Maj. Gen. William B. Caldwell, says violence in the capital has spiked with the onset of the Muslim holy month of Ramadan, which officially began on Monday, and that suicide attacks were at their highest level ever.

"This has been a tough week," he said.

In other violence, a child was killed in the southern Baghdad neighborhood of Dora when a mortar shell landed on a house, police said.

Seven policemen and three Iraqi Interior Ministry special forces were injured in three different bomb attacks in the capital.

Meanwhile Wednesday, American troops killed eight people — four of them women — after taking heavy fire during a raid on a suspected terrorist's house northeast of Baghdad, the U.S. command said. But relatives of the dead disputed the U.S. account, saying their family had nothing to do with any terrorist group.

In all, 23 people died violently around Iraq, including at least 10 killed in a shootout Wednesday night near a Sunni mosque in Hurriyah, a northern neighborhood of Baghdad, police said. The U.S. command also announced the deaths of a Marine and a U.S. soldier, both killed in action Monday in Anbar province.

Outside the pockmarked house, which relatives said belonged to Mohammed Jassim, bullet casings littered the ground and blood stained the sand. Family members cried and consoled one another as the bodies of the women were taken away.

"This is an ugly criminal act by the U.S. soldiers against Iraqi citizens," Manal Jassim, who lost her parents and other relatives in the attack, told Associated Press Television News.

Iraq's major Sunni clerical organization, the Association of Muslim Scholars, condemned the raid as a "terrorist massacre."

quote:

Op zondag 24 september 2006 18:20 schreef Monidique het volgende:
Enerzijds roepen om eenheid en anderzijds het land formeel opdelen in de facto sektarische staten.

quote:

Op donderdag 28 september 2006 11:11 schreef SalmanPack het volgende:
Je leest het verkeerd want Al-Maliki riep op tot eenheid binnen de Islam, dus tussen de sjiieten en soennieten. Hij had het niet over eenheid als land