[Centraal] Irak na de oorlog - deel 35

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BAGHDAD, Iraq (CNN) -- Nine U.S. troops died in Iraq during the weekend, including five killed by roadside bombs, the U.S. military reported Sunday.

Two soldiers were killed and two wounded Sunday when a roadside bomb exploded near their vehicle in northern Iraq, U.S. commanders in the northern city of Tikrit announced. The soldiers were assigned to the Army's 3rd Brigade, 1st Cavalry Division.

Two U.S. soldiers and a Marine died from unspecified "enemy action" in western Iraq's Anbar province Saturday, the American command in Baghdad reported, while two U.S. soldiers were killed by a roadside bomb.

Anbar, including the provincial capital Ramadi, has been a hotbed of the mostly Sunni Arab insurgency against U.S. troops that emerged after the 2003 invasion of Iraq.

And two American soldiers were reported killed in Baghdad -- one slain by a roadside bomb Saturday, another killed in fighting Sunday.

The latest deaths bring the number of U.S. troops killed in Iraq to 2,900, including including seven civilians working for the Defense Department.

http://www.cnn.com/2006/W(...)l?section=cnn_latest

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Vanavond in Tegenlicht: Baghdad E.R.
Uitzending: maandag 4 december 21.00 uur, Nederland 2

In Tegenlicht het aangrijpende verslag van de gang van zaken in het belangrijkste Amerikaanse militair hospitaal in Irak. In de zwaarbewaakte groene zone in Baghdad worden dagelijks tientallen -zwaargewonde - Amerikaanse soldaten binnen gebracht. Artsen, verplegers en priesters proberen een voortdurende stroom van gewonde soldaten te behandelen, in leven te houden en bij te staan.

Maar er lijkt geen einde te komen aan het uitputtende gevecht van doktoren en verplegers tegen de horror van de oorlog. Veel van de ernstige verwondingen worden veroorzaakt door de talloze zelfgemaakte explosieven- IED's :improvised explosive devices- onder meer langs de kant van de 'gevaarlijkste weg ter wereld: Road Irish'.

In Baghdad ER een rauw en ongecensureerd beeld van de wérkelijke schade van de oorlog. Want zoals een verpleegkundige uit de operatiekamer in Baghdad zegt: "zelfs als je het geluk hebt om lichamelijk ongedeerd naar huis terug te gaan, als je niet leert omgaan met ál de aspecten van de oorlog, dan ga je uiteindelijk van binnen kapot.

http://www.vpro.nl/programma/tegenlicht/afleveringen/31873782/

tja, dat blijft behoorlijk buiten beeld, het aantal gewonde Amerikanen.

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Op maandag 4 december 2006 17:53 schreef pberends het volgende:

[..]

http://www.vpro.nl/programma/tegenlicht/afleveringen/31873782/

Was vorige week nog bij de Belg, geloof ik. Toch maar even kijken misschien.

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Op maandag 4 december 2006 18:14 schreef Monidique het volgende:

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Was vorige week nog bij de Belg, geloof ik. Toch maar even kijken misschien.

nee, dat was een andere, deze was trouwens nogal... indringend volgende weken alweer over Irak trouwens, ook over gewonde militairen geloof ik

Indringend, ja. Stukken been die eraf getrokken worden.

De Iraakse politie is doelwit nummer 1 van de terroristen maar het is wel een erg gewilde baan. Als je bij de Iraakse politie wilt moet je smeergeld betalen voordat ze je aannemen.

Check dit filmpje om erachter te komen waarom het zo'n puinzooi is in Bagdad
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JTqDXTZYDXY

_____________
Why Bush’s meeting with Iraqi Shiite leader Abdul Aziz al-Hakim is also seen as a signal to Iran



By Kevin Peraino - Newsweek
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/16042190/site/newsweek/

Dec. 4, 2006 - Professional diplomats love to talk about "watching the signals." High-profile meetings— like President Bush's encounter at the White House today with Iraqi Shiite politician Abdul Aziz al-Hakim—seldom result in sweeping policy shifts. But they do send a message, and the "optics" of the event are often more important than the sound-bites that emerge from the press conference afterward. So what signal, exactly, is President Bush trying to send by meeting with Hakim, one of the most revered, but also controversial, Shiite figures in Iraq?

On the surface, the message seems clear enough. As leader of one of the most powerful blocs in Iraq's parliament, Hakim is one of the few Iraqi politicians positioned to rescue the foundering government of Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki. As sectarian violence has exploded over the past several weeks, Maliki's hold on power appears more tenuous than ever. Even some of Bush's closest aides, like National Security Adviser Stephen J. Hadley, have questioned whether Maliki is up to the job. And the problem was only compounded last week when followers of radical Shiite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr announced they would boycott Maliki's government. The Sadrist threats probably aren't enough to topple Maliki's government on their own. Still, securing the support of Hakim's bloc of 30 parliamentarians (CORRECTIE: 128, waar halen ze 30 nou weer vandaan? —the same number as those who support Sadr’s party—seems more urgent than ever for Maliki and his allies in Washington.

Yet at least some Iraqis say they are also getting another signal. The final report of the Iraq Study Group, due to be delivered on Wednesday, is expected to call for talks with Iraq's neighbors, including Iran. And Hakim could end up emerging as a key conduit, acting as a "mediator" between the United States and the Islamic republic, according a senior Iraqi government official, who didn't want to be identified discussing sensitive diplomacy. The Iranians "send a very clear message through Hakim," says the Iraqi official. "They want to be recognized and reckoned with."

It wouldn't be the first time that the Bush administration has turned to Hakim for help. In one sense, American policymakers considered the Hakim family natural allies during the original push to overthrow Saddam Hussein. As a son of the Grand Ayatollah Muhsin al-Hakim, Abdul-Aziz was born into one of Shia Islam's most prominent families. In 1982, he helped to found the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI)—one of the key groups working to overthrow the Iraqi dictator. When Hakim's brother Baqir was assassinated in Najaf in 2003, Abdul-Aziz took over the group's leadership, and was eventually appointed president of the U.S.-backed Iraqi Governing Council in 2003.

But Hakim's ties to Iran's clerical leadership—along with his command of SCIRI's Badr Corps militia, which fought against Iraq in the Iran-Iraq war during the 1980s—also made him a dangerous figure in the eyes of at least some Americans. At a press conference back in March 2003, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld dismissed Hakim's Badr fighters as "unhelpful," and declared that the militiamen be "treated as combatants." "The Badr Corps is trained, equipped and directed by Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard," Rumsfeld insisted. "We will hold the Iranian government responsible for their actions." Even Sadr regularly rails against the dangers of Iranian influence in Iraq, warning that the country's intelligence operatives are trying to infiltrate his organization. In recent months, Hakim's Badr forces have periodically clashed with Sadr's Mahdi Army, fueling tensions even further. Some worry that a fight between Sadr and Badr could be just as bloody as the current Sunni-Shia violence.

American officials insist they still consider Hakim's fighters—along with Iraq's other militias—to be a danger to the stability of the Maliki government. A senior U.S. official in Baghdad, who did not want to be identified discussing sensitive diplomacy, said that during the meeting today Bush would reiterate his support for Maliki's government, and press Hakim to help "fix the militia problem." Still, such vague pronouncements are likely to be lost on Iraqis mired in the daily violence of sectarian warfare. They're more likely to be watching the signals. The clear message: Abdul-Aziz al-Hakim is once again a key man to see.

With Christopher Dickey and Babak Dehghanpisheh

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More Troops?

By William S. Lind

[The views expressed in this article are those of Mr. Lind, writing in his personal capacity. They do not reflect the opinions or policy positions of the Free Congress Foundation, its officers, board or employees, or those of Kettle Creek Corporation.]

The latest serpent at which a drowning Washington Establishment is grasping is the idea of sending more American troops to Iraq. Would more troops turn the war there in our favor? No.

Why not? First, because nothing can. The war in Iraq is irredeemably lost. Neither we nor, at present, anyone else can create a new Iraqi state to replace the one our invasion destroyed. Maybe that will happen after the Iraqi civil was is resolved, maybe not. It is in any case out of our hands.

Nor could more American troops control the forces driving Iraq’s intensifying civil war. The passions of ethnic and religious hatred unleashed by the disintegration of the Iraqi state will not cool because a few more American patrols pass through the streets. Iraqis are quite capable of fighting us and each other at the same time.

A second reason more troops would make no difference is that the troops we have there now don’t know what to do, or at least their leaders don’t know what they should do. For the most part, American troops in Iraq sit on their Forward Operating Bases; in effect, we are besieging ourselves. Troops under siege are seldom effective at controlling the surrounding countryside, regardless of their number.

When American troops do leave their FOBs, it is almost always to run convoys, which is to say to provide targets; to engage in meaningless patrols, again providing targets; or to do raids, which are downright counterproductive because they turn the people even more strongly against us, where that is possible. Doing more of any of these things would help us not at all.

More troops might make a difference if they were sent as part of a change in strategy, away from raids and “killing bad guys” and toward something like the Vietnam war’s CAP program, where American troops defended villages instead of attacking them. But there is no sign of any such change of strategy on the horizon, so there would be nothing useful for more troops to do.

Even a CAP program would be likely to fail at this stage of the Iraq war, which points to the third reason more troops would not help us: more troops cannot turn back the clock. For the CAP or “ink blot” strategy to work, there has to be some level of acceptance of the foreign troops by the local people. When we first invaded Iraq, that was present in much of the country.

But we squandered that good will with blunder upon blunder. How many troops would it take to undo all those errors? The answer is either zero or an infinite number, because no quantity of troops can erase history. The argument that more troops in the beginning, combined with an ink blot strategy, might have made the Iraq venture a success does not mean that more troops could do the same thing now.

The clinching argument against more troops also relates to time: sending more troops would mean nothing to our opponents on the ground, because those opponents know we could not sustain a significantly larger occupation force for any length of time. So what if a few tens of thousands more Americans come for a few months? The U.S. military is strained to the breaking point to sustain the force there now. Where is the rotation base for a much larger deployment to come from?

The fact that Washington is seriously considering sending more American troops to Iraq illustrates a common phenomenon in war. As the certainty of defeat looms ever more clearly, the scrabbling about for a miracle cure, a deus ex machina, becomes ever more desperate - and more silly. Cavalry charges, Zeppelins, V-2 missiles, kamikazes, the list is endless. In the end, someone finally has to face facts and admit defeat. The sooner someone in Washington is willing to do that, the sooner the troops we already have in Iraq will come home – alive.

http://www.d-n-i.net/lind/lind_11_30_06.htm

Far-called, our navies melt away;

On dune and headland sinks the fire:

Lo, all our pomp of yesterday

Is one with Nineveh and Tyre!

Judge of the Nations, spare us yet.

Lest we forget - lest we forget!

Vanavond een item in Netwerk:

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Bagdad door de ogen van een arts
In Netwerk een reportage die in zijn geheel is gefilmd door de Iraakse arts Omer. Hij werkt op de eerste hulp afdeling van het al Yarmoukziekenhuis in Bagdad. Dagelijks wordt hij geconfronteerd met slachtoffers van aanslagen en schietpartijen.

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Op dinsdag 5 december 2006 18:19 schreef pberends het volgende:
Vanavond een item in Netwerk:
[..]

Ik kwam de reportage tegen tijdens het zappen, erg indrukwekkend!

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Op dinsdag 5 december 2006 18:19 schreef pberends het volgende:
Vanavond een item in Netwerk:
[..]

Netwerk: Bagdad door de ogen van een arts

Hier online terug te zien.

edit;

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Op woensdag 6 december 2006 13:26 schreef pberends het volgende:

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Netwerk: Bagdad door de ogen van een arts

Hier online terug te zien.

is hier uitgebreider te zien trouwens: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rveYg7L6DgA , http://video.google.nl/videoplay?docid=-5206675421358585877&q=Baghdad%3A+A+doctor%27s+story

[ Bericht 16% gewijzigd door zakjapannertje op 06-12-2006 13:39:37 ]

De eerstvolgende keer dat Bush gaat poepen zal-ie het langverwachte Irak-rapport wel meenemen.

Panel says U.S. policy in Iraq ‘is not working’

Read the Iraq group's full report (.pdf)

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Op donderdag 7 december 2006 01:22 schreef popolon het volgende:
Read the Iraq group's full report (.pdf)

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In addition, there is significant underreporting of the vio-
lence in Iraq. The standard for recording attacks acts as a filter
to keep events out of reports and databases. A murder of an
Iraqi is not necessarily counted as an attack. If we cannot deter-
mine the source of a sectarian attack, that assault does not
make it into the database. A roadside bomb or a rocket or mor-
tar attack that doesn’t hurt U.S. personnel doesn’t count. For
example, on one day in July 2006 there were 93 attacks or sig-
nificant acts of violence reported. Yet a careful review of the re-
ports for that single day brought to light 1,100 acts of violence.
Good policy is difficult to make when information is systemati-
cally collected in a way that minimizes its discrepancy with pol-
icy goals.

Goh. Verrassend.

Was voor de oorlog al duidelijk dat ze het daar niet gingen winnen.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nJ2Cr6eRIiU&mode=related&search=

Door al die ellende tegenwoordig, zou je bijna terugverlangen naar de "good old days"

Elf Amerikaanse soldaten in Irak gedood op één dag

http://www.nieuws.nl/441269

(Novum/AP) - In Irak zijn woensdag elf Amerikaanse militairen gesneuveld. De elf kwamen om bij aanslagen en gevechten verspreid over het land. Dat heeft het leger donderdag bekendgemaakt.

In december zijn nu 31 Amerikanen in Irak om het leven gekomen. In november lag dit aantal op 69 en in oktober sneuvelden er 105 Amerikaanse soldaten. Sinds het begin van de oorlog, in maart 2003, zijn zeker 2.919 Amerikanen in Irak gesneuveld.

_____

'Aantal vluchtelingen uit Irak groeit schrikbarend'

http://www.trouw.nl/laats(...)_groeit_schrikbarend

(Novum/AP) - Het aantal vluchtelingen uit Irak groeit schrikbarend snel. De de Verenigde Staten zouden het initiatief moeten nemen om Iraakse vluchtelingen te helpen. Dat zegt de in Washington gevestigde organisatie Refugees International.
Naar schatting van de Verenigde Naties ontvluchten momenteel per maand honderdduizend Irakezen hun land. Daarmee neemt de Iraakse vluchtelingencrisis sneller in omvang toe dan die in de Sudanese regio Darfur, zegt Kristele Younes van Refugees International.

De vluchtelingen vormen een zware last voor de andere landen in het Midden-Oosten, met name Syrië, Jordanië en Libanon. Veel landen hebben de rechten van Iraakse vluchtelingen ingeperkt en het is van groot belang om te voorkomen dat de vluchtelingen worden teruggestuurd naar hun land, waar ze het slachtoffer kunnen worden van geweld en ontvoering, zo staat in een woensdag verschenen rapport van de organisatie.

Jordanië heeft zijn grenzen inmiddels vrijwel gesloten voor vluchtelingen uit Irak, waardoor Syrië nu de meeste vluchtelingen, zo'n tweeduizend per dag, te verwerken heeft. De verblijfsvergunningen van Irakezen in Jordanië worden bovendien niet meer verlengd.

"In Jordanië zijn de mensen bang. Ze hebben geen wettelijke status", zegt Younes. "Ze komen hun huizen niet uit, ze sturen hun kinderen niet naar school. De situatie is tamelijk dramatisch. Ze kunnen niet werken, dus hun middelen van bestaan raken heel snel uitgeput."

De VS worden in het rapport opgeroepen voor te gaan in een internationaal initiatief om landen in het Midden-Oosten die Iraakse burgers opvangen te steunen.

"De Verenigde Staten en hun bondgenoten hebben de huidige chaos in Irak uitgelokt, maar ze doen weinig om de humanitaire crisis te verzachten die door de huidige exodus is veroorzaakt", zegt de voorzitter van Refugees International, Kenneth Bacon. De VN-vluchtelingenorganisatie UNHCR heeft niet de middelen om het probleem op te lossen, aldus Refugees International, dat donors oproept meer geld te geven. De VS en andere westerse landen zouden volgens de organisatie de meest kwetsbare vluchtelingen moeten opnemen.

Woordvoerster Nancy Beck van het Amerikaanse ministerie van buitenlandse zaken zei in reactie op het rapport dat de VS reeds geld geven om de meest kwetsbare Irakezen in Jordanië en Syrië te helpen en van plan zijn die hulp volgend jaar op te schroeven. Bovendien neemt de VS een kwart van de kosten van de UNHCR-programma's voor Jordanië en Irak voor hun rekening, zei ze.

Bush is weer lekker angst aan het zaaien op CNN..

_{Geef toch gewoon toe dat je oorlogje mislukt is kerel!!}

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Every single thing that a person does--not just prayer or the time spent in a mosque but every action--is in fact an act of veneration. So yes, many things are different here. Yet we all have become friends--good friends--in part because I am here; I honor them and their religion by going out of my way to show them respect. Not all Americans act this way.

http://www.thenation.com/doc/20061211/soldiers_story

Het Gedroomde Land

Ze hebben een geschiedenis die teruggaat tot in de oudheid, ze kenden beroemde dynastieën en befaamde leiders, maar een volwaardige eigen staat hebben ze nooit gehad. Voor de Koerden in Turkije, Irak en Iran blijft het onafhankelijke Koerdistan een luchtspiegeling in het Midden-Oosten.