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| 11/23 |
| 2006/7/14-18 [Politics/Foreign/MiddleEast/Iraq] UID:43672 Activity:nil |
7/14 Baghdad descending into total anarchy.
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,3-2268585_2,00.html
"A local journalist told me bitterly this week that Iraqis find it
ironic that Saddam Hussein is on trial for killing 148 people 24 years
ago, while militias loyal to political parties now in government kill
that many people every few days. But it is not an irony that anyone
here has time to laugh about. They are too busy packing their bags and
wondering how they can get out alive."
\_ but it is our God given duty to bring FREEDOM LIBERTY AND THE
PURSUIT OF HAPPINESS into primitive cultures around the world,
starting with Iraq! There is no price too great for our glorious
War on every primitive culture on this planet. The War is totally
worth it. God Bless.
\_ Son, all I've ever asked of my marines is that they obey my
orders as they would the word of God. We are here to help
the Vietnamese, because inside every gook there is an American
trying to get out. It's a hardball world, son. We've gotta
keep our heads until this peace craze blows over.
\_ Personally, I think, uh... they don't really want to be
involved in this war. You know, I mean... they sort of took
away our freedom and gave it to the, to the gookers, you
know. But they don't want it. They'd rather be alive than
free, I guess. Poor dumb bastards.
\_ that's because there is evidence for that.. there are tons
more people killed but no evidence to support it..
\_ that's <censored by the US Government> no <censored by the US
Government> support <censored>
\_ Uh...forest, trees anyone?
\_ sorta like how evidence of WMD's was the technical reason for
the war?
\_ No, the real difference is that this is (largely) the people killing
themselves.
\_ So the people killing each other is preferable to the government
doing it?
\_ it's a democratic right! if yer still alive, it's probably
because you and yours have also exercised yer right to bear
an assault rifle!
\_ If you've been paying attention to other reporting coming out
of Baghdad recently, it is becoming evident that the government
is collaborating with the militia death squads - or at least
tacitly supporting them. For instance see:
http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2006/07/12/baghdad
For a personal perspective:
http://www.csua.org/u/gfl (riverbend blog)
\_ hey, democrats, got a problem for ya. I've been opposing the war
all along. And there is a part of me want us just to get out.
The logic is that you can not reverse a failed policy (i.e.
invading iraq), and we shouldn't be responsible for such failed
policy. HOWEVER, it is more and more clear that if we get out
prematurely, there will be a genocide of some sort... what
should we do? continue Bush's failed policy?
\_ Check the Lawrence Kaplan article. The (quiet) Bush policy is
withdrawal anyway, even though they keep vigorously denying the
existence of a "timetable."
\_ and blaming democrats for the genocide happened afterwards...
sounds like an ingenius plan of Karl Rove again.
\_ any link to that article?
\_ Here you go:
http://www.tnr.com/doc.mhtml?pt=3FtL2Vxi34T0BA0X2XTFjy%3D%3D
\_ I told you a long time ago what we should do, you are just
not interested in doing what will work. |
| 11/23 |
|
| www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,3-2268585_2,00.html Page 3 Hundreds -- Sunni and Shia -- are abandoning their homes. My driver said all his neighbours had now fled, their abandoned houses bullet-pocked and locked up. On a nearby mosque, competing Sunni and Shiite graffiti had been scrawled on the walls. A senior nurse at Yarmouk hospital on the fringes of west Baghdad's war zone said that he was close to being overwhelmed. "On Tuesday we received 35 bodies in one day, 16 from Al-Furat district alone. I packed my bags at once and got ready to leave because they could storm the hospital at any moment." In just 24 hours before noon yesterday, as parliament convened for another emergency session, 87 bodies were brought to Baghdad city morgue, 63 of them unidentified. Since Sunday's massacre in Jihad, more than 160 people have been killed, making a total of at least 1,600 since Iraq's Government of national unity came to power six weeks ago. In early June, Nouri al-Maliki, the new Prime Minister, flooded Baghdad's streets with tens of thousands of soldiers and police in an effort to restore order to the capital. More recently, he announced a national reconciliation plan, which promised an amnesty to Sunni insurgents and the disbandment of Shia militias. "The country is sliding fast towards civil war," Ali Adib, a Shia MP, told the Iraqi parliament this week. "Security has deteriorated in a serious and unprecedented way," said Saadi Barzanji, a Kurdish MP Mr al-Maliki told parliament: "We all have a last chance to reconcile and agree among each other on avoiding conflict and blood. Joseph Biden, the senior Democrat on the US Senate's Foreign Relations Committee, described Baghdad after a recent visit as a city in the throes of "nascent civil war". "There is a campaign to eradicate all Sunnis from Baghdad," said Sheikh Omar al-Jebouri, of the Iraqi Islamic Party, a Sunni parliamentary group. He said that it was organised by the Shia-dominated Interior Ministry and its police special commandos, with Shia militias, and aimed to destroy Mr al-Maliki's plans to rebuild Iraq's security forces along national, rather than sectarian, lines. Ahmed Abu Mustafa, a resident of the Sunni district of Amariyah in western Baghdad, was stunned to see two police car pick-ups speed up to his local mosque with cars full of gunmen on Tuesday evening and open fire on it with their government-issued machineguns. Immediately, Sunni gunmen materialised from side streets and a battle started. "I'd heard about this happening but this was the first time I'd seen police shooting at a mosque," he said. Yesterday, General George Casey, the most senior US commander in Iraq, said that the US might deploy more American troops in Baghdad. He said that al-Qaeda, to show that it was still relevant, had stepped up its attacks in Baghdad following the killing last month of its leader, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. "What we are seeing now as a counter to that is death squads, primarily from Shia extremist groups, that are retaliating against civilians." A local journalist told me bitterly this week that Iraqis find it ironic that Saddam Hussein is on trial for killing 148 people 24 years ago, while militias loyal to political parties now in government kill that many people every few days. But it is not an irony that anyone here has time to laugh about. They are too busy packing their bags and wondering how they can get out alive. My driver and his extended family are now refugees living in The Times offices in central Baghdad. Ali is also trying to persuade his stubborn family to leave home and move into our hotel. |
| www.salon.com/news/feature/2006/07/12/baghdad -> www.salon.com/news/feature/2006/07/12/baghdad/index_np.html Letters City of vengeance A savage outbreak of retaliatory killings has pushed Iraq to the brink of civil war. In the first of three exclusive reports, our correspondent investigates the Mahdi Army's Baghdad death squads. Photo by Reuters/Namir Noor-Eldeen Two men lie on the road shortly after they were shot by gunmen in Baghdad July 9, 2006. Over the weekend and on Monday, July 10, Baghdad witnessed the most savage outbreak of revenge killings to date. Shiite militiamen, who witnesses claimed were members of Muqtada Sadr's Mahdi Army, set up checkpoints in the city's al-Jihad neighborhood, inspected ID cards and killed 42 people they identified as being Sunnis. They also broke into homes and killed their inhabitants. Corpses were found in the street with drill holes and pierced by nails and bolts. These attacks, which took place after sunrise, were clearly acts of revenge for two earlier car bombings near Shiite mosques. In turn, the checkpoint killings spurred two more huge Sunni car bomb attacks in the Sadr-dominated neighborhood of Talbiyeh, killing 25 and wounding 41. The latest killings are ominously similar to the "Black Saturday" massacre in December 1975 that helped precipitate the Lebanese civil war, when Christian Phalangist militiamen stopped 40 unsuspecting Muslims at a checkpoint in Beirut and cut their throats. Reproduction of material from any Salon pages without written permission is strictly prohibited. SALON is registered in the US Patent and Trademark Office as a trademark of Salon Media Group Inc. |
| www.csua.org/u/gfl -> riverbendblog.blogspot.com/2006_07_01_riverbendblog_archive.html#115264752348608248 I'll meet you 'round the bend my friend, where hearts can heal and souls can mend... We're almost at the mid-way point, but it feels like the days are just crawling by. It's a combination of the heat, the flies, the hours upon hours of no electricity and the corpses which keep appearing everywhere. The day began with news of the killings in Jihad Quarter. According to people who live there, black-clad militiamen drove in mid-morning and opened fire on people in the streets and even in houses. They began pulling people off the street and checking their ID cards to see if they had Sunni names or Shia names and then the Sunnis were driven away and killed. The media is playing it down and claiming 37 dead but the people in the area say the number is nearer 60. The horrific thing about the killings is that the area had been cut off for nearly two weeks by Ministry of Interior security forces and Americans. Last week, a car bomb was set off in front of a 'Sunni' mosque people in the area visit. The night before the massacre, a car bomb exploded in front of a Shia husseiniya in the same area. The next day was full of screaming and shooting and death for the people in the area. No one is quite sure why the Americans and the Ministry of Interior didn't respond immediately. They just sat by, on the outskirts of the area, and let the massacre happen. T was a 26-year-old civil engineer who worked with a group of friends in a consultancy bureau in Jadriya. He had stopped by the house to tell us his sister was engaged and he'd brought along with him pictures of latest project he was working on- a half-collapsed school building outside of Baghdad. He usually left the house at 7 am to avoid the morning traffic jams and the heat. Yesterday, he decided to stay at home because he'd promised his mother he would bring Abu Kamal by the house to fix the generator which had suddenly died on them the night before. His parents say that T was making his way out of the area on foot when the attack occurred and he got two bullets to the head. His brother could only identify him by the blood-stained t-shirt he was wearing. People are staying in their homes in the area and no one dares enter it so the wakes for the people who were massacred haven't begun yet. I haven't seen his family yet and I'm not sure I have the courage or the energy to give condolences. I feel like I've given the traditional words of condolences a thousand times these last few months, "Baqiya ib hayatkum... Except they are empty words because even as we say them, we know that in today's Iraq any sorrow- no matter how great- will not be the last. There was also an attack yesterday on Ghazaliya though we haven't heard what the casualties are. People are saying it's Sadr's militia, the Mahdi army, behind the killings. The news the world hears about Iraq and the situation in the country itself are wholly different. People are being driven out of their homes and areas by force and killed in the streets, and the Americans, Iranians and the Puppets talk of national conferences and progress. It's like Baghdad is no longer one city, it's a dozen different smaller cities each infected with its own form of violence. It's gotten so that I dread sleeping because the morning always brings so much bad news. The television shows the images and the radio stations broadcast it. The newspapers show images of corpses and angry words jump out at you from their pages, "civil war... Though it's not really the latest- it's just the one that's being publicized the most. The poor girl Abeer was neither the first to be raped by American troops, nor will she be the last. The only reason this rape was brought to light and publicized is that her whole immediate family were killed along with her. We've been hearing whisperings about rapes in American-controlled prisons and during sieges of towns like Haditha and Samarra for the last three years. The naivete of Americans who can't believe their 'heroes' are committing such atrocities is ridiculous. In the news they're estimating her age to be around 24, but Iraqis from the area say she was only 14. Imagine your 14-year-old sister or your 14-year-old daughter. Imagine her being gang-raped by a group of psychopaths and then the girl was killed and her body burned to cover up the rape. Finally, her parents and her five-year-old sister were also killed. Raise your heads high supporters of the 'liberation' - your troops have made you proud today. I don't believe the troops should be tried in American courts. I believe they should be handed over to the people in the area and only then will justice be properly served. And our ass of a PM, Nouri Al-Maliki, is requesting an 'independent investigation', ensconced safely in his American guarded compound because it wasn't his daughter or sister who was raped, probably tortured and killed. His family is abroad safe from the hands of furious Iraqis and psychotic American troops. It fills me with rage to hear about it and read about it. It's been eradicated by the atrocities in Abu Ghraib, the deaths in Haditha and the latest news of rapes and killings. I look at them in their armored vehicles and to be honest- I can't bring myself to care whether they are 19 or 39. I can't bring myself to care if they make it back home alive. I can't bring myself to care anymore about the wife or parents or children they left behind. I can't bring myself to care because it's difficult to see beyond the horrors. I look at them and wonder just how many innocents they killed and how many more they'll kill before they go home. They've done enough damage and we hear talk of how things will fall apart in Iraq if they 'cut and run', but the fact is that they aren't doing anything right now. People are being killed in the streets and in their own homes- what's being done about it? It's convenient for them- Iraqis can kill each other and they can sit by and watch the bloodshed- unless they want to join in with murder and rape. Buses, planes and taxis leaving the country for Syria and Jordan are booked solid until the end of the summer. People are picking up and leaving en masse and most of them are planning to remain outside of the country. Life here has become unbearable because it's no longer a 'life' like people live abroad. It's simply a matter of survival, making it from one day to the next in one piece and coping with the loss of loved ones and friends- friends like T It's difficult to believe T is really gone... I was checking my email today and I saw three unopened emails from him in my inbox. For one wild, heart-stopping moment I thought he was alive. I let myself ride the wave of giddy disbelief for a few precious seconds before I came crashing down as my eyes caught the date on the emails- he had sent them the night before he was killed. One email was a collection of jokes, the other was an assortment of cat pictures, and the third was a poem in Arabic about Iraq under American occupation. He had highlighted a few lines describing the beauty of Baghdad in spite of the war... And while I always thought Baghdad was one of the more marvelous cities in the world, I'm finding it very difficult this moment to see any beauty in a city stained with the blood of T and so many other innocents... |
| www.tnr.com/doc.mhtml?pt=3FtL2Vxi34T0BA0X2XTFjy%3D%3D E-mail this article Baghdad, Iraq A t dawn, the sky over Baghdad turns red for a few minutes before sunlight breaks through the dust. Combat engineers have been clearing IEDs from the streets of Amiriyah since 3 am, but the 500 American soldiers about to descend on the western Baghdad neighborhood wait for the sun. Just as it rises, Apache helicopter gunships arrive overhead, and, in the blinding light above them, two F-15 attack aircraft begin circling in a wide arc. The radio chatter quickens as the Bradley Fighting Vehicles on the ground and the aviation units above check in with one another. The operation's planners intend to cordon off Amiriyah as two battalions from the 10th Mountain Division's First Brigade Combat Team (1-10 Mtn), along with 700 Iraqi soldiers and police, hunt for insurgents and weapons caches. As a US foot patrol navigates its way through garbage-filled alleys, the residents of Amiriyah, which has become a dumping ground for headless bodies, emerge from their houses to plead for the soldiers to stay. Without the Americans, they say, it's too dangerous even to take out their trash. "This is a real bad area," Captain Michael Fortenberry says. "There's a lot of former Baathists, IEDs, sniper attacks." After searching a block of houses, the soldiers return to their Humvees, which proceed down an avenue lined with shrapnel-scarred buildings. Gunners swivel their turrets as the column passes a corner lot strewn with junk and, eerily, a rusted Ferris wheel. A flare dropped from an Apache floats down beside it like a Roman candle. American soldiers have died in its shadow, and, tomorrow, an IED planted here will wound several more. Tonight, American snipers return under cover of darkness to the Ferris wheel, where, after a short wait, they kill two men planting more bombs. US forces patrolled Amiriyah last year, the year before that, and the year before that. Today, many of them know the neighborhood as well as they know their own. They also know what will come when they depart, which 1-10 Mtn will do in a few weeks, with no one coming to replace it. "Many Iraqis feel more comfortable with a US presence," says the 1-10 Mtn commander, Colonel Jeffrey Snow. In Washington, however, it's 1971 all over again--after support for the war in Vietnam collapsed and not long before America's efforts to salvage it did. Neatly summarizing prevailing wisdom, Democratic campaign adviser Robert Shrum recently told The Washington Post, "The war in Iraq is over except for the dying." For all its testimonials to American resolve, the Bush administration can barely wait to devise the fig leaf that will permit the United States to withdraw. Quietly, but inexorably, the administration is "moving in the direction of downsizing our forces," as American Ambassador to Iraq Zalmay Khalilzad has put it, having already cut troop levels to 127,000 with a plan to cut another 7,000 this summer. So how do the Armed Forces feel about fighting a war that is "over except for the dying"? Responding to strategic rather than political imperatives, they operate at the same frenetic pace they always have. Anything less, commanders say, and the country would collapse around them. In a fine bit of solidarity with the soldiers dying there, Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid calls Iraq "George Bush's war." As its sense of ownership grows deeper with each year it spends here, the Army has created its own universe in Iraq--an ecosystem with its own values, requirements, and purposes. The din of politicians speechifying about the war, the faux moral posturing of opinion-makers who claim to speak in the name of "the troops," everything that Iraq has come to represent in the American imagination--it all melts away in the 115-degree heat. What's left is the machinery of a war that, having been called into being by civilians, no longer bears a relation to anything they say. T he anatomy of this universe, as much as anything that happens in it, points to an essential truth about the Iraq war: It has a momentum of its own. This much becomes clear even in Kuwait, where, at a desert air base, hundreds of soldiers line up in front of signs announcing flights to Speicher, Q-West, and other bases in Iraq. It is after midnight, but, from the other side of the base, the golden arches of McDonald's still glow in the sky. "When it gets built up like this, it's the surest sign you're going to lose," a contractor who served in Vietnam tells me, alluding to the wasted years that must elapse before this sort of infrastructure can come into being. Never much to look at in the first place, Kuwait has been fully transformed into a supply depot. Here, amid a bleached landscape of sand and concrete known as Camp Arifjan, lies the nerve center of the US staging operation. At his office in one of Arifjan's stadium-sized warehouses, Colonel Ross Campbell keeps an eye on a monitor tracking supply convoys as they move north through Iraq. The quantification of the US enterprise in Iraq has few limits, and, knowing his figures by heart, Campbell ticks them off: over 800,000 personnel moved in and out of Iraq since 2003 and as many as 3,000 supply trucks on the road every day. Outside, hundreds of them idle in the noonday heat, their South Asian drivers sleeping in bullet-raked cabs. In convoys of 30, they will head north to the border, crossing near the Iraqi town of Safwan for the 400-mile run up Main Supply Route (MSR) Tampa to Baghdad. Safwan, whose residents welcome the trucks with volleys of rocks, offers a fitting portal into Iraq. In response, the military has contracted to build an entry point farther to the west, at a site called K Crossing, and a new highway through the Iraqi desert to go with it. Whatever guides the invisible hand behind all this, it isn't the logic of withdrawal. At the border, where supply trucks line up night and day, Army gun trucks join the convoys for the trip into Iraq. Helicopter gunships fly the length of MSR Tampa scouting for ambush sites, but the convoys still get attacked two or three times a week. Many of the Bangladeshis and Sri Lankans driving the supply trucks speak not a word of English, relying instead on cue cards that US soldiers wave at them. At night, near Baghdad, you can watch them careening down the road in clouds of dust, only their headlights visible. When the trucks reach their bases in Iraq, the Army takes over. After flying from Kuwait to Baghdad, I head to Camp Liberty, where 1-10 Mtn's supply battalion prepares to head into the city with a load of concrete barriers for a checkpoint. The barriers come not from Kuwait but from the base itself, where the Americans have opened their own cement plant. Baghdad is rapidly disappearing behind a maze of blast walls, and the cement keeps coming: In the heat, men from the battalion clean the guns on their Humvees and swat away mosquitoes before delivering more of it. Next: "What the Post describes as the "small-town feel" of Forward Operating Bases (FOBs) in Iraq has been well-chronicled, but, with its traffic jams and sun-baked day laborers, Baghdad's Victory Base Complex feels more like Phoenix." |