Photo: Iraqi soldiers stand next to new equipment and Badger armoured vehicles at Taji military base in Baghdad March 31, 2007. Soldiers from 1st Battalion of the 3rd Brigade, 6th Iraqi Army Division, received 40 Badger armoured vehicles at Taji military base on Saturday as part of a modernisation program, according to the Ministry of Defense. REUTERS/Ceerwan Aziz (IRAQ)
REPORTS – LIFE IN IRAQ
Deadliest Bomb In Iraq War Kills 152 in Tal Afar
The Iraqi government raised the death toll on Saturday from a truck bomb in the town of Tal Afar to 152, making it the deadliest single bombing of the four-year-old war. Interior Ministry spokesman Brigadier Abdul Kareem Khalaf said 347 people were wounded in Tuesday's attack on a Shi'ite area. There was another truck bomb in the mixed northwestern town on Tuesday, but it was small. Khalaf said 100 homes had been destroyed in the main blast, which officials have blamed on al Qaeda. The explosion left a 23-meter (75-ft)-wide crater. "It took us a while to recover all the bodies from underneath the rubble of the homes ... what did they achieve by using two tons of explosive to kill and wound 500 in a residential area?" Khalaf asked at a news conference.
Iraq’s Justice Minister Resigns
Iraqi Justice Minister Hashem al-Shebly has resigned because of dissatisfaction over the running of the government, an official said on Saturday. Izzat Shahbandar, a spokesman of the secular Iraqi National List to which Shebly belongs, said the resignation had been accepted by Shi'ite Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki. "He did not feel there was any harmony in government policy and he did not want to continue," Shahbandar told Reuters. Shahbandar said Shebly had offered his resignation three days ago. The Iraqi National List is headed by former interim prime minister Iyad Allawi.
Iraqis Celebrate Compatriot Shazha’s Win of Star Academy Title
Iraqi amateur singer Shazha Hassoun's win in the popular contest Star Academy, televised by Lebanese channel LBC, was the cause of celebration all over Iraq, causing Iraqis to forget for a while about the waves of violence hitting the troubled country. "I was pinned to the TV screen yesterday praying for Shazha to win. I would have had a heart attack if she hadn't. I recommended all my relatives and work colleagues to vote for her," Um Solin, an employee, told the independent news agency Voices of Iraq (VOI) on Saturday. Fadi, a student, said he spent 40 dollars (50,929 Iraqi dinars) buying two cell phone pre-paid cards to vote for her. Omar Abdul-Mohsen, a contractor, said "Shazha is our sister who has brought joy to our hearts. All members of my family kept praying for her, even my aging father." Many view Shazha's win as success for Iraq. Some even went further to consider it a ray of hope for Iraq's unity.
Mosul: Victims Pile Up at City Morgue
Hard-pressed staff daily confronts the horrors of local bloodletting. After twenty years of service at the Mosul morgue, Abdul-Kareem Ahmed has become inured to death. All the more so over the last few years of violence, which has claimed the lives of up to 150 of the city’s residents a day. But Ahmed’s detachment was shattered when the charred body of a young man was laid out on the autopsy table. Ahmed immediately recognised the silver ring on the corpse’s finger - a gift he had given his 20-year-old son Kazim when he graduated from the College of Administration at Mosul University. Ahmed stared at the body in disbelief - his son, he said, was no more than “some bones and burned flesh" - and then broke down and cried. As with the central morgue in Baghdad, Mosul’s morgue struggles to cope with the number of corpses that are brought in each day. Like the capital, this northern city - a stronghold of Sunni militants, foreign fighters and members of the Islamic Emirate in Iraq, which allies itself with al-Qaeda - has been ravaged by the insurgency and sectarian conflict. Khalid Abdul-Ameer, an administrator at the morgue, said sometimes they receive corpses of entire families that were killed because of their religion, ethnicity or the party affiliation or profession of one or more of its members. The constant stream of charred, deformed and mutilated corpses, and the public’s apparent disdain for the job they do, puts the 23 staff under the enormous psychological strain. “People look at us as if we were butchers,” said one employee. Their one consolation, it seems, is that unlike in Baghdad, militants have yet to target them.
Radio Star’s Tough Route to the Top
Farm-girl defies the odds to front popular Baghdad radio show. In her jeans and sneakers, Majide al-Jiburi, 43, sitting in her studio on the second floor of Radio al-Nas (People) in Baghdad, looks every bit the urban professional woman. But the moment she begins to speak, her accent betrays her rural Iraqi origin. “I never dreamt I’d end up in the city, and I am still afraid of my family and my community,” said the farm girl-turned-radio anchor. She began her radio career as a presenter on Radio Mahabba (Love), hosting a programme that dealt with the lives of women in the countryside. Her current show is a popular 45-minute morning phone-in, a mixture of news and history, cultural and educational topics. Majide’s rise from farmer’s daughter to host a top radio show in the capital is a rare exception in Iraq, where women from rural areas face many restrictions in terms of education and social mobility. Tribal traditions often keep them from studying, working outside the house, going out with friends, and can mean that they have little choice when it comes finding a husband. Born in a village near Hilla, the largest town in Babil province, southeast of Baghdad, Majide had a difficult life before she got married and moved to Baghdad in 2004. She completed primary and secondary school but had to drop out of further education for financial reasons. There were other problems too. Her family got into trouble with the former regime because of their communist beliefs - outlawed in Saddam’s time. She and one of her brothers were arrested repeatedly. Compared to her former life, she’s now very happy and considers herself rather privileged. In the past, she had to work to the point of physical exhaustion just to bring enough food to the table, but now she feels she’s treated with respect and dignity.
REPORTS – IRAQI MILITIAS, POLITICIANS, POWER BROKERS
Sadr’s Fourth Anniversary Statement
Muqtada al-Sadr released a statement Friday, read at Friday prayers in Najaf. IraqSlogger has obtained the document; full text appears below. Translators remarks appear in parentheses. Four years have passed since the occupation of our beloved country on the part of the great evil, America, and its followers who have assigned to themselves the elimination of Islam and of peace from the world, in order that they may live in peace. And the words of the great evil, Bush, continue to ring in the ears of the oppressed when he says “America has become more secure,” unaware of the blood that was shed in Iraq, and Afghanistan, and Palestine, and Lebanon, and many other places. Yet, how I wish peace for the people of peace! As the Most High has said (in the Qur'an), “Grant the unbelievers a short respite.” Four years have passed and Iraq is still languishing under the yoke of oppression and tyranny. So where are their claims of spreading freedom, from the prison of Abu Ghraib and the rest of the Iraqi prisons, as the prisons are still full of women and men? Is this (imprisonment) due to the misdeeds (of the prisoners)? Is this due to courts that are just? Bombs and explosions continue to resound in the skies and land of Iraq, shedding the blood of the innocent and the honorable, yet leaving the occupier and its partisans in our holy land. Yet how I wish that these humiliations be a call for resistance!
Iraq Endorses Arab Relocation for Kirkuk
Iraq’s government has endorsed plans to relocate thousands of Arabs who were moved to Kirkuk as part of Saddam Hussein’s campaign to force ethnic Kurds out of the oil-rich city, in an effort to undo one of the former dictator’s most enduring and hated policies. The contentious decision on Kirkuk was confirmed Saturday by Iraq's Sunni justice minister as he told The Associated Press he was resigning. Almost immediately, opposition politicians said they feared it would harden the violent divisions among Iraq's fractious ethnic and religious groups and possibly lead to an Iraq divided among Kurds, Sunni Arabs and Shiites. The plan was virtually certain to anger neighboring Turkey, which fears a northward migration of Iraqi Kurds — and an exodus of Sunni Arabs — will inflame its own restive Kurdish minority.
REPORTS – US/UK/OTHERS IN IRAQ
“We Were Torturing People For No Reason”
Tony Lagouranis is a 37-year-old bouncer at a bar in Chicago's Humboldt Park. He is also a former torturer. That was how he was described in an email promoting a panel discussion, "24: Torture Televised," hosted by the NYU School of Law's Center on Law and Security in New York on March 21. And he doesn't shy away from the description. As a specialist in a military intelligence battalion, Lagouranis interrogated prisoners at Abu Ghraib, Al Asad Airfield, and other places in Iraq from January through December 2004. Coercive techniques, including the use of military dogs, waterboarding, and prolonged stress positions, were employed on the detainees, he says. Prisoners held at Al Asad Airfield, which is located approximately 110 miles northwest of Baghdad, were shackled and hung from an upright bed frame "welded to the wall" in a room in an airplane hanger, he told me in a phone interview after the NYU event. When he was having problems getting information from a detainee, he recalls, the other interrogators said, "Chain him up on the bed frame and then he'll talk to you." (Lagouranis says he didn't participate directly in hangings from the frames.) The results of the hangings, shacklings, and prolonged stress positions -- sometimes for hours -- were devastating. "You take a healthy guy and you turn him into a cripple -- at least for a period of time," Lagouranis tells me. "I don't care what Alberto Gonzales says. That's torture."
US Raids Iraqi MP’s Residence
US forces raided the residence of an Iraqi member of parliament, one day after he called for the relocation of the US embassy. The Iraqiya network has reported that the a US force raided the residence of Mithal al-Alousi, member of parliament and general secretary of the Iraqi 'Umma party, inside the Green Zone in the center of Baghdad, Aswat al-Iraq reports in Arabic. Further details on the raid were not available. One day before, the MP had demanded that the US embassy should be relocated from its current site at the Republican Palace inside the Green Zone, saying that the foreign presence in the building was a provocation to the feelings of Iraqis.
HISTORY
How George H.W. Bush Helped Saddam Hussein Prevent An Iraqi Uprising
Though Saddam Hussein has been dispatched, the trial of his confederates continues in Baghdad. In the next few months, the Special Iraqi Tribunal will be hearing evidence against almost a hundred of Saddam's former officials, charged with the slaughter of tens of thousands of Shiites following the abortive uprising or Intifada of 1991. Because of the way the Tribunal has been run, it's highly unlikely there'll be any mention of U.S. complicity with that slaughter. In fact, President George H. W. Bush was very much involved. It was he who in February 1991, as American forces were driving Saddam's troops out of Kuwait, called for the people of Iraq to rise up and overthrow the dictator. That message was repeatedly broadcast across Iraq. It was also contained in millions of leaflets dropped by the U.S. Air Force. Eager to end decades of repression, the Shiites arose. Their revolt spread like wildfire; in the north, the Kurds also rose up. Key Iraqi army units joined in. It looked as if Saddam's days were over. But then George H. W. Bush blew the whistle. Things had got out of hand. What Bush had wanted was not a messy popular uprising but a neat military coup -- another strongman more amenable to Western interests. The White House feared that turmoil would give the Iranians increased influence, upset the Turks, wreak havoc throughout the region. But the Bush administration didn't just turn its back; it actually aided Saddam to suppress the Intifada. ….. A Shiite survivor of the uprising later said he had seen other American forces at the river town of Nassiriya destroy a huge cache of weapons that the rebels desperately needed. "They blew up an enormous stock of arms," he said. "If we had been able to get hold of them, the course of history would have been changed in favor of the uprising, because Saddam had nothing left at that moment."
How to Help
Very few organizations are working on getting aid to Iraqi refugees, and of those that are, many are too small or too beleaguered to accept individual donations; the Iraqi Red Crescent, for example, has suffered bombings and mass kidnappings, yet its volunteers continue to deliver aid to displaced families inside Iraq. One of the larger relief organizations working with the refugees is the Catholic group Caritas, whose caseworkers I shadowed while in Amman. Bucking the image of the Land Rover-driving aid worker, they made their rounds in an aging gray Honda, its roof eaten through by rust. They visited Iraqi doctors, engineers, and executives desperate for food, heat, or blankets to fend off the desert winter; one family told the crew they had just sold their stove to buy food. Caritas helps a few thousand families a year, but "the demand far outstrips the money available to us," says Magy Mahrous, who oversees the project. You can make a contribution at:
International Catholic Migration Commission
Citibank USA
153 East 53rd Street, 16th floor
New York, NY 10043
Account # 10100491, ABA # 21000089, Swift Code CITIUS33
To ensure that the money reaches the Iraqi program, write "Iraq-icmc" on your check.
Another way to help: War Child International
Quote of the day:
They hang the man and flog the woman
That steal the goose from off the common,
But let the greater villain loose
That steals the common from the goose.
The law locks up the man or woman
Who steals the goose from off the common'
And geese will still a common lack
Till they go and steal it back.
English folk poem, circa 1764
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