News of the Day for Sunday, May 20, 2007

Demonstrators burn a U.S. flag during a protest in Baghdad May 19, 2007. Hundreds of demonstrators took to the streets denouncing the frequent raids of the U.S. forces in Baghdad's Shi'ite neighbourhoods, protesters said. (Kareem Raheem/Reuters)

Yet another one of those newsworthy incidents that I can only find reported in a photo caption. -- C.

















Baghdad

Six U.S. soldiers and an Iraq interpreter killed by bomb attack in Western Baghdad. No further details available at this time.

Bomb near al-Zahraa Husseiniya Shiite mosque in central Baghdad kills at least seven, causes extensive damage.

Gunmen abduct a Catholic priest.

Car bomb injures 4 in Ur district of northeastern Baghdad. Also from Reuters:

• Gunmen killed Hadi al-Rubaie, a senior figure of the Iraqi National Accord political movement headed by former Prime Minister Iyad Allawi, on Friday in Baghdad, his party said on Sunday.
  
• A car bomb killed two people and wounded 10 others in a parking lot in the commercial district of Bab al-Sharji in central Baghdad, police said.
  
• The bodies of 20 people were found shot in different districts of Baghdad on Saturday, police said.
  
• Four people were killed and eight were wounded when a car bomb exploded near a busy market in al-Shurta al-Rabiae in southwestern Baghdad on Saturday, police said.
  
• Mortar rounds wounded two civilians when they landed on and near the small Bahaa hotel in central Baghdad , police said.

Truth is stranger than fiction department: U.S. "reconnaissance plane" (presumably unmanned) crashes in the residence compound of Iyad Allawi, who understandably is not pleased.

South of Baghdad (near Latifiyah)

On soldier killed by IED while heading to join the search for missing soldiers. A sniper also shot and seriously wounded a U.S. soldier keeping watch from the roof of a house that had been commandeered as a resting place. Troops searching elsewhere rushed to help the units that were attacked, who had no medic.

Kut

Clashes between Shi'ite militiamen and Iraqi, U.S. security forces left two militiamen dead and three others wounded in the southern Iraqi city of Kut, police said.

Reuters also reports Police retrieved the bodies of five people, including one that was decapitated, from the Tigris River near the city of Kut, 170 km (100 miles) southeast of Baghdad, police said.

Basra

Two mortar rounds hit British base in Basra shortly after Tony Blair arrives. No casualties reported. This occurred yesterday but wasn't reported in time for yesterday's post.

Roadside bombs attack two British patrols, causing an unspecified number of injuries. Aswat al-Iraq has a slightly different version, in which one of the incidents was not a roadside bombing but a gunfight. Or, possibly, this represents an additional incident.

Salah ad-Din Province

U.S. forces say they found seven bodies dumped near Samara, hand them over to Iraqi police. Iraqi police also find two bodies in the area, one a 12-year-old boy.

Al-Safrah (near Kirkuk)

Gunmen attacked the oil protection force commander's patrol while others detonated an oil pipeline in an attack near the northern Iraq city of Kirkuk, an official security source said. Oil protection force commander injured in the attack.

al-Suweira, Wassit province

Bodies of three Iraqi soldiers were salvaged from the river al-Maleh.

Near Ramadi

Suicide truck bomber kills two police, injures nine, in attack on checkpoint.

Fallujah

Gunmen assassinate a member of the Iraqi Islamic Party.


Irbil

South Korean soldier found shot dead in barber shop at a South Korean base. (Bet you didn't know they had one.) South Korea has 1,200 troops at this base, but the south Korean parliament has ordered the government to plan for a full withdrawal this year. Appears to be a suicide.

OTHER NEWS OF THE DAY

At World Economic Forum conference, Iraq's Sunni VP Tariq al-Hashemi condemns upcoming talks between U.S. and Iran on the Iraq situation, as "damaging to Iraq's sovereignty." The Shiite-controlled government strongly supports the talks.

In a bizarre coincidence, the leaders of two of the most powerful factions in Iraq's government are in the U.S. for medical treatment. Iraqi President Jalal Talabani, leader of the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan, claims to be basically healthy ,but he is flying to Rochester, Minnesota for an examination at the Mayo clinic. He plans to spend three weeks in the U.S. to "lose weight." (Okaaaaaaaaayy. -- C) Meanwhile, Abdul-Aziz al-Hakim, leader of SCIRI, the largest Shiite faction, is at the University of Texas Cancer Center to determine whether he has lung cancer. (Gee, I don't know why they couldn't get treatment in Iraq's excellent, modern health care system created with U.S. reconstruction funding. -- C)

UPDATE: Hakim's diagnosis of lung cancer was confirmed in Texas, but he has now left the U.S. and gone to Iran for treatment.

The Scotsman reports that incoming UK Prime Minister Gordon Brown intends to withdraw all UK forces from Iraq within 2 years. Excerpt:

BRIAN BRADY WESTMINSTER EDITOR

GORDON Brown will remove all British forces from Iraq before the next election under a plan to rebuild support among disillusioned Labour voters.

Scotland on Sunday can reveal the Prime Minister elect is working on a withdrawal plan that could see troop numbers slashed from 7,000 to as few as 2,000 within 12 months.

If implemented, the strategy would culminate in total withdrawal no later than spring 2010, the date by which Brown must go to the country to seek his own mandate.

Policy under Tony Blair involved keeping a small force in Iraq for many years to come. But it emerged last night that President George Bush has been briefed by White House officials to expect an announcement from Downing Street within Brown's first 100 days in power.

The accelerated 'troops out' plan will prove unpopular in Washington, and leaves Brown open to accusations that after supporting the Iraq war he is now leaving its people to an increasingly uncertain future.

U.S. troops face exhaustion, frustration, rising casualties as search for soldiers believed captured near Mahmudiya continues. Gen. Petraeus says he believes two of them are alive, but does not explain the basis for this belief. Excerpt:

By KIM GAMEL, Associated Press LATIFIYAH, Iraq -- U.S. and Iraqi troops jumped across ditches and waded through mud in difficult, canal-lined terrain Saturday in the eighth day of a hunt for three missing American soldiers south of Baghdad.

A U.S. soldier was killed and four others wounded shortly after their Humvees rolled out of base before dawn Saturday. A roadside bomb struck one group on a foot patrol, sending up a plume of smoke that could be seen hundreds of yards away. The U.S. military said one U.S. soldier died and three were wounded. An Iraqi soldier also was hurt.

A sniper also shot and seriously wounded a U.S. soldier keeping watch from the roof of a house that had been commandeered as a resting place. Troops searching elsewhere rushed to help the units that were attacked, who had no medic.

Saturday's death was believed to be the second during the search for the three missing soldiers. The first service member was killed by a roadside bomb while searching a nearby village on Thursday.

Troops who spent days crossing parched sand and muddy fields in temperatures above 100 degrees vowed to press forward. But their exhaustion was evident as they took a break on the concrete floors of a house west of Latifiyah, about 20 miles south of Baghdad. "It could be worse. I could be sitting in the shoes of those guys who were abducted," said Spc. Andrew Carbajal, a 20-year-old medic from Clinton, Iowa.

snip

Gen. David Petraeus, the top U.S. commander in Iraq, said he thinks he knows who kidnapped the soldiers and believes that at least two of them are alive, the Army Times newspaper reported. "We know who that guy is," Petraeus said in an interview posted Saturday on the Army Times website. Petraeus did not give the man's name but described him as "sort of an affiliate of al-Qaida. He's the big player down in that area. We've tangled with him before."

According to the newspaper, Petraeus said he did not know for certain whether the three 10th Mountain Division soldiers were alive. "As of this morning, we thought there were at least two that were probably still alive," he said. "At one point in time there was a sense that one of them might have died, but again we just don't know."

Capt. Aaron Bright, of the 10th Mountain Division, had been out for five of the past seven days looking for any sign of the missing soldiers - a piece of clothing, a glove or a boot. He said they had found a piece of body armor earlier in the week.

He said the troops were taking more breaks and slowing down a bit after the frenetic activity of the initial days of the search effort. "You have to start to pace yourself," he said as a drone buzzed overhead.

American troops have increasingly been moved from their heavily fortified bases to remote outposts and joint security stations in Baghdad and surrounding areas in a bid to stem the country's sectarian violence. U.S. forces are already stretched thin as the military faces pressure to restore calm in the capital.

The American troops suffered another disappointment on Saturday evening, when they received what seemed like a promising tip that the soldiers were in a Sunni mosque or a tribal sheik's house in Latifiyah.

A three-hour sweep through the neighborhood - in which the soldiers went house-to-house and searched vehicles - turned up nothing, the latest in a series of false alarms and deflated hopes.

AP finally notices the palace of the proconsul rising on the banks of the Tigris. Excerpt:

The new U.S. Embassy in Baghdad will be the world's largest and most expensive foreign mission, though it may not be large enough or secure enough to cope with the chaos in Iraq. . . .

The $592 million embassy occupies a chunk of prime real estate two-thirds the size of Washington's National Mall, with desk space for about 1,000 people behind high, blast-resistant walls. The compound is a symbol both of how much the United States has invested in Iraq and how the circumstances of its involvement are changing.

The embassy is one of the few major projects the administration has undertaken in Iraq that is on schedule and within budget. Still, not all has gone according to plan. The 21-building complex on the Tigris River was envisioned three years ago partly as a headquarters for the democratic expansion in the Middle East that President Bush identified as the organizing principle for foreign policy in his second term.

The complex quickly could become a white elephant if the U.S. scales back its presence and ambitions in Iraq. Although the U.S. probably will have forces in Iraq for years to come, it is not clear how much of the traditional work of diplomacy can proceed amid the violence and what the future holds for Iraq's government.

"What you have is a situation in which they are building an embassy without really thinking about what its functions are," said Edward Peck, a former top U.S. diplomat in Iraq.

Quote(s) of the Day

I think as far as the adverse impact on the nation around the world, this administration has been the worst in history. The overt reversal of America's basic values as expressed by previous administrations, including (those of) George H.W. Bush and Ronald Reagan and Richard Nixon and others, has been the most disturbing to me.

I think that the almost undeviating support by Great Britain for the ill-advised policies of President Bush in Iraq have been a major tragedy for the world.

Former U.S. President Jimmy Carter