Photo: The mother of 20-year-old Mohammed Hasson cries over his body in the holy Shiite city of Najaf, Iraq, Wednesday, July 4, 2007. Mohammed was killed in a car bomb blast in the Baghdad's Shaab district Tuesday. (AP Photo/Alaa al-Marjani)
REPORTS – LIFE IN IRAQ
Sunni, Shia families swap homes in bid to remain safe
Six months ago Sunni militants forced the Shia family of Baqir Zaidan Najim out of their house in Baghdad's southern Sunni-dominated suburb of Dora. Two months earlier, Shia militiamen had broken into the house of the Sunni family of Abdul-Khaliq Mohammed Khayon, and told them they had 24 hours to leave Baghdad's northern Shia district of Kadhimiyah or "face death". Since then, the two families had been moving from place to place seeking shelter with relatives or friends until late last month when the heads of the two families shook hands on a deal to swap houses. Iraq's unprecedented turning point in relations between Sunni and Shia Muslims can be traced directly to 22 February 2006, when a revered Shia shrine in Samarra, 60 miles north of Baghdad, was bombed. Sunni extremists were blamed for the act. The attack, which was repeated last month, spawned days of reprisals that damaged or destroyed dozens of mosques, killed hundreds and made thousands of families homeless, compounding the displacement problem created after the US-led invasion of Iraq in 2003. As a result, a new phenomenon has emerged: Sunni and Shia families are swapping houses. Estate agents are providing lists of available properties, facilitating swap arrangements. “It is hard to leave the house you built and in which you spent your life raising your children, and which contains memories in every corner, but death is dreadful," said bearded Najim, a 52-year-old Shia pensioner and father of six boys. "When I heard about house exchanges, I immediately started looking for a displaced Sunni family from Baghdad to take my house in Dora. After weeks of inquiries, I found an estate agent with a list of uprooted Sunni families looking to swap properties," he said.
Kurds to rebuild dam they had looted in 1990s
Massoud Barzani, head of the semi-independent Kurdish enclave in northern Iraq, is considering building a dam which the former regime of Saddam Hussein had started constructing prior to the outbreak of the 1991 Gulf War over Kuwait. The Bakhma dam on the Greater Zab, a tributary of the Tigris River originating in Turkey, was under construction by foreign firms when the war broke out. Construction was progressing on schedule and the massive dam was to be completed in 1992. But when the Kurdish militias known as Peshmerga under the command of Barzani and Jalal Talabani, the current Iraqi president, controlled northern Iraq, Iraqi engineers in charge fled leaving behind equipment and other assets worth hundreds of millions of dollars. The Kurds, with Barzani and Talabani’s blessings, dismantled the dam and shipped the equipment, construction materials and anything that could be moved to Iran. The smuggling was part of an organized campaign which saw the removal and dispatch to Iran of infrastructure equipment which included even power pylons. The Kurds were then against building the dam, saying its construction was part of a move to isolate their areas. The Kurds would now like to rebuild the dam, but they will have to start from scratch.
Even Green Zone has it own fuel crisis
Baghdad’s Green Zone, the only relatively quiet area in Baghdad, is suffering from the chronic fuel crisis gripping the country since the 2003-U.S. invasion. Thousands of its employees are now unable to join their offices because they have run out of petrol. There are filling stations in the Green Zone, where the U.S. and Iraqi government have their offices, but only U.S. officials, administrators and soldiers have the right to use them. Senior Iraqi officials can fill their tanks there but the stations are off bounds to low-ranking Iraqi civil servants. Lack of fuel in Baghdad has forced many of these civil servants to stay away or fail to reach their offices on time. Security at the checkpoints leading to the zone is tough and queues long. The zone includes the complex of palaces where former leader Saddam Hussein had his presidential office. But the complex was on much smaller area and none of the streets close or leading to it were closed to the public. The point is senior Iraqi officials have slapped fines on those civil servants failing to attend or being late in arriving. The civil servants have made one demand, easy to meet anywhere in the world but almost impossible to respond to positively in Iraq despite its massive oil wealth. They have asked the government to let them use the filling stations in the zone.
Joblessness forces Iraqis to join army
Volunteer armies complain of lack of recruits but that is not the case with the nascent Iraqi forces. Officers complain that they normally have more volunteers than the number of applicants they ask for despite mounting violence and suicide attacks. When Iraqi police and military authorities announced their need for 3,000 volunteers in the violence-torn districts in Baghdad’s suburbs, they received more than 15,000 applications. “Unemployment is worse than death,” replied a young man amid a big crowd of people willing to register their names as volunteers at an army recruit center in Baghdad. Army recruitment centers have been scenes of repeated suicide bombing and hundreds of recruits have been killed in such attacks. Guards at the center at Alzawara Park could hardly bring some sort of order to a crowd of recruits fighting to present their papers. Some recruits complained of corruption, saying officials in the center would normally ask for a tip of nearly 1,000 dollars to have their names registered as volunteers.
REPORTS – IRAQI MILITIAS, POLITICIANS, POWER BROKERS
Parliament holds session without IAF, Sadrists
The Iraqi Parliament held on Wednesday an ordinary session chaired by First Deputy Speaker Sheikh Khaled al-Attiya in the absence of members of the Iraqi Accordance Front (IAF), the Sadrists and the National Dialogue front. "The session will witness voting on the investment law related to refining crude oil, in addition to the first reading of the draft law on the ratification of international roads in the Arab Mashreq (The eastern part of the Arab world), the second reading of the draft law on the first amendment to the publishing law in the official newspaper number 78 for 1977, and the second reading of the draft law regarding Iraq joining the Vienna agreement and Montreal Protocol to protect the Ozone," a media source from the parliament told the independent news agency Voices of Iraq (VOI). "The agenda also includes voting and second readings of draft laws on canceling a number of the decisions of the dissolved revolution command council," he added. The Sunni IAF is the third largest parliamentary bloc with 44 seats out of the 275-member parliament. The front suspended its participation in cabinet last week, mainly over legal steps being taken against the culture minister, one of its six members in the Shiite-led government.
Fatwa from Sunni Scholars Association forbids voting for draft oil law in parliament
The Sunni Association of Muslim Scholars on Wednesday issued what it described as an "Islamic Fatwa" that considers the Iraqi government ratification of the draft oil law an abhorrent measure according to Islamic law and voting for it as "harming the interests of Muslim Iraqis." "The Association of Muslim Scholars had issued a statement on 6 March 2007 in which it considered this law as part of transactions concluded with the occupier by politicians who came with the occupier, and it will lead to the plundering of the greatest national wealth owned by the country," the association said in a statement received by the independent news agency Voices of Iraq (VOI). The statement added, "the association considers this law illegitimate from an Islamic point of view and thus issued this Fatwa (religious edict)." The association also said that the draft oil law ratification by the Council of Ministers was illegitimate, as the law would enable large oil companies to lay hand on the country's wealth. The association's fatwa came only one day after the Iraqi prime minister said his government approved the oil law.
REPORTS – US/UK/OTHERS IN IRAQ
Iraq Contractors Outnumber Troops
The number of U.S.-paid private contractors in Iraq now exceeds that of American combat troops, new figures show, raising fresh questions about the privatization of the war and the government's capacity to carry out military and rebuilding campaigns. More than 180,000 civilians - Americans, Iraqis and others - are working in Iraq under U.S. contracts, according to State and Defense department figures obtained by the Los Angeles Times. Including the recent troop buildup, 160,000 soldiers and a few thousand civilian government employees are stationed in Iraq. The total number of private contractors, far higher than previously reported, shows how heavily the Bush administration has relied on private corporations to carry out the occupation of Iraq - a mission criticized as being undermanned. "These numbers are big," said Peter Singer, a Brookings Institution scholar who has written on military contracting. "They illustrate better than anything that we went in without enough troops."
RESISTANCE
Many of you have written to ask us when we were going to call for the impeachment of Bush as well as Cheney. Of course we have done Bush impeachment action pages before, and were focusing on Cheney on the premise that he was not only the least popular, but also the most guilty. But now Bush has thrown himself in the middle of the worst of the Cheney scandals, and so we have launched a new action page calling for the impeachment of them both.
IMPEACH BOTH: http://www.usalone.com/impeach_both.php
If you were looking to submit something to reiterate your call for impeachment, please submit the page above as this is a NEW joint action. The ink was barely dry on the order DENYING bail on appeal to convicted White House felon Scooter Libby, before president Bush intervened to "commute" his sentence. It is very well possible that NEVER before in the history of American jurisprudence had anyone sentenced to prison received such a commutation BEFORE serving a single day of that sentence. Cheney and Bush conspired together to give Libby an escape hatch. This was their contingency plan all along, to game our legal system with every frivolous defense imaginable, knowing all along they would subvert justice in the end to whatever extent necessary. Who are the people celebrating this gross miscarriage of justice, as they dance on the grave of our Constitution?
Iraq Moratorium Day – September 21 and every third Friday thereafter ~ "I hereby make a commitment that on Friday, September 21, 2007, and the third Friday of every subsequent month I will break my daily routine and take some action, by myself or with others, to end the War in Iraq."
Quote of the day: Alive in Baghdad will be featured on ABC's Good Morning America on Thursday July 5th - airing 7-9 AM EST. Brian Conley, our fearless leader, has just returned from a trip to Syria, where he was training new correspondents for Alive in Baghdad and expanding the project. While in Syria, ABC's Bob Woodruff approached Brian to ask him to appear on Good Morning America. The segment will run this Thursday! From the Alive in Baghdad Team
Photo: The mother of 20-year-old Mohammed Hasson cries over his body in the holy Shiite city of 
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