Photo: Salwann, the son of Reuters driver Saeed Chmagh, 40, cries during the funeral procession for Saeed Chmagh and his Reuters colleague photographer Namir Noor-Eldeen, 22, in Baghdad July 13, 2007. They were killed yesterday. The two Reuters employees were killed in eastern Baghdad at a time when clashes had been taking place between U.S. forces and militants in the area. REUTERS/Mohammed Ameen (IRAQ)
REPORTS – LIFE IN IRAQ
Two Iraqi Journalists Killed as U.S. Forces Clash With Militias
Clashes in a southeastern neighborhood here between the American military and Shiite militias on Thursday left at least 16 people dead, including two Reuters journalists who had driven to the area to cover the turbulence, according to an official at the Interior Ministry. The two Reuters staff members, both of them Iraqis, were killed when troops on an American helicopter shot into the area where the two had just gotten out of their car, said witnesses who spoke to an Agence France-Presse photographer who arrived at the scene shortly after their bodies were taken away. The Reuters employees were Namir Noor-Eldeen, 22, a photographer, and Saeed Chmagh, 40, a driver. "When we reached the spot where Namir was killed, the people told us that two journalists had been killed in an air attack an hour earlier," said Ahmad Sahib, the Agence France-Presse photographer, who had been traveling in a car several blocks behind Mr. Noor-Eldeen but was delayed by the chaos in the area. He said he was in touch with Mr. Noor-Eldeen by cellphone until his colleague was killed.
"They had arrived, got out of the car and started taking pictures, and people gathered," Sahib said. "It looked like the American helicopters were firing against any gathering in the area, because when I got out of my car and started taking pictures, people gathered and an American helicopter fired a few rounds, but they hit the houses nearby and we ran for cover." According to a Reuters report after the incident, some people at the scene said that American troops fired into the area from a helicopter, and a police report stated that the American attack killed the two journalists and nine other people.
Reporting Iraq news inflicts rising toll
AT 8.45am on Friday, Khalid Hassan was navigating his car out of one of Baghdad's most dangerous neighbourhoods on his way to work as a reporter and interpreter at The New York Times bureau here. "My area is blocked," he wrote in a text message to the paper's newsroom manager. "I am trying to find a way out." Within 45 minutes, about three kilometres from his home, Hassan was forced to the side of the road by gunmen in a black Mercedes. The gunmen opened fire, with automatic rifles, pitting Hassan's rundown Kia car with bullets. At least one struck him in the upper body, but failed to kill him. Hassan, a heavyset, pranksterish 23-year-old, loved the new world of mobile phones, online computers and downloadable videos ushered in by the US occupation of Iraq. Slumped in his seat, he called his mother, then his father, at work as a school caretaker, telling them he had been shot. "I'm OK, Mum," he said. An off-duty policeman told Hassan's father what came next. Gunmen in a second car, seeing Hassan on his phone, pulled forward and fired two fatal shots into Hassan's head and neck. The murderous turmoil in Baghdad has reached a point where many families never know the killers of their loved ones, or their motives.
.......Two Reuters employees were killed during an incident involving US forces in Baghdad on Thursday. Driver Saeed Chmagh and photographer Namir Noor-Eldeen were killed in what police said was American military action and which witnesses described as a helicopter attack.
VIDEO: INSIDE THE SURGE
The Guardian's award-winning photographer and filmmaker Sean Smith spent two months embedded with US troops in Baghdad and Anbar province. His harrowing documentary exposes the exhaustion and disillusionment of the soldiers.
[I recommend watching this video. It gives an idea of what is going on in Iraq for the civilians there and for US troops. – dancewater]
Crushing Iraq's human mosaic
Iraq's minorities are suffering a persecution at times verging on genocide, a campaigning Iraqi MP has told the BBC News website. Caught in a triangle of religious, ethnic and criminal violence, communities which once made up as much as 14% of the country's population get little state protection, said Hunain Qaddo, chairman of the Iraqi Minorities Council, a Baghdad-based non-governmental organisation. The marketplace bomb attack on a Shia Turkmen village near Kirkuk on 7 July marked a new spiral of horror, according to Dr Qaddo, who believes 210 civilians, mostly women and children, died and about 400 were injured. Police reported 130 deaths at the time. He says that his own community, the Shabaks of the Nineveh Plains, face oblivion as a people, targeted physically by al-Qaeda militants because they are mainly Shia, and politically by Kurdish separatists with claims on their land.
Dr Qaddo is in London as part of a campaign by the UK-based advocacy group Minority Rights Group International to raise awareness of the crisis gripping Iraq's lesser-known peoples while the big three - the Shia and Sunni Arabs and the Kurds - pursue their own interests. Iraq's minorities range from large communities like Turkmens and Christians to small groups of Armenians, many of them descended from refugees from the Ottoman Empire nearly a century ago, and Palestinians given sanctuary by Saddam Hussein. The problems of the Shabaks, a community of up to 400,000 with their own language and cultural traditions, are rarely reported by foreign media, in contrast to those of Iraqi Christians, for example. "They have no communities in Western countries," Dr Qaddo points out. It is hard to assess the scale of the problems facing the Shabaks and other ethnic minorities independently during the current conflict in Iraq, Charles Tripp of the London School of Oriental and African Studies points out. Estimates for population size, he told the BBC News website, are often exaggerated in a country where parliamentary seats, resources and recognition are based on a community's percentage of the population. Nonetheless, the number of minority group members among the 2m [million] refugees from Iraq is believed to be disproportionately high.
REPORTS – IRAQI MILITIAS, POLITICIANS, POWER BROKERS
Iraqi Military's Readiness Slips
Despite stepped-up training, the readiness of the Iraqi military to operate independently of U.S. forces has decreased since President Bush's new strategy was launched in January, according to the White House progress report released yesterday. Combat losses, a dearth of officers and senior enlisted personnel, and an Iraqi army that has expanded faster than the equipment available for it have resulted in a "slight reduction" in the number of units designated at Level 1 status, or "capable of independent operations," the report said. The report's assessment of progress on 18 congressionally mandated benchmarks is likely to fuel ongoing disputes over what is really happening in Iraq. But the fine print in the 25-page document contains some remarkably candid descriptions of problems, as well as qualifiers for claimed achievements and briefly referenced, unexplained new facts.
Deadlocked Sunni, Shiite Factions Block Political Progress, Iraqis Say
Iraqi politicians on Thursday struck a more pessimistic tone about Iraq than did the White House assessment, and said the deadlock between warring Sunni and Shiite factions makes major political progress unlikely in coming months. Some Iraqi leaders, including members of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki's ruling Shiite alliance, added that U.S. officials have set unrealistic goals that the Iraqi government cannot achieve at a time of such instability and violence. Setting timelines and benchmarks according to Washington's political calendar would be counterproductive to Iraq's success, allowing the government's adversaries to work harder to shatter Iraq's efforts to bring security, Foreign Minister Hoshyar Zebari said. "I was the first to argue: These are not your benchmarks, these are our goals. Why do you make it yours?" Zebari, an ethnic Kurd, said in an interview earlier this week. "I think some of the difficulties we've been through in the past is because we have been held hostage to these timelines. Now, I think the stakes are so high, really, the situation needs to be managed with a bit more care."
REPORTS – US/UK/OTHERS IN IRAQ
CIA's dim view of Iraq regime
Two hours later, around the same conference table, CIA director Michael Hayden painted a starkly different picture for members of the study group. Hayden said "the inability of the government to govern seems irreversible," adding that he could not "point to any milestone or checkpoint where we can turn this thing around," according to written records of his briefing and the recollections of six participants. "The government is unable to govern," Hayden concluded. "We have spent a lot of energy and treasure creating a government that is balanced, and it cannot function." Later in the interview, he qualified the statement somewhat: "A government that can govern, sustain and defend itself is not achievable," he said, "in the short term."
Hayden's bleak assessment, which came just a week after Republicans had lost control of Congress and Bush had dismissed defence secretary Donald Rumsfeld, was a pivotal moment in the study group's intensive examination of the Iraq war, and it helped shape its conclusion in its final report that the situation in Iraq was "grave and deteriorating." In the eight months since the interview, neither Hayden nor any other high administration official has publicly described the Iraqi government in the uniformly negative terms that the CIA director used in his closed-door briefing.
"Terrorists" Thriving in Iraq, Senior Military Official Says
While the military has maintained that al Qaeda is on the run in Iraq, by any number of measures the terror group and its affiliates are as strong as ever, and June was the most violent month since the start of the war, a senior U.S. military official told ABC News.
COMMENTARY
The Deadly Occupation
One day in January 2005, an elderly couple was driving down a road in Mosul, Iraq, when without realizing it they passed through a makeshift US military checkpoint. The checkpoint, recalled a sergeant who came upon the scene, was "very poorly marked." Yet, he said, the soldiers "got spooked" and opened fire. The bodies of the couple sat in the car for three days, the sergeant said, "while we drove by them day after day." That incident was no Haditha or Abu Ghraib. It was a fairly typical day for Iraqis under US occupation. As Chris Hedges and Laila Al-Arian make clear in their exhaustive investigation in this issue, the degradation and killing of civilians by US troops have become commonplace in Iraq. At tense checkpoints, in futile house-to-house searches, as convoys and patrols hurtle down the roads, the official rules of engagement and unofficial day-to-day practices of the occupation often add up to shoot first and ask questions never. The results make for tough reading: a family's dog gunned down for barking, a 2-year-old shot in a spray of gunfire, the terrified scream of a father awakened in a midnight raid. Few such incidents were reported, according to most of those interviewed; even fewer resulted in discipline.
This Nation investigation, based on interviews with fifty soldiers, sailors and marines, marks the first time so many veterans have spoken on the record about civilian casualties at the hands of US troops in Iraq. They have shown notable courage in speaking out about the horrors they witnessed. Most insisted that only a minority in their ranks have killed civilians indiscriminately. Yet such abuses are common enough that many veterans have returned home with deep emotional scars. It is time to reckon with the weight of evidence that American forces regularly kill Iraqi noncombatants. Occupying armies with little knowledge of the local culture, fighting guerrillas who mingle among the population, have usually meant disaster for civilians. In Iraq, the impossible mission, poor training and inconsistent and irresponsible rules of engagement have compounded the problem, leading many American soldiers to conclude that endangering civilians is simply the cost of staying safe; to consider all Iraqis the enemy; or, under extreme stress, to lash out in revenge after insurgent attacks.
Quote of the day: It may be that US administrations would have been no less willing to release their bombs and missiles on white noncombatant populations (as was the case with Germany in World War II); but it can at least be said that, for the past half-century-plus, air power has functionally acted as an armed form of racism, that the sense of "their lives" as cheaper, even if seldom spoken aloud, has made it easier to use the helicopter, the bomber, the Hellfire-missile-armed Predator drone. The fact is that air war always cheapens human life. After all, from the heights, if seen at all, people must have something of the appearance of scurrying insects. – Tom Engelhardt
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