More Security Incidents for December 3, 2007:
Four al-Qaeda gunmen killed east of Falluja
Teacher killed in front of his students in Basra
Five unknown corpses found in Baghdad
Georgian base in Wassit rocketed
2 gunmen killed, 3 Iraqi soldiers wounded near Tikrit
3 IEDs defused, munitions found in Basra
Monday: 51 Iraqis Killed, 11 Wounded
Sunday: 53 Iraqis Killed, 33 Wounded
REPORTS – LIFE IN IRAQ
Hundreds of Iraqis seek aid after al Qaeda battle
Hundreds of Iraqis displaced by fierce battles between al Qaeda militants and U.S. and Iraqi security forces began receiving humanitarian aid on Monday at a camp set up on Baghdad's southern outskirts. The Iraqi Red Crescent aid programme began on the same day the humanitarian group announced falling violence had allowed between 25,000 and 28,000 Iraqis to return from Syria in September and October. More than 100 Sunni Arab families had been seeking help since Sunni Islamist al Qaeda launched a major attack on the town of Adwaniya, 20 km (12 miles) southeast of Baghdad on November 13.
950 juveniles in US prisons in Iraq: general
US troops are holding nearly 950 children and teenagers in a military prison at a Baghdad base, some as young as 10, a top commander said Monday. Brigadier General Michael Nevin of US military police said many of these youngsters, mainly 15, 16 or 17 years of age are illiterate and have been detained for planting bombs and even for "picking up a gun and firefighting." The juveniles are being held in Camp Cropper near Baghdad airport and are part of the nearly 26,000 detainees held by the US military across Iraq. But these youngsters, dressed in red jumpsuits, make up almost 25 percent of the 4,000 detainees held at Camp Cropper in Baghdad. The US military currently holds detainees in two prisons in Iraq, Camp Cropper and Camp Bucca in the southern port city of Basra. Camp Bucca holds most of the detainees. ….. Most of the youngsters have been sucked into the insurgency with threats or offers of money from Al-Qaeda, he said. [Or more likely, they needed some money to feed their families, so they went to work for the resistance. – dancewater]
Vicar: Dire Times For Iraq's Christians
From the time of Jesus, there have been Christians in what is now Iraq. The Christian community took root there after the Apostle Thomas headed east. But now, after nearly 2,000 years, Iraqi Christians are being hunted, murdered and forced to flee -- persecuted on a biblical scale in Iraq's religious civil war. You'd have to be mad to hold a Christian service in Iraq today, but if you must, then the vicar of Baghdad is your man. He's the Reverend Canon Andrew White, an Anglican chaplain who suffers from multiple sclerosis and from a fanatical determination to save the last Iraqi Christians from the purge. White invited 60 Minutes cameras and correspondent Scott Pelley to an underground Baghdad church service for what's left of his congregation. White's parishioners are risking their lives to celebrate their faith.
Cholera crisis hits Baghdad
Baghdad is facing a 'catastrophe' with cases of cholera rising sharply in the past three weeks to more than 100, strengthening fears that poor sanitation and the imminent rainy season could create an epidemic. The disease - spread by bacteria in contaminated water, which can result in rapid dehydration and death - threatens to blunt growing optimism in the Iraqi capital after a recent downturn in violence. Two boys in an orphanage have died and six other children were diagnosed with the disease, according to the Iraqi government. 'We have a catastrophe in Baghdad,' an official said. The United Nations Children's Fund (Unicef) said 101 cases had been recorded in the city, making up 79 per cent of all new cases in Iraq. It added that no single source for the upsurge had been identified, but the main Shia enclave of Sadr City was among the areas hardest hit. As Iraq's rainy season nears, its ageing water pipes and sewerage systems, many damaged or destroyed by more than four years of war, pose a new threat to a population weary of crisis.
IRAQ: A Tenuous 'Peace' in Al-Anbar
A semblance of calm belies an undercurrent of violence, detentions and fear across Iraq’s volatile al-Anbar province. The province -- which occupies one-third of Iraq’s geographic area -- has been a bane to authorities since the beginning of the occupation. "The Americans talked about our province as the deadliest enemy, and suddenly they are marketing us as their best friends," Sa’doon Khalifa, an independent politician in the capital city of al-Anbar Province, Ramadi -- 110 km west of Baghdad -- told IPS. "They were lying to their people and to the world in both cases as we were never terrorists nor their friends now," he stressed. Khalifa explained that resistance fighters in al-Anbar did fight occupation forces, but now they are standing down from launching new attacks against U.S. forces. This is due in large part to U.S. military payments to collaborating tribal sheikhs -- already totalling over 17 million dollars. The money funds tribal fighters who are paid 300 dollars per month to patrol their areas, particularly against foreign fighters. The military refers to these men as "Concerned Local Citizens," "Awakening Force," or simply "volunteers," even though it is well known that most of them used to carry out attacks against the occupation forces. "Those Americans thought they would decrease the resistance attacks by separating the people of Iraq into sects and tribes," a 32-year-old man from Ramadi -- speaking on terms of anonymity -- told IPS, "They know they are going deeper into the moving sand, but the collaborators are fooling the Americans right now, and will in the end use this strategy against them." As of Wednesday, the U.S. military counts 77,000 of these fighters. It plans to add another 10,000. Eighty-two percent of the fighters are Sunni. In spite of this mass recruitment, sporadic attacks are continuing against U.S. forces in the province.
The last tour
More than four years ago some of my friends and I agreed that what would happen might change Baghdad's face forever and I suggested driving through Baghdad's streets for the last time few days before the invasion started. Every one agreed and other friends brought a mini bus and invited other friends and it became more like tourist's tour. Today I am convinced that the last tour decision was the best decision at that time. Baghdad was not the perfect place and was not paradise but it was better than now. I saw for the last time Baghdad but it was then filled with fear and families leaving prior to war, men in uniforms in intersection preparing to war, trenches, shops owners closing their shops to leave but never the less it was the last time that I travel in Baghdad without fear of a fake checkpoint with gunmen to ask me Sunni or Shiite?The last time I see Baghdad ruled by a dictator and now I see Baghdad ruled by jungle law (if there is difference). It was the last time that I see Baghdad's face not stained with blood as obvious as now. To the most beautiful woman, to you Baghdad: your men are captivated by your love, love them back as you always did.
IRAQ: More aid needed for the displaced in Anbar Province
Displaced families in Anbar Province, west of Baghdad, lack essential supplies, including tents, food parcels and medical care, local non-governmental organisations (NGOs) say. According to the UN Refugee Agency (UNHCR), there are over 60,000 internally displaced persons (IDPs) in the province, but local aid groups say their plight has been relatively neglected. “In response to the latest events [IDPs continuing to seek refuge] in northern and southern governorates, aid agencies are responding faster to the requests in these areas, leaving Anbar with much less aid than before March 2007,” said Fatah Ahmed, a spokesman for the Iraqi Aid Association (IAA). According to Iraqi Red Crescent and IAA, there is about a 40 percent decrease in the aid delivered this year compared to what was delivered last year. “There are over eight big displacement camps in Anbar and over 25 smaller displaced communities, including those displaced in their own cities. The situation is worst in Fallujah, Ramadi and Al-Qaim but many villages also lack assistance,” Ahmed said.
REPORTS – IRAQI MILITIAS, POLITICIANS, POWER BROKERS
100 chieftains to stage hunger strike in Baghdad
The head of al-Salam awakening council on Monday said that more than 100 chieftains representing Diala province will stage a hunger strike until their demands are met.
"More than 100 chieftains representing Diala, who are at a sit-in for the 4th day running in Baghdad, protesting the deteriorating security situation in their province, will start a hunger strike tomorrow until their demands are met," Sheikh Ibrahim Ali Zidan al-Ankabi told the independent news agency Voices of Iraq (VOI). He explained that the angry protestors demanded the government to wage a military campaign in Diala to out an end to al-Qaeda's the Islamic State in Iraq, restrict the possession of arms to security personnel, and cancel the popular committees which have been established in the province.
Sadr hails followers for obeying ceasefire
Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr on Monday praised his followers for obeying his ceasefire order, holding foreign troops responsibile for raiding and arresting Sadrists, mainly in Diwaniya and Karbala. "I thank al-Mahdi army elements for their obedience to the halt," he said in a lengthy statement to his followers. "The presence of the foreign troops in Iraq has a great impact in planting sedition in the country," he also said. Al-Sadr announced last August the freeze of his Mahdi Army militia after bloody incidents in the holy city of Karbala, 100 km south of the Iraqi capital Baghdad. On Sunday a Sadrist source in Karbala said a delegation sent by Shiite leader al-Sadr arrived in Karbala on a fact-finding mission regarding arrests targeting Sadrists and their Mahdi Army militias. "The delegation is comprised of Sadrist legislators and politicians," said Sheikh Abdul-Hadi al-Muhammadawi in statements to the (VOI), not revealing the names of the delegation’s members. The delegation, which is to discuss security and political developments in Karbala to convey a clear picture to Muqtada al-Sadr, is scheduled to meet with officials, citizens, and detainees in the province, he said.
Iraqi insurgents regrouping, says resistance leader
Iraq's main Sunni-led resistance groups have scaled back their attacks on US forces in Baghdad and parts of Anbar province in a deliberate strategy aimed at regrouping, retraining, and waiting out George Bush's "surge", a key insurgent leader has told the Guardian. US officials recently reported a 55% drop in attacks across Iraq. One explanation they give is the presence of 30,000 extra US troops deployed this summer. The other is the decision by dozens of Sunni tribal leaders to accept money and weapons from the Americans in return for confronting al-Qaida militants who attack civilians. They call their movement al-Sahwa (the Awakening). The resistance groups are another factor in the complex equation in Iraq's Sunni areas. "We oppose al-Qaida as well as al-Sahwa," the director of the political department of the 1920 Revolution Brigades told the Guardian in Damascus in a rare interview with a western reporter. Using the nom de guerre Dr Abdallah Suleiman Omary, he went on: "Al-Sahwa has made a deal with the US to take charge of their local areas and not hit US troops, while the resistance's purpose is to drive the occupiers out of Iraq. We are waiting in al-Sahwa areas. We disagree with them but do not fight them. We have shifted our operations to other areas".
Ramadi, the capital of Anbar province, has seen some of the heaviest fighting since the 2003 invasion but has become conspicuously calmer in recent months. "There is no resistance at the moment in Ramadi," Omary said. He described the tribal Awakening movement as "good for pushing al-Qaida out but negative for the resistance". "There are no armed clashes between us and them but they prevent us working in their areas," he added. Omary's group is named after a Sunni uprising against British occupation forces in 1920. The group recently joined seven other Sunni-led armed resistance organisations to form the Front for Struggle and Transformation, a political committee aimed at drawing up a programme for national unity and hastening a US withdrawal.
Arabs and Kurds reach accord in Iraq's Kirkuk
Arab and Kurdish parties in Iraq's oil city of Kirkuk have clinched a deal under which Arabs will end their boycott of the provincial council in return for a more equal sharing of power, an official said on Monday. The "in principle" agreement was reached on Sunday, according to the chief of the Kirkuk provincial council, Razgar Ali, a leader of the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK) headed by Iraqi President Jalal Talabani. Ethnic Turkmen, however, have refused to join the agreement and will continue boycotting the 41-member council.
Iraqis defy death threats to rebuild their navy
The eclectic bunch of Iraqis on board the Predator patrol boat included a carpenter, a doctor's assistant, a fisherman and a music shop owner. Most were Shias from Basra but there were also Sunnis from Baghdad and even a smattering of Kurds and Christians. Some had grown up close to the sea and had it in their blood. Others were looking a sickly green due to the swell of the waves. But they all had one thing in common: Each one was clad in the new garb of Iraqi marines. They had all swapped their previous trades for a life protecting Iraq's waterways and crucially the two giant oil terminals six miles out to sea which support the bulk of the country's fragile economy.
About 2.4 million barrels – worth more than $230m at today's peak prices – are pumped through the Al Basra and Khawr Al Amaya oil terminals daily, making them the source of 90 per cent of Iraq's gross domestic product and a prime terrorist target. Today British, American and Australian warships encircle the platforms, but eventually it should fall to the country's own marines to protect them. The Iraqi navy was devastated by the very same UK and US forces who are now trying to build it back up to a credible operation. The small number of patrol and fast aluminium boats they currently use were originally ordered by Saddam Hussein and confiscated en route to Iraq in 2002 because of sanctions. Contracts have been signed with Italian and Malaysian companies to provide new ships but the first is not due to arrive for at least a year.
Former Karbala intelligence chief escapes Baghdad prison
"Lt. Colonel Hashim Jalloub, the former chief of Karbala intelligence service, managed to escape from al-Rasafa prison in Baghdad on Sunday evening," Raed Shakir Jawdat, the Karbala police director, told the independent news agency Voices of Iraq (VOI). “Investigations are still going on and a number of officers were arrested after the incident," said Jawdat, not indicating how Jalloub escaped. Jalloub was arrested in Karbala on charges of attempted murder of a police director in a prison in Baghdad, where he was sent to resume the investigations and then refer him to a court for trial, he added.
REPORTS – US/UK/OTHERS IN IRAQ
Rudd sets date for Iraq pull-out
Australia's new leader, Kevin Rudd, has said he will pull his country's troops out of Iraq by mid-2008, fulfilling a promise he made during the election campaign.
New U.N. Envoy in Iraq Sets Out Strategy to Revive Hopes Crushed in 2003 Attack
The new United Nations special representative for Iraq has been here barely three weeks, but he says he is moving swiftly to reassert the organization's involvement in a place from which it had largely retreated after its compound was bombed four years ago. The special representative, Staffan de Mistura, a longtime United Nations diplomat of Italian and Swedish parentage, said in an interview last week that the United Nations was prepared to carry out the expanded mission mandated by a Security Council resolution approved in August. The resolution requires the United Nations to help the Iraqi government with goals including reconciling political factions, meeting the needs of returning refugees and settling internal boundary disputes, like deciding whether the semiautonomous Kurdistan region will include the oil-rich city of Kirkuk. To that end, de Mistura said, he had begun to amass a larger staff with extensive expertise in areas where the Iraqi government has requested assistance. Mr. de Mistura warned that time was short for the government to win legislative approval for political reconciliation measures that could defuse deep disagreements between Sunni and Shiite factions. Those unresolved issues - a date for provincial elections, a formula for sharing oil revenues and the drawing of provincial boundaries - are "Damocles swords" threatening Iraq's future, he said. "These laws cannot be left too long," he said. "Otherwise what happens is that the feeling would be the dialogue doesn't lead anywhere and then we could go back - which nobody wants - to violence, which has proven to lead nowhere."
IRAQI REFUGEES
Iraqis in Syria face food shortages
Hundreds of thousands of Iraqi refugees in Syria face a bleak winter, with rising fuel costs that could leave many without enough money for food, the director of the World Food Program said Monday. About a third of Iraqi respondents in a recent United Nations study said they skipped one meal a day to feed their children. Nearly 60 percent said that they're buying cheaper, less nutritious food to cope with a dramatic increase in prices. With the weather turning colder and heating prices rising, humanitarian workers predict more Iraqis will go hungry in order to keep up with rent and utilities.
Tens of thousands of Iraqi refugees return from Syria
The Iraqi Red Crescent reported Monday at least 25,000 refugees had returned since mid-September, though that number represents a small fraction of the estimated 1.5 million who fled to Syria to escape violence.
Sweden's 300 Million Dollar Iraqi Refugee Trafficking Business
Four million people are on the flight from Iraq. When the surrounding world closes its borders, illegal escape routes are the only things offered. Kaliber follows the desperate traffic -- towards the attaining goal: Sweden. Here you can take part of Nuri Kino and Marie-Jeanette Löfgren's report of a billion dollar industry, where networks of smugglers take people here on dangerous ways from Iraq -- in exchange for big money. All refugees we have met live under pressure and threats. Their names are therefore changed, and the details of where we have met are sometimes altered in order to avoid identification. The humanitarian tragedy in Iraq truly knocks on Sweden's door. 70 times a day, according to Swedish authorities. That is how many illegally smuggled refugees from Iraq come here -- every day.
How to Help Iraqi Refugees
ANOTHER Way to help: The Collateral Repair Project
COMMENTARY
A Change Ain't Gonna Come: Democrats Openly Embrace Aggression and Torture
It was a remarkable display even by the hideous standards that the Democrats have already set for themselves. Over the past week, the party's leaders have put forward not one but two architects of Bush Regime war crimes as standard-bearers for Democratic policies and principles. In so doing, they have aligned themselves as completely and publicly as possible with the Hitlerian war crime of military aggression in Iraq and the Stalinist filth of deliberate, calculated and brutal torture, as exemplified by (but in no way limited to) the sickening atrocities at Abu Ghraib.
First, the party leadership picked retired General Ricardo Sanchez to give the Democratic response to the president's weekly radio address last Saturday. Then, just three days later, frontrunning presidential candidate Hillary Clinton singled out Colin Powell as one of the personal emissaries she would send out to tell the world that "bipartisan foreign policy is back." But as these incidents display so nakedly, "bipartisan foreign policy" has never gone away. It has continued to operate smoothly at the highest levels throughout the Bush imperium, greased by the blood money flowing to both parties from the spoils of war (H. Clinton now receives more legalized bribery from military-related industries than any of the Republican candidates), and by their shared vision of armed American hegemony over world affairs.
Iraq as a Pentagon construction site
The title of the agreement, signed by President Bush and Iraqi Prime Minister Maliki in a “video conference” last week, and carefully labeled as a “non-binding” set of principles for further negotiations, was a mouthful: a “Declaration of Principles for a Long-Term Relationship of Cooperation and Friendship Between the Republic of Iraq and the United States of America.” Whew! Words matter, of course. They seldom turn up by accident in official documents or statements. Last week, in the first reports on this “declaration,” one of those words that matter caught my attention. Actually, it wasn’t in the declaration itself, where the key phrase was “long-term relationship” (something in the lives of private individuals that falls just short of a marriage), but in a “fact-sheet” issued by the White House. Here’s the relevant line: “Iraq’s leaders have asked for an enduring relationship with America, and we seek an enduring relationship with a democratic Iraq.” Of course, “enduring” there bears the same relationship to permanency as “long-term relationship” does to marriage.
Quotes of the day: "Don't get hung up on all the talk about anthropologists and Ph.D.s," one recruitment e-mail says. "The key is we need smart people who get the Middle East to whatever extent such a thing is possible." –from Army Social Scientists Calm Afghanistan
More Security Incidents for December 3, 2007:
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