Photo: Map of the changing status of Baghdad neighborhoods from April 2006 (above) to November 2007 (below). Red and pink areas are predominantly Shi’a, blue areas are predominantly Sunni, and yellow areas are mixed. Source is US-led Multi National Forces.
REPORTS – LIFE IN IRAQ
Deadly Bombings Mar Holiday In Iraq
Baghdad car bomb toll rises to 24 casualties
Baaquba blast casualties up to 18
Baghdad car bomb targets alcohol sellers
Blood and ouzo mingled on the sidewalk outside a shattered Baghdad liquor store Thursday after three people died in a car bombing targeting alcohol sellers during the Muslim religious festival of Id al-Adha. The attack was in one of the heaviest-protected areas of Baghdad, when the alcohol merchants were among the very few plying their trade on a public holiday.
Two abducted women freed in Basra
Police freed two kidnapped women and captured their abductors in two separated operations downtown Basra on Wednesday, police source said. "Police squad managed to set free a kidnapped woman from the abductors Tuesday night in Jezair neighbourhood, downtown Basra", a responsible sources in Basrah police told the independent news agency Voices of Iraq (VOI). The source did not provide information about how many abductors were captured, though he described them as "woman abducting gang". He added "another squad freed another abducted woman in Ashar neighbourhood, downtown Basra, and seized their abductors".
Iraqi Media Braves Assault From All Sides
For the fifth year in a row, Iraq was the most dangerous place in the world to be a journalist. The New York-based Committee to Protect Journalists reported this week that 31 journalists have died in 2007, one fewer than a year ago. The media watchdog group said that 173 have died since 2003, including 49 media support workers – the drivers, translators, and guards who work for media companies and help report the news.
Iraqi Refugees Return, and Are Stranded
For most Iraqi refugees, the trip home is just the beginning of their troubles. Many return to find their homes destroyed or filled with squatters, most of them displaced people themselves. But the government committee that decides property disputes is charged with hearing only cases that predate the invasion of 2003. “We urgently need a plan; the whole government needs to be involved,” said Hamdiya A. Najaf, an official with the Iraqi Ministry of Displacement and Migration. Her ministry is overloaded with property dispute cases from Saddam Hussein’s time, when thousands were forcibly relocated. “We’re still working on the old problems,” she said. “We don’t have the mechanism to solve the new ones.” The brewing housing crisis extends to millions who abandoned their homes but stayed in Iraq. In Baghdad alone, more than 300,000 people left one neighborhood for another, as Sunnis fled to the west and Shiites to the east, often moving into recently evacuated houses.
Torture chamber, mass graves found in Iraq
The bodies are believed to have been dead between six and eight months, according to a gruesome military video shot at the scene. Some had their hands tied behind their backs. Identification is proving to be a challenge because of advanced decomposition. Photos given to the news media show a filthy bed wired to an electrical system, with an outlet hanging from wires on the wall. In the video, troops point out rubber hoses and boxing gloves, a ski mask and a blood-covered sword and knives. Other still photos show an entrance to the underground bunker and barbed wire stretched outside it. [How much did the US torturers embolden these torturers? - dancewater]
friendly argument
He said "people now started fighting Al Qaida and they are awakened now. They formed awakening council in many Sunni neighborhoods including Adil" I laughed sarcastically and said "why are they awakened? Were they sleeping when Al Qaida killed thousands of innocent people?" At that point, I can say the political struggle started. We argued for about 30 minutes. After a long fight, we agreed on one point. We agreed that so many promises were made by the American administration and by the Iraqi government _ so many promises that were never fulfilled. He started laughing and said "I feel so sorry because I participated in the election. I though that Saddam's days were over but now I feel sorry because we have many small Saddams who were brought by the USA. The old Saddam had been kicked out by the Americans but who will help us to end the days of the new Saddams if the USA keeps supporting them". I didn't answer him because I couldn't find an answer.
A surge of their own: Iraqis take back the streets
"My friends said I was mad when I started rowing," said the 22-year-old former science student. "They said I would be sharing the river with dead bodies and that people would shoot at me. But it keeps me fit and it keeps me focused for my night work." As dusk fell, he checked the contents of his kit bag, slung it over his shoulder and jumped into a waiting taxi. Fifteen minutes later, he had made it through checkpoints and concrete blast barriers en route to his home in al-Amil district of west Baghdad. At a makeshift barricade close to the street where he was born he greeted the sentries as friends. Then he unzipped his kit bag and pulled out a Kalashnikov. And for the next six uneventful hours he stood guard with his peers behind the straggles of barbed wire. ……There are now an estimated 72,000 members in some 300 groups set up in 12 of Iraq's 18 provinces, and the numbers are growing. They are funded, but supposedly not armed, by the US military. "It is Iraq's own surge," said a western diplomat, "and it is certainly making a difference."
Do U.S. Prisons In Iraq Breed Insurgents?
American officials have detained thousands of insurgents in the months since the surge of forces began this spring, in an effort that most agree has improved security in Iraq. But now the commander of the American detention facilities in Iraq is wondering aloud if holding all those detainees is breeding a "micro-insurgency" and asking whether it's time to begin releasing thousands of people. The two main detention facilities operated by the U.S. military in Iraq, at Camp Bucca near Basra and Camp Cropper in Baghdad, have swollen to hold nearly 30,000 detainees.
Dear Santa: Please Stop the Bombs
Here's what Karrar Haider, a 10-year-old Shi'ite boy at a school in eastern Baghdad, told Santa he wants this year for the holidays: "I have one wish to ask Santa Claus. Please bring peace to my country. Stop the bombs so I can play with my friends again." Santa -- who spends the rest of the year disguised as a 48-year-old Chaldean Christian monastery administrator named Jalal Hourmoz -- said he was delighted to spread joy after two years when sectarian violence made a merry Christmas impossible. "I stopped wearing the costume for two years. I was afraid of death. But this year it's a bit safer. So I'm back, to celebrate both Christmas and Eid," he said of the Christian and Muslim holidays that this year fall less than a week apart.
YOUNG INSURGENTS IN IRAQ - A Teenage Terrorist Tells His Story
It was on a Wednesday a few weeks ago when Diya Muhammad Hussein went out to kill Americans. It was shortly after one o'clock in the morning and the curfew had just begun in the western Iraq town of Rawah. Diya crept out of his brother's house and walked to the tree where he had hidden the explosive device three days before. He carried the hand-made mine to a gravel road nearby and buried it. Then he put the batteries for the remote-controlled detonator into a charger he had attached to a car battery, hid and waited. It was a cold night, the 16-year-old recalls as he sits on the sofa of the police chief in his home town. After several hours a patrol of US Marines approached but Diya couldn't get the batteries back in the remote control unit fast enough. The Marines drove past unharmed. [This guy was arrested, and it turns out his brother is one of his jailers. This indicates to me a true civil war, when brothers are working on opposite sides. – dancewater]
IMF approves loan for war-torn Iraq
The IMF has given green light to a 744-million-dollar loan for Iraq only a week after the war-ravaged country settled an earlier dept. In a statement on Thursday, the International Monetary Fund said that the arrangement is aimed at supporting Iraq's economic program over the next 15 months through March 2009. "Iraqi authorities have succeeded in keeping their economic program on track in 2006 and 2007," the IMF's Deputy Managing Director Takatoshi Kato said. [I can’t decide if these IMF people are smoking crack or are just vultures. – dancewater]
Iraq government 'failing Falluja'
Three years after the massive US assault on Falluja, the city's mayor has accused Iraq's central government of starving the city of resources. Mayor Sa'ad Awad says Shia officials still consider the former insurgent stronghold a haven for Sunni militants. Support was particularly lacking for the city's 2,000-strong police force, he added, as it takes on a bigger role. The head of the US military in Falluja said he shared some of the mayor's concerns over scarce police resources. Colonel Richard Simcock told the BBC there were no immediate plans to withdraw the 5,000 US Marines currently stationed in the area. Mayor Sa'ad Awad told the BBC: "The evidence points to Falluja being a model for other cities in terms of security and stability, but our capabilities have been weakened by this government that doesn't support us." [Doesn’t an occupying force have some responsibility to the civilian population? I think I read that somewhere…. – dancewater]
REPORTS – IRAQI MILITIAS, POLITICIANS, POWER BROKERS
Kurdish leader slams U.S. over military assistance to Turkey
A Kurdistan Coalition leader criticized on Thursday the U.S. policy of providing military assistance to Turkish troops in their bombing of northern Iraqi regions, describing the cooperation as a violation of Iraqi sovereignty.
Brothers in arms?
The Party of Free Life of Kurdistan's (PJAK) press officer, a Turk called Roj with an Australian passport, said he could not guarantee me an interview with the commander but he would take me to the camp if I was prepared for an uncomfortable journey. The PJAK is a sister organisation to the Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK). While the US wants the Iraqi government to comply with Turkey's demands and drive PKK fighters from the Kandil mountains, where they have been launching attacks on Turkish military targets, the PJAK continues to operate against Iran from the Iraqi side of the border, and the Iranian government alleges it does so with American financial support.
Turkish military may keep going to Iraq
Turkey's military may stage more cross-border operations into northern Iraq to hunt down separatist Kurdish rebels, Turkey's parliament speaker said Thursday, as the justice minister again urged the rebels to surrender. Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan thanked the Turkish armed forces, calling their operations successful, and said Turkey was at an important stage of its fight against the rebels of the Kurdistan Workers' Party, or PKK, who are based in northern Iraq.
REPORTS – US/UK/OTHERS IN IRAQ
Dutch firm admits kickbacks in UN oil-for-food Iraq programme
The Dutch firm Akzo Nobel NV has admitted to paying thousands of dollars in kickbacks to the Iraqi government during the UN-administered programme that allowed Saddam Hussein's regime to sell oil to buy food or other humanitarian goods, the US Justice Department said Thursday.
Badger has some insightful comments on US efforts to recruit Shi’ite tribal leaders
The reports are said to include also a second theme, in addition to this point about creation of an armed force capable of confronting Iranian influence. The second point is that Washington is intent on igniting a Shiite-Shiite war at the earliest possible opportunity.
IRAQI REFUGEES
Judge rebukes Home Office over Iraqi boy seeking asylum
A 15-year-old Iraqi asylum seeker deported to Austria is to be returned to the UK after a high court judge condemned the Home Office's "total lack of humanitarianism" in the case. He arrived unaccompanied in Britain a year ago, and was said by his carer to have been terrified when Border and Immigration Agency officials arrived without warning at his home in south-west London at 4am to arrest him last month. Lawyers for the boy described how after being flown to Austria later that day he was held at a police station for a night and then spent three days on the streets until being given shelter in a charity-run hostel for adults. The Home Office was accused of not warning the Austrian authorities that the unaccompanied youth, known only as J for legal reasons, was being returned to them.
Video: Iraqi Refugees at Work in Syria - 12.17.2007
Damascus, Syria - Although there are many reports of Iraqis returning to Baghdad, there are still hundreds of thousands of refugees and resident Iraqis struggling to get by in Syria. This week Hayder Fahad brings you some of their stories. There are so many refugees still in Syria, that the UNHCR has just begun distributing financial aid to refugees as of Sunday the 16th. Alive in Baghdad has written stories previously about Iraqi refugees in Syria, this week we focus not on the reasons why they have left, but how they get by. It is illegal for Iraqis to work in Syria, but the underground economy of Iraqi workers is thriving.
How to Help Iraqi Refugees
ANOTHER Way to help: The Collateral Repair Project
COMMENTARY
Don't Try to Stay in Iraq.
Because of the greatly improved situation in the counterinsurgency war in Iraq there will be a terrible temptation to think that Iraqis have now accepted a long term American military presence in their country. That would be a mistake. The improved military situation has largely been the result of Iraqi revolt against takfiri jihadi oppression and the emergence of a coalition military leadership philosophy that welcomed that revolt and which provided fnancial, materiel and operational support to the rebels against Al-Qa'ida in Mesopotamia and its freinds. The urge to attribute the success in the last year and a half to the increased presence of American combat forces must be strong, but, in fact, that presence has been helpful but not decisive.
The truth behind the Surge
Arming the Sunnis + using air strikes = a successful 'Surge', at least statistically, for the time being. In reality, this will make the situation even worse as the Sunnis will inevitably turn on the occupation force they hate, the Shias will be even further alienated by their betrayal, and the thousands of new civilian casualties will only result in more hatred for the brutal occupation. Add to this the US support for Turkey against the Kurds and you have all the ingredients of a complete nightmare and even more bloodshed. The 'Surge' will go down in history as one of the dumbest and most immoral political stunts ever devised.
RESISTANCE
Two Asheville anti-war vets detained
Two members of an anti-war veteran's group were escorted off Fort Bragg after handing out baked goods and anti-war literature, the men and base officials said. Army veterans Jason Hurd, 28, and Steve Casey, 23, were told they needed a permit Monday about an hour after they set up a folding table outside a post shopping center and began handing out gift bags of cookies and brownies. Attached to the bags was the monthly newsletter from Iraq Veterans Against the War. Both men belong to its Asheville chapter. [I made the brownies. – dancewater]
We Support the Troops Who Oppose the War
On the weekend of 13-15 March, 2008, Iraq Veterans Against the War will assemble history's largest gathering of US veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as Iraqi and Afghan survivors. They will provide first hand accounts of their experiences and reveal the truth of occupation. We support Iraq Veterans Against the War and their Winter Soldier: Iraq & Afghanistan Investigation. Join us in supporting the effort to reveal truth in the way that only those who lived it can.
Please go to this website to sign the petition.
Quote of the day: "Love your enemies, do good to those who hate you, bless those who curse you, pray for those who treat you badly" (Lk 6: 27-28).
Photo: Map of the changing status of 
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