News & Views 12/21/07

Photo: 1920 Revolution Brigades members grieve for Naseer Salam al Maamouri, their security chief, and two of his bodyguards in Baqouba, 60 kilometers (35 miles) northeast of Baghdad, Iraq on Friday, Dec. 21, 2007. Their bodies were found after gunmen kidnapped the men on Wednesday. (AP Photo)

REPORTS – LIFE IN IRAQ

Violence Leaves Terrible Legacy on Iraqi Children

"Children in Iraq are seriously suffering psychologically with all the insecurity, and with the fear of kidnapping and explosions," the report says. "In some cases, they're found to be suffering extreme stress." The toll the war has had on a generation of young children is often hard to quantify, mental health experts say. But examples of just how the violence is playing out are evident in many Baghdad neighborhoods. A year ago, when sectarian violence in the capital was at its peak, 11-year-old Haider found his father's headless body near the family's home in Sadr City, a violent Shiite-populated area in northeastern Baghdad. He was murdered by Sunni insurgents who terrorized the neighborhood, says Haider's mother, Suham Kadhum. The killing had a profound effect on Haider, with weeks going by after the death before he'd mix with other neighborhood kids and go to school. "I can't go to school," Haider told ABC News at the time. "I just can't."

UNICEF: War has taken a toll on Iraq's children

BAGHDAD — More than four years after the United States invaded Iraq, the country's children continue to face a litany of problems from disrupted educations to unsafe drinking water, detentions and violence, UNICEF reported Friday. Violence and displacement often kept Iraqi children out of school this year. The organization estimates that 2 million educations were interrupted, especially among primary-school students. The report says that only 28 percent of 17-year-olds in Iraq took final exams this summer, and fewer than half passed. However, UNICEF-supported programs to distribute classroom materials, rebuild schools and provide more learning opportunities benefited 4.7 million children, the agency reported.

Help renovate 2 Iraqi orphanages in Duhok, Iraq!

The primary idea behind the project is to help to improve the orphans’ quality of life. The project aims to provide two orphan houses with heaters and carpets because the houses are lacking this important part at the moment. The project is also trying to provide the houses with some educational materials like books, stories or toys, with re-establishing an existing computer network and hopefully provide it with internet supplies. In the same time, I will be addressing another issue which is youth empowerment and gender equality, by giving the youth in my close community the chance to work and to be creative and helpful. Through this project and other similar activities we hope to be giving equal chances to both males and females to work together and accomplish things as a team.

Disaffected Iraqis Spurn Shiite Clerics

Two years after helping to bring to power a government led by Shiite religious parties, Iraq's paramount Shiite clerics find their influence diminished as their followers criticize them for backing a political alliance that has failed to pass crucial legislation, improve basic services or boost the economy. "Now the street is blaming what's happening on the top clerics and the government," said Ali al-Najafi, the son of Bashir al-Najafi, one of four leading clerics collectively called the marjaiya. Speaking for his father, the white-turbaned Najafi said he wished that the government, all but paralyzed by factionalism and rival visions, was more in touch with ordinary Iraqis. "We were hoping that it would have been better," he said. The marjaiya, led by Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani, still wield enormous power in Iraq. But if a critical mass of Iraqis stops listening to them, it could hinder efforts toward political reconciliation and strain the fragile unity of the Shiite parties that head the government. The loss of clerical influence could also hurt the political fortunes of Abdul Aziz al-Hakim, one of Iraq's most powerful Shiite politicians and America's main Shiite ally, who has closely aligned himself with Sistani. The marjaiya now compete in the streets with political parties that maintain armed militias and in the seminaries with younger, ambitious clerics. In recent months, the top clerics' aides have become frequent targets of assassination, victims of the fight for power and resources.

Bitterness apparent as U.S. releases Iraqi prisoners

When Leila Nasser was six months pregnant, U.S. soldiers burst into her house and wrestled away her husband, Mohammed Amin, who was asleep on the roof, trying to escape the summer heat. This week, Nasser waited outside what's now called the "reconciliation hall" in Baghdad's Jihad neighborhood for Amin to appear. In her arms she cradled her year-old son, whom she'd named Moubin, the Iraqi word for apparent. "I called him Moubin hoping that his father would appear for his eyes," she said. Moubin had never met his father. Now Amin was one of 15 detainees who'd be released as part of a reconciliation program that the U.S. military's 1st Battalion, 28th Infantry Regiment put together in hopes of easing tensions in this divided neighborhood. But the release showed how far reconciliation has to go.

More than 25,000 Iraqis are now in U.S. detention facilities. The Jihad reconciliation committee of Sunni and Shiite Muslims had requested that 562 men be released. Last month, 48 people were released, but 40 more were detained. Most of those held are never charged with crimes. Sometimes Iraqis are detained because of a tip from a neighbor or because a few cables and cleaning agents are mistaken for bomb-making material. Nasser said that there was no evidence linking her husband to Shiite Muslim militias. "They destroyed the house with us in it," she said of the U.S. soldiers. "The reason? Because he has a revolver, a revolver that he puts under his pillow to defend me and my daughter." A member of the reconciliation committee, eavesdropping, interrupted her. "Talk about reconciliation," he instructed. "Reconciliation? Which reconciliation? What did we understand from the reconciliation?" Nasser asked. "It's been one year and three months and he did nothing."

Hundreds in Ramadi protest policeman killing by U.S. soldier

Hundreds of people in al-Anbar staged a demonstration in front of a U.S. forces headquarters north of Ramadi on Thursday to protest the killing of an Iraqi policeman stabbed by a U.S. soldier in a quarrel on Wednesday. "About 400 protesters in the area of al-Jazira, (4 km) northeastern Ramadi, demanded a trial of the U.S. soldier in accordance with the Iraqi law for stabbing an Iraqi policeman in a joint checkpoint to death on Wednesday evening," a police officer in Ramadi, who declined to have his name mentioned, told the independent news agency Voices of Iraq (VOI).

Veneer of security

While the US and much of the western world may obsess over policy in Iraq, Iraqis themselves pay less and less attention, even to last week's "surge" of reports and speeches. It is a debate from which they feel largely excluded. "It doesn't matter what we think," said a teacher friend, who does try to follow the news from the US. "The Americans will do what they want." It is hardly surprising, the way Iraq is discussed by both President George Bush and his political opponents. The policy revolves around US security - "fighting terrorists in Iraq, so Americans are safe at home". The needs and hopes of Iraqis - for their own security, jobs, and functioning power, water and sewage systems - are rarely mentioned. When Iraqis do get a mention, it is usually to be blamed for the failings of their politicians. That is how it looks from here. There is no question that Iraq's new political class have not served their people well, but there is mounting anger that they are being landed with all the blame, not the US. Or rather, that everyone but the Americans is getting the blame. Veteran Kurdish politician Mahmoud Othman voiced widespread feelings with a recent outburst. "The Americans always try to pretend the responsibility for cleaning up this mess isn't theirs and tend to shift the blame onto Iraq, Iran and Syria for everything that goes wrong," he said. "They should stop this nonsense and admit that most of the accountability rests on their shoulders."

Giant Inflatable Santa Looms Large in Baghdad

A giant inflatable Father Christmas stands outside the front of a juice shop in central Baghdad, with one arm outstretched in a welcoming wave. Across the road is a line of Christmas trees for sale along with all the trimmings — baubles, tinsel, red stockings and confectionery. The festive displays provide only a fraction of the colour that decorated shops before the 2003 invasion. They are, however, more prominent than last year, fuelling hope that this Christmas will be a happier affair for the city's depleted Christian population. Aida Hogobian, who owns a flower and decorations store in a Christian neighbourhood in the heart of the capital, is benefiting from the improvement in yuletide cheer. “Over the past four years hardly anyone came to buy Christmas decorations or trees, but this year business is better,” the 37-year-old said. Ms Hogobian sold five Christmas trees in 2006. This year she has already sold 12 to individual families and scores more to other shops. Her trees, as well as those outside several shop fronts and market stalls in central Baghdad, are fake. Some families like to buy the real thing.

REPORTS – IRAQI MILITIAS, POLITICIANS, POWER BROKERS

Iraq: Kirkuk Referendum Delayed By Six Months

Iraq's Kurdish officials reluctantly accepted a UN proposal calling for a six-month extension to implement Article 140 of the Iraqi Constitution in mid-December, despite warnings from Kurdish lawmakers that failure to implement the article would be considered a direct violation of their rights under the constitution. Article 140 refers to the normalization of Kirkuk, a highly contested multiethnic governorate with a capital city of the same name that contains vast oil reserves. Under the Arabization campaign launched in the 1980s, Saddam Hussein displaced thousands of Kurds from Kirkuk and relocated Shi'ite Arab families to the area in an effort to change the demographic landscape of the historically Kurdish-majority governorate.

Delayed application of article 140 is only for once – Kurdish parliament speaker

[Unless Rice tells them to delay it again. – dancewater]

Cleric slams govt.'s failure to release detainees

Shiite cleric Muhammad al-Yaaqubi slammed in his Eidul-Adha sermon on Friday the Iraqi government for its failure to honor pledges to release detainees on the occasion. "We in Iraq are going through a state of occupation, political conflict, poverty, deprivation, killings, forced relocation, administrative corruption, theft of public funds, detention of innocent people and other issues that require a firm stance to resolve them," read a statement by Yaaqubi's media office. Shiite seminaries in the holy city of Najaf had announced Friday as the first day of Eidul-Adha, or Corban Bairam, for Shiite Muslims. "The government is not to be excused for disregarding the demands of the innocent prisoners' families to have their beloved ones released," Yaaqubi, one of the four top seminaries for Shiite Muslims in Iraq and the world, said. Earlier on Friday the spokesman for the Iraqi government, Ali al-Dabbagh, said that the Eidul-Adha holiday would not see a pardon for prisoners as sought by Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki with the aim of pushing forward national reconciliation.

Shiite leaders oppose expansion of U.S.-backed citizens groups

The leader of Iraq's most powerful Shiite Muslim political party warned Friday that the security organizations that American officials credit with helping to cut violence in Iraq must be brought under control. Abdulaziz al Hakim, the head of the Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq, became the latest Iraqi leader to raise concerns that the U.S.-financed groups, which are predominantly Sunni Muslim and known as awakening councils or "concerned local citizens," could become a potent army capable of challenging the U.S.-backed Shiite-dominated central government. "We emphasize that it's important that these awakening councils become an aid and an arm to the Iraqi government in its pursuit of criminals and terrorists and not become a substitute for it," Hakim said in a speech that marked the Eid al Adha festival of sacrifice commemorating the end of the annual pilgrimage to Mecca.

REPORTS – US/UK/OTHERS IN IRAQ

Australia to pull out combat troops next June-PM

U.S. convoys struggle to adjust to policy change

U.S. soldiers have been ordered to assume that all civilian vehicles are friendly and to yield to civilian drivers instead of stopping traffic. That puts some Kentucky National Guard soldiers pulling convoy duty on edge. They figure if the roads get worse again, they'll be among the first to know.

US Iraq Arms Sales Office Gets 1000% Staff Hike

The Pentagon is bolstering a badly understaffed office in Baghdad to speed the flow of warfighting gear to Iraqi forces and help keep the weapons from insurgents and off the black market. [Here’s an idea – stop sending weapons around the world for fun and profit. See next story. – dancewater]

Same US-made weapon killed 7 UK soldiers in Iraq -inquest

Seven British soldiers shot dead in Iraq this year were probably killed by the same sniper using the same U.S. - made weapon, a British coroner said on Friday. The coroner, David Masters, was speaking a day after recording a verdict of unlawful killing in the death of Rodney Wilson, a British soldier shot by insurgents while on patrol in the southern Iraqi city of Basra in June. Masters said evidence given during Wilson's inquest showed that six other British soldiers killed in the three months before Masters were more than likely killed by the same sniper using the same weapon. "In terms of the markings on the fragments found, an expert forensic scientist concluded that they were fired from the same weapon," Masters told Reuters.

HISTORY

Why it went wrong

Deep holes from heavy calibre US rounds scarred the walls of the hospital. Three dead Iraqi soldiers had been laid out in the remains of the morgue, their wounds still fresh. The battle wasn't long over and marines were now going through the buildings room by room. Some Iraqis had surrendered. But as the marines moved upstairs, they realised there had been many more inside. Along the corridors and in many of the now wrecked wards, they found little heaps of military fatigues. "Look, they're taking off their uniforms, but keeping their gear, their ammunition, so they can keep on fighting," said one marine, holding up a camouflage jacket. They had clearly fled before the Americans got in and left behind anything that would identify them as soldiers. It was March 2003, a few days into the invasion. I was in the small southern city of Nasiriya, travelling with the US Marines as an embedded reporter.

Quote of the day: It belongs to human nature to hate those you have injured. ~ Tacitus