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An urgent appeal for humanitarian intervention.
Lenin’s Tomb
655,000 dead, government death squads wiping out families, mass starvation and malnourishment; the government is venal and corrupt, promotes fanatical sectarianism, and hides the true scale of deaths; so far 1.6 million people have had to become refugees. I think we can safely call this a humanitarian catastrophe, so when are the Americans going to invade? Oh, wait…
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Haditha is a black hole
Born at the Crest of the Empire
Just an observation. Further down this page, I quoted an Azzaman article, In one the outskirts of Haditha, for example, fighting is reported to be raging between U.S. troops and the rebels who have barricaded themselves inside the city. They are lying in ambush and waiting for U.S. troops to enter the city, the witnesses said. I cannot, in fact, solidly confirm that, but looking at the wire photos, there have been just two pictures from Haditha sinc! e Sept 25, both seemingly on the outskirts of the city. Both of those were supplied by the military from what looks like one patrol.
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THE SHAME OF THE NATION: A COLLECTIVE PERVERSION
Stephen Lendman
The daily headlines about a single congressman’s online pedophiliac behavior obscure the greater issue of a nation off its moorings and afflicted by the collective perversion of defiling the foundational equity and justice-for-all letter and spirit of what the nation long-claimed to stand for but no longer does if it ever did. Nearly everyone in the administration, Congress and courts share the collective guilt and shame and by their actions destroy! ed Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address “resolve…that this nation…shall have a new birth of freedom (in a) “government of the people, by the people, for the people (that) shall not perish from the earth.”…
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Halliburton’s Iraq Deals Greater Than Cheney Has Said
Affiliates Had $73 Million in Contracts
Colum Lynch, Special to The Washington Post
During last year’s presidential campaign, Richard B. Cheney acknowledged that the oil-field supply corporation he headed, Halliburton Co., did business with Libya and Iran through foreign subsidiaries. But he insisted that he had imposed a “firm policy” against trading with Iraq. “Iraq’s different,” he said. According to oil industry executives and confidential Unite! d Nations records, however, Halliburton held stakes in two firms that signed contracts to sell more than $73 million in oil production equipment and spare parts to Iraq while Cheney was chairman and chief executive officer of the Dallas-based company…
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Able Danger whitewash attempt
Xymphora
…The issue is presented as a problem concerning whether Able Danger could have identified the September 11 terrorists in time to stop the tragedy, but, of course, that isn’t the real problem. The real problem is that the guy using the identity ‘Mohammed Atta’ was leading a terrorist cell in Brooklyn at a time when the original Mohammed Atta, the Egyptian student we are supposed to believe was a radical Muslim leading the attack under the direction of Osama bin Laden, was ! documented in Hamburg…
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Ethnic cleansing comes (further) out of the closet in Israel
Eli Stephens, Left I on the News
It’s official: Avigdor Lieberman, the leader of the far-right, racist Yisrael Beitenu party, will be joining the Israeli Cabinet. As Saree Makdisi put it on CounterPunch earlier this year: Lieberman’s party believes what all Israelis believe: that Israel is a Jewish state. Unlike the more respectable Israeli parties, however, Lieberman’s party is willing to add that since Israel is a Jewish state, non-Jews are not we! lcome. Even if they were born there. That is to say, Lieberman and his party call openly for the “transfer” (expulsion) of non-Jewish Israelis from the borders of Israel. And while ethnic cleansing has been the policy and practice of the state of Israel since its founding (and even before), rarely has it been so openly defended and advocated as it is by Yisrael Beitenu…
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Iraqi Resistance Report for events of Monday, 23 October 2006
Translated and/or compiled by Muhammad Abu Nasr, member, editorial board, the Free Arab Voice
…In a dispatch posted at 10:20am Makkah time Monday morning, Mafkarat al-Islam reported that Iraqi Resistance fighters observed the Eid al-Fitr holiday early on Monday morning by delivering presents to children of fallen Resistance fighters in Baghdad, Abu Ghurayb, al-Fallujah, ar-Ramadi, Samarra’, Ba’qubah, al-Mawsil and other parts of the country. Mafkarat! al-Islam reported that the Resistance men distributed food baskets containing canned goods, and children’s clothes and money to families whose members have been killed in the struggle against the US occupation. Resistance fighters also paid personal visits to families of martyred fighters throughout the country. A correspondent for Mafkarat al-Islam reported Shaykh Abu Taha al-Falluji of the Jaysh Ansar as-Sunnah Resistance group as saying that the resistance struggle was being carried out through the cooperation of most of the Resistance organizations with religious leaders and mosque Imams. They provide food, clothing, and money to families of fallen fighters…
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Is It Vietnam Yet?
Cindy Sheehan, t r u t h o u t | Perspective
… So many people approach me and say: “I never thought this would happen again after Vietnam.” I always ask them, “Why?” After the troops limped home from Southeast Asia, badly wounded, physically and emotionally, the anti-war movement went home, too. The anti-war movement cannot rest on its laurels this time. We need to transform the anti-war movement into a radical peace movement to make sure unending wars for greed never “happen again!” Is Iraq! “Vietnam yet?” Yes and no. Yes, that people are dying for no reason and the continued death is justified by not “cutting and running.” Yes, that families are being destroyed and our treasury is not only being emptied, but is trillions in the red. But also, no …
… Iraq is worse than Vietnam…
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WAR NEWS FOR MONDAY, OCTOBER 23, 2006
Today in Iraq
About 50 corpses were collected around Baghdad on Sunday, a figure that was considered high weeks ago but has now become routine. An Interior Ministry official said many of the victims had apparently been shot at close range and bore signs of torture. A bomb exploded under an unattended car in the capital’s Shorja market, an area filled with wholesale stores that is Baghdad’s largest and oldest shopping bazaar. At least two people were killed and five wounded fr! om the explosion. A series of bombs ripped through a Baghdad market and bakery packed with holiday shoppers, killing at least nine people and injuring dozens…
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Baghdadi Gays Fear for Their Lives
Basim al-Shara’a (ICR No. 199, 20-Oct-06)
Faris Thamir carefully watches the street in his Al-Batawin neighbourhood, afraid the police or militia men might try to kill him. In Iraq, where religious radicals consider homosexuality a sin punishable by death, gays have good reason to worry about being “outed”. Thamir, 35, is wary of the extremist Islamic groups that prowl the streets of the capital – but neither does he trust the police who are supposedly there to protect him. Tha! mir and other gay men complain about frequent mistreatment by police, accusing them of blackmail, torture, sexual abuse and theft (…) For him, the Saddam era seems like a “golden” time because homosexuality was discreetly tolerated. “Now I am desperate because I expect either to be shot or beheaded at any moment,” he said (…) Outrage! reports of cases where members of a family have been killed for refusing to hand over a gay male relative to the militia…
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The Eid Slaughter in Gaza!
Sabbah’s blog
You can never miss them. In fact, they never stopped their crimes. The racist, terrorist gang of Olmert and his army is proud to wish the Muslim world, and Palestinian in particular, a Happy Eid, so they killed SEVEN and injured at least thirty. Above album photos are from last 48 hour crimes ONLY. More to come in the coming days. If you look at last week report by Palestinian Centre for Human Rights, it tells you the never ending story: 28 Palestinians, 17 of whom includi! ng 2 children and a woman are civilians, were killed by IOF. Each of the two children was killed together with the father of each. 6 of the victims were extra-judicially executed by IOF in 3 separate attacks…
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Nuclear Dual Standards
Ramzy Baroud
…A recent study, published by a joint US-Iraqi team in the eminent medical journal, The Lancet, estimates that about 655,000 Iraqis have been killed in post-invasion Iraq, 31 per cent of whom have fallen victim to US and other ‘coalition’ attacks. While the bulk of the reported casualties allegedly took place during the ongoing ethnic strife, few can claim that such deaths would have taken place were it not for the state of chaos and ethnic rivalry created and fed by the Marc! h 2003 US takeover. Needless to say, no WMDs were ever recovered from Iraq, for no such weapons existed. Yet while the death toll is now comfortably exceeding the half-million mark, US officials arrogantly parrot the same tired argument: that the world is now better off without Saddam Hussein, a classically pretentious retort to any serious criticism of the Bush administration’s disastrous and reckless war…
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Eid Al Fitr: An Outsider Reflects.
Felicity Arbuthnot
When the United States and Britain blitzed Baghdad for four days in time for Christmas (’Eid al Issa’ – Celebration of Jesus) Eid and Yom Kippur in December 1998, announced in front of his resplendent Christmas tree, by Lord Blair of Kut Al Amara (as dubbed by the Independent’s Robert Fisk, referring to the bloody and ignominous defeat of the British at Kut in Iraq in an earlier British debacle) Iraq’s Christian hierarchy cancelled Christmas. After another ! horror heaped after an eight year embargo – actually more akin to a draconian mediaeval siege – there was nothing to celebrate. The previous year an Iraqi Chaldean priest had written of the deprivation caused by the US-UK driven UN., in a country sitting on the second largest oil reserves on earth (…) The joyous celebration of Eid Al Fitr (Celebration of Fast Breaking) is Islam’s ‘Christmas’ but without the overt commercialism (though preparations are every bit as planned and detailed.) In Iraq, a real Eid was cancelled for most long before 1998. Not to visit with gifts, new clothes, families to offer hospitality was unthinkable. An unspoken agreement for most was to stay at home, unable to give, unable to receive with appropriate offerings, people hugged at Mosques and stadia, thanked Allah that they still had their strenght of spirit and cut the joyous socialising. The US/UK UN driven embargo (1990-2003) killed not alone up to or exceeding one and a half million! people, it killed normality: birthday parties, religious fes! tivals a nd for many, even hope…
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IL discovers significant details of the site of Al-Chalabi Death Squads – Maps
Iraqi League
Al-Hurriya district has been witnessing a series of horrendous crimes perpetrated by squads from Mashtal Awwad (Awwad’s Orchard)-which was confiscated by Ahmad Chalabi after the war. This orchard consists of an old house, repaired just last year, with a giant swimming pool, dance and party hall, and, most importantly, iron cages! One hundred and forty iron cages, large enough for only one person to sit still in, can be fo! und within the area of the orchard. In addition, more than 70 brand new Land Cruisers without license plates were found along with cars used for death and kidnapping. The following makes were among them: six Opals, 9 BMWs, as well as an area where stolen cars were stored after their owners were killed. We turn your attention to the fact that corpses of entire families of There was a corpse of a man who had been crucified on the wall of the orchard on June 13, 2006. Today, he is nothing but a skeleton!…
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Long Black Veil: Tony Blair’s Dangerous Game of Muslim-Bashing
Chris Floyd, TO UK Correspondent – t r u t h o u t
For centuries in Britain, each sentence of death was accompanied by a strange ritual. Before handing down the verdict, the judge would first take a piece of black silk cloth and put it on his head. With this rather bizarre and ancient drapery covering his powdered wig – itself a relic, a cultural fossil carried into modern times – he would then render the prisoner into the hangman’s care. In such a gu! ise, the black cloth once represented the full, dread measure of state power. Today, however, a cloth of similar size, shape and color – worn across the faces of a small number of some of the most vulnerable members of British society – has become a target of that same dread power, after Britain’s high and mighty unleashed a sudden, thunderous sneak attack on the nation’s Muslim minority, centering the campaign around the tabloid-ready symbol of the veil…
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Statements
Truth About Iraqis
A friend of mine – an Iraqi journalist who is still in Iraq and writing under various pseudonyms to avoid assassination (or worse) – recently wrote me a Eid greeting. Eid Mubarak, he said. I responded that I was sorry but I could not accept his greeting because I have not celebrated Eid since 2003. Since Iraq was brutally raped by a horde of pillaging, ravaging murderers aided by the various Iraqi exiles, businessmen and all who looked to make a quick buck as their brethren were slau! ghtered. I will celebrate Eid when the occupier is vanquished, when Iraq is whole again, when there is a government that is nationalistic – not sectarian, not religious (…) But there are causes for celebration. Western Iraq is back in the hands of the nationalistic Iraqis. US soldiers do not dare tread one inch of that soil lest they be cut down like the rabid dogs they are. The US military has lost control. The Iraqi military (haha!) has lost control. Nationalistic tribes are mobilizing. Indeed. The Iraqi resistance is winning. US commanders have registered up to 200 attacks on US forces each and every day in the past six weeks…
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Military Build-up in the Eastern Mediterranean and the Persian Gulf: Israel and NATO sign Framework Agreement
MICHEL CHOSSUDOVSKY, Global Research
On the 16th of October, NATO and Israel signed a major framework agreement, which essentially establishes close cooperation between Israel and ther Atlantic Alliance in NATO led “counterterrorism” under Operation Active Endeavour. “NATO and Israel have also finalised the modalities of Israel’s contribution to the NATO maritime Operation Active Endeavour.” In practice,! this operation in which Israel is participating coincides with the NATO naval build-up off the coast of Lebanon and Syria, which is presented to public opinion as a “peace-keeping” operation under a mandate emanating from the UN Security Council. This Israel-NATO framework agreement not only has a bearing on the military build-up in the Eastern Mediterranean, which in practice is directed against Syria and Lebanon, it is also related to the massive deployment of US naval forces in the Persian Gulf, oppositie Iran…
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Nancy Pelosi Gives the Neocons a Get Out of Jail Card
Kurt Nimmo
Once again, demonstrating there is essentially no difference between Democrats and Republicans, House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi has told CBS’s 60 Minutes that the war criminal cabal deserves to escape justice. “Wouldn’t they just love it if we came in and our record as Democrats coming forth after 12 years is to talk about George Bush and Dick Cheney? This election is about them. This is a referendum on them. Making them lame ducks is good enough! for me.” According to Pelosi, prosecuting Bush and Cheney for torturing children, killing 650,000 Iraqis, and destroying the United States economy is “off the table.” Of course, this makes sense, as Democrats will continue killing Iraqis and deficit spending the nation into bankruptcy…
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Israeli Crimes Against Humanity in Palestine Over the Past Three Months
Genevieve Cora Fraser
According to the Palestinian Centre for Human Rights, crimes committed by Israeli Occupation Forces (IOF) since 25 June 2006 include: 315 Palestinians, mostly civilians, including 62 children and 14 women, have been killed. At least 1072 Palestinian civilians, including 315 children and 45 women, have been wounded by IOF gunfire. At least 286 air-to-surface missiles and hundreds of artillery shells have been fired at the! Gaza Strip. The Palestinian Ministry of Interior, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the Ministry of National economy, the office of the Palestinian Prime Minister and a number of educational institutions have been destroyed as well as the Palestinian government compound in Nablus (…) These Crimes against Humanity represent USA tax dollars at work…
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SHAME “ISRAEL” – SHAME ON YOU
Israelis You are Sickening the World with your Crimes
Hayam Noir, PalestineFreeVoice
The new Israeli warlord – Ehud Olmert kills the Palestinians with one hand – the other hand makes a telephone call to the Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas to pass on his best wishes for Eid Al-Fitr feast! How disgustingly perverted and malignant! This mornings killing operation is a part of the Israelis ongoing daily aggression on the Gaza Strip that has continued for months now. The Is! raelis are waging a new battle against Gaza Strip – no doubt about it !…
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“What We Did Was Insane and Monstrous”
Israel’s Cluster Bomb War
SAREE MAKDISI
Of all the statistics to emerge from Israel’s recent war on Lebanon, the most shocking concerns the number of cluster bombs that Israel dropped on or fired into Lebanon. A cluster bomb is made up of a canister that opens and releases hundreds of individual bomblets, which are dispersed and explode over a wide area, showering it with molten metal and lethal fragments. About 40 percent of the bomblets dropped by Israel (many o! f which were American-made) did not explode in the air or on impact with the ground. They now detonate when someone disturbs them—a soldier, a farmer, a shepherd, a child attracted by the lure of a shiny metal object…
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Why Didn’t the Democrats Block Bush’s Rampages?
The End of Habeas Corpus and the Belligerent Despot-in-Chief
RALPH NADER
On October 17th, George W. Bush, signed into law a bill he bulldozed through Congress that, in Senator Patrick Leahy’s prophetic words, would suspend “the writ of habeas corpus, a core value in American law, in order to avoid judicial review that prevents government abuse.” This law, whose constitutionality is in doubt and will be reviewed by the Supreme Court in due time, puts so mu! ch arbitrary and secret unilateral power in the hands of the Presidency that the ghost of King George III must be wondering what all the fuss was about in 1776. If you want more evidence of how obsessively-compulsed George W. Bush is about his wars, their fabrications, budgets and cover-ups, consider his cue card statement on the legislation at the White House signing ceremony. “It is a rare occasion when a president can sign a bill he knows will save American lives,” he declared…
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Who is negotiating with the US?…… is there a second Ba’ath party?
Roads to Iraq
Nothing new in the “Times” article “US in secret truce talks with insurgency chiefs”, at the same when I already reported this two days before the “Times”, Iraqi newspaper Al-Zawraa reported a denial from a leader of “Resistance Groups” saying: The commander of the organization (resistance groups) called (Abu Omar), denies any dialogue with the Iraqi government or with the American ambassador in Iraq, He pointed out that there was! a dialogue with the Americans in the past. but they brook the contact and neglected the proposals made by the resistance. I think you noticed that this statement don’t deny the negotiations in Amman, but the most interesting is what Ba’ath party says in their updated version of political program published yesterday (…) Surprises continues, because Jordanian newspaper “addustour” wrote today about a “second” Ba’ath party, issues a statement criticizing Saddam…
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Baghdadi Gays Fear for Their Lives
Basim al-Shara’a (ICR No. 199, 20-Oct-06)
Faris Thamir carefully watches the street in his Al-Batawin neighbourhood, afraid the police or militia men might try to kill him. In Iraq, where religious radicals consider homosexuality a sin punishable by death, gays have good reason to worry about being “outed”. Thamir, 35, is wary of the extremist Islamic groups that prowl the streets of the capital – but neither does he trust the police who are supposedly there to protect him. Tha! mir and other gay men complain about frequent mistreatment by police, accusing them of blackmail, torture, sexual abuse and theft (…) For him, the Saddam era seems like a “golden” time because homosexuality was discreetly tolerated. “Now I am desperate because I expect either to be shot or beheaded at any moment,” he said (…) Outrage! reports of cases where members of a family have been killed for refusing to hand over a gay male relative to the militia…
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Rebels stage military parade in Ramadi
Azzaman
Iraqi rebels have conducted a military parade in the city of Ramadi, west of Baghdad, to mark the setting up of what they call ‘the Islamic Emirate’ of Iraq. The parade was organized by Majlis Shora al-Mujahideen, the Mujahideen Shora Council, in which thousands of fighters and hundreds of vehicles took part. The parade continued for two consecutive days last week (Thursday and Friday), residents said. The rebels brandished their weapons which included rocket launche! rs other heavy weapons as well as light arms. Clad in black uniforms, they raised placards vowing to continue fighting U.S. occupiers and the current Iraqi government led by a Shiite and Kurdish coalition. Eyewitness said the staging of the parade in the heart of Ramadi signaled that the rebels have had the upper hand in recent fighting in Iraq. Other major towns west of Baghdad are also said to be in rebel hands…
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CAMP FALCON: WHAT REALLY HAPPENED?
Sarah Meyer, INDEX RESEARCH
Iraqis and Americans must read the information below. They must watch the two videos. And then they, and people over the world, must ask the U.S. government for a full and open explanation of what happened at Camp Falcon, Baghdad, on the 10th of October 2006…
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Iraqi Insurgent Leader: Premier’s Initiative Rejected, Dialogue With US Halted
Ma’ad Fayad, Asharq Al-Awsat Exclusive
A leader of an armed Iraqi group has denied the existence of any dialogue with the current Iraqi Government or US Ambassador in Iraq Zalmay Khalilzad. The armed leader, who goes by the name Abu-Umar, stated that “resistance factions” have rejected the national reconciliation initiative proposed by Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki, “because it is not a comprehensive plan, and lacks a lot of the object! ives for which thousands of Iraqis were martyred.” Regarding dialogue with US Ambassador Khalilzad, which began seven months ago, the field commander told Asharq Al-Awsat in a phone call from an undisclosed location in Iraq, “Yes, we had a dialogue with the Americans, but they cut short these talks although our approach was supported on the political, religious, and popular levels”…
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Shiite militiamen re-emerge in troubled southern city in Iraq
Associated Press
Shiite militiamen loyal to a fiery anti-American Shiite cleric re-emerged in the troubled southern city of Amarah on Monday, dragging four policemen aligned with a rival Shiite militia from their homes and killing them. Witnesses said the Iraqi army, camped on the edge of the city, was doing nothing to stop the resurgence of Shiite-on-Shiite violence. Iraq’s leaders sent a force of about 500 soldiers to the city late last week after Mu! qtada al-Sadr’s Mahdi Army militiamen stormed the city and attacked police stations, manned primarily by loyalists of the rival Badr Brigades, also a Shiite militia…
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11 US troops killed in Iraq
Ammar Karim , Middle East Online
Five more US soldiers have been killed in attacks in Baghdad and a sixth in western Iraq, the military said Monday, as October remains on course to be the worst month for American deaths since 2004. The five were killed Sunday, three in gun attacks and the other two by roadside booby-traps, the US military said in a series of statements. It said a sixth soldier was killed Saturday in western Iraq, following an earlier announcement of the deaths of five ! marines and a soldier the same day, all but one of them in the west of the country. The deaths followed the killings of five more soldiers and marines on Saturday elsewhere around Iraq and brought to 86 the number of US troops killed in the first three weeks of October…
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The Exodus: 1.6m Iraqis have fled their country since the war
Patrick Cockburn
Iraq is in flight. Everywhere inside and outside the country, Iraqis who once lived in their own houses cower for safety six or seven to a room in hovels. Many go after they have been threatened. Often they leave after receiving an envelope with a bullet inside and a scrawled note telling them to get out immediately. Others flee after a relative has been killed, believing they will be next. Out of the population of 26 million, 1.6 mill! ion Iraqis have fled the country and a further 1.5 million are displaced within Iraq, according to the UN High Commissioner for Refugees. In Jordan alone there are 500,000 Iraqi refugees and a further 450,000 in Syria. In Syria alone they are arriving at the rate of 40,000 a month…
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In Balad, Age-Old Ties Were ‘Destroyed in a Second’
Sectarian Battles Drive Out Sunnis, Create State of Siege
Ellen Knickmeyer, Washington Post Foreign Service
At midweek, Shiite Interior Ministry commandos and their Shiite militia allies cruised the four-lane hardtop outside the besieged city of Balad, trying to stave off retaliation for a deadly four-day rampage in which they had all but emptied Balad of Sunnis (…) And all that was left holding Balad, and Iraq, together — the desire for peace and ! normality still held by the great majority of Iraqis, and the generations of intermarriage and neighborliness between ordinary Shiite and Sunni Muslims — was ripping apart. “The people of Balad should not kill the Sunnis who are among them,” said one slightly built Shiite man, fleeing his home on the outskirts of Balad. He and 13 women and children of his family were crammed into a single, battered Toyota sedan, stranded by a flat tire near the highway turnoff to the city. “Our relations are not of months or years. It’s since the beginning of time,” he said. “This relationship has been destroyed in a second.”
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GI Special 4J23: Seven More Gone – October 23, 2006
Thomas F. Barton
– 2 Baghdad Soldiers Killed By Small-Arms Fire
– Another Baghdad Soldier Killed By Small-Arms Fire
– One Soldier Killed, Three Wounded In Salah Ad Din
– Marine Killed In Al Anbar Province
– Baghdad Soldier Killed By IED
– Another Baghdad Soldier Killed By IED
– Improvised Bomb Kills Marine From Shreveport
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GI Special 4J22: Fiasco – October 22, 2006
Thomas F. Barton
Fiasco: “The Iraqis Can’t Make It With The Teams We Have Now” “They Will Fall Flat On Their Face”
“By the time the training was finished, soldiers were demoralized, motivation was nonexistent and the team motto came from the Jo Dee Messina lyric, ‘my give-a-damn’s busted.’”
“In my 28 years of military service I have never seen such an appalling approach to training,” he wrote. “Nowhere else in the Army system would this have been acceptable.” His soldiers received only a few hours of instruction in Arabic language, Iraqi culture and advising foreign forces, says Col. Demas, who had previously served in Special Forces units.
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