We’re in the midst of the most radical privatization agenda in our nation’s history….
iraq update
…Well, right now in Iraq, there are 180,000 contractors operating alongside 170,000 US troops. So it’s effectively a doubling or more than doubling of the occupation force. What this does is it subverts the citizenry in the United States. You no longer have to have a draft. You don’t have to depend on your own citizens to fight your wars. You can simply hire up the poor of the world to work for American and British companies occupying another country….well, General Petraeus himself has been guarded by private contractors in Iraq. I mean, what message did that send when the general who’s overseeing the surge in Iraq is guarded at times not by the US military, but by private forces….Erik Prince likes to describe Blackwater as the sort of Federal Express of the national security apparatus….But the fact is, the US military is the junior partner in the coalition that’s occupying Iraq to these private companies. There are over 170 mercenary companies like Blackwater operating in Iraq right now…

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One Thousand, Two Hundred And Seventy-Six People Per Week
Lawrence of Cyberia
…The next time Israeli apologists tell you that the Wall is a security measure that keeps suicide bombers out of Israel, just remember the number 1,276. One thousand, two hundred and seventy six is – at a minimum – the average number of permit-less Palestinians who bypass the Wall on a weekly basis to work in Israel. They are asking you to believe that the destitution Israel’s West Bank land grab inflicts on some of the poorest people on earth is justified because a wall which is breached at least 1,276 times a week by undocumented workers is nevertheless impermeable to suicide bombers. That’s what they’re asking you to believe. That’s how stupid they think you are….

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Treachery for treatment
Saleh Al-Naami ,Al-Ahram Weekly
His calm demeanour belies the personal tragedy he is living. Journalist Bassam Al-Wahidi, 30, is on the verge of giving in to perpetual darkness. This will happen if he doesn’t have an operation to reposition his retina, an operation that he was supposed to have had last month in a Palestinian hospital in Jerusalem. Although Al-Wahidi, a news presenter on the Voice of the Workers radio station in Gaza, had completed all the necessary administrative procedures required of him to travel to Jerusalem, officers in the Israeli domestic intelligence agency, Shin Bet, at the Erez Crossing on the northern border between the Gaza Strip and Israel, won’t allow him to cross until he agrees to become an Israeli agent and provide information on the activities, leaders and members of Palestinian resistance movements active in Gaza (…) The sadistic coercion that Palestinians with chronic illnesses have been subjected to by Shin Bet has become the talk of the street in Gaza. The story typically begins when a Palestinian patient requests a permit from the Israeli- Palestinian Civil Liaisons Department to be allowed to travel from Gaza to the West Bank or Israel for an operation….

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Antiwar Radio: Scott Horton Interviews Chris Hedges
Antiwar.com
Chris Hedges, veteran war reporter and author of War Is a Force that Gives Us Meaning and many other books, discusses the convergence of the Egyptian and American national security states as their puppet military dictatorship kidnaps and tortures people at the best of the U.S. government, the incompatibility of the rule of law and a republican form of government with empire and oligarchy, the “ghost prisons” and “ghost detainees,” held by the U.S. government around the world, the tortured (and false) testimony of Ibn-al Shaykh al-Libi which was used by Colin Powell in his UN speech to justify aggressive war against Iraq, how Mamdah Habib was threatened with rape by an animal, the perhaps thousands of victims of these crimes, his article about American war crimes in Iraq (soon to become a book), the Egyptian war against domestic dissidents, the long term consequences of abandoning law and the American population’s preference for Amusing Ourselves to Death…

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Are the Kurds going to use the refugees trick again?
Roads to Iraq
…In this operation of the Turkish army against the terrorists, we expect that the Kurds will use their old plot to generate sympathy of the international public opinion, and that armed Kurdish militias forcing the civilian population, especially women and children to leave their home areas and live in the open spaces and bringing news agencies and television stations to be photographed and offering them to the world as the victims of the Turkish army. Kurds have deceived the world earlier with this trick, deported whole families in Halabja and the Anfal and forced them at gunpoint on the battlefield, exposed to the fires of the Iraqi army, and then they photographed the victims. The Kurds used this trick in 1991, when civilians displaced from their homes and left in the open making the international community decides to establish a no-fly-zone to protect them….

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Money gone, Iraqi refugees reluctantly head back to uncertain future
Associated Press
Their money gone, Iman Faleh and her family packed their belongings for Baghdad — a journey they said was like a trip to “death row.” The religiously mixed family — Iman is a Sunni but the others are Shiites — fled their home in a mostly Shiite part of east Baghdad in July and took refuge in Syria, joining an estimated 1.5 million other Iraqis here. But in early fall, they became part of a growing wave of Iraqis leaving Syria for home — not because they are confident of Iraq’s future, but because they ran out of money. Others are returning because Syria has made it more difficult to stay — most Iraqis cannot work legally in Syria and survive on savings or handouts from relatives. “Going back to Baghdad means going to ‘death row,’” said Iman’s 27-year-old son Zaid as he hauled luggage from the family’s $1,200-a-month apartment in Damascus. “But we have no money left that could allow us to go on living here.”….

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The Turkish Explosion, 14 Military Bases in Iraq and Lebanon
karlmarxwasright
…Something about which I’ve been writing for months and months and years on my blog. Curious, isn’t it, when another strong, independent state, such as Turkey, threatens to use it’s military in its own self-interests, suddenly, it becomes a pariah amongst those who routinely use their militaries provocatively and aggressively. In addition, Syria has militarily allied itself with Turkey….

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Top army officer reprimanded for using Palestinian Civilians as Human Shields in Nablus
Saed Bannoura – IMEMC
Israeli army Chief Of Staff, Gabi Ashkenazi, decided on Thursday to reprimand Israel Army brigadier general Yair Golan, for allowing soldiers under his command to use Palestinian civilians as human shields during in Israeli military invasion into the northern West Bank city of Nablus. The decision came following an investigation conducted by the Israeli Army Criminal Investigation Unit into the conducts of the soldiers during an invasion into Nablus. Israeli online daily, Haaretz, reported that “Golan was the most senior officer to be questioned in the probe, which the army launched last March”….

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Israel/Palestine Question – Book Review
Jim Miles, Special to PalestineChronicle.com
Ilan Pappe’s highly revised second edition of The Israel/Palestine Question offers the reader a very instructive read on changing historical perspectives about Israel/Palestine within one over-riding theme – land tenure and population control. Apart from two chapters dealing with women’s issues within Palestinian culture, this main theme – as with most recent revisionist histories of the region – explores the various permutations on the methods and ideas on how to control the land and the indigenous population, its settlement patterns, the control of resources and people, and the expulsion or marginalization of the Palestinian population within Israel. In consideration of the upcoming ‘conference’ or ‘peace talks’ to be arranged by the Americans, and Condaleeza Rice’s ignorant warnings to the Israelis about not seizing land in East Jerusalem, this volume should be considered “required reading” for all American participants. One must ask Ms Rice, “What about the other millions of dunums of land already seized?” The past continues on….

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US Planning to Build 14 Bases in Iraq: Finnish MP
Arab News
The United States is planning to stay in Iraq by building as many as 14 “permanent” bases, regardless of whether orders come from current or future US administrations to bring US troops back home. “As far I am informed, they are planning to set up permanent bases. Not only one, two, three, four, but maybe 14,” Finnish MP Jaakko Laakso told a group of Saudi journalists, which included Arab News, who visited the Finnish Parliament recently in Helsinki. “It means there will be no withdrawal on a permanent basis.” The MP, who is a member of the Left Alliance, pointed out that the bases were not the bases the US government plans to build between the Iraq and Syria borders, but were permanent bases located in the heartland of the country. “There is no difference between Republicans and Democrats regarding these permanent bases,” Laakso added….

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Why I know weapons expert Dr David Kelly was murdered, by the MP who spent a year investigating his death
NORMAN BAKER, Daily Mail
….But as Blair was lapping up the grateful plaudits from the U.S. Congress on July 17, 2003, the man who had done more than almost any other individual on earth to contain the threat from WMD lay dead in the woods at Harrowdown Hill in Oxfordshire. For Dr David Kelly, the UK’s leading weapons inspector, there was to be no adulation, no medal, no standing ovation. His life ended in the cold, lonely wood where he was found the next morning, his left wrist cut open, and three nearly-empty blister packs of painkillers in his jacket pocket. His death was, of course, sensational front-page news. Dr Kelly, unknown to almost everybody at the beginning of that July, had in recent days barely been absent from media headlines. Much to his chagrin he had been thrust into the harsh glare of publicity, accused of being the mole who expressed to the BBC deep concerns about the Government’s “sexing up” of its dossier on weapons of mass destruction….

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Do We Already Have Our Pentagon Papers?
Tom Engelhardt
They can’t help themselves. They want to confess. How else to explain the torture memorandums that continue to flow out of the inner sancta of this administration, the most recent of which were evidently leaked to the New York Times. Those two, from the Alberto Gonzales Justice Department, were written in 2005 and recommitted the administration to the torture techniques it had been pushing for years. As the Times noted, the first of those memorandums, from February of that year, was “an expansive endorsement of the harshest interrogation techniques ever used by the Central Intelligence Agency.” The second “secret opinion” was issued as Congress moved to outlaw “cruel, inhuman, and degrading” treatment (not that such acts weren’t already against U.S. and international law). It brazenly “declared that none of the C.I.A. interrogation methods violated that standard”; and, the Times assured us, “the 2005 Justice Department opinions remain in effect, and their legal conclusions have been confirmed by several more recent memorandums.” ….

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War News for Friday, October 19, 2007
Iraq today
MNF-Iraq is reporting the death of a Task Force Lightning soldier in an explosion in Salah ad Din Province on Wednesday, October 17th. Three other soldiers were injured in the attack. The DoD is announcing the death of Spc. Micheal D. Brown, 20, of Williamsburg, Kansas, who died Tuesday, October 16th in Landstuhl Regional Medical Center, in Germany, of a non-combat related illness after being transported from Tikrit, Iraq on Oct.15. He was an aviation operations specialist assigned to the 1st Battalion, 1st Aviation Regiment, 1st Combat Aviation Brigade, 1st Infantry Division, Fort Riley, Kansas….

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Blackwater Wanted Iraqi Military Planes
RICHARD LARDNER
Blackwater USA tried to take at least two Iraqi military aircraft out of Iraq two years ago and refused to give the planes back when Iraqi officials sought to reclaim them, according to a congressional committee investigating the private security contractor. Rep. Henry Waxman, D-Calif., chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, wants the company to provide all documents related to the attempted shipment and to explain where the aircraft are now….

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Iraq Kurdish leader vows to fight strike
YAHYA BARZANJI, Associated Press Writer
The most senior leader in Iraq’s Kurdish region appeared to raise the stakes in the standoff over northern Iraq on Friday, warning Turkey that the region would defend itself against any cross-border military strike on rebel bases. The tough line taken by the Kurdish region’s president, Massoud Barzani, further stoked worries that a Turkish incursion could ignite a wider cycle of conflict and unrest in one of the few stable corners of Iraq. Barzani said urgent talks were needed on all sides. But Turkey has flatly declared it is out of patience with escalating attacks by separatist guerrillas who use hideouts in northern Iraq….

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Iraqi Violence Moves South
Darrin Mortenson
…Clashes between Shi’a factions have made Diwaniyah a recent flashpoint in Iraq even as other areas, most notably cities in Anbar Province, have calmed down. The local government and security forces of Diwaniyah are largely controlled by the Supreme Islamic Iraqi Council (SIIC) and its armed wing, the Badr Corps, who are challenged almost daily in the streets by members of the rival Jaish al Mahdi, the militia loyal to cleric Moqtada al Sadr. (The SIIC was formerly known as the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq, with the initials SCIRI.) While both groups are engaged in a raw and bloody fight for dominance in the region, they are also pitted against each other by basic political positions that are key to the Shi’ite majority in search of a national identity and place in Iraq’s future (…) Although the two groups recently pledged to work together in an accord signed by Sadr and SIIC leader Abdul Aziz al Hakim two weeks ago in Iran, the power grab plays out daily on the streets of southern cities such as Diwaniyah. “What’s happening in this town is like a political duel over who’s going to govern,” said Ali al Mayali, a Sadrist member of the Iraqi Parliament. “It’s a fight to control the street.”…

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Head of Reconstruction Teams in Iraq Reports Little Progress Throughout Country
JAMES GLANZ , NYTimes
Attempts by American-led reconstruction teams to forge political reconciliation, foster economic growth and build an effective police force and court system in Iraq have failed to show significant progress in nearly every one of the nation’s provincial regions and in the capital, a federal oversight agency reported on Thursday. The report, by the Office of the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction, comes as the United States tries to take advantage of a drop in overall violence to create a functioning government here….

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Why We Don’t Require The Partition of USA …?
Mr. Zahra, Association of Muslim Scholars in Iraq (AMSI)
A British woman author has submitted the following suggestion to the Arabs and said: why you don’t vote for requesting the partition of United States of America? Of course the author submits this suggestion on the context of the speech about the decision taken by the American Senates regarding partition of Iraq. She adds saying that “Why the Arabs, for instance, don’t demand returning California to Mexico, Hawaii to the habitants of the Islands and Alaska to the Eskimos? Why they don’t require some states for Afro-Americans.. Or it is well enough to give the Muslims their independence in some states… and so on. The idea here is obvious, if the American Senates can give to themselves the right of determining the fate of an Arab country and decided to divide it, then why the Arab MP’s does not have the right to vote and take a decision of partition of United States? Of course the answer for those racists and imperialists in the American Senate or other American political departments is clear….

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The Casualties of Iraq
Conn Hallinan, Foreign Policy In Focus
…In 1258 the Mongol generals Hulagu and Guo Kan besieged and took the city of Baghdad. They murdered its inhabitants, burned its libraries, and ravished its lands. The Bush administration has done the same, but hidden it behind a smoke screen of lies and voodoo statistics. For the average Iraqi, there is little difference between the Mongols and the United States. Both have laid waste to their country….

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PA health ministry warns of a health catastrophe in Gaza if blockade persists
Palestinian Information Center
The PA health ministry has called on international humanitarian organizations, including UN organizations, the ICRC, and the EU parliament to pressure the Israeli occupation government into opening crossings to the Gaza Strip to avoid possible health catastrophe if the closure persists. The Israeli occupation government had imposed hermitic closure on Gaza Strip since June of this year after Hamas Movement took control of the tiny Strip. The IOA sealed off all crossings, including the vital Rafah and Beit Hanon (Erez) terminals, and limited goods and supplies coming into the Strip to minimal levels since then….

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Palestinians’ lives invisible to Israelis
EDWARD MAST
On a visit to Tel Aviv last month, I asked some Israeli friends what people in Israel were saying about the Palestinian situation. Not much, they told me. Israelis are more concerned about the corruption charges against Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, coming on the heels of corruption charges against previous governments. Palestinians and their issues, my friends told me, are becoming more and more invisible to the Israeli people. Palestinian lives are kept invisible in David Brumer’s Oct. 10 guest column, “Despite concerns, Israel a vibrant country.” Also invisible are Israel’s military occupation and the ongoing takeover of Palestinian land. If Brumer had traveled to the other side of the wall, as I did, he could have witnessed the many ways that the Israeli occupation crushes people with poverty, violence and injustice….

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Palestinians live as “ghosts” in Gaza
Nidal al-Mughrabi, Reuters
Officially, Mahmoud Jnaid does not exist. The 25-year-old Palestinian almost made that a reality earlier this month when he doused himself with petrol and tried to set himself alight. Jnaid is one of about 54,000 displaced Palestinians who returned to Gaza and the West Bank from abroad after an interim peace accord in 1993, but still have no identity cards because Israel refuses to approve them. Following years of silence, they recently started holding weekly protests in Hamas-run Gaza to demand the documents, which they need to travel as well as for daily basics like opening a bank account or getting a driving licence. “I am Mr Nobody,” said Jnaid, who, at one of the protests, doused himself in petrol and tried to set himself alight before onlookers overpowered him….

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Why Baghdad Can’t Please Turks or Kurds
By Fatih Abdulsalam, Azzaman – Translated By James Jacobson and Nicolas Dagher
…This government has no idea how to deal with neighboring countries in a professional and diplomatic manner because depending on their own interests, different Iraqi factions always try to establish their own bilateral relations. The root of the problem is that the different regional groups partake in their own relations with neighboring countries without the approval of the central government, as the Constitution requires. Having a central government direct the nation’s foreign relations could be an advantage, but unfortunately the central government today is the object of widespread public scorn….

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Kurds demand U.S. defense
Sharon Behn, Washington Times
Kurdish leaders said yesterday the United States is obliged by a U.N. resolution to defend them in the event that Turkish forces invade northern Iraq in pursuit of members of a Kurdish rebel movement. They also said they will continue to sign oil contracts with international companies while awaiting passage of an Iraqi oil law, despite objections from Baghdad and the State Department. “The U.S. forces are mandated by the United Nations to protect Iraq’s sovereignty and defend Iraq’s people,” said Qubad Talabani, the Kurdistan Regional Government’s representative in Washington…

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US intelligence does not show Syrian nuclear weapons program, officials say
Larisa Alexandrovna, RAW STORY
Allegations that a Syrian envoy admitted during a United Nations meeting Oct. 17 that an Israeli air strike hit a nuclear facility in September are inaccurate and have raised the ire of some in the US intelligence community, who see the Vice President’s hand as allegedly being behind the disinformation…

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Senate and Neocons Agree to Carve Up Bill of Rights
Kurt Nimmo
It’s now official, the entire Senate is criminally complicit in undermining the Fourth Amendment. “Senate Democrats and Republicans reached agreement with the Bush administration yesterday on the terms of new legislation to control the federal government’s domestic surveillance program, which includes a highly controversial grant of legal immunity to telecommunications companies that have assisted the program, according to congressional sources,” reports the CIA’s favorite newspaper, the Washington Post….

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Iraqi Resistance Report for events of Friday, 19 October 2007
Translated and/or ompiled by Muhammad Abu Nasr, member, editorial board, the Free Arab Voice. www.freearabvoice.org
In a dispatch posted at 11pm Baghdad time Friday night, the Aswat al-’Iraq news agency, which was set up by Reuters and the U.N. Development Agency, reported that the US had admitted the deaths of three more American troops in occupied Baghdad. Aswat al-’Iraq reported one US statement as acknowledging that an Iraqi Resistance bomb had exploded by a US military unit in southern Baghdad on Thursday and then fighters opened fire on the Americans with small arms, in an engagement that left one US soldier dead and a second one wounded. In a separate announcement Friday, the US military said that an American Special Forces soldier had died of an affliction that he had contracted after his evacuation from Iraq to Germany…

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Blackwater and Haditha
A Tale of Two Atrocities
RAHUL MAHAJAN
The recent public outrage over the conduct of Blackwater Security mercenaries in Iraq, after an unprovoked massacre of at least 17 Iraqi civilians in western Baghdad has been heartening; unfortunately, there has been virtually no attention a far more important concurrent development — the ongoing collapse of the military prosecution in the Haditha massacre. Paul Bremer’s decision at the eleventh hour before his departure in June 2004 to set all private contractors in Iraq above the law (they are not subject to Iraqi law, U.S. military law, or U.S. civilian law) stands out as one of the more cynical decisions of a war that has redefined cynicism, and attention to that fact is a positive development. At the same time, however, all the attention is being focused on an extremely minor issue. The U.S. military has possibly killed more civilians in a single incident than all the mercenary companies operating in Iraq in the last several years….

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All the lies that fit
Xymphora
The New York Times, still dedicated to the relentless promotion of Zionist lies exemplified by their star writer Judy Miller, continues the tradition (emphasis in red; I’m shocked that Michael Gordon didn’t write this!): “Israel’s air attack on Syria last month was directed against a site that Israeli and American intelligence analysts judged was a partly constructed nuclear reactor, apparently modeled on one North Korea has used to create its stockpile of nuclear weapons fuel, according to American and foreign officials with access to the intelligence reports. The description of the target addresses one of the central mysteries surrounding the Sept. 6 attack, and suggests that Israel carried out the raid to demonstrate its determination to snuff out even a nascent nuclear project in a neighboring state…

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Diego Garcia and the Mukasey Nomination
Scott Horton, Harpers
…So let’s be clear about what that question is: Has the CIA been given the go ahead to use torture and torture-lite techniques in its black sites overseas? The answer which emerges from everything we’ve seen is: Yes. The techniques in question include waterboarding, long-time standing, hypothermia, sleep deprivation in excess of two days, the use of dogs to terrify detainees, sexual humiliation techniques, and psychotropic drugs. Each of these techniques is very clearly illegal and their use is punishable as a crime…

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The leader of the Islamic army in Iraq
A call to the honorable nation
Islamic Army in Iraq (IAI)
…Allah put some people on the points of touch with the enemies- which the nation suffers from- like what happened in Iraq when the Mujahideen activated the soul of Jihad and renewed the path of it because it is the right way to defend the crusaders, to get the victory and honour back to the nation and make it suitable to regain the old situation of the nation and rebuild what was destroyed of its civilization. The blessed steps of the Islamic activity groups on this way are coming in sequence; the latest step was declaring the political council of the Iraqi resistance which contents of Jihad and Reform Front with its four contents: The Islamic army in Iraq, Al-Mujahideen Army, Ansarusunnah (Religion committee), and Al-Fatiheen Army, beside the Islamic Front of the Iraqi Resistance (Jami) and Resistane Islamic group (Hamas Al-Iraq)….

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Iraqi senior officials said to have forged degrees
Nidhal al-Laithi, Azzaman
Many parliamentarians, deputy ministers, governors and other senior officials have submitted forged certificates in order to keep their positions and earn higher salaries and additional bonuses. Cultural attaches in foreign countries particularly in Europe are reported to be under increasing pressure from these officials to certify university degrees despite lack of evidence that holders have attended classes in them. The disclosure that senior Iraqi officials have obtained their posts after submitting fake degrees is yet another blow the government and the post-U.S. invasion Iraq….

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AIDING THE ENEMY (UPDATED)
Malcom Lagauche
…Steele was found guilty on October 19, 2007 and sentenced to two years in prison. The charges of “aiding the enemy” were dropped. He was convicted because of possession of confidential material and of having a sexual relationship with a female Iraqi translator. Here’s the irony of his conviction for having a relationship with an Iraqi. Their affair was a consenting one between two adults. Other U.S. military personnel have been found not guilty after raping Iraqi women and kids. At least Steele did not rape, murder and then burn his translator. If he did, maybe he would not have received prison time….

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Iraqis who fled homes in fear face new terror as Turkey targets PKK rebels
Michael Howard, The Guardian
When Youssef Toma and his family fled their home in Baghdad’s perilous Dora neighbourhood and found refuge in the peaks and valleys of Kurdistan, they assumed their fear had been left behind with their furniture. With the help of local authorities, Mr Toma, a former manager of an insurance company, had spent the last year building a new house, and life, in Anishky, a village nestling at the foot of the Matin mountains in the bucolic Sabna valley, 13 miles from the Turkish border. Mr Toma, a deacon in the Assyrian church, and his family soon became active members of the neighbourhood congregation. He took special pride in developing his garden. Standing by a healthy crop of tomatoes this week, he gestured with his trowel at the perimeter walls of a palace Saddam Hussein built for his wife Sajida in the late 70s – a reminder, he said, that the beauty of the region was not just prized by locals. Last weekend, however, Mr Toma’s rural idyll was brutally disrupted….

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IRAQ: Assassination of Sheikh Shakes US Claims
Ali al-Fadhily*
Resistance to occupation seems to have risen after the assassination last month of Abdul Sattar Abu Risha, head of the al-Bu Risha tribe. Abu Risha had begun to cooperate actively with U.S. forces. Abu Risha was killed Sep. 13 when a bomb exploded outside his house in the restive al-Anbar province to the west of Baghdad. His tribe is a branch of the powerful al-Dulaim tribe in al-Anbar. The Bush administration used Abu Risha to send messages to many parties and groups in Iraq. The week before Abu Risha was killed, U.S. President George W. Bush met with him in Iraq, and claimed that al-Anbar province now suggested “what the future of Iraq can look like.”….

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West won’t win Afghan war: former UN envoy
Darren Ennis
International forces are unlikely to win their battle against the Taliban in Afghanistan, risking a regional conflict that could match the magnitude of previous world wars, a former top UN envoy said on Wednesday. Lord Paddy Ashdown — former United Nations high representative and European Union special representative for Bosnia and Herzegovina — said failure by the NATO-led force would have far wider repercussions than any losses in Iraq. He called for the appointment of a high-level coordinator to lead the foreign mission in Afghanistan. “I think we are losing in Afghanistan now, we have lost I think and success is now unlikely,” he said in an interview….

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IRAQ: Turkish offensive would lead to humanitarian crisis, ICRC warns
IRIN News
A humanitarian crisis will accompany any large-scale Turkish military operations aimed at pursuing Turkish-Kurdish rebels in northern Iraq, the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) warned on 17 October. “Any military conflict in the region will bring about a humanitarian crisis as civilians will be killed or displaced due to shelling and troop incursions,” said northern Iraq ICRC spokesperson Flamerz Mohammed. “So far the Turkish artillery shells… over the past few days only concentrated on abandoned mountains and did not reach border villages, but we are observing and assessing the situation on the borders,” Mohammed said….

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