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uruknet.info information from occupied iraq
12 December 2007

 

12/12/07

Freedom lost
Mark Lattimer, The Guardian
…under Saddam, women in Iraq – including in semi-autonomous Kurdistan – were widely recognised as among the most liberated in the Middle East. They held important positions in business, education and the public sector, and their rights were protected by a statutory family law that was the envy of women’s activists in neighbouring countries. But since the 2003 invasion, advances that took 50 years to establish are crumbling away. In much of the country, women can only now move around with a male escort. Rape is committed habitually by all the main armed groups, including those linked to the government. Women are being murdered throughout Iraq in unprecedented numbers. In October the UN Assistance Mission in Iraq (Unami) expressed serious concern over the rising incidence of so-called honour crimes in Iraqi Kurdistan, confirming that 255 women had been killed in just the first six months of 2007, three-quarters of them by burning….

Read the full article / Leggi l’articolo completo: www.uruknet.de/?p=39147

Torture, Destruction of Evidence, Obstruction of Justice—Just a Typical Day in the Bush Administration
Democracy Cell Project
Let’s be frank here. The recent discovery of documents related to the torture videotapes that were destoyed is old news, not new. The fact is that since 2001, our government has tortured, lied about the torture, and destroyed court ordered evidence and documents of the torture. In other words, they’ve done everything they can to cover their own asses. Ask Jesselyn Radack. If you don’t know who Jesselyn Radack is, rest assured that Bush, Cheney, Ashcroft, Gonzalez, Rumsfeld, De Pue, Cherthoff and other high ranking officials do. Jesselyn Radack was the ethics advisor at the Department of Justice in 2001 at the onset of America’s emerging torture policies. She was also one of the first to witness how far this administration would go to destroy evidence of their torture and to attack anyone who revealed them to the public. Take a short trip down memory lane. Most of us surely remember the famous picture of John Walker Lindh—naked, blindfolded, strapped and bound to a board with the word “SHITHEAD” sprawled across the duct-tape on his forhead, as he was lifted out of the freezing cold, unlit shipping container, where he’d been bound for days. He suffered dehydration, hypothermia, and frostbite. Parts of his torture had even been caught on videotape….

Read the full article / Leggi l’articolo completo: www.uruknet.de/?p=39165

Guantanamo staff trashing web sites and spreading propoganda
Stephen Soldz
The Wikileaks group have struck again. Today they revealed that Guantanamo staff have been engaged in a campaign of propaganda, revising the web encyclopedia Wikipedia entries, including removing detainee IDs from Wikipedia, and posting pro-Guantanamo propaganda around the web. He, or they, have posted repeated encouragement for readers of various web sites to go the the “JTF GTMO” web site, Wikileaks reports….

Read the full article / Leggi l’articolo completo: www.uruknet.de/?p=39157

Another Cancer Patient Dies Due to Israeli Gaza Siege
Medicine, Water and Fuel Shortages
Mohammed Omer, BBSNews
…If medicine and water are in shortage, can there be any hope that diseases will not run rife for Gazans? Many people in Gaza feel that the real aim, masked behind Israel’s mantra of ‘preventing the firing of home-made rockets,’ is to impose an even greater than before “collective punishment,” causing Palestinians in the Gaza Strip deprived of virtually every basic need to starve and fade away. Two bald children lie waiting for medical treatment in Nasser Children’s hospital in Gaza City. But it is clear there will be no medication for them: both have cancer and need chemotherapy treatments in hospitals outside of Gaza. They lie, sharing one bed, their options either to live or to die. It is painfully certain they will not receive the medication they need. Their mother sits beside them, weeping, and says: “The world turns blind eyes on our suffering, as even if we do not exist here in Gaza. I want to tell the world, we are here, we are dying under this Israeli occupation. But although we will die, we will not concede our rights and our identity.” …

Read the full article / Leggi l’articolo completo: www.uruknet.de/?p=39148

The Witnessing Of American Torture
Andrew Sullivan
The Brian Ross interview with former CIA interrogator, John Kiriakou, who tortured Abu Zubaydah, is well worth reading in full. You can download the transcript here and here. Among the things I learned: – According to Kiriakou, everything was very closely monitored and approved up the chain of command. The president absolutely knew and approved of the waterboarding. President Bush personally authorized the torture of a prisoner, via the Deputy Director for Operations of the CIA…

Read the full article / Leggi l’articolo completo: www.uruknet.de/?p=39160

Israeli blockade leads to humanitarian disaster
Gaza runs out of cement to build graves
AlArabiya.net
Palestinian officials warned of a humanitarian and environmental disaster in Gaza, due to a shortage of cement to build graves in which to bury the dead. “The situation in Gaza is tragic,” said Deputy Minister Abdullah Jarboa of the Palestinian Ministry of Endowments and Religious Affairs, according to Quds Press. “The sick are not allowed to seek treatment outside, medicines are not allowed in, and there is no cement to build graves,” Jarboa said…

Read the full article / Leggi l’articolo completo: www.uruknet.de/?p=39145

Justifying murder
Eli Stephens, Left I on the News
It happens so easily you hardly notice it happening. I know I don’t. You read an article like this: About 30 Israeli tanks and armored vehicles pushed into the Hamas-run Gaza Strip on Tuesday, sparking clashes with Palestinians in which five militants were killed, medics and militant groups said. and you think, “well, it was just “militants” that were killed, I guess they deserved it, being “militants” after all (…) In the old days, Israel used to try to justify such actions on the grounds that someone was “on the way to fire a missile.” Now they don’t bother. Just the fact that they might have been thinking about it, or might know someone who was thinking about it, or they might think about it in the future, is enough….

Read the full article / Leggi l’articolo completo: www.uruknet.de/?p=39166

The Annapolis Conference: Dead Men walking
John Chuckman
The Annapolis Conference was, like so many political and diplomatic events of our time, highly choreographed, finely stage-managed, and heavily marketed. Yet, as soon as it was over, it was apparent little had happened, much as when a child opens a much-advertised, expensive plastic toy on Christmas, a brief, glitzy, big-eyed moment followed quickly by tedium. You might compare it to a George Bush press conference or any American presidential debate. Indeed, such choreographed non-events make up a fair portion of what Americans see on their evening news, a phenomenon we might call virtual or synthetic news….

Read the full article / Leggi l’articolo completo: www.uruknet.de/?p=39158

A short inner debate on…”Fun”.
Layla Anwar, An Arab Woman Blues
I am still debating within myself, as to whether I should sit and continue…or go out and have some FUN. A bunch of friends have asked me to join them to listen to that crappy American guitar player again. The word FUN irritates a lot of you, I know. The Americans are into sick fun and the Fundies into the same sick fun. Both lead very sad lives..their sense of fun is so Abu Ghraib – Abeer like, and the sectarian shits, so Basrah, Baghdad…style. So caught between these two extremes, am still debating…within….

Read the full article / Leggi l’articolo completo: www.uruknet.de/?p=39156

Israeli Terrorism Deserves Punishment, Too
Joharah Baker for MIFTAH
The horrific bombings in Algiers yesterday in which as many as 60 people were killed drives home a terrible point for all of us. Such acts of terrorism where innocent people – in this case United Nations employees, Algerian government workers and students – are killed in a senseless act of violence – must unexceptionally be condemned, their perpetrators immediately brought to justice. The Algeria bombings are unfortunately just one example of the many other terrible acts of terrorism taking place in our world today. While the United States has successfully associated the word terrorism with the attacks of September 11, 2001 – which they were – terrorism has many faces and many facades behind which it hides. In the international community, Israel has been conveniently excluded from the list of abhorred perpetrators of terrorist acts. On the contrary, it is one of the parties that rants and rages about the need to extricate terrorism from our midst, proposing harsh sanctions against those who supposedly embrace it….

Read the full article / Leggi l’articolo completo: www.uruknet.de/?p=39161

Iraqi Resistance Report for events of Wednesday, 12 December 2007
Translated and/or compiled by Muhammad Abu Nasr, member, editorial board, the Free Arab Voice. www.freearabvoice.org
In a dispatch posted at 9:55pm Baghdad time Wednesday night, the Yaqen News Agency reported that US troops killed a 14-year-old Iraqi girl to the north of al-Fallujah, 60km west of Baghdad on Wednesday evening in the course of a raid in which they also arrested three civilians. Yaqen reported a source in the al-Fallujah puppet police, who asked not to be identified, as saying that the American troops shot the girl just because the opened the window of her bedroom inside her family’s house in the as-Sajar area, 7km north of al-Fallujah on Wednesday evening. The source said that the girl was just trying to see what the American patrol was doing during its raid. The source said that the killing of the young girl did not satisfy the Americans; they went on to raid several houses in the area and arrested three civilians for reasons that local people never knew…

Read the full article / Leggi l’articolo completo: www.uruknet.de/?p=39162

GI Special 5L9: “I Threw Him On The Floor” [ December 12, 2007 ]
Thomas F. Barton
Iraq Gang-Rape Cover-Up By U.S. Government, Halliburton/KBR: “The Company Put Her Under Guard In A Shipping Container With A Bed And Warned Her That If She Left Iraq For Medical Treatment, She’d Be Out Of A Job” “The Rape Kit Disappeared After It Was Handed Over To KBR Security Officersb…

Read the full article / Leggi l’articolo completo: www.uruknet.de/?p=39154

Iraq Looks to Iran for Security
Trumpet.com
Sunday’s Gulf State Security Conference has illuminated just how much Iraq is relying on Iran to secure the Persian Gulf region. At this conference, Iraqi National Security Adviser Mouaffak al-Rubaie stressed the need for the Persian Gulf states to come together in a nato-style regional security pact. The purpose of this proposed pact would be to foster regional reconciliation rather than heightening the “sectarian tension” that is causing so much bloodshed in the region. Iraqi officials have called for Iran to be a key member of this pact.

Read the full article / Leggi l’articolo completo: www.uruknet.de/?p=39149

Illiteracy increasing among Iraq’s refugee children
Hannah Allam | McClatchy Newspapers
Illiteracy is spreading rapidly among refugee children from Iraq, with at least 300,000 young Iraqis not attending school in the countries where their families have sought safety. Alarmed aid workers in Syria and Jordan report that a growing number of children can’t read or write because cash-strapped parents have withdrawn them from school to cut down on expenses. In many cases, displaced families can afford to send only one of their children to school, creating a painful gap between educated children and their illiterate siblings, humanitarian workers say. UNICEF, the U.N. education agency, is beginning a census to determine the size of the problem….

Read the full article / Leggi l’articolo completo: www.uruknet.de/?p=39164

Resistance and Hope
Charles Sullivan
If we Americans are nothing more than hopelessly addicted consumers who think of ourselves as an exceptional people with special entitlements; if we see ourselves as god’s morally superior chosen people; if we are selfish and greedy beyond redemption—then we are complicit in all of the horrible crimes that government commits in our name. The United States has a violent history of atrocity and exploitation that began with the arrival of Christopher Columbus on the shores of North America in 1492. It extends all the way to the present and is guided by the same poisoned ideology—Manifest Destiny….

Read the full article / Leggi l’articolo completo: www.uruknet.de/?p=39146

Palestinian Prisoner Denied Access To Care — PHR
Press Release: Physicians For Human Rights In Israel
In December 2005, PHR-Israel submitted a petition, demanding that the Israel Prison Service (IPS) pay for a kidney transplant for Ahmad Al-Tamimi, a Palestinian prisoner. After approximately two years, throughout which IPS and Beilinson Hospital withheld the examinations, which finally showed that the potential donor matches Al-Tamimi, and therefore that the transplant is medically feasible, the court ruled that IPS must pay for the transplant…

Read the full article / Leggi l’articolo completo: www.uruknet.de/?p=39144

A Plot against Britain?
Something Sleazy This Way Comes
Gilad Atzmon, Peacepalestine
Once again the London Jewish Chronicle happened to be well ahead of any other British media outlets. In the main article of its Friday edition, David Abrahams, the leading protagonist in the current Labour donation fiasco, tried to explain why he donated money to the Labour party by proxy. Abrahams, who insists upon presenting himself as a charitable being, claimed that he “had made (his) donations secretly so as to avoid accusations of being part of a ‘Jewish conspiracy’.”Yet, one may wonder why this renowned philanthropic millionaire was so concerned with issues having to do with ‘Jewish conspiracy’. I may try to offer a simple explanation. The Labour Party is not exactly a charity and Abrahams was at the time of the donation to them, a prominent activist in two major Zionist lobbies (’Labour Friends of Israel’ and ‘Jewish Labour’). Furthermore, four years ago, when Abrahams was donating money in secrecy via other people’s accounts, the British Labour Party was led by a warmonger who, together with his American ally, raged an illegal war against Iraq based on forged documents and false WMD accusations….

Read the full article / Leggi l’articolo completo: www.uruknet.de/?p=39159

The future of Iraq and the Neo Con project to bring democracy to Iraq
Sami Moubayed
…Blair purposely ignored all the violence that had taken place in Basra in 2006. Brown continues to deny the horrific situation there, claiming that the city – healed or not – will have to deal with its own affairs after the American and British messed it up in 2003. The Basra that Brown wants to leave is one dominated by Shi’ite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr. His pictures are plastered on the walls and monuments of Basra, showing how powerful he really is. Alcohol is banned and veiling is becoming a must; those who refuse are arrested or beaten by religious militias who act as morality police squads. Merchants who sell alcohol have been beaten by the fundamentalists. Some have been even executed….

Read the full article / Leggi l’articolo completo: www.uruknet.de/?p=39140

PALESTINE ~~ ONE PEOPLE WITH TWO NON-STATES
Desert Peace
The arguments for a One or Two state solution to the Palestinian crisis has taken on a new dimension thanks to the joint efforts of the United States and Israel… today we see a TWO NON-STATE SOLUTION… Joint efforts and reinforced support given at Annapolis have ‘solved’ the problem of Palestinian Statehood…. that being the total elimination of the Palestinian people… that is what is happening and that is what they want….

Read the full article / Leggi l’articolo completo: www.uruknet.de/?p=39137

Dershowitz on Waterboarding
A blatant expansion of state power
Mike Whitney
Alan Dershowitz is a skillful debater, a capable attorney, and and a ferocious defender of Israel. He is also a Harvard professor and a former member of OJ Simpson’s legal defense called the Dream Team. An article by Dershowitz appeared on op-ed page of the Wall Street Journal on Novemeber 7, 2007, titled “Democrats and Waterboarding”. In that article Dershowitz makes a spirited defense of waterboarding, going so far as to say that (he believes) the Democrats “will lose the presidential race if it defines itself as soft on terror.” Dershowitz thinks the Democrats are headed for trouble if they assume the “pacifistic stance” that he identifies with Cindy Sheehan and Michael Moore. By using Moore and Sheehan as examples; it is clear that Dershowitz accepts the media’s attempts to dismiss them as part of an imaginary “leftist fringe”….

Read the full article / Leggi l’articolo completo: www.uruknet.de/?p=39141

It is the season of paying homage to Tehran
Fatih Abdulsalam, Azzaman
…Washington has no more option left from now on but to appease Iran with regard to Iraq file. Washington needs Iran’s protection when the hour for withdrawal strikes. Iran is not naïve and stupid. It has longstanding strategic interests in Iraq with a bearing on developing the country’s oil riches. It wants to link Iraq’s economy intricately with its own so that no government will be in a position in the future to shun Iran’s hegemony. Washington was late in giving Iran the clean bill of nuclear health. But as arrangements for U.S. withdrawal are being made, it had no choice but to pursue the path of appeasement. The U.S. should have signed a memorandum of understanding with the government in Tehran rather than Baghdad for plans calling for long-term military presence in the country….

Read the full article / Leggi l’articolo completo: www.uruknet.de/?p=39136

Basra: Hundreds of vehicles and 20 tons of lead disappear from government ware houses
Mustafa al-Hashemi, Azzaman
Unidentified gunmen stormed government ware houses in the southern city of Basra and stole 375 government cars and 20 tons of lead, police sources say. The robbery is reported to be the largest and most organized in the years since the U.S. invasion of the country. The robbers were said to by carrying forged papers which enabled them to drive away with the vehicles, the sources refusing to be named said. The lead has disappeared from government warehouses in central Iraq….

Read the full article / Leggi l’articolo completo: www.uruknet.de/?p=39135

Iraqi mother’s choice: Which child goes to school?
Hannah Allam, McClatchy Newspapers
The Zuhairy family lives in a freezing one-room apartment in Jaramana, a growing Iraqi refugee enclave in Damascus . There’s no bathroom door, no hot water, no furniture, no heat and no privacy. Seven people sleep and eat in the same room, where a battered television set provides the only entertainment. The mother, who goes by the nickname Umm Sundus, has fought to keep her family fed since her husband, a goldsmith, was killed in Iraq last year and the rest of the family fled here. Rent is $150 a month, but the family’s main income is $100 a month, wired from a relative in Australia , and Umm Sundus is always behind on bills. There’s no way of educating so many children: Adam, 4; Bahram, 10; Ram, 14; Ranya, 17; Samir , 20; and Suzanne, 22….

Read the full article / Leggi l’articolo completo: www.uruknet.de/?p=39142

Israel’s second attempt to assassinate Brigadier-General Francois Hajj was successful
Roads to Iraq
Israel second attempt to assassinate Brigadier-General Francois Hajj was successful. Al-Hajj survived the first attempt in 1976, when the Israeli bombed his car after he refused to join Israeli-backed Lahad militias, the so-called [South Lebanon Army] to fight against the Lebanese army. Last year, 2006 Israeli aggression against Lebanon, Israel threatened Hajj with assassination….

Read the full article / Leggi l’articolo completo: www.uruknet.de/?p=39139

Israeli military attacks close several media centers in Nabulus
Ameen Abu Wardeh – IMEMC
Israeli military forces invaded the Northern West Bank city of Nablus early on Wednesday and shut down several media offices and agencies in what is considered the most violent direct action against Palestinian media since the beginning of the al Aqsa intifada Local sources reported that military forces invaded the city at around 1.00 am and forcibly entered the offices of several organizations, confiscating property. Issa Abu Al Ez, director of Afaq TV station in Nablus, reported that the invading troops assaulted an employee of the station who was on duty at the time of the raid, before confiscating broadcasting equipment and computers….

Read the full article / Leggi l’articolo completo: www.uruknet.de/?p=39134

Baghdad at Night Shows Shiite Dominance
Associated Press
Strings of bulbs festooning the Imam Kazim shrine’s four majestic minarets light up the sky over Baghdad’s Shiite Kazimiyah neighborhood, attracting thousands of nighttime worshippers. Coffee houses and restaurants are packed with customers along nearby streets, where turbaned clerics, chador-clad women and families buy furniture, toys and clothes in teeming shops. The district’s gold market, the largest in the city, does brisk business until well after dusk. But a drive from Kazimiyah over an unlit Tigris River bridge into Azamiyah, a Sunni stronghold, reveals only darkness and no signs of life along the main road. What nightlife does exist is confined to a walled area of about two square miles heavily patrolled by U.S. troops. One glaring exception: Kasrah, a Shiite enclave, with its lively outdoor market and coffee houses. Night is the time when the Shiite dominance of the capital becomes most apparent following the sectarian “battle of Baghdad,” which displaced tens of thousands of Sunnis and reshaped a city where the two sects had lived in relative peace….

Read the full article / Leggi l’articolo completo: www.uruknet.de/?p=39128

Bush sought Rice’s advice on Iraq war
ANNE GEARAN, AP Diplomatic Writer
Alone in the Oval Office three months before the U.S. led-invasion of Iraq, President Bush asked Condoleezza Rice whether she believed war was the proper course, a new book about the close presidential adviser said. “Yes,” the book quotes Rice as telling Bush, the United States would have no choice unless Saddam Hussein suddenly yielded to international pressure over his supposed weapons of mass destruction. “Everybody knew what the consequences meant,” Rice said in an interview for “Condoleezza Rice, an American Life.” “We would have to carry through.”…

Read the full article / Leggi l’articolo completo: www.uruknet.de/?p=39143

“Hands Off the People of Iran!”: Founding statement
Hands Off the People of Iran!
We recognise that there is an urgent need to establish a principled solidarity campaign with the people of Iran. The contradictions between the interests of the neo-conservatives in power in the USA and the defenders of the rule of capital in the Islamic Republic has entered a dangerous new phase. US imperialism and its allies are intent on regime change from above and are seriously considering options to impose this – sanctions, diplomatic pressure, limited strikes or perhaps bombing the country back to the stone age. The main enemy is imperialism. The Iranian regime does not represent a progressive or consistent anti-imperialist force….We recognise that effective resistance to this war can only mean the militant defence of the struggles of the working class in Iran and of the rising social movements in that country. We want regime change – both in Iran and in the imperialist countries. But we know that change must come from below – from the struggles of the working class and social movements – if it is to lead to genuine liberation…

Read the full article / Leggi l’articolo completo: www.uruknet.de/?p=39124

IRAQ: Iran Eases Support to Radical Group – For Now
Roxana Saberi
Iraq’s deputy prime minister has credited Tehran with helping curb the activities of a radical Shia Muslim militia, and he is also hoping Iran will do more to help stabilise its western neighbour. “There is no doubt the Iranians have recently applied influence and leverage over Jaish al-Mahdi to contain and limit its operations inside Iraq,” Barham Salih said in an interview to IPS. “This is a welcome sign. But I’ll be very frank with you: the very fact that Iran can turn on and off the activities of Jaish al-Mahdi is one of concern to me as an Iraqi official.” Washington has long accused Tehran of training, arming and funding Shia extremist groups in Iraq such as the Mehdi Army militia run by cleric Muqtada al Sadr. U.S. defence secretary Robert Gates repeated claims of Iranian interference on Saturday, and called Tehran’s foreign policies a threat to the United States and to the Middle East. But his comments followed those of some U.S. officials who said in recent weeks that Iran appears to have halted the flow of arms across its border with its western neighbour, Iraq….

Read the full article / Leggi l’articolo completo: www.uruknet.de/?p=39122

Oil or Nothing: what’s the real story?
Liz Burbank, Digest
From different angles we hear the U.S. war described as a “war for oil”. Many left ‘interpretations’ of the slippery ‘no war for oil’ mantra include blaming ‘the war on Iraq’ on one or more of these: personal Bush/Cheney connections to ‘big oil’ profits …(and insanity); Bush religious fanaticism; domestic consumption; “peak oil” production level’s diminishing resources; oil price volatility, etc. Sort of like before —and after —Bush the u.s. wasn’t, and won’t still be, the #1 scourge of the world, as if Bush isn’t a vile rabble-rousing figurehead. All scrupulously miss the point. Why?…

Read the full article / Leggi l’articolo completo: www.uruknet.de/?p=39127

A quick thought…
Layla Anwar, An Arab Woman Blues
Someone is dying to see a civil war in Lebanon again. Why do I have this eerie feeling that Iran and Israel are itching big time? Why can’t I shake off this deep gut instinct that they would love to repeat their collaborative Iraq scenario in Lebanon ? I have more to say about that….

Read the full article / Leggi l’articolo completo: www.uruknet.de/?p=39133

Oil or Nothing: what’s the real story?
Liz Burbank, Digest
From different angles we hear the U.S. war described as a “war for oil”. Many left ‘interpretations’ of the slippery ‘no war for oil’ mantra include blaming ‘the war on Iraq’ on one or more of these: personal Bush/Cheney connections to ‘big oil’ profits …(and insanity); Bush religious fanaticism; domestic consumption; “peak oil” production level’s diminishing resources; oil price volatility, etc. Sort of like before —and after —Bush the u.s. wasn’t, and won’t still be, the #1 scourge of the world, as if Bush isn’t a vile rabble-rousing figurehead. All scrupulously miss the point. Why?…

Read the full article / Leggi l’articolo completo: www.uruknet.de/?p=39127

Waterboarding Our Democracy
Robert Scheer, Truthdig
When the CIA destroyed those prisoner interrogation videotapes, was it also destroying the truth about 9/11? After all, according to the 9/11 Commission Report, the basic narrative of what happened on that day—and the definition of the enemy in this war on terror that George W. Bush launched in response to the tragedy—comes from the CIA’s account of what those prisoners told their torturers. The commission was never allowed to interview the prisoners, or speak with those who did, and was instead forced to rely on what the CIA was willing to relay. On the matter of the existence of the tapes, we know the CIA lied, not only to the 9/11 Commission but to Congress as well….

Read the full article / Leggi l’articolo completo: www.uruknet.de/?p=39132

Dozens dead in Iraq bomb attacks
Aljazeera.net
Forty people have been killed and more than 125 wounded after three car bombs exploded in quick succession in a southern Iraqi city, according to police. The attacks in Amara on Wednesday came amid tension across oil-producing southern Iraq, where rival Shia factions are struggling for influence. A police official said 40 people had died. A health official said 39 were killed and more than 125 wounded. The bombs exploded along a main street in Amara, the capital of Maysan, a province home to the Marsh Arabs and has large oil fields….

Read the full article / Leggi l’articolo completo: www.uruknet.de/?p=39125

Iraq’s national museum remains shut — and counting its losses
Cara Buckley
FOR a few brief hours, 36 spectators — journalists, politicians and their guards — gathered at the National Museum of Iraq, their voices echoing through its vast, darkened halls. It was one of the few occasions when outsiders had been allowed inside since Baghdad fell and looters stripped the galleries of 15,000 Mesopotamian artefacts. The sacking of the museum became a wrenching symbol of the losses of the war. Its directors have recovered 4000 missing pieces, among them gems, Islamic coins and carved stones. The pace of recovery picked up as word spread that rewards were being offered for items returned. Still, executive director Amira Eidan said she could not forecast when the museum might reopen because restoration efforts had been slowed by insufficient financing….

Read the full article / Leggi l’articolo completo: www.uruknet.de/?p=39131

Brown: ‘It’s time to talk to the Taliban’
Colin Brown, Independent
As the deadliest year in Afghanistan since the US-led invasion in 2001 comes to a close, Gordon Brown is ready to talk to the Taliban in a major shift in strategy that is likely to cause consternation among hardliners in the White House. Six years after British troops were first deployed to oust the Taliban regime, the Prime Minister believes the time has come to open a dialogue in the hope of moving from military action to consensus-building among the tribal leaders. Since 1 January, more than 6,200 people have been killed in violence related to the insurgency, including 40 British soldiers. In total, 86 British troops have died. The latest casualty was Sergeant Lee Johnson, whose vehicle hit a mine before the fall of Taliban-held town of Musa Qala….

Read the full article / Leggi l’articolo completo: www.uruknet.de/?p=39129

Iraqi Resistance Report for events of Tuesday, 11 December 2007
Translated and/or compiled by Muhammad Abu Nasr, member, editorial board, the Free Arab Voice. www.freearabvoice.org
…In a dispatch Tuesday, the Yaqen News Agency reported that US forces raided the as-Sajar area of southeastern al-Fallujah (60km west of Baghdad) at dawn Tuesday morning. Yaqen reported a source in the puppet police as saying that in the raid the Americans arrested three local residents and killed a 9-year-old girl (…) In a dispatch Tuesday, the Yaqen News Agency reported that the US military announced early Tuesday morning that two more American occupation troops had been killed in separate attacks. Yaqen reported a US communiqué as saying that one soldier in the “Iron” military forces died of wounds received in a car bomb explosion somewhere in Salah ad-Din Province on Monday, 10 December. The statement added that two more troops were wounded in the same attack and taken to the nearest military medical station for treatment…

Read the full article / Leggi l’articolo completo: www.uruknet.de/?p=39123

Nabil Abu Rdainah & Khaled Mash’al Ahead of Negotiations with the Israelis.
Meanwhile the Israeli ‘s Incursions & Abductions & Assassinations Continues on Palestine Lands
Hiyam Noir, PalestineFreeVoice
Eight Palestinian resistance fighters from Al Quds Brigade,the armed wing of Islamic Jihad, and the An-Nasser Brigades was assassinated during separate Israeli incursions in the Gaza Strip on Tuesday.AlQuds Brigade announced that three members of the organisation were killed and sustained serious injuries when Israelis State terrorists fired missiles at a house in Rafah in the southern parts of Gaza Strip.The four were killed when confronting the invading Israelis.Two of the dead are identified as Muhammad Abu Hamra23 and Jihad Al-Aswad 26- a third body was discovered but could not be identified….

Read the full article / Leggi l’articolo completo: www.uruknet.de/?p=39138

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