9th of April – The Fall of America
Layla Anwar, An Arab Woman Blues
Everyone says that the 9th of April was the fall of Baghdad…And this Arab Woman says the 9th of April was the Fall of America. At the gates of Babylon the Great, you are still struggling, fighting away, chasing this or the other, detaining, bombing from above, filling up morgues, hospitals, graveyards and embassies and borders with queues for exit visas. Not ONE IRAQI wishes your presence. Not ONE IRAQI accepts your occupation. And don’t give me that shit about your democratic process and elections. You brought the whores from Iran to rule on your behalf and pimp for their Persian motherland. You are small players in a game that still eludes you…the Iraqi Game is far greater and bigger than all of your strategies. You have lost in Iraq, you have been totally defeated – Politically, psychologically and economically… Your tanks, your weapons, your artillery, your jets are nothing for us, for we are RESILIENCE and we are RESISTANCE…

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April 9th
Felicity Arbuthnot
Iraqis have had yet another western insult imposed upon them: the fifth anniversary of “liberation” and the shameful, staged toppling of the statue of President Saddam Hussein, the face covered by an American flag, by a US marine. A flag, the world was told, which had been rescued from the Twin Towers. Like the alleged hijacker’s passport ( the latter presumably chucked from the ‘plane before impact) the flag too, survived an inferno that melted steel. The Pentagon PR machine must have burned a lot of midnight oil dreaming up that rubbish. The statue’s fall began the systematic destruction and erasure of the history of Mesopotamia and our humanity, ancient and modern. Whilst government and media, predominantly American and British, feel the need to mark this sixty month holocaust, every day is an April 9th for Iraqis. Lives, homes, families smashed, fallen, fragmented, ruined. Overnight, Iraqis became the new Palestinians, the world’s new diaspora, fleeing internally and externally, with just what they could carry or load into a vehicle and for many, their travel documents worthless – and if not worthless, unwelcomed by most countries…

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April 9, 2008: 7 US Soldiers, 49 Iraqis Killed; 122 Iraqis Wounded
Margaret Griffis, Antiwar.com
On the fifth anniversary of the fall of Baghdad to U.S. forces, Iraqi authorities placed curfews on the capital and other cities in order to prevent anti-American activities and protests. At least 49 Iraqis were killed and another 122 were wounded in the latest violence. Also, seven American soldiers were killed in separate incidents. An IED attack left one U.S. soldier dead in Baghdad today. Another soldier was killed during an IED attack in Salah ad Din province….

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Interview: Mohammed al-Douri
Ahmed Janabi, Aljazeera.net
Mohammed al-Douri, the last Iraqi ambassador appointed by Saddam Hussein’s government to the UN, says his country’s demise began well before the US-led invasion in March 2003. A university professor of international law who rose through the ranks of the foreign ministry, al-Douri told Al Jazeera that UN sanctions slapped on Iraq in response to its 1990 invasion of Kuwait debilitated his country. “The sanctions from 1991 to 2003 destroyed Iraq’s military, health, educational, and economical infrastructure, and brought the country to its knees,” he said….

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US Lawmakers Invested in Iraq, Afghanistan Wars
Abid Aslam, Inter Press Service
U.S. lawmakers have a financial interest in military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan, a review of their accounts has revealed. Members of Congress invested nearly 196 million dollars of their own money in companies that receive hundreds of millions of dollars a day from Pentagon contracts to provide goods and services to U.S. armed forces, say nonpartisan watchdog groups. David Petraeus, the top U.S. general in Iraq, is to brief the Senate Foreign Relations and Armed Services committees on Tuesday and Wednesday. The latest findings are unlikely to have a significant impact on this week’s proceedings but could stoke anti-incumbent sentiment in this year of presidential and legislative elections…

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Maliki, Hakim, and Iran’s Role in the Basra Fighting
Reidar Visser (www.historiae.org)
…In sum, the Iraqi system is locked at the top level. The artificial constellation of the so-called “moderate coalition” under Maliki is to a large extent the result of a weaponry-focused American misreading of the many channels of Iranian influence. This was best summed up by Ryan Crocker’s comments in the US Senate on 8 April: in an attempt at playing down the significance of Mahmud Amadinejad’s popularity in Iraqi government circles, Crocker referred to the staunch anti-Iranian attitude of the Iraqi Shiites during the Iran-Iraq War. What Crocker failed to mention was that his own administration’s main Shiite partner in Iraq, ISCI, is the only sizeable Shiite party that fought on the Iranian side. Moreover, the confusion about the relationship between Iraqi Shiites and Iran is equally widespread on the Democratic side. Top Democrats are among the foremost proponents of the view that strong Iranian influence is a perfectly natural aspect of Iraqi politics and entirely unrelated to US policy decisions, and that it cannot possibly be reversed. This particular kind of defeatism is an affront to those nationalist Iraqi Shiites who fought against Iran in the 1980s and whose marginalization is the result of US policy decisions rather than of internal Iraqi dynamics….

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Siege on Gaza intensifies as more Palestinian patients die everyday
Palestinian Information Center
The Gaza-based anti siege committee asserted on Wednesday that the Israeli economic blockade on Gaza was intensifying rapidly, adding that at least five sick Palestinian citizens have passed away on Wednesday. The Israeli occupation government blocked all crossing points of Gaza Strip, denying food and medicine to the 1.5 million Palestinians living their amidst unexplainable international silence. Rami Abdo, the spokesman of the committee, confirmed the death of Palestinian citizen Nabila Zakkot, 32, adding that the IOA had internationally delayed her admission to a hospital in the 1948-occuoied Palestinian lands that led to her death…

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Military Mom Says She Was Brutally Raped in Iraq
MADDY SAUER, ABCNews
Yet another woman has come forward saying she was brutally raped in Iraq while working for the U.S. contractor Kellogg Brown Root (KBR). Dawn Leamon, who has two sons on active duty, says she was raped earlier this year by a U.S. soldier and a KBR colleague. She will tell her horrific story to members of Congress today at a hearing of the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations…

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Khalil regrets toppling statue of Saddam
AFP
Ibrahim Khalil, who five years ago took part in the iconic toppling of a giant statue of Saddam Hussein in central Baghdad, said on Wednesday he now regrets taking part in the hugely symbolic event. “If history can take me back, I will kiss the statue of Saddam Hussein which I helped pull down,” Khalil told reporters on the fifth anniversary of the statue’s toppling. “I will protect the statue more than my own self,” Khalil said in Firdoos Square alongside a monument erected where Saddam’s statue once stood before US marines and Iraqis strung a chain around its neck and brought it crashing down…”All my friends who were with me that day feel the same as me,” Khalil told reporters in Firdoos Square, which was virtually deserted on Wednesday amid a vehicle ban in the capital imposed by the government to prevent insurgent attack….

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Baghdad anniversary clampdown fails to stop violence
Ahmed Rasheed and Wisam Mohammed, Reuters
…Dr Qasim al-Mudalla told Reuters 11 bodies and 54 wounded had been brought to the Imam Ali hospital he manages in Sadr City, where U.S. and Iraqi forces have battled militia loyal to cleric Moqtada al-Sadr since Sunday. The dead included four children and two women, he said. “What are they doing? The floor of the hospital is covered with the blood of children. What is the world doing? They have seen the blood of our children and are doing nothing,” he said…

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Iraqi Resistance Report for events of Wednesday, 9 April 2008
Translated and/or compiled by Muhammad Abu Nasr, member, editorial board, the Free Arab Voice.
In a dispatch posted at 10:05pm Baghdad time Wednesday night, the Yaqen News Agency reported that a bomb exploded by a US column on the strategic oil road near the storage area 30km south of al-Hadithah (which is 270km northwest of Baghdad) on Wednesday. Yaqen reported eyewitnesses as saying that the explosion totally destroyed a Humvee in the American column, killing or wounding all the US troops aboard. A statement that appeared in markets and other public places in western Iraq several hours later announced that three groups had been responsible for the attack: the Ansar al-Islam, al-Jaysh al-Islami, and a newly formed organization known as Harakat Nusrat al-Muqawamah (”the Movement in Support of the Resistance”)….

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The Birth of the Iraqi Resistance
Wafaa’ Al-Natheema
The Iraqi resistance did not begin after April 9, 2003 when the US forces finally invaded Baghdad. It began from the days when the US army entered southern Iraq after the “Shock and Awe” air bombing campaign. Political and military analysts have argued that Iraqis didn’t resist well and that Baghdad was swiftly taken within few days by the US forces. There is a little truth in this analogy and conclusion. It took the US forces three weeks from March 19 to April 9 to finally get a foothold in Baghdad, longer than both the 1967 and 1973 Arab-Israeli wars put together. The most devastating military confrontation was the airport battle in the early part of April. At first the courageous Iraqi army and Saddam’s Fida’yeen caused the US forces a large number of deaths, which has not been covered by any media since then. Many eyewitnesses have seen Saddam Hussein himself fight in that battle. In one of my trips to Iraq in 2004, both the driver and the front-seat passenger have informed me of their participation in that battle. One of them witnessed Saddam’s involvement indicating that he fought courageously…

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Missing Iraq antiquities haunt experts
Johanna Neuman, Los Angeles Times Staff Writer
Five years ago, looters ransacked the Iraqi National Museum, stealing centuries-old artifacts that celebrated Iraq’s role as the cradle of civilization. Some headlines at the time exaggerated the size of the damage — erroneously reporting 170,000 items missing. Investigators later discovered that some important artifacts — including gold jewelry from Nimrud — had been hidden at Iraq’s Central Bank since the Persian Gulf War in 1990. Today, investigators say that about 15,000 pieces were either stolen in the wake of war or went unaccounted for in the months and years before the conflict began. About half have been recovered. But the impact of the thefts — amulets, Assyrian ivories, sculpture heads, ritual vessels and cylinder seals — is still being felt in art circles and black markets throughout the world…

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Who are Iraq’s outlaws?
Fatih Abdulsalam, Azzaman
Five years after the fall of Baghdad, Iraq has turned into a country of outlaws. And the government, which itself is a bunch of outlaws, has recently embarked on massive military campaigns to strike “the outlaws” and their groups which it blames for the upsurge in insecurity. But one basic condition for these military operations sponsored and aided by U.S. occupation troops must be justice and equity in dealing with the groups that have turned into umbrellas for the protection of the outlaws. To single out one particular group and blame it for the lawlessness and violence is unfair.The outlaws in Iraq are not all members of the Sadr movement and his Mahdi Army despite the fact that Sadr’s outlaws have hitherto been almost free to act under the nose and eyes of the government and the U.S. occupiers. The outlaw could be a cabinet minister who must be dismissed and brought to justice for corruption…

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Four U.S. soldiers killed in Iraq
Xinhua
Four U.S. soldiers have been killed in Iraq, including one died from non-combat related cause, the U.S. military said on Wednesday. A soldier was killed by a roadside bomb attack Wednesday in Salahudin province, a military statement said. A second soldier died of wounds sustained from a roadside bomb attack in northeastern Baghdad, the military said. Earlier, a military statement said that another soldier was killed by a roadside bomb attack during operations in east of Baghdad on Tuesday….

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This is what Israel is doing to the children of Palestine, America, are you listening?
Robin, Under The Holly Tree
…According to another Palestinian study, 15% of children in the Gaza Strip have suffered a loss in the family at the hands of the Israeli army, 9% have one family member who suffers from a disability after having been shot by the occupation forces, 21% have a family member in exile and 42% have family members who are political detainees….Yet the suffering of Palestinian children does not stop at the psychological level; dozens of children have been killed during the first quarter of this year. According to a report by the department of national and international relations in the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO), the number of Palestinians killed as a result of Israeli military operations within the Palestinian Territories since the beginning of this year is estimated at 274, including 50 children, two of whom were newborns (20 days old and seven months old) and 18 women…

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Video: Iraq: Who fired on the Green Zone?
Joost Hiltermann: Not clear where weapons are coming from
THE REAL NEWS
Joost Hiltermann is the Deputy Program Director, Middle East and North Africa for the International Crisis Group. He writes policy-focused reports on the factors that increase the risk of and drive armed conflict. His specialty is the crisis in Iraq…

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Questions over journalists’ deaths
Linda Isam Haddad, Aljazeera.net
An international media advocacy group has criticised the US military for not fully investigating the deaths of three journalists killed when their hotel and Al Jazeera’s office came under US fire as Baghdad fell on April 8, 2003. The Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) says it has continuously called on the US military to fully investigate the incidents that came just before the statue of Saddam Hussein was toppled. “The Pentagon has never credibly explained the strike on the Baghdad bureau on Al Jazeera, despite our repeated calls to investigate it,” Joel Campagna, CPJ’s Middle East and North Africa senior programme co-ordinator, said. Tariq Ayoub, a correspondent for Al Jazeera, was killed when a US missile struck the Baghdad bureau…

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Deadly clashes across Gaza Strip
Aljazeera.net
The Israeli military has shelled an area of Gaza City, following an attack by Palestinian fighters at the Nahal crossing in the northern part of the territory.
Raed El-Erini, a spokesperson at the Al Shifa Hospital in Gaza, said that at least three people were killed when a house in the Al Shegaeya neighbourhood was hit. Two Israeli civilians and two Palestinian fighters were killed in an exchange of fire after the Palestinians stormed the crossing, which is mainly used for the transit of fuel, earlier on Wednesday, Israeli police and medics said….

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General Petraeus gives Senate a blueprint for an unending occupation of Iraq
Bill Van Auken, WSWS
Gen. David Petraeus and Ambassador Ryan Crocker testified before two packed hearings on Capitol Hill Monday, serving up the predetermined recommendation that the US occupation of Iraq continue indefinitely, with troop levels remaining at more than 140,000. That figure is higher than the number deployed in Iraq before the so-called “surge,” as the Bush administration terms its escalation begun over a year ago. There were few surprises in the testimony by the US commander and US ambassador to Iraq when they appeared before the Senate Armed Services and Foreign Relations committees. There was even less in the way of probing questions—not to mention sharp political challenges—from the members of the Democratic-led panels….

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Iraq’s Talabani hopes to reshape government within one week
Monsters and Critics
Iraq’s President Jalal al-Talabani said on Wednesday that talks about reshaping the Iraqi government were progressing and he hoped there would be a new cabinet within a week. Talabani said that he plans to meet with Vice-President Tarek al- Hashimi and Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki to discuss the possibility of including ministers from the Iraqi Accord Front, the country’s largest Sunni bloc, in the new cabinet. ‘National unity can not be achieved without the presence of the Sunni brothers,’ Talabani told reporters in a press conference, marking the fifth anniversary of the fall of Baghdad….

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Salah el-Din placed under curfew
Voices of Iraq
A curfew was imposed on Salah e-Din province on the occasion of the 5th anniversary of the invasion of Iraq, a police source said on Wednesday. “Local security forces imposed a curfew on Salah el-Din cities of Tikrit, Samarra, al-Dour, Beiji, al-Shurqat, Dalouiya, Yathreb, Ishaqi as a security measure against possible protests or violent acts during the 5th anniversary of the invasion of Iraq,” the source, who asked to be unnamed, told Aswat al-Iraq – Voices of Iraq (VOI)…

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Iraq: Fatal attacks in Baghdad despite curfew
Adnkronos
At least nine people were killed and 38 others were injured in a missile attack in the Baghdad Shia neighborhood of Sadr City on Wednesday. The attack was one of several mortar attacks reported in Baghdad, including one fired at the Green Zone, the highly fortified area of Baghdad where the US embassy and Iraqi government offices are located….Meanwhile, one of Iraq’s eminent clerics, Ayatollah al-Sistani, has offered his support to the government of prime minister Nouri al-Maliki in its bid to control the Mahdi Army. A spokesman for the cleric from the city of Najaf said al-Sistani supported disarming the militias and removing them from Iraq. It is five years since the US-led invasion of Iraq brought down the government of Saddam Hussein on April 9, 2003….

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Southern Iraq tribes call for national unity
Voices of Iraq
The southern Iraq Arab tribes council called Wednesday to make the 6th year of occupation as a year of national unity and liberation, asserting that Iraqis’ interests would be realized by a safe and strong Iraq. In a statement released on the occasion of the 5th anniversary of the invasion of Iraq, the council called for an immediate end to the occupation. The council urged different parties and political blocs to favor the country’s interests and to make the 6th year of the occupation as a year of national unity and liberation…

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Israeli siege kills five Palestinian patients in one day
Palestinian Information Center
The Israeli siege on Gaza has killed since the early hours of Wednesday morning five Palestinian patients and the death toll is likely to rise in light of the Israeli restrictions imposed on the entry of medicines and medical supplies to Gaza, and also on patients who are routinely denied permits to leave Gaza for life-saving treatment. With these new deaths, the number of the siege victims rose to 130 Palestinians, where Palestinian medical sources told the popular committee against the siege that a female patient called Nabila Zaqqout, 32, died of a heart disease in a hospital inside the Palestinian lands occupied in 1948….

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Israeli soldiers continue to use civilians as human shields
Saed Bannoura – IMEMC News
Resident Sameer Abu Khweira from Khallit Al Amoud area in the northern West Bank city of Nablus reported on Wednesday that Israeli soldiers forced him and his brother to accompany them as the soldiers broke into two homes. Sameer stated that on Wednesday approximately at 2:20 A.M, soldiers broke into his home and forced him and his brother Sa’id to walk in front of them as they broke into two houses in the area. He added that he, his brother and their uncle had to stand in the cold weather for more than 30 minutes and were used as human shield as the soldiers broke into nearby houses, searched them and kidnapped four residents…

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New York Times Explains Winter Soldier Blackout
Public editor responds to concerns raised by FAIR
FAIR
New York Times public editor Clark Hoyt has offered a response to media activists who wrote to the paper about its non-coverage of last month’s Winter Soldier hearings. Hoyt’s explanation is that reporters at the Times had “not been aware of the group or its meeting,” but likely wouldn’t have covered it if they had been aware of the event. The idea that the Times was unaware of Winter Soldier is remarkable; the paper’s D.C. reporters were repeatedly sent press releases about the events, the same ones that other media outlets received that did manage to cover the event, ranging from Pacifica Radio’s Democracy Now! to the New York Times’ corporate sibling the Boston Globe….

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April 8, 2008: 1 US Soldier, 52 Iraqis Killed; 190 Iraqis Wounded
Margaret Griffis, Antiwar.com
As U.S. officials briefed Congress on Iraq withdrawal plans, Shi’ite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr warned that his Mahdi army will end their unilaterally imposed ceasefire and called off a peaceful demonstration scheduled for tomorrow, citing fears of more attacks. Meanwhile, General Petreus has advised postponing the U.S. drawdown in troops. At least 52 Iraqis were also killed, and another 190 Iraqis were wounded in the latest violence. Two American soldiers were also killed. One American soldier was killed in Baghdad late yesterday. Another GI was killed during an IED attack today in northeast Baghdad…

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Iraqi Resistance Report for events of Tuesday, 8 April 2008.
Translated and/or compiled by Muhammad Abu Nasr, member, editorial board, the Free Arab Voice.
…In a dispatch posted at 11:48am Baghdad time Tuesday morning, the Yaqen News Agency reported that the US military had admitted Tuesday that the US admitted that four more American troops had been killed in Iraq since Monday evening. Four mortar shells slam into “Green Zone” as US wages offensive against Jaysh al-Mahdi. In a dispatch posted on its Arabic website at 3:39pm Tuesday afternoon Beijing time (11:39am in Baghdad), the Xinhua News Agency reported that four mortar rounds were fired at the top-security “Green Zone” in Baghdad on Tuesday morning…

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Iraq war vet: We’ve heard enough from the generals and the politicians
Bill Van Auken, WSWS
Among the several hundred spectators who joined hundreds of members of the media and the Democratic and Republican Senators on the Armed Services and Foreign Relations committees was a fairly small, but particularly skeptical audience—a group of veterans returned from Iraq. “I would have rather not heard from General Petraeus at all,” said Geoff Millard, who served with the Army’s 42nd Infantry in Tikrit in 2004 and 2005. “I think we are at capacity of hearing from politicians, pundits and generals.”…

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Internet censorship – the ballad of Gilad and PePa
Peacepalestine
Not long after posting an article about Tony Greenstein’s obsessive and unsuccessful efforts to shut down the peacepalestine blog, the blog’s editor Mary Rizzo reported that her blog access (though not Machetera’s) had been shut down once more, this time on the basis of the false accusation that she was running a “spam blog.” Rather than delve into definitions of what constitutes a spam blog and why someone would run one, for now Machetera will simply make the following observations: 1. peacepalestine is not a spam blog, 2. Blogger does appear to have a shoot first, ask questions later approach; 3. Machetera does not have enough information at the present time to say whether Wordpress has a less trigger-happy temper, although being somewhat self-interested she will hope for the best…

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