The discovery and unearthing of the biggest mass grave committed by the militias in Mahmoudiya
Kareem Abd Zaid, Azzaman
Iraqis were shocked yesterday, when they discovered the biggest mass grave in the contemporary history of their country. The mass grave made of 4020 bodies, mainly women, youngsters and some men from the Mahmoudiya district and its surroundings. Local Eyewitnesses from the area asserted that these bodies were victims of the Jaysh Al Mahdi militia, the Badr militia of the SIIC and Al-Dawa party militia, in the year 2005 and 2006. A source close to the enquiry being conducted regarding this biggest mass grave, said that the lieutenant 45 from the 6th division had refused to open another enquiry regarding another mass grave found at al Amin Mosque which was discovered some hours before and comprised 114 bodies of young men from Mahmoudiya, over and above the stumbling upon of yet another mass grave comprising 100 bodies found in the garbage dumping grounds in Mahdmoudiya…

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Mass Graves in Iraq. Whose mass graves are these?
Gabriele Zamparini, The Cat’s Dream
Finally the notorious Iraqi mass graves are being unearthed. There is only one problem: they are the product of Liberated Iraq. Az-Zaman (London; Iraq): Largest mass grave found in Mahmoudiya – Iraqis were shocked yesterday by the discovery of the largest mass grave in their modern history, with 4,020 bodies of mostly women, youth and men from Mahmoudiya and its surroundings. Local residents said the bodies belonged to victims of kidnappings and executions carried out by (Shiite) al-Mahdi Army, Badr, and al-Dawa militias in 2005 and 2006. It seems this is just the beginning; not only Oil in New Iraq’s underground. Have you ever seen such a Liberation?…

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Iraq: Christians Say Targeting By Extremists Amounts To Genocide
Kathleen Ridolfo, RFE/RL
…Unlike other groups in Iraq, Christians do not have militias or tribes to protect them. In their absence, they have relied on coalition and Iraqi forces for protection, and say they have been let down. Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki vowed to increase protection for the Christian community following the March killing of Mosul Archbishop Bulus Faraj Rahhu, but it does not appear that he has followed through on his pledge. The first major attack against the Christian community in Iraq came in August 2004 when five Baghdad churches were bombed over a 30-minute period. The Al-Qaeda-affiliated Islamic State of Iraq (ISI) appeared to be responsible for the bombings, and for the majority of attacks that have since targeted the Christian community…The other main perpetrator of violence against Christians in recent years has been the Shi’ite militia led by cleric Muqtada al-Sadr, Imam Al-Mahdi Army…

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Solidarity with Iraq’s orphans
Hussein Al-alak, the Iraq Solidarity Campaign
Only silence has echoed through the corridors of power in Great Britain, in relation to the news that 4.5 million child orphans now exist in Iraq, according to the Iraqi Ministry of Labour and Social Affairs. The ministry also announced in January, that there are an estimated 500,000 orphans now living in Iraq’s streets, without accommodation or an appropriate care provider, as the Iraqi news agency Voices of Iraq reported, that there are only around 459 orphans who are currently residing in Iraqi government funded orphanages. There is uncertainty as to how many children are actually being held in “detention” inside of prisons in Iraq, or even information relating to the welfare of children who are now resident in refugee camps as a result of the crisis. There also exists no record of those children who have been kidnapped by criminal gangs and whose lives are being held hostage for use in the now booming sex trade…

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The Yezidis of Iraq say Kurds oppressing them and forcing them to flee
Nidhal al-Laithi, Azzaman
The supreme leader of the Yezidis in Iraq says his community is in danger losing its ancestral habitat and existence in Iraq. But the threat this time comes from the two main Kurdish parties and their militias, U.S.’s best allies in Iraq. Anwar Muawiya al-Amawi, the Yezidis’ Emir and their grand spiritual and political leader, told Azzaman that Kurdish leaders were encouraging wealthy Kurds to buy land owned by his impoverished community at exorbitant prices. “The Kurds aim to purchase the land owned by other minorities like the Yezidis in order to integrate the area into their enclave,” Amawi said…

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Cheerleading genocide
Khaled Amayreh, Al-Ahram Weekly
With spectacular fanfare and a plethora of highlighted events, Israel is planning to celebrate its 60th birthday on 18 May 2008. According to an Israeli government website called Israelfestival.com, the festival will include “non-stop entertainment, [a] fashion show, a variety of ethnic food for sale, Israeli folk dancing, arts and crafts, Israeli and Jewish cultural and heritage pavilions and art exhibits”. The centrepiece ceremony is expected to take place in West Jerusalem and be attended by Israel’s political and military leaders as well as foreign dignitaries. Among those expected are US President George W Bush, French President Nicolas Sarkozy and German Chancellor Angela Merkel… Today, as Israel is getting ready to celebrate its 60th birthday, the massive theft of Palestinian land in the West Bank, especially in East Jerusalem and its surroundings, continues unabated. Against all odds, the Palestinian people have survived. Indeed, Palestinian resilience to Israeli oppression is legendary — a trait that continues to baffle and frustrate Israeli strategists. Perhaps it is this resilience that is encouraging influential Israeli political, military and religious leaders to openly call for genocide of the Palestinians..

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Video: The Women in the New Iraq ?????? ?? ?????? ?????
namirkh2
The women of Iraq have disappeared. Five years after the US-led invasion of Iraq, women’s secular freedoms – once the envy of women across the Middle East – have been snatched away because militant Islam is rising across the country. Across Iraq, a bloody and relentless oppression of women has taken hold. Many women had their heads shaved for refusing to wear a scarf or have been stoned in the street for wearing make-up. Others have been kidnapped and murdered for crimes that are being labelled simply as “inappropriate behaviour”…

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GAZA: Health ministry warns: The anesthetic gas used to narcotize patients ran out
Palestinian Information Center
The health ministry in Gaza warned Thursday that the surgical operation rooms in the Gaza hospitals were shut down and all surgeries were suspended after the anesthetic nitrous oxide used for narcotizing patients during surgeries was depleted. The ministry appealed to the international health organization and all health and human right institutions to necessarily move to end this disaster afflicted Gaza patients. The Wafa hospital for rehabilitation and specialist surgery in Gaza announced that its medical and administrative staff resumed providing medical services to the wounded and disabled cases after the hospital was bombed during Israeli aggression on Gaza…

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American airplanes dropped flyers in Mosul
Roads to Iraq
I don’t know what you call this, but Iraqirabita called a sign of desperation and defeat. There are two images of flyers dropped by American airplanes on Mosul this morning asking a person called “Faris Mohammad Mukhtar” to give himself up, the thing is that they are doing this to capture one person…

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email to Liberal Democrats MPs Edward Davey and Nick Clegg RE: Iraq war death toll
Gabriele Zamparini, The Cat’s Dream
Thank you for your recent comments on the Iraq war. “… Contrary to the ludicrous claims of victory made by the likes of David Miliband and George Bush, the war has made Iraq a more dangerous place at a horrific cost whether measured in terms of lives, money or our security. Labour and the Conservatives share the blame for this catastrophic foreign policy mistake.” “The war in Iraq has already cost thousands of lives and billions of pounds. This tragic revelation brings home the continued human and financial impact, both at home and abroad.” Presumably, when you said “thousands of lives”, you were just thinking of US and UK military personnel. The US media watch FAIR wrote a few weeks ago: “There is no more important question about the Iraq War than the question of how many Iraqis have died. It is impossible to truly evaluate the war or discuss where to go from here without knowing the human cost of the war, and that cost has overwhelmingly been borne by Iraqis.” Surely I would not call a war of aggression – illegal under the UN Charter – that might have cost the lives of over one million Iraqi citizens a “mistake”. Please, may I ask you if the Liberal Democrats intend to spend some time and energy to highlight the human cost of the Iraq war?…

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Carter calls Israel treatment of Palestinians a crime
Jeffrey Fleishman, Los Angeles Times Staff Writer
Former President Carter told a university audience here Thursday that the treatment of Palestinians in the Gaza Strip by the Israeli military was “a crime” but that there were “officials in Israel quite willing to meet with Hamas” and that may happen “in the near future.” Carter spoke to students and faculty at American University in Cairo after talks with Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak and a separate three-hour meeting with Hamas officials. The Bush administration and Israel have set rules to not talk to the militant Palestinian group, which controls the Gaza Strip, but Carter said, “I consider myself immune” from such restrictions….

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IRAQ: Chaos Hardening Sectarian Fiefdoms
Ali Gharib
There are an estimated 2.7 million Iraqis who have been displaced within their own country. No house; no food; no security. Who do they turn to for help? The international community’s humanitarian organisations? The occupying United States government? The central Iraqi government based in Baghdad? According to a report released Tuesday by Refugees International (RI), none of these has been able to provide sufficient assistance to the most vulnerable Iraqis. As a result, they are turning increasingly to local religious-political armed groups for their humanitarian needs — often Shia cleric Moqtada al-Sadr’s Mahdi Army, or the Sunni militias known as Sahwa or Awakening groups, made up of former insurgents armed and funded by the U.S. military, though other militias and strongmen exist as well…

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Sadrist leaders refuse to lay down weapons
Voices of Iraq
Sadrist leaders asserted they refuse to hand over Shiite Cleric Muqtada al-Sadr’s al-Mahdi army’s weapons to the Iraqi government or dissolve it except if Shiite top clerics gave directives to do that. London-based al-Hayat newspaper quoted senior Sadrist leader in Najaf, Basem al-Marwani, as saying that “al-Mahdi army will not allow anyone to disarm it and al-Sadr could not disarm al-Mahdi army except if top Shiite clerics gave directives to do that.”…”al-Sadr’s main demand is the withdrawal of the foreign occupation from Iraq or at least putting a timetable to pullout troops,” he explained….

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Assad: The Americans told Syria not to host Iraqi scientists, now we know why
Roads to Iraq
In president al-Asad speech yesterday at the Pan-Arab Thought Revival and Arab Destiny in Damascus, he revealed untold secret about the invasion of Iraq. A few weeks after the fall of Baghdad, however the American secretary of state Colin Powell came to Damascus, and talked with pride on the work accomplished by his army in Iraq, and he mentioned that Syria must not hosts the Iraqi scientists, and prevent the Iraq thinkers from entering its territory, later we knew that they are targeted and assassinated…

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50 killed in Iraq suicide bombing
SINAN SALAHEDDIN
A suicide bomber struck the funeral of two anti-al-Qaida Sunni tribesmen in a town north of Baghdad on Thursday, killing at least 50 people and wounding dozens, police said…Thursday’s attack took place in the town of Albu Mohammed about 90 miles north of Baghdad, during the funeral of two brothers who belonged to the local Awakening Council and had been killed in an attack a day earlier, police said…

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PHOTO JOURNAL OF ISRAEL’S LATEST ATTACK IN GAZA
Desert Peace
The following were taken yesterday….. zionism in action. Even the camera cried as can be seen above. Share these photos with all…. ISRAEL MUST NOT GET AWAY WITH THESE CRIMES…

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Report reveals Iran seized British sailors in disputed waters
Dominic Kennedy, Times
Fifteen British sailors and Marines were seized by Iran in internationally disputed waters and not in Iraq’s maritime territory as Parliament was told, according to new official documents released to The Times. The Britons were seized because the US-led coalition designated a sea boundary for Iran’s territorial waters without telling the Iranians where it was, internal Ministry of Defence briefing papers reveal. Documents released under the Freedom of Information Act detail for the first time the blunders last spring that led to what an all-party committee of MPs came to describe as a “national embarrassment”….

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Israeli forces in Gaza “willfully kill” journalist
PCHR – Palestinian Centre for Human Rights
The Palestinian Centre for Human Rights (PCHR) strongly condemns the crime committed by Israeli Occupation Forces (IOF) on Wednesday evening, which took the life of Fadel Shana’a, a Palestinian journalist, when he carrying out his job in Gaza. PCHR expresses utmost concern over continued crimes committed by IOF against journalists and media professionals, which is a reflection of excessive use of force against civilians, and systematic targeting of journalists to prevent them from covering crimes committed against civilians….

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UNRWA: Gaza siege led to uncontrollable humanitarian crisis
Palestinian Information Center
The United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestinian refugees has warned that the tightened Israeli siege on Gaza for the past ten months especially fuel blockage had led to real disaster to one and a half million Palestinians. John Ging, the operations director of UNRWA, said that the siege, which culminated in blocking fuel supplies for over a week, was posing real danger to the lives of the Strip’s populace and was causing a humanitarian crisis that is hard to control…

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Bad Days
Mohammed, Last of Iraqis
…I woke up later and headed to work as usual and when I finished working I went back home and took my wife to go shopping, I wanted to buy new jeans for me so I stopped the car in front of some shop and there were couple of cars parked also, I went inside and as I was trying to make my mind and trying wearing some of them two policemen came inside and said “does any body knows who own the------” (referring to my car) and I said “yes, it’s mine what’s wrong!” and I was wearing one of the jeans that I want to buy and I didn’t finish entering my shirt in it or even closing the buttons, the policeman said” come out NOW, are you deaf? Couldn’t you hear us screaming in the loud speakers about your car?” and I told him OK I’ll come wait until I wear my clothes back” and he said “I said NOW” and the shop owner told me to go it’s OK, so I told my wife to stay in the shop and I went out although I’m sure they didn’t use loud speakers because I would hear them, it’s true that there was music playing in the shop but it wasn’t loud and the car is just 2 or 3 meters away from the shop…

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USA’s Iraq officials and media in denial of the truth of the aggression
Paul J. Balles*
To mark the fifth anniversary of the invasion of Iraq, nine foreign affairs “experts” offered their reflections in the New York Times on 16 March 2008 “on their attitudes in the spring of 2003 and … comment on the one aspect of the war that most surprised them or that they wished they had considered in the pre-war debate”. Looking back, each of them did more to reveal their continuing blindness or to attempt to justify errors in their original judgment…

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