Since the American invasion of Iraq, more than 5 million Iraqis have been driven from their homes by violence and terror. One of these Iraqis is Ahlam Ahmed. This is her story.
In his first public statement since the Wednesday’s carnage, Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki assured Iraqis that its forces would defeat terrorism despite the year’s deadliest bombings. His address ignored remarks from a minister that the government had fallen into a false sense of security.
A few hours earlier, his foreign minister, Hoshiyar Zebari, said he suspected police or soldiers might have colluded in the attacks. Zebari also criticized Maliki’s decision to remove most blast walls from Baghdad’s streets, indicating it was one cause of the blasts.
In his address, Maliki said the perpetrators of the bombings on the foreign and finance ministries had been captured. “I want to tell the Iraqi people we are still in an open war against (the terrorists),” he said on state television. “I reassure the Iraqi people that the security forces can keep up the battle and achieve victory despite breaches here and there.”
These suicide truck bombings, effectively shattered the growing sense of stability in Iraq since the U.S. troops pulled out of urban centers and handed over security responsibility to their Iraqi counterparts.
They also dealt a crippling blow to Maliki himself as he prepares to contest the national election next January, looking to claim credit for a sharp fall in overall violence in the past 18 months, and public confidence in Iraq’s domestic security forces.
Foreign Minister Zebari summoned the media earlier today to his wrecked ministry and said he suspected police or soldiers must have helped.
“According to our information, there has even been collaboration between security officers and the murderers and killers,” he said, calling for a thorough investigation.
Zebari offered no direct evidence for the accusation, but said checkpoints and blast walls near the ministry had been removed due to a “false sense” of security.
Blast walls were piled up outside the ministry today in preparation for being reinstalled.
Across the world, Muslims have begun celebrating the holy month of Ramadan, a month of fasting and feasting. But threats of swine flu and the economic downturn, on top of already existing security fears in several Islamic countries, have dampened the mood.
In response to the H1N1 swine flu virus, a string of governments have placed restrictions on citizens making the pilgrimage to the holy places in Saudi Arabia, a trek traditionally made by many Muslims during Ramadan.
Meanwhile, financial worries forced many families to cut back on their holiday spending. In the Saudi cities of Mecca and Medina, which normally do a brisk trade from pilgrims during Ramadan, businesses are bracing for their worst holy month in years.
Trying to tempt travelers, tour companies have slashed the price for package tours from Riyadh to Mecca by 25 percent, the English language Saudi Gazette reported.
In neighbouring Medina, officials said they expected business to be down by 70 percent.
Read More:
Xinhua: “Gazans find joyous Ramadan a luxury during economic downturn”
Iraqi officials are questioning 11 security officers about security failures that resulted in the bloodiest day in Baghdad in more than a year.
The Iraqi government raised the death toll from Wednesday’s Baghdad bomb and mortar attacks to at least 100. More than 500 other people were wounded.
An Iraqi army spokesman said there are regulations instructing security officers to prohibit trucks of the sort that exploded Wednesday from approaching government ministries.
But even the tightened security Thursday failed to prevent another bombing in the Iraqi capital. Officials say a bomb strapped to a bicycle killed two people and wounded at least 10 in central Baghdad.
After Wednesday’s bloodshed, Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki vowed an immediate re-evaluation of the government’s security methods. Read more…
Three Iraqi cattle herders were killed today after wandering into the middle of a U.S.-Iraqi mortar training exercise north of Baghdad.
U.S. troops were conducting a live-fire training exercise with Iraqi forces near Taji, a city about 12 miles north of Baghdad, when the three men walked onto the artillery range, a military spokesman said. An 11-year-old boy was also injured in the incident. He was evacuated to a U.S. military hospital where he is in stable condition.
The incident comes as the U.S. military shifts its primary role in Iraq from combat to training Iraqi security forces with exercises like these.
The Pentagon said it was “very nervous” about ethnic tensions in Iraq between Arabs and Kurds despite the progress stemming from initial talks between their leaders. A top U.S. commander warned fighting over land and oil could still turn violent.
While the sectarian violence that created massive rifts in Iraq has died down, the battle between northern Iraq’s Kurdistan region and its Arab-led government in Baghdad is being seen as one of the greatest threats to the country’s fragile stability by politicians and military leaders in Washington.
These tensions have not gone unnoticed by al Qaeda insurgents. According to U.S. defense officials, they have sought to exploit the tensions to retain a strong hold even as their influence wanes in other region’s in Iraq. These officials point to a string of deadly bombings as evidence that the group was capable of reconstituting its “combat power.”
Reuters reports:
Geoff Morrell, the Pentagon press secretary, said Washington was “heartened” last week when Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki met the Kurdish region’s president, Masoud Barzani, after more than a year of deadlock.
“But we are very nervous, continue to be, about the overall Arab-Kurd tensions,” Morrell told a news conference.
U.S. troops, preparing to withdraw from Iraq by 2012, have intervened many times to defuse the row, and Washington has pushed for a settlement before its forces go home.
Chicago is home to the second largest Iraqi population in the United States (the first is in Dearborn, Michigan). But the absence of the Iraqi community is being felt by Chicago resettlement agencies, like the Heartland Alliance’s Refugee and Immigrant Services. With the resettlement of Iraqis increasing almost 15 fold, representatives of these agencies say this void was not something they expected.
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Highlights:
Bombings of a Shia mosque and a bus full of pilgrims killed at least 36 people as Iraq’s Shia community celebrates one of its biggest feasts.
View Karbala, Iraq in a larger map
Pilgrims have been swarming in and out of Karbala, about 40 miles south of Baghdad, to mark the birth of a historic religious figure, placing Iraqi and American security forces on high alert.
The first bomb went off as worshipers were leaving a mosque after Friday prayers near the northern city of Mosul, killing 30. According to the BBC, police said at least 61 people had also been wounded in the blast, and the number of casualties was likely to rise.
City authorities are urging citizens to donate blood and appealed for construction vehicles to lift debris trapping victims of the attack, Rueters says.
“I was in the house when this explosion happened,” said 19-year-old Khalil Qasim through his tears.
“I hurried to the mosque to search for my father in the ruins… I found him seriously wounded, and took him to hospital, but he died.”
Meanwhile, a bus full of pilgrims returning to Baghdad was struck by a roadside bomb as it entered the Shia area of Sadr City, The blasts killed six and injured many other returning pilgrims, police said.
An attack Thursday evening killed at least one person making their way to the festival and injured three.
Violence surrounding this festival is not uncommon. According to the BBC, the hundreds of thousands of Shia pilgrims who gather in Karbala to mark the birth of Mohammed al-Mehdi – the 12th and last Shia Imam, known as the Hidden Imam – have often been targeted by attacks in the past.
Since the American invasion in Iraq in 2003, Iraqis have enjoyed many of the same freedoms from censorship that Americans have. Uncensored media from scandalous Egyptian soap operas to romance novels to pornography have been widely available. But now, the Iraqi government is imposing new censorship laws to crack down on this behavior deemed improper by the standards of Islamic law.
The new censorship policy will require Internet cafes to register with the government and publishers to censor content in new books. The laws are a continuation of Prime Minister al-Maliki’s attempts to censor sexual material coming into the country beginning in May.
Government officials say these uncensored materials are corrupting the minds of young Iraqis and encouraging sectarian violence. Iraq’s cultural minister Mufid Al-Jazairi told the New York Times, “Our constitution respects freedom of thought and freedom of expression, but that should come with respect for society as a whole, and for moral behavior. It is not easy to balance security and democracy. It is like being a tightrope walker.”
Col. Timothy Reese (courtesy of Antiwar.com)
A senior military adviser in Iraq, issued an internal memo urging the US to significantly speed up its pullout from Iraq. In this memo leaked to the New York Times, Col. Timothy Reese pushes for the U.S. to simply “declare victory” and have announce that all troops will be out of the nation by August 2010.
Bluntly, Col. Reese says keeping US troops in Iraq “isn’t yielding benefits commensurate with the effort and is now generating its own opposition.” He asserts that America has overstayed it’s welcome, saying, “guests, like fish, begin to smell after three days.” Read more…