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.
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.
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…
Violence interrupted the celebrations of National Sovereignty Day (photo courtesy of Iraq Solidarity Campaign)
One month ago today, celebrations filled the streets of Baghdad as Iraqis marked “National Sovereignty Day,” commemorating the official withdrawal of American troops from Iraqi cities. But in Kirkuk, just 150 miles north of Baghdad, the cheers and high spirits were replaced with screams and panic when a car bomb exploded in a crowded market, killing at least 34 people.
This incident caused me to take a step back and ask, ‘Is Iraq ready to stand on its own two feet?’
Over the last six years American troops, advisers and diplomats have been working to establish a stable Iraq, combating violence, training Iraqi soldiers and police, and planting the seeds of democracy for the first time in Iraq’s history. What more can the United States do to help this war torn nation?
Perhaps the answer is to stop helping. Read more…
Iraq is certainly exercising its sovereignty over the last week.
With a new reading for the U.S.-Iraqi security agreement (the same document which set a deadline for the American troop withdrawal from Iraqi cities) the Iraqi government has sharply restricted the movement and activities of American forces. This control has rubbed many U.S. commanders the wrong way, who have become increasingly concerned with the safety of their men and women.
The Washington Post reports:
In a curt missive issued by the Baghdad Operations Command on July 2 — the day after Iraqis celebrated the withdrawal of U.S. troops to bases outside city centers — Iraq’s top commanders told their U.S. counterparts to “stop all joint patrols” in Baghdad. It said U.S. resupply convoys could travel only at night and ordered the Americans to “notify us immediately of any violations of the agreement.”
In an e-mail obtained by the Post, Maj. Gen. Daniel P. Bolger, commander of the Baghdad division, wrote “Maybe something was ‘lost in translation.” He continued, writing, “We are not going to hide our support role in the city. I’m sorry the Iraqi politicians lied/dissembled/spun, but we are not invisible nor should we be.” He indicated that U.S. troops intend to continue to engage in combat operations, even in urban areas, in order to avert or respond to threats, with or without help from the Iraqis.
“This is a broad right and it demands that we patrol, raid and secure routes as necessary to keep our forces safe,” he wrote. “We’ll do that, preferably partnered.”
These new guidelines are a reflection of rising tensions between the American and Iraqi governments. Iraqi leaders are using this agreement as an opportunity to show their countrymen that the are in charge and that Iraq’s dependence on the U.S. is decreasing.
Army.mil/Flickr
In 2003, a Raed Jarrar watched American planes drop bombs on building after building near his home in Baghdad. Now Jarrar is in Washington D.C. serving as the Iraq consultant for the American Friends Service Committee, as well as facilitating communication between Americans on Capitol Hill and Iraqi politicians and citizens. When I spoke with Jarrar last week, he said he was frustrated by the misinformation being disseminated by the media about the violence on conflict in Iraq.
He said, “When I hear the U.S. coverage on Iraq, it’s similar to, for example, an Iraqi saying that the US Civil War was a religious civil war, or that it was a racial civil war that put some white people against some black people.”
He acknowledged that the Civil War was full of political intricacies like the desire to keep a central government and the question of whether individuals in newly inducted states should be allowed to hold slaves. He emphasized that just as Americans would not stand for misinformation about our past, Iraqis should not have to hear misinformation about the present situation, saying “I think that the same way that Americans understand the Civil War with its complexity, and they will not buy any argument about it being a religious civil war or some other descriptions, I think Iraqis, including myself, think the US understanding of the current Iraqi conflict is really wrong.”
“It’s not a war based on ancient hatreds between Sunnis and Shiites,” Jarrar said. “It’s not a religious war. It’s way more political and economic. It has way more complicated layers than we hear in covered in the U.S.”