Today in Iraq

DAILY WAR NEWS FOR THURSDAY, September 21, 2006 Photo: An Iraqi man injured in a parked car bomb explosion near an electricity office, grimaces in pain at a hospital, in Baghdad, Iraq, Thursday Sept. 21, 2006, the explosion killed two people and injuring nine, police said. (AP Photo/Hadi Mizban) Bring ‘em on: One Soldier assigned to 1st Brigade, 1st Armored Division died today as a result of wounds sustained from enemy action while operating in Al Anbar Province. (MNF - Iraq) Brng 'em on:A Baghdad Soldier died at approximately 10:30 p.m. Wednesday after the vehicle he was traveling in was struck by an improvised-explosive device in northern Baghdad. (MNF - Iraq) OTHER SECURITY INCIDENTS Baghdad: Six policemen were killed and one wounded when gunmen ambushed them in a Baghdad western neighborhood today.. Unknown armed men opened fire at a group of policemen outside the police station of Khadraa neighborhood, killing six of them and wounding another. The policemen were leaving the police station for vacation when the gunmen ambushed them. Two people were killed and eight others wounded on Thursday when a car bomb went off near an electricity office in a northern Baghdad neighborhood. A car, parked near the office in the Hurriyah neighborhood, exploded at around 9:00 a.m. (0500 GMT). At least four civilians were killed and five wounded in a mortar attack on a Baghdad neighborhood. Thirty-eight bodies were found dumped in the streets of Baghdad. Three policemen attached to the ministry of electricity were killed when their vehicle was hit by a roadside bomb in southern Baghdad's district of Al-Dura. A roadside bomb went off in east Baghdad killing three and wounding another four. Gunmen stormed a bank and kidnapped four employees in central Baghdad. Four employees of a government-owned company were kidnapped by eight armed men in three cars in the commercial heart of the capital. Militants wounded three Iraqi employees for a Kuwaiti mobile phone firm when they attacked their car in southern Baghdad. Gunmen wounded the manager of a small bank in central Baghdad. The bodies of four people were found in a minibus in Baghdad's Adhamiya district. Gunmen wounded a policeman and two civilians in western Baghdad. A roadside bomb killed three people and wounded six others in the district of New Baghdad in the east of the capital. A car bomb killed two people and wounded eight when it exploded in western Baghdad's Hurriya district. Four Katyusha rockets landed on a house killing five residents and wounding four in southern Baghdad. Baqubah: An officer was gunned down in Baqouba. Two policemen and an officer were also killed in clashes with gunmen in the centre of Baquba. Two policemen were killed and two others wounded, including a civilian, in another clash with gunmen near a market in Baquba. One civilian was killed and two others wounded in another attack on a police patrol in the Yarmuk neighbourhood of Baquba. Two civilians were shot dead in separate attacks in Baquba's Tahrir neighbourhood. Najaf: A top aide to al-Sadr and three others from his movement were arrested in a pre-dawn swoop by US and Iraqi forces in the holy city of Najaf, part of a nationwide crackdown on suspects in sectarian killings. Salah al-Obeidi, a close colleague of firebrand Muslim cleric Moqtada al-Sadr, was picked up from his home in Najaf along with cleric Bassim al-Ghuraifi, Sadr's office said. Two others were also arrested, but their identities were not immediately known. Karbala: Gunmen shot and killed three civilians in different parts of Kerbala, 110 km (68 miles) southwest of Baghdad. Diwaniyah: Three roadside bombs went off against a joint US-Iraqi military convoy in Iraq's central city of Diwaniyah, killing two Iraqi soldiers and wounding another two. Diyala: A roadside bomb exploded targeting the governor of Diyala, killing one of his police bodyguards. Nasiriyah: An Italian soldier passed away as a result of the wounds brought back because of a street incident happened this morning to the 6 local hour irachena. (Google translation from Italian) Al Khadra: One policeman was wounded in an attack on the Al-Khadra police station. Mosul: A police officer was killed in a drive-by shooting in Mosul. Fallujah: Four Iraqi soldiers were killed and three wounded when a missile hit their camp northeast of Fallujah. Three Iraqi soldiers were killed in clashes with unknown gunmen in the centre of Fallujah. Parts of two mutilated bodies were found in downtown Fallujah. One was decapitated with hands and legs chopped off but could still be identified by family members, said police Lt. Mohammed Ismail said, without identifying the victim. >> NEWS The BBC has obtained evidence that Israelis have been giving military training to Kurds in northern Iraq. A report on the BBC TV programme Newsnight showed Israeli experts in northern Iraq, drilling Kurdish militias in shooting techniques. Kurdish officials have refused to comment on the report and Israel has denied it knows of any involvement. The revelation is set to cause enormous problems for the Kurds, not only in Iraq but also in the wider region. British and Italian forces handed over control of the southern province of Dhi Qar to Iraqi troops. Dhi Qar, which has been under British control since 2003, is the second of 18 provinces to be handed over to Iraqi forces after Japanese forces withdrew from Muthanna, also in the south, in July. Although the Iraqis took over security responsibility for Dhi Qar, UK troops will retain what they call "operational over-watch" and occupation forces will be stationed nearby to deal with any security emergency, Reuters reported. About 1,800 Italian forces, under British command, have been responsible for much of the security work in Dhi Qar. The Italians are expected to leave Iraq within eight weeks, said a UK military spokesman. Torture is rampant in Iraqi prisons and police detention centers, and may be worse than under Saddam Hussein's rule, a U.N. human rights investigator said on Thursday . "The situation as far as torture is concerned in Iraq is now completely out of hand," Manfred Nowak, the U.N. special rapporteur on torture and cruelty, told reporters in Geneva. "The situation is so bad that many people say that it is worse than in the times of Saddam Hussein," he said. (...) He also cited reports of inhumane treatment in U.S.- and foreign-run detention centers, but said conditions there seemed to have improved since an international furor over mistreatment of prisoners by U.S. forces at the Abu Ghraib prison. >> REPORTS The number of Iraqi civilians killed in July and August hit 6,599, a record-high number that is far greater than initial estimates suggested, the United Nations said Wednesday. That raises new questions about U.S. and Iraqi forces' ability to bring peace to Baghdad, where the bulk of the violent deaths occurred. Iraq's government, set up in 2006, is "currently facing a generalized breakdown of law and order which presents a serious challenge to the institutions of Iraq," it [the report from the U.N. Assistance Mission in Iraq's Human Rights office] said. A confidential Pentagon assessment finds that an overwhelming majority of Iraq's Sunni Muslims support the insurgency that has been fighting against U.S. troops and the Iraqi government, ABC News has learned. Officials won't say how the assessment was made but found that support for the insurgency has never been higher, with approximately 75 percent of the country's Sunni Muslims in agreement. When the Pentagon started surveying Iraqi public opinion in 2003, Sunni support for the insurgents stood at approximately 14 percent. The news comes as September is on track to become one of the deadliest months this year for U.S. troops in Iraq. Forty-nine Americans have been killed this month, with four deaths today. DAHR JAMAIL AND ALI AL-FADHILY: HOME RAIDS PROVOKE INCREASED UNREST "Operation Forward Together should be called 'To Hell Together'," 53-year-old Hamid Fassal, an estate broker from the Dora region of Baghdad told IPS, referring to the major U.S.-Iraqi joint security campaign launched in June. "They should be ashamed of what's going on after four years of plans and such huge expenditure. The result is only more deaths and more agony for all Iraqis." U.S. troops accompanied by Iraqi soldiers have conducted raids across much of the Sunni region of Iraq in search of death squads. Several Iraqis say they are surprised about the areas searched because they say U.S. forces know that the majority of death squads are located in the Shia areas. "I do not understand what they are really looking for and whether they are doing it right," Salim al-Juboori of the Sherq Journal in Baghdad told IPS. "They searched Amiriya, Adhamiyah, Dora and other places in Baghdad where citizens are the victims of gangs who come from other places under government flags, and during curfew hours." Residents of the Amiriya neighbourhood of Baghdad recently faced a week-long blockade after U..S. troops raided more than 6,000 houses. Residents had to face checkpoints and body searches. read in full… COLLECTIVE PUNISHMENT IN IRAQ’S AL ANBAR "Ramadi, the capital of al-Anbar province, is still living with the daily terror of its people getting killed by snipers and its infrastructure being destroyed," said Ahmad, a local doctor. "This city has been facing the worst of the American terror and destruction for more two years now, and the world is silent." Last week, The Washington Post, citing recent U. S. Marine Corps secret report, stated that "the prospects for securing that country's western Anbar province are dim and. . . there is almost nothing the U.S. military can do to improve the political and social situation there." "For days and even weeks is routine reaction to the resistance", Asia Times quoted Ahmad as saying. "Guys of the resistance do not need water and electricity; it's the families that are being harmed, and their lives which are at stake." University professors in Anbar reported numerous attacks on their campus. "Nearly every week we face raids by the Americans or their Iraqi colleagues," said one professor who demanded anonymity. Also students said that U.S. forces occupied their school last week. "We've been under great pressure from the Americans since the very first days of their occupation of Iraq," one student said. Those raids by the occupation troops and the relentless attacks reported across the province resulted in huge damage and grave destruction of Ramadi’s infrastructure. "The infrastructure destruction is huge around the governorate building in downtown Ramadi," said Ali al-Ani, a 24-year-old student. "And they are destroying the market, too." Also earlier this week, Inter Press Service (IPS) reported that the U.S. army was bulldozing entire blocks of buildings near the governorate claiming that the raid was aimed at curbing “insurgency” attacks targeting government buildings there. read in full… >> COMMENTARY AND ANALYSIS THE ZARQAWI AFFAIR, PART 7 OF 15 Why does Israel want to partition Iraq? Does Israel possess the material means to do it? And, where does Zarqawi fit in this plan? For all practical reasons, Israel (via decision makers loyal to it and to Zionism inside the American regimes since George H. W. Bush) had, de facto, partitioned Iraq with the so-called No-Fly Zones (NFZs) on Iraq’s national airspace after the end of the Gulf War Slaughter in 1991. (…) In breaking Iraq’s historical continuity and national mosaics, the American occupation and the strategy to conquer it had only brought to fruition a long effort by Israel to destroy Iraq. Still, while it was easy to separate the Kurdish areas from Iraq, it was still difficult to partition Arab Iraq with the same logic, because we are dealing with one homogenous ethnic group (Iraqi Arabs) that is also religiously homogenous except for conflict in interpretation of religious dogmas. Again, since the Kurdish region is technically out of Iraq’s control, severing it ethnically from Iraq sets the pace to partition the rest of the country, but this time on a confessional basis. But how can the American-Israeli axis partition Arab Iraq on a confessional basis regardless of common ethnic heritage of Iraqi Muslim Arabs? The Zionist planners of the American Empire came up with one single strategy: a war between Sunni and Shiites. If that was the strategy, what was the tactic? Answer: create a situation of incompatibility problems strong enough to justify a split. But Iraqi Arabs, be they Shiites or Sunnis have never battled each other. Socially, Arab Shiites and Arab Sunnis are identical ethnical twins in all forms of societal transaction, cultural origins, religions, etc. That means they are not somatically distinguished groups as African-Americans vs. Caucasians. In other words, unless because of specific religious rituals, no one could ever differentiate between a Shiite or Sunni; the only distinguishing mark between them is the attire of their respective clergy. In Iraq’s secular society, there is no telling who is Sunni or Shiite. Under these conditions of total, innate similarity (except the Shiite’s exaggeration over their veneration for Imam Ali -- Mohammad’s cousin -- and his son Hussein) creating a war between Iraqi Arabs was an insurmountable barrier that the United States seeks to overcome -- but only to a certain degree -- with a two-pronged catalyst that includes fuel and igniter. As fuel, the U.S. drummed up the notion that Saddam Hussein persecuted the Shiites -- Iraq’s relative confessional majority. Of course, that charge is fictitious and its sole purpose was to create a psychological condition predisposed to arouse confessional passions. The reality is different though. In fact, although the Shiites did not occupy the very highest posts in the Saddam government (these were reserved to his hometown mates), they were, nonetheless, the backbone of Saddam’s rule. Second, Hussein only persecuted only those who opposed his political system regardless of their origins. Briefly, taking advantage of rivalry between Shiism and Sunnism, the U.S., in collaboration with Sistani, Hakim, Chalabi, Allawi, Rubeiee, Jaffari, and Makia created the myth that the time had come for the Shiites to rule Iraq -- keep in mind, the U.S. strategic target is to rule Iraq alone but with the help of the Shiites as inconsequential bureaucrats and facilitators. In order for the U.S. to push the myth of Shiite rule in Iraq and induce the Shiites to separate from Iraq, the U.S. had to create a Sunni figure and endow it with an extreme hatred for Shiism. To hit two birds with one stone, the U.S. invented an anti-Shiite adversarial personality that combined two qualities: 1) it must be a "Qaedaist," so the U.S. could say that is was battling al-Qaeda in Iraq, and 2) it must be an Shiite hater in the tradition of Saudi Wahabism. . . . Ladies and gentlemen, here enters Zarqawi. read in full… THE PARADISE OF THE GRAVE Any government in the world with such killing rate like every day in Iraq, would declare its resignation immediately as an admission of its failure in providing its people with the basic requirement any people need to live like human beings. With all this vivid failure on all levels and the best indication for it, is the escalation of violation and increase of number of Iraqis who are fleeing the hell of Iraq, with all this shortage in fuel, power an water and endless list of red marks the Iraqi government gets for its shameful performance, still all its members, from the president till the MPS whom quarrelling all the time, all of them are clinging to their chairs to the last breath. Moreover, when they show on TV, they will talk about the achievement of the National Unity government though any statement aired by the president, will be crossed by the premier or in the opposite, and same with ministers and the MPS, as if they do not meet and agree about a unified speech, but again, it does not matter, Iraqis are busy with their victims, their IDS, their names, their displacement, their thinking of getting up early in the morning to stand in the line for gas, though every month if not every week, they will hear in the news about the soaring level of Iraqi oil exportation and revenues. I really do not know what the minister of Defence, minister of Interior and minister of National Security are doing? do they read the news? do they bother themselves to look at the statistics of the forensic department and think of the Iraqi people for a moment not of their personal interest and admit their failure in putting an end for this brutal killing. Saddam was accused of his obsession with the presidency chair and there is no power can move him out except the American power who came to save the Iraqi people, but now, all these people who are in power, are supported by the Americans, in the contrary, the only power that can move them out, is the departure of the US forces, they will runaway within a minute, simply because of the non-loyalty of the Iraqi army and police to the government, but to their ethnic minorities and clerics. read in full… >> BEYOND IRAQ TOLERATING INTOLERANCE Upsetting one out of every five people living today may be of no concern for His Holiness—made evident by his half-hearted, “sorry my infallible words offended you,” apology—but one can surely understand why some Muslims took offense to his recent speech. Were his comments his own words—maybe not—but it doesn’t take a scholar to comprehend the inappropriateness in referencing 14th century Byzantine emperor, Manuel II Paleologus, who proclaimed, “Show me just what Mohammed brought that was new, and there you will find things only evil and inhuman, such as his command to spread by the sword the faith he preached.” Setting aside Christian Crusade amnesia, it’s like quoting Bin Laden at ground zero on the five year anniversary of 9/11. Unless you’re quoting him to call him crazy, don’t expect applause from the audience. read in full… QUOTE OF THE DAY: "The U.S. military had initially claimed a drastic drop in the [Baghdad] death toll for August, but the estimate was revised upward after the United States revealed it had not counted people killed by bombs, mortars, rockets or other mass attacks." -- from today's AP story U.N.: Iraq civilian deaths hit a record