Kurdistan Bolstered by Influx of Arab Academics
24 Jan 2007
Higher education in Baghdad and other troubled cities dealt a blow as lecturers flee sectarian violence for the Kurdish north. Academic life in Baghdad and other strife-torn cities has almost come to a halt because many academic staff have either gone abroad or moved to safer provinces. Some 200 lecturers and assistant lecturers have left the capital for the relatively-stable Kurdish north. Last week insurgents attacked Mustansiriyah University, killing at least 70 students and staff members and wounding 138, in the deadliest violence in the country so far this year. In November, the dean of the College of Economics was assassinated. And then a few days later, a number of higher education ministry employees were abducted in broad daylight by gunmen masquerading as ministry of interior forces. Universities remain open but are more or less deserted. For although campuses are guarded by police and army, staff and students still feel like easy prey for militants once they leave the premises.

Senate Passes Nonbinding Anti-”Surge” Measure
23 Jan 2007
The Senate Foreign Relations Committee, now controlled by Democrats, voted 12-9 today, largely along party lines, for a nonbinding measure calling President Bush’s “surge” plan “not in the national interest.”

Red Crescent Gradually Resumes Its Work in Baghdad
23 Jan 2007
The Iraq Red Crescent is steadily resuming its work in Baghdad after it suspended its activities in the capital for more than three weeks following the kidnapping by militants of its staff members and volunteers on 17 December 2006. Of the 30 staff members kidnapped from the heavily guarded Red Crescent headquarters, 10 are yet to be released. The aid agency has been the main conduit for the distribution of supplies, food and non-food items, countrywide, according to the Ministry of Displacement and Migration and local aid agencies. Thousands of families became desperate after the suspension of the Red Crescent’s work in Baghdad and the closure of 40 of its subsidiary offices in the capital.

No end to violence in Saddam Hussein’s home province
23 Jan 2007
Home of Iraq’s deceased former president Saddam Hussein, Salah ad-Din province has been rocked by anti-US insurgency, assassinations and sectarian violence ever since US-led forces invaded the country in 2003. Situated some 200km north of the capital, Baghdad, and with a population of about 1.6 million, Salah ad-Din province is located in the heart of the so-called ‘Sunni triangle’. Nearly four years of violence in this province have claimed the lives of about 4,800 civilians, according to a local police officer who spoke on condition of anonymity as he was not authorized to release such figures. Samarra is a city which belongs to Salah ad-Din. The city is about an hour’s drive south of Tikrit, the capital of the province and Saddam’s hometown. On 22 February, 2006, the Shi’ite golden dome shrine in Samarra was bombed by extremists, widely believed to be Sunnis. The attack spawned days of reprisal attacks between the country’s two major Muslim sects, Shi’ites and Sunnis, and was one of the main causes for an escalation of sectarian violence throughout Iraq.

The Union of the State
23 Jan 2007
“By the end of President Bush’s State of the Union address,” writes eIraq’s Laurie King, “it was clear that the unifying force upon which this administration continues to depend is fear – of terrorists and purveyors of evil who wish to harm or destroy our civilization. The Union of our State requires clear thinking, courageous decisions, and humility in the face of mistakes that have destroyed the lives of thousands of Americans and tens of thousands of Iraqis. The new members of Congress, as well as the people who voted for them, should resist the easy escape of uniting Americans on the basis of fear, blind pride, ignorance and intolerance.”

“I cannot stand the constant military raids in my home”
22 Jan 2007
“My name is Lina Massufi. I’m a 32-year-old laboratory assistant who works 10 hours a day just to make enough money to raise my children. My life has been like hell over the past three months. US and Iraqi soldiers have raided my house more than 12 times. My husband, Khalil, was killed during the US invasion in 2003 when he drove through a closed road and soldiers shot him dead. I live in Haifa Street, one of the most dangerous places to live in Baghdad today. The area is infamous for its huge number of insurgents. This is why Iraqi and US soldiers have increased their activity in the area, constantly raiding homes and arresting men for interrogation.”

U.S. Soldier Speaks Out From Baghdad
22 Jan 2007
More than 1,000 active duty U.S. soldiers have signed a petition to Congress – known as an Appeal for Redress – calling for the withdrawal of all U.S. troops from Iraq. Among them is Sgt. Ronn Cantu of Los Angeles, California. He served in Iraq with the 1st Infantry Division from February 2004 until February 2005 and participated in the second siege of Fallujah in November 2004. He started the website soldiervoices.net to give soldiers a forum to speak about the Iraq war. Cantu was redeployed to Iraq in December 2006 and spoke on the telephone with IPS’s Aaron Glantz.

Iraq’s Struggling Health Care System (Part 3): A Long List of Pricy Failures
22 Jan 2007
Today, almost four years after the toppling of Saddam Hussein, Iraq’s healthcare system is still a shambles. While most hospitals lack basic supplies, dozens of incomplete clinics and warehoused high-technology equipment remain as a testament to the U.S. experiment in Iraq. Meanwhile the hospitals are grappling with an unexpected health crisis – the daily toll of bombs and sectarian clashes, which leaves over a hundred dead each day and more seriously injured. In mid-December, dozens of workers for the Iraqi Red Crescent, one of the few groups still operating in the country, were kidnapped in broad daylight from its Baghdad offices, forcing the group to shut down operations in the capital. Since the invasion, 2,000 Iraqi doctors have been murdered and some 250 kidnapped. Altogether more than half of Iraq’s 34,000 doctors have fled the country. Even the repair and expansion of existing health care facilities in safe parts of the country was botched, leaving hospital administrators frustrated by the lack of basic supplies and simple training.

Bush Continues to Unite the World…Against Him
22 Jan 2007
More people around the world have an unfavorable opinion of U.S. policies than at any time in recent memory, according to a new BBC poll released here Monday. The survey, which polled more than 26,000 people in 25 countries, including the U.S., between November and January, found that a 49 percent plurality overall believes the U.S. is playing a “mainly negative” role in the world today, compared to less than a third (32 percent) who said Washington’s influence was “mainly positive.” And in the 18 countries where respondents were asked the same question in each of the past two years, the latest poll found a substantial drop in the percentage who said they viewed U.S. influence as positive, from 40 percent in 2005, to 36 percent last year, to 29 percent in 2007. Respondents in the United States also showed greater opposition to their government’s policies than in previous years, according to the survey.

Thousands of Iraqi refugees seek asylum
22 Jan 2007
Thousands of Iraqis who have fled the violence in their country are stranded in Lebanon seeking asylum, according to a senior United Nations official. Having not signed the UN’s Convention relating to the Status of Refugees, introduced in 1951, Lebanon does not grant asylum to any refugees, despite the presence on its territory of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians. “Ninety-five percent of asylum seekers today enter Lebanon illegally through the Syrian borders and 80 percent of them are Iraqis. So Lebanese authorities send them to jail, and force them to go back to their countries of origin no matter what,” said Dominique Tohme, Protection Officer in Lebanon for the UN Refugee Agency.

Kirkuk’s time-bomb could explode at any time
22 Jan 2007
The oil-rich city of Kirkuk, some 290km north of the capital, Baghdad, was long considered a microcosm of Iraq with its diversity of ethnic and religious groups. With Turkomen, Kurds, Assyrians, Chaldeans and Arabs living together in peace, it was a melting pot of the various communities that reflected Iraq’s demographic makeup. However, the government of former Iraqi president Saddam Hussein changed all that. Its ‘Arabisation’ policy in the early 1980s and during the 1990s forced tens of thousands of Kurds and other non-Arabs to flee Kirkuk. They were replaced with pro-government Arabs from the impoverished south. But after the US-led invasion, Kirkuk was widely seen as a tinderbox as Kurds and other non-Arabs streamed back with their house keys in hand only to find their homes were either sold or given to Arabs. the city of more than one million residents has witnessed escalating violence with bombings, assassinations and shootings directed against civilians, Iraqi security forces, US forces and political rivals.

“The Big Push”: Mired in the Trenches of the Iraq Fiasco
21 Jan 2007
National Security Advisor Stephen J. Hadley referred to increasing the number of American troops in Iraq as “the big push” that would bring victory closer. “The Big Push” is a phrase that came into the language with another troop surge that was supposed to bring another war to victory: the 1916 Battle of the Somme. The British army lost nearly 20,000 killed and some 40,000 wounded or missing on the first day alone. Like the Big Push of the Somme, the Big Push in Iraq is a reapplication of tactics that have already proven a calamitous failure. As the outspoken retired U.S. Army Lieutenant General William Odom, former director of the National Security Agency, puts it, it’s like finding yourself in a hole and then digging deeper.

“I want to live for my three children”
21 Jan 2007
A 35-year old Iraqi widow talks of her illness and her experiences in Iraq’s struggling health care system. “I can no longer stand the situation of our hospitals in Iraq,” she writes. “I’m tired of waiting for assistance. And when a doctor comes to take care of me, he is usually rude, gives me a wrong diagnosis and, in the end, I find that I cannot get medicines in the hospital pharmacy anyway. I want to live for my three children. I have been washing other peoples’ clothes to get money to feed my children. Without me, they will join the army of orphans begging in the streets of Baghdad.”

Southern Tribes Joining Armed Resistance
21 Jan 2007
Violence is spreading further across Iraq, as Shia Arab tribes in the south begin to engage occupation forces in new armed resistance. Resistance in the southern parts of Iraq has been escalating over the last three months, leading to increased casualties among British and other occupation forces. In the last seven months, at least 24 British soldiers have been killed in southern Iraq, with at least as many wounded, according to the independent website Iraq Coalition Casualties. So far at least 128 British soldiers have died in Iraq, along with 123 of other nationalities. Most of these have been stationed in southern Iraq. Casualties earlier were far lower. Attacks against occupation forces appear to stem more a growing nationalism. “This is not about vengeance,” a former Iraqi army officer from Kut, 200 km south of Baghdad told IPS in Baghdad. “People have lost hope in the U.S.-led occupation’s promises, and they are thinking of saving the country from Iranian influence which has been supported, or at least allowed by the Multi-National Forces.”

Iraq’s Struggling Health Care System (Part 2): U.S. “Cure” for Health Sector Worse than the Disease?
21 Jan 2007
While some critics of the stumbling rehabilitation of Iraq’s health care system focused on the failure to deliver basic infrastructure and supplies, others questioned the whole U.S. approach. Unlike other poorer countries, which focused on mass health care using primary care practitioners, in the 1970s, Iraq had developed a Westernized system of sophisticated hospitals with advanced medical procedures, provided by specialist physicians and financed by oil revenues. A July 2003 report by UNICEF and the World Health Organization noted that prior to 1990, 97 percent of the urban dwellers and 71 percent of the rural population had access to free primary health care; just 2 percent of hospital beds were privately managed. Infant mortality rates fell. The 1991 war and the sanctions destroyed the capital-intensive model of free and sophisticated care. Water was often contaminated and the electricity supply erratic, making it difficult to operate the expensive medical equipment. Deaths from diarrhea rose fivefold and malnutrition-related diseases such as respiratory infections became widespread. After the 2003 U.S. invasion, sanctions were lifted, and the government finally started to earn cash on its oil income, allowing it to raise medical salaries. But the damage to the health care system was hard to reverse.

Kurdistan, low in violence but lacking services
18 Jan 2007
Unlike other parts of the country, the three-province autonomous northern region of Kurdistan is not the Iraq of roadside bombs and beheadings. It is relatively safe and well-protected by an experienced security force. Locals and foreigners alike can walk around freely and there is even an active nightlife. “Have you seen the other parts of Iraq? It’s spectacular. It’s peaceful,” states a website advertisement to lure tourists and investors to Kurdistan, which consists of Sulaymaniyah, Dahuk and Arbil provinces. “Welcome to Iraqi Kurdistan where democracy has been practiced for over a decade. This is not a dream. It’s the other Iraq,” adds the advertisement. However, not all Kurds are in accordance with the picture painted of their region by advertisements or politicians.

Iraq’s Struggling Health Care System (Part 1): What They Asked For, They Did Not Get
18 Jan 2007
The convoy of flatbed trucks picked up its cargo at Baghdad International Airport last spring and sped northwest, stacked high with crates of expensive medical equipment. But instead of being delivered to 150 brand-new Primary Health Care centres (PHCs) as originally planned, the Eagle Global Logistics vehicles were directed to drop them off at a storage warehouse in Abu Ghraib. Not only did some of the equipment arrive damaged at the warehouse, owned by PWC of Kuwait, one in 14 crates was missing, according to the delivery documents. The shipment was fairly typical: Military auditors would later calculate that roughly 46 percent of some 70 million dollars in medical equipment deliveries made to the Abu Ghraib warehouse last spring had missing or damaged crates or contained boxes that were mislabeled or not labeled at all. Even if the equipment finally makes it through the bureaucratic logjam, lack of trained personnel to operate it, especially outside major cities, will severely limit its utility. The Army Corps had written a 15-day training plan into the contract, but over time, this had been whittled down to 10 and then to just three days. Iraqi Ministry of Health officials have given up hope that any training at all will accompany the sophisticated equipment.

Democracy Languishes, but Neo-Con Strategy Lives
18 Jan 2007
The Project for the New American Century may have effectively closed up shop two years ago and its key neo-conservative allies in the administration, such as Scooter Libby and Douglas Feith, may be long gone, but the group’s five-year-old Middle East strategy remains very much alive. This is not the “Wilsonian” strategy of transforming Iraq into a model of democracy and pluralism that will then spread domino-like across the entire benighted region of autocrats, monarchs and theocrats whose oppression and backwardness have, in the neo-con narrative, been the main cause of anti-U.S. Islamic extremism. On the contrary, that “idealist” vision has largely disappeared from the administration’s discourse, particularly over the past year as Iraq slipped steadily into sectarian civil war, despite having been enthusiastically embraced by George W. Bush and his neo-conservative supporters after their early justifications for war in Iraq – Saddam Hussein’s alleged weapons of mass destruction and ties to al Qaeda – proved unfounded.

Call for determined action by authorities after five more media employees killed
17 Jan 2007
Just weeks after the UN security council’s adoption of Resolution 1738 on the protection of journalists in armed conflicts, a new string of killings of journalists in Iraq has underlined the urgent need for the Iraqi government to take determined measures to protect its country’s media personnel, Reporters Without Borders said today. A total of 146 journalists and media assistants have been killed since a US-led coalition invaded Iraq in March 2003.

U.S. Offers Scant Help to Fleeing Refugees
17 Jan 2007
With some two million of its citizens having fled to other countries and another 1.7 million internally displaced, Iraq has become one of the world’s biggest and fastest growing humanitarian crises for which the United States should take far more responsibility, according to human rights groups and other experts. The administration of President George W. Bush, which is currently spending roughly 30 million dollars a day on military operations in Iraq, has earmarked only 20 million dollars for Iraqi humanitarian needs in bilateral aid for all of 2007, the administration’s senior refugee official, Assistant Secretary of State Ellen Sauerbrey, told a Senate hearing Tuesday. It has also granted refugee status to only 466 Iraqis since 2003, she told the Senate Judiciary Committee.

The War Becomes More Unholy
17 Jan 2007
A stepped up military offensive that targets mosques, religious leaders and Islamic customs is leading many Iraqis to believe that the U.S.-led invasion really was a ‘holy war’. Photographs are being circulated of black crosses painted on mosque walls and on copies of the Quran, and of soldiers dumping their waste inside mosques. New stories appear frequently of raids on mosques and brutal treatment of Islamic clerics, leading many Iraqis to ask if the invasion and occupation was a war against Islam. Many Iraqis now recall remarks by U.S. President George W. Bush shortly after the events of Sep. 11, 2001 when he told reporters that “this crusade, this war on terrorism, is going to take a while.”

An Iraqi Parliamentarian Considers ‘The Surge’
17 Jan 2007
Nadim al-Jabiri, a professor of political science at Baghdad University, a member of Iraq’s parliament, and the head of the Islamic Virtue Party, considers the the new Bush administration strategy for Iraq, and warns the new strategy will “legitimize the Iraqi armed resistance to the occupation,” will “destroy all non-violent options,” and “could lead to increasing the civil violence, and might even spark an Arab-Kurd civil war.” Moreover, al-Jabiri writes, “Increasing the U.S. troops will show Iraqis that the U.S. administration is against setting a timetable for withdrawing all the occupation forces.”

US, Jordan, Syria Must Open Doors to Iraq Refugees
16 Jan 2007
With the Senate Judiciary Committee holding hearings today on the plight of Iraqi refugees, Human Rights Watch called upon the Bush administration to share the responsibility of protecting refugees fleeing the war in Iraq. The administration should significantly increase the number of Iraqi refugees it will resettle this year and contribute quickly and generously to the UN refugee agency’s appeal for financial assistance, Human Rights Watch said. Jordan has shut its border to Iraqi men between the ages of 17 and 35, and a growing number of Palestinian refugees trying to flee Iraq are currently stranded at Syria’s border. Human Rights Watch said that Jordan and Syria are violating on a daily basis the most fundamental principle of refugee protection – nonrefoulement, which prohibits the return of refugees to persecution or serious harm.

Anything But a Happy New Year in Iraq
16 Jan 2007
Iraqis have left a bloody 2006 behind, but the two opening weeks of 2007 do not bode well for the rest of this year. As the United Nations reported a death toll of 34,000 civilians for last year, the non-government organization Iraq Body Count suggested that more than 1,000 civilians have been killed during the New Year already. And that count came before the bombings at Baghdad University Tuesday. The high death toll comes amid heated debates in Baghdad and Washington on the ability of Iraqi and U.S. forces to secure the war-torn country. Many in Iraq doubt that the current strategies could resolve the security and political crisis that the country is sinking deeper into. They see the factors of instability in 2006 continuing into this year.

UN death figures paint a grim picture
16 Jan 2007
The Iraqi government must move fast to curb sectarian violence and establish the rule of law to prevent the deaths of more innocent civilians, said a United Nations senior official and an Iraqi analyst. On Tuesday the U.N. Assistance Mission for Iraq (UNAMI) said just over 34,000 Iraqi civilians were killed last year and nearly 37,000 wounded. “Without significant progress in the rule of law, sectarian violence will continue indefinitely and eventually spiral out of control,” Gianni Magazzeni, the UNAMI chief, said as he issued UNAMI’s ninth bimonthly report on the human rights situation in Iraq at a news conference in Baghdad. The report, which covered the period of 1 November to 31 December 2006, stated that 6,376 civilians were killed violently in November and December – 4,731 of them in Baghdad – and that most died as a result of gunshot wounds. This breaks down to be just over 100 deaths a day.