Daily Iraq War News - End the War in Iraq

Most refugees are refusing to go home, due to the ongoing violence. Despite the security gains of the past year, a recent survey by the UN Refugee Agency (UNHCR), found only four percent of respondents planning to return to Iraq. Thursday's violence is telling enough of their reasons to fear.

In Mosul, four policemen were killed when their patrol approached the body of a policeman in civilian clothes lying near a booby-trapped wooden cart. Gunmen also killed Mahmoud Younis, a local leader of the Iraqi Islamic Party. Three policemen were wounded when a car bomb exploded in the parking lot belonging to the police directorate in Baaj.

In Baghdad, eight members of one Iraqi family, including three woman and two children, were killed when an old mine brought home by one of their children exploded inside their house. Three U.S-backed neighbourhood patrol group members were killed and two wounded on Wednesday when gunmen in a car opened fire at their checkpoint in the Sulaikh district. One person was wounded when a roadside bomb went off on Wednesday in central Kirkuk.

The U.S. military said its forces spread out across central and northern Iraq Thursday, detaining 25 Iraqis. U.S. and Iraqi forces are preparing to launch another siege against Fallujah under the pretext of combating “terror,” according to local media. The city has now been placed under tight curfew. The two U.S. sieges of the city during 2004 led to the destruction of approximately 75 percent of the city, thousands of civilian deaths, and the displacement of hundreds of thousands of people. There are meanwhile no signs of improvement of any other kind in Fallujah. Walls now divide the city into sectarian sections, with poverty, unemployment and suffering on all sides.

A videotape of the execution of British aid worker Margaret Hassan in 2004 leaves questions as to who her killers were. Kidnapped by men in police uniforms, it is now November, 2004, Margaret is shown being excuted by gun in a tape that was handed over the Al Jazeera. In the video a lone man wearing a grubby grey and black checked shirt and ill-fitting, baggy trousers, a scarf concealing his face fires a gun into her head. Margaret's husband Tahseen remains suspicious that a "foreign" hand took her away. As Margaret once exclaimed, "these people have been reduced to penury. They live in shit. And when you have no money and no food, you don't worry about democracy or who your leaders are." posted 07 August, 2008

Drought, war hits Iraqi farmers; Diyala arrests in hundreds; Gen. Chiarelli promoted

Across Iraq, farmers are struggling with the worst drought the country has faced in years. Adding to the disaster is ongoing occupation and war in many of the breadbasket areas - such as Diyala - of Iraq. Instead of crops, shriveled, dusty fields stretch as far as the eye can see. U.S. security forces, working on ousting insurgents, have contributed to farmers' woes by diverting their canals and burning their fields.

Majid al Khalid, Diyala's top agriculture official, says he has never seen it this bad. He says the drought and war has damaged more than 120,000 acres of farmland and killed any summer vegetable crop. One-third of the fruit orchards are also in bad shape. A two-hour drive south of Baghdad, outside the city of Diwaniyah, the farm belt is also more brown than green. Irrigation ditches that run through the fields are dry and cracked. Azzawi Selman Abdullah crumbles fistfuls of soil from his water-starved farm to demonstrate what the drought has done to his land. The 47-year-old farmer says this field should be lush with cucumbers he planted in the spring. He adds that instead, everything on his 150 acres is dying — even the weeds.

In Mosul on Wednesday, a suicide car bomber, targeting an Iraqi army patrol, killed one person and wounded eleven, including one soldier. Gunmen also wounded a man and a child in a drive-by shooting. One person in Arbil was injured by a Katyusha rocket launched from Iran. In Baghdad, two bomb attacks targeted a convoy of a foreign security firm in the Karradah neighborhood and an Iraqi police patrol on Wednesday, wounding six people. There was sporadic shooting in other areas of the city. The bodies of 16 men were discovered on Tuesday in different areas of a village near Baquba.

The total number of suspects arrested since the beginning of a military offensive in Diyala last week has reached 483, the Defence Ministry said in a statement. Iraqi security forces also arrested three women on charges of plotting suicide bombings against the military.

Iraq on Tuesday announced it was seeking six billion dollars in investment over the next three years to fund a masterplan to revitalise conflict-torn Baghdad with new hotels, restaurants and highways. "A year ago, we were not able to talk about such projects as we were worried about security issues. We have succeeded in that area and now we will succeed in construction," said Tahsin al-Sheikhli, spokesman for the civilian wing of Baghdad's security plan. Baghdad suffered considerable damage in the US-led invasion of 2003 and the violence that followed. It also endured the effects of a decade of UN sanctions.

Lt. Gen. Peter W. Chiarelli was promoted to four-star general yesterday in Washington. Chiarelli commanded the 1st Cavalry Division based at Fort Hood, Texas, in August 2003 and deployed to Iraq as the commander of Task Force Baghdad - from February 2004 to March 2005. He also served as commander, Multi-National Corps-Iraq from January 2006 to December 2006. In his Pentagon job as the Army's vice chief of staff, Chiarelli will serve as the principal advisor and assistant to the chief of staff of the Army, advising and assisting the CSA on issues related to personnel, logistics, operations and plans. posted 06 August, 2008

Iceland, Sweden accept Palestinians; Suskind: Bush "lied; $300 M for PTSD; Agent Orage link

Palestinian refugees stranded for two years in desperate conditions on the Iraq-Syria border will be resettled in Iceland and Sweden in the coming weeks, the United Nations refugee agency said Tuesday. More than two dozen vulnerable Palestinians from the Al Waleed camp will be leaving for Iceland while another group of 155 refugees from the Al Tanf camp are bound for Sweden, UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) spokesman Ron Redmond said. Redmond said that an estimated 2,300 Palestinians were living in camps along the border amid "dire" health conditions, unable to return to Iraq or cross into neighbouring countries.

In Tuesday violence, gunmen attacked on Monday evening the home of Sheikh Ibrahim al-Karbouli, a leader of a U.S.-backed local patrol unit in Yusufiya and there were several casualties. Militants slit the throats of three members of a U.S.-backed neighbourhood patrol who were guarding a checkpoint just southwest of Kirkuk. In Baghdad, a roadside bomb wounded six people including two policemen in Palestine street while a blast struck the commercial Bab al Muadham district, killing one person and wounding five others. U.S. forces said captured 15 militants during operations in central and northern Iraq on Tuesday while Iraqi soldiers killed two militants and arrested 99 others during last 24 hours. Five bodies were found in Suwayra, Hilla and Mosul.

President Bush committed an impeachable offense by ordering the CIA to to manufacture a false pretense for the Iraq war in the form of a backdated, handwritten document linking Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda, according to journalist Ron Suskind. The author writes that Bush’s action is “one of the greatest lies in modern American political history” and says he spoke on the record with U.S. intelligence officials who stated that Bush was informed unequivocally in January 2003 that Saddam had no weapons of mass destruction. Nonetheless, his book relates, Bush decided to invade Iraq three months later — with the forged letter from the head of Iraqi intelligence to Saddam bolstering the U.S. rationale to go into war. On page 371 of “The Way of the World,” Suskind describes the White House’s concoction of a forged letter purportedly from the hand of Habbush to Saddam Hussein to justify the United States’ decision to go to war. CIA officers Richer and John Maguire, who oversaw the Iraq Operations Group, are both on the record in Suskind’s book confirming the existence of the fake Habbush letter. The White House denied the claim.

The Pentagon is spending an unprecedented $300 million this summer on research for post-traumatic stress disorder and traumatic brain injury (TBI). The money — the most spent in one year on military medical research since a $210 million breast cancer study in 1993 — will fund 171 research projects on two of the most prevalent injuries of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. An estimated 1.4 million Americans suffer TBI each year, leaving 235,000 hospitalized and 50,000 dead, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The Pentagon also will target new ways of delivering therapy to PTSD victims living in remote areas of the U.S. and reducing the stigma that can keep victims from seeking help. The military funding will go toward evaluating up to 20 different medications for TBI and studying ways of regenerating damaged brain cells. A study released in April by the Rand Corp. think tank estimates 300,000 current or former combat troops have PTSD or depression, and up to 320,000 may have suffered a brain injury.

In related news, UC Davis Cancer Center physicians today released results of research showing that Vietnam War veterans exposed to Agent Orange have greatly increased risks of prostate cancer and even greater risks of getting the most aggressive form of the disease as compared to those who were not exposed. "While others have linked Agent Orange to cancers such as soft-tissue sarcomas, Hodgkin's disease and non-Hodgkin's lymphoma, there is limited evidence so far associating it with prostate cancer," said Karim Chamie, lead author of the study and resident physician with the UC Davis Department of Urology and the VA Northern California Health Care System. "Here we report on the largest study to date of Vietnam War veterans exposed to Agent Orange and the incidence of prostate cancer." It is estimated that more than 20 million gallons of the dioxin tetrachlorodibenzo-para-dioxin (TCDD), also known as "rainbow herbicides," were sprayed between 1962 and 1971, contaminating both ground cover and ground troops. Prostate cancer is the second most common malignancy and the second leading cause of cancer death in American men. It is estimated that there will be about 186,320 new cases of prostate cancer in the United States in 2008 and about 28,660 men will die of the disease this year. posted 05 August, 2008