Iraq Occupation Focus
www.iraqoccupationfocus.org.uk
Newsletter No.176
July 1st, 2011
Contents
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Military news
US military base in Iraq takes hits from rockets
Big News reports (June 12th): US military bases have come under concentrated rocket attacks in Iraq. In what seems to be the most serious raid on American forces since May 2009, six rockets have been fired into a base in the southern city of Nassiriya.
Another US military base was attacked in the northeastern city of Baqouba.
U.S. helicopters fire on attackers in Iraq oil hub: military
Reuters report (June 15th): U.S. military helicopters fired on suspected militia fighters in southern Iraq, killing one, in a rare American air strike responding to a rocket attack on an airport, the U.S. military said.
The U.S. response at Basra came at a sensitive time as Baghdad and Washington debate whether American soldiers need to stay past a planned withdrawal at the end of 2011 after they finished combat missions last year.
Militia set up within Iraqi ministry, Maliki says
McClatchy reports (June 15th): In a dramatic revelation after a series of major security breaches, Prime Minister Nouri al Maliki has linked the assassinations of security officials to his government and said a "militia" of more than 400 men had been set up within the Interior Ministry, answerable only to an outside political figure he didn't name.
Sadr supporters ready for attacks on US troops
AFP reports (June 25th): Supporters of Shiite radical leader Moqtada al-Sadr have offered to carry out suicide attacks against US troops in Iraq, his office said, as a year-end deadline for a US pullout looms.
The message came from "a group from the Mahdi Army who say they are ready to place themselves under his command to carry out suicide attacks to defend Islam and Iraq, targeting the occupying infidels without hitting civilians or public institutions," Sadr's office said.
Abuse
Iraq Historic Allegations team probe 'is a shambles’
BBC reports (June 14th): The team investigating allegations UK troops abused Iraqi civilians has been called "a shambles". Lawyers for the alleged victims say only one has been interviewed so far, despite the Iraq Historic Allegations (IHAT) team starting work in November.
CIA role suspected in 2003 Iraq prison homicide
AFP reports (June 13th): A secret US federal grand jury is looking into the role of CIA agents in several alleged "war on terror" abuse cases, including the November 2003 homicide of a prisoner at Iraq's notorious Abu Ghraib prison, Time magazine reported.
Protests
Women's Rights Protestors In Iraq sexually assaulted
Nobel Women’s Initiative reports (June 15th): Women protesters were molested and beaten by government-sponsored protesters in Baghdad's Tahrir Square on Friday. The women were part of a delegation from the Organization of Women's Freedom in Iraq(OWFI), protesting to create a visible female presence in the pro-democracy movement.
Thousands Rally in Baghdad Against US Presence
AFP report (June 16th): Thousands of followers of Shiite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr staged a mass rally in Baghdad on Thursday against US forces, as Iraqi leaders consider asking for an extended American troop presence.
At the protest in the mostly Shiite north Baghdad neighbourhood of Sadr City, named after father of the anti-US cleric, several groups of tightly-disciplined demonstrators wearing identical t-shirts emblazoned with Iraqi flags paraded in unison.
Waves of men clad in black trousers and caps bearing the words "I am Iraqi", marched in military-style formation, while others in the rally set fire to American and Israeli flags.
15 men at imminent risk of execution
AI reports (June 21st): Fifteen men, alleged to be members of armed groups, were sentenced to death on 16 June, only days after “confessions” by several of them were broadcast on Iraqi television. They may not have received a fair trial and are at imminent risk of execution.
Daily life
Bitter Feud Between Top Iraqi Leaders Stalls Government
NY Times reports (June 25th): Fifteen months after an election that was supposed to lay the groundwork for Iraq’s future, the government remains virtually paralyzed by a clash between the country’s two most powerful politicians, who refuse to speak to each other. In December, the two politicians, Ayad Allawi, the leader of the Iraqiya bloc, and the country’s prime minister, Nuri Kamal al-Maliki, entered into an American-backed power-sharing agreement. But since then, the men have been unable to agree on who should run the Interior and Defense Ministries, the government’s two most important departments.
The United States has been unable to end the stalemate, demonstrating to some analysts and Iraqis its waning influence here.
UN: Iraqi children used, killed in continuing conflict
M&C report (June 16th): The ongoing conflict in Iraq has killed and maimed hundreds of children while others are used as spies and to lure security forces into ambushes, the UN said in the first report on the status of Iraqi children in armed conflict.
A group monitoring children and armed conflict set up by the UN Security Council reported that at least 194 children were killed and 232 wounded in 2010 as the result of the fighting in Iraq.
Missing Iraq money may have been stolen, auditors say
LA Times reports (June 13th): After the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq in March 2003, the George W. Bush administration flooded the conquered country with so much cash to pay for reconstruction and other projects in the first year that a new unit of measurement was born.
They sent an initial full planeload of cash, followed by 20 other flights to Iraq by May 2004 in a $12-billion haul that U.S. officials believe to be the biggest international cash airlift of all time.
This month, the Pentagon and the Iraqi government are finally closing the books on the program that handled all those Benjamins. But despite years of audits and investigations, U.S. Defense officials still cannot say what happened to $6.6 billion in cash.
For the first time, federal auditors are suggesting that some or all of the cash may have been stolen, not just mislaid in an accounting error. Stuart Bowen, special inspector general for Iraq reconstruction, an office created by Congress, said the missing $6.6 billion may be "the largest theft of funds in national history."
Missing Iraq cash 'as high as $18 billion'
Al Jazeera reports (June 19th): Osama al-Nujaifi, the
Iraqi parliament speaker, has told Al Jazeera that the amount of Iraqi money unaccounted for by the US is $18.7bn - three times more than the reported $6.6bn.
NY Fed Won't Say How Much Money Went to Iraq
CNBC reports (June 21st): The New York Fed is refusing to tell investigators how many billions of dollars it shipped to Iraq during the early days of the US invasion there, the special inspector general for Iraq reconstruction told CNBC. http://www.cnbc.com/id/43487056
For Baghdad's poor, city garbage brings in the bread
Reuters report (June 22nd): For 12-year-old Abbas Mohammed and his family, it is used plastic bottles and empty aluminum cans that keep them alive. Mohammed spends his school summer holidays picking through a Baghdad garbage dump so he can sell the discarded items and help support his family.
In the refuse dump near Abbas's home in the Iraqi capital's impoverished district of Sadr City, men, women and children swarm over the stinking piles of garbage.
Mohammed, a slim boy dressed in grubby clothes, runs with other children to greet the arrival of trucks carrying fresh rubbish, waiting anxiously for them to unload so they can start raking through the refuse despite the smell and the dirt.
"We earn our living through this garbage," shrugged Mohammed, holding a big sack and a metal hook.
Children pay ultimate price of Iraq's poisonous wartime legacy
Irish Times reports (June 13th): The effects of depleted uranium can be seen among the young in the city’s hospitals, where staff are convinced of its link to cancer and deformities.
Dr Ahmed Jafer, a paediatric specialist, says: “Ours is the only neo-natal unit in this region but we cannot quickly diagnose what exactly we are dealing with. Our children are dying from malnutrition, diarrhoea, TB, meningitis, leishmaniasis, chronic liver disease, pneumonia, anaemia and congenital heart disease, all of which are easily preventable outside of Iraq.”
Add to this the high incidence of miscarriages, up to 40 abortions every week, child leukaemia rates that more than doubled here from 1993 to 2007 and the weekly number of tumours and congenital deformities – missing eyes or limbs for example – that children are born with and you only begin to get a sense of the scale of the horror that has been visited on Basra’s children; indeed, on many more across Iraq – since UN sanctions against Saddam Hussein began during the first Gulf War in 1991.
In Falluja, "monster babies" raise questions over US weapons used in 2004
Cancer & Birth Defects Foundation reports (June 13th): "Did the American army use nuclear weapons in Iraq?" This is the surprising question raised by France Info. In partnership with Paris-Match, Angélique Férat, radio correspondent for the area, returned to the city of Fallujah, about fifty kilometers from Baghdad. The city was attacked and partially destroyed by American forces in April 2004 and again in November the same year. Since then the city has seen a very high number of birth defects - so much so that, according to Angélique Férat, "almost every family has its own 'monster baby'". The Iraqi authorities refuse to consider the subject and there are no official statistics.
Relatives of Anbar victims striving to raise judicial case against former U.S. President
Aswat al-Iraq reports (June 16th): A number of relatives of victims of the American military operations in west Iraq’s Anbar Province are striving to raise a judicial case against former U.S.
President, George Bush, whose forces have killed a number of their sons in the Province during the years that followed Iraq’s occupation in 2003.
Judicial council sets thousands of Iraqi detainees free for lack of evidence
Azzaman reports (June 14th): Iraq’s Supreme Judicial Council has freed 8,912 detainees when its investigators found no evidence to have them sentenced. Persons imprisoned without evidence are compensated in other countries for the time they unjustifiably had spent in jail.
But the Iraqi judicial system and the current conditions in the country will make the request for damages almost impossible although legally the released detainees entitled to compensation.
Corporate takeover
In Rebuilding Iraq’s Oil Industry, U.S. Subcontractors Hold Sway
NY Times reports (June 16th): When Iraq auctioned rights to rebuild and expand its oil industry two years ago, the Russian company Lukoil won a hefty portion — a field holding about 10 percent of Iraq’s known oil reserves.
The auction’s outcome helped defuse criticism in the Arab world that the United States had invaded Iraq for its oil. “No one, even the United States, can steal the oil,” the Iraqi government spokesman, Ali al-Dabbagh, said at the time. But American companies can, apparently, drill for the oil.
In fact, American drilling companies stand to make tens of billions of dollars from the new petroleum activity in Iraq long before any of the oil producers start seeing any returns on their investments.
Lukoil and many of the other international oil companies that won fields in the auction are now subcontracting mostly with the four largely American oil services companies that are global leaders in their field: Halliburton, Baker Hughes, Weatherford International and Schlumberger.
Unreported Afghanistan
WSWS reports (June 18th): On the eve of President Barack Obama’s July deadline for beginning the withdrawal of American troops from Afghanistan, the US military has opposed any significant drawdown.
Citing military and administration officials, the Wall Street Journal reported Thursday that the military commanders are demanding that the White House “hold off on ending the Afghanistan troop surge until the fall of 2012.”
Since taking office in January 2009, Obama has nearly tripled the number of American troops fighting in the decade-old war. When he entered the White House, there were 34,000 troops in the country. Now there are nearly 100,000.
US-funded Afghan militias 'beat, rob and kill with impunity'
Daily Telegraph reports (June 19th): Residents and officials warn that the rush to recruit local defence forces around Kandahar following the arrival of last year's surge of American troops had given rise to poorly-controlled armed gangs.
They listed armed robberies, thefts and assaults by the militias, saying the groups had become the main worry of many residents in the province's rural districts.
US-led forces kill Afghan civilians
Press TV reports (June 22nd): An Afghan official said five Afghans were killed by NATO troops during an overnight raid in the southern province of Helmand.
However, local people put the number of those killed at 25. Elsewhere, foreign troops killed two Afghan farmers in the southern province of Laqman.
Two other civilians, including a child, were also wounded in the attack.
US raid kills civilian in Afghanistan
Press TV reports (June 21st): The US forces have killed at least one civilian and detained three others during a night raid on a residential area in the troubled northern Afghanistan, officials say. According to Afghan officials, the incident took place in Kunduz Province on Monday night.
Anti-war news
CIA denies spying on US critic of Iraq war
AFP report (June 17th): The Central Intelligence Agency denied allegations by an ex-spy that it had sought information on a US professor who was critical of the Iraq war in order to discredit him.
Glenn Carle, who served as a top CIA counter-terrorism official, had told The New York Times that Bush administration officials twice sought to investigate Juan Cole, a history professor and widely read blogger.
Carle detailed two occasions in which he was approached by colleagues who were looking for information to discredit Cole, a professor at the University of Michigan, despite a legal ban on the agency spying on Americans.
U.S. mayors: End wars in Afghanistan and Iraq
CNN reports (June 17th): A group of U.S. mayors urged Congress to end the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and redirect money spent to support those conflicts to domestic interests.
The call to bring a speedy end to the wars came in a resolution presented at the opening of the Annual Conference of U.S. Mayors in Baltimore. The resolution, signed by such leaders as Minneapolis Mayor R.T. Rybak and Santa Fe, New Mexico, Mayor David Coss, cited the high cost of supporting the wars, both in financial and human terms, in calling for their end.
