Several US Soldiers Killed
Pilgrims Targetted
AP reports several incidents of sectarian violence on Friday, including concerted attacks on Shiite pilgrims heading to the holy city of Karbala. Al-Zaman says that by next Tuesday there will be 3 million Shiite pilgrims in Karbala for the 40th day mourning rites after the anniversary of the martyrdom of the Prophet's grandson, Husayn. Protecting 3 million people will be no easy task, though the original Ashura rites themselves went off without major incident 40 days ago. Some past such processions have been bombed by guerrillas.
The violence included the killing of a US soldier at Samarra and a bombing at Miqdadiyah that may have killed several US troops and wounded more.
It turns out that "Operation Swarmer" was just a routine search and destroy mission. It doesn't in fact appear to have involved massive bombings, and has met no significant resistance, with a few guerrillas apprehended in villages around Samarra.
Al-Zaman reports that Nadim al-Jabiri and his Virtue (Fadila) Party oppose Abdul Aziz al-Hakim's attempt to bring Iranians into dialogue with the US over Iraqi affairs.
You will see a lot of propaganda about the situation in Iraq, some of it put out by English-speaking Republican journalists or bloggers who visit the country (mainly safe Kurdistan). But Nir Rosen, an Arabic-speaking journalist who goes about unembedded in Iraq, has given us the real deal-- firsthand reporting on the sectarian violence and tensions in Iraq, based on Arabic-language conversations with real Iraqis.
posted by Juan Cole @ 3/18/2006 12:30:00 AM
|
Facebook
1 Comments:
My mother called the other day, incredibly worried about the "air assault", just a deep emotional sadness for the people of Iraq.
I don't have cable and was blithely unaware.
Later, at the gym, CNN was on, hyping "Operation Swarmer" like some Copola-esque flight of the Valkyrie, savoring their ability to give the real time scoop.
All very reminiscent of the CNN Psyop in Falllujah.
The ability of journalists to be swindled and/or complicit in these weird administration/Pentagon scare tactics and propaganda marketing campaigns is pitiful.
NPR headlines this morning talked about Swarmer as "the largest assault". They left out the word "air" altogether, and reported it as the largest assault of the war. Stunningly inaccurate.
And, again, once this inaccuracy gets into the information stream it is extremely difficult to rectify, as witness the 85% of troops who think we invaded Iraq to punish Saddam-Osama-Damma
War planners and propagandists must plan on this idiocy, which explains the utter incoherence of American public reaction.
The key thing to note is the way relatively trivial verbal inflections ("air assault" versus "aerial bombardment", or whatever one of a thousand other technical terms the technocrats of death have invented) make huge differences to the facts on the ground, and the way the people in power deliberately abuse them.
Post a Comment
<< Home