26 Killed, 37 Wounded in Baghdad Bombing;
Women's Condition Deteriorating
A car bombing in a market district of Shaab, Baghdad, killed 26 and wounded 37 on Thursday, the fifth large bombing in March. The LAT underlines that blast walls separating Shiite Shaab from nearby Sunni Arab areas have recently been removed. But it should be remembered that Shaab used to be mixed and is now almost wholly Shiite, so there could be some disgruntled Sunnis and who struck back.
AP has video:
Al-Zaman reports in Arabic that Iranian speaker of the House Ali Larijani is on a secret mission in Iraq to mediate between the Islamic Mission (Da'wa) Party of Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki and his sometime coalition partner, the Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq (ISCI). The two parties are seeking to form coalitions in several southern Shiite provincial councils, and Iran is said impatient for the deal to be concluded.
Compare this item to the complaints of the incoming US ambassador to Iraq, slamming Iranian influence.
Iraqi women are in the grip of a silent emergency, according to Oxfam:
' "Women are the forgotten victims of Iraq. Despite the billions of dollars poured into rebuilding Iraq and recent security gains, a quarter of the women interviewed still do not have daily access to water, a third cannot send their children to school and since the war started, over half have been the victim of violence.'
McClatchy reports political violence in Iraq on Thursday:
' Baghdad
A car bomb targeted civilians near al Zahraa Hospital in Shaab neighbourhood, northern Baghdad at 1 p.m. Thursday killing 16 civilians including four women, injuring 40 others including four women.
Nineveh
Gunmen attacked and killed a store owner in his store in Faisaliyah neighbourhood, central Mosul at 11.30 a.m. Thursday.
A joint Iraqi police and Iraqi army patrol opened fire upon a suspect speeding car that wouldn't stop at the checkpoint in al Jamiaa neighbourhood in which Mosul University is located injuring the driver and accidentally killing a female student who was passing by. The car turned out to be booby trapped and was detonated under control without casualties.
- A gunman threw a grenade at a shop in Dawasa neighborhood in downtown Mosul in the afternoon. The shop owner was wounded and the gunman was arrested by police.
Kirkuk
Gunmen attempted to kidnap one of the body guards of the President of the Criminal Court in Kirkuk, Thursday morning. And during the ensuing hand fight, people started to gather and the gunmen fled leaving the body guard, Murad Fikret with superficial injuries.
Three workers in the Electricity Department in Kirkuk were injured when a roadside bomb targeted them while working in Rashad neighbourhood, western Kirkuk, early Thursday afternoon.'
My interview with Scott Horton of Antiwar.com is now available on the web. It concerns my book:
Engaging the Muslim World
End/ (Not Continued)
posted by Juan Cole @ 3/27/2009 01:15:00 AM
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5 Comments:
The post on women's rights in Iraq is very relevant. It is a truism that all fundamentalist religions repress women the most. That process might be thought the very foundation of repressive religion.
If there is a basic cultural clash here, and if it can be resolved more or less peacefully, then the obvious need is for feminist Arabists, if such people exist.
"I guess my general sense of where we are with respect to Iraq and at the end of now, what, nearly six years, is that we've accomplished nearly everything we set out to do."
Dick Cheney-March 15, 2009
26 killed in Baghdad, 37 wounded (you know, we never find out how many of the wounded die later or are seriously maimed for life - no medevac to Walter Reed.) 50 to 70 killed by suicide bomb in Khyber region of Pakistan. That's just in the last 24 hours or so. But we don't blink.
If the same horrors had happened on US soil, the cry for Muslim blood would be deafening. Drones would be busy 24/7. B-52's, B-1's, smart and stupid bombs, etc, etc. would all be thrown into the game. Don't just sit there, destroy someone or something!!
Our overarching purpose is simple: prevent terror attacks on US soil. Our methods to achieve that purpose are anything that appears to have a chance of killing al Qaeda or Taliban. And, real men don't blink at collateral damage or the secondary violence by those populations we have stirred up.
I'm sure that any successor to Mohamed Atta would avoid a toughening-up trip to Waziristan, and confine the planning cycle to coffee houses in the West, and, if short on funds, take a page out of Tim McVeigh's playbook. Drones be damned, they are thousands of miles away.
The re-writing of history continues unabated today in Yahoo News, “Fallujah Is Test Case for Post-US Iraq”:
“In November 2004, with Fallujah in insurgent hands, the U.S. military launched an operation to recapture the city. After 45 days that saw some of the heaviest urban combat for Americans since the Vietnam War, the U.S. announced it had crushed the last pocket of resistance in Fallujah.
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20090327/ap_on_re_mi_ea/ml_iraq_fallujah_s_test;_ylt=At1AQPGwxWHUFl.0Wk9kWqBvaA8F
Yahoo managed to get it totally wrong and is complicit in one of the greatest single crimes of the Iraq War. The quote about “crushing the last pocket of resistance” was the only pre-game show of the US military. Yahoo substituted the pre-game for the US military’s own judgment following Fallujah—that there were only a few thousand “insurgents”estimated to be in Fallujah before the attack, and that most managed to escape. Neither the military nor Yahoo cared to mention that more than 200,000 Iraqis had been forced to flee and become refugees in their own country, with no humanitarian aid from the US whatever, and that the city remains in ruins five years later. One pertinent question about those refugees might be: How do you feel about the US?
But the most relevant quotes regarding Fallujah will always be: “If a building didn’t have a hole in it, we would put one in it.”(multiple anons), and ''This is the first time since World War II that someone has turned an American armored task force loose in a city with no restrictions," Newell said. ''Let's hope we don't see it again any time soon." by Lieutenant Colonel Paul Newell. And “Attacking Fallujah would be like attacking Los Angeles to get rid of the gangs.”
We forget about such things at our own peril.
James:
"We forget about such things at our own peril."
Agreed completely.
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