posted April 18, 2006 12:10 AM            

That's BS, most of the artifacts are in museums...some of them were alleged to have been looted from a museum in Iraq.

No coalition soldier put ancient vases in sandbags. If anything at all, they were shards which were already destroyed.

posted April 18, 2006 12:15 AM              

quote:

---

Colonel John Coleman, former chief of staff for the 1st Marine Expeditionary Force in Iraq, said yesterday that if the head of the Iraqi antiquities board wanted an apology, "if it makes him feel good, we can certainly give him one".

Babylon declined and fell into ruin after it was conquered by the Persians under Cyrus the Great in around 538BC. But no devastation seems to have matched that inflicted by US troops and their Polish allies after the overthrow of Saddam Hussein.

after entering Babylon in April 2003, coalition forces turned the site into a base camp, flattening and compressing tracts of ruins as they built a helicopter pad and fuel stations. The soldiers filled sandbags with archeological fragments and dug trenches through unexcavated areas, while tanks crushed slabs of original 2,600-year-old paving.

But Babylon is not the only point of archaeological controversy in a country with an estimated 10,000 sites. In a separate complaint, the Iraqi Ministry for Tourism and Antiquities has demanded that US troops pull out of the city of Kish, which dates back 5,000 years, accusing American forces of damaging the precious archaeological site.

It accused the soldiers of preventing anyone from entering the city to assess damage. There has been no comment from the US military.

---

posted April 18, 2006 12:29 AM            

The dig in ancient Babylon started in the early 1900's.

posted April 18, 2006 12:41 AM              

quote:

---

Babylon declined and fell into ruin after it was conquered by the Persians under Cyrus the Great in around 538BC. But no devastation seems to have matched that inflicted by US troops and their Polish allies after the overthrow of Saddam Hussein.

---

An apology would make up for everything.

quote:

---

after entering Babylon in April 2003, coalition forces turned the site into a base camp, flattening and compressing tracts of ruins as they built a helicopter pad and fuel stations. The soldiers filled sandbags with archeological fragments and dug trenches through unexcavated areas, while tanks crushed slabs of original 2,600-year-old paving

---

How thoughtful, and considerate of them. Perhaps if there was a McDonalds or Walmart they would have known better not to land there?

quote:

---

Excuse me, every building destroyed in Iraq by coalition forces is not an ancient artifact. More hyperbolic nonsense. In fact, you can't name a single ancient Babylonian building which was destroyed by coalition forces.

---

posted April 18, 2006 01:05 AM            

quote:

---

Babylon declined and fell into ruin after it was conquered by the Persians under Cyrus the Great in around 538BC. But no devastation seems to have matched that inflicted by US troops and their Polish allies after the overthrow of Saddam Hussein.

---

More BS and blather from an anti-war twit looking for something to use against America.

Saddam got what he deserves. He'll get the rest when he's convicted of genocide and executed by the Iraqis.

posted April 18, 2006 01:20 AM              

quote:

---

The Islamic terrorists are getting what they deserve too and I hope they all get the proper dose of lead.

---

posted May 13, 2006 03:01 PM              

BAGHDAD, Iraq - An armed confrontation between two Iraqi army units left one soldier and one civilian dead Friday, raising questions about the U.S.-trained force's ability to maintain control at a time when sectarian and ethnic tensions are running high.

The incident near Duluiyah, about 45 miles north of Baghdad, illustrates the command and control problems facing the new Iraqi army, which the Americans hope can take over security in most of the country by the end of the year. It also shows that divisions within the military mirror those of Iraqi society at large.

The trouble started when a roadside bomb struck an Iraqi army convoy, which police said was made up of Kurdish soldiers. Four soldiers were killed and three were wounded, police said. U.S. military officials put the casualty figure at one dead and 12 wounded.

The wounded were rushed to the civilian Balad Hospital. Police said that as the Kurdish soldiers drove to the hospital, they fired weapons to clear the way, and one Iraqi Shiite civilian was killed.

Shiite soldiers from another Iraqi unit based in Balad rushed to the scene, and the Kurds decided to take their wounded elsewhere, Iraqi police said. Iraqi troops tried to stop them and shots were fired, killing one Shiite soldier, Iraqi police said.

The U.S. account said an Iraqi soldier from the 3rd Battalion, 1st Brigade was killed in a "confrontation" as the other Iraqi troops were trying to remove their wounded from the hospital.

A third Iraqi army unit set up a roadblock in the area and stopped the soldiers who were leaving with their wounded, the U.S. statement said. American troops intervened at the roadblock and calmed the situation.

The U.S. said the Iraqi army was investigating the incident.
http://www.military.com/NewsContent/0,13319,97180,00.html

posted July 16, 2006 12:43 PM              

July 15 (Bloomberg) -- U.S. President George W. Bush held up Iraq today as a model of democracy for Russia to follow. Russian President Vladimir Putin was quick to say he wasn't interested.

Bush made clear before arriving in St. Petersburg for talks with Putin he would raise concerns Russia was rolling back some of the democratic advances made in the 1990s, a charge Putin firmly denies. Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice have all spoken out on the issue over the last year.

``I talked about my desire to promote institutional change in parts of the world like Iraq where there's a free press and free religion,'' Bush told a news conference with Putin after their talks. ``I told him that a lot of people in our country would hope that Russia would do the same thing.''

``We certainly would not want to have the same kind of democracy as they have in Iraq, I will tell you quite honestly,'' Putin shot back.

``Just wait,'' retorted Bush.

Bush said he understood Russian democracy would develop in its own way.

``I don't expect Russia to look like the U.S.,'' Bush said, adding that Putin had shared with him some thoughts on the subject ``that I think would surprise some of our citizens''.

Putin said Russia needs to develop democratic institutions to prosper, ``but certainly, we will do this by ourselves.''
http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601103&sid=a8LVtxNJABqA&refer=us

posted July 16, 2006 12:43 PM              

by Llewellyn H. Rockwell, Jr.

So you thought that the US went into Iraq to uproot a dangerous dictator and establish democracy? Well, the US military has taken on a job a bit more difficult than that. It is trying to build an economy, which no state in the history of the world has been able to do without the assistance of a vibrant market.

Fallujah, Iraq, has no economy to speak of. The US bombed all that away a few years ago. It doesn't have clean water. The place is filled with rubble. There is some electricity, for about four hours a day, but you can't count on it nor even which four hours of the day it will be. You only need to think for a moment what your life would be like under those conditions.

The US military has taken responsibility for the rebuilding effort, as they have done all over Iraq, where 90 percent of projects have been delayed and delayed. But in Fallujah, the US is promising that by the fall, 80 percent of homes will have clean water. Most implausibly, the US is promising to bring wireless internet to everyone. Just don't drink the water while you surf the web.

How much is this going to cost? Oh, a couple hundred million. Or maybe a few billion. We'll let you know once it's done.

Water distribution relies on electricity, and the US has somehow not been able to get the generating plants working right to make the electricity available. People buy their own generators, but those require gasoline. There is a shortage of gasoline owing to several factors: the masters of the universe who overthrew Saddam have not been able to process the oil from the ground and get it to market, and the gas that is available can only be sold at an ultra-low and controlled price. The US enforces these controls by arresting black-market gas dealers.

Now, there are general and specific problems with the central planning that the US is doing in Iraq. The general problem afflicts all socialist planning. Think of Stalin's plan to bring electrification to the Ukraine, a "progressive" move not unlike Bush's plan to modernize Iraq. It was one disaster after another, all backed by political despotism and death.

Why does socialist central planning not work? The means of production are not held privately, so there cannot be any exchange markets for them and therefore no exchange ratios established. That means there is no way to calculate profit and loss. Without profit and loss, there is no way to assess the tradeoffs associated with alternative uses of resources. That means there is no economy in the literal sense of that term.

Let's say there is only a limited amount of gasoline. Should it be used to fuel trucks to haul debris away, run construction equipment to put in power plants, or used to move building materials in for new schools and roads? There is no way to assess the relative merit of these choices. The same is true for every resource. What is the priority? It ends up being an arbitrary decision by the central planners. In this case, that arbitrariness ends up with Fallujah residents who can view home videos on Youtube.com but can't get a drink of water without acquiring a deadly infection. The analogy with the Ukraine is unavoidable: electrification in the midst of famine.

The pricing problem, or the calculation problem, as Mises called it, will always and everywhere doom any attempt to centrally plan. It even makes it impossible to carry out projects from the first to the last stage of production, since every economic good requires many stages of production. After all, even with all of Stalin's secret police and armies, there was nothing they could do to produce a decent crop of grain. The process of production is too complicated to be run by anything as stupid as a government bureaucracy.

The specific problems of martial-law central planning are tied to the way the US has chosen to do business. The government has contracted out most of its work to private corporations. Of the $18 billion that the US Congress has allocated since 2003, 90 percent has been farmed out to private contractors.

This may (or may not) increase efficiency but this strategy does not overcome the calculation problem. The question of what should be built and how much and by when (the core of the economic problem) is still made by the government, not by private enterprise. The contracting agency does not own or sell what it builds. It is there only to do what it is told and pick up the check.

So the "privatization" of construction is Iraq is not a step toward market economics, contrary to what the Right says (in praise) or the Left says (in condemnation). It only ends up adding another layer of problems, namely the problem of graft and corruption that comes from the decision-making process of who or what is going to get the money.

A main beneficiary of Iraqi rebuilding money has been Halliburton, a company with famous political connections throughout the whole of the Bush administration. The missing funds, cost overruns, and incomplete projects have finally become too much even for the Army, which is ending its exclusive deal with the company. But who or what will pick up the slack? More companies with high-level political connections like Lockheed Martin and Northrop Grumman.

Mises wrote in 1920 that he could confidently predict the future of Soviet socialism:

There will be hundreds and thousands of factories in operation. Very few of these will be producing wares ready for use; in the majority of cases what will be manufactured will be unfinished goods and production goods. All these concerns will be interrelated. Every good will go through a whole series of stages before it is ready for use. In the ceaseless toil and moil of this process, however, the administration will be without any means of testing their bearings. It will never be able to determine whether a given good has not been kept for a superfluous length of time in the necessary processes of production, or whether work and material have not been wasted in its completion.

Similarly, we can confidently predict the future of US-run socialist planning in Iraq. There will be billions more spent, and hundreds of projects in operation. The majority will not amount to anything. In ceaseless toil and moil, the military will be without any means of testing its bearings. It won't be able to determine whether or not anything it did or built was economically wise.

We can add to the tenor of Mises's predictions. Bombs will still be killing people. The living will continue to suffer unbearable deprivations. There will not be a stable central government. The GDP will not reach prewar levels for many years, if then. The water will still be dirty in Fallujah, the electricity will not be reliable, and the residents won't be surfing the internet.

--------------------

Lew Rockwell is president of the Mises Institute and editor of LewRockwell.com. Send email to Rockwell@mises.org.

posted July 18, 2006 09:28 AM              

Tuesday July 18, 2006 12:31 AM

By PAUL GARWOOD

Associated Press Writer

KABUL, Afghanistan (AP) - Taliban militants seized two towns in tumultuous southern Afghanistan, forcing police and government officials to flee, officials said Monday.

The Taliban operate freely in large areas of southern Afghanistan and police presence there often is virtually nonexistent, but insurgents only were known to have completely seized one town since their hard-line regime was toppled by U.S. forces in 2001.

They were quickly driven out of that town, Chora, in Uruzgan province.

The attacks came with thousands of U.S.-led troops involved in an offensive against Taliban holdouts and allied extremists in remote southern and eastern provinces to curb the deadliest upsurge in violence since the hard-line militia was ousted in late 2001.

On Monday, large numbers of militants chased out police after a brief clash in the town of Naway-i-Barakzayi, in Helmand province near the Pakistan border, district police chief Mullah Sharufuddin said.

Scores of Taliban forces overran police holed up Sunday in a compound in the nearby Helmand town of Garmser. The security forces and a handful of government officials fled, a local government official said.

The official, speaking on condition of anonymity because he did not have permission to speak to the media, said Taliban forces were now ``moving freely'' around the Garmser and the surrounding district.

``We have heard reports of two districts in southern Helmand being under control of the Taliban, and we are in contact with lots of people to build an accurate picture,'' said another coalition spokesman, Maj. Scott Lundy.

``The Taliban are a credible threat, but the coalition is more than a match for them when and wherever we encounter them,'' he said.

British military spokesman Capt. Drew Gibson confirmed enemy ``activity'' in both areas but declined to elaborate. More than 3,000 British soldiers are deploying to Helmand to take over security control from U.S. forces later this month.

Taliban forces killed a coalition soldier and wounded 11 others in a fierce battle Monday in Tirin Kot, capital of Helmand's neighboring Uruzgan province, a U.S. statement said. The nationalities of the soldiers were not released.

More than 800 people, mostly militants, have been killed since May, according to an Associated Press tally of coalition and Afghan figures.

U.S.-led troops entering southern insurgent hotbeds for the first time are facing intense resistance.

In other violence:

- A suicide bomber killed the top two Justice Ministry officials and another employee inside the ministry's office building in the capital of Helmand province, police said.

- Three Afghan soldiers were killed and three wounded when a roadside bomb destroyed their vehicle in the same province.

- In eastern Afghanistan, U.S.-led troops killed four suspected al-Qaida members, including Arab and Chechen fighters, after raiding their hideout.

__._,_.___
Messages in this topic (1) Reply (via web post) | Start a new topic
Messages | Files | Photos | Links | Database | Polls | Members | Calendar

You are receiving Individual Emails Change Delivery Settings
Visit Your Group | Yahoo! Groups Terms of Use | Unsubscribe New Message Search
Find the message you want faster. Visit your group to try out the improved message search.

Share feedback on the new changes to Groups

Recent Activity
21New Members
1New Files
Visit Your Group .

__,_._,___

Looks like the war in Afghanistan wasn't successful.

What a waste of human life ugh.

posted July 18, 2006 11:30 AM            

More lying propaganda from terrorist.com TP.

posted July 24, 2006 09:49 PM              

The Iraqi Prime Minister, Nouri al-Maliki, meets Tony Blair in London today as violence in Iraq reaches a new crescendo and senior Iraqi officials say the break up of the country is inevitable.

A car bomb in a market in the Shia stronghold of Sadr City in Baghdad yesterday killed 34 people and wounded a further 60 and was followed by a second bomb in the same area two hours later that left a further eight dead. Another car bomb outside a court house in Kirkuk killed a further 20 and injured 70 people.

"Iraq as a political project is finished," a senior government official was quoted as saying, adding: "The parties have moved to plan B." He said that the Shia, Sunni and Kurdish parties were now looking at ways to divide Iraq between them and to decide the future of Baghdad, where there is a mixed population. "There is serious talk of Baghdad being divided into [Shia] east and [Sunni] west," he said.

Hoshyar Zebari, the Iraqi Foreign Minister, told The Independent in an interview, before joining Mr Maliki to fly to London and then Washington, that in theory the government should be able to solve the crisis because Shia, Kurd and Sunni were elected members of it.

But he painted a picture of a deeply divided administration in which senior Sunni members praised anti-government insurgents as "the heroic resistance".

In the past two weeks, at a time when Lebanon has dominated the international news, the sectarian civil war in central Iraq has taken a decisive turn for the worse. There have been regular *** -for-tat massacres and the death toll for July is likely to far exceed the 3,149 civilians killed in June.

Mr Maliki, who is said to be increasingly isolated, has failed to prevent the violence. Other Iraqi leaders claim he lacks experience in dealing with security, is personally very isolated without a kitchen cabinet and is highly dependent on 30-40 Americans in unofficial advisory positions around him.

"The government is all in the Green Zone like the previous one and they have left the streets to the terrorists," said Mahmoud Othman, a veteran Iraqi politician. He said the situation would be made worse by the war in Lebanon because it would intensify the struggle between Iran and the US being staged in Iraq. The Iraqi crisis would now receive much reduced international attention.

The switch of American and British media attention to Lebanon and away from the rapidly deteriorating situation in Baghdad is much to the political benefit of Mr Blair and Mr Bush.

"Maliki's trip to Washington is all part of the US domestic agenda to put a good face on things for November," a European diplomat in Baghdad was quoted as saying.

Ever since the overthrow of Saddam Hussein a succession of Iraqi political leaders have been fêted in London and Washington where they claimed to have the insurgents on the run. Mr Maliki's meetings with Mr Blair today and Mr Bush tomorrow are likely to be lower key but will serve the same purpose before the US Congressional elections in November. US commanders are considering moving more of their troops - there are some 55,000 near the capital ­ into Baghdad to halt sectarian violence.

Meanwhile, Saddam Hussein has begun to receive fluids voluntarily after being taken to hospital following 17 days on a hunger strike to protest against biased court procedures and the murder of three defence lawyers.Among fellow Sunni his defiant court performances have rehabilitated his reputation, though he is still detested by Kurds and Shia.

http://news.independent.co.uk/world/middle_east/article1193108.ece

posted July 31, 2006 04:45 PM            

By Dafna Linzer
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, July 30, 2006; A07

When angry Democrats briefly shut down the Senate last year to protest the slow pace of a congressional investigation into prewar intelligence on Iraq, Senate Minority Leader Harry M. Reid (D-Nev.) claimed a rare victory.

Republicans called it a stunt but promised to quickly wrap up the inquiry. Sen. Pat Roberts (R-Kan.), chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, which is overseeing the investigation, said his report was near completion and there was no need for the fuss.

That was nine months ago.

The Republican-led committee, which agreed in February 2004 to write the report, has yet to complete its work. Just two of five planned sections of the committee's findings are fully drafted and ready to be voted on by members, according to Democratic and Republican staffers. Committee sources involved with the report, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, said they are working hard to complete it. But disputing Roberts, they said they had started almost from scratch in November after Democrats staged their protest.

Roberts spokeswoman Sarah Ross Little said the slow pace is partially the result of Roberts's desire to give members a chance for input. She said Roberts will make public the two completed sections "when they are approved by the committee and have been declassified," rather than wait for the other three to be done, as well. If the sections are not approved by the committee next week, they will have to wait until members return from recess in September.

The section most Democrats have sought, however, is not yet in draft form and might not emerge until after the November election, staffers said. That section will examine the administration's deliberations over prewar intelligence and whether its public presentation of the threat reflected the evidence senior officials reviewed in private.

President Bush, Vice President Cheney and senior administration officials asserted before the U.S. invasion of Iraq in March 2003 that Iraq was rebuilding its nuclear weapons program, had chemical and biological weapons, and maintained links to al-Qaeda affiliates that could use those weapons against the United States. Bush said it was on that basis that he ordered the invasion.

But when teams of U.S. troops and intelligence experts failed to find any such weapons, and numerous commissions proclaimed the intelligence had been deeply flawed, some Democrats who voted to support the war began to allege that administration officials had willfully exaggerated Iraq's capabilities and terrorism ties and that they had resisted inquiries into the intelligence failures.

Sen. John D. Rockefeller IV (D-W.Va.), the committee's ranking Democrat, began inquiring about the evidence against Iraq one week before U.S. troops invaded. His interest was sparked by revelations that the Bush administration passed on forged documents to U.N. weapons inspectors to support allegations that Iraq had sought uranium from the African nation of Niger.

Roberts resisted a full investigation for three months. But in June 2003, when it became increasingly apparent that no weapons of mass destruction had been found in Iraq, the committee agreed to look into the intelligence cited in the administration's case for war.

A year later, the committee issued the first phase of its bipartisan report, which found that the U.S. intelligence community had assembled an exaggerated assessment of Saddam Hussein's weapons capabilities. The second phase was to focus on the Bush administration's use of intelligence and examine public statements made by key policymakers about the threat posed by Iraq. That is the phase that has been delayed.

Part of the investigation that focuses on the Pentagon's Office of Special Plans, which was run by former undersecretary of defense Douglas J. Feith, is on hold, staff members said, pending a separate inquiry by the Defense Department's inspector general.

The Special Plans office, which ran its own intelligence gathering operation with the help of Iraqi exiles, stopped cooperating with the Senate panel last year. Roberts said key officials hired lawyers and quit talking when Rockefeller suggested that laws may have been broken. But Democrats dismissed that as an excuse.

The intelligence community's warnings about the possibility of chaos and violence in post-invasion Iraq also are under review in a separate chapter, staff members said. "What we have so far makes clear the intelligence community was saying lots of things can go wrong here, and they were certainly right," one congressional source said.

The two drafted sections could be voted on by committee members as early as next week, two congressional aides said yesterday. Both chapters cover ground that has largely been explored by a presidential commission on weapons of mass destruction.

One completed section of the Senate effort compares prewar estimates on Iraq's alleged chemical, biological and nuclear programs with the findings of U.S. weapons hunters who wrapped up their work empty-handed in December 2004.

The other chapter examines what, if any, information provided by Iraqi exiles was used in official intelligence estimates. That chapter does not review the influence that exiles such as former deputy prime minister Ahmed Chalabi had on the intelligence community and administration officials.

posted August 02, 2006 04:10 AM              

AHMED RASHEED AND ASEEL KAMI

AT LEAST 50 Iraqis were murdered yesterday in bomb and gun attacks, including 26 soldiers - undermining the government's attempts to show it can suppress unremitting violence.

A roadside bomb attack on a bus filled with Iraqi troops on a road between Tikrit and Baiji, north of Baghdad, killed at least 23, the Iraqi army said.

In the north-western town of Tal Afar, a car bomb killed three more Iraqi soldiers and wounded four.

In Baghdad, a suicide bomber in a car targeted soldiers collecting their salaries from a bank, killing at least ten people, including an elderly woman, police said. State television put the toll at 14.

The blast was in the same spot in Karrada district where a car bomb and mortars killed at least 27 people last week.

"We should carry guns to protect ourselves. If we expect Iraqi security forces to protect us we will burn, just like those innocent people," said kiosk owner Abu Fadhil, surveying charred bodies.

"The government is useless. Only days ago we suffered from a huge blast here. The interior minister has to admit the government has lost the war against the terrorists."

A boy, about 12 years old, stood in the street sobbing and tearing his shirt after seeing his dead mother. Iraqi security forces were also targeted in the town of Muqdadiya, 50 miles north-east of the capital.

A car bomb exploded as a police patrol passed in front of a hospital, killing at least seven people.

In the northern oil city of Kirkuk, a roadside bomb killed two police and wounded a third as they conducted a patrol.

Gunmen opened fire on a bus in Yusufiya, south of Baghdad, killing at least three people in a failed kidnapping, police said.

Two months after being sworn in, the Iraqi prime minister, Nouri al-Maliki, has yet to prove he can end such carnage and sectarian bloodshed which has raised fears of civil war.

He has presented a 24-point reconciliation plan that is long on promises and short on details, and imposed a security crackdown in Baghdad that has proven ineffective.

The army casualties served as a reminder that US-trained Iraqi forces have a long way to go before they can handle security on their own.

Gunmen kidnapped 45 Shiites from the Iraqi city of Najaf as they travelled home past the Sunni rebel stronghold of Ramadi on Monday, the governor of Najaf said yesterday.

They were abducted along Highway 160, one of Iraq's most dangerous roads, Asa'ad Sultan said.

The United States plans to boost its troop levels in Baghdad and Iraq's national security adviser, Mowaffaq al-Rubaie, said extra Iraqi brigades would also be brought to the capital.

A few hours after he spoke several mortar bombs landed at the fortified Green Zone government compound, police said.

The body of Adel al-Mansouri, a correspondent for al-Alam television station, was found dumped with bullet holes on a street.

Related topic

Iraq http://news.scotsman.com/topics.cfm?tid=404
This article: http://news.scotsman.com/international.cfm?id=1117772006

Last updated: 01-Aug-06 00:58 BST

posted August 02, 2006 04:12 AM              

AHMED RASHEED AND ALASTAIR MACDONALD IN BAGHDAD

TENS OF thousands more Iraqis have fled their homes as sectarian violence looks ever more like civil war two months after a US-backed national unity government was formed, official data showed yesterday.

Iraq's most powerful religious authority, the Shiite Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, joined the United Nations and US officials in raising the alarm that a rise in bloodshed and "campaigns of displacement" threaten Iraq's very future.

The US military admitted violence in Baghdad was little changed by a month-long clamp down and the city morgue said it had seen 1,000 bodies so far in July, a slight increase on June.

A day after the United States issued a stern warning to both Shiite and minority Sunni leaders to match talk with action on reining in and reconciling "death squads" and "terrorists" from their respective communities, the migration ministry said more than 30,000 people had registered as refugees this month alone.

"We consider this a dangerous sign," Sattar Nowruz, a ministry spokesman said, acknowledging that many people fled abroad or sought refuge with relatives rather than accept official aid or move into state camps.

The increase took to 27,000 families - some 162,000 people - the number who have registered for help with the ministry in the five months since the 22 February bombing of a Shiite shrine at Samarra sparked a new phase of communal bloodshed.

Among 11 new tented camps being set up by the ministry is one in the southern city of Diwaniya, where police said about 10,000 Shiite refugees have arrived in recent weeks. They include Abd Hammad al-Saeidi. "Gunmen told us to leave or they would kill us," said the farmer from the violent lands just south of Baghdad. His family of 11 now live in a tent.

At a Sunni mosque in Baghdad, Red Crescent officials said numbers taking refuge there rose sharply after suspected Shiite militiamen killed 40 in the Sunni district of Jihad on 9 July. Um Yaseen, a mother of ten, recalled fleeing the area: "It was a black day ... and not a single policeman was there to help us."

The US military conceded that a security operation launched a month ago had achieved only a "slight downtick" in bloodshed. "It's a start. We're moving in the right direction," Major-General William Caldwell said, adding that it would take "months not weeks" to gain a victory he described as a "must win" for Iraq.

The UN has also warned of the risk of civil war, two months after prime minister Nuri al-Maliki's coalition of Sunnis, Kurds and fellow Shiites was sworn in by parliament.

The new data shows how Sunnis and other minorities have been leaving the south, while Shiites have quit areas around Baghdad and the north. There has also been an ethnic component to the displacement, with Kurds and Arabs moving to avoid hostile neighbours. In Baghdad, the Tigris river is becoming a divide between the Sunni west and Shiite east - definitions that leave many of the city's seven million on the "wrong" side.

Ayatollah Sistani, whose restraining grip on Shiite militias appears to be slipping, issued a rare statement: "I call on all sons of Iraq ... to be aware of the danger threatening their nation's future and stand shoulder to shoulder in confronting it by rejecting hatred and violence."

This article: http://news.scotsman.com/topics.cfm?tid=404&id=1058392006

posted August 02, 2006 11:30 AM            

He is working on behalf of Iran...whose goal is to cause a civil war in Iraq.

posted August 02, 2006 11:34 AM              

------------------
Virgo Rising, Sagittarius Sun, Pisces Moon