These are the archives for the week ending 3rd August 2007
At least 1,652 civilians killed in July...
The number of Iraqi civilians killed in the country's brutal civil conflict rose by more than a third in July despite a five-month-old surge in US troop levels, government figures showed Wednesday.
At least 1,652 civilians were killed in Iraq in July, 33 percent more than in the previous month, according to figures compiled by the Iraqi health, defence and interior ministries.
Meanwhile, a US Government Accountability Office probe revealed the American military cannot account for 190,000 weapons issued to Iraq's beleaguered security forces in 2004 and 2005.
According to a July 31 report, the US military "cannot fully account for about 110,000 AK-47 assault rifles, 80,000 pistols, 135,000 items of body armour and 115,000 helmets reported as issued to Iraqi forces."
AFP, 1/8/07
...while US took in 57 refugees
The U.S. has taken in 190 Iraqi refugees since last year, according to a government document that shows the monthly numbers falling despite pledges to accept thousands by October. The Bush administration admitted just 57 refugees in July, six fewer than in June.
An estimated 50,000 Iraqis are fleeing their war-ravaged country per month, contributing to the fastest growing refugee population in the world, now put at between 2 million and 2.5 million, according to refugee advocacy groups.
Associated Press, 1/8/07
Obama would send troops into Pakistan
Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama issued a pointed warning Wednesday to Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf by saying, as president, he would be prepared to order U.S. troops into that country unilaterally if it failed to act on its own against Islamic extremists.
In his most comprehensive statement on terrorism, the Illinois senator said the Iraq war has left the U.S. less safe than it was before the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, and said he would seek to withdraw U.S. troops as president and shift the country's military focus to threats in Afghanistan and Pakistan.
"When I am president, we will wage the war that has to be won," he told an audience at the Woodrow Wilson Center here. "The first step must be to get off the wrong battlefield in Iraq and take the fight to the terrorists in Afghanistan and Pakistan."
Houston Chronicle, 1/8/07
Sunni bloc leaves cabinet
Iraq's largest Sunni political faction resigned from Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki's cabinet on Wednesday, severely weakening the government's credentials as a national unity coalition and setting back hopes of reconciliation.
Although Mr. Maliki's Shiite-dominated coalition still retains a parliamentary majority, most analysts believe that any legislation passed without the backing of the main Sunni bloc, the Iraqi Consensus Front, would be virtually meaningless.
In strong and frustrated words, Rafaa al-Issawi, a leading member of the Iraqi Consensus Front, said the government had failed to meet demands to involve Sunni Arabs more in decisions on security issues, to disband militias and to release prisoners being held without charge.
"The government is continuing with its arrogance, refusing to change its stand, and has slammed shut the door to any meaningful reforms necessary for saving Iraq," said Mr. Issawi, whose colleagues claim that the government's representative failed even to turn up for last-minute crisis talks.
New York Times, 1/8/07
US aids Turkish drive against Kurdish fighters
The Pentagon confirmed that it is working closely with the Turkish government to stop Kurdish guerrillas operating from bases in northern Iraq.
But it refused to comment on a report that theUS is planning a covert operation to send special forces into action to try to nuetralise the leadership fo the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK), which has been mounting attacks inside Turkey.
The US is trying to persuade the Turkish army against taking matters into its own hands by invading northern Iraq, where the Kurds have established an autonomous region. Washington, faced with a myriad of problems in Iraq, does not need a new front opening up in the country.
Bryan Whitman, a Pentagon spokesman, would neither confirm nor deny that a covet operation was being planned. But he said "We recognise that the PKK is a serious problem and we're working closely with both the government of Iraq and the government of Turkey to resolve this".
Guardian 31/7/07
Iraqi parliament takes summer break...
Iraq's parliament adjourned for its summer recess on Monday, taking a break until September despite having failed to enact a series of laws demanded by Washington.
Parliamentary speaker Mahmoud Mashhadani said in a statement issued after Monday's session that he had dismissed lawmakers until Sept. 4.
"Parliament has decided to break until early September," Hussein Falluji of the mainly Sunni Accordance Front bloc in parliament told Reuters. "We have already cut the holiday by one month. It is our constitutional right to take it."
Reuters, 30/7/07
...while government corruption is 'untouchable'
Supplies and medicine in strife-torn Baghdad's overcrowded hospitals have been siphoned off and sold elsewhere for profit because of "untouchable" corruption in the Iraqi Ministry of Health, according to a draft U.S. government report.
The report, written by U.S. advisers to Iraq's anti-corruption agency, analyzes corruption in 12 ministries and finds devastating and grim problems.
"Corruption protected by senior members of the Iraqi government remains untouchable," the report said. One potential problem is in the office of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, according to the report.
The report said that "the prime minister's office has on a number of occasions intervened on cases involving political supporters."
NBC News, 30/7/07
US to stay in Iraq until at least 2009
U.S. generals expect to need a large contingent of troops in Iraq until the middle of 2009, the commander of U.S. forces in Iraq said on Monday.
Such a timeline would hand President George W. Bush's successor the task of bringing U.S. forces home from Iraq, more than six years after Bush dispatched them to topple Saddam Hussein.
The next U.S. president will take office in January 2009 after an election in 2008.
Reuters, 30/7/07
Many Iraqis 'need immediate aid'
Nearly a third of Iraqis need immediate emergency aid while the conflict in the country "masks the humanitarian crisis", according to a report.
Although the everyday threat of armed violence is the biggest problem facing most ordinary Iraqis, eight million - almost one in three - are in urgent need of water, sanitation, food and shelter, the report by Oxfam and the aid agency network NGO Co-ordination Committee in Iraq (NCCI) said.
According to the report, four million citizens (15%) regularly cannot afford to eat; 70% are without adequate water supplies (up from 50% in 2003); 28% of children are malnourished (compared with 19% before the 2003 invasion); 92% of Iraqi children suffer learning problems, and more than two million people - mostly women and children - have been displaced inside Iraq, with a further two million Iraqi refugees fleeing the country, mainly to Syria and Jordan.
Guardian, 30/7/07
NATO to use smaller bombs in Afghanistan
Nato plans to use smaller bombs in Afghanistan as part of a change in tactics aimed at stemming a rise in civilian casualties that threatens to undermine support in the fight against the Taliban.
The head of the alliance, Jaap de Hoop Scheffer, acknowledged that mounting civilian casualties had hurt Nato and alliance commanders had recently instructed troops to hold off attacking the Taliban in some situations where civilians were at risk.
"If you put a 250kg bomb rather than 500kg bomb on the plane that could make a huge amount of difference," said a Nato diplomat. Other Nato officials say that the alliance will also increasingly leave house-to-house searches to the Afghan army to reduce the risks of confrontation.
In June, the Agency Coordinating Body for Afghan Relief, a coalition of more than 90 aid agencies, said at least 230 Afghan civilians had been killed by western troops this year.
Financial Times, 29/7/07
British draw back in Basra
As American troop levels are peaking in Baghdad, British force levels are heading in the opposite direction as the troops prepare to withdraw completely from the city center of Basra, 300 miles to the south.
The British intend to pull back to an airport headquarters miles out of town, a symbolic move widely taken by Iraqis as the beginning of the end of the British military presence in southern Iraq.
Skepticism is widespread in Basra, as in Baghdad, about whether Iraqi forces are ready to take over. The British and the Americans will have to assuage the fears of Iraqis that they are being abandoned to gunmen and religious extremists. And each is likely to face intensified attacks from propaganda-conscious enemies trying to claim credit for driving out the Westerners.
As the British prepare for the withdrawal from the city center - and the wider transition of handing over Basra Province to Iraqi security forces during the coming months - Brig. James Bashall, commander of the First Mechanized Brigade, concedes that his men will almost certainly "get a lot of indirect fire as we go backward."
It is no coincidence that he is reading up on Britain's withdrawal from its former crown colony Aden in what is now Yemen, and lessons from other theaters, with the American experience in Vietnam as the "obvious parallel."
New York Times, 29/7/07
Brown hails US ties
Gordon Brown stamped on talk of cooler relations with Washington on Saturday, saying before his first meeting with President George W. Bush that the bond between the countries remained strong.
Tony Blair was Bush's closest ally in the invasion of Iraq, but Brown is well aware that the war's unpopularity in Britain was one of the factors that forced Blair to step down early in June after a decade in power.
Brown said in a statement released before his trip that ties with the United States should be Britain's "single most important bilateral relationship".
"It is a relationship that is founded on our common values of liberty, opportunity and the dignity of the individual. And because of the values we share, the relationship with the United States is not only strong but can become stronger in the years ahead," he said.
None of the world's major problems could be solved without the active engagement of the United States, Brown said.
Reuters, 28/7/07
Arming the middle east
The Bush administration is preparing to ask Congress to approve an arms sale package for Saudi Arabia and its neighbors that is expected to eventually total $20 billion at a time when some United States officials contend that the Saudis are playing a counterproductive role in Iraq.
The proposed package of advanced weaponry for Saudi Arabia, which includes advanced satellite-guided bombs, upgrades to its fighters and new naval vessels, has made Israel and some of its supporters in Congress nervous.
Senior officials who described the package on Friday said they believed that the administration had resolved those concerns, in part by promising Israel $30.4 billion in military aid over the next decade, a significant increase over what Israel has received in the past 10 years.
The officials said the plan to bolster the militaries of Persian Gulf countries is part of an American strategy to contain the growing power of Iran in the region and to demonstrate that, no matter what happens in Iraq, Washington remains committed to its longtime Arab allies.
New York Times, 28/7/07
US gives up on Iraqi power grid
As the Bush administration struggles to convince lawmakers that its Iraq war strategy is working, it has stopped reporting to Congress a key quality-of-life indicator in Baghdad: how long the power stays on.
Ryan Crocker, the U.S. ambassador to Iraq, told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee last week that Baghdad residents could count on only "an hour or two a day" of electricity. That's down from an average of five to six hours a day earlier this year.
But that piece of data has not been sent to lawmakers for months because the State Department, which prepares a weekly report for Congress on conditions in Iraq, stopped estimating in May how many hours of electricity Baghdad residents typically receive each day.
The change, a State Department spokesman said, reflects a technical decision by reconstruction officials in Baghdad who are scaling back efforts to estimate electricity consumption as they wind down U.S. involvement in rebuilding Iraq's power grid.
Santa Fe New Mexican, 27/7/07
More than 2 million Iraqi refugees
An international conference in Jordan on the more than two million Iraqi refugees uprooted by war has pledged to help them with their difficulties.
But it insisted the solution to the problem lay in their return home and that the Iraqi government was directly responsible for its displaced citizens.
The UN refugee agency, Unrwa, said some 50,000 more Iraqis were escaping the violence in their homeland each month. Most are ending up in Jordan and Syria, which want help to ease the burden.
Unrwa said the wave of displacement sparked by the war in Iraq was the biggest in the Middle East since 1948, when hundreds of thousands of Palestinians fled the newly created Israel.
BBC News, 27/7/07
British army has 'succeeded' in south Iraq
The head of the armed forces has told the BBC that the British military has "succeeded" in its mission objectives in southern Iraq.
He told BBC Radio 4's The World at One that opinions on southern Iraq depended "upon what your interpretation of the mission was in the first place".
He said: "I'm afraid people had, in many instances, unrealistic aspirations for Iraq, and for the south of Iraq. Our mission there was to get the place and the people to a state where the Iraqis could run that part of the country, if they chose to, and we're very nearly there."
"Our mission was not to make the place look like somewhere green and peaceful, because that was never going to be achievable in that timescale."
BBC News, 27/7/07
More troops may be needed in Afghanistan
The head of the Armed Forces hinted yesterday that troop levels would have to be increased in Afghanistan. The news came as a second British soldier was killed in as many days.
Air Chief Marshal Sir Jock Stirrup said the current force of almost 7,700 troops was likely to expand as British influence spread across Helmand province.
"I suspect that we will, over time, as we develop more opportunities, as we spread our influence, want to increase our capacity in one or two areas to take advantage of those opportunities," the Chief of the Defence Staff told the BBC.
While the year-long fight in the lawless province had "come an enormously long way" he conceded that compared to where Afghanistan needed to get "it looks as if we've come hardly any distance".
Daily Telegraph, 27/7/07
Death count rising in Iraq
With five days to go before the end of July, an Associated Press tally showed that at least 1,759 Iraqis were killed in war-related violence through July 26, a more than 7 percent increase over the 1,640 who were reported killed in all of June.
Victims of sectarian slayings were also on the rise. At least 723 bodies were found dumped across Iraq so far in July, or an average of nearly 28 a day, compared with 19 a day in June, when 563 bodies were reported found, according to the AP tally.
Those numbers included civilians, government officials and Iraqi security forces, and are considered only a minimum based on AP reporting. The actual number is likely higher, as many killings go unreported or uncounted.
Despite the increase in killings during the past month, U.S. and Iraqi officials have claimed some success in reducing violence as they fight to gain control of the capital and surrounding areas ahead of a pivotal progress report to be delivered to the Congress in September.
Kansas City Star, 27/7/07