These are the archives for the week ending 6th July 2007
NATO casualties in Afghanistan
Six Canadian soldiers were killed by a roadside bomb in Afghanistan on Wednesday as criticism increased here of the growing military and civilian toll.
The six soldiers were returning from a joint patrol with Afghan soldiers near Kandahar city when the blast ripped through their vehicle.
The deaths bring to 66 the number of Canadian soldiers killed since the U.S.-led invasion of Afghanistan in 2001. In addition, 408 American troops have been killed there, as well as 63 British soldiers and 86 from other countries.
Washington Post, 5/7/07
Australia admits oil motive
Australia's defense minister said Thursday that protecting Iraq's oil supplies is one of his country's motivations for keeping troops in Iraq, adding a new government justification for its Iraqi mission.
"The Middle East itself - not only Iraq - ... is an important supplier of energy, oil in particular, to the rest of the world, and Australians ... need to think what would happen if there were a premature withdrawal from Iraq," Nelson told ABC.
International Herald Tribune, 4/7/07
Iraq's oil bill delayed
Iraq's crucial oil bill today faced further delay amid opposition from Kurdish politicians and parliamentary supporters of the radical Shia cleric Moqtada al-Sadr.
Passage of the bill is seen by the US as vital to healing Iraq's sectarian divisions. The prime minister, Nuri al-Maliki, had hoped for parliament to start debating the draft law today.
As Mr Sadr's supporters voiced their displeasure with the bill, the Kurdistan regional government (KRG), which administers Iraq's Kurdish north, said it had not seen and did not support the draft approved by the Iraqi cabinet yesterday.
Sunni politicians were also opposed. "We hope the cabinet is not approving a text with which the KRG disagrees because this would violate the constitutional rights of the Kurdistan region," the KRG said in a statement.
The Bush administration sees the bill as essential to political reconciliation between Iraq's three main blocs, the Sunnis, Shias and Kurds. The legislation is considered to be one of the "benchmarks" for continued US support for the Shia-dominated government led by Mr Maliki.
Ownership of oil reserves has been one of the most contentious issues among the country's bitterly divided factions. The Kurds have argued that some of the bill's annexes are unconstitutional as they take oilfields away from regional governments and hand them to a state oil firm created by the legislation.
Guardian Unlimited 4/7/07
Iraqi cabinet agrees new oil law
Iraq's cabinet yesterday approved an amended draft oil law and was set to forward the bill to the parliament. "The law has been endorsed during the cabinet meeting and it will be sent to parliament," government spokesman Ali Al Dabbagh said.
Ownership of Iraq's vast oil reserves has been a subject of fierce debate among leaders from the country's bitterly divided factions. The bill was first approved in February but several powerful factions expressed reservations about the text, prompting further debate.
On the controversial question of foreign ownership, Dabbagh said the oil law will address the issue of production sharing on a "case by case basis." "We usually seek best revenues for Iraqis when signing a contract," he said.
Gulf Daily News, 4/7/07
US implicates Iran in Iraq
The U.S. military accused Iran on Monday of a direct role in a sophisticated militant attack that killed five American troops in Iraq, portraying Tehran as waging a proxy war through Shiite extremists.
The claims over the January attack marked a sharp escalation in U.S. accusations that Iran has been arming and financing Iraqi militants, and for the first time linked the Iranian effort to its ally, Lebanon's Shiite Hezbollah militia.
The allegations could endanger Iraqi efforts to hold a new round of talks between the U.S. and Iran.
U.S. military spokesman Brig. Gen. Kevin J. Bergner said the Quds Force, part of Iran's elite Republican Guards, was seeking to build an Iraqi version of Hezbollah to fight U.S. and Iraqi forces - and had brought in Hezbollah operatives to help train and organize militants.
``Our intelligence reveals that the senior leadership in Iran is aware of this activity,'' Bergner told a Baghdad news conference. He said it would be ``hard to imagine'' that Iran's supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei did not know about the activity.
Iran has denied past claims that it was backing Iraqi militants - including accusations that it was providing them with a particularly deadly type of roadside bomb. Its ally Hezbollah has denied having any role in Iraq, saying it operates only in Lebanon.
Guardian 3/7/07
Iraq government continues to splinter
Iraq's main Sunni Arab bloc that is boycotting cabinet meetings in protest at being sidelined in the unity government may adopt new drastic tactics to win fairer treatment, Vice President Tarek al-Hashemi said on Monday.
Hashemi, a key member of the Sunni Accordance Front, told Reuters in an interview that Iraq no longer had a government of national unity comprised of Shi'ites, Sunni Arabs and Kurds.
His words underscored deep frustration at a political process that has failed to reconcile majority Shi'ites with minority Sunni Arabs.
Besides holding six cabinet posts in the 35-member administration, the Accordance Front has 44 seats in the 275-member parliament.
It does not have the numbers to bring down the government, but its absence from cabinet and parliament makes it increasingly hard for Shi'ite Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki to portray his administration as a unity government.
Reuters, 2/7/07
600 civilians killed in Afghanistan this year
The United Nations says it estimates that about 600 Afghan civilians have been killed in insurgency-linked violence this year, just over half of them by pro-government forces.
UN spokesman Adrian Edwards said today that the number of civilian killed in May was the highest in months. Edwards said that in June, those killed by national and foreign forces supporting the government appear to "largely exceed" those killed by rebels.
Radio Free Europe, Czech Republic, 2/2/07
Basra security committee replaced
The Iraqi government replaced the top security commission in the country's second-largest city because of suspected links to Shiite militias as authorities prepare for British forces to reduce their presence in southern Iraq, officials said Monday.
Basra, the capital of Iraq's oil-rich southern region, has been plagued by feuds between rival Shiite militias - blamed for killings of police officers and civilians as well as rocket and mortar attacks against British troops and Iraqi security forces. The old security committee was disbanded after being accused of cooperating with some militias and other armed groups.
British and Iraqi forces have struggled to bring calm to Basra, about 340 miles southeast of Baghdad and the main route for Iraq's oil exports to the Persian Gulf. Attacks have increased against British troops in the province, killing seven in June.
In June 2006, Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki declared a state of emergency in Basra following a rise in violence among mostly Shiite groups competing for power and infiltrating police and government institutions.
Associated Press, 2/7/07
British mercenaries head intelligence effort
On the first floor of a tan building inside Baghdad's Green Zone, the full scope of Iraq's daily carnage is condensed into a 30-minute PowerPoint presentation.
Displayed on a 15-foot-wide screen, the report is the most current intelligence on significant enemy activity. Two men in khakis and tan polo shirts narrate from the back of the room.
The intelligence was compiled not by the U.S. military, as might be expected, but by a British security firm, Aegis Defence Services Ltd.
Aegis won its three-year, $293 million U.S. Army contract in 2004. The company is led by Tim Spicer, a retired British lieutenant colonel who, before he founded Aegis, was hired in the 1990s to help put down a rebellion in Papua New Guinea and reinstall an elected government in Sierra Leone.
The government has outsourced a wide range of security functions to 20,000 to 30,000 contractors in Iraq; the exact number has not been disclosed. Contractors protect U.S. generals and key military installations and have served as prison guards and interrogators in facilities holding suspected insurgents, among other responsibilities.
Washington Post, 1/7/07
Basra controlled by militias
In one of the most detailed independent reports on Basra since the invasion, the authoritative International Crisis Group (ICG) last week painted a devastating portrait of life in the city.
It said Operation Sinbad, Britain's attempt between September 2006 and March this year to root out militias, restore security and kick-start economic reconstruction, appeared at first to be a qualified success. Criminality, political assassinations and sectarian killings receded somewhat, and relative calm prevailed.
"Yet this reality was both superficial and fleeting," says the ICG report. "By March-April 2007, renewed political tensions once more threatened to destabilise the city, and relentless attacks on British forces in effect had driven them off the streets into increasingly secluded compounds.
Basra's residents and militiamen view this not as an orderly withdrawal, but rather as an ignominious defeat. Today the city is controlled by militias."
Independent, 1/7/07
NATO kills more civilians than Taliban...
Air strikes in the British-controlled Helmand province of Afghanistan may have killed civilians, coalition troops said yesterday as local people claimed that between 50 and 80 people, many of them women and children, had died.
In the latest of a series of attacks causing significant civilian casualties in recent weeks, more than 200 were killed by coalition troops in Afghanistan in June, far more than are believed to have been killed by Taliban militants.
The civilian deaths caused by US and Nato-led troops have infuriated local people and prompted President Hamid Karzai to publicly condemn foreign forces for careless 'use of extreme force' and for viewing Afghan lives as 'cheap'.
The increasingly fragile President has urged restraint and better co-ordination of military operations with the Afghan government, while also blaming the Taliban for using civilians as human shields.
The Observer, 1/7/07
...while US raid kills civilians in Iraq...
Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki condemned a U.S. raid Saturday in Baghdad's Shiite Sadr City slum - a politically sensitive district for him - in which American troops searching for Iranian-linked militants sparked a firefight the U.S. said left 26 Iraqis dead.
The U.S. military said all those killed in the fighting were gunmen, some of them firing from behind civilian cars. But an Iraqi official put the death toll lower, at eight, and said they were civilians. Residents also said eight civilians were killed in their homes, angrily accusing American troops of firing wildly during the pre-dawn assault.
Associated Press, 30/6/07
...and US troops are charged with murder
Two American soldiers have been charged with premeditated murder for allegedly killing three Iraqis and then planting weapons on their bodies to portray them as combatants, the U.S. military said Saturday.
The three Iraqis were killed in separate incidents between April and June near Iskandariyah, 30 miles south of Baghdad, the military said in a statement.
Iraqis often accuse American soldiers of unnecessary killings or abuse, and the war has seen U.S. service members face prosecution in several high-profile incidents, including abuse of detainees at Abu Ghraib prison, the killings of 24 civilians by Marines in Haditha and the rape and killing of a 14-year-old girl and the slaying of her family south of Baghdad.
After the rape case came to light, Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki said his government would also investigate and seek to prosecute those responsible, but no Iraqi investigation was ever pursued. The U.S. military has said it alone has the right to prosecute its soldiers accused in abuses in Iraq.
Washington Post, 30/6/07
Bush manufactures Al Qaida threat
Facing eroding support for his Iraq policy, even among Republicans, President Bush on Thursday called al Qaida "the main enemy" in Iraq, an assertion rejected by his administration's senior intelligence analysts.
The reference, in a major speech at the Naval War College that referred to al Qaida at least 27 times, seemed calculated to use lingering outrage over the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, to bolster support for the current buildup of U.S. troops in Iraq, despite evidence that sending more troops hasn't reduced the violence or sped Iraqi government action on key issues.
U.S. military and intelligence officials, however, say that Iraqis with ties to al Qaida are only a small fraction of the threat to American troops. The group known as al Qaida in Iraq didn't exist before the U.S.-led invasion in 2003, didn't pledge its loyalty to al Qaida leader Osama bin Laden until October 2004 and isn't controlled by bin Laden or his top aides.
Bush's use of al Qaida in his speech had strong echoes of the strategy the administration had used to whip up public support for the Iraq invasion by accusing the late Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein of cooperating with bin Laden and implying that he'd played a role in the Sept. 11 attacks.
A similar pattern has developed in Iraq, where the U.S. military has cited al Qaida 33 times in a barrage of news releases in the last seven days, and some news organizations have echoed the drumbeat. Last month, al Qaida was mentioned only nine times in U.S. military news releases.
McClatchy Newspapers, 28/6/07
US death count at new high
Five American soldiers were killed when insurgents blew up a huge bomb buried deep beneath the road as American armored Humvees passed, and then attacked the soldiers with rocket-propelled grenades and rifles, military officials said Friday.
With the newest casualties, the American death toll for June now stands at 100, one day before closing out what will be the deadliest quarter yet for the American military in Iraq, with 330 soldiers killed in three months, according to data from the Iraq Coalition Casualty Count Web site.
In the first six months of this year 574 American servicemen have died, a 62 percent increase over the same period last year.
International Herald Tribune, 29/6/07
Germans oppose Afghanistan involvement
The German parliament isn't set to vote on extending the country's Afghanistan mission until this autumn. But the debate has already begun -- and some within Chancellor Merkel's coalition would like to see a partial withdrawal.
The vote in Germany's parliament may be months away, but the politicking, maneuvering and backbiting has already begun in earnest.
Despite the SPD having been, under former Chancellor Gerhard Schröder, the party in charge when German soldiers first set foot in Afghanistan, the party has since become decidedly ambivalent about the mission.
And with a new survey indicating that 61 percent of Germans are in favor of bringing the troops home, the self-appointed "party of peace" is eager to give the impression that it is working toward an end to the engagement.
Der Spiegel, 28/6/07
Bush holds up Israel as model for Iraq
US President George W Bush has appealed for people to give his strategy in Iraq a chance - holding up Israel as a model for defining success there. He said America would like to see Iraq function as a democracy while dealing with violence - just as Israel does.
"In places like Israel, terrorists have taken innocent human life for years in suicide attacks" he said.
"The difference is that Israel is a functioning democracy and it's not prevented from carrying out its responsibilities. And that's a good indicator of success that we're looking for in Iraq."
BBC News, 28/6/07
Gordon Brown and Iraq
There's an odd myth about Gordon Brown. His views on the war in Iraq are said to be unknown. Whether the myth is put out by Brownites to hint that change is imminent or by wishful thinkers on both left and right who desperately hope for a new Downing Street line on the Iraq disaster, it has no substance.
It is not just that Brown was a member of the cabinet that decided on war. There is plenty of contemporary evidence that he was a wholehearted supporter, rather than a man who acquiesced in silence.
Two days before the House of Commons voted to attack Iraq, Brown endorsed the government case in measured terms on Breakfast With Frost.
In cabinet he was more fervent. "Gordon launched a long and passionate statement of support for Tony's strategy," Robin Cook wrote in his memoirs of the last cabinet he attended.
Guardian, 29/6/07