These are the archives for the week ending 8th June 2007
4.2 million Iraqis are now displaced
More than 4 million Iraqis have now been displaced by violence in the country, the U.N. refugee agency said Tuesday, warning that the figure will continue to rise.
The number of Iraqis who have fled the country as refugees has risen to 2.2 million, said Jennifer Pagonis, spokeswoman for the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees. A further 2 million have been driven from their homes but remain within the country, increasingly in "impoverished shanty towns," she said.
Pagonis said UNHCR is receiving "disturbing reports" of regional authorities doing little to provide displaced people with food, shelter and other basic services.
More than half of Iraq's 18 governorates are preventing displaced people from entering their territories, either by stopping them at checkpoints or by refusing to register them for food aid and other basic services.
Associated Press, 5/6/06
Turkish troops enter northern Iraq
Hundreds of Turkish troops crossed into northern Iraq in pursuit of Kurdish guerrillas who raid Turkey from hideouts there, Turkish security officials and an Iraqi Kurdish official said, amid fears that Turkey might stage a bigger incursion that could lead to conflict with U.S.-backed Iraqi Kurds.
The United States says the PKK is a terrorist group, but U.S. forces are consumed by chaos elsewhere in Iraq, and want to preserve the Kurdish-dominated north as a rare spot of relative stability. The Iraqi Kurdish administration has tense ties with Turkey, which has accused it of backing its Kurdish brethren in the PKK movement.
International Herald Tribune, 6/6/07
Air strikes and civilian casualties on rise
In the first four and a half months of 2007, U.S. aircraft dropped 237 bombs and missiles in support of ground forces, already surpassing the 229 expended in 2006, according to U.S. Air Force figures.
At the same time, the number of civilian Iraqi casualties from U.S. airstrikes appears to have risen sharply, according to Iraq Body Count, a London-based, anti-war research group compiled news media reports on Iraqi war deaths.
The rate of such reported civilian deaths appeared to climb steadily through 2006, the group reports, averaging just a few a month in early 2006, hitting some 40 a month by year's end, and averaging more than 50 a month so far this year.
The U.S. military says it doesn't track civilian casualties.
Houston Chronicle, 5/6/07
Maliki's government is on the edge
Iraq's government is teetering on the edge. Maliki's Cabinet is filled with officials who are deeply estranged from one another and more loyal to their parties than to the government as a whole. Some are jostling to unseat the prime minister. Few, if any, have accepted the basic premise of a government whose power is shared among each of Iraq's warring sects and ethnic groups.
Maliki is the man U.S. officials are counting on to bring Iraq's civil war under control, yet he seems unable to break the government's deadlock.
Even Maliki's top political advisor, Sadiq Rikabi, says he doubts the prime minister will be able to win passage of key legislation ardently sought by U.S. officials, including a law governing the oil industry and one that would allow more Sunni Arabs to gain government jobs.
"We hope to achieve some of them, but solving the Iraqi problems and resolving the different challenges in the [next] three months would need a miracle," Rikabi said.
Interviews with a broad range of Iraqi and Western officials paint a portrait of Maliki as an increasingly isolated and ineffectual figure, lacking in confidence and unable to trust people.
Los Angeles Times, 5/6/07
Surge failing in Baghdad
Military officials acknowledged Monday that U.S.-led forces have control of fewer than one-third of Baghdad's neighborhoods despite thousands of extra troops nearly four months into a security crackdown _ an assessment that came as the U.S. death toll approached 3,500, with at least 15 American troops reported killed in the first three days of June.
Lt. Col. Scott Bleichwehl, a military spokesman for Baghdad operations, confirmed a status report completed in May found that American and Iraqi forces were able to "protect the population" and "maintain physical influence over" only 146 of the 457 Baghdad neighborhoods, while troops have either not begun operations aimed at rooting out insurgents or still face "resistance" in the others.
But Bleichwehl stressed that the assessment, first reported by The New York Times, did not mean a lack of progress and said the setbacks were largely because of the need to return to some areas that had previously been cleared, as well as problems with the availability and reliability of Iraqi police.
Washington Post, 4/6/07
US dissatisfied with both Bush and Democrats
Americans are becoming more discontented over the situation in Iraq and more unhappy with Democrats who won control of Congress last November largely because voters want to see an end to the war, according to a Washington Post/ABC News poll.
Just 39 percent said they approve of the job Congress is doing, down from 44 percent in April. Approval of congressional Democrats dropped to 44 percent from 54 percent, according to the poll results.
Much of that drop was fueled by lower approval ratings of congressional Democrats among strong opponents of the Iraq war, independents and liberal Democrats, The Washington Post reported on Tuesday.
Reuters, 5/6/07
Military to brief Brown on withdrawal plan
Military chiefs have drawn up plans to speed up the withdrawal of the vast majority of British troops from Iraq within 12 months.
The new proposed timetable, which would see almost all the 5,500 British troops return home by next May, will be presented to Gordon Brown when he takes over as Prime Minister later this month.
Mr Brown is due to visit Iraq where it is believed commanders will brief him about the options. The new proposals were reported to have suggested withdrawing almost all troops, leaving only a small number of teams in the south to advise Iraqi military forces.
Until now, the Government and the military have both insisted the withdrawal of troops from Iraq would be dictated by events and the needs of the Iraqi government. The new timetable reflects the intense pressure on the military of fighting in both Iraq and Afhanistan.
Independent, 4/6/07
Best US can do is 'stave off defeat'
At least 14 US troops have been killed in Iraq over the weekend, as one former US commander warned victory in the intractable conflict was now beyond reach.
The latest fighting erupted after a former commander of American forces in Iraq, retired army Lieutenant General Ricardo Sanchez, said the United States could no longer win the war and must find a way to stave off defeat.
"I think if we do the right things politically and economically with the right Iraqi leadership we could still salvage at least a stalemate, if you will - not a stalemate but at least stave off defeat," he said.
General Sanchez retired last year and is the highest-ranking former military leader yet to suggest the Bush administration fell short in Iraq. He commanded troops there between June 2003 and June 2004.
World News Australia, 4/6/07
US bombards Somalia's coast
A U.S. warship pounded Somalia's remote coastal northeast, targeting Islamic militants hours after a gunbattle with Somali government forces that left eight insurgents dead, officials said Saturday.
The fighting late Friday appeared to mark the opening of a new front against Islamic militants in Puntland, a semiautonomous region that has remained relatively peaceful through Somalia's anarchy.
Puntland Vice President Hassan Dahir Mohamoud said eight foreign militants were killed in the fighting and Somali forces were pursuing five others. He told The Associated Press there were no civilian casualties because the area is uninhabited. Mohamoud said the Puntland government had requested the U.S. navy to help fight the militants.
Defense Secretary Robert Gates, attending a security conference in Singapore, said he had no comment on the action in northern Somalia as it is "possibly an ongoing operation."
The United States has repeatedly accused Somalia's Council of Islamic Courts of harboring terrorists linked to al-Qaida and allegedly responsible for the 1998 bombings of the U.S. Embassies in Kenya and Tanzania.
The U.S. sent a small number of special operations troops with the Ethiopian forces that drove the Islamic forces into hiding. U.S. warplanes have carried out at least two airstrikes in an attempt to kill suspected al-Qaida members, Pentagon officials have said.
Houston Chronicle, 2/6/07
2,000 civilian deaths in May
The number of civilians killed in Iraq jumped to nearly 2,000 in May, the highest monthly toll since the start of a U.S.-backed security crackdown in February, according to figures released on Saturday.
Reuters, 2/6/07
Kidnappers were police
The raid on the Finance Ministry in Baghdad by 40 policemen in 19 vehicles who calmly cordoned off the street in front of the building before abducting five Britons shows how little has changed in the Iraqi capital despite US reinforcements and a new security plan.
It has always been absurd to speak of men "dressed in police uniforms travelling in police vehicles" as if they were gunmen in disguise. "Of course they have the uniforms and the vehicles, because they are real policemen," said an Iraqi minister after a similar operation in which 150 people were abducted from the Ministry of Higher Education in the capital last year.
The unit that carried out this kidnapping is almost certainly Shia and is probably under the control of the Mehdi Army or the Badr Organisation. The Finance Ministry in East Baghdad is in a heavily Shia district not far from the Oil and Interior Ministries. There are many checkpoints here, so it would be difficult for a detachment of Sunni insurgents to pass undetected.
The most obvious explanation for the abductions is that they werein retaliation for the killing of Abu Qader, also known as Wissam Wiali, the Mehdi Army commander in Basra, by a British-backed operation last week. It may be designed to send a message that any British action will be met with retaliation.
Independent, 31/5/07
'No way' Iraq war can be won
There is "no way" the war in Iraq can be won by the United States and its allies, a former British Army commander said as he called for the troops to be withdrawn.
General Sir Michael Rose, who commanded the United Nations Protection Force in Bosnia-Hercegovina from 1994 to 1995, said coalition forces in Iraq were facing an impossible situation.
"There is no way we are going to win the war and (we should) withdraw and accept defeat because we are going to lose on a more important level if we don't,'' he said. Though the coalition could not simply "cut and run,'' Gen Rose said announcing a withdrawal date would help to dampen down the violence between Sunni, Shia and Kurdish factions.
"Give them a date and it is amazing how people and political parties will stop fighting each other and start working towards a peaceful transfer of power,'' he said.
The Australian, 2/6/07
US may be in Iraq for decades
Defense Secretary Robert Gates and a senior U.S. commander said Thursday that they favor a protracted U.S. troop presence in Iraq along the lines of the military stabilization force in South Korea.
In Hawaii, Gates said he is thinking of "a mutual agreement" with Iraq in which "some force of Americans ... is present for a protracted period of time, but in ways that are protective of the sovereignty of the host government."
Gates said such a presence would assure Middle East allies that the United States will not withdraw from Iraq as it did from Vietnam, "lock, stock, and barrel."
The comments represented the second time this week that administration officials invoked the U.S. experience in South Korea in citing the need for a long-range presence in Iraq. Concerns that U.S. forces might stay for a lengthy period have provoked considerable controversy in the region.
Seattle Times, 1/6/07
Police chief arrested for murder
A Sunni police chief praised by U.S. forces for clearing his city of insurgents has been arrested following an investigation into alleged murder, corruption and crimes against the Iraqi people, the U.S. military said Wednesday.
Col. Hamid Ibrahim al-Jazaa, his brother and 14 bodyguards were taken into custody Tuesday in the city of Hit, 85 miles west of Baghdad, according to a statement by the public affairs office of Multinational Corps- Iraq.
"The apprehensions were the result of an investigation which alleges murder, corruption and crimes against the Iraqi people. The apprehension of this group was authorized and coordinated with local Hit city officials," the statement said.
Al-Jazaa was lauded by the U.S. military for leading "Operation Police Victory," a crackdown on insurgents in the Sunni Arab city in February.
Associated Press, 31/5/07
'Small progress' in bloody May
With the past month marking one of the deadliest periods for U.S. troops since the start of the war, the second-ranking U.S. military commander in Iraq said Thursday that some progress has been made in the early going of the troop buildup
Lt. Gen. Ray Odierno, the commander of multinational troops in Iraq, said that overall sectarian violence is down, attacks in volatile Anbar province have been cut by half and nearly 18,000 enemy fighters have been captured this year.
"We've made small progress here. We have not made the progress that I think is necessary yet, but I hope over the summer that we will continue to make progress," Odierno said.
For the moment, however, any gains on the security front have been overshadowed by the American death toll. At least 122 U.S. service members were killed in May, making it the deadliest month of the war since November 2004, when 137 troops were killed in action mainly due to pitched battles during the siege of Fallujah.
Chicago Tribune, 1/6/07