These are the archives for the week ending 27th April 2007
April bloodiest month for British troops
British troops in Iraq passed a bloody milestone this week with the killing of soldier Alan Joseph Jones, 20, a gunner on a Warrior fighting vehicle, who was shot dead by gunmen in the southern city of Basra.
A total of 11 British soldiers have been killed in Iraq so far this month, the highest number of casualties suffered by British forces in a single month since March 2003, when 27 were killed in the opening days of the U.S.-led invasion.
Analysts say that with British troops poised to begin reducing their numbers in Basra in the coming months, Shi'ite militias are increasing their attacks so that they can claim victory when British forces eventually pull out.
Reuters, 25/4/07
UN criticises Iraq for disappearances...
The United Nations Assistance Mission for Iraq criticised Baghdad on Wednesday for concealing the casualty figures from its sectarian war and charged that many detainees have "disappeared".
The Baghdad Security Plan seeks to quell the violence but UN human rights officer Ivana Vuco said it also had increased the potential for the abuse of detainees' human rights.
"The disappearance of detainees still continues," she said. "We have serious concerns that not all detainees are being registered. We found people looking for detained family members who they were unable to locate."
Most of these detainees are held for "prolonged periods of time without charge in overcrowded conditions," she said. At least 37,641 people were being held in detention centres across Iraq as of end of March, UNAMI said.
AFP, 25/4/07
...and for rushed trials
The UN report, which covers the period from the 1 January to 31 March 2007, said that some 3,000 thousand people have been arrested in security sweeps since the Baghdad security plan began in mid-February and it condemned Iraq for failing to guarantee due process rights to those taken in.
It also criticised the court system in general saying that deliberations at some trials involving life imprisonment or the death penalty only lasted for minutes.
The report describes the situation in Iraq as a "rapidly worsening humanitarian crisis".
BBC News, 25/4/07
Iraqis and US split over security walls
Residents of a Sunni enclave of Baghdad demonstrated and shouted slogans yesterday against a newly built wall sealing off their neighbourhood from the rest of the city.
About 2,000 people marched through al-Adhamiyah in east Baghdad carrying banners saying that their district was being turned into "a big prison".
There was confusion as the Iraqi Prime Minister, Nouri al-Maliki, said that the building of the wall must stop while the spokesman for the US-led security crackdown asserted that "construction of security barriers across Baghdad will continue without exception".
Independent, 24/4/07
al-Maliki support eroding
A broad range of prominent Iraqi lawmakers say they have lost confidence in Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki's ability to reconcile the country's warring factions.
Legislators from several parties told USA TODAY that al-Maliki lacks the support in parliament to push through laws, such as a plan to distribute oil revenues, that could reduce tensions between Sunnis and Shiites. Iraq's parliament has failed to pass major legislation since a U.S.-led security plan began on Feb. 14.
"He is a weak prime minister," said Mahmoud Othman, a Kurdish legislator who supported al-Maliki until recently. "This government hasn't delivered and is not capable of doing the job. They should resign."
Al-Maliki seems unable to broker deals among the fractious alliance of Kurds and Shiites who supported his appointment last May, said Qasim Dawood, a member of al-Maliki's coalition. "The present government is not competent," said Dawood, a Shiite legislator. "It's more or less paralyzed, inactive. I doubt very much that this government can continue in power much longer."
USA Today, 25/4/07
Afghanistan vows to stop border fence
Afghanistan says it will use all means to stop Pakistan erecting a fence along their disputed border. Pakistan says the fence is designed to stop the movement of Islamic militants Kabul says are involved in attacks inside Afghanistan. But Afghanistan doesn't recognise the colonial-era frontier.
The foreign ministry in Kabul also argues the fence is no solution to crossborder attacks, and divides families living in the area. And it says Afghanistan will use all legal tools to stop it being erected. Last week, there was a cross border gun battle after Afghan troops tore down part of the new fence.
Radio Australia, 25/4/07
Bomb breaches British tank
A British Challenger 2 tank has been badly damaged by a roadside bomb in Iraq, leaving the driver seriously injured, the Ministry of Defence said.
Professor Michael Clarke, from King's College's Defence Studies centre, said the Challenger 2 tank's armour was usually "inviolable".
He said: "Most of the things on a battlefield are not much of a threat to a tank, usually. This is worrying, because if there are many of these sorts of very heavy penetrative improvised explosive devices around in the area then no vehicle is safe."
BBC News, 23/4/07
Oil companies want Iran oil despite US pressure
Irritated by the prospect of a huge European gas development deal with Iran, the Bush administration said Monday it will argue that such transactions undercut international bargaining power over Iran's nuclear program.
The prospective gas development deal between Iran and an Austrian firm would not violate United Nations sanctions against Tehran, and the United States cannot block it outright.
Austria's OMV energy firm and Iranian officials announced a preliminary agreement to develop Iran's Pars gas fields. The agreement announced over the weekend could also open the way for a deal to build a liquifying plant for Iranian natural gas. The announcement was the latest sign that European oil companies continue investing in Iran despite U.S. pressure.
``We're going to talk to the Austrian government, talk to the firm involved and raise with them the idea that perhaps this is not the most appropriate time to be making or committing to making large investments in the Iranian oil and gas sector,'' State Department spokesman Sean McCormack said.
Guardian, 24/4/07
Congress Backs US withdrawal
A Democrat-led congressional panel has approved a war-funding bill that sets a tentative March 31, 2008 deadline for US troop withdrawal from Iraq despite a promised veto by the president.
The fight in Washington escalated as nine US soldiers were killed and 20 wounded on Monday in a suicide car bombing northeast of Baghdad, the Pentagon said.
The bill will require troops to start withdrawing by October 1 if the president cannot show by then that Iraq is stabilising. Congress will vote on the $100bn legislation this week. But George Bush maintained that the Baghdad troop surge was working and rebuked Democrats for setting a deadline.
Al Jazeera, 24/4/07
Tensions over reversing Baath purge
After the invasion, they were Iraqi pariahs, seen by Americans as remaining too loyal to Saddam Hussein to be trusted. Members of the ruling Baath party, many of them Sunni Arabs, were purged from the country's ministries and military in an aggressive de-Baathification program initiated by then US administrator Paul Bremer and, later, misconstrued by the new Shiite political elite to serve their ambitions.
But now the Americans are trying to reverse much of the impact of the de-Baathification policies. Analysts and the US itself say that that approach - along with disbanding the former army - polarized Iraqi society and helped fuel the violent Sunni-led insurgency. Reintegrating many former Baath Party members, as a way to weaken support for the insurgency, has become one of Washington's top priorities and a cornerstone of its new strategy here.
In fact, US zeal for reversing de-Baathification has been so intense that a source close to the process told the Monitor that Iraqi Vice President Adel Abdel-Mahdi was summoned to Washington in mid-March to discuss the issue. Upon his return to Baghdad, the source says, he met with former US ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad to draft a bill to reform anti-Baath policies.
"The prime minister was fuming because of the pressure, and how such an issue was being used by the White House for its argument with Congress on funding for the war," said the source, who added that Mr. Maliki's only solace was that his Shiite allies in parliament, who include partisans of anti-American cleric Moqtada al-Sadr, would realize "how pro-Baath the bill is and would change it." Indeed, the US continues to face much opposition from Shiite leaders in Iraq.
Christian Science Monitor, 23/4/07
al-Maliki condemns building of security wall...
Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki said Sunday that he was ordering a halt to construction of a controversial wall that would block a Sunni neighborhood in Baghdad from other areas.
The announcement, which he made in Cairo while on a state visit, appeared intended to allay mounting criticism from both Sunni Arab and Shiite parties about the project.
"I oppose the building of the wall, and its construction will stop," Mr. Maliki told reporters. "There are other methods to protect neighborhoods."
A spokesman for the American military said the military would remain "in a dialogue" with the Iraqi government about how best to protect citizens. The military did not say whether the wall's construction would be halted.
New York Times, 23/4/07
...and denies civil war
Gunmen shot and killed 23 members of an ancient religious sect in northern Iraq yesterday after stopping their bus and separating out followers of other faiths, and at least 20 Iraqis died in car bombings in Baghdad, most in a double suicide strike against a police station in a mixed Sunni-Shiite neighborhood.
Explosions also rocked the heavily fortified Green Zone in central Baghdad in an apparent mortar attack for the second consecutive day, sending black smoke billowing into the sky but causing no casualties, the US military said.
Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, the leader of mostly Shiite Iraq, traveled to Egypt on Sunday at the start of a tour seeking help from the Arab world's Sunni-led governments. After meeting with Egypt's top two officials, al-Maliki said he told them to ignore widespread reports that his country is suffering "a civil or sectarian war."
Independent, 23/4/07
US leaves torture to Iraqis
In one of the new joint American-Iraqi security stations in the capital this month, in the volatile Ghazaliya neighborhood, Captain Darren Fowler was heaping praise on his Iraqi counterparts for helping capture three insurgent suspects who had provided information he believed would save American lives.
The Iraqi officers beamed. What the Americans did not know and what the Iraqis had not told them was that before handing over the detainees to the Americans, the Iraqi soldiers had beaten one of them in front of the other two. The stripes on the detainee's back, which appeared to be the product of whipping with electrical cables, were later shown briefly to a photographer, who was not allowed to take a picture.
To the Iraqi soldiers, the treatment was normal and necessary. They were proud of their technique. "I prepared him for the Americans and let them take his confession," Bassim Hassan said through an interpreter.
Boston Globe, 22/4/07
Training Iraqi troops no longer US priority
Military planners have abandoned the idea that shaping up Iraqi troops will enable American soldiers to soon start coming home. They now think that U.S. troops will have to defeat the insurgents and secure control of troubled provinces.
Training Iraqi troops, which had been the cornerstone of the Bush administration's Iraq policy since 2005, has dropped in priority, officials in Baghdad and Washington said.
Evidence has been building for months that training Iraqi troops is no longer the focus of U.S. policy. Pentagon officials said they know of no new training resources that have been included in U.S. plans to dispatch 28,000 additional troops to Iraq. The officials spoke on the condition of anonymity because they aren't authorized to discuss the policy shift publicly.
Kansas City Star, 20/4/07
Marines considered Iraqi deaths 'insignificant'
The Marine Corps chain of command in Iraq ignored "obvious" signs of "serious misconduct" in the 2005 slayings of two dozen civilians in Haditha, and commanders fostered a climate that devalued the life of innocent Iraqis to the point that their deaths were considered an insignificant part of the war, according to an Army general's investigation.
Maj. Gen. Eldon A. Bargewell's 104-page report on Haditha is scathing in its criticism of the Marines' actions, from the enlisted men who were involved in the shootings on Nov. 19, 2005, to the two-star general who commanded the 2nd Marine Division in Iraq at the time.
Bargewell's previously undisclosed report found that officers may have willfully ignored reports of the civilian deaths to protect themselves and their units from blame. Though Bargewell found no specific coverup, he concluded that there also was no interest at any level in investigating allegations of a massacre.
Washington Post, 21/4/07
Amnesty condemns Iraq executions
Iraq is now the world's fourth highest user of the death penalty, human rights group Amnesty International has said.
At least 270 people have been sentenced to death since mid-2004, often after unfair trials the report says, and more than 100 people have been hanged.
Only China, Iran and Pakistan used the death penalty more frequently. Iraqi officials have dismissed criticism, saying that capital punishment is an intrinsic element of implementing an Islamic criminal code.
BBC News, 20/4/07
Iraq oil wealth 'significantly untapped'
Iraq's oil reserves are significantly untapped and daily production could be doubled within five years, a report has concluded. Iraq is sitting on potential reserves of 100 billion barrels, nearly twice as much as currently estimated, according to a study by energy analysts IHS.
"Iraq's reserves are clearly phenomenal," said Ron Mobed, president and chief operating officer of IHS, adding that they represented a "gold star opportunity".
But he stressed that the security situation needed to improve dramatically if the foreign investment needed to improve the country's infrastructure was to materialise.
"Obviously the security situation is very bad. But once the infrastructure is in place, the oil will come out of the ground quite cheaply."
BBC News, 19/4/07
Balkanization of Baghdad
A U.S. military brigade is constructing a 3-mile-long concrete wall to cut off one of the capital's most restive Sunni Arab districts from the Shiite Muslim neighborhoods that surround it, raising concern about the further Balkanization of Iraq's most populous and violent city.
U.S. commanders in northern Baghdad said the 12-foot-high barrier would make it more difficult for suicide bombers to strike and for death squads and militia fighters from sectarian factions to attack one another and then slip back to their home turf. Construction began April 10 and is expected to be completed by the end of the month.
Although Baghdad is replete with blast walls, checkpoints and other temporary barriers, including a massive wall around the Green Zone, the barrier being constructed in Adhamiya would be the first to be based in essence on sectarian considerations.
Los Angeles Times, 20/4/07
US commitment not open-ended
U.S. Defence Secretary Robert Gates urged Iraqi political leaders to step up reconciliation efforts on Thursday, saying they had to accept Washington could not make an open-ended commitment with troops and support.
He said the United States wanted faster progress on legislation widely seen as vital to quelling sectarian bloodshed between Iraq's Shi'ite Muslim majority and Sunni Arabs, once-dominant under Saddam Hussein.
Gates, due to meet Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki, said he would press Iraqi leaders to finalise an oil revenue sharing law and to agree on a plan to allow thousands of former members of Saddam's Baath party to return to public life.
Reuters, 19/4/07
Baghdad in 'open battle'
A suicide bomber has breached Baghdad's heavy security presence again, killing a dozen people in a mostly Shiite district a day after more than 230 people died in one of the war's deadliest episodes of violence.
Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki called the violence in Baghdad an "open battle" - nine weeks into a US-led effort to pacify the capital's streets.
Despite new barricades and checkpoints erected as part of the security crackdown, a fraction of the cars in Baghdad - a city of six million residents - are searched at all. Many of the suicide car bombs explode at the checkpoints, either targeting Iraqi troops or detonating a moment before they are discovered.
Sydney Morning Herald, 20/4/07
Occupiers cannot be prosecuted in Afghanistan
Attorney General Abdul Jabar Sabit has said the soldiers of the foreign military accused of crimes will not be prosecuted in Afghanistan. Answering questions from members of the audit and assessment commission of the lower house of parliament, the attorney general said Afghan prosecutor could not interfere in cases pertaining to foreign military.
Representative of the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) said according to their agreement with the Afghan government, foreign soldiers, accused of crimes, would be prosecuted under the laws of their native country.
Pakistan Tribune, 20/4/07