Gorilla’s Guides

I have written an article briefly outlining why I expect the sitaution in both Lebanon and Gaza to escalate. It can be found on my markfromireland site. Here’s the conclusion:

“The situation therefore has several intertwined strands:

• An Israeli attempt to bantustanise both Lebanon and Gaza.
• An Israeli attempt to seize desperately needed water resources.
• An Israeli attempt to
  comprehensively defeat armed Islamic activism in its neighbourhood once and for all and establish a “pax Israelica.”

What can be expected? In summary:

1. Don’t expect anyone to back down soon.
2. Expect the military conflict to escalate.”

You can find the entire posting here.

markfromireland

The [Arabic language] account of Nouri al-Maliki’s remarks at the Iraqi embassy in London yesterday summarised below would be hilarious if the situation in Iraq weren’t so bad. One has to wonder who Maliki’s remarks were directed at. When I started to write this posting:

• Abdul Aziz al-Hakim, had urged the creation of “people’s committees.” - If you think this sounds suspiciously like “Committee of Public Safety” you’d be right.
• Operation Forward Together” is acknowledged by politicians “close to” Maliki as having failed.
• In one of several attacks today in Baghdad alone A policeman was killed and three wounded when a roadside bomb targetting their patrol in the Zayouna district exploded. Attacks in the capital continued - there was a gun battle on Haifa Street in which six police officers were killed and 30 were wounded.
• In other attacks seven police and ten civilians were killed and that was attacks during the night on forces loyal to the green zone government in Central Baghdad alone.
• Today (again in Baghdad) alone three bombs exploded in the city, killing two civilians and a policeman and wounding many others. I haven’t been able to get estimates of the casualties.
• Six other civilians were shot dead two of those were in drive-by shootings.
• There were mortar attacks.
• There was the usual crop tortured murder victims found by the roadside.
• And two US soldiers were killed in al-Anbar.

Compare this with what Maliki said according al Zaman:

So to whom were al-Maliki’s remarks directed? They weren’t directed at his Iraqi compatriots that’s for sure.What the article doesn’t say (because it’s already well-known by it’s Iraqi readership) is that Maliki is isolated, and a “lame duck.” His American minders, chief amongst them the American Viceroy Governor Ambassador prevent his own aides from having access to him, he’s surrounded by about 40 American advisers and they control not only who can see him but the information he gets.

Al Maliki’s trip is for American domestic political consumption and for American domestic political consumption alone. It has nothing to do with the realities of the situation in Iraq. Nothing. While I was writing this (as I expected) the cynicism of the Bush administration in organising this trip, was matched by the wanton disregard of the Democrats for the lives of the Iraqi people and American troops in Iraq:

“Your failure to condemn Hezbollah’s aggression and recognize Israel’s right to defend itself raise serious questions about whether Iraq, under your leadership, can play a constructive role in resolving the current crisis and bringing stability to the Middle East, ………

As you know, the American people have given so much in the name of fighting global terror and helping build a better future for the people of Iraq,……… [emphasis mine - mfi]”

Iraq is boiling in blood, Israel has launched a war of domination against Lebanon and it’s election season in America. God save the people of the Middle East.

markfromireland

America’s moral abyss
The rape and murder of a young Iraqi girl by US soldiers is exemplar of the fate of the Iraqi nation at the hands of its imperial tormentors, writes Firas Al-Atraqchi

In early 2003, an Arabic-language newspaper ran a cartoon depicting the nation of Iraq as a young girl being raped by a US soldier while several Arabs in traditional garb enthusiastically egged the soldier on. The message was simple: Iraq was about to be plundered of its wealth, stripped of its manpower, its expertise, its middle and educated classes, its infrastructure and its knowledge base. Like a rape victim, the country would be scarred, mutilated and contorted, never again to appear fully sovereign.

This vision became horrific reality in the town of Mahmoudiya in March 2006 when 16-year-old Abeer Qassem Hamza Al-Janabi was raped, shot and burned by a team of US soldiers who allegedly had been planning for a week to perpetrate their crime. Their plan included discarding their military uniforms and donning dark clothes (resembling that of militia or fedayeen ) to avoid identification as US military personnel. Abeer’s family were executed in the assault, including her seven-year-old sister, so that none may point a finger of blame at the US military.

In the immediate aftermath, the US military cordoned off the area surrounding Abeer’s house, announcing that her family were Shia and were murdered by Sunni “insurgents”. We now know neither claim was true. Al-Janabi’s neighbours protested that the family were Sunni, and that the girl had complained of harassment by US troops at a nearby checkpoint some time earlier.

Three weeks before the US military announced and opened an internal investigation, the alleged lead perpetrator of the rape of Abeer was discharged from the army on grounds that he was mentally unstable. The undeclared reason, according to some sources, was that the US military was aware of his conduct in Mahmoudiya and sought to avoid further embarrassment to a military plagued by atrocities in Abu Ghraib and Haditha, among dozens of other reports of human rights violations.

[snip]

Abeer’s life as a whole is testament to the suffering of the Iraqi people. Born the year Iraq invaded Kuwait, Abeer lived out her infancy under the punitive sanctions regimen. She grew up different from other girls in the Arab world: an innocent child, yet punished for wrongs she could not begin to understand. By the time she turned 13, Iraq had been invaded and entire cities and villages were soon under siege. In the great war of liberation allegedly waged to stifle terrorism and liberate the Iraqi people from the stranglehold of tyranny, Abeer paid with her life at the hands of the liberator.

Despite the best efforts of senior officials to categorise Green’s actions (and those of his unit cohorts) as aberrations, evidence increasingly emerging from Iraq indicates that similar crimes and human rights abuses are perpetrated on a near daily basis.

[snip]

Regarding Abu Ghraib, two years on from the scandalous atrocities captured on camera and leaked to the press, thousands of pictures and video footage showing ongoing torture, human rights abuses and, according to New Yorker journalist Seymour Hersh, the rape of minors, remain unpublished.

[snip]

The media has also reported that gang graffiti has been scrawled on walls in Iraq, including proclamations of loyalty to the Aryan nation — a statement usually made by white supremacists.

The notion that racist ideology exists among US military servicemen and women serving in Iraq is hardly new. In late 2004, British officers told The Telegraph that they viewed the US use of force as aggressive and disproportionate. They added that it was the belief of many British commanders that certain quarters within the US military viewed Iraqis as untermenschen, or sub-humans.

Perhaps it is such dogma that facilitates the emergence of websites that display pictures of Iraqi dead or allows for songs to be written about the killing of an Iraqi girl and her family (Hadji Girl) by a US marine. Adding insult to injury, such songs are being bought up by radio stations in the US and will be available for download at a premium.

The US military has a serious personnel problem on its hands and has all but lost the hearts and minds campaign it aimed to win among Iraqis. How could it be otherwise when Abeer’s savage rape and murder stands as testament to the absence, at the core of the US military, of adherence to even the most fundamental tenets of ethics and human morality?

Full Article in AL-Ahram Here:

markfromireland

BORJ AL-BARAJNEH, 24 Jul 2006 (IRIN) - Community leaders in Lebanon’s largest refugee camp, Borj al-Barajneh in southern Beirut, say thousands of Palestinian families have fled the area around the camp, and sought safety inside it, straining its fragile resources. Terrified families, they say, are now living as many as 16 persons to a room.

“This camp is a disaster area,” says Abu Zaher al-Habet, a member of the Popular Committee that organises the camp. “Ninety percent of the people are unemployed. Sixty percent live below the poverty line. We have no running water normally, only water trucks, and now even those are not making deliveries.”

Several generations of Palestinians here have been on the receiving end of Israeli attacks.

Zakia Hamad was just three years old when her mother was killed by the Israeli army in 1948. Forty years later, her husband, daughter and son were killed by the Israeli military during its occupation of southern Lebanon.

Today, the elderly woman sits on the floor of an underground bunker. All of a sudden, a small boy runs in clutching a red-hot piece of shrapnel from Israeli shells exploding metres away outside.

He brings news that Hamad’s aunt has been hurt by flying glass. “Oh god,” screams Hamad. “What am I to do?”

Across the bunker, Amne Assem huddles with her family - Alia, Tihaj and Jihan. She says her husband is old, tired and weak, and stayed behind in their shanty home on the edge of the Borj camp, now directly in the line of fire.

Tihaj is asked how her children are coping with the Israeli bombardment. “There are tears,” she says. “What do you expect?” Community leaders say the noise of shelling is traumatising children in the camp.

The slum of Borj al Barajneh has been cut off from food aid and services since Israel began its attacks on suspected Hizbollah targets in Lebanon, on 12 July. “We are trying to raise awareness of how urgent this situation is,” says Olfat Mahmoud, director of a woman’s organisation in the camp. “Maybe tomorrow the road access to the camp will be bombed, so we must get badly needed goods to them now.”

“This camp is a place of deprivation,” says Abu Badr Merte, another community leader. “Other people live in their country. We live in our country [Palestine] only in our hearts.”

Al-Habet from the Popular Committee deals with relief organisations, including the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA). The committee drew up a list of things it says people need - including children’s milk, grain, meat, bread, candles, fire extinguishers and medical supplies - and submitted it to UNRWA on 20 July.

Richard Cook, Director of UNRWA, says he received the written request on Monday. “We had made our regular distribution of foodstuffs to the camp ahead of this conflict, so we have to assess what additional needs they have and if indeed there are 9,000 extra persons taking refuge there.”

The camp normally houses about 20,000 Palestinians, with around 9,000 more living just outside. According to community leaders, it is this 9,000, or some thousands of them, who have come into the camp since Israeli shelling began.

The plight of the Palestinians in Lebanon is more overlooked now than in the past. Ten years ago, thousands of Palestinians died when the Borj camp was largely destroyed in fighting between Yasser Arafat’s Palestinian Liberation Organisation and Syrian-backed Lebanese Amal militia.

But since the early 1990s, community leaders say they have seen money spent by UNRWA on the camp, fall by as much as 70 percent.

“They are partly right about this,” concedes Cook. “It’s been an ongoing grumble as UNRWA has struggled with a chronic funding shortage. We do still provide the same quality of services but whereas camp residents may have had 50 patients to a doctor before, now it might be nearer 100.”

From IRIN
markfromireland

BAGHDAD, 24 Jul 2006 (IRIN) - Hosts of college students from the west Anbar governorate of Iraq are spending their summer holidays doing volunteer work in hospitals, clinics and camps for displaced persons.

“We can’t just sit back and watch conditions deteriorate without offering some help, especially given the current lack of professionals,” says Othman Bakr, a 24-year-old student of medicine from Ramadi.

The Ministry of Displacement and Migration reported last month that more than 150,000 Iraqis had been displaced countrywide due to sectarian violence. Many NGOs devoted to the relief effort, meanwhile, have complained about a serious lack of supplies and assistance.

Like Bakr, dozens of students have offered their time and experience to help their compatriots, many of whom are in dire need of food, shelter and medical assistance. “I’m assisting at a camp near Ramadi, where most displacements are a result of sectarian violence,” says Mariam Dera’a, who is studying to be a secondary school teacher. “I help them by preparing fresh food and providing the children with some extra education.”

Local relief NGOs express appreciation for the help. “Ten students from different colleges are helping us,” says Fatah Ahmed, spokesman for the Baghdad-based Iraq Aid Association. “They’re going to be doctors, dentists, pharmacists and engineers, and they will definitely garner much experience here.”

Some students have collected food donations from Baghdad and brought them back to displaced families and hospitals in Anbar. “We filled our cars with rice, beans and cooking oil and divided it all between several local families,” says Ayman Razak, a student of engineering from the city of Fallujah. “People were often surprised to see students collecting food to help the displaced.”

For many of the displaced, the experience has proven to be a tremendous morale booster. “When the students come to help us, we feel like we’re respected again,” says Um Omar, a mother of four who fled her home in Ramadi in the wake of sectarian violence. “God bless these young people with good hearts – they are difficult to find in today’s Iraq.”

From IRIN
markfromireland