Reports From Irak August 30th 2007
Charitable Appeal For Eid Gifts:
Iraq charities are launching their donation campaign for gifts for Eid Al Fitr this year. A UK£20 donation will provide a gift package that will include:
- Clothes (e.g. suit, dress, headscarf)
- A pair of shoes & socks
- Toys
- Sweets
Their goal is to provide 2,000 such packages. The links below take you the relevant pages which include information on how the gifts are to be distributed, guarantees, credit card or bank donation links.
Electricity Bombing Campaign
The electricity campaign continued. An attack yesterday evening on the al-Doura power station, (south Baghdad) caused severe damage to two generation plants forcing the power station offline. Widespread blackouts were caused throughout the region. One of the plants was set on fire the other severely damaged by the attackers. A fire engine was attacked and also set on fire. Several firefighters were wounded. The area is considered to be a hotspot and as the Electricity ministry official who spoke to Aswat Al Iraq on condition of anonymity pointed out repairs require security and the region is a “hot spot” and not under control either of the Americans or the green zone government despite massive reinforcements there. (Notes: The plant is now operating at one third of its already reduced capacity. The last attack was on the pipelines to the plant. The attack before that destroyed one generation plant.)
Karbala Aftermath (Update 6):
Afternoon: In general the governorate is calm. In the city things are gradually returning to normal. In the centre of the city there are people in the streets. Cleanup crews and citizens aided by civil dense are at work. Work is also underway at the shrines.
Statement from the religious authorities.
The tourism director of Karbala said today that he had organised the evacuation of 6000 Iranian pilgrims from the city “to preserve their lives” the evacuation (??roundup??) involved targeting hotels and hostel used by pilgrims and is evacuating the pilgrims first to Najaf from where they will be returned to Iran. (there is security plan to maintain their safety he said - editor’s note: There is an agreement between the two countries on the number of pilgrims allowed and on measures to protect their safety. This agreement was strengthened after the July 6th, 2006 suicide bombing of Iranian pilgrims in Kufa that markfromireland reported on here: Iranian Pilgrims Bombed in Kufa
Security Reorganisation In Karbala
The meeting in Karbala headed by Nouri Al Maliki and attended by:
- the green zone government Minister of Defense
- Muwaffaq al-Rubaie
- Bahaa Al-Araji
- officials in the police and intelligence service in the province
agreed to strengthen the role of the security forces in Karbala, which will be under the command of the green zone government Ministry of Defense. The meeting lasted several hours. The meeting agreed the dismissal of officers on grounds of negligently performing their duties and reorganising the security services in particular the protection of the Mosques.
The same report says that the Sadrist office in Karbala has closed for three days in mourning for those killed during the clashes. That when telephoned an official in the office said this was in obedience to the statement by Muqtada al-Sadr and his directives and pointing out that the security forces are currently conducting raids and arresting members of the Sadrist movement in the city and outlying neighbourhoods.
Cleanup and repair operations are underway to open the Shrine of Imam Hussein.
Babil:
Two SIIC (SCIRI) offices have been burnt down in al-Hashimiya, (30 south of Hilla) the Islamic Centre in the region (the centre belongs to the foundation led by Amar Abdel Aziz al-Hakim the son of Abdul Aziz Al Hakim) has been burnt down also. SIIC (SCIRI) has blamed what it calls “renegade Ba’athists”.
Other Reports:
Muthanna Governorate
Muthanna’s new governor has been elected (his predecessor was killed 10 days ago) like his predecessor he is a member of SIIC (SCIRI)
Indexed under: Al Muthanna (Governorate), Child Poverty, Children, Electricity Crisis (Irak), Women and Children
9 Responses
to “Reports From Irak August 30th 2007”
2 Trackback(s)
- Aug 31, 2007: University Update - Verizon - Reports From Irak August 30th 2007
- Aug 31, 2007: appletree » Blog Archive » News from Iraq: August 31, ‘07
Editor’s Note:
And that may God be thanked is my turn finished for a month. This has been a very difficult few days.
Haleema.
Get some sleep :-)
I prefer having the subscriber postings available on the main page as Haleema has done instead of having to click a link in the email and then enter my password.
I hope this innovation will be continued.
Uh oh the great public/private debate reopens :-) I asked Haleema to make an exception for the last few days because of the pressure on Khalil and there were problems with the news aggregator service. In fact there still are problems with that service and I can only access their server intermittently. They mailed us last week saying they were upgrading their server and their software so hopefully everything will be back to normal soon.
I take it this has come up before :-). While I have you would it not be possible to make the postings into PDFs as you do with the daily summaries and briefings and the Friday sermon reports?
There’s a report on Chinaview Iraqi militia leader Moqtada al-Sadr calls truce as clashes continue (thanks for suggesting them by the way) that says Al Sadr has threatened to rescind his order. Is the “stand down” order like the interview in The Independent that (apparently) he never gave?
It’s definitely come up before! :-) It’s just too much work Sagib, we can’t ask them to take on even a tiny bit more and there are licensing issues as well I can’t remember the exact figure but we’d wind up paying something like 4 or 5 times more and that’s more than we can or will pay. Everything is paid for out of our own pockets - we don’t carry advertisements, we don’t charge a subscription and we never will, and we never have (and never will) ask for donations for Gorilla’s Guides.
The PDF idea is a good one and we have tried it using a plug-in but the results weren’t consistent sometimes it would “take” and sometimes it wouldn’t. There’s nothing to stop you doing a cut and paste of the postings into Word or Thinkfree or Google documents and exporting it as a PDF.
Yah - Xinhua and China View are both good for news from Irak - they make heavy use of local reporters who they pay a decent amount to. If you check the wording of that declaration though you’ll see that what it said was:
“for a period not exceeding six months from the day of issuing of this statement.
The other thing is that they reserve the right to defend themselves if you take a look here you’ll see that they make that point very strongly, that the right to self-defense is God given and therefore supercedes everything else. I’ll ask the others about The Independent interview IIRC the person who denied that he gave it was the director of publicity in the Sadr City office. But that the reporters involved said he gave the interiview in Najaf. My guess would be that he wasn’t told about it for security reasons and that a lot of his job is squashing misquotations.
Interesting video report thanks for the link and the suggestion.
du
Yes that was who it was who denied that the interview had been given Du presumably, as you say, because he hadn’t been told that it was going to take place and what a large part of his job consists of. I would imagine that every politician has somebody whose sole function is to deny that they said particular things.