السلاح الشخصي، قبل أكثر من أربع سنوات، كان يعني للعراقي علامة من علامات السلطة والنفوذ، و محاولة جعل مقبض المسدس ظاهرا للعيان كانت تعني ان حامله يتمتع بتفويض من سلطة أمنية عليا. وبعد سقوط النظام السابق بات حمل السلاح شائعا، كحمل القلم، أو نظارة القراءة، أو سلسلة المفاتيح. ويقول (جاسم،ح) وهو ضابط في الشرطة برتبة رائد، أن "الذين لا يحملون سلاحا تحت ثيابهم اليوم هم قطعا يحتفظون به في منازلهم" . مشيرا على أنه وحسب تقديرات وزارة الداخلية في زمن الحكومة الانتقالية الثانية؛ فإن العراقيين يحتفظون في بيوتهم بحدود خمسة ملايين قطعة سلاح، وهو ما يسمح به القانون دون حاجة إلى إجازة من الحكومة على عكس ما كان عليه الحال سابقا حيث يتطلب حمله رخصة من الحكومة. 
وفي قسم الأمانات في معاهد وكليات الموصل تجد أسلحة تعود لطلاب وطالبات وأساتذة وضعوها في صناديق مقفلة، أو أودعوها عند موظف الاستعلامات ليعودوا ويأخذوها بعد انتهاء حصتهم الدرسية، وفي المحافظات الأخرى تبدو هذه الظاهرة أكثر انتشارا حتى داخل المدرجات وصفوف الطلاب.
ويقول (صادق. ع) وهو تاجر أسلحة خفيفة لم يبلغ الثلاثين بعد ينحصر نشاط عمله في منطقة باب سنجار أن الطلب على السلاح زاد بشكل ملحوظ مع بداية عام 2006 وهو في تصاعد مستمر وان أسعار السلاح في ارتفاع أيضا حيث يبلغ سعر مسدس ( برونك ـ 9 ملم ) الآن حدود ( 1000 ـ 1200 $ ) بعد ان كان في السابق بحدود( 700 $ ) أما مسدس ( طارق ـ 7 ملم و 9 ملم ) العراقي الصنع فان القطعة الجيدة منه تصل إلى سعر ( 1500 $ ) بعد ان كانت في حدود ( 800 $ ) العام الماضي.
ويقول ياسين وهو طالب جامعي من سكنه حي الوحدة أن "حمل السلاح أباح للشباب اكتساب الخبرة في التعامل مع أنواع مختلفة من الأسلحة، والقدرة على بناء أمنهم شخصي" مشيرا إلى أن "اتساع عمليات الاغتيالات والخطف هي عامل هام في عملية اللجوء إلى حمل السلاح ،حيث لا يمكن للمتاجر والمحلات في مدينة الموصل أن تخلو أبدا من قطعة سلاح".
أسلحة للسيدات:

(more…)

• 10 Fatalities throughout KRG.
• More than 7,000 case of acute watery diarrhoea.
• Estimated 2.8 Million people living in the affected areas.

Twelve districts of Northern Iraq have reported laboratory-confirmed cases of cholera putting over 2.8 million people exposed to public health risk from this current outbreak. Five out of eleven districts of Sulaymaniyah province, all five districts of Kirkuk province and two out of seven districts of Erbil province are now affected by this cholera outbreak in Northern Iraq.

Sulaymaniyah

The cumulative number of cases of acute watery diarrhoea reported from five out of eleven districts stands at 48401 including 9 deaths with an overall case fatality rate of 0.18%. In Sulaymaniyah province, Vibrio cholerae has been laboratory confirmed in 315 stool specimens out of 1,629 specimens (19%) collected so far.

Kirkuk:

The health authority of Kirkuk province reported a total of 3,728 cases of acute diarrhoeal disease including 1 death (CFR: 0.026%). The first index case of cholera, confirmed by laboratory test, was reported from Kirkuk province on 14 August 2007. So far, from the Kirkuk province, a total of 291 stool specimens out of 5,610 samples collected so far have tested positive for Vibrio cholerae. Out of these, 116 stool specimens out of 3,207 samples (4%) collected tested positive in the month of August and 175 stool specimens out of 2,403 stool specimens (7%) tested positive in the first week of September so far.

Erbril:

On 6th of September, the first laboratory-confirmed case of cholera was reported for the first time from one of the  districts (Erbil centre) of Erbil province. Later on, laboratory confirmed case was also reported from Koisnjaq district. So far 21 stool specimens from these two districts of Erbil province have tested positive for Vibrio cholerae serogroup 01 Inaba signifying that cholera has now spread to three provinces of Northern Iraq (Sulaymaniyah, Kirkuk and Erbil). Consolidated figure on cumulative number of cases of acute watery diarrhea since the first index case of Vibrio cholerae was laboratory confirmed are still not available.

Actions Taken/Bodies Involved:

The International Committee of the Red Cross, Medecins Sans Frontieres (Doctors Without Borders), and United Nations agencies including UNICEF and the U.N. Development Programme have joined WHO efforts to respond to the cholera epidemic.

All public water systems in the affected areas have been chlorinated, and samples are being regularly collected and tested to ensure potable water standards are being met.

(Note: Many in the affected areas rely on well water according to our sources.)

URGENT NEEDS

While surveillance system for acute watery diarrhea/cholera is showing signs of improvement in general, there is an urgent need to improve it further in order to obtain better quality data for continuous risk assessment and assess  the effectiveness of the control measures real time. In order to strengthen the surveillance system for acute watery diarrhea/cholera in the affected districts of Northern Iraq, two international qualified epidemiologists needs to be deployed temporarily (One in Sulaymaniyah province and the other in Kirkuk province) to assist the local health authority in improving surveillance, conducting case investigation, imparting training to the rapid response team members for outbreak verification etc.

In terms of medical and laboratory supplies, the current need is to expedite the shipment of 10 Inter Agency
Diarrhoeal Disease Kits to Erbil and 5000 rapid diagnostic kits (SMART kits) to Northern Iraq

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OSAMA BIN STEAMEN ATTACKS BIG APPLE!

Cheney’s pacemaker rushed to undisclosed secure location

Trained chimpanzee gives picture books to schoolchildren

Clinton and Obama demand constitution be suspended

Rumsfeld reappointed - Ottawa and Rio De Janeiro Nuked

more….

Du

The Third Punic War

The Third Punic War was a brief, tawdry affair, unworthy of the heroism of the previous conflicts. If ever there was a war that could be called unnecessary, this one would qualify.

Despite all the penalties and all the impediments, Carthage recovered economically. Rome had taken away her empire and the financial burden that went with it, but had left her free to pursue trade as she willed. Carthage paid off her war indemnity and by the middle of the second century, was flourishing.

This did not set well with many Roman senators. Rome had acquired a good deal of fertile land along the coast of North Africa, and a number of senators had invested in olives and grain there. But these were goods in which Carthage traded as well, and Carthage was rather better at it.

A faction within the Senate, led by Cato the Elder, began to agitate against Carthage. Was it right, they asked, that Carthage should prosper while Romans toiled? Was Carthage’s new prosperity not potentially dangerous? After all, the city had twice troubled Rome. And, in any case, Carthage was harming Roman mercantile interests.

Cato took the lead in these arguments. He was a prestigious statesman with a prestigious reputation. He was the classic virtuous Roman and he didn’t mind that others knew it. His public career was spotless, his marriage was perfect, his oratory was compelling, his values were conservative, and all in all he got on some people’s nerves.

Cato began to urge that the only sure defense against a resurgent Carthage was to destroy it. Rome would never be safe so long as Carthage stood. He made a campaign of it: Carthago delenda est! — Carthage must be destroyed!

Ian Welsh:

The Senate passed a bill yesterday instructing the militry [sic] to give it more details on what it calls Iran’s intolerable acts of hostility towards the US. As Agonist readers know the drumbeat that Iran is behind attacks on the US in Iraq (indeed, that next to al-Qaeda it is the primary actor) has been going on for months now. (Al-Qaeda, of course, is not the primary insurgency movement in Iraq, and the evidence on Iran is sketchy and beside the point in any case. Thank goodness the USSR didn’t nuke the US into the ground for supplying the mujahideen with weaponry, which is simply a matter of public record, not of conjecture.)

This is part of the drumbeat for war with Iran. The bill passed 97-0 and while authorization for military action was stripped out of it (for now), does anyone doubt that the military will report anything but that Iran is deeply involved in giving support to everyone in Iraq, including Sunni insurgency groups it makes no sense for Iran to work with? They certainly have in the past, and while the evidence has bordered on non-existent, there’s no reason to believe they won’t continue to do so.

I don’t think people will quickly grasp how truly disastrous this piece of Senatorial foolishness really is. There are so many potentials for world catastrophe in this that it’s hard to even enumerate them. The effects on the US economy can be more destructive than the post WWI depression ever was.

When the first bomb falls, the oil tankers will stop moving. I know the military will assure us that they know where every Silkworm missile is, where every fast gunboat is housed, and they can guarantee that shipping will be safe. Maritime insurers won’t care. They’ll shut down their underwriting immediately. Or, if we’re lucky, they quintuple their rates. I suppose it’s human nature, but I suspect the tanker owners won’t feel too obligated to risk their bottoms just to deliver oil to keep Americans in (relatively) cheap gas. Again human, nature, but suppose they ordered their captains to sail anyway? A lot of those tankers sail under foreign flags, for the convenience of lower costs. If you were a Greek captain running a VLCC with an Indonesian crew would you want to risk your life to keep Americans driving their SUVs to work on 40 or 50 mile round trips? Would you consider it a moral imperative to risk your life sailing in order to assure food deliveries to Kansas City? What would the ship owners do? Cancel your contract and get another captain? There are a finite number of captains qualified to sail these ships.

Let’s briefly recap: just about everything in the US runs on the internal combustion engine. People moved into the suburbs to get away from the awful, crowded cities, but many drive 30 to 50 miles a day to work. Unless you work in a major city like New York, Chicago, San Francisco, or Philadelphia, you don’t have a truly reliable public transportation system to rely on.

Most of our food is carried by semi-trailers. Are you ready for chicken at $8 or $9 a pound? Lettuce at $7 a head? $7.50 for a gallon of milk?

Americans are being played. They are being played exactly the way they were played in the run-up to the Iraq war. Every piece of evidence that Iran has been attacking the US has been dubious, unsourced or so vague as to be meaningless. Even if Iran was supplying some weaponry, and I wouldn’t be surprised if it is supplying some to the US’s allies in the Badr brigades, for example, ask yourself very clearly if you’re willing to go to war over that and if you think that supplying weapons to a group resisting an occupation is really a causus [sic] belli. Because the US has done it, itself, more than once.

Leaving aside all considerations of morality and of the US’s foreign reputation, a war against Iran right now is military insanity. The US is currently losing two wars already and Iran is in a position to shut off the majority of Middle Eastern oil supplies. Trust me, a few weeks, even, of over $200 or $300 a barrel oil, absolute shortages throughout the world, and no US citizen will be safe anywhere outside US sovereign soil because everyone, even Europeans, will be paying for America’s splendid little war.

Senators were played in the run up to the Iraq war. They’re being played again right now, and so are Americans. The drumbeat of propaganda against Iran is never ending, mostly false (or at least unverifiable, and the US has no credibility on these questions) and planted in all the same places as the propaganda against Iraq was.

Fool me once - shame on you.

Fool me twice - shame on me.

If you like gasoline at $3 a gallon, you’re going to love it at $8 $13 when the oil tankers stop sailing.

Text of the Lieberman demand for war against Iran.

Crooks and Liars has the video of our Democratic Senator, Carl Levin, giving his sloppy wet kiss of love to Joe Lieberman (R-Tel Aviv).

FDL has the list of text and phone numbers to register your disapproval.

By the way, a sensible man could probably assume that this bit of errant propaganda is “no longer operative” as lying scumbuckets say. By all means read this unsourced story though, because The Sun has always been a reliable outlet for Republican Party propaganda.

Yesterday, a spokesman for the U.S. Navy, Lieutenant Bashon Mann, said the arrival of the USS Enterprise should not be understood as an escalation in the Gulf. “That is not going to happen,” he said. “The Enterprise is doing a one-for-one swap with the Nimitz. They are big ships, they are traveling with their strike groups, they cannot turn on a dime so to speak, but there won’t be an overlap. People will say there will be these overlaps. That means there will be three carriers, but that is incorrect.” The Drudge Report yesterday featured a story from Reuters announcing the arrival of the third carrier group.

Another Defense Department spokesman who asked for anonymity confirmed yesterday that by the end the summer, the Navy will have only one carrier in the Gulf.

A cynical man might think no one told the Navy that Joe Lieberman just might own a lot of ExxonMobil stock.

Blackwater deaths detailed

Sunday, Jul 08, 2007 - 12:09 AM

Some can be found in memos from a second team for Blackwater operating around Fallujah on March 31, 2004.

Blackwater, a private security firm based in Moyock, sent two squads through Fallujah without maps, according to memos obtained by The News & Observer of Raleigh. Both of the six-man teams, named Bravo 2 and November 1, were sent out two men short.

The Bravo 2 team members had protested that they were not ready for the mission and had not had time to prepare their weapons, but they were commanded to go, according to memos written by team members. The team disregarded directions to drive through Fallujah and instead drove around it and returned safely to Baghdad that evening.

The November 1 team went into Fallujah and was massacred.

The Bravo 2 team memos, in emotional, coarse and damning language, placed the blame squarely on Blackwater’s Baghdad site manager, Tom Powell.

“He had sent us on this [expletive] mission and over our protest,” team member Daniel Browne wrote the next day. “We weren’t sighted in, we had no maps, we had not enough sleep, we was taking 2 of our guys [out of the mission]. As we went over these things we [knew] the other team had the same complaints.”

The memos surface amid heightened congressional scrutiny of the private security industry, which grows ever more valuable to the Pentagon.

The families of the four men killed in the ambush — Jerry Zovko, Wesley Batalona, Scott Helvenston and Michael Teague — sued Blackwater in Wake County Superior Court in an effort to find out what happened.

Blackwater countersued the estates of the four men in federal court, successfully arguing for arbitration, where the proceedings are closed to the public and the investigation of the incident can be much more limited.

Powell, the site manager, left Blackwater shortly after the Fallujah incident. He will not discuss the event while litigation is pending, said his attorney, Clifford Higby of Panama City, Fla. Efforts to reach the other Blackwater contractors for comment were unsuccessful.

Blackwater, owned by former Navy SEAL Erik Prince, did not respond to requests for comment starting in early June.

. . .

Team Bravo 2 arrived in Baghdad late on the night of March 30, 2004, according to the memo written by team leader Jason Shupe.

In a meeting held just before midnight, Powell — the Blackwater site manager — told Shupe that his team would likely go on a mission the next morning. Shupe protested; his team was fighting jet lag and had not “sighted” its weapons, or adjusted the scopes so that the bullets would hit the targets sighted in the crosshairs.

The next morning, Bravo 2 was ordered to go to the Jordanian border and pick up an executive for ESS, a food catering company, and escort him to Baghdad.

Shupe protested, calling it “a bad idea” to send out the crew shorthanded, and wrote in his memo that Powell disregarded his concern.

Shupe briefed his team. Like Shupe, they thought the mission was a bad idea, according to the written accounts of two other team members.

Shupe eventually decided to drive around Fallujah rather than through it as Powell had instructed.

Unknown to Shupe, Blackwater’s November 1 squad had driven into the city on its way to Camp Ridgeway, an American base west of town. Gunmen approached the rear of the convoy and shot Helvenston, Teague, Batalona and Zovko. A crowd gathered, set the cars on fire, pulled the men out and dragged their bodies through the street.

Oblivious of the massacre, Bravo 2 drove to the Jordanian border and picked up the ESS executive.

There, Shupe got a phone call from Kuwait telling him that a Blackwater team had been ambushed. The team then drove back safely to Baghdad, taking care to skirt Fallujah.

inRich - News - Blackwater deaths detailed

Isn’t that interesting?

Du

Alan Johnson has been freed.

Like I said some good news for a change. The BBC’s report is here.

Du 

So this platoon’s advance was held up for a day while they waited for artillery or an airstrike to clear the houses for them. The next day, finally, an M1 tank appeared and blew the houses with its main gun.

The insurgents/Sunnis/Mahdi Army death squads/resistance/ militants/Ba’athist dead enders are going to make the Americans destroy as much of Baquba as they can.

Nothing makes a people more loyal to a resistance than having their homes destroyed by a foreign occupier. It’s funny; I learned this back in the Viet Nam era. I don’t think many of our military leaders were around, then.

Main and Central

Go read.

Du.

Their badly decomposed bodies were found in the desert and brought to the morgue at Imam Ali Hospital, Sadr City, Baghdad, where relatives identified them from their clothing.

Thirteen of the missing 15 have been identified so far. Tests are being conducted on two other bodies found close to the other 13 to see if they are the bodies of the remaining two missing squad members.

Baghdad, June 16, (VOI) – Thousands of residents of Sadr City, eastern Baghdad, attended the funeral of 13 members of an Iraqi junior tae kwon do team, whose bodies were found on Thursday on the international highway linking Baghdad to the Jordanian capital Amman.

The funeral ceremonies started from the office of Shiite leader Muqtada al-Sadr in the city, where angry mourners chanted anti-U.S. slogans. The 13 coffins were held by the mourners to be taken by vehicles for burial in the holy Shiite province of Najaf, south of Baghdad.

Iraqi police sources on Friday had announced that the bodies of a tae kwon do team members who had been kidnapped by unidentified gunmen on May 17 were found near Ramadi, laid on the international Baghdad-Amman motorway.

“All the casualties were junior tae kwon do players whose ages did not exceed 15 years, except the coach who was 30 years old,” a mourner told the independent news agency Voices of Iraq (VOI).
“All of them were residents of Sadr City,” he added.

Source: Aswat Al Iraq | English | Sadr City residents bid last farewell to tae kwon do team

Aswat Al Iraq’s Arabic Language report is here.

Reuters Report:

BAGHDAD, June 16 (Reuters) - The decomposed bodies of at least 13 martial arts experts have been found more than a year after they were kidnapped in an al Qaeda stronghold west of Baghdad, local officials and family members said on Saturday.

The bodies were found on Thursday in a ditch in the desert about 100 km (60 miles) west of Ramadi in Anbar province, one of Iraq’s most violent areas and where al Qaeda and Sunni Arab insurgents are battling U.S. and Iraqi forces.

All appeared to have been shot, hospital officials said. Weeping relatives gathered at the hospital in the Baghdad Shi’ite slum of Sadr city to identify the bodies.

“The bodies were very badly decomposed. Just the bones and clothes remained,” Qasim al-Mudalal, the director of Baghdad’s Imam Ali Hospital, told Reuters.

Fifteen tae kwondo experts were kidnapped in May 2006 as they were traveling by bus through the Anbar desert on their way to Jordan to attend a training course.

Mudalal said partial remains which may be those of the remaining two squad members were also recovered.

The Iraqi government had tried to secure their release but no word had been heard of them until Thursday’s grisly find.

“They were killed about the same time they were taken. They were killed and left in the desert,” said Hameed al-Hai’es, head of a Sunni Arab group that has been fighting al Qaeda in Anbar.

He said family members had been able to identify them by the clothes they were wearing. An identity card was also found on one body belonging to 26-year-old squad member Haidar Jabbar.

The bodies were not wearing team uniforms, Mudalal said.

Hai’es said members of the Anbar Salvation Council, a group of local Sunnis who have been fighting al Qaeda in the province, found the bodies after an al Qaeda captive told them where the tae kwondo team members had been killed.

Funeral processions for the squad were being held in Sadr City on Saturday. The families said they had received to permission to bury them in the southern holy Shi’ite city of Najaf despite a four-day curfew.

Iraqi athletes were rarely able to travel abroad during Saddam Hussein’s rule because of United Nations sanctions.

Athletes looked forward to international competitions and more funding after Saddam was toppled in 2003 but many have since been kidnapped and killed in Iraq’s relentless sectarian fighting between majority Shi’ites and Sunni Arab

Reuters AlertNet | Bodies of Iraq tae kwondo squad found in desert | By Wissam Mohammed

 AP’s Report:

BAGHDAD - The remains of 13 members of an Iraqi tae kwon do team kidnapped last year have been found in western Iraq, police and hospital officials said Saturday.

The team had been driving to a training camp in neighboring Jordan in May 2006, when their convoy was stopped and all 15 athletes abducted along a road between the cities of Fallujah and Ramadi, in Anbar province.

Members of the Anbar Salvation Council, a group of Sunni tribal leaders who have partnered with U.S. and Iraqi officials to fight al-Qaida influence in Anbar, found the 13 bodies Friday west of Ramadi, near the main highway leading to Jordan, said Anbar police Col. Rashid Nayef. Two of the athletes remained unaccounted for.

The remains — mostly skulls and bones entangled in tattered sports uniforms — were transferred to Imam Ali Hospital in Baghdad’s predominantly Shiite Sadr City neighborhood, home to most of the athletes. A doctor there, who spoke on condition of anonymity for security reasons, said the bones would undergo DNA testing to determine their identities.

Relatives gathered at the hospital Saturday to mourn the victims. Women in black robes cried out while men hoisted rickety wood coffins atop minivans and cars. Plastic athletic sandals lay scattered on the ground near the bodies.

The athletes were members of a private sports club that hopes to one day send members to the Olympics.

“His dream was to represent his country in sports, but instead he was killed,” said Ali Kanoun, cousin of one of the victims, Rasoul Salah.

“I tell the killers, you should point your guns at the Americans and the foreigners (fighting in Iraq) instead of hurting athletes who were representing all of Iraq, not their tribe or sect,” Kanoun said by telephone from a crowd of mourners at Imam Ali Hospital.

Athletes and sports officials have increasingly become targets of threats, kidnappings and assassination attempts in Iraq, either as part of tit-for-tat violence between Shiites and Sunnis or for ransom.

Victims have included the Sunni head of one of Iraq’s leading soccer clubs, an Iraqi international soccer referee, a top player on the Iraqi Olympic soccer team and a national volleyball player.

A blind Iraqi athlete and paralympics coach were kidnapped last year but later released unharmed after sports officials said their abductors determined neither man was linked to the Sunni insurgency.

Gunmen also kidnapped the chairman of Iraq’s National Olympic Committee and at least 30 other officials last year, including the presidents of the tae kwon do and boxing federations, in a bold daylight raid on a sports conference in the heart of Baghdad. Iraq’s national wrestling coach, a Sunni, was killed around the same time in a Shiite district of Baghdad.

Kidnapped athletes found dead in Iraq - Yahoo! News

Du