|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
By Varlam Shalamov; John Glad (Translator)
By Sean Wilentz
$16.92
$23
|
|
|
|
Klearchos Kapoutsis (CC BY 2.0)
|
After the deadliest month of political fighting in five years, Iraq appears to be sliding rapidly into a new civil war that “will be worse than Syria,” leaders say.
Posted on May 4, 2013
READ MORE 
|
AP Photo
|
By Juan Cole — The Syrian government’s resort to Alawite death squads in recent weeks has pushed former supporters into the opposition.
Posted on Jun 17, 2012
READ MORE 
|
Al Jazeera English (CC BY-SA 2.0)
|
Bahrain’s hospitals are becoming centers of terror and distrust as government officials use them to identify, torture and arrest protesters, doctors and nurses for their involvement in the ongoing uprising against the ruling Al Khalifa family.
|
|
By Robert Fisk — History comes full circle in Syria. In February 1982, President Hafez al-Assad’s army stormed into the ancient cities to end an Islamist uprising.
|
AP / Khalid Mohammed
|
The U.S. troops that remain in Iraq after last summer’s withdrawal face some new challenges from within Iraqi factions, as some previously American-allied members of the Awakening Councils are apparently joining the ranks ... (continued)
|
Wikimedia Commons
|
Shiite-dominated Iran has shifted its stance toward neighboring Iraq, backing Sunni inclusion in a new government in Baghdad and likely putting a damper on current Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki’s attempts to shape the new government.
Posted on Apr 11, 2010
READ MORE
|
AP / Alaa al-Marjani
|
In the early hours of Saturday morning, a group of men dressed as Iraqi army soldiers busted into five houses in a southern district of Baghdad, handcuffing up to 25 people and shooting them in the head.
|
U.S. Air Force / Staff Sgt. Jessica J. Wilkes
|
Iraq’s recent election was supposed to remove Nouri al-Maliki from power, but the prime minister, sounding rather like a Bond villain, declared “the game is still very much on.” Now a governmental commission created to keep Baathists out of public life says that on the night before the election it banned six candidates who went on to win.
|
AP via YouTube
|
A suicide bomber struck a procession of Shiite Muslims in Karachi, Pakistan, on Monday as they commemorated the day of Ashura, a traditional day of mourning and remembrance of the Prophet Muhammad’s martyred grandson. According to the Los Angeles Times, 20 people were killed and dozens wounded in the blast—the third attack in three days in Pakistan.
|
UNICEF Yemen
|
An escalating conflict between Shiite rebels and Sunni government forces has displaced at least 150,000 people in the northern part of Yemen. Aid agencies are struggling to absorb the stream of civilians as a lack of supplies and internal politics exacerbate the problem.
|
AP photo / Karim Kadim
|
Two suicide bomb explosions—one in central Baghdad and the other in Diyala province—killed at least 78 people on Thursday, according to the Associated Press, marking the worst day of violence in over a year.
|
U.S. Marine Corps / Lance Cpl. Sarah Furrer
|
The Awakening movement isn’t very happy these days. The U.S. has been paying Sunni militants to turn their guns from American soldiers to al-Qaida foreign fighters, a program that has been celebrated for reducing violence in Iraq and is now falling apart. In the words of one Sunni leader who spoke to NPR, “The Americans completely abandoned us.”
|
mexicanpictures.com
|
Because it worked out so well the last time, the U.S. plans to arm Afghan militias in an effort to police the country. The Pentagon is presenting this plan—and the media are reporting it—as a spinoff of a successful strategy in Iraq, not a revival of the secret war that gave rise to Osama bin Laden and the Taliban.
|
Flickr/Jim Gordon
|
A key overlooked fact about the much-ballyhooed “surge is working” argument in Iraq is that the U.S. military actually paid some former insurgents $10 a day to help American troops keep the peace in parts of the country. But what happens when that setup changes in volatile regions like Anbar?
|
AP photo / Darko Bandic
|
By Robert Fisk — Yesterday [July 16] was the last day of the 2006 Lebanon war, the final chapter of Israel’s folly and Hizbollah’s hubris, a grisly day of corpse-swapping and refrigerated body parts and coffin after bleak wooden coffin on trucks crossing the Israeli border, which left old Ali Ahmed al-Sfeir and his wife, Wahde, stooped and broken with grief.
|
|
By Patrick Cockburn — Mosul looks like a city of the dead. American and Iraqi troops have launched an attack aimed at crushing the last bastion of al-Qa’ida in Iraq and in doing so have turned the country’s northern capital into a ghost town.
|
AP photo / Samir Mizban
|
As one U.S. soldier tells Truthdig foreign correspondent Anna Badkhen, it’s not entirely a bad sign that residents of Baghdad’s Saidiyah neighborhood are complaining about their meager daily power allotment: A year earlier they were concerned about just staying alive.
|
warnewsradio.org
|
In this first installment in her series of stories from Iraq for Truthdig, veteran foreign correspondent Anna Badkhen reports about the civilian costs of war, life under occupation and the precarious state of a Baghdad burger joint.
|
|
In this first-ever biography of the religious leader many predict will take over Iraq after the Americans leave, Patrick Cockburn, one of the most respected correspondents in the Middle East, provides a dramatic look at a man Paul Bremer denounced as a “Bolshevik Islamist.”
|
|
By Eugene Robinson — No, it’s not your imagination: The “debate” about Iraq, and I use the word loosely, becomes ever more surreal as the occupation drags on.
|
|
Iraq’s Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki faced a crisis last week when 1,000 to 1,500 of his troops, including from several dozen to more than 100 officers, refused to fight in the battle against Shiite militia members in Basra, raising questions about Iraqi security force readiness.
|
AP photo / Karim Kadim
|
By Patrick Cockburn — A new civil war may be looming in Iraq as American-backed Iraqi government forces battle Shiite militiamen for control of Basra and parts of Baghdad.
|
AP photo / Hadi Mizban
|
It was a violent Sunday in Iraq, as attacks of all stripes killed dozens and the U.S. death toll crossed 4,000. A day of suicide bombings, shootings and rocket and mortar attacks has cast yet another shadow over the “surge.”
|
|
Presidential contender John McCain took a trip to the Middle East to showcase his foreign policy chops, so the opposition was particularly delighted that it was during such a demonstration that he committed this gaffe.
|
AP photo / Hussein Malla
|
By Scott Ritter — Imad Mughniyeh was once America’s most-wanted terrorist, and his crimes were truly abhorrent. But his assassination, Ritter argues, will only lead to more violence.
|
AP photo
|
By Chris Hedges — There’s an ugly secret behind the “success” of the surge: The United States is paying off Iraqi militants with weapons and cash. It’s a recipe for disaster, one that reminds Chris Hedges of “Yugoslavia before the storm.”
|
|
The New York Times reports that in certain areas of Baghdad, such as the Dora neighborhood in the south of the city, residents are cautiously returning to their homes and attempting to resume some semblance of normal life by taking advantage of a recent lull in violence. How long it will last, however, remains to be seen.
|
|
By E.J. Dionne, Jr. — It’s time that we subject the Iraq war to the same cost-benefit analysis that we are called upon to impose on other government endeavors. We are supposed to repeal or revise domestic programs that don’t work. Shouldn’t a troubled war policy be treated the same way?
|
news.bbc.co.uk
|
For the first time in George W. Bush’s political life, a Bush government is trying not to have someone executed, or so it seems. Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki has accused the U.S. of stalling the executions of three prominent prisoners, one of whom might have been in cahoots with the CIA during Saddam Hussein’s reign.
|
AP photo / Wisam Sami
|
Here’s a good way we can all support our troops: by listening to them when they tell us how the Iraq war is really going. Take this account from Sgt. Victor Alarcon and others in his battalion, who in Saturday’s Washington Post give their frank, and stark, assessment of the situation in Baghdad’s Sadiyah district.
|
uncorrelated.com
|
Sen. Joe Biden’s plan to divide Iraq along sectarian lines has had an unintended consequence: It has united much of the country, Shiite and Sunni alike, in opposition to the measure.
|
|
By Eugene Robinson — Gen. David Petraeus likes to describe the Iraq he envisions as a patchwork quilt. You establish security in a neighborhood over here, bring peace to a village over there, create more and more of these scraps of relative tranquility—and then stitch the heterogeneous pieces together. The problem is with the seams. They have a tendency to unravel.
|
|
The definition of “progress” in Iraq clearly depends upon whom you ask—while the Petraeuses and Crockers of the world are claiming that the U.S. troop “surge” is (slowly) showing signs of success, a BBC/ABC/NHK poll of 2,000 Iraqis suggests quite a different story.
|
|
By Eugene Robinson — The next six months in Iraq are crucial—and always will be. That noise you heard Monday on Capitol Hill was the can being kicked further down the road leading to January 2009, when George W. Bush gets to hand off his Iraq fiasco to somebody else.
|
|
This week’s highly anticipated Iraq progress report will no doubt be highly predictable, says The New Yorker’s George Packer, who’s more concerned about the longer view than America’s current leadership, whom he considers to be “trapped in the eternal present” in ways that can only spell trouble for Iraqis.
|
AP Photo / Charles Dharapak
|
By Robert Scheer — It’s enough to make one a libertarian, Robert Scheer argues, as the federal budget is hijacked by a bloated military-industrial complex wallowing in post-9/11 greed. As the president smiles, the failures of this American experiment in imperialism become all the more costly and apparent.
|
AP Photo / Charles Dharapak
|
The “What, me worry?” president paid a cheerful visit to U.S. troops in Iraq’s Anbar province, an auspiciously timed trip (his third since the war began in 2003) that falls mere days before Congress is scheduled to hear Army Gen. David Petraeus’ Iraq “progress” report. For another status report (read: reality check), follow this link.
|
nytimes.comiraq
|
According to two humanitarian organizations, Iraqis are fleeing their homes in record numbers, despite the much touted (if difficult to demonstrate) accomplishments of the “surge.” Iraqis are increasingly separating themselves into sectarian groups, according to the data.
|
|
Patrick Cockburn —
Prior to the U.S. invasion and overthrow of Saddam Hussein in 2003, Iraq’s three main religious communities—the Kurds, Sunnis and Shiites—were already divided. Although each group responded differently to the American presence in their country, Patrick Cockburn of The Independent argues that the divisions between them only deepened as a result.
|
|
Just as Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki announced a renewed effort to restore unity to his government, the leader of the largest Sunni political group, Adnan al-Dulaimi, accused him of working with Iran to support sectarian violence against Sunnis.
|
news.bbc.co.uk
|
Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki’s “unity government” has lost its last Sunni representatives, as five ministers announced a boycott in protest of sectarian favoritism. Nearly half of the Cabinet has walked this year.
|
AP Photo / Irwin Fedriansyah
|
At least some of the gunfire heard in Baghdad on Sunday was celebratory, for a change: Jubilant Iraqis flouted a government ban by firing shots into the air following Iraq’s 1-0 victory over Saudi Arabia in the final match of the Asian Cup soccer tournament.
|
AP Photo / Pablo Martinez Monsivais
|
Patrick Cockburn —
Scrambling to shore up support for the Iraq war, President Bush has released a report claiming progress has been made. To many, it seems that the administration is playing its last cards. Patrick Cockburn, in an article originally published in Britain’s The Independent, analyzes the situation.
|
|
Living inside Baghdad’s Green Zone seems to encourage a dangerous disconnect between its occupants—American or Iraqi—and the chaotic and violent reality outside its bounds. American journalist Rajiv Chandrasekaran takes a sobering look inside for the UK paper The Sunday Times.
|
news.bbc.co.uk
|
A devastating explosion near a Shiite mosque in the center of Baghdad has killed at least 78 people and injured more than 200. The mosque’s imam said the attack was carried out by “sick souls” who targeted worshipers as they left the prayer hall. Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki said that such attacks have “scarred the beautiful face of Baghdad by destroying the religious landmarks it has known over the centuries.”
|
news.bbc.co.uk
|
One of the holiest of Shiite Muslim shrines has been bombed in the Sunni-dominated Iraqi city of Samarra north of Baghdad. Explosions reportedly caused the collapse of the shrine’s two minarets. The 2006 bombing of the golden dome at the same shrine sparked the rampant sectarian strife in Iraq that continues today.
|
news.bbc.co.uk
|
A video has surfaced that shows what appears to be the identifications cards of two missing American soldiers. The Islamic State of Iraq, a Sunni insurgent coalition, has claimed responsibility for the capture of three soldiers, one of whom was later found dead.
|
|
Although it was sadly not an isolated incident, the bloody death by stoning of a 17-year-old girl has sparked controversy about sectarian strife and gender relations in Iraq, which some believe have taken a sharp turn for the worse since the beginning of the war in 2003.
|
|
U.S. and Iraqi forces are continuing their search for three missing American soldiers, despite threats from the Sunni insurgent coalition that claims to have taken them as hostages. Some 4,000 troops along with helicopters, jets and unmanned aerial vehicles are involved in the effort. The Pentagon said on Monday that it believed the soldiers had fallen into enemy hands.
|
View older articles:
1 2 3 >
View the most popular tags overall?
|
|
Truthdigger of the Week: Medea Benjamin
Newsletter 
Like Us
Follow Us
Get Our Feed
