Iraq

NOVANEWS antiwar.com Reports coming out of Fox News today have the Obama Administration poised to announce its post-December troop levels for Iraq and, in a move that will surprise virtually no one who was paying attention, that number is more than the “zero” mandated by the Status of Forces Agreement (SOFA). Instead, the US will keep around 3,000 troops in Iraq, a major reduction from current levels and also much lower than the 27,000 troops the US generals currently in charge of the occupation sought. This is separate from any Defense Department contractors remaining in the country as well as the massiveState Department “army” of 5,100 contractors planning to remain. “There is almost no room for security operations at that number; it will be almost purely a training mission,” one ...

NOVANEWS Global Research A massive archive of unredacted US diplomatic cables is circulating freely on the web ANTI-secrecy group WikiLeaks says its massive archive of unredacted US State Department cables has been exposed in a security breach which it blames on its one-time partner, Britain's Guardian newspaper. In a 1600-word-long editorial posted to the internet, WikiLeaks accused the Guardian's investigative reporter David Leigh of divulging the password needed to decrypt the files in a book published earlier this year. The Guardian and Leigh both denied wrongdoing. Copies of the files appeared to be circulating freely around the web, although their authenticity could not immediately be determined. WikiLeaks said in its statement that Leigh had "recklessly, and witho...

NOVANEWS Blair Was Warned Invading Iraq Would Make UK Less Safe antiwar.com The Chilcot inquest into the Iraq War has provided ample opportunity to uncover the disgracefully large amount of advice Tony Blair ignored in helping in the US occupation, but there’s always more, as Baroness Manningham-Buller revealed today. In an interview today on BBC Radio 4, the Baroness revealed that she had personally warned Tony Blair that invading Iraq would actually make the country less safe, and might increase the risk of terrorist attacks. The MI5′s assessment of Iraq, as communicated to Blair, was that Iraq “did not present a threat to the UK” and that the war would both be a “distraction” from al-Qaeda and would increase domestic terrorism. The closest Blair ever came to an apology on Iraq was ...

NOVANEWS Women and children had their hands tied behind their back and were shot in the head in house raid, which was covered up by the military antiwar.com As revealed by a State Department diplomatic cable released by WikiLeaks last week, US forces committed a heinous war crime during a house raid in Iraq in 2006, wherein one man, four women, two children, and three infants were summarily executed. The cable excerpts a letter written by Philip Alston, Special Rapporteur on Extrajudicial, Summary, or Arbitrary Executions, addressed to then Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice. American troops approached the home of Faiz Harrat Al-Majma’ee, a farmer living in central Iraq, to conduct a house raid in search of insurgents in March of 2006. “It would appear that when the MNF [Multinational...

NOVANEWS By Rebecca Murray Al-Battaween, the red light street in Baghdad. Rania was 16 years old when officials raped her during Saddam Hussein’s 1991 crackdown in Iraq’s Shia south. “My brothers were sentenced to death, and the price to stop this was to offer my body,” she says. Cast out for bringing ‘shame’ to her family, Rania ran away to Baghdad and soon fell into living and working in Baghdad’s red light district. Prostitution and sex trafficking are epidemic in Iraq, where the violence of military occupation and sectarian strife have smashed national institutions, impoverished the population and torn apart families and neighbourhoods. Over 100,000 civilians have been killed and an estimated 4.4 million Iraqis displaced since 2003. “Wars and conflicts, wherever they are fought, in...

NOVANEWS  With Gaddafi at large, a guerrilla war eroding the new powers is inevitable by Robert Fisk Doomed always to fight the last war, we are recommitting the same old sin in Libya. Muammar Gaddafi vanishes after promising to fight to the death. Isn’t that just what Saddam Hussein did? And of course, when Saddam disappeared and US troops suffered the very first losses from the Iraqi insurgency in 2003, we were told – by the US proconsul Paul Bremer, the generals, diplomats and the decaying television “experts” – that the gunmen of the resistance were “die-hards”, “dead-enders” who didn’t realise that the war was over. And if Gaddafi and his egg-headed son remain at large – and if the violence does not end – how soon will we be introduced once more to the “dead-enders” who simply will n...

NOVANEWS If 47,000 US troops in country cannot prevent such coordinated bombings, then how could a much smaller contingent do so? President Obama speaks to U.S. troops at Camp Victory in Baghdad on April 7 Jim Young / Reuters by Juan Cole And as Vice President Tariq al-Hashemi has pointed out on several occasions recently, the very presence of US troops would provoke terrorist attacks and be destabilizing. Some 80 people were killed and over two hundred wounded on Monday in a clearly coordinated set of bombings and attacks in 17 Iraqi cities. The prime suspect is radicalized Sunni Arabs who are typically called “al-Qaeda” in Iraq even though they likely have little connection to the original. The biggest toll came from two bombings in the southern Shiite city of Kut, though there were als...

NOVANEWS Iran’s Press-TV claims aircraft to be deployed in addition to intelligence agents and military consultants; Ahmadinejad: US and Zionist wish to attack Zio-Nazi has recently stepped up its operations in Iraq’s autonomous Kurdistan Region and is planning to deploy six unmanned aerial vehicles, intelligence agents and military consultants in the region, Iran’s Press-TV has reported. According to the report, Iraqi Kurdistan Regional Government President Massoud Barzani has agreed to the concession in return for the admission of a number of Iraqi Kurd students to IsraHell universities. Barzani has reportedly approved the deployment without the permission of the central government in Baghdad. Tehran establishes new cyber command as Iranian technology minister vows to ‘block Zionist ...

NOVANEWS Bill Shows Commitment to End Violence Against Women One day when Dashty (right) was 12, her mother told her to expect company. Expecting friends, she was shocked when she saw the midwife enter her house. After Dashty resisted, her mother beat her as other women held her down. She said she spent 20 days recovering in bed from the traumatic operation. “Since that day, my personality has changed and I’m depressed,” says Dashty, 32, who lives close to her sister Sara (left), 30, in their village of Meer Ghasem. “I’ve lost my love for this world because of what happened at the hands of people I trusted.” Many women and girls in Iraq's Kurdish region are subjected to female genital mutilation (FGM). A new report from Human Rights Watch says the local go...

NOVANEWS   John Glaser antiwar.com Eric Clifton has an important addendum to his earlier post on the push from almost the entire Senate for Obama to add further sanctions on Iran (which I posted on here). Obviously, the Israel lobby supports these sanctions too, but Clifton says their tactics resemble all too closely the lead up to the 2003 invasion of Iraq. He writes: a Tuesday press release [PDF] from the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC)brings to mind eery parallels between the escalation of sanctions against Iran and the slow lead up to the invasion of Iraq in 2003. The press release read: AIPAC applauds today’s bipartisan letter—signed by 92 U.S. Senators—to the administration urging it to sanction the Central Bank of Iran (CBI), or Bank Markazi. The letter, spear...