News from Iraq

[longknife]

If you want more news from the source, I recommend Iraq Business News I see a lot of interesting news there that just doesn't make headlines.

 

[waltky]

Sectarian violence spreading...

Iraq violence 'ready to explode' - UN envoy
30 May 2013 > The UN's envoy to Iraq has warned that "systemic violence is ready to explode at any moment", as a fresh wave of attacks killed at least 24 people.

Martin Kobler urged Iraq's political leaders to "engage immediately to pull the country out of this mayhem". There has been a recent upsurge in violence across Iraq amid rising sectarian and political tension. Several car bombs targeted different areas of the capital, Baghdad, and the northern city of Mosul on Thursday. Five bombs killed 21 people in Baghdad and wounded dozens, officials said. In Mosul, three policemen were killed in an early morning suicide attack.

The mainly Shia district of Karrada in the Iraqi capital was hit by two blasts in about 12 hours

The dramatic escalation in attacks in recent weeks has raised fears of a return to the levels of sectarian violence seen in 2006 and 2007, in which thousands died. This week alone, more than 60 people were killed in attacks targeting main Shia areas of Baghdad on Monday. A further 25 deaths were reported in bombings in the city on Wednesday. The UN has said more than 700 people were killed in April - the highest monthly toll in almost five years. That would take the toll from the last two months well over 1,000 victims.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-middle-east-22714700

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Alarm grows as Iraqi forces fail to stem violence
May 30,`13 -- Officials in Iraq are growing increasingly concerned over an unabated spike in violence that claimed at least another 33 lives on Thursday and is reviving fears of a return to widespread sectarian fighting.

Authorities announced plans to impose a sweeping ban on many cars across the Iraqi capital starting early Friday in an apparent effort to thwart car bombings, as the United Nations envoy to Iraq warned that "systemic violence is ready to explode." Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, meanwhile, was shown on state television visiting security checkpoints around Baghdad the previous night as part of a three-hour inspection tour, underscoring the government's efforts to show it is acting to curtail the bloodshed.

Iraqi security forces are struggling to contain the country's most relentless round of violence since the 2011 U.S. military withdrawal. The rise in violence follows months of protests against the Shiite-led government by Iraq's Sunni minority, many of whom feel they've been marginalized and unfairly treated since the 2003 U.S.-led invasion. Tensions escalated sharply last month after a deadly crackdown by security forces on a Sunni protest camp. Sunni militants, including al-Qaida, have long targeted Iraq's Shiite majority and government security forces. But Sunni mosques and other targets have also been struck over the past several weeks, raising the possibility that Shiite militias are also growing more active.

Several members of the security forces were killed in Thursday's bombings. The attacks also included an assassination attempt by a suicide bomber targeting a provincial governor in the country's Sunni-dominated west. "These daily patterns of car bomb attacks ... in Baghdad and some other cities (are) really unacceptable for the people of Iraq, who have suffered so much," Foreign Minister Hoshyar Zebari said Thursday. "It's the government's responsibility to redouble its efforts, to revise its security plans, to contain this wave, to prevent it from sliding into sectarian conflict and war," he added. "That should not happen again."

The spike in violence, which has gained momentum since the middle of the month, is raising worries that Iraq is heading back toward the widespread sectarian bloodletting that spiked in 2006 and 2007 and pushed the country to the brink of civil war. More than 500 people have been killed in May. The month before was Iraq's deadliest since June 2008, according to a United Nations tally that put April's death toll at more than 700.

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[RoccoR]

waltky; et al,

(REFERENCE)

LINK ---> Making Sarin
updated 12:09 PM EDT, Sat June 1, 2013
Baghdad (CNN) -- Iraqi troops raided a suspected terror cell of five people who specialize in making chemical compounds for sarin, mustard and nerve gases, the defense ministry said Saturday.
The suspected terror cell was broken by military intelligence forces after three months of surveillance, the ministry said.
One of the five people made a "confession" stating the cell was planning to use the chemicals agents in Iraq and other countries, the ministry said.

LINK ---> NPR-by Eyder Peralta-3 hours ago Share
Special Representative of the United Nations Secretary-General for Iraq Martin Kobler called the record "sad" and called on the Iraqi government to "stop this intolerable bloodshed."

(COMMENT)

The Iraqi people did not want to be free from Saddam Hussein; they just wanted a newer repressive regime. I was there in 2004 thru 2010. They never made an effort to establish community and culture harmony. It is a quasi-Arab country, and all they know is conflict. That is the legacy of Islamic Teachings and the nature of the people. The violence they have now is what they want, and what they need. If it were different, if they wanted something different, they would have it already. The people would have rose-up and defeated the insurgency. We know that an insurgency cannot survive in a vacuum. It must have community support. Somebody is helping the insurgent.

Freedom cannot be handed to the people. They must earn it and maintain it. The Iraqi did neither. They are a people that cannot evolve into the 21st Century.

Do not feel sorry for them. They have what they earned.

Most Respectfully,
R

 

[waltky]

Funeral crashed by mad Mooslamic suicide bombers...

Assault on Iraq funeral, other attacks kill 96
Sep 21,`13 -- Two suicide bombers, one in an explosives-laden car and the other on foot, struck a cluster of funeral tents packed with mourning families in a Shiite neighborhood in Baghdad, the deadliest in a string of attacks around Iraq that killed at least 96 people on Saturday.

The assaults, the latest in a months-long surge of violence, are a chilling reminder of insurgents' determination to re-ignite sectarian conflict more than a decade after the U.S.-led invasion. Thousands of Iraqis have been killed in violent attacks in recent months - a level of bloodshed not seen since Iraq pulled back from the brink of civil war in 2008 - despite appeals for restraint from Shiite and Sunni political leaders. The attack on the funeral was one of the largest single terrorist assaults on civilians in Iraq in recent years. It happened shortly before sunset in the densely populated Shiite neighborhood of Sadr City in northeastern Baghdad.

Police said at least 72 people were killed and more than 120 were wounded in that attack. One bomber was able to drive up near the tent before detonating his deadly payload, and another on foot blew himself up nearby, police said. The explosions set the tents and several nearby cars on fire, sending a towering plume of thick black smoke over the city. "I saw several charred bodies on the ground and tents on fire and also burning cars. Wounded people were screaming in pain," said Sheik Sattar al-Fartousi, one of the mourners. "The scene was horrible. The funeral turned into an inferno."

People inspect the site of a double suicide bomb attack, in the Shiite neighborhood of Sadr city in Baghdad, Iraq, Saturday, Sept. 21, 2013. Two suicide bombers, one in an explosives-laden car and the other on foot, hit a cluster of funeral tents packed with mourning families in a Shiite neighborhood in Baghdad, the deadliest in a string of attacks around Iraq that killed at least 92 on Saturday.

He said the first blast went off as dinner was being served in one of several tents set up for the funeral of a member of the al-Fartousi tribe. He estimated that more than 500 people were attending the event. Civilian pickup trucks loaded with casualties and ambulances with sirens blaring were seen racing from the scene. Hussein Abdul-Khaliq, a government employee who lives near the bomb site, said the tents were packed with mourners when the blasts went off.

He described seeing several lifeless bodies on the ground, and wounded women and children. The clothes of several victims were soaked with blood, and firefighters had to leave the scene to refill tanker trucks with water as they struggled to contain an immense blaze, he said. "This funeral was not a military post or a ministry building, yet it was still targeted," Abdul-Khaliq said. "This shows that no place and no one is safe in Iraq."

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[longknife]

And it's getting worse by the day.

Good job, Obumbler. You are personally responsible for each and every one of these senseless deaths.

 

[waltky]

Sunni/Shia conflict in Iraq...

Car bombs and mortar attacks kill at least 17 in Iraq
Sat Jan 25, 2014 - At least 17 people were killed in violence across Iraq on Saturday, including by car bombs and a mortar attack on a Shi'ite Muslim village, police and medical sources said.

The deadliest attack took place in a village near the Iraqi city of Baquba, 65 km (40 miles) northeast of Baghdad, where three mortar bombs killed six people, police said. A woman and a child were among the victims, five of whom belonged to the same family, the police said, adding that the assailants might have been aiming at a nearby police station. Violence in Iraq climbed back to its highest level in five years in 2013, when nearly 9,000 people were killed, most of them civilians, according to the United Nations.

No group immediately claimed responsibility for any of the latest attacks, but Sunni Islamist militants, some linked to al Qaeda, have been regaining momentum in Iraq, emboldened by the conflict in neighboring Syria, where they are also active. A bomb near a grocery market killed two people and wounded seven in the mainly Sunni district of Saydiya in southern Baghdad, police said.

In western Baghdad, a car bomb in a busy street killed three people and wounded 12 in Amriya district, police said. Two car bombs blew up simultaneously in the disputed northern town of Tuz Khurmato, 170 km (100 miles) north of Baghdad, killing four people and wounding nine, police and medics said.

In other incidents, two policemen were killed and four wounded when a roadside bomb exploded near their patrol in Balad, 80 km (50 miles) north of Baghdad, police said. Sunni Muslim insurgents often target the security forces, as well as Shi'ite civilians and Sunni tribal militiamen paid by the Shi'ite-led government to combat al Qaeda-linked groups.

Car bombs and mortar attacks kill at least 17 in Iraq | Reuters

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Former NATO commander warns of wider war in Middle East
January 20, 2014 ~ NATO’s former top military commander has warned that the widening sectarian conflict in Syria and Iraq could engulf a broader region in the Middle East, just as the religious wars in Europe did in the 16th and 17th centuries.

James Stavridis, who served as the alliance’s supreme commander until last year, said that although Syria and Iraq are the flashpoints of the conflict at the moment, Lebanon and other nearby nations could easily be sucked into a war. He said the conflicts present a direct security threat to Europe as well. “I worry deeply about the potential for this Sunni-Shia conflict to widen into a truly regional war,” Stavridis said.

Analysts and diplomats in the region have warned that the civil war in Syria and the escalating intercommunal violence in neighboring Iraq are becoming a regional conflagration spanning the 363-mile desert border between the two nations. Both conflicts pit Shiite-led government forces against mainly Sunni Muslim insurgent groups. “If we look back on the wars of the reformation in Europe, which pit Catholic versus Protestant, we can see how this kind of inter-religious conflict can consume an entire region,” Stavridis said referring to the series of armed conflicts that devastated much of central and western Europe and killed millions.

Stavridis’ warning comes as the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant (ISIL), a powerful al-Qaida-affiliated group and the main jihadist force operating on both sides of the porous frontier, is battling to unite Sunni populations in eastern Syria and western Iraq. The militants already control swathes of territory, advancing their aim to establish an Islamic Emirate, which would unite the desert region. ISIL has become the main source of terrorism inside both nations.

In Iraq, at least 8,868 Iraqis were killed in a series of attacks and suicide bombings last year, according to government statistics, making 2013 the bloodiest year since the withdrawal of U.S. forces. Syria is being torn apart in a three-way war between rival opposition groups and the Shiite-dominated army of President Bashar Assad that has claimed 130,000 lives and generated nearly 2.3 million refugees, according to U.N. statistics.

Currently, the focus of the fighting in Syria is between ISIL and more moderate, Western-backed Sunni rivals. This has claimed about 700 lives since the beginning of the year, mostly around the northern city of Aleppo, according to the London-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights. In December, the United States suspended its official aid shipments to the Western-backed Free Syrian Army, after some U.S. aid was seized by a collection of al-Qaida-linked militias.

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