There’s More to Iraq than the Headlines

[longknife]

Posted on 23 May 2013.

It has been a rough couple of weeks in Iraq, with a string of major attacks bringing the death toll for the year to nearly 2,500.

But despite the upsurge in sectarian attacks, the country is still managing to make progress on a number of fronts.

In the energy sector, for example, Shell has announced that production will start at Majnoon as early as next month, while in the north of the country WesternZagros Resources has announced that it has started its latest drilling program at the Garmian Block.

Read more good stuff @ There?s More to Iraq than the Headlines | Iraq Business News

 

[waltky]

Sectarian violence goes way back...

Spike in violence in Iraq has echoes in the past
Jun 1,`13 -- More than a year after the U.S. military left Iraq, the country is reeling from its most sustained violence since 2008. Over the last two months more than 1,700 people have been killed, raising fears the country is sliding back into chaos.

The current mayhem began with a wave of protests by Sunnis alleging neglect and mistreatment at the hands of the Shiite-led government of Nouri al-Maliki. Violence has risen steadily since an April 23 crackdown by security forces on a Sunni protest in the northern city of Hawija. Conflict between Iraq's two main religious communities sounds ominously like the explosion of sectarian hatred unleashed by the U.S.-led invasion of 2003 that toppled Saddam Hussein's Sunni-led regime and propelled the Shiites to power.

Adding to the tension is the civil war in neighboring Syria, where Sunni rebels are seeking to topple Bashar Assad's government, dominated by a spinout of the Shiite faith and backed by Shiite powerhouse Iran. But the Iraq of 2013 is different from the country seven years ago. The Shiite government is more firmly entrenched in Baghdad. The Sunnis are divided and weakened from setbacks they suffered in the last sectarian war.

Violence is on the rise but far short of the levels when death squads roamed the streets. Clearly, many Iraqis are still worried. "I see no solution on the horizon in a country that is full of political and sectarian disputes," said Ali Abdullah, who has blocked parking in front of his mobile phone store in Baghdad's sprawling Shiite district of Sadr City to protect against car bombs. Mohammad Majeed, a Baghdad businessman in the mixed Sunni-Shiite neighborhood of Jihad, is considering fleeing the country. "Terror is returning to us," Majeed said. "I survived the first round. I don't want to take my chances with a second one."

---

Two AP Chiefs of Bureau in Baghdad, past and present, paint a picture of what it was like then and how things have changed.

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Iraq uncovers al-Qaeda 'chemical weapons plot'
1 June 2013 > The authorities in Iraq say they have uncovered an al-Qaeda plot to use chemical weapons, as well as to smuggle them to Europe and North America.

Defence ministry spokesman Mohammed al-Askari said five men had been arrested after military intelligence monitored their activities for three months. Three workshops for manufacturing the chemical agents, including sarin and mustard gas, were uncovered, he added. Remote-controlled toy planes were also seized at the workshops. Mr Askari said they were to have been used to release the chemical agents over the target from a "safe" distance of 1.5km (1 mile), reports the BBC's Rami Ruhayem in Baghdad.

All of the arrested men had confessed to the plot and said they had received instruction from another al-Qaeda offshoot, he added. As the defence ministry spokesman spoke on Iraqi TV, footage was shown of four men with black hoods on their heads, our correspondent adds. Three of them were wearing bright yellow jumpsuits and a fourth was in a brown jumpsuit. Their arrests were possible because of co-operation between Iraqi and foreign intelligence services, Mr Askari said.

Chlorine bombs

Al-Qaeda in Iraq is believed to be the only offshoot of the Islamist militant network to have used chemical weapons. It detonated 16 crude chlorine bombs in Iraq between October 2006 and June 2007. Chlorine inhalation made many hundreds of people sick, but no deaths resulting from exposure to the chemical were recorded, US officials said at the time. Instead, the bomb blasts are believed to have caused the fatalities. At the time, US officials said al-Qaeda appeared to want to use debilitating agents like chlorine in their bombs to cause casualties beyond those hit by the initial explosion.

US and Iraqi troops subsequently killed or detained many of the militants who were building the chlorine-laced bombs and seized much of their stockpiled chemicals. A letter written by the late al-Qaeda leader Osama Bin Laden five days before he was killed in a US military raid in Pakistan in 2011 urged members of the group's offshoot in Yemen who he believed were considering using "poison" to be "careful of doing it without enough study of all aspects, including political and media reaction", according to CNN.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-middle-east-22742201

 

[waltky]

Iraq bustin' out all over again...

Other crises overshadow growing violence in Iraq
Aug 16,`13 WASHINGTON (AP) -- Security crises in Egypt, Syria and other countries are overshadowing rising death tolls and new fears of civil war in Iraq, once the top U.S. priority in the Mideast. However, the prospect that sectarian violence could fuel instability beyond Iraq's borders remains a concern for the Obama administration.

Officials and experts say the White House's attention is focused elsewhere - even as more than 1,000 people were killed in Iraq in July, the deadliest month since 2008. At Thursday's meeting between Secretary of State John Kerry and his Iraqi counterpart, Hoshyar Zebari, one of the main topics was flights of weapons from Iran across Iraqi airspace into Syria and back as well as the threat from al-Qaida fighters along the Iraqi-Syrian border. Surveys show a majority of Americans favor President Barack Obama's hands-off approach toward Iraq after withdrawing the U.S. military from the country in 2011 after nearly nine years of war, at least $767 billion spent in taxpayer funds and nearly 4,500 U.S. troops killed.

But after hitting a low, if grim, level of violence immediately before the U.S. troops left, attacks have resurged in Iraq at a rate reminiscent of its darkest days. A wave of car bombs killed 33 people and wounded dozens others in Baghdad on Thursday, just the latest assault against a fearful public and a government staggering from sectarian political infighting. "The security situation in Iraq is deteriorating rapidly and is of significant concern," Sen. Bob Corker, top Republican on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, said Thursday, a day after meeting Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki and other senior Iraqi officials during a trip to Baghdad and Irbil, the Kurdish capital in Iraq's north. "A United States foreign policy that does not recognize this will be very problematic," said Corker, R-Tenn.

In the 20 months since the troop withdrawal, the U.S. has sought to stay out of Iraqi affairs and engage with its government as Washington would with any other nation. A majority of Americans agreed with that approach, and 58 percent of U.S. adults said in a Washington Post-ABC poll taken in March that the Iraq war had not been worth the fight. Distracted by a civil war in Syria, a policy pivot to Asia, growing extremism in North Africa and Iran's nuclear ambitions, the White House turned its attention elsewhere.

Egypt, once reliably stable, has disintegrated over deadly street riots and attacks that killed more than 600 people Wednesday during protests over the ouster of Egyptian President Mohammed Morsi. Jordan, a key U.S. ally, is threatening to collapse under financial strain caused, in large part, by more than 1 million refugees who have crossed into the country from Syria. The U.S. is also leading peace talks between Israel and Palestinian authorities, and watching a growing threat from al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula in Yemen. A threat from al-Qaida led to the closing of 19 diplomatic posts across the region last week. "That's a pretty large agenda," said Jon Alterman, a Mideast expert at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington. "Iraq is no longer viewed as central to everything the U.S. cares about in the Middle East. But Iraq is still relevant to a wide range that the U.S. cares about."

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US warns of rising threat from al-Qaida in Iraq
August 15, 2013 > Top U.S. and Iraqi diplomats warned Thursday of a rising threat in Iraq from al-Qaida, which is carrying out suicide and car bombings with greater frequency nearly two years after U.S. troops withdrew from the country.

WASHINGTON -- Top U.S. and Iraqi diplomats warned Thursday of a rising threat in Iraq from al-Qaida, which is carrying out suicide and car bombings with greater frequency nearly two years after U.S. troops withdrew from the country. Secretary of State John Kerry and Iraqi Foreign Minister Hoshyar Zebari also discussed how to stop Iraqi airspace from being used to ferry weapons and illicit cargo from Iran to the embattled Syrian government and how to stem the flow of weapons and extremist fighters into Iraq from neighboring Syria. "It's a two-way street. It's a dangerous street," Kerry said.

The two met on the same day that a wave of car bombs hit the Iraqi capital, killing 33 people and wounding dozens. More than 3,000 people have been killed during the past few months, including 69 who died last weekend in a series of car bombings targeting those celebrating the end of Ramadan. "Iraq sits at the intersection of regional currents of increasingly turbulent, violent and unpredictable actions," Kerry said. "Sunni and Shia extremists on both sides of the sectarian divide throughout the region have an ability to be able to threaten Iraq's stability if they're not checked. "And al-Qaida, as we have seen, has launched a horrific series of assaults on innocent Iraqis, even taking credit for the deplorable bombings this past weekend that targeted families that were celebrating the Eid holiday. And this al-Qaida network, we know, stretches well beyond Iraq's borders."

In 2011 and 2012 there was an average of five to 10 suicide bombings a month, according to a senior administration official familiar with Kerry's talks with his Iraqi counterpart. They have averaged about 30 in each of the past three months and it's suspected that the suicide attackers are mostly coming from Syria, indicating a fairly sophisticated al-Qaida network, said the official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because he wasn't authorized to speak publicly about the meeting. The official said the U.S. wants to share intelligence and help the Iraqis map the network and disrupt its financing. Also, the U.S. is encouraging Iraq to make precision attacks against perpetrators to avoid aggravating the fragile security situation in the country by rounding up too many people or targeting the wrong person. The overflights in Iraq, which is sandwiched between Iran and Syria, long have been a source of contention between the U.S. and Iraq.

Iraq and Iran claim the flights are carrying humanitarian goods, but American officials say they are confident that the planes are being used to arm and support Syrian President Bashar Assad's fight against U.S.-backed opposition forces. In 2012, then-Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton secured a pledge from Iraq to inspect the flights, but until March when her successor, Kerry, visited Baghdad, only two aircraft had been checked by Iraqi authorities, according to U.S. officials. Kerry said some progress has been made since then to curtail the movement of weapons but that he and Zebari agreed that "there is very significant progress yet to be made." Congress recently was notified that a $2.6 billion air defense system was being sold to the Iraqis to help them better control their airspace, but it won't be operational for some time, the administration official said. The Iraqis also are getting a shipment of F-16 aircraft from the U.S. in the fall.

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[rdean]

Way more than just the headlines. It was that big of a disaster.

 

[sambino510]

I was really hoping the article cited in this thread was sarcasm, but nope, this business website actually is trying to be positive just because of some oil programs. I'm sorry, but the success of Shell's oil production does not overrule the death of over two thousand people. The two aren't even comparable.

 

[RoccoR]

et al,

Remembering that: About 4,488 service members were killed, at a cost of over three-quarters of a trillion dollars.

Whether or not the Iraq government wants us now, -- it is too late. Let al-Qaeda eat them alive. The multi-sectarian leadership of the Iraqi's need to face the consequences of their actions. Without regard to whether or not they accord legal immunity for troops, we should never again extend a helping hand to the Iraqi that bit that same hand in 2011.

They are simply not worth it.

Most Respectfully,
R

 

[waltky]

Mustafa the militant hooks up detonator too soon...

IRAQI MILITANTS ACCIDENTALLY KILL 21 OF THEIR OWN
Feb 10,`14 -- An instructor teaching his militant recruits how to make car bombs accidentally set off explosives in his demonstration Monday, killing 21 of them in a huge blast that alerted authorities to the existence of the rural training camp in an orchard north of Baghdad. Nearly two dozen people were arrested, including wounded insurgents trying to hobble away from the scene.

The fatal goof by the al-Qaida breakaway group that dominates the Sunni insurgency in Iraq happened on the same day that the speaker of the Iraqi parliament, a prominent Sunni whom the militants consider a traitor, escaped unhurt from a roadside bomb attack on his motorcade in the northern city of Mosul. Nevertheless, the events underscored the determination of the insurgents to rebuild and regain the strength they enjoyed in Iraq at the height of the war until U.S.-backed Sunni tribesmen turned against them. The militants are currently battling for control of mainly Sunni areas of western Iraq in a key test of the Shiite-led government's ability to maintain security more than two years after the withdrawal of U.S. troops.

While the Iraqi army has been attacking insurgent training camps in the vast desert of western Anbar province near the Syrian border, it is unusual to find such a camp in the center of the country, just 95 kilometers (60 miles) north of the capital. The discovery shows that "the terrorist groups have made a strong comeback in Iraq and that the security problems are far from over, and things are heading from bad to worse," said Hamid al-Mutlaq, a member of the parliament's security and defense committee.

Smoke rises after a parked car bomb went off at a commercial center in Khilani Square in central Baghdad, Iraq. Car bombs are one of the deadliest weapons used by the al-Qaida breakaway group in Iraq that dominates the Sunni insurgency in Iraq, with coordinated waves of explosions regularly leaving scores dead in Baghdad and elsewhere across the country.

The militants belonged to a network now known as the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant, an extremist group that recently broke with al-Qaida. The ISIL, emboldened by fellow fighters' gains in the Syrian civil war, has tried to position itself as the champion of Iraqi Sunnis angry at the government over what they see as efforts to marginalize them. Car bombs are one of the deadliest weapons used by this group, with coordinated waves of explosions regularly leaving scores dead in Baghdad and elsewhere across the country. The bombs are sometimes assembled in farm compounds where militants can gather without being spotted, or in car workshops in industrial areas.

The explosion Monday took place at a camp tucked away in an orchard in the village of al-Jalam, a farming area that has been a stronghold of al-Qaida close to the Sunni city of Samarra. According to a police officer, an army official and a hospital official, all of whom spoke on condition of anonymity for security reasons, the events unfolded as follows. The militants were attending a lesson on making car bombs and explosive belts when a glitch set off one of the devices during the car bomb part of the demonstration. Security forces rushed to the area after hearing the thunderous blast and arrested 12 wounded militants along with another 10 trying to flee.

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