Like ships in the early, dewy dawn, Ductapefatwa and I passed. And ran each other over. Catch D’s excellent diary, “Dahr Jamail stuck in Amman as US gets advice from Big Poodle,” that adds a lot more to Jamail’s report.
“Abu Talat [Jamail’s close friend and translator] phoned his family today in Baghdad. They’ve had no electricity for four days. They told him (unconfirmed) that all of Iraq has had no electricity for several days. As Abu Talat says, ‘Baghdad is running on the generator.'” – From Jamail’s May 14 entry in “Iraq Dispatches” written from Amman, Jordan.
About Operation Matador in Qaim (near the Syrian border): It “appears to be a micro-version of Fallujah,” with the military claiming they’re fighting foreigners.
Then there’s the humanitarian crisis in the area of Qaim:
All of the aforementioned statistics were provided to me by a friend who is here working with the Italian Consortium of Solidarity, an Italian NGO based in Amman which provides humanitarian aid and has set up an emergency working group for al-Qaim and has contacts on the ground there. She also reports that people there need shelter, food, water and medical care.
The loss of life continues unabated….in the last week at least 37 US soldiers have been killed, while at least 450 Iraqis have died amidst a huge surge of ongoing attacks since 28 April, when the Iraqi government was officially announced. …
Visit Dahr’s website.
From MSNBC‘s “Iraq’s new chapter” section:
U.S. wraps up ‘Operation Matador’ after week of fighting; Rice visits country
BAGHDAD, Iraq – The bodies of 13 blindfolded and bound men were found shot multiple times in the head in Baghdad on Sunday, while 11 others killed in a similar fashion were discovered in a deserted chicken farm south of the capital, police said.
The grisly discoveries came as Secretary of State of Condoleezza Rice made a surprise visit to Iraq, a day after the U.S. military announced it had successfully wrapped up a major offensive in a remote desert region near the Syrian border aimed at followers of Iraq’s most-wanted terrorist Abu Musab al-Zarqawi.
With the U.S. operation ended, gunmen freed the kidnapped governor of Iraq’s western Anbar province, relatives and a government official said. …
if they were murdered by crusaders, or extrajudicially executed collaborators.
Even their families may never know. And either way, they are equally dead. Their children are equally orphans, their wives equally widows.
or Iraqi government death squads. Yes, they have them.
What got to me:
The “neat” piecing of Condi’s surprise visit with the discovery of those bodies that, well we all must know, came from those evil terrorists .. and the “neat” wrap-up of Matador.
“When 14 Sunni farmers from the Dulaimi tribe were found executed in Baghdad a week ago the Interior Ministry had to deny what was widely believed, that they had been killed by a Shia police unit.”
The Independent
I DID IT! Finally. I had to take a shower because Darcy’s coming over to pick me up and we’re headin’ out to the organic farmer’s little store and then to the movie.
with me as we shriek “Bread and Butter”
I just saw your diary. Mine was up an hour earlier but, if you’re like me: I get “into” a diary and am madly searching/researching and lose track of all else in the universe until I’m ready to post. The most famous example of that is the Sat. morning a couple weeks ago when I compared the runaway bride media attention to the story of the Yemeni woman facing a firing squad… posted it … then saw that Georgia10 had already written a diary comparing the two women! How could THAT happen?!
Anyway, back to business: Shall we “combo” our work? I can paste your diary below. Or, I will gladly zap my story. I’m working on another story at the moment so don’t have much time to devote to this and (to be honest) haven’t read all of your diary yet You make the call, and I’ll GLADLY go along. It’s not a big deal.
An hour, huh. So I’m not one of those people who reloads the front page constantly. ;>
That was my point. Who does? Well, let’s just let people read both. And I will add a prominent link to your diary + clips … in a few .. i’m putting up a new story and proofreading it.
Somedays I only reload the home page once. Others I don’t. 😀
FYI: 1924 has a Day of Action notice for May 18 in the crawl, no details yet, but that’s also the deadline for US to turn over the Koran desecrators to Afghanistan….
Patrick Cockburn, Independent
Ten US troops were killed in action across Iraq last week. The fighting is now sustained and ferocious. Patrick Cockburn, winner of the Martha Gellhorn prize for journalism, reports from the frontline of America’s war on terror
15 May 2005
“The battlefield is a great place for liars,” Stonewall Jackson once said on viewing the aftermath of a battle in the American civil war.
The great general meant that the confusion of battle is such that anybody can claim anything during a war and hope to get away with it. But even by the standards of other conflicts, Iraq has been particularly fertile in lies. Going by the claims of President George Bush, the war should long be over since his infamous “Mission Accomplished” speech on 1 May 2003. In fact most of the 1,600 US dead and 12,000 wounded have become casualties in the following two years.
The ferocious resistance encountered last week by the 1,000-strong US marine task force trying to fight its way into villages around the towns of Qaim and Obeidi in western Iraq shows that the war is far from over. So far nine marines have been killed in the week-long campaign, while another US soldier was killed and four wounded in central Iraq on Friday. Meanwhile, a car bomb targeting a police patrol exploded in central Baghdad yesterday, killing at least five Iraqis and injuring 12.
Iraqi President Jalal Talabani, the leader of one of the Kurdish parties, confidently told a meeting in Brasilia last week that there is war in only three or four out of 18 Iraqi provinces. Back in Baghdad Mr Talabani, an experienced guerrilla leader, has deployed no fewer than 3,000 Kurdish soldiers or peshmerga around his residence in case of attack. One visitor was amused to hear the newly elected President interrupt his own relentlessly upbeat account of government achievements to snap orders to his aides on the correct positioning of troops and heavy weapons around his house.
There is no doubt that the US has failed to win the war. Much of Iraq is a bloody no man’s land. The army has not been able to secure the short highway to the airport, though it is the most important road in the country, linking the US civil headquarters in the Green Zone with its military HQ at Camp Victory.
[…] Link