Archive for the 'IRAQ' Category
Wednesday, May 9th, 2007
GAZA CITY, Gaza Strip - Hamas militants have enlisted a figure bearing a strong resemblance to Mickey Mouse to broadcast their message of Islamic domination and armed resistance to their most impressionable audience — children.
A giant black-and-white rodent — named “Farfour,” or “butterfly,” but unmistakably a rip-off of the Disney character — does his high-pitched preaching against the U.S. and Israel on a children’s show each Friday on Al-Aqsa TV, a station run by Hamas. The militant group, sworn to Israel’s destruction, shares power in the Palestinian government.
“You and I are laying the foundation for a world led by Islamists,” Farfour squeaked on a recent episode of the show, which is called “Tomorrow’s Pioneers.”
“We will return the Islamic community to its former greatness, and liberate Jerusalem, God willing, liberate Iraq, God willing, and liberate all the countries of the Muslims invaded by the murderers.”
Children call in to the show, many singing Hamas anthems about fighting Israel.
Palestinian Media Watch, an Israeli organization that monitors Palestinian media, said the Mickey Mouse lookalike takes “every opportunity to indoctrinate young viewers with teachings of Islamic supremacy, hatred of Israel and the U.S., and support of ‘resistance,’ the Palestinian euphemism for terror.”
Israeli officials denounced the program Tuesday.
David Baker, an official in Prime Minister Ehud Olmert’s office, said “there is nothing comic about inciting young generations of Palestinians to hate Israelis.”
A spokeswoman from Walt Disney Co.’s headquarters in Burbank, Calif., did not immediately return messages asking for comment about the use of the Disney-like character.
Yehia Moussa, a Hamas leader in the movement’s Gaza Strip base, denied inciting children against Jews. “Our problem is not with the Jews. Our problem is with the (Israeli) occupation and the occupiers,” he said.
The television station would not comment.
A Gaza-based psychologist said the program proved that the culture of glorifying violence had penetrated mainstream society in the Palestinian territories, where dreams of Islamic dominion and animosity toward the U.S. and Israel are widespread.
“It’s the fault of both (Israel and the Palestinians),” said Samir Zakkout, of the Gaza Community Mental Health Program. “There’s been a collapse of values. If I can kill my enemy, I can kill my brother.”
The program is opposed by the Palestinian Broadcasting Corp., which is controlled by Hamas’ political rival — the Fatah movement of Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas.
“I don’t think it’s professional or even humane to use children in such harsh political programs,” said Basem Abu Sumaya, head of the Palestinian Broadcasting Corp. “Children’s nationalist spirit must be developed differently.”
Hamas loyalists launched the Al Aqsa satellite channel last year. Bearded young men read the news and Islamic music is layered over footage of masked militants firing rockets into Israel. The channel also broadcasts talk shows, programs about the disabled and cartoons.
In addition, Hamas loyalists run at least five news Web sites, one newspaper — launched just last week — and a radio station.
source : assocciated press
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Sunday, January 28th, 2007
Washington, Jan 28 (PTI) Thousands of protestors, including Hollywood stars and civil rights leaders, came out on to the streets here opposing the war in Iraq ahead of a crucial debate and vote in the US Senate on the issue.
The protestors, roughly estimated around 100,000, were addressed by several Hollywood stars, leaders of the civil rights movement and Congressmen critical of the manner in which President George w. Bush took America into the war in Iraq and the decision to send an additional 21,000 plus troops to the troubled country.
“Thank you so much for the courage to stand up against this mean-spirited, vengeful administration. Your ongoing commitment to ending this war allows people in other parts of the world to remain hopeful that America has the stuff to become again a country that they can love and respect,” said actress Jane Fonda, a key Vietnam war era protestor.
“Silence is no longer an option,” the 69-year old actress said to cheers The event, sponsored by the umbrella group ‘United For Peace and Justice’, started with a rally yesterday on the Mall and later marching towards the Capitol Hill.
“George Bush has a habit of firing military leaders who tell him the Iraq war is failing. He can’t fire you. He can’t fire us. But we can fire him,” remarked senior House Democrat John Conyers, one of the speakers at the event with California Democrat Lynn Woolsey making the point that Bush’s request for additional troops is a waste of taxpayers money. PTI
source PTI.
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Friday, January 19th, 2007
The hard core truth is that America can not win a war
in today’s time of disunion . Importantly America can not
fight the ground level wars without which even Alexander
the GREAT could not have conquered Babylon and other
countries .
Today is Now which is the time of technology and the seperiority
can not remain one sided .
We now live in a Global Village created by Dear Bill Gates and we
must all appreciate every one’s contribution to the Heavenly Planet
Mother Earth .
Let us rise above the religions , politics of greed , power , ego ,
selfishness and have a FAMILY REUNION OF THE WHOLE PLANET HEAVENLY MOTHER EARTH .
Do not wait for some extra terrestrial civilisation or comet power to descend and threaten and force us to be one to fight them in unity .
Preserve the UN and the Planet and it’s civilisation which has a history
older than the Historians were born to document what they were dictated
by the Victors of their times .
Time is ripe for the world policeman to unite the whole world or else his
title will shortly become meaningless and powerless .
HER HOLINESS MAHA MAYA ANANTA
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Tuesday, January 2nd, 2007
| By Claudia Parsons and Ibon Villelabeitia
BAGHDAD (Reuters) - Thousands of Sunni Arabs vented their anger on Tuesday over Saddam Hussein’s execution as the Iraqi government promised an investigation into illicitly filmed footage of Shi’ite officials taunting him on the gallows.
A court official said he nearly halted the hanging over the jeering, which has inflamed sectarian passions in a nation already on the brink of civil war. Data showed civilian deaths hit a new record in December and were over 12,000 in 2006.
He also challenged government claims those who filmed the event were guards, saying they were senior officials.
In the video, widely seen on the Internet, observers chant the name of Shi’ite cleric and militia leader Moqtada al-Sadr as Saddam stands on the scaffold, a convicted mass killer appearing dignified in contrast to the uproar below him.
By rushing through the execution just four days after the former president’s appeal failed, over the reservations of the U.S. ambassador who urged a two-week delay, Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki made good on a promise to fellow Shi’ites that few had once found credible — that Saddam would not live to see 2007.
But a moderate lawmaker from Saddam’s Sunni community said the uncensored images of the hasty hanging were a blow to Maliki’s calls for national reconciliation.
Prosecutor Munkith al-Faroon, who can be heard appealing for order on the Internet video, said he threatened to leave the room if the jeering did not stop. That would have halted the execution as a prosecution observer must be present by law.
“I threatened to leave,” Faroon told Reuters. “They knew that if I left, the execution could not go ahead.”
As President Bush prepares a new strategy for a war in which the 3,000th soldier died at the weekend, Interior Ministry data showed at least 1,930 civilians died in political violence in December, almost certainly an underestimate.
MOURNING
Saddam’s grave in his native village, Awja, drew thousands more mourners on Tuesday, as it has each day since he was buried there in the dead of night early on Sunday.
Thousands of people marched in nearby Tikrit and in the northern city of Mosul, carrying portraits of Saddam and banners proclaiming him a martyr. In Samarra, Sunni mourners prayed at a shrine venerated principally by Shi’ites that was destroyed by a bomb in February, unleashing the present sectarian bloodbath.
Sunni neighborhoods in Baghdad and other towns have seen similar demonstrations since Saturday.
The rapid execution has boosted Maliki’s fragile authority among his fractious Shi’ite allies, but has angered many Sunnis.
“The timing of the execution and the footage shown hurt the feelings of those who have the desire to join the political process,” said Saleem al-Jibouri, a moderate voice from the Accordance Front, the largest Sunni Arab parliamentary bloc.
As the Iraqi government mounted an investigation into how officials smuggled in mobile phone cameras, Faroon challenged the accounts of the justice minister and an adviser to the prime minister who said the illicit film was shot by a guard.
“Two officials were holding mobile phone cameras,” said Faroon, who was a deputy prosecutor in the case for which Saddam was hanged and is the chief prosecutor in a second trial that will continue against his aides for genocide against the Kurds.
“One of them I know. He’s a high-ranking government official,” Faroon said, declining to name the man. “The other I also know by sight, though not his name. He is also senior.”
Describing how U.S. troops searched the official delegation to attend the hanging, he said: “I don’t know how they got their mobiles in because the Americans took all our phones, even mine which has no camera.”
Khudayer al-Khuzai, the acting justice minister, said guards violated orders not to bring mobile phones or cameras. He vowed an investigation with “highest standards of discipline.”
Washington says the Mehdi Army militia, loyal to Sadr, is the biggest threat to Iraq and has urged Maliki to crack down on its illegal activities. But Maliki relies on the support of Sadr’s political movement — an uneasy relationship illustrated by the presence of Sadr supporters at Saddam’s execution.
(Additional reporting by Alastair Macdonald)
© Reuters 2007. All Rights Reserved.
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Saturday, December 30th, 2006
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Thursday, December 28th, 2006
| By Tabassum Zakaria
CRAWFORD, Texas (Reuters) - President George W. Bush met with top advisers at his Texas ranch on Thursday to hash out a new Iraq strategy that he plans to unveil next month to an American public weary of the war.
Vice President Dick Cheney, Defense Secretary Robert Gates, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, Gen. Peter Pace, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and national security adviser Stephen Hadley attended the session.
Bush will make a statement to reporters at about 12:30 p.m. EST (1730 GMT), the White House said.
As criticism mounts over his handling of the war, among the options Bush has been considering is a short-term “surge” in U.S. forces to help contain rampant violence. There are currently 134,000 U.S. troops in Iraq.
The Pentagon announced on Wednesday it would send about 3,500 troops to Kuwait to serve as a standby force for use in Iraq or elsewhere in the region.
Democrats say November elections in which they took control of Congress from Bush’s Republican Party reflected public discontent with the Iraq war and desire for change.
But Bush, who prides himself on sticking to decisions, has brushed aside a proposal from a bipartisan panel to ask U.S. foes Iran and Syria for help in stabilizing Iraq and is said to be looking closely at a temporary troop increase.
Sen. Joseph Biden, the Delaware Democrat who will be the next chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, and other Democrats already have expressed opposition to a troop increase.
John Edwards, the Democratic vice presidential candidate in 2004 who now says his vote for the Iraq war was a mistake, called for the United States to begin withdrawing troops rather than “escalating” the conflict by sending more troops.
Edwards, a former North Carolina senator who on Thursday announced his bid for the presidency in 2008, said the problem in Iraq was “not one that’s susceptible to a military solution.”
The White House suggested Democrats and other critics should hold their fire until they hear Bush’s recommendations.
“I hope that Senator Biden would wait to hear what the president has to say before announcing what he’s opposed to,” spokesman Scott Stanzel said.
“President Bush will talk soon to our troops, to the American people and to the Iraqi people about the new way forward in Iraq that will lead to a democratic and unified country that can sustain, govern, and defend itself,” he said.
Former Republican President Gerald Ford, who died on Tuesday, said in a 2004 interview embargoed until after his death that he thought Bush and his top advisers made a “big mistake” in their justification for invading Iraq.
Ford told Washington Post journalist Bob Woodward he would have “maximized our effort through sanctions, through restrictions, whatever, to find another answer.”
As Bush considers a shift in strategy to contain the violence in Iraq, where scores of civilians die daily, supporters of Saddam Hussein threatened to retaliate if the ousted Iraqi leader is executed.
An Iraqi appeals court this week upheld Saddam’s death sentence for crimes against humanity and said it should be carried out within 30 days.
Gates met with Bush last weekend at the Camp David presidential retreat after visiting Iraq to get a first-hand assessment as the new defense secretary. He took over from Donald Rumsfeld, one of the main architects of the Iraq war.
Bush last week said he was reviewing all options, including a short-term surge in troops. “We’re looking at all options, and one of those options of course is increasing more troops, but in order to do so there must be a specific mission that can be accomplished with more troops,” Bush said.
© Reuters 2006. All Rights Reserved.
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Friday, December 8th, 2006
| By Steve Holland
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The White House on Friday dismissed former Secretary of State James Baker’s appeal that his Iraq recommendations be largely adopted as a whole and said President George W. Bush was considering various proposals for a change in course.
Democrats who will take control of the U.S. Congress in January piled pressure on Bush for a major change in course after meeting him at the White House along with Republicans now in their waning days in power.
“Someone has to get the message to this man,” said Nevada Democratic Sen. Harry Reid, soon to be the Senate majority leader, who has praised the work of the Iraq Study Group which issued its report on Wednesday.
In testimony to the Senate Armed Services Committee on Thursday, Baker had urged Congress to accept most if not all of the report’s 79 recommendations as part of a comprehensive strategy and said Bush should do the same.
“I hope we don’t treat this as a fruit salad, and say, ‘I like this but I don’t like that,’” Baker had said.
But White House spokeswoman Dana Perino said the report by the group, led by Baker and former Democratic congressman Lee Hamilton, would be considered along with internal reviews being conducted by the Pentagon, the State Department and the National Security Council.
Bush’s goal is to outline a shift in course in a speech to be delivered before the Christmas holiday. He has given a cool response to two key recommendations — talks with Iran and Syria and pulling back U.S. combat forces by early 2008.
“I understand that Secretary Baker’s comment yesterday about the fruit salad is descriptive, I think, of how they feel about it; however, I don’t think the president considers it as any type of food,” she said.
“I think that he is going to digest it, however, and he will take the time that he needs in order to figure out how he wants to move forward.”
American support for Bush’s handling of the war continued to decline. An AP-Ipsos poll taken earlier this week found that just 27 percent of Americans approved of Bush’s handling of Iraq, down from his previous low of 31 percent in November.
Under pressure for a course correction in the unpopular war, Bush set up meetings for next week with senior Pentagon and State Department officials and outside experts on Iraq.
He talked about Iraq with leaders of the U.S. Congress, both Republicans who are still in charge and Democrats who have warned they will exert strong pressure on the president for a new strategy when they take over in January.
“The time for change is no and is apparent to the American people,” said California Rep. Nancy Pelosi, who will take over in January as speaker of the House of Representatives, after meeting Bush at the White House.
Sen. Richard Durbin, an Illinois Democrat, said Bush did not reject the Iraq Study Group report outright.
“But when he talked about his approach to Iraq, there was no indication of a change in basic strategy. He talked about changing some tactics,” Durbin said.
Reid praised the work of the study commission, but said Bush made it clear that he is the one who calls the shots.
“As he said this morning, he is the commander in chief. He reminds us of that all the time. And we acknowledge that,” Reid said
Perino insisted Bush is keeping an “open mind” about recommendations from the bipartisan panel on ways to shift course in Iraq despite his cool response to key proposals.
Bush on Thursday rejected direct talks with Iran and Syria, a central proposal of the Iraq Study Group.
At a news conference with British Prime Minister Tony Blair, he also declined to endorse a proposal that most U.S. combat troops could be pulled out of Iraq by early 2008, although he called it an important goal if conditions on the ground warrant it.
(Additional reporting by Tom Ferraro, Jeremy Pelofsky and Susan Cornwell)
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Monday, November 20th, 2006
| By Aseel Kami
BAGHDAD (Reuters) - Gunmen killed a much-loved Iraqi comedian on Monday, as attacks and kidnaps of senior politicians and dozens of ordinary people prompted the defense minister to declare that Iraq was now in a “state of war”.
With pressure also growing on U.S. President George W. Bush for a change of tack and his allies urging him to approach Washington’s adversaries Syria and Iran to help stabilize Iraq, Syria’s foreign minister visited Baghdad for the first time since the U.S.-led invasion toppled Saddam Hussein March 2003.
The past week has seen sectarian tensions come to a head inside Iraq’s national unity government, which has yet to make headway on key issues six months after taking office on May 20 on a pledge to reconcile communities and avert civil war.
At a news conference uniting ministers who have been openly at odds over the fate of dozens of civil servants kidnapped by suspected Shi’ite militiamen, Defence Minister Abdel Qader Jassim said the security forces were hunting the kidnappers: “We are in a state of war and in war all measures are permissible.”
The Shi’ite interior minister said it was not a sectarian attack on the Sunni-run Higher Education Ministry. Education officials have rejected government assertions that most hostages have been freed, saying dozens are still missing.
Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki, who is preparing a cabinet reshuffle and is under U.S. pressure to disband militias loyal to his fellow Shi’ites, warned Iraq’s political leaders they had to abandon sectarian, partisan interests and pull together.
“We cannot be politicians by day and with the militias or terrorists … by night,” he told generals, whose own loyalties are in question.
Comic Waleed Hassan, whose satirical television show let Iraqis laugh at the sectarian violence and economic chaos, was killed by three bullets to the head on his way to work, the latest of dozens of broadcasters and journalists to be killed.
“We feel we’re all at risk,” a journalist at Hassan’s station said. “We all think of quitting the station.”
MINISTERS ATTACKED
Deputy Health Minister Hakim al-Zamily said gunmen attacked his convoy and killed two guards near a Sunni rebel stronghold.
Zamily, who is a member of a Shi’ite party, was the second ministry deputy targeted in two days. His colleague Ammar al-Saffar, a member of Maliki’s Shi’ite Dawa party, was kidnapped from his home by gunmen in uniform. Another prominent Shi’ite politician was shot dead on Saturday.
“The convoy was blocked by several cars and we were fired on from the cars and round about,” Zamily told Reuters. “Two of my guards were killed but we were able to fight our way out.”
A roadside bomb hit the convoy of another junior minister, Mohammed al-Oreibi, said an official in his secular party.
U.S. military data showed less violence in Baghdad in the past four weeks than at any time since the government was formed but it spiked last week, Major General William Caldwell said.
Few Iraqis put much faith in their U.S.-trained security forces, which Washington hopes can stand up to the militants but which U.S. commanders concede are heavily infiltrated by them.
More than 100 deaths were reported around Iraq since Sunday morning. The bodies of 14 more people were found dumped south of Baghdad on Monday, an Interior Ministry source said, adding they were believed to be those of 14 people kidnapped from their homes in a Sunni neighborhood on Sunday.
On a rare trip by a senior Arab official, Syrian Foreign Minister Walid al-Moualem stressed he was coming not to please Washington: “I am nobody’s godfather and am not a mediator for the United States … I’m not here to please the United States.”
On Sunday, he called for a timetable for U.S. withdrawal.
Iraqi officials say they are pressing Moualem to prevent al Qaeda fighters crossing the border, cut off funding for Saddam’s diehard Baathist followers and stop protecting his former aides.
(Additional reporting by Mussab Al-Khairalla, Alastair Macdonald, Ross Colvin, Aseel Kami)
© Reuters 2006. All Rights Reserved.
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Saturday, November 18th, 2006
| By Claudia Parsons
BAGHDAD (Reuters) - Gunmen in Baghdad killed a prominent Shi’ite Islamist politician on Saturday as Condoleezza Rice appealed to Iraqis not to let the sectarianism fuelling an orgy of violence destroy their country.
In what looked like a sectarian assassination, Ali al-Adhadh of the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI) was shot dead with his wife as he drove in mainly Sunni west Baghdad, police and SCIRI member Adnan al-Obeidi said.
Secretary of State Rice said during a visit to Vietnam that Iraqis “have one future and that is a future together. They don’t have a future if they try to stay apart.
A recent surge of kidnappings by men in uniform has stoked fears of infiltration of Iraq’s security forces by members of both sectarian militias and criminal groups.
Continuing arguments on Saturday between Sunni- and Shi’ite-run ministries about the fate of hostages seized on Tuesday from the Higher Education Ministry underlined the extent to which sectarianism infects politics at the top.
Tensions have also been heightened by the issue of an arrest warrant for Iraq’s most prominent Sunni cleric, Sheikh Harith al-Dari.
Obeidi said Adhadh was a member of SCIRI’s Shura council, the central decision-making body of the party which was founded in Iran in the 1980s to oppose Saddam Hussein and which is now the biggest party in Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki’s coalition.
He had been due to leave as ambassador to the United Nations in Geneva, a city where he was long SCIRI’s representative. At that time the U.N. post was held by Saddam’s brother Barzan, who was sentenced to death along with the former president this month for crimes against humanity committed against Shi’ites.
Saddam’s fellow minority Sunnis accuse SCIRI, led by Abdul Aziz al-Hakim, and its armed wing, the Badr organization, of running death squads, as well as being involved in killing defense lawyers in Saddam’s trial — charges they strongly deny.
KIDNAP CONFUSION
In the row over the kidnapped civil servants, an official at the Sunni-run ministry said he had lists of 66 people, including 20 visitors, who were still unaccounted for.
He said a released hostage had seen two others suffocated after being gagged with cotton wool and tortured. Another official said five hostages released on Friday had been tortured.
But a spokesman for the Shi’ite-run Interior Ministry, Brigadier Abdul Karim Khalaf, said: “This matter is now closed and we have declared all the hostages released.”
In the south of the country, security forces were hunting for five kidnapped Western contractors, also by men in uniform.
Four Americans and an Austrian were seized in the hijack of a truck convoy near the Kuwaiti border on Thursday. Amid great confusion about other incidents involving Western contractors in the area, police said three British guards detained after a clash with police on Friday had been handed to British troops.
British officials were unavailable for comment.
Thursday’s convoy hijack in Iraq’s oil-rich south underlined the extent to which militias and gangs are undermining stability well beyond Baghdad, despite U.S. assurances that the vast bulk of violence in Iraq takes place in the capital.
British Prime Minister Tony Blair’s office sought to quell the idea that he had admitted to Al Jazeera television on Friday that the intervention in Iraq had so far been disastrous.
When the interviewer suggested the period since the U.S.-led invasion had been “pretty much of a disaster”, Blair replied:
“It has, but you see, what I say to people is: ‘Why is it difficult in Iraq?’”
Iraq’s Deputy Prime Minister Barham Salih said the situation had reached a “critical level”: “There is no way that these levels of violence can be sustained,” he told Al Jazeera, adding that ministers were planning a crisis meeting to bolster resolve to “fight terrorism” and dissolve militias.
(Additional reporting by Aref Mohammed in Basra; Arshad Mohammed in Hanoi; Paul Majendie in London; Mussab Al-Khairalla, Ahmed Rasheed, Ross Colvin and Alastair Macdonald in Baghdad)
© Reuters 2006. All Rights Reserved.
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Tuesday, November 14th, 2006
| WASHINGTON (Reuters) - U.S. Sen. Harry Reid, a moderate Nevada Democrat, was elected by colleagues on Tuesday as U.S. Senate majority leader for the 110th Congress that will convene in January.
Reid, like most fellow Democrats, favors a phased withdrawal of U.S. troops from Iraq, a major issue in last week’s elections that saw Democrats win control of the Senate and House of Representatives from President George W. Bush’s Republicans.
Reid has served the past two years as Senate minority leader. He replaced Tom Daschle, who was ousted by voters in his home state of South Dakota in 2004 after being denounced as “the chief obstructionist” to Bush’s conservative agenda.
Democrats also elected Dick Durbin of Illinois as assistant Senate majority leader. He has been Senate assistant minority leader since January 2005.
Senate Republicans are to elect their leadership for the new Congress on Wednesday, while the two parties select their leadership in the House on Thursday and Friday.
© Reuters 2006. All Rights Reserved.
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