BlogIraq

Yesterday, the most loved person in Baghdad got even more loved. The minister of Electricity, Dr.Kareem Al-Aboudi, and his group of gangsters (his bodyguards), have encountered a minor incident and dealt with it the way things are handled in Iraq.

As he and his gangsters were passing by a police convoy, in the eastern part of Baghdad, and it seems like the police convoy got too close to them and the gangsters opened fire on the police cars. And then they got off their cars and the gangsters started kicking the police as*..!!!

They broke the hand of one police captain and ripped his uniform off and bashed the head of another police captain. And the most loved person (the minister) was looking as so were other people in the street.

This was not the first encounter of this type, not for this minister nor for the other ministers or officials. 

I wonder when Al-Maliki is going to do the changes he promised more than a year ago. I wonder what his gangsters would do if he had to live outside the green zone? 

France 24 TV channel aired a good report from Iraq two days ago. They went to few places in Baghdad and Falluja. I think it was worth to watch so here is the link.

The Information Technology and Telecommunications Center in University of Technology, in Baghdad have produced, with the aid of computer science students in the university, the first %100 Iraqi-made computer game.

The game named "Gilgamish" is inspired by the story of the King that fights the evil that hits the kings of Mesopotamia to liberate them from the evil god "Khumbaba".

The five stages game, Giglamish the Brave King, is of a 200Mbytes size and works on virtually any PC and does not require high resolution video card. Dr.Mazin Sameer, the head of the center said that 5000 copies of the game will be distributed to the students of the university and later on will be released to the markets.

Way to go guys. 

"Khan Jghan" is an Iraqi phrase describing a place where everyone gets in and out whenever the feel like it. The origin of these words is Turkish by the way.

Turkey army has launched land offensive into Iraq last night. Turkish television reported, without citing sources, that 10,000 troops had entered Iraqi territory and moved 10 km (6 miles) inside Iraq.

I believe that the Iraqi government did not handle the PKK issue in the proper way. But this does not entitle Turkey to do such a military operation inside Iraq. I think the Iraqi government should have asked the PKK to move out of Iraq whether in Turkey or any where in the world to avoid being in this position.

This action by Turkey shows the world how Turkey does not take the Iraqi government seriously and do not give the space for peaceful solutions to take place. I have before admired the Turkish parliament for not letting the US attack Iraq from the Turkish land in 2003. And I though that this was much braver than the action of any "Arab" land. But this is off the limit now.

And of course the US did not mind that. The US was informed about this attack and, according to Zebari, the Iraqi government was not. This just shows how much the US and Turkey trust the Iraqi Government. They did not inform the Iraqis so the information would not be leaked to the PKK fighters. Thats a lot of trust here, although the Turkish side say that they have informed Washington and Baghdad.

I hope that this operation is periodically as short as the Turkish claimed it would be. And I hope no Iraqi gets hurt in this operation. I mean Iraq has enough turbulences of its own, and we don't need people fighting their own battles on our land (kind of reminds me of Americas fight against Al-Qaeda). 

God bless your soul Raheem Al-Maliki. He wrote this poem few months before he was assassinated and he read it in the convention palace in Baghdad. I think once you hear the poem, you will know why he was killed. May he rest in peace.

You can download the audio file of this poem here. 

So, you are free to say whatever you want in Iraq, but you will pay for it.

The UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) approved giving the Syrian Kurds residing in the Iraqi Kurdistan region for four years now the "refugee" status, the region's coordinator with the UN said on Sunday.

Are you kidding me?

Iraqis are not allowed to enter Kurdistan unless accompanied by a Kurdish sponsor to take responsibility of this Iraqi person and guarantee that this Iraqi person will not stay too long in the Iraqi land of Kurdistan. And now they are giving asylum to Syrians??

Isn't this a bit over the edge?

I mean who is more entitled to enjoy the safety and prosperity of the Iraqi land of Kurdistan, the syrian kurds or the Iraqis who had to leave their homes and seek safety somewhere else?

And ironically the UNHCR approved that. 

"If it happens that an individual or some individuals were repatriated independently, then is nothing wrong with that but if this repatriation took the form of groups, this would not be allowed," stressed Guterres

Its nice of the UNHCR to forbid the Kurdish government from kicking Iraqis out of their land, unless they break the law. And on the other hand, the Kurdish government makes laws to forbid Iraqis from staying in Kurdistan unless they have a job. Or, they can stay for a short amount of time with the exoistence of a kurdish sponsor.

According to this piece of news,

" According to Kurdish estimates, there are about 3,500 Iranian Kurds, 500 Syrian Kurds and 6,000 Turkish Kurds seeking asylum in the autonomous region,www.ekurd.net in addition to about 160,000 displaced persons who fled security unrest in the Iraqi provinces."

And even if these people do not get the legal right of asylum, still they stay in Kurdistan for an indefinite period of time.

One more small observation, the person making the announcement with Guterres is Dr Dindar Zebari, the Kurdistan Regional Government’s (KRG) Coordinator to the United Nations. This person attends all the meetings that the Iraq representative in the UN attends to represent kurdistan. I wounder if each state in the US has its own representative in the UN, or the each emirate in the UAE has its own representative in the UN? 

This post was written one year ago by a friend of mine. I wanted to quote some of it here, but I found my self copying the whole post.

It was seventeen years ago, when an American pilot obeyed the order to burn a thousand people to death. The holocaust took place in Shelter No. 25 in Baghdad, in Al-Amirya district.

It was Wednesday February 13th, 1991 at 4:20am in Baghdad time. A time that thousands of Iraqi people can not forget. The first bomb dug a small hole in the thick ceiling of the shelter. And the 1000Kg steel door was automatically shut as it was programmed to protect the people inside from effects of bombs outside. But this time, it protected the world from witnessing the most brutal crime of all times.

The second 2000 pounds-bomb found its way through to the ground floor of the shelter where about 1000 people were sleeping.

According to witnesses I talked to, the shelter was full of women and children and very old people. They used to go there every night because the shelter had electricity and water and because they thought they would be protected from the rapid bombing of American airplanes daily. This time, they were not.

After the second bomb with the steel head penetrated the ceiling, it exploded inside the shelter. Everything was on fire. And to be accurate, every one was on fire. No one could help them because the shelter was designed to prevent anything and everyone from getting into the shelter once it was shut.

People kept burning until the morning and until the turned to ashes.

At that morning, the entire world woke up safely and joyfully. A thousand people in Baghdad could not wake up. And few other thousands’ lives were never the same.

I’ll quote some of what the 6 survivors of this holocaust and few other witnesses said:

‘The sound of the explosion woke me up. I was looking around and all I saw was fire. I tried to protect my face with my hands and my chest with my legs. I did not know what to do. I thought that these are my last moment.’ A survivor said.

‘I thought it was just a dream. I thought that I will wake up soon and all this was just a dream.’ Another survivor said.

‘They killed my 16 year old son. They killed my daughter on her fifteenth birthday. I wish I was them. I wish I was with them.’ A mother of five kids whom were killed that day said.

‘I wish they died in a different way. I wish they did not feel the fire.’ Said a relative of a family who died that day.

‘I found her blanket. I even found her earrings. But I could not find her.’ Said a mother of a 12-year old girl who died that day.

A father of an infant who died that day said ‘My son was only 5 days old. I don’t even remember his face. I don’t have a photo of him. I can’t even proof that he ever existed.’

Only 314 bodies were found complete that day. The rest of the bodies were turn to dust or torn into small burned pieces. The evacuation of bodies took three days.

The American administration claimed that there was a meeting for high ranked Iraqi military personnel there. Although we saw non when we were evacuating the bodies, is this a good enough reason to take a thousand life ??

I lost five relatives in there. One of them was four moths old. We found him in his mother’s lap burnt to ashes. We could only recognize them from the wedding ring in his mother’s hand.

This is the ugliest face of war no matter what achievements were made.

Earlier today, the Iraqi parliament approved a new flag for Iraq. The one shown below:

164 Parliament members attended the session of which 50% voted for this flag out of four options that were given in this session. Mahmoud Al-Mashhadani, the head of the parliament, said that "this is a temporary flag until a flag is chosen by the Iraqi people". It seems like the parliament does not represent the Iraqi people anyway.

Way to go Kurds. You've made it through an f*cked up the flag. Its the flag that the evil army of Saddam killed the Kurds under. The army that Maoud Al-Barazani asked for Saddam's help against Jalal Al-Talibani under. o you cannot tolerate its existence anymore.

This brings me to an interesting reading I came across today. Masoud Barzani is trying to press charges against Michael Rubin how said that the Kurds are assisting Iranian to come into Iraq in a deal that involves money and guarantees that no terrorism act will take place on the lands of Kurdistan.

"During the first week in July 2003, an American military unit patrolling the mountains of northeastern Iraq approximately thirty miles from the Iranian border came across an unauthorized KDP checkpoint from which they confiscated a cache of Iranian passports and money. KDP officials had used the checkpoint to facilitate Iranian infiltration–allowing Iranian operatives to swap Iranian passports for local Kurdish identity papers–in exchange for cash. Kurdish officials privately acknowledge that this case was not unique. At the beginning of the Iraqi insurgency in April 2004, Iraqi Kurdistan became a transit point for Ansar al-Sunna: its members entered Iraqi Kurdistan from Iran and received safe passage to Mosul in exchange for an agreement not to conduct operations in the three northern governorates–and perhaps payment as well."

Everyone in Kurdistan knows what happened after Saddam lost control over Kurdistan in 1991. Talbani and Barzani disassembled and sold all the facilities in Kurdistan and sold it through smugglers to Iran and Turkey. This includes water and electricity facilities and even school seats.  Afterwards, Talbani and Barzani started to ask for money to help and support the poor kurdish people. And they took the shares of Food-for-Oil program into their on pockets through fake companies and contracts.

People who do such things, are very likely to smuggle terrorism into Iraq for money. And also, having the whole country f*cked up would lead more investments into Kurdistan. An apartment in Sulaymaniya and and even Arbil now cost more than an apartment in Paris. The rents are very high and the living costs are going though the roof. And by the end of the day, a piece of everything goes into the pockets of the good old Talbani and Barzani.

If the kurdish people are willing to hold the silence for a long time, maybe it better for Iraq to let Kurdistan be an independent country of its own. 

Right after I write the title of this post, I recognized how wrong it is. Its not that everyone is above the law, its like there is no law at all. You can get killed for no reason and have the full faith that whoever killed you will not be punished for it whatsoever.

NY Times published an article a couple of days ago about the difficulties the justice department is facing in putting up a case against BlackWater for murdering "at least" 17 Iraqi in Nissour Square last September. This is only as good as slaughtering Shiites and joining the "Awakening" forces afterwards to become hero and a savior. And only as good as slaughtering the Sunnis and joining the Iraqi Security Forces afterwards and become a hero an a savior.

Its not only the lives of the 17 dead Iraqis we are talking about here. We are talking about setting an example. And this way, the example is put simply: kill the Iraqis as much as you can, no one will give a rat's ass..!!!

The US army are above the law. Blackwater are above the law. The criminals in the Iraqi government are above the law. The criminals in the Iraqi Parliament are above the law. Militias are above the law. Awakening forces are above the law. And basically every motherf***ing criminal on the Iraqi soil is above the law.

How many of the soldiers involved in Abu-Ghraib rapes and humiliations were actually thrown into jail?

How many of the Blackwater assassins was thrown in jail or even brought to trail?

How many stealing ministers or ex-ministers were brought to trail?

What happened to ex-minister of electricity Ayham Al-Samirrae after an arrest warren was issued for him? Oh let me answer that one for you. He was "helped" to travel outside Iraq.

What happened to the arrest warren of Muqtada Al-Sadr that was issued in 2004?

What happened in the "parliamentary" investigation conducted for the incident of finding guns and explosive in Adnan Al-Dulaimi's house in in his guards houses?

How on earth, at the end of 2007, the ministry of finance sends to the parliament the closures of the ministries spendings for 2004? Yes that is 2004. And by the way, this means that the accounts and auditing of 2005, 2006, and 2007 are not submitted yet.

How many Iraqi people are held in jails with no evidence, trail, or sometimes even without investigation?

I would really love to know if there is any law that is being applied in Iraq at all. I mean not even the traffic law are being applied for God's sake.

The nice thing about law in Iraq, is that every political party and basically every country who is involved in Iraq is pushing hard on the Iraqi parliament to pass legislations. What for people?? Its not going to be applied anyway. 

A good piece was published in the Economist few days ago. Although I don't with some points in that article, but its worth to read.

"IT IS not easy to be an Arab these days. If you are old, the place where you live is likely to have changed so much that little seems friendly and familiar. If you are young, years of rote learning in dreary state schools did not prepare you well for this new world. In your own country you have few rights. Travel abroad and they take you for a terrorist. Even your leaders don't count for much in the wider world. Some are big on money, others on bombast, but few are inspiring or visionary.

These are gross generalizations, of course. Huge differences persist among 300m-odd Arabic speakers and 22 countries of the Arab League. With oil prices touching record highs, some Arab economies are booming. The gulf between a Darfuri refugee and a Porsche-driving financier in Dubai is as great as between any two people on earth. Yet to travel through the Arab world right now is to experience a peculiar sameness of spirit. Particularly among people under 30, who make up the vast majority of Arabs, the mood is one of disgruntlement and doubt."

And here is the link to the rest of the article:

http://www.economist.com/world/africa/PrinterFriendly.cfm?story_id=10499063