Archives for 2009

Adam L. Silverman writes in a guest editorial for IC: On 1 April 2009 Juan Cole briefly wrote about the events surrounding the arrest of the Fadl District Sons of Iraq (SOI) leader. Cole, in commenting on remarks reported in al Sharq al Awsat [“The Middle East”] correctly indicated that by siding with the Coalition […]

The NATO summit is off to a shaky start. It was supposed to elect a new leader, and the Obama administration backed Danish Prime Minister Anders Fogh Rasmussen for the role. Rasmussen has been a strong supporter of the NATO mission in Afghanistan, where there are Danish troops, at a time when many European countries […]

1. Exaggerating the threat. An Afghan army foot patrol was attacked by guerrillas in Helmand Province on Wednesday, according to AP. US and Afghan soldiers responded, engaging in a firefight. Then the US military called in an air strike on the Taliban, killing 20 of them. On Tuesday, a similar airstrike had taken out 30 […]

Avigdor Lieberman, the Moldovan night club bouncer, is now foreign minister of Israel. The world has had a lot of fun laughing at the pronouncements of Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who stands falsely accused of threatening to wipe Israel off the face of the map. But Ahmadinejad has protested that it would be wrong to […]

Al-Hayat reports in Arabic that the Sadr Movement led by Sayyid Muqtada al-Sadr is facing the possibility of internal factionalism, among imprisoned members and among those under Iranian influence. Muqtada al-Sadr had created two special operations units within his Mahdi Army, the League of the People of Truth (led by Sheikh Qays al-Khaz`ali) and the […]

Paul Fitzgerald and Elizabeth Gould write in a guest op-ed for IC: “Rebuilding Afghanistan is the most cynically pro-American thing you could do anywhere in the world in terms of making it a strong ally in the best sense of the word. Not a puppet or a right-wing military dictatorship but a really good Islamic […]

A US predator drone strike on a Pakistani village in Orakzai killed 10 persons on Wednesday morning. The US maintains that it struck at a Taliban compound. The leader of the Pakistan Taliban Movement, Baitullah Mahsud, again threatened on Tuesday to strike at Washington DC. He has made a string of such threats for some […]

A suicide bomber struck a police station in the northern city of Mosul on Tuesday, killing 7 persons (4 policemen)and wounding 38 (17 policemen). Mostly Sunni Arab Mosul remains a center of guerrilla war against the Shiite-dominated Baghdad government and troops. Al-Zaman reports in Arabic that the government of PM Nuri al-Maliki has announced the […]

A truck bomber struck at police in downtown Mosul (pop. 1.7 mn.) on Tuesday morning, killing 7 and wounding 17. Al-Zaman writing in Arabic says that Iraqi troops continued for a third straight day their siege of the Sunni Fadl distrinct. The paper alleged that diseases are starting to spread among women and children because […]