Juan Cole

Karbala Bomb Blast A bomb blast outside the holy shrine of Imam Husain in Karbala left Shaikh Abdul Mahdi al-Karbala’i wounded with shrapnel in his legs and killed two of his bodyguards along with six other persons. Altogether 32 were wounded. Al-Karbala’i is a prominent spokesperson for Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani of Najaf. Sistani recently […]

Fassihi on Muslim-Jewish Relations in Prerevolutionary Iran Dr. Michael Fassihi writes concerning his own family’s experience of Muslim-Jewish relations in Iran: Today I came across the comment made via email to you by one of your readers, regarding the Muslims and Jews in the Middle East, that I think I should respond citing my personal […]

Iraqi Jews before 1948 Adam Ovadia Mansoor writes, with regard to the position of the substantial Iraqi Jewish population before 1948: ‘ I have one minor quibble with your assessment of Iraqi Jews and the cause for their expulsion. I can only relay what my father, who was 16 at the time, told me about […]

Election News The Iraqi Islamic Party, a Sunni group, appears finally to have gotten off the fence and decided definitively to contest the elections in January. Iyad Allawi’s decision to start trials against high Baath officials, however, may further roil ethnic relations in Iraq, since a recital of Baath atrocities just before the elections may […]

Pentagon Threatens Germany over Rumsfeld Suit The New York-based Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR) and Berlin’s Republican Lawyers’ Association has filed suit in Germany against Donald Rumsfeld on behalf of 4 Iraqis who allege they were mistreated by American troops. A number of other high-ranking US officials are also named. AFP writes: ‘ The groups […]

Opinion Polls in Iraq My allegation that the IraqTheModel website is far outside the norm of Iraqi public opinion as measured by polling has caused a stir in the weblogging world among, apparently, dittoheads who can’t read polls. Here are the results of an April, 2004, Gallup poll, which was scientifically weighted and involved over […]

Abroad I’m going to be out of town for a few days. I think I will be able to do some posting, but just a head’s up that it may not be as regular as usual. As luck would have it, I’m getting an error message at Blogger, so am doing this manually. It should […]

Carbomb targets Green Zone Again Electricity Outage in All Iraqi Cities for Second Straight Day A car bomber struck the same Green Zone checkpoint again Tuesday morning as had been targeted on Monday. LBC satellite television is reporting one Iraqi National Guardsman killed and twelver persons seriously wounded. Two Marines were killed by guerrilla action […]

Access Problems For mysterious reasons, some readers in the past week have been experiencing difficulty in accessing Informed Comment. For others, the problem has cleared up. I checked with my server provider and with Blogger, but haven’t had any report of a denial of service attack or any other obvious explanation. For those who can […]