Juan Cole

Churches Bombed in Mosul Reuters reports that guerrillas in Mosul cleared two churches and then blew them up. There were no injuries, but extensive damage was done to an Armenian and an old Chaldean church. Mosul, a city of 1.2 million, has a substantial Christian population (Christians form about 3 percent of the Iraqi population). […]

Elections face Logistical Obstacles Mohamad Bazzi of Newsday reports that quite aside from major security problems, the January 30 elections could be derailed by poor preparations. In contrast to the 600 UN election workers in Afghanistan for the recent presidential elections, there are only 35 in Iraq, and security concerns are delaying the sending of […]

Character Assassination Yes, I’m aware that Daniel Pipes of the so-called Middle East Forum sent some puppy out to slime me over at David Horowitz’s Frontpagerag. So this is the way it goes with the Likudniks. First they harass you and try to have you spied on. Then they threaten, bully and try to intimidate […]

Shiite List to be Announced Hussein Shahristani, the Shiite scientist charged by Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani with cobbling together a big comprehensive Shiite list, said Monday that the full listing of candidate names (in ranked order) would be made available on Tuesday. The list is being called the United Iraqi Congress. The list groups the […]

Clash on a Street called Haifa Guerrillas on Haifa Street in downtown Baghdad fought a running battle Monday with Iraqi police or national guards, and killed one civilian working for the US. The battle took place near the Green Zone, where the US embassy is sited. There were also attacks on an oil pipeline that […]

Carnage becoming Routine in Iraq: Another Bloody Sunday ArabNews summarizes the carnage in Iraq on Sunday. Tikrit: Guerrillas ambushed a bus as it let off Iraqis working for the US military at a weapons dump in Tikrit on Sunday morning around 8:30 am, spraying it with machine-gun fire and then fleeing. They killed 17 Iraqi […]

Abu Ghuraib Redux The Arabic satellite television programs showed the new Abu Ghuraib pictures repeatedly late last week, and they provoked a new round of disgust with the United States. Boing Boing tells the story of how these photos were tracked down on a photo sharing site by a reporter using the google search engine. […]

Blogging Fallujah, and the US Air War against Iraqi Civilians Thomas E. Ricks has a characteristically piercing examination of the way in which a single blogger has been able to challenge the public relations efforts of the entire US military with regard to the human cost of the Fallujah campaign. He contrasts the US military’s […]

Arab/Kurdish, Sunni/Shiite Violence Flares, Killing Dozens The violence in Iraq on Saturday, which killed at least 40 and wounded many more, was particularly worrying because it was again characterized by a strong element of ethnic warfare. In Mosul, a car bomber pulled alongside a bus bringing in Kurdish militiamen or peshmerga, who guard the offices […]