Juan Cole

Muqtada to Electricity Minister over Israel: “Go to Hell!” According to AFP, Aiham al-Samarrai, interim minister of electricity in Iraq, has said that although Iraq would not buy electricity from Israel (as it does from Turkey and Syria), at some future time it might be willing to sell electricity to Israel ““at three times the […]

Muslim Brotherhood Heads up Iraq under Americans AFP reports that the president of the Interim Governing Council for February is Muhsin Abdul Hamid, the leader of the Iraqi Islamic Party, the Iraqi branch of the Sunni fundamentalist Muslim Brotherhood. The party was founded, according to Islam Online, in 1944 when Hasan al-Banna (founder of the […]

Details of Iraqi Draft Fundamental Law The Kuwaiti newspaper al-Qabas [“Firebrand”: Arabic URL] has published a draft of the Fundamental Law on which the Interim Governing Council is working. It will function as Iraq’s constitution until a new one can be fashioned, and will allow a transitional government to be installed this summer. I thought […]

14 Dead in Iraq Attacks, including 3 US Soldiers Guerrillas used a roadside bomb to kill 3 US troops near Kirkuk on Saturday. Another group car-bombed an Iraqi police station in Mosul on payday, killing 9 and wounding dozens. al-Hayat reports that guerrillas killed one leader of the Turkmen Front and wounded another by spraying […]

Shiites Seek Something Close to Free Elections A glimpse of the likely strategy of Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani and his chief aides can be found in an Iranian news report quoting this week’s Friday sermon of Shaikh Abdul Mahdi al-Karbala’i, Sistani’s representative in the holy city of Karbala. “Karbalai told reporters after the prayers that […]

Senior US Officials Knew in May there was no WMD in Iraq The Observer reports that “US military survey teams sent to visit suspected sites of WMD, and intelligence interviews with Iraqi scientists and officials, had concluded” . . . as early as last May that there were no chemical or biological weapons stockpiles in […]

Rieff on Iraqi Shiites David Rieff”s excellent firsthand report from Iraq on the Shiite movements there in the New York Times magazine is now available online (free registration required). This report seems to me among the more realistic and informed assessments of the situation yet to appear in the Western press. Rieff has done an […]

Dutch Embassy Destroyed by Rocket; 4 Policemen gunned down in Mosul According to wire services, Baghdad was shaken by several explosions late Friday night, including two rocket-propelled grenade attacks on the Dutch embassy in Baghdad that set it ablaze briefly before the fire was extinguished. No one was harmed, since the building was unoccupied. US […]

Debate Begins on Constitutional Provisions in Iraq Alissa Rubin of the Los Angeles Times has a fine piece today discussing debates in Iraq over the Fundamental Law that will govern the country until a constitution is crafted. She points out that several members of the Interim Governing Council reject the idea of a 3-man rotating […]