Juan Cole

al-Da`wa Party will act as Intermediary for Muqtada The Shiite al-Da`wa Party announced that it would attempt to negotiate a truce between radical young Shiite preacher Muqtada al-Sadr and the Americans. (al-Zaman). Muqtada recently announced that he would call fo a general strike in February to protest the jailing of a number of his followers. […]

Hilla Demonstrations Point to problems of Legitimacy Mariam Fam of AP notes that there has been a popular movement of protest against the American-appointed mayor of the Shiite city of Hillah. His opponents accuse him of having been a Baath party member, of having collaborated, and of being corrupt and nepotistic. There have been similar […]

Gas and Electricity Shortages Return Glen Carey of USA Today reports that gasoline/ petrol and electricity shortages have returned to Baghdad, raising anxieties among Iraqis about how they will make it through the winter. The fall-off in megawattage and gasoline has to do in part with sabotage, since guerrillas have launched numerous attacks against pipelines, […]

Controversies about New Security Agency in Iraq In the 1980s, Saddam employed tens of thousands of persons in the Ministry of the Interior (analogous to the US FBI) and related organs, for the purpose of domestic spying on Iraqis. Some have asserted that the number of snitches was greater than the number of all the […]

Stages of American Iraq, and Parallels I was on an Iraq panel at MIT on Friday with Ivo Daalder,, co-author of the just-published America Unbound: The Bush Revolution in Foreign Policy. I found his views of how the policy in Iraq has developed very interesting, and they provoked me to some thoughts of my own. […]

IGC Considers New Elections and Democratic Trade Unions According to ash-Sharq al-Awsat, Abdul Aziz al-Hakim has revealed that the Interim Governing Council has still not finally come to a compromise on how to hold elections this spring for a transitional government. Al-Hakim wants general, one-person-one-vote elections, whereas the majority agrees with the Americans in wanting […]

Bomb blast in Baghdad kills 1 US soldier, 4 Iraqis, wounds 16 Guerrillas set off a bomb in Baghdad as a US military convoy was passing from one direction and an Iraqi civilian minibus from the other. At least 1 US soldier was killed, and eyewitnesses spoke of seeing others wounded. At least 4 Iraqis […]

Muqtada threatens General Strike In his Friday sermon, young Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr threatened to announce general strike if the US military did not release his followers from imprisonment. He said that the strike would be held on the anniversary of the assassination of his father, Grand Ayatollah Muhammad Sadiq al-Sadr (mid-February 1999). Al-Sadr did […]

Guerrillas fire Artillery Shells at Spanish in Diwaniyah The Spanish Plus Ultra squad has come under fire numerous times during the past week from guerrillas in the southern Shiite city of Diwaniyah, but took no casualties. Az-Zaman reported that the most recent attack was the day before yesterday. The Spanish contingent includes 1300 troops from […]