Juan Cole

The events around the assassination of Shiite leader Abd al-Majid Khu’i in Najaf a couple of days ago remain murky. From what I can tell, though, Khu’i got involved in trying to defend a man named Kalidar, the keeper of Ali’s shrine in Najaf, from an angry crowd who was accusing him of having collaborated […]

*Madinat Saddam, a Shiite area of 2 million in Baghdad, had already tossed out the Iraqi militiamen two days ago, it turns out. These desperately poor slum dwellers had suffered massacres as recently as 1999, when they rose up in protest against Saddam’s assassination of Ayatollah Muhammad Sadiq al-Sadr. I suspect their first order of […]

*The British forces in Basra have announced that the battle for that city has just about ended. They have taken most of the important government buildings and have 4000 troops with 200 tanks inside the city. Some Fedayee Saddam guerrillas still lurk in the twisting alleyways, but the populace has apparently lost all fear of […]

*Humanitarian disaster may loom in Basra if something isn’t done quickly. The city has fallen to British forces and some of the population has turned on Baath enforcers, killing them. But despite their evident joy at being liberated, the people of the city are thirsty. They do not have access to clean water, and will […]

*For anyone who hasn’t been near news this morning, the US military has taken several key sites in downtown Baghdad in a dramatic show of force. Taking and pacifying a city of 5 million will take some time, but apparently the Iraqi military has collapsed to the point where the US can just walk into […]

*Saudi Arabia and Kuwait are giving Jordan three months of its oil supplies free to make up for the interruption of its petroleum imports from Iraq. Jordan is being economically hurt by the Iraq war, and its people are boiling over with rage about it. Kuwait and Saudi Arabia have just made an extremely important […]

*With news of the advance of the US Third Army to the edges of Baghdad and the fall of the airport, it is easy to forget how much of Iraq the Anglo-British forces do not control. The British have just crossed the Shatt al-Basra waterway and have established a beachhead in southern Basra proper for […]

Well, the latest reports still are saying that Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani in Najaf issued a fatwa or legal ruling today that urges Shiites not to interfere with the US troops as they take control of Iraq. The confusion was caused by al-Jazeera, which carried a denial. It is not impossible that the confusion is […]

*The Shiite expatriate group, the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq in Tehran, has condemned the Baath regime of Iraq for putting its soldiers into the mosque complex at the shrine of Imam `Ali in Najaf. This was a ploy to trick the US into shelling the shrine, in a bid to turn the […]