Arab World

The Turkish military announced on Monday that it had killed another 41 Kurdish guerrillas inside Iraq. It claims to have killed 151 fighters of the Kurdish Workers Party (PKK) during the present operation. It admitted the deaths of 2 more Turkish troops, bringing the total loss for Ankara in this operation to 17 dead. The […]

Between 40 and 60 Shiites were killed and 105 wounded on Sunday by a suicide bomber at Iskandariya in northern Babil province as they made their way south to the holy city of Karbala. Entire families were on the move together, so that the bombing killed or wounded many women and children. Many of the […]

Turkish military land and air operations inside northern Iraq left 35 PKK guerrillas dead on Saturday, and two Turkish soldiers. The PKK warned that it would blow up people in Turkish cities if the Turkish army did not withdraw. This threat would be more impressive if they hadn’t already been blowing up people in Turkish […]

I review the news below and don’t somehow conclude that the US occupation of Iraq is a success story. I know we are paying a lot for our presence in Iraq. I can’t figure out what the average American is receiving for the money. It isn’t increased security, since Iraq is a training ground for […]

While US troops keep a tenuous grip on Baghdad in the center, Iraq’s two extremities– Kurdistan in the north and Basra in the deep south– are coming apart at the seams. Neither area has many US troops to fall back on. In a tense confrontation, Iraqi Kurdish troops nearly surrounded Turkish troops who had made […]

DPA estimates that civil war violence killed 25 in Iraq on Wednesday and wounded 70. The dead included 5 US troops. On Tuesday evening, 3 US troops were killed when their vehicle hit a roadside bomb in northwestern Baghdad (a Sunni Arab area). Another was killed on Wednesday by an RPG attack in Mosul, which […]

It is awfully suspicious that as soon as a firm date was set for new provincial elections in Iraq (October 1), the truce broke down between the paramilitary of Muqtada al-Sadr and that of Abdul Aziz al-Hakim. This according to Nassar al-Rubaie, the leader of the Sadrist bloc in parliament. The Sadrists say that the […]

Two bombings shook Iraq Sunday morning. In the Misbah commercial center in the upscale Shiite Karrada district, a female suicide bomber detonated a belt bomb, killing 3 persons and wounding 10. Meanwhile, in Mosul a car bomb killed 3. Mosul is the site of a major push against foreign fighters styled ‘al-Qaeda’ (really mainly Salafi […]

AP reports that two suicide bombers attacked a Shiite mosque congregation in the northern Turkmen city of Tal Afar on Friday. The first was stopped and his belt bomb only killed him. But the second managed to detonate his belt in a crowd, killing four persons and wounding over 20. The scene of the attack […]