Arab World

The USG Open Source center translates from an Iraqi television report, “Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki pledged to end the crisis facing his government as a result of the recurring withdrawals of the political blocs, asserting that there will be a change this week. In press statements, Al-Maliki said that the Presidency Council gave him […]

The USG Open Source Center translates a broadcast by the Iranian Al-Alam satellite television station reporting on a new pact between the [Shiite] Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq and the [Sunni coalition, the] Iraqi Accord Front, especially the latter’s Islamic Iraqi Party. This alliance probably comes in response to the move of other parties to […]

The USG Open Source Center translates an opinion piece from a major Kurdish Iraqi newspaper containing quotes from a Kurdish official about the Kurdish-US relationship. The piece maintains that the alliance is one of convenience on the US side; is not as strong as that between Washington and Kuwait; and may not last if the […]

According to al-Hayat in Arabic, Iraqi preachers on Friday expressed outrage over the Israeli siege of Gaza and condemned Arab governments for doing nothing about it. They also condemned the bombing in Mosul and the doomsday group, Supporters of the Mahdi, in the Shiite south. Al-Hayat reports in Arabic that the Iraqi parliament still has […]

The police chief of Mosul and two other officers were killed by a suicide bomber when they came to the site of the recent powerful explosion. The death toll from that bomb rose to 40. A bomb lightly wounded Abdul Mahdi Karbala’i, the representative in the holy Shiite city of Karbala of Grand Ayatollah Ali […]

Guerrillas were stockpiling munitions in an unoccupied building in the Zanjabili district near the Houston-sized northern city of Mosul. Someone informed the Iraqi security forces of the stockpile, and apparently the guerrillas had good intelligence on such things, so they blew up the arms warehouse to deny it to their foes. It blasted surrounding apartment […]

The Center for Public Integrity has published a study finding that ‘President George W. Bush and seven of his administration’s top officials, including Vice President Dick Cheney, National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice, and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, made at least 935 false statements in the two years following September 11, 2001, about the national security […]

The USG Open Source Center translates a letter from Kurdistan Regional Authority leader Massoud Barzani slamming the Hawlati newspaper for having published in Kurdish an article by Neoconservative operative Michael Rubin of the American Enterprise Institute, which had accused Barzani and Iraqi president Jalal Talabani of embezzling large sums of money. Barzani offers to give […]

On Tuesday morning in Iraq, a suicide bomber walked into a school in downtown Baquba and detonated his payload, killing a guard and wounding 20 students and teachers. Baquba, a city of 200,000, is the capital of the key Diyala Province that lies between Baghdad and Iran. It is a mixed province, some 60% Sunni […]