Arab World

Kurdistan-Baghdad Oil Deal? US Strike Kills 11 Civilians Shiites Rally in Najaf, Criticize US Reuters is reporting that the Kurds have reached an agreement with other parliamentarians on changes to a draft petroleum bill. These changes do not address, as Reuters incorrectly reports, “the equitable distribution of petroleum receipts.” There is nothing in the draft […]

Everyday Apocalypse in Iraq War of the Mosques 142 Dead on Tuesday 142 persons were killed or found dead on Tuesday, and Wednesday morning two Sunni mosques in towns south of Baghdad were blown up. On Tuesday, a huge truck bomb in Baghdad blew up a Shiite mosque dedicated to an important religious figure and […]

111 Killed or Found Dead in Iraq on Monday Al-Maliki to Ankara Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki has accepted the Turkish government’s invitation to visit Ankara. Al-Maliki says he is worried about PKK terrorism. Al-Maliki should be careful. When his predecessor, Ibrahim Jaafari, flew to Istanbul for talks on Kirkuk, the Kurds in the Iraqi […]

PKK Leader Warns Turkey on Incursions Michael Howard of the Guardian interviewed a Kurdish Workers Party (PKK) guerrilla commander in northern Iraq. Money graf: ‘The Turkish army faces “a political and military disaster” if its generals give orders for a cross-border offensive, Cemil Bayik, one of the two most powerful figures in the Kurdistan Workers […]

Kurds and Turks: Will they or Won’t They? Joshua Partlow has a good article in WaPo on the military friction at the Turkish-Iraqi border. It is based on interviews in Iraqi Kurdistan and with US military officials, however, and oddly lacks the perspective from Ankara. I was just at an International Relations conference at Middle […]

US Paramilitary Casualties Covered Up Sistani condemns Attacks on Sunni Shrines, Mosques Pakistan Rallies Condemn US Highly paid “security guards” play an essential role in the US war against Iraqi guerrillas. They form a paramilitary, which has inevitably taken great numbers of casualties (they sometimes actually guard US troops!) Turns out that they have been […]

Sunni Mosque Demolished Turks Plan Buffer Zone inside Iraq An important, historic Sunni shrine south of Basra was blown up on Friday, raising fears of further Sunni-Shiite sectarian killings and reprisals, according to Alissa Rubin of the NYT. The town of Zubayr near Basra is largely Sunni, though it is situated in the overwhelmingly Shiite […]

Khamenei, Global Demonstrations, Blame US Demonstrations in Sadr City, Basra, Kashmir 3 Sunni Mosques Torched Iran’s Supreme Jurisprudent,Ali Khamenei, managed to blame the Iraqi Baath Party, the Wahhabi sect of Islam, the Salafi Jihadi radicals among Sunnis, and the United States, jointly for the blowing up of the minarets at the al-Askariya Shrine in Samarra. […]

Samarra Fallout Surge not Working The Sadr Bloc in parliament [Sawt al- Iraq in Arabic] is threatening to suspend their participation in legislation in protest against the failure to rebuild and protect the Shiite Askariya shrine in Samarra. Often the Iraqi parliament, many of whose members live abroad, cannot get a quorum without the Sadrists […]