Middle East

A roadside bomb almost killed Iraq’s first lady on Sunday in Baghdad, striking her car and wounding three of her bodyguards. Bush is asking for another $70 bn. for next year, most of it for the Iraq War. Will the next president have the courage to put the war in the regular budget and not […]

McClatchy reports that a US missile strike aimed at a suspected Mahdi Army HQ blew out the windows in a hospital next door in the densely populated slum of Sadr City. Flying glass produced by a missile is like lots of little missiles: ‘The rocket strike near Sadr Hospital injured 30 people, shattered the windows […]

Friday prayers were tumultuous in Baghdad’s Sadr City on Friday, as supporters of cleric Muqtada al-Sadr denounced Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki for his brutal invasion of their township. Turkey’s bombing campaign on Friday against the Kurdish Workers’ Party guerrillas hiding out in northern Iraq caused the price of oil to rally on Friday. Speculation on […]

For those of you with access to BBC World, the best 24 hour news channel in the English-speaking world check out the Doha Debate this weekend. I was one of the debaters in Qatar. Press coverage: The Christian Science Monitor The blurb: ‘ Watch the latest Doha Debate: ‘This House believes the Sunni-Shia conflict is […]

A double suicide bombing killed 35 and wounded 66 at a wedding party in Baladruz, a city northeast of Baghdad in troubled Diyala province. In Baghdad, 1 US soldier and 8 Iraqis were killed by a roadside bomb targeting a US convoy. In a sign of a reinvigorated American Left, longshore workers declined to come […]

Madhavi Bhasin writes from Calcutta: The Bush administration says it is waging a global war to fight terrorism and defeat Al-Qaeda. The human, financial and psychological costs of the war on terror have been immense. The U.S. is attempting to adopt every possible military and non-military approach to meet the challenges in Iraq and Afghanistan– […]

5 Years after George W. Bush’s infamous speech aboard the USS Lincoln, the mission seems incomplete. Bush imagined that he could get rid of Saddam Hussein and install exiled businessman and bank fraudster Ahmad Chalabi in his place. Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz told Congress that the US would be out of Iraq, except […]

According to BBC television, AFP is reporting that Mahdi Army militiamen killed 2 US troops in northern Baghdad on Wednesday morning. US Secretary of Defense Robert M. Gates admitted on Tuesday that the reduction in US troop casualties in recent months had ended in the past few weeks, because of the fighting in Sadr City […]

Baghdad has been roiled for the past three days with major fighting between Iraqi government/ US forces and the Mahdi Army militia in east and north Baghdad, leaving 45 militiamen dead and an unstated number of Iraqi troops. At one point on Sunday, the a Mahdi Army company nearly took a government checkpoint in the […]