Middle East

Sam Dagher of the Christian Science Monitor is a good reason to subscribe to CSM. He reports on the way Muqtada al-Sadr is using his ‘freeze’ on Mahdi Army activities to organize cadres and turn his organization into something like Hizbullah in Lebanon. Dagher also provides the most connected and detailed count I have seen […]

Guerrillas deployed a roadside bomb to kill the police chief of Hilla, a largely Shiite city south of Baghdad. AP reports that “Religious vigilantes have killed at least 40 women this year in the southern Iraqi city of Basra because of how they dressed, their mutilated bodies found with notes warning against “violating Islamic teachings […]

Guerrillas differ from conventional armies in that they typically avoid direct, conventional engagements on the battlefield. They melt away before a conventional army’s advance, and then reemerge to engage in sniping, sneak attacks, and bombings from an unexpected quarter. The advantage of Fred Kagan’s troop escalation or “surge” is that it allowed a tamping down […]

Bombings were back on the front page in Iraq on Saturday, with significant attacks carried out on Thursday evening and Friday. At Muqdadiya in Diyala province, a female suicide bomber blew up a meeting of the local ‘Awakening Council’ or tribal levies willing to ally with the Americans against the radical Islamic State of Iraq. […]

Four major bombings around Iraq left at least 25 dead and dozens more wounded on Wednesday. Al-Hayat says that a car bomber detonated his payload near the Abd al-Rasul Shiite religious center (Husayniya) in Karrada. It is expected that the count of 15 killed will rise, given the size of the explosion and how crowded […]

My Salon column, “Why Bush’s troop surge won’t save Iraq,” is now online. Excerpt: ‘the only truly good news to come from Iraq would be good news regarding the political landscape. And there, Iraq is still beset with problems. In recent days, parts of northern Iraq have been invaded by Turkey, an ally of the […]

Turkish President Abdullah Gul reaffirmed Sunday that Turkey has the right to make incursions into Iraq to retaliate against attacks on Turks by the Kurdish Workers Party (PKK) guerrilla group. In eastern Anatolia near Iraq on Sunday, Turkish troops killed two PKK fighters. Turkey says that it made an incursion into Iraq on Saturday, deploying […]

The detention by US troops of the bodyguards and son of Adnan Dulaimi, the leader of the largest Sunni Arab bloc in parliament on Thursday night has now led to a walk-out of the 44 members of the Iraqi Accord Front. MP Abdul Karim Samarraie said that he attempted to go to Dulaimi’s house, but […]

The US military arrested Makki Dulaimi, the son of prominent Sunni Arab politician Adnan Dulaimi, on Friday, along with 40-odd security guards. The US soldiers had discovered a car rigged up as a bomb near the younger Dulaimi’s house and found that one of his security guards had the key to the car. They tried […]