Bury Me Broken

Iraq News Roundup

from Informed Comment, Thoughts on the Middle East, History, and Religion


Guerrillas assassinated an Iraqi female member of parliament
Wednesday, women's rights activist Lamia Abid Khadduri Sakri. Al-Zaman says she was a member of the Iraqiya List of Iyad Allawi, which is dominated by secularists and ex-Baathists. Earlier, failed assassination attempts were made against Iyad Allawi and Mishaan Juburi, both of whom are MPs. There is no specification in the interim constitution as to how a vacant seat is to be filled. The Iraqi press had earlier reported at least on resignation by an MP, so there appear now only to be 273.

Not only are deaths from terrorism way up in 2004, but Iraq alone topped the terrorism charts compared to the year before.

There are still 400 guerrilla strikes a week in Iraq.

Al-Zaman: President Hosni Mubarak of Egypt said Wednesday that he expect violence to go on in Iraq for some time, in part because of the country's ethnic diversity. He advised the Americans to withdraw their troops from the cities to outposts in the desert. Mubarak maintained that the US dissolution of the Iraqi army had been a "true national catastrophe."

Amnesty International says that, incredibly enough, torture and abuse of prisoners has continued in Iraq even during the past year after the Abu Ghraib revelations: 'In February, three men died in custody after being arrested at a police checkpoint, the rights body said. The bodies "were found three days later, bearing clear marks of torture from beatings and electric shocks", it said.

'The number of babies born in Iraq with birth defects has risen by 20 percent in the past two years. Iraqi physicians are blaming the increase on pollution and on depleted uranium shells used by the US military and still unrecovered in the Iraqi south.

Sunni-Shiite tensions and violence are increasing daily in Iraq.

Many US bureaucrats in the Coalition Provisional Authority did not bother to do proper paperwork when giving out contracts to civilian contractors. The new Iraqi government is baulking at the big bills being presented, provoking at least one major riot.

Now their physicians are fleeing abroad.

posted by niteskolar @ 9:38 AM