Baghdad's vicious sectarian war has claimed another victim; a Christmas tradition that used to bond the city's Christian community closer to their Muslim neighbours is dying. Until this year, Muslim farmers from Baghdad's outskirts would descend on Sadun Street in downtown Karrada to sell Christmas trees to the area's large Christian community and exchange season's greetings.Prices were low and, for the remaining Christians in an increasingly dangerous district, it was as much an inter-religious social event as a market."They used to wish me Merry Christmas before selling me the tree I chose," said mother-of-two Mary Hanna. "I miss them and their trees this year."Reporters who visited Karrada in the build-up to Christmas found very few tree stalls, where once Sadun street would have been decked with green boughs. Shops were still stocking a colourful array of artificial trees, baubles and party decorations, but the pre-Christmas street market ambiance was lost....
http://news.yahoo.com
censor News |
Editor - 22:51:00 12-23-06
|
 Former Paratrooper Freed After Serving AWOL Sentence, Greets Supporters in North Carolina |
A former paratrooper who admitted abandoning his post because he disagreed with the U.S. mission in Iraq was freed from a military prison Saturday, stopping in Raleigh to greet supporters before he headed home to Washington state. Ricky Clousing, 24, left Fort Bragg without permission in June 2005 after returning from a five-month tour in Iraq, where he worked as an interrogator in a military intelligence battalion. The Sumner, Wash., native surrendered to the military at Fort Lewis, Wash., in August, and was returned to North Carolina to face a court-martial. He pleaded guilty in October to going absent without leave and was sentenced to three months' confinement, reduction in rank from sergeant and forfeiture of two-thirds of his pay during his confinement, which ended with a bad conduct discharge from the Army. ...
http://abcnews.go.com/US/wireStory?id=2748785
full News |
Editor - 22:32:00 12-23-06
|
| Residents blame U.S. for deadly attack in Baquba |
Residents in Baquba blamed U.S. troops for a rocket attack that killed six people and wounded six others, including women and children, a Baquba joint coordination center official said Saturday.Rockets landed on a residential neighborhood Friday, leveling one of the houses and partially damaging several others.It was not known who attacked the town 37 miles northeast of Baghdad, and no one has claimed responsibility.The U.S. military declined to comment Saturday but said it was investigating the incident.Baquba, the provincial capital of ethnically mixed Diyala province, is a hotspot for insurgent strongholds.In the city of Diwaniya, police found the bullet-riddled body of an Iraqi military intelligence officer a day after he had been kidnapped....
http://www.cnn.com/2006/WORLD/meast/12/23/iraq.main/index.html
full News |
Editor - 22:22:00 12-23-06
|
| Did an American fire on Iraqis unprovoked? U.S. security contractors allege their supervisor was ‘out of control’ |
Shane Schmidt was a U.S. Marine for seven years, the leader of a sniper unit. Chuck Shepard spent seven years in the U.S. Army. After leaving the military, each found his way into the legions of heavily armed private security contractors working in Iraq. The two were working together on July 8, 2006, when they claim they witnessed what they believe was a crime. They say another American fired, unprovoked, into two Iraqi civilian vehicles. They say it started during a mission to Baghdad International Airport, when their supervisor, who was leaving Iraq the next day and was in the vehicle with them, made a troubling remark. "He'd made a comment that he was going to kill somebody today," says Schmidt. "Kill someone." The two men say they thought he was joking....
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/16316248/
full News |
Editor - 21:54:00 12-23-06
|
| Trainers skeptical on training The U.S. is likely to add military advisors. But those already present wonder if Iraqi units can benefit from their help. |
When Gunnery Sgt. Scott Stalker, one of 5,000 U.S. military advisors in Iraq, arrived at this sprawling base last spring, he was training 80 Iraqi soldiers to fire and maintain their rifles. Now his class is down to 25. "It almost feels like 'What are we here for?' " the Marine told Brig. Gen. Dana Pittard, the Army officer sent to Iraq in June to overhaul the Pentagon's military advisor program. "Now the philosophy is 'Train who's there.' " Pittard has been visiting teams at bases across Iraq recently, checking their progress. Other advisors told him similar stories. Progress is slow. Corruption and fuel shortages are endemic. And 75% of Iraqi soldiers don't show up for duty. "The reason that is given is it's too dangerous," said Marine Lt. Col. Mark Winn, a Pleasanton, Calif., native who leads Stalker's border patrol advisory team in northern Iraq. "But they get back in time to be paid, right?" said Pittard, a perennially upbeat West Point graduate. "How do they explain that?"...
http://fairuse.100webcustomers.com/sf/latimes188.htm
full News |
Editor - 21:52:00 12-23-06
|
| Robert Fisk: Banality and barefaced lies Here in America, I stare at the land in which I live and see a landscape I do not recognise |
call it the Alice in Wonderland effect. Each time I tour the United States, I stare through the looking glass at the faraway region in which I live and work for The Independent - the Middle East - and see a landscape which I do no recognise, a distant tragedy turned, here in America, into a farce of hypocrisy and banality and barefaced lies. Am I the Cheshire Cat? Or the Mad Hatter? I picked up Jimmy Carter's new book, Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid at San Francisco airport, and zipped through it in a day. It's a good, strong read by the only American president approaching sainthood. Carter lists the outrageous treatment meted out to the Palestinians, the Israeli occupation, the dispossession of Palestinian land by Israel, the brutality visited upon this denuded, subject population, and what he calls "a system of apartheid, with two peoples occupying the same land but completely separated from each other, with Israelis totally dominant and ...
http://news.independent.co.uk/world/fisk/article2097774.ece
full News |
Editor - 20:32:00 12-23-06
|
|
| post The Good, The Bad and The Ugly |
|
|
