These are the archives for the week ending
"The biggest new flow of refugees in the world"
In one of the few comprehensive surveys of how many Iraqis have fled their country since the US invasion, the US Committee for Refugees and Immigrants said last month that there were 644,500 refugees in Syria and Jordan in 2005 - about 2.5 per cent of Iraq's population.
In total, 889,000 Iraqis had moved abroad, creating "the biggest new flow of refugees in the world", according to Lavinia Limon, the committee's president. And the exodus may only just be starting.
Times, 14/7/06
US policy caught in 'a perfect storm'
Rarely can United States policy in the Middle East have been in such disarray as now. Events in Iraq are a fair approximation of civil war, while after a brief display of smiles, Iran is more truculent than ever over its nuclear ambitions. As for Israel, far from moving towards peace with its neighbours, the Jewish state is embroiled in an escalating, two-front confrontation with Lebanon and Syria to its north, and with the Palestinians in its midst.
The White House insists that its policies are on track. If there are "a lot of issues in motion", according to Stephen Hadley, Mr Bush's National Security Adviser, "in some sense, it was destined to be. We have a president that wants to take on the big issues and see if he could solve them on his watch."
More probably an administration whose energies have been consumed by the war in Iraq, on which Mr Bush has staked his presidency, may be simply overwhelmed. The separate crises amount to "a perfect storm", Madeleine Albright, who was Secretary of State under Bill Clinton, told The Washington Post last week. "We have not been paying attention to a lot of these issues."
Independent, 13/7/06
More than 100 dead in 3 days
More than 50 people were killed in Baghdad on Tuesday in violence that included a double suicide bombing near busy entrances to the fortified Green Zone, scattered shootings, mortar attacks, a series of car bombs and the ambush of a bus with Shiite mourners returning from a burial. Tuesday's killings, many of them apparently carried out with sectarian vengeance, raised the three-day death toll in the capital alone to well over 100, magnified the daunting challenges facing the new government and deepened a sense of dread among Iraqis.
Many of the attacks, particularly those in neighborhoods primarily populated by one religious group or another, bore the hallmarks of sectarian militias, both Sunni Arab and Shiite. Militias now appear to be dictating the ebb and flow of life in Iraq, and have left the new government of Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki and his American counterparts scrambling to come up with a military and political strategy to combat them.
New York Times, 12/7/06
Bush concedes Geneva convention rights
The White House conceded on Tuesday for the first time that terror suspects held by the United States had a right under international law to basic human and legal protections under the Geneva Conventions.
The new White House interpretation is likely to have sweeping implications, because it appears to apply to all Qaeda and Taliban terror suspects now in the custody of the Central Intelligence Agency or other American intelligence organizations around the world. From the outset, Mr. Bush declared that the battle against Al Qaeda would be a war like no other, but his administration has been forced to back away from its most forceful efforts to deny rights to terror suspects.
New York Times, 12/7/06
Sacked police attack governor's office
Some 200 sacked policemen from a province where Iraqi forces will take over security from British troops this month stormed the governor's office on Monday, beating people with hoses and stabbing them with knives.
The policemen, who were fired by Iraq's new interior minister for forgery and bribery, were demanding they be reinstated in their jobs in the southern city of Samawa, the capital of Muthanna province.
Muthanna is the first province outside peaceful northern Kurdistan that will be handed over from U.S.-led forces to Iraqis since the invasion in 2003, a move Washington, London and Baghdad have hailed as sign of progress of Iraq's forces.
Reuters, 10/7/06
US will keep legal immunity for troops
Iraq will ask the United Nations to end immunity from local law for U.S. troops, the human rights minister said on Monday, as the military named five soldiers charged in a rape-murder case that has outraged Iraqis.
In an interview a week after Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki demanded a review of foreign troops' immunity, Wigdan Michael said work on it was now under way and a request could be ready by next month to go to the U.N. Security Council, under whose mandate U.S.-led forces are in control of Iraq.
"We're very serious about this," she said, blaming a lack of enforcement of U.S. military law in the past for encouraging soldiers to commit crimes against Iraqi civilians, such as the alleged rape and murder of a teenager and killing of her family.
The day before handing formal sovereignty back to Iraqis in June 2004, the U.S. occupation authority issued a decree giving its troops immunity from Iraqi law. That remains in force and is confirmed in an annexe to Resolution 1546, the Security Council document that established the U.S.-led force's mandate in Iraq.
Analysts say it is improbable the United States would ever make its troops answerable to Iraq's chaotic judicial system.
Scotsman, 10/7/06
Iraq on the edge of civil war...
Iraq moved further towards all out sectarian civil war yesterday after Shia gunmen attacked a Sunni district in Baghdad, killing at least 42 people. Many were dragged from their cars at two fake police checkpoints and shot dead.
A savage sectarian conflict is now raging in Baghdad and nearby provinces in central Baghdad. Both the Shia and Sunni communities are turning districts in which they are a majority into bastions from which the minority is expelled.
Baghdad is becoming more like Beirut during the Lebanese civil war, with people being routinely slaughtered because of their identity card showing their name and place of birth. Many mixed districts are becoming either Sunni or Shia. Even a hardcore Sunni district such as Amariya in west Baghdad was once 30 per cent Shia.
One effect of the increasing sectarian violence has been to reduce US casualties, with only nine American soldiers killed this month - which is less than half the usual rate.
Independent, 10/7/06
...but US confident
Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said Monday she is certain Iraq's new leaders can prevail over "determined killers" like those who killed 41 people over the weekend.
Likewise, National Intelligence Director John Negroponte said an increase in violence does not mean the security situation cannot be contained, "There has been a spike ... in sectarian violence," Negroponte said. "But I certainly wouldn't use the term 'out of control.'"
San Jose Mercury News, 10/7/06
Children dying in Basra
NGOs devoted to health issues in southern Iraq say that dozens of children have died of relatively common diseases since January due to a lack of medicine. "There are no official statistics about the number of children who have died in Basra since January," said Hassan Abdullah, a senior official in the Basra governorate. "But local health department employees and volunteers from some NGOs have collected information suggesting that about 90 children have died as result of the lack of medicine." According to Abdullah, this is worse than the same period last year, when some 40 children died for similar reasons.
Marie Fernandez, a spokeswoman for Vienna-based aid agency Saving Children from War, said that the agency - which has been working with local doctors - has noted a lack of essential supplies, especially intravenous infusions and blood bags. "There's a lack of everything. Children are dying because of bleeding because there are no blood bags available," said Fernandez. "Antibiotics, Pentostam [an antimony compound used in the treatment of parasite infection], special milk for dehydrated children, and almost all medical material for emergency conditions aren't available."
Fernandez noted that about 40 children per day had been admitted to the children's hospital in Basra since May, due to high temperatures and poor water quality. "Children between the ages of one and three years are the most affected by problems of dehydration and pneumonia, meningitis, malnutrition and typhoid," she said. "And some cholera cases have also been reported."
According to doctors at Basra's Maternity and Child Hospital, about 14 to 16 new cancer and leukaemia cases have also been reported among children each month. "It's painful to see so many children dying of cancer as a result of inadequate treatment," said Dr Ali Hashimy, an oncologist at the hospital. "If there was medicine, they would have been saved."
Reuters, 9/7/06
Brutality and graft rife in Iraqi police
Brutality and corruption are rampant in Iraq's police force, with abuses including the rape of female prisoners, the release of terrorism suspects in exchange for bribes, and participation in insurgent bombings, according to confidential Iraqi government documents detailing more than 400 police corruption investigations.
A recent assessment by State Department police-training contractors underscores the investigative documents, concluding that strong paramilitary and insurgent influences within the force and endemic corruption have undermined public confidence in the government. Officers have also beaten prisoners to death, been involved in kidnapping rings, sold thousands of stolen and forged Iraqi passports, and passed along vital information to insurgents, the Iraqi documents allege.
Los Angeles Times, 9/7/06
UK 'energised' Taliban
Des Browne, the defence secretary, conceded yesterday that the deployment of 3,300 British forces into the Taliban heartland of southern Helmand has "energised" the Taliban. His sombre assessment came after a week in which a sixth British soldier was killed in the province, and as he prepares to announce next week the dispatch of reinforcements to the country, including extra air cover and engineers.
In an interview with the Guardian, Mr Browne said: "It is certainly the case that the very act of deployment into the south has energised opposition, and the scale of that opposition and the nature of that opposition became apparent when we were deploying". But he insisted the attacks on British troops were foreseen, and the original package had been an impressive fighting force, including artillery, Apache helicopters and paratroopers.
Guardian, 8/7/06
US at war with Shias
US forces in Iraq have launched a series of bloody attacks on Shia militia forces in and around Baghdad, killing or wounding 30 fighters and provoking widespread anger in the Shia community.
The US army is masking the fact that it is increasingly at war with the Iraqi Shia militias by referring to both Sunni and Shia as insurgents. Thus, after the raid into al-Sadr City, the US military said in a statement: "The captured individual heads multiple insurgent cells in Baghdad whose main focus is to conduct attacks against Iraqi and coalition forces." This conceals the fact that the US is fighting the Mehdi Army, which is controlled by Muqtada al-Sadr, whose party is an important part of the Iraqi government.
Independent, 8/7/06
Iraq calls for review of immunity
Iraq's Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki has said that the blanket immunity enjoyed so far by foreign troops must be reviewed following allegations of rape and murder by US soldiers in Iraq.
"We have to review the immunity enjoyed by members of these forces or look for ways in which Iraqis can participate in the investigation," he said. "A lot of mistakes have been committed before Mahmudiyah that have caused grief and anger in the Iraqi people who cannot tolerate these brutal crimes for very long."
In his last decree before the transfer of power from the US-led occupation authority to Iraqi officials, former US administrator in Iraq Paul Bremer in June 2004 granted immunity from prosecution for coalition forces and private security contractors working with the Americans and US-backed Iraqi government.
AFP, 6/7/06