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Category: Iraq

  • Deadly car bombs rock Baghdad

    Deadly car bombs rock Baghdad

    At least 26 people have been killed and dozens wounded after two car bombs exploded in the west of Baghdad, the Iraqi capital.

    A dozen people died and 35 were hurt after a bomb on board a minibus blew up outside a mosque in the city’s Shurta area on Sunday.

    A second blast killed one person and wounded another in Hai al-Amil.

    Both the attacks took place minutes before the end of the day’s Ramadan fasting period.

    A third attack involving a car bomb and a roadside bomb in the central Karrada district killed 12 people and wounded 37, officials said, adding the dead included three policemen and three women.

    Earlier, one person was also killed and three wounded earlier on Sunday by a roadside bomb in the capital’s district of Mansur, security officials said.

    A Kurdish mayor of a northern Iraqi town was wounded in a separate roadside bombing in Saadiyah near the Kurdish-dominated city of Khanaqin, along with six of his guards, police said.

    Source: english.aljazeera.net, September 28, 2008

  • Tit-for-tat Kurds reverse Saddam’s ‘ethnic cleansing’

    Tit-for-tat Kurds reverse Saddam’s ‘ethnic cleansing’

    KHANAQIN, Iraq (AFP) — For Iraqi Kurdish mathematics teacher Mohammed Aziz, two wrongs can make a right. After decades of forced exile by the Baath party of Saddam Hussein, he is back with a vengeance.

    Aziz was just four years old in 1975 when his family was evicted from Bawaplawi village, near the northern city of Khanaqin, and Arab settlers grabbed their home.

    Now schoolteacher Aziz is back and has done to the Arabs what they did to him.

    “Our homes were taken over by the Arabs without paying us any compensation,” Aziz, 37, said at the modest single-storey brick house which he has occupied since the fall of Saddam’s regime in 2003.

    “We moved in and took any house that was empty. The Arabs who were here had fled.”

    Saddam’s “Arabisation” campaign sought to change the demography of Khanaqin, which originally had a vast majority of Kurds and a smaller minority of Shiite Arabs, Turkmen and Jews.

    With the fall of Saddam’s regime, the Kurds are back and the Arabs are nowhere to be seen, at least in Khanaqin.

    “Ninety percent of the people who were forced out of Khanaqin have returned,” said the city’s mayor, Mohammed Mala Hassan, 52. “I want the others to return too, but I have no money to provide them with the basic facilities.”

    Kurds such as Aziz did not depend on handouts from the authorities and instead took the land that was hastily abandoned by the Arabs. For Aziz, it is a case of correcting an injustice done more than three decades ago.

    “What they did was wrong in taking our homes. We also just took the empty houses, but that is because our houses were taken in the same way in 1975,” he told AFP during a tour of Khanaqin and his village.

    Inside his home is the tricolour — red white and green — of the peshmerga, the Kurdish security forces, which somehow seems to give him the authority to live in it.

    He said the area is safe and has not seen the violence that has afflicted other parts of Iraq because of the peshmerga presence.

    Most of the dwellings in the village are mud huts, with only a few made out of bricks, and they are built in walled compounds.

    Khanaqin, which is close to the Iranian border, has emerged as a new flashpoint because of its untapped oil wealth and proximity to the autonomous Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) in northern Iraq.

    Khanaqin mayor wants his region, which includes 175 villages, to be attached to the KRG and break away from the authority of the restive Iraqi province of Diyala where the majority are Arabs.

    Aziz said he was forced to teach his subject in Arabic at a school in the Shiite majority province of Babil where they were forced to settle by the previous regime.

    “I am happy to be back here because I can now educate my three children in Kurdish,” he said, pointing to two boys aged 10 and seven years and a girl of one. “I am happy to see my land.”

    The highway from the Iraqi capital Baghdad to Khanaqin is regarded as one of the most dangerous because of the regular roadside bomb attacks, landmine explosions and ambushes by Al-Qaeda-led insurgents.

    On the highway, Iraqi soldiers have their camps on hilltops with checkposts at regular intervals.

    While returning from Khanaqin, the Iraqi soldiers manning the checkpoints ask motorists their destination and starting point. The questioning underscores ethnic tensions in the region.

    On Sunday morning, the Kurdish mayor of the nearby Saadiyah town, Ahmad al-Zarqushi, was wounded in a roadside bomb attack, police Major Shriko Baajilan said, adding that six of his men were also wounded.

    A peshmerga member died on Saturday when Iraqi police raided a peshmerga security post in the nearby town of Jalawla, a spokesman for the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan told AFP.

    An Iraqi security official said police targeted a cell of the peshmerga secret service known as Asayish.

    The effects of Saddam’s “Arabisation” have been rapidly undone by the Kurds. But this has sparked new tensions with Baghdad, particularly over peshmerga influence in the region.

    Talks are under way between Kurdish leaders and the Shiite-led government of Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki to end simmering tensions between federal forces and the peshmerga.

    However, the Khanaqin mayor said his town is an oasis of peace compared with other areas of Iraq. He said there had been less than a handful of attacks in the past five years.

    Fighters from Al-Qaeda have failed to penetrate Khanaqin because of the peshmerga, unlike in the rest of Diyala, considered one of the last strongholds of the jihadists.

    Khanaqin, with around 250,000 people, is one of about 40 regions claimed by competing ethnic sects after the US-invasion.

    The stakes in Khanaqin have risen because of high oil prices as well as its fertile land, where the agricultural economy started flourishing in the early 1970s when the city was known for its tomatoes and pomegranates.

    Aziz sees a brighter future for his children and said the events of the past five years add up to a free Khanaqin that will be part of Kurdistan. “That is what my ancestors also wanted.”

    Source: AFP, 28 September 2008

  • Iraq Passes Provincial Elections Law

    Iraq Passes Provincial Elections Law

     

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    The struggle over Kirkuk, where Arabs, Kurds, Turkmens, Christians
    and other groups have all staked claims, has been among the central
    obstacles to unifying Iraq. Government officials in the Kurdish
    region in the north insist that Kirkuk rightfully belongs to them.
    Sunni Arab and Turkmen lawmakers have proposed a power-sharing
    agreement to govern the city.

    Under the new bill, passed unanimously by the 190 members of
    Parliament present, a committee made up of representatives from the
    major groups involved in the Kirkuk dispute will take up the question
    and present recommendations by March 31. The election in Kirkuk is to
    be postponed, and the current provincial council would remain in
    place until a separate election law for the province could be passed.

    Elections in the three provinces of the Kurdish region, an autonomous
    territory, will be held in 2009.

    Sa’adaldin Arkij, head of the Turkmen Front political party, called
    the passage of the election law “a historical victory for Iraqis.”

    “Today there was no winner and no loser, but Iraq won” he said.
    “Kirkuk is not an easy issue, and the agreement is a confirmation of
    Iraqis’ awareness and responsibility for unity in their country.”

    The new law eliminates an article that, in an earlier version, had
    provided 13 seats in six provinces for Iraqi Christians, Yazidis and
    other minorities — a move that Younadim Kanna, head of the Assyrian
    Democratic Movement and the only Christian member of Parliament said
    was “a very, very bad sign.”

  • KRG confirms South Korea oil deals

    KRG confirms South Korea oil deals

    By United Press International

    South Korea was granted the lead role in two northern Iraq oil projects and increased interest in six others, United Press International has confirmed.

    The Korean National Oil Corp. has also pledged $2.1 billion in infrastructure projects in Iraq’s Kurdish region as part of the deal, but $1.5 billion will be withheld until oil exports begin.

    Iraq’s central government has called most of the 20-plus oil deals signed by the Kurdistan Regional Government illegal and is pledging to confiscate any oil produced.

    The KRG and KNOC have confirmed leaders signed a massive Implementation Agreement for Oil & Gas Infrastructure Projects Thursday in Seoul.

    In exchange for the investment in electricity, water, road and other infrastructure — the remaining $1.5 billion will come from KNOC’s earnings from oil exports — KNOC was granted two production-sharing contracts.

    The state-owned firm will have an 80-percent ownership of the Qush Tappa block PSC and 60-percent ownership of Sangaw South.

    KNOC was also granted interest in existing production contracts: a 15-percent stake in each of Norbest Limited’s K15, K16 and K17 blocks; a 15-percent interest in block K21; and a 20-percent stake in Sterling Energy Ltd.’s Sangaw North block. It also was given 20 percent more of the Bazian block, of which KNOC is the lead company in a consortium that was granted a 60-percent stake last November.

    The agreement was seven months in the making, when a memorandum of understanding was reached between the two sides. In June, contracts for oil stakes were agreed to, as well as an investment project. All of the details were negotiated since then and the deals made official Thursday.

    Iraq Oil Minister Hussain al-Shahristani, in a June interview in his Baghdad office, told United Press International all but the four KRG contracts signed before February 2007 would be regarded as illegal.

    “That oil will be confiscated; they have no right to work in that part of the country,” he said. “We’ll use a number of measures to stop any violation of Iraqi law. Those contracts have no standing with us, we don’t recognize them and they have no right to do that.”

    A draft version of a new oil law for Iraq was approved in February 2007 by the Iraqi Cabinet but was scuttled after changes were made and interpretations varied.

    KRG Prime Minister Nechirvan Barzani urged Baghdad to concentrate on passing the law instead of condemning the regional government’s contracts.

    —

    Ben Lando, UPI Energy Editor

  • DEBKA:Russia lines up with Syria, Iran against America and the West

    DEBKA:Russia lines up with Syria, Iran against America and the West

    Summary of DEBKAfile Exclusives in Week Ending Sept. 18, 2008
    Russia lines up with Syria, Iran against America and the West

    Sept 12.: Moscow announced renovation had begun on the Syrian port of Tartus to provide Russia with its first long-term naval base on the Mediterranean.

    As the two naval chiefs talked in Moscow, Russian foreign minister Sergei Lavrov met Iranian foreign minister Manouchehr Mottaki in the Russian capital for talks on the completion of the Bushehr nuclear power plant by the end of the year.

    DEBKAfile’s military sources report Russia’s leaders have determined not to declare a Cold War in Europe but to open a second anti-Western front in the Middle East.

    In the second half of August, DEBKA file and DEBKA-Net-Weekly’s analysts focused on this re-orientation (Russia’s Second Front: Iran-Syria), whereby Moscow had decided to use its ties with Tehran and Damascus to challenge the United State and the West in the Middle East as well as the Caucasian, the Black Sea and the Caspian region.

    In aligning with Tehran and Damascus, Moscow stands not only against America but also Israel. This volatile world region is undergoing cataclysmic changes at a time when Israel is without a fully competent prime minister.

    Missile alert is revived on Israel-Gaza border

    12 Sept.: DEBKAfile’s Palestinian sources report that the leaders of the Iranian-backed Jihad Islami terrorist group in Gaza have warned they will go back to firing missiles at neighboring Israeli towns and villages unless the ruling Hamas stops persecuting them.
    Our military sources report that Israeli forces securing the Gaza border went on missile alert Thursday, Sept 11, when Hamas heavies continued their crackdown.

    Hamas gunmen are systematically bulldozing the Jihad bases, built over the ruins of the former Israeli Gush Katif villages, and flattening the sites. They have seized control of Jihad mosques in the southern part of the Gaza Strip and are making arrests.

    Syrian commandos invade 7 Greater Tripoli villages of N. Lebanon
    DEBKAfile Exclusive Report

    13 Sept.: Two Syrian commando battalions accompanied by reconnaissance and engineering corps units have crossed into Lebanon in the last 48 hours and taken up positions in seven villages, most of them Allawite Muslim, outside Tripoli, DEBKAfile’s military sources reported Saturday, Sept. 13. They are the vanguard of a large armored force poised on the border.

    Damascus has signaled to Washington and Paris: Don’t interfere.

    The Syrian incursion coincided with the expected arrival of Russian naval and engineering experts for renovating Tartus, the Syrian port 40 kilometers north of Tripoli, to serve as the Russian fleet’s first permanent Mediterranean base.

    Seen from Israel, once Assad’s army completes its advance on Tripoli, he will control the full length of the military supply route for Hizballah from the Syrian ports of Latakia and Tartus. The Russian presence will add a new and troubling dimension to this development.

    Russia, US pull further apart over Iranian nuclear activities

    13 Sept.: Russian president Dmitry Medvedev said Friday a military solution to the standoff over Iran’s nuclear ambitions is unacceptable and there is no need for new sanctions. At the same time, Washington has imposed new sanctions on Iran, blacklisting a main shipping line and 18 subsidiaries. The US government accuses the maritime carrier of ferrying contraband nuclear material, which Tehran denies.

    Washington sources predict this may be the prelude to more serious actions, such as a naval blockade to choke off Iran’s imports of fuel products.

    Moscow continues to support the European Union’s diplomatic drive to trade incentives for Iran’s consent to curb “some of its nuclear activities.”

    The nuclear watchdog has asked Tehran to account for 50-60 tons of missing uranium from its main enrichment site at Isfahan. It is enough to produce five or six nuclear bombs and is suspected of having been diverted to secret sites to boost the covert production of weapons-grade uranium.

    Terror suspected in Aeroflot crash which killed all 88 people aboard
    DEBKAfile Exclusive Report

    14 Sept.: DEBKAfile’s counter-terror sources report from Moscow that three Jewish families, two Habad students and a Russian general were among the 88 passengers and crew killed in the Aeroflot Boeing 737 crash at Perm, Siberia, Saturday, Sept. 13. The plane was in flight from Moscow.

    Russian authorities reported the plane’s sudden disappearance off the radar at the moment cockpit communications shut off. This indicated the craft may have exploded in mid-air. They suspect terrorism as the cause of the crash because –
    1. At least five passengers bought tickets but did not turn up for the flight. Security officials are trying to locate their addresses and sifting through the wreckage for unaccompanied luggage.

    2. One of the passengers has been identified as Gen. Gennadiy Troshev, a Russian hero for quelling the Chechen rebellion.

    3. Our sources name one of the Jewish – or possibly Israeli – families aboard the doomed flight. They have been named as Ephraim Nakhumov, 35, his wife Golda, 24, and their two children, Ilya, aged 7, and Eva, aged four.

    Thirty-four people die in Iraq Monday

    15 Sept.: At least 22 people were killed and 32 wounded by a female suicide bomber who blew herself at a police gathering in Iraq’s Diyala province.

    The guests were attending an Iftar banquet, when Muslims break their fast during the month of Ramadan, in Balad Ruz, 70km (45 miles) north of Baghdad.

    Earlier, two car bombs exploded in central Baghdad, killing 12 people.

    In show of bravado, Iran launches “air defense exercises”

    Iranian official sources report that the air force drill began Monday, Sept. 15, in half of the country’s 30 provinces. They gave out no details of which provinces or how long the exercise would last. The commander of Iran’s aerial defense, Brig. Gen. Ahmed Mighani said that any enemies attacking the Islamic Republic would regret it.

    The exercise was launched on the day the UN nuclear watchdog reported that non-cooperation from Tehran had stalled its efforts to establish whether or not Iran was developing nuclear warheads, enriching uranium for military purposes, testing nuclear explosives or building nuclear-capable missiles.

    Tehran is not deterred by sanctions or tempted by international diplomacy to give up its nuclear aspirations, especially since the Georgia conflict with the United States has presented Iran with Russian backing for its nuclear program and opposition to sanctions.

    Iran’s defense minister Mostafa Mohammad Najjar said scornfully Monday: “Threats by the Zionist regime and America against our country are empty” – showing that Tehran feels free to go forward with its nuclear plans.

    Gates arrives in Baghdad unannounced

    15 Sept.: Gates arrived in Baghdad to supervise the handover of the Iraq command from Gen. David Petraeus to Lt. Gen. Ray Odierno. Petraeus moves on to lead the Central Command overseeing Middle East, Afghanistan, Horn of Africa.
     

    		 France wants more sanctions on Iran for stonewalling UN nuclear probe

    16 Sept.: The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) report that for lack of Tehran’s cooperation, it has made no progress in establishing whether or not Iran is developing nuclear warheads, enriching uranium for military purposes, testing nuclear explosives or building nuclear-capable missiles..

    Furthermore, despite three rounds of UN Security Council sanctions, Iran has not stopped nuclear enrichment. At present, 4,800 centrifuges are operating and another 2,000 are getting read to start work in the near future.

    DEBKAfile’s Iranian sources report that the Tehran administration shows more contempt than ever before toward the UN, international diplomacy and potential sanctions, certain that the prospect of a US and Israeli military strike on its nuclear facilities recedes further day by day.

    “Threats by the Zionist regime and America against our country are empty,” said defense minister Mostafa Mohammad Najjar,”

    Ex-PMs Barak and Netanyahu in secret power-sharing talks
    DEBKAfile Exclusive Report

    16 Sept.: Defense minister Ehud Barak of Labor and opposition leader Binyamin Netanyahu of Likud are in advanced negotiations to rotate the premiership between them in order to cut the ground from under Kadima’s winner as leader. The ultra-religious Shas is in on the plan.

    This is reported by DEBKAfile’s political circles.

    Barak’s Labor and Netanyahu’s Likud combined with Eli Yishai’s Shas hold more Knesset seats – 43, than Kadima’s 27. They are in a position to prevent the winner of the Kadima primary from automatically taking over from Olmert as head of the incumbent government coalition. Without Labor, Kadima lacks the numbers to form a viable coalition government.

    DEBKAfile’s sources report that Netanyahu and Barak are close to accord on the general principles of their partnership but are still working on details. Netanyahu would go first up until a general election because Barak, who is not a member of Knesset, cannot become prime minister. Barak believes he can use his pact with Netanyahu to push Kadima’s buttons and at the right moment, take the party over and form a left-of-center Labor-Kadima bloc to fight his current partner, head of the right-of-center Likud.

    North Korea conducts long-range missile engine ignition test

    17 Sept.: The test at the new Tongchang-ri site was detected by the U.S. KH-12 spy satellite. The base is located 50 kilometers (30 miles) from the North Korean border with China,

    At least 11 killed in bloody Hamas crackdown on Doghmush clan militia in Gaza

    16 Sept.: The dead included Momtaz Doghmush, head of Army of Islam and co-kidnapper with Hamas of Gilead Shalit, and in infant. Hamas battled the militia for five hours with mortar fire on its base at the Sabra district of Gaza City, losing one of its gunmen.

    Sixteen killed in al Qaeda attack on US embassy in Yemen

    17 Sept.: Eight Yemeni soldiers, six assailants and 2 civilians were killed in an al Qaeda suicide car bombing, RPG rocket and shooting attack on the US embassy in Sanaa, Wednesday, Sept. 17. No embassy staff members were harmed in the five explosions reported by a US official.

    DEBKAfile’s counter-terror sources disclose that Yemeni president Abdullah Salah, formerly a US partner in the war on terror, recently began working with al Qaeda to win their help for quelling plots by army dissidents to overthrow his regime and for beating back an Iran-backed Shiite rebellion.

    In March, al Qaeda mounted a mortar attack which missed the US embassy but injured 13 girls at a nearby school; other attacks targeted the Italian mission and Western tourists. Non-essential US staff were ordered to leave Yemen in April.

    CIA chief: Al Qaeda greatest security threat to US

    17 Sept.: Speaking in Los Angeles, CIA director Michael Hayden said Osama bin Laden has said repeatedly that he considers acquisition of nuclear weapons a religious duty and he intends to attack America “in ways that inflict maximum death and destruction.”

    North Korea and Iran were also threats. Hayden confirmed that the nuclear reactor Israel destroyed in Syria last year was similar to one in North Korea. Iran, he, has the scientific, technical and industrial capacity to produce nuclear weapons.

    DEBKAfile notes: This comment contradicts the US intelligence assessment last year that Iran had discontinued its military nuclear program in 2003.
    Tuesday, diplomats said that the UN watchdog had intelligence showing Iran had tried to refit a long-distance Shehab missile to carry a nuclear payload.

    Israeli banks hammered on Tel Aviv stock exchange

    17 Sept.: In Tel Aviv, prices plunged across the board, with the major banks taking an extra beating. The public voted no-confidence in the leading banks (Bank Hapoalim plunged 12.5 percent) and disregarded the finance minister, Ronnie Bar-On’s assurances that the Israeli economy is insulated from the global crisis.

    After meeting bank heads Wednesday, Bank of Israel governor Stanley Fischer issued a statement that Israel banks are “relatively well run.”

    Economic experts foresee an Israeli recession around the corner. Lehman Brothers is a major player in Israel’s structured-products market and options market. Personal savings schemes, exports to the United States and Europe and foreign investment are also susceptible.

    As foreigners employed on Wall Street, Israelis are second only to Canadians.

    Thousands have been thrown on the job market. Aside from those recalled by Lehman Brothers after the Barclays buyout, many will return home adding to the pressures on the job market. Israel’s hi-tech industry, second only to the US in annual start-ups, was already facing difficulties before the current crisis, as export orders began drying up.

    After her narrow win, Livni’s ability to form government in doubt
    DEBKAfile Exclusive Analysis

    18 Sept.: Foreign minister Tzipi Livni scraped through to victory in the Kadima party’s first leadership primary Wednesday, Sept. 17.although her win was challenged by transport Shaul Mofaz, one percent behind her (43 to his 42 percent). Early Thursday, Mofaz finally called Livni to congratulate her. Later, he announced he was quitting politics, including the party and government.

    The real results differed dramatically from the three TV exit polls which wrongly awarded Livni a landslide victory and were up to 10 percent wide of the mark. Throughout the campaign the foreign minister was a media favorite and inaccurately described as unchallenged successor to Ehud Olmert both as party chair and prime minister.
    Kadima comes out of the primary bitterly divided.. Livni faces the daunting dual challenges of uniting the party and persuading all the government coalition parties to accept her as prime minister.
    Kadima’s two senior partners, Labor and Shas, are already looking at alternatives.

    The low Kadima turnout, according to DEBKAfile’s political analysts, was a public vote of non-confidence in the party. At the Tel Aviv stock exchange Wednesday, another popular vote of no confidence took place – this one against the economic system ruled by Kadima ministers and the banks
  • Turkey to extend mandate for military incursion into Iraq

    Turkey to extend mandate for military incursion into Iraq

    The Turkish government will ask parliament to extend by one year its mandate to order military strikes against separatist Kurdish rebels based in northern Iraq, the deputy prime minister said Wednesday.

    “We have decided to ask the parliament again for a one-year authorization” when lawmakers return from summer recess on October 1, Cemil Cicek, who is also the government spokesman, told reporters after a cabinet meeting.

    “I believe the motion will be debated within the first few days of parliament reopening,” he said without giving a date.

    The ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) dominates the 550-seat parliament and is likely to face no difficulty in securing approval for the extension.

    The government won a one-year parliamentary authorization on October 17 last year for cross-border raids against Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) rebels who have led a 24-year-long bloody campaign against Ankara.

    Since last October, the army has carried out several air strikes and a week-long ground incursion against rebel targets in northern Iraq, using intelligence passed on by Turkey’s close ally, the United States.

    IC Publications.