Yes, I'm sure from the position of the insurgents feeding him this crap it looks bleak! Cant' wait to see his sources dry up..and I mean literally...dry up!

http://icasualties.org/oif/


05/18/05 PA: Iraqis to seek fresh Basra abuse inquiry
Eight Iraqi men who claim to be victims of torture by British soldiers will today set out their case for an independent inquiry in a move that could lead to legal action against the government.

05/18/05 Anatolia: Suicide car bomb kills two Iraqi police
Two Iraqi police were killed in a suicide car bomb attack near the oil refinery town of Baiji early Wednesday morning, a police captain said.

05/18/05 Gannett: Police officer recovering from war injuries
Hattiesburg Police Officer and Marine Pfc. Terrance Bullock sustained facial and arm injuries last week when the amphibious assault vehicle he was driving triggered a land mine near Karbala.

05/18/05 OregonLive: Oregonian dies while on patrol near Tikrit
Jacob Simpson, a 24-year-old U.S. Army sergeant who was raised in Hood River and Ashland, was killed Monday near Tikrit, Iraq, when he was struck by shrapnel from a rocket-propelled grenade, family members said Tuesday evening.

05/18/05 National Guard and Reserve Mobilized as of May 18, 2005
This week, the Army, Navy and Marine Corps announced a decrease in the number of reservists on active duty, while the Air Force and Coast Guard had an increase. The net collective result is 5,133 fewer reservists mobilized than last week.

05/18/05 AP: Gunmen kill transport ministry driver
Gunmen also shot dead a transport ministry driver, Ali Mutib Sakr, in Sadr City, a predominantly Shiite area in the eastern part of the capital, police Lt. Col Shakir Wadi said.

05/18/05 AP: Car bomb in Baqouba injures 14
A car bomb also detonated in Baqouba, 60 kilometres northeast of Baghdad, injuring 14 people - including 12 police officers. The car blew up as a three-car police convoy drove by, damaging all the vehicles, police Col. Mudhafar Muhammed said.

05/18/05 AP: Iraqi Official Killed in Baghdad Shooting
Drive-by shooters killed a senior member of Iraq's Interior Ministry [Brig. Gen. Ibrahim Khamas]Wednesday, continuing a campaign against the new government's administration and security infrastructure.

05/18/05 Reuters: Bodies of 7 Iraqi Turkmen dumped west of Baghdad
Seven Iraqi Turkmen captured in an ambush on a security convoy near Falluja were found dead on Wednesday, shot in the head and with their hands bound, police said.

05/18/05 Reuters : Al Qaeda behind rise in Iraq car bombs - U.S. army
An upsurge in car bomb attacks in Iraq in recent weeks was ordered by al Qaeda's leader in the country, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, at a meeting of insurgents in Syria, a senior U.S. military officer said on Wednesday
05/18/05 AFP: 18 People Injured in Attack North of Baghdad
18 people, including 14 policemen were injured in attack with a car-bomb aimed at a police convoy in the Iraqi town of Bakuba North of Baghdad, announced AFP, citing police sources.

05/18/05 dmregister: Burlington soldier hurt in training accident
Sgt. Jeffery Bailey, 36, assigned to Company A of the 224th Engineer Battalion headquartered in Fairfield... is recovering from injuries suffered in a training accident last month on a grenade range in Iraq.

05/18/05 AP: Mortar Attacks Kill Two Iraqis in Mosul
Mortar attacks by insurgents in northern Mosul on Wednesday killed two Iraqis and injured eight others, including seven school children, police and hospital officials said.

05/18/05 KUNA: Two Iraqi policemen killed in explosion
A booby-trapped vehicle explosion outside a police station in north of the Iraqi capital Baghdad killed Wednesday two Iraqi policemen... the vehicle exploded outside Al-Siniyah police station near Biji in the governorate of Tikrit, north of Baghdad.

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/05/19/internat...agewanted=print

May 19, 2005
Generals Offer Sober Outlook on Iraqi War

By JOHN F. BURNS and ERIC SCHMITT

BAGHDAD, Iraq, May 18 - American military commanders in Baghdad and Washington gave a sobering new assessment on Wednesday of the war in Iraq, adding to the mood of anxiety that prompted Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice to come to Baghdad last weekend to consult with the new government.

In interviews and briefings this week, some of the generals pulled back from recent suggestions, some by the same officers, that positive trends in Iraq could allow a major drawdown in the 138,000 American troops late this year or early in 2006. One officer suggested Wednesday that American military involvement could last "many years."

Gen. John P. Abizaid, the top American officer in the Middle East, said in a briefing in Washington that one problem was the disappointing progress in developing Iraqi police units cohesive enough to mount an effective challenge to insurgents and allow American forces to begin stepping back from the fighting. General Abizaid, who speaks with President Bush and Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld regularly, was in Washington this week for a meeting of regional commanders.

In Baghdad, a senior officer said Wednesday in a background briefing that the 21 car bombings in Baghdad so far this month almost matched the total of 25 in all of last year.

Against this, he said, there has been a lull in insurgents' activity in Baghdad in recent days after months of some of the bloodiest attacks, a trend that suggested that American pressure, including the capture of important bomb makers, had left the insurgents incapable of mounting protracted offensives. But the officer said that despite Americans' recent successes in disrupting insurgent cells, which have resulted in the arrest of 1,100 suspects in Baghdad alone in the past 80 days, the success of American goals in Iraq was not assured.

"I think that this could still fail," the officer said at the briefing, referring to the American enterprise in Iraq. "It's much more likely to succeed, but it could still fail."

The officer said much depended on the new government's success in bolstering public confidence among Iraqis. He said recent polls conducted by Baghdad University had shown confidence flagging sharply, to 45 percent, down from an 85 percent rating immediately after the election. "For the insurgency to be successful, people have to believe the government can't survive," he said. "When you're in the middle of a conflict, you're trying to find pillars of strength to lean on." Another problem cited by the senior officer in Baghdad was the new government's ban on raids on mosques, announced on Monday, which the American officer said he expected to be revised after high-level discussions on Wednesday between American commanders and Iraqi officials.

The officer said the ban appeared to have been announced by the new defense minister, Sadoun al-Dulaimi, without wider government approval, and would be replaced by a "more moderate" policy. To raise the level of public confidence, the officer said, the new government would need success in cutting insurgent attacks and meeting popular impatience for improvements in public services like electricity that are worse, for many Iraqis, than they were last year. But he emphasized the need for caution - and the time it may take to complete the American mission here - notes that recur often in the private conversations of American officers in Iraq.

"I think it's going to succeed in the long run, even if it takes years, many years," he said. On a personal note, he added that he, like many American soldiers, had spent long periods of duty related to Iraq, and he said: "We believe in the mission that we've got. We believe in it because we're in it, and if we let go of the insurgency and take our foot off its throat, then this country could fail and go back into civil war and chaos."

Only weeks ago, in the aftermath of the elections, American generals offered a more upbeat view, one that was tied to a surge of Iraqi confidence that one commander in Baghdad now describes as euphoria. But this week, five high-ranking officers, speaking separately at the Pentagon and in Baghdad, and through an e-mail exchange from Baghdad with a reporter in Washington, ranged with unusual candor and detail over problems confronting the war effort.

By insisting that they not be identified, the three officers based in Baghdad were following a Pentagon policy requiring American commanders in Baghdad to put "an Iraqi face" on the war, meaning that Iraqi commanders should be the ones talking to reporters, not Americans. That policy has been questioned recently by senior Americans in Iraq, who say Iraqi commanders have failed to step forward, leaving a news vacuum that has allowed the insurgents' successful attacks, not their failures, to dominate news coverage.

The generals' remarks, emphasizing the insurgency's resilience but also American and Iraqi successes in disrupting them, suggested that American commanders may have seen an opportunity after Secretary Rice's trip to inject their own note of realism into public debate. In talks with Iraq's new Shiite leaders, she urged a more convincing effort to reach out to the dispossessed Sunni Arab minority, warning that success in the war required a political strategy that encouraged at least some Sunni insurgent groups to turn toward peace.

The generals said the buildup of Iraqi forces has been more disappointing than previously acknowledged, contributing to the absence of any Iraqi forces when a 1,000-member Marine battle group mounted an offensive last week against insurgent strongholds in the northwestern desert, along the border with Syria.

American officers said that 125 insurgents had been killed, with the loss of about 14 Americans, but acknowledged that lack of sufficient troops may have helped many insurgents to flee across the border or back into the interior of Iraq. The border offensive was wrapped up over the weekend, with an air of disappointment that some of wider goals had not been achieved - possibly including the capture of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the Islamic militant who is the American forces' most-wanted man in Iraq.

General Abizaid, whose Central Command headquarters exercises oversight of the war, said the Iraqi police - accounting for 65,000 of the 160,000 Iraqis now trained and equipped in the $5.7 billion American effort to build up security forces - are "behind" in their ability to shoulder a major part of the war effort. He blamed a tendency among Iraqi police to operate as individuals rather than in cohesive units, and said this made them more vulnerable to insurgents' intimidation.

Another American officer, in an e-mail message from Baghdad, suggested a wider problem in preparing Iraqi forces capable of taking over much of the fighting, which was the Pentagon's goal when it ordered a top-to-bottom shakeout last year in the retraining effort. He said the numbers of Iraqi troops and police officers graduating from training were only one measure of success.

"Everyone looks at the number of Iraqi forces and scratches their heads, but it is more complex than that," he said. "We certainly don't want to put forces into the fight before they can stand up, as in Falluja," the battle last November that gave American commanders their first experience of Iraqi units, mostly highly trained special forces' units, that could contribute significantly to an American offensive.

One of starkest revelations by the commanders involved the surge in car bombings, the principal insurgent weapon in attacks over the past three weeks that have killed nearly 500 people across central and northern Iraq, about half of them Iraqi soldiers, police officers and recruits.

Last week, Lt. Gen. David H. Petraeus, the top American trainer in Iraq, defended the Iraqi security forces, saying in an e-mail message, "They are operating effectively with coalition forces - and, in some cases, are operating independently - in the effort to find the locations at which vehicles are rigged with explosives."

The senior officer who met with reporters in Baghdad said there had been 21 car bombings in the capital in May, and 126 in the past 80 days. All last year, he said, there were only about 25 car bombings in Baghdad.

[On Thursday, gunmen shot and killed a senior Iraqi Oil Ministry official, Ali Hameed, in Baghdad, The Associated Press reported, citing a police official.]

The officer said American military intelligence had information that the car-bombing offensive had been ordered by a high-level meeting of insurgents in Syria within the past 30 days, and that reports indicated that one of those at the meeting may have been Mr. Zarqawi, the Jordanian-born militant who was named by Osama bin Laden earlier this year as Al Qaeda's chief in Iraq. In statements on Islamic Web sites, groups loyal to Mr. Zarqawi have claimed responsibility for many of the car bombings.

The officer said that in two of the recent Baghdad bombings, investigators had found indications that the men driving the cars had been bound with duct tape before the attacks. He said the foot of one of the attackers, in a marketplace bombing last week that killed 22 people in south Baghdad, had been found taped to his vehicle's accelerator. In another case, the officer said, the attacker's hands were taped to the vehicle's wheel.

The implication was that those planning the attacks wanted to be sure that the vehicles would continue to their targets even if the drivers were killed by American or Iraqi gunfire as they approached.


Arriving at a lunch with reporters from a meeting with Iraqi cabinet ministers and military commanders, the officer said he expected the government to make an early move to revise the defense minister's announcement of a ban on raids on mosques and religious schools. The revised policy, the American officer implied, would allow Iraqi forces, backed by Americans, to raid mosques when they are used as insurgent strongholds.

John F. Burns reported from Baghdad for this article and Eric Schmitt from Washington. Richard A. Oppel Jr. contributed reporting from Baghdad.

How can anyone say the US is winning when we cannot even secure the road to the airport. The "offensive" in western Iraq is meaningless. We still do not have enough troops to hold the ground once it is secured. The insurgance say that US troops are a nuisance that hide in their bases and are only targets when they leave. That is why they changed their aim to Iraqis instead. In this type of war it is said that if you are not winning you are loosing. The US is not winning. We just do not understand we are loosing.

May 20, 2005
An Iraq Correspondent Comes Home
by Dahr Jamail and Tom Engelhardt
Tom Dispatch

http://www.commongroundcommonsense.org/for...topic=29733&hl=

There was a panel of reporters (who were embedded with the troops in Iraq) on CSPAN last week. It was very interesting, especially a couple of comments from the ABC reporter. She said that it is so dangerous now in Iraq that reporters are not able report what is really going on in all parts of the country, and because of the dangers, the military really doesn't know what is going on in all areas as well. She said soldiers often write home to parents telling them they spent the day giving candy to children--when actually they were doing dangerous missions. However, when she reports the dangerous missions, some of those parents complain that she isn't reporting the good stories/
She told of one visit to Iraq when a US officer showed her a street in Baghdad where a great deal of restoration had been done by the military--shops were open, etc., however, she noted the officer was standing on the street with full protective gear--although things looked great, it was clear they were not safe.

Another reporter said a US military officer told him that in order to take down an insurgency it can take from 6-9 years, which indicated we won't be pulling our troops out any time soon.

The CSPAN program was on Thursday evening and may be shown again.

Education Ministry Establishes a Human Rights Unit


“The Ministry of Education established a unit for human rights in the Directorate General for Academic Curricula”, said Dr. Abd El Zahr, the curricula general manager in the ministry.

Baghdad / “The directorate has held several specialized meetings, within the Directorate General units for curricula, for the discussion of the possibility of including what helps the students to avoid negative phenomena through the various academic curricula. The directorate prepared special information forms to be acquainted with the activities and proceedings of the general education directorates on human rights.
He pointed out that the directorate carried out a field study to investigate the spread of drugs and intoxicants in the society through the national association for fighting drugs and intoxicants and the creation of a subcommittee for fighting the actual indications and carrying out a field research for the investigation of this phenomenon within the different educational sections in our society. He clarified that the directorate would issue a pamphlet that includes the concept of human rights, its systems and how to teach this material within the academic curricula in schools.
Source: Al Mada

Displaced Iraqis Simmering with Anger in Amman

The Ester Republic
published May 18, 2005
© 2005 by Dahr Jamail

/Interviews with some decidedly angry Iraqis who are refugees living in
Amman, Jordan./

http://esterrepublic.com/Archives/djamail11.html

Amman, Jordan

It isn’t difficult to find Iraqis in Amman nowadays. The word on the
street is that somewhere around half a million have come to Jordan over
the last couple of years, seeking security and/or jobs, since they have
neither at home in Iraq.

“The American troops have not come for the benefit of the Iraqi people,”
says Mohammed Majid Abrahim, a fifty-two-year-old former resident of
Baghdad. “They are stealing from the Iraqis, and now all our problems
are because of the invaders.”

Mohammed arrived in Amman four months ago, and is as angry at the
current Iraqi government as at the interim government that preceded it.

“I want to ask Jalal Talabani to solve this problem for us,” he tells me
while we talk at a square in central Amman where many Iraqis congregate
on this sunny Friday morning. “What did Ayad Allawi achieve during his
time as president?” he asks, displaying his contempt for the new
National Assembly: “So what do we think this new government will
achieve? Nothing!”

He fled to Jordan from Baghdad because there is no work there. Yet like
so many other Iraqis here, he lacks adequate paperwork for the Jordanian
government to allow him to either stay in Jordan or work here legally.

“My main difficulty is that I have no approval to stay from the
government, so the Jordanian police are attacking Iraqis here because we
have no papers.”

He pulls out his United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR)
card and shows it to me. With this, he has political refugee status, but
it does not permit him to work. Nevertheless, he has found a job as an
ironworker, taking money under the table.

His hope for his home country?

“Iraqis must have a new government, this time with legal elections,” he
explains while we stand in the shade of a palm tree, “I think we need a
revolution to get things back to where they once were for us. Then,
Insh’Allah [God willing] I will go back. Saddam was so much better than
these bastards [US occupation forces], even though I hated him.”

His opinion is not unique, nor is it unfounded when we consider the
facts. Recently at the School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine in
London, it was reported by journalist John Pilger that Dr. Les Roberts,
who led the US-Iraqi research team that conducted the first
comprehensive study of civilian deaths in Iraq, gave a lecture in which
he again presented his findings (published in the most respected medical
journal in the world, the Lancet): that a minimum of 100,000 Iraqi
civilians have died violent deaths in their country in the last two
years, the vast majority of them at the hands of occupation forces.

In his lecture he also explained that US military doctors found that 14
percent of US soldiers and 28 percent of marines had killed a civilian.
If you do the math, considering there has been an average
(conservatively) of 135,000 US soldiers in Iraq (a significant
percentage of them marines), and consider the fact that bombs dropped by
US warplanes have generated massive numbers of civilian casualties which
may well surpass the number of those generated on the ground by soldiers
and marines, it becomes clear why Iraqis hold such great contempt
towards the occupiers of their county: the refugees have likely lost
family and friends, livelihood and home to the Americans. Refugees
attribute the destruction, violence, and chaos in their country to the
Multinational Forces, in particular, the US military.

Ghaleb is a carpenter from Nasiriyah. The forty-year-old Shia carpenter
came to Amman one year ago because the security situation in his city
was so horrible. He, like Mohammed, holds a deep disdain toward the
coalition forces.

“The occupiers should leave immediately,” he explains while sipping tea,
“They only came with their own interests and we can manage Iraq for
ourselves. We do not need them for any reason.”

His anger about what has happened in his country is exacerbated by his
current struggles in Jordan. He too holds a UNHCR political refugee
card, and works when he finds an odd job. He also lives under the threat
of being detained by Jordanian police and sent back to Iraq.

“I appreciate even Saddam Hussein compared to what Iraq is now,” he
states, “Even though I am a Shia!”

His friend Ali Hassan, standing nearby, adds, “We can do nothing here;
our Iraqi passports are now useless. We used to have to buy them under
Saddam but we could travel to different countries. But now, we can get
them for free but they are useless. We can go nowhere, and it isn’t even
safe for us to go back to our own country.”

I glance over his shoulder at a white GMC with an Iraqi flag painted on
the side window. These are still being used to take people in and out of
Iraq—at least those who are willing to accept the risk of the dangerous
trip through roads controlled by mujahideen, looters, or the US military.

In another area of Amman near a small mosque downtown, I find more
displaced Iraqis who tell me of similar difficulties—being harassed by
Jordanian police.

One of these men is Ismael. He left Baghdad fifteen years ago because he
overtly opposed the regime of Saddam Hussein. His once-valid political
refugee status is now in question in Jordan, and he does not wish to
return to Iraq since his country is in flames. He openly voices his
support of the armed resistance in Iraq.

“I support the resistance in Iraq,” he tells me while lighting a
cigarette, “They are honorable people and the Americans deserve to be
killed since they invaded our country.”

He asks for my notepad and pen, signs his name, and smiles proudly,
having underscored his comments.His cousin was killed by men from the
regime of Saddam Hussein in 1989, so he left so as not to be targeted
himself.

“I usually don’t come to this particular area,” he tells me while
gesturing about at the shops where men walk about peddling hot mint tea,
“But I came today to buy this photo.”

He pulls out a picture of the deposed Iraqi dictator sitting in a nice,
white suit inside an ornate room.

“I bought this because Saddam is so much better than the Americans,” he
says with a stern smile.

A little later while walking down the street I meet Abrahim Hassan. The
twenty-five-year-old laborer from Nasariyah came to Jordan just after
the invasion a little over two years ago. His problems typify those of
the other Iraqis I’ve been meeting in Amman as of late.

“The problem I face here is the Jordanian police detain me when I try to
work and then try to force me to return to Iraq,” he says. He claims to
have been detained twice, but the police released him when he showed his
UNHCR identification card.

Regarding the situation back at his home in the south of Iraq he says,
“Everything has gotten worse since the invasion. No matter if you are
Sunni or Shia, all of us are suffering now because of the invaders.”

Al Hakeem Invites Iraqis to Unite Amidst the Intensity of Sectarian Tension
Updated on 22/05/2005 09:58:46

Yesterday, Abdul Aziz Al Hakeem, president of the supreme council of the Islamic revolution in Iraq, called the Iraqi people to resort to “reasoning” and “resisting all attempts of creating sectarian sedition among Iraqis”, accusing foreign entities and the remains of the former regime of being behind such attempts.


The Association of Muslim Scholars condemns the assassination of a Shiite clergyman
On Thursday, the Shiite Badr Organization, the former military wing of the supreme council of the Islamic revolution in Iraq, has denied, in a statement, the accusations of the (Sunni) association of Muslim Scholars of being behind the assassination of Sunni identities and sheikhs in Baghdad. It confirmed that it would submit a complaint in this regard.
Al Hakeem considered “the remains of the former regime and their supporters” responsible for the violence, which targets “the infrastructure”, attacking “houses of worship; mosques, Husainias and churches and murdering hundreds of victims in Al Latifeya, Al Madae’n (south of Baghdad) and other crimes against innocent Iraqis.” Nevertheless, he expressed his trust that the Iraqi people have borne violence to reach “the establishment of a constitutional Iraq, where justice is achieved for everybody.”
Al Hakeem, president of the united Iraqi coalition, the biggest bloc in the National Assembly (Parliament), called Iraqis “not to be drifted behind the publicized evil attempts to ignite sectarian war in the country”, referring to the Jordanian extremist Islamist, Abu Mosa’b Al Zarqawi. He said, “Despite the harshness of the crimes committed by his (Al Zarqawi’s) followers and supporters against Iraqis, the National unity is still holding up because it is the demand of all good and honest people of this nation.”
In a reply for the accusation of Sheikh Hareth Al Dhari, president of the (Sunni) Association of Islamic Scholars, to Badr Organization of being behind various assassinations of Sunni clergymen, Al Hakeem called Iraqi justice institutions to verify these accusations, confirming that mass media is not the channel that accusations should be launched through. In his statement, addressing the Association of Islamic Scholars, he said “It is more appropriate for those, who are currently aiming their arrows of accusations towards the righteous powers (Badr Organization), whose history testifies for its huge sacrifices for being eager to maintain the security of the whole nation and its unity, (…), to quit that and Fear Allah.”
Al Hakeem called, “The righteous Shiite and Sunni scholars to firmly very seriously confront the evil conspiracy targeting to tear the unity of Iraq.”
Agencies

** Dahr Jamail's Iraq Dispatches **
** http://dahrjamailiraq.com **


Daily Life in Baghdad, from Afar

20-22 May 2005

It’s coming apart at the seams now in Iraq. We saw on the news today
that members of the Mehdi Army in the south, the militia of Shia cleric
Muqtada al-Sadr, exchanged gunfire with members of the ING (Iraqi
National Guard) who in the south are primarily, if not entirely composed
of members of the Badr Army, also a Shia group. So now we have Shia
fighting Shia.

Meanwhile in Baghdad, things are just as bad. Abu Talat, my friend and
interpreter, was speaking with his family who live in the al-Adhamiya
district of the capital city. Just across the Tigris River from
Adhamiya, which is predominantly Sunni, is the predominantly Shia
Khadamiyah neighborhood.

A car bomb detonated inside Khadamiyah which killed at least one ING, so
people in that area began firing guns across the Tigris into Adhamiyah.
According to two sources in Adhamiyah, they confirmed there was heavy
damage to several houses-broken windows, bullet pockmarked walls, etc.
When people inside Adhamiyah began returning fire, a US warplane bombed
a small mosque on the Adhamiyah side of the Tigris, for yet unknown reasons.

Abu Talat was talking via IM with his wife as she nearly fainted because
bombs and gunfire were so near their home.

“What can I do,” Abu Talat asked me from a nearby computer at an
internet café, “My family is in great danger and what can I do to help
them?”

I stared at him dumbly…there was no response.

I helped find phone numbers of friends and other family members of his
around Baghdad to try to go check on his family. He called them five
times, constantly monitoring their situation while he was crying.
Between calls he set the phone down to hold his head in his hands.

Abu Talat later spoke with his sister, who informed him that Iraqi
soldiers were raiding houses in her neighborhood and detaining men of
“fighting age,” which if we go by the US military definition of such
when they do home raids, means men roughly between the ages of 15-50 years.

“They almost took my nephew,” Abu Talat told me in frustration, “But
thanks to his father telling them that his son is a doctor and never
leaves the home nowadays, they let him be.”

Abu Talat had his two young sons go with his wife over to a relatives
home so they would not be detained. Although one of his sons, Ahmed, is
merely 14 years old. Ahmed is a soft-spoken, gentle boy who wouldn’t
hurt a fly.

When I was in Baghdad in February, one day we were taking tea in the
home of Abu Talat. Ahmed came out and began shining the shoes of his father.

“You don’t need to do this in front of Dahr,” said Abu Talat to his
youngest son.

“You are my father, and I am your son,” replied Ahmed, “I wish to shine
your shoes. Dahr understands that this is what a son does for his father.”

Abu Talat beamed and held up his hands with a huge smile on his face.

My friend Aisha who is here, also an Iraqi, has a friend who lives in
Adhamiyah.

“He just left the day before this all happened to bring his sick son to
Amman for cancer treatment,” she tells me while we sit under palm trees
and a nearly full moon later that evening while having dinner with her
mother.

Her friend believes his son has DU poisoning.

“He learned that one of the rooms of his home was destroyed by a missile
shot from an American helicopter,” she added while shaking her head.

Things quieted down in Baghdad after the events of the 20th, as well as
the next day, relatively.

However, today Abu Talat came over to me in a panic and asked for
Ahmed’s mobile number.

“He’s just been shot at,” he tells me as I feel the panic with my friend
and begin finding the number of his son.

Ahmed was walking down the street when two men demanded his ring and his
mobile. When Ahmed started yelling “Thieves, Thieves,” they kicked him
to the groun and shot their pistols over his head. At gunpoint, the two
men commenced to loot him.

Abu Talat received the information from his oldest son, then called home
to find that his youngest son was home crying, but alright.

“He has his exams tomorrow and now he is sleeping,” Abu Talat explains
with tears in his eyes, “He is alright but terribly shaken.”

This is the life in Baghdad today. This is the life of having a dear
friend whose family is living in peril and his attempts to remain in
contact with them from Amman. This is one family in a city of 5.5
million Iraqis, struggling to survive the brutal, chaotic, lawlessness
caused by the Anglo-American occupation that has destroyed their country.


_______________________________________________