contributions

By Khaled Yacoub Oweis
BAGHDAD - Shi’ite militiamen struck at the center of Iraq’s oil industry Thursday, setting the South Oil Company headquarters in the southern port of Basra on fire and further undermining the central government authority, police and officials said.
The attack did not effect Iraq’s oil exports from Basra of one million barrels per day.
"They came in droves, surrounded the building and looted it before setting it on fire," said an official at the state company’s (…)

United States army medics have been accused of being complicit in the abuse of Iraqi inmates at Abu Ghraib prison, outside Baghdad.
Writing in the respected medical journal The Lancet, Professor Steven Miles says some medics collaborated with abusive guards.
The University of Minnesota academic has called for an inquiry into the role played by medics in the abuse.
The US Military said investigations were already underway.
Abuse allegations
Reports of abuse at the US-run Abu Ghraib (…)

The grieving family of a teenage soldier who died in Iraq after just two months of active service have taken their anti-war protest all the way to Downing Street.
Sarah Left reports
Gordon Gentle arrived home from a trip to a Glasgow job centre one day and announced he was signing up for the military. His mother, Rose, tried to talk the teenager out of it. His 14-year-old sister, Maxine, was frightened that her big brother might be sent off to a war zone on the basis of a spur of the (…)

The new US Army report on the Abu Ghraib prisoner abuse scandal will implicate at least two dozen more personnel, say US defence officials.
It will also criticise senior officers in Iraq for failures of leadership, but clear them and the Pentagon of ordering any abuse, the unnamed officials said.
The report is still under internal review, but is expected to be released to Congress next week.
So far, seven military police soldiers have been charged over the affair.
The scandal erupted (…)

By Michael Georgy
NAJAF, Iraq - The U.S. military pounded positions held by radical clerical Moqtada al-Sadr’s lightly armed militiamen early Friday, unleashing one of its most terrifying aircraft in a bid to break their will to fight.
The unmistakable menacing buzz of the AC-130 gunship equipped with everything from rapid fire machineguns to deadlier howitzers was followed by thuds around a holy shrine and ancient cemetery where Sadr’s men are holed up.
Houses as far as five km (…)

A Vietnam veteran who claims Sen. John Kerry lied about being under fire during a Mekong Delta engagement that won Kerry a Bronze Star was under constant fire himself during the same skirmish, according to the man’s own medal citation, a newspaper reported. The newly obtained records of Larry Thurlow show that he, like Kerry, won a Bronze Star in the engagement and that Thurlow’s citation said he also was under attack, The Washington Post reported Thursday.
Thurlow, also like Kerry, (…)

by Salim Lone
Even before that awful bomb ripped through our Baghdad headquarters on August 19 2003, taking the lives of 22 of my colleagues, the UN mission in Iraq had already become marginal to the epic crisis being played out there. Iraq had become the centre of both the US war on terror and the war between the extremities of two civilisations. The vicious terrorist attack a year ago today surprised no one working for Sergio Vieira de Mello, the UN secretary general’s special (…)

By Scott Baldauf
NAJAF, Iraq - What we were about to do was more than risky. It was foolish.
Thursday, several journalists began organizing a delegation to enter the Imam Ali shrine in Najaf, where members of Muqtada al-Sadr’s Shiite Muslim militia were taking shelter. We wanted to get what may be the final comments of the top militia leadership inside the holy site. We also wanted to help two colleagues get out of the shrine after they had spent three days there. Between us and the (…)

Iraq: Top UN Envoy Discusses Najaf Fighting With Interim Leaders
Meeting with Iraq’s interim President Ghazi al Yawer today, the top United Nations envoy to the country reiterated Secretary-General Kofi Annan’s concern over the deteriorating situation in the Shiite Muslim holy city of Najaf, voicing hope for a peaceful solution to the fighting there.
Mr. Annan’s Special Representative, Ashraf Jehangir Qazi, continuing his first visit to Iraq since his appointment last month, also (…)

By Gwynne Dyer
The claims and counter-claims make it hard to discern the strategies behind the showdown in Najaf, and the language that is used blurs the situation even more. US military spokesmen, for example, always call the young men who are defending the rebel Shiite cleric Moqtada Sadr “anti-Iraqi forces”, although not one in a hundred of them has ever been outside Iraq. But you can guess why the US authorities in Iraq chose this moment to try to eliminate Sadr and his Al Mahdi (…)