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Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region ForumsThe Billion $$ Embassy: U.S. to Evacuate Many Staff Members From Baghdad Embassy
ERBIL, Iraq The American Embassy in Baghdad plans to temporarily evacuate a substantial number of its personnel this week and to increase security at the embassy in the face of a militant advance that rapidly swept from the north toward the capital, the State Department announced on Sunday.
The embassy, a beige fortress on the banks of the Tigris River within the heavily-secured Green Zone, where Iraqi government buildings are also located, has the largest staff of any United States Embassy.
The exact number of people being evacuated was not clear Sunday. The embassy would remain open, according to a statement from the departments spokeswoman, Jen Psaki,and many of its approximately 5,500 staff members would stay in Baghdad.
Many staff members who are leaving the statement called it relocating will be flown to Amman, Jordan, where they will continue their work at the embassy there, the statement said. Others will be shifted from Baghdad to consulates here in Erbil, in the northern Kurdish region, and in Basra, in the south, which are not now under threat by the militants.
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http://www.nytimes.com/2014/06/16/world/middleeast/embassy.html?smid=tw-bna&_r=1
malaise
(268,930 posts)Hope those who enriched themselves building it are very happy.
IDemo
(16,926 posts)cali
(114,904 posts)delrem
(9,688 posts)sheesh, no wonder their problems continue to escalate.
Why haven't they re-appropriated most of those valuable properties (seized in an illegal and immoral war by foreign forces)?
But then Iraq's is yet another in a long list of "democracies US style", forced into effect after a coup/invasion and instituted at the point of a genocidally efficient gun. Plus, even more recently Libya and Syria got ripped by the same ever so helpful gun and the fallout from that has hardly begun, what with the US's major ME partner the Saudi despots stirring the pot. Now throw drones into the mix in Yemen, Pakistan, ... THE USA's helpfulness might be just a tad overextended.
So it's wonderful to be able to say that "those Arabs, they've been at each other's throats for hundreds of years, it just isn't the US's problem that the US should spend even more blood and treasure to help those benighted people". I believe the Democratic Party's poll leading '16 candidate said something almost exactly like that...
dsc
(52,155 posts)both the Embassy and the government buildings are in the green zone.
truebluegreen
(9,033 posts)No one could have predicted that would be a problem?
indepat
(20,899 posts)of the entire Iraqi venture.