Baghdad starts to collapse as its people flee a life of death

....I returned to Baghdad on Monday after a break of several months, during which I too was guilty of glazing over every time I read another story of Iraqi violence. But two nights on the telephone, listening to my lost and frightened Iraqi staff facing death at any moment, persuaded me that Baghdad is now verging on total collapse.
...
The previous night I had had a similar conversation with my driver, a Shia who lives in another part of west Baghdad. He phoned at 11pm to say that there was a battle raging outside his house and that his family were sheltering in the windowless bathroom.

We phoned the US military trainer attached to Iraqi security forces in the area. He said there was nothing to be done: “There’s always shooting at night here. It’s like chasing ghosts.”

In fact, the US military generally responds only to request for support from Iraqi security forces. But as many of those forces are at best turning a blind eye to the Shia death squads, and at worst colluding with them, calling the Americans is literally the last thing they do.

West Baghdad is no stranger to bombings and killings, but in the past few days all restraint has vanished in an orgy of ethnic cleansing.
...
A local journalist told me bitterly this week that Iraqis find it ironic that Saddam Hussein is on trial for killing 148 people 24 years ago, while militias loyal to political parties now in government kill that many people every few days. But it is not an irony that anyone here has time to laugh about. They are too busy packing their bags and wondering how they can get out alive.

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,3-2268585_1,00.html

<We phoned the US military trainer attached to Iraqi security forces in the area. He said there was nothing to be done: “There’s always shooting at night here. It’s like chasing ghosts.”>

A civil war in which people have no lights, jobs, money, or water. Mission Accomplished. :cry:

Those that can are leaving the country. At Baghdad airport, throngs of Iraqis jostle for places on the flights out — testimony to the breakdown in Iraqi society.

One woman said that she and her three children were fleeing Mansour, once the most stylish part of the capital. “Every day there is fighting and killing,” she said as she boarded a plane for Damascus in Syria to sit out the horrors of Baghdad.



A neurologist, who was heading to Jordan with his wife, said that he would seek work abroad and hoped that he would never have to return. “We were so happy on April 9, 2003 when the Americans came. But I’ve given up. Iraq isn’t ready for democracy,” he said, sitting in a chair with a view of the airport runway.

Fares al-Mufti, an official with the Iraqi Airways booking office, told The Times that the national carrier had had to lay on an extra flight a day, all fully booked. Flights to Damascus have gone up from three a week to eight to cope with the panicked exodus.

If you have clan members who are still in the villages, there is still time for another crop. For those of you who don't, Lord have mercy on you all.

last paragraph:
"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."

Being a border State the division of loyalties resulted in numerous killings in State. The result was abandonment of much of the State for the duration of the war, My wifes family still tells stories of bushwhackers (terrorists) and claiming Confederate and Union loyalty. One of her ancestors was killed by these bushwhackers.

When I heard the stories of the death squads and Sunni's leaving the country this sounds very similar. Would you say that Iraq is in the grips of a Civil War?

the first time in a month. When she doesn't post for a while, I beging to wonder if she's still
there, and okay.

She describes the collapse, and sounds angrier than she ever has been before.


http://riverbendblog.blogspot.com/

there will be a civil war. I said if we get out next month, there will be a civil war next month. If we leave in ten years, there will be a civil war in 10 years. I was wrong. There's already a civil war. They didn't wait for us to get out. The only thing were doing there at this point is giving them another focal point aside from their sectarian violence. Boy, did the boy king and his fucktards screw up. No surprise here but damn, this is just getting bloodier and bloodier. The karma of the American people is so fucked - we'll probably all come back as slime mold.

It is already a civil war. Bush just does not want to admit it. Sorry Mr. Bush, but the situation in Iraq has escalated into a civil war.

Definition: civil war
Function: noun
: a war between opposing groups of citizens of the same country

Why isn't anyone talking about that?

/mindless idiot

disaster possible.

What do you think all those "newly-trained" Iraqi "police" and "soldiers" are doing with their weapons and skills, given that it is well known that most of the recruits have had militia ties?

The more we "progress", the more bloodshed.

If we're going to continue down this path, maybe we should take it all the way to its bitter, brutal, insane end: give each faction some nukes, train them in their use, and announce that we're reached a "turning point". Then, when radiation levels have reached survivable levels again the US military (or what's left of it) can march into the uninhabitable area where they believe Ramadi to once have been located, and announce that the city is finally under the control of "coalition troops".

I suppose some war supporters might object to my abovementioned (admittedly, absurd) plan, saying that the bombs could well be turned against the US. My reply is that they've already turned the entire Middle East into a roiling mass of highly fissionable humanity, which will be turned against the US for generations to come.

Like my son asked me the other day.... " How does Iraq surrender? Give up? " Good question, how do they? Any ideas out there on how an entire country may want it over, yet just what would they do to have it happen ? Wave white flags, everyone just march out of Iraq so there is no one there to fight with, what ? Please don't say it's all up to the new Iraqi government.

Prime Minister of Iraq on American television.

then I sent this article to the people who forward to me all of their "prayer" emails and urban legends. I put the link in the email, but I also put the text in it as well as I told them "in case you choose not to click on the link and read it at the newspapers' webs site. Hopefully, I'll make a few "converts".

edited for spelling

Good for you :hug:

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,3-2268585_1,00.html

snip

West Baghdad is no stranger to bombings and killings, but in the past few days all restraint has vanished in an orgy of ethnic cleansing.

Shia gunmen are seeking to drive out the once-dominant Sunni minority and the Sunnis are forming neighbourhood posses to retaliate. Mosques are being attacked. Scores of innocent civilians have been killed, their bodies left lying in the streets.

snip

In just 24 hours before noon yesterday, as parliament convened for another emergency session, 87 bodies were brought to Baghdad city morgue, 63 of them unidentified. Since Sunday’s massacre in Jihad, more than 160 people have been killed, making a total of at least 1,600 since Iraq’s Government of national unity came to power six weeks ago. Another 2,500 have been wounded.

snip

A local journalist told me bitterly this week that Iraqis find it ironic that Saddam Hussein is on trial for killing 148 people 24 years ago, while militias loyal to political parties now in government kill that many people every few days. But it is not an irony that anyone here has time to laugh about. They are too busy packing their bags and wondering how they can get out alive.

snip

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.


more...

dere!!!!!

corner! Victory is at hand! Come back!

and now we have 25,000 americans caught in Lebanon after Irsael bombed the airport....things are going great.

quote......

The fighting that erupted in Lebanon has prompted the Pentagon to develop scenarios for evacuating American citizens, estimated to number around 25,000, military sources told CNN.

The rapid widening of the Mideast conflict this week has created great concern in the U.S. government, which doesn't want Americans in Lebanon caught in the middle of a shooting war.

end quote.......

http://www.cnn.com/2006/POLITICS/07/14/lebanon.us.citizens/

express orders that she didn't want to be disturbed when she's out shopping.

You have to know this is vital if you are a woman!

we would better off if she continued to go shopping.

Let's drop her off at the Mall of America and speed off into the distance.

Happy shopping, Condi. Whip out that plastic.

Sounds like the OLD CIVIL WAR in Lebanon 25 years ago

that he sees more progress each time he visits? My God, these people have their heads in 'the green zone', don't they? Pathetic.

Maybe we should use 'the green zone' syndrome as a campaign strategy though. Could be effective.

how vulnerable the Green Zone really is in Baghdad. It seems to me that Iran could make things very difficult for us if it wished to.

Not hoping that would happen, but there are a lot of people in that city, in and out of the Green Zone, and right now the Middle East is one dry field waiting for someone to drop a match.

ac·cel·er·ant ( P ) Pronunciation Key (k-slr-nt)
n.
A substance, such as a petroleum distillate, that is used as a catalyst, as in spreading an intentionally set fire.

But I don't love the Bush administration's foreign policy. It makes me nervous. In other words it makes me nervous. Etc.

Some people in this country are getting what they wanted, aren't they? Fanatics the whole world over are getting a taste of what they lust for -- death to the infidel, a crusade, and the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse.

Neocon hubris, meet Nemesis. Gods help us all...

Hekate

end-times point yet. I lived during the Carter and Clinton administrations, both of which strove to find peaceful resolution to violent Middle East tensions. And both succeeded to a significant degree, where this administration is out-to-lunch.

Bush is not solely to blame, but his administration has fallen well short of predecessors in the same role.

Well short.

That's why we're there, right?????

They're all getting hard to keep up with these days.

infiltrated the Green Zone and killed our troops en mass (a la Beirut). After the initial burst of violence last weekend, this story has really fallen down the memory hole, as you stated.

At one point, the Iraqi Army was about to post insurgents posing as guards all around the Green Zone and they were going to make a coordinated attack. When the plot was caught and stopped, it was "one signature away" from happening.

http://abcnews.go.com/International/wireStory?id=1724316

BAGHDAD, Iraq Mar 14, 2006 (AP)— Security officials foiled a plot that would have put hundreds of al-Qaida men at guard posts around Baghdad's Green Zone, home to the U.S. and other foreign embassies as well as the Iraqi government, the interior minister told The Associated Press on Tuesday.

A senior Defense Ministry official confirmed the plot, and said the 421 al-Qaida fighters involved were actually recruited to storm the U.S. and British embassies and take hostages. Several ranking Defense Ministry officials have been jailed in the plot, the official said on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the information.

Interior Minister Bayan Jabr, in an exclusive interview with The Associated Press, said the al-Qaida recruits were one bureaucrat's signature away from acceptance into an Iraqi army battalion whose job it is to control the gates and main squares in the Green Zone. The plot was discovered three weeks ago.

And we can see in Iraq what America really is all about: a brutal occupier that has unleashed forces that it cannot control.

I suggest that all those Iraqi exiles that campaigned for a US invasion of Iraq should be sent to Iraq, together with their families, so that they too get to enjoy the freedom and democracy they wished on their compatriots.

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... both about Hussein, and also to be suspicious of me!

Iraq is a tough situation, and credible arguments can be made about whether or not it was a good idea to invade. But no one should lose sight of the brutality of the former regime when criticizing the new. Institutionalized rape, torture, and political imprisonment were endemic, with no end in sight.

...to warrant careful consideration of the ramifications of all dealings, especially military action. However, the precarious nature of internal Iraqi politics is well-known and known for a long time. This is why Bush Sr. did not go all the way to Baghdad in GW I. His son, showing none of the natural curiosity for world history, intelligence, or cunning of his father made one of the most egregious moves in recent U.S. history.

  And it shows.

  It is a humiliation, embarrassment for our country. Worse, it is dishonorable.

PB

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that might mean staying there for 10, maybe 20, years.

fuck that

Saddam wasn't even killing raping torturing etc that many of his own people, that is relative to what some of our other allies do.

He did most of his killing etc decades ago.

Now "Institutionalized rape, torture, and political imprisonment are endemic, with no end in sight".

They could've toppled Saddam, withdrawn, and let things in Iraq settle themselves out long ago.

But no, that wasn't in their PNAC plan.

It's not Operation Iraqi Freedom.

It's Operation Iraqi Fiefdom.

How do you look at www.icasualties.org and think about the past?

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And when are you shipping out?

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I'm a little unclear on the validity of a few of your points:

2a) While it is undoubtedly important to reduce the global proliferation of these weapons, there have been no WMDs found and the intelligence cited as 'proof' has been shown to either been greatly exaggerated or outright fabrication.

North Korea, which is now a significant threat, was at the time developing its own nuclear program and the means of warhead delivery by its own admission, yet they were essentially ignored as a non-issue.

2b) The strongest link that Saddam had to terrorism (lets just go with Al Qaeda since they're the no. 1 bad guys here) is that Bin Laden offered the Saudis his forces to help repel Saddam in 1990 and the two guys didn't exactly get along--at all.

3) I'm assuming the two wars you're referring to are the one against Iran and the invasion of Kuwait, both of which were done with the approval of the U.S. administrations at the time--Saddam was given a green light to invade Kuwait by Bush the Elder and he fought Iran with weapons that Reagan sold him (Saddam was our friend back then). Since '91, the Iraqi regime was contained. In early 2001, then-Secretary of State Powell gave a speech where he said that Iraq was contained

4) This is fairly idle--Iran was (and is) by all rights a democracy and probably the best example of what happens when fundamentalist theocracies are introduced to democracy. The current and previous Iranian presidents were democratically elected in open elections.

5) The enforcement of U.N. resolutions is tenuous at best--Iraq was declared to be in violation less than a handful of resolutions (one specifically given as the reason to invade). Israel was and is in violation of dozens of resolutions and nothing is done about it.

And there are no "credible arguments"; bush's invasion of Iraq was ILLEGAL. That's a FACT.

due to sanctions and now is completely destroyed? The electricity is now on for perhaps 2 hours per day, the water supplies have dropped, a country rich in oil now imports gasoline.

People can no longer live in their homes, trust their neighbors or safely send their children to schools. Teachers are killed, families are displaced, the numbers of dead are increasing exponentially.

The cost of this "freedom" was estimated at $50 million (which was to be paid with Iraq's assets) and has reached in excess of $290 BILLION - has cost more than 2500 military lives - 15000 to 18000 military wounded (mostly amputees) - we have more than 20% of those that have served suffering PTSD - and yet, somehow, you feel that this is what is good. There were no WMDs, Saddam is on trial and his sons have been killed and their death pictures paraded through the streets (ala the terrorists and their propoganda), we have "cleansed" Ramadi twice (iirc), Fallujah twice (iirc) and yet, somehow, you feel this is what is good.

(edit typo)

Yours contains an excellent illustration of all the lies we have been told by the Bush regime. I am surprised that it came from the Washington Post, one of the earliest cheerleaders for the war.

Rather it is the fault of the man who commands the US military, who created a situation that makes such a thing possible.

This scenario was predictable, and was predicted, by those of us who were here way back in 2002.

Furthermore this statement just blows me away. You said "You have to compare the situation before and after Iraq was invaded." The intellectual disconnect inherent there both disturbs and befuddles me. Iraq before we invaded was stable and relatively safe. Sunni and Shia woked and played alongside each other. Now of course, the situation is far different. There is a civil war occuring in Iraq which WE made possible. Things are not better in Iraq now, you merely have to look at the large scale emigration taking place to know that. Iraqis who felt safe as could be under Saddam are now leaving Iraq by the thousands. Those very same people who were held up as poster children for our imposed democracy are now telling you with their feet what they really think.

And by the way, yes we are responsible for what takes place in Iraq now. That is what you take on when you choose to conquer and occupy a country. Whatever happened to the Republican obsession with responsibility? It's ours now; we have removed every previous deterrent, every police force, every military unit. We own it, we are responsible for what happens there, and we are failing in that role. And you KNOW it. I don't blame you for trying to put the best face on it but it is a losing effort and you know that too. Iraq is a mess, we made it that way, and we can't fix it. That's the long and short of it right there.

Bush's apologists (such as yourself) pretend the chaos in Iraq was inevitable, but it was not. It was caused by Bush, or rather the Bush/Cheney/Rumsfeld troika. It was their decision to invade Iraq and destroy its government without providing enough resources (troops) to manage the situation afterward. They stupidly believed that the invaders would be greeted with flowers and there would be no need to maintain security.

It was colossal incompetence, and a gruesome crime that has caused hundreds of thousands of unneccessary deaths. And you defend them.

Since Saddam was a secular leader, Iraq was more "westernized" than Iran and especially, our great ally Saudi Arabia. Women were not forced to cover their hair, they held professional positions and Christianity was tolerated there (oldest Christian sect was in Iraq). Even Blair had to back down on how many people were murdered by Saddam. I remember seeing a PBS special after the first Gulf War (Amy Goodman?), interviewing civilians in Iraq--their infrastructure was devastated from our bombs-and the film showed a park playground where people who had died in the bombings were hurriedly buried so that the number of deaths would not be as visible. Another words "a front" so that the US wouldn't see how much devastation the bombings had actually done. Now, you have women fearing for their lives if they don't conform. the oldest Christian sect has fled for their lives, and it seems, we are using some of Saddam's old tactics (Abu Ghraib).

I was at the store last week and I listened to a woman, who just came back from a cruise to Turkey. She was relating how they had picked up a boat of Iraqi refugees after the boat had capsized, and that some had drowned--it was quite disturbing to her. She said that when she turned on the news in Europe, the story was there, but heard nothing from the media in the US. She also stated that the Turkish government refused to take the refugees.

on the FACTS.

.....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.

distracted?