afp
Posted: 21 May 2009 1805 hrs

BAGHDAD - Iraq was engulfed on Thursday by a wave of violence, with suicide and bomb attacks killing 23 people a day after a massive bomb devastated a Baghdad Shiite neighbourhood slaughtering 40 civilians.

The main target of Thursday's attacks was Baghdad, where a suicide bomber detonated his explosives in a crowded market in southern Dora neighbourhood, killing at least 12 people and wounding 25, security officials said.

The bomber targeted a US patrol that was passing through a popular Assyrian market in the confessionally mixed neighbourhood, officials from the interior and defence ministry told AFP.

The market attack came soon after a bomb exploded in a rubbish bin inside a Baghdad police station, killing three policemen and injuring 20, among them 12 officers and eight civilians, officials told AFP.

The day began on a bloody note when a suicide bomber killed eight members of an anti-Qaeda militia early morning in the tense northern city Kirkuk as they were lining up to receive their salaries, police said.

The attacks in two of Iraq's largest urban centres come as the US military prepares to decamp from the nation's cities and towns by June 30 and ahead of a complete withdrawal by the end of 2011.

The bloodletting has sparked fears of a return of Al-Qaeda-style attacks aimed at reigniting the sectarianism that swept the country two years ago.

Iraqi Vice-President Tarek al-Hashemi, a Sunni Arab, called Thursday for national unity in the wake of the violence.

"The evil and criminal powers are back once again to continue their criminal actions against our patient people," he said in a statement.

"We call upon our people to unite, to not give in to the enemies of Iraq who are trying to undermine our unity." more

_{Tolerating prostitution is tolerating abuse and torture of women and children.}

Muhanad Mohammed

BAGHDAD, May 23 (Reuters) - Turkey has boosted the flow of the Euphrates river passing through its dams upstream of Iraq to help farmers cope with a drought after Iraqi complaints, but it is still not enough, a top Iraqi lawmaker said on Saturday.

Iraq is mostly desert and its inhabitable areas are slaked by the Tigris, which comes down from Turkey, the Euphrates, also from Turkey but passing through Syria, and a network of smaller rivers from Iran, some of which feed the Tigris.

Iraq accuses Turkey, and to a lesser extent Syria, of choking the Euphrates by placing hydroelectric dams on it that have restricted water flow, damaging an Iraqi agricultural sector already hit by decades of war, sanctions and neglect.

The dispute is a delicate diplomatic issue for Iraq as it seeks to improve ties with its neighbours and Turkey is one of Iraq's most important trading partners.

Saleh al-Mutlaq, leader of a Sunni Arab bloc in parliament, said he flew to Turkey on Friday and met Turkish Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan and President Abdullah Gul to ask them to release more water from the river, which has been depleted by a drought.

"They have since increased the quantities of water coming to Iraq by 130 cubic metres per second," he said.

"It's not enough, but it has partly solved the water problems preventing our farmers from planting rice," he said.

That makes the flow of water to Iraq 360 cubic metres per second, up from the 230 cubic metres per second that Iraq received before Turkey took action.

Iraq's director of water resources, Oun Thiab Abdullah, said last week that Iraq faced a catastrophe this summer unless Turkey triples the Euphrates water flow. A drought has already withered crops and created severe water shortages. The river has dropped 35 percent since January, Abdullah said.

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Leo Shane III, Stars and Stripes
Mideast edition, Saturday, May 23, 2009

WASHINGTON — No one in Air Force Lt. Col. Victor Fehrenbach’s unit knew he was gay until he went on television Tuesday night to talk about his sexuality.

“It was never my intention to come out publicly,” he said in an interview with Stripes the next day.

But Fehrenbach, an F-15 pilot, said he was grounded last spring, just weeks before his unit deployed to Iraq, when a civilian acquaintance told his commanders that Fehrenbach might be gay.

He said he doesn’t know why he was outed. For almost two decades, he kept his sexual orientation a secret from military officials. But the tip began a yearlong review that culminated in a recommendation for discharge earlier this week, under the military’s “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy.

Fehrenbach, an 18-year airman who has served overseas tours in Kosovo, Iraq and Afghanistan, said he felt compelled to share his story with the press after that because of the White House’s reluctance to confront the issue of homosexuals serving openly in the military.

“I had a lot of hope in September, when I heard about [President Barack Obama’s] plans to overturn the law,” he said. “Now, I’m hoping that by coming out and telling my story that the president will move faster on this.”

For now, there’s no indication that will happen, and Fehrenbach stands to lose his military pension.

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US Brig. Gen. Steven Salazar, in an interview, says that a budget crisis is shifting the focus away from new recruitment, toward better training for existing forces.

Jane Arraf | Correspondent of The Christian Science Monitor
from the May 22, 2009 edition

Baghdad - In a legacy of the US rush to build up Iraqi security forces, almost one-quarter of the Iraqi Army currently fails to meet its own minimum qualifications for soldiers, the Iraqi government is discovering in its first real look at the composition of the Army.

"They're finding about 24 percent are not qualified based on Army criterion for being in the Army," US Brig. Gen. Steven Salazar says of an ongoing rescreening of Iraq's 253,000 soldiers.

"A very small number of them are overage, a little bit bigger number of them would be medically disqualified, and then somewhere – around 15 percent they're finding – are illiterate," says General Salazar, deputy commander of the Multinational Security Transition Command-Iraq, in an interview.

Salazar says the rescreening, which has surveyed 46,000 soldiers so far, was undertaken because neither the Iraqi Ministry of Defense nor US officials knew who exactly was in the Army.

Although the cash-strapped Iraqi government has had to scrap plans to expand the Army due to budget cuts, it does not plan to automatically fire the unqualified soldiers.

In an effort to keep them employed, the government plans such initiatives as literacy programs for illiterate soldiers and aid to those deemed medically unfit because of remediable problems such as poor vision.

"I can tell you the leadership's view is that, regardless of how they came in, they've all been involved in the fight for quite some time, and they've served their country well," says Salazar, who has been in charge of the coalition effort to set up and train the Iraqi Army over the past year.

He concedes that the high proportion of unqualified soldiers could well be linked to the US rush to build security forces as quickly as possible after 2003.

"That could very well be the case," he says. "When we were standing up the ICDC – the Iraqi national guard – we took what we could get to get combat power out into the fight."

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Tehran talks focus on defeating the Taliban

24/05 13:15 CET

The leaders of Pakistani and Afghanistan are meeting in Iran to discuss security as the battle against the Taliban intensifies in both countries.

The talks are focusing on joint efforts to combat the insurgents, and the flourishing drugs trade that is helping to finance their campaign.

It comes as Pakistan steps up an offensive against the Taliban in the Swat valley, with reports of street-fighting in the main town of Mingora.

Regaining control of Mingora is said to be crucial to defeating the Taliban in Swat, and some 15,000 troops have been drafted into to complete the task.

Washington, which has made winning the war in Afghanistan its top military priority, is backing the joint approach being taken by the three countries.

By REUTERS
Published: May 26, 2009
Filed at 3:35 a.m. ET

KABUL (Reuters) - Three soldiers fighting with NATO-led forces and a civilian were killed by a suicide car bomb attack on a military convoy in east Afghanistan on Tuesday, Afghan officials and a spokesman for the alliance said.

One foreign soldier and one civilian were also injured when a suicide bomber rammed an explosive-laden car into the convoy in the northern Sayat district of Kapisa province, said Abdul Ali Mayar, a spokesman for the provincial governor.

Mayar also said a U.S. military vehicle was destroyed in the attack. U.S. forces declined to comment on the incident.

NATO-led forces said the nationality of the soldiers had not yet been released. Mainly U.S. and French troops working under NATO command are deployed in Kapisa province.

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http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/2009/05/26/world/international-uk-afghanistan-violence.html?ref=world

this is a bonehead idea

Officials believe that in stopping smuggling across borders, the price will fall as the market is saturated internally

* Jon Boone in Herat
* guardian.co.uk, Monday 25 May 2009 22.10 BST
* Article history

United Nations officials in Afghanistan are attempting to create a "flood of drugs" in the country intended to destroy the value of opium and force poppy farmers to switch to legal crops such as wheat.

After the failure to destroy fields of the scarlet flowers in Afghanistan's volatile south, the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime says the answer is to stop the drugs from leaving the country in the first place.

"Manual eradication is incompetent and inefficient," UNODC chief Antonio Maria Costa said during a visit to the western Afghan province of Herat. "So we want to see more efforts to stop the flow of drugs across Afghanistan's borders and the hitting of high-value targets to create a market disruption.

"We want to create a flood of drugs within Afghanistan. There will be so much opium inside Afghanistan unable to go out that the price will go down."

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By MARC SANTORA
Published: May 26, 2009

BAGHDAD — An American soldier, a State Department employee and an American civilian working for the Department of Defense were all killed Monday afternoon when the vehicle they were riding in was struck by a roadside bomb as it traveled through the city of Falluja west of Baghdad, American officials said Tuesday.

Two civilians working for the Department of Defense were wounded in the attack, according to the officials.

The incident took place just three miles from the bridge where in March of 2004, four American contractors were killed – their bodies burned and mutilated and dragged through the street in front of frenzied mobs. The image of two of the workers’ charred bodies strung up from the bridge spurred calls for action from Americans at home and was a major factor in the American military’s decision to launch the first major offensive against the city several months later.

It would take four often bloody years and another major assault, but when the Marines finally prepared to leave their sprawling base on the outskirts of the city in December, the military expressed high hopes that the pacification of the former heart of the insurgency would demonstrate that the security gains would hold even as the American role was reduced.

While the situation in Falluja remains more stable than it had been when the contractors were killed in 2004, there is concern expressed by both political leaders and tribal leaders that if the Sunni insurgents who later reconciled with the Americans are not made to feel like they have a place in the central government, they will once again turn to violence.

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LONDON, May 28 (Reuters) - Photographs of Iraqi prisoner abuse which U.S. President Barack Obama does not want released include images of apparent rape and sexual abuse, Britain's Daily Telegraph newspaper reported on Thursday.

The images are among photographs included in a 2004 report into prisoner abuse at Abu Ghraib prison conducted by U.S. Major General Antonio Taguba.

Taguba included allegations of rape and sexual abuse in his report, and on Wednesday he confirmed to the Daily Telegraph that images supporting those allegations were also in the file.

"These pictures show torture, abuse, rape and every indecency," Taguba, who retired in January 2007, was quoted as saying in the paper.

He said he supported Obama's decision not to release them, even though Obama had previously pledged to disclose all images relating to abuses at Abu Ghraib and other U.S.-run prisons in Iraq.

"I am not sure what purpose their release would serve other than a legal one," Taguba said. "The sequence would be to imperil our troops, the only protectors of our foreign policy, when we most need them, and British troops who are trying to build security in Afghanistan.

"The mere depiction of these pictures is horrendous enough, take my word for it."

The newspaper said at least one picture showed an American soldier apparently raping a female prisoner while another is said to show a male translator raping a male detainee.

Others are said to depict sexual assaults with objects including a truncheon, wire and a phosphorescent tube.

The photographs relate to 400 alleged cases of abuse carried out at Abu Ghraib and six other prisons between 2001 and 2005.

dpa (Roundup)
South Asia News

May 28, 2009, 14:06 GMT

Kabul - Two British troops and one Afghan soldier were killed in roadside bombings in southern Afghanistan while US and Afghan troops killed nearly three dozen suspected militants in a clash and airstrike in the eastern part of the country, officials said Thursday.

One British soldier serving in the NATO-led International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) was killed in a roadside bomb blast Thursday in southern Afghanistan, the British Defence Ministry said in a statement.

The second British soldier died in a hospital in Britain late Wednesday after being flown home for treatment for injuries sustained May 22 in a roadside blast near Lashkar Gah in Helmand Province, it said.

The ISAF in Kabul also confirmed the deaths of the soldiers in a statement Thursday.

Separately, an Afghan soldier was killed and another was wounded Wednesday in another roadside attack in Helmand, the Afghan Defence Ministry said.

Meanwhile, US and Afghan troops targeted a compound used by a 'senior' militant leader identified only as Sangeen, in Paktika province's Wor Mamay district, the US military said in a statement. It accused him of operating the compound as a staging area for future attacks in the province.

Several militants were killed in combat as well as from their own explosives while the rest were killed when the US-Afghan forces called in an airstrike on the militants' firing positions, it said.

'During the assault, at least six enemies detonated suicide vests, killing only themselves,' it said, adding that one coalition soldier received minor wounds in a blast.

The US statement said 29 militants were killed in the operation, but an Afghan army statement said its forces counted the bodies of 35 militants left in the destroyed compound.

Because of the remoteness of the area and security concerns in the district that borders neighbouring Pakistan, it was difficult to verify the death toll independently.

The statement did not say whether Sangeen, who is also known as Fateh and is accused of involvement in numerous attacks in eastern Afghanistan, was among those killed.

The US military statement also said weapons caches containing rocket-propelled grenade launchers, ammunition, AK-47 assault rifles, heavy machine guns and suicide vests were discovered at the compound.

Hamidullah Zewak, a spokesman for Paktika's governor, said four vehicles and 25 motorbikes were also seized.

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* Richard Norton-Taylor
* guardian.co.uk, Thursday 28 May 2009 19.33 BST

British pilots in Afghanistan are firing an increasing number of "enhanced blast" thermobaric weapons, designed to kill everyone in buildings they strike, the Ministry of Defence has revealed.

Since the start of this year more than 20 of the US-designed missiles, which have what is officially described as a "blast fragmentation warhead", have been fired by pilots of British Apache attack helicopters. A total of 20 were also fired last year after they were bought by the MoD from the Americans last May.

The missiles are a variant of the AGM-114N Hellfire missile, described by the Pentagon as "designed to produce higher sustained blast pressure in multi-room structures.

It adds: "The enhanced blast from the … warhead is more effective against non-traditional targets; multi-room structures expected in military operations in urban terrain operations, caves, and fortified bunkers."

The missile's warhead is made with a mixture of chemicals rather than a simple blast mechanism.

"The thermobaric Hellfire missile can take out the first floor of a building without damaging the floors above, and is capable of reaching around corners," according to Global-Security.org, a US thinktank.

It describes the effects of the missile as "formidable". Unlike conventional warheads, it produces a sustained pressure wave. US forces have deployed the missiles in Iraq as well as Afghanistan.

Its wider use was disclosed by John Hutton, the defence secretary, in answer to a parliamentary answer from Nick Harvey, the Liberal Democrat defence spokesman. "Given the MoD's reluctance to admit they were even going to use these weapons, they now seem to be getting rather more trigger-happy," Harvey said yesterday. "If these controversial weapons are being fired on a weekly basis in Afghanistan, we need to know that they are being used according to strict rules of engagement.

"Human rights groups have serious concerns about the effect of these weapons in populated areas, and their legality seems to be a grey area. The last thing we need in this counter-insurgency campaign is the allegation that civilians are dying at the hands of some kind of terror weapon. Parliament must be reassured these are a weapon of last resort."

A UK defence official told the Guardian that the Hellfire missiles that British Apaches had been initially equipped with were lighter anti-tank weapons. They would simply make a "small hole" in a building and the enemy would run away unscathed, the official said.

The new US-designed weapon was "particularly designed to take down structures and kill everyone in the buildings".

The official said British pilots' rules of engagement were strict and everything a pilot sees from the cockpit is recorded.

Posted: 30 May 2009 1838 hrs

KANDAHAR, Afghanistan : Four civilians were killed and a provincial governor wounded in two separate bomb blasts in Afghanistan on Saturday, officials said.

The civilians, including a child and a woman, were killed when a roadside bomb, similar to those used by Taliban insurgents, struck their vehicle in the southern province of Kandahar, police said.

"Four civilians, one of them a five-year-old child were killed when a bomb hit their car in Khakriz district," police official Afzal Khan said.

"Their vehicle was destroyed in the blast."

He could not say who had planted the device but similar incidents have been blamed on Taliban militants who are waging an insurgency against the US-backed government in Kabul.

A provincial governor and his driver were wounded in a similar attack in northeast Afghanistan which was blamed on the Taliban, an intelligence official said.

Kunduz governor Mohammad Omar was returning from neighbouring Takhar province when a remote-controlled bomb struck his vehicle, said local intelligence chief Abdul Majeed Azimi.

"Along the road a remote-control mine struck his vehicle, injuring him and his driver slightly," Azimi said, adding the two men were hospitalised with "slight injuries".

"Obviously, it was the work of the Taliban," he said.

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