Terror

January 3, 2014

miraqA nightmarish cauldron is mushrooming out of control in Iraq, and apparently there’s not anything to be done. Bloody mess George Jr. cooked up, then left on the grill to burn — from the Washington Post this morning:

“At the moment, there is no presence of the Iraqi state in Fallujah,” said a local journalist who asked not to be named because he fears for his safety. “The police and the army have abandoned the city, al-Qaeda has taken down all the Iraqi flags and burned them, and it has raised its own flag on all the buildings.”

Appears Iraq is in a melt-down mode — nearly 10,000 Iraqis killed in 2013, the highest in five years as the country seems headed for civil war.

(Illustration found here).

Iraq has become to most Americans a horrible sin in which no speaketh — the crazy, foaming-at-the-mouth aunt in the basement. Except in this horror-tale, hundreds and hundreds of thousands of innocents were killed for no real justifiable reason.
Some background on the current shit from the Center for Research on Globalization:

The violence and fatalities have soared since last April, when the Shia-based government of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki ordered a violent crackdown on a Sunni protest camp erected in the northern town of Hawija, resulting in the deaths of roughly 50 civilians.
A similar crackdown on Monday against a protest encampment in Ramadi touched off the upheavals that left that city, Fallujah and several smaller towns largely in the hands of antigovernment insurgents.
In a crude attempt to defuse popular opposition, Maliki followed Monday’s dispersal of the protest camp, in which at least 10 people were killed, with an apparent concession to one of the protesters’ demands, announcing Tuesday that he was removing army troops from Sunni population centers in Anbar and leaving security to the regular police.
By Wednesday, however, heavily armed militants laid siege to police stations in Ramadi and Fallujah, releasing at least 100 prisoners, grabbing weapons stocks and burning a number of buildings.
For the most part, the police abandoned their positions without putting up a fight.
Maliki then reversed his earlier decree and ordered the reinforcement of army units in the area, which prepared to lay siege to the towns, with artillery shelling parts of Fallujah by Thursday and air strikes reportedly carried out against both that city and Ramadi.
“Half of Fallujah is in the hands of ISIL [the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant] and the other half is in the control” of armed tribesmen, an Interior Ministry official told the AFP news agency.
He said that in Ramadi there was a similar situation, with some areas controlled by ISIL and others controlled by tribesmen.
AFP quoted one of its correspondents in Ramadi as saying he witnessed “dozens of trucks carrying heavily armed men driving in the city’s east, playing songs praising ISIL” and carrying “black flags of a type frequently flown by ISIL.”

Maliki had seized upon the actions of the ISIL forces as a pretext for violently suppressing the wider Sunni protest movement that has been provoked by the Baghdad government’s sectarian bias, which has resulted in political marginalization and repression against the Sunni population.
This has included the persecution of Sunni politicians and their aides as “terrorists.”
On the eve of the latest crackdown, security forces raided the home of parliament member Ahmed al-Alwani in Ramadi, arresting him and killing his brother and five guards.
The move prompted the resignation of 44 members of parliament, most of them Sunni.
Issuing an ultimatum last month for the dispersal of the protest camp, Maliki described it as “the headquarters for the leadership of Al Qaeda.”
This self-serving government narrative seeks to obscure the fact that Maliki’s own sectarian policies have fueled bitter resentment within the Sunni population, driven by lack of services, indiscriminate “terror” raids, imprisonment of thousands without charges, and a de-Baathification program that has been used to expel public workers from their jobs.

Maliki has become just another Hosni Mubarak. George Jr. should be inside a prison cell, if not, then why not?

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