Irak 97

Dahr Jamail bericht: '"Operation Forward Together": Deeper Into the Quagmire.

On Tuesday, June 13th, while Mr. Bush spent a brave five hours in the "green zone" of Baghdad with puppet Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki, at least 36 people were killed across Iraq amidst a wave of bombings. 18 of those died in a spasm of bombings in the oil city of Kirkuk in the Kurdish north.
The minute word hit the streets in Baghdad of Bush's visit, over 2,000 supporters of Shia cleric Muqtada al-Sadr took to the streets in protest. The protestors chanted "Iraq is for the Iraqis," and Sadr aide Hazem al-Araji publicly condemned the peek-a-boo visit of who he referred to as "the leader of the occupation."
Day One
The very next day, not coincidentally, Maliki instituted the biggest security crackdown in the capital city since the US invaded Iraq, dubbed "Operation Forward Together." An estimated 75,000 US and Iraqi soldiers clogged the already seriously congested streets of Baghdad, using tanks and armored vehicles to man checkpoints, impose a more strict curfew in liberated Baghdad (9 p.m. - 6 a.m. as opposed to the more generous 11 p.m. - 6 a.m.) and attempt to impose a weapons ban.
Just after "The Operation" began, a car bomb detonated, killing one person while wounding five others. Major General Mahdi al-Gharrawi who commands "public order forces" under the deadly umbrella of the controversial Interior Ministry, made a statement for which George Orwell would have been proud: "Baghdad is divided according to geographical area, and we know the al-Qaeda leaders in each area," he told reporters. "We are expecting clashes will erupt in the predominantly Sunni areas." So Sunnis in Iraq, according to Gharrawi, are tied to al-Qaeda.
Lest we forget, the Iraqi "army" ran a similar draconian security crackdown in Baghdad in May 2005 called "Operation Lightning." That one, too, was tens of thousands of Iraqi "police" and "soldiers" backed by American troops and air support. That operation, rather than quell violence in the capital, effectively alienated the Sunni populations in the city due to rampant death squad activities, mass detentions and heavy-handed tactics. Civilians across Baghdad complained about the mass detentions, random violence and torture meted out by the death squads during that "operation." And we see how well that operation managed to improve security in Baghdad over the last year.
So here we go again - only this time with even more troops, raiding even more homes, manning more checkpoints, and of course more death squads operating - with backup support from American soldiers, and of course their air strikes.
Iraq's puppet prime minister, in an effort to sooth the fear in the hearts of Baghdad's residents who are concerned about more detentions, random violence and "torture by electric drill" which the US-backed Shia death squads prefer with their victims, told reporters of the operation, "The raids during this plan will be very tough ... because there will be no mercy towards those who show no mercy to our people."
The same day "Operation Forward Together" began and the day after Bush bid farewell to Baghdad, Wednesday, he dismissed calls for a US withdrawal as "election-year" politics. Refusing to give a timetable for withdrawal or some kind of benchmark with which to measure success that may allow troops to be brought home, Bush said simply, "It's bad policy," at a news conference in the Rose Garden. He thought it would "endanger our country" to pull out of Iraq before we "accomplish the mission." Of his visit to Baghdad, Bush said, "I sense something different happening in Iraq."' Lees verder:
http://www.dahrjamailiraq.com/
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