The Soviets built the Berlin wall to try and keep East Berliners from leaving.
Then the Israeli’s built the Seperation wall, to keep suicide bombers out while making a land grab.
Then the American’s started building walls to surround Sunni communities in Baghdad.
What’s with the world and walls? I thought the metaphor was “building bridges” not walls? […]

“The street was transformed into a swimming pool of blood.” - Ahmed Hameed, a shopkeeper in Shia-dominated Sadriya where 170 over 200 Iraqis died after a powerful bomb exploded in the middle of a market full of shopkeepers and shoppers. On the same day a bomb went off in Sadr City killing 35, in Karadda […]

I was kind of shocked and saddened to hear about the shooting in Virginia Tech that has dominated western media in the past 48 hours, especially the Internet. I tend to pay close attention to how such incidents unravel in the media and the public eye. The number 30 was splashed across home pages of […]

When I look at sectarian violence in Iraq I don’t see it under a religious context any more. Sects have become a source of ethnic identity and religion doesn’t seem to play much of a role at all. Sects are merely a way to identify people and it’s historically now the easiest way to do […]

Iraqi kids in Baghdad don’t play cowboys and indians, rather sunnis versus shia’s. A sad article on how sectarian violence has seeped into children war games.

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Jordan is severely restricting the number of refugees it is letting in.
Partly for security reasons and partly because the country is already dealing with nearly one million Iraqi refugees.
UN refugee body appealed for $60m in emergency aid for those fleeing the violence in Iraq - the largest long-term displacement of people since the uprooting […]

The leader never carries out the killing himself but will always get his hands dirty. So how will the execution of Saddam be seen 200 years from now?
A quarter of a million American troops invade Iraq. Hunt down its leader and set up a tribunal with all the trappings of ‘fairness’ and he is in […]

Last month, North Korea conducted a nuclear test. How does the US respond: banning iPods (which are probably manufactured in China, which is alright by China since it is the biggest lender to the US war on Iraq).
The US is now targeting the lifestyle of North Korea’s leader Kim Jong-il and the families of his […]

To be fair…this is one WMD that hurts like hell.

NY Times video of Saddam testing out WMDs like Molotov Cocktails and something that looks like an AB exercise device that I swear I’ve seen on late night infomercials.

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While sectarian violence is at a high point in Iraq, fueled by many elements that have caused the death of about 120 people a day, everyone seems to be engulfed in the terminology. Is it a civil war? Should it be called a civil war? Does admitting it’s a civil war frame it as a […]

The news world seems a bit abuzz with HM King Abdullah’s reference to the possibility of three civil wars emerging in the region, yesterday on “This Week” with George Stephanopoulos. I find it a bit odd since the international media is treating this like the King has just discovered a problem no one knew about […]

I guess the greatest show on Earth came to a conclusion today with Saddam sentenced to death. The irony that Iraq lives in today is somewhat depressing. Saddam is a symbol of a brutal past and that symbol is about to see the gallows. Yet Iraq’s present and it’s future look a lot worse than […]

“We were not in Iraq when they killed nearly 3,000 people on September the 11th, 2001.”
(Cheers, applause.)
George W. Bush speaking on Monday afternoon, October 30th 2006, at a rally held at Georgia Southern University

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A few days ago Gillo Pontecorvo passed away at the age of 86. I honestly didn’t pay attention to his death until yesterday; I don’t think many people noticed either. Gillo, an Italian Jew, made one of the most important anti-colonial films of all time: The Battle of Algiers. Few people probably remember this black […]

This is one crazy story about the family of Iraqis that died recently in Amman under mysterious circumstances. The following is what happened…
Amman - Jordanian security authorities have established that a love affair between a Jordanian and an Iraqi woman prompted the man to set his lover’s house ablaze at dawn on Wednesday, killing her […]

US researchers estimate that 655,000 Iraqis, or around one in 40 of the Iraq population, have died as a result of the 2003 invasion of their country, according to a study to be published Thursday by the British journal The Lancet. [source]

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