Thread: Iraq/Dinar News until April 26, 2007 Midnight cst.

23 April, 2007

FM Zebari Meets US Ambassador to Iraq

Mr. Hoshyar Zebari, Minister of Foreign Affairs, met on 23 April with Mr. Ryan Crocker, the US Ambassador to Iraq in attendance of Mr. Labeed Abbawi, the Ministry Undersecretary for Policy Planning and Bilateral Relations, and a number of the embassy staff members. During the meeting, issues of shared interest were discussed.

Mr. Zebari briefed Mr. Crocker on the key developments concerning Geneva Conference on Humanitarian Needs of Refugees and Displaced inside and outside Iraq recently held, the communications made with his counterparts on the expanded Ministerial Meeting of Iraq’s Neighboring Countries, P5, G8, UN, OIC and the Arab League as well as the preparations for the Sahrm Al-Sheikh Meeting on 4 May 2007.

Minister Zebari stressed the need to coordinate with states for the success of the Meeting. Mr. Zebari referred to the technical committees decided on in the Meeting of Iraq’s Neighboring countries on 10 March 2007.

Mr. Crocker expressed the US’s keenness to see the participation by all neighboring countries and other concerned parties in the upcoming Conference.

23 April, 2007

FM Calls up KSA FM


On 23rd April, 2007, Mr. Hoshyar Zebari, Foreign Minister called up His Highness Ameer Saud Al-Faisal, the Foreign Minister of Saudi Arabia.

Mr. Zebari expressed appreciation of the Iraqi government to the Saudi government for writing off 80% of Iraqi debts owed by Iraq as a kind gesture from the leadership of KSA towards the people of Iraq.

Mr. Zebari briefed his Saudi counterpart on the ongoing preparations for the expanded ministerial meeting of Iraq neibouring countries due to be held in Sharm Al-Shaikh , Egypt, on 4 May 2007 .

A number of issues of common interest were discussed

Originally Posted by Adster

Best this gets moved to the speculation/rumour thread please mods as there's no link to back up the info and shouldn't be on the 'news' thread.

Thanks.

Good call.
Leann

What difference does it make to the dead, the orphans and the homeless, whether the mad destruction is wrought under the name of totalitarianism or the holy name of liberty or democracy?-Mahatma Gandhi

Originally Posted by bambiebdgrl

What is "West Qurna2"?
Leann

It's a Russian oil project that LUKoil plans to kick into high gear as soon as the HCL is rockin'.

Az-Zaman claimed that an Iranian force entered Iraq yesterday, occupied a nearby police station, and that the occupied area will soon be surveyed for oil by Iran. The newspaper relayed the news through Radio Sawa, whose objectivity may be questionable – the radio station is owned and funded by the US Government – but Az-Zaman said that the Iraqi police in the area “did not confirm or deny the reports.”

Sawa learned of the event through “sources in the International Coalition.” Its journalists were told that an Iranian Army force asked the Iraqis to evacuate the station of Qutaiba, east of the city of Kut, and informed the Iraqi border guards that oil surveys are to begin on the site soon, “and that they should not interfere.”
Bitter border disputes have plagued the relationship between Iran and Iraq over the last decades. Iraq long maintained that areas east of Shatt al-'Arab are Iraqi territory occupied by Iran, while Iran claims territories in Iraq. These disputes are further complicated by the fact that the disputed areas (especially in the South) are extremely rich with oil resources, and are the main cause behind the decade-long Iran-Iraq war in the 1980s.

In other news, Az-Zaman relayed an Iraqi government report affirming that around eight billion dollars have been “squandered” in Iraq during the last four years due to “administrative and financial corruption.”

For a sense of scale, the Iraqi state budget since 2003 has ranged between 5 and 25 billion dollars.

The report did not mention additional details or specify these instances of “corruption” and the ministries involved. Az-Zaman referred that to the fact that the commission that drafted the report is “an official one, and directly attached to the office of the prime minister, Nuri al-Maliki.”

The newspaper also said that a report by the Interior Ministry revealed that 120 cases of corruption were picked up by the ministry’s controllers in 2006, adding up to a total value of 6 billion dinars (around 4 million dollars).

According to the ministry’s report, these investigations have allowed the return of 5 billion dinars to the state’s coffers.

Go Big, Go Long, Go Home. . . . Go to Commercial
04/07/2007 5:38 PM ET

Army deserters to be executed

Azzaman, April 23, 2007


Iraqi soldiers who desert their units now face execution, according to a decree by the country’s Presidential Council.

The offense is the latest of nearly 200 others convicted Iraqis are to be punished with death penalty.

The council slapped three-year imprisonment on absentee soldiers.

The harsh penalties come following reports of large-scale desertion from army ranks in the wake of the latest surge in rebel attacks against U.S. and Iraqi forces.

The penalties are also applicable to the cadets of military academies in the country.

Turning desertion into an offense punishable by death comes amid mounting criticism from human rights groups that Iraq has become one of the world’s highest users of death penalty.

Amnesty International, for example, says that more than 100 people have been hanged since mid-2004 after unfair trials and 270 others are on the death row.

Kurds in Internation - In twist of history, Kurds patrol Baghdad
BAGHDAD- The New York Times - The Shiite mother and her son opened their door for the soldiers on night patrol.



In walked the Americans, each brandishing an M-16 assault rifle. Next came the men wearing tan uniforms and carrying Kalashnikovs. They spoke Arabic with accents as thick as crude oil.

“Are there problems in the neighborhood?” said their leader, Capt. Sardar Hamasala. “We’re here for your safety. Let us know if there are sectarian problems or other kinds of problems — Sunnis threatening Shia, Shia threatening Sunnis.”

The black-robed mother and her son said they were glad to see the soldiers, and shook their hands before the men stepped back into the cool night air of western Baghdad.

“There was a time when we couldn’t go from house to house like this among the Arabs just because we’re Kurds,” Captain Hamasala said. “Now we’re trying to make things easier for them. We’re proud of that.”

Kurdish soldiers from the rugged north are the latest armed group to be introduced into Baghdad’s boiling sectarian stew. Like the Americans, they are a slender peacekeeping force standing between the warring Sunni Arabs and Shiite Arabs in a city of more than six million. American commanders consider them a critical part of the new Baghdad security plan because of their fighting prowess and neutrality in the conflict between the Arab sects. About 2,100 have been brought into the capital in recent months.

The deployment of Kurdish forces carries risks. Some Kurdish politicians have criticized sending Kurds to Baghdad for fear their presence will exacerbate tensions between Kurds and Arabs. Many Kurds also harbor intense hostility toward Arabs because of decades of violence in Iraq between the two ethnicities, so there is the chance that Kurdish soldiers could treat Arabs harshly.

But so far, American officers working with the Kurds have praised their professionalism, and several Arab families in neighborhoods patrolled by Kurds said in interviews that they hoped the Kurds would help stem the sectarian violence.

This is possibly the first time since the days of Saladin, the revered 12th-century Kurdish warrior-king, that Kurdish forces have been given the task of controlling swaths of Baghdad. They have been ordered to secure the streets for their historic enemies, the Arabs.

The Kurds have complicated attitudes toward their mission. “God sent Muhammad as a prophet to these people, and he couldn’t solve their problems,” Captain Hamasala said. “How are we supposed to help them?”
He later added: “Here, they still talk about what happened 2,000 or 3,000 years ago. That’s the way the Arabs think.”

There have already been some clashes between the Kurds and Arab militants. The captain’s unit and American soldiers came under withering gunfire one night when they went into two mosques to detain hundreds of men and boys. Another Kurdish unit battled members of the Mahdi Army, a powerful Shiite militia, at a checkpoint in western Baghdad this month, leaving one civilian dead and one wounded. That unit has been trying to secure several blocks in the Amel neighborhood to encourage displaced Sunni Arab families to return.

Some of the Kurds here — as well as their fathers and grandfathers and great-grandfathers — fought for independence from Arab Iraq as militiamen called pesh merga, or “those who face death.”

Saddam Hussein retaliated, killing at least 80,000 Kurds and razing villages in the so-called Anfal campaign in 1988. But the Kurds won autonomy after the American military set up a no-flight zone over Iraqi Kurdistan in 1991 to prevent incursions by the Iraqi Army.

“I’m proud of being an officer in an army that just years ago was killing my people and torturing my family,” said Lt. Karwan Abdul Hadi as he led a night patrol on a hunt for a suspected Shiite militant. “It’s very important to make the point that we’re not like the Arabs. We don’t look for revenge. We don’t have a black heart.”

The lieutenant noted that the Kurdish militias fought their own civil war from 1993 to 1998, a conflict that left thousands dead.
“But it wasn’t like this,” he said.

The lieutenant’s superior, Captain Hamasala, 30, commands the headquarters company of the 1st Battalion, 3rd Brigade of the 4th Iraqi Army Division, the first Kurdish unit to enter Baghdad as part of the buildup to the new security plan. The company lives on an old air base in the Ali Salah neighborhood of western Baghdad. Arab soldiers from another division sleep in nearby barracks, as do American soldiers from the 82nd Airborne.

The Kurds go out on patrol with the Americans and shun the Arabs.
“The Americans are our friends in Iraq, not the Arabs,” Captain Hamasala said as he and 10 other Kurds left the base one night with an American foot patrol.

Another officer, Lt. Serwan Dawa Rashid, said one afternoon at a traffic checkpoint: “I consider the relationship between us and the United States to be like that between Tel Aviv and the U.S.”


The Kurds moved into the area in January. The Americans came a few weeks later. They oversee the neighborhoods of Ali Salah, Salaam and Topchi, which are dominated by Shiite militiamen who have evicted dozens of Sunni Arab families. The most challenging task is to keep the militias from running off the few remaining Sunni Arab households.


Most Kurds are Sunni Muslims, but generally have little religious zeal. They drink hard and dance harder and rarely pray five times a day.
Arabs see them as a neutral force, the Americans say.
“The reason why people are willing to trust the 1-3-4 is because they’re Kurdish,” said Capt. Benjamin Morales, 28, commander of Company B of the 1st Battalion, 325th Airborne Infantry, the partner unit of Captain Hamasala’s company. “They don’t care about Sunni or Shia.”

There is little doubt as to where the loyalties of the Kurds lie. The company is from eastern Kurdistan, which has been ruled for decades by the party of Jalal Talabani, now the president of Iraq. Each room in the Kurdish barracks has a poster of Mr. Talabani’s roly-poly face.

Every Iraqi Army unit brought into Baghdad for the security plan is expected to remain here for three months. Captain Hamasala said he was not keen to be here, far from the relative safety of Iraqi Kurdistan.
But orders are orders.

When word came of the deployment, “our families were shocked,” the captain said. “They call us every day, and we lie to them. We tell them we stay inside the base. One day, my mother called when we were out on patrol in a market. There were cars, people, noise in the background. I wanted to end the call. I knew she’d suspect something was up.”

The American officer who serves as a liaison to Captain Hamasala’s company said the Kurds had never turned down a mission.

“They’re the best soldiers I’ve worked with on the Iraqi Army side in three deployments in Iraq,” said the officer, Capt. Ross Kinkead.
Peyamner News Agency