A bomb blast has killed one person and injured 13 others near a bus stop in Turkey’s biggest city of Istanbul.

A Kurdish separatist group, the TAK, said it carried out the attack in response to recent violence in the mainly Kurdish south-east of Turkey.

Seven people died during several days of clashes between Kurds and Turkish riot police in the region – the worst for many years.
bbc.co.uk

When the 3,000 men of the mainly Kurdish 3rd Brigade of the 2nd Division of the Iraqi Army go on patrol it is at night, after the rigorously enforced curfew starts at 8pm. Their vehicles, bristling with heavy machine guns, race through the empty streets of the city, splashing through pools of sewage, always trying to take different routes to avoid roadside bombs. “The government cannot control the city,” said Hamid Effendi, an experienced ex-soldier who is Minister for Peshmerga Affairs in the Kurdistan Regional Government.

He is influential in the military affairs of Mosul province with its large Kurdish minority, although it is outside the Kurdish region. He believes: “The Iraqi Army is only a small force in Mosul, the Americans do not leave their bases much and some of the police are connected to the terrorists.” In the days since a suicide bomber killed 43 young men waiting to join the Iraqi army at a recruitment centre near Mosul last week soldiers in the city have been expecting a second attack.

“We are not leaving the base in daytime because we know other bombers are waiting for us,” said a soldier at a base near Mosul’s city centre.

Saadi Pire, until recently the leader of the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan in Mosul, says bluntly that the 12,000 police “are police by day and terrorists by night. They should all be dismissed and other police brought in from outside.”

He thinks that Mosul, the northern capital of Iraq with a population of 1.7 million, could erupt at any moment. He points out that it is difficult to pacify because so much of Saddam Hussein’s army – some 250,000 soldiers and 30,000 officers – was recruited from there.
independent.co.uk

BAGHDAD, Iraq (AP) – A letter from President Bush to Iraq’s supreme Shiite spiritual leader, Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, was hand-delivered earlier this week but sits unread and untranslated in the top religious figure’s office, a key al-Sistani aide told The Associated Press on Thursday.

The aide – who has never allowed use of his name in news reports, citing al-Sistani’s refusal to make any public statements himself – said the ayatollah had laid the letter aside and did not ask for a translation because of increasing “unhappiness” over what senior Shiite leaders see as American meddling in Iraqi attempts to form their first, permanent post-invasion government.

The aide said the person who delivered the Bush letter – he would not identify the messenger by name or nationality – said it carried Bush’s thanks to al-Sistani for calling for calm among his followers in preventing the outbreak of civil war after a Shiite shrine was bombed late last month.

The messenger also was said to have explained that the letter reinforced the American position that Prime Minister Ibrahim al-Jaafari should not be given a second term. Al-Sistani has not publicly taken sides in the dispute, but rather has called for Shiite unity.

The United States was known to object to al-Jaafari’s second term but has never said so outright and in public.

But on Saturday, U.S. Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad carried a similar letter from Bush to a meeting with Abdul-Aziz al-Hakim, leader of the largest Shiite political organization, the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq.

The al-Sistani aide said Shiite displeasure with U.S. involvement was so deep that dignitaries in the holy city of Najaf refused to meet Khalilzad on Wednesday during ceremonies commemorating the death of the Prophet Muhammad. The Afghan-born Khalilzad is a Sunni Muslim.
guardian.co.uk

Iraq Shi’ite ayatollah demands U.S. fire envoy
BAGHDAD, March 31 (Reuters) – A leading Iraqi Shi’ite cleric demanded on Friday that the United States sack its ambassador, accusing Zalmay Khalilzad of siding with his fellow Sunni Muslims in the sectarian conflict gripping the country.

In a sermon read out at mosques for Friday prayers, Ayatollah Mohammed al-Yacoubi said Washington had underestimated the bloody conflict between Shi’ites and the once dominant Sunni Arab minority, which many fear threatens to trigger a civil war.

“By this, they are either misled by reports, which lack objectivity and credibility, submitted to the United States by their sectarian ambassador to Iraq … or they are denying this fact,” Yacoubi said in the message, later issued as a statement.
“It (the United States) should not yield to terrorist blackmail and should not be deluded or misled by spiteful sectarians. It should replace its ambassador to Iraq if it wants to protect itself from further failures.”

After the imam of Baghdad’s Rahman mosque read that line, worshippers chanted “Allahu Akbar” — God is Greatest.

Afghan-born Khalilzad, former envoy to Kabul and the most senior Muslim in the U.S. administration, has been in Iraq for 10 months and is spearheading Washington’s increasingly urgent efforts to pressure Iraq’s leaders into a unity government.

Events in Iraq are giving the lie to administration claims that all it wants to do is create a stable, democratic Iraq, and then leave.

The U.S. assault on the Mustafa Mosque, and the deaths of, variously, 16 insurgents or 37 unarmed worshippers (depending upon whether you believe the Pentagon or Iraqi police), has prompted calls from the Iraqi government for the U.S. to hand over control of security in Iraq to the local government.

Now, if this is what the U.S. government is trying to do anyway, the Bush administration and the Pentagon should be very happy. They’ve just been told, pretty clearly, that they’re no longer wanted and they can pack up and go home, right?

But they’re not doing it.

Why?

Because the Bush administration has no intention of leaving Iraq, particularly in the hands of its elected Shi’ia-led leadership.

Note also that the Iraqi “government,” supposedly sovereign (remember all that talk of handing over sovereignty two years ago?), is asking the US to turn over control of security in the country to it, not telling it to. Note also that Bush and the U.S. ambassador to Iraq have told the country’s Shi’ia leaders that they don’t want the elected prime minister-designate, Ibrahim al-Jafari, to be prime minister.

Some sovereignty!

The truth is that the U.S. is running Iraq from the giant U.S. Embassy compound in the Green Zone, and the Iraqi “government” remains a puppet regime. The truth is also that the U.S. has been spending billions of dollars not on Iraq reconstruction, which in any case is not being phased out if it ever was being attempted, but on building several large, permanent military bases inside Iraq, from which the U.S. has no intention of budging in the foreseeable future. (Want to guess where some of that “missing” $9 billion in U.S. reconstruction money has really gone?).

The Mosque attack also shows the terrible morass that American troops have been dumped into. They’re getting shot at from all over the place–probably from mosques as much as anywhere–but if they shoot back, they end up killing innocents. And even when they kill people who were actually shooting at them, those people have families and friends who consider their deaths to be heroic and patriotic. So a blood feud against the American occupiers is made all the more bitter.

…Let’s be clear: the attack on the Mustafa mosque was no accident, nor was it some stupid move by a low-ranking officer who didn’t know the implications of what he was doing. The attack was a deliberate act of intimidation and provocation directed against the Shi’ia majority by U.S. occupation authorities. It will not be the last.

The U.S. has no interest in a successful Iraq government, since it is now clear that such a government will be Shi’ia led, and close to Iran politically. Therefore, my guess is that the fallback strategy is to rev up the Shi’ia militants, stir up civil strife, and perhaps even to get the Sunni minority, long the heart of opposition to the U.S., to turn to the U.S. for help, as the Kurds did years back.
counterpunch.org

SULAIMANIYAH, Iraq, March 31, 2006 (ENS) – Every day before school, seven year old Mohammed Fariq Rostam goes with his father on their donkeys to scrounge through Sulaimaniyah’s garbage dump.

Mohammed’s eyes often burn from the smoke that rises from the rubbish, and his forehead bears a scar from when he slipped on trash and sliced it on a piece of glass.

But he is proud when he helps his father find a source of income for their five member family. That could be aluminium cans that they can resell in the market, or a piece of electrical equipment that has been thrown away but can be repaired. Shoes and clothes, though torn or stained, are also prized.

“This isn’t a place for him,” said Mohammed’s father Fariq, 31, who is illiterate and unemployed. “I want him to have a better future.”

The dump lies in an industrial area 11 kilometers southwest of Sulaimaniyah city, near seven villages that are home to more than 100 families. It has become a source of income for many like the Rostams who are out of work and looking for anything that can be resold or reused.

Zereen Abdullah, 12, sloshes through garbage with a pair of muddy boots – one of her many finds. She has rashes all over her body from the trash that itches her skin, but triumphantly announces, “I have found three dolls, and whenever I go home I play with them.”
ens-newswire.com

No one knows how many civilians have died violently in Iraq since the US-led invasion in 2003. The most careful assessment, by the website Iraq Body Count, estimates at least 36,000. The true figure could be three times higher. The uncertainty is explained by General Tommy Franks’ now-notorious remark, “We don’t do body counts.”

Three interesting facts nevertheless help shape a sense of the possibilities. One is that the US forces insist that they use precision techniques to minimise “collateral damage”. The second is that the coalition recently and controversially admitted using phosphorus weapons in its attack on Falluja. The third is that one of the US marine air wings operating in Iraq announced in a press release in November 2005 that since the invasion began it had dropped more than half a million tons of explosives on Iraq.

The felt inconsistency between the first fact and the other two reminds one that ever since the deliberate mass bombing of civilians in the second world war, and as a direct response to it, the international community has outlawed the practice. It first tried to do so in the fourth Geneva convention of 1949, but the UK and the US would not agree, since to do so would have been an admission of guilt for their systematic “area bombing” of German and Japanese civilians.
guardian.co.uk

US AUTHORITIES in Iraq guarded freed hostage Jill Carroll overnight after insurgents released her from nearly three months of captivity and published a video showing her praising them.

Insurgents, meanwhile, carried out a series of attacks killing eight people, five of them from one Shiite family.
US officials declined to say when the 28-year-old freelance journalist would go home to the United States.

Video footage posted on the Internet late Thursday showed Ms Carroll in an interview with her kidnappers before her release in which she praised Iraq’s insurgents and even predicted their victory.

The circumstances under which she spoke were unclear.

“I think the mujahedeen are very smart and even with all the technology and all the people that the American army has here, they still are better at knowing how to live and work here, more clever,” Ms Carroll said in response to a question.

Asked what she meant, Ms Carroll, who was snatched from a Baghdad street on January 7, answered: “It makes very clear that the mujahedeen are the ones that will win in the end.”
heraldsun.news.com

Off with her head.

Professing to be the greater civilization, the intellect is deliberately disassociated, sanity is interned so that greed may proceed and allow the savagery of the greater to prey upon the less. While mankind strives for nobility, there are some among us who contemplate such base decisions that would threaten the existence of another nation. Those same powers who would refute that man is born under one law, and so they bound him by another, targeting him with nuclear weapons.
Alarmed at such baseness, Philip Giarldi, A former CIA officer, in an August 1, 2005 issue of The American Conservative warns that Dick Cheney has issued a request for using tactical nuclear weapons against Iran. More troubling is that the use of nuclear weapons is not conditional on Iran being involved in the act of terrorism against the United States. Otherwise stated, Iran is being set up for “an unprovoked nuclear attack”.

Ms. Rice who is rather smug about having earned herself a major victory by getting everyone on board in referring Iran to the United Nations Security Council, can also invite these same nations to share this crime against humanity. Dr. Jorge Hirsch, professor of physics at UC, San Diego, in his remarkable video emphasizes the consequences of a US nuclear attack on Iran. Each bomb would deliver an incalculable number of corpses, the radiation fallout, both immediate and residual, unparallel in magnitude to the tragedy witnessed in Hiroshima and Nagasaki 60 years ago.
zmag.org

“This is a real test for the Security Council. There’s just no doubt that for close to 20 years, the Iranians have been pursuing nuclear weapons through a clandestine program that we’ve uncovered.

“If the U.N. Security Council can’t deal with the proliferation of nuclear weapons, can’t deal with the greatest threat we have with a country like Iran – that’s one of the leading state sponsors of terrorism – if the Security Council can’t deal with that, you have a real question of what it can deal with.”

Thus spake Bonkers Bolton, Bush’s Ambassador to the United Nations, on the eve of UN Security Council debate on what to do with the “Iranian Dossier” the Director-General of the International Atomic Energy Agency had forwarded them at the request of the IAEA Board of Governors.

As required by the Treaty on Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons, Iran concluded in 1974 a Safeguards Agreement with the International Atomic Energy Agency wherein Iran agreed to allow IAEA inspectors to satisfy themselves that no “source or special nuclear materials” are being used or have been used in furtherance of a nuclear weapons program.

Director-General ElBaradei reported to the IAEA Board just last month [.pdf] that no declared source or special nuclear materials had been used in furtherance of a nuclear weapons program, but that “the Agency is not at this point in time in a position to conclude that there are no undeclared nuclear materials or activities in Iran.”

Contrary to Bonkers Bolton, the Iranian dossier makes it clear that the IAEA has never uncovered any evidence whatsoever that Iran is now pursuing or has ever pursued a nuclear weapons program.

And, of course, whether Iran is – or is not – a leading state sponsor of terrorism is none of the IAEA’s beeswax.

So, how did the Security Council deal with a report whose principal conclusion was that the IAEA would need more time before finally concluding that there is no evidence to uncover?

Well, they noted with “serious concern” that after more than two years of intrusive inspections the Agency was still not in a position to conclude that Iran had declared all its activities that should have been declared.

Now, that’s obviously not what Bolton wanted or expected.

No Security Council resolution.

Not even a Presidential Statement declaring Iran “in violation of its NPT obligations.”

No suggestion that Iranian behavior “constituted a threat to international peace and security.”

In fact, the only concrete action the Council took was to “call on” Iran to resume cooperating with ElBaradei, as before.
antiwar.com

An article by two prominent American professors arguing that the pro-Israel lobby exerts a dominant and damaging influence on US foreign policy has triggered a furious row, pitting allegations of anti-semitism against claims of intellectual intimidation.

Stephen Walt, the academic dean of Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, and John Mearsheimer, a political science professor at the University of Chicago, published two versions of the essay, the Israel Lobby, in the London Review of Books and on a Harvard website.

The pro-Israel lobby and its sway over American policy has always been a controversial issue, but the professors’ bluntly worded polemic created a firestorm, drawing condemnation from left and right of the political spectrum.

Professor Walt’s fellow Harvard professor Alan Dershowitz – criticised in the article as an “apologist” for Israel – denounced the authors as “liars” and “bigots” in the university newspaper, The Harvard Crimson, and compared their arguments to neo-Nazi literature.

“Accusations of powerful Jews behind the scenes are part of the most dangerous traditions of modern anti-semitism,” wrote two fellow academics, Jeffrey Herf and Andrei Markovits, in a letter to the London Review of Books. Critics also pointed out that the article had been praised by David Duke, a notorious American white supremacist.

Prof Mearsheimer said the storm of protest proved one of its arguments – that the strength of the pro-Israel lobby stifled debate on US foreign policy.
guardian.co.uk