In Iraq, Combating Oil Corruption, Staving Off Fears of a Kurdish-Arab War

Iraq Oil Report. Posted February 22, 2009.

McClatchy Newspapers’ Trenton Daniel reports of the trial when Iraqi journalist Muntathar al Zaidi took the stand Thursday, he said that he hadn’t planned to hurl his shoes at President George W. Bush, but the sight of the smirking leader at a Baghdad news conference got the best of him. “He had an icy smile with no blood or spirit,” said Zaidi, who was enclosed in a wooden pen. “At that moment, I only saw Bush, and the whole world turned black. I was feeling the blood of innocent people moving under his feet.”

Four prisoners who were being held at the American prison at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, have been sent back to their home country, Iraq, where they are being interrogated, Marc Santora reports for The New York Times. “The government is reviewing their files to see if there are any charges against them,” said Wijdan Mikhail Salim, the minister of human rights. If they are not found guilty of any crimes, she said, they will be released.

Alive in Bagdad: Hospitals Improve Slowly

In this episode of Alive in Baghdad, we talk to several Iraqis: doctors, patients and hospital administrators, each of whom offers us a unique, yet notably hopeful, perspective on Iraq’s health care system.

Iraq’s wars and crises over recent years and decades have left over one and a half million children as orphans, disabled or with special needs, Hussein al-Shummari reports for Niqash. Today, in the ‘new’ Iraq, these children are struggling to find a path to a better future as medical facilities and government assistance remain woefully inadequate.

Commanders of the former army have set several conditions for the government to meet before considering reconciliation. Azzaman reports on top of their demands come the cancellation of a notorious law called debaathification and ridding the current armed forces of sectarian affiliations.

“We only want a normal life,” says Um Qasim, sitting in a bombed out building in Baghdad. She and others around have been saying that for years, Dahr Jamail reports for Inter Press Service. Um Qasim lives with 13 family members in a brick shanty on the edge of a former military intelligence building in the Mansoor district of Baghdad. Five of her children are girls. Homelessness is not easy for anyone, but it is particularly challenging for women and girls.

Turkey is likely to play a prominent role as the US begins to remove thousands of tons of equipment and supplies from Iraq over the next year or so. Gordon Lubold reports for The Christian Science Monitor the American military has been quietly shipping construction materials, food, fuel, and other nonlethal items into Iraq through Turkey using a two-lane commercial border crossing known as the Habur Gate in southeastern Turkey.

The war in Iraq isn’t over. The main events may not even have happened yet, Thomas E. Ricks reports for The Washington Post:

Many of those closest to the situation in Iraq expect a full-blown civil war to break out there in the coming years. “I don’t think the Iraqi civil war has been fought yet,” one colonel told me. Others were concerned that Iraq was drifting toward a military takeover. Counterinsurgency expert David Kilcullen worried that the classic conditions for a military coup were developing — a venal political elite divorced from the population lives inside the Green Zone, while the Iraqi military outside the zone’s walls grows both more capable and closer to the people, working with them and trying to address their concerns.

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