Rape Case Political Football in Iraq
Iraq War has Caused Spike in Global terrorism
Iraqi security forces, Shiites, raided a house looking for a possible Sunni Arab insurgent named al-Janabi. They found only his wife at home. They took her into custody (probably as a hostage). They accused her of cooking for insurgents. Then the police gang-raped her. She went on Aljazeera and told her story. Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki, a Shiite head of a Shiite government, at first said he would have a commission look into her charges. Then he reversed himself and accused the woman of lying and implying that she was put up to it by the Sunni insurgency. Marc Santora of the New York Times managed to interview the nurse who treated her, and found that Mrs. al-Janabi’s story was corroborated.
In essence, the Shiite prime minister is shielding Shiite police commandos from being charged with a crime against a Sunni Arab woman. Al-Zaman reports in Arabic that Ahmad Abdul Ghafur al-Samarra’i of the Sunni Pious Endowments Board was demanding that the victim be sent to Europe for treatment. Update: Al-Samarra’i has just been fired from the board by PM Nuri al-Maliki for making this comment!
Riverbend meditates on the meaning of the rape, and laments that the incident is being interpreted in the terms of religious ethnicity.
The US is considering attempting to go into Sadr City after the Mahdi Army and Frederick Kagan of the American Enterprise Institute is now in favor. He says he over-estimated the Mahdi Army and under-estimated Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki earlier. Kagan doesn’t have the slightest idea what he is talking about when it comes to Iraq, and he is advising Bush what to do, who knows even less. Sadr City is quiet because the Mahdi Army made a policy decision to cooperate with the security plan, and al-Maliki is in on this deal. The Mahdi Army is the street gangs of the Sadr Movement, to which millions of Iraqis have given their allegiance. You can’t uproot a social movement with a few patrols and firefights. Sadrism will be there long after the US is forced to withdraw from Iraq.
Bush’s Iraq War has driven a big increase in terrorist attacks in the world.
Iraq through an Iraqi’s eyes. It doesn’t sound like Cheney’s description.
Blair may pull out thousands of British troops from the Basra area.