Juan Cole

At least 10 Dead in Deadly blasts in Mosul, Telafar Wire services report that a suicide bomber killed five Iraqis in Mosul, and another killed five Iraqis in the largely Turkmen city of Telafar. Guerrillas attempted to assassinate a deputy interior minister, but killed his bodyguard and injured three others, while he escaped. On Monday, […]

Demonstration in Samarra Ash-Sharq al-Awsat/ AFP: Hundreds of Iraqis demonstrated Tuesday in Samarra, demanding the withdrawal of American troops from their city. Clan elders and school and university students participated in the rally, which came in response to a call from the municipal council and the Association of Muslim Scholars. The demonstrators gathered close to […]

Iraq News Roundup Ash-Sharq al-Awsat does a report on Fallujah in which it alleges that of the residents who have returned after the US assault, many are living in tents because their homes are uninhabitable. It also says that Iraq is asking the UN Security Council formally to lift the sanctions and restrictions imposed on […]

Competent Intelligence Urged by Rumsfeld Ironies of Iraq today: Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld is afraid that the new Shiite religious government in Iraq will purge ex-Baathists placed in the army and intelligence services by US ally Iyad Allawi, a long-term CIA asset. Rumsfeld said that competent persons should be retained. This is the same […]

Sharon Defies Bush The AP headline gets it right: Sharon dismisses Bush Warning on Settlement Expansion. I would have called it “large-scale land theft” rather than “settlement expansion,” but it comes to the same thing. Wait a second. Isn’t that Ariel Sharon, whose government gets billions of dollars a year from the United States (who […]

What the Muslims think is Really Happening in Jerusalem The far-right Israeli extremists who demonstrated in Jerusalem were not just protesting the plan to remove Israeli colonists from Gaza, as was reported in the Western press. Rather, they were threatening to invade the al-Aqsa Mosque. The Muslim world understood this threat as an intention to […]

Life Imprisonment for Saddam? Are the guerrillas fighting in Iraq demanding that Saddam not be executed as one of their conditions for coming in from the cold? Adrian Blomfield reports from Baghdad that leaders of the Fidayi Saddam and Jaish Muhammad (Sunnis, including some former military officers who adopted political Islam) have been in back-channel […]

US Millions in Iraq Wasted I saw Lewis Black, the comedian, in Detroit last month. Lewis does angry humor. But at one point he went on a rant about how you just had to look around Detroit to see how the Congress was allowing our cities to deteriorate, and he flew into a genuine rage. […]

Allawi resigns, Joins New Government Iyad Allawi has consented to join the new Iraqi government. He is demanding 4 of 31 cabinet posts for his Iraqiya Party, which only has 40 seats in the 275-member parliament, including at least one important cabinet post. Allawi has now submitted his resignation as prime minister and is dissolving […]