Juan Cole

5 Members of Interim Governing Council Press for Power Ahmad Chalabi, Abdul Aziz al-Hakim, and three other members of the American-appointed Interim Governing Council are using the current difficulties of the Bush administration to press for greater immediate power for themselves. The French at the Security Council have argued for a quick return to Iraqi […]

Constitutional Preparatory Report at end of September Fuad Masum, head of the Preparatory Committee for the Iraqi Constitution, announced Sunday that his committee’s report would be out at the end of September. The committee sees two principal ways of proceeding toward an elected constitutional convention. One would be to hold town meeting style elections in […]

Iraq Petroleum Production Jumps Iraq is back to producing 1.5 million barrels a day, up from the 800,000 typical of August. With its present equipment, Iraq could produce 3 million barrels a day, and the US administration of the country had been hoping to reach that level by next spring. The low levels of production […]

Najaf Police Chief Dismissed for Corruption Haydar Mahdi Matar al-Miyali, the Governor of Najaf, announced Sunday that the city’s police chief, Husayn Yasin al-Juburi, had been arrested on corruption charges. Legal action against him is pending. Other sources said he had been dismissed for poor administration. The dismissal comes two weeks after a huge truck […]

Four US Soldiers Wounded Guerrillas fired a rocket propelled grenade at US troops in Mosul on Saturday, wounding three of them. Also, guerrillas near Falluja hit a humvee with explosives, wounding one US soldier.

The Case of the Missing Weapons of Mass Destruction Josh Marshall has an excellent piece today, Sunday, on how the British and US governments are delaying the publication of the Kay report on Iraq’s alleged weapons of mass destruction. Marshall quotes sources that indicate that these just haven’t been found, so that the report will […]

Baathist Resistance Fighters Highly Organized in Iraq The Baathist cells hitting American troops in and around Baquba are tightly knit, organized and take direction from a command cell in Diyala. This according to interviews conducted by Knight-Ridder and summarized by Hannah Allam. These guerrillas are a combination of remnants of the Baath military, young volunteers […]

“Massacre” Condemned by Sunni Clerics in Falluja Angry crowds chanted anti-American slogans in the western city of Falluja (pop. 256,000) as the security police killed in a friendly fire incident by US troops were buried on Saturday. Reuters reported that “Sunni clerics in the town issued a ‘Declaration by the people of Fallujah’ condemning the […]

al-Qaeda and Pakistani Intelligence It has long been clear that Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence (military intelligence) helped create the Taliban and almost certainly was involved in al-Qaeda somehow. Just-declassified US military intelligence documents reveal that ISI actually ran one of the al-Qaeda training camps in Afghanistan and may have been far more involved in fostering the […]