Juan Cole

A suicide belt bomber killed his own clansmen at a tribal reconciliation meeting at Yusufiya just south of Baghdad, killing at least 30 and wounding 110. It was the first big suicide bombing of 2009.i There was also a bombing each in Baghdad and Mosul that left 6 civilians wounded. Sawt al-Iraq reports in Arabic […]

The USG Open Source Center paraphrases articles in the Jordanian press on the Israeli attack on Gaza. Jordan is one of only two Arab states to have a formal peace treaty with Israel, and its intellectuals clearly want the government to abrogate it. Worse, they have been driven by the images of dead children dug […]

Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki announced Thursday that Iraq had “regained its national sovereignty”. It could in fact be argued that for the first time since the end of the Gulf War, Iraq is again for most purposes an independent country in international law. It was put under Chapter 7 of the United Nations charter […]

The news keeps reporting that the Israeli air force bombed refugee camps in Gaza. Did you ever wonder how those refugee camps got to be in Gaza? Cont’d . . .I mean, where are they refugees from? There didn’t used to be refugees in Gaza, before 1948, after all. The grandparents of today’s refugees were […]

We all too often focus only on negative developments, and while it is understandable for people to keep their eyes on impending calamities, obsessing about the bad sometimes causes us to miss good news. We see a lot of that even with regard to the US. For instance, there has been a 23% decline in […]

The pace of Israel’s bombardment of Gaza slowed on Wednesday, with two big airstrikes. One aimed at destroying tunnels that allow Palestinians to smuggle in goods from Egypt. The other targeted the offices of deposed Palestine Authority prime minister Ismail Haniya, who is now in hiding. Aljazeera English has compelling video of Tuesday’s bombardment from […]

1. Iraqis are safer because of Bush’s War. In fact, conditions of insecurity have helped created both an internal and external refugee problem: ‘ At least 4.2 million Iraqis were displaced. These included 2.2 million who were displaced within Iraq and some 2 million refugees, mostly in Syria (around 1.4 million) and Jordan (around half […]

Israel pursued “all out war” on Hamas in Gaza on Tuesday, as the death toll rose to 360, with wounded at over 1000. Already in the morning on Tuesday, 10 Palestinians had been killed. AP reports that the Islamic Mission Party (Da’wa) of Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki called on all Muslim countries to cut […]

Here is my translation of Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani’s fatwa or legal ruling issued on Sunday concerning the Israeli attacks on Gaza. Arabic text courtesy of Sawt al-Iraq. Sistani is the spiritual leader not only of Iraqi Shiites but of many other Shiites in Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, Lebanon and India. He is explicit in […]