Iraqis defying bloody crackdown, continue protesting against government corruption and dire living conditions
October 27th, 20190 BAGHDAD - Thousands of Iraqi protesters stood fast in Baghdad’s central Tahrir Square on Sunday, defying a bloody crackdown that killed scores over the weekend and an overnight raid by security forces seeking to disperse them. Young men had erected barricades on a bridge leading to the capital’s fortified Green Zone against...
How Biden’s secret 2002 meetings led to war in Iraq
August 3rd, 20190 Even though former Vice President Joe Biden’s favorability has declined following the first Democratic debate, he remains largely considered the frontrunner for the Democratic presidential nomination by many mainstream media outlets and pundits. Early in the first debate, Sen. Bernie Sanders mentioned how Biden had supported the...
Iraq’s great rivers are dying as government struggles to fix failing infrastructure
July 4th, 20190 BAGHDAD — Iraq is in a fragile state and its great rivers including the iconic Euphrates and Tigris are dying, scientists say, as the country works to rebuild itself after thirty years of near constant war. Iraq is now in the process of running out of water, which is sourced from the two mighty, historical rivers. Both run the...
Jared Kushner’s ‘deal of the century’ fails in Bahrain
July 3rd, 20190 MANAMA - The so called "deal of the century" proposed by President Trump's senior adviser and son-in-law Jared Kushner, which sought to deal with the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, was met with minimal interest from the attending crowd. With the Palestinians absent from the conference table, in addition to the refusal of many Arab...
U.S. soldier convicted of killing Iraqi soldier, pardoned by Trump Â
May 8th, 20190 Oklahoma – President Trump pardoned former U.S. Army Lieutenant Michael Behenna on Monday after he served five years in prison for killing an Iraqi soldier in 2008. Behenna was convicted of unpremeditated murder and sentenced to 25 years in prison for the killing of Ali Mansour Mohamed. Mansour had been suspected for his involvement...
Federal appeals court reverses lower court ruling, backs Trump administration bid to deport some Iraqis
December 24th, 20180 NEW YORK — On Thursday, a federal appeals court backed the Trump administration in its attempt to deport about 100 Iraqi immigrants who'd been convicted of crimes years ago. A divided Sixth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals panel reversed a lower court ruling that had blocked President Trump’s bid to send the immigrants back to Iraq....
ISIS claims responsibility for attack on Shi’a pilgrims in Iraq
October 30th, 20180 BAGHDAD - ISIS has claimed responsibility for a bomb attack on Shi’a Muslim pilgrims in Iraq on Tuesday, the Islamist militant group’s news agency Amaq reported. The roadside bomb killed three pilgrims as they walked to a holy site near the northeastern Iraqi city of Khanaqin.
Iraq’s new prime minister struggles to form a government amid divisions and corruption
October 29th, 20181 Iraq’s new prime minister, Adel Abdul Mahdi, has had an early taste of the partisan politics he hopes to rein in, failing so far to win parliament’s approval of a full government to begin to tackle the destruction of years of war and rampant corruption. At a heated session on Wednesday night, parliament members rejected key...
Iraqi Consul General: Iraqi Americans celebrate victory over ISIS, healthier U.S.-Iraqi ties
July 21st, 20170 SOUTHFIELD — The liberation of Mosul from ISIS was a formidable victory for Iraq. But for Iraqi Americans, it was an exhilarating and unifying experience during a time of great scrutiny. The extremist group had left a trail of devastation wherever they set camp and strained relations between Western and Arab World...
Syrian Observatory: ISIS leader al-Baghdadi is dead
July 11th, 20170 BEIRUT ― The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights told Reuters on Tuesday that it had "confirmed information" that ISIS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi has been killed. The report came just days after the Iraqi army recaptured the last sectors of the northern Iraqi city of Mosul, which Baghdadi's forces overran almost exactly three years...
Iraqi PM declares victory over ISIS in Mosul
July 10th, 20170 MOSUL/ERBIL, IRAQ -Â Iraq's prime minister declared victory over Islamic State in Mosul on Monday, three years after the militants seized the city and made it the stronghold of a "caliphate" they said would take over the world. "I announce from here the end and the failure and the collapse of the terrorist state of falsehood and...
Iraq declares end of ISIS in Mosul
July 3rd, 20170 MOSUL — After eight months of grinding urban warfare, Iraqi government troops captured the ruined mosque at the heart of ISIS' de facto capital in Mosul, on Thursday and the prime minister declared the group's self styled caliphate at an end. Iraqi authorities expect the long battle for Mosul to end in coming days as remaining ISIS...
Suicide bomber kills 13, injures 24 at Baghdad ice cream shop
May 29th, 20170 BAGHDAD - On Tuesday, a suicide bomber detonated a rigged vehicle  outside of a popular ice cream shop in the Karrada district of Baghdad, killing 13 people and wounding at least 30 others, officials said. The Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant's (ISIL) claimed responsibility, stating its intent in attacking a "gathering of...
Deadly U.S. strike killed no militants in Mosul
May 5th, 20170 CAIRO — After an American airstrike killed more than 100 Iraqi civilians in a house in the western part of Mosul in March, U.S. officials suggested ISIS was to blame for the horrific toll, saying militants may have crammed the building with people, booby-trapped it with explosives, then lured in an airstrike by firing from the...
UN: ‘Worst is yet to come’ with 400,000 trapped in west Mosul
March 24th, 20170 MOSUL — About 400,000 Iraqi civilians are trapped in the ISIS-held Old City of western Mosul, short of food and basic needs, as the battle between the militants and government forces rages around them, the United Nations refugee agency said on Thursday. Many fear fleeing because of ISIS snipers and landmines. But 157,000 have......
Iraq aims to drive ISIS from west Mosul within a month, Baghdadi in hiding
March 10th, 20170 MOSUL — Iraqi forces aim to dislodge ISIS militants from west Mosul within a month, despite grueling urban combat in densely populated terrain, the head of the elite Counter Terrorism Service told Reuters on Thursday. As Iraqi forces advance deeper into west Mosul, they are facing increasingly stiff resistance from ISIS militants...
Most ISIS leaders in Mosul killed
January 21st, 20170 MOSUL — Most ISIS commanders in Mosul have been killed in battles with Iraqi government forces that raged over the past three months in the eastern side of the city, an Iraqi general said on Thursday. The fight to take the western side of Mosul, which remains under the jihadists' control, should not be more difficult than the...Iraq says all troops out by 2011
WASHINGTON (IPS) — Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki signaled last week that that all U.S. troops — including those with non-combat functions — must be out of the country by the end of 2011 under the agreement he is negotiating with the George W. Bush administration. That pronouncement, along with other moves indicating that...
A downsized occupation disguised as withdrawal
August 29th, 20080 Back in January, the Bush administration proposed a Status of Forces Agreement to govern relations between American troops and the Iraqis after the U.N. mandate expires in December 2008. Both Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton accused the White House of trying to tie the hands of a future American president and many Democrats in......
U.S., Iraq have draft to pull U.S. troops out
August 22nd, 20080 BAGHDAD — Iraq and the U.S. have reached a preliminary agreement to withdraw American forces from Iraqi cities by next June, six years into the increasingly unpopular war, Iraqi Foreign Minister Hoshyar Zebari said Thursday after meeting with Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice. The negotiations over a withdrawal timetable follow...One-fifth of Iraq funding paid to contractors
NEW YORK (IPS) — As a new report forecasts that the 190,000 private contractors in Iraq and neighboring countries will cost U.S. taxpayers more than 100 billion dollars by the end of 2008, an under-the-radar Florida court case suggests that U.S. President George W. Bush — a staunch contractor supporter — is preparing to throw......
U.S. officials admit worry over a “difficult” al-Maliki
WASHINGTON (IPS) — U.S. officials privately admit being concerned that Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al- Maliki has become "overconfident" about his government's ability to manage without U.S. combat troops, according to an Iraq analyst who just returned from a trip to Iraq arranged by U.S. commander General David Petraeus. Colin...U.S. shifts ‘hearts and minds’ fight
Washington — Nearly seven years after the 9/11 attacks spawned the question, "Why do they hate us?" and made the repair of America's poor international image a top foreign-policy pursuit, the Bush administration is taking a new tack in the "war of ideas." Out, or at least de-emphasized, is the effort to explain America and its......