The View From Baghdad: Mounting Death Toll Makes a Mockery of US Optimism

[unhappycamper]

September 14, 2007 | Members of an honor guard, assigned to a group burial, hold six American flags at Arlington National Cemetery in Virginia. Army Pfc. David Neil Simmons, Staff Sgt. Harrison Brown and Pfc. Todd Singleton were killed in an explosion in Iraq in April. Their remains were unidentifiable, leading to the group burial.
(Photo: Win McNamee / Getty Images)


The View From Baghdad: Mounting Death Toll Makes a Mockery of US Optimism
By Kim Sengupta
The Independent UK
Tuesday 11 September 2007

By the time General Petraeus had finished speaking yesterday the slaughter in Iraq for the previous 24 hours could be tallied. It was not an exceptionally violent day by the standards of Iraq: seven US soldiers lay dead and 11 injured in the capital; other instances of sectarian violence included a suicide bomb which had killed 10 and wounded scores near Mosul while 10 bodies were found in Baghdad. Three policemen were killed in clashes in Mosul, and a car bomb outside a hospital in the capital had exploded, killing two and wounding six.

In Baghdad, on the surface the overt violence appears to have diminished. There are fewer loud explosions. But, the city is now being partitioned by sectarian hatred and fear; by concrete walls and barbed wire. Claims that the US military strategy is paving the way for a stable society bear little resemblance to the reality on the ground.

The US is accused of manipulating figures relating to violence to fit their case, ignoring evidence which shows that the influx of 30,000 troops has done little to end the continuing bloodshed.

The death of Omar al-Husseini in the Huriya district of Baghdad is one of many which does not even figure in the American reckoning. His killers, masked and carrying guns, dragged him away as his mother wept and his father pleaded for mercy. That was the last time they saw their son alive. Three weeks later they heard that he had been killed.

Omar was 20. His killers were Shia, he was a Sunni, the victim of a spree of murders which has ethnically cleansed neighbourhoods through the city. But both the US military and the Iraqi police have told his parents that as far as they are concerned the abduction and killings were purely criminal acts. This means, statistically, that his death is not included by the US in the calculations for sectarian killings produced yesterday.

The causes behind the daily death toll, if addressed at all, draw conflicting accounts. Mourners carried the coffin of a young mother along the streets of Sadr City yesterday. She had been killed, said the locals, along with her two daughters when US and Iraqi government forces had stormed four homes. The US military confirmed they had exchanged small-arms fire during the operation, but insisted they had no reports of civilian casualties. Also yesterday, attendants at the Baghdad morgue did their round of collecting bodies, nameless victims of faceless killers.


Rest of article at: http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/091107D.shtml

[babylonsister]

1. uhc, this might get wider viewing in GD. Rec'd. nt

[unhappycamper]

2. Thanks - I just posted to GD.

How was your vacation?

[babylonsister]

3. Gee, thank you for asking!

It was fine though we went knowing it was the rainy season-went to Phuket, and I am grateful we weren't on that plane that crash-landed. When it rained, is sure did (reminded me of TX), but we did have a few glorious days. All in all, a fun, relaxing trip (except for getting there and back!).