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Baghdad, Iraq: The City of Sectarian Lights
2007-12-12 03:49:00 AP:Strings of bulbs festooning the Imam Kazim shrine's four majestic minarets light up the sky over Baghdad's Shiite Kazimiyah neighborhood, attracting thousands of nighttime worshippers. Coffee houses and restaurants are packed with customers along nearby streets, where turbaned clerics, chador-clad women and families buy furniture, toys and clothes in teeming shops. The district's gold market, the largest in the city, does brisk business until well after dusk.But a drive from Kazimiyah over an unlit Tigris River bridge into Azamiyah, a Sunni stronghold, reveals only darkness and no signs of life along the main road. What nightlife does exist is confined to a walled area of about two square miles heavily patrolled by U.S. troops. One glaring exception: Kasrah, a Shiite enclave, with its lively outdoor market and coffee houses.Night is the time when the Shiite dominance of the capital becomes most apparent following the sectarian "battle of Baghdad," which displaced tens of ...
By: American Entropy
BAGHDAD, Iraq (AP) — Saddam Hussein’s half broth
2007-01-15 08:47:01 BAGHDAD, Iraq (AP) — Saddam Hussein’s half brother and the former head of Iraq’s Revolutionary Court were both hanged before dawn Monday, Prosecutor Munqith al-Faroon said, two weeks and two days after the former Iraqi dictator was executed in a chaotic scene that has drawn worldwide criticism. Barzan Ibrahim, Saddam’s half brother and former intelligence [...]
BAGHDAD, Iraq (AP) - A Kurdish army brigade from northern Ir
2007-01-14 05:18:01 BAGHDAD, Iraq (AP) - A Kurdish army brigade from northern Iraq is undergoing intensive urban combat training for deployment to Baghdad, where it expects to take on the Mahdi Army Shiite militia, its commander said Saturday. Meanwhile, three Iraqi generals told The Associated Press that the Iraqi commander who will lead the Baghdad security mission was the government’s second choice and only got the job after the U.S. military objected to the first officer named to the post by Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki. Underscoring the difficulties in taming Iraq’s surging violence, at least 48 people were killed or found dead nationwide on Saturday, including a Sunni cleric who was shot to death near his home in Samarra, 60 miles north of Baghdad. In the northern city of Irbil, Brig. Gen. Nazir Assem Korran, commander of the 1st Infantry Brigade, 2nd Division of the Iraqi army, said “we will head to Baghdad soon. We have 3,000 soldiers who are currently undergoing intensive t...
By: TexasFred's
BAGHDAD, Iraq - Mahdi Army militia members have stopped wea
2007-01-14 05:18:01 BAGHDAD, Iraq - Mahdi Army militia members have stopped wearing their black uniforms, hidden their weapons and abandoned their checkpoints in an apparent effort to lower their profile in Baghdad in advance of the arrival of U.S. reinforcements. ?We have explicit directions to keep a low profile . . . not to confront, not to be dragged into a fight and to calm things down,? said one official who received the orders from the anti-American Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr. Al-Sadr heads the Mahdi Army, Iraq?s largest Shiite militia, headquartered in Najaf. The official asked not to be named because he was not authorized to reveal the militia?s plans. Militia members say al-Sadr ordered them to stand down shortly after President George Bush?s announcement that the U.S. would send 17,500 more American troops to Baghdad to work alongside the Iraqi security forces. The decision by al-Sadr to lower his force?s profile in Baghdad will likely cut violence in the city and allow American forces t...
By: TexasFred's
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