BAGHDAD-Nobody in Iraq gives a tinker’s damn whether or not the U.S. Secretary of Defense gets fired.
That is, nobody that I’ve come across in the attempt to gauge the depth and diameter of the crater that has been blown into the Iraqi mind by those images out of Abu Ghraib.
So far, this Read More
BAGHDAD-Even if you are a deaf person and an optimist, it would be hard not to hear the sound of the wheels coming off.
On Wednesday, March 31, four American contractors escorting a food-distribution convoy through the city of Falluja were killed by Iraqi insurgents, and crowds cheered as their charred bodies were mutilated, dismembered Read More
BAGHDAD-Compared to Baghdad’s in-front-of-a-hotel bombing on Wednesday, March 17, Basra’s in-front-of-a-hotel bombing on Thursday, March 18-three Iraqi civilians killed, minimal damage-was no big news.
At the time, however, it was not without interest.
“They stabbed him with knives; they stepped on him,” recounted Fouad Hassan, 19. It was about 20 minutes after a Read More
BAGHDAD-If you didn’t know the devil himself had been put behind bars, you never would have guessed.
It was the night of Dec. 14, barely six hours after U.S. administrator Paul Bremer fired the six words heard ’round˜the world:
“Ladies and gentlemen, we got him.”
The jig was up, the news was Read More
“They’re throwing shoes at us and telling us they’ll kill us, and we can’t do anything about it,” said U.S. Army Specialist Robert Stacy, 21, of Tulsa, Okla., as he stood guard at the Assassins’ Gate. This darkly named arch stands at the main entrance to the main palace in Baghdad, where the Coalition Provisional Read More
BAGHDAD, Oct. 28-”This is not the time for the Americans to get out of the country. This is not the time …. Life is better here. Better! A hundred times, life is better.”
Of all the places to meet an Iraqi doing unpaid public relations for the Bush administration, this one seemed highly unlikely. Ali Read More
There are many words that come to mind about Iraq at this moment, but there is one word that springs to mind over and over again. That word is revenge .
“Kill him!” cried Sabria Salmen, who said she was 64 but who could, by the look of her, easily have been 84. Her dark Read More
MOSUL, Iraq-”She’s lucky I didn’t shoot her,” said Sgt. First Class James Johnson, 43, of Queens, N.Y., via England and Jamaica. “We will shoot a woman in a heartbeat.”
Sergeant Johnson was recalling an encounter with a covered Muslim woman at a U.S. military checkpoint. Asked to be checked for weapons under her robes, the Read More
BAGDHAD, IRAQ, April 21-At the mosque, the war was all about Islam.
“I want to say that we hate America,” said Ahid Alah, a 39-year-old mother of five who had turned up with the throng at the Abu Hanifa mosque in the Adhmya quarter of Baghdad and expressly elbowed her way to an American Read More
When the American-Iraqi joint community-policing initiative involves a Humvee of Marines hurtling through the streets of Baghdad to apprehend a runaway police car, the U.S. non-occupation of Iraq is not going 100 percent smoothly.
The initiative was aimed at curtailing the carnival of plunder that is the all-too-liberated Iraqi capital; a place that is Read More
