Sunday, December 09, 2012

The military stand-off continues in Iraq

The Preemptive Love Coalition notes  the are claims that 80 children a day are denied treatment at one hospital in Baghdad, that 3,000 children wait for surgery in the KRG and that the backlog for Iraq grows by 11,000 each year.  Currently Dr. William Novick and others working with Preemptive Love Coalition are in Basra until December 15th where they are helping with training and also performing heart surgeries. In other medical news, Al-Shorfa notes the Ministry of Health announced it had started a country-wide "campaign to vaccinate children against measles." From 2008 through 2010, there were 27,000 recorded cases of children with measles in Iraq.


Turning to the latest crisis Nouri has created in Iraq, Nehro Muhammad (Rudaw) reports:

Iraq’s autonomous Kurdistan Region will not give in to demands by Baghdad to withdraw its Peshmerga troops from all disputed territories, an official said. Halgurd Hikmat, media officer at the Peshmerga ministry, said that Baghdad also had demanded the disbanding of the 450-man Golden Lions security force, a joint unit of Iraqi soldiers and Peshmerga fighters that was built by the US military.
"We will not accept these requests, especially the one that asks for the withdrawal of the Peshmerga forces from all of the disputed areas," Hikmat said.
Iraq's Arab-dominated central government has been locked in a weeks-old stand-off with the Kurdistan Regional Government, since Baghdad ordered its Dijla forces into disputed areas that are claimed by both sides, and the KRG deployed thousands of its own Peshmerga fighters into the territories.



As the conflict continues, Nouri finds himself with less and less support.  His State of Law is part of the National Alliance.  The other parts?  Al Mada reports they are stating they support the demands of the Kurds but, in the words of the Sadr bloc, they can't control Nouri who seems set on inflaming tensions.  All Iraq News reports Kurdistan Alliance MP Shwan Mohammed al-Taha states that State of Law is forever searching for a new crisis to create and then refusing to fix the mess they made.

Robert M. Danin (CFR) does a round up of voices from the Middle East and includes this quote from Iraqi Vice President Tareq al-Hashemi, "Al-Maliki is not talking about Iranian intervention in all Iraqi affairs, and we have not heard any response to Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corp [IRGC] commander Qassem Soleimani’s statement that Iran has more influence than America in Iraq and that Washington should negotiate with Tehran, not Baghdad, regarding the situation in Iraq."

Alsumaria notes a Habebh bicycle bombing left five people injured, an armed attack in Tikrit left 2 police officers dead and a third injured,


The following community sites -- plus Cindy Sheehan, Adam Kokesh,  Jody Watley, ACLU, OutFM, Susan's On the Edge and Pacifica Evening News  -- have updated since Friday night: 



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