PRGATIVADI NEWS SERVICE notes the worldwide numbers for the coronavirus pandemic including that John Hopkins University says the number infected has passed 19.7 million worldwide. In the United States, there have been over five million cases. In Iraq? 150,115 cases. If that number seems small, remember that Iraq has a population of less than 40 million -- according to CIA estimates. Iraq has not had a census in decades. XINHUA reports on the coronavirus and how Iranian President Hassan Rouhani thinks that this pandemic will play out over the next six months but Iraq's government officials are less sure:
In Iraq, the tally of coronavirus infections rose to 150,115 after 2,726 new cases were reported.
The country also reported 82 more deaths and 2,271 recovered cases, raising the death toll from the infectious virus to 5,392 and the total recoveries to 107,775.
In a column at THE GUARDIAN on Beirut, Simon Tisdall notes Iraq:
A disturbingly similar picture is seen in Iraq
where a new prime minister, Mustafa al-Kadhimi, is struggling to shake
off the twin legacies of American military intervention and regional
power-games involving Iran, Turkey and the Gulf Arabs. Kadhimi has
called for early elections in response to protesters who, like their
Lebanese counterparts, rose up last year in huge numbers to demand a
wholesale dismantling of the political system.
Sectarian
rivalries between Sunni and Shia parties and affiliated militias,
corruption, and economic pain, exacerbated in Iraq’s case by falling oil
revenues and failure to invest in jobs and infrastructure, also feed
instability. But so, too, do foreign states.
The Iran-backed Kata’ib Hezbollah militia is blamed for recent attacks on residual US forces fighting Isis. Iran itself is determined to maintain the dominant influence it gained during the chaos following the US invasion.
Like his post-2003 predecessors, Kadhimi faces an uphill struggle to
save Iraq’s dysfunctional democracy from collapse – and with it, the
Iraqi state. His plan for early polls could yet be thwarted in
parliament. His attempts to loosen Tehran’s grip have not been helped by
cuts in US financial aid. And his personal safety may be at risk after
last month’s assassination of a top counter-terrorism adviser, Hisham
al-Hashimi.
Iraq has already broken apart, in the sense that the
de facto autonomous, Kurdish-controlled northern region barely answers
to Baghdad. A key player here is Turkey, which has exploited Iraq’s
sovereign weakness, ostensibly in pursuit of a vendetta against Kurdish
PKK separatists. With his armed interventions in Iraq, Syria and Libya,
Recep Tayyip Erdogan, Turkey’s president, recalls the Ottoman sultans of
old: imperious, reckless, vicious.
Lastly, criminal justice reform advocate Alice Marie Johnson Tweets:
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