'We Are The Many' at Hebden Bridge

Sent in from Trevor Hoyle

Hebden Bridge Picture House -- Sunday 17 July

'WE ARE MANY'

AHEAD of the upcoming publication of the Chilcot Inquiry, it feels timely to revisit Amir Amirani's incendiary documentary We Are Many. It's the story of 15 February 2003, when over 30 million people in over 800 cities across the world marched in demonstration against the Iraq War. How did this day come about?  Who organised it?  And was it, as many people claimed, a total failure?

Eccles Lad Alan Henning Murdered

Head Severed in Horrific Execution!

 

DESPITE appeals from the family of Alan Henning, and Muslims in this country, was killed by his  Islamic State captors yesterday.  A video showed Alan kneeling in the desert in a jump suit.

 

The taxi driver from Salford was delivering aid to Syria last December when he was kidnapped.  It seems that two sharia courts in the north of Syria had also demanded his release.

 

Earlier this week Mrs Barbara Henning had asked for 'mercy' for her husband, saying his family was continuing their attempts to communicate with the group.  She said she had received an audio message of her husband pleading for his life.  Mrs Henning had said some people thought her husband was in the wrong place at the wrong time, but she said:  'He was in the right place doing the right thing.'



Dr Shuja Shafi, secretary general of the Muslim Council of Britain, tweeted:
'Saddened by reported murder of Alan Henning. A despicable and offensive act. He helped Muslims. My thoughts and prayers with his family.'

Mohammed Shafiq, chief executive of the Ramadhan Foundation, said:
'This barbaric killing is an attack against all decent people around the world.'

 

The suspicion is that the killing is an attempt to provoke the western powers into making a greater effort to defeat Islamic State, and to draw the west into a Holy War.  The urge the do something is powerful when such obscene acts are committed.  But it is difficult to see that any action by Britain will help resolve the situation, and the present involvement by the UK has been described as largely cosmetic.

 

Local people interviewed this morning were calling for action to tackle the situation but more involvement in either Iraq or Syria may easily encourage more support for Islamic State throughout the world.  The best that can be expected is that the Kurds and others forces in the region can get their act together to defeat Islamic State. 

Iraq & Western Intervention

 

A Media Lens reader quipped recently that he had discovered a solution to the climate crisis.  Simply harnessing the energy produced by Orwell turning in his grave would provide a limitless source of cheap, clean energy.  The comment was prompted by the decidedly Orwellian news that the Guardian's Jonathan Freedland had been awarded the Orwell Prize for political writing. Orwell must have been spinning like a top to have his name linked with a journalist who works so hard to sell Western 'intervention'.

 In March 1999, Freedland wrote: 

'How did the British left get so lost? How have its leading lights ended up as the voices of isolationism? How did it come to this...? Why is it the hard left - rather than the isolationist right - who have become the champions of moral indifference? For, make no mistake, that's what opposition to Nato's attempt to Clobba Slobba (as the Sun puts it) amounts to... either the West could try to halt the greatest campaign of barbarism in Europe since 1945 - or it could do nothing.' (Jonathan Freedland, 'The left needs to wake up to the real world. This war is a just one,' The Guardian, March 26, 1999)

In a 2005 article on Iraq titled, 'The war's silver lining', Freedland commented:

'Tony Blair is not gloating. He could - but he prefers to appear magnanimous in what he hopes is victory. In our Guardian interview yesterday, he was handed a perfect opportunity to crow. He was talking about what he called 'the ripple of change' now spreading through the Middle East, the slow, but noticeable movement towards democracy in a region where that commodity has long been in short supply. I asked him whether the stone in the water that had caused this ripple was the regime change in Iraq.

'He could have said yes...'

On March 22, 2011, with Nato bombing underway in Libya, Freedland focused on how 'in a global, interdependent world we have a "responsibility to protect" each other'. The article was titled:

'Though the risks are very real, the case for intervention remains strong - Not to respond to Gaddafi's chilling threats would leave us morally culpable, but action in Libya is fraught with danger.'

Ignoring the resultant chaos, Freedland wheeled out the same arguments in response to the Syrian crisis in 2012:

'The 2003 invasion of Iraq has tainted for a generation the idea once known as "liberal interventionism".... We have new problems now. Fail to see that and we make the people of Homs pay the price for the mistake we made in Baghdad.'

Despite this continuous warmongering, Freedland is deemed a sober, restrained commentator by his corporate peers. Ostensibly at the opposite end of the media 'spectrum' from the Guardian, David Aaronovitch of The Times responded to Freedland's winning of the Orwell Prize: 'Congratulations, J. My favourite award!'

Aaronovitch featured in many of our early alerts after we started Media Lens in July 2001. Like Freedland, he is a militant advocate for Western 'intervention', including the 'Clobba Slobba' war, famously declaring his willingness to join the fight himself (Aaronovitch, 'My country needs me,' The Independent, April 6, 1999). Aaronovitch also supported the case for Western attacks on Iraq, Libya and Syria. This month, he once again called on 'us' to bomb Iraq:

'We must do everything short of putting boots on the ground to help the Kurds to defend themselves against Isis and similar groups.' (Aaronovitch, 'Forget the past. Iraqi Kurds need our help now; The 2003 invasion is irrelevant to what is happening in Mosul now. What matters is preventing the advance of Isis,' The Times, June 12, 2014)

Despite their enthusiasm for 'intervention', neither Freedland nor Aaronovitch has ever proposed bombing Israel for its enormous crimes against the captive Palestinian population - a fine example of Orwellian 'doublethink'. Freedland merely shakes his head sadly and asks if Israelis and Palestinians will be 'locked in a battle that drags on and on, perhaps till the end of time?' 

Yes, We're Still At It

That warmongers like Aaronovitch and Freedland can still hold down senior positions in the media means there is a desperate need for analysis that punctures the façade of liberal journalism.

A key problem is that corporate journalists cannot or will not criticise either their own employers or potential future employers. Like all corporate employees, journalists who criticise their industry are unlikely to be embraced by any media corporation. This is why Freedland, Aaronovitch, the Guardian and the Independent are almost never subjected to honest criticism from a left perspective. On the contrary, aspirant left writers bend over backwards to praise corporate journalists and media, as do ambitious executives in every industry.

Supplied by Trevor Hoyle.

The Tony Blair Trial

The trial of Tony Blair Essay of the week by Neil Mackay Sunday 22 June 2014 The charge: That Tony Blair, former UK prime minister, in lock-step with US policy, deliberately misled Britain, its parliament and people, into the catastrophe of the illegal invasion of Iraq in March 2003 that resulted in the deaths of at least 100,000 people - a crime against peace and humanity - and in doing so created the circumstances that have brought Iraq to the brink of ruination today. The defence: Last week, the accused issued a statement in his defence, claiming that the capture of large swathes of Iraq by the Islamic terrorist group Isis - an organisation too extreme for al Qaeda - had nothing to do with the invasion he and then US president George W Bush executed upon the lie that Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction (WMD) that threatened the West. Blair said: "We have to liberate ourselves from the notion that 'we' have caused this. We haven't." Exhibit A: Rebuilding America's Defences, the founding document of The Project for the New American Century (PNAC) . The PNAC was effectively the Bush cabinet-in-waiting prior to the 2000 election. It included Dick Cheney, who went on to become vice-president; Donald Rumsfeld, defence secretary; Bush's brother, Jeb; Lewis Libby, Cheney's chief of staff; Paul Wolfowitz, Rumsfeld's deputy; and other key members of the Bush administration. This was the "brain" of the neo-conservative movement hell-bent on regime change in Iraq. Blair was fully signed up to the neo-con vision, their ideology providing a key motive for the crime in question. Rebuilding America's Defences was the foundation for the Bush-Blair doctrine of pre-emption. Written in September 2000, just months before the Bush election, it said: "The United States has for decades fought to play a more permanent role in Gulf regional security. While the unresolved conflict with Iraq provides the immediate justification, the need for a substantial American force presence in the Gulf transcends the issue of the regime of Saddam Hussein." In other words, even if Saddam were removed from power, America would still want troops in the Gulf. Rebuilding America's Defences talks of "a blueprint for maintaining global US pre-eminence" and a "Pax Americana", which would require the US and its allies to "fight and decisively win multiple, simultaneous major theatre wars as a 'core mission'." Exhibit B: The receipts from Iraq for the sale of weapons of mass destruction from Britain and America. Details of sales of WMD to Saddam up to 1989 are contained in a Senate report into US exports, called the Riegle Report. Saddam is known to have used WMD in 1988 against the Kurds - in the town of Halabja, up to 5,000 were gassed. The attack took place when Saddam was engaged in the Iran-Iraq war against Ayatollah Khomeini and was, in the language of US-UK diplomacy, "a son of a b###h, but our son of a b###h". This was prior to the first Gulf War in 1990 when Saddam invaded Kuwait, seized its oil and became the West's enemy. However, the Riegle Report shows America sold Saddam the following germ warfare capabilities: anthrax; botulism; histoplasma capsulatuma, a germ similar to TB; and clostridium perfringens, which causes gas gangrene. Some 16 UK companies also sold weaponry to Saddam. The West was aware Saddam had begun a series of banned weapons programmes in the 1980s. In December 1983, Donald Rumsfeld, then president Ronald Reagan's special envoy to the Middle East, met Saddam, shook his hand and discussed the curtailment of Iran. A 1984 US state department memo shows America knew it was selling "dual use" technology to Iraq - material that could be used for civilian purposes or to create nuclear, biological or chemical weapons. The CIA estimates Iran took more than 50,000 casualties from Iraqi chemical weapons. British politicians were equally aware. Exhibit C: Statements from key UN weapons inspectors. Scott Ritter was the United Nations' former chief weapons inspector in Iraq, a former US Marine intelligence officer and a Republican who voted for Bush, as well as being a Gulf War veteran. Ritter told me in 2003 he knew "categorically" that weapons inspections imposed on Saddam in the wake of his defeat in the first Gulf War destroyed 90% to 95% of Iraq's WMD stockpiles - built up with British and American material. The remaining stockpiles were unusable by 2003. Ritter was clear that any invasion of Iraq on the grounds of WMD capabilities would be based on lies. Hans von Sponek, the UN's former co-ordinator in Iraq and UN under-secretary general, also told me he had visited alleged chemical and biological weapons sites as recently as September 2002 and found them "comprehensively trashed". Dennis Halliday, former UN assistant general-secretary and UN humanitarian co-ordinator in Iraq, told me that at least one million Iraqis died as a result of sanctions imposed to remove WMD from Saddam: WMD that the world's experts in WMD said no longer existed. Exhibit D: Strategic Energy Policy Challenges For The 21st Century. This paper, prepared for Dick Cheney, helped the Bush cabinet agree before September 11, 2001 that Iraq was a risk to world oil markets and therefore a risk to America. It has been said this may point to the true motive for invading Iraq. The document stated that "the United States remains a prisoner of its energy dilemma" and "Iraq remains a destabilising influence � to the flow of oil to international markets from the Middle East � Saddam Hussein has also demonstrated a willingness to threaten to use the oil weapon and to use his own export programme to manipulate oil markets". As a result, the US "should conduct an immediate policy review toward Iraq, including military, energy, economic and political/diplomatic assessments". Exhibit E: Operation Rockingham, a British spying operation established by the Defence Intelligence Staff within the Ministry of Defence in 1991. Scott Ritter knew members of Rockingham and said the spying outfit was "dangerous" and authorised at "the very highest levels". He added: "Rockingham was spinning reports, and emphasising reports that showed non-compliance [by Iraq with UN inspections] and quashing those reports which showed compliance. It was cherry-picking." It became "part of an effort to maintain a public mindset that Iraq was not in compliance � They had to sustain the allegation that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction, even though [UN inspections were] showing the opposite. "Rockingham received hard data but had a pre-ordained outcome in mind. It only put forward a small percentage of the facts when most were ambiguous or noted no WMD." Dr David Kelly - the British weapons expert who took his own life after being exposed as the source behind a BBC claim that the Blair government had "sexed up" a dossier claiming Iraq had WMD - worked with Rockingham. Ritter said Kelly was the "go-to person" for translating the often confusing data from weapons inspections "into concise reporting that could be forwarded to analysts in the British intelligence community as well as political decision-makers". Ritter added that, thanks to Rockingham, "there existed a seamless flow of data from Iraq, though New York to London, carefully shaped from beginning to end by people working not for the UN Security Council but for the British government. Iraq's guilt, pre-ordained by the government, became a self-fulfilling prophecy." Exhibit F: The Office of Special Plans (OSP). In effect, this was America's version of the Rockingham cell. It was set up when the Iraq desk of the Near East and South Asia affairs (NESA) office in the Pentagon was transformed into the OSP. Lieutenant Colonel Karen Kwiatkowski worked inside NESA up to the outbreak of the war. "At the OSP," she told me, "what they were doing was looking at all the intelligence they could find on WMD." She added: "That was the focal point, picking bits and pieces that were the most inflammatory, removing any context that might have been provided in the original intelligence report, that would have caused you to have some pause in believing it. "They would take items that had occurred many years ago and put them in the present tense � The other thing they would do would be to take unrelated events that were reported in totally unrelated ways and make connections that the intelligence community had not made." One story that made the British papers shortly before the invasion claimed Saddam had a team of beautiful female assassins in deep cover in the UK as sleeper agents, posing as belly dancers. This myth has been connected to the work of Rockingham and the OSP. OSP intelligence was the kind of bogus material also used to support erroneous claims presented to the world that secular Saddam was working with the religious fundamentalists of al Qaeda. Exhibit G: Dodgy dossiers. The Joint �Intelligence Committee under the chairmanship of MI6's John Scarlett was meant to have full control over the contents of dossiers outlining Iraqi WMD - in effect, Blair's case for war. However, it became fully politicised. A special adviser to Alastair Campbell, Blair's spin doctor, wrote of one early draft: "Very long way to go � Think we're in a lot of trouble with this as it stands now." Campbell later admitted he was involved from a "presentational point of view". Here's how the most contentious claim was handled in draft form: "Chemical and biological munitions could be � ready for firing within 45 minutes." This claim was already based on cherry-picked OSP/Rockingham reports, but when it was published it had become much more firm - the key section now read that the warheads "are deployable within 45 minutes". Campbell told Scarlett - who he described as his "mate" - that there were weak passages in the draft. Scarlett wrote back: "We have been able to amend the text in most cases as you proposed." Tony Blair eventually wrote in a final dossier foreword: "The assessed intelligence has established beyond doubt that Saddam Hussein has continued to produce chemical and biological weapons." The case for war was made, put to Parliament and voted for overwhelmingly. Exhibit H: Copious warnings from within �British intelligence against any invasion of Iraq. Intelligence sources confirmed to me that many spies had been openly sceptical about WMD in Iraq for years. They concurred with the notion of cherry-picking and pressure to find evidence against Saddam. This newspaper published these allegations on our front page at the time. In a July 2002 secret Downing Street memo, it is noted that Bush wants to "remove Saddam through military action, justified by the conjunction of terrorism and WMD. But the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy." In January 2004, David Kay, the CIA-appointed head of the Iraq Survey Group with the task of finding Saddam's WMD, resigned, saying there were no stockpiles. Exhibit I: Intelligence leaks confirming Blair was warned the invasion would lead to chaos in Iraq and terrorism on the streets of Britain. One report from the Defence Academy, an MoD think tank, written by a naval commander, said: "The war in Iraq � has acted as a recruiting sergeant for extremists across the Muslim world � al Qaeda ideology has taken root within the Muslim world and Muslim populations within Western countries. Iraq has served to radicalise � disillusioned youth and al Qaeda has given them the will, intent, purpose and ideology etc." In the US, a declassified National Intelligence Estimate found that the "Iraq conflict has become the cause celebre for jihadists � cultivating supporters of the global jihad movement." Exhibit J: The launch of the war. Blair �committed himself to waging war against Iraq whether or not the UN supported military action. In the end, no UN support was forthcoming. In 2002, inter-departmental advice for UK Government ministers stated that the objectives towards Iraq were "the reintegration of a law-abiding Iraq, which does not possess WMD � into the international community. Implicitly, this cannot occur with Saddam in power � the use of overriding force in a ground campaign is the only option that we can be confident will remove Saddam." Later in 2002, Blair met Bush in Crawford, Texas, where they discussed the "need for effective presentational activity". The die was cast. War was coming. Former UN secretary-general Kofi Annan later said the invasion was "illegal". Exhibit K: The conduct of the Iraq War. �Western business followed US-UK forces into Iraq, �carving up the nation and profiteering from war. The policy was one of exploitation, not nation-�building. British and American troops were allowed to behave appallingly - from the atrocities of Abu Ghraib to the detention, torture and even death of Iraqi civilians at the hands of British soldiers. One corporal, Donald Payne, remains the only British soldier to be convicted of a war crime following the death of an Iraqi citizen who was hooded and beaten - he was found to have 93 injuries on his body. The occupation brought chaos to Iraq. Al Qaeda moved in to a country where it had not been before, and laid down deep roots. As far back as August 2003, al Qaeda in Iraq blew up the UN HQ in Baghdad. Soon its leader, Abu Musab al-Zaraqwi, had the nation in the grip of fear, and sprung to international attention with the televised beheadings of captives including Nick Berg and Ken Bigley. The behaviour of allied troops further alienated the population, with horrors such as the wedding party massacre at the town of Makaradeeb in which 42 civilians, including 13 children, were killed. Al Qaeda, made up of Sunni Muslim extremists, used the chaos to bring terror to the Iraqi Shia Muslims they hated. Shrines were bombed, holy days targeted. The predominantly Shia armed forces and government replied with death squads and extra-judicial executions against often innocent Sunnis. Torture became routine. Bodies were found with acid burns and drill marks and still wearing police handcuffs. Divisions deepened. The country split along ethno-religious lines. Over the border in Syria - a country some believe might have remained at peace without the seismic shock of the invasion of Iraq - the �fundamentalist and brutal Isis movement saw its chance and began making inroads within Iraq's borders. Town after town fell. Fallujah, Samarra, Mosul, Tikrit. Isis now threatens Baghdad. Verdict: Guilty. Neither Blair nor Bush will ever face punishment for taking the US and UK into an illegal war they knew was based on lies, and killing countless innocent people. Western statesmen do not end up in The Hague facing war crimes charges. The punishment is on us and the Iraqi people. The standing of Britain has been degraded abroad, trust in politics destroyed at home. Our morality is so drained that the very concept of military intervention to save Iraq from Isis is rendered absurd. We brought that nation to ruin and now we watch as it falls, with echoes of the Khmer Rouge taking Cambodia back to Year Zero. Where there was no terrorism, we created a terrorist homeland. Chief among Blair's crimes is that while he may have blood on his hands, he has spread the blood on to us, because in a democracy we must carry some of the blame for our elected leaders, even if they try to blind us to the truth through a web of deceit, chicanery, bullying and sin. Neil Mackay is the Sunday Herald's Head of News. He is the author of The War On Truth, which investigated the roots of the invasion of Iraq; and of the novel All The Little Guns Went Bang Bang Bang http://www.heraldscotland.com/comment/columnists/the-trial-of-tony-blair.24526819

Balkanisation in the international sphere

Balkanisation is the name of the game
Posted by SueC on June 17, 2014, 4:04 pm, in reply to "Re: Iraq crisis: US urgently deploys hundreds of armed troops to Baghdad "

Or at least it is in my opinion. Everything but everything that's happening today in which the West has a hand is attributable to the becoming-really-desperate need to gain control over the world's remaining - and rapidly depleting - resources. Does the West really want to deal with strong, democratic nations in the Middle East, Africa, Latin and South America and Eurasia? Of course not - such nations tend to have peculiar ideas about wanting their natural resources to benefit their own people first and foremost. Look at the demonisation of Chavez and Putin as an indication of how welcome that approach is. So, if you're sitting in Washington, London or Brussels, what to do? Well, a tried and tested method of controlling resources is encouraging the break-up of nation states into mutually hostile enclaves predicated on nationality, religion, or ethnicity. The smaller the fragments, the better. So, in Iraq, there's the basic Sunni/Shia/Kurd divide. But there's lots of opportunity to forment conflict within those groups. If the Kurds seize too much territory for the West's liking and prove to be too independent over the oil resources they'd then have, you can always work on the grievances other minorities living within the areas the Kurds control such as the Turkmen, And so it goes on. The groups that are left as a result of Operation Break-Up are usually too small and too divided to mount serious opposition to outside corporate interests. Look at Sudan - the US and others relentlessly proposed a split of the country and so South Sudan was born - where the oilfields are - and now that is consumed by internal conflict between different groups. This is not madness at all - it's deliberate strategy to get and control resources. Look at Libya - what's the result of the coup that removed Gaddafi? The country's oil production has fallen dramatically, the oil is still is the ground and can be harvested later by the 'right' people and pretty much the entire nation has been or will be pauperised. Just like the Iraqis. This is another important and desired consequence for western elites. Eliminating the 'threat of a good example' has always been key. If any people anywhere manage to harness their resources to improve their lot, then others elsewhere - even those living in the West - might well ask the question, why can't we do this? And that wouldn't be good. None of this is an 'accident', or an 'unforeseen consequence', or an 'error of judgement' or 'western naivety' as the MSM likes to call it. It's deliberate, the desired outcome. And they'll do it in country after country. http://members5.boardhost.com/medialens/thread/1402992094.html   From Trevor Hoyle

Crimea another view: E-mail to Channel 4!

Dear Mr Frei (journalist on Channel 4),

In reference to tonights 'Snowmail' (1).

It is indeed instructive to watch and listen to western hacks sniping, sneering and twisting themselves into Gordian knots of hypocrisy over the Crimean referendum. The spectacle of the great and the good and their lapdog hacks in their absurd efforts to square the circle of one minute condemning Russia for interfering in Crimea and then the next minute condemning them for not interfering is something to behold.
 

You, who said absolutely nothing about the rigged elections in occupied Iraq and Afghanistan, you who said absolutely nothing to condemn those who refused to recognise the democratic wishes of the Palestinians when they voted in Hamas in fair and internationally observed elections, have the brass neck to tut and cluck your tongue as you sneer:

'On Sunday the people of Crimea (that would be all the Russians in the peninsula) voted by 96.7 per cent - in a majority reminiscent of the old Soviet Union to join the Russian Federation.'

Your malicious implication is clear but as you well know, it is based on nothing. Nada. Zilch. These elections were also well observed and no malpractice occurred. But such is the arrogance of our western press that you think you don't have to provide any evidence for your dirty slurs. Such is the state of your 'profession' these days.
You plough on with:

'Moscow and Crimea ploughed on with the referendum thumbing their nose at the west.'

Again, the implication that everyone should listen to 'the west', as if it has some moral high ground from which to pontificate to other sovereign countries. Are you serious? The west has no moral authority to dictate to anyone, no matter what they do! The illegal wars the west has prosecuted and the absolute hell in those broken countries they have left behind makes your kind of reasoning perverse in the extreme.

As to sanctions, you continue to lament that: 'None of those on the list belong to Vladimir Putin's inner circle'. The west, and you, as their trusty echo chamber just won't forgive Putin for his part in saving Syria from yet another western bombing campaign.  It is truly sickening to see such double standards on show and being contorted and massaged to demonise Russia and Putin and portray our blood soaked leaders as 'good guy' humanitarians.
It's full on hypocrisy. I know it and you know it.

Ed Murray.

(1)  US and EU impose sanctions on Russia
Good evening it’s Matt here tonight with Cathy Newman and we start off with the dramatic events around the Ukraine crisis. On Sunday the people of Crimea (that would be all the Russians in the peninsula) voted by 96.7 per cent - in a majority reminiscent of the old Soviet Union to join the Russian Federation.

Russia immediately declared it was delighted to embrace Crimea and the EU and US immediately went into crisis mode. Despite all their threats of sanctions in recent days and weeks Moscow and Crimea ploughed on with the referendum thumbing their nose at the west. And so Washington and Brussels had to come good on their word to impose limited sanctions against Russia after several hours of talks. The EU has decided to put 21 individuals from Russia and Ukraine onto a list that would prevent them from travelling and will freeze any assets they have in the west.
None of those on the list belong to Vladimir Putin's inner circle, so are these first sanctions going to have any bite at all especially when Moscow has so far been blithely indifferent to the gnashing of western teeth?

We have a report from International Editor Lindsey Hilsum in Simferopol. Our Political Editor Gary Gibbon looks at the diplomacy and we have an interview with a worried sounding Estonian foreign minister.

Bloody Monday in Iraq: 15 April 2013

WHILE the US and UK corporate media was awash with stories about the Boston Marathon bomb, in which three people were killed, this is what was happening on one day in Iraq, which the media ignored:  

Not really in the news:

1. At least 75 Iraqis were killed and 356 more were wounded in a series of attacks across the country. Only the far south and Iraqi Kurdistan were spared. Many of the attacks were apparently coordinated and occurred at about the same time this morning. They also came a few days ahead of local elections in most provinces. Nineva and Anbar province, both heavily Sunni, had their elections postponed by the Shi’ite-led government.

2. In Baghdad, the bombings left 30 dead and 92 wounded. Among them, a blast in the Kamaliya neighborhood left four dead and 13 injured; security forces then fired into the air to disperse crowds. Near the airport a pair of bombs killed three people and wounded 16 more. Four people were killed and 15 more were wounded in a bombing at a market and bus station in Umm al-Maalif. In Karrada, another bomb left two dead and 15 injured. A car bomb in Shurta killed two people and wounded nine more. A roadside bomb wounded five policemen in Baladiyat. Two people were killed and nine more were wounded in a blast in Habibiya.

3. In Kirkuk, at least nine people were killed and 79 more were wounded in a string of six car bombings. The downtown bombs exploded in three different ethnic neighborhoods, suggesting that no particular group was targeted. Those explosions took place in Arab, Kurdish, and Turkmen neighborhoods. The other three blasts hit neighborhoods outside of the city. One bombing targeted the home of a Shi’ite politician. Also, gunmen wounded a doctor last night.

4. Explosions in Tuz Khormato left six dead and 67 wounded.

5. In Mosul, gunmen killed a civilian. Two people were wounded in roadside bombings. Gunmen killed a married couple. Security forces killed a bomber. Another blast left no casualties. A soldier was killed in a clash. Three policemen were wounded in a bomb blast.

6. In Falluja, a suicide car bomber killed two policemen and wounded six more at a checkpoint. Acivilian was shot dead. A sticky bomb killed two civilians. Another bomb south of the city left no casualties.

7. A car bomb in Mussayab killed four people and wounded 13 more.

8. Four people were killed and three more were wounded in a Tikrit bombing at political office. Another bombing left 13 policemen wounded.

9. In Nasariya, a car bomb killed two people and wounded 14 more.

10. A policeman was killed in Buhriz when a sticky bomb exploded.

11. Near Ramadi, a bomb targeting a Sunni cleric and leader of anti-government protests killed two bodyguards and wounded at least one more. His cousin was killed in a sticky bomb blast in Falluja.

12. A policeman was shot dead in Tarmiya.

13. A bomb in Khalis killed one child and wounded eight more.

14. Nineteen people were wounded in bombings in Babil province.

15. In Dowr, 13 people were wounded in a blast there.

16. Bombs wounded seven people at a political candidate’s home in Salah ad Din province.

17. In Muqdadiya, a car bomb wounded seven people.

18. In Tal Abta, a blast killed a policeman and wounded two more.

19. In Baquba, two policemen were wounded during a bombing. Three people were wounded in a blast.

20. Gunmen in Sabeen killed a captain and wounded two soldiers.

21. A young man was gunned down in Shirqat.

22. On a rural road in Bani Saad, a bomb wounded a civilian.
Also in this edition of the weekly update, reflections on the Muslim Brotherhood's declining support from some states and groups, the implications for Khalid Meshaal and Hamas of being 'embedded' with the Emir of Qatar, and what Sergei Lavrov thinks of the 'Friends of Syria' who met in Istanbul yesterday..

http://members5.boardhost.com/medialens/msg/1366462380.html