After The Wars In Iraq, ‘Everything Living Is Dying’

As far back as 2005, the United Nations had estimated that Iraq was already littered with several thousand contaminated sites. Five years later, an investigation by The Times, a London-based newspaper, suggested that the U.S. military had generated some 11 million pounds of toxic waste and abandoned it in Iraq. Today, the country remains awash in hazardous materials, such as depleted uranium and dioxin, which have polluted the soil and water. And extractive industries like the KAR oil refinery often operate with minimal transparency. On top of all of this, Iraq is among the countries most vulnerable to climate change, which has already contributed to grinding water shortages and prolonged drought. In short, Iraq presents a uniquely dystopian tableau—one where human activity contaminates virtually every ecosystem, and where terms like “ecocide” have special currency.

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I Want To Get Our Rights From The Americans Who Harmed Us

On 12 July 2007, two US AH-64 Apache helicopters fired 30-millimetre cannon rounds at a group of Iraqi civilians in New Baghdad. These US Army gunners murdered at least a dozen people, including Reuters photographer Namir Noor-Eldeen and his driver Saeed Chmagh. Reuters immediately asked for the US to conduct a probe into the killing. Instead, they were fed the official story by the US government that soldiers of Bravo Company, 2-16 infantry had been attacked by small arms fire as part of their Operation Ilaaj in the al-Amin al-Thaniyah neighbourhood. The soldiers called in air strikes, which came in and cleared the streets of insurgents. Reuters had information that the helicopters filmed the attack, and so the media house requested the video from the US military.

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Iraq Announces End Of US Combat Mission

Iraqi groups expressed dissatisfaction and opposition to the official announcement of the end of the US combat mission in the country on Thursday, December 9, weeks before the deadline of December 31. The groups pointed to the official declaration by the US that no troops will be withdrawn from Iraq immediately but that the remaining troops will shift their mission to assisting and training the Iraqi forces. The groups have reiterated their demand for a complete withdrawal of foreign troops.

Qasim al-Araji, Iraq’s national security advisor, tweeted, “today we finished the last round of dialogue with the international coalition..to officially announce the end of the combat mission of the coalition forces and their withdrawal from Iraq.”

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The Unlearnt Lessons Of 9/11, Twenty Years Out

Twenty years after 9/11, America is less safe, a deeply troubled country, ravaged by COVID, racism, inequality, extreme weather from global warming and political strife. Its political leaders have embraced an Orwellian approach to the truth in which war is peace and large segments of our society are polarized by widely divergent concepts of reality.

On the afternoon of 9/11, with the American media joining with the leaders of the two major parties in banging the drum for war, I wrote one of the first statements calling for America to seek peace instead, to not turn our cries of grief into a call for war. Eventually, many joined with early voices such as those of the Green Party and the War Resisters League in warning that peace and freedom both at home and abroad would be undermined if the United States went to war instead of participating in international criminal prosecution of this crime against humanity.

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Axis Of Resistance Responds To Biden’s Aggression

Richard Medhurst: “The Americans have come under attack in numerous places in Iraq and Syria in the last 24 hours. It appears to me, and I think anyone would agree, to be a coordinated move by the resistance. So I am going to show you what has taken place. So you had three attacks that took place. One was at the Ain al Asad Air Base. You may recall that this is the air base that the Iranians fired at after Trump assassinated General Suleimani. There were no casualties because they actually warned the Americans in advance. It was more of a warning, a retaliation without casualties. And this is the strategy that is being pursued. I plotted what is going on on a map…”

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Rumsfeld Was Not ‘Controversial’

When word came down yesterday that former Defense Secretary and brazen orchestrator of mass death Donald Rumsfeld had shuffled loose the mortal coil at age 88, CNN and the other networks began to do their standard back-and-fill exercises to shore up the fiction while burying the truth after a genuine monster drops dead. “Controversial,” they called Rumsfeld, while showing footage of him scurrying around the wreckage after the Pentagon attack on September 11. “I think that’s what we’ll all remember,” said one talking head of those images.

Not if I have anything to say about it.

See, on the same day he was doing no more or less than what any average citizen would likely do at an emergency scene, Rumsfeld returned to his office and immediately began scheming to use the attacks as a pretense for invading Iraq.

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Biden’s Bombing Of Iraq And Syria Only Serves The Weapons Industry

For the second time in the five months since he was inaugurated, President Joe Biden on Sunday ordered a U.S. bombing raid on Syria, and for the first time, he also bombed Iraq. The rationale offered was the same as Biden’s first air attack in February: the U.S., in the words of Pentagon spokesman John Kirby, “conducted defensive precision airstrikes against facilities used by Iran-backed militia groups in the Iraq-Syria border region.” He added that “the United States acted pursuant to its right of self-defense.”

Embedded in this formulaic Pentagon statement is so much propaganda and so many euphemisms that, by itself, it reveals the fraudulent nature of what was done. To begin with, how can U.S. airstrikes carried out in Iraq and Syria be “defensive” in nature? How can they be an act of “self-defense”?

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US Again Bombs Nations On Other Side Of The World In ‘Self-Defense’

The US is again illegally bombing nations on the other side of the planet which it has invaded and occupied and branded this murderous aggression as “defensive”.

“At President Biden’s direction, U.S. military forces earlier this evening conducted defensive precision airstrikes against facilities used by Iran-backed militia groups in the Iraq-Syria border region,” reads a statement by Pentagon Press Secretary John Kirby. “The targets were selected because these facilities are utilized by Iran-backed militias that are engaged in unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) attacks against U.S. personnel and facilities in Iraq. Specifically, the U.S. strikes targeted operational and weapons storage facilities at two locations in Syria and one location in Iraq, both of which lie close to the border between those countries.”

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Five Injured In Rocket Attack On US Airbase In Iraq

Five people – two foreign contractors and three Iraqi soldiers – were injured on Sunday, April 18 in a rocket attack on an air base near Baghdad, Al Jazeera reported. A total of five rockets hit the Balad air base, north of Baghdad, with two of them landing on a dormitory and one hitting a canteen belonging to US company Sallyport, according to security sources in the area. There were no reports of any deaths. The rocket attack was the latest in a series of attacks targeting US bases and other installations in Iraq as opposition to the US military presence in the country continues to grow.

Responsibility for the rocket attack was not immediately claimed by any Iraqi armed groups. The US has routinely blamed Iraqi Shia militias for such attacks, accusing them of carrying them out on the behest of or in coordination with neighboring Iran.

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While Biden Plots To Divide Iraq, Resistance To US Occupation Is Growing Stronger

Last year, after the United States so brutally and openly assassinated the Iranian General Qassem Soleimani and the commander of the Iraqi Popular Mobilization Forces, Abu Mahdi al -Muhandis, the Iraqi Parliament voted for the United States to cease its occupation of the country. The United States has not done that, but the resistance to US occupation in Iraq is growing. Clearing the FOG speaks with Iraqi sociologist Sami Ramadani about the history of internal resistance to the Saddam Hussein regime, how the devastation caused by the United States impacted that and the current state of the resistance. Ramadani described the “Biden Plan” to divide Iraq into three sectors and to maintain the US presence in the region to protect US oil interests.

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18 Years Ago The US War On Iraq Began

Friday, March 19, 2021 was the 18th anniversary of the U.S. government political decision to invade and occupy oil-rich, Arab/Muslim Iraq, a country of 32 million persons.  U.S. elected officials and their advisors decided it would be in the U.S. national security interest to attack and overthrow the Iraqi government.  We saw how the military attack on Iraq which was based on the lie that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction destroyed hundreds of thousands of lives, homes, infrastructure and culture and unleased a whirlwind of unintended (or sometimes intended) consequences that we are dealing with even now 18 years later.

At the time I was a U.S. diplomat assigned as the Deputy Chief of Mission (deputy ambassador) in Mongolia. 

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Iraqi Resistance Groups Announce Confrontation With US Occupiers Until Liberation

“The resistance sees confrontation as the only option that guarantees the freedom, dignity of this country after exhausting all the means that others have bet on with the occupation,” the coordinating body for the Iraqi resistance factions said in a statement on Thursday, according to the Iraqi media.

“We are facing a new page from the pages of the resistance, in which the weapons of the resistance will reach all the occupation forces and its bases in any part of the homeland,” they said.

Hailing the recent attacks against the “occupation forces”, the statement added that “the resistance has the legal and national right and popular support for all of that, but will not target diplomatic missions.”

“The Iraqi resistance is an Iraqi decision, and its choice is the choice of the Iraqi people, and it will continue circumstances and sacrifices until Iraq is liberated from the filth of the occupation,” it said.

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Biden’s Plan To ‘Carve Up’ Iraq Into Three Statelets Has Proven Disastrous

Sami Ramadani is an Iraqi-born lecturer in sociology and writes on Middle East current affairs. A political exile from Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, Ramadani nonetheless campaigned against US-led sanctions as well as the invasion and occupation of the country. He is a member of the steering committee of Stop the War Coalition.

Ramadani spoke at length with Mohamed Elmaazi about the consequences of the US-led invasion and occupation of Iraq and challenged some misconceptions regarding the nature of the resistance to the foreign military presence there. He also explained that an improvement of America’s foreign policy towards Iraq will be shaped by whether US President Joe Biden ditches his original plan to carve the country up into three separate ethno-religious statelets, with a weak central government.

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One More US Logistics Convoy Reportedly Hit By Roadside Bomb In Iraq

The blast is the latest in a series of explosions that have targeted US-led coalition logistical convoys in Iraq over the past several months.

A possible roadside bomb blast has ripped through a US military logistics convoy’s route in the central Iraqi province of Babil, Iran’s MEHR news agency cited unnamed sources as saying on Tuesday.

There was no immediate word on casualties due the explosion. The latter is the most recent in a spate of such attacks staged in Iraq in the past few months. No group has claimed responsibility for the blast.  

In early February, a logistical convoy carrying supplies for the US-led coalition in Iraq was hit in an improvised explosive device (IED) attack about 80 kilometres south of the capital Baghdad.

The bomb was reportedly detonated on a road in the area of al-Musayyib, a Shia-majority town that witnessed heavy fighting between US forces and local militias in the aftermath of the 2003 US invasion of Iraq.

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On Contact: Realities Of War

On the show this week, Chris Hedges discusses the realities of war, its appeal for young men and its destruction of them, with Salar Abdoh, novelist and essayist. Abdoh’s new novel, ‘Out of Mesopotamia’, considered one of a handful of great modern war novels, tells the story of Saleh, a jaded, middle-aged Iranian reporter who accompanies Shia militias, as Abdoh did, in Iraq and Syria during the heavy fighting between 2014 and 2017.

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