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03/12/2006:

"Developments in Iraq, March 11"

FALLUJA - Three civilians, one Iraqi soldier and a U.S. soldier were killed when a suicide car bomb detonated near the western city of Falluja on Friday, the U.S. military said.
BAGHDAD - The body of American hostage Tom Fox was found with gun shot wounds and his hands tied behind his back near a railway line in western Baghdad on Thursday, police said on Saturday.
BAGHDAD - A director of Al-Iraqiya state owned television Amjad Hameed was killed and his driver wounded when gunmen ambushed his car in western Baghdad, police said.
BALAD - A roadside bomb exploded near a mosque killing two people and wounding one in the small town of Yathrib near Balad 85 km (55 miles) north of Baghdad on Friday, police said on Saturday. In a separate incident a U.S. military unit raided a house and killed a 25-year-old man in al-Thuluya near Balad on Friday, police said on Saturday.
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No One Knows How Many Iraqis Have Died
BAGHDAD, Iraq - Three years into the war, one grim measure of its impact on Iraqis can be seen at Baghdad's morgue: There, the staff has photographed and catalogued more than 24,000 bodies from the Baghdad area alone since 2003, almost all killed in violence.

Despite such snapshots, the overall number of Iraqi civilians and soldiers killed since the U.S.-led invasion in spring 2003 remains murky. Bloodshed has worsened each year, pushing the Iraqi death toll into the tens of thousands. But no one knows the exact toll.

President Bush has said he thinks violence claimed at least 30,000 Iraqi dead as of December, while some researchers have cited numbers of 50,000, 75,000 or beyond.

The Pentagon has carefully counted the number of American military dead — now more than 2,300 — but declines to release its tally of Iraqi civilian or insurgent deaths.

The health ministry estimates 1,093 civilians died in the first two months of this year, nearly a quarter of the deaths government ministries reported in all of 2005.

The Iraqi government, however, has swung wildly in its casualty estimates, leading many to view its figures with skepticism.

At the Baghdad morgue, more than 10,000 corpses were delivered in 2005, up from more than 8,000 in 2004 and about 6,000 in 2003, said the morgue's director Dr. Faik Baker. All were corpses from either suspicious deaths or violent or war-related deaths — things like car bombs and gunshot wounds, tribal reprisals or crime — and not from natural causes.

By contrast, the morgue recorded fewer than 3,000 violent or suspicious deaths in 2002, before the war, Baker said. The tally at the Baghdad morgue alone — one of several mortuaries in Iraq — thus exceeds figures from Iraqi government ministries that say 7,429 Iraqis were killed across all of Iraq in 2005.


Stop your meddling, Iraqi minister tells US
AMID rising American frustration with the political deadlock in Iraq, the National Security Minister, Abdul Karim al-Enzy, has rebuked Washington for interfering in Iraq's domestic affairs.

In a remarkable broadside against the US, Mr Enzy charged that it was deliberately slowing Iraq's redevelopment because of a self-serving agenda that included oil and the "war on terror".

The attack came as the US Defence Secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, told a Senate inquiry in Washington that Iraq's political leaders needed "to recognise the seriousness of the situation and form a government of national unity that will govern from the centre, and to do it in a reasonably prompt manner".

To that end, US diplomats have demanded a more generous sharing of key portfolios among Iraq's religious and ethnic populations than the dominant Shiite religious parties are willing to concede.

In particular, they are urging the dismissal of the hardline Interior Minister, Bayan Jabr.

But in an interview with the Herald, Mr Enzy snapped: "The last time I checked, Bayan Jabr was Interior Minister of Iraq - not of the US or the UN. He is one of our best and this is interference in our business."

Mr Enzy argued that if the US-led coalition in Iraq had been more serious about rebuilding the country's security forces in the first year of the occupation, it could now be making substantial cuts in foreign troop numbers in Iraq. "We don't want foreign forces here, but it's impossible for them to leave now, because we're on the edge of civil war," he said.

"The truth is the Americans don't want us to reach the levels of courage and competence needed to deal with the insurgency because they want to stay here.

"They came for their own strategic interests. A lot of the world's oil is in this region and they want to use Iraq as a battlefield in the war on terror because they believe they can contain the terrorism in Iraq."


Iraqi Shi'ite cleric calls U.S., Britain and Israel a 'Triad of Evil'
In a television interview Friday night, radical Shi'ite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr described the United States, Israel and Britain as a "Triad of Evil".

Speaking on state-run Iraqiya television, the anti-American al-Sadr also said last month's attack on a Shi'ite shrine in the central city of Samarra was carried "in collusion with the occupiers and the Zionist Entity of Israel," meaning for the U.S. and Israel. Hundreds of Iraqis died in the subsequent sectarian violence, much of which Sunni Muslims said was the work of al-Sadr's militia, the Mahdi Army.

The Triad of Evil reference was an obvious play on words U.S. President Bush used in his 2002 State of the Union address, when he labeled Iraq, Iran and North Korea an "axis of evil."

Al-Sadr, whose militia launched two uprisings against U.S. troops in 2004, refused to name any group that he believed was behind the bombing of the Askariyah shrine in Samarra but hinted at members of Saddam Hussein's former regime or Sunni Muslim extremists.

"Those who carry arms could be takfiri extremists, Saddamists or others. But those who control arms are the Triad of Evil that are Israel, America and Britain," said the black-turbaned cleric during the one-hour interview.