GMT 6-12-2007 17:24:46
Assyrian International News Agency
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Stockholm (AINA) -- Speaking during a conference on the future of Iraq and the Assyrians (also known as Chaldeans and Syriacs), MP Fredrik Malm from the Liberal Party expressed his full support for the establishment of an administrative area in the Nineveh plain in northern Iraq. He also expressed sorrow for the persecution of the Christian Assyrians who are the indigenous people of Iraq.

The Nineveh plain administrative area is expected to halt the exodus of the Christian Assyrians, Mandeans, Yazidis, Shabaks and other minorities from war torn Iraq by offering them security and local self administration. The area lies outside the town of Mosul and encompasses lands the Assyrians have inhabited for millennia and still continue to inhabit.

The current Iraqi constitution supports the creation of local administrative units as the one proposed in the Nineveh plains. Article 125 of the constitution states:

This constitution shall guarantee the administrative, political, cultural and educational rights of the various nationalities, such as Turkmen, Chaldeans, Assyrians, and all other constituents, and this shall be regulated by the law.
The support for the project is increasing as the world witnesses more and more killings and persecution against the Christian Assyrians in Iraq.

By Afram Barryakoub
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GMT 6-12-2007 18:20:26
Assyrian International News Agency
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(AINA) -- The U.S. House Subcommittee on State, Foreign Operations, and Related Programs held a meeting this morning. On the agenda was an amendment to provide support directly to religious minorities in Iraq. The amendment, which was unanimously passed, was introduced by Congressman Kirk (10th district, Illinois) and states:
The Committee is concerned about the plight of religious minorities in Iraq and intends that from within the unobligated amounts provided in previous years under the heading "Economic Support Fund" for Iraq, not less than $10,000,000 should be provided to assist religious minorities in the Nineveh Plain region of Iraq, of which $8,000,000 should be provided for internally-displaced families and $2,000,000 should be provided for microfinance programs.
The Nineveh Plain region of Iraq is an area with a strong concentration of Assyrians (also known as Chaldeans and Syriacs) and has been proposed as a candidate for an administrative area for Assyrians and other minorities in Iraq, as prescribed by Article 125 of the Iraqi constitution, which states:

This constitution shall guarantee the administrative, political, cultural and educational rights of the various nationalities, such as Turkmen, Chaldeans, Assyrians, and all other constituents, and this shall be regulated by the law.
The severe persecution of Assyrians in Iraq was high on the agenda of the meeting on June 9 between the Pope and President Bush. The Pope expressed his concern for the Christians in Iraq and asked President Bush to alleviate their suffering (AINA 6-12-2007 ).

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Al-Qaida targets Iraqi infrastructure
By QASSIM ABDUL-ZAHRA, Associated Press Writer2 hours, 11 minutes ago
Suspected al-Qaida bombers stepped up attacks on key transportation arteries, striking a bridge north of the capital Monday a day after shutting the superhighway south of Baghdad with a huge explosion that collapsed an overpass and killed three U.S. soldiers.

The attack, a parked truck bomb, blew apart the bridge that carries traffic over the Diyala River in Baqouba, police said on condition they not be identified by name because they feared retribution. There were no casualties, but motorists and truckers now must use a road that runs through al-Qaida-controlled territory to reach important nearby cities.

Baqouba is the capital of Diyala province, which is swarming with al-Qaida fighters. Those militants were driven out of Baghdad by the four-month-old U.S. security operation and out of Anbar province west of the capital by Sunni tribesman who rose up against the terrorist group.

On Tuesday, insurgents bombed and badly damaged a bridge over the main north-south highway leading from Baghdad, police reported. The attack occurred 35 miles south of Baghdad.

The explosion at 7:30 a.m. Tuesday — not thought to be a suicide bomb — struck a bridge linking the villages of al-Qariya al-Asriyah and al-Rashayed in northern Babil province. No injuries were reported.

The attacks on the bridges were only the latest in a campaign to deepen turmoil in Iraq, especially on the vital transportation network linking Baghdad to the rest of the country. Such bombings — especially suicide attacks — are an al-Qaida trademark and one of the group's many and ever-shifting tactics against U.S. and Iraqi forces.

Earlier this month, a bomb heavily damaged the Sarhat Bridge, a key crossing 90 miles north of the capital on a major road connecting Baghdad with Irbil, Sulaimaniya and other Kurdish cities.

In March and April, three of Baghdad's 13 bridges over the Tigris River were bombed. The attacks were blamed on Sunni insurgent or al-Qaida attempts to divide the city's predominantly Shiite east bank from the mostly Sunni western side of the river.

The most serious attack, an April 12 suicide truck bombing, collapsed the landmark Sarafiyah bridge and sent cars plunging into the brown waters of the Tigris. Eleven people were killed.

U.S. forces used bulldozers Monday to push aside the rubble of the overpass that crashed onto Iraq's main north-south highway just east of Mahmoudiyah, a dangerous triangle of death city with a large al-Qaida presence.

The suicide truck bombing 20 miles south of Baghdad not only brought down a section of the bridge, it killed three U.S. soldiers at a checkpoint and wounded six other American soldiers along with an Iraqi interpreter, the U.S. military said in a statement issued at its Camp Victory headquarters at Baghdad International Airport.

Paul Kane, a fellow with the International Security Program at Harvard University's Kennedy School of Government, said the attacks on bridges are an extension of earlier insurgent attacks on "electric generation sites, infrastructure for water and also the obvious target of oil pipelines."

Kane noted that Iraq does not have railroad service so insurgents "may be at the end of the transit list. If anything, it means they're trying to be creative and they're running out of targets."

Tumult arose in Iraq's fragile political structure Monday when lawmakers declared themselves fed up with the parliament speaker and voted to oust the controversial Sunni politician from his powerful post.

Mahmoud al-Mashhadani is a physician who was jailed by Saddam Hussein and who had said from the parliament speaker's chair that those who attack American forces should be treated as heroes. He was voted out in a closed session of the Shiite-dominated 275-member legislature.

His ouster appeared to have grown out of a shouting match Sunday with lawmaker Firyad Mohammed Omar, a Shiite Turkoman.

Omar had complained to the speaker about the heavy-handedness of al-Mashhadani's bodyguards; al-Mashhadani responded abusively, according to lawmakers who spoke on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the issue. Omar told fellow legislators that the speaker's guards had assaulted him.

Al-Mashhadani's deputy, Khaled al-Attiyah, who chaired the closed session, will assume the duties of the speaker until a replacement is chosen.

"It's an illegal decision made by a juvenile house," al-Mashhadani told the U.S.-funded Radio Sawa in an interview posted on the Internet.

Al-Mashhadani is part of the Accordance Front, parliament's largest Sunni Arab bloc with 44 of the house's 275 seats. Salim Abdullah, a fellow lawmaker from the Accordance Front, said it would offer a replacement for al-Mashhadani within a week.

The speaker's job is allotted to a Sunni member of parliament according to an agreement among lawmakers who struggled for months to chose their leadership, a prime minister and government.

"We agreed to replace him because we want to improve the house's performance," Abdullah told The Associated Press.

But al-Mashhadani told Radio Sawa that if his performance as speaker were below par, Shiite Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki's was "much worse." The level of competence of President Jalal Talabani, a Sunni Kurd, was "even worse because he does nothing," the former speaker said.

The man expected to become Britain's next prime minister, meanwhile, met with Iraqi leaders in an unannounced visit. Treasury chief Gordon Brown has vowed to study his country's participation in the Iraq war in the face of growing opposition at home.

Brown, slated to succeed Tony Blair this month, was on a one-day fact-finding mission, British officials said.

In London, the House of Commons rejected a motion by Britain's opposition Conservative Party calling for a formal inquiry into the decision to go to war in Iraq. By a vote of 288 to 253, the lower house of parliament sided with Blair, who has ruled out such an inquiry while British troops are deployed in Iraq.

Like so much in Iraq these days, even final exams for high school seniors aren't going as planned: Iraq's Education Ministry delayed the start of finals after some of the test questions were leaked to students, an official said.

A week of final exams had been due to start Tuesday with the Islamic education test, but that was put off until July 1 while authorities investigate reports of cheating, an official said, on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the subject.

Iraqi police, morgue and hospital officials reported 34 deaths in sectarian violence across Iraq on Monday, including 17 bodies dumped on Baghdad streets and believed to be the victims of Shiite death squads.

The al-Qaida front group Islamic State in Iraq posted a video showing what it said were 14 captive members of the Iraqi security forces. The hostages were shown in uniform standing in three rows; one of them repeatedly sighed and looked up at the ceiling. It wasn't clear when they were seized. The video was provided to the AP on Monday by the Virginia-based IntelCenter.

Al Qaeda's New Enemy
In Iraq, the Terror Group's Former Sunni Allies Are Turning against It
By Frederick W. Kagan
Posted: Monday, June 11, 2007

ARTICLES
Los Angeles Times
Publication Date: June 10, 2007


Resident Scholar
Frederick W. Kagan

Last Month, the Associated Press reported that residents of Amariya, one of the bastions of Al Qaeda control in Baghdad, turned on the terrorists and, with U.S. help, killed their leader and many of his followers. The fight is emblematic of a larger trend in Iraq.

The Iraqi government has long declared its determination to root out terrorists in the country, and its security forces have been fighting Al Qaeda for months. But now, ordinary Iraqis, most significantly Sunni Arabs in Al Anbar province (until now the chief supporters of the terrorists), are putting their lives on the line against Al Qaeda as well.

The story of the "Anbar Awakening"--the uniting of the province's Sunni Arab tribes against Al Qaeda--is relatively well known. In mid-2006, a Marine intelligence officer in Al Anbar declared the situation hopeless and the province irretrievably lost. The Iraqi government was unable to recruit Anbaris into the local or national police or into the Iraqi army. But later that year, a combination of Al Qaeda atrocities and skillful counterinsurgency techniques by U.S. forces convinced Sunni tribal leaders that enough was enough.

These movements show that success on the most important front in Iraq is possible, but they also are a reminder of how fragile the situation is.

Today, more than 12,500 Anbari recruits, the overwhelming majority of them Sunnis, are fighting or preparing to fight Al Qaeda despite ferocious counterattacks by the terrorists against them and their families. Tribal leaders are negotiating with the Iraqi government to rebuild their war-torn province. Violence in the provincial capital has dropped precipitately, from 108 deaths a week in mid-February to seven in the second week of May. Al Anbar has gone from hopeless to a beacon of hope and a signal of the turn of Iraq's Sunnis against their erstwhile terrorist allies.

Now the movement against Al Qaeda is spreading. "Salvation councils" similar to the Anbar Awakening have been formed in mostly Sunni Salahuddin province (north of Baghdad), Shiite-Sunni mixed Diyala province (northeast of the capital) and mostly Shiite Babil province (south of Baghdad). In some cases, their coming together coincides with cease-fires between U.S. forces and non-Al Qaeda insurgent groups. All are striving to reestablish normal relations with the Iraqi government.

Al Qaeda has responded in characteristic fashion--a campaign of atrocities designed to intimidate or kill its new antagonists. Such tactics were successful in the past. No longer. Today these atrocities only serve to remind the leaders of the salvation councils and their supporters that Al Qaeda is the real enemy. They have not deterred Anbaris from joining and integrating into the Iraqi government's security organs. They have not deterred leaders in other provinces from forming similar groups.

These movements show that success on the most important front in Iraq is possible, but they also are a reminder of how fragile the situation is. The Iraqi security forces are not yet strong enough to protect their leaders and followers from the terrorists. U.S. troops are vital in this task, something the tribal leaders constantly make clear, and they continue to be essential to suppressing Shiite death squad activity, which remains below 50% what it was before the surge began. A reduction of U.S. forces in the coming months would expose these Iraqis to horrific deaths and would turn what might be one of the most important victories we could win against Al Qaeda into an unnecessary defeat.

There are many problems in Iraq beyond Al Qaeda. Sectarianism within the government and the security forces continues to pose a significant challenge. Iranian influence is large and dangerous. Muqtada Sadr's return to public life adds more complexity to an already complex political situation. U.S. commanders and civilian leaders are working on these issues, but success cannot be guaranteed.

In the midst of the doubt and fear that grips the United States about Iraq today, however, it's critically important to recognize the positive trends. Iraq's Sunni Arabs, once one of the most supportive communities of Al Qaeda, are now among the most hostile, repudiating their alliance of convenience with the terrorists and risking their lives to fight with us against our worst enemies. This is a trend worth fighting to continue, and Iraqis who now stand with us at their own peril are people worth fighting for.

Frederick W. Kagan is a resident scholar at AEI.

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