Avis aux lecteurs francophones:
Sur son blog: " Journal d’Irak " http://www.dhblogs.be/categories/International.html
Marc Lemaire publie des informations sur l'Irak au jour le jour ainsi que des traductions d'articles publiés en Anglais:
Journal d'Irak
"Aujourd'hui, face aux ambitions hégémoniques de l'impérialisme, l'information est une arme au service de la paix.
Les médias occidentaux dans leur large majorité acceptent les versions de l'armée américaine et ferment les oreilles aux autres sources.
Dénoncer ne suffit plus, il faut expliquer, informer, transmettre!
Sa diffusion est un acte de résistance.
Les informations contenues dans ce journal sont obtenues par la lecture journalière des journaux en ligne (Afp- ats - Ap - Reuters, la résistance & les médias occidentaux & Al Manar & Chine nouvelle Bassirat-net ainsi que les sources d'informations de la résistance.
P.S: Mes informations sont le travail de recoupements car les occupants donnent des informations qui se contredisent ou ne prennent en note qu’une partie des infos. "
Marc Lemaire
jeudi 4 octobre 2007
Kurani Kerim - The Holy Quoran
Bu linkte Kuraný kerimi Ýngilizce ve bir çok dilde okuyup dinleyebilirsiniz, dualarýnýz kabul olsun.
http://www.quranexplorer.com/quran
The above link to the Holy Quoran Explorer was sent to us by our friends from Biz Türkmeniz.
http://www.quranexplorer.com/quran
The above link to the Holy Quoran Explorer was sent to us by our friends from Biz Türkmeniz.
Report into Kurdish Abuse in Turkmeneli by Mofak Salman Kerkuklu
ISBN NUMBER FOR THE REPORT978-0-9555489-2-5
PURPOSE AND SCOPE
This report was written with two clear objectives. Firstly, to reveal the atrocities that have been carried out against the Turkmen populations in Iraq and an assessment of the current position of Turkmen in Iraq, and secondly, to draw the world’s attention to the situation of the Turkmen. This book would not have been written without the support of Turkmen all over the world.
I wish to reveal to the world the political situation and suffering of the Iraqi Turkmen after the occupation of Iraq, to expose Iraqi Kurdish bandits and reveal their premeditated plan to change the demography of the Turkmen-populated area.
I would like to dedicate this report to every Turkmen who has been detained in Iraqi prisons; to Turkmen who died under torture in Iraqi prisons; to all Turkmen whose sons and daughters were executed by the Iraqi regime; to all Turkmen who fought and died without seeing a free Turkmen homeland; and to the Turkmen City of Kerkuk, which is a bastion of cultural and political life for the Turkmen resisting the Kurdish occupation.
Therefore, my first and foremost sincere thanks are to Mr. Habib Hurmuzlu, Global Strategic Institute, Turkey. In addition, I would also like to thank my family and finally yet importantly, my thanks go to my martyred brother, surgeon Dr. Burhan Mohammed Salman Kerkuklu, who motivated and encouraged me from childhood to fight for the Turkmen cause in the Turkmeneli.
Mofak Salman Kerkuklu(*)
TABLE OF CONTENTS
1.0 SQUATTING IN THE GOVERNMENT PROPERTIES AND BUILDINGS- 14
2.0 ESTABLISHING PUPPET PARTIES- 20
3.0 USING FALSE IDENTITY- 20
4.0 LOOTING OF DEED AND LAND REGISTRY OFFICE- 22
5.0 THE ASSASSINATION OF THE GENERAL DIRECTOR FOR EDUCATION- 23
6.0 KURDISH REGIONAL GOVERNMENT ISSUING A FAKE DOCUMENT- 26
7.0 HUMAN RIGHTS WATCH- 31
8.0 VANDALISING TURKMEN MARTYRS’ NAMES ON THE COMMEMORATING PANEL- 32
9.0 POWER ABUSE BY KURDISH ASAYISH- 33
10.0 TURKMEN OWNED SUPER MARKET NAMED AL-TASAHUL- 37
11.0 POLICE HEADQUARTERS (KORYA) CENTRAL KERKUK- 38
12.0 THE ATTACK ON MEMBER OF THE GOVERNING COUNCIL IN KERKUK MR. ALI MAHDI 42
13.0 THE TURKMEN SCHOOLS’ BOOKS CONFISCATED- 43
14.0 DEMOLISHING OF THE TURKMEN HOuSE BY KURDISH MILITIA- 45
15.0 BARZANI BRIBEs A FORMER MINISTER OF JUSTICE HASHIM AL- SHEBLI 46
16.0 PROPERTY CLAIMS COMMISSION CONTROLLED BY KURDS- 46
17.0 KURDICIZATION, THE ATROCITIES CARRIED OUT BY THE KURDS AND CHANGING THE DEMOGRAPHY OF THE TURKMENELI IN GENERAL AND ESPECIALLY KERKUK CITY- 56
18.0 SUPPORT IRAQ STUDY GROUP REPORT, IRAQ’S IGNORED MINORITIES FACE EXTINCTION - NEW MRG REPORT, ´ 26-02-07 57
18.0 SUPPORT IRAQ STUDY GROUP REPORT, IRAQ’S IGNORED MINORITIES FACE EXTINCTION - NEW MRG REPORT, ´ 26-02-07 58
19.0 KURDS TERRORIZING TURKMEN IN IRAQ- 59
20.0 KIDNAPPING OF THE ARABS AND TURKMENS BY KURDISH MILITIA- 59
21.0 AMERICAN FORCES AND IRAQI POLICE DEMOLISHED TURKMEN VILLAGES- 60
22.0 ABUSES AND ATROCITIES COMMITTED BY THE KURDISH REBELS 63
23.0 PROVOCATION OF TURKMEN CITIZENS- 64
24.0 TRANSFER OF THE KURDS TO KERKUK- 65
25.0 THE ATTACK ON A TURKMEN HOSPITAL- 65
26.0 THE ATTEMPTED ASSASSINATION OF MR. ALI MAHDI 65
27.0 KURDS HARASSED TURKISH PEACE KEEPING FORCE- 66
28.0 KERKUK AND KURDISH ELECTION FRAUD- 67
(*) Mr. Mofak Salman Kerkuklu is the Turkmeneli Party Representative for Ireland and the United Kingdom.
Email: msalman@eircom.net
mercredi 3 octobre 2007
Article by Mohammed Koja
حقيقة خطة تقسيم العراق
والموقع التركماني المحتمل في الجغرافية الجديدة
ها هي ضربة اخرى نتلقاها نحن العراقيين لتزيد من اخلال توازننا المفقود أصلآ، والهدف مثل كل مرة هو المزيد من فقدان والوعي الوطني، والانجرار رغبة أو رهبة نحو التخندق الطائفي والقومي. الامر لا يختلف هذه المرة عن مثيلاته من المخططات والمؤامرات المشبوهة التي أمطرتها ومازالت على العراقيين غيوم الحقد من الشرق والغرب، الفرق هو أن هذا القرار صدر من مجلس الشيوخ الامريكي، وليس معنى الكلام أن هذا المجلس نزيه لا يصدر مثل هذه القرارت، لأن العالم قد اكتوى بالكثير من قرارته التي دفعت ثمنها الكثير من شعوب العالم، حيث كان الثمن مئات الالاف من ارواح ابنائها واقتصادها وحريتها، ففيتنام وكوريا وكوبا وفلسطين ودول امريكا اللاتينية وووو، حاضرة في ضمائر وما جرى لها تحت قرارت هذا المجلس حاضرة في ضمائر الشعوب. ولكن المعنى يكمن في أن ما كان يخطط له ضمن أطار حكومي وينفذ في دوائر الاستخبارات صار اليوم يتمتع بشرعية كاملة
يجزم الكثيرون ويظن غيرهم، أن مجلس الشيوخ الامريكي هو السلطة التشريعية للولايات المتحدة الامريكية فحسب، وقد لا يدري هؤلاء أن الطغيان في عقلية هذا المجلس يجعله واثقآ، أنه الى جانب مسؤوليته عن التشريع في امريكا، هو متسلط على بقية دول العالم، وألا كيف يمكن أن نفهم اقدام هذا المجلس على أتخاذ قرار مصيري يخص دولة لا علاقة قانونية تربطها بالولايات المتحدة؟
ورغم صورة الطغيان في عقلية متخذي هذا القرار، ألا أنه قد اسقط الستار عن واجهة المسرح، وظهر طاقم التمثيل عاريآ على حقيقته
فأكتشفنا جميعآ مدى سخافة شعار الديمقراطية من أجل العراق الذي أطل به علينا الرئيس الامريكي ابان أحتلال العراق، وتقلفه سياسيوا مرحلة الانحطاط. وكشفت لنا مدى هزال الحكومة التي يديرها العراقيون بأنفسهم، وكشفت ايضآ حجم الكذبة الكبرى أو حتى الاكبر في العصر الحديث، وأعني الدستور العراقي الذي صوت له 80% من العراقيين
فبعد أربعة سنوات من تنفيذ حكم الأعدام بالعراق وشعبه رميآ بالمدافع والطائرات وكل ما يمكن أن يتخيله أو لا يتخيله عقل الانسان، جاءت خطة التقسيم كطلقة رحمة على جسد العراق الموحد النازف دما برماح الارهاب والطائفية، التي فقط اليوم عرفنا بوضوح تام من أين كانت تغذى ولماذا ظهرت على حين غرة في داخل مجتمع أتسم بوحدة التنوع منذ خمسة الاف سنة
لمصلحة من جاء هذا القرار، فاذا كان العراقيون بمختلف طوائفهم، حتى المتخندقين ضد بعضهم البعض قد أدانوا ورفضوا هذا التقسيم، بأستثناء جهة واحدة فقط معروفة نواياها ضد العراق، فلمصلحة من أذن
فأذا كان القرار لصالح العراقيين، فلماذا رفضه العراقيون؟ واية مصلحة يمكن أن تكون للعراقيين، اذا كانت كل مدن العراق فيها سنة وشيعة واكراد، وماعدا هؤلاء فهناك الملايين من العراقيين غير محسوبين على هذه الجهات الثلاث. فأين هو موقع التركمان والاشوريين والكلدان والايزديين والفيلية والصابئة والأرمن! اين هو موقع هؤلاء من هذه المصلحة المزعومة لكافة العراقيين؟
والمضحك في الامر هو رفض البيت الابيض لهذا القرار مباشرة بعد صدوره، قد يتصور البعض ان هذا الرفض قد يكون له تاثيرآ سلبيآ على أمكانية تطبيق القرار في المدى القريب، لكن الاستقراء الصحيح لسياسة البيت الابيض يقول غير ذلك، اذ نشر تقرير في صحيفة نيويورك تايمز يكشف عن تنامي اهتمام ادارة الرئيس بوش الجمهوري بخطة السيناتور الديمقراطي جوزف بايدن حول تقسيم العراق، مشيرا إلى أن مسؤولا أميركيا في إدارة بوش أكد أن الإدارة أصبحت "قريبة من خطة بايدن"، في وقت نسب فيه التقرير الذكور إلى محلل سياسي قوله إن الإدارة أعطت إشارات إيجابية بشأن هذه الخطة، وعليه فان رفض البيت الابيض للخطة في الوقت الحاضر ماهو الاذر الرماد في العيون. فالقرار وما يمكن ان ينتج عنه امر واقع لامحال، كون الخطة ليست وليدة صدفه اوموقف تبناه الكونغرس الامريكي في هذا الوقت لهدف وقتي يريد تحقيقه، ، بل رسمت ملامحها ووضعت خطوطها العريضة من قبل اخصائيين لهم باع طويل في السياسة الدولية، محددا الية تطبيقها وبالتفصيل الممل،هذا يعني ان القوميات التي تجاهلها القرار حكم عليها قبول الامر الواقع مرغما، واذا مابقيت هذه القوميات تراوح مكانها دون ان تتقدم بالطعن او التحرك وفق معايير منطقية تتماشي مع الواقع الدولي والاقليمي الجديد و المعقد لايجاد موقع لها ضمن اطار هذا الواقع ،قد يفقدون الحقوق التي يتمتعون بها الان، فالحكم صدر ولكن لم ينفذ بعد، قد لايفصل بين الحكم وتنفيذه وقت طويل، فالزمن لايمكن ايقافه مثلما لايستطيع احد مواجهة قرارات امريكا
لتقييم حقيقة وواقع القرار من الافادة اللرجوع قليلا الى الوراء كي نبني على غراره التوقعات المستقبية المصاحبة لبعض الاحتمالات بشكل منطقي قريب من الواقع، ، ففي الثامن من اذار من العام 2004 قال هنري كيسنجر والذي يعد من اهم واضعي ومخططي السياسة الامريكية ، الامريكي الجنسية والاسرائيلي الانتماء في برنامج حوار صعب الذي بثته قناة بي بي سي البريطانية وسمعه وشاهده الملايين من المشاهدين، ان العراق ربما يسير باتجاه مصير يوغسلافيا السابقة، منوها الى التقسيم الذي ينتظره العراق،لم يكن حديثه جاء من فراغ بل بني على معلومات دقيقة فضلا عن علمه المسبق بالخطة ودوره المؤثر في صياغتها ، راسما تفاصيلها ايادي اسرائيلية تخطط منذ قيامها تدمير العراق، لتكون اروقة البيت الابيض الامريكي مكان ولادتها بعد ان هيئات الاجواء المناسبة لها
اما عن ادوات تطبيق الخطة فقد تم دراسة كافة الجوانب التي من شانها يمكن انجاحها وتطبيقها على ارض الواقع بالصورة التي يريد صناعها ، من حيث الالية والسياسة المناسبة المعتمدة للنظام الجديد،اذ أصدر مركز سابن بمعهد بروكينجز للدراسات السياسية والإستراتيجية بواشنطن دراسة بعنوان(حالة التقسيم السهل) التي اعدها الباحث جوزيف ادوار مع مشاركة مايكل هالتون الباحث المتخصص في شؤون الامن القومي الامريكي في المعهد المذكور، تضمنت الدراسة رؤية متكاملة حول إمكانية العمل لانجاح وكيفية تطبيق الخطة في العراق تحت الاحتلال الامريكي مع الاخذبنظر الاعتبار الصعوبات التي ستواجه الأطراف المختلفة المشاركة في تنفيذ هذا الخيار الذي قد يكون له بعض العواقب والمفاجأت
واذا ما القينا نظرة الى بنود والزوايا التي تطرقت اليها الدراسة نجد انها توحي فعلا بتقسيم العراق الى دويلات لها حدود مرسومة تفصلها نقاط تفتيش، فعلى سبيل المثال جاء في احد بنودها مايلي: أنه ينبغي، عقب عملية التقسيم، تأسيس نظام جديد لإصدار بطاقات هوية خاصة بكل إقليم يتم التحقق منها عن طريق وضع نقاط تفتيش على حدود كل منها، وذلك لمحاصرة العناصر المتطرفة، متوقعة أن تبلغ التكلفة التقديرية لهذا النظام مليار دولار
ان الاشارة الى الحدود يعني نحن في انتظار تغيير جغرافية المحافظات حسب التقسيم الجديد اذ ترى الدراسة أن الظروف الحالية التي يشهدها المجتمع من زواج مختلط بين أبناء الطوائف المختلفة تجبر النظام الجديد على احترام الأقليات مما يجعل رسم الحدود على أساس جغرافي وليس طائفي وذلك من خلال استخدام الظواهرالطبيعيةكالأنهاروالجبال
وتعطي للمحافظات الجنوبية نوعا من الاستقلالية بسبب وجود نوع من الانسجام بين ابنائها على اعتبار انه ليس هناك مشكلة فيما يخص تلك المحافظات لان معظم قاطنيها من العرب الشيعة ، ولاتخفي الدراسة المشكلة الحقيقية لبعض المدن الحساسة مثل كركوك مشيرةالى :إلا أن المشكلة الحقيقة في المحافظات والمدن الرئيسية مثل بغداد والموصل وكركوك
اذا ما اردنا التعرف على شخصية صاحب الخطة وهوالسيناتور الديمقراطي جوزيف بايدن الذي نفى رسميا سعيه لاشغال منصب وير الخارجية اذا ما فاز الديمقراطيون في الانتخابات القادمة ، لكن من المحتمل ان يكون المرشح للرئاسة ، وهذا يعني تطبيق الخطة وموافقة البيت الابيض لهالاغبار علية في المستقبل القريب ،من خلال دعم قوي من الديمقراطيين، هذا احتمال وارد لقناعتنا بوصول الديمقراطيين الى البيت الابيض، بمساندة اللوبي اليهودي في امريكا الذي له اليد الطولى في تحديد من سيفوز في الانتخابات الرئاسية ، فان تبني جوزيف بايدن لهذا المشروع في هذا الوقت كان له دلالات واضحة لكسب الدعم المطلوب في الحملة الانتخابية القادمة
ردود فعل متباينة اعقبت صدور القرار منها مؤيدة ممن يعيشون شهر العسل السياسي مع الامريكان واخرى معارضة كاضعف الايمان، كالعادة جاء رد الفعل العربي من خلال الجامعة العربية الرافضة لهذا التقسيم، من المعروف بان هذا الاستنكار لن يكون له تاثير لا على المدى القريب ولا البعيد ، لفقدانها المصداقية لدى الشعب العربي والراي العام الدولي ، بعدما اصبحت قراراتها مجرد حبر على ورق تنتهي صلاحيتها بعد ترك البيان يد المسؤول مباشرة، ولكن قد يكون هذا القرار بهذه القوة سببا في صحوة البلاد العربية وحكامها من غفوتهم، لكي يراجعو حساباتهم قبل ان يضيع العراق،مثلما اضاعوا فلسطين من قبل، ولكن من من العرب له القدرة على فعل شئ اذا ماعلمنا ان القادة اليوم ماهم الا موظفين لدى الادارة الامريكية
الاحزاب والكتل العراقية اختلط الامر لديهم وبدات بيانات الاستنكار تصدر يوما بعد اخر عدا حكومة الاقليم الكردي هي الوحيدة التي رحبت بالقرار ، بل اعلنت موقفها بعد ساعات من صدور القرار من قبل رئيس مكتب العلاقات الخارجية في حكومة إلاقليم فلاح مصطفى اذ اعلن ترحيب الإقليم بقرار الكونغرس الأميركي ، مشيرا إلى أن ذلك يمثل حلا للأزمة العراقية بعد فشل المصالحة الوطنية، على حد قوله.ولكن هناك حقيقة قائمة وهي ،فمهما صدرت من ادانات او استنكارات سواء من العراقيين اوغيرهم ، فانها لاتستطيع وقف الطاحونة الامريكية التي تسحق كل ما من شانه عرقلة تحقيق مطامعها في المنطقة سواء الوطنية او القومية او التحرك باسم الدين ،مادامت ابار النفط تتدفق من بلادنا .(ده كيرمن ايتديغين ايده ر... جيق جيقا... باش أغردي
اما نحن التركمان فكما هو حالنا في كل مرة لاناقة لنا ولاجمل، ولا امكانية لنا غير الرفض، اذ قدمنا عن طريق الاحزاب والكتل السياسية استنكارنا وادانتنا لهذا القرار الذي يمس وحدة العراق ويعد تدخلا سافرا في شؤونه الداخلية. نعم نحن التركمان نريد وحدة العراق ارضا وشعبا، نريد عراقا مستقلا، ولكن هل نستطيع نحن وحدنا ان نحافظ على وحدة العراق والجميع يساهم في تقسيمه؟ وهل لنا تلك القوة للمواجهة؟ اذن اصبحنا نحن التركمان امام اليوم على المحك، وتلك الحقائق شاهدة على ذلك، اي ان تقسيم العراق بات مؤكدا، والسؤال الذي يطرح نفسه، اين يكون موقع التركمان من هذا التقسيم؟
اذا ما نظرنا الى الواقع التركماني بتمعن ودرسناه بعقل منفتح، واضعين امامنا كل الاحتمالات، نجد انفسنا نسير باتجاه المجهول، تائهون وسط هذه الامواج العاتية، فدورنا مهمش في تاسيس العراق، وتعاقب حكوماته، وفي الاحتلال الاخير، واليوم لا دور لنا في نهاية المسرحية التي أسمها التقسيم الفدرالي للعراق
فكل شيء مفصل لنا، وليس لنا أن نختار بانفسنا شيئآ، فأن أردناها ديمقراطية وانتخابات بقائمة تركمانية، فلنا مقعد واحد في البرلمان، حتى وأن صوت لقائمتنا خمسة، الأشجار والعصافير على كثرتها، وان أنضممنا الى قوائم الاخرين فلنا أربعة مقاعد، حتى وان جئنا للعالم بلبن العصفور
هناك الكثير ممن يقولون أن هذا العصر هو عصر التحالفات، أو بالاحرى أن العراق الجديد هو عراق التحالفات، اذن على التركمان أن يتحالفوا مع الاخرين كي يظمنوا حقوقهم، أو حتى أكثر من حقوقهم كما يفعل الاكراد على سبيل المثال! ولكن لا أحد يقول لنا مع من نستيطع أن نتحالف؟ سواء داخل العراق او خارجه؟
كل هذا التخبط سببه بسيط جدآ، ويكمن في أننا لا نعرف مكامن قوتنا؟
اذن مالحل؟ الحل الجديد القديم، والذي نادينا به ونادى به كل الشرفاء من ابناء الشعب التركماني خلال اربعة اعوام هو تفعيل دور مجلس التركمان، وتوحيد الجهد السياسي للأحزاب التركمانية تحت مظلة مجلس التركمان، حتى يأخذ هذا المجلس شرعيته الكافية كبرلمان موحد للشعب التركماني، وتأخذ القرارت السياسية للقيادة التركمانية الموحدة في ظل هذا المجلس صداها في أي خطوة تتعلق بمصير العراق وشعبه. فاللعبة دخلت الوقت الضائع، والشرارة التي كان بالامكان أن لا تصيب طرفآ تركمانيآ تحت عباءة الانقسام المخرومة، صارت اليوم لا مفر منها ألا بالوحدة، نحن بحاجة الى قرارات جريئة ومواقف شجاعة
ونقولها للتاريخ اذا ما أنضوت أحزابنا جميعآ في ظل مجلس التركمان، وانبثقت من هذا المجلس قيادة موحدة، فأن من يريد أن يتجاهل صوت التركمان سيفكر ألف مرة قبل أن يقدم على مثل تلك الحماقة
محمد قوجا
قسم الدراسات السياسية
قسم الدراسات السياسية
مركز الإعلام التركماني العالمي
AMSI: Kurdish Assassination militias
Roads to Iraq
October 2, 2007
This a statement issued today by the AMSI (*) criticizing Kurdish warlords for their support to the US dividing Iraq decision, accusing them with involvement of committing crimes against the Iraqi people, and secretly assassinating Iraqis.
Challenging the feelings of millions of Iraqis from all ethnic groups Kurdish politicians announced their support to the United States senate’s decisions of partitioning Iraq.
As is known, the Kurdish politicians and others were behind the incitement of the occupation of Iraq and cooperating with the occupiers in all projects, and content themselves to be partners in every of what happened to the people from the killing of more than 1 million, the destruction of the country and put 27 million Iraqis to unknown destiny, they also participated in targeting Iraqi cities and people through their forces PESHMARGA as happened in Fallujah and elsewhere, as they practiced shameful ethnic cleansing in a number of Iraqi cities, particularly in Mosul and Kirkuk.
Other than the Kurdish forces PESHMARGA, the Kurdish leaders own other militias exercise assassinations for their own agenda and according to an international agenda, this militias are accused of the liquidation of clerics, tribal sheiks and scientists, and the people of Mosul and Kirkuk own many documents in this regard, they will reveal it at a certain time.
The assassinations of religious scholars and others in the city of Mosul, were widely known with testimonies of many of the citizens of the city in the context of working with occupation forces.
The Kurdish people, whether in northern Iraq or in the cities of Kirkuk, Mosul or Baghdad and in most parts of Iraq enjoy deep love of all the Iraqi people and they are not responsible for acts of these two parties and their militias.
(*) http://www.iraq-amsi.org/news.php?action=view&id=19751&bdeb15266aec802a2c58e4607b2a16d5
www.roadstoiraq.com/2007/10/02/amsi-kurdish-assassination-militias/
October 2, 2007
This a statement issued today by the AMSI (*) criticizing Kurdish warlords for their support to the US dividing Iraq decision, accusing them with involvement of committing crimes against the Iraqi people, and secretly assassinating Iraqis.
Challenging the feelings of millions of Iraqis from all ethnic groups Kurdish politicians announced their support to the United States senate’s decisions of partitioning Iraq.
As is known, the Kurdish politicians and others were behind the incitement of the occupation of Iraq and cooperating with the occupiers in all projects, and content themselves to be partners in every of what happened to the people from the killing of more than 1 million, the destruction of the country and put 27 million Iraqis to unknown destiny, they also participated in targeting Iraqi cities and people through their forces PESHMARGA as happened in Fallujah and elsewhere, as they practiced shameful ethnic cleansing in a number of Iraqi cities, particularly in Mosul and Kirkuk.
Other than the Kurdish forces PESHMARGA, the Kurdish leaders own other militias exercise assassinations for their own agenda and according to an international agenda, this militias are accused of the liquidation of clerics, tribal sheiks and scientists, and the people of Mosul and Kirkuk own many documents in this regard, they will reveal it at a certain time.
The assassinations of religious scholars and others in the city of Mosul, were widely known with testimonies of many of the citizens of the city in the context of working with occupation forces.
The Kurdish people, whether in northern Iraq or in the cities of Kirkuk, Mosul or Baghdad and in most parts of Iraq enjoy deep love of all the Iraqi people and they are not responsible for acts of these two parties and their militias.
(*) http://www.iraq-amsi.org/news.php?action=view&id=19751&bdeb15266aec802a2c58e4607b2a16d5
www.roadstoiraq.com/2007/10/02/amsi-kurdish-assassination-militias/
None Dare Call It Genocide
by Llewellyn H. Rockwell, Jr.
How comfy we are all in the United States, as we engage in living-room debates about the US occupation of Iraq, whether "we" are bringing them freedom and whether their freedom is really worth the sacrifice of so many of our men and women. We talk about whether war aims have really been achieved, how to exit gracefully, or whether we need a hyper-surge to finish this whole business once and for all.
But there's one thing Americans don't talk about: the lives of Iraqis, or, rather, the deaths of Iraqis. It's interesting because we live in an age of extreme multiculturalism and global concern. We adore international aid workers, go on mission trips abroad, weep for the plight of those suffering from hunger and disease, volunteer in efforts to bring plumbing to Ecuador, mosquito nets to Rwanda, clean water to Malawi, human rights to Togo, and medicine to Bangladesh.
But when "we" cause the calamity, suddenly there is silence. There is something odd, suspicious, even disloyal about a person who would harp on the deaths of Iraqis since the US invasion in 2003. Maybe a person who would weep for Iraq is really a terrorist sympathizer. After all, most of the deaths resulted from "sectarian violence," and who can stop crazed Islamic sects from killing each other. Better each other than us, right?
Here is the grisly bottom line: more than one million people have been murdered in Iraq since the US invasion, according to the ORB. Yes, other estimates are lower, but you have to be impressed by what they have found. It seems very credible.
In Baghdad, where the US presence is most pronounced, nearly half of households report having lost a family member to a killing of some sort. Half the deaths are from gunshot wounds, one-fifth from car bombs, and one-tenth from aerial bombs. The total number of dead exceeds the hugely well-publicized Rwandan genocide in 1994.
You are welcome to inspect the detailed data.
Aside from the astonishing detail, what jumps out at me is the number of dead who are neither Sunni nor Shia. It is also striking how the further geographically you move from US troop activity, the more peaceful the area is. Americans think they are bringing freedom to Iraq, but the data indicate that we are only bringing suffering and death.
If you have ever lost a family member, you know that life is never the same again. It causes every manner of religious, social, and marital trauma. It's bad enough to lose a family member to some disease. But to a cold-blooded killing or a car bomb or an airplane bomb? That instills a sense of fury and motivation to retribution.
So we are speaking of some 1.2 million people who have been killed in this way, and that does not count the numbers that were killed during the invasion itself for the crime of having attempted to oppose invading foreign troops, or the 500,000 children and old people killed by the US-UN anti-civilian sanctions in the 10 previous years.
And let's not flatter ourselves into thinking that these are nothing but ragheads killing each other for no good reason. Just this past weekend, there is an example in point. Some of the legendary contractors for the State Department were driving through the Sunni neighborhood of Mansour in Baghdad. They were driving their SUVs when witnesses reported an explosion of fire that lasted 20 minutes. The SUVs drove off, leaving at least nine people dead on the road.
Why? No one knows. Sure there will be investigations. There have already been apologies. The company in question has had its license to practice occupation revoked by the Iraqi government. For how long, no one knows. But these are merely symbolic gestures. There will be no justice, and no forgetting.
To the extent anyone pays attention to this stuff, they only hear the words of the State Department spokesman: "The bottom line is that the secretary wants to make sure that we do everything we possibly can to avoid the loss of innocent life."
In light of the one million plus figure, such statements come off as evil jokes.
The US has unleashed bloodshed in Iraq that is rarely known even in countries we think of as violent and torn by civil strife. It is amazing to think that this has occurred in what was only recently a liberal and civilized country by the region’s standards. This was a country that had a problem with immigration, particularly among the well-educated and talented classes. They went to Iraq because it was the closest Arab proxy to Western-style society that one could find in the area.
It was the US that turned this country into a killing field. Why won’t we face this? Why won't we take responsibility? The reason has to do with this mysterious thing called nationalism, which makes an ideological religion of the nation's wars. We are god-like liberators. They are devil-like terrorists. No amount of data or contrary information seems to make a dent in this irreligious faith. So it is in every country and in all times. Here is the intellectual blindness that war generates.
Such blindness is always inexcusable, but perhaps more understandable in a time when information was severely restricted, when technological limits actually prohibited us from knowing the whole truth at the time. What excuse do we have today? Our blindness is not technological but ideological. We are the good guys, right? Every nation believes that about itself, but freedom is well served by the few who dare to think critically.
An essential postulate of the Western idea, or so we tell ourselves, is the universal and ultimate value of human life. And indeed it is true. No person or group of people is without value – not even those whom our own government chooses to label the enemy.
September 18, 2007
Llewellyn H. Rockwell, Jr. [send him mail] is president of the Ludwig von Mises Institute in Auburn, Alabama, editor of LewRockwell.com, and author of Speaking of Liberty.
Copyright © 2007 LewRockwell.
How comfy we are all in the United States, as we engage in living-room debates about the US occupation of Iraq, whether "we" are bringing them freedom and whether their freedom is really worth the sacrifice of so many of our men and women. We talk about whether war aims have really been achieved, how to exit gracefully, or whether we need a hyper-surge to finish this whole business once and for all.
But there's one thing Americans don't talk about: the lives of Iraqis, or, rather, the deaths of Iraqis. It's interesting because we live in an age of extreme multiculturalism and global concern. We adore international aid workers, go on mission trips abroad, weep for the plight of those suffering from hunger and disease, volunteer in efforts to bring plumbing to Ecuador, mosquito nets to Rwanda, clean water to Malawi, human rights to Togo, and medicine to Bangladesh.
But when "we" cause the calamity, suddenly there is silence. There is something odd, suspicious, even disloyal about a person who would harp on the deaths of Iraqis since the US invasion in 2003. Maybe a person who would weep for Iraq is really a terrorist sympathizer. After all, most of the deaths resulted from "sectarian violence," and who can stop crazed Islamic sects from killing each other. Better each other than us, right?
Well, it's about time that we think about the numbers, even though the US military has decided that body counts are not worth their time. Opinion Research Business, a highly reputable polling firm in the UK, has just completed a detailed and rigorous survey of Iraqis. In the past, the company's results have been touted by the Bush administration whenever the data looks favorable to the US cause. But their latest report received virtually no attention in the US.
Here is the grisly bottom line: more than one million people have been murdered in Iraq since the US invasion, according to the ORB. Yes, other estimates are lower, but you have to be impressed by what they have found. It seems very credible.
In Baghdad, where the US presence is most pronounced, nearly half of households report having lost a family member to a killing of some sort. Half the deaths are from gunshot wounds, one-fifth from car bombs, and one-tenth from aerial bombs. The total number of dead exceeds the hugely well-publicized Rwandan genocide in 1994.
You are welcome to inspect the detailed data.
Aside from the astonishing detail, what jumps out at me is the number of dead who are neither Sunni nor Shia. It is also striking how the further geographically you move from US troop activity, the more peaceful the area is. Americans think they are bringing freedom to Iraq, but the data indicate that we are only bringing suffering and death.
If you have ever lost a family member, you know that life is never the same again. It causes every manner of religious, social, and marital trauma. It's bad enough to lose a family member to some disease. But to a cold-blooded killing or a car bomb or an airplane bomb? That instills a sense of fury and motivation to retribution.
So we are speaking of some 1.2 million people who have been killed in this way, and that does not count the numbers that were killed during the invasion itself for the crime of having attempted to oppose invading foreign troops, or the 500,000 children and old people killed by the US-UN anti-civilian sanctions in the 10 previous years.
And let's not flatter ourselves into thinking that these are nothing but ragheads killing each other for no good reason. Just this past weekend, there is an example in point. Some of the legendary contractors for the State Department were driving through the Sunni neighborhood of Mansour in Baghdad. They were driving their SUVs when witnesses reported an explosion of fire that lasted 20 minutes. The SUVs drove off, leaving at least nine people dead on the road.
Why? No one knows. Sure there will be investigations. There have already been apologies. The company in question has had its license to practice occupation revoked by the Iraqi government. For how long, no one knows. But these are merely symbolic gestures. There will be no justice, and no forgetting.
To the extent anyone pays attention to this stuff, they only hear the words of the State Department spokesman: "The bottom line is that the secretary wants to make sure that we do everything we possibly can to avoid the loss of innocent life."
In light of the one million plus figure, such statements come off as evil jokes.
The US has unleashed bloodshed in Iraq that is rarely known even in countries we think of as violent and torn by civil strife. It is amazing to think that this has occurred in what was only recently a liberal and civilized country by the region’s standards. This was a country that had a problem with immigration, particularly among the well-educated and talented classes. They went to Iraq because it was the closest Arab proxy to Western-style society that one could find in the area.
It was the US that turned this country into a killing field. Why won’t we face this? Why won't we take responsibility? The reason has to do with this mysterious thing called nationalism, which makes an ideological religion of the nation's wars. We are god-like liberators. They are devil-like terrorists. No amount of data or contrary information seems to make a dent in this irreligious faith. So it is in every country and in all times. Here is the intellectual blindness that war generates.
Such blindness is always inexcusable, but perhaps more understandable in a time when information was severely restricted, when technological limits actually prohibited us from knowing the whole truth at the time. What excuse do we have today? Our blindness is not technological but ideological. We are the good guys, right? Every nation believes that about itself, but freedom is well served by the few who dare to think critically.
An essential postulate of the Western idea, or so we tell ourselves, is the universal and ultimate value of human life. And indeed it is true. No person or group of people is without value – not even those whom our own government chooses to label the enemy.
September 18, 2007
Llewellyn H. Rockwell, Jr. [send him mail] is president of the Ludwig von Mises Institute in Auburn, Alabama, editor of LewRockwell.com, and author of Speaking of Liberty.
Copyright © 2007 LewRockwell.
We Count, They Don't by Tom Engelhardt
Tom Dispatch
posted 2007-10-02
Tomgram: Having a Carnage Party
Counting to Three
At least Caesar was just commenting on reality when he wrote that "all Gaul is divided into three parts." Last week, Senate Foreign Relations Chairman Joe Biden attempted to create reality when an overwhelming majority of the U.S. Senate voted for his non-binding resolution to divide Iraq into three parts -- Shiite, Sunni, and Kurdish autonomous zones. Shailagh Murray of the Washington Post reported that the 75-23 Senate vote was "a significant milestone…, carving out common ground in a debate that has grown increasingly polarized and focused on military strategy." Murray added, "The [tripartite] structure is spelled out in Iraq's constitution, but Biden would initiate local and regional diplomatic efforts to hasten its evolution."
In Iraq, the plan was termed a "disaster" by Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki; a representative of Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani called the Senate resolution "a step toward the breakup of Iraq." He added, according to Juan Cole's Informed Comment website, "It is a mistake to imagine that such a plan will lead to a reduction in chaos in Iraq; rather, on the contrary, it will lead to an increase in the butchery and a deepening of the crisis of this country, and the spreading of increased chaos, even to neighboring states." In the meantime, Sunni clerics and various political parties joined in the denunciations. Only the Kurds, eager for an independent state, evidently welcomed the plan.
Cole caught the essence of this latest stratagem perfectly: First, he pointed out, the Senate "messed up Iraq by authorizing Terrible George to blow it up, now they want to further mess it up by dividing it."
But here's the most curious thing in this strange exercise in counting to three -- simply that it happened in the United States. Let's imagine, for a moment, that the Iraqi Parliament had voted a non-binding resolution to grant congressional representation to Washington DC or to allow California's electoral votes to be divided up by district. Or what if the Iranian parliament had just passed a non-binding resolution to divide the United States into semi-autonomous bio-regions?
Such acts would, of course, be considered not just outrageous and insulting, but quite mad and, on our one-way planet, they are indeed little short of unimaginable. But no one I noticed in the mainstream of political Washington or the media that covers it -- whether agreeing with the proposal or not -- seemed to find it even faintly odd for the U.S. Senate to count to three in support of a plan that, at best, would put an American stamp of approval on the continuing ethnic cleansing of Iraq.
No matter how meaningless Biden's resolution may turn out to be as policy, it has the benefit of taking us directly to bedrock Washington belief systems -- specifically, that it is America's global duty to solve the crises of other nations (even the ones that we set off). We are, after all, the nation-building nation par excellence and, despite all evidence to the contrary in Iraq, it is still impossible for official Washington to imagine us as anything but part of the solution rather than part of the problem.
You can find this same thinking no less readily available in another counting exercise under way in Washington…
Counting to Five, to Ten, to Fifty
Right now, leading Democrats, as well as Republicans, are focused on counting to both five and ten, which turn out to be the same thing. In a recent debate among the Democratic candidates for the presidency, for instance, the top three (by media and polling agreement), Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, and John Edwards refused to commit to having all American troops out of Iraq by 2013, the end of a first term in office -- five years from now, and 10 years from the March 2003 launching of the invasion.
Like much else of recent vintage, this 10-year count may have started with our surge commander in Iraq, General David Petraeus, who, for some time, has been telling just about anyone willing to listen that counter-insurgency operations in Iraq could take "up to a decade." ("In fact," he told Fox News in June, "typically, I think historically, counter-insurgency operations have gone at least nine or 10 years.") Now, it seems, his to-the-horizon-and-beyond Iraqi timetable has largely been subsumed into an inside-the-Beltway consensus that no one -- not in this administration or the next, not a new president or a new Congress -- will end our involvement in Iraq in the foreseeable future; that, in fact, we must stay in Iraq and that, the worse it gets, the more that becomes true -- if only to protect the Iraqis (and our interests in the Middle East) from even worse.
Conservative New York Times columnist David Brooks put it this way on the NewsHour with Jim Lehrer: "[The Democrats in Congress are] not going to cut off funding, and we've seen and we saw in the debate this week, there are going to be probably U.S. troops in Iraq there 10 years, regardless who's elected. So they're not going to win on this." Liberal warhawk George Packer in the New Yorker recently wrote a long article, "Planning for Defeat," laying out many of the reasons why Iraq remains a disaster area and discussing various methods of withdrawal before plunking for a policy summed up in the suggestion of an anonymous Bush administration official, "Declare defeat and stay in." Packer concluded: "Whenever this country decides that the bloody experience in Iraq requires the departure of American troops, complete disengagement will be neither desirable nor possible. We might want to be rid of Iraq, but Iraq won't let it happen."
Retired Brigadier General Kevin Ryan, representing the military punditocracy, offered the following: "I don't see us getting out of Iraq for a decade." In fact, increasingly few in official Washington do. (An exception is presidential candidate Bill Richardson, who launched a web video this week from a total withdrawal position that began: "George Bush says the surge is working. Gen. Petraeus says it will take more time. Republican presidential candidates say stay as long as it takes. No surprises there. But, you might be surprised to learn that Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama and John Edwards would all leave tens of thousands of troops in Iraq…") Iraq is, of course, acknowledged to be the number-one issue in the upcoming presidential campaign; the ever growing unhappiness of Americans with our presence in that country is considered a fact of political life; and yet it's becoming ever harder to imagine just what the future Iraq debate among presidential candidates will actually be about, if everyone agrees that we have at least five years to go with no end in sight.
And let's remember that behind the five and ten counts lurks a count to 50 and beyond; the number of years, that is, that American troops have been garrisoned in South Korea since the Korean War ended in stalemate in 1953. Visitors to the White House have long reported that President Bush was intrigued with the "Korea model." As David Sanger of the New York Times' wrote recently: "Many times over the past six months, he has told visitors to the White House that he needs to get to the Korea model -- a politically sustainable U.S. deployment to keep the lid on the Middle East." (Keep in mind, however, that, when the Bush administration rumbled into Baghdad on their tanks and Bradley Fighting Vehicles in April 2003, it was the Korea model they had in mind -- though they weren't calling it that at the time.)
This is the model that Secretary of Defense Robert Gates also seems to have put his money on -- a drawn-down American force garrisoned in giant, semi-permanent bases in a "stabilized" Iraq for eons to come. The Congressional Budget Office has already crunched numbers on what such a model would likely cost.
Behind all these counting exercises lies the belief that wherever we land and whatever we do, we are, in the end, the anointed bringers of something called "stability" and if we have to count to 50, 500, 50,000, or 500,000 and do it in the currency of corpses, sooner or later it will be so.
Counting Bodies
Everyone remembers when the Vietnam-era body count was banished from the Global War on Terror. Tommy Franks, the general who led American forces into Afghanistan (and later Iraq), bluntly stated: "We don't do body counts." And then, jumping ahead a few years, there was the President plaintively blurting out his pain to a coffee klatch of empathetic conservative journalists in October 2006: "We don't get to say that -- a thousand of the enemy killed, or whatever the number was. It's happening. You just don't know it…. We have made a conscious effort not to be a body-count team."
Well, tell that to the troops on the ground. There, it's evidently been déjà vu all over again for a while.
The recent murder trial of an American sniper from an elite sniper scout platoon operating in Iskandariya, a Sunni area in the "Triangle of Death" south of Baghdad, has been filled with revelations. Among them, that the Pentagon has a program to put "bait" out like "detonation cords, plastic explosives and ammunition" to draw unwary insurgents into sniper scopes; this, in a land with perhaps 50% unemployment, where anything salvageable will be scavenged by civilians. ("In a country that is awash in armaments and magazines and implements of war, if every time somebody picked up something that was potentially useful as a weapon, you might as well ask every Iraqi to walk around with a target on his back," comments Eugene Fidell of the National Institute of Military Justice.) As it turns out, the snipers seem to have misunderstood the use of these "bait" items -- or to have understood all too well their real use -- and instead placed them on unarmed Iraqis they had already killed in order to create instant "insurgent" bodies appropriate for the body count that wasn't supposed to be.
As Private David C. Petta, told the court, according to the Washington Post, "he believed the classified items were for dropping on people the unit had killed, ‘to enforce if we killed somebody that we knew was a bad guy but we didn't have the evidence to show for it.'" (The weaponizing of the dead was, by the way, a commonplace of the Vietnam War as well.) According to court testimony, the specialists from this sniper squad, "described how their teams were pushed beyond limits by battalion commanders eager to raise their kill ratio against a ruthless enemy.... During a separate hearing here in July, Sgt. Anthony G. Murphy said he and other First Battalion snipers felt 'an underlying tone' of disappointment from field commanders seeking higher enemy body counts. 'It just kind of felt like, "What are you guys doing wrong out there?"'")
And little wonder, given what was at stake. This was, of course, standard operating procedure in Vietnam too -- and for the same reasons. Lieutenant General Julian J. Ewell, for instance, had his own codified kill ratios of "allied to enemy dead" for his units in Vietnam. These ranged from 1:50, which qualified as "highly skilled U.S. unit" to 1:10, "historical U.S. average." And woe be to those who were just average. Units will be "pushed beyond limits" any time "victory" or "success" or "progress" becomes nothing but a body-counting game, as is happening again.
Once progress in a frustrating counter-guerrilla war is pegged to those endlessly toted up corpses, the counting process itself naturally becomes a crucial measure of success (in lieu of actual success), unit by unit -- which means it also becomes a key measure of performance, and performance is, of course, the measure of military advancement. So, the pressure to be that "highly skilled unit" translates into pressure for more bodies to report as signs of success. Sooner or later, if you just report actual enemy killed, your stats sheet begins to look lousy -- especially if others are inflating their figures, as they will do. And then the pressure only builds.
Every bit of this should ring a grim bell or two; but, as New Yorker journalist Seymour Hersh commented recently in an interview with the German magazine Der Spiegel, from Vietnam to today there's been "no learning curve." "You'd think," he said, "that in this country with so many smart people, that we can't possibly do the same dumb thing again.... [but] everything is tabula rasa."
Counting Squads
Prepare not to be surprised: In Iraq, the military counted bodies from the beginning -- counted, in fact, everything. They just weren't releasing the figures back in the days when the Bush administration was less desperate about Iraq and far more desperate not to appear to be back in the Vietnam era of endless stats and no victory. But the "metrics" (as they are called) were always something of an open secret. In March 2005, for instance, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld told an NPR reporter:
"We have a room here [in the Pentagon], the Iraq Room where we track a whole series of metrics. Some of them are inputs and some of them are outputs, results, and obviously the inputs are easier to do and less important, and the outputs are vastly more important and more difficult to do.
"We track, for example, the numbers of attacks by area. We track the types of attacks by area…. [W]e track a number of reports of intimidation, attempts at intimidation or assassination of government officials, for example. We track the extent to which people are supplying intelligence to our people so that they can go in and actually track down and capture or kill insurgents. We try to desegregate the people we've captured and look at what they are. Are they foreign fighters, Jihadist types? Are they criminals who were paid money to go do something like that? Are they former regime elements, Ba'athists?
And we try to keep track of what those numbers are in terms of detainees and people that are processed in that way.... We probably look at 50, 60, 70 different types of metrics, and come away with them with an impression."
And as it happens, though he didn't mention it that day, the military were also assiduously counting corpses. We know that because last week they released figures to USA Today on how many insurgents U.S. forces have supposedly killed since the invasion of Iraq ended: 18,832 since June 2003; 4,882 "militants" so far in 2007 alone. That represents a leap of 25% in corpse-counting from the previous year. These previously derided body counts, according to American officials quoted in Stars and Stripes, now give the necessary "scale" and "context" to the fight in Iraq.
As the USA Today report points out, last year Centcom Commander John Abizaid had suggested that the forces of the Sunni insurgency numbered in the 10,000-20,000 range. If the released figures are accurate, nearly 25%-50% of that number must have been killed this year. (Who knows how many were wounded.) Add in suspected Sunni insurgents and terrorists incarcerated in American prisons in Iraq only in the "surge" months of 2007 -- another 8,000 or so -- and it suddenly looks as if something close to the full insurgency has essentially been turned into a ghost resistance between January and September of this year.
(Again, Vietnam had its equivalents. After the nationwide Tet Offensive in February 1968, for instance, the U.S. military requested more troops from the Johnson administration. They also claimed that the Vietnamese had lost 45,000 dead. As historian Marilyn Young wrote in her book, The Vietnam Wars, "UN Ambassador Arthur Goldberg wanted to know what was enemy troop strength at the start of Tet. The answer: between 160,000 and 175,000. And the ratio of killed to wounded? Estimated at three and a half to one, answered the officer. 'Well, if that's true,' Goldberg calculated quickly, 'then they have no effective forces left in the field.' This certainly made additional American forces seem redundant.")
By now, it seems as if everyone on the American side is suddenly counting in public. In August, the President, for the first time, felt free to become the leader of a "body-count team" and proudly announced, in a televised speech to the American people, just how many insurgents U.S. forces were supposedly killing in each surge month (though the figures don't gibe with the ones released by the military last week): "Our troops have killed or captured an average of more than 1,500 al Qaeda terrorists and other extremists every month since January of this year." General Petraeus, of course, arrived in Washington to deliver his "progress report" to Congress with his own Vietnam-style multicolored charts and graphs to display; and the military, having sworn not to do body counts, is now releasing figures daily -- often large ones -- on kills in Afghanistan and Iraq that regularly make the headlines. And every day, it seems, new Pentagon databases and squads of number-crunchers are revealed. By now, it's a genuine carnage party.
Last week, Karen DeYoung of the Washington Post reported in far greater depth than we've seen before on the metrics squads run out of the Pentagon and the U.S. command in Baghdad. In the process, she found some interesting discrepancies between the findings of the Pentagon's data analysts and those working for Petraeus -- "Civilian casualty numbers in the Pentagon's latest quarterly report on Iraq last week, for example, differ significantly from those presented by the top commander in Iraq…" -- and this became the subject of much on-line analysis at sites like ThinkProgress.org and TalkingPointsMemo.com. But perhaps more interesting than these discrepancies was the size of the overall military counting operation.
DeYoung, for instance, interviewed Chief Warrant Officer 3 Dan Macomber, the "senior all-source intelligence analyst" in charge of a six-person team whose only task is "to compile [data] and track trends and analysis for General Petraeus" personally. And that team, in turn, is but a small part of a larger crew "far from the battlefield" that, DeYoung reports, includes "platoons of soldiers in Iraq and at the Pentagon… assigned to crunch numbers -- sectarian killings, roadside bombs, Iraqi forces trained, weapons caches discovered and others -- in a constant effort to gauge how the war is going."
Think of that for a moment. "Platoons" of military counters trying to count their way so high on a pile of Iraqi corpses and captured weapons that, someday, "progress" and even perhaps a glimmer of "success" might appear at the end of that dark, dark tunnel. That would be when, assumedly, the "stability" we represent would finally make its appearance. What Iraq would be by then is another matter entirely.
Counting to a Million and Beyond
Why would such "platoons" of counters be needed? One answer might be that the counting runs high indeed. On Monday, there was a revealing inside-the-fold piece in the New York Times on this subject. It was, on the surface, a modest good-news piece from a distinctly bad-news land. While the central government in Baghdad is now almost paralyzed, wrote James Glanz, its corrupt ministries unable to spend even small percentages of the oil moneys allotted to them for various reconstruction activities, local spending in some provinces may be significantly more effective (or, if you read the piece to the end, it may not). Here was the key passage:
"The capital budget for the entire country, including the provinces, was $6 billion in 2006 and $10 billion in 2007. But some national ministries spent as little as 15 percent of their share last year, citing problems such as a shortage of employees trained to write contracts, the flight of scientific and engineering expertise from the country and the danger from militias and the insurgency."
Think about that: "a shortage of employees trained to write contracts…"; "the flight of scientific and engineering expertise from the country…" There's something worth counting, but you might be doing it for a long, long time.
Significant parts of what was once a large Iraqi professional class have, since the occupation, become "bus people." They have fled the country in unknown numbers -- though a recent Oxfam report indicates that, in Baghdad, some hospitals and universities have lost up to 80% of their staffs. These are part of a larger exodus of staggering dimensions. It is now estimated -- nobody knows the real numbers -- that there are at least 2.5 million Iraqis who have fled abroad since the Bush administration's invasion ended. Up to 2.2 million more Iraqis have been dislodged from their homes, largely by sectarian violence, and turned into internal refugees.
And then, of course, there were the Iraqis who couldn't flee -- those corpses everyone is now so hot to count, so eager to measure progress upon. As in June 2006 with the door-to-door study that became the Lancet report, which suggested that 600,000 Iraqis might have died violently since the invasion of 2003, we have another survey of the dead. Again, it offers startling figures; and, once again, those figures, though produced by a reputable British survey outfit, ORB or Opinion Research Business, which has been polling in Iraq since 2005, were largely ignored in the mainstream media. As Llewellyn H. Rockwell, Jr. wrote in a moving essay at his libertarian website, LewRockwell.com:
"How comfy we are all in the United States, as we engage in living-room debates about the US occupation of Iraq, whether 'we' are bringing them freedom and whether their freedom is really worth the sacrifice of so many of our men and women. We talk about whether war aims have really been achieved, how to exit gracefully, or whether we need a hyper-surge to finish this whole business once and for all.... But when 'we' cause the calamity, suddenly there is silence."
A sample of 1,499 Iraqis 18 years old and up were asked: "How many members of your household, if any, have died as a result of the conflict in Iraq since 2003 (i.e. as a result of violence rather than a natural death such as old age)? Please note that I mean those who were actually living under your roof." Nearly one of every two Baghdad households claimed to have lost a family member and the firm estimated that, overall, approximately 1.2 million Iraqis may have died violently since the invasion, which, if true, would put even the Rwandan genocide in the shade. Other estimates of Iraqi deaths are lower, but still staggering.
And that's just the dead. Not the wounded. Not the mentally damaged or the shell-shocked or the deranged. Not those thousands in northern Iraq who are now coming down with cholera, thanks to worsening sanitary conditions and the unavailability of potable water.
There -- in a country which may have lost 1.2 million people to violence in four-plus years -- is where our leading presidential candidates, many pundits (liberal as well as conservative), and significant numbers of Congressional representatives agree we must remain in some form beyond at least 2013, for reasons of "stability," lest a "genocide" occur.
If the polls are to be believed, here in this country only the American people disagree, and they obviously don't count for much.
So while we hunker into Iraq, the numbers-crunchers will undoubtedly redouble their efforts for the next "progress report," upcoming in March 2008, from General Petraeus and Ambassador Ryan Crocker. They are undoubtedly already preparing their bar charts and multi-colored graphs. Out in the field, the pressure on the troops to provide the stats that will make those graphs reflect "progress," that will allow units to achieve "success" and commanders to advance, will only increase.
The lesson of these last metrics-filled surge months is already clear enough: We count, they don't.
Tom Engelhardt, who runs the Nation Institute's Tomdispatch.com, is the co-founder of the American Empire Project. His book, The End of Victory Culture (University of Massachusetts Press), has just been thoroughly updated in a newly issued edition that deals with victory culture's crash-and-burn sequel in Iraq.
Copyright 2007 Tom Engelhardt
posted 2007-10-02
Tomgram: Having a Carnage Party
Counting to Three
At least Caesar was just commenting on reality when he wrote that "all Gaul is divided into three parts." Last week, Senate Foreign Relations Chairman Joe Biden attempted to create reality when an overwhelming majority of the U.S. Senate voted for his non-binding resolution to divide Iraq into three parts -- Shiite, Sunni, and Kurdish autonomous zones. Shailagh Murray of the Washington Post reported that the 75-23 Senate vote was "a significant milestone…, carving out common ground in a debate that has grown increasingly polarized and focused on military strategy." Murray added, "The [tripartite] structure is spelled out in Iraq's constitution, but Biden would initiate local and regional diplomatic efforts to hasten its evolution."
In Iraq, the plan was termed a "disaster" by Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki; a representative of Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani called the Senate resolution "a step toward the breakup of Iraq." He added, according to Juan Cole's Informed Comment website, "It is a mistake to imagine that such a plan will lead to a reduction in chaos in Iraq; rather, on the contrary, it will lead to an increase in the butchery and a deepening of the crisis of this country, and the spreading of increased chaos, even to neighboring states." In the meantime, Sunni clerics and various political parties joined in the denunciations. Only the Kurds, eager for an independent state, evidently welcomed the plan.
Cole caught the essence of this latest stratagem perfectly: First, he pointed out, the Senate "messed up Iraq by authorizing Terrible George to blow it up, now they want to further mess it up by dividing it."
But here's the most curious thing in this strange exercise in counting to three -- simply that it happened in the United States. Let's imagine, for a moment, that the Iraqi Parliament had voted a non-binding resolution to grant congressional representation to Washington DC or to allow California's electoral votes to be divided up by district. Or what if the Iranian parliament had just passed a non-binding resolution to divide the United States into semi-autonomous bio-regions?
Such acts would, of course, be considered not just outrageous and insulting, but quite mad and, on our one-way planet, they are indeed little short of unimaginable. But no one I noticed in the mainstream of political Washington or the media that covers it -- whether agreeing with the proposal or not -- seemed to find it even faintly odd for the U.S. Senate to count to three in support of a plan that, at best, would put an American stamp of approval on the continuing ethnic cleansing of Iraq.
No matter how meaningless Biden's resolution may turn out to be as policy, it has the benefit of taking us directly to bedrock Washington belief systems -- specifically, that it is America's global duty to solve the crises of other nations (even the ones that we set off). We are, after all, the nation-building nation par excellence and, despite all evidence to the contrary in Iraq, it is still impossible for official Washington to imagine us as anything but part of the solution rather than part of the problem.
You can find this same thinking no less readily available in another counting exercise under way in Washington…
Counting to Five, to Ten, to Fifty
Right now, leading Democrats, as well as Republicans, are focused on counting to both five and ten, which turn out to be the same thing. In a recent debate among the Democratic candidates for the presidency, for instance, the top three (by media and polling agreement), Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, and John Edwards refused to commit to having all American troops out of Iraq by 2013, the end of a first term in office -- five years from now, and 10 years from the March 2003 launching of the invasion.
Like much else of recent vintage, this 10-year count may have started with our surge commander in Iraq, General David Petraeus, who, for some time, has been telling just about anyone willing to listen that counter-insurgency operations in Iraq could take "up to a decade." ("In fact," he told Fox News in June, "typically, I think historically, counter-insurgency operations have gone at least nine or 10 years.") Now, it seems, his to-the-horizon-and-beyond Iraqi timetable has largely been subsumed into an inside-the-Beltway consensus that no one -- not in this administration or the next, not a new president or a new Congress -- will end our involvement in Iraq in the foreseeable future; that, in fact, we must stay in Iraq and that, the worse it gets, the more that becomes true -- if only to protect the Iraqis (and our interests in the Middle East) from even worse.
Conservative New York Times columnist David Brooks put it this way on the NewsHour with Jim Lehrer: "[The Democrats in Congress are] not going to cut off funding, and we've seen and we saw in the debate this week, there are going to be probably U.S. troops in Iraq there 10 years, regardless who's elected. So they're not going to win on this." Liberal warhawk George Packer in the New Yorker recently wrote a long article, "Planning for Defeat," laying out many of the reasons why Iraq remains a disaster area and discussing various methods of withdrawal before plunking for a policy summed up in the suggestion of an anonymous Bush administration official, "Declare defeat and stay in." Packer concluded: "Whenever this country decides that the bloody experience in Iraq requires the departure of American troops, complete disengagement will be neither desirable nor possible. We might want to be rid of Iraq, but Iraq won't let it happen."
Retired Brigadier General Kevin Ryan, representing the military punditocracy, offered the following: "I don't see us getting out of Iraq for a decade." In fact, increasingly few in official Washington do. (An exception is presidential candidate Bill Richardson, who launched a web video this week from a total withdrawal position that began: "George Bush says the surge is working. Gen. Petraeus says it will take more time. Republican presidential candidates say stay as long as it takes. No surprises there. But, you might be surprised to learn that Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama and John Edwards would all leave tens of thousands of troops in Iraq…") Iraq is, of course, acknowledged to be the number-one issue in the upcoming presidential campaign; the ever growing unhappiness of Americans with our presence in that country is considered a fact of political life; and yet it's becoming ever harder to imagine just what the future Iraq debate among presidential candidates will actually be about, if everyone agrees that we have at least five years to go with no end in sight.
And let's remember that behind the five and ten counts lurks a count to 50 and beyond; the number of years, that is, that American troops have been garrisoned in South Korea since the Korean War ended in stalemate in 1953. Visitors to the White House have long reported that President Bush was intrigued with the "Korea model." As David Sanger of the New York Times' wrote recently: "Many times over the past six months, he has told visitors to the White House that he needs to get to the Korea model -- a politically sustainable U.S. deployment to keep the lid on the Middle East." (Keep in mind, however, that, when the Bush administration rumbled into Baghdad on their tanks and Bradley Fighting Vehicles in April 2003, it was the Korea model they had in mind -- though they weren't calling it that at the time.)
This is the model that Secretary of Defense Robert Gates also seems to have put his money on -- a drawn-down American force garrisoned in giant, semi-permanent bases in a "stabilized" Iraq for eons to come. The Congressional Budget Office has already crunched numbers on what such a model would likely cost.
Behind all these counting exercises lies the belief that wherever we land and whatever we do, we are, in the end, the anointed bringers of something called "stability" and if we have to count to 50, 500, 50,000, or 500,000 and do it in the currency of corpses, sooner or later it will be so.
Counting Bodies
Everyone remembers when the Vietnam-era body count was banished from the Global War on Terror. Tommy Franks, the general who led American forces into Afghanistan (and later Iraq), bluntly stated: "We don't do body counts." And then, jumping ahead a few years, there was the President plaintively blurting out his pain to a coffee klatch of empathetic conservative journalists in October 2006: "We don't get to say that -- a thousand of the enemy killed, or whatever the number was. It's happening. You just don't know it…. We have made a conscious effort not to be a body-count team."
Well, tell that to the troops on the ground. There, it's evidently been déjà vu all over again for a while.
The recent murder trial of an American sniper from an elite sniper scout platoon operating in Iskandariya, a Sunni area in the "Triangle of Death" south of Baghdad, has been filled with revelations. Among them, that the Pentagon has a program to put "bait" out like "detonation cords, plastic explosives and ammunition" to draw unwary insurgents into sniper scopes; this, in a land with perhaps 50% unemployment, where anything salvageable will be scavenged by civilians. ("In a country that is awash in armaments and magazines and implements of war, if every time somebody picked up something that was potentially useful as a weapon, you might as well ask every Iraqi to walk around with a target on his back," comments Eugene Fidell of the National Institute of Military Justice.) As it turns out, the snipers seem to have misunderstood the use of these "bait" items -- or to have understood all too well their real use -- and instead placed them on unarmed Iraqis they had already killed in order to create instant "insurgent" bodies appropriate for the body count that wasn't supposed to be.
As Private David C. Petta, told the court, according to the Washington Post, "he believed the classified items were for dropping on people the unit had killed, ‘to enforce if we killed somebody that we knew was a bad guy but we didn't have the evidence to show for it.'" (The weaponizing of the dead was, by the way, a commonplace of the Vietnam War as well.) According to court testimony, the specialists from this sniper squad, "described how their teams were pushed beyond limits by battalion commanders eager to raise their kill ratio against a ruthless enemy.... During a separate hearing here in July, Sgt. Anthony G. Murphy said he and other First Battalion snipers felt 'an underlying tone' of disappointment from field commanders seeking higher enemy body counts. 'It just kind of felt like, "What are you guys doing wrong out there?"'")
And little wonder, given what was at stake. This was, of course, standard operating procedure in Vietnam too -- and for the same reasons. Lieutenant General Julian J. Ewell, for instance, had his own codified kill ratios of "allied to enemy dead" for his units in Vietnam. These ranged from 1:50, which qualified as "highly skilled U.S. unit" to 1:10, "historical U.S. average." And woe be to those who were just average. Units will be "pushed beyond limits" any time "victory" or "success" or "progress" becomes nothing but a body-counting game, as is happening again.
Once progress in a frustrating counter-guerrilla war is pegged to those endlessly toted up corpses, the counting process itself naturally becomes a crucial measure of success (in lieu of actual success), unit by unit -- which means it also becomes a key measure of performance, and performance is, of course, the measure of military advancement. So, the pressure to be that "highly skilled unit" translates into pressure for more bodies to report as signs of success. Sooner or later, if you just report actual enemy killed, your stats sheet begins to look lousy -- especially if others are inflating their figures, as they will do. And then the pressure only builds.
Every bit of this should ring a grim bell or two; but, as New Yorker journalist Seymour Hersh commented recently in an interview with the German magazine Der Spiegel, from Vietnam to today there's been "no learning curve." "You'd think," he said, "that in this country with so many smart people, that we can't possibly do the same dumb thing again.... [but] everything is tabula rasa."
Counting Squads
Prepare not to be surprised: In Iraq, the military counted bodies from the beginning -- counted, in fact, everything. They just weren't releasing the figures back in the days when the Bush administration was less desperate about Iraq and far more desperate not to appear to be back in the Vietnam era of endless stats and no victory. But the "metrics" (as they are called) were always something of an open secret. In March 2005, for instance, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld told an NPR reporter:
"We have a room here [in the Pentagon], the Iraq Room where we track a whole series of metrics. Some of them are inputs and some of them are outputs, results, and obviously the inputs are easier to do and less important, and the outputs are vastly more important and more difficult to do.
"We track, for example, the numbers of attacks by area. We track the types of attacks by area…. [W]e track a number of reports of intimidation, attempts at intimidation or assassination of government officials, for example. We track the extent to which people are supplying intelligence to our people so that they can go in and actually track down and capture or kill insurgents. We try to desegregate the people we've captured and look at what they are. Are they foreign fighters, Jihadist types? Are they criminals who were paid money to go do something like that? Are they former regime elements, Ba'athists?
And we try to keep track of what those numbers are in terms of detainees and people that are processed in that way.... We probably look at 50, 60, 70 different types of metrics, and come away with them with an impression."
And as it happens, though he didn't mention it that day, the military were also assiduously counting corpses. We know that because last week they released figures to USA Today on how many insurgents U.S. forces have supposedly killed since the invasion of Iraq ended: 18,832 since June 2003; 4,882 "militants" so far in 2007 alone. That represents a leap of 25% in corpse-counting from the previous year. These previously derided body counts, according to American officials quoted in Stars and Stripes, now give the necessary "scale" and "context" to the fight in Iraq.
As the USA Today report points out, last year Centcom Commander John Abizaid had suggested that the forces of the Sunni insurgency numbered in the 10,000-20,000 range. If the released figures are accurate, nearly 25%-50% of that number must have been killed this year. (Who knows how many were wounded.) Add in suspected Sunni insurgents and terrorists incarcerated in American prisons in Iraq only in the "surge" months of 2007 -- another 8,000 or so -- and it suddenly looks as if something close to the full insurgency has essentially been turned into a ghost resistance between January and September of this year.
(Again, Vietnam had its equivalents. After the nationwide Tet Offensive in February 1968, for instance, the U.S. military requested more troops from the Johnson administration. They also claimed that the Vietnamese had lost 45,000 dead. As historian Marilyn Young wrote in her book, The Vietnam Wars, "UN Ambassador Arthur Goldberg wanted to know what was enemy troop strength at the start of Tet. The answer: between 160,000 and 175,000. And the ratio of killed to wounded? Estimated at three and a half to one, answered the officer. 'Well, if that's true,' Goldberg calculated quickly, 'then they have no effective forces left in the field.' This certainly made additional American forces seem redundant.")
By now, it seems as if everyone on the American side is suddenly counting in public. In August, the President, for the first time, felt free to become the leader of a "body-count team" and proudly announced, in a televised speech to the American people, just how many insurgents U.S. forces were supposedly killing in each surge month (though the figures don't gibe with the ones released by the military last week): "Our troops have killed or captured an average of more than 1,500 al Qaeda terrorists and other extremists every month since January of this year." General Petraeus, of course, arrived in Washington to deliver his "progress report" to Congress with his own Vietnam-style multicolored charts and graphs to display; and the military, having sworn not to do body counts, is now releasing figures daily -- often large ones -- on kills in Afghanistan and Iraq that regularly make the headlines. And every day, it seems, new Pentagon databases and squads of number-crunchers are revealed. By now, it's a genuine carnage party.
Last week, Karen DeYoung of the Washington Post reported in far greater depth than we've seen before on the metrics squads run out of the Pentagon and the U.S. command in Baghdad. In the process, she found some interesting discrepancies between the findings of the Pentagon's data analysts and those working for Petraeus -- "Civilian casualty numbers in the Pentagon's latest quarterly report on Iraq last week, for example, differ significantly from those presented by the top commander in Iraq…" -- and this became the subject of much on-line analysis at sites like ThinkProgress.org and TalkingPointsMemo.com. But perhaps more interesting than these discrepancies was the size of the overall military counting operation.
DeYoung, for instance, interviewed Chief Warrant Officer 3 Dan Macomber, the "senior all-source intelligence analyst" in charge of a six-person team whose only task is "to compile [data] and track trends and analysis for General Petraeus" personally. And that team, in turn, is but a small part of a larger crew "far from the battlefield" that, DeYoung reports, includes "platoons of soldiers in Iraq and at the Pentagon… assigned to crunch numbers -- sectarian killings, roadside bombs, Iraqi forces trained, weapons caches discovered and others -- in a constant effort to gauge how the war is going."
Think of that for a moment. "Platoons" of military counters trying to count their way so high on a pile of Iraqi corpses and captured weapons that, someday, "progress" and even perhaps a glimmer of "success" might appear at the end of that dark, dark tunnel. That would be when, assumedly, the "stability" we represent would finally make its appearance. What Iraq would be by then is another matter entirely.
Counting to a Million and Beyond
Why would such "platoons" of counters be needed? One answer might be that the counting runs high indeed. On Monday, there was a revealing inside-the-fold piece in the New York Times on this subject. It was, on the surface, a modest good-news piece from a distinctly bad-news land. While the central government in Baghdad is now almost paralyzed, wrote James Glanz, its corrupt ministries unable to spend even small percentages of the oil moneys allotted to them for various reconstruction activities, local spending in some provinces may be significantly more effective (or, if you read the piece to the end, it may not). Here was the key passage:
"The capital budget for the entire country, including the provinces, was $6 billion in 2006 and $10 billion in 2007. But some national ministries spent as little as 15 percent of their share last year, citing problems such as a shortage of employees trained to write contracts, the flight of scientific and engineering expertise from the country and the danger from militias and the insurgency."
Think about that: "a shortage of employees trained to write contracts…"; "the flight of scientific and engineering expertise from the country…" There's something worth counting, but you might be doing it for a long, long time.
Significant parts of what was once a large Iraqi professional class have, since the occupation, become "bus people." They have fled the country in unknown numbers -- though a recent Oxfam report indicates that, in Baghdad, some hospitals and universities have lost up to 80% of their staffs. These are part of a larger exodus of staggering dimensions. It is now estimated -- nobody knows the real numbers -- that there are at least 2.5 million Iraqis who have fled abroad since the Bush administration's invasion ended. Up to 2.2 million more Iraqis have been dislodged from their homes, largely by sectarian violence, and turned into internal refugees.
And then, of course, there were the Iraqis who couldn't flee -- those corpses everyone is now so hot to count, so eager to measure progress upon. As in June 2006 with the door-to-door study that became the Lancet report, which suggested that 600,000 Iraqis might have died violently since the invasion of 2003, we have another survey of the dead. Again, it offers startling figures; and, once again, those figures, though produced by a reputable British survey outfit, ORB or Opinion Research Business, which has been polling in Iraq since 2005, were largely ignored in the mainstream media. As Llewellyn H. Rockwell, Jr. wrote in a moving essay at his libertarian website, LewRockwell.com:
"How comfy we are all in the United States, as we engage in living-room debates about the US occupation of Iraq, whether 'we' are bringing them freedom and whether their freedom is really worth the sacrifice of so many of our men and women. We talk about whether war aims have really been achieved, how to exit gracefully, or whether we need a hyper-surge to finish this whole business once and for all.... But when 'we' cause the calamity, suddenly there is silence."
A sample of 1,499 Iraqis 18 years old and up were asked: "How many members of your household, if any, have died as a result of the conflict in Iraq since 2003 (i.e. as a result of violence rather than a natural death such as old age)? Please note that I mean those who were actually living under your roof." Nearly one of every two Baghdad households claimed to have lost a family member and the firm estimated that, overall, approximately 1.2 million Iraqis may have died violently since the invasion, which, if true, would put even the Rwandan genocide in the shade. Other estimates of Iraqi deaths are lower, but still staggering.
And that's just the dead. Not the wounded. Not the mentally damaged or the shell-shocked or the deranged. Not those thousands in northern Iraq who are now coming down with cholera, thanks to worsening sanitary conditions and the unavailability of potable water.
There -- in a country which may have lost 1.2 million people to violence in four-plus years -- is where our leading presidential candidates, many pundits (liberal as well as conservative), and significant numbers of Congressional representatives agree we must remain in some form beyond at least 2013, for reasons of "stability," lest a "genocide" occur.
If the polls are to be believed, here in this country only the American people disagree, and they obviously don't count for much.
So while we hunker into Iraq, the numbers-crunchers will undoubtedly redouble their efforts for the next "progress report," upcoming in March 2008, from General Petraeus and Ambassador Ryan Crocker. They are undoubtedly already preparing their bar charts and multi-colored graphs. Out in the field, the pressure on the troops to provide the stats that will make those graphs reflect "progress," that will allow units to achieve "success" and commanders to advance, will only increase.
The lesson of these last metrics-filled surge months is already clear enough: We count, they don't.
Tom Engelhardt, who runs the Nation Institute's Tomdispatch.com, is the co-founder of the American Empire Project. His book, The End of Victory Culture (University of Massachusetts Press), has just been thoroughly updated in a newly issued edition that deals with victory culture's crash-and-burn sequel in Iraq.
Copyright 2007 Tom Engelhardt
mardi 2 octobre 2007
KRG Regional Oil and Gas Council approves 4 new PSCs
2 October 2007 Erbil
The Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) Ministry for Natural Resources today announced that the KRG Regional Oil and Gas Council has approved four new production sharing contracts (PSCs) and sanctioned two new refinery projects in the Kurdistan Region in Iraq. The announcement came a day after the Council unanimously decided to award the contracts at its second formal meeting.
The Ministry for Natural Resources today executed two of the approved production sharing contracts (PSCs) for oil and gas exploration and development in the Kurdistan Region:
· Award of the Miran Block (1,015 square kilometres) in Suleimaniah Governorate to Heritage Energy Middle East Limited, a wholly owned subsidiary of Canadian listed oil company Heritage Oil and Gas. The Miran Block is a low to medium exploration risk area.
· Award of the Sindi/Amedi Block (2,358 square kilometres) along the Iraq/Turkish border to Perenco Kurdistan Limited, a wholly owned subsidiary of Perenco S.A., the privately held French oil exploration and production company. The Sindi/Amedi Block is a high exploration risk area.
The signing of the other two PSCs with experienced international companies will follow shortly. If commercial discoveries are made, these two PSCs will provide an estimated aggregate return/profit of over 85% to Iraq and around 15% to the contractors.
The contract signed with Hunt Oil in August this year was also within these terms. The existing KRG contracts, signed prior to Kurdistan Region Oil and Gas Law, will also, where necessary, be brought into conformity with the guidelines, and as required by that Law. The details of commercial terms of all contracts will soon be published by the KRG as required by the Law.
All contracts issued by the KRG are in the form of the Model PSC, also published on 29 June. Under the four PSCs, the KRG has the right to up to 25% participation interest, and it has retained the right to assign up to another 25% to qualified Iraqi and international companies to further stimulate the local economy.
Downstream projects
· Miran area Refinery: Heritage has also agreed to fully fund (on a joint-venture basis) the completion of a new 20,000 barrels per day refinery in the Taq Taq / Miran area, to be completed within two years.
· Taq Taq Refinery: The KRG’s Regional Oil and Gas Council has also approved a project for a refinery to be fully funded, commissioned and constructed by the Taq Taq field oil project operators (Genel/Addax) and other local and international investors. The refinery will also be expected to produce another 20,000 barrels per day. This refinery will be completed within eighteen months.
The KRG is in continuing negotiations with a number of international oil companies, downstream operators and local companies for further upstream and downstream projects.
The Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) Ministry for Natural Resources today announced that the KRG Regional Oil and Gas Council has approved four new production sharing contracts (PSCs) and sanctioned two new refinery projects in the Kurdistan Region in Iraq. The announcement came a day after the Council unanimously decided to award the contracts at its second formal meeting.
The Ministry for Natural Resources today executed two of the approved production sharing contracts (PSCs) for oil and gas exploration and development in the Kurdistan Region:
· Award of the Miran Block (1,015 square kilometres) in Suleimaniah Governorate to Heritage Energy Middle East Limited, a wholly owned subsidiary of Canadian listed oil company Heritage Oil and Gas. The Miran Block is a low to medium exploration risk area.
· Award of the Sindi/Amedi Block (2,358 square kilometres) along the Iraq/Turkish border to Perenco Kurdistan Limited, a wholly owned subsidiary of Perenco S.A., the privately held French oil exploration and production company. The Sindi/Amedi Block is a high exploration risk area.
The signing of the other two PSCs with experienced international companies will follow shortly. If commercial discoveries are made, these two PSCs will provide an estimated aggregate return/profit of over 85% to Iraq and around 15% to the contractors.
The contract signed with Hunt Oil in August this year was also within these terms. The existing KRG contracts, signed prior to Kurdistan Region Oil and Gas Law, will also, where necessary, be brought into conformity with the guidelines, and as required by that Law. The details of commercial terms of all contracts will soon be published by the KRG as required by the Law.
All contracts issued by the KRG are in the form of the Model PSC, also published on 29 June. Under the four PSCs, the KRG has the right to up to 25% participation interest, and it has retained the right to assign up to another 25% to qualified Iraqi and international companies to further stimulate the local economy.
Downstream projects
· Miran area Refinery: Heritage has also agreed to fully fund (on a joint-venture basis) the completion of a new 20,000 barrels per day refinery in the Taq Taq / Miran area, to be completed within two years.
· Taq Taq Refinery: The KRG’s Regional Oil and Gas Council has also approved a project for a refinery to be fully funded, commissioned and constructed by the Taq Taq field oil project operators (Genel/Addax) and other local and international investors. The refinery will also be expected to produce another 20,000 barrels per day. This refinery will be completed within eighteen months.
The KRG is in continuing negotiations with a number of international oil companies, downstream operators and local companies for further upstream and downstream projects.
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