Date: July 14, 2006 10:44:47 AM PDT
Subject: [ctrl] 'Baghdad is in meltdown'
'Baghdad is in meltdown'
July 14, 2006 5:07 AM / FUBAR .
The standard line of political bullshit from the Bush Administration and
the Republican leadership on Capitol Hill is that the situation is
improving in Iraq. But journalists on the ground in Baghdad, the ones who
aren't brain dead from U.S. propaganda, report otherwise.
Reports James Hider of The London Times:
As I hung up the phone, I wondered if I would ever see my friend Ali
alive again. Ali, The Times translator for the past three years, lives in
west Baghdad, an area that is now in meltdown as a bitter civil war rages
between Sunni insurgents and Shia militias. It is, quite simply, out of
control.
I returned to Baghdad on Monday after a break of several months, during
which I too was guilty of glazing over every time I read another story of
Iraqi violence. But two nights on the telephone, listening to my lost and
frightened Iraqi staff facing death at any moment, persuaded me that
Baghdad is now verging on total collapse.
The U.S. may be staying but Iraqis are getting out as fast as they can:
Those that can are leaving the country. At Baghdad airport, throngs of
Iraqis jostle for places on the flights out - testimony to the breakdown
in Iraqi society.
One woman said that she and her three children were fleeing Mansour, once
the most stylish part of the capital. "Every day there is fighting and
killing," she said as she boarded a plane for Damascus in Syria to sit
out the horrors of Baghdad.
A neurologist, who was heading to Jordan with his wife, said that he
would seek work abroad and hoped that he would never have to return. "We
were so happy on April 9, 2003 when the Americans came. But I´ve given
up. Iraq isn´t ready for democracy," he said, sitting in a chair with a
view of the airport runway.
Fares al-Mufti, an official with the Iraqi Airways booking office, told
The Times that the national carrier had had to lay on an extra flight a
day, all fully booked. Flights to Damascus have gone up from three a week
to eight to cope with the panicked exodus.
Muhammad al-Ani, who runs fleets of Suburban cars to Jordan, said that
the service to Amman was so oversubscribed that that prices had rocketed
from $200 (£108) to $750 per trip in the past two weeks.
Despite the huge risks of driving through the Sunni Triangle, the number
of buses to Jordan has mushroomed from 2 a day to as many as 40 or 50.
Abu Ahmed, a Sunni who was leaving Ghazaliya with his family and
belongings, said that he was ready to pay the exorbitant prices being
charged because his wife had received a death threat at the hospital in a
Shia area where she worked.
"We can´t cope, we have to take the children out for a while," he said.
In one of the few comprehensive surveys of how many Iraqis have fled
their country since the US invasion, the US Committee for Refugees and
Immigrants said last month that there were 644,500 refugees in Syria and
Jordan in 2005 - about 2.5 per cent of Iraq´s population. In total,
889,000 Iraqis had moved abroad, creating "the biggest new flow of
refugees in the world", according to Lavinia Limon, the committee´s
president.
And the exodus may only just be starting.
© Copyright 2006 by Capitol Hill Blue
Alamaine, IVe
Grand Forks, ND, US of A
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person can come from wood of any sort. It is through firmness and
restraint and a sense of truth that one becomes noble, not through
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