Today's Stories

May 19, 2008

Saul Landau
Cuba Will Live

May 17 / 18, 2008

Alexander Cockburn
The View from the Crusaders' Castle

Tim Wise
Testosterone is Not to Blame: Why Sexism isn't the Reason for Hillary's Loss

Andy Worthington
Gitmo Trials: Betrayal, Backsliding and Boycotts

Robert Fantina
The Double-Talk Express Derails

Karim Makdisi
In the Wake of the Doha Truce

Harry Browne
Only Ireland Can Vote on EU's Future

John Ross
Suicide by Taco? The Demise of Mexico's PRD

Dave Lindorff
Fear at the Pump

Robert Weissman
Pharmaceutical Payola

Laray Polk
Bush Family Appeasement

David Yearsley
Puritans in Seattle

Ron Jacobs
Riot Squads, Privatization and the National Front

Paul Quinnett
My Last Flight

Sam Bahour
Refugees are the Key

Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor
Poverty Wages

Dr. Susan Block
The Groom May Kiss the Groom

Kim Nicolini
Paranoid Park: Inside the Fractured Landscape of Male Adolescence

Jeremy Scahill
John Cusack's War

Jeffrey St. Clair
Booked Up

Poets' Basement
Dominguez, Gerard and Davies

May 16, 2008

Stephen Soldz
Involuntary Drugging of Detainees

Jonathan Cook
Police Attack Al-Nakba March

Paul Craig Roberts
Lies of Aggression

Christopher Brauchli
A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Pharmacy

James L. Secor
Olympic Torch China: the View from Shaoxing

Franklin Lamb
Did Hezbollah Thwart a Bush/Olmert Attack on Beirut?

Linn Washington, Jr.
The Price of Protecting Racist Cops

Dave Lindorff
What West Virginia Means

May 15, 2008

Stan Cox
Big Brother Close Up

Jeff Halper
Rethinking Israel After 60 Years

Greg Moses
Living for the Children of Palestine

John Ross
Why Mexican Justice is a Euphemism

Ron Jacobs
Go to Work, Go to Jail

Binoy Kampmark
Indian Jailbirds: the Case of Binayak Sen

Eve Spangler
We Should Not Celebrate Dispossession

Martha Rosenberg
Meat Wars with South Korea

Website of the Day
Idaho Wolf Killers

May 14, 2008

Ismael Hossein-Zadeh
Oil Wars

Reza Fiyouzat
Torture, a Bully's Creed

Felice Pace
California Water Politics: Of Dams and Water Buffaloes

Hamdan A. Yousuf / Dania S. Ahmed
A Generation Defined by War

Robert Weitzel
Hillary's "Final Solution" to the Persian Problem

Ralph Nader
You're Either with the American People or the Big Auto Bosses

Dave Lindorff
Hillary, McCain and the Stupid Vote

Missy Comley Beattie
White Heaven: Hillary's W. Virginia Idyll

Neve Gordon
Israel as a Site of Struggle

Dr. Susan Block
A Washington Witch Hanging

Website of the Day
Hillary's Downfall

May 13, 2008

David Rosen
Sexual Terrorism: the Sadistic Side of Bush's War on Terror

Alan Farago
Nuclear Florida: Beachfront Reactors in an Age of Rising Sea Levels?

Saul Landau
The Crisis at Home

Saree Makdisi
Forget the Two-State Solution

Paul Craig Roberts
How Empires Fall

Andy Worthington
Gitmo's Suicide Bomber

Brother Bede Vincent
The Problem with Rev. Wright--There are Too Few Like Him

Linda Mamoun
Marketing Ethnic Cleansing

David Macaray
The Myth That Won't Die

Website of the Day
Burning the Future: Coal in America

May 12, 2008

St. Clair / Frank
The Pentagon's Toxic Legacy

Ziga Vodovnik
Rebels Against Tyranny: an Interview with Howard Zinn on Anarchism

Gary Leupp
Why All of Our Efforts Won't Stop an Attack on Iran

Frankln Lamb
Choufeit's Bloody Pentacost

Suzanne Baroud
The Ambition of Hillary Clinton

Martha Rosenberg
Farmer Ernie's Chamber of Horrors

Dave Zirin
The Boss's Boycott

Carl Finamore
I Ain't Gonna Work No More

Peter Morici
Recession Watch

Richard Rhames
The Third Way to Nowhere

Website of the Day
The Untold Story of Black New Orleans

May 10 / 11, 2008

Alexander Cockburn
Real Clear Numbers: 101,000 Casualties a Year

Franklin Lamb
Hezbollah Eases Up and Beirut Opens Its Shutters

Ciara Gilmartin
A Surge in Iraqi Detainees

Diane Farsetta
Inside a Nuclear Industry Soirée

Kent Paterson
Mother's Day in Ciudad Juarez

Alan Farago
The Social Engineers

Rannie Amiri
Beirut on the Brink

Patrick Irelan
Bolivia, Morales and the Red Ponchos

Robert Fantina
The Lexicon Legacy of George W. Bush

Nikolas Kozloff
El Salvador 2009: Another Feather in the Cap of Chavez?

George Ciccariello-Maher
The Yumare Massacre, 22 Years On

David Yearsley
Bacharach at 80

Ron Jacobs
Rosa Luxemburg's Shock Doctrine

John Holt
Can Yellowstone Survive?

David Michael Green
It's So Over

Ben Terrall
Dealing Sleep

Kim Nicolini
The Best Film of the Bush Era?

Jeffrey St. Clair
Booked Up

Poets' Basement
Gibbons, Orloski, Frisella, Gladstone-Gelman

May 9, 2008

Franklin Lamb
A Wild Day in Beirut

Andy Worthington
The Afghans of Gitmo

Benjamin Dangl
Polarizing Bolivia

Mark A. Huddle
Remembering Mildred Loving, an Unsung Hero of the Civil Rights Movement

David Macaray
Hollywood Gives SAG the Brush Off

Dave Lindorff
Team Clinton: Going Down Ugly

C.G. Estabrook
The Way We Live Now

Matt Kosko
McCain, Clinton, Obama and the Wages of Lesser-Evilism

Robert Weissman
Big Business is not the Solution to Global Poverty

Michael Dickinson
Jailing the Joint

Website of the Day
The Role of Third Parties in the U.S.A.

May 8, 2008

Sharon Smith
Rockefeller Family Fables

Saul Landau
The NATO Axiom

Laura Carlsen
A Primer on Plan Mexico

Binoy Kampmark
Food Riots are Coming to the U.S.

Kenneth Couesbouc
China's Paper Feet

Liaquat Ali Khan
Pakistan's Constitutional Shenanigans

Franklin Lamb
Blindsided, Hezbollah Mulls Its Response

Sen. Russ Feingold
Government in Secret

George Wuerthner
The Problems with Conservation Easements

Richard W. Behan
A Brief Exposé of a Fraudulent War

Adam Federman
Marching for Sean Bell

Website of the Day
State of the Air

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City of the Dead

Mosul on Lockdown

By PATRICK COCKBURN

Mosul.

Mosul looks like a city of the dead. American and Iraqi troops have launched an attack aimed at crushing the last bastion of al Qaida in Iraq and in doing so have turned the country's northern capital into a ghost town. Soldiers shoot at any civilian vehicle on the streets in defiance of a strict curfew. Two men, a woman and child in one car which failed to stop were shot dead by US troops who later issued a statement saying the two men were armed and one man made 'threatening movements.'

It is not easy to reach Mosul, a city of 1.4 million people on the Tigris river, sealed off from the outside world by hundreds of police and army checkpoints since the Iraqi government offensive against al-Qa'ida began at 4 am on Saturday morning.

The operation is a critical part of the government's attempt over the last six weeks to reassert military control over Iraq which has led to heavy fighting in Baghdad and Basra.

We began the journey from the Kurdish capital Arbil in a convoy of white pick up trucks, each with a heavy machine gun in the back manned by alert-looking soldiers, some wearing black face masks, that were escorting Khasro Goran, the deputy governor of Mosul, to his office in the city.

Soon after crossing the long bridge over the Zaab river and leaving territory officially controlled by the Kurds, we saw lines of trucks and cars, whose drivers presumably had not heard of the curfew, being stopped by police.  The soldiers defending our convoy said that there was little real danger ahead, but even so we turned into a military headquarters in the Christian village of Bartilla to exchange our pick ups for more heavily armoured vehicles with small windows a few inches across of bullet proof glass.

I had been to Mosul down this road half a dozen times since the fall of Saddam Hussein in 2003 and on each occasion the military escort necessary to reach the city safely has grown bigger. Squinting through the small glass portholes I could see local people were clearly taking the curfew seriously. Even the miserable looking cafes used by the truck drivers, and which I had imagined were never closed, had put up their metal grills.

In eastern Mosul the streets are usually bustling and stalls spill onto the road near the tomb of the prophet Jonah who died in Mosul sometime after his alarming experience with the whale. Most of the people living in this part of the city are in any case Kurds, who support the central government against al-Qa'ida, but here again every shop was shut and there were police and soldiers at checkpoints every fifty yards.

An extra brigade had been sent from Baghdad for the present offensive along with special security troops to reinforce the 2nd and 3rd divisions. Outside the police headquarters the black vehicles of the Interior Ministry, each with a heavy machine gun and a yellow head of a tiger as an insignia on the doors, were drawn up in rows.

American helicopters flew high overhead as well as drones for reconnaissance. There was the occasional burst of firing and bomb blast in the distance. The governor of Mosul, Dunaid Kashoula, says the city 'has come to be dominated by the leaders of al-Qa'ida as a result of the delay in the military operation' originally scheduled for earlier this year. Nevertheless, the insurgents in Mosul have never held whole quarters of the city and there was no street fighting.

The government offensive in Mosul was promised in January by the prime minister Nouri al-Maliki as the last battle against al-Qa'ida. He promised revenge for the assassination of the previous police commander for the city who had been assassinated by an al-Qa'ids suicide bomber dressed in a police uniform.

There is no doubt that security in Mosul has been getting worse over the last six months. Mr Goran, who effectively runs the city, says that 90 people were killed in Mosul last September compared to 213 dead this March including 58 soldiers and policemen. The number of roadside bombs had risen from 175 to 269 over the same period.

The official theory for this is that al Qa'ida in Iraq, which has only a limited connection with Osama bin Laden and is largely home grown, has been driven out of its old bastions in Anbar and Diyala provinces and Sunni districts of Baghdad. It has therefore retreated to Mosul, the largest Sunni Arab city and the third largest in Iraq.

This is probably over simple. Attacks on US troops in Anbar province have started again and in Sunni districts of west Baghdad al-Qa'ida appears to be lying low rather than being eliminated. In many cases in Baghdad al-Sahwa, the supposedly anti-al-Qa'ida awakening Councils paid by the Americans, in practice have cosy arrangements with al-Qa'ida.

I had decided to go to Mosul - and therefore arrived in the first hours of the government offensive - because of what turned out to be a false report that the head of al Qa'ida in Iraq, Abu Ayyub al-Masri [check spelling], had been captured in a pre-dawn raid in the city. Later Iraqi security officers said they captured many 'Emirs', al Qa'ida cell leaders, and targeted hundreds of suspected houses.

These are critical days for the Iraqi government of Mr Maliki. Since 25 March he has launched military offensives in Basra and Baghdad. He is getting support from the Americans and the Kurds. But it it is not clear if the Iraqi army will fight without the backing of US firepower in the air or on the ground. On Saturday a ceasefire was agreed with the Mehdi Army of Muqtada al-Sadr in Sadr City giving the government greater control. But, as in Mosul, it is not clear how far the government's opponents have simply retreated to fight another day.

I was in Mosul on the day it was surrendered by Saddam Hussein's forces in 2003.Scenes of joy were succeeded within the space of a few hours by looting and gun battles between Arabs and Kurds. Five years later Mosul, one of the great cities of the world, looks ruinous and under siege. Every alley way is blocked by barricades and the only new building is in the form of concrete blast walls. The fact that the government has to empty the streets of Mosul of its people to establish peace for a few days shows how far the city is from genuine peace.

Patrick Cockburn is the Ihe author of "Muqtada: Muqtada Al-Sadr, the Shia Revival, and the Struggle for Iraq."

 

 

 

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