Newsweek: Ethnic Cleansing Of Baghdad Is Complete

Newsweek   |   September 3, 2007 01:06 PM


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It was their last stand. Kamal and a handful of his neighbors were hunkered down on the roof of a dun-colored house in southwest Baghdad two weeks ago as bullets zinged overhead. In the streets below, fighters from Moqtada al-Sadr's Mahdi Army fanned out and blasted away with AK-47s and PKC heavy machine guns. Kamal is a chubby 44-year-old with two young sons, and he and his friends, all Sunnis, had been fighting similar battles against Shiite militiamen in the Amel neighborhood for months. They jumped awkwardly from rooftop to rooftop, returning fire. Within minutes, however, dozens of uniformed Iraqi policemen poured into the street to support the militiamen. Kamal ditched his AK on a rooftop and snuck away through nearby alleys. He left Amel the next day. "I lost my house, my documents and my future," says Kamal, whose name and that of other Iraqis in this story have been changed for their safety. "I'm never going back."

Thousands of other Sunnis like Kamal have been cleared out of the western half of Baghdad, which they once dominated, in recent months. The surge of U.S. troops--meant in part to halt the sectarian cleansing of the Iraqi capital--has hardly stemmed the problem. The number of Iraqi civilians killed in July was slightly higher than in February, when the surge began. According to the Iraqi Red Crescent, the number of internally displaced persons (IDPs) has more than doubled to 1.1 million since the beginning of the year, nearly 200,000 of those in Baghdad governorate alone. Rafiq Tschannen, chief of the Iraq mission for the International Organization for Migration, says that the fighting that accompanied the influx of U.S. troops actually "has increased the IDPs to some extent."

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- cuzkate I'm a Fan of cuzkate 3 fans permalink

My family and I would like to invite you all to Thanksgiving dinner. For an appetizer I have chosen WMD and you will never guess where I found it stuffed. RSVP

    Favorite    Flag as abusive Posted 05:10 PM on 09/04/2007
- johnnyjust I'm a Fan of johnnyjust 6 fans permalink

Terrorists are an ethnic group?

    Favorite    Flag as abusive Posted 01:45 PM on 09/04/2007
- TWOSHORT I'm a Fan of TWOSHORT 3 fans permalink

They had plenty of practice here at home with the war on Black Folks.Poverty and the Black Man,Job that pay the rent,Health care,Buying a home,Owning a new car,Loans to help start small business,Education! The only option seem to be Probation-Parole-Jail-Prison and in most cases death felony you can't work or vote taken away by the state you live in.POVERTY IS A BITCH BUT AS A BLACK MAN LIVING IN THIS SO CALLED GREAT NATION OF GOD FEARING PEOPLE WHO WANT TO SEE HEAVEN!!! WITH THEIR RECORD ON THE TREATMENT OF THEIR FELLOW MAN HOW DO THEY GET IN?

    Favorite    Flag as abusive Posted 12:40 PM on 09/04/2007

THE WHOLE THING IS SUCH A DISGRACE. WHY AREN'T OUR GOVERNMENT OFFICALS BEING IMPRISIONED FOR THE WAY THEY CONDUCTED THIS WAR?

    Favorite    Flag as abusive Posted 12:30 PM on 09/04/2007
- researcher I'm a Fan of researcher 118 fans permalink

"AND of course the real cost, our dead soldiers, and tens of thousands of wounded soldiers"

libsrule: you may want to change this last sentence. A dead Iraqi is as much as a loss as a dead American.

Bottom line those dead and wounded Americans are participating in an illegal war and can now be considered a mercenary army. Yet we welcome them back as heroes.

Most do this out of patriotism but their patriotism is based in ignorance. These soldiers are even more liable for these war crimes than the German soldiers during World War II as many of those soldiers were forced to fight or be killed by their own.

We have a volunteer military that has become a mercenary military to benefit America’s imperialism.

    Favorite    Flag as abusive Posted 04:11 AM on 09/04/2007
- researcher I'm a Fan of researcher 118 fans permalink

"AND of course the real cost, our dead soldiers, and tens of thousands of wounded soldiers"

libsrule: you may want to change this last sentence. A dead Iraqi is as much as a loss as a dead American.

Bottom line those dead and wounded Americans are participating in an illegal war and can now be considered a mercenary army. Yet we welcome them back as heroes.

Most do this out of patriotism but their patriotism is based in ignorance. These soldiers are even more liable for these war crimes than the German soldiers during World War II as many of those soldiers were forced to fight or be killed by their own.

We have a volunteer military that has become a mercenary military to benefit America’s imperialism.

    Favorite    Flag as abusive Posted 04:06 AM on 09/04/2007
- Libsrule I'm a Fan of Libsrule 21 fans permalink

WOW, the president has finally achieved something for the hundreds of billions of dollars, tens of thousands of dead Iraqi's, destruction of the infrastructure of Iraq, AND of course the real cost, our dead soldiers, and tens of thousands of wounded soldiers.

He helped to establish ETHNIC CLEANSING AS A SIGN OF SUCCESS.

Wow, I can only imagine the place in Hell that is reserved for the criminally insane, morally corrupt, and evil Shrub and his puppetmaster Darth Cheney.

Sheer insanity.

    Favorite    Flag as abusive Posted 12:33 AM on 09/04/2007
- ritamary I'm a Fan of ritamary 2 fans permalink

Yer doin' a heckuva job, Georgie!

    Favorite    Flag as abusive Posted 11:38 PM on 09/03/2007
- bushmocker I'm a Fan of bushmocker 7 fans permalink

Tomorrow we'll hear more about how things are looking up and we should stay and finish the mission.This is the great democracy we have set up,a whole nation of religious fanatics that kill Americans when no Sunni's are available.Why don't we hear our White House correspondents ask pertinent questions during press conferences?Like,what are the oil contracts about,who set them up,who's going to profit before the oil companies?Why does George Bush have a better handle on what's the right thing to do if everything he's done so far is wrong?If Iraq can't take care of themselves after more than five years,and nobody knows when or if they will,why are our boys dying for a Muslim theocracy?To put things bluntly,why are we better off with this catastrophe than we were with Sadaam in power?When the CEO of a large corporation screws up this bad the board of directors gets rid of him.We are a fascist state right now with criminals in key positions that seem to act in a criminal manner without fear of retribution.The Democrats have rolled over,no impeachment,no nothing.I'm probably as sick of this as everyone else but still see no light at the end of the tunnel.Not one conviction for the numerous crimes committed,just lip service from Democrats that have abandoned the constitutional requirement of impeaching a criminal president and vice president.

    Favorite    Flag as abusive Posted 11:05 PM on 09/03/2007

now can we call in the hague????????

    Favorite    Flag as abusive Posted 10:48 PM on 09/03/2007
- Birdman I'm a Fan of Birdman 41 fans permalink

The surge is working, mission accomplished

    Favorite    Flag as abusive Posted 10:19 PM on 09/03/2007
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All your tap, tap, tapping away on a keyboard does nothing.

How do you plan to stop these murderers? Exactly how?



In the late 60's MILLIONS of the young got into the streets and STOPPED the immoral war.


WHERE THE HELL ARE THE YOUNG TODAY?


Bring back the draft. No deferments.


It's the only thing that will get these lazy, inconsiderate, spoiled rotten kids off their butts.

    Favorite    Flag as abusive Posted 10:11 PM on 09/03/2007
- Birdman I'm a Fan of Birdman 41 fans permalink

SAme pkace you are :-) kind of calling the kettel black aren't we? Do you happen to know how many people don't even bother to write their congressman, commment on Blogs, or even vote? Before you call any of this a waste of time why don't you try to enlighten peope who have no idea of the crimes Bush has committed most people if they happen to see any news it comes from places like Fox News. They have no idea nor do they care they don't in most cases even pick up a news paper. So it is not us here that are the problem it is the 100 million that do not care enough to even vote.

    Favorite    Flag as abusive Posted 10:24 PM on 09/03/2007
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Agreed about the young, but they are scared shitless about their financial futures, and with good reason, not like us in the 60s, when the middle class was healthy (and the draft existed).

    Favorite    Flag as abusive Posted 05:03 AM on 09/04/2007

A comment on the general tone of these comments: They sound like an angry mob. Anger is understandable but not an effective mood for a discussion.

    Favorite    Flag as abusive Posted 09:24 PM on 09/03/2007
- MajorKong I'm a Fan of MajorKong 423 fans permalink
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It's a clusterfuck, sir.

    Favorite    Flag as abusive Posted 09:03 PM on 09/03/2007
- RichardD I'm a Fan of RichardD 10 fans permalink

This legacy of horror left by America by virtue of its unnnecessary intervention in the affairs of another sovereign state will be a moral stain it will not easily wash away by other good deeds in the future, if ever.

This is a sad and mournful time in the history of a once great political experiment.

    Favorite    Flag as abusive Posted 08:09 PM on 09/03/2007
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