7 posts tagged “baghdad”
Iraqi Gay Activist Murdered in Baghdad
September 26, 2008
Michelle Garcia, The Advocate
A coordinator of an Iraqi LGBT advocacy group was assassinated Thursday. The 27-year-old university student, known only as Bashar, was assassinated in a barbershop in Baghdad. Militia members burst into the barbershop and "sprayed his body with bullets at point blank range," Peter Tatchell of the U.K gay advocacy OutRage! told the Guardian newspaper.
The student organized safe houses for gays and lesbians in Baghdad, where many seek refuge from militias that seek out and kill LGBT people...
A United Nations report on human rights, released in 2006, showed that while gays and lesbians are supposed to be protected by law in Iraq, LGBT residents must still live in hiding or face extreme brutality.
...gays and lesbians in Iraq are often threatened because "homosexuality is sometimes interpreted by people in Iraq as being a Western import...
The 10-fold expansion of a system to help threatened Iraqi employees obtain U.S. visas and ultimately citizenship comes after criticism over delays.
U.S. Expands Visa Program for Iraqis
The New York Times
By ALISSA J. RUBIN
Published: July 25, 2008
BAGHDAD — The American Embassy in Baghdad announced Thursday that it had expanded tenfold its program to help Iraqi employees of the American government here, who faced threats for their work, to obtain visas and ultimately citizenship in the United States.
Although the program was established by law in January, it has become a practical reality just in the last two to three weeks as guidelines have been finalized and the embassy has brought in staff members and started processing applications.
The decision is the latest step in the administration’s attempt to answer sharp criticism over its failure to help even those Iraqis who have made the American presence in Iraq possible by serving as translators and supervisors on embassy projects, for the American military and for the Agency for International Development. But critics in the refugee relief community noted that the State Department had promised several times that it would try to speed up the process, and that it had not come through.
State Department officials attribute the gap between words and deeds to a cumbersome refugee resettlement system that includes fingerprinting, job checks, name checks and interviews.
The program will allow 5,000 Iraqis to go to the United States for each of the next five years. Each person can take immediate family members, who include spouses and children. More distant relatives, including siblings, parents and grandchildren, can apply under another program. So the actual numbers emigrating will probably be considerably higher. The average Iraqi household is estimated to have about six people...
Four Americans, six Iraqis killed in Baghdad blast
Tuesday June 24, 2008
BAGHDAD (AFP) — Two US soldiers, two American civilians and six Iraqis were killed in a bomb attack Tuesday on municipal offices in Baghdad's eastern Shiite bastion of Sadr City, US and Iraqi officials said.
The attack which the US military blamed on Shiite extremists occurred mid-morning shortly before district council elections were to take place, an Iraqi security official said.
One US soldier, three members of the district council and seven other Iraqis were wounded, the US military and Iraqi security officials said...
...US embassy official W. Johann Schmonsees said that one of the civilians killed was a State Department employee and the other worked for the Defence Department. They were both attached to the American mission in Baghdad.
The US military said two of its soldiers were killed in the blast and charged that the attack was carried out by Special Groups extremists...
...The blast occurred at about 9:30 am (0630 GMT) in the southern section of Sadr City, a stronghold of anti-American cleric Moqtada al-Sadr's Mahdi Army militia.
It took place when when US officials and soldiers had arrived "to supervise the process of elections as the council was to elect some new members today," a member of the district council said...
...The latest attack on US nationals comes a day after two American soldiers were killed and three wounded as they were fired on as they were leaving the council office of Madain town located south of Baghdad.
The recent decrease in violence in Baghdad and other regions of Iraq has led to an increased presence of US soldiers on the streets, most of them involved in restoring community services...
...The latest deaths of US soldiers bring the overall losses of the military in Iraq since the March 2003 invasion to 4,106, according to an AFP tally based on independent website.
Car bomb kills more than 50 people in Baghdad
By Qassim Abdul-Zahra – 52 minutes ago
BAGHDAD (AP) — A car bomb tore through a market area in a mainly Shiite neighborhood in Baghdad on Tuesday, killing more than 50 people and wounding dozens, officials said, the deadliest such attack in more than three months.
The attack occurred just before 6 p.m. as the market in the northwestern Hurriyah neighborhood was packed with shoppers preparing for their evening meals.
Nobody claimed responsibility for the attack, but it bore the hallmarks of al-Qaida in Iraq, which is known to use car bombs and suicide attacks...
...The casualty toll spiked to at least 51 people killed and 75 people wounded after rescue crews extinguished the blaze and found the bodies of dozens of victims who had been trapped inside or buried in the rubble, a police officer said, speaking on condition of anonymity because he wasn't authorized to release the information...
...The blast shattered the relative calm in the capital amid stepped up security measures. American commanders have consistently said they have al-Qaida in Iraq on the run but warned that the insurgents retain the ability to stage high-profile attacks...
...Tuesday's attack was the deadliest car bombing since March 6, when a twin bombing killed 68 people in a crowded shopping district in the central Baghdad district of Karradah.
New U.S. Embassy in Baghdad ready — six months late
By Warren P. Strobel | McClatchy Newspapers
Posted on Monday, April 14, 2008
WASHINGTON — The State Department on Monday certified the new $740 million U.S. Embassy in Baghdad as ready to open, more than six months behind schedule.
Richard Shinnick, the department's buildings chief, said problems with the mammoth, 27-building complex's fire-safety systems have been fixed...
Undersecretary of State Patrick Kennedy signed the formal certificate of occupancy Monday... Diplomats will begin moving into the compound next month...
...the United States' biggest embassy, will provide working and living quarters for more than 1,000 U.S. diplomats and military personnel, many of whom have been posted on the grounds of a former palace of late Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein.
During a recent round of violence linked to the Iraqi government's military offensive in the southern city of Basra, the former palace came under intensified rocket and mortar fire, and Crocker authorized some U.S. personnel to spend the night in the new compound.
Shinnick's predecessor promised Congress last July that the embassy would be complete in September 2007.
But the project has been plagued by allegations of shoddy workmanship by the main contractor, First Kuwaiti General Trading and Contracting Co., and unproven charges of labor abuses. First Kuwaiti has denied any wrongdoing and says it stands by the quality of its work.
Embassy contracts have been the subject of a Justice Department investigation. The status of that probe is unclear.
After McClatchy reported in January that the embassy's fire-fighting system was defective and that experts' concerns were overruled in an apparent rush to declare the facility completed, Shinnick ordered a top-to-bottom review of the project. He'd just taken over the job from retired Army Gen. Charles Williams, whose performance Congress criticized.
Shinnick said Monday that numerous small "punch list" items remain to be rectified.
"But they are not vital. ... They are not life-safety issues," he said.
Additional work also has to be done on the chancery building, which is being reconfigured with more classified spaces to accommodate U.S. diplomatic and military staffers who've now been assigned to the same location, Shinnick said. Those changes and others added $144 million to the compound's original $592 million cost.
Documents obtained by McClatchy, along with a Feb. 13 report by the State Department's own inspectors, showed numerous problems with the embassy's fire-safety systems.
They included fire alarms that didn't operate properly when tested, concerns about underground fire mains, and, in one annex building, stairs that didn't reach the structure's top floor, a violation of fire codes.
Shinnick said a team of about a dozen specialists inspected the new embassy compound over the Easter holiday to verify that First Kuwaiti and its subcontractors had carried out repairs that had been ordered.
McClatchy Newspapers 2008
Fighting resumes in Baghdad; rockets kill three Americans
By Leila Fadel and Mohammed al Dulaimy | McClatchy Newspapers
Sunday, April 6, 2008
BAGHDAD — The U.S.-backed Iraqi government Sunday began deploying Shiite Muslim volunteer fighters in neighborhoods dominated by the rival Mahdi Army militia of radical Shiite cleric Muqtada al Sadr...
...In the heavily fortified Green Zone, where U.S. and Iraqi officials live and work, rocket attacks killed two U.S. soldiers and injured 17, at least five of them seriously. Rocket attacks on a U.S. base in southeast Baghdad killed another American soldier and wounded 14...
...A senior Iraqi official said that U.S.-backed Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al Maliki is now trapped in his battle with Sadr's militia. A million-man march that Sadr has called for April 9 to protest the U.S. occupation will likely bring more fighting
"We are expecting more trouble . . . . This is not a resolution, and I think we are going to see an eruption," said the official, who asked not to be named due to the sensitivity of the subject. "It was untimely, and (Maliki) went there unprepared to take on the militia. He didn't recognize the scale of this movement, and he went there and it blew up in our faces in Baghdad."...
...Gen. Jeffrey Hammond, the senior U.S. military commander in Baghdad, said that at the height of last week's battle there were more than 100 attacks a day in Baghdad, compared to 13 the week before...
...Maliki promised to liberate the Mahdi Army strongholds of Sadr City and Shoala, then said government forces wouldn't raid Sadr strongholds until the ultimatum to the renegade Shiite militias runs out on April 8.
Sadr asked his militia to stand down after an Iranian-brokered ceasefire, but days later issued a statement saying his forces were being forced to choose between "drawing swords and degradation"...
..."We call them special groups. They are not just purely criminals. They are obviously organized," said Lt. Col. Dan Barnett, the head of the 1st Squadron, 2nd Stryker Cavalry Regiment, based in Vilseck, Germany and operating in Sadr City. "They have a command and control structure and a plan in place."...
McClatchy Newspapers Washington Bureau is reporting
Severed fingers of 5 hostages given to U.S. officials in Iraq
By Hannah Allam - McClatchy Newspapers - Wednesday, March 12, 2008
BAGHDAD _U.S. authorities in Baghdad have received five severed fingers belonging to four Americans and an Austrian who were taken hostage more than a year ago in Iraq, U.S. officials said Wednesday.
The FBI is investigating the grisly development, and the families of the five kidnapped contractors have been notified, American officials said on condition of anonymity because they weren't authorized to discuss the case publicly.
Authorities confirmed that the fingers belonged to hostages Jonathon Cote, of Gainesville, Fla.; Joshua Munns, of Redding, Calif.; Paul Johnson Reuben, of Buffalo, Minn.; Bert Nussbaumer of Vienna, Austria; and Ronald J. Withrow, an American who was kidnapped separately from the others.
No information was available on when or how the fingers were delivered to U.S. authorities. Some relatives of the missing men said that they'd heard weeks ago that the DNA of the hostages had been obtained, but they'd been given no details.
The first four men were security contractors with Kuwait-based Crescent Security and were captured in a brazen ambush of their 43-truck supply convoy in the southern Iraqi town of Safwan, near the Kuwaiti border, on Nov. 16, 2006.
There was no word on a fifth contractor who was seized with them, John Young, of Kansas City. Contrary to Austrian news reports, none of the fingers belonged to him, authorities said.
