Thread: Iraq/Dinar News. 09/05 to 01/14/07

Originally Posted by *CLEO*

Someone PM me with info on who to call at CBI. I have a co-worker fluent in Arabic who can get some info for us all!!!!

I am not at all sure that anybody at CBI will be willing or able to tell us anything but maybe we can get lucky.

I would be VERY interested to know more details from that Kurd sat that was posted earlier regarging the "blue card". Is there a link where that can still be viewed so maybe this co-worker could give us the scoop on that?

Originally Posted by fsndirector

I was on that call and that was not exactly the way it was put,He said the CBI was closed yes, and he said that they were passing out lower denoms, but he did not say that that was why they were closed, a little twist on words changes the whole meaning of what was said.

I don't think he is referring to the call. Here is Apollo's post from this morning; it might clear this up a bit.

[quote]We contacted Ali Shabibi yesterday to see if he knew anything about the CBI site being down. He is in Jordan and works for us as our General Manager for a home building factory that we are just about to break ground on. He has been somewhat out of touch with the things in Iraq, and we keep him quite busy in Jordan. When he got back to us, he said that it appears that its off line.. Ah, yeah, we know, but why are they off line? That he didn't know, but he later got back with us and said that he has heard that "other denominations are being moved in to the banks". We specifically asked WHAT denominations and after about 5 minutes of trying to get through the language barrier, he said "LOWER". Whew!

He is quite smart, and we often chat over the Google interface, but when speaking to him in person, a lot gets lost in translation. So I feel fairly confident that the lower denoms are in Iraq. We have considered having him on the call several times, but it just wouldn't work with the language problems.

On another note, we currently have a local Arabic student coming into our office twice a week to teach us (mostly Jeremy and Dustin) Arabic. Last week I showed him the paper where the MOF makes the infamous "147" statement. After a short lesson in how the English numbers we currently use were the original Arabic numbers, and the current Arabic numbers were taken from India (I think), he read the article (several times) and he believes that the MOF was saying that 147 or 1.47 is where in his opinion the currency should be valued at. He was also confused because he knew that 1470 is (or was) the current value, so in the end, he was somewhat confused, but still stuck to his original view.

I was also going to have him watch the video where the 14 denominations were mentioned, but we may know before our next lesson exactly what those are. This video is also in a streaming format, so I can't download it and send it home with him, or at least I haven't been able to find a way.

One other thing that Bob mentioned to me (and he has also been out of the loop for quite a while), is that the TBI has recently suspended writing LC's for any of their own contracts. They will still write them for the Ministry, but those are usually made in dollars. Nothing done in Dinars. This would fit perfectly if they knew a reval was around the corner and didn't want to get caught writing an LC for several billion dinars...

Anyway, its way past my bedtime. Keep up the good work and with a little luck, we will all be doing the happy dance before long!!!![/qoute]

BAGHDAD, Iraq, Oct. 19 — The United States military command in Iraq acknowledged on Thursday that its 12-week-old campaign to win back control of Baghdad from sectarian death squads and insurgents had failed to reduce violence across the city. A spokesman for the command said intensive discussions were under way between American and Iraqi officials on ways to “refocus” the effort, which American officials have placed at the heart of their war strategy.

Eight people were killed and 70 wounded Thursday in a suicide car-bomb attack on a bank in Kirkuk, in an oil-rich area of northern Iraq, as soldiers were collecting their salaries. Two army vehicles were set on fire. More Photos »
In one of the most somber assessments of the war by American commanders, a statement read by the spokesman, Maj. Gen. William B. Caldwell IV, said the campaign had been marked by increasing attacks on American troops and a spike in combat deaths. Attacks soared by 22 percent, he said, during the first three weeks of Ramadan, the holy month now nearing its end. With three new combat deaths announced on Thursday, the number of American troops who have lost their lives in October rose to 73, representing one of the sharpest surges in military casualties in the past two years.

General Caldwell said American troops were being forced to return to neighborhoods, like Dora in southwestern Baghdad, that they had sealed off and cleared as part of the security campaign because “extremists” fighting back had sent sectarian violence soaring there. The security plan sent heavy deployments of American troops into troubled neighborhoods, reversing the previous policy, which was to allow Iraqi troops to police the capital.

“The violence is indeed disheartening,” General Caldwell said. While the sweeps have contained violence in some areas, over all, he said, the campaign to gain control of the city “has not met our overall expectations of sustaining a reduction in the levels of violence.” As a result, he said, “We are working very closely with the government of Iraq to determine how to best refocus our efforts.”

President Bush, who ordered the rearrangement of troops to begin the campaign, is now left with only a handful of tough and politically unattractive options.

The general’s remarks, unusual for their candor and unvarnished portrayal of bad news, appeared to mark a new setback for the American military effort. Stark new videotape broadcast on Thursday by Al Jazeera from Ramadi, an insurgent stronghold 80 miles west of Baghdad, showed heavily armed insurgents taking over a busy city street in broad daylight to celebrate the proclamation by their leaders of an Islamic state in wide areas of Iraq’s Sunni heartland. There was no sign of any attempt to intervene by the heavy concentration of American and Iraqi troops in the city. The Iraqi government said the demonstrators fled after 15 minutes.

The insurgents’ ability to strike across wide areas of the country was demonstrated anew on Thursday in the northern oil city of Mosul, when suicide bombers attacked a police station and an American convoy, killing at least 22 people and wounding dozens more, mostly civilians, a hospital official said.

In the city of Diyala, 40 miles north of Baghdad, a bomb near a market killed 10 people and injured 20 others, an Interior Ministry official said. In Baghdad, the police reported the discovery of 27 bodies on Thursday.

The American command’s statement on the faltering campaign signified a new and jarring stage in 18 months of efforts to bring peace to Baghdad, with one military plan succeeding another, and none achieving more than a temporary decline in the violence that has made Baghdad the most bloody theater of the war. Senior officers have spoken of the campaign in “make or break” terms, saying that there would be little hope of prevailing in the wider war if the bid to retake Baghdad’s streets failed.

General Caldwell gave little hint of what changes the American command might make in the Baghdad operation. Other senior American military officials who have discussed the Baghdad operation with reporters in recent days have suggested that they have no fundamental reworking of the plan in mind; rather, they say, they plan to continue with it for many months, adjusting as conditions dictate.

Across Baghdad, as in other troubled areas of Iraq that American forces have tried to “clear and hold,” military officials have struggled to deal with insurgents simply melting away, only to return stronger after the offensives wound down. Commanders say the challenge will be not only to clear and hold, but also to “build,” meaning that the cleared areas, with Iraqi policing after the troops withdraw, will benefit from infrastructure investment as part of a plan to cut the militants’ support.
General Caldwell suggested that the increased American troop presence had acted as a spur to the surge in attacks. The general said the Iraq insurgents were aiming at affecting American public opinion in an election year.
Maj. Gen. William B. Caldwell IV gave a somber assessment.
“It’s no coincidence that the surge in attacks against coalition forces and the subsequent increase in U.S. casualties coincide with our increased presence in the streets of Baghdad and the run-up to the American midterm elections,” the general said. “The enemy knows that killing innocent people and Americans will garner headlines and create a sense of frustration.”

A hint that changes in the Baghdad operation were afoot came three weeks ago, when the neighborhood sweeps were halted with large areas of the city untouched, including strongholds of Sunni and Shiite militants like Mansour, in western Baghdad, and Sadr City in the east. Last week, Mr. Bush told reporters he was open to modifying the approach in Iraq “if it’s not working.” Gen. George W. Casey Jr., the top American commander in Iraq, made similar comments.

The American military has said that it has committed 15,600 troops to the operation — compared with 9,600 from the Iraqi Army — with 30,000 Iraqi policemen serving in support roles. American troops have led the 95,000 house searches conducted in the campaign, and General Caldwell said that their visibility had been accompanied by a shift in the pattern of insurgent attacks, with a sharp rise in strikes against American troops and attacks on civilian targets staying more or less constant.

“We find the insurgent elements, the extremists, are in fact punching back hard,” he said. “They’re trying to get back into those areas,” the general said. “We’re constantly going back in and doing clearing operations again.”

Perhaps the most striking element in the news conference was General Caldwell’s candor. Although American commanders have struck a generally sober tone in the past year, they have been careful not to hint in public at the increasingly gloomy view that some, at least, have taken in private. In recent weeks, some senior officers have voiced growing exasperation at background briefings for reporters, particularly when discussing the ineffectiveness, dithering and corruption, as they have termed it, in the government of Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki, and the prime minister’s failure to act effectively on his pledge to rein in the Shiite militias that American commanders now see as the main source of instability.

General Caldwell came to the Baghdad spokesman’s job after commanding the 82nd Airborne Division in its relief efforts after Hurricane Katrina last year, and he has struck a generally upbeat tone in his briefings since arriving here this spring. But on Thursday, he appeared unusually subdued. He waved off a question suggesting that the situation in Baghdad had similarities to the period of the 1968 Tet offensive in Vietnam, saying, “We’re getting far beyond my realm to start making analogies to the Vietnam War.”

Then he added: “But I can tell you that we’re obviously very concerned about what we’re seeing in the city. We’re taking a lot of time to go back and look at the whole Baghdad security plan.”

He went on: “Everything stays very dynamic in this type of environment, and it’s clear that the conditions under which we started are probably not the same today. And so it does require some modifications of the plan.”

American commanders who have discussed the Baghdad operation with reporters in recent days have spoken of having limited options as they seek for ways to make the campaign more effective. One is to increase the number of Iraqi troops deployed to the sweeps. Of six Iraqi battalions that were promised when the operation began, these commanders said, only two have been deployed. The commanders also noted that assessments of the operation might improve after November, when a phase of the plan involving economic reconstruction in the “cleared” areas would begin.

The strategy known as “clear, hold and build” is loosely patterned on a similar effort in Vietnam after the Tet offensive, which was credited with helping turn the tide in that war against the Communist insurgents in the early 1970’s, before the withdrawal of American troops and a cutoff in Congressional financing for the war hastened the final Communist victory. American commanders in Iraq say that the Baghdad campaign has so far covered only the “clear” and “hold” phases, and that the rebuilding of infrastructure in cleared Baghdad neighborhoods, especially restoring electricity, sewage and clinics, could help win popular support that would aid in tracking down the death squads and insurgents.



U.S. Says Violence in Baghdad Rises, Foiling Campaign - New York Times

this whole venture gets more and more complicated as the days go on ,wish they would just reval and get it over with .for there people and for us as well

[QUOTE=Alphamystic;124180]I don't think he is referring to the call. Here is Apollo's post from this morning; it might clear this up a bit.

We contacted Ali Shabibi yesterday to see if he knew anything about the CBI site being down. He is in Jordan and works for us as our General Manager for a home building factory that we are just about to break ground on. He has been somewhat out of touch with the things in Iraq, and we keep him quite busy in Jordan. When he got back to us, he said that it appears that its off line.. Ah, yeah, we know, but why are they off line? That he didn't know, but he later got back with us and said that he has heard that "other denominations are being moved in to the banks". We specifically asked WHAT denominations and after about 5 minutes of trying to get through the language barrier, he said "LOWER". Whew!

He is quite smart, and we often chat over the Google interface, but when speaking to him in person, a lot gets lost in translation. So I feel fairly confident that the lower denoms are in Iraq. We have considered having him on the call several times, but it just wouldn't work with the language problems.

On another note, we currently have a local Arabic student coming into our office twice a week to teach us (mostly Jeremy and Dustin) Arabic. Last week I showed him the paper where the MOF makes the infamous "147" statement. After a short lesson in how the English numbers we currently use were the original Arabic numbers, and the current Arabic numbers were taken from India (I think), he read the article (several times) and he believes that the MOF was saying that 147 or 1.47 is where in his opinion the currency should be valued at. He was also confused because he knew that 1470 is (or was) the current value, so in the end, he was somewhat confused, but still stuck to his original view.

I was also going to have him watch the video where the 14 denominations were mentioned, but we may know before our next lesson exactly what those are. This video is also in a streaming format, so I can't download it and send it home with him, or at least I haven't been able to find a way.

One other thing that Bob mentioned to me (and he has also been out of the loop for quite a while), is that the TBI has recently suspended writing LC's for any of their own contracts. They will still write them for the Ministry, but those are usually made in dollars. Nothing done in Dinars. This would fit perfectly if they knew a reval was around the corner and didn't want to get caught writing an LC for several billion dinars...

Anyway, its way past my bedtime. Keep up the good work and with a little luck, we will all be doing the happy dance before long!!!![/qoute]

Dan the poster of that is with the company that FSN listened to the call with. Dan was just going over the information from that call in that post.

Originally Posted by TheBrain

OK Thank you. So the value thats quoted on each currency compared daily and are not commensurate with each other are just because they are linked to the dollar?

I would think that each currency is reflecting "its" daily change compared to the last published rate of the IQD...seems pretty obvious

Originally Posted by TheBrain

Mike, who said this proves anything. I presented a chart of retail interbank rates, Sunday if my source is correct you can compare the changes percentage wise to the published rates. Nothing more.

Ok fine- Twice now I've asked you a question and twice you have evaded the question . Its real simple -WHO faxed the information about these alleged auctions after monday to your currecy exchanger in Kuwait??? I don't want to hear anything else from you except the answer to this question.

Thanks in advance for your anticipated cooperation!:

Originally Posted by TheBrain

So each day the rate changed there was an auction at CBI?

I do not want to turn this forum into our personal debate so this will be my last post on this subject. You claimed that your source told you that the CBI had been conducting auctions every day, then you posted rates of other currencies to show as proof. We all know that any currency that is internationally traded will flucuate in value on a day to day basis. I do not see how this shows that they have been conducting auctions everyday.

Originally Posted by TheBrain

So each day the rate changed there was an auction at CBI?

Ok, let me try. The currency that IS being traded changes many times throughout the day. Therefore the value of the IQD AGAINST that money changes. The IQD does not have to be traded to change its value against any other currency.
Ok, how did I do??

no there was no auction brain.. the rates change because the other currency's rates change..they're just showing each days rates against an unchanged IQD in my opinion..and please sgs grow sum thicker skin.. this drama is killin me! lol