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

BAGHDAD, Iraq Nov. 20, 2006 (AP)— Gunmen shot and killed has television comedian Monday who was famous for mocking everyone from the Iraqi government to U.S. forces to Shiite militias to Sunni insurgents.

Walid Hassan S slaying cam have the Iraqi death toll pink to more than 1,300 for the first 20 days of November the highest for any month since The Associated Press began alignment the figure in April 2005.

In all, 22 Iraqis were killed Monday in A series of attacks in Baghdad, Ramadi and Baqouba, police force said. The bodies of 26 capital Iraqis who had been kidnapped and tortured also were found one the streets of the, in Dujail to the north of Baghdad and in the Tigris To rivet in southern Iraq.

The Iraqi death toll this month is already well above the 1,216 who died in all of October, which had been the deadliest month in Iraq since the AP began its count.

The actual totals are likely considerably higher because many deaths are not reported. Victims in those boxes are quickly buried according to Muslim custom and never reach mortuaries gold hospitals to Be counted.

In addition to the victims of violence, countless Iraqis cuts had closed calls with death. Among them were two government officials who escaped assassination attempts Monday.

Minister of State Mohammed Abbas Auraibi, has member of Iraq' S Shiite majority, said has roadside bomb hit his convoy At butt 9:30 a.m. have it was driving one has highway in eastern Baghdad. Two of his bodyguards were wounded.

Hakim Al-Zamily, has Shiite deputy health minister, also escaped unhurt when gunmen opened fire one his convoy in downtown Baghdad At noon, killing two of his guards, the minister said.

One Sunday, suspected Sunni insurgents kidnapped another deputy health minister, Shiite Ammar Al-Saffar, from his home in northern Baghdad. Officials said the gunmen wore police force uniforms and arrived in seven vehicles to abduct Al-Saffar, who was believed to Be the most senior government official kidnapped in Iraq since the war began in March 2003.

Al-Saffar was seized nearly has week after dozens of suspected Shiite militia gunmen in police force uniforms kidnapped scores of people from has Ministry of Higher Education office in Baghdad. That ministry is predominantly Sunni.

Originally Posted by Wm.Knowles

Have you ever had a BFO? I just had one! (Blinding Flash of the Obvious)

Yeah I had one....your the IMF guy phiberoptik talked to aren't you? Come on...fess up, your secret is safe with us.

Cheers!
DayDream

Big Picture time....stop for a moment and picture this:

A big metropolitan city with a rail system used by 1MILLION riders DAILY...imagine the whole scene....thriving markets, booming business, bustling people and healthy cultural scene...can you picture it???

I'm guessing that from the looks of the below article that SOMEBODY in Baghdad is seeing it...but I'm thinking it's going to take better than 1345 to get it done...

Baghdad metro project to be fulfilled
20/11/2006
Source: Al-Sabah


Engineering and technical staffs in Baghdad municipality intend fulfilling Baghdad metro project according to international technical standards.

Spokesman of municipality said project fulfilling will be in three steps first of which will witness extending two lines each one with length of 18 kilometers. First line will have 20 stations, while second line will be 14 kilometers length. Structural speed of the metro will be 90 kilometer per hour and with operating capacity of 80 kilometers per hour.Metro capacity of passengers in the first phase will be one million passengers per day. Construction method will be fulfilled underground with depth of 18 meters without damaging buildings and roads that metro passes under them.

http://www.iraqdirectory.com/DisplayNews.aspx?id=2612

ANCN NUMANIYA, Iraq, Oct. 23, 2006 — In the streets of Basra, Iraq, the country's oil-rich southern capital, a British army unit known as "the Poachers" combats the insurgency by setting up snap vehicle checkpoints to look for bomb-making materials, mortars and rockets.

The soldiers, in full body armor and helmets, pull over cars randomly. But in a surprising move we saw two Iraqi police vehicles pulled over and searched.

"Can we have a look in the boot?" asked Lance Cpl. Kris Moore. The 23-year-old was looking for firearms, as many of the British troops here in the south don't trust the local police.

"They are quite corrupt," More said. "Some of the police stations are corrupt."

And it's not just in Basra. Coalition officials admit that militias have infiltrated many of the local police across the country, and the vast majority of the 188,000 man force is not up to the job it is supposed to be carrying out.

Earlier this month, the Iraqi Interior Minister took the dramatic step of standing down an entire national police brigade. Members of the 8th Brigade are suspected of assisting, or turning a blind eye to militiamen who entered a meat-packing plant and kidnapped more than 20 workers.

This news came just days after U.S. forces started retraining the entire national police force.

The national police force, which makes up 10 percent of the overall Iraqi police, has been in the field for more than a year. The 20,000 men are now undergoing three weeks of training and will be issued new uniforms that will be difficult to counterfeit, and will then be put back on the streets.


'Year of the Police'

Military officials say the Iraqi police are key to bringing security to the country, and have dubbed 2006 the Year of the Police.

But nearly 10 months into the effort, senior military leaders concede that only 70 percent of the police are "partially capable" of carrying out planning and operations on their own. And that's after the military has embedded 1,000 soldiers and contractors with Iraqi police units across the country.
American leaders have complained that the government of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki has not done enough to weed out the militia members who have infiltrated the police. And, even a general with the national police force said security will come to Iraq "when politicians speak with a unified voice."

sounds like more of the same...Quality of life issues...


Babil Province Council Prepares Investment Plan Projects
20/11/2006
Source: Al-Sabah

Babil province council prepared the suggested balance sheet investment for the coming year in the fields of municipality and services within a finance amount 75 billion dinar.

A source at the finance committee Raja'a Naji said that the council organized with the cooperation local sides towards preparing a mechanism technical and scientific balance plan for the coming year, showing the real need in the municipality, pointing that the suggested balance need 75 billion dinar including paving, cities numbering, establishing gardens and parks besides other cleaning works for the various districts and streets.

http://www.iraqdirectory.com/DisplayNews.aspx?id=2614

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Neglected nurses fight their own war E-mail this
Print this
Report, IRIN, 20 November 2006

BAGHDAD - Nissrin Muhammad, 36, sees death every day and worries how her children would survive if she were killed. The only means this widowed mother-of-five has to support her family is to continue working in the dangerous and deteriorating conditions of a public hospital in the capital, Baghdad.

Nissrin works 13 hours a day to feed her children. Spending her days tending to sick and bullet-ridden bodies, she is increasingly worried that the day will come when she will be the one lying on the operating table.

"I love to help people. I graduated in nursing with the aim of helping to save lives but in the past two years, we are losing more [lives] than improving health conditions," Nissrin said. "I am stressed and sometimes I go into an empty room behind the hospital's cafeteria to cry and alleviate the tension that I am living under."
Nissrin works 13 hours a day to feed her children. Spending her days tending to sick and bullet-ridden bodies, she is increasingly worried that the day will come when she will be the one lying on the operating table.

Iraq is suffering a dearth of nurses. Those who could afford to have already fled to neighbouring countries. Those with working husbands stay at home, afraid of the escalating violence. But the rest must soldier on in their fight against fear and poverty.

"They are our main support. Without their work, doctors cannot do their job because nurses are the ones who maintain the lives of patients after the medical diagnosis. Losing their work means losing lives," said Dr Yehia al-Mawin, senior official at the Ministry of Health's strategy department. He added that women represent 80 percent of all nurses.

More than 160 nurses have been murdered since the US-led invasion of Iraq in 2003 and more than 400 wounded, according to al-Mawin. In addition, he said thousands had fled the country or were forced to leave their work after receiving threats from insurgents and militia fighters.

Meagre salary

Nissrin said she feels like a warrior herself. With a salary of US $150 a month, she struggles to make ends meet.

"Our salary [nurses'] was always one of the worst in the country but families used to give us extra money when we delivered their children, or when patients had successful operations or treatments. But today, even this extra benefit has disappeared," Nissrin told IRIN.

"People are getting poorer and cannot afford to [give nurses money]. Often, the [patients'] family does not have money even to buy medicines," she said.

On the one day off she has each week, she goes in search of food to buy. Most of the shops in her neighbourhood are closed because of ongoing sectarian violence, so she has to walk to another district, and take more risks in the process, to get food. With her meagre salary, she said a typical meal might be some rice, beans and a carrot.

Meat was too expensive, she said, and she had stopped eating it anyway because it reminded her of dead bodies. "After what I see in the hospital with the victims of attacks, it is hard to imagine eating something like that," she said.

Nissrin starts work at 7am. At lunchtime, she takes a two-hour break to pick her sons up from school, warm up some food for them and then go back to the hospital.

"I prepare the food every night after I return from hospital at 10pm. I check if the children did their homework, clean the house and sleep like a rock," she said.

If her children fall ill, Nissrin asks a neighbour to help look after them. Once, when they were particularly sick, she asked her boss if she could take time off to tend to them. "He just said that two lives were not more important than the hundreds that come into the hospital on a daily basis in need of my services," she said.

Weak and disheartened

When she feels weak and disheartened, she pulls out a photo of her children and reminds herself why she endures what she does. She dreams of a day when nurses will be respected and appreciated for what they do. "Sometimes I feel indignation that even with millions of people depending on our work, they still see us as a lowly profession and treat us badly," she said.

With more than 150 patients to look after on a typical day, Nissrin has the additional burden of having to accept physical and verbal abuse from angry patients, or their friends and relatives, demanding immediate treatment. This sometimes amounts to punches in the face or worse.

"In the most recent incident, a husband of a patient broke a glass over my head because his wife urinated and I was late changing her. I tried to explain that 50 injured patients had just arrived in the hospital and we were just three [nurses] helping the doctors. He told me that I was useless and beat me," Nessrin said.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Easy Riders on the Tigris E-mail this
Print this
Duraed Salman and Haydar al-Musawi, IWPR, 20 November 2006

A year and a half ago, Hussein Sahib, 37, decided to get himself a car. He chose a Korean model, a small Kia. Like many Iraqis after 2003, he was happy and proud to finally own a car, a luxury many could not afford during Saddam's time of high import taxes and low incomes.

But the joy did not last long. In the first years after the regime fell, more than a million mainly used cars were imported into the country. Soon traffic jams became a common sight in Iraqi cities.

The demand for fuel increased while the capacity of refineries dwindled due to sabotage and the slow pace at which outdated and destroyed facilities were replaced and repaired. As a result, queues at fuel stations have become endless.

On top of that, the deteriorating security situation has left Baghdad looking like a huge open-air prison. High concrete barriers and checkpoints force drivers to take long detours to get from one part of the city to another.

The roadblocks often change from day to day so even drivers who know Baghdad well get confused and don't know their way around.

All of this aggravation put Sahib off driving a car. He replaced the Kia with a small blue motorcycle he bought for 250 US dollars.

Now he speedily zigzags through the streets of the capital, his headscarf and his dishdasha, the Arabic tunic, blowing in the wind. He easily passes the long lines at the frequent checkpoints that strangle the traffic and gets to his home in Za'afaraniya, south of Baghdad, much quicker than before.

A trip from al-Sha'ab in northern Baghdad to Bab al-Sharji in the city centre that these days would require a tense hour-long journey by car takes about 15 minutes on a motorbike, he says.

The traffic chaos and the constant fuel crisis are driving a fast-growing motorcycle market in Baghdad. Demand for new models is high, but trading in second-hand ones is also becoming quite lucrative. Much of the latter takes place in the al-Fadhil market in the centre of Baghdad. There, Ali Thamir, 29, sells used motorcycles for between 250 and 900 US dollars. "We make perfect profit," he said.

The traffic police authorities say they do not have a figure for how many motorcycles have been imported. And since April 2003, there have been no regulations for riders, while license plates are not issued anymore.

No special driver's license is required, and in Baghdad even children can be seen zooming around, making risky and reckless moves while the police just stand by watching.

Sabir Salim, 38, a traffic policeman, said officers tend to excuse many infringements because life for Iraqis is tough enough as it is. His colleague, Nasir Salim, 26, agreed, " Me and many of my colleagues never stop or punish motorcyclists."

Many hold the view that they're safer than taking a bus or a taxi, since both the latter are regularly targeted by insurgents.

"I want to avoid buses," said Sa'ad Saif, 36, a technician who used to ride the bus to work but now drives a small, nimble motorcycle, a red box with a watermelon perched on the luggage rack behind him.

Unfortunately, it is not only ordinary Iraqis who have discovered the benefits of motorcycles. They're often used by burglars and suicide bombers - and insurgents are also known to pack them with explosives and detonate them by remote control.

A policeman on duty in a Baghdad street, who asked that his name not be used, said that two months ago his patrol in the al-Sayidiya neighborhood was targeted by a "motorcycle bomb". He was injured and a friend was killed.

"I am suspicious about any motorcycle approaching our checkpoint now," he said.

Duraed Salman is an IWPR contributor in Baghdad.

T

Originally Posted by Wm.Knowles

The answer to all of your questions maybe yes. We will never have an idea as to how much they intend to take out. All I can say is the more the beter. But what is important to note, is that they simply can't return to a position of "sell them all they want at an undervalued level". And, yes at the "tail end"
of this process we should see fewer banks and lessor numbers. But, they can not return to a position of sell to all, all that they want, as before. They did not engage in this removal of dianr, just to return to such a low rate that speculators could continue to purchase this currency at such an undervalued level, It will need to be more expensive. i.e. an RV.

I have no idea what these "m" figures mean, I have heard that "M2" is all the cash + deposits, I have also heard that this figure is arount 19T, in a nutshell, what does that mean?

Life as a street seller...dodging bombs E-mail this
Print this
A profile of 'Amin', IRIN, 20 November 2006

BAGHDAD - Working in Iraq has never been more dangerous. Bakers, hairdressers and rubbish collectors are just some of the professions that have been singled out by death squads. As a street vendor, Fua'ad Amin, 48, faces danger every day in order to feed his family of nine.

When Amin leaves his house in a suburb of the capital, Baghdad, at 6am every morning, he needs to choose carefully where to sell his goods from. Frequent explosions have forced him to change his location daily.

Carrying three big sacks full of electronic gadgets made in China and pirate CDs made at home, Amin takes the first bus he sees to find different places to sell his wares and make money to feed his family of nine.

But his 12-hour work days just don't bring enough in to support his family, he said. "Because I have to change my location every day, I lose customers because they can never find me in the same place," Amin said.
A couple of weeks ago...a man came near me asking where the police car usually stops in the fair. When he left, I took my electronics and CDs and ran like a deer. After 10 minutes, I heard an explosion and later heard the news that more than six people were killed by the same man who approached me - a suicide bomber.

"In addition, people don't have the money to buy like before. Foreign music has been prohibited by insurgents [deeming to be against Islam] so I depend on my Arabic music CDs, but most of the time they are not the ones preferred by the younger generation," he added.

"Come on, come close, it's cheap. Hear music and dance to make your life happier!" Amin shouts to get the attention of customers.

Amin said he has to stay alert all the time. He watches his back and keeps a close eye on cars passing by or any person acting strangely. If he does see something suspicious, he picks up his goods and runs to another area.

"A couple of weeks ago I was right. A man came near me asking where the police car usually stops in the fair. When he left, I took my electronics and CDs and ran like a deer. After 10 minutes, I heard an explosion and later heard the news that more than six people were killed by the same man who approached me - a suicide bomber," said Amin.

"There are some days when I'm so scared that I go home without selling anything, but I prefer this than putting myself at risk."

Unemployment and pain

Amin did not go to school as a child because he was an orphan and then married very young. "I have been trying to get a decent job for years but no one gives jobs to an illiterate," Amin said.

He had worked as a gardener until earlier this year and had been getting enough money to feed his family. However, since February, when sectarian violence in Iraq began escalating, his customers started to ask what religious sect he was to determine whether or not to keep him on.

He lost many customers because of this and then more because of poverty - people could no longer afford the luxury of a gardener.

So Amin decided to change profession. In April, he borrowed money from a neighbour and bought a computer so that he could copy music CDs and sell them in the street. Being illiterate meant he needed his son to help him do this. This proved to have tragic consequences.

"In July, another person in our neighbourhood who also makes pirate CDs killed my son while he was out buying bread for his mother. The man said that my son was taking over his work," said Amin, adding that the killer was imprisoned for this offence but that it made no difference because his son was gone for good.

Amin had to carry on so asked a relative to help him copy the CDs. "He asks me for 50 percent of all my income. I had no choice because I need this job so that my family can eat," he said. "Maybe one day I can learn how to read and write and work in a better job. But in the meantime, I have to continue selling CDs."

This item comes to you via IRIN, a UN humanitarian news and information service, but may not necessarily reflect the views of the United Nations or its agencies. All IRIN material may be reposted or reprinted free-of-charge; refer to the copyright page for conditions of use. IRIN is a project of the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs.

EU, Iraq to kick off 1st round of trade negotiations
20/11/2006
Source: Kuna

The EU and Iraq has commenced here Monday the first round of trade negotiations to reach a joint cooperation deal in diverse economic areas.

EU External Relations Commissioner Benita Ferrero-Waldner said negotiations show renewed European commitments towards Iraq, which were earlier announced by the EU.

For his part, EU Trade Commissioner Peter Mandelson stressed the significance of the deal that could help Iraq wriggle out of its deteriorating economic conditions and ensure stability which the Iraqi government seeks to bring to the country.

The deal is meant to reintegrate Iraq into the international community and the EU as far as economy and trade are concerned, he said, noting that the EU seeks to shore up efforts exerted to overhaul trade, economic and social institutions and to reconstruct the country.

EU-Iraq trade talks are expected to deal with goods, services and necessary means to stimulate and spur investment, as well as taxes and intellectual property rights.

Both sides will also mull over how to curb poverty and protect environment, along with cultural and academic issues.

The European Commission said in a release that all agreements hammered out between the EU and other countries attach much attention to human rights, terrorism and weapons of mass destruction. Due to insecurity in Iraq, bilateral talks will also deal with the political and security situations in the country, it said, vowing that the EU would promote Iraq's national reconciliation.

Minister of Trade Borham Saleh is leading the visiting Iraqi delegation.

http://www.iraqdirectory.com/DisplayNews.aspx?id=2617