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

BAGHDAD (AP) — A U.S. Army helicopter crashed in Iraq's western Anbar province, leaving two crewmembers missing and four injured, while hundreds of Iraqi and U.S. troops poured into the capital in a desperate bid to stem sectarian violence that is threatening to ignite a civil war.
In Baqouba, 35 miles northeast of Baghdad, four people were killed and 16 wounded in a U.S. airstrike late Tuesday, police said. There was no immediate comment from U.S. officials, but a mosque and nearby houses in the city were heavily damaged in the blast.
Four U.S. service members were injured when the UH60 Blackhawk helicopter crashed Tuesday with six people on board during a routine flight to survey the area, the U.S. command said in a statement Wednesday. The four injured troops were in stable condition, and it did not appear the crash was due to hostile fire, the U.S. said.
The ongoing violence in Baghdad has prompted U.S. commanders to reinforce troop strength in the city. Over the past weeks, a force expected to number nearly 12,000 has been assembling here to try to take the streets back from Sunni and Shiite extremists.
A U.S. statement Tuesday said about 6,000 additional Iraqi troops were being sent to the Baghdad area, along with 3,500 soldiers of 172nd Stryker Brigade Combat Team and 2,000 troops from the U.S. 1st Armored Division, which has served as a reserve force since November.
"We must dramatically reduce the level of violence in Baghdad that is fueling sectarianism," said Maj. Gen. J.D. Thurman, commander of the coalition forces in Baghdad, where strife between Shiites and Sunnis runs the highest.
"Iraqi and U.S. forces will help the citizens of Baghdad by reducing the violence that has plagued this city since the Samarra bombing," Thurman said. "Iraqi and Multinational Division-Baghdad soldiers will not fail the Iraqi people."
Much of the violence has been blamed on sectarian militias that have stepped up a campaign of tit-for-tat killings since the Feb. 22 bombing of a Shiite shrine in the northern city of Samarra.
Some of the reinforcements have already been seen patrolling a mostly Sunni neighborhood in western Baghdad, scene of armed confrontations between Sunni and Shiite gunmen.
Many of the militias responsible for sectarian violence are linked to political parties that are part of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki's national unity government, and they are reluctant to disband their armed wings unless others do the same.
The U.S. ambassador to Iraq, Zalmay Khalilzad, said there were talks underway between various Sunni and Shiite groups to reach agreements and sign pledges to end sectarian fighting.
In other violence Wednesday, gunmen on two motorcycles assassinated Col. Qassim Abdel-Qadir, administrative head of an Iraqi army division in the southern city of Basra, said a police official who did not want to be named for security reasons.
A roadside bomb exploded near a U.S. patrol in eastern Baghdad's Shiite neighborhood of Habibiya, killing one bystander and injuring one U.S. soldier, said police Lt. Bilal Ali.
Police also found the bodies of three men who were shot in the head and dumped in two locations in southwestern Baghdad, said police Lt. Maitham Abdul-Razzaq said.
A policeman was killed and another wounded when they were trying to defuse a roadside bomb late Tuesday in Samarra, 60 miles north of Baghdad, police Capt. Laith Mohammed said.

Do you think a reval will even calm these people down? I'm beginning to wonder if they even care if their country falls apart. It's all about the religion with them. I'v done some research on the Islam religion and all they are concerned about is satisfying Allah.

Originally Posted by cigarman

Do you think a reval will even calm these people down? I'm beginning to wonder if they even care if their country falls apart. It's all about the religion with them. I'v done some research on the Islam religion and all they are concerned about is satisfying Allah.

I understand what you are saying cigarman, but putting religion aside, I know my main concern would be to feed my family. And at this point they are having a hard time even doing that. It may not take the hostilities totally away, as I feel they will always be there, as they always have been, but people tend not to be so grumpy, and not so quick to react when their belly is full.

Originally Posted by cigarman

Do you think a reval will even calm these people down? I'm beginning to wonder if they even care if their country falls apart. It's all about the religion with them. I'v done some research on the Islam religion and all they are concerned about is satisfying Allah.

Hmmm, don't know much about Islam, but I sure would not want to serve a god who was only satisfied by suicide bombings and the bloodshed of innocents. Sounds like the enemy to me.

To keep this about the dinar.........Let it Peg!

Originally Posted by cigarman

Do you think a reval will even calm these people down? I'm beginning to wonder if they even care if their country falls apart. It's all about the religion with them. I'v done some research on the Islam religion and all they are concerned about is satisfying Allah.

While I am sure there are some Iraqis particpating in the violence, I would venture that Iran and Syria are driving the Shi'ite activities through their close ties with Al Sadr and others within the Iraqi government. They don't want a democratic Iraq...It endangers their theological hold over their own countries...

EW

cigarman,I have spoken to several people who have been purchasing dinar for the past 2 years. I also wonder if the revalue is going to calm them down. As you say it is not dictatorship they are fighting any more . it all seems to me to be Phnatical religious groups . Death to them Is the greatest honor.in their religion. So why would a reval be of their concern? I Pray, and hope, and wish , and wake up every day with the hope, and faith that all will be settled soon, but as with any investment you being to wonder. I KNOW it will Happen sooner or later. Just a matter of when . all I am doing is taking advantage of the buying opportunities of dinar, with the extra time it takes for the R/V.

I agree with you Bob, I just wish everyone could get along.

It's a very sad thing. I to KNOW that the dinar WILL revalue, and all of us here will benefit from it. The investment part is great, it's one of our many freedoms we enjoy. Unfortunatly, innocent people will still be killed every day. There is no way around it, and that is sad.

Bob1949 I totally agree with your statement that "Death to them Is the greatest honor." It means more than economics, feeding families, etc. their values are so different from ours..
Thats why changes for them is a much deeper challenge than we can comprehend... just wishing for a better life for everyone involved...

Let us think about these people in our prayers as well.



The End of Christianity in Iraq
Posted GMT 8-6-2006 18:33:49

The news from Iraq has been especially grim of late. As bad as things have been for Muslim Iraqis, for one vulnerable group of Iraqis, life inside "free Iraq" has been even more difficult. For the Assyrians, who are both Christian and the indigenous people of Iraq, the aftermath of Iraq's "liberation" has been downright catastrophic.

The Assyrian Christian population of Iraq has been brutalized by both ethnic and religious attacks since the US-led invasion in 2003. Glyn Ford, a UK Labor member of the European Parliament and member of the "Save the Assyrians" campaign, recently laid out a litany of woe that has befallen the Assyrians.

Ford reports that torture, kidnapping, extortion, harassment, church bombings, forced religious conversion, political disenfranchisement and property destruction are just some of the deliberate human rights violations that are both ruining and taking the lives of Assyrians in Iraq.

The President of "Save the Assyrians," Andy Darmoo, told a news conference in New York, "Today, the situation is the worst we have ever lived in Iraq."

Christians accounted for somewhere between five and twelve percent of the pre-war Iraqi population of 26 million. Most Iraqi Christians are Assyrians whose native language is a form of Aramaic. Over half of the Assyrian Iraqi community resides in the north, primarily in the Nineveh Plains and its surrounding areas. This location puts them at the mercy of America's allies, the Kurdish Regional Government (KRG), which has been anything but kind to the Assyrians, oppression has become more prevalent in the North.

The remaining Assyrians living elsewhere in Iraq have faired little better, of course, as they have been frequently targeted by the insurgency, by religious extremists, and even by criminal gangs bent on earning ransom money. As Halfath Hamama, an Iraqi refugee who fled to Syria explained, "Our children, wives, and family members are kidnapped every day. They send us a note telling us to give them fifty thousand dollars or they will kill our family. They send us their fingers or toes, pictures of them beaten and bruised, and tell us we bring this on our head because we are Christians and collaborate with the Christian Americans."

In total, over 250,000 Christian refugees are now stranded in Syria, Jordan and Turkey. This is not even counting those that are displaced within Iraq itself, many having fled north trying to find some measure of safety among other Assyrians. Despite the scale, however, of this human tragedy, the Assyrians have largely been left to their own devices.

While the Kurds, for example, have received millions of dollars in aid following the end of Saddam's regime, aid to the Assyrians has been almost non-existent. This has resulted in many refugees living in appalling conditions. It was even recently reported that some of the Assyrian refugees in northern Iraq had been reduced to sleeping on bare dirt in Christian cemeteries.

Since 2005, the Council for Assyrian Research and Development has sought to record the abuses endured by Assyrians through the Assyrian Human Rights Documentation Project. The first outcome paper produced by the group pulls no punches in its grim assessment. The paper warns, "At the current rates of ethnic cleansing, forced assimilation and migration, the indigenous Assyrian Christians will be fully eradicated from the new 'democratic Iraq' in less than 10 years ... the Kurdification, Arabisation, and Islamification of Iraq have left an ancient people at the doors of extinction."

The Assyrians have been calling for assistance, and these pleas have largely fallen on deaf ears. What is most needed is an Assyrian Administrative Unit, a safe haven that would be administered and guarded by the Assyrians themselves. While international groups such as the European Parliament have issued declarations and resolutions of support, the actual power in Iraq, the United States, appears to have already relegated the Assyrians to the dustbin of history. Unless the American people themselves choose to demand a policy reversal, it is unlikely that the Bush Administration will become interested in the fate of Iraqi Christians on its own accord.

The End of Christianity in Iraq