Tag: al-Maliki
…Iraq is not the only country threatened by Islam religious strife. The conflict between Sunnis and Shiites is a strategic absurd – the war without winners. The United States is responsible for inciting the conflict. Its interventions in Afghanistan, and then in Iraq, tipped the delicate balance of forces and provoked the regional competition between Riyadh and Tehran, which strives for dominance in the Middle East. Saudi Arabia has nothing but sand and oil, it imports foodstuffs and water, its chances to win in the fight against Iran are negligibly small…
Guernica in the Spanish civil war, My Lai in the Vietnam War, Guantanamo Bay in the war on terror – these have been powerful symbols. The siege of Fallujah in May 2004 stands out in the Iraq War as the bloodiest battle that the United States fought since the Vietnam War. The US Marines suffered 40 deaths in the siege, while Iraqi civilian casualties were in the hundreds. The US forces reportedly used F-16 warplanes to blitz residential areas in Fallujah with cluster bombs. The majority of prisoners were executed…
The pressure in the boiler which Western officials affectedly call «the new democratic Iraq» is building steadily and, figuratively speaking, the needle has entered the red zone. The deepening crisis is systemic in nature, encompasses the most important areas of life and undermines the foundations of statehood… While in 2011 4,147 people in Iraq were killed as a result of terrorist attacks, since the beginning of 2013 over 5,600 people have already been killed, more than in all of 2012 (4574); this is the highest figure since 2008. Since April – May 2013, every week there have been no less than 200 acts of terrorism and armed attacks, with numerous victims…
The strategic partnership which arose between Baghdad and Tehran in 2008 was Ahmadinejad's accomplishment… By this summer a situation had formed where the interests of the anti-Syrian and anti-Iranian coalitions… Neither the removal of the current government nor the division of Iraq could please Tehran; either of these cases would be a strategic defeat, and the outcome of the Syrian conflict would once again be hanging by a thread… Ahmadinejad's visit to Baghdad two weeks before the end of his presidential term is a sign of the Iranian leadership's serious concern about the situation which has arisen literally over the past few months.