Brave New Iraq

A few more 'successes' for the Bush Junta and their fellow travelers:

IRAQ: Ethnic violence forces more Arabs to flee Kirkuk

KIRKUK, 16 September 2007 (IRIN) - Iraqi Arab residents of the northern oil-rich city of Kirkuk, some 250km from Baghdad, say scores of Arab families are fleeing the city as ethnic violence increases there.

“The attacks on our community have worsened since February 2007. We are being forced to leave the city almost empty-handed and the government isn’t taking any action to support us,” said Ali Akram Mahmoud, a spokesperson for Kirkuk’s Arabs Association (KAA), formed in 2003 with the aim of safeguarding the rights of Arabs who had settled in the city.

“The number of [Arab] families fleeing the city has increased by 20 percent on previous years. Their flight will seriously affect the upcoming referendum in which Kurds will have a majority not because of their numbers but because, with guns in their hands, they will have forced all Arabs to flee the city. It is absolutely unfair,” he said.

The December 2007 Kirkuk status referendum is due to decide whether the city becomes part of the Iraqi Kurdistan region.

“The most common scene in Kirkuk is of families filling cars with their relatives and fleeing the city in the early morning,” said Jihad Muhammad, a political analyst at Mustansiriyah University.

IRAQ: Diyala the worst province for basic services

BAQUBAH, 16 September 2007 (IRIN) - Diyala province, on Iraq’s eastern border with Iran, is the scene of some of the worst violence in Iraq today, making the province’s shortages of basic services worse than anywhere else in the country, according to the local council and non-governmental organisations (NGOs).

“Few schools are functioning properly, with few numbers of teachers and students. Hospitals lack essential supplies as the militants and insurgents fight over them. On top of that, some police stations are under the control of local militias,” Fatah Ahmed, a spokesman for the Iraq Aid Association (IAA), said.

Again I ask how can you pro war people contiue to support this occupation?