These are the hells that Bush has created with his "liberation" of Iraq:
Under US noses, brutal insurgents rule Sunni citadel. (Guardian) Excerpts:
Under US noses, brutal insurgents rule Sunni citadel
The executions are carried out at dawn on Haqlania bridge, the entrance to Haditha. A small crowd usually turns up to watch even though the killings are filmed and made available on DVD in the market the same afternoon. One of last week's victims was a young man in a black tracksuit. Like the others he was left on his belly by the blue iron railings at the bridge's southern end. His severed head rested on his back, facing Baghdad. Children cheered when they heard that the next day's spectacle would be a double bill: two decapitations. A man named Watban and his brother had been found guilty of spying...
...Alcohol and music deemed unIslamic were banned, women were told to wear headscarves and relations between the sexes were closely monitored....The court caters solely for divorces and marriages. Alleged criminals are punished in the market. The Guardian witnessed a headmaster accused of adultery whipped 190 times with cables. Children laughed as he sobbed and his robe turned crimson...Two men who robbed a foreign exchange shop were splayed on the ground. Masked men stood on their hands while others broke their arms with rocks...DVDs of beheadings on the bridge are distributed free in the souk. Children prefer them to cartoons...
From the Washington Post:
Militias on the Rise Across Iraq
Excerpts: Shiite and Kurdish militias, often operating as part of Iraqi government security forces, have carried out a wave of abductions, assassinations and other acts of intimidation, consolidating their control over territory across northern and southern Iraq and deepening the country's divide along ethnic and sectarian lines, according to political leaders, families of the victims, human rights activists and Iraqi officials....
...In Basra in the south, dominated by the Shiites, and Mosul in the north, ruled by the Kurds, as well as cities and villages around them, many residents have said they are powerless before the growing sway of the militias, which instill a climate of fear that many see as redolent of the era of former president Saddam Hussein...
...Across northern Iraq, Kurdish parties have employed a previously undisclosed network of at least five detention facilities to incarcerate hundreds of Sunni Arabs, Turkmens and other minorities abducted and secretly transferred from Mosul, Iraq's third-largest city, and from territories stretching to the Iranian border, according to political leaders and detainees' families...."I don't see any difference between Saddam and the way the Kurds are running things here," said Nahrain Toma, who heads a human rights organization, Bethnahrain, which has offices in northern Iraq and has faced several death threats....
From Azzaman (Iraqi, secular, anti-Saddam paper):
U.S. troops bomb Tel Affar despite parliament speaker's warning
Excerpts: U.S. troops have been bombing the city of Tel Affar in the past four days despite warnings from parliamentary speaker Hajim al-Hassani. For months, the troops have been striving to control the city and the adjacent region close to the Syrian border but to no avail. Fierce fighting is reported between U.S. troops and the insurgents who have turned the northern city west of Mosul into a major stronghold...
Thousands of families are reported to have fled the city. In interviews with Azzaman's correspondent in Tel Affar, the residents described the U.S. shelling of their city "as fires of hell" ... The shelling has so far killed several people and wounded many others. Those staying behind suffer from lack of water, food and health services.
Hassani, the speaker, had warned last month that the use of military force to solve the crisis in Tel Affar would further destabilize rather than pacify an already restive region. Azzaman's correspondent, whose identity we withhold for security reasons, reported residents as saying that life has come to a standstill in the city. And those who opted to flee are in even worse condition, he added. "The people are too scared to go out and recover corpses of dead relatives or tend the wounded. U.S. troops have ringed the city and now prevent people from either leaving or entering the city," he said.
