Sunday, May 11, 2014

Editorial: The silence cracks

Iraq must be a lot safer with Nouri's forcces attacking the people in Falluja.















    • Yeah, everyone must be sleeping easy now that the 'dangerous' child was taken care of.

    Nouri's been killing Iraqi civilians every day and getting away with it for months now.

    The US government is giving him even more weapons this despite the fact that he's using them on the Iraqi people.

    Thursday,  NINA reported his shelling of residential areas of Falluja left 13 civilians dead ("including a woman, three children")  and twenty-one more were injured.

    That same day, the silence in the US was finally broken.


    Janine di Giovanni (Newsweek) reported:

    “First it was hospitals, then densely populated civilian areas,” says Erin Evers from Human Rights Watch (HRW) in Baghdad. “Now it’s neighborhoods where people are just trying to live.”
    The tragedy in Fallujah was barely noticed in the run-up to the Iraqi parliamentary elections, which took place on April 30, the first national elections since U.S. troops pulled out of the country in 2011. No one much paid attention because violence has become a trademark in this campaign.
    Since January, when the Shia-backed government of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki began a campaign of retaliation against the Sunni-backed Islamic State of Iraq and al-Shām, it is estimated that 4,000 have been killed, or roughly 1,000 a month. Researchers on the ground say 20 to 30 percent of the dead are children. Meanwhile, government forces have killed 348, according to Iraq Body Count.


    Will others follow suit?

    Already AP kind of has.  Kind of.

    But some western outlet will.

    Especially now that Al Jazeera's reporting:

     Shelling by the Iraqi army in the city of Fallujah has killed more civilians, hospital sources and witnesses have said, amid allegations that government forces were using barrel bombs in an attempt to drive out anti-government fighters from the area, 
    The use of barrel bombs in civilian areas is banned under international conventions given their indiscriminate nature.

    But Mohammed al-Jumaili, a local journalist, told Al Jazeera that the army has dropped many barrel bombs "targeting mosques, houses and markets" in Fallujah.


    And questions will arise.

    Such as why did the US government refuse to call out this slaughter?

    Such as why did the US government continue to provide Nouri with weapons?




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