ARBIL - It is 8:30 in the morning, and the roads of Arbil appear for a moment to be eerily silent. Most cars have been banned from the streets of this Kurdish city of 800,000. Roadblocks are up all over town. But the city is hardly abandoned. The local peshmerga...
I had the opportunity to participate in the long-awaited Iraqi elections this weekend. Contrary to popular belief, this was not the first time my opinion has mattered to the Iraqi state. It was actually the third. Saddam Hussein had asked us Iraqis in both 1995 and...
The man most responsible for Iraq's election didn't vote because he wasn't eligible. No, not George W. Bush – I mean the Grand Ayatollah Ali al Husseini al-Sistani, the man who single-handedly faced down the Americans, demanded direct elections rather than the...
ARBIL, Northern Iraq, (IPS) – Many Kurds in Northern Iraq are facing new threats – and they do not come from masked Arab terrorists. They come from the two main Kurdish parties doing all they can to gain strength in the election Sunday, independent local...
My Husband Is Defending DemocracyMonica Benderman and her husband are practicing their faith in the truest sense of the word. Those like George Bush who profess to be Christians but persist in breaking the commandments are demonstrating what many of us reject: false...
Pulitizer Prize Winner Seymour Hersh first revealed – and neocrazy sycophants at the New York Times, Washington Post, CNN and UPI reluctantly confirmed – that the Bush-Cheney Administration has been conducting secret "reconnaissance" missions...
DOHUK, Kurdistan - As Iraq's first national election since the fall of Saddam Hussein draws near, the country seems more on the brink of falling apart than of coming together in a celebration of democracy. Attacks against Shi'ite targets have increased in an effort to...
Since ancient Rome, imperial republics have invariably felt a tension between cherished republican practices at home and distinctly unrepublican ones abroad; or put another way, if imperial practices spread far enough beyond the republic's borders and gain enough...
Despite a continuing increase in the already draconian security measures imposed across Iraq, the bombs keep coming. Today in the al-Dora district of Baghdad a primary school which had been a designated polling station was struck by a car bomb. Four Iraqi Police (IP)...
ARBIL, Kurdistan - The afternoon call to prayer sounds on the final Friday before election on Sunday, and thousands of Kurds across Northern Iraq file into their mosques. At each one of them, imams appointed by the ruling Kurdish factions give the same message: go out...
