Month: March 2003

Andrew Buncombe writes some interesting stuff in the Independent today. He notes how quickly teams were sent in to qwell the oil fires from sabotaged Iraqi wells. Importantly of the firefighter he notes:

Furthermore, Washington had clearly been planning for this months ago. Mr Flak, dressed in red overalls and a white hard-hat, said his company had been in negotiations with the American government since September over coming to Iraq to douse fires.

Robert Fisk writes about the images of war – and double standards in the West. With regard to Basra and its apparent fall:

It is also proof that Basra – reportedly “captured” and “secured” by British troops last week – is indeed under the control of Saddam Hussein’s forces. Despite claims by British officers that some form of uprising has broken out in Basra, cars and buses continue to move through the streets while Iraqis queue patiently for gas bottles as they are unloaded from a government truck.

He also refers to the killing of two British soldiers, from an unedited tape seen in Baghdad.

The two Britons, still in uniform, are lying on a roadway, arms and legs apart, one of them apparently hit in the head, the other shot in the chest and abdomen.

Another sequence from the same tape shows crowds of Basra civilians and armed men in civilian clothes, kicking the soldiers’ British Army Jeep and dancing on top of the vehicle. Other men can be seen kicking the overturned Ministry of Defence trailer, which the Jeep was towing when it was presumably ambushed.

Also to be observed on the unedited tape – which was driven up to Baghdad on the open road from Basra – is a British pilotless drone photo-reconnaissance aircraft, its red and blue roundels visible on one wing, shot down and lying overturned on a roadway. Marked “ARMY” in capital letters, it carries the code sign ZJ300 on its tail and is attached to a large cylindrical pod which probably contains the plane’s camera.

And with regard to casualties,

Other harrowing scenes show the partially decapitated body of a little girl, her red scarf still wound round her neck. Another small girl was lying on a stretcher with her brain and left ear missing. Another dead child had its feet blown away. There was no indication whether American or British ordnance had killed these children. The tapes give no indication of Iraqi military casualties.

Faisal Bodi, a senior editor for aljazeera.net writes in the Guardian today. He criticises the Western media for not reporting on important stories, and being blatantly biased in their reporting. He also mentions some stories that I indeed have not heard over the first week of the war.

Only hours before the Basra non-event, one of Iraq’s most esteemed Shia authorities, Ayatollah Sistani, had dented coalition hopes of a southern uprising by reiterating a fatwa calling on all Muslims to resist the US-led forces. This real, and highly significant, event went unreported in the west.

Earlier in the week Arab viewers had seen the gruesome aftermath of the coalition bombing of “Ansar al-Islam” positions in the north-east of the country. All but two of the 35 killed were civilians in an area controlled by a neutral Islamist group, a fact passed over with undue haste in western reports. And before that, on the second day of the war, most of the western media reported verbatim central command statements that Umm Qasr was under “coalition” control – it was not until Wednesday that al-Jazeera could confirm all resistance there had been pacified.

He also points out:

The British media has condemned al-Jazeera’s decision to screen a 30-second video clip of two dead British soldiers. This is simple hypocrisy. From the outset of the war, the British media has not balked at showing images of Iraqi soliders either dead or captured and humiliated.