Iraq: another bloody year

The mayhem unleashed by Messrs Blair and Bush when they so carelessly invaded Iraq in 2003 continues. Last year was the worst for six years, with at least 7,818 civilians and 1,050 members of the security forces killed according to the United Nations.

Since April, there has been a surge in sectarian violence following a deadly crackdown on a Sunni protest camp in Hawija. Sunni militants stepped up attacks across the country, while Shia groups launched reprisals.

Since the US-UK invasion, Al-Qaeda has emerged as a major force in Iraq, and the black flags of their allies are reported to be flying over two cities in the west of the country, Ramadi and Fallujah, showing they are still in control of parts of them.

December alone saw at least 661 civilians killed, plus 98 members of the security services, and tensions have increased this week with the arrest of a prominent Sunni MP.

*Just had news that my A Disastrous History of the World is going to be translated into Romanian. It has already appeared in Spanish and Estonian.

Continuing disaster in Iraq - 9th anniversary bombings

As the US and UK governments gear up for their next Middle Eastern war - most favoured venue, Iran – a reminder of the continuing bloody disaster we unleashed on Iraq.   On the 9^th anniversary of the invasion, at least 30 people have been killed in a series of bombings in the country.

Two car bombs in the mainly Shia city of Karbala are said to have killed at least 13 people, while another in the northern city of Kirkuk caused the deaths of at least seven.   A pregnant woman died in Fallujah.

Bombings are now part of the daily pattern of life in Iraq.    In January, a suicide bomber killed 53 people in an attack on Shi’ite pilgrims in Basra in the south.   Then a few days later another suicide bomber killed 31 mourners at a Shi’ite funeral in Baghdad.

Nearly 5,000 soldiers in the invading armies were killed, but we have no real idea of the number of Iraqi civilians who have paid with their lives.    Few now contest that it is well over 100,000, but we will probably never know the true number because, as Nikita Khrushchev said of the authorities’ indifference to those who died in the great Soviet famine of 1932-3: ‘no one was counting.’

Iraq - a war crime in Fallujah? + my new book

A study has revealed that birth defects suffered by children in the Iraqi city of Fallujah are greater than those inflicted by the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs. Since a ruthless American attack in 2004, there has been a twelve-fold increase in childhood cancers, and a fourfold increase in cancer overall.

Children have been seen with grotesque deformities – an eye or nose in the middle of the forehead, and so on. The suspicion is that the Americans’ use of depleted uranium and other “special weapons” is to blame, but the BBC’s world affairs editor John Simpson pointed out last night that US law would make it virtually impossible for the victims to hold the USA to account. Maybe Americans will feel they should hand over some of the $20bn they’re extracting from BP? No, thought not.

The Fallujah revelation comes just as we are learning that in 2002, the then head of Britain’s secret service MI5, Eliza Manningham-Buller, was warning Labour Prime Minister Tony Blair that if he joined in the attack on Iraq it would expose Britain to a greatly increased risk of terrorism. Blair and his Labour cronies ignored this, of course, just as they ignored the biggest mass protest in history by the British people. We are now paying the price.

*My new book London’s Disasters: from Boudicca to the Banking Crisis is out! Published by the History Press, ISBN: 9780752457475. City AM was kind enough to write about it yesterday:-
http://www.cityam.com/news-and-analysis/allister-heath/why-britain-needs-save-far-more