Has the central government in Baghdad realized that merely liberating physical space from the clutches of the takfiris is not enough? It has to win the hearts and minds of people that found the demonic notions of the takfiris appealing. A good starting point would be to treat citizens equally above tribal or sectarian considerations.
The heavy American assault on Falluja in November ranks among the worst crimes ever committed against Muslims. ZAFAR BANGASH, director of the Institute of Contemporary Islamic Thought, answers two key questions that it raises.
Few sceptics doubted that the long-anticipated attack on the Iraqi city of Falluja, some 70 kilometres (about 45 miles) to the west of Baghdad, would be launched with unusual ferocity. Still fewer doubted the US Marines’ ability to retake the city...
Until some months ago, few in the world had heard of Falluja, the main city of the Iraqi province of Anbar, even though it was famous as a city of minarets and a summer resort for Iraqis.
September 2004 was described as “a month of death in Iraq” by one Arab commentator after a series of major clashes in which at least a thousand Iraqis, many of them civilians, were killed...
One of the questions asked before the so-called transfer of power from US pro-consul Paul Bremer to Iyad Allawi at the end of June was whether the new Iraqi government would be able to prevent another brutal and murderous US assault on an Iraqi city like the one on Falluja in April...
More than a century and a half later, George W. Bush is engaged in a desperate struggle to fool enough of the people enough of the time to control Iraq for long enough to secure the US's interests, while also getting re-elected as president in November, against a backdrop of increasing criticism from all quarters...
For a year after the US invasion of Iraq, it was the epicentre of military resistance to the occupation, becoming a virtual no-go area for Westerners until the US decided less than two months ago that it had to be pacified by overwhelming force...
With the US presidential elections due to be held in November, and painfully aware of the fact that the terrorist attack on Madrid in March was timed for maximum political impact in Spain's elections, the Bush regime is desperate for something they can present as progress in Iraq as soon as possible...
The US attack on Fallujah last month, in which at least 1,000 people have been killed, thousands more injured and an estimated 60,000 – out of a population of some 300,000 – forced to flee their homes, appears to have been carried out in a similar spirit...
