In the Name of Allah, Most Gracious, Most Merciful
Iraq: The continued suffering of it's innocent people at the hands of Western leaders.
Destruction of civilian areas during Allied bombings
These articles are pretty comprehensive on the subject of Iraq and the sanctions, they deal with all questions about the program and who is really to blame. These articles explain why there is so much tension in the Muslim world against the West, it shows that the most harm done to the Iraqi people with sanctions is not really due to Saddam's (who incidentally was put into power by America in 1979) "greed" but actually due to the cumbersome nature of the sanctions program of which the West is fully aware:
Western atrocities against the people of Iraq and part 2
Great video exposing American disinformation and atrocities in Iraq.
Comprehensive links dealing with most questions on Iraq:
"The U.S. armed forces bombed one end of the main highway from Kuwait city to Basra, sealing it off. They bombed the other end of the highway and sealed it off. They positioned mechanized artillery units on the hills overlooking it. And then, from the air and from the land they simply massacred every living thing on the road. Fighter bombers, helicopter gunships, and armored battalions poured merciless firepower on traffic jams backed up for as much as twenty miles. When the traffic became gridlocked, the B-52s were sent in for carpet bombing.
That was the killing zone. You couldn’t move down the road. You couldn’t move up the road. You couldn’t move off the road. You couldn’t surrender, wave a white flag, or give yourself up. The allied forces simply kept bombing and firing - at every person, jeep, truck, car, and bicycle. One allied air force officer called it a “turkey shoot.” …
This slaughter, along with similar unreported operations during Bush’s heroic hundred hours, ranks among the great atrocities of modern warfare. It was the Guernica, the Hiroshima, the Dresden, the My Lai of the U.S. war against Iraq.
Gen. Colin Powell, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, was asked by a reporter to provide an estimate of the number of Iraqis killed as a result of combined allied bombing and ground operations. …. Powell replied: “It’s really not a number I’m terribly interested in.”"
More criminal acts;
(extracts from a much longer article. Full version available on request)
TOQ AL-GHAZALAT, Iraq - Suddenly out of a clear blue sky, the forgotten war being waged by the United States and Britain over Iraq visited its lethal routine on the shepherds and farmers of Toq al-Ghazalat about 10:30 a.m. on May 17.
Omran Harbi Jawair, 13, was squatting on his haunches at the time, watching the family sheep as they nosed the hard, flat ground in search of grass. … Omran, who liked to kick a soccer ball around this dusty village, had just finished fifth grade at the little school a 15 minute walk from his mud-brick home.
That is when the missile landed.
Without warning, according to several youths standing nearby, the device came crashing down in an open field 200 yards from the dozen houses of Toq al-Ghazalat. A deafening explosion cracked across the silent land. Shrapnel flew in every direction. Four shepherds were wounded. And Omran, the others recalled, lay dead in the dirt, most of his head torn off, the white of his robe stained red.
What happened four weeks ago at Toq al-Ghazalat, 35 miles southwest of Najaf in southern Iraq, has become a recurring event in the Iraqi countryside. A week of conversations with wounded Iraqis and the families of those killed, around Najaf and in northern Iraq around Mosul, showed that civilian deaths and injuries are a regular part of the little discussed U.S. and British air operation over Iraq.
Lt. Gen. Yassin Jassem, spokesman for Iraq's air defense command, said about 300 Iraqis have been killed and more than 800 wounded by U.S. and British retaliatory attacks in the 18 months since President Saddam Hussein ordered his anti-aircraft batteries to fire on allied warplanes enforcing "no-fly" zones in northern and southern Iraq.
The Iraqi death toll has been substantiated in part by a U.N. survey that examined some incidents independently and accepted Iraqi reports on others.
U.S. and British warplanes enforcing the zones were heard almost daily crisscrossing the skies, although they were invisible flying at more than 20,000 feet. The Iraqi air defense command says it has detected penetrations into Iraqi airspace by more than 21,600 U.S. and British warplanes since December 1998, when Iraqis started opposing the patrols with antiaircraft fire. [There are] bomb or missile attacks on an average of once every three days. The Pentagon says more than 280,000 sorties have been flown in the near decade since the no-fly zones were imposed, without a single loss of aircraft to hostile fire.
The mounting toll - averaging one civilian death every other day by Iraq's count - has prompted France to freeze participation in enforcing the no-fly zones. It has generated growing protests from Russia and has left neighboring Saudi Arabia and Turkey increasingly uneasy about continuing to provide air bases for the U.S. and British enforcement aircraft.
Brian Whitaker - The Guardian, 16 June '00"
Behind the official version of Desert Storm lie awful secrets of a one-sided slaughter, writes John Pilger.
The great American reporter Seymour Hersh is at war with the American military over his report in The New Yorker that one of its most lauded generals, now a member of President Bill Clinton’s Cabinet, ordered his troops to fire on retreating Iraqis on the eve of the Gulf War ceasefire in 1991.
Barry McCaffrey, commander of the 24th Infantry Division, has denied accusations such as the machine-gunning of 350 disarmed Iraqi prisoners. “Why are we shooting at these people when they are not shooting at us?” says one of his men on a tape quoted by Hersh. “It’s murder,” says another.
The allegations against McCaffrey suggest he was a bad apple. But the enduring secret of the 1991 Gulf War was that it was not a war at all, rather an epic act of homicide. A great deal of propaganda has been devoted to covering up this truth and promoting the precision of so-called smart weapons, as if war has finally become a science. The bombing of the Al-Amiriya bunker in Baghdad in February 1991, incinerating more than 300 people, mostly women and children, was immediately blamed on Saddam Hussein. The bunker, we were told, was a “military facility”.
Although the lie was exposed by several reporters, the taint of “Iraqi reporting restrictions” remained. Britain’s Independent Television News said it was censoring its report because the material was “too distressing”.
Six months later, the unedited CNN and World Television News “feeds” of footage of the bunker were obtained by the Columbia Journalism Review. “They showed scenes of incredible carnage,” wrote the reporter who viewed them. “Rescue workers were collapsing in grief, vomiting from the stench, dropping blackened corpses.”
The atrocity was passed over quickly, and the “coverage” returned to its main theme of a sanitised, scientific war. Unknown to reporters corralled in Saudi Arabia, less than 7 per cent of the weapons used in the Gulf War were “smart”; most were old-fashioned “dump” bombs. Seventy per cent of the 88,500 tonnes dropped on Iraq and Kuwait - the equivalent of more than seven Hiroshimas - hit no military targets and fell in populated areas. Paul Roberts, one of the few journalists to escape the “pool” system, travelled with Bedouins. “I experienced bombing in Cambodia, but it was nothing like that ...” he said. “There were three waves every night. After 20 minutes of this carpet bombing there would be a silence and you would hear a screaming of children and people. [The survivors] were walking around like zombies.”
This was never published in the mainstream media, nor was the overwhelming evidence that - as in Vietnam and last year in Serbia and Kosovo - civilians were not mistakenly killed, but targeted. Cluster bombs, still killing and maiming children in Kosovo, are, as the label says, “anti-personnel”.
As the ceasefire was being negotiated with Iraq, columns of retreating other nationalities who had been trapped in Kuwait, mostly guest workers, were attacked by American carrier-based aircraft. They used cluster bombs and napalm B, the type that sticks to the skin while continuing to burn. Returning pilots bragged about a “duck shoot” and a “turkey shoot”. Others likened it to “shooting fish in a barrel”.
Unknown to journalists in the pool system, in the two days before the ceasefire (when the McCaffrey atrocities allegedly happened), American armoured bulldozers were deployed, mostly at night, burying Iraqis alive in their trenches.
Six months later, the New York Newsday reported that three brigades of the 1st Mechanised Infantry Division used snow ploughs mounted on tanks and combat earthmovers to bury thousands of Iraqi soldiers - some still alive - in more than 110 kilometres of trenches.
A brigade commander, Colonel Anthony Moreno, said: “For all I know, we could have killed thousands.” To my knowledge, the only images of this shown in the West included a few fleeting pictures on the BBC.
The policy of the American commander, General Norman Schwarzkopf, was that Iraqi dead were not to be counted. One of his senior officers boasted: “This is the first war in modern times where every screwdriver, every nail, is accounted for.” As for human beings, he added: “I don’t think anybody is going to be able to come up with an accurate count for the Iraqi dead.”
The London Independent rejoiced in the “miraculously light casualties”. In the US, there was some attempt to root out the truth. However, this was confined to very few newspapers, such as Newsday, and samizdat publications such as Z magazine, which publishes Noam Chomsky.
Shortly before Christmas 1991 the Medical Educational Trust in London published a comprehensive study of casualties. Up to 250,000 men, women and children were killed or died as a direct result of the American-led attack on Iraq. A one-sided slaughter.
In evidence before the House of Commons Foreign Affairs Select Committee, the major international relief agencies reported that 1.8million people had been made homeless, and Iraq’s electricity, water, sewerage, communications, health, agriculture and industrial infrastructure had been “substantially destroyed”, producing “conditions for famine and epidemics”.
Most of this was not reported, or was tucked away. In the most covered war in history, almost everybody had missed the story.
It is hardly surprising that, in the nine years since, the death of half a million children due to economic sanctions, and the continuing bombing of populated areas in Iraq by American and British aircraft, are not news. “The thought that the state is punishing so many innocent people,” wrote playwright Arthur Miller, “is intolerable. And so the evidence has to be internally denied.”"
After that we see no indictments for war crimes, why? Many innocent civilians were killed in this bloodbath which was done on the behest of American leaders yet we see no indictments for war crimes against humanity! Certainly the American and Western governments have one standard for justice for them and another for others. Here is a good link showing how they want to avoid these charges. A small sample of their crimes against the Iraqi people are are shown below, the rest can be seen on the above links:
Some eye-opening facts refuting Western claims about Iraq;
"Before we left, our small group expected to have our travels strictly controlled by the Iraqi regime. We found the exact opposite to be true.
We delegation not only traveled freely, but we often changed our own itinerary on the spot. There were many times that the delegation members split up and went in different directions. This allowed us to meet more ordinary Iraqi citizens and delve further into their lives than we had ever expected.
Being fluent in the language and culture allowed us to work independent of government translators and made it quite easy to sift through statements that were government rhetoric and those that reflected true human despair.
UNICEF indicates that at least 300,000 Iraqi children have died from illness, hunger and disease as a result of the sanctions imposed after the Gulf War. This number was given as a minimum; other sources go as high as 1.5 million Iraqis.
The United States government believes that lifting the sanctions will not solve these problems. To the contrary, it would solve the most important problem, which is saving the lives of innocent children."
The oil for food program and effects of the sanctions:
"Claims that the "oil-for-food" program is sufficient neglects important information. First of all, more than 34% of the money goes to Kuwait for war reparations and to bankroll U.N. programs, including weapon inspection.
There also are severe problems tied to delivering the food and medicine in the country that needs them most. The Iraqi infrastructure has fallen apart and cannot be repaired due to the sanctions. How can you deliver food and medicine that needs to be refrigerated if there are no refrigerated delivery trucks and no equipment to repair demolished roads and bridges?
This doesn't even begin to address the many other necessities of life that are denied the Iraqi people. How long could Americans endure without soap, detergent or toilet paper?"
These are just one of the many crimes against humanity perpetrated by Western governments on the people of Iraq, more information can be found on this link and this one. Why, after finding out the cumbersome nature of the sanctions and it's effects do the Western governments persist in carrying out this genocide against the Iraqi people? They are the ones who put Saddam in power during the late seventies and they are the ones who still bomb Iraq even today, so since they are at war with the Iraqi regime, should they not remove him instead of blaming him for the sanctions? Since they give all the blame to Saddam and his regime, it is only logical for them to remove him otherwise they'd be killing the Iraqi people while blaming Saddam, that will in turn implicate the West because they have the opportunity to either remove the sanctions or remove Saddam, since they do neither they are implicating themselves because they continue to impose sanctions and do no further actions. Should they not according to their logic then impose these sanctions on Russia which has used many weapons of mass destruction on the innocent people of Chechnya and killed thousands? Obviously they will not, this only exposes their double-standards and probably explains why the West is hated so much, a hate which culminated in the WTC attack, that is, if Arabs or Muslims did it. Why can this not be seen as a war against Islam? We witness their double-standards when dealing with other non-Muslim nations and Muslim nations.