Mission accomplished says Zarkawi

Juan Cole’s correspondent writes and is published 12.30 BST 19/9/05

"The situation has deteriorated in Baghdad dramatically today. Five neighborhoods (hay) in Baghdad are controlled by insurgents, and they are Amiraya, Ghazilya, Shurta, Yarmouk and Doura. It is very bad. My guys there report that cars have come into these neighborhoods and blocked off the streets. Masked gunmen with AKs and other weapons are roaming these areas, announcing that people should stay home. One of my drivers in Amiraya reports that his neighborhood is shut down totally, and even those who need food or provisions are warned not to go out.

The government will respond feebly. It will go into a contested neighborhood, and then just like Fallujah, Ramadi, Tel Afar, the insurgents will flee to take over another area on another day. Bit by bit they are taking over the main parts of Baghdad. The only place we are sure they cannot control is Sadr City, unless of course they want to take on Jaish Mahdy [Muqtada al-Sadr's Mahdi Army], and that would be bloody.”

President Jaafari (fresh back from Washington whilst chaos calls) has been on TV to tell everyone in Baghdad to stay at home. “The current sectarian and ethnic killings in Iraq are actually the beginning of a civil war,” said Georges Sada, an adviser to Iraqi Prime Minister Ibrahim al-Jaafari and the executive secretary of the Iraq Institute for Peace. “Sectarian divisions in Iraq have started back in the ’90s, which prepared the ground for the civil war spreading today.”

There are flyers in public areas of Baghdad warning people not to gather in large numbers because they will thereby become targets.

Zarqawi (whomseoever he may be) and the Sunni resistance are working together100%

More and more of even the most patriotic intelligentsia are departing. The situation is dire, and those with escape valves are using them. [Some organizations are]sending more of [their] staff to Arbil and Sulamaniyah and out of Baghdad. Until about March this year, [some] thought that there was a chance of returning to Baghdad. It is remarkable how incapable this government is. Its only success is that it exists at all.


Meanwhile embassy people act as if nothing in Baghdad is wrong (but wear body armour in the Green Zone and worry endlessly about kidnapping).

Washington Post “Insurgents for three days running last week managed to lob mortar rounds into the Green Zone, the heart of the U.S. and Iraqi administration.”


The Independent reports US£1 Bn (that’s one thousand x 1million dollars) was removed from Iraq during the inter regnum of Saddam Hussein’s ex enforcer, that nice Mr Allawi, the brain surgeon – so called because his preference for sorting the awkward squad was the use of an axe applied forcefully to the skull.

It appears some of it went to Poland and some to Pakistan – probably another US$600 left the oil and electricity ministries at the same time.