By RYAN LENZ, Associated Press Writer
1 hour, 8 minutes ago
BAGHDAD - Heavily armed soldiers trudge through the fetid streets of Sadr City, gagging from the stench of open sewage, eyes warily scanning ahead for trouble. Suddenly, a middle-aged man approaches — and begs for a job.
"We are a peaceful people," the man tells the interpreter. "We only want to work and feed our families. Now is the time for people to come and offer us jobs."
~snip~
There are a lot of days when I'm like, 'It's going to take a miracle to make this work,'" said 1st Lt. Jacob Czekanski of the 1st Battalion, 23rd Infantry Regiment as he stared at a soccer field surrounded by trash. "We will always be viewed as outsiders here."
In a capital where public services barely function and five straight hours of electricity is cause for celebration, Sadr City stands out.
An estimated 2.5 million people, nearly all of them Shiites, live in the northeastern Baghdad community. Many of them lack running water and proper sewerage. Hundreds of thousands have no jobs and subsist on monthly government food rations, a holdover from the international sanctions of the Saddam Hussein era.
much more:
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20070314/ap_on_re_mi_ea/iraq_saving_sadr_cityIRAQ: Children's education gravely affected by conflict BAGHDAD, 14 March (IRIN) - Eight-year-old Ahlaam al-Hasnawi and her three brothers, aged between seven and 13, should be at school but their widowed mother recently demanded they stay at home for fear that they might be killed on the streets of Baghdad or in school.
"I love my school, my teachers and my fellow pupils. Even though my class was often empty, there was still much more to do there than stay at home where my mother forbids me from even going to our neighbour's house," Ahlaam said.
"I cannot just stay at home watching television but my mother told me last week that the situation in our neighbourhood was getting dangerous and she had to take me away from school until things improve. But I don't believe that will happen soon," she added, with tears in her eyes.
Last year, Ahlaam was one of 35 students in her class but today there are only 11 left. Some have fled the country with their parents, others are displaced and now live in improvised camps, and at least half of them stay at home for security reasons.
According to a report released last year by NGO Save the Children, 818,000 primary school-aged children, representing 22 percent of Iraq's student population, were not attending school.
more:
http://mobile.alertnet.org/thenews/newsdesk/IRIN/4eb6faa91ee1249a6f120ab8da1243da.htmU.S. Strategy Undermined Iraq's Women: Report Aaron Glantz, OneWorld US Mar 10, 1:51 PM ET
SAN FRANCISCO, Mar 10 (OneWorld) - The United States' four-year-old occupation of Iraq has considerably worsened the lives of the country's women, charges a new report from an international human rights group.
The New York-based group MADRE says Iraqi women are enduring unprecedented levels of assault, abductions, public beatings, death threats, sexual assaults, honor killings, domestic abuse, torture in detention, beheadings, shootings, and public hangings.
MADRE's 40-page report, titled "Promising Democracy, Imposing Theocracy: Gender-Based Violence and the U.S. War on Iraq," also argues that the rise of theocratic militias in Iraq is the result of deliberate plans by U.S. officials, not an accidental byproduct of a bungled occupation.
"Rather than support progressive and democratically minded Iraqis, including members of the women's movement," the report reads, "the U.S. threw its weight behind Iraq's Shiite Islamists, calculating that these forces, long suppressed by Saddam Hussein, would cooperate with the occupation and deliver the stability needed for the U.S. to implement its policies in Iraq."
Chief among the groups brought to power by the U.S. invasion is the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI), a theocratic organization whose militia, the Badr Brigades, was trained by the Iranian government.
more;
http://news.yahoo.com/s/oneworld/20070310/wl_oneworld/45361470191173556315Full electricity in Baghdad 6 years off$4.2 billion spent on key goal in fighting insurgency
Originally published March 2, 2007
WASHINGTON // Getting full-time electric power turned on in Baghdad, a key wartime goal toward which the United States has spent $4.2 billion dollars, won't be accomplished until the year 2013, U.S. officials said yesterday, in what others called a significant setback for the new U.S. initiatives to quell Iraq's bloody insurgency.
Power outages in the Iraqi capital are frequent, leaving residents without electricity for an average of 17 or 18 hours a day. For most residents without personal generators, that means not just no lights but dead radios and televisions, heaters, washing machines and water pumps.
Army Brig. Gen. Michael J. Walsh, the senior U.S. military officer overseeing reconstruction efforts, told reporters yesterday via video teleconference that the Iraq government plans to increase power generation "to catch up with demand" for electric power by 2013, "somewhere in around that area."
When President Bush announced in January that he was sending additional troops to Baghdad, he said the initiative must go "beyond military operations." Ordinary Iraqis, Bush said, "must see visible improvements" in their neighborhoods.
Reliable electric power is only one such improvement, but it is a critical one, counterinsurgency specialists said.
more:
http://www.baltimoresun.com/news/nationworld/iraq/bal-te.powerless02mar02,0,644223.story?track=rssso much more....
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