Fallujah

A man from a refugee camp waits to vaccinate his daughter in Baghdad, Iraq [Xinhua]
A new report released by the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) says that a third of all Iraqi children require humanitarian aid while as many as 20 per cent are in danger of exploitation.
UNICEF says that there are at least 1.5 million children displaced by conflict in Iraq, with that number likely to rise if and when the Iraqi army moves to liberate the northern city of Mosul from the clutches of the Islamic State.

21st Century Wire says…
Their fight appears to be over.
Much progress has been made in the fight against ISIS with the Iraq Army successfully declaring the complete liberation of Fallujah, Iraq in recent days.
Now, dramatic footage has emerged showing airstrikes annihilating a 700-vehicle strong convoy of jihadists attempting to flee from the city.
Watch the action here:

It is hard to imagine that anything worse could befall Fallujah after the war crimes and criminal assaults by the US military in 2004. At the time, one correspondent wrote:

There has been nothing like the attack on Fallujah since the Nazi invasion and occupation of much of the European continent – the shelling and bombing of Warsaw in September 1939, the terror bombing of Rotterdam in May 1940.

Struan Stevenson, President of the European Iraqi Freedom Association (EIFA), is calling for “urgent action to end callous food and medicine blockade” of the Iraqi city of Fallujah.

Since terrorism’s tragedy is again in the news, it is timely to revisit perhaps one of the biggest acts of terrorism in modern history — the illegal invasion and destruction, ongoing, of Iraq.
March 20th marked the thirteenth anniversary of an action resulting in the equivalent of a Paris, Brussels, London July 7th, 2005, often multiple times daily in Iraq ever since. As for  September 11th, 2001, there has frequently been that death toll and heartbreak every several weeks, also ongoing.

By Chris Busby | CounterPunch | March 18, 2016 Those who fear the effects of radiation always focus on cancer. But the most frightening and serious consequences of radiation are genetic. Cancer is just one small bleak reflection, a flash of cold light from a facet of the iceberg of genetic damage to life on […]

I was a bit surprised as well as appalled at the reported reaction of U.S. military personnel who had participated in the November 2004 destruction of Fallujah under Operation Phantom Fury, to the January 2014 taking control of the city by Sunni insurgents.

Their precious young minds and our precious young minds

I saw Clint Eastwood’s movie American Sniper the other night. It is the story of U.S. Navy SEAL sniper Chris Kyle, based on his autobiography. Kyle fought in Iraq between 2004 and 2009 when the U.S. was occupying the country. (In February 2013, Kyle was killed at a gun range by another former soldier, reportedly suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).)
American Sniper has been nominated for six Oscars, including best film and best leading actor; it has broken box-office records for war movies, and it’s generating heated debate.

Thinking through the binary oppositions of “have” and “have nots” is like segregating the homeless from the Paris Hiltons of the world in order to present a narrative that represents a ‘going America’s way’ kind of reality, a reality that uses finance, by way of speculation and specialisation, to foster advantages for elites and their hierarchical institutions for the sole purpose of amassing capital in order to leverage control of the social narrative through the commodification of culture itself.