When I first saw this picture back in '79, I kept asking myself how could IRI at its infancy inflict so much pain and terror? We had barely celebrated the revolution that the killings started.
I always saluted the brave photographer that took this Pulitzer prize winning picture and wondered who he was. Now after 27 yrs we get to meet this hero.
This is a great historical read exposing the unjust mass executions by Akhond Khalkhali with Khomeini's blessing.
December 02, 2006
The Wall Street Journal
Joshua Prager
Flash Point,Iranian photographer Jahangir Razmi, below, took 70 pictures of an execution in Kurdistan on Aug. 27, 1979. One picture (No. 20) won the Pulitzer Prize. It was, however, awarded to an unnamed photographer -- the only anonymous recipient in the 90-year history of the award. Mr. Razmi preserved 27 of the photos on a contact sheet and stowed it away in his home:
http://online.wsj.com/public/resourc...cs0611-28.html
Twenty-six years ago, a picture of an execution in Iran won the Pulitzer Prize. But the man who took it remained anonymous. Until now.
On Aug. 27, 1979, two parallel lines of 11 men formed on a field of dry dirt in Sanandaj, Iran. One group wore blindfolds. The other held rifles. The command came in Farsi to fire: "Atesh!" Behind the soldier farthest to the right, a 12th man also shot, his Nikon camera and Kodak film preserving in black and white a mass execution.
Within hours, the photo ran across six columns in Ettela'at, the oldest newspaper in Iran. Within days, it appeared on front pages around the world. Within weeks, the new Iranian government annexed the offending paper. Within months, the photo won the Pulitzer Prize.
Taken seven months after Islamic radicals overthrew the U.S.-backed Shah, the photo remains one of the most famous images of Iran. It is an icon of government terror, invoked in critiques of the regime from the 1979 poem "Screaming," to the 1986 music video "Speak To Me From My Land, Iran" to the 1997 book "Kurdistan." Davood and Davar Ghassemlouie, brothers who operate a photo shop in Los Angeles, say they have made tens of thousands of reprints for demonstrators, including 200 in late September when Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad visited the U.S.
On Jan. 16, 1979, the Shah fled Iran following mass demonstrations protesting his rule. Sixteen days later, Ayatollah Khomeini, a radical Islamic cleric, returned from France and seized control. Mr. Razmi photographed Mr. Khomeini in his Qom headquarters so regularly that he came to greet the imam with a handshake. Using his favorite Nikon lens, a 28mm wide-angle lens with automatic focus, Mr. Razmi chronicled the conversion of Iran to theocracy from autocracy.
By August, about 500 alleged counter-revolutionaries and officials of the former regime had been executed. The judiciary decreed it illegal to criticize Islam and Iran's spiritual leaders. A holding company formed by the regime appropriated Kayhan, the only newspaper in Iran larger than Ettela'at. Journalists who pushed back at censorship under the Shah were petrified.
"Under Khomeini they would kill you," says Amir Taheri, then editor of Kayhan and now a political analyst living in England. "It was a different ballgame."
On Aug. 16, Mr. Khomeini called on Iranian troops to suppress restive Kurds hoping for autonomy. Thousands of soldiers headed 300 miles northwest to the Iranian province of Kurdistan. Mr. Razmi and Khalil Bahrami, an Ettela'at reporter, followed.
Ten days later, Mr. Bahrami received a tip that a judge he had befriended was set to try Kurds in an antechamber of the municipal airport at Sanandaj, the capital of Kurdistan. The reporter, then 37, had worked at Ettela'at for 22 years and was thankful he was paired with the young Mr. Razmi, whose father had lived in Sanandaj and had raised his son to admire the Kurds and their traditions. "He knew his responsibility," says Mr. Bahrami, who lives in Iran and is retired. "And he was quicker than the others."
At the airport, Mr. Razmi stood ready outside the makeshift courtroom as 10 handcuffed men filled a wooden bench before the judge, a black-bearded Shiite cleric named Sadegh Khalkhali. An injured 11th prisoner lay on a stretcher beside the door.
The judge removed his turban, Mr. Bahrami recalls. He removed his shoes. He put his feet on a chair. Scanning the prisoners through thick eyeglasses, he asked their names. Officers of the court told of the defendants' alleged crimes -- of trafficking arms, inciting riots and murder. The prisoners, some with leftward or nationalist leanings, denied the accusations.
No evidence was presented, Mr. Bahrami says. "It was pure speculation." After roughly 30 minutes, Mr. Khalkhali declared the 11 men "corrupt on earth" -- mofsedin fel arz -- the Koranic phrase he cited before issuing a sentence of death. A few of the men cried.
Mr. Bahrami summoned his colleague Mr. Razmi. "It was Razmi's luck that day that he was with me," the reporter says.
Mr. Razmi withdrew from his green canvas shoulder bag a 35-80mm lens and attached the zoom to his Nikon FE. The handcuffed men were blindfolded. Each put his hand on the shoulder of the man before him and together they walked single-file through the airport's concrete lobby, through a metal doorframe and toward an open airfield. Mr. Razmi darted ahead and shot, untroubled by security forces: "I was totally free," he says. Unbeknownst to Mr. Razmi, a soldier present also was taking pictures, which were never published.
The caravan passed roughly 30 airport workers, both men say. Up front walked Mr. Razmi. In the rear, both men say, was Ali Karimi, one of the judge's bodyguards, wearing white shoes, white pants, white shirt, sunglasses and twin hip holsters. After about 100 yards, an officer halted the condemned on a plain of dry dirt. All but one of the executioners tied about their own heads Iranian shawls called chafiyehs. Both the faces of the Shiites and the eyes of the Kurds were now concealed.
Mr. Karimi asked the prisoners if they had last words, the two journalists recall. The men didn't, all silent save a man Mr. Bahrami later reported to be Essa Pirvali, who wept aloud. A sandwich maker, he belonged to no political party but possessed a handgun and had been accused of murder. "He was scared," Mr. Razmi says. "He wouldn't stand." The soldiers instructed a fellow prisoner to hold him.
An afternoon sun shone behind the prisoners and Mr. Razmi reached for his 28mm lens. He sidled in behind members of the firing squad, who stood in brown leather boots laced to the calf. He thought, he says, only about "speed and angle." The prisoners stood in plainclothes. The firing squad crouched in camouflage.
"Afrad mosallah!," yelled the commanding officer, calling his troops to attention. His charges aimed their G3 rifles at the midsections of the men standing little more than a body's length away.
Standing farthest to the right, Naser Salimi, an employee of the Sanandaj health department, raised his right hand to his chest. It was bandaged, injured in a street fight that had led to his sentencing, according to contemporary newspaper reports. Opposite him, the only soldier who wore no chafiyeh raised his rifle.
Mr. Razmi stood a few feet behind this unmasked gunman. He raised his camera. At 4:30 p.m., the command came to fire: "Atesh!" Eleven guns discharged. Eleven bodies dropped. "When they fell, it was dusty," Mr. Razmi says. The photographer lowered his camera.
The soldiers eyed Mr. Karimi, the judge's bodyguard, lifting a pistol off his right hip. Not all of the men were dead, the photographer recalls. The bodyguard leaned over Ahsan Nahid, the injured prisoner on the stretcher, and fired one bullet into his head. Mr. Razmi snapped his Nikon. Mr. Karimi stepped to the next man and shot him, too. He proceeded along -- one bullet per body, both journalists say. (Recent efforts to locate Mr. Karimi were unsuccessful.)
WITHIN MINUTES, ambulances ferried away the 11 bodies, airport workers returned to work, the huddle of soldiers thinned and Mr. Razmi stowed his two rolls of Kodak 400 film in a pocket of his canvas bag. After a helicopter flight landed the pair too late to cover a second execution, Mr. Razmi left his colleague, flagged a passing minibus and returned to the airport in Sanandaj, where at 8 a.m. the only daily flight to Tehran departed.
The photographer fell asleep. He was awakened at a checkpoint by shouts from airport officers, the same men who had shared their lunch with him the previous afternoon as they awaited the Kurdish prisoners. "It's me!" yelled Mr. Razmi. "Jahangir!" The men held their fire. Mr. Razmi told them he had film and an article that had to get back to Tehran. "I put it in an envelope and gave it to the flight attendant," he says, needing to continue his work in the region.
Mr. Razmi called Ettela'at, which dispatched a courier to the airport. The man picked up the white envelope from Tehran airport and delivered it to the newspaper. Ali Akbar Moradi, head of the paper's darkroom, says he knew the 70 exposures were taken by Mr. Razmi and that he turned them into two contact sheets with the help of a technician. An office runner gave them to the photo editor, the late Fereydoun Ebrahimzadeh, who marked the frames he wished turned into prints and delivered them to Mohammed Heydari, the chief Ettela'at editor, Mr. Heydari says.
Mr. Heydari was examining the layout of that day's front page and flipped through the stills. At about noon, he says, he stopped, overwhelmed by a single image of the moment when some of the squadron had fired and some hadn't. Bodies fell. Dust rose.
Mr. Heydari, then 35, had little time to think -- the afternoon paper was about to go to print. He says he told himself that the country was conflicted over the killing of the Kurds and angry over censorship. He decided to publish the photograph, although not in the edition distributed in the Kurdistan province, where it would be tantamount to a call to arms. "Considering the political climate, I knew I could get away with it," Mr. Heydari says.
The Ettela'at editor made another snap decision. The photograph would run with no credit. "I was aware that if I published his name, he would be in danger," Mr. Heydari says. "I wanted to protect Razmi."
By 2 p.m., newsstands across Tehran trumpeted word of the Kurdish executions. The banner headline read: "Forty People Executed in Sanandaj, Marivan and Saqqez." The accompanying photograph was a sensation, the seven months of Iranian firing squads distilled to one image.
Copies of Ettela'at sold out and representatives of international news agencies hustled to Khayam Street to buy prints. The photo editor, Mr. Ebrahimzadeh, "sold it to everyone like he was selling French fries," says Alfred Yaghobzadeh, 47, then a photographer for the Associated Press, now a photojournalist based in France.
The first to arrive at Ettela'at was Sajid Rizvi of United Press International. Mr. Rizvi, then 30, had seen the newspaper at his home, ordered a copy by phone and sped off in the company's pistachio-colored sedan. He picked up the photo roughly 15 minutes later inside the Ettela'at newsroom.
"It was almost wet when I took it," says Mr. Rizvi, now editor of an arts publishing house in London. "I don't think I have ever seen a picture as moving as that," he says. "It is a picture between life and death."
Mr. Rizvi asked who had snapped it. "They said, 'better not to give out the name of the photographer.' " Once home, he walked into the bathroom he had converted into a darkroom, dried the photo with a hairdryer, composed a caption on his yellow Olympus typewriter, phoned the UPI desk in Brussels and transmitted the print.
Genghis Seren, a photo editor in Brussels, sat transfixed beside the company UniFax. "The drama of that machine was that the picture took 15 minutes to complete," recalls Mr. Seren, then 25 years old and in his first year at UPI. "It came a 10th of an inch after a 10th of an inch.... It was something!" Mr. Seren forwarded the photo to UPI bureaus in Africa, Europe and the Middle East, and to company headquarters in Manhattan.
"It was transmitted to us with no name," says Larry DeSantis, the UPI managing editor who received the photo 11 stories above 42nd Street. "Not knowing who made it interested me."
At about 3 p.m., several armed agents from the Islamic Revolutionary Council arrived at Ettela'at, ascended four flights and entered the office of the editor, Mr. Heydari. They asked for the negative of the photo and asked to speak with the photo editor, Mr. Heydari recalls.
Mr. Heydari refused. "I said, 'No. I am the editor. I take full responsibility.' " Mr. Heydari says he told the men: "If I am arrested, the negative consequences will outweigh the effect of this photo."
The chief agent backed off. Both men telephoned government and religious officials, and the judge who ordered the executions radioed the agent seated beside Mr. Heydari, the editor says.
Mr. Khalkhali, the judge, declared the photo a fabrication and told the agent to arrest the editor, Mr. Heydari says. He says he responded by offering to show the negatives to the agent "as long as you agree not to use force to confiscate them."
The agent agreed and viewed the negatives with two fellow officials. "They were astonished," recalls Mr. Heydari. The agent made another call and told Iran's attorney general that "the newspaper has been considerate to only publish this one," Mr. Heydari remembers. The agents left with one proviso: Upon their return from Kurdistan, Messrs. Bahrami and Razmi should come in for questioning.
THAT SAME DAY, Mr. DeSantis, the UPI editor, had prints of the photo distributed by motorcycle to the New York papers and by telephoto machine to thousands of papers across the country. On Aug. 29, the New York Times, Washington Post, Der Tagesspiegel in Berlin and the Daily Telegraph in London were among the many newspapers to run it. Nearly all credited UPI.
"Our play was fabulous," exults Mr. DeSantis, now retired. "It was a once in a lifetime.... Like it was a movie set. One guy kneeling, aiming. One guy falling. A mass execution."
Mr. Razmi remained in Kurdistan, where at a Sanandaj newsstand he came across a copy of Ettela'at featuring one of his other photos showing the blindfolded men standing in wait. He understood why his more incendiary photographs were unprinted but nonetheless was disappointed. "I expected my name to be published," he says.
Two days later, reporter and photographer returned to the Ettela'at office in Sanandaj. The office manager lifted from his desk the Tehran edition of the paper that had reported the execution, they recall. He said copies brought to Kurdistan were selling for more than double the cover price. The manager was a Kurd and Mr. Razmi recalls him saying: " 'We have to build a statue of gold of you.' And because of what he told me, I understood that this photo was dangerous."
Close readers of Ettela'at could have surmised Mr. Razmi was the photographer. On Aug. 26, the day before the execution, the newspaper named him as one of three employees it had sent "to the Western portion of the country." An Aug. 29, the day after the photo ran, the paper reported on its front page that he and Mr. Bahrami had been "sent to Kurdistan."
Home in Tehran, after a long shower, Mr. Razmi spoke about the execution to his wife and again the next morning to curious colleagues in the newsroom. He says he asked Mr. Heydari why his photo had carried no credit and didn't object when the editor explained his worry. "I told him jokingly that you would have also been executed in Kurdistan on the spot," Mr. Heydari says.
Mr. Razmi walked to the newspaper darkroom and saw for the first time what had been the 18th exposure of his first roll of film. "There I realized what I had taken," he says. Turning on the red safelights in the studio, the photographer made prints of eight stills and preserved on a contact sheet 27 of his 70 photographs.
Mr. Razmi asked the darkroom supervisor for his negatives and locked them in the middle of his three metal drawers together with his other prints. A few days later, he slipped the contact sheet and stills into the fold of a newspaper and hid them in his home, "somewhere no one would have noticed," he says. The next morning, he returned to Kurdistan.
On Sept. 9, the Islamic Revolutionary Council published a notice in the Islamic Revolution newspaper: "we hereby draw your attention to the picture which was published on the front page of [Ettela'at] on 6/6/1358 and was objected to harshly by the public." It continued: "If this occurs again, serious decisions will be made."
A serious decision already had been made. The day before, the Foundation for the Disinherited -- the holding company that in August had swallowed Kayhan, Iran's largest paper -- also seized Ettela'at. Overnight, the paper, privately held since 1920, became state-owned.
The image continued to spread. Reza Deghati, then 27, a free-lance Iranian photographer, had seen the photo. It is "the most stirring execution picture in the history of photojournalism, of the human being," he says. Mr. Deghati says he procured five additional photos of the execution from an Ettela'at employee and mailed them to SIPA, the Paris agency that had been publishing his own photos since the revolution.
Goksin Sipahioglu says he received the prints from Mr. Deghati at his agency on Paris's Rue Roquepine. Even though UPI had already published one, Michele Sola, photo editor of Paris Match magazine, paid 14,000 French francs (about $10,000 today) for the additional prints. Mr. Sipahioglu forwarded half that sum to Mr. Deghati in Tehran.
The magazine went on sale in Paris days before its Sept. 21, 1979, cover date. About 2,600 miles east, readers in Iran turned to page 66. Titled "Les Kurdes, sous les balles d'Allah" ("The Kurds, under Allah's bullets"), the photos spread rapidly. People paid 20 times the cover price for the magazine, and dozens of Iranians tacked the photos about town.
No one, however, neither Mr. Razmi nor the Iranian brain trust, seemed to notice the magazine's erroneous credit -- "Reza (Sipa)" -- printed in the lower left corner of the index page. "When someone sends a picture to us," explains Mr. Sipahioglu, "we always credit him."
Mr. Deghati says he sent SIPA a letter saying he didn't take the photos and that SIPA sent out a news release via the AP retracting his name. Representatives at SIPA, Paris Match and the AP don't recall Mr. Deghati clarifying the matter and didn't find such a release in their archives.
Mr. Razmi returned from Kurdistan in late September and Mr. Ebrahimzadeh approached him at his desk. The photo editor asked for the negatives of the 70 photos and extended his hand. "I couldn't protest," Mr. Razmi says. "It belonged to him." He unlocked his metal drawer. Mr. Ebrahimzadeh told the photographer the police wished to speak to him in Tehran's Evin prison, Mr. Razmi recalls.
Mr. Razmi says he arrived at the prison with Mr. Bahrami and two Ettela'at editors, and quickly found himself alone with the late Asadollah Lajevardi, a future warden of the prison already notorious for torturing inmates. As part of his newspaper duties, Mr. Razmi had often photographed men housed in Evin whom the state would soon execute. "I had a right to be nervous," he says.
Mr. Lajevardi asked him who had photographed the Sanandaj execution, Mr. Razmi says. When Mr. Razmi said he had, the guard asked why he had hidden his negatives in the drawer. "So that no one would take them," Mr. Razmi recalls answering.
He told Mr. Lajevardi that he had permission from the judge to shoot the scene and that he hadn't sent the pictures overseas. The interrogation was soft, and it became apparent to Mr. Razmi that he wouldn't be harmed. Mr. Razmi returned to the paper, and a few weeks later was consumed with work when, on Nov. 4, Iranian students took hostages inside the U.S. Embassy.
The next month, UPI managing editor Mr. DeSantis sat down to submit his newswire's best work of the year for awards. At the top of his list was the execution photo. "I was a very good picture editor," Mr. DeSantis says, "but on this one you could be a dumb dog and pick this out."
That neither he nor anyone at UPI knew who took the photo was of little concern. The agency had been the first to provide it to the press and presented it as the work of an unnamed UPI photographer, which, says Mr. DeSantis, he assumed it was. "It came on the UPI wire," he explains.
"Because of the present unrest in Iran," wrote the editor to the Pulitzer committee, "the name of the photographer cannot be revealed at this time."
Mr. Razmi didn't know his photograph had been nominated for the Pulitzer. He didn't know the jury nominating finalists for Spot News Photography was overwhelmed by the entry UPI titled, "Firing Squad in Iran." Robert Duffy, then an editor at the St. Louis Post-Dispatch and chairman of the jury, says he informally lobbied a member of the Pulitzer Board that spring to pick the photo. "We were hell-bent on giving the prize to 'Anonymous,' " he says.
On April 14, 1980, seven days after the U.S. severed diplomatic relations with Iran, 'Anonymous' won the Pulitzer Prize. Mr. Heydari told Mr. Razmi the news. But the same people who, in effect, had ordered the execution now owned his employer. Mr. Heydari says he was fired two months later. Representatives of the paper cancelled an August 2005 appointment at their Tehran head office and declined to be interviewed for this article.
Ettela'at didn't report news of its prize-winning employee. Mr. Razmi says he "didn't have the guts to celebrate."
UPI did. The newswire flew its Tehran bureau chief Mr. Rizvi to the U.S. and had him speak to subscribers. "They were trying to show me off," he says. Asked about the anonymous photographer, Mr. Rizvi recalls answering: "Eventually it will be revealed."
IN THE SPRING, Ettela'at promoted Mr. Razmi, then 32, to photo editor. Iraq attacked Iran in September and Mr. Razmi covered the war. A mortar deafened his right ear in 1987. When months later Ettela'at asked him to work in Iraq, he decided he was tired of war. He quit his employer of 15 years, sold the home he had built by himself in a leafy neighborhood of northern Tehran, bought an apartment and opened a photography studio.
Forty years old, the photographer had come full circle, developing film and shooting portraits as he had as a boy. Says Mr. Razmi: "I was looking for a peaceful life."
Mr. Razmi called the studio "Abgineh," the Farsi word for glassware, which he says connoted for him the clarity of water. He didn't advertise the studio. Still, six days a week, brides in gowns flocked to the shop, looked at Mr. Razmi and smiled.
Mr. Razmi thought often of Sanandaj. In his shop, he hung a large portrait of a boy wearing a Kurdish shawl and sash. Every summer, during the month of Shahrivar, he locked himself in his bedroom and looked at the execution photographs he had hidden.
On Aug. 3, 1997, three weeks before Shahrivar, Mohammad Khatami took office as president of Iran and hired Hashem Taleb to head his public relations. Mr. Razmi had met Mr. Taleb years before and saw a business opportunity. He drove to the office of the president, pronounced the headshots of Iranian officials unbefitting their rank and "suggested I take photographs of the president and the cabinet," he recalls. Mr. Taleb hired him.
Days later, Mr. Razmi, the first "Official Photographer of the President and his Cabinet," set up his flash umbrellas inside the Iranian presidential residence at the intersection of Palestine and Pastor streets. He shot pictures of the new government. He developed the color portraits. Before mailing the prints to the president's office, he stamped his name on the back of each.
The name Jahangir Razmi, however, remained unconnected to his most famous photograph. Monir Nahid, mother of two of the executed men, who has since settled in Los Angeles, says over time, "10, 20 people came to me and said, 'I took the picture.' "
Among them, say Mrs. Nahid and her daughter, was Mr. Deghati, the stringer who in 1979 sent the photo to Paris Match. Mr. Deghati, who left Iran in 1981 and today lives in France working for the Webistan Photo Agency, says he has never met the Nahids. Last September, Paris Match magazine quoted him saying he took the photo, adding in French that Mr. Khomeini "was furious." Mr. Deghati says he knows Mr. Razmi took the photo, and that the magazine misquoted him.
Mr. Razmi says he first learned about a decade ago that others were claiming his work. Kaveh Golestan, Iran's best-known photographer, reported to him that Mr. Deghati had said as much at a European photo exhibit. Mr. Razmi didn't know that Mr. Golestan also had taken credit for the photo in classes he taught, according to several of his photojournalism students at Tehran University.
When Mr. Golestan died in 2003, after stepping on a landmine in Iraq, newspapers around the world reported that he had won a Pulitzer Prize. His widow, Hengameh Golestan, says her late husband never took credit for the photo and that the obituaries were mistaken. Mrs. Golestan says she knows Mr. Razmi took the photo.
On the fourth floor of a cement apartment building in northern Tehran, Mr. Razmi sat on a dimpled leather couch. His living room walls were barren of his work. Beside him on his couch, his son Ali sat rapt, tamping down a pinch of Cavendish tobacco in his father's pipe. Mr. Razmi struck a match and puffed.
"My sons have told me a lot of times that I should go and prove that I am the photographer," Mr. Razmi said, his voice soft and his eyes cast down. "I said, 'No. Better not.' "
It is understandable why he feared claiming credit for such a public indictment of the Islamic Revolution. The hardline Mr. Ahmadinejad, elected in June 2005, shuttered Shargh, the country's last large reformist newspaper, three months ago. Mr. Razmi also was still the official government photographer and returned the next morning to the presidential residence to shoot Mr. Ahmadinejad's cabinet, including the defense minister who in 1979 helped quell the Kurds.
But Mr. Razmi, who is now 58, said part of him always wanted to step forward. He was disappointed when he first saw that his photo didn't carry his name. He was irked when others took credit, people who "never feel the danger," he said. And all the time, he was weighted by his secret, that of an ordinary man witness to extraordinary events. "Without this picture," he said, "I wouldn't be anything."
Emboldened by time and dismayed by the opportunism of his fellow photographers, Mr. Razmi decided the moment was right to tell his tale after this newspaper approached him. "My name should be there," he said.
Minced lamb and baghali polo -- a dish of green rice and beans -- awaited Mr. Razmi at home, and he sat down to eat with his wife and sons, his sister, two nephews and his father-in-law. They talked about Mr. Razmi identifying himself, for the first time, as the anonymous photographer.
Mr. Razmi had done nothing wrong, they reasoned. He photographed the execution with the permission of the judge. He turned over his negatives to the photo editor. He described his work to the prison guard. He wasn't the one who sent the six images abroad. He didn't earn a single rial or credit from his photo, the rights to which had passed from UPI to the Bettmann Archive to Corbis Corp.
The family approved of his decision to come forward. Voicing hope that it wouldn't harm Mr. Razmi, eight people around the table spoke as one: "Inshallah," if Allah wills it.
Past midnight, Mr. Razmi retreated to a bedroom closet and lifted his canvas camera bag by the faded strap that had hung over his shoulder during the 1979 revolution. Here in pale black ink on the inside flap of a pocket was written in Farsi, "Jahangir Razmi, Ettela'at, 328 331" -- the newsroom number to phone in the event of his death.
Mr. Razmi returned to his living room. He had unearthed his contact sheet and stills for his annual look back at the execution. "I have pictures that have never been published," he said.
The photographer held in his right hand a sheaf of black-and-white photographs, 27 images that were 26 years, five days old. He withdrew from a plastic sleeve a furling photo of the sandwich maker who cried as he waited to be shot.
Mr. Razmi thrust it forward. "Who has this picture?" he asked, his voice rising. "Nobody." He thrust forward a photo of the dust that rose over 11 fallen men. "Who has this picture?" he asked. "Nobody." He thrust forward a photo of the bodyguard surveying the men he had shot. "Who has this picture?" he asked. "Nobody."
Mr. Razmi returned the photos to the sleeve that had held them since 1979. And for the first time since he had secreted them home in a folded newspaper, he put them in a Samsonite briefcase he had long used to store chosen photos from his career.
Says Mr. Razmi: "There's no more reason to hide."
Write to Joshua Prager at joshua.prager@wsj.com
Saturday, February 07, 2009
Block Ex-Council Members from Leaving Iraq-Khayrallah al-Basri
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After Elections, A Call to Block Fleeing Corrupt Provincial Authorities
Iraqi MP Khayrallah al-Basri.
An Iraqi MP from an electoral bloc that gained seats in many Iraqi provinces in the last election, has called for blocking all former members of Iraq’s outgoing provincial councils from leaving the country, citing fears of corruption and graft.
Khayrallah al-Basri, an MP with the secular al-Iraqiya list of former Iraq interim Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki, has asked the Iraqi minister of Interior to issue orders to...
White House looking at Iraq withdrawal options
WASHINGTON, (AFP) – The White House is weighing several options for US troop withdrawals from Iraq, with timetables ranging from President Barack Obama's campaign pledge to remove all combat troops within 16 months to a 23-month option, a defense official said.
A 19-month scenario was also presented to the president by military advisers at the White House's request, the official told AFP on condition of anonymity, confirming an earlier report by US-based McClatchy Newspapers.
"We know they would like to do it in 16 months" but "we presented a range of options and the risks associated with it," said a second defense official, who also requested anonymity.
The newspaper group said the White House had received assessments of the risks associated with the 16, 19 and 23-month troop withdrawal options.
Obama warned in late January that he would have to make "difficult decisions" on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, following his maiden meeting as commander-in-chief at the Pentagon with military brass.
During his first week in the White House, he asked top military commanders to draw up plans for a "responsible" military drawdown in Iraq, where there are currently 142,000 US troops.
US military commanders in Iraq worry that a precipitous withdrawal would threaten security gains as Iraqis go to the polls in a series of elections this year.
Secretary of Defense Robert Gates has said that a 16-month drawdown was one of "various options" being evaluated, warning about a potential reversal in Iraq.
"Let me just say, I think our obligation is to give the president a range of options and the risks associated with each of those options," Gates said after meeting with Obama in late January. "And he will make the decision."
McClatchy Newspapers said Obama would likely announce his Iraq strategy by mid-March.
Obama is also preparing to send up to 30,000 US troops to Afghanistan, which he has called "the central front in our enduring struggle against terrorism and extremism."
Some 36,000 US troops, some part of a broader NATO force, fight a resurgent Taliban and Al-Qaeda there.
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By ANNE GEARAN, AP Military Writer Anne Gearan, Ap Military Writer – 2 hrs 56 mins ago
Officials: Most troops out of Iraq in 18 months Play Video AP – Officials: Most troops out of Iraq in 18 months
In this Sunday, Feb. 15, 2009 picture, U.S. soldiers stand guard after a road AP – …
WASHINGTON – Some of the U.S. forces likely to remain in Iraq after President Barack Obama fulfills his pledge to withdraw combat troops would still have a combat role fighting suspected terrorists, the Pentagon said Wednesday.
Obama plans to announce his withdrawal strategy as early as Friday. He will travel that day to Camp Lejeune in North Carolina, the White House announced Wednesday.
While there, Obama is expected to outline a compromise withdrawal plan that leaves behind as many as 50,000 troops for cleanup and protection operations.
"The president will thank the Marines and their families for their incredible sacrifice, and will outline his plan for a way forward in Iraq," said a senior administration official, speaking on condition of anonymity because the plan has not been announced.
Although most of the fighting forces would be withdrawn in the next 18 months, some troops could remain in Iraq for years to come. An agreement forged by the Bush administration with Iraqi officials requires removal of all U.S. forces by 2012.
Defense Secretary Robert Gates has said that a holdover, or "residual," force would number in the tens of thousands.
His spokesman said Wednesday that assuming there is such a force, it would have three primary functions: Training and helping Iraqi forces; protecting Americans and U.S. assets in Iraq and limited counterterrorism operations in which Iraqi forces would take the lead.
"I think a limited number of those that remain will conduct combat operations against terrorists, assisting Iraqi security forces," Pentagon spokesman Geoff Morrell said. "By and large you're talking about people who we would classify as enablers, support troops."
Obama campaigned on ending the Iraq war, and pledged to do so in 16 months. The withdrawal timetable he is expected to approve would stretch over 19 months, counting from Inauguration Day. That means more than 100,000 troops would leave over the coming 18 months.
The pullout would free up troops and resources for the war in Afghanistan, where Obama has said the threat to national security remains high.
"We are now carefully reviewing our policies in both wars, and I will soon announce a way forward in Iraq that leaves Iraq to its people and responsibly ends this war," Obama said in his address to Congress on Tuesday.
Gates, Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Adm. Mike Mullen and others met with Obama at the White House on Wednesday. There was no announcement afterward.
"The president has not made a final decision about our force structure in Iraq going forward," White House spokesman Robert Gibbs told reporters Wednesday. "I don't think it would be a surprise, though, to anybody in this room that the president since his first full day in office has been working toward a solution that would responsibly draw down our troops in Iraq."
Morrell said he anticipates an announcement this week.
The role and makeup of residual forces has been unclear throughout last year's negotiations between the United States and Iraq, and during Obama's planning for an exit strategy.
Plans became only slightly clearer Wednesday. Morrell said many troops would be long-term advisers in such areas as intelligence, or would help the Iraqi military fill in gaps in equipment such as helicopters.
Although he said Iraq would still be considered a "war zone," Morrell said most remaining forces would not do anything that resembles fighting.
"But just because these troops would carry a sidearm, as all U.S. troops do in theater, that should not be confused with them having a combat mission," Morrell said.
"For example, U.S. personnel assigned to the Ministry of Finance may have a sidearm," he said, "but I doubt they'd consider themselves a combat force, and certainly wouldn't be equipped in that fashion to perform combat operations."
___
Associated Press writer Ben Feller contributed to this report.
----------
27 Feb 2009 11:44:56 GMT
Source: Reuters
Feb 27 (Reuters) - The United States will pull combat troops out of Iraq by Aug. 31, 2010, faster than foreseen in a bilateral security pact and also faster than some U.S. military commanders on the ground had hoped.
A large residual force will remain for limited counter-terrorism operations and for training Iraqi troops in a bid to prevent a slide back into the sectarian violence that swept Iraq after the 2003 U.S.-led invasion.
The following are some potential implications of the speedier withdrawal:
POWER VACUUM
Many of the 140,000 U.S. troops now in Iraq have in the past year become more like peacemakers or police than a combat force.
In particular, U.S. forces say they have been instrumental in stemming conflict between Iraqi soldiers or police loyal to the Shi'ite Muslim-led government in Baghdad and Kurdish peshmerga fighters.
Towns near the border of the largely autonomous northern Kurdistan region are disputed by Kurds and the central government. They could become flashpoints for future conflict.
Some analysts fear that Iraqi forces and peshmerga will both try to fill the power vacuum that a U.S. pullout will leave in places like oil-rich Kirkuk. The results could be bloody.
There is also a question mark as to whether local security forces can eradicate lingering pockets of insurgency, such as in the ethnically mixed northern city of Mosul and elsewhere, where Sunni Islamist groups like al Qaeda are making a stand.
MINORITIES
Washington has been able to exert some political influence on the government of Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki simply because of its massive military presence in Iraq.
One area where U.S. officials say they have focused their efforts is to encourage the government to pay attention to the concerns and complaints of minority groups, such as Sunni Muslims who were dominant under Saddam Hussein.
When most of the U.S. soldiers have gone, Washington will be left with much less clout.
Some Sunni politicians are concerned that will allow Maliki, or whoever is in charge of the Iraqi government in August 2010, to ignore the demands of minority communities. That could lead to a resurgence in sectarian fighting.
WILL IRAQI FORCES BE READY?
Iraq's 600,000 police and soldiers have made tremendous strides in the past year, U.S. military officials say.
The peaceful nature of Jan. 31 provincial elections, which took place without a single major militant attack in the country, was a testament to their improving capabilities.
But the Iraqi security forces still lack what U.S. commanders call "combat enablers", such as logistics, air power, skilled mechanics and intelligence gathering and analysis.
It is possible that many of the 35,000-50,000 U.S. troops that will remain after August 2010 will fulfill some of those roles until the Iraqi army and police are fully able to support their own operations. (Writing by Michael Christie; Editing by Dominic Evans)
---------
Winding down the Iraq war will allow Obama to boost troop numbers in Afghanistan, which he has declared the central front in the U.S. fight against terrorism. He hopes it will also help him slash a ballooning $1.3 trillion budget deficit.
Defense Secretary Robert Gates said he would favor a modest U.S. military presence in Iraq even after the end of 2011 to assist Iraqi security forces if requested by Baghdad.
"We cannot sustain indefinitely a commitment that has put a strain on our military, and will cost the American people nearly a trillion dollars," he said.
A 19-month scenario was also presented to the president by military advisers at the White House's request, the official told AFP on condition of anonymity, confirming an earlier report by US-based McClatchy Newspapers.
"We know they would like to do it in 16 months" but "we presented a range of options and the risks associated with it," said a second defense official, who also requested anonymity.
The newspaper group said the White House had received assessments of the risks associated with the 16, 19 and 23-month troop withdrawal options.
Obama warned in late January that he would have to make "difficult decisions" on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, following his maiden meeting as commander-in-chief at the Pentagon with military brass.
During his first week in the White House, he asked top military commanders to draw up plans for a "responsible" military drawdown in Iraq, where there are currently 142,000 US troops.
US military commanders in Iraq worry that a precipitous withdrawal would threaten security gains as Iraqis go to the polls in a series of elections this year.
Secretary of Defense Robert Gates has said that a 16-month drawdown was one of "various options" being evaluated, warning about a potential reversal in Iraq.
"Let me just say, I think our obligation is to give the president a range of options and the risks associated with each of those options," Gates said after meeting with Obama in late January. "And he will make the decision."
McClatchy Newspapers said Obama would likely announce his Iraq strategy by mid-March.
Obama is also preparing to send up to 30,000 US troops to Afghanistan, which he has called "the central front in our enduring struggle against terrorism and extremism."
Some 36,000 US troops, some part of a broader NATO force, fight a resurgent Taliban and Al-Qaeda there.
----------
Some US forces will face combat after Iraq pullout
By ANNE GEARAN, AP Military Writer Anne Gearan, Ap Military Writer – 2 hrs 56 mins ago
Officials: Most troops out of Iraq in 18 months Play Video AP – Officials: Most troops out of Iraq in 18 months
In this Sunday, Feb. 15, 2009 picture, U.S. soldiers stand guard after a road AP – …
WASHINGTON – Some of the U.S. forces likely to remain in Iraq after President Barack Obama fulfills his pledge to withdraw combat troops would still have a combat role fighting suspected terrorists, the Pentagon said Wednesday.
Obama plans to announce his withdrawal strategy as early as Friday. He will travel that day to Camp Lejeune in North Carolina, the White House announced Wednesday.
While there, Obama is expected to outline a compromise withdrawal plan that leaves behind as many as 50,000 troops for cleanup and protection operations.
"The president will thank the Marines and their families for their incredible sacrifice, and will outline his plan for a way forward in Iraq," said a senior administration official, speaking on condition of anonymity because the plan has not been announced.
Although most of the fighting forces would be withdrawn in the next 18 months, some troops could remain in Iraq for years to come. An agreement forged by the Bush administration with Iraqi officials requires removal of all U.S. forces by 2012.
Defense Secretary Robert Gates has said that a holdover, or "residual," force would number in the tens of thousands.
His spokesman said Wednesday that assuming there is such a force, it would have three primary functions: Training and helping Iraqi forces; protecting Americans and U.S. assets in Iraq and limited counterterrorism operations in which Iraqi forces would take the lead.
"I think a limited number of those that remain will conduct combat operations against terrorists, assisting Iraqi security forces," Pentagon spokesman Geoff Morrell said. "By and large you're talking about people who we would classify as enablers, support troops."
Obama campaigned on ending the Iraq war, and pledged to do so in 16 months. The withdrawal timetable he is expected to approve would stretch over 19 months, counting from Inauguration Day. That means more than 100,000 troops would leave over the coming 18 months.
The pullout would free up troops and resources for the war in Afghanistan, where Obama has said the threat to national security remains high.
"We are now carefully reviewing our policies in both wars, and I will soon announce a way forward in Iraq that leaves Iraq to its people and responsibly ends this war," Obama said in his address to Congress on Tuesday.
Gates, Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Adm. Mike Mullen and others met with Obama at the White House on Wednesday. There was no announcement afterward.
"The president has not made a final decision about our force structure in Iraq going forward," White House spokesman Robert Gibbs told reporters Wednesday. "I don't think it would be a surprise, though, to anybody in this room that the president since his first full day in office has been working toward a solution that would responsibly draw down our troops in Iraq."
Morrell said he anticipates an announcement this week.
The role and makeup of residual forces has been unclear throughout last year's negotiations between the United States and Iraq, and during Obama's planning for an exit strategy.
Plans became only slightly clearer Wednesday. Morrell said many troops would be long-term advisers in such areas as intelligence, or would help the Iraqi military fill in gaps in equipment such as helicopters.
Although he said Iraq would still be considered a "war zone," Morrell said most remaining forces would not do anything that resembles fighting.
"But just because these troops would carry a sidearm, as all U.S. troops do in theater, that should not be confused with them having a combat mission," Morrell said.
"For example, U.S. personnel assigned to the Ministry of Finance may have a sidearm," he said, "but I doubt they'd consider themselves a combat force, and certainly wouldn't be equipped in that fashion to perform combat operations."
___
Associated Press writer Ben Feller contributed to this report.
----------
SCENARIOS-Risks of speedier U.S. troop pullout from Iraq
27 Feb 2009 11:44:56 GMT
Source: Reuters
Feb 27 (Reuters) - The United States will pull combat troops out of Iraq by Aug. 31, 2010, faster than foreseen in a bilateral security pact and also faster than some U.S. military commanders on the ground had hoped.
A large residual force will remain for limited counter-terrorism operations and for training Iraqi troops in a bid to prevent a slide back into the sectarian violence that swept Iraq after the 2003 U.S.-led invasion.
The following are some potential implications of the speedier withdrawal:
POWER VACUUM
Many of the 140,000 U.S. troops now in Iraq have in the past year become more like peacemakers or police than a combat force.
In particular, U.S. forces say they have been instrumental in stemming conflict between Iraqi soldiers or police loyal to the Shi'ite Muslim-led government in Baghdad and Kurdish peshmerga fighters.
Towns near the border of the largely autonomous northern Kurdistan region are disputed by Kurds and the central government. They could become flashpoints for future conflict.
Some analysts fear that Iraqi forces and peshmerga will both try to fill the power vacuum that a U.S. pullout will leave in places like oil-rich Kirkuk. The results could be bloody.
There is also a question mark as to whether local security forces can eradicate lingering pockets of insurgency, such as in the ethnically mixed northern city of Mosul and elsewhere, where Sunni Islamist groups like al Qaeda are making a stand.
MINORITIES
Washington has been able to exert some political influence on the government of Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki simply because of its massive military presence in Iraq.
One area where U.S. officials say they have focused their efforts is to encourage the government to pay attention to the concerns and complaints of minority groups, such as Sunni Muslims who were dominant under Saddam Hussein.
When most of the U.S. soldiers have gone, Washington will be left with much less clout.
Some Sunni politicians are concerned that will allow Maliki, or whoever is in charge of the Iraqi government in August 2010, to ignore the demands of minority communities. That could lead to a resurgence in sectarian fighting.
WILL IRAQI FORCES BE READY?
Iraq's 600,000 police and soldiers have made tremendous strides in the past year, U.S. military officials say.
The peaceful nature of Jan. 31 provincial elections, which took place without a single major militant attack in the country, was a testament to their improving capabilities.
But the Iraqi security forces still lack what U.S. commanders call "combat enablers", such as logistics, air power, skilled mechanics and intelligence gathering and analysis.
It is possible that many of the 35,000-50,000 U.S. troops that will remain after August 2010 will fulfill some of those roles until the Iraqi army and police are fully able to support their own operations. (Writing by Michael Christie; Editing by Dominic Evans)
---------
Winding down the Iraq war will allow Obama to boost troop numbers in Afghanistan, which he has declared the central front in the U.S. fight against terrorism. He hopes it will also help him slash a ballooning $1.3 trillion budget deficit.
Defense Secretary Robert Gates said he would favor a modest U.S. military presence in Iraq even after the end of 2011 to assist Iraqi security forces if requested by Baghdad.
"My own view would be that we should be prepared to have some very modest-sized presence for training and helping them with their new equipment and providing perhaps intelligence support," he told reporters.
"We cannot sustain indefinitely a commitment that has put a strain on our military, and will cost the American people nearly a trillion dollars," he said.
Friday, February 06, 2009
A potential factor behind the Al-Maliki's win
February 02, 2009
Elections 1: Ameriyah
Our plan is to go to areas in west Baghdad, areas that had mostly boycotted the last elections.
Areas that became hotbeds of insurgency.
And al Qaeda.
We drove on, one of our drivers, S, and myself alone in the car. Our car the only moving vehicle in sight.
Past Qadisiyah. Past Yarmouk. Past Jamiaa and Khadraa, we were stopped every 300 m by checkpoints, sometimes searching us and sometimes just checking our vehicle sticker permit and waving us on our way – We reach the checkpoint of Ameriyah.
We turn left and six Iraqi Army soldiers take aim – at us.
We stop.
"Where do you think you're going? There's curfew – no cars allowed on the streets!"
He walks up to us.
"We are journalists" S shouts, "We are here to speak to voters."
"Journalists???" Surprised faces – raised eye brows.
"Why? Are we the first journalists who have come here?"
"Yes."
After searching the car three times, searching my handbag six times, asking to check our non-existing cameras six times, three military vehicles drive up in respond to the checkpoint's call.
"We will let you pass – but we will send two soldiers with you – for your protection."
"You mustn't mind them, some of them are civilized and some just aren't." commented a traffic policeman standing nearby.
During these 45 minutes I saw five men arrive on foot, get searched and set off down the long road into Ameriyah. We followed.
Barbed wire across the wide street at every 50 to 75 m – no way could we have been able to move about if it weren't for the two soldiers. I felt guilty for disliking them when they were ordered out with us.
The area between each barbed wire and the next was turned into a small football fields with bricks marking the goals and young and older boys were playing – scores of them! They were having the times of their lives! We weaved through, every pair of eyes we passed focused on us, the lone car out during curfew, and stopped at around 50 m from the voting centre.
"No media permitted! Where is your camera??" No cameras, I told him, just notebook and pen. He solemnly orders me away. "NO media." After trying to stare him down, and failing, I reluctantly start to move away, only to find my lovely, lovely protection – the two soldiers, come to the rescue and tell him that they are my escort, by orders of the Commander. He reluctantly moves away giving me room to speak to people walking out of the voting centre.
Risala, Um Atheer (a family of four; the mother, father and two young boys):
"We came to the centre with enthusiasm, but we didn't vote. We couldn't find our names. We were displaced from al Hurriyah, and were told that as long as our ration card was in Ameriyah, then that is where we should vote. This is the third centre we go to – and don't find our names. I don't want to lose my voice. I'm afraid that if I don't vote, my form will be used for me - to vote for God knows whom."
Abu Rami (with him were his three married sons):
"We are a displaced family. We were told that we could only vote where our ration card is issued. How do they expect us to go vote in the neighbourhood from which we were displaced? All the world knows that there are millions of Iraqis displaced inside Iraq – couldn't the Elections Commission place a box for the displaced in every centre? We have been issued IDs stating that we are displaced – Is corruption so wide spread that they don't trust their own IDs?? We wanted to vote for Ayad Allawi, maybe he can put this country back together again. He is a strong man and, I believe has no sectarian leanings. My three sons are jobless. Is it too much to ask that we live in our own homes and return to our jobs? That is all we ask"
Mohammed Allawi (young man, about 25 yrs):
"What optimism?? We are an occupied country. I am voting only so that my vote will not be stolen by the corrupt people who are willing to do anything to remain firm on their seats. But it seems I am not even considered an Iraqi citizen – I can't find my name anywhere - and my family has been in Ameriyah nearly forty years."
Two women (afraid to give their names):
"We couldn't vote! We couldn't find our names. We have been to two centres, and aim to go on looking until we find them or are too tired to go on."
Aymen Zamil (in a group of four men and two women):
"We haven't voted. We were displaced and have now returned. We went to more than one centre and couldn't find our names. They told us that more names will be forwarded after 3 (p.m.). They said that there is a list of miscellaneous names after 3 (p.m.). We will come back, but the women – they can't keep going back and forth."
Nemeer Mohammed – University graduate student:
"We are voting today with the hope of change. Change in everything – everything. Our lives have become a nightmare. We mustn't stand aside silent. We want security. We want harmony in our lives, this has been lost to us for so long now and we miss it. We want normal lives! I have voted for Allawi because he doesn't believe in the nonsense these Muslim pretenders have exploited to divide the Iraqi people."
A very old gentleman, walking with the aid of a walking stick and carrying a stool.
"Security – All we want is security. And justice. And the trust to return between our friends and neighbours. Trust is a blessing that we didn't value until we lost it. God bless Iraq! God bless Iraq and rid it of the gang that came in the wake of the foreign forces. I have voted for Saleh al Mutlag. Not that I expect too much of him, but who is better?"
Majid Jassim Mohammed:
"I came from Egypt to vote. I came with all my hopes and dreams. I want to vote to feel like an Iraqi citizen – But my name is nowhere to be found. I have been to three centres so far, and there are two more, I think. They told me to come after 3 (p.m.), that more names will be posted after 3 (p.m.)."
I love our two soldier friends. They are keeping a hawk's eye out for anyone who comes to shoo me away.
Many, if not most the voters are women. Some came in twos, some within whole families and many… each one by herself.
"I don't want my vote to be taken by someone else"
"I am doing what I have to do – and I leave the rest to God almighty."
"I am voting for Allawi's list. He is not sectarian."
"I am voting for Maliki's list. He has been able to achieve something – maybe not a lot – but something, which is more than the others can say."
"I will keep my choice to myself. The important thing is that I chose a person whom I feel has a patriotic spirit."
And many, many more in Ameriyah, the place looked like a picnic. And that did not prepare me for what I saw in Khadraa and Jamiaa.
Elections 1: Ameriyah
Our plan is to go to areas in west Baghdad, areas that had mostly boycotted the last elections.
Areas that became hotbeds of insurgency.
And al Qaeda.
We drove on, one of our drivers, S, and myself alone in the car. Our car the only moving vehicle in sight.
Past Qadisiyah. Past Yarmouk. Past Jamiaa and Khadraa, we were stopped every 300 m by checkpoints, sometimes searching us and sometimes just checking our vehicle sticker permit and waving us on our way – We reach the checkpoint of Ameriyah.
We turn left and six Iraqi Army soldiers take aim – at us.
We stop.
"Where do you think you're going? There's curfew – no cars allowed on the streets!"
He walks up to us.
"We are journalists" S shouts, "We are here to speak to voters."
"Journalists???" Surprised faces – raised eye brows.
"Why? Are we the first journalists who have come here?"
"Yes."
After searching the car three times, searching my handbag six times, asking to check our non-existing cameras six times, three military vehicles drive up in respond to the checkpoint's call.
"We will let you pass – but we will send two soldiers with you – for your protection."
"You mustn't mind them, some of them are civilized and some just aren't." commented a traffic policeman standing nearby.
During these 45 minutes I saw five men arrive on foot, get searched and set off down the long road into Ameriyah. We followed.
Barbed wire across the wide street at every 50 to 75 m – no way could we have been able to move about if it weren't for the two soldiers. I felt guilty for disliking them when they were ordered out with us.
The area between each barbed wire and the next was turned into a small football fields with bricks marking the goals and young and older boys were playing – scores of them! They were having the times of their lives! We weaved through, every pair of eyes we passed focused on us, the lone car out during curfew, and stopped at around 50 m from the voting centre.
"No media permitted! Where is your camera??" No cameras, I told him, just notebook and pen. He solemnly orders me away. "NO media." After trying to stare him down, and failing, I reluctantly start to move away, only to find my lovely, lovely protection – the two soldiers, come to the rescue and tell him that they are my escort, by orders of the Commander. He reluctantly moves away giving me room to speak to people walking out of the voting centre.
Risala, Um Atheer (a family of four; the mother, father and two young boys):
"We came to the centre with enthusiasm, but we didn't vote. We couldn't find our names. We were displaced from al Hurriyah, and were told that as long as our ration card was in Ameriyah, then that is where we should vote. This is the third centre we go to – and don't find our names. I don't want to lose my voice. I'm afraid that if I don't vote, my form will be used for me - to vote for God knows whom."
Abu Rami (with him were his three married sons):
"We are a displaced family. We were told that we could only vote where our ration card is issued. How do they expect us to go vote in the neighbourhood from which we were displaced? All the world knows that there are millions of Iraqis displaced inside Iraq – couldn't the Elections Commission place a box for the displaced in every centre? We have been issued IDs stating that we are displaced – Is corruption so wide spread that they don't trust their own IDs?? We wanted to vote for Ayad Allawi, maybe he can put this country back together again. He is a strong man and, I believe has no sectarian leanings. My three sons are jobless. Is it too much to ask that we live in our own homes and return to our jobs? That is all we ask"
Mohammed Allawi (young man, about 25 yrs):
"What optimism?? We are an occupied country. I am voting only so that my vote will not be stolen by the corrupt people who are willing to do anything to remain firm on their seats. But it seems I am not even considered an Iraqi citizen – I can't find my name anywhere - and my family has been in Ameriyah nearly forty years."
Two women (afraid to give their names):
"We couldn't vote! We couldn't find our names. We have been to two centres, and aim to go on looking until we find them or are too tired to go on."
Aymen Zamil (in a group of four men and two women):
"We haven't voted. We were displaced and have now returned. We went to more than one centre and couldn't find our names. They told us that more names will be forwarded after 3 (p.m.). They said that there is a list of miscellaneous names after 3 (p.m.). We will come back, but the women – they can't keep going back and forth."
Nemeer Mohammed – University graduate student:
"We are voting today with the hope of change. Change in everything – everything. Our lives have become a nightmare. We mustn't stand aside silent. We want security. We want harmony in our lives, this has been lost to us for so long now and we miss it. We want normal lives! I have voted for Allawi because he doesn't believe in the nonsense these Muslim pretenders have exploited to divide the Iraqi people."
A very old gentleman, walking with the aid of a walking stick and carrying a stool.
"Security – All we want is security. And justice. And the trust to return between our friends and neighbours. Trust is a blessing that we didn't value until we lost it. God bless Iraq! God bless Iraq and rid it of the gang that came in the wake of the foreign forces. I have voted for Saleh al Mutlag. Not that I expect too much of him, but who is better?"
Majid Jassim Mohammed:
"I came from Egypt to vote. I came with all my hopes and dreams. I want to vote to feel like an Iraqi citizen – But my name is nowhere to be found. I have been to three centres so far, and there are two more, I think. They told me to come after 3 (p.m.), that more names will be posted after 3 (p.m.)."
I love our two soldier friends. They are keeping a hawk's eye out for anyone who comes to shoo me away.
Many, if not most the voters are women. Some came in twos, some within whole families and many… each one by herself.
"I don't want my vote to be taken by someone else"
"I am doing what I have to do – and I leave the rest to God almighty."
"I am voting for Allawi's list. He is not sectarian."
"I am voting for Maliki's list. He has been able to achieve something – maybe not a lot – but something, which is more than the others can say."
"I will keep my choice to myself. The important thing is that I chose a person whom I feel has a patriotic spirit."
And many, many more in Ameriyah, the place looked like a picnic. And that did not prepare me for what I saw in Khadraa and Jamiaa.
Tuesday, February 03, 2009
Mosque imam in Ohio deported
Mosque ex-leader Damra deported to Middle East
The former leader of Ohio's largest mosque was deported to the Middle East on Thursday, ending a nearly two-year battle to force Fawaz Damra out of the United States.
Damra, 46, flew with agents from the Bureau of Immigration and Customs Enforcement from Detroit to Newark, N.J., to Amman, Jordan, said ICE spokesman Tim Counts.
"It happened Thursday morning about 4 or 5 a.m.," Counts said Friday. "He was flown into Jordan and from there crossed the bridge into the Palestinian territories."
Damra, the longtime leader of the Islamic Center of Cleveland, had agreed to be deported after a trial and conviction linking him to terrorist groups.
Friends and relatives said Friday that the suddenness of the departure surprised them, and they expressed alarm that they still had not heard from Damra by late Friday.
Nesreen Damra, Fawaz's wife and mother of their three American-born children, declined to comment, but friends described her as anxious and distraught.
"For two, three days she didn't know where her husband was. She still doesn't know," said Haider Alawan, an elder at the Parma mosque and a friend of the Damra family's. "Everything is running through her head. What do you do now?"
Damra was in jail in Michigan more than a year as federal officials searched for a country willing to take him.No one wanted him.
He had been convicted in June 2004 of lying on his citizenship application because he did not disclose his links to Palestinian Islamic Jihad and other terrorist organizations.
At his trial in U.S. District Court, prosecutors played a video from 1991.
It showed Damra at a Muslim gathering in Cleveland, disparaging Jews in Arabic as "pigs and monkeys" and raising money for the killing of Jews by the Palestinian Islamic Jihad.
Damra's arrest and the images on the videotape shocked many in the region, who viewed him as a voice of moderate, mainstream Islam.
Until the tape surfaced, Damra was often seen at public events with politicians and leaders of other faiths, including several prayer services after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.
Al-Akhras said he suspects Damra received especially harsh treatment because he is an Arab and a Muslim in a country where both cultures are suspect.
But others say Damra's sins proved hard to forgive, no matter his religious or ethnic background.
"This was more than saying bad things. This was taking actions to essentially support terrorism," said Alan Melamed, president of the Cleveland chapter of the American Jewish Committee, which enjoyed amiable relations with Damra before his past came to light.
Melamed said Damra never directly apologized to Cleveland Jews, leading many to suspect the sincerity of his repentance.
Damra was born in the West Bank town of Nablus. He came to the United States in 1988 and in 1991 was hired as imam, or spiritual leader, of the Islamic Center of Cleveland, in Parma. He denied any links to terror groups on his citizenship application.
ICE officials said they do not know where in the West Bank Damra might be. Damra has family in Nablus, but Muslim civic leaders in Cleveland said on Friday that no one on either side of the ocean had heard from him.
All arrangements for Damra's deportation were worked out with officials from the Palestinian Authority, not Israel, said Counts, the ICE spokesman. He said Damra was turned over to Palestinian officials after crossing the Allenby Bridge that links Jordan and the West Bank.
But that bridge, called the Al-Karameh Bridge by Palestinians, is controlled by the Israelis, noted Julia Shearson, director of the Cleveland office of CAIR.
The former leader of Ohio's largest mosque was deported to the Middle East on Thursday, ending a nearly two-year battle to force Fawaz Damra out of the United States.
Damra, 46, flew with agents from the Bureau of Immigration and Customs Enforcement from Detroit to Newark, N.J., to Amman, Jordan, said ICE spokesman Tim Counts.
"It happened Thursday morning about 4 or 5 a.m.," Counts said Friday. "He was flown into Jordan and from there crossed the bridge into the Palestinian territories."
Damra, the longtime leader of the Islamic Center of Cleveland, had agreed to be deported after a trial and conviction linking him to terrorist groups.
Friends and relatives said Friday that the suddenness of the departure surprised them, and they expressed alarm that they still had not heard from Damra by late Friday.
Nesreen Damra, Fawaz's wife and mother of their three American-born children, declined to comment, but friends described her as anxious and distraught.
"For two, three days she didn't know where her husband was. She still doesn't know," said Haider Alawan, an elder at the Parma mosque and a friend of the Damra family's. "Everything is running through her head. What do you do now?"
Damra was in jail in Michigan more than a year as federal officials searched for a country willing to take him.No one wanted him.
He had been convicted in June 2004 of lying on his citizenship application because he did not disclose his links to Palestinian Islamic Jihad and other terrorist organizations.
At his trial in U.S. District Court, prosecutors played a video from 1991.
It showed Damra at a Muslim gathering in Cleveland, disparaging Jews in Arabic as "pigs and monkeys" and raising money for the killing of Jews by the Palestinian Islamic Jihad.
Damra's arrest and the images on the videotape shocked many in the region, who viewed him as a voice of moderate, mainstream Islam.
Until the tape surfaced, Damra was often seen at public events with politicians and leaders of other faiths, including several prayer services after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.
Al-Akhras said he suspects Damra received especially harsh treatment because he is an Arab and a Muslim in a country where both cultures are suspect.
But others say Damra's sins proved hard to forgive, no matter his religious or ethnic background.
"This was more than saying bad things. This was taking actions to essentially support terrorism," said Alan Melamed, president of the Cleveland chapter of the American Jewish Committee, which enjoyed amiable relations with Damra before his past came to light.
Melamed said Damra never directly apologized to Cleveland Jews, leading many to suspect the sincerity of his repentance.
Damra was born in the West Bank town of Nablus. He came to the United States in 1988 and in 1991 was hired as imam, or spiritual leader, of the Islamic Center of Cleveland, in Parma. He denied any links to terror groups on his citizenship application.
ICE officials said they do not know where in the West Bank Damra might be. Damra has family in Nablus, but Muslim civic leaders in Cleveland said on Friday that no one on either side of the ocean had heard from him.
All arrangements for Damra's deportation were worked out with officials from the Palestinian Authority, not Israel, said Counts, the ICE spokesman. He said Damra was turned over to Palestinian officials after crossing the Allenby Bridge that links Jordan and the West Bank.
But that bridge, called the Al-Karameh Bridge by Palestinians, is controlled by the Israelis, noted Julia Shearson, director of the Cleveland office of CAIR.
Jews must know that US has neither fixed friends nor fixed enemies !
The Jews have been directing American Middle East policy that resulted in financing Israeli development and arming Israel with all kinds of conventional and mass destruction weapons. Furthermore, America has been encouraging Israeli Nazi generals to commit crimes and to protect Israel from condemnation by the UN Security Council; using its Veto. That is because the Jews have been in control of the US financial institutions and the media.
But history shows that America has neither fixed friends nor fixed enemies but establish its relations with others based mainly on US interest. Right now, the American mood doesn’t favour the continuation of the status quo. The Jews are about to be officially accused by the American people of causing the current economic downturn.
Obama has complained about the predominantly Wall Street managers for cashing $B-18.5 in 2008 alone, while driving their institutions to bankruptcy. Unlike Bush’s rewards for the Jewish managers who robbed the banks and their lobby who conspired to make America fight costly Jewish wars, one must not be surprised if America changes gear and start to punish the Jewish perpetrators.
No one would have believed that America abandons Marcus of the Philippines, the Shah of Iran, Saddam Hussein or Bin Laden. Similarly no would have believed that America biggest trading partner is no other but Red China.
Jews must come down and abandon their conspiracies as the world may accuse them of all current problems the way Hitler did before launching his final solution.
What does America get out of its friendship with the Jews? The answer is: Bankrupt US banks and financial institutions, corrupt US politicians, unstable Middle East, Costly Jewish wars and unfriendly 1.2 billion Arabs and Muslims. It is in the interest of corrupt American politicians to appease the US Jewish lobby, disregarding all the damage done to America and to American interests.
Ariel Sharon (now a vegetable) has said on anumber of of occasions that Israel has never had a better friend in the Whitehouse than G.W. Bush. Beacsue of this, Jews were reluctant to support Obama as was indicated by a poll in the Jewish infested city, New York. Furthermore, Jewish-controlled media were hammering Obama's Muslim father. At this very moment, Obama is very busy trying to repair the damage done to America by the Jewish bank robbers.
---
Adnan Darwash, Iraq Occupation Times
But history shows that America has neither fixed friends nor fixed enemies but establish its relations with others based mainly on US interest. Right now, the American mood doesn’t favour the continuation of the status quo. The Jews are about to be officially accused by the American people of causing the current economic downturn.
Obama has complained about the predominantly Wall Street managers for cashing $B-18.5 in 2008 alone, while driving their institutions to bankruptcy. Unlike Bush’s rewards for the Jewish managers who robbed the banks and their lobby who conspired to make America fight costly Jewish wars, one must not be surprised if America changes gear and start to punish the Jewish perpetrators.
No one would have believed that America abandons Marcus of the Philippines, the Shah of Iran, Saddam Hussein or Bin Laden. Similarly no would have believed that America biggest trading partner is no other but Red China.
Jews must come down and abandon their conspiracies as the world may accuse them of all current problems the way Hitler did before launching his final solution.
What does America get out of its friendship with the Jews? The answer is: Bankrupt US banks and financial institutions, corrupt US politicians, unstable Middle East, Costly Jewish wars and unfriendly 1.2 billion Arabs and Muslims. It is in the interest of corrupt American politicians to appease the US Jewish lobby, disregarding all the damage done to America and to American interests.
Ariel Sharon (now a vegetable) has said on anumber of of occasions that Israel has never had a better friend in the Whitehouse than G.W. Bush. Beacsue of this, Jews were reluctant to support Obama as was indicated by a poll in the Jewish infested city, New York. Furthermore, Jewish-controlled media were hammering Obama's Muslim father. At this very moment, Obama is very busy trying to repair the damage done to America by the Jewish bank robbers.
---
Adnan Darwash, Iraq Occupation Times
Monday, February 02, 2009
Saudis hope Turks will help stem Shi'ite influence
02 Feb 2009 11:24:27 GMT
Source: Reuters
By Souhail Karam
RIYADH, Feb 2 (Reuters) - Turkish President Abdullah Gul can expect a warm welcome when he starts an official visit to Saudi Arabia on Tuesday with the stated goal of boosting business ties with the world's largest oil exporter.
Saudi Arabia hopes the visit will bring it closer to forming a strategic alliance with the NATO member state to counter the growing influence of Iran in the region, diplomats say.
Bilateral ties have improved dramatically since Gul's AK Party and King Abdullah came to power in 2002 and 2005 respectively.
Saudi Arabia's ultra-conservative Sunni Muslim rulers were for decades wary of the avowedly secular Turkish state -- having helped to evict the Ottomans from the Arabian peninsula in the early years of the 20th century.
But the Saudi economy has more recently provided work for thousands of Turks, including Gul himself, whose daughter was born in the Saudi city of Jeddah.
Diplomats say that rising Shi'ite influence in the region, foremost from Iran, is now bringing a further rapprochement.
"Saudi leaders see in Turkey a strong ally to counter Iran's growing influence in the region. They don't mind giving Turkey the means that will enable it to supersede both their own influence and that of Iran," said one Western diplomat.
Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan won Turkey millions of fans in the Arab world last week by haranguing Israel's President Shimon Peres at an international forum last week over its recent assault on the Hamas-ruled Gaza Strip.
STRIKING A CHORD
Erdogan's outburst struck a chord among many Arabs, who found many of their own leaders not only unable to stop Israel's offensive, in which more than 1,300 Palestinians were killed, but also reluctant to take a stand against it.
King Abdullah has pledged a $1 billion donation to help rebuild Gaza. But it is not clear how these funds will be channelled to the population, given the divisions in the Palestinian leadership and Saudi Arabia's manifest unease in dealing with the Hamas movement, which has close ties with Iran.
Turkish diplomats said the monarch wanted to discuss Gaza with Gul, as well as Iran's growing influence in the region.
"We are friends with both (Iran and Saudi Arabia) ... But for us the visit is mainly for business," a Turkish diplomat said on condition of anonymity.
Turkey hopes that bilateral trade with Saudi Arabia, which has already risen to about $5 billion in 2008 from less than $2 billion in 2006, to around $15 billion by the end of 2013, the diplomat said.
Some 150 Turkish businessmen will be accompanying Gul in the hope of winning infrastructure and industrial contracts.
In remarks published on Monday by Saudi newspapers, Gul suggested that Iran would not have gained so much influence if Arab states had not left a vacuum on issues affecting the Middle East, such as Lebanon and the Palestinian territories.
Source: Reuters
By Souhail Karam
RIYADH, Feb 2 (Reuters) - Turkish President Abdullah Gul can expect a warm welcome when he starts an official visit to Saudi Arabia on Tuesday with the stated goal of boosting business ties with the world's largest oil exporter.
Saudi Arabia hopes the visit will bring it closer to forming a strategic alliance with the NATO member state to counter the growing influence of Iran in the region, diplomats say.
Bilateral ties have improved dramatically since Gul's AK Party and King Abdullah came to power in 2002 and 2005 respectively.
Saudi Arabia's ultra-conservative Sunni Muslim rulers were for decades wary of the avowedly secular Turkish state -- having helped to evict the Ottomans from the Arabian peninsula in the early years of the 20th century.
But the Saudi economy has more recently provided work for thousands of Turks, including Gul himself, whose daughter was born in the Saudi city of Jeddah.
Diplomats say that rising Shi'ite influence in the region, foremost from Iran, is now bringing a further rapprochement.
"Saudi leaders see in Turkey a strong ally to counter Iran's growing influence in the region. They don't mind giving Turkey the means that will enable it to supersede both their own influence and that of Iran," said one Western diplomat.
Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan won Turkey millions of fans in the Arab world last week by haranguing Israel's President Shimon Peres at an international forum last week over its recent assault on the Hamas-ruled Gaza Strip.
STRIKING A CHORD
Erdogan's outburst struck a chord among many Arabs, who found many of their own leaders not only unable to stop Israel's offensive, in which more than 1,300 Palestinians were killed, but also reluctant to take a stand against it.
King Abdullah has pledged a $1 billion donation to help rebuild Gaza. But it is not clear how these funds will be channelled to the population, given the divisions in the Palestinian leadership and Saudi Arabia's manifest unease in dealing with the Hamas movement, which has close ties with Iran.
Turkish diplomats said the monarch wanted to discuss Gaza with Gul, as well as Iran's growing influence in the region.
"We are friends with both (Iran and Saudi Arabia) ... But for us the visit is mainly for business," a Turkish diplomat said on condition of anonymity.
Turkey hopes that bilateral trade with Saudi Arabia, which has already risen to about $5 billion in 2008 from less than $2 billion in 2006, to around $15 billion by the end of 2013, the diplomat said.
Some 150 Turkish businessmen will be accompanying Gul in the hope of winning infrastructure and industrial contracts.
In remarks published on Monday by Saudi newspapers, Gul suggested that Iran would not have gained so much influence if Arab states had not left a vacuum on issues affecting the Middle East, such as Lebanon and the Palestinian territories.
"As a Muslim nation, Iran is entitled to have aspirations and it likes to defend Islamic issues, but Palestine is Arab and there is Sunnism in Palestine, so it is up to Palestinians and Arabs to initiate ... a solution for these issues,"Gul said. (Editing by Thomas Atkins and Kevin Liffey)
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