Doug Lorimer

“A US military convoy opened fire on a column of cars Sunday morning, killing at least two Iraqi civilians in southern Iraq and igniting a new round of anger over the apparent loss of innocent life”, the US McClatchy Newspapers chain reported on November 18. “Police charged that the shootings were unprovoked and said six people, including two Iraqi policemen, died in a barrage of bullets.”

This month marks the third anniversary of the massive US military assault on the rebel Iraqi city of Fallujah, 55 kilometres west of Baghdad. A year after the US assault, the New York Times described Fallujah as “virtually a police state”. Little has changed in the two years since. The October 14 Chicago Tribune described Fallujah as a “place under 24-hour lockdown, surrounded by berms and barbed wire”.

On November 9, two days after Mikheil Saakashvili, the former Soviet republic of Georgia’s pro-US president, ordered riot police to club and tear-gas anti-government protesters in the capital Tbilisi, Georgian officials issued arrest warrants for two opposition leaders on charges of “espionage”. Hospitals reported that nearly 600 protesters sought medical treatment after the police assault.

“Taliban insurgents have captured a third district in western Afghanistan, local officials said on Monday [November 5], defying Western assertions the rebels are unable to mount large military offensives”, Reuters reported that same day.

The November 2 British Independent reported that US- NATO ally Turkey “has started to impose economic sanctions on Iraqi Kurdistan by stopping flights between Istanbul” and Irbil, capital of the Kurdistan autonomous region in northern Iraq.

On November 4, Mikhail Saakashvili, the pro-US president of the former Soviet republic of Georgia, accused Russia of fomenting mass protests against him. Saakashvili’s remarks were his first response to three days of protests in the capital Tbilisi in which some 100,000 people — a tenth of the city’s population — demanded his resignation.

“America’s hostile policy to the Iranian people and the country’s legal institutions are against international law. They are worthless and ineffective, and doomed to failure”, Iranian foreign ministry spokesperson Mohammad Ali Hosseini told a media conference in Tehran on October 25.

The US military has increased air strikes in Iraq five-fold this year, according to data obtained by USA Today. The paper’s October 22 edition reported that the US military had carried out 1140 air strikes in the first nine months of this year, compared with 229 last year. The figures do not include attacks carried out by helicopters.

Carrying signs reading “Police are the real terrorists” and “Free all political activists”, up to 1000 people rallied outside the Rotorua District Court on October 25 to protest against police raids that resulted in the arrest of 17 people a week earlier, as three of those arrested had their court cases transferred to Auckland.

“Waving colourful banners and Kurdish flags, thousands of people demonstrated across northern Iraq today in protest at the growing threat of a big military incursion by Turkey to hunt down Kurdish rebels”, the October 18 London Times reported.