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Author: TriSec    Date: 09/22/2009 10:44:57

Good Morning.

Today is our 2,379th day in Iraq.

We'll start this morning as we always do, with the latest casualty figures from Iraq and Afghanistan, courtesy of Antiwar.com:

American Deaths
Since war began (3/19/03): 4345
Since "Mission Accomplished" (5/1/03): 4206
Since Capture of Saddam (12/13/03): 3882
Since Handover (6/29/04): 3486
Since Obama Inauguration (1/20/09): 117

Other Coalition Troops - Iraq: 325
US Military Deaths - Afghanistan: 838
Other Military Deaths - Afghanistan: 566
Contractor Employee Deaths - Iraq: 1,395
Journalists - Iraq: 335
Academics Killed - Iraq: 431

We find this morning's cost of war passing through:
$ 912, 166, 600, 000 .00



We'll go back in the past a bit today. Specifically, to Europe in the wake of the German's surrender in May of 1945.

What happens to a country or region when one dominant power is utterly crushed by another? Unless there is a careful plan, or overwhelming masses of men and guns, the situation rapidly devolves into chaos and anarchy. Particularly in Eastern Europe, where the Soviets were busy cementing their hold on power, they were indifferent to the native populations taking revenge on the Germans, Jews, or whoever else was the perceived enemy.

If you're interested in reading about that sort of thing, I'll steer you to the tremendous WWII site, George Duncan's Historical Facts of WWII.


CZECHOSLOVAKIA TAKES REVENGE

A massacre similar to to the one in Lidice was repeated in the village of Lezaky on July 24, 1942. With a population of about fifty, seventeen men and fourteen women were executed and fourteen children taken to Prague to be adopted out to Nazi families. Only two of the fourteen children survived the war. The village of Lezaky was never rebuilt but crosses were put up where the houses once stood. On May 5, 1945, the village of Javoricko experienced the wrath of the Nazi occupiers. Attacked by an SS unit, thirty-eight men of the village were murdered, allegedly for co-operating with partisans, the whole village was then burned to the ground. The only buildings left standing were the school and the chapel. The victims were all buried in a common grave over which a memorial has since been erected.

In retaliation for the 213,000 of its citizens murdered during the Nazi occupation, the Czechs lost no time in squaring the account. In May, 1945, the native German population was just over three million. Eduard Benes returned from exile in London and in Prague set up a new government which established a brutal campaign of expulsions against the German minority. Thousands of Sudeten Germans were rounded up and interned in camps without proper sanitation facilities. Soon, the camps were swarming with vermin. Hunger and disease were on a par with Belsen. In July, 1945, the Czech militia massacred some 1,000 Germans in a village near Aussig. In the town of Saaz, thousands of German women were herded into huge barracks. As night fell, hundreds of Czech militia entered the barracks and picked out their victims, mostly young women. Whoever wanted to could rape them. For two whole weeks, night after night, this mass rape continued. Without decent food and medicines, babies and young children were dying at a rate of up to fifteen per day. Eventually, when the survivors were transported to Germany, they left behind around 2,000 of their dead. In Troppau, in Silesia, 4,200 German women and children were expelled back to Germany, a journey by rail, in unheated freight cars, that lasted eighteen days. When the train arrived in Berlin, only 1,350 were still alive. In Prerau, Moravia, on June, 1945, an anti-German pogrom resulted in the deaths of 71 men, 120 women and 74 children who were ordered from a train and forced to dig their own grave before being shot. Many of these Germans were totally innocent and in no way sympathetic to Hitler's regime. It is estimated that between 20 and 40 thousand Germans, Austrians and Hungarians were murdered during the Czech reprisals. In the 2001 census in the Czech Republic only about 40,00 persons claimed German ethnicity.



ATROCITY AT KIELCE (July 4, 1946)

In the later part of 1945, tens of thousands of Jewish concentration camp survivors made their way back to their homeland, Poland. Many found their former homes destroyed or inhabited by Polish or German families who had moved in after the previous owners were arrested. Their possessions were either sold, confiscated or lost. These survivors were shocked by the anti-Jewish violence perpetrated against them by their former neighbours. In their first year of freedom over 1,000 survivors had been murdered. Incidents of anti-semitism in Poland was common in the months after the war ended. In Kielce, an industrial city where during the war 27,000 Jews were deported to the Treblinka death camp and murdered, a group of 150 returned Jews were living in the Jewish Community building at No 7 Planty Street. On July 4, 1946, they were ordered to leave the building by armed Polish police and then set upon by a local mob of onlookers and 41 of them were killed, 39 Jews and 2 Gentiles. (the strong Soviet garrison in the area wasn't involved in any way) As a result of these killings over 5,000 survivors made their way back to the Displaced Persons camps in the Allied occupation zones of Germany. There, stateless and penniless, they waited for the opportunity to emigrate. Their dream of a Jewish state in Palestine prompted thousands to sail in obsolete sailing vessels toward the land of their dreams, only to be confronted by British patrol vessels and turned back towards the island of Cyprus to again be incarcerated in a new type of camp, the 'Interment Camp'. They were finally allowed entry into Palestine in 1948 after Israel became independent. By 1949, some 92,000 survivors had emigrated to the USA, Canada, South America and Australia, all eager to get as far away from Europe as possible. The first census carried out in Israel in 1948 listed 712,000 Jews, a year later it had reached one million.



Fast forward to today. In Iraq, a longstanding power was overthrown approximately 6 years ago. In the wake of Saddam's fall, the US was more interested in cementing it's hold on power, and remains indifferent to the suffering of the people of Iraq to this day. It should come as no surprise that old hatreds are bubbling to the surface and what remains of society is rapidly heading towards anarchy, should it?


The kidnappers holding an Iraqi auto mechanic's 11-year-old son gave him just two days to come up with $100,000 in ransom. When he could not, they were just as quick to deliver their punishment: They chopped off the boy's head and hands and dumped his body in the garbage.

The boy's final words to his father came in an agonizing phone call. "Daddy, give them the money. They are beating me," Muhsin Mohammed Muhsin pleaded a day before he was killed.

As the worst of the country's sectarian bloodshed ebbs, Iraqis now face a new threat to getting on with their lives: a frenzy of violent crime.

Many of those involved are believed to be battle-experienced former insurgents unable to find legitimate work. They often bring the same brutality to their crimes that they showed in the fighting that nearly pushed the country into a Sunni-Shiite civil war in 2006 and 2007.

The result has been a wave of thefts and armed robberies, hitting homes, cars, jewelry stores, currency exchanges, pawn shops and banks.

Kidnapping, too, remains terrifyingly common, as it was during the peak of the insurgency. Now, however, the targets are increasingly children, and the kidnappers, rather than having sectarian motives, are seeking ransoms.

In southern Baghdad's Saydiyah neighborhood, photos of missing children are pasted on electricity poles and the concrete blast walls that enclose many areas of the bomb-battered capital.

There are few statistics tracking the number and kinds of crimes, in part because the government remains focused on the bombings and other insurgent attacks that continue to plague Baghdad and Iraq's north.

But in the minds of the public, crime has become at least as consuming as the violence directly related to the war. And like the lack of electricity and other services, crime is now a top complaint of Iraqis.

To cope, some businesses are hiring more guards and even taking their money out of Iraqi banks, believing it will be safer in secret locations under private guard or in banks outside the country.

Iraqi military spokesman Maj. Gen. Qassim al-Moussawi said investigations found that 60 to 70 percent of the criminal activity is carried out by former insurgent groups or by gangs affiliated with them — partly explaining the brutality of some of the crimes.

"After the success our forces have achieved in tightening the noose on insurgent groups, we are seeing that some of them are turning to form well-organized criminal gangs," al-Moussawi said.

Some members of Iraq's security forces are also involved, perhaps a sign that militants are still infiltrating the security services.

In August, two gunmen in their 20s broke into a neighbor's house in Baghdad's southern Dora district, beheading a father and his 1-year-old daughter and severely injuring her mother and another child. They stole 5 million Iraqi dinars, or about $4,300, and some jewelry.

They were arrested the next day. One of them was a former soldier who left the Iraqi army seven months ago.

In one of the most high-profile crimes in recent years, several members of Iraq's presidential guards — which protect senior officials — broke into the state-run Rafidain Bank on July 28 and stole about 5.6 billion Iraqi dinars, or $4.8 million. They tied up eight guards at the bank in Baghdad's central Karradah area and shot each one execution-style.

Four of the robbers were convicted and sentenced to hang. Three others remain at large.

In another heist, four gunmen with Interior Ministry ID cards robbed a private bank on Aug. 13 after forcing employees into a side room at gunpoint. The gunmen surrendered after a shootout with police, and no one was hurt.

In April, Iraq created a military task force to battle gangland-style crime after gunmen with silencer-fitted weapons killed at least seven people during a daylight heist of jewelry stores.

Still, criminals continue to operate seemingly without fear of getting caught.

Muhsin Mohammed Muhsin, the 11-year-old, was kidnapped around noon on his way home from a neighbor's funeral on Aug. 31 in Baghdad's eastern Shiite district of Sadr City.

His father frantically searched through police and hospitals records and distributed his son's picture. The kidnappers called two days later.

"They were calling us once every eight hours for two straight days," said Mohammed Muhsin, the 39-year-old father of six. "They said, 'You are wealthy people' and asked for $100,000, but I told them I could only secure $10,000."

"The next day, the police found him dumped in the garbage ... with his head and hands chopped off. His body showed burns and marks of torture."



Iraq sure seems to be going in circles these days. I wonder how long before someone else comes to throw us out and attempt to restore the rule of law?


 

28 comments (Latest Comment: 09/23/2009 02:39:07 by clintster)
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