Friday, May 11, 2007
INM daily summary – 11 May 2007
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- The Sunni-led Muslim Scholars Association issued a statement on its website on May 9 condemning the nearly weeklong siege of Samarra by U.S. forces and describing it as collective punishment.
- Baiyaa, a middle-class district in western Baghdad, has started to display the fears and flight that have already carved up much of the city, which has become a patchwork of separate Sunni and Shiite enclaves.
- The Islamic State of Iraq, through its al-Furqan Foundation for Media Production, issued to jihadist forums, Thursday, May 10, 2007, a one-minute video depicting the gunshot execution of the nine captured employees of the Iraqi Ministries of Interior and Defense.
- Local Hay Al Bayaa citizens said that a joint Iraqi-US force began searches and raids in the city looking for wanted for wanted suspects and illegal weapons.
- Iraq's autonomous Kurdish region has sent 1,000 peshmerga troops to its border with Iran to prevent attacks by the Islamist insurgent group Ansar al-Islam.
- The provincial authorities in the holy city of Najaf have started scores of projects worth billions of Iraqi dinars.
- Cancer-related death rates have increased substantially in southern Iraq particularly in the provinces of Basra and Missan, a medical study has found.
- Senior Iraqi Kurdish officials will travel to Baghdad next week hoping to end an impasse with the central government over a draft oil law.
- Iraq's cabinet approved selecting May 16 every year to commemorate the mass graves memory in Iraq.
- The Iraqi House Speaker Mahmoud al-Mashhadani adjourned Thursday's session until this Saturday half an hour after its start following a heated argument between Iraqi parliamentarians over a report on a sit-in staged by Diala residents in the Shiite city of Karbala.
- A group of Iraqi women launched a peace movement, called Balad al-Salam Bas lil Unf (Abode of Peace…No More Violence) in an effort to promote peace and halt violence.
- The fate of Nouri Al Maliki's government has been the subject of many Iraqi rumours and possible scenarios.
- Iraq's government will respond to oil workers who have delayed a strike that could take 1.6 million barrels per day from the market.
- Addustour has learned from Accord Front sources that the Defense Minister, Mohammed Abd Al Qadr Ubaidi [Mufriji], will announce his resignation in the next few days.
- The Finance Ministry has allocated 140 billion dollars in additional budget funding to speed up reconstruction in the Basrah governorate in 2007.
- Security round-up.
