baghdad

It’s Time for the US to Declare Victory and Go Home
As the old saying goes, “guests, like fish, begin to smell after three days.” Since the signing of the 2009 Security Agreement, we are guests in Iraq, and after six years in Iraq, we now smell bad to the Iraqi nose. Today the [...]

There’s a haunting paragraph in Nancy Youssef’s dispatch from Kabul today. She writes about the influx of U.S. diplomats and other civilians to Kabul — generally considered a Good Thing, even if their activities may be less necessary in the capitol than in the provinces but whatever — and how their presence is, ironically, making [...]

We’ve gotten word for weeks now that the U.S. military probably planned to request that Mosul be the exception to the July 30 deadline for U.S. combat troops to leave Iraqi cities set by the Status of Forces Agreement. Now that’s definitely the case, with a twist thrown in, according to The New York Times:
[Iraqi [...]

There used to be this line among Iraq war supporters that the “road to Jerusalem runs through Baghdad,” meaning that the intractable problems of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict required the invasion of Iraq to be resolved. Or something. And so it’s noteworthy that this is what Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki said in his press conference [...]

Tallies are still unofficial in the Iraqi provincial elections, but from the perspective of Sunni participation in the political process — one of the biggest imbalances in Iraqi politics that the elections were supposed to redress — it’s looking increasingly grim.

The United States has officially handed over control of the “Green Zone” back to the Iraqis. From The Washington Post:
When the clock struck midnight on Wednesday, the U.S. returned the palace to the Iraqi government and relinquished formal control over the Green Zone, a heavily fortified six-square-mile enclave on the Tigris River where key U.S. [...]

Naturally, it’s beneath stuff about 11 people dying in a Mosul suicide bombing, but still: Egypt is due to reopen its embassy in Baghdad, closed since insurgents murdered Egypt’s ambassador in 2005.
The Los Angeles Times reports:

BAGRAM AIR FIELD, Afghanistan – For those, like myself, who’ve never before been to Afghanistan, the sprawling Bagram Air Field is known for two things: transit and torture.
Naturally I saw no evidence of torture during my brief in-processing, after which I went on to Forward Operating Base Salerno in Khost Province, near the Pakistan border. [...]