Iraq

Devolution into federated states (letter, January 13) is an apparently attractive answer, the more so since Iraq is an artificial country, cobbled together from three Turkish provinces containing three substantial ethnic/religious groups each of which detests and distrusts both the others. The catch is that it wouldn’t stop there. The …

“I don’t think this is the right moment,” he said. “The very first thing we need is security and reconciliation.”The Tablet reports that Archbishop Basile Georges Casmoussa, 66, was kidnapped from in front of a church in the city and bundled into a car. He was released on Tuesday. The …

Saddam Hussein is usually portrayed as the villain of the piece. It would be near impossible to defend the man. It would, however, be more than useful to understand what helped him attain the position that he so brutally controlled until the most recent United States and British invasion. During …

“It was a time when a lot of fear was starting to spread into the population. You literally had to escape,” recalled Oshana, 36, whose journey took her from Iraq to Jordan and then to the United States, where her family settled in Chicago. Oshana, now a resident of Glendale, …

Parallèlement, les attaques des rebelles continuent. Une voiture piégée a explosé près du siège à Bagdad du principal parti chiite, le Conseil suprême de la révolution islamique en Irak (CSRII), tuant deux personnes et le kamikaze. Un policier a été tué à Baaqouba, au nord de Bagdad, alors que trois …

BAGHDAD, Iraq — Nestled off a bustling shopping avenue in central Baghdad, Babylon Farms offers all the retail trappings of Christmas. Baskets brim with glitterdusted ornaments. A 4-foot Santa Claus doll towers over the cash register. Rows of decorated trees and plastic red poinsettias line the shop. The only thing …

Fewer Iraqi Christians than usual came to church for Christmas Day prayers on Saturday, but those that did came despite fears insurgents, who have attacked churches and mosques in the past year, would strike again. At Our Lady of Salvation, one of Baghdad’s largest churches, hundreds of Christians sang hymns, …

Rescuers in Baghdad lifted blackened corpses on Christmas Day from the ruins of a suicide truck bombing the previous evening that killed eight people, further unnerving Iraq’s embattled Christian community. A giant fireball ripped the wealthy Mansur district in Baghdad on Friday a few hours after Christmas Eve mass was …

Sorya Isho Warda, Minister of Displacement and Migration, was once displaced herself. She told IRIN she narrowly escaped being killed by former president Saddam Hussein by fleeing the country and living in exile. Warda faces a nearly impossible task: How to create an equitable distribution of housing for people who …

Compared with the ferocity of war in much of Iraq, the isolated Monastery of the Virgin Mary — 25 miles north of Mosul — exists in tranquility. Surrounded by desert, this cool shelter — complete with olive trees, honeybees and a Chaldean church — houses six monks and 36 orphaned …