Iraq went to the polls for the third time since the fall of Saddam Hussein but for many Iraqis the election has held little hope.
Hundreds of international fighters have flocked to Syria to join the war against Bashar al-Assad’s government, most of them ill-equipped.
Former comrades are pitted against one another –and against a besieged government.
On a side street off Mogadishu’s Wadnaha Road frontline a young officer is explaining the unwritten rules of the city’s intractable civil war.
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/ 28 October 2008
Dizzying construction boom relies on migrant labourers who are lured into a life of squalor and exploitation, writes Ghaith Abdul-Ahad.
The Mehdi Army Shi’ite militia vowed on Friday night to conduct revenge attacks on British soldiers in southern Iraq after its Basra leader was killed by Iraqi special forces in an operation supported by British troops. Wissam Abu Qader was described by British officials as responsible for criminal activities and attacks against foreign troops.
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/ 5 February 2007
Fadhel is a slim 26-year-old Mahdi Army commander with a thin goatee beard and smoothed-down hair that looks like a flat cap. One day last month he described how he and his men seized a group of three Sunnis suspected of killing his fellow Shia. ”I followed the group for weeks and then one of them crossed the bridge to Karrada [a Shia district]. We first informed a nearby Iraqi army checkpoint that we were arresting terrorists”
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/ 6 November 2006
Husham is standing on a street corner in his Sunni Baghdad neighbourhood when his cellphone rings. ”Yes brother … Two strangers … Investigate and take measures,” he mumbles. He carries a pistol in his right hand. Around him are a half-dozen fellow vigilantes carrying Kalashnikovs or wearing pistols tucked into their belts.
Some men hold paper tissues under their noses; others wrap their kuffiya ends around their mouths. It is a hot and humid day at the city’s main morgue where 20 men stand in a yard, their faces pressed with silent urgency against the bars of a window, next to a white plastic sign that baldly announces the location of ”The Refrigerator”.
The road to Zarqa from Amman runs for 15km through beige hills peppered with limestone quarries, past factories, military camps, a scrapyard for big yellow cabs and a KFC joint. Trucks, taxis and military Land Rovers speed up and down, leaving trails of dust and black smoke. Like every other town in that part of Jordan, Zarqa is a place of filthy streets, traffic jams, donkey carts and grey breeze-block buildings.