04 Oct
United States Wars, News and Casualties
United States Wars, News and Casualties
Originally Published In 2007
The McGlynn
The war ended for those children, but it has never ended for survivors who carry memories of them. Likewise, the effects of the U.S. bombings continue, immeasurably and indefensibly.
Damn
The WarCriminals,Bush,Cheney,Rice,Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, Powell and Blair from England.
How many Iraqis have died as a result of the invasion 15 years ago? Some credible estimates put the number at more than one million. You can read that sentence again.
The invasion of Iraq is often spoken of in our country as a “blunder,” or even a “colossal mistake.” It was a crime.
Those who perpetrated it are still at large. Some of them have even been rehabilitated thanks to the horrors of a mostly amnesiac citizenry.
We condemned children to death, some after many days of writhing in pain on bloodstained mats, without pain relievers. Some died quickly, wasted by missing arms and legs, crushed heads. As the fluids ran out of their bodies, they appeared like withered, spoiled fruits. They could have lived, certainly should have lived – and laughed and danced, and run and played- but instead they were brutally murdered. Yes, murdered!
The McGlynn
War News
GUARD: ‘I watched my family die’: Shatila refugees’ suffering laid bare
Located on one square kilometre in central Beirut, Shatila is home to an estimated 14,000 people, although the true number may be more than twice that. The camp is not policed by the Lebanese authorities and most residents have limited access to housing, employment, electricity and water. Established in 1949 to accommodate Palestinian refugees, Shatila now has a population that is more than half Syrian.
Syrian refugees seeking mental health services from Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) in Shatila are suffering less from the acute trauma of war than from shifts in family dynamics and relationships caused by their displacement.
MSF has encountered an increasing number of Syrian women who have experienced domestic and sexual violence. Supported by counsellors, they told their stories, bearing witness to the psychological and emotional challenges that women in their community face and overcome. We hear first from a midwife, and then from several of the women and their counsellors………………….
‘Vendors offer food in exchange for sex’
A good memory of Syria? The night I finished my uni exams. We all went to the public park to have a BBQ and chill. Look, I have photos, I can show you. Here in Lebanon, the best times here have also been in the park when my husband and I take our children there to play. But this rarely happens as I can’t go out unaccompanied, and my husband must look for work. Most days I just stay in the room with the children. It’s been almost five weeks since my last day out. When we don’t have enough money for food, I’ll go to the market in the evening to gather vegetables from the bins. The vendors often offer fresh food in exchange for sex. But I won’t do that. I may have nothing here, but back home I was decent and respected; I had a job, a good home, neighbours, friends. It’s hard to accept that life is gone. (Syrian refugee)
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AP: Key battle in Yemen’s war risks tipping country into famine
BAJIL, Yemen (AP) — With American backing, the United Arab Emirates has resumed an all-out offensive aimed at capturing Yemen’s most vital port, Hodeida, where Shiite rebels are digging in to fight to the last man. Thousands of civilians are caught in the middle, trapped by minefields and barrages of mortars and airstrikes.
If the array of Yemeni militias backed by the UAE takes the city, it would be their biggest victory against the rebels, known as Houthis, after a long stalemate in the three-year-old civil war.
But the battle on the Red Sea coast also threatens to throw Yemen into outright famine.
A father gives water to his malnourished daughter at a feeding center in Hodeida. (AP Photo/Hani Mohammed)
Hodeida’s port literally keeps millions of starving Yemenis alive, as the entry point for 70 percent of food imports and international aid. More than 8 million of Yemen’s nearly 29 million people have no food other than what is provided by world relief agencies, a figure that continues to rapidly rise.
A protracted siege could cut off that lifeline. The battle has already killed hundreds of civilians and forced hundreds of thousands to flee their homes, adding to the more than 2 million Yemenis displaced by the war. Amid the fighting, cholera cases in the area leaped from 497 in June to 1,347 in August, Save the Children reported Tuesday.
The assault first began in June, then paused in August as the U.N. envoy for Yemen tried to cobble together peace talks, the first in two years. That attempt fell apart, and the offensive resumed in mid-September.
The United States effectively gave a green light to push ahead when Secretary of State Mike Pompeo on Sept. 12 certified continued American support for the Saudi-led coalition’s air campaign against the Houthis. The coalition has come under heavy criticism for its relentless airstrikes since 2015, which U.N. experts say have caused the majority of the estimated 10,000 civilian deaths in the conflict and could constitute a war crime. Several strikes in August killed dozens of children……………..
A woman with her malnourished son at a hospital in Hodeida. (AP Photo/Hani Mohammed)
The fighting has displaced half a million of the 2.6 million people living in the province where Hodeida is located. Documented civilian deaths in Hodeida spiked to an average 116 a month in June, July and August, up from 44 a month in the first five months of the year, according to the Armed Conflict Location and Event Data Project, a monitoring group cited by U.N. agencies.
The actual toll is likely far higher.
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AP: UN court orders US to lift some Iran sanctions
THE HAGUE, Netherlands (AP) — The United Nations’ highest court on Wednesday ordered the United States to lift sanctions on Iran that affect imports of humanitarian goods and products and services linked to civil aviation safety.
The ruling by the International Court of Justice is legally binding, but the Trump administration said the U.S. was terminating a decades-old treaty that Iran used as the basis for its case.
U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said withdrawing from the 1955 Treaty of Amity was long overdue and followed Iran “groundlessly” bringing the complaint to the U.N. court…………..In a preliminary ruling, the court said that Washington must “remove, by means of its choosing, any impediments arising from” the re-imposition of sanctions to the export to Iran of medicine and medical devices, food and agricultural commodities and spare parts and equipment necessary to ensure the safety of civil aviation.
By limiting the order to sanctions covering humanitarian goods and the civil aviation industry, the ruling did not go as far as Iran had requested.
The U.S. ambassador to the Netherlands, Peter Hoekstra, pointed that out in a tweet.
“This is a meritless case over which the court has no jurisdiction,” the ambassador tweeted. “Even so, it is worth noting that the Court declined today to grant the sweeping measures requested by Iran. Instead, the Court issued a narrow decision on a very limited range of sectors.”
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NYT: UN Suspends Crucial Cash Aid to 9 Million Yemenis
CAIRO — The U.N. children’s agency on Wednesday suspended cash transfers to 9 million of Yemen’s most impoverished citizens under pressure from the country’s Houthi rebels.
The move comes at a time when Yemen’s local currency has been deteriorating, increasing prices of food and fuel, and sparking fears of a worsening humanitarian crisis.
UNICEF said the decision came after it was unable to set up a call center to get feedback from beneficiaries, without providing further details.
Two individuals familiar with the program said the Houthi rebels who control northern Yemen hindered the launch of the call center because they feared it might reveal their manipulation of the cash transfers. The two spoke on condition of anonymity, fearing reprisals from the rebels…………..The suspended UNICEF payment is the third since the project was launched in August 2017. UNICEF has said the cash transfers are a “lifeline” to a third of Yemen’s people and “contribute to avert the risk of famine and allowed targeted families to buy food and medicine.”
The value of the Yemeni rial has been in a steady freefall. The rial traded at 800 to the dollar earlier this week, causing immediate price hikes in goods and prompting the Saudis to inject $200 million to shore up Yemen’s Central Bank reserves. Before the civil war erupted in 2015, the rial was around 215 to the dollar.
With 8.4 million people not knowing where their next meal will come from, the U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs warned last month that a further slide in the rial could result in an additional 3.5 million Yemenis becoming food insecure, and that more than 2 million are “likely to be at a heightened risk of famine.”
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NYT: Pakistan Urges Restraint by New US Envoy for Afghan Peace
WASHINGTON — Pakistan’s top diplomat on Wednesday urged the Trump administration’s new envoy for reconciliation in neighboring Afghanistan to be more sensitive to Pakistani opinion than he has been as a private citizen.
The recent appointment of veteran U.S. diplomat Zalmay Khalilzad has raised hackles in Pakistan. Khalilzad, a former ambassador to Afghanistan, has previously called on the U.S. to declare Pakistan a terrorist state unless it stops harboring insurgents.
Pakistani Foreign Minister Shah Mahmood Qureshi said that there’s been a negative reaction in the Pakistani press to the appointment because Khalilzad “has made statements in the past which have not been, to be put it mildly, very friendly to Pakistan.”
“He’s been given a new role, and I hope, I would urge him to be more sensitive to opinion in Pakistan,” Qureshi told the U.S. Institute of Peace, a Washington think tank. “Obviously as individuals we can say what we want, but once you have an official position you have to be more restrained and you have to be more sensitive, because only (then) can you be an honest broker.”
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REU: Four Turkish soldiers killed, five wounded in Kurdish militant attack: governor’s office
ANKARA (Reuters) – Four Turkish soldiers were killed and five others were wounded after a roadside bomb in the southeastern province of Batman was detonated by Kurdish militants, the local governor’s office said on Thursday.
In a statement, the governor’s office said Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) militants detonated the an improvised explosive during the passage of a military convoy in the Gercus region of the province. It said an operation was launched to capture the perpetrators.
The PKK, considered a terrorist organization by the United States, Turkey and the European Union, has waged an insurgency against the state since the 1980s. Violence in the largely Kurdish southeast has escalated since the collapse of a ceasefire in 2015.
Separately, the Turkish military said 13 PKK militants were killed in air strikes in northern Iraq’s Avasin-Basyan and Zap regions and in Turkey’s southeastern province of Siirt in air strikes over the past two days.
Turkey has in recent months carried out strikes on PKK bases in northern Iraq, especially its stronghold in the Qandil mountains, where Ankara has also threatened to carry out a ground offensive.
REU: Can Iraq’s new leaders deliver stability after months of deadlock?
SULAIMANIYA, Iraq (Reuters) – The election of a respected Kurdish politician as Iraq’s new president and his designation of a compromise figure as premier gives the country a fighting chance of achieving stability after years of sectarian bloodshed, war and economic turmoil.
President Barham Salih, 58, who was elected by parliament, is respected by both the United States and Iran, arch-rivals whose competition for influence in Iraq has fueled factionalism in a country already dogged by deep sectarian rifts.
The U.S. embassy in Baghdad and Iranian President Hassan Rouhani both congratulated Salih on Wednesday, raising hopes he might be able to energize the traditionally ceremonial role of president and engage Tehran and Washington to Iraq’s benefit.
“President Barham Salih has a strong personality and he’s well respected by the West and regional countries and most importantly Iran,” said senior lawmaker Rebwar Taha from the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan, the party that nominated him………………….Both Washington and Tehran had been vying for months to influence the shape of the incoming government, but neither can claim to be the deciding factor in the presidential outcome.
“The outcome was not predetermined. Despite U.S. and Iranian intervention, everyone was on the phones,” said Bilal Wahab, a fellow at Washington Institute for Near East Policy who is currently in Baghdad. “It was a unique political process, true politics. But this was an outlier event.”
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BBC: US to end Treaty of Amity with Iran after ICJ ruling
The US will pull out of a decades-old treaty with Iran which was used by Tehran as a basis for a case at the International Court of Justice (ICJ), Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said.
Iran took the US to court after it re-imposed sanctions on the back of abandoning a nuclear deal in May.
Iran argued that decision violated the terms of the 1955 Treaty of Amity.
But after the ICJ ordered the US to ease sanctions on Wednesday, Mr Pompeo said the treaty would be terminated.
“This is a decision that is, frankly, 39 years overdue,” Mr Pompeo said.
National Security Advisor John Bolton said all agreements which could expose the US to ICJ rulings would be also reviewed.
Both men called Iran’s claims “baseless” and rejected the ICJ ruling.
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NYT: Attacks on Afghan Checkpoints Kill 9 Police
KABUL, Afghanistan — At least nine Afghan police officers were killed in attacks by insurgents on checkpoints in three different parts of the country, provincial officials said Wednesday.
Wali Ahmad Sarih, police spokesman in southern Nimroz province, said Taliban fighters attacked a checkpoint late Tuesday, killing four police and wounding two others. He said four insurgents were killed and six wounded in the ensuing gunbattle.
Aziz Ahmad Azizi, spokesman for the governor of southern Kandahar province, reported a similar attack in which the Taliban killed three police and wounded six, also late Tuesday.
Meanwhile, in another attack carried out by insurgents in northern Faryab province, two policemen were killed and two others wounded, said Karim Yuresh, spokesman for the provincial police chief.
Recent Casualties:
Color Denotes Today’s Confirmation
The Department of Defense announced today the death of a soldier who was supporting Operation Freedom’s Sentinel.
Command Sgt. Maj. Timothy A. Bolyard, 42, from Thornton, West Virginia, died Sept. 3, 2018, of wounds sustained from small arms fire in Logar Province, Afghanistan. The incident is under investigation.
Bolyard was assigned to 3rd Squadron, 1st Security Force Assistance Brigade, Fort Benning, Georgia.
War Casualties By Name
Iraqi Freedom >>
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Total Dollar Cost of Wars Since 2001>>
Cost of War in Iraq>>
Cost of War in Afghanistan>>
Care for Veterans:
PTSD: National Center for PTSDPTSD Care for Veterans, Military, and FamiliesSee Help for Veterans with PTSD to learn how to enroll for VA health care and get an assessment.
All VA Medical Centers provide PTSD care, as well as many VA clinics.Some VA’s have programs specializing in PTSD treatment. Use the VA PTSD Program Locator to find a PTSD program.
If you are a war Veteran, find a Vet Center to help with the transition from military to civilian life.
Call the 24/7 Veteran Combat Call Center1-877-WAR-VETS (1-877-927-8387) to talk to another combat Veteran.DoD’s Defense Centers of Excellence (DCoE) 24/7 Outreach Center for Psychological Health & Traumatic Brain Injury provides information and helps locate resources.
Call 1-866-966-1020 or email resources@dcoeoutreach.orgMilitary OneSourceCall 24/7 for counseling and many resources 1-800-342-9647.Need further assistance? Get Help with VA PTSD Care
