GENEVA: More than 4 million Iraqis have now been displaced by violence in the country, the U.N. refugee agency said Tuesday, warning that the figure will continue to rise as Iraqi authorities struggle to provide food and medical services amid the current poor security situation.
Regional authorities and local municipalities are helpless to handle this relentless infantry of hungry and scared people. Checkpoints are stopping people and essentially killing them by denying them entry or registration for relief. Checkpoints are sending families already travelling on foot to places where they have no food, shelter, clean water or sanitation facilities. This a living hell that the Bush Administration has sent these liberated people to. An absolute living hell.
I mean this is just a goddamned shameful mess and the only reason America doesn’t have to pay for it is because the goddamned lazy press is more interested in Anna Nicole’s dead ass than the actual suffering of people who we claim to liberate. This press has no interest in journalism, only entertainment. Let’s not depress anyone with a sad story about the havoc we have sent this region into. No caskets. No cameras at Walter Reed. No placards for the President to read.
Forced evictions from public buildings are common, Pagonis added. Almost half of all displaced people have no access to official food distribution programs, according to U.N. estimates.
Most of those uprooted from their homes come from Baghdad and its surrounding districts. More than 85 percent of the Iraqis displaced within the country have moved to central and southern regions, Pagonis said. She said about 30,000 Iraqis continue to flee each month to Syria, which is now housing 1.4 million Iraqi refugees. Another 750,000 are in Jordan. While Iraq's neighbors are bearing the bulk of the refugee burden, few Iraqis are being welcomed into countries further afield, particularly in Europe, Pagonis said.
The administration of U.S. President George W. Bush said in February that it will allow up to 7,000 Iraqis to permanently settle into the U.S. — up from 202 in 2006 — and will pay more to help Iraq's neighbors cope with the surge of refugees.
UNHCR hopes to find a permanent home for 20,000 Iraqi refugees by the end of the year.
Wow. We send 4 million liberated people fleeing and offer to house 7000. Compassionate Conservatism folks.
Imagine for a second the Hell of walking your family and what precious few items they can carry to another country. This is Katrina but in another country. That's how dangerous these asshats who run our government are. Imagine waking up one day and realizing that your business will never open again and your dead friends will never say goodbye and your wounded friends will never really heal and how there never seem to be any news cameras to see your suffering.
Link here: http://www.iht.com/...
American television never mentions that the US has 19000 Iraqis in jail, or that some have been women, or that some are innocent, or how they feel about being in prison.
So is Paris Hilton being given special treatment by our media? We all are, folks.
Link here: http://www.juancole.com/...
And thanks to the Bush Administration, a new industry is being born in Lebanon and Syria: Prosthetics.
Silicone arms, hands and legs were strewn across drafting tables where Syrian prosthetics engineers drilled and shaped at a feverish pace. Gypsum casts of tiny feet – replicas of the lost limbs of a 5-month-old Iraqi girl – dried on a bench. A startlingly lifelike woman’s arm, complete with carefully shaped fingernails and a wedding ring, was nearly ready for its owner.....About 60 Iraqi families show up every day, carting children who are missing limbs, gravely ill with untreated leukemia or bowed to 90-degree angles because Iraqi hospitals lacked the expensive braces to combat spinal disabilities. Today, one little boy with severe scoliosis arrived strapped like furniture to a dolly. Until the workshop finishes his back brace, the family will wheel him around Damascus using the only tool they have to keep him upright.
http://washingtonbureau.typepad.com/...
In a new report it's not 4 million refugees, but approximately 5 million refugees are trying to find a safe place to live.
Omar, a Sunni driver, lived in a pleasant house in a Shia neighbourhood of al-Jihad district in west Baghdad until he decided that it was too dangerous for his family to stay...Omar moved to the supposedly safer Sunni district of al-Khadra, but now he faces another problem. Al-Qa'ida insurgents are demanding that he join them on nightly patrols.
First they asked him politely to meet their emir or local leader. Later, when he failed to do so, they became more menacing.
They said: "Either you come with us or you will have to leave here. We suspect that you are not a Sunni, because a real Sunni would not hesitate to join the jihad."
Across Iraq, millions of people are looking for safer places to live, and not finding them. The United Nations High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR) reported last week that 4.2 million Iraqis have been forced out of their homes.
There are also ominous signs that the four-month-old US security plan for Baghdad is failing to reduce the level of violence despite an extra 17,000 US troops in the capital.
"The situation in Iraq continues to worsen," the UNHCR announced, "with more than two million Iraqis now believed to be displaced inside the country and another 2.2 million sheltering in neighbouring states."
The Iraqi refugee crisis is now surpassing in numbers anything ever seen in the Middle East, including the expulsion or flight of the Palestinians in 1948.
Link here:
http://news.independent.co.uk/...
And one last shot at our worthless sycophantic media: While 19,000 Iraqis we are holding get no press, a rich asshat gets news once worthy of a moon landing.
This is the shame of the world. We invaded, destroyed a country, made millions lose their homes, hell we did the same thing in Katrina without the bombs.
God deliver us all from Bush and his war criminals.
Remember this.
Remember what they did here.