Az-Zaman (international) headlined: “Ten cars sneak past ten thousand soldiers brought in to protect the visitors of `Ashura”, while the Iraqi Az-Zaman headline was: “The governor of Karbala acknowledges the infiltration of `Ashura’s security wall”.
The American soldiers were attacked while in the police headquarters, meeting with Iraqi officials, early reports said that the building was attacked with RPGs and machine gun fire, resulting in the death of five soldiers and the injury of three. New details of the operation have starting appearing. According to Az-Zaman, the armed men who executed the operation wore the uniforms of the American Army, and rode in ten GMC jeeps. After the operation, the American forces prevented the governor and the municipal board members from entering the hall, but the governor held a press conference in his home, where he described the attack and said that the armed men came from “a neighboring province”. Az-Zaman interviewed a guard in the Police building who said that the attackers “came in an official visit”, but when they were intercepted, the attackers “took the weapons and phones” of the guards and asked them to lie on the ground. The guard added that the attackers executed the operation and left in a short period of time, destroying an American Hummer before they departed. The Americans were in yard of the building when the attack occurred, and no casualties were reported among the attackers, the newspaper added.
Iraqi papers also reported the ‘return’ of the Sadr Current to the government and the parliament, after having suspended all cooperation with the Iraqi government for over two months. The Sadr Current had suspended the participation of its ministers in the cabinet after the meeting of Nuri al-Maliki with the American president in November. The Sadr bloc controls 30 seats in the parliament and six cabinet seats.
In other news, al-Mada said that 3200 American soldiers have arrived to Iraq as part of the new ‘surge’ plan. These units will be deployed in and around Baghdad. Al-Mada also wrote on the visit of Iraqi president, Jalal Talabani to Syria, which ended yesterday. The official visit was sealed with a joint statement in which the two countries “condemned all forms of terrorism against Iraqis and Iraqi institutions and the state infrastructure and the houses of worship and the security and military apparatuses”. Al-Mada noted that the official Syrian condemnation of attacks against the new Iraqi army and police is significant, since it is the first such statement from the Syrian diplomacy.
In an interesting report, Az-Zaman quoted the Iraqi oil minister as saying that the World Bank is pressuring the Iraqi government to lift subsidies on oil products in Iraq. The Iraqi daily said that Husain al-Shahrastani, Iraq’s oil minister, stated in a press conference that the World Bank has made the lifting of government subsidies a condition for the elimination of 21 billion $ of Iraqi debts. Since the American invasion, The World Bank and US administrators have been trying to push for ‘free market’ reforms in Iraq, often translated in the privatization and abandonment of state institutions and the lowering of government subsidies, which many Iraqis see as harming the standard of living for the middle class. More importantly, the ‘liberalization’ of Iraq’s economy was chosen as a target by the US occupation from the days of Paul Bremer, these reforms were not the result of a democratic debate within Iraq, and many Iraqi experts and scholars (such as Kamil Mahdi) have criticized these measures and warned against their long-term effects on the political and economic future of Iraq.
