Nice pics Chris.

I will check out the movie when I get a chance.

Hope you don’t mind if I pimp those pics and share them on other web sites…

I wonder if your website hits have gone up in recent days?

anyway

stay sharp…

again,

don’t get lulled to sleep if a 1960’s love fest breaks out.

Back in the US…we seem to be fixated on events in the 1960’s.

AT least the media will not let the past slip away from our memory.

Good luck and enjoy the Ice Cream .

…seems buisness will be “BOOMING” once again for the Ice Cream man ;)

Thank you so much. I am not one to gush, but you have the a great job at reporting from the scene, better than anything else I have read. I sincerely appreciate that you have put your life on the line to get the facts out there. Stunning reporting.

How do the Mahdi Fighters hold up in the shrine justify their role as Human Shields when there’s evidence everywhere that we would leave the shrine alone if there were no fighters based from it? Does anyone “really” believe this claim of shields?

Great pictures, Chris - thanks for posting these.

good pictures and interesting movie clip Chris.

the gunfire certainly sounds close, but I notice nobody’s ducking for cover. And two kids on bikes seemingly nonchalant as they ride across the street. The car in shot seems to have some sense in reversing back into the street it was just about to exit from.

This is what broadcast has over print, to hear the shots, shells falling, to get more of a ‘feel’ for it. Your writing is better though :) don’t give it up

the winners were the fundamentalists. they’ll be seen as having held off the americans. they all get amnesty, too. jesus h. christ, we could’ve ignored them and gotten the same result!! absurd!! when are we getting the hell out and letting these people stumble their way toward their own vision of freedom? if south africa hasn’t yet erupted into a bloodbath after all those years of apartheid, what on earth makes us think these iraqis have some mass death wish? they will work it out. it’s their right. we have no business there anymore. period.

come home, chris. it’s time for all of us.

Wow thats the first time I saw the inside of the temple. The rocket launcher there standing on looks like a M-136 AT-4, a U.S. made one-use weapon. I wonder where they got it? The other one slung on the dudes shoulder is (I think) a RPG-22, about the same thing except it’s Russian.

Dadler, South Africa (RSA) is a totally different situation. Yes there was outside pressure for the whites to relinquish control, but the USA (or anyone else) didn’t invade and force the situation to change through military action - the entire process was done off their own backs. Plus there wasn’t (technically) any major change in the system of government anyway - the only real legal/political change as such was the repealing of laws which disadvantaged anyone who wasn’t white (RSA has a large Pakistani/Indian population too). RSA was already a democracy, their laws simply forbed a specific section of the population from voting, in exactly the same way as the UK, USA and others limited voting rights to landowning males - effectively preventing women and the poor from voting.

Plus I seem to remember there was a LOT of bloodshed imediately after the repealing of Apartheid. It simply never reached a level where the RSA government felt international assistance was required, and since it could be viewed as the ‘natural evolution’ of RSA society, ‘outsiders’ wouldn’t necessarily be welcome or even wish to get involved, unless there was an obvious humanitarian crisis as there is in Sudan’s Darfur province at the moment.

Chris, lets not forget these courteous Mehdi militants are the one who have been bullying women to wear hijab in the southern cities, they are the ones who have been killing liquor store owners etc. Although I did not get the sense of sempathy for them, I did not think they deserved press coverage. Foreign journalists are falling in the same trap Aljazeera had fallen into, and that is you are getting to cover these brutal anarchists because they want you to. The underdogs are not always right. Please keep that in mind. Hey, did you learn Arabic yet? Be safe.

Mark

PacSailor,

If you want the shiny glossy version of what’s going on, whatch CNN or FOX.

Good job out there Chris.

Looks like Basra is going to be cooking this week.

http://portal.telegraph.co.uk/global/main.jhtml?xml=/global/2004/08/27/wirq127.xml

Pacsailor, bear this in mind: the Mahdi fighters were probably only acting honourably towards Christopher, and those he works alongside, because they are Journalists, and because the Mahdi Army knows whatever they do has an affect on view of the Journalists’ readers. That doesn’t make them ‘nice’ people, it just means they’re wily foxes who are quite happy at using the media to their own ends. Essentially it’s propaganda, and it’s not the first time it’s been done. But that doesn’t mean their view should be squashed either - otherwise all you’ll hear is either the Bush/Blair view, or the idea of some dusty anti-war academic who’s just been disinterred from their books and hasn’t ever actually met the people they’re psychoanalysing.

PacSailor — I’m fully aware of the brutality of the Mahdi guys. As I posted in earlier posts, below, that got me royally flamed by many, I harshly criticized these guys. I just felt in these posts, it was time to show some more elements of them.

http://www.back-to-iraq.com/archives/000803.php

http://www.back-to-iraq.com/archives/000807.php

Chris,

  Real Player.....please

I was absolutely blown away by the 2 boys on the bikes. Only a deep sadness can describe my response. What a childhood they, and all the children in Iraq, have been forced to live! We go on merrily here, making sure that our children wear their helmets etc. while riding their bikes. We don’t have to worry about them being hit on the head by bomb fragments.

Thanks for all the comments, I was by no means trying to lessen the value of Chris’s reporting. Actually Chris’s blogs and some Iraqi websites are my only source of news these days. I am just getting very frustrated and disappointed with the situation in Iraq, it has gone from bad to worse in the past six months, and I blame the Sadr among the Shiites and the Baathi’s among the Sunnis for the chaotic situation in Iraq. Most of all I blame the Bush administration for making the wrong decisions that started the detoriorating security situation.

I might not have mentioned that I was born, raised, and studied in Baghdad, and the bad news only tear my heart.

Keep at it Chris, and I am just hoping the news coming from Iraq become more hopeful.

Mark