5/2010 Security and Human Rights in South/Central Iraq
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How Soon Is Safe?
HOW SOON IS SAFE? IRAQI FORCE DEVELOPMENT AND ―CONDITIONS-BASED‖ US WITHDRAWALS Final Review Draft: February 5, 2009 Anthony H. Cordesman Arleigh A. Burke Chair in Strategy And Adam Mausner [email protected] [email protected] Cordesman: Iraqi Forces and US Withdrawals 4/22/09 Page ii The Authors would like to thank the men and women of the Multinational Force–Iraq and Multinational Security Transition Command - Iraq for their generous contribution to our work. The Authors would also like to thank David Kasten for his research assistance. Cordesman: Iraqi Forces and US Withdrawals 4/22/09 Page iii Executive Summary The US and Iraq now face a transition period that may well be as challenging as defeating Al Qa‘ida in Iraq, the other elements of the insurgency, and the threat from militias like the Mahdi Army. Iraq has made progress in political accommodation and in improving security. No one, however, can yet be certain that Iraq will achieve a enough political accommodation to deal with its remaining internal problems, whether there will be a new surge of civil violence, or whether Iraq will face problems with its neighbors. Iran seeks to expand its influence, and Turkey will not tolerate a sanctuary for hostile Kurdish movements like the PKK. Arab support for Iraq remains weak, and Iraq‘s Arab neighbors fear both Shi‘ite and Iranian dominance of Iraq as well as a ―Shi‘ite crescent‖ that includes Syria and Lebanon.. Much will depend on the capabilities of Iraqi security forces (ISF) and their ability to deal with internal conflicts and external pressures. -
Perceptual Dialectology and GIS in Kurdish 1
Perceptual Dialectology and GIS in Kurdish 1 Full title: A perceptual dialectological approach to linguistic variation and spatial analysis of Kurdish varieties Main Author: Eva Eppler, PhD, RCSLT, Mag. Phil Reader/Associate Professor in Linguistics Department of Media, Culture and Language University of Roehampton | London | SW15 5SL [email protected] | www.roehampton.ac.uk Tel: +44 (0) 20 8392 3791 Co-author: Josef Benedikt, PhD, Mag.rer.nat. Independent Scholar, Senior GIS Researcher GeoLogic Dr. Benedikt Roegergasse 11/18 1090 Vienna, Austria [email protected] | www.geologic.at Short Title: Perceptual Dialectology and GIS in Kurdish Perceptual Dialectology and GIS in Kurdish 2 Abstract: This paper presents results of a first investigation into Kurdish linguistic varieties and their spatial distribution. Kurdish dialects are used across five nation states in the Middle East and only one, Sorani, has official status in one of them. The study employs the ‘draw-a-map task’ established in Perceptual Dialectology; the analysis is supported by Geographical Information Systems (GIS). The results show that, despite the geolinguistic and geopolitical situation, Kurdish respondents have good knowledge of the main varieties of their language (Kurmanji, Sorani and the related variety Zazaki) and where to localize them. Awareness of the more diverse Southern Kurdish varieties is less definitive. This indicates that the Kurdish language plays a role in identity formation, but also that smaller isolated varieties are not only endangered in terms of speakers, but also in terms of their representations in Kurds’ mental maps of the linguistic landscape they live in. Acknowledgments: This work was supported by a Santander and by Ede & Ravenscroft Research grant 2016. -
FY 2006 from the Dod Iraq Freedom Fund Account To: Reimburse Foreign Governments and Train Foreign Government Military A
06-F-00001 B., Brian - 9/26/2005 10/18/2005 Request all documents pertaining to the Cetacean Intelligence Mission. 06-F-00002 Poore, Jesse - 9/29/2005 11/9/2005 Requesting for documents detailing the total amount of military ordanence expended in other countries between the years of 1970 and 2005. 06-F-00003 Allen, W. - 9/27/2005 - Requesting the signed or unsigned document prepared for the signature of the Chairman, JCS, that requires the members of the armed forces to provide and tell the where abouts of the most wanted Ben Laden. Document 06-F-00004 Ravenscroft, Michele - 9/16/2005 10/6/2005 Request the contracts that have been awarded in the past 3 months to companies with 5000 employees or less. 06-F-00005 Elia, Jacob - 9/29/2005 10/6/2005 Letter is Illegable. 06-F-00006 Boyle Johnston, Amy - 9/28/2005 10/4/2005 Request all documents relating to a Pentagon "Politico-Military" # I- 62. 06-F-00007 Ching, Jennifer Gibbons, Del Deo, Dolan, 10/3/2005 - Referral of documents responsive to ACLU litigation. DIA has referred 21 documents Griffinger & Vecchinone which contain information related to the iraqi Survey Group. Review and return documents to DIA. 06-F-00008 Ching, Jennifer Gibbons, Del Deo, Dolan, 10/3/2005 - Referral of documents responsive to ACLU litigation. DIA has referred three documents: Griffinger & Vecchinone V=322, V=323, V=355, for review and response back to DIA. 06-F-00009 Ravnitzky, Michael - 9/30/2005 10/17/2005 NRO has identified two additional records responsive to a FOIA appeal from Michael Ravnitzky. -
Congressional Record United States Th of America PROCEEDINGS and DEBATES of the 109 CONGRESS, SECOND SESSION
E PL UR UM IB N U U S Congressional Record United States th of America PROCEEDINGS AND DEBATES OF THE 109 CONGRESS, SECOND SESSION SENATE—Tuesday, September 5, 2006 The Senate met at 11 a.m. and was will reframe what I expect to happen tax relief and fiscal restraint we have called to order by the President pro over the course of this week and in the implemented. tempore (Mr. STEVENS). near future. What is forefront in the minds of the Similar to many of my colleagues, I American people is the economy; even PRAYER spent the month traveling the country. The Chaplain, Dr. Barry C. Black, of- more so is security—yes, economic se- I began in Tennessee and ended in Ten- curity but security in general. fered the following prayer: nessee. I visited a number of States, Let us pray. from the west coast to the east coast, From Georgia to California, and each Lord and Creator of humanity, bless from Washington State to Florida. At stop in between, the people I met want this legislative body today. Give Sen- each stop, I spent a lot of time doing reassurance. They want to know when ators, during these challenging times, what I hope, and I am sure, all of my their family boards a plane, for exam- the calmness of Your abiding presence. colleagues did, listening, listening very ple, on vacation or going to Break the tensions of partisan divi- carefully to what the American people Disneyland, that plane will be safe. sions with the soothing music of uni- are thinking and what they are feeling. -
Gibbs Umd 0117E 12639.Pdf
ABSTRACT Title of Document: THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN LEGITIMACY, TERRORIST ATTACKS AND POLICE Jennifer Catherine Gibbs Doctor of Philosophy, 2011 Directed By: Professor Laura Dugan Department of Criminology and Criminal Justice Scholars often suggest that terrorism – “the threatened or actual use of illegal force and violence to attain a political, economic, religious or social goal through fear, coercion or intimidation” (LaFree & Dugan, 2007, 184) – is a battle of legitimacy. As the most ubiquitous representatives of the government’s coercive force, the police should be most susceptible to terrorism stemming from perceptions of illegitimacy. Police are attractive symbolic and strategic targets, and they were victimized in over 12% of terrorist attacks worldwide since 1970. However, empirical research assessing the influence of legitimacy on terrorist attacks, generally, and scholarly attention to terrorist attacks on police are scant. The purpose of this dissertation is to examine the influence of state and police legitimacy and alternative explanations on the proportion of all and only fatal terrorist attacks on police in 82 countries between 1999 and 2008. Data were drawn from several sources, including the Global Terrorism Database and the World Values Survey. Surprisingly, results of Tobit analyses indicate that police legitimacy, measured by the percentage of the population who have at least some confidence in police, is not significantly related to the proportion of all terrorist attacks on police or the proportion of fatal terrorist attacks on police. State legitimacy was measured by four indicators; only the percentage of the population who would never protest reached significance, lending limited support for this hypothesis. Greater societal schism, the presence of a foreign military and greater economic inequality were consistently significant predictors of higher proportions of terrorist attacks on police. -
Iraq : an Intolerable, Forgotten and Unpunished Repression”
International Federation for Human Rights Report “Iraq : an intolerable, forgotten and unpunished repression” Introduction. 5 I. Repression in Iraq . 7 II. Arrests and arbitrary detentions . 13 III. Inhuman and degrading treatments. 16 IV. Executions . 19 V. Beheading of women . 21 VI. Involuntary or forced disappearances . 24 VII. Forced Arabization and deportation . 25 VIII. Ashbal Saddam . "Saddam's cub scouts" . 26 IX. Corruption . 28 Conclusion . 29 Recommendations . 30 Appendix . 32 “Iraq : an intolerable, forgotten and unpunished repression” HRA/CJI - FIDH / PAGE 3 “Iraq : an intolerable, forgotten and unpunished repression” Contents Introduction . 5 A. Mandate and objectives of the commission . 5 B. General context of the mission . 5 I. Repression in Iraq . 7 "Peculiar conception" of the citizenship. 7 The organization of repression . 7 The repression after the death of Ayatollah M'hammed Sadek Sadr . 10 The repression of religious freedom . 11 II. Arrests and arbitrary detentions . 13 Importance and power of the services . 14 Arrest of family members. 14 Belonging to an opposition party. 14 Arrest of children under 18 . 14 Uprising of the provinces in 1991 . 14 Arrests for "unpleasant" acts . 15 Arrest of journalists . 15 III. Inhuman and degrading treatments. 16 Legalized application of cruel punishments . 16 Torture and ill-treatments . 16 IV. Executions . 19 Prison cleansing campaign . 19 Other executions . 19 V. Beheading of women . 21 Prostitution : an increasing phenomenon . 21 Prostitution : an excuse for physical elimination and political pressure . 21 Beheading : barbarism, terror and propaganda . 21 60 to 2000 women beheaded from June 2000 to April 2001 . 23 VI. Forced or involuntary disappearances . 24 VII. Forced Arabization and deportation. -
Revisiting Kurdish Dialect Geography: Preliminary Findings from the Manchester Database
Revisiting Kurdish dialect geography: Preliminary findings from the Manchester Database June 2017 Yaron Matras University of Manchester Introduction: Database method and Persian). Bilingual speakers were asked to translate the phrases into their local Kurdish dialect. Sessions were and scope recorded and transcribed into templates in which each phrase was pre-tagged for anticipated structures. The data My aim in this paper is to describe preliminary findings was imported into an open-source database (utilising from work carried out between 2011-2017 as part of a MySQL and PHP web interface software), which was made collaborative project on ‘Structural and typological accessible online. It allows the user to filter transcribed variation in the dialects of Kurdish’, based at the phrases by content (Kurdish forms), English elicitation University of Manchester. The project’s objectives were to phrase, tags, and speaker’s place of origin. create a reference database covering the main areas in A pilot questionnaire was tested in 2011-2012. It which dialects of Kurdish are spoken, to assess typological contained around 200 items, of which around half were variation (with particular consideration to possible individual lexemes and function words. The items had been contact influences), and to investigate the role of verb selected based on an assessment of structural variation in semantics in the volatility of the ergative construction in samples of connected speech from around 50 recorded Kurmanji/Bahdini. This paper presents initial findings interviews of up to 40 minutes each with speakers from pertaining to the distribution of structural features, dialect various locations in Turkey, Iraq, and Iran, and based on geography, and dialect classification. -
Historical Site of Mirhadi Hoseini ………………………………………………………………………………………
Historical Site of Mirhadi Hoseini http://m-hosseini.ir ……………………………………………………………………………………… KARIM KHAN ZAND [Moḥammad-Karim], (b. c. 1705; d. Shiraz 13 Ṣafar 1193/1 March 1779; ), “ The Wakil,” ruler of Persia (except Khorasan) from Shiraz during 1164-93/1751-79. The Zand were a pastoral tribe of the Lak branch of the northern Lors, ranging between the inner Zagros and the Hamadān plains, centered on the villages of Pari and Kamāzān in the vicinity of Malāyer. In 1732 Nāder Shah (q.v.) deported thousands of Baḵ-tiāri and a number of Zand families to Khorasan. After Nāder’s assassination in 1747, they made their way home, the Baḵ-tiāri under ʿAli-Mardān Khan (see BAḴTIĀRI CHIEFS) of the Čahār Lang, and the Zand under Moḥammad-Karim Beg (also called Tušmāl Karim, and later Karim Khan). When Nāder’s successors of the Afsharids (q.v.) failed to reassert their authority over western Persia, these two chieftains, in alliance with Abu’l-Fatḥ Khan Baḵ-tiāri (q.v.), a chieftain of the Haft Lang branch of the Baḵ-tiāri, who nominally governed Isfahan for the Afsharids, occupied the former Safavid capital in 1750 in the name of a Safavid princeling, Abu Torāb Mirzā, whom they styled Esmāʿil II (actually the third monarch of that name; Nāmi, pp. 15-17; Golestāna, pp. 171-72). While the Zand leader, as commander-in-chief, was pacifying the northern Lor areas and Kurdistan, ʿAli-Mardān staged a coup: he killed Abu’l-Fatḥ Khan, invaded Fārs, and plundered Shiraz. On his way back he was ambushed in the narrow mountain pass known as Kotal-e Pir Zan (Kotal-e Doḵ-tar in Fasāʾi) by local musketeers and driven into the mountains (Moḥammad Kalāntar, pp. -
The Iraq War Ledger a Look at the War’S Human, Financial, and Strategic Costs
Update: The Iraq War Ledger A Look at the War’s Human, Financial, and Strategic Costs Matthew Duss and Peter Juul December 2011 The United States is withdrawing the last of its troops from Iraq this month, which makes now an appropriate time to begin weighing the costs and benefits to U.S. national security from our intervention there. On May 1, 2003, President George W. Bush stood aboard the deck of the aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln and declared to the country and to the world that “Major combat opera- tions in Iraq have ended. In the battle of Iraq, the United States and our allies have prevailed.” As Americans would quickly find out, President Bush’s declaration of victory was severely premature. Iraq would soon be in the throes of a violent insurgency and, eventually, a full- blown sectarian civil war. More than eight years after that speech, as President Barack Obama prepares to keep his promise to end the war, Iraq has made progress but still struggles with insecurity and deep political discord. Though the level of violence has remained down from its 2006–2007 peak—when dozens of bodies could be found on Baghdad’s streets every morning—Iraq still endures a level of violence that in any other country would be considered a crisis. Still, the end of former Iraq President Saddam Hussein’s brutal regime represents a consider- able global good, and a nascent democratic Iraqi republic partnered with the United States could potentially yield benefits in the future. But when weighing those possible benefits against the costs of the Iraq intervention, there is simply no conceivable calculus by which Operation Iraqi Freedom can be judged to have been a successful or worthwhile policy. -
Read the Full PDF for Free!
HOPE HOPE BECAME BECAMEA DREAMA DREAM PRESS FREEDOM IN IRAQ FRÉDERIKE GEERDINK CENSorSHIP IN IRAQ Copyright © Fréderike Geerdink Book design Edwin Smet www.evatasfoundation.com HOPE BECAME A DREAM PRESS FREEDOM IN IRAQ FRÉDERIKE GEERDINK CENSorSHIP IN IRAQ Amsterdam 2019 On 10 October 2019 journalist and writer Adnan Hussein, extensively interviewed for this book, passed away. He was 71 years old. May he rest in peace. CONTENTS 9 INTRODUCTION 15 CHAPTER 1: LIFE IN CONSTANT DANGER 33 CHAPTER 2: A SHORT DIVE IN HISTORY 52 INTERVIEW WITH SHIRIN AMIN, WIDOW OF A MURDERED JOURNALIST 59 CHAPTER 3: PARTISAN MEDIA IN IRAQ AND KURDISTAN 77 CHAPTER 4: THE TIGHT GRIP OF OLD LAWS 93 INTERVIEW WITH TV JOURNALIST JUMANA MUMTAZ 98 LIST OF SOURCES 7 INTrodUCTION The text of this book had been finalized already when in early October 2019 unrest broke out in Iraq. It wasn’t unexpected, since already last year people had taken to the streets of Baghdad, Basra and other cities to protest against sub-standard living conditions, the impossibility of making a normal living and the immense corruption of the ruling political class. The media came under attack too, not from protesters but from authorities. One Saturday evening in Baghdad, masked men attacked the prominent dissenting channels NRT, Al-Arabiya and Dijlah TV, all three around the same time, suggesting it was a coordinated attack. Journalists were assaulted, leaving at least one person injured, equipment was destroyed, mobile phones damaged and buildings set on fire. The perpetrators and those ordering the attacks will remain unknown because attacks on the press always happen with impunity in Iraq. -
Automatic Kurdish Dialects Identification
AUTOMATIC KURDISH DIALECTS IDENTIFICATION Hossein Hassani 1,2 and Dzejla Medjedovic 3 1Department of Computer Science and Engineering, University of Kurdistan Hewlêr, Erbil, Kurdistan Region, Iraq 2Department of Computer Science, Sarajevo School of Science and Technology, Sarajevo, Bosnia and Herzegovina [email protected] [email protected] 3Department of Computer Science, Sarajevo School of Science and Technology, Sarajevo, Bosnia and Herzegovina [email protected] ABSTRACT Automatic dialect identification is a necessary Language Technology for processing multi- dialect languages in which the dialects are linguistically far from each other. Particularly, this becomes crucial where the dialects are mutually unintelligible. Therefore, to perform computational activities on these languages, the system needs to identify the dialect that is the subject of the process. Kurdish language encompasses various dialects. It is written using several different scripts. The language lacks of a standard orthography. This situation makes the Kurdish dialectal identification more interesting and required, both form the research and from the application perspectives. In this research, we have applied a classification method, based on supervised machine learning, to identify the dialects of the Kurdish texts. The research has focused on two widely spoken and most dominant Kurdish dialects, namely, Kurmanji and Sorani. The approach could be applied to the other Kurdish dialects as well. The method is also applicable to the languages which are similar to Kurdish in their dialectal diversity and differences. KEYWORDS Dialect identification, NLP, Kurdish language, Kurmanji, Sorani 1. I NTRODUCTION Dialectology has not received a considerable attention in Computational Linguistics (CL) and Natural Language Processing (NLP). -
Reporting on Minorities Across Iraq INARABIC & KURDISHPRESS
Reporting on Minorities across Iraq INARABIC & KURDISHPRESS APRIL 2016 By the Institute of Regional and International Studies (IRIS) at the American University of Iraq, Sulaimani (AUIS) ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS This report was developed out of the collaboration of multiple actors and institutions. This report has been produced by the Institute of Regional and International Studies (IRIS) at the American University of Iraq, Sulaimani (AUIS) in They are listed below: partnership with Free Press Unlimited (FPU) and Author: Sarah Mathieu-Comtois, Institute of PAX for Peace. Regional and International Studies (IRIS) at the American University of Iraq, SulaImani (AUIS) Researchers: Amal Hussein Alwan, Haval Mustafa Muhamad, Muhammed Ahmed, and Aws Mohammed Taha Research facilitation and editing: Christine van This report has been produced with the financial den Toorn and Zeina Najjar, Institute of Regional assistance of the European Union. The contents and International Studies (IRIS) at the American of this report are the sole responsibility of the University of Iraq, Sulaimani (AUIS) authors and can under no circumstances be regarded as reflecting the position of the We would also like to make a special note of European Union. The report has been produced acknowledgement to Saad Salloum, Iraqi as part of a program entitled ‘We Are All Citizens’ academic and journalist specializing in Iraqi in Iraq. minorities and human rights and author of Minorities in Iraq (2013). TABLE OF CONTENTS EXECUTIVE SUMMARY I RECOMMENDATIONS II INTRODUCTION 1 METHODOLOGY