As the final month of the UN Mandate for Iraq begins, more and more nations are pulling their forces from the nation. The latest is Tonga, whose 55 soldiers are preparing to depart this week. When the month is over, the once 35-nation strong war effort will be down to...
A Kuwaiti subcontractor to major US military contractor KBR has been holding around 1,000 men from South Asia in windowless warehouses near the Baghdad airport for months without pay or employment. The workers staged a recent protest march outside the compound to...
Two weeks ago, Iraqi President Jalal Talabani and both Vice Presidents Tareq al-Hashemi and Adel Abdel Mahdi issued a statement demanding that Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki suspend the so-called Support Councils. Today, Maliki announced that he will refuse the...
Current and future Secretary of Defense Robert Gates said today that he supports President-elect Barack Obama's Iraq policy, saying he is now "less concerned" about Obama's campaign promise to have troops out of Iraq within 16 months. Gates spent most of the past two...
Iraq's most influential religious leader Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani has expressed serious concerns about the Status of Forces Agreement (SOFA) with the United States which narrowly passed in Iraq's Parliament on Thursday. Sistani says he believes the United States has...
Thursday's narrow victory for the Status of Forces Agreement (SOFA) in Iraq's Parliament has put Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki in a position of increased power. The Prime Minister has used the US military presence to enhance his own power, and has used President...
With the expiration of the United Nations mandate at the end of December, 13 of the 19 nations that still have military commitments to Iraq are set to bring them to an end by the end of the year. A farewell ceremony for Bosnia's 86 soldiers is scheduled for Saturday,...
A deal yesterday to schedule a referendum for July 30, 2009 on the Status of Forces Agreement (SOFA) may have been instrumental in scoring the vote a narrow victory today in Iraq's Parliament, but the terms of the deal are unlikely to give the referendum the meaning...
Numerous vote delays to allow time for extra politicking, a deal for a referendum next year to placate the major Sunni bloc (the Iraqi Accord Front), and last minute endorsements from the IAF, the National Dialogue bloc, and the Iraqi Communist Party seem like a...
The Iraqi government continues to scramble to get ready for tomorrow's talks on the Status of Forces Agreement (SOFA) and tentatively the vote (though it has already been delayed twice this week). It is now being reported that the government has agreed on a demand by...
