Translated material
Not a day without a murder
Bush prepares for third anniversary of Iraq war
Today, US President George W. Bush will give the first of a series of speeches he has planned to mark the third anniversary of the coalition invasion of Iraq on March 20, 2003. According to White House spokesman Scott McKellan, George W. Bush will address the nation three times on Iraq before the end of the month. The President wants to convince his fellow citizens that his Iraq course is correct. Today's talk is about training Iraqi national forces capable of "leading the fight and defending their own democracy."Almost 80% of Americans fear the outbreak of a civil war in Iraq, since there are acute contradictions in the country between Sunnis, Shiites and Kurds. The parties representing them cannot agree on the composition of the future government and the candidacy of the prime minister. Iraqi Kurdish President Jalal Talabani hopes that on March 19, Iraqi parliamentarians elected in December 2005 will finally convene for their first session.
Meanwhile, Iraq is becoming increasingly restless, and Americans are increasingly becoming victims of violence. On Saturday, supporters remembered 54-year-old Tom Fox, who was killed after being tortured by two shots to the chest and head. His body was found on Thursday on the outskirts of Baghdad. Tom Fox was abducted on November 26, 2005 by the Swords of Justice, along with two Canadians, 41-year-old James Loney and 32-year-old Harmeet Singh Suden, and 74-year-old Briton Norman Kember. They are all members of the Canadian pacifist organization Christian Peace Teams. She was the first to alert the world to the violation of the rights of prisoners in Iraq. Fox was the only American in this pacifist brigade.
For the lives of the hostages, the militants demanded the release of all Iraqi prisoners. Video footage of prisoners begging for salvation was published on the Internet. In the last video, which appeared on February 28, Tom Fox was no longer present. The fate of his comrades is unknown.
“He walked with his eyes open. He knew what he was getting into and what the outcome could be,” his friends say. Those who remembered Fox spoke of his dedication during his work in Palestine. And the Quakers who participated in his funeral in the United States only silently prayed. But, as they later explained to reporters, not for Fox at all, but for his killers and for the Iraqi people.
According to the international human rights organization Reporters Without Borders, Iraq has been the most dangerous country for journalists for three years since the start of the American invasion. Jill Carroll, a 28-year-old journalist for the Boston newspaper Christian Science Monitor, who was kidnapped in Baghdad on January 7, is still languishing hostage. During this period, 112 media representatives were killed while on duty in Iraq. Ten of them worked for the local Al-Iraqiya TV channel. On Saturday, the channel’s editor himself, 43-year-old Amjad Hamid Hussein, was added to this list, shot at point-blank range in an official car in Baghdad’s protected “green zone.” After his murder, al-Iraqiya employees demanded permission from the authorities to carry weapons for self-defense. Yesterday, explosions and shelling in Baghdad claimed the lives of six people.