New challenge for Iraqi Christians
Over the past decade, Iraqi Christians have fled repeatedly to the ancient mountainside village of Alquosh, seeking refuge from violence, then returning home when the danger eased. Now they are doing it again, but this time few say they ever want to go back to their homes. The flight is a new blow to Iraq's dwindling Christian community, which is almost as old as the religion itself. During the past 11 years, at least half of the country's Christian population has fled the country, according to some estimates, to escape frequent attacks by Sunni Muslim militants targeting them and their churches.
key envoys stuck in senate logjam
A U.S. Senate logjam over confirming ambassadors risks hampering U.S. efforts to contain the expanding Islamist insurgency in Iraq, with several of President Obama's nominees for the volatile Middle East unsure when they can get to work. Obama announced his choice of a new ambassador to Iraq last month, and recently nominated envoys to Egypt, Jordan, Qatar and Turkey — key regional players that Washington is counting on to combat Sunni extremists. But a distracted Senate is moving slowly to put the new Mideast team in place, its attention focused largely on judicial appointees and politically driven votes over everything from student loans to unemployment insurance as lawmakers gear up for November elections.
100,000 Kurds guarding 'front line'
More than 100,000 Kurdish fighters, known as peshmergas, are guarding a "front line" from Iraq's eastern border with Iran to the northern town of Fishkabur near Turkey, said Jabbar Yawar, Peshmerga Ministry secretary-general, in Irbil, the Kurdish region's capital. They now occupy areas around the contested city of Kirkuk, where BP has been in talks with Iraq's government to help reverse declining output at the oil field discovered in 1927. Iraq's army abandoned Kirkuk last week.
U.N. calls killings 'war crimes'
The United Nations said the Iraqi insurgents almost certainly had committed war crimes by carrying out "coldblooded executions" in their drive for power. U.N. human rights chief Navi Pillay said in Geneva that the Sunni jihadists have carried out an "apparently systematic series of coldblooded executions" near the northern city of Tikrit in recent days that "almost certainly amount to war crimes." She said that according to corroborated reports from various sources, hundreds of noncombatants had been executed.
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