Friday, November 25, 2005

Side by side

These are pictures of the military parade made by security keeping forces to
show their strength.
The U.S soldiers were there observing closely


That was the message I got from my brother who took these pictures. When I looked at the pictures I noticed that the American soldiers weren’t wearing anything to protect themselves and they were calmly watching the Iraqi soldiers they trained, I guess they were feeling real good in that beautiful sunny day. They stood side by side with the Iraqis to watch the parade, I can feel how proud they are to help those men to make Iraq more secure. I really enjoyed seeing the pictures and I hope you will too.







Tuesday, November 22, 2005

A clearer vision and a new starting point

Too many things happened in Iraq the past few days:

First was the scandal of torturing the detainees by the interior minister, that day set a new "rule" in the new Iraq history and sent a clear message "no more abuse" it’s a new era where Iraqis can say "No" and ask "Why".

Second was the "Reconciliation Conference" where too many Iraqis political parties and powers tried to "patch their quarrel" and also tried to find a new definition to what so called "resistance", well we didn’t expect much from this conference but still there is one big thing happened there "Zarqawi sold out!", this is the first time when all Iraqis say "No" to terror "even if not all of them meant it" because Zarqawi used to speak in the name of Sunni Arab and now they dropped him!.

The third thing is the promotion campaigns of the parties for the coming elections started and there are too many good things I would like to refer to about this subject:

· Almost all the political powers will participate in the elections and this hopefully means a balanced National Assembly
· All the big entities came apart for smaller and I can say distinguished entities. Most of the liberals left the "United Alliance" (the biggest Shia bloc in the assembly) and this is what made the Alliance make a new partnership with Muqtada al-Sadir and its obvious that " the radicals becoming more radical". That was on the Shia side
· On the Sunni side there are good changes too since they are not all "Islamic" now and there is a new branch I can't say liberal "even if they acclaim so" but at least they are not a religious party and they will take a good share of the votes.
· The liberals are stronger this round and much more organized and they are trying a new concept that I will call "a flower from every garden", they have organized their slate to make room for everyone ( Shia, Sunni, communists even old Ba'ath members)

We really hope that the coming elections will be a new starting point when all the Iraqis will have their representatives in the National Assembly and by time they will start to believe in the peaceful political process instead of violence, I'm not assuming that the violence in Iraq will stop but I hope that we will win more voices saying no to it.

Saturday, November 05, 2005

Eid photos from Baghdad

It is relatively calm in Baghdad these days and many people celebrated the Eid (a three days holiday after the holly month of Ramadan) and my brother was in one of the amusement parks (I think this is what they call it) in Baghdad and he took many pictures out there and here are some of them