Summaries here and here and here.

A group of demonstrators burnt tires in front of a gas station in Kut, Wassit province, in protest against the fuel crisis that has gripped the city for over 10 days, a government source said on Saturday.

A number of demonstrators, mainly drivers of gas-fueled vehicles, gathered in front of a gas station on the highway linking Kut and Baghdad, burnt tires and blocked all roads leading to the province, a source from Wassit’s Oil Protection Force (OPF), who spoke on condition of anonymity, told the independent news agency Voices of Iraq (VOI). Article

So how’s that sovereignty going?

Iraq’s Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki on Saturday criticized the U.S. military operation in Baghdad’s Shiite bastion of Sadr City, hours after the U.S. military killed 26 suspected militants in the capital’s eastern neighborhood.

Maliki also ordered the Iraqi special forces not to take part in any military operation without prior approval from Iraqi military command.

In a statement, Maliki said that his government “vehemently rejects any military operation by the Multi-National Forces in any Iraqi province or city without prior approval of the command of the Iraqi military forces or coordination with the command.” Article

Chaos mapped:

The following is a translation of one such email making the rounds among residents of Baghdad and on Iraqi Web forums. The sarcastic email, which was written in Iraqi slang, attempts to classify the districts of Baghdad based on their level of danger. According to the author, the safest neighborhoods are the ones where the odds of staying alive are 50%:

The situation in different areas of Baghdad in regard to takfiri gangs of the new age: Al-Qaeda, the Mahdi Army, and their spiritual leaders – the forces of liberation. fall into four different categories: safe, relatively safe, dangerous, and relatively dangerous. They are classified as follows:

• A safe area: where the probability of you staying alive is 50%.
• A relatively safe: where the probability of you staying alive is 40%.
• A relatively dangerous area: where the probability of you staying alive is 30%.
• A dangerous area: where the probability of you staying alive is 20 to 10%. Source

Oil happenings — rushing to get the ink dry before any movement on the draft law?

Iraq’s Kurdish regional government plans to invite foreign bids on 40 new oil blocks in anticipation that a new national oil law will be agreed upon soon.

In a statement posted on the Kurdish authority’s website on Friday, it detailed plans for investor conferences in Erbil, London and possibly Houston to discuss the tendering process.

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Kurdish officials last month reached an agreement with the central government in Baghdad over the fair sharing of oil revenues from the country’s oil fields, a major plank of a long-awaited new hydro-carbon law.

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Important areas remained to be thrashed out, including annexes in the draft that Kurds say are unconstitutional because they wrest oilfields from regional governments and place them under a new national state oil company. Article

Contours of chaos:

The deteriorating security situation and absence of law and order has allowed sexual slavery to grow in Iraq, with traffickers able to sell victims without fear of punishment.

According to the US State Department’s Trafficking in Persons Report, issued in June, Iraqi women and children are forced into prostitution and trafficked inside Iraq and abroad, to countries like Syria, Jordan, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates, Turkey and Iran.

In the volatile northwestern city of Mosul, near the Syrian border, girls and young women from poor and illiterate families are particularly vulnerable to sexual exploitation. Many of those hired as domestic servants end up becoming sex slaves.

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Victims of sexual slavery in Iraq have little support from the police or the courts. Iraqi law only criminalises the sexual exploitation of children.

Many women are tricked into sex slavery in Iraq with the promise of a new life in the Gulf.

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The state department report noted that the Iraqi government did not prosecute any trafficking cases this year, nor did it offer protection for victims or make efforts to prevent or document trafficking. It also said efforts needed to be made to “curb the complicity of public officials in the trafficking of Iraqi women”. Article

Keeping up with the charged:

Two American soldiers have been charged with premeditated murder and planting weapons on dead Iraqis, the United States military said Saturday.

The soldiers, Staff Sgt. Michael A. Hensley and Specialist Jorge G. Sandoval Jr., were detained after fellow soldiers reported they had been involved in the deaths of three Iraqis near Iskandariya, a stronghold of the Sunni Arab insurgency south of Baghdad, in separate events between April and June this year.

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…American military officials said Sergeant Hensley, 27, from Candler, N.C., faces three charges of premeditated murder, obstruction of justice and wrongfully placing weapons with the remains of deceased Iraqis. Specialist Sandoval, 20, faces one charge of premeditated murder and one of wrongfully placing a weapon on one of the three Iraqis killed.

Both were serving with the First Battalion, 501st Infantry, of the 25th Infantry Division, which has its headquarters at Fort Richardson, Alaska. Specialist Sandoval was picked up while at home on a two-week leave in Laredo, Tex., the military said. Charges were filed Thursday, and both men are in confinement in Kuwait.

The military said in a statement that an investigation was under way. Article