Summaries here and here and here and here and a judicial occurence here.

Fourteen persons were arrested by the security border forces in Zakho, Duhuk province, on Monday, while trying to infiltrate into Turkish territories, a security source said.

[snip]

Border guard forces in Duhuk arrested more than 400 people during the past six months in different parts near to the Iraqi-Turkish borders for attempting to sneak into Turkey.

Most of them are young men from different parts of Kurdistan and Iraq. Article

If true to past form (and there is no reason to expect otherwsie) the majority of them will not just get out of town, but out of the country.

Iraq’s parliament went into summer recess for a month on Monday after political leaders failed to agree on a series of laws that Washington sees as crucial to stabilising the country.

Lawmakers said the government had yet to present them with any of the laws. The parliament had earlier signalled its intention to go into recess in August after cutting short its summer break that normally starts in July.

“We do not have anything to discuss in the parliament, no laws or constitutional amendments, nothing from the government. Differences between the political factions have delayed the laws,” Kurdish lawmaker Mahmoud Othman told Reuters. Article

No weapons or forces being marshaled, but it is nonetheless a civil war — of words.

Iraq’s electricity minister is blaming southern provinces for the Baghdad blackouts, threatening sanctions if they do it again.

Meanwhile, the southern Maysan province, which is not on the ministry’s list, said it will build a power plant to meet an electricity shortage.

The governing council of the Najaf province has also taken action against the lagging power problem, saying it will remove its power plants from the national grid in order to meet local demand.

The weekly Baghdad newspaper Al Mada reports Electricity Minister Karim Wahid called out the Diwaniya, Basra, Nasiriya and Babil provinces for consuming too much of the electricity their plants produce, allegedly depriving Baghdad.

The capital has suffered extensive blackouts lately, worse than the usual lull in electricity the country faces routinely.

Wahid said the provinces are not following National Power Control Center orders, which he said may lead to withholding of funds and technical assistance as punishment. Article

Guess who won’t be in the gallery during G. Walker’s next State of the Union address?

Iraq’s 1-0 victory over Saudi Arabia on a 71st-minute header by captain Younis Mahmoud was an inspirational triumph for a team whose players straddle bitter and violent ethnic divides. After the game, Mahmoud called for the United States to withdraw its troops from his nation.

“I want America to go out,” he said. “Today, tomorrow, or the day after tomorrow, but out. I wish the American people didn’t invade Iraq and, hopefully, it will be over soon.”

Mahmoud also said he will not return to Iraq to celebrate.

“I don’t want the Iraqi people to be angry with me,” he said. “If I go back with the team, anybody could kill me or try to hurt me.”

[snip]

Elation was juxtaposed against the tragedy in the players’ homeland. Coach Jorvan Vieira and Mahmoud wore black armbands during the postgame news conference to commemorate the dozens of fans killed back home during celebrations following Wednesday’s semifinal victory over South Korea.

“It’s very clear, from our arms, our respect to the people who died when we put Korea out of the competition,” Vieira said. “This victory we offer to the families of those people.”

Vieira, who is Brazilian, resigned after the game.

“I have worked my best to give happiness to the Iraqi people, to bring a warm smile to their lips and my mission is accomplished,” Vieira said. “The satisfaction is doubled when you can get this cup and you bring happiness for a country, not just a team. It’s more important than anything.”

Mahmoud, who plays for Al Gharafa in Qatar, scored his fourth goal of the tournament when he met Hawar Mulla Mohammed’s corner kick at the far post. Goalkeeper Yaser Al Mosailem went or the ball but didn’t get it, presenting an easy chance for an unmarked Mahmoud. Article

Oil-related news.

#1:

Iraq’s Kurdistan Regional Government will take up its own oil law Tuesday morning as it moves forward on economic development in the northern region.

A KRG official told United Press International the regional parliament will begin debate on a law that will set guidelines for developing the oil and natural gas reserves. Article

#2:

A disagreement that emerged last week between the two mainstream Iraqi Kurdish political parties concerning the country’s draft oil law has been overcome and the draft is expected to be approved [Tuesday] at the regional Kurdish parliament in northern Iraq, according to a report on pukmedia.com, the official Web site of the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK).

Iraqi President Jalal Talabani (L) and the head of the semi-autonomous Kurdish region in northern Iraq, Massoud Barzani, have solved the disagreement on the country’s draft oil law.

The disagreement between parliamentarians from Iraqi President Jalal Talabani’s PUK and Massoud Barzani’s Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP) surfaced at a special parliamentary session last Tuesday when PUK deputies left the assembly in protest, pukmedia noted in its report posted from Arbil on Monday. Article

#3:

Insurgents attacked on Sunday an oil refinery in the southern part of the Iraqi Capital Baghdad wounding 10 workers, the MNF said in a statement Monday.

The insurgent launched four mortar shells at “Doura” oil refinery, the statement added.

The attack is said to have resulted in wounding 10 workers at least but the refinery operations were not affected. Article

Scathing is the only way to describe the Washington Post’s belated expose of Crescent contractors, as described (link within) here.

Palace of broken dreams, moinument to deadly delusion.

Huge, expensive and dogged by controversy, the new American embassy compound nearing completion here epitomizes to many Iraqis the worst of the U.S. tenure in Iraq.

“It’s all for them, all of Iraq’s resources, water, electricity, security,” said Raid Kadhim Kareem, who has watched the buildings go up at a floodlit site bristling with construction cranes from his post guarding an abandoned home on the other side of the Tigris River. “It’s as if it’s their country, and we are guests staying here”

For all its scale and nearly $600 million (U.S.) cost, the compound designed to accommodate more than 1,000 people is not big enough and might not be safe enough if a major military pullout leaves the country engulfed in a heightened civil war, U.S. planners now say.

[snip]

Like much U.S. planning in Iraq, the embassy was conceived nearly three years ago on assumptions that stability was around the corner, and that the military effort would draw down, leaving behind an array of civilian experts who would remain intimately engaged in Iraqi state-building. The result is what some analysts are describing as a $592 million anachronism.

“It really is sort of betwixt and between,” said Stephen Biddle, a senior fellow at the U.S.-based Council on Foreign Relations who advises the defence department. “It’s bigger than it should be if you really expect Iraq to stabilize. It’s not as big as it needs to be to be the nerve centre of an ongoing war effort.”

In a stunning security breach, architectural plans for the compound were briefly posted on the Internet in May.

“If the government of Iraq collapses and becomes transparently just one party in a civil war, you’ve got Fort Apache in the middle of Indian country, but the Indians have mortars now,” Biddle said.

[snip]

Plans are also being drawn up to build short-term housing for several hundred additional people on a currently unused portion of the site, said Patrick Kennedy, the State Department’s management chief, who travelled to Iraq in May to review embassy staffing. How much the housing will add to the cost has not been determined.

The project has echoes of another mega-embassy where diplomats, spies and army brass met for drinks and golf dates in a slice of America amid the escalating chaos in Somalia. That compound, which dwarfed even the Baghdad facility, was dismantled by looters in the power vacuum left by the overthrow of Mohamed Siad Barre’s dictatorship in 1991. Article

Noted FYI:

The Department of Foreign Affairs (UD) has decided to stop the training of Iraqi police officers in Norway, after 10 officers have defected, said reports reaching here on Monday.

Instead, UD plans to support the training in Iraq, Norwegian Broadcasting (NRK) reported.

[snip]

“Maybe in a hundred years we will be able to apply our training,” a high-ranking Iraqi police officer told NRK. Article

Floating incidents just waiting to occur. A regional concurrence on updating alignment and mapping of the strait is long overdue.

Mandated to secure Iraqi waters, the commander of a US gunboat orders his crew to watch an Iranian look-out post for activity as his ship sails through waters with no clear divide between Iraq and Iran.

It was in this murky stretch that 15 British military personnel were captured by Iran earlier this year and accused of straying into its waters. A long-running dispute over the nearby Shatt Al Arab border river has helped spark war in the past.

Now, the US military and its allies patrol as close as possible to where they believe Iraq’s territorial waters end, but as tension rises between the Islamic Republic and the West, so does the potential for accidental escalation.

“We set a line where we think it’s reasonable, and by customary use, going up and down that line, we try and set the tone,” said John Chandler of the Australian HMAS Anzac warship, part of the coalition patrolling Iraqi waters.

“The Iranians have slightly different view as to where the line is.”

The last time Iran and Iraq agreed on the division of their waterways was in 1975, when the Shatt Al Arab river and its mouth into the Gulf were split along their deepest channel.

Since then, Western navy sources said, silt has shifted the riverbed’s topography but no new marine border has been defined, leaving right of passage to custom: use it or lose it. Article

Keeping up with the courts-martial:

A US soldier pleaded not guilty Monday to the rape and murder of a 14-year-old Iraqi girl and the slaying of her family, officials said.

Private Jesse Spielman did, however, plead guilty to lesser charges related to his involvment in the scandalous crime.

Revelations last year that the soldiers calmly plotted to violate a young girl they had seen walking down the street and cover up their crime by killing her family and setting their house on fire undermined the already battered reputation of the US military.

Private Jesse Spielman is the last of four soldiers to face a military tribunal in the case.

He pleaded guilty to conspiracy to obstruct justice, arson, obstruction of justice, and wrongfully touching a corpse but denied all charges that he planned the gang rape and murders.

The alleged ringleader, Steven Green, has been charged as a civilian because he was discharged before the crime came to light. Federal prosecutors have said they will be seeking the death penalty in his case.

Sergeant Paul Cortez and Specialist James Barker — who both admitted to raping the girl — received life sentences after pleading guilty earlier this year.

Private Bryan Howard, who served as a watchout, was sentenced to 27 months in jail for acting as an accessory and helping to obstruct justice. Article