U.S. Soldiers Face Growing Resistance
Attacks in Central Iraq Become More Frequent and Sophisticated

Attacks on American troops are growing in frequency and sophistication across central Iraq, a crescent of discontent and hostility where many Iraqis remain opposed to the U.S. occupation of their country.

Almost every day, well-organized groups of assailants using assault rifles, rocket-propelled grenades and mortars are ambushing U.S. Army convoys, patrols, checkpoints, garrisons and public offices used by troops to interact with the civilian population.

In response, U.S. forces are trying to crush resistance through house-to-house searches, arms seizures and deadly force, in some cases with fatal consequences for innocent bystanders.
[more]

A latte - and a rifle to go
Baghdad's cafes are busy but there's no clean water. Galleries are opening, but visitors are armed. Patients freed from the bombed psychiatric hospital are returning there - because they feel it's safe. In this powerful dispatch, we reveal the reality of daily life in an upside-down city.

How, for instance, can the Americans still be failing, weeks after the fall of Baghdad, to keep any kind of electricity running for more than about an hour at a time, leaving the streets insanely, medievally dark? What are the aid agencies playing at and why, while we're at it, when it's about 40 in the shade, have the mad Koreans just sent a few tons of winter blankets? How hot will it have to get - and it hits 60 and above in July - before, still painfully short of clean water, normal Baghdadis take to the streets and finally do what Saddam wanted - go for the occupying troops with the many thousands of guns now looted from Baathist armouries?

And didn't anyone realise that, if you can surgically take out almost every ministry (the oil building was left strangely untouched), it might be an idea to have a vague plan to put something in their place? And why on earth are the Iraqis here, where nothing works, apologising to me ?

It was when I met the poet and the painter that I first began to question aspects of my tottering grasp on reality, but it was poisonously hot and I was, after all, in an insane asylum, which is actually a fine place to be if you're going to go mad.
[more]

Looting Leaves Iraq's Oil Industry in Ruins

It was only three hours into the workday, but Mr. Leaby's frustrations started, as they do every morning, when he arrived around 8 to the lone refurbished office in a complex of buildings so thoroughly ransacked that birds dart through the upper stories. Employees of South Oil, Iraq's leading oil producer before the war, are now idle because looting has brought most of the company to a standstill.

"The other day, there was looting and sabotage at the North Rumaila field," Mr. Leaby said. "The day before that, at the Zubayr field. For three months, I've been talking, talking, talking about this, and I'm sick of it."

This is now the state of the Iraqi oil industry, custodian of the world's third largest oil reserves — an estimated 112 billion barrels — and the repository of hope for the United States-led alliance and the Iraqi people themselves. Money from oil, the Bush administration has said repeatedly, will drive Iraq's economic revival, which in turn will foster the country's political stability. Many Iraqis agree.

Yet from the vast Kirkuk oil field in the north to the patchwork of rich southern fields around Basra, Iraq's oil industry, once among the best-run and most smartly equipped in the world, is in tatters.
[more]