http://www.khaleejtimes.com/DisplayArticle.asp?xfile=data/opinion/2004/December/opinion_December44.xml§ion=opinion&col=Facts about Iraq you wouldn’t know from Western media
BY PHILLIP KNIGHTLEY (ONE MAN’S VIEW)
25 December 2004
THIS has been a bad year for war correspondents. The war in Iraq is, of course, not over and yet we know less about it than ever before. Even events such as the major assault on Fallujah seem to have moved to the back pages of the Western media. As one British columnist put it before the assault began, “We won’t hear the screams of the civilians”.
One major reason for this is that the assault has been reported by correspondents “embedded’ with American military units”. So we have seen lots of TV footage of American marines running through the streets of Fallujah firing apparently indiscriminately. Only occasionally have we seen the results of this firing — including a group of Iraqis shouting defiantly ‘Allahu Akbar’ as an American mortar shell collapsed a ceiling over their heads. One might think that from the Western point of view the war against insurgents has been going well. That is certainly the view propagated in Washington and London. The truth is that it has been going very badly but is now so dangerous for independent Western war correspondents and even representatives of the Arab media to move freely around Iraq, that no one really knows what is happening.
Under the regime of the interim Iraqi Prime Minister Iyad Allawi, Iraqi exiles report that the multinational forces ‘remain immune from legal address and are only rarely held accountable for crimes against Iraqis. And while cabinet ministers and the US and UK embassies huddle inside a fortified green zone, Iraqis are denied the basic right of walking safely in their own streets. US tanks rumble by with signs saying “If you pass this convoy you will be killed.” snip
Iraqi women had schools for girls as early as 1899 and by 1933 Unicef was reporting that rarely had women in the Arab world enjoyed as much power as they did in Iraq. By the early 90’s, Iraq had one of the highest literacy rates in the Arab world and had more professional women in positions of power than in other Middle Eastern nations. These are just a few of the aspects of life in Iraq. How many more are we not being told about?
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