Carnival of the Liberated
David J. Schuler
Welcome to the Carnival of the Liberated, a sampler of some of the best posts from the Iraqi blogosphere. It's quiet in the Iraqi blogosphere right now. Power outages are interfering with posting; daily life intervenes; neurotic iraqi wife is on vacation with Hubby. But Iraqi bloggers still have a few things to say.
First, Ibn AlRafidain wishes us a happy Thanksgiving.
Two different bloggers have two different views of Fallujah. Riverbend reacts pretty much as you'd expect. Rose of Diary from Baghdad thinks a little differently:
I think Fallujah needed a campaign similar to this long time before the terrorists and gangs strengthened themselves and made large cells and killed many innocent people. Maybe if they did it before they might have made it less bloody with less casualties and without destructing the whole city and driving away thousands of people from their homes and forced them to live in tents without source of heat in this cold weather. As I heard from people living in Fallujah, they had enough from those terrorists , but they could not do any thing against them because the terrorists would kill them with their families. I heard that some of the terrorists forced many families to have them at their homes and I heard that many of those families were killed during some attacks by the US forces. And that's why the people of Fallujah want to put an end to it.There's a lot more and some of it is quite critical of U. S. actions. You decide.
Najma of A Star from Mosul answers her readers' questions
Hammorabi and Kurdo have somewhat different opinions about elections in January in Iraq.
By the way, if you've ever wondered how to get from Sulaimani in the north-east of Iraq to Jordan, Kurdo of Kurdo's World can fill you in.
One blog, two opinions. Sarmad Zangna of Road of a Nation posts his friend Yassir's opinion of the state of things in Iraq and his own. Yassir is pretty critical; Sarmad is more positive. Yassir ends his post:
Finally I will stay work for Iraq , rebuild ,educate, strive, struggle ,help Iraqis & do all thing I can do it for Iraq & stay saying NO for war , NO for blood , NO for explosionsIf there are enough Iraqis who feel the way that either Yassir or Sarmad do and will work to make good things happen, Iraq will be just fine.
Yes for Iraq
Yes for freedom
Yes for peace
Yes for diplomatic .
Finally, Abu Khaleel of Glimpse of Iraq has an interesting story about a wounded soldier:
This post follows two rather grim posts one of which, Nihad Had to Die, I cited here last week.Soldiers in a small battalion of new recruits for the Iraqi National Guards were in training. One of the soldiers was careless and apparently had his finger on the trigger of his loaded and cocked machine gun. The gun went off and the man shot his own foot!
The person telling me of this incident said that he was surprised by the reaction of the two different groups of people there: Iraqi and US personnel. While the US boys rushed to inspect the wound and try and stop the bleeding and so forth, the Iraqi boys, the injured man's comrades-in-arms stood over him scolding him and saying things like “Fool... idiot... donkey!”
Dave Schuler posts regularly to his own weblog, The Glittering Eye. The Carnival was originally conceived by Ryan Boots.
I have been wondering recently how many of the Iraqi blogs are by Shias. The Baghdad bloggers will probably be disproportionately Sunni.
The Iraqi bloggers are understandably quite circumspect about revealing too much about their beliefs. Based on the evidence in the posts themselves I suspect that most of the Iraqi bloggers are Sunni with probably one Shi'ite and at least one Christian.