Source: themugglelibrarian“About ten days after the troops entered [Basra], the library was completely burnt down. We carried about 30,000 books to the restaurant and to our homes. Then, we transferred them from the restaurant to our homes in my own car and in cars belonging to the employees. Most of these books and manuscripts were rare and important ones. Regrettably, we lost a lot of books in the fire,” she said.
…there were approximately 137,000 contractors working for the Pentagon in its region. There were 113,376 in Afghanistan and 7,336 in Iraq. Of that total, 40,110 were U.S. citizens, 50,560 were local hires, and 46,231 were from neither the U.S. not the country in which they were working.
Put simply, there are more contractors than U.S. troops in Afghanistan.
"(via govtoversight)
Iraq—Some 160 miles northeast of Baghdad, in a Sulaymaniyah music hall ravaged by war, looting, and neglect, a violin-playing boy sounds a note of hope. His teacher, Azad Maaruf, lives there, instructing scores of students
-National Geographic
Photograph by Julie Adnan, Reuters
(via mademoisellealiyah)
Source: humrich
Source: guernicamag.comSome images remain like scars on my memory. One of the last things I saw in Iraq, where I spent a year with the Department of State helping squander some of the $44 billion American taxpayers put up to “reconstruct” that country, were horses living semi-wild among the muck and garbage of Baghdad. Those horses had once raced for Iraqi autocrat Saddam Hussein and seven years after their “liberation” by the American invasion of 2003, they were still wandering that unraveling, unreconstructed urban landscape looking, like many other Iraqis, for food.
Iraq Daily Life, a photo series at Guernica that strives to show the real lives in Baghdad beyond the bombs and the bloodshed.
Photos by Marieke van der Velden
Source: guernicamag.com