Year: 2008

May’s occupation deaths in Afghanistan outnumber Iraq

Posted on By 3arabawy

From AP:

It’s a grim gauge of U.S. wars going in opposite directions: American and allied combat deaths in Afghanistan in May passed the monthly toll in Iraq for the first time.

AP is also reporting that:

As of Friday, June 13, 2008, at least 447 members of the U.S. military had died in Afghanistan, Pakistan and Uzbekistan as a result of the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan in late 2001, according to the Defense Department. The department last updated its figures June 7 at 10 a.m. EDT.
Of those, the military reports 310 were killed by hostile action.
Outside the Afghan region, the Defense Department reports 65 more members of the U.S. military died in support of Operation Enduring Freedom. Of those, two were the result of hostile action. The military lists these other locations as Guantanamo Bay Naval Base, Cuba; Djibouti; Eritrea; Ethiopia; Jordan; Kenya; Kyrgyzstan; Philippines; Seychelles; Sudan; Tajikistan; Turkey; and Yemen.
There were also four CIA officer deaths and one military civilian death.

“Military civilian” by the way means mercenaries. What an oxymoron.

Superman found dead in Iraq

Egypt child labor a somber reality

Posted on By 3arabawy

From AFP:

Thirteen-year-old Essam Hussein spends his days lugging exhaust pipes in a little repair workshop in central Cairo, one of hundreds of thousands of children forced into labor to secure a future.
“I hate school, I like it here,” says Essam who dreams of owning his own repair shop with his brothers one day.
“I’ve been working here since last year,” he says, showing the mechanics’ garage where he has been working for about a year.
In a nearby workshop, Mohammed Hassan, 15, says he works only during the summer holidays.
“At least if school doesn’t work out, I’ll have a job,” says the teenager who makes around LE 40 per week.
Whether sweating under the engine of a broken down car, roaming the streets for a few pennies in exchange for flowers or picking cotton in the Nile Delta, one in 10 Egyptian children are forced into work.
On every street corner, out in the open fields or in gritty workshops, children, some as young as 10, are required to put in a day’s work.
The UN children’s agency UNICEF estimates that 2.7 million children between the ages of six and 14 in Egypt work.
According to official statistics, a third of Egypt’s 80 million population is below the age of 15. NGOs say that among those, 10 percent are forced to work, often in difficult conditions.

Man tortured for refusing to be a police informer

Posted on By 3arabawy

From the Daily News Egypt:

Mottled with bruises and abrasions Reda Abdeen has been in a state of severe fatigue after being assaulted by Warraq Police Station officers who raided his house and took him to the police station when he refused to collaborate with them.
Abdeen says that the police wanted him report to them on movements of drug traffickers in Ard El-Liwa. He also claims that his aging father was not spared the assault either.
In a complaint he filed to the Prosecutor General and the Interior Minister, however, the father said that a police squad “stormed the house and attacked us. They tied up the hands of my son and dragged him along the floor. They tied up his hands and feet and threw him into a microbus trunk.”
The father confirmed that the reason for the assault was his son’s refusal to work with them as an informer. “They have even trumped up a drug dealing accusation against him. They planted hashish and 31 rolls of cannabis on him because he refused to work with them,” he claimed.
He said the officers had assaulted his son and had wounded him in the face and foot, pointing to the fact that his son had sustained a fracture in the right arm and the ribs after they had hung him against a door inside the police station to force him to agree.
“Despite my injuries,” the father told Daily News Egypt, “I decided to file the complaint immediately when they detained him inside the police station.”
He submitted a petition to the Interior Minister to have Abdeen released after more than three weeks despite his poor health which necessitates urgent hospitalization.
The Interior Ministry’s failure to respond prompted Abdeen’s father to file another complaint accusing the Interior Minister of colluding with Al-Warraq Police Station officers to coerce him into working with them. The victim’s mother told Daily News Egypt that Reda was their only support in their old age.

وزارة الخنازير