Update On The Mess We've Made

A few news nuggets via Juan Cole.

US troops found caches of chlorine and nitric acid in guerrilla storehouses in the Ghazaliya district of Baghdad on Thursday, raising the specter that the guerrillas are increasingly turning to chemical weapons. They have conducted several attacks using chlorine gas.

The US is attempting to avert a potentially disastrous Turkish military intervention in Iraqi Kurdistan. The Turks accuse Kurdistan of harboring 3600 guerrillas of the radical Kurdish Workers' Party (PKK), who, it says, are committing acts of terrorism in eastern Anatolia and then slipping back over the border into Iraq. Turkish Foreign Minister Abdullah Gul is threatening hot pursuit by Turkish troops across that border. Such an incursion could set off the tinderbox that is northern Iraq.

Prince Hassan of Jordan supports Turkey in this regard. He warns against an ethno-religious breakup of Iraq, saying it will lead to the Balkanization of the entire Middle East.

Total's CEO has been detained in connection with a bribery charge related to Total's interest in Iranian petroleum.

Iraqi Christians are being forced to flee their country by the violence and because they are sometimes targeted by Sunni Arab guerrillas who wrongly associate them with the West. This article estimates them at 5% of the Iraqi population, which is probably incorrect. There were 800,000 or so of them before the war, but my understanding is that they may be down to 500,000 now, which would make them 2 percent of the population. Likewise, it strikes me as highly unlikely that 40% of Iraqis fleeing the country are Christian. The vast majority of Iraqi expatriates (some 800,000) in Jordan are Sunni Arabs, e.g.

There is so little safe water in Iraq that this summer a major cholera epidemic could break out, the UN is warning.