War in Iraq II: Report From Baghdad

Here's a roundup of what Iraqi bloggers are saying.

River at Baghdad Burning notes that it's going to be a long, hot and bloody second half of summer.

We're almost at the mid-way point, but it feels like the days are just crawling by. It's a combination of the heat, the flies, the hours upon hours of no electricity and the corpses which keep appearing everywhere.

Fatima says at Thoughts From Baghdad that the escalation of sectarian violence has taken an unexpected and, for her, a familial turn:

Now in a tragic, yet not unexpected turn of events, Sunni gunmen have started "avening" their dead. Tragedy has hit close to home for us. I have mentioned before my husband's uncle in law, Uncle S. . . . Uncle S, a Shiite married to a Sunni, had to leave his home in the Sunni district of Amiriya because of the violence against Shiites there. Uncle S has been in hiding since the beginning of May, when a man was killed and dumped right in front of their home, and when his Shiite neighbor was killed in his store.

Omar mulls the implications of the escalating conflict between Israel and Palestinian militant groups at Iraq the Model:

From an Iraqi perspective I believe that a powerful strike to Hizbollah will be in Iraq's national interest. Hizbollah is Iran's and Syria's partner in feeding instability in Iraq as there were evidence that this terror group has a role in equipping and training insurgents in Iraq and Hizbollah had more than once openly showed support for the "resistance in Iraq and sponsored the meetings of Baathist and radical Islamist militants who are responsible for most of the violence in Iraq.

Meanwhile, Zeyad is visiting Amman, Jordan and notes at Healing Iraq that there are signs of the war everywhere:

You can notice it everywhere you go in Amman. At shopping malls and supermarkets; at restaurants and coffee shops; at hotels and net cafés; at discos and nightclubs; at bus stops and fruit stands: the signs and symptoms of an Iraqi invasion.

An unofficial estimation by Jordanian authorities, based on residency records, recently put the number of Iraqis inside Jordan at half a million, which in a country of 6 million is, understandably, an alarming trend. All other evidence, however, indicates that actual numbers are much higher. The majority of Iraqis here work around the restrictions of Jordanian immigration laws by paying fines or by staying illegally.

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