Free Republic

The Iraqi army will need Kurdish fighters' help to retake Mosul, the largest city under the control of Islamic State, Iraqi Finance Minister Hoshiyar Zebari said, with the planned offensive expected to be very challenging. Mosul, 400 km (250 miles) north of Baghdad, has been designated by the government as the next target for Iraq's armed forces after they retook the western city of Ramadi."Mosul needs good planning, preparations, commitment from all the key players," Zebari, a Kurd, said in an interview on Monday in Baghdad. "Peshmerga is a major force; you cannot do Mosul without Peshmerga," he told Reuters,...

This is an excerpt from reporter Scott Johnson's blog, which focuses on the impact of violence and trauma on the community. Go to www.oaklandeffect.com for updates on his reporting. When the architects of apartheid South Africa were drawing up their urban plans, they paid special attention to the highways. In the seaside city of Cape Town, for instance, the white rulers pushed tens of thousands of blacks and people of mixed racial ancestry out of the cities and into squatter camps several miles outside the city, in a barren wasteland that came to be known as the Cape Flats. The...