Israeli company to cash in on building separation walls in Iraq

Baghdad, 25 April - Following Monday's protest marches in the Adhamiya district of Baghdad against a US project which they feel aimed at herding them into a prison, Iraqi Shia leader Moqtada al-Sadr surprisingly stood up against the project also. Adding his voice to the mainly Sunni protesters against the construction of a 5 km-long wall around the neighborhood of Adhamiya in Baghdad, he condemned the evil intentions of the occupation forces, accusing them of aiming at dividing Sunni from Shiite Iraqis. Declaring himself confident that mounting protest from "honourable people" will bring down the US project of fencing in unwanted local minorities, Moqtada al-Sadr declared "We the people of Iraq will defend Adhamiya and other neighbourhoods that you (Americans) want to segregate from us. We will stand hand in hand with you (Sunnis) to demonstrate and protect our holy land." Seemingly unabated, high-ranking US officers, among them Brig. Gen. John F. Campbell, declared the construction of the wall will go ahead as planned and revealed that a plan to construct additional separation walls around other neighbourhoods were also in the making. The US military spokesmen applied the term of "gated communities" - a term borrowed from the entirely different US socio-ecnomical reality of urban planning - to what Iraqi protesters perceive as a policy of ghettoization. In any case, the plan to fence in Iraqis on a large scale is designed to bring into business a well-known Israeli company: according to a report issued yesterday by the Mosul-based Dar Babel, the project of social engeneering through building conrete separation walls in Iraq has been in preparation for at least three months. The project is headed by the well-known finance tycoon Ahmad al-Chalabi and will bring into business on an unprecedented scale the Israeli company of Zeef Belinksi. The company of Zeef Belinski, a German-Israeli Jewish businessman, has a long experience in building barriers in the Occupied Territories of Palestine: with the help of two corrupt Palestinian business clans - owners of the Tarifi Cement Companies and the Barakeh General Trade - in the years 2003/4 Zeef Belinski imported 390.000 tons of subsidized Egyptian cement and used it for building Jewish settlements and the Apartheid wall in the Occupied Territories of Palestine. The cement had been subsidized by the Egyptian government exclusively for use in rebuilding Palestinian homes and infrastructure destroyed by the Israeli occupation forces, but the Tarifi and Barakeh companies used only 30.000 of the delivered 420.000 tons for that purpose, while reselling the greater part to Belinski. While Tarifi and Barakeh, outfitted with certificates from the Fatah-managed Palestinian National Authority, managed to get the cement from Egypt at an average price of 13,5 dollars per ton, the average market price in Israel at that time was at 90 dollars per ton. Thus, the trio Belinski, Tarifi and Barakeh generated millions of dollars of net profit at the expense of the Egyptian taxpayer.