Iraq: Bleak Eid

Eid is the Islamic holiday and usually it's a time for families to get together, eat, drink and celebrate. Not this Eid. This Eid is unbearable. We managed a feeble gathering last year and no one was in a celebratory mood. There hadn't been a drop of water in the faucets for six days. There have been several explosions -- some far and some near but even those aren't as worrisome as the tension that seems to be growing on a daily basis.

Even at the beginning of the occupation, when the water would disappear in the summer, there was always a trickle that would come from one of the pipes in the garden. We've been purchasing bottles of water (the price has gone up) to use for cooking and drinking. Forget about cleaning. It's really frustrating because everyone cleans house during Eid. It's like a part of the tradition. The days leading up to Eid are a frenzy of mops, brooms, dusting rags and disinfectant. The cleaning makes one feel like there's room for a fresh start. It's almost as if the house and its inhabitants are being reborn. Not this year. We're managing just enough water to rinse dishes with. To bathe, we have to try to make-do with a few liters of water.

Water is like peace -- you never really know just how valuable it is until someone takes it away. It's maddening to walk up to the sink, turn one of the faucets and hear the pipes groan with nothing. The toilets don't function… the dishes sit piled up until two of us can manage to do them- one scrubbing and rinsing and the other pouring the water.

The three-day Eid holiday will also be a tense time as crowds gather to celebrate the end of Ramadan, offering an easy target if insurgents choose to attack.

In a goodwill gesture for Eid, 500 prisoners were released from Abu Ghraib jail last year. The U.S. military said they were freed after their cases went before an Iraqi-led review board and they were found not to have committed serious or violent crimes.

Over 13,000 more prisoners are behind bars in Abu Ghraib and around Iraq, including several hundred foreign fighters.

Washington says the Sunni Arab insurgency is swollen by those small numbers of foreign fighters from Arab countries and US forces had launched extensive operations in western Iraq in an attempt to keep the militants out of the country.

The Iraqi government said on Tuesday that a Moroccan militant wanted in connection with bombings in Casablanca in 2003 had been linked to three simultaneous car bombings in the Iraqi town of Balad that killed more than 100 people.

"Mohsen Khayber, aka Abdul Rahim, a Moroccan-born extremist, is a terrorist wanted by Moroccan authorities," the Iraqi government said in a statement, offering an unspecified financial reward for information leading to his arrest.