Chairman: Welcome to another meeting of the Gulf Cultural Club and Open Discussions. As you are aware we have been conducting these sessions for the past 16 years. The first session we had was during the civil war in Yemen in 1994. Since then we have had these sessions regularly and we have debated important issues regarding the politics of the Middle East, international relations, Islam, cultural topics and so on.
Iraq, being one of the important and significant countries in the Middle East has always attracted our attention and we have discussed the situation in Iraq now and before. Due to the situation: the instability, the terrorism, the violence and most recently the elections Iraq remains a country which needs to be looked at closely and assessed in order to understand the dynamics of politics in the Middle East.
The recent elections have produced results that are not clearly known until now and the formation of the new government will remain a challenge to the winner or to those who may have lost in those elections. What will be the future of Iraq from now on? How do we look at the environmental issues that have come up after the war of 2003? What are the effects of the extensive use of depleted uranium on the Iraqi environment, on the soil, on the atmosphere? Why do we see a rise in the cases of cancers?
We will start by looking at the political scene and how the results of those elections could change the political landscape. There are many related issues including the future of the occupation by the American and British troops, relations between the fabrics of that country and also the potential of Iraq as a powerful central power in the Middle East and whether Iraq can play a significant role in Middle Eastern politics.
Dr Ali Al-Hilli: Thank you very much for the introduction and the invitation. I will talk about the current political situation and touch upon the coalitions that have been debated – the possible coalitions.
You might have heard in the news a lot of debates and discussions about what sort of government Iraq is going to have. will talk about the most likely coalitions that could emerge.
As you know in Iraq we had elections on 3 March 2010. The results were not surprising. There were four major winning blocs. I will go through them in case people are new to Iraqi politics.
State of Law Coalition is headed by the current Prime Minister, Nouri Al Malaki. It consists of the Islamic Dawa Party, the Anbar Salvation National Council , Led by Sheikh Ali Hatem Suleiman, the Independent Arab Movement, the United Independent Iraqi Bloc, the Independent Iraqi Gathering (led by Ali Al Dabagh) and a lot of independents, people like the Oil Minister, Hussein Sharastani and others. The State of Law coalition achieved 89 seats in the Iraqi parliament.
The Iraqi National Alliance (INA) achieved 70 seats. They consist of the Supreme Islamic Iraqi Council headed by Al Hakim, the SADR Movement led by Moqtada Al Sadr, the National Reform Trend led by Said Ibrahim Jafferi, the Islamic Virtue Party led by Ibrahim Al Hassani, the Islamic Dawa Party (the Iraq part led by Al Anisi), the Iraqi National Congress led by Ahmed Al Chalabi, the Anbar Salvation Council (they split into two) and the Justice and Unity Party, the Turkomans and a number of other small parties. The Sadrist movement got around 40 seats out of the 70 from the INA, the Supreme Islamic Iraqi Council got 18.
Al Iraqia Bloc which got 91 allegedly. It consists of the Iraqi National List led by former Prime Minister Ayad Allawi, the Iraqi National Dialogue Front, led by Salah Al Mutleq (he was banned from the elections because of his Baathist background), the Renewal List led by the Vice President Tariq Al Hashemi, the Iraqi Turkoman Front and a few others.
The Kurdish Alliance which got 43 seats in parliament consists of two main blocks: The Kurdish Democratic Party and the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan led by President Jalal Talabani.
So why is this all significant? Why did I explain the four main blocs and why are the numbers so significant?
The Iraqi constitution states clearly what is required to form a government, although there has been some interpretation about article 76. I have read it and I think it states clearly that to form a government you need to have a majority representation in the house of parliament. If you are going to form a coalition you need to form a coalition that consists of a majority in the house of parliament, 50 percent of the seats allocated for the house of parliament plus one member.
There are 325 seats available for grabs in the new Iraqi house of parliament. So 325 divided by 2 plus one will be 163, so if you want to form a government you have to have a coalition that consists of 163 members of parliament.
The reason why I also refer to the constitution is that there has been a debate between the Allawi group who got 91 seats in parliament and the State of Law Coalition. Allwai says that according to the constitution we have the power to form a government. We have one month to form a government. This is his interpretation of the constitution.
I have the constitution here. Article 76 point one. It says: The president of the republic shall charge the nominee of the largest council of representatives bloc with the formation of the council of ministers within in 15 days. So it clearly states the nominee of the largest council of representatives. It does not say if you got the highest vote after the elections then you will form the government. It says that if you have formed a council of representatives that are the highest number in the parliament then you have the priority to form a government. I think it is very clear.
However this was taken to a court, the Iraq Supreme Court and the court referred to a clause in the constitution stating that the largest parliamentary bloc could be any new coalition formed after the pole.
So the supreme court said exactly what I have just mentioned: that if you form a coalition that consists of more than 163 members of parliament then you have the right to form a government. What does ‘form a government’ mean? The main task of this major bloc is to nominate a prime minister and also the head of the parliament. And also very importantly to lay out the manifestos of the new government and to allocate ministries.
I am going to go through certain possibilities of coalitions that could happen and I have been calling people in Iraq who are negotiating in the political arena to get the latest.
Let us start with the least likely: Iraqia (Allawi) forming a coalition with the Kurds. Some of you may be surprised that I say this coalition is least likely but the reason I say it is least likely is as follows: first of all Kurds do not have a very good relationship with many members of Al Iraqia. They have quite a good relationship with the person himself, Allawi. But as I told you previously, Al Iraqia consists of many different blocs including the Vice President Tariq Al Hashimi who got quite a significant number of votes. There is also Sami Najef who had many problems with the Kurds in Mosul. There have been certain wars between them in the media with one of the Kurds said that it is impossible for us to deal with Al Iraqia. His name is Feriad Rawaduzi, a senior official from President Talabani’s party. There are some groups within Al Iraqia whose agenda and way of thinking is different from the Kurds, so I can’t see a coalition being formed.
Another main reason I don’t see this coalition happening is that the Kurds want the presidency to stay with Jalal Talabani. Al Iraqia want Tareq Al Hashimi to become president. So this is the first main disagreement between the two blocs. Tareq Al Hashimi is determined to get the presidency and there is no way the Kurds are going to have that, they are going to make sure that Talabani keeps the presidency.
Another note about the Kurdish Alliance is that to negotiate this issue with other blocs they have made a bigger coalition with the other Kurdish groups such as the Movement for Change (Goran) who won 8 seats, the Kurdish Islamic Union who one 2 seats and the Islamic Group of Kurdistan who won 2 seats. They announced a few days ago that they have formed this big coalition and whoever wants to negotiate with them has to speak to all of them.
If we talk about the State of Law of Coalition and Al Iraqia what is the possibility that there is going to be a coalition? Iraqia got 91 seats and State of Law got 89 so you will get 180 seats – more than the 163 that is needed to form a government.
But it seems to me that a coalition is extremely unlikely. Although both coalitions have very similar manifestos. If you look at the State of Law Coalition and if you look at the manifesto of Al Iraqia one major thing they believe in is a strong central government compared to INA who actually believe in federalism, spreading power to the federal states and having a weaker central government.
The reason why I don’t think they will form a coalition is because of Allawi’s Baathi background: his coalition consists of many people who had close links to the Baath Party. Al Malaki and the Dawa Party have always opposed the Baath Party and will never associate themselves with the Baath Party so their principles and their ideology differ greatly and you can’t put them together.
Having said all that in Iraq there has been some talk dialogue between the State of Law and Al Iraqia. Top officials have spoken. Malaki did not meet Allawi – top officials have met but there have not been any concrete results from these talks. I believe that one of these blocs will definitely be in opposition. They can’t both form a government.
If we move to Al Iraqia and the Iraqi National Alliance (INA) there has recently been a lot of talk between the two. Let us focus on the INA. I believe there are a lot of divisions. The reason is that when you talk about the INA you mainly see the Sadrist Movement. They are doing a survey at the moment to find out who is the prime minister and always when it comes to negotiating with the INA is seems that the Sadrists come forward and it seems as if they are representing the INA.
In their defence they might say that they got 40 seats out of 70 and they are the majority in the INA so they have the power to talk. Al Jafferi is doing a bit of the talking and Al Hakim is doing a bit of the talking but in my view whoever makes the Sadrists happy makes the INA happy. Within themselves the INA is a bit divided. They haven’t named a prime minister. They have many candidates. The State of Law stuck with the current Prime Minister Nouri Al Malaki and they una unanimously voted him as a candidate for the prime minister.
The INA are divided in terms of their nomination for the prime minister. They have people like Ibrahim Al Jafferi who is a potential candidate, Abdul Ahmed Mahdi who is a potential candidate, Ahmed Chelabi who is also a potential candidate. They have never come to an agreement among themselves yet alone to a coalition with the others as to who can be the prime minister. So this can create problems. There is also another person who has come out recently: Qais Al Suhail who is a Sadri. He could also be a potential candidate from the Sadrist Movement. If they come and say this is our candidate for prime minister then I will be convinced , and many people will be convinced, that they can form a coalition with others.
Going back to Al Iraqia and the INA. The Sadri movement don’t really have a very good relationship with the Supreme Islamic Council of Iraq. So I believe that can also create problems. You need to sit down at one table and agree on one person to nominate for prime minister if you are going to do a coalition with the others. The Sadris do not seem to have a very good relationship with the Supreme Islamic Council and this can create divisions between them.
Some media have actually said that Hakim and Jafferi have met representatives of Allawi to perhaps do a coalition between the two but I don’t get the feeling this will happen. If you go back to their manifestos and their policies Al Iraqia believe in a strong central government and some blocs in the INA believe in federalism and that could create a clash between the two. If you add 91 plus 70 you get 161. They need more seats in parliament to form this coalition.
One most likely coalitions that will happen, and I had information that this is going to happen, is between the State of Law Coalition and the INA. There are many reasons for that. One major reason is that they know each other very well. They were in the Italaf Al Watani before and they have worked together before. They have allegiance to the marjaia. Considering all these issues they seem to understand each other to some extent and possibly could form a coalition.
However having said all that they have many problems. One of the problems which goes back to why they didn’t form a coalition before the elections is that many people in the INA do not want Nouri Al Malaki to become prime minister again. They have their own reasons, I do not know the reasons. The Sadrists do not want Malaki to become prime minister due to his crackdown on Sad’rs Mahdi Army fighters in Basra and Baghdad in 2008. They say you went after our troops, we don’t like you any more. There was a huge conflict between Malaki’s private army and the Mahdi army in 2008.
Before I came here I spoke to one of the negotiators representing the State of Law Coalition. He met with the Sadris yesterday together with President Nouri Al Malaki. He told me it was a very positive meeting. Everyone seems to say that when you interview them. They say it was a positive meeting but you don’t know what went on behind closed doors. That is why it is a very grey area at the moment.
It looks likely that the two coalitions the State of Law and the INA can come together and form a government. But the problem is again because the INA do not want Nouri Al Malaki to become prime minister. And within themselves they do not know who to elect as prime minister. So they have said they would come together – the State of Law Coalition and the INA – and come up with a method to elect or chose a prime minister. They still don’t know what this method is. Some say it could be elections, some say it could be negotiations between themselves and possibly the involvement of the marjaia. The marjaia was involved when there were disputes as to who to chose as a prime minister and it succeeded in choosing the prime minister. Now within themselves they have certain conflicts. So choosing this method which is unknown is very important in choosing a prime minister.
I heard that they have selected eight representatives from the State of Law and the INA to do those negotiations and perhaps elect a prime minister between themselves. If there are no conclusions they may perhaps go back to the whole bloc and try to form some sort of negotiation team to try and come up with a nominee for a prime minister. But the signs are quite positive that the INA and the State of Law are moving in a positive direction to form a government.
However in my view I think we will get the following coalition: we will get the State of Law Coalition and the INA and the Kurds and also some of the winning candidate from Al Iraqia. The reasons are as follows: I explained the reasons for the State of Law Coalition and the INA. The Kurds want Talabani to be the president so it will be easy to form a coalition with them if you give them the presidency and that will guarantee that they will go along with your nomination of prime minister.
If you are going to have a government that consists mainly of Shias from the State of Law Coalition and the INA and also Kurds you need Sunni representation. Al Iraqia got very high votes in Mosul and Anbar, the two big Sunni areas. So you do need Sunni representatives in government. And that is when you go to Al Iraqia and get the people who are interested in forming a coalition who will follow the manifesto of the government and who will respect the prime minister.
The reason I say respect the prime minister is that many of them did not respect the prime minister previously. A minister just walks out when he wants to. This is what needs to be different this time. The prime minister needs to have full control over his ministers. If he thinks that one of them is not doing his job properly he can easily sack him or replace him with another minister.
So I believe Nouri Al Malaki will be the next prime minister, Talabani will be the president. Important ministeriers will be given to the INA such as the Interior Ministry and Defence and perhaps the oil ministry. And one of the people in Al Iraqia will be given the position of leader of parliament who is traditionally a Sunni and Allawi will stay in opposition.
I believe it is great to see this in Iraq. It may be confusing with a lot of back stabbing and an lot of people have all sorts of different opinions on these things. It is a good democratic exercise we are going through especially in view of what Iraq has been through in terms of dictatorship. You see people negotiating at one table. You see that people are understanding each other. I am happy to see such a thing happening in Iraq.
I can also see that it is obvious that many neighbouring countries are interfering in all this. I don’t blame them because whoever is going to be the next prime minister is going to have some policies that will affect the region. This is creating some security problems and Al Qaeda have intensified their movement in Iraq because of this lack of forming a government at the moment. So I will end with this and hope we can have a discussion afterwards.
Chairman: Thank you Dr Ali. There is another side to Iraq and that is the humanitarian side.
Nicholas Wood: I am mainly going to talk about depleted uranium but I have been working on the politics of Iraq for eight years now, since 2002, and I have a few observations. I hope you will take them in good heart. I know that the English have been telling the Iraqis what to do since 1887.
I started work in Iraq in 1986 on the traditional houses of Baghdad which are very beautiful. This was down by Al Khadamiyah and I worked on eight houses in Haifa Street which were built in the 30’s. They were very important houses for the British imposed prime minister. There was also the house of the chief engineer of the Baghdad- Istanbul railway which was shaped like a Swiss chalet which I helped to restore.
In my work I met various women who were in charge of the banks. I met the deputy mayor of Baghdad who was a young lady who had been at the School of Architecture where I taught. I also met the Imam of the Gilani mosque who was very shy and just said hello. I learned afterwards that he was a don in Oxford and spoke perfect English.
It struck me that when Blair and Bush started the idea of a war how could you possibly have a war against such beautiful people? I met lots of children. War is in my view an obscenity. It is not a civilised thing to do so I devoted the last eights years to trying to combat it.
The government of Blair is in my view an extremely ignorant group of failed lawyers. Blair got a third class degree, his wife got a first. They are totally ignorant. They had never been to Iraq before the war, they never saw what it was like and Blair is an extremely ignorant man, scientifically. They have no scientists in the cabinet. One, Michael Meacher, they sacked.
One of the little observations I have is that some of these extremely beautiful houses should be preserved in the future as in Damascus in Syria. It is a very beautiful ancient city which the Damascus government is doing its best to preserve. A lot of the houses are used for students. There are uses for the houses.
The alternative is the American idea. I have seen plans for Baghdad which are the usual American idea – a road down each side of the Tigris with tower blocs. That is a way to kill off all the excitement and pleasures of the city down by the river with boats crossing, prostitutes, kebab shops, book shops in Rashid Street. The vitality of Baghdad in my view, is the way in which the houses come right down to the river.
Another observation I have is that if you go around the British Museum, 17 percent of the floral area is devoted to things stolen from Iraq. Niveh, Nimrud and marvellous things from Ur. As a gesture – it is no good the British Museum saying how terrible the destruction of archaeological sites in Iraq is – we should do something about it and give some it back. Copies should be made and they should be given back.
My wife and I went to Babylon in 1986 and saw the Euphrates a marvellous river that ripples along the roots of the palm trees. That was 23 years ago. I understand that because Turkey, Syria, Iran and the Kurdish areas have started damming the Tigris and the Euphrates, the Euphrates is now two-thirds of its depth. A simple bit of mathematics will show you that in 20 years to Euphrates will be dry like the Jordan which is now just a sewer.
In my view Saddam Hussein would never have allowed this to happen. He would have used his weapons of mass destruction, if he had any, to stop this. Because the war diverted everyone’s attention from what is going on Turkey, Syria and Iran have made dams. This is a very important destruction of Iraq.
It appears to me that this war is very largely about Israel. Saddam made a mistake by supplying martyrs – he called them martyrs of Palestine – and their families with money. This drew attention to the problem of Saddam Hussein and what surprises me is that there is a connection between the bible and the Old Testament and what God is telling the Jews to do. They take it very seriously. A lot of Jewish people, Israelis, live in their heads, two and a half thousand years ago. They think about Babylon and the 79 years that they were imprisoned in Babylon. Maybe the destruction of Babylon with tanks is a revenge for what happened about them being in captivity for 79 years. If you read the bible a lot of it is about Joshua smiting various people. Even when he has ruined a city to kill the women and children and donkeys who come out of the door. It is a very violent book that will upset a lot of people.
I have been to Syria. We were privileged because there were very few tourists for the deputy archaeologist of Aleppo to show us round Syria. He said that there is a scheme by the Deutsche Bahnhof to have a high speed train that connects Istanbul with Syria and extend it. My view is that a way of containing Israel is to have a high speed train by a company like the Deutsche Bahnhof which goes from Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, Libya, Egypt, Jordan, Iraq, Syria, Turkey, Europe.
What has happened in Europe is that these high speed trains have meant that boundaries between Germany and France, traditionally great enemies are blurred. I think these high speed trains have a very good political effect. The boundaries, a lot of them imposed by the British with a ruler and a drunken foreign office official, those boundaries will cease to be so important and Israel will wake up surrounded by Arab countries.
I am now going to talk about depleted uranium. In 2007 I got a group of 98 doctors to write a letter to the prime minister about the state of children’s’ hospitals and children’s’ health in Iraq. Children were dying because they did not have a little oxygen mask worth 98 pence. Another problem was that they did not have the proper catheters. The 98 doctors wrote to the prime in 2007 and we got a reply from Mr Hillary Benn. He said :”The other task now that Iraq has an elected government following the end of the occupation is for that government to deal with the problems affecting the distribution of medical supplies and ensure that Iraq’s vast oil wealth is spent on things such as health care”.
Now this to me is an obscene letter. He is ignoring the fact that we invaded Iraq, we were there as occupiers for two years. This letter blames Saddam Hussein for the state of hospitals but Iraq had one of the best hospital systems in the Middle East before the 80s. It is obscene because he puts the onus on the Iraq government to do something when the Iraq government had no helicopters of its own, no transport. It was surrounded by people with machine guns stealing everything. The British army should have delivered all this stuff. So that was an obscene letter.
As a result of that letter I got an invitation with my wife to go to a conference in Switzerland with 200 doctors who were protesting about the Iraq war. There I met Professor Gunter who had worked in Iraq for 40 years. He was an assistant of Schewizer a very eminent professor of medicine and he made a connection in 1995 between children playing in tanks and getting leukaemia and cancers. He was convinced that a single shell that he picked up was radio active and this was the cause of children getting cancers.
He went into Basra hospital and saw the most grotesque deformities he had ever seen in his life. He did not know what half of them were. He saw children with eyes in the middle of their heads. He had never seen anything like this. He concluded that there was a connection between depleted uranium and these defects.
So he went to Berlin with a single shell and he had it tested for radio activity and the test of this showed that yes indeed the shell was radio active. He was told come back on Monday – :”We want to discuss this with you”. When he got to the research institute there were 16 police waiting to arrest him. He was arrested and fined, he refused to pay and was put in prison for five weeks,.
I sat next to Professor Gunter and saw his film.I am going to leave it for you because I think one of the sessions that you should have should be to just sit and watch this film. What Professor Gunter showed was that there were British veterans who were handling shells and this young woman produced a dead child which was grossly malformed without any eyes. He made this link between the shell and her dead foetus.
There was another veteran whose children had their fingers all joined together and they were constantly having headaches. I had never heard about depleted uranium until I sat next to Professor Gunter with an Iraqi diplomat and we just wept because it was terrible.
One thing that occurred at the end of this film is a German doctor saying to Professor Gunter that he discovered that sand is blowing from the south of Iraq to Arbil in the north. This sand has alpha particles in it and the incidence of leukaemia in Arabia has gone up by 40 fold in children. It struck me then that one of the main problems of depleted uranium is that this sand is blowing all over the place.
The German doctor who investigated Arbil found that cows were being born with two heads. This is in 2006. We are talking about four years ago. They had been born with two heads and he found that the tissue samples from those cows and the isotopes that exactly matched those in Basra. Apparently it is now possible to match isotopes from one place to another.
Last year in 2009 in July there was a tremendous sand storm which blew sand to Bahrain and all over the place. We only need one particle of this stuff to get into your lungs or to injest in your throat and you don’t know that you have got it but your children are produced without heads.
What has happened in Fallujah is that women have been told don’t have children. Now can you imagine anything worse than a young married couple being told ‘don’t have children’. I can’t imagine anything worse.
My daughter works in the oil industry and her job is to try to stop oil spills. So a year ago I said to her :”Emily why don’t you do the opposite, why don’t you spill the oil , you spill the oil around these tank dumps because this oil soaks through the sand”.And I have seen pictures of this oil spill with no plants growing round it and it is after 25 years. It is still a sticky mess like bloc of trickle pudding, a horrible mess.
I said supposing you spread this in a circle of 30 meters. I have spoken to two oil engineers in Iraq. They said this is perfectly feasible. It is the way traditionally that we made roads in the desert, we sprayed them with oil as tracks across the desert. So you have got the oil.
Another things that you have got is bitumen which is used in Babylon to stick the bricks together. It is also used in the Thames estuary to stop the sea from flooding into the land. If you look at the shoreline at Southend it is black tar. It is water proof.
So it strikes me that you have got two things: You can spray the sand with oil which will bind it together. You can spray it from a distance or you can even have robots spraying it so that you don’t have any human contact. Of the five people who made this film, two got contaminated urine. So they are going to be ill. They already are ill just after messing around with gigacounters for two weeks.They went off the screen and the Iraqi doctor said human beings shouldn’t be anywhere near it.
A terrible problem is that you get a building site with rubble in it and it is full of this dust. To my horror in this film near Al Kindi in the Mansour district there were workmen with shovels putting this sand into wheelbarrows, just spreading the problem. They had no protective clothing.
So I did a little film which is on U-tube about how to do something about this. Since then as far as I know nothing has been done. And in Fallujah the worst possible thing has happened. Whoever is in charge of clearing up Fallujah’s mess is shouveling it into the Euphrates. The rubble from these building sites. What madness is that? It is going to be taken into the Persian Gulf. A lady has found a coach roach that is bent double. So it is not just human beings that are being affected by this. Animals and plants are also affected. Their DNA gets messed up. So you could be eating a plant that is full of poison. So the worst thing is to shovel it into the Euphrates.
There are three letters that I want to read to you. One is from Tony Benn. He sent the Minister of Defense a letter saying that I have the idea of spraying the sand with oil. And Des Browne wrote back and said I am sorry we are not involved. It is up to the Iraqi government. He said two very interesting things. He said that the UK government has always acknowledged that DU has a very low level of radio active and chemically toxic material. This was on 21st April 2008. This has been shown on studies using laboratory rodents and by death based health assessments. It does affect laboratory rodents. But he goes on to say that the scientific consensus is that DU has not been shown to have any significant effect on the local population. So it affects rats but not Iraqis.
There was a coroners ruling in 2009 that a Gulf War soldier had in fact been killed by DU. That is an important letter.
There was a letter to Claire Short from DFID saying that there were only two or three cases of birth deformities in Fallujah.
We wrote to 140 ambassadors to the United Nations and 40 embassies in London saying more or less crudely you better watch out as sand is blowing and a disaster is expected.
Nothing has happened for a year and frustratedly I came to this society a month ago and met Saeed Shehabi and asked for a session about it. At the weekend I was with my wife at the seaside and said they want me to talk about this lets get some sand and demonstrate that this works. I won’t blow to hard, this sand could blow all over the place.
This is a model of a tank dump and I said if you pour oil over that which you can do with a pump and a spray that sand is stickey and won’t move for 25 years and then you can shovel it up with a bulldozer an cover it with bitumen – it will keep the kids out – and the water will run off it rather than into the ground. And I am hoping that one of you in the audience has contacts in Iraq that could try this as an experiment because the consequences of not doing anything about this dust are horrendous and it will last for 4.6 billion years. And at least you could put a notice, keep out and that will save children’s’ lives.
*Dr Ali Al-Hilli is a co-founder and co-director of the Iraqi Prospect Organisation. The Organisation has been running successful projects in three universities in Iraq and has many youth members. Dr Al-Hilli has traveled to Iraq on numerous occasions notably participating in the formation of the Iraqi Youth Parliament in Baghdad. He has written on Iraqi politics and has been involved in several debates and discussions. He is also a scientist and a researcher at the Health Protection Agency in London. He has a PhD in Bioinformatics from The University of Glasgow.
**Nicholas Wood: M.A. (Cantab) Dipl. Arch (Cantab) R.I.B.A. F.R.G.S. with degrees from UCL and Cambridge (1959) in Architecture. He has extensive experience in projects in the Middle East (Egypt, Iraq, Saudi Arabia). He also worked on Archaeological projects and courses in UK. He took part in professional exhibitions on Archeology and the House of Tragic Poet. He is the author of many articles and books including: House of the Tragic Poet, a Reconstruction. ISBN 0 9528443 03, Actio 1, Ernst Klett, Schulbuchverlag, Leipzig. ( Illustrations), and War Crime or Just War ? The Iraq War 2003- 2005 ISBN 0-9528443-1-1
