Iraq: Elections, Occupation and the Withdrawal of US Forces

Raed Jarrar,  AFSC Iraq Consultant

Iraq: Elections, Occupation and the Withdrawal of US Forces

The stakes could not be higher for Iraq than they are right now.

This month marks seven years since the 2003 US-lead invasion and occupation of Iraq. It also marks the second general elections since the beginning of the occupation and six months before the date by which President Obama promised to remove U.S. combat forces.  

Iraq’s general elections will result in a new Government that will govern Iraq as the US military presence ends.   
 
Join us for a briefing, with Raed Jarrar, who has recently returned from a trip to Iraq.  He will speak about the impact of the elections and steps we are taking to insure and monitor the removal of US troops.  
 
Raed Jarrar is AFSC’s Iraq consultant based in Washington DC.  He has helped to design education and advocacy campaigns for AFSC for the last four years.  One recent success is a requirement in the defense authorization bill that the US military give quarterly reports to Congress on the status of US forces in Iraq.

Jarrar is an Iraqi-born architect, blogger, and political analyst.  After the U.S.-led invasion, he became the country director for CIVIC Worldwide, the only door-to-door casualty survey group in post-war Iraq. He also established an NGO called Emaar, (meaning "reconstruction" in Arabic), a grassroots organization that provided humanitarian and political aid to Iraqi internally displaced persons. He maintains his own popular political analysis and news web-log and has been featured as an Iraq expert on many media outlets including CNN, Aljazeera, Al-Alam, BBC, Democracy Now, Pacifica, NPR, CBS, and Fox.

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