Female mutilations in the name of Allah widespread among the Kurdish people.

Sheelan Anwar Omer, a shy 7-year-old Kurdish girl, bounded into her neighbor's house with an ear-to-ear smile, looking for the party her mother had promised.

There was no celebration. Instead, a local woman quickly locked a rusty red door behind Sheelan, who looked bewildered when her mother ordered the girl to remove her underpants. Sheelan began to whimper, then tremble, while the women pushed apart her legs and a midwife raised a stainless-steel razor blade in the air. "I do this in the name of Allah!" she intoned.

As the midwife sliced off part of Sheelan's genitals, the girl let out a high-pitched wail heard throughout the neighborhood. As she carried the sobbing child back home, Sheelan's mother smiled with pride.

"This is the practice of the Kurdish people for as long as anyone can remember," said the mother, Aisha Hameed, 30, a housewife in this ethnically mixed town about 100 miles north of Baghdad. "We don't know why we do it, but we will never stop because Islam and our elders require it."

"We don't know why we do it, but we will never stop because Islam and our elders require it." These are words spoken in ignorance which demonstrate an adherence to ancient superstitions and rituals that have no place in this modern world.

If you ask yourself how can anything so barbaric ever have been implemented in the first place then of course you have to understand the culture which is rampant in this part of the world concerning the attitude toward women. And you need to take into account the cover that their religion provides which allows them to continue without serious challenges. To question this practice in the eyes of the Kurds is to question the teachings of Allah himself.

Women are simply the property of the male. First they belong to their fathers who then arrange their marriage (sale) to their future husbands. The marriage is for the benefit of the man only. It is to create male heirs that will carry his lineage into the future. By taking away the pleasure that making love may provide the woman, she is reduced to nothing more then an instrument for the man's needs. And with her sexual responses crippled she is unlikely to seek carnal relations with a man who is not her husband.

Still in this day and age, with so much information available, how could this mutilation still be practiced openly? The answer to that may be found in the words of this 91 year old woman.

"I would not eat food from the hands of someone who did not have the procedure," said Hurmet Kitab, a housewife who said she was 91 years old.

Kurds who support circumcising girls say the practice has two goals: It controls a woman's sexual desires, and it makes her spiritually clean so that others can eat the meals she prepares.

Can you imagine anything so self loathing, as a woman, then to condemn your daughters to a life without pleasure? To turn them into nothing more then plastic sex dolls whose job is to allow a man to use them as a simple masturbatory aid?

And if that were not enough this old woman even refuses to eat food prepared by a female who may have had the temerity to actually enjoy the touch of her husband from the night before. As if her pleasure somehow detracts from her ability to prepare nutrition for her friends and family.

Usually it is shame and religious constraints which are used to keep the female in check. But in many parts of the world that did not seem to be enough to control the women sufficiently for the elders and these barbaric practices were introduced to keep the men in complete control.

It is my opinion that America should remove ALL aid to this part of the world, and any others who practice this form of mutilation, until they offer proof that they have put a stop to this horrific practice.

I could care less about cultural or religious sensitivity in this case. These children are being brutalized and for that there is absolutely no excuse.

And one final thought before I drop this topic and leave to shower the disgust from my body.

Any man who takes a woman's love, has never really FELT a woman's love. Any man who demands that his women submit to him, is denied the joy that exists when a woman freely gives herself to him. Any man who holds his woman in an iron grip, will never feel the softness of her loving caress. In other words to deny your woman pleasure, is to deny yourself the same.

No real man fears his lovers sexuality, he merely feels blessed when he is the recipient of her passion and her love.

Are you kidding me?

The Bush Administration is considering air strikes, including cruise missiles, against the Kurdish rebel group PKK in northern Iraq.

The move would be an attempt to stave off a Turkish invasion of that country to fight the rebels.

President George Bush spoke with Turkish President Abdullah Gul by phone yesterday in an effort to ease the crisis.

Does this President believe that "diplomacy" is synonymous with "air strikes"?

The Kurds are almost completely reliant on the American military support. Doesn't that give us a lot of clout to negotiate with them? Why the hell would we automatically start bombing the people that our Americans soldiers have been dying to liberate?

I canot believe that the Kurds are not willing to talk to the country that saved their asses about the country that they are pissed at. Somebody send Jesse Jackson in there for God's sake!

So how does defending the terrorist activites of the Kurds against Turkey jive with that whole "War against Terror"?

Kurdish leaders said yesterday the United States is obliged by a U.N. resolution to defend them in the event that Turkish forces invade northern Iraq in pursuit of members of a Kurdish rebel movement.

They also said they will continue to sign oil contracts with international companies while awaiting passage of an Iraqi oil law, despite objections from Baghdad and the State Department.

"The U.S. forces are mandated by the United Nations to protect Iraq's sovereignty and defend Iraq's people," said Qubad Talabani, the Kurdistan Regional Government's representative in Washington.

But Mr. Talabani, who was accompanied by the head of the Kurdistan government's foreign relations department, said he is worried the United States might not fulfill that commitment.

"We would like stronger reassurances by the United States that they would defend the Iraqi people, be it in the south, north or center, if they were threatened in any way," Mr. Talabani told editors and reporters at The Washington Times.

You know the Iraq situation may evolve form being a quagmire to being at fucking black hole at this rate.

With the Blackwater thing simmering on the back burner, and then this Turkey/Kurd thing heating up as well, we may see a nuclear explosion without any fission even necessary.

The Kurds, the only Iraqis to really benefit from our occupation, are starting some shit with Turkey.

Turkey's prime minister, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, came under intense pressure last night to order an invasion of northern Iraq following the deadliest attacks for over a decade on the Turkish military and civilians by separatist Kurdish guerrillas.

Mr Erdogan, who has resisted demands from the Turkish armed forces for the past six months for a green light to cross the border into Iraqi Kurdistan, where the guerrillas are based, called an emergency meeting of national security chiefs to ponder their options in the crisis, a session that some said was tantamount to a war council.

A Turkish incursion is fiercely opposed by Washington since it would immensely complicate the US campaign in Iraq and destabilise the only part of Iraq that functions, the Kurdish-controlled north.

Two Turkish soldiers were killed yesterday in booby trap explosions laid by guerrillas of the Kurdistan Workers' party (PKK) - fighters classified as terrorists by Ankara, Washington and the European Union. Those casualties followed the killing of 13 Turkish soldiers in the south-east on Sunday when PKK forces outgunned a Turkish unit of 18 men without sustaining any casualties, according to the Kurds.

Encouraging the victims of constant attacks to ignore them because it would "complicate the US occupation" is a pretty flimsy argument.

Would Americans allow their country to be attacked because it might upset Mexico if we retaliated? Yeah I did not think so.

If we want to help stabilize Iraq then I would think that the United States would be telling the Kurds to control their people or risk losing any American support. This fight has been raging since the early 1980's and I am sure it will continue long after our troops are out of the potential crossfire.