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First Passenger Train Leaves Sanctions-Hit Baghdad for Turkey
BAGHDAD, July 20 (IslamOnline & News Agencies) - The first Iraqi passenger train bound for Turkey left Baghdad on Friday, setting up a weekly link between the two neighbors after a break of 20 years, news agencies reported.
The head of Iraqi railways, Ghassan Abdul Razek al-Ani, told reporters at Baghdad station that 27 Iraqi and Turkish passengers were on board and more would join them during a stop in the northern city of Mosul.
For this trip, Iraq is using a train with two sleeper cars for the 11-12 hour passenger service, while a Turkish freight train previously rolled into Baghdad on July 13.
The trains link Baghdad and Mardin in southeast Turkey, passing through northeast Syria in the absence of a direct line through the mountainous border region.
The reopening of the line, dating back to the Ottoman Empire but suspended since 1981, was agreed to at a meeting in Ankara last January.
Trains are the cheapest form of transportation in Iraq, which has remained under U.N. sanctions for over a decade now, owing to continued U.S. accusations of Iraq's ownership of weapons of mass destruction.
Notably, former United Nations weapons inspector, Scott Ritter, lately called for an end to sanctions imposed on Iraq, saying he did not feel the country posed a danger any longer.
He accused the United States of deliberately provoking confrontations with Iraq, which he says, was almost fully disarmed in 1995.
Ritter says the United States undermined the work of UNSCOM, the United Nations weapons inspection team in Iraq, and used the issue to push Iraq towards conflict with the West, BBC's online service reported.
Ritter says his team was satisfied that Iraq had destroyed 98% of its weapons by 1995.
But he says the U.S. government deliberately set new standards of disarmament criteria to maintain U.N. sanctions against Baghdad in order to justify bombing raids.
In his new documentary film, "In Shifting Sands: The Truth About UNSCOM and the Disarming of Iraq," which premiered at the United Nations, Ritter said UNSCOM chief Richard Butler told his inspectors: "You have to provoke a confrontation...so the U.S. can start bombing" before March 15th, a Muslim holy period, the BBC added.
Ritter, an ex-U.S. marine intelligence officer, said Iraq "did cooperate to a very significant degree with the U.N. inspection process" and blamed the United States for the eventual breakdown of the initial purposes for the inspections.
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