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Dear WW4 REPORT Readers:

The upcoming anniversary of the September 11 attacks will mark four years that WORLD WAR 4 REPORT has been publishing. After three years of experimenting, we believe we have found both a name and a format that work.

The "World War III" envisioned in the Cold War was a devastating conflict between two monolithic superpowers. The Cold War, thankfully, never reached this climax. But now we are faced with its chilling sequel: the age of "asymmetrical" or "molecularized" warfare, in which a single globalized superpower faces an invisible, hydra-headed enemy which is everywhere and nowhere; in which the expansion of "free markets" is an explicit aim of military campaigns; and in which indigenous peoples, stateless ethnicities and localist/autonomist poltical models—the "fourth world"–are increasingly targeted and conflated with the "terrorist" threat. The leaders of this new global crusade acknowledge openly that it will last generations. To emphasize that this new world situation requires a new kind of thinking, we have joined with those on the left and right alike that call this global conflict World War 4.

With all of the current horrors in the headlines, the world has paid little note to the tenth anniversary of the July 1995 massacre of 8,000 at the eastern Bosnian town of Srebrenica after it was overrun by besieging Serb rebel forces. The town's women, children and elderly were put on buses at gunpoint and expelled to Bosnian government-held territory. But the adult men were separated out and kept by the Serb forces for "interrogation." Their whereabouts became the subject of an international investigation which is now bearing grim fruit—thousands of corpses exhumed from mass graves, held in Bosnia's morgues, where international teams are conducting the lugubrious work of DNA identification, matching genetic material from the bones with samples provided by relatives of the missing. Some 2,000 of the dead have now been thusly identified, the International Commission on Missing Persons reports. The massacre is rightly called Europe's worst since World War II.

UK memo says US, UK readying Iraqi withdrawal-report

LONDON, July 10 (Reuters) - A leaked document from Britain's Defence Ministry says the British and U.S. governments are planning to reduce their troop levels in Iraq by more than half by mid-2006, the Mail on Sunday newspaper reported.

The memo, reportedly written by Defence Minister John Reid, said Britain would reduce its troop numbers to 3,000 from 8,500 by the middle of next year.

"We have a commitment to hand over to Iraqi control in Al Muthanna and Maysan provinces (two of the four provinces under British control in southern Iraq) in October 2005 and in the other two, Dhi Qar and Basra, in April 2006," the memo was reported to have said.

Syrian forces have arrested two fugitives from Jordan who are believed to be former bodyguards of Saddam Hussein and linked to the Iraq insurgency. The manhunt followed a clash between militants and Syrian forces on Qassioun Mountain overlooking Damascus July 4. Condoleezza Rice offered rare praise for the Syrian regime upon news of the arrests. The July 4 clash was but the most recent in a series of skirmishes that come as Washington is pressuring Syria to seal its border with Iraq. (Lebanon Daily Star, July 7) In another sign of the Iraq insurgents' isolation from Damascus, Syria strongly denounced on the killing of an Egyptian diplomat in Iraq as a "horrible criminal action," the official SANA news agency reported. Egypt's Ambassador-designate to Baghdad Ihab el-Sharif was kidnapped near his home in Baghdad on July 3. The group "Al-Qaeda in Iraq" announced his death July 7 in an Internet statement. (Xinhua, July 9) The US and its client regime in Iraq have previously claimed evidence that Syria is supporting the insurgents.

More glowing reports of freedom on the march in Iraq. This from the July 7 New York Times, reprinted the following day in the International Herald Tribune.

Shiite theocracy takes hold in Iraqi oil city
By Edward Wong The New York Times

BASRA, The loudest sounds from musicians' row these days come from explosions.

Ahmed Ali walked through a shop that had sold musical instruments before it was gutted by a bombing a week earlier, the latest in a series of mysterious attacks in this narrow alley in the past six months, he said. The men here, just a block from the Ministry of Religious Affairs, sell instruments by day and perform at weddings in the evening.

As this fairly comprehensive account from The Australian makes clear, the notion that the London attacks were carried out by a heretofore unheard-of "Secret Organization of the Jihad of al-Qaeda in Europe" originates from reports on the websites of Germany's Der Spiegel and the Italian news agency ANSA that a communique claiming responsibility in that name appeared on an unnamed Islamic militant website. The quoted rhetoric is entirely plausible:

In another sign that the administration of Mexican President Vicente Fox is seeking to capitalize on the Zapatista rebels' new political direction to finally resolve the ongoing Chiapas headache, his government announced yesterday that it will release some 800 indigenous prisoners, finding that they were either innocent or had been manipulated into committing a federal crime, the daily El Universal reports July 7.

A large area of downtown Edinburgh was evacuated today when police found a "suspicious package" on a bus, the Scotsman reports. The alert was called off after police conducted what they callled a "controlled explosion" on the bus. Given the London blasts and continuing protests against the G8 summit in the Scottish capital, police are taking no chances. Meanwhile, the Scotsman reports that following yesterday's brief breach of the security perimeter around the Gleneagles resort, police have sealed off the protesters' encampment at nearby Stirling, trapping some 5,000 within the cordon.