One participant now claims "I really regret bringing down the statue.The Americans are worse than the dictatorship. Every day is worse than the previous day"."We thought the fall of the regime would bring freedom, reconstruction but as the days passed we saw it was lies. This new statue (which is ironically called "Freedom"), is of injustice, inequality,"

According to Bert de-Belder of Al-Ahram: "A recent UNDP-backed study reveals that one-third of Iraqis live in poverty, with more than five per cent living in abject poverty. The UN agency observes that this contrasts starkly with the country's thriving middle- income economy of the 1970s and 1980s."

"But these figures may well be a grave underestimation, as other reports speak of eight million out of 28 million Iraqis living in extreme poverty on incomes of less than $1 per day. More than 500,000 Baghdad residents get water for only a few hours a day. And the majority of Iraqis get three hours of electricity a day, in contrast to pre-war levels of about 20 hours."

According to the United Nations Children's Agency (UNICEF), about one in 10 Iraqi children under five are underweight (acutely malnourished) and one in five are short for their age (chronically malnourished). But this is only the tip of the iceberg, according to Claire Hajaj, communications officer at the UNICEF Iraq Support Centre in Amman.

"Many Iraqi children may also be suffering from 'hidden hunger' -- deficiencies in critical vitamins and minerals that are the building blocks for children's physical and intellectual development," Hajaj says. "These deficiencies are hard to measure, but they make children much more vulnerable to illness and less likely to thrive at school."

The newspaper Azzaman reported on the 4/5/2007, that the Iraqi government "is burying en mass hundreds of bodies of victims of violence which have been lying in Baghdad morgues for several months."

"Government sources, refusing to be named for fear of retribution have said, at least 2,252 bodies have been buried in the Shiite holy city of Karbala."

Indiscriminate acts of violence are being carried out daily, by government backed death squads, with "Supporters of the fundamentalist Sadr and Badr militias" boasting that they are "cleansing Iraq of what they call 'sexual perverts’", or members of the countries Lesbian and Gay Community.

According to the group Iraqi LGBT, the death squads are "open about terrorising gay Iraqis to make them flee the country and murdering those who fail to leave."

Not surprising "Some members of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki’s government are linked to the anti-gay death squads. They are the political representatives of the Muqtada al-Sadr movement and the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI)."

According to the SCIRI website: "The head office of SCIRI are based in Iran", where the Iranians "welcomed Ayatollah Al Hakim the leader of SCIRI and thousands of Iraqi immigrants, who fled after Saddam took power in 1979".

This allowed "The chance for the Iraqi opposition to move against Saddam's regime from Iran", with "The long borders between Iraq and Iran" allowing insurgents "to cross to and from Iraq to carry on their activities."

SCIRI "commands a military force called the Badr Corps" which "has secret cells all over Iraq which are involved in gathering information and military activities".The movement is also represented and has "active accredited agents" in several "axis of evil" regions including: "London, Geneva, Vienna, Canada, France, Holland, Sweden, Norway, Finland and Australia".

SCIRI openly acknowledges that it aims to "mobilise Iraqis outside Iraq and to train them on using arms", with their London based office also claiming that it "helps Iraqi refugees in the UK and other European countries by supporting letters to their asylum cases."

Other questions relating to Iranian involvement with death squads in Iraq, were first brought concretely to light by the www.iraqirabita.org/english/index.php?do=article&id=755"
> style="font-family: verdana;">photographic evidence of the Iraq League, who reported on the 2006-10-12, the capture by the Iraqi resistance of a member of the Mehdi Army.

"The Resistance fighters succeeded in arresting one of the assailants with a telecom device. Hence they decided to gather the littering fragments of the mortar projectiles and also a Katyusha rocket that did not explode."

The Mehdi Army have also been reported to be involved with the ethnic cleansing of Iraq’s Palestinian community, where Palestinians have been warned to "leave Iraq or prepare to die".

According to the Sunday Telegraph: "Iraqi police say the Palestinians, who are mostly Sunni Muslims, are the target of a backlash by hardline Shias, including members of the Mehdi Army led by the Shia preacher Moqtada al-Sadr."

"More than 600 Palestinians are believed to have died at the hands of Shia militias since the war began in 2003, including at least 300 from the Baladiyat area of Baghdad. Many were tortured with electric drills before they died."

Many Palestinian families first settled inside of Iraq, after the creation of the state of Israel but according to "Sheik Mahmoud El Hassani, a spokesman for the Mehdi Army", "the Palestinians have brought their suffering on themselves."

Al Sharqiyah reported in March 2007, that "hundreds of Al-Mahdi Army members continue to receive training in the Kermanshah area of western Iran", where the "Iranian Revolution Guards Intelligence Unit, have asked Al-Mahdi Army to establish a command-in-waiting that would include new elements that are not publicly known, while maintaining the central command of the Mahdi Army militia."

Iraqi "Government sources have repeatedly declined to give official information on the movement of Al-Mahdi Army in Iraq and Iran," thus raising the question as to whose interests are the present "government" in the Green Zone serving and whom exactly are the US/UK troops actually protecting?