April 9, 2007

Wildly Different Estimates on Najaf Rally

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I blogged earlier about the thousands of Moqtada al-Sadr followers who protested the fourth anniversary of the fall of Baghdad in Najaf today.

Well, it appears there is a major dispute over how many “thousands” were actually there. According to this CNN article, the U.S. military’s estimate is “5,000 to 7,000.” According to this Reuters article that I cited earlier, it is “tens of thousands.” And according to this Agence France-Presse article and this BBC article the number of participants is in the “hundreds of thousands.” If that’s true, did the military really think they were going to fool anybody with that “5,000 to 7,000” nonsense?

Hoo-boy. Who to believe? We’ll keep digging…

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THE BIG PICTURE

You expect the big picture, and it's our job at Mother Jones to give it to you. And right now, so many of the troubles we face are the making not of a virus, but of the quest for profit, political or economic (and not just from the man in the White House who could have offered leadership and comfort but instead gave us bleach).

In "News Is Just Like Waste Management," we unpack what the coronavirus crisis has meant for journalism, including Mother Jones’, and how we can rise to the challenge. If you're able to, this is a critical moment to support our nonprofit journalism with a donation: We've scoured our budget and made the cuts we can without impairing our mission, and we hope to raise $400,000 from our community of online readers to help keep our big reporting projects going because this extraordinary pandemic-plus-election year is no time to pull back.

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