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From Our Own Correspondent

Death In Baghdad

From Our Own Correspondent

BBC

News, News Commentary

4.41.3K Ratings

🗓️ 4 January 2020

⏱️ 29 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

The assassination in a US air strike of the senior Iranian general Qasem Soleimani raises the prospect of a response from Teheran that few can predict. Jim Muir reports on the significance of the US target and what might happen next. Thirty years ago the United States acted to remove another foreign threat, this time closer to home. Following the US invasion of Panama shortly before Christmas, the country's military leader General Manuel Noriega surrendered to US troops on January the 3rd, 1990. David Adams was there. In Ireland it used to be common for unmarried mothers to be confined in state-funded institutions. Often their babies, once born, were taken without their consent and given up for adoption. Deirdre Finnerty has met one of the thousands of women who were sent to these mother and baby homes. Air travel in the Democratic Republic of Congo matters because there are few reliable roads. But there are serious concerns about the safety of flying and many people can't afford it anyway. Most Congolese who need to cover long distances do so - precariously - by boat. Olivia Acland has been aboard. Maximum Irritability is a little known but nonetheless debilitating condition sometimes encountered high in the mountains on Pakistan’s border with India, as David Baillie discovered when he took a trip in a helicopter courtesy of the Pakistani army.

Transcript

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0:00.0

BBC Sounds, music radio podcasts.

0:05.0

Good morning.

0:06.8

At a time when American engagement in foreign affairs is in the spotlight,

0:11.5

we remember the US Invasion of Panama 30 years ago.

0:16.3

In Ireland we hear that the legacy of grim institutions to which supposedly errant women were

0:22.1

dispatched still causes pain.

0:25.0

There's a precarious boat trip up the Congo River,

0:29.0

and we encounter the debilitating condition known as

0:32.0

maximum irritability high in the mountains where Pakistan meets

0:36.7

India.

0:39.1

We begin with American engagement today in foreign affairs and the assassination of General

0:44.6

Kasim Salimani, seen by many as the single most important figure in Iran after

0:50.0

the Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei.

0:53.4

Directing Iranian military operations across the Middle East,

0:57.3

revered, feared, and effective.

1:00.1

Solimani was killed in a targeted US

1:02.6

airstrike early on Friday morning, along with a senior Iraqi commander,

1:07.6

Abu Mahti al-Mahandis.

1:09.9

As tensions rise across the region, Jim Muir assesses the consequences.

1:15.0

I can't remember exactly which year it was, most probably, it was 2002,

1:21.0

but I do remember being deeply struck by a big military parade being conducted through the streets of the Iranian city of Kerman Shah.

1:29.0

It had all the usual paraphernalia and bravado of men with guns and rockets showing off.

...

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