Iraqi Troops Donate $1000 to California Wildfire Aid, Media Mum

Here's a heart-rending story out of Iraq media will likely boycott or downplay: a group of Iraqi soldiers in a military camp east of Baghdad collected $1000 last week to send to folks in southern California affected by the recent wildfires.

Certainly not something an anti-war media will want to quickly share with the public, wouldn't you agree?

Yet, there it was Monday evening at CNN.com, amazingly filed by Barbara Starr, the correspondent that told Howard Kurtz three weeks ago why good news from Iraq shouldn't get reported (h/t NBer Prester John):

"In the months I've been here, I have never been so moved," Army Col. Darel Maxfield, the senior U.S. military official at Camp Besmaya, said in an e-mail.

The money was collected from Iraqi officers and enlisted soldiers at Besmaya.

Many of the Marines at that camp are from Camp Pendleton, a U.S. Marine Corps base about 38 miles north of downtown San Diego, California, he said.

[...]

Maxfield said the Iraqi leadership at the camp called a meeting Thursday evening to gather Iraqi soldiers and U.S.-led coalition members. The Iraqi commander there gave a short speech, thanking all his "American brothers" for their role in Iraq.

He then presented a sealed envelope with the check, Maxfield said.

"I'm honored to participate by sending you a simple fund of $1,000 to the American people in San Diego city to lowering their suffering from the wildfire," the Iraqi colonel told them. "That's for the feeling of being brothers and friends and for the great connections together."

[...]

The U.S. military said it isn't the first time the Iraqi commander collected money for Americans coping with natural disasters. When Hurricane Katrina struck the U.S. Gulf Coast in 2005, the Iraqi reportedly took up $680 from his men to aid victims.

For the record, this news apparently was first broken on October 27 by Richard S. Lowry at the blog Op For, and came from an October 26 press release.

Yet, apart from Starr's article at CNN.com, and a World Net Daily piece Tuesday, no major media outlet has picked this story up.

In fact, according to LexisNexis and Google news searches, although Starr wrote a piece for CNN's website, "The Most Trusted Name in News" hasn't reported this marvelous story to its viewers.

Of course, neither has any television media outlet.

Why might that be?