Story update: I wrote an article published yesterday that didn't get much attention from other media, possibly because it was based on sources our stringer up north tapped that other media stringers may not have been able to reach. It's about Iranian soldiers storming northeastern Iraqi villages -- part of a clash between ethnic Kurds and neighboring countries, but with much larger implications if it escalates. Read it here.

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Every once in a while I'll be riding in the car traveling from the hotel to the Green Zone or somewhere else and I'll see a plume of smoke rising out of some neighborhood. It's hard to tell whether it's one of the many non-EPA-approved factories with high-rising smokestacks pumping out fumes, or a fire pit, or a mortar attack, or a car bomb, or something else.

When I looked out my balcony yesterday, I was pretty sure that the billowing smoke I saw rising in the distance was ... something else. Turns out I was right: Insurgents had bombed an oil pipeline. And the picture doesn't really do justice to show just what a huge pile of smoke that was.

The crazy thing is that there were still traces of the smoke the next day.

Hamad, one of the Iraqi journalists here, wasn't too impressed by the smoke looming over his city. He said he remembers two times when all of Baghdad was covered under clouds of smoke and filth -- and black soot filled the air: The 1991 Shiite uprising, and the 2003 U.S. invasion.

What a crazy town.