Maliki stooge and collaborator of US subjugation |
Iraq collaborators
Is this what the Iraq people are voting for:
Maliki — the stooge and collaborator!
Allawi — permanent CIA Illuminati tool!
How it sickens one to see human submissiveness in the face of such pervasive Illuminati evil!
Kewe | Iyad Allawi CIA Illuminati tool |
Depleted Uranium — its use in Afghanistan, Iraq, Balkans Photos of Iraq children being born deformed |
US used white phosphorus chemical and thermobaric fuel-air weapons War Crimes — Fallujah |
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State-Sponsored Terror: British and American Black Ops in Iraq
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by Andrew G. Marshall
Global Research, June 25, 2008
What’s The Difference Between Lehman Shining Light on the "Black World"
In January of 2002, the Washington Post ran a story detailing a CIA plan put forward to President Bush shortly after 9/11 by CIA Director George Tenet titled, "Worldwide Attack Matrix," which was "outlining a clandestine anti-terror campaign in 80 countries around the world.
What he was ready to propose represented a striking and risky departure for U.S. policy and would give the CIA the broadest and most lethal authority in its history."
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The plan entailed CIA and Special Forces:
"Covert operations across the globe."
And at:
"The heart of the proposal was a recommendation that the president give the CIA what Tenet labeled "exceptional authorities" to attack and destroy al Qaeda in Afghanistan and the rest of the world."
Tenet cited the need for such authority:
"To allow the agency to operate without restraint — and he wanted encouragement from the president to take risks."
Among the many authorities recommended was the use of "deadly force."
Further:
"Another proposal was that the CIA increase liaison work with key foreign intelligence services."
As:
"Using such intelligence services as surrogates could triple or quadruple the CIA's effectiveness."
Western Governments Worldwide Matrix
The Worldwide Attack Matrix:
"Described covert operations in 80 countries that were either underway or that he was now recommending.
The actions ranged from routine propaganda to lethal covert action in preparation for military attacks."
as well as:
"In some countries, CIA teams would break into facilities to obtain information." [1]
Washington to deliberately foment the murder of innocent people — your family, your friends, your lovers, you — in order to further their geopolitical ambitions
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In 2002, the Pentagon’s Defense Science Board (DSB) conducted a:
"Summer Study on Special Operations and Joint Forces in Support of Countering Terrorism."
Portions of which were leaked to the Federation of American Scientists.
According to the document, the "War on Terror" constitutes a:
"Committed, resourceful and globally dispersed adversary with strategic reach."
Which will require the US to engage in a:
"Long, at times violent, and borderless war."
As the Asia Times described it, this document lays out a blueprint for the US to "fight fire with fire."
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Many of the "proposals appear to push the military into territory that traditionally has been the domain of the CIA, raising questions about whether such missions would be subject to the same legal restraints imposed on CIA activities."
According to the Chairman of the DSB:
"The CIA executes the plans but they use Department of Defense assets."
Specifically, the plan:
"Recommends the creation of a super-Intelligence Support Activity, an organization it dubs the Proactive, Preemptive Operations Group (P2OG), to bring together CIA and military covert action, information warfare, intelligence and cover and deception.
For example, the Pentagon and CIA would work together to increase human intelligence (HUMINT) forward/operational presence and to deploy new clandestine technical capabilities."
The purpose of P2OG would be in:
"‘Stimulating reactions’ among terrorists and states possessing weapons of mass destruction, meaning it would prod terrorist cells into action, thus exposing them to ‘quick-response’ attacks by US forces." [2]
In other words, commit terror to incite terror, in order to react to terror.
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The Los Angeles Times reported in 2002 that:
"The Defense Department is building up an elite secret army with resources stretching across the full spectrum of covert capabilities.
New organizations are being created.
The missions of existing units are being revised."
And quoted then-Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld as saying:
"Prevention and preemption are ... the only defense against terrorism."[3]
Chris Floyd bluntly described P2OG in CounterPunch, saying:
"The United States government is planning to use "cover and deception" and secret military operations to provoke murderous terrorist attacks on innocent people.
Let's say it again: Donald Rumsfeld, Dick Cheney, George W. Bush and the other members of the unelected regime in Washington plan to deliberately foment the murder of innocent people — your family, your friends, your lovers, you — in order to further their geopolitical ambitions."[4]
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British working alongside Special Air Service [SAS] and American Delta Force responsible for terror
On February 5, 2007, the Telegraph reported that:
"Deep inside the heart of the "Green Zone" [in Iraq], the heavily fortified administrative compound in Baghdad, lies one of the most carefully guarded secrets of the war in Iraq.
It is a cell from a small and anonymous British Army unit that goes by the deliberately meaningless name of the Joint Support Group (JSG)."
The members of the JSG:
"Are trained to turn hardened terrorists into coalition spies using methods developed on the mean streets of Ulster during the Troubles, when the Army managed to infiltrate the IRA at almost every level.
Since war broke out in Iraq in 2003, they have been responsible for running dozens of Iraqi double agents."
They have been:
"[W]orking alongside the Special Air Service [SAS] and the American Delta Force as part of the Baghdad-based counter-terrorist unit known as Task Force Black."
It was reported that:
"During the Troubles [in Northern Ireland], the JSG operated under the cover name of the Force Research Unit (FRU), which between the early 1980s and the late 1990s managed to penetrate the very heart of the IRA.
By targeting and then "turning" members of the paramilitary organisation with a variety of "inducements" ranging from blackmail to bribes, the FRU operators developed agents at virtually every command level within the IRA."
Further:
"The unit was renamed following the Stevens Inquiry into allegations of collusion between the security forces and protestant paramilitary groups, and, until relatively recently continued to work exclusively in Northern Ireland." [5]
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Intelligence officers of the British police and the military actively helped Protestant guerillas to identify and kill Catholic activists in Northern Ireland
Considering that this group had been renamed after revelations of collusion with terrorists, perhaps it is important to take a look at what exactly this "collusion" consisted of.
The Stevens Inquiry’s report:
"Contains devastating confirmation that intelligence officers of the British police and the military actively helped Protestant guerillas to identify and kill Catholic activists in Northern Ireland during the 1980s."
It was:
"A state policy sanctioned at the highest level."
The Inquiry:
"Highlighted collusion, the willful failure to keep records, the absence of accountability, the withholding of intelligence, and the extreme of agents being involved in murder."
And acknowledged:
"That innocent people had died because of the collusion."
These particular:
"Charges relate to activities of a British Army intelligence outfit known as the Force Research Unit (FRU) and former Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC) police officers." [6]
In 2002, the Sunday Herald reported on the allegations made by a former British intelligence agent, Kevin Fulton, who stated that:
"He was told by his military handlers that his collusion with paramilitaries was sanctioned by Margaret Thatcher herself."
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Fulton worked for the Force Research Unit (FRU), and had infiltrated the IRA, always while on the pay roll of the military.
Fulton tells of how in 1992, he told his FRU and MI5 intelligence handlers that his IRA superior was planning to launch a mortar attack on the police, yet his handlers did nothing and the attack went forward, killing a policewoman.
Fulton stated:
"I broke the law seven days a week and my handlers knew that.
They knew that I was making bombs and giving them to other members of the IRA and they did nothing about it.
If everything I touched turned to shit then I would have been dead.
The idea was that the only way to beat the enemy was to penetrate the enemy and be the enemy." [7]
Worst single terrorist atrocity one of the terrorists was a British agent
In 1998, Northern Ireland experienced its:
"Worst single terrorist atrocity."
As described by the BBC, in which a car bomb went off, killing 29 people and injuring 300. [8]
According to a Sunday Herald piece in 2001:
"Security forces didn't intercept the Real IRA's Omagh bombing team because one of the terrorists was a British double-agent whose cover would have been blown as an informer if the operation was uncovered."
Kevin Fulton had even:
"Phoned a warning to his RUC handlers 48 hours before the Omagh bombing that the Real IRA was planning an attack and gave details of one of the bombing team and his car registration."
Further:
"The man thought to be the agent is a senior member of the [IRA] organization." [9]
In 2002, it was revealed that:
"One of the most feared men inside the Provisional IRA," John Joe Magee, head of the IRA’s "internal security unit," commonly known as the IRA’s "torturer- in-chief," was actually "one of the UK's most elite soldiers," who "was trained as a member of Britain's special forces."
The Sunday Herald stated that:
"Magee led the IRA's internal security unit for more than a decade up to the mid-90s — most of those he investigated were usually executed."
And that:
"Magee's unit was tasked to hunt down, interrogate and execute suspected British agents within the IRA." [10]
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Two British agents central to bombings of three army border installations in 1990
In 2006, the Guardian reported that:
"Two British agents were central to the bombings of three army border installations in 1990."
The claims included tactics known as the ‘human bomb’, which:
"Involved forcing civilians to drive vehicles laden with explosives into army checkpoints."
This tactic:
"Was the brainchild of British intelligence." [11]
In 2006, it was also revealed that:
"A former British Army mole in the IRA has claimed that MI5 arranged a weapons-buying trip to America in which he obtained detonators, later used by terrorists to murder soldiers and police officers."
And:
"British intelligence co-operated with the FBI to ensure his trip to New York in the 1990s went ahead without incident so that his cover would not be blown."
Further:
"The technology he obtained has been used in Northern Ireland and copied by terrorists in Iraq in roadside bombs that have killed British troops." [12]
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Considering all these revelations of British collusion with IRA terrorists and complicity in terrorist acts in Northern Ireland through the FRU, what evidence is there that these same tactics are not being deployed in Iraq under the renamed Joint Support Group (JSG)?
The recruits to the JSG in Iraq are trained extensively and those:
"Who eventually pass the course can expect to be posted to Baghdad, Basra and Afghanistan." [13]
P2OG in Action — Iraq’s most sacred Shiite mosque blown up
In September of 2003, months after the initial invasion of Iraq in March 2003, Iraq’s most sacred Shiite mosque was blown up, killing between 80 and 120 people, including a popular Shiite cleric, and the event was blamed by Iraqis on the American forces. [14]
On April 20, 2004, American journalist in Iraq, Dahr Jamail, reported in the New Standard that:
"The word on the street in Baghdad is that the cessation of suicide car bombings is proof that the CIA was behind them."
Jamail interviewed a doctor who stated that:
"The U.S. induces aggression.
If you don't attack me, I will never attack you.
The U.S. is stimulating the aggression of the Iraqi people!"
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This description goes very much in line with the aims outlined in the Pentagon’s P2OG document about "inciting terror," or "preempting terror attacks." [15]
Weeks after the initial incident involving the British SAS soldiers in Basra, in October of 2005, it was reported that Americans were:
"Captured in the act of setting off a car bomb in Baghdad."
As:
"A number of Iraqis apprehended two Americans disguised in Arab dress as they tried to blow up a booby-trapped car in the middle of a residential area in western Baghdad on Tuesday...
Residents of western Baghdad's al-Ghazaliyah district [said] the people had apprehended the Americans as they left their Caprice car near a residential neighborhood in al-Ghazaliyah on Tuesday afternoon.
Local people found they looked suspicious so they detained the men before they could get away.
That was when they discovered that they were Americans and called the... police."
However:
"The Iraq police arrived at approximately the same time as allied military forces — and the two men were removed from Iraq custody and whisked away before any questioning could take place." [16]
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It was reported that in May of 2005, an Iraqi man was arrested after witnessing a car bombing that took place in front of his home, as it was said he shot an Iraqi National Guardsman.
However:
"People from the area claim that the man was taken away not because he shot anyone, but because he knew too much about the bomb.
Rumor has it that he saw an American patrol passing through the area and pausing at the bomb site minutes before the explosion.
Soon after they drove away, the bomb went off and chaos ensued.
He ran out of his house screaming to the neighbors and bystanders that the Americans had either planted the bomb or seen the bomb and done nothing about it.
He was promptly taken away."
100 kilograms of explosives booby trapped by the Americans and intended for al-Khadimiya Shiite district of Baghdad
Further, another story was reported in the same month that took place in Baghdad when an Iraqi driver had his license and car confiscated at a checkpoint, after which he was instructed:
"To report to an American military camp near Baghdad airport for interrogation and in order to retrieve his license."
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After being questioned for a short while, he was told to drive his car to an Iraqi police station, where his license had been forwarded, and that he should go quickly.
"The driver did leave in a hurry, but was soon alarmed with a feeling that his car was driving as if carrying a heavy load, and he also became suspicious of a low flying helicopter that kept hovering overhead, as if trailing him.
He stopped the car and inspected it carefully.
He found nearly 100 kilograms of explosives hidden in the back seat and along the two back doors.
The only feasible explanation for this incident is that the car was indeed booby trapped by the Americans and intended for the al-Khadimiya Shiite district of Baghdad.
The helicopter was monitoring his movement and witnessing the anticipated ‘hideous attack by foreign elements." [17]
On October 4, 2005, it was reported by the Sydney Morning Herald that:
"The FBI's counterterrorism unit has launched a broad investigation of US-based theft rings after discovering some vehicles used in deadly car bombings in Iraq, including attacks that killed US troops and Iraqi civilians, were probably stolen in the United States, according to senior US Government officials."
Further:
"The inquiry began after coalition troops raided a Falluja bomb factory last November and found a Texas-registered four-wheel-drive being prepared for a bombing mission.
Investigators said there were several other cases where vehicles evidently stolen in the US wound up in Syria or other Middle Eastern countries and ultimately in the hands of Iraqi insurgent groups, including al-Qaeda in Iraq." [18]
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In 2006, the Al-Askariya mosque in the city of Samarra was bombed and destroyed.
It was built in 944, was over 1,000 years old, and was one of the most important Shi’ite mosques in the world.
The great golden dome that covered it, which was built in 1904, was destroyed in the 2006 bombing, which was set off by men dressed as Iraqi Special Forces. [19]
Former 27-year CIA analyst who gave several presidents their daily CIA briefings, Ray McGovern, stated that he:
"Does not rule out Western involvement in this week's Askariya mosque bombing."
He was quoted as saying:
"The main question is Qui Bono?
Who benefits from this kind of thing?
You don't have to be very conspiratorial or even paranoid to suggest that there are a whole bunch of likely suspects out there and not only the Sunnis.
You know, the British officers were arrested, dressed up in Arab garb, riding around in a car, so this stuff goes on." [20]
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Death Squads for "Freedom"
In January of 2005, Newsweek reported on a Pentagon program termed the "Salvador Option" being discussed to be deployed in Iraq.
This strategy:
"Dates back to a still-secret strategy in the Reagan administration’s battle against the leftist guerrilla insurgency in El Salvador in the early 1980s.
Then, faced with a losing war against Salvadoran rebels, the U.S. government funded or supported "nationalist" forces that allegedly included so-called death squads directed to hunt down and kill rebel leaders and sympathizers."
Updating the strategy to Iraq:
"One Pentagon proposal would send Special Forces teams to advise, support and possibly train Iraqi squads, most likely hand-picked Kurdish Peshmerga fighters and Shiite militiamen, to target Sunni insurgents and their sympathizers, even across the border into Syria, according to military insiders familiar with the discussions." [21]
The Times reported that:
"The Pentagon is considering forming hit squads of Kurdish and Shia fighters to target leaders of the Iraqi insurgency in a strategic shift borrowed from the American struggle against left-wing guerrillas in Central America 20 years ago.
Under the so-called ‘El Salvador option’, Iraqi and American forces would be sent to kill or kidnap insurgency leaders."
It further stated:
"Hit squads would be controversial and would probably be kept secret."
As:
"The experience of the so-called "death squads" in Central America remains raw for many even now and helped to sully the image of the United States in the region."
Further:
"John Negroponte, the US Ambassador in Baghdad, had a front-row seat at the time as Ambassador to Honduras from 1981-85." [22]
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Mass killings are when Police Commandos active
By June of 2005, mass executions were taking place in Iraq in the six months since January, and:
"What is particularly striking is that many of those killings have taken place since the Police Commandos became operationally active and often correspond with areas where they have been deployed." [23]
In May of 2007, an Iraqi who formerly collaborated with US forces in Iraq for two and a half years stated that:
"I was a soldier in the Iraqi army in the war of 1991 and during the withdrawal from Kuwait I decided to seek asylum in Saudi Arabia along with dozens of others like me.
That was how began the process whereby I was recruited into the American forces, for there were US military committees that chose a number of Iraqis who were willing to volunteer to join them and be transported to America.
I was one of those."
He spoke out about how after the 2003 invasion, he was returned to Iraq to:
"Carry out specific tasks assigned him by the US agencies."
Among those tasks, he was put:
"In charge of a group of a unit that carried out assassinations in the streets of Baghdad."
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Some job units of American government and other foreigner governments specialize in planting bombs and car bombs in neighborhoods and markets
He was quoted as saying:
"Our task was to carry out assassinations of individuals.
The US occupation army would supply us with their names, pictures, and maps of their daily movements to and from their place of residence and we were supposed to kill the Shi'i, for example, in the al-A'zamiyah, and kill the Sunni in the of 'Madinat as-Sadr’, and so on."
Further:
"Anyone in the unit who made a mistake was killed.
Three members of my team were killed by US occupation forces after they failed to assassinate Sunni political figures in Baghdad."
He revealed that this "dirty jobs" unit of Iraqis, Americans and other foreigners:
"Doesn’t only carry out assassinations, but some of them specialize in planting bombs and car bombs in neighborhoods and markets."
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Best-known and most famous among the US troops is placing a bomb inside cars as they are being searched at checkpoints
He elaborated in saying that:
"Operations of planting car bombs and blowing up explosives in markets are carried out in various ways, the best-known and most famous among the US troops is placing a bomb inside cars as they are being searched at checkpoints.
Another way is to put bombs in the cars during interrogations.
After the desired person is summoned to one of the US bases, a bomb is place in his car and he is asked to drive to a police station or a market for some purpose and there his car blows up." [24]
Divide and Conquer?
Craig Murray, former British Ambassador to Uzbekistan, wrote in October of 2006, that:
"The evidence that the US directly contributed to the creation of the current civil war in Iraq by its own secretive security strategy is compelling.
Historically of course this is nothing new — divide and rule is a strategy for colonial powers that has stood the test of time.
Indeed, it was used in the previous British occupation of Iraq around 85 years ago.
However, maybe in the current scenario the US just over did it a bit, creating an unstoppable momentum that, while stalling the insurgency, has actually led to new problems of control and sustainability for Washington and London." [25]
Click here for notes
© Copyright 2005-2008 GlobalResearch.ca
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| IraqAlmost a million dead4 million displaced, scattered into other countriesUntold injuredHorror of US UK invasion continuing |
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U.S. troops backed by helicopters killed the man, injuring his wife
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US largest war funding request ever for 2008
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Weeps for father killed by the USU.S. troops backed by helicopters killed his father, injuring his mother
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US largest war funding request ever for 2008
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Published on Wednesday, April 27, 2005 by the Guardian (UK)
This Is Our Guernica
Ruined, cordoned Falluja is emerging as the decade's monument to brutality
by Jonathan Steele and Dahr Jamail
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Robert Zoellick is the archetypal US government insider, a man with a brilliant technical mind but zero experience of any coalface or war front.
Sliding effortlessly between ivy league academia, the US treasury and corporate boardrooms (including an advisory post with the scandalous Enron), his latest position is the number-two slot at the state department.
Put the prime minister and the foreign secretary to shame
Yet this ultimate "man of the suites" did something earlier this month that put the prime minister and the foreign secretary to shame.
On their numerous visits to Iraq, neither has ever dared to go outside the heavily fortified green zones of Baghdad and Basra to see life as Iraqis have to live it.
They come home after photo opportunities, briefings and pep talks with British troops and claim to know what is going on in the country they invaded, when in fact they have seen almost nothing.
Zoellick, by contrast, on his first trip to Iraq, asked to see Falluja. Remember Falluja?
A city of some 300,000, which was alleged to be the stronghold of armed resistance to the occupation.
Two US attempts were made to destroy this symbol of defiance last year.
The first, in April, fizzled out after Iraqi politicians, including many who supported the invasion of their country, condemned the use of air strikes to terrorise an entire city.
The Americans called off the attack, but not before hundreds of families had fled and more than 600 people had been killed.
Six months later the Americans tried again.
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This time Washington's allies had been talked to in advance. Consistent US propaganda about the presence in Falluja of a top al-Qaida figure, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, was used to create a climate of acquiescence in the US-appointed Iraqi government.
Shia leaders were told that bringing Falluja under control was the only way to prevent a Sunni-inspired civil war.
Blair sent British troops to block escape routes from Falluja
Blair was invited to share responsibility by sending British troops to block escape routes from Falluja and prevent supplies entering once the siege began.
Warnings of the onslaught prompted the vast majority of Falluja's 300,000 people to flee.
The city was then declared a free-fire zone on the grounds that the only people left behind must be "terrorists".
Three weeks after the attack was launched last November, the Americans claimed victory.
They say they killed about 1,300 people; one week into the siege, a BBC reporter put the unofficial death toll at 2,000.
But details of what happened and who the dead were remain obscure.
Were many unarmed civilians, as Baghdad-based human rights groups report?
Even if they were trying to defend their homes by fighting the Americans, does that make them "terrorists"?
Journalists "embedded" with US forces filmed atrocities, including the killing of a wounded prisoner, but no reporter could get anything like a full picture.
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Since the siege ended, tight US restrictions - as well as the danger of hostage-taking that prevents reporters from travelling in most parts of Iraq - have put the devastated city virtually off limits.
Blasted husks of buildings still line block after block
In this context, Zoellick's trip, which was covered by a small group of US journalists, was illuminating.
The deputy secretary of state had to travel to this "liberated" city in a Black Hawk helicopter flying low over palm trees to avoid being shot down.
He wore a flak jacket under his suit even though Falluja's streets were largely deserted.
His convoy of eight armoured vehicles went "so quickly past an open-air bakery reopened with a US-provided micro-loan that workers tossing dough could be glanced only in the blink of an eye," as the Washington Post reported.
"Blasted husks of buildings still line block after block," the journalist added.
Meeting hand-picked Iraqis in a US base, Zoellick was bombarded with complaints about the pace of US reconstruction aid and frequent intimidation of citizens by American soldiers.
Although a state department factsheet claimed 95% of residents had water in their homes, Falluja's mayor said it was contaminated by sewage and unsafe.
Other glimpses of life in Falluja come from Dr Hafid al-Dulaimi, head of the city's compensation commission, who reports that 36,000 homes were destroyed in the US onslaught, along with 8,400 shops.
Sixty nurseries and schools were ruined, along with 65 mosques and religious sanctuaries.
Daud Salman, an Iraqi journalist with the Institute for War and Peace Reporting, on a visit to Falluja two weeks ago, found that only a quarter of the city's residents had gone back.
Thousands remain in tents on the outskirts.
The Iraqi Red Crescent finds it hard to go in to help the sick because of the US cordon around the city.
Burhan Fasa'a, a cameraman for the Lebanese Broadcasting Company, reported during the siege that dead family members were buried in their gardens because people could not leave their homes.
Refugees told one of us that civilians carrying white flags were gunned down by American soldiers.
Corpses were tied to US tanks and paraded around like trophies.
Justin Alexander, a volunteer for Christian Peacemaker Teams, recently found hundreds living in tents in the grounds of their homes, or in a single patched-up room.
A strict system of identity cards blocks access to anyone whose papers give a birthplace outside Falluja, so long-term residents born elsewhere cannot go home.
"Fallujans feel the remnants of their city have been turned into a giant prison," he reports.
Many complain that soldiers of the Iraqi national guard, the fledgling new army, loot shops during the night-time curfew and detain people in order to take a bribe for their release.
They are suspected of being members of the Badr Brigade, a Shia militia that wants revenge against Sunnis.
One thing is certain: the attack on Falluja has done nothing to still the insurgency against the US-British occupation nor produced the death of al-Zarqawi - any more than the invasion of Afghanistan achieved the capture or death of Osama bin Laden.
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Thousands of bereaved and homeless Falluja families have a new reason to hate the US and its allies.
Tour the city that Britain had a share in destroying
At least Zoellick went to see.
He gave no hint of the impression that the trip left him with, but is too smart not to have understood something of the reality.
The lesson ought not to be lost on Blair and Straw.
Every time the prime minister claims it is time to "move on" from the issue of the war's legality and rejoice at Iraq's transformation since Saddam Hussein was toppled, the answer must be: "Remember Falluja."
When the foreign secretary next visits Iraq, he should put on a flak jacket and tour the city that Britain had a share in destroying.
The government keeps hoping Iraq will go away as an election issue.
It stubbornly refuses to do so.
Voters are not only angry that the war was illegal, illegitimate and unnecessary.
The treatment inflicted on Iraqis since the invasion by the US and Britain is equally important.
In the 1930s the Spanish city of Guernica became a symbol of wanton murder and destruction.
In the 1990s Grozny was cruelly flattened by the Russians; it still lies in ruins.
This decade's unforgettable monument to brutality and overkill is Falluja, a text-book case of how not to handle an insurgency, and a reminder that unpopular occupations will always degenerate into desperation and atrocity.
Jonathan Steele is the Guardian's senior foreign correspondent; Dahr Jamail is a freelance American journalist.
© 2005 Guardian Newspapers, Ltd.
Common Dreams © 1997-2005 |
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A Baathist looks at the big picture
Arablinks.blogspot.com
From the blowing up of bridges to the attempts to split the resistance: what's going on in Iraq?
April 18, 2007
Salah al-Mukhtar was a prominent Baathist in the late Saddam era, serving in diplomatic positions in India, Vietnam and the UN, and although he doesn't have an official position currently, he often comments on the Iraq war from a Baathist perspective.
This article was published on the resistance website albasrah.net April 15, and a commenter suggested this would be a good introduction to a point of view that doesn't get much coverage here in the anglosphere. And it is hard to argue with that.
One of his major points is that it seems to him that at the point when the Americans realized they were in trouble militarily, they came up with the idea of covertly helping the takfiris attack other Iraqis, as a way of helping turn the war against the occupation into an Iraqi-on-Iraqi war. Abu Omar al-Baghdadi, this writer implies, without mentioning the name, is a likely a nobody who rose to prominence with covert American aid.
His title is "From the blowing up of bridges to the attempts to split the resistance: what's going on in Iraq?"
Al-Mukhtar begins by talking about the recent blowing up of two major bridges over the Tigris in Baghdad, and the intensified popular sense of foreboding this caused, because it suggests to people the idea of Iraqi partition extending to the heart of Baghdad, and it suggests too the idea that there are some with a strategy of not leaving stone upon stone, and finishing the work of destruction that the Americans began.
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The American Mukhabarat has undertaken another project, this one with the clear support of Iran
He then segues to the execution of Saddam and his associates, with its "artificial creation of a sectarian atmosphere", the idea being that these apparently separate events, and many others, are part and parcel of a scheme to foster sectarian warfare, split the resistance, and weaken the country to the point where the occupation can succeed.
The Saddam execution was followed by an attempt by a group in Syria to split the Baath, and American-led persecution of the Party and its members and supporters throughout Iraq. The writer goes on:
And in addition to the attempts to attack the name of the [Baath] Party, the American Mukhabarat has undertaken another project, this one with the clear support of Iran, whether by direct arrangement or by a meeting of the minds, namely the plan to cause fighting between factions of the Iraqi jihad, by encouraging Islamist takfiris within some of the factions to announce their intention to monopolize, from now on, the control of Iraq or at least of the field of jihad, giving the other factions the choice of having their necks cut, or pledging allegiance to them and proceeding under their leadership — and that even though they only represented a small group!
Likewise other members took to applying takfir to the progressive and arabist nationalist factions.
...And they went so far as to kill dozens of military cadres fighting against the occupation from among the Baathists and arabists, for the purpose of igniting a fight among the jihadi factions, serving in this way the primary purpose of America and Iran, namely the division of the Iraqi resistance, because that is the basic prerequisite for turning the American defeat in Iraq into victory.
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'Moles'
The writer then explains the meaning of the expression "moles" in organizations like these.
And he says what has been going on is this:
(The Americans) Once they understood that they had well and truly fallen into the Iraqi trap, from which they wouldn't emerge safely unless they could come up with an elaborately thought-out scheme, started putting moles in specific factions, and via these moles they offered the groups generous material and PR support.
This enhanced the credibility of these moles, and raised their profile and role within these factions, and some of them came to have leadership roles within those factions.
Without mentioning names, it is pretty clear he is referring to people like Abu Omar al-Baghdadi, a person no one had ever heard of before, who suddenly emerged as the emir of the Islamic State of Iraq.
Overlooking this role of agents, the writer says, would be a fateful error no matter how you look at it. And he asks:
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Are Allawi, Hakim, Chalabi the only agents?
Why is it that there was never, ever, any disclosure of any new American agents after the original disclosure of the roles of the old agents Allawi, Hakim, Chalabi and the others?
Are they the only agents, or are their other agents who are more important because they operate within the national ranks and haven't been exposed yet? |
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A Baathist looks at the big picture
Arablinks.blogspot.com
The writer then compares the role of moles in the jihadi organizations to that of Iran in the macro picture, in the sense that Iran
...appears with the appearance of opposing America for the good of the cause of Islam and Palestine...
[but] this is in preparation for dividing [Iraqis and Palestinians] and changing the fight from a fight for liberation against America and Israel, into sectarian fights between muslims, instead of focusing all guns on the Zionists and the Americans.
As far as Iraq is concerned, the writer says, the result has been that most attacks carried out by these groups are now against Iraqis, Shiite and Sunni, and not against the occupation forces except peripherally.
America has spent a lot on this war, and that in Afghanistan, but since success would give them control over the world's major oil reserves, and and with it a global dictatorship, the price will have been cheap considering the result.
It would be naive, the writer says, to think that everyone who fights America or Israel in Iraq or in Palestine is necessarily engaged in struggle or jihad.
Because you have to look at the final result, and not at half-way results.
You can't judge military efforts against the occupation except in the light of real aims and real results, and the one necessary condition for victory in Iraq is maintenance of the unity of the resistance, just as the one necessary condition for the occupation to succeed is to split the resistance.
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The writer offers a couple of observations in conclusion:
The first observation is that at the same time that the American Mukhabarat toughens its campaign against the Baath by various means...
[including] its extreme efforts to dry up the sources of funding for the Party and its resistance, and its arrest of tens of thousands of its fighters and mujahideen, at the same time it is making life easier in a remarkable way for the sectarian Sunni takfiris, offering them financial and military support, whether directly, or channeled via the Gulf, and this at a time when their takfir is being intensified against the nationalists and the patriots and the true Islamists....
People shouldn't lose sight of this for even a moment, the writer says, because what this American strategy amounts to as an attempt to change the war from one against the occupation to a sectarian Shiite-Sunni war, which will not stop until the sectarian takfiri power is the dominant one in Iraq.
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And this is particularly ungent for Baathists to understand, because the first requisite for this American strategy is the crushing of the Baath Party, conceptually, organizationally, financially.
Because the Baath is the only nationalist party that covers all of Iraq and includes Sunnis, Shiites and others.
His second concluding observation is that Iran, even though it is naturally an enemy of the Sunni takfiris, still provides them with support and assistance in their attacks on Iraqi Shiites.
The reason is to make the Iraqi Shiites side with Iran, in a way that will ultimately further feed the conversion of this war into a sectarian one, in order to weaken the country.
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BEHIND THE SCENE |
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Loup de Loup: The Deeper Darkness
Chris Floyd — www.chris-floyd.com
...If the neocons all hopped a spaceship for the Hale-Bopp comet tomorrow — indeed, if the cult had never arisen at all — we would still be right where we are today: neck-deep in the Big Muddy.
That's not to say, of course, that we weren't misled into Iraq, or that strings aren't being pulled for a war on Iran, or that flames aren't being fanned to widen the Middle East war — or that the gaggle of third-rate thinkers and first-class troublemakers loosely grouped under the rubric "neocon" aren't intimately involved in all of these affairs.
They are, in spades.
But to accuse them of playing the central role in America's on-going Gõtterdõmmerung gives them an importance they don't deserve — and unduly mitigates the guilt of the true culprits:
The good old-fashioned Anglo-Saxon boardroom buccaneers of the American Establishment, bred for generations to feast on war and rumors of war, and to regard the hoi polloi as mere cannon fodder and cash cows to be mulched and milked as needed.
For what's the underlying implication of the "neocons über alles" meme?
It's that hard-core, down-and-dirty inside operators like Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld — who have spent their entire adult lives at the dark heart of the government-corporate-warbiz-spygame power nexus — are actually innocent lambkins led astray by the wicked blandishments of Richard Perle.
It's that the world-striding oil barons, Wall Street dynasts and CIA scions of the Bush Faction are just wide-eyed rubes bamboozled into acting against their own interests by the dazzling sophistry of William Kristol and Michael Leeden.
It's that no U.S. administration would ever undertake the kind of rapacious policies we've seen in the last five years — unless they'd been tricked into it by wily Zionists and their ideological outriders.
It is, in short, our old friend "American exceptionalism," decked out in dissident drag.
Shakespeare pegged the neo-cons' true place in the scheme of things more than 400 years ago in Julius Caesar.
Listen to Marc Antony dismissing his fellow triumvir Lepidus, and you will hear the authentic voice of Great Gamesters like Cheney, Rumsfeld and James Baker, dicing for world empire and using anything at hand — neo-cons, evangelicals, Caucasian despots, Arab tyrants, Israeli proxies, British lapdogs, Shiite death squads — to further their ambitions:
"This is a slight unmeritable man, meet to be sent on errands.
...and though we lay these honours on this man, to ease ourselves of divers slanderous loads, he shall but bear them as the ass bears gold, to groan and sweat under the business, either led or driven as we point the way.
And having brought our treasure where we will, then we take down his load and turn him off, like to the empty ass, to shake his ears and graze in commons."
Or at the World Bank, as the case may be.
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Again, this is not to deny that neocon fingerprints are all over the various shivs and bludgeons that the Bush Regime has used in its whack jobs on the Constitution, the Geneva Conventions, the UN Charter, the Magna Carta and the Ten Commandments.
After all, the veritable blueprint for the whole godawful shebang — the infamous "Rebuilding America's Defenses" document of September 2000 — was concocted under the aegis of that quintessentially neocon think tank, the Project for the New American Century.
...But without the presence of long-time Establishment power players like Cheney and Rumsfeld on the PNAC board, the plan would have remained the pipe dream of a few curdled academics and comb-licking policy wonks.
Indeed, it was the Great Gamesters themselves who set the neocons to work on devising ways to extend the "unipolar moment" of unchallenged American power that arose after the collapse of the Soviet Union.
The first version of the PNAC plan was drawn up at Cheney's order by Paul Wolfowitz and Scooter "Leaker" Libby in 1992, in the last months of the Bush I administration.
Under Bush II, the neocons were brought in as shock troops.
Their mindless zealotry was a perfect tool for implementing the plans drawn up by the real players in the new regime: Cheney's notorious "Energy Task Force" and the much lesser-known "Joint Task Force on Petroleum" formed by the Council on Foreign Relations and — who else? — the James Baker Institute at Rice University.
It was here that the final solution for Iraq was hammered out...
These are dark days, serious times.
The whiff of apocalypse is in the air.
For it will be virtually impossible for the Gamesters to carry off their next immediate goal, subduing Iran — much less their long-range aim of dominating the world throughout a "new American century" — without the use of nuclear weapons.
So let's be done with the comforting fairy tale that the vast crimes we are witnessing are the work of a few cranks who have somehow hijacked the noble U.S. government and are using it for their own purposes, or Israel's purposes, or whatever.
The reality is that Iraq was invaded because a powerful faction of the old-line American Establishment wanted to do it and the rest of the Establishment — the Democrats, the media, the "respectable" intelligentsia — countenanced the crime.
The belligerence and oppression that the Israeli government is inflicting in Lebanon and Palestine are receiving unquestioned — and armed — support from the United States because this suits the larger strategic purposes of the "global dominance" faction of the Establishment, and the domestic political purposes both of the Democrats, heavily reliant on Jewish-American backing, and the Republicans, dependent on their rabidly pro-Israel evangelical base.
[As many others have pointed out, whenever the Israelis try to do something that the American elite don't like -- such as sell sophisticated military technology to the Chinese — they are called on the carpet and forced to back down. ]
It is the American elite — pursuing, as always, the enhancement of its own power and privilege, heedless of the consent of the governed or the genuine interests of the American people (or the Palestinian people or the Israeli people or the Lebanese people or the Iraqi people) — that bedevils us.
The emergence of the cretinous neoconservative cult is just a symptom of a deeper moral corruption coursing through the dominant institutions and structures of American society.
The body politic is rotting from the head.
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INDEX ON IRAQ: A JOURNEY IN HELL Sarah Meyer, INDEX RESEARCH |
US black budget special operations — continuing in Iraq
March 21, 2007
Bomb rips through Kia passenger bus in Baghdad, as mysterious bombings increase. Russian expert cites US special services as source of sectarian tension in Iraq. In a dispatch posted at 1:20pm Makkah time Tuesday afternoon, Mafkarat al-Islam reported that a bus carrying civilian passengers exploded in the Baghdad district of al-Karradah according to an announcement by the puppet police. The correspondent for Mafkarat al-Islam reported the source as saying that a bomb went off in a Kia vehicle in a shopping center near the al-Karrahda area, which is predominantly Shi‘i. The source said that two people were killed and four more wounded. The injured were ambulanced to nearby hospitals.
The bombing was one of a growing number of mysterious attacks that have rocked Baghdad on a daily basis, killing or wounding thousands of Iraqis amidst claims that regional powers are attempting to keep sectarian violence raging in the country.
Since no groups of the Resistance take responsibility for the mysterious blasts, suspicions are widely expressed that intelligence services are behind the bombing campaign.
Russian geostrategic expert Colonel-General Leonid Ivashov alluded to precisely this reality in an interview with the RIA-Novosti Press Agency correspondents Valery Yarmolenko and Zalina Tsopanova on Monday.
Ivashov, who is Vice-President of Russia’s Academy of Geopolitical Problems, reviewed America’s military and political defeat in Iraq and noted the failure of US troops to counter the guerrilla movement, despite America’s advanced technological edge and the primitive armament of the Resistance.
Ivashov remarked that, “the only thing that is working is not being done by the US troops but by their special services, namely to organize fighting between Shi‘ah and Sunnis.”
Mysterious car bomb explodes in Baghdad.
In a dispatch posted at 1:11pm Makkah time Tuesday afternoon, Mafkarat al-Islam reported that a short while earlier a car bomb that had been parked by the side of a road in Baghdad blew up near the ash-Shaykh ‘Umar puppet police station, inflicting numerous civilian casualties.
The correspondent for Mafkarat al-Islam reported that the explosion killed or wounded 22.
The blast was also positioned close to an elementary school.
All the injured were taken to nearby al-Kindi Hospital as puppet police cordoned off the area.
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More reports of US special operations planting ' suicide ' bombs in cars
March 18, 2007
www.uruknet.de and www.roadstoiraq.com First reported in English by www.roadstoiraq.com An American sniper on the roof of one the buildings in Ahdamiya neighborhood opened fire on a small bus, the bullet caused the burning of the bus. The passengers who were traveling with the bus [a family] and the driver, miraculously managed to escape the fire.
He got suspicious because the Americans call him ask if he is already in the market
Iraqirabita tell a story about an Iraq interpreter working in an American military base was sent to the city by his bosses to by computer hardware, he took the car but he stopped by friends.
He got suspicious because the Americans call him every now and then asking him if he already in the market, he parked the car in the middle of nowhere and answered yes, few minutes after that the car exploded. The guy left the country after that to Turkey.
To see the Iraqirabita article in Arabic, click here
For more information in English on American black budget special operations money being used to set up so called suicide bombing, below — Fast click down here
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| Conflict Terminology
Editors, journalists, and readers are urged to use correct and objective references to the Iraq resistance fighters as such.
Not the other derogatory conflict terminology used by occupation forces and their corporate media outlets, such as guerilla, terrorist, militant, extremist, and insurgent group.
Al-Jazeerah Editor's Note http://www.ccun.org/
Note: This is also followed by TheWE.name |
233 Dead in Civil War Carnage, Health Ministry Besieged, 3,000 Widows Created Each Month
Juan Cole, Informed Comment
November 24, 2006
So as Thursday began, Sunni Arab guerrillas surrounded and attacked the Ministry of Health, which is dominated by followers of Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr.
The guerrillas trapped 2,000 employees in the compound and threatened to kill any who came outside.
They also subjected the building to mortar fire.
The ministry guards, who are probably Mahdi Army, kept them at bay but lost 7 men doing it.
It took US and [US puppet] Iraqi forces 2 hours to respond, and the guerrillas were only finally dispersed by helicopter gunships.
The siege probably came in revenge for the Mahdi Army attack on the Sunni-run Ministry of Higher Education two weeks ago.
Oh, my. Since Iraq is 11 times smaller in population than the US
Then US troops searching for a kidnapped US soldier in Sadr City were a approached by van traveling at a high speed, which did not slow as they instructed it.
They shot up the van, killing 4 civilians and creating some unhappy families in Sadr City; then this incident was overshadowed by several big attacks.
Steven R. Hurst of the Associated Press reported that the death toll in the string of car bombings targetting Sadr City and other Shiite neighborhoods on Thursday has risen to 161, with 257 wounded.
Altogether, he says, "Counting those killed in Sadr City, at least 233 people died or were found dead across Iraq on Thursday."
Oh, my. Since Iraq is 11 times smaller in population than the US, that would be like the deaths of 2,563 Americans.
KarbalaNews.net reports in Arabic that after the car bombs were detonated in Sadr City, the Sunni Arab guerrillas set up checkpoints and attacked ambulences and rescue crews, stopping further ambulances from getting through.
The Sunni Arab guerrillas also surrounded hospitals near to Sadr City and prevented cars bearing the wounded from getting through, firing on them.
The Iraqi government imposed a curfew on Baghdad and closed the Baghdad and Basra airports, cutting the country off from the outside worlds.
Al-Hayat reports in Arabic that Basra ports were also closed "until further notice."
How bad the situation is in Iraq is suggested by this email I just got from a professional who used to be in Iraq but now is in a nearby country:
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Muqtada al-Sadr, the young Shiite nationalist cleric, is said to be afraid that he cannot constrain his Mahdi Army militiamen from taking revenge on the Sunni Arab community for Thursday's mass slaugher.
AP reports:
In a TV statement read by an aide, al-Sadr urged unity among his followers to end the U.S. occupation that he said is causing Iraq's strife.
Al-Sadr said the attacks coincided with the seventh anniversary of the assassination of his father, Mohammed Sadiq al-Sadr, a revered Shia religious leader.
The anniversary reckoning was by the Islamic calendar.
‘Had the late al-Sadr been among you he would have said preserve your unity,’ the statement said.
‘Don't carry out any act before you ask the Hawza (Shia seminary in Najaf).
‘Be the ones who are unjustly treated and not the ones who treat others unjustly.’
Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, the pre-eminent Shia religious figure in Iraq, condemned the bombings and issued condolences to family members of those who were killed.
He called for self-control among his followers.
In fact, Shiite guerrillas went ahead and took some revenge on Thursday, lobbing mortar shells at the HQ of the hardline Sunni Association of Muslim Scholars as well as at the mosque and shrine of Imam Abu Hanifa, which they damaged.
Most Turks, Pakistanis, Indian Muslims, and many Lebanese and Syrian and Iraqi Sunnis follow the Hanafi legal rite founded by Abu Hanifa.
His is an important shrine, an attack on which will inevitably produce a Sunni backlash of some severity.
Harith al-Dhari, a leader of the Association of Muslim Scholars [Sunni revivalist clerics], told al-Sharq al-Awsat that he had not sought out Arab states as mediators between himself and the Iraqi government.
Baghdad issued a warrant last week for his interrogation on suspicion of instigating terrorism.
The Arab League has intervened on his behalf.
He is visiting Egypt for a conference but resides in Jordan and has not been taken into custody.
In Thursday's interview, al-Dhari insisted that he would travel back to Iraq at a time of his choosing, undeterred by the warrant.
He said that those who have taken up arms against the American occupier would not relinquish them for the sake of entering the political process.
He expressed pessimism that the establishment of diplomatic relations with Syria would change the situation in Iraq.
Al-Sharq al-Awsat says that Raja' al-Khuza'i, a secular Shiite woman physician and the head of the National Council for Iraqi women, announced Thursday that Iraqi women are subjected to increasing violence and that 3,000 become widows each month.
Al-Kuza'i served on the Interim Governing Council during the tenure of US proconsul Paul Bremer and had fought against the imposition of religious law on Iraq's women.
Speaking in Vienna, al-Khuza'i said that a large number of female activists had been assassinated, along with large numbers of school teachers, female physicians, and woman police officers.
She said the 100 new widows every day were often left with no means of supporting themselves and their children.
Ed Wong reports on sophisticated training camps in Diyala for Sunni Arab guerrillas of a Salafi or Sunni revivalist bent (they are not actually Wahhabis for the most part, i.e.— Wahhabis predominate in Saudi Arabia).
The guerrillas were able to stand and fight US troops in a pitched battle, deploying platoon-sized units.
Aljazeera reports that ex-Baathist Sunni fighters of the Awda [Return] Party have asserted control in the region near the Syrian border, driving Salafi Sunni revivalists out. Awda's paramilitary is called the Army of Muhammad even though it is secular. |
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'The jihad now is against the Shias, not the Americans'
As 20,000 more US troops head for Iraq, Ghaith Abdul-Ahad, the only correspondent reporting regularly from behind the country's sectarian battle lines, reveals how the Sunni insurgency has changed
Saturday January 13, 2007
The Guardian
"I used to attack the Americans when that was the jihad.
Now there is no jihad.
Go around and see in Adhamiya [the notorious Sunni insurgent area] — all the commanders are sitting sipping coffee; it's only the young kids that are fighting now, and they are not fighting Americans any more, they are just killing Shia.
There are kids carrying two guns each and they roam the streets looking for their prey.
They will kill for anything, for a gun, for a car and all can be dressed up as jihad."
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Rami was no longer involved in fighting, he said, but made a tidy profit selling weapons and ammunition to men in his north Baghdad neighbourhood.
Until the last few months, the insurgency got by with weapons and ammunition looted from former Iraqi army depots.
But now that Sunnis were besieged in their neighbourhoods and fighting daily clashes with the better-equipped Shia ministry of interior forces, they needed new sources of weapons and money.
He told me that one of his main suppliers had been an interpreter working for the US army in Baghdad.
"He had a deal with an American officer. We bought brand new AKs and ammunition from them."
He claimed the American officer, whom he had never met but he believed was a captain serving at Baghdad airport, had even helped to divert a truckload of weapons as soon as it was driven over the border from Jordan.
These days Rami gets most of his supplies from the new American-equipped Iraqi army.
"We buy ammunition from officers in charge of warehouses, a small box of AK-47 bullets is $450 (£230). If the guy sells a thousand boxes he can become rich and leave the country."
But as the security situation deteriorates, Rami finds it increasingly difficult to travel across Baghdad.
"Now I have to pay a Shia taxi driver to bring the ammo to me. He gets $50 for each shipment."
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The box of 700 bullets that Rami buys for $450 today would have cost between $150 and $175 a year ago.
The price of a Kalashnikov has risen from $300 to $400 in the same period.
The inflation in arms prices reflects Iraq's plunge toward civil war but, largely unnoticed by the outside world, the Sunni insurgency has also changed.
The conflict into which 20,000 more American troops will be catapulted over the next few weeks is very different to the one their comrades experienced even a year ago.
In Baghdad in late October I called a Sunni insurgent I had known for more than a year.
He was the mid-level commander of a small cell, active against the Americans in Sunni villages north of Baghdad. Sectarian frontlines had been hardening in the city for months — it took us 45 minutes of haggling to agree on a meeting place which we could both get to safely.
We met in a rundown workers' cafe.
"Its not a good time to be a Sunni in Baghdad," Abu Omar told me in a low voice.
He had been on the Americans' wanted list for three years but I had never seen him so anxious; he had trimmed his beard in the close-cropped Shia style and kept looking towards the door.
His brother had been kidnapped a few days before, he told me, and he believed he was next on a Shia militia's list.
He had fled his home in the north of the city and was staying with relatives in a Sunni stronghold in west Baghdad.
He was more despondent than angry.
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Kidnapped
"We Sunni are to blame," he said.
"In my area some ignorant al-Qaida guys have been kidnapping poor Shia farmers, killing them and throwing their bodies in the river. I told them: 'This is not jihad. You can't kill all the Shia! This is wrong! The Shia militias are like rabid dogs — why provoke them?' "
Then he said: "I am trying to talk to the Americans. I want to give them assurances that no one will attack them in our area if they stop the Shia militias from coming."
This man who had spent the last three years fighting the Americans was now willing to talk to them, not because he wanted to make peace but because he saw the Americans as the lesser of two evils.
He was wrestling with the same dilemma as many Sunni insurgent leaders, beginning to doubt the wisdom of their alliance with al-Qaida extremists.
Another insurgent commander told me: "At the beginning al-Qaida had the money and the organisation, and we had nothing."
But this alliance soon dragged the insurgents and then the whole Sunni community into confrontation with the Shia militias as al-Qaida and other extremists massacred thousands of Shia civilians.
Insurgent commanders such as Abu Omar soon found themselves outnumbered and outgunned, fighting organised militias backed by the Shia-dominated security forces.
A week after our conversation, Abu Omar invited me to a meeting with insurgent commanders.
I was asked to wait in the reception room of a certain Sunni political party.
A taxi driver took me to a house in a Sunni neighbourhood that had recently been abandoned by a Shia family.
The driver came in with me — he was also a commander.
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The house had been abandoned in a hurry, cardboard boxes were stacked by the door, some of the furniture was covered with white cloths and a few cheap paintings were piled against a wall.
The property had been expropriated by the local Sunni mujahideen and we sat on sofas in a dusty reception room.
Abu Omar had been meeting commanders of groups with names like the Fury Brigade, the Battalions of the 1920 Revolution, the Islamic Army and the Mujahideen Army, to discuss options they had for fighting both an insurgency against the Americans and an escalating civil war with the Shia.
Abu Omar had proposed encouraging young Sunni men to enlist in the army and the police to redress the sectarian balance.
He suggested giving the Americans a ceasefire, in an attempt to stop ministry of interior commandos' raids on his area. Al-Qaida had said no to all these measures; now he wanted other Iraqi insurgent commanders to support him.
A heated discussion was raging.
One of the men, with a very thin moustache, a huge belly and a red kuffiya wrapped around his shoulder, held a copy of the Qur'an in one hand and a mobile phone in the other.
I asked him what his objectives were.
"We are fighting to liberate our country from the occupations of the Americans and their Iranian-Shia stooges."
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'Do politics'
"My brother, I disagree," said Abu Omar. "Look, the Americans are trying to talk to us Sunnis and we need to show them that we can do politics. We need to use the Americans to fight the Shia."
He looked nervously at them: suggestions of talking to the Americans could easily have him labelled as traitor.
"Where is the jihad and the mujahideen?" he continued.
"Baghdad has become a Shia town. Our brothers are being slaughtered every day! Where are these al-Qaida heroes? One neighbourhood after another will be lost if we don't work on a strategy."
The taxi driver commander, who sat cross-legged on a sofa, joined in: "If the Americans leave we will be slaughtered."
A big-bellied man waved his hands dismissively: "We will massacre the Shia and show them who are the Sunnis! They couldn't have done anything without the Americans' support."
When the meeting was over the taxi driver went out to check the road, then the rest followed.
"Don't look up, we could be monitored, Shia spies are everywhere," said the big man.
The next day the taxi driver was arrested.
By December Abu Omar's worst fears were being realised.
The Sunnis had become squeezed into a corner fighting two sides at the same time.
But by then he had disappeared; his body was never found.
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Baghdad was now divided: frontlines partitioned neighbourhoods into Shia and Sunni, thousands of families had been forced out of their homes.
After each large-scale bomb attack on Shia civilians, scores of mutilated bodies of Sunnis were found in the streets.
Patrolling militias and checkpoints meant that men with Sunni names dared not venture far outside their neighbourhoods, while certain Sunni areas came under the complete control of insurgent groups the Shura Council of the Mujahideen and the Islamic Army.
The Sunni vigilante self-defence groups took shape as reserve units under the control of these insurgent groups.
Like Abu Omar before him, Abu Aisha, a mid-level Sunni commander, had come to understand that the threat from the Shia was perhaps greater than his need to fight the occupying Americans.
Abu Aisha fought in Baghdad's western Sunni suburbs, he was a former NCO in the Iraqi army and followed an extreme form of Islam known as Salafism. |
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'If they pay we kill them anyway' — the kidnapper's story In the second of two remarkable dispatches from behind Baghdad's front lines, Ghaith Abdul-Ahad meets the commander of a Shia death squad Saturday January 27, 2007 The Guardian Fadhel is a slim, well-muscled 26-year-old Mahdi Army commander with a thin goatee beard and smoothed down hair that looks like a flat cap. One day last month he described how he and his men seized a group of three Sunni men suspected of killing his fellow Shia.
"I followed the group for weeks and then one of them crossed the bridge to Karrada [a Shia district].
We first informed a nearby Iraqi army checkpoint that we were arresting terrorists then we attacked them and put them in the boots of the cars.
We only have six to seven minutes when we grab someone — we have to act quickly, if he resists we shoot him."
In this case, he said, the men were taken to Sadr City, the Shia slum to the north-east of Baghdad, where they were interrogated by a "committee" which ordered their execution.
"We ask the families of the terrorists for ransom money," said Fadhel. "And after they pay the ransom we kill them anyway."
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Kidnapping in Baghdad these days is as much about economics as retribution or sectarian hatred. Another Shia man close to the Mahdi Army told me:
"They kidnap 10 Sunnis, they get ransom on five, and kill them all, in each big kidnap operation they make at least $50 000, it's the best business in Baghdad."
One day as we chatted in a small squatters' community to the east of Baghdad, Fadhel showed me his badge — a square laminated card that identified him as a "Amer Faseel" or "platoon commander" in charge of a unit of around 35 fighters.
He is particularly valuable to the Shia militia because he grew up in a predominantly Sunni area south of Baghdad and still has an ID card registered in the Sunni town of Yossufiya.
"I can speak in their accent, so I can come and go to Sunni areas without anyone knowing that I am a Shia."
It was these qualifications plus his military experience — he was a corporal in the Iraqi military police — that earned Fadhel the role of commanding a "strike unit".
His main job is kidnapping Sunnis allegedly involved in attacking Shia areas.
It is men like Fadhel, responsible for the scores of bodies dumped on Baghdad's streets daily, whom the US troops pouring into Baghdad will have to bring under control if they are to have any hope of quelling the city's civil war.
Fadhel is also called Sayed, a title given to men who descend from the Prophet Muhammad.
Over glasses of hot sweet tea, he told me how his family of farmers, originally from the Shia stronghold of Najaf, had resettled in the 70s in the heart of the Sunni area south of Baghdad where he went to school with Sunni and Shia kids.
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A year after Baghdad fell, his family had to move again; the area had become a hub for Sunni extremists who started evicting Shia families a year earlier than their comrades in Baghdad.
After a neighbouring Shia farmer was killed they packed up and moved to Baghdad:
"We had 15 donums of the best land, I was born there and worked there all my life.
They told us you Shia are not from here, go away."
Fadhel and his family found themselves in the squatters' compound in east Baghdad.
He and his brother joined the Mahdi Army and fought against the Americans in Sadr City and Karbala.
Now he lives in a small rented flat in Dora, once a mixed Sunni area but now one of the main battle fronts in this sectarian war.
To gather intelligence, he set out to make Sunni friends: "I live with them, pray like them, I even insult the imams and the Mahdi Army."
Fadhel and other Mahdi Army commanders describe an intimate relationship with Iraqi security services, especially the commandos of the Iraqi interior ministry. He says the Mahdi Army often uses these official forces in conducting its own operations against Sunni "terrorists".
"We have specific units that we work with where members of the Mahdi Army are in command.
We conduct operations together.
We can't ask any army unit to come with us, we just ask the units that are under the control of our men.
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"The police are all under our control, we ask them to help or inform them that shooting will take place in a street and it involves the Mahdi Army, and that's it."
In one operation Fadhel took part in last summer, Iraqi interior ministry commandos attacked a Sunni area in Dora called "Arab Jubour".
The raid involved 28 pickup trucks, he told me. Of them 16 were ministry of interior, the rest Mahdi Army.
The new Bush plan to secure Baghdad gives a major role to the Iraqi army and police units in securing Baghdad.
Few in the city expect that these predominantly Shia forces will seriously challenge their fellow Shia.
As the discussions for the new security plan were continuing, an Iraqi Shia official who belongs to another party told me:
"We know that Moqtada [al-Sadr] and his men are responsible for all this mess but what can we do?
We can't attack them, we can only talk to them.
Its like having a mentally ill relative — you can't just throw him in the street."
Fadhel and other Mahdi army officers also describe a complex relationship with Iraq's Shia neighbour.
Iran, which backs a rival Shia faction to the Mahdi Army, secured a PR success when Mr Sadr upon his arrival in Tehran last year announced that the Mahdi Army would defend Iran if attacked by the US.
One Mahdi Army commander told me:
"The Iranians are helping us not because they like us, but because they hate the US."
The help comes in different forms. "We get weapons from them, mortar shells, RPG rounds, sometimes they give us weapons for free sometimes we have to buy. Depends on who is doing the deal," said the same commander.
Fadhel told me that back in November he escorted a small truck filled with weapons from Kut, on the Iranian border, to Baghdad. "We get the weapons in trucks, we take a letter to the Iraqi army checkpoints and it's all fine."
Like many of their Sunni counterparts, the Mahdi commanders boast that they could wipe out the other sect and gain total control over Baghdad if the US left.
"We control most of Baghdad, our main enemy is the Americans," said Fadhel.
Then he paused for a second and continued:
"Also we can't trust the other Shia factions.
Imam Ali says 'God please protect me against my friends and I will take care of my enemies.'" |
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Sick strategies for senseless slaughter
The cat is out of the bag now
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by John Kaminski
May 27, 2005
The first hint came in Imad Khadduri's "A warning to car drivers" written in Arabic and posted on www.albasrah.net on May 11 (See. http://globalresearch.ca/articles/KHA505A.html ).
The dispatch was quickly picked up by two of the most realistic and reliable news sites on the Web, www.uruknet.info , which I try to read every day, and www.globalresearch.ca , which I try to read every week, since it offers less breaking and more analytical news.
Clear window who is perpetrating this inexplicable violence
Khadduri recounted a scam that opens up a clear window to seeing who is perpetrating all this inexplicable violence in Iraq.
Beyond the American attempt to pacify an outraged and abused nation through demonic destruction, and beyond the Iraqi attempt to resist this totalitarian takeover by a foreign conqueror, there are more than numerous acts of violence that simply can't be understood by straightforward explanations.
I mean, when a mosque blows up and Americans blame Islamic terrorists, whether Sunni or Shiite, it makes no sense.
Muslims never blow up their own houses of worship.
Or when reporters sympathetic to either the Iraqi cause of freedom, or even just general principles of international justice, are suddenly assassinated and the blame is placed on often imaginary Islamic extremists whose perspective is supported by these writers, how can anyone believe that Muslims did it, even thought this is what the Zionist American press and government continue to insist.
So who's doing all these demented deeds?
As if we didn't know ...
www.johnkaminski.com/ |
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Khadduri's report went like this:
Told him to report to an American military camp
"A few days ago, an American manned check point confiscated the driver license of a driver and told him to report to an American military camp near Baghdad airport for interrogation and in order to retrieve his license.
The next day, the driver did visit the camp and he was allowed in the camp with his car.
He was admitted to a room for an interrogation that lasted half an hour.
At the end of the session, the American interrogator told him:
'OK, there is nothing against you, but you do know that Iraq is now sovereign and is in charge of its own affairs.
Hence, we have forwarded your papers and license to al-Kadhimia police station for processing.
Therefore, go there with this clearance to reclaim your license.
At the police station, ask for Lt. Hussain Mohammed, who is waiting for you now.
Go there now quickly, before he leaves his shift work".
(http://globalresearch.ca/articles/KHA505A.html )
The driver did leave in a hurry, but was soon alarmed with a feeling that his car was driving as if carrying a heavy load, and he also became suspicious of a low flying helicopter that kept hovering overhead, as if trailing him.
He stopped the car and inspected it carefully.
He found nearly 100 kilograms of explosives hidden in the back seat and along the two back doors.
The only feasible explanation for this incident is that the car was indeed booby trapped by the Americans and intended for the al-Khadimiya Shiite district of Baghdad.
The helicopter was monitoring his movement and witnessing the anticipated "hideous attack by foreign elements".
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She recounts:
"The last two weeks have been violent .... The number of explosions in Baghdad alone is frightening.
There have also been several assassinations — bodies being found here and there.
It's somewhat disturbing to know that corpses are turning up in the most unexpected places.
Many people will tell you its not wise to eat river fish anymore because they have been nourished on the human remains being dumped into the river.
That thought alone has given me more than one sleepless night.
It is almost as if Baghdad has turned into a giant graveyard.
The latest corpses were those of some Sunni and Shia clerics — several of them well-known.
People are being patient and there is a general consensus that these killings are being done to provoke civil war.
Also worrisome is the fact that we are hearing of people being rounded up by security forces (Iraqi) and then being found dead days later — apparently when the new Iraqi government recently decided to reinstate the death penalty, they had something else in mind.
One of the larger blasts was in an area called Ma'moun, which is a middle class area located in west Baghdad.
It's a relatively calm residential area with shops that provide the basics and bit more.
It happened in the morning, as the shops were opening up for their daily business and it occurred right in front of a butcher's shop.
Immediately after, we heard that a man living in a house in front of the blast site was hauled off by the Americans because it was said that after the bomb went off, he sniped an Iraqi National Guardsman.
I didn't think much about the story — nothing about it stood out: an explosion and a sniper — hardly an anomaly.
The interesting news started circulating a couple of days later.
Man taken away because he knew too much
People from the area claim that the man was taken away not because he shot anyone, but because he knew too much about the bomb.
Rumor has it that he saw an American patrol passing through the area and pausing at the bomb site minutes before the explosion.
Soon after they drove away, the bomb went off and chaos ensued.
He ran out of his house screaming to the neighbors and bystanders that the Americans had either planted the bomb or seen the bomb and done nothing about it.
He was promptly taken away.
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The bombs are mysterious.
Some of them explode in the midst of National Guard and near American troops or Iraqi Police and others explode near mosques, churches, and shops or in the middle of sougs.
One thing that surprises us about the news reports of these bombs is that they are inevitably linked to suicide bombers.
The reality is that some of these bombs are not suicide bombs — they are car bombs that are either being remotely detonated or maybe time bombs.
All we know is that the techniques differ and apparently so do the intentions.
Some will tell you they are resistance.
Some say Chalabi and his thugs are responsible for a number of them.
Others blame Iran and the SCIRI militia Badir.
In any case, they are terrifying.
If you're close enough, the first sound is a that of an earsplitting blast and the sounds that follow are of a rain of glass, shrapnel and other sharp things.
Then the wails begin — the shrill mechanical wails of an occasional ambulance combined with the wail of car alarms from neighboring vehicles and finally the wail of people trying to sort out their dead and dying from the debris.
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Then there was this one.
On May 13, 2005, a 64 years old Iraqi farmer, Haj Haidar Abu Sijjad, took his tomato load in his pickup truck from Hilla to Baghdad, accompanied by Ali, his 11 years old grandson.
Stopped at an American check point
They were stopped at an American check point and were asked to dismount.
An American soldier climbed on the back of the pickup truck, followed by another a few minutes later, and thoroughly inspected the tomato filled plastic containers for about 10 minutes.
Haj Haidar and his grandson were then allowed to proceed to Baghdad.
A minute later, his grandson told him that he saw one of the American soldiers putting a grey melon size object in the back among the tomato containers.
The Haj immediately slammed on the brakes and stopped the car at the side of the road, at a relatively far distance from the check point.
He found a time bomb with the clock ticking tucked among his tomatoes.
He immediately recognized it, as he was an ex-army soldier.
Panicking, he grabbed his grandson and ran away from the car.
Then, realizing that the car was his only means of work, he went back, took the bomb and carried it in fear.
He threw it in a deep ditch by the side of the road that was dug by Iraqi soldiers in preparation for the war, two years ago.
Upon returning from Baghdad, he found out that the bomb had indeed exploded, killing three sheep and injuring their shepherd in his head.
He thanked God for giving him the courage to go back and remove the bomb, and for the luck in that the American soldiers did not notice his sudden stop at a distance and his getting rid of the bomb.
"They intended it to explode in Baghdad and claim that it is the work of the 'terrorists', or 'insurgents' or who call themselves the 'Resistance'.
Taint the Resistance
I decided to expose them and asked your reporter to take me to Baghdad to tell you the story.
They are to be exposed as they now want to sow strife in Iraq and taint the Resistance after failing to defeat it militarily.
Do not forget to mention my name. I fear nobody but God, as I am a follower of Muqtada al-Sadir."
http://riverbendblog.blogspot.com/
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Rumsefeld — Satanic shenanigans
The background and admission of guilt for such satanic shenanigans was clearly outlined in Frank Morales' piece on globalresearch.ca: "The Provocateur State: Is the CIA Behind the Iraqi 'Insurgents' — and Global Terrorism," by Frank Morales clearly demonstrates how Donald Rumsfeld said he was going to do exactly what these three sorry episodes show he actually did.
Morales writes:
Back in 2002, following the trauma of 9-11, Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld predicted there would be more terrorist attacks against the American people and civilization at large.
How could he be so sure of that?
Perhaps because these attacks would be instigated on the order of the Honorable Mr. Rumsfeld.
According to Los Angeles Times military analyst William Arkin, writing Oct. 27, 2002, Rumsfeld set out to create a secret army, "a super-Intelligence Support Activity" network that would "bring together CIA and military covert action, information warfare, intelligence, and cover and deception," to stir the pot of spiraling global violence.
http://globalresearch.ca/articles/MOR505A.html
We never got the full story on those ghastly beheadings of Nick Berg and others.
Nor have we ever understood who killed the American mercenaries in Fallujah that eventually precipitated one of the great slaughters in history.
Nor have we ever been able to discern if Abu Musab al-Zarqawi s actually a real person or just another bin Ladenesque boogeyman.
Nor if the al-Qaeda website which claims responsibility for various atrocities is not really run by the CIA.
Sinister genocide the Israelis continue to perpetrate
Provoking this type of violence also further conceals the sinister genocide the Israelis continue to perpetrate on the hapless Palestinians, which is exactly its point, as is the entire Iraq invasion and destruction, and as was the inside job mass murder on 9/11 in New York City.
The purpose of all these despicable acts is to conceal what the Israelis and the Americans have been doing all along to the entire Arab world, namely enslaving and destroying it.
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There is not now nor ever was an Arab terror threat.
That was all invented by Rothschild, Rockefeller, Kissinger, Brzezinski, Bush, Cheney, Sharon, Zakheim, Perle, Wolfowitz, Feith, Abrams and Warren Buffett.
These people are all traitors to not only their countries but to humanity in general, and should all be slammed and RICOed into Guantanamo immediately.
And so should the government officials, media lackeys, and ordinary citizens who, by their complicity or their ignorance, support them.
Deliberate provocations to prevent peace
The main point in understanding these deliberate provocations to prevent peace is to understand how the American capitalist system, now hijacked by billionaires with no trace of conscience, thrives on war and profits from the misery of others.
The neocon murder menace has been for months ratcheting up the hyperbole about why we need to invade Iran — which some predict will happen in June — and just this week, rumors of troop movements in the Caribbean and lockdowns at Florida military bases appear to augur an imminent invasion of oil-producing Venezuela.
The overall plan is to create hell on Earth, and we are succeeding.
By our silent complicity and cowardly reluctance to oppose and stop this homicidal behavior in the name of profit, we are all accessories to mass murder and the destruction of human society, not to even mention the extinction of individual human freedom and the God-given right to be safe and secure in the homes of our choice.
So now that you know, what are you going to do about it?
You know if you do nothing, these same things will one day happen to you.
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US 'victory' against cult leader was 'massacre'
Patrick Cockburn — UK Independent
Baghdad, 31 January 2007
There are growing suspicions in Iraq that the official story of the battle outside Najaf between a messianic Iraqi cult and the Iraqi security forces supported by the US, in which 263 people were killed and 210 wounded, is a fabrication. The heavy casualties may be evidence of an unpremeditated massacre.
A picture is beginning to emerge of a clash between an Iraqi Shia tribe on a pilgrimage to Najaf and an Iraqi army checkpoint that led the US to intervene with devastating effect. The involvement of Ahmed al-Hassani (also known as Abu Kamar), who believed himself to be the coming Mahdi, or Messiah, appears to have been accidental.
The story emerging on independent Iraqi websites and in Arabic newspapers is entirely different from the government's account of the battle with the so-called "Soldiers of Heaven", planning a raid on Najaf to kill Shia religious leaders.
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The cult denied it was involved in the fighting, saying it was a peaceful movement. The incident reportedly began when a procession of 200 pilgrims was on its way, on foot, to celebrate Ashura in Najaf.
They came from the Hawatim tribe, which lives between Najaf and Diwaniyah to the south, and arrived in the Zarga area, one mile from Najaf at about 6am on Sunday. Heading the procession was the chief of the tribe, Hajj Sa'ad Sa'ad Nayif al-Hatemi, and his wife driving in their 1982 Super Toyota sedan because they could not walk.
When they reached an Iraqi army checkpoint it opened fire, killing Mr Hatemi, his wife and his driver, Jabar Ridha al-Hatemi. The tribe, fully armed because they were travelling at night, then assaulted the checkpoint to avenge their fallen chief.
There are growing suspicions in Iraq that the official story of the battle outside Najaf between a messianic Iraqi cult and the Iraqi security forces supported by the US, in which 263 people were killed and 210 wounded, is a fabrication. The heavy casualties may be evidence of an unpremeditated massacre.
A picture is beginning to emerge of a clash between an Iraqi Shia tribe on a pilgrimage to Najaf and an Iraqi army checkpoint that led the US to intervene with devastating effect. The involvement of Ahmed al-Hassani (also known as Abu Kamar), who believed himself to be the coming Mahdi, or Messiah, appears to have been accidental.
The story emerging on independent Iraqi websites and in Arabic newspapers is entirely different from the government's account of the battle with the so-called "Soldiers of Heaven", planning a raid on Najaf to kill Shia religious leaders.
The cult denied it was involved in the fighting, saying it was a peaceful movement. The incident reportedly began when a procession of 200 pilgrims was on its way, on foot, to celebrate Ashura in Najaf.
They came from the Hawatim tribe, which lives between Najaf and Diwaniyah to the south, and arrived in the Zarga area, one mile from Najaf at about 6am on Sunday.
Heading the procession was the chief of the tribe, Hajj Sa'ad Sa'ad Nayif al-Hatemi, and his wife driving in their 1982 Super Toyota sedan because they could not walk.
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When they reached an Iraqi army checkpoint it opened fire, killing Mr Hatemi, his wife and his driver, Jabar Ridha al-Hatemi.
The tribe, fully armed because they were travelling at night, then assaulted the checkpoint to avenge their fallen chief.
Members of another tribe called Khaza'il living in Zarga tried to stop the fighting but they themselves came under fire.
Meanwhile, the soldiers and police at the checkpoint called up their commanders saying they were under attack from al-Qai'da with advanced weapons.
Reinforcements poured into the area and surrounded the Hawatim tribe in the nearby orchards.
The tribesmen tried — in vain — to get their attackers to cease fire.
American helicopters then arrived and dropped leaflets saying: "To the terrorists, surrender before we bomb the area."
The tribesmen went on firing and a US helicopter was hit and crashed killing two crewmen.
The tribesmen say they do not know if they hit it or if it was brought down by friendly fire.
The US aircraft launched an intense aerial bombardment in which 120 tribesmen and local residents were killed by 4am on Monday.
The messianic group led by Ahmad al-Hassani, which was already at odds with the Iraqi authorities in Najaf, was drawn into the fighting because it was based in Zarga and its presence provided a convenient excuse for what was in effect a massacre.
The Hawatim and Khaza'il tribes are opposed to the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI) and the Dawa Party, who both control Najaf and make up the core of the Baghdad government.
This account cannot be substantiated and is drawn from the Healing Iraq website and the authoritative Baghdad daily Azzaman.
But it would explain the disparity between the government casualties — less than 25 by one account — and the great number of their opponents killed and wounded.
The Iraqi authorities have sealed the site and are not letting reporters talk to the wounded.
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Sectarian killings across Iraq also marred the celebration of the Shia ritual of Ashura.
A suicide bomber killed 23 worshippers and wounded 57 others in a Shia mosque in Balad Ruz.
Not far away in Khanaqin, in Diyala, a bomb killed 13 people, including three women, and wounded 29 others. In east Baghdad mortar bombs killed 17 people. |
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Baghdad is under siege
By Patrick Cockburn in Arbil, Northern Iraq Published: 01 November 2006 |
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©2006 Independent Digital (UK) Ltd. All rights reserved |
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"It is for sure that they did it," one of the victim's neighbours told IPS on condition of anonymity.
"The tortured bodies were found the second day. They came in their official police cars.
"It is not the first time that they did something like this.
"They do it all over Baghdad, and we hope they will get proper punishment this time."
Men of the police unit meanwhile do not face imminent punishment.
"They are going to be rehabilitated and brought back to service," director-general of the Iraqi police Adnan Thabit told IPS.
Ali Al-Fadhily and Dahr Jamail October 19, 2006 IPS — Inter Press Service |
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Chalabi’s “Death Squads” mapped
Lydia Khalil
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In the western city of Fallujah, hundreds of newly recruited police officers failed to show up for work August 13, 2006 after Iraq resistance circulated pamphlets threatening officers.
"We will kill all the policemen infidels," read the pamphlets, "whether or not they quit or are still in their jobs."
Fallujah Police Lt. Mohammed Alwan said that the force, which he estimated had increased to more than 2,000, had now shrunk to 100.
He said insurgents had killed dozens of policemen in their homes and also attacked relatives in a weeks-long intimidation campaign.
A Fallujah police major who spoke on condition of anonymity for fear of reprisals said that at least 1,400 policemen had left their jobs since Friday, 400 of them above the rank of officer.
"During the last three months more than 100 policemen were killed here," including a number of senior officers, the major said. |
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The Iraqi Islamic Party, the largest Sunni party, blamed militias with ties to the government and the U.S. military.
"The Iraqi Islamic Party asks how could 26 people, women among them, have been transported from Amil to Abu Chir through all those Iraqi and U.S. army checkpoints and patrols," it said in a statement.
The U.S. military has denied any involvement in the killings.
General Yassin al-Dulaimi, deputy minister for the interior, has said on Iraqi television several times that death squads are composed mainly of Iraqi police and army units. His comments reflect differing allegiance and agendas even within the Shia bloc.
General Dulaimi has been trying for long to expose the organised criminal gangs that have been controlling the ministry since its formation - a formation that was overseen by U.S. authorities.
The Baghdad Order Maintenance police force is led by Mehdi al-Gharrawi, who also led similar security units during the U.S.- led attack on Fallujah in November 2004.
"All criminals who survived the Fallujah crisis after committing genocide and other war crimes were granted higher ranks," Major Amir Jassim from the ministry of defence told IPS.
"I and many of my colleagues were not rewarded because we disobeyed orders to set fire to people's houses (in Fallujah) after others looted them."
Jassim said the looting and burning of homes in Fallujah during the November siege was ordered from the ministries of interior and defence.
"Now they want to do the same things they did in Fallujah in all Sunni areas so that they ignite a civil war in Iraq," said Jassim, referring to the Shia-dominated ministries.
"A civil war is the only guarantee for them to stay in power, looting such incredible amounts of money."
Ali Al-Fadhily and Dahr Jamail October 19, 2006 IPS — Inter Press Service |
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Al-Jazeerah editorial note regarding the purported Iraqi Shi'i-Sunni civil war:
It is inaccurate to describe the war in Iraq as if it is fought between Muslim Shi'is and Muslim Sunnis, as the US corporate media have been trying hard to do.
It is more accurate to describe it as fought between US-led forces and Iraqi resistance fighters. Even killing civilians is part of the war, as the evidence earlier demonstrated that Interior Ministry death squads and British soldiers were caught either targeting or attempting to target civilians to make the war appear as if it is between Shi'is and Sunnis.
This purported Shi'i-Sunni civil war in Iraq aims at distracting Iraqis and dividing their country into three regions, in preparation for a final partition and dismemberment of Iraq. Previous statements of Iraqi elected officials pointed fingers to death squads of the Interior Ministry.
41 Iraqi Sunni Pedestrians Massacred in a Baghdad Street, 17 Shi'is Killed in Car Bombs, Interior Ministry Death Squads are Blamed
Moreover, on September 19, 2005, two British soldiers were arrested by Iraqi police for driving a car bomb in a Basra street. They were freed by British forces before being interrogated by Iraqi police. This incident sheds some light on who might be behind car bomb explosions in Iraq.
British Terrorist Operation in Basra, Tanks on Fire, Four Iraqis Killed, Two Captured British Undercover Soldiers Freed After Demolishing Prison Hollywood Style
British Occupation Forces Suspected Behind Sectarian Terrorism in Southern Iraq: The Two British Soldiers Drove a Car Bomb in Basra
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A UN human rights report released September last year held interior ministry forces responsible for an organised campaign of detentions, torture and killings.
It reported that special police commando units accused of carrying out the killings were recruited from Shia Badr and Mehdi militias, and trained by U.S. forces.
Retired Col. James Steele, who served as advisor on Iraqi security forces to then U.S. Ambassador John Negroponte supervised the training of these forces.
Steele was commander of the U.S. military advisor group in El Salvador 1984-86, while Negroponte was U.S. ambassador to nearby Honduras 1981-85.
Negroponte was accused of widespread human rights violations by the Honduras Commission on Human Rights in 1994.
The Commission reported the torture and disappearance of at least 184 political workers.
The violations Negroponte oversaw in Honduras were carried out by operatives trained by the CIA, according to a CIA working group set up in 1996 to look into the U.S. role in Honduras.
The CIA records document that his "special intelligence units," better known as "death squads," comprised CIA-trained Honduran armed units which kidnapped, tortured and killed thousands of people suspected of supporting leftist guerrillas.
Ali Al-Fadhily and Dahr Jamail October 19, 2006 IPS — Inter Press Service |
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Iraqi Sufis Join the Fight Against Coalition Forces
Lydia Khalil
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Al-Gilani's teachings stayed close to orthodox interpretations of Islam but featured some mystical interpretations of the Quran.
He attacked materialism and instead stressed charity and humanitarianism.
The Battalions of Sheikh 'Abd al-Qadir al-Gilani is led by Sheikh Muhammad al-Qadiri.
The group had previously rejected violence against the coalition and in fact cooperated with U.S. forces upon their entry in Iraq in 2003.
Yet on August 26, guerrillas holed up in the Abdul Qadir al-Gilani mosque in Ramadi attacked U.S. troops.
They fired small arms, machine guns and rocket propelled grenades, according to U.S. coalition statements.
Coalition troops returned fire and the mosque suffered serious structural damage as a result.
It is unclear whether it was members of the Battalions of Sheikh 'Abd al-Qadir al-Gilani or other insurgents who were allowed sanctuary in the mosque who carried out the attacks.
Little is known about how many fighters belong to the group or exactly which other insurgent groups they cooperate with.
It is believed that they are cooperating with indigenous Iraqi Salafi-Jihadi insurgents in the al-Anbar and Baghdad areas.
The rising sectarian violence played a prominent role in the Sufi group's decision to take up arms and join the insurgency.
Ahmed al-Soffi, a Sufi leader in Fallujah, told the media in August, "We will not wait for the Mahdi Army and the Badr Brigade to enter our houses and kill us. We will fight the Americans and the Shiites who are against us."
In January, guerrillas fired mortar rounds at the Sheikh 'Abd al-Qadir al-Gilani mosque in Baghdad.
It is unknown whether this attack was perpetrated by Shiite militias or Salafi-Jihadi Sunnis.
It is speculated that the attack was done by Salafi-Jihadis who hoped that Shiites would be blamed for the attack (al-Zaman, January 6).
If that is the case, the strategy seems to be working as Sufi orders are aligning themselves closer to Sunni Salafi-Jihadi insurgents against the Shiite-led government despite the fact that they have been the target of Salafi-Jihadi attacks in the past.
Historically, Sufis as a minority sect within Islam have been frequently targeted, but mostly by Salafis and Wahhabis, not Shiites (al-Jazeera, June 30, 2005).
There would seem to be enough tension between Salafi and Sufi strains within Islam to keep either group from entering into an alliance.
Yet, perhaps because the Qadiri sect does not deviate too much from orthodox interpretations of Islam that they are acceptable to Salafi-Jihadis. For their part, the Sufi insurgents feel marginalized enough by the dominant Shiite presence that they are willing to put aside their more peaceful tendencies when they feel threatened.
Uncertain of the coalition's ability and the Iraqi government's willingness to protect their population against the incursion of Shiite militias who are operating freely and conducting reprisal killings, Sunnis, and their Sufi subset, are pushed toward the insurgency.
For this particular Sufi group, it is more of a matter of self defense against sectarian violence than it is opposition to the U.S.-led military intervention.
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The Battalion is not the only Sufi militant group to form in Iraq.
In April 2005, the Sufi Jihadi Squadrons of Sheikh 'Abd al-Qadir al-Gilani announced their formation and the beginning of their military operations against U.S. coalition troops.
The founding statement by the Sufi Jihadi Squadrons reads:
"With the blessings of God the exalted it has been announced in the capital of Harun ar-Rashid [Baghdad] today that the Jihadi Sufi Squadrons of Sheikh 'Abd al-Qadir al-Gilani have been formed to join the rest of their brothers on the fields of combat…
Your brothers in the Squadron of 'Abd al-Qadir al-Gilani have seized the day today to announce themselves as a combat force against the American occupation in Iraq, having previously limited ourselves to prayer and seeking guidance."
The formation of this second Sufi group to join the insurgency is a troubling development for coalition and Iraqi policymakers who thought that they could count on Sufis to remain apolitical and peaceful.
Perhaps because of this thinking, the coalition did not do much to reach out to Sufis in Iraq.
Instead, Sufi orders have aligned themselves with their more militant Salafi-Jihadi counterparts.
This alliance is not as incompatible as once thought. |
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Informed Comment — Thoughts on the Middle East, History, and Religion
Saturday, September 23, 2006
3,000 Demonstrate in Tikrit for Saddam Return
Muqtada: US DoD has File on Shiite Messiah
The Associated Press reports Friday's major events in Iraq:
In the city of Tikrit north of Baghdad, 3,000 persons came out on Friday to demonstrate for the return of Saddam Hussein to power. Tikrit is his birthplace.
In the mixed Hurriyah district of Baghdad, guerrillas attacked Sunni Arab homes and mosques. The guerrillas shot down 4 persons.
Muqtada al-Sadr called for a joint Sunni-Shiite nonviolent campaign against the presence of US troops in Iraq.
He said that he had not stood against the elections held under conditions of foreign military occupation, because he wanted to see a political opposition to the Occupation develop.
He said that nevertheless, conflicts between him and the Americans had continued and would continue.
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He added, "I want it to be a peaceful war against them. I do not want a single drop of blood to be spilled, since [Iraqi lives] are dear to me. Fight them with a popular, nonviolent, political war."
... [Arabic language link], al-Zaman reports that the young nationalist Shiite cleric maintained that the US Department of Defense has compiled an enormous file on the hidden Twelfth Imam, that is virtually complete save that it lacks his photograph.
[For Shiite Muslims, the Twelfth Imam or Imam Mahdi is a little like Jesus Christ for evangelical Christians.
Shiites believe that the Imam was translated by God into a supernatural realm, from which he secretly rules the world and from which he will one day return to restore the world to justice.]
Al-Sadr said during his Friday prayer sermon in Kufa that "The United States has been preparing for ten years a rapid reaction force against the awaited Imam Mahdi and the US provoked the Gulf War so as to fill the region with military outposts for this purpose."
Of the recent arrest in Najaf by the US forces of his lieutenant, Salah al-Ubaidi, Muqtada [said:] "This is an extension of the attacks on Islam."
He added, "Have you asked yourselves what the US has given the Iraqi people save the killing and destruction that you see?...
"That is only a preparation for the advent of the Imam Mahdi."
Oliver Poole reports from Baghdad that the Mahdi Army militia of Muqtada al-Sadr had taken over gasoline stations in Baghdad and were smuggling petroleum from them, earning $1 mn. a day.
Apparently the US considers the Sadrists' control of the Ministry of Transportation worrisome in this regard.
Muqtada seems to be losing control of local branches of the Mahdi Army, often to Shiite clerics who have taken a more radical position vis-a-vis the new government and the Americans than has he.
An example is Abu Dara' in Baghdad, said to be extremely violent
In addition, Reuters reports 18 killed and dozens wounded in Iraq's civil war.
One of the dead was a US GI.
Among the major incidents:
' BAGHDAD - Two car bombs in Shi'ite districts of southern Baghdad wounded 16 people late on Friday, an Interior Ministry source said.
Five were hurt in a market in the Abu Chehr district and 11 in a street near an Agriculture Ministy office in Zaafaraniya . . .
BAGHDAD - Police found 10 bodies [AP says 17], including those of two women, in different parts of Baghdad.
Most bore signs of torture and had been shot, police said.
The two women were found in the western Shi'ite district of Shula.
None of the bodies was immediately identified. '
US military commanders in Baghdad want 3,000 more Iraq troops to join the current operation, but have been unable to get them because Iraqi soldiers refuse to leave their regional posts for the capital. |
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July 19, 2006
Massacres Soar in Central Iraq: Maliki Government Discredited
By PATRICK COCKBURN Baghdad |
A civil war between Sunni and Shia is spreading rapidly through central Iraq with each community seeking revenge for the latest massacre.
A suicide bomber driving a van packed with explosives blew himself up yesterday outside the golden-domed mosque in Kufa yesterday killing at least 59 and injuring 132 Shia.
In the last ten days, while the world has been absorbed by the war in Lebanon, sectarian massacres have started to take place on an almost daily basis leading observers to fear a level of killing approaching that of Rwanda immediately before the genocide of 1994.
On one single spot on the west bank of the Tigris river in north Baghdad between 10 and 12 bodies have been drifting ashore every day.
In Kufa, a city on the Euphrates south of Baghdad, the suicide bomber drove his vehicle into a dusty square 100 yards from a Shia shrine at 7.30am.
He knew that poor day laborers gathered there looking for work.
He said “I need labourers” and they clambered into his van which exploded a few moments later killing them and other workers standing around.
“Four of my cousins were killed,” said Nasir Feisal, who survived the blast.
“They were standing beside the van. Their bodies were scattered far apart by the blast.”
The dramatic escalation in sectarian killings started on July 9 when black-clad Shia militiamen sealed off the largely Sunni al-Jihad district in west Baghdad and slaughtered every Sunni they identified, killing over 40 of them after glancing at their identity cards.
Since then there has been a tit-for-tat massacre almost every day.
On Monday gunmen, almost certainly Sunni, first attacked Shia mourners at a funeral near Mahmoudiya, a market town of 100,00 people 75 miles north of Kufa. They then shot down another 50 people in the local market.
American agents
The failure of the newly formed government of Nouri al-Maliki to stop the mass killings has rapidly discredited it.
The Shia and Sunni militias — in the latter case the insurgents fighting the Americans — are becoming stronger as people look to them for protection.
After the explosion in Kufa angry crowds hurled stones at the police demanding that the militiamen of the Mehdi Army, followers of the nationalist cleric Muqtada al-Sadr, take over security in the city.
“We want the Mehdi Army to protect us,” screamed a woman in a black abaya robe.
“We want Muqtada’s army to protect us.”
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Other people chanted at the police, who began to fire in the air to disperse them, “you are traitors!” and “American agents!”
In much of Baghdad the militias have taken over and are killing or driving out the minority community.
It has become very easy to get killed anywhere in central Iraq, where one third of the 27 million population live, through belonging to the wrong sect.
Many people carry two sets of identity papers, one forged at a cost of about $60, so they can claim to be a Sunni at Sunni checkpoints and Shia at Shia checkpoints.
Even this may not be enough to stay alive.
Aware of the number of forged identity papers being used Mehdi Army checkpoints in the largely Shia Shu’ala district in west Baghdad have started to ask drivers questions about Shia theology to which a Sunni would not know the answer.
One man, who was indeed a Shia, passed the test but was still executed because he was driving a car with number plates from Anbar, a wholly Sunni province.
While the White House and Downing Street still refuse to use the phrase ‘civil war’ Iraqis in the centre of the country have no doubt what is happening.
Baghdad mortuary alone received 1,595 bodies in June.
It has got worse since then.
Many people are fleeing.
On one day early this month at al-Salhai bus station in central Baghdad there were 23 buses, each carrying 49 people as well as 30 four wheel drive vehicles, all departing for Syria carrying refugees.
Access to Jordan has become more difficult with many Iraqis turned back at the border.
All buses have Sunni drivers these days since five Shia drivers were killed as ‘spies’ driving through the Sunni heart lands of western Iraq on their way to Jordan and Syria. |
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But you cannot kill this many people...
— as Bush and Blair
The British Labour Party
The Conservative Party
The U.S. Democratic Party
The Republican Party
The US, UK military forces
As all have killed and injured
You cannot kill and injure this many people without there being real evil involved
This is not just madness
This is more than madness
Kewe — TheWE.name |
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US Army admits Iraqis outnumber foreign fighters as its main enemy
By Toby Harnden in Ramadi
(Filed: 04/12/2005) Iraqis, rather than foreign fighters, now form the vast majority of the insurgents who are waging a ferocious guerrilla war against United States forces in Sunni western Iraq, American commanders have revealed. Their conclusion, disclosed to the Sunday Telegraph in interviews over 10 days in battle-torn Anbar province, contradicts the White House message that outsiders are the principal enemy in Iraq. |
Of 1,300 suspected insurgents arrested over the past five months in and around Ramadi, none has been a foreigner.
Col John Gronski, senior officer in the town, Anbar's provincial capital, said that almost all insurgent fighting there was by Iraqis.
Foreigners provided only money and logistical support.
"The foreign fighters are staying north of the [Euphrates] river, training and advising, like the Soviets were doing in Vietnam," he said.
Although there are tensions between Iraqi insurgents and foreigners from the group al-Qaeda in Iraq, led by the Jordanian zealot Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, there are also alliances of convenience.
Col Gronski identified Mohammed Bassim Hazim, a former Ramadi taxi driver known as Abu Khattab, as the leader of the town's insurgency. Abu Khattab has become an "affiliate" of Zarqawi's group, many of whose members are Iraqis, and has been responsible for most of the 1,770 attacks against US and Iraqi forces in the past three months.
Ramadi, unlike neighbouring Fallujah, where 10 marines were killed by a bomb on Friday, has never been taken over by rebels. But it remains disputed turf at best. Thirty-four troops have died there since the beginning of September. Insurgent casualties have been much heavier — more than 180 in the same period in the town's eastern half alone.
American troop strengths have doubled in the past year with a US Army armoured battalion now supplementing a US Marine light infantry battalion.
Lt Col Michael Herbert, a brigade intelligence officer, said Abu Khattab has become an almost mythical figure. "He is the face of the insurgency in Ramadi. He has been behind the majority of the attacks." He was arrested by US forces last year but released, apparently due to lack of evidence and because his significance was not then appreciated. His photograph shows him wearing a Guantanamo-style orange jumpsuit.
The insurgents have the support of most locals. "They have the ability to move freely around the city," said Capt Twain Hickman, the commander of India Company of the 3/7 US Marines battalion. "That means they can attack at a time of their choosing."
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Col Gronski said the local nature of the insurgency meant that even the few civic leaders prepared to work with the Americans view the fighters as legitimate.
"They see them as resistance. They don't view these local guys placing IEDs [improvised explosive devices] and firing mortars at us as insurgents."
Some Iraqis in Ramadi now adhere to Zarqawi's radical Islamist philosophy, but for most the insurgency is about removing the occupiers, Col Herbert said.
"Their family and tribal honour has been impugned if we're on their ground. They're almost duty bound to fight."
Unemployment, which is over 50 per cent, and widespread intimidation are also fuelling the insurgency. "It's economic," said Lt Col Robert Roggeman, who commands the 2/69 US Army battalion. "Two hundred bucks to shoot at an American, 50 bucks to lay down an IED."
Iraqi officials who deal with the Americans are routinely killed.
Ma'amoun Salmi Rasheed, the governor of Anbar, has survived a dozen assassination attempts.
His predecessor and deputy were murdered.
Little reconstruction is being done, said Col Roggeman. "Here, it's security first."
The Pentagon plan for the country is to hand over "battle space" to Iraqi forces once they are capable of combating the insurgency so that American forces can withdraw. But this scheme has been beset by problems in Ramadi.
A year ago the local police force was disbanded because many of its members were insurgents.
In October, the provincial police chief was arrested on suspicion of diverting salaries to fund the insurgency.
There are three Iraqi army battalions in the town, comprised mainly of Shia troops from outside Ramadi, where the population is Sunni.
If American troops exit prematurely, this could be a factor in sparking a civil war.
Splits among insurgents, however, could assist the US aim to isolate Zarqawi's group.
Recent weeks have seen what the military terms "red on red" gun battles between insurgent groups.
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Bombs near houses and one that killed civilians on a bus prompted the clashes and could have eroded Abu Khattab's support. "He is feared rather than popular," said Col Herbert. "He might be overstepping the mark."
But the commander of one of the Iraqi battalions, who asked not to be named for fear of reprisals, said it would be "at least two or three years" before his men were ready to fight alone.
"The terrorists control Ramadi and the mosques assist them," he said. "We are getting better but the Iraqi army is still weak and we need equipment. We always rely on the Americans to do the hardest jobs for us."
Each week, US forces achieve successes. In the recent Operation Machete, Capt Hickman's men uncovered an Aladdin's cave of arms buried in caches close to the banks of the Euphrates.
There had been intelligence that the munitions were being transported across the river on small boats. But since Iraq still has huge stockpiles of weapons from the Saddam era, insurgents are unlikely to run out of supplies.
"These insurgents have a great deal of tactical and operational patience," said Col Gronski. "They will continue to look for the time and the place because time is on their side."
© Copyright of Telegraph Group Limited 2005 |
slide cursor underneath or side of photos
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Part II
Death at 'Immoral' Picnic in the Park
Interview with Sheikh Hassan Al Zargani |
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Published on Monday, July 4, 2005 by CommonDreams.org
by Sheldon Drobny Justice O'Connor's decision in Bush v. Gore led to the current Bush administration's execution of war crimes and atrocities in Iraq, Afghanistan, and other places in the Middle East that are as egregious as those committed by the Third Reich and other evil governments in human history. The lesson is clear. Those people who may be honorable and distinguished in their chosen profession should always make decisions based upon good rather than evil no matter where their nominal allegiances may rest. Justice O'Connor was quoted to have said something to the affect that she abhorred the thought of Bush losing the 2000 election to Gore. She was known to have wanted to retire after the 2000 election for same reason she is now retiring. She wanted to spend more time with her sick husband. Unfortunately, she tarnished her distinguished career with the deciding vote in Bush v. Gore by going along with the partisan majority of the Court to interfere with a democratic election that she and the majority feared would be lost in an honest recount. She dishonored herself and the Supreme Court by succumbing to party allegiances and not The Constitution to which she swore to uphold. And the constitutional argument she and the majority used to justify their decision was the Equal Protection Clause. The Equal Protection Clause was the ultimate basis for the decision, but the majority essentially admitted (what was obvious in any event) that it was not basing its conclusion on any general view of what equal protection requires. The decision in Bush v Gore was not dictated by the law in any sense—either the law found through research, or the law as reflected in the kind of intuitive sense that comes from immersion in the legal culture. The Equal Protection clause is generally used in matters concerning civil rights.
The majority ignored their basic conservative views supporting federalism and states' rights in order to justify their decision.
History will haunt these justices down for their utter lack of justice and the hypocrisy associated with this decision.
Sheldon Drobny is Co-founder of Air America Radio.
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Bush v. Gore Appointment of U.S. President by the U.S. Supreme Court — Raw political clout exercised by US Supreme Court |
Unspeakable grief and horror
...and the circus of deception continues... |
Nanci Pelosi — U.S. House Democratic leader — Congresswoman California, 8th District
Speaking at the AIPAC agenda May 26, 2005
There are those who contend that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is all about Israel's occupation of the West Bank and Gaza. This is absolute nonsense.
In truth, the history of the conflict is not over occupation, and never has been: it is over the fundamental right of Israel to exist.
The greatest threat to Israel's right to exist, with the prospect of devastating violence, now comes from Iran.
For too long, leaders of both political parties in the United States have not done nearly enough to confront the Russians and the Chinese, who have supplied Iran as it has plowed ahead with its nuclear and missile technology....
In the words of Isaiah, we will make ourselves to Israel 'as hiding places from the winds and shelters from the tempests; as rivers of water in dry places; as shadows of a great rock in a weary land.'
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The United States will stand with Israel now and forever.
Now and forever.
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Ahmed and Asma, story of two children dying — Lest we forget |
Atrocities committed by Israel — graphic pictures What CNN never shows you |
Israel, chemical weapons and phosphorous bombs New and unknown deadly weapons used by Israeli forces Undetectable poison-needle gun for 'clean' assassinations |
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For archives, these articles are being stored on TheWE.name website.The purpose is to advance understandings of environmental, political, human rights, economic, democracy, scientific, and social justice issues. |
