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Baghdad Fighting
Here are pictures from today´s morning fights in Baghdad. 1, 2, 3, 4 and 5.
The pictures were taken by Gaith, a friend of Iraq Blogger Salam Pax (old blog, new blog).
Gaith reports 20 dead and 48 wounded. According to Aljazeera´s report, an Iraqi photographer working for Getty Images were also wounded slightly by flying shrapnel. Gaith looks ok though. Good, we need these pictures.
Yesterday Gaith made a picture showing Allawi´s hand bandaged because he broke his hand when he banged a table during an argument with an aid. Was he talking with Negroponte? Maybe, but then, that aid relationship is supposed to be the other way round.
Justin Raimondo at antiwar.com:
(W)hile hardly anyone was looking, the U.S. lost Iraq to the rebels. The Seattle Post-Intelligencer, along with Juan Cole and Pat Buchanan, were among the few who noticed.
Ramadi and Samarra are lost. Fallujah was never taken, and neither was the teeming ghetto of Shi’ite Muslims loyal to Muqtada Sadr, just outside Baghdad, known as “Sadr City.” The alleged “transfer” of sovereignty to the “interim” Iraqi government has gone well beyond farce, all the way to pastiche. The present script reads like David Halberstam’s The Best and the Brightest, retold in the style of The Simpsons.
The Sunni Triangle is a de facto independent state, with absolute control of Fallujah, for example, ceded to something that calls itself the “Mujahideen Shura Council,” which executes “American spies” (30-plus so far), collects the garbage, and rules according to the many strictures of Islamic law.
The leader of the Shura, Sheik Abdullah al-Janabi, is a conservative Sunni cleric who opposes the American occupation on the grounds that the famed “weapons of mass destruction” proved nonexistent, and hence the American presence has no legitimacy. Although the Bushies are still sticking to the line that the principal armed opposition to the occupation is engineered by “Saddamites,” Sheik Abdullah was banned from making speeches in the mosques in the old days for predicting that Saddam was provoking an American invasion. This administration used the plight of people like him to tout the invasion as a “liberation,” but the Sheik’s answer to them, recorded in this recent interview, is sternly matter of fact.
ROSS COULTHART: So do I take from that that you believe that the fight against the Americans is a good fight?
SHEIKH ABDULLAH AL-JANABI: In my opinion, it’s only natural that you would want to fight invaders and drive them out of your country.
ROSS COULTHART: When the Americans liberated, as they say, Iraq from Saddam Hussein, were you not a supporter of that?
SHEIKH ABDULLAH AL-JANABI: Not only me, but most Iraqis initially gave credence to what they were saying, but after the Americans occupied Iraq, they changed the tune, and instead of hunting Saddam Hussein, they were here fighting terrorism. They ruined our country, committed human rights abuses, violated our cultures and traditions. All these things negated any credibility they once had.
Gen. Richard Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, admits that it could be months before the U.S. and its Iraqi sock-puppets would even attempt to take the rebel cities:
“Part of that strategy is that Iraqi security forces must be properly equipped, trained and led to participate in these security operations, and then once it’s over, can sustain the peace in a given city.”
Myers is full of it. As the Seattle P-I tartly observed: “That appeared to be a tacit acknowledgment that even if the Americans regained the cities by force, the Iraqis would not be able to control them.” When Sheik Abdullah’s boys carried out a sentence of death against the local Iraqi National Guard commander, the PI reports that “the entire National Guard contingent, estimated to number several hundred, fled the city.” The much-touted “Fallujah Brigade,” which, the Wall Street Journal assured us, was supposed to eventually have responsibility for ensuring security in the city, blew away like so much vaporware. Their commander claims sabotage by the U.S. military, as extended negotiations between the de facto government of Fallujah and the U.S.-backed regime of Prime Minister Iyad “Shoot ‘Em Up” Allawi drag on.
The “transition” is in tatters. No sooner had the U.S. military handed over the Fallujah administrative center to the Iraqi police when 23 were killed in a guerrilla assault, and Sheik Abdullah stepped up to the plate, ready to take a swing at the American occupiers:
COULTHART: What if, even under a new Iraqi government, the Americans are still here in two, three, five years’ time?
SHEIKH ABDULLAH: Well, the new government will be slaughtered first, then the Americans.[…]
Posted by: Pat | Sep 13 2004 19:11 utc | 12
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