Sweden: Life is not quite what it may seem!

Read the article and then consider the facts presented AFTER their story.

Malmo shooting: Swedish city rocked by gunfire, reports of explosion

September 26, 20167:36am

SWEDEN is on high alert after four people were injured in a shooting and an explosion reportedly rocked the city of Malmo.

Gunmen opened fire on a car they had been chasing through a neighbourhood in Sweden’s third largest city.

The gunmen fled the scene while four people were taken to hospital with gunshot wounds, Fox News reported.

The condition of the victims is unknown, however one person is understood to have suffered a head injury.

Swedish police are treating the shooting as attempted murder.

One witness reported the shots were fired from a grey Audi, which drove off from the scene, but others said the suspects may have escaped on mopeds.

4 injured In Malmo Sweden Shooting https://t.co/KqBVXBxdB6 pic.twitter.com/U5LRnN4PXO via @AmichaiStein1

— Liveuamap World (@lumworld) September 25, 2016

Other witnesses told Sweden’s Expressen newspaper the shots were fired in bursts of three rounds.
Witnesses reported hearing 20 gunshots as a football derby was taking place about 7pm local time.
Police spokesman Ewa-Gun Westford told Expressen: “We have an ongoing operation in the area and have a confirmed shootings with more than one injured.
“Because it happened during a football derby between Malmö FF and Helsingborgs IF in town, there are many policemen on duty in Malmo tonight.”
The shooting came two hours before a blast reportedly rocked Heleneholm, a kilometre away from the scene of the shooting, The Express reported.
It is not yet known if the two incidents are linked, and reports of an explosion remain unconfirmed.
Police remain at the scene of the reported blast site but have not confirmed if anything has been found.
Nordic News reported there are no indications the shooting is terror related and that there has been no confirmation a blast has taken place.

#Malmo shooting recap: Police have found no signs of alleged detonation near shooting scene.
Sources Aftonbladet, Expressen,SVT, Sydsvenskan

— Nordic News (@Nordic_News) September 25, 2016

One car was the target of the shooting, the 4 wounded are the car occupants. Also, NO evidence of an explosion #Malmo

— Citizen K (@handlek) September 25, 2016

Sweden has been rocked by a series of shootings in recent weeks.
Like the country’s other major cities, Malmo has seen a rise in gun violence in the past decade, often connected to feuds between rival gangs, Associated Press reported.
Reports of a possible explosion in Malmo follow the news that a suspicious device was blown up outside a school in the city of Gotherburng earlier in the day.


_______________________________________________________


It's all in the words, what are written down and what are ... not mentioned.

43% of the residents of Malmo (300,000 total population) are foreign.
31% were born abroad, while 11% are Swedish-born but their parents are foreign-born.

The largest group of foreign nationals are from Iraq. 

This tells the ... rest of the story.

It isn't little Olaf shooting at Ove because he shorted Ingrid on her drugs.  No. 
Olaf and Ove aren't shooting and blowing shit up.

And they all know it.


Sweden is a lost cause.  What we need to begin doing is what we did with the Soviet Union - containment.  Sweden has decided to surrender its civilization to Islam.  Already approximately 20% are Muslim.  Your country is being changed and in 50 years forget about Walpurgis Night and May Day.  Forget about waffle day and all that almond paste / cream buns.  Forget all that festivity around light - false idols and false worship.  

And you think you are being tolerant and open-minded.  You are committing suicide.

Iraqi Freedom: From Hell to Hell, again.

For this, we have given American lives - to give them the freedom to kill children.

Iraqi teenagers stoned to death for "emo" haircuts

Published Friday, March 9, 2012

At least 90 Iraqi teenagers with "emo" appearances have been stoned to death by religious extremists in Baghdad in the past month after an inflammatory interior ministry statement dubbed it "devil worshiping", activists said.

Iraq's Moral Police released a chilling statement on the interior ministry's website condemning the "emo phenomenon" among Iraqi youth, disturbingly declaring its intent to "eliminate" the trend.

"The 'Emo phenomenon' or devil worshiping is being followed by the Moral Police who have the approval to eliminate [the phenomenon] as soon as possible since it's detrimentally affecting the society and becoming a danger," the statement read.

"They wear strange, tight clothes that have pictures on them such as skulls and use stationary that are shaped as skulls. They also wear rings on their noses and tongues, and do other strange activities," it continued.

Religious extremists caught onto the interior ministry statement, and have been harassing and killing teenagers with "strange" or "emo" appearances.

A group of armed men dressed in civilian clothing led dozens of teenagers to secluded areas a few days ago, stoned them to death, and then disposed their bodies in garbage dumpsters across the capital, according to activists.

The armed men are said to belong to “one of the most extremist religious groups” in Iraq.

“First they throw concrete blocks at the boy's arms, then at his legs, then the final blow is to his head, and if he is not dead then, they start all over again,” one person who managed to escape told Al-Akhbar.

Iraq's moral police was granted approval by the Ministry of Education to enter Baghdad schools and pinpoint students with such appearances, according to the interior ministry's statement.

The exact death toll remains unclear, but Hana al-Bayaty of Brussels Tribunal, an NGO dealing with Iraqi issues, said the current figure ranges "between 90 and 100."

"What's most disturbing about this is that they're so young," she said.

Al-Bayaty said the killings appear to have been carried out by extremist Shia militias in mostly poor Shia neighborhoods and said she suspected "there's complicity of the Ministry of Interior in the killings."

Photos of the victims were released on Facebook, causing panic and fear among Iraqi students.

A young man with long hair expressed alarm at the government-ordained harassment of teenagers with Western appearances.

“I have long hair but that doesn't mean I'm an Emo. I'm not less of a man if I have long hair. Let's not say that if I have long hair, I'm a homosexual, but I have long hair because this is my style, this is me," he told Iraq's Al-Sharqiya television network.

Safiyyah al-Suhail, an MP, said on Thursday that "some students have been recently arrested because they were wearing American jeans or had Western haircuts."

The interior ministry has not disclosed the number of teenage victims, but released a follow-up statement on Thursday warning extremists "not to step on public freedom of Iraqis."

News of the gruesome deaths drew a stern reaction from Iraq's prominent Shia cleric, Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, who criticized the stoning of the young men as "an act of terrorism."

Below is the full English translation of the Iraqi interior ministry's inflammatory statement:

The Director of the Moral Police of the Interior Ministry released a statement, saying "The 'Emo phenomenon' or devil worshiping is being followed by the Moral Police who have the approval to eliminate [the phenomenon] as soon as possible since it's detrimentally affecting the society and becoming a danger."

'Emo' comes from the English word 'emotional' and the phenomenon is popular among teenagers not only in Iraq, but in most societies. They use their appearances and movements as a method to express their emotions and embody their will and their view of life in their behavior.

Colonel Mushtaq Taleb al-Mahemdawi said: "The Emo Phenomenon was discovered a while back by members of our force in Baghdad. A report has been made and given to the Ministry of Interior to receive an approval to carry on with the investigation and to know how to eliminate the phenomenon."

He added: "The Ministry of Interior took this situation very seriously and received an approval from the Ministry of Education to set a plan under my full supervision and to allow us to enter schools in the capital."

"There are some cases of the spread of this phenomenon specifically among schools in Baghdad, but we are facing great difficulty in the lack of women on the force who would allow us to carry the investigation more accurately since the phenomenon is more popular among girls between the ages of 14 and 18."

"They wear strange, tight clothes that have pictures on them such as skulls and use stationary that are shaped as skulls. They also wear rings on their noses and tongues, and do other strange activities."











iraq

Let's Compare Shall We

Abu Ghraib or the newest issue, Marines standing over dead Taliban.  Inquests, hearings, jail time versus ... we're sorry, they tried to escape and we shot them dead.

Barbarism.

A mentality they would like to spread around the globe.

Body of Iraq hostage Alan McMenemy handed over to Baghdad embassy

Conal Urquhart and agencies

Friday 20 January 2012 18.00 EST

Alan McMenemy, whose body has been handed over to the British embassy in Baghdad. The security guard was kindapped and taken hostage in Iraq in 2007

The body of a Briton, who was taken hostage in Iraq and later killed, has been handed over to the British embassy in Baghdad, it was announced on Friday.

Alan McMenemy, a security guard from Glasgow, was abducted in 2007 as he and three colleagues were guarding a computer consultant working in the Iraqi ministry of finance. Scores of militia men disguised as police officers took over the ministry and abducted the five Britons.

The bodies of Jason Creswell, Jason Swindlehurst and Alan MacLachlan were transferred to the British embassy in 2009. Peter Moore, the consultant, was released alive the same year.

David Cameron said: "It is with great sadness that I can confirm that the British embassy in Baghdad received a body today that has been identified as Alan McMenemy, who was kidnapped in Baghdad in 2007, along with four other men."

"My thoughts are with Alan's family and friends at this time. They have waited so long for his return and I hope that this will allow them to find some peace after an ordeal that no family should ever have to suffer."

An inquest in 2011 heard that Creswell, Swindlehurst and MacLachlan, were subjected to mock executions, regularly beaten and kept chained and blindfolded for long periods before they were shot dead by their captors.

Moore told Channel 4 News this month that when he was released he was told McMenemy's body would be handed over at the same time. "We've been waiting for the body for a long time. When I was released I was told by Qais al-Khazali [the leader of the militia that abducted the men] that the body would be released with me, and obviously that never happened," he said.

Clearly the leader of the pack doesn't feel enough for these men to keep his word and release the body for a Christian burial.  Although I am certain he would demand the release of a dead pack member to bury according to Islamic custom.

"So I've been waiting for the body to be released. It's so long, it's never going to go away from any of our lives. But it is important to move on. We don't have to forget but we have to keep living, and this is the end of the chapter, sort of thing. It's the end of the book."

Rosaleen McMenemy, Alan's widow, said: "Our families have suffered terrible uncertainty and distress over the past four years and eight months. We have worried about Alan every single minute of each waking day. We now know that we will shortly have Alan home again. This will allow us to properly grieve for him and we will draw some comfort from the fact that we have him home at last."

Earlier this year, Qais al-Khazali, the militia leader, apologised for the deaths. He said the four guards were killed when they tried to escape from their captors. "The brothers told me that those four bodyguards tried to escape … they took advantage of a negligent moment and took the weapon of one of their guards and the clash ensued and led to this result. We honestly are sorry for that incident," he said.

"Peter Moore was in another place. They [the kidnappers] knew how important he was and they were expecting a raid or something else. In addition to that, Peter was a civilian and they knew that it was unexpected that he would be any kind of risk. But the confrontation happened with the four guards and led to all of them being killed."

It is not clear why the militia waited more than two years to hand over the body of McMenemy.

In his statement, Cameron noted that the families of Margaret Hassan and Ken Bigley, who were also killed in Iraq, were still waiting for the return of their bodies.

iraq

Obama and Iraq" The Legacy He Leaves

In fleeing Afghanistan, the West relinquishes its grip on the world

By Peter Oborne

Politics

June 23rd, 2011

The withdrawal of US forces from Afghanistan, formalised by Barack Obama early yesterday, cannot be precisely compared to America’s humiliation in Vietnam nearly 40 years ago. There have been no photographs – not yet, anyway – of US embassy staff being airlifted out of the Kabul embassy.

The approximately 6,000 American deaths from the two failed wars in Iraq and Afghanistan do not compare to the nearly 60,000 who lost their lives in Vietnam, in part because of the miracles wrought by modern trauma surgeons. The exit, so President Obama and David Cameron insist, will be carefully managed.

But President Nixon made the same claim when he announced his policy of “Vietnamisation” after his victory in 1968. Nixon and his advisers envisaged a smooth transition as the US departed and a South Vietnamese administration took its place. But neither the Saigon government nor its US-trained army could cope as America scuttled for the exit in the spring of 1975.

Let’s throw the clock forward to 2014, the year Obama and Cameron say combat operations must end. This much is certain: the Taliban will return to power, conceivably with Mullah Omar (still topping the FBI’s most wanted terrorist list) coming down from the mountains to resume his old position, so rudely interrupted, as Head of the Supreme Council and effective head of state.

It is unlikely that Taliban commanders will take kindly to the flourishing nightlife and lively restaurants that have sprung up under President Karzai’s rule. All this will close at once, while Kabul’s notorious Swimming Pool Hill – where blindfolded criminals and homosexuals were pushed off a high diving board to their deaths – may open again for its ghoulish business. The Taliban attitude towards female education has, to be fair, improved over the past decade. At best, Kabul will come to resemble a provincial Saudi Arabian city.

It is unlikely that the Taliban will exert the same mesmeric centralised control over all Afghanistan that it did before the 2001 invasion. The forces ranged against it are, for the time being, too strong, while after 10 years of war the Taliban itself has fractured into opposing groups. This is why American strategists are hoping for a negotiated solution: an arrangement embracing both the Taliban and elements of the old Northern Alliance. It is more than likely that this will not work, and Afghanistan will face a civil war, just as it did after the Soviet withdrawal in 1989. If so, humanitarian agencies will find it impossible to operate, and reports of hideous carnage and atrocities will seep out of the country, with Western powers unable to do more than wring their hands. Stalemate is the likely outcome: eventually, large parts of the country will be dominated by warlords, each appropriating a chunk of the Afghan National Army.

In any case, it is unlikely that Obama’s sketchy three-year plan will work. There is no serious incentive – apart from cash – for any Afghan to stay loyal to the departing Americans and British. They must look to secure their future. President Karzai – currently at the heart of a massive banking fraud – will probably quit soon and flee, taking with him the billions of pounds his family have stolen.

Meanwhile, governments such as Britain’s, with armies still operating inside Afghanistan, will be forced to answer a very troubling question: why are we sending our bravest and best young men to be maimed and killed when we are going to leave, anyway? The pointless horror of Britain’s final months in Basra Palace remains a potent memory, and must not be repeated. Whatever our discredited generals may claim, nothing important is going to change over the next three years, and what does will not be for the better.

Those countries with a genuine long-term interest in the region will get more and more involved, and be entitled to do so – China, Iran, India, Russia and, above all, Pakistan. No force on earth will prevent the Pakistani government from backing the Afghan Taliban, and it is past time that Britain and the US woke up to this elemental fact.

So where does this latest humiliation leave the United States? There were many who predicted that defeat in Vietnam marked the end of the American century, yet they were soon proved wrong and the US went on to enjoy a period of astonishing global success. But remember this – Nixon and Kissinger played one dazzling card as Vietnam weakened. They made peace with China, recruited her as an ally against Soviet Russia, and opened this formerly closed state to international capitalism. The consequences can be assessed in the history books – the greatest advance in living standards the world has ever seen, and US hegemony reaffirmed for an extra generation. But that happy epoch is over. China feels no gratitude, and has turned almost overnight from protégé into malevolent rival, with an ever harsher appreciation of the realities of global power.

Certainly, America remains the greatest military force on earth, with three million men and women in uniform and seven formidable battle fleets, with a combined tonnage greater than the next 13 largest navies combined. Yet the sorry lesson of Iraq and Afghanistan is that this prodigious military muscle is practically useless for 21st-century warfare. Incoming defence secretary Leon Panetta’s solution, expounded at his Senate confirmation hearing earlier this month – to place US military personnel under CIA direction, so their operations can be made secret and unaccountable – is sinister and unconstitutional.

Back in 1974, as the US prepared to abandon Vietnam, its national deficit stood at $6.1 billion, equivalent to about $27 billion today. This year’s deficit is $1,660 billion – 60 times higher. Back then, US debt stood at $475 billion (around $1.8 trillion, inflation adjusted). In the intervening period, that debt has risen sevenfold to around $14 trillion, having doubled over the last seven years alone. The withdrawal from Afghanistan is, in part, the unexpected consequence of this financial crisis.

There is a sense that yesterday’s Afghan defeat was ordained when Barack Obama, with his mandate to bring George W Bush and Tony Blair’s senseless “War on Terror” to an end, won the 2008 presidential election. Now Obama has fulfilled his promise, and the task that lies before him now is to manage that defeat. More serious than America’s military defeat in Afghanistan has been its moral defeat. Again and again, it has behaved as hideously, and with the same barbaric contempt for human rights, as the worst of its enemies. Obama needs to reunite the United States with civilised values and redefine his country’s role in the world.

The rest of the familiar post-war architecture has gone. America is no longer capable of being the policeman of the world, and may retreat to its historic isolation. Across the Channel, the debt crisis is wrecking the European dream. History is moving faster than ever, and taking us into a new and formless world.





















Iraq

Iraq - Pay us for the roads you damaged when you drove on them

I believe we should pay them.

After they pay us for the sanitation plants we built they never had.  After they pay us for the electric plants that did not function, that do now.

After they pay us for the schools we built, the books we brought, the roads we built, the infrastructure we provided via our urban planning engineers.

After they pay for the time and labor on the above - we will still owe them a bit.

Then we can bill for the rebuilt cities - the shia now live in communities with services and hope.  Schools and stores, jobs and opportunity for some.

They can pay us for removing the tyrant and the cost of military equipment.

They can pay us for the loss of American lives and for the cost of maintaining the stability of Iraq for seven years so they can now be at a point to ask us to pay for their roads.

We can bill for man hours, air hours, fuel costs, food costs ...

When we finish, we can spread the debt they owe us over 100 years and they can pay us in oil, and we promise we will not raise this issue again - unless they raise the issue of their roads again.




Baghdad wants U.S. to pay $1 billion for damage to city




BAGHDAD

Thu Feb 17, 2011 10:44am EST




(Reuters) - Iraq's capital wants the United States to apologize and pay $1 billion for the damage done to the city not by bombs but by blast walls and Humvees since the U.S.-led invasion that toppled Saddam Hussein.

The city's government issued its demands in a statement on Wednesday that said Baghdad's infrastructure and aesthetics have been seriously damaged by the American military.

"The U.S. forces changed this beautiful city to a camp in an ugly and destructive way, which reflected deliberate ignorance and carelessness about the simplest forms of public taste," the statement said.

"Due to the huge damage, leading to a loss the Baghdad municipality cannot afford...we demand the American side apologize to Baghdad's people and pay back these expenses."

The statement made no mention of damage caused by bombing.

Baghdad's neighborhoods have been sealed off by miles of concrete blast walls, transforming the city into a tangled maze that contributes to massive traffic jams. Despite a sharp reduction in overall violence in recent years only 5 percent of the walls have been removed, officials said.

The heavy blast walls have damaged sewer and water systems, pavement and parks, said Hakeem Abdul Zahra, the city spokesman.

U.S. military Humvees, driven on street medians and through gardens, have also caused major damage, he said.

"The city of Baghdad feels these violations, which have taken place for years, have caused economic and moral damage," he said.

U.S. troops pulled out of Iraq's cities in June 2009 before formally ending combat operations last August. Around 50,000 remain in Iraq but they are scheduled to withdraw by year end.

Baghdad is badly in need of a facelift. Electricity and trash collection are sporadic, streets are potholed and sewage treatment plants and pipes have not been renovated for years.

Iraq has seen growing protests in recent weeks over poor government services.

Zahra said the city's statement issued on Wednesday would be the start of its measures to get the United States to pay for damages but he did not say what other steps might be taken.















iraq

Obama: Burning Bridges, Destroying Alliances

One must wonder - even the most ardent Obama supporter, what is he doing? 


Not that we should capitulate to any oil state, nor should we be bowing to their despotic leaders, but ... to so undermine our credibility and worth, that these states look elsewhere for economic investments ...


NBC’s Brokaw: Saudis ‘So Unhappy' With Obama They Sent Emissaries to China, Russia Seeking Enhanced Ties


Wednesday, April 06, 2011
By Susan Jones



(CNSNews.com) – Reporting from Baghdad, Iraq yesterday, NBC’s Tom Brokaw said the Saudi Arabian monarchy is “so unhappy with the Obama administration for the way it pushed out President Mubarak of Egypt” that it has sent senior officials to the Peoples' Republic of China and Russia to seek expanded business opportunities with those countries.

After remarking on the difficulty of establishing democracy in the Middle East, Brokaw said that Defense Secretary Robert Gates “will face some tough questions in this region about the American intentions going on now with all this new turmoil, especially in an area where the United States has such big stakes politically and economically.”

“And a lot of those questions presumably will come from King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia,” reported Brokaw on the Nightly News. “I was told on the way in here that the Saudis are so unhappy with the Obama administration for the way it pushed out President Mubarak of Egypt that it sent high level emissaries to China and Russia to tell those two countries that Saudi Arabia now is prepared to do more business with them.”

Brokaw continued, “Back here in Iraq, the political and the economic situation remains fragile. So fragile that the U.N. secretary general is worried that this country could now see massive protests in the streets once again.”


Earlier in his report, Brokaw noted that while U.S. military forces are supposed to leave Iraq at year’s end, the U.S. Embassy staff was being beefed-up from 8,000 to nearly 20,000 personnel.

[That last bit is interesting - we remove 10-12,000 troops and with the switcheroo, the numbers remain static.  Yet, we can call it a reduction.  Mighty big embassy!]
















obama

There will be no Christmas in Iraq

There is little to say.  The excuses given, the number of dead ...




Iraqi churches cancel Christmas festivities




By YAHYA BARZANJI and SAMEER N. YACOUB, Associated Press
Wed Dec 22, 9:24 pm ET



.KIRKUK, Iraq – No decorations, no midnight Mass. Even an appearance by Santa Claus has been nixed after Iraq's Christian leaders called off Christmas celebrations amid new al-Qaida threats on the tiny community still terrified from a bloody siege on a Baghdad church.



Christians across Iraq have been living in fear since the assault on Our Lady of Salvation Church as its Catholic congregation was celebrating Sunday Mass. Sixty-eight people were killed. Days later Islamic insurgents bombed Christian homes and neighborhoods across the capital.



On Tuesday, al-Qaida insurgents threatened more attacks on Iraq's beleaguered Christians, many of whom have fled their homes or the country since the church attack. A council representing Christian denominations across Iraq advised its followers to cancel public celebrations of Christmas out of concern for their lives and as a show of mourning for the victims.



"Nobody can ignore the threats of al-Qaida against Iraqi Christians," said Chaldean Archbishop Louis Sako in Kirkuk. "We cannot find a single source of joy that makes us celebrate. The situation of the Christians is bleak."



Church officials in Baghdad, as well as in the northern cities of Kirkuk and Mosul and the southern city of Basra, said they will not put up Christmas decorations or celebrate midnight Mass. They urged worshippers not to decorate their homes. Even an appearance by Santa Claus was called off.

"It's to avoid any attacks, but also to show that people are sad, not happy," said Younadim Kanna, a Christian lawmaker from Baghdad.

Even before the Oct. 31 church attack, thousands of Christians were fleeing Iraq. They make up more than a third of the 53,700 Iraqis resettled in the United States since 2007, according to State Department statistics.

Since the church attack, some 1,000 families have fled to Iraq's safer Kurdish-ruled north, according to the United Nations, which recently warned of a steady exodus of Iraqi Christians.

The latest threats were posted late Tuesday by the Islamic State of Iraq, an al-Qaida front group, on a website frequented by Islamic extremists. The group said it wants the release of two women it claims are being held captive by Egypt's Coptic Church.

Muslim extremists in Egypt accuse the Coptic Church of detaining the women for allegedly converting to Islam, an accusation the church denies. The message posted Tuesday was addressed to Iraq's Christian community and said it was designed to "pressure" Egypt.

Few reliable statistics exist on the number of Christians remaining in this nation of 29 million. A recent State Department report says Christian leaders estimate there are 400,000 to 600,000, down from a prewar level of some 1.4 million.

For those who remain, Christmas will be a somber affair.

In the northern city of Kirkuk, 180 miles (290 kilometers) north of Baghdad, Sako said there will be no Christmas decorations outside churches and a traditional visit by Santa Claus has also been called off. Money usually used on celebrations or gifts will instead go to help Christian refugees.

Ashour Binyamin, a 55-year-old Christian from Kirkuk said he and his family would not go to church on Christmas and would celebrate at home.

At Baghdad's Our Lady of Salvation Church, where more than 120 parishioners were held hostage by gunmen during the four-hour siege, all Christmas Masses have been canceled. Only a modest manger display will mark the occasion.

"We have canceled all celebrations in the church," said Father Mukhlis. "We are still in deep sorrow over the innocent victims who fell during the evil attack."

In Baghdad's Karradah neighborhood, where many of the city's remaining Christians live, churches were guarded by security forces Wednesday and surrounded by razor wire. Shop owners said few people were buying the Christmas trees and Santa Claus toys on sale.

Ikhlas Bahnam, a Christian in the neighborhood, vowed to go to Mass on Christmas Day, despite what she called the government's failure to protect her small minority. But she won't be visiting friends during the holiday season because all of them have fled the city.

"We did not put any decorations inside or outside our house this year," Bahnam said. "We see no reason to celebrate."

In Mosul, 225 miles (360 kilometers) northwest of Baghdad, the Rev. Faiz Wadee, a Syrian Orthodox priest, said there will be no public Christmas celebrations there.

And Christians in Iraq's second-largest city of Basra have also called off all celebrations, said Saad Matti, a Christian legislator on the Basra provincial council.

"There will be only a small Mass in one church in Basra without any signs of joy or decoration and under the protection of Iraqi security forces," he said. "We are fully aware of al-Qaida threats."

Matti said Christians were also toning down their celebrations out of respect for a Shiite holiday going on at the same time. The majority of Iraqis are Shiite Muslims, especially in the south.

Even among Iraqi Christians who've managed to escape the violence, the mood was subdued.

Maher Murqous, a Christian from Mosul who fled to neighboring Syria after being threatened by militants, said his relatives are still at risk in Iraq, and since they cannot celebrate, neither will he.

"We will pray for the sake of Iraq. That's all we can do," he said from his home in Damascus.





 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
Islam

The Extinction of the Christians in Iraq

One way or another, for one reason or one method over another - the result is the same.





Iraqi Christians put to the sword


Worship in Iraq is now more dangerous than under Saddam's dictatorship as Islamists bomb churches in a campaign of ethnic cleansing.


Adrian Blomfield
The Telegraph
12 Nov 2010


Unless told what to look for, the casual visitor to the once glamorous Baghdad thoroughfare that hugs the east bank of the Tigris would almost certainly pass them by. The Stars of David carved into the stonework of the low-slung buildings that line the alleyways of Abu Nuwas Street are little more than a curiosity these days – a memento of a civilisation lost to the pages of history.

Judaism has a connection to Iraq that no other faith can match. The patriarch Abraham may well have been born there; the prophet Jonah reluctantly returned to foretell the destruction of Nineveh. Centuries later, the Bible tells us that the exiled Jewish people sat down by Babylon's rivers and wept for their homeland. Yet Jewish links to Iraq are far from ancient history.

In the 1920s, there were reckoned to have been 130,000 Jews in Baghdad, 40 per cent of the population. Today, after decades of persecution before and immediately after the creation of the state of Israel, there are no more than eight.

Iraqi Christians might not be able to boast such a heritage – though even if there is no way of proving their belief that the apostle Thomas brought the faith to Iraq in the first century AD, theirs is still one of the oldest Christian communities on earth. Yet after a series of attacks in the past month by Islamist extremists – whose creed is the parvenu of the monotheistic religions in the country – fears are mounting that Christianity in Iraq is doomed to follow Judaism into oblivion.

At the end of last month, in the most ferocious attack on the community yet, Islamist extremists linked to al-Qaeda burst into Baghdad's Our Lady of Salvation Church during evening mass and took the congregation hostage. The gunmen began executing clergymen and worshippers before tossing a grenade into a safe-room where 60 parishioners had huddled to hide. As Iraqi forces stormed the church, the assassins surrounded themselves with children and detonated explosives secreted in suicide vests.

By the time it was over, 52 Christians were dead. Blood smeared the walls of the church, body parts and scraps of seared flesh littered the pews. A policeman standing guard outside the church afterwards summed up the scene: "Blood, flesh and bones. You can't bear the smell."

A group calling itself the Islamic State of Iraq, a self-acknowledged front for al-Qaeda, claimed responsibility and issued a chilling warning, telling Christians it would "open upon them the doors of destruction and rivers of blood". Delivering on their promise, 11 car bombs aimed at Christian shops and homes in Baghdad exploded on Wednesday, killing another five members of the minority.

The US and British invasion of Iraq rid the country of Saddam Hussein and instituted a bloodily delivered democracy of sorts after decades of oppressive totalitarianism. And yesterday, eight months of political deadlock since elections in March were broken with a deal to form a new government. Nouri al-Maliki, a Shia, remains as prime minister, while Iyad Allawi, leader of the main Sunni faction al-Iraqiya, will lead a new council for national strategy.

The agreement may be taken by outsiders as a welcome sign of stability that ought to reassure Iraqi Christians, but it is a painful truth that they led a safer and more dignified existence under Saddam's brutal rule. However, in a sign of the coalition's fragility, the Iraqiya bloc last night walked out in protest before a vote on the presidency.

Earlier this week, Athanasius Dawood, the exiled archbishop of the Syriac Orthodox Church, one of the smaller Christian communities, gave a warning that the minority was facing extinction at the hands of a campaign of "pre-meditated ethnic cleansing". He said that the only hope of salvation for Iraq's Christians was if countries such as Britain gave them blanket political asylum.

Although most of the extremists attacking them are thought to be Sunni Arab, Christians are as fearful of the Shia-dominated government and the kind of rule they believe it will one day institute. Tellingly, Archbishop Dawood laid much of the blame for the Christians' plight on Mr Maliki's administration, calling it "weak, biased, if not extremist".

Statistics vary wildly, but according to the US State Department, there are between 550,000 and 800,000 Christians left in Iraq, compared with 1.4 million in 1987 when a census was taken. Those numbers may be an over-estimation, but it is generally agreed that the number has halved since Saddam's fall as members of the faith flee the pogroms. Iraqi Christians say they are in graver danger now than at any time in their history. As gruesome as last month's attack on the Our Lady of Salvation Church was, they have been living in terror since the first bombings of their places of worship in 2004.

In the northern city of Mosul, Christians have been routinely kidnapped and executed because of their faith. In the past two years, Islamist gunmen have frequently stopped young men and women on the street and asked for their identity cards. If they bore a Christian-sounding name, they were often shot dead where they stood.

To have any chance of survival, churches in Mosul have been forced to pay protection money to gangsters linked to al-Qaeda. Any doubts about the Islamists' ultimate intentions were laid to rest when a group calling itself the Secret Islamic Army delivered a letter to homes in the Christian enclaves of Dura, a district of Baghdad.

"To the Christian, we would like to inform you of the decision of the legal court of the Secret Islamic Army to notify you that this is your last and final threat," the letter read. "If you do not leave your home, your blood will be spilled. You and your family will be killed." With its chilling echoes of similar missives delivered to Tutsis during the Rwandan genocide, it is little wonder that Iraqi Christians fear extermination.

Some have fought back. Churches in parts of Kurdistan have formed militias to protect their congregations. "The only solution left for our people is to bear arms," Father Ayman Danna of the Church of St George in Bartella was quoted as saying. "We either live or die."

But the Church Guard, as the militia is known, has the benefit of being funded by a rich Christian in the Kurdish regional government. Christians elsewhere can find no such powerful patronage.

Iraq's Christians learnt the hard way that to survive they had to pledge unquestioning fealty to successive, Sunni-dominated governments. When British troops pulled out of Iraq in 1933, members of the Assyrian Church, now one of the smallest of Iraq's 12 Christian communities, began to agitate for independence. The army and Kurdish irregulars retaliated by massacring 3,000 of them. Ever since, Christians have known that their loyalty had to be beyond reproach, and under Saddam, they were largely left in peace to practise their faith.

Saddam espoused Ba'athism, an ideology founded by a Syrian Christian that promoted secularism while acknowledging the importance of Islam in Arabic culture. Christians were only represented at secondary levels in the army and government, with the notable exception of Tariq Aziz – born Michael Yuhanna – Saddam's former deputy prime minister. Despite the repression of the Saddam years, Christians believed that was preferable to a government dominated by the Shia majority whose leaders had close links with Iran.

Those fears were given added impetus in 1991 when, at the encouragement of the United States in the aftermath of the Gulf war, the Shia rose up in revolt. One of their first acts was to attack and desecrate churches in Basra. Mr Maliki is a particular target of suspicion because he spent eight years in Iran during the 1990s. Tehran was also intimately involved in attempting to end the eight-month political impasse to create a coalition government.

With Shia rule set to continue, Iraqi Christians believe that not only will they receive no protection against Sunni extremists, but also that Iranian-style intolerance towards religious minorities will grow more entrenched. A number of Shia leaders with popular backing espouse a greater role for Islamic Sharia in daily life and many also support a return to Dhimmi status for Christians, an old Ottoman construct that limited the rights of minorities in return for protection. That would represent a regression from the Ba'athist constitution of 1970 which acknowledged the "legitimate rights of all minorities" and gave formal recognition to the five main Christian communities.

As persecution of Christians grows across the Middle East, and numbers dwindle ever faster, it is a supreme irony for many Iraqi Christians that one of the safest places for their faith in an ever more dangerous region is Ba'athist Syria. As a member of the minority Allawi strain of Shia Islam, Bashar al-Assad, the Syrian president, has recognised the need to protect other vulnerable faiths. As a result, Christian holidays are observed by the whole country and work does not start until 10am on Sundays to allow Christians to go to church.

Christians across the border in Iraq can only look wistfully at Syria – for all its imperfections – as a reminder of how things once were.

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
Iraq

Bush, Iran, and Iraq

• THE WASHINGTON TIMES


• October 25, 2010

WikiLeaks papers back Bush claims of Iran role in Iraq war

The largest unauthorized disclosure of classified government documents in U.S. history confirms a long-standing assertion of President George W. Bush at the start of the 2007 troop surge: Iran was orchestrating one side of the Iraqi insurgency.

Field reports made public by the website WikiLeaks on Friday show that U.S. military intelligence agencies had many strands of evidence revealing that Iran provided paramilitary training to Shiite Muslim insurgents at the height of the civil war in Iraq.

In one case, the military circulated a Dec. 22, 2006, warning that a group known as Jaish al-Mahdi planned to kidnap U.S. troops. The man planning the operation, Sheik Azhar al-Dulaimi, was trained by Hezbollah terrorists near the Iranian city of Qom, the document stated. Hezbollah is a Lebanon-based militia that was founded, trained and funded by the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps.

“This confirms the degree of operational involvement the Iranian Revolutionary Guard used in anti-U.S. operations in Iraq,” said Kenneth Katzman, a Gulf affairs specialist at the Congressional Research Service. “It confirms the degree to which Iran was involved in operations that directly targeted U.S. forces.”

The disclosures about Iran’s role in the Iraqi insurgency were first reported by the New York Times. That newspaper, along with the Guardian and Al Jazeera, were given access to the Iraq war logs before the documents were placed on the Internet on Friday.

Analysts today generally do not dispute Iran’s role in providing covert political and weapons support to insurgents in Iraq, but it was a major political issue in 2007. In September 2007, Sen. Jon Kyl, In September 2007, Sen. Jon Kyl, Arizona Republican, and Sen. Joe Lieberman, Connecticut independent, proposed a resolution condemning the Iranian role in subversion in Iraq. The amendment called for the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps to be officially designated a foreign terrorist group, something Mr. Bush did in 2008.

Barack Obama, as a Democratic senator from Illinois, opposed the resolution at the time but also used the vote in support of the measure by Hillary Rodham Clinton, then a Democratic senator from New York, to attack her antiwar credentials during public debate in the run-up to the Iowa caucuses.

In a letter to Iowa voters from October 2007, Mr. Obama said the resolution was dangerous because “George Bush and Dick Cheney could use this language to justify keeping our troops in Iraq as long as they can point to a threat from Iran. And because they could use this language to justify an attack on Iran as a part of the ongoing war in Iraq.”

Other disclosures from WikiLeaks include reports showing that U. S. troops intervened in some cases to halt abuses of detainees by Iraqi security forces.

In Iraq, the office of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki said the release of the documents was politically motivated.

“There are some political interests behind the media campaign who are trying to use the documents against national leaders, especially the prime minister,” Mr. al-Maliki said in a statement.

Iraq’s high court ordered the Iraqi parliament to convene on Sunday to try to break the political deadlock in choosing a new government. Last month, Iraq’s United Iraqi Alliance, comprising major Shiite parties not affiliated with Mr. al-Maliki, reluctantly agreed to give Mr. al-Maliki a second term as prime minister.

Nick Clegg, British deputy prime minister and leader of the Liberal Democrats, told the BBC that some of the disclosures from WikiLeaks warranted investigation.

Pentagon officials stressed that the disclosures did not reveal new information about the Iraq war and condemned the unprecedented leak of classified data.

Adm. Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said on his Twitter account: “Another irresponsible posting of stolen classified documents by Wikileaks puts lives at risk and gives adversaries valuable information.”

WikiLeaks’ last major release of documents was related to the war in Afghanistan and included the names of Afghans who helped coalition forces, potentially endangering their lives. Although the Taliban has said it was combing through the documents to find those Afghans, an assessment from the Pentagon provided to the Senate Armed Services Committee found that no one had been killed as a result of the WikiLeaks disclosure.





 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
iraq

OBAMA'S WARS: A Couple Thoughts

I am not sure about the degree to which it shows OBAMA in a negative light, so much as it shows others negatively.  If you accept the premise - Obama wants out of ther war(s) and everything he does and says is to that end, then what I have read does not show him as misguided, rather his minions are an infighting rabble.




Bob Woodward book details Obama battles with advisers over exit plan for Afghan war




By Steve Luxenberg
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, September 22, 2010; 12:11 AM


President Obama urgently looked for a way out of the war in Afghanistan last year, repeatedly pressing his top military advisers for an exit plan that they never gave him, according to secret meeting notes and documents cited in a new book by journalist Bob Woodward.

Frustrated with his military commanders for consistently offering only options that required significantly more troops, Obama finally crafted his own strategy, dictating a classified six-page "terms sheet" that sought to limit U.S. involvement, Woodward reports in "Obama's Wars," to be released on Monday.

According to Woodward's meeting-by-meeting, memo-by-memo account of the 2009 Afghan strategy review, the president avoided talk of victory as he described his objectives.

"This needs to be a plan about how we're going to hand it off and get out of Afghanistan," Obama is quoted as telling White House aides as he laid out his reasons for adding 30,000 troops in a short-term escalation. "Everything we're doing has to be focused on how we're going to get to the point where we can reduce our footprint. It's in our national security interest. There cannot be any wiggle room."

Obama rejected the military's request for 40,000 troops as part of an expansive mission that had no foreseeable end. "I'm not doing 10 years," he told Secretary of Defense Robert M. Gates and Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton at a meeting on Oct. 26, 2009. "I'm not doing long-term nation-building. I am not spending a trillion dollars."

Woodward's book portrays Obama and the White House as barraged by warnings about the threat of terrorist attacks on U.S. soil and confronted with the difficulty in preventing them. During an interview with Woodward in July, the president said, "We can absorb a terrorist attack. We'll do everything we can to prevent it, but even a 9/11, even the biggest attack ever . . . we absorbed it and we are stronger."

But most of the book centers on the strategy review, and the dissension, distrust and infighting that consumed Obama's national security team as it was locked in a fierce and emotional struggle over the direction, goals, timetable, troop levels and the chances of success for a war that is almost certain to be one of the defining events of this presidency.

Obama is shown at odds with his uniformed military commanders, particularly Adm. Mike Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and Gen. David H. Petraeus, head of U.S. Central Command during the 2009 strategy review and now the top U.S. and NATO commander in Afghanistan.

Woodward reveals their conflicts through detailed accounts of two dozen closed-door secret strategy sessions and nearly 40 private conversations between Obama and Cabinet officers, key aides and intelligence officials.

Tensions often turned personal. National security adviser James L. Jones privately referred to Obama's political aides as "the water bugs," the "Politburo," the "Mafia," or the "campaign set." Petraeus, who felt shut out by the new administration, told an aide that he considered the president's senior adviser David Axelrod to be "a complete spin doctor."

During a flight in May, after a glass of wine, Petraeus told his own staffers that the administration was "[expletive] with the wrong guy." Gates was tempted to walk out of an Oval Office meeting after being offended by comments made by deputy national security adviser Thomas E. Donilon about a general not named in the book.

Suspicion lingered among some from the 2008 presidential campaign as well. When Obama floated the idea of naming Clinton to a high-profile post, Axelrod asked him, "How could you trust Hillary?"

'Can't afford any mistakes'

"Obama's Wars" marks the 16th book by Woodward, 67, a Washington Post associate editor. Woodward's reporting with Carl Bernstein on the Watergate coverup in the early 1970s led to their bestselling book "All the President's Men."


Among the book's other disclosures:

-- Obama told Woodward in the July interview that he didn't think about the Afghan war in the "classic" terms of the United States winning or losing. "I think about it more in terms of: Do you successfully prosecute a strategy that results in the country being stronger rather than weaker at the end?" he said.

-- The CIA created, controls and pays for a clandestine 3,000-man paramilitary army of local Afghans, known as Counterterrorism Pursuit Teams. Woodward describes these teams as elite, well-trained units that conduct highly sensitive covert operations into Pakistan as part of a stepped-up campaign against al-Qaeda and Afghan Taliban havens there.

-- Obama has kept in place or expanded 14 intelligence orders, known as findings, issued by his predecessor, George W. Bush. The orders provide the legal basis for the CIA's worldwide covert operations.

[Oooh ooh call CODE PINK, let them know, and Soros, and whats that other leftist org ... MOVEON.  Let them all know about Obama's dramataic shift.]

-- A new capability developed by the National Security Agency has dramatically increased the speed at which intercepted communications can be turned around into useful information for intelligence analysts and covert operators. "They talk, we listen. They move, we observe. Given the opportunity, we react operationally," then-Director of National Intelligence Mike McConnell explained to Obama at a briefing two days after he was elected president.

-- A classified exercise in May showed that the government was woefully unprepared to deal with a nuclear terrorist attack in the United States. The scenario involved the detonation of a small, crude nuclear weapon in Indianapolis and the simultaneous threat of a second blast in Los Angeles. Obama, in the interview with Woodward, called a nuclear attack here "a potential game changer." He said: "When I go down the list of things I have to worry about all the time, that is at the top, because that's one where you can't afford any mistakes."

-- Afghan President Hamid Karzai was diagnosed as manic depressive, according to U.S. intelligence reports. "He's on his meds, he's off his meds," Woodward quotes U.S. Ambassador Karl W. Eikenberry as saying.

[This 'diagnosis' is interesting.  Assume for a second it is accurate.  Karzai went to a doctor while we followed him, and while the doctor evaluated him, prescribed him meds, we watched or listened - on a 'friendly' leader - we spied!  Otherwise, how would we know this???  Unless someone within the WH, which loathes Karzai, threw this story in, knowing he would hear of it and flip out.  And you can't exactly quiz the intelligence agencies as they would never reveal whether they had or not, any reports attesting to this statement.  Win-Win.  But I would guess more likely than not, it is not accurate but another effort by the Obama WH to discredit and punish Karzai.]


'The cancer is in Pakistan'

Obama campaigned on a promise to extract U.S. forces from Iraq and focus on Afghanistan and Pakistan, which he described as the greater threat to American security. At McConnell's top-secret briefing for Obama, the intelligence chief told the president-elect that Pakistan is a dishonest partner, unwilling or unable to stop elements of the Pakistani intelligence service from giving clandestine aid, weapons and money to the Afghan Taliban, Woodward writes.

By the end of the 2009 strategy review, Woodward reports, Obama concluded that no mission in Afghanistan could be successful without attacking the al-Qaeda and Afghan Taliban havens operating with impunity in Pakistan's remote tribal regions.

"We need to make clear to people that the cancer is in Pakistan," Obama is quoted as saying at an Oval Office meeting on Nov. 25, 2009. Creating a more secure Afghanistan is imperative, the president said, "so the cancer doesn't spread" there.

The war in Iraq draws no attention in the book, except as a reference point for considering and developing a new Afghanistan strategy. The book's title, "Obama's Wars," appears to refer to the conflict in Afghanistan and the conflicts among the president's national security team.

An older war - the Vietnam conflict - does figure prominently in the minds of Obama and his advisers. When Vice President Biden rushed to the White House on a Sunday morning to make one last appeal for a narrowly defined mission, he warned Obama that a major escalation would mean "we're locked into Vietnam."

Obama kept asking for "an exit plan" to go along with any further troop commitment, and is shown growing increasingly frustrated with the military hierarchy for not providing one. At one strategy session, the president waved a memo from the Office of Management and Budget, which put a price tag of $889 billion over 10 years on the military's open-ended approach.

In the end, Obama essentially designed his own strategy for the 30,000 troops, which some aides considered a compromise between the military command's request for 40,000 and Biden's relentless efforts to limit the escalation to 20,000 as part of a "hybrid option" that he had developed with Gen. James E. Cartwright, the vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

In a dramatic scene at the White House on Sunday, Nov. 29, 2009, Obama summoned the national security team to outline his decision and distribute his six-page terms sheet. He went around the room, one by one, asking each participant whether he or she had any objections - to "say so now," Woodward reports.

The document - a copy of which is reprinted in the book - took the unusual step of stating, along with the strategy's objectives, what the military was not supposed to do. The president went into detail, according to Woodward, to make sure that the military wouldn't attempt to expand the mission.

After Obama informed the military of his decision, Woodward writes, the Pentagon kept trying to reopen the decision, peppering the White House with new questions. Obama, in exasperation, reacted by asking, "Why do we keep having these meetings?"

Along with Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, the top U.S. commander in Afghanistan at the time, they kept pushing for their 40,000-troop option as part of a broad counterinsurgency plan along the lines of what Petraeus had developed for Iraq.

The president is quoted as telling Mullen, Petraeus and Gates: "In 2010, we will not be having a conversation about how to do more. I will not want to hear, 'We're doing fine, Mr. President, but we'd be better if we just do more.' We're not going to be having a conversation about how to change [the mission] . . . unless we're talking about how to draw down faster than anticipated in 2011."

Petraeus took Obama's decision as a personal repudiation, Woodward writes. Petraeus continued to believe that a "protect-the-Afghan-people" counterinsurgency was the best plan. When the president tapped Petraeus this year to replace McChrystal as the head of U.S. and NATO forces in Afghanistan, Petraeus found himself in charge of making Obama's more limited strategy a success.

Woodward quotes Petraeus as saying, "You have to recognize also that I don't think you win this war. I think you keep fighting. It's a little bit like Iraq, actually. . . . Yes, there has been enormous progress in Iraq. But there are still horrific attacks in Iraq, and you have to stay vigilant. You have to stay after it. This is the kind of fight we're in for the rest of our lives and probably our kids' lives."





 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
obama

Obama: Speak and Mean Nothing

OBAMA:  We have met our responsibility. 


OBAMA:  The surge will fail, it will make everything worse.


OBAMA:  The surge is NOT working.   2008


OBAMA:  The surge will fail, we will fail.  2007 / 2008




Now, some of the Obamessiah supporters will say, he didn't know X and Y back then, and it was only because he was elected that the world became less dangerous (just the opposite actually).

The issue is - if you are running for the highest office in our country, DON'T SPOUT OFF on crap you know nothing about.  It shows how reckless and irresponsible you really are.  Further, it shows off all the stupid fools who cheer you on when you do spout off - how how utterly naive and foolish they are.

When you run, don't talk, and you won't be charged with being a fool.


















obama

When Are No Combat Forces in Iraq the Same as Combat Forces in Iraq?

Combat brigades in Iraq under different name







 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
Obama

Don't Leave Iraq to the Wolves Obama

From the mouth of a former leader of Iraq, friend of Saddam, and the face the world saw of Iraq - Tariq Aziz:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/aug/05/iraq-us-tariq-aziz-iran


Aziz is full of praise for his jailers, in particular a young warden who lights his cigarettes for him, places his medicine on a table and allows him a weekly phone call to his family in Jordan.


"The conditions here are excellent," he says in an air conditioned office adjacent to his cell in a north Baghdad suburb. "The treatment from these guys has been excellent and I'm not just saying that. It is clean, the food is good and there is a small garden nearby where we can exercise."

Pressed by one of his jailers on how his conditions compared with the conditions that prisoners during Saddam's regime faced, Aziz would only say: "Yes, there were some mistakes made."

Aziz has a perhaps surprising request of the US commander-in-chief, whom he initially welcomed as a clean break from George W Bush. Aziz now wants the occupation to continue.

"He cannot leave us like this. He is leaving Iraq to the wolves," he said. "When you make a mistake you need to correct a mistake, not leave Iraq to its death."













Iraq

The Reason the English Lost their Empire

The English.  One must wonder how they ever managed to nearly conquer the world with feckless wonders like those mentioned in the stories below.  Amazing.

I cannot find every story, and this one was sent, like several others, by a friend - who is just as confused as I am.




SAS defied MoD to rescue two of its men held hostage in Iraq as top commanders 'prepared to quit' over ban on mission


By Tim Shipman
Daily Mail
12:23 PM on 6th May 2010



The SAS launched a daring mission to rescue two of its own men held hostage in Iraq against the orders of the Ministry of Defence, the Daily Mail can reveal.

The elite unit was pushed to the brink of mutiny after it was banned from saving the SAS soldiers captured by militants because to do so would embarrass the Government.

The astonishing edict drove SAS officers close to mass resignation, according to a hardhitting report by the Tory MP Adam Holloway, a former Guards officer.

The SAS Lieutenant-Colonel on the ground, believing that ‘politically motivated’ commanders in the UK were ‘unable to make rational and effective decisions’, sent in a rescue team anyway – fearful that within hours the captured men could have been spirited away or executed.

The rescuers blasted their way into the police station in Basra where the two soldiers were being held and saved them.

Details of the incident in 2005 expose the shameful way the Armed Forces have become politicised under Labour – with political spin put before soldiers’ lives.

Mr Holloway’s explosive account is supported by General Sir Mike Jackson, who was head of the Army at the time but only learned of the scandal later.

General Jackson last night made clear his disgust at the way soldiers were asked to sacrifice their men for political reasons, shattering the sacred military covenant that no man is left behind on the battlefield.

He told the Mail: ‘The story as you relate it chimes with my memory of the events. It was not only a brave but a very necessary operation to release those two captured soldiers. The British Army looks after its own. Underline that three times.’

The two troopers were seized by militant Islamic militiamen who had infiltrated the Iraqi police.

But a ‘very senior general’ at Permanent Joint Headquarters in Northwood, to the west of London, refused to approve the rescue mission.

Ministry of Defence officials were concerned that attacking an Iraqi police station would undermine the Government’s claims that Britain was successfully handing power to the local security services.

In a report on the Failure of British Military and Political Leadership in Basra, published by the First Defence think tank, Mr Holloway says: ‘The senior operational commanders in the MoD – a continent away from the frontline – repeated very clearly, and a number of times, that there were “more important things at stake than the lives of the soldiers”.’

Explaining the reasons for the decision, Mr Holloway quotes a senior British civilian official in Iraq at the time: ‘The need to rescue the soldiers from an insurgent group embedded within the police force proved that our training and mentoring operation was dangerously ineffective, and in complete contradiction to the universally positive picture presented to Whitehall by the Government and MoD at the time.’

That explanation was met with incredulity in the special forces. The report says SAS commanders regarded the orders as ‘politically-motivated deliberations’ that would only succeed in giving the insurgents time to ‘remove their captives beyond the reach of any rescue operation’.

The SAS Lt-Col ‘told his forward based troops to mount the operation with or without approval. In the event, approval did come through – but the operation was already being mounted by the time that it did’.

In a damning conclusion, Mr Holloway reveals: ‘The next day General Mike Jackson was told what had happened and was, reportedly, appalled. He also learned that had the authority not eventually come through the commanding officer and many of his officers and senior ranks would have resigned.’

Mr Holloway’s account makes no reference to the SAS but it was widely reported at the time that the two soldiers seized were part of the special forces regiment based in Hereford.

He reveals that the SAS Lt-Col later left the Army, ‘disillusioned at the degeneration of the moral backbone of British military generalship in the heart of Whitehall’. The MoD said it did not comment on special forces matters.


'There are more important things than the lives of soldiers' said the voice in London

By Tim Shipman

The SAS commander in Basra was planning one of the most risky and high-profile operations in the regiment’s recent history when he discovered that the enemy was not his biggest problem.

Hunkered in the nondescript HQ in Iraq’s second city, the Lieutenant-Colonel watched for the umpteenth time as footage of two of his men – held captive, beaten and bloodied – flashed on the TV screen in his office.

It was September 19, 2005, and in a jail in the centre of town two SAS men accused of killing an Iraqi policeman were held hostage by militants who had infiltrated the Iraqi police.

Three hundred miles north, on an airfield just outside Baghdad, a C-130 Hercules special forces transport plane sat on the runway, wind whipping the sand into a yellow mist.

In the back, a squadron of SAS troops sat patiently looking at the crate of kit strapped to the floor of the fuselage, pulses quickening as they checked their Heckler & Koch submachine guns and C8 carbine rifles.

A second SAS squadron in Basra prepared for the arrival of the reinforcements. Like any mission they had made speedy plans and moved into action with calm professionalism.

But this time it was personal. The targets were two of their own. That was when the call came – on a secure line from a military bunker just outside London. The Lt-Col could not believe what he was hearing. ‘Permission not granted. There are more important things than the lives of the soldiers.’

The voice was that of a senior general at Permanent Joint Headquarters at Northwood, the UK nerve centre of the war.

That was when the Lt-Col realised that his biggest challenge would be the top brass at home. The men waiting on the runway were flabbergasted when they heard. ‘People were pretty fired up,’ one source close to the regiment said. ‘And then there was the let down. The CO was furious.’

It was then the commanding officer made the decision that could have seen him and his brother officers hauled over the coals. The alternative, they agreed, was to resign en masse in disgust.

He picked up the phone and made the fateful call. ‘We’re doing it anyway,’ he said. Minutes later the C-130 took off. There was no going back. BASRA was originally proclaimed a beacon for post-war Iraq, a model of how to hand over control to the local population.

But now it was a hotbed of militia extremism. For weeks the SAS had been monitoring and infiltrating the Iraqi insurgent groups who were quietly gaining a stranglehold on the very police force that British soldiers were supposed to be working with to restore order.

The operation had gathered intensity after six British soldiers were killed in attacks by militants. The crisis began when a group of special forces soldiers, clad in Arab garb and driving a battered civilian car, got into a shootout with Iraqi policemen at a roadblock in the city.

One Iraqi was killed and three injured in the gun battle. The SAS men were seized and beaten by their Iraqi captors. They were handed to a militant militia group. Then there was the public humiliation of the TV cameras.

The insurgents could not have chosen a better time to strike. The senior officer in Iraq was on leave, his deputy a staff officer without the clout to make the big calls. Brigade commander Brigadier John Lorimer – a soldier universally admired as an effective commander – had his hands tied by demands that he refer major command decisions to London.

In the drab corridors of the Ministry of Defence main building, there was panic, but not just about the lives of the men held hostage. Operational command rested with an RAF officer who was allegedly playing golf. His highly-regarded deputy, Major General Peter Wall, was out of the office.

The SAS commander’s request to launch a rescue mission was passed to Northwood. The judgment was that a raid would be both a diplomatic disaster in terms of relations with the Iraqis – but more seriously that launching the raid against Iraqi police who were supposed to be allies would be an admission that the British had lost control of Basra.

As Andy McNab, the SAS hero of the first Gulf War who is now a bestselling author, puts it: ‘There is a very strong feeling from the guys on the ground in Iraq and now in Afghanistan that we have made a mistake by running our wars from 3,000 miles away.’

In Basra, a delegation of officials and diplomats was dispatched to the police station where the men were being held, backed up by troops. They were quickly ambushed by a mob assembled by the militants who armed the crowd with petrol bombs. The scene descended into chaos.

Two Warrior fighting vehicles were swiftly engulfed in flames. One soldier, his uniform ablaze, was forced to throw himself from the hatch of his armoured car and roll on the ground to put out the flames. It became one of the defining images of the Iraq occupation. He was rescued by colleagues and there was a tactical retreat.

Then came rumours that the two hostages were going to be moved. SAS commanders feared their men would disappear and perhaps be executed. As darkness fell, ten armoured vehicles, packed with SAS colleagues, returned. They bulldozed through a 6ft wall to the compound.

The special forces troops fanned out, firing stun grenades while helicopters hovered overhead. They found the men and got them out. No British serviceman was seriously hurt. At some point after the SAS commander gave the green light for the raid, retrospective permission was granted by top brass back home.

But those who were there insist it was well under way before the agreement was given. One SAS source said: ‘The OK was given retrospectively because the operation was a success. But if it had gone wrong they would all have been completely shafted.’

There was a price. In the chaos 100 prisoners escaped and furious Iraqis quickly demanded compensation for the damage caused.

But insiders say the price of inaction for the reputation of the Army would have been higher. Just how serious became clear a day later when the head of the army, General Mike Jackson was told that the senior ranks of the SAS would have resigned if permission had not been granted.
















feckless fools

Sometimes Life is Good, and We get to See the Evil Punished.

Sometimes good things happen and bad people are sent to hell to become the play thing of Satan for all eternity.  Sometimes life is good and we can smile knowing that two creatures have been sent home.




Al-Qaida in Iraq confirms deaths of top 2 figures



Sinan Salaheddin, Associated Press Writer
April 25, 2010



.BAGHDAD – An al-Qaida front group in Iraq on Sunday confirmed the killing of its two top leaders but vowed to keep up the fight despite claims by U.S. and Iraqi officials that the deaths could be a devastating blow to the terror network.

The defiance came in a statement released a week after the group's leaders — Abu Omar al-Baghdadi and Abu Ayyub al-Masri — were killed in a raid by Iraqi and U.S. security forces on their safe house near Tikrit, north of Baghdad.

"After a long journey filled with sacrifices and fighting falsehood and its representatives, two knights have dismounted to join the group of martyrs," the statement said. "We announce that the Muslim nation has lost two of the leaders of jihad, and two of its men, who are only known as heroes on the path of jihad."

The four-page statement by the Islamic State of Iraq was posted on a militant website early Sunday.

It concluded: "The war is still ongoing, and the favorable outcome will be for the pious."

The Islamic State of Iraq is an offshoot of al-Qaida in Iraq. Al-Baghdadi was its self-described leader and was so elusive that at times U.S. officials questioned whether he was a real person or merely a composite of a terrorist to give an Iraqi face to an organization led primarily by foreigners.

Al-Masri, a weapons expert who was trained in al-Qaida camps in Afghanistan in the late 1990s, was the shadowy national leader of al-Qaida in Iraq.

Their deaths were triumphantly announced last Monday by Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki. U.S. Vice President Joe Biden called the killings a "potentially devastating blow" to al-Qaida in Iraq.

But four days later, officials believe al-Qaida struck back, bombing mosques, shops and the office of an influential Shiite cleric, killing 72 people in Iraq's bloodiest day of the year so far. Homes of police also were bombed. Al-Maliki said the insurgents were fighting back after the deaths of their two leaders.

The new statement did not mention Friday's bombings, and no group has claimed responsibility for them yet. But the statement signals that al-Qaida will remain a threat to Iraq even without its top two leaders, and urges its members and supporters to stay the course.

"Commit to what those two leaders stood for," the statement says. "Transform the blood of those two leaders into light and fire — a light which will illuminate the path before you and facilitate your ability of speech, and a fire against the enemies of the creed and the religion."

Al-Qaida in Iraq has proven resilient in the past, showing a remarkable ability to change tactics and adapt — most notably after its brutal founder, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, was killed nearly four years ago in a U.S. airstrike. Still, it is widely believed the group was far stronger then and would likely have a harder time now replenishing its leadership and sticking to a timetable of attacks.

Al-Maliki has seized on the militants' killings to show he can restore stability to Iraq after years of bloodshed. Following his political coalition's second-place finish in the March 7 parliamentary elections, al-Maliki is locked in a tight contest with secular challenger Ayad Allawi to see who will form the next government.

Al-Maliki's coalition trails Allawi's bloc by two seats in the 325-seat parliament, and neither has yet been able to secure enough support from other parties to muster a majority.

Meanwhile, the police chief in Hawija, 150 miles (240 kilometers) north of Baghdad, said troops raided the nearby town of al-Safra and arrested Burhan Mahmoud Mohammed, a local leader of the Islamic State of Iraq.

Col. Fatah al-Khafaji told The Associated Press that troops acted on intelligence but did not indicate exactly where the information came from. Iraqi officials have said the investigation into al-Baghdadi and al-Masri, especially the arrest in March of a senior al-Qaida official, has also led them to a number of other leaders associated with the insurgency.

In Baghdad, a so-called sticky bomb attached to the underside of a civilian's car exploded, killing the driver and wounding six passers-by, according to a police officer and a medic at the nearby al-Yarmouk hospital, where the victims were taken. Both officials spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to talk to the media.

Also Sunday, an explosion at an iron factory in the northern city of Irbil killed five workers, including two Indians, two Arabs, a Kurd, and wounded 15. Workers from India, Bangladesh, Pakistan and other Asian nations have flocked to the Kurdish region in recent years as the economy there has grown.

Police Chief Abdul-Khaliq Talaat said the cause of the explosion was not immediately known.

Irbil is located in Iraq's Kurdish-controlled north about 217 miles (350 kilometers) north of Baghdad.

An Irbil hospital worker confirmed the deaths.

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
al qaida

Hollywood and the Unbelieveable Gymnastics Required

Idiots on Parade.  I am amazed.  Yes, Steven, it failed because the American people do not appreciate being lectured on Iraq.  Hurt Locker is not proof this is not the case.  Hurt Locker is not a run away money maker.  Few people went to see it, and quite likely, the same ones who saw it will buy it on DVD, which means still no one saw it.  The fact it won anything has nothing to do with the American people, and their interest or desire to see make believe reality, it has more to do with Hollywood make-believing anyone cares.





Why 'Green Zone' failed



March 15, 2010
Steven Zeitchik
LA Times Blogs
 

It's dispiriting to sit back today and soak in just how poorly "Green Zone" performed over the weekend, earning a meager $14.3 million. Depression sets in because the Paul Greengrass movie is legitimately great, a potent thriller and action picture that entertains no matter your politics (we're not the only ones who feel this way -- the movie is the second best-reviewed wide release of the year according to meta-review site Movie Review Intelligence).

But what's even more discouraging about the results is that they offer definitive proof that even the highest-quality filmmaking and the most palatable marketing hook can't save a movie set in a tumultuous Middle East. This was a movie retailed as a Jason Bourne-like thriller made by the director and the star of same, with all the double-crosses, chases and explosions one would want from such a union. And yet no matter how deftly it was executed, audiences didn't see past the topicality. The simple presence of Iraq kept people home, as it has before for films of so many different stripes, tones and budgets.

What's less clear -- and, indeed, what gets under our skin -- is the debate over how specific politics are responsible for the film's failure. "Did politics sink Matt Damon's 'The Green Zone'?" an Atlantic blog asks. Andrew Breitbart's Big Hollywood compares the opening of "Green Zone," unfavorably, to the Damon-Greengrass collaborations "The Bourne Supremacy" and "The Bourne Ultimatum" and implies that politics did this one in. "Gee, I wonder what the difference was [compared to those films]?" the piece asks sarcastically. (Never mind that those two movies were sequels based on a huge Robert Ludlum franchise.)

And in a New York Times op-ed column today, Ross Douthat faults "Green Zone" for "refus[ing] to stare real tragedy in the face, preferring the comforts of a 'Bush lied, people died' reductionism." (Incidentally that's not true -- sure, there's a one-note Paul Bremer-Douglas Feith character played by Greg Kinnear. But the movie is rolling in nuance and is particularly adept at showing internecine Iraqi tribal politics, something no scripted feature has previously done well.)

But even accepting Douthat's one-dimensionality argument, it's hard to see how that played a role in the picture's dismal box office. Douthat draws a contrast to a little Iraq movie that just swept the Oscars. " 'The Hurt Locker,' of course, was largely apolitical," he writes. "Throw politics into the mix, and there seems to be no escaping the clichés and simplifications that mar Greengrass’s movie."

But "Hurt Locker," for all of its character study of one outlaw type, was hardly apolitical -- it just showed the effects of politics (a battle whose enemy we don't understand and can't fight) instead of the causes. Yes, Damon speechifies in "Green Zone." But there's an argument to be made that by showing the toll politics has taken, "Hurt Locker" is far more ideological. Besides, it's not like "Hurt Locker" lighted up the box office either, just as Iraq-set movies that are decidedly less political, like "Body of Lies" or "Brothers," underwhelmed too.

"Green Zone" does plenty of things that are policy-neutral. The film traffics in the slipperiness of intelligence-gathering and the shadowy nature of foreign enemies -- a staple of thrillers long before the current Middle East conflict. Even the film's main message -- that the U.S. government bungled the immediate post-war operation -- is a fact that can be tossed off by pretty much any high schooler. Sure, there's a cardboard character and some wooden moments. But the film is not, by most measures, an ideological provocation.

What the film does achieve lies with its formal rigor. Greengrass' masterful editing and neo-verite camera work make us feels like we're in Iraq, for perhaps the first time in a studio feature. And that may be the true problem: It wasn't the ideology that was the issue for filmgoers, it was that it all just felt so real. And American moviegoers -- as one look at the receipts for "Avatar" and "Alice in Wonderland" show -- aren't much in the mood for real these days.

It can take months or even years for a movie with difficult subject matter to catch on with the public. This seems like a syndrome that particularly afflicts Greengrass, who's been the victim of his own success before. The director's "United 93" was condemned by many for some of the same reasons as "Green Zone." "I don't want to feel like I'm on that plane," people said. "Why would I pay money to see that?"

Of course putting us on the plane, just as he puts us in Iraq, is exactly what makes Greengrass so skilled and his movies so great. "United 93" went on to land two major Oscar nominations and do nicely on DVD. Here's hoping "Green Zone's" battle is also far from over.












Iraq and Hollywood