Today in Iraq

DAILY WAR NEWS FOR TUESDAY, June 20, 2006 Photo: Villagers gather at the scene, after U.S.-led forces killed 15 terror suspects and detained three others after a fierce gunfight broke out during simultaneous raids targeting a senior al-Qaida member, according to the U.S. military, in the village of Bushahin north of Baqouba in Iraq Tuesday, June 20, 2006. Angry villagers denied those killed were involved in terrorist activities and a local security official said a 12-year old boy was among 13 civilians killed. (AP Photo/Adam Hadi) (See below) Thirteen Iraqis, including a child, have been killed in an alleged US air strike on a village north-east of Baquba. Four others who were injured in the strike on two farm houses in the Shaikh Qaddur al-Shahin village early on Tuesday were detained by US forces, Haidar al-Tamimi, an Iraqi journalist, told Aljazeera. Al-Tamimi said US troops were dropped to the ground, after the strike. The troops then opened fire at the targeted houses, he added. Residents also say the injured were arrested. They added that the casualties of the strike were poultry farm workers.

U.S. forces hunting insurgents linked to al Qaeda in Iraq killed 15 gunmen in simultaneous raids north of Baghdad on Tuesday, the U.S. military said in a statement. "The raids were targeting individuals associated with a suspected senior al Qaeda in Iraq network member targeted in previous Coalition operations," the statement said of the operation, which took place near the insurgent stronghold of Baquba.

An aircraft supporting the troops on the ground hit power lines and had to make a controlled landing. None of the crew were injured, the U.S. military said.

U.S. forces recovered the bodies of two American soldiers reported captured by insurgents last week. An Iraqi defense ministry official said the men were tortured and "killed in a barbaric way." Al-Qaida in Iraq claimed responsibility for killing the soldiers, and said the successor to terror leader Abu Musab al-Zarqawi had "slaughtered" them: The claim was made in a Web statement that could not be authenticated. The language in the statement suggested the men were beheaded. U.S. Maj. Gen. William Caldwell said the remains were believed to be those of Pfc. Kristian Menchaca, 23, of Houston, and Pfc. Thomas L. Tucker, 25, of Madras, Ore. He said U.S. troops - part of a search involving some 8,000 American and Iraqi forces - found the bodies late Monday near Youssifiyah, where they disappeared Friday. Troops did not recover the bodies until Tuesday because they had to wait until daylight to cordon off the area for an ordnance team for fear it was booby-trapped, Caldwell said. OTHER SECURITY INCIDENTS Baghdad: A Swedish national employed by the British security company Genric in Iraq was killed in a bomb attack over the weekend in the Iraqi capital, the foreign ministry in Stockholm said today. A car bomb exploded in a crowded Baghdad market on Tuesday, killing seven people and wounding 18. The bomb exploded among morning shoppers in the market in the eastern district of Jamila, a police source told Reuters. In the eastern Baghdad district Sadr City, the death toll in a car bomb at the Jamila marketplace rose to three, from the previous one person reported killed, while the number of wounded camed to 81, security sources told Deutsche Presse-Agentur dpa. A car bomb parked in a street in Saidiya district in southern Baghdad exploded wounding five civilians. Police Captain Amir Kamil, who provided security for the Yarmouk hospital, was shot to death on Tuesday at a bus station. A bomb struck a square in central Baghdad, killing two people and wounding 18. A bomb in the busy Haraj market in central Baghdad killed four persons and wounded 18 others. The same market was the scene of a bomb last week which killed and wounded dozens. Eleven bodies were found scattered in a number of Baghdad districts. All 11 eleven corpses were found 'blindfolded, with their hands bound, and bore evidence of torture,' a security source in the city said. A car bomb exploded in central Baghdad killing at least five people and wounding 11. The blast occured in the Hurriya district of the capital. Al Amara: Gunmen riding motorcycles killed a traffic officer near his house in al-Amara, 290km southeast of Baghdad. The slain policeman was a former member of Saddam Hussein's Fedayin militia. Baqubah: One man was killed by gunmen and another man was wounded when an explosive device went off near his house west of Baquba. Bahraz: Gunmen killed a man and his wife and wounded his two daughters in Bahraz, south of Baquba. Iskandariya: Police found two dead bodies in the town of Iskandariya south of Baghdad. The bodies were blindfolded and the hands tied, police sources said. Suwara: Iraqi police retrieved the bodies of seven people from the Tigris river in Suwayra, 40 km (25 miles) south of Baghdad, police said. The bodies were handcuffed, blindfolded and bearing signs of torture. In the city of al-Soweira, 45 kilometres south of Baghdad, police on Tuesday discovered the headless corpses of five Iraqi soldiers. Sources told dpa that police patrols found the bodies of five unidentified soldiers by the side of the road leading to the al- Soweira airbase. The sources added that the five soldiers, wearing Iraqi army uniforms, had their heads cut off, and their bodies bore evidence of torture. Basra: A suicide bomber killed a woman and wounded five people when he attacked a crowd of elderly and disabled senior citizens in Basra. The crowd were gathering to receive their monthly pension. Ak-Kifl: A roadside bomb directed at a US military patrol killed one civilian and wounded four in al-Kifl, south of the capital. There was no immediate comment from the US military on the incident. Fallujah: Gunmen in speeding cars killed Brigadier Hudairi al-Janabi, the chief of police in Falluja. Ramadi: A US military spokesman in Iraq has confirmed that US forces have carried out wide military operations, against fighters in al-Ramadi. US forces have set up new checkpoints at all entrances and exits of the city to restrict fighters' movements and cut off their supplies. Hawija: Gunmen opened fire on a car near Hawija, 70 km (43 miles) southwest of Kirkuk, killing three members of the same family. >> COMMENTARY AND ANALYSIS DAHR JAMAIL: "OPERATION FORWARD TOGETHER", DEEPER INTO THE QUAGMIRE On Tuesday, June 13th, while Mr. Bush spent a brave five hours in the "green zone" of Baghdad with puppet Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki, at least 36 people were killed across Iraq amidst a wave of bombings. 18 of those died in a spasm of bombings in the oil city of Kirkuk in the Kurdish north. The minute word hit the streets in Baghdad of Bush's visit, over 2,000 supporters of Shia cleric Muqtada al-Sadr took to the streets in protest. The protestors chanted "Iraq is for the Iraqis," and Sadr aide Hazem al-Araji publicly condemned the peek-a-boo visit of who he referred to as "the leader of the occupation." Day One The very next day, not coincidentally, Maliki instituted the biggest security crackdown in the capital city since the US invaded Iraq, dubbed "Operation Forward Together." (...) back in liberated Baghdad, also on that same day [when the Pentagon announced the death of the 2,500th US soldier in Iraq], I received an email from a very close friend of mine. It is a sobering glimpse into "Operation Forward Together" and what Bush alluded to when he said, "I sense something different happening in Iraq."

Habibi, we are divided in three houses today. I am at our home in Adhamiya. My wife and two youngest boys are at her sister's house in Bab Al-Moudam because it's safer for them. It's a mixed Sunni and Shia area, so there are no detentions. Our daughter is with her husband in their home, and my oldest son is at his house with his wife and baby, although he is not in a safe area. There is often fighting there, but not too many detentions. Today Adhamiya is totally under occupation since early morning. None of the shops are open, the soldiers are holding up all cars and searching them, and home raids are happening. The city is a city of ghosts. This situation is the same in all the Sunni areas. Checkpoints are all over Baghdad, the highways between Baghdad and the other cities are all closed and nobody can go on them. The airports are closed, and no flights are coming in or out of Baghdad. We cannot leave the country until the beginning of next month. By the way, three of my son's friends were killed by explosions two days ago while they were having fruits in the market. He came home crying because of that. The situation is very bad. The son of Abdul Sattar Al Kubaisy, who is in the Ministry of Interior, has been kidnapped from inside the Ministry. He was found in one of the trash cans outside the Ministry of Interior building ... so even the offices of the government are no longer safe!!! God is with us insh'allah [God willing].

read in full... BRZEZINSKI POSES REALISTIC SOLUTIONS In an interview last week on the Jim Lehrer News Hour Brzezinski said that the invasion "was not worth it" and that it was a "major misadventure". "This is worse than the bad days of Vietnam... We do not have a free and democratic government that is functioning... The authority we have installed is besieged and relatively helpless, and a civil war is beginning to mushroom, under the occupation which is unable to crush the insurgency, because it is a foreign occupation....We no longer live in an age of colonialism. We no longer have to assume the 'white man's burden' in order to 'civilize' others." Brzezinski finished the interview by offering a 4-step strategy for withdrawing from Iraq; something that the Democratic leadership should consider immediately. 1. Talk to the leadership about when to leave. 2. Set a date for withdrawal. 3. Let the government convene a conference of all Iraq's Muslim neighbors about stabilizing Iraq and helping it to stabilize. 4 "Convene a donor's conference of interested countries in Europe and the Far East who benefit from Iraqi oil on helping to rehabilitate Iraq. This would allow us to leave and still say that we basically achieved what we wanted-the removal of Saddam-though not providing a secular, stable, united Iraq under a perfect democracy." Brzezinski poses realistic solutions for a situation that will progressively deteriorate into anarchy. His analysis cannot be easily dismissed. He is respected among his peers as a hard-edged Machiavellian strategist who is not given to flights of fancy. If he says the war is over, it is not because of some heartfelt connection with the Iraqi people, but because it is "unwinnable" and damaging to America's long-term interests. read in full... FAILING TO LEARN THE LESSONS OF ALGERIA AND VIETNAM Bush may imagine a scene in which the insurgency is conclusively defeated, perhaps even a signing ceremony, as on the USS Missouri, or at least an acknowledgment, a scrap of paper, or perhaps the silence of the dead, all of them. But his infatuation with a purely military solution blinds him to how he thwarts his own intentions. Jeffrey Record, a prominent strategist at a U.S. military war college, told me: "Perhaps worse still, conventional wisdom is dangerously narcissistic. It completely ignores the enemy, assuming that what we do determines success or failure. It assumes that only the United States can defeat the United States, an outlook that set the United States up for failure in Vietnam and for surprise in Iraq." Haditha is a symptom of the fallacy of Bush's military solution. The alleged massacre occurred after the administration's dismissal of repeated warnings about the awful pressures on an army of occupation against an insurgency. Conflating a population that broadly supports an insurgency with a terrorist enemy and indoctrinating the troops with a sense of revenge for Sept. 11 easily leads to an erasure of the distinction between military and civilian targets. Once again, a commander in chief has failed to learn the lessons of Algeria and Vietnam. read in full... DEALING WITH REALITIES IN IRAQ AND WASHINGTON I no longer am convinced that the U.S. adventure in Iraq is lost. There is no guarantee that the Bush administration cannot succeed in its goals there. The only certain thing is that success -- what the president calls "victory in Iraq" -- will come at the expense of thousands more American deaths, tens of thousands more Iraqi deaths, and hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars. Indeed, this war would have to be sustained not only by this administration, but by the next one and probably the one after that as well. For over three years, the United States has supported a massive military presence on the ground in Iraq, while taking steady casualties. It may be no less capable of doing so for the next two-and-a-half years, until the end of Bush's second term -- and during the next administration's reign, too, whether the president is named John McCain or Hillary Clinton. At least theoretically, a force of more than 100,000 U.S. soldiers could wage a brutal war of attrition against the resistance in Iraq for years to come. (...) Just as the antiwar movement in the United States can strengthen the resistance in Iraq, the Iraqi resistance can aid the antiwar movement. The cold reality of the war in Iraq is that, had it not been for the Iraqi resistance, there would be no U.S. antiwar movement. Had Iraq's Sunnis collapsed in disarray and meekly ceded power to the Shiite-Kurdish coalition empowered by the U.S. invasion, President Bush's illegal war in Iraq might have succeeded far more effortlessly. read in full... GOOGLE KNOWS BETTER THAN TALIBANI, MALIKI AND BUSH Using Google's translation tool: For the Arabic phrase ' a people being exterminated ', the English translation is ' Iraqi People '. posted by Imad Khadduri # google.com WHY? Go to: "http://www.google.com/translate_t; it is the free google translation service.. Go o: translating from Arabic and English and write ((___ ____ which means (people annihilated or genocided) yet google translates it into (Iraqi people)!you can try any other phrase to be translated and you will get the correct translation only with this phrase regarding killing and genociding people, the translation will be IRAQI PEOPLE.. Any body could explain? I have mine: it is coming very clear day after another that Iraqis are not allowed more to remain a nation.. They should be eliminated.. WHY? Bush knows the answer because he is leading the campaign! Do not forget the American massacre against Iraqi civilians all over Iraq.. posted by the woman i was link KILLING IRAQI CHILDREN In a short editorial, the Detroit News asked an interesting question:

"Some war critics are suggesting Iraq terrorist Abu Musab al-Zarqawi should have been arrested and prosecuted rather than bombed into oblivion. Why expose American troops to the danger of an arrest, when bombs work so well?"

Here's one possible answer: In order not to send a five-year-old Iraqi girl into oblivion with the same 500-pound bombs that sent al-Zarqawi into oblivion. (...) Some would argue that such "collateral damage" is just an unfortunate byproduct of war. War is brutal. People get killed in war. Compared with the two world wars, not that many people have been killed in Iraq, proponents of the Iraq war and occupation would claim. Such claims, however, miss an important point: U.S. military forces have no right, legal or moral, even to be in Iraq killing anyone. Why? Because neither the Iraqi people nor their government ever attacked the United States. The Iraqi people had nothing to do with the 9/11 attacks in New York and Washington. Thus, this was an optional war against Iraq, one that President Bush and his military forces did not have to wage. The attack on Iraq was akin to, say, attacking Bolivia or Uruguay or Mongolia, after 9/11. Those countries also had nothing to do with the 9/11 attacks and so it would have been illegal and immoral for President Bush to have ordered an invasion and occupation of those countries as well. To belabor the obvious, the fact that some people attacked the United States on 9/11 didn't give the United States the right to attack countries that didn't have anything to do with the 9/11 attacks. That made the United States the aggressor nation and Iraq the defending nation in this conflict. That incontrovertible fact holds deep moral implications, as well as legal ones, for U.S. soldiers who kill people in Iraq, including people who are simply trying to oust the occupiers from Iraq. Don't forget that aggressive war was punished as a war crime at Nuremberg. read in full... EVEN A FICTIONAL CHARACTER HAS TO DIE SOME TIME "What one man can invent, another can discover." (Sherlock Holmes) When "Zarqawi" was killed off the evening of Wednesday June 7, 2006, at a house on the outskirts of the village of Hibhib, outside Baquba, I wasn't at all surprised. Even a fictional character has to die some time. This one had lost all credibility. The plot had become unbelievable. So I argued a little over month ago, following release of the embarrassing Zarqawi promotional video and the fortuitous find by the Americans of some "out-takes", showing him decked-out in American gear and fumbling his M-249. See Deceived "R" US: The al-Zarqawi story (Friday, May 12, 2006) It was then I knew for sure that this "Zarqawi" was an impostor and his entire "narrative" a work of military deception. There is an instinctive truth known to every animal: the ways in which individuals hold themselves, move, and talk tells us how they feel and who they are. The body language, movement and voice of this "Zarqawi" scream "phony!" That Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, a Bedouin from the Bani Hassan tribe, who fought and distinguished himself in Afghanistan-this we know with some certainty-could not operate an automatic weapon is simply unbelievable. The intent of these out-takes, supposedly chanced upon by the Americans in a raid on yet another "safe" house, was to ridicule Zarqawi. And this they did, but at the expense of destroying the credibility of the character itself. There was much puzzlement when the video was released as to why the most wanted man in Iraq, known only by a dated photograph, would risk capture by revealing his much-changed face, not to mention his dramatically increased girth, in this way. A real guerrilla, of course, would not. But a simulated guerrilla, especially one scripted to die shortly, would. Now we know the purpose of that video: it was to familiarise us with al-Zarqawi's new appearance, so we could identify the body a month later. Sure enough, it was an image taken from that video that was placed alongside a photograph of a man, presumed to have been killed by two 500 lb bombs. Their silent juxtaposition suggesting that they are the same man and that he is Zarqawi. read in full... THIS IS WHAT THE OCCUPATION DID TO IRAQ A little while ago, I saw on one channel an interview with an American man in Washington, perhaps in the Congress, or something connected to the government and its address, saying: The Shia'ats were orderly at the beginning, but with time, and with the violence by the Sunnie militias against them, especially the Samara bombing, the Shia'at anger exploded, and the Shia'at militias moved out of control, even out of Al-Systani's control. So,... This is the viewpoint of the American sitting in Washington, in the government, this is how he sees things from there, and explains things as he likes. As for my viewpoint, as an Iraqi, I see the picture like this: Historically, there has never been any sectarian violence in Iraq, except on the times when some foreign fingers interfered; like the Turkish attacks on Iraq, at the times of the Ottoman Empire, and its conflict with the Safawi state in Iran; for both had their greed in Iraq, wanting to occupy it, and turn it into a subject, and they fought inside Iraq in a fashion that seemed sectarian, the victims of which were the innocent Iraqis. This was in the old, dark centuries... But since 1900 and till now, in the modern Iraqi state, Iraqi never witnessed any sectarian conflict. And under the British occupation, the Sunnies and the Shia'ats united in the National movement, and threw the occupier out of Iraq. So, the story of AL-Zarqawi was invented, and his extremist Sunnie address, malicious against the Shia'ats. Meaning, in truth; there isn't any Party or Sunnie Iraqi militia that ever declared it was against the Shia'ats or had a grudge against them. So, AL-Zarqawi, not an Iraqi person, was invented, and inserted into the equation to rip the unity of the Iraqis, and destroy the fabric of the one society. read in full... >> BEYOND IRAQ Afghanistan: Bring 'em on: An explosion tore apart a coalition tank in southern Afghanistan on Tuesday, killing one Romanian soldier and wounding four others, the military and a witness said. It said one vehicle drove over an explosive device, killing a 38-year-old corporal instantly and wounding three other soldiers, one seriously. A fourth soldier suffered leg wounds when he stepped on another explosive device after the remaining Romanian vehicles stopped to help the targeted vehicle, the statement said. The explosion was so powerful that it split a tank in two pieces and left its hull engulfed in flames, according to an Associated Press reporter at the scene. QUOTE OF THE DAY:"I will not do it even if they pay $1 million. They deserve all that they are facing... We are living a hard life because of them." -- a Youssifiyah resident, who said his house was searched by U.S. soldiers Sunday afternoon, also said the Americans used translators to offer $100,000 for information leading to those who took the soldiers.