Some Sunnis Targeting al-Qaida in Iraq

[reader (the Second)]

Some Sunnis Targeting al-Qaida in Iraq

By BASSEM MROUE, Associated Press Writer2 hours, 16 minutes ago

Residents reported curious declarations hanging from mosque walls and market stalls recently in Ramadi, the Sunni Muslim insurgent stronghold west of Baghdad. The fliers said Iraqi militants had turned on and were killing foreign al-Qaida fighters, their one-time allies.

A local tribal leader and Iraq's Defense Ministry have said followers of Jordanian militant Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, leader of al-Qaida in Iraq, have begun fleeing Anbar province and Ramadi, its capital, to cities and mountain ranges near the Iranian border.

"So far we have cleared 75 percent of the province and forced al-Qaida terrorists to flee to nearby areas," said Osama al-Jadaan, a leader of the Karabila tribe, which has thousands of members living along the border with Syria.

He claimed his people have captured hundreds of foreigner fighters and handed them to authorities. The drive, dubbed Operation Tribal Chivalry, is designed to secure the country's borders with Syria, Jordan and Saudi Arabia to prevent foreign fighters from crossing in.

After the U.S. invasion in March 2003, residents of the province — which also includes cities like Fallujah, Haditha and Qaim — became known for their violent anti-American sentiments. The province is still the most dangerous in Iraq for U.S. troops. In the past two days alone, two U.S. Marines were killed by hostile fire there.

Relations between residents and the foreign fighters started to sour, however, when the foreigners started killing Iraqis suspected of having links to the Americans or even for holding a government job.

The rift became an outright split four months ago, with a wave of assassinations and bombings that killed scores of Anbar residents. The attacks were blamed on al-Qaida.

"We were fed up with the situation," said one Ramadi resident, complaining about closed roads, unemployment and a lack of security. The resident spoke on condition of anonymity because he feared for his life.

In late November, tribal and religious leaders, former army officers and hundreds of ordinary Iraqis met in Ramadi with U.S. military commanders for a first-ever comprehensive dialogue on what could be done to speed a U.S. withdrawal.

Afterward, gunmen began killing some of those who had met with the Americans or who had urged Sunnis in the region to vote in the U.S.-backed parliamentary elections on Dec. 15. Several top clerics and a tribal leader were killed.

The deadliest attack — a suicide bombing Jan. 5 among a line of police recruits in Ramadi — killed at least 58, including U.S. troops.

Stunned city residents turned on al-Qaida, and al-Jadaan, of the Karabila tribe, announced an agreement with the U.S.-backed Iraqi government to help with security.

The moves by al-Jadaan's men and Iraqi army units against al-Qaida forced many of the foreign fighters to flee to central and eastern areas of Iraq — some to the mountains near Iran — that have large Sunni populations, al-Jadaan said.

That prompted tribes in the central city of Hawija, where some al-Qaida fighters sought refuge, to issue a statement earlier this week openly declaring war on foreign al-Qaida members.

The declaration was prompted by the killing a week ago of tribal leader Suhaib Abdullah al-Obeidi. Al-Qaida also killed three Shiites — a father and his two sons — and a Communist Party boss.

"We are against the killing of civilians for sectarian or ethnic reasons. That's why we are shedding the blood of Muslim extremists, especially al-Qaida," said Abul-Rahman Mansheed, a top Sunni politician in Hawija.

Army Maj. Gen. Anwar Mohammed Amin, in the nearby city of Kirkuk, said the military soon would launch a major attack, with help from the local tribesmen, to clear that region of al-Qaida as well.

Claims such as those issued by the tribesmen and local military officers are nearly impossible to confirm, but the considerable drop in suicide bombings throughout the country recently indicates operations by al-Qaida foreigners have been hampered.

Al-Jadaan, the Anbar tribal leader, looked confidently to the future and — if his prediction comes true — what likely will be a hero's role in the eyes of the U.S. military.

"Under my leadership and that of our brothers in other tribes, we are getting close to the shelter of this terrorist," al-Jadaan said of al-Zarqawi. "We will capture him soon."

[reader (the Second)]

Iraq: 13 Insurgents Hanged
BAGHDAD, March 9, 2006(CBS/AP) Iraq hanged 13 insurgents Thursday, marking the first time militants have been executed in the country since the U.S.-led invasion ousted Saddam Hussein nearly three years ago, the government said.

The Cabinet announcement listed the name of only one of those hanged, Shukair Farid, a former policeman in the northern city of Mosul, who allegedly confessed that he had worked with Syrian foreign fighters to enlist fellow Iraqis to carry out assassinations against police and civilians.

"The competent authorities have today carried out the death sentences of 13 terrorists," the Cabinet statement said.

It said Farid had "confessed that foreigners recruited him to spread the fear through killings and abductions."

In September, Iraq hanged three convicted murderers, the first executions since the 2003 ouster of Saddam. They were convicted of killing three police officers, kidnapping and rape.

Iraqi authorities reinstated the death penalty after the end of the U.S.-led occupation in June 2004 so they would have the option of executing Saddam if he is convicted of crimes committed by his regime.

In other recent developments:

# The American military said Thursday its new lockup near Baghdad airport to house security prisoners now held at the notorious Abu Ghraib prison should be ready within three months. Once the U.S. moves prisoners to the new prison at Camp Cropper, a process that will take months, Abu Ghraib will be returned to Iraqi prison authorities, said Lt. Col. Barry Johnson, a U.S. military spokesman in Baghdad.

# Also Thursday, a woman accountant was gunned down as she left her west Baghdad home for work, said police Lt. Mohammed Khayoun, who claimed she was attacked because she worked in the capital's American-controlled Green Zone said.

# Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice on Thursday urged quick passage of a $91 billion spending bill that includes money to continue the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Appearing with Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld before the Senate Approporiations Committee, Rice said most Iraqis are convinced that their aims will succeed despite the persistent insurgency.

# A day after Iraq's Shiite Vice President Adil Abdul-Mahdi co-signed a presidential decree to call parliament into session for the first time since the Dec. 15 elections, senior political leaders among the various parties and factions met for intense negotiations. Abdul-Mahdi's change of heart signaled a dangerous and growing internal dispute among the country's majority Shiite political factions over the nomination of al-Jaafari.

# Former President Jimmy Carter criticized the war in Iraq on Wednesday, urging a troop drawdown as the U.S. enters its fourth year of conflict in Iraq. "It was a completely unnecessary war. It was an unjust war," said Carter, the 2002 Nobel Peace Prize winner.

# The U.S. military reported the death of another Marine, killed Wednesday in insurgency-ridden Anbar province.

# A "climate of extreme violence" exists in Iraq, according to the U.S. State Department's annual report on human rights abuses. The report found an increase in killings by members of the American-backed government and security forces dominated by sectarian militias. The government's ability to control the situation "handicapped by insurgency and terrorism," the report said.

Death sentences must be approved by the three-member presidential council headed by President Jalal Talabani, who opposes capital punishment. In the September executions and again in the Thursday hangings, Talabani refused to sign the authorization himself but gave his two vice presidents the authority.

Meanwhile, at least 16 more people and wounded 19, all civilians, police said. One of the deadly blasts targeted an Iraqi army patrol in Amariyah, a mostly Sunni neighborhood in west Baghdad, killing nine civilians and wounding six.

At Yarmouk hospital in west Baghdad a car bomb was detonated killing at least two people and wounding 13 as they entered the clinic, according to police Lt. Thaer Mahmoud.

A car bomb exploded Thursday night near a Sunni mosque in east Baghdad, killing five civilians and wounding 12 others, police said. Capt. Mahir Hamad Mousa identified the target as the Al-Israa Walmiraj mosque in the New Baghdad region of the capital.

The U.S. military also confirmed that a mass abduction from a security firm was the work of kidnappers masquerading as Interior Ministry commandos. In the audacious attack Wednesday, gunmen dressed as Interior Ministry commandos stormed into the company's east Baghdad headquarters and took away 50 people, many of them ex-military personnel from the Saddam Hussein regime, CBS News correspondent Kimberly Dozier reports.

"We can confirm based on our investigation that individuals dressed like this, in chocolate-chip desert combat uniforms, riding in eight vehicles, drove up and kidnapped 50 local nationals," U.S. military spokesman Maj. Gen. Rick Lynch said Thursday, referring to his combat fatigues. "We don't know who did that. In our conversations with Iraqi authorities, they don't know either."

The al-Rawafid Security Co. was attacked by gunmen who arrived in a convoy of vehicles, including several white SUVs and a pickup truck mounted with a heavy gun, that they used to carry away the hostages, said al-Mohammedawi.

The victims did not resist because they believed their abductors were police special forces working for the Interior Ministry, he said.

"It was a terrorist act," ministry Undersecretary Maj. Gen. Ahmed al-Khefaji said.

The Sunni minority, which was dominant in the country under Saddam, has complained bitterly that it is under attack from death squads associated with the Interior Ministry, in charge of Iraq's police. And, over the past two weeks, since the bombing of a Shiite shrine in Samarra, violence has become increasingly sectarian. Hundreds have been killed.

Lynch said that the U.S. military believed at least 452 civilians had died in that violence through the first of this week, although he offered no break down according religious sect or ethnicity.

Several other large blasts were heard in the capital Thursday, but police only had details about one, a roadside bomb aimed at a police patrol in Jihad, also mostly Sunni western neighborhood, Dozier reports. Three bystanders were hurt.

Police and the U.S. military reported Wednesday finding the bodies of 24 men who were garroted or shot in the head, most of them in an abandoned bus in a tough Baghdad Sunni neighborhood. The killings appeared to be a continuation of the sectarian killing since the shrine attack.

Many of the dead in that period were Sunnis, killed at close range after apparently being captured by overwhelming numbers of attackers. The nature of the killings suggested that a well-armed and organized force carried out the attacks.

There have also been repeated attacks against the Shiite-led security forces. Interior Minister Bayan Jabr and one of his assistants may themselves have been targets of assassination attempts Wednesday.

[Disagreeable]

We don't find many things that 65-70% of Americans agree on. One item that fits that criteria is Social Security, another was the ports debacle. And now civil war in Iraq falls into that category.

"An AP-Ipsos Poll found an overwhelming majority of Americans — including 70 percent of Republicans and 90 percent of Democrats — saying it's likely that a civil war will break out in Iraq."

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20060310/ap_on_re_us/iraq_ap_poll_1;_ylt=Ak1FjDWk7rNFrZ6LWDbBVeJX6GMA;_ylu=X3oDMTBiMW04NW9mBHNlYwMlJVRPUCUl

[reader (the Second)]

Actually I thought these two articles were hopeful. If the Iraqis crack down on the insurgents and those who cooperate with them, that will end one of the causes of civil strife and violence. The insurgents are tapping into ethnic hostilities and worsening them intentionally.

I believe that even for al-Qaeda who are depraved, Zarqawi is beyond depraved and the Iraqis will find him and kill him.

[Disagreeable]

I think they were hopeful, too. But the Sunnis can stop supporting the terrorists and still fight the Shiites. I think most of the killing these days is being done by Iraqis, not terrorists.

From the link above:

"Authorities in Baghdad and south of the capital discovered the bodies of eight more men — many of them blindfolded, handcuffed and shot in the back of the head."

That's an almost daily occurrence in and around Baghdad.