Peaceloving "Insurgents" behead more hostages
 

Militants Behead Three Hostages in Iraq
Captives Believed to Be Iraqi Kurds; Government Pledges to Stick to Election Timetable
By ALEXANDRA ZAVIS, AP

BAGHDAD, Iraq (Sept. 19) - Militants sawed off the heads of three hostages believed to be Iraqi Kurds in a grisly videotape that surfaced Sunday, hours after Iraq's prime minister said January elections would be held on schedule and asserted that American and Iraqi troops were winning the fight against an increasingly bold insurgency.

Allawi says his government is determined "to stick to the timetable of the elections," which are due by Jan. 31.

In another sign of continuing instability 17 months into the U.S.-led occupation of Iraq, a suicide car bomb killed three people in Samarra - a northern city that U.S. and Iraqi commanders have portrayed as a success story in their attempts to put down the insurgency.

Over the past week, about 300 people have been killed in escalating violence, including bombings, street fighting and U.S. air strikes. Last week, U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan warned there could not be ''credible elections if the security conditions continue as they are now.''

But Iraqi Prime Minister Ayad Allawi, who spoke with reporters after a meeting with British leader Tony Blair in London, said his interim government was determined ''to stick to the timetable of the elections,'' which are due by Jan. 31.

''January next, I think, is going to be a major blow to terrorists and insurgents,'' said Allawi, who is heading to the United Nations for this week's General Assembly session. ''We are adamant that democracy is going to prevail, is going to win in Iraq.''

Allawi, a Sunni Muslim, has been insistent about holding elections on time because of pressure from Iraq's Shiite Muslim community and its most powerful cleric, Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, who fought for early elections. Reneging on the vote would risk angering the generally cooperative Shiite religious establishment.

Shiites, who are in the majority in Iraq, are eager to translate their numbers into political power.

But alongside the increasing violence, several cities in the Sunni Muslim heartland north and west of Baghdad are out of U.S. and Iraqi government control, with insurgents holding sway, particularly in the city of Fallujah. That raises questions on whether balloting can be held there - and the legitimacy of elections held without adequate Sunni participation.

Republican and Democratic senators urged the Bush administration on Sunday to face the reality of the situation in Iraq and change its policies. A major problem, said leaders of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on CBS' ''Face the Nation,'' was incompetence by the administration in reconstructing the country's shattered infrastructure.

''The fact is a crisp, sharp analysis of our policies is required. We didn't do that in Vietnam, and we saw 11 years of casualties mount to the point where we finally lost,'' said Sen. Chuck Hagel, a Vietnam War veteran who is co-chairman of President Bush's re-election committee in Nebraska.

The decapitated bodies of the three slain Kurdish hostages were found on a road near the northern city of Mosul, said Sarkawt Hassan, security chief in the Kurdish town of Sulaimaniyah. He said the three were members of the peshmerga militia of the Kurdistan Democratic Party.

The videotape, posted Sunday on a site known for its Islamic militant content, shows three young men, two of whom hold up identity cards. Seconds later, each has his throat slit and his head placed on the back of his body.

The Ansar al-Sunna Army - a Sunni militant group that said it killed 12 Nepalese hostages in August and carried out Feb. 1 suicide attacks against Kurdish political parties that killed 109 people - claimed responsibility for the beheadings in a statement with the video.

It said the three were KDP members snatched as they were transporting military vehicles to a base in Taji, 15 miles north of Baghdad.

The group said it was targeting Iraqi Kurdish parties because they have ''sworn allegiance to the crusaders and fought and are still fighting Islam and its people.''

The tape and the statement could not be independently verified.

Later, the Arab news station Al-Jazeera aired a separate video claiming 15 captured Iraqi soldiers would be killed unless a detained aide of rebel Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr was freed in 48 hours. The men in military dress were shown seated at gunpoint in the video from a group calling itself the Brigades of Mohammed bin Abdullah.

No audio was aired, but Al-Jazeera's announcer said the militants threatened to kill the 15 unless Hazem al-A'araji, who was detained in a raid by U.S. and Iraqi forces on al-Sadr's Baghdad offices on Saturday, is freed.

The videos surfaced the day before the Tawhid and Jihad group, led by Jordanian terror mastermind Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, has threatened to behead Americans Jack Hensley and Eugene Armstrong and Briton Kenneth Bigley, who were seized from their Baghdad house last week.

The group, which has claimed responsibility for a series of bombings and hostage takings, demands the release of Iraqi women from the American controlled Abu Ghraib and Umm Qasr prisons.

Abu Ghraib is the prison where U.S. soldiers were photographed sexually humiliating male prisoners, but the U.S. military says no women are held at either facility, though it says it is holding two female ''security prisoners'' elsewhere.

More than 100 foreigners have been kidnapped in Iraq, some for lucrative ransoms, and many have been executed. At least five other Westerners are currently being held hostage here, including an Iraqi-American man, two female Italian aid workers and two French reporters.

Lebanon's Foreign Ministry said Sunday that three Lebanese men and their Iraqi driver were abducted by gunmen on the Baghdad-Fallujah highway Friday night. The four worked for a travel agency that has a branch in Baghdad, a Foreign Ministry official said

Sunday's attack in Samarra, 65 miles north of Baghdad, came less than a week after American forces re-entered the city, which had been under insurgents' control and a virtual ''no-go'' area for U.S. troops since May 30.

The Americans returned under a peace deal brokered by tribal leaders under which U.S. forces agreed to provide millions of dollars in reconstruction funds in exchange for an end to attacks on American and Iraqi troops.

The blast killed an Iraqi soldier, a civilian and the suicide bomber and wounded four American and three Iraqi soldiers, said Maj. Neal O'Brien of the Army's 1st Infantry Division.

Allawi has pointed to the Samarra deal as an example of success in a fight he insists U.S and Iraqi forces are winning against the insurgents.

''We are squeezing out the insurgency,'' he said in an interview with ABC's ''This Week,'' taped on Friday and aired Sunday. ''We have secured Samarra now, which was an important tie for insurgencies and the so-called resistance.''

Meanwhile, U.S. warplanes and artillery pounded the insurgent stronghold of Fallujah late Saturday and early Sunday, killing four people and wounding six, hospital officials said. The military said it hit a checkpoint manned by militants linked to al-Zarqawi, the military said.

Elswhere, four insurgents were killed when a bomb they were attempting to plant at the side of a road near the eastern Iraqi city of Suwayrah exploded shortly before midnight Saturday, a military spokesman said.

It was an American who lost his head today. Still no outrage? Next one in a few hours...

Who calls the insurgents "peace-loving"?

Outrage? Yes. Why do you think you're the only one angry?

Do you think that anyone who doesn't call for B-52s to incinerate some Iraqi cities (referring to the other thread) ISN'T angry at the beheadings and thinks the insurgents are "peace-loving"?

People can be outraged at the same thing, but arrive at different conclusions about the cause and the solution.

This is a play on the earlier thread regarding the lack of outrage among the Muslim community when innocent civilians are murdered in such a cruel fashion...One would hope that they are at least as outraged as they were about Abu Garib!

Ok, I misinterpreted your post.

I wasn't clear...the link was only fresh in my head!

Right now we are killing 100 to 1. Apparently that's not enough. Maybe at 500 to one they'll listen to reason. But if it takes 10,000 to one, then that's what it takes.

It's times like this that make me so happy that Bush took us into Iraq.:rolleyes: NOT!

Meanwhile with only a small fraction of troops left in Afghanistan trying to hunt and kill Al Quieda members, some nut in a turbin sits in a cave laughing at us hook up to his dialisis machine.

Hey, Kerry just said he'd take us to Iraq given the same evidence, so you can't really use that argument, can you now?

They want to kill us whether Bush is president or Kerry is. They don't care. At least Bush has the balls and resolve to actually DO something, unlike your pacifist democrats. Kerry'd still be asking France for permission if he had any control.

Which is it flip flopper?

Can't have it both ways, pick a lie and run with it, but you only get one lie, alright?

No United States President would ask permission of another country before defending America. Not Kerry or anyone else. That's just a nasty remark (sorry, Bryan, I'm not just picking on you). Kerry voted to support the decision to invade Iraq, but probably would not have proposed it had he been President. Kerry's decision, along with everyone else's, was predicated on a pile of false facts, unsubstantiated intelligence, invalid assumptions and (some say) 'cooked' data that has pretty much ALL been demonstrated to be misleading. We so-called "pacifists" are actually just people who think we understand the impact of invading another country besides having the wonderful Christian feeling of revenge. We also feel we have noticed how international sociological and ideological problems are actually solved. Same way this one will ultimately be solved. We think this military action is pushing the solution further out into the future. I'm thinking fifty years now, at least. Again, I notice that the vengeance angle and retribution thing are being pursued now and that's got to give some people a sense that we're "winning." We're "winning" for ourselves the right to feel vindicated, or at least partly so. It was a horrendous attack on our country and we're angry and embarrassed. Those are appropriate emotions under the circumstances. But what I still find mysterious is the notion that the intended effect of our military action is to scare the terrorists into not attacking us anymore. Anybody believe that? If so, then am I correct in assuming that military action will continue until the terrorists are so intimidated that they are quaking in fear? And what are the time projections for when this might become the case?

If the terrorists never crawl into a corner and beg for our mercy, then do you think the time may come when we build a community of countries whose values will not tolerate terrorism? do you think international pressure could be used to examine and direct those movements that foster terrorism? Do you think that religious zealots are playing politics, or at least that political vacuums breed support for leaders who use religious ideology to control their constituents? Could this ever happen in America? And finally, we're hearing that the toppling of the Hussein regime has created a political vacuum and that terrorists and other ideological zealots are pouring into Iraq. If so, then our actions are creating just another perfect breeding ground for hatred.

Okay, that being said, I'm pretty disgusted by these executions, along with the 'collateral casualties' (a conveniently pretty term for a very ugly fact) of our actions. Those of you who think we peaceniks would like to try to solve this by inviting the terrorists to an Ohhhmmmm Circle, are incorrect, at least in my case. I don't believe in the Iraq "war." But I do believe in hunting down terrorists and executing them in their boots. That's one of the ideas worth discussing. Stealing their money is another. So, I guess we'll get back into that coalition after we have finished kicking the Middle-East beehive and once the other countries who never left the coalition forgive us for kicking that beehive for political purposes and further endangering the rest of the world.

You know, it's interesting. Bagdad is captured and there's not a huge amount of violence there. Fallujah is another story and we've not yet scraped the surface of the outlying cities. Apparently, many are packed with "insurgents." So, they're going to have an election there in a few months, and the safe bet is that it will not go well. This is going to get worse before it gets better. Anybody hear Dubya's exit strategy? Anybody doubt that the draft will be re-instituted, or that other ME countries will be invaded by us? The world is looking for a leader, and it usually looks to my country for that. Heck, we probably have an international power vacuum amoung developed countries. what if, while Dubya is having fun clobbering those terrorists in front of adoring, hand-picked crowds, another leader in another developed country starts galvanizing support for an independent agenda? That coalition would usurp our position as the dominant world power. Hmmmm. Maybe there's even more at stake than we liberals have been complaining about. but I'm sure that Dubya has all this figured out. Just can't pronounce it, that's all.

On one hand, they're too scared by the insurgents to be openly outraged. On the other, they believe the Americans are getting just what they deserve.

ok. these outsourced workers applied for the wrong job, in the wrong town, during the wrong war. don't these guys have guns? doesn't their employer provide protection.?thank goodness it was out of country. the l&i penalties would be pretty steep.

kevin

They do in some cases have guns. But I think that's a YMMV issue with the employer. These guys in particular had a guard (or guards) who would come to work and quickly leave, or not show up at all. My thoughts were the kidnappers got hold of the guards and warned them not to show up.

If a foreign army took over TN, you didn't want them there (regardless of whether that army thought you had a valid opinion) and they upped the killing against you from 100:1 to 500:1, would you be more likely to:

(a) roll over and love them; or
(b) fight harder?

This may come as a surprise to you, but many Iraqis don't like Americans because they kill their family members and friends. You are prepared to go postal because some innocent guy you've never met has been killed by terrorists - what would you expect the reaction of those in Iraq in the equivalent situation to be?

Valid logic, but here's the kicker. Our soldiers aren't adept enough to tell a regular Iraqi from an insurgent or terrorist, nor can their bullets tell the difference.

That's why they can't go postal. I'd be scared to death to be Iraqi right now.

One small correction, I belive that was Kerry's position as of 3:24pm on September 16th, 2004. I belive he has changed his position a couple of times since then. And yes, for all you smarta@@es who are going to check the time, I made it up.

Beautifully stated, Supe.

Not the muslims in Iraq, silly ducky, the ones in other third world countries...like France!

LOL! Seriously, France (Paris in particular) is beautiful. I'd live there as long as I didn't have to eat dog or snails.

Talk about French govt work. How's four days a week strike you and a mandatory month off a year? If your wife has a child, it's a year off! Not bad...
:)