|
Zark's boyz use torture
A U.S. Army commander asserted Tuesday that extremist fighters in northern Iraq committed atrocities against civilians, including beheadings, torture and the booby-trapping of a murdered child's body.The accusations by Col. H.R. McMaster, commander of the 3rd Armored Cavalry Regiment, included some of the most graphic and specific charges by an American military officer during the ongoing battle for control of Tal Afar, a city about 50 miles from the Syrian border that has been an insurgent stronghold. "The enemy here did just the most horrible things you can imagine _ in one case murdering a child, placing a booby trap within the child's body and waiting for the parent to come recover the body of their child and exploding it to kill the parents; beheadings and so forth," McMaster said in an interview from Tal Afar with reporters at the Pentagon. McMaster said Tal Afar is not yet under the control of the 5,000 Iraqi government forces and 3,500 to 3,800 U.S. troops that have been fighting together there for the past two weeks. He predicted eventual victory but said it was impossible to know how long it would take before the Iraqis can control Tal Afar by themselves. "Is Tal Afar secure? No, it's not secure," he said. "Is the enemy on the run in Tal Afar? Yes, the enemy's on the run. And we're going to conduct some follow-on operations in the next week or so to relentlessly pursue the enemy across the city." McMaster repeatedly condemned the tactics of the insurgents, whom he called terrorists and extremists. "Not only were they targeting civilians, brutally murdering them, torturing them, but they were also kidnapping the youth of the city and brainwashing them and trying to turn them into hate-filled murderers," he said. His comments came two days after the al-Qaida leader in Iraq, Abu-Musab al-Zarqawi, purportedly accused American forces of using poison gas in the Tal Afar fighting, a charge that U.S. officials have denied. The accusation was made in an audiotape posted on the Internet on Sunday and attributed to al-Zarqawi. McMaster alluded to that accusation and said he believed the insurgents had planned to detonate chemicals in a building in a residential area and then claim that U.S. forces had employed poison gas against civilians. "In one of these buildings the enemy had big barrels of chemicals that had explosives implanted in the chemicals, wires running around them. The whole house was rigged for demolition," he said. When U.S. troops went into the house, "immediately their eyes began burning, their throats began burning. So they withdrew out of the house immediately and then we conducted reconnaissance with some chemical protective gear, with a remote reconnaissance capability, into the house. And we could tell that the thing was rigged with chemicals." McMaster also said U.S. troops found manuals that described how to make "these kind of chemical dirty bombs and so forth." Posted by: Dan Darling 2005-09-14 |
| http://www.rantburg.com/poparticle.php?ID=129518 |