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Holy Man Sez Fallujah Raids Not Helping Hostages
"This isn't helping, y'know! It's just gonna make us madder!... Duck, Mahmoud!"A radical Sunni Muslim cleric in Iraq said Sunday that repeated US military raids on the rebel city of Fallujah were not helping the cause of foreign hostages. "The whole world was turned upside down about the fate of one British man, but nothing of the sort happens when thousands of people are killed in Fallujah and elsewhere in Iraq," Sheikh Mahdi al-Sumaidiy, so-called emir (prince) of the hardline Sunni Muslim Salafist movement, told reporters in Baghdad. "How do you think Iraqis are going to react to this."
| Some are going to roll their eyes and jump up and down and holler "Jihad!" Some are going to explode. The majority are going to hunker down and try and get through the mindless violence. |
At least 15 people were killed and 33 wounded in two separate air strikes Saturday by US planes on a suspected hideout and meeting place in Fallujah of operatives of the alleged Al-Qaeda leader in Iraq, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. The Tawhid wal Jihad (Unity and holy war) militant group of Jordanian-born Zarqawi has claimed responsibility for some of the deadliest bombings in Iraq and a slew of kidnappings of foreigners including British engineer Kenneth Bigley, and two of his US colleagues who have been beheaded. Sumaidiy castigated the interim government of Prime Minister Iyad Allawi for refusing to release one former woman weapons scientist in Saddam Hussein's regime held by the US military as demanded by Bigley's captors. "This is the height of immorality on the part of this government which gives no thought to the honour of these Iraqi women," he said speaking at the bin Taimiya mosque in Baghdad, which was searched for weapons Saturday by Iraqi and US forces who found nothing. "We reject this government and everything it stands for."
| "We stand for the core values of Islam: Turbans! Automatic weapons! Explosives! Sharp objects!" |
Last week Iraq's justice ministry said Rihab Taha -- a biologist known as Dr Germ suspected of involvement in an illegal weapons program under Saddam -- was eligible for release. But Allawi took the decision not release her, according to his national security advisor Kassem Daoud. The US military says Taha and Huda Amash, another female scientist who worked on the weapons programmes and is known as Dr Anthrax, are the only two women thay are holding at a detention facility near Baghdad airport.
Posted by: Fred 2004-09-26 |
