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Fallujah yields up weapons, videos
The video cassette in the Sony Handycam told the story of how the mujahideen of Fallujah prayed, lived, and died, even as US forces invaded 10 days ago. Found along with a laptop computer, stacks of CD-ROMs, and a number of telephones in an insurgent safe house Thursday, the trove is just one of many intelligence finds in Fallujah that are shedding light on the insurgency. Those finds - along with that of a vast weapons cache and safe house operating under the cover of an Islamic medical charity, which contained flags of Al Qaeda affiliate Abu Musab al-Zarqawi - are one reason US marine commanders want to keep pushing the offensive.While firefights continue, the battered city echoed throughout the day Thursday with the crashing booms of US military explosives experts destroying one weapons stockpile after another. "It's going to take a long time [for insurgents] to reconstruct what they had in this city, for command and control, to push people out to Ramadi, Tikrit, and down south," says Col. Craig Tucker, commander of the Regimental Combat Team-7, which has waged the attack. They have to reestablish their ratlines." Those who would do that - if they are still alive - are the young, thinly bearded men on the captured video, which translators believe features some fighters from Saudi Arabia or Yemen. Clearly militants, they are first shown mourning a martyr whose body lies on a stretcher with a white strip of cloth around his head. There is an AK-47 assault rifle behind him in one scene; in another, the gun is clasped to the dead man's chest. The film also shows tanks in Fallujah - apparently US Army tanks from the first day of assault - and a militant popping up on a rooftop with a rocket- propelled grenade (RPG), and firing wildly away from the target. The cameraman can be heard speaking in awe: "Oooohhh." The video shows what appears to be suicide bombers preparing for battle and talking with black-turbaned comrades. It also shows insurgents with an unmanned US drone surveillance aircraft, a Pioneer labeled "Crazy Horse 1054." Also on tape is an antiaircraft gun mounted in the back of a truck, and night battles, with tracer rounds arcing across the sky. The computer was password protected, and is now being examined by US intelligence officers. The light armored reconnaissance unit that discovered the safe house during a random check blew it up Thursday. Posted by: Fred 2004-11-20 |
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