From Jihad Unspun, back on line.
.... many thousands of foreign fighters have indeed come "flooding" into Iraq - not terrorists sent by Bin Laden but mercenaries hired by the occupation authorities. Their role is to carry out dangerous tasks, to help reduce US army casualties. This is in addition to the Pentagon’s Israeli-trained special assassination squads. Iraqis now believe that some of the recent assassinations of scientists and academics were perpetrated by these hit-squads. A similar campaign of assassinations in Vietnam claimed the lives of 41,000 people between 1968 and 1971. .... Sharon-style tactics and brutality are now the favoured methods of the US-led occupation forces - including the torture of prisoners, who now number well over 10,000. ....
What has changed is that many Iraqis have decided that the peaceful road to evict the occupiers is not leading anywhere. They didn’t need Sadr to tell them this. They were told it loudly and brutally a few days ago by a US Abraham tank, one of many facing unarmed and peaceful demonstrators not far from the infamous Saddam statue that was toppled a year ago. The tank crushed to death two peaceful demonstrators protesting against the closure of a Sadr newspaper by Paul Bremer, the self-declared champion of free speech in Iraq. The tragic irony wasn’t lost on Iraqis. ....
It is ironic that, had Sadr’s political and social programme (towards the Kurdish people and women, for example), as distinct from his very popular anti-occupation stance, been more enlightened, he would have been much more popular. Indeed, he would probably have seen his Mahdi army grow to millions before Bremer’s resignation on June 30. |