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| Iraq |
| 18 Iraqi police killed in jailbreak |
| 2006-03-22 |
| More than 200 masked insurgents stormed an Interior Ministry jail at daybreak on Tuesday, killing at least 18 police officers, freeing all the prisoners and leaving the facility a smoldering wreck. The battle raged for nearly an hour at the jail, in Muqdadiya, 60 miles northeast of Baghdad, as the fighters blasted government buildings with mortars, grenades and machine guns, Interior Ministry officials said. The attack demonstrated that even though sectarian violence has recently emerged as Iraq's gravest concern, the antigovernment insurgency is far from over. Showing a high degree of sophistication, insurgents reportedly cut telephone lines and then detonated several roadside bombs to block reinforcement troops from reaching the jail. Overwhelmed Iraqi forces radioed for help, and American helicopter gunships quickly responded. As soon as they arrived, insurgents drilled them with machine-gun fire, American military officials said, wounding one American soldier. "It was a huge attack," said Raad Rashid al-Mula Jawad, the governor of surrounding Diyala Province. "And we will avenge it. Our sons' blood will not be lost." More than 30 prisoners escaped. According to Tassin Tawfik, an Iraqi Army official, "All of them were insurgents." Many had been detained Sunday in a raid by security forces in neighboring towns, The Associated Press reported, leading to the raid to free them. The governor said the local police chief and several officers might have conspired with the insurgents and helped them get away. "I accuse them, and have ordered an investigation," Mr. Jawad said. The raid was reminiscent of an assault on a Falluja jail in February 2004, in which more than a dozen police officers were killed and 70 prisoners were freed. That attack was one of the first signs of tactical coordination between Iraqi insurgents and Al Qaeda, which claimed credit on the Internet, through one of its splinter groups, for the jail attack on Tuesday. Insurgents seemed to be keeping up the pressure across the country on Tuesday, singling out a number of police patrols and government buildings. One mortar shell sailed into the Green Zone, where the American Embassy is situated, at the same time that a delegation of United States senators was meeting with Iraqi officials. No injuries were reported. Such attacks have become so commonplace in Baghdad that children playing on a nearby swing set kept on swinging, even as a cloud of thick brown dust rose behind them. At a news conference after the meetings, Senator Carl Levin, a Michigan Democrat, reiterated a point that American officials have been making ceaselessly for several weeks: the sooner Iraqi leaders settle their differences and form a government, the better, because the American government believes that the violence in Iraq is fueled by an absence of clear authority. Iraqi voters chose a new Parliament in December, but politicians are still haggling over crucial posts. "April is fine," Mr. Levin said, about the Iraqi leaders' plan to form a government by then. "But we need that commitment kept, in order for there to be continuing support for American troops to be kept in Iraq." "There's been too much dawdling while Baghdad is burning," Mr. Levin said. American military officials announced Tuesday that they were looking into an allegation that American soldiers intentionally killed 11 Iraqi civilians last week. The inquiry, the second announced in a week, stems from an episode on Wednesday in Ishaqi, a Sunni Arab town north of Baghdad. American officials initially said that American troops had been fired on from a farmhouse during a raid to capture an insurgent, and that they had returned fire, from the ground and the air, killing four people. Iraqi police officials immediately rejected that account, saying 11 people had been killed after American soldiers lined up an entire family — from a 75-year-old grandmother to a 6-month-old baby — and shot them. A local police official, Farouq Hussein, told Reuters that all the victims had been shot in the head. "It's a clear and perfect crime without any doubt," he said. Lt. Col. Barry Johnson, an American military spokesman, said the military was investigating the episode. "This is not the way we operate," he said. "We take the allegation seriously, and we're working with the Iraqis to determine the facts." Last week, American officials announced that they were investigating an occurrence in November in which residents in a western Iraq town accused American marines of gunning down 15 civilians after a marine was killed by a roadside bomb. Military officials originally reported that the civilians had been killed by the bomb blast, but later revised their account to say that the civilians were killed by gunfire. An American soldier was fatally shot on Tuesday while patrolling in western Baghdad. In the same area, the bodies of eight more executed men were discovered. Dozens of bodies have turned up virtually daily in Baghdad's streets, apparently the victims of warring Shiite and Sunni gangs, continuing a cycle of revenge that erupted after an important Shiite shrine was destroyed last month. Sectarian tensions were especially high this past week as throngs of Shiite pilgrims streamed to Karbala, a holy city in southern Iraq, to commemorate the death of Imam Hussein, the grandson of the Prophet Muhammad. So far, several pilgrims have been killed in drive-by shootings and others by roadside bombs. Authorities in Diyala said they were focusing all their energies on protecting pilgrims traveling through the area on their way to Karbala, and so were caught off guard by the attack on the jail. "The insurgents came from a direction we never expected," said a Diyala provincial official, who asked not to be identified. "The attack was very well planned." |
| Posted by:Dan Darling |
| #3 The NY Times continues to prop up the MSM info economy by being the BS buyer of last resort. |
| Posted by: 6 2006-03-22 12:27 |
| #2 different news/results - same attack - I'll post it now |
| Posted by: Frank G 2006-03-22 11:38 |
| #1 On other news, popcorn futures rose today on active trading. We gave them democracy, and they are attempting to pound it back into the eighth century. Next time, let's give them a puppet dictator. |
| Posted by: wxjames 2006-03-22 08:57 |