Antiwar.com Blog

Now, here’s a really bizarre story.

(06-21-2004) – Four U.S. service members were killed Monday – shot repeatedly in the head during an ambush while they were on patrol in the Sunni Muslim stronghold of Ramadi.
[…]
The four Americans killed in Ramadi had failed to check in at an appointed time, and a search was launched, Kimmitt said, declining further comment until relatives could be notified.

Videotape delivered to Associated Press Television News showed the four, still in uniform, lying dead near what appeared to be a walled compound.

So, four Marines were on patrol and whoever jumped them took them all out, shot them repeatedly in the head, lined their bodies up in a macabre display, took a video of them and delivered it to the AP. When I first read this terse account, which is all that any news outlets are carrying so far, I thought they might have been beheaded, which would account for Kimmitt’s reluctance to tell what happened. It still may turn out that they were – then again, it may never be publicly announced either way. Maybe the video will be shown or at least an acount will be written of what it shows.

Anyway, this story stinks. Where was/is the vehicle the Marines were driving? How did they manage to be so completely overwhelmed? Are four person patrols normal in Ramadi, probably the most dangerous city in Iraq for Americans next to Fallujah? Why were they not found rapidly, after they failed to check in? Why didn’t they call for help at the first sign of an attack? Who made the videotape?

Too many unanswered questions surround this odd incident.

UPDATE: The AP reports a few more details:

A videotape delivered Monday to Associated Press Television News showed four Americans in uniform lying dead in what appeared to be a walled compound in Ramadi, an insurgent stronghold 60 miles west of Baghdad. One of the Americans was slumped in the corner of a wall.

The bodies had no flak vests _ mandatory for U.S. troops operating in contested areas _ and at least one was missing a boot. One fieldpack was left open next to a body as if the attackers had looted the dead before fleeing.

UPDATE: Information ClearingHouse has stills from the AP video. Click to enlarge this photo:

Thanks for the tip on the photos from poster Raincoast!

How come the more wars we fight to defend freedom, the less there is left to defend? I’m just now trying to imagine what my new identity patch will look like. How to depict a cheese-eating surrender monkey? The patches needn’t all be ethnic, of course. Sure, Arab-Americans will probably have to wear red crescents, but maybe the pink triangle could be resurrected for all war opponents.

A letter from a KBR civilian employee in Iraq:

The thrill of war is gone

Imagine explosions without warning 24-7. Mortar attacks are unpredictable. They’re in the minds of every person who lives on the forward operation bases in Iraq.

They kill, wound, bloody and break the hearts of families of loved ones who have suffered the results of mortars. In five months, the number of mortar attacks increased at a steady pace, as have injuries and lives lost.

As June 30 draws nearer, the Iraqi government decides its future. The mortars fall more frequently, with greater numbers. Fifteen is common with each round a potential killer. We hug the ground, pray the explosions will stop, grit our teeth, tense our bodies and feel the ground shake beneath. A blast threw me 10 feet. I ask the question: “Why did I survive?” A friend questioned his pain by repeating, “I think I’ve been hit.” He was hit. He fell next to me and two more mortars rumbled near.

The thrill of war is gone. Fear takes over my thoughts most days. We constantly look for places to shield our bodies from flying shrapnel that sends friends home or to their final resting place.

Soldiers say I am lucky. I can leave this place. That is a choice I have made. I return to Eugene to run the Butte to Butte and gather my thoughts of the past five months and never forget fallen friends in the Iraq war that ended before I arrived.

I dedicated my time there to my wife, Lt. Col. Sherry McConnell, U.S. Marine Corps, on active duty in Iraq.

VINCENT G. SUETOS
KBR Security Coordinator
Mosul, Iraq

President Putin really stunned the world, and especially the State Department, when he recently stated that Russian intelligence had warned Bush before the war that Saddam had oodles of terrorists in Iraq just waiting in the wings to attack America and the world. Apparently, his own government was unaware of this terrorist crisis as evidenced in this news story of 3/21/03, the day after the war started:

Russian Finance Minister Alexei Kudrin said he was astonished by a U.S. request to freeze Iraqi bank assets. “Under our legislation, we can freeze accounts if they are used to finance terrorism or money laundering activities,” Kudrin said. “As far as I am aware, there are no facts linking Saddam Hussein’s accounts in Russia to such activities.”

And a year later on 2/27/04, in this news story from Pravda, Putin states that Iraq “…is a new territory to them [terrorists].” Doesn’t that seem to mean that the terrorists weren’t in Iraq before the war?

“Terrorists are ‘exploring’ Iraq, which is a new territory to them,” President Vladimir Putin said at a meeting with students in Krasnoyarsk on Friday. “This is a very dangerous process, the longer it will take place, the more dangerous it will be,” said the president. Mr Putin reiterated his position to the effect that the military campaign against Iraq had not been justified. “It was a mistake. There was no need for the military operation, and subsequent events proved that,” said President Putin.

Israeli agents in Kurdistan

I first saw this report on a rather unreliable Bulgarian site, but Ha’aretz is now running it, so I’ll just post it as an FYI:

WASHINGTON – Israel operates hundreds of agents in the Kurdish areas in northern Iraq, according to a report published in the upcoming issue of The New Yorker magazine.
In an interview to CNN on Sunday, reporter Seymour Hersh said that hundreds of Israelis, some of them Mossad agents, are operating in the region in order to collect information on Iran’s nuclear program and monitor events in Syria.

According to the report, Israel in the past has had many ties with the Kurds, which with the fall of Saddam Hussein’s regime are currently being renewed.

Israel is not confident of the success of the American program for the stabilization of the country, the report says, and that is why it is interested in setting up independent connections in the region.

Israelis operating in the region are also attempting to assist Kurds living in Syria, the report says.

My only comment at this time is that things are not looking bright for the Kurds if the Americans sell them out again. With the furor over the peshmerga involvement in the siege of Fallujah and general collaboration with the Americans during the invasion and now being linked as sponsors of Israeli spies, the tensions are certainly there for a clash between Arabs and the Kurdish minority. The fact that Kurds are now violently displacing Arab Iraqis from lands and homes stolen from them during the Saddam Arabization period is just more dry tinder on the pile awaiting a spark.

UPDATE: The Guardian has an interesting perspective on this story:

Israeli military and intelligence operatives are active in Kurdish areas of Iran, Syria and Iraq, providing training for commando units and running covert operations that could further destabilise the entire region, according to a report in the New Yorker magazine.

The article was written by Seymour Hersh, the Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter who exposed the abuse scandal in Abu Ghraib. It is sourced primarily to unnamed former and current intelligence officials in Israel, the United States and Turkey.

Israel’s aims, according to Hersh, are to build up the Kurdish military strength in order to offset the strength of the Shia militias and to create a base in Iran from which they can spy on Iran’s suspected nuclear-making facilities.

“Israel has always supported the Kurds in a Machiavellian way – a balance against Saddam,” one former Israeli intelligence officer told the New Yorker. “It’s Realpolitik. By aligning with the Kurds Israel gains eyes and ears in Iran, Iraq and Syria. The critical question is ‘What will the behaviour of Iran be if there is an independent Kurdistan with close ties to Israel? Iran does not want an Israeli land-based aircraft carrier on its border.”

By supporting Kurdish separatists, Israel also risks alienating its Turkish ally and undermining attempts to create a stable Iraq. “If you end up with a divided Iraq it will bring more blood, tears and pain to the Middle East and you will be blamed,” a senior Turkish official told Mr Hersh.

Read the rest…..

When are the Americans going to stop acting on their bad intelligence? Just as their garbage intelligence led them to bomb a wedding party in their last foray against imaginary “foreign fighters”, so have they now killed over 20 Iraqis by dropping huge bombs on a neighborhood in Fallujah and, as usual, failed to accomplish anything but killing more Iraqis, women and children included.

A senior officer of the U.S.-backed Fallujah Brigade on Sunday disputed U.S. claims that an American airstrike had hit a safehouse of terrorist Abu Musab al-Zarqawi’s network.

The Health Ministry said at least 16 people were killed in the attack Saturday; witnesses put the number of dead at least 20, including women and children.

Col. Mohammed Awad said members of the Fallujah Brigade had investigated the site and “affirmed to us that the inhabitants of the houses were ordinary families including women, children and elders.”

“There was no sign that foreigners have lived in the house,” Awad said.

Brig. Gen. Mark Kimmitt, coalition deputy operations chief, told reporters Saturday that multiple intelligence sources reported that the house was used by the al-Zarqawi network, which U.S. officials believe operates in Fallujah.

Even if they were able to take out “Zarqawi” in the midst of this carnage, what gives them the right to slaughter indiscriminately all these people? Every one of these dead Iraqis had a name, a family, people who loved them. How many new resistance fighters were created in this stupid strike? It isn’t just Fallujans who will now take up arms, either, it will be Iraqis from across the country who are outraged and furious over this indiscriminate slaughter.

Apart from the immoral aspect of the indiscriminate killing of Iraqis, another reason that this bombing is hideously stupid is that it once again fortifies the perception that the American occupation of Iraq parallels the hated Israeli occupation of Palestine. This is an excellent reason to avoid any IDF-like tactics in Iraq, though there is little hope that the heavily Likudnik-influenced Bush administration neocons running the show in Iraq will ever realize or be honest enough to admit that their aping of Israeli tactics has been a major factor in inspiring and sustaining the Iraqi rebellion.

I suppose at least viciously racist neocon ideologues like Bill O’Reilly are happy, along with the bloodthirsty hard-core Republican Bushbots like these. It is quite clear that the reason the American neocon occupation of Iraq resembles the Israeli occupation is because the people running them see themselves as engaged in the same battle against the same “enemy” – never mind the pretense of “Iraqi liberation”. The enemy in their minds is “the arabs” and their profound contempt for the Arab world and the religon of Islam is illustrated in both their actions and their rhetoric.

A few typical comments from the link above: Continue reading “Neocons thrilled by bombed Arabs”