November 21, 2004

U.S. Troops Say They Find "atrocity Sites" in Fallujah - from TBO.com

U.S. troops have found close to 20 "atrocity sites" used by insurgents to imprison, torture and kill hostages in Fallujah, a U.S. military officer said Sunday.

Marine Maj. Jim West said that in addition to numerous weapons caches, troops clearing the city after a major U.S.-led offensive had found rooms containing knives and black hoods, "many of them blood-covered."

Briefing reporters at a base outside Fallujah, West said one room had "handprints on the walls and along the sides of the walls ... There was blood covering the entire wall and along the floorboard area."
[Dear God!
How else to respond to this scene of gratuitous carnage except to retch and give thanks that we're killing and imprisoning these evil, evil murderers?--Jen]

He said troops had found signs of "torture, murder, very gruesome sights."

"We found numerous houses where people were just chained to a wall for extended periods of time," he added.

West did not provide more details, but said "a few less than 20" such sites had been found in the city, a stronghold for insurgents 40 miles west of Baghdad.

At least 34 foreign hostages have been killed by their captors in Iraq this year, including three Americans. Many of the victims have been beheaded and their deaths shown on grisly videos posted on the Internet. Iraqi police and other security forces have also been killed after their capture by insurgents.

West said more than 1,400 people were detained in connection with the Fallujah offensive. More than 400 of them have been released after interrogators determined they were non-combatants.

The military says an estimated 1,200 insurgents and more than 50 U.S. troops have been killed in the assault.
[God rest the souls of the brave American fallen.
At least we killed 24 times the number of bad guys!
And as Gen. George Patton said, the key to victory is to get the other SOB's army to die rather than yours.--J.T.]

On Friday, Lt. Col. John Sattler, commander of the 1st Marine Expeditionary Force, said this month's offensive had "broken the back" of the insurgency. But U.S. troops and their Iraqi colleagues have continued to come under attack while searching for holdouts.

Marine Lt. Col. Daniel Wilson said troops were searching an estimated 30,000-50,000 buildings that could contain pockets of resistance. He said small numbers of insurgents managed to move in and out of the city but that a U.S. Army cordon around Fallujah kept most of the rebels contained.

Lest we forget, each and every one of those buildings could contain a booby-trapped enemy "corpse" that might require our soldiers to shoot first and ask questions later, such as the one the MSM made the brouhaha about this past week.
As Kevin Myers said so correctly in today's Sunday Telegraph, "A Marine's gotta do what a Marine's gotta do."
Myers also points out that the crucial issue of the video of the Marine killing the "poor" enemy combatant wasn't that it was an "unjust" killing, but that the TV cameraman was there at all and chose to roll tape on that particular incident, when there have been so many others doing the last 18 months since OIF began, such as U.S. troops rebuilding schools, roads and clinics or generally interacting well with the peace-loving Iraqi public.

And while we like to hope that the "back" of enemy resistance was truly broken by our Fallujah assault, there were some fireworks in Baghad over the weekend:
Raid on Mosque Sparks Battles in Baghdad

A U.S.-Iraqi raid on the Abu Hanifa mosque -- one of the most revered sites for Sunni Muslims
[How many of these "holy" sites do they have?
You've gotta wonder.
It's always the one under attack, though. Hmmm.] -- spawned a weekend of street battles, assassinations and a rash of bombings that changed Baghdad. The capital, for months a city of unrelenting but sporadic violence, has taken on the look of a battlefield.
[...]
Lt. Col. James Hutton, spokesman for the U.S. Army's 1st Cavalry Division, which is in charge of security in Baghdad, acknowledged that there has been an increase in insurgent activity in the capital.

But he linked the increase to the fighting in Fallujah, where U.S. troops are still fighting pockets of resistance after recapturing the city last week, rather than the raid on the Abu Hanifa mosque.
[I'm going with Lt. Col. Hutton rather than the anti-American Ass. Press!--Jen]

The government has said the raid was carried out because of suspicions of "terrorist activity" there. It appears the operation was part of a crackdown on militant Sunni clerics, many of whom are believed to have links to some insurgent groups and who had spoken out against the Fallujah operation.
[Of course, these Sunni hate-preachers are funded by our "friends" the Sunni Waahab Saudis or the Baathist Sunni thugocracy in Syria to stir up Muslim hatred to jihad.]
[...]
Tensions are likely to sharpen as the Jan. 30 election date approaches. The ballot is expected to confirm the domination of Iraq's Shiite community, estimated at 60 percent of the nearly 26 million population.

Victory would allow the Shiites to shrug off decades of oppression by the Sunni Arabs, a powerful minority that had long dominated Iraq. Most Kurds are Sunni, but they are resented by many Arab Sunnis because of their close ties to the Americans and for what are perceived as sucessionist tendencies.

Prominent Sunni clerics are calling on supporters to boycott the vote in retaliation for the fighting in Fallujah. A Sunni boycott would greatly undermine the legitimacy of the vote for a 275-member assembly, whose main task will be draft a permanent constitution for Iraq.

Why do the Iraqi Sunnis sound so much like our Democrats?
When votes don't go their way, they act as if they're "disenfranchised."
Boycotting the Jan. 30 election and thereby not getting their own representatives elected to the new Iraqi assembly will only hurt the minority Sunnis more.
So, it looks as if they haven't quite gotten or embraced the concepts of democracy--whatta surprise!
I'd be willing to bet that almost 100% of these radical clerics call democracy a "heresy" that must be resisted with violence and death.
The Iraqi Kurds--bless them!--have been running what has virtually been their own state in Iraq since 1991, when the no-fly zones were set up, and have set the standard for peaceful, democratic government for their fellow Iraqis and Sunni Muslims.
Iraq needs to look to them for the standard and probably does, whereas the "insurgents" and the Leftist media like the AP must realize that they're backing the wrong, weaker horse.
Why is it so impossible for the Ass. Press to laud American efforts to establish a peaceful democracy and truly representative government in a country that had previously been a terrorist haven and a living nightmare of a dictatorship of murder, torture and the suppression of the human rights of many of its citizens and with the least use of military force as possible, as well?
Just as with the recent re-election of President Bush, which I consider the "Culture War" part of the war, if we do win the WOT, it will be in spite of the many, various and concerted efforts of the MSM to defend Evil and to defeat the good and the True.