January 10, 2005

Baghdad Deputy Police Chief Assassinated

Gunmen assassinated Baghdad's deputy police chief and a suicide bomber driving a stolen patrol car killed three people at a police station on Monday as insurgents pressed a campaign to wreck Iraq's Jan. 30 election.
[...]
The shooting of Brigadier Amer Nayef, the second-ranking police commander in the capital, came just six days after guerrillas assassinated Baghdad's provincial governor.
[...]
With three weeks to go before the election, insurgents have stepped up their drive to cripple the U.S.-backed interim government and scare away voters. Iraqi leaders say Sunni-led guerrillas also want to provoke sectarian civil war.
[That's a 10% Sunni minority that's making war on a 60% Shi'ite majority...and the other 30% are the Kurds.--J.T.]

A senior U.S. commander said last week that four of Iraq's 18 provinces, including parts of the capital, were still too insecure to hold elections and predicted a surge of violence as the ballot approached.
[...]
A group of leading Sunni Muslim clerics meeting a senior American official offered to call off an election boycott in return for a U.S. timetable for a withdrawal from Iraq, an embassy spokesman said.

But chances of Washington setting such a schedule for the withdrawal of roughly 150,000 troops are all but nil as U.S. forces are still struggling to get Iraqi security services in shape to take over when they leave.

We're not withdrawing, killers, so go suck on your prayer rugs!
I hate to see either our U.S. troops or freedom-loving Iraqis get hurt and killed, but this is what the Enemy does: They murder people to stop the advance and enjoyment of Liberty.
Rest in piece, Mr. Nayef.
It was clear to me when the evildoers murdered the governor of Baghdad that the terrorists don't want this vote to happen in Iraq or anywhere else in the Arab world!
(They only let the elections go forward in the Paleostinian areas because all the candidates were Arafat-cloned, ineffectual, Islamist killers-- especially Abu Mazen*--who aren't going to change Arafart's original goal of wiping Israel and Jews off the map.
*Never forget that Abbas/Mazen financed the kidnapping and murder of the Israeli atheletes at the Munich Olympics in 1972 and he also wrote a book saying that the Holocaust was a "lie.")