August 03, 2005

Israel's Haaretz tells it like it is:
U.S. writer killed in Iraq after criticism of Shi'ite fundamentalists

An American journalist and author was found dead after being shot three times in the chest in the southern Iraqi city of Basra, a U.S. embassy official said on Wednesday.

Steven Vincent's death came four days after an opinion piece he wrote criticising the rise of Shi'ite Islamist fundamentalism in Basra was published in The New York Times.
[Read that piece here:
Switched off in Basra]
[...]
His Iraqi translator, Nouriya Ita'is, was shot four times and is in serious condition, the nurse said.
[Healing prayers going up for her!--Jen]

Vincent was the author of a book on post-war Iraq and was researching another about the history of Basra, where British troops are based.

The New York Times opinion piece criticised the failure of British forces to clamp down on what Vincent described as a city that was "increasingly coming under the control of Shi'ite religious groups, from the relatively mainstream ... to the bellicose followers of the rebel cleric Moqtada al-Sadr."
[...]
But residents say Shi'ite fundamentalists have been gaining control over the city since the U.S.-led invasion that toppled Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein in April 2003.

Christian alcohol sellers have been threatened and their shops damaged, residents say.

Sadr, who staged two violent uprisings against U.S. troops, is one of the Shi'ite clerics with followers and influence in Basra, 550 km (340 miles) southeast of Baghdad.

Iraq has faced growing sectarian violence since January elections empowered Shi'ites for the first time and sidelined Arab Sunnis dominant under Saddam Hussein.

AP had more details about Vincent's killing in a related story:

[...]
Vincent was abducted along with his female translator at gunpoint Tuesday evening, police said. His translator, Nour Weidi, was seriously wounded.

They were seized by five gunmen in a police car as they left a currency exchange shop, police Lt. Col. Karim al-Zaidi said.

In an opinion column published July 31 in The New York Times, Vincent wrote that Basra's police force had been heavily infiltrated by members of Shiite political groups, including those loyal to radical cleric Muqtada al-Sadr.
Vincent quoted an unidentified Iraqi police lieutenant as saying that some police were behind many of the assassinations of former Baath Party members that have taken place in Basra.

Looks as if Vincent exposed Basra's dirty little secret and paid for it with his life.

Here's what Michael Ledeen had to say about the news of Vincent's death at NRO's TheCorner

This is to mourn the murder of the free lance journalist Steven Vincent, a victim of the Sadrist thugs (that is to say, the Iranian-sponsored terrorists) in Basra. His crime was to have written about the fanatics in Basra, who are attempting to create a mini-islamic republic in the south, to the shameful indifference of the British forces and Coalition commanders, and the so-called Left in this country and Europe. If there is ever a day of reckoning, those opinion makers who have remained silent in the face of the monstrous terrorist campaign against the Iraqi people will find it quite impossible to explain their de facto collusion with the terrorists.

Ominous news indeed.
My prayers go out to the family and friends of Mr. Vincent who was a crack reporter on the Iraqi war front, writing both a book and a blog.

As for Basra, are British soldiers turning a blind eye to Islamist jihadi violence and oppression in Iraq in the same way that their fellow countrymen are willing to overlook similar terrorist activities back at home, in the name of multicultural "comity?"
I'm worried that this bodes ill for the new Iraqi constitution and government, if fundamentalist Shi'ites begin to dominate not just the Basra scene, but that of the whole country.
While the Shi'a are in the majority, there still remain the Kurds and the Sunni (and a few Christians and Jews and perhaps even atheists).
We didn't liberate Iraq to have it become a clone of the mullah theocracy in Iran!
Iraq's Shi'a need to remember what it felt like under Saddam when they were the oppressed "minority."
And I thought we'd taken care of Muktada al-Sadr!
Isn't he still wanted for murder in Iraq?
We've worried for years now about the terrorists being inspired by Al-Jazeera...now we find out they read the Gray Lady.
Strange, horrible days indeed.