Posted on 07/15/2007 10:20:45 AM PDT by Ooh-Ah
Sunni extremists from Saudi Arabia make up half the foreign fighters in Iraq, many suicide bombers, a U.S. official says.
BAGHDAD — Although Bush administration officials have frequently lashed out at Syria and Iran, accusing it of helping insurgents and militias here, the largest number of foreign fighters and suicide bombers in Iraq come from a third neighbor, Saudi Arabia, according to a senior U.S. military officer and Iraqi lawmakers.
About 45% of all foreign militants targeting U.S. troops and Iraqi civilians and security forces are from Saudi Arabia; 15% are from Syria and Lebanon; and 10% are from North Africa, according to official U.S. military figures made available to The Times by the senior officer. Nearly half of the 135 foreigners in U.S. detention facilities in Iraq are Saudis, he said.
Fighters from Saudi Arabia are thought to have carried out more suicide bombings than those of any other nationality, said the senior U.S. officer, who spoke on condition of anonymity because of the subject's sensitivity. It is apparently the first time a U.S. official has given such a breakdown on the role played by Saudi nationals in Iraq's Sunni Arab insurgency.
He said 50% of all Saudi fighters in Iraq come here as suicide bombers. In the last six months, such bombings have killed or injured 4,000 Iraqis.
(Excerpt) Read more at chicagotribune.com ...
This isn’t news. Everyone knows that the Saudis dump their fanatics in Iraq, which
1) gets them out of Saudi; and
2) keeps the US entangled in Iraq so that we can’t meddle in Saudi and perhaps spread democracy there also.
The Saudis are out for themselves, no matter their protestations otherwise...
Just further evidence that if it they are Islamic, they are no friend of ours. Lest we forget the country of origin of most of the 9-11 hijackers...
To add to your 2nd point, I have never thought the countries surrounding Iraq would let a democracy succeed—it’s too threatening.
The Wahabi clerics in Saudi Arabia (whom the royals must support or face a civil war - civil war even within and among the royals themselves) preach in a manner that creates the terrorist cannon fodder of mush-for-brains Saudi youth who, due the hatred bred into them by the Wahabi, are ripe for recruitment by Al Queda and others.
And who underwrites most of the fundamentalist madrassas in Pakistan, from which both Al Queda and the Taliban draw recruits? Saudi Arabia.
Congressman Billybob
A Judge Sympathetic to U.S. Frees 19 of Its Enemies; Islamic Law Allows Jihad
WSJ August 14, 2006
...a Yemeni judge, sitting on the state's special terrorism court, ruled that 19 defendants who had traveled to Iraq to kill American soldiers and fight alongside al Qaeda there had done nothing wrong. The defendants -- 14 Yemenis and five Saudis who had been caught with guns and fake Iraqi passports -- made no attempt to deny their connection to al Qaeda in Iraq. They openly praised Osama bin Laden, and bore wounds from fighting American and Iraqi troops....
His argument: "Islamic Sharia law permits jihad against occupiers" of Muslim lands....
Yet Judge al-Baadani says that he couldn't have ruled any differently. Yemeni law -- a mixture of British colonial law, local ordinances and Islamic Sharia law -- is murky on the subject of when it is permissible for Yemenis to take up arms with fellow Muslims. The country also has a long history of allowing its young men to go off to fight alongside fellow Muslims battling foreign forces in places like Afghanistan, Bosnia and Chechnya. For many Yemenis, jihad against foreign occupiers is an Islamic duty.
Our government is too afraid of “offending” leftists and muslims. War on Terror, my ass.
I tend to agree, Bush and so many others are in bed with the Saudi scumbags that it does seem to make a bad, sick joke of it all. People have been - and will continue to be - harmed by it.
there's a Chinese proverb that makes a lot of sense:
"The first step on the path to wisdom is to call things by their proper name".
Saudi and Iraqi and Jordanian are only labels of general description. Arabic and tribal affiliation are all that matter to them.
Westerners will have an easier time understanding the conflict by realizing it is an ethnic-cleansing, sub-racial, sectarian regional total war pitting one sub-society coalition against another. With those coalitions changing from day to day.
It is easily the most complex struggle in history. Our military will only be able to pacify those areas that not mixed. Even homogeneous societies such as Basra are now in conflict between shia warlords.
Split them all up, segregate them all and put up fences. They don't play well with others.
Lastly, they are all generally too busy exterminating each other to export terror to us. We have to neutralize Pakistan, particularly the NW tribal areas to minimize the threat to our homelands.
Bump
Amazing how ignorant Conservatives are of anything outside their own trailer park.
MOST of the people fighting and dying on OUR side are Muslims.
Sorry unless the "Journalists" source goes on the record these days, this should be treated as rumor. Considering we had two front page stories from the NY Times this month claiming the WH was going wobbly on Gitmo and Iraq that turned out to be just more lies, Conservatives should be really suspicious of anything the PC Media claims that cannot be verified by credible sources.
Yeah, we all don't have the luxury of living in Karl Rove's home like you do.
Thanks for outing yourself as an elitist doing the RNC's dirty work.
The problem here is with an "unnamed source" you have no idea if the source exists, if the reporter is honestly reporting the facts OR if the source did not simply lie to the reporter to advance their own political agenda.
More often then not these "unnamed sources" have been prove to be lies. That one of the reason Rush Limbaugh calls them the "Drive By Media". They drive up, spray the target with a bunch of rumor and accusation and then speed off while all the Dinocon drones in the "Conservative" movement go into hysterics at their own side based wholly on false or misleading accusations.
The Drive By media has been prove liars on hundreds of these “anonymous source” articles. How many times are the 100%ers going to blindly rise to the bait spewed forth by the Politically Corrupt Media before they wise up?
Given the track record of the source here, it would be wise for “Conservatives” to be as cynical about this sort of political advertising as they would be about any other form of marketing.
This isn’t your daddy’s “news media”. They are wholly politically corrupt. The only difference between them and Talk Radio is Talk Radio at least comes right out and lets you know their agenda, these clowns merely lie about theirs. As Ronaldus Mangus once said "Trust but Verify".
Leaders in Saudi states have occasionally mentioned intents to send their Sunnis to fight the prevailing Shiites in Iraq.
"About 160 Saudi nationals arrested in Iraq have been tried while hundreds of others await trial," Iraq's national security adviser Muwaffaq Al Rubaie told the Okaz daily in Saudi Arabia.
"Many were killed in suicide attacks," he said, claiming that foreign militants infiltrate Iraq "from a neighbouring country," in an apparent reference to Syria.
Al Rubaie's statements concided with a Los Angeles Times report that said 45 per cent of foreign militants fighting US and Iraqi troops came from Saudi Arabia. The report said nearly half of the 135 foreigners in US detention facilities in Iraq are Saudis, and that 50 per cent of them are suicide bombers.
http://archive.gulfnews.com/region/Iraq/10139635.html
“Foreign fighters” need to be shot on the spot and disposed of immediately.
The Kingdom is the world’s biggest broodery of lunatics, thanks to the infusion of petrodollars and the Wahhabist insanity they practise there.
We need to insist that Saudis shape up their policies
(http://www.suntimes.com/news/huntley/490408,CST-EDT-HUNT31.article)
July 31, 2007
STEVE HUNTLEY shuntley@suntimes.com
President Bush wants to shower billions of dollars in sophisticated military goodies on Saudi Arabia. Can anyone explain why this is a good idea?
The stated purpose of the $20 billion worth of fighter aircraft upgrades, precision missile technology and new warships is to bolster the military capability of Saudi Arabia and several other Sunni Arab nations to confront the hegemonic ambitions of Shiite Iran. And as far as that goes, the Bush plan seems to make sense.
The trouble is that Saudi Arabia has failed time and again when asked to play a constructive role in the crisis-prone Middle East.
Only last week the New York Times, quoting various sources, reported a laundry list of Saudi meddling in Iraq: offering financial support for Sunni tribes, trying to get other Persian Gulf states to do the same, passing forged documents falsely portraying Iraqi Shiite leaders as tools of Iran, and doing nothing to stop Saudis from traveling to Iraq to join the bloodletting. Nearly half of foreign fighters in Iraq are Saudis and they make up the majority of the suicide bombers.
All that takes place under the radar screen, but the royal family in Riyadh hasn’t been shy about publicly pouring gas on the tinderbox emotions in the Arab street. In April, King Abdullah denounced the U.S. intervention in Iraq as “an illegal foreign occupation.”
And let’s not forget that 15 of the 19 hijackers on 9/11 were Saudis. Since then, Riyadh has cracked down on some of the worse jihadists within its borders, meaning those who joined al-Qaida in attacking targets in Saudi Arabia. Saudi petro dollars continue to fund madrassas around the world, religious schools that often spew vitriolic hatred and rage against the West. And Wahhabism, an intolerant brand of Islamic fundamentalism that has been a wellspring of radicalism, is the state religion of Saudi Arabia.
Nor have the Saudis been agents for a peaceful resolution to the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. They like to parade the “Saudi initiative” on the world stage, but it has turned out to be little more than a desert mirage in the five years since King Abdullah, in an interview with a journalist, allowed that he had tucked away in his desk a solution to the conflict. His so-called solution claims a “right of return” to Israel for Palestinian refugees from the 1948-49 war and their descendants, a poison pill that would mean the demographic death of the Jewish state.
The Arab League supposedly has embraced this Saudi initiative and the foreign ministers of Egypt and Jordan, the only Arab states with diplomatic relations with Israel, traveled to Jerusalem last week to discuss that. Yet the League itself went out of its way to emphasize that the two officials were not actually representatives of the group.
All this history should be on the minds of Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and Defense Secretary Robert Gates as they meet with Arab leaders in the Middle East this week. The Saudis’ influential sway in oil pricing for years has had the United States tip-toeing around the misbehavior of Riyadh. That has to end.
It can be argued that the threat from Tehran means we don’t have much choice but to bolster Iran’s adversaries in every way. Maybe so. But for a change, we’ve got to get something in return for our military largess. The Saudis must be told it’s time for them to exert leadership and be a responsible citizen in the region. That means ceasing their troublemaking in Iraq and embracing in full President Bush’s call for the Arab world to end the fiction that Israel doesn’t exist.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.