Posted on 11/23/2003 1:27:33 PM PST by areafiftyone
MOSUL, Iraq - Iraqi teenagers dragged the bloody bodies of two American soldiers from a wrecked vehicle and pummeled them with concrete blocks Sunday, witnesses said, describing a burst of savagery in a city once safe for Americans. Another soldier was killed by a bomb and a U.S.-allied police chief was assassinated.
The U.S.-led coalition also said it grounded commercial flights after the military confirmed that a missile struck a DHL cargo plane that landed Saturday at Baghdad International Airport with its wing aflame.
Nevertheless, American officers insisted they were making progress in bringing stability to Iraq (news - web sites), and the U.S.-appointed Governing Council named an ambassador to Washington — an Iraqi-American woman who spent the last decade lobbying U.S. lawmakers to promote democracy in her homeland.
Witnesses to the Mosul attack said gunmen shot two soldiers driving through the city center, sending their vehicle crashing into a wall. The 101st Airborne Division said the soldiers were driving to another garrison.
About a dozen swarming teenagers dragged the soldiers' bodies out of the wreckage and beat them with concrete blocks, the witnesses said.
"They lifted a block and hit them with it on the face," Younis Mahmoud, 19, said.
Another teenager, Bahaa Jassim, said some looted the vehicle of weapons, CDs and a backpack.
"They remained there for over an hour without the Americans knowing anything about it," he said. "I ... went and told other troops."
Television video showed the soldiers' bodies splayed on the ground as U.S. troops secured the area. One victim's foot appeared to have been severed.
The frenzy recalled the October 1993 scene in Somalia, when locals dragged the bodies of Marines killed in fighting with warlords through the streets.
In Baqouba, just north of Baghdad, insurgents detonated a roadside bomb as a 4th Infantry Division convoy passed, killing one soldier and wounding two others, the military said.
In Baghdad, Brig. Gen. Mark Kimmitt confirmed the Mosul deaths but refused to provide details.
"We're not going to get ghoulish about it," he said.
The savagery of the attack was unusual for Mosul, once touted as a success story in sharp contrast to the anti-American violence seen in Sunni Muslim areas north and west of Baghdad.
In recent weeks, however, attacks against U.S. troops have increased in Mosul, raising concerns the insurgency is spreading.
Simultaneously, attacks have accelerated against Iraqis considered to be supporting Americans — such as policemen and politicians working for the interim Iraqi administration.
On Sunday, gunmen killed the Iraqi police chief of Latifiyah, 20 miles south of Baghdad, and his bodyguard and driver, American and Iraqi officials said. No further details were released.
The assassination occurred one day after suicide bombers struck two police stations northeast of Baghdad within 30 minutes, killing at least 14 people. Gunmen on Saturday also killed an Iraqi police colonel protecting oil installations in Mosul.
Elsewhere, Iraqi police said six U.S. Apache helicopter gunships blasted marshland after insurgents fired four rocket-propelled grenades at the American military garrison at the city's northern end. One Iraqi passer-by was killed in the air attack, police said.
In Kirkuk, 150 miles north of Baghdad, a bomb exploded at an oil compound, injuring three American civilian contractors from the U.S. firm Kellogg Brown & Root. The three suffered facial cuts from flying glass, U.S. Lt. Col. Matt Croke said.
KBR, a subsidiary of Halliburton, also has a significant presence at Baghdad's Palestine Hotel, which was rocketed by insurgents Friday, wounding one civilian.
"We all know that Americans are being threatened," Croke said.
Kimmitt told reporters in Baghdad that witnesses saw two surface-to-air missiles fired Saturday at a cargo plane operated by the Belgium-based package service DHL as it left for Bahrain.
The plane was the first civilian airliner hit by insurgents, who have shot down several military helicopters with shoulder-fired rockets.
DHL and Royal Jordanian, the only commercial passenger airline flying into Baghdad, immediately suspended flights on orders of the coalition authority.
Despite the ongoing violence, U.S. officials insisted the occupation was going well.
"If you look at the accomplishments of the coalition since March of this year, it has been enormous," Marine Gen. Peter Pace, vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said in Tikrit.
Pace is touring Afghanistan (news - web sites) and Iraq.
Also Sunday, Iraqi Foreign Minister Hoshyar Zebari said veteran Washington lobbyist Rend Rahim Francke was appointed Iraq's ambassador to the United States. Francke, an Iraq native who has spent most of her life abroad, led the Iraq Foundation, a Washington-based pro-democracy group, and has helped plan Iraq's transition from Saddam Hussein (news - web sites)'s rule.
The appointment will renew the diplomatic ties between Washington and Baghdad severed in 1990 when Saddam invaded Kuwait.
They do understand fear and fear is what we should be providing.
Absolutely - they should be executed.
I wish we had a hundred more like him in Congress.
We keep asking: WHEN ARE WE GOING TO GET SERIOUS, GET TOUGH IN IRAQ WITH THESE TERRORISTS?
Damn, our men and women KNOW what needs to be done, but politicians are holding them back, and that is getting them killed.
President Bush, TAKE THE TERRORISTS, AND THE TOWNS THAT HARBOR THEM, OUT NOW!!
Arabs in Iraq dragged the bloody bodies of two American soldiers from a damaged army vehicle and pummeled them to death with concrete blocks, Sunday, according to witnesses. The scene was one that many in Israel have seen one too many times.A crowd of Arab youths dragged the American soldiers' bodies out of the wreckage and beat them with concrete blocks, the witnesses said. "They lifted a block and hit them with it on the face," Younis Mahmoud, 19, said.
Another teenager, Bahaa Jassim, said some looted the vehicle of weapons, CDs and a backpack. "They remained there for over an hour without the Americans knowing anything about it," he said. "I ... went and told other troops."
Television video showed the soldiers' bodies sprawled on the ground as U.S. troops took control of the area. One victim's foot appeared to have been severed from his body.
The images are sending shockwaves across the US, but Israel has unfortunately had plenty of experience with Arab brutality. Almost two years ago, Ya'acov (Kobi) Mandell and Yosef (Yossi) Ish-Ran, both 14, were discovered inside the Haritun Cave in Nahal Tekoa, a few hundred meters from the community, with their heads smashed in by rocks. Local Arab shepherds had stumbled upon the boys as they hiked and brutally murdered them beyond recognition.
At the very beginning of the Oslo War, First Sgt. Vadim Norzhich and First Cpl. Yosef Avrahami, who had been called up for reserve army duty as drivers only a few days before, were apprehended by Palestinian police after they mistakenly entered PA-controlled Ramallah. They were brought to PA police headquarters in the center of town, where a violent mob of Palestinians stormed the building and tortured the soldiers to death, mutilating and defiling their bodies beyond recognition.
A gleeful Arab man displayed his bloodied hands from the window of the police station and was caught on camera and has become a symbol of opposition to the establishment of a Palestinian terror-state.
(It was the Lynching at Ramallah when the Intifada first began. The pictures are just as horrible. But the minds that could DO this are beyond redemption.)
I concur with your observation that the hit was professionally staged. Let me add that the teenagers, much like many of their parents in the AO, can be bought off for a price and followed a script.
It is a callous propaganda effort to demonstrate how much we are hated.
Good idea..
I would courtmarshall the mindless middle level supply officers who decide to send a jeep "to a different garrison" and then don't check up on it for an hour, or the mindless who-ever that put the chinooks up in the air without assuming that the Iraq/Al_Qaeda will try to shoot them out of the sky. I find it insane that instead they courtmarshall an officer that uses an only slightly stronger techniques than used by police interrogators all over the US...
Sad to say we are seeing a form of Darwinian selection going on in Iraq -- soldiers who do not take where they are seriously enough probably won't make it back. I just hope the higher ups are smart enough to take middle lever officers who make stupid decisions out of the picture as well before they manuever more able soldiers into harms way...
unfortunately, i suspect there are a lot of clueless PC Clinton era middle level turkeys to weed out, and not much time to do it in...
Either that or(perhaps in addition) the Iraqis have a more sophisticated intelligence apparatus than we think they do. Very relatively speaking, yes, they are barbaric. But Iraq is not Afghanistan--it is nothing like it. It is a sophisticated country that used to have sophisticated weaponry. Its citizens are, for the most part, well educated. Many were reduced to poverty and ignorance under the dictatorship.
Maybe they need to look at tactics from centuries ago to make this thing work. The Romans had a culture of death, a matter-of-fact cruelty, and absolute obedience to end recalcitrance. We can't be Romans. We can be better versed on the historical tactics of warfare from the barbarians' views and stop thinking in conventional terms. I'm appalled at the carelessness. And this type of demoralizing murder plays well in the streets. I suppose the relentless march that we do is the best way, and actually that is quite Roman.
I agree with you that the military brass could do better. But I think there has to be a very new strategy--as I think you started to point out. This is a very new kind of situation that calls for a strategy appropriate to the mess we're in. The brass are going to have to be a lot more creative. Maybe this demands a strategy never before tried--though I'm no military expert and have no idea how to go about such a thing. But I do wonder why we didn't put together some substantial covert operations before launching such conventional war, and I don't mean the special ops that preceded the war by some months; I mean something very long-term. Maybe that was done and we don't know it, but such a thing might have been interesting to try.
If only the critics would SHUT UP and stop giving these people a reason to hope that we will cut and run.
There's no way we're going to cut and run; there's no way we could now. It would be nice to have some help from more nations though.
On the other hand...these miserable people are reduced to concrete and donkey carts.
Yes they are. And yes, they are miserable, in more ways than one (as you seem to suggest). Your post is very thought provoking.
God only knows what those soldiers were doing. Maybe you are right and the brass were careless, thinking that Mosul was secure and safe.
We have to be realistic here. We have removed a dictator, but we have bombed, shot up, and occupied a country. Our military brass are living in the palace of the former dictator. We have selected a council to govern that country. Some people in that country, if not most, are going to be VERY pissed off. I think that to deny this view is to be very naive. (I am not suggesting that you don't realize this.) But I wonder if some people just don't understand what is going on.
No disrespect but, I really don't think they have to learn it.
Nice class warfare driven nonsequitur Joe.
The politicians don't send their kids to serve in Iraq. Therefore there is no valid reason to be in Iraq.
You bet, the elite would absolutely agree with you.
They hate this type of comment or logic, and they run scared from any statements that include them in any risk taking or patriotism...
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