[BlackVeil]

I wondered when I first saw the story. Forty + seemed an awful lot of guerillas to be milling around together. Look at this bit:

Brigadier General Kimmitt also sought to play down earlier reports that many of the attackers wore the uniforms of the disbanded Saddam Fedayeen militia of the ousted regime.

There was an announcement that they had been dressed in black Fedayeen clothes. AlJezeera is claiming that a bus load of Iranian pilgrims got shot up. It is possible that they were there, because Samarra is the site of an important Shia shrine (to the occultation of the Twelfth Imam).

The Iranian pilgrims like to go dressed in black. Witnesses were waving around what were allegedly identity cards of Iranians. Time will tell.

[pierrem15]

In any case, both the moral and legal responsibility belongs to the irregulars who attacked our troops, not the other way around.

I'm beginning to think that Chalabi was right: we may need to treat some areas as the British did in the Boer War, and simply put all of them in internment camps until a new Iraqi government is firmly in place.

I'm not advocating killing them, but almost all I'm reading from Iraqis is that we're too soft on these guys.