Posted on 04/06/2004 6:22:06 PM PDT by Ernest_at_the_Beach
NAJAF, Iraq (AP) -
Insurgents and rebellious Shiites mounted a string of attacks across Iraq's south and U.S. Marines launched a major assault on the turbulent city of Fallujah on Tuesday. Up to a dozen Marines, two more coalition soldiers and at least 66 Iraqis were reported killed.
Reports from the city of Ramadi, near Fallujah, said dozens of Iraqis attacked a Marine position near the governor's palace, a senior defense official said from Washington. "A significant number" of Marines were killed, and initial reports indicate it may be up to a dozen, said the official, speaking on condition of anonymity.
U.S. authorities also launched a crackdown on radical Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr al-Sadr and his militia after a series of weekend uprisings in Baghdad and cities and towns to the south that took a heavy toll in both American and Iraqi lives. The fighting marks the first major outbreak of violence between the U.S.-led occupation force and the Shiites since Baghdad fell a year ago.
Two more coalition soldiers - an American in Baghdad and a Ukrainian in Kut - were killed in fighting. The deaths brought the three-day total to up to about 30 Americans and 136 Iraqis killed in the worst fighting since the war that toppled Saddam Hussein.
In the Ramadi fighting, heavy casualties were inflicted on the insurgents as well, officials said. It was not immediately known who the attackers were, nor whether the attack was related to fighting under way in nearby Fallujah.
On the Fallujah front, Marines drove into the center of the Sunni city in heavy fighting before pulling back before nightfall. The assault had been promised after the brutal killings and mutilations of four American civilians there last week. Hospital officials said eight Iraqis died Tuesday and 20 were wounded, including women and children.
U.S. warplanes firing rockets destroyed four houses in Fallujah after nightfall Tuesday, witnesses said. A doctor said 26 Iraqis, including women and children, were killed and 30 wounded in the strike. The deaths brought to 34 the number of Iraqis killed in Fallujah on Tuesday, including eight who died in street battles earlier in the day.
The dusty, Euphrates River city 35 miles west of Baghdad is a stronghold of the anti-U.S. insurgency that sprang up shortly after Saddam's ouster a year ago.
With fighting intensifying ahead of the June 30 handover of power to an Iraqi government, Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld said American commanders in Iraq would get additional troops if needed. None has asked so far, he said.
State Department deputy spokesman Adam Ereli said al-Sadr and his followers were not representative of a religious cause but of "political gangsterism."
The 30-year-old al-Sadr, however, does not have a large following among majority Shiites - many see him as a renegade, too young and too headstrong to lead wisely.
"They're not acting in the name of religion, they're acting in the name of arrogating for themselves political power and influence through violence, because they can't get it through peaceful persuasion," he said.
Five Marines were killed Monday - one in Fallujah and the others on the western outskirts of Baghdad. A U.S. soldier was killed in Baghdad Tuesday, a day after two more were killed there. On Sunday, two soldiers were killed in Kirkuk and Mosul. Excluding the report out of Ramadi on Tuesday evening, at least 614 American troops have died in Iraq since the war began.
Marines waged a fierce battle for hours Tuesday with gunmen holed up in a residential neighborhood of Fallujah. The military used a deadly AC-130 gunship to lay down a barrage of fire against guerrillas, and commanders said Marines were holding an area several blocks deep inside the city. At least two Marines were wounded.
The crackdown on al-Sadr, who has drawn backing from young and impoverished Shiites with rousing sermons demanding a U.S. withdrawal, sent his black-garbed militiamen against coalition troops Sunday, Monday and Tuesday.
Fighting in the southern cities of Nasiriyah, Kut, Karbala and Amarah and in a northern Baghdad neighborhood killed 30 Iraqis, coalition military officials said. Tuesday evening, gunfire was heard in another part of Baghdad, Sadr City, where fierce battles occurred Sunday, residents said.
Fearing a U.S. move to arrest him, al-Sadr on Tuesday left a fortress-like mosque in the city of Kufa, south of Baghdad, where he had been holed up for days, his aides said.
Al-Sadr issued a statement saying he was ready to die to oust the Americans. He urged his followers to resist foreign forces.
"America has shown its evil intentions, and the proud Iraqi people cannot accept it. They must defend their rights by any means they see fit," the al-Sadr statement said.
"I'm prepared to have my own blood shed for what is holy to me," he said.
Al-Sadr moved to his main office in Najaf, in an alley near the city's holiest shrine, according to a top aide, Sheik Qays al-Khaz'ali. Hundreds of militiamen were protecting the office Tuesday, but there was no independent confirmation al-Sadr was there.
Perhaps more worrisome than the current fight with al-Sadr's forces is the possibility that he will start drawing support from more mainstream Shiite leaders who have largely supported the Americans until now.
The U.S.-led coalition announced a murder warrant against al-Sadr on Monday and suggested it would move to capture him soon. U.S. officials would not explain why they were only releasing word of the warrant Monday. They said an unnamed Iraqi judge had issued it in the past months.
Still, the heavy battles over the past three days showed that even with limited backing, al-Sadr's al-Mahdi Army militia is capable of a damaging fight.
The militiamen clashed with coalition troops Sunday in Baghdad and outside Najaf in fierce fighting that killed 61 people, including eight American soldiers.
In Nasiriyah on Tuesday, 15 Iraqis were killed and 35 wounded in clashes between militiamen and Italian troops, coalition spokeswoman Paola Della Casa told an Italian news agency Apcom. Eleven Italians troops were slightly wounded.
Della Casa said the Iraqi attackers used civilians as human shields, and a woman and two children were among the dead.
Fighting overnight in Amarah between al-Sadr's followers and British troops killed 15 Iraqis and wounded eight, said coalition spokesman Wun Hornbyckle.
In Kut, militiamen attacked an armored personnel carrier carrying Ukrainian soldiers, killing one and wounding five, the Ukrainian Defense Ministry said. Two militiamen were killed in the fight. Ukraine has about 1,650 troops in Iraq.
U.S. Marines encircled Fallujah early Monday, and on Tuesday, they penetrated several central neighborhoods for the first time. Mortar and rocket-propelled grenade blasts were heard, and one witness said a Humvee was ablaze.
Heavy fighting also occurred between Marines entrenched in the desert and guerrillas firing from houses on Fallujah's northeast outskirts. For hours into the night, the sides traded fire, while teams of Marines moved in and out of the neighborhood, seizing buildings to use as posts and battling gunmen. Helicopters weaved overhead, firing at guerrilla hide-outs.
"We are several blocks deep in the city of Fallujah," Marine Maj. Briandon McGolwan said. He said several helicopters were hit by small arms fire, but none were downed. He said Marines had detained 14 people since Monday.
L. Paul Bremer, the top civilian administrator in Iraq, conceded not all was going smoothly as the coalition approached the June 30 handover, a date he said was inviolable.
"We have problems, there's no hiding that. But basically Iraq is on track to realize the kind of Iraq that Iraqis want and Americans want, which is a democratic Iraq," he said on ABC's "Good Morning America."
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Associated Press reporters Bassem Mroue and Lourdes Navarro contributed to this report from Fallujah.
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"A nation can survive its fools, and even the ambitious.But it cannot survive treason from within. An enemy at the gates is less formidable, for he is known, and he carries his banners openly. But the traitor moves among those within the gates freely, his sly whispers rustling through all the alleys, heard in the very hall of government itself. For the traitor appears no traitor. He speaks in the accents familiar to his victims, and he wears their face and their garments, and he appeals to the baseness that lies deep in hearts of men. He rots the soul of a nation. He works secretly and unknown in the night to undermine the pillars of a city. He infects the body politic so that it can no longer resist. A Murderer Is Less To Be Feared." - Cicero, 42 B.C.
It's evident you don't know what your'e talking about. Either that or you're an enemy of America. Why does your tagline says you're "Sin Patria?" Didn't you also mention on another thread that English is your second language? If you are an American with alligiance to it, why would you say that you're "sin patria" (a man without a country) and consider English as a second language?
You're anti-American agenda is crystal clear.
Vamos, Luis, diganos las verdad.
LOL....And turn the whole country into a pirates of the Caribbean theme park.
I think that the Federal agencies charged with patrolling the borders, and handling matters of immigration should do their jobs, and that we should supply and expand their ranks as much as we need to.
And I believe that the Armed Forces should be serious butt wherever they have to go to fight this war.
I don't know if you're not understanding me or just ignoring what I write.
"Al Qaeda" per se was never the problem. "Saddam" per se was never the problem. If "Al Qaeda" were to vanish tomorrow - but be REPLACED by an EQUIVALENT terror organization - we'd have to fight against THAT too.
Similarly, while Saddam has vanish, if he were REPLACED by an EQUIVALENT expansionist dictator - we have to fight against that too.
This is because we don't want there to be an expansionist dictator ruling Iraq any longer. It's not, and was NEVER, that we don't want guys named "Saddam Hussein" ruling Iraq. It's the fact that he was an expansionist WMD-using dictator which was the problem. Hence, to oust him just to see him replaced by *another* expansionist WMD-using dictator would be, uh, bad.
That's why we have to fight against these street gangs, cuz that's what they're trying to do.
Understand yet?
So what are you suggesting? That all of these Iraq friends of ours can't fight their own battles?
As of now, that appears to be the case - they appear unable or unwilling to fight their own battles, or to recognize that they *are* their own battles. Believe me, I'm plenty ticked at any cowardly or mob-following Iraqi so-called "men" who sit there on TV cameras saying "I'm glad the US is here, I don't want them to leave, I didn't like Saddam, and I don't support Sadr", yet won't lift a damn FINGER to fight against these hoodlums, and is even too peeing in his pants to leave his own al Jazeera-hooked-up apartment and take control of his own damn neighborhood, relinquishing control of it to this or that smalltime gang of hoodlums or brainwashed mullah followers.
Yes, it appears to be the case that Iraqians won't fight this battle of theirs. So we will have to do it for them.
Because, again, we do not wish to see an expansionist dictator come to rule Iraq. That would be bad FOR US. So, we are not going to allow it. If Iraqis are too pansy-assed and cowed, or brainwashed and tribally-bigoted, to prevent it, we will have to. Yes.
If there are only a few bad guy terrorist there, what's the problem?
The problem is not the raw # of terrorists on the ground in Iraq. My goodness. That is not the problem at all. Please.
The problem is that Iraq is a vast nation-state in a key strategic region. If some power-hungry megalomaniac were squatting on it, exerting an autocratic control over the population, he can build up his wealth quite fast (due to oil). That wealth can be used to raise armies and invade neighbors (as Saddam did), and to develop WMDs (as Saddam did).
This is what we had to prevent Saddam from doing, and it wouldn't be any better if a guy not named 'Saddam' were doing it, would it?
And if you are right, does that mean we never leave?
We will not be leaving for quite some time, it seems to me. Not "never" but at least 10 years. At least. We still have troops in Germany, come to think of it.
Why can't we just supply arms to our good Iraq friends?
I think we have tried to do that to some extent. A reason not to do that, and then just pick up and leave, is, I think, that we don't trust them not to blow it yet. We don't trust them not to use those arms in the service of some maniac. Neither do we fully trust them to use those arms *against* a maniac who is strong-willed and fearsome enough, who is of their tribe and cloaks his powerlust in words they find "holy". For many Iraqis there is a reluctance or fear, it seems, to shoot a "holy" man or men who is "their own kind" or seems crazy-nuts-violent or both; the temptation is to acquiesce, make nice, nod heads, bow down, and so we don't trust them to stand up for their own freedom and their own civil society.
At least I don't quite trust them. And neither do you, right? So what are you arguing against?
I think we have tried to do that to some extent.
Well hell Doc, you think maybe would should have given them a bigger gun?
A reason not to do that, and then just pick up and leave, is, I think, that we don't trust them not to blow it yet.
So the reason we are afraid to give our good friends the iraqis arms to fight for their own damn country, is that they'll blow it?
LOL!
Good one Doc!
So I take it from your above statement that you're not an American citizen? Let me guess: you're a permanent resident?
"Are the people who attacked us in the Middle East, or the Southwestern border?"
I think you asked the wrong question. The question should have been: Are the people who are invading us in the Middle East, or the Southwestern border?"
Nay! He's a leftist in Conservative feathers, as are all neocons.
I was wondering what his tag line meant. Thanks for clearing that up. Yes, "a man without a country" fits in well with his consistent Anti-American agenda that we see everyday on FR. Some immigrants don't assimilate too well I guess.
You are comparing this to World War II? Please.
Get with the program already, unless you and your idealogical breathren want your granddaughters wearing burquas and all of your descendants speaking Arabic.
To late, our government is already doing that for us.
____________________________________________________
Middle Easterners Streaming Into Texas:
The HoustonChronicle.com ^ | August 2002 | Edward Hegstrom Middle Easterners streaming to Texas
By EDWARD HEGSTROM Copyright 2002 Houston Chronicle Texas has one of the nation's fastest-growing Middle Eastern populations, and most of the state's immigrants live in Houston, according to a study based on census data.
Researchers at the Center for Immigration Studies say Texas' Middle Eastern population more than doubled in the last decade, to just over 100,000, including more than 52,000 in Greater Houston.
______________________________________________________ And compound this by *millions* of illegal aliens, from Lord knows where, and a Republican Governor of Florida that just called for the support of illegal aliens and is in support of giving these criminals legitimate drivers licenses.
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