Posted on 12/28/2004 8:05:10 AM PST by crushelits
TIKRIT, Iraq (Reuters) - Insurgents overran a police post near Saddam Hussein (news - web sites)'s home town on Tuesday, hauled 12 men outside and shot them in a dramatic show of force, a day after Osama bin Laden (news - web sites) declared holy war on the U.S.-backed election.
The dawn massacre in Tikrit, where the guerrillas also blew up the police station, was the bloodiest in a spate of attacks in Iraq (news - web sites)'s Sunni minority heartlands north of Baghdad; at least five other policemen were killed and several National Guards.
In Samarra, U.S. forces banned cars from the streets after an attack on a police station and two attacks on U.S. troops, residents and the U.S. military said. A suicide car bomber failed to assassinate a National Guard general in Baghdad.
The timing of the attacks and broadcast of the al Qaeda leader's audiotape seemed coincidental but together they racked up the pressure on Iraqi voters to stay at home on Jan. 30 and seemed aimed to instil fear in Iraq's new security forces.
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A seven year-old Iraqi girl cries near an armed guardsman after a car bomb exploded near her school in northern Baghdad, December 28, 2004. A car bomb targeting a senior officer in the U.S.-backed Iraqi National Guard killed one person and injured eight, witnesses and a police source said. |
Bin Laden's call for a boycott of the election and his endorsement of Islamist ally Abu Musab al-Zarqawi's campaign of bombing and kidnap will find few willing supporters in Iraq. But the threat of being killed will put many off voting anyway.
The most prominent party from Saddam's long dominant Sunni minority already pulled out of the election on Monday, saying violence in Sunni areas meant the vote could not be fair.
The chances have risen that an assembly will be elected that gives Shi'ites an exaggerated majority, and so finds little legitimacy among Sunnis. That will upset Washington's hopes for a representative government that can handle its own security.
Security may also have to remain in U.S. hands if Iraqi forces succumb to the relentless intimidation of the insurgents.
EXECUTION-STYLE KILLINGS
Hours after the purported bin Laden audiotape was broadcast on Al Jazeera television, calling anyone who voted an "infidel," gunmen swarmed over the Mukashifa police compound, just south of Tikrit, after dawn, police and a U.S. military spokesman said.
Rounding up the dozen officers in the compound, they shot them execution-style, gunning down one who tried to flee, a police source told Reuters. They then blew up the station.
Five other policemen were killed in four other attacks south of Tikrit around the same time. At Baquba, northeast of Baghdad, a suicide car bomber killed five people and wounded 22, most of them National Guards attending the scene of an earlier bomb.
"Jihad in Iraq is a duty and shirking it is baseless," a voice, apparently bin Laden's, said, calling also for financial contributions to flow in to back Zarqawi's al Qaeda operations.
"Happy is he who takes part in this war with his wealth or his body," he said. "As ... the expenses of al Qaeda in Iraq are 200,000 euros ($272,800) a week, not counting the expense of other groups."
At Samarra, where clashes have resumed since a major U.S. offensive in October, two civilians died and eight were wounded when a suicide car bomber hit a U.S. convoy, witnesses said.
A U.S. spokesman said four soldiers were slightly hurt. Troops also killed three gunmen who attacked them in the city earlier. A policeman was killed and four wounded when rebels then attacked a police station in broad daylight. U.S. vehicles and mosque minarets ordered cars off the streets for the day.
At Sineeya, near the northern oil refining town of Baiji, the town council resigned after the assassination of its leader.
POWELL CAUTION
The day's bloodshed was a reminder of the potency of the alliance between international Sunni Islamists, like Zarqawi and Iraqi nationalists from the 20-percent Sunni Arab minority, who see elections handing power to the 60-percent Shi'ite community.
If Sunni areas fail to vote, Secretary of State Colin Powell (news - web sites) said the resulting assembly should at least give a nod to the Sunni minority when it appoints a new government: "For the government to be representative and for the government to be effective, the transitional national assembly would certainly have to take into account the ethnic mix," Powell said.
U.S. officials, including Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld on a Christmas visit to soldiers in Iraq last week, stress the need to expand and improve Iraq's security forces as a means of ensuring U.S. troops, now numbering 150,000, can go home.
But the performance of Iraqi forces has been patchy and they are prone to infiltration by militants like the suicide bomber who killed 21 people in a U.S. mess hall in Mosul a week ago -- the bloodiest single incident of the war for the Americans.
(Additional reporting by Sabah al-Bazee in Samarra, Faris al-Mehdawi in Baquba and Khaled Yacoub Oweis and Alastair Macdonald in Baghdad)
Why don't these police ever shoot back?
Why would any Iraqi ever surrender to these terrorists? Better to fight to the death than be slaughtered like pigs...
There is no way to tell if the police shot back or not. These are carefully planned raids by terrorists/insurgents; if they did not outgun and outman the police, they would not bother to attack. The story, as are most of them, is written by Reuters. They are a mouthpiece for anti-Americanism and victory for jihad in Iraq, or anywhere, against America. To accept their version is to accept that all of Iraq is against us, Saddam was an okay guy, etc. Get real. The truth is not rosy, but it is not nearly as bad as Reuters portrays in every one of their blankety-blank stories.
I dont know much about Iraq, but its hard for me to undestand why the police dont have fewer police stations that can be well-guarded, it seem like anytime they want the terrorists can take a police station.
Most of the time they are out gunned and out numbered. What they need to do is over run Al Jezzera and start executing reporters for broadcasting this crap and send a message to them. You support them, you'll die like them.
I would hope that none of these policemen died with a gun that wasn't empty.
Level Tikrit
Level Mosul
Level Fallujah
Turn guns on Tehran and Damascus
Rinse and repeat
Agreed, you can't trust or believe anything from Reuters. I would trust Weekly World News to be more accurate.
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