Posted on 09/13/2005 2:52:18 PM PDT by jmc1969
WASHINGTON -- A U.S. Army commander asserted Tuesday that extremist fighters in northern Iraq committed atrocities against civilians, including beheadings, torture and the booby-trapping of a murdered child's body.
"The enemy here did just the most horrible things you can imagine _ in one case murdering a child, placing a booby trap within the child's body and waiting for the parent to come recover the body of their child and exploding it to kill the parents; beheadings and so forth," McMaster said in an interview from Tal Afar with reporters at the Pentagon.
His comments came two days after the al-Qaida leader in Iraq, Abu-Musab al-Zarqawi, purportedly accused American forces of using poison gas in the Tal Afar fighting, a charge that U.S. officials have denied. The accusation was made in an audiotape posted on the Internet on Sunday and attributed to al-Zarqawi.
McMaster alluded to that accusation and said he believed the insurgents had planned to detonate chemicals in a building in a residential area and then claim that U.S. forces had employed poison gas against civilians.
"In one of these buildings the enemy had big barrels of chemicals that had explosives implanted in the chemicals, wires running around them. The whole house was rigged for demolition," he said.
When U.S. troops went into the house, "immediately their eyes began burning, their throats began burning. So they withdrew out of the house immediately and then we conducted reconnaissance with some chemical protective gear, with a remote reconnaissance capability, into the house. And we could tell that the thing was rigged with chemicals."
McMaster also said U.S. troops found manuals that described how to make "these kind of chemical dirty bombs and so forth."
(Excerpt) Read more at washingtonpost.com ...
"His comments came two days after the al-Qaida leader in Iraq, Abu-Musab al-Zarqawi, purportedly accused American forces of using poison gas in the Tal Afar fighting..."
How about the rat bomb, the sex bomb, and the halitosis bomb? That would be fun. Fregards....
The AP better be careful how it slanders the friends of the American left. /sarc
"I wonder why they are called journalists..."
They want to 'make a better world' and say all the 'right things'.
bump!
So there is not a cult of Netscape Navigator browser worshipers?
You must remember. It's America's fault.
This is a parallel to the Nazis in WWII. On multiple occasions, the Nazis would bomb a German school or church in an effort to whip up anger against the Allies. Evil is always evil.
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