Posted on 06/08/2006 8:25:54 AM PDT by neverdem
BAGHDAD, Iraq, June 8 — Al Qaeda's leader in Iraq, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, was killed in an American air strike on an isolated safe house north of Baghdad at 6.15 p.m. local time on Wednesday, top United States and Iraqi officials said today.
At a joint news conference with Iraq's prime minister, Nuri Kamal al-Maliki, the top American military commander in Iraq, Gen. George W. Casey Jr., said Zarqawi's body had been positively identified by fingerprints, "facial recognition" and "known scars." He said seven of Zarqawi's associates had also been killed in the strike.
The announcement of Zarqawi's death, shortly before noon today in Baghdad, appeared to mark a major watershed in the war. With a $25 million bounty the United States had on his head, the Jordan-born Zarqawi has been the most wanted man in Iraq for his leadership of Islamic terrorist groups that have carried out many of the most brutal attacks of the war, including scores of suicide bombings, kidnappings and beheadings.
"Today, we have managed to put an end to Zarqawi," said a beaming Mr. Maliki, who took office three weeks ago at the head of Iraq's first full-term government since the overthrow of Saddam Hussein. He said the death should be a...
--snip--
For Mr. Maliki, a Shiite, the killing of Mr. Zarqawi brought immediate political results in the form of parliamentary approval, immediately after the news conference, of Mr. Maliki's nominees for the vacant security posts in the cabinet, the ministers of defense, interior and national security. After the prime minister's repeated failures to win agreement of contending groups within the government on earlier nominees, he stood at the lectern in the Parliament chamber and presented the three men who emerged from weeks of overlapping vetoes by the main Sunni and Shiite political groups.
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
The Iraqi Minutemen have lost a leader:
The Iraqis who have risen up against the occupation are not "insurgents" or "terrorists" or "The Enemy." They are the REVOLUTION, the Minutemen, and their numbers will grow -- and they will win.
--Michael Moore, April 2004
Some media reports are asking about the other "victims" of this attack.
Anyone in Zarqawi's company was an accomplice.
You are with us or with the terrorists.
May he both rot, and burn, in hell.
Amen.
Michael Moore said that shortly before Nick Berg was decapitated (although he had already been kidnapped, so his kidnapping was NOT in retaliation for the Abu Ghraib media blitz).
Lumpy Riefenstahl has never apologized for his support for terrorists or taken them to task for the war crimes they commit.
Zarqawi's family say they cut ties with him some time ago yet in his death, they call him a martyr and say they hope to be reunited with him in heaven.
Important good news ping!
Too bad Michael Moore was too chicken to go over there and face Zarqawi, all by himself, in person. He would have lost his head, I am sure! Micheal Moore is a big fat liar.
God bless our brave soldiers, sailors, airmen, marines, etc etc etc GOOD JOB! God bless them all!
Typical...
Got you you son of a b!tch!
Reports have understandably been sketchy, so far, but as I presently understand it 7 associates were also killed, and two women (who were intelligence gatherers for Zarqawi) and possibly one child. Of course anyone who brings a child to a terrorist meeting is totally unaware of the possible consequences.
Am I the only one who thinks that "hosting" a Zarqawi meeting at your house is not something that happens randomly or by accident?
Why is FOX the only network to show the Iraqi's dancing in the streets. Oh, never mind.
"Lumpy Riefenstahl" - LOL!
Move on. org is probably in mourning over there. Sorry Murtha that we didn't read him his rights before we blew his @ss
This @ss hole is only a matyr to all the uneducated, unbathed adolescent fanatical muslum male youth in the world who have nothing else to do in their pathetic lives other than to lie, steal, beat their woman, listen to western music and masturbate to naked ladies.
Maybe it was "Bring a child to work" day in Iraq.
I personally wish they had mounted Zarqawi's severed head on a pike and then took the picture. My only regret would have been he wasn't alive when they used a dull rusty knife to cut his f'ing head off.
Michael Berg is upset that we didn't rehabilitate him with volunteer duty working in a hospital.
What if a liberal president decided that Free Republic members were "terrorists" and decided to target them with the same action? I certainly do not trust the government to make those kinds of decisions.
:) Flame away... :)
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