Posted on 01/28/2007 7:03:38 PM PST by Ernest_at_the_Beach
BAGHDAD, Jan. 28 — Iraqi forces backed by American helicopters and tanks battled hundreds of gunmen hiding in a date palm orchard near the southern city of Najaf on Sunday, exchanging fire for 15 hours in what appeared to be one of deadliest battles in years, Iraqi officials said.
An American helicopter was shot down and 250 bodies were found where the clashes occurred near the village of Zarqaa, about 120 miles south of Baghdad, by a river and a large grain silo that is surrounded by orchards, the Iraqi officials said.
Col. Ali Numaas, a spokesman for the Iraqi security forces in Najaf, said that the fighting stopped just after 10 p.m. local time and that most of those killed were gunmen. An employee at a local morgue said at least two Iraqi policemen were among the dead.
The United States military confirmed in a statement that the helicopter went down, that two soldiers aboard were killed, and that their bodies had been recovered. The crash is under investigation.
Asad Abu Ghalal, the governor of Najaf Province, said that the fighters in the orchard were Iraqi and foreign, some wearing the brown, white and maroon regalia of Pakistani and Afghan fighters. He said they had come to assassinate Shiite clerics and attack religious convoys that are gathering in Najaf, one of Shiite Islam’s holiest cities, and other southern cities for Ashura, a Shiite holiday that starts Monday night and runs through Tuesday morning.
At a news conference Sunday afternoon, he said they called themselves “soldiers of heaven” and seemed to be part of a wider effort to disrupt Ashura. The holiday commemorates the seventh-century death of the Prophet Muhammad’s grandson Hussein in a battle at Karbala, where hundreds of thousands of pilgrims have already started gathering.
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
Constitutional Authority to Attack Iran
******************************AN EXCERPT *************************************
By Henry Mark Holzer
FrontPageMagazine.com | January 26, 2007
In President Bush’s recent speech announcing his troop buildup, he promised to interrupt the “flow of support” running from Iran to their surrogate killers in Iraq. Even though the president’s inner circle and speechwriters chose his words carefully, there is necessarily an unmistakable meaning to what he said.
American forces and intelligence agencies have long known that there is a pipeline of fighters, materiel, and money flowing from Iran to the killers on the ground throughout Iraq. This is what the president meant by “flow of support.” And it is this pipeline that he has vowed to “interrupt.” Predictably, those who want to see America’s nose bloodied in Iraq even more than it has been already reacted quickly. Senator Joseph Biden, for example, warned the Secretary of State that an attack on Iran would “generate a constitutional confrontation in the Senate,” whatever that obvious threat was supposed to mean. Members of both parties in the House of Representatives, who apparently don’t understand Article II of the Constitution, have started to push a joint resolution that would prohibit an attack on Iran unless Congress approved. While Article I of the Constitution provides that Congress has the power to “declare War,” to “raise and support Armies,” and to “provide and maintain a Navy,” Article II provides that the “executive Power shall be vested in a President of the United States,” who “shall be Commander in Chief of the Army and Navy of the United States.” This constitutional architecture, federal court cases that have addressed presidential war powers, and custom and practice during this nation’s entire history, leave no doubt that President Bush can interrupt the flow of support from Iran into Iraq and, for good measure, destroy, or at least immobilize, Iran’s growing nuclear capability. The Constitution’s text is clear regarding the division of war powers: Congress can, if it wishes, declare war, and can fund or not fund, military operations. But it is the president who commands that military. It was President Franklin Roosevelt, as commander-in-chief, not some committee of Congress, who abandoned the Philippine Islands after Pearl Harbor, who declined to open the “second front” invasion of mainland Europe until he was ready, and who insisted on “unconditional surrender” of the German and Japanese armies. One would think from today’s struggle for power between Congress and the president, that the war powers delegated by the Constitution have produced serious conflicts between the two branches in the past. Not so. In nearly 200 years, from about 1798 to late last century, presidents have sent—at least 130 times—troops and materiel abroad absent Congressional approval. The last time Congress formally declared war was in December 1941, following the attack on Pearl Harbor more than a half-century ago. Yet in the ensuing 50 years, our country has fought three major conflicts—not counting President Eisenhower’s actions in the Formosa Straits and Suez, President Kennedy’s Cuba quarantine, President Johnson’s troop deployment to Santo Domingo, President Reagan’s attack on Grenada, and the first President Bush’s ousting of dictator Manual Noriega in Panama.
"Now would be a good time to put a few hundred "spec ops" on both the Iranian and Syrian borders with orders to capture, torture and kill anything that goes in either direction"
no no..downtown Tehran and Damascus
I always wondered what happened to Damien after all those creepy movies.
"250 Insurgents Killed. Women and Children Hardest Hit. New York Times Deeply Saddened."
d.o.l.
Criminal Number 18F
Good shooting Bump.
and grind.
And still awaiting some confirmation on who this band of cretins actually were. I'm curious if it would be beyond Iran's filthy hand to actually arm a Sunni/terrorists Al Qaeda group of foreigners to take out Sistani.
I suspect they were behind the Samara mosque bombing too before.
When someone gets US, not Iraqi, US confirmation, please post it right away.
Thanks all.
'fought three major conflicts'
Interesting how they are considered 'conflicts' and not Wars.
The dream team ah. Pelosi and blurtha entering baggy dad upon two half starved donkeys. People cheering them in the streets, throwing rose petals into the air and into their foot path, as Sadr peers from the side lines with his beady eyes.
Monday, January 29, 2007
Major Battle in Iraq: 250 ‘militiamen’ killed
by Michael van der Galien
Good Stuff Inside Iraq
Posted by Curt on January 28, 2007 at 9:30 PM
Includes comments about our friends on the left selectively cherry picking the news that fits the story that they wish to tell.....
jules crittenden...forward movement BLOG
I Smell Iran
***************************************************************
Najaf attack was a plot to kill al-Sistani, CNN reports.
Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani and other top Shiite religious figures were the apparent targets of an insurgent plot thwarted in an intense battle near the Shiite Muslim holy city of Najaf, Iraqi officials said.
… The possible death of al-Sistani “would really plunge Iraq and the possibly the rest of the region into a bloodbath,” said Vali Nasr, author of “The Shia Revival,” a recent book on the rise of the sect.
“Ayatollah Sistani is the most revered and the most followed Shia spiritual leader,” Nasr said. “He is like the Shia pope. Shias follow him across the Middle East in religious affairs, and his death at the hands of the insurgents would be of enormous symbolic value.”
Iraqi officials said a force of about 400 to 600 insurgents planned to seize control of Najaf and the surrounding province.
Exactly who and why remain puzzling questions, given that weird report about Mahdi-happy zealots that included both Sunni and Shia. From a cynical, murderous realpolitikische (Iranian) point of view, it creates a bloodbath in which the Sunnis and the U.S. lose, and the Iranians emerge triumphant. So maybe that makes the most sense. From an al Qaeda/Sunni point of view … which, as we’ve learned is also an Iranian pro-chaos point of view … it provokes open warfare which the most extreme Sunnis believe is their own chance at survival in what is otherwise Shiite-dominated state.
Topics: Uncategorized
Posted by Jules Crittenden at 10:54 am on Monday, January 29, 2007
The Blogosphere is working on sorting this out.....see above posts.
see above links.
bump for updates...
Thanks for the further pings E. I will carefully examine the links you provided.
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