Posted on 04/24/2008 8:40:50 PM PDT by bruinbirdman
BAGHDAD, Iraq (CNN) — The images in the Basra police file are nauseating: Page after page of women killed in brutal fashion — some strangled to death, their faces disfigured; others beheaded. All bear signs of torture.
Police chief Gen. Abdul Jalil Khalaf holds a book cataloging the dead.
1 of 3 The women are killed, police say, because they failed to wear a headscarf or because they ignored other “rules” that secretive fundamentalist groups want to enforce.
“Fear, fear is always there,” says 30-year-old Safana, an artist and university professor. “We don’t know who to be afraid of. Maybe it’s a friend or a student you teach. There is no break, no security. I don’t know who to be afraid of.”
Her fear is justified. Iraq’s second-largest city, Basra, is a stronghold of conservative Shia groups. As many as 133 women were killed in Basra last year — 79 for violation of “Islamic teachings” and 47 for so-called honor killings, according to IRIN, the news branch of the U.N.’s Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs.
One glance through the police file is enough to understand the consequences. Basra’s police chief, Gen. Abdul Jalil Khalaf, flips through the file, pointing to one unsolved case after another. Watch Khalaf show evidence of the brutality »
“I think so far, we have been unable to tackle this problem properly,” he says. “There are many motives for these crimes and parties involved in killing women, by strangling, beheading, chopping off their hands, legs, heads.”
“When I came to Basra a year ago,” he says, “two women were killed in front of their kids. Their blood was flowing in front of their kids, they were crying. Another woman was killed in front of her 6-year-old son, another in front of her 11-year-old child, and yet another who was pregnant.
The killers enforcing their own version of Islamic justice are rarely caught, while women live in fear.
Boldly splattered in red paint just outside the main downtown market, a chilling sign reads: “We warn against not wearing a headscarf and wearing makeup. Those who do not abide by this will be punished. God is our witness, we have notified you.”
The attacks on the women of Basra have intensified since British forces withdrew to their base at the airport back in September, police say...
http://edition.cnn.com/2008/WORLD/meast/02/08/iraq.women/index.html
Even better is that it is a Shia led government cracking down on Shia militias. Iraq can not be a true democracy until people can get beyond identity politics. A lesson a certain US political party could learn as well.
They were too afraid to challenge the "religion of peace" and stand up to Sadr's extremism. Same thing happens in the UK. How many years did that hook handed, hate preaching Imam have free range to preach his crap right out in the open? Sadly, there are hundreds more just like him.
Iraq was largely secular, even under Saddam's dictatorship. Only in Saddam's last decade did he start inviting the fundamentalist in to set up training camps and infest small villages.
When Saddam was taken out, there was a mad rush of fundamentalists to get into Iraq and establish hard line Islamics, knowing full well that Westerners, not very educated as to what Islam really is and could be, would be too afraid to stand up to that religious cults extremism, too afraid to blow the heck out of a mosk used as a terrorist base, too afraid to shoot a black robed devil.
The Mullahs must be getting nervous over these developments.
Why? Do you think the Iraqi army went and trained itself?
And do you think all those Afghan artillery men in Helmand province went and trained themselves?
We (the US and UK) adopted a policy of leaving Sadr for the Iraqi army. No-one on FR liked it, and I'm still not sure about it. But Sadr's father was a saint and martyr to the Iraqis for standing up to Saddam: it would have been perilous for foreigners just to off his son.
Now finally the Iraqi army, with its UK and US MITT embeds, is kicking militia-butt and FR's most ignorant are blaming some of the people who made it happen.
Do you think Basra would have blown up if the Brits kept their troops there and engaged ? Engaged being the key word ? Instead of pulling back to a defensive position at the airport ?
Did you miss the British “no response” then their delayed response to the hostility in Basra ? They had to be embarrassed into engaging.
And now that things have been secured in Basra, the Brits talk as if they are the experts.
Sorry...no thanks.
But let us not forget that Saddam Hussein WAS in fact building a nuclear bomb:
http://www.ConservativeEvents.com/SaddamsNukes.html
The Police Chief was able to successfully pacify Fallujah because he does things the Iraqi way while the Americans look the other way, if you know what I mean.
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