Posted on 01/11/2009 7:13:30 PM PST by nuconvert
In May 1988, a prison guard checked Taymour Abdullah Ahmad's name off a list and directed him to a bus idling in the Popular Army camp in Topzawa, southwest of Kirkuk. The camp was one of Iraq's grimmest prisons. During his month-long internment there, the 12-year-old Kurdish boy watched guards beating male prisoners senseless with lengths of coaxial cable. He had seen four children weaken and then die of starvation. He stood helplessly as a guard stripped his father to his undershorts and led him off to his death. So Taymour was not sorry to see the last of Topzawa. He did not know that the paper in the guard's hand was an execution list.
The buses idling in the prison courtyard looked like ambulances. But this, Taymour soon discovered, was a cruel illusion; inside, they were squalid mobile prisons. The boy, his mother, and two younger sisters were forced into a dark air compartment that reeked of urine and feces. There was no toilet, no food, no water, no way out. The only ventilation came from a small, mesh-covered opening. By the time the bus pulled out, 60 or so frightened passengers--mainly Kurdish women and their young children--were crushed together in the stifling heat.
After more than 12 hours of travel, the bus bumped to a halt in the desert near the Saudi Arabian border. Taymour stepped into the cool night air and noticed at once that their bus, along with the 30 others in the convoy, had parked next to a large, shallow pit. Before he could take this in, however, a soldier pushed Taymour and his mother and sisters over the edge. Gunmen began firing. "When the first bullet hit me," Taymour later recalled, "I ran to a soldier and grabbed his hand." He had seen tears in the man's eyes, and instinctively reached toward him, hoping he would pull him out. But an officer watching nearby issued a command in Arabic, and the soldier shot Taymour. This time the boy fell to the ground, wounded in the left shoulder and lower back. He played dead until the gunmen moved away, then crawled out of the open grave and set off into the darkness. Several hours later, he reached a camp of Bedouins who took pity on him, hiding him in their tents.
(Con't at source link)
People like Matthews, if they thought they could get away with it would murder you and cook your body for dinner.
Great post.
It is a disgrace that anyone would dishonor the American removal of Saddam in light of the Kurdish genocide.
It is important to realize the ramifications of consenting to the dogma that Saddam did not have WMD. That dogma will replicate itself as a denial comparable to Holocaust denial. In the new Anti American reactionary history, Saddam Hussein did not gas to death thousands of Kurds as part of his larger genocidal behavor.
It is profoundly reprehensible that the victory in Iraq is held in equivocal or negative terms.
Maybe we won?
Saddam Hussein is dead — after a trial examining his culpability for atrocious crimes. Now the world tries to pretend there was no Saddam, no weapons, and no crimes. Its outrageous. The Deniers are the moral criminals of our time.
Freeing the tormented is not a good enough reason to go to war according to the current Democrats.
Ping
Bump to your reply
“Leftwingtards LOVE genocide. “
The irony is they’ll be the first to be slaughtered when it happens here.
I’m gonna play the bad cop here, since no one else will.
What saddam did to kurds has no bearing on our decision to go into iraq. Kurds are of no strategic importance to america.
agreed.
They still don't have a country.
I think we should give them a country, with a right to claim parts of Kurdistan now in other counties, and back it up with nuclear warheads.
Bet that'd scare the pants off EVERYONE in the Middle East.
Sure it would. But what would we gain by doing so? And how could we justify stealing land from iran and turkey to create this hypothetical country? Legally, I mean.
As I understand our promises to the Kurds; we promised them safety. (If I am wrong please supply a link)
I doubt that the Kurds will ever have a country because as you pointed out the Kurds homeland is currently claimed by several countries. Most notably for US interest would be Turkey.
I very much doubt that the US is going to alienate our most important Muslim ally to give the Kurds an independent state.
I think they were told they could have a degree of autonomy and self rule. But not a separate country.
I don’t have a link. I’m going by memory.
I disagree.
They were noted repeated in Presidential and Congressional authorizations and explanations.
Moreover, the idea that they had WMD originated with Saddam’s use of those same weapons. The extravagant efforts to disconnect the event from the contemporary war are disingenous. It is unconscienable that the world would allow a sovereign leader to drop chemical weapons on their own domestic civilian population.
If curveball was lying about current WMD, it is little wonder. Saddam constantly bragged about it and used it to deter domestic and international rivals. The fact of his past WMD use made it irrational and outrageous to suggest he should be left in power.
There was no more reckless member of the international community at that time.
Taking out Saddam was in the strategic interest of America. What do you think he would be up to now if he were still in power? What alliances would he be developing? What WMD’s? What terrorists groups would he be hosting? Funding?
We need to understand that the Kurds do have a quasi sovereign state in the north of Iraq.
Not only that, but America Bush and our soldiers are viewed by that community today as the foremost of heroes.
That reality has been swept under the Bush hating American hating rug. We were and are liberators without question in the Kurdish regions of Northern Iraq.
Anytime you bothered to read the small print on Iraqi polling— it always said— we removed the Kurdish sample from our survey.
The BBC made no effort to defend this decision to remove segments of the Iraqi population that always supported the American war at levels exceeding anything seen here at home. Support was and is in excess of 90%.
We cannot fathom how we have been lied to in regard to the Iraqi Kurdish region.
Of course. Why else would they spend most of their waking hours spewing hate and lies?
They are bloodthirsty.
In the last debate Obummer said that the US should intervene militarily anywhere that genocide or ethnic cleansing was occurring but that he was against going into Iraq. Typical lefty. The US should only intervene when it is not in our national interest. McLame could have nailed him but...
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.