Posted on 03/29/2003 2:31:50 PM PST by HAL9000
BAGHDAD, Iraq, March 29 - One of Iraq's top leaders said today that Saddam Hussein's government was ready to meet the overwhelming military superiority of the United States by resorting to widespread suicide attacks against Americans, Britons and all who support them, both inside Iraq and across the Arab world.
Vice President Taha Yassin Ramadan, usually ranked No. 3 in the Iraqi hierarchy, told a news conference that the soldier who killed four Americans in a suicide attack earlier today outside the city of Najaf would be the first of a wave of Iraqis and other Arab volunteers ready to become "martyrs."
"These are not `suicide' fighters," Mr. Ramadan said in an hourlong display of defiance, "Those who commit `suicide' are desperate people. They are not filled with faith and confidence in their nation and their homeland."
Vowing that Iraq would use any method available to turn back the American attacks, he said: "And I say to the United States administration, that it will turn the whole world into people who are willing to die for their nations. The aggressors think that their B-52's can carry bombs of such weight that they are capable of killing an unlimited number of people. Do we wait until the Arabs can make bombs to counter that? No, all they can do is turn themselves into bombs. If the B-52 bomber can kill 500 people at one time, then I am sure that our operations by freedom fighters will be able to kill 5,000 people."
Mr. Ramadan named the man who killed the Americans at Najaf as Ali Jafar al-Namani, a noncommissioned officer in the Iraqi Army. Iraqi state television said Saddam Hussein, who was shown tonight meeting with top officers, had awarded the dead man two posthumous medals.
Mr. Ramadan said that there were "columns" of volunteers from Arab and other Muslim countries arriving in Iraq to join fedayeen paramilitary groups, and implied that many of them came from the Persian Gulf states whose governments supported the American-led war and from Saudi Arabia.
But the Iraqi vice president said that the tide of anger against America that was bringing these people to Iraq would be replicated across the entire Middle East, "turning every country in the Arab world into a battlefield."
The targets, he said, would be all Americans and Britons, "not only those in uniform, but all those who support them," implying that civilians would be targets as well.
Explosions shook Baghdad tonight as the allied assault continued.
Earlier today, American Tomahawk missiles struck directly through the roof of Iraq's 11-story Information Ministry, forcing officials to abandon the building and move an important part of Iraq's war effort, its propaganda machine, across the Tigris River to the Palestine Hotel.
Along with the stiff resistance Iraqi fighters have mounted against American troops advancing towards Baghdad, the government here has sought to marshal world opinion to its side with accounts of its struggle against the world's greatest military power. This has made the Information Ministry, in effect, part of Iraq's front line, its principal task to raise international protests against the United States and Britain to the point where, the Iraqis hope, the allies will be forced to abandon the effort to overthrow Mr. Hussein.
At around 1:15 a.m. today, American war commanders brought the war to Iraq's propaganda effort. Missiles that struck the ministry reduced satellite dishes and other communications antennas on the roof to scrap metal, still visible from the ground but punctured like kitchen strainers with holes made by thousand of blast fragments.
At daybreak, jumpy Iraqi security men with Kalashnikov rifles prevented Western reporters from entering the interior of the ministry, but shattered windows on every floor suggested that the missiles had penetrated deep into the building's core.
By midafternoon, ministry officials announced they were moving operations, at least those involving the control of Western reporters in Baghdad, about a mile and a half away to the Palestine Hotel, where most of the remaining foreign reporters are staying.
The decision reflected a broader trend as the war moved through its 10th day. With the daunting military challenges still lying between Baghdad and American military units checked in their advance toward the capital, intensified American air power has become essential to maintaining pressure on Mr. Hussein and his inner circle of leaders.
Viewed from on the ground in Baghdad, the American strategy has seemed to involve hitting key government targets hard and often enough to try to break the Iraqi leader's iron grip on every aspect of government activity here.
Since he began his rise to power more than 40 years ago as one of a group that tried - unsuccessfully - to kill Iraq's first military ruler in central Baghdad, Mr. Hussein has shown himself to be a master of the clandestine arts, always keeping a step ahead of those seeking to kill or weaken him.
With the war now well into its second week, the signs here are that he has so far lost none of his ability to compel loyalty and fear, despite what appears to have been a narrow escape from an American attempt to kill him with a cruise missile strike that was the opening blow of the war in the early hours of March 20.
It is unknown where the Iraqi ruler is - in Baghdad or in some hideaway in the desert, perhaps in his hometown of Tikrit; in some deep bunker complex, or driving about Baghdad in a battered Volkswagen, alone but for a driver, as he is reputed to have done during the American air attacks that accompanied the 1991 was in the Persian Gulf.
But the pattern of American air attacks in the past 72 hours suggests that the Pentagon believes it can make life a lot more difficult for the Iraqi leader, and perhaps even cut him off from communicating with his political subordinates and military commanders.
On Thursday and Friday, the American Central Command headquarters in Qatar confirmed that B-2 stealth bombers had dropped 4,700-pound American "bunker buster" bombs on three of Baghdad's main telephone exchanges. One, on Friday, reportedly hit the high-rise tower beside the Tigris that handles all international calls, but appeared to plunge deep into the building's basement from an entry point on its side without exploding, or at least without doing any major damage. Today, international land-line calls continued to operate normally.
But much of the rest of the city was without domestic telephone service after American bombs obliterated two switching centers, one on either side of the Tigris.
The strike on the Information Ministry, which Pentagon officials have described as a conduit for secret communications as well as for the more conventional work of a government propaganda agency, demonstrated the accuracy of many of the American air strikes.
With the building effectively abandoned after the Pentagon's warnings, officials said that nobody had been killed, and only one man, apparently a security guard, was injured.
Broken glass shattered the surrounding streets, and Western news agencies with offices in the press center, on the building's ground floor, arrived at dawn to find collapsed partitions, shattered television sets and papers and other equipment strewn on the floor.
The only Iraqis who seem to have stuck to their posts were the men who sell sugary cups of tea across the street and shoeshine boys, who chatter away in a scatological form of pidgin English learned by rote from visiting reporters that few of the boys, happily, seem to understand.
One success that has bolstered the sense of defiance in Baghdad is the continued broadcasting by Iraqi state television. Although its headquarters next to the information ministry is a Swiss cheese of bomb and missile strikes, the system's principal channel has remained on air for all but the first five hours after the initial American strike earlier this week.
Today the state network showed videotape it said had been shot today showing Mr. Hussein meeting with his advisers.
Another focus for the network today was the aftermath of the bombing on Friday evening at a marketplace outside Baghdad that Iraqi officials, and many survivors, blamed on an American aircraft or missile. Doctors at the Al Noor hospital in Shula, the impoverished neighborhood of Shiite Muslims where the explosion occurred, said the death toll had risen overnight to 62, with 49 injured. Spokesman for the American Central Command in Qatar said on Friday that the incident was under investigation.
That incidents like the market bombing can be used as propaganda against the United States seemed evident from the attention given to the latest incident today on television networks across the Arab world.
The Al-Jazeera channel, broadcasting from Qatar across the Muslim world, gave lurid coverage to people carrying coffins out of hospitals and mosques, and a woman hitting herself repeatedly in the face as she grieved for a young man in a hospital bed. Today, black-veiled mothers drove in battered taxis and minibuses to hastily arranged funerals in a desolate Baghdad cemetery.
Exceedingly good news indeed. Into the blender they go.
Arab fundamentalists are animals.....and extremely stupid.
SEND THEM TO HELL! That is all.
I want to see that Vice President meet the same fate as Saddam...
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I believe it. We'll be facing the same thing the Israelis have faced for decades, that the Indians have faced in Kasmir with the death of 35,000 non Mohammedans in the last few years, and that is occurring in the Philippines.
SEND THEM TO HELL! That is all.
It wouldn't be at all surprising if hell stopped letting these raghead bastards in. There's been some concern about degrading the neighborhood as well a the property values, you know.
Well excuse me if the entire country hasn't yet been sublimated after 10 days.
Who gives a damn what these subhuman bastards mood is.
Within 30 days there will be no more Iraqi Vice President, no more press conferences, and no more propaganda.
There will be a boatload of dead ragheasd from Iraq and a lot of other jihadist mongrel countries that want to play games with the USA.
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