Posted on 01/27/2007 4:08:59 PM PST by jmc1969
DEATH SQUAD leaders have fled Baghdad to evade capture or killing by American and Iraqi forces before the start of the troop “surge” and security crackdown in the capital.
A former senior Iraqi minister said most of the leaders loyal to Moqtada al-Sadr, the radical anti-American cleric, had gone into hiding in Iran.
Among those said to have fled is Abu Deraa, the Shi’ite militia leader whose appetite for sectarian savagery has been compared to that of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the leader of Al-Qaeda in Iraq, who was killed last year.
The former minister, who did not want to be named for security reasons, backed Sunni MPs’ claims that Nouri al-Maliki, the Iraqi prime minister, had encouraged their flight. He alleged that weapons belonging to Sadr’s Mahdi Army had been hidden inside the Iraqi interior ministry to prevent confiscation.
Maliki said last week: “I know that senior criminals have left Baghdad, others have left the country. This is good — this shows that our message is being taken seriously.”
(Excerpt) Read more at timesonline.co.uk ...
Islam is a religion of COWARDS!
How can they take over the world if they flee everytime men with guns show up?
Sure. They are brave when their victims are unarmed. But let a commited soldier show up, and the muslim flees.
Pathetic.
Who cares if a warrior is mighty or not - the last one standing wins. Chase them into iran and syria and NUKE them.
Bears repeating ... does this sound like a civil war retreat or an invasion retreat?
I completely agree with you. From a military and political stand point..it was a wise decision for the opposition.
The question that keeps haunting me is this..should we change our strategy in some way? There is no doubt that our military is strong and capable. But if they are asked to fight an unconventional war in a conventional manner..can they succeed? Sadly, I am no military strategist and don't know what avenues could be explored.
Where are these scumbags headed? Syria? Iran? Yemen? Saudi Arabia? Can't we find them and bomb them to smithereens along with plenty of collateral damage?
Nouri al-Maliki is aligned with the (Iranian-backed) Shiite militias. Both are controlled by Iran.
I had a thought that maybe announcing Iraqi Invasion part Deux wasn't a really good idea.
Let them flee to Iran, and then take out Iran. Problem solved.
ping
January 21, 2007
The Sunday Times - by Jon Swain
AS convoys of American military equipment were crossing the desert into Iraq last week and more US soldiers headed towards Baghdad to crack down on sectarian violence, a video on the internet showed one of their prime targets, the leader of a Shi’ite death squad, bottle-feeding a baby camel with Pepsi-Cola.
It is one of the few images of Abu Deraa, an elusive Shi’ite whose orgy of sectarian killings in the past two years has helped to propel Iraq towards civil war.
The benign video belies Deraa’s savagery. His squad is thought to be responsible for the murder of thousands of civilians, mostly Sunnis, and he is said to take personal delight in killing — sometimes with a bullet to the head, sometimes by driving a drill into the skulls of his victims. On other occasions, Iraqis say, he gives them a choice of being shot or battered to death with concrete building blocks.
Each day the police find more bodies dumped in shallow graves on wasteland known by Iraqis as the macabre “Happiness Hotel”. They have been kidnapped, tortured and murdered after being accused of attacking Shi’ite shrines or of involvement in the daily bombings which are tearing Baghdad apart.
The video shows Deraa, a short, well built and bearded man in his forties, pouring the cola down the camel’s throat. “All of it. Drink to the bottom,” he tells the gulping animal, asking his guards whether they paid for the bottle or took it.
Behind the video is a sinister story. The significance of the camel is that Deraa has vowed to sacrifice it in celebration if he succeeds in killing Tariq al-Hashimi, the Iraqi vice-president.
Hashimi is Iraq’s most important Sunni politician and Shi’ite extremists such as Deraa regard him as a bitter enemy who must be eliminated.
Hashimi was in Downing Street last week for talks with Tony Blair and for the time being he is safe from assassination. But Deraa or another Shi’ite death squad killed his sister and two brothers last year. The hitmen will keep trying to fix him in their sights.
Another of Deraa’s high- profile victims is Khamis al-Obeidi, Saddam Hussein’s lawyer, who was abducted and murdered. A grim video recorded on a mobile phone shows his hands being tied behind his back by a man believed to be Deraa.
He pleads for his life but is put into the back of a Toyota truck and paraded through Baghdad’s vast Sadr city, where the crowds taunt him with Shi’ite slogans and stone him. At one point he is hit on the back of the neck — a big insult to Muslims. The vehicle stops. Obeidi is forced out and Deraa puts three bullets in his head.
In another operation Deraa reportedly acquired a fleet of ambulances and drove them into a Sunni neighbourhood of Baghdad. He tricked groups of young men to come forward and give blood to help Sunni brothers who, he said, were being “slaughtered by the Shi’ites”. But once the young men approached, he trapped and killed them.
By such deeds Deraa has won a reputation as perhaps the single most brutal mass murderer in Iraq. He is seen as a Shi’ite version of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the Jordanian leader of Al-Qaeda in Iraq, who caused such mayhem before he was killed by the Americans last year.
Infamous though his deeds are, Deraa’s background is cloaked in mystery. One account has it that he hails from the southern marshes, which Saddam drained to punish the Shi’ite inhabitants for rising up after the 1991 Gulf war. It is also said that he was a fishmonger and that his real name is Ismail al-Zarjawi.
Abu Deraa, meaning Father of the Armour, is the nom-de-guerre he adopted in 2004 after battling with US forces at Najaf, the holy Shi’ite city, where he was photographed holding a captured American helmet. He was fighting alongside the Mahdi army, the powerful Shi’ite militia loyal to Moqtadr al-Sadr, the radical anti-American cleric.
Mystery also surrounds Deraa’s present life and whereabouts. For months the Americans have been determined to catch or kill him as sectarian violence has worsened. On occasions they seem to have come tantalisingly close and in one operation at the end of last year they may have killed his son.
No one can be sure, because others in Sadr city say that they failed, killing a guard and merely wounding the son, who lost his hand but escaped and may be having medical treatment in Iran.
On Friday, however, the American and Iraqi forces made a clear breakthrough. They captured a man the Americans link to the Shi’ite death squads, including Deraa’s, in a raid that may signify Iraq’s growing seriousness about reining in the violent militias loose in Baghdad. In the early hours they stormed a mosque, seizing several Shi’ite suspects after an hour-long shoot-out.
The arrests were the first blow against the Shi’ite militias since President George W Bush’s announcement this month that he was sending an extra 17,500 troops to pacify Baghdad. The battle for the capital, where a fifth of all Iraqis live, is seen by both Americans and Iraqis as the tipping point for Iraq’s future.
Deraa’s protection has always been his strong links with the Mahdi army and therefore with Sadr, who helped to put Nouri al-Maliki, the Iraqi prime minister, in power. Sadr’s political party has seats in parliament and controls the two security ministries in Maliki’s Shi’ite-dominated government.
Although the Mahdi army has been indubitably linked to the sectarian violence, Maliki has hitherto shrunk from cracking down on it because of Sadr’s support. These days, army officials disavow knowledge of death squads in general and connections with Deraa in particular. But this is implausible because Deraa operates from Sadr city, the cleric’s teeming stronghold, and could not do so without the support of Sadr’s men.
It is also true, however, that many Mahdi militiamen have split off into their own fiefs, turning to kidnappings and criminality to make money.
Deraa figures among them, according to one Sadr city resident. “Abu Deraa has 200 guards and is working independently of the Mahdi army now,” he said. Others refute this.
The Americans have no doubt that Deraa and the Mahdi army are linked. They say the key man they arrested on Friday, Sheikh Abdul al-Hadi Darraji, who is the director of Sadr’s main office in Sadr city and the cleric’s spokesman, is a “high-level, illegal armed group leader” who is involved in kidnapping, torturing and killing civilians, heading and working with death squad commanders and armed cells and carrying out sectarian revenge murders across the city.
Mohammed al-Kaabi, a Sadr official, rejected the American description. “We are very surprised over this arrest. We think there was a mix-up,” he said. Senior members of Sadr’s movement were engaged in urgent talks with Maliki yesterday in an attempt to secure his release.
Whether Maliki will yield and ask the Americans to free him or whether he will stand firm remains to be seen. It is a test of his will to clamp down on sectarian violence as he had pledged to do after Bush’s announcement of the military push in the capital.
In an interview last week the prime minister revealed that Iraqi forces had quietly arrested more than 400 militia members since October, including some senior figures. But the arrests were largely in the Shi’ite south where there is much less violence than in Baghdad.
It is the vicious actions of the Shi’ite armed groups which have caused the great population shifts that are changing, perhaps irrevocably, the ethnic and sectarian diversity of the city. More and more Sunnis are moving to safer areas after notes have been pinned to their doors warning them to leave or be killed. Almost anyone who has the opportunity is going abroad.
The Mahdi army and Deraa’s death squad fill a power vacuum. American and Iraqi forces have shown themselves powerless to prevent the Sunni bombings that cause hundreds of deaths a month in Baghdad. Hardly a day goes by without a bomb blast in a place where Shi’ites gather. As a result, the militia and death squads are perceived by Shi’ites as protectors.
A double bombing last week outside a Baghdad university as students were heading home in a predominantly Shi’ite area hammered home this truth. At least 70 people were killed in the most devastating attack of the year so far — on the day when the United Nations said more than 34,000 Iraqis had died in sectarian violence in 2006.
The American campaign to restore order to Baghdad is expected to kick off next month and gradually build up over the spring. Every previous security plan for Baghdad has failed and the Americans admit there is no guarantee that the latest will achieve anything more than a temporary lull in the bombings and killings. But they believe there is some chance as long as the Iraqi forces do their bit.
Already changes are noticeable. Since Bush announced troop reinforcements, a number of Mahdi army leaders have gone into hiding, fearing arrest. Their mobile phones have been switched off. Foot soldiers have melted away from roadblocks and become more careful about showing their weapons. Darraji’s arrest will increase wariness.
Some reports last week said that Deraa had also slipped out of Sadr city and gone to Iran, which the Americans accuse of helping the Shi’ite militias with arms, bombs and training.
“He is not popular any more. Nobody likes him because he is always just kidnapping and killing for money. He is not a religious man like Moqtadr al-Sadr,” said a Sadr city resident.
However, Iraqi analysts believe that the murky connection between Sadr and Deraa will be maintained. With so many in the Shi’ite community applauding Deraa’s bloody deeds against their former Sunni “oppressors”, the cleric sees the importance of staying on his side. “Deraa is the new Shi’ite hero,” an American official said. “He fights blood with more blood.”
The killing goes on. The blindfolded bodies were still piling up last week at “Happiness Hotel” in Sadr city, bound and mutilated, the handiwork of Deraa or his supporters.
The bodies will continue to be dumped there until he is captured or killed. And perhaps only then will the corner be turned in Baghdad’s vicious sectarian war.
http://www.kurdishaspect.com/doc0121JS.html
Not anymore. I think Maliki has finally figured out which side his bread is buttered on.
I think that is yet to be seen.
Yeah.
But when the lights go off, the cockroaches gather again.
We cannot stay there forever.
Abu Deraa???
In another operation Deraa reportedly acquired a fleet of ambulances and drove them into a Sunni neighbourhood of Baghdad. He tricked groups of young men to come forward and give blood to help Sunni brothers who, he said, were being “slaughtered by the Shi’ites”. But once the young men approached, he trapped and killed them.
On Friday, however, the American and Iraqi forces made a clear breakthrough. They captured a man the Americans link to the Shi’ite death squads, including Deraa’s, in a raid that may signify Iraq’s growing seriousness about reining in the violent militias loose in Baghdad. In the early hours they stormed a mosque, seizing several Shi’ite suspects after an hour-long shoot-out.
http://www.kurdishaspect.com/doc0121JS.html______________________________________________________
Troops Died After, Not In, Sneak Attack ~ Karbala Attack ~ Soldiers abducted then killed.....
The brazen assault 50 miles south of Baghdad was launched Jan. 20 by a group of nine to 12 militants. They traveled in black GMC Suburban vehicles - the type used by U.S. government convoys, had American weapons, wore new U.S. military combat fatigues and spoke English.
The U.S. officials said they could not be sure if the soldiers were killed as the attackers drove them to the place where they abandoned the Suburbans or afterward. Iraqi officials said the men were killed just before the vehicles were abandoned.
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1774121/posts
THE VICE PRESIDENT: So there are a number of things that you plan for that didn't happen, but still it's warfare, there are always surprises. And I think it would be fair to say the insurgency has been stronger than anybody anticipated.
http://64.233.167.104/search?q=cache:ZYrAs51adusJ:www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2006/02/20060207-3.html+cheney+insurgency+to+be+so+strong&hl=en&gl=us&ct=clnk&cd=7
bttt
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