Rantisi new report- Fallujah, Abuse of Iraqi prisoners

[General Duke]

Falluja fighters hit US morale

 

 

Friday 30 April 2004, 13:17 Makka Time, 10:17 GMT

 

 

The fighters have mastered the art of attacking occupation

 

 

 

Related:

US pounds city amid pullout talks

Renewed fighting shakes embattled Falluja

Falluja truce has 'weakened resistance'

 

 

 

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Under cover of darkness, US Marine snipers hunting the fighters of Falluja have spent a long night on Iraq's desert sand, emerging with little but frustration.

 

 

"We were on some very exposed ground and we didn't get anyone," said an exhausted Lance Corporal Migel Nunez, 22, of Elgin, Texas.

 

It was their tenth ambush mission in Iraq, none of which killed or captured a fighter near the city, site of a weeks-long standoff with resistance fighters who the US occupation forces say include Saddam Hussein loyalists and foreign Muslim fighters.

 

For weeks US Marines operating near the city have been searching houses, hunting suspected fighters and setting up ambush positions deep in enemy territory.

 

Few results

 

But the operations have yielded few tangible results and despite their high-tech weapons and draconian discipline, US Marines are struggling against resourceful resistance fighters with no clear leadership, structure or supply lines.

 

"It is just impossible to tell them apart. They can't aim very well and they don't have lots of weapons but they are resourceful and smart. They are geting better"

 

Peter Johnson,

Lance Corporal

 

Marines say the fighters have mastered the art of attacking them and then melting away in villages where it is impossible to distinguish between fighters and civilians.

 

"They fire their AK-47s from their homes, walk out the back door and then actually walk up and shake hands with American soldiers when the fighting is over," said Lance Corporal Peter Johnson, 20, of Wheaton, Illinois.

 

"It is just impossible to tell them apart. They can't aim very well and they don't have lots of weapons but they are resourceful and smart. They are getting better."

 

Signs of activity

 

That reality is especially troubling for Marines who had hoped to launch an offensive in besieged Falluja but have instead been searching for resistance fighters in nearby villages along roads infested with bombs.

 

So far they have seen signs of activity only in hamlets where assault rifles are hidden in wheat fields, while they listen to air strikes and explosions around Falluja in the distance.

 

 

Some Marines have begun

questioning their own tactics

 

Some Marines have begun questioning their own tactics. Many complain they alert their enemies long before they enter villages by travelling in noisy armoured vehicles.

 

But commanders say moving in small groups is far too risky in a land where everyone from farmers to soda shop owners could be guerrilla supporters or fighters.

 

Overnight on Thursday, the sniper unit attached to Golf Company returned to a village they left just hours earlier, hoping to ambush fighters who might have returned.

 

As soon as their noisy armoured vehicle approached, every household in one hamlet turned off its lights and then switched them on again when they left, an apparent signal to fighters.

 

'They know everything'

 

"The problem is they know everything about us. They hear us coming, they know what vehicles we ride in and calculate how many in each vehicle," said Private First Class Joseph France, 19, of Batesville, Indiana.

 

"They hear us coming, they know what vehicles we ride in and calculate how many in each vehicle"

 

Joseph France,

Private First Class

 

"We know nothing about them. We don't know who they are. They know how to surprise us and they are resourceful with their weapons and know how to escape."

 

Marines recalled how one resistance unit put ice in a mortar tube and then pumped the mortar down it. The ice melted and the round was fired after they made their getaway.

 

The eagerness to kill fighters showed in a recent skirmish when Marines entering a village spotted three men running as they approached. They pursued and fired on the men, killing one, wounding and capturing another.

 

Marines said the men fired on them. A senior officer said they had no weapons, but that with shots coming in the men were legitimate targets because they ran.

[General Duke]

US forces 'withdraw' from embattled Falluja

 

 

Friday 30 April 2004, 14:14 Makka Time, 11:14 GMT

 

 

Marines' withdrawal to make way for political settlement

 

Hundreds of people in Falluja have taken to the streets to welcome a former officer of the Iraqi army who has taken control of the city, following a pullout by US occupation forces.

 

People waving Iraqi flags and Iraqi security forces cheered the former officer of Saddam Hussein's Republican Guard Jasim Muhammad Salih, wearing his old army uniform, when he entered the town centre and gave a speech on Friday

 

The former officer said he was forming a military unit to restore calm to the bloodied Iraqi city of Falluja after an agreement with US occupation forces.

 

Salih, who a relative said had been chief of staff of a Republican Guard brigade, said the force would help Iraqi security forces bring order to the town, so US forces would not be needed.

 

He did not say who would make up the unit.

"We have now begun forming a new emergency military force to help the forces of the Iraqi Civil Defence Corps and the Iraqi police in completing the mission of imposing security and stability in Falluja without the need for the American army,

 

which the people of Falluja reject," Salih said.

 

Withdrawal

Falluja civilians were badly hit by

the fighting

 

Earlier US Marines withdrew from the southeastern part of Falluja which they had occupied for the last three weeks while Iraqi police were deployed in some areas inside the city.

 

The 1st Battalion, 5th Marines Regiment withdrew from frontline bases in the abandoned factories and garages of Falluja's southern industrial zone, witnesses said.

 

Occupation troops also moved out of areas in the western part of the city.

The city has been the scene of the most violent clashes during April with scores of US soldiers and hundreds of Iraqi civilians and fighters killed.

 

 

Settlement

The withdrawal follows a push for a political settlement in the city and troops on Friday were seen taking down barbed wire and defences while tanks left the area.

 

US troops have been frustrated in their attempts to overcome a highly motivated and increasingly resourceful resistance force.

"We have now begun forming a new emergency military force..."

 

Jasim Muhammad Salih,

former Iraqi army officer

 

The withdrawal came after Lieutenant General James Conway, who commands the 1st Marine Expeditionary Force, held closed-door talks with a group of Iraqis.

A much-abused ceasefire in Falluja was announced earlier this month, but occupation forces pounded parts of the city from the air on Thursday even as talks proceeded.

US military officials have said their negotiations with leaders in Falluja would lead to the deployment of more Iraqi forces in the city.

But they have denied the troop withdrawal spelt an end to the siege of Falluja, which began after four US contractors working for the occupation forces were killed and two were then publicly mutilated.

Explosion

Elsewhere on Friday, a US soldier was wounded when an explosive device detonated on the highway east of the town of Heet, reported Aljazeera's correspondent in Ramadi quoting eyewitnesses.

"The explosion damaged a US military truck and American forces were immediately at the scene," witnesses told our correspondent.

 

 

 

The ambush followed an attack late on Thursday in which the representative of the Iraqi Communist Party (ICP) in the municipality council in Diyala, northeast of Baghdad, was seriously wounded by unidentified armed men.

[General Duke]

The US should be locking these radicals into democracy, not blasting them out of it

Any moment the Shia turn against the occupation, the clichés about Vietnam become true

 

Interesting article by the ignorant Mr Johann Hari

an openly proud homosexual who supported the war on the people of Iraq and now wants to furhter divide Sunni/Kurd/Shait in order to prove his point that this aggression against a soverign peple was just.

 

30 April 2004

 

 

Saddam Hussein could only ever have been dealt with by force. There was no way he was going to give up or moderate his tyrannical power except at the barrel of a gun. The Saddamist-Sunni insurgents - who are systematically targeting Shia civilians - can similarly only be dealt with by force. There is no way their agenda of restoring Sunni supremacy over the Shia majority can be haggled over by the coalition authorities.

..............................................................................

Note tis only an extract, purchase the paper or borrow it from someone.

[General Duke]

US investigating abuse of Iraqi prisoners

By David Usborne in New York

30 April 2004

 

 

The United States military has announced that it is pursuing a widening criminal investigation into allegations that its own soldiers committed acts of abuse, humiliation and torture against Iraqi prisoners, as photographs of the purported incidents were aired for the first time on US network television.

 

CBS broadcast pictures said to have been taken last November and December inside the Abu Ghraib prison near Baghdad where Allied forces were holding hundreds of prisoners captured after the invasion of Iraq. One showed Iraqis naked - except for hoods - stacked into a human pyramid.

 

In March, US officials revealed that six soldiers faced courts martial for possible violations of the rights of Iraqi prisoners they had been guarding. But, at the time, they offered few details. Following the airing of the photographs, they now admit that the affair has become even more far-reaching.

 

In addition to the criminal charges against the six - all military police belonging to the 800th Brigade - investigators have recommended disciplinary action against seven US officers who helped run the prison, including Brigadier General Janis Karpinski, the commander of the 800th Brigade. She and seven other officers implicated in the case face being relieved of their commands.

 

The revelations are acutely embarrassing for Washington, which has emphasised repeatedly its record of liberating the Iraqi people from the inhumane repression of Saddam Hussein.

 

The pictures from inside the prison graphically show some of the alleged incidents.

 

One picture depicts an Iraqi soldier standing on a box with wires attached to his hands. He was reportedly left on the box for a long period and told that he faced electrocution if he fell off. Another shows prisoners kneeling on each other, naked except for hoods covering their heads, to form a human pyramid. Another shows naked prisoners being forced to pretend to have sex with one another.

 

Many of the photographs show the American guards smiling and flashing thumbs-up signs. A slur in English is scrawled on one prisoner's skin.

 

The investigation began when a US soldier from the prison reported the abuse and turned over the photographs, which also found their way to CBS.

 

One of the six, Sergeant Chip Frederick, who plans to plead innocent, asserted on CBS that he and his colleagues had had no proper guidance from commanders on how to treat the prisoners. Nor, he said, had they been given access to provisions of the Geneva Convention on the proper treatment of prisoners.

[General Duke]

US investigating abuse of Iraqi prisoners

By David Usborne in New York

30 April 2004

 

 

The United States military has announced that it is pursuing a widening criminal investigation into allegations that its own soldiers committed acts of abuse, humiliation and torture against Iraqi prisoners, as photographs of the purported incidents were aired for the first time on US network television.

 

CBS broadcast pictures said to have been taken last November and December inside the Abu Ghraib prison near Baghdad where Allied forces were holding hundreds of prisoners captured after the invasion of Iraq. One showed Iraqis naked - except for hoods - stacked into a human pyramid.

 

In March, US officials revealed that six soldiers faced courts martial for possible violations of the rights of Iraqi prisoners they had been guarding. But, at the time, they offered few details. Following the airing of the photographs, they now admit that the affair has become even more far-reaching.

 

In addition to the criminal charges against the six - all military police belonging to the 800th Brigade - investigators have recommended disciplinary action against seven US officers who helped run the prison, including Brigadier General Janis Karpinski, the commander of the 800th Brigade. She and seven other officers implicated in the case face being relieved of their commands.

 

The revelations are acutely embarrassing for Washington, which has emphasised repeatedly its record of liberating the Iraqi people from the inhumane repression of Saddam Hussein.

 

The pictures from inside the prison graphically show some of the alleged incidents.

 

One picture depicts an Iraqi soldier standing on a box with wires attached to his hands. He was reportedly left on the box for a long period and told that he faced electrocution if he fell off. Another shows prisoners kneeling on each other, naked except for hoods covering their heads, to form a human pyramid. Another shows naked prisoners being forced to pretend to have sex with one another.

 

Many of the photographs show the American guards smiling and flashing thumbs-up signs. A slur in English is scrawled on one prisoner's skin.

 

The investigation began when a US soldier from the prison reported the abuse and turned over the photographs, which also found their way to CBS.

 

One of the six, Sergeant Chip Frederick, who plans to plead innocent, asserted on CBS that he and his colleagues had had no proper guidance from commanders on how to treat the prisoners. Nor, he said, had they been given access to provisions of the Geneva Convention on the proper treatment of prisoners.