Feb 12 2008

Updates From Iraq

Published by at 8:45 am under All General Discussions,Diyala,Iraq

Some news from Iraq that was missed by the presidential race-horse obsessed media. As we have seen many times in the past al-Qaeda is running out of holy warriors willing to be suicide bombers or even be fighters. They have recently been trying to recruit and train young children – as if these poor waifs would have a chance where adult Jihadis failed? Now it turns out al Qaeda are scavenging mental hospitals for patients they can trick into being bombers:

“They [the security forces] arrested the acting director, accusing him of working with al-Qaeda and recruiting mentally ill women and using them in suicide bombing operations,” a hospital official said.

Ibrahim Muhammad Agel, director of the hospital, was killed in the Mansour district of Baghdad on December 11 by gunmen on motorbikes. Colleagues suspect that he was shot for refusing to cooperate with al-Qaeda. Even before Sunday’s arrest, US officials believed that al-Qaeda was scouring Iraq’s hospitals for mentally impaired patients whom it could dupe into acting as suicide bombers. They said that al-Qaeda had used the mentally impaired as unwitting bombers before. “We have fairly good reason to believe this is not the first time they have recruited mentally handicapped individuals,” said one senior officer, though he did not think there had been more than half a dozen cases.

Few people are crazy enough to buy into Bin Laden’s butchery, so these animals go out and find sick people they can trick. The true face of Jihad al-Qaeda style is now very clear. It is not movement of the future, it is the sick and deranged blood lust of malcontents and criminals who would stoop to any low.

I wrote recently about the al Qaeda documents found by Iraqi and US forces, now the transcripts are available ofr all to read. Here is one fascinating snippet:

Its group Emir called [redacted] (Detained), and the number of fighters in the Battalion were 200. … The battalion was one of the first battalions whose numbers of fighters was tarnished after Abu-Haydar al-Ansari Battalion, and the number of fighters is now only ten.

The al-Ansari Battalion mentioned here went from 300 fighters to 17. The passages are very interesting to read, as the anger at those who turned their backs against jihad just comes rushing out, demanding more brutality for the snub. Thus is the vicious cycle of hate and defeat al-Qaeda finds itself in across the Muslim world.

I found an interesting editorial from the ME which blames Bush for being stubborn, and yet notes the fact that it is al-Qaeda’s fault for losing Iraq through their continued bloodlust. Some people will never understand that determination in the face of murderous evil (and you don’t get much more murderous or evil than al-Qaeda) is not the reason murderous evil fails. It is the reason freedom wins out in the end.

There is a new Iraq and US action in the Mosul region to defeat al-Qaeda’s last remnants. Given what we have seen in the way of local intel tips and leads, and the fact AQ is now fleeing the area, this should be successful, and could be the final stage of major fighting. We shall see. al-Qaeda is tenacious, but they are not invincible.

Rich Lowry highlights the sea-change in a small village in Iraq as the march of freedom continues to spread across even the rural areas of Iraq:

This small, rural village in the Diyala Province north of Baghdad experienced a revolution a month ago. It had been controlled by al-Qaeda and its band of teenage killers who terrorized the place. The mayor of the nearby city of Muqdadiya lived here — until al-Qaeda blew up his house and he fled. The village became a ghost town.

Then, for the first time in five years of war, U.S. troops showed up. They captured key al-Qaeda leaders, and the rest ran away. Local citizens formed a makeshift security force, and people returned to the streets. Suddenly, it was a new day.

At this village level, the war on terror is less a grand ideological struggle than an elemental fight to replace men with guns who want to prey on the local population (al-Qaeda) with men with guns who want to help it (us). It doesn’t take a romanticism about human nature to realize most people will prefer the latter.

Gen. Mark Hertling, who commands American forces in the north, recalls being introduced in the village of Himbus to a 12-year-old girl who had pointed out where the al-Qaeda thugs were hiding. “I asked her why she had done that,” Gen. Hertling says, “and she said, ‘They killed my two brothers, my father couldn’t farm, and I couldn’t go to school.’ ”

In Iraq it is clear al-Qaeda is not the future of Islam, it is seen as the enemy. It will take a long time for the nay-saying SurrenderMedia to realize how big a change has swept that country. Even now these professional doubters of America look for marginal imperfections in a massive force of popular will – as if the ever present imperfection of human kind could stop the demise of al-Qaeda’s fortunes in Iraq. But this obsession with trying to salvage defeat from success in Iraq is a personal emotional issue for those on the liberal left to deal with. It is a denial of reality – it is not changing reality. To those who lost loved ones to the Bin Laden’s butchers, and now fight to bring them to judgement, the inability of some journalist or politician in the West to grasp the anger and hate that now enshrouds al-Qaeda is of no consequence. The focus is on routing and destroying al-Qaeda for their heinous crimes. Nothing else matters.

7 responses so far

7 Responses to “Updates From Iraq”

  1. Terrye says:

    It is called breaking the will of the enemy. The only reason America was able to come together after the Civil War was the exhaustion of its people outweighed the hatred.

    But there were still men in sheets killing Republicans in Tennessee and hanging blacks in the deep south for years to come.

  2. norm says:

    “…could be the final stage of major fighting…”
    i thought major combat operations ended on may 1st, 2003?
    what i do not see anywhere in your post is the acknoledgment that al queda wasn’t in iraq until we invaded, and we are largely struggling against a situation of our own making. isn’t there a failure somewhere when we must spend trillions of dollars in an attempt to achieve success overcoming a problem of our own creation? boehner yesterday was jawing about how we have al queda on the run in iraq. well we let them into iraq. so now it’s taken us 5 years to reach what you call the “final stage of major fighting”. so while you accuse others of denying reality, it seems that you have a problem with reality. i think that is called projection. you can get help for it.

  3. norm says:

    “…the focus is on routing and destroying al-Qaeda for their heinous crimes. nothing else matters…” then what are we doing in iraq? why is al queda and the taliban resurgent in afghanistan and pakistan where we left them when we went to iraq where al queda wasn’t. nothing you say comports with the facts. nothing. it’s not your fault. you’ve been led to believe things by the administration because you are scared and susceptable to fear-mongering. but much of the rest of the nation has seen what is going on. you can get past this too.

  4. AJStrata says:

    Norm,

    I have been accurately predicting how things would unfold in Iraq for over a year now.

    I suggest your little fantasy world is where the facts fall flat!

  5. norm says:

    you are funny. you have been predicting victory for years. when can we stop spending $12 billion a month mr. soothsayer?

  6. AJStrata says:

    Norm,

    We have been achieving victory for years! $12 Billion a month is a small price to pay to stop terrorists from killing innocents.

    Get over it dude – this is the Surrendercrats big problem this fall – they cannot find defeat no matter how hard they try.

  7. norm says:

    $12 billion a month is a ridiculous sum, especially when you consider the innocents we have killed, and you consider that iraq wasn’t involved in terrorism against the us, and you consider that second hand smoke killed more people last year than terrorists. but the white house has made you so afraid…poor aj.