posted November 23, 2005 04:40 PM            

2 hours, 43 minutes ago

A top US military spokesman called for parts of Iraq's raging insurgency to be brought into the political process, while insisting that Al-Qaeda was being hit hard by ongoing offensives.

"We understand the capabilities, the vulnerabilities and the intentions of each group of the insurgency -- the foreign fighters, the Iraqi rejectionists and the Saddamists," Major General Rick Lynch told reporters.

"The group in the middle, the Iraqi rejectionists -- (which) includes the Shia rejectionists and the Sunni rejectionists -- we believe that deliberate outreach will allow them to participate in the political process and allow them to become part of the solution and not part of the problem," he said.

Lynch was commenting on last week's Iraqi reconciliation conference in Cairo which called for elements of the insurgency to be involved in the talks and recognized the importance of distinguishing between different factions of the resistance.

US officials had initially expressed dissatisfaction with the final statement from the Arab League-sponsored meeting which condemned "terrorism" but also spoke of "the legitimate right of people to resistance".

Lynch said that a recently concluded offensive in the country's restive western province of Al-Anbar had disrupted the Al-Qaeda in Iraq group of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi enough to allow reconstruction projects to proceed.

"We come close to Zarqawi continuously and at one point in time, in the not too distant future, we are going to get Zarqawi," he said.

In Tehran, visiting Iraqi President Jalal Talabani said that Iran was doing its utmost to stem the insurgency.

"Iran is interested in our security just as it is interested in its own security," Talabani said as he was seen off by hardline Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

"They all said one thing to me: that there are no limits to Iran's cooperation with and support for the Iraqi people and government."

Iran has often been accused of supporting insurgent attacks against US and British forces in Iraq, charges Tehran denies.

Amid increasing calls for foreign troops to quit the country, radical Shiite cleric Moqtada Sadr urged voters in December 15 general elections to back candidates who "call for the withdrawal of foreign forces," a spokesman said.

In Washington, US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said troop reductions could occur soon.

"The president has said that as soon as Iraqi forces are ready, we want to see a reduction in our own forces, and I think those days are going to be coming fairly soon when Iraqis are going to be more and more capable of carrying out the functions to secure their own future," Rice told Fox News Channel.

About 159,000 US troops are currently deployed in Iraq ahead of the December vote, the final stage in the political transition to democracy after the fall of Saddam Hussein in April 2003.

Once the election is over, the number of US troops is expected to be reduced to about 138,000, a figure US defence officials refer to as the "baseline."

US authorities are eager to show a steady transfer of responsibility to the Iraqis, with regular announcements of successful joint military operations and the handover of bases.

The violence continued apace however, with the assassination of a Sunni Arab tribal leader and his four sons by gunmen dressed as Iraqi soldiers.

That attack was followed shortly afterwards by the killings of a high ranking official from the ministry of industry, Radi Ismail Jawad, and the former chief of traffic police, General Mahdi Kassem -- both in Baghdad.

Leaders from all religious and political affiliations have been regularly targeted in the strife following the fall of Saddam Hussein's regime in 2003.

With Saddam's trial set to resume on Monday, sources close to the Iraqi High Tribunal said they believed his defence lawyers had suspended their boycott and would attend the trial.

The defence team representing Saddam and seven former associates earlier this month vowed to stay away from the court to protest at the lack of adequate protection following the murder of two of their members.

Defence lawyers have been offered protection and the United States will take part in the investigation into the killings, said a US official close to the tribunal.

------------

Didn't you say they [the insurgents] were all terrorists, Jwhop?

posted November 28, 2005 02:24 PM            

Further, the longer we are in Iraq, training their military forces, the more capable they become....also part of the Bush policy to have Iraqis take over their own defense.

It makes perfect sense and always had made sense that when the new government is in place, with the new constitution and their own institutions take over the running of their country, that then, the US would draw down troops in Iraq....as stated repeatedly by Bush from the beginning.

Now acoustic, if you have a quote of mine saying ALL the so called insurgents were terrorists, then you should post that and the link.

As for any part of the insurgent groups being taken into the government, that's for the Iraqis to decide but those who target civilians with bombs, mortars and rifle fire, those are the very definition of terrorists and you will note, the US, coalition forces and Iraqi units are finding them and killing them.

"The group in the middle, the Iraqi rejectionists -- (which) includes the Shia rejectionists and the Sunni rejectionists -- we believe that deliberate outreach will allow them to participate in the political process and allow them to become part of the solution and not part of the problem," he said."

posted November 28, 2005 05:17 PM            

Well, when would you expect a reduction in troop strength? There have been 2 successful elections in Iraq and a 3rd coming in December that there's no reason to believe won't also be successful...and they were held on time and per the plan.

In the mean time, Iraqi troop strength is going up and they are taking part in more and more operations against both insurgents and terrorists....also part of the plan.

Now, you're seeing the carping, leftist dimocrats who were afraid to politically oppose deposing Saddam lining up to take credit for troop strength reductions which were always part of the plan Bush put forth.

But you're right, Bush will move when he thinks the time for troop reductions is right and not on the leftist dimocrats time schedule. There is another consideration and that's the wishes of the Iraqi government.

posted November 28, 2005 05:34 PM            

quote:

---

You sound like you're either drunk or high Acoustic..and I don't mean high on life.
Your assumption that Bechtel is rebuilding Iraq for terrorists makes me sense you believe the terrorists...ummm freedom fighters are going to win in Iraq and control the country. Do you? http://www.linda-goodman.com/ubb/Forum16/HTML/001397-2.html

---

Was nice reminiscing since the search function's down. This was the only one I found during my own search. It is true that you try to qualify what terrorist means to you in the vast majority of cases, though I do believe that you equated all of the insurgents as terrorists, and dismissed the notion that some of them could indeed be freedom fighters.

quote:

---

In case you're not aware, there are elections next year and members of Congress who are up for reelection, those who have presidential aspirations for 2008 and those who oppose the president on every issue are attempting to get out in front of the troop withdrawal issue and make it theirs.

---

posted November 28, 2005 07:10 PM            

None of the forces fighting against the legitimate government of Iraq...that government elected by the people of Iraq...none of those are fighting for the cause of freedom.

Insurgents, freedom fighters or terrorists acoustic? Time for you to take a stand on this issue instead of hiding behind the gutless press who can't bring themselves to call people fighting against the legitimate government of Iraq and targeting civilians....terrorists.

BAGHDAD (AFP)

The Iraqi army said it had seized a number of booby-trapped children's dolls, accusing insurgents of using the explosive-filled toys to target children.

The dolls were found in a car, each one containing a grenade or other explosive, said an army statement. The government said that two men driving the car had been arrested in the western Baghdad district of Abu Ghraib.

"This is the same type of doll as that handed out on several occasions by US soldiers to children," said government spokesman Leith Kubba.

posted November 28, 2005 07:25 PM            

Bomber Bloodies U.S. Toy Giveaway
At Least 31 Iraqis Killed; 22 Die in Other Violence
By Ellen Knickmeyer
Washington Post Foreign Service
Friday, November 25, 2005; Page A01
BAGHDAD, Nov. 24

A suicide attacker steered a car packed with explosives toward U.S. soldiers giving away toys to children outside a hospital in central Iraq on Thursday, killing at least 31 people. Almost all of the victims were women and children, police said.

In all, 53 people were killed in bombings and gunfire across the country, including two American soldiers who died in a roadside bombing near Baghdad. The U.S. military also reported the deaths of four American troops on Wednesday.

A woman outside a Baghdad hospital mourns the death of a relative in a car bombing in Mahmudiyah, 15 miles south.

About 140,000 Americans marked Thanksgiving in Iraq, the third there for U.S. forces. Private contractors at the increasingly fortified bases prepared feasts of turkey, lobster and steak flown in for the troops on jumbo planes.

U.S. military helicopters ferried the top U.S. officer in Iraq, Army Gen. George W. Casey Jr., from base to base so he could deliver Thanksgiving greetings and encouragement.

U.S. Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad, visiting troops in Baghdad, said their service in Iraq was "a huge sacrifice, but a sacrifice for a good cause," the Associated Press reported.

President Bush, who made a surprise visit to Iraq on Thanksgiving two years ago, telephoned service members here and in Afghanistan from his ranch in Texas to send his greetings this year, U.S. officials said.

Iraqi security officials said they believed that Iraqi police or U.S. forces were the target of Thursday's bombing outside the general hospital in Mahmudiyah. The town has a mixed Shiite and Sunni Arab population and is in an area south of Baghdad known as the Triangle of Death.

One Iraqi police officer was among the dead, said Capt. Muthanna Ahmed, a police spokesman in Babil province. Four American troops participating in the toy giveaway were wounded, according to Iraqi officials.

"It was an explosion at the gate of the hospital," a woman who had wounds on her face and legs told the AP. "My children are gone. My brother is gone."

With no room left at the hospital, emergency workers rushed victims to hospitals in Baghdad, about 15 miles to the north. And when the hospital morgue was full, the workers were forced to place the dead in the hospital garden so family members could find them.

Ahmed said late Thursday that an Iraqi parliament member, Jafar Muhammad, was among the dead. His death would bring to three the number of National Assembly members killed in insurgent attacks.

In Baghdad on Thursday, a spokesman for the interim government warned that violence, particularly against Iraqi soldiers and police, would probably accelerate ahead of the Dec. 15 elections to elect Iraq's first permanent postwar government. Officials issued similar warnings ahead of previous national votes.

"They are trying to challenge the state's authority and spread the impression that there is no state structure or authority in Iraq, to promote a sense of despair among citizens," said Laith Kubba, spokesman for Prime Minister Ibrahim Jafari.

Kubba also announced the discovery of arms caches in the northern city of Tall Afar. He said the find was "surprising," because U.S. and Iraqi forces had in recent months carried out a third full-scale offensive there, leveling some neighborhoods. The discovery "means there are some terrorist cells still operating there" despite the all-out U.S. offensive, he noted.

The deaths reported Thursday included five people killed in a suicide car bombing at a market in Hilla, an overwhelmingly Shiite town about 60 miles south of Baghdad. "There were no police or army at the scene when the car exploded, so all the casualties were Shiite civilians," said Ahmed, the provincial police spokesman. News agencies reported that the car exploded outside a soft-drink stand on Thursday evening, when many fathers take their families out for snacks and a stroll at the beginning of the Muslim weekend.

In other violence, a close-range attack in Baghdad killed three bodyguards of the country's industries minister, and four police officers were killed in an ambush in the capital.

Also Thursday, the U.S. military denied reports from officials in far western Iraq that U.S. troops and insurgents were engaged in fighting near the Syrian border.

posted November 28, 2005 07:36 PM            

The Times never misses an opportunity to give Uncle Sam a black eye by quoting people who may themselves be terrorists and reporting what they have to say....nor do they report the truth of what really happened.

So, again acoustic, are the people who do these and similar bombings and killings of civilians...including women and children...
Insurgents, freedom fighters or terrorists?

Suicide Bombing in Iraq Kills 30 and Wounds Dozens

By EDWARD WONG
Published: November 25, 2005
BAGHDAD, Iraq, Nov. 24

A suicide car bomb exploded Thursday near an American convoy at the entrance to the main hospital in the volatile town of Mahmudiya, killing at least 30 Iraqis and wounding dozens of others in a burst of fire and shrapnel.

Even by the violent standards of this war, the bombing in Mahmudiya was particularly vicious, taking place outside a hospital as visitors and the sick were coming and going. The blast flung bystanders and body parts through the air and shattered the facades of buildings for blocks around. Policemen and Iraqi Army soldiers quickly sealed off the town's main streets while American helicopters circled the scene of carnage.

So overwhelmed were the doctors in the area that the most seriously wounded, including some people with limbs missing, had to be transported 30 miles north to Baghdad for treatment.

Ali Khudaiyer Inad Sigar, 13, said he had been buying chocolate at a shop after getting an injection at the hospital for a chronic illness when the bomber suddenly appeared.

"A red car coming at high speed exploded," Ali said as he drifted in and out of an anesthesia-induced haze in a bed in Yarmouk Hospital in Baghdad. Cuts covered his face and arms, and doctors had amputated his right leg. "I found myself on the lawn on the hospital. Then I fainted. When I woke up, I thought I was home."

Late in the afternoon, the police commander of Mahmudiya, Lt. Col. Moayad Jabir, was killed in a roadside bomb explosion as he was driving outside the town, an Interior Ministry official said.

Mahmudiya lies in a restive part of the Euphrates River valley south of Baghdad that is commonly called the Triangle of Death, because of the frequency of ambushes by guerrillas and bandits there. The American military has often tried sweeps of towns and villages there, only to find that the residents had cleared out well before the operations began.

Some of the worst sectarian violence of the post-Saddam Hussein era has taken place in the area, as Sunni Arabs and Shiites struggle for control of the towns and of the major arteries leading south from the capital to the Shiite holy cities of Najaf and Karbala. Shiite pilgrims traveling to those cities have often turned up dead alongside the main road, known as the Highway of Death. The executions have incited so much fury that Shiites in the south have announced the creation of vengeance-seeking militias in response to the slayings.

The sectarian nature of Iraq's low-level civil war is evident in virtually every major attack that takes place now. A surge in such assaults has roiled the country in the last week and tested the limits of Shiite patience. Last Friday, a pair of suicide bombers attacked two Shiite mosques in the Kurdish town of Khanaqin, killing at least 70. A car bombing at a Shiite funeral the next day killed at least 30. By the end of the weekend, at least 155 Iraqis and 8 American and British soldiers had been killed over a three-day period.

Iraqi and American officials have warned of increasing violence before the Dec. 15 elections for a new Parliament charged with appointing a full, four-year government. Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, the most revered Shiite cleric in Iraq, has called for Shiites to remain calm in the face of such violence. Yet, increasingly, bands of Shiites, some in police and army uniforms, are raiding Sunni Arab areas and dragging off people, some of whom are killed, often with a bullet to the head.

An Interior Ministry official said four bodies with torture marks were found Thursday in the town of Yusufiya, not far from Mahmudiya and also in the Triangle of Death. The four, two young men and two women, had been hanged or strangled, the official said. Just last week the American military announced it had found 169 prisoners in a central Baghdad prison run by the Shiite-led Interior Ministry. Most were Sunni Arabs. Many of the prisoners were malnourished and some bore signs of torture.

In violence elsewhere on Thursday, a car bombing in the southern town of Hilla killed at least 3 people and wounded at least 14, the Interior Ministry official said. Gunmen in southern Baghdad opened fire on a convoy carrying the minister of industry, killing at least three guards and wounding a civilian, and an adviser to Ayad Allawi, the former prime minister and a candidate for Parliament, was shot dead in his car in the evening.

An Iraqi Army major, a police officer and an Iraqi commando were gunned down in separate incidents in Baghdad. A roadside bomb explosion in the Baghdad suburb of Doura killed one policeman and wounded two, while a police colonel and his son were killed when guerrillas sprayed their house with gunfire. A girl was killed when "unknown explosive ordnance" detonated near an engineering convoy in Diwaniya, the American military said.

The American military said a soldier died Wednesday of a gunshot wound in central Baghdad, and two died the same day of gunshot wounds southwest of the capital. Two other soldiers were killed by a roadside bomb explosion on Thursday, also southwest of Baghdad. At least 2,104 American troops have died in the war.

The recent spate of suicide bombings has called into question the American military's assertions that it has effectively clamped down on such attacks. The American command says suicide bombings dipped somewhat from early summer to late summer, and officers attribute the decline to operations in the desert regions of western Anbar Province, near the Syrian border. These operations were aimed at disrupting the flow of foreign fighters and munitions, the officers say.

But the number of suicide operations in October was 52, about the same as the average number per month in the early summer, according to statistics released this week by the American command. Of those, 46 were car bombings and 6 involved belt or vest bombs. The military counted 28 suicide attacks in the first three weeks of November, 23 of them car bombings.

The bombing Thursday in Mahmudiya took place in the morning, as an American convoy was parked at or pulling up to the entrance of the hospital, witnesses said. Many Iraqis had packed into the reception area of the building. The bomber drove up in a red car that appeared filled with candies and bags of chips, said Omar Muhammad, 16, as he lay with bloody bandages over an eye and a leg in a hospital ward in Baghdad.

"The driver saw the Americans and tried to cross over a median to get to them," said Omar, who had been working at a nearby tea stand with his father and two brothers. The father and a brother died in the blast. "A policeman waved at him and tried to stop him, but he hit one of the Humvees."

A 40-year-old pharmacist, who gave his name as Abu Tiba, grew angry as he recounted the incident over the phone.

posted November 28, 2005 07:36 PM            

quote:

---

"The group in the middle, the Iraqi rejectionists -- (which) includes the Shia rejectionists and the Sunni rejectionists -- we believe that deliberate outreach will allow them to participate in the political process and allow them to become part of the solution and not part of the problem," he said.

Lynch was commenting on last week's Iraqi reconciliation conference in Cairo which called for elements of the insurgency to be involved in the talks and recognized the importance of distinguishing between different factions of the resistance.

---

posted November 29, 2005 01:12 AM            

quote:

---

Why should I judge them to be anything? It's not my place. I'm not there...acoustic

---

How about the concept of simple intellectual honesty acoustic. That's the reason you should call them what they are....if you call them anything at all....and you have.

Terrorists commit acts of terrorism.

Terrorism
the calculated use of violence (or threat of violence) against civilians in order to attain goals that are political or religious or ideological in nature; this is done through intimidation or coercion or instilling fear [syn: act of terrorism, terrorist act]

The groups the general spoke about as being possibly brought into the Iraqi political process were NOT the foreign fighters...terrorists or the Saddamists....terrorists who have deliberately targeted and blown up Iraqi civilians including women and children.

posted November 29, 2005 05:18 PM            

quote:

---

"The group in the middle, the Iraqi rejectionists -- (which) includes the Shia rejectionists and the Sunni rejectionists -- we believe that deliberate outreach will allow them to participate in the political process and allow them to become part of the solution and not part of the problem," he said.

---