Gayle in MD
01-16-2008, 01:15 PM
CHRISTOPHER CHESTER | January 16, 2008 12:21 PM EST |
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BAGHDAD — A woman wearing a vest lined with explosives blew herself up near Shiite worshippers in turbulent Diyala province north of the capital Wednesday, killing nine of them _ the latest in a growing number of female suicide attacks.
Six people were wounded in the bombing in Khan Bani Saad, a town nine miles south of Baqouba, Diyala's provincial capital, police said.
Although female suicide bombings have been fairly rare in Iraq, extremists have been using women more frequently in recent months. U.S. officials say this indicates the militants are running short of male volunteers. However, it also could be that al-Qaida in Iraq believes women are less likely than men to be searched and that explosives are easier to conceal under women's clothing.
Wednesday's bombing was the fourth female suicide attack in Iraq since November. All have taken place in Diyala, which has been a major focus of a nationwide campaign the U.S. military launched last week against al-Qaida in Iraq and other Sunni extremists.
According to residents and police, the woman detonated her explosives when she saw Shiite men in black about 50 yards from a mosque making preparations for a ceremony marking Ashoura, the holiest day in the Shiite calendar.
Sunni Arab militants have repeatedly targeted Ashoura processions since 2003, with hundreds killed by mortar shelling or car bombings. As a precaution, authorities announced a 48-hour ban on the use of vehicles in Baghdad and nine provinces south of the capital starting Thursday at dusk.
Ashoura, which comes later this week, commemorates the death in a 7th century battle of Imam Hussein, one of Shiite Islam's most revered saints whose tomb is in the city of Karbala, about 60 miles south of Baghdad.
The U.S. military announced Wednesday that one of the key al-Qaida in Iraq leaders in Diyala, Abu Layla al-Suri, also known as Abu Abd al-Rahman, was killed in a military operation Dec. 30 near Muqdadiyah, about 60 miles north of Baghdad.
Diyala has defied the trend toward lower violence over the past six months in Baghdad and much of central Iraq. Insurgents who were pushed out of the western province of Anbar and out of Baghdad have shifted their operations into the farming region of palm and citrus groves, where Shiite and Sunni communities press up next to each other.
At least 273 civilians were slain in Diyala last month, compared to at least 213 in June, according to an Associated Press count. Over the same span, monthly civilian deaths in Baghdad dropped from at least 838 to at least 182.
But after several months of relative quiet in Baghdad, fighters believed allied with Iran have resumed mortar and rocket attacks, with several big blasts heard shortly after dawn on Wednesday as well as a few more later in the morning.
On Tuesday night, at least five mortars crashed into the fortified Green Zone, site of the American Embassy and Iraqi government, not long after Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice held a news conference after making an unannounced visit.
Mortar and rocket attacks on the Green Zone, which had been a daily event, virtually stopped about mid-October. The quiet followed a six-month cease-fire announced by radical Shiite leader Muqtada al-Sadr and his Mahdi Army militia in August, though some breakaway factions of al-Sadr's group continued to launch attacks.
The resumption of the attacks coincided with a sharp rise in U.S. rhetoric against Iran by President Bush during his tour of the Middle East.
Two Mahdi Army commanders have told The Associated Press the uptick in mortar and rocket attacks is not the work of their organization, which continues its cease-fire.
Instead, they said the attacks are the work of a new organization with ties to Iran. The group, called Italat, which means "information" in Farsi, was formerly the Iranian Revolutionary Guard's liaison to the Mahdi Army and its rogue factions, the commanders said. They spoke on condition of anonymity because they did not want to advertise their jobs to the U.S. military.
Not all the attacks in Baghdad may be linked to Shiite extremists. About 10 a.m., two mortar rounds slammed into Palestine Street in east Baghdad.
Three pedestrians were wounded, police said. The target was unclear, but the neighborhood is dominated by Shiites.
But other types of attacks linked to Iran also appear to be on the rise.
On Sunday, Gen. David Petraeus, the top U.S. commander in Iraq, told reporters that the overall flow of weaponry from Iran into Iraq appears to be down, but that attacks with "explosively formed projectiles" tied to Tehran are up by a factor of two or three in recent days. "Frankly, we are trying to determine why that might be," he said.
The roadside bombs, known as EFPs, are armor-piercing explosives that have killed hundreds of U.S. soldiers in Iraq. U.S. military officials have said for months that mainly Shiite Iran has been supplying the devices to Shiite militias in Iraq. Tehran denies it.
In other attacks Wednesday, a roadside bomb exploded at 8 a.m. in the commercial Bab al-Muadham district of Baghdad, killing two civilians and wounding four. The blast appeared to target a passing police car but instead hit a civilian car, a police officer said.
About the same time, another roadside bomb went off southeast of Baghdad at an intersection where U.S. and Iraqi troops often pass, police said. The attack killed one civilian and wounded four others.
All police spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to release information.
<font color="blue">For the last four plus years we were told not to listen to the echoes of Vietnam. It was a different war, long ago and far away. Then, last fall, Bush told us that what we fqaced in Iraq was analygust to what we faced in Vietnam when he rewrote the history of Vietnam, las August, to justify Staying the Course. If we didn't stay, he said, we would watch the horrors of the Viet Nam Killing Fields, leaving aside the fact that those killing fields of which he spoke were actually in Cambodia, a country with which Vietnam was actually at war, let us focus on just two of his central arguments.
First he argued we should have stayed the course in Vietnam. In fact, we did, for four years after the TET Ofensive had shown that we couldn't win, we slowly pulled back, and during that time, we lost an additional 21,000 young American soldiers. Second, even when we had half a million American soldiers in Vietnam, we were not able to prevent the social revolution that ultimately reshaped the country. When we left, a massive and painful readjustment wqas inevitable.
The lessons of Guerilla Warfare have been expressed by William Polk, our former member of the Policy Planning Council of the Department of State, in 1962, and witness to all the thousands of Intelligence Reports, coming into our government, stated to the National War college, now called the Defense University, Navy Captians - Marines - Air Force - Army Captians - and Colners.
William Polk, author of Violent Politics, stated that Guerill Warfare is made up of three parts that fall roughly in a sequence, and can be weighted in impact. The first is politics, the infurgents have to establish their claim to speak for their nation, and usually the way they do this is to put themselves in the forefront as the Nationalist leaders.
they were so successful in Vietnam that President Eisenhower thought that Ho Chi Men could have won a landslide victory of 80%, of a free vote election, even in South Vietnam.
The second component is administration; the inusrgents have to destroy the ability of the government to affect it's rule. In Vietnam, they systematically murdered officials, and caused the government virtually to cease to function. We see the same in Iraq today. As we know, General Jones stated Iraq's police force was so disfunctional, it should be abolished, and in September, the General Accounting Office reported that the Iraq Regime is still, even now, hardly functioning; Indeed, only 7 of the 18 Provinces are even nominally under the control of the Iraq government. And, incidentally, that's not just our experience, that was the experience of the Russians in Afghanistan. Their chosen government functioned only in the shadow of russian Tanks and Ari Craft.
These two points of the insurgency, political legitimacy, and administration, amount to about 95% of the total effort in the war, so even before America sent it's first large Troop Contingency to Viet Nam, we had grasped the short end of the lever.
What happened from 1963, for the next decade, was the period of the fighting, and that was only for the last 5%, So Polk told his 1963 War College that we had already lost the war in Vietnam. They were no more receptive to this notion than many of our Senior Officers are today. So we plunged ahead, surging from a few thousand, to half a million. We used every trick and every weapon we had. but despite the glowing press hand outs; coining such phrases as we hear today, more time is needed, we must stay the course, we are near success, the South Vietnamese government was taking charge, there was light at the end of the tunnel....things didn't get any better.
to convince us that things had improved, President Johnson brought back our Military Commander, General William Westmoreland, to reassure the Conress, and the American public. He cut a fine figure with his medals and stars, and was very popular with the press, and what he said was very reassurring, with a marvelous display of graphs and charts, and power points, and so forth. He advised us that the Viet Cong were on the run. Their soldiers were sick, and discouraged, their numbers had fallen by about 15%, they were, "Almost starving to death" and about half of their main forces, were no longer combat effective. Victory, he said, lies within our grasp. but the Vietnamese weren't listening.
Invasive force, even massive force does not work.
In Vietnam, we armed the insugency, In Iraq, we've imported huge numbers of AKA's...190,000 weapons have vanished...</font color>
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BAGHDAD — A woman wearing a vest lined with explosives blew herself up near Shiite worshippers in turbulent Diyala province north of the capital Wednesday, killing nine of them _ the latest in a growing number of female suicide attacks.
Six people were wounded in the bombing in Khan Bani Saad, a town nine miles south of Baqouba, Diyala's provincial capital, police said.
Although female suicide bombings have been fairly rare in Iraq, extremists have been using women more frequently in recent months. U.S. officials say this indicates the militants are running short of male volunteers. However, it also could be that al-Qaida in Iraq believes women are less likely than men to be searched and that explosives are easier to conceal under women's clothing.
Wednesday's bombing was the fourth female suicide attack in Iraq since November. All have taken place in Diyala, which has been a major focus of a nationwide campaign the U.S. military launched last week against al-Qaida in Iraq and other Sunni extremists.
According to residents and police, the woman detonated her explosives when she saw Shiite men in black about 50 yards from a mosque making preparations for a ceremony marking Ashoura, the holiest day in the Shiite calendar.
Sunni Arab militants have repeatedly targeted Ashoura processions since 2003, with hundreds killed by mortar shelling or car bombings. As a precaution, authorities announced a 48-hour ban on the use of vehicles in Baghdad and nine provinces south of the capital starting Thursday at dusk.
Ashoura, which comes later this week, commemorates the death in a 7th century battle of Imam Hussein, one of Shiite Islam's most revered saints whose tomb is in the city of Karbala, about 60 miles south of Baghdad.
The U.S. military announced Wednesday that one of the key al-Qaida in Iraq leaders in Diyala, Abu Layla al-Suri, also known as Abu Abd al-Rahman, was killed in a military operation Dec. 30 near Muqdadiyah, about 60 miles north of Baghdad.
Diyala has defied the trend toward lower violence over the past six months in Baghdad and much of central Iraq. Insurgents who were pushed out of the western province of Anbar and out of Baghdad have shifted their operations into the farming region of palm and citrus groves, where Shiite and Sunni communities press up next to each other.
At least 273 civilians were slain in Diyala last month, compared to at least 213 in June, according to an Associated Press count. Over the same span, monthly civilian deaths in Baghdad dropped from at least 838 to at least 182.
But after several months of relative quiet in Baghdad, fighters believed allied with Iran have resumed mortar and rocket attacks, with several big blasts heard shortly after dawn on Wednesday as well as a few more later in the morning.
On Tuesday night, at least five mortars crashed into the fortified Green Zone, site of the American Embassy and Iraqi government, not long after Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice held a news conference after making an unannounced visit.
Mortar and rocket attacks on the Green Zone, which had been a daily event, virtually stopped about mid-October. The quiet followed a six-month cease-fire announced by radical Shiite leader Muqtada al-Sadr and his Mahdi Army militia in August, though some breakaway factions of al-Sadr's group continued to launch attacks.
The resumption of the attacks coincided with a sharp rise in U.S. rhetoric against Iran by President Bush during his tour of the Middle East.
Two Mahdi Army commanders have told The Associated Press the uptick in mortar and rocket attacks is not the work of their organization, which continues its cease-fire.
Instead, they said the attacks are the work of a new organization with ties to Iran. The group, called Italat, which means "information" in Farsi, was formerly the Iranian Revolutionary Guard's liaison to the Mahdi Army and its rogue factions, the commanders said. They spoke on condition of anonymity because they did not want to advertise their jobs to the U.S. military.
Not all the attacks in Baghdad may be linked to Shiite extremists. About 10 a.m., two mortar rounds slammed into Palestine Street in east Baghdad.
Three pedestrians were wounded, police said. The target was unclear, but the neighborhood is dominated by Shiites.
But other types of attacks linked to Iran also appear to be on the rise.
On Sunday, Gen. David Petraeus, the top U.S. commander in Iraq, told reporters that the overall flow of weaponry from Iran into Iraq appears to be down, but that attacks with "explosively formed projectiles" tied to Tehran are up by a factor of two or three in recent days. "Frankly, we are trying to determine why that might be," he said.
The roadside bombs, known as EFPs, are armor-piercing explosives that have killed hundreds of U.S. soldiers in Iraq. U.S. military officials have said for months that mainly Shiite Iran has been supplying the devices to Shiite militias in Iraq. Tehran denies it.
In other attacks Wednesday, a roadside bomb exploded at 8 a.m. in the commercial Bab al-Muadham district of Baghdad, killing two civilians and wounding four. The blast appeared to target a passing police car but instead hit a civilian car, a police officer said.
About the same time, another roadside bomb went off southeast of Baghdad at an intersection where U.S. and Iraqi troops often pass, police said. The attack killed one civilian and wounded four others.
All police spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to release information.
<font color="blue">For the last four plus years we were told not to listen to the echoes of Vietnam. It was a different war, long ago and far away. Then, last fall, Bush told us that what we fqaced in Iraq was analygust to what we faced in Vietnam when he rewrote the history of Vietnam, las August, to justify Staying the Course. If we didn't stay, he said, we would watch the horrors of the Viet Nam Killing Fields, leaving aside the fact that those killing fields of which he spoke were actually in Cambodia, a country with which Vietnam was actually at war, let us focus on just two of his central arguments.
First he argued we should have stayed the course in Vietnam. In fact, we did, for four years after the TET Ofensive had shown that we couldn't win, we slowly pulled back, and during that time, we lost an additional 21,000 young American soldiers. Second, even when we had half a million American soldiers in Vietnam, we were not able to prevent the social revolution that ultimately reshaped the country. When we left, a massive and painful readjustment wqas inevitable.
The lessons of Guerilla Warfare have been expressed by William Polk, our former member of the Policy Planning Council of the Department of State, in 1962, and witness to all the thousands of Intelligence Reports, coming into our government, stated to the National War college, now called the Defense University, Navy Captians - Marines - Air Force - Army Captians - and Colners.
William Polk, author of Violent Politics, stated that Guerill Warfare is made up of three parts that fall roughly in a sequence, and can be weighted in impact. The first is politics, the infurgents have to establish their claim to speak for their nation, and usually the way they do this is to put themselves in the forefront as the Nationalist leaders.
they were so successful in Vietnam that President Eisenhower thought that Ho Chi Men could have won a landslide victory of 80%, of a free vote election, even in South Vietnam.
The second component is administration; the inusrgents have to destroy the ability of the government to affect it's rule. In Vietnam, they systematically murdered officials, and caused the government virtually to cease to function. We see the same in Iraq today. As we know, General Jones stated Iraq's police force was so disfunctional, it should be abolished, and in September, the General Accounting Office reported that the Iraq Regime is still, even now, hardly functioning; Indeed, only 7 of the 18 Provinces are even nominally under the control of the Iraq government. And, incidentally, that's not just our experience, that was the experience of the Russians in Afghanistan. Their chosen government functioned only in the shadow of russian Tanks and Ari Craft.
These two points of the insurgency, political legitimacy, and administration, amount to about 95% of the total effort in the war, so even before America sent it's first large Troop Contingency to Viet Nam, we had grasped the short end of the lever.
What happened from 1963, for the next decade, was the period of the fighting, and that was only for the last 5%, So Polk told his 1963 War College that we had already lost the war in Vietnam. They were no more receptive to this notion than many of our Senior Officers are today. So we plunged ahead, surging from a few thousand, to half a million. We used every trick and every weapon we had. but despite the glowing press hand outs; coining such phrases as we hear today, more time is needed, we must stay the course, we are near success, the South Vietnamese government was taking charge, there was light at the end of the tunnel....things didn't get any better.
to convince us that things had improved, President Johnson brought back our Military Commander, General William Westmoreland, to reassure the Conress, and the American public. He cut a fine figure with his medals and stars, and was very popular with the press, and what he said was very reassurring, with a marvelous display of graphs and charts, and power points, and so forth. He advised us that the Viet Cong were on the run. Their soldiers were sick, and discouraged, their numbers had fallen by about 15%, they were, "Almost starving to death" and about half of their main forces, were no longer combat effective. Victory, he said, lies within our grasp. but the Vietnamese weren't listening.
Invasive force, even massive force does not work.
In Vietnam, we armed the insugency, In Iraq, we've imported huge numbers of AKA's...190,000 weapons have vanished...</font color>