Update on Two eyewitnesses

Posted on February 23, 2006 by Sappho

There are two small updates on the post:

The night before the bomb­ing: Two eyewitnesses

In the time line I said 6,41 sec­ond explo­sion, this should be 6,45 it was my mis­take because I was read­ing many news sources while I was writ­ing this add to this watch­ing the win­ter Olympics also at the same time, now it’s corrected.

Sec­ond update, I said Sunni Imams use white tur­ban on their heads, Shi­ite imams use black tur­ban on the heads.

More on this, Sun­nis call their reli­gious lead­ers Imams, Shi­ite uses this title only for their hi-ranked reli­gious peo­ple but the one who lead the prayer in the mosque called Saiyyd.

Please I am not post­ing this to encour­age sec­tar­ian among Iraqis, I am just explain­ing facts to “foreigners”.

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8 Responses to Update on Two eyewitnesses

  1. Rubin says:
    February 24, 2006 at 00:08

    Please I am not post­ing this to encour­age sec­tar­ian among Iraqis, I am just explain­ing facts to foreigners.

    Thanks for­eigner, btw LB I’m not sure we’re even of the same species.

  2. Keld Bach says:
    February 24, 2006 at 00:47

    Pepe Esco­bar nails it again: Exit strat­egy: Civil war:

    Break­ing up Iraq
    Sev­eral Iran­ian web­sites have widely reported a plan to break up Iraq into three Shi’ite south­ern mini-states, two Kur­dish mini-states and one Sunni mini-state — with Bagh­dad as the seat of a fed­eral gov­ern­ment. Each mini-state would be in charge of law and order and the econ­omy within its own bor­ders, with Bagh­dad in charge of for­eign pol­icy and mil­i­tary coor­di­na­tion. The plan was allegedly con­ceived by David Philip, a for­mer White House adviser work­ing for the Amer­i­can For­eign Pol­icy Coun­cil (AFPC). The AFPC is financed by the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foun­da­tion, which has also funded both the ultra-hawkish Project for a New Amer­i­can Cen­tury and Amer­i­can Enter­prise Institute.

    The plan would be “sold” under the admis­sion that the recently elected, Shi’ite-dominated Jaa­fari gov­ern­ment is inca­pable of con­trol­ling Iraq and bring­ing the Sunni Arab guer­ril­las to the nego­ti­at­ing table. More sig­nif­i­cantly, the plan is an exact replica of an extreme right-wing Israeli plan to balka­nize Iraq — an essen­tial part of the balka­niza­tion of the whole Mid­dle East. Curi­ously, Henry Kissinger was sell­ing the same idea even before the 2003 inva­sion of Iraq.

    Once again this is clas­sic divide and rule: the objec­tive is the per­pet­u­a­tion of Arab dis­unity. Call it Iraqi­fi­ca­tion; what it actu­ally means is sec­tar­ian fever trans­lated into civil war. Oper­a­tion Light­ning — the highly pub­li­cized counter-insurgency tour de force with its 40,000 mostly Shi’ite troops round­ing up Sunni Arabs — can be read as the first salvo of the civil war. Vice Pres­i­dent Dick Cheney all but admit­ted the whole plan on CNN, con­fi­dently pre­dict­ing that “the fight­ing will end before the Bush admin­is­tra­tion leaves office”.

    Mili­tia inferno
    In Iraq’s cur­rent mili­tia inferno, some are more respectable than oth­ers. The 100,000-strong Kur­dish per­sh­merga are not forced to dis­arm because they are Amer­i­can allies. The Sadrists’ Mehdi Army on the other hand is regarded as a bunch of thugs because it responds to the mav­er­ick Muq­tada al-Sadr — whom the Pen­ta­gon still con­sid­ers an enemy. Iraq’s Inte­rior Min­istry is infested by at least six sep­a­rate mili­tias — half of them respond­ing to for­mer prime min­is­ter Iyad Allawi’s pals. Iraqi Pres­i­dent Jalal Tal­a­bani, a Kurd, is busy prais­ing the per­sh­merga. Abdul-Salam al-Qubeisi, an AMS spokesman, doesn’t skip a beat, say­ing that Tal­a­bani is fol­low­ing “US poli­cies to pro­long the strug­gle in Iraq and turn it into an Iraq-Iraq con­flict”. In other words: he unmasks Iraqification.

    The Badr Brigades — renamed Badr Orga­ni­za­tion — for its part is accused by the AMS of giv­ing intel­li­gence to the noto­ri­ous Wolf Brigade, still another mili­tia (or, euphemisti­cally, “elite com­mando unit”) oper­at­ing in the Inte­rior Min­istry but under a top SCIRI official.

    Abdul Aziz al-Hakim, the SCIRI leader and emi­nence grise behind Jaa­fari, went on record vocif­er­ously defend­ing the Badr. In a price­less lin­guis­tic stretch mix­ing Bushism with Arab nation­al­ism, Hakim said that “forces of evil” are try­ing to “sully the rep­u­ta­tion of nation­al­ist move­ments like Badr so that they can achieve goals that do not serve the inter­ests of the Iraqi people”.

    One won­ders whether Pen­ta­gon black ops are also part of these “forces of evil”. In Octo­ber 2002, Defense Sec­re­tary Don­ald Rums­feld invented a secret army — one of his pet projects. Accord­ing to the Pentagon’s Defense Sci­ence Board, the goal of Rumsfeld’s army — the 100-member, US$100 million-a-year Proac­tive, Pre­emp­tive Oper­a­tions Group (P2OG) — would carry out secret oper­a­tions designed to “stim­u­late reac­tions” among “ter­ror­ist groups”, thus expos­ing them to “counter-attack” by the P2OG. The stock in trade of Rumsfeld’s army is assas­si­na­tions, sab­o­tage, decep­tion, the whole arse­nal of black ops. Iraq is the per­fect lab for it. “Iraqi­fi­ca­tion” means in fact “Sal­vadoriza­tion”. No won­der old faces are back in the game. James Steele, leader of a Spe­cial Forces team in El Sal­vador in the early 1980s, is in Iraq. Steve Cas­teel, a for­mer top offi­cial involved in the “drug wars” in Bolivia, Peru and Colom­bia, is also in Iraq. He is a senior adviser in — where else — the Inte­rior Min­istry, to which friendly mili­tias are subordinated.

  3. moron99 says:
    February 24, 2006 at 03:21

    Keld,

    there’s one major prob­lem. How could the Ira­ni­ans know in advance that Al Queda did not bomb the shrine? If you read their state­ments you can see that they are 100% con­fi­dent that Al Queda will not step for­ward and claim respon­si­bil­ity. How could they know?

  4. Keld Bach says:
    February 24, 2006 at 04:59

    moron99, I think the Ira­ni­ans have their own agenda. They would of course like to blame the US and Israel for the bomb­ing. It’s just pro­pa­ganda but they might be right.

    If we can believe the two eye­wit­nesses, then the US troops left the shrine only 10 min­uttes before the blasts. That’s quite a smok­ing gun, I think.

  5. moron99 says:
    February 24, 2006 at 05:09

    The prob­lem with the US the­ory is two-fold. First, The US wouldn’t have told the Ira­ni­ans and the Ira­ni­ans would not be able to rule out al queda. More impor­tantly, their ambas­sador has been work­ing very hard for two months to dimin­ish the influ­ence of badr/mahdi mili­tia. This obvi­ously strength­ens them.

    Per­son­ally I think mahdi did it. Sadr is the only one stu­pid enough to pull a stunt like this, he had the most to gain, and he would also have noti­fied the ira­ni­ans in advance. Its Reich­stag all over again.

  6. Charles says:
    February 24, 2006 at 15:23

    LB,

    Have you not heard any other ver­sions of what hap­pened? I have. They present some evi­dence that con­tra­dicts the rumours that you par­rot. I won­der why you don’t present them on your blog. I found the infor­ma­tion and I’m a dumb Amer­i­can. As an Iraqi and a Bagh­dad Dweller, I am sure you have seen the info too.

    Why not present it here? Or would that get in the way of try­ing to blame the US and the Iraqi government?

    Typ­i­cal…

  8. Charles says:
    February 24, 2006 at 19:06

    Oh and Chales I see how much you love iraq, don’t worry I know you just love Iraq more then any­one can imagine….

    yap yap slob­ber yap.

    thanks for that nadia!

    Evi­dence of their [US] involve­ment in Wednesday’s anti-Sunni reprisals was picked up in the Times, which reported that after an armed attack on the al-Quds Sunni mosque in Bagh­dad the gun­men climbed back into six cars and were ush­ered from the scene by cheer­ing sol­diers of the US-controlled Iraqi National Guard.

    How is this evi­dence of US involve­ment? Oh, I for­got, for the pro­pa­ganda to work you need to

    Sadr was reported by the BBC as call­ing for revenge on Sun­nis — in fact, he said “no Sunni would do this” and called for revenge on the occupation.

    Hey — as long as this guy can find some­one to do some revenge on, he is happy!