Just an Iraq Thread

[KipWellsFan]

I'm tired of making threads every day about how bad it's going so I'll just use one.

 

Post-Election Violence Kills 28 in Iraq and election updates

 

courtesy foxnews!

 

BAGHDAD, Iraq — Insurgents struck back with a vengeance following a post-election lull, killing at least 28 people, including two Marines, in a burst of attacks, waylaying a minibus carrying new Iraqi army recruits, detonating car bombs and gunning down police and Iraqis working for the U.S. military, officials said Thursday.

 

Incomplete election results from Baghdad and five others of Iraq's 18 provinces showed the Shiite clerical-endorsed ticket running strong in races for seats in the National Assembly, according to the first official results.

 

So far, 1.6 million votes have been counted, from 10 percent of the country's polling stations. The United Iraqi Alliance (search), which is backed by the country's most influential Shiite cleric, Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani (search), had 1.1 million votes, and the list led by interim Prime Minister Ayad Allawi's (search) list was second with more than 360,500 votes.

 

But the figures were only partial results — mainly from Shiite dominated provinces where the Alliance was expected to do well — and were too small to say whether they represent the nationwide trend.

 

Election officials have said it could take up to seven to 10 days from the Sunday vote to produce full official results. Some 16 million Iraqis were eligible to vote, but it is still not known what percentage turned out at the polls. Seats in the National Assembly will be determined by the percentage of the nationwide vote that each faction wins.

 

Iraqi election officials said Thursday they sent a team to Mosul to look into allegations of voting irregularities in the surrounding Ninevah province, a largely Sunni region. Complaints have included polling stations running short of ballots, confusion over the poll locations and ongoing military operations. It was not clear how many voters were affected.

 

Shiites, who make up about 60 percent of Iraq's estimated 26 million people, turned out in large numbers in Sunday's balloting, eager to turn their majority into political power.

 

But many in the Sunni Arab minority are believed to have stayed away, raising concerns that the outcome could further alienate them and continue to fuel the Sunni-led insurgency.

 

Insurgents had eased up on attacks following the elections, when American and Iraqi forces imposed sweeping security measures. But starting Wednesday night, guerrillas launched a string of dramatic attacks.

 

In the deadliest incident, insurgents stopped a minibus south of Kirkuk (search), ordered army recruits off the vehicle and gunned down 12 of them, said Maj. Gen. Anwar Mohammed Amin. Two soldiers were allowed to go free, ordered by the rebels to warn others against joining Iraq's U.S.-backed security forces, he said.

 

The assailants identified themselves as members of Takfir wa Hijra (search), the name of an Islamic group that emerged in the 1960s in Egypt, rejecting society as corrupt and seeking to establish a utopian Islamic community.

 

Elsewhere, gunmen fired on a vehicle carrying Iraqi contractors Thursday to jobs at a U.S. military base in Baqouba north of the capital, killing two people, officials said. Insurgents fired mortars at a U.S. base in Tel Afar, near Mosul, killing two civilians Wednesday night.

 

A car bomber struck a foreign convoy escorted by military Humvees on Baghdad's dangerous airport road Thursday, destroying several vehicles and damaging a house, Iraqi police said. Helicopters were seen evacuating some casualties, witnesses said. There was no immediate comment from the U.S. military.

 

Insurgents ambushed another convoy in the area, killing five Iraqi policemen and an Iraqi National Guard major, police said. An Iraqi soldier was killed by gunmen as he was leaving his Baghdad home, officials said.

 

Also, the bodies of two slain men wearing blood-soaked clothes were found in the western insurgent stronghold of Ramadi. A handwritten note tucked into the shirt of one of the men claimed the two were Iraqi National Guardsmen.

 

In the south, gunmen overran a police station in the city of Samawah, killing an Iraqi policeman and injuring two others Wednesday night, Japan's Kyodo news agency reported. Japanese troops are based outside Samawah.

 

A car bomb exploded at a house used by U.S. military snipers in Qaim, near the Syrian border, witnesses said. U.S. troops opened fire, hitting some civilians, the witnesses said. A U.S. military spokesman had no immediate information.

 

A roadside bomb exploded near the car of the governor of Anbar province Thursday in Ramadi. Gov. Qaoud al-Namrawi was not harmed, but a woman was injured when his guards opened fire.

 

Both Marines were killed in clashes Wednesday in Anbar province, which includes such restive cities and towns as Ramadi, Fallujah and Qaim.

 

The lull in attacks had prompted Allawi earlier to declare that the success of the elections had dealt a major blow to the insurgency.

 

"The coming days and weeks will show whether this trend will continue," he told Iraqi television. "But the final outcome will be failure. They will continue for months but this (insurgency) will end."

 

Iraqis turned out in large numbers to vote for a 275-seat National Assembly, provincial councils and a regional parliament for the autonomous Kurdish north. But in large areas of the country where the Sunni Arab-led insurgency still roils, few went to the polls, either because of objections to the holding elections under foreign occupation or for fear of retribution.

 

The results released Thursday by election officials represented partial counts from six provinces. They ranged from 25 percent of Baghdad's votes to 70 percent of the votes in the sparsely populated province of Muthanna.

 

According to the count, the Alliance was running first and Allawi's list second in all six provinces. In Baghdad province, for example, the Alliance was leading 3-1 over Allawi. It was not clear what districts of Baghdad the partial results came from.

 

The other provinces were Dhi Qar, Qadisiyah, Najaf and Karbala, which like Muthanna have overwhelmingly Shiite populations.

 

Kurdish political leader Jalal Talabani said he would seek the office of either president or prime minister when the National Assembly convenes.

 

"We as Kurds want one of those two posts and we will not give it up," Talabani, head of the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan, said at a news conference alongside the other main Kurdish leader, Massoud Barzani.

 

Jockeying has begun for the leadership positions even before the balance of power in the assembly is known. The assembly must elect a president and two vice presidents by a two-thirds majority, then it must approve the prime minister chosen by the three. Kurds voted in large numbers, and the ticket led by Talabani and Barzani is expected to win a sizeable bloc of seats.

 

Because many Sunnis stayed away from the polls, influential Sunni clerics are challenging the legitimacy of the ballot, as well as the new government and the constitution that the National Assembly is to create.

 

"We cannot participate in the drafting of a constitution written under military occupation," said Mohammed Bashar al-Feidhi, a spokesman for the Sunni clerical Association of Muslim Scholars (search).

[NUKE_CLEVELAND]

So are you the score keeper for the number killed by insurgents?

[KipWellsFan]

So are you the score keeper for the number killed by insurgents?

 

Whatever, I'm just going to post important news about Iraq in here. And I encourage others to do the same.

[NUKE_CLEVELAND]

Whatever, I'm just going to post important news about Iraq in here.  And I encourage others to do the same.

 

 

Like so many of your kind the violence is all that's important.

[KipWellsFan]

Like so many of your kind the violence is all that's important.

 

Someone might as well just delete this thread.

[Rex Kickass]

I would think if this is a war, the violence would be pretty damn important NUKE.

 

Last time I checked, wars weren't fought with pillows and feathers.

[LowerCaseRepublican]

Nuke, don't whine about violence when you're in the military -- especially after Lt. Gen. James Mattis, came in at a panel discussion in San Diego...He said in reference to fighting insurgents in Iraq. He went on to say, "Actually, its a lot of fun to fight. You know, it's a hell of a hoot. I like brawling. You go into Afghanistan, you got guys who slap women around for 5 years because they didn't wear a veil," Mattis continued. "You know, guys like that ain't got no manhood left anyway. So it's a hell of a lot of fun to shoot them."

 

"I was a little surprised," said Retired Vice Adm. Edward H. Martin. "I don't think any of us who have ever fought in wars liked to kill anybody."

 

http://www.nbcsandiego.com/news/4153541/detail.html

 

So who is the violence important to again Nuke?

[NUKE_CLEVELAND]

I would think if this is a war, the violence would be pretty damn important NUKE.

 

Last time I checked, wars weren't fought with pillows and feathers.

 

 

For you guys this is a game. HEY! Look how many died today! It's almost a source of glee for you guys because you can sit there and point and yell about how we shouldn't be there.

[NUKE_CLEVELAND]

Nuke, don't whine about violence when you're in the military -- especially after Lt. Gen. James Mattis, came in at a panel discussion in San Diego...He said in reference to fighting insurgents in Iraq. He went on to say, "Actually, its a lot of fun to fight. You know, it's a hell of a hoot. I like brawling. You go into Afghanistan, you got guys who slap women around for 5 years because they didn't wear a veil," Mattis continued. "You know, guys like that ain't got no manhood left anyway. So it's a hell of a lot of fun to shoot them."

 

"I was a little surprised," said Retired Vice Adm. Edward H. Martin. "I don't think any of us who have ever fought in wars liked to kill anybody."

 

http://www.nbcsandiego.com/news/4153541/detail.html

 

So who is the violence important to again Nuke? 

 

 

That was a stupid comment, obviously, and even you must realize that it's representative of only a tiny fraction of servicemen/women.

[LowerCaseRepublican]

For you guys this is a game.  HEY!  Look how many died today!  It's almost a source of glee for you guys because you can sit there and point and yell about how we shouldn't be there.

 

We should not have been there and it is a sadness that Chimpy in Chief said that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction...or was it weapons of mass destruction related programs....or was it weapons of mass destruction related program activities? Fact is at best Bush and his administration was terribly incompetent taking stovepiped information from notoriously unreliable Iraqi groups and Iranian and Israeli spies all the while the PNAC neo-cons egging the war closer because they've wanted it since the mid-1990s. At worst, he was complicit in allowing this to go forward knowing that there were no WMD and he lied to the nation. So, take your pick.

[Rex Kickass]

For you guys this is a game.  HEY!  Look how many died today!  It's almost a source of glee for you guys because you can sit there and point and yell about how we shouldn't be there.

 

This is no game to me Nuke. Just because I'm not in the s*** doesn't mean I can't smell it. I'm working within my party to create the positive change that this country deserves. And I have family and friends over there doing things they shouldn't have to be doing because of a foreign policy that is contrary to what America is and should be.

 

We had three days of "Gee, everything in Iraq is just gonna be great now" all over the news because an election went well in two thirds of the country, after the US Army basically blocked every road in every city to do it. Although this election could be a huge turning point for the Iraqis, it's way too soon to announce everything's just peachy over there. If people aren't reminded that problems still exist, they will never be fixed.

[NUKE_CLEVELAND]

We should not have been there and it is a sadness that Chimpy in Chief said that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction...or was it weapons of mass destruction related programs....or was it weapons of mass destruction related program activities?  Fact is at best Bush and his administration was terribly incompetent taking stovepiped information from notoriously unreliable Iraqi groups and Iranian and Israeli spies all the while the PNAC neo-cons egging the war closer because they've wanted it since the mid-1990s.  At worst, he was complicit in allowing this to go forward knowing that there were no WMD and he lied to the nation.  So, take your pick.

 

 

I choose none of the above. We've had intelligence that these people were cooking up stuff for years and it came from the CIA through aerial reconnaissance and through defectors who worked in Saddams WMD programs. Those "assets" you speak of were a small piece of the equation. People in government, including most prominent Democrats, had been saying for years the exact same things Bush was saying. Iraq was a major threat and needed to be dealt with, including John Kerry and Al Gore. The only difference between W and all those prominient leftists is that he actually did something about it.

 

 

I wonder if you would have been this upset if Bill Clinton had gone into Iraq back in the fall of 1998 like we were about a hairs breadth from doing.

[NUKE_CLEVELAND]

This is no game to me Nuke. Just because I'm not in the s*** doesn't mean I can't smell it. I'm working within my party to create the positive change that this country deserves. And I have family and friends over there doing things they shouldn't have to be doing because of a foreign policy that is contrary to what America is and should be.

 

We had three days of "Gee, everything in Iraq is just gonna be great now" all over the news because an election went well in two thirds of the country, after the US Army basically blocked every road in every city to do it. Although this election could be a huge turning point for the Iraqis, it's way too soon to announce everything's just peachy over there. If people aren't reminded that problems still exist, they will never be fixed.

 

 

I never said the election was going to be the end of all Iraq's problems but it's a big step.

[LowerCaseRepublican]

I choose none of the above.  We've had intelligence that these people were cooking up stuff for years and it came from the CIA through aerial reconnaissance and through defectors who worked in Saddams WMD programs.  Those "assets" you speak of were a small piece of the equation.  People in government, including most prominent Democrats, had been saying for years the exact same things Bush was saying.  Iraq was a major threat and needed to be dealt with, including John Kerry and Al Gore.  The only difference between W and all those prominient leftists is that he actually did something about it. 

I wonder if you would have been this upset if Bill Clinton had gone into Iraq back in the fall of 1998 like we were about a hairs breadth from doing.

 

Nuke -- calling the majority of Democrats actual leftists makes me laugh. In one of my favorite quotes about our government "We don't have two parties. We have identical twins played by Patty Duke." Our government is filled with greedy whores -- and to answer your question, yes I would have been angry if Clinton did commit an invasion force on this bulls*** WMD claim.

[KipWellsFan]

Iraq says 10 per cent of votes counted and so far Shia parties have 72% of the vote

 

http://www.cbc.ca/story/world/national/200...vote050203.html

[KipWellsFan]

Attacks Kill 3 U.S. GIs, 33 Iraqis (also election updates)

 

courtesy foxnews.com

 

Saturday, February 05, 2005

 

BAGHDAD, Iraq — Facing the prospect of a Shiite Muslim (search) landslide, Sunni politicians offered on Saturday to participate in mapping the nation's political future. But Sunni rebels showed no sign of compromise, killing three U.S. troops and at least 33 Iraqis in a string of attacks.

 

Officials of the Shiite-led coalition that has rolled up a big lead in last weekend's elections said it wants the prime minister post in the upcoming government — casting doubt on chances that U.S.-backed Prime Minister Ayad Allawi (search) can keep his job.

 

Meanwhile, police questioned the driver and translator of Italian journalist Giuliana Sgrena (search), who was seized by gunmen Friday near Baghdad University — the first reported kidnapping of a foreigner since the Jan. 30 vote. But police said the two were not suspects in her abduction.

 

Allawi, whose ticket is running a distant second in election returns so far, had been seen as a possible compromise candidate if the Shiites and their allies don't win the two-thirds of the 275 National Assembly seats needed to pick the government.

 

But the United Iraqi Alliance (search) — a Shiite-led group whose leaders have ties to Iran — appeared confident it would have to be given the top spot.

 

"The Alliance would like to get either the position of the president or the prime minister and it prefers that it be that of the prime minister," Redha Taqi, a top official in one of the coalition factions, told The Associated Press.

 

The presidency is a largely ceremonial post, currently held by a Sunni Arab, Ghazi al-Yawer. Kurdish leader Jalal Talabani has announced his candidacy for president, and the Kurds are likely to end up as one of the top three blocs in the assembly. Shiites and Kurds suffered under Saddam Hussein's regime and are expected to work together in the assembly.

 

The Iraqi election commission released no new election returns Saturday, but predicted it would announce final vote totals by Thursday. The National Assembly must elect a president and two vice presidents by a two-thirds majority. The three in turn select a prime minister subject to assembly approval.

 

Partial returns from about 35 percent of the 5,200 polling centers showed the Alliance, which was endorsed by Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani (search), with about two-thirds of the votes to 18 percent for Allawi, a secular Shiite. Shiites are believed to make up two-thirds of Iraq's 26 million people.

 

Most of those returns were from Shiite provinces where the Alliance, whose leaders have links to Iran, had been expected to run strong. No returns have been announced from much of Baghdad and from heavily Sunni Arab or Kurdish provinces.

 

But many Sunnis apparently stayed at home on election day, heeding boycott calls by hard-line clerics or fearing insurgent attacks. That has raised fears that the Sunni Arab minority, estimated at 20 percent of the population, may not accept a new Shiite-dominated government, fueling the Sunni-led insurgency.

 

In a bid to avoid marginalization, a group of Sunni Arab parties that refused to participate in the election said Saturday they want to take part in the drafting of a permanent constitution — a chief task of the new National Assembly.

 

"The representatives of these political bodies that did not participate in the elections have decided in principle to take part in the writing of the permanent constitution in a suitable way," a statement from the group said.

 

The groups were mainly small movements and it was not clear whether they represent a major portion of the Sunni Arab community. The initiative was spearheaded by Sunni elder statesman Adnan Pachachi, who ran for a National Assembly seat.

 

Pachachi told CNN he had talked with Shiite and Kurdish leaders about a role for the Sunnis in drafting a new constitution "and they all welcomed this idea."

 

"So I think this will help to perhaps lessen the tensions and help in satisfying the country to some extent," Pachachi said.

 

Nevertheless, armed Sunni groups — including nationalists, Saddam supporters and Islamic zealots — showed little sign they were ready to join in any national reconciliation.

 

Strong detonations rumbled through Baghdad at sunset, and police said insurgents had fired mortar shells near Baghdad's international airport.

 

A U.S. Marine was killed Saturday during "security and stability operations" in Bail province south of Baghdad, the U.S. command said. Two American soldiers were killed in a roadside bombing Friday night near the town of Beiji, about 155 miles north of Baghdad, the U.S. military said Saturday.

 

A roadside bomb killed four Iraqi national guardsmen early Saturday in Basra, Iraq's second-largest city. Gunmen stormed a police station in the northern city of Mosul, killing five officers, police said.

 

The brother of Mosul's police chief was kidnapped Saturday, police said, three days after the official, Gen. Mohammed Ahmed al-Jubouri, threatened to destroy rebel sanctuaries if insurgents did not surrender their weapons within two weeks. Al-Jubouri said late Saturday that his brother was freed in a raid that netted nine of the kidnappers.

 

Elsewhere, insurgents assassinated a member of the Baghdad city council, Abbas Hasan Waheed, and a member of Iraq's intelligence service in two separate drive-by shootings.

 

Bombs and clashes killed seven Iraqis in Samarra and Tal Afar, north of Baghdad, and in Ramadi, to the west.

 

Eight bodies were found Saturday in Anbar province — five in Ramadi and three in the town of Baghdadi — and residents said they were believed to be Iraqis who worked for the Americans or Iraqi security services.

 

The extremist Ansar al-Sunnah Army posted a video on an Islamist Web site Saturday showing seven people being shot. The group said the seven were Iraqi National Guardsmen captured two days ago in an ambush west of Baghdad.

 

Police interrogated the driver and translator of the Italian journalist, Sgrena, 56, who was kidnapped Sunday near Baghdad University compound. Officials said the two have not been charged.

 

A Web site posting in the name of the Islamic Jihad Organization claimed responsibility for the kidnapping, but Italian officials said they were not convinced the statement was genuine.

[HighHeat45]

We should not have been there and it is a sadness that Chimpy in Chief said that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction...or was it weapons of mass destruction related programs....or was it weapons of mass destruction related program activities?  Fact is at best Bush and his administration was terribly incompetent taking stovepiped information from notoriously unreliable Iraqi groups and Iranian and Israeli spies all the while the PNAC neo-cons egging the war closer because they've wanted it since the mid-1990s.  At worst, he was complicit in allowing this to go forward knowing that there were no WMD and he lied to the nation.  So, take your pick.

 

Who didnt think Iraq had WMD's

[Soxy]

Who didnt think Iraq had WMD's

The UN?

[Rex Kickass]

Many of the weapons inspectors kicked out in 1998 that had filed a report saying that they thought Iraq was at least 95% disarmed. Brent Scowcroft, former National Security Advisor to the Bush campaign and Retired General Anthony Zinni thought there weren't weapons there either. Both had some oversight of the containment regime that we had established in Iraq shortly after the cease fire in Gulf War I. Our own CIA had plenty of data that didn't back the claims made by the Bush administration and Blair government. In fact many of the specific claims turned out not to be the case.

[LowerCaseRepublican]

Who didnt think Iraq had WMD's

 

There was an Israeli spy found in the Pentagon that was a player in the Iraq WMD intel with Feith and the rest of the policy board along with Ahmed Chalabi being found to be an Iranian spy -- so the two men who helped give us a lot of info about the WMD programs came from spies from countries with vested interest in having us bomb the f*** out of Iraq.

[Queen Prawn]

Who didnt think Iraq had WMD's

 

Most people I know doubted there were WMD there.

[KipWellsFan]

Sunday's tally

 

-4 kidnapped Egyptians

-22 Iraqi Security Forces killed

-a bunch of "insurgents" dead

 

http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,146521,00.html

 

EDIT: US Command has denied this report.

Edited February 7, 2005 by KipWellsFan

[Rex Kickass]

And this from the AFP, Europe's AP.

 

http://www.channelnewsasia.com/stories/afp.../131180/1/.html

[mreye]

Sunday's tally

 

-4 kidnapped Egyptians

-22 Iraqi Security Forces killed

-a bunch of "insurgents" dead

 

http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,146521,00.html

 

EDIT: US Command has denied this report.

What's with the ? Is this funny to you?

[NUKE_CLEVELAND]

What's with the  ? Is this funny to you?

 

 

Yeah.