"Friendly Fire" Kills 4 Sahwa and 2 Iraqi Police

I find it strange that the same people who call for "death and dishonor" to Iraqis who work for the occupier (Americans) complain when the Iraqis who work for Americans are killed by Americans.

U.S. military reviewing friendly-fire incident

Six Iraqis killed, 10 wounded in attack on patrol

By AMIT R. PALEY Washington Post
Sept. 3, 2008, 11:21PM

BAGHDAD — U.S. troops mistakenly killed six members of Iraq's security forces Monday, Iraqi officials said, further straining relations between the U.S. military and the Iraqis they are paying to secure the country.

The pre-dawn confusion in Mizrafa, a stretch of farmland along the Tigris River north of Baghdad, claimed the lives of two Iraqi police officers and four members of the Awakening, a group of mostly Sunni fighters who work with the U.S. military, said Iraqi Army Maj. Mohammed Younis.

A U.S. military spokeswoman said the shooting was under review. "It is always regrettable when incidents of mistaken fire occur on the battlefield," Staff Sgt. Stephanie Boy wrote in an e-mail.

The incident took place when U.S. troops aboard a boat on the Tigris approached a patrol of Awakening fighters, who were already on alert because a suicide bomber had attacked the leader of the local group in nearby Tarmiyah, killing one person and wounding four.

"They heard a rumor that al-Qaida was going to stage an offensive against their town from the river," Younis said, referring to the Sunni insurgent group al-Qaida in Iraq. "They deployed themselves along the river waiting to ambush al-Qaida if they started to attack."

Continued

Would-be suicide bomber's husband wanted for 40 murders

'Covered from head to toe in a jet-black abaya, the traditional Arabic dress for women, Raniya smiled with childish delight as she recalled the words of her husband, al-Qaeda operative who investigators say is wanted for 40 murders, most of them beheadings.

Raniya, who said she dreamed of being a doctor but married at 14 at the insistence of her apparently financially strapped mother, spoke softly about her ordeal that she said included drugging and detention, before the media spotlight. I was trying to go to my mother and leave the vest with her or ask her to inform the police,” she insisted.'

“Since my video was shown, the soldiers shoot at our house all the time”

This makes me Angry.

Israeli army targets family over brutality film

Jonathan Cook, Foreign Correspondent

• Last Updated: September 01. 2008 10:53PM UAE / September 1. 2008 6:53PM GMT

Salam Amira stands by the window where she filmed a bound and blindfolded Palestinian being shot by an Israeli soldier. The roadblock is seen at a distance. Jonathan Cook / The National

Nilin, West Bank // The window through which Salam Amira, 16, filmed the moment when an Israeli soldier shot from close range a handcuffed and blindfolded Palestinian detainee has a large hole at its centre with cracks running in every direction.

"Since my video was shown, the soldiers shoot at our house all the time," she said. The shattered and cracked windows at the front of the building confirm her story. "When we leave the windows open, they fire tear gas inside too."

Her home looks out over the Israeli road block guarding the only entrance to the village of Nilin, located just inside the West Bank midway between Jerusalem and Tel Aviv. It was here that a bound Ashraf Abu Rahma, 27, was shot in the foot in July with a rubber bullet under orders from an Israeli regiment commander.

The treatment of the family stands in stark contrast to the leniency shown to the soldier and his commander involved in that incident.

Continued

Wahhabis in the UK

This is scary. I have walked by the London Central Mosque a few times, but have never been inside. I find it difficult to believe that this mosque is practically part of beautiful Regents Park. Watch this video to learn what Wahhabis teach Muslims about Christians and Jews, about the very country that gives them freedom of speech and religion! It is so embarrassing.

Thanks Aton the Sun God for linking to this excellent documentary. Watch Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, and Part 5. Also watch this.

Backward views of some Shia

On my blog I have focused a great deal on the backward views of Wahhabi clerics, and more recently I have discussed the injustices carried out by the Iranian regime as well, but I have not written about the backward views of many Iraqi Shia, including Ayatollah Ali al Sistani. Over the weekend I watched an episode of the Turkish soap opera Nour, which has been dubbed in Arabic by mbc and is a huge hit in the Arab world. My cousin told me that Sistani has warned young Iraqis not to watch the soap, presumably because it promotes secular ideas. Showing women without veils no doubt irritates conservative Muslim clerics, and I'm not surprised by the Saudi grand mufti's attack on "malicious" Turkish soap operas, but to hear that Sistani has done the same surprises and upsets me. I cannot confirm that Sistani warned Iraqis not to watch Nour, but more seriously, Sistani did issue a fatwa against homosexuals and instructed to kill homosexuals "in the most severe way". Sistani eventually renounced the fatwa, but by then it was too late for many gay Iraqis.

Other fatwas by Sistani and practices by conservative Shia make me laugh, and some of them I find quite backward, even more so than fatwas by Wahhabis, because Sistani's words affect Iraqis directly. I have praised Sistani before, and I still admire him for calling for peace and unity among Iraqis, but I hope he respects the fact that much of Iraqi society is secular, and I hope he does not move to make Baghdad look more like Tehran.

How does it feel when you got no food?

I know what it feels like to have no food, but the poverty my family experienced was short-lived, and I know that millions of people, including children, experience real hunger every day for most of their lives. Doing my part as a blogger on the first day of Ramadhan.

US returns control of Anbar to Iraqis

BAGHDAD - The U.S. military has handed over security control of the western province of Anbar to Iraqi forces.

The province was once a hotbed of the Sunni Arab insurgency, and the scene of some of the bloodiest battles of the Iraq war.

The handover marks a major milestone in America's strategy of turning security over to the Iraqis so U.S. troops can eventually go home.

In the ceremony Monday in the provincial capital of Ramadi, the top American commander in Anbar, Marine Maj. Gen. John Kelly, said al-Qaida has not been entirely defeated in Anbar. But he said, "their end is near."