Bill
06-30-2007, 10:49 PM
I'm sure you heard on the news about the big al qaida kill, part of the new operations.
Turns out it wasn't al qaidas, it wasn't even the 'corrected' report of 7 civilians.
It was a bunch of Iraqi citizens trying to help hunt for al qaidas.
Now, I know, all the terror-lovers are gonna say "collateral damage" and "you can't make an omelet without breaking some eggs".
Thing is, anti-insurgency warfare is political warfare, war for the trust and dependency of the citizens. When you shoot up the citizens, you lose the political war. You are better off letting al qaidas kill the citizens, than "accidentally" doing it yourself, because killing citizens = LOSING THE WAR.
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the BBC reported:
A group of villagers in Iraq is bitterly disputing the US account of a deadly air attack on 22 June, in the latest example of the confusion surrounding the reporting of combat incidents there. . .
On 22 June the US military announced that its attack helicopters, armed with missiles, engaged and killed 17 al-Qaeda gunmen who had been trying to infiltrate the village of al-Khalis, north of Baquba, where operation "Arrowhead Ripper" had been under way for the previous three days.
The item was duly carried by international news agencies and received widespread coverage, including on the BBC News website.
But villagers in largely-Shia al-Khalis say that those who died had nothing to do with al-Qaeda. They say they were local village guards trying to protect the township from exactly the kind of attack by insurgents the US military says it foiled.
Minutes before the attack, they had been co-operating with an Iraqi police unit raiding a suspected insurgent hideout, the villagers said.
They added that the guards, lightly armed with the AK47 assault rifles that are a feature of practically every home in Iraq, were essentially a local neighbourhood watch paid by the village to monitor the dangerous insurgent-ridden area to the immediate south-west at Arab Shawkeh and Hibhib, where the al-Qaeda leader Abu Musab al-Zarqawi was killed a year ago.
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Turns out it wasn't al qaidas, it wasn't even the 'corrected' report of 7 civilians.
It was a bunch of Iraqi citizens trying to help hunt for al qaidas.
Now, I know, all the terror-lovers are gonna say "collateral damage" and "you can't make an omelet without breaking some eggs".
Thing is, anti-insurgency warfare is political warfare, war for the trust and dependency of the citizens. When you shoot up the citizens, you lose the political war. You are better off letting al qaidas kill the citizens, than "accidentally" doing it yourself, because killing citizens = LOSING THE WAR.
===
the BBC reported:
A group of villagers in Iraq is bitterly disputing the US account of a deadly air attack on 22 June, in the latest example of the confusion surrounding the reporting of combat incidents there. . .
On 22 June the US military announced that its attack helicopters, armed with missiles, engaged and killed 17 al-Qaeda gunmen who had been trying to infiltrate the village of al-Khalis, north of Baquba, where operation "Arrowhead Ripper" had been under way for the previous three days.
The item was duly carried by international news agencies and received widespread coverage, including on the BBC News website.
But villagers in largely-Shia al-Khalis say that those who died had nothing to do with al-Qaeda. They say they were local village guards trying to protect the township from exactly the kind of attack by insurgents the US military says it foiled.
Minutes before the attack, they had been co-operating with an Iraqi police unit raiding a suspected insurgent hideout, the villagers said.
They added that the guards, lightly armed with the AK47 assault rifles that are a feature of practically every home in Iraq, were essentially a local neighbourhood watch paid by the village to monitor the dangerous insurgent-ridden area to the immediate south-west at Arab Shawkeh and Hibhib, where the al-Qaeda leader Abu Musab al-Zarqawi was killed a year ago.
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