Bodies of babies found in Saddam's 'killing field'

By Joe Murphy, Evening Standard Political Editor

13 October 2004

A mass grave containing the bodies of children, babies and their mothers has been unearthed in Iraq.

Shocked investigators reported finding "thighbones the size of matchsticks" at what they believe is the site of one of Saddam Hussein's atrocities. Among the findings-were the skeletons of unborn babies and toddlers clutching toys.

A baby had been shot in the back of its head and was found still being clutched by its mother, who had been shot in the face. The discovery was reported as Tony Blair came under mounting pressure to apologise to Parliament for the misleading intelligence claiming Saddam had weapons of mass destruction.

It will strengthen the Prime Minister's case that despite the intelligencefailures the war to topple the Iraqi dictator was justified by his record as a mass killer of his own people. Mr Blair is facing MPs for the first time since the Iraq Survey Group report last week admitted there were no illegal chemical and biological weapons in Iraq.

Liberal Democrat leader Charles

Kennedy demanded he make a full Commons statement on the findings but Mr Blair was hoping to escape by merely answering questions at his regular weekly appearance.

The mass grave was being excavated near Hatra, a village in northern Iraq with a large Kurdish population. US-led investigators have located nine trenches so far containing hundreds of bodies, believed to be Kurds killed during the repression of the Eighties. The bodies had been bulldozed into the ground.

Evidence from the graves will be used at the Iraqi Special Tribunal where Saddam will face trial for war crimes. "It is my personal opinion that this is a killing field," said Greg Kehoe, a US official. "Someone used this field on significant occasions over time to take people up there and execute them."

One trench contains only women and children while another contains only men. "The youngest foetus we have was 18 to 20 foetal weeks," said a US investigating anthropologist. "Tiny bones, femurs - thighbones the size of a matchstick."

Some 300,000 people are thought to have been killed during Saddam's regime. Iraq's human rights ministry has reportedly identified 40 possible mass graves across the country.

Meanwhile, Saddam underwent an operation to repair a hernia about 10 days ago and has made a full recovery, Iraqi sources said today.

He has been in US custody since 13 December and appeared in court in July for a preliminary hearing.

The Iraqi people are starting to get it.

By Karl Vick (Washington Post)

Updated: 12:45 a.m. ET Oct. 13, 2004, BAGHDAD, Iraq - Local insurgents in the city of Fallujah are turning against the foreign fighters who have been their allies in the rebellion that has held the U.S. military at bay in parts of Iraq's Sunni Muslim heartland, according to Fallujah residents, insurgent leaders and Iraqi and U.S. officials.

Relations are deteriorating as local fighters negotiate to avoid a U.S.-led military offensive against Fallujah, while foreign fighters press to attack Americans and their Iraqi supporters. The disputes have spilled over into harsh words and sporadic violence, with Fallujans killing at least five foreign Arabs in recent weeks, according to witnesses.

"If the Arabs will not leave willingly, we will make them leave by force," said Jamal Adnan, a taxi driver who left his house in Fallujah's Shurta neighborhood a month ago after the house next door was bombed by U.S. aircraft targeting foreign insurgents.

Located 35 miles west of Baghdad in Iraq's Sunni Triangle, Fallujah has been outside the control of Iraqi authorities and U.S. military forces since April, when a siege by U.S. Marines was lifted and Iraqi security forces were given responsibility for the city's security. Local and foreign insurgents gradually gained control, and Iraqi and U.S. officials say Fallujah has become a principal source of instability in the country.

U.S. and Iraqi authorities together have insisted that if Fallujah is to avoid an all-out assault aimed at regaining control of the city, foreign fighters must be ejected. Several local leaders of the insurgency say they, too, want to expel the foreigners, whom they scorn as terrorists. They heap particular contempt on Abu Musab Zarqawi, the Jordanian whose Monotheism and Jihad group has asserted responsibility for many of the deadliest attacks across Iraq, including videotaped beheadings.

"He is mentally deranged, has distorted the image of the resistance and defamed it. I believe his end is near," Abu Abdalla Dulaimy, military commander of the First Army of Mohammad, said recently.

One of the foreign guerrillas killed by local fighters was Abu Abdallah Suri, a Syrian and a prominent member of Zarqawi's group, whose body was discovered Sunday. Suri was shot in the head and chest while being chased by a carload of tribesmen, according to a security guard who said he witnessed the killing.

Residents say foreign fighters recently have taken to gathering in Fallujah's grimy commercial district after being denied shelter in residential neighborhoods because their presence so often attracts U.S. warplanes. The airstrikes and the turmoil in the streets have spurred perhaps half of the city's 300,000 residents to flee, residents and officials said.

U.S. aircraft hit Fallujah twice on Tuesday. An airstrike just after midnight destroyed the city's best-known restaurant, a kebab house that a military statement said was used as an arms depot, citing "numerous secondary explosions." A second strike at 4 a.m. destroyed "a known terrorist safe house" in the northeast of the city, the statement said.

Adnan, the taxi driver who moved his panicked wife and four children to another town, said attitudes toward the foreign fighters have changed dramatically since they poured into Fallujah after the Marines' siege ended in April. "We were deceived by them," he said. "We welcomed them first because we thought they came to support us, but now everything is clear."

Among the tensions dividing the locals and the foreigners is religion. People in Fallujah, known as the city of mosques, have chafed at the stern brand of Islam that the newcomers brought with them. The non-Iraqi Arabs berated women who did not cover themselves head-to-toe in black -- very rare in Iraq -- and violently opposed local customs rooted in the town's more mystical religious tradition. One Fallujah man killed a Kuwaiti who said he could not pray at the grave of an ancestor.

Residents said the overwhelming majority of Fallujah's people also have been repulsed by the atrocities that Zarqawi and other extremists have made commonplace in Iraq. The foreign militants are thought to produce the car bombs that now explode around Iraq several times a day, and Zarqawi's organization has asserted responsibility for the slayings of several Westerners, some of which were shown in videos posted on the Internet.

There was another digital display of a beheading on Tuesday. The victim apparently was a Shiite Muslim Arab, and the group that said it posted the video identified itself as the Ansar al-Sunna Army.

Abu Barra, commander of a group of native insurgents called the Allahu Akbar Battalions, said: "Please do not mix the cards. There is an Iraqi resistance, a genuine resistance, and there are other groups trying to settle accounts. There is also terror targeting Iraqis.

President Bush, he said, "knows that and so does the government, but they purposely group all three under the tag of 'terrorism.' "

Barra and other insurgent leaders said the "genuine resistance" is a disciplined force that restricts its attacks to military targets, chiefly U.S. forces. It is motivated, they say, by Iraqi nationalism and humiliation over what it regards as a foreign occupation.

"The others," Barra said, "are Arab Salafis who claim that any Iraqi or Muslim not willing to carry arms is an infidel. They are the crux of our ailment. Most of them are Saudis, Syrians" and North Africans. Salafism is a strain of Islam that seeks to restore the faith to the way it was in the days of the prophet Muhammad, 14 centuries ago.

"It is the Zarqawis and his Salafi group who are going to lead Fallujah, Samarra, Baqubah, Mosul and even some parts of Baghdad to disaster and death," Barra said.

Such worries are encouraged by U.S. and Iraqi officials, who together have mounted offensives in recent weeks to reclaim areas held by insurgents. U.S. forces have led battles to take Najaf, Tall Afar, Samarra and, last week, a string of towns southwest of Baghdad. The operations are intended to establish government control over the entire country before nationwide elections promised for January.

But they also serve, officials say, as a psychological lever on Fallujah, long considered the toughest insurgent outpost.

"The pressure is certainly going up, both as a result of our airstrikes and as a result of their seeing Najaf, Tall Afar, Samarra giving a sense this whole thing is serious," a senior U.S. official in Baghdad said. "There's a lot of fear in Fallujah."

Many residents say the same. A delegation of six prominent Fallujans began negotiating with Iraq's interim government late last month. But senior government officials said it was only after the Oct. 1 assault on Samarra that the Fallujah delegation approached the task with new zeal.

The proposal the delegation took back to Fallujah calls for surrendering control of the city to the Iraqi National Guard. U.S. forces would remain outside the city unless the lightly armed government forces were attacked.

But first, all foreign fighters must leave the city, and the foreigners are adamantly and publicly opposed to the plan. Their representative voted against it in a meeting last week of the city's ruling mujaheddin shura, or council of holy warriors, which supported the peace proposal, 10 to 2. The local insurgent who cast the other negative vote was later persuaded to change his mind, residents say.

Foreign fighters already are blamed for violating a cease-fire in April and prompting a Marine offensive that killed hundreds. Dulaimy said a Syrian was slain by local insurgents "after he fired on American forces during the last truce." In remarks broadcast from one of the city's main mosques on Thursday, an insurgent negotiator, Khalid Hamoud Jumaili, said a city of several hundred thousand should not be sacrificed for a handful of foreign fighters.

Meanwhile, U.S. forces kept up military pressure Tuesday in several nearby cities. Marines raided eight mosques allegedly used as armed bases in Ramadi, a provincial capital about 25 miles west of Fallujah, and called in airstrikes in the town of Hit, about 60 miles to the northwest.

"I think there is unquestionably a fissure and there are probably several different splits based on different groups," said the U.S. official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because his remarks were not cleared by Washington. But "whether any of the townspeople have enough force to make this fissure into something that changes the complexion of things" remains to be seen, the official said.

The assault on Samarra was mounted after a more unified local establishment headed by tribal leaders failed in a similar bid to eject a far smaller band of insurgents and foreign fighters than are holding Fallujah, the official noted.

Maki Nazzal, a Fallujah native who travels into the city frequently as an aid worker, said substantial support remains for the foreigners, especially given the number of civilian casualties caused by U.S. airstrikes.

"Not all the people in Fallujah want these people to leave," Nazzal said. "They always have the explanation of Americans bringing people from Spain, Salvador, Poland and over the world to help them and why can't our brothers help us?"

Some foreign fighters already have left, at least for now. The fighting Tuesday in Hit erupted as Marines pursued insurgents who had recently arrived in the city from Fallujah, residents said.

"There are Arab fighters and Iraqis too," said Omar Jabbawi, 23, an engineering student at Anbar University. "They are supplied with modern weapons which even the modern army didn't have. They killed some of the people the moment they came, saying that they were spies for the Americans."

The blend of insurgents held the town, some patrolling a street of shuttered stores, others praying on the sidewalk.

"Most of the people of the city knew that after Fallujah, the fighters will come to Hit because it is an open city and has many wide woods in which maneuvering is easy," said Abeer Fadhill, 32, a traffic policeman.

A woman in Hit said one fighter had said they had come to liberate Hit as they had Fallujah.

"We don't want to be another Fallujah," said the woman, 45, who gave her name as Umm Hussein. "Ramadan is coming, and we don't have any will to lose a father, a son, a relative or even a friend. Let them leave in peace and fight in a desert away from houses and people."

Blix Says Iraq War Stimulated World Terrorism
By Patrick McLoughlin, Reuters

STOCKHOLM (Oct. 13) - Former chief U.N. weapons inspector Hans Blix said Wednesday the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq had failed tragically in its aim of making the world a safer place and succeeded only in stimulating terrorism.

Blix, in implicit criticism of the main protagonists President Bush and British Prime Minister Tony Blair, said the action had also failed to deter any ambitions on the part of Iran or North Korea to develop nuclear weapons.

"The acknowledged gain of the war was that a treacherous and murderous dictator (Saddam Hussein) was removed, but the rest has been tragedy and failure," he told Reuters in an interview. "It has stimulated terrorism."

Many critics of the invasion argue it opened Iraq to Islamist militants involved in an insurrection against coalition forces, while distracting attention from a campaign against the al-Qaeda group blamed for September, 2001 attacks on the United States.

"Is the world safer? No. It's not safer in Iraq," he said in his native Stockholm. "If North Korea and Iran are contemplating going for weapons of mass destruction, then it hasn't stopped them. It has not solved the Middle East conflict."

OTHER ISSUES NEGLECTED

Blix suggested Washington and London had lost perspective in focusing on Saddam who, it has since emerged, was not involved in developing nuclear arms.

"Of course they were concerned with North Korea and Iran. But...they focused a great deal of their efforts on Iraq while other things were left simmering."

Iran denies U.S. accusations it is developing nuclear arms. Experts say North Korea has an arsenal of between two and nine nuclear bombs.

Blix, who retired from the UN last year and now chairs a Swedish-sponsored Weapons of Mass Destruction Commission, also cast doubt on the Iraqi government's comments Tuesday that UN weapons inspectors were welcome to return.

"The Iraqi government would need to offer guarantees of safety," said the 75-year-old former head of the International Atomic Energy Agency, who led the UN inspections team until 2003. "But to go to sites which satellites have already found to be empty is perhaps not meaningful."

Iraqi Science and Technology Minister Rashad Omar issued the invitation after an IAEA report Monday said neither Baghdad nor Washington appeared to have noticed the disappearance of nuclear equipment and materials once closely monitored by IAEA.

Oh, puuleeeeze! :rolleyes: This is, what, excuse number 15 or 16? Quit making excuses for a failed foriegn policy, already!

Unless you're already campaigning to invade Sudan. Have you written your president and requested invasion of Columbia? How about Iran? Jordan? Come on, if you're really serious about invading a country because they have a history of killing their own citizens for crimes against the government, then you better quite *****ing about paying taxes because it's going to cost a lot more to invade every stinking country on this planet.

:rolleyes:

Quit making so many damned excuses and start taking some responsibility for a change! You radical-righties are worse then junior high kids.

"Have you written your president and requested invasion of Columbia? How about Iran? Jordan? Come on, if you're really serious about invading a country because they have a history of killing their own citizens for crimes against the government, then you better quite *****ing about paying taxes because it's going to cost a lot more to invade every stinking country on this planet."

Nope I am waiting for France, Germany, Spain, Russia and the rest of the world to pull their weight. We will let them have the easy one's.

I like AuntyM's anology of domestice abuse. In such a situation it is proper for sociaty to put the offending criminal in prison. When it comes to Nation States that is the job of the Marines. How many democracy's where created peacefully? Except for a handfull of British Colonies (India, Canada, Australia) most if not all democracy's where created at the end of rifle. And most of those where created by the American soldiar (France, Germany, Japan, All of Eastern Europe etc.....). I'm not real sure how you propose "showing" a baby with, "thighbones the size of matchsticks," "democracy the right way?"

TK-Don't hold your breath! We must remember that most of the countries you mentioned became free at the end of a machine gun being held by an American Soldiar!

GH-There has to be line somewhere. IMHO, As a Nation, we should do all we can to end Civil Wars and Genocide through deplomacy without an invasion. But when a country invades their neighbor and shoots at American pilots daily we reserve the right to invade. That is why I did not agree with the Bosnian War (although once the decision was made I supported Clinton and the soldiars) but did agree with the invasion of Iraq. I would agree that the Bush administration did throw out some red herrings (excuses as you say) that where unneccesary. If it was me I would have held a press conferance saying that Saddam has violated the cease fire so hostilities have resumed. Easy enough!

Broodbuster,
I don't necessarily agree with your difference between Iraq and Bosnia since there was absolute genocide going on in Bosnia when we invaded. The genocide card was only played in Iraq after every other reason failed, and Iraq's atrocities are almost 20 years old. If it was so damned important, why did we wait so long?

But I whole-heartily agree with your suggestion that Bush should have stood before the American people and done a better job of convincing them why he wanted to invade. And I concur with your belief of protecting our allies when they are invaded.

KK and GH,

No way you can make those statements if you have read the presidents list of reasons for going into war and Congress reason as well.

GH "The genocide card was only played in Iraq after every other reason failed,"

KK "stating that the WMD's were what they settled on"


Kerry gave one reason not Bush be honest before you label someone else as being dishonest.

It's already been admitted to by members of the administration that they couldn't come to a concensus on a reason to invade so they "settled" on the WMD issue. Straight out of the Goering/Rove playbook.

You know, my teenager tries to do the same thing: give a laundry list of reasons/excuses for whatever. Eventually one of them gotta stick, he figures. Ergo, the administration's genocide card.

No Harley they voted on a list of reasons the president gave. Congress then added one more reason. Kerry otoh only listed one reason.

No Elvis, the administration (Cabal) couldn't come to a concesus before they even presented it to Congress or the American public.

The fact that there was a list of reasons given to congress to vote on and the list was created in concert with congress says you are talkin out your O ring as usual Harley.

The fact that the cabal couldn't even decide on a credible reason to present to Congress for a preemptive invasion in the first place shows you haven't a clue what's really going on.


As usual.

TK, you keep referring to that list. What everyone remembers is what Bush told them during his limited press conferences and Presidential Announcements on TV. He highlighted (3) primary reasons, WMD, imminent threat and murdering his people. The others were just CYA.

So they voted on vapor with no reason and you say the war is Bush's fault. So the entire congress are idiots or under a spell? Did you use the power bander for your scrunchie today?

All we need now is Marty Feldman's comments and we have a remake of a 3 Stooges. Jeff'ed are you a dullard or just playing one?

dullard: a mentally dull person or a dolt, blockhead.

Technically they voted to allow Bush to use force. And they voted with the list the cabal concocted. They never voted to go to war.


Technically.

But Congress fell victim to assumptions. They assumed that the president would use good judgement and prudence before preemptively invading. But as Bush would say, "Fool me once .... shame on .... fool me again .... shame ..... I'm a fool."

Why, did you just parse my post and take it completely out of context??

How utterly Republican of you.