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I was offered a small glass of the very sweet and strong tea popular in Iraq, always poured into glasses that taper inward gracefully. The young men guarding the mosque welcomed me and gave me a tour of the wreckage. The journalist was there, too, and he introduced himself as promised. A missile fired from an American Apache helicopter had apparently destroyed it. As proof, the men had collected all the shrapnel, along with numerous shell casings from American Ms, not the Kalashnikovs used by Iraqis.
Three blackened cars sat inside the courtyard. These, the men explained, had belonged to people praying in the mosque and had been parked outside, but the Americans had burned them and dragged them in. And one was shot here. Inside the offices, blood covered plastic chairs and parts of the floor.
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Political posters on the walls featured the first and second Sadr martyrs. I glanced at a Sunni doctor who was my interlocutor to get confirmation. It looked real to him. The men pointed to more blood. A book written by Muhammad Sadiq al Sadr was bloodied. A poster of Prime Minister Jaafari had black ink scribbled on his face. In the room where the ceremonial drums and chains were stored, drums had been torn.
Outside, Sheikh Safaa paced back and forth in the courtyard by his destroyed home, talking on his mobile phone. The journalist and several other young men surrounded him to consult as I waited. I recognized another one of them, also wearing a black suit and shirt with no tie and leather shoes. Sheikh Safaa agreed to meet me inside the prayer room itself. Its green carpet and shiny model of the Najaf shrine were still intact.
On its walls hung verses from the Quran about judgment day, a picture of Muhammad Sadiq al Sadr, and one of Muqtada. Sheikh Safaa looked extremely young, and his stylishly groomed beard was still not fully mature.
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He was thin, with a long, narrow nose. He wore modern wire-frame glasses and had a white imama , or turban, balanced on his ears. As we spoke he held his mobile phone and prayer beads in one hand, gesticulating with the other. He confirmed that the mosque belonged to the Sadrists.
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He explained that they had permitted the Dawa Party to use some of their rooms as an office. The American forces denied that they attacked the husseiniya—they said they just attacked the Dawa office—but it was a lie. The truth is they entered both the Dawa office and the Mustafa Husseiniya and they killed in a very barbaric way. And nobody expected the Americans would do that, especially those who saw films about freedom in America.
No one expected this. They surrounded the husseiniya and started firing randomly. They also used bombs and grenades. Infantry soldiers came in shooting.
They took the brothers to a single place and grouped them together and executed them. One of them had a black band on his forehead because he was a sayyid. He was the one who got the most bullets. You have already seen his brains. They went inside the shrine with a grenade. People were praying. They went inside the mihrab [which only the imam enters]. The mosque should be a safe place.
I have four children, and they were very scared. They still are not stable. I went today to visit my mother, an old woman. They allowed the Sadrists to participate in the elections, but the election results were not what the Americans wanted, so they are putting political pressure to prevent things from going in the direction they dislike.
Muqtada demanded that the occupation forces apologize and compensate the families of the victims. America should not kill and compensate. Just stop killing. When the occupier came to this country we lost our security, and security is one of the most important favors that God gives to us. It is true that there was a strong oppression of Iraqis by the former regime. America came to Iraq proclaiming its liberation and freedom and democracy and pluralism, but America proclaimed one thing and we saw something else.
We saw freedom, but it was the freedom of tanks and the democracy of Humvees, and instead of multiple parties we saw multiple killings of people in ugly ways. I expected some mention of the raid, since prominent Shias had issued angry statements. Prime Minister Ibrahim al Jaafari said that the dead had indeed been inside a mosque. Lynch wore pressed fatigues with two stars on his shoulder straps.
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He stood before American and Iraqi flags and throughout the conference remained expressionless. His hands sliced the air to emphasize points, in rhythm with his words. He neglected to mention that this was also where U. In fact, the number of attacks against Iraqi security-force members has increased 35 percent in the last four weeks compared with the previous six months. The people that are going to win this counterinsurgency battle against Zarqawi and al Qaeda in Iraq are the Iraqi people, and indications like that show their courage, their conviction, and their commitment to a democratic future.
Amazing story. He switched slides to a satellite image of Ur and Shaab showing the Mustafa Husseiniya.
Media installations should not be attacked unless it is clear that they make an effective contribution to military action and their destruction offers a definite military advantage. The sermon would be inflammatory. While the rhetoric of nationalism still pervaded his sermons, so did thinly veiled references to Sunnis as infidels. Where are the Muslims? To Americans, the question might seem impossibly distant.
This was led, planned, and executed by the Iraqi special-operations forces, based on detailed intelligence that a kidnapping cell was occupying this complex. The operation consisted of about 50 members of Iraqi special operations forces and about 25 U. But the U. They surveyed the battlefield in advance, looking for sensitive areas, and they said, Okay, there are mosques in the area, but the nearest mosque is about six blocks from the target-point complex, so a decision was made to do the operation.
We found over 32 weapons, and we found the hostage, the innocent Iraqi, who just 12 hours before was walking the streets of Baghdad. He was walking the streets of Baghdad en route to a hospital to visit his brother who had gunshot wounds. He was kidnapped and beaten in the car en route to this complex. He was tortured. He was tortured with an electrical drill. Twelve hours after he was kidnapped, he was rescued.
He is indeed most grateful. He is most grateful to be alive, and he is most grateful to the Iraqi special-operations forces. The closest mosque was six blocks away. When they got close to the compound, they took fire, and they returned fire. When they got inside the room, a room in this compound, they realized this could have been a husseiniya , a prayer room. They saw a prayer rug. They saw a minaret. In that room and in that compound, the enemy was holding a hostage and torturing a hostage, and in that room and in that compound, they were storing weapons, munitions, and IED explosive devices.
Very, very effective operation, planned and executed by Iraqi special-operations forces. We have reason to believe and evidence to support that the terrorists and foreign fighters are indeed using kidnapping as a way to finance their operations.