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02/25/2006:

"Attacks Surge in Iraq Despite Curfew"

BAGHDAD, Iraq - A car bomb exploded in a Shiite holy city and 13 members of one Shiite family were gunned down northeast of the capital Saturday in a surge of attacks that killed at least 30 people despite heightened security aimed at curbing sectarian violence following the bombing of a revered Shiite shrine.

At least one more Sunni mosque was attacked in Baghdad on Saturday after two rockets were fired at a Shiite mosque in Tuz Khormato, north of the capital, the previous night. Shooting also broke out near the home of a prominent Sunni cleric as the funeral procession for an Al-Arabiya TV correspondent slain in sectarian violence was passing by. Police believed the procession was the target.

The violence occurred despite an extraordinary daytime curfew in Baghdad and three surrounding provinces. Stretched security forces could not be everywhere to contain attacks that have killed more than 150 people since Wednesday's shrine bombing and pushed Iraq to the brink of civil war.
news.yahoo.com


Death-squad “democracy” in Iraq
...Sunni leaders estimate that death squads have murdered some 1,600 Sunnis so far. This scale of killing by paramilitary groups couldn’t take place without tacit, if not outright official, support.

That means from the U.S., too. In early 2005, Pentagon war planners around Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld talked of pursuing the “Salvador option”--outsourcing the work of cracking down on Sunni resistance fighters to Shiite and Kurdish paramilitary forces, as the U.S. did during its secret wars on left-wing movements in Central America. Now we have evidence that the “Salvador option” is in full swing.


Pentagon-Controlled Iraqi National Guard Implicated in Samarra Mosque Bombing
As the “non-partisan” Council on Foreign Relations assures us, Iraqi National Guard troops are trained and fully “vetted” by the Pentagon. “National guard troops receive three weeks of formal training and then on-the-job training by working with U.S. forces,” a CFR backgrounder explains. “The National Guard has replaced the Iraqi Civil Defense Corps as the largest security force in Iraq,” reports the World Tribune. “The 45,000-member force has been trained and equipped by the United States, with help from Britain and Jordan.” In short, the Iraqi National Guard is a subsidiary of the Pentagon, organized and trained to do the bidding of the Anglo-American occupation forces and their installed minions. Thus it should come as no surprise the Iraqi National Guard may play an important role in the recent bombing of the Golden Dome mosque in Samarra, according to locals.

Since it is unreasonable to expect Baghdad hotel-bound corporate media hacks to report anything beyond what is read from a Pentagon script inside the Green Zone, most Americans remain unaware of details implicating the Iraqi National Guard in the bombing. According to reports appearing on the humanitarian Iraqi League organization’s Iraqi Rabita website and translated into English by the Iraqi blogger Baghdad Dweller (see original Arabic here and here), at least two witnesses saw “unusual activities by the ING [Iraqi National Guard] in the area around the mosque.” Two mosque guards reported four men in ING uniforms had blindfolded them and planted explosives. A second witness, Muhammad al-Samarrai, the owner of an internet cafe in the area, was told to stay in his store and not leave the area. From 11 pm until 6:30 am, ten minutes before two bombs were detonated, the area surrounding the mosque was patrolled by “joint forces of Iraqi ING and Americans,” according to al-Samarrai.