Bekijk Volledige Versie : 'Saddam' ontkent op tape betrokkenheid bij aanslag Najaf
Zwarte Schaap
01-09-03, 14:08
'Saddam' ontkent op tape betrokkenheid bij aanslag Najaf
Bagdad - De Arabische nieuwszender Al-Jazeera heeft maandag een geluidsopname uitgezonden die van Saddam Hussein afkomstig zou zijn. 'Saddam' zegt op de tape niets te maken te hebben met de bomaanslag van afgelopen vrijdag op een islamitisch heiligdom in Najaf, waarbij zeker 85 mensen omkwamen. Onder de doden was de prominentste sjiitische geestelijke van Irak, ayatollah Mohammad Baqir al-Hakim.
Volgens de stem op de tape hebben de ,,slangen, de dienaren van de bezetters'' de getrouwen van Saddam ,,zonder enig bewijs'' beschuldigd van de moord op al-Hakim. 'Saddam' benadrukt op de tape nog altijd de leider te zijn van alle Irakezen, daarmee aangevend dat hij geen aanslag zou laten plegen op welke etnische of religieuze groepering binnen Irak dan ook. ,,U gelovigen, als een corrupt persoon u nieuws brengt, controleer het dan goed alvorens zomaar beschuldigingen te uiten'', haalde Saddam de koran aan. ,,Anders zult u spijt krijgen van uw beschuldiging.''
,,Saddam steunde tijdens zijn bewind vooral op de soennitische minderheid; de sjiitische meerderheid werd onder Saddam jarenlang onderdrukt. Veel sjiieten in Najaf hebben de schuld voor de aanslag bij getrouwen van Saddam gelegd.
Het was voor het eerst sinds 1 augustus dat 'Saddam' weer een geluidsopname aan een televisiezender stuurde. Of de opname authentiek is, moet nog worden vastgesteld.
Bron: Rotterdams Dagblad 01/09/03
vanaf het begin heb ik niet geloofd, dat Sadam hierachter zit
Ik zet mijn geld op teheran , daar Hakim voor hun smaak veel te tollerant en cooperativ was.
Teherans interesse is het een shiitisch bolwerk aan hun grens te etableren en niet een USA vriendelijk regime.
Nu we toch zijn begonnen met het beschuldigen van alle partijen ter wereld.
Volgens mij was het Tel Aviv. Reeds in de jaren 70 was het de droom van Sharon om Iraq op te splitsen in 3 ministaatjes met leiders gecontrolleerd door Israel. Wat Israel dus niet wil is een samenwerkende bevolking en dus is men bezig bomaanslagen te plegen om chaos te creeeren wat zal leiden tot een burgeroorlog. Zoals ik al eerder vermeldde lijkt de aanslag op Hakim verdacht veel op een in 1985 gepleegde op de Shi'itische geestelijke Fadlallah. De verdenking viel op de CIA, maar meer waarschijnlijk is dat de CIA opdracht heeft gegeven tot de aanslag en de Mossad deze heeft uitgevoerd.
Volgens mij de familie Saud, die hebben het meest belang bij het blijvend ontregelen van de olie-industrie in Irak!!
Ik denk dat het de marsmannetjes zijn!
Ayatollah's killing: Winners and losers
By Pepe Escobar
PARIS - Grand Ayatollah Mohammed Baqr al-Hakim, ripped to pieces by the Volkswagen car bomb in front of the sacred Imam Ali Shrine in Najaf which killed 125 and left more than 230 wounded after last Friday's prayers, was the quintessential martyr of the current Iraqi jihad. All that was left of him was a charred fragment of muscle which was sent to Baghdad for DNA identification. A prominent cleric of a Shi'ite culture deeply imbued with the concept of martyrdom, fate in the end dictated that al-Hakim would tragically fall to a jihad conducted by Sunni Muslims against a foreign invader just because he was kind of a pacifist: although he wanted the end of the American occupation, he was against armed resistance under the current circumstances.
No Shi'ite would dream of carrying out such blasphemous violence on the doorstep of the Imam Ali Shrine, the third most sacred site for Shi'ites after Mecca and Medina. Grand Ayatollah al-Hakim was the victim of an assassination - as was the UN's special representative Sergio Vieira de Mello. The hundreds of dead and wounded in the horrific Najaf massacre were just - to borrow Pentagon terminology - "collateral damage". Al-Hakim may have become another high-profile victim - like Vieira de Mello - of what Iraqis are now calling "the Saddam network", which has already sabotaged oil pipelines and bombed the Jordanian embassy and the UN compound in Baghdad.
But what if this was the work of somebody else? European intelligence sources in Brussels tell Asia Times Online that ordinary Iraqis are becoming increasingly convinced the bombings are part of a sinister American conspiracy to plunge the country into total chaos and so force the UN to take responsibility for mopping-up operations, thus saving American face. Others blame Israel's Mossad, which infiltrated Iraq even before the invasion. Israel - with a history of political assassinations - would be the big loser in the event of an Islamic government coming to power in Iraq. Al-Hakim, a key political player, wanted a moderate, Shi'ite-led, Islamic regime for the country.
A few days before his death, he was still telling a Spanish newspaper he hoped the American-appointed governing council would become representative, "but for the moment nothing very real has come out of it". He believed the Constitutional Assembly which will write the future Iraqi constitution should be democratically elected, "otherwise the constitution would be rejected". And he stressed that "the occupying troops are neither qualified nor capable of resolving our problems, which are very serious and could provoke a social explosion. In which case, they would be responsible." He was a moderate, and he had a broad constituency, but he was a post-Saddam leader-in-the-making who did not please either the Americans, the secular "Saddam network" or Wahhabi jihadis.
The resistance against the US occupation has been carried out by myriad groups, which call themselves names like Iraqi Resistance Brigade, Army of Mohammed, Muslim Fighters of the Victorious Sects, General Command of the Iraqi Armed Resistance and Liberation Forces, and Islamic Armed Group of al-Qaeda (Fallujah branch). They have upgraded from attacking and ambushing American soldiers to organizing complex operations like the UN and Imam Ali Shrine bombings. The Americans at first thought they were fighting a hard core of 600 former Republican Guards and Saddam fedayeen with up to 11,000 "reserves". But now the hard core is estimated at at least 7,000, all responding to local command and self-sufficient in terms of funds, weapons and military know-how.
It's wrong to view the resistance as "remnants of Saddam's regime", as the Pentagon insists on doing. The Saddam remnants - former soldiers and Ba'athists - are joined by any number of Iraqis angered by the occupation, and of course by Saudi, Syrian, Egyptian, Yemeni and northern African jihadis, many of them Arab-Afghans trained in the Afghan jihad. In this particular sense, we are finally able to see something of the missing link between Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda that the White House and the Pentagon were so desperate to announce in the run up to the war. But Saddam Hussein seems to have been clever enough to prepare the conditions for the linkage to emerge only after the war, as a time bomb designed to blow up in the Pentagon's face.
It's the deadliest of combinations, says a European intelligence official monitoring global terror: "The former Republican Guards, Ba'ath Party officials and members of security services know the terrain, know everybody and have loads of cash. And the jihadis not only focus on the special incentive of fighting the American infidels on sacred Arab soil: they have the necessary military knowhow." In the case of the Najaf bombing, there's the added bonus of a meeting of minds. Saddam's secular regime and its sycophants persecuted the Shi'ites, and the jihadis are essentially Wahhabis or crypto-Wahhabis, for whom the Shi'ites are as perverse an enemy as the Jews and the Christians.
Did Saddam plan all this? Of course he did - at least a great deal of it. He knew he would lose the war, but he had enough time to conceive a three-pronged form of resistance: nationalist, Ba'athist and Islamist. European intelligence knows that months before the US invasion Saddam had already distributed reserves of troops, weapons and cash around Iraq. He himself recruited the key guerrilla chiefs, whose ages range from 18 to 35. He conceived them as operating independently, but with himself as commander-in-chief. The Saddam view of the resistance is not necessarily shared by most of the resistance groups, which consider the Ba'athists a bunch of losers. These groups - all of them tribal - are essentially nationalist: they are defending Iraqi pride and Iraqi land. But in Saddam's scenario they are also useful as added firepower and a nuisance factor against the invaders.
After Baghdad fell without a fight on April 9, scores of Ba'ath Party cadres took refuge in Jordan, Syria, Egypt, Yemen, Libya, Morocco and Mauritania. The Ba'ath Party has operated cells in these countries since 1968. The idea - brilliant in itself - was to have these cadres rally the Arab masses in these countries to join a jihad against the superpower which dared to occupy sacred Arab land. The masses may not be responding yet - but certainly professional jihadis already have. With the Najaf bombing, the "Saddam network" has scored another big hit: it has managed in one stroke to simultaneously divide the Shi'ites (62 percent of the Iraqi population) and hurl hundreds of thousands of them into the streets chanting anti-US slogans. Ayatollah al-Hakim's brother is a member of the American-imposed interim governing council, which has absolutely no power and is considered a sham by the majority of Iraqis. Al-Hakim's Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI) has been vilified by other Shi'ite factions because it is - at least for the moment - against armed resistance. And many Shi'ites also remember very well that SCIRI backed Iran in the 1980-1988 Iran-Iraq war.
As Asia Times Online has reported, holy Najaf is at the dead center of what happens next in Iraq. Immediately after the fall of Baghdad, first the imam at Ali's Shrine, Dr Haider Alkelydar, and then Shi'ite cleric Abdul Majid al-Khoei, who returned from exile in London, were assassinated. As chaos takes over, Shi'ites are increasingly in favor of armed resistance against the Americans. But the top de facto religious authority, Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, does not want to get drawn into any political wrestling match: he is still adopting a "wait and see" attitude. The one character who has everything to gain from al-Hakim's murder is young Moqtada al-Sadr, extremely respected because he is the son of Grand Ayatollah Mohammed Sadeq al-Sadr. Moqtada al-Sadr favors armed struggle - right now - and that's exactly why he would be a useful ally to both the "Saddam network" and the jihadis. Their objective is total confrontation with the Americans - with no space for appeasers like the UN's Vieira de Mello or SCIRI's al-Hakim.
European diplomats are very cynical about the possibility of the neo-conservatives controlling the Bush administration swallowing their pride and turning to the UN for help. Even the UN is facing a no-win situation, and the diplomats in New York and Geneva know it. In the unlikely event blue helmets were deployed in Iraq, it's practically certain they would be regarded by most of the population as the tail end of the US occupying serpent. Especially if Washington insists on not relinquishing one inch of control of the whole, disastrous operation. So this is the gift of Washington's neo-conservatives to the world: instead of a democratic Iraq, a putrid state infected by a guerrilla virus and on the verge of a devastating civil and ethnic war.
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/EI02Ak01.html
Americans To Establish First Iraqi Security Force
Bassel Mohamad Al-Hayat 2003/09/1
Baghdad
The coalition authority has taken the first steps towards establishing the first security force in Iraq after the ouster of the former regime. The brigadier general Raad Al Aani, a high-ranking member of the Movement of Lieutenants and Civilians in Iraq, revealed that the Americans have empowered the movement to form the first security force in the country. He said he expected the Movement's Secretary General Najib El Salihi to head the force, which will include "professional security forces that reflect the new Iraq and that its members will be respected and obeyed by the Iraqi people," as it was stipulated in the memorandum issued the American civil administration on this issue.
According to Al Aani, the Movement of Lieutenants and Civilians, which boasts a strong military and security experience, presented to the American parties a three-fold security plan: protecting the borders, establishing a strong security force and coordinating with the American security forces.
Regarding the last terrorist operation that took place in Iraq, he explained that the Movement had obtained information indicating that the Israeli Mossad could be involved in these operations. Observers attribute the Americans' decision to ask the Movement to form a security force to the breakdown of the security situation and the escalating terrorist operations.
These observers maintain that the U.S. administration has made two mistakes: the first one is disbanding the Iraqi army, which led to the collapse of the Iraq's international borders security, and the second is the appropriation and direct control of the security, without allowing any other party to interfere.
Sources from the Movement said that the work had already started, with a list being drawn of all the potential candidates for the new security force, which should end up having approximately 3,000 to 5,000 members.
The New York Times newspaper reported yesterday American and Iraqi officials discussing the formation of a large Iraqi quasi-military force to help foster stability in Iraq. The newspaper reported the officials saying one day after the Najaf explosion, that this force could comprise thousands of Iraqis, and that the Iraqi political parties have examined the files of the candidates to ensure that none of them has any relation with the government of toppled Saddam Hussein. The sources added that this militia could in the end handle the control over the Iraqi cities, replacing thereby American forces, adding that a force of several thousand men, most of them having a military experience, could be ready in a month.
Mudhar Shawkat, one of the Iraqi National Congress officials, said that he had participated in the discussions held on Saturday, said the "situation has changed, and there is a new tendency to accept the idea."
The newspaper pointed out that one of the pending issues was whether the force would fall under American or Iraqi authority.
The newspaper also reported Iraqi politicians, who after Friday's attack in Najaf, expressed their loss of trust in the ability of the U.S. forces to protect leaders and sacred places, and saying that they were no longer able to prevent their followers from working against their enemies.
In this regard, Nael Moussawi, a religious Shiite leader, addressed the American soldiers guarding the gate of the provisional coalition authority, saying: "I don't know how long I will be able to control my men."
But according to The New York Times, U.S. officials still fear that this project will end in a confrontation between the different factions supposed to form this militia.
http://english.daralhayat.com/arab_news/09-2003/Article-20030901-5d33c658-c0a8-01ed-0055-39d8f5a70b5b/story.html
Merkwaardig dat de Amerikanen een militie willen bewapenen (zoals ze claimen) die beweert dat de Mossad het heeft gedaan.