Thursday, April 01, 2004

Since I am not aware of what news is being broadcasted in the US regarding the war efforts (there is practically no news here in Chile), I decided to share the following excerpt from an article that I encountered online.

An Iraqi Mob Kills 4 US Contractors (International Herald Tribune)

FALLUJA, Iraq An enraged mob attacked four American contractors here Wednesday, shooting them to death, burning their vehicles, dragging their bodies through the streets and then hanging the charred corpses from a bridge over the Euphrates River.
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Meanwhile, less than 24 kilometers, or 15 miles, away, in the same area of the increasingly violent Sunni Triangle, five marines were killed in one of the deadliest roadside bomb incidents for coalition troops in weeks.
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The steadily deteriorating security situation in the Falluja area, west of Baghdad, has become so dangerous that no American soldiers or Iraqi security staff responded to the attack against the contractors. There are a number of police stations in Falluja and a base of more than 4,000 marines nearby.
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But even while the two vehicles burned, sending plumes of inky smoke over the closed shops of the city, there were no ambulances, no fire engines and there was no security.
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Instead, Falluja’s streets were thick with men and boys and chaos. Boys with scarves over their faces hurled bricks into the burning vehicles. A group of men dragged one of the smoldering corpses into the street and ripped it apart. Someone then tied a chunk of flesh to a rock and tossed it over a telephone wire.
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‘‘Viva mujahadeen!’’ shouted Said Khalaf, a taxi driver. ‘‘Long live the resistance!’’
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Nearby, a boy no older than 10 put his foot on the head of a body and said: ‘‘Where is Bush? Let him come here and see this!’’ Many people in the crowd said they felt as if they had won an important battle. Others said they thought that the contractors, who were driving in four-wheel-drive trucks, were working for the Central Intelligence Agency.
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‘‘This is what these spies deserve,’’ said Salam Aldulayme, a 28-year-old Falluja resident.
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The series of deadly attacks on U.S. troops and foreign civilians in the Sunni Triangle area of central Iraq, particularly around Falluja, and a similar spate of attacks in the northern oil city of Mosul, have raised doubts about the cautiously optimistic appraisal of American progress in the war that has been common among U.S. generals since the beginning of the year.
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But Wednesday’s events at Falluja indicate that the war may not have changed as much as the generals have suggested. The fact that the attack on the civilian vehicles occurred in Falluja, an overwhelming Sunni city that is the most volatile stronghold of support for Saddam, and that it followed a 10-day offensive by U.S. marines aimed at gaining effective control of the city, suggested that the current war may, in practice, be an extension of the conflict that began last year.
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Captain Chris Logan of the Marine Corps said Wednesday that the city was becoming ‘‘an area of greater concern.’’ He added: ‘‘This is one of those areas in Iraq that is definitely squirrelly. The guerrillas in Falluja are testing us. They’re testing our resolve.’’
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TESTING OUR RESOLVE? I think that we are testing theirs.

posted by Rebecca @ 4/01/2004 03:33:00 PM