One of Ours

...[Brigadier General Mark Kimmitt, the top US military spokesman in Iraq, ] said the leader of the Fallujah Brigade, former Major General Jassem Mohammed Salah, and his officers had yet to be fully vetted...

...Maj Gen Salah’s ability to deliver would soon be put to the test, said Gen Conway, who commands the 1st Marine Expeditionary Force that has besieged Fallujah for nearly a month.

“In a few days we will have our first convoy go through the centre of Fallujah … and we’ll expect him to provide security,” Gen Conway said...

...Gen Conway described the Iraqi force as part of the US-led “military partnership” and said its leaders fully understand that foreign “terrorists” and other hardcore fighters in Fallujah “must be killed or captured”.

The official in Baghdad said the new force would initially hold the city’s southern industrial zone, with the marines forming an outer cordon about a kilometre away.

Tentative plans exist to hand the city’s more volatile northern section to the brigade within the next few weeks...

...the move was seen as a major victory by those inside the shattered city.

“We resisted and won,” an armed young man, Abu Safaa Mehmadi, told an AFP correspondent inside the city.

Another fighter, Abu Salem, 60, said: “Baghdad fell in 20 days and we resisted nearly a month before getting an Iraqi force to look after our security.”...

...She said the prison cellblock where the abuse occurred was under the tight control of Army military intelligence officers who may have encouraged the abuse.

The suggestion by Brig. Gen. Janis Karpinski that the reservists acted at the behest of military intelligence officers appears largely supported in a still-classified Army report on prison conditions in Iraq that documented many of the worst abuses at the Abu Ghraib prison...

...the report by Maj. Gen. Antonio M. Taguba found that reservist military police at the prison were urged by Army military officers and C.I.A. agents to "set physical and mental conditions for favorable interrogation of witnesses."...

...General Karpinski said the special high-security cellblock at Abu Ghraib had been under the direct control of Army intelligence officers, not the reservists under her command.

She said that while the reservists involved in the abuses were "bad people" who deserved punishment, she suspected that they were acting with the encouragement, if not at the direction, of military intelligence units that ran the special cellblock used for interrogation. She said that C.I.A. employees often joined in the interrogations at the prison...

...Prisoners were beaten and threatened with rape, electrocution and dog attacks, witnesses told Army investigators...Much of the abuse was sexual, with prisoners often kept naked and forced to perform simulated and real sex acts...

...General Karpinski said she was speaking out because she believed that military commanders were trying to shift the blame exclusively to her and other reservists and away from intelligence officers still at work in Iraq.

"We're disposable," she said of the military's attitude toward reservists. "Why would they want the active-duty people to take the blame? They want to put this on the M.P.'s and hope that this thing goes away. Well, it's not going to go away."...

...the special cellblock, known as 1A, was one of about two dozen cellblocks in the large prison complex and was essentially off limits to soldiers who were not part of the interrogations, including virtually all of the military police...

..."It was awful. My immediate reaction was: these are bad people, because their faces revealed how much pleasure they felt at this."

But she said the context of the brutality had been lost, noting that the six Army reservists charged in the case represented were only a tiny fraction of the nearly 3,400 reservists under her command in Iraq...

...little attention has been paid to the Army military intelligence unit that controlled Cellblock 1A, where her soldiers guarded the Iraqi detainees between interrogations...

...one of the photographs of abused prisoners also showed the legs of 16 American soldiers — the photograph was cropped so that their upper bodies could not be seen — "and that tells you that clearly other people were participating, because I didn't have 16 people assigned to that cellblock."...

...she said she did not visit Cellblock 1A, in keeping with the wishes of military intelligence officers who, she said, worried that unnecessary visits might interfere with their interrogations of Iraqis...

...military intelligence officers at the prison went "to great lengths to try to exclude the I.C.R.C. from access to that interrogation wing."...

...he believed that she was being made a scapegoat for others in the military, especially for military intelligence officers who knew what was going on in Cellblock 1A...

My research was started before 12 days ago to looking for the fact in the filuja and in Al-Najaf, I met two persons from the Filuja and I asked him
Why you are fighting ?
They say.
1. We are fighting to get money we are without work without salary we spend our life to served Saddam we worked with him and now we can't live without money so we are fight for money.
2. there are many members from the Saddam's intelligent and terrorists pay the money to push the people to fight and kill any one reject the fight.
3. Many people from the Filuja City fight retaliation because they losing them kinsfolk in the war.
4. There are many terrorists " Ben Laden's fellows from other countries" in the Filuja city always tries to make argument between Iraqi people and USA.

That what was Al-Filuja people say.

When I asked Muqtada's fellows in Al-Najaf City they say.
1. We are fighting because we haven’t any work and haven't money to live in the peace, we spend our life in the captor and we get our freedom with USA and UK help but we discovered we are without money without jobs without any things.
2. Muqtada and whom support him pay good money so we need that money to get good life.
3. there are many thieves in the Iraqi government council like Ahmmed Al-chalabi, Muafaq Al-Rubaei and others they are looting the Iraqi money with out any deterrent.

That what was Muqtada's fellows say...

...Muqtada al-Sadr threatened "the Baathists" whom the Coalition had begun returning to the administration of the state. He said in his Friday prayer sermon that the Americans "are attempting to return the Baathists to the administration of the state. I will not permit it. They will meet their end at the hands of the believers."...

...Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani and his three colleagues in Najaf issued a strong denunciation of Muqtada al-Sadr for his threat to unleash suicide bombers against the Americans if they invaded Najaf. The statement said that neither Sistani nor any other authority had authorized suicide bombings, and Muqtada did not have the standing to issue such a decree.

BAGHDAD — Just before 10:30 a.m. Thursday, 1st Lt. Nicholas Bradley crouched next to an Iraqi boy, telling him he’s going to live. The boy, about 12, was bleeding from shrapnel wounds in his back, near his spinal column, and his arm.

The boy couldn’t move his legs, couldn’t feel anything as Bradley probed his feet. But the platoon leader kept talking to him soothingly as medical help arrived. Bradley held the boy’s hand while repeating, “Hey, buddy. You’re good. You’re gonna be all right,” sounding like he believed it, too...

...his platoon [had] pulled over to deal with a roadside bomb. With the area secure, bomb explosives soldiers from the 752nd Ordnance Company out of Fort Sill, Okla., arrived and prepared to detonate the bomb’s 155 mm artillery shell.

As they worked, locals gathered. Between turns at trying to unsnarl traffic, Bradley and his team — Sgt. Jeremy Lewis and Spc. Timothy Heim — talked about how this fit a recent pattern of attacks in which insurgents wait until bomb disposal teams arrive, then attack with mortars.

Seconds later, their fears came true.

Three mortar rounds landed only about 50 feet from their up-armored Humvee.

Miraculously, no soldiers were injured. But two small Iraqi boys lay dead. A third, older boy tried to drag himself to safety.

Bradley, Heim, Lewis and the rest of the soldiers somehow stayed almost supernaturally calm. Although they expected rocket-propelled grenades to follow the mortars, they rushed to check the bodies of the children, and to drag the wounded boy to safety...

...Insurgents lobbing mortars into a crowded neighborhood “shows they don’t care,” he says. “IEDs, RPGs and mortars guarantee civilian casualties,” he adds...