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Suicide Bombings - A Favorite Counter-Insurgency Tactic

Signs of the Times
20 Aug, 2007


The true face of Iraqi suicide bombers. Two SAS agents dressed in full "Arab Garb" driving a car full of explosives were caught carrying out a false flag terror attack in Basra, Iraq

Since 9-11 reports of "suicide bombings" have increased exponentially in the news. We are led to believe by the experts that it is one of the favorite weapons of the insurgency against the occupation forces, since it is a cheap and simple way to create chaos. Hardly a day goes by without at least one bombing in Iraq or Afghanistan being immediately seized upon by the media as the work of Iraqi insurgents.

It is one thing for an insurgency to commit suicide bombings against the occupation forces, it is another thing entirely to use them to target and kill civilians. We have been brainwashed into believing that the insurgents in Iraq are such brutal, uncivilized, fanatical crazy extremists that they will anything to fight 'freedom' - even kill their own people.

This picture presented to us by the US government and mainstream media is so insane that Joe Quinn, in response to the massive 'suicide' bombings in Mosul that killed 350+ people last week, felt confident to say:

"The person who can present a convincing argument (i.e. logical and backed up with reliable data) that explains why any anti-American Arab or Islamic group, "terrorist" or otherwise, would kill hundreds of thousands of Iraqis as a response to the US occupation of Iraq, will receive a prize of 1 million USD."

Looking at this from a historical perspective, precedence for the type of bombings in Iraq that are attributed to the insurgency or "al-Qaeda" is virtually non existent. During world war II, a number of countries were occupied by the Nazis. Countries such as France, Denmark, Norway and many others all had resistance movements who used various tactics to hamper the Nazi take over. Yet, there are no records whatsoever that the resistance fighters resorted to the mass murder of their fellow country men in an effort to evict the Nazis. Sure there was factional infighting, but nothing on the massive scale that we are seeing in Iraq. And of course, how could there be? It defies all logic.

Fast forward to the Vietnam war and here too we find no evidence that the Vietcong waged a campaign to kill their own fellow citizens as part if the fight against American forces.

Of course, there are those who would suggest that Muslims are a different breed, that they, like so many other ungrateful peoples who attempted to throw-off the chains of empire, are little more than uncivilised savages and we cannot therefore hope to understand their mentality or actions. Such an ill-informed attitude however is in no way backed up by any evidence and must therefore be dismissed for the obvious racism that it is.

When the Iraqis first fought the British Empire in the 1920's, there was no "suicide bombings" by insurgents against Iraqis. On the contrary and according to good strategy, they united despite minor cultural and religious differences to confront the common British enemy.

Likewise in Afghanistan during the 10 year war with the Soviet union there were no instances of suicide bombings targeting Afghan civilians. Here too, the Afghan tribes united despite previous disagreements against the common aggressor.

Does no one find all of this even mildly odd? After 9-11, suddenly this bizarre phenomenon of an insurgency using suicide bombings against their own people rather than the invaders appears, as if to provide supporting evidence for the reality of the crazed "suicide bombing" hijackers that attacked America - or so the official story goes.

Could the answer be as simple as that what is being touted as suicide bombings are in fact the work of US/British/Israeli counterinsurgency teams? In Iraq, are we in fact dealing with the what are better know as "false flag operations"?

This certainly would explain a lot of the confusion over why Iraqi groups would kill their own people in response to a US invasion of their country. After all, the people who are dying by the hundreds every day in Iraq are the people who support the insurgency, and the US, British and Israeli forces in Iraq are fighting that insurgency, so who benefits from the daily mass murder of the supporters of the insurgency?

Past counterinsurgency tactics involved such things as ethnic cleansing ("draining the dam" as this tactic was known) and/or the destruction of crops like with agent orange in the case of Vietnam. But these methods had little success.

In recent years it seems that devious and deviant minds in the employ of the military industrial complex came up with much more insidious modern tactics.

Roger Trinquier, an immensely influential French counter-insurgency expert, suggested in his book Modern Warfare: A French View of Counterinsurgency (1961) (Available online here) three simple principles of Counter Insurgency:

1. separate the guerrilla from the population that supports him;

2. occupy the zones that the guerrillas previously operated from, making them dangerous for him and turning the people against the guerrilla movement;

3. coordinate actions over a wide area and for a long enough time that the guerrilla is denied access to the population centres that could support him.

Remote controlled bombings masquerading as "suicide bombings" that are carried out by the US, British and Israeli occupation forces fit these principles very neatly. By detonating bombs on a daily basis across Iraq and Afghanistan and via the propa****a organs touting them as being the work of Iraqi/Afghani "suicide bombers" belonging to the insurgency, the occupying military hopes to achieve several goals:

cut off the widespread support base that the insurgency have amongst the Iraqis

create tensions between religious lines, especially by ascribing the faked "suicide attacks" to either Shias or Sunnis.

In other words divide and conquer.

The sheer carnage shown on TV back in the West only supports the idea that the Iraqis/Afghans can't take care of their own country without help from the occupation forces or that they are uncivilised savages. This propa****a reinforces the US government's persistent claim that it would be dangerous to pull US troops out of Iraq and for the American military grunts on the streets of Iraq it helps them to rationalise their continued presence. Either they are trying to show a lesser class of human how to become civilised, or they are doing god's work in wiping them out.

There is ample evidence for the inquiring reader to discover that so-called suicide bombings against civilians are not the product of the insurgency. Some will say that it is the product of "al-Qaeda", which is true if you first clarify that "al-Qaeda" is simply a tool of the very same counterinsurgency, namely CIA/MI6/Mossad. Always ask yourself, "who benefits?", and in this case it is pretty obvious who doesn't benefit.

For years Israel has very effectively used 'suicide' bombings as a tool in the perpetration of its slow genocide of the Palestinian people, with the effect that, today, the world's sympathy lies with the perpetrator (Israel). As a result, all peace initiatives have been stalled and the world has provided tacit if not outright approval of Israel's covert genocidal policies.

The knowledge gained by the Israelis has certainly been passed on to the their counterparts in MI6 and the CIA as this SOTT editorial from September 2005 illustrates:

"Today in Basra, Southern Iraq, two members of the British SAS (Special Ops) were caught, 'in flagrante' as it were, dressed in full "Arab garb", driving a car full of explosives and shooting and killing two official Iraqi policemen.

This fact, finally reported by the mainstream press, goes to the very heart and proves accurate much of what we have been saying on the Signs of the Times page for several years.

The following are facts, indisputable by all but the most self-deluded:

Number 1:

The US and British invasion of Iraq was NOT for the purpose of bringing "freedom and democracy" to the Iraqi people, but rather for the purpose of securing Iraq's oil resources for the US and British governments and expanding their control over the greater Middle East.

Number 2:

Both the Bush and Blair governments deliberately fabricated evidence (lied) about the threat the Saddam posed to the west and his links to the mythical 'al-Qaeda' in order to justify their invasion.

Number 3:

Dressed as Arabs, British (and CIA and Israeli) 'special forces' have been carrying out fake "insurgent" attacks, including 'car suicide bombings' against Iraqi policemen and Iraqi civilians (both Sunni and Shia) for the past two years. Evidence would suggest that these tactics are designed to provide continued justification for a US and British military presence in Iraq and to ultimately embroil the country in a civil war that will lead to the breakup of Iraq into more manageable statelets, much to the joy of the Israeli right and their long-held desire for the establishment of biblical 'greater Israel'

Coming not long after the botched London bombings carried out by British MI5 where an eyewitness reported that the floor of one of the trains had been blown inwards (how can a bomb in a backpack or on a "suicide bomber" INSIDE the train ever produce such an effect), more than anything else today's event in Basra highlights the desperation that is driving the policy-makers in the British government.

British intelligence would do well to think twice about carrying out any more 'false flag' operations until they can achieve the 'professionalism' of the Israeli Mossad - they always make it look convincing and rarely suffer the ignominy of being caught in the act and having the faces of their erstwhile "terrorists" plastered across the pages of the mainstream media. "

As in Israel, 'suicide' bombings in Iraq and Afghanistan often occur at a time that most benefits the occupiers. A recent 'suicide' bombing in Afghanistan illustrates this aspect well:

Seventeen civilians, a dozen of them schoolboys, were killed and 30 others wounded when a suicide bomber blew himself up near a NATO convoy in southern Afghanistan, officials said Tuesday.

The timing just couldn't have been better. NATO had been under a lot of international pressure due to their random use of Aerial bombings with very large numbers of civilian casualties. This incident (as in most cases) harmed no troops, most victims were children. The desired effect of the bombing was described in the article:

The UN representative in Afghanistan, Tom Koenigs, was shocked.
"I am especially concerned by the reports I am seeing of a large number of children being among the dead from todays bomb," he said in a statement." Such utter disregard for innocent lives is staggering and those behind this must be held responsible."

You see? The enemy is uncivilised, crazy, half human in contrast to the civilised benevolent white crusaders who sacrifice so much in the fight against evil. The article concludes:

"There have been more than 70 suicide attacks in Afghanistan this year, as compared with about 140 in all of 2006. Most are aimed at the security forces but civilians are usually the primary victims."

It should be pointed out that these so-called suicide bombings seem to be a speciality of Western intelligence agencies and their client regimes. In recent months we have also heard a lot about suspicious suicide bombings targeting civilians in Pakistan, whose intelligence agency, ISI, has close ties to the CIA.

In Chechnya there have been 28 acts of suicide bombings from June 2000 until 2006. The difference is that these attacks were against Russian civilians and not their own people. Perhaps the defining point is that Western (US/British/Israeli) counterinsurgency teams are not involved in these attacks because they do not wish to hand the Russians a victory. Certainly suicide bombings would demonise the Chechnyan rebels and provide propa****a value to the Russians. This is not to say that Russia does not engage in its own counter-insurgency, it is just that faked suicide bombings do not appear to form a core part of their strategy.

As mentioned before, during the 10 years of Russian occupation of Afghanistan, no suicide attacks were carried out by the insurgency against the Afghan population. Why? It certainly didn't benefit the Americans to kill Afghans who were engaged in killing Russians, the key enemy of the Americans at the time. The Americans were heavily involved in recruiting and supplying the insurgency with all kinds of military hardware. Now however, the situation is different. In Afghanistan it serves the American agenda to murder as many Afghani civilians as possible under the cloak of Taliban "suicide bombings" because it provides the justification for the troops to stay there to fight this manufactured "evil". In Iraq, the goal is the same, with the added element of the Neocons' desire to destroy the real Iraqi resistance by dividing and alienating them from the ordinary people that support their fight against a brutal occupier. It seems that the American, Israel and British tactic in Iraq is that if the ordinary Iraqi people will not be intimidated into accepting occupation and rejecting the real insurgency, then they will be murdered. Plain and simple.

Despite Joe Quinn's offer of 1 million dollars then, he can rest assured that it is unlikely that he will have to go and talk to the bank anytime soon.

[fairnas]

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January 9, 2003

Sharon's Fingerprints on Latest Suicide Bombing
By STEVE NIVA

It is difficult to imagine that Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, with his much vaunted military and strategic acumen, did not understand the consequences of his policies over the past month.

Since the last suicide bombing on November 21, escalating Israeli military assaults have killed over sixty Palestinian civilians, culminating in the December 26 wave of killing and abductions, in which Israeli occupying forces killed at least nine Palestinians, injured more than 30 and abducted several others.

On that day alone, Israeli execution squads assassinated three prominent members from three different militant Palestinian groups: Hamza Abu el-Rab of Islamic Jihad, Ibrahim Hawash, of Hamas and Gamal Abu el-Nader of Fatah's Al-Aqsa Martyr's Brigades. All three groups vowed revenge.

As if on que, the horrific double suicide bombing near the old Tel Aviv bus station took place within two weeks of these assassinations and reports have now confirmed that the bombers were members of the Al-Aqsa Martyr's Brigades. Twenty two Israeli's and foreign workers were killed and a hundred more injured.

Any observer with elementary skills in discerning cause and effect could see this latest suicide bombing atrocity coming. In fact, the vast majority of the nearly 100 Palestinian suicide bombings since they began in 1994 have followed an almost predictable sequence: Israeli attacks that cause major Palestinian civilian casualties or Israeli assassinations of important militant leaders are the most common trigger leading to suicide bombing cycles.

This escalating cycle of violence can be traced to the first Hamas suicide bus bombing inside an Israeli city on April 4, 1994 following the February 1994 Hebron Massacre, when the American-Israeli settler Baruch Goldstein murdered 29 praying Palestinians in a mosque. Since then, the Islamic militant groups Hamas and Islamic Jihad have made it a routine policy of responding to civilian massacres and assassinations with suicide bombings.

And Israel's assassination of the leading Fatah militant Raed Karmi on January 14 2002 led a militant group associated with Arafat's Fatah party, calling itself the "Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigade," to deliver its first suicide bombing on January 27. This group has conducted nearly a dozen new attacks since that time.

Yet this striking pattern has become even more frequent and predictable since Ariel Sharon became Prime Minister in February 2001 and escalated military assaults on Palestinian civilian areas and adopted a systematic assassination campaign of Palestinian militant leaders. The startling fact is that four times as many suicide bombings--around 80--have occurred since Ariel Sharon became Prime Minister than in the seven previous years combined--around 20.

None of this has deterred Sharon from escalating assassinations of militants or violent military actions against civilians.

But what is even more incriminating is the extent to which Sharon has systematically ordered violent Israeli military incursions and assassinations during major cease-fires by militant Palestinian groups as well as diplomatic efforts to ease the hostilities, resulting in new suicide attacks.

Ariel Sharon ordered the assassination of the two leading Hamas leaders in Nablus on July 31 2001, which put an end to a nearly two-month cease-fire on Israeli civilians observed by Hamas. Haim Shalev, an editorialist in a leading Hebrew daily Ma'ariv, gravely warned on August 1 that because "Israel has violated the cease-fire" it should expect a new wave of suicide bombings, which indeed came on August 9 in a brutal attack on a Jerusalem Sbarro pizzeria.

More notorious was Sharon's decision to assassinate leading Hamas militant Mahmud Abu Hanoud on November 23, 2001 just when the Hamas was upholding an agreement with Arafat not to attack targets inside of Israel and a few days before US envoy General Zinni was to arrive in Israel.

In a widely cited article from November 25 2001, the conservative military commentator for one of Israel's leading newspapers Yediot Aharanot, Alex Fishman, noted that this assassination had the effect of "shattering in one blow the gentleman's agreement between Hamas and the Palestinian Authority." He continued that "Whoever decided upon the liquidation of Abu Hanoud knew in advance that [a terrorist attack inside of Israel] would be the price. The subject was extensively discussed both by Israel's military echelon and its political one, before it was decided to carry out the liquidation."

The brutal bombings that followed Abu-Hanoud's assassination gave Sharon the ideal pretext for his subsequent declaration of war upon Arafat. Moreover, it effectively scuttled the Zinni mission and Sharon obtained an unprecedented open backing from President Bush for more aggressive policies during his scheduled visit to Washington the next week.

More recently, it was widely reported that the July 22, 2002 assassination of leading Hamas militant Salah Shehada in Gaza, which also killed 15 civilians, 11 of them children, came within hours of a unilateral cease-fire declaration by both the Palestinian nationalist militia Tanzim and Hamas. Sharon had been briefed by EU go-betweens, yet he went ahead anyway.

And now, the December 26 executions of members from all three militant Palestinian groups took place while representatives from Fatah, Hamas and other factions were meeting in Cairo to formulate a cease-fire to last through the Israeli election on January 28 later this month.

The only conclusion one can draw from these actions is that either Sharon thought it so important to kill these militant leaders despite the bloody consequences for Israeli civilians or that he took these actions precisely because he expected these consequences and cynically sought to reap the political gains. Either way, Sharon is complicit.

And any observer can easily discern the obvious political windfall for Ariel Sharon generated by this attack.

First, Sharon is now able to resist any pressure to agree to the latest draft of the Middle East peace "road map" drawn up by the so-called quartet, made up of the United States, United Nations, European Union and Russia. Sharon strongly opposed its recommendations that in the first stage, from January to June 2003, Israeli commitments would include a total freeze on Jewish settlements in the West Bank and a pullback to positions held before the uprising began in September 2000.

Second, the talks in Cairo between members of Yasser Arafat's Fatah faction and representatives from Hamas and Islamic Jihad about a temporary cease-fire are now irrelevant.

And finally, Ariel Sharon is now almost assured re-election as Palestinian attacks inevitably give a strong boost to the hard line parties in Israel that he leads.

Palestinian officials were quick to point out the obvious following December 26 assassinations.

"The escalation of violence by (Israeli Prime Minister Ariel) Sharon is aimed at creating a volatile atmosphere which he believes will serve him in his election campaign," Palestinian Information Minister Yasser Abed Rabbo told Reuters on December 27. "Sharon is inviting retaliation because he wants ... to prevent any possibility of an agreement (between Palestinian factions) on a cease fire," he continued.

By the same token, it appears that militant Palestinian groups are more than willing to seize upon Sharon's provocations through their myopic preoccupation with revenge.

Palestinian militants have not only soured the Israeli public on peace, they have also severely damaged the Palestinian cause in the court of world opinion. In effect, they have aligned themselves with Israel's expansionist right wing, led by Ariel Sharon, by escalating the conflict into open military conflagration, which could be disastrous for Palestinians.

A Palestinian opponent of suicide bombings, the Bir Zeit University professor Salah Abdel Jawad, has recently argued that "The failure of Palestinians, both in the leadership and among the population at large, to grasp the danger of suicide bomb attacks results from their failure to understand Ariel Sharon's aims following the end of the Oslo process and the destruction of the Palestinian authority. He wants to destroy Palestinian civil society and thus move closer to a second expulsion of Palestinians."

Nevertheless, based on the evidence from the past decade of suicide bomb attacks, and Sharon's clear record of inciting these attacks, Israel's actions are of incomparably greater significance for stopping suicide attacks than those of Yasser Arafat and what little remains of his authority and security services.

Israel could easily refrain from actions that kill Palestinian civilians and could suspend the assassination campaign of militants. It could also lift the deadly curfews that have created a major humanitarian crisis in many parts of the West Bank and Gaza Strip.

But if Israeli leaders were truly committed to Israel's long-term security, they would have to offer a political vision attractive enough to enable Palestinians to mobilize around returning to peace negotiations with Israel, thereby marginalizing militant organizations and depriving them of the crucial support they depend upon to gain recruits and conduct their operations. This vision must include the prospect of a viable Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza Strip.

However, none of this will happen for the simple reason that Ariel Sharon's entire political career has been based on his long-standing opposition to a viable Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza Strip and his relentless support for colonizing these lands with Israeli settlements. Suicide bombings have become a crucial pretext for enabling the brute force and violence needed to achieve this objective.

In a scathing August 2, 2002 editorial in Israel's prestigious Ha'aretz newspaper, Doron Rosenblum declared that "In short, any four-year-old child who examined this pattern of events would conclude that this government, whether consciously or not, is simply not interested in the cessation of the terrorist attacks, for they constitute its raison d'etre".

Steve Niva teaches International Politics and Middle East Studies at the Evergreen State College in Olympia, Washington. He writes regularly for Middle East Report and his articles have appeared in Open Democracy, The Middle East Times, and The Jordan Times. He can be reached at: niva@counterpunch.org

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Robert Fisk: Seen through a Syrian lens,

'unknown Americans' are provoking civil war in Iraq

By Robert Fisk

04/29/06 "The Independent" -- - In Syria, the world appears through a glass, darkly. As dark as the smoked windows of the car which takes me to a building on the western side of Damascus where a man I have known for 15 years - we shall call him a "security source", which is the name given by American correspondents to their own powerful intelligence officers - waits with his own ferocious narrative of disaster in Iraq and dangers in the Middle East.

His is a fearful portrait of an America trapped in the bloody sands of Iraq, desperately trying to provoke a civil war around Baghdad in order to reduce its own military casualties. It is a scenario in which Saddam Hussein remains Washington's best friend, in which Syria has struck at the Iraqi insurgents with a ruthlessness that the United States wilfully ignores. And in which Syria's Interior Minister, found shot dead in his office last year, committed suicide because of his own mental instability.

The Americans, my interlocutor suspected, are trying to provoke an Iraqi civil war so that Sunni Muslim insurgents spend their energies killing their Shia co-religionists rather than soldiers of the Western occupation forces. "I swear to you that we have very good information," my source says, finger stabbing the air in front of him. "One young Iraqi man told us that he was trained by the Americans as a policeman in Baghdad and he spent 70 per cent of his time learning to drive and 30 per cent in weapons training. They said to him: 'Come back in a week.' When he went back, they gave him a mobile phone and told him to drive into a crowded area near a mosque and phone them. He waited in the car but couldn't get the right mobile signal. So he got out of the car to where he received a better signal. Then his car blew up."

Impossible, I think to myself. But then I remember how many times Iraqis in Baghdad have told me similar stories. These reports are believed even if they seem unbelievable. And I know where much of the Syrian information is gleaned: from the tens of thousands of Shia Muslim pilgrims who come to pray at the Sayda Zeinab mosque outside Damascus. These men and women come from the slums of Baghdad, Hillah and Iskandariyah as well as the cities of Najaf and Basra. Sunnis from Fallujah and Ramadi also visit Damascus to see friends and relatives and talk freely of American tactics in Iraq.

"There was another man, trained by the Americans for the police. He too was given a mobile and told to drive to an area where there was a crowd - maybe a protest - and to call them and tell them what was happening. Again, his new mobile was not working. So he went to a landline phone and called the Americans and told them: 'Here I am, in the place you sent me and I can tell you what's happening here.' And at that moment there was a big explosion in his car."

Just who these "Americans" might be, my source did not say. In the anarchic and panic-stricken world of Iraq, there are many US groups - including countless outfits supposedly working for the American military and the new Western-backed Iraqi Interior Ministry - who operate outside any laws or rules. No one can account for the murder of 191 university teachers and professors since the 2003 invasion - nor the fact that more than 50 former Iraqi fighter-bomber pilots who attacked Iran in the 1980-88 Iran-Iraq war have been assassinated in their home towns in Iraq in the past three years.

Amid this chaos, a colleague of my source asked me, how could Syria be expected to lessen the number of attacks on Americans inside Iraq? "It was never safe, our border," he said. "During Saddam's time, criminals and Saddam's terrorists crossed our borders to attack our government. I built a wall of earth and sand along the border at that time. But three car bombs from Saddam's agents exploded in Damascus and Tartous- I was the one who captured the criminals responsible. But we couldn't stop them."

Now, he told me, the rampart running for hundreds of miles along Syria's border with Iraq had been heightened. "I have had barbed wire put on top and up to now we have caught 1,500 non-Syrian and non-Iraqi Arabs trying to cross and we have stopped 2,700 Syrians from crossing ... Our army is there - but the Iraqi army and the Americans are not there on the other side."

Behind these grave suspicions in Damascus lies the memory of Saddam's long friendship with the United States. "Our Hafez el-Assad [the former Syrian president who died in 2000] learnt that Saddam, in his early days, met with American officials 20 times in four weeks. This convinced Assad that, in his words, 'Saddam is with the Americans'. Saddam was the biggest helper of the Americans in the Middle East (when he attacked Iran in 1980) after the fall of the Shah. And he still is! After all, he brought the Americans to Iraq!"

So I turn to a story which is more distressing for my sources: the death by shooting of Brigadier General Ghazi Kenaan, former head of Syrian military intelligence in Lebanon - an awesomely powerful position - and Syrian Minister of Interior when his suicide was announced by the Damascus government last year.

Widespread rumours outside Syria suggested that Kenaan was suspected by UN investigators of involvement in the murder of the former Lebanese prime minister Rafik Hariri in a massive car bomb in Beirut last year - and that he had been "suicided" by Syrian government agents to prevent him telling the truth.

Not so, insisted my original interlocutor. "General Ghazi was a man who believed he could give orders and anything he wanted would happen. Something happened that he could not reconcile - something that made him realise he was not all-powerful. On the day of his death, he went to his office at the Interior Ministry and then he left and went home for half an hour. Then he came back with a pistol. He left a message for his wife in which he said goodbye to her and asked her to look after their children and he said that what he was going to do was 'for the good of Syria'. Then he shot himself in the mouth."

Of Hariri's assassination, Syrian officials like to recall his relationship with the former Iraqi interim prime minister Iyad Alawi - a self-confessed former agent for the CIA and MI6 - and an alleged $20bn arms deal between the Russians and Saudi Arabia in which they claim Hariri was involved.

Hariri's Lebanese supporters continue to dismiss the Syrian argument on the grounds that Syria had identified Hariri as the joint author with his friend, French President Jacques Chirac, of the UN Security Council resolution which demanded the retreat of the Syrians from Lebanese territory.

But if the Syrians are understandably obsessed with the American occupation of Iraq, their long hatred for Saddam - something which they shared with most Iraqis - is still intact. When I asked my first "security" source what would happen to the former Iraqi dictator, he replied, banging his fist into his hand: "He will be killed. He will be killed. He will be killed."
© 2006 Independent News and Media Limited