Shiites Suppress Body Count After Mosque Bombing
Shiite politicians are conspiring to hold down the reported death toll among Sunnis in the sectarian violence that has followed the mosque bombing in Samarra two weeks ago.
Days after the bombing of a Shiite shrine unleashed a wave of retaliatory killings of Sunnis, the leading Shiite party in Iraq's governing coalition directed the Health Ministry to stop tabulating execution-style shootings, according to a ministry official familiar with the recording of deaths.
The official, who spoke on the condition that he not be named because he feared for his safety, said a representative of the Shiite party, the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq, ordered that government hospitals and morgues catalogue deaths caused by bombings or clashes with insurgents, but not by execution-style shootings...
The widely differing tolls reflect acute political sensitivity at a time when Iraq's three-year-old conflict is undergoing a fundamental shift: Execution-style killings of the kind frequently blamed on police or Shiite militias allied with the government appear to be killing more Iraqis than bombings of government and civilian targets by Sunni Arab insurgents.
The facts on the ground alone give the necessary clues as to who is the responsible party in the morgue skullduggery:
The Health Ministry, which operates the Baghdad morgue and government hospitals, is in the hands of a religious party headed by Moqtada al-Sadr, the Shiite cleric whose militia, the Mahdi Army, waged two armed uprisings against U.S. forces in 2004. Since the Samarra bombing, the Mahdi Army has been widely accused of kidnapping and killing Sunni men. Families collecting bodies at the morgue last week described gunmen in the black clothes associated with Sadr's militia coming to Sunni homes or to mosques and taking men away.
The morgue workers will have to step it up a notch with new reports of Shiite death squad activities in Baghdad.
Gunmen wearing what appeared to be the uniforms of Iraqi Interior Ministry commandos stormed a private security company in the capital Wednesday afternoon and kidnapped as many as 50 employees, a ministry official said. In an atmosphere of spiraling lawlessness, other violence killed at least 47 people across the country between Tuesday and Wednesday nights.
In the deadliest incident, the bodies of 18 men, all bound at the wrists and blindfolded, were found piled in an abandoned minibus late Tuesday by a U.S. military patrol in Mansour, a mixed neighborhood of Shiite and Sunni Arabs in western Baghdad, the U.S. military said in a statement Wednesday...
The killings and mass kidnapping were new illustrations of deteriorating security in many parts of Iraq, particularly the capital. Multiple slayings, often of people from the same family or religious sect discovered bound and gagged, have become commonplace.
The American public is supposed to believe that things are improving on the ground, per Joint Chiefs Chairman Gen. Peter Pace.
And that there is no civil war in progress.
Days after the bombing of a Shiite shrine unleashed a wave of retaliatory killings of Sunnis, the leading Shiite party in Iraq's governing coalition directed the Health Ministry to stop tabulating execution-style shootings, according to a ministry official familiar with the recording of deaths.
The official, who spoke on the condition that he not be named because he feared for his safety, said a representative of the Shiite party, the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq, ordered that government hospitals and morgues catalogue deaths caused by bombings or clashes with insurgents, but not by execution-style shootings...
The widely differing tolls reflect acute political sensitivity at a time when Iraq's three-year-old conflict is undergoing a fundamental shift: Execution-style killings of the kind frequently blamed on police or Shiite militias allied with the government appear to be killing more Iraqis than bombings of government and civilian targets by Sunni Arab insurgents.
The facts on the ground alone give the necessary clues as to who is the responsible party in the morgue skullduggery:
The Health Ministry, which operates the Baghdad morgue and government hospitals, is in the hands of a religious party headed by Moqtada al-Sadr, the Shiite cleric whose militia, the Mahdi Army, waged two armed uprisings against U.S. forces in 2004. Since the Samarra bombing, the Mahdi Army has been widely accused of kidnapping and killing Sunni men. Families collecting bodies at the morgue last week described gunmen in the black clothes associated with Sadr's militia coming to Sunni homes or to mosques and taking men away.
The morgue workers will have to step it up a notch with new reports of Shiite death squad activities in Baghdad.
Gunmen wearing what appeared to be the uniforms of Iraqi Interior Ministry commandos stormed a private security company in the capital Wednesday afternoon and kidnapped as many as 50 employees, a ministry official said. In an atmosphere of spiraling lawlessness, other violence killed at least 47 people across the country between Tuesday and Wednesday nights.
In the deadliest incident, the bodies of 18 men, all bound at the wrists and blindfolded, were found piled in an abandoned minibus late Tuesday by a U.S. military patrol in Mansour, a mixed neighborhood of Shiite and Sunni Arabs in western Baghdad, the U.S. military said in a statement Wednesday...
The killings and mass kidnapping were new illustrations of deteriorating security in many parts of Iraq, particularly the capital. Multiple slayings, often of people from the same family or religious sect discovered bound and gagged, have become commonplace.
The American public is supposed to believe that things are improving on the ground, per Joint Chiefs Chairman Gen. Peter Pace.
And that there is no civil war in progress.
posted by Effwit at 9:32 AM
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