Son of Sistani aide assassinated

[Tom Yossarian Joad]

KUT: The son of an aide to Shia spiritual leader Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani was assassinated southeast of Baghdad on Sunday, police said.

Ali al-Khatib, the 30-year-old son of Sheikh Habib al-Khatib, was shot dead by a lone gunman in an internet cafe in the town of Naamaniya, police officer Ali Jassem said. His father, Sistani’s aide in Wasit province, survived an assassination attempt two months ago.

US forces carried out a series of raids in Iraq’s troubled northern city of Mosul, the military said on Sunday, as American and Iraqi authorities scramble to prepare for elections there in the face of mass resignations of polling staff and police. In the Mosul area, the US Army’s Stryker Brigade Combat Team detained 11 suspected insurgents, including an alleged cell leader, and seized weapons and bomb making material in several weekend raids — part of the military’s strategy to try to secure the city short of launching an all-out offensive.

East of Mosul, a Katyusha rocket slammed into a home near the Kurdish regional parliament building in Irbil where leaders of the two main Kurdish parties were meeting to discuss the election, a police official said on Sunday. Also on Sunday, insurgents attacked an Iraqi National Guard patrol south of Baghdad, injuring two guardsmen, one of them critically, police Lt. Adnan Abdul-Allah said.

West of the capital, in the city of Ramadi, five explosions rocked a joint US-Iraqi National Guard base, sending columns of smoke rising above the area, witnesses said. Sporadic clashes were reported in the city center.

Elsewhere, US troops fired on a car that sped toward them near the central city of Samarra on Sunday morning, wounding two people, the military said. A spokesman said ground troops fired warning shots before aiming directly at the vehicle. The driver and a passenger were wounded.

More: http://www.dailytimes.com.pk/default.asp?page=story_17-1-2005_pg7_43

[autorank]

1. If anything happens to Sistani, we'll be blamed...all Hell will break

loose. This is going to be the great tragedy of the war for our troops. The Army didn't even want this war, the soldiers just did their duty, and they end up sitting on top of a powder keg...all for * and his corporate cronies. In Halliburton We Trust.

[alcuno]

2. Is anyone keeping track of all of this?

The assassinations, the kidnappings, the sabotage? It would be interesting to know how many Iraqi citizens have been gunned down. Seems like a lot to me.

[Tom Yossarian Joad]

3. The toll for Iraqi civilians is between 15000 and 17000...

Here: http://www.iraqbodycount.net/

This is something that our news outlets cannot speak of.



Edited because the toll went up since this morning.

[theresistance]

4. That's only an incomplete list of Iraqi dead

as stated by the Iraq Body Count themselves. It is very slow to update deaths and there is no doubt the true number is way higher. Three different studies have given the three following numbers of Iraqis killed: Between 19 000 and 55 000, 37 000 and 100 000.

[Tom Yossarian Joad]

5. One is too many (nt)