Iraqi Guerrilla Gives U.S. a Dire Warning (LA Times)

[IkeWarnedUs]

FALLOUJA, Iraq — "Commander A," a hawk-nosed, stubble-bearded former Iraqi intelligence officer who says he leads anti-American guerrillas in this area, sat in a car on a deserted country road screened by seven-foot reeds Monday and laid out his vision for driving U.S. forces out of Iraq.

Slowly, he said, the "resistance" has been building its strength, accumulating stores of weapons and collecting money from residents. Former supporters of Saddam Hussein and observant Muslims alike are rallying to the cause, he asserted. Thousands are willing to die to evict U.S. forces from the country, and attacks are now being centrally coordinated, he said.

"The American Army will feel that Vietnam was just a playground by comparison," the self-proclaimed leader of Serayeh al Jihad — the "Companies of Jihad" — said. At one point his deputy flinched when two U.S. helicopters passed overhead.

The man who gave his name as Commander A and the deputy who called himself Commander B agreed to meet with an American journalist and discuss their activities, offering a rare glimpse of what may be the thinking behind the insurgency against U.S. forces in Iraq.

The clandestine meeting was brokered by an Iraqi journalist from Fallouja who has covered the resistance for Arab television networks and worked in the Hussein-era Information Ministry. Although the two reputed resistance fighters were boastful and prone to exaggerated assertions of their effectiveness, their knowledge of recent operations, their wariness and their connections to Hussein's intelligence service lent some credence to their claims.


Link: http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/iraq/la-fg-resist7oct07,1,4548764.story?coll=la-home-leftrail

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My comments -

I am not sure what to make of this. I just heard the LA Times reporter interviewed on NPR. He said (and this is in the article too) that the Iraqi guerilla he interviewed said they plan to kidnap US soldiers and turn them over to binLaden to use to get Gitmo prisoners released. The reporter says the men he interviewed were security officers under Saddam and wanted to return Saddam to power. They claim the US government is lying when they say we have been capturing Baathist leaders, that Uday and Qusai are not really dead and that the US is grossly under reporting US military deaths.

The reporter said in the NPR interview that he was surprised by some of what they said - especially the parts about binLadden, since it goes against what he has been hearing in Iraq. He also said he thought their claims that the resistance was about to spread in the north and south were exagerated, since the Kurds in the north and the Shiites in the south don't like or trust the Sunni Baathists.

Is this US propoganda to counter the riots in Baghdad? Are they just a couple of disgruntled Baathists who are venting? Whatever it is, it is hot off the presses.

[lazarus]

1. dupe

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_topic&forum=102&topic_id=153306