Inside The Iraq "Insurgency", an Iraqi Photographer Embeds With Them

[leftchick]

This is an excellent piece from 60 Minutes as they traveled with some Marines in Ramadi. The whole thing is worth a read. Here is a person "embedded" with the resistance...

http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2005/01/16/60minutes/main667271.shtml

Under Fire, Alongside The Fallen

~snip~

Rapicault "leads from the front," as the Marines like to say, and he's focused on getting the rest of his men home. Most often, Rapicault's men never see the enemy—they don't truly know who he is or what he's fighting for. They have never seen the enemy like this—that watches for an approaching American patrol and prepares to set off a roadside bomb. Iraqi photojournalist Ghaith Abdul-Ahad embedded himself with the insurgents and took pictures of them setting up their IEDs.

Abdul-Ahad describes the IEDs. He says the insurgents take a "couple of big mortar shells or artillery shells, they wire it with some explosive. They take the wire into the edge of the street and they hide behind a building." Then they "kind of put their heads into the ground and try to listen to the tanks coming."

The insurgents usually use cell phones, using local kids in the neighborhood as spotters for U.S. tanks.

"And they have spotters everywhere," he says. But he adds, "Most of the insurgency is — if I can use this word — is pathetic. Pathetic in the term that when they are waiting for the tank, and the tank is five meters away, and they kind of put the wires together and nothing happens, because it's an old battery or something. And that happens in some of the cases, you know. But other cases, they do kind of detonate things and do cause lots of damage."

Abdul-Ahad told us that some of the fighters he met were religious extremists from Saudi Arabia, Tunisia and Syria, but he claims that many others weren't fanatics at all. For example, a businessman was fighting because he despised the foreign occupation and its chaos.

"He wanted to end the occupation. And this is why he decided to sell off his business to fund a small cell of fighters, and to fight the Americans in Fallujah," Abdul-Ahad says.





Iraqi insurgents prepare a roadside bomb in front of an embedded Iraqi photojournalist. (Photo: GETTY IMAGES/Ghaith Abdul-Ahad)

[Why Syzygy]

1. og

this is so sad .. really ..

are they not fighting our war for us?

War = both sides lose.

I do not believe war solves anything.
History buffs disagree with me.

It just does not resolve issues, imo.

Just cranks on and on.

Give Peace a Chance.
(John Lennon)
http://www.lyricsplayground.com/alpha/songs/g/givepeaceachance.shtml

All we are saying
Is give peace a chance
All we are saying
Is give peace a chance

[HysteryDiagnosis]

2. Big minds would agree with you.... even Albert.....

"He who joyfully marches to music rank and file, has already earned my contempt. He has been given a large brain by mistake, since for him the spinal cord would surely suffice. This disgrace to civilization should be done away with at once. Heroism at command, how violently I hate all this, how despicable and ignoble war is; I would rather be torn to shreds than be a part of so base an action. It is my conviction that killing under the cloak of war is nothing but an act of murder."

Albert Einstein

[Why Syzygy]

3. Beautiful

thank you..

and another >>

"Great spirits have always found violent opposition from mediocre minds. ... Albert Einstein "

Can 'modern man' not learn from great teachers of the past?

[HysteryDiagnosis]

4. Modern man has been programmed by the one eyed monster, and he has drunk

deeply from the chalice of consumerism. He lives in this world, wanting of this world... he exists in an invisible prison with bars molded out of thoughts and senseless desires for things material.... he is a slave to his desires and as such, will succumb to the fate of previous civilizations that have tread a similar route. His fake spirituality is a slap in the face to those who would have him turn from his consumeristic coma. Indeed, man is his own worst enemy.

[DukeBlue]

5. My father

worked with him at Los Alamos. They werent buddies but had a working relationship. They all knew exactly what they were doing. Teller and Ulam knew 15 years before Bikini and IVY MIKE what it was capable of.

not saying war is good, but Einstein and the other European physicists knew what they were building, what it would do, and continued to work.

In my educated opinion were fucked..

Through the release of atomic energy, our generation has brought into the world the most revolutionary force since prehistoric man's discovery of fire. This basic force of the universe cannot be fitted into the outmoded concept of narrow nationalisms.
For there is no secret and there is no defense; there is no possibility of control except through the aroused understanding and insistence of the peoples of the world. We scientists recognise our inescapable responsibility to carry to our fellow citizens an understanding of atomic energy and its implication for society. In this lies our only security and our only hope - we believe that an informed citizenry will act for life and not for death.
A. Einstein, 1947 d.C.

[bpilgrim]

6. pfft... unless they are now calling our grunts the insurgency

this was a puff peace probably edited by rove.

if you want stories from the other-side try here...
http://www.albasrah.net/moqawama/english/iraqi_resistance.htm

peace