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| Iraq-Jordan |
| 'Core fighters' |
| 2005-01-03 |
| ELF Iraqi Intelligence chief Gen Muhammad Abdullah Shahwani told AFP news agency "the resistance is bigger than the US military in Iraq". He estimated that 40,000 of the 200,000 were core fighters, while the remainder were volunteers and part-timers. Meanwhile, Iraqi Defence Minister Hazem al-Shaalan has said Iraq's elections could be delayed if the Sunni Muslim community in Iraq agreed to take part, the AFP news agency reported. "We have asked our Arab brothers, particularly in Egypt and Gulf countries, to get Iraqi Sunnis to participate in the elections and if such participation requires a delay to the election date, they could be delayed," he told AFP. Iraq's main Sunni political grouping, the Iraqi Islamic Party, has already called for a boycott of the election, and Sunni militant groups have threatened to attack voters. Significant participation in the election by Iraq's Sunni minority is widely seen as essential to the credibility of the vote. On Sunday, at least 23 Iraqi soldiers were killed when a car bomb struck the bus they were travelling in Balad, a town in central Iraq's restive Sunni Muslim heartland. |
| Posted by:tipper |
| #4 None of them are on "our" side, but some support our goals more than others. So how much support for our goals can someone give if this guy is his Intelligence Minister? If nothing else, Allawi is getting bad intel from him, and bad decisions follow. Shahwani is a Sunni who knows that an election delayed will more than likely be an election cancelled, continuing the pandering to the violent Sunni minoriy. An election completed is the end of disproportionate Sunni power, and the end of second-rates like Shahwani. Shahwani's peddling this kind of crap is crafty, one part of a larger Sunni anti-democratic strategy. He's only stupid if he actually believes it. |
| Posted by: longtime lurker 2005-01-03 9:44:52 PM |
| #3 Is Allawi on our side? He's hardly more useful than a ba'athist mole would be |
| Posted by: lex 2005-01-03 9:08:00 PM |
| #2 TW, he's full of it. Now for the $64,000 question--why is this guy the Iraqi Intelligence Chief? Find Gerecht's article in the lastest Weekly Standard. He's wrong that insurgency is driving Sunnis away from the election, but he's dead on that Allawi has failed, and that the best thing possible is for the election to be held, and the Shia take over a legitimate, elected government with the mandate to finish this fight--a fight that Shahwani, Allawi's crony among others, obviously doesn't want to win. |
| Posted by: longtime lurker 2005-01-03 9:06:42 PM |
| #1 He estimated that 40,000 of the 200,000 were core fighters, while the remainder were volunteers and part-timers. I don't buy it. If those numbers were real, surely the Coalition and allied Iraqi forces would be reeling back on the defensive, rather than having it their own way wherever they choose to exert force. I think this is a Baghdad Bob statement -- the bluster and exaggeration tyoical of the culture. |
| Posted by: trailing wife 2005-01-03 8:28:14 PM |