"NOYB" wrote in message
ink.net...

Oh....OK. You think this war's gonna cool off soon.

So does Joe Lieberman, who just got back from Iraq:

I liked these excerpts from the article you posted:

=======================================
Other war backers shared the belief that the strategy would work. Rep.
Christopher Shays, R-4th District, said he was "pretty optimistic" after his
10th trip to Iraq last month.

"The [Iraqi] troops are moving forward in a very positive way," Shays
reported.


"The Iraqi Security Forces are fighting hard. They're fighting well. They
are not cracking under pressure, as you see in some armies, and they are
making a tremendous contribution," Brig. Gen. Mark Kimmitt, deputy director,
plans and strategy, U.S. Army Central Command, told a Heritage Foundation
forum Monday.

=======================================

But, there's a problem with these glowing reviews of the Iraqi troops.
They're starting to sound like the South Vietnamese troops we put so much
faith in 35 years ago.

The New York Times
November 29, 2005
Sunnis Accuse Iraqi Military of Kidnappings and Slayings
By DEXTER FILKINS

BAGHDAD, Iraq, Nov. 28 - As the American military pushes the largely Shiite
Iraqi security services into a larger role in combating the insurgency,
evidence has begun to mount suggesting that the Iraqi forces are carrying
out executions in predominantly Sunni neighborhoods.

Hundreds of accounts of killings and abductions have emerged in recent
weeks, most of them brought forward by Sunni civilians, who claim that their
relatives have been taken away by Iraqi men in uniform without warrant or
explanation.

Some Sunni men have been found dead in ditches and fields, with bullet holes
in their temples, acid burns on their skin, and holes in their bodies
apparently made by electric drills. Many have simply vanished.

Some of the young men have turned up alive in prison. In a secret bunker
discovered earlier this month in an Interior Ministry building in Baghdad,
American and Iraqi officials acknowledged that some of the mostly Sunni
inmates appeared to have been tortured.

Bayan Jabr, the interior minister, and other government officials denied any
government involvement, saying the killings were carried out by men driving
stolen police cars and wearing police and army uniforms purchased at local
markets. "Impossible! Impossible!" Mr. Jabr said. "That is totally wrong;
it's only rumors; it is nonsense."

Many of the claims of killings and abductions have been substantiated by at
least one human rights organization working here - which asked not to be
identified because of safety concerns - and documented by Sunni leaders
working in their communities.

American officials, who are overseeing the training of the Iraqi Army and
the police, acknowledge that police officers and Iraqi soldiers, and the
militias with which they are associated, may indeed be carrying out killings
and abductions in Sunni communities, without direct American knowledge.

But they also say it is difficult, in an already murky guerrilla war, to
determine exactly who is responsible. The American officials insisted on
anonymity because they were working closely with the Iraqi government and
did not want to criticize it publicly.

The widespread conviction among Sunnis that the Shiite-led government is
bent on waging a campaign of terror against them is sending waves of fear
through the community, just as Iraqi and American officials are trying to
coax the Sunnis to take part in nationwide elections on Dec. 15.

Sunnis believe that the security forces are carrying out sectarian
reprisals, in part to combat the insurgency, but also in revenge for years
of repression at the hands of Saddam Hussein's government.

Ayad Allawi, a prominent Iraqi politician who is close to the Sunni
community, charged in an interview published Sunday in The London Observer
that the Iraqi government - and the Ministry of Interior in particular - was
condoning torture and running death squads.

The allegations raise the possibility of the war being fought here by a set
of far messier rules, as the Americans push more responsibility for fighting
it onto the Iraqis. One worry, expressed repeatedly by Americans and Iraqis
here, is that an abrupt pullout of American troops could clear the way for a
sectarian war.

One Sunni group taking testimony from families in Baghdad said it had
documented the death or disappearance of 700 Sunni civilians in the past
four months.

An investigator for the human rights organization said it had not been able
to determine the number of executions carried out by the Iraqi security
forces. So far, the investigator said, the evidence was anecdotal, but
substantial.

"There is no question that bodies are turning up," said the investigator,
who agreed to speak on the condition of anonymity, citing safety concerns.
"Quite a few have been handcuffed and shot in the back of the head."

As an example, the human rights investigator said that the group had been
able to verify that a number of Sunni men taken from the Baghdad
neighborhood of Huriya and shot to death last August. Relatives of the dead
told the group that more than 30 men had been taken from their homes by the
Iraqi police in what appeared to be a roundup of Sunni males.

In the Iskan neighborhood in Baghdad, the human rights group said it had
confirmed that 36 Sunni men had been abducted and killed in the neighborhood
in August. Sunni groups say the men were taken from their homes by men who
identified themselves as intelligence agents from the Interior Ministry.

"The stories are pretty much consistent across the board, both in the manner
that the men are being abducted and in who they say is taking them," the
human rights investigator said.

More than 15 Sunni families interviewed for this article gave similar
accounts of people identifying themselves as Iraqi security forces taking
their relatives away without warrants. The families said that most of those
said to have been abducted were later found dead.

On Nov. 12, according to the Samarraie family in Gazalia, a Baghdad
neighborhood, a group of masked men identifying themselves as agents of the
Interior Ministry broke down the family's door. Outside, the family members
said, was a line of white pickup trucks with machine guns mounted on them.

The men in masks said they were looking for Yasir, 36, one of the Samarraie
brothers, the family said. They took him away.

"We are intelligence people from the Ministry of the Interior," one of the
men said, according to Yasir's wife, Wuroud Sami Younis.

A few days later, the police found Yasir's body in an empty field a couple
of neighborhoods away. His skull was broken, and there were two bullet holes
in his temple, family members said. Officials at the city morgue confirmed
Mr. Yasir's death.

"The government is trying to terrorize and dominate the Sunni people," said
Yasir's brother, Shuhaib.

The claims of direct involvement by the Iraqi security services are
extremely difficult to verify. In a land where rumor and allegation are
commonly used as political weapons, the truth is difficult to distill.

Mr. Jabr, the interior minister, acknowledged that many civilians were being
killed in Baghdad and around Iraq, and that some of them were being killed
for sectarian reasons. "When we have cases like that, we investigate them,
and if we can find the culprits we arrest them," he said.

The chief suspects, according to Sunni leaders, human rights workers and a
well-connected American official here, are current and former members of the
Badr Brigade, the Iranian-backed militia controlled by the Supreme Council
for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq, a principal part of the current
government. Since the fall of the Hussein government in April 2003, Badr
gunmen are suspected of having assassinated dozens of its former officials,
as well as suspected insurgents.

Since April, when the Shiite-led government came to power, Badr fighters
have joined the security services, like the police and commando units under
the control of the interior minister, Mr. Jabr, who is also a senior member
of the Supreme Council.

With Badr gunmen operating inside and outside the government, the militia
can act with what appears to be official backing. It is not clear who is
directing the security services, the government officials or the heads of
the militias.

"The difference between the Ministry of the Interior and the Badr Brigade
has become very blurry," the human rights investigator said.

"You have these people in the security services, and they have different
masters," said the American official in Baghdad. "There isn't a clear
understanding of who is in charge."

The alarm in the Sunni community is so great the Um al-Qura Mosque, one of
the largest temples in Baghdad, has begun documenting cases of allegations
of executions and abductions. Mazan Taha, who is overseeing the project,
said he has compiled the names of some 700 Sunni men who have disappeared or
been killed in the past four months.

In one Sunni neighborhood, Sababkar, residents said the Iraqi Army
surrounded the neighborhood and took away 11 of its Sunni men in July. Most
of the bodies were found the next day; television stations here showed
pictures of bodies that had been burned with acid and drilled with holes by
electric drills. Most of the men had been shot in their temples.

"How did these killers get police uniforms?" Mr. Taha asked of the details
surrounding many of the killings. "How was it that they were operating
freely after curfew? That they had police cars?"

Each day, Sunni families with little faith that the Shiite-led government
will help them line up at Mr. Taha's office instead, to tell of family
members who have been killed and disappeared.

"They took three of my sons!" wailed Naima Ibrahim, waving three
government-issued identification cards, as Mr. Taha quietly wrote the
information down. "They took three of my sons!"

The grief in Baghdad's Sunni neighborhoods has begun to spill onto the
streets.

On Friday, hundreds of Iraqi Sunnis marched through the Amriya neighborhood
to protest the killing of a prominent Sunni leader and three of his sons
last Wednesday. Witnesses said the killers were wearing Iraqi army uniforms
and came in the middle of the night, when the curfew has been strictly
enforced. The Sunni leader, Kadhim Surhid, was buried, but much was unclear.

"They killed them in their beds," said Jama Hussein, a friend who attended
the funeral. He jutted his palms out from his body. "I myself carried them
from their beds."

John F. Burns and Mona Mahmoud contributed reporting for this article.