Tuesday,
September 7, 2004
Quote of the now: "It is a certain fact that not all Muslims are terrorists, but it is equally certain, and exceptionally painful, that almost all terrorists are Muslims." (Abdel Rahman al-Rashed)
Articles and opinion:
"A video grab image shows pupils and adults..."
(NTV/Reuters, 2004/09/07)
"A video grab image shows pupils and adults, as well as an object hanging from wires attached to the basketball rings, in the gym of the school in Beslan, Russia, which was shot by the militants during the siege and released on September 7, 2004.""Russian TV airs graphic footage from school" (Reuters/MSNBC, 2004/09/07)
Russian School Siege XXXVI: "Russia’s NTV television showed graphic footage shot by the militants who took more than a thousand hostages in a school in Beslan in the south of the country last week.
The pictures showed militants including a masked and heavily armed man and a woman in Arab-style black headdress, as well as hundreds of hostages sitting in the gymnasium which later became a battleground. At least 335 people, around a half of them children, died when Russian troops stormed the school.
Blood was smeared on the floor. Bombs hung from a basketball hoop and from a wire suspended across the room. Another lay on the floor in plastic container.""Gunmen Abduct Two Italian Aid Workers in Baghdad" (Khaled Yacoub Oweis and Tom Perry, Reuters/Yahoo! News, 2004/09/07)
"Gunmen abducted two Italian aid workers and two Iraqis in central Baghdad Tuesday in a brazen attack that will alarm foreigners already on edge from widespread kidnappings.
Witnesses told Reuters about 20 men with AK-47 assault rifles and pistols with silencers stopped their vehicles in broad daylight in a busy commercial area of Baghdad and raided a building housing humanitarian organization Bridge to Baghdad.
They left with Italian staffers Simona Pari and Simona Torretta and two Iraqis, a woman who worked for another Italian organization Intersos and a male employee of Bridge to Baghdad.
"It appeared it was totally professional. It appeared they knew exactly who they wanted to abduct," said one witness, who declined to be named.
Gunmen dragged the Iraqi woman away by her hair. "She was screaming," a witness said.""Dozens killed in Baghdad fighting" (BBC News, 2004/09/07)
"Fighting between US forces and Shia insurgents across Baghdad's Sadr City suburb has left at least 34 dead.
Clashes in the last 24 hours also injured at least 170 Iraqis, health officials said. One US soldier is among the dead and several were wounded.
The area is a bastion of radical cleric Moqtada Sadr, who recently called on followers to observe a ceasefire.
Also in Baghdad, the city's governor narrowly escaped an assassination attempt targeting his convoy.""Cult of Death" (David Brooks, The New York Times, 2004/09/07)
Russian School Siege XXXV: "We should be used to this pathological mass movement by now. We should be able to talk about such things. Yet when you look at the Western reaction to the Beslan massacres, you see people quick to divert their attention away from the core horror of this act, as if to say: We don't want to stare into this abyss. We don't want to acknowledge those parts of human nature that were on display in Beslan. Something here, if thought about too deeply, undermines the categories we use to live our lives, undermines our faith in the essential goodness of human beings.
Three years after Sept. 11, too many people have become experts at averting their eyes. If you look at the editorials and public pronouncements made in response to Beslan, you see that they glide over the perpetrators of this act and search for more conventional, more easily comprehensible targets for their rage. ...
This death cult has no reason and is beyond negotiation. This is what makes it so frightening. This is what causes so many to engage in a sort of mental diversion. They don't want to confront this horror. So they rush off in search of more comprehensible things to hate.""They're Terrorists, Not 'Activists'" (Daniel Pipes, FrontPageMagazine, 2004/09/07)
Russian School Siege XXXIV: "The media, however, generally shies away from the word terrorist, preferring euphemisms. Take the assault that led to the deaths of some 400 people, many of them children, in Beslan, Russia, on Sept. 3. Journalists have been deep into their thesauruses, finding at least twenty euphemisms for terrorists:
• Assailants — National Public Radio.
• Attackers — the Economist.
• Bombers — the Guardian.
• Captors — the Associated Press.
• Commandos — Agence France-Presse refers to the terrorists both as “membres du commando” and “commando.”
• Criminals — the Times (London).
• Extremists — United Press International.
• Fighters — the Washington Post.
• Group — the Australian.
• Guerrillas — in a New York Post editorial.
• Gunmen — Reuters.
• Hostage-takers — the Los Angeles Times.
• Insurgents — in a New York Times headline.
• Kidnappers — the Observer (London).
• Militants — the Chicago Tribune.
• Perpetrators — the New York Times.
• Radicals — the BBC.
• Rebels — in a Sydney Morning Herald headline.
• Separatists — the Daily Telegraph.
And my favorite:
• Activists — the Pakistan Times.""European Abdication" (David L. Bosco, The Washington Post, 2004/09/07)
"Afghanistan has been left with peacekeeping done on the cheap. Major European powers such as France, Italy, Turkey and Spain have coughed up only a few hundred troops each for duty in the country. ...
The hard truth is that European political leaders have not had the courage to seek to convince their skeptical publics of the need for a commitment to Afghanistan. At the same time, few European governments have invested adequately in their militaries, which are still structured for territorial defense and have trouble operating far from home for extended periods.
Unless European leaders are dissembling, they understand the significance of the transition underway in Afghanistan. They understand that failure will have strategic consequences for the West and terrible human consequences for the Afghan people. Disturbing enough on its own, Europe's performance in Afghanistan has even darker implications: It suggests that the hands-off policy in Iraq may be little more than military impotence and political weakness masquerading as principle.""Bush-beating is nothing but snobbery" (Mark Steyn, The Daily Telegraph, 2004/09/07)
"In Sunday's Observer, Robert McCrum observed: "Today, by some margin, George W Bush is the most despised figure in America." Really? The paper sent McCrum to America to interview nine novelists about the election. That's the first mistake right there: shipping a guy 3,000 miles to take the pulse of the nation by interviewing a bunch of guys who already agree with him. One of the reasons why the Bush-despisers will be waking up stunned on the morning of November 3 is because they spend way too much time talking to each other and sustaining each other's delusions.
"These guys are out of touch with reality," twitters Wallace Shawn, referring to Bush and Dick Cheney rather than himself and McCrum. "They could — and probably will — do anything. This is the scariest I've known it." ...
Is the Bush-Cheney tyranny truly a "scary" time for him? Is he really "scared"? Of course not. He's having a convivial drink with a fawning Brit interviewer; what could be more agreeable?
"Scary" is — to pluck at random — being held hostage in a school gym and the kid next to you is parched and asks for water and the terrorist stabs him in the belly in front of your eyes. "Scary" cannot encompass both that situation and Wallace Shawn's vague distaste for Bush without losing all meaning." (See also: "Once upon a time in America" (Robert McCrum, The Observer, 2004/09/05))"Angry Putin rejects public Beslan inquiry" (Jonathan Steele, The Guardian, 2004/09/07)
Russian School Siege XXXIII: "The Russian president, Vladimir Putin, last night refused to order a public inquiry into how the Beslan school was captured by gunmen and then ended with such a high death toll, and told the Guardian that people who call for talks with Chechen leaders have no conscience.
"Why don't you meet Osama bin Laden, invite him to Brussels or to the White House and engage in talks, ask him what he wants and give it to him so he leaves you in peace? Why don't you do that?" he said with searing sarcasm.
"You find it possible to set some limitations in your dealings with these bastards, so why should we talk to people who are childkillers?
"No one has a moral right to tell us to talk to childkillers," he added.""Hostage Takers in Russia Argued Before Explosion" (Peter Baker and Susan B. Glasser, The Washington Post, 2004/09/07)
Russian School Siege XXXII: "The guerrillas who took over a school in southern Russia last week argued heatedly with each other over whether to abandon the siege in the moments leading up to the firestorm of explosions and shooting that killed hundreds of children and adults, Russian officials said Monday.
Russian special services had a surveillance tape of the militants fighting about whether to stay or flee just before a bomb they had planted in the school gym went off, prompting Russian commandos to storm the building, a senior Kremlin official said. Investigators were exploring whether the bomb detonated by accident or as a result of the internal dispute.
As more details surfaced about the massacre at School No. 1 in the town of Beslan, a partial picture emerged of the guerrillas and the four men who led them into the school, where investigators say they took orders by phone from a Chechen commander, Shamil Basayev. ...
Investigators are still trying to piece together how the first bomb, which triggered the confrontation, went off. Aslakhanov said one theory was that a guerrilla was confused over the wires and connected the wrong ones. But Aslakhanov also pointed to the internal rift.
"The special services have a recording of a split among the terrorists," he said. 'Some wanted to leave and others wanted to stay. The conflict was happening and at that moment this tragic explosion occurred.'""14 Palestinian Militants Killed in Gaza" (Ibrahim Barzak, AP/Yahoo! News, 2004/09/07)
"Israeli helicopters attacked a Hamas training field in Gaza City early Tuesday, killing at least 14 militants and wounding 30 others in one of the deadliest air strike on militants in four years of violence.
The attack came a week after Hamas suicide bombers blew up two buses in the Israeli city of Beersheba, killing 16 people.
Hamas vowed revenge for Tuesday's air strike. Hours later, Palestinian militants fired rounds of mortars and homemade rockets at Jewish settlements in the Gaza Strip and Israeli towns bordering the coastal area. One Israeli in the border town of Sderot was lightly wounded in a rocket attack, rescue officials said.
The army said it struck a field Hamas used to train militants for firing mortars and rockets. In the past month, Hamas assembled a large bomb and a suicide bomber's explosives belt at the training camp, the army added."Added in archive:
"Boy who begged for water was bayoneted" (Peter Conradi, The Sunday Times/Free Republic, 2004/09/05)
"They knifed babies, they raped girls" (Euan Stretch, The Sunday Mirror, 2004/09/05)
"One little boy was shouting: 'Mama.' She couldn't hear him. She was dead" (Olga Craig, The Sunday Telegraph, 2004/09/05)
Monday,
September 6, 2004
Articles
and opinion:
"A relative of a victim..."
(Maxim Marmur, Reuters, 2004/09/06)
"A relative of a victim (no name given) of the Russian hostage siege cries at the cemetery in Beslan, North Ossetia.""A war unlike any other" (Melanie Phillips, Daily Mail/melaniephillips.com, 2004/09/06)
Russian School Siege XXXI: "When the US was repeatedly attacked by Islamic terrorism throughout the 1980s and 1990s, it merely sat on its hands, made token responses, or decided to cut and run. Osama bin Laden concluded from this that the US was weak. We know this because he said so. And so he unleashed 9/11.
But instead of learning the correct lesson that the current horrors are the result of such a failure to act, the west has succumbed to historical amnesia over those previous attacks. It is convulsed instead by hysteria over the war on Iraq, with absurd conspiracy theories about Zionists and ‘neo-conservatives’ surfacing instead almost daily in the mainstream media and driving out rational debate.
And so the terrorists carefully calibrate their atrocities to exploit such weakness, confident that for every outrage it is not they but America which will be blamed. Those whipping up this hysteria, therefore, have blood on their hands.
As President Putin has said, ‘the weak are always beaten’. Unless the west wakes up from its trance and starts realising who are its true allies and who its true enemies, the scenes of anguish in Russia will be merely the prelude to an unthinkable defeat.""Blood on their hands" (Melanie Phillips, melaniephillips.com, 2004/09/06)
Russian School Siege XXX: "Classic example of appeasenik idiocy and moral vacuity by Max Hastings, writing in the Guardian about the Beslan massacre. Having observed that terrorism is getting nastier, he opines that the last thing that should be done is to use force against it. Those who do are guilty of 'savagery' and 'vengeance'. The idea that such actions might be designed to stop the terror is not entertained. Indeed, Hastings tells us breathlessly that the real purpose of terror is to produce a reaction from the victims that will recruit yet more to the cause. You don't say!
So what should folks who are being fried in bus bombs or whose children are slaughtered in schoolrooms do instead? Why, 'undramatic, even invisible means: intelligence, politics, diplomacy, special forces operations '. Uh huh. Like those aren't used already? And what happens when they fail to persuade the terrorists to pack up their bomb belts and go home? Hastings says force never works. But where in the world has his approach ever worked?
A little detail like that is, of course, irrelevant. For Hastings, killing terrorists is the equivalent of Nazi tactics or war crimes." (See also: "These terrible tactics may actually be working" (Max Hastings, The Guardian, 2004/09/06))"Iraq Group Sets Ransom, Deadline for French Release" (Dominic Evans, Reuters, 2004/09/06)
"An Iraqi group purportedly holding two French journalists hostage demanded a $5 million ransom on Monday and set a 48-hour deadline for their demands to be met.
The statement, posted on a Web site in the name of the Islamic Army in Iraq, punctured the mood of cautious optimism in France that reporters Christian Chesnot and Georges Malbrunot would soon be free. ...
The ransom demand and fresh deadline were the first word from the kidnappers since a previous ultimatum expired last Wednesday.
Monday's statement also called for a truce with al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden and a promise of no military and commercial dealings with Iraq — demands which appeared to be directed at France.""Car Bomb Kills Seven Marines in Iraq" (Kim Housegao, AP/Yahoo! News, 2004/09/06)
"A suicide attacker sped up to a U.S. military convoy outside Fallujah and detonated an explosives-packed vehicle on Monday, killing seven Marines and three Iraqi soldiers, U.S. military officials said. It was the deadliest day for American forces in four months.
The force of the blast on a dusty stretch of wasteland nine miles north of Fallujah, a hotbed of Sunni insurgents, wrecked two Humvee vehicles and hurled the suicide car's engine far from the site, witnesses and military officials said. ...
Meanwhile, the Interior Ministry said medical tests confirmed that Iraqi authorities had once again mistakenly reported the capture of ousted dictator Saddam Hussein)'s deputy, Izzat Ibrahim al-Douri, putting a stop to two days of conflicting statements about his purported arrest.""The government of Sudan doesn't hide its atrocities" (Kelly D. Askin, International Herald Tribune, 2004/09/06)
"As Bill Frist, the majority leader of the U.S. Senate, was interviewing Darfurian refugees in Chad earlier this month, the Sudanese government and Arab janjaweed forces attacked a number of black Darfurian villages just a few miles away, over the Sudanese border. Frist was in Chad because Sudan had refused to grant him a visa, even though Khartoum had done so on earlier occasions. The timing and location of the attacks demonstrated the Sudanese government's confidence that it could act with impunity. ...
While on the border we could hear planes and bombing just to our north. Survivors told us that a UN camp for internally displaced persons had also been attacked that Saturday and, ominously, that UN staff members had been evacuated from the camp on July 29, a week and a half before the attack. There were also reports that some 20,000 men, women, and children were trapped in the Jabal Moon mountains near Chad. Soldiers had sealed off the area to prevent their escape and to stop aid from getting through in what was apparently an attempt to starve them to death.""No other word for it but slaughter" (Mark Steyn, The Australian, 2004/09/06)
Russian School Siege XXIX: "Photographed from above, the body bags look empty. They seem to lie flat on the ground, and it's only when you peer closer that you realise that that's because the bodies in them are too small to fill the length of the bags. They're children. Row upon row of dead children, more than a hundred of them, 150, more, many of them shot in the back as they tried to flee.
Flee from whom? Let's take three representative responses: "Guerillas", said The New York Times. "Chechen separatists", ventured the BBC, eventually settling for "hostage-takers". "Insurgents", said The Guardian's Isabel Hilton, hyper-rational to a fault: "Today's hostage-taking," she explained, "is more savage, born of the spread of asymmetrical warfare that pits small, weak and irregular forces against powerful military machines. No insurgent lives long if he fights such overwhelming force directly . . . If insurgent bullets cannot penetrate military armour, it makes little sense to shoot in that direction. Soft targets — the unprotected, the innocent, the uninvolved — become targets because they are available." ...
Sorry, it won't do. I remember a couple of days after September 11 writing in some column or other that weepy candlelight vigils were a cop-out: the issue wasn't whether you were sad about the dead people but whether you wanted to do something about it. Three years on, that's still the difference. We can all get upset about dead children, but unless you're giving honest thought to what was responsible for the slaughter your tasteful elegies are no use. Nor are the hyper-rationalist theories about 'asymmetrical warfare.'" (See also: "There will be another Beslan" (Isabel Hilton, The Guardian, 2004/09/04))"Bombers' justification: Russians are killing our children, so we are here to kill yours" (Jonathan Steele, The Guardian, 2004/09/06)
Russian School Siege XXVIII: "Margarita Komoyeva, a physics teacher released the day before the terrible climax in Beslan, said: "One of them told me: 'Russian soldiers are killing our children in Chechnya, so we are here to kill yours'."
The words were amplified yesterday on a website that is close to Shamil Basayev, the most extreme Chechen commander, whom Russian officials think was the mastermind behind the Beslan atrocity. "However many children in that school were held hostage, however many of them will die (and have already died) ... it is incomparably less than the 42,000 Chechen children of school age, who have been killed by Russian invaders," said the statement on www.kavkazcenter.com.
Dead children, dead adults — brutal murder of more than 250,000 Chechen peaceful civilians by the invaders — all of it cries to heaven and demands retribution. And whoever these 'terrorists' in Beslan might be, their actions are the result of Putin's policies in the Caucasus in response to terrorism and crimes committed by the Kremlin's camarilla, which is still continuing to kill children, flood the Caucasus with blood and poison the world with its deadly bacilli of Russism."
The website quotes the Bible: "What measure ye mete, it shall be measured to you." (This is what Jesus said in The Bible - Matthew 7:2, Mark 4:24, Luke 6:38).""'Hostage-taker' interviewed on TV" (BBC News, 2004/09/06)
Russian School Siege XXVII: "A man said to have been a hostage-taker in the bloody school siege in the southern Russian town of Beslan has been shown on state television.
His hands bound, the frightened-looking man was shown being led by two hooded commandos into a room, where he was interviewed for a short time. ...
Asked by a state TV reporter whether he felt sorry for the child hostages, the man replied: "I swear by Allah, I did feel sorry for them. I have got children too."
Asked whether he fired his weapon, he said: "I swear by Allah I did not shoot, I swear I did not shoot."
But later, pressed by his interviewer, he became less coherent before saying: "In general, I did not want to die anywhere. I do not want to die anywhere."
The man's accent suggests he is from the region and not a foreigner, observers say.
Correspondents say the report's tone was highly triumphalist and ended with images of the corpses of dead hostage-takers crawling with flies.""Russia Admits It Lied On Crisis" (Susan B. Glasser and Peter Finn, The Washington Post, 2004/09/06)
Russian School Siege XXVI: "The Russian government admitted Sunday that it lied to its people about the scale of the hostage crisis that ended with more than 300 children, parents and teachers dead in southern Russia, making an extraordinary admission through state television after days of intense criticism from citizens. ...
Sergei Markov, a political analyst with close ties to the Kremlin, said the deadly outcome of the school standoff had left Putin at a loss as to how to respond beyond the former KGB colonel's instinct to strengthen police powers and centralize control over government institutions. "They don't know what to do," he said. "Vladimir Putin didn't explain in detail what will be happening."
Speaking before the Sunday night broadcast of the state television news program "Vesti," Markov said it had been clear that the government had engaged in a clumsy coverup. "Everybody understands they are lying," he said. 'Everybody can do the math and know there were more than 1,000 people inside the school.'""Russian Rebels Had Precise Plan" (C.J. Chivers and Steven Lee Myers, The Washington Post, 2004/09/06)
Russian School Siege XXV: "Inside the charred, bullet-pocked wreckage of Middle School No. 1, there lies evidence of the terror Russia faces: Two parts of the library's wooden floor had been pried up, evidently by the heavily armed attackers who seized the school last week and held more than 1,100 hostages for 52 hours.
Beneath the boards, investigators now suspect, the attackers had secreted a cache of weapons or other equipment weeks and perhaps months before their attack - possibly during a seemingly innocuous summer renovation, officials said. ...
The attackers - described by the authorities as including Chechens, Ingush, ethnic Russians and some still-unidentified foreigners - seemed to follow a plan after they seized the school with precision and alacrity, forcing their hostages to help place explosives and build barricades that limited the options of Russian forces outside.
The attackers wore NATO-issued camouflage. They carried gas masks, compasses and first-aid kits. They communicated with hand-held radios, and brought along two sentry dogs, as expertly trained as the attackers themselves, the officials said. All suggested detailed planning, including surveillance and possibly rehearsals, the officials said."Added in archive:
"Beheading video for sale in Baghdad" (Michael Georgy, Reuters, 2004/09/05)
"'Innocent religion is now a message of hate'" (Abdel Rahman al-Rashed, The Sunday Telegraph, 2004/09/05)
Sunday,
September 5, 2004
Articles
and opinion:
"Middle School No. 1..."
(Yuri Tutov, AFP, 2004/09/05)
"Middle School No. 1 was opened Sunday to the people of Beslan, who found themselves drawn toward it by an almost gravitational pull.""Boy who begged for water was bayoneted" (Peter Conradi, The Sunday Times/Free Republic, 2004/09/05)
Russian School Siege XXIV: "After more than 24 hours in the sweltering heat of the school gymnasium in Beslan, one of the boys trapped inside could not take it any longer, writes Peter Conradi.
Summoning up his courage, he approached a hostage taker with a bayonet fixed to his assault rifle and asked him for a drink. It was probably the worst error that he could have made.
“Instead of giving him water, he drove his bayonet through the boy’s body,” said Stanislav Tsarakhov, 10, another captive standing nearby. “I don’t know if he died.”
Details of the incident emerged as children who escaped the siege described how their captors had deliberately deprived them of food and water, repeatedly firing guns into the ceiling to try to silence them. “The hostage takers would hold their machineguns to your temple and said that if there was a lot of noise, they would shoot everyone,” said a girl, who gave her name only as Zalina.
Diana Gadzhinova, 14, who also survived the siege, said that one of the greatest hardships had been the lack of food and drink.
“When we were let out to go to the lavatory, some children would run into a room where there were plants in pots and they would eat them,” she said.
“Others would hide the plants in their underwear and share them with their friends. But the hunger was not as bad as the thirst. Some children couldn’t take it and would urinate into their hand and drink.”
At another point, Gadzhinova said, they were all ordered to lie down. There were so many people packed into the gym that they had to lie on top of each other. “The gunmen warned that if there was an arm or a leg in their way, they would shoot at it without warning,” she said.
For Arsen Khasigov, 11, trapped with his mother, the worst thing was the sleep deprivation. “They kept us awake all the time,” he said. 'They would pour our urine on our heads.'""Russians Begin Burying Victims of Attack" (Burt Herman, AP/Yahoo! News, 2004/09/05)
Russian School Siege XXIII: "Mothers wailed over the coffins of their children Sunday and dozens of townsmen dug graves in a football field-sized piece of scrubland next to the cemetery. Funeral processions snaked through the streets of this grief-stricken town as Russians began to bury victims of the terror attack on a school that left more than 350 people dead.
Frantic relatives also were still searching for 180 people still unaccounted for — many of them children — two days after the bloody climax of the hostage crisis that left few families untouched in this tight-knit, mostly industrial town of 30,000.
Weeping mourners placed flowers and wreaths at the graves, including one where two sisters Alina, 12 and Ira Tetova, 13 — were laid to rest together. Relatives walked toward the cemetery bearing portraits of the dark-haired girls and simple wooden planks — temporary grave markers — bearing their names and the dates framing their short lives.""Beheading video for sale in Baghdad" (Michael Georgy, Reuters, 2004/09/05)
"The hottest selling item at Baghdad's video CD market is not a movie or a music video.
It's an ordinary Egyptian whose beheading was filmed by his Muslim militant captors and distributed as a gruesome message to anyone who cooperates with U.S. troops in Iraq. ...
The video shows a terrified Mohammed Abdel Aal kneeling in front of masked militants with AK-47 assault rifles as he confesses to planting electronic devices in houses that guided bombs dropped from U.S. warplanes.
One of the militants pulls out a knife, knocks down Abdel Aal, then severs his head and places it on his body over a pool of blood. ...
The video has already generated conspiracy theories in a country where people kept quiet for decades to avoid the iron first of toppled Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein.
"A Muslim could not do something so barbaric. This was the work of Israeli intelligence trying to give Muslims a bad image in the world," said video shop owner Abu Safwat.
'Besides Islam does not permit beheadings from the side of the neck like in the video. It must be done from the back of the neck.'""Iraqi government says top Saddam aide captured" (Waleed Ibrahim and Tom Perry, Reuters, 2004/09/05)
"Iraqi and U.S. forces have arrested a man believed to be the most wanted Saddam Hussein aide still on the run in a bloody raid in which 70 of his supporters were killed and 80 were captured, Iraqi officials say.
Izzat Ibrahim al Douri, who was sixth on a U.S. list of the 55 most wanted members of Saddam's administration and had a $10 million (5.6 million pound) price on his head, was captured in Tikrit, Saddam's former powerbase north of Baghdad, the Defence Ministry said on Sunday.
Officials said DNA tests were under way to confirm his identity.
The U.S. military said Ibrahim was not in its custody, and it had no information on whether he was being held by Iraqis.
Iraqi Minister of State Wael Abdul al-Latif said it was "75 to 90 percent certain" the man was Ibrahim. Seventy of the man's supporters were killed and 80 were captured when they tried to prevent him being seized, said Latif." (But see also: "Saddam top aide's capture denied" (BBC News, 2004/09/05): "Initial announcements by the Iraqi authorities suggested he had been arrested on Saturday while receiving treatment at a clinic near Tikrit. But the US military have made it clear he is not in their custody, and the Iraqi national guard later denied involvement in any operation.")"Blaming Israel for Beslan" (Backspin, 2004/09/05)
Russian School Siege XXII: "What took so long? From China Post:Ali Abdullah, an Islamic scholar in Bahrain who follows the ultraconservative Salafi stream of Islam, condemned the school attack as "un-Islamic," but insisted Muslims weren't behind it. "I have no doubt in my mind that this is the work of the Israelis who want to tarnish the image of Muslims and are working alongside Russians who have their own agenda against the Muslims in Chechnya," said Abdullah, reviving an old conspiracy theory altered to fit any situation.
(See also: "School siege prompts horror, self-criticism in Arab world" (AP/The China Post, 2004/09/05))
"View to a kill" (David Aaronovitch, The Observer, 2004/09/05)
Russian School Siege XXI: "Yesterday, in the wake of the Beslan school horror, the historian Corelli Barnett more or less blamed the crisis on the war against terror itself. His thesis was that, since September 11th, the actions of the West (and particularly the Americans) had made things far, far worse.
The problem with this is the simple one that the war with terror was declared by terror itself. Declared in Dar-es-Salaam and Nairobi in 1998, declared in New York on 11 September. It wasn't until 11 September, however, that we began to appreciate the scale of what was already happening. The idea that, had we negotiated with the Taliban, left Saddam in place and put more pressure on Sharon to settle, kids would now be safe in North Ossetia, is just wishful thinking.""Cleric supports targeting children" (Rajeev Syal, The Sunday Telegraph, 2004/09/05)
Russian School Siege XX: "Omar Bakri Mohammed, the spiritual leader of the extremist sect al-Muhajiroun, said that holding women and children hostage would be a reasonable course of action for a Muslim who has suffered under British rule.
In an interview with The Sunday Telegraph, Mr Mohammed said: "If an Iraqi Muslim carried out an attack like that in Britain, it would be justified because Britain has carried out acts of terrorism in Iraq.
As long as the Iraqi did not deliberately kill women and children, and they were killed in the crossfire, that would be okay." ...
"The Mujahideen [Chechen rebels] would not have wanted to kill those people, because it is strictly forbidden as a Muslim to deliberately kill women and children. It is the fault of the Russians," he said.""'Innocent religion is now a message of hate'" (Abdel Rahman al-Rashed, The Sunday Telegraph, 2004/09/05)
Russian School Siege XIX. An article which was published in yesterday's edition of the pan-Arabic newspaper Al-Sharq Al-Awsat under the title "The Painful Truth: All the World Terrorists are Muslims!":
"It is a certain fact that not all Muslims are terrorists, but it is equally certain, and exceptionally painful, that almost all terrorists are Muslims.
The hostage-takers of children in Beslan, North Ossetia, were Muslims. The other hostage-takers and subsequent murderers of the Nepalese chefs and workers in Iraq were also Muslims. Those involved in rape and murder in Darfur, Sudan, are Muslims, with other Muslims chosen to be their victims.
Those responsible for the attacks on residential towers in Riyadh and Khobar were Muslims. The two women who crashed two airliners last week were also Muslims.
Bin Laden is a Muslim. The majority of those who manned the suicide bombings against buses, vehicles, schools, houses and buildings, all over the world, were Muslim.
What a pathetic record. What an abominable "achievement". Does all this tell us anything about ourselves, our societies and our culture?
These images, when put together, or taken separately, are shameful and degrading. But let us start with putting an end to a history of denial. Let us acknowledge their reality, instead of denying them and seeking to justify them with sound and fury signifying nothing." (See also: "Siege prompts self-criticism in Arab media" (AP/The Jerusalem Post, 2004/09/04))"When hell came calling at Beslan's School No 1" (Paton Walsh and Peter Beaumont, The Observer, 2004/09/05)
Russian School Siege XVIII: "But the worst was to come - what lay inside the still burning gym. It was revealed as the Russian troops continued to fight the last of the gunmen who had taken the school. At one stage, a tank was called up to clear a basement room.
They are scenes that will never be forgotten by those who fought there that day, some of whom are still struggling to understand what happened and whether they contributed to the high death toll.
Among them is a Spetznaz soldier called Vitali, who told the Kommersant newspaper: 'There was no command to storm and we did not return fire until we knew it was the end. The Vitez Spetznaz unit went in first. We saw a terrible fire in the gym.' Another Spetznaz trooper said: 'There were a lot of children on the floor; it was full of them'.
Even the most battle-hardened struggled to cope with what greeted their eyes. Lt Col Andrei Galageyev told Gazeta : 'When we entered the gym, I saw a 2 litre plastic bottle filled with plastic explosive and metals balls. I have been at war since 1994, but I have never seen anything like that. There were dozens of mangled bodies, some of them still burning.'""They knifed babies, they raped girls" (Euan Stretch, The Sunday Mirror, 2004/09/05)
Russian School Siege XVII: "While despairing soldiers and rescue workers moved among the growing pile of body bags, it was revealed that an 18-month-old baby had been repeatedly stabbed by a black-clad terrorist who had run out of ammunition.
Other survivors told how screaming teenage girls were dragged into rooms adjoining the gymnasium where they were being held and raped by their Chechen captors who chillingly made a video film of their appalling exploits
They said children were forced to drink their own urine and eat the petals off the flowers they had brought their teachers after nearly three days without food or water in the stifling hot gym. ...
"The famished children had to eat rose petals from bouquets which they specially bought for their teachers to mark the first day of term. Parents who were also captured had to feed their kids with all the window plants.
'After they ate all the petals, my daughter said that she started to nibble the rose plants.
She told me that several 15-year-old girls were raped by terrorists. She heard their terrible cries and screams when those monsters took them away.'""One little boy was shouting: 'Mama.' She couldn't hear him. She was dead" (Olga Craig, The Sunday Telegraph, 2004/09/05)
Russian School Siege XVI: "Tanya, 14, was slapped across the face when she tried to drink from a tap in the lavatories.
"The man went crazy, he hit me and tugged the top off the tap so I couldn't drink any more. All around me, people were taking off clothes, peeing on them and trying to suck off the urine. Little children were tearing off the leaves of plants and eating them - they were so hungry.
"One little boy, about seven, stood naked with urine running down his leg. He was stuffing rose petals into his bleeding mouth from one of the bouquets the children had brought for the teachers. He was shouting, 'Mama!' She couldn't hear him. She was dead."
One 15-year-old boy spoke of how the older boys and men were separated and given "chores". "We had to gather the bodies of those who had died when they took the school and throw them out of the windows. Then they wanted us to board them up.
"I carried the body of a little girl and threw it out of the window," he said, tears rolling down his cheeks. As he threw her, he decided to try to escape, and jumped out of the window, too. "I knew it might be my one chance." ...
'Some people said that the older girls who were dragged into another room were being raped. We could hear cries, but then, so many were screaming and crying, that it was impossible to know.'""Hostages Were Helpless in Face of Chaos" (Peter Finn and Peter Baker, The Washington Post, 2004/09/05)
Russian School Siege XV: "Conditions deteriorated by the hour. Gurieva was allowed to drink in the bathroom when she accompanied young children there, but many others were not even allowed to go. They were forced to soil themselves.
By the second day, people began to urinate in plastic bottles and then drink from them. "They gave us bottles like this," said Galastyan, pointing to a plastic soda bottle, "and the children had to piss in them and drink from them."
"People exchanged bottles of urine and poured urine on the children to keep them cool," said another woman, Alla, 24, who was with her 6-year-old son, one of the first graders, who lay injured in the hospital. "They didn't allow people to get up."
The guerrillas spoke to the hostages mostly to taunt them. "Do you know why I cut my beard?" said the man the other guerrillas addressed as Colonel, according to Gurieva. "So I can pass your blockades."
"No one cares about you," said the man, who was wearing a traditional Chechen cap over military fatigues, and who Gurieva estimated was about 40. "Not your President. Not your government. You are not needed."
One of the guerrillas carried a video camera and "constantly filmed us," said Gurieva.""52 Hours of Horror and Death for Captives at Russian School" (C.J. Chivers, The New York Times, 2004/09/05)
Russian School Siege XIV: "The day began with an assembly in the schoolyard, with children streaming in with parents and brothers and sisters to open the school year. It was like years past, until the moment when the newly arriving first graders were to be introduced. It had always been a tender moment in years past. This year, people heard shouts, and saw something alarming: a line of masked gunmen advancing through the yard.
"The terrorists ran in yelling, 'Allahu Akhbar,' " said Asamaz Bekoyev, 11, who escaped with his mother and brother and lay in his bed on Saturday at his grandmother's house, being treated for cuts and minor burns. ...
Azamat and Emma said that a woman offered the hostage takers all of the town's money, but one of their captors said: 'We don't need money. We have come here to die.'"
Saturday,
September 4, 2004
Articles
and opinion:
"People look for their relatives among the dead bodies..."
(Viktor Drachev, AFP, 2004/09/04)
"People look for their relatives among the dead bodies (not pictured) of the Beslan hostage-taking drama victims at the morgue in Vladikavkz, North Ossetia.""When the killers come for the kids" (Ralph Peters, New York Post, 2004/09/04)
Russian School Siege XIII: "A final thought: Did any of those protesters who came to Manhattan to denounce our liberation of 50 million Muslims stay an extra day to protest the massacre in Russia? Of course not.
The protesters no more care for dead Russian children than they care for dead Kurds or for the hundreds of thousands of Arabs that Saddam Hussein executed. Or for the ongoing Arab-Muslim slaughter of blacks in Sudan. Nothing's a crime to those protesters unless the deed was committed by America.
The butchery in Russia was a crime against humanity. In every respect. Was any war ever more necessary or just than the War on Terror?
And what will terror's apologists say when the killers come for their own children?""Siege prompts self-criticism in Arab media" (AP/The Jerusalem Post, 2004/09/04)
Russian School Siege XII: "Images of terrified young survivors being carried from the scene aired repeatedly on Arab TV stations. Pictures of dead and wounded children ran on front pages of Arab newspapers Saturday. "Holy warriors" from the Middle East long have supported fellow Muslims fighting in Chechnya, and Russian officials said nine or 10 Arabs were among militants killed.
"Our terrorist sons are an end-product of our corrupted culture," Abdulrahman al-Rashed, general manager of Al-Arabiya television wrote in his daily column published in the pan-Arab Asharq Al-Awsat newspaper. It ran under the headline, "The Painful Truth: All the World Terrorists are Muslims!"
Al-Rashed ran through a list of recent attacks by Islamic extremist groups - in Russia, Iraq, Sudan, Saudi Arabia and Yemen - many of which are influenced by the ideology of Osama Bin Laden, the Saudi-born leader of al-Qaida terror network.
"Most perpetrators of suicide operations in buses, schools and residential buildings around the world for the past 10 years have been Muslims," he wrote. Muslims will be unable to cleanse their image unless "we admit the scandalous facts," rather than offer condemnations or justifications.
"The picture is humiliating, painful and harsh for all of us," al-Rashed wrote.""Captors' cruelty terrified hostages" (Mike Eckel, AP/Seattle Times, 2004/09/04)
Russian School Siege XI: "Holding up the corpse of a man just shot dead in front of hundreds of hostages at a Russian school, the hostage-taker — his pockets stuffed with ammunition and grenades — warned: "If a child utters even a sound, we'll kill another one." ...
Gadieyeva said children whimpered in fear, and all around there was screaming and crying. The hostages were forced to crouch, their hands folded over their heads. ...
When children started to faint from thirst, the adults urged them to urinate. It was so they could drink their own urine, Gadieyeva said.
Some children said the guerrillas terrorized them, but did not hurt them physically. When some of the children cried too loudly, the guerrillas fired their weapons into the air or out a window to silence them. "They intimidated us," fourth-grader Sosik Parastayev said. "They pointed their guns at us. But they didn't beat us."
Another child said the students were victimized, too.
One boy, 10-year-old Stanislav Tsarakhov, said another child was so thirsty he approached one of the hostage-takers who was holding an assault rifle with a bayonet attached. When the boy asked for water, Stanislav said, the hostage-taker attacked him with the bayonet. 'I don't know if he died.'""An Agonizing Vigil Leads to Reunion or Despair" (C.J. Shivers, The New York Times, 2004/09/04)
Russian School Siege X: "And the sense of hope that accompanied the sight of each survivor was tempered by the horrors among even the lucky. One speeding ambulance contained a girl who appeared to be about 5, blood rolling down her short and matted black hair. She stood in the back of the crowded ambulance, palms pressed against the glass, wild-eyed and screaming in a black floral print dress.
Because of the sirens and the gunfire and the roar of the overworked engine, her screams seemed soundless, drowned out by everything else. Then she was gone from sight. ...
The morgue had reached capacity. Children and dead Russian fighters were arranged in rows on the grass.
One row contained 13 dead and bloodied children, aged roughly 4 to 16. The youngest, a boy, shirtless and with his hands folded neatly on his stomach, was unclaimed. A few were covered with sheets or towels, which mothers passing by lifted, to see if they hid the faces of their missing children. One girl, a young teenager in a dress, appeared to have been executed, having been shot through the eye.
The covered remains of one woman, carried out of the hospital and set in the hospital yard, told of a terrible end. Her bare feet protruded, showing soles of feet that were covered with fresh nicks and cuts, as if before she died, she had run and run and run.""Bloodbath: up to 200 die as siege ends in mayhem" (Nick Paton Walsh, The Guardian, 2004/09/04)
Russian School Siege IX: "All that was left were the ashes. On the floor of the gym at Middle School No 1 yesterday lay the mangled, black detritus from Russia's worst hostage crisis. Corrugated iron roofing, loft insulation material, soggy wood and an endless black, unidentifiable mulch, still smoking.
It was a skeletal scene. Rescuers tore out the shredded window frames, ducking gunfire and grenade blasts, and firefighters drenched the beams that stood where a roof once was. A curtain fluttered in the wind. Children's drawings from their art classes could still be seen taped across windows. But there was no one left to walk out of the ruins.
It is hard to believe that hundreds of women and children had been held in the gym.
An intricate series of wires, in which mines were strung between the gym's two basketball hoops and along its outer walls, had malfunctioned. When the militants fulfilled their unspeakable threat to blow themselves and their schoolchild hostages up if Russian troops stormed the school, only two mines went off.
Yet the damage was still immense in its scale and inhumanity, killing at least 150 hostages. Interfax news agency later put the toll at 200, quoting regional health ministry sources."
See the archive for earlier articles and opinion.
Copyright © Watch 2001-2004.
Copyrights of quoted materials belong to their respective owners.
"Rather than easing the Middle East's madness, the West has caught the disease itself."
Articles of the week
"'Innocent religion is now a message of hate'" (Abdel Rahman al-Rashed, The Sunday Telegraph, 2004/09/05)
"When the killers come for the kids" (Ralph Peters, New York Post, 2004/09/04)
"Europe's Iran Fantasy: Europeans are from Venus, Mullahs are from Mars" (Leon de Winter, The Weekly Standard, from the 2004/09/06 issue)
"Brace Yourself — The months ahead will be momentous" (Victor Davis Hanson, National Review, 2004/09/02)
"Now for the hard part" (Walter Russell Mead, The Boston Globe, 2004/08/29)
"The "New" French Anti-Semitism" (Don Feder, FrontPageMagazine, 2004/08/23)
› Archive
From
the archives
"The Connection: The collaboration of Iraq and al Qaeda" (Stephen F. Hayes, The Weekly Standard, from the 2004/06/07 issue)
"Text from Abu Mus'ab al-Zarqawi Letter" (Coalition Provisional Authority, 2004/02/12)
"The New Arab Way of War" (Peter Layton, Naval Institute Proceedings, from the March 2003 issue)
Weekly archive
2004/08/30
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2004/08/23
- 2004/08/29
2004/08/16 - 2004/08/22
2004/08/09 - 2004/08/15
2004/08/02
- 2004/08/08
2004/07/26
- 2004/08/01
Monthly
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September
2004
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July 2004
June 2004
May 2004
April 2004
Alphabetical index
Ajami,
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Kagan, Robert
- Ye'or, Bat
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