[Shadow_Group] Rebels Keep Up Attacks in Central and North Iraq

[shadowgroup-l at lists.resist.ca]

I believe there is good news in Iraq so where is it?
Come on repubs... you're in charge now...
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Rebels Keep Up Attacks in Central and North Iraq
By EDWARD WONG

Published: November 21, 2004

FROM
AGHDAD, Iraq, Nov. 20 - Violence surged through
central and northern Iraq on Saturday as a tenacious
insurgency led by Sunni Arabs kept up relentless
assaults in several major cities, including Baghdad,
Ramadi and Falluja, which the Americans devastated
during an intense weeklong offensive aimed at routing
the insurgency.

In the capital, insurgents armed with Kalashnikov
rifles and rocket-propelled grenades tried storming a
police station at dawn in the northwestern
neighborhood of Amariya, where American and Iraqi
soldiers had engaged in a mosque shootout on Friday.
The attack on the police station left three Iraqi
policemen dead and two others wounded, said Col. Adnan
Abdul-Rahman, an Interior Ministry spokesman.

Hours later, a car bomb exploded in downtown Baghdad,
at the eastern end of the bridge over the Tigris River
leading to the Green Zone, the fortified compound
housing the American Embassy and the headquarters of
the interim Iraqi government. The bomb was aimed at a
convoy of vehicles from a Western security contractor.
At least one Iraqi was killed and another wounded,
witnesses said.

Four employees of the Public Works Ministry were
gunned down from a passing car, and three Iraqi
national guardsmen died in explosions in western
Baghdad during gun battles with insurgents, Iraqi
officials said. 

An ambush on an American military convoy in central
Baghdad ended with the death of one soldier, the
military said. Nine others were wounded in what
appeared to be a highly coordinated attack, with
insurgents using explosives, automatic rifles and
rocket-propelled grenades. Fighting raged in the
rubble of Falluja. Two marines were killed and four
wounded in an ambush on Friday in which an insurgent
deceived the Americans by waving a white flag,
military officials said Saturday. 

The weeklong offensive, which began Nov. 8, smashed a
haven for the insurgents, but guerrillas still roam
the devastated streets, sniping at American troops and
deterring military engineers brought in to try to
rebuild the city.

American commanders in Falluja say they are seeing an
increasing number of guerrillas using white flags to
pose as unarmed civilians.

In a bit of positive news, a Polish woman abducted in
October by insurgents announced her release to
reporters in Warsaw in a brief news conference with
the Polish prime minister, Marek Belka, broadcast by
the BBC and CNN. 

The woman, Teresa Borcz-Kalifa, 54, said her captors
had treated her well. She is married to an Iraqi and
had lived in Iraq for 30 years. Her captors made at
least two videos that were shown on Al Jazeera, the
Arab satellite television network, demanding the
withdrawal of Polish troops. 

The unrelenting wave of assaults in the
Sunni-dominated parts of the country indicate that the
attack on Falluja could have inflamed Sunni resentment
against the American presence. 

American and Iraqi officials have found it impossible
in the 19 months since the invasion to persuade
hostile Sunni Arabs to lay down their arms and engage
in the emerging political system. 

The Sunni Arabs, who make up a fifth of the population
here, ruled the region known as modern Iraq for
centuries, until the American invasion toppled Saddam
Hussein. 

Mr. Hussein, himself a Sunni, heightened ethnic and
religious differences by installing Sunnis in the most
senior positions and persecuting Shiite Arabs and
Kurds. Now, with a power and security vacuum
throughout Iraq, those tensions are reviving and
threatening to unravel the very social fabric of the
country.

Sunni-dominated cities exploded during and immediately
after the Falluja offensive. In April, when the
Marines tried to take control of Falluja, thousands of
unruly Shiites rose up also, led by the firebrand
cleric Moktada al-Sadr. 

During the more recent invasion, Mr. Sadr condemned
the Americans' use of force but did not call on his
militia to fight. These days, even radical Shiites
appear ready to use legitimate politics to ensure that
Shiites seize majority rule of the country.



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