Any later news on this ?

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Registered: 03-26-2003
Any later news on this ?
19
Mon, 09-20-2004 - 12:22am
Iraq militants threaten to kill American hostages

Group vows to kill hostages within two days

2004-09-20 / Associated Press /

An al-Qaida linked group has threatened in a videotape to behead two Americans and a Briton within two days, and insurgents carried out a new string of car bombings, killing at least 20 Iraqis and two American soldiers.

The unrelenting violence has taken 300 lives in the past week.

The videotape was the first word on the fate of Americans Jack Hensley and Eugene Armstrong and Briton Kenneth Bigley since the three construction workers were kidnapped from their Baghdad home two days earlier.

"My job consists of installing and furnishing camps at Taji base," each man said in turn after identifying himself, as all three sat on the floor, blindfolded, slightly bowed but apparently unharmed. At one point, a militant's rifle pointed down at the head of the man who identified himself as Hensley.

The Tawhid and Jihad group, led by Jordanian militant Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, claimed responsibility for the abduction and demanded the release of Iraqi women detained in two American prisons.

The videotape was broadcast by Al-Jazeera on Saturday shortly before it revealed a fresh kidnapping claim. Another group claimed it had kidnapped 10 workers for an American-Turkish company and threatened to kill them in three days if their firm didn't leave Iraq.

Kidnappings and spectacular bombings have become the signature weapons of insurgents waging a 17-month campaign against U.S. and Iraqi forces, a campaign that has persisted since the interim government of Prime Minister Ayad Allawi took power in June.

Nevertheless, Allawi insisted U.S. and Iraqi forces were winning the fight and said progress would be made to calm the violence before crucial elections set for January.

The insurgency is "not getting stronger; it's getting more desperate. We are squeezing out the insurgency," Allawi said, speaking in an interview due to be aired Sunday on ABC's "This Week."

"We are winning. We will continue to win. And we are going to prevail," he said.

Guerrillas have struck with increasing sophistication in Baghdad, the center of Allawi's authority, and have dealt punishing blows against Iraq's security forces - which are the lynchpin of the U.S.-Iraqi strategy for fighting the insurgency.

On the road to Baghdad's airport Saturday, insurgents set off a car bomb near an overpass as a U.S. convoy passed, wounding three U.S. soldiers. When other American troops moved to the scene, another car bomb exploded, killing two soldiers and wounding eight more.

In the northern city of Kirkuk, a car sped at a crowd of would-be recruits lined up at the offices of the Iraqi National Guard. Guardsmen opened fire on the vehicle and it exploded, leaving the street strewn with bloodied bodies, twisted metal and shards of glass.

At least 19 people were killed and 67 wounded, the Health Ministry said.

It was the third bombing this week targeting the beleaguered security forces, seen as collaborators with the United States and its allies.

The attack occurred as recruits lined up to read the lists of those who had passed the physical fitness test, said Rustem Abdellah, one of the job-seekers who suffered burns to his face and chest.

"I am a graduate from the oil institute," Abdellah, 33, said from his hospital bed. "But there are no jobs available in the oil sector, and I was forced to join the guard force because of the difficult economic situation."

Earlier yesterday, a roadside bomb exploded in a small side street in central Baghdad, killing one Iraqi man and seriously wounding two, police and witnesses said.

The hostage videotape showed the American and British captives aired in part on Al-Jazeera television before it was posted in full on a Web site known for carrying Islamic militant material.

In the tape, a masked militant dressed in black stood behind the men and read from a statement, saying the three were kidnapped because they offer logistic support to American troops. He threatened to kill them unless Iraqi women detained at the American-controlled Abu Ghraib and Umm Qasr prisons are freed within 48 hours.

A U.S. military official said only two Iraqi women were in U.S. custody.

The militant accused Allawi of enabling "infidel foreigners" to "violate the honor of Muslim women, humiliate people and suck up the riches of the country" and gave the United States and Britain 48 hours to release Iraqi women detained at Baghdad's Abu Ghraib prison and Camp Bucca at Umm Qasr in the British controlled south.

If the demand is not met, the speaker warned: "By the name of God, these three hostages will get nothing from us except their throats slit and necks chopped, so they will serve as an example."

In Armstrong's home town of Hillsdale, Michigan, his brother, Frank Armstrong, said he'd spoken with the FBI about the abduction but declined to comment further.

"We only know what they're showing on television," said Minnta Davis, Armstrong's cousin. "We just know there are just a lot of prayers for him."

Gulf Supplies and Commercial Services, the employer of the kidnapped Americans and Briton, refused to comment on the tape when contacted by The Associated Press.

Both the prison facilities named in the video are run by American forces. Abu Ghraib is the prison where U.S. soldiers were photographed sexually humiliating male prisoners. Fears about the safety of women inmates have multiplied since then.

Lieutenant Colonel Barry Johnson, a U.S. military spokesman in Baghdad, said coalition forces do not hold any women at Abu Ghraib or at Camp Bucca.

"The only females we hold are two high-value detainees, which are kept with the other approximately 100 high-value detainees in a separate, secure location," Johnson said.

He did not rule out the possibility that women were among an estimated 1,500 prisoners at an Iraqi facility for convicted criminals at Umm Qasr.

























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iVillage Member
Registered: 03-18-2000
Mon, 09-20-2004 - 5:04pm

Up date: U.S. hostage beheaded
Mon 20 September, 2004 21:26


http://www.reuters.co.uk/newsPackageArticle.jhtml?type=topNews&storyID=587530&section=news


An Iraqi group led by al Qaeda ally Abu Musab al-Zarqawi has beheaded American Eugene Armstrong and posted a video of the killing on the Internet.


The hostage's body was later recovered and identified, a U.S. official in Washington told Reuters.

The video, broadcast on an Islamist site, showed a masked man sawing the construction contractor's head off with a knife.

It also showed the banner of Zarqawi's Tawhid and Jihad group, which said it had kidnapped him along with another American and a Briton from their house in central Baghdad on Thursday. The other two now face death within 24 hours.

In the video, five armed and masked men stood around the hostage, who was blindfolded and dressed in orange overalls typical of U.S. jails and associated around the world with images of Muslims detained at Guantanamo Bay.

After reading a lengthy statement, during which the hostage sat rocking on the floor, one of the men decapitated him.

They said they had killed Armstrong because the U.S. authorities had failed to free women prisoners in Iraqi jails. They gave another day for the United States to do so, or Jack Hensley and Briton Kenneth Bigley would also be killed.

U.S. President George W. Bush, however, vowed to keep up the pressure: "We will stay on the offensive against them," he said at an election event in Derry, New Hampshire, before the video.

"They will behead people in order to shake our will. These people are ideologues of hatred."

Tawhid and Jihad said in an Internet posting on Saturday it would kill all three men unless Iraqi women were freed from Abu Ghraib and Umm Qasr jails.

The U.S. military says no women are being held in the two prisons specified, but that two are in U.S. custody. Dubbed "Dr Germ" and "Mrs Anthrax" by U.S. forces, they are accused of working on Saddam Hussein's weapons programmes and are in a special prison for high-profile detainees.

The hostages' families have appealed for their release. The men were seized from their house in an upscale neighbourhood of Baghdad early on Thursday morning by a group of gunmen.

Zarqawi's group has claimed responsibility for most of the bloodiest suicide bomb attacks in Iraq since the fall of Saddam.

It has already beheaded several hostages, including U.S. telecoms engineer Nicholas Berg in May and South Korean driver Kim Sun-il in June.

MORE THAN A DOZEN HOSTAGES

The group released Filipino captive Angelo de la Cruz in July after Manila bowed to its demands to pull out troops.

The United States has offered $25 million (14 million pounds) for information leading to the death or capture of Zarqawi, a Jordanian, and has launched a series of air strikes on his suspected hideouts in the rebel-held town of Falluja, west of Baghdad.

The latest strike was on Monday afternoon, residents said. Doctors said at least two people were killed.

Another Islamist group freed 18 Iraqi soldiers it had threatened to kill, but more than a dozen other hostages are still facing death unless demands from their captors are met.

Two French journalists were seized a month ago, and two female Italian aid workers were kidnapped in broad daylight in central Baghdad earlier this month.

A statement purportedly from the group holding the Frenchmen said at the weekend they were no longer captives but had agreed to stay with the group for some time to cover it. France said on Monday it was preparing for a long wait for their release.

Another group has threatened to kill 10 workers from a U.S.-Turkish firm unless their company stopped doing business in Iraq within three days. Most of the workers seized are believed to be Turkish.

On Sunday a guerrilla group said it had captured 18 Iraqi soldiers and would kill them unless authorities freed an aide to Shi'ite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr, Hazem al-Araji, within 48 hours. Araji was arrested on Saturday night by U.S.-backed forces, Sadr's supporters said.

The release of the Iraqi soldiers -- shown on a video given to Reuters on Monday -- followed an appeal by a Sadr aide, Ali Smeisim, for the hitherto unknown group, the Mohammad bin Abdullah Brigades, to free them.

It was not immediately clear if Araji had been released.

One U.S. soldier was killed when guerrillas attacked a U.S. patrol north of Baghdad on Monday, the U.S. military said.

In the northern city of Mosul, a car rigged with explosives blew up killing all three inside the vehicle in what was probably a premature detonation of the bomb, police said.

The Association of Muslim Scholars, an influential Sunni group, said two of its members were assassinated in separate incidents over the past 24 hours, raising concerns guerrillas were targeting clerics to try to spark sectarian war.

More than 300 Iraqis have been killed in a surge of violence over the past 10 days, casting doubt on whether elections can go ahead in January as scheduled.

Prime Minister Iyad Allawi insisted on Sunday the polls would take place as planned. The U.S. military says it has launched a drive to regain control of rebel-held areas ahead of the elections.

cl-Libraone~

 


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iVillage Member
Registered: 03-18-2000
Tue, 09-21-2004 - 4:58pm

Second American Hostage Killed by Iraqi Militant Group.


http://wsrw.com/script/headline_newsmanager.php?id=349153&pagecontent=nationalnews&feed_id=59


A second U.S. hostage has been executed by suspected Iraqi insurgents in as many days, al-Jazeera television reported Tuesday.

American Jack Hensley was killed a day after a Web site linked to Jordanian militant Abu Musab al-Zarqawi showed the beheading of another American, Eugene Armstrong, who was kidnapped along with Hensley and Briton Kenneth Bigley last week from their Baghdad home. All three were contractors working for a United Arab Emirates-based firm.

Bigley is presumed to be still alive.

Zarqawi's group, the al-Qaida-linked Tawhid and Jihad said Monday it had executed Armstrong at the expiration of a 48-hour deadline the group had set for the release of Iraqi women prisoners. A video on the group's Web site showed the kidnappers cutting the throat of the blindfolded and crying hostage.

More than 100 foreigners have been kidnapped in Iraq and some two dozen killed by insurgents opposed to the U.S. and allied presence in the country.

cl-Libraone~

 


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Registered: 03-18-2000
Thu, 09-23-2004 - 5:53pm
There's talk on the news that the two Italian women have been killed but that's not confirmed, as yet.

 


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Registered: 03-18-2000
Fri, 09-24-2004 - 9:48am

2 Egyptians Kidnapped From Baghdad Office.


http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/wire/ats-ap_top11sep24,1,7806043.story


Gunmen broke into a mobile phone company office in Baghdad and seized two Egyptian employees, government officials said Friday, while the family of a British hostage shown pleading for his life on a video earlier this week awaited word on his fate.

Also Friday, mortars exploded near the Italian Embassy in Baghdad, slightly wounding three Iraqis, the Foreign Ministry in Rome said. The mortars were fired shortly after 6 a.m. when the embassy offices were closed, the Foreign Ministry said. No other details were released.

It was not clear if the kidnapping was politically motivated like that of the Briton, Kenneth Bigley, who was shown in a video tape Wednesday begging for the release all female prisoners in Iraq as his captors have demanded. The United States says only two high-profile women prisoners are in custody and there are no immediate plans to release them.

The repeated hostage takings underscored the extremely volatile security in Iraq, a situation that is only expected to get worse in the run-up to elections scheduled to take place by the end of January.

In Washington, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld suggested Thursday that parts of Iraq might have to be excluded from the elections because of continuing violence.

With car bombs, shootings and kidnappings escalating and several cities effectively under insurgent control, there are concerns that Iraq will not be ready to hold a vote by the Jan. 31 deadline. But Shiites, who make up about 60 percent of Iraq's 25 million people, are eager to hold elections since they expect to dominate whatever government emerges.

Iraq's top Shiite Muslim cleric Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani is insisting elections promised for January must be held on time, an aide said.

Interim Prime Minister Ayad Allawi, in a speech to a joint session of the U.S. Congress on Thursday, vowed not to let violence derail the election timetable. He said 14 or 15 of Iraq's 18 provinces "are completely safe."

However, at least six provinces -- Baghdad, Anbar, Diyala, Salahuddin, Kirkuk and Nineveh -- have been the scene of significant attacks on U.S. troops and Iraqi authorities in the past month. The only areas not plagued by bloodshed are the three northern provinces controlled by Kurds. The situation in many areas, however, is unknown since journalists' travel is restricted by security fears.

Rumsfeld, at a Senate committee, was asked how elections could be held if restive cities remained in revolt when U.N.-supervised elections are to be held.

"So be it," Rumsfeld said. He said "it could be" that violence will be worse by January. The result, he said, would be "an election that's not quite perfect." But he said that some balloting would be better than none at all.

The Egyptians were kidnapped late Thursday in the upscale Harthiya neighborhood, said Interior Ministry official Col. Adnan Abdel-Rahman. The two engineers were taken away in a black BMW, he said.

Another ministry official said the assailants tied up the guards outside the building before breaking in and seizing the two men. The men's employers at Iraquna Mobile Net had no immediate comment.

More than 130 foreigners have been kidnapped in Iraq -- some for lucrative ransoms -- and at least 27 have been killed.

Two Italian women aid workers were also seized from their office on Sept. 7. Two statements surfaced on the Internet this week claiming they had been killed, but the Italian government says the claims are unreliable.

In other violence Thursday, U.S. warplanes blasted insurgent positions in Sadr City, and American ground troops pushed into the sprawling Baghdad slum in a new operation aimed at disarming the militia of a renegade anti-U.S. Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr.

Iraqi doctors said one person was killed Thursday and 12 were wounded, many of them children.

Militia fighters returned fire with machine guns and an American Bradley fighting vehicle was hit by a rocket-propelled grenade and caught fire, according to a U.S. military report. It was not clear if there were casualties.

The aim of the Sadr City operation, dubbed "Iron Fist 2," is to subdue al-Sadr's Mahdi Army militia by seizing weapons caches and detaining or killing his lieutenants, said Maj. Bill Williams of the 1st Cavalry Division.

"The main problem is that he has the militia," he said. "Our goal is to pressure him to disband and disarm."

U.S. commanders have said the Mahdi Army has dug into the alleyways of Sadr City -- a district named after al-Sadr's late father. Although al-Sadr has indicated he might join the political process, he refuses to disband his militia -- a move Allawi and the Americans say would exclude him from running in the January elections.

Al-Sadr -- who vehemently opposes the U.S. presence in Iraq and has clashed with al-Sistani's more moderate clerical hierarchy -- is just one of the security problems. Mainly Sunni Muslim insurgents have unleashed a wave of attacks in recent weeks.

cl-Libraone~

 


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Avatar for baileyhouse
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Registered: 03-26-2003
Fri, 09-24-2004 - 10:11am
Wish I could understand how such a "small group of insurgents" (isn't that what Rummy keeps telling us??)can be everywhere at once. Apparently the amount of resistance to our occupation of this country was underestimated....ya think??? I guess Bush and Co can blame bad intelligence for this also...how about NO intellegence!!!!
iVillage Member
Registered: 03-18-2000
Fri, 09-24-2004 - 10:34am

"how about NO intellegence!!!!"


No planning, no knowledge of that region or

 


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iVillage Member
Registered: 04-16-2003
Fri, 09-24-2004 - 12:26pm
<>

I think it is all part of a grand delusion. Consider the excerpt from the NYT:


"Ms. Tugrul, 28, was the third foreign woman taken in the flood of kidnappings that have swept Iraq.

From the start, her captors made her dress in a long loose coat and tied a scarf tight over her hair. They did not want to look at her in her T-shirt and pants.

"Look how beautiful you look," they would coo, and she would cry at her reflection in the mirror. "It was not me," she said. "I was losing me."

Everywhere they were taken, she said, people appeared eager to help anyone they thought was part of the resistance.

"I saw that around Mosul, everybody is the resistance - not terrorists, but not civilians really either," she said. "They used the small kids to bring them water, and nobody treated them like children. They'd be with the men who were talking about cutting heads, and the kids would be standing guard, like little men, so you become afraid of the children too."

Ms. Tugrul could communicate with her captors, at least the Turkish-speaking armed men who held her until the last day. And she shared their religion, although the militants considered her too independent to be a Muslim woman except in name.

None of those factors saved her from being beaten or threatened with beheading. But they gave her a close-up view of the kidnappers' fascination with death, their view of Islam and the links between ethnically diverse insurgents in northern Iraq.

"These are people who think they are living in the time of the Crusades," Ms. Tugrul recalled in a four-hour conversation at an Ankara cafe this week. "They say they are fighting for Islam first and Iraq second. They think their religion is being attacked."

Her abductors in the ethnic Turkmen city of Tal Afar identified themselves as members of Ansar al-Islam, a fundamentalist Muslim group that set up a Taliban-like enclave in northern Iraq before the war.

The American authorities have linked the group to Al Qaeda, and the kidnappers described Osama bin Laden and the Jordanian terrorist Abu Musab al-Zarqawi as brothers. They spoke Turkish, Ms. Tugrul said, but also claimed to be Sunni Arabs, and not Turkmen of the Shia branch of Islam. Ms. Tugrul said they also spoke a very different Turkish dialect from the Turkmen. They eventually handed the two journalists off to Arabic-speaking men in Mosul.

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/09/24/international/europe/24hostage.html

Avatar for baileyhouse
iVillage Member
Registered: 03-26-2003
Fri, 09-24-2004 - 12:56pm
What made this adminstration think that they could change thousands of years of religious/cultural beliefs?? I will never understand such arrogance and intolerance. I do not agree with the way women are treated in these Mid East cultures but it is not up to us to change them...It is up to the people of these countries to make the change IF THEY want to??? I also am confused by all of the "fire power" these insurgant groups have. Where did it come from??? Did our government/military not know about these stock piles of weapons???....More "bad intel" I guess....sigh
iVillage Member
Registered: 03-18-2000
Fri, 09-24-2004 - 1:39pm

Ms.Tugrul's Canadian companion.


Escape from death.
Canadian journalist Scott Taylor's fate rested with a dead man's promise.


 


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iVillage Member
Registered: 04-16-2003
Fri, 09-24-2004 - 4:02pm
<>

I suppose this is rhetorical. I don't think this administration thought about culture, and we know what they thought about Islam. You can't expect intellectual insight from a good/evil mentality.


<>

Agreed, however, I can understand the cloistered sense of security.

<<"fire power" these insurgant groups have. Where did it come from??? Did our government/military not know about these stock piles of weapons>>

This wasn't a failure of intelligence it was a failure of procedure or oversight. They just left the weapons unguarded. Just like they allowed looters to destory the infrastructure. However, I also think weapons are coming in from the neighboring countries. This is a case of a power vacuum creats a power struggle.

I don't think a show of power after 11/2 is going to settle the situation.

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