Free Republic

ON CHRISTMAS DAY in Erbil--the semi-official capital of the semi-official entity known as Iraqi Kurdistan--over 100 delegates from across northern Iraq gathered in a meeting hall that resembled nothing so much as an inner city high school auditorium, complete with rows of battered faux-leather chairs and dim fluorescent lighting. An improbably huge Kurdish flag was draped across the rear of the stage--three stripes of red, white, and green, with a golden sun at the center. The assembly was a cross-section of Iraqi society: a bespectacled professor of law from Sulaimaniya in a prim three-piece suit; a Yezidi doctor from Sinjar;...

According to a report in last weekend's Sunday Express in Britain, Saddam Hussein was captured by U.S. troops only after he had been taken prisoner by Kurdish forces, drugged and abandoned ready for American soldiers to recover him. Quoting an unnamed senior British military officer, the Sunday Express recounted that Saddam came into the hands of the Kurdish Patriotic Front after being betrayed to the group by a member of the al-Jabour tribe, whose daughter had been raped by Saddam's son Uday, leading to a blood feud. The intelligence officer told the paper that Saddam was held prisoner by a...

Washington's claims that brilliant US intelligence work led to the capture of Saddam Hussein are being challenged by reports sourced in Iraq's Kurdish media claiming that its militia set the circumstances in which the US merely had to go to a farm identified by the Kurds to bag the fugitive former president. The first media account of the December 13 arrest was aired by a Tehran-based news agency. American forces took Saddam into custody around 8.30pm local time, but sat on the news until 3pm the next day. However, in the early hours of Sunday, a Kurdish language wire service...

LONDON, (AFP) - Saddam Hussein (news - web sites) was captured by US troops only after he had been taken prisoner by Kurdish forces, drugged and abandoned ready for American soldiers to recover him, a British Sunday newspaper said. Saddam came into the hands of the Kurdish Patriotic Front after being betrayed to the group by a member of the al-Jabour tribe, whose daughter had been raped by Saddam's son Uday, leading to a blood feud, reported the Sunday Express, which quoted an unnamed senior British military intelligence officer. The newspaper said the full story of events leading up to...

London, Dec 21. (PTI): Ousted Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein was captured by Kurdish forces, then drugged and handed over to the American forces as a revenge against the rape of a tribal chief's daughter by the tyrant's psychopathic eldest son Uday, a media report said today. The full story of the fallen dictator's capture last Saturday in a "spider hole" near his birthplace of Tikrit exposes the version peddled by Americans as incomplete. According to the report in The Sunday Express, Saddam had already been handed over to Kurdish forces, who then brokered a deal with US commanders. He was...

LONDON, (AFP) - Saddam Hussein was captured by US troops only after he had been taken prisoner by Kurdish forces, drugged and abandoned ready for American soldiers to recover him, a British Sunday newspaper said. Saddam came into the hands of the Kurdish Patriotic Front after being betrayed to the group by a member of the al-Jabour tribe, whose daughter had been raped by Saddam's son Uday, leading to a blood feud, reported the Sunday Express, which quoted an unnamed senior British military intelligence officer. The newspaper said the full story of events leading up to the ousted Iraqi president's...

Saddam’s capture was the best present George Bush could have hoped for, and then Gaddafi handed a propaganda gift to Blair. But nothing’s ever that simple It was exactly one week ago at 3.15pm Baghdad time, when a beaming Paul Bremer made that now-famous announce ment: “Ladies and gentlemen, we got him!” Saddam Hussein: High Value Target Number One. The Glorious Leader. The Lion of Babylon had been snared. Iraq’s most wanted – the ace of spades – had become little more than an ace in the hole. In Baghdad’s streets, Kalashnikov bullets rained down in celebration. In the billets...

A crackdown on Al Qaida in northern Iraq by pro-U.S. Kurdish forces has confirmed the transfer of hundreds sleeper agents into the region by way of Iran. The Patriotic Union of Kurdistan has arrested at least five suspected insurgents from the Al Qaida-aligned Ansar Al Islam. Sources in the PUK, led by Jalal Talabani, said the suspects were planning to carry out a series of strikes against U.S. and Kurdish interests in northern Iraq. The Ansar plans included a plot to bomb a celebration for Talabani in wake of his appointment as president of the interim Iraqi Governing Council. This...

Better late than never. As the foreign minister Abdullah Gul revealed in this space last week, postwar public opinion has changed in Turkey. Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan wants to reassert that secular Muslim nation's historic position as America's stalwart strategic ally. At the moment the coalition most needs a boost, leaders of the powerful Turkish Army are now ready to provide a division of peacekeeping troops. Yesterday, the Turkish Parliament approved — by a whopping 2-to-1 majority — the government's proposal to take an active part in stabilizing Iraq. Unlike Russia and Pakistan (our allies in name only), and...

Biyara, controlled by militant Islamists until the US-led war, is wary of news that such groups may be returning. By Scott Peterson | Staff writer of The Christian Science Monitor BIYARA, IRAQ - The merchant shuddered when told that Islamic militants of Ansar Al Islam - the Al Qaeda-backed group dispersed by American bombs last March - may be returning to Iraq. "If they come to my orchard, I will shoot them myself!" vows Shaho Abdulkarim, a merchant-smuggler with a perfect moustache. Such a visceral reaction is common in this village on Iraq's northeastern border with Iran, where Ansar imposed...

Fresh Islami Ansar militants slip into northern Iran to assassinate PUK officials 18/08/2003 02:55 More than 1,000 al Qaeda operatives including Arabs and Afghans as well as other Middle Eastern radicals have slipped into Iraq through the rugged mountains bordering Iran in recent months adding to the terrorist threat against U.S. forces, diplomatic sources told the Turkish Daily News on Friday. The extremists have reportedly traveled from Afghanistan to Iraq via Iran. The TDN was told dozens of such extremists have been taken into custody by the forces of the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK) in recent weeks but still...

Kurdish leaders have refused a US request to allow 12,000 Turkish troops through northern Iraq for a possible peacekeeping assignment in the city of Falluja, a Kurdish official said on Wednesday. Adel Murad, head of the political office of the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK), said the request came at the weekend from General John Abizaid, head of US central command, in a meeting in the northern city of Mosul with the leaders of PUK and its occasional rival, the Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP). Mr Murad said any introduction of Turkish troops into Iraq would damage Kurdish support for the...

Iraqi Kurds Make Move Toward CooperationBy SABAH JERGESASSOCIATED PRESS BAGHDAD, Iraq (AP) - The two main Iraqi Kurdish groups moved to unite the administration of their two competing strongholds in the Kurdish enclave of northern Iraq, confirming Saturday they will present an outline by month's end on a single government. Leaders of the Kurdistan Democratic Party, or KDP, and the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan, or PUK - the two armed political groups running Kurdish northern Iraq - said they've set up a six-member committee to complete the plan. "It was a sense of responsibility that persuaded us that this was...

Saturday night, February 8, in the Iraqi-Kurdish city of Suleimaniyeh, al Qaeda and Iraqi military intelligence fired their first shot of the US-Iraq war - by assassination. They used their shared surrogate, the extremist Kurdish Ansar al-Islam of northeast Iraq, to eliminate the top command of the pro-American Patriotic Union of Iraqi Kurdistan’s fighting militia. The three-way collaboration between Baghdad, al Qaeda and the Kurdish fundamentalist terrorists provided a live and incontrovertible smoking gun. The price was heavy, a grave setback for US war plans. DEBKAfile’s military analysts compare the murders to the assassination of the Afghan Northern Alliance commander...

<p>The former stronghold of the militant Islamic group Ansar al-Islam looked like a ghost town yesterday, after die-hard fighters fled into a network of caves and bunkers in the rugged, mountainous terrain along the Iranian border.</p> <p>The militants were chased out Friday under heavy bombardment by US special forces troops and Kurdish soldiers. Fighting resumed at dusk yesterday amid reports US forces were under fire on a ridge above Sargat, another village held by the guerrillas.</p>

Kurds go it alone with international oil dealsLocal authorities ignore US administration and seek to lure major companies with generous contracts Andrew Buncombe in Washington Kurdish authorities in northern Iraq are offering hugely lucrative oil deals to European and American companies without consulting either the US administration in Baghdad or any other Iraqi groups. The move threatens to raise new problems over the future ownership of Iraq's vast oil reserves. The Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK), which controls the Sulaymaniyah region as part of the regional government of Kurdish Iraq, has in recent weeks started seeking investment from international companies...

BAGHDAD - A council of up to nine Iraqis will probably lead the country’s still unformed interim government through the coming months, the American civil administrator said on Monday.Retired Lt. Gen. Jay Garner also said he expects the newly appointed L. Paul Bremer, former head of the State Department’s counter terrorism office, to take charge of the political process within the US postwar administration.“What you may see is as many as seven, eight, nine leaders working together to provide leadership,” Garner said. He added, though, that he didn’t know how the collective leadership would function specifically.The Iraqi leaders Garner referred...

KIRKUK, IRAQ – Seven years ago, a customer walked intoFalah Abdulrahman Mohamad Salih's television store and insisted on a barter: One of your televisions for one of my satellite dishes. Under Saddam Hussein, who kept an almost Orwellian lid on information, satellite dishes were banned. So Mr. Salih tried to hide the round, white saucer inside some laundry lines. A few days later at 4 a.m, security police came to his door and, with his wife and children crying, hauled him off to prison. The six grueling months there in 1996 makes these days all the sweeter. Salih was the...

During the war he was the oddball public face of America's enemy Iraq, but now there are claims that Mohammad Said Sahaf, the former information minister, cannot get himself arrested. The minister, nicknamed "Comical Ali" for his eccentric denials that Iraqi forces were being overrun, is said to have tried to turn himself in to the Americans. But they refused, as he was not on their list of the 55 most wanted members of Saddam Hussein's regime. A senior Kurdish official said that Sahaf had been holed up at a relative's house in central Baghdad for a week near a...

MOSUL, Iraq - Kurdish paramilitary forces have been given an ultimatum: Halt armed patrols around Mosul by Monday, or the U.S. Army will stop them by force. Col. Joe Anderson, commander of the 101st Airborne's 2nd Brigade, said his troops are prepared to enforce the edict against fighters from the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan and the Kurdistan Democratic Party. Militia members will be allowed to keep their weapons at their headquarters or militia compounds but will be banned from bringing them on patrol, Anderson said. Anderson said Kurdish patrols carrying weapons after 10 a.m. Monday will be forcibly disarmed. Militia...