Mixed News About Hostages
by pessimist
As I wrote yesterday, three Japanese citizens were being held captive under a literal deadline to force Japan to withdraw Japanese troops from Iraq. Today, according to this article, these hostages are to be freed after an appeal by the Muslim Clerics Association, who issued a call that all abducted foreigners not linked to the U.S.-led occupation forces should be freed. "We believe that the kidnapping of foreign civilians not connected to the occupation forces is forbidden," said Abdel Satar Abdel Jabar, a senior official in the Muslim Clerics Association in Iraq.
On the other hand, this report also came out:
On Saturday, a group calling itself the "Brigades of the Hero Martyr Sheikh Ahmed Yassin" said they were holding 30 foreign hostages and threatened to decapitate them unless U.S. forces lifted their blockade of the Iraqi town of Falluja."We have Japanese, Bulgarian, Israeli, American, Spanish and Korean hostages," a masked gunman said in an footage aired by Arab TV station, Al Arabiya. The footage showed no hostages.
A Japanese foreign ministry official said the ministry was checking the report and could not comment whether any Japanese, apart from the three hostages, had gone missing in Iraq.
If true, this is not a good sign. It means that larger groups have taken up the practice of taking hostages and that it will only spread. Especially if the
The bottom line of these reports is this: Iraq is NOT under the control of the CPA or the US military. It is looking to this commentator that the only way any semblance of order can be restored to that nation would be to find another country, preferably Muslim, whose authority Iraqis would accept to take on the role of nation-building that the US attempted to usurp for itself. It's obvious that we are going to lose, and lose badly, when our troops don't have enough ammunition to protect themselves when attacked.
If we had leaders with brains instead of brained leaders, we would be getting out as quickly as we could. Now.