Killings in Mosul have taken a huge toll

[NNN0LHI]

http://www.ledger-enquirer.com/mld/ledgerenquirer/news/world/10715901.htm

MOSUL, Iraq - (KRT) - The bodies turn up at night. Pulled from the trunks of cars, throats slit and dropped off in a cemetery. Or shot in the back of the head and dumped in the middle of the road.

There's no official tally, but interviews with U.S. Army officers and soldiers in Mosul indicate that hundreds of the corpses - calling cards of the insurgency - have turned up during the past several months.

It's part of a vicious guerrilla campaign of murder and intimidation in the northern Iraq town that's killed not only hundreds of police, national guardsmen and contractors, but also interpreters working for the U.S. military. U.S. troops have proved unable to stop it.

The threat has moved inside military bases in Mosul, places usually considered sanctuaries against the guerrillas. A suicide bomber killed 14 U.S. soldiers last month in a blast at the mess hall at Forward Operating Base Marez.

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[leftchick]

1. 14? did some come back to life?

I thought it was 22.

[TacticalPeek]

3. 14 US soldiers.

Plus four US contractors, 3 ISF, and one unk.

They say.

[NNN0LHI]

2. ‘The Salvador Option’

The Pentagon may put Special-Forces-led assassination or kidnapping teams in Iraq

Jan. 8 - What to do about the deepening quagmire of Iraq? The Pentagon’s latest approach is being called "the Salvador option"—and the fact that it is being discussed at all is a measure of just how worried Donald Rumsfeld really is. "What everyone agrees is that we can’t just go on as we are," one senior military officer told NEWSWEEK. "We have to find a way to take the offensive against the insurgents. Right now, we are playing defense. And we are losing." Last November’s operation in Fallujah, most analysts agree, succeeded less in breaking "the back" of the insurgency—as Marine Gen. John Sattler optimistically declared at the time—than in spreading it out.

Now, NEWSWEEK has learned, the Pentagon is intensively debating an option that dates back to a still-secret strategy in the Reagan administration’s battle against the leftist guerrilla insurgency in El Salvador in the early 1980s. Then, faced with a losing war against Salvadoran rebels, the U.S. government funded or supported "nationalist" forces that allegedly included so-called death squads directed to hunt down and kill rebel leaders and sympathizers. Eventually the insurgency was quelled, and many U.S. conservatives consider the policy to have been a success—despite the deaths of innocent civilians and the subsequent Iran-Contra arms-for-hostages scandal. (Among the current administration officials who dealt with Central America back then is John Negroponte, who is today the U.S. ambassador to Iraq. Under Reagan, he was ambassador to Honduras. There is no evidence, however, that Negroponte knew anything about the Salvadoran death squads or the Iran-Contra scandal at the time. The Iraq ambassador, in a phone call to NEWSWEEK on Jan. 10, said he was not involved in military strategy in Iraq. He called the insertion of his name into this report "utterly gratuitous.")

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[izzie]

4. I would not think killing more to save people would work.

For some odd reason bombing cities to dust does not work either. I guess no one will play by our rules. We have all this 'stuff' to fight with our rules and no one will play. It could be as I have said forever that it is hard to kill an ideas. Any Christian country in the world should have learned that lesson in Sunday school. The ideas do not have to be the one you like. I think that is where the trouble is.

[mike_c]

5. yeah, right....

There is no evidence, however, that Negroponte knew anything about the Salvadoran death squads or the Iran-Contra scandal at the time.

Don, you forgot a link for that article (or was it part of the OP?).

It's no coincidence that Negroponte was sent to Iraq. He has LOTS of experience with black and "off the books" ops against popular insurgencies fighting U.S. puppet dictatorships. A most impressive resume.

[NNN0LHI]

6. Sorry Mike. Forgot the link. To late to edit so here it is n/t

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/6802629/site/newsweek/

[billyoc]

7. Yeah, he didn't know about those death squads,

we're just tasking him with creating these new ones by coincidence. :eyes:

[DulceDecorum]

8. Remember the Mau Mau?

Kenya is now SO very peaceful......

[FlemingsGhost]

9. Saddam was right. We are getting our asses handed to us ...

Slow and painful-like.