"This is Just like Gaza.." Americans turn Tikrit into Iraq's own West Bank

[LittleApple81]

Americans turn Tikrit into Iraq's own West Bank
By Phil Reeves in Awja
18 November 2003
It is the West Bank and Gaza Strip, but transported to Iraq. A town is imprisoned by razor wire. The entrance is guarded by soldiers, protected by sand bags, concrete barricades and a machine-gun nest.
Snip…
"Hey, this is just like Gaza, isn't it?" a fiery-eyed young Iraqi policeman shouted at us from behind the chest-high, three-layer wire coils which separate his home from the rest of the surrounding dead-flat Iraqi landscape, Sunni Triangle heartland. "We're not happy. Not happy!"
snip
"We were asleep," recalled Mohammed Shakr al-Nassiri, 33, a shopkeeper. "We did hear some work going on during the night. When we got up, we found all this barbed wire around us. We don't understand the point of it. Why us? There's been resistance all over Iraq." In the case of Awja, the Americans appear to have resorted to this strategy after concluding they have no hope of winning over the people.
Snip…
The American military yesterday proved unable to provide The Independent with any comment on the enclosing of Awja. But Lieutenant-Colonel Steve Russell of the 4th Infantry Division, who came up with the scheme, told The Washington Post in an interview last week: "The insurgents should not be allowed to swim among the population as a whole. What we elected to do was make Awja a fish bowl so we could see who was swimming inside."
More…
http://news.independent.co.uk/world/middle_east/story.jsp?story=464771

[izzie]

1. The wall next? How can they be doing this with our tax money?

This Bush is doing just awful thing for our country. He is the real evil in the world.

[ShaneGR]

2. We should move all the Jews into the Ghetto

So they can't swim with the rest of the population.


Gees, we've lost our soul. How depressing is that?

[incapsulated]

3. Blowing up the homes of "insurgents"

How's that for a Gaza deja-vu?

Un-fucking-believable.

Taking a page right out of the IDF playbook.

Well, it's working so well for them, why not?

[NNN0LHI]

4. Welcome to Happy Valley Asylum ... "Where the patients are in charge.". .

[Lindacooks]

5. And BFEE KNOWS it

It seemed like they were denying this was like the Israel-Palestine conflict even before anybody said so. This is exactly the same situation. The military is even denying that they're targeting civilians - just 'resisters'. Yeah, right, like a bomb dropped from the sky can tell the difference between a six year old and a 'resister'.

[IronLionZion]

6. The whole mess is unbelievable but who can save us?

So far which candidate(s) will resolve Iraq and Palestine? I'm thinking the good General will, but who else will do it?

That's the real ticket to stopping terrorism. And Clark is committed to catching Osama too.