Secondly why was it so close to where people live? Wouldnt it be wise to do it in the desert. There is plenty of that to go around.
U.S. Special Forces troops have taken up residence in five schools in this little town on the northwest
If this report is correct, it was wrong to do so and I hope it has been corrected.
CM,
Driving 80 large missles out of town is an invitation to an RPG attack. The best protection is not distance it is dirt. Dig a large hole, wire it with explosives, cover it with tons of dirt and blow it in place. It is standard procedure. Done well there is a loud whump, and no risk even short distances away. Ask any Army in the world and they would tell you the same thing. The problem here is that one description said that there were "acres" of accumlated arms. When the local residents requested that explosions sop, which they did days ago, all of that ordinance sat exposed and vulnerable above ground.
Bs that is not standard procedure in a city area. Tell me would the US have done that in the US itself?
OG,
As far as I can see the US troops are making a dogs breakfast of the occupation thus far, and we don’t have to ‘wait and see’ for this result.
Exploding ammunition dumps killing innocent civilians, then getting stoned by the civilians doesn’t paint a successful picture of the occupation.
The only miracle that is likely to be wished for in Iraq is to have the thousands of occupying troops disappear ‘over night’.
Also, do tell me more of this ‘remarkable Kurdish culture’, is it remarkable right up until the Kurds are cast aside again for some new lapdogs?
You speak of success in Iraq, was the primary goal of the invasion to install a puppet regime paint it pink and call it a democracy, I seem to remember something about Iraq being a ‘global’ threat and having illegal WMD’s.
As it stands, the occupiers are losing a battle that should have never been fought and running out of ideas as to why they should continue fighting.
Regional hegemony, forced economic tribute to bolster the waning US coffers and appeasement of the state of Israel is the writing on the wall that the Bush administration is having a hard time painting over.
CM,
Please see the map provided by the BBC. The site is at the fringe of Baghdad. It was protected by high walls, and the site itself contained substantial armaments. Long convoys full of unstable weapons are also dangerous to civilians.
And by the way, controlled explosions happen almost every day in every major city. The “Big Dig” construction project had blasting constantly for years. Many foundations for large buildings are blasted out of rock. The risk is not the blasting, it is the handling and movement of the munitions, particularly old, battered or poorly constucted munitions.
Thap,
I disagree. The results of this will be judged in a decade or a generation, not a month.
From what i can tell from the map it is close to a suburb. Plus if it was so far away why are they civilian casualties?
No these blasting you are talking about are surrounded by high explosives that can knock out entire armies. There is a difference in magnitude. Plus which cities did these explosions take place in the US?
[QUOTE]
Originally posted by Ohioguy:
**U.S. Special Forces troops have taken up residence in five schools in this little town on the northwest
If this report is correct, it was wrong to do so and I hope it has been corrected.**
[/QUOTE]
Yes it is correct, and it rather rubbishes the belief that the US does not use civilian facilities for military purposes like the Saddam regime did. If you can condemn the Saddam regime for this disregard of civilian lives why do you find it difficult to do the same for the US soldiers? The Iraqi people are condemning both Saddam and the US occupation forces for using civilian facilties like the schools, and ammunition dumps and endangering the lives of Iraqi civilians.
Now after you fully address that question, maybe you can try to explain why none of the US occupation soldiers who are guarding and storing ammunition at the ammunition depot , got killed, and only innocent Iraqi civilians did?
[QUOTE]
*Originally posted by Ohioguy: *
Thap,
I disagree. The results of this will be judged in a decade or a generation, not a month.
[/QUOTE]
OG,
I agree right about the time the GI's are queuing up for Chemotherapy.
The results are plain to see, the mixture of ignorance and arrogance would be so out of place were you not so American.
You never did continue to extol the virtues of the Kurds, goodness only knows why you mentioned them, I hope you haven’t booked a package Holiday to northern Iraq, your government may have played down the dangers somewhat.
I don't buy the assumption that transporting that stuff anywhere else was a security risk.. come on.. that ammo was transferred from somewhere to this site right?? what happened to the security risk then??
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Caption: Fanning over: One and a half-year-old Zainab Thamir is fanned by her mother as she lies wounded in a bed in a ward at the Zaafaraniah hospital in this southern Baghdad suburb, following an explosion that killed 14 people and wounded more than 50. (AFP/Ahmad Al-Rubaye)
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Caption: Tears of sorrow: Grieving female members of a family comfort each other after losing eight members of their family, including two children, in an explosion that rocked a southern district of Baghdad when an ammunition depot kept by US forces exploded. (AFP/Romeo Gacad)
Also isnt it stupid to transport them to one area and then leave it unguarded? Come one some one could just walk up and steal a couple of rounds of ammo and an AK47. Hmmm....
Another victim of the ammo dump blast, another present by the invaders to the children of Iraq.
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Kudeir, a 30 year-old Iraqi worker, carries his badly burned nine-month-old son Amir Yas to safety in the Zaafaraniya neighborhood on the outskirts of Baghdad on Saturday after an arms dump blew up.
[QUOTE]
*Originally posted by chosen1: *
[thumb=B]burn27.JPG[/thumb]
Kudeir, a 30 year-old Iraqi worker, carries his badly burned nine-month-old son Amir Yas to safety in the Zaafaraniya neighborhood on the outskirts of Baghdad on Saturday after an arms dump blew up.
[/QUOTE]
oh my God.
Title might be a bit misleading. It’s not ALL Iraqis who reject US explanations; a number of them do but i am sure not all.
Iraqis reject US explanations, BBC, Martin Asser, 28 April 2003
Lieutenant Colonel Jack Kammerer is on a mission to “explain and offer help” to the people of Hai al-Muallimin, but it doesn’t seem to be going very well.
A few young Iraqi men and boys are gathered around his Bradley armoured vehicle, where a US Army lieutenant who speaks a few words of poor Arabic is causing some wry amusement. But most residents are still too emotionally bruised to do anything except stare resentfully from a distance. Not that Colonel Kammerer is discouraged. “After Saturday’s unfortunate event we were received here by an angry mob which chased us away… People seem less angry today,” he tells me.
The reason for the anger is that, between about 0800 and 1100 on Saturday, Hai al-Muallimin was hit by an infernal rain of twisted, blackened metal during a series of massive explosions at the nearby weapons’ dump under Colonel Kammerer’s command. “My soldiers were attacked by some Iraqi gentlemen who fired flares into the ammunition storage area causing a fire,” the colonel says. “We tried to contain the situation but the blaze spread, detonating the munitions.”
On the other side of Hai al-Muallimin - a long strip of houses skirting the arms dump in Baghdad’s Zafaranya district - a red-eyed Sabi Hassoun is still too shocked to hold a conversation. **The 70-year-old great-grandfather is grieving for six members of his family - one son, three grandsons and two of their wives - who died when a Soviet-made Frog-7 missile exploded on their doorstep, demolishing two houses and leaving a large crater in the street.
Amid the crowds and the rubble, little Abbas is crying inconsolably. He lost both his parents in the disaster**.
“What are the Americans doing? It’s two kilometres from Hai al-Muallimin to the nearest district, and they are exploding weapons between us. Is that normal?” the boy’s uncle, Hisham, asks.
Just then a group US soldiers approaches up the street, causing a murmur of revulsion around me.
There are seven of them in full battle dress, helmets and flack jackets, five with weapons at the ready, two taking photos of the devastation. It turns out that the two - one of them a great bear of a man with bristling moustache and wrap-around sunglasses - are engineers who have come to see “what they can do to help”. But they don’t have a translator with them to explain this and their appearance just seems to rub salt into the wounds of the shocked and angry residents.
I hear a voice behind me muttering: “Don’t they say that criminals always return to the scene of their crimes?”
No one in Hai al-Muallimin believes the US explanation that Iraqis caused the blasts. They think it was probably an accident caused by the Americans, who they say have been carrying out at least three controlled explosions a day here - usually at 0800, 1400 and 1700 - for the past two weeks.
Three days earlier, they said, village representatives had demanded that the Americans should stop the blasts, which they feared were too close to their homes. “They ignored us, saying they took orders only from their military superiors, not from Iraqis like us,” Hisham says.
But when I spoke to Colonel Kammerer he denied that any explosions had been carried out next to Hai al-Muallimin since he had taken over command of the area from the US marines a week earlier. “Because of concerns about the proximity of civilian populations, this facility has only been used as a consolidation area,” he said. “There have been explosions around this part of Baghdad, but it is a misperception that we’re destroying things in this particular location.”
I go over to a group of Iraqis standing on the other side of the dirt road after my interview with the colonel. “The officer tells me that, apart from Saturday, there haven’t been any explosions here for more than a week,” I tell them. They look at me with incredulity for a moment, before insisting: “there were, there were”.
So I ask the group whether they want to discuss this with Colonel Kammerer. Most are reluctant, but one man says he will, and the others follow him across the dirt road towards the Bradley. “Colonel, these people say there have been lots of explosions here in the last week,” I say. A short debate ensues, with the increasingly agitated crowd pressing their point via the colonel’s translator and an increasingly defensive colonel sticking to his story.
Finally, the colonel says he has to go. He leaves his audience unpersuaded.
“Let them pay the price for this crime, every single American soldier who has come to occupy Iraq,” says one of the group as the Bradley and accompanying Humvee disappear in a cloud of dust.
I later showed my photographs of Saturday’s blasts to a Western security consultant with explosives expertise currently working in Baghdad. He found it hard to believe that simple flares could have caused the tragedy in Zafaranya, in which at least 12 people are thought to have been killed.
"The debris at the epicentre is consistent with a powerful high explosive blast whose shockwave triggered what we call sympathetic explosions in nearby munitions. "If you’d asked me to cause that using flares, I’d have been stumped. High explosives are not that volatile to be detonated with flares. But you could do it with a hand grenade or a mine.
“The question is why were all those munitions stored together - and so close to civilian areas? It might have been necessary in the first phase after the capture of Baghdad, but that was two weeks ago.”