Female Suicide Bomber in Iraq

 Okay, if a female suicide bomber blows herself up in the cause of Allah, what reward does she get in a male dominated heaven?   Does she become a virgin for the male suicide bombers?  Perhaps someone out there can enlighten me on this one…

Female bomber kills 17 Iraqi police recruits
Reuters | Wednesday, 11 April 2007

BAGHDAD: A female suicide bomber has killed 17 police recruits outside an Iraqi police station northeast of Baghdad.

The attack wounded 23 people in the majority Sunni Muslim town of Muqdadiya, 90km from the capital.

Al Qaeda has been blamed for most attacks on police and army recruitment centres during the Iraq conflict. The last major attack was in December when 10 people were killed at a police recruitment centre in Baghdad.

A guard at the station and police officials said a woman was suspected of being the bomber who wore a belt filled with explosives.

“The recruits were bringing along their files and they were intending to line up when all of a sudden there was a big explosion,” the guard said. A woman had been seen among the recruits acting suspiciously, he added.

Australians Urged to, “Stay the Course”

The following article is from Down Under. One paragraph caught my attention (I’m easily distracted), and reflects my own thoughts about the war against the Jihazis:

“…the enemy is not the generic evil of terrorism. The enemy is Islamist terrorism as represented by al-Qa’ida and its non-state networks. This is not primarily a military threat but a global ideological and political threat that constitutes a crisis within a civilisation. This threat is long term and will demand from the West a response of hard and soft power including diplomacy, force, intelligence, law enforcement and economics; but, above all, it will demand an internal consensus on the nature of the threat that, at present, is missing from the democracies.”

Now, if only the Republicans and Democrats can put their differences on the back burner and focus on the threat at hand, we can easily and swiftly win this war on Islamonazism! The folks Down Under understand what is at stake. Why is it that the U.S. Government is so focused on the next election, and the next, and the next, that they can’t get together for the common good???

Stay the course in Afghanistan

* In the Long War against Islamism, grave doubt surrounds the will and patience of the West, writes editor-at-large Paul Kelly
* April 11, 2007

The Australian News

AUSTRALIANS should get used to the idea of the Long War. Its present manifestations are Iraq and Afghanistan and its future manifestations will range across the Middle East, the Gulf, Southeast Asia and the cities of the West.
This war is not going well. Hence John Howard’s announcement yesterday of a significant lift in Australia’s combat role in Afghanistan, taking overall numbers to about 1000 by mid-2008. This follows Howard’s boost of Australia’s 1400 military personnel in Iraq and its region by an extra 70 logistics and training personnel.

It is six years since Australian forces were first dispatched to Afghanistan, only to be withdrawn, then re-committed. It is four years since Australian forces were first dispatched to Iraq. Expect our military forces to be operating in Afghanistan for many years to come.

Both wars have been severely mismanaged by the US, and President George W. Bush’s 2003 decision to intervene in Iraq has only confused and confounded the Long War against Islamist terrorism.

Iraq has exhausted the West’s public opinion, sapped its energy and moral standing, and even brought into dispute within Western democracies the idea of the Long War against Islamist terrorists.

Much of the debate in the US, Britain and Australia about Iraq is really about our own politics, party rivalries, electoral tactics and reluctant public opinion. It is about ourselves and not the enemy, a sign of deep malaise. We seem unsure whether we are at war and, if so, what the nature of this war is. The political and intellectual weakness of the Western powers is manifest in this struggle.

Scorpions Convicted of Killing Muslims – Relatives Stung by Verdict

I guess the moral of the following story is: Don’t shoot Muslims while being filmed! Of course, if it were Muslims killing Muslims, they would have probably just gotten off with just a warning not to do it again… (*I’m just being sarcastic, so don’t get all bent out of shape and declare a Fartwar or something*).

Jail for Serb video death squad
http://news.bbc.co.uk

Serbia’s war crimes court has jailed four Serb paramilitaries who were filmed as they shot dead six captured young Bosnian Muslims.

The Scorpions unit leader and one of his accomplices were given 20 years each – the others 13 and five years.

A fifth man was cleared of the murder which took place during the Srebrenica massacre in Bosnia in July 1995.

This was the first trial in Serbia to deal with the massacre of nearly 8,000 Muslim men and boys around Srebrenica.

It was also the biggest war crimes trial of Serbs by Serbs to date.

But relatives of the victims expressed disappointment that the maximum sentences – of 40 years – had not been handed down.

Prosecutors said the five suspects were members of a paramilitary unit called the Scorpions.

On the video, paramilitaries are heard taunting the youths about their virginity before shooting them in the back as they lay in a ditch.

The tape was played at the international war crimes tribunal in The Hague (ICTY) in June 2005 at the trial of the late Yugoslav leader Slobodan Milosevic.

Ethiopia Detains 41 Suspected Terrorists as Mogadishu Death Toll Rises

Sorry, I haven’t had my morning cup of coffee and so I don’t have much to say about the following article:

WRAPUP 1-Death toll from Mogadishu clashes tops 1,000
Tue 10 Apr 2007, 12:44 GMT

By Sahal Abdulle

MOGADISHU, April 10 (Reuters) – The worst fighting in Mogadishu for more than 15 years killed at least 1,086 people and led half the city’s population to flee in terror, according to a Somali committee set up to assess the damage.

The clashes pitting Ethiopian and Somali forces against clan militia and insurgents wounded more than 4,300, said the committee’s report obtained by Reuters on Tuesday.

The March 29-April 1 battles prompted 1.4 million to flee their homes in the Somali capital, home to 2.4 million people.

An earlier report by a local human rights group put the death toll at 381 civilians in what aid workers have called the worst fighting in Mogadishu for more than 15 years.

It was sparked when Somali government troops and their Ethiopian allies began a disarmament drive that escalated into an offensive to flush out insurgents before a national reconciliation conference scheduled to take place on April 16.

Colonel Hussein Siayaad, a member of the committee grouping security officials and civil society activists, said 88 bodies were recovered from one square kilometre (0.4 sq miles) of land, only a fraction of the battlefield.

“This is a rough estimate and the number is going to be much higher because we have not ventured out of the main roads,” Siayaad told Reuters. “The dead bodies are still there and it will take weeks to collect all of them.”