Wednesday, September 22, 2004

In two posts (here and here), Fubar at Needlenose discusses the story of Scott Taylor, a Canadian journalist who was recently kidnapped in northwest Iran by resistance fighters, then released. Fubar draws on Taylor's account of his ordeal and a subsequent interview at Antiwar.com. If what Taylor says in the interview is correct, we shouldn't expect too much help in defeating the resistance from Iraqi cops:

Everywhere we went, it was obvious that the militants had the full cooperation of the U.S.-trained Iraqi police. Whenever we transited outside the city, to the corners of Mosul or the checkpoints, the cops would see us bound in the back seats -- and offer cigarettes to our captors! ...

I learned that the Iraqi police on the checkpoints were contributing part of their salary to the resistance's local leader, the emir. After all, they're whacking the crap out of these police recruits all over the place throughout Iraq, so it's partially protection money.

One guy was laughing at me and saying how ironic it is that the Americans are being attacked with RPGs purchased with their own money. Sad to say, the U.S. taxpayer is actually funding the Iraqi resistance. By paying these cops' salaries, U.S. taxpayers are actually helping to buy the weapons that are killing American soldiers every day.


Wait -- it gets worse:

...my mujahedin captors told me in advance the exact time the U.S. air strikes would hit them. I said, "How the hell you know?" To which the guy laughed and said, "Don't be stupid, of course we know." They have infiltrated U.S. command even.

And then there's this gloss on U.S. forces, from Taylor's account:

Around 2 p.m. we had stopped near a remote desert house. The nearly 30 fighters had assembled around our car and began to conduct a mass prayer. Zeynep and I were instructed to remain in the car. It was as they were engrossed in their prayer that I spotted the two American helicopters coming out of the south – low and fast and headed straight towards our parked convoy. I cried out in alarm. At first the mujahedeen were angry at the interruption until they too spotted the approaching threat. Caught out in the open, they were sitting ducks. Nobody could move; they simply watched the helicopters steadily bear down on us.
 
At about 800 metres distance, the gunships inexplicably banked away to the east without so much as a reconnaissance overpass of our mysterious group of vehicles in the middle of the desert. We had to have been in plain view, but the Americans turned away. "They always fly the same patrol routes" explained one of the fighters, "They see nothing."


Victory is not in sight.

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