U.S. General Calls For A Cease Fire

FALLUJAH, Iraq (April 10) - Government negotiators entered the besieged city of Fallujah Saturday as fierce battles raged elsewhere in central Iraq, including Baghdad. Forty Iraqis were killed, two U.S. servicemembers and two Germans were missing, an American civilian was captured and a Red Crescent official was gunned down.

Several members of the Iraqi Governing Council met with Fallujah city leaders to try to win the handover of people who killed and mutilated four American civilians last week. They also want the insurgents to give up foreign militants in the city, a council member said.

Brig. Gen. Mark Kimmitt said a third battalion of Marines and a battalion of troops from the new Iraqi army were being moved to Fallujah to join the siege of the city. Two battalions of 1,200 Marines are already in place.

Kimmitt said the military was seeking a cease-fire during the talks, but that insurgents continued to shoot at the U.S. troops. Explosions and sporadic gunfire continued to be heard Saturday afternoon in the city. The Marines largely remained in the industrial zone they hold in the eastern part of the city, 35 miles west of Baghdad.

Some Marines moved a few blocks into a nearby neighborhood, breaking into homes, witnesses said, in an apparent attempt to clear out gunmen firing on them. An AC-130 gunship airplane raked insurgent positions with gunfire Friday night.

Members of the Governing Council have expressed increasing anger over the U.S. siege, calling it a ''mass punishment'' for the city's 200,000 residents. A Shiite member suspended his council seat in protest, and a Sunni council member said he would quit if the Fallujah talks fell apart.

In Baqouba, northeast of the capital, gunmen attacked government buildings and police stations, fighting U.S. troops in battles that killed around 40 Iraqis and wounded several Americans, said Capt. Issam Bornales, spokesman for the 1st Infantry Division's 3rd Brigade.

Insurgents also fought U.S. troops in Baghdad's northern, mainly Sunni neighborhood of al-Azamiyah.

Guerrillas attacked a tank on a highway near the airport in western Baghdad on Saturday, setting it on fire. In the west of the city, a convoy of supply trucks being escorted by two U.S. Humvees was attacked. One of the trucks was set ablaze and the driver kidnapped, said Majid Hameed, a witness. The kidnapping could not be confirmed and the driver's nationality was not known.

In the north of the country, the head of the Iraqi Red Crescent's Irbil office, Barzan Umer Mantik, and his wife were attacked and killed Saturday in their car in the nearby city of Mosul, the International Committee of the Red Cross said.

Two U.S. servicemembers and several contract employees were still unaccounted for from attacks on Friday, a Pentagon spokesman, Lt. Commander Dan Hetlage, said Saturday.

In the latest in a string of kidnappings this week, Australia's ABC television showed an American civilian being taken away in a car by fighters after an attack on a fuel convoy near Baghdad on Saturday. The man spoke with a southern American accent.

When asked by an ABC reporter what happened, the man said: ''They attacked our convoy. That's all I'm going to say.''

The car then drove off down the highway with him still in the back seat, passing a burning tanker truck on the road. The prisoner wore what appeared to be a light flak jacket of the sort worn by private security guards, who are often contracted to protect convoys.

Also Saturday, the German Foreign Ministry said two security agents from its embassy in Baghdad have been missing for several days. It gave no further details, but Germany's ZDF and ARD television reported that the missing were two Germans, 38 and 25 years old, who were ambushed Wednesday while on a routine trip from Amman, Jordan, to Baghdad.

ARD said the two were agents with GSG-9, a counterterrorism unit trained for freeing hostages and other commando missions.

Militants kidnapped three Japanese civilians earlier in the week and have threatened to burn them alive unless Tokyo withdraws its troops from Iraq by Sunday, a demand Japan has rejected. A Canadian and an Arab from Jerusalem have also been kidnapped.

A group calling itself the ''Marytr Ahmed Yassin Brigades'' in Ramadi claimed to have 30 hostages from the United States, Japan, Spain and Bulgaria. A masked man holding an automatic weapon made the claim in video shot by Associated Press Television News. No hostages were shown, and there was no way to verify the claim.

In the south Saturday, the militia of radical Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr remained in control of Karbala and nearby Najaf and Kufa.

Leaders of al-Sadr's militia said Saturday that they would not launch attacks on U.S.-led coalition forces in Karbala, 65 miles south of Baghdad, until the end of a religious festival this weekend.

Hundreds of thousands of pilgrims are in Karbala and other Shiite cities to mark al-Arbaeen, the end of the mourning period for a 7th-century martyred Shiite saint. Ceremonies are to be held until Sunday night.

In their first major military move into south in months, about 1,000 U.S. troops backed by tanks swept into the city of Kut on Wednesday to push out al-Sadr militiamen who had seized control. Kimmitt said al-Sadr followers were driven from much of Kut in the initial assault, and he expected the rest of the city to be under U.S. control soon.

Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, meanwhile, made a surprise visit to Italian troops in the southern city of Nasiriyah, which saw fighting with al-Sadr followers earlier in the week but has largely calmed since.

The U.S. military's death toll from the week of fighting stood at 46 after the killing of a Marine on Friday in Fallujah. The fighting has killed more than 460 Iraqis - including more than 280 in Fallujah, a hospital official said. At least 647 U.S. soldiers have died in Iraq since the war began in March 2003.

Well at least we are trying diplomacy.

When asked by an ABC reporter what happened, the man said: ''They attacked our convoy. That's all I'm going to say.''

That statement is suspiciously brief.

Good to know the militia is taking the holiday off...

*believe*

damn, my cuzz is out there. :(

the internet is funny.

webs, we've never met, we've had our ups and downs, i still owe you a black book and some art, and until just two seconds ago, i never knew you had a cousin (a mexican with a cousin? i don't buy it!) but when you said that, i honestly felt a little attachment to this whole stupid fucking thing. i don't know if that makes any sense, but it's kind of my way of sayin best wishes to him and your whole family, and having it mean more than your usual facade of patriotism.

with any luck, motherfuckers in charge of this whole thing will get their act right, one way or another, and people can start living in this 'freedom' we're over there to create.

^^^I'll say though that (while I really never would wish harm in anyway on another) the rhetoric of the liberal left in America puts on this PC facade that I'm becoming less and less willing to go with...

The facade is this: We support our troops, not the war...bring them home to safety

Given I am painting with a broad brush, but the truth is that most of the guys over there don't like anti-war/intellectuals/leftists of any kind. They might not want to go to war but they aren't voting Anti-war en masse this November, believe me. Beyond that my notions follow in line with a Dead Prez quote that I'm not absolute about but it captures my ideas:

"I got cousins in the military, as far as I'm concerned they died when they registered."

Also, people should read

The Coming Anarchy : Shattering the Dreams of the Post Cold War. It gives the opinion that socities are losing there ability to reinforce state borders and will lose them all together. However the idea that most struck me was that in some cases, which he documents, dictator control is neccesary. The dictator allows a society to flourish and grow into a more free state or at least to preserve the artificial boundries established which put at conflict opposing groups brought together by an arbitrary and unnatural map. Its a worthwhile and easy read and seems to apply to Iraq now more than ever...

Legal Background

Recalling that every State has the duty, in conformity with the Charter of the United Nations, to refrain in its international relations from the threat or use of force against the sovereignty, territorial integrity or political independence of any State, or in any other manner inconsistent with the purposes of the United Nations.

4. The situations referred to in the preceding paragraph include armed conflicts in which peoples are fighting against colonial domination and alien occupation and against racist regimes in the exercise of their right of self-determination, as enshrined in the Charter of the United Nations and the Declaration on Principles of International Law concerning Friendly Relations and Co-operation among States in accordance with the Charter of the United Nations.

http://www.unhchr.ch/html/menu3/b/93.htm

4. Such declarations have regularly been echoed at other UN events. Recently, the World Summit on Sustainable Development, in its Plan of Implementation, under Chapter IX. Mean of Implementation stated the following. "97. Take further effective measures to remove obstacles to the effective measures to remove obstacles to the realization of the right of peoples to self-determination, in particular peoples living under colonial and foreign occupation which obstacles continue to adversely affect their economic and social development and are incompatible with the dignity and worth of the human person and must be combated and eliminated" (Johannesburg, September, 2002).

http://www.acsf.net/self-determination_IPs..._minorities.doc

International Law is really interesting once you start reading it.

*believe*

first off, happy easter.

i know some of you probably

dont celebrate easter, thats cool.

to me, its just another reason

to get together with family,

and have a good time.

thanks seek.

were hoping he makes it back ok.

it was his choice to enlist, but he enlisted

before 9/11. he enlisted for finacial

reasons. i just worry, ya know.

he is a badass dude, but i know

them terrorists give a fuck...

and he raids houses looking for terrorists.

anything can happen.

Originally posted by villain

Well at least we are trying diplomacy.

 

 

 

 

That statement is suspiciously brief.

 

Good to know the militia is taking the holiday off...

did you see the video of him saying it? he may as well have just said "I know a fuck of alot more but I'm not able to tell you" the way he was acting. then again...there was a masked gunman with an ak to his neck....sometimes you need to be brief.

Originally posted by ese

did you see the video of him saying it? he may as well have just said "I know a fuck of alot more but I'm not able to tell you" the way he was acting. then again...there was a masked gunman with an ak to his neck....sometimes you need to be brief.

I just thought he would have been a little more effluent since he IS being taken hostage. Perhaps give away some information to the press about his captors or thier AO.

(i thought i had this posted here, maybe twas deleted?)

http://www.sr.bham.ac.uk/~jpfo/jokes/george_bush.jpg'>

^^^Yeah I remember seeing that.