Iraqi recruiting method:"Fight or we'll kill you"

[RonOnGuitar]

Liberated Iraqis detail the evil choice given them by Saddam & his supporters:



www.washingtonpost.com/wp...3Apr3.html



By ELLEN KNICKMEYER

The Associated Press

Thursday, April 3, 2003; 5:10 PM





KUT, Iraq - Many in Kut waved white flags and welcomed the U.S. Marines, and this is why: Saddam Hussein's regime, they said, was going door to door and giving their young men a sinister choice.



Fight, or die.



"God help us because Saddam Hussein is killing us," said Kasem Fasil, an old man with a solitary jagged tooth. Behind him, smoke billowed from Iraqi military jeeps and a military school shelled by Marines.



"They want to give us machine guns and make us fight," he said.



"We are not soldiers. How can we fight? And if we don't fight they kill us."



And so, as the Marines fought Thursday for this city southeast of Baghdad - countering suicide attacks, dueling at close range range with grenade-throwing Republican Guard fighters and Baath Party irregulars - many of Kut's people made it clear they were sitting this one out.



Farmers and townspeople lined the roads as Marine tanks and troops rolled to the fight. Iraqi men in taxis and battered cars pulled over as Marine convoys passed, getting out and crossing their hands behind their heads to show that they were not Iraqi fighters.



Families waved white flags for the same reason. At one home, a man marched back and forth in front of a compound waving a white banner on a stick. Outside one office, men knelt in the lush grass outside, clustered around a woman in a black chador who was waving a white rag.



Marines came to Kut - site of a key bridge over the Tigris River that meets the road west to Baghdad - to seek and battle Republican Guard and Baath Party fighters.



"They found both, along with huge caches of arms - dozens of mortar rounds, grenades and small arms ammo - that Iraqi fighters had stashed in schools in the town," Lt. Col. B.P. McCoy, commander of the 3rd Battalion, 4th Marines. "More than we could blow up."



Marines entered town with an attack on the military training school on the outskirts. Heavy machine gun fire shattered a mosaic of Saddam on a front wall.



Blocks into the town, Marines met Iraqi fighters firing from behind the trunks of a date palm grove.



Inside the grove, and in low white buildings around it, the Marines fought what they said was their battalion's closest fight in a week of raids aginst military complexes and Baath offices in the south.



"We were throwing grenades at each other," McCoy said. Other Marine units had encountered that kind of intense engagement last week to the south, at Nasiriyah.



McCoy and other Marines described a final suicide charge by the last Iraqi fighters. Clutching AK-47s, Iraqis came running against Marine tanks.



"At the end they came charging in a human wave, 10 or 15 guys," he said. "We mowed them down."



The fight ended with about 30 Iraqis dead, and the first three Marine injuries in the battalion's five raids so far. Chinook helicopters ferried out one Marine shot in the abdomen and two lightly wounded in the arm, as well as one gravely injured Iraqi.



U.S. troops stopped Iraqi civilians and the first of a stream of refugees at the outskirts of town, blocking them from the fight. Men said they had sent women and children into the countryside days ago.



Many people in Kut, a town of Shiite Muslims - Iraq's majority group persecuted by Saddam's Sunni minority - had feared Saddam's forces would unleash chemical attacks, resident Ali Hussein said, speaking through a U.S. military interpreter.



U.S. forces said Thursday they found a trove of untouched chemical protection suits in an Iraqi bunker in the area.



Army staff Sgt. Brian Plesich, traveling with the Marines, directed the translator to ask townspeople in Kut "if they don't like Saddam, why don't they rise up themselves and fight themselves?"



Fasil replied that in 1991, after the Gulf War, Shiites in southern Iraq had done just that.



"We fought, and we thought America would help us," Fasil said. "But they left us."



"Let him know this time we're here to stay," Plesich said.



As Marines left town, they crossed paths with the first Iraqi refugees on the lane coming into Kut - thousands fleeing east from the direction of Baghdad.



© 2003 The Associated Press

[Social Spit]

They would take the machine gunz and SHOOT the re-pube-licking guard.

[debbie mannas]

any comment?



www.abc.net.au/news/newsi...819685.htm

[NRKofOver]

[quote]"Pray that the President and his advisers will be strong and courageous to do what is right regardless of critics".[/quote]



this one makes me laugh, shouldn't it just say 'Pray that the President and his advisors will be strong and courageous to do what is right'. Because, it could just as easily say to pray that they do what is right regardless of supporters.



As far as the original topic, it's pathetic that any nation would force people into war under any circumstance. The draft and the threat of jail time is just as sinister as threats of death.

Read all about ME!

[LarreeMP3]

'Pray that the President and his advisors will be strong and courageous to do what is right'



It is almost as if some of the left-wingers are praying for President Bush to be doing the wrong thing insead of praying that he is doing the right thing. I mean, as long as we are doing it don't you want it to be right? Or are you so hung up on your partisan BS that you pray we are doing the wrong thing? Conceptually, war sucks. But in reality it is sometimes necessary.

[NRKofOver]

Larree, I think my revision was the non-partisan revision.



When you say that he should do what is right regardless of what his critics say, you are suggesting you already know what is right. If I suggested changing it to 'he should do what is right regardless of what his supporters say', then I too would be infusing a simple prayer with my own expectations of what is right. The original suggestion is partisan, mine wasn't. At least recognize the difference.

Read all about ME!

[Social Spit]

This is actually: Pretty GOOD:



http://www.intouch.org/War/duty_38088298.html