Al-Qaeda’s Moroccan Swedish Iraqi Leader

It appears that the US raid in Mosul we reported earlier this month which killed 11, including several women and children, was in fact the same raid that killed Abu Qaswarah, the much ballyhooed al-Qaeda in Iraq second in command.

Qaswarah has an interesting background. A native of Morocco, he held Swedish citizenship, allegedly has connections to the Brandbergen Mosque. He somehow parlayed his North African slash Scandinavian background into the role of senior al-Qaeda in Iraq leader in northern Iraq.

The Icing on the Yellowcake

It was brought to my attention this morning that some people have recently been using last month’s Iraqi government sale of Yellowcake uranium to a Canadian company as vindication for starting everyone’s favorite Middle East quagmire that’s totally going less awful now that most of the integrated neighborhoods in Iraq have been violently purged of one group or another.

But lets not get ahead of ourselves here… lets have a look at this story when the AP first ran it. For those who don’t want to read the whole thing, here’s the important part:

Tuwaitha and an adjacent research facility were well known for decades as the centerpiece of Saddam’s nuclear efforts.

Israeli warplanes bombed a reactor project at the site in 1981. Later, U.N. inspectors documented and safeguarded the yellowcake, which had been stored in aging drums and containers since before the 1991 Gulf War. There was no evidence of any yellowcake dating from after 1991, the official said.

Anti-Terrorist Raids

Any given day in Iraq includes a distressingly long list of casualties, but what about the stories behind those incidents? Here’s one from today which I thought warranted some expounding on:

Under the headline Terrorist hideout destroyed, a military press release touts the raid of a suspected “terrorist hideout”, the killing of a “terrorist” and the capture of 15 men.

How do we know it’s a terrorist hideout? Surveillance determined that the building contained “stockpiled food”, 12 bedrolls, and perhaps most damning of all, “men’s clothing”. How do we know the slain man was a terrorist? Well he was “near the target building” and made an unspecified sudden movement before being killed. Oh, and those 15 men who were captured? Well 3 of them were actually “wanted” for some crime or another. That would imply the other 12 were “unwanted”, wouldn’t it?

Here’s something conspicuously absent: weapons. Nowhere in the report is it alleged that this vitally important terrorist hideout, the destruction of which would, according to the story, “further degrade al-Qaeda’s terror network”, contained any IEDs, or explosive components, or the dreaded Iranian EFPs. Not one of these hardened al-Qaeda members was reported to be armed, and the story contains not one mention of a weapons cache, or even a single round of ammunition being present in the house: just food, and clothing.

And that “threatening” man somewhere near the building, the one so ably gunned down by Coalition forces? There is nothing in the story to suggest that he had a gun, or a suicide belt, or even a really pointy-looking stick. Just a guy, standing somewhere in Mosul, who made a sudden movement after being accosted by an unknown number of foreign troops. Now and forever though, he is a “killed terrorist”.

Says MNF Spokesman Major Hall “Our pursuit of these terrorists will continue to disrupt their ability to hinder the security, stability, and growth that Iraqi citizens are entitled to” Yet one must wonder how 15 unarmed guys in a building containing food and clothing posed such a dire threat to the citizenry of Iraq.