Zarqawi gets his way with carnage
By Liz Sly and John Burns in BaghdadMay 20, 2005

Al-Qaeda's leader in Iraq, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, personally ordered the onslaught of suicide bombings that has resulted in the deaths of more than 500 people in the past three weeks during a meeting with his top lieutenants in Syria last month, a senior US military official claims.
Zarqawi "wasn't happy with how the insurgency was going", the official said.

The claim came as US military commanders in Baghdad and Washington gave a sobering new assessment of the war on Wednesday, with one senior officer saying US military involvement could last years. However, they pulled back from recent suggestions that there could be a reduction in the 138,000 US troops in Iraq later this year or early in 2006.

General John Abizaid, the senior officer in the Middle East, said one problem was the disappointing progress in training Iraqi paramilitary police units able to mount an effective challenge to the insurgents and allow the US to reduce its troop numbers.

The total of 21 car bombings in Baghdad so far this month was creeping close to the 25 for all of last year. Just in that city, there have been 126 suicide bombs since the end of February.

In further violence yesterday an aide of Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani and an oil ministry official were assassinated in separate incidents in Baghdad.

Sayid Mohammed al-Allaf, Ayatollah Sistani's representative in the Sadr City area of Baghdad, was killed when gunmen broke into his house. The police also said Ali Hameed, a senior oil ministry official, was killed when leaving for work yesterday morning.

In an audiotape released on Wednesday, someone, purportedly Zarqawi, justified the killing of civilians, saying it was permitted under Islamic law to kill Muslims who collaborate with Americans.

At a time of mounting tensions between Iraq's Sunni minority and Shiite majority, the man said members of the Shiite community, who now dominate the Government, have been singled out for attack.

"What Sunnis have suffered and are still suffering from the Shiites is far worse than what they have suffered from the Americans," the voice said.

The head of the influential Sunni Muslim Clerics Association, Harith al-Dhari, further inflamed sectarian tensions and fear of civil war on Wednesday when he accused the militia of the main Shiite political party of assassinating Sunni preachers.

A senior Badr official, Hadi al-Amiri, denied the accusations.

In London, the Ministry of Defence said the army was investigating allegations that British soldiers tortured nine Iraqi men on a military base in Basra two years ago.

Four British soldiers have already been court-martialled for abusing soldiers at Camp Breadbasket, receiving prison sentences of up to two years.

■ President George Bush suggested in a speech in Washington on Wednesday that the US had not moved civilian workers into Iraq quickly enough to stabilise the country following the military invasion that ousted Saddam Hussein.

"One of the lessons we learned from … Iraq is while military personnel can be rapidly deployed anywhere in the world, the same is not true of US government civilians," Mr Bush said.

The Chicago Tribune, The New York Times, The Guardian

http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2005/05/19/1116361678338.html