Someone has to say it. Al Queda headed to Vatican after Iraq Church Bombings

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I gave a Debka report because we are candy coating it. Of course, Islam is a "tolerant" existence, as long as it's a theocracy. I called this months ago, and they are not going to stop till they are made to stop.

Al Qaeda Blows up Iraq’s Churches on Way to Vatican

DEBKAfile Special Report Citing also DEBKA-Net-Weekly

August 2, 2004, 12:21 AM (GMT+02:00)
Al Qaeda’s assault on Iraq’s Christian churches – the first attack suffered by the Christian minority since the fall of Saddam Hussein – underlined the seriousness of the threat al Qaeda’s al Masri Brigades issued against Italy that very morning, Sunday, August 1 in the London Arabic publication, al Quds al-Araby. It also coincided with the heightened terror alert declared in New York, Washington DC and New Jersey, prompted by very specific intelligence that al Qaeda was plotting attacks on prime US financial institutions and companies, including Wall Street.

The coordinated car bombing attacks in Baghdad and the northern town of Mosul, quickly condemned by the Vatican, precisely targeted five of the mainstream Christian minorities’ places of worship – Armenian, Catholic and Chaldean. At least 15 were killed and many more injured in explosions that rocked the two Iraqi cities. The threat to Italy is addressed to prime minister Silvio Berlusconi and gives him 15 days to withdraw his troops from Iraq or endure attack. Operational squads were already roaming through Rome and other cities primed for action, according to the published warning.

Other reckonings behind the Iraqi church offensive were less discernible:

Al Qaeda is furious over what it sees as the treachery of its Iraqi Baath, Sunni Muslim allies, who are engaged in secret negotiations first revealed by DEBKA-Net-Weekly on July 23 as follows:

Since the first week of July, the Bush administration has been immersed in a secret, high-wire diplomatic exercise aimed at bringing down the level of Iraqi insurgent attacks on US troops, or perhaps halting the violence altogether, by coming to terms with the enemy. DEBKA-Net-Weekly’s intelligence sources report exclusively that the initiative is being carried forward by a prominent non-Iraq Arab figure as intermediary on behalf of the highest White House echelons. His identity is top secret for reasons of security. (Our editors have his name but promised to preserve his anonymity in return for this exclusive).

All that can be said at this time is that the intermediary is not based in Iraq; he goes over for delicate negotiating sessions in the Bush administration’s name with Baath guerrilla leaders, militia commanders and heads of the great Sunni Muslim tribes and clans. At all times, he is in direct communication with the White House.

The only three Americans in Iraq privy to this negotiating track are Robert Blackwill, the president’s senior adviser on Iraq, US ambassador John Negroponte who is not personally involved, and the commander of American forces in Iraq, General David Casey, who is in charge of security arrangements and any changes on the ground arising from progress in the talks.

The only two Iraqis kept informed are prime minister Iyad Allawi and deputy prime minister for security Salih Barham.

DEBKAfile adds: the negotiating track began with a preliminary condition: Baath and Sunni leaders must undertake to disengage from al Qaeda and other foreign Arab fighters.

On Sunday, the fundamentalist terror organization was at pains to demonstrate its power to torpedo any deal the Baath-Sunni side might strike with Washington by ever-more horrendous terrorist attacks against Iraqis to put paid to any chances of stabilizing the country. Neither the Americans nor prime minister Iyad Allawi would manage, moreover, to evict the terrorist group from the country. Al Qaeda was in Iraq to stay.

The fundamentalists were cracking the whip to punish their Iraqi allies for another unforgivable sin: the new guidelines the Baath leadership recently issued guerrilla commanders, which stressed that the Baath rather than al Qaeda was the driving force of the anti-US insurgency and, furthermore, that the nature of the struggle was national rather than religious. Al Qaeda was not denied a role in the struggle, the commanders were told, only a say in charting Iraq’s future.

Al Qaeda had no intention of letting the Baath get away with this; Sunday it unsheathed its claws against fellow Iraqis partly to put the Sunni Baath in its place

As to its next steps, we stand by the DEBKAfile report published on March 13, 2004, two days after the great Madrid train blasts in which 200 were killed:

DEBKAfile’s counter-terror experts emphasize that Osama bin Laden’s terrorist movement makes no secret of its plans, priorities or motives. They are all laid out - in English too – in a plethora of print and internet publications. While difficult reading for Westerners, who find it hard to take the florid phrasing and outrageous aspirations seriously, such publications are the daily fare of tens of millions of Muslims around the world, almost in the same way a daily newspaper may be part of an ordinary Westerner’s routine.

According to data gathered by our experts, from December 2002, three months before the US invasion of Iraq, al Qaeda began issuing a stream of fatwas designating its main operating theatres in Europe. Spain was on the list, but not the first.

1. Turkey was first. Islamic fundamentalists were constrained to recover the honor and glory of the Ottoman caliphates which were trampled by Christian forces in 1917 in the last days of World War I.

2. Spain followed. There, al Qaeda set Muslims the goal of recovering their lost kingdom in Andalusia.

3. Italy and its capital were third. Muslim fundamentalists view Rome as a world center of heresy because of the Vatican and the Pope.

4. Vienna came next because the advancing Muslim armies were defeated there in 1683 before they could engulf the heart of Europe.

Italy has been warned before and on Sunday, August 1 it was warned again, although it is not alone: the United States is constantly in al Qaeda’s sights.

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Islamic Fundamentalists Bombing Churches, and CNN manages 9 three line paragraphs.

Can you imagine if we bombed 5 Mosques?

BAGHDAD, Iraq (CNN) -- Iraqi insurgents targeted Christian worshippers attending Sunday evening services, setting off explosions near four churches in Baghdad and another in the northern city of Mosul.

Ten people were killed and more than 40 wounded in the attacks in Baghdad, according to the U.S. military. Iraqi police put the number of wounded at 46.

In Mosul, Iraqi Police Gen. Mohammad Kairi Barhawi said one person was killed and 11 wounded when a car bomb exploded outside a church as worshippers were leaving about 7 p.m. (11 a.m. ET).

Barhawi called the perpetrators "criminals and terrorists," and said Iraqis would remain unified against them.

Lt. Col. James Hutton, a spokesman for the U.S. Army's 1st Cavalry Division, said four explosions occurred Sunday evening in Baghdad -- two in the Karada district, east of the fortified Green Zone, and two in the southern neighborhoods of New Baghdad and Dura.

The largest was in Karada, in central Baghdad, where a car bomb exploded outside a church, leaving a crater more than 5 feet wide.

Karada has several churches for Iraq's Christian minority, which makes up about 3 percent of the country's population.

Police and emergency workers responding to the first blast, which occurred about 6 p.m. (10 a.m. ET), discovered a second car they suspected had been rigged as a bomb. The explosives in that vehicle detonated before it could be disarmed, they said.

Earlier bomb blasts Sunday killed four more people in Mosul and two in Baghdad, Iraqi police said.

Another car bomb in Mosul wounded 32 others when it exploded outside the Sumer police station in a Palestinian neighborhood, U.S. and Iraqi officials said.

Also Sunday, a roadside bomb killed a U.S. soldier in northern Iraq and wounded two others, the U.S. military announced. The death in the city of Samarra brings the number U.S. troops killed in the Iraq war to 914, with 678 from hostile action and 235 from nonhostile activity, according to the U.S. military.

Sunday's violence comes just days after at least 70 people were killed in Baquba, when a suicide bomber drove a minibus into a marketplace near a police station.

Truckers taken hostage
On Saturday, a group linked to terrorist mastermind Abu Musab al-Zarqawi announced it has kidnapped two drivers working for a Turkish company supplying goods to U.S. forces in Iraq.

In a videotape broadcast on the Arabic-language Al-Jazeera network, the Unification and Jihad group said the company must stop its activities in Iraq within 48 hours or the militants will behead the two.

U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell has acknowledged that the rash of kidnappings throughout Iraq could deter countries from participating in Iraq's reconstruction and security.

Powell made an unannounced visit to Iraq on Friday, arriving in Baghdad after stopping in Saudi Arabia, which has suggested a plan to send Muslim troops to Iraq. (Full story)

On Thursday, Al-Jazeera reported that a Somali truck driver had been kidnapped by Unification and Jihad.

The network reported the man works for a Kuwaiti company, which also was given a 48-hour ultimatum. There is no word on the fate of the Somali.

The group has taken responsibility for beheading U.S. businessman Nicholas Berg, South Korean translator Kim Sun-il and two Bulgarian truckers.

Another Turkish truck driver seized earlier in the month in Mosul has been freed, CNN Turk reported Saturday.

And captors of seven other truck drivers kidnapped in Iraq denied reports from the Kenyan government Sunday that the captives were being freed.

"This is not true," said Sheikh Hisham al-Dulemi, representing a group calling itself the Black Banners Brigades. "The negotiations are ongoing."

Al-Dulemi later pulled out of the negotiations, a well-placed source involved in the talks told CNN.

The hostages include three Kenyans, three Indians and an Egyptian. They were kidnapped July 21.

Insurgents attack military convoys
Insurgent attacks on three military convoys near the city of Falluja spurred firefights late Saturday and early Sunday in which at least 10 insurgents were killed, but no coalition troops were killed or wounded, according to the U.S. military.

The fighting northeast of Falluja included airstrikes against insurgent positions, the military said.

A spokesman with the Iraqi Health Ministry said at least 12 people were killed and 47 wounded, including noncombatant civilians, in the Falluja battles overnight.

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Obviously, the Jewish poulation was allready been exterminated again and again. Nothing left there, only 4 percent Christian. Nothing left of Christians in Lebanon either.

[Crushaholic]

The irony is that the Vatican was against this war. I wonder if they have changed their mind??

[Bronco Yoda]

I doubt they'd change their minds- but I know what you're saying Crush. Iraq was a mostly secular state. Say what you will about all the atrocities... at least extreme Islam was checked by Saddam. Or at least that's what I'm assuming their thinking was/is. That's the double edge sword for taking that madman down.

However it will be interesting to see how long the Vatian keeps up this 'PC' nicey nice talk.

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Wrong. The Vatican is always anti-war, hoping it doesn't step on it's holy a-hole. They expect others to fight their wars while praying for peace. What did you really expect the Vatican to do, call for Jihad?

Bush is handling the new Crusades.