Saturday, June 25, 2011

New Video (still shot only provided - not going to show full vid) Shows Taliban Jihadists Beheading Afghan Christian Convert…































Afghans are warning of dire consequences for the country’s tiny Christian population should American forces leave Afghanistan, as President Barack Obama prepares to announce his plans for a troop drawdown in a televised address to the nation scheduled for Wednesday evening.

“If U.S. troops are not in Afghanistan the Taliban will come to power,” said Obaid S. Christ, an Afghan Christian exiled to India who spoke to me Tuesday. “We will have the same situation we had in the 1990s when the Russians left Afghanistan, when we had civil war and millions killed.”

The exile, who changed his name and fled Afghanistan in 2007 after an Islamic court issued an arrest warrant following his conversion to Christianity, acknowledged that the U.S.-backed government headed by President Hamid Karzai has been no friend to Christian converts either. Earlier this year two civilian courts sentenced to death jailed Afghan Christians for changing their religion. After international pressure, including personal visits to one jail by U.S. and European diplomats, the two were released and allowed to leave the country. Both now reside in Europe.

But a more recent, gruesome incident makes clear that the danger for anyone turning from Islam in Afghanistan is not over. A video released in recent weeks, and made available to WORLD this week by two separate Afghan sources, shows four Afghan militants beheading a man believed to be a Christian in Herat Province.

The militants, who claim to be Taliban, captured the victim, a man in his 40s named Abdul Latif (according to Obaid Christ, who provided translation of the video), earlier this year from his village outside Enjeel, a town south of Herat.

In the two-minute video, the men, wearing explosive belts (or suicide vests) and kaffiya head scarves to cover their faces, recite verses from the Quran while forcing Latif to the ground and pinning him with their feet. “You who are joined with pagans . . . your sentence [is] to be beheaded,” read one of the militants in Farsi from what looked like a paper decree. “Whoever changes his religion should be executed.” The passages refer to Sura 8:12 (“I will instill terror into the hearts of the Unbelievers: smite ye above their necks . . .”) and the hadiths, or sayings of Mohammed.

As Latif fought his captors from the ground, one of the militants thrust a medium-sized blade into the side of his neck. With blood flowing onto the ground the militants shouted “Allahu Akhbar” or “God is great” over and over until Latif was fully beheaded and his head was placed on top of his chest.

The brutal killing followed a now-too-familiar pattern used in other beheadings captured on video, notably the killings of Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl in Pakistan in 2002 and U.S. defense contractor Nick Berg in Iraq in 2004. It also likely coincided with a Taliban-incited mob attack on the UN compound in Mazar-e-Sharif in April that followed the March burning of Qurans in the United States by pastor Terry Jones’ church in Florida. After that incident an estimated 4,000 Afghans poured into the streets of Mazar and marched on the compound, killing 10 UN officials—and reportedly beheading two of them. That was followed by a May attack by the Taliban on the Provincial Reconstruction Team headquarters in Herat (at the time under Italian control), where they killed four and injured more than 38. Both cities until then were considered among Afghanistan’s safest, and slated to be the first areas turned over to all-Afghan control.

Despite the obvious uptick in violence in Afghanistan, President Obama is likely to tell the American people on Wednesday night that he will begin a drawdown of troops starting next month, with the final pullout possible next year or in 2013—earlier than a 2014 deadline agreement previously reached with Karzai.

Relations between the Obama team and the U.S.-backed Afghan government are plainly fraying in the lead-up to a drawdown. On Saturday Karzai made public that the United States had been negotiating with the Taliban. The next day, U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Gates for the first time acknowledged “preliminary” U.S. talks with the militant movement that carried out a five-year reign of terror from 1996 until the U.S. invasion in October 2001.

Karzai also accused NATO forces of being in Afghanistan “for their own purposes, for their own goals, and they’re using our soil for that.” In an unusual retort, U.S. ambassador to Afghanistan Karl Eikenberry responded, “When Americans, who are serving in your country at great cost—in terms of life and treasure—hear themselves compared with occupiers, told that they are only here to advance their own interest and likened to the brutal enemies of the Afghan people . . . my people, in turn, are filled with confusion and grow weary of our effort here.”






























Many Afghans, like Obaid Christ, criticize the Karzai regime, but more fear the return of Taliban influence and renewed fighting among tribal groups. “At least you cannot fight with each other now,” said Christ. “Now you have people from different tribes in the government, but we don’t know what will come after.” http://www.worldmag.com/webextra/18252


Afghan Army Plans For Foreign Troop Exit
























Astonishingly after all these years of training and equipping the ANA, NATO appears not to have provided them with heavy weaponry or training on it. No wonder the ANA has its problems, if it is just fighting with light arms (i.e. it is no better than the popular militias of Misrata in Libya). There are other problems, too. 86% of the army is illiterate, military training is short and perfunctory, and there is a severe shortage of officers and non-commissioned officers, according to even the mostly supportive Long War Journal. It does not mention widespread problems of substance abuse, or the really key question. Who will be willing to risk their lives for the Karzai government?










Afghan Army Plans For Foreign Troop Exit






Iraqi Army Convoy Ambushed + Aftermath

























Islamic state of iraq






English: Executioners in the Iraqi government !

Human rights violations..Arrests..torture..kidnapping..prisons..murder..rape..poverty..diseases..
displacement.. psychological warfare !

Iraq crucified daily by the Iraqi government, which came from Iran after U.S. and British invasion into the country in 2003 !

-Death toll in Iraq is 109.032 during the period 1/1/2004 to 31/12/2009 only, five times the casualties in Afghanistan during the same period, according to the Guardian!

-More than 25 thousand Iraqi detainees in prisons without charge, according to the statistics of the Ministry of Justice in 2011!

-Orphans is 5 million orphans in Iraq, according to the reports of international organizations in 2011!





























-Widows is 3 million widows in Iraq, according to a UN report in 2011!

-Iraqi Refugees is the million and 600 thousand refugees, according to the statistical High Commissioner for Refugees in 2011!

-The poverty rate in Iraq is 23 %, according to statistics from the Ministry of Planning in 2011!

-The illiteracy rate in Iraq is 20%, according to a report by UNESCO in 2010.

-Pollution of the environment are not known, Drought and desertification and low water levels in rivers"Tigris and Euphrates", pollution of the waters of the Tigris in the heart of the capital Baghdad because of tons of industrial waste and thousands of cubic meters of urban waste, according to the report of Radio Free Europe in 2011.

-Numbers horror of chronic diseases and skin and nationality, as well as that every psychiatrist in front of 200 thousand people, while the number of cancer cases to 640 000, and doubled the proportion of birth defects in areas that have seen the use of depleted uranium and radioactive materials by the U.S. military in Basra, Falluja and Najaf , according to the health and environment committee in the House of Representatives in 2011!

-The number of missing is unknown?!, According to the report of the Commission on Human Rights in the House of Representatives in 2011!


What is the fate of 32 million Iraqis?

or

Are they in the missing numbers?!


Ihab Salim-independent journalist-Iraqi News Agency INA





























http://www.iraq4allnews.dk









Planting and detonating an IED targetting the police in Baghdad

























Planting and detonating an IED targetting the police in Baghdad






New attack on U.S. base with rockets

Attack on 20/6/2011






























New attack on U.S. base with rockets