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OpEdNews Op Eds    H3'ed 7/14/11

Dahlia Wasfi and the Tragedy of Iraq, Part 4: Survival, Women's Rights and Death Squads

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The link to this flash video was removed for security reasons ). But you may have heard of how in September 2005 in Basra there was a suspicious car that the Iraqi police approached, and when the police approached the car, the people in the car shot at the policemen, so they were detained immediately and brought to the police station, and what they found in the car was were that these two guys were British Special Operations.

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Special Note - Mac:

[Amazingly, The British military actually soon "sprang" the two from jail in, apparently, cowboy fashion. Here is an excerpt that posits one view of the entire event, that the Brits were actually involved in "False Flag" bombings, from a Raw Story article on this entire episode, although you will have to read the entire article to catch the various allegations against the British plus the latter's defense and explanations. At the very least this incident raises some curious questions:

In an interview with Al Jazeerah TV, the popular Iraqi leader Fattah al-Sheikh, a member of the Iraqi National Assembly and deputy official in the Basra governorate, said that police had "caught two non-Iraqis, who seem to be Britons and were in a car of the Cressida type. It was a booby-trapped car laden with ammunition and was meant to explode in the centre of the city of Basra in the popular market." Contrary to British authorities' claims that the soldiers had been immediately handed to local militia, al-Sheikh confirmed that they were "at the Intelligence Department in Basra, and they were held by the National Guard force, but the British occupation forces are still surrounding this department in an attempt to absolve them of the crime." (source)]

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Dahlia (cont'd): So as soon as you catch one [so to speak] "cockroach", there's a lot more behind them, so this opens the door for questioning what happens, but its the same tactic of divide and conquer, pitting Sunni against Shia. Yes, there was disagreement. Yes, there was conflict, and 1400 years ago the sects were established because of division, but not since that time has there been a split like this where people were being exterminated because of their religious sect. Not until after 2003.  Actually on my website, liberatethis.com, I have a section on the Salvador Option, and there's so many references there, and this is all from the 2005 and 2006 time period - I don't have that many more updated resoruces since then - but it's called Fake Terrorism is a Coalition's Best Friend because you set up these explosions, and you tell the one group that the other group did it, boom! And then we set up the training; we fund the training.

I haven't spoken to him in a long, long time, but I have a contact who was with IVAW (Iraqi Veterans Against the War) and he said his job was training soldiers in Tikrit, and he said when they brought the soldiers in, they divided them up, Sunni and Shia. That's our architecture; that's our artificial divisions. And in terms of the Salvador Option, it [an article] just came out relatively recently that proved that the Americans were tied to the training and funding of the Wolf Brigade. 

Mac: How many people do you think might have been murdered by the Wolf Brigade?

Dahlia: I don't know. I don't know. I mean it got to a point - I met a woman who, she was an environmental engineer in Iraq and now she's outside of Iraq, one of the refugees - and she talked about how when she was still in Iraq, they [hit men - Mac] would just walk into a room, they would call out a name - and you turn around when you hear your name - whoever it was who turned around, the person who called out their name shot them, no accountability. And this was [told me] in 2007 in a conference in Madrid, it's kind of a long story, but I got to go to the conference, and I met her there, and she was talking about how these death squads were now spilling over into Syria and Jordan where all the refugees were, so this is anecdotal evidence, but the money's coming from somewhere. And unfortunately, there's always the possibility of another Iran-Contra situation, but if we could cut the funding, once the funding for the death squads will go away these people don't have an incentive to do that work anymore, so you hope that with the withdrawal of the occupation, no more funding and training of armies.

Mac: How many people do you think died in Iraq, your personal opinion.

Dahlia: Since 2003, I would say close to one-and-a half-million people. But that is only since 2003. We are also responsible for the 1.2 and and 1.8 million who died during sanctions. This was because of lack of medical care, because of lack of antibiotics, lack of medicine, lack of insulin - this is overall, and people starving to death.

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It is indeed a tragedy what has been wrought in Iraq, all of which has, as has been rather thoroughly exposed, been based on lies and propaganda, and the wages of lies can be death, and in the case of Iraq, in spades! There were no WMDs or viable ties between bin Laden's al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein. "Al Qeada in Iraq" metamorphosed later in response to the occupation, a self-fulfilling prophecy. 

Settling on "removing the dictator" became a final excuse to justify what was already a done deal, the invasion, and there was nothing organic about it, meaning that the Iraqi people had not gotten to the historical point yet of widespread rebellion or revolution against their own tyrant. 

Meanwhile, what we have put in Saddam's place is more or less a wild-card Frankenstein monster of a government, with close ties to Iran, that is still under attack from dissident forces within Iraq, an ongoing hornet's nest of intrigues and conflict as that country lurches along.

There is more to my interview with Dr. Dahlia Wasfi, but at this point I am starting to steal her thunder since she is in the process of writing a book on her and her family's experiences in Iraq and America. So we will end this series now with one final question I posed to her during our interview:

Mac: Well let me ask you one final question. Have you got any closing remarks for me, to sum this all up?

Dahlia: Immediate, unconditional withdrawal. I've been calling for that since 2004, so we could have definitely had a seven year phased withdrawal by now, but clearly that's not the objective, but I would emphasize, because again Obama had his "mission accomplished moment" without the banner saying that we've withdrawn combat forces, but there continue to be over 50,000 US soldiers and Marines on the ground in Iraq, and thousands more mercenaries, and many, many, many CIA, and that's the Mothership, still the Green Zone with the largest embassy in the world, "embassy" since we have diplomatic relations. So basically I'm still calling for our ending our presence in Iraq, and Afghanistan too. Everything that is happening to the people of Iraq is also happening to the people of Afghanistan, same use of depleted uranium, same bombardment, same trauma to civilians. We're killing families, here and abroad. So the bottom-line is "bring the troops home."

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I am a student of history, religion, exoteric and esoteric, the Humanities in general and a tempered advocate for the ultimate manifestation of peace, justice and the unity of humankind through self-realization and mutual respect, although I am not (more...)
 
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