More Al Qaeda Deaths and Captures in Iraq

It’sÂ a sad fact that the reporting in the Pakistan Observer and IRNAÂ is better for what is going on in Iraq than AP and Reuters. Both foreign papers are carrying the headlines on how more Al Qaeda operatives (14) have been killed immediately following the capture of the Al Qaeda #2 leader in Baghdad, and that 200 further arrests have been made.

From Pakistan Observer:

Iraqi security forces killed 14 â€œterroristsâ€ and arrested almost 200 suspects, the government has said, in a spectacular follow-up to their earlier capture of an alleged top-level Al-Qaeda leader. Prime Minister Nuri al-Malikiâ€™s office announced Monday that over the previous 24 hours a large force of Iraqi troops and police swept through suspected insurgent strongholds in the Euphrates valley south of Baghdad.

Taken with the arrest of Hamed Jumaa al-Saedi, an Iraqi alleged to be the Al-Qaeda militant networkâ€™s number two in the country, the arrests will be seen as a victory for Malikiâ€™s embattled government in its war with insurgents.Â  â€œOver the past 24 hours Baghdad and its outskirts witnessed a series of military operations carried out by security forces from the defence and interior ministries to achieve security and stability,â€ Malikiâ€™s office said. The raids took place on Sunday in a region south of Baghdad which is mainly inhabited my members of the countryâ€™s restive Sunni minority and has been a hotbed of the insurgency. â€œThe units in charge of the southern and middle Euphrates district, the 8th and 10th army divisions, killed 14 terrorists and arrested 98 of them along with 95 more suspects,â€ the statement said.

To give AP some minor credit, they have this notedÂ at the tag end of an article that details every other bad bit of news from Iraq first, down to individual kidnappings. To me this seems more important than a soccer player kidnapped, since it is the Government of Iraq and the Iraqi forces acting on their own. To me this stands alone, to the obviously slanted MSM, it’s backpage news.


The moral of the story: If you really want to know what’s going on, you better be reading foreign papers andÂ agencies, not AP or Reuters. This is also further evidence that Al Qaeda leaders “talk the jihad talk, but don’t walk the jihad walk”, it’s probable that these terrorists were given up by the number 2 Al Qaeda leader in Baghdad recently captured.