Mosques are not 'off limits' anymore!……  About time too!

"U.S. troops pound insurgents

Associated Press
Oct. 13, 2004 12:00 AM

BAGHDAD - U.S. troops went on the offensive from the gates of Baghdad to the Syrian border Tuesday, pounding Sunni insurgent positions from the air and supporting Iraqi soldiers in raids on mosques suspected of harboring extremists.

American and Iraqi forces launched the operations ahead of Ramadan, expected to start at week's end, in an apparent attempt at preventing a repeat of the insurgent violence that took place at the start of last year's Muslim holy month.

Clashes broke out in a string of militant strongholds from Fallujah, 40 miles west of Baghdad, northward along the Euphrates Valley to the Syrian border town of Qaim, all major conflict areas.

Some of the sharpest exchanges took place in Hit, 90 miles northwest of Baghdad, where residents and hospital officials said U.S. aircraft attacked two sites, killing two people and wounding five. The U.S. command had no comment.

U.S. helicopters fired on a mosque in Hit on Monday and set it ablaze after the military said insurgents opened fire on Marines from the sanctuary. Scattered clashes were reported overnight, killing at least two Iraqis and wounding 15, hospital officials said.

Insurgents attacked an Iraqi National Guard outpost east of Qaim on Tuesday, the U.S. military said. The local hospital reported 15 to 20 people were killed.

Seventy miles west of Baghdad, Iraqi troops backed by U.S. soldiers and Marines raided seven mosques in the Sunni insurgent stronghold of Ramadi, arresting a locally prominent member of a clerical association and three other people. They also seized bomb-making materials and "insurgent propaganda" in the mosques, U.S. officials said.

In Baghdad, the Association of Muslim Scholars, a Sunni clerical group suspected of links to the insurgency, condemned the mosque raids as an example of alleged American hostility toward Islam.

"I think there is a religious ideology that drives the American troops," said the association's official spokesman, Mohammed Bashar al-Faydhi. "President Bush has said at the beginning of the war that this is a 'crusade,' " he said, referring to the Christian attacks on Muslims in the Middle Ages.

The raids followed a surge in insurgent attacks in Ramadi, and the U.S. command accused the militants of violating the sanctity of the mosques by using them for military purposes. Marine spokesman Maj. Francis Piccoli said U.S. troops provided backup for the Iraqi soldiers but did not enter the mosques.

Also Tuesday, the United States announced that coalition personnel mounted two operations last month to rescue members of a group of three hostages held by Iraq but didn't find them.

In the attempted rescue operation, British civil engineer Kenneth Bigley and U.S. engineers Eugene Armstrong and Jack Hensley were the targets. They were kidnapped from their homes in Baghdad on Sept. 16.

The first operation came before Sept. 20, when Armstrong is believed to have been beheaded by his captors, a U.S. official said only on the condition of anonymity. The second came after Armstrong's death but before that of Hensley, which was reported Sept. 21.


www.azcentral.com/news/articles/1013iraq13.html

About bloody time they raided a few mosques.

... Good!

... Keep mopping boys

They can be rebuilt

Our boys over there can't be -- if they are being used for harm to Americans -- burn them down..

Can I get an animated GIF of the "burning mosque", please?

smoke & burn those bastards out

I am a muslim, but if there are people shooting at me from inside a mosque ......... I will like hell shoot back at them.  Mosque is just a building.  What people do in it what makes it a sacred place.  If people choose to fight from inside the compound, it loses its status as a house of worship.  In my book, this also applies to other house of worship from different faiths.

Quoted: I am a muslim, but if there are people shooting at me from inside a mosque ......... I will like hell shoot back at them.  Mosque is just a building.  What people do in it what makes it a sacred place.  If people choose to fight from inside the compound, it loses its status as a house of worship.  In my book, this also applies to other house of worship from different faiths.

EXACTLY.

Well said.

TXL

Something about "mosque on fire" which warms the cockles of my heart.

GunLvr

"Fuck with the Bull and you'll get the horns"... SMOKE 'EM BOYS!!

thats a good plan put them on the defensive before rammadan.

about time!

I think it's great.  

The military has finally taken the stance if you store weapons and insurgents in a mosque it loses it's religous protections.  

Burn baby burn.

Quoted: Can I get an animated GIF of the "burning mosque", please?

Please?

WooHoo!!

Like 'federal pound them in the ass," or some other kind of 'pound?'

About time... Burn all the damn things down. Their own religion tells them not to build structures over the dead being whoshiped at the things anyway.  

So technically your doing the rest of the Muslims a favor  .

The United States wouldn't do this on it's own.  Having an interim government in Iraq is a great help.  Now we can help the Iraqis in the attacks on the Mosques instead of vice-versa.

Quoted: I think it's great.   The military has finally taken the stance if you store weapons and insurgents in a mosque it loses it's religous protections.   Burn baby burn.

+1


About fucking time!!!!    

Now we just need to make sure we don't hand a propaganda victory to our enemies - time to lean on our supposed "friends" in Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, the provisional govt in Iraq.

Quoted: Something about "mosque on fire" which warms the cockles of my heart. GunLvr

Big +1..........make sure they are full first

Quoted: Quoted: Can I get an animated GIF of the "burning mosque", please? Please?

Your wish is my command O master!



Andy

You are a god.

Bout time for a serious @$$ woopin i believe.

Fearful of a large-scale U.S. attack, native insurgents in the Iraqi city of Fallujah are turning against allied foreign fighters...One of the foreign guerrillas killed by local fighters was Abu Abdallah Suri, a Syrian and a prominent member of Jordanian dissident Abu Musab Zarqawi's Jihad group.

washingtontimes.com/upi-breaking/20041013-090556-1300r.htm

IBTL

And the reaction to the US levelling a mosque from the Arab world is...

...Nothing, and the Iraqis are not pissed either.

Quoted: I am a muslim, but if there are people shooting at me from inside a mosque ......... I will like hell shoot back at them.  Mosque is just a building.  What people do in it what makes it a sacred place.  If people choose to fight from inside the compound, it loses its status as a house of worship.  In my book, this also applies to other house of worship from different faiths.

Thank you very much for taking the sensible stance. I hate the bleeding heart people who feel that any religous building should be revered solely because it is used for religious purposes. God (or Allah, Jehova, Yehud, or whatever your particular name for the Supreme Being) is not in a building He is in everything and everywhere. All the great teachers that I can think taught in the open air.

Quoted: And the reaction to the US levelling a mosque from the Arab world is... ...Nothing, and the Iraqis are not pissed either.

Exactly! the ONLY people going off the deep end about attacking Mosques are our sides Liberals and our Politicians wanting to be seen as 'sensitive to Arab opinion'!… your avarage Arab coudn't give a flying f••k when we whack a mosque…

ANdy

Arel Sharon also has used a incremental approach to racheting up the pressure on the Palistinians.

Now they kill someone on a daily basis and most of the world no longer takes note, compared to what IDF incusions into the West Bank incurred three years ago.

Looks like we need to start doing some incursions of our before it's to late.

Al Qaeda seeks tie to local gangs
By Jerry Seper
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
washingtontimes.com/national/20040928-123346-3928r.htm

A top al Qaeda lieutenant has met with leaders of a violent Salvadoran criminal gang with roots in Mexico and the United States -- including a stronghold in the Washington area -- in an effort by the terrorist network to seek help infiltrating the U.S.-Mexico border, law enforcement authorities said. Adnan G. El Shukrijumah, a key al Qaeda cell leader for whom the U.S. government has offered a $5 million reward, was spotted in July in Honduras meeting with leaders of El Salvador's notorious Mara Salvatrucha gang, which immigration officials said has smuggled hundreds of Central and South Americans -- mostly gang members -- into the United States. Although they are actively involved in alien, drug and weapons smuggling, Mara Salvatrucha members in America also have been tied to numerous killings, robberies, burglaries, carjackings, extortions, rapes and aggravated assaults -- including at least seven killings in Virginia and a machete attack on a 16-year-old in Alexandria that severely mutilated his hands. The Salvadoran gang, known to law enforcement authorities as MS-13 because many members identify themselves with tattoos of the number 13, is thought to have established a major smuggling center in Matamoros, Mexico, just south of Brownsville, Texas, from where it has arranged to bring illegal aliens from countries other than Mexico into the United States. Authorities said al Qaeda terrorists hope to take advantage of a lack of detention space within the Department of Homeland Security that has forced immigration officials to release non-Mexican illegal aliens back into the United States, rather than return them to their home countries. Less than 15 percent of those released appear for immigration hearings. Nearly 60,000 illegal aliens designated as other-than-Mexican, or OTMs, were detained last year along the U.S.-Mexico border. El Shukrijumah, born in Saudi Arabia but thought to be a Yemen national, was spotted in Tegucigalpa, Honduras, in July, having crossed the border illegally from Nicaragua after a stay in Panama. U.S. authorities said al Qaeda operatives have been in Tegucigalpa planning attacks against British, Spanish and U.S. embassies. Known to carry passports from Saudi Arabia, Trinidad, Guyana and Canada, El Shukrijumah had sought meetings with the Mara Salvatrucha gang leaders who control alien-smuggling routes through Mexico and into the United States. El Shukrijumah, 29, who authorities said was in Canada last year looking for nuclear material for a so-called "dirty bomb" and reportedly has family members in Guyana, was named in a March 2003 material-witness arrest warrant by federal prosecutors in Northern Virginia, where U.S. Attorney Paul J. McNulty said he is sought in connection with potential terrorist threats against the United States. A former southern Florida resident and pilot thought to have helped plan the September 11 attacks, El Shukrijumah was among seven suspected al Qaeda operatives identified in May by Attorney General John Ashcroft as being involved in plans to strike new targets in the United States. Citing "credible intelligence from multiple sources," Mr. Ashcroft said at the time that El Shukrijumah posed "a clear and present danger to America." In August, an FBI alert described him as "armed and dangerous" and a major threat to homeland security. Earlier this month, Mr. Ashcroft confirmed that U.S. border agents and inspectors had ramped up efforts to find El Shukrijumah amid reports that the al Qaeda leader was thought to be seeking entry routes into the United States along the U.S.-Mexico border. Mr. Ashcroft noted that increased enforcement efforts were under way in the wake of a rise of arrests of border jumpers from Afghanistan, Indonesia, Iran, Iraq, Jordan, Pakistan, the Philippines, Saudi Arabia and Syria. Authorities said Mara Salvatrucha gang members moved into the Los Angeles area in the 1980s and developed a reputation for being organized and extremely violent. The gang since has expanded into the Washington area, including Virginia and Maryland, and into Oregon, Alaska, Texas, Nevada, Utah, Oklahoma, Illinois, Michigan, New York, Georgia and Florida. More than 3,000 Mara Salvatrucha gang members are thought to be in the Washington area, with a major operation in Northern Virginia. Other gang centers, authorities said, include Montgomery and Prince George's counties and the Hispanic neighborhoods of Washington.