Warning from Samarra as US assault on Falluja looms

Iraqi's interim government is struggling to assert its authority in Samarra, the first town in the country's Sunni heartland to be wrested from rebel control, as National Guards, mostly from the capital and the Shia south, clash with local police.

Iyad Allawi, Iraq's interim prime minister, has upheld Samarra, north of the capital Baghdad, as a model for other rebellious towns such as Falluja, where US Marines have massed for an offensive widely expected to begin within days...........
But residents of Samarra complain that neither the National Guard garrison nor the embittered police force can keep order in the town.

While the Samarra assault early last month led to the death or capture of more than 100 insurgents - including dozens of foreign fighters loyal to radical Islamist Abu Musab al-Zarqawi - Samarrais say that most of the local insurgent leaders slipped away to fight again.

The offensive "got rid of the foreign terrorists, but now we are caught between arbitrary authority and corrupt authority", said Hisham Nuri al-Samarrai, a tribal leader on the local council.

Guardsmen stormed houses without warrants, arrested people at random and fired into the air wherever they went, he said. The police were less abusive but were open to bribes and co-operated with criminal gangs.

http://news.ft.com/cms/s/f572509e-2f21-11d9-984e-00000e2511c8.html

... the more insurgents they will create!!!

Welcome to Iraqnam!!!!

no oil in vietnam.

namely rubber.

Why do I have a feeling that this is a lie? I doubt that any of these fighters were foreign. I have never seen this investigated or discussed beyond these 3rd hand newspaper stories.

....kill, kill, kill.

at work in Iraq.

Scores slaughtered, hundreds wounded, lots of death and destruction....

Fallujah will be far worse.

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they had a sovereign government in Iraq not a puppet dictatorship........

The fundies worship Barabas, not Jesus!!!

Jesus was a pacifist sucker. Barabas killed, got away and killed another day!!!

the insurgents just killed at least 30 in Samarra.