'The jihad now is against the Shias, not the Americans'

As 20,000 more US troops head for Iraq, Ghaith Abdul-Ahad, the only correspondent reporting regularly from behind the country's sectarian battle lines, reveals how the Sunni insurgency has changed

One morning a few weeks ago I sat in a car talking to Rami, a thick-necked former Republican Guard commando who now procures arms for his fellow Sunni insurgents.

Rami was explaining how the insurgency had changed since the first heady days after the US invasion. "I used to attack the Americans when that was the jihad. Now there is no jihad. Go around and see in Adhamiya (the notorious Sunni insurgent area) - all the commanders are sitting sipping coffee; it's only the young kids that are fighting now, and they are not fighting Americans any more, they are just killing Shia. There are kids carrying two guns each and they roam the streets looking for their prey. They will kill for anything, for a gun, for a car and all can be dressed up as jihad."

Rami was no longer involved in fighting, he said, but made a tidy profit selling weapons and ammunition to men in his north Baghdad neighbourhood. Until the last few months, the insurgency got by with weapons and ammunition looted from former Iraqi army depots. But now that Sunnis were besieged in their neighbourhoods and fighting daily clashes with the better-equipped Shia ministry of interior forces, they needed new sources of weapons and money.

He told me that one of his main suppliers had been an interpreter working for the US army in Baghdad. "He had a deal with an American officer. We bought brand new AKs and ammunition from them." He claimed the American officer, whom he had never met but he believed was a captain serving at Baghdad airport, had even helped to divert a truckload of weapons as soon as it was driven over the border from Jordan.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/Iraq/Story/0,,1989397,00.html

when Lister reads the history of the Cat People, who have mythologized him into their God. They had bloody wars where most of them were killed off, all over the color of the hats they were to wear-one side said Red, the other Blue--and Lister looks up from the book and says sorrowfully that the hats were to be Green.

Neither side is practicing Islam--they are hating one another over things that are really unimportant compared to the greater teaching.

So we're helping kill our own when members of the military is selling weapons to the jihadists.

This whole war has been and still is about money. There is little hope of there being any actual solutions to this problem when getting rich is a consideration for so many. Dirty military men, dirty contractors, dirty politicians....

Rp