RSS 2.0
Al Qaeda in Iraq: Baking Children
The amazing Michael Yon has his latest dispatch up here. It is gut-wrenching to read. But read it you must.
Here is the latest startling report about an interview he conducted a few days ago in Baqubah:
The official reported that on a couple of occasions in Baqubah, al Qaeda invited to lunch families they wanted to convert to their way of thinking. In each instance, the family had a boy, he said, who was about 11 years old. As LT David Wallach interpreted the man’s words, I saw Wallach go blank and silent. He stopped interpreting for a moment. I asked Wallach, What did he say? Wallach said that at these luncheons, the families were sat down to eat. And then their boy was brought in with his mouth stuffed. The boy had been baked. Al Qaeda served the boy to his family.
Every syllable I wrote about this reported incident was in that paragraph, which offers no opinion about the veracity of his words.
Mr. Abdul Jabar had lived near the al Hamari village. He had more details about what happened there, and he was willing to go on the record. The reported incidents, wretching though they were and are, were reported “as is.
As you might expect, this story generated a lot of questions among bloggers and some in the media about the veracity of the report. Michael Yon answers the skeptics and again put up on his site one of the most moving images of this war, an American soldier cradling an Iraqi girl who had been the victim of an Al Qaeda car bomb. The picture says and shows it all. There can be no doubt about the ruthlessness of this enemy. If anything, their atrocities are being underreported not exaggerated.
When context is other people’s children
As I write these words just a few miles from the graves I saw, the resulting controversy about whether what the man said was true, or whether his words should have been written if the writer couldn’t verify them, seems precious. There is no imaginary line of credulity that al Qaeda might cross should it go from beheading children to baking them.
No unnamed Iraqi stringer claimed that al Qaeda had taken over Baqubah. Al Qaeda said this through the press. I sit writing these words in Diyala Province just a short drive from where the self-proclaimed leader of al Qaeda in Iraq was killed by a bomb delivered by a US warplane. Al Qaeda: the organization that gleefully bragged about murdering roughly 3,000 people by smashing jets full of civilians into buildings and earth. Al Qaeda in Iraq: who proudly broadcast their penchant for sawing off the heads of living breathing people, and in such a manner as to ensure lots of spurting blood and gurgles of final pain, in some cases with the added flourish of the executioner raising up the severed head and squealing excitedly.
These are the same terrorists I often come face to face with: not on television or in magazines, but on bloodstained streets ablaze with human carnage. I remember the charred corpse of a small Iraqi boy. I remember the wailing Iraqi parents and countless other scenes that I am likely to see again and again. Back in 2005, terrorists here were intentionally attacking children. I shot the photo below on a day when they drove a car bomb through a crowd of children who had run out to American soldiers on patrol.
In the more than two years since that awful day in May 2005, I’ve witnessed innumerable instances of the work of terrorists of many stripes. One clear indicator of just how bad a terrorist group is, is when battle-hardened soldiers and writers like me who travel with the Marines don’t find it hard to believe a story which purports that al Qaeda had baked a child and set his roasted body out as the main course at a lunch for his parents.People at home might find it incredible, improbable, even impossible. Yet here in combat with al Qaeda, the idea is no more improbable-sounding than someone saying “The chicken crossed the road. Maybe the chicken crossed the road. Maybe not. The veterans I’ve been talking with here have no difficulty imagining the chicken crossing the road, or al Qaeda roasting kids. Sickening, yes. Improbable, no.
We must defeat this enemy. Their desire is to do this to our children, too.
Support Michael Yon and support The Surge!