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Monday,
September 20, 2004 at 07:48 JST
BAGHDAD — Militants sawed off the heads of
three hostages believed to be Iraqi Kurds in a
grisly videotape that surfaced Sunday, hours after
Iraq's prime minister said January elections would
be held on schedule and asserted that American and
Iraqi troops were winning the fight against an
increasingly bold insurgency.
Prime Minister Ayad Allawi, who spoke with reporters
after a meeting with British leader Tony Blair in
London, said his interim government was determined
"to stick to the timetable of the elections," which
are due by Jan 31
"January next, I think, is going to be a major blow
to terrorists and insurgents," said Allawi, who is
heading to the United Nations for this week's
General Assembly session. "We are adamant that
democracy is going to prevail, is going to win in
Iraq."
Allawi, a Sunni Muslim, has been insistent about
holding elections on time because of pressure from
Iraq's Shiite Muslim community and its most powerful
cleric, Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, who fought
for early elections. Reneging on the vote would risk
angering the generally cooperative Shiite religious
establishment.
Shiites, who are in the majority in Iraq, are eager
to translate their numbers into political power.
But alongside the increasing violence, several
cities in the Sunni Muslim heartland north and west
of Baghdad are out of U.S. and Iraqi government
control, with insurgents holding sway, particularly
in the city of Fallujah. That raises questions on
whether balloting can be held there — and the
legitimacy of elections held without adequate Sunni
participation.
Republican and Democratic senators urged the Bush
administration on Sunday to face the reality of the
situation in Iraq and change its policies. A major
problem, said leaders of the Senate Foreign
Relations Committee on CBS' "Face the Nation," was
incompetence by the administration in reconstructing
the country's shattered infrastructure.
"The fact is a crisp, sharp analysis of our policies
is required. We didn't do that in Vietnam, and we
saw 11 years of casualties mount to the point where
we finally lost," said Sen Chuck Hagel, a Vietnam
War veteran who is co-chairman of President George
Bush's re-election committee in Nebraska.
The decapitated bodies of the three slain Kurdish
hostages were found on a road near the northern city
of Mosul, said Sarkawt Hassan, security chief in the
Kurdish town of Sulaimaniyah. He said the three were
members of the peshmerga militia of the Kurdistan
Democratic Party.
The videotape, posted Sunday on a site known for its
Islamic militant content, shows three young men, two
of whom hold up identity cards. Seconds later, each
has his throat slit and his head placed on the back
of his body.
The Ansar al-Sunna Army — a Sunni militant group
that said it killed 12 Nepalese hostages in August
and carried out Feb 1 suicide attacks against
Kurdish political parties that killed 109 people —
claimed responsibility for the beheadings in a
statement with the video.
The group said it was targeting Iraqi Kurdish
parties because they have "sworn allegiance to the
crusaders and fought and are still fighting Islam
and its people."
Later, the Arab news station Al-Jazeera aired a
separate video claiming 18 captured Iraqi soldiers
would be killed unless a detained aide of rebel
Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr was freed in 48 hours.
The men in military dress were shown seated at
gunpoint in the video from a group calling itself
the Brigades of Mohammed bin Abdullah.
No audio was aired, but Al-Jazeera's announcer said
the militants threatened to kill the 18 unless Hazem
al-A'araji, who was detained in a raid by U.S. and
Iraqi forces on al-Sadr's Baghdad offices on
Saturday, is freed.
The videos surfaced the day before the Tawhid and
Jihad group, led by Jordanian terror mastermind Abu
Musab al-Zarqawi, has threatened to behead Americans
Jack Hensley and Eugene Armstrong and Briton Kenneth
Bigley, who were seized from their Baghdad house
last week.
The group, which has claimed responsibility for a
series of bombings and hostage takings, demands the
release of Iraqi women from the American controlled
Abu Ghraib and Umm Qasr prisons.
Abu Ghraib is the prison where U.S. soldiers were
photographed sexually humiliating male prisoners,
but the U.S. military says no women are held at
either facility, though it says it is holding two
female "security prisoners" elsewhere.
More than 100 foreigners have been kidnapped in
Iraq, some for lucrative ransoms, and many have been
executed. At least five other Westerners are
currently being held hostage here, including an
Iraqi-American man, two female Italian aid workers
and two French reporters.
Lebanon's Foreign Ministry said Sunday that three
Lebanese men and their Iraqi driver were abducted by
gunmen on the Baghdad-Fallujah highway Friday night.
The four worked for a travel agency that has a
branch in Baghdad, a Foreign Ministry official said
(Wire reports)
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