Sign of the impending apocalypse:
Sign of the impending apocalypse: The Arab News is reporting from inside Basra, giving a not-too-favorable impression of the Iraqi regime:
The father of three Iraqi soldiers walked his sons through a British-manned checkpoint and told them to surrender themselves.That last line is pretty freaking chilling. What I can't quite figure out is if he's saying that the Iraqi civilians will rise up against the Ba'ath party, or rise up against their Arab neighbors who did everything they could to keep Saddam in power. Either way, it's just another morsel of evidence that at least some Iraqis have been more than a little pissed off about their life under Saddam.When asked by Arab News why he did this, he said: “This battle is growing more and more hopeless every hour. The Iraqi soldiers are dispirited and running out of ammunition. They are no match for the Americans, and they will be killed. I don’t want that. I would rather that they stayed alive as prisoners of war.”
Arab News asked the three surrendering soldiers — aged 17, 23 and 26 — whether they had actively fought the Americans in Basra.
Their reply was “No, no, no.”
“We are deserting the army,” one of them explained. “We are surrendering to the British because we do not want to fight anymore. We want the protection of the coalition forces as we will surely be hanged by the Iraqi Army for refusing to fight.”
On the way out of the city, as Arab News passed an Iraqi, he asked this correspondent whether I spoke Arabic. He became furious, despite the fact I lied by saying that I did not.
“You’re Arabic, and when this war is over, you will see what we are going to do to the Arabs,” he said. “We will kill the Arabs. They are bastards.”
Posted by Matt at March 30, 2003 10:54 AM
