Popular Uprising In Baghdad?

[Bill in SD, CA]

According to Iranian and Kuwaiti news services citizens in Baghdad are fighting Iraqi forces in some areas of Baghdad. One source say 35 Iraqi soldiers have been killed by citizens.

Bill

[osprey4]

Not especially objective news sources. But if I was an Iraqi leader, I might consider relocating, possibly to a different planet.

[Epidemic]

It would be nice. Hope to see more developments like this to be confirmed.

[Theophylact]

Many news items would be interesting if true. Often they turn out not to be true; check out many earlier threads in this forum. For example, I'm still waiting for "weapons of mass destruction" to be located, and for the purposes of this discussion, I'll settle for nerve gas or anthrax instead of nukes.

Mind you, I won't be surprised if they eventually do materialize. Saddam certainly once had them, and there's no reason to believe we found them all. (But if I were a bit more paranoid, I'd suspect we'd find them even if he didn't have them before we went in, because they represent such a large part of our justification for the war.)

[Bill in SD, CA]

Originally posted by Theophylact
Many news items would be interesting if true. Often they turn out not to be true; check out many earlier threads in this forum.

Hence the "?" mark in the title of the thread. However, further reports state that Fedayeen forces are being killed by citizens.

One can only hope.


Bill

[nomaxim]

You mean like this;

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - U.S. forces near Baghdad found a weapons cache of around 20 medium-range missiles equipped with potent chemical weapons, the U.S. news station National Public Radio reported on Monday.

10:25am(EST) 7Apr03

[daveleau]

I have not heard what the 40 cases of white powder were that they found 25 miles outside of Baghdad. I wish they would follow up on this. One thing we must realize is that these troops' jobs are not to find WoMD, but to enable inspectors (whether from the UN or the coalition or Arab neighbors) to begin an actual search, which has not been conducted since the end of Desert Storm.

[Centurion]

edit

[Toadman]

But wait, there's more...

WMD storage found.

A military source who declined to be identified said there were unconfirmed reports there could be sarin -- a highly lethal nerve agent that causes death by suffocation -- at the site. Iraq (news - web sites) is believed to have used sarin against Kurdish Iraqis in the 1980s. "Our detectors have indicated something," said Major Ross Coffman, a public affairs officer with the U.S. 3rd Infantry.

"We're talking about finding a site of possible WMD storage. This is an initial report, but it could be a smoking gun," he said, adding that the site was south of the central Iraqi town of Hindiyah.

"It is not as if there is a cloud of gas hanging everywhere endangering soldiers lives. We're talking about a facility," Coffman added.

Military sources said experts were looking at three 50-gallon barrels and 11 25-gallon barrels found at the site. As well as sarin, they may also have found phosgene, a choking agent that causes fluid buildup in the lungs, he said.

Brigadier General Vicent Brooks at U.S. Central Command forward headquarters in Qatar said he knew of no discoveries of weapons of mass destruction, but said that didn't mean they weren't waiting to be found.

The U.S. news station National Public Radio, reporting what appeared to be a separate discovery, said U.S. forces found a weapons cache of around 20 medium-range missiles equipped with potent chemical weapons.

NPR said the rockets, BM-21 missiles, were equipped with sarin and mustard gas and were "ready to fire."

It said the cache was discovered by Marines with the 101st Airborne Division, which was following up behind the Army after it seized Baghdad's international airport.

Officers from the 101st Division were unable to confirm the report and U.S. Central Command headquarters in Qatar had no immediate comment.

The United States and Britain launched the war against Iraq to rid the country of weapons of mass destruction Iraqi President Saddam Hussein (news - web sites) denies having.

Over the weekend, U.S. Marines in the central Iraqi town of Aziziyah began digging up a suspected chemical weapons hiding place at a girl's school.

"We have always expected that this regime has chemical weapons and also possesses the will and means to use it," Brooks told a news conference at Central Command.

He said the U.S.-led forces' advance inside the country had removed some of the means and its blizzard of leaflets and messages warning Iraqi commanders not to use weapons of mass destruction had removed much of the will.

There had also been strikes early on in the campaign, he added, against Iraqi missile capabilities -- such as al Samouds -- which could have delivered chemical or even biological weapons into neighboring countries.




LOL, the 101st Airborne is US Army, not Marines. :rofl

[Theophylact]

Wake me when these stories check out.

So far, I've heard no confirmatory followup to the "white powder" story, the "potent chemical weapons" story, the "tabun" story, the "Brits' Chilling Chemical/Nuke Find" story, and so on and so on.

A rumor gets reported, the report serves as a kind of validation and it's repeated, nothing appears to confirm it, it becomes old news, and a new rumor and report come along to replace it.

No doubt eventually one of these stories will turn out to be true. In the meantime...