Children Held Hostage to Extort the Handover of Other Children

"The US forces surrounded the village of Mazraa near Baiji and detained five children under 10 years old, calling on the residents by loudspeakers to hand over several other children showed on TV channels celebrating the killing of US soldiers after roadside blast last week," a police source from Baiji told Xinhua on condition of anonymity.

Read the whole article. I note the following things:

• It is again apparent that contrary to spin, the guerillas have widespread local support.
• When even children are so happy to celebrate the grisly remains of dead Americans, as in Fallujah in March 2004, that should hint at the way the war is conducted by the most prolific killers of civilians in Iraq beyond the media blackout.
• When you blackmail a town for the handover of children, by kidnapping children, it is obvious that the war is irrecoverably lost - the resistance won't cease, not even in a generation.
• If you think "I don't believe this, what would they do to those children?", a reminder: that worse batch of Abu Ghraib images and videos, whose release is stonewalled by the Pentagon, includes a snuff video about Iraqi auxiliaries raping a young boy, to 'motivate' his father to speak.
  

By the way, the harrowing account of famous Iraqi blogger Raed Jarrar's brother, Khalid, about his imprisonment paints the picture of a new police both brutal and inept (and doing its own part for pushing the sectarian divide). Khalid was arrested at his university because he visited internet sites suspected of being terrorist web pages - incidentally, the web page of his own brother Raed... Much worse than his own experience was what he wrote about the arrest background and treatment of his cellmates.