7,000 Qaeda members killed or captured in two years

[ECH1969]

US and Iraqi forces have killed or captured at least 7,000 Al-Qaeda fighters in the past two years, with 30 "senior leaders' taken out of action since July.

The news comes hard on the heels of a leaked US Marine report that states US forces cannot defeat the Al-Qaeda-led insurgency in the vast western desert province of Al-Anbar.

"The social and political situation has deteriorated to a point" that US and Iraqi troops "are no longer capable of militarily defeating the insurgency in Al-Anbar", wrote the paper. "I was just down in Fallujah last week and that's not what we saw at all," said Caldwell, referring to a former insurgent stronghold in the province. "It does not sound correct to me at all."

"Since October 2004, we have now killed or captured over 7,000 Al-Qaeda terrorists," coalition spokesman Major General William Caldwell told journalists on Tuesday.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20061128/wl_mideast_afp/iraqusunrestqaeda_061128164338

[IDemo]

1. And every one of them a Number Two man. Amazing n/t

[Hand]

20. Dang! Ya beat me to it! nt

[Ms. Clio]

2. yes, if they say so, it must be true

:rofl:

[Bandit]

3. Considering they told us they numbered in the hundreds of thousands

a pretty poor showing I would say...

[wtmusic]

4. And...how many joined? nt

[demnan]

5. and for every one we killed

7 of his closest relatives joined up.

I just thought of something. How do they know? It's not like you have a little card in your wallet saying al Quaeda Member, is it? If you're dead they can't torture the information out of you either.

[TexasLawyer]

9. How do they know?

Good question. My guess:

Dead guys-- presumed al Qaeda.

Captured guys-- Tortured 'til they confess to being al Qaeda.

7,000-- nice round number that seems to indicate progress.

[doubleplusgood]

6. missing word: "suspected"?

Back to the Vietnam days of body counts...if they're dead, they're communists.

[MGKrebs]

7. That's just bad news no matter how you look at it.

You would think that if we have killed 7000, we would be making more progress "stabilizing" things. This looks like evidence that they are making more fighters faster than we can kill them.

Or, seeing as how I don't think "Al Qaida fighters" carry membership cards, they might just be making this number up. No doubt we've killed 7000 people, but who were they really? How do we determine their Al-Qaida-ness?

Shiites are killing Sunnis, and we can't protect Sunnis, and the only protection Sunnis can get is from Al Qaida, but we are killing Al Qaida. Not sure where that leads, but it doesn't sound good.

[jaysunb]

8. Please stop making sense....

n/t

[RaleighNCDUer]

10. That might mean something if "Al Queda" actually existed.

But of course, Al Queda, "the base" is just a cobbled together list of active and potential supporters of Bin Laden's group, a networking of disparate right-wing fundamentalist Islamic activists, some of whom were actively militant and others mere supporters, all with different agendas such as supporting Chechnyan rebels, fighting for an Islamic state in the Phillipines, overthrowing the Saudi royal family, etc.

We tied them all together and called it "Al Queda." And there was no "Al Queda" in Iraq before we invaded.

[nealmhughes]

11. Damn! That sure is a lot of mouths for Old Sammy to have to feed by himself...

:sarcasm:

[Roland99]

12. Interesting, considering Al Qaeda only numbered a few hundred, at most, in 2001.

[llmart]

13. Time to ramp up the propaganda machine..........

again because no one's buying into the Bush/Cheney spin.

[jordi_fanclub]

14. Mathematics...

"Since October 2004, we have now killed or captured over 7,000 Al-Qaeda terrorists,"
coalition spokesman Major General William Caldwell told journalists on Tuesday.

WOW... that's a lot of Al-Qaeda decks of cards in 2 years!
None living in a cave and "attached" to a dialyse machine, I presume.

BTW, sometimes is better to shut up the mouth instead to show the "house"...
So, 7000 terrorists killed or captured with the "small" expense of 1930 dead troops!

EDITED... to the math:
01-11/2006 = 749 ; 01-12/2005 = 897 ; 10-12/2004 = 284
GrandTotal =1930 http://icasualties.org/oif/Cumulative.aspx

[PSPS]

15. Bush has killed almost a million Iraqis.

So another way to look at this figure, which was obviously just made up anyway, is that for every 140 ordinary Iraqis murdered in cold blood by bush, there was one "evil-doer" in there.

[mitchum]

16. What ? They carried membership cards? Wore Al Queda Tshirts?

what horseshit

[anotherdrew]

18. you can tell cause they've got it stamped on the back of their necks n/t

[anotherdrew]

17. they'll just call anything Al-Qaeda, why is it in their interest to build up the brand

they'll just call anything Al-Qaeda, why is it in their interest to build up the brand? The repigs are the greatest marketing arm of Al-Qaeda.

[ckramer]

19. better kill all their family

do you really think that their kids would be growing up to be some American-loving persons?

[Bhaisahab]

21. Check out this report from Pakistan:

The Missing
Pakistan's response to dissent: abduct and kill the dissident

<SNIP>
The missing person phenomenon became Pakistan's reality when President Pervez Musharraf joined the US war on terror post 9/11. Nobody knows the precise number of missing people, it could run into hundreds. The Pakistan Institute for Peace Studies says media monitoring between January 2002 and May 2006 shows more than 1,000 instances. Conservative estimates of human rights groups say nearly 600 have disappeared in the first half of this year alone.

<SNIP>

Musharraf wrote in his memoir: "We have earned bounties totalling millions of dollars. Those who habitually accuse us of not doing enough on the war on terror should simply ask the CIA how much prize money it has paid to the Pakistan." When asked by a TV channel in September, Musharraf repented, "I should not have written that and I'm going to amend it in the future copy."

Does reality change only because you keep silent? Obviously not. Babar cites the case of Kamil Abdallah, who was handed over to the US military in December 2001 in Kohat, NWFP. Abdallah quoted the US guards taunting him, "We got you cheap, for only $5,000." From Kohat, Abdallah was taken to Kandahar and then to Guantanamo Bay. Angelika Pathak, a South Asia researcher at Amnesty International, recently released a report in Islamabad saying prisoners in Pakistani jails are groomed to appear as potential terrorists before being sold to Americans.

Says Claudio Cordone, senior director of research at Amnesty International, "The road to Guantanamo very literally starts in Pakistan. Hundreds of people have been picked up in mass arrests, many have been sold to the US as 'terrorists' simply on their captors' words, and hundreds have been transferred to Guantanamo Bay, Bagram Air Base or secret detention centres run by the US."

COMPLETE ARTICLE AT: http://www.outlookindia.com/full.asp?fodname=20061204&fname=Pakistan+%28F%29&sid=1

[jwirr]

22. Obviously the members of Al-Qaeda must have a tatoo

somewhere on their body. They seem to be so easy to identify. Maybe they carry enlistment papers?