Diyala Cries for the Government’s Immediate Help

When I lived under Saddam, the news on propaganda TV networks did not mention anything in details about how the Taliban regime made Afghans live in hell. I didn’t even know who their leaders were until recently. I only recall the news coverage of how the US bombarded Afghanistan after September 11 attack and how it targeted Osama Bin Laden and the Taliban regime.

In 2003, I bought my first satellite TV receiver. Aljazeera and Al-Arabiya were my CNN. Both channels broadcasted some documentaries about Taliban and how this regime brutalized the people of Afghanistan in the worst ongoing violation of human rights the world had ever witnessed.

Public executions and abuses were trade marks of this puritanical regime. I recall once seeing some of the footage Aljazeera aired of how Taliban executed people in the stadium in front of thousands of people, who God knows if they were thinking they would be next. Encyclopedias and dozens of articles on the web enlightened me and kept me informed about this tyrannical regime. But the thought of them controlling my country never came to my mind. I thought because of the demography, modernity, relative secularity and education of Iraqis, any form of Taliban would never be able to control my country. How mistaken I was! I didn’t know that criminals like these can do anything to take over any piece of land on earth, no matter what it takes. I didn’t think that guns and bombs can burn even God’s heaven.

Here they are! Deployed like ants in Iraq. They started killing educated people, doctors, university professors, and students. They started with their plan to threaten education. They forced massive numbers of elite educated people to leave the country after they threatened them or killed some of them with their families.

Then they vowed to start a civil war and succeeded. Today, they officially took over huge parts of the country including Baghdad, Diyala Province and Anbar leaving the rest of the country blended with different militia control and a federal region.

There are so many stories to be told about the new Talibanization in Iraq. All kinds of explosions, kidnappings, killings and beheadings, but one specific article made it pretty clear that it is official now that Iraq is out of control and that the government is hiding behind the blast walls which the Americans built for them when the end of modern Iraq started with their invasion which came with no future plans, except capturing and executing Saddam.

The article is published in Azzaman newspaper on a PDF version. “Public Executions Under the Name of Islam” is the second of a series of comprehensive coverage of what the insurgents are doing in Diyala province, especially in its capital Baqubah. The insurgents, who most of them belong to al-Qaeda in Iraq, are doing exactly what Talibans did during their rule of Afghanistan between 1996 to 2001. Public Execution!

The article is published in Azzaman newspaper on a PDF version. “Public Executions Under the Name of Islam” is the second of a series of comprehensive coverage of what the insurgents are doing in Diyala province, especially in its capital Baqubah. The insurgents, who most of them belong to al-Qaeda in Iraq, are doing exactly what Talibans did during their rule of Afghanistan between 1996 to 2001. Public Execution!

Below are excerpts I translated from Azzaman’s article, showing the brutality of the new “State” these terrorists formed in that specific region.

The urgent calls, denouncing the crimes and the brutal massacres committed by armed groups or what is know as the “Islamic State of Iraq” in Diyala, increased daily asking the government’s immediate intervention to rescue the people of the province, whose patience in enduring that, vanished and the security forces entirely failed in even protecting themselves.

The massacres are intentionally done to spread fear among the neighborhoods more than killing separate individuals. Dozens of civilians are being kidnapped. A few hours later, [the armed groups] gather people and seize the opportunity of the people’s presence at the markets, which they turned into public fields for executions. The armed men surround these markets to force the people see how they execute [the hostage]. One of the armed men stands in the middle of the market and address the people before executing the hostage. He provides the crowd with background about their hostage, who is always charged of being a commander in a well-known militia, while most of the executed people are people from Baqubah, some of them are even well-known [in the city].

One of the young men kidnapped was an employee of the Morgue Directorate, whom all media reporters know as a retarded young man. He was the only breadwinner of his family. He was slaughtered by a knife in front of the people in al-Mualimeen neighborhood. The speech [which one armed man gave] accused him of being a militia man, but he was taken because he was from the other sect. [meaning he was a Shiite]

Most internet cafés are closed since they deviate people from Jihad and worship. In one incident, a bomb was put in front of an internet café, destroying it which forced most of the internet cafés in Baqubah to be close.

Bqubah today is a city of ghosts. People hide inside their houses starting form 11 a.m. because of these acts.

In another incident, a resident said one man was kidnapped by the “Islamic State of Iraq”. The man was whipped seventy times because one of the “State’s” men heard the man swearing to his father’s soul instead of swearing to God as he was speaking to a friend on the cell phone. He said he found many people were being tortured and some were killed and others were sentenced to memorize three parts of the Quran.

A friend told us what he saw by his eyes how a man was brought to the middle of the market in Buhruz town. After their speech, they beheaded the man and put his head on the top of a car and threw his body in the middle of the street. At that time, it was time for noon prayers. The armed men left the scene and went to the nearby mosque to pray and even of them had stains of the slaughtered man’s blood on his shirt.

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