L'Ombre de l'Olivier

The Shadow of the Olive Tree

being the maunderings of an Englishman on the Côte d'Azur

08 June 2006 Blog Home : June 2006 : Permalink

Reuters competes with Auntie Beeb

In my last post about the "Explosion of Revenge" I nearly added a PS wondering why Al-Reuters & co were not doing the same "Sky is falling" lament that the BBC was doing. That was probably a good thing because Al Reuters quickly found their own "special" approach to the death of the mass murderer where they have lines like (my bolding):

Arab and Western security analysts were agreed on Thursday that Zarqawi's death in a U.S. air raid would not end the insurgency, even if it represents a rare triumph in Iraq for the Bush administration.

"There will be people that will be mobilized to join the caravan of martyrs, to emulate his example and to honor him," said Magnus Ranstorp, an al Qaeda expert at the Swedish National Defense College.

Oh and lest we forget the US created him:

The United States helped to build up Zarqawi's aura, even before the invasion of Iraq, when Secretary of State Colin Powell told the United Nations in 2003 he was part of a "sinister nexus" between Iraq and Osama bin Laden's al Qaeda.

And then they do their best to point out that stuff still happens:

Some security analysts played down the impact of his death, saying Zarqawi's network represented only a fraction of the wider insurgency in which less extreme resistance groups had gained in strength.

It was business as usual in Iraq on Thursday, with two bombs killing 15 people and injuring 36 in Baghdad within a couple of hours of Maliki's announcement.

"Other Zarqawis will soon spring up," said Nadim Shehadi of London's Chatham House think-tank. "The Iraqi insurgency is a very loose organization and I don't see how the decapitation of it will have such a great impact."

(BTW how do I get a job as a "security analyst" or "al Qaeda expert"? I reckon I can spout the same clap trap as these ones)

Anyway its only after all this that Reuters begins to hint that you know maybe even Al Qaeda thought he went a tad far and that his strategy of pitting Sunni vs Shia was not going down well with any of those on the ground.

To wipe the nasty taste from my mouth, I intend to end with a link to how it should be written and two quotes from it which help illustrate the feeling of the man in the Baghdad Souq:

A reserved Sunni intellectual who is quite particular in the language he uses summed up the feeling surrounding al Zarqawi’s death: “Goddamn that motherfucker for what he has done to Iraq.”

A Shia friend may have said it best, “Zarqawi would not listen to ballots, today there is no mistaking that he listened to the bombs.”

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