Gorilla’s Guides

In yesterday’s report Hassan posted information on the American F-16 plane that went down in Salah Al Din governorate and posted this comment:

[In that area which is very much a “hot spot” if the pilot was alive when the plane landed he is very likely to have been taken captive, similarly even a corpse would be taken and used as a “bargaining chip.”]

The so-called “Islamic Army in Iraq” have issued a statement on an Internet site usually used by such groups [no I won’t link to it the link below is to Aswat al Ira1’s report - Du] saying that at nine o’clock on Thursday some of their fighters who they described as “detachments of the Islamic Army Air Defense” … “succeeded in downing a F-16 plane of the American occupation forces.” The statement posted on the Internet site said that the pilot was dead.

The statement released by the US forces said that the plane was based out of Balad and had been on a “close support mission” but did not mention the fate of the pilot saying only that “the incident is under investigation.”

At least nine helicopters have come down in Iraq in 2007, killing 30 people, mainly U.S. soldiers, but military plane crashes have been rare. In May 2005, two Marine Corps F/A-18 Hornet aircraft crashed in Iraq and officials said at the time they believed the warplanes may have collided.

Comment And Analysis:

What to make of the disparities?

The initial American statement can be discounted - their first statements whenever a plane or a helicopter comes down is always to say that it made a “hard landing” and generally to downplay the idea that it was shot down.

There are disparities in time between the “Islamic Army” claim to have shot it down at nine and the eyewitness report that Aswat Al Iraq published yesterday in which the eyewitness said that it went down early in the morning and also said that they had not heard gunfire from the ground.

The fact that that eyewitness didn’t hear anything is not in itself significant the time differential is. By “early in the morning” most Irakis mean very early. There isn’t any way of reconciling the two. That doesn’t mean that it wasn’t shot down it just means that if it was shot down it wasn’t necessarily the so-called “Islamic Army” that did the shooting. There are lots of people in Irak who are well capable of taking a potshot at a low flying aircraft and, as the Soviets found out the hard way in Afghanistan, you don’t need very sophisticated weaponry to do it. A slightly modified RPG does the job very nicely thank you.— Just ask the Afghan Mujahideen and the CIA officers who supplied them.

On the basis of past performance I thiink it likely the machine was shor down by person or persons as yet unkown and that the initial U.S: statements were just their usual holding job. I am inclined to think that it probably wasn’t the so-called “Islamic Army” though. They run a very sophisiticated propaganda outfit and the last time an F-16 went down as my colleague Ali recorded on November 28, 2006 they posted this film online:

The bodies of the Iraqi junior tae kwon do team kidnapped May 17th 2006 on the old international highway between Haditha and Ramadi as they traveled for training in Jordan have been found.

Their badly decomposed bodies were found in the desert and brought to the morgue at Imam Ali Hospital, Sadr City, Baghdad, where relatives identified them from their clothing.

Thirteen of the missing 15 have been identified so far. Tests are being conducted on two other bodies found close to the other 13 to see if they are the bodies of the remaining two missing squad members.

Baghdad, June 16, (VOI) – Thousands of residents of Sadr City, eastern Baghdad, attended the funeral of 13 members of an Iraqi junior tae kwon do team, whose bodies were found on Thursday on the international highway linking Baghdad to the Jordanian capital Amman.

The funeral ceremonies started from the office of Shiite leader Muqtada al-Sadr in the city, where angry mourners chanted anti-U.S. slogans. The 13 coffins were held by the mourners to be taken by vehicles for burial in the holy Shiite province of Najaf, south of Baghdad.

Iraqi police sources on Friday had announced that the bodies of a tae kwon do team members who had been kidnapped by unidentified gunmen on May 17 were found near Ramadi, laid on the international Baghdad-Amman motorway.

“All the casualties were junior tae kwon do players whose ages did not exceed 15 years, except the coach who was 30 years old,” a mourner told the independent news agency Voices of Iraq (VOI).
“All of them were residents of Sadr City,” he added.

Source: Aswat Al Iraq | English | Sadr City residents bid last farewell to tae kwon do team

Aswat Al Iraq’s Arabic Language report is here.

Reuters Report:

BAGHDAD, June 16 (Reuters) - The decomposed bodies of at least 13 martial arts experts have been found more than a year after they were kidnapped in an al Qaeda stronghold west of Baghdad, local officials and family members said on Saturday.

The bodies were found on Thursday in a ditch in the desert about 100 km (60 miles) west of Ramadi in Anbar province, one of Iraq’s most violent areas and where al Qaeda and Sunni Arab insurgents are battling U.S. and Iraqi forces.

All appeared to have been shot, hospital officials said. Weeping relatives gathered at the hospital in the Baghdad Shi’ite slum of Sadr city to identify the bodies.

“The bodies were very badly decomposed. Just the bones and clothes remained,” Qasim al-Mudalal, the director of Baghdad’s Imam Ali Hospital, told Reuters.

Fifteen tae kwondo experts were kidnapped in May 2006 as they were traveling by bus through the Anbar desert on their way to Jordan to attend a training course.

Mudalal said partial remains which may be those of the remaining two squad members were also recovered.

The Iraqi government had tried to secure their release but no word had been heard of them until Thursday’s grisly find.

“They were killed about the same time they were taken. They were killed and left in the desert,” said Hameed al-Hai’es, head of a Sunni Arab group that has been fighting al Qaeda in Anbar.

He said family members had been able to identify them by the clothes they were wearing. An identity card was also found on one body belonging to 26-year-old squad member Haidar Jabbar.

The bodies were not wearing team uniforms, Mudalal said.

Hai’es said members of the Anbar Salvation Council, a group of local Sunnis who have been fighting al Qaeda in the province, found the bodies after an al Qaeda captive told them where the tae kwondo team members had been killed.

Funeral processions for the squad were being held in Sadr City on Saturday. The families said they had received to permission to bury them in the southern holy Shi’ite city of Najaf despite a four-day curfew.

Iraqi athletes were rarely able to travel abroad during Saddam Hussein’s rule because of United Nations sanctions.

Athletes looked forward to international competitions and more funding after Saddam was toppled in 2003 but many have since been kidnapped and killed in Iraq’s relentless sectarian fighting between majority Shi’ites and Sunni Arab

Reuters AlertNet | Bodies of Iraq tae kwondo squad found in desert | By Wissam Mohammed

 AP’s Report:

BAGHDAD - The remains of 13 members of an Iraqi tae kwon do team kidnapped last year have been found in western Iraq, police and hospital officials said Saturday.

The team had been driving to a training camp in neighboring Jordan in May 2006, when their convoy was stopped and all 15 athletes abducted along a road between the cities of Fallujah and Ramadi, in Anbar province.

Members of the Anbar Salvation Council, a group of Sunni tribal leaders who have partnered with U.S. and Iraqi officials to fight al-Qaida influence in Anbar, found the 13 bodies Friday west of Ramadi, near the main highway leading to Jordan, said Anbar police Col. Rashid Nayef. Two of the athletes remained unaccounted for.

The remains — mostly skulls and bones entangled in tattered sports uniforms — were transferred to Imam Ali Hospital in Baghdad’s predominantly Shiite Sadr City neighborhood, home to most of the athletes. A doctor there, who spoke on condition of anonymity for security reasons, said the bones would undergo DNA testing to determine their identities.

Relatives gathered at the hospital Saturday to mourn the victims. Women in black robes cried out while men hoisted rickety wood coffins atop minivans and cars. Plastic athletic sandals lay scattered on the ground near the bodies.

The athletes were members of a private sports club that hopes to one day send members to the Olympics.

“His dream was to represent his country in sports, but instead he was killed,” said Ali Kanoun, cousin of one of the victims, Rasoul Salah.

“I tell the killers, you should point your guns at the Americans and the foreigners (fighting in Iraq) instead of hurting athletes who were representing all of Iraq, not their tribe or sect,” Kanoun said by telephone from a crowd of mourners at Imam Ali Hospital.

Athletes and sports officials have increasingly become targets of threats, kidnappings and assassination attempts in Iraq, either as part of tit-for-tat violence between Shiites and Sunnis or for ransom.

Victims have included the Sunni head of one of Iraq’s leading soccer clubs, an Iraqi international soccer referee, a top player on the Iraqi Olympic soccer team and a national volleyball player.

A blind Iraqi athlete and paralympics coach were kidnapped last year but later released unharmed after sports officials said their abductors determined neither man was linked to the Sunni insurgency.

Gunmen also kidnapped the chairman of Iraq’s National Olympic Committee and at least 30 other officials last year, including the presidents of the tae kwon do and boxing federations, in a bold daylight raid on a sports conference in the heart of Baghdad. Iraq’s national wrestling coach, a Sunni, was killed around the same time in a Shiite district of Baghdad.

Kidnapped athletes found dead in Iraq - Yahoo! News