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The Americans were taken by surprise and withdrew when they encountered the SRG forces at the airport. Instead of engaging them in battle, U.S. troops went searching for other entrances and exits to the underground complex. One was found at Saddams opulent suite at the airport, another at the official palace. There were others. When these entrance-exit points had been sealed, and U.S. Commanders were certain of the exact locations of the Special Republican Guardsmen, the Americans detonated some kind of hi-tech bomb -- there were rumours that it was a neutron bomb, but this seems outrageous even by their standards -- in the airports underground complex, in the Southern palace, killing everyone in it and in the northern palace. Estimates are in the forty thousand range. With the SRG defeated the war was essenitally over.
The former commander of Iraq's Republican Guard has accused the US of using non-conventional weapons in its war against the Middle East country.
Saifeddin Fulayh Hassan Taha al-Rawi told Al Jazeera that US forces used neutron and phosphorus bombs during their assault on Baghdad airport before the April 9 capture of the Iraqi capital.
Al-Rawi is one of the most wanted associates of Saddam Hussein, the deposed Iraqi leader, still on the run.
"The enemy used neutron and phosphorus weapons against Baghdad airport... there were bodies burnt to their bones," he said.
The bombs annihilated soldiers but left the buildings and infrastructure at the airport intact, he added.
A neutron bomb is a thermonuclear weapon that produces minimal blast and heat but releases large amounts of lethal radiation that can penetrate armour and is especially destructive to human tissue.
About 2,000 elite Republican Guard troops "fought until they were martyred", according to al-Rawi.
He said the Iraqi military command was surprised by the speed of the US land offensive, expecting air bombardment to last much longer.
"We had not expected the enemy to launch its land offensive from the very first or second day.
We expected the air raids to last at least a month," he said.
"The land offensive came at the same time as the air offensive. That was a situation we did not expect," he told Al Jazeera.
The infamous battle of the Baghdad airport took place in the first week of April 2003. It was the final battle of the “official” conquest of Iraq. Even the Iraqi army admitted it was the deathblow. We call it the Battle of al-Hawasim (“the finals”). The same phrase, since then, is used to refer to any thug, thief, or criminal in the chaos of life after Saddam.
Our entire army was concentrated in the south of Baghdad waiting for the American troops to come on land. But the American 101st Division of air-transported vehicles landed at the airport west of Baghdad and surprised Saddam’s army. The Iraqi response was to send the entire National Guard (the equivalent of the US Special Forces in training and skill) and all of Saddam’s freedom fighters directly to the scene. Many Arab men also voluntarily joined up to meet a certain death.
Very few Iraqis survived the airport battle, which made it a myth on the tongues of the entire country. Rumors swirled around, mixed with stories from the few survivors, about the epic fight that took place at Saddam’s international airport. But now even the earth cannot tell us the truth about what happened—the land was completely burned by mysterious American weapons. After the war, the American army brought many bulldozers filled with new soil to cover the evidence before the eyes of thousands of Iraqis and to bury the thousands of stories that took place on the famous airport road, aka the Highway of Death.
The most important things that survived are a few video CDs that I collected from friends and some photos that I took of the scattered bodies I found on the airport road. The CDs contained videos taken with small hand cameras by Fedayeen Saddam or Saddam’s freedom fighters. These brutal special warriors were trained from the early stages of their lives to do two things: Obey and kill. I still remember how I used to watch these videos of their training on the Iraqi national channel on TV, before the war broke out. They were exiled to the desert in camps with no food or water for weeks, and the cameras monitored how they managed to survive by eating raw desert animals. I still remember seeing them butchering a wolf and eating it raw. The Fedayeen were the Iraqi stars of the airport battle. The movies they recorded show how they were unleashed by the hundreds to kill and butcher American soldiers at the beginning of the battle at the airport. There is this part of the video showing a group of them standing to take a photo together while each of them is holding the head of an American soldier. So if they were winning the battle, how and why did they all disappear?
Some people described it as a blue light; others just said that they saw an unbelievably strong glow that made them go blind for minutes afterward. The stories vary, but the truth is one. There were thousands of fierce Iraqi warriors with strong German and Russian artillery and tanks at that field, and they were all killed in one day. The stories that we received say that the Americans were horribly defeated in the first two days. Saddam’s Fedayeen made small hills of American bodies spread around the field, burned some, ate the livers of some, and celebrated on their bodies. Then on the third day the American troops started to retreat, and the absentminded warriors who had no commanders above them (by that time the high commanders of the army, along with Saddam and all his gang, had managed to escape and disappear forever) thought that they won the battle. They moved further to take over the airport buildings, which were occupied by the marines. Soon after that, US aircraft came and bombed the hell out of everyone. No one could add any details to this part of the story because no one survived. But there were two important pieces of evidence on which I can guess that the American aircraft did use illegal weapons in that shelling.[/QUOTE]
Cont;
One: I was a volunteer with the Iraqi Red Crescent Society. Our job during the war was to collect the bodies of Iraqis and bury them where they fell. Only two days after the Iraqi troops were defeated in the airport battle, we went to the airport road. Luckily, I had my camera with me. The bodies had not shed one drop of blood and they were wearing clean clothes, but they were all either completely charred, or nothing but a skeleton wearing a uniform. I hurriedly took as many pictures as I could and then we buried the bodies and left the place.
Two: After the war, I joined several other international activists doing research on 50 houses adjacent to the airport road. Each of the 50 houses had at least one resident who had started to suffer from skin disease, respiratory diseases, or other symptoms of cancer. We ordered a Geiger-Müller counter to measure the local radioactivity, and it indicated levels way higher than what a human being can take. Once the American Army started to change the soil of the airport road less than a week after the war was over, we became certain that some kind of radioactive bomb was used.
The truth about whatever happened in that battle died under the new soil of the airport road. All I have now to remember it are the pictures of those burned bodies and the videos of Saddam’s fighters.
Originally posted by DangerDog84
Before I go to list points offering some measure of 'proof', a word on neutron bombs. They aren't 'nuclear' per se. There isn't a nuclear 'blast'. I'm sure some of you already know this.
This intense burst of high-energy neutrons is intended as the principal killing mechanism, but large amounts of heat and blast force are also produced.
It is, in theory, possible to get away with detonating a neutron bomb in a very hot area without creating too many questions as to the noise/shockwave etc.
The U.S. military used neutron weapons in the Battle of Baghdad, says a former commander of Iraq’s Republican Guard. And at least one retired U.S. Army officer is backing up his charge.
In an April 9 interview reported by Al Jazeera, Saifeddin Fulayh Hassan Taha al-Rawi says that, “U.S. forces used neutron and phosphorus bombs during their assault on Baghdad airport before the April 9, 2003, capture of the Iraqi capital.”
The bombs incinerated about 2,000 elite Republican Guard troops but left the buildings and infrastructure at the airport intact, he added. (aljazeera.net)
The neutron bomb is designed to produce a minimal blast while releasing a massive wave of neutron and gamma radiation, which can penetrate armor or several feet of earth. This radiation is extremely destructive to living tissue. (britannica.com) The bomb has been in the U.S. arsenal for decades but has never been used in combat before.
While no major U.S. media have reported on the neutron bomb charge, David Hambling, author of “Weapons Grade: How Modern Warfare Gave Birth to Our High-Tech World,” says there’s something to it. Hambling notes that the U.S. has already admitted to the use of phosphorus weapons in the Iraq invasion.
Writing on April 13 for the Danger Room blog at Wired, Hambling says that from the description al-Rawi gives in the Al Jazeera interview of a series of explosions that killed the occupants of buildings without destroying the structures, “Interestingly, there is a weapon in the U.S. arsenal designed to do exactly that. ... The AGM-114N.”
Hambling continues, “On May 15th, 2003, just a few weeks after the action at Baghdad airport, Donald Rumsfeld praised the new weapon. ... Although officially described as ‘metal augmented’ or even ‘hyperbaric,’ the new warhead is not distinguishable from thermobaric weapons which produce the same sort of enhanced blast with a lower overpressure and longer duration for more destructive effects. Like many thermobarics, the AGM-114N used finely powdered aluminum. The military are generally quiet about thermobarics because they have received such bad press. Human Rights Watch criticized them because they ‘kill and injure in a particularly brutal manner over a wide area.’ “
Weapons that have been described as thermobaric include flame-throwers and napalm. A BBC News article on March 4, 2002, said the U.S. was using thermobaric weapons in Afghanistan, and described how they employ a combination of heat and pressure, “distributing a very fine cloud of explosive material throughout the target which is then ignited. The heat and pressure effects are formidable—soldiers caught in the blast could have the air sucked from their bodies and even their internal organs catastrophically destroyed.”
Too bloody to report
Retired U.S. Army Captain Eric May, a former intelligence and public affairs officer, believes that the U.S. military did use neutron weapons in the Battle of Baghdad. May was one of the participants in Cindy Sheehan’s original encampment outside George Bush’s Crawford, Texas, villa.
In an interview published by the Crawford, Texas, Lone Star Iconoclast (lonestaricon.com), May says, “The biggest story of the war became a non-event when the truth of the matter was that it was simply too bloody an event to report.
“The bogus rescue of Private Lynch was merely a distraction from the truth,” said May. “And the staged photo-op of the pulling down of Saddam Hussein’s statue was nothing more than a way to cement into people’s minds that it was an easy victory.”
Congressional hearings on April 24 heard testimony on “the histories of Pfc. Jessica D. Lynch and Cpl. Pat Tillman ... as egregious examples of officials’ twisting the truth for public relations in wartime.” (“Government Challenged on Lynch and Tillman,” New York Times, April 24)
Captain May says, “I think the Battle of Baghdad was emblematic of the whole misadventure in the Middle East. There is nothing that I thought then that I don’t think now has been validated by time. The American public still doesn’t know that there was a Battle of Baghdad because the media-military apparatus constructed the Private Jessica Lynch mess to hold attention.”
May continues: “The best evidence that I have from international sources, scientific sources, is that our position was becoming untenable at the Baghdad airport and we used a neutron warhead, at least one. That is the big secret of Baghdad airport.
“If one looks into international data, there are reportings of enhanced radiation of some livestock, and of human metabolic effects—death and disease. It explains why, after the Battle of Baghdad, we got fragmentary stories of things like truckloads of dirt being moved out and moved in. It made no particular sense at the time, until one puts it into perspective, as a decontamination operation. Again, that part of the Battle of Baghdad, the fact that we went nuclear, explains a lot of things that came out afterwards and also explains why it is that it had to be covered up.”
Whether it was a neutron bomb or the AGM-114N, the Pentagon used some sort of Weapon of Mass Destruction on Baghdad airport.
The source of the image is footage from the BBC. The Standard's paperboys were obviously allowed to clone and blur the image in numerous ways to make it look like a gigantic crowd. This was first exposed Simone Moore and posted on the UK Indymedia site. The image below is a dissection of the fakery by an IndyMedia user called Gnu and a Memory Hole reader called Daedalus.
The red circles show a man in a turban who appears three times. The purple circles highlight an unknown object that appears four times (it's smudged in its rightmost incarnation). The darker blue circles show two instances of an identical white object, disembodied arm, and partial male faces. The yellow ovals show a partial male face and another one or two objects that appear as a group thrice. Similarly, the orange ovals highlight some sort of conglomeration that was duplicated. The two lighter blue circles are around an indistinct blob that appears on top of itself, while the bright green circles show yet another man who appears twice in the scene.
The black circles show something a little different. Obviously, two different still-frames from the footage were used, because the man with sunglasses and white, open-collar shirt appears twice but in a different pose, as do the men on either side of him.
The green line indicates where the image was clumsily smudged in order to cover up the fact that it had been stitched together.