CENTCOM Videos: Bombing Tikrit (Is ISIS always the Target?)

As The Daily Beast is reporting, Iran is saying some of the U.S. airstrikes on Tikrit that began last week have hit its advisors and the militias it supports. The United States embassy in Baghdad has denied this. But, for all the effectiveness of American precision guided munitions, it looks from these videos like things get pretty messy on the ground.

Palm Sunday: 35 years ago I was at the funeral of Archbishop Romero

March 31st, 1980 The Washington Post

"40 Killed in San Salvador;
40 Killed at Rites For Slain Prelate; Bombs, Bullets Disrupt Archbishop's Funeral"
By Christopher Dickey, Washington Post Foreign Service
Monday, March 31, 1980 ; Page A1

SAN SALVADOR, March 30, 1980 -- A solemn funeral mass for the assassinated archbishop of San Salvador turned into a panic-driven hell today that left at least 40 people dead in the Salvadoran capital's cathedral and the huge square outside.

More than 50,000 people, many of them old women and children, had gathered in the plaza with only a contingent of Boy Scouts as security guards when a bomb explosion, followed by wild bursts of gunfire, sent then fleeing for cover.

Scores of people were trampled as the vast crowd tried to escape to sanctuary in the church. But they were blocked by an eight-foot high fence and closed gate intended to provide security for the ceremony, taking place at the top of the steps leading to the church.

Many of those who died were crushed against the steel fence. Dozens were injured. Others were able, as I did, to climb the fence to seek safety inside.

Mexico's Cardinal Ernesto Corripto Ahumado, the representative of Pope John Paul II at the funeral, was delivering his tribute to slain archbishop Oscar Romero when the first bomb went off. Within seconds, wild bursts of gunfire erupted across the massive square.

As the panicked crowds surged outside, and many rushed into the already packed cathedral, Romero's body was taken to a crypt below the sanctuary and buried.

The archbishop was killed by a gunman Monday night as he was saying a memorial mass for a friend's mother. He died within minutes.

A highly popular and controversial figure and outspoken critic of the military that has long dominated this Central American nation, Romero was looked upon as one of the few people who could keep the violence-ridden society from plunging into all-out civil war.

Whether his assissin came from the political left or from the right is not known. Neither is there any certainty about who started today's violence.

Eyewitnesses who had taken different vantage points on balconies surrounding the plaza gave differing accounts of how it began.

Several maintain that the initial explosion was a "propaganda bomb" set off by the heavily armed members of leftist militant organizations that had marched in among the crowd only a few minutes earlier. These bombs are often used by the militants to launch leaflets into the air.

One corpse that I saw later near where the first explosion appeared to take place was of a man whose hand had been blown away by a bomb that he carried. Other witnesses also believe that the explosion came from this man's general direction. Whether the bomb he carried accidentally exploded and set off the chaos or whether he was subsequently shot and the bomb then exploded was unclear.

The reporter who was standing on a high balcony of the cathedral says that bombs and shots first issued from the National Palace, which faces onto the same plaza as the cathedral. Soldiers were known to have been stationed within that building.

However, that account was not corroborated by other witnesses, and there was no evidence of uniformed military men anywhere near the scene before, during or immediately after the incident.

From visits to hospitals and the morgue after restoration of order, it appeared that the vast majority of wounded and dead were victims either of being trampled outside the church or asphyxiated within. Fewer than 10 of the confirmed deaths were from bullet wounds.

According to church officials, the militant left-wing groups had promised not to cause any incident during the funeral service.

The armed forces also had announced their intentions of keeping a low profile throughout the ceremony. The atmosphere was so tense, however, that no matter where the first explosion and shots came from, disaster followed, by reflex action of the crowd. I was standing between the church gates and the roped-off crowd when I heard the first explosion.

The masses of people had pressed so tightly against the rope barricade, manned only by Salvadoran Boy Scouts, that several had already been overcome by the noon heat and been taken away.

The crowd for most of the morning had been waving palm fronds on this last Sunday before Easter and singing along with a folk choir on the steps, "You are the God of the Poor."

At first the explosion took the crowd by surprise. Few people moved. I saw leaflets flying in the air and assumed they had been launched by a bomb. But then came other explosions and a series of shots, apparently none of them from automatic weapons.

I clambered over the fence and up the steps, past the archbishops's coffin toward other reporters and the clergy at the cathedral entrance.

Visiting Roman Catholic dignitaries from most of Latin America were there, including Nicaragua's foreign minister, Miguel D'Escoto, who is a priest. The Mexican cardinal stopped his homily and the clerics began to call to the crowd to stay calm.

But the shots continued, their frequency rapidly increasing. Still the bishops steadfastly blocked the doors to the cathedral while the crowd began to surge toward the gates.

I was in the midst of the clerics now, looking out over the square as suddenly cars at every corner began to explode in flames.

The crowd was pressing toward the steps now in complete panic. At the western edge of the plaza I could see young men taking prone positions on the street to fire at any snipers or whatever troops might advance.

The square, which had been packed moments before, was suddenly mostly empty as people tried to escape the shooting and fell into the crush at the closed church gates.

A bishop standing beside me seemed utterly calm, repeating over and over in an Irish accent to those around him, "Don't panic, don't panic."

But by then shots could be heard all around the square and on every side of the cathedral and the clerics gave way to the crowd and fell back, knocking the empty chair of the archbishop to the ground as they pressed inside.

Within a few minutes, perhaps 7,000 people had forced themselves into the cathedral which usually holds no more than 3,000.

I went to the stairs inside to work my way up to a higher vantage point and found them already guarded by young, masked left-wing opponents of the government.

Soon I was caught in the suffocating mass of humanity along with three other reporters I had managed to find. We linked arms to stay together and finally to keep some women near us from being crushed.

Weeping children were being carried on their parent's shoulders. Some people collapsed onto the floor near us and disappeared. One weeping young woman near me prayed to God that she would not die. Everywhere people could be seen in prayer. Once there was a cheer for the "unity of the people" but afterwards nothing but tears and pleas.

Explosions could be heard repeatedly near the three entrances to the cathedral. People inside, unable to see what was going on beyond the walls of the massive, unfinished building, expressed fear that the armed forces would arrive and enter the cathedral to get at the armed militants. Direct firing into the church inevitably would have killed scores of people.

Young guerrillas stationed themselves in strategic points around the building. On one side of the cathedral, one young woman crouched in the door spraying bullets from a U.S.-made M16 rifle out onto the streets.

The priests and Boy Scouts inside the cathedral tried desperately to keep order as one person after another succumbed to heat and panic. Within a few minutes hundreds of shirts were being twirled through the air as makeshift fans.

An ailing old man and a child were being carried behind me by people trying to get them to some open space. Over the course of 30 minutes, they moved no more than 15 feet in the tremendous immobile compression of people. Finally, the old man lost consciousness.

Eventually I was able to make my way to the stairwell and up to the balconies as young guerrillas directed people past the areas most dangerously exposed to the outside.

In the choir loft was the bishop of Cuernevaca, Mexico, Sergio Mendez, known for his liberal views. Shots were echoing nearby as he told reporters, "I think it is fitting that we, the bishops who came to honor Romero, should suffer the same situation as his people."

After almost an hour, the shooting tapered off and several reporters, including myself, decided to go into the streets.

There was still no evidence of the military, but some bodies were being carried away. Leaflets were everywhere, and littered among them were hundreds of shoes lost by people who had scrambled over the cathedral fence.

At the large Rosales Hospital a few miles away, scores of people, some of them wounded, many of them crushed, lay unconscious or in agony. The mops of the cleaning women were everywhere drenched in the blood spilled on the floor.

One woman, her pelvis broken, screamed continuously. Another man, with a wound from a large-caliber weapon in his shoulder, said he had just been stepping off a bus when the shots opened up on him from what seemed like three sides. He had no idea who was firing them.

A young schoolteacher, unable to walk after being trampled by the crowd before the gates of the cathedral -- her arms and face a mass of bruises -- said. "We didn't think anything like this would happen. Not then, not during a religious service. Never. Never."

Also see these photographs from the time:

http://americanbyways.blogspot.fr/2012/04/central-america-in-early-19980s.html

And these more recent articles about Romero's beatification:

08.24.14
Why Pope Francis Wants to Declare Murdered Archbishop Romero a Saint
The pontiff who earlier denounced the “tyranny of capitalism” is now opening the way to sainthood for clergy killed because they were identified with “the theology of liberation”

My CNN Commentary on Qassem Suleimani - Iran's Man in Iraq, Lebanon, Syria, Gaza, Afghanistan ...

http://www.cnn.com/videos/world/2015/03/07/exp-a-closer-look-at-a-top-iranian-military-commander.cnn

Video: Talking ISIS, CAGE, Jihadi John, Smashed Idols and Mysterious Drones on France 24

This more 
passionate 
than usual 
panel discussion 
can be seen here. 

Paris, France—Rain ended. Fog Lifted. Can drones be far behind?

Read Your Bible and Think About the History that ISIS is Destroying Right Now

An ISIS thug chiseling the face off an Assyrian sphinx. To learn what this is about read my article from last July:
http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2014/07/07/isis-is-about-to-destroy-biblical-history-in-iraq.html

Daesh, IS, ISIS, ISIL, Assholes: Acronyms and Acrimony

You may have noticed there is not much consistency in the way the press and public officials make reference to the bands of murderous fanatics who claim to be part of a new caliphate. Others can do as they please, of course, but for my part, in any story I write or edit, these guys are referred to in the first reference as "the so-called [or self-declared, or self-appointed, or self-anointed, or putative] Islamic State" and afterward as ISIS (which I no longer bother to explain comes from the earlier name Islamic State of Iraq and al Sham), or sometimes as Daesh, the Arabic acronym for ISIS, with occasional nods to the U.S. government's preferred ISIL (from Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant). 

One takes some pleasure in the fact that the so-called self-declared self-appointed self-anointed putative Caliph Ibrahim, formerly known as Abu Bakr al Baghdadi a.k.a. Ibrahim Awad Ibrahim al Badri, hates those old acronyms. Not reverential enough. What he wants is for all of us to get used to describing his collection of murderers as the Islamic State.  But, let's be clear, whether we call these guys Daesh, ISIS or ISIL, really, they are just assholes. At the risk of sounding acrimonious, but more in sorrow than in anger, I wish those publications that have fallen into the IS trap (like the BBC) would re-think their policies.

Murdered Muslims in North Carolina don't make headlines? You're not reading The Daily Beast.

Maybe this is true for Fox News or some local paper in Idaho. It isn't true at The Daily Beast, The New York Times, The Washington Post, Reuters, the AP, or any respectable American news outlet. And the coverage continues.

I have heard the same sort of thing said by Jews about terrorism in Israel or anti-Semitism in France. Of course these stories do get extensive coverage, but for the aggrieved in a community that feels targeted, there can never be enough, and what there is never seems adequately to express their sadness and their fears.

Friend: This Was No ‘Parking’ Murder

Feb 12, 2015 5:55 AM EST Official word is that the shooting of three young Muslims in North Carolina was over parking.... MORE

1. cheat

   Palestine: Chapel Hill Was Terrorist Act

   February 14, 2015 11:01 AM EST

   Palestine investigators want in on probe.

2. How to Be Muslim in the South

   by Suzi Parker February 14, 2015 06:45 AM EST

   After the horrendous Chapel Hill murders, there’s new attention on Muslims in the most religious—and Christian—part of the country.
3. cheat

   Guns Found at Chapel Hill Suspect's Home

   February 13, 2015 03:50 PM EST

   According to warrant.

4. What Turned N.C. Fury to Murder

   by Michael Daly February 13, 2015 05:15 AM EST

   Parking dispute or hatred of Muslims, we still don’t know what motivated the slaying of three young people in Chapel Hill. But do we know that without a gun, they’d still be alive.

5. The Chapel Hill Shootings and the Benefit of the Doubt

   by Arthur Chu February 12, 2015 05:45 AM EST

   The ingrained bias that makes us see evildoers from a familiar culture as exceptions but evildoers from an alien culture as representative runs too deep to dispel easily.

Recent Articles: Copenhagen Terror, the Jordanian Pilot Burned Alive and, on a lighter but still sordid note, DSK's Big Swinging Shtick

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Twitter and Instagram @csdickey

Bill Maher: Too True About Brian Williams and the Mindless Evening News

Post by Bill Maher.

Christopher Dickey and the Last Crusades

Once again the Crusades are in the news. Consider this excellent piece by Jay Michaelson on The Daily Beast:

‘The Crusades Were Great, Actually!’
The right-wing hysteria following President Obama’s remarks has revealed a shocking belief held by many Christian conservatives: that the Crusades weren’t really so bad.


As it happens, I have been writing about today's un-holy wars in the context of the old Crusades for many years, so I thought I would post links to a few of those articles here for those who are interested:


Newsweek: In The Name Of God, 20 May 2002

Amid the wanton slaughter of 40,000 Muslims and Jews, Christian knights "rode in blood up to their knees and bridle reins," reported a witness to the Crusaders' conquest of Jerusalem in 1099. "It was a just and splendid judgment of God." In the nine centuries since, the sword and shield have given way to belt-bombs and battle tanks, but the righteous violence remains. A 20-year-old Jewish settler praying outside the Tomb of the Patriarchs in Hebron last week would understand it. "This is the center of the Jewish nation," he said, wrapped in a white prayer shawl down to his ankles. "I pray to get rid of the Arabs and return the whole of Hebron to its rightful owners." (A couple of miles away is the grave of another Jewish settler, Baruch Goldstein, who shared that dream. He murdered 29 Muslim worshipers in 1994 before he himself was killed.) And 19-year-old Zidan Muhammad Vazani would have understood too. His passion for God--for Allah--led him to a billiard hall on the Israeli coast last week, where he blew himself up and slaughtered 15 Jews. It was the first suicide bombing for almost a month--the 20th of the year.

There will always be Christian, Muslim and Jewish zealots who believe they hear messages of ruthless violence from their one God. ("I did it to make Jesus come back," an Australian Christian planned to tell police when he torched the holiest Muslim shrine in Jerusalem in 1969.) But why do such voices attract a following today? Are they on a mission of righteousness or madness or cold-blooded politics?... MORE



Shadowland: The Last Crusades, Newsweek, 14 November 2003

"Kill them all and let God sort them out." I first saw that bloody-minded credo in Beirut in the 1980s, where it was popular among Christian militias and with American soldiers, emblazoned on T shirts and tattooed across biceps. I thought of it again after the bombing in Saudi Arabia this week, and then the escalation of the war in Iraq.

The notion of wholesale holy war is deeply medieval, of course. The phrase was coined by 13th-century crusaders slaughtering heretics in southern France. (Righteous Christians exterminated other Christians almost as often as they killed Muslims in those days.) On July 22, 1209, tens of thousands of people were besieged by the knights of the cross in the French town of Béziers, some of them heretical, some not. How to decide who should be slaughtered? The monk serving as spiritual adviser to the crusaders deftly cited II Tim. 2:19, "The Lord knoweth them that are his." Kill them all, they figured, let God sort them out.

This sort of thinking isn't ancient history for Al Qaeda. ... MORE

(For more on killing them all and leaving the sorting to the Almighty— "Caedite eos. Novit enim Dominus qui sunt eius," as the Abbott Arnaud Amalric is supposed to have said—there are two unusually good overlapping Wikipedia entries here and here.)


Low Motives and Higher Laws, OnFaith, 1 February 2008

If American politicians thought they could get away with calling their critics blasphemers and dispatching them to burn in hellfire, I’m sure there are some that would. There have been times in the last 20 years when not a few senators and congressmen had that look in their eye, and not one of them was a Muslim. Fortunately the Constitution and the common sense of our diverse society have kept them in check. Afghanistan is not so lucky. What we’ve seen there in the last couple of weeks looks like a classic case of politicians using religion, in this case Islam, as a cover for their own cynical self-interest.... MORE

Illustration is of the sacking of Constantinople, Christians slaughtering Christians in the Fourth Crusade.

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J'Accuse: In Spanish, the Complete 289-page #Nisman Brief on the Argentina Government's Cover-Up of Iran's Role in 1994 AMIA Bombing

The complete PDF, just released by the Argentine courts after the suspicious suicide of prosecutor Alberto Nisman on Sunday, can be downloaded here.

The brief passage above accuses President Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner and Foreign Minister Héctor Marcos Timerman of signing a secret memorandum of understanding with the Iranian government guaranteeing the immunity from prosecution of the Iranian fugitives Nisman believed were behind the 1994 bombing of the AMIA Jewish center in Buenos Aires that cost the lives of 85 people and injured hundreds more.

The Kirchner government has dismissed the accusations as groundless and delusional, and initially sought to prove that Nisman killed himself for unknown, perhaps personal, reasons. But even members of Kirchner's party are now opening the door to the possibility he was pressured into ending his own life, and the forensic evidence has yet to establish that he pulled the trigger of gun found next to his body—an Argentine-manufactured Bersa .22 semi-automatic—which presumably was used to fire the shot into his temple that killed him. No traces of powder were found on Nisman's hand, which investigators say is conceivable given the small caliber of the weapon. The investigation goes on.

This is my write-up of the initial reports on Nisman's death, raising the question of Iranian secret service involvement:

ARTICLE

Has Iran Resumed Global Assassinations?

Jan 19, 2015 8:12 AM EST

An Argentine prosecutor died from a single gunshot wound to the head Sunday, hours before giving... MORE

Video: Obama and Cameron Say Terrorism Can Be "Solved." Really? How? Also, The Fears of French Jews

A conversation with Alex Witt on MSNBC, following up on remarks by President Obama.

Why We Published the Charlie Hebdo Muhammad Cover

The BBC asked me why The Daily Beast published the Muhammad cover of Charlie Hebdo. In fact, Editor in Chief John Avlon explained our reasons last week. Somewhat less elegantly, I made the same points in the audio below:



From my point of view, having written about the obscurantist evil represented by the putative Islamic State, there is one Charlie Hebdo cover that stands out. It represents the Prophet as a caricature, but it does Him no injustice. Rather, it drives home the point that people murdering in his name have nothing to do with Islam. The headline: "If Muhammad Came Back ..." He's on his knees. "I'm the Prophet, you moron!" he tells the black-masked jihadi with a knife to his throat. "Shut your trap!" says the jihadi, who, of course, wants to hear nothing that interferes with his self-appointed role as God's angel of death.

Decrypting the Carnage in Paris

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On Morning Joe: Terrorism "is not exclusive to Islam"

In the pouring rain on Thursday. The rather passionate explanation of the roots of terrorism begins about 18:00 minutes in. 

"Neutralization," or, France's version of capital punishment, with Chris Matthews #CharlieHebdo

My appearance on Chris Matthews (very late at night ...)

Al Qaeda's "non-negotiable terrorism," a war to the death. Talking with RachelMaddow #Charlie Hebdo

"It's not just terrorism, it is a war, and it's a war, basically, to the death."

My appearance (at 3:00 a.m. my time) with Rachel Maddow. Her introduction is long and informative. My remarks begin about 18 minutes into it.

"Footloose" In Iran?

The Daily Beast picked up a terrific little story from IranWire about people going to clandestine dance lessons in Iran. And while I was editing it, I looked up the final scene of the 1984 movie "Footloose," with Kevin Bacon, about an ultra-conservative town in the USA where dancing is deemed contrary to Christian religion. I had forgotten how much fun those last few minutes of the movie really are. Perhaps our friends in Iran can take a little inspiration from them.