Target Centermass

Day: June 15, 2005

  • Australian Hostage Rescued by US-Iraqi Troops

    I wanted to blog about this story, the tale of the rescue of a hostage in Iraq.

    US and Iraqi forces rescued an Australian hostage in Baghdad while the death toll continued to rise across the country with suicide bombers killing 26 soldiers and eight policemen.

    Douglas Wood, a 64-year-old engineer, had been held for 47 days in Ghazaliyah, a western suburb of the capital. His kidnappers had demanded that the Australian government withdraw its 1,400 troops from Iraq and pay a substantial ransom.

    I wanted to blog about it, but was unhappy with the information currently available about what I’m certain was a quite dramatic event. I shrugged it off until I found the following glimpse at Mr. Wood, post-rescue.

    Freed hostage craves beer and football results

    Freed after being held for 47 days by Iraqi insurgents, Douglas Wood just wanted a beer and to know how his favorite Australian Rules Football team was faring.

    Wood has not lived in Australia for years — he’s a U.S. resident married to a Californian woman — but he has not lost his typically Australian love of beer or his team from the southern city of Geelong where he grew up.

    At an emotional news conference in Canberra, two of his brothers, Malcolm and Vernon, recalled Thursday their first telephone conversations with their older brother since his dramatic rescue Wednesday from the clutches of Iraqi insurgents.

    “Doug sounded remarkably composed,” Malcolm Wood, 57, told reporters. “He asked me whether the Geelong Cats would win the premiership this year.”

    Wood, a 64-year-old engineer, is recovering in Baghdad after being held for more than six weeks by insurgents who kicked him in the head, shaved off his hair and demanded Australia remove its 1,400 troops from Iraq.

    One of his first questions to Australia’s counterterrorism chief Nick Warner, who headed Australia’s six-week quest to secure the engineer’s release, was whether he had any beer.

    Granted, he’s talking about soccer, but substitute any sport I really care for, keep the beer aspect, and I’d safely say we’re talking about a man I view as a kindred spirit. Here’s a tip of the brew to Douglas Wood.

    I’ll keep hunting for details on the actual rescue mission.

    EDIT: I stand corrected. As JohnL of TexasBestGrok pointed out in the comment section, the Geelong Cats are not a soccer team. Apparently, Douglas Wood is a huge fan of Aussie rules football, a very cool sport I used to be able to watch in the early days of ESPN. All the more reason to celebrate Mr. Wood’s rescue.

  • Spain Claims Terror Pipeline to Iraq Cut

    It was certainly bad enough that, through a bloody terror strike, al Queda was able to gut Spain, affecting the country’s elections and precipitating an early withdrawal of Spanish forces from the Iraqi theater. Adding insult to injury, the terror network continued to abuse the nation, using it as a conduit to move jihadists into the same battleground Spain had fled. Now, Spain has made a move to cut the terror flow through its nation.

    The Spanish Interior Ministry said Wednesday that the police had arrested 16 people on charges of involvement with Islamic terrorism, including 11 men suspected by the police of having worked for a network that provided recruits for the insurgency in Iraq.

    Spain, which is described by terrorism experts here as a major logistical center for Al Qaeda and its affiliates in Europe, was not thought to be a significant supplier of fighters for the Iraq insurgency.

    But the announcement on Wednesday suggests that the flow through Spain of recruits to Iraq may be heavier than previously estimated, at least publicly.

    The Interior Ministry said in a statement that the 11 men, most of them Moroccans and Algerians, had recruited Islamic fighters for Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the militant leader who is America’s most wanted man in Iraq, and for Ansar al-Islam, a group of mostly Kurdish guerrillas who are suspected of collaborating with Zarqawi.

    “The activities of this Islamist network centered on the recruitment and sending of jihadists to Iraq with the goal of committing suicide terrorist activities against the coalition forces,” the ministry statement said.

    Officials asserted that the network appeared to have been directed from Syria, although its activities were largely financed locally through drug trafficking, document fraud and robbery.

    The ministry also announced Wednesday that the police had arrested five more suspects in the 2004 train bombings in Madrid that killed 191 people and wounded at least 1,000. That attack, which Spanish investigators say was carried out by Islamic militants with ties to Al Qaeda, has led to the arrests of more than 100 people and the jailing of about 25.

    This is a possibly significant achievement, especially if Spain follows up the arrests with a successful haul of intelligence. I would like to point out, however, that the success probably is not nearly grand as it sounds — the country is merely treating symptoms of the Islamist movement within its borders, having already run away from the attempt in Iraq to provide an alternative to the Arab world, a possible last ditch to salvage a huge chunk of the world’s population from falling hopelessly into sheer barbarism and madness.

    This kind of success, while dramatic and helpful, is fleeting. Al Queda will find other ways to move its jihadists, much as the human nervous system can sometimes find alternate routes when nerve pathways are severed. Unfortunately for Spain and the rest of Europe, other paths already exist and this one will be replaced, thus making it obvious that simply treating local symptoms of radical Islam while ignoring the global disease is not enough. That, and it may eventually be painful and deadly to those only trying to police the waypoints of jihad within their borders, as the article points out ominously.

    In describing the men suspected of ties with the insurgency in Iraq, the Interior Ministry’s statement said that several had already vowed to carry out suicide attacks in the name of Islam, a fact that “highlights the extreme radicalism and the danger of most of those arrested in this operation.”

    The statement also suggested that the men were prepared to carry out attacks before reaching Iraq, and perhaps even before leaving Spain. “Several members,” it said, were “willing to commit a suicide terrorist act as soon as the leaders of the organization ordered it.”

    Pain and blood will come again to Europe via the Islamists. I hold it as a certainty. This is not a game where the sidelines are safe. This is not a game at all.

    Chad has more at In the Bullpen.