“If the Iraqis are comfortable, we are comfortable, too,” General Thomas said of the negotiated surrenders of insurgent leaders sometimes described as members of Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia, the homegrown Sunni insurgent group that American officials say is led by foreigners.
Aside from the inherent absurdity of this sentence (would a homegrown group choose a foreign leader?), the Times is ignoring all sorts of recent evidence. First of all, there was this article, widely reported on the Web (but not in the NYT) about six Mosul youths who were forced to train as suicide bombers:
BAGHDAD: The Iraqi military on Monday displayed a group of weeping teenagers who said they had been forced into training for suicide bombings by a Saudi militant in the last urban stronghold of al-Qaida in Iraq.
Four of the six boys were lined up for the media at police headquarters in the northern city of Mosul, where they said they had been training for a month to start suicide operations in early June.
The United Nations and the Iraqi and U.S. militaries say they fear that al-Qaida in Iraq is increasingly trying to use youths in attacks to avoid the heightened security measures that have dislodged the group from Baghdad and surrounding areas.
The youths, three wearing track suits and one with a torn white T-shirt, began crying as they were led into the police station.
"The Saudi insurgent threatened to rape our mothers and sisters, destroy our houses and kill our fathers if we did not cooperate with him," one of the youths, who were not identified, told reporters in Mosul, where security forces are cracking down on al-Qaida in Iraq and other Sunni insurgents.
And then there is this article, also widely reported (but also not in the NYT) about a group of mostly French militants convicted for sending fighters to Al Qaeda in Iraq:Paris court convicts 7 on terror charges
The judge handed down sentences of up to seven years in prison. The suspects — five Frenchmen, a Moroccan and an Algerian — were convicted of "criminal association with a terrorist enterprise," a blanket charge used in many French terrorist cases that carries a maximum 10-year prison term.
Most acknowledged going to Iraq after the U.S.-led invasion in 2003, or planning to go, but all denied involvement in a cell accused of recruiting French fighters for Iraq's insurgency.
The men went on trial in March after years of investigation by French authorities. The case struck a nerve because it demonstrated how young devout Muslim Frenchmen were abandoning what they saw as bleak prospects in secular France for Iraqi battlefields. It also raised fears that French fighters could use those battlefield skills in terror attacks back home in Europe.
France strongly opposed the U.S.-led campaign in Iraq but has struggled to fight homegrown terrorism. France is home to western Europe's largest Muslim population: about 5 million people.
Investigators said the alleged network funneled about a dozen French fighters to camps linked to the leader of al-Qaeda in Iraq, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. They say the network sought to send more recruits before al-Zarqawi was killed in a U.S. airstrike in 2006. At least seven French insurgents have died in Iraq, some in suicide bombings, police said.
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