Colonel Riyadh al-Samarrai joins Abdul-Sattar Abu Risha killed sleeping with the enemy
Mourners carried the bodies of Colonel Riyadh al-Samarrai, the security leader, and some of his bodyguards through the streets of Adhamiyah, once a Sunni insurgent hotbed until the colonel and his patrols started work under the pay of the US military.
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IHT: The effect the groups, known as “awakening councils,” have had on security appears to have provoked bin Laden.[the new bin laden
cause we know uncle osama been dead years now]
“I advise those who follow the path of temptation should wash out this disgrace by repentance,” he said. “This participation (in the Awakening Councils) is a great apostasy and sedition that will lead them to Hell.”
Monday’s bombing occurred at the entrance of a Sunni Endowment office, a government agency that cares for Sunni mosques and shrines, and near an Awakening Council office in Baghdad’s northern Azamiyah district.
The first suicide bomber walked up to Riyadh al-Samarrai, a former police colonel and head of the local Awakening Council group…
“A man came saying that he is a friend of Col. Riyadh al-Samarrai,” the guard said from his bed in al-Nuaman hospital. “He met him and embraced him and after a few seconds, the explosion took place.” He spoke on condition of anonymity for fear of reprisals.
As people rushed to evacuate the wounded, a suicide car bomber detonated his explosives just meters (yards) away, said Baghdad’s chief military spokesman, Brig. Qassim al-Moussawi.
Sunni Endowment leader Ahmed Abdul Ghafur al-Samarrai — who is from the same tribe as the colonel — blamed bin Laden for the attack.
“Those criminal gangs fled from al-Anbar province to Azamiyah neighborhood for bloodshed and to abuse the dignity of the people,” he said, referring to the province west of Baghdad that was a stronghold of al-Qaida in Iraq. The “awakening council” movement began there late in 2006. “This criminal act occurred according to the urging of Bin Laden against the awakening; he incited al-Qaida” to kill awakening fighters.
The founder of the awakening movement, Abdul-Sattar Abu Risha, was killed by a bomb in September, 10 days after meeting U.S. President George W. Bush at a U.S. base in Anbar.
The switch of allegiance by insurgents in Azamiyah was one of the most significant in a series of similar moves across Baghdad’s Sunni neighborhoods. Azamiyah is home to Iraq’s most revered Sunni shrine, the mosque of Imam Abu Hanifa, and many in the area served as officers in Saddam Hussein’s army and security agencies, giving an edge to the insurgency there.
The U.S. military has frequently said the improved security is fragile and could be reversed.
“It is tenuous at best,” Maj. Gen. Rick Lynch, the commander of U.S. forces south of Baghdad, said last week. “On any given day, the security situation could go backward by some catastrophic attack, or by the local population not seeing continuing forward progress.” [the savages can't see that we are helping them by killing them]
