"Who Kills Hostages in Iraq?"

An Inventory of Iraqi Resistance Groups

Samir Haddad and Mazin Ghazi, Al Zawra (Baghdad)

(Nota Bene: Al-Zawra is published weekly in Arabic in Baghdad by the Iraqi Journalists Association. This is the FBI's translation.)

US soldiers guard the wreckage of a military armored vehicle destroyed by the Iraqi resistance. In Iraq, the issues are even more confused now than they were before. This happened after an armed group abducted two French journalists, and threatened to kill them if France did not rescind the law banning religious symbols at schools, including the veil, and another group abducted two Italian women in Baghdad. The issues became even more confused when a third group killed 12 Nepalese workers, claiming that they were serving the US forces.

It is our duty now to clarify the picture with regard to who targets civilians and foreigners, who abducts hostages indiscriminately, and who makes the US occupation and its soldiers his main preoccupation.

A strident minority: anti-Bush US troops in Iraq

Though military personnel lean conservative, some vocally support Kerry - or at least a strategy for swift withdrawal.

By Ann Scott Tyson | Correspondent of The Christian Science Monitor

Inside dusty, barricaded camps around Iraq, groups of American troops in between missions are gathering around screens to view an unlikely choice from the US box office: "Fahrenheit 9-11," Michael Moore's controversial documentary attacking the commander-in-chief.

"Everyone's watching it," says a Marine corporal at an outpost in Ramadi that is mortared by insurgents daily. "It's shaping a lot of people's image of Bush."

Anonymous Comrade writes: After the autopsy following his death at the hands of Marine prison guards, Nagem Hatab's removed organs were left to rot in the blazing sun at an Iraqi airstrip. His larynx was recently found in a freezer in Germany, and his ribcage has likely been located in a refrigerator at the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology in Washington, D.C.

The A.P. reports:

Evidence Found From Iraqi Killed in Prison

Missing medical evidence taken from the body of an Iraqi man beaten by Marine prison guards resurfaced this week, a defense attorney for an officer charged in connection with the man's death said Thursday. For months, the military had insisted the evidence was lost.

An Army medical examiner found the larynx of Nagem Hatab in a freezer in Germany, said Keith Higgins, a civilian defense attorney. The examiner, Col. Kathleen Ingwersen, conducted Hatab's autopsy in Iraq and concluded he died from a broken bone in his neck.