Zarqawi Losing Friends

Looks like it’s not just the US putting the squeeze on Zarqawi and his thugs:

For four days this month, US marines were onlookers at just the kind of fight they had hoped to see: a battle between suspected followers of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, a foreign-born insurgent, and Iraqi Sunni tribal fighters at the western frontier town of Husaybah. In clashes sparked by the assassination of a tribal sheik, which was commissioned by Zarqawi, the foreign insurgents and Iraqi tribal fighters pounded one another with weapons and mortars in the streets of Husaybah as the US military watched from a distance, tribal members and the US military said.

When a stray mortar round accidentally hit near the Marines, Lt. Col. Tim Mundy recalled, ‘‘they’d adjust their fire, and not shoot at us’’ for fear of drawing Americans into the fight. ‘‘They shot at each other,’’ he said. The Sunni Arab tribe involved in the clashes, the Sulaiman, lost four men, Salman Reesha Sulaiman, a member of the tribe, said in an interview after the fighting, which occurred during the first week of May.

On the al-Zarqawi side, 11 foreign fighters were killed outright, plus an unknown number of other foreign fighters and their Iraqi allies in US bombing runs after local tribes tipped off their location to the Americans.

The fighting at Husaybah was a dramatic sign of the fractures in support and allegiance the foreign fighters are experiencing, several Iraqi political leaders and other Iraqis said. The battles also revealed what appears to be fissures within the network’s top leadership, they said.

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Jim Hoft is the founder and editor of The Gateway Pundit, one of the top conservative news outlets in America. Jim was awarded the Reed Irvine Accuracy in Media Award in 2013 and is the proud recipient of the Breitbart Award for Excellence in Online Journalism from the Americans for Prosperity Foundation in May 2016. In 2023, The Gateway Pundit received the Most Trusted Print Media Award at the American Liberty Awards.

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Thanks for sharing!