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Articles: Al-Sadr's newspaper will reopen

Posted by admin on Monday, July 19, 2004 - 01:30 AM

The interim Iraqi government announced yesterday that it would allow a newspaper affiliated with anti-American cleric Muqtada al-Sadr to reopen. It was the U.S.-led coalition's closure of al-Sadr's Al-Hawza newspaper March 28 that sparked a widespread and deadly uprising by al-Sadr's al-Mahdi Army.
Then-U.S. Administrator L. Paul Bremer ordered the weekly shuttered on the grounds that it had repeatedly published false information designed to incite attacks on U.S. troops, including articles that blamed terrorist bombings on American aircraft. Interim Prime Minister Iyad Allawi issued a statement saying he would allow Al-Hawza to reopen in an effort to demonstrate his "absolute belief in freedom of the press." He said Iraqis should have access to all views, including those represented by the newspaper, "in order to contribute and enrich the blessed process of freedom, democracy, security and prosperity." Hefty reward offered for killing of Allawi A reward of $282,000 for killing interim Iraqi Prime Minister Iyad Allawi was offered on an Islamic Web site yesterday. "We in Khalid bin al-Walid Brigade announce to the Iraqi people a reward of 200,000 Jordanian dinars to whoever gets us Allawi's head," the statement said. The Brigade is affiliated with Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, a Jordanian who has taken responsibility for attacks on Americans and Iraqis, but there was no way to verify the offer. Senior commander of Saddam guard held A senior commander of Saddam Hussein's elite Republican Guard suspected of planning and financing attacks against Iraqis, Iraqi security forces and coalition troops has been captured, the military said yesterday. Iraqi national guardsmen and coalition forces captured Sufyan Maher Hassan in a raid Friday in Tikrit. Hassan was the Republican Guard commander responsible for units defending Baghdad during the war and is a relative of Saddam. Kay says intelligence on weapons was weak President Bush and British Prime Minister Tony Blair should have realized before going to war that intelligence on Iraqi weapons was weak and did not indicate Saddam Hussein posed a danger to the West, America's former chief weapons inspector in Iraq said yesterday. When David Kay resigned from the CIA in January, he said his conclusion was Iraq did not have stockpiles of forbidden weapons. He told Britain's ITV network yesterday that Bush and Blair "should have been able to tell before the war that the evidence did not exist for drawing the conclusion that Iraq presented a clear, present and imminent threat on the basis of existing weapons of mass destruction." "That was not something that required a war," he said. Recent reports from the Senate Intelligence Committee and a British commission agreed that intelligence agencies had failed to accurately gauge Saddam's threat, but neither accused Bush or Blair of distorting the information. Leader downplays terrorist's threat Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, a Jordanian linked to al-Qaida and accused of terrorist attacks inside Iraq, may be less of a threat than portrayed by the media, Jordan's King Abdullah said yesterday in an interview with CNN. "I think that the press made him much more capable, much smarter and much more of a threat than actually he really is," Abdullah said. He said al-Zarqawi, said to have been involved in a number of killings including the beheading of U.S. contractor Nick Berg in May, is "part of a larger group of resistance that Iraq is facing."

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