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Slain Korean not the last
So it was with Kim Sun-il, the 33-year-old South Korean interpreter kidnapped in Baghdad Thursday by Islamist militants. On Tuesday, the last moments -- or almost the last moments -- of Kim's life were relayed through al-Jazeera. Kim was shown kneeling in front of three of his hooded captors, apparently minutes before he was decapitated. One had a large knife tucked in his belt. Another read from a piece of paper. "We warned you," he declared. "Now you see the consequence of what you did not do. Stop your lies. You are not here for the Iraqis, but for the damned Americans."
What made the fluent Arabic speaker a suitable target, according to observers, was that he worked for a South Korean trading company that supplies food to U.S. forces in Iraq. He was grabbed off the street in Fallujah by gunmen from the group calling itself Jamaat al-Tawhid wal Jihad (Monotheism and Struggle). On Sunday, the group threatened to decapitate him unless South Korea announced within 24 hours that it would withdraw its troops in the U.S.-led coalition. The Seoul government's immediate reaction was to reject the threat and to confirm that it was going ahead with plans to increase its contingent by another 3,000 men, making it the fourth-largest military presence in the coalition after the United States, Britain and Poland. At the same time, South Korean sources were quoted as saying that they were in contact with the kidnappers through indirect channels. Thus, a dim light of hope appeared before the final, ultimate despair.
It's been reported that his kidnappers are led by the notorious Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, a Jordanian said to have ties with al-Qaeda. But everything -- absolutely everything -- in this shadowy war of masks, lies and sinister inferences must always be viewed with enormous caution. Still, al-Qaeda-linked groups have been busy in the region of late. The same group is said to have responsible for the "execution" of American businessman Nick Berg. Last week, another American Paul Wilson was decapitated by militants said to be tied to al-Qaeda in Saudi Arabia after the Saudi government failed to comply with a demand to release several jailed terrorists.
Clearly, the clockwork orange of Islamist terrorism has the dual role of destabilizing Iraq -- as the June 30 deadline for handing over sovereignty to an Iraqi pseudo-government approaches -- and undermining the Saudi kingdom. In Iraq, the favorite targets are civilians connected with the coalition, and, for good measure, key oil installations. In Saudi Arabia, the aim is to hit the U.S. and other foreign oil companies in an attempt to force out the foreigners, the technicians, the contractors and the bankers, leaving the Saudis to their own inevitable fate. In both cases, the long-term objective is decapitation of another kind -- of the hugely oil-dependent Western economies.
The killers of Wilson and Kim are even now sharpening their knives for their next victim. They know they cannot force Bush to pull out of Iraq because for him that would be political suicide. But given the ever-growing unpopularity of the Iraq debacle for other coalition leaders, it could be a welcome excuse -- and a political advantage. |
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