Sunnis Burned Alive? Press Thinks So But US Military Says No

If you follow the news, you probably read over the weekend that in response to sectarian violence in Iraq that 6 Sunnis were burned alive leaving their prayer services. Almost every media site in the country reported this story breathlessly on a slow news weekend. The report from the AP went like this:

Revenge-seeking militiamen seized six Sunnis as they left prayers and burned them alive with kerosene yesterday in a savage new twist to the brutality shaking the Iraqi capital a day after suspected Sunni insurgents killed 215 people in Baghdad’s main Shiite district.

Iraqi soldiers at a nearby army post failed to intervene in yesterday’s assault by suspected members of the Shiite Mahdi Army militia or subsequent attacks that killed at least 19 other Sunnis, including women and children, in the same neighbourhood, the volatile Hurriyah district in northwest Baghdad, said police Capt. Jamil Hussein. AP

But wait one second, the blogger Flopping Aces has done some great investigative reporting and has come up with some interesting facts in the case.

Doing a search via Google I began reading the stories printed about the burned six and each and every one had one thing in common. The only person stating that this incident happened was one Capt. Jamil Hussein. Every news report printed this man as the source of the information.

So our hard working media all got the report from one individual, this Capt. Jamil Hussein. But there is more…

Centcom has confirmed this Capt. Jamil Hussein is NOT a Police Officer nor is he employed by the Ministry of Interior:

So this report is from an person using a fictitious name and has been used as the source for other horrific stories that turned out to be false. I have teased Flopping Aces work enough now go over and read the whole post. It will show how eager our media is to grab on to anything that will make our efforts in Iraq look weak and push the story of a civil war to hasten our exit from Iraq.