jfeil wrote:
] Elonka wrote:
] ] ] U.S. officials have pointed to Khazraji, widely respected
] ] ] among the Iraqi armed forces for his role in the
] ] ] Iran-Iraq war, as a candidate for a leadership position
] ] ] in an Iraq without Saddam.
] ]
] ] The ex-Chief of Staff of the Iraqi Army (1987-1990) goes for a
] ] walk near his current home in Denmark, and disappears. Was he
] ] kidnapped (or worse) by Iraqi Intelligence? Did he flee the
] ] country from fear of a war crimes trial, or did something else
] ] happen? Stay tuned...
]
] It looks like this guy might have been spirited away by the
] CIA and killed in Iraq along with the Shiite cleric. From Arab
] News
]
] http://www.arabnews.com/Article.asp?ID=25014
]

This is starting to sound like the plot of a Clancy novel! Slate MSN says something similar about the Denmark disappearance, that Khazraji may have been spirited out of Denmark by the CIA, so that they could offer him as an alternative to Chalabi, who they very much dislike:

 http://slate.msn.com/id/2081329/

More background on Chalabi and various entities' dislike of him here:
 http://www.memestreams.net/thread/bid6142/

If Khazraji was indeed killed along with the Grand Shiite Ayatollah's son al-Khoei, then it makes the story kind of moot, but the reports that I've been hearing are that the two people killed today were instead al-Khoei and al-Kadar. I haven't been able to quite make sense yet about why both these guys were killed, since they seem to have been on opposite sides of the figurative fence: Khoei was anti-Saddam and had been living in exile for years, while Kadar was pro-Saddam and much hated because of his association with Saddam's "Ministry of Religion." They were also both Shiite, and seem to have been attacked by other Shiites, so if anything, this seems to underscore the bitter divisions within the Iraqi Shiite community.

Getting back to Khazraji's status though, while I was surfing the news streams on this, I did see a *lot* of reports that Khazraji has been seen in the Kuwait/Iraq region, so the assassinations do indeed bring more attention to his own story: How did he get out of Denmark? Was the CIA involved, as a couple reports suggest? And is Khazraji going to be presented as a potential leader in the new Iraqi government?

The plot thickens . . .

RE: Top Iraqi defector disappears