The death of Zarqawi
I woke up, fired up the computer and checked out a website that lists all the recent changes to the (Thanks to Matthew Sommerville for the great site). There was a flurry of activity this morning as it was announced that militant leader had been killed in an air strike.
Sometimes a bit of news so dominates the day that we have to talk about it. This is one of those days. We're going to hear from people around the world as they respond. We're going to hear from Iraqis, US soldiers, people across the Middle East, people in Pakistan and experts on counter-terrorism to find out what this means.
Talk of the web
The US Council of Foreign Relations has a great one-stop roundup of coverage of . The Counterterrorism Blog has a lot of coverage from a list of counter-terrorism experts. They have a good roundup of their . One thing that caught my eye was chart by Evan Kohlmann of (pdf file).
What soldiers are saying
This is obviously just one aspect of the talk online, but a really interesting thing has happened over the last few years with the rise of blogging: (sorry for the vanity link back to a story I wrote last December).
JP at Milblogging.com said that a huge number of milbloggers, as they are called, are talking about it. Here's a link showing more than 100 posts by talking about the death of Zarqawi.
Here's a quick roundup. , who will be joining us from Bagdhad, escorts media crews in Iraq. He had this to say:
From my perspective, a monster departs the realm of the living.
I’m sure further details will emerge throughout the day.
Prediction: Conspiracy theorists will come up with all kinds of plots and claim that the U.S. had him in custody all along and he was killed to offset negative press reports about Haditha. And variants on that theme as well.
Trevor has been posting all day long with updates. As he points out, here is a with footage of the airstrike, if you're interested.
Mike Fay, one of two combat artists for the US Marine Corps and one of our guests recently discussing Iraq, had this to say on his blog :
We are stopping terrorism in Iraq. We have defeated symmetrical state sponsored terrorism in the utter defeat of Saddam Hussein. We are defeating asymmetrical terrorism with the death of Musab Al-Zaraqari. The only front where we are still losing ground is the ultimate battleground...the place that Terrorism has most clearly in its cross-hairs; the will of America and the Western World.
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