Weird Morning on the Jamil Hussein Snipe Hunt

Retractions and non-committal rumblings around the blogosphere about the mysterious "Captain Jamil Hussein". I'll have more soon--nothing dispositive, though very informative--but I'm going to actually add to the fog and confusion a bit first.

Frequent commenter "Steve" at Patterico's Pontifications--someone obviously very knowledgable about journalism, though not usually sympathetic to Patterico's POV--points to this account of the Hurriya attack in the Times of London, dated November 25. [date corrected.] Steve points out that the Times is the only British paper with a full-time news bureau in Baghdad. Steve's point was that they ran this account without any named source, suggesting it independently corroborated the AP's account.

Not quite:

The worst of the violence was in the northwestern neighbourhood of Hurriya, where militants seized six Sunnis, who were leaving Friday prayers, drenched them with kerosene and set them on fire. Dozens of their colleagues fanned out across the district and set four mosques ablaze.

Iraqi soldiers failed to confront the Mahdi Army during their spree, according to police captain Jamil Hussein, who added that at least 25 Sunnis were killed. The fighting started in Hurriya when Mahdi Army fighters, with Kalashnikovs and rocket-propelled grenades, attacked a mosque where Sunni gunmen were hiding, a Shia woman said. People in local shops ran for home as soon as they heard the bullets fly.

“There were so many Mahdi Army fighters. Some of them were teenagers. I saw about 21 in the afternoon. I saw them with guns, running and hiding behind buildings and blast walls. There was a man holding his gun passionately who wanted to fight. He was cursing the Sunnis, saying, ‘Damn their fathers’.” When the Iraqi Army pulled up to the besieged al-Mashada mosque, the Mahdi Army men hid their guns but stayed in the street. The soldiers knew the pedestrians were militiamen but did nothing, the woman said.

Let's ignore the fact that this is one of the few times, perhaps the only times, that "Capt. Hussein" speaks with reporters outside the AP. And let's ignore for a second the fact that the meat of this account and of the four burning mosques seems to have originated, once again, with him. The unnamed Shia woman doesn't back up that part, and she doesn't even mention the burning, only a gunfight in front of one mosque.

The conversation with the unnamed Shia woman continues, but notice her characterization of the mosque as "full of Sunni gunmen".

These darn Arab transliterations obscured something I hadn't noticed before. Look at this CENTCOM account of the action on the 24th, the one where they found signs of a fight at only one mosque in Hurriya instead of four:

While investigating the Al Meshaheda mosque, the patrol received small arms fire from unknown insurgents. The patrol returned fire, and the insurgents broke contact and fled the area. A subsequent check of the mosque found the mosque intact with no evidence of a fire.

When you render the name of the mosque Al-Mashada, as it was in the Times, now that rings a bell--since six members of the Mashaddani clan were supposedly the ones burned.

The Mashhadani clan has its own significance. I blogged about them, and why that matters, here. An attack on a mosque identified with a clan with which you are at war--and full of "gunmen" to boot-- is very different matter than random targeting of a mosque full of peaceful worshippers. Or, um, four mosques. I hadn't realized that the al-Mashada mosque bore the same name as well, and that that is one more tie to the clan. If I'm wrong about that connection though, though, the description of a mosque where gunmen were hiding is certainly informative.

In any case, by the time I find an e-mail address for the Times' Ned Parker to ask him what Jamil Hussein looks like, I'll bet fifteen bloggers will have already fired off queries to him. If you do hear from him, kindly link back here.