An Iraqi police official in the northwestern city of Tall Afar said Thursday that a military officer and three soldiers had admitted to raping a Sunni woman and recording the act with a cellphone camera.
The four soldiers told an investigative committee convened by the Iraqi army that they sexually assaulted the woman nearly two weeks ago, according to Gen. Najem Abdullah, a police spokesman in Tall Afar.
The soldiers' statement follows another Sunni woman's assertion this week that she had been raped in Baghdad by members of Iraq's predominantly Shiite security forces. Iraq's Kurdish president and its Sunni vice president said Thursday that a judge should investigate her case, which the Shiite-led government of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki has dismissed as groundless.
Iraqi President Jalal Talabani said in a statement that the courts were "the only legitimate place to examine such allegations" and that the government should avoid steps that would "inflame sensitivities and create mistrust."
Talabani's stance, echoed by Vice President Tariq al-Hashimi, is sharply at odds with Maliki's insistence that the 20-year-old Baghdad woman who contends three Iraqi policemen raped her Sunday is a criminal who fabricated the story to exacerbate sectarian tension and undermine a U.S. and Iraqi security plan to pacify the capital.
Nouri al-Maliki is the guy that the Bush Administration has been holding up as the leader as a new, free Iraq. I guess that freedom only applies to men, because it sure looks like al-Maliki's policy towards women who are raped by the Iraq military is to not just attack their credibility, but call THEM criminals. I wonder how the 3150 young Americans who have died in Iraq and the tens of thousands of others who left limbs or their sanity there would react to the idea that they gave their lives and limbs to make Iraq safe for rapists.
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