BAGHDAD, July 6: A top militant group has released a haunting documentary of what it says are some of the biggest attacks of the Iraqi resistance, featuring suicide bombers' last moments and a series of massive blasts.
Bearded young men are shown reading their final statements before hugging their friends and climbing into vehicles laden with explosives. The vehicles are then shown disappearing in balls of flame as they reach their target.
The video, whose contents cannot be verified, was apparently released by the Tawhid wa al-Jihad (Unification and Holy War) group of fugitive Islamist Abu Mussab al Zarqawi, whom US officials blame for at least 30 attacks in Iraq.
Purporting to show some of the most devastating attacks of the insurgency, the slick hour-long video has been circulating in the rebel bastion of Fallujah for the past week and has now been handed to Western media.
The film shows what it claims to be the assassination of Iraqi Governing Council member Ezzedine Salim's in a Baghdad car bombing on May 17, while footage is also shown of the Mount Lebanon hotel bombing on March 18 that killed seven people.
"I'm carrying out this operation because I see the USA has come to this land. Come on my friends please yourself with their losses and quench your thirst with their blood," Saudi militant Abu Jihad Saleh al-Rahimi tells the camera before allegedly heading off to blow himself up in an attack.
The video also claims the bombing of the Baghdad headquarters of the United Nations last August, which killed 22 people, including UN special representative Sergio Vieira de Mello.
It shows footage of Prime Minister Iyad Allawi, with a purported audio-message from Zarqawi threatening to kill him. Headscarf-wearing men from Saudi Arabia, Syria and Libya quote from the Koran and rail against the West before the camera cuts to the scene of an attack.
The video criticizes the US military for the Abu Ghraib prison scandal, which saw guards beat and sexually humiliate Iraqis, and seems set to use the fiasco as a recruiting tool.
The film flashes a picture of an Iraqi detainee, shrouded in a black hood, with electrodes attached to his naked body as a voice drones: "Abu Ghraib prison. Whenever I remember our free brothers kept inside the crusaders' prisons ... I feel the earth turning and I promise God to seek vengeance on every hand which participated in performing the chapters of this conspiracy. "The speaker insults the Iraqi police and lashes out and vows holy war.
"They're recruited outside the country, they're taken to safe houses across the border and they're brought in," said Time magazine's Michael Ware, an investigative journalist who received a copy of the video from "known Zarqawi sources".
"Global jihad has come here and hijacked the resistance and Islamised it," he added. "Six months ago they were saying they want an Iraqi government, now they want an Islamic state and Shariat." -AFP
