Wow, I totally predicted this a few weeks ago. "Imagine the outcry from the left if the terrorists started strapping bombs onto dogs!" I said. And now... terrorists are employing "canine bombs", and the left and their terrorist sympathizers are none-too-pleased.
Some Iraqis are horrified by the ethics of dragging the animal world into a human conflict."How can they use these lovely pets for criminal and murderous acts?" asked Rasha Khairir, 25, an employee of a Baghdad stock brokerage. "A poor dog can't refuse what they are doing with him because he can't think and decide."
Despite a common prejudice in the Muslim world against dogs, which are considered unclean, even the most virulent clerical opponents of the U.S. presence in Iraq have decried the use of canines as proxies in the war.
Abdel Salam Kubaisi, a spokesman for the Muslim Scholars Assn., a hard-line Sunni Arab clerical organization sympathetic to insurgents, called the practice un-Islamic. "Our religion does not permit us to hurt animals," he said, "neither by using them as explosive devices nor in any other manner."
But apparently some terror groups aren't as concerned with the alleged teachings of Islam.
"Dogs have been used in many areas by insurgents throughout Iraq" to carry explosive devices, said Noori Noori, inspector-general at the Interior Ministry. "They used mentally retarded people for operations during the elections, so why wouldn't they use animals?"Last year in Ramadi, in the vast desert west of the capital, insurgents dispatched a booby-trapped donkey toward a U.S.-run checkpoint around sunset. "As one of the soldiers tried to stop it, the donkey exploded," said resident Mohammed Yas, 45. The only casualty was the donkey.
Too bad the "hardline clerics" -- i.e., terrorists who make others carry the bombs -- aren't as concerned about human life as they are about the lives of dogs. I'm just waiting for PETA to chime in; oh please, please let them say something condemning the use of dogs as weapons.
