Terrorists assault Abu Ghraib prison, free 500-plus senior Al Qaeda militants

[Little-Acorn]

How many Americans died to put these Al Qaeda prisoners into that jail? Most of them had received death sentences.

A complete waste. Now we get to do it all over again. Maybe.

Maybe the liberals were right: We should have just let them all go. The end result would have been the same.

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Al Qaeda militants flee Iraq jail in violent mass break-out | Reuters

Al Qaeda militants flee Iraq jail in violent mass break-out

By Kareem Raheem and Ziad al-Sinjary
BAGHDAD/MOSUL, Iraq
Mon Jul 22, 2013 3:06pm EDT

(Reuters) - Hundreds of convicts, including senior members of al Qaeda, broke out of Iraq's Abu Ghraib jail as comrades launched a military-style assault to free them, authorities said on Monday. The deadly raid on the high-security jail happened as Sunni Muslim militants are gaining momentum in their insurgency against the Shi'ite-led government that came to power after the U.S. invasion to oust Saddam Hussein.

Suicide bombers drove cars packed with explosives to the gates of the prison on the outskirts of Baghdad on Sunday night and blasted their way into the compound, while gunmen attacked guards with mortars and rocket-propelled grenades. Other militants took up positions near the main road, fighting off security reinforcements sent from Baghdad as several militants wearing suicide vests entered the prison on foot to help free the inmates.

Ten policemen and four militants were killed in the ensuing clashes, which continued until Monday morning, when military helicopters arrived, helping to regain control. By that time, hundreds of inmates had succeeded in fleeing Abu Ghraib, the prison made notorious a decade ago by photographs showing abuse of prisoners by U.S. soldiers.

"The number of escaped inmates has reached 500, most of them were convicted senior members of al Qaeda and had received death sentences," Hakim Al-Zamili, a senior member of the security and defense committee in parliament, told Reuters.

 

[waltky]

Jailbreak!...

Jihadists focus on prison breaks
July 31st, 2013 > Editor's note: Peter Bergen is CNN's national security analyst, a director at the New America Foundation and the author of "Manhunt: The Ten-Year Search for bin Laden -- From 9/11 to Abbottabad." Bailey Cahall is a research associate at the New America Foundation.

In an attack orchestrated by a Pakistani Taliban commander, around 250 prisoners, most of them militants, were freed this week at the central prison in Dera Ismail Khan in northwestern Pakistan. The commander, Ahmed Rashid, had been freed a year earlier, this time at the central jail in Bannu, where 150 Taliban fighters stormed the facility and released nearly 400 prisoners -- Pakistan's largest jailbreak. Both prison breaks happened in the stronghold of the Pakistani Taliban, Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province, which borders North and South Waziristan, and both were conducted with a high degree of sophistication.

This week's attack unfolded in multiple stages, beginning with cutting the prison's electricity, detonating bombs that had been planted around the facility to breach its external wall, and ambushing the security forces that rushed to the scene. Once the militants overwhelmed the guards, they used loudspeakers to contact and locate specific prisoners, freeing them from their cells with hand grenades. At least 13 people died in the attack. Pakistani authorities launched a search operation for the missing prisoners, but few have been recaptured. The others have simply melted away into the mountains.

Jihadist militants have been breaking people out of prison across the Middle East and South Asia for years, some with significant consequences for the United States and its allies. A 2006 prison break in the Yemeni capital, Sanaa, led to the creation of al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, one of al Qaeda's most virulent affiliates, the one that recruited the "underwear bomber" who nearly brought down Northwest Airlines Flight 253 over Detroit on Christmas Day 2009. During the 2006 prison break, 23 inmates escaped through a 460-foot tunnel into a nearby mosque. Two of the escapees went on to become the leader and deputy leader of al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula.

In 2008 and again in 2011, the Afghan Taliban led attacks on the Sarposa prison in Kandahar in southern Afghanistan that freed an astounding number of militants, around 1,700. Like the prison attacks by the Taliban in Pakistan, the Kandahar plots showed sophisticated planning. In the aftermath of the 2011 breach, Afghan officials discovered an intricate network of tunnels under the jail, equipped with electrical and ventilation systems. But perhaps no group has made prison breaks an organizational focus more than al Qaeda in Iraq. On July 21, 2012, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, al Qaeda in Iraq's leader, announced the "Breaking the Walls" campaign, a yearlong effort to release his group's prisoners.

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