The Return of the Ripper

The bodies of young women began to appear in Basra six weeks ago. First there was a group of three, then two, and last week the corpses of six were found, each victim riddled by gunshots and left on the street to die in pools of blood. The Iraqi police say they have no strong leads. But it is an open secret in the port city why they died.

They worked as prostitutes and their killers are widely believed to be one of the city's armed militias. In recent months they have become increasingly violent in their campaign to enforce a strict interpretation of the social code of Islam.

The Telegraph's described the local citizenry's reaction to the 21st century equivalent of Jack the Ripper's campaign of terror.

No one wanted to talk about the details of the murders. "I do not want to be killed," one man said. But another told how he had been in a house of "belly dancers" recently in order to drink alcohol - an illicit activity in Basra - when a dozen masked men broke down the front door. "They started hitting the girls and shooting against the walls and breaking the furniture," he said.  "They bought boxes of vodka and beer outside to smash them. One of the girls ran outside and she had stones thrown at her. "Everyone in the place was too frightened to help."

Then they described the British Army's. "The British, who are responsible for the security of the sector, have refused to intervene, saying that it is a domestic matter of political and law and order issues. Political parties have been largely silent." These murders are taking place in part of Iraq that has virtually been untouched by that fountain of all evil, American occupation and the insurgency. It underscores the importance of organizing resistance cells within the Islamic community to fight the internal oppressors of Islam, a point made in an earlier Belmont Club post. Unless people can be made willing to resist the murder of their daughters, they can hardly be expected to help the infidel escape his fate.

It is not enough, as the British Army has done, to look on at this mayhem from the outside in, blinded by the illusion that these executions are just one more quaint ethnic practice that the guilt-ridden West has no right to criticize; that it is one more expression of identity that one is obliged to tolerate, whether these sanguinary events happen in British-patrolled Basra or the British city of Leeds.The wellsprings of terrorism arise from certain tendencies within Islamic society itself; and unless the weeds are pruned the flowers will never grow, until we find ourselves alone at midnight in the Garden of Evil.