TMV Quoting the NY Times:
It was the first time that private citizens are known to have retaliated successfully against insurgents. There have been anecdotal reports of residents shooting at attackers after a bombing or assassination. But the gun battle today erupted in full view of half a dozen witnesses, including a Justice Ministry official who lives nearby.
Despite what the Times claims, it seems pretty clear that this isn't the first well documented case of this type of thing (see this for example).
Tangent: What exactly makes something anecdotal or non-anecdotal for the Times? By definition all news reporting is anecdotal. Maybe they mean that everything that the Times didn't bother to publish before isn't real in the same way what they choose to call "news" is real. It's interesting. Whatever language they are speaking over at the New York Times it isn't exactly English.
Back to our original story.
Joe Gandleman from TMV offers these thoughts:
Basically, what this seems to indicate is that Iraqis are starting to get their political feet on the ground and feel a sense of ownership in their new society. And they are defending it against those who want to either turn the clock back two years to The Bad 'Ol Days of Sadaam...and against those who would like to turn it back a few centuries, to be like the late, unlamented Afghani Taliban regime. Bad news for anti-democratic forces...but a suggestion that the U.S. is now closer to the day when the Iraqis will be running their whole country themselves.
I hope he is right.
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