MASS suicide by soldiers in iraq!!

this is some fucked up shit if its verifiable.
i have a few questions about it.
the first and foremost is were they all just getting high and did too much or was it actually a suicide pact? how do they know it was suicide?
of course if the headline read 21 soldiers OD in iraq 16 dead it would still be just as disturbing..

http://www.presstv.com/detail.aspx?id=68821&sectionid=351020201

16 US troops commit suicide in Iraq
Mon, 08 Sep 2008 12:48:50 GMT

Sixteen US troops from the 57th Unit of the Airborne Division have committed suicide inside a military base in Iraq, security sources say.

Iraqi security sources have revealed that 21 US troops had committed suicide inside a former Iraqi air force base 27 days ago, Fars News Agency reported on Monday.

According to the sources, the 21 troops were treated in a hospital but only five soldiers have survived and they are in a critical condition. Security officials said they used potent narcotics to kill themselves.

The troops' motivations for suicide are not known but according to Iraqi sources the servicemen belonged to the 57th Unit of the US Airborne Division that was behind the massacre of several Iraqi families-- mostly women and children-- in northern Baghdad, said Ali al-Baghdadi an Iraqi security official.

The suicides took place in the soldiers' dormitory after the dinner time.
"The bodies of the US troops became misshapen such a way that they looked like 5000-year mummies," said a witness.

According to Iraqi officials' estimates, some 600 US troops, including senior officers, have committed suicide in Iraq since the invasion of the country in 2003. Half of the suicide attempts have been successful.

SB/DA

 

Hmmm , if those were 16 suicides , then the Easter Bunny smoked John F Kennedy.

Like they weren't gonna spill the beans on anyone...

 

like i said, seems fishy. someone on another board said this was translated from a iranian newspaper and it does read as if it were translated..
i havent tried to source it or even verify it as of yet,i was hoping odon would for me as usual..

 

iraq-war.ru gives some account of the "un-Americanised" view of stuff.
There's some good on the net , but there's some shit as well , so ..?

 

well i fished a bit,seems press tv is supposedly iranian government controlled..

and that is the ONLY source i could find doing a quick google search reporting this.
on another board someone claimed the 57th airborne division wasnt even in iraq..
but again i havent verified that either..

 

No listing of a 57th airborne here:
http://www.army.mil/a-z/


found an AF 57th
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/57th_Air_Division_(United_States)

 

so its looking like its BS propaganda.
but is there ANY truth in it at all?
that is the question..

 

According to Iran, the holocost never happened, so I would definitely be wary of anything coming from there.

 

well there are LOTS of 57th units in the military,just not a airborne unit.
could they have just gotten the division wrong?
im not convinced either way at the moment but i am leaning towards calling bullshit..

 

If it is true, I wouldn't be too terribly surprised. Those soldiers are being used right up until there is nothing left of their poor minds. They are not machines.

 

yeah its a damn shame. so far this year there have been 62 suicides confirmed and 31 others being investigated as suicide by active duty military.

add to that the rash of soldiers killing there wives and girl friends this year. then just yesterday i ready where a soldier at fort hood killed his commanding officer then himself. i would say its a pretty convincing argument that they are not properly addressing the mental health issues of our military..

scariest part of that to me is the sheer numbers of law enforcement in this country that have been deployed to iraq at least once in the last 5 years..
theres gotta be a lot of cops on the streets suffering from severe PTSD.. and thats scary as hell..

 

My younger brother left for Iraq last Wednesday....

 

im truly sorry to here that..

 

I guess its more of a crime to kill Iraqi by US troops then it would be when they come home and kill civillians so they wait to get back home to do it. You know "War Crimes" and all.

 

It's just such a really weird feeling, I can't stop thinking about him and what he is doing... He got to come home for two weeks in June, he told me a bunch of stuff that the army told him and other things, it was pretty crazy.. He told me that a couple people he knew who when they went on leave they ended up killing themselves, and then some woman there ended up shooting herself basically right in front of him because she was pregnant and ended up having a miscarriage.. Over the two years he has been in the army, he just hasn't been the same, and I know when he comes back from Iraq he will be a different person...I won't see him for over a year...

I feel extreme guilt because I told him to call me from the airport so I could talk to him before he left, I got caught up at work for something stupid and got home and had a message and missed his call...And I wished I would have left work sooner or something so I could have talked to him...I now have this message on my machine from him that I don't want to delete...

I couldn't agree with you more...

 

That screams BS to me. You say this was translated, but this sentence is odd. How long would those bodies have been laying there? couldn't have been that long. I know its hot over there, but jesus, you don't mummify a body in what, at most 12 hours? that these soliders were unknown to be dead?

 

These are not unusual happenings at all. It happens during and immediately after every military action. Not everyone is cut out to kill people. When I worked auxiliary support, a senior crew chief in SAC learned that his aircraft had dropped conventional bombs and possibly killed hundreds of people. The next day he was "accidentally" ingested by one of his aircraft's engines.

Yeah, a guy who works 22 years on B-52s all of a sudden forgets there's this giant vacuum with a slice and dice machine attached to it and gets too close. Right. He spent all those years maintaining airplanes and the first time one of them is used to kill he couldn't handle it. And it's all kept hush hush so you the public doesn't know that morale is lower than recruitment rates.

Madness.

But yeah, that story smells of BS.

 

Thats totally understandable. But I'm not sure this article is telling the story exactly as it happened, if it even happened at all. I can totally see how it would be a time where the suicide rate would be extremely high.


But this article? this article is probably propaganda.

 

Sorry, I short edited after your previous post,

 

the only "reputable" *cough* news outlet to pick it up is al jazeera..

like i said,i wonder if theres ANY truth to it.
its been my experience that there is almost always a little truth in even the wildest "news" stories..