"TO CLOSE WITH AND DESTROY THE ENEMY"

The phrase above is a part of the mission statement of the US Military. Good job, guys.

U.S. military forces continued their campaign to eradicate the al Qaeda-linked terror group commanded by Abu Musab Zarqawi yesterday, launching a "precision strike" on a safe house used by his group in Fallujah.

Four people were reported killed in the airstrike — the second in four days — that set off loud explosions and flattened a building in the violently anti-American city.

Brig. Gen. Mark Kimmitt, spokesman for U.S. forces, said the air raid was based on "multiple confirmations of actionable intelligence" that Zarqawi's group was using the building as a headquarters.

"Wherever and whenever we find elements of the Zarqawi network, we will attack them," Kimmitt said...

Yesterday's airstrike took place at 10:30 p.m., about five hours after the beheaded body of South Korean hostage Kim Sun-il was discovered by U.S. troops on a highway between Fallujah and Baghdad.

Zarqawi's group claimed responsibility for that atrocity as well as the beheading of American hostage Nick Berg last month.

And, as we see here, there is more than good reason, as Zarqawi proclaims he is trying to kill the Iraqi Prime Minister:

An audiotape posted on an Islamic website Wednesday in the name of Iraq's Al-Qaeda-linked terror chief Abu Mussab al-Zarqawi threatens to kill Iraqi interim prime minister Iyad Allawi.

"Allawi ... you have escaped many times, without knowing it, from well organised ambushes that we laid," says the voice.

"But we pledge to go all the way without giving up so that you will meet the same fate as Ezzedine Salim," head of the now dissolved Governing Council who was assassinated in a Baghdad suicide car bombing on May 17.

The purported recording by Zarqawi, who heads the Tawhid wa al-Jihad (Unification and Holy War) group, branded Iraqis who cooperate with the US-led occupying forces "the symbols of evil, infidel imams, the sign of betrayal. You are hypocrites."