Monday, June 16, 2008
Alsammarae, ready to rejoin Allawi's political coalition, calls for more insurgent attacks
Aiham Alsammarae in Baghdad, 2002 or 2003


Nibras Kazimi, a visiting scholar at the Hudson Institute in Washington, D.C., and a contributing editor for the New York Sun, provides an update on the whereabouts of convicted Iraqi-American Aiham Alsammarae, the former classmate of convicted Syrian-American political fixer, Antoin "Tony" Rezko, who is the patron and personal real estate fairy to Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.).

Writing in his Talisman Gate blog, Kazimi commented June 15, 2008, "There’s so much vileness here that I really don’t know what to mop up first":



Ayham Alsammarae, Iraq’s slimy ex-Minister of Electricity under the Bremer and Allawi administrations, who had escaped from an Iraqi prison by hiring an American security company to break him out back in December 2006, has resurfaced in the Jordanian capital Amman where he gave a press conference today saying, among other things, that he hoped that the insurgency in Iraq “would continue [against U.S. occupation] and avenges the Iraqi people.”

Alsammarae, an Iraqi-American Chicagoan, added during remarks carried by Radio Sawa (Arabic link) that he had contributed the maximum allowable of $2,300 to Barack Obama’s campaign. But there’s another Obama link to Alsammarae: while serving as electricity minister Alsammarae had been involved in brokering deals in the Iraqi electricity sector for Antoin Rezko, Obama’s long-term friend and patron. Rezko is the Syrian-American hustler who was convicted of fraud in an Illinois court on the day that Obama secured the Democratic nomination. [...]

In an astounding and blatantly treasonous assertion for a U.S. citizenship holder, he stated that “the [insurgency] in Iraq is a legitimate resistance [movement] and it is against occupation and any resistance in the world against occupation is considered legitimate, and I hope that the [insurgency] continues and avenges the Iraqi people and I look forward to expanding its political agenda.”


Kazimi reported that Alsammarae, who "allegedly fled Chicago because the authorities were going to get him on tax evasion," "claimed that he was on his way back to Iraq after being let off the legal hook under the amnesty law and that he is set to re-join Ayad Allawi’s political coalition."

Now, he wants more insurgent attacks on U.S. troops. What a slime-bucket, but he’s the same slime-bucket that I’ve always thought he was, from the days before the war when he opportunistically hopped onto the anti-Saddam bandwagon when it began revving up for real.

I had seen part of Alsammarrae’s General Intelligence Directorate file back in Baghdad, and he’s identified as a snitch that had worked for the Saddam regime while he was a student in the 1970s, reporting on the political activities and utterances of fellow Iraqi students then pursuing their degrees in the UK.


On the matter of Alsammarrae's campaign contributions to Sen. Obama, Kazimi wrote "I wonder how Obama would react to a paycheck and an endorsement from ex-con buddy of Rezko’s who is now braying for more American soldiers to be killed."