Iraq insurgents wanted Bush to win elections, say released French hostages
(DPA)
24 December 2004
PARIS - An insurgent guarding two French hostages told them his group supported President George W. Bush in the US November election because his policies help Islamic extremism expand, the French daily Le Figaro reported Friday.
Former hostage Georges Malbrunot, 41, told the paper that sometime between September 26 and October 15, he asked his guard if he wanted Bush or Democratic Party challenger John Kerry to win the US presidential election.
“We want Bush,” his guard told him. “We want Bush because with him, the American soldiers will stay in Iraq, and this way we will be able to expand.”
Malbrunot, a journalist employed by Le Figaro, said the guard also told him that the American attack on the Taliban regime in Afghanistan following the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on the United States enabled Islamic extremism “to spread throughout the world”.
“We are now present in 60 countries around the world,” the hooded guard said. “And our aim is to overthrow Arab rulers and establish a caliphate from Andelusia to the borders of China.”
In his description of his 124-day captivity in the hands of the Islamic Army in Iraq, Malbrunot said that he and the other French hostage, Radio France Internationale reporter Christian Chesnot, ”discovered little by little that we are really on planet (Osama) bin Laden”.
Malbrunot said that there were repeated references among the kidnappers to “Sheik Osama” and that the group holding them had an Iraqi agenda” but also “an international and jihadist agenda”.
When he asked his guard what its priorities were, the man replied, ”There are two. Saudi Arabia, Egypt ... but we know all Arab leaders are traitors. None is truly Islamic.”
Malbrunot and Chesnot were kidnapped August 20 while travelling to the holy Shiite city of Najaf. They were released to French secret service agents near Baghdad on Tuesday.
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