Christiaan Briggs stated for the record:
On 27 Aug 2004, at 7:15 pm, Poor, Edmund W wrote:
Who is the desecrator:
- the armed men who take refuge inside the mosque and use it as a base
to attack enemies; or,
- those who attack the armed men inside the mosque?
In terms of established law it seems you already have your answer. In terms of morality, when you're the armed men and women of a government that has committed the supreme international war crime (according to the Nuremberg Tribunal), a war of aggression, and illegally occupies that nation on spurious justification I think those attacking the men inside the mosque could be regarded as the desecrators.
In your loathing of all things "Western" you are ignoring nearly a century of international law declaring the exact opposite of what you think. The moment the first set of armed men occupied the mosque, it lost all protection under international law, and the attackers became justified in attacking the mosque. (The question of whether their presence /near/ the mosque was justified is moot.)