Mass Grave Found

In the Anbar Province of Western Iraq where we do most our work, there is a lot of open rural area and a lot of farmers and ranchers. One particular area in between Ramadi and Fallujah is the Lake Thar Thar region. In Anbar a major freeway connects Baghdad to the cities of Fallujah and Ramadi on the way to Iraq's western border with Jordan and Syria. From this freeway there is a major road which runs north along Lake Thar Thar on the way to Samarra and Tikrit in Iraq's northwestern Salahuddin Province. Given that Samarra is one of Iraq's holiest Shia cities actually populated mostly by Sunnis there is natural tension. Additionally, Tikrit was Saddam Hussein's birthplace and is also a Sunni stronghold. This region has always been a hot bed of insurgent activity since late 2004. Over the course of the last 2 years, especially after the major Marine Corps offensives in Fallujah and Ramadi, most of the insurgents from the "Sunni Triangle" and the whole western Anbar province have been pushed out, most have fled north to the Salahuddin province (an Army area!). As the Army has fought them in the cities of Samarra and Tikrit, the insurgents have all ended up in this rural region between the two provinces near Lake Thar Thar. Thus, it is no surprise that this north-running road has been riddled with IED attacks and the Iraqi Police don't dare spend much time in the area. This is where our first assignment upon entering Iraq came! In order to secure the road for safe transportation for us and civilians, the plan was to place a checkpoint along this road between two small combat outposts.

Task Force Military Police watches over Golden land
http://www.marines.mil/units/hqmc/Pages/2007/OCTContentSorted15.aspx

The checkpoint would be operated by local Iraqi Police based mostly out of Ramadi (30 minutes away). Well, just like all good plans, it didn't work. The problem? Nobody forecast the Iraqi Police response to this assignment-abandon post! It doesn't take a very smart man to decide that they don't want to spend the night at a place in the middle of the countryside where mortars are launched on them continually accompanied by small arms attacks and daily IED blasts! So the plan was modified, now a platoon worth of Marines would stay with the police day and night to help them feel safe and mostly to make sure they don't abandon post. The IHP or IP's as we call them (Iraqi Highway Patrol and Iraqi Police, respectively) would run the checking of vehicles and local patrols, we would tag along as necessary and mostly provide a constant observing eye (overwatch) and respond to any threats as necessary. For the first month IED's went from daily to weekly and machine gun attacks from 500 meters turned into mortar attacks from 2K. The engineers built earthen walls around the compound and huts for the police to sleep in and overall it kept insurgents from moving south of the Thar Thar region and fleeing into Ramadi. This enabled the Army to the north to pin down lots of groups hiding out in the rural areas and flush them out. While operating at this outpost we have seen lots of hostile activity, from IED attacks against us and civilians, to incoming mortar fire, to hostile machine gun fire, insurgents are definately vying for a piece of this region. Luckily our heavily armored vehicles and strong defensive posture have kept us safe and no one has been harmed or injured. One truck had a machine gun bullet weld itself to the armor plate due to the heat and velocity from the impact.


A lot of intel can be gathered from civilians passing through the checkpoint. One day we received multiple reports of insurgents who had taken innocent civilians hostage in an effort to find out who in the community had been informants for the IP's about the whereabouts of insurgents. Supposedly these civilians had been held in an underground shipping container buried a few miles north of us. After verifying this intel with enough of the locals we leaped into action hoping to save some lives and thwart the efforts of the bad guys. Upon traveling north to the nearest Army outpost we learned that we were too late. A few days previous they had recovered the shipping container full of blindfolded and handcuffed corpses.

http://www.mnf-iraq.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=15075&Itemid=128
http://afp.google.com/article/ALeqM5i4kR9S0llrozRn2RiLMpz7QykrGw
http://www.belfasttelegraph.co.uk/breaking-news/world/middle-east/article3133307.ece
http://www.channel4.com/news/articles/world/more+bodies+found+in+mass+grave/1020252

Apparently the terrorist insurgents had been terrorizing locals who cooperated with Iraqi Police. It is unfortunate that these Iraqis had to suffer so much for the sake of their community and their freedoms. Yet despite this, hords of locals continued to loyally assist us and Iraqi Police in the hunt for insurgents in the area. I am convinced that given enough time for economic stabilization and normalization in the country, these people will ferociously defend their liberty. They have sacraficed so much and continue to sacrafice so much more. The last thing we must do is turn our backs on them now. They are doing so well by themselves knowing that we are there to back them up if things get too hard to handle.