Wednesday, November 28, 2007

All quiet on the Western Front

Anbar Province is the Western Front of the war in Iraq if you would still call it a war with fronts in the classical sense. However, this front is quite quiet. Life in and around Fallujah Iraq is very well described by this accurate portrayal, worth a read: http://www.michaeltotten.com/archives/001542.html

Includes great pictures too.

Friday, November 09, 2007

Army screw up or unfortunate incident?

So while operating in the Lake Thar Thar region, we are often left in the dark as to what the Army is doing just to our north. You would think that with technology and organization improvements of a modern era a quick phone call or comprehensive intel collaboration were easy. Well, it is. The problem is the individuals in the middle responsible for making it happen. They are often not quite competent enough to multi-task like that. Hey its a combat zone, some people have a lot on their plate. One particular night our company is manning the highway checkpoint and we get a call not to travel north of a certain grid line. A few hours later a rainstorm of fire descends from the sky in the distance. A few helicopters and gunships are in action! The next morning our company is called in to assist in setting up a security perimeter for the Army at the location of the previous nights' assault. The scene we enter is the demise of 34 Iraqis: 19 Adult Men (all quoted by official sources as either Al Qaeda operatives, insurgents, or both), 9 Women, and 6 Children (cited by news sources as 15 Civilians). Of course the Adult Male survivors were 'suspected insurgents'. How fortunate that they were able to kill all the ACTUAL insurgents and leave just the SUSPECTED ones living! I guess the Army Helo's have less discrimination when it comes to civilians.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/10/12/AR2007101200590_pf.html

What am I saying here? Well, I am saying the Army is sloppy. Also, when were they going to tell us they had been tracking a known Al Qaeda cell for weeks just miles away from us? Thanks for the heads up. It turns out the story was they had tracked a small group of Al Qaeda planners from another meeting location to this house. When the Army came upon the house they received gun fire from multiple persons in the house. The Army cordoned off the area, returned fire, and called in the Helos for superior firepower. While there was plenty of spent casings in the house, it hardly seemed enough for an air strike. Perhaps they could have used their armored vehicles to create a siege line from a safe distance and let the bad guys run out of gas. Then perhaps they would have had 19 captured insurgents with all the intel they inevitably died with. I am no war planner, and certainly this incident is not the result of failings at higher levels (Generals, President, etc.), but I think sometimes the Army is dumb, and sometimes there are incompetent officers out there doing a bad job. Luckily, the great majority of men are doing an outstanding job. It is too bad seemingly innocent women and children (innocent by virtue of their sex/age) had to die, but the insurgent men made that decision. They fired upon coalition forces with lethal force as if to use the women and children as a screen or shield to hide behind. Certainly they were bad guys. Most farmers and ranchers in this area do not and are not allowed to stockpile Russian made military grade automatic weapons with enough ammunition to cause the Army to call in an air strike.

http://www.iht.com/articles/2007/10/12/america/iraq.php
http://www.evtv1.com/player.aspx?itemnum=9349
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/13/world/middleeast/13iraq.html?ex=1349928000&en=d2a1b1380409154e&ei=5088&partner=rssnyt&emc=rss
http://www.ireland.com/newspaper/breaking/2007/1012/breaking1.html?via=rel
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2007/10/13/MNUNSPBFC.DTL

Tuesday, November 06, 2007

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.