More Like This
AP’s Todd Pitman, who did great work when he was embedded with U.S. forces in the storming of al-Sadr’s Mahdi Army positions in Najaf in 2004, is with 1st Cav in Diyala and doing it again.
As Ray Robison points out, actual meaningful, no-nonsense Iraq war coverage out of the AP, providing evidence of remarkable things. Al Qaeda is comprised of terrorists. The locals hate them and want us to help get rid of them. It takes troops, lots of them, to accomplish this. The locals are grateful when we do this:
For months, al-Qaida turned a part of one Baqubah neighborhood into an insurgent fiefdom that American and Iraqi forces were too undermanned to tackle — a startling example of the terror group’s ability to thrive openly in some places outside Baghdad even as U.S.-led forces struggle to regain control in the capital.
U.S. forces took back the entire Tahrir neighborhood during a weeklong operation that wrapped up Sunday in Baqubah, a city 35 miles northeast of Baghdad that al-Qaida declared last year the capital of its self-styled Islamic caliphate.
Though the operation was a success — it forced the guerrillas to either flee or melt into the population — soldiers say the extremists are likely to pop up anywhere else that’s short on American firepower.
Hence the surge. It’s about denying the enemy safe havens, it’s about killing the enemy, it’s about freeing local people from the threat the enemy poses to them, to Iraq’s future and to the future of the region. And it works.
When U.S. forces began pouring into the embattled district last week, residents said it was the first time they’d seen significant numbers of coalition troops since last fall. U.S. troops set up a combat outpost in northern Tahrir several months ago.
But to the south, residents recounted watching helplessly as masked fighters came and went freely in past months, piling weapons into the back of vehicles and taking over the homes of Shiites who had either fled or been killed.
“We were terrorized,” said one man. “We wondered, Where is the government? Why have they forgotten us? Why does nobody come here to help?”
Baqubah has been wracked by violence for years. But insecurity has skyrocketed since late last year, partly because Sunni militants fleeing Baghdad’s security crackdown have sought refuge here.
… The battle for Baqubah picked up in mid-March.
U.S. commanders rushed in Stryker infantry battalion which helped clear, and eventually calm, the southern district of Buhriz, once the city’s most violent area. While American forces fought there and in Old Baqouba, they watched neighboring Tahrir spin out of control.
Parsons said video from an unmanned aerial drone last month showed suspected al-Qaida militants searching vehicles at a checkpoint. They held back from destroying it, choosing to “track them to see where they were going, where they lived,” Parsons said.
Then, for eight days in early April, al-Qaida battled fellow insurgents from the nationalist 1920 Revolution Brigades, who residents said were trying to resist the terror group’s bid for control. The nationalist fighters ran out of ammunition and fled.
With the district firmly in al-Qaida’s hands, local leaders and sheiks called on American and Iraqi soldiers for help.
U.S. forces first sent road-clearing teams into southern Tahrir April 22. Insurgents fired mortars and popped out of windows with rocket launchers, destroying three de-mining robots. Tanks and infantry blasted surrounding buildings, killing more than a dozen attackers.
The next day, Parsons moved three of his platoons into central Tahrir on foot. All three came under fire. The day ended with a 30-minute firefight at dusk in which rounds ripped through palm groves. Apache helicopters shot Hellfire missiles at a house insurgents had fled to, lighting the sky in thunderous blasts.
Fighting eased afterward. Soon, previously empty streets were teeming with crowds of people who shook soldiers’ hands as they passed.
This is why the military, rather than having its bureaucrats trying to figure out how to muzzle its soldiers, needs to put them to work trying to figure out how to get more embeds in there.
Posted by Jules Crittenden at 9:13 am on Saturday, May 5, 2007
3 Responses to “More Like This”
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May 5th, 2007 at 10:08 am
Al Qaeda is comprised of terrorists. The locals hate them and want us to help get rid of them. It takes troops, lots of them, to accomplish this. The locals are grateful when we do this
I don’t know. It just bore repeating.
May 5th, 2007 at 1:13 pm
Harry Reid was unavailable for comment about this crushing American defeat.
March 16th, 2008 at 1:23 pm
The problem is, Jules, from your own. For every decent, good and honest journo in the AO, there’s a whiner like that retard that outed himself as a jerkoff in his blog entry regarding mean American soldiers at the green zone gate. This same jerkoff that proudly proclaimed his preconceived guilt of US forces in an atrocity accusation and was only in the AO to pick up back ground color (his own words).
And that piece of treasonous filth from Time that operated as nothing more than a distributor and legitimizer of an enemy black propaganda op in creating the Haditha fight as the new “Iraq My Lie” (misspelling intended).
And, lets not forget the mind numbing degree of idiocy of that Fox News crew… Jeraldo, iirc, that accompanied an infantry foot patrol in Afghanistan. Remember that one? High threat area. Expected enemy contact. The troops set up a position, waited for nightfall to get real dark. Moved under cover of darkness, real quietly, to their actual night position… and the mind numbingly stupid, completely clueless, totally incapable of dealing with actual functional reality piece of retarded shit of a journo fired up his big ol’ bright lights to do a “live shot”. Completely compromised the troops.
The problem is Jules… your industry does have good, honest, integrity driven folk in it, but they give the impression of being the rare exception. Most that get acclaim and access to production are so completely worthless that your industry as a whole is now competing with lawyers and politicos as the most universally despised and hated.