G
GREGG .
Guest
Leyendo esta madrugada el New York Times, aun sacando brillo mis
heridas y tratando de 'evaluar' que hicimos bien o mal en Iraq
desde el punto de vista tactico, veo, que como entonces -cuando
servi mi pais en ese hervidero de hormigas-, aunque fuimos criticados
por algunos, inclusive la prensa internacional, por haber actuado muy
duramente en Fallujah en Noviembre de 2004 - mi ultima accion militar
en la region antes de volver a los EEUU, tanto los 'liederes tribales'
como la mayoria de los miembros coherentes de la region, mantienen
y hasta PIDEN que las FFAA de los EEUU actuen tacticamente como
nosotros lo hicimos en la oportunidad de literalmente "aplanar'
Fallujah en el enfrentamiento militar mas cruento y definiente que
yo haya tenido memoria en ios anios militares.
Hoy... meses han pasado, mi pierna aun me molesta del disparo
recibido... pero poco a poco se disipan esas dudas del momento,
cuando las criticas solo sirven para nublar las mentes decididas
a un objetivo concreto y sin tanta politiqueria correctiva.
Ayer fue Fallujah... hoy, Tal Afar... solo que, esta estrategia de
'sostenimiento politico' que adoptan los EEUU hoy, NO ha de
funcionar... hay que 'escuchar a los lideres tribales'... yo, nosotros
lo hicimos... y en esas bases actuamos. Con absouluto prejudicialismo
contra las fuerzas terroristas de Iran y Siria que estaban emplazadas
en Fallujah... creyeron que podrian... no fue asi. La leccion de todo
esto es olo una: al terrorista hay que arrasarlo sin consideraciones
laterales... sin ardor de estomago, sin tregua. sin opcion a retirada... cerrarle
los flancos y destruirlo. Mi exeriencia en Fallujah en 2004, y este
post del New York Times, condirman lo que siempre crei fuese la
mejor deoctrina tactica en estos contextos de accion militar.
No hay otra...
-----------------------------
The New York Times
June 16, 2005
Magnet for Iraq Insurgents Is a Crucial Test of New U.S. Strategy
By RICHARD A. OPPEL Jr.
TAL AFAR, Iraq, June 15 - Nine months ago the American military laid
siege to this city in northwestern Iraq and proclaimed it freed from
the grip of insurgents. Last month, the Americans returned in force -
to reclaim it once again.
After the battle here in September the military left behind fewer than
500 troops to patrol a region twice the size of Connecticut. With so
few troops and the local police force in shambles, insurgents came
back and turned Tal Afar, a dusty, agrarian city of about 200,000
people, into a way station for the trafficking of arms and insurgent
fighters from nearby Syria - and a ghost town of terrorized residents
afraid to open their stores, walk the streets or send their children
to school.
It is a cycle that has been repeated in rebellious cities throughout
Iraq, and particularly those in the Sunni Arab regions west and north
of Baghdad, where the insurgency's roots run deepest.
"We have a finite number of troops," said Maj. Chris Kennedy,
executive officer of the Third Armored Cavalry Regiment, which arrived
in Tal Afar several weeks ago. "But if you pull out of an area and
don't leave security forces in it, all you're going to do is leave the
door open for them to come back. This is what our lack of combat power
has done to us throughout the country. In the past, the problem has
been we haven't been able to leave sufficient forces in towns where
we've cleared the insurgents out."
While officials in Washington say the military has all the troops it
needs, on-the-ground battle commanders in the most violent parts of
Iraq - in cities like Ramadi, Mosul and Mahmudiya - have said
privately that they need more manpower to pacify their areas and keep
them that way.
Now, with the pace of insurgent attacks rising across Iraq and scores
being killed daily in bombings and mass executions, Tal Afar and the
surrounding area is becoming something of a test case for a strategy
to try to break the cycle: using battle-hardened American forces
working in conjunction with tribal leaders to clear out the insurgents
and then leaving behind Iraqi forces to try to keep the peace.
Many tribal sheiks here say they favor an all-out assault to rout the
city's insurgents, but American commanders say a major attack like the
one that leveled Falluja last November is to be avoided almost at all
costs. The bloodshed, destruction of property and alienation of the
Iraqi public is too high a price to pay, they say.
A political solution is best, the Americans said, but fiendishly
difficult, given the tangle of insurgent pressures and tribal
loyalties and divisions.
"If you take all the complexities of Iraq and compressed it into one
city, it is Tal Afar," said the regiment's commander, Col. H. R.
McMaster.
The military's decision to reassign the regiment from the so-called
Triangle of Death south of Baghdad to the region around Tal Afar was
an implicit acknowledgement that it had lost control of the area. The
first troops began arriving in April, and nearly 4,000 were in place
by mid-May.
A Place Frozen in antiestéticar
On arrival here, commanders found a town that was, for all practical
purposes, dead, strangled by the violent insurgents who held it in
their thrall. "Anyone not helping the terrorists can't leave their
homes because they will be kidnapped and the terrorists will demand
money or weapons or make them join them to kill people," said Hikmat
Ameen al-Lawand, the leader of one of Tal Afar's 82 tribes, who said
most of the city is controlled by insurgents. "If they refuse they
will chop their heads off."
Khasro Goran, the deputy provincial governor in Ninewa, which includes
Tal Afar, concurred. "There is no life in Tal Afar," he said in an
interview a week ago. "It is like Mosul a few months ago - a ghost
town." There are more than 500 insurgents in Tal Afar, he said, and
they project a level of antiestéticar and intimidation across the city far in
excess of their numbers. Thoroughfares lined with stores have been
deserted, the storefronts covered with blue metal roll-down gates.
In northeast Tal Afar, a young mother now home-schools her six
children, after a flier posted at their school warned: "If you love
your children, you won't send them to school here because we will kill
them." A neighbor, Muhammad Ameen, will not let his kids play outside.
"Standing out in the open is not a good idea," he said.
Tribes sympathetic to the new Iraqi government have suffered constant
assaults at the hands of insurgents and rival tribes. More than 500
mortars have struck lands belonging to the Al-Sada al-Mousawiyah tribe
since September, said the tribe's leader, Sheik Sayed Abdullah Sayed
Wahab. "All of my tribe are prisoners in their own homes," he says.
"We can't even take our people to the hospital."
At least 40 members of two predominantly Shiite tribes of Turkomen,
the Sada and Jolak, were killed in two car bombings in May. The
perpetrators are believed by American officers to be members of the
predominantly Sunni Arab Qarabash tribe, which they say has strong
ties to Syrian fighters and links to the network of Abu Musab
al-Zarqawi, the Al Qaeda leader in Iraq. "I need someone to hear my
cries for help because we are in a bad situation," said Sheik Wali
al-Jolak in an interview at his compound in southwest Tal Afar, only a
few blocks from the Qarabash neighborhood. He lost 28 tribe members in
the two attacks.
The Tal Afar police force disintegrated last fall, and the few who
remain stay in an ancient hilltop castle, afraid to venture out.
Commanders here caution troops to assume that anyone on the street
dressed as a policeman is an impostor. Insurgents wearing police
uniforms shoot at American helicopters and threaten residents.
Even with the new regiment, the military still lacks troops to
completely patrol the outlying desert and grazing lands, where
insurgents had taken over remote villages, providing sanctuary a short
distance from Mosul, the country's dominant northern city and an
active insurgent hub. Insurgents use irrigation canals to elude
American forces chasing them in armored vehicles that cannot cross the
waterways. Smugglers drive through holes cut in the large berm that
guards the Syrian border. Remote cinderblock farmhouses serve as safe
havens.
At the Rabia border crossing into Syria, several hundred American
soldiers arrived three weeks ago and say they have disrupted the
smuggling of weapons and money. But they doubt there has been any
curtailment yet in the infiltration of foreign fighters. "As far as
foreign fighters coming in from the border control point, I can't say
we've had any impact on that," said Capt. Jason Whitten, the company
commander at Rabia. Commanders say new technology will be installed at
the border crossing shortly to help track travelers and detect false
identification materials.
In its first weeks here, the regiment has pressed sweeps deep into
desert areas that had not seen a large American presence since the
101st Airborne Division left in early 2004. Instead, many areas had
witnessed, at best, only sporadic patrols that had done little to
deter insurgents, commanders say. "Resources are everything in combat,
and when you don't have enough manpower to move around, you have to
pick the places," said Maj. John Wilwerding, executive officer of
Sabre Squadron, a 1,000-strong unit that now oversees Tal Afar.
Two weeks ago more than 1,000 troops from the new regiment poured into
Biaj, a town of 15,000 people about 40 miles southwest of Tal Afar,
where insurgents had destroyed the police station, and the mayor and
the police fled last fall. Soldiers eventually searched every house in
the town, capturing more than a dozen suspected insurgents without a
shot being fired.
Biaj faces a severe water shortage and trash and sewage fill the
streets. But the markets and neighborhoods teem with children who give
passing American patrols waves and a thumbs-up. Indeed, the town
appears to show what happens if there are enough troops to pacify an
area and police it effectively afterward. But commanders plan to
withdraw all but 150 American troops and leave a battalion of about
500 Iraqi soldiers and 200 police officers in Biaj.
Taking Back Tal Afar
In Tal Afar, Lt. Col. Chris Hickey, commander of Sabre Squadron, which
is equipped with tanks, Bradley fighting vehicles and helicopters,
moved quickly to reassert control of strategic sites. Soldiers drove
out insurgents who had taken control of the area around the hospital,
and turned over security there to Iraqi troops.
Similarly, soldiers cleared the main east-west highway, which had been
made impassable by improvised explosive devices. An Iraqi battalion
now patrols the route, and Colonel Hickey is spearheading an effort to
rebuild the police with recruits drawn from tribes and trained in
Jordan.
Insurgents waged heavy assaults against the squadron in the first few
weeks after it arrived but suffered heavy losses while having little
impact on the American troops. Those attacks have declined while
violence against townspeople has increased, Colonel Hickey said.
"We've disrupted the terrorists' network," he said. "But what I have
to overcome is a population too scared to open their stores or step
out on the street."
Tal Afar has little municipal leadership to speak of. American
commanders say the mayor, a Sunni Arab, may have ties to the
insurgency. The police chief - a Shiite dismissed a few days ago for
the second time in as many months - may have been involved in the
abuse or torture of suspects, they say.
Real leadership in Tal Afar lies with the 82 tribal leaders. Angered
by the attacks and emboldened by the enlarged American military
presence here, some sheiks have become outspoken critics of the
insurgency. On June 4, at great risk to their own lives, more than 60
attended a security conference at Al Kasik Iraqi Army base near here.
To the surprise of Iraqi and American commanders who organized the
gathering, many sheiks demanded a Falluja-style military assault to
rid Tal Afar of insurgents and complained that American forces do not
treat terror suspects roughly enough.
Other sheiks said it was better to pursue a political solution. But
sheiks from each point of view accused one another of being unwilling
to identify suspected insurgents. American commanders had planned to
circulate a list of 1,400 people thought to have potential insurgent
connections, seeking verification - or denials - from the sheiks. But
they decided against it because few sheiks would openly affirm or deny
the status of insurgent suspects in front of other Iraqis, Colonel
Hickey said.
Tal Afar's tribes have to bury old grudges for the city to be at
peace, says Brig. Gen. Mohsen Doski, a Kurd who commands a brigade of
2,000 Iraqi troops garrisoned here. "If we continue talking about the
past or what this certain person did or this tribe did, we will stay
in a closed circle," he said. If the city's problems cannot be solved
politically, he said, "We have to do in Tal Afar the same as in
Falluja."
The American regiment's commander, Colonel McMaster, warned the sheiks
at the close of the day-long conference that the insurgents cannot be
defeated unless the tribes work together better. "To an outsider, it
seems there is not a lot of power because there are divisions. That's
exactly what the terrorists want," he said.
In an interview, the colonel said the violence "isn't intertribal" but
a mixture of foreign fighters, Zarqawi loyalists and others working
"to incite chaos, breed antiestéticar and set conditions for them to continue
to operate out of Tal Afar." With the regiment now in place, he added,
"Tal Afar is clearly contested, where before it wasn't."
An Iraqi Fighting Force?
One week ago Tuesday, 1,000 American soldiers and hundreds of Iraqi
troops swept into the insurgency's principal safe haven in Tal Afar,
the Sariya neighborhood, detaining 34 suspected insurgent leaders and
fighters and killing as many as 10 fighters.
Relying on Iraqi troops proved a perversos failure 13 months ago in
Falluja, where Iraqis were put in charge only to see the city come
rapidly under the sway of a Taliban-style terrorist theocracy that had
to be rooted out six months later by the Marines. But American
commanders now maintain that in some places, like Haifa Street, a
former insurgent stronghold in the heart of Baghdad, Iraqi soldiers
are improving.
In Tal Afar, commanders say the new Iraqi troops they work with - two
predominantly Kurdish battalions and one mainly of Shiites from Basra
- have helped immeasurably in identifying insurgents. Capt. Greg
Mitchell, a company commander with Sabre Squadron, said his troops
could not have apprehended so many suspects on Tuesday had Iraqis not
been involved. "They have a much more discerning eye" for clues about
suspicious Iraqis, he said.
Yet American troops also remain wary of Iraqis' tendencies to respond
to an attack by shooting wildly in all directions - a "death blossom,"
as the troops here call it. "They keep their fingers on the trigger
and they'll just shoot without aiming," Command Sgt. Maj. Mark Horsley
warned during the operation Tuesday, as fire rang out.
Last Tuesday, an insurgent gunman wounded an American officer as he
walked through an alley accompanied by Iraqi troops. When the shooting
started, the Iraqis ran back to the street as the gunman continued to
fire at the wounded officer, said Capt. Jesse Sellars, a company
commander here. An American sergeant had to cajole a handful of Iraqis
to return fire in an effort to rescue the officer, who later died.
"They're new soldiers," Major Wilwerding, of Sabre Squadron, said of
the Iraqis who fled. "They're not conditioned yet. They'll get
better."
--------------
Salud,
Gregg
---------------
"This is an age of exhausted whoredom groping for its God."
(James Joyce, Ulisses p.280)
http://www.geocities.com/airborne_col/America.html
heridas y tratando de 'evaluar' que hicimos bien o mal en Iraq
desde el punto de vista tactico, veo, que como entonces -cuando
servi mi pais en ese hervidero de hormigas-, aunque fuimos criticados
por algunos, inclusive la prensa internacional, por haber actuado muy
duramente en Fallujah en Noviembre de 2004 - mi ultima accion militar
en la region antes de volver a los EEUU, tanto los 'liederes tribales'
como la mayoria de los miembros coherentes de la region, mantienen
y hasta PIDEN que las FFAA de los EEUU actuen tacticamente como
nosotros lo hicimos en la oportunidad de literalmente "aplanar'
Fallujah en el enfrentamiento militar mas cruento y definiente que
yo haya tenido memoria en ios anios militares.
Hoy... meses han pasado, mi pierna aun me molesta del disparo
recibido... pero poco a poco se disipan esas dudas del momento,
cuando las criticas solo sirven para nublar las mentes decididas
a un objetivo concreto y sin tanta politiqueria correctiva.
Ayer fue Fallujah... hoy, Tal Afar... solo que, esta estrategia de
'sostenimiento politico' que adoptan los EEUU hoy, NO ha de
funcionar... hay que 'escuchar a los lideres tribales'... yo, nosotros
lo hicimos... y en esas bases actuamos. Con absouluto prejudicialismo
contra las fuerzas terroristas de Iran y Siria que estaban emplazadas
en Fallujah... creyeron que podrian... no fue asi. La leccion de todo
esto es olo una: al terrorista hay que arrasarlo sin consideraciones
laterales... sin ardor de estomago, sin tregua. sin opcion a retirada... cerrarle
los flancos y destruirlo. Mi exeriencia en Fallujah en 2004, y este
post del New York Times, condirman lo que siempre crei fuese la
mejor deoctrina tactica en estos contextos de accion militar.
No hay otra...
-----------------------------
The New York Times
June 16, 2005
Magnet for Iraq Insurgents Is a Crucial Test of New U.S. Strategy
By RICHARD A. OPPEL Jr.
TAL AFAR, Iraq, June 15 - Nine months ago the American military laid
siege to this city in northwestern Iraq and proclaimed it freed from
the grip of insurgents. Last month, the Americans returned in force -
to reclaim it once again.
After the battle here in September the military left behind fewer than
500 troops to patrol a region twice the size of Connecticut. With so
few troops and the local police force in shambles, insurgents came
back and turned Tal Afar, a dusty, agrarian city of about 200,000
people, into a way station for the trafficking of arms and insurgent
fighters from nearby Syria - and a ghost town of terrorized residents
afraid to open their stores, walk the streets or send their children
to school.
It is a cycle that has been repeated in rebellious cities throughout
Iraq, and particularly those in the Sunni Arab regions west and north
of Baghdad, where the insurgency's roots run deepest.
"We have a finite number of troops," said Maj. Chris Kennedy,
executive officer of the Third Armored Cavalry Regiment, which arrived
in Tal Afar several weeks ago. "But if you pull out of an area and
don't leave security forces in it, all you're going to do is leave the
door open for them to come back. This is what our lack of combat power
has done to us throughout the country. In the past, the problem has
been we haven't been able to leave sufficient forces in towns where
we've cleared the insurgents out."
While officials in Washington say the military has all the troops it
needs, on-the-ground battle commanders in the most violent parts of
Iraq - in cities like Ramadi, Mosul and Mahmudiya - have said
privately that they need more manpower to pacify their areas and keep
them that way.
Now, with the pace of insurgent attacks rising across Iraq and scores
being killed daily in bombings and mass executions, Tal Afar and the
surrounding area is becoming something of a test case for a strategy
to try to break the cycle: using battle-hardened American forces
working in conjunction with tribal leaders to clear out the insurgents
and then leaving behind Iraqi forces to try to keep the peace.
Many tribal sheiks here say they favor an all-out assault to rout the
city's insurgents, but American commanders say a major attack like the
one that leveled Falluja last November is to be avoided almost at all
costs. The bloodshed, destruction of property and alienation of the
Iraqi public is too high a price to pay, they say.
A political solution is best, the Americans said, but fiendishly
difficult, given the tangle of insurgent pressures and tribal
loyalties and divisions.
"If you take all the complexities of Iraq and compressed it into one
city, it is Tal Afar," said the regiment's commander, Col. H. R.
McMaster.
The military's decision to reassign the regiment from the so-called
Triangle of Death south of Baghdad to the region around Tal Afar was
an implicit acknowledgement that it had lost control of the area. The
first troops began arriving in April, and nearly 4,000 were in place
by mid-May.
A Place Frozen in antiestéticar
On arrival here, commanders found a town that was, for all practical
purposes, dead, strangled by the violent insurgents who held it in
their thrall. "Anyone not helping the terrorists can't leave their
homes because they will be kidnapped and the terrorists will demand
money or weapons or make them join them to kill people," said Hikmat
Ameen al-Lawand, the leader of one of Tal Afar's 82 tribes, who said
most of the city is controlled by insurgents. "If they refuse they
will chop their heads off."
Khasro Goran, the deputy provincial governor in Ninewa, which includes
Tal Afar, concurred. "There is no life in Tal Afar," he said in an
interview a week ago. "It is like Mosul a few months ago - a ghost
town." There are more than 500 insurgents in Tal Afar, he said, and
they project a level of antiestéticar and intimidation across the city far in
excess of their numbers. Thoroughfares lined with stores have been
deserted, the storefronts covered with blue metal roll-down gates.
In northeast Tal Afar, a young mother now home-schools her six
children, after a flier posted at their school warned: "If you love
your children, you won't send them to school here because we will kill
them." A neighbor, Muhammad Ameen, will not let his kids play outside.
"Standing out in the open is not a good idea," he said.
Tribes sympathetic to the new Iraqi government have suffered constant
assaults at the hands of insurgents and rival tribes. More than 500
mortars have struck lands belonging to the Al-Sada al-Mousawiyah tribe
since September, said the tribe's leader, Sheik Sayed Abdullah Sayed
Wahab. "All of my tribe are prisoners in their own homes," he says.
"We can't even take our people to the hospital."
At least 40 members of two predominantly Shiite tribes of Turkomen,
the Sada and Jolak, were killed in two car bombings in May. The
perpetrators are believed by American officers to be members of the
predominantly Sunni Arab Qarabash tribe, which they say has strong
ties to Syrian fighters and links to the network of Abu Musab
al-Zarqawi, the Al Qaeda leader in Iraq. "I need someone to hear my
cries for help because we are in a bad situation," said Sheik Wali
al-Jolak in an interview at his compound in southwest Tal Afar, only a
few blocks from the Qarabash neighborhood. He lost 28 tribe members in
the two attacks.
The Tal Afar police force disintegrated last fall, and the few who
remain stay in an ancient hilltop castle, afraid to venture out.
Commanders here caution troops to assume that anyone on the street
dressed as a policeman is an impostor. Insurgents wearing police
uniforms shoot at American helicopters and threaten residents.
Even with the new regiment, the military still lacks troops to
completely patrol the outlying desert and grazing lands, where
insurgents had taken over remote villages, providing sanctuary a short
distance from Mosul, the country's dominant northern city and an
active insurgent hub. Insurgents use irrigation canals to elude
American forces chasing them in armored vehicles that cannot cross the
waterways. Smugglers drive through holes cut in the large berm that
guards the Syrian border. Remote cinderblock farmhouses serve as safe
havens.
At the Rabia border crossing into Syria, several hundred American
soldiers arrived three weeks ago and say they have disrupted the
smuggling of weapons and money. But they doubt there has been any
curtailment yet in the infiltration of foreign fighters. "As far as
foreign fighters coming in from the border control point, I can't say
we've had any impact on that," said Capt. Jason Whitten, the company
commander at Rabia. Commanders say new technology will be installed at
the border crossing shortly to help track travelers and detect false
identification materials.
In its first weeks here, the regiment has pressed sweeps deep into
desert areas that had not seen a large American presence since the
101st Airborne Division left in early 2004. Instead, many areas had
witnessed, at best, only sporadic patrols that had done little to
deter insurgents, commanders say. "Resources are everything in combat,
and when you don't have enough manpower to move around, you have to
pick the places," said Maj. John Wilwerding, executive officer of
Sabre Squadron, a 1,000-strong unit that now oversees Tal Afar.
Two weeks ago more than 1,000 troops from the new regiment poured into
Biaj, a town of 15,000 people about 40 miles southwest of Tal Afar,
where insurgents had destroyed the police station, and the mayor and
the police fled last fall. Soldiers eventually searched every house in
the town, capturing more than a dozen suspected insurgents without a
shot being fired.
Biaj faces a severe water shortage and trash and sewage fill the
streets. But the markets and neighborhoods teem with children who give
passing American patrols waves and a thumbs-up. Indeed, the town
appears to show what happens if there are enough troops to pacify an
area and police it effectively afterward. But commanders plan to
withdraw all but 150 American troops and leave a battalion of about
500 Iraqi soldiers and 200 police officers in Biaj.
Taking Back Tal Afar
In Tal Afar, Lt. Col. Chris Hickey, commander of Sabre Squadron, which
is equipped with tanks, Bradley fighting vehicles and helicopters,
moved quickly to reassert control of strategic sites. Soldiers drove
out insurgents who had taken control of the area around the hospital,
and turned over security there to Iraqi troops.
Similarly, soldiers cleared the main east-west highway, which had been
made impassable by improvised explosive devices. An Iraqi battalion
now patrols the route, and Colonel Hickey is spearheading an effort to
rebuild the police with recruits drawn from tribes and trained in
Jordan.
Insurgents waged heavy assaults against the squadron in the first few
weeks after it arrived but suffered heavy losses while having little
impact on the American troops. Those attacks have declined while
violence against townspeople has increased, Colonel Hickey said.
"We've disrupted the terrorists' network," he said. "But what I have
to overcome is a population too scared to open their stores or step
out on the street."
Tal Afar has little municipal leadership to speak of. American
commanders say the mayor, a Sunni Arab, may have ties to the
insurgency. The police chief - a Shiite dismissed a few days ago for
the second time in as many months - may have been involved in the
abuse or torture of suspects, they say.
Real leadership in Tal Afar lies with the 82 tribal leaders. Angered
by the attacks and emboldened by the enlarged American military
presence here, some sheiks have become outspoken critics of the
insurgency. On June 4, at great risk to their own lives, more than 60
attended a security conference at Al Kasik Iraqi Army base near here.
To the surprise of Iraqi and American commanders who organized the
gathering, many sheiks demanded a Falluja-style military assault to
rid Tal Afar of insurgents and complained that American forces do not
treat terror suspects roughly enough.
Other sheiks said it was better to pursue a political solution. But
sheiks from each point of view accused one another of being unwilling
to identify suspected insurgents. American commanders had planned to
circulate a list of 1,400 people thought to have potential insurgent
connections, seeking verification - or denials - from the sheiks. But
they decided against it because few sheiks would openly affirm or deny
the status of insurgent suspects in front of other Iraqis, Colonel
Hickey said.
Tal Afar's tribes have to bury old grudges for the city to be at
peace, says Brig. Gen. Mohsen Doski, a Kurd who commands a brigade of
2,000 Iraqi troops garrisoned here. "If we continue talking about the
past or what this certain person did or this tribe did, we will stay
in a closed circle," he said. If the city's problems cannot be solved
politically, he said, "We have to do in Tal Afar the same as in
Falluja."
The American regiment's commander, Colonel McMaster, warned the sheiks
at the close of the day-long conference that the insurgents cannot be
defeated unless the tribes work together better. "To an outsider, it
seems there is not a lot of power because there are divisions. That's
exactly what the terrorists want," he said.
In an interview, the colonel said the violence "isn't intertribal" but
a mixture of foreign fighters, Zarqawi loyalists and others working
"to incite chaos, breed antiestéticar and set conditions for them to continue
to operate out of Tal Afar." With the regiment now in place, he added,
"Tal Afar is clearly contested, where before it wasn't."
An Iraqi Fighting Force?
One week ago Tuesday, 1,000 American soldiers and hundreds of Iraqi
troops swept into the insurgency's principal safe haven in Tal Afar,
the Sariya neighborhood, detaining 34 suspected insurgent leaders and
fighters and killing as many as 10 fighters.
Relying on Iraqi troops proved a perversos failure 13 months ago in
Falluja, where Iraqis were put in charge only to see the city come
rapidly under the sway of a Taliban-style terrorist theocracy that had
to be rooted out six months later by the Marines. But American
commanders now maintain that in some places, like Haifa Street, a
former insurgent stronghold in the heart of Baghdad, Iraqi soldiers
are improving.
In Tal Afar, commanders say the new Iraqi troops they work with - two
predominantly Kurdish battalions and one mainly of Shiites from Basra
- have helped immeasurably in identifying insurgents. Capt. Greg
Mitchell, a company commander with Sabre Squadron, said his troops
could not have apprehended so many suspects on Tuesday had Iraqis not
been involved. "They have a much more discerning eye" for clues about
suspicious Iraqis, he said.
Yet American troops also remain wary of Iraqis' tendencies to respond
to an attack by shooting wildly in all directions - a "death blossom,"
as the troops here call it. "They keep their fingers on the trigger
and they'll just shoot without aiming," Command Sgt. Maj. Mark Horsley
warned during the operation Tuesday, as fire rang out.
Last Tuesday, an insurgent gunman wounded an American officer as he
walked through an alley accompanied by Iraqi troops. When the shooting
started, the Iraqis ran back to the street as the gunman continued to
fire at the wounded officer, said Capt. Jesse Sellars, a company
commander here. An American sergeant had to cajole a handful of Iraqis
to return fire in an effort to rescue the officer, who later died.
"They're new soldiers," Major Wilwerding, of Sabre Squadron, said of
the Iraqis who fled. "They're not conditioned yet. They'll get
better."
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Salud,
Gregg
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"This is an age of exhausted whoredom groping for its God."
(James Joyce, Ulisses p.280)
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