Free Republic

My buddy, a Chinook pilot, posted some of the videos he shot while serving in Iraq. This is one HUGE formation of Chinooks and Blackhawks landing

16:44 2004-01-24 Iraq lost war against USA because of venality of Hussein's guards On Saturday at a meeting of the Academy of Military Sciences Anatoly Kvashnin, chief of the Russian Armed forces General Staff stated that the Iraqi defeat in the war against the USA was conditioned not by weaknesses of the Russian military science but by venality of Hussein's republican guards. Many Iraqi officers studied in Russian military institutions. Kvashin categorically refuted statements that defeat of Iraq allegedly armed with outdated Soviet armaments meant defeat of the Russian military science. The chief of the General Staff stated that "behavior...

(December 2, 2003) U.S. Forces Stage Massive Raid in Iraq AP - 26 minutes ago BAGHDAD, Iraq - U.S. troops north of the capital arrested at least 20 insurgents in a raid while workers began demolishing gigantic bronze busts of Saddam Hussein (news - web sites) in Baghdad on Tuesday — both moves aimed at stamping out loyalty to Iraq (news - web sites)'s ousted regime. Iraqi police said a senior former member of Saddam's elite Republican Guard was among those captured in Hawija, 155 miles north of Baghdad. However, the U.S. troops failed to catch the target of the...

<p>BAGHDAD -- Iraq's armed forces virtually evaporated during the war in March and April because of a confused and often ineffectual command structure, which oversaw hundreds of thousands of disaffected soldiers who had no idea of the battle plan. After decades of dictatorship, the war was fought with little gusto by anyone other than Saddam Hussein's inner circle, former Iraqi officers say.</p>

TIKRIT, Iraq (AP) - U.S. troops identified Saddam Hussein loyalists in custody Wednesday as two key members of the ousted dictator's Republican Guard and a paymaster for his Fedayeen Saddam militia. Officials at the 4th Infantry Division said they released 10 other men taken in a sweep through the outskirts of Saddam's hometown, Tikrit, on Tuesday, keeping four in custody. The military still had not released names but said the four included a Republican Guard corps-level chief of staff, a guard division commander and a paymaster for the militia. A fourth man kept in custody was not identified at all....

U.S. seizes Iraqi Republican Guard chief By D'ARCY DORAN Associated Press TIKRIT, Iraq - American soldiers rounded up 14 members of a family said to be a pillar of support for Saddam Hussein in raids Tuesday, including a Republican Guard officer and one of the deposed dictator's bodyguards. West of Baghdad, guerrillas attacked an American convoy with three roadside bombs, killing one U.S. soldier and wounding two. But the commander of American forces told The Associated Press the stakes are too high to let casualties deter the mission of pacifying Iraq. "Every American needs to believe this: that if we...

The Associated Press TIKRIT, Iraq Aug. 12 — American soldiers rounded up 14 members of a family said to be a pillar of support for Saddam Hussein in raids Tuesday, including a Republican Guard officer and one of the deposed dictator's bodyguards. West of Baghdad, guerrillas attacked an American convoy with three roadside bombs, killing one U.S. soldier and wounding two. But the commander of American forces told The Associated Press the stakes are too high to let casualties deter the mission of pacifying Iraq. "Every American needs to believe this: that if we fail here in this environment, the...

VIII: The Story of a Palestinian Mujahid - Abu Khaled Al-Ahram's reporter Rasha Sa'ad interviewed a Palestinian fighter when he returned home. The following are excerpts from the interview: "'I cannot believe that I am alive. I was in hell and Allah brought me back,' said Abu Khaled, who joined other Arab volunteers in the battle at Baghdad's airport in early April. Abu Khaled's - not his real name - story begins one month earlier. It was back in March that Abu Khaled, a Palestinian, was deported from Jordan. Unable to immediately return to the West Bank, he had to...

<p>June 19, 2003 -- BAGHDAD, Iraq - U.S. troops raided two farmhouses near Tikrit north of Baghdad yesterday and seized millions of American dollars, British pounds, euros and Iraqi dinars apparently designated, in part, to pay bounties to kill American soldiers, a senior U.S. general said.</p>

DEBKAfile Special Military Report June 15, 2003, 1:10 AM (GMT+02:00) US army hits back at Saddam loyalists who lean on clandestine support from Damascus The cat was out of the bag - almost - as a result of Operation Peninsula Strike, the massive US crackdown against a lethal brew of anti-American resistance forces which have been bedeviling US troops north of Baghdad. A substantial quotient of foreign combatants from Arab countries - Saudis, Yemenis, Egyptians, Jordanians, Syrians and Palestinians from Syria or Lebanon - was discovered to be mixed in with the Fedayeen Saddam, Baathists and former Republican Guards officers...

A senior member of Saddam Hussein's government handed Baghdad over to U.S. troops in exchange for a pay-off and a safe exit from Iraq, Le Journal du Dimanche claimed Sunday. Citing a senior Iraqi source, the French newspaper reported that Soufiane al Tikriti, head of the Special Republican Guard in Baghdad, ordered his troops not to defend the capital against attack by U.S. and British forces, and particularly to hold fire against coalition helicopters circling over the city. In exchange, Le Journal claimed, Tikriti was paid several hundred thousand dollars and, along with 20 family members, was ferried in a...

<p>Baghdad -- In the final days before Baghdad fell, Saddam Hussein's son Qusai issued a series of military orders that sent thousands of elite Republican Guard troops to their certain death in the open countryside.</p> <p>According to accounts provided to The Chronicle by more than a dozen Iraqi military officials -- some of them still hiding from American forces -- the orders exposed the core of the Iraqi military to devastating U.S. air attacks and left the capital's defenses markedly weakened.</p>

<p>BAGHDAD — Iraq's new U.S. overseer took a major step yesterday toward disarming Iraq, formally dissolving Saddam Hussein's Defense Ministry and disbanding the Republican Guard and the once-mighty Iraqi army.</p> <p>Coalition authorities are also readying a directive that will attempt to control the flood of weapons that swamped Baghdad and other urban areas in the months before the war. That order will ban the possession of heavy firearms and munitions, except by coalition forces and the Kurdish "peshmerga" militia fighters, U.S. allies in the drive to oust Saddam.</p>

<p>The Army's only retreat in the lightning-fast war to oust Saddam Hussein came after an Iraqi general in the town of Najaf cell-phoned ahead to his troops that a regiment of Apache attack helicopters was on the way.</p> <p>"He used it to speed-dial a number of Iraqi defenders," Lt. Gen. William Wallace, the commander of Army V Corps in Iraq, told reporters at the Pentagon yesterday via a teleconference hookup from Baghdad. "As our attack aviation approached the attack positions, they came under intense enemy fire."</p>

A TIME investigation suggests most of the elite Iraqi forces survived the U.S. bombardment During their onslaught against the Republican Guard in the southern approaches to Baghdad, U.S. military commanders had grim words to describe what they were doing to the elite Iraqi forces. "I find it interesting when folks say we're softening them up," Air Force Lieut. General T. Michael Moseley, the air-war commander, said on April 5, the day the U.S. Army entered Baghdad. "We're not softening them up. We're killing them." Later on, in its assessment of the damage the U.S. had wrought, the Pentagon focused on...

Saddam killed his top commander as Marines stormed Baghdad SPECIAL TO WORLD TRIBUNE.COMSunday, May 4, 2003 LONDON — Iraqi President Saddam Hussein killed his leading military commander on charges of treason as U.S. forces captured Baghdad. The London-based A-Sharq Al Awsat daily said Saddam and his younger son, Qusay, executed Gen. Seif Eddin Al Rawi on April 8. The newspaper said Al Rawi, commander of the elite Republican Guards, was accused of treason and shot in the head and back. Al Rawi was summoned by Saddam and executed on the day U.S. marines captured the Iraqi capital. The newspaper...

DAMASCUS, SYRIA – Paralyzed from the waist down after being shot by American soldiers in the battle for Baghdad, Fahd lies in a hospital bed here contemplating a bleak future. But any bitterness harbored by the 18-year-old Syrian student is reserved solely for the Iraqi Republican Guards, "traitors," he says, who yielded the Iraqi capital without a fight. All across the Arab world, young men who rallied to defend Iraq from the Anglo-American invasion are returning home, many of them disillusioned and embittered by the swift collapse of Iraqi resistance and the sometimes hostile reception they received from ordinary Iraqis....

Guerrilla leader who became a legend emerges from hiding For 13 years he was a defiant symbol of Iraqi resistance. Hunted in vain by Saddam Hussein's militia, the legendary guerrilla fighter Abu Hattem fought an extraordinary campaign against the Iraqi regime from his secluded bases in the poisoned marshland of southern Iraq. Known as the Lord of the Marshes, his exploits earned him a reputation that is a cross between Robin Hood and Lawrence of Arabia, with tales of suicidal missions and narrow escapes. Western journalists tried for years to track him down during the guerrilla years, visiting Iranian border...

<p>Chanting "Saddam no, Bush yes," some 200 Iraqi prisoners of war were let go Sunday at the coalition's main internment camp in the desert near the southern port of Umm Qasr.</p> <p>The men, many of them barefooted, shook hands with the American soldiers guarding the camp before boarding buses and trucks to be driven to nearby Basra, southern Iraq's largest city.</p>

CAMP BUCCA, Iraq April 27 — Chanting "Saddam no, Bush yes," some 200 Iraqi prisoners of war were let go Sunday at the coalition's main internment camp in the desert near the southern port of Umm Qasr.The men, many of them barefooted, shook hands with the American soldiers guarding the camp before boarding buses and trucks to be driven to nearby Basra, southern Iraq's largest city.Their departure brought to 700 the number of POWs released since Friday, said Maj. Stacy Garrity of the U.S. Army's 800th Military Police Brigade, which runs the camp. Around 5,800 more prisoners, including some from...