Posted on 01/10/2004 4:36:50 AM PST by Cannoneer No. 4
CAMP PACESETTER, Iraq - With a month of combat operations under its belt, the Stryker brigade is moving on to its next mission: Mosul.
The Fort Lewis-based brigade will relieve the 101st Airborne Division, which has been restoring order and public services in Iraq's third-largest city and the surrounding areas since April.
The 101st has been doing the job with some 25,000 U.S. troops; the Stryker brigade brings just over 5,000.
But it won't be the brigade's mission to do the same work as a force five times its size. Just the opposite: Stryker troops will be trying every day to do a little bit less for the local authorities ahead of June's scheduled handover of sovereignty to a new provisional Iraqi government.
"Our goal is to work ourselves out of a job," said brigade spokesman Lt. Col. Joseph Piek.
The mission will be led by a task force of about 100 soldiers from Fort Lewis as part of a larger multinational division. In its first month in Iraq, the Stryker brigade has been working under the command of the 4th Infantry Division in the Samarra area, about 200 miles south of Mosul.
The 101st has pushed to rebuild public institutions across the board in Mosul - police, courts, public works, schools, public utilities, recreation and so on.
Under its commander, Maj. Gen. David Petraeus, the division has spent hundreds of millions of dollars on local construction, jobs programs and other efforts that have moved the recovery effort in Mosul ahead of Baghdad and other parts of the country.
The region was relatively calm for several months after the fall of Saddam Hussein's regime in April. There were far fewer attacks on U.S. troops than in Baghdad and in the Sunni Muslim-dominated areas west and north of the capital.
But there have been a number of high-profile attacks the past few months on U.S. troops and the Iraqis working with them in Mosul.
Soldiers have been killed guarding gas stations and traveling in convoys across the city. Late last month soldiers killed three members of the extremist group Ansar al-Islam during a firefight.
Earlier in December a suicide bomber drove a car into the front gate at the U.S. base at Tall Afar, 30 miles west of Mosul, injuring 58 soldiers from the 101st.
And on Nov. 15, 17 division soldiers were killed with two UH-60 Black Hawk helicopters under fire collided over a residential area in Mosul - the deadliest event for U.S. forces since the war began.
Local judges, newspaper editors and police also have been attacked.
Still, Stryker brigade officials say Mosul and surroundings are more stable and secure than the rest of the country.
Money has been key to the 101st's approach, especially the dollars the division has spent under the Pentagon's "commander's emergency relief program," or CERP.
"Those CERP dollars are like bullets up there," said Maj. Bob Bennett, deputy operations officer with the Fort Lewis-based task force that will command the Stryker brigade as well as Iraqi military and civil defense units.
U.S. military commanders were given a reported $170 million of the assets seized from Saddam Hussein's regime to repair roads and water lines and pay for small civic projects.
When that money dried up last fall, the Pentagon asked Congress to provide more funding. A reported $300 million was released last month for commanders to spend.
But commanders didn't miss that the number of attacks on U.S. forces rose in November, when the money was running low.
Stryker brigade officials said they're still not certain how much money they'll have available for CERP and similar expenses.
Brigade troops will be stationed primarily in Mosul. Units also will relieve 101st troops in Tall Afar to the west and Qayyarah to the south.
In their first three weeks in Iraq, the brigade was focused on the Tigris River city of Samarra, where infantrymen conducted house-to-house raids, searching for weapons caches and insurgency leaders.
They took no casualties, although three soldiers died in a rollover accident while on patrol.
The brigade has been planning for the Mosul mission since before it arrived in Iraq in early December, but for security reasons embedded reporters were forbidden to report on the Strykers' ultimate destination.
Pentagon officials announced the news Thursday during a briefing with reporters about the next rotation of 100,000 U.S. troops into Iraq.
The timing of the brigade's takeover of operations in Mosul still is off-limits for reporting.
The Stryker soldiers won't be the first Fort Lewis-based troops to operate in Mosul.
The 62nd Medical Brigade worked with the 101st out of Mosul Airfield for six months, providing combat health support to U.S. troops and helping with an assessment of the region's hospitals and health-care system.
The medical brigade, which took no casualties during its deployment, went home in August.
Staff writer Michael Gilbert is embedded with the Stryker brigade in Iraq. He was embedded with the 62nd Medical Brigade in Mosul last year. Reach him at mjgilbert41@yahoo.com.
• For regular reports on the brigade, sign up for an e-mail newsletter at www.tribnet.com/registration.
ABOUT MOSUL
Population: About 1.8 million
Religious and ethnic background: Mostly Sunni Arab in the city, with large numbers of Kurds also in the city and in surrounding towns in Nineveh province. There also is a large minority of Arab-speaking Christian Assyrians and a smaller minority of Turkomans.
Also notable: Traditional home of the Iraqi Army officer corps
(Published 12:01AM, January 10th, 2004)
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Brigade troops will be stationed primarily in Mosul. Units also will relieve 101st troops in Tall Afar to the west and Qayyarah to the south.
The brigade has been planning for the Mosul mission since before it arrived in Iraq in early December, but for security reasons embedded reporters were forbidden to report on the Strykers' ultimate destination.
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Long version of yesterday's Michael Gilbert piece. More comments here: 8 Stryker brigade moves on to its next mission
Bad guys in and around Mosul will be dealing with Soldiers who lit up the night sky on New Year's Eve, for fun.
Godspeed, Stryker Brigade!
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Every day is a bad day to be wearing a black hat.
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