Mohammed Uraibi/Associated Press
U.S. Army soldiers at the scene where a car was destroyed today by an explosion, possibly caused by a roadside bomb, in Baghdad.
Posted on 03/23/2005 4:55:56 PM PST by neverdem
BAGHDAD, Iraq, March 23 - Iraqi and American forces killed at least 80 insurgents during a Tuesday morning raid on what appeared to be the biggest guerrilla training camp yet discovered, Iraqi officials said today. Seven Iraqi police officers were also killed and six were wounded in what American and Iraqi officials characterized as an especially fierce battle.
"It was one of the largest such engagements that I'm aware of," said Col. Robert Potter, a spokesman for the American command in Baghdad.
The number of anti-government fighters killed was the most reported in a single conflict since the American offensive against the insurgent stronghold of Falluja last November. The size and location of the camp, with scores of guerrillas reportedly living in tents and small buildings in a marshy lakeside encampment 50 miles northwest of the capital, revealed a strategic shift among some insurgents, American military officials said. It was first time, they said, that the military had come across insurgents organizing in such numbers in a remote rural location, reminiscent of Al Qaeda training camps in the arid mountains of Afghanistan before the American invasion there.
"A year ago, they preferred to organize in small cells in urban areas," said Maj. Richard Goldenberg, a spokesman for the 42nd Infantry Division, which sent soldiers and attack helicopters to aid the hundreds of Iraqi commandos who raided the camp. "Here, they organized into a large group in a remote site, perhaps under the impression that coalition forces wouldn't look for them there."
Along with munitions, training manuals, prepared car bombs, suicide-bomb vests and computers, the Iraqi and American forces discovered identification papers that showed some of the fighters had come from outside Iraq, Major Goldenberg said, though he declined to identify the nationalities of the foreign insurgents. Iraqi officials said the foreigners mostly came from Arab countries, and a written statement early today from the Interior Ministry said an Algerian had been arrested.
But Gen. Rashid Flaiyeh, the head of the police commandos in Salahuddin Province, where the battle took place, said the bodies of Filipino and Arab men were also among the dead guerrillas. "I was surprised there were men from the Philippines," he said on the state-run television network Iraqiya. "The Arab countries are sending fighters into Iraq because they want to destroy our democratic movement." The effort by the insurgents to set up such a large outpost by a lake so relatively near Baghdad was an audacious, if ultimately ill-fated, move. American and Iraqi officials said they had no immediate information on how or when the camp was established. Before the American invasion, the site, Lake Tharthar, in an otherwise barren, parched region, was a popular tourist spot for Iraqis and was home to a fish farming project started by the government of Saddam Hussein.
The lake straddles the border between Anbar and Salahuddin Provinces, both insurgent strongholds dominated by the former governing Sunni Muslims, and its southern and eastern shores lie close to cities with strong guerrilla cells.
The battle was the second in recent days in which American forces were engaged with a large, highly organized paramilitary group. On Sunday, an American convoy fended off an ambush by a band of 40 to 50 insurgents in Salman Pak, a town 12 miles southeast Baghdad. The American military said 26 attackers were killed in that fight, which was the most ambitious assault against the American military since the Jan. 30 elections and showed that the guerrilla war was still burning two years after the American-led invasion and despite a high turnout in the elections.
The Iraqi Interior Ministry statement said 85 insurgents had been killed, and that the fighters had been planning to attack the town of Samarra, 34 miles east of the lake, with a large number of car bombs found at the camp.
In his television interview, General Flaiyeh said that the fighting had lasted seven hours and that American and Iraqi forces had killed at least 80 guerrillas.
But Major Goldenberg said the American military estimated that the battle had taken two hours and that about 80 insurgents had been at the camp, but he declined to provide figures on how many had been killed. The major said no prisoners were taken during the assault, despite the Interior Ministry statement on the arrest of the Algerian.
The battle began at about 11 a.m., as members of the Interior Ministry's First Police Commando Battalion, acting on tips from residents of the area, approached the insurgent camp across a flat expanse, Major Goldenberg said. As the commandos closed in, guerrillas began firing at them with assault rifles, machine guns and mortars or rockets. "It was quite likely they could see the approach of other forces from a distance," Major Goldenberg said.
The Iraqi police then called for support from the 42nd Infantry Division, based out of a palace complex in the nearby provincial capital of Tikrit, Saddam Hussein's hometown. The Americans sent in Apache attack helicopters and smaller OH-58D Kiowa helicopters, as well as ground troops. An official at the Interior Ministry said some insurgents had tried escaping by boat across the lake, but were killed on the water or as they tried pushing off from shore.
The training camp was so extensive that American and Iraqi troops were still searching it today, Major Goldenberg said. Among the items seized were manuals with "techniques they would have used to train other insurgents to conduct operations," he said, declining to go into details. The 42nd Infantry Division, charged with securing the northern Sunni triangle, has never "come across such an organized facility for the Iraqi insurgent elements," the major said. Iraqi and American troops burned four vehicles found at the camp, the Interior Ministry official said.
The 500 to 700 Iraqi commandos who took part in the assault belong to a unit that has been working alongside the 42nd Infantry Division and that was involved in a brief offensive sweep earlier this month in Samarra. In that operation, Iraqi commandos and American soldiers blocked off sections of Samarra to arrest suspected insurgent leaders, but found that they had gone into hiding or had fled the town.
Officers of the 42nd Infantry Division have been training Iraqi security forces at its palace headquarters by the Tigris River in Tikrit. The training has been taking place on an island in the middle of the river, and experienced Iraqi officers are increasingly doing some of the teaching, American commanders say. The use of Iraqi forces as the spearhead for an ambitious assault like the one on Tuesday "reflects the trend we expect to see for the rest of the year," Major Goldenberg said.
Violence also flared today in the capital, where Shiite and Kurdish leaders continued intensive negotiations on forming a coalition government seven weeks after the elections for a constitutional assembly.
An insurgent mortar attack killed an Iraqi girl and injured another child at a primary school in western Baghdad, an Interior Ministry official said. The mortar hit a school in the Amariya neighborhood, an area rife with insurgents, between downtown Baghdad and Abu Ghraib prison. In the neighborhood of Etafiyah, two policemen were killed and their driver was wounded as they tried to defuse a roadside bomb near a prominent Shiite mosque, the official said.
Two insurgents tried to set off a suicide car bomb in the northern Shiite neighborhood of Kadhimiya, where one of the holiest shrines of the Shiite world is located, but officials said they hurt only themselves after they failed to detonate the explosives properly. The Interior Ministry official identified the driver of the car, a golden Opal sedan, as Ahmed al-Janabi, an Iraqi. Since the American invasion, Shiite holy sites have come under constant attack from Sunni Muslims trying to ignite a large-scale civil war.
Ordinary Iraqis often blame foreign jihadists, or holy-warriors, for the suicide car bombings at those sites, saying that even the most militant of Iraqis could never pull off such horrific acts of bloodshed.
Mohammed Uraibi/Associated Press
U.S. Army soldiers at the scene where a car was destroyed today by an explosion, possibly caused by a roadside bomb, in Baghdad.
HOO-O-ah-h-h!
Finally, some GOOD news today!
At least we didn't make any of them wear underpants on their heads.
We needed some.
Good Start
"Alex, 'What do you call 80 dead Iraqi insurgents?'"
i say pass around the fatback and beans boys,
gonna be a wang dang doodle tonight.
What page was this on? ZZZZZ Appendix 99999?
Game laws more liberal in Iraq than New Hampshire, apparently.
Way beyond permissible bag limit here.
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But, but, don't they love their children too? (s/c)
Front page, but easily glanced over... you would think it'd at least have a picture... ;)
I hope we don't learn later that the Iraqi police killed a village filled with Sunni women and children. I don't put it past any tribe over there to wipe out the families of their denominational enemies.
More evidence that the tipping point has been reached, and the Iraqis just aren't putting up with the "insurgent's" crap anymore.
Speaking of which, when is the NYTimes going to figure out that "insurgents" are not terrorists from other countries?
Along with munitions, training manuals, prepared car bombs, suicide-bomb vests and computers, the Iraqi and American forces discovered identification papers that showed some of the fighters had come from outside Iraq, Major Goldenberg said, though he declined to identify the nationalities of the foreign insurgents. Iraqi officials said the foreigners mostly came from Arab countries, and a written statement early today from the Interior Ministry said an Algerian had been arrested.
But Gen. Rashid Flaiyeh, the head of the police commandos in Salahuddin Province, where the battle took place, said the bodies of Filipino and Arab men were also among the dead guerrillas. "I was surprised there were men from the Philippines," he said on the state-run television network Iraqiya. "The Arab countries are sending fighters into Iraq because they want to destroy our democratic movement."
Excellent!
It's their web homepage. It's updated during the day, but I'm not sure if it's done on a regular basis, or as stories become available. Stories that are inconvenient can be buried deeply or simply ignored.
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