we need a updated version of this
Posted on 05/11/2005 3:28:06 PM PDT by Choose Ye This Day
Screaming "Allahu Akbar'' to the end, the foreign fighters lay on their backs in a narrow crawl space under a house and blasted their machine guns up through the concrete floor with bullets designed to penetrate tanks. They fired at U.S. Marines, driving back wave after wave as the Americans tried to retrieve a fallen comrade.
Through Sunday night and into Monday morning, the foreign fighters battled on, their screaming voices gradually fading to just one. In the end, it took five Marine assaults, grenades, a tank firing bunker-busting artillery rounds, 500-pound bombs unleashed by an F/A-18 attack plane and a point-blank attack by a rocket launcher to quell them.
"They were willing to stay in place and die with no hope," Hurley said Tuesday. "All they wanted was to take us with them.
The mosque's loudspeakers screamed Arabic that the Marines could not understand, but they said that since it was past time for prayers, they assumed the loudspeakers were rallying forces for attack.
The Marines went in a fourth time. Bullets, and one chanting voice, met them. "Nobody should have survived" the tank assault, Hurley later said in amazement.
Still under fire, the Marines holed up for the night in Ubaydi...Fired from a dozen or so yards, the rockets collapsed the walls over the fighters' hiding place
When the Marines entered a final time, the daylight finally showed them where the bullets had come from: the floor beneath their feet. The insurgents had lain faceup on the ground below, with barely enough room to point their weapons upward, Marines said. They simply blasted through the floor.
The Marines found the last foreign fighters there, dead. There were at least two, and it was unclear whether they had bled to death overnight or been killed in the morning's rocket volley, Hurley and other Marines said.
Maybe it is me and my cynicism about the WP, but the tenor of this article was one of admiration for the courage and determination of the terrorist vermin, which the WP calls "foreign fighters." The WP would have us believe that this is a war we cannot win.
I read the whole account. I did not read in any part of the account where the villages where leveled when we recieved fire from them. I did not read where B52s flew over and left huge holes where buildings had been.
Oh and the piece of crap M16 doesn't even have automatic fire. Why? Because they took that automatic fire from the M16 away so they could sell the Squad Automatic Weapon. We had full auto on the M16 when I was in. We are playing by the enemies rules, and when you do that, the enemy rules.
Sure we killed 100 and lost 3. Islamist can train 100 more in a day, and send them in from the Sanctuary our President allows them to enjoy, Syria.
Get into Syria and wipe it out, crush it. Mr Bush, stop playing around with this kinder gentler compassionate Bush Idealism. Time is not on our side. Look at the problem we have now with N. Korea, we gave them time and they now are giving us the finger - the Nuclear Finger.
Well, aren't THEY heros! Too bad that "courage" was employed in the defense of madness; it might have been put to better use. Now, these geniuses are just crypt grout.
And now they're dead. The only problem I see here is that they took a few good men with them.
Killing them seems to be the only solution. God Bless our troops!
Iraq is a big country with lots of fairly inaccessible places.
"U.S. officers say the most-wanted insurgent leader in Iraq, the Jordanian Abu Musab Zarqawi, is being sheltered among tribal leaders in Haditha and Hit, two towns 80 and 110 miles downriver"
That is news and no one has mentioned this. Maybe this is why there is such fierce resistance?
As the lit cigarette butt flies over the surface of spilled gasoline (and it is hot in Iraq, so there are a LOT of vapors above that surface) - I would be betting on ignition. It is not like rapid immersion under the surface of spilled liquid. One would need to allow the air to saturate with vapors first, and then either a cigarette butt or an incendiary round would do the job.
Exactly. This story was on the front page of the Post, above the fold on the left side, prominently displayed with the headline, 'They Came Here to Die' Insurgents Hiding Under House in Western Iraq Prove Fierce in Hours-Long Fight with Marines.
We didn't win WWII by describing the enemy in such gallant terms. The MSM wants us to lose and come back with our tails between our legs. They want to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory like they did in Vietnam. This is a concerted effort to undermine support of the war at home. Anyone who thinks this is a great article, doesn't understand propaganda.
we need a updated version of this
This is as blatant anti-war as it gets. On the left you see a determined, heroic enemy willing to die to the last man for their cause and on the right an expensive quagmire of a war, which has proven to be a black hole sucking our resources down the drain.
What a hatchet job.
Just remember that the leaders in DC deny the need for more troops.
Having been there I have always thought that we had too few to do the job. Qaim is extremely remote. Haditha has always been treacherous and many convoys have been hit there.
And speaking of Hit, they have always hated us there, too. Trust me on that, you could see it in their eyes.
If I could amend the order of the priority you laid out, it would be to take out N. Korea with their burgeoning nuclear arsenal first, worry about the guys in the sandals with the AK's second.
“House Guest” (Named by 2nd squad, 1st platoon, I Company) – Propane tanks placed in the central hallway with C-4 used to ignite it, creates a fuel air explosive – Used for bringing down a house when contact is made inside, propane tanks must be full
A 60 or 81 mm white phosphorous mortar round, wrapped three times with detonation cord and a 1/4 or 1/2 stick of C-4 – Used when contact is made in a house and the enemy must be burned out
"This bothers me. It appears they may be the source of the car bombs and suicide bombers hitting the country recently.
1)Partly so. Foreign terrorist come in from many many crossings in Saudi Arabia, Syria, and Iran, and even some come in via. Kuwait. The borders are as porus as lets say the Canadian/US border. As you can imagine one does nto have to enter the US via a road. It would take a few million border patrol police to keep the border closed. Like wise in Iraq we are faced with a similiar situation. In Al Anbar Province which easily has over 800 miles of border with Jordan, Syria, and Saudi Arabia alone it simply is an impossible task. All one can do is do their best to provide air recon of various types and concentrate ones forces over a few hundred miles at best per Battallion and do 24/7 patrols.
Why has it taken a year to get at these multiplying cockroaches?
2)The article as expected is a bit misleading in that both the Army units and now the replacement Marine units in these areas have been doing only occasional SASO in towns and hamlets in these vast area. Truly some areas are pure desert environments, hills with wadi (dry creek beds) that extend for hundreds of miles etc.. no man's land that even Saddam Hussein's forces could not control when in power. But the article makes it sound like nothing has been done in this vast area in the past. That is a complete falsehood. One must understand that Al Anbar is a huge area, mostly desert with few east/west, north/south routes in it's grid. It would take a few divisions of our Army to actually occupy the whole area to any effect. But to say it has not seen action in the past is wrong. Our Intel has known for two years that a lot of activity has gone on in these areas, names of towns dating back a few thousand years, that are known in recent times to be towns that sponsor smuggling and drug trafficing for instance are well understood. The problem is one of logistics. How many companies of some Battallion for instance can you put into a given remote location for so long to properly interdict and stop some activity? How many Marines or Army folks are needed to patrol a given hundred square miles of desert that contains lets say three towns that are suspect of harboring local and foreign insurgents/terrorist?
And how is the border to be secured once we finish this job?
3)That is a headache for the Iraqi government and military to deal with. Just like Saddam before them. Like I said earlier, this area was a thorn in Saddam's side and ironically it was mostly populated by Sunni Arabs!
Are we going to have to go back again in 6-months or a year to repeat the process?
4) Once we leave, we leave. But do realize we will not totally leave, but provide a presence in the area with permission of the Iraqi government, to work with their new military for many years to rebuild them, and maintain most likely spook shops to monitor the whole mideast. Iran,Syria, and the rest of the mid east will not like that but tough shit. We need to be able to monitor things closely in the area and what better place then Iraq, it is in the geographic center of the mid east.
And where are these terrorists getting the special ammo that is so powerful it will shoot through concrete floors and walls to injure and kill our men?
5) This is misleading. The article did not say the bullets fromo their 50 caliber machine guns where going through any significant amount of concrete. Concrete is to dense and hard for that to happen. Likewise the article is ball shit as usual when it says their machine guns could penetrate one of our main line tanks. So as usual. The gentle readers must understand we have most often rabid ill informed at best L/MSM reporter types who most probably could not hit a nail stuck in a board, let alone accurately fire a M16 at a mere 50 yard target and hit in the kill zone, reporting things that mislead the reader.
Hope I have partially shed some light on questions you ably presented. Let me leave you with this. Hypothetically if we would have had an additional full Army division (20-30 thousand strong) in Iraq earlier on, it would not have made hardly any difference in what has been happening. The only thing I can say about the insurgency to their credit is they most often run like hell once our military engage them. They escape to their little holes in the sand. So for instance the perhaps 2000 that fleed Fallujah in the early moments of the battle that we could not take out, got away. As we continue to kill them in the main Sunni and triangle of death triangles and upward toward Mosul, Kirkut, Erbil etc., those still alive scurry to lets say the far Al Anbar province. Now we are going to kill as many in this province as we can find.
Terrorists in basements? There was a time that we had some cost effective solutions and the will to use them.
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