Posted on 09/28/2005 10:49:47 AM PDT by Ernest_at_the_Beach
Camp al Qaim, Iraq -- A senior U.S. Marine commander said Monday that insurgents loyal to militant leader Abu Musab al-Zarqawi had taken over at least five key western Iraqi towns on the border with Syria and were forcing local residents to flee.
In an interview with The Chronicle, Lt. Col. Julian Alford, commander of the 3rd Battalion, 6th Marines Regiment stationed outside the western Iraqi town of al Qaim, said insurgents in the area had been distributing flyers they called "death letters," in which they ordered residents of this western corner of volatile Anbar province to leave -- or face death.
"Basically, the insurgents say if they don't leave they will ... behead them," said Alford, who took command this month of about 1,000 Marines stationed in the dusty desert area populated by roughly 100,000 Sunni Arabs.
"It appears that al Qaeda in Iraq is kicking out local people from a lot of these towns out there," he said. Alford said he did not know why the insurgents were forcing townspeople to leave, but he estimated that as many as 100 families per day were passing through a Marine checkpoint just east of the troubled area, their cars packed with their belongings as they flee east alongside the Euphrates River on the ancient Silk Road.
Two weeks ago, Marine spokesmen denied initial reports that insurgents had taken control of the area and were enforcing strict Islamic law, whipping men accused of drinking alcohol, burning a beauty parlor and shops that sold CDs and executing government workers for collaboration with the Iraqi government.
(Excerpt) Read more at sfgate.com ...
Sounds like the first thing to do is bomb a moat around this area to stop tunnel use and the carpet bomb the h&!! out of the area until it is a large deep pit.
Drop it about 100' below it's current altitude.
The civilians are the ones who have been giving our people the GPS coordinates that cause the insurgent safehouses in the Anbar province to go kaboom.
God you got to love stupid foes. Get ready to meet Satan you morons.
Source for this? Sounds a little too convenient for the Iraq is Vietnam crowd. This terrain is not exactly tunnel friendly.
Time for a demostration project for the Syrians,,,show our B-1's, B-2's and of course the Rolling Thunder.....B-52...the ancient one!
A tunnel which U.S. military officials said was used by insurgents to escape fighting is shown in the northern Iraqi town of Tal Afar
Iraqi authorities claimed nearly 200 suspected militants were killed and 315 were captured in the Sept. 8-12 offensive in Tal Afar. But U.S. and Iraqi troops discovered later that many had slipped away, some through a network of tunnels.
I must have mis heard this morning...the tunnels were in Northern Iraq
Neither do I. In fact it shows that the locals have been helpful! They don't want locals around ratting them out. Now we know where they are and when we are ready, we can kill them.
The only bad part is paying the people off that owned the property/homes afterwards.
You think they want a mant-to-man slugfest fight with the 6th Marines? :)
Don't jeapordize the Op for the sake of "being first to post" or those individuals wanting to be seen as a "knowledgeable source of information" to boost their ego.
Do you by chance have any links to stories talking about the underground structures that we heard so much about pre-war?
I have not heard anything as of late about these. Would have thought some curious reporter would have published a documentary taking the viewer on a tour of all of these underground bunkers.
That looks like an 'oops'...
Roger that.
Reuters
Agence France (AFP)
Al Jazeera
Al Qaida themselves
"I don't necessarily see this as bad news. It seems they're helping us out by getting the innocent civilians out of the blast zone. I hope any town that is "taken over" by jihadis will be promptly turned to glass."
I was thinking the same thing, don't have to be extra careful there, now do we?
Judging from the way some of the bombs are breaking apart, my guess is that those are cluster munitions.
Just the thing those Al-Queda buttwipes are asking to be introduced too.
Ah! Maybe so. I thought a couple conventional bombs had collided in mid-air.
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