Posted on 10/21/2005 7:01:20 PM PDT by 1066AD
US troops fighting losing battle for Sunni triangle By Adrian Blomfield (Filed: 22/10/2005)
The mob grew more frenzied as the gunmen dragged the two surviving Americans from the cab of their bullet-ridden lorry and forced them to kneel on the street.
Killing one of the men with a rifle round fired into the back of his head, they doused the other with petrol and set him alight. Barefoot children, yelping in delight, piled straw on to the screaming man's body to stoke the flames.
It had taken just one wrong turn for disaster to unfold. Less than a mile from the base it was heading to, the convoy turned left instead of right and lumbered down one of the most anti-American streets in Iraq, a narrow bottleneck in Duluiya town, on a peninsular jutting into the Tigris river named after the Jibouri tribe that lives there.
As the lorries desperately tried to reverse out, dozens of Sunni Arab insurgents wielding rocket launchers and automatic rifles emerged from their homes.
The gunmen were almost certainly emboldened by the fact that the American soldiers escorting the convoy would not have been able to respond quickly enough.
"The hatches of the humvees were closed," said Capt Andrew Staples, a member of the Task Force Liberty 1-15 battalion that patrols Duluiya and other small towns on the eastern bank of the Tigris, who spoke to soldiers involved.
Within minutes, four American contractors, all employees of the Halliburton subsidiary Kellog, Brown & Root, were dead. The jubilant crowd dragged their corpses through the street, chanting anti-US slogans. An investigation has been launched into why the contractors were not better protected.
Perhaps fearful of public reaction in America, where support for the war is falling, US officials suppressed details of the Sept 20 attack, which bore a striking resemblance to the murder of four other contractors in Fallujah last year.
Duluiya, located in the notorious Sunni triangle, is much smaller than Fallujah but no less violent, even if events here rarely make the news.
The violence here seems to encapsulate the growing difficulties the US military is facing in trying to defeat the insurgency. Pinned down by a constant stream of hit-and-run attacks from former Saddam regime loyalists, American soldiers are unable to focus their attention on the foreign extremists who pose a far more dangerous threat to the future of Iraq.
Yet it is here that the battle against the suicide bombers must be won.
The isolated towns east of the Tigris supply the foreign fighters and their allies and provide a haven where they can regroup after American offensives on their urban strongholds.
If the Americans do not close off these boltholes, it seems unlikely the war can be won.
But hopes for progress are growing more remote. The insurgency in eastern Salahuddin province is growing more intense, more deadly and more sophisticated.
Lt Col Gary Brito, the battalion's commanding officer, said that in recent months the number of roadside bombs targeting his men had increased by a third - even though journeys out of base have been cut back. They are having a more devastating effect too.
"Before only two out of 10 used to be effective," he said. "Now four or five have a catastrophic effect, blowing away a vehicle or causing casualties." In the past few months at least four American soldiers in this battalion alone have been killed. Another 39 have been wounded.
Even routine patrols are fraught with danger.
"What the hell was that," shouted Lt Chris Baldwin as a huge explosion rocked Baker Company's convoy of humvees trundling along a street in Dour, another town under Lt Col Brito's watch.
"Contact! Contact!" he bellowed into his radio as the gunners opened fire on a row of nearby houses from where the rocket-propelled anti-tank missile was fired.
As the gunfire died down, the soldiers burst into house after house, their facades peppered with bullet holes.
But, as is so often the case, the attacker had vanished down one of Dour's maze-like alleys.
Instead the Americans were confronted with sullen Iraqis, holding their terrified children to their sides. An old woman sat on her bed, clutching her heart, as the soldiers interrogated the family.
"They heard nothing, they saw nothing, same as ******* usual," said Sgt Jody Miller. Taking another deep drag from his cigarette, he turned to the company's translator.
"Tell them to tell us where the bad guys are so we stop frigging shooting up their houses," he said.
Nobody was hurt but the mutual distrust between the Americans and the local community deepened just a little bit more.
It's just a matter of time. In a year or so the Iraqi army will be strong enough to take on the insurgency itself and I doubt they will pussyfoot around. The Sunnis are a small minority in Iraq and I think that in the coming years they will be in a world of hurt with only themselves to blame for it.
Look at the author's other articles. I don't know if I would call him pro-Iraq Liberation
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Re the reporter, Adrian Blomfield, from http://yglesias.typepad.com/matthew/2004/10/diary.html
See also this sobering account by Daily Telegraph reporter Adrian Blomfield published in The Spectator (UK) -
"Why I turned against the war"
"Adrian Blomfield went to Baghdad as a strong believer in regime change. Now he thinks that Bush has messed up in Iraq — and should be booted out of the White House."
http://www.spectator.co.uk/article.php?id=5168&issue=2004-10-30
Oh, I know... I'm familiar with the Telegraph and the Guardian. The T has only ever been marginally better than the G, though. They're both way ~way~ more leftist than even our leftist papers here.
So the author of this article was against the war last year.
So we have an unconfirmed report of american soldiers burning a DEAD BODY, and its like World War 3, but when they burn our men alive, nothing. I don't expect much from the religion of peace, although it would be nice if they could muster just a tiny bit as much outrage over torching people alive as they do for outrages like a talk-show host pointing out they they support terrorists.
No sympathy for the contractors. Our troops are trigger happy killers?
What a sorry SOB you are.
You want kid gloves during a war, send policemen in there and let them read the bastards their Miranda rights. Our troops are fighting vicious enemy that would and have shown them no mwercy.
Let's take their oil first.
I keep looking for corroborating news sources... nothing.
Has our friend Adrian's hate for Bush finally sent him round the bend?
Stay tuned....
Your a year old, and don't know the rules yet?
Need a DU cleanup here, guys....
It's MOAB time.
Right now they have the choice of submission to American pacification as in Fallujah, or resistance.
If America turns tail and runs, the insurgency will be at the mercy of the Shia majority that has suffered a hideous murder and bombing campaign for two and a half years and Sunni/Baathist brutality for much longer, and wants blood. One word from Ayatollah Sistani and the Shia will depopulate entire provinces--it's the ancient way of the Middle East, after all.
I could be wrong, but I think the paragraph you are referring to was taken from the DU sight that he referenced earlier.
If I'm wrong, I gladly join the flaming party.
It's not his opinion, it's what the nihilists on DU are saying.
Excellent point, I had never thought about it in quite that way.
How ironic, the only thing keeping the Sunni's from being destroyed is that WE are fighting them.
The Libs want to bring the troops home in order to make us ignominously lose. Wouldn't they be pissed if we brought the troops home and caused us to win!
Dan Rather's head would explode.
We need to cluster-bomb the Sunni Triangle and not stop until the entire rathole is in smoking ruins.
Perhaps he's started dating Robert Fisk, and has fallen under his malign spell?!
B.S. - do it, do it right, do it right now!
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