The Challenge: Fear of Infiltration

I suppose I’ve expressed enough of my political views in the last month to last a while, I think the situation over here is amazingly complex and history may or may not reveal the truth. But, I suppose it doesn’t matter, whether this war was conceived on deceit, or a genuine belief that things would turn out differently (even if plans weren’t made to ensure anything.) I am here, will be here for at least the next seven months, and regardless of how quickly the democrats promise to bring home the troops if elected, American Soldiers will be advising and developing the Iraqi Army for the foreseeable future. Over the next couple of weeks or so, I plan to write a series of posts covering the challenges that face us as we assess, advise and assist our Iraqi Partners.



Overall, our Iraqi Battalion is quite capable of day to day operations. They man their checkpoints professionally, the leadership is comprised of mostly former members of the Army under Sadaam Hussein. The sectarian divide that gets so much publicity doesn’t seem to exist for us, we have a very good mix of religions, Sunni, Shiite and Yezidi, and a good mix of Arabs and Kurds as well. I’ve never witnessed nor heard of a disagreement which stemmed from sectarian differences. Many Battalions are reported to be infiltrated with insurgents, and that may well be the case with ours. We are careful to never let our guard down when we are with the IA, we never leave our house without a loaded 9mm piston on our hip, though I’ve never felt threatened.



Because of this possible insurgent infiltration, mission planning is very compartmentalized at the higher levels of the Battalion. In the U.S. Army, mission planning is done both from the top down and the bottom up, the Iraqi model is different. The BN Commander may call his company commander on the cell phone and tell him to report to HQ, he will then tell him to have 4 HMMWV’s ready to go in ½ an hour. This is all the info the Company Commander will get out of fear that the target of the raid may be his brother, uncle, cousing, tribesman or someone he knows and he will tip them off. This compartmentalization results in little development of Junior Leaders, they are simply told what to do. Also, the lack of prior knowledge of a mission precludes the Company Commander, who is leading the mission, from doing any type of reconnaissance or detailed planning; only very generic basic rehearsals can be conducted. For example, if you know exactly what house you are targeting, you can plan your ingress and egress routes, determine where to best position your cordon, and identify most likely enemy avenues of approach and escape. All of these are key things to be familiar with before a mission begins and our Iraqi Company Commanders, Platoon Leaders and NCOs are force to operate without them. This leads to numerous raids resulting in what are referred to as “dry holes.” Because escape routes aren’t sealed off before the cordon is set, the targeted individual is able to sneak out of the area.


Next time I’ll write about the logistical problems our BN deals with on a daily basis.

A Multiple Choice Exam

These four scenarios are equally unbelievable and ridiculous, one of them just happens to be true. Just to help you, i've italicized the right answer.

The Federal Government has implemented one of the following plans in order to create positive spin for a failing policy. Pick One.

• The Dept. of Energy has plans to raise the price of gasoline to $4.00 per gallon for six months, then the price will be dropped to May '07 levels, they will then take credit for lowering the price of gas.
• The Border Patrol will allow the next 50,000 illegal immigrants to walk across the border unchallenged, in six months they will round up 50,000 illegal immigrants and deport them, claiming progress in securing our borders.
• The EPA is going to permit clear cutting 10,000 acres of virgin old growth forest in Yellowstone National Park, they will then replant the acreage, an environmental success story we can all appreciate.
• Finally, we will increase troop levels in Iraq from a sustainable 130,000 to 165,000, then when troops are slated to go home, and there are no available forces to replace them, we will claim that due to an improved security situation, we are now able to begin a withdrawal of 35,000 soldiers over the next 4 months. Hey Hey, we're winning the war.

The Petraeus, Crocker hearings made for great entertainment, but I don't think they should be taken for more than that. The "decisions" that came about as their result were already made when the surge was first proposed. We couldn't maintain current troop levels here without doing something drastic. Like pulling even more troops out of Afghanistan, or extending tour lenghts to 18 months. The security situation in this country may be better than it was 4 months ago, but it is still much more dangerous for U.S Forces and the Iraqi people than it was a year ago.

Finally, here's a short clip of Juan Cole discussing what is happening in Al-Anbar. If you don't know by now, I think this guy really has his finger on the pulse of what is happening in Iraq. His latest headlines are always on the right side of this page. I try to read his blog every day. have a look.

Three Years

Three years ago, my father died. Just to type these words is difficult, I think all who loved him are still struggling with the loss. How have three years passed? If you knew Thomas Doll, then you can appreciate the loss we all suffered three years ago. If you never met the man, then no blog post, no matter how well written could possibly explain what he meant to us.

Being in Iraq, away from loved ones, the comforts of home, security, predictability, I find myself constantly wondering what Dad would have thought about the situation here. I would give anything to sit and talk to him about all that I have experienced here in the 17 total months that I have spent in this country. What would he have thought of my role in the first elections in Iraq in January of 2005. What would his reaction be to hearing that the Dining Facility where I ate every day was attacked by a suicide bomber on December 21, 2004? What of the Turkish truck driver who lay bleeding on an Iraqi road while I tried to call for a medevac helicopter to come and pick him up. I wish I could have told him how I spent what would have been his 52^nd birthday at the Combat Support Hospital in Mosul, sitting with one of my squad leaders SSG Mejia who earlier in the day had been blown up by an IED on a road I now travel 3 times a week, and whose eyebrows were singed off and his leg crushed by the HMMWV which came to rest on top of it.

I wonder what Dad would think of the world I now live in. Of the customs and courtesies that are part of my daily life. Of my stories of the Iraqi Army, of the dilapidated house we live in. He would certainly appreciate the way our house is rigged up to work, building codes and American standards be damned. I know he would like the stories about the farmers here, and the broken John Deere combines that are scattered through the country.

Not a day goes by that something doesn't remind me of Dad. He had a way of looking at this world in a way that few can Every new experience, tragedy success and blessing in my life makes me miss him even more.

A 'Non Western' View of Things

This video presents a lot of numbers, just try to imagine this level of human suffering in the U.S.

A few movies

Here's a few movies for your amusement, let me know what you think.

Human Feces on my Boot



Just Back From a Dusty Mission


Chinook Flight to Mosul


Night Vision on the Roof of COP Destroyer

What If?

Ambassador Ryan Crocker and Gen. David Petraeus are slated to deliver their congressionally mandated progress report in a week, conveniently enough on September 11. I don't think there is really much of a question what the report will contain. By my estimation it will be a validation of the surge, it will champion the idea that violence is down across Iraq. Juan Cole at Informed Comment offers the following analysis:

If you compare each month in 2006 with each month in 2007 with regard to US military deaths, the 2007 picture is dreadful.

8-2007 77 8-2006 65
7-2007 79 7-2006 43
6-2007 101 6-2006 61
5-2007 126 5-2006 69
4-2007 104 4-2006 76
3-2007 81 3-2006 31
2-2007 81 2-2006 55
1-2007 83 1-2006 62

I mean, how brain dead do the Bushies think we are, peddling this horse manure that US troop deaths have fallen? (There are always seasonal variations because in the summer it is 120 F. in the shade and guerrillas are too heat-exhausted to fight; but the summer 2007 numbers are much greater than those for summer 2006; that isn't progress.) And why does our corporate media keep repeating this Goebbels-like propaganda? Do we really live in an Orwellian state?

The report will likely make the claim that political progress is slow but moving forward (the Iraqi parliament only recently returned from their summer vacation, apparently its hot in Baghdad in the summer.)

Crocker will brief that reconstruction efforts are taking hold, again a dubious claim at best, Baghdad has considerable less electricity than prewar levels, the city where I work, Tal Afar i only receives about 1/3 the electricity to power the entire city, so 2/3d's of the day the power is out.
Insurgents and militia's control many of the outer province electrical substations and in many cases have taken them "off the grid" thereby depriving Baghdad of power but giving their constituents power virtually all of the time.

One of the largest dams in the North, holding back 8 billion cubic meters of water is "in danger of imminent collapse." If this damn gives way, the city of Mosul and the American FOB Diamondback will be inundated, is there any doubt that recover and disaster relief operations would be a bit slower than those in New Orleans? I wonder what Mike "heckuva job" Brown is up to these days?



What if General Petraeus simply wrote the following:

Mr. President:

The United States Army and Marine Corps achieved their principal mission of overthrowing Saddam Hussein and his government. We did so with dispatch and minimum loss of life. We were then confronted with a massive insurgency which U.S. civilian officials, including yourself, did not anticipate and for which we have not been given adequate personnel and resources. There is little if any prospect of resolving this insurgency anytime in the next decade, if not longer. Further, continued engagement in Iraq's civil war distracts us from our most urgent mission in Afghanistan and erodes our stature in the world. Therefore, it is my recommendation that all U.S. forces be withdrawn from Iraq in an orderly but expeditious manner. In the event that this recommendation is not accepted, I have attached my letter of resignation from the United States Army.

David Petraeus

General, United States Army

Mr. Bush visited Iraq yesterday and stopped in Al Asad, an airbase in the once volatile, always newsworthy al-Anbar province. The al-Anbar has been in the news recently as a success story, local Sunni Tribeman have agreed to stop killing Americans and to focus their violence instead on AlQaeda operatives crossing the Syrian border. But to say that Al Anbar is peaceful and prosperous is simply propaganda. Consider the following:

• Al-Anbar residents killed 20 US troops in July. The total US fatalities in July were 79. Al-Anbar attacks accounted for fully 1/4 of US deaths for the month, while Al-Anbar residents represent only 1/24th of the total Iraqi population.
• In mid-July, There were about 100 violent attacks in a single week in al-Anbar. That's a bright spot. That's progress. Since the year before, there were 400 violent attacks in that same period.
• Since May, if you wanted to get somewhere in Fallujah, you have had to walk. I submit that it is much easier to control a population if you don't allow them to drive. It is certainly easier to prevent the type of huge VBIEDs that have been decimating the yezidi population in the North.
• Economic recovery, humanitarian aid, and simple recover and clean-up are virtually impossible to affect without large vehicles and construction equipment, let alone not even a pick-up truck or the trunk of a car
  

IPS quotes a local Sunni cleric:

' "To say Fallujah is quiet is true, and you can see it in the city streets," said Shiek Salim from the Fallujah Scholars' Council. "The city is practically dead, and the dead are quiet.'

Watch this exchange between CNN's Wolf Blitzer and Republican Rep. Charles Boustany (R-LA)

Attacking the Yezidis

The Yazidi's are members of one of the smallest religions in the world with between 200,000 and 300,000 members, primarily centered around Mosul in Northern Iraq, they have been the targets of catastrophic attacks in the recent weeks.

Suicide Bomb Kills 28 in Tal Afar
Iraqi Red Crescent says 500 killed in Yazidi attack


This has been significant for our team for a couple of reasons. First of all, 4 of our 5 interpreters are Yezidi, luckily all of their immediate family members were okay, but it still hit very close to home for them. Second, our IA battalion has responded to the tragedies by delivering food, water, clothing and other humanitarian items to the villages, and finally, the threat of huge dump trucks full of explosives pulling into town and blowing themselves up is particularly unnerving, especially when you consider how much time we spend living in the city. (See my post from March 29)

I'm not sure what news story pushed this carnage out of the American Mainstream Media, probably something as important as how to solicit anonymous gay sex while traveling through the twin cities. But whatever it was it pales in comparison to seeing the destruction in person

I encourage anyone interested in other religions to read further on this small religion. Some of the places mentioned in literature are very familiar to us here. Sinjar Mountain is to the West of our FOB and we watch the sun set behind it almost every night. One of our former interpreters, “Daniel” recently emigrated to Germany to link-up with his father where apparently there is an additional enclave of Yazidis .
Anyway, I took some pictures while we were in the village so I thought I would go ahead and post them here.

COP DESTROYER

Like all high rollers, celebrities and famous athletes, Soldiers are accustomed to luxurious amenities and the red carpet treatment. So it should come as no surprise that we don’t limit our lifestyle to 160 square foot containers. Our MiTT team has a second home in the city of Tal Afar. Our Iraqi Army battalion lives and operates for the most part out of Combat Outpost (COP) Destroyer. We as their advisors spend approximately half of our time living with them in our house. COP Destroyer is on the outskirts of Tal Afar and consists of a bunch of abandoned houses which the IA has commandeered. It is protected on most sides by coils of concertina wire (razor wire) and concrete barriers. On one side it is open desert and on the other three sides the city of Tal Afar is close by. Our house sits on one side of the COP and overlooks both the desert and the city.
The house is fairly nice by Iraqi standards, substandard by American standards, it is constructed entirely of concrete, has concrete floors, and no indoor plumbing. There is one long room that runs the length of the house. It has three rooms off one side, two off the other and a courtyard out the back. We’ve converted one of the rooms into a kitchen with a microwave, deep freeze, toaster oven and a couple of hot plates. Another room serves as a “war room” where we store all of our gear (vests, helmets, weapons, and ammo) that we need to get out of the house in a hurry. The other rooms are sleeping rooms. The bathroom is a concrete structure in the back with a water tank on the roof. The “toilet” is an eastern style toilet which means it is a porcelain hole in the ground. The locals utilize it by squatting carefully over it (a comfortable position for them, as that is how they sit around a lot anyway), but we Americans are used to sitting not squatting, so we have a portable toilet chair, very similar to a training toilet for kids, we took out the pail and it now sits over the hole in the floor. After you do your business you simply pour about five gallons of water down the hole, and from there we really aren’t sure where it goes, though there is raw sewage flowing through the city and I guess some of that is ours. The other room outside has a shower head on the wall and a whole cut where the wall meets the floor, also there is a sink and a mirror for shaving etc.
Most Iraqi homes have flat roofs with a staircase to reach the top. Ours is no different. When the city power goes out or the AC isn’t working we typically spend the night on the roof. We have a machine gun mount up there and sandbagged bunkers at each corner “just in case.” It’s probably overkill but I guess you never know.
The biggest challenge to living in the house is the lack of consistent electricity. The TalAfar city power distribution substation rations the power to different neighborhoods throughout the day. Our house has power for about two hours at a time followed by two hours without power. In the past we had a large generator for backup power, but due to an incident the other night the generator caught on fire. Here’s what happened (names omitted to protect the innocent.) Late one night, a Captain and a Sergeant First Class were pulling guard duty. The generator was humming along happily but was running out of fuel. The CPT noticed that city power was on and decided to take the opportunity to refuel the sputtering generator, before he could make another move however the generator sputtered, coughed and died. No problem thought the Captain; I’ll just turn on the city power and go refuel the generator. So, he went to the back of the house and flipped a circuit breaker which allowed city power to once again power the house. This set into motion a series of events that ended our days of easy power. The normal sequence of events to switch from generator power to city power is to power down the generator; turn off the breaker which connects the generator to the house, and then and only then switch the city power on. By not disconnecting the generator from the house before turning on the city power, the CPT inadvertently sent city power the wrong way into the generator thereby causing it to catch fire. So, now we are without a method of backup power. And the SFC and CPT are now known affectionately as “The City Power Duo.”
Without electricity the house doesn’t cool off at all during the night, we have taken to sleeping on the roof where at least you can get a cool breeze to cool off. The problem with that is the noise, dogs barking and growling all night, donkeys braying loudly, and finally the mosque sounding its call to prayer. There is something mysterious, scary and yet peaceful and beautiful about waking up at 4 in the morning to a sky full of stars and hearing the slow, mournful call of “Allahu Akbar” a call which has been bastardized by the insurgents, Saddam Hussein, and the American Media. Alahu Akbar is often heard in the background on videos which show insurgents blowing up American convoys, it is also stitched into the Iraqi flag, and if you say it whole heartedly three times with the intention of becoming a Muslim, you are thereby a Muslim. Saddam Hussein ordered it to be sown onto the Iraqi flag not out of religious fervor, but to prevent he Shiite people from burning the Iraqi flag. No Muslim would be so brazen as to burn an item which has sown onto it Alahu Akbar or translated to English…”God is Great.”