The Push Into Baquba – Iraq

Will wonders never cease?  Here is Michael Gordon writing in the New York Times with a piece on Iraq and the latest push into Baquba:

The enemy was a phantom who never showed his face but transformed a neighborhood into a network of houses rigged to explode.

And the soldiers from Comanche Company’s First Platoon confronted this elaborate and deadly trap.

The platoon’s push began shortly after 4 a.m. on Saturday, as American forces continued their effort to wrest the western section of this city north of Baghdad from Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia. Tracer rounds zipped through the air as the soldiers fired antitank weapons, mortar shells and machine guns at the abandoned houses they planned to inspect across the street.

They calculated that the firepower would blow up any bombs the insurgents might have planted in the houses, while providing cover so the first squads could move south across the thoroughfare.

The use of house bombs is not a new trick, but as the soldiers were to learn, the scale was daunting. The entire neighborhood seemed to be a trap.

After darting across the road, Sgt. Gerard Mennitto, 23, checked the front door of a partly constructed house and peered through a window looking for telltale signs of enemy explosives. The house was free of explosives and the operation seemed to be going as planned.

But there were a few early indications that the bomb threat in the area might be more challenging than the Americans had expected. The street the soldiers had raced across was strewn with slender copper wires, which the insurgents used to set off buried bombs powerful enough to upend armored vehicles.

As the platoon watched from its new foothold south of the road, a Buffalo vehicle, a heavily armored truck with a V-shaped body to dissipate bomb blasts and a giant mechanical claw, began to scour the nearby roads for bombs. It found three, which were exploded by American combat engineers.

“Controlled dets,” a soldier called out, referring to a deliberate detonation of a discovered bomb. The good news was that the buried bombs had been found and neutralized. But some had been deeply buried on the road the platoon had just crossed.

The street bombs were probably little threat without a triggerman to set off the blast. The houses where the soldiers had secured their toehold seemed to have been abandoned, but soon after the platoon settled in, a small line of weary Iraqi civilians carrying a white flag emerged and slowly walked away. If some civilians had been lingering in or near the neighborhood, perhaps some insurgents were, too.

To blast a path through the next bomb-ridden stretch of road, combat engineers brought in a mine-clearing device. A bright fireball appeared over the street and a cloud of gritty dust engulfed the platoon’s house as the soldiers huddled in the back and plugged their ears.

Afterward, as Sgt. Philip Ness-Hunkin, 24, walked to the house next door, he saw copper wires leading to the home. The gate was unlocked and the front door was invitingly open.

The rest of the story deals with the fact that our troops faced an enemy whose sole strategy was to force a gunfight in the middle of the street which in turn pushes our troops into houses for cover.  Houses rigged with explosives which the terrorists then blow up.  Of course they fail to realize that our troops have become quite good at sniffing these things out as evidenced by the fact that during the day this reporter wrote about no casualties were taken in the squad of troops he rode with.

This is what reporting should be.  No sly liberal sentences sandwiched in between true facts, no hidden bias.  Good reporting, and for that to come from the New York Times is just astounding.

Meanwhile General Mattis, the General leading all the Marines in the Middle East, sat down for a great interview:

Lt. Gen. James Mattis told the North County Times during an exclusive interview this week that while a lot of work has been done in Iraq and Afghanistan, there is much to do to defeat the extremist threats to Middle East stability and long-term U.S. security.
 
"The problem of violent extremists existed long before 2003, and it is going to exist long after the next presidential election," said Mattis, who also commands Camp Pendleton’s 25,000-member I Marine Expeditionary Force. "We are going to have to confront it and come up with a national policy."

The slightly built, 57-year-old combat veteran said he understood that the unconventional nature of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and their sustained lengths, are testing American resolve.

"We have to recognize that our electoral process may not provide the patience consistent with fighting this sort of war," he said. "Sincere, patriotic Americans can disagree with where we are going, but we have got to come up with an understanding and build consensus for how we are going to address it."

The three-star general’s remarks came during the wide-ranging, two-hour interview with a reporter and editor in his wood-paneled office on the second floor of the I Marine Expeditionary Force headquarters at Camp Pendleton.

When asked why and how the Sunni insurgency has switched sides and now fight against al-Qaeda he responded that they, meaning al-Qaeda, made many mistakes by trying to force the residents to live by strict Islam standards…and those who didn’t were killed, including children:

"These were mistakes," he said of those killings and how the incidents created an opportunity for the U.S. to make new alliances. "And war, at times, is decided by whoever makes the fewest mistakes."

Read the whole thing here.

Curt

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