The with­drawal of American troops from Iraqi cities today marks a turn­ing point for the war in Iraq, and leaves me with mixed feel­ings about the cur­rent sit­u­a­tion and the war overall.

I see it as a suc­cess that the secu­rity sit­u­a­tion has improved so much that US forces basi­cally aren’t needed to pro­tect the urban pop­u­la­tions any­way. Whether it was an arbi­trary date or not, it sort of turned out to be an event-​​driven one — at least in terms of secu­rity. I can’t express the pride I feel for the sac­ri­fice and adapt­abil­ity of the troops who made this suc­cess possible.

I remem­ber being at a small out­post on the out­skirts of Balad in July of 2003. My pho­tog­ra­pher col­league and I hired two seats in a con­voy of Suburbans head­ing out of Amman to a hotel in Baghdad, where we based our­selves for six weeks to cover the begin­nings of the occupation.

We went on a raid one night out of the small base — which had no elec­tric­ity, no air con­di­tion­ing, no refrig­er­a­tion — with a group from the 4th ID based on intel gained from a short trip into town by the com­pany com­man­der who slipped in with his trans­la­tor (terp) wear­ing a dish­dash and dri­ving in a cap­tured taxi cab. This was two months after the “mis­sion accom­plished” speech and I was amazed at the ini­tia­tive of the troops there that early on.

I went to Sadr city then too. The fetid stench of sewage and rot­ten trash waft­ing into the gritty dust thrown up by the totally unar­mored Humvee we were in. Kids threw rocks at us. “That means they like us,” one Soldier told me. “I think.…”

Then there was the vic­tory lap with Marines in south­ern towns. The Shiite pop­u­la­tion there was over­joyed with the US vic­tory and the over­thrown Saddam. I was in a small camp in Diwaniyah when Udeh and Kuseh Hussein were killed. There was so much cel­e­bra­tory fire, a Marine stand­ing post on a rooftop nearby was injured when a round came down out of the sky and hit him in the leg.

I remem­ber stand­ing on the street cor­ner just out­side what was still not yet called the Green Zone (the troops from the 2nd ACR called it the MOAC: mother of all check­points) at 9pm wait­ing for a dri­ver from the AP to pick me and a cou­ple col­leagues up after a trip into the field. I didn’t think for one sec­ond that some­thing would hap­pen to me at the time.

Then it all changed from hope to despair.

I returned to a very dif­fer­ent Iraq in late 2005. For a month I cow­ered in the back of a Marine Humvee in Ramadi dodg­ing IEDs on nightly patrols and raids. My first night there in early December, a coor­di­nated IED attack maimed sev­eral Marines and killed two after they’d dis­mounted from a 7 ton truck to fix a Humvee dis­abled by a pre­vi­ous bomb. I went along on the QRF and watched as Marines picked up com­bat boots filled with sev­ered feet and legs.

In Hit, we were in the boon­docks for a month. The desert “rat­lines” that fun­neled sui­cide bombers into Iraq from Syria. It was tense but quiet, until a group of insur­gents tried to over­run the camp I was in guarded by a sin­gle pla­toon of Marines. We joked together that the Iraq war had turned into the war on drugs — every time you grab an insur­gent or uncover a (mas­sive) weapons cache, there’s three more that pop up right along­side it (or him). We were never going to win this war, we thought.

And then it all changed. I remem­ber think­ing to myself even after the first trip to Iraq that the main prob­lem was the Iraqis them­selves. They refused to act. They refused to reject being cooped in some­one else’s fail­ing agenda (the islamists). They failed to stand up for them­selves and con­front the vio­lence that no one wanted. Why weren’t we guilt­ing them into acting?

Then we did. There was a tip­ping point there. Not sure when, but some­thing showed the com­mu­nity lead­ers there that throw­ing their lot in with AQ wasn’t going to get them where they needed to go. The Iraqis didn’t strike me as par­tic­u­larly rad­i­cal peo­ple — they weren’t ripe for the Taliban or the Iranian mul­lahs. But some­thing clearly con­vinced local lead­ers to side with the US and stand up against AQ. Whether it was the sev­ered head of a cousin to Abdul-​​Satter Abu Risha deliv­ered to his doorstep that did it or what, I don’t know. But some­thing tipped the balance.

Then it was hard fight­ing and close team­ing and tough, thor­ough train­ing that got the job done. The troops stuck to their guns. They refused to relent. They bit their tongues when they saw the Iraqi forces act­ing like idiots. They kept cajol­ing them into the fight. And they did it. As Steve Colbert said: “We won…”

I went back to the new Iraq in early 2008 and I was stunned. I was also bored. One month with com­bat units there — Marines and Army — and not a sin­gle raid. No incom­ing rock­ets. Not even a stray AK round from a Friday wed­ding party. Everything had changed.

And this is where we find our­selves today.

Am I ner­vous about how this is all going to shake out? Yes. But I’m con­fi­dent that Iraq has passed the point of no return. I’m con­fi­dent that they will not revert to the chaos and jihadist may­hem of 2006 and ’07. DO they have “rec­on­cil­i­a­tion?” No. But do we? Do they have a hydro­car­bon law yet? No. But can you even con­ceive of how com­plex such a law would be? Could you see the US com­ing up with one? The only states in the region that have them are theoc­ra­cies or king­doms. No one voted on those.

But at the end of the day it’s been a major tri­umph for our armed forces. Politicians in the US cer­tainly didn’t help much. The troops stuck to the guns, put their heads down and worked hard to make it a suc­cess. They didn’t involve them­selves in the debates — there is no debate, right? You exe­cute your orders and you do them deci­sively. The mil­i­tary did way more than they were trained to do. And they did it with­out com­plaint and with amaz­ing skill and aptitude.

I am glad to have wit­nessed and been a part — in a small way — of this very unpop­u­lar war. It’s when the chips are down; when nobody says you’ll win; when all sup­port has faded away where char­ac­ter is found. Those who fought, worked and died there had it. And we should be excep­tion­ally proud of those who will never quite brush all that tal­cum sand out of their boots ever again.

– Christian

Can we please now say that the “Cut and Run”-ers were dead wrong. That America could be suc­cess­ful in Iraq and that it wasn’t the Sunnis who did it; it was Americans who sup­ported an unpop­u­lar “surge” strat­egy that proved to be the real solu­tion to the secu­rity problem…

American Forces Press Service

WASHINGTON — The num­ber of daily attacks in Iraq has dropped nearly 95 per­cent since last year, a U.S. mil­i­tary offi­cial said yesterday.

Iraq suf­fered an aver­age of 180 attacks per day this time last year. But over the past week, the aver­age num­ber was 10, Army Brig. Gen. David G. Perkins, a Multi-​​National Force Iraq spokesman, said.

“This is a dra­matic improve­ment of safety through­out the coun­try,” Perkins told reporters dur­ing a wide-​​ranging news con­fer­ence in Baghdad yesterday.

He added that the country’s mur­der rates have dropped below lev­els that existed before the start of American oper­a­tions in Iraq. In November, the ratio was 0.9 per 100,000 people. 

– Christian

…but you wouldn’t know it from the main­stream media. 

Military​.com ran a story from our friends at Stars and Stripes which reported the Marines plan to hand over “Provincial Iraqi Control” of al Anbar province on Saturday (June 29).

Once the most vio­lent place in Iraq, Anbar province will come under Provincial Iraqi Control on Saturday, a senior mil­i­tary offi­cial said Monday.

So far, nine Iraqi provinces are under Provincial Iraqi Control, or PIC, in which Iraqi secu­rity forces per­form day-​​to-​​day oper­a­tions and U.S. troops pro­vide assis­tance as needed, the mil­i­tary offi­cial told reporters.

“When you PIC a province, the coali­tion force goes into what we call an oper­a­tional over­watch: They’re there, essen­tially as a secu­rity blan­ket,” the offi­cial said.

Though the Washington Post ran a story on its Web site today which lead with the heinous attempt by AQI to dis­rupt the han­dover by bomb­ing a provin­cial coun­cil meet­ing and killing an esti­mated 20 (which hits pretty close to home for me because I met some of these tribal lead­ers in the very place where the bomb­ing occurred — see the pic­ture above), the paper edi­tion did not have a story on the han­dover, nor did the New York Times.

Remember, these were the papers that jumped on the leak of a Marine Corps Intelligence report in September 2006 that Anbar was lost. Wrote the NYTimes:

As the sit­u­a­tion has dete­ri­o­rated, insur­gent attacks have increased. The report describes Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia as an inte­gral part of the social fab­ric of Anbar.

Aside from being flat out wrong on that assess­ment, the sto­ries painted a grim pic­ture of the sit­u­a­tion in Anbar and help solid­ify impres­sions (with an elec­tion com­ing up just a month later) that Iraq was a lost cause.

(more…)

Our boy Bill Roggio got his hands on some intel that filled in the blanks on that truck explo­sion in Sadr City this week.

“…the explo­sions were caused by the pre­ma­ture det­o­na­tion of a Special Groups impro­vised rocket launch­ing sys­tem. The sys­tem, which has been described as a fly­ing impro­vised explo­sive device, or air­borne IED, had received lit­tle atten­tion until yes­ter­days explo­sions in Shaab. 

“What I find dis­con­cert­ing is there have been few cor­rec­tions. This was not an engage­ment and these were not Special Groups trans­port­ing mis­siles and mor­tars in a bongo truck.“ 

The bongo truck was actu­ally the “launch vehi­cle,” accord­ing to bomb experts who sur­veyed the scene. “This was a crude rocket launch­ing sys­tem we call an IRAM [impro­vised rocket assisted mor­tars] that pre­ma­turely det­o­nated caus­ing the other rock­ets in the truck to cat­a­stroph­i­cally exploded,” Stover said. Two Mahdi Army Special Groups fight­ers were killed in the sub­se­quent explo­sions, as well as 16 civil­ians. Twenty-​​nine civil­ians were wounded and 15 build­ings were severely damaged. 

There were five blast sites, the US mil­i­tary reported. The ini­tial blast occurred at the rocket launcher, while the four other rock­ets were thrown sev­eral hun­dred meters to the east and det­o­nated. “It is believed the intended tar­gets were US Soldiers at [Forward Operating Base] Callahan and while in the final stages of prepar­ing for the attack, for an unknown rea­son one rocket pre­ma­turely det­o­nated caus­ing the remain­ing rock­ets to launch and explode erratically.“ 

I dunno, what’s the dif­fer­ence between an impro­vised MLRS and an IED? Roggio tries to explain:

While the US mil­i­tary related the IRAM explo­sions in Sha’ab to the April 28 IRAM attacks on Joint Security Station Thawra I in Sadr City and Forward Operating Base Loyalty, there may be two impro­vised weapons sys­tems at play. Both the JSS Thawra I and the FOB Loyalty attacks were con­ducted by pulling trucks right out­side of the bases’ blast walls and fir­ing the impro­vised rock­ets into bases. The attack on FOB Loyalty resulted in two sol­diers killed and 16 wounded. 

The US mil­i­tary said the weapons used in the April 28 attacks had a lim­ited range of between 50 and 150 yards, accord­ing to a source famil­iar with the attack who wishes to remain anony­mous. The US mil­i­tary said the range and size of the war­head on the IRAMs is classified.

(more…)

Here’s an early look at Military.com’s lede story tomor­row morn­ing (bar­ring break­ing news, of course). Christian con­tin­ues his report­ing from Iraq, this time focus­ing on the enemy sniper threat in Tikrit:

They call it the sniper dance.

Youre out in the open. There are houses all around you — cover and con­ceal­ment for enemy sharp­shoot­ers to plink off a U.S. Soldier.

Stand there, wait a few sec­onds, shift to the right — then do it all over again.

We dont want a sniper to get a good shot off on us, one Soldier says. So we keep mov­ing all the time.

In this home region for the deposed Iraqi dic­ta­tor Saddam Hussein, the secu­rity that has only recently descended here is ten­u­ous at best. With the Iraqi army largely pushed out of the sur­round­ing towns and vil­lages to help U.S. forces root out the most tena­cious hold­outs in other areas, the focus here is on build­ing a durable police force that can secure the pop­u­la­tion and at the same time keep the insur­gency from spark­ing up again.

American Military Police units and the civil­ian advi­sors that help them rec­og­nize the man­date is a tall order. With cor­rup­tion a part of every­day life here and a polic­ing phi­los­o­phy mak­ing the tran­si­tion from being an instru­ment of oppres­sion to a force that serves the com­mu­nity, putting the local police on the right track takes con­stant inter­ac­tion and a deep reser­voir of patience.

Our motto is no free chicken, said Staff Sgt. Joe Cline, a pla­toon sergeant with the 56th Military Police Company, who added their main mis­sion is to cut the Iraqi polices depen­dence on the U.S. military.

Each of the pla­toons with the 56th Military Police Company — which is made of Army reservists from a Arizona, California and Nevada — is divided into smaller Police Transition Teams, called PiTTs. Paired with civil­ian con­trac­tors drawn from police depart­ments from across the coun­try, the PiTT teams patrol the towns out­side the sprawl­ing Camp Speicher base just to the north of Tikrit, vis­it­ing police sta­tions, meet­ing with their lead­ers and assess­ing what needs they have to keep cops on the beat.

At the Tikrit patrol sta­tion, MPs wanted to see if a shoot­ing inci­dent that occurred the pre­vi­ous day showed up on the sta­tions log books. After a furi­ous series of mis­trans­la­tions and fum­bling through piles of papers, the Iraqi police­man said he didnt have the shoot­ing — which occurred just a block away — on his books.

That was reported at another sta­tion, the Iraqi police­man told the MPs.

Frustrated, the MPs looked at each other with dismay.

Read the rest in the head­lines at Military​.com, first thing Monday morning.

And I’m headed for Kansas University tomor­row to be part of a mil­blog­ging panel with Jack Holt from DoD’s New Media Directorate and Castle of Argghhh’s John Donovan. I’ll be post­ing when I can from the road. If any DT read­ers are in or around Jayhawk Country please stop by the cam­pus and say hello after the panel on Tuesday night.

(Photo by Christian Lowe)

– Ward

It didnt look like much to me.

I was warned that this place was bad news. That it had been made into a tem­ple for the deceased dic­ta­tor and that we really shouldnt hang out there for long.

I told them I wanted to go anyway.

(Sorry about the pic­ture qual­ity but I had to shoot it from a speed­ing Humvee window.)

You can see for your­self, the tomb of Saddam Hussein and the shrine (if you can call it that) thats devoted to him aint much. I mean, check out the trash pile in the dirt to the right. And I expected Lenins tomb-​​esque lines of devoted fol­low­ers lin­ing the side­walk to pay trib­ute to the dear leader. But no one was there.
Not even a guard to keep venge­ful vic­tims of his rule at bay.

The town of Owja, where Saddam was born and raised, is still a net­tle­some mix of dis­grun­tled Sunnis, Baathists and Hussein kin. Its a dan­ger­ous place, these Soldiers told me. But judg­ing from the lack of devo­tion to his final rest­ing place, hes not the local celebrity he once was.

(That’s a pic­ture of the wall lead­ing up to Saddam’s tomb…If any­one can read Arabic I’d like to know what it says. Or maybe a new cap­tion contest?)

– Christian

(Cross-​​posted at my “From the Front” blog.)

It all seemed to be going so smoothly.

Sure, the unit was an hour late to pick me up. But you gotta be ready for that when trav­el­ing in a war zone. They don’t work on your sched­ule over here.

I made it down to the com­mand post for 3rd Battalion, 3rd Marines — a Hawaii-​​based unit that’s been here since August. The plan was to head out with them in a town called Karmah for a cou­ple days to see how secu­rity has improved since some tough fight­ing this past summer.

I met a few of the guys, loaded my gear (way too much of it, of course) into the “high-​​back” Humvee (the pickup truck ver­sion with a big box of thick steel armor­ing its cargo com­part­ment) and we headed toward the back gate of Camp Fallujah. During the first part of the ride, we made small talk, get­ting to know where each other was from and how things had been since they got here.

Then I asked them how their Humvees had been hold­ing up.

“Pretty good,” one of the Marines replied.

The Humvee is a real work­horse here. But for the last few years new units com­ing in have been falling in on the same jeeps left here by other bat­tal­ions head­ing out. That means these Humvees have taken quite a beat­ing. And it’s a real trib­ute to the main­te­nance Marines — and Soldiers, for that mat­ter — who keep them running.

(more…)

Christian’s “in coun­try” and, at this writ­ing, headed for Fallujah. Check out all the details here.

As many of you already know, Stratfor has been an impor­tant resource for deep analy­sis of many geostrate­gic prob­lems fac­ing the United States. While their analy­sis is typ­i­cally dry and dis­pas­sion­ate, they tend to exam­ine all angles with­out favor and do a pretty good job of dis­till­ing the issue for gen­eral consumption.

They have not been Iraq war cheer­lead­ers, nor have they been obses­sively morose in their char­ac­ter­i­za­tion of the chal­lenges there. So I thought it might be a thought-​​provoking exer­cise to include an excerpt here of their most recent analy­sis of the options in Iraq, which is posted in full on Military​.coms Warfighters Forum page.

While I under­stand none of you want this page to turn into an Iraq War site, we will be includ­ing a few more Iraq items than usual as the Sept. 15 interim report dead­line approaches.

…Following the Republican defeat in Congress in November, U.S. President George W. Bush sur­prised Iran by increas­ing U.S. forces in Iraq rather than begin­ning with­drawals. This cre­ated a win­dow of a few months dur­ing which Tehran, weigh­ing the risks and rewards, was suf­fi­ciently uncer­tain that it might have opted for an agree­ment thrust­ing the Shiites behind a coali­tion gov­ern­ment. That moment has passed. As the NIE points out, the prob­a­bil­ity of form­ing any viable gov­ern­ment in Baghdad is extremely low. Iran no longer is fac­ing its worst-​​case sce­nario. It has no moti­va­tion to bail the United States out.

What, then, is the United States to do? In gen­eral, three options are avail­able. The first is to main­tain the cur­rent strat­egy. This is the administration’s point of view. The sec­ond is to start a phased with­drawal, begin­ning some­time in the next few months and con­clud­ing when cir­cum­stances allow. This is the con­sen­sus among most cen­trist Democrats and a grow­ing num­ber of Republicans. The third is a rapid with­drawal of forces, a posi­tion held by a fairly small group mostly but not exclu­sively on the left. All three con­ven­tional options, how­ever, suf­fer from fatal defects.

Bush’s plan to stay the course would appear to make rel­a­tively lit­tle sense. Having pur­sued a strate­gic goal with rel­a­tively fixed means for more than four years, it is unclear what would be achieved in years five or six. As the old saw goes, the def­i­n­i­tion of insan­ity is doing the same thing repeat­edly, expect­ing a dif­fer­ent out­come. Unless Bush seri­ously dis­agrees with the NIE, it is dif­fi­cult to make a case for con­tin­u­ing the cur­rent course.

Looking at it dif­fer­ently, how­ever, there are these argu­ments to be made for main­tain­ing the cur­rent strat­egy: Whatever mis­takes might have been made in the past, the cur­rent real­ity is that any with­drawal from Iraq would cre­ate a vac­uum, which would rapidly be filled by Iran. Alternatively, Iraq could become a jihadist haven, focus­ing atten­tion not only on Iraq but also on tar­gets out­side Iraq. After all, a jihadist safe-​​haven with abun­dant resources in the heart of the Arab world out­weighs the strate­gic locale of Afghanistan. Therefore, con­tin­u­ing the U.S. pres­ence in Iraq, at the cost of 1,000–2,000 American lives a year, pre­vents both out­comes, even if Washington no longer has any hope of achiev­ing the orig­i­nal goal… 

Read the entire Endgame arti­cle in this weeks Warfighters Forum.

– Christian

We at DefenseTech rec­og­nize that the con­flict in Iraq is, to say the least, a con­tro­ver­sial sub­ject for our read­ers and we’re not endors­ing the fol­low­ing view other than to say that it comes from a very reli­able source and is at least a small win­dow into the cur­rent sit­u­a­tion from some­one other than a Pentagon appointed spokesman. 

No mat­ter how skep­ti­cal you are on Americas strug­gle in Iraq, its at least worth a read to see an under-​​reported aspect of the ongo­ing surge and its effect on the insur­gency (no mat­ter whos doing the shooting)…

I must apol­o­gize for the tar­di­ness of my update. As you may know I have been kept pretty busy since my return from R&R. I was one of the early birds so now most of the team is on R&R along with some who are away on TDY; so the few of us back here have to cover down on mul­ti­ple areas. 

Over the past month we have seen and expe­ri­enced a lot. As mil­i­tary pro­fes­sion­als we are see­ing the ben­e­fits of the President’s surge, our tac­ti­cal and oper­a­tional progress over the month has been really impres­sive. Between U.S. ground forces and the Iraqi Security Forces (Army and National Police) we have been uncov­er­ing hun­dreds of insur­gent (Al Qaeda and Jaish al Mahdi — aka JAM) caches and detect­ing far more IEDs before they explode. Caches so far this year are over 3,800. I think that is triple last year’s. 

Al Qaeda has totally lost the sup­port of Iraq’s Sunni Arabs. The fanat­ics over-​​played their hand when they started mur­der­ing pop­u­lar sheiks, kid­nap­ping tribal women for forced mar­riages, and even tried out­law­ing smok­ing. The locals in Al Anbar Province are tak­ing their com­mu­ni­ties back and going after the ter­ror­ists them­selves. Attacks on Coalition Forces out in what once used to be the Wild Wild West are down dra­mat­i­cally; we used to see 50 to 60 attacks a day but now they’re down to less than one a day. To the point that the Marine com­man­der out west has asked for per­mis­sion to lighten his sol­diers’ and Marines’ load by hav­ing them only wear the flack jacket/​vest with­out the side plates and upper arm Kevlar. 

Up in Diyala the provin­cial cap­i­tal is com­pletely dif­fer­ent than it was over a month ago. The sol­diers of the two Brigade Combat Teams (1st CAV and 2nd ID) have secured the city. The insur­gents are now wan­der­ing around the coun­try­side — eas­ier to pick up with infrared/​heat sen­sors on our UAVs and air weapons teams (attack helos). They try to plant IEDs at night think­ing they are safe and sound, then out of nowhere they are taken out by a Hellfire mis­sile and it’s all caught on tape too. It’s our own real­ity TV show call “IED Planters;” its a great show when one has night duty; dial in the UAV lead, cook some pop­corn, grab a soda, sit back, relax and watch the fun — all live! 

The insur­gents are still out there, but they are find­ing it harder and harder to find sup­port. We are no longer play­ing “whack-​​a-​​mole.” Since we have a larger num­ber of troops over here we are now able to clear out the insur­gents and then hold on to our gains; then turn it over to the Iraqi Security Forces, Army, National Police and local Police. 

(more…)