IRAQ
Iraq: US soldiers say it's time to end war
Doug Lorimer
15 February 2007
The US troop casualty rate in Iraq surged to a post-invasion high over the four months to the end of January, according to a February 7 Associated Press. AP reported that more US troops “were killed in combat in Iraq over the past four months — at least 334 through Jan. 31 — than in any comparable stretch since the war began.”
The AP report continued: “The reason is that US soldiers and Marines are fighting more battles in the streets of the Iraqi capital, Baghdad, and other cities. And with President Bush now sending thousands more US troops to Baghdad and western Anbar province, despite opposition in Congress and the American public’s increasing war weariness, the prospect looms of even higher casualties …
“The increasingly urban nature of the war is reflected in the fact that a higher percentage of US deaths have been in Baghdad lately.” According to AP, 1142 US troops had died in Anbar as of February 6, compared to 713 in the capital. But since December 28 “there were more in Baghdad than in Anbar — 33 to 31 …”
The wire service reported that the “upward trend” began last August, “the same month that US and Iraqi forces launched the second phase of a Baghdad security crackdown, dubbed Operation Together Forward, that ultimately failed”.
The operation involved deploying 15,000 US combat troops and 50,000 puppet Iraqi troops and police commandos — notorious for carrying out death-squad killings — onto the streets of Baghdad with the declared aim of “reducing violence in the Iraqi capital”. However, during each month of the operation between 1300 and 2000 Baghdad residents were killed.
On October 23, the US military death toll became the highest for any month in 2006. The next day, the White House announced the end of the Operation Forward Together.
Under Washington’s new troop “surge” plan, announced by Bush on January 10, the August-October Baghdad “security crackdown” is to be repeated, but with extra US troops being deployed.
Over the next four months the number of US combat troops deployed in Baghdad is to gradually rise from 24,500 to 42,000. US troops, accompanied by soldiers from the US-controlled Iraqi Army, are to conducted military offensives to “clear” Baghdad neighbourhoods of their armed residents — described by the Pentagon as “Sunni insurgents” or “Shiite militias”.
They will then set up 40-60 heavily fortified outposts across Baghdad to “hold” the neighbourhoods, rather than operating from US bases outside the city of 6 million residents.
While only 3500 of the 17,500 additional US combat troops projected for the “surge” had been deployed by mid-February, since the beginning of the year US troops in Baghdad have been conducting stepped up neighbourhood raids in preparation for the surge.
On February 12, AP reported: “Soldiers from the [US] Army’s 1st Battalion, 23rd Infantry Regiment converged this week on a religiously mixed north Baghdad neighborhood of auto parts stores and ‘chop shops’ that Iraqi commanders believed was used to rig deadly car bombs.
“Moving door to door, Iraqi and US soldiers smashed padlocks with sledge hammers, clipped through wire gates and rifled through hundreds of buildings as Iraqi mechanics, their hands slick with grease and motor oil, peered from nearby shops.
“Instead of discovering a network of clandestine car bomb factories, the soldiers instead found only a few Kalashnikov rifles, eight grenades and some wire.”
“We’re told this new surge is going to be more intelligence-based instead of just hitting random sites, but that’s what seems to me to still be going on”, US Army Staff Sergeant Jamie Slagle told the wire service, adding: “The newest plan had the best chance of being effective two years ago. But I don’t think it has much of a chance now. It’s just too late. The militias are embedded in everything.”
Three days earlier, NBC TV’s Nightly News program had run a sound-bite from Staff Sergeant Chris Copley, a member of the same battalion as Slagle, in which he said: “It is pretty much almost a lost cause. I mean, nothing it seems we do is doing any good.”
NBC reporter Richard Engel, “embedded” with the regiment, told Nightly News anchor Brian Williams that after a roadside bomb had detonated as the soldiers drove toward a local mosque to search for “insurgents”, “The soldiers eventually decided to monitor the sermon from a rooftop”.
Engel then added: “They all told me it’s time to end this war. And, Brian, the soldiers also asked why it seems from here there are no plans to end the war, just discussions of battle tactics.”
