Trouble in my old AO

I was very saddened to see that a series of bombings in the city of Hit in Iraq killed eight including the family of Lt. Col Suleiman (the BBC says he was a major but he wasn’t), the leader of a counter-terrorism unit in Hit. After my battalion left Ninawa province, my company was assigned an AO that stretched from the western outskirts of Ramadi all the way up to the city of Haditha. In the middle of that AO was the city of Hit, which was about six klicks south of the COP we were posted at. During my time in Hit, there wasn’t a lot of insurgent activity. There were weak attempts at placing IEDs that targeted convoys moving from Al Asad Airbase along MSR Bronze and of course the occasional pot-shot at our posts and helos flying into our COP. RKG-3s, like everywhere else in the country at the time, were also a problem. One of the reasons why Hit, which at one point was literally controlled by insurgents, was so quiet during my time there was because an effective Iraqi police and counter-terrorist force had been trained and deployed in the city, which was led by Lt. Col Suleiman. The Iraqis were able to do most operations on their own and almost never requested our help. Iraqi forces even had an EOD capability in our AO, and on one occasion were able to defuse a complex magnetic IED on their own, without any assistance from our Navy EOD attachment. Of course, it wasn’t perfect in Hit. The mayor was extremely corrupt and used money the Americans gave him to hold parties that resembled something out of Miami Vice at his home along the Euphrates River. Some of the local IPs were related to known insurgents and were helping them elude American and Iraqi forces. But the progress made in just a short time is amazing and shouldn’t be ignored.

When most media outlets report these incidents, they seem to relish in the carnage they cause. For years most of the chattering class in the media predicted and even cheered on complete failure in Iraq. When the surge worked and violence subsided, many media outlets turned to magnifying isolated attacks or political failures in an attempt to show that Iraq was on the verge of coming apart. I remember when I was in Iraq on several occasions reading New York Times and Washington Post articles about bombings in Baghdad, Mosul or up the road in Ramadi and the writers implying that the whole country was on the verge of coming apart. There were was a lot of this type of hysteria in the lead up to the June 30th deadline to withdraw from the cities, with many predicting that once the Americans left these cities would explode. Of course this never happened, and for the most part, Iraqis were able to fill the void left by departing American forces.

The bombings in Hit do not mean that the city will come apart and explode into violence, as some people predict and secretly want. The Iraqi Security Forces (most likely with little or no American help) will attempt to track down the savages who committed these acts of violence down and if they catch them, well, lets just say that the Iraqis’ version of GITMO is a hole in the desert. Take that last part however you want…

Iraqi Army rehearsing for a raid in Hit

Category: Antiwar crowd, Foreign Policy, Media, Military issues, Terror War