Evening...
I hope your weekend was good...another one gone as we continue the journey. The info hounds were moving fast over night. In fact, there is more info and photos than I can share tonight. Lets start the week with an excellent report and video clip that provides a look at the work of the 2nd Stryker Cavalry Regiment in what is now considered the most violent spot in Iraq - Diyala.
If you wondered what your warrior was doing in Diyala this should help answer that question...
Here is what I'd like for you to do...first, give the article a read and then grab your camel back and body armor, lace your boots up tight and buckle your helmet snug as you travel with Fire Squadron, 2nd SCR on a patrol in Diyala via an excellent collage by Scott Hadley (video) and James Lee (photos)...
Fair warning, a couple of the photos in the video will not be easy to look at...
As I read the article the first time the names came flooding back...Vrooman...Tran...and I could almost feel beads of sweat rolling off my neck as I sat in the thick, lush vegetation in the sweltering heat...
By Scott Hadly (Contact)
Monday, July 21, 2008DIYALA PROVINCE, Iraq — A black burn mark covers one corner of a mud brick wall.
The stain, less than a block from the Wajihiyah City Council office, marks the spot where two weeks ago a young woman wearing a black hijab blew herself up.
It’s believed she intended to detonate the bomb strapped to her body in the midst of a group of new Sons of Iraq recruits — citizen soldiers enlisted to help battle insurgents and members of terrorist cells operating in the province. The woman first went to the city offices but was turned away. Then she started running toward the spot where the Sons of Iraq are garrisoned and she tripped, setting off the bomb.
Army Capt. Travis Cox, commander of Fire Squadron Alpha in the 2nd Stryker Cavalry Regiment, walks past the spot without much notice.
He’s meeting with the mayor, Mudiyar Waysi, a man with a thick build, a dense black mustache and gold-rimmed glasses. A Turkish cigarette wrapped in brown paper is perpetually held between his fingers.
Cox doesn’t trust the man, but he’s working with him, members of the local council, the police and army units.
He’s prodding them to buy into their own security, to combat suicide bombers, roadside bombs and threats of assassination.
Cox and the rest of the American military hope that the Iraqis in Diyala will join with American forces, as they’ve done elsewhere in Iraq, to help push out the entrenched forces of al-Qaida, which for several years have found safe haven in dense palm groves along the Diyala River valley.
Though still brutal, violence in Iraq is down to the point that there is talk of moving some U.S. troops out of the country and into Afghanistan, where conflicts are escalating. Fighting, bombings and casualties in Iraq have dropped from the highest point a year ago to the lowest since 2004. There are bright spots in Iraq, but Diyala is not one of them.
“This is the most dangerous spot in Iraq right now,” said Cox, a 31-year-old West Point graduate from Washington state.
‘I saw a bunch of smoke’
No one comes up with the same number.
It could be 11, or 13 or maybe 16 times that one of their armored Humvees or MRAPs, Mine Resistant Ambush Proteced vehicles, has hit an Improvised Explosive Devices, or IED.
There’s a graveyard of vehicles on a lot at Forward Operating Base Warhorse. The bombs are triggered mostly by “crush wire” laid on the road or pressure plates buried under it. When a heavy vehicle passes, its weight presses together two contacts completing a circuit and triggering the bombs.
One squad hit six last week.
“I think it was six,” said Don Farinacci, a 20-year-old bespectacled private from Ohio.
One road has the distinction of being referred to as “IED Alley,” and has had as many as two or three bombs hit vehicles in a single day.
While on an ambush mission near the abandoned hamlet of Malala, Pfc. Keith Bryan, 28, steers his big MRAP down what the Army calls “Route Belushi” just before dawn one day last week. The vehicle is three back in the convoy when a bomb in the road blows off much of the front end.
“It was really loud. I saw a bunch of smoke and we just stopped,” Bryan said.
In the back, Staff Sgt. John Fassett, 37, gets rattled. This is the third time he’s been in a vehicle hit by an improvised explosive device.
As everybody scrambles out of the smoking truck, Fassett, a father of four who wants to retire in four years, feels the same piercing headache he got after the two previous bombs, but everyone escapes injury.
A broken fuel line is leaking onto the hot metal and it ignites.
Two men scramble back into the vehicle to grab weapons, grenades and sensitive night vision and communication equipment.
Every day soldiers from the Fire Squadron 2nd Stryker’s Cavalry Regiment roll out of the Forward Operating Base Warhorse in Diyala, and every day they either hit an IED, get shot at with small arms fire or find some hidden al-Qaida lair in the dense palm grove brush.
Some days they go on what Cox calls their “traveling road show.” It involves going into a new town accompanied by Iraqi government officials and someone from the Iraqi army to talk with people.
“We want to be known for something other than people who come in the middle of the night to detain military-aged men,” Cox said.
It’s also part of a plan to put pressure on insurgents and raise confidence of Iraqis who are hesitant to make a stand, said Lt. Col. Robert McAleer, a West Point graduate and former Special Forces officer who is commander of the battalion.
“Nothing but good comes from going to those towns,” said McAleer, a West Point graduate and former Special Forces officer.
Many of these towns were largely ceded to jihadists for years now, but by showing up with Iraqi officials, the Army is able to gain some level of trust from the people there, he said. With increased security and basic services, some people have begun to move back into the area.
“It’s the carrot portion of what we do,” McAleer said.
Those who have remained and may have even sympathized with the jihadist can be won over, he said.
“In al Anbar province there were some Sunnis, really tribal leaders, who said ‘Hey these are not the people we want to be under,’ ” McAleer said. “They turned against this Taliban-like behavior.’’
Turning that around here may be a bit more complicated because there isn’t the same kind of tribal structure. But McAleer believes that local cooperation with or tolerance of al-Qaida in Iraq operations here has been through intimidation. He cites an example from two summers ago when the group set up a special Shira court and ordered the beheading of more than 30 men.
“That kind of thing sends a message,” McAleer said.
The message was obey or suffer the consequences. Mixed in with that were criminal elements and ethnic violence between Shias and Sunnis. It all contributed to the atmosphere of fear, he said. Some people fled. Others remained bowing to the intimidation.
“Statistically, Diyala is the most violent place in Iraq right now and there’s no doubt about that,” said McAleer.
Despite the heavy violence in Diyala, McAleer believes that when the Iraqi Security Forces begin their big offenses, things will turn around.
“We’ll take a good bite out of them in the next two weeks,” he said. “I know I sound confident partly because militarily I look at the match-up and can say, ‘Yeah we’ll beat them.’ ”
Suicide bombersCox and his battery of soldiers from the 2nd Stryker Regiment come into Wajihiyah almost every day to disrupt cells of suicide bombers and push the insurgents out of the palm groves along the river to the south.
The insurgents are pushing back, planting bombs in the road, in houses, launching random mortar attacks on towns and targeting posts of the Iraqi police, Iraqi army and Sons of Iraq.
On the same day that Cox and his squad met with the City Council in Wajihiyah, two teenagers with explosives strapped to their chests moved into a crowd of police recruits at the Saad military base, a joint American and Iraqi army outpost. One set off his bomb, and then as rescuers showed up, the second one blew himself up. Together, they killed 33 people and wounded 69 others.
The next day an American soldier, attached to the 2nd Stryker Cavalry Regiment but working in an area farther to the south, chased a man who had shot at his convoy into a house. When the soldier entered the house, it was blown up. Sgt. Jeremy Vrooman, 28, of Sioux Falls, S.D., was the 23rd American to die fighting in the province.
On one brutal day in June, the regiment lost a staff sergeant and three soldiers were badly wounded during a palm grove clearing operation. Staff Sgt. Du Hai Tran, 30, of Reseda, was killed when a soldier opened a gate that triggered a bomb. The explosion blew him back into another soldier, possibly shielding the man from more serious injuries.
Another explosion was triggered during the effort to get him medical attention.
One of the seriously wounded men told his friend, Sgt. Wayne Wynkoop, that Tran “was still alive, but you could tell his soul had already left his body.” There was nothing more they could do to help him.
Pushing into the palm groves is risky, but the Americans have captured or killed dozens of jihadists, including three foreign fighters from Sudan, Tunisia and Morocco.
Working with Iraqi army and police units, Army troops have broken up several “suicide-vest” bombing cells using women. So far the province has been attacked by 18 female suicide bombers, representing more than half of all suicide bombings carried out by women in Iraq.
Just four days after Cox’s meeting, one pregnant woman was killed and three other women were critically injured in two separate bombings in a nearby town. The women had gone into a palm grove to gather wood. The three injured women were evacuated to a American military hospital in Balad.
On average, three Iraqis are killed every day in the province. It’s nearly twice as violent as the next most violent province in the country, and almost three times as violent as Baghdad.
On the day Cox meets with Mayor Waysi and an Iraqi army major, whom Cox trusts and admires, the three men go to a funeral south of the town.
As they arrive, the village elders sit under a tent hoisted in a dirt road outside the walls of the town.
It’s the second day of the traditional three-day funeral for a man and his son who were killed when a roadside bomb destroyed their little truck. The elders smoke Ishtar cigarettes, and then share a meal of roast lamb, rice and flat bread.
When Cox departs, he leaves some dinars (Iraqi currency) for the family, which is the custom.
The next day, some of Cox’s soldiers, this time led by Lt. Justin Magula, return to Wajihiyah to walk through the market and pass out leaflets, encouraging people to support the Iraqi police and army or enlist in the Sons of Iraq program.
‘We’ve done some good things here’
Crowds of children follow the soldiers chanting “Mista, Mista,” and asking for soccer balls, pencils and candy.
Spc. Dustin Elser, a 27-year-old from Dillon, Mont., talks to a boy wearing a shirt with an image of the Brazilian soccer star Ronaldo.
“I hear he’s going to A.C. Milan,” Elser tells him.
Later, after another soldier says the fighting has been like a standoff in tic-tac-toe, Elser said, “We’ve done some good things here, stuff we can be proud of.”
In the village market, one of the soldiers takes off his helmet, borrows a kid’s bike and rides down the main road, drawing smiles.
Later he talks to a group of men about the Sons of Iraq, and they complain about the pay. There’s only enough money to pay a small number of all the volunteers. One of the Iraqis asks the soldier how much he makes to fight here, and the soldier retorts, saying this isn’t his country.
“If it was my country, no one would have to pay me.”
With his “traveling road show,” Cox wants people to associate the Army with helping rather than detaining people, and he wants locals to start taking responsibility for their own security. If they choose to, the people in the towns could flush out those planting the bombs and hiding in the palm groves, he said.
A hot day in MalalaOn the day the patrol was hit by a roadside bomb, Bryan’s MRAP went up in flames, setting off ammunition that soldiers weren’t able to pull from the vehicle. A huge column of black smoke rose into the dawn sky as .50-caliber rounds and cluster grenades popped off.
Instead of watching a sunrise, it sort of appeared as if someone were turning up a dimmer because of the dusty haze, said Spc. Brittney Griffy, a medic from Tennessee.
By 9 a.m., the temperature had risen to 107 degrees. Griffy and Pvt. Dan Stepp of Georgia are squatting and sweating, gripping their M-4s, as they hide in the reeds to the south of the abandoned village of Malala. They and the rest of the squad, led by Capt. Ryan Johnson of Pennsylvania, have been there since just before 3 a.m., waiting to ambush any insurgents fleeing a ragtag team with the Iraqi army that is moving through a palm grove and into the edge of the town.
The soldiers eventually link up with the Iraqis and start moving into the town, slowly checking the vacant homes, all of which have been ransacked. Clothes, pots and pans are sprawled on the floor. Windows are broken and doors are knocked off their hinges. The ghost town and a nearby palm grove yield some jihadist literature. There is evidence of an insurgent camp, including a bunker; wire spool and 9-volt batteries, commonly used to make bombs; urea-based material used for explosives; and a hand grenade.
The patrol continues down the road past an empty school and a mosque with jihadist graffiti scrawled on one wall.
They pass a small grape vinyard with a farm compound, possibly used by those planting roadside bombs.
The interpreter with the squad, Ty (most of the interpreters, or “terps,” use pseudonyms), asks a man walking outside the compound to call out all the adult men.
‘He’s guilty’Four men emerge, one perhaps in his 70s, the others ranging from early 20s to late 30s. As the men walk through a big metal gate, a few children walk out with them. Women, their heads covered, peek out from behind a gate.
One man’s papers are very old. When he’s asked why he and his family are still here and everyone in the town has fled, he begins to shake. Some of the soldiers laugh and say, “he’s guilty.”
As they cuff the men together using thick black plastic restraints, one of the little boys milling about begins to wail, then the rest of the children start crying. The old man starts arguing with the interpreter, and the women start yelling at the soldiers from behind the gate. Ty shouts at them in Arabic.
Cox tells Ty, a fearless young Iraqi interpreter with a “get some” patch on his camouflage uniform, to explain that they are taking the men to the Iraqi army for questioning.
The squad walks the men down the road toward the waiting MRAPs and the Iraqi army. All the soldiers are tired, overheated and testy.
As the men walk past two fresh craters where bombs have blown up army vehicles, and close to the huge 10-by-10 foot cavity that ripped up the MRAP that morning, one of the detainees points to the holes and spins his finger by his head as if to say, “that’s crazy.”
But the other man, the one who has been shaking, starts to panic.
Crying, he tilts his head up and his eyes roll up as if he’s fainting. He falls onto the asphalt. His body jerks and the soldiers give him water. But then he begins a strange pantomime of fits with his legs.
The soldiers get angry, yelling at him to get up or his friends will have to drag him down the road.
He gets up.
“Any time you pull a father away from his wife and children, that’s going to be painful,” Lt. Col. McAleer said later. “What we’ve done in the past is almost always afterwards, myself or one of the company commanders will go back and talk to them. We’ll tell them, ‘Your husband is safe. Being well fed. Here’s what he’s being charged with.’ Typically, the wives, at that point, they’ve accepted the fact that he’s going to be tried and might be out a year or two. Then they move onto other issues, and we’ll find ways to help them.”
Army Spc. Randall Hooker looks back during a foot patrol through a dense palm grove in Diyala province on Thursday. The palm groves are a favored hiding spot for insurgents.
Photo by James Lee
Special to The Ventura County Star
On Patrol in Diyala...
Every day soldiers from the Fire Squadron 2nd Stryker’s Cavalry Regiment roll out of the Forward Operating Base Warhorse in Diyala, and every day they either hit an IED, get shot at with small arms fire or find some hidden al-Qaida lair in the dense palm grove brush.
Scott Hadley, Ventura County Star staff writer
Army Spc. Robert Hernadez secures the scene of an improvised explosive device attack that killed a local father and his son recently in Diyala province, Iraq.
Photo by James Lee
Special to The Ventura County Star
Chris, I love you buddy. Thanks so much for the phone call - it was great to hear your voice and know that you are well. Sure, it is tough in your area of operations but...I know the leadership cared enough to send the very best...stay strong!
Be safe!
v/r,
- Collabman
Soldiers from Dog Company, 2nd Squadron, 2nd Stryker Cavalry Regiment take a break during a combat patrol in Iraq.
Soldiers from Dog Company, 2nd Squadron, 2nd Stryker Cavalry Regiment share a laugh prior to heading out on patrol.
Soldiers from Dog Company, 2nd Squadron, 2nd Stryker Cavalry Regiment take time out for a photo with Iraqi children.
A soldier from Dog Company, 2nd Squadron, 2nd Stryker Cavalry Regiment interacts with Iraqi children during a break on patrol.
Soldiers from Dog Company, 2nd Squadron, 2nd Stryker Cavalry Regiment hydrate in their stryker vehicle following a combat patrol.
Warriors from Dog Company, 2nd Squadron, 2nd Stryker Cavalry Regiment relax poolside during some time off at the Forward Operating Base.
U.S. Army soldiers from Charlie Battery, Fires Squadron, Second Stryker Cavalry Regiment prepare to leave their outpost for Operation Fires Festung in Qubah, north of Baghdad in Iraq's volatile Diyala province on Wednesday, July 9, 2008. (AP Photo/Maya Alleruzzo)
Spc. David Scantlin crew chief for Company A, Devils 1st Attack Reconnaissance Battalion, 1st Aviation Regiment, demonstrates the cargo capacity of the AH-64D Apache Longbow helicopter gunship. On June 20, Co. A Devils, delivered much needed supplies of water to the Fires "Hell" Squadron, 2nd Stryker Cavalry Regiment, operating in Abu Sayta, Iraq. (Photo by U.S. Army Maj. Enrique T. Vasquez)
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