Warning long article and mainstream - so beware of propaganda.
U.S. Commanders Express Disappointment with Iraqi Forces, Request More Troops
2 U.S. Soldiers, 7 Contractors Missing After Convoy Attacked
Sewell Chan and William Branigin
BAGHDAD, April 12 -- Top U.S. military commanders expressed disappointment Monday with the performance of Iraqi security forces in countering an intensifying insurgency and said they were requesting thousands of additional U.S. forces to meet the threat.
The commanders said two U.S. soldiers and seven employees of the American construction company Kellogg Brown and Root were missing in Iraq after an attack on a convoy near Baghdad's airport Friday. A statement issued Monday by the firm's parent company, Halliburton, confirmed that seven employees were missing, including Thomas Hamill, a truck driver from Mississippi. The identities of the six others were not disclosed.
In a news conference in Baghdad with Pentagon reporters by video link, Gen. John Abizaid, the commander of all U.S. forces in the Middle East, and Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez, who commands forces of the U.S.-led coalition in Iraq, also said a tenuous ceasefire was holding Monday in Fallujah, a turbulent city west of Baghdad that has been a hotbed of Sunni Muslim resistance to the occupation. They said U.S. forces south of Baghdad were poised to attack a militia loyal to a radical Shiite Muslim cleric in the holy city of Najaf, with a mission to kill or capture him.
Earlier Monday, the top U.S. military spokesman here said that about 70 troops in the U.S.-led coalition in Iraq have been killed so far this month in combat that has also claimed the lives of about 700 Iraqi insurgents. Brig Gen. Mark Kimmitt, the deputy director of coalition operations in Iraq, told a news conference there was no reliable figure for Iraqi civilian casualties in the latest fighting and dismissed reports from Fallujah of hundreds of civilian deaths as "propaganda."
Abizaid, commander of the U.S. Central Command, said he was dissatisfied with the performance of Iraqi police and members of the civil defense corps in refusing to help U.S. Marines in Fallujah and in deserting their posts in southern cities, allowing militiamen loyal to Moqtada Sadr, a 30-year-old Shiite cleric, to take over government buildings and police stations. Abizaid said programs to train the Iraqis need to be revamped because ultimately, it will be up to Iraqi police and civil defense personnel to maintain order.
Sanchez said U.S. officers would "reassess some of the training strategies we're employing" and would follow up with "mentoring" after Iraqi forces are deployed.
Abizaid said he has requested reinforcements in the form of two U.S. combat brigades, but he declined to specify where they would come from and how many troops they would include.
Military analysts in Washington said the two brigades would probably amount to about 10,000 troops, allowing commanders to maintain U.S. troop strength in Iraq at about 125,000 in the coming months. The military had planned to drawn the forces down to about 115,000, from an "unusually high" number of about 135,000 at present that is attributable to an overlap of new and departing units.
Sanchez said U.S. forces battling Sadr's militia, known as the Mahdi Army, have regained control of Kut, Nasariyeh and Hilla, but that Najaf and part of Karbala are still controlled by Sadr. U.S. forces are respecting a Shiite religious festival for the time being, but have maneuvered into the area around Najaf to carry out an offensive aimed at eliminating Sadr's influence, Sanchez said.
"The mission of U.S. forces is to kill or capture Moqtada al-Sadr," Sanchez said in response to a reporter's question.
Abizaid, noting that Sadr is wanted by Iraqi authorities for the murder last year of a rival Shiite cleric, said the way in which Sadr is brought to justice "will probably end up being a uniquely Iraqi solution" and that the United States was "applying the military forces to assist in that regard."
The U.S. commanders spoke as talks resumed in Fallujah between local Iraqi leaders and a delegation from the Iraqi Governing Council on a truce in the city 35 miles west of Baghdad. A U.S. Marine statement said the truce had been broken Sunday and overnight by "enemy fire" and that Marines returned fire, inflicting "a significant number of enemy dead" and detained about 20 insurgents.
"The coalition casualties since April 1 run about 70 personnel," Kimmitt said. He said casualties "inflicted on the enemy" were "somewhere about 10 times that amount. . . ."
Kimmitt said "there is no reliable, authoritative figure" on civilian casualties. Once Fallujah is brought back under control, he said, the Iraqi ministry of health would be asked to "get a fair, honest and credible figure and not one that is somehow filtered through some of the local propaganda machines."
The U.S. military, meanwhile, announced the deaths of seven more soldiers and Marines in combat since Friday.
But the fate of foreign hostages seized by insurgents in several separate incidents remained uncertain. The Chinese government appealed Monday for the release of seven Chinese workers who had been kidnapped in Fallujah Sunday after entering the country by road from Jordan, apparently to find work.
There were reports that up to 12 foreigners of various nationalities were freed, but there was no verification of those claims. A British truck driver was freed in southern Iraqi earlier.
But three Japanese -- two aid workers and a journalist -- apparently remained in custody, along with Hamill, 43, of Macon, Miss., and the six other Kellogg Brown and Root employees who were reportedly kidnapped Friday by gunmen who attacked a fuel convoy.
Insurgents have repeatedly attacked military convoys, commercial trucks and passenger vehicles on two major highways that run west and south from the Iraqi capital over the past week, slowing the movement of troops and supplies and rendering both highways off-limits to most foreigners, U.S. military commanders said Monday.
The two highways provide the major transportation linkages between Baghdad and the densely populated agricultural zone to the south and the restive cities of Fallujah and Ramadi to the west. In the past week, armed bands of as many as 60 men have ambushed fuel-truck convoys, kidnapped foreign civilians and shot down aircraft along the two highways.
Military commanders "remain very concerned" about the two motorways and have declared them dangerous but not impassable, Kimmitt said. He said it could take several weeks before the roads are completely safe for traffic.
The latest deadly attack along the highways came Sunday, when an AH-64 Apache helicopter was shot down near Abu Ghraib, a western suburb of Baghdad. The helicopter was on its way to investigating an ambush of a convoy on the east-west highway near Baghdad International Airport, according to military officials.
The Army has not determined what brought the helicopter down, although a military spokesman said the insurgents likely used either a SAM-7 shoulder-launched ground-to-air missile or a rocket-propelled grenade launcher.
After the helicopter was downed, the Army deployed military police officers and other units from the 1st Armored Division and 1st Cavalry Division to step up patrols along the highway and sent helicopters to fly over the roads.
Also Monday, the U.S. administrator of Iraq, L. Paul Bremer, and the top field commander in the country, Army Lt. Gen. Ricardo S. Sanchez, met with members of the Iraqi Governing Council to discuss the violence of the past week, which has claimed the dozens of American and hundreds of Iraqi lives.
Military commanders said the violence that has convulsed towns in western and southern Iraq has largely subsided.
Three Marine battalions still encircle the besieged city of Fallujah, where local leaders have met with members of the Iraqi Governing Council since Saturday to discuss an end to a revolt by Sunni Muslim insurgents. The Marines halted offensive operations in the city on Friday. Kimmitt said the only recent violence was an attack by indirect fire that wounded two members of the Iraqi Civil Defense Corps.
In south-central Iraq, Shiite Muslim militiamen loyal to Moqtada Sadr, the fiercely anti-American cleric, continued to control public buildings and major parts of Najaf and Karbala, the two holiest Shiite cities in Iraq. The military has pledged not to enter the cities during the annual Shiite religious celebration of Arbaeen, which ended Sunday.
About 8,000 pilgrims remain in Karbala, down from an estimated 1.5 million who visited over the weekend, and Kimmitt said the military would wait for them to leave before making any effort to retake the city.
After retaking the southern city of Kut in three days of fighting, a battalion of the 1st Armored Division moved out Monday, leaving the 2nd Armored Cavalry Regiment to maintain control of the city.
Military officials felt confident enough about their control of the city that they plan to move the staff of the U.S. occupation authority back in to Kut on Tuesday. The seven-member staff had evacuated the building when Ukrainian troops withdrew last week, leaving the town to militiamen.
There were occasional attacks in other southern cities. The U.S.-led military coalition reported two mortar attacks in Diwaniyah.
An Italian army brigade raided Sadr's office in Nasiriyah, seizing documents before setting off a controlled explosion to render the building useless.
A spokesman for Bremer said the militias pose a challenge to the creation of a democratic Iraqi government. An interim government is supposed to take power on June 30 from the Americans, but its shape and leaders have not yet been decided.
"We must confront these forces now," the spokesman, Daniel Senor, said of the militias. "The task will only become more difficult down the road."
Most of the attacks along the highways have been clustered in two areas, according to Brig. Gen. Mark E. Hertling, assistant commander of the 1st Armored Division, which controls the capital and has assumed responsibility for patrolling the most dangerous stretches of the highways.
The first area is a 20-mile stretch of Highway 8 centered around Abu Ghraib, an impoverished town that is best known for Iraq's largest prison. The Abu Ghraib prison was notorious under the regime of former president Saddam Hussein as a site of torture and executions. It is now an American-run military detention compound, holding about 6,000 Iraqi detainees.
"It's a hotbed of criminal and extremist activity," Hertling said.
The second cluster of violence is a 20-mile stretch of Highway 10, south of Baghdad, which includes the towns of Mahmudiyah and Iskandariyah. The highway runs through the towns, forcing the flow of traffic to twist and slow down. The local businesses include food stands that cater to travelers heading south. Many of the townspeople are heavily armed, military officials said.
The north-west highway has had three times as much traffic as normal in recent weeks, due to increased traffic as part of the military's massive troop rotation. In other developments, U.S. officials and a top Iraqi official lashed out at al-Jazeera and al-Arabiya, the two major satellite television networks in the Arab world.
American officials have increasingly accused the networks of contributing to anti-American violence by broadcasting graphic images of civilian casualties and providing distorted and inaccurate information about the occupation in Iraq.
Mowaffak Rubaie, a Shiite physician whom Bremer named last week to be Iraq's national security adviser, sharply criticized the networks at a news conference. He said the two networks are "serving as a catalyst for increasing attacks and inciting war" and violating norms of journalistic practice.
Rubaie said that the networks had falsely reported that he was resigning from the Iraqi Governing Council to protest the recent violence, when in fact Rubaie was required to resign from the advisory body in order to assume the national security post. "Don't they understand separation of powers?" he asked.
Rubaie suggested that governmental action could be taken against both networks for inciting violence.
A day earlier, Kimmitt made a similar accusation against both networks. "We've noticed a real trend with al-Jazeera and al-Arabiya and some other channels that we believe are misreporting the facts on the ground and contributing to a sense of anger and frustration," Kimmitt said.
In some of the latest reporting on U.S. military casualties in Iraq, a Marine statement said three Marines were killed Sunday by "enemy action" in Anbar Province, which includes Fallujah. It provided no other details.
Also on Sunday, a 1st Armored Division soldier died of wounds received in a roadside bomb attack in Baghdad shortly before midnight Saturday, the military said.
A 1st Infantry Division soldier was killed and another wounded Saturday when 15 insurgents attacked their reconnaissance patrol near the town of Khalis north of Baghdad, the U.S. military in Tikrit said.
Another Army soldier was reported killed Friday when a rocket-propelled grenade was fired at his M2 Bradley Fighting Vehicle near the town of Buhritz north of Baghdad. In a separate incident, an Iraqi Civil Defense Corps soldier was also killed Friday in a rocket-propelled grenade attack on his unit's headquarters in Samarra.
Branigin reported from Washington.
washingtonpost.com |
