Another Helicopter Downed, 5 Americans Dead
Mahdi Army Pledges not to Respond to US Arrests
Sunni Arab guerrillas used some sort of surface to air rocket or missile a heavy PKC machine gun of a sort the US has trained the Iraqi Army in to shoot down a Blackwater helicopter guarding a high-level US ground convoy.* This downing of a helicopter is the second such attack in the past few days. See Today in Iraq.
Guerrillas (probably Shiite militiamen) wounded 7 British troops in Basra on Tuesday with bombings or mortar attacks.
In Baghdad and Mosul, a further 45 persons were killed by new violence or showed up dead in the streets, and US forces killed a further 16 in clashes. Guerrillas detonated five car bombs in the capital, including one in the Karrada district. Some districts of Mosul, according to al-Zaman, witnessed pitched battles most of the afternoon on Tuesday. Al-Sharq al-Awsat says that guerrillas in Mosul killed 5 policemen and wounded 3.
US and Iraqi troops launched an operation in the Sunni Adhamiya district of Baghdad.
Reuters reports a US firefight with guerrillas at Ramadi, guerrilla attacks in the supposedly pacified cities of Fallujah and Tal Afar, and killings and assassinations in a wide number of Iraqi cities.
US forces have captured some 600 Mahdi Army militiamen since the current push against guerrilla violence began.
Al-Zaman reports in Arabic that leaders of the Mahdi Army are saying they will not retaliate for the arrests. Baha' al-A'raji, a Sadrist MP, said that the followers of young Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr would not stand against the Baghdad security plan.
Oh, great. Now Bush's Iraq War is in danger of destabilizing Pakistan, too.
Representative Walter Jones (R-NC) will introduce a bill forbidding Bush from undertaking military action against Iran without Congressional authorization. Good for him! Maybe someday we'll get our Constitition back.
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*Thanks to readers who corrected this point and provided additional information.
posted by Juan Cole @ 1/24/2007 06:32:00 AM
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Expect more aircraft casualties as the guerillas hone their skills with their shoulder fired missiles in anticipation of the heavy application of airpower to make up for the lack of boots on the ground in Baghdad. From experience, rubbled buildings make even better defensive positions, and movement between positions is easy and undetected through the sewers. I also expect to see TOW missiles used for the first time. Further, streets become chanalized by building rubble facilitating anti-armor ambush. The whole situation favors the defender. Casualties will be high on both sides, but the Iraqis can take them, while the US cannot--both politically and militarily. The battle is lost on paper before it even begins, so why fight it?
In the future there will be a new word for abject failure--bushed.
Al Jazeera reports the killing of a great Iraqi benefactor.
"(Economics professor Diya) Al Meqoter was well-known for his work in helping poor people secure loans to start small businesses, police and his university dean said."
http://english.aljazeera.net/NR/exeres/C1B4957C-451A-49D9-BCEA-36F3F596848A.htm
(scroll to bottom of article)
How important was Mr. Al Meqoter's work? Last year Muhammad Yunus and the bank he founded were awarded a Nobel Peace Prize for extending micro-credit business loans to the poor.
A correction which may not be minor. The Iraqi official does not say that the Blackwell chopper was downed by a rocket, but by a PKC machine gun. This happens to be the model used by the Iraqi military, with the benefit of U.S. training.
Here's a cache of a page of relevant info.
I note the Pakistan article ends with reference to "Musharraf's crackdown on... preachers of hate". This is supposedly a good thing, if done in Pakistan. However there is nary a word in the US from Bush about right wing hate preachers--Coulter et al--who preach hate and openly suggest murder. This kind of thing used to be categorized right alongside "inciting to riot", which traditionally was dealt with quickly and strongly by the powers that be. We apparently need to rise to Pakistan's level.
The mention of 600 captured Mahdi fighters makes a splashy US headline, but take-'em-all-and-let-somebody-else-sort-'em-out Odierno is now in Iraq. How many of the 600 are really Mahdi, and how many are ordinary Iraqis caught up in a ham-fisted sweep? How many of those 600 who are not Mahdi have now been motivated to join the violence against the US based on their detention? It's just another kind of body count for US public consumption, semi-factual and containing seeds and fertilizer for a growing insurgency. What new and better result is to be expected about this "surge" when the old, non-functional plays are being re-run?
Rep. Walter Jones of the GOP shows more spin than the Democratic big wigs. Plenty of them seem anxious to bully Iran to the brink. Will they vote for Jones's bill? Time to open a Waffle House on the Hill?
Reports on the helicopter are confusing. At first it was reported the helicopter was called in to support an Embassy convoy and then it seems it was 3 helicopters. It appears one landed for some reason and one of its occupants was shot. While this helicopter was lifting off, it appears the second helicopter was shot down. There is no mention of the third helicopter being engaged.
Blackwater reported that they were saddened by these deaths of independent contractors who were killed trying to bring democracy and freedom to Iraq.
Heavy fighting in the center of Baghdad.
US troops in Baghdad battle
Pitched battles in the streets, attempts to take and hold individual buildings. So here's Baghdad devolving into the nightmare urban guerrilla war of attrition in a city of millions, as predicted by the more gloomy doom-sayers prior to the war. Like Groznyy, but worse: here we have a much more complicated and messy scene with two major sectarian elements warring not only mutually but also with the army of another country plus mercenaries. All in the same city, with far more innocent bystanders.
Today's events were stranger than fiction, as is so often the case with this sort of crumbling chaos. According to early reports the Blackwater aircraft whose crew was slaughtered after landing was coming to the aid of a U.S. diplomatic convoy under attack by one or another Iraqi element. Where was the U.S Army? Off attempting to take and hold buildings, presumably, so the rescue of the convoy was handed off to mercenaries.
Let me clarify the error accusing the Army of employing mercenaries in Iraq, which would violate 5 USC 3108, the Anti-Pinkerton Act.
The US Army Legal Services Agency responded to my protest against using mercenaries by explaining that they are only mercenaries if they are conducting planned offensive operations, attacks.
Military operations such as base defense, repelling attacks, rolling up and exploiting routed attackers, all of these are merely "guard and protective services," comparable to the night watchman at the Mall.
One Army lawyer pointed out to me that the actual combat operations in Iraq ended in May 2003, and we're simply in the stabilization phase now. This is the same Army lawyer who last year helpfully explained that contractors performing convoy escort duty in Iraq are not combatants because that duty is comparable to driving a Brinks armored car in a US city, picking up bank deposits.
So if soldiers on the ground are telling you that Iraq is a combat zone, who are you going to believe ? The grunt infantryman, or the Army lawyer back in Arlington ?
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