Insurgents elude forces in eastern Iraqi province

[Barrett808]

Insurgents elude forces in eastern Iraqi province
Villagers deny knowledge of the rebels -- except for a teen who describes their getaways.
By Alexandra Zavis, Times Staff Writer
January 6, 2007

FONTIMIYA, IRAQ — U.S. and Iraqi forces trudged through waterlogged fields, crawled down tunnels and went house to house Friday in a painstaking search for Sunni Arab insurgents, combing a remote rural region east of Baghdad that has been a training and logistics base for Al Qaeda in Iraq and other militant groups.

But for the second day of the 1,000-troop operation, in home after home, they found only women, children and men too old to fight.

Time and again, U.S. forces in Iraq have staged major assaults on known insurgent hide-outs only to have key individuals melt away. As with other operations, the military is attempting to dislodge insurgents from their hiding places in Diyala province, then sweep them into known escape routes where they can be intercepted.

But the area's sunken irrigation canals, vast agricultural fields, seldom-traveled back roads and widely scattered hamlets have given guerrillas innumerable ways to avoid capture.

"We are hardly finding any military-aged males," U.S. Army Sgt. 1st Class Pete Johnson said as he directed a truckload of Iraqi fighters into position outside a village in an icy downpour. "They have all pushed away somewhere. Either they have run away or they are waiting for us."

(more)

http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-fg-diyala6jan06,0,3009282.story?coll=la-home-nation

[IndianaGreen]

1. Doesn't this story read just like a dispatch from Vietnam?

This is what will happen when Bush sends the surge troops into Iraq, they will find nothing but "women, children and men too old to fight."

[VegasWolf]

9. See Cheney and Rummy were right! We are winning! We can't find hide nor hair of them! nt

[Botany]

2. George W Armstrong Custer-Bush

Out looking for the Iraqis in Iraq or the Indians in their native lands
except unlike The U.S. v the Native Peoples the Iraqis out # U.S. forces

by:

25,000,000 v 150,000

Gotta make Iraq safe from the Iraqis.

[bluerum]

3. Yeah. They are are going to sit around and wait for a knock on the door. Sheesh. nt

[Botany]

4. That is because they are terra - wrists

and they "hate us for our freedom & don't want democracy to grow in Iraq"

The stupidity of our "mission" in Iraq now is mind numbing in it's scope.

[mike_c]

5. so all military aged males are "insurgents...?"

This is how you make it so-- beat down all the doors, arrest or simply kill all the military aged males.

[rodeodance]

7. I do believe that is the assumption.

[HysteryDiagnosis]

6. Dumbya's war on terrah is now, and always has been a war on

the Iraqi people themselves.

[necso]

8. In general,

well-led military forces (of any sort, but especially guerrilla forces, which tend to be outgunned in "stand-up" fights*) avoid fights they can't win. However, there's the influencing-concern of protecting the non-fighting population, and this revolves around the question of what the adversary forces are like: that is, what these forces might be expected to do to the non-fighting population. And there are also other considerations: how amenable the "resisting" forces are to this strategy (sometimes considered "unmanly"); various strategies (tactics) for attriting/slowing-down the attackers; appeasing one's "followers"; the need for some delaying action, etc.

It should prove interesting to see what happens in Baghdad.

*: A familiar, well-prepared defensive territory can change the dynamic considerably.