 Ed
Offley, Editor of DefenseWatch magazine, has
been a military reporter and defense specialist
for 22 years in a variety of journalism assignments
throughout the United States. DefenseWatch
is an online magazine that addresses military
and security issues from the viewpoint of
active-duty and reservist component personnel
and veterans.
Offley previously served as Editor-in-Chief
of The Stars and Stripes after the civilian-owned
newspaper was acquired by Stars and Stripes
Omnimedia Inc. in March 2000. A 1969 graduate
of the University of Virginia, Offley served
in the U.S. Navy in Vietnam before joining
The Virginia Gazette, Williamsburg, Va., as
a reporter in 1972. He worked as an editorial
writer at three newspapers in Virginia during
1977-85 before joining The Seattle Post Intelligencer
as an editorial writer in 1986.
Offley, 55, lives in Panama City Beach, Fla.,
with his wife, Karen, and daughter, Andrea.
Contact: dweditor@yahoo.com.
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June 17, 2005
[Have an opinion about the views expressed in this article? Sound
off in the Hot Issues with Defensewatch Forum.]
By Ed Offley
While various and sundry politicians and pundits this week were squalling about the possibility of a lost war in Iraq, clear evidence continued to appear showing that victory is not only attainable but possibly closer than we think.
Here are two succinct examples:
The desert raid : Company H of the U.S. Army's 3rd Armored Cavalry Regiment in a predawn raid On June 7 swept in on a house in the Iraqi town of Tal Afar as part of a larger operation to clean out the area of terrorists. They were hunting eight specific Iraqi resistance leaders and captured them without a fight. “Eight suspects were supposed to be in one house and all eight were there,” Company Commander Capt. Greg Mitchell told a New York Times reporter embossed with the 3ACR.
American soldiers seized a total of 28 suspected insurgents in the morning's operation. The Times reporter noted, “The detainees, who seemed surprised by the size, timing and direction of the attack from the desert, were caught off guard.”
Snatching a terrorist : A force of U.S. and Iraqi troops in northern Iraq on Tuesday captured Mohammed Sharkawa, the militant leader who leads al Qaeda terrorist Abu Musab al-Zarqawi's operations in northern Iraq. U.S. military officials report that in the last few months alone, Sharkawa has been directly responsible for at least 50 car bombings and 150 beheadings and assassinations.
Lt. Gen. James T. Conway, director of operations for the JCS at the Pentagon, said of Sharkawa, “He has said that he will not be taken alive; that he wore a vest and would detonate himself. In fact, he gave up rather peacefully when U.S. and Iraqi forces went to, actually, an associate's house, and he happened to be there with a number of others.”
Doubters and cynics will easily dismiss both incidents as minor tactical victories occurring in the midst of a strategic stalemate. I could not disagree more.
For the pair of events share one fundamental fact: Both the Tal Afar raid and the capture of Sharkawa occurred because ordinary Iraqis fed up with the terrorists' nihilist violence turned on them and told the U.S. military and Iraqi National Guard where they were.
As I noted last month ( “Iraq Is Still Up for Grabs,” DefenseWatch , May 19, 2005), a growing number of experts in guerilla movements and counter-insurgency operations have come to the conclusion that the loosely-affiliated fighters – including disaffected former Ba'athist regime officials, al Qaeda terrorists and criminal gangs – have blown the prime rule of guerrilla war: They have alienated the civilian population which Mao Zedong once described as the “ocean” in which the guerrilla “fish” swim. These two new events further underscore that assessment.
The Times report on the 3ACR's operation noted that Tal Afar, “a dusty, agrarian city of about 200,000 people,” had been hijacked by only 500 terrorists, mostly foreign Arabs who infiltrated into the country through Syria or Turkey:
“On arrival here, [U.S. military] commanders found a town that was, for all practical purposes, dead, strangled by the violent insurgents who held it in their thrall. ‘Anyone not helping the terrorists can't leave their homes because they will be kidnapped and the terrorists will demand money or weapons or make them join them to kill people,' said Hikmat Ameen al-Lawand, the leader of one of Tal Afar's 82 tribes, who said most of the city is controlled by insurgents. ‘If they refuse they will chop their heads off.' ”
“Khasro Goran, the deputy provincial governor in Ninewa, which includes Tal Afar, concurred. … There are more than 500 insurgents in Tal Afar, he said, and they project a level of fear and intimidation across the city far in excess of their numbers. Thoroughfares lined with stores have been deserted, the storefronts covered with blue metal roll-down gates.”
Despite a popular stereotype that the Sunni minority in Iraq – from which the Ba'athist Party and Saddam Hussein emerged to rule the country for more than a generation – has uniformly supported the violence directed against the American occupation force and the newly formed Iraqi government, the “ground truth” at Tal Afar is quite different.
“Many tribal sheiks here say they favor an all-out assault to rout the city's insurgents,” Times reporter Richard A. Oppel Jr. wrote:
“Angered by the attacks and emboldened by the enlarged American military presence here, some sheiks have become outspoken critics of the insurgency. On June 4, at great risk to their own lives, more than 60 attended a security conference at Al Kasik Iraqi Army base near here. To the surprise of Iraqi and American commanders who organized the gathering, many sheiks demanded a Fallujah-style military assault to rid Tal Afar of insurgents and complained that American forces do not treat terror suspects roughly enough.”
In Mosul, Sharkawa was no shadowy John Galt of the Iraqi resistance. Several months ago, Brig. Gen. Carter Ham, then-U.S. commander in northern Iraq, said of him, “Right now, if we could get one guy off the street in northern Iraq, he would be the guy.”
So how did they get him? U.S. officials describe it as the result of a patient and steady campaign of seizing lower-ranking terrorists and using intelligence they revealed to follow the next lead. The capture several weeks ago of a Zarqawi network subordinate named Mehdi Moussa, who also operated in Mosul, reportedly enabled the coalition to get even closer.
But here's the kicker, as the Times cited a U.S. military official: “A Mosul resident provided information hours before the raid, by American and Iraqi troops, that helped identify Sharkawa's whereabouts …. ”
History is full of decisive battles that were unplanned by either side at the onset. Neither Robert E. Lee nor George Meade intended to fight the pivotal battle of the American Civil War at Gettysburg. Neither Imperial Japan nor the United States thought that the island of Guadalcanal would suddenly become pivotal as the two Pacific powers maneuvered toward one another in the summer of 1942.
Never mind the relatively small size of the opposing forces in northwest Iraq: We see the outlines of a “meeting engagement” that is simply too important to ignore. For better or worse, the crazed jidhadists who would plunge the Middle East back into the 7th Century have decided that this will be the crucial battlefield not only for Iraq but their global war against the West.
Following months of activity elsewhere (dictated by our biggest failure, to field a large enough occupation force), the U.S. military and Iraqi National Guard have stormed into the region. Not only have they routed the insurgents, but our soldiers and their Iraqi counterparts have also found that they have the clear support of the very Iraqis on whom a military victory and political settlement in that country depend: the Sunni minority.
Quit the squalling in Washington, D.C., and read the dispatches from Mosul and Tal Afar: Something big is happening here.
Ed Offley is
Editor of DefenseWatch.
He can be reached at dweditor@yahoo.com.
Please send Feedback responses to dwfeedback@yahoo.com
© 2005 Ed Offley.
All opinions
expressed in this article are the author's and do not necessarily
reflect those of Military.com.
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