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Two steps backward, and a tragic test of the new strategy in Baghdad:
Paratroopers from the 2nd Battalion, 325th Airborne Infantry Regiment fired upon a vehicle failing to respond to visual warning signals March 9 in a northern neighborhood of the Iraqi capital.That "northern neighborhood" is Sadr City:The vehicle failed to respond to paratrooper’s warning signals as it approached their patrol in the Adhamiyah security district. The paratroopers followed established protocol for escalation of force but the vehicle continued to advance toward them forcing them to disable it with small arms fire.
Three Iraqis were wounded and three were killed in this incident. The wounded were provided immediate medical assistance. Iraqi police and national police secured the area and Iraqi police evacuated the wounded.
The incident is under investigation.
U.S. soldiers were accused Friday of opening fire on a car carrying a family in the Baghdad district of Sadr City, killing a man and his two young daughters and wounding his son.The rules of engagement, the positioning of U.S. and Iraqi troops together in small neighborhood enclaves, and the thus-far quiet reception afforded their presence in Sadr City will now be put to the test. As has been reported elsewhere, there are those who will welcome the event - who until now have been relying on rather unlikely claims:The allegations were made by the man's wife, who was in the car, and members of the Iraqi police, who were at the scene. The U.S. military command said it was investigating an episode in Sadr City involving "an escalation of force," but it could not confirm any details of the account given by the man's wife.
The woman, Ikhlas Thulsiqar, said her family had turned from an alleyway onto a main street guarded by U.S. soldiers. Seconds later, she said, a fusillade of bullets ripped into the car.
"They killed the father of my children! The Americans killed my daughters!" she sobbed, sitting crumpled on the floor of Imam Ali Hospital in Sadr City, where rescuers had taken the victims, including her daughters, 9 and 11, and her son, 7.
"That is a serious allegation, and we'll take a look and figure out what happened," Lieutenant Colonel Christopher Garver, a military spokesman in Baghdad, said.
The Mehdi army is not responding to the raids with fire, but they are trying to undermine the security plan by spreading rumors about alleged crimes committed by US soldiers, specifically against the Shia. The latest of these rumors was a ridiculous one I heard yesterday from a taxi driver from Sadr city. His story, quite similar to one told by a Sadr city council member, is that US soldiers are raiding Shia homes, arresting innocent civilians, and then dumping them at night near strongholds of Sunni insurgents, blindfolded and handcuffed so that the insurgents would find them defenseless and slaughter them!For them, there will be no acceptable resolution. But there's no denying the scales have been tipped in the wrong direction. Whether enough so to change momentum we'll soon see.
How many infiltrators does it take to destroy an Iraqi unit from within? How many to destroy the trust developing between an IA unit and the U.S. unit it is living with in a Baghdad outpost?The answer is that it depends on the leadership and men of both units.
How many suicide bombers does it take to shake the faith of a neighborhood in the capabilities of the coalition forces down the street?
How many false (or, God help us, real) atrocity charges from certain quarters does it take to turn those neighbors into suicide bombers themselves? (See recent rape claims against Shi'ia and Sunni responses for example.)
The race isn't to "victory" - the real race is to the "tipping point" beyond which victory is assured. Our tactics in this race are fairly straightforward, the enemy's are described in my questions above.
