How do you say get some in arabic..
Posted on 11/27/2004 8:06:26 PM PST by Dr. Marten
U.S. Sends in Secret Weapon: Saddam's Old Commandos
By Alastair Macdonald
NEAR ISKANDARIYA, Iraq (Reuters) - Twenty months after toppling Saddam Hussein, U.S. troops still battling his followers in the heartland of Iraq's old arms industry are hitting back with a new weapon -- ex-members of Saddam's special forces.
For five months, Iraqi police commandos calling themselves the Black Scorpions have been based with U.S. Marines in the region along the Euphrates south of Baghdad, which roadside bombs, ambushes and kidnaps have turned into a no-go areas and earned it the melodramatic description "triangle of death."
"All of them were previously officers in the Iraqi army or special forces," the Scorpions' commander, Colonel Salaam Trad, said at the Marines' Kalsu base near Iskandariya on Saturday.
"But Saddam was dirty and no good for Iraq."
The performance of this SWAT team, as the Americans call it, could be a critical test of how U.S. forces can hand over to Iraqis to meet their goal of withdrawing from a stable Iraq. U. S. officers in the area say they are increasingly optimistic.
"The hardest fighters we have are the former special forces from Saddam's days," Colonel Ron Johnson, commander of the 24th Marine Expeditionary Unit, told reporters.
Praising their local knowledge and fighting skills, Johnson singled out one man who fought against him at Nassiriya, the hardest battle of last year's brief war against Saddam's army.
"If I could have an Iraqi security force guy who's honest, reliable and dependable, it's worth five Marines," he added.
Captain Tad Douglas, who leads almost daily raids with the Scorpions, said he believed it was a unique experiment that made use of the Iraqis' feel for their home province of Babylon.
"Ninety-five percent of our intelligence is from the SWAT," he said. "They can put a guy in a cafe in the way we never could ... They have a good finger on the pulse."
NO HARD FEELINGS
U.S. officers are reluctant to discuss how big the SWAT team is and Trad and Douglas brush off questions on what they may or not have done to each other in last year's war.
"It doesn't matter to me what they did. They're staunchly anti-insurgent," said Douglas, who dismissed suggestions their training under Saddam might have made them too violent.
"We just had to polish them up a bit," he said. This week, Johnson has stepped up raids against insurgents in an operation code-named Plymouth Rock, hoping to keep pressure on Sunni rebels after their rout at Falluja to the northwest.
Of Johnson's 5,000-strong force in the region, which was once the heart of Saddam's arms industry and base of the Medina armored division of the elite Republican Guard, more than 2,000 are Marines, 850 British soldiers and the rest Iraqi.
At the camp 30 miles south of Baghdad, the Scorpions are very visible, wearing the khaki jumpsuits of Marine special forces and black mustaches traditional in the Iraqi military.
Occupying powers have a long and patchy history of creating local units and Iraqi forces in other regions have had mixed success. This month, thousands of police in the northern city of Mosul fled or changed sides when Sunni insurgents took charge.
Johnson acknowledges the loyalties of some Iraqis in his force may be divided but says they "want to be on the winning side" and is confident that U.S.-led troops can end what he sees as limited and decentralized violence by at most a few thousand disgruntled Saddam supporters and local bandits.
Iraqi police here have stuck to their posts despite killings of comrades in bomb attacks and murders of off-duty officers: " They don't cut and run, despite their losses," Johnson said.
Clearly exasperated by the "triangle of death" tag, he said: "I'm getting more optimistic every day."
As for Colonel Salaam, a small, wiry man of 32, he shrugs off insurgent threats to himself and his family and says what he wants is: "Freedom, a new Iraq, peace."
I just pray no Marines are hit by "friendly fire", or any other fire. May God help them all.
BUMP for all to read....
Yea, definitely a bad choice of words. I think he means better to put their asses on the line than our guys, if possible. I wouldn't trust any of them.
Actually, MacArthur spared the hangman's noose to a number of high officials in imperial Japan-- those who were interested in rebuilding their country in a pro-American model. Those who could not be trusted, or were guilty of the worst atrocities, were hung.
He means that one of the Iraqis can blend in with the civilian population... that intelligence capability is worth more than a marine's capability.
Whoa...I didn't think of that angle....that i buy.
thanx
You beat me to the punch. I'm no marine; just a silly engineer. But the logic makes sense to me. A 'local' who will fight for our side, who understands the language and culture; as well as the proper 'ettiquite' the situation demands is better than having a group of marines with brute strength. Some things demand both brute strength, and finesss; using Iraqi troops is the better solution (as long as they can be trusted to behave with our plans and objectives).
These are probably professional thugs, not very nice nor very talented -- but hopefully possessed of an esprit de corps which makes them too proud to sell out to al-qaeda.
They may also realize that if they cooperate now . . . when we leave, they will have a toehold in the government.
Bear in mind the these are special ops guys.
There knowledge of the geography, people, customs, attitudes, language, and "culture" is something that would be difficult to "teach" a US Marine.
I don't think he is implying they are "better", but that the qualities that they bring to the party are particularily valuable.
Not better - different "skills"
That's right. We can't win that war, all we can do is kill all the enemy. Only the Iraqis can win the war.
Excellent point
We don't "need" to have 5 Marines there, if and when they can do the job for themselves.
When the US occupied Japan in 1945 the waters around Japan were filled with mines, ours, theirs, Russian, and drifting mines from who knows where. The US Navy was not anxious to put our ships and men in danger to help out Japan, so Japanese Imperial Navy warships that could sweep mines were transferred to the Japanese Depatment of Commerce (or its equivilant), complete with crews, who went on doing their old jobs with new civilain titles instead of military ranks.
Great for Japan. They got their sea lanes cleared of mines. Great for the US Navy, they didn't have to waste ships and men on a task as mundane and dangerous as minesweeping.
Then the Korean war broke out. Gen. MacArthur sailed to Inchon in a US Navy ship, as did the soldiers and Marines who landed at Inchon. But the US Navy suddenly found that it could not sweep mines when it needed too. So the task force that landed at Inchon was led by former Imperial Navy ships officered by former Imperial Navy officers, clearing the mines out of the way.
How do you say get some in arabic..
Taking off down a rabbit trail for a second here - if I hear the Republican Guard referred to as "elite" one more time, I'm going to puke.
He needs to revise and extend his remarks, no question.
Thanks for the explanation - it sounded strange but I knew something else was meant by his comment.
Any backgound on that great pic?
No, he means that their local knowledge, capacity to blend in, gain intelligence, talk to the people in their language, and put an Iraqi face on operations thereby defusing the foreign occupation argument is so valuable that one of them gives you the value of five Marines. Colonel Johnson is a smart guy who's there to win, not beat on his chest. I strongly suspect the Commandant of the Marine Corps would agree with him.
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