Regards, Ivan
Posted on 04/06/2003 3:38:04 PM PDT by MadIvan
NO MAN’S LAND at night was a wondrous silver world of empty desert to the two teams of American Green Berets as they moved slowly towards their reconnaissance objective.
The desert town near the Iraqi lines outside Kirkuk seemed abandoned, but there were other eyes scanning the wilderness. The men eased forward in two vehicles, acquired days earlier from their Kurdish peshmerga allies.
“Then the engine block seemed literally to fall right out the bottom of the vehicle,” one of the lead team recalled. “We’re standing around trying to fix it when we hear a sound. The town isn’t empty after all. The Iraqis have moved back into it. Worse still, they are special forces. They know we are around and they’re after us.”
Pulling back with the Iraqis in pursuit, the American commander made the decision to lay a snap ambush for the Iraqi special forces and to try to capture their vehicle. A bare 300 yards from the Green Berets’ ambush site, the Iraqis stopped and turned back.
No man’s land remained silent, and the Green Berets were left with mixed sensations of anti-climax and relief.
Unfamiliar allies, sensitive politics, poor logistics, thin intelligence, mines, dust and dirt: the war of the American Special Forces in northern Iraq is a complex mission riven with hazard, exemplified by the accidental killing yesterday of special forces soldiers, along with the wounding of a senior peshmerga commander and his fighters, by a coalition jet. “We usually spend a lot of time working with indigenous forces, training and equipping them,” said one Green Beret at his forward base near the Kirkuk front. “This time, though, we got pitched in quick and were just told to start hammering the Iraqis.”
Deprived at first of secure air corridors to northern Iraq as well as key logistical support by Turkey, the Green Berets were forced to deploy from Romania using hostile airspace above Iraq before landing in the Kurdish-held zone. Scattering in small teams across the front lines around Kirkuk and Mosul, the men set up improvised bases in buildings vacated by the Iraqis two weeks ago.
Using locally acquired vehicles, working by day and night calling in airstrikes on frontline Iraqi units, the task of special forces here has been further disadvantaged by the tangled political situation. Rather than let peshmerga guerrillas move forward to seize the bomb-shattered Iraqi positions, US Special Forces have been ordered to keep their local allies on a leash for fear that a rapid seizure of territory may upset Turkey.
The Iraqi forces defending Mosul and Kirkuk are proving obstinate. “We find ourselves bombing the same positions day after day,” a Green Beret noted. However, capture remains their greatest fear. “We hear the Iraqis are offering $1 million for special forces prisoners,” one soldier said.
He tapped his assault rifle. “No way my old man’ll see me a prisoner on CNN.”
Regards, Ivan
Turkey, Turkey, Turkey. Boy, someone is really screwing up the Turkish angle. Foggy bottom pinstripers no doubt.
Alas, when Michael Wayne Morrison was cast, the mold was broken immediately thereafter. We'll neve see his like again....
the infowarrior
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