WP-Trouble Spots Dot Iraqi Landscape

[maddezmom]

Trouble Spots Dot Iraqi Landscape
Attacks Erupting Away From Fallujah

By Karl Vick
Washington Post Foreign Service
Monday, November 15, 2004; Page A01

BAGHDAD, Nov. 14 -- The fighting started in Mosul two days after U.S. tanks entered Fallujah. Armed men appeared in a sudden tide on a main street in Iraq's third-largest city, a wide avenue where so many American convoys had been ambushed that locals nicknamed it "Death Street."

At 11 a.m. Thursday, the target was an armored SUV. Witnesses said that after its Western passengers were chased into a police station, the driver was burned alive atop the vehicle as the attackers shouted "Jew!" The city of 1.8 million people then devolved into chaos. Thousands of police officers abandoned their precinct houses. The governor's house was set alight. Insurgents took the police chief's brother, himself a senior officer, into his front yard and shot him dead.

By Sunday, the dawn of a three-day festival celebrating the end of Ramadan, control over sections of the city remained in doubt. In streets emptied by fear and gunfire, insurgents battled hundreds of Iraqi National Guard reinforcements dispatched by the interim government to quell an uprising that was at once largely expected and disquieting.

U.S. and Iraqi officials said they knew that Ramadan would bring attacks, and that the widely publicized offensive in Fallujah would spark violent provocations in other predominantly Sunni Muslim centers. But the scale of the Mosul attack surprised the U.S. forces in the city. And the disintegration of the city's police force recalled the debacles of April, when a suddenly rampant insurgency shattered faith in the security forces that are expected to assume the ever-more difficult task of making Iraq at least reasonably safe.

much more:http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A49770-2004Nov14.html

[Liberal Veteran]

1. Whack-a-mole

What a fun game.

[ogradda]

2. so that's a

"trouble spot" huh?:eyes:

[maddezmom]

3. definition of "trouble spot"

clusterf*ck

[deadparrot]

4. Trouble? In Iraq? NEVER.

Damned librul media.

[maddezmom]

5. LAT:U.S. Looks Ahead to City's Reconstruction

~snip~

Reconstruction of Fallujah is on hold as the fighting persists, especially in southern areas of the city, where some of the most die-hard guerrillas are reported to be making a last stand. Some have burrowed underground, prompting U.S. forces on Saturday to drop a 2,000-pound bomb -- the most powerful munition used here to day -- on a tunnel complex.

~snip~

"We want to clean this city up," declared Maj. Gen. Richard F. Natonski, commander of the 1st Marine Division. "We want to get the people back here. But we can't bring them back until the city is secure."

~snip~

The reconstruction effort in Fallujah will require tens of millions of dollars in U.S. funds to compensate residents for damaged property and to rebuilding large parts of the city damaged by weeks of U.S. airstrikes and says of street-by-street fighting. The project seems likely to dwarf the large-scale rebuilding scheme in the southern city of Najaf, where damage was estimated at $500 million after a Marine offensive in August ousted Shiite Muslim militiamen.

Fallujah -- once home to almost 300,000 people, though most fled before the U.S. forces launched their assault early last week -- now lies abandoned and in ruins, an apocalyptic tableaux of the aftermath of urban warfare.

more: http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/iraq/la-fg-rebuild15nov15,0,1197248.story?coll=la-home-headlines

[Journeyman]

6. ". . . the ever-more difficult task . . ."

And the disintegration of the city's police force recalled the debacles of April, when a suddenly rampant insurgency shattered faith in the security forces that are expected to assume the ever-more difficult task of making Iraq at least reasonably safe.

At least this is beginning to get the attention it deserved in the run-up to the U.S. election.

[maddezmom]

7. more: "The most immediate concern for the interim government is manpower"

Iraq has no more than eight battalions of the newly trained troops, whose main job is to occupy cities after U.S. forces defeat insurgents. Duty in Samarra and Fallujah, which have about a half million people between them, already was stretching that force thin. Adding duty in Mosul "means you're operating right out on the edge of what forces you have -- Iraqi forces," the U.S. official said.

American forces may be stretched thin as well. A battalion deployed outside Fallujah raced back to its Mosul base when insurgents struck, attacking in groups as large as 50 at a time, numbers not previously seen in the city, said Lt. Col. Paul Hastings of Task Force Olympia, the brigade that in February replaced a much larger unit, the 101st Airborne Division.

The magnitude of the assault generated a wave of excited reports that officials feared would further undermine public order elsewhere in Iraq. Mosul's governor went on state television to attack "lies" on Arabic-language satellite news channels, which at one point reported that U.S. forces had evacuated one of their main bases. On Sunday, the interim Interior Ministry issued a statement denying that insurgents had overrun two police stations in northern Baghdad.

The news was not all bad for the government. Also Sunday, Najaf buzzed with the news that local tribesmen had carried out three days of devastating attacks in the town of Latifiyah. Located on the exceedingly dangerous road between Baghdad and Najaf, the town harbors extremists blamed for killing 18 young Iraqi men returning from Najaf after signing up for the National Guard earlier this month. The victims' tribal leaders, incensed after extremists demanded payment before handing over the bodies, last week sent fighters north to burn farms and carry out revenge killings, officials in Najaf said.