As Forces Gather, It's Unknown Whether Iraqis Will Show Up, Fight

Team Infidel

Forum Spin Doctor
Arizona Republic (Phoenix)
February 2, 2007
By Steven R. Hurst, Associated Press
BAGHDAD - U.S. Army engineers have torn down houses and surrounded the newly cleared space with razor wire atop concrete blast walls for neighborhood bases, the first outward signs of the coming Baghdad security crackdown.
American and Iraqi commanders are pulling together a force that numbers, on paper at least, about 90,000 troops for what many see as a last-chance drive to curb the debilitating violence that has turned Baghdad into a battleground and has killed, according to the United Nations, more than 34,000 civilians last year alone.
"This will be a difficult mission and time is not on our side," Lt. Gen. David Petraeus, who will soon take over the U.S. command in Iraq, said in written testimony to the Senate Armed Services Committee last month.
In the past eight months, two U.S.-Iraqi security missions have failed to rout gunmen, bombers, suicide attackers and the death squads that haunt Baghdad's streets after dark. The U.S. military blamed Iraq's Shiite-dominated government for its inability to muster sufficient troops.
Of the 90,000-troop force now assembling for a new try at calming the capital, more than half were to be Iraqi soldiers and police, a large majority of whom are Shiite Muslims.
It remains an open question whether those forces will be any more inclined this time to battle heavily armed fellow Shiite militiamen or Sunni insurgents, including al-Qaida in Iraq and its suicide bombers.
This operation to sweep the capital of Sunni insurgents and Shiite militiamen was widely expected to begin early this month. But a senior Iraqi general told the Associated Press this week that "preparations are not complete."
The general refused to say how many of an expected influx of about 8,000 Iraqi forces had arrived, as advertised, from the Kurdish north, the Shiite south or Fallujah, in the insurgent stronghold of Anbar province west of Baghdad.
Local commanders, however, said only about 2,000 of the additional troops had reached Baghdad or were nearby. The general and the commanders spoke on condition of anonymity because of security reasons.
The Baghdad security plan, announced Jan. 6 by Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki and four days later by President Bush, includes an infusion of 21,500 additional American troops to Iraq, 17,500 of them to Baghdad.
The U.S. Congress, with a new Democratic majority, has been embroiled for weeks in debate about sending more Americans to a conflict that already has stretched to nearly four years and taken the lives of nearly 3,100 U.S. service members and hundreds more American contract workers.
U.S. and Iraqi officials say the United States plans to have about 41,000 troops in Baghdad and the region when all additional 17,500 American forces arrive by late spring. There are currently about 15,000 in and around the capital and an estimated 8,500 were expected to arrive from other parts of the country.
The Iraqis say they have about 22,000 troops in the capital, more than half at the airport and in two nearby towns. There are about 20,000 police and Interior Ministry troops and commandos also in the city, according the Defense and Interior ministries. The additional 8,000 scheduled to arrive from elsewhere would put the total Iraqi forces at about 50,000.
But the overall Iraq troop count is an extrapolation from the number of battalions deployed or on the way. Experience has shown far fewer troops show up.
U.S. military officials have said that about one-third of any Iraqi unit is missing at any given time because soldiers must return to their hometowns and villages to deliver their paychecks to families. Iraq's banking system is too primitive to allow the electronic transfer of money.
And those absences do not include soldiers missing because they don't want to serve. There are no laws against failure to muster for the country's new, volunteer force.
 
These people are ****ed until they figure out what national pride is instead of Shiite or Sunni pride. I have no pity for these people, we cant do anything for them. It makes my ****ing blood boil.
 
Perhaps they should take a page from old European armies and have a corporal at the rear of the formation ready to dispatch any soldier who fails to do his duty. Worked for the Russians in WWII.
 
Lol I was tempted to write the same thing. "One step backwards and your dead" More fear of the people behind you than the ones in the front.

There are no laws against failure to muster for the country's new, volunteer force.
That is the biggest problem....
 
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