Militia failure in Iraq

Bill Roggio:

The Iraqi Army's 3rd Brigade, 8th Division has conducted a large scale cordon and search operation in the city of Suwayra in Wasit province. During the operation, there were two separate engagements, both north of Suwayra, where “25 gunmen were killed and 18 others were arrested in separate incidents,” according to the Kuwaiti News Agency.

...

Suwayra is the location of fighting between the Iraqi Army and the Mahdi Army just one week ago, after about 150 Mahdi militiamen attacked a police station in the city. Eight Mahdi fighters were killed during the engagement. While neither the Iraqi Army or MNF-Iraq identified the current 'insurgents' as Mahdi, the likelihood the operation was indeed directed at the Mahdi Army. Wasit province is largely Shiite, and the Sunni insurgency and al-Qaeda have not been active in this region. If this is true, the Iraqi Army is continuing to erode Sadr's support outside of Baghdad, and has given his Mahdi Army another lopsided defeat.

...
The insurgents have the power of a cock roach to make a mess and infest an area, but they are vulnerable when superior force is used to control an area and eradicate their operations. Media attention is limited to their messes and not their failures. In the media battle spaces we need to do a better job of calling attention to enemy failures, because there are many more of those than there are of ours.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Should Republicans go ahead and add Supreme Court Justices to head off Democrats

Washington Post: Some Democrats eye adding more justices to the Supreme Court to change its ideological bent The once-remote idea has gained the attention of liberals angered by the GOP push to remake the federal courts. Probably the easy way to defeat this court-packing scheme is for Trump to propose doing the same thing now.  It would lead to Democrat denunciations and claims that it would be wrong, thereby blowing up any attempt by them in the unfortunate event of Democrats winning a presidential election.
Read more

29 % of companies say they are unlikely to keep insurance after Obamacare

Conn Carroll: A new survey of 368 midsize to large companies found that 29% of them are considering terminating their active employee health care plans when Obamacare is full implemented in 2014. Only 71% of employers surveyed said they did not expect to drop their health coverage, while 20% said they did not know and 9% said they were planning to exit. The latest survey, conducted by Towers Watson, echoes an ealier survey by McKinsey & Co. finding that 30% of private-sector employers were planning to drop their employee health insurance coverage by 2014. When the Congressional Budget Office crunched Obamacare's spending numbers, they estimated that only 7% of employees currently covered by employer-sponsored plans would lose their plans. ... This means the cost of the health care fiasco will be hundreds of billions more than estimated by the CBO and Congressional Democrat. It is also clear that Obama's pledge that you could keep your health care plan if you wanted t
Read more

Bin Laden's concern about Zarqawi's remains

James Robbins: ... Bin Laden suggests that President Bush should allow Zarqawi’s body to be returned to his family in Jordan, but this is a matter that is up to the Jordanian government, which so far has not shown much interest in facilitating a homecoming. Bin Laden mocks King Abdullah II, calling him a Coalition minion, and asking “w hat scares you about Abu Musab after he’s dead? You know that his funeral, if allowed to happen, would be a huge funeral showing the extent of sympathy with the mujahedin.” A large crowd would definitely turn out, though most people would be on hand to demonstrate their anger and disgust. Last November’s hotel bombings in Amman , masterminded by Zarqawi, are still fresh in people’s memory, and mentioning them to Jordanians has the same visceral impact as memory of the 9/11 attacks does here. Jordan has adopted a zero-tolerance policy towards those who choose to mourn the country’s least favorite son, and four opposition members of parliament who paid con
Read more