Wednesday, July 05, 2006

85 People Kidnapped


Mass Kidnapping in Iraq

Camp Taji, Iraq: 30 km North of Baghdad

"It seems cooler today," the Sgt. 1st Class says as we walk from the DEFAC to the office.

"Yeah, it feels about 110 today," I tell him as we walk through the gravel and the dust between a couple 10 foot concrete blast walls.

We continue walking through the shade structures that the Iraqi Republican Guard built under Saddam Hussein for tank shade. It's similar to the shade I build as a construction manager at Burning Man, except the squares of shade are concrete and attached in a diagonal diamond shape along rows. Some of the concrete blast walls are stenciled DPW here. That takes my mind back to Black Rock desert.

I've interviewed about 20 soldiers from Nevada here at Camp Taji. They are excited that someone from Nevada has come to write about them. Most of them are pretty happy with there job. Many have been to Iraq in OIF 1. Winnemucca Dave's son told me, "As soon as I stepped off the plane, it was like being out in the Black Rock." Of course there aren't a lot of raves, or black rocks, here. Burning Man is held in the Black Rock Desert and Winnemucca Dave was one of my co-workers.

For the past three days I have been working with the 414 Civil Affairs (CA), a New York State Reserve Unit. Yesterday I drove to the Ministry of Oil and they talked about problems with propane, and propane accessories. The "insurgents" blew up the pipeline two months ago. So trucks are used to transport propane, and it doesn't seem to get to its proper location. Most of it seems to hit the black market. There is a shortage of gasoline and propane here. Isn't that funny in an oil producing country? Gas was about 45 cents a gallon three months ago here. Now it is about $2.75 gallon. (They buy it in liters and I have converted it.) Skilled labor pays about $25 a day and unskilled is $10. Afghanistan: $2 a day unskilled, $6 skilled, with an average wage of $35 a month. I am not sure what the average monthly pay in Iraq is, yet. Or what the soldiers make. In Afghanistan, a soldier makes $70 a month and the family gets a little over $500 if they get killed.

They do not have reliable electricity here, either. Just like Afghanistan. All they have in Afghanistan is poppies. It must be frustrating to have oil but no electricity.
Most problems seem to come from insurgents. Really! They killed the workers sent to fix the propane pipeline.

The two US Soldiers that were kidnapped the other day were 40 miles South of Taji. 85 people were kidnapped yesterday about 10 clicks North of here on MSR Tampa. I drove by there today. We visited the Mushada Medical Clinic. The electricity was not on when we came in to meet with the head doctor. It was fucking hot and smelled like a county jail, with BO.

There was a Nahia scheduled. That is sort of like a city council meeting. But the streets were empty, which is a really bad sign if you are moving around on a gun truck. No one showed up for the meeting. So, as I mentioned, 85 people were kidnapped.

http://www.forbes.com/technology/feeds/ap/2006/06/22/ap2832870.html

85 Iraqi's that were getting on buses after work to go back to their homes in Baghdad city. Gone. I heard, unofficially, that the factory made hammers and stuff, including bombs for insurgents, which offered them some degree of protection. But that protection seems to have expired since they bombed Zarqawi.

We went to the local Iraqi Police Station, next. This was interesting, as it was a recruiting day. Each room of the station had men in it, testing to become a cop. One guy took a picture of our interpretor, a cute little Jordanian woman. We made him erase that picture. One room had the recruits doing sit-ups. Another they checked the backgrounds of the recruits. I am not sure how they did this. But I do know they are starting to use fingerprinting here on the Iraqi's in our own database.

The upstairs of the cop shop was being refinished. The CA did not fund the operation, but were asked to look over it as it was in there Area of Operations (AO.)

There were two US Tanks parked at the cop shop entrance. They recently put up 12 foot concrete blast walls around the entire compound. One contractor was already killed for working there. Killed on the job by gun fire.

We step out towards the roof.
"You may not want to come out here," the Sgt. Tells me. "We take sniper fire from West."
"Are you going out?" I ask.
"Yeah."
"Well, so am I," I say and step out. I had on my kevlar, so I was willing to take the chance for a few photos. I didn't come here to hide from the money shot.

We made it back to Taji without incident, which was fine with me. I have another week here. I am working with CA, as mentioned. They called a most of the guys out of Individual Readiness Reserve (IRR), which means you get paid $5000 a year to be on a roster for duty, in case of war. One fellow told me that only 1/3 of the IRR showed up for duty out of the Washington, D.C. area, where he is from.

So the 414 CA have a number of grey haired gentlemen that were re-trained to come fight in this war. Most of them did not have CA as there MOS. One fellow from Texas was in Vietnam, where he got his combat 4ID patch in 1968. I am doing a story on him. Will be riding out into the wilds with him on Sunday and Monday.

Bombs regularly go off on and around the base. From what I gather, most of them are mortars shot at us. They run a lot of UAVs, particularly the Shadow, 24/7 so they usually catch the insurgents after they fire the first one.

Three days ago an Iraqi soldier had both of his arms blown off by an IED on MSR Tampa (Iraqi HWY 1). They covered that in our briefing when we drove off the base. Apparently there is a new bomb maker in town that likes to use pressure plates covered in gravel. These plates may also be used on walls, say, for a anti-American poster. When someone goes up to grab the poster, boom!

The morale of the troops here is pretty good, much better than I would expect. No one likes it here, and why should they? It is a war. It is an unpleasant environment. But the soldiers do there jobs.

This place is a lot worse off than Afghanistan, although I read everyday that the Taliban are up to their old tricks in force there, too, since I was shot at by them in May and they wacked Captain Goddard ( http://www.theitem.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20060529/NEWS01/105290076 ) and looted Kabul. Still, the US has lost less than 300 troops in five years in Afghanistan. That war isn't over, but NATO committed to ten years there and on 31 July they take over Regional Area Command South (RAC) and the US footprint there will be pretty reduced to nothing. Operation Enduring Freedom will be pretty much over for us. The Canadians and the British have a big bite of shit sandwich on their plates, now.

This War on Terror has lasted longer than WWII. That is something for perspective. This global war on terror rages on. I think that the Iraqi Army might be able to take care of business for us. I have seen them, talked to the Maj. Gen. Bashar Mahmoud Ayoub, who is in charge of the 9th Iraqi Mechanized Division. We just gave him 615 sq. km of battle space. He and his Iraqi soldiers handle everything there except helicopter medivacs, which the US still assists on. He reports directly to Maj. Gen. James Thurman, Multi-National DivisionBaghdad, commander.

Iraq, unlike Afghanistan, had an Army and some what modern infrastructure. It is a misnomer to say the reconstruction of Afghanistan. They are largely in the stone age, or just past it. No water, electricity or anything that would have surprised Alexander the Great or Genghis Kahn, with the exception of a moped or Chinese made tractor.
Maj. Gen. Bashar Mahmoud Ayoub signed up for the Iraqi Army in 1967 at the age of 20. He seems pretty tenacious to survive in the Iraqi Army to the last 39 years. Some of the Afghan Generals served the Red Army. It's fun to study how these people get recycled into duty. Afghanistan even has one female General. I wonder how many the US has.

One more week here and I catching a hop back to Kabul. I flew through Qatar to get here. Not sure which way I go back. Maybe Kuwait. I have two weeks, well, a little less, in Afghanistan, then I fly back to Iraq. I will be South of Baghdad for my next mission. It is some what safer there. I'll be at Tallil, where the Ziggurat is, and Abraham, of the Bible, Torah and Koran was born, lived and is buried, right on the US Air Base. There is also a pizza parlor and espresso shop there, courtesy of the Italian soldiers.

I've been a tourist of death and destruction for eight months now. Watching four Apache helicopters kill the Taliban was one of my more memorable sites, along with watching a JDAM "Bunker Buster" smite insurgents. Maybe they should do that to the Burning Man. . . After all, the bombs are laser guided and government approved.

Well, that is all for now. I am running out of cash, as usual. If anyone has some extra cash, you can paypal me at editor@nvnewswire.com
I am going to have a lot of articles out. Some might even pay. Others, like this one, do not. http://www.fernleynews.com/1400000/military/SgtRoccoDanna061806.html

http://www.nuvo.net/article.php?title=stories_from_iraq-_pfc__robert_neeld,_carmel_in



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