NEWS RELEASE
HEADQUARTERS UNITED STATES CENTRAL COMMAND
7115 South Boundary Boulevard
MacDill AFB, Fla. 33621-5101
Phone: (813) 827-5894; FAX: (813) 827-2211; DSN 651-5894
August 16, 2004
Release Number: 04-08-45
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
POOL REPORT 2 FROM FPRINT PRESS POOLER AT FOB EAGLE, SADR CITY
Filed 1830 on Saturday, Aug. 14, 2004
From Mike Dorning,
Chicago Tribune,
Cell 07901-908-549
Recapping from Report 1, I am with the 2nd Batallion, 5th Regiment of the 1st Cavalry Division at Forward Operating Base Eagle, on the eastern edge of Sadr City. The battalion is responsible for about ¾ of Sadr City and some adjacent areas.
According to the battalion commander, Lt. Col Gary Volesky, 42, of Spokane Washington, between 13,000 to 14,000 local Iraqis had been hired for trash collection and other community work; all have been out of work since the fighting began.
There sounds of mortar fire throughout the night last night and again series of mortars were fired at the base (not sure how many, if any actually hit the base). During night-time hours, soldiers are required to wear body armor and helmet whenever out-of-doors on the base, because of the risk of mortar fire. One officer said that at times during last week, more than 40 mortars were fired at the base within 24 hours, although he was uncertain how many hit the base.
Capt. Darrell Gayle, 29 of Ft. Myers, Fla., the battalion's liaison with the Iraqi National Guard, spoke with your pool reporter a bit about the performance of the ING. The ING battalion is in a camp next door to the U.S. battalion.
The ING battalion keeps one company on duty for patrols for 24 hours at a time and 3 other companies commute as if it were a day job. The companies rotate pool duty. Most live in Sadr City or close by.
After the first day of fighting, about half of the ING battalion's 500-600 members showed up to work, which Capt. Gayle believes was somewhat of a success.
"About 50 percent showed up. That's about what we predicted and what the Iraqis predicted," Gayle said. By contrast, when fighting broke out in April "only a few" showed up to work.
Gayle said that ING members and their families have been threatened at home. And, he said, ING who have showed up to work reported that Mahdi militia members were looking for ING members at checkpoints to stop them from working.
Friday morning, an ING captain in the battalion was abducted by militants manning a checkpoint in the Shaab neighborhood. He reported being taken to Sadr City and being threatened with having his tongue cut out. It's a little unclear why, but Gayle speculates that was because the militia members considered his membership in the ING to be tantamount to speaking again Sadr. The captain was released Saturday morning. Again, a little unclear why, but Gayle believes that the ING battalion commander made contact with "influential people" in Sadr City and arranged the release. (Ironically the ING battalion commander is named Madhi: Lt. Col. Mahdi Charak.
An ING member also reported passing by a traffic circle in Sadr City on Friday and seeing two bodies laid out in the circle with ING uniforms laid beside them. But the ING member could not positively identify the bodies.
In general ING members in the battalion are instructed to leave their uniforms and an identifying materials at the base camp. But they carry an identity card. Gayle said they hide the card in "some pretty clever ways." The abducted captain was identified as an ING member because he was carrying a laptop, Gayle said.
During the fightin, the ING has been mostly doing patrols to help identify mortar firing positions and manning checkpoints to check for car bombs, Gayle said.
Your pool reporter was assigned to a patrol with Bravo Company this morning, which actually did not patrol in Sadr City. The patrol of 2 up-armored humvees and 3 tanks went out to a neighborhood that the translator, "Ricky" identified as the "Ar-Rashad" neighborhood, a group of small cinder-block buildings on fields adjacent to Sadr City that the translator said was populated mainly by former residents of Sadr City.
The patrol received a mostly friendly reception. Many children ran up to the humvees, smiled and waved along the way. However, two kids did yell out "Fuck You" and "Fuck your sister" shortly after we pulled out of base. The patrol dismounted and stopped to speak with people a number of times. People seemed calm and receptive, although one bare-shirted teen-ager was so nervous when talking with the soldiers that you could see his heart palpitating. The soldiers asked around to see if anyone knew anything about the mortar fire and, as usual, almost no one knew anything except that they couldn't be from that neighborhood. A few said they believed the mortar fire was coming from a nearby dump and one man described seeing a green Kia sedan fleeing after a mortar attack The soldiers dismounted and searched a dump north of the neighborhood for signs of a stashed mortar launcher, with no success.
Lt. Ben Ferguson, 24, of Fort Hood, Texas, described the fighting in Sadr City:
"All of a sudden, it kicked in to a higher gear again," Ferguson said.
"We had a lot during the first two days when it first started again: Men with RPGs running around. We shot a lot of them..The norm was , they RPG us, they shoot at us. Our army is so good. It's really an overmatch."
But the streets are calmer more recently, he said, "Thursday, we went out during the day and night for almost 8 hours total (in Sadr City). That day we didn't see anything."
Describing the mood of soldiers as they go out to patrol, he said, "It's a little bit hard to describe. You get wired and you get very alert. You've got to be able to respond to anything."
A Catholic, he wears a brown scapular and a St. George medal whenever he goes out to patrol and has done so the entire time he has been here.
That's all for now.
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