Cox News Service December 21, 2004
Rocket, Mortar Attacks A Constant Threat At U.S. Bases In Iraq
By Larry Kaplow
To defend against mortars and rockets, U.S. troops keep attack helicopters ready to scramble after the shadowy assailants. They use "fire-finding" radar to trace the source of incoming rounds and answer with artillery fire.
But the shots known as "indirect fire" keep coming, often into bases where soldiers still eat or work in tents that are literally soft targets.
Tuesday's attack on Forward Operating Base Marez in the northern city of Mosul, which killed at least 20 U.S. and Iraqi troops and contracting personnel, was attributed by some military officials to a rocket fired into the base.
One official speculated that the blast may have been caused by a bomb placed in the tent, raising the fear that Iraqi workers are providing information to the insurgents either out of loyalty or intimidation.
However, most reports focused on the likelihood that it was a rocket or mortar attack _ a danger that became commonplace in Iraq more than a year ago.
Many U.S. bases have had spells in which they see mortar or rocket fire on a daily basis. Most of the time, the incoming munitions fall on unpopulated areas of bases that sprawl over wide areas of desert.
But with about 140,000 U.S. troops and tens of thousands more contractors on scores of bases around the country, some here see Tuesday's toll of up to 19 U.S. troops _ perhaps the worst in the war's 21 months _ as an inevitable tragedy.
One of the worst attacks came in April at Camp Cooke near the town of Taji, just north of Baghdad when four soldiers from the Arkansas National Guard were killed by a rocket blast. When a patrol found the source, it was hauntingly crude _ a launcher made of some plastic tubes and a roughly welded metal frame.
The camp had already seen other deaths from rockets. The attacks stopped _ at least temporarily _ after stepped-up patrols and helicopter responses helped track down and kill members of a cadre firing them.
The scene in Mosul on Tuesday highlighted the vulnerabilities.
Nearly two years after the base was established, troops still ate in the large tent that was shredded in the explosion. That is typical at bases across the country where crews are bringing in trailers and constructing buildings for bunks and offices, but mess halls are often huge tents.
Bill Nemitz, a columnist with the Portland Press Herald embedded at the base with the Maine National Guard's 133rd Engineer Battalion, told CNN that a concrete dining hall was under construction.
Other reports stated that soldiers had expressed concern about the soft-sided mess hall because mortar attacks had become frequent around lunchtime _ the time of Tuesday's fatal explosion.
Mitchell Zais, a retired Army brigadier general who was chief of war plans at the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said Tuesday that some in the military are worried that permanent structures at military bases might cause political problems in Iraq by giving the impression that U.S. forces plan to stay indefinitely.
But "force protection does take priority over appearances," said Zais, president of Newberry College in South Carolina.
John E. Pike, director of the GlobalSecurity.org Web site, which provides extensive coverage of U.S. facilities in Iraq, said one of the problems with the Marez base is that it sits on the edge of Mosul, Iraq's third largest city. This precludes the kind of intense patrolling and square miles of buffer zone available in a more open area.
This problem has grown more severe since U.S. forces raided the insurgent stronghold of Fallujah west of Baghdad this fall and many insurgents migrated to other parts of Iraq, including the region around Mosul.
George Edmonson of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution contributed to this story from Washington.
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