THE FIRST TWO PARAGRAPHS of the New York Times story gives the scant details of today's event...
BAGHDAD, Iraq (AP) -- A U.S. helicopter crashed Saturday northeast of Baghdad, killing all 13 people on board, the military said.
The military did not give a cause for the crash, saying only that the incident was under investigation. But the brief statement lacked the customary comment that the aircraft was not shot down...
The crash occured in Diyala province. There'll be lots of stories on the crash itself, but it's probably only in this diary that you'll learn of the true story underlaying the tragedy...
On Monday, January 10, the Chicago Tribune reported...
Perspective: Insurgents elusive in Diyala
FONTIMIYA, IRAQ — U.S. and Iraqi forces trudged through waterlogged fields, crawled down tunnels and went house to house Friday in a painstaking search for Sunni Arab insurgents, combing a remote rural region east of Baghdad that has been a training and logistics base for Al Qaeda in Iraq and other militant groups.
But for the second day of the 1,000-troop operation, in home after home, they found only women, children and men too old to fight.
This was the first major new military operation undertaken since the December arrival of the notorious Lt. General Raymond Odierno as commander of day to day operations in Iraq.
And he has a history in Iraq. Especially when it comes to dealing with Sunnis.
The LA Times gave a capsule description of his most notorious history:
Odierno gained a reputation as an aggressive commander while leading the 4th Infantry Division in Sunni Arab-dominated parts of the country in 2003 and '04. Some military analysts have argued that the region's continued unrest can be traced to his heavy-handed methods.
But that doesn't quite capture his time there, which included included widespread indiscriminate 'mass sweeps' of all adult males 16 years or older in Sunni villages, many of whom ended up in Abu Ghraib. From the book, Fiasco:
What wasn't widely understood at the time, or even now outside the military, is that the overcrowding at the prison... resulted directly from tactical decisions... most notably the 4th ID's Gen. Odierno. In the fall of 2003 they were stuffing Abu Ghraib with thousands of detainees, the majority of them bystanders caught up in the sweeps.
When Fast, the top Army intelligence officer in Iraq, questioned the 4th ID's indiscriminate approach, she was told by its intelligence officer that Odierno didn't care...
Brig. Gen. Karpinski, the reserve MP officer overseeing detentions across Iraq (said)..."The 82nd's interrogators did it right. They'd inveterview twenty-five and send three to me. Odierno's guys would grab twenty-five, and send twenty-five, or fifty, by including a bunch from his holding pen..."
And from the Washington Post:
From its first days in Iraq in April 2003, the Army's 4th Infantry Division made an impression on soldiers from other units -- the wrong one.
"We slowly drove past 4th Infantry guys looking mean and ugly," recalled Sgt. Kayla Williams, then a military intelligence specialist in the 101st Airborne. "They stood on top of their trucks, their weapons pointed directly at civilians. . . . What could these locals possibly have done? Why was this intimidation necessary? No one explained anything, but it looked weird and felt wrong..."
The unit, a heavy armored division despite its name, was known for "grabbing whole villages, because combat soldiers [were] unable to figure out who was of value and who was not," according to a subsequent investigation of the 4th Infantry Division's detainee operations by the Army inspector general's office. Its indiscriminate detention of Iraqis filled Abu Ghraib prison, swamped the U.S. interrogation system and overwhelmed the U.S. soldiers guarding the prison.
Lt. Col. David Poirier, who commanded a military police battalion attached to the 4th Infantry Division and was based in Tikrit from June 2003 to March 2004, said the division's approach was indiscriminate. "With the brigade and battalion commanders, it became a philosophy: 'Round up all the military-age males, because we don't know who's good or bad.' " Col. Alan King, a civil affairs officer working at the Coalition Provisional Authority, had a similar impression of the 4th Infantry's approach. "Every male from 16 to 60" that the 4th Infantry could catch was detained, he said. "And when they got out, they were supporters of the insurgency."
The unit's tactics were no accident, given its commanding general, according to his critics. "Odierno, he hammered everyone," said Joseph K. Kellogg Jr., a retired Army general who was at Coalition Provisional Authority, the U.S.-led occupation agency.
All of which casts a new light on the report above "insurgents elusive in Diyala".
For Odierno is well-known to the Sunnis of Iraq (Diyala, like Anbar where Odierno gained his notoriety, is overwhelmingly Sunni). As is the fact that the Iraqi 'security forces' on the operation were primarily Shi'ite.
And so when the surprise operation started, entire villages emptied themselves of all adult males over the age of 16, and hid in the canals spread throughout the region.
But of course the very act of hiding equalled guilt in the eyes of the new commander, and so the next day the air strikes began...
HAMOUD, IRAQ — Bombers, fighter jets and attack helicopters unleashed a thundering attack today as U.S. and Iraqi troops closed in on a web of irrigation canals east of Baghdad where they thought Sunni Arab insurgents were massing.
The predawn strikes shook the ground and sent fireballs and thick smoke into the sky.
...and many 'insurgents' were killed.
Last Saturday, afters days of such operations, success was declared:
TURKI, IRAQ — U.S. and Iraqi forces have denied Sunni Arab insurgents an important power base in a lawless region east of Baghdad, the commander of a joint offensive said Friday.
The challenge now, U.S. Lt. Col. Andrew Poppas said in an interview, is to ensure that the militants do not return to the region in the eastern province of Diyala.
But blocking who goes in, also means blocking who goes out, and so last Tuesday came the following report...
Iraq: US air strikes isolate Diyala villagers
BAQUBAH, 16 January (IRIN) - Hundreds of people have been trying to flee the eastern Iraqi province of Diyala, close to the Iraqi-Iranian border, following a recent offensive by US and Iraqi troops in the area. Although the offensive has ended, scores of families in rural villages were said to be hiding in their houses for fear that air strikes might start again...
Very few families managed to leave the area before the attacks started on 5 January. The closures of entry and exit points in the vicinity forced hundreds of families to stay inside their homes.
A mass sweep operation, indiscriminate air strikes, terrified villagers, and no accountability. It's a classic Odierno operation. Today, 13 more Americans paid for it with their lives.
And it's all just a foretaste of the carnage to come.
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This diary by Spread the Word: Iraq-Nam, a daily blog on Iraq.
Update: January 20, 2007, 1:45pst. Reuters is now reporting:
A U.S. Blackhawk helicopter crashed northeast of Baghdad on Saturday, killing all 13 soldiers aboard in one of the deadliest single incidents for U.S. forces in four years of war in Iraq.
Residents near Baquba, in violent Diyala province, said they saw a helicopter in flames in the air but a military spokeswoman said it was not clear whether the aircraft was shot down.
My apologies to those who thought the headline misleading in that there was no behind-the-scenes scoop on the actual helicopter. But the 'real story' referred to is the human suffering leading up to the crash, and the disastrous policy behind that suffering. Now to that we can add the image of a helicopter in flames in the air with 13 terrified souls aboard, all now lost to us forever.
And that, as far as I'm concerned, is the real story behind the crash.