Here’s
more bad news for insurgents:
BAGHDAD, Iraq – In the battle against insurgents here, two kinds of Iraqi military forces are emerging: the planned units and the pop-ups. The planned units of the Iraq Army, about 57,000 soldiers strong, are the result of careful preparation this summer between the U.S. and Iraqi commanders. The pop-ups started to emerge last fall out of nowhere, catching the American military by surprise. These dozen disconnected units totaling as many as 15,000 soldiers are fast becoming one of the most significant developments in the new Iraq security situation.
The unplanned units – commanded by friends and relatives of cabinet officers and tribal sheiks – go by names like the Defenders of Baghdad, the Special Police Commandos, the Defenders of Khadamiya and the Amarah Brigade. The new units generally have the backing of the Iraqi government and receive government funding.
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Troops who might have otherwise joined the regular Iraqi Army are drawn to these units because they are often led by a particularly inspirational commander or made up of people with similar tribal and religious backgrounds. This makes the units more cohesive and potentially effective against the insurgency. “Just show us where to go and we will eat the insurgents alive,” an Iraqi in one of these units told Maj. Wales earlier this month when he tracked them down at a long-shuttered Baghdad airport.
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The first of these military units, the Special Police Commandos, was formed in September by Gen. Adnan Thavit, the uncle of Iraq’s interim interior minister. The unit started with about 1,000 soldiers. When Col. James Coffman, a senior aide to Gen. Petraeus, found them they were occupying a heavily damaged Republican Guard base a few miles from the U.S. embassy. “It was basically 1,000 guys at the time living in a bombed-out building with no electricity, no plumbing and no bathrooms,” the colonel says.
Col. Coffman, however, was struck by the unit’s arms room, which was stocked with rocket-propelled-grenade launchers, mortar tubes and lots of ammunition. “The weapons were clean and organized,” he says. He immediately went on a patrol with the unit and was impressed by both Gen. Thavit and his troops. The soldiers seemed to have a discipline that many of the U.S.-trained Iraqi Army units lacked.
The 63-year-old Gen. Thavit, an intelligence officer in the old Iraqi Air Force, attended military academies in the former Soviet Union and former Yugoslavia. In the mid-1990s he joined a small group of former officers plotting to overthrow Saddam Hussein. In 1996 their plan unraveled and Gen. Thavit was sentenced to life in Iraq’s notorious Abu Ghraib prison. Gen. Thavit and his second-in-command, Maj. Gen. Rashid Flayeh Mohammed, were both released by Mr. Hussein along with thousands of other political prisoners and common criminals just before the American invasion. One of Gen. Thavit’s former jailers, who gave him food and cigarettes, is now a battalion commander in his new force.
On Col. Coffman’s recommendation, Gen. Petraeus visited the Commandos’ base and was impressed with the troops. “When I saw them and where they were living I decided this was a horse to back,” the U.S. general says today. He agreed to give the fledgling unit money to fix up its base and buy vehicles, ammunition, radios and more weapons.
mudvillegazette.com/