• “The men (i.e. U.S. forces) are expecting a nasty fight from the insurgents, who have surprised them with the sophistication of their tactics. Chachi, a former private investigator says the insurgents “have a pretty good command structure. Perhaps not as formal as ours but certainly not a bunch of farmers throwing something together.” Chachi says the Marines are under observation (by the Mujahideen) pretty much most of the time.”

• “The enemy is getting professional.”

• “Weighed down by their weapons and body armour, the Marines move on toward a second bunker. It is taken out, and within minutes we are pulling back under fire. We run across a field divided by an irrigation ditch. “Get in that ditch!” an NCO shouts. We sink to our waist in the water, scrabbling for grip in the slippery mud. “Get out of that ditch!” the same NCO yells, just as our feet touch bottom. We dash across the field and pause for breath. When we reach the base, its already daybreak
.”

• “A (U.S.) sniper team comes under fire (from the Mujahideen) and requests extraction. U.S. planes make bombing runs over the central part of the city. As evening falls, the insurgents are still firing mortars at the Easy Company base.”

• “Dawn in Fallujah, and the men of the 2nd Battalion, 2nd Marines’ Easy Company, part of the 1st U.S. Marine Expeditionary Force, are withdrawing under (Mujahideen) fire. At 4:30 that morning, 150 Marines had moved into the southern edge of the city to destroy two bunkers that insurgents were using to fire in their positions.”

• “The rest of the Marines pull back, running across a field and over to bushes, urged on by non-commissioned officers. They expect the insurgents to harass them all the way back to their base. One young man falls and lies prone on the ground, his head pressed down as if afraid something might hit him. His hands shake uncontrollably. Chachi, a member of Easy Company’s Intelligence unit, turns to me as we run for cover….”

• “The Marines are at war with a well organized and relentless enemy…...The insurgents routinely broke the truce, lobbing mortars and rockets at the Marines’ positions from every direction.” • “Despite the agreements, the Marines were still taking heavy fire from the insurgents.”

• “Insurgents turned a neighbourhood into a battle zone in which U.S. troops have to fight for their lives.”

• “The booby-trapped artillery shell detonated shortly before midnight. In the roar and smoke, bodies ripped apart. Suddenly the nine-man foot patrol from Task Force 1/9, composed of infantrymen and cavalry troopers, was down to five, alone, in a darkened Baghdad alley and cut off from help. One soldier was dead. Three others lay bleeding, but still alive as fire from AK-47’s rained down on the scrambling troopers……. Grenades were lobbed down from houses and apartments above. Moments like these have become harrowingly familiar for the men of Task Force 1/9 since their arrival in Baghdad in April. Their area of operation lies in the heart of the Iraqi capital, with one stretch about three kilometres from the office of the new Iraqi government and the U.S. embassy inside the fortified Green Zone. It centres on Haifa Street that has become the most feared stretch of Baghdad: a vicious insurgent sanctuary where U.S. and Iraqi government forces cannot tread….”

• “After 17 months (now 22 months) in Iraq, U.S. forces still often find themselves operating in enemy territory—even in the heart of Baghdad. For many, the dangers are mounting.” • “This month (i.e. August 2004) U.S. personnel are dying three times the rate they were in February.”

• “Like other frontline soldiers in Iraq, the men of Task Force 1/9—of which Charlie Company, of the National Guard’s 1st Batallion, 153rd Infantry Regiment, is a part—face the risk of almost perpetual combat.”

• “Foley (a U.S. commander) sees these streets (of Baghdad) stripping his young charges of their youth. “People outside have no idea of the overall effect of this. Eighteen-year-old kids are having to go through this. I’m watching some of them in my company and how quickly they’re being made to grow up. It’s chilling.” (Did they think they were heading to Iraq for a picnic?—Al-Haq)

• “The insurgents are not intimidated”, says Staff Sergeant Wilbert Tynes. “You’ve actually got to wipe them out to get rid of them.” (After 22 months of occupation and massive assaults, the U.S. military has miserably failed to wipe out even 2% of the Mujahideen, although the U. S. claims to have killed 10% which of course is a gross exaggeration.—Al-Haq) • “Senior officers of Task Force 1/9 concede they do not know whom they’re up against. They see boys, some as young as 10, hurling grenades. But they also encounter deftly executed ambushes bearing the mark of professional soldiers and sophisticated terrorist groups. “I really don’t know who it is. I really don’t know what they want. That’s the problem.”, says Foley.”

• “His (i.e. Zarqawi’s) men barrage Task Force 1/9’s base with rockets and mortars every two or three days, knowing that the Americans will rarely fire back. “I can fire from anywhere I like. Go on, pick a spot. I’ll show you,” Abu Musa’ab Zarqawi told TIME. “They can’t chase us in here.”

• “The G.I.’s of Task Force 1/9 admit to a growing dread about the persistence of the insurgency.” • “My initial feeling when I’m told we’re going back in there is ‘damn’. You sit and shake your head,” says Staff Sergeant Bryan Keeping.

• Tynes tells his crew to pray, “cause you never know what’s going to happen.”

• “Late last month, after a joint U.S.-Iraqi sweep of Haifa Street, the Iraqi government announced that 263 have been detained in a sweep for “insurgents” — a suspect figure, given that most of the detainees were Shi’ites and the bulk of the hard-core insurgents in this neighbourhood are Sunnis. What wasn’t reported is that Task Force 1/9 was ambushed three minutes into the operation and hit by 26 RPGs, eight roadside bombs and relentless small-arms fire during the gun battles that followed..”

• “Each morning I thank God we got outta there that day.” says Foley. “No one knows about the next time.” • “Insurgents appear to be adopting a similar strategy up north in Mosul, Iraq’s third largest city. In mid-November, at the height of Operation al-Fajr, Mosul erupted in violence as gangs of fighters attacked police stations and engaged in pitched street battles with U.S. and Iraqi forces. It took the Americans and their Iraqi partners the better part of a week to regain control, and a U.S. battalion had to be recalled from Fallujah to help. The attackers “showed a degree of local command and control we have not seen before,” says Brigadier General Carter Ham, commander of U.S. forces in Mosul. “The willingness to stand and fight signaled to me that something has changed.” Also rebels in Mosul have launched an intensive campaign of hit-and-run operations, kidnappings and beheadings. The bodies of victims are being dumped around the city. At least 60 were found last week alone, many of them Iraqi soldiers.” In this instance, the insurgents’ threat is what it has always been: Those who cooperate with the Americans are inviting doom.”

• “Full-scale offensives like Fallujah inevitably exact a psychic toll. Yet the punishing strain of fighting a hydra-headed insurgency afflicts U.S. troops even on what passes for a normal day in Iraq.”

• “Sergeant Justin Harding of the Ramadi-based 2nd Batallion, 5th Marines “went out on patrol the next day carrying with him classic symptoms of combat stress: the emotional, physical and psychological fallout from living through—or under the extended threat of—traumatic events. Said company commander Captain Patrick Rapicault, “You have to get over your feelings and keep on pushing, just for the simple reason that you have another 170 Marines to take care of and make sure they come back.”

• “These days, stress is a given fact in Iraq for locals and foreigners working in just about any capacity. Combat troops no doubt feel it most acutely. Day after day in the hit-and-run, chaseand- hide rhythm that has defined most of the fighting over the past 20 months, front-line forces are confronting the bulk of the horrors.” “Its easy to see why so many troops are succumbing to stress. Every trip “outside the wire” brings the possibility of attack from any direction, from people who look like everyday citizens and from everyday object—cars, oilcans, dead animals, even human beings—refashioned into deadly bombs. “Its relentless”, says a Marine who was deployed in al-Anbar province, which includes violent hotbeds like Ramadi and Fallujah. “from the moment you arrive until the moment you leave, you’re in danger.” The life threatening character of the daily job steadily erodes an individual’s psychological immune system.”

• “It makes everyone even more susceptible, less resilient, to whatever happens.” says Navy Captain Bill Nash, a psychiatrist who heads the Marines’ Operational Stress Control Readiness (OSCAR) program in al-Anbar. “The war here has produced more significant stress injuries than any other conflict since Vietnam,” he says. “And you’d have to be exceptionally optimistic and using massive denial to believe we are not going generate a hell of a lot more of these stress injuries before we are done here.”

• “The Marine who served in al-Anbar province for seven months says that when he drives past potholes in his hometown, he wonders if they will explode. If the refrigerator door closes, says, “I ask myself if that was incoming fire-- bomb?”

• “A soldier deployed near Baghdad for nine months witnessed several members of his unit torn apart by mortar fire. “I can’t erase that picture,” he says. “It’s something I cannot take anymore.”

• “The insurgents, who target any Iraqi associated with the occupation or the interim government, have killed nearly 1500 (now almost 2000) Iraqi security personnel.”