Screaming “Allahu Akbar” to the end, the foreign fighters lay on their backs in a narrow crawl space under a house and blasted their machine guns up through the concrete floor with bullets designed to penetrate tanks. They fired at U.S. Marines, driving back wave after wave as the Americans tried to retrieve a fallen comrade.
Through Sunday night and into Monday morning, the foreign fighters battled on, their screaming voices gradually fading to just one. In the end, it took five Marine assaults, grenades, a tank firing bunker-busting artillery rounds, 500-pound bombs unleashed by an F/A-18 attack plane and a point-blank attack by a rocket launcher to quell them…
…The Marines got their fallen man, suffering one more dead and at least five wounded in the process. And according to survivors of the battle, the foreign fighters near the Syrian border proved to be everything their reputation had suggested: fierce, determined and lethal to the last.
Wash Post: Free Reg
Major combat operations are over.
No they’re not! A Cessna flew within three miles of the White House! And some people in the White House got left behind and had to find out by watching the TV!
3 miles? A cessna? Holy crap. Stop the presses.
When they appear on toast, you know it’s just a matter of time. Homeland Security should have been ready.
gilgamesh’s diary on NET covered the “intelligence” aspect. From an article in the Chicago Trib printed in the San Luis Osbispo Trib:
“Overnight, the Army’s 814th Multi-Role Bridge Company crawled along back roads towards the Euphrates, where it was to construct a pontoon bridge that would allow the Marines to cross. The trucks were forced to use their headlights to allow them to spot land mines along the route.
But the routine safety practice apparently alerted area residents to the convoy’s presence. An entire town along the route switched off its lights all at once, a move Marines believe is used to send signals from one river town to the next.
As the bridging unit approached the river crossing early Sunday, they switched off the truck headlights even though many soldiers lacked night-vision goggles. In the gloom, one truck rolled off the road and into a ditch, bringing the column to a dead halt in the darkness.
The soldiers soon discovered another problem: The river banks, sodden after recent rains, might have been too wet to support the oncoming American tanks.”
So much is wrong about the operation, it’s hard to know where to start. gilgamesh says “intelligence”. I agree, and think that from now on, the intelligence folk should be riding in the lead vehicle.
Two years, missing weapons, porous border, massive influx of “terrorists”, a nation armed and dangerous. What a colossal waste of life. Maybe we should just rent a truck and deliver granite “blanks” to the front door of the pentagon. Nah. At the rate they’re going we’d need a f*king convoy.
at the skill and sophistication of these simple childlike people.
Other intelligence reports indicate that some of them are so clever they have even learned to read and write a little.
Who knew?
So surprised that these people living in the cradle of
civilization who have withstood invasion, colonization and war for hundreds of years would know anything. Especially surprising that they would have a strategy for survuval.
Literate? quel surprise since their ancient ancestors invented papyrus.
I suspect the troops walking into that mess were suprised, yes. But not at the skill, sophistication, or intelligence of the enemy. It was lack of same by military planners.
Thanks for keeping these stories in the forefront.
You are the Indy media after all.