Word: battalions
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There are risks besides an all-out confrontation. The fledgling Iraqi security forces could fracture along ethnic or sectarian lines. A Kurdish battalion commander and 200 of his Kurdish soldiers stationed in Nineveh deserted en masse last summer during the Khanaqin standoff, taking their weapons with them into Erbil, says Vines. At the same time, a Kurdish brigade stationed in Diyala refused orders from the central government, according to other sources...
...Mosul. Iraqi security forces have crossed out some of the writing on the wall, but it's proving harder to erase the insurgents and their support base. "I knew AQ [al-Qaeda] was a problem, but I didn't know to what extent," says Lieut. Colonel Thomas W. Cipolla, battalion commander of the 3rd Battalion, 8th Cavalry Regiment. Cipolla, who is on his third tour in Iraq, took command of his battalion in mid-February after his predecessor was killed in a suicide car-bombing in west Mosul. "I certainly didn't know that there was a place as kinetic...
...captured many such suspected insurgents, but did not provide concrete figures. Nor would they say if these detentions have increased of late. "We have arrested a lot, but there's a lot of corruption here in Iraq," says Colonel Moslet Ahmad Attiyeh, commander of the national police's Salah battalion. "The terrorists pay their way out and are released," he says, whereupon they join other insurgents displaced from al-Qaeda's former stronghold of Anbar and the still volatile Diyala who have found refuge in Mosul...
American commanders in Mosul agree that insurgents unseated from elsewhere in Iraq have followed a "path of least resistance" to this northern city. "There were 28 U.S. battalions in Baghdad during the surge as well as lots of Iraqi battalions. Up here there was one battalion," says Brigadier General Robert B. Brown, deputy commander of the 25th Infantry Division. "So where are [the insurgents] gonna...
...definition of a sig act, however, is not fixed. According to some soldiers, some sig acts today (those without fatalities, say) never would have been considered as such a year or two ago. And the value of the metric is a matter of contention, even on the record, among battalion commanders. The Lieutenant Colonel responsible for East Mosul says it is an excellent, valuable metric for progress, while his counterpart in West Mosul says the opposite. (See pictures of the U.S. military's struggle to retain control of Mosul...