Subject: [Fwd: Knight Ridder: US sniper interviews]
>
>
> "The reason why they're fighting us is not Osama bin Laden. They're
> fighting us because we're here. . . . They don't want us here. They
> just want us to leave. I guess that would be a victory for them,'' he
> said. "As far as I can see there's not going to be any victory for
> us.''
>
>
http://www.mercurynews.com/mld/mercu...n/12798134.htm
>
> U.S. SNIPERS SEE TROUBLE BREWING
>
> By Tom Lasseter
> Knight Ridder
> Posted on Sun, Oct. 02, 2005
> AL-MUQDADIYAH, Iraq -- Sgt. Antonio Molina sat on a rooftop in the
> black of night, scanning the road before him with a high-powered
> sniper scope, hoping an insurgent would scramble out of a car to lay a
> bomb and give him a reason to squeeze the trigger.
>
> He and three other 3rd Infantry Division snipers were dropped off two
> weeks ago at a house on the outskirts of Al-Muqdadiyah, in an Iraqi
> province that military officials frequently claim is largely pacified.
> Dozens of infantry soldiers stormed the abandoned structure in a
> staged raid and left the four men behind. Alone with their rifles,
> they moved quietly, fearing that an insurgent ambush might catch and
> kill them before Bradley Fighting Vehicles could respond.
>
> "Some people don't get the gravity of the situation here; people in
> the 'green zone' are always trying to paint a rosy picture,'' said
> Molina, a 27-year-old sniper from Clearwater, Fla. He was referring to
> the fortified compound in Baghdad where U.S. officials work. "These
> politicians are all about sending people to war but they don't know
> what it's all about, being over here and getting shot at, walking
> through swamps, having bombs go off, hearing bullets fly by. They have
> no idea what that's like.''
>
> Military commanders in Baghdad and Washington say four Iraqi provinces
> are home to 85 percent of the daily attacks. They claim that a
> relatively low attack rate in Iraq's 14 other provinces is proof that
> the insurgency is on its knees.
>
> Al-Muqdadiyah is in one of those 14 provinces, Diyala. Yet five days
> in the field with a 3rd Infantry Division sniper team suggests that,
> to those on the ground here, the insurgency is anything but defeated.
>
> Many American troops on the ground in Al-Muqdadiyah expect the
> violence to continue long after they are gone. They worry that Sunni
> Muslim insurgents -- from a Sunni population that makes up 40 percent
> of Diyala -- will simply move from targeting U.S. forces to increasing
> attacks against Shiite Muslims, who compose 35 percent of the
> province. Shiites are a majority in Iraq, and they dominate the
> Baghdad government.
>
> Al-Muqdadiyah is a relative backwater of some 100,000 people. But the
> guerrilla war there, while gaining little attention, indicates wider
> instability than military leaders have acknowledged and could plague
> efforts to put the Iraqi government on its feet.
>
> "As soon as we leave this place they're all going to kill each
> other,'' Molina said in his barracks recently.
>
> His sniper team commander, Staff Sgt. Donnie Hendricks, agreed: "It's
> going to be a civil war.''
>
> Hendricks was quiet for a few moments.
>
> "We go out and kill the bad guys one at a time,'' said Hendricks, 32,
> who speaks with the soft accent of his native Claremore, Okla., where
> his high school graduating class had 55 students. "But we're just
> whittling down one group so it's easier for the other groups to kill
> them.''
>
> Fight grinds on
>
> Maj. Dean Wollan, the top U.S. intelligence officer in Diyala, said
> his men had made tremendous gains against the insurgency, but he
> worries that the fight will grind on for years.
>
> "I think it's going to be a while,'' said Wollan, 38, of Missoula,
> Mont.
>
> Commanders for the 3rd Infantry Division in Diyala said the number of
> attacks there had dropped from about a dozen a day last year to seven.
> Roadside bombs, they said, have decreased by a third. The latter
> trend, though, hasn't held up. In September 2004 there were 72
> roadside bombs detonated or found, but 106 in September 2005.
>
> "They say attacks are down. Well . . . we're not patrolling where the
> bad guys are,'' Hendricks said.
>
> In September, the Army began using bulldozers in Al-Muqdadiyah to
> discourage roadside bombs, tearing apart palm groves, fields and
> roadside stands in the areas near explosions that had targeted
> American convoys.
>
> On Route Vanessa, the main supply route to the base on the edge of
> Al-Muqdadiyah, explosives hit the military's bomb-detecting truck
> every day for 11 straight days in August. Commanders routinely call in
> F-16 fighters to provide close support for the vehicle.
>
> U.S. Maj. Gen. Rick Lynch, a military news officer in Baghdad, pointed
> to Diyala and the 13 other provinces in September as examples of a
> weakened insurgency.
>
> "So what I'm trying to show you is . . . there are indeed areas of
> Iraq that are relatively safe and secure, and those people in those
> provinces are working their way towards a peaceful society as they
> work their way towards democracy,'' Lynch said, motioning to a map of
> Iraq. "Sixty percent of the people of Iraq live in these provinces
> that are experiencing a much, much, much lower level of violence, to
> the point where they're averaging less than one attack per day.''
>
> Patrols reduced
>
> The U.S. military in Al-Muqdadiyah has reduced patrols from 24-hour
> cycles to two daily five-hour rotations. And instead of canvassing the
> entire area, the patrols now concentrate almost exclusively on Route
> Vanessa. The insurgents shifted their attacks and now regularly place
> bombs along that road.
>
> "The bad guys watch our gates. They know when we're out in sector.
> They just wait for us to leave and then they plant'' the bombs,
> Hendricks said. "They plant them with impunity.''
>
> A roadside bomb hit Hendricks' vehicle in June. He has scars on his
> face and neck and a piece of shrapnel in his jaw.
>
> Beyond U.S. patrols on the main supply route in Al-Muqdadiyah, Iraqi
> police and army units are responsible for much of the city.
>
> Sgt. Hunter Sabin has spent a fair amount of time near the Iraqi
> troops, and said that although they are getting better, they are still
> far from ready.
>
> "I was up in a guard tower,'' and Iraqi police "came up and offered us
> hash and whiskey,'' said Sabin, a 26-year-old sniper from Richmond,
> Va., who was in a Ranger special-operations unit during the 2003
> invasion. "That's who's protecting the people.''
>
> Hendricks taught a sniper's training course to a select group of Iraqi
> soldiers, but stuck to marksmanship.
>
> "I haven't taught them tactics because they're infiltrated,''
> Hendricks said. "It's like going to a party where you don't know
> anybody, but somebody in the room -- you don't know who -- wants to
> kill you.''
>
> Hendricks and his men are career military. Four of the seven are
> sergeants, the backbone of the enlisted ranks.
>
> Hendricks has spent eight of nine years in the military as a sniper,
> including five with the Army Rangers. Including his first deployment
> to Iraq in 2003, he has had nine confirmed kills and nine wounded.
>
> "It takes nothing,'' he said with a half-grin. "I don't care about
> these people.''
>
> The snipers have formed their impressions of the war on enemy ground.
>
> The team steals out of trucks on the back roads of Al-Muqdadiyah late
> at night and dashes into the cover of palm groves, scrambling over
> fences, jumping across canals and flattening against the ground when
> car headlights sweep by.
>
> They often sit in the same clearings that guerrilla fighters used days
> earlier to detonate roadside bombs. During a mission in a palm grove,
> the men pointed to empty cigarette cartons, water bottles and
> flattened stretches of grass as telltale signs that guerrillas were
> there recently.
>
> "Haji will use a position. We go find it, stay there overnight, and we
> know they're watching us,'' Hendricks said, using the pejorative slang
> for Iraqis. "We have them in the palm groves with us. . . . We hear
> them talking but we can't find them.''
>
> Sitting in the darkness, near the edge of a palm grove, Molina looked
> at the street in front of him.
>
> "The reason why they're fighting us is not Osama bin Laden. They're
> fighting us because we're here. . . . They don't want us here. They
> just want us to leave. I guess that would be a victory for them,'' he
> said. "As far as I can see there's not going to be any victory for
> us.''
>
> Sabin, sitting next to him, nodded.
>
> "In past situations you've had a good guy and a bad guy and the troops
> were impassioned, but now troops just want to go home,'' Sabin said.
> "I don't feel like there's a cause. I don't personally think there's a
> reason for this.''
>
> The two fell silent. Slowly, they went back to peering through their
> scopes, out at the darkness.
>
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