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Belmont Club: The Battle for the Border
From Thursday, but still interesting. Some highlights:

Making it harder for the enemy to move around while making it easier for US units has the effect of lowering apparent enemy numbers while correspondingly increasing apparent American troop strength; but this is only a means to an end. Another LA Times report on the Rawah operation, Rebels on the Run, Locals Too describes some of its effects as observed by the correspondent.

Since arriving in mid-July, the 2nd Infantry Division's 2nd Squadron of the 14th Cavalry Regiment has defeated the fighters here and will now spread out to seal the border with Syria, said Lt. Col. Mark Davis, the unit's commander. ... Having wrested control of Rawah, the division's Stryker Brigade Combat Team now hopes to press westward toward the border and, for the first time, gain control of a broad swath of the land north of the Euphrates that has eluded the U.S.-led coalition for more than two years. On Thursday and Friday, soldiers searched every one of the town's estimated 3,000 to 5,000 homes, capturing some suspected insurgents and a bounty of weapons, including mines, rocket-propelled grenades, mortars, bomb-making equipment, sniper rifles and rockets.

"Since then, there has been no enemy attack, no explosions, nobody shooting at us in Rawah," Davis said. The town might be quiet now, but it's not necessarily friendly. On an outer school wall, spray painted in Arabic, is a note of defiance: "Praise the people of Fallouja" — a former insurgent stronghold where U.S. and Iraqi forces prevailed in November. Davis acknowledged that most Iraqis had left town but said they didn't leave under instructions from U.S. troops. The insurgents apparently had held the town hostage, American officials said. There were no police, a dormant city council, a compound of schools with no children and no teachers inside.

italics mine - pgf

(Speculation alert) There are probably many similar operations that are taking place along the river and to its north, as per the Di Rita briefing. One of them may have been undertaken by the US Marines at Haditha, during which 21 Marines were killed. One possible reason why this operation has been kept low key, despite its size, is that it may be literally ripping up the insurgent base of support along the upper Euphrates. If the LA Times article is accurate, the insurgents essentially took the whole population of Rawah with them; if the phenomenon is being repeated elsewhere, the displacement of the Sunni population must be huge. To the north there is the unsustaining desert; to the south across the river there is the sweep of the Marines; for the insurgents to leave the population in place would risk leaving intelligence in the hands of the Americans. This has got to hurt and it is only the beginning. The LA Times notes the abandonment of RPGs, sniper rifles, mortars -- stuff you wouldn't leave behind -- not willingly. The whole point of strangling the enemy lines of communication while building support bases is to set up the stage for pursuit. And they will be pursued. The focus of newspaper coverage in the coming days may abruptly shift from 'poor helpless Marines from Ohio' to 'we're slaughtering them! We're killers!' These are the hard choices of war, and as Hemingway once wrote "all stories, if continued far enough, end in death, and he is no true-story teller who would keep that from you."

This scenario is not making sense to me. Assuming two people per home, you're talking about something like 8000 people, being moved against their will? And not being picked up by whatever surveillance the town was under?
Posted by: Phil Fraering 2005-08-06
http://www.rantburg.com/poparticle.php?ID=126071