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OPERATIONAL BRIEFING: 1st ARMORED DIVISION
Lots of info, but wanted to exerpt the info about how we are handling the terrorist cellsThe first of these operations took place 10 days or so ago, and we attacked a cell that we knew to be operating in what we call the 636 Mahallah (sp), which is located on the western edge of the Mansour district. And as you see there — well, first let me mention that when I talk about a cell, we look to find how a cell is organized by finding its leaders and its deputies, its financiers and its planners, its suppliers, recruiters and operators. And clearly, the better we do at defeating that cell from the top, that is to say by stripping away its leadership, stripping away its suppliers, the better off weâll do over time. And in fact, itâs a little more challenging when youâre going after those people. When youâre going after an operator, youâre likely to find the operator with a weapon or a piece of ordnance, some indication that youâre looking for a trigger-puller, fundamentally. Those individuals tend to be not as difficult to track down and defeat as the leaders of the cell. In this case, we think we did get at that cell, by virtue of the fact that we captured its leadership; we captured many of its deputies; we captured people we know to be planners, suppliers; and we as well captured some of the operators. You can see there that we captured bombs, roadside bombs. Youâll hear us describe them sometimes as improvised explosive devices. We captured several of those in a state of readiness to be used against us. You can see there that you know youâre into a cell when you find things like fake passports and some of the literature that we tend to find. And then, of course, in this case, we were looking for someone involved in the rocket attack in the Rashid Hotel, and we were able to capture the leadership of the cell with a translated, fundamentally, hand-written rocket manual that clearly, in my mind, ties it back to those perpetrators... This shows that our professional soldiers are analyzing and addressing the problems pretty well. Posted by: Chuck Simmins 2003-11-21 |
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