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Former Baathist "Black Scorpions" involved in Fallujah operation
Twenty months after toppling Saddam Hussein, US troops still battling his followers in the heartland of Iraq's old arms industry are hitting back with a new weapon: ex-members of Hussein's special forces. For five months, Iraqi police commandos calling themselves the Black Scorpions have been based with US marines in the region along the Euphrates south of Baghdad. Roadside bombs, ambushes and kidnaps have turned the area into a no-go zone and earned it the melodramatic description "triangle of death"."All of them were previously officers in the Iraqi army or special forces," said Scorpions commander Colonel Salaam Trad. "But Saddam was dirty and no good for Iraq." The performance of this SWAT team, as the Americans call it, could be a critical test of how US forces can hand over to Iraqis to meet their goal of withdrawing from a stable Iraq. US officers in the area say they are increasingly optimistic. "The hardest fighters we have are the former special forces from Saddam's days," said Colonel Ron Johnson, commander of the 24th Marine Expeditionary Unit. Praising their local knowledge and fighting skills, Colonel Johnson singled out one man who fought against him at Nasiriyah, the hardest battle of last year's brief war against Saddam's army. "If I could have an Iraqi security force guy who's honest, reliable and dependable, it's worth five marines," he added. Captain Tad Douglas, who leads almost daily raids with the Scorpions, says he believes it is a unique experiment that made use of the Iraqis' feel for their home province of Babylon. "Ninety-five per cent of our intelligence is from the SWAT," he said. "They can put a guy in a cafe in the way we never could. They have a good finger on the pulse." US officers are reluctant to discuss how big the SWAT team is and Colonel Trad and Captain Douglas brush off questions on what they may or not have done to each other in last year's war. "It doesn't matter to me what they did. They're staunchly anti-insurgent," Captain Douglas said. "We just had to polish them up a bit," he said. Posted by: Dan Darling 2004-11-28 |
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