Snippets- The Iraqi Civil Defense Corps in Baghdad is currently trained to the company level. Now, what that means is companies are about 190 men strong and we’ve trained, as you’ll see on a subsequent slide, about 4,000 of them in 190-man increments. The next step will be to form battalions, which are four companies of that size; and then eventually, one brigade-size unit inside of the city of Baghdad.
- There were -- the Iraqi police and some of the fixed-site protective services found two men today and placing a roadside bomb, took them into custody. The initial indications are that one is an Iranian and one is an Afghani (sic). And we, of course, have to develop that through interrogation and try to determine what that means. But yeah, there were two men apprehended today near the al-Doura refinery and placing a roadside bomb.
- We have now about 7,500, almost 8,000 -- we just graduated a class of police from the academy -- we have almost 8,000 police. We’ll have 10,000 by May, and 19,000 by February ’05. We had zero ICDC; now we have about 4,000. We’ll have 6,000 here within the next few months. There were no fixed-site protective service functions; there are now 5,700 of them; 700 or so work directly for me, 5,000 for the ministries. [ed. inside the city of Baghdad]
- A couple of days ago, we found a Jordanian with an RPG.
- Between the time we got here and the time, let’s say, of Saddam Hussein’s capture, we had a very good picture of about eight cells. But as you remember in previous press conferences, I admitted that there was this cloud that I couldn’t penetrate. Over top of that, I had a sense that there was an organization to it, but I just couldn’t penetrate it. And then the capture of Saddam Hussein allowed us to penetrate into that and determine some of the leadership, especially the financial backbone of it. We also discovered that instead of eight, it was 14 cells. This isn’t new news, by the way. And we began attacking the leadership. And of the 14 cells, we have certainly disrupted eight of them, and in this most recent operation, continued that effort.
- [ed. ICDC training] But about 60 percent of them, by the way, are from -- are come to us having served in the military before, so they don’t come to us untrained. In some cases it’s refresher training. In other cases, it’s adopting methods that are more conducive to democratic societies. But we take them through a one-week academy course, which you’re all welcome to visit by the way -- we have two of them, one on each side of the river -- and that’s kind of a basic training and refresher training. And then we actually take them and we form a partnership with a particular unit in one of my formations, and they go through training in we call it cordon and search: the act of picking a target inside of an urban environment, cordoning it off, moving into it, penetrating it, attacking the target, bringing it out, traffic control points, route reconaissance to make sure that the route is clear and safe.
- Until three days ago, we had captured a total of 19 foreigners in the city of Baghdad, out of several thousand individuals that we captured. So it -- I would not have characterized that particular number as a significant part of the fight. We very clearly still are fighting, as the principal enemy, the former regime and its structures.
Now I just mentioned in the last 72 hours we’ve picked up three foreigners. And then you add that to the earlier question about the particular nature of the VBIED at the front gate here and the attack up in Erbil, and I think it causes us to try figure out exactly what is occurring here. - Q James Hyde (sp) of the Times. What’s the status of the foreign fighters that you pick up and detain? And are they processed in any different way to the former regime loyalists that you have in detention?
GEN. DEMPSEY: Yeah, I hope you don’t mind a one-word answer to that one. The answer’s yes. Are they processed differently? Yes. Why? Because we want to know why they’re here.
|