Year Six, Part II

Last March, also while TDY to Qatar, I wrote about the completion of the fifth year of the war here in Iraq and the challenges ahead for year six. At the time, I had only vague inklings about just how personal it could become. As I tried to get back to Baghdad following that TDY, Shiite extremists -- members of Jaysh al Mahdi -- fired artillery rockets into the International Zone in protest of the Iraqi Army’s offensive against JAM elements in the southern Iraqi city of Basrah. After getting back to Baghdad International Airport (BIAP), I caught a helicopter to the International Zone. As we attempted to land near the embassy, I looked down and saw people running out of the passenger terminal and into bunkers. I looked out to the right and saw the impact of rocket near the banks of the Tigris River and accompanying plume of smoke. Just fifty feet from the ground, the helicopter pilot applied power and we veered away from the landing zone. We raced back to BIAP and waited for things to settle. Welcome to year six, not an auspicious start.

Since then, things thankfully have quieted down and, dare I say, improved. The Iraqi Security Forces (ISF), who every day grow more professional and capable, completed their security sweep of Basrah and performed similar operations in Sadr City (where most of those pesky rockets were fired from) and Amarah, another important JAM bastion near the Iranian border. Amongst the dwindling press coverage of Iraq, you can read about a current operation ISF is performing in the Diyala River Valley, north of Baghdad, to root out both Shi’a and Sunni insurgents.

The most troubling recent trend is Al Qaeda in Iraq’s (AQI) use of female suicide bombers. While we were away on this TDY, female suicide bombers struck three times targeting Shi’a pilgrims in the vicinity of the Shi’a holy cities of Najaf and Karbala. It’s a familiar AQI technique -- trying to foment sectarian violence -- only this time using female Sunni suicide bombers. As the press has reported, women in Iraq (or any Islamic country) are not typically subjected to searches by police due to religious taboo and thus can pass relatively unhindered through security checkpoints. AQI recruits Sunni destitute widows who, under Islamic practice are virtually persona non grata, with promises of money for their families. While the attacks this week were devastating, they are the mark of a desperate foe and it is certainly not a viable long term strategy. Nevertheless, it shows that things are far from over here even as they slowly improve.

As I write this, we are nearly half over with year six of this war.

On a more positive note, and while I’m writing about five year anniversaries, let me also say it’s my attractive wife’s and my fifth wedding anniversary today. When I think of what I was doing six years ago, it seems like I was in another world and another person. Of course, something similar might be said about my current position but there is light at the end of the tunnel: There are sixty-two days left in my tour in Iraq.