Friday, January 04, 2008
A battlefield victory
We nailed a big pile of bad guys today:
An al Qaeda in Iraq leader who was suspected of helping to plan a large scale attack against coalition forces "in the near future" was killed by a U.S. air strike south of Baghdad last week, the U.S. military said.
The military also said it captured "dozens of suspected extremists" connected to al Qaeda in an assault south of Baghdad on Saturday.
Muhammad Khalil Ibrahim, identified as the deputy military leader for the al Qaeda's network south of Baghdad, was killed along with two other terrorists in the air strike on their vehicle on Dec. 27, the military said.
Ibrahim was "a key planner in numerous attacks against Coalition forces operating in the Mahmudiyah area, and was also involved in the facilitation of foreign terrorists and weapons," the military said.
The news release announcing the deaths said Ibrahim "and other senior al Qaeda members were allegedly planning to conduct a large-scale attack against Coalition forces in the near future."
The question is, how did we know where to find these guys? Somebody squealed, and that was the real victory.
2 Comments:
By 
Georg Felis, at
Sat Jan 05, 02:54:00 AM:
Seems their morning staff meeting was a bit more than they expected. Good.
By 
, at
Sat Jan 05, 11:12:00 AM:
Since the predominant Democrat position has been consistently "get the hell out of Iraq" during the election season, so far, it'll be interesting to see how these positions now start to morph in the face of Gen. Petraeus' ongoing and growing success.
Will the party and it's candidates indicate any commitment or trust in the current government, in order to help the war effort and to reap the foreign policy victory due us in the region post-war, or will they instead try to politically undermine that government here in the U.S., as an election ploy?
I'm betting option "B" will be their choice, and we'll all start to see more articles in the NYT on corruption, government tyranny, Shia collaboration with Iran etc etc.
Andrew
