Snippets- Two days ago, three Iraqi civilians were killed and one wounded when they were stopped in northern Mosul at a traffic control point. After resisting questioning and opening fire on an Iraqi police officer, one of the Iraqis in the car attempted to throw a grenade at the checkpoint, but the grenade exploded in the car, killing two of the occupants and wounding two more who were taken to the hospital under guard. One died yesterday of wounds. Further research found that the four individuals were directly involved in the assassination of a city council member, Tillal al-Khalidi (ph), in November of 2003. Proving, yet again, the superiority of baseball skills over soccer skills while handling explosives
- There were two attacks yesterday in Iraqi police stations. In the first incident, the Balbuto (ph) police station in central Mosul was attacked with small arms fire and grenades. Three Iraqi police and four officials were wounded. All of the wounded were treated and released from local hospitals. In the second attack, drive-by shooters attacked a police station of Biaj (ph) two days ago. Police on duty returned fire, wounded the attacker. He was taken into custody and placed in a local hospital.
- Two days ago, Iraqi Civil Defense Corps soldiers reported that the imam of the Al Qubasi (sp) Mosque, Ali Hassan Hussein Al-Dhabi (sp), was murdered. Coalition forces sent a patrol to investigate and confirmed that he was shot by four unknown individuals driving a brown BMW or Opel on 7 March.
- In the western zone of operations, coalition forces received information from the border police that two males wearing black masks and driving a white four-door Nissan pickup had kidnapped a border policeman in Husbayah (sp). The source helped identify the truck. An OH-58 confirmed its presence at a target location. Soldiers and Marines conducted a cordon-and-search of the target house and captured 10 enemy personnel.
- In the southeastern zone of operations, Iraqi police officers last night were engaged with small-arms fire from a mob of approximately 50 personnel in An Nasiriyah. Coalition forces responded to the scene and were at some stage involved in the firefight as well. The Iraqi police withdrew to an NGO compound, and a quick reaction force and an unmanned aerial observer vehicle were launched to assess the situation. The incident resulted in four Iraqi police killed, two Iraqi police wounded, no civilian casualties, and nine Iraqi(s) were arrested. In addition, one coalition soldier was wounded and evacuated to a medical facility.
- The training program we have for new Iraqi police officers right now is an eight-week training program that’s conducted in Baghdad or in Jordan at the International Police Training Center there. And the more rapid, expedited training program is for Iraqi police officers who served as police officers in the former regime. And while the basic police skill training isn’t as critical for them, they do have a three-week training program, what we call the TIPPs program -- Transition and Integration Policing Program. And that program is focused on policing in a democracy, human rights, professional investigative skills, those sorts of things.
- We have roughly 9(,000) to 10,000 Iraqi citizens, people holding Iraqi passports, currently in detention as security detainees or as criminal detainees. I don’t have the exact numbers -- we can give them to you right after this -- in terms of which are under each category.
- With regards to women, out of the more than 10,000 persons we hold in detention, I believe the latest number is less than 20 of those are female. Some are being held as criminals. Some are being held as security detainees. Two of them are being held being part of the top-55 list of high-value detainees.
- What I said in northeastern Mosul was that we picked up 14 persons -- five of them primary targets -- that we believed to have possible connections to the Ansar al-Sunna group. But that’s going to be over the next couple of days as we talk to these people, as we have a chance to find out their past affiliations and past associations, we’ll be able to make a better determination of whether they in fact are members of the organization. But it’s still too early to tell. The intelligence is what led us to picking these people up. The interrogations will bear out whether the intelligence we had prove that these people were in fact members of the group.
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