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Iraq-Jordan

The Marines Are in a Fight

2004-07-07

I look at the Central Command web site frequently. It began to occur to me that Iâd seen a rather high number of press releases about Marine deaths in al Anbar province. The screen capture above shows what the search engine turned up for the last 45 days. I count 30 [but there may be duplicate reports].

It looks like there was a spurt of fighting in late May, 2004, and another beginning around June 25 and continuing to date. Marine policy is to announce nothing with regard to the circumstances of the death.

We do have enough experience to draw a conclusion or two from the data. Given the number of dead, there is serious fighting going on in Western Iraq. Based upon past fighting, the enemy is incurring their own deaths at a rate of 5 or 10 to one.

Who are we fighting? Syrians? Baathists? Islamists?

The Marines are in a hell of a fight and we donât know diddly about it.

Posted by:Chuck Simmins

#17 Allawi needs to do more to protect the US forces !

Posted by: Anonymous5332 2004-07-07 11:23:16 PM

#16 Possibly Syrians, or Iranians, but more likely its the cannon fodder that the Iranians ans Syrians are funnelling into Iraq to try to destabilize it.

Posted by: OldSpook 2004-07-07 10:50:19 PM

#15 Ship, imho, it's just the sad price of doing lots of patrols in injun country. Peace keeping in a low intensity environment is a dirty, ugly, unglamourous job that involves many casualties on the friendly side. Any info on how many dirt-bags we clipped in the process? Prolly in the area of 10 to 1. So maybe 270-300 douche-bags got vented in the process. Definitely no consolation to the families of the deceased but would be considered acceptable percentages to the commanders. War sucks anyway you slice it though this one was necessary imho.

Posted by: Jarhead 2004-07-07 10:14:53 PM

#14 Chuck, anecdotally it seems the assholes got better with practice with their mortars. I'd expect Allawi to loosen ROE to alllow suppression and pre-emptive strikes more. He doesn't want to die either

Posted by: Frank G 2004-07-07 9:53:04 PM

#13 If it's any consolation, the Marines generally don't drive Humvees. And only one of the 27 dead was from an IED. The rest are combat related.

I looked at the non-Marine list. About the same numbers, but almost all from IED's or rocket/morter attacks. Just a handful from combat.

Posted by: Chuck Simmins 2004-07-07 9:47:52 PM

#12 What REALLY pisses me off (as a reservist and father of a son who is a NROTC-Marine Opton) is that they are still forcing our guys to drive those suicide wagon-HUMVEEs. Armored or not, those things are killing our men and women.

What they need to do as a stop-gap is to bring back the old Vietnam guntruck.
http://www.guntrucks.com/

You put steel plating around the driver cab, truck bed, and underneath. With the driver and gun crew elevated it would protect them from the normal IED.

Posted by: anymouse 2004-07-07 8:55:36 PM

#11 Note that only one of the releases talks about an IED. I looked at all of the press releases and did not find any duplicates. The death on May 24th is classified as non-hostile. The two deaths on June 24 were in the Stan. So, 27 dead in the last 45 days from combat.

Posted by: Chuck Simmins 2004-07-07 7:21:20 PM

#10 This and another news item suddenly click. What if the Syrians and Iranians are both trying to destabilize their borders with Iraq at the same time?
Creating personnel-intensive border distractions to draw US and Iraqi personnel away from the cities, thus giving their operatives some breathing room. As long as nothing *too* provacative happens, they can get away with it. Plus, there is the bonus that any infiltrators who can get through both add to the in-country troublemakers and identify the weak spots along the border.

Posted by: Anonymoose 2004-07-07 6:18:20 PM

#9 Thanks for the link, a4021; what I really wish I had, though, was a decent reference, where I could obtain both US armed forces casualties over a specified time period (like May or June) and compare with Iraqi civilian casualties from insurgent terrorism during the same time period.

Posted by: Phil Fraering 2004-07-07 5:33:24 PM

#8 I've heard the same IED cause of the casualty clusters as Sherry and RWV. I think if there was a lot if direct fighting we would hear about it.

Posted by: remote man 2004-07-07 5:21:17 PM

#7 happening at same time as repeated announced air strikes on Fallujah.

Posted by: Liberalhawk 2004-07-07 5:20:13 PM

#6 From what little I hear, the main problem is IEDs.

Posted by: RWV 2004-07-07 5:19:18 PM

#5 Fox, yesterday reported 7 killed in 48 hours from IED's

Posted by: Sherry 2004-07-07 5:17:40 PM

#4 I think this is border action.
JarHead?

Posted by: Shipman 2004-07-07 3:49:46 PM

#3 What sort of bothers me is the number of clusters (three or four on one day.) To me that suggests either small patrols getting hit hard or larger units in, as Chuck puts it, a hell of a fight.

To put the number in perspective, my recollection is that the entire First Marine Division lost 30 Marines in the three-week campaign to take Baghdad.

Rest in Peace and thank you.

Posted by: Matt 2004-07-07 3:29:48 PM

#2 Unless the offensive spreads to the bar at the Baghdad Intercontinental, we'll probably never know either.

Posted by: tu3031 2004-07-07 3:29:27 PM

#1 I think a great deal of those are overlapping.

The Casualty page on lunaville does a really good job of analyzing the trends of casualties and by type.

http://icasualties.org/oif/Details.aspx

Apply the filter of US Marine at the bottom, and you get about 17 USMC casualties since 06/17

Most all of them in the Anbar Province.

Posted by: Anonymous4021 2004-07-07 3:26:27 PM

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