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| Iraq-Jordan |
| IRAQ: The Low Key War |
| 2004-09-27 |
| September 26, 2004: The "war" in Iraq is a low key affair. In the last two weeks, there have been about 70 "hostile incidents" a day, resulting in one or two friendly casualties (nearly 90 percent of the them Iraqi) per incident. The U.S. Department of Defense still refuses to release any official numbers on enemy casualties (although data on this is carefully compiled), but the enemy losses are believed to be 3-4 times higher. Even Iraqi troops, benefiting from superior training (particularly in marksmanship and tactics) are giving much better than they are getting. Increasingly, the fighting is occurring around the towns and neighborhoods that the anti-government forces call home. Increasing amounts of information from pro-government informers in these areas has led to daily smart bomb and artillery attacks on specific houses or compounds being used by anti-government fighters. Fallujah has been particularly hard hit, and the al Qaeda men operating in that town are taking heavy losses. American and Iraqi troops are also moving closer to Fallujah, with raids being conducted to take prisoners and capture documents and weapons. |
| Posted by:ed |
| #1 If the 'hostile incidents per day' metric was the best index to use, it would show the US/Iraqi govt. losing since the hipd was only a dozen or so immediately after the fall of Baghdad. The only other indexes I know about are fatalities per month. A good index could be 'street cost of RPG' with the higher the index the best for the US/Iraqi govt. but its hard to get real numbers on this. One could also create an index based on the number of successful ING/IP operations. |
| Posted by: mhw 2004-09-27 11:56:16 AM |