November 18, 2004

A MAN'S HOUSE IS OUR CRATER:

Military Believes Zarqawi Headquarters Found: Army Major Calls Fallujah Street 'One-Stop Shop for Terrorists' (Jackie Spinner, November 18, 2004, Washington Post)

U.S. soldiers discovered a house in southern Fallujah on Thursday believed to be a main headquarters for Jordanian-born militant Abu Musab Zarqawi, the leader of an insurgent network responsible for bombings, kidnappings and beheadings across Iraq.

A mural in the house indicated that it belonged to Zarqawi's organization.

In the house, the soldiers found letters reportedly written by Zarqawi to his lieutenants, medical supplies from the U.S. Agency for International Development and boxes of ammunition from the Chinese and Jordanian armies.

Nearby were medical supplies from the International Red Cross.

The house, a simple cement structure, was on a block that Army Maj. David Johnson described as a "one-stop shop for terrorists."

"That part of town is the most dangerous place on earth," said Johnson, a historian attached to 1st Infantry Division's Task Force 2-2, which conducted the raid.

Posted by Orrin Judd at November 18, 2004 11:02 AM
Comments

Most dangerous place on earth for terrorists!

This hasn't exactly been a repeat of Cold Harbor for American soldiers.

By the way, with a kill ratio of around 40 to 1 (1,600 terrorists for 40 Americans) the tough guys in Fallujah didn't do much better than the Somalis in the Mog, this despite having months to prepare for the arrival of the GIs.

Posted by: H.D. Miller at November 18, 2004 11:52 AM

HD - the other night the local news anchor described the US losses in Fallujah as disasterous. No mention of the 1600-40 ratio. The MSM is not going to change.

Posted by: AWW at November 18, 2004 12:19 PM

And it's nothing new:

"If we shot all the war correspondents at sundown, there'd be dispatches from Hell before breakfast."

William Tecumseh Sherman

Posted by: TimF at November 18, 2004 3:55 PM

The US military didn't have armored vehicles in Mogadishu.

This time they had tanks and armored troop carriers, as well as close air support.

Taking into account the difficulty factor, I'd say that the terrorists in Fallujah did three or four times better than the armed rabble in Mogadishu.

Posted by: Michael Herdegen at November 18, 2004 8:15 PM

Hurrah for The Fightin' Historians! (Battlin' Bookworms?)

Posted by: JGM at November 18, 2004 8:32 PM

That Maj. Johnson is a historian who's in the middle of the battle for Falujah speaks to how fine a military this nation has.

Posted by: Brooks at November 18, 2004 10:34 PM

It was a disaster, the marines didn't take out the NBC cameraman.

Posted by: Robert Schwartz at November 19, 2004 1:56 AM
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