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Troops in Diyala Face A Skilled, Flexible Foe
A unit of 600 soldiers from the 1st Cavalry Division's 3rd Brigade Combat Team descended on the village of Buhriz al Barra, only to find it largely devoid of adult males. "They knew we were coming," one American soldier said.
(By Joshua Partlow -- The Washington Post)
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The boy covered his face and sobbed. It was 3 in the morning. He said he didn't know where his father had gone.
"Does he love his father?" Nogle asked. "Does he want to see him again?"
The small barefoot boy shook with fear and said nothing.
"Ask him where his father hides his weapons," Nogle demanded.
"I swear to God I don't know," the boy said.
"He is not a man, he is scared," said his mother, who was also wailing.
"He needs to quit crying. He's responsible for everybody in here right now since his father left; his father abandoned everybody else," Nogle told the boy through his interpreter. "Tell him when his father comes back later tonight or tomorrow that he needs to have a talk with his father, that his father is doing very bad things and it's getting the whole family in trouble."
Before the soldiers left, an Iraqi police officer brandished two large buck knives in front of the boy's face. Nobody was arrested.
During the daylong operation in Buhriz al-Barra, American soldiers killed one gunman and detained 12 people, including one man soldiers said was an al-Qaeda emir, Mehdi Salman Kabouri al-Sharafi. They found five small weapons caches, with artillery rounds, hand grenades and machine-gun ammunition. Commanders said the near-total exodus of men was typical.
"We've seen no military-aged males before. It's a trend," Col. Sutherland said.
There were few clues as to where the men of the village went or why they left. The soldiers found one hint written in rusty English on a piece of paper taped to a computer screen.
"We didn't runaway because we are terrorist," the note said. "We run away because we afrad of you."
Staff researcher Robert E. Thomason in Washington contributed to this report.
