No home run, just hard work

No home run, just hard work

By David Mac Dougall, Baghdad Bureau

I’m never good on just three hours of sleep. Let’s face it, who is? But often that’s what it takes to get a story, and I learned a long time ago the US military loves an early start.

Arriving at Camp Taji on a helicopter flight from Baghdad recently, the soldier who greeted us at the flight line in the early hours of the morning said “I’ll pick you up at 5:15″.

“PM?” asked producer Nicola Sadler, a little too hopefully.

“No ma’am,” came the soldier’s reply. “A.M.”

And that’s how our embed began.

I first visited the town of Tarmiyah in Dec. 2006 with the army’s 2nd Battalion 8th Cavalry, commanded by Lt. Colonel Scott Efflandt. The town was, quite frankly, in disarray. A local al-Qaeda affiliated group called the Mujahidin Shura Council had decided to declare itself independent from the rest of Iraq, a supposed counter-weight to the Shiia-dominated central government. Police quit their posts en masse, businesses and schools closed down after being threatened by Al-Qaeda and Tarmiyah looked like a ghost town. Not that we could see very much; we pretty much drove through the main street in a convoy of five hum-vees, because it was pretty dangerous to get out and walk around. In fact, one of our vehicles was hit by a roadside bomb, although thankfully nobody was injured.

Add to all this mess a dose of regular criminal activity, tribal rivalries, decades-old blood feuds, and you can see the scope of the problems the US military had to deal with.

Scott Efflandt was effectively acting as the mayor of Tarmiyah, and trying to use the carrot-and-stick approach to get the community back on its feet, encouraging various local Sheikhs and civic leaders to work together and also withholding spending on infrastructure projects for “bad behavior”. The US military ended up using Tarmiyah as a case study during counter-insurgency training school for how to deal with a multi-layered insurgency problem. Scott Efflant said that putting things right in Tarmiyah was “a task of inches” and that there were “no silver bullets, no home run, just hard work.” How right he was.

The real thorn in the side of Lt. Colonel Efflandt and the men of 2/8 CAV (as well as the people of Tarmiyah) was an insurgent leader by the name of Abu Ghazwan, the head of the Mujahidin Shura Council. He’d been jailed by the Iraqi authorities for two years and then released in the fall of 2006. On his route from prison to Tarmiyah, he’d linked up with al-Qaeda cells and received extra training, and by late 2006 Abu Ghazwan was Tarmiyah’s most wanted. We heard stories of public executions and suicide bomb attacks terrorizing the town’s residents, and the US army post in Tarmiyah was almost over-run in the spring of 2007 in a concerted insurgent attack.

Abu Ghazwan was behind many of the terror attacks in Tarmiyah, and in 2006 Scott Efflandt told me “we’ll deal with Abu Ghazwan. He was a problem before, and he went to prison; he was released, and we’ll deal with him again, and I’m sure next time he won’t be released”.

CLICK HERE to see my original 2006 video report about Tarmiyah on Fox News.

If Scott Efflandt – or any of the soldiers from 2/8 CAV – visited Tarmiyah today they would be shocked by the progress there. I know that I was. For a start, Abu Ghazwan is dead. Last November, during a routine search of Abu Ghazwan’s sister’s home, a sharp-eyed Iraqi soldier saw a man running away so he gave chase. The man – who turned out to be Abu Ghazwan of course – threw a grenade at the Iraqi soldier which seriously wounded him – but not before he could fire off a shot and kill Tarmiyah’s most wanted man. The Iraqi soldier, by the way, is being protected by members of his own family, for fear of revenge attacks by Abu Ghazwan’s supporters who are still lurking on the outskirts of the town. With improved security – thanks to the US-backed Sunni militias known as the Sons of Iraq – Tarmiyah was able to slowly reverse the slide into chaos which the previous few years had brought.

During this most recent visit to Tarmiyah our host was Capt. Chris Loftis from 1-14 Infantry Battalion out of Schofield Barracks in Hawaii. It’s a heck of a lot colder in Tarmiyah in January than it is in Hawaii I’m betting! Chris is a real asset to his commanders because he speaks Arabic. He’s also been in the army for 23 years, first as an enlisted soldier and later as an officer. That longevity brings much-needed experience to the streets of Tarmiyah.

What we found for ourselves was a town transformed. We were able to walk freely up and down the main street, where stores and markets were open and doing a thriving business. A couple of stores in particular, according to Capt. Chris Loftis, really indicated a bright future ahead: bridalwear and furniture. If people are planning weddings they’re planning for the future – and they often give bedroom furniture as a wedding gift – plus the furniture store we saw also sold cribs which means couples are looking to expand their families.

The whole town had an air of “normalcy” about it – normal that is, by Iraqi standards with checkpoints, razor wire, and security blast barriers still in evidence. There were boys spilling out of the high school, stopping to buy street food from a vendor. There were election posters plastered on walls, and women busy buying household goods at a makeshift roadside market spread out on the sidewalk. Something that was very satisfying to see however was Abu Ghazwan’s “wanted” poster. Some Iraqi policemen had drawn a large red “X” over his face.

And as for Abu Ghazwan… well… we had an unusual “encounter” with him. Turns out the room we slept in for a few nights (which I thought was as cold as a morgue) had in fact been used to store Abu Ghazwan’s body. I guess Lt. Colonel Scott Efflandt was right on the money when he told me back in 2006 that next time justice was visited upon Abu Ghazwan, he wouldn’t be escaping his fate so easily – it’s just especially poetic that Iraqi security forces were the ones to bring his murderous run to an end.