Jennifer Farish: Dogwood troops round up insurgents
7/25/2005 7:16:17 AMDaily Journal
Soldiers with the 155th at FOB Dogwood completed their "largest mission to date" last week when they detained more than 100 insurgents.Second Lt. Eric Kimbrough, of Houston, said Internet and telephone service at Dogwood were shut down for several days in preparation for the 12-hour raid of Owesat village.The village has been a dangerous spot for soldiers since the beginning and was the place where two soldiers and an interpreter were killed by a roadside bomb last month."Owesat has been a cancerous growth since we arrived at Dogwood," Kimbrough said. Residents of the village include many former Baath party loyalists, Sunni extremists and hired assassins."Simply speaking, in Owesat they are all bad to some degree, so if you grab an adult male, he is almost certain to be guilty of something," Kimbrough said. "Many of the kids lay out IEDs (improvised explosive devices) or bombs, as well, but we don't go after them, we simply try to win their hearts and minds."During the raid of the village, at least 10 insurgents were killed and another 101 detained. No U.S. troops were injured.
The redeployment schedule seems to change with the dust and the wind."The schedule hinges on another round of Iraqi elections scheduled for December."The official dispatch is that if the elections are held in December, for purposes of stability, we will remain, just as our predecessors, the 1st Calvary Division, held fast during January elections until we were firmly in place," he said. "If the elections are pushed back another six months, which is very likely, we will go home in December."
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