A Memorial Day Message From Michael Yon
For a more meaningful Memorial Day message than the AP's body count noted below, check out Michael Yon's excellent site. Yon reports from Anbar province:
Although there is sharp fighting in Diyala Province, and Baghdad remains a battleground, and the enemy is trying to undermine security in areas they’d lost interest in, the fact is that the security plan, or so-called “surge,” is showing clear signs of progress. The city of Hit, for instance. Only about a hundred days ago, Hit was a city at war. Today, the buildings are still riddled with bullet holes, but the Iraqi people are opening shops and painting over the scars. They are waving and smiling while hundreds of men are volunteering to join the police. I saw a “policeman” on duty today whose “weapon” was a plastic pistol. I photographed the toy. And so this man was on “duty” with a toy pistol, though he has not yet attended the police academy and is not even being paid. A writer could probably squeeze bad news from that story, but I won’t try. In fact, Hit is a place where writers who wish to escape combat and bad news should visit.
Via InstaPundit. Glenn also has a nice photo of Hit that Yon emailed him.
Speaking of Diyala province, where, as Yon notes, hard fighting is going on, American soldiers have found an al Qaeda "prison" there in which 42 Iraqis were being held by the terrorists:
U.S. forces raided an al-Qaida hide-out northeast of Baghdad on Sunday and freed 42 Iraqis imprisoned inside, including some who had been tortured and suffered broken bones, a senior U.S. military official said Sunday.The raid was part of a 3-month-old security crackdown that included the deployment of 3,000 more U.S. troops to Diyala, a violent province north of the capital that has seen heavy fighting in recent weeks, said Maj. Gen. William Caldwell, the top U.S. military spokesman in
Iraq.Caldwell said Iraqis told U.S. forces about the hide-out: "The people in Diyala are speaking up against al-Qaida."
He said the 42 freed Iraqis marked the largest number of captives ever found in a single al-Qaida prison. Some of those freed were held for as long as four months and some had injuries from torture and were taken to medical facilities for treatment, he said.
Given the gruesome al Qaeda manual on how to torture prisoners that Scott refers to below, one can only imagine the scene that must have greeted the liberating soldiers.
Most of Iraq, however, is not like that. Over most of the country, people are leading mostly normal lives; for example, children are attending school. I liked this photo of one G.I. taking a picture of another, surrounded by school children in Hilla, a town 60 miles south of Baghdad:
I wonder whether those children know how hard many here in America are working to turn them over to the tender mercies of those who operated the Diyala prison.
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