Word: battalion
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Thursday on the city that has most bedeviled the U.S. occupation, the hyperbole seemed appropriate. Fallujah is the presumed base of Abu Mousab al-Zarqawi, the most potent terrorist in Iraq. And more than 100 suspected insurgents have been arrested in recent weeks in nearby villages. Now the 3rd Battalion, 5th Marines along with the Army's Brigade Combat Team 2 and a company from the 2nd Tank Battalion--a combined force exceeding 1,000 troops--were about to launch the biggest move on Fallujah in months. The 3/5 would not enter the city but intended to go right...
...assault had begun in Ramadi two days earlier, when much of the 2nd Battalion, 5th Marines joined the élite 36th Battalion of the Iraqi National Guard and their U.S. special- forces advisers to raid seven mosques in the city. As in Fallujah, attempts to prop up a local government in Ramadi have faltered amid violence, kidnappings and assassinations. Military bases in both places are frequently mortared. Unlike in Fallujah, though, in Ramadi the Marines are a regular presence in the streets. And they are hit daily by a mostly invisible enemy, bountifully armed with improvised explosive devices (IEDS), rocket...
...restive Iraqi cities like Ramadi, the U.S. campaign to deny sanctuary to the insurgents consists of a daily assortment of hit-and-run exchanges, alleyway gunfights and nighttime raids. "They've taken the fight into the neighborhoods," says Captain Jeffrey Kenney, commander of Golf Company of the 2nd Battalion, 5th Marine Regiment. "The hardest thing is to ID where the fire is coming from." The jarheads long for a pitched battle but know that will never happen because the rebels aren't suicidal. The Marines must seek out the insurgents and monitor the places where they hide, which...
Handling the heaviest fighting would be the soldiers of the battle-hardened 1st Battalion of the 14th Infantry Regiment. Stationed in Kirkuk to the north, the 1/14 battalion knows something about the feints and vanishing acts of the insurgents, having faced them in Najaf, Tall 'Afar and elsewhere. The 1/14 would follow the 1st Battalion of the 26th Infantry Regiment, which would hit Samarra first, crossing a long bridge leading into the city to secure a staging area for the troops that would pour in afterward. Just past midnight on Friday morning, the 1/26 moved. The 1/14, not far behind...
...call comes shortly before noon: Insurgents toting AK-47s and RPGs have ambushed a Marine patrol in Ramadi, wounding two soldiers. At Combat Outpost, a dusty, sun-baked base that houses two companies of the 2nd Battalion, Fifth Marine Regiment, the Quick Reaction Force mounts up. Moments later, a convoy of armored Humvees, seven-ton trucks and reinforced high-backed personnel carriers tears into the streets of the long-restive town...