Word: voelkel
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...instructive to spend a night with the 82nd Airborne's Alpha Company, 3rd Battalion, 2nd Brigade, bivouacked in southern Baghdad. An Iraqi informant reports that 12 to 20 suspected resistance leaders from Afghanistan and Syria are meeting in a mosque near the airport. The unit's commander, Captain Tyson Voelkel, tells his men these foreigners are gathering to review plans to launch terror attacks starting the next day. Some 110 G.I.s plus 40 members of the new Iraqi Civilian Defense Corps training with Alpha Company move in to seal off the area. "I hope we get some of these guys...
That may well have been the plan. An hour later Voelkel aborts the raid after the Iraqi informer fails to show up at a designated rendezvous and an intelligence source inside the mosque says no Afghans or Syrians are present. Instead, the mosque is filled with Ramadan worshippers and, the source suspects, a television crew waiting to film the raid. "It would have been really bad," says Voelkel, if "we were seen going in with [bomb-sniffing] dogs while 200 people were praying...