Officers sacked over 2006 Iraq kidnapping [Archive] - Marine Corps

thedrifter

05-17-07, 05:28 PM

Why were they alone?
Investigators focus on security lapse in ambush deaths
Gina Cavallaro - Staff writer
Posted : Thursday May 17, 2007 9:22:46 EDT

Originally published July 3, 2006.

Yusufiyah, an isolated farming hamlet southwest of Baghdad in an area known as the Triangle of Death, has always been trouble.

It is a Sunni area populated mostly by the former soldiers from Saddam Hussein’s elite Medina Division whose headquarters and training facilities were destroyed in March 2003 at the beginning of U.S. operations in Iraq.

Rampant unemployment among the soldiers, their families, former bomb factory workers and a strong presence of resentful Saddam loyalists has made the town 10 miles from Baghdad a nest of insurgent activity where scores of U.S. ground troops and aviators have lost their lives.

So the most pressing question surrounding the abduction and killing of three soldiers at a checkpoint near there June 16 is why they were on their own, in a lone Humvee, and so vulnerable to attack.

An investigation into the circumstances leading up to the attack is ongoing, and the Army has yielded few details. But it is already clear that the focus is on a probable lapse in procedures for the security of soldiers on patrol.

“This did not fit standard operating procedures. No one has a good answer to that, and it’s going to have to come out in the investigation,” said Lt. Col. Michelle Martin-Hing, spokeswoman for Multi-National Corps-Iraq in Baghdad. “What were the SOPs for that unit? Was it part of a rotational security element? We will have to look into it all, including how the attack happened.”

MNC-I operations officers declined to discuss details of those SOPs for checkpoints and convoys, citing the need to maintain operational security.

While tactics, techniques and procedures vary among the many types of missions carried out by units in Iraq, a three-humvee minimum has evolved as the standard for combat patrols and convoys, with different weapons configurations and numbers of personnel.

The area where the attack occurred is near the Euphrates River, just downstream from the defunct Yusufiyah power plant. Irrigation canals crisscross the farmlands, some with footbridges, others with bridges wide enough for vehicles.

The site of the ambush was a canal checkpoint at an armored vehicle launched bridge, a heavy-duty, temporary bridge that unfolds hydraulically from a tracked vehicle on the shoreline.

It was close to 8 p.m. and the only two vehicles on site, Martin-Hing said, were the AVLB, which was unmanned, and the humvee in which Spc. David J. Babineau, 25; Pfc. Kristian Menchaca, 23; and Pfc. Thomas Tucker, 25, were riding.

The soldiers were members of 1st Battalion, 502nd Infantry Regiment, 101st Airborne Division, which has suffered at least 15 killed in action since they put boots on the ground in the Yusufiyah area in November.

The 1-502nd has not said why the junior enlisted soldiers were unaccompanied by either a commissioned or noncommissioned officer or how the soldiers were positioned when they were ambushed.

There was a second, two-Humvee element, part of the same combat patrol configuration, “manning a traffic control point slightly to the northeast of the bridge crossing at the next major road,” Martin-Hing said.

Neither the makeup of this group — the number of troops or ranking soldier — or the distance between the lone Humvee and the two-Humvee element has been reported. Martin-Hing said there were no Iraqi security forces with any of the soldiers.

Martin-Hing confirmed that the two groups were in radio communication but not in visual range.

At 7:55 p.m., the group at the road heard explosions and gunfire from the vicinity of the bridge and tried to make contact by radio. When they couldn’t raise anyone, “that’s when they dispatched the QRF,” Martin-Hing said of a quick-reaction force whose point of origin or unit has not been reported by the Army.

By the time the QRF arrived at the bridge checkpoint 15 minutes later, all they found was an empty humvee and, a few feet away near the canal bridge, Babineau’s body.

Menchaca and Tucker were missing.

Coalition forces sealed off all roads leading to the area of the attack and its wider surroundings within an hour, and launched a massive search with more than 8,000 U.S. and Iraqi forces: Army, Navy and Air Force troops, as well as fixed-wing fighter attack aircraft, E-8 Joint Surveillance Attack Radar System, Predator unmanned aerial vehicles and dive teams from pararescue jumpers, according to Multi-National Force-Iraq spokesman Maj. Gen. William Caldwell.

More than a dozen raids were conducted and more than 30 suspects were detained based on nearly 100 tips from citizens.

During the search, one U.S. soldier was killed and 12 wounded.

Four days later, on June 20, the remains of Menchaca and Tucker were recovered near the power plant “not far from where they went missing,” Martin-Hing said. They had to be identified through DNA samples, she said.

It took 12 hours to get to the bodies once they were located, she said, because the entire area, including the soldiers’ remains and the roads leading to the site, had been booby-trapped with improvised explosive devices.

The two soldiers were retrieved at daybreak.

It has not been officially reported whether the soldiers were killed outright or died after being tortured. some military officials have said that one and possibly both soldiers were beheaded.

The families of the two soldiers were scheduled to be briefed on the autopsy results June 23, according to Shari Lawrence, a spokeswoman at Human Resources Command.

MNC-I commander Lt. Gen. Peter Chiarelli, who commands all ground forces in Iraq, has “reminded commanders to refine and look at procedures for combat patrols, that they have the proper number of vehicles, to make sure they don’t have any personnel or vehicles that become isolated,” Martin-Hing said. “That area is an insurgent hotbed.”

No surprise

For two battalion commanders who have spent time in that area, it was no surprise that the attack took place near Yusufiyah.

“That was the area I had to do the most fighting at,” said Lt. Col. John King, commander of 1st Battalion, 108th Armor, Georgia National Guard, who lost six soldiers in August and September 2005, when the battalion was in that area.

“In Yusufiyah, the people who did deal with us did so only after dark or on cell phone. They were afraid,” he said, noting that he didn’t have the same resistance from surrounding towns like Mahmoudiyah and Ludufiyah.

The area hasn’t benefited much from the goods and services offered by the coalition because the people living there have resisted the presence of U.S. forces since the start of the war.

“There was always a feeling as a task force that there was something in Yusufiyah that was being used as a base of operations and they didn’t want us to get in there, that they were protecting something,” said promotable Lt. Col. Brian McKiernan, who spent three months in the area in 2004 as commander of 4th Battalion, 27th Field Artillery, 1st Armored Division.

The roads leading to and from the village, he said, were loaded with hidden bombs. The battalion’s Charlie Battery lost eight soldiers to a suicide bomber who exploded his car amid their dismounted patrol. Other combat patrols suffered multiple casualties.

The heightened level of violence the unit saw just days after arriving in the area prompted McKiernan to implement a more robust patrolling discipline.

“The smallest element we would send out, based on the situation during our time there, was a company-minus or a platoon-plus,” he said. “We weren’t welcome there. You could tell from the glares.”

Not much has changed in the Triangle of Death since McKiernan was there.

In addition to the deaths suffered on the ground, a 4th Infantry Division Apache helicopter was downed in April by enemy fire, killing the two-man crew. A video later surfaced showing the wreckage site and “what appeared to be a torso from the aircraft wreckage,” Martin-Hing said.

A month later, a special operations chopper was shot down in the same area, killing two pilots.

Although a video has not surfaced in connection with the deaths of Menchaca and Tucker, the Army is on the lookout for one.

“We’ve certainly been watching for one to appear. There’s always the potential. That’s a standard TTP of theirs,” she said.

Ellie