Iraq in a Nutshell

December 19, 2005:

Tal Afar was the site of the largest military operation of 2005, when 8,000 US and Iraqi troops reclaimed it from armed groups.

It has since been used to test a new strategy of "clear, hold, build", in which areas would be purged of insurgents and then rejuvenated to win support from local people, before being handed over to the Iraqi security forces. It is also called "ink spot" strategy, whereby one area of control would spread to another - like an ink spot spreading on blotting paper - until the entire country was covered, in a model similar to that adopted by the British in Malaya.

In Tal Afar, according to the president, military success had been followed by the restoration of law and order and the implementation of reconstruction projects to give "hope" to its citizens...

Their commander, Col H R McMaster, is a counter-insurgency specialist who wrote a book about the Vietnam War, in which he criticised the US military's failure to understand the enemy's culture.

And TODAY:

A suicide bomber slammed his truck into a densely populated residential area in the northern Iraqi city of Tal Afar on Monday, killing at least 28 people, police said. Most of the dead were women and children, the mayor said.

At least 40 others were wounded in the attack and the death toll was expected to rise, said Brig. Gen. Rahim al-Jibouri, commander of Tal Afar police....

Tal Afar — a city which the U.S. military initially cited as success story after major operations were said to have cleared the city of insurgents — has been the frequent site of Sunni attacks in the past year.

Many of them stemmed from allegations by a 50-year-old Sunni Arab woman, who came forward last February and said Iraqi soldiers raped her when they raided her house searching for weapons. Sunni insurgents have kidnapped and killed dozens of Iraqi security officials in response.

The city also recorded one of the deadliest days since the start of the Iraq war, when at least 152 people died in truck bombings on March 27.

McMaster is now one of the designers of "the Surge" and on Patraeus' staff.

Meanwhile...

The Pentagon has lost track of about 190,000 AK-47 assault rifles and pistols given to Iraqi security forces in 2004 and 2005, according to a new government report, raising fears that some of those weapons have fallen into the hands of insurgents fighting U.S. forces in Iraq...

The United States has spent $19.2 billion trying to develop Iraqi security forces since 2003, the GAO said, including at least $2.8 billion to buy and deliver equipment. But the GAO said weapons distribution was haphazard and rushed and failed to follow established procedures, particularly from 2004 to 2005, when security training was led by Gen. David H. Petraeus, who now commands all U.S. forces in Iraq.

This would have been when the "New Jesus" had time in September 2004 to write an editorial praising the tranining of Iraqi troops to help George Bush get himself reelected.

Outfitting hundreds of thousands of new Iraqi security forces is difficult and complex, and many of the units are not yet fully equipped. But equipment has begun flowing. Since July 1, for example, more than 39,000 weapons and 22 million rounds of ammunition have been delivered to Iraqi forces, in addition to 42,000 sets of body armor, 4,400 vehicles, 16,000 radios and more than 235,000 uniforms.

Odd that. I guess those weapons were delivered in one fashion or another.