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Seasoned Vet
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Conway: Resistance dissipating around Marine perimeter
By Christian Lowe
Times staff writer
CAMP BABYLON, Iraq — Enemy resistance is faltering on the southern outskirts of Baghdad and Iraqi holdouts are starting to give up, the top Marine general in Iraq said Sunday.
That area has been a thorn in the Corps’ side during the past several weeks as Marines face ambush attacks almost daily despite the relative calm in the rest of their sector.
The forces are being hit in northern Babil province — near the towns of Mahmudiyah and Iskandariyah — in the southern suburbs of Baghdad.
“I just saw in reports this morning that certain groups in one part of north Babil, where we are having some shootings, have just about given up the ghost,” said Lt. Gen. James Conway, commander of I Marine Expeditionary Force, in an interview at his headquarters here.
Iraqi guerrilla forces have attacked Marines nearly 50 times in the past 30 days, according to Marine officials here. The Marine Corps’ occupation zone ranges from the southern outskirts of Baghdad to the borders of Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and Iran. The vast majority of those attacks have taken place in the northern Babil province.
Reservists from the 4th Light Armored Reconnaissance Battalion joined active-duty infantry companies from the 2nd Battalion, 5th Marine Regiment and the 3rd Battalion, 7th Marine Regiment, to take part in Task Force Scorpion in mid-June to stamp out those pockets of resistance.
Though Army forces have suffered casualties almost daily since May 1 when major combat operations were declared at an end, Conway said the Marines’ aggressive tactics have helped to keep casualties at a minimum.
“When we have to spank people, we spank them pretty hard,” Conway said. “When Marines shoot back they usually hit what they’re shooting at.”
Army forces have seen increasing resistance in Baghdad and in towns outside the Iraqi capital, from Fallujah and Ramadi in the west and north to Tikrit. Resistance has grown in towns further north as well; two soldiers from the 101st Airborne Division were killed in a July 20 ambush in the northern town of Mosul.
The newly appointed commander of U.S. Central Command, Army Gen. John Abizaid, said July 16 that Iraqi Baathist holdouts “have organized at the regional level” to conduct a “classical guerrilla-type campaign against us.”
But the relative quiet in the Marine Corps occupation zone to the south gives them a quite different perspective of the conflict.
“People start talking about quagmire, that this is Vietnam. There is no comparison,” said Lt. Col. Dusty Rhoades, the intelligence chief for I MEF. “People don’t understand; we either defeat these people, or they will kill us.”
------------------------------------------------------------ Albert Einstein defined insanity as doing the same thing repeatedly and expecting different results. ------------------------------------------ 
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Seasoned Vet
 
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Last Login: 10/2/2005 10:13 PM
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OOH FREAKING RAH !!
Go with God, but make Him walk the point.
If you load a mudfoot down with a lot of gadgets he has to watch somebody a lot more simply equipped - say with a stone axe - will sneak up and bash his head in while he is trying to read a Vernier. - Robert Heinlein
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