A Battlefield Tourist

US Special Forces Get Break That Leads to MIAs

Jul 12 at 2:02pm by David Tate

US Special Forces captured an Iraqi who led them to the bodies of two 10th Mountain Division soldiers missing in Iraq for more than a year. 

Sgt. Alex Jimenez, of Massachusetts, and Pvt Brian Fouty, of Michigan, have been missing since their small unit was attacked May 12, 2007 south of Baghdad.  The attack also left four US soldiers and an Iraqi soldier/interpreter dead. 

According to the Associated Press, Brian Fouty’s stepfather, Gordon Dibler, said that military officials who personally visited the Fouty family July 8 told him the remains of both missing soldiers were found in the village of Jurf as Sakhr, an area where members of Saddam’s top-tier security apparatus used to live.

Ambush

In the early morning hours of May 12th, 2007, seven soldiers and an Iraqi soldier/interpreter were manning an “overwatch” position on Route Malibu.  Their mission:  To monitor an area in the town of Qarghuli, 12 miles west of Mahmudiyah notorious for roadside bombs.  The unit was part of a larger operation deployed within proximity of the road.

The Americans, using two humvees encircled by concertina wire as their position, were carrying out the often boring mission when, just before 5am, the trees and tall grass around them erupted in small arms fire and rocket propelled grenades.  It’s not known how long the battle lasted, but by the end, the insurgents were within hand grenade distance.

The attack happened just 800 yards from a US base and within view of an Iraqi Army position, which ignored the fighting.

A nearby American unit that had heard the explosions couldn’t reach the soldiers using their communications equipment, which prompted them to call in an aerial drone to investigate the position.  In the early dawn light the drone found the position, which was now marked by billowing black smoke from the two humvees which were heavily damaged and on fire.

45 minutes later, two units made it to the scene, both slowed by IEDs encountered on the way.  When they got there, they found the bodies of four soldiers, including the Iraqi soldier, in the burning humvees.  The only evidence of the other four men came in the form of blood trails and drag marks.  Soldiers following one blood trail found another soldier dead in a nearby building.  He had been shot.

The capture of several members of the supposed kidnap team, including two major  players in December 2007, led US officials to believe that 13 criminals, hired by Al Qaeda affiliated, Islamic State of Iraq, planned and executed the attack.  Evidence indicates the terrorists had practiced the assault in the days leading up to May 12th. 

Following the ambush, the team split into two groups and drove off; the three Americans were with the gang’s ringleader and were alive.

Al Qaeda in Iraq quickly took credit for the attack, claiming the umbrella group, Al Qaeda in Mesopatamia, carried the assault out.  The group also warned the thousands of US and Iraqi troops, who had flooded the area in an attempt to find the soldiers, to stop looking or the prisoners would be executed.

On May 23rd, the body of Joeseph Anzack Jr., of California, was pulled from the Euphrates River by civilians 30 miles south of the area of the ambush.  Anzack had been shot in the head and torso plus showed signs of excessive torture.  There are plausible theories that suggest Anzack was shot and dumped in the river as US forces closed in on his captors.

While the search for the two remaining men did slow down in the ensuing weeks, the US military never stopped looking for them; digging up dozens of suspected gravesites over the past year.

In June 2007, Al Qaeda released a video claiming to have killed the men, but offered no pictures of the bodies.  US troops also found the ID cards of the missing soldiers in a safehouse near Samarra, 60 miles north of Baghdad and more than ninety miles from where the ambush took place.  At that time, US military sources believed they were on the soldiers’ trail with “credible” leads taking them northeast to Iraq’s Salahuddin Province.  In October, troops even recovered some of the weapons that belonged to the men, but still no sign of Jimenez or Fouty themselves. 

That would all change on July 1 when US Special Forces captured a man who led them to the graves a few days later.  The wondering, the questions, suffering the unknown, is now over.

Same Method of Operation?

A year earlier on June 16, 2006, not far from where the 2007 ambush/kidnapping occurred, a dozen soldiers manning a checkpoint on a bridge, also along Route Malibu, were attacked in a coordinated ambush that would later be realized as a planned kidnapping of American soldiers.  The operation was a rare one for insurgents. The only other similar incident during the war happened farther south in Karbala in January 2007.

According to an Iraqi eyewitness, three humvees were manning a checkpoint on a bridge west of Yusifiyah when the checkpoint came under attack from several directions.  Two of the humvees speed off and before the third could follow, it was engaged at close range by seven masked men supported by a truck bearing a heavy machine gun.

One soldier, Specialist David Babineau of Massachusetts, was killed during the initial assault.  Two others, PFC Kristian Menchaca of Texas and PFC. Thomas Tucker of Oregon, were captured alive. 

A month later, insurgents released a gruesome video of the two mutilated, decapitated soldiers as fighters continued to desecrate their bodies.  A US military official says the men were paraded up and down Route Malibu before being killed.

The bodies were found June 19 in a ditch booby trapped with IEDs.  They were found at the power plant in Jurf as Sakhr.

Abu Usama al-Tunisi, the alleged mastermind of the attack, was killed in an american airstrike in September 2006. Tunisi was also a major facilitator for foreign fighters coming into Iraq and was al-Qaeda’s emir of Yusufiyah.

Steven Dale Green’s Legacy?

There is a debate as to the motivation behind both of these attacks.  Some say it’s as simple as well executed insurgent operations.  However others, including al-Qaeda in Iraq, say both ambushes were in retaliation for the rape and murder of a young Iraqi girl and her family in 2006, three months before the first ambush, also west of al Mahmudiyah.

In March of that year, 15-year old Abeer Qasim Hamza al-Janabi was gang raped by a group of paratroopers after her mother, father and five year old sister were murdered.  Abeer herself was then shot and set on fire.  The main perpetrator was Pvt. Steven Dale Green.

Within three months insurgents sprung the first ambush/kidnapping detailed above, targeting members of the same unit accused in the rape and murder incident.  Al Qaeda claims the executions of the soldiers were carried out by Abu Hamza al-Mujaeer, possibly a member of Abeer Hamza’s family.

Whether the deaths of these 10 soldiers from Bravo, 1/502, 101st airborne and 4/31, 10th Mountain are tied to the rape and murders of the Hamza family may never be agreed on.  However, the fact that both ambushes carried similar hallmarks, both ambushes happened within 25 miles of one another and the fact that both incidents ended in Jurf as Sakhr certainly suggests, at the least, the two incidents are related in some way.