Riding to Tarmiya

Today, in the Columbia Journalism Review, is a piece by Paul McLeary reporting from Iraq

... This rotation back to the big bases was how I got out to JSS Tarmiya, about thirty kilometers north of Baghdad. From Liberty, I caught a short helicopter ride north to Camp Taji, where I spent a night near an artillery battery (the 2nd Battalion, 11th Field Artillery Regiment, 2nd SBCT, 25th Infantry Division) firing illumination flares that rattled the walls of my room.

The next morning I was placed in the hands of 1st Lieutenant Matt Ives, who was taking his platoon from Taji back to Tarmiya—home of the 1st Battalion, 14th Infantry Regiment, 2nd Stryker Brigade Combat Team, 25th Infantry Division. There was a bit of excitement before I left Taji however. While waiting to leave the dining area one afternoon, word started trickling back that someone had—just minutes before—lobbed two rockets at the base, and they landed about fifty meters away from the DFAC near the PX. One round hit the trailer containing the beauty salon, leaving a hole in the side of the structure, while the other landed nearby. One soldier got a few scrapes, but other than that, no one was seriously wounded. It was another example of how, even at the big bases, the war is never far.

The ride from Taji to Tarmiya should take about thirty minutes, but ended up taking almost two hours due to route-clearance issues. Along one particularly dangerous stretch of road that was known for having IEDs placed along the route, a few soldiers had to dismount from the Strykers and walk the sides of the road, looking for the telltale wires.

When the ramp finally dropped inside the base at Tarmiya, I found myself in a very different place than when I got in the vehicle. Here, as at other combat outposts, high concrete blast walls ring the base, but unlike Courage and IBA, which are out in the countryside, Tarmiya sits smack in the middle of the Sunni town of Tarmiya, which up until a few months ago was being described as “a mini-Mogadishu…Al Qaeda has the run of the place. They just live there, in the houses, armed to the teeth…”

Buildings rise above the blast walls on three sides of the JSS, while palm trees grace the fourth side. Like in all of Iraq, things are much quieter in Tarmiya than they were just a few months ago, but it is almost a different country than it was a year ago. Last February, two American soldiers were killed and seventeen wounded when the base was attacked by a multiple car bomb assault, followed by a ground assault with small arms fire, which the Americans beat back. More grotesquely, in May 2007, al Qaeda actually rigged a newly-built girls school in the town with explosives—building artillery shells into the ceiling and floors—but American forces prevented tragedy when they discovered the plot before the school opened...

Read the whole thing...