U.S. troops identify sites of Iraqi guerrilla weapons caches

MOUSTACHE ISLAND, Iraq, Dec. 30 (UPI) -- Moustache Island, named for its shape, is located in a bend in the Tigris River northeast of Baghdad. It's just over half a mile long and more than 1,200 feet at its widest.

Only one person and a few cows live on the island permanently. The surrounding areas on both sides of the riverbank are rural. The largest concentration of people in the qadah -- county -- patrolled by 1-27 and the Iraqi National Police's 2nd Brigade, 1st Division is the town of Husseiniyah, a predominantly Shiite community of about 500,000 people and once a bed-down, transit or hiding area for Iranian-influenced Special Groups that operate in and around East Baghdad's Shiite-dominated Sadr City.

Officers with the 1-27 say regular air assaults, cordon-and-search ground missions and presence patrols with Iraqi National Police keep possible terrorists in the area off balance and on the defensive, thus degrading their ability to conduct attacks in the capital.

In October and November in Baghdad and Baghdad province, Iraqi and U.S. forces found more than 1,800 mortar rounds, 60-plus 107mm and 122 mm rockets, 78 hand grenades and 180 pounds of C-4 explosive, according to the U.S. Army's 4th Infantry Division.

In late November in Thalba, a sparsely populated area of many abandoned or partially built homes located about 3 miles from Sadr City, the huge Shiite-dominated working-class district of Baghdad, 1-27 troops found a significant cache of rifles, components for improvised explosive devices and assembled IEDs.

Thalba was the focus of an air assault the day before Moustache Island. The landings of troops there was trickier. The UH-60s helicopters had to set down within power lines, and their pilots had to worry about civilians who may have wandered into the landing zone. The action was also clearly visible to traffic along a main highway nearby and to residents of Thalba and surrounding areas.

"The direct benefit (of the Thalba assault) was to obviously find any caches because that's been an enemy storage point," said Capt. Lucas Yoho. "They like to put their caches in the abandoned buildings in the area because they can't be tied to any one person if found. The indirect benefit is the interaction with the population to show that we are concerned about security in the area, to gather information from the population.

"We push all the time to deny the terrain -- and the terrain being the population because that's their center of gravity, that's where they gain their support -- so we deny that to them by being in the neighborhood, doing clearance operations and other things."

Yoho told United Press International that another benefit of the air assaults is that they act as training opportunities for Iraqi Security Forces, which will be in the operational lead come Jan. 1 as a result of the U.S.-Iraq Status of Forces Agreement, also called the Strategic Framework Agreement.

That accord, replacing an expiring U.N. Security Council mandate, governs how U.S. forces can operate in Iraq until the withdrawal of U.S. combat forces from the country is completed according to anticipated schedule at the end of 2011.

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