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Troops At Risk

Failed US Intelligence Policy Armed American Troops Force Iraqis to Seesaw Until They Talk! Iraqi Child Bites GI In Self Defense After Obvious Torture! GI Falls Asleep On Duty While Using Iraqi Child As Body Armor! GI Overheard to say? Talk or I'll tickle you till you pee!? Soldier Attempts to Eat Iraqi Child! Clear Evidence of Forced Labor by Troops! Iraqis Grateful That American Forces Did Not Open Fire During Soccer Game! Soldier Caught At 'Tickle-Torture' To Extract Intelligence! GI Forces Iraqi Child To Hang By Fingertips! No comment here. There's nothing funny about this one.

Rules Of Engagement

The mission to help Iraqis build a free and prosperous Iraq is at a critical juncture. In order to reduce the unacceptably high levels of violence, the president has recently set forth a new strategy that increases the number of troops patrolling the streets of Baghdad and Anbar province. Although some Americans have concerns about this new strategy, they are united in their desire that our troops have the best training and equipment possible in order to achieve success. Americans also want to ensure that our leaders are sending our forces into combat with rules of engagement that permit them to accomplish the mission without subjecting themselves to undue risk.

Two separate articles from Jan. 26 editions of The Washington Times offer contradictory assertions concerning rules of engagement for U.S. forces in Iraq. The first article asserts that the rules are too specific and demanding, placing troops at risk. The second article argues that the rules are vague and confusing, endangering troops who must make life and death decisions in an instant. Both assertions are wrong.

Contrary to the claim in Untie military hands, the rules of engagement in Iraq do not require U.S. service members to satisfy seven steps prior to using force. Instead, the overriding rule for all service members is that nothing in our rules of engagement prevents our troops from using necessary and proportional force to defend themselves.

This foundational concept of U.S. rules of engagement (ROE) is provided to every service member on a pocket-size ROE card. More important, service members are trained to understand this rule and its application in life or death situations. While I cannot rule out the possibility that a leader at a lower level may have issued the restrictive guidance stated in the article, such guidance is in direct conflict with both current ROE and command policy.

The law of armed conflict requires that, to use force, "combatants" must distinguish individuals presenting a threat from innocent civilians. This basic principle is accepted by all disciplined militaries. In the counterinsurgency we are now fighting, disciplined application of force is even more critical because our enemies camouflage themselves in the civilian population. Our success in Iraq depends on our ability to treat the civilian population with humanity and dignity, even as we remain ready to immediately defend ourselves or Iraqi civilians when a threat is detected.

If someone levels an AK-47 at our troops, or if our forces receive hostile fire, the current ROE unambiguously allow our troops to fire immediately in self-defense. In either situation, our forces are trained to recognize the threat and respond with appropriate force to eliminate it. This does not mean "firing wildly"; instead, the individual perceiving the threat identifies the source of that threat, and engages with disciplined shots. "Positive identification" of a threat has nothing to do with membership in a particular ethnic or sectarian group, and has everything to do with recognizing hostile intent. U.S.Iraq have never had limitations beyond that.

Vague rules, on the other hand, asserts that vague rules of engagement endanger our troops. The article focuses on the words "use minimum force necessary to decisively eliminate the threat." Although this phrase articulates the self-defense principles of necessity and proportionality — principles that are especially relevant in the current counterinsurgency fight — it neither appears nor is discussed on the ROE card issued to U.S. service members in Iraq.

Moreover, ROE remain commanders' — not lawyers' — rules for the use of force. Commanders ensure that ROE cards are periodically reviewed to identify problems of interpretation that may emerge.

No words on a card can fully address every situation a soldier or Marine will face in Iraq. ROE cards were never intended to tell service members exactly what to do in a specific situation, nor were they designed as a stand-alone reference. Instead, they serve as a reminder of general principles of the law of armed conflict taught from the time one enters basic training.

Ultimately, the answer to the issues raised by both articles is training, not rule-writing. We train service members to apply ethics, values, experience and situational awareness to make judgment calls in ever-changing situations that require split-second decisions. Properly trained, service members know that they can engage only valid targets using the force appropriate to decisively eliminate the threat.

Admittedly, this is a tough task. But everyday, 136,000 U.S. servicemen and women lace up their boots, strap on their body armor and drive ahead with our mission to help Iraqis build a free, prosperous and united Iraq.

And everyday in Iraq, U.S. service members are put into positions requiring them to make good judgment calls. Our troops can and do make the right decisions. We expect and demand nothing less.

A Little Iraqi Girl

Baghdad is a city full of sad stories. Soldiers on patrol hear so many of them, a kind of numbness tends to set in. But when a platoon of Soldiers heard the sad tale of a little Iraqi girl named Rusil recently, they knew they had to act.

Rusil, a 5-year-old living in Baghdad’s Adhamiyah District, was hit in the leg by a stray bullet in July. Local doctors treated the wound, but without proper follow-up care, the leg wasn’t healing, and Rusil had been shut up in her house, unable to walk, for almost a month.

Since learning of the situation, Soldiers from Troop A, 3rd Squadron, 7th Cavalry Regiment have taken it upon themselves to make sure Rusil gets the medical attention she needs.

Soldiers from Troop A’s 2nd Platoon first heard about Rusil during an Aug. 8 patrol in Adhamiyah’s Suleikh area. The platoon had stopped to talk with some of the locals when one of them mentioned a sick little girl in the neighborhood. Information often gets passed to the Soldiers that way, said Paso Robles, Calif., native Pfc. Anthony Graves, the platoon’s medic. “We’ll be standing there talking to a group of people and someone will come up and tell us about someone who is hurt or needs help,” Graves said. “Usually, even if there’s nothing we can do, we still go take a look, just to show our good faith.”

When the man told the Soldiers about Rusil’s situation, they immediately decided to investigate. The platoon paid a visit to the tiny apartment where Rusil lives with her aunt and grandmother. The women were, at first, very nervous to have the Americans in their home, but they took the Soldiers to the next room to see Rusil. She was on the bed, wearing a white dress, her curly brown hair pulled back from her face, and she had a gruesome steel brace screwed into her tiny leg. The Soldiers’ appearance in body armor, helmets, and sunglasses seemed to frighten her. Graves went over and knelt down next to the girl and smiled. “I took off some of my gear to look a little bit more normal and talked to her real softly and she started to calm down,” Graves said.

The grandmother told the Soldiers that Rusil had been playing in the yard July 17 when a bullet from a firefight between U.S. forces and insurgents struck her in the leg. The 3-7th Cav. has not been able to corroborate that there was an incident that day, but to the Soldiers who were there in the room with Rusil, it didn’t matter who was responsible. “Whether or not she was hurt by American forces isn’t really important,” Graves said. “She’s just a little girl who needs help.”

The bullet had shattered Rusil’s right femur. Her aunt and grandmother took her for treatment at a local hospital, but the treatment there wasn’t adequate for the severity of the injury.

To hold the bone in place, the doctors had given Rusil an external fixator, a brace that screws through the skin and into the leg. According to Oklahoma City native Lt. Col. Marvin Williams, the 3-7 Cav’s squadron surgeon, the device is only meant to stay on for a few days. By the time the Soldiers found her, Rusil had it on for almost a month.

It appeared to Graves that the wound was infected. The Soldiers urged the family to take Rusil back to the hospital for antibiotics. When they left, Rusil was over her initial fright. She waved happily.

The next day, they came back to the little apartment to check up on her. This time they brought coloring books and toys for Rusil, as well as food and water for the family, who were destitute and living off the kindness of neighbors. Rusil was glad to see the Soldiers this time, smiling and waving when they came in, and eventually trying to talk with them. “Even though we didn’t understand each other, we talked a little bit,” Graves said. “She showed me how to write her name in Arabic and I showed her how to write my name in English.”

But when the aunt showed them the x-rays taken at the hospital, the news was worse than they had feared. “As it is now, if she doesn’t get proper surgery, the best that will happen is that the leg won’t heal right and she’ll be crippled for life,” Graves said. “The worst that will happen is, she could lose the leg or even die.”

When the Soldiers left the house this time, they were committed to getting Rusil the best possible care. Their best hope was to get her to the Army’s Combat Support Hospital in the International Zone. When the story reached Anchorage, Alaska, native Capt. Jesse Reynolds, the squadron’s physician’s assistant, he got to work making the arrangements to have Rusil admitted to the CSH.

On Aug. 11, Rusil and her grandmother were taken to the 3-7’s base in Adhamiyah. Because of the nature of her injury and the limited space on helicopter flights, they couldn’t fly her to the hospital. So, instead, the squadron arranged a special convoy just to take her to the Green Zone. “What this has been all about is teamwork,” said Williams. “Everyone from the Soldiers out on patrol who found her, to the orthopedic surgeons at the CSH, to the people transporting her there, they all pitched in to make this happen.”

At the CSH, Rusil will have to have surgery to clean out her wound and put in pins and a plate to hold her bones together. After that, she’ll need physical therapy to learn how to walk again, Williams said. “She still has a good, long road ahead of her,” Reynolds said. But Reynolds and the other Soldiers are now guardedly optimistic about her prospects. I want her to be outside playing soccer in a few months,” Reynolds said. Many of the Soldiers who pitched in to help Rusil said they felt obligated to do so, because it may have been an American bullet that hurt her in the first place. “We want to put right any harm that we cause,” Gassman said.

But for others, there was something like a sense of redemption in their efforts to help the little girl. For Soldiers accustomed to operating in gray areas, it was a rare chance to do something purely selfless and positive. “This little kid had nothing to do with our fight,” Graves said. “She’s just a 5-year-old girl who needed help. You need to do something good like that over here just to make everything else worthwhile.” Baghdad may still be a city of sad stories, but now it has one less.

Maj. Gen. William B. Caldwell. Spokesman, Multi-National Force - Iraq. Caldwell: Rules of Engagement not vague. Friday, 09 February 2007. Sgt. Mike Pryor. 2nd Brigade Combat Team, 82nd Airborne Division Public Affairs. Troops go the distance to care for wounded Iraqi girl. Operation Iraqi Freedom Multi-National Force - Iraq. Wednesday, 15 August 2007.

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