One Us Soldier Killed 5 Wounded On

One US Soldier killed, 5 Wounded on Sunday; Iraqi police Major among Insurgents

AP reports that a roadside bomb exploded in a median in a highway south of Baghdad, killing one US soldier on Sunday afternoon.

Earlier Sunday, a rocket propelled grenade attack at Mosul wounded three US soldiers, according to eyewitnesses who also saw the bloody humvee. In Fallujah, guerrillas detonated a roadside bomb near a US army convoy, injuring two soldiers.

US troops on a search and find mission in Qaddisiyah south of Tikrit came under fire on Saturday evening. The returned fire at a house under surveillance, and toss a grenade in, killing one guerrilla and wounding two. Imagine their surprise to find that the dead man was a major in the reconstituted Iraqi police force trained by the US! This problem is the same one the US faced in Vietnam–a lot of the South Vietnamese officers turn out actually to have been working for the Viet Cong for nationalist reasons. The next time you hear Donald Rumsfeld boast that the US has “trained” 200,000 Iraqi police and security forces, remember two things. They can’t have been trained very well in that period of time; and there is no way to know where their loyalties really lie.

On Saturday, the police station in Suwayrah was blown up, killing 3 Iraqi police officers and wounding 8. Cable news in the US suggested it was an inside job, and that another officer had set the bomb. (See item just above).