Tuesday, August 19, 2003 Coalition Provisional Authority Operational Briefing August 14, 2003
GEN SANCHEZ: (In progress) -- continue to conduct our offensive operations throughout Iraq on a daily basis in order to identify, locate, kill or capture noncompliant forces, Saddam Fedayeen, former regime loyalists, Ba'athists, and any supporters that are creating instability in this country.
The first thing I'd like to discuss today is going to be smuggling operations. And the issue -- this issue has been directly related to the security and instab -- and stability OR instability of Iraq, and this is a fairly well defined operation that has been conducted in this country for some time. It's being done by professionals and it has a very direct impact on the families, the communities and the country of Iraq.
We have some fairly well-organized groups, criminal groups, that are conducting these operations across the country. And lately we have been focusing on these groups down in the south, in the Basra area. Our objective is to disrupt these operations and, hopefully, end them. And the southern region is attractive because of its oil refineries, its ports and its access to the sea and ability to rapidly move that out of Iraqi-controlled waters and move it to other countries.
The other aspect of this smuggling is not just oil, but also copper. And these two resources flow out of here at a pretty good rate. The copper problem is a problem that impacts on our ability to provide power to the country, because a favorite technique of the copper smuggler is to drop the power lines, take the transmission lines, smelt that, and then go ahead and smuggle it out of the country.
To just give you an indication of how lucrative this is for the smugglers, and the disparity in the cost between Iraq and some of its neighbors here: The cost of oil in Iraq is approximately $100 a ton, and that has been held artificially low for some period of time by the previous regime, so a single truck's full of oil will yield about $500 for a smuggler. And some of these tankers are not registered and therefore pose a significant problem for those trying to identify the legitimate transporter from the smuggler.
We believe that somewhere between 2,000 and 2,500 tons of various sorts of fuel are smuggled out of Iraq through the south. And the volume of smuggled crude oil, diesel and gasoline is estimated to be worth somewhere around $200,000 a day.
The other element that complicates our problem down there is some of the attacks on the oil pipelines. And to give you a perspective, since late May, we have had 15 attacks on oil pipelines. And now, some of these are clearly sabotage, aimed at disrupting the production of oil, but some of them are to tap in to the oil lines in order to smuggle this product out of country.
So, what we have done is we have taken a multi-pronged approach to this problem. We have begun to train oil police guards, fixed-site security guards, in order to protect some of this key infrastructure. And at this point in time, we have in excess of 9,500 guards that we have hired nationwide. And that's not enough at this point. We still continue to hire and train them and field them. And we have been assisting the Iraqi Oil Ministry in registering tankers. And at this point, we have about 120 oil tankers that have been registered.
Of course, the enforcement side of this must contain an enforcement element, a kinetic element, if you will, and that is our Operation Power Crude. Operation Power Crude is targeting oil initially, and we have impounded 79 tanker trucks, 20 barges and, as you may have -- I'm sure most of you are aware we have seized the Navstar. And once we seized the Navstar and brought it in to port, we determined that it actually had 3,500 tons of diesel, instead of the 1,100 that we thought it contained when we first detained it. And then also, we have detained the tanker Cindy on suspicion of smuggling. And we think this ship has probably another thousand tons of diesel that were going out of the country illegally.
The Iraqi police have been helping us in these operations, and they truly are beginning to take responsibilities for a portion of this security problem.
Now, let me go back and cover the status of some of the investigations that we have had ongoing. I know last week, we discussed a couple of the incidents that had occurred where there were some Iraqis who had either gotten hurt or killed. And all of these investigations are still ongoing, but let me give you an update on a couple of them.
Part of the effort and the reason we conduct these investigations, of course, is just to determine what has happened, what went wrong, if anything did in fact go wrong, and to make sure that we're improving on our procedures as we conduct these operations in the country.
And I mentioned to you last week that in the al-Mansour raid that was conducted, we had, in fact, learned that our traffic control point procedures needed some improvement, and that we were going to improve the marking standards for these hasty checkpoints, in order to attempt to prevent anything of this nature happening in the future.
A consequence of that initial investigation caused the brigade commander and the division commander that was responsible for this district to meet with the district leadership and discuss the situation. And they met for about three hours and discussed a whole range of issues, in order to get at some consensus on the way ahead.
Simultaneously, there were -- two of the families filed claims in this case, and two of the families have not filed any claims to this point. And the residents that had property damage done -- those also have been taken care of. So we still have a little bit of work to do there in policing up that incident with those two families have not filed any claims.
In the incident where the Iraqi police were involved, in here, we have known for some time that we must improve the coordination between the Iraqi police, our military conventional forces and the military police as they conduct operations in this city. And we've taken initiative to establish a joint operations center. That would be co- located at the maneuver force headquarters. That will allow us to maintain situational awareness as these forces operate in this city.
You all know that the Iraqi police are conducting independent operations now here in Baghdad, which is exactly what we want them to be doing. And as part of this, it comes with a bill, and that is the need for us to increase our coordination.
In this incident, we continue to investigate this incident, and what we understand is that the police car was responding to a call unilaterally and that it came upon a hasty traffic control point, and they were fired upon. The actual details are still not completely sorted out, and when I those completed, I will present those to you and describe the lessons that we may have learned and the procedures that we -- or identify if any procedures need to be adjusted as a result of this incident.
Also, there was a -- in the Sumer (sp) neighborhood at Hatamiyah (sp), there was a traffic control point incident in which a vehicle approached the checkpoint at a high rate of speed, did not stop. It struck an Iraqi interpreter, and the vehicle was engaged, and in that incident two women were killed and two males were wounded. One of the young men remains in the hospital and is doing well, and the other one is still in critical condition. The inquiry was completed on the 10th of August. The battalion commander met with the uncle of the deceased and was able to take care of funeral expenses for the women.
There was also on the -- we continue to work with the neighborhood advisory councils here in the city of Baghdad whenever these incidents occur in order to make contact with the families at the right time, whenever the family is prepared to talk to our commanders on the ground. And we're using that medium to ensure that we have linkage between the local authorities and the families as we try to take care of some of these problems.
Now, if I may, let me turn to the conduct of operations in the sector. Over the last week, we've conducted over 13,000 patrols, over 180 raids. And some of the successes in the last 24 hours, the 101st Airborne Division has confiscated a series of anti-aircraft guns that were armed. And also, we had some Iraqis interested in increasing the stability and security of the country have come in into the 4th IB CMOC in Tikrit and identified an ammunition cache of 98 rocket- propelled grenades. Also, in the 3rd ACR zone, we discovered a cache that was a significant cache. This included over 800 rocket-propelled grenades, the warheads. It had 920 120mm AT rounds; had over 300 illumination rounds in it; 120 -- 125 AT tank rounds. So, as you can see, a fairly big ammunition cache that could have been a source of improvised explosive device that has now been eliminated.
In the area of our Civil Defense Corps, extremely good response out in all parts of the country up to this point, and we've recruited over two battalions worth of Iraqis to serve in this force. And up in the north, in Mosul, they're already conducting operations. We had the first joint operation between the Iraqi Civil Defense Corps and our forces up there. As you may recall, their duties will be as translators, drivers, route security, convoy security, and other small-level tasks.
Now, let me highlight a couple of items in the reconstruction area that are important for us. The first one, if you look at the slide we've got off to my right here, I want to highlight the Al Hydi al Ghari (ph) Primary School for Girls. This is a school for girls ages 6 to 12. About 500 girls are in this school. This was a school that was attacked by the coalition forces when we came into the country because there were air defense weapons that were stored next to the site, and therefore, we had to eliminate the air defense threat.
The 1st Marine Expeditionary Force took on this project; paid about $74,000. It was of economic impact to the area. It hired about 40 to 50 local men that worked six days a week for about three months. And all of the material that was used in this project to come up with what you see up there on the slide now was procured locally. So all that was money that went right back into the economy, and that's what the school looks like today after the Marines completed the project.
The other project I'd like to highlight for you today is Al Secor (ph), is in the -- located in the area northwest of Tikrit. This small village has a population of about 1,200. And the 244th Combat Engineer Battalion out of Denver, Colorado, took on the business of clearing out about 200 loads of rubble, about 20 ton dump trucks' worth that they removed from this area. They installed new generators to stabilize the local power. They built a new soccer field.
Next slide.
They designed and built a playground for the children. This photo here shows our engineers building that playground. The engineers, welders, specifically, repaired old bicycles for the children. And during this whole time, the battalion's physicians assistance was providing medical assistance to the 1,200 people in the village. And in the end, the children came out of there with a soccer field and a playground that they did not have before.
This is what our (surp ?) funds are doing for the people of Iraq. I've been keeping you abreast of how much money is being spent out there by our commanders. At this stage, we're up to about $50 million that have been distributed to the military commanders. We've got more than 4,900 projects that have been completed, and this continues every single day. And we have 670 projects that we completed last year -- correction -- last week.
Now, there's one other final issue that I'd like to discuss before I take your questions. I think some of you are aware that there was an order that went out eliminating embedded media in units. That order has been rescinded. And there was never any intent for us to eliminate that embed program. There has been too much, way too much value to this program. This is exactly what America needs so that the American people can understand what our soldiers and our units are doing in this great effort. The order was rescinded and you will be able to continue to highlight our soldiers as they conduct operations out in the field. Clearly, there are times when we are employing certain capabilities, that should not be appearing in the media, and when we conduct certain operations where OPSEC and safety are of tremendous concern to us, and in those cases, just like we have in the past, we will restrict media access. And so, you know, we have rescinded that order, and we will work to clarify instructions to our units.
Wth that, I will now open up to your questions. From CentcomGo to the link for more information. -- posted by Chuck at Tuesday, August 19, 2003 | E-mail | Permalink | Main |
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