During my fifteen month deployment we went on various missions on a daily basis. Some were as short as a couple hours if we were going to pick up a target or informant, and some would last several days or a week or more if we had to go occupy and patrol a certain area. There were hundreds of different missions, and most of them run together now so it’s difficult to remember a lot of them unless something of significance happened. For instance, I can certainly recall missions where I saw friends die, and I can half remember the mission where I was injured because my head was a pinball and there are some periods of time I don’t remember. But one mission does stick with me for a number of reasons, it was one part of a nationwide offensive and it was called Operation Arrowhead Ripper.

When we first got to Baqubah we were unprepared for the fight we walked into. We were fighting the same group (ISIS) that has recently gone on a rampage through parts of Iraq and Syria and declared the creation of a Caliphate in those areas. At first, each company was assigned an area of operation to work in but it very quickly became evident that we were outnumbered and sustained a lot of casualties in a very quick period of time. So we consolidated our forces and systematically went through each section of the city where we engaged in some extremely brutal and close quarters fighting. As we made progress through different parts of the city it was house to house fighting and as we would push forward block by block, the ISIS fighter would retreat block by block until they were pushed out of the city limits. As we were pushing them out of the city they would retreat into the thousands of acres of palm groves and reconsolidate there. They were small victories but we knew that every time we pushed them out of one neighborhood that the ones we weren’t able to kill were just moving to another neighborhood, and as it were, we knew which neighborhoods they were going to. Unfortunately, we didn’t have the man power to push into that neighborhood at the time. When we were sent to Baqubah, only a couple of Companies were sent, which meant that we had about 700 combat troops to work with. The enemy forces were unknown but estimated to be around 5,000. Those aren’t very good odds for picking a fight, and we knew that each time we ventured out into the city.

Baqubah is a city of about 450,000 people and its split in half by the Diyala River, and the city is bordered by thousands of acres of palm groves. It was an area that was very easy to disappear into for the bad guys. After we consolidated our forces and started clearing large sections of the city we operated mostly on the west side of the river, so as we pushed them out of the city they were regrouping and digging in on the east side of the river. We were unable to enter the east side of the city because it was so littered with IED’s and land mines that there were no roads we could use to get in there. At one point we tried to make our way into that part of the city by letting the engineers find and detonate the IED’s and in a one mile stretch of road they found over 75 IED’s and land mines. They also lost one of their robots that approaches and attaches a detonator to the bombs because someone fired an RPG out of the palm groves and blew up the robot while it was trying to blow up one of the bombs. Suffice it to say that the east side of the city was a major stronghold for the ISIS fighters and they made it extremely difficult to penetrate.

Part 2 next week.