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01-18-2007, 21:18 PM
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Michael Yon interview on Hugh Hewitt
Some excerpts from a Michael Yon interview. I invite folks to talk a look at the whole transcript.
Quote:
http://michaelyon-online.com/media/p...-Jan-12-07.pdf
HH: We turn to an American reporter in al-Anbar Province. Michael Yon, a pleasure to have you back on the Hugh Hewitt Show. Michael, tell us where you are and what you’ve been doing.
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MY: Let me start just slightly north of there, Hugh, and go to two extremes. One extreme is the Kurdish north, where everything is a done deal, and the other extreme is Anbar Province, which you just mentioned, where the
Iraqi Security Forces are really in the crawling stage at best. Now here in Nineveh Province, where Mosul is the capitol, the ISF is doing very well, actually.
***
HH: Now in Mosul itself, can civilians walk the streets without fear of IED’s exploding and snipers?
MY: It’s still dangerous here. It’s not anything like it was when I left. Now when I talk with the soldiers here, to them, it seems very dangerous, which it is. They have about 8-12 IED’s a day, still, but those IED’s, generally
speaking, are not anything like what they used to be about a year ago. A year to a year and a half ago, they would be catastrophic attacks, could destroy an entire vehicle. Now, a lot of them are actually just pipe bombs,
and they’re surface-laid. Now there was a vehicle that was very badly damaged about two days ago, a striker, but for the most part, they’re just surfaced-laid pipe bombs, that sort of thing. The snipers previously were very
good here in Mosul. Now, they’re not so good. Now down in Ramadi, they’re excellent, unfortunately. But no, in Mosul, the insurgents are on the run. They’re hiding. And so they’re fighting a losing game up here. It’s not
over, don’t get me wrong. But the ISF is getting stronger faster than the insurgents are.
***
HH: Michael, before we got cut off on that satellite interruption there, you were about to give us your best guess of what Mosul will look like in a year. Please do.
MY: Right. Hugh, I usually don’t do the crystal ball thing, but I think I’m going to do it this time, because I do have some confidence. I think a year from now, and I’m going to go on the record here, I believe a year from
now, the ISF, the Iraqi Security Forces in Nineveh, are mostly going to be running the operation. I believe we’re still going to definitely have a U.S. presence here. That’s going to be needed beyond a year from now. But it’s
very clear that the Iraqi Security Forces, the Iraqi police and army, are getting much stronger. We need to build the next layer in their organization. Their combat power is already there. They’re well-trained, they’re getting
better as well. But now, the next stage is to build those other layers that go into a military, for instance, logistics and those sort of things, sustainment, but these things take time. But when it comes down to day to day combat,
the insurgents are definitely on the run here. They know they’re not welcome in Mosul. And so what’s happening now is the insurgents are trying to operate outside of Mosul in the villages, and they’re now being targeted there. You know, Tal Afar used to be a huge problem west of Mosul about a year and a half ago, but that’s now been a tremendous success story. You’ll still see some attacks on the news, but they’re more of a nuisance than anything else. So I’d say a year from now, you’re…you don’t see Mosul or Nineveh Province in the news much already. So I think a year from now, people are going to forget that it even exists.
HH: All right, now take us down to Anbar. You have an amazing series of posts and pictures on Anbar, and the difficulty of the fighting there. But capture it, if you could, in a few minutes for our radio audience, Michael
Yon.
MY: Okay, Anbar is on a different edge of the scale there. The good things I’ve said about Nineveh Province I cannot say about Anbar. I was just down there talking with quite a few Marines and soldiers on different bases,
and observation posts, and also people that were out training Iraqi army and police. The government, the Iraqi government in Anbar Province is all but non-existence. Now it is definite confidence among the Marines and
the Army trainers there that they are making progress. And you would never guess from the news. And it is deadly. I mean, that’s a serious fight down there. Just in a three day period, while I was in Ramadi and Fallujah,
we lost four people to snipers, KIA, and then there was quite a few others wounded. And so, the fight down there is very intense. We don’t have enough people in Anbar Province, and that’s one of our problems. It’s a
very large province, there’s big cities there, Ramadi and Fallujah. Fallujah’s getting better, still extremely dangerous, but much better than it was before. So there’s progress there, but that one is a definite sore spot that
needs to be addressed in a big, big way.
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