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'Deuce Four' balances Mosul raids with medical aid

May-21-2005 » Filed Under: 1/25 SBCT

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By Sandra Jontz, Stars and Stripes

MOSUL, Iraq — There are at least 13 fewer insurgents terrorizing Mosul.

In the overnight hours of Thursday and Friday, soldiers with 1st Battalion, 24th Infantry Regiment conducted nine simultaneous raids and cordon-and-searches throughout Mosul.

The unit, known as the “Deuce Four,” captured 13 terrorists, including three foreign fighters who said they’d come to be suicide martyrs, said Lt. Col. Erik Kurilla, the battalion’s commanding officer. The military declined to specify the fighters’ nationality.

The detainees were high on drugs and some weren’t captured without a fight, to include one combative detainee who bit Kurilla.

“They were on drugs, they admitted to it this morning,” he said. Kurilla said he did not know what drugs they had been taking. “They were ... hopped up.” [...]

Since Deuce Four arrived in Mosul in October, soldiers have killed nearly 300 insurgents and captured more than 600. [...]

Day in and day out, the Deuce Four soldiers patrol Mosul to find holed-up insurgents and their weapons and bomb-making materials, and to drive a wedge between law-abiding residents and the insurgents, said Capt. Paul Carron, Company B commander. [...]

But the soldiers’ missions are not all about capturing bad guys.

During the late-night raid into the Isla Zeral neighborhood, Company B soldiers learned about 5-year-old Rhma Taha Ahmed, who suffers from a congenital heart defect that is slowly taking her life.

As promised, at about 7:30 a.m. Friday, soldiers brought a doctor to her family’s home.

Though Rhma was frightened at first of the armed soldiers in vests and helmets, she finally yielded to Dr. (Maj.) Dave Brown’s soft words and touch as he listened to her heart and lung sounds and tapped her hands and feet. [...]

While he could make no promises that care would be provided, Brown is working to see what services might be available, through U.S. channels or others, to save Rhma, he said.


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