Stryker Brigade News

Over a lunch of piping hot pita bread, roasted chicken, potatoes, eggplant and lamb-topped pizza, Vanantwerp, 29, sat with a restaurant owner to learn of new developments.

“All the men in your neighborhood need to make an agreement that if you ever see foreigners committing a crime, you have to go out and scare them off,” he said through a translator. “And you need to call us.” [...]

While making connections helps, sometimes it’s soldiers’ observations that lead them to insurgents, such as the suspicious behavior of two men driving who caught battalion commander Lt. Col. Erik Kurilla’s attention Wednesday afternoon.

When soldiers stopped the car and dismounted from their Stryker vehicles, the men were reluctant to get out of the car. When they finally did, a search turned up a machine gun and 500 rounds, two Kalashnikovs with 10 magazines, three ski masks and documents. The men were detained.

“This neighborhood is what we’d like to see the rest of Mosul become,” 2nd Lt. Dave Beaudoin, 23, said of the al-Mansoor area of about 6,000 residents, whose polling place had the highest voter turnout for the Jan. 30 elections. The few bombings and small-arms fire encountered when they first arrived in October have all but stopped, he said. [...]

On Thursday, Cheney checked on a teenage boy jailed by Iraqi police commandos who thought he was involved with a roadside bomb nearly three weeks earlier. The teen had simply been in the wrong place at the wrong time, Cheney said.

The teen’s family erupted with joy when Cheney told them the teen was well and soon would be released.

The hour-and-a-half it took out of his day will pay off immeasurably, Cheney said, hoping word will spread through the neighborhood.