Stryker Brigade News

Colonel Tovo emphasizes that surgical force must be combined with other methods. In the restive west, his teams woo Sunni tribal chiefs and have persuaded some to send recruits to the police and army. "This task force understands that we cannot kill our way to victory," he told U.S. News. "That said, we live in the security side of the house. We are building Iraqi security force capacity and using that to attack insurgents." This year, Iraqi units with special ops advisers detained 2,065 selected targets, including 460 high- and mid-value ones, killed 222 enemy combatants, and wounded 92. Perhaps a more important measure of their success is that, thanks to their careful targeting and preparation of evidence packets, 70 percent of those captured remain in detention and 85 percent of those who made it to trial were convicted, compared with 40 and 50 percent for other units.

Perhaps their most important breakthrough was getting Mosul's largely Sunni police force to work with the Kurdish Army brigade that secures the east half of the city. After a suicide bomber hit the Army unit one day in July, the police responded-before the U.S. soldiers even learned of the attack. "They were fighting each other just two years ago," says one of Webster's company commanders. The Special Forces master sergeant praised the young officer's diplomatic skill. "He played them like a fiddle," he said.

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