Map of The Triangle of Death

The latest death toll figures from Hurricane Katrina can be seen on this website here. The famous Russian neo-Nazi video is on this blog here.

Updated January 31, 2008:

If you have been following the news lately, you are aware that a US force was attacked at a checkpoint in the Triangle of Death south of Baghdad, with the guerrillas killing 1 soldier and capturing 2 more. On June 19, at 3:45 PM Iraqi time (4:45 AM PST), the press reported that the 2 captured soldiers had been found killed.

The bodies had actually been found late on Monday, June 18, but the area was so dangerous and the bodies were in such poor shape that the report was delayed by at least 15 hours.

The Pentagon has released the names of the killed and captured soldiers. Pvt. Kristian Menchaca and Pvt. Thomas L. Tucker were captured by guerrillas and later killed. The third soldier, Spc. David J. Babineau, was killed in the attack. The official Pentagon press release is here.

An Iraqi Army official, Major General Abdul Assiz Mohammad-Jassim, Director of Operations for the Iraqi Ministry of Defense, both Menchaca and Tucker were found dead near a power plant in Yusufiyah.

A later report indicated that they were found in Jurf as Sakhr, 3 miles from where they were initially captured, which is where this lonely blog has insisted they were captured from the beginning.

Jurf as Sakhr is a predominantly Sunni town on the Euphrates described by one journalist as a town of "crumbling dirt farms, dilapidated weapons factories and boys selling chickens by the roadside". The Sunnis in Jurf as Sakhr, like most Sunnis in this region, are seething with Nazi-like exterminationist hatred for Shia Iraqis and are heavily involved in the ethnic cleansing of Shia from the area.

Jurf as Sakhr, under Saddam Hussein, was home to rich date plantations, a Scud missile testing site and the Medina Division of the Republican Guard. The powerful Sunni Janabi tribe resides from here all the way to Yusufiyah, 17 miles to the north. The Janabi tribe, which was deeply loyal to Saddam Hussein, is deeply involved in the most extreme racist aspects of the Sunni insurgency.

Adnan Al-Janabi, head of the Janabi tribe that is concentrated around Jurf as Sakhr. This tribe, which is also very prominent up around Yusufiyah, is responsible for most of the violence that has earned the Triangle of Death its name. Janabi himself was a Baathist and a prominent member of Saddam's regime.

He is married to a Shia woman and does not seem to have much control over his tribal members anymore. He turned against the regime partway through the US invasion and worked with the enemy to overthrow Saddam. He is now associated with Iyad Allawi's ex-Baathist party. He does not seem to be playing much of a role in the insurgency.

Unfortunately, the local Shia police have taken to detaining Sunni men from Jurf as Sakhr at will and refusing to release them even after US forces conclude that they are innocent.

If local Sunnis venture to Musayyib to the south, there is a chance they will be abducted and murdered by Shia death squads. In Musayyib, the Islamofascist vermin in the Shia Mahdi Army have laid down a savage version of Sharia, or Islamic Law.

On a side note, note that the International Herald Tribune article about Jurf as Sakhr linked above, published only 3 weeks ago on May 30, said things were starting to look up in Jurf as Sakhr. Not anymore. My, what a difference a few weeks makes.

According to the official, both soldiers had been barbarically killed and there was evidence of torture on their bodies.

The US military initially refused to affirm or deny the reports. Speculation was that the military was angry at the Iraqis for releasing the news before the US could notify the families of the dead soldiers. Later, ABC reported that the US military confirmed the Iraqi report, and CNN said the military had found two bodies that they have not yet identified.

An uncle of one of the dead soldiers is presently lashing out at the military over this ordeal, insisting that the US should have paid a huge ransom to get the POW's back. It is assumed that this poor, damaged man will become the latest conservative punching bag.

The initial incident occurred at 7:55 PM on Friday, June 16. At first, it was believed that there were 3 Humvees with 3 soldiers each at the checkpoint. Witnesses stated that the attack was apparently an elaborate ruse intended to draw 2 of the Humvees away in order to isolate and swarm the third Humvee.

The checkpoint came under attack from many different directions from guerrillas hiding in the fruit groves that line the road. According to the witness, 2 Humvees peeled out to chase the guerrillas into the groves as the guerrillas retreated into the trees, possibly in an effort to draw the soldiers in deeper and away from their checkpoint.

The witnesses said that with the third Humvee isolated, a group of 7 guerrillas in black running suits and masks swarmed the Humvee and attacked it before the soldiers in the Humvee could fight back. 1 guerrilla carried a heavy machine gun and 2 others carried RPG's. They took out the US force in the Humvee, killing 1 US soldier and capturing the other 2.

The US military denies that there were three Humvees at the scene and that one Humvee got separated from the other two (supposedly a violation of force rules). A spokesman said that instead there was only the one Humvee with 3 soldiers at the checkpoint.

A backup force arrived within 15 minutes but they found 1 soldier dead and the other 2 missing. Residents of the area witnessed guerrillas bundling Menchaca and Tucker into 2 vehicles before driving them away. The 2 captured soldiers may have been badly wounded. One of the vehicles was later found abandoned with blood stains on the back seat.

The attack is said to have taken place in Yusufiyah, 20 miles southwest of Baghdad, but that is incorrect. It actually took place on the outskirts of a town called Karagol, where a canal crosses the Euphrates River.

Karagol could not be located on any map. The town is reportedly located right next to Jurf as Sakhr in the far southwestern corner of the Triangle of Death. Jurf as Sakhr is 37 miles southwest of Baghdad and 17 miles south of Yusufiyah. Residents in the area said that they heard rumors that the soldiers were being held in Jurf as Sakhr, rumors that were apparently true.

Reports dating back months describe Karagol as the center of Iraqi Al Qaeda's network in the region. Residents live in terror of terrorists who roam the streets at will. Shia of all ages and both sexes are wantonly abducted, tortured and murdered in large numbers in this region, a process that has been ongoing down there for about 2 years now.

US troops fanned out across the area looking for the captured troops. Ground forces, helicopters and jets participated in the search. Troops searched women wearing hijabs to make sure that men were not hiding behind those garments.

Cell phone service in the area was scrambled to make it hard for the guerrillas to communicate. During operations to find the men, 2 guerrillas were killed and 78 more were arrested. 1 US soldier was killed and 12 more were wounded in the search.

Iraqi Al Qaeda captured the soldiers, perhaps deliberately, possibly to avenge the killing of Musab al-Zarqawi, leader of Iraqi Al Qaeda, 2 weeks ago. Later, IAQ issues a statement on one of their websites confirming that they captured the soldiers.

In the same statement, IAQ said they had captured 4 Russian diplomats and killed a fifth in a raid in the Mansur District in early June. They gave Russia 48 hours to get out of Chechnya. The 48 hours ended with no word from the Russian government.

IAQ then issued another statement saying that since the Russian government refused to give in to IAQ's demands, IAQ is going to murder the 5 diplomats. IAQ issued another statement saying that they murdered the 5 diplomats.

But the most recent article on the crisis quotes Russian officials as saying that the diplomats are still alive and negotiations are ongoing. What is interesting is that Chechen rebels, much reviled for savagery, issued a statement imploring IAQ to spare the lives of the diplomats.

In case you are wondering, this blog strongly supports the Chechen rebels.

After the soldiers' bodies were found, IAQ issued another statement saying that the new head of IAQ, Abu Hamza al-Mujaher, also known as Abu Ayyub al-Masri, had "slaughtered" the POW's.

However, a post on The Counterterrorism Blog said that this statement is fake since it was not posted by IAQ or its propaganda team. Therefore, says Iraqi insurgent expert Even Kohlman, it should be regarded as a hoax until proven otherwise.

The language used in the IAQ statement, along with the Iraqi official's comment that the troops had been "barbarically" killed and the US military's report that it had found "the remains" of 2 bodies, all suggested that the men were personally beheaded by the new leader of IAQ.

The Pentagon and US news channels are not confirming or denying reports that the soldiers were beheaded. They are saying that the bodies showed signs of "severe trauma" such that they could not be immediately identified.

A military official, US Major General William V.Caldwell IV, said that the cause of death could not be determined. However, according to the Houston Chronicle, Mario Vasquez, Menchaca's uncle, verified that Army officials told family members Tuesday morning that both men had indeed been beheaded. Menchaca was from Houston.

And according to a poster on the Free Republic site, on Tuesday afternoon, US Army Colonel David Hunt, a Fox News military expert said that Menchaca and Taylor had, at the least, had their toes cut off and their internal organs removed.

The soldiers' bodies were booby-trapped, in that roadside bombs were scattered along the road leading to the bodies and around the bodies themselves. US forces suspected as much, and called in an explosive team before retrieving the bodies, so none of the bombs went off. But the painstaking procedure slowed the retrieval of the bodies by 12 hours.

The bodies are being shipped back to the US for autopsies and positive identification.

An Iraqi Al Qaeda master plan found in Zarqawi's destroyed safe house in Hibhib said that among IAQ's plans was the capturing and executing of hostages. Donald Sensing of One Hand Clapping astutely points out that after Zarqawi was killed, IAQ and its associated groups started beheading captives again.

For some time prior, IAQ had stopped beheading hostages and was shooting them instead after being reprimanded by top Al Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahiri that the beheadings were alienating people. The suggestion here is that the killing of Zarqawi has so angered IAQ that they have started beheading people again in revenge.

The last known capture of a US soldier in Iraq occurred in April 2004 when Keith M. Maupin was taken prisoner after an attack on his convoy in Abu Ghraib. Later, an Islamofascist group released a videotape purporting to show the murder of this POW, but the Pentagon said that the tape was inconclusive. Having reviewed stills from the tape, I think that the tape shows Maupin being executed.

Fears for the soldiers' safety were validated by the fact that IAQ captured the soldiers. Few Iraqi guerrilla groups have followed anything resembling rules of war in terms of any captured persons, especially captured US and Iraqi forces. Of these, Salafists like IAQ have been the worst offenders. As expected, IAQ apparently killed the troops, though the soldiers would have had greater propaganda value if they had been kept alive.

Sunni Salafist terrorists have captured US and Iraqi troops and have even abducted innocent journalists, businessmen and backpackers as a part of their insane and evil insurgency. These Takfiri maniacs have killed many of their prisoners, and apparently killed Menchaca and Tucker too.

The usual suspects in the rightwing blogosphere are making the non reality-based assessments typical of their surreal community.

After the seizure of the POW's, they called for such insanity as "carpet bombing the Triangle of Death" because the region "harbors terrorists". Now, I am all for killing as many Salafi-jihadis as possible in Iraq and Afghanistan, but doesn't carpet-bombing whole regions sound like a pretty terroristic thing to do ourselves?

Other rightwing blogs questioned whether the terrorists took the captives to "regain the advantage" after Zarqawi's death last week. As if five car bombs in a couple of hours in Baghdad Monday was not enough to show that these guys are not exactly down and out?

Others fretted that the terrorists would kill the soldiers on tape and that then the media will play the tape endlessly in an effort to make us believe that the war "is going badly", when in fact, the war is going just peachy-keen. Bloggers said it was time to stop pussyfooting around and to cry havoc and let slip the dogs of war.

This theoretical escalation would apparently be somehow qualitatively different from the US War on Iraq which has already killed, via pussyfooting, 250,000 Iraqis - the latest estimate by the authors of a famous study in Lancet.

Thankfully, US Dictator and Head Terrorist George Bush went on TV after the soldiers were captured and gave a speech to the terrorists who abducted the soldiers. "Give them back", King George demanded in his best cowboy accent. Surely, every terrorist and guerrilla in Iraq was trembling afterwards. IAQ apparently did not heed Bush's marching orders.

Pathological liar Dick Cheney reiterated that the insurgency was "in its last throes", even as 2 US POW's got their heads sawed off. He had previously said that one year ago. He defends his previous statement now, and reiterates it, with a bizarre explanation. In real life, those of us who are not doormats of masochists tend to run the pathological liars out of our lives and friendship circles. How come it doesn't work that way in politics?

The Triangle of Death has been unstable for a very long time.

Originally the area was mostly Shia, but Super-Racist Saddam Hussein deliberately moved Sunnis into the area to break up and dilute the hated Shia presence, in a type of deliberate ethnic warfare that is practiced in sicko nations the world over, including Israel inside the Green Line, Iran, Indonesia, China, Turkey, the Philippines and Pakistan.

Saddam then handed out Shia lands to these Sunni racists, many of whom came from tribes in the Ramadi and Fallujah area, and sent the these Sunni tribes down South to slaughter Shia in a mass murder campaign during the Shia Uprising after the Gulf War. The original insurgency in this area was pro-Saddam, especially in Latifiyah, traditionally the worst city in the area.

Some of the worst crimes of the early war occurred here. 2 Japanese journalists were burned alive here, 2 Italian journalists were kidnapped and one of them were murdered, 2 French journalists were captured, and Ken Bigley were murdered by Iraqi Al Qaeda. Starting about 2 years ago, the criminal Sunni guerrillas started simply killing any Shia, no matter who they were, simply for their religion.

The perpetrators seemed to be a combination of Saddam loyalists and Sunni Salafist Takfiri extremists. Where one began and the other left off was not completely clear - Chris Albritton points out the process whereby Saddam loyalists morph into radical Islamists here. The region has grown increasingly fundamentalist, and the Takfiris and other Sunni racists have been in full control in recent months.

The influence of the Saddam loyalists in this area, and in the insurgency in general, has dropped off dramatically since the start of the year, in my opinion. I believe that that Saddam loyalists no longer play a prominent role in the insurgency, though the 2 articles linked above certainly call that into question.

As the Salafization of the Sunni insurgency in the Death Triangle deepened, the persecution of both the Shia and anyone violating extreme Islamic strictures escalated. Any Sunni selling land to Shia around Latifiyah was threatened with death.

Shia traveling south to Karbala and Najaf via the main highway - the most direct route - were typically waylaid, harassed, beaten and murdered. A bridge was blown up just before 2 vans full of Shia pilgrims approached it - the vans plunged off the road and a couple dozen Shia were murdered. A woman was murdered for the crime of wearing jeans. And on and on. Typically, Latifiyah was Ground Zero for this animalistic BS.

Obligatory anti-Iraq War plug: This great post from the very good blog No More Mister Nice Blog illustrates brilliantly what the Administration was doing when they got us into this war of choice. The Iraq War was basically a win-win thing for the Bushies.

If it went like a cakewalk, they could continue cakewalk wars of choice until they got bogged down, and reap all the political capital. As long as the wars went well, the Bushies could paint the Dems are war skeptics, even if most Dems were quiet about these victorious wars of choice. Bingo - majority stays in the Republican lap.

The goal seems to have been to create a generational fault line a la the Vietnam War - the aftermath of which caused a national tectonic shift to Republican conservatism. Even if the war goes badly, the macho, proud, vengeful POV that retains our emotional investment is to buck up and slug out the war, no matter how hopeless it seems.

As Steve points out insightfully: I think the White House wanted to create a generational fault line, with Republicans on the side of fighting and pride and vengeance and Democrats painted as the other side. I'm afraid it's still working, if barely.

Bush may never again be a popular president, but Americans either have to stick with his party's approach or embrace an alternative that's dispiriting -- which means he may still have us where he wants us.

As you can see, there is no glory in our position. Withdrawal is humiliating and miserable and feels like losing. It feels like all of those US deaths and injuries for naught. But the warmongers have us by the balls.

I noticed that the murder and torture of the 2 US POW's (a serious defeat for the US) is taken by the pro-war crowd as all the more reason to stay there and kick and some major butt. So, if we are losing, we definitely need to stay. But the killing of Zarqawi, coded as a major US victory, meant that we were winning, and this was no time to cut and run.

Anyway, if we leave, we renounce forever the possibility of future victories - like killing the new Zarqawis that will keep popping up like weeds. So, if we are winning, then we for sure need to stay. Get it? No matter if we are winning or losing, we still need to stay in Iraq. Now how do you argue with someone like that, anyway?

A map of the Triangle of Death showing the location of the town where the soldiers were captured can be seen below. This is probably one of the best maps on the net showing the Triangle of Death.

Looking at this updated map of the Triangle of Death, you can see that on many maps, the Triangle of Death is not really a triangle at all - it is more a parallelogram. Note that the boundaries are approximately Iskandariyah and Jurf as Sakhr in the south and Yusufiyah, Madaen and Salman Pak in the north. The boundaries on the east are Madaen and Salman Pak and on the west are Jurf as Sakhr and Yusufiyah. The Triangle also includes Mahmudiyah and Latifiyah.

Most maps of the triangle usually just draw a triangle from Mahmudiyah to Yusufiyah to Iskandariyah, including Latifiyah. The resulting smaller triangle is not correct because it fails to include Jurf as Sakhr west of Iskandariyah and Madaen and Salman Pak to the far east. This map ideally should include Rushdi Mullah, a town that is definitely part of the Triangle, as this gripping account of a recent firefight shows. I would have included Rushdi Mullah but I am getting tired of redrawing this map.

Jurf as Sakhr, Madaen and Salman Pak are clearly part of the Triangle of Death. The attack took place in Karagol, which, though not marked on the map, is apparently right next to Jurf as Sakhr. Copyright Oakhurst Technology 2006. All rights reserved.

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