Iraq Journal: Operation Dagger: Coming up empty
Lake Tharthar, Iraq—Marines hunting in the Iraqi desert north of Baghdad for large weapons caches and insurgent training camps came up largely empty after three days of searching.
Operation Dagger kicked off on Saturday aimed at rousting insurgents from a section of Al Anbar province. The roughly battalion-size operation of about 800 American and Iraqi troops, backed up with air support from F/A-18 jets and Cobra attack helicopters, has searched the eastern coast of Lake Tharthar and the adjacent desert since early Saturday. In March, an Army unit discovered an insurgent training camp in the area.
Since the fall of Fallujah, some parts of the insurgency have rebased themselves in rural parts of Al Anbar province, away from the areas regularly patrolled by American and Iraqi troops. The rural, and nomadic, insurgent bases have proved difficult to find and destroy. And even before the operation kicked off, Marine officers took pains to play down expectations. Technological intelligence, like aerial reconnaissance and spy satellites, has limits: Analysts can identify structures, but they have a hard time telling exactly what they are used for. "It is not known if there are enemy there," said Lt. Col. William Jurney, the commander of the 1st Battalion, 6th Marines, before the operation began. "It could be fishermen."
To the marines' disappointment, it has proved to be mostly fishermen who are camped on the shores of Lake Tharthar. The area was a training ground for the Republican Guard (as well as the site of a casino) during Saddam Hussein's regime, and civilians were prohibited from fishing its waters. But after the fall of Saddam, some of the same fishermen who worked the shores in the 1960s returned to their old grounds.
Though many of the Marine grunts patrolling the desert said they were frustrated not to have found training camps or engaged insurgents in a firefight, Jurney called the search a success. He said his forces had uncovered dozens of mortar rounds and rocket-propelled grenade rounds–the building blocks of improvised explosive devices, the biggest threat American troops face. "Each of these mortar rounds we destroy is one that cannot be used against a marine, soldier, or sailor," said Jurney.
Though there was at least one large cache discovered, most of the rounds have been unexploded ordnance from the Republican Guard training area, according to the Marine engineers working with the operation.
Operation Dagger, or Khanjar in Arabic, kicked off a day after Operation Spear, a similarly sized operation taking place in the western portion of Al Anbar province. But Spear has netted more immediate results: About 60 insurgents have been killed and 100 captured, and multiple caches have been raided, with dozens of RPG launchers and other weapons seized.
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