Soldiers with the U. S. Army's 10th Mountain Division nabbed terrorists and confiscated weapons during an operation in Baghdad Feb. 26.
The soldiers, assigned to Company B, 1st Battalion, 87th Infantry Regiment, 1st Brigade Combat Team, were conducting vehicle inspections in western Abu Ghraib. 1st Lt. Scott Treadwell had ordered his soldiers to search a suspicious vehicle.
Treadwell's men found two known murderers of Iraqi civilians. The two terrorists were carrying rifles and contracts for the murder of other Iraqis.
The capture of the two assassins was inspiring to the soldiers, who conduct patrols every day in hopes of similar success.
"I felt an urge to join after viewing the Nick Berg story on the news," said Pfc. David Henry, Co. B, 1-87 Inf. "One year later, here I am with my platoon and we've captured murderers of innocent people.” Berg was an American contractor in Iraq who'd been captured and killed by terrorists.
And, on Feb. 25, soldiers from the battalion's Company C found a large weapons cache. Officials said that Iraqis -M no longer willing to tolerate terrorists in their neighborhoods - had provided the Americans with the cache's location.
The soldiers discovered weapons buried in an empty field a few miles west of Baghdad. Along with bomb-making equipment the cache yielded five rocket-propelled grenade launchers, 19 rocket-propelled grenades, 20 mortars, eight rockets, 21 grenades and some explosives.
Soldiers from Special Troops Battalion, 1st BCT, 10th Mountain Division destroyed the weapons in a controlled explosion.
"This is a big source of motivation for our soldiers," said Staff Sgt. Douglas Batchko, who led the search that revealed the cache. "Finding and destroying weapons caches like these marks a huge blow to the insurgency.”
(Above courtesy of DoD - American Forces Press Service and taken from a Multinational Division-Baghdad news release.)
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