Hearts and Minds Update

On a tip from Owlmother (she who makes salacious salads), comes this further sign of the morass of amorality we have stepped into in Iraq.

On Sept. 10, American troops in helicopters swooped down on this remote desert sheepherding village and detained nearly all the males, one as young as 13 and at least two in their 80s. More than a month after the raid, apparently aimed at preventing foreign fighters from slipping across the border from Saudi Arabia, only two of the 79 captives have been freed.

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U.S. military officers declined to talk about the operation, but knowledgeable American sources confirmed the basics of the account given to the Associated Press by six villagers, including one detainee who was released. Their description of what happened offers the first details of U.S. military operations in this border area as well as one of the first looks at efforts to fight the influx of foreign insurgents as the scope of guerrilla violence against American troops increases.

Villagers say they heard the whir of helicopters at dawn over Habbariyah, a Bedouin enclave of 500 people clustered in an area about the size of two football fields. The village is in Anbar province, a third of Iraq's territory stretching west, north and south from Baghdad to the borders with Saudi Arabia, Syria and Jordan. U.S. soldiers come under daily attack in the conservative, mostly Sunni Muslim province, a former stronghold of support for Saddam Hussein.

Over the next 10 hours, villagers say, troops rounded up men including police, the elderly and teenagers. One woman also was seized. All were restrained with plastic handcuffs and taken to one house. From there, troops loaded the captives on to the helicopters and flew them to an air base north of the village.

The woman, the wife of a tribal leader, was released the next day. The men were transported to the Abu Ghraib prison west of Baghdad, where all but two remain. The two who were freed were Sheikh Meta'ab al-Hathal, 88, the tribal chief, and Hawas Sahn Ibrahim, 81.