One young Sons of Iraq member with cuts on his arms and face told me that he had seen the whole thing. A “foreigner” with a “pale face and a long beard” pulled around the corner in his car and stopped directly in front of the checkpoint in front of Zakaria’s house. Waiting to be checked, the driver pulled out a grenade and tossed it under a truck in front of him that was carrying large 55-gallon drums of diesel fuel, and just before the explosion, the young man said, he jumped into a canal across the street to save himself.


1st Lieutenant Pete Cox, a twenty-three year-old Class of 2006 West Point grad, was in the base at the time of the explosion, and helped coordinate the treatment of the wounded Iraqis. There were no interpreters on base at the time, so Cox and others had to rely on their rudimentary Arabic and sign language to communicate. “Remember that famous picture from Vietnam with the little girl running from the napalm?” he asked, “it reminded me of that scene. I’d never seen injuries like that, I’d never seen burns like that. You had some guys with small shrapnel cuts and burns, and then you had guys with compound fractures and cuts all over their body and burns all over their body.”


One of the injured was a young boy, who had been at Zakaria’s with his father. His face was badly burned. “He looked like his face had been exposed to the flame, but the rest of him was fine. It looked like he was behind a wall, maybe, and only his face was exposed.”


The explosion and the aftermath was a test Lt. Cox felt that the patrol base passed. “The soldiers were pretty inventive about where to hang the IV bags, and figure out ways to help these people. You only have so many medics and when you have a mass casualty situation like that, you just don’t have enough, you can’t tend them all at the same time.”


Within thirty minutes of the blast, two Army helicopters actually landed on the small patch of land inside the base to ferry the most badly wounded Iraqis to an Army hospital, a risky move that impressed Cox, and one he hoped impressed the Iraqis, as well. It showed the Iraqis, he believes, that while groups like al Qaeda want to sow death, the Americans are willing to risk their lives to save Iraqi lives.


The attack came at a time of increasing al Qaeda attacks on Sons of Iraq checkpoints, a gambit that doesn’t seem to be accomplishing its objective of getting Iraqis to quit the groups.


“That we’re taking more Iraqi casualties means that they’re getting involved,” Cox told me that evening. “And it’s not just bystanders but guys who are putting their life on the line. The fact that they were targeted—Abu Zakaria and the Sons of Iraq—means that they’re considered a threat. And if al Qaeda thinks they’re a threat that means that they’re doing something right.”


Still, while that may or may not be true, the events of a single day at combat outpost IBA show that this war is far from over, and the complex maneuverings of fighting a counterinsurgency are only now starting to become fully apparent.


Part One, “The Rejected,” is here.

Part Two, “Men With Guns,” is here.

Part Three: “Night Patrol,” is here.