Photo By Luis Delgadillo | An explosive ordnance disposal team conducts a controlled detonation on munitions...... read more read more
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By Sgt. Luis Delgadillo
2nd Brigade Combat Team, 3rd Infantry Division
FORWARD OPERATING BASE KALSU, Iraq - In the early morning of, April 2, 2nd Brigade Combat Team Soldiers took weapons out of the hands of insurgents in Kutimiyah, north of Joint Security Site W-1.
Hours earlier, Iraqi army soldiers with 5th Battalion, 25th Brigade, 6th IA Division, questioned a suspected insurgent who said he had information on a weapons cache location.
"For the past couple of weeks the IA had been hearing about a guy who used to work with al-Qaida and he stayed in the area and he didn't flee like the rest did," said Staff Sgt. Ronald Satterwhite, a section chief with Battery B.
The man admitted to knowing the approximate location of buried weapons.
He needed his brother's assistance - another known collaborator with al-Qaida, according to IA soldiers - to find the exact location.
The Soldiers of Battery B, 1st Battalion, 9th Field Artillery, 2nd BCT, 3rd Infantry Division rolled out of the JSS, informant in tow, to pay his brother a visit.
Satterwhite, of Glenville, Ga., said he and his fellow Soldiers had been trying to speak with the brother for two weeks but were unable to find him each time they went to his residence. Tonight, fortune favored Battery B.
"We just got lucky, he immediately knew what we were going after ... it didn't take too much talking to him to get him to take us to where they were," Satterwhite said.
With both brothers assisting, it was a matter of minutes before the Soldiers were digging up the first of five caches.
At the first cache site, beside a road in the dirt wall of a canal, they found three separate weapons caches consisting of 45 rocket propelled grenade warheads, 300 PKC heavy machine gun rounds, 37 mortar and projectile fuses, one DSHKA .50 caliber machine gun with 500 rounds of ammunition and an anti-personnel mine.
In a farm field adjacent to the road the informants also dug up a complete 81 mm mortar system.
While the Soldiers waited for an explosive ordnance disposal team to arrive they learned the informants knew of a few more weapons stashes.
Walking 500 meters to the south of the first cache site, the brothers stopped first in a farm field to pick up an RPG launcher, next at a farm house where they located machine gun ammunition, then at a culvert to dig up another 81 mm mortar tube and finally reached the last cache, a buried 55 gallon barrel containing a PKC machine gun and 2000 PKC machine gun rounds.
The Soldiers collected the additional weapons and returned to meet the explosive ordance disposal team who was already at the site of the first cache preparing the find for disposal.
| Date Taken: | 04.02.2008 |
| Date Posted: | 04.04.2008 13:26 |
| Story ID: | 18071 |
| Location: | ISKANDARIYAH, IQ |
| Web Views: | 127 |
| Downloads: | 109 |
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