Letter from Iraq

Mom,

I read the article you sent. Most of our guys are down at forward operating base Falcon. I go there about once a week; the area is bad. The unit they are talking about, I remember when their commander died, it was probably about two months  ago. And the thing they were talking about with the mosques, that's true too.

There are a lot of mosques used as shelter, or as weapons caches for  insurgents. There is intel on hundreds of mosques that are not only  publicly advocating the killing of American soldiers, they also advocate  the killing of any Iraqi that works in the government, for the government, or for coalition forces. We send people out and they listen to these  broadcasts every night, guys take sniper fire from mosques and can't do  anything about it, they drag in dead bodies, use them as torture chambers, and any other horrible thing you can think of.

Anyone who thinks the reason the different sects are blowing up each other's mosques is religious is wrong: they blow up the opposing mosques because that is where the weapons are, that's where the fighters are, that's the base of operations for different groups.

The US military is not allowed to enter a mosque without permission from the theatre commander. It is unbelievable to me that we can get tips from all around the neighborhood saying the mosque is where the weapons are and they can take potshots at us, advocate killing everyone and we can't step a foot in to search the place.

We tell these guys that they need to help themselves by informing  on criminals in their neighborhoods and when they do and it happens to be a mosque, we have to ignore it. It's the al-Jazeera factor, I suppose.  Still, isn't the mission important enough to stop and say: "we have a file the length of my arm on this mosque, we KNOW they are bad, let's raid it and search it so maybe some people can live."

Apparently soldiers lives, Iraqi lives, and damage to the government, infrastucture, and God knows what else are all not a good enough reason from a pr standpoint to enter a mosque. Go figure.

Love you.

From a daughter serving in the U.S. Army in Iraq.