Via The Editors we hear about apparently another contractor massacre:

The mob grew more frenzied as the gunmen dragged the two surviving Americans from the cab of their bullet-ridden lorry and forced them to kneel on the street.

Killing one of the men with a rifle round fired into the back of his head, they doused the other with petrol and set him alight. Barefoot children, yelping in delight, piled straw on to the screaming man's body to stoke the flames.

This was reported yesterday, Oct 22nd, in only one paper, as far as I can tell. The event is reported to have occurred Sept 20th, and the story was repressed by CENTCOM, perhaps because the story so closely resembles the attack on Halliburton contractors in Fallujah in early 2004.

Perhaps fearful of public reaction in America, where support for the war is falling, US officials suppressed details of the Sept 20 attack, which bore a striking resemblance to the murder of four other contractors in Fallujah last year.

The article is actually quite US-friendly, carefully mentioning the Bu$hCo party line about foreign fighters.

Duluiya, located in the notorious Sunni triangle, is much smaller than Fallujah but no less violent, even if events here rarely make the news.

The violence here seems to encapsulate the growing difficulties the US military is facing in trying to defeat the insurgency. Pinned down by a constant stream of hit-and-run attacks from former Saddam regime loyalists, American soldiers are unable to focus their attention on the foreign extremists who pose a far more dangerous threat to the future of Iraq.

The isolated towns east of the Tigris supply the foreign fighters and their allies and provide a haven where they can regroup after American offensives on their urban strongholds. If the Americans do not close off these boltholes, it seems unlikely the war can be won.

Whether the fabled “foreign fighters” are really militarily significant in the Iraqi resistance is a moot question, because the US military lacks concrete intelligence and any truly effective means of collecting it. There’s that language problem, as well as the cultural awareness difficulties that prevent truly good merging with any Iraqi elements that might be predisposed to help us. The Iraqis consider this “collaboration” and they’ve found an effective means of punishment: kill the collaborator and his family.
If we can’t offer them safety they won’t help us. If they won’t help us and remain neutral, then we’ve lost.

Lt Col Gary Brito, the battalion's [ed: 1st/15th Infantry] commanding officer, said that in recent months the number of roadside bombs targeting his men had increased by a third - even though journeys out of base have been cut back. They are having a more devastating effect too.

"Before only two out of 10 used to be effective," he said. "Now four or five have a catastrophic effect, blowing away a vehicle or causing casualties." In the past few months at least four American soldiers in this battalion alone have been killed. Another 39 have been wounded.

Time to fold up the tents and plan a fighting withdrawal.