A second look at that fleeing Iraqi unit

Yesterday, the NYTimes had a story on an Iraqi unit in Sadr City who fled the action.

Today the NYTimes gives a voice to the Iraqi commander involved. He claims he was taking a "long overdue" 3 day break.

He had not been paid in two months and was overwhelmed by the problems of commanding his company..... He was considering not going back to the fight in Sadr City......

The captain who left his men on Tuesday said that even away from the battle, he was not able to escape his army burdens. He said his phone rang incessantly. His men had called from the front line saying that, once again, they had run out of ammunition and they pleaded for help.....

Then his phone had rung again, he said. It was the Mahdi Army militia, the group his men were fighting, on the line.

“We know where you live,” they had told him.

“If they come to my house, they can kill my whole family,” he said.

On the phone they had read a roster of names of the men in his battalion. “I don’t even have access to that,” he said. “They could only have gotten it from my senior commanders.....

He said most of his men had only two 30-round ammunition magazines each, magazines that sell for less than $12 on the streets of Baghdad.....

His company was below half-strength and shrinking by the day. It was down to 70 men from a normal roster of 150. Five had been wounded in the past week, others had been lent to another company. And then there was the desertion problem, made worse by the threatening phone calls from the Mahdi Army to his men......

As much as he did not want to leave his men, he was not sure he would return to them.

“It is very hard; I’m thinking of resigning,” he said.

It does sound like he abandoned his men, but who would want that job?

Unpaid, undermanned, and underarmed, very real threats to your family, and always looking both up and down the command structure to see who is looking to put a bullet in your back.