WILL SOMEBODY TELL FOX NEWS BULLETS ARE STILL FLYING IN IRAQ

G.I.’s Find Bullets Still Flying at Outpost in Iraq
By TIM ARANGO
NEW YORK TIMES
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/15/world/middleeast/15base.html?hp

ASH SHURA, Iraq — Technically, American soldiers have stopped fighting in Iraq. But they can fire back when attacked, which happens frequently in this village of wheat and barley farmers, as well as an uncomfortable number of Baathist insurgents.
So much so that, while United States troops in nearly all other parts of the nation are quietly preparing to withdraw, soldiers stationed here are fighting what looks, for now, like the last American combat in the seven-year war in Iraq.
“They only attack Americans,” said Capt. Russell B. Thomas, the commander of Alpha Company of the First Battalion of the Third Infantry Division’s Second Brigade.
They may only attack Americans now, but with all combat troops scheduled to leave Iraq by the end of August, military commanders worry that this area in northern Iraq offers a glimpse of a post-American Sunni insurgency, led by former Saddam Hussein loyalists intent on overthrowing the Shiite-dominated central government.
Some in the American military view the insurgents in this area, a group called the Men of the Army of Al Naqshbandia Order, as a greater long-term threat to stability here than Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia, whose top leadership was recently killed by American and Iraqi forces not far from this village.
Lt. Col. Michael A. Marti, an intelligence officer with Task Force Marne, Third Infantry Division, said the group had a more cohesive militarylike structure than Al Qaeda — many were military officers under Mr. Hussein— and the worry among American military officers is that once the Americans leave they will turn toward attacking Iraqis. Many experts say the probability goes up if the nation’s Shiite majority does not give Sunnis a meaningful role in the new government being formed now in Baghdad. Under Mr. Hussein’s government, Sunnis, while a minority in Iraq, were in power.
“There’s a longing to return to that,” Colonel Marti said.
In most of the country, the Iraqi Army and the police are the visible face of security, with Americans largely out of public view. Not here. When American units left city centers last June, they largely took on advisory roles, training Iraqi security forces and responding to attacks only rarely and only at the request of the Iraqis
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