So that's the story of "afternoon coffee." Just in case you were wondering. And, yeah, we once had it while a murthering great battle was raging but there wasn't much we could do about it at that point so we had "coffee."
Back to the run.
The good news was, there were no major threats. I sweated blood at first figuring we were going to get hit by RIFs from every side. Shouldn't have bothered. The area was more agricultural than the Midwest. And while it was more densely populated, it was spread out.
See, they didn't do the whole "industrial farming" thing with giant combines. That area, you were lucky to have a tractor. Bunch of it was done by ox plow. Good in one way; they had less to fall from the Plague and shit. But not particularly efficient. See "Organic."
So you'd have a farmhouse surrounded by a few trees and some fields. Farming less than a hundred acres cause that's about what you can do with oxen and shit. Then another down the road not too far.
And the area had been hit hard by the Plague. No medical facilities to speak of, not many cities and few towns. Just fucking farms and irrigation ditches.
Most of the farms were fallow and I could tell the irrigation system was breaking down. Places where the water had spread out over fields and was still there. Places where ditches were dry.
We didn't see many people. There must have been a shitload before the Plague but I figure they took at least 80% casualties between the Plague and secondaries.
Up side was that there was probably enough food stored.
But harvests had gotten fucked up by the Plague and the weather. That area normally had at least two harvests a year, three if you did it right. Most of the wheat, millet, peas and what-not was still standing. Most of it was all fucked up for that matter.
There were some fields active. I taught the Scouts to recognize those and we avoided them as much as possible. These people were going to need the food. We could go through the fallow fields.
Not that they were probably going to be allowed to keep it. Places like this never did. Somebody more powerful came along and took it away to feed an army.
We ran into that around Al Amarah. Actually, near a village called Al Halfayah. Group of thugs in a truck rounding up food from one of the functioning farms.
I wasn't going to get into it. Pax Americana. See also: Gnat/blast furnace.
Problem was, one of the thugs spotted our Scout vehicle and took it under fire with an RPG.
Which was really really stupid. The max range on an RPG is about 300 meters against a moving target, which the Scout was. And they were almost a klick back.
The 25mm, especially with stabilization systems, has a max effective range of 2000 meters.
So they lit up the thugs' truck.
We carefully maneuvered around the farm but I sent the gun Stryker with Hollywood on it over to parley and gain intel.
The "tax collectors" had been from a group called the Al Sulemani Warriors' Brigade. They were the big local group based in and around Al Amarah. The farmer didn't know much about them except that they were taking his food and telling him he was now under their rule.
There was a lot of that as we headed north. Every little city had its rulers and was, in effect, a city-state. Al this and Ibn that and . . . They sort of blended.
Mostly we tried to avoid them. When it did come down to getting busy, it was usually against a small detachment like the "tax collectors" that got stupid. Sometimes we saw guys who were less stupid who just let us pass through.
More or less stayed the same until we got up around Baghdad. At which point three things happened in pretty rapid succession, Bad, Good, Really bad. (Or at least I thought so at the time.)
I'll take the "good" first since it leads to the "bad" and the "really bad" is pretty unconnected.
The good was that we finally got ahold of the Kurds.
I've spoken about the Kurds a little but I figure I'll add some detail.
The Kurds are a mountain people found in the mountainous triangle of what used to be Iraq, Turkey and Iran and is now Kurdistan good and proper.
They're pretty much descended from the Hurrians (look it up) and have been in those mountains for fucking ever. Like the Nepos there's some basic similarities between all Kurds:
They're generally fairly tall for the region, not giants just a bit above average.
They're very straightforward compared to anybody else in the whole fucking area, even to an extent the Greeks. You don't spend ten minutes exchanging polite inquiries about their family with the Kurds; you get to the point.
They love Americans despite the fact that we've regularly fucked them over. (Ditto British.)
They treat their women just about as badly as any other group in the Middle East. Perhaps a touch worse. By the same token, they're pretty okay with women in positions of soft power like doctors.
They are hard-core, in-your-face, one-of-us-is-going-to-get-fucked-up-and-it's-you fighters.
Since back in the Bronze age they've gone through periods of conquering the lowlands around them, getting pushed back by a big "settled" empire, raiding said empire until it takes them over, fighting against the conquerors until nearly wiped out, becoming the best fucking fighters the empire has after it tacitly lets them run things in their own area, waiting until the empire falls and repeat.
Suleiman, one of the most famous warriors of Islam and the guy who kicked the fuck out of one Richard the Lion Hearted? Kurd.
That's the Kurds in a nutshell.
So we finally got ahold of the Kurds when we were southeast of Baghdad and trying to screen past.
To our east were the Zagros Mountains. As a foretaste of what was to come they were covered in fucking snow about two thirds of the way down. They also had a bunch of bad-boy Iranians in them and we'd picked up indicators of some organization, a couple more city-state groups, around Ilam and Khorambad. They were reputed to be remnant Revolutionary Guard back in command and had some fair forces. We did not want to tangle with them in mountains. Especially mountains covered in snow.
So we were keeping to the lowlands, hoping to slip through between Baghdad and the mountains and avoid major conflict.
My initial goal was the Kurdish region. Why besides the above?
During the latter reign of Saddam Hussein the U.S. had established a "no-fly" zone over the northern part of Iraq. (And the south but it was different there.) They also sent in SF teams to work with the Kurds.
With no more than "keep the helos and planes off of us" and some spare equipment the Kurds kicked the shit out of everything Saddam sent at them on the ground and established their own local democracy. Saddam purely hated the Kurds; he'd used poison gas on them in his time. He wanted to be one of the guys that conquered them. Good luck, the Kurdish Perg Mersha were not going to be beaten by a bunch of lowland driven wheat-farmers.
But they really appreciated the help, little as it was. And when we went in and hung Saddam, the "Kurdish Provinces" were the only areas we didn't get fucked in.
There were, basically, four cities in the "Kurdish Provinces." Two of them were pure Kurdish; the other two had been "disputed."
The pure Kurdish were As Sulymaniyah—and, yeah, that's "Suleiman"—and Kirkuk. The two "disputed" were Mosul and Irbil.
See, Mosul and Irbil, pre-Saddam and during the first part of his reign, had been pretty mixed cities. They were about 70% Kurdish with the rest being Assyrian Christians, Turkics and a smattering of Islamic Arabs. More or less in that order.