EFL
During the April 6 Battle of Debecka Pass fought near between Mosul and Kirkuk, Antenori said, the Americans’ prior training in Kuwait with the shoulder-fired Javelin surface-to-surface missile system turned out "to be worth its weight in gold." During that fight, 31 Americans and 80 Iraqi Peshmerga troops, aided by Navy fighter bombing runs guided by Air Force combat air traffic controllers, successfully dealt with an Iraqi infantry brigade that was equipped with T-55 tanks and armored personnel carriers, Antenori said.
The fighting went back and forth, he recalled, but ultimately the Navy jets and Javelins destroyed myriad enemy armored personnel carriers and tanks, taking "the wind out of the Iraqi’s sails" and helping to seal the victory. After two more hours of fighting, the Iraqis left the battlefield, Antenori said, abandoning eight of their tanks and 16 APCs during the withdrawal. Not everything, though, went according to plan, Antenori acknowledged, noting that a Navy bomb mistakenly killed a group of Kurdish soldiers gathered around a disabled T-55 tank. "It was just one of those terrible things that happens" during war, he said. |