I look at the Central Command web site frequently. It began to occur to me that I’d seen a rather high number of press releases about Marine deaths in al Anbar province. The screen capture above shows what the search engine turned up for the last 45 days. I count 30 [but there may be duplicate reports].

It looks like there was a spurt of fighting in late May, 2004, and another beginning around June 25 and continuing to date. Marine policy is to announce nothing with regard to the circumstances of the death.

We do have enough experience to draw a conclusion or two from the data. Given the number of dead, there is serious fighting going on in Western Iraq. Based upon past fighting, the enemy is incurring their own deaths at a rate of 5 or 10 to one.

Who are we fighting? Syrians? Baathists? Islamists?

The Marines are in a hell of a fight and we don’t know diddly about it.