The contest surrounding Military Bloody Day (period) number five;
Who wins the Blue Footed Crane Trophy to MBD five?

 

Posted 04 December  2003.

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Introduction: The so called Military Bloody Days into Iraq (and Afghanistan) are a great success, every time the resistance did scale up a bit. Therefore MBD number five was turned into some kind of contest, that cell (or cells) that killed the most coalition soldiers wins the Blue Footed Crane Trophy!

But the information from the Media was rather mixed in a number of cases, therefore it is hard for me to announce 'the winner' with 100% certaincy. Therefore I just make a list of the attacks as far as they have reached me via the Media and in every instance tell what details I hold for 'true' and what for 'false'. 

Paragraph number one: 

The attacks on police stations into Iraq, remark that police is not a full blown 'coalition member' and like I said before the resistance must try to use their fellow Iraqis in positions like this to make spectacular attacks!
But since I still have problems with local police here in Holland (constantly until the highest levels refusing to investigate into how the 9/11 attacks really could have happened...) I think that for this first contest it is 'ok'.

Flip! I lost the little note with the numbers! So I grab it from my memory;

There were 12 dead reported included 3 civilians (again I grab this from my memory, so I could be wrong!). According to valuation model (as in example one on the previous page) with  

a = 0 and b = 1 

there are 9 points to be collected. So this looks like the winner to the Blue Footed Crane Trophy!

Remark: For my private use I often simply take 

  a = 1 and b = 1

to measure 'success' although in my writing I constantly ask for minimizing collateral stuff (so pretending me being a saint). According to alpha and beta both being one the number of collected points is 6.     

 

Paragraph number two:

Of course it has to be mentioned; the rocket attack on that DHL plane that was not blown out of the skies but had to return with one of it's engines (and the wing) on fire. Given the psychological impact of this against the coalition forces I found wisdom in rewarding this with five 'bonus' points. 

So that is it, why not look at one of those (civilian) planes again?

Title: Sharply placed at the perfect date of 22 Nov & thanks people!
        

Remark: Other cells must not feel jealous that no pics of their attacks are placed. This file is not the place of graphical art or some list of photos. 

Paragraph number three:

The helicopter downing into the Afghan landscape. There were reported five American GI Joes dead in this crash.
In case the Taliban statement was true (that means when the plane was shot out of the skies with some heavy machine gun fire) they have five points! 

A pity I do not have photos from that scene, may it would have made nice war art (may be combined with the five coffins of those who fell on the path of defending freedom). So Taliban, five real points in that in case you shot it out of the skies.  

Paragraph number four:

The world is a strange place, we all know this. But even the US army did compete for the Blue Footed Crane Trophy because they to did shoot with sharp timing. On Saturday 22 November an Abrams tank did shoot a Humvee at the Baghdad international airport resulting in two death!

Suppose furthermore that the (Western) Media reports from the villagers in the neighborhood of that Afghan helicopter downing are correct (meaning the fact they did not hear machine gun use implies that there was no machine gun use from the Taliban side). Suppose that the end of the helicopter did break away 'spontaneous', then the lack of normal maintenance at this helicopter gives five more points!

So the US army would stand on a total of seven points in this little contest! Very good & please proceed my dear cells as they are even found into the US army... I have great expectations from you in the future and I have these expectations for some relatively long time by now.

Paragraph number five:

In Iraq (city name lost by me) also two US soldiers got their throats slid while waiting in traffic. This looks like some spontaneous attack where some people just grabbed the opportunity but facts are facts and this can only be rewarded with two full points!

Paragraph number six:

All loose roadside bombs lumped together, I just did not file all those reports with just one coalition soldier reported dead. (May be that is a mistake, but I did not come across Media files saying 'synchronized roadside bomb attacks observed'. But a lot of journalists are missing constantly a lot of insight into the blasting stuff so may be I am mistaken by not filing the 'OnePointers').
Needless to say the daily OnePointers are important, that makes sure the Americans can only travel in convoy and therefore nicely will underperform into the rebuilding Iraq stuff... 

So I do not know how many coalition soldiers got killed via the method of remote control roadside blasts. There were no daisy chains observed (or anyway they were not reported via the Media) so that is may be for the next contest. The next contest is on Military Bloody Day number 10, so you have to wait upon that one.

Conclusion:

These are the details as far as I know them, may be I am wrong on some details. You can look for yourself what the number of points is in the above cases, who has won do you think? Are it the police attackers or is it the US army? 

In the next contest there will be less points 'a body' for civil police, but military police is still a 'full point'. Just as for example FBI and CIA employees, they are strongly 'military related' and therefore allowed targets. In theory it would be wise to give more points to high ranking military officials but in practice I cannot measure this good via the Media files, it is far to time consuming to get all the ranks of the death (but it could be done that way if I just would have a little budget or so).

All in all I had a good feeling upon this contest, but as always I just hope that the US army did not spray around at random to many bullets. A lot of Iraqis have found out that this often gets less Media attention compared to the Media attention that high ranking Pentagon officials get with comments on particular attacks. 
But I have good feelings upon this so I will proceed with the policy of Military Bloody Days and the policy of contest every now and then. 

__________________________

  

Title: Aftermath detail from Military Bloody Day number four (Mosul, Iraq).
        

 

 

 

 

 

End of file.

 

 

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