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“Rich,

Why no response from the forces on the ground? I think there are two reasons:

A) they could not be saved at that point, and

B) it would have entailed a rather large scale use of force against civilians to cut through the crowd.

I think the practical thing to do was to back off, and then prepare an encirclement/house by house weapons search like thjat which was recently done in Tikrit to take place in the next few days.

I am hopeful that it will be done in the next few days; otherwise there is the potential for this being hailed as a “Mogadishu” by Al Qaeda, the Ba’ath Dead Enders, and a few professors at Coulmbia, if you remember that incident: