Leaving A Man Behind

About a week ago a US soldier was captured. The US responded quickly and has been working hard to try to find him, and those who captured him. In this effort, they surrounded a portion of Baghdad, set up check points and tried to make sure that he could not be moved from this area until he was found.

Then the Iraqi prime Minister ordered us to stop it. He told us to allow free movement, to remove the check points, in short, to allow the captured American to be moved if our search efforts got to close.

And

We did.

American soldiers rolled up their barbed-wire barricades and lifted a near siege of the largest Shiite Muslim enclave in Baghdad on Tuesday, heeding the orders of a Shiite-led Iraqi government

Now, it could be just random chance. It could be that the US military's leadership decided that the check points were no longer need, at exactly the same time the Iraqi PM demanded that they be removed. It could just be random chance that we decided to abandon this part of the search effort for our lost soldier just when the Iraqi government told us to quit.

But is sure looks like Iraq told us to leave this man behind, and we agreed.


Tags
Iraq