Here.
I normally can’t stand this guy, and a lot of his stuff is just flat out wrong, but this time I think he is right on it.
Remember when the media cheered about the bombing of an ISIS convoy heading out of Fallujah that killed 250 ISIS fighters?
Well, it never happened.
As with so many things about those wars over there, the whole thing is pretty much made up.
First of all, yes, there was a vehicle convoy heading out of Fallujah at the end of the battle.
Yes, it was bombed by Iraqi and apparently also US planes.
Yes, many of the vehicles were destroyed, and it looks like quite a few people were killed and injured, though a journey to the site soon after the attack found few bodies.
The problem is that it wasn’t a convoy of ISIS fighters heading out of Fallujah. It wasn’t even a convoy of military vehicles heading out of Fallujah.
Instead it was a convoy of civilian vehicles heading out of the city. And it was filled with civilians, not with ISIS fighters.
There are a few clues that this is indeed the case.
- Soon after the bombing of the convoy, a call went out to Baghdad of many dead and wounded civilians in the Fallujah area. Multiple plane and helicopter trips were flown to the area and, many of the wounded were medevacced out. The medevac process took several hours. The area where the civilians were killed and wounded was in the same general area as the convoy bombing.
- The reason that a trip to the scene of the attack showed few dead bodies was because the dead and wounded had been for the most part medevacced out or were flown out in body bags.
- ISIS seldom if ever travels in such huge convoys. There have been only two or three reports of ISIS convoys this long in the region since ISIS started fighting. They tend to travel in convoys that are much shorter and harder to detect. There is no way that ISIS would lead a huge convoy that size out of that city at the last minute. They are not that stupid.
- When the US first heard about the convoy they were asked whether to attack it, and Air Command decided not to attack the convoy because they felt that there were civilians present. Later they bombed it anyway after the Iraqis bombed it.
- A trip to the scene of the attack revealed many burned out vehicles. However almost all of them seemed to be civilian vehicles like sedans and minivans. ISIS doesn’t use vehicles like that on the battlefield.
Sorting it all out, it appears that this civilian convoy was not as innocent as it seemed. The best analysis of what happened is that this was a convoy of the families of the ISIS fighters who stayed in the city for most of the battle but finally left after the city fell. You could argue that the families of the fighters should be killed too, but I would not agree with you on that one.