Operation Matador

As American Leftist notes, it's awfully hard to find much discussion of "Operation Matador" in the media now.

Knight Ridder's Hannah Allam comes through again, though, with this story:

The U.S. military hails last week's "Operation Matador" as a success that killed more than 125 insurgents. But local tribesmen said it was a disaster for their communities that's made them leery of ever again assisting American or Iraqi forces.

The battle, which pitted some Iraqi tribes against each other, underscored the complex tribal politics that compound the religious and ethnic tensions plaguing Iraq.

In interviews, influential tribal leaders and many residents of the remote border towns said the 1,000 U.S. soldiers who swept into their territories in the weeklong campaign that ended over the weekend didn't distinguish between the Iraqis who supported the United States and the fighters battling it.

"The Americans were bombing whole villages and saying they were only after the foreigners," said Fasal al-Goud, a former governor of Anbar province who said he asked U.S. forces for help on behalf of the tribes. "An AK-47 can't distinguish between a terrorist and a tribesman, so how could a missile or tank?"

Goud was the only tribal leader who spoke on the record. Two others reached by phone in western villages expressed similar views, but said they didn't want their names published because the foreign insurgents were still holding some of their tribesmen hostage.

To be fair, the piece notes that tribal leaders initially reached out to Iraqi and American officials for help with dealing with the insurgents. What they didn't appreciate was the fact that the Americans decided to "do a Fallujah" and invade, bomb, and destroy their towns to save them from the foreign menace.