OT, but thought you should know

Operation continues effort to find missing

Operation Liberator II, the latest undertaking in the U.S. military’s ongoing effort to find and recover the 16 American and Coalition service members and civilians missing here, is underway.

“We never have, and we never will stop looking,” said Navy Lt. Cmdr. K.C. Chhipwadia, the senior intelligence officer with United States Forces — Iraq’s Personnel Recovery Division.

This current operation began April 15, and continues the work started last summer during Operation Liberator, a two-month-long effort that improved the collection of actionable intelligence relating to missing personnel, said Lt. Col. Kevin Dennehy, director of the USF-I PRD. That operation laid the groundwork for the development of this phase of the search.

“We feel we can build on it with additional intelligence and cooperation and make Liberator II even more successful,” Dennehy said.

Although USF-I is spearheading the operation, a wide spectrum of agencies are involved, Dennehy said, including U.S. Central Command and the U.S. Embassy’s Office of Hostage Affairs; as well as the FBI, the Defense Intelligence Agency and the National Geospatial Agency.

Chhipwadia said the goal is to conduct Operation Liberator II in conjunction with the Government of Iraq, which is not yet directly involved. However, he expects the operation to be one of the main things that “boots-on-the-ground” Soldiers will discuss with their counterparts in the Iraqi Police and Iraqi Army as they spend time together in leadership meetings and during advise-and-assist missions.

Operation Liberator, which focused intelligence-gathering on the missing individuals, created a grassroots campaign that contributed to the recovery of Navy Capt. Scott Speicher in July 2009, Dennehy said. Speicher, a naval aviator whose jet was shot down on the first night of Operation Desert Storm in 1991, was the only American listed as missing in action from the first Gulf War.

Recently, the PRD helped with the return of Issa Salomi, an American contractor captured by insurgents in January. He was held for two months and released, March 25.

According to Chhipwadia, 11 of the16 individuals still missing in Iraq are American citizens, four are South Africans and one is British. Two of the Americans are members of the military who have been missing since 2006. Air Force Maj. Troy Gilbert disappeared after his F-16 crashed, and Army Reserve Staff Sgt. Ahmed Al-Taie, a linguist for the Baghdad Provincial Reconstruction Team, was kidnapped in Baghdad.

As U.S. forces prepare for the transition out of Iraq, Dennehy said it is important that the U.S. military fulfills its duty to bring all 16 home with dignity and honor.

“The mission to recover personnel will continue in some form or another, because we never stop looking for our people,” he said. “Go back to World War One, World War Two, Korea, or Vietnam. We still have people out there looking for our missing.”

“You never leave a fallen comrade,” Dennehy said. “Even though we are leaving Iraq, we’re not leaving our missing.”

MIAs from World War 2 are still being found and identified at a rate of about 3 a month. It has only been 4 years since the last World War 1 MIA was returned and more may show up yet.