NYT:
The Black Watch Regiment is one of the oldest and most storied in the British military, originating with six groups of Scottish highlanders from clans that remained loyal to King George I in the Jacobite rebellion of the early 1700's.The BBC reports, the three soldiers of the Black Watch who died yesterday in Iraq were manning a roadblock when a car drove up then blew up, followed by a mortar attack.
[A]n unnamed Iraqi interpreter, who had postponed his wedding to travel north with the battle group from Basra...was also killed in the attack on the day he was due to get married.From the Guardian:The east side of the river had been controlled by US marines until this week, when the Black Watch began active patrols from their base at Camp Dogwood on the west bank of the river. Black Watch expanded its operations in an attempt to stop rebels reaching Falluja. Since British Black Watch troops arrived they have come under attack from mortars fired at Camp Dogwood.
It would be hard to imagine many places on the planet bleaker, more miserable, and more dangerous than the Black Watch's new base at Camp Dogwood. The featureless desert base, where the British battle group will spend the next month, is a wilderness of sand and mud. Mortars and rockets, fired by unknown insurgents, arc nightly into the rubble-strewn ground. But seldom has it been grimmer than it was last night...Outside the base, British soldiers were still struggling to retrieve a Warrior armoured car which was disabled by a roadside bomb 24 hours earlier. A second Warrior which went to the aid of the stricken vehicle was driven off the road after a mortar was fired at it. As the sun was setting, two rockets whooshed overhead to land in the sandy mud of the base. Although they failed to explode they served as a reminder that even inside Dogwood the British deployment is at constant risk......They handed out flyers bearing Scottish flags, and a photograph of a smiling Black Watch officer and two young Iraqi children. "Please allow me to introduce myself," read the Arabic message on the reverse. "I am a Scottish soldier of the Black Watch regiment. "We ask you to ignore those who would reject our presence ... What have they ever done for you but take away your sons and bring sadness and despair to your area?" The flyers bore the cross of St Andrew, but conspicuously lacked the Union flag. "When people see the Union Jack, they think of it as English, and we want to emphasise that we're Scottish," said one Black Watch officer.
