Assadourian said that JRTN fighters, who also operate in neighboring Salaheddin Province around Saddam Hussein’s hometown of Tikrit — a traditional Baathist stronghold — mostly used roadside bombs and grenades, and often exaggerated their battlefield successes.
“They post videos and they’ll drop it off on the street corner — ‘Look at us, look at what we can do, we’re capable, we’ll stand up against the occupiers,’” he said. “One of the funny things is that they do a monthly production of these videos, and you’ll go from month to month sometimes and you’ll see the exact same video, and they’ll tell you that it’s a different unit that did it or a different location.”
The group, however, has scored some major coups against US targets.
In January, four US soldiers were killed when two US helicopters on a reconnaissance mission came down, which JRTN said happened as a result of their fire.
The US military initially insisted that it was an accident, only to acknowledge the following month that the aircraft were downed by “hostile fire,” but gave no specifics.
Nationwide, security has improved markedly compared with last year, with the number of violent deaths falling by a third in July to 275 from 437 in June.
But the JRTN’s strength in volatile Kirkuk threatens a new flareup with the movement’s mainly Sunni Arab supporters bitterly opposed to longstanding Kurdish claims to incorporate the province and its oil wealth in their northern autonomous region.
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