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June 4th,
2007 - Commanders Say Push in Baghdad Is Short of Goal |
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Commanders Say
Push in Baghdad Is Short of Goal By David S. Cloud and Damien Cave New York Times June 4, 2007 Baghdad, June 3 - Three
months after the start of the Baghdad security plan that has added thousands
of American and Iraqi troops to the capital, they control fewer than
one-third of the city’s neighborhoods, far short of the initial goal for the
operation, according to some commanders and an internal military assessment. The American assessment,
completed in late May, found that American and Iraqi forces were able to
“protect the population” and “maintain physical influence over” only 146 of
the 457 Baghdad neighborhoods. In the remaining 311
neighborhoods, troops have either not begun operations aimed at rooting out
insurgents or still face “resistance,” according to the one-page assessment,
which was provided to The New York Times and summarized reports from brigade
and battalion commanders in Baghdad. The assessment offers the
first comprehensive look at the progress of the effort to stabilize Baghdad
with the heavy influx of additional troops. The last remaining American units
in the troop increase are just now arriving. Violence has diminished in
many areas, but it is especially chronic in mixed Shiite-Sunni neighborhoods
in western Baghdad, several senior officers said. Over all, improvements have
not yet been as widespread or lasting across Baghdad, they acknowledged. The operation “is at a
difficult point right now, to be sure,” said Brig. Gen. Vincent K. Brooks,
the deputy commander of the First Cavalry Division, which has responsibility
for Baghdad. In an interview, he said
that while military planners had expected to make greater gains by now, that
has not been possible in large part because Iraqi police and army units,
which were expected to handle basic security tasks, like manning checkpoints
and conducting patrols, have not provided all the forces promised, and in
some cases have performed poorly. That is forcing American
commanders to conduct operations to remove insurgents from some areas
multiple times. The heavily Shiite security forces have also repeatedly
failed to intervene in some areas when fighters, who fled or laid low when
the American troops arrived, resumed sectarian killings. “Until you have the ability
to have a presence on the street by people who are seen as honest and who are
not letting things come back in,” said General Brooks, referring to the Iraqi
police units, “you can’t shift into another area and expect that place to
stay the way it was.” When planners devised the
Baghdad security plan late last year, they had assumed most Baghdad
neighborhoods would be under control around July, according to a senior
American military officer, so the emphasis could shift into restoring
services and rebuilding the neighborhoods as the summer progressed. “We were way too
optimistic,” said the officer, adding that September is now the goal for
establishing basic security in most neighborhoods, the same month that Bush
administration officials have said they plan to review the progress of the
plan. Lt. Gen. Raymond T. Odierno,
the senior American ground commander in Iraq, said in a brief interview that
he never believed that a midsummer timetable for establishing security in
Baghdad was realistic. “This was always going to be conditions-driven,” he
said, noting that he always had expected it would take until fall to
establish security across much of the city. But in order to meet that
timetable, he added, the Iraqi Security Forces would have to make strides in
coming months at maintaining security. “Ultimately the I.S.F., and
specifically the police, are the key to holding an area,” he said. “We have
to within the next four months move them more toward holding the areas we
have cleared.” The last of the five combat
brigades ordered to Iraq as reinforcements as part of the security plan will
increase the number of American troops in the city to around 30,000, up from
21,000 before the operation, an American officer said. In addition, around 30,000
Iraqi Army and national police forces and another 21,000 policemen have been
deployed in Baghdad. Many of the Iraqi units have turned up at less than full
strength and other units have been redeployed from the capital, General
Brooks said, leaving fewer than expected. American commanders have
also had to send troops outside the capital, to deal with a sharp rise in
violence in Diyala Province and to search for American soldiers kidnapped
south of the capital. In some parts of the city,
commanders have yet to attempt large-scale clearing operations. For example,
American forces have moved into only a small portion of Sadr City, the vast
slum on the city’s east side that is a Shiite stronghold. Sending large number of
troops in there could incite heavy violence and opposition from Prime
Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki’s largely Shiite government, several officers
said. The problems facing American
troops are illustrated in troubled western Baghdad. In the Rashid district
there, the First Battalion, Fourth Brigade of the First Infantry Division has
been working since March to carry out the security push. When the battalion,
commanded by Lt. Col. Patrick Frank, moved in, it was replacing a lone
American Army company of 125 soldiers. Yet even with three times as many
soldiers patrolling the area, violence has worsened. Last month, 249 bodies
were found in the sector, up from 98 the month Colonel Frank arrived,
according to statistics compiled by the battalion. Lately, his troops have been
hit by a wave of roadside bomb attacks that have killed five of them and
wounded 13 others. “We have a tough fight ahead of us,” he said. The district includes Ameel,
Baya, Jihad and Furat, mostly mixed Sunni-Shiite neighborhoods abutting the
road to the Baghdad airport where his troops have established three patrol
bases. Before the new strategy, there were none. The area, a mixture of
poorer urban slums and middle-class dwellings, once home to many retired
professionals, has been troubled for years. Violence dipped there and across
the city in the first months of the year, but has since worsened. Militants, many associated
with the Mahdi Army of the Shiite cleric Moktada al-Sadr, have resumed a push
to drive Sunnis from their few enclaves, American commanders said. One of the
area’s last Sunni mosques was bombed Wednesday. “This area used to be
primarily Sunni, but in the last six months Jaish al-Mahdi has conducted
essentially a cleansing campaign,” said Colonel Frank, using the Arabic name
for the Mahdi Army. In addition to carrying out
sectarian killings, the Mahdi Army controls two of the area’s three gas stations,
which refuse to sell to most Sunnis. Gunmen regularly attacked trash trucks
when they entered Sunni areas until the American military began providing
security. Sunni homes are also the targets of arson attacks if their
occupants fail to heed warnings to leave, he said. Sunni insurgents have fought
back as well, with two large car bomb attacks in largely Shiite sections of
Baya and Ameel that killed more than 60 people, officers said. The sectarian violence was
especially disheartening to some American officers because it occurred in
May, the same month that they were undertaking the centerpiece of the Baghdad
security plan - a neighborhood clearing operation. The battalion’s troops,
augmented by more than 2,000 soldiers in armored Stryker vehicles, went block
by block through the neighborhood, arresting suspected insurgents and
destroying arms caches. But since the Stryker unit
has moved on to a different area of Baghdad, “there’s been a reinfiltration”
by Shiite fighters and intimidation squads, who had left the area when the
operation began, said Capt. Tim Wright, the company commander responsible for
the neighborhood. In addition to the dumped
bodies being found every day, more Sunni families are departing. Soon, he
said, they may all be gone. Colonel Frank, of Cuba,
N.Y., who served a previous Iraq tour in Mosul in 2003 with the 101st
Airborne Division, said his forces were having some success in neighboring
Ameel at keeping sectarian violence under control. Thirty Sunni families have
returned to the neighborhood recently, he said. But American officers worry
that many members of the largely Shiite police force sympathize or
collaborate with the Mahdi Army. The local commander of the
Iraqi national police, a force run by the Shiite-run Interior Ministry, has
been replaced three times since March. One of those commanders,
Col. Nadir al-Jabouri, a Shiite described by Colonel Frank as the most
aggressive and even-handed Iraqi officer he had seen. But he was detained in
late March by the Interior Ministry and accused of having ties to insurgents. “He was not a protector of
the people; he was a terrorist,” said Col. Vhafir Kader Jowda, his Shiite
replacement. American patrols have been
attacked in a wave of deadly bombings recently, sometimes within sight of
police checkpoints, officers said. Ten soldiers under Colonel
Frank’s command have been killed since March. At least eight of the recent
attacks in the area have used explosively formed penetrators, or E.F.P.’s,
powerful bombs able to pierce armored Humvees. When Colonel Frank went to
the Ameel police station recently accompanied by a reporter and asked for
help in capturing a local Shiite sheik believed to be behind the bombings,
the police official he was meeting with spoke in a whisper. “They listen to
us,” he said, pointing to a ventilation grill on his wall. “I am in danger
just by meeting with you.” A few weeks earlier, angered
by the attacks on his soldiers, Colonel Frank ordered a video camera hidden
near an abandoned swimming pool along a main road in Ameel, near a police
checkpoint, where patrols had been hit repeatedly. When the video was examined
after another attack, it showed two Iraqi policemen talking with companions,
who were heard off-camera, apparently laying an explosive device. Minutes
after the policemen were seen driving away, the camera showed a powerful bomb
detonating as an American Humvee came into view. The video of the attack, which
just missed the vehicle and caused no casualties, was shown to a reporter
from The New York Times. After police commanders were
confronted with the video in mid-May, six Iraqi officers were arrested,
Colonel Frank said. But the episode has not been
forgotten. At a weekly meeting where military commanders and police chiefs
sit around a horseshoe-shaped conference table at one of the American bases,
Capt. Adel Fakry, the Ameel police commander, complained that American
soldiers on patrol were showing “distrust” toward his officers. “The reason there is
distrust,” Colonel Frank responded, his voice rising, “is because I have a
video of six Iraqi officers placing a bomb against my soldiers, and they came
from your station.” There had been “some mistakes,”
Captain Fakry responded, looking taken aback by the confrontation. Not all of
the six officers were from his station, he added before ending the
conversation by flipping open his cellphone and making a call while the
meeting continued. The same distrust has
hampered relations throughout Baghdad since the strategy began. In Shula, a
neighborhood just east of Kadhimiya, north of Rashid, American troops in
March discovered a group of Iraqis in police uniforms setting up an E.F.P.
near a bridge. They were using police vehicles to provide cover. The American soldiers killed
two of the bomb planters. They later discovered that one had a badge granting
him wide access to the Green Zone, the fortified area in central Baghdad
where the American Embassy and most Iraqi government buildings are situated. “That’s the level of
penetration that these guys have,” said Lt. Col. Steven M. Miska, deputy
commander of the Second Brigade, First Infantry Division, which is charged
with controlling northwestern Baghdad. Copyright 2007 The New York
Times Company External link: http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/04/world/middleeast/04surge.html |