The battle for Baghdad, again
07/25/2006
By Rick Jervis and David Jackson, USA TODAY
BAGHDAD — The battle for Iraq’s future has come down to this: Can the country’s U.S.-supported government control escalating violence in the streets of its capital?
Tuesday, Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki met at the White House with President Bush, where they announced a plan to dispatch more U.S. and Iraqi troops to Baghdad to try to salvage a faltering security plan for Iraq’s war-ravaged capital.
Without providing specifics, the leaders said the redeployment will respond to a surge in violence that has claimed more than 100 civilians a day since Bush’s surprise visit to Baghdad six weeks ago.
About 9,000 of the 125,000 U.S. troops in Iraq are in Baghdad, a city of 6 million where centuries-old tensions between Sunni and Shiite Muslims have exploded into increasingly difficult-to-control violence. The chaos is being fueled by rogue militias and foreign Arab fighters such as al-Qaeda in Iraq, the extremist group trying to undermine U.S.-led efforts to establish a democracy in Iraq.
Bush said additional U.S. troops will be sent to Baghdad from elsewhere in Iraq and will help train Iraqi security forces to eventually take over the job of protecting the capital.
“Our strategy is to remain on the offense, including in Baghdad,” Bush said. “We still face challenges in Baghdad, yet we see progress elsewhere in Iraq.”
“We are determined to defeat terrorism, and the security plan for Baghdad has entered the second phase,” al-Maliki said.
The increasing urgency of the situation in Baghdad reflects how, more than three years after U.S.-led forces steamrolled into the city and toppled Saddam Hussein’s regime, the battle for Iraq’s largest and most important city is widely viewed as a tipping point for the nation’s future.
While much of the world’s attention has focused lately on violence in the Middle East, where Israel is attacking Hezbollah targets in Lebanon, insurgents in Iraq have turned their attention on Baghdad. They apparently hope to demonstrate Iraq’s new government is not able to control its capital, and therefore the nation.
“Clearly, Baghdad is the center that everybody is fighting for,” says Maj. Gen. William Caldwell, the top U.S. military spokesman in Iraq. “We will do whatever it takes to bring security to Baghdad.”
Iraq’s government believes Baghdad is the first step to bring security to the rest of the country.
“If you control Baghdad, you control Iraq,” says Mishan al-Alusi, an independent Sunni lawmaker and secretary of the parliament’s foreign relations committee. “There’s no other way around it.”
Caldwell says, “If Prime Minister Maliki succeeds in Baghdad, he’ll be able to succeed in Iraq.”
Increase in attacks
Soon after taking office in April, al-Maliki announced an operation to send 50,000 Iraqi and U.S. troops into the streets of Baghdad to restore order. Iraqi forces, backed by U.S. troops, set up checkpoints and patrolled through the streets.
The result: Violence increased. From February through May this year, Baghdad province, made up mostly of the capital city, averaged more attacks per day — 29 — than any other province. That includes the volatile Anbar province in western Iraq, which contains the restive cities of Fallujah and Ramadi, according to the Defense Department’s quarterly report to Congress.
By mid-July, there was an average of 34 attacks each day against U.S. and Iraqi forces in Baghdad.
The Iraqi capital has long been a diverse city with large numbers of Sunnis, Shiites and Kurds. Some neighborhoods are mixed, and marriage between Sunni and Shiite Muslims is not uncommon.
As the country has been broken apart by war, insurgents have tried to exploit religious tensions. Death squads and Shiite militias have infiltrated heavily Shiite police and army units, which already were having difficulty gaining trust in heavily Sunni areas. As a result, violence between Sunnis and Shiites in the streets has increased.
To try to curb the violence, Iraqi officials will have to continue battling Sunni extremists, go after Shiite gunmen prowling the city and control Shiite militias, says Anthony Cordesman of the Center for Strategic and International Studies.
“We are at a point where it’s very unclear if what we’re going to get is real political progress and movement toward security or steady drift toward civil war,” he says.
The most dangerous threat facing Baghdad is the rising sectarian violence, Zalmay Khalilzad, the U.S. ambassador to Iraq, has said. Carefully staged attacks on mosques and other targets have helped to provoke a wave of sectarian violence that sometimes has turned neighbors against each other and led to revenge killings.
A United Nations study released this month said the number of Iraqi civilians killed climbed from 1,778 in January to 2,669 in May and 3,149 in June.
“The overwhelming majority of casualties were reported in Baghdad,” said the report, which was based on Iraqi Health Ministry statistics.
This spring, as Iraqi leaders wrangled over forming a government, Sunni extremist groups refocused their strategy on Baghdad. Smuggling routes once used to get insurgents across the Syrian border to safe houses in Fallujah or Tal Afar began delivering them straight to Baghdad, Caldwell says.
Insurgents established a base of operations south of Baghdad in the so-called Triangle of Death from which to launch attacks into the capital.
Youssifiyah, a farming community on the eastern banks of the Euphrates River, was a hub of insurgent activity. This year, two Apache attack helicopters were shot down during clashes near there.
The violence in Youssifiyah came to a head in June, when two soldiers were ambushed, kidnapped and killed while manning a checkpoint. The incident brought a tough response from the 4th Infantry Division, which moved in force into the area..
In prior raids around Youssifiyah, U.S. troops recovered documents and memos purportedly from al-Qaeda in Iraq. The documents indicate how important al-Qaeda considers Baghdad.
The memos, released by the U.S. military in May, chided the group’s commanders in Baghdad for not having a long-term strategy and lacking organization.
They also promised to focus more resources and energy on the Iraqi capital with the goal of inciting sectarian conflict between Sunni and Shiite Arabs.
“The operation at this stage is to incite the people against the Shias (Shiites), in view of the fact that the sectarian war has benefits for us,” one of the memos reads. The memo recommends using car bombs.
During raids in the Triangle of Death, troops captured foreign Arab fighters, bombmaking workshops, computers full of insurgent documents and weapons caches — all within striking distance of the capital.
“All those groups had their attentions focused on Baghdad,” Caldwell says. The area “was far more dense with foreign fighters down there operating and working than we perhaps realized.”
Brig. Gen. David Halverson, a deputy commander of U.S. troops in Baghdad, says the city has become “the center of gravity” in the war. Al-Qaeda “wants to foment the insurgency in Baghdad,” he says.
“They’re attempting to discredit the government’s ability to govern and secure the people,” he says.
There are signs that insurgent efforts to touch off civil war are working. The bombing of a holy Shiite shrine in Samarra on Feb. 22 led to reprisal killings across Baghdad that left hundreds dead.
More recently, a bombing near a small Shiite mosque in the Jihad neighborhood of southwest Baghdad on July 8 triggered another cycle of violence.
The next day, Shiite gunmen there pulled Sunni motorists from cars and homes, killing them on the spot.
In one of the deadliest incidents, masked gunmen with machine guns mounted on pickups opened fire July 17 on a busy Shiite market in Mahmoudiya, south of Baghdad, killing more than 40.
‘We don’t know who’s who’
Gen. Haider Abdel Rassum al-Badri, an Iraqi special forces commander in western Baghdad, was largely responsible for pacifying northwestern Baghdad, including Haifa Street, the site of pitched battles between mostly Sunni insurgents and U.S. forces in 2004. His tactics included working with tribal leaders and cracking down on lawbreakers
Dealing with sectarian violence is more difficult, al-Badri says. Lately, al-Badri says, the enemy has been coming from all ethnic and religious sides, making it difficult to distinguish insurgents from civilians. Rogue militias also are a growing problem, he says.
Sunni extremists recently kidnapped an Iraqi translator who worked on al-Badri’s base in northwestern Baghdad. A video of her beheading later appeared on a militant website.
Shiite militia checkpoints have sprouted around some neighborhoods, where militiamen stop people and question women who are not covering their heads in adherence to strict Islamic tradition, al-Badri says.
Snipers have reappeared on Haifa Street.
“We don’t know who’s who anymore,” al-Badri says. “It’s all mixed.”