U.S.Forces Work to Secure Sadr City

U.S. Forces Work to Secure Sadr City
1 hour, 11 minutes ago

By DENIS D. GRAY, Associated Press Writer
BAGHDAD, Iraq - Six months after Sadr City erupted in rebellion, U.S. forces are launching a renewed campaign to wrest control of the vast Baghdad neighborhood from radical Muslim cleric Muqtada al-Sadr's forces.

"We're going fishing tonight," says one major as a column of U.S. tanks and Humvees creeps up dimly lit, trash-strewn streets into one of Iraq (news - web sites)'s most tenacious bastions of insurgency.
Above the seething slum of 2 million people — who make up roughly 40 percent of Baghdad's population — unmanned aircraft known as Predators are spotting for the "fish" the Americans hope will surface from urban hide-outs long enough to be taken.
Down below, perhaps on rooftops or up dark alleys near the U.S. force, Maj. Hugh McGloin suspects young men with mobile telephones are watching and warning their fellow insurgents ahead of the column. Surprise is difficult in Sadr City, says the battalion operations officer with the 1st Cavalry Division.
The gun-mounted Humvees draw up expectantly in a semicircle. The Predators have sounded an alarm. An AC-130 gunship sails high overhead, its spectral outline faintly visible by the light of a three-quarter moon. Then it unleashes torrents of machine gun fire, sounding like a pneumatic drill juddering through the sky.
Dubbed "Iron Fury 2," the military's latest push into Sadr City is the biggest since fighting in early August and probably will have to be escalated to achieve its aim.
The most recent attack came before dawn Monday, with U.S. jets pounding suspected militant positions. Dr. Qassem Saddam of the Imam Ali hospital said the strikes killed at least five people and wounded 46 — including 15 women and nine children. The U.S. military said the claim of such high casualties was "suspect."
Army Lt. Gen. Thomas F. Metz, the U.S. land forces commander, has said that Iraq's three major centers of rebellion — Fallujah, Samarra and Sadr City — may have to be subdued before general elections in January. Metz speculated that Sadr City — named after the cleric's late father — could prove the easiest of the three to tackle.
U.S. officers on the ground, although still expressing optimism, say they're faced with a "hard nut to crack" both militarily and in winning hearts and minds across 23 square miles of concrete jungle.
Maj. Bill Williams, executive officer of the division's 2nd Battalion, 8th Cavalry, says al-Sadr's militia — known as the al-Mahdi Army — has used cease-fire negotiations over the past two months as a screen behind which to reinitiate its influence in the slum and plant more, increasingly sophisticated roadside explosives. Mortar attacks against Fort Eagle, the U.S. base astride Sadr City, have increased.
On the table is a 12-point proposal calling for fighters to disarm in exchange for millions of dollars in reconstruction money and compensation for victims. The U.S. insists on disbanding the al-Mahdi Army, which refuses to do so.
"We can go anywhere we want to go in Sadr City. But there are places we don't go into without considerable combat force," says Capt. Steven Gventer, commander of the 2nd Battalion's Charlie Company, which conducted the night operation.
The Americans claim that only some 10 percent of Sadr City's residents are hostile. But only a small southern corner of the city, Jamilah, could be classed as relatively safe. Beyond, to the north, across what U.S. troops call the "no smile line," lies a battleground in which scores have been killed and hundreds wounded, many of them civilians, since al-Sadr and his Shiite followers rose up in Baghdad and elsewhere against the American occupation.
"It's tough," Gventer, of Grapevine, Texas, says. "A guy will shoot a weapon at you, hand it to someone and then run into his cousin's house to wave at passing U.S. troops. They have a great ability to melt into the neighborhood."
How tough is reflected in the 20 purple hearts awarded Charlie Company, some 150 strong, during the past two months of Sadr City duty. Gventer, a burly, energetic officer, was shot through the lower leg and must still have shrapnel removed from his right arm. His battalion commander was evacuated to Germany after sustaining wounds.
And the fighting has not yet escalated to a house-by-house, street-by-street intensity, often being reactive.
"We let the al-Mahdi army choose the time and place they want to attack us," said Lt. Tye Graham, a platoon leader of the battalion's Bravo Company, on an earlier patrol. The battalion had previously staged its own ambushes of the insurgents, but these were called off and Graham doesn't know why.

Officers say that in the end, only better livelihood in Sadr City rather than military operations will wean the populace from al-Sadr and stop the seeming ease with which he can recruit angry, impoverished men to his ranks.
"It's in his interest not to let us set up development projects," said Willliams.
"It's a tit-for-tat. We say, `If you lay down your arms you will be able to flush your toilet,' literally," says Lt. Dan Lucitt, an engineer trying to solve Sadr City's crucial problems — sewage and trash, electric power and clean water.
Increased violence in early September forced the military to suspend two-thirds of its aid projects in the slum, telling the Iraqi contractors to go home for the time being. Work on five vital sewage pumping stations had to be shut down, but Lucitt said they could be restarted overnight if a cease-fire is worked out.
Hence the military pressure on the militia, or in the words of McGloin, the operations officer, a "synchronized ballet of combat power."
The night's expedition is actually a feint rather than an attack, with planners hoping the oncoming eight tanks and 17 Humvees will draw out the militia to lay roadside explosives and otherwise expose themselves. Spotted from the air, the deadly accurate gunship can then destroy both the explosives and the fighters.
The C-130 rakes an area around the Jolan Club, a ramshackle, abandoned sports complex said to be a favorite al-Mahdi hangout, but radio reports indicate no targets have been hit. Meanwhile, Humvee-borne soldiers search a five-story building to find a smiling man guarding chickens stacked in freezers. They talk to a shopkeeper who agrees that violence in Sadr City is bad for business.
It appears that no fish have been netted tonight.
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Denis Gray spent a week with U.S. troops inside Sadr City.