RAMADI, 22 June 2003 — They rammed their vehicles into metal gates to smash them open, rounded up Iraqi men from their homes at gunpoint and wrote a code on their arms with marker pens. Hundreds of US soldiers from the First Battalion of the 124th Infantry Regiment staged the raid in a suburb of Ramadi, 100 km west of Baghdad, after sunrise yesterday. The raid on the homes of suspected guerrillas was part of a campaign to stamp out mounting armed resistance to the US occupation of Iraq.
Several soldiers on the raid were wounded by a grenade and came under gunfire in the same district around 10 days earlier. Some were clearly braced for trouble as they returned to the area, leaving their base after a blast over loudspeakers of Wagner’s rousing “Ride of the Valkyries” — a favorite with troops for its use in the Vietnam War film “Apocalypse Now”.
One unit of soldiers pulled half a dozen men from their homes as women wailed in distress. The troops wrote a code in marker pen on each man’s skin and on confiscated possessions. They removed a handful of weapons and a computer hard disk. Two helicopters with thermal imaging equipment whirred above the neighborhood of modest, angular houses.
US forces have frequently come under fire in towns west and north of the capital since ousting Saddam Hussein in April. Those areas are dominated by Sunni Muslims, some of whom had close ties to Saddam’s mainly Sunni ruling elite.
“They’re getting too powerful,” battalion commander Lt. Col. Hector Mirabile of Miami, Florida, said of the raid’s targets. “It’s time for them to stop.”
Officers said they aimed to capture at least five members of the Fedayeen paramilitary force, which put up some of the fiercest resistance to US troops in their invasion and has been blamed for continuing attacks since Saddam’s fall. The raid was part of Operation Desert Scorpion, launched by the US military on June 15. A US military spokesman said 90 raids had netted 540 suspects in the operation, which also aims to befriend civilians with aid and reconstruction projects.
Meanwhile, Iraqi schoolchildren began to sit exams yesterday in another sign of post-war normalization in Iraq, as US-led forces continue their crackdown on elements opposed to foreign presence in their country. Three months after the outbreak of war forced more than five million pupils from the classroom, the exam season was due to kick off with internal testing, followed for some by state final exams in July.
“We want to finish the school year,” said Salah Salman, who is in charge of exams in the southern Baghdad region. Pupils began returning to their classes in early May after a six-week hiatus, and classes have been extended for a month to make up for the interruption caused by the war launched in late March.
In Beirut, a previously unknown group, the National Front of Fedayeen, vowed to keep attacking US soldiers in Iraq until they left the country. A man, his face hidden in a checkered red and white headscarf, delivered the warning to US President George W. Bush “and his henchmen” in a video-taped message broadcast on Lebanon’s LBCI satellite channel.
Also yesterday, chanting and waving banners, about 2,000 Shiite Muslims protested outside the compound of the US administration in Baghdad, demanding an end to the US occupation of Iraq. “We want to form a national government,” said one of the demonstrators, Sayyid Ali.
