BAGHDAD, 12 August 2006 — Faced with a make-or-break struggle to wrest control of Baghdad from insurgents and sectarian death squads, US and Iraqi commanders plan an ambitious strategy to take back the Iraqi capital street by street, district by district.
Thousands of reinforcements have been drafted in to flashpoint areas like Dura in the south of the city — until recently a scene of bloody clashes and massacres — and are setting up cordons around entire neighborhoods, before proceeding to disarm the gangs through house-to-house searches.
Analysts warn that the Iraqi government and its US ally face an enormous challenge to restore their battered authority in an increasingly divided and radicalized city, the scene of more than 50 murders per day. But commanders in Dura feel they have made a start and have proved their tactics can work.
“So far, we’ve had some effect. Obviously during the last three days while we’ve had 5,000 soldiers involved in this operation, we have had no murders. These are the same neighborhoods where on the worst day we’ve had over 20 murders,” said Col. Michael Beech, who leads the US 4th Infantry Brigade.
Speaking to reporters this week in Dura alongside his Iraqi colleagues, Beech explained how one Tuesday morning Iraqi police commandos set up a blockade around the area, while US and Iraqi Army brigades began house-to-house searches of three districts of between 1,300 and 1,500 homes.
The searches, he said, led to 38 arrests, including those of three “foreign fighters.” More than 20 illegal weapons — including machine guns and a rocket launcher — were seized, along with explosives and video CD disks extolling Osama Bin Laden or the Lebanese Hezbollah group.
Now they are moving on to neighboring areas, followed by refuse collection trucks and officers sent to discuss economic and social regeneration projects with local sheikhs and imams, in a bid to impose lasting peace. “The most important part is yet to be conducted. Overlaid on top of this military component is the economic and essential services component,” Beech said, explaining how US Army engineers and Iraqi contractors will clear rubble, repair water mains and rebuild part of Dura’s market.
The operation is laborious and painstaking task in a city of between six and seven million people, but US commanders feel it is a necessary one, indeed a vital one if the city and the country is not to slip deeper into chaos and perhaps open civil war between rival Sunni and Shiite camps.
“This will be the defining battle of this particular campaign. We’ve got to take back Baghdad,” said Lt. Gen. Pete Chiarelli, commander of the US-led Multinational Corps Iraq, in an interview this week with the television network ABC.
Some observers see a tough task ahead. In a paper this week entitled “Winning the Battle of Baghdad,” Anthony Cordesman of the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) in Washington said US forces are “essentially experimenting with new kinds of peacemaking and warfare.”
Cordesman warned that Baghdad’s militias and death squads could hide their weapons and melt back into the civilian population to wait out the joint US-Iraqi operation. “They can wait days, weeks or months, lashing out after the US has claimed to have secured a given area,” he wrote. Above all, observers say, success will depend on the ability of Prime Minister Nuri Al-Maliki’s government to build a dialogue both with the Shiite militias loyal to parties in his government and the Sunni insurgents inspired by Islamism or nostalgia for the rule of Saddam Hussein.
