Soldiers Raid Iraq City

Military.com ^ | June 7, 2005

[robowombat]

Soldiers Raid Iraq City

June 7, 2005

BAIJI, Iraq - By military estimates, the odds in this unruly city situated at the apex of the Sunni Triangle should be firmly in favor of the Americans.

In a nine-hour raid that began well before dawn Monday, more than 600 soldiers stormed house by house through some of Baiji's most troublesome neighborhoods. Armed with a list of "high value targets" that included names, aliases and physical descriptions, they searched for the "less than a couple dozen" insurgents who the top Army commander here estimates have made this dusty, dangerous city a hotbed for roadside bombs, vehicle bombs and suicide bombers.

But military success in Iraq today is no longer solely determined by odds, by troop strength or even by who has more physical resources on the battlefield.

"It'd be nice to be able to come back ... at the end of a mission and say, 'We blew up this many tanks today; we policed up this many weapons caches today; we captured or killed this many bad guys today,'" said Lt. Col. Philip Logan, commander of the 1st Battalion of the 103rd Armor Regiment, the unit that overseas Baiji and its surrounding area. "But it is no longer nearly that simple or that cut and dried. It takes a long while to figure out what we've got and how successful we've been."

What is left then is an imperfect system of imperfect patrols in an imperfect search for the enemy.

Soldiers can't find a suspected terrorist, but they locate his 13-year-old brother, an earnest kid in a Brazil soccer shirt who claims he hasn't seen his big brother in months. Do they haul in the kid?

They can't find Mullah Sabah Abdullah al Hamdani -- the No. 1 target in the region who is believed to provide a weapons pipeline from Syria, spiritual direction and financial backing to a cell of deadly insurgents -- but they find two children of a man with a similar name, according to a passport found in a back bedroom. Should they detain them for questioning?

They search a home and find new two Motorola radios -- the same kind often used to detonate roadside bombs. Are those innocent possessions for a man who claims to work for the fire department or potentially deadly pieces of contraband that warrant arrest?

The answers are complex, to be sure, and the course of action pursued by the young infantrymen on the ground have far-reaching consequences. Don't make the arrest, and perhaps a bomb that kills a comrade goes off three days later. Make a false arrest or tear the home apart in search of more evidence and risk alienating or inciting a populace already predisposed to dislike U.S. troops at a time when Iraq's Sunnis feel increasingly maligned and mistreated.

Monday's raid in Baiji resulted in 16 teenagers and men being brought in for questioning. Weapons were hauled away, computers were confiscated, and piles of cash were entered into evidence.

But do those statistics really give a true picture of the success or failure of a mission? A look at what happened between 2 a.m. and 11 a.m. in Baiji on Monday -- from the first house and mosque raided to the last--illustrates just how difficult such an operation has become in Iraq today.

Baiji, home to Iraq's largest oil-production facility and a key energy plant, has remained a restive insurgent hotspot since the invasion. In October 2003, riots broke out among townspeople protesting the U.S.-backed police force, which was accused of corruption. And in recent months, American troops have been repeatedly ambushed, mortared, targeted with roadside bombs and vehicle bombs.

Monday's raid was not simply to root out insurgent cells. It was one of the largest joint operations in the city between American and Iraqi forces.

Yet that relationship added to the difficulty of the day's mission. One of the two Iraqi companies assigned to accompany the American troops on the raid showed up four hours late to their mission briefing Sunday afternoon. They were nearly 45 minutes late to the staging area on the outskirts of the city.

"Now this is the kind of thing that worries you as you go in with them," said J.P. Sykes, Bravo Company commander of the 2nd Battalion of the 7th Infantry Regiment.

The Iraqis said they struggled to use night vision goggles--military technology they are still getting used to -- in a blinding sandstorm that had swept into town just as the mission was to kick off.

A house and a mosque believed to be used as safe havens by top target al Hamdani yielded nothing. But a man at a nearby home told soldiers he knew where a man on the American's target list could be found.

Thus began a day filled with what soldiers have come to call "cascading effect arrests." The man they were initially led to leads them to another man and so on. Lt. Col. Erik Kurilla, a top commander in Mosul, a restive city north of Baiji, likes to explain the phenomenon by quoting an Iraqi expression one of his detainees told him: "If death comes to greet you at your door, introduce him to your brother."

For nearly nine hours, soldiers went house to house in a part of the city believed to be used by al Hamdani and his deputies, who are said to have bodyguards and multiple safe havens. The men of Bravo company were particularly driven in their mission to find a man believed to be leading an improvised explosive devise cell because they had lost a soldier, Pfc. Travis Anderson, 28, just weeks earlier to such an explosive.

A man at one home was trained in explosives and seemed suspicious from the start. But further review of documents in his home revealed that he was a member of an international group that educated citizens on the dangers of unexploded ordinance and land mines left behind after wars. He was not detained.

A man at a house where no weapons or anything suspicious was found was detained because his name -- a common Arabic name -- matched a name on the soldiers' target list. He did not resist but politely told them this would mark the fourth time he had been detained and then released with an apology. His wife and young daughter did not seem immune to the sight of him being handcuffed, though; they sobbed as he was led away.

By far the biggest find of the day was the discovery of what the military officials believe to be the home of al Hamdani.

The house was that of someone who could have the financial means to support insurgent activity. Inside the sprawling home were vast stores of food, not the kind seen in ordinary Iraqi pantries. There were satellite telephones, two computers, a copy machine, at least one smoke grenade and the kind of radio equipment often used in explosives. The man's passport had a name very similar to al Hamdani's and his photo matched the man's description.

Two young men at the house said they were the sons of "Mullah Sabah." They confirmed that he sometimes preached at a Baiji mosque, as the wanted Mullah Sabah is known to do. And they said he frequently went to Syria, though they said it is because he has problems with one of his eyes and sees a doctor there.

The young men were courteous to soldiers and seemed earnest in their answers. They were clearly terrified and their younger sister cried as the soldiers cuffed the young men and led them away. One soldier went back and told the women, "Tell your father that if he wants his sons back he needs to come to the base and talk to us about who he is."

By late Monday, interrogators were not yet sure what, if any, information the brothers could provide about al Hamdani or if they had found the sons of the man they wanted. Operation Hurtgen Forest had wrapped up, but the results of it were still as unclear as the early morning sky had been when the sandstorm hit.

"We're still doing the detective work," said Logan, the battalion commander. "In some military operations, you know the full result of the mission right away. This isn't one of them."

[Conservateacher]

"And they said he frequently went to Syria, though they said it is because he has problems with one of his eyes and sees a doctor there."

I wonder if he went to see Syrian President Bashar Assad who is an optometrist