U.S. prepares tactics to counter insurgencies

By Thom Shanker
The New York Times

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WASHINGTON — U.S. commanders are preparing for a prolonged campaign to quell the twin uprisings in Iraq, issuing orders to attack relentlessly any members of a rebellious Shiite militia in southern cities while moving methodically to squeeze Sunni fighters west of Baghdad until they lay down their arms.

Officials in Baghdad and at the Pentagon said the military was prepared, if no peaceful solution materializes, to use two distinct sets of tactics to counter what they viewed as two different insurgencies — both of them dangerous and complex situations on difficult urban battlefields.

One campaign would entail retaking cities around Baghdad, if necessary block by block against an entrenched Sunni foe. The other would involve a series of short, sharp local strikes at small, elusive bands of Shiite al-Mahdi Army members in southern cities, continuing until the militia was wiped out.

Even as commanders offered a cease-fire to Sunnis in Fallujah, allowing Iraqis to try to find a peaceful solution, and postponed any assault on Shiites in Najaf and elsewhere during religious holidays, they prepared for campaigns against foes who showed unexpected discipline and ferocity last week in killing 47 American service members and several coalition soldiers.

"We are on a war footing," said a senior military officer in Baghdad.

President Bush, in his weekly radio address, made clear yesterday that the battle could last for weeks.

"This week in Iraq, our coalition forces have faced challenges, and taken the fight to the enemy," the president said, without mentioning the exceptionally high rate of casualties. "And our offensive will continue in the weeks ahead."

Senior Pentagon officials and military officers reaffirmed their decision to "confront head-on and defeat" the militiamen loyal to Muqtada al-Sadr, the Shiite cleric leading an insurrection across southern Iraq.

A senior Pentagon official conceded that the conflict with al-Sadr's militia had come at an inopportune time, just as the United States is trying to knit together a government to establish Iraqi sovereignty on June 30.
 
"Attacking the Sadr militia was not an option anybody wanted," one senior Pentagon official said. "Now we have to go out and do it."

Assessments by U.S. military intelligence put the strength of the al-Sadr militia at 300 to 400 hard-core fighters, but they said it can rouse 3,000 to 6,000 foot soldiers or other sympathizers.

Already, "we think we have taken away a significant capability," Brig. Gen. Mark Kimmitt, deputy director for operations of the military's task force in Iraq, said in a telephone interview. "It no longer is an offensive threat; but it still remains a threat." Kimmitt said the order had gone out "to destroy the Sadr militia — deliberately, precisely and powerfully."

But now the militiamen who took control, to varying degrees, in Kut, Kufa, Najaf and a section of Baghdad called Sadr City have broken into small groups, with some already seeming ready to melt away to fight another day.

"We believe that many who were wearing the Mahdi Army uniform last Saturday have tucked it under the bed and put their AKs back in the closet," one senior military officer said.

That means detailed intelligence will be required to identify the militia's leadership and important fighters, a factor noted by Bush in his radio address, which carried a warning of the "struggle and testing" that lie ahead. In Fallujah, he said, the Americans "are taking control of the city, block by block." In the south, he said, "they have taken the initiative from al-Sadr's militia."

"Prisoners are being taken, and intelligence is being gathered," Bush said. "Our decisive actions will continue until these enemies of democracy are dealt with."

But unless something changes, continued fighting of the ferocity of the past week implies continued high casualties on both sides.

Military officials in Baghdad and Washington said commanders had been surprised by the fierceness of the al-Sadr militia, and by the discipline shown by a number of the Sunni fighting units that engaged Marine forces in Fallujah and Ramadi in the restive region west of Baghdad.

In past months, much of the anticoalition violence there had come from explosives dropped along roadways, from mortars or rockets set up to launch on timers, or from brief sneak attacks, which officers call "shoot and scoot."

But engagements last week, in particular a firefight that claimed the lives of a dozen Marines, were set-piece, coordinated small-unit actions, or what one officer called "a stand-up fight between two military forces."

"This is an area that has harbored pro-Saddam individuals who benefited from the regime," one senior Pentagon official said. "Our challenge is to win their hearts and minds, to convince them that a better Iraq is in their future. But the challenge in that is to convince them while they're shooting at us and we're shooting back."

Military officers noted privately that they were confident their soldiers could win at the battlefield level, but they noted that their combat missions carried a heavy political component: They are ordered to respond with decisive force, but to do so with such precision as to not agitate the broader Iraqi population.

"We will always be humanitarian in our efforts," Maj. Gen. James N. Mattis, commander of the 1st Marine Division, wrote in an e-mail message. "We will fight the enemy on our terms.... "

The task was framed by a leading Democrat on the Senate Armed Services Committee as "a terrible dilemma."

"We cannot sit back and let these attacks go without response, but then our response runs the risk of engendering more resistance and more sympathy for the attackers," said the senator, Jack Reed of Rhode Island, who toured Iraq just days before the insurgency peaked again last week.

William Nash, a retired Army major general and veteran of the 1991 Persian Gulf War and the Bosnia mission, said that while combat in Fallujah, Ramadi, Najaf and other hot spots draws public attention, "the key to success remains in the political field, not the battlefield."

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