Showdown in Sadr City

By Denis D. Gray
The Associated Press

JIM MACMILLAN / AP A U.S. soldier keeps an eye on the Sadr City slum in Baghdad, Iraq, from a rooftop. Sadr City is one of three major centers of insurgency that the military says may have to be subdued before January elections.

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BAGHDAD, Iraq — Six months after Sadr City erupted in rebellion, U.S. forces have launched a renewed campaign to wrest control of the vast Baghdad neighborhood from anti-U.S. cleric Muqtada al-Sadr's forces, with the most recent attack coming yesterday.

"We're going fishing tonight," one major said recently as a column of U.S. tanks and Humvees crept up dimly lit, trash-strewn streets into one of Iraq's most tenacious bastions of insurgency.

Above the slum of 2 million people — who make up roughly 40 percent of Baghdad's population — unmanned aircraft known as Predators are looking for the "fish" the U.S. troops 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 cellphones are watching and warning fellow insurgents ahead of the column. Surprise is difficult in Sadr City, said the battalion operations officer with the 1st Cavalry Division.

The gun-mounted Humvees draw up 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 clattering through the sky.

The night's expedition is a feint rather than an attack, with planners hoping the eight tanks and 17 Humvees will draw out the militia to lay roadside explosives and otherwise expose themselves. Seen from the air, the explosives and the fighters can then be destroyed by fire from the deadly accurate plane.

The gunship rakes an area around the Jolan Club, a ramshackle, abandoned sports complex said to be a favorite hangout for members of al-Sadr's Mahdi Army, but radio reports indicate no targets have been hit. Meanwhile, Humvee-borne soldiers search a five-story building to find only a smiling man guarding chickens stacked in freezers.

It appears no fish have been netted.

Dubbed "Iron Fury 2," the military's week-old push into Sadr City — marked by almost nightly aerial attacks and subsequent accusations of civilian deaths — is the biggest since fighting in early August and probably will be escalated to achieve its aim.

The latest attack came before dawn yesterday, with U.S. jets pounding suspected insurgent positions. Residents said explosions lit up the night sky for hours, leaving a trail of mangled vehicles, damaged buildings and shards of glass.

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. At least two children wrapped in bloodstained bandages could be seen lying in hospital beds and one man had burns from head to toe.

The U.S. military said the claim of such high casualties was "suspect."

"Early indications are that injuries to a large group of people as a result of this engagement did not occur," the military said in a statement. It said it was opening an internal investigation to determine what happened.

Army Lt. Gen. Thomas Metz, the U.S. land-forces commander, has said Iraq's three major centers of insurgency — 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.

However, U.S. officers on the ground, although expressing optimism, said they're faced with a "hard nut to crack," militarily and in winning hearts and minds across 23 square miles of concrete jungle.

The Americans claim only 10 percent of Sadr City's residents are hostile. But only a small southern corner of the slum, 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 of Iraqis have been killed and hundreds wounded, reportedly many of them civilians, since al-Sadr and his Shiite followers rose up in Baghdad and elsewhere against the U.S. occupation.

"We can go anywhere we want to go in Sadr City. But there are places we don't go into without considerable combat force," said Capt. Steven Gventer, commander of the 2nd Battalion's Charlie Company.

"It's tough," said Gventer, of Grapevine, Texas. "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 being wounded.

The fighting has not escalated to a house-by-house, street-by-street intensity that may be necessary to achieve U.S. aims. Instead, U.S. tactics are often 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. The battalion had staged ambushes of the insurgents, but these were called off and Graham doesn't know why.

Officers said that in the end, only better a 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.

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 al-Sadr disbanding his Mahdi Army, which he refuses to do.

"It's a tit for tat. We say, 'If you lay down your arms, you will be able to flush your toilet,' literally," said 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 caused 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."

Copyright © 2004 The Seattle Times Company

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