U.S. widens net south of Baghdad

By Jackie Spinner
The Washington Post

SGT. ZACHARY A. BATHON / AP A photo released by the U.S. military shows Marines on a search mission outside a house last week as part of Operation Plymouth Rock. A new offensive by U.S., British and Iraqi forces aims to root out insurgents in northern Babil province.

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Unlike the massive military push into the insurgent stronghold of Fallujah, or similar assaults on Samarra and Mosul, the operation here in Babil province has involved few firefights. It consists mostly of gathering intelligence and launching raids on homes and suspected weapons caches. Insurgents here are not clustered in urban neighborhoods but scattered over wide areas of what many Iraqis call the "Triangle of Death."

"We have to go out and hunt them down," said Col. Ron Johnson, commander of the 24th Marine Expeditionary Unit, which is conducting the 6-day-old operation.

U.S. military officials estimate they could be fighting as many as 6,000 insurgents in the region, most of them disgruntled and unemployed local residents. Among them are said to be former members of the Republican Guard, a key element of Saddam Hussein's disbanded Iraqi military.

Johnson said the strategic importance of northern Babil stems from its geographic location along major transportation arteries that link Baghdad with southern Iraq and also extend west to Fallujah and beyond.

"It's a natural line of drift" for insurgents, he said. "The problem is all roads lead to Latifiyah," he added, referring to a town near the center of the region.

Johnson said insurgents in the area have been setting up roadblocks to waylay Iraqi police and national guardsmen, or civilians they consider collaborators. At least 32 Iraqi civilians have been killed in the region in recent months, executed at the illegal checkpoints, Johnson said. "These are bad guys," he said. "They don't care who they kill."

But in an office in Latifiyah that used to belong to the city's police chief, Ishmael Jubouri contended that the insurgents in Babil care deeply about who they kill.

Jubouri, a member of a prominent Sunni tribe from an area south of Baghdad, is the leader of the Islamic Army in Iraq, one of the armed groups that the Americans and their allies are trying to defeat. Jubouri said the Islamic Army has thousands of fighters trying to force foreign troops out of the country. "The members of the army believe in the language of weapons," he said.

"Fallujah was a mistake because it is not possible to fight in a city," he said. "We want to open more than one front in the same time to disrupt the U.S. forces and defeat them at once. The Latifiyah battle will be more successful than Fallujah because we learn from the mistakes done by our brothers there."

Military officials here said they have seen an influx of fighters and weapons since the Fallujah offensive. Maj. Clint Nussberger, the intelligence officer for the 24th Marine Expeditionary Unit, said many of the insurgents were locals who went to Fallujah to fight and then came back. He estimated that between 200 and 500 such fighters returned to the area "with more skills than when they left."

Johnson said the U.S.-led force would take a methodical approach to wiping out the insurgency in north Babil.

While acknowledging that they did not control Latifiyah, U.S. military officials said they would ultimately take it back from the insurgents.

"I could take Latifiyah in an afternoon, but why am I going to kill innocent civilians?" Johnson said.

Special correspondent Omar Fekeiki contributed to this report.

Copyright © 2004 The Seattle Times Company

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