Site Map | Archives

Home › › The Trib in Iraq

The Trib in Iraq: The long slog

Tribune reporter Michael Gisick is embedded with New Mexico soldiers in Iraq. This is a personal account of his experience.

By Michael Gisick
Monday, October 8, 2007

related linksMore The Trib in Iraq
related linksMOST RECENT TRIB STORIES

related linksTRIB IN THE BLOGOSPHERE*

*Note: The Tribune does not create and is not responsible for the blogosphere's headlines and stories. These links to blogs talking about ABQTrib.com are automatically generated. Use them at your own risk.
STORY TOOLS

SHARE THIS STORY [?]
related linksMore The Trib in Iraq
related linksMOST RECENT TRIB STORIES

related linksTRIB IN THE BLOGOSPHERE*

*Note: The Tribune does not create and is not responsible for the blogosphere's headlines and stories. These links to blogs talking about ABQTrib.com are automatically generated. Use them at your own risk.
STORY TOOLS

SHARE THIS STORY [?]
related linksMore The Trib in Iraq
related linksMOST RECENT TRIB STORIES

related linksTRIB IN THE BLOGOSPHERE*

*Note: The Tribune does not create and is not responsible for the blogosphere's headlines and stories. These links to blogs talking about ABQTrib.com are automatically generated. Use them at your own risk.
STORY TOOLS

SHARE THIS STORY [?]

RAMADI, Iraq — Finally made it in to Ramadi on a helicopter at about 3 a.m. Sunday. I'm glad to be out of the weird Green Zone. For the next few days I'll be embedded with a Marine battalion here in the capital of Al Anbar Province, 100 or so miles west of Baghdad.

Right now I'm on a base toward the edge of the city, on the grounds of a Saddam-era ministry building the marines call "the castle." Apparently there's also a palace around here that belonged to Saddam's older son, Uday, who built a water treatment plant nearby because he figured people wanted to poison him.

The Marines here are part of a brigade combat team that falls under the umbrella of the 3rd Infantry. It includes four Army combat battalions, two support battalions, two Marine battalions and some civil affairs and air support units. That's a long way of saying there are about 6,000 U.S. troops here, most of them soldiers or Marines.

The U.S. experience in Ramadi has swung on a pendulum. From 2004 until late 2006 the city was a stronghold of insurgents claiming allegiance to al-Qaida in Iraq and a virtual no-go zone for the Americans. Now, the military holds Ramadi up as the jewel of its counter-insurgency campaign. That story has been told, but it bears at least a brief recounting here.

The military is hopelessly addicted to PowerPoint presentations, and one of the slides they gave me this morning offered their simplified explanation of counter-insurgency theory: clear, hold and build. In other words, push the enemy out, hold the area you've taken, and build infrastructure and services with an eye toward winning over the populace.

That last part is really the core of a counterinsurgency. Winning battles and taking territory are precursors, but they're of limited value if the population supports the insurgents, who can just blend in and keep on fighting.

The basic tactics of a counterinsurgency follow on that strategy. They call for troops to live among and work with the population, enlist local allies to the greatest extent possible, and use force in as limited and pinpointed a way as possible.

As Army Col. John Charlton, the overall brigade commander here, put it to me in an interview this morning, the use of violence by a counter-insurgency force always has costs.

"Even if you hit your target and there's no collateral damage, you're still using force in a foreign country, and people are going to react to that," he said.

As has been well-documented, the U.S. did not come into Iraq prepared to fight this kind of war. The result were tactics that, at the very least, made little progress against the insurgency. Most troops lived in massive, heavily fortified compounds and ventured forth only in bristling force. That may have helped hold down U.S. casualties, but it offered little opportunity for constructive engagement with the local population. Force was employed too often and too generally. Add to that, in Al Anbar, a Sunni population highly suspicious of U.S. intentions from the get-go and wary of the Shiite majority they saw coming inexorably to power, plus an international Islamist network capable of funneling large numbers of fighters and much money into the area, and you had the makings of a formidable enemy.

"What happened is that you had al-Qaida starting to insert itself more and more and create violence" beginning in 2004, Charlton said. "In some cases, U.S. forces over-reacted to that violence, and so you started to get that split that occurred."

While U.S. forces fought two bloody battles in nearby Fallujah, they largely stayed on the outskirts of Ramadi until 2006. Al=Qaida in Iraq, meanwhile, declared the city its capital.

But commanders here now say it was the insurgents themselves who wound up playing an important role in turning the tide. As Maj. Lee Peters, a spokesman for the brigade, put it, "They overplayed their hand."

Again, Col. Charlton: "People here began to realize that al-Qaida wasn't exactly the kind of partner they wanted. Al-Qaida was using pure murder and intimidation to control the population. I mean absolute brutality. If you talk to these tribal leaders, every one of them will tell you they've lost family members."

In late 2006, a group of sheiks, the traditional tribal leaders in this area, broke away from al-Qaida in Iraq and allied themselves with U.S. forces. Al-Qaida attempted to reassert its control with a wave of assassinations, but U.S. commanders say that only further alienated the population. Many see the assassination of one sheik, whose body was hidden for days in what amounted to a deep affront to Islamic custom, as a particular turning point.

The support from the sheiks produced several tangible windfalls. U.S. forces saw a spike in solid intelligence tips leading them to weapons caches and bomb factories, and the city's largely unemployed male population began signing up for the Iraqi police and army in droves. But when Charlton's brigade arrived in January, there was still plenty of hard work to do, he said.

"There's this misconception that al-Qaida just declared peace and left Anbar," he said. "They didn't. They were killed, captured or forced to flee."

During his unit's first month here, Charlton said, they were weathering 30 to 35 attacks a day, and 10 soldiers and Marines were killed.

"We spent the first two or three months engaged in some pretty heavy combat with al-Qaida," he said. "Al-Qaida had strongholds throughout the city and the surrounding area. It was pretty much continuous combat operations."

As I noted, similarly tough fighting had been seen in Fallujah a year earlier, but two things were different in Ramadi in early 2007. One was that the U.S. came in determined to stay and with a clear counter-insurgency strategy in place. The second, probably more important factor, was that the local population was apparently no longer willing to shelter the insurgents. As U.S. forces moved through the city, they left a network of local police stations and joint security outposts where U.S. and Iraqi forces worked to hold and consolidate the gains.

Those two came together in a critical way. The support from the sheiks gave U.S. troops both a political cover among the population for the use of force and the intelligence they needed to use that force effectively/

"We faced a very capable enemy here," Charlton said. "Their goal was to drive a wedge between the population and the coalition forces, but they were so brutal that it backfired. We were able to exploit that, gain the trust of the population and isolate al-Qaida. Once we were able to isolate them, we could go in and defeat them."

The result is a city where attacks are now virtually nonexistent. Massive challenges remain, however.

By far the biggest is infrastructure. Charlton said his brigade has poured $60 million into rebuilding -- $13 million alone into the considerable task of rubble removal ("which is fair," Charlton said, noting that most of the rubble was the result of fighting involving American forces.)

The troops here -- in some cases the same soldiers and Marines who fought their way through the city at the beginning of the year, now spend most of their time funding projects, training local forces and cultivating relationships with the sheiks and religious leaders, or imams.

"These new commanders, I'm telling them, 95 percent of your missions are going to be non-lethal, and that's what's going to win it for you," Charlton said. "The relationship you build with your neighborhood imam is going to be more important than anything you do with a weapon."

Later tonight I'm headed out to one of the joint security stations in the middle of the city. Apparently, there are two or three Marines there from New Mexico, and I'm interested to see how they and the other Marines relate to this mission. I don't think most of them signed up (or shipped out) imagining this is what they'd wind up doing. At the same time, they are now in a sense the last, best hope for the U.S. effort in Iraq.