US Support In Iraq Fades After Raids
By Ellen Barry and Bryan Bender
Boston Globe
16 June, 2003
DULUIYAH, Iraq -- Njim Rais loved America. Growing up in this provincial Iraqi city, he dreamed of seeing Niagara Falls, and was so enraptured by a television program set in Florida that when his sister was born 10 years ago, he insisted she be named Miami. He promoted America's virtues in Duluiyah until people rolled their eyes.Then, at 2 a.m. on Tuesday he had his first visit from an American: There was a roar of Bradley fighting vehicles down his street, patrol boats on the river, and four Apache helicopters circling in a throbbing net over his house. He saw his mother try to gather Miami into her skirt while an American soldier trained a weapon on them, and then he heard her scream as if someone had died. Two of his brothers had been arrested.
An Iraqi man shows the damage made inside his house by U.S. Army soldiers from Task Force 'Ironhorse' during a night house search in the Iraqi town of Duluiyah during Operation Peninsula Strike June 12, 2003. Coalition forces detained over 400 suspects and numerous weapons systems and ammunition during the operation. REUTERS/Radu Sigheti
Four days later, people in Duluiyah, about 60 miles north of Baghdad, jeer at Rais for promising them that America would bring jobs and food to the city, he said. And Rais, for once, keeps silent.''They say, `Congratulations. Your brothers were arrested,' '' said Rais, a bespectacled, bookish 34-year-old. ''I am embarrassed. Until this, I had a shining picture.''
Six weeks after President Bush declared the major fighting over, the ''shock and awe'' campaign that flushed Saddam Hussein's government from power has settled into a protracted, guerrilla-style war against organized units. This new phase dashes hopes of a speedy American withdrawal, and could severely test the US military presence and Iraqi support for it, according to senior American officials and military specialists.
''We are into insurgency, and we are going to have to do counter-insurgency,'' said retired Army Colonel William Taylor, a professor at Georgetown University's School of Foreign Service. ''It's going to be touch and go for a while.''
The remnants of the Iraqi Army, guerrilla fighters, and other Hussein loyalists are believed to have melted into the civilian population as the lightning-fast ground-and-air assault bypassed large swaths of the country. US commanders have launched a new, aggressive strategy to ferret out the increasingly violent foe, beginning what military officials said will be sustained sweeps.
Success might depend heavily on the good will of Iraqis, many of whom are already discouraged by the slow pace of reconstruction.
Michael O'Hanlon, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution in Washington, said, ''Insurgency means you need good intelligence and a friendly local population that we don't yet have.''
To the soldiers who arrived in the Duluiyah area last week, the local population seemed to shift. Troops spoke of the friendly relationships they had established with residents, and members of the Army's Third Infantry Division, stationed at a crossroads in blistering heat, said they had been gratified to receive a gift of cucumbers from a local man.
Then the attacks started -- ''potshots, onesies, and twosies'' from inside the thick orchards that extend on either side of the road, said Lieutenant Jason Greenan. Gradually, it dawned on the patrols that the gunmen were not working alone; someone was signaling their presence as they moved down the roads at night. A flare would go up, or all the lights in surrounding houses would blink out simultaneously. Then they would be attacked from within the thicket of grapevines.
People in the city ''were kind of assisting,'' Greenan said. It left them wondering about the man who gave them cucumbers. ''Do you think he knew about it?'' one soldier asked, and a few of them, in the shade of a tarpaulin, debated the question.
US officials and specialists said the resistance may be fueled by the nagging, unanswered question of whether Hussein survived the invasion -- or by swirling rumors that he and his two sons are alive and plotting a comeback.
''I think it does make a difference, because it allows the Ba'athists to go around in the bazaars and villages, as they are doing, saying, `Saddam is alive, and he's going to come back. And we're going to come back,' '' Ambassador L. Paul Bremer, the senior US civilian administrator, said last week. ''It makes it more difficult for [Iraqis] to come forward and cooperate with us.''
So far, officials do not believe the groups of up to a dozen fighters launching sniper and rocket-propelled grenade attacks are centrally coordinated. Rather, they appear to be independent groups of former Republican Guard commanders and troops and the Fedayeen Saddam irregulars that ambushed US forces in southern Iraq in the early days of the war. Central and western Iraq was largely spared by the allied onslaught, primarily because the planned northern front was scrapped after Turkey denied the Army permission to use Turkish bases as a staging area for an invasion.
''There are still those that are loyal to a regime that is no longer in power [and] we will continue to have to seek out, close with, and either apprehend them or destroy them. And that will take some time,'' Lieutenant General David McKiernan, the commander of US ground forces in Iraq, said on Friday.
A senior Pentagon official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said: ''Our problem is we took a big-picture view of solving the country's problems. We looked too long-term rather than getting into the neighborhoods. Some important things got dropped,'' he said, including mopping up some of the most hard-core, pro-Hussein areas.
He said that the Sunni triangle -- the slice of land between the Euphrates and Tigris rivers northwest of Baghdad -- was a stronghold of Hussein supporters, but it had escaped major combat as the American invasion advanced from the Kuwaiti border to the capital. The Sunni region is the source of much of the current opposition.
At the same time, the April disappearance from Baghdad and Tikrit of many elite Iraqi security forces and senior leaders now looks like it may have been part of a plan, said retired Army General Wesley K. Clark, a former NATO commander.
''Perhaps they thought that the best way to get at Americans was to wait, make them come in, and then pick them off, one by one,'' Clark said. ''I wondered if it was a deliberate move to execute another phase and go underground. . . . Had we gone in with more forces and in a different way, we might have been able to stamp this out before it got organized.''
The enemy's apparent goal: to whittle away at US resolve and foment popular opposition by forcing the United States to impose an iron will, further alienating the populace. The kind of house-to-house sweeps carried out in Duluiyah last week could serve as a model for other enemy strongholds.
''You have to demobilize people and units,'' said a retired Army general, George Joulwan, who commanded NATO forces in Bosnia. ''You have to institute curfews and get people off the streets to make sure you can get rid of these bad guys.''
The same tactics could hurt US support among Iraqis, which is essential to the counter-insurgency military officials are now planning.
''A lot will depend on if we can do something in Iraq that we couldn't do in Vietnam,'' said Taylor, the Georgetown professor. ''If Bremer can lead an operation that wins hearts and minds, we'll beat them cold. If the population tells us who they are -- and they see their economy restored, schools reopened, food made available, and police on the streets -- we can begin to reduce our presence over time.''
In the Rais home this week, there was no one left to defend America. Njim's brothers, 21-year-old Yunis and 23-year-old Taleb, had both been released -- after two days and three days, respectively -- with papers identifying them as prisoners of war.
''We will never forget the night they came with their machine guns. I will never forget it until I die,'' said their mother, Aliya Safi, who is illiterate and wears between her eyebrows the tattoos traditional in the Iraqi countryside. ''We thought that [the Americans] volunteered to come to Iraq, that they would bring aid, that they would bring food.''
As for Njim, he has given the Americans another month to restore the government before he joins the chorus of rage in Duluiyah. He has resolved not to defend them, either.
''If I do not attack them with words,'' he said, ''then I will keep silent.''
Bender reported from Washington, Barry from Iraq.
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